The Knights of the Cornerstone (22 page)

Shirley Fowler was cooking at the griddle when they walked in, frying up cheeseburgers, and at one of the two picnic tables sat Bob Postum and two other men, one of whom, unfortunately, was the tall, lanky man from the quarry, who wouldn’t be a big Calvin Bryson fan after the merry chase the other day. The other was maybe sixty years old, stocky, and mostly bald. His nose had apparently been broken a few times and set by a drunk. He looked prodigiously unhappy at the moment—sad rather than angry. They were all sipping coffee out of foam cups.

“Cal!” Postum said, standing up and putting out his hand for a shake. “This here is Calvin Bryson,” he said
to the others. “Out here from L.A., where he’s in the rare book business. I help him out now and then with some hard-to-find titles.”

Calvin hesitated, but then he shook hands, even though he was fairly sure now that Bob Postum was some kind of grinning devil.
Not
shaking hands would mean starting things up in some way, and he wasn’t ready for that yet. Best to avoid it altogether—play the game, wait for his opportunity. “I thought I’d join you,” he said to Postum.

“Do we look like we’re coming apart?” Postum asked, and then laughed. Maybe later Calvin would think it was funny. “Meet Pat Yorkmint and Stillwater Mifflin, Cal. They call him Stillwater because he runs deep. Isn’t that right?” he asked. Mifflin nodded heavily. Postum’s sense of humor was apparently lost on the man. “You already met Jefferson Davis here.” He nodded at the small man. “Most people call him ‘Defferson’ on account of he’s hard of hearing.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” the man muttered, and Postum laughed again and winked hard at Calvin.

“What’ll you have?” Shirley asked him.

“Chili cheese fries,” Calvin said to her. She nodded, loading the burgers onto buns that were laid out on wax paper in little pastel-colored plastic baskets.

“Anything to drink?”

“Grape soda, I guess.”

“Soda’s in the case,” she said. “Opener’s on a string at the end of the table.”

He grabbed a cold grape Nehi, found the church key hanging from the string, and opened the bottle. He watched Shirley dip the wire basket of fries into the hot oil. She looked efficient and bored. There was no indication that anything was up, or that she recognized him, and
he wondered how much Taber had told her, hoping that she knew enough to duck out the back if things got rough. The radio played the usual country-western music—a sad song about being a long way from home and family—and Calvin realized that Mifflin, the bald-headed man, was singing along with the song under his breath now, singing as if he meant it.

Shirley set the cheeseburgers on the table, each of them accompanied by a bag of chips and a wedge of pickle.

“These are
deli
pickles?” Mifflin asked, forgetting about the song and looking up sharply. “Cold process?”

“Yessir,” Shirley said. “You cook a dill pickle and you ruin it, as far as I’m concerned.”

“That’s just how I feel,” Mifflin said to Calvin, squinting his eyes to add emphasis. “Pickles are like people. When they come off the vine they’re pretty much equal, and then they get screwed up along the way. A pickle don’t know that, but a man does. You don’t see a pickle with regrets.”

Calvin nodded at him, at a complete loss for words.

“I like them big fat dill pickles they’ve got at the ballpark,” the tall one said.

“You like big fat ugly women, too,” the small man told him. “Because that’s all you can get.”

The tall man shrugged, as if there was no reason to argue. Calvin couldn’t remember the man’s name. Then he noticed that the wrapper of a peppermint patty lay next to his plate, and it came to him—Pat Yorkmint. What if it had been an Abazaba, he wondered, or Cup of Gold? Mifflin pointed what was left of his pickle at Calvin and said, “Now a dill pickle
chip
is whole ’nother matter, not to mention a gherkin. I like a good gherkin, although they’re hard to find. One thing about your grocery store gherkin …”

“God
damn!”
the small man said, looking at Mifflin as
if he’d just as soon kill him right then and there, but Postum gave him a hard look, which he seemed to take seriously. He sat back on the bench and shrugged, indicating he had nothing more to say.

For a long space there was no noise but the sound of rustling wax paper and chewing. “Pass the salt, Walt,” Postum said at one point, and he salted his fries heavily and then squirted ketchup on them, set the ketchup down, and stabbed the fries around in the ketchup, getting them just right. The whole thing was distinctly surreal—time taken out of everyone’s busy day to have a sit-down meal and a parlay, all very civilized, just like Julia Child recommended. Mifflin was a dainty eater, holding the burger with both hands, his pinky fingers extended, whereas Postum pretty much porked it down, mopping the ketchup out of his beard with his napkin. Calvin wanted to do something crazy—shout, break into song, sweep the cheeseburger baskets onto the floor. His anxiety level was climbing into the desperation zone. He looked out toward the parking lot. The dry wind gave him the jitters. A sheet metal sign blew back and forth on its hooks, and a crumpled newspaper flew out of the trash can and whirled away into the sky, bound for Oz. Donna was maybe five minutes out.

“Nothing like a good burger,” Postum said, winking at Calvin.

“Amen to that, brother,” Yorkmint put in.

Shirley brought his chili fries, poured more coffee into the foam cups, put the check on the table, set the coffeepot on its hot plate, and went into the back room, leaving them to it. Maybe she’d stay there, Calvin thought, or better yet, just go out the back, get into her car, and drive home to Essex.

“How does this work?” Calvin said as soon as she was out of sight.

“Pretty much like I told you,” Postum said, wiping his hands with a napkin. “You in a rush here? Don’t like your fries?”

“I’ve got a date,” Calvin said, glancing out the window again and immediately wishing he hadn’t.

“She picking you up outside? You seem to be eyeballing those gas pumps like you’re expecting the Pep Boys to roll in.”

The suggestion was so startling to him that it had to have shown in his face. “Figure of speech,” he said.

“Figure of bullshit, I call it,” the small man said senselessly. He looked at Calvin with strangely intense loathing.

“Go ahead and eat your fries before they get cold, Cal,” Postum told him. “Chili fries aren’t worth anything cold.” He dug his wallet from his pocket, fished out a fifty-dollar bill, and slid the check and the fifty under the salt shaker. “Anyway, forget that date of yours. Have you got the
goods,
is the question. Deffermint, open up the box.” He gestured at it, but it took a moment for the small man to realize that he was being spoken to. He put the last bite of his cheeseburger down and reached into his pocket, and Calvin braced himself, ready to tip the whole table over if he took out a pistol. The least Calvin could do was wreck their lunch for them. Then he could be shot in the back going out the door and die like a dog on the highway. …

The man came up with a little switchblade pocketknife, clicked it open, and slit the tape. Postum pulled back the flaps, reached inside, and drew out the veil, letting it fall open and staring at it carefully. Calvin waited for him. The reproduction was good—he’d say that much for it. He had
sketched the face in charcoal on grocery bags until he got it right, and then reproduced it onto a thin piece of tattered muslin cut out of some weatherworn window curtains. After washing out excess charcoal and drying it, he had fixed the charcoal with a can of hairspray, and then hung it in the desert wind all night to get rid of the smell. The likeness was close enough to the original so that it would satisfy anyone who didn’t have the original to compare it to. It didn’t have the
effect
of the original—the power—but they wouldn’t know that. Postum held it up again and looked through it. He shrugged.

“All right,” he said, nodding heavily, “what’re your terms?”

“What do you mean, what’re my terms?” Calvin asked.

“Well, the two of us talked about money, but I suppose you’ve got grandiose new ideas by now. I thought I’d give you a chance to renegotiate, but if it’s just the money you’re after, we’re about through here.”

“I want Al Lymon, obviously. I don’t give a damn about the money. If it was just the money, I wouldn’t be here at all.”

“That’s downright noble, Cal. It pains me to say I don’t have Lymon with me, though. We left him back at the ranch. He’s not for sale.”

“You don’t have the veil, either,” Calvin said, staring straight back at him.

“I’ll be ding-donged,” Postum said, breaking into a grin. “Is that right? Ain’t this it?” He held up the veil and looked at it one more time, then put it back in the box. “You could have fooled me silly—taken my money and gone on your way. And now you tell me this is a
fraud?
What did I say to you about trying to bluff?”

“Yeah, it’s a fraud,” Calvin said truthfully. “The real veil is up the road a ways, safe. You deliver Lymon and it’s yours. We figured he might not be here, so I’m authorized to negotiate, and I’m negotiating. That part isn’t any bluff.”

Postum stared at him for the space of thirty seconds, and then said, “Son, I just don’t believe you. I think this
is
it. I think they sent in a boy to do a man’s job. Sorry to have to say that. If there’s negotiating to do, we’ll get to it in due time.”

“Think what you want, but …”

Out of the corner of his eye, Calvin saw a white car swing a U-turn into the lot and stop on the other side of the gas pumps. It was everything he could do not to look.

“That’s gracious of you, allowing me to do my own thinking. What I
think
is I’ll keep this one, is what I’ll do. We’ll let our … expert … authenticate it. That’d be your uncle. If it’s a clunker, we’ll shoot him in the head, cut him up, and feed him to the catfish. A school of them big fifty-pound bullheads are like hogs in a pen—they’ll eat anything you give them and then crap out the teeth and bones somewhere downriver. They’ve got a digestive system that’d put an alligator to shame.”

Yorkmint let out with a wolf whistle. “Look at that piece out there!” he said.

Calvin looked, since he’d been invited to, stopping himself from telling Yorkmint to watch his mouth. It was Donna all right, washing her windows, the Mustang pointing back east, toward Needles. She was paying a heap of attention to the job. She glanced toward the store, and worked away with the squeegee and towel again. Calvin realized that Shirley had come back into the store and was leaning against the counter.

“Apparently she’s not going to buy any gas,” Postum said to Shirley. “She’s just going to use up a bunch of them expensive blue towels you’ve got out there.”

“She’s not the only one that does that,” Shirley said. “Seems like half the people on the road drive in here just to clean off the bugs. It’s just the cost of doing business.”

“Stillwater, why don’t you step on out there and inform the young lady that the polite thing is to buy
gasoline
to go along with the rest of the services. Check her oil while you’re at it. Women have no idea of checking their own oil.”

“Me?” the bald man asked. “She ain’t doing no harm. Couple of towels is all it is. …”

“Your name’s Stillwater Mifflin, ain’t it? Or am I mistaken?”

“You want me to go on
out
there …?”

“That’s the idea. And hurry up. She’s going after another handful. Them towels cost a nickel apiece. Bring her on back in here.”

“There’s no call to bother the girl,” Shirley said.

But Mifflin got up tiredly and went outside. Calvin glanced at Postum, who looked back at him, smiling. The smoker had his hand in his pocket again, although he had put away the knife a couple of minutes ago, and there were no more boxes to cut open.

Move now,
Calvin told himself, but he was frozen in place. Move
how
? It didn’t take a high IQ to know that he was finished. With any luck, Donna could talk her way out of this and hit the road like they’d planned, put in a phone call to Taber, and then the Knights could save Calvin’s weary carcass from death and decapitation.

“Take me along,” Calvin said without thinking. “Me for my uncle. Even trade. You’ll have the veil and a hostage both. …”

“So now it
is
the veil? In that case I’ve already got the veil and
two
hostages, so let’s just see how this plays out.” Postum nodded out the window.

Calvin saw Donna look up in surprise at Mifflin, who was speaking to her. She took the gas nozzle out of its cradle and gestured, shaking her head, the wind blowing her ponytail out behind her. The man pointed at the “Pay First!” sign and then at the store, and Donna nodded and hung up the nozzle.

Don’t come in,
Calvin commanded, sending out the mental message, firing on all brain cylinders.
Don’t come in.
But she was coming in, chatting away, followed by Mifflin, who was nodding sympathetically. The door opened, the bell jangled, and she spotted Shirley at the counter. “Didn’t know I had to pay first,” she said. Then she saw the rest of them sitting there and widened her eyes in a greeting, with no recognition in her face. She took a bill out of her pocket and handed it to Shirley, who punched up the appropriate amount on the pump. The register clanged open, Shirley put in the bill and slammed it shut, and Donna turned toward the door. Mifflin stood in front of it, unmoving.

“Excuse me,” Donna said, as if she was dealing with an impolite bonehead, but it had no effect on him.

“Let the girl through the
door,”
Shirley said. “Don’t go fooling with my customers. I don’t have enough of them as it is. That’s just plain bad for business.”

“Just you calm down,” Postum said to her. “In fact, why don’t you go on into the back room again for a bit? Yorkmint, you accompany granny, will you? See that she’s not … uncomfortable.”

“What’s going on here?” Donna asked, brassing it out. “A robbery or something?”

This is it,
Calvin thought.
Match point,
like Hosmer said. He stood up suddenly, his hands gripping the edge of the picnic table. But before he could move, Postum said, “Sit back down,” and in that same instant the small man drew out the pistol and pointed it at him. Calvin sat back down.