Ames To Thrill: Three Full-Length Gripping Mystery Thrillers

by Dan Ames

She answered without hesitation. "Right."

  "You said he seemed nervous."

  "Yeah," she said. "He wasn't himself."

  I forced myself to slow down. "Okay, can you remember anything else?"

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know," I said. "Anything he talked about. What he was doing. Where he was going. Was he meeting anyone else?"

  She shook her head and I felt something sink inside me. I'd wasted my time. I should have known.

  "No. Nothing like that.”

  Shit.

  "Do you know where he went afterward?” I asked.

  "Yes. Here."

  I pointed at the floor of the dining room. "Here? Like, your house you mean?"

  "Yeah."

  "But you said the last time you saw him was at the coffeeshop..."

  "I had to go back to work and he said he needed something. He knows where the spare key is so I didn't come back. He was here alone. But it's not like I wouldn't trust him."

  "Did he get it? What he needed?"

  She squinted. As if the memory were so long ago she could barely make it out on the horizon.

  "Well, that brings up a good point," she said. "I'm sorry I didn't think of it before, but when he told me he needed something, it, well, it struck me as kind of odd."

  "Why?"

  "Because I'd cleaned the basement the week before and as far as I could tell, all his stuff was gone. He'd moved it all out a long time ago. I just assumed I must have missed something."

  From the kitchen, a hissing sound erupted and she jumped up to turn the heat down on whatever was cooking in the pan. Smelled like garlic.

  She poured herself a glass of wine as I sat back in my chair. She walked over to me and stood next to me.

  "It was odd," she said. Sip.

  "Unless..." I said, "Unless he wasn't picking something up."

  She looked at me over the rim of her glass.

  "Maybe," I said. "Maybe he was dropping something off."

  35

  Thirty-Five

  "Boy," I said, swiping away a big cobweb, "how long ago did you clean this place?" The spiderweb clung to my hand. I wiped it on my pants. It just seemed to smear.

  We went down the wooden steps to her basement. I had accepted a beer from Emily and was glad I did. Drinking in the basement is a unique Wisconsin tradition.

  The stairs were old, steep, and creaked with each step. One step was completely cracked.

  It was a typical basement. The cement floor had been painted gray many years ago. The cement block walls were white. Several bare light bulbs hung from the ceiling, their string covered with dust. I turned them all on.

  In one corner was the furnace, in the other corner, an ancient concrete double sink was pushed up against the wall. Next to it were the washer and dryer.

  Emily spoke from behind me. "What are we looking for?" she asked.

  "I don't know, did you see anything out of the ordinary when you cleaned down here?"

  "No." A long centipede type insect scurried away from the light. "Just spiders and mouse poop."

  Water rushed from the washer to the big sink. The furnace kicked in.

  "Did you find anything of Tim's?" I asked. "Empty boxes? Anything you thought was garbage?'

  "I don't think so. If I did, I threw it out."

  Great. Where to start looking?

  "Has anyone been down here since?"

  She shook her head. "No, just the guy from the city."

  I turned around and looked at her.

  "The guy from the city?"

  "He needed to check the furnace for gas leaks, said that the area had reported abnormal readings. Something like that. "

  She saw the expression on my face. Rolled her eyes and held her hands out.

  "Look," she said. "He had papers from the Elm Grove police, authorizing him to...be doing that. I checked. I'm not an idiot."

  "Did he check your neighbors, too? Did you get any kind of notification from the city ahead of time? Did anyone else mention it? Or did he just show up?"

  She looked off, annoyed. "He just showed up," she finally said. "Come on, he was a harmless gas man. Stop being so fucking paranoid."

  Something scurried across the floor and Emily said, "I think I need another glass of wine." She went up the stairs and I stood there, alone in the basement. I knew that someone else had already been here. Probably thoroughly searched the space. And judging by what had happened, I figured they hadn't found anything.

  I tried to put myself in Tim's place. He must have found something and needed to hide it someplace safe. He figured, accurately I'm sure, that his place wasn't safe. What better place than his estranged ex-wife's house?

  I went back up the steps to a small ledge that held a collection of car wax, ant spray and gardening gloves. On the near side was a flashlight. I tested it, and a thin ray of light shone out. Good enough to look into the nooks and crannies.

  In the area beneath the stairs, I saw a pair of matching steel shelves, littered with old rolls of duct tape, a few crescent wrenches, pliers, an old hammer, jars of nails and screws, a tape measure and some oily rags.

  A box was beneath the bottom shelf. I pulled it out. Nails.

  I straightened up. There was only one way to do this. I started with the easy stuff. The washer and dryer area. The workbench. The shelves. Nothing. I went through every box, every nook, every cranny of Emily Lyons' basement.

  And I had nothing.

  Nothing but a sore back and a headache. And lungs full of musty basement air.

  I looked around me. I didn't know what I’d hoped to find. A secret compartment. A loose rafter. A section of drywall with smudged fingerprints around it that seemed out of place.

  But there was nothing.

  I stood there, hoping for some sort of inspiration, but none came. It was just a basement. No secrets. At least none that it was willing to divulge at the moment.

  I turned the lights off and went back upstairs.

  Emily had eaten alone. Canceled her dinner plans. I was sure William Vanderkin wasn’t a happy camper right about now. She sat on the couch in sweatpants and a sweatshirt, her feet tucked under her legs, watching television. A bottle wine sat on the table next to her.

  “Mind if I grab a beer?” I said.

  She shrugged her shoulders, then flicked the remote control and the television went to black.

  "Nothing but repeats,” she said.

  I came back with my beer, took a long drink, and watched the television as it faded to black.

  "I like movies, but those are getting so expensive. Jeez, it's like, seven-fifty, eight bucks to go see a flick. Popcorn? Add on another three bucks. Two people go, you could have dinner at Bartalotta's for that kind of mon-"

  She was looking at me.

  "Burr. What is it?"

  A thought had occurred to me.

  "Do you have a camera?'

  "Sure, a Nikon-"

  "No, a movie camera."

  "Like for film? Real film?"

  "Anything."

  She gestured to the entertainment center.

  "Just a plain old camcorder. Sony. Or is it a Panasonic? Whatever. Lower right door."

  I stood, walked and then knelt in front of the television.

  "I got it at Target. On sale. It was like four hundred bucks. Now they're down to..."

  I pushed the lower right hand door and it sprang open. Inside was a gray case with two handles and a shoulder strap. It had nylon pouches on the outside, and the main compartment had a zipper around it.

  "...like two ninety-nine. So much cheaper now," she said.

  I unzipped the main compartment.

  A Sony videocamera was nestled in the bottom, along with a spare battery. A nylon pouch was on the underside of the main flap. And next to it, something else.

  From the couch, Emily asked, "What is it?"

  It had once been a silvery color. But now it was pitted on the sides with rust.

  It was an o
ld film can.

  36

  Thirty-Six

  My cell phone rang. It was Paul from the Historical Society.

  The rustle of papers again and then Mr. Jenkins sighed. "Mr. Ashland, I have located as you say, the 'Hairy Man.'"

  "Who is he?"

  A few puffs of the pipe.

  "Perhaps you'd better come to my office.”

  "I'll be right there," I said.

  Traffic was slow, but so far there had been no accidents.

  In less than an hour, I pulled into a parking space on the western side of the historical society, slammed the door shut and stepped out into the slush. I walked around the Audi and started for the main door of the historical society, then turned around. I scanned the surrounding streets for cars, for people I might recognize or who just seemed out place. Nothing jumped out at me.

  The historical society doors were covered with frost on the inside. I stepped into the vestibule that was only a few degrees warmer than outside. Brown slush covered the flimsy mat. I shook off my shoes, the mat squeaked underfoot. I went through the inner doors into the main foyer. A thick trail of brown slush led from the entryway into the foyer until it thinned out and disappeared.

  The elderly lady at the front desk looked up from her People magazine as I passed her for the stairs to the second story. The door to the research room was open and I found Jenkins in his office, puffing on his pipe, reading an old newspaper. He had on a thick green sweater and brown corduroy pants. Apparently taking wardrobe cues from Captain Kangaroo.

  "Good morning, Mr. Jenkins," I said. I had pulled myself together after the episode on the parking structure, and now I clapped my hands together. Jenkins set down his paper and hefted a thick manila envelope.

  "Could you tell me anything more about where you found these pictures?" he asked, holding up the original still photos I'd lifted from the film.

  "No, I can't." I lifted up my hands. "You see these?"

  He nodded.

  "They're completely tied."

  "Very well."

  He set the folder back down and packed some more tobacco into his pipe, lit it and got it going with a flurry of consecutive puffs. At last, smoke tendrils emerged from his nostrils.

  "Are you familiar, Mr. Ashland, with what happened, way back when, when the owner of a brewery died?" He sucked on his pipe and let the smoke curl outward from his lips.

  "Not a friggin' clue," I said.

  "Typically," he answered. "The brewmaster would ask for the widow's hand in marriage."

  "Really."

  "It was often a marriage of convenience. A business proposition. The widow inherited the brewery. The brewmaster was the man who ran the business. Who knew the most about how the entire operation worked. He would be the man to whom the widow would turn. So, in order to keep simple, the two would marry."

  "Isn't that a bit…"

  "Calculated?"

  "Yeah," I said. "To the extreme."

  "You have to remember something, this was a long time ago. If anything, business was more cutthroat and even more political. There were fortunes being made and a misstep in running the brewery would have caused a lot of people a lot of headaches. So they were playing for keeps."

  He then ceremoniously reached into a drawer on the left side of his desk and pulled out a large scrapbook. It was the same one that he had used to retrieve the photos of Mary Schletterhorn.

  He opened it up to a page and spun the book around so it faced me.

  "Tell me what I'm looking at," I said. The picture before me was a shot of at least fifty men, all standing with beer mugs in their hands. Behind them, hung a sign.

  "Krahn Breweries,” Jenkins said. “Taken in 1908. It’s a shot of the brewery and its workers on Water Street.”

  There he was. In the very middle. Next to an older man with a full white beard. I would have recognized his square block head and beady little eyes, even without some underage girl wrapped around him.

  "The man with the beard," Jenkins said. "That's Jacob Krahn. The founder of Krahn breweries."

  "And the man-" I said.

  "-the man to his right is...your man."

  I peered closer.

  "And he would be..."

  "Otto Hilgert. Brewmaster for Krahn Breweries from 1899 to 1909."

  "What happened in 1910? He get fired?"

  Jenkins flipped through some notes.

  "On the contrary. He married Krahn's widow. Ruth Krahn. And became the head of Krahn Breweries."

  My mind struggled to sift through the implications.

  "A year later," Jenkins said. "He died in a fire. The newspaper said it was an accident."

  "An accident," I repeated.

  "The other body was never identified," Jenkins added.

  "The other body?" I asked.

  "There was an unidentified body in the room with Hilgert. It remained a mystery."

  37

  Thirty-Seven

  The Milwaukee Antique Center was in the Third Ward, just off the freeway at the corners of Buffalo and Chicago. Just up the street was the Manly Building, which housed Planned Parenthood. Another city planner with a sense of humor.

  The Antique Center was run by Don Chambers, a friend and drinking buddy of mine from way back.

  I found him in the back room, unpacking a set of vases from a box. He was wearing blue jeans and a flannel shirt.

  "Hit another garage sale?" I asked.

  He turned around and the easy smile I'd always remembered him wearing sprang to his face. "Burr Ashland!" We shook hands.

  Don was a small man but his blue eyes were alert, his handshake firm. The kind of sixty-year old guy who runs four miles a day and will probably live to be a hundred.

  "Estate sale," he said.

  I looked at one of the vases.

  "Rookwood?"

  He shook his head. "Weller. Louwelsa."

  I could tell by the small smile on his face that he was quite pleased with himself.

  "How much did you pay for them, Don?"

  "Fifty."

  "Each?"

  "Total."

  I stepped forward and peered into the box. I could make out four more vases in the box. Ten bucks a pop.

  "How much will you ask?"

  "Two hundred. Each."

  "And I thought my business was a racket."

  He put the top vase back in the box and we walked down a narrow hallway piled high with boxes. We got to his office which was nothing more than a tiny, eight foot by eight foot space dominated by an old wooden desk buried beneath a mountain of paper.

  He put his feet up on his desk which caused an avalanche of papers to fall to the floor.

  Don merely smiled. "So what can I do for you?" he asked.

  "I need a projector, one that I can watch an old eight millimeter film on. It has to be in good working condition, though. I don't want to ruin the film in the process."

  "No problem. Follow me."

  Don's shop was really a giant brick warehouse, four floors packed top to bottom with stuff. The whole place smelled like dust.

  The first and second floors were full of knick-knacks. Glassware. Jewelry. Nostalgic collectibles. The third and fourth floors were devoted to all kinds of furniture. Giant armoires, beds, chests of drawers. You name it, you could find it.

  Don led me to the second floor, past rows of cameras and photographs until we came across a shelf of old film projectors. He moved with certainty to one on the end. It was in a cracked plastic case covered with dust. Don opened the case for me and inside I saw a cumbersome machine made of black metal, with two arms, one forward, one back. It had a glass lens and controls on one side.

  "This is the best one I have," Don said. "I know it works, the guy I bought it from actually played some stuff on it for me. Said he took good care of it. Even showed me how to take it apart and clean it."

  "How long ago was that?"

  "About a month."

  I looked at the price tag. A hundred
bucks.

  "Do you remember how it works?"

  "Sure," Don said.

  "Show me how and you got yourself a deal."

  38

  Thirty-Eight

  I closed the blinds in my living room. Set up the screen, which Don had thrown in for ten bucks.

  When I began to thread the brittle film into the projector, I winced and thought about Gabby. She'd kill me if she knew I was doing this with a key piece of evidence.

  But I needed to see this. Had to see what my friend died for. I'd be damned if I'd let the cops get their hands on it first and then refuse to tell me what was on it. Although I had a pretty good idea before I even flicked on the projector.

  I let out a deep breath, hit the switch, and made sure the film caught.

  An image flickered onto the screen.

  Without Fred's high-tech equipment, the film looked even grainier, more lurid.

  The images wavered in my living room like ghosts. It was the same room. The same bed. The same camera angle. But the girl wasn't the same. Gone was the pale, wide-eyed beauty of Mary Schletterhorn.

  In her place was a girl.

  A black girl.

  She stood next to the edge of the bed. Naked. Probably the same age Mary Schletterhorn had been, maybe sixteen years old. Her hair was cut short, pulled back. Her face was more strong than pretty. Chiseled. Sharp. Her legs were longer, more muscular. She seemed more sure of herself than Mary Schletterhorn had been. More comfortable. More at home.

  The hairy man I now knew to be Otto Hilgert walked from behind the camera to the bed. His body looked especially crude and vulgar in the black-and-white grainy world playing itself out before me.

  He stood before the girl.

  And then something happened that never occurred in the other films.

  They smiled at each other.

  The black girl dropped her hand and began to stroke. They laughed about something. He raised his hands to her shoulders, caressed them. They kissed. Hugged. Otto bowed down and kissed her breasts, licked the dark nipples.

  They moved eagerly to the bed. Otto gently pushed her back onto the pillows and he knelt before her. He spread her legs with his hands, then moved between them and pressed his face between her legs.