The Nebraska Quotient (A Nebraska Mystery Book 1)

by William J. Reynolds

  I turned the Chevy’s protesting tires toward the littered curb across the street from the building, which looked to be a pre-Depression filling station converted to a garage. George’s Car Barn would be shortened in conversation to George’s Barn, I decided. In a quickly scribbled note to yourself it could easily emerge as geo bar, the final letter lost in hastiness.

  Killing the engine I swiveled my head around to inspect the rest of the block. It had all slid pretty far downhill. Most of the buildings, like George’s, probably began life in other incarnation—a dry cleaner looked like an old Phillips 66 station, a used-furniture store like a grocery. No telling how many businesses George’s building had held over the years. Or how many it would in the future, for George seemed to have gone bust. Words to that effect were drippingly whitewashed over the inside of a large window in the south corner of the building. Several other places along the street had faced similar economic trials. A sign of the recessed times. Here it was like a ghost town—an image I decided wasn’t too inaccurate, and one that would appeal to someone needing a little privacy while extracting information from less than cooperative witnesses.

  It was also near enough my apartment for Copel to have traveled the distance the night before—though that he was able to even move at all would forever seem to me a miracle.

  I started the car again, drove down the block to the cross-street, and up the alley behind George’s.

  I got out of the car.

  The alley was as quiet as the street in front. It held garbage dumpsters for a couple other buildings that shared the alley, some miscellaneous boxes and other debris, and nothing more. I peeked through flyspecked windows facing the alley. Some light from the street came through the garage’s front windows. I made out two pits in the floor, mechanic’s pits, from the days before every service station in the land had hydraulic lifts. It was an indication of the neighborhood’s long-time economic standing that no one had ever filled in the pits and installed lifts. George’s was a quickie oil-change-and-lube spot—at least, had been up until a few weeks or months ago. Now it looked totally deserted.

  Apparently, I reminded myself. I strongly believed the place was still used, had been used recently, as recently as last night, when Copel was no doubt interviewed there. I was equally sure that Eddie Bell had had an appointment to meet Crazy Al Manzetti there only a couple weeks ago.

  I needed in.

  I stepped back from the window. It was composed of several small panes of glass, each perhaps six-by-eight inches. It, and the steel back door, were firmly buttoned down.

  From the trunk of the red Chevy I took a quart of Quaker State; the owner of a car as old as mine finds it prudent to lug some oil around with him. I also grabbed an old newspaper from my windshield-cleaning supply.

  I broke into the can with an oil funnel and, folding the tabloid to quarter-size, poured half the 10W40 in a thick layer over the paper. When it was coated, I carefully lifted it by the upper edge and pasted it, oily side in, to one of the rectangular panes near the window’s inside crank. It overlapped the peeling wooden frame only a little.

  I carefully set the opened can on the floor of the trunk and got out the jack handle. I smacked the lug end of it once—hard—against the oiled paper. The glass under it gave with a dull crunch, and only a shard or two tinkled against the cement floor inside the building. Even in the night’s stillness it made about as much noise as some loose change dropping—and attracted one hell of a lot less attention.

  When I peeled away the paper, most of the glass came with it. I wrapped the mess in another sheet of newsprint and deposited it and the jack handle in the trunk. From my emergency box—I told you it was an old car—I took an oversized spot lantern. Gently, I closed the trunk lid.

  I reached through the broken pane like I was reaching into a lion’s mouth, grabbed the window crank and started turning. It was awkward going, and the frame was swollen a bit from humidity, but I got the window open wide enough to hoist myself through, then quickly closed it again.

  There was as much air in the garage as on the moon, and what little there was was made practically unfit for breathing by a thick, unidentifiable, sickening stench that imposed itself over decades’ worth of automotive odors and a strong, oily, smoky smell. The wing-beats of a rather large number of rather large flies trying to push out window panes provided the only airflow. The smell, as much as my fear of being caught flagrante delicto, made me resolve to hold a very quick search.

  As it was, there wasn’t much to search. At a glance you saw that the building was divided into four areas: the garage itself, a small and doorless office, a narrow washroom whose door stood open and another room with a closed door. Storeroom, probably.

  The garage bay was practically empty. I scanned the spot lamp over a half-dozen crusty metal drums huddled together against a pegboard wall on which still hung a utility lamp, an Allen wrench, a rubber mallet and a tire iron. A Phillips screwdriver rested on one of the drums that had lids. The drums were empty. A long workbench lined half of the back wall; it was vacant except for a large vise bolted to it, and an old, dangerous-looking coffee cup.

  I wandered over to the narrow strip of flooring that separated the mechanics’ pits and shined the bright light into them. The pits themselves were identical: a roomy rectangular hole in which the mechanic stood to work on the car driven overhead. The only difference between the two holes was that one had about a quarter-inch of water in the bottom.

  I looked overhead automatically. Two red hoses, one for air, one for water, hung from the high ceiling. Neither worked.

  On the spotted concrete floor near the edge of the pit were several darker gray spots with spiky perimeters: almost-dried water drops. I followed them over to the drums and, behind the drums, to a canvas fire hose on a spigot at the base of the wall. The needle-spray nozzle still bled a dark halo around itself on the floor.

  However long George’s had been out of business, someone had indeed been using the facilities, and recently.

  With my white beam I followed the drops back to the pit like a DWI suspect following a tape line. In one corner of the damp hole I noticed a small white something. I went down the narrow metal ladder at the head of the pit and got my shoes a little wet.

  The white something was the reverse side of a curled piece of Kodak paper. On the front of it was a photograph, a color snapshot of a young, thin, dark-haired man who glared with opaque pink eyes into the camera. He looked like he was trying to decide whether to slug the Instamatic operator.

  He also looked like Marcie Bell.

  And then it fell into place like a roulette ball. The fire hose had been used the night before last, when someone put Morris Copel in the pit, where he couldn’t avoid the full brunt of the high-pressure spray, where he got soaked before managing to escape and find me—though not before getting shot—and where he lost the photo of Eddie Bell that Marcie had given him.

  It was as I would have guessed—but it’s so much nicer not having to guess at such things.

  It hardly answered all my little questions, though, like who brought Copel to this malodorous place, beat him, hosed him down, ultimately killed him?

  And more important—because I could still guess at who had done it—why?

  The stench of the place invaded my mind and my stomach, with no benefit to either. Deciding I could be just as confused in the comfort of my own home, I pocketed the soggy photograph and moved quickly to finish casing the joint.

  The little office was the room with the big windows facing the street. I had to keep my beam out of the line of dusty panes while I inventoried the room’s contents. They were: a scarred wooden desk, no drawers; a swivel chair that matched the desk cigarette burn for cigarette burn; a gray four-drawer file cabinet, empty; an auto-supply house calendar, which hadn’t been changed since April, yellowing on the wall. In a corner of the ceiling a glistening
web constructed by the Frank Lloyd Wright of arachnids threw back the spotlight’s rays. A couple flies made themselves comfy there.

  The washroom was a grimy white sink and a stool, a cracked mirror, a dusty half roll of toilet paper and a horsefly family playing a symphony against an overhead slab of beaded glass.

  That left only the storeroom. Its door was shut, stuck but not locked. I pushed against it. I pushed harder and it popped with an elephantine squeal.

  When it did, that awful, pervasive stink hit me like a steamroller. I clapped my handkerchief over my nose and mouth and, fighting the gag impulse, entered.

  The room was a smallish, high-ceilinged square. It held more drums—ten or twelve—large cardboard boxes, smaller, flimsier boxes of the sort parts come in, a broken straight-back chair that rested on its side against the west wall. And flies. The damn things were holding a convention in that stinking room. I swung my lamp at the cloud they formed and, reluctantly, humming angrily, they parted for me.

  Except for dust, the boxes were empty. I turned back to the drums, kicking a few of the nearer ones, those that still had lids, to see if they were empty. They echoed back hollowly, deeply. One apparently had an inch or two of liquid in the bottom. One thudded. I shoved at it with my foot. It was heavy. Its lid was tightly in place, but obviously had once been removed. Someone had replaced it crudely but effectively, crimping the edges solidly in place with heavy-duty pliers.

  From the garage bay’s pegboard wall, I retrieved the mallet and tire iron. In short, sweaty order I gouged a hole in the side of the drum just under the lip of the lid, jammed in the tire iron and heaved with all my weight. The lid folded back four or five inches.

  My held breath gave out and I had to inhale. The stench was now literally overpowering. I bent over, face between my knees, until the lightheadedness passed. Then I looked into the drum.

  Inside, of course, was Eddie Bell.

  He looked like an overripe banana and smelled of feces and rotting meat.

  The flies went crazy. This, after all, was what they had come for.

  I scrambled to the filthy washroom and threw up into the sink.

  The water, when I rinsed my mouth and the sink, tasted of iron, but it was cold and clean. My lips and the tips of my fingers were numb. My empty stomach was still doing barrel rolls. But my mind, crippled by shock though it was, limped gamely along. It decided that Bell had indeed come to this horrible place on the seventh, keeping his mysterious appointment, and had been killed that very night or within a couple of days at the outside, judging by the body’s condition. It had to have been at night, when the block’s pathetic businesses shut down and the neighborhood was virtually evacuated.

  Bell had been sealed in that metal drum for ten long, sultry days. Only the fact that the place was shut up tight had prevented the discovery of the body for this long.

  Now, of course, the cops would have to be let in on the flies’ secret. On television I’d be expected to keep the body stashed away until the last two minutes of the show, when I would turn the bad guys over to the slack-jawed flatfoots and say, “And all the evidence you need to convict ’em is in a garage on the other side of town. Bring your own No-Pest Strip.”

  Unfortunately, in the nonvideo world, the slack-jawed flatfoots would, at that point, haul you in along with the base evildoers and give you an opportunity to acquire a new skill, like license-plate manufacture.

  However, I knew that marching into Ben Oberon’s office with the announcement that I’d turned up yet another body while butting into the case he’d ordered me only a few hours earlier to butt out of was only a little more advisable than knocking back a cup of rat poison with breakfast. The compromise course was to let some civic-minded but anonymous citizen with outraged olfactories dial 911. The cops would investigate the stench, which in short order would permeate the neighborhood, and the body would be “discovered.” In order to guarantee that happy outcome, I’d volunteer to be the citizen myself.

  Unthrilled with the prospect of going back for another look at the decomposing Bell, I easily convinced myself that his killer must have removed anything of any importance from his person. I left him to the flies, moved quickly, nervously, through the garage, wiping with a fat wad of toilet paper anything I’d touched that seemed likely to take fingerprints. That meant reclaiming the tire iron and mallet from the storeroom, but I didn’t peek into Bell’s final resting place.

  That done, I let myself out into the alley by way of the metal door, which I conscientiously locked behind me, twisting my hand on the doorknob to obliterate my prints. Reading all those detective novels pays off.

  I turned back toward the Chevy and barely had time to jump out of my skin before one of two gigantic men smashed a granite fist loaded with a pistol butt into the left side of my face, sending constellations through my brain, sending me crashing, unconscious, to the oily grit of the alley.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In the dream were giants. After all, I seemed to be meeting up with an awful lot of them; and in this dream, while nothing of any great significance resulted from the meetings, I was painfully aware of the discrepancies in size and weight and strength. It would be, my dream-self determined, far less humiliating to be pummeled by a giant than to have a giant refrain from pummeling you because he knew he could, easily, effortlessly, if he wanted to.

  To my dream-self it made a lot of sense.

  Painfully, I dragged myself half out of the dream. The wakeful part of me was aware of pain and blackness, and of a red light somewhere above me. Like a darkroom, the dreaming part decided. The whole case was tied to the image—literally, as in the darkroom where Bell processed Adrian Mallory’s nude photos; figuratively, in the sense that I seemed prohibited from examining anything in clear, white light.

  I was awake, solidly. I knew because now my head throbbed unmercifully, because now I knew the red light in the darkness was the hot end of a cigar in the mouth of a man standing over me, because now I realized I was again in the garage, lying in one of the mechanics’ pits, the dry one. And because now I understood what had nettled me in Bell’s apartment, what gave me the uncomfortable sensation of something—something very obvious—being amiss.

  There was no developing or printing equipment of any kind in Bell’s room, and certainly not enough space to assemble even a makeshift darkroom there.

  The photographs—Adrian’s and the others—weren’t the sort that you leave off at the local Rexall and come pick up next Tuesday. Bell either had a darkroom set up someplace else, or he had been working with someone who had one.

  Copel?

  I still wasn’t inclined to think so, but there was no denying he fit into the equation somewhere. Maybe he was a kind of silent partner of Bell’s. It would have to be figured in there somewhere.

  Meanwhile, there were other problems to figure out. Namely, mine.

  I focused in fairly well on the face behind the cigar. It meant nothing to me. It was just a face, a square face running to plump, on top of a long and solid body.

  I dragged myself to a sitting position on the concrete floor. This wasn’t as easy as it may sound. My head felt like a rotting zucchini ready to split. I reached up and gingerly stroked the damaged skin. A little blood came away, but it seemed mostly dried by now. I canted my watch toward the paltry light and read the time: 2:45. It seemed reasonable to guess I’d been out for twenty minutes to half an hour. Slowly I checked through my pockets. Everything was in its proper place, but I knew with a kind of chilling certainty that I’d been carefully searched. It didn’t matter, there was nothing on me to be found, but I still didn’t like it or the vulnerable feeling it left me.

  A wave of nausea took hold of me. I fought it, but I’d’ve probably lost if I hadn’t emptied my stomach of everything less than an hour earlier. Thank heaven for small favors. Across the back of my mind flitted the observation tha
t I could no longer smell Bell’s rotting corpse, even though the air I breathed was redolent with it. The nose tires easily. I put the thought out of my head before it reached my stomach.

  “He’s up,” Cigar said. On the horizon appeared another man, similarly constructed, a balding giant with a mustache.

  “That’s swell,” said Mustache unemotionally. “We plant ourselves in front of his crummy apartment and sweat like pigs all fucking day, and then he walks right into our arms when we ain’t even looking for him.” He snorted. “What about the boss?”

  “He’s on his way,” Cigar said.

  “That’s swell,” Mustache repeated, and went back to whatever he was doing, back out of my line of sight. Cigar went on smoking and staring at me as if I were a television set. I couldn’t think of any good conversational gambits and I had the feeling he wasn’t much of a talker anyway, so I ignored him, closed my eyes against another onslaught of illness, leaned my head against the stone wall of the pit.

  The boss. Manzetti, of course. Crazy Al, homicidal hoodlum. It occurred to me that I was in the same position—literally, quite literally—as Bell and Copel had been in, and look what they had to show for it. The realization didn’t set my mind or stomach at ease, but it did whisk the last mists out of my head and set my little gray cells, as Hercule Poirot put it, to work—furiously.

  Creative-writing time, class. What was the connection between Bell and Manzetti? What brought Bell here? What caused Manzetti to keep Bell from ever leaving?

  The photographs. They are the case’s common denominator. Bell had the nude photos of Adrian Mallory, a U.S. senator’s daughter. Never mind for now how he got them, class, the point is they’re great blackmail ammo. Was Bell working for Crazy Al? No—more likely, Bell was trying to sell the photos to the Mob, as represented by Manzetti. That worthy organization would be most interested in the photographs’ potential, and would know how to exploit it to the max.