It was the elevator man himself who stirred his memory.
One day—it was around Thanksgiving, McReary recalled later, because Perry Como was still singing about autumn leaves, but the department stores were already filling up electric trains and monkey-fur coats—the car came to a sudden stop between floors, with a shudder and a clankity-clank that sounded ominously like a severed cable flapping free: JUNIOR DETECTIVE DIES IN FREAK FALL was the headline that flashed to mind.
But the elevator didn’t drop. Hank let go of the lever, which was pushed all the way around to stop. He looked at his passenger with a glint of life in his matte-finish black eyes.
“Near wet yourself, there, young feller. Five floors ain’t nothing to old Betsy. Her sister took fifteen in Frisco in ought-six and they put ’er right back on the line with a fresh coat of paint. Not that the six folks that died appreciated it.”
“You were in the quake?”
“No, I missed that one. But us lift jockeys know all the stories. I could curl your hair.”
McReary lifted his hat to show his young bald head.
A bony shoulder lifted and fell, but the material of his uniform stayed shrugged. “Think what you save on Brilliantine. I wanted a minute of your time. Betsy’s slow, but she ain’t that slow. The poor schnook you’re working over upstairs won’t notice you’re late.”
“You got the wrong idea, old-timer. That kind of police work went out with bathtub gin.”
“Says you. I can fetch you a jug in ten minutes. I seen them jitterbugs go up full of vinegar and come back down two hours later spittin’ blood. You can’t pull the wool over these eyes, nor get out of me what they seen. A good elevator man is like a priest, only without the dog Latin.”
It was more words than he’d heard the old man speak since before Pearl Harbor. “So what’s the scoop?” McReary asked. “Selling raffle tickets on a turkey?”
“You mean a pigeon bloated up with water. Government drafted all the turkeys and sent ’em overseas in cans. I’m offering you a cut of a million.”
“A million what, card tricks?”
“Simoleons, you fresh punk. Maybe you can’t use it. Maybe you already got a million stashed in the box that twenty-dollar suit came in.”
“Eighteen-fifty, from J. L. Hudson’s basement. And it came in a paper bag.” He pointed at Hank’s uniform. “I guess that’s gold under the green on those buttons.”
“I didn’t say I had it. I know where I can get it, but I need help. I don’t trust them monkeys you work with. You got an honest face. What are you doing Sunday?”
“Taking my mother to church.”
“See what I mean? Good boy. Swing by my dump after you eat her fried chicken. Beer’s on me.” He gave McReary an address on Gratiot and started the elevator back up.
“A million, no kidding?” Lieutenant Zagreb lit a Chesterfield and grinned, tilting it toward the squad room ceiling. McReary had gone there when his boss didn’t show up at the California.
“I know it’s a joke, L.T. I want to hear the punch line, but somebody should know where I am Sunday in case I don’t check in. I can handle the old guy, but if he’s shilling for somebody with a gripe against the squad—” His smile was uncertain. “Anyway, if I told Canal or Burke, I’d get the horselaugh. You’re the only one doesn’t treat me like Andy Hardy.”
“Swell, Mac. Ring me at my place around six. I’ll be polishing off a can of cranberries. You don’t call by quarter after, I’ll send in the marines.”
“On the level, what’s he up to?”
Zagreb scratched the fine sandy hair on his big brainy head. “Probably wants to sell you some swampland in Florida. The Ambassador Bridge is already spoken for.”
“As long as it’s jake with you we talk.”
“Just don’t drag the squad into it. All the commish needs is one good excuse to put us all on a troop ship.”
The apartment was a sawed-off shotgun flat on the third floor of a building Buffalo Bill and the Wild West had paraded past in 1883: one long, narrow, barely furnished room with a Murphy bed and in the kitchen area an icebox and a hotplate. Hank, nearly unrecognizable in a worn twill shirt, baggy slacks, and suspenders, his white top-thatch exposed, pried the caps off two bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon and sat down opposite his guest at a folding card table. “Salt?”
McReary looked at the shaker, said no. The old man shook some salt down the neck of his bottle and swirled it around. “How was church?”
“Long. How do we split up the million?”
“Hold your horses, son. I don’t get no company. Let’s chew the fat a little.”
The detective saw he was in for it, drank beer, sighed. “So tell me about Barrymore.”
Hank grinned, swigged, belched. “Hell, that wasn’t Barrymore. It was John Gilbert. He was on a cross-country bender after Garbo dumped him at the altar. Ancient history for a sprout like you.”
“I’m not as young as you think. Gilbert washed out when talkies came in, didn’t he? Squeaky voice.”
“So they say. I ain’t been to a picture show since Rin-Tin-Tin. How come you ain’t in uniform, strapping boy like you?”
He adjusted to the subject change. “I made detective.”
“I mean in the war.”
“I’m fighting it right here. Essential service.”
“Don’t get sore. Me, I’m a pacifist. I voted for Debs twice because I believed him when he said he’d keep us out of the last one. But I knew Roosevelt was a liar. When he said if he was reelected no American boy would die on foreign soil, I knew we’d be in this one up to our hips in a year. That’s when I stopped paying taxes.”
“You haven’t paid taxes for two years?”
“They padlocked my house. Why else would I put up in a rathole like this? That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
McReary sat back cradling his bottle in his lap. “I can’t help you, old-timer. That’s federal. I can barely fix a parking ticket.”
“I know that. I don’t care about the house. They can have it, leaky pipes and all. It’s what’s in it I care about.”
He hesitated with beer raised, then thumped it down, rose, and unscrewed the lid from a sugar canister on the counter next to the hotplate. McReary, who was unfamiliar with the Midwestern custom of salting one’s beer, wondered if his host was going to sweeten it as well. But the canister was stuffed with papers. Hank rustled among them, found what he wanted, and sat back down, spreading the item between them on the table.
His guest didn’t touch the paper. It was about the size of a typewriter sheet, yellow and dog eared, and tattered at the seams where it had been folded in quarters. It was bordered in filagree, and the bold print near the top was faded but still legible:
THE HENRY FORD MOTOR COMPANY
McReary smiled. “Congratulations. You own a share of stock in Ford.” The old man had delusions of grandeur.
“We’ll come to that. I bought it from Henry himself back in ought-one. It was in the bar of the Russell House, a hotel you never heard of on account of they tore it down before your father was born. Henry didn’t drink, but he had a glass of mineral water to celebrate starting up. How we got to talking I don’t remember: Times was friendlier then, you struck up acquaintances with strangers. Also, I was drunk. Celebrating, too, you see. My pa had died, miserable man, and I’d sold the fambly farm for a nice piece of change. I wound up buying a thousand shares.”
“A thousand—?” This time it was McReary who set his beer down without drinking.
Hank, lost in the past, didn’t appear to notice. “Don’t you think I didn’t kick myself when I sobered up. I tried to stop payment on the check, but it was already cashed.
“Well, time passed, and I didn’t hear anything more about Ford Motors. Not for seven years, till he come up with the Model T. The rest I guess you know. He’s the richest man in the world now, and I reckon I’m the richest you’re likely to share a beer with.”
“I wasn’t bor
n yesterday, no matter what you think. That’s no Cadillac you’re driving up and down the California.”
“You’re a smart young feller, I seen that right off. Keep your mouth shut while them apes you work with are jabbering. Soak everything in. See, I had a steady job by then, working the elevator at the Pontchartrain, which was where that auto crowd hung out in their hunnert-dollar suits, puffing two-bit cigars. Smelled like burning money. That wasn’t for me. I was married, had a boy. Figured I’d sit on them shares and have something to leave him with to remember his old pa when I was six feet under.”
Hank sighed rackingly, pain showing in the faded old eyes. “Life don’t always work out the way you planned. Little Hank grew up to be a philanderer, run out on his wife and baby boy in 1920 for a cooch dancer he met at the Vanity. The wife and the boy went to live with her folks in Indiana. I never laid eyes on either one of them again. The Ponch got tore down, so I moved to the California, and that’s the story on me.
“Except,” he added, leaning forward with his arthritic hands wrapped around the bottle; and McReary leaned forward also. “I kept sitting on that Ford stock. It had got to be a habit, you see, like old Scrooge counting his bucks and never spending a cent. I was a widower by then—influenza took my Maggie—and there was nobody left to please by throwing in with the idle rich. Fred, that poor little boy whose pa deserted him, was going to get a nice surprise come his twenty-fifth birthday.”
McReary drained his bottle in one slug. He wanted another, but didn’t ask. He needed to stay alert.
The suspense grew. The old man sighed again, subsiding in his chair, and the sound was like all the bereaved of wartime America and Europe moaning in concert. His face collapsed into a thicket of wrinkles. He looked as old as Canal and Burke thought he was.
“I got the telegram first of the month. I never knew my daughter-in-law cared that much, but I guess under the circumstances she had to keep busy somehow. Fred bought it at Midway. Japanese torpedo caught his destroyer amidship. All hands lost.”
“Hank, I’m sorry.”
The elevator man rubbed his eyes, looked at his hand, showed it to his guest. “Pipe that. I’m all dried up like a squoze-out lemon. I never got to know the boy. It’s the idea of him I miss. Like saving up for a shiny new bike in a store window and then you find it’s sold. What the hell. I might as well be rich. What else have I got?”
“You don’t need me to cash in your stock.” McReary thought, nodded. “Oh. That’s what’s locked up in your house.”
“Only reason I had this one is I carried it around for luck. But I ain’t had none lately.” He folded the certificate and put it in his shirt pocket. “The feds are too busy stopping Third Column counterfeiters from busting the value of the dollar to follow up on foreclosures. They just stuck a padlock on the door without taking inventory. You and me are the only ones know what’s inside.”
“A million seems steep even for a thousand shares in Ford.”
“Not too steep for a man in charge. Years ago he near went broke buying back every share he could find so he wouldn’t be beholden to a soul. When he finds out there’s a piece of his company he don’t own, he’ll pay a dollar for a dime’s worth to snap it up. They don’t call him Crazy Henry just for laughs.”
“What are you going to do, break in?”
“Not me. Too old. You are.”
After he left the apartment, McReary used his call-box key to get Zagreb on the line. He heard Jack Benny on a radio playing in the background. The lieutenant asked if he could borrow a couple of hundred thousand till payday. McReary chuckled, but it sounded hollow. “No can do, Zag, sorry.”
“What was the deal?”
“The old guy wanted me to go in with him on the Irish Sweepstakes. He thought it was a sure thing if we bought fifty tickets.”
“Bet he figured he was the first one had that idea.”
“Anyway, the beer was free.”
There was a brief pause, then the radio got quieter. “Why so glum, chum? Don’t tell me you thought there was anything to it.”
“No. Some people just have funny notions about cops.”
“Comes with the badge. See you tomorrow, kid.”
Driving his cranky Model A home, the young detective felt a little bad about the way he’d turned down Hank’s proposition. He was still sore he’d been expected to commit burglary, for a cut of a million or a bus token, and risk a federal rap to boot; but the old man’s expression, and the pleading way he asked McReary not to tell anyone about their conversation, made him feel sorry for the lonely old soul.
He’d keep silent. It was a boneheaded plan anyway, and nothing would come of it.
The next day, and every workday into the new year of 1943, not a word passed between the operator and passenger. McReary stopped pitying him. The way Hank seemed to see it, behaving like an honest cop had made him as bad as the rest.
But things changed besides the weather.
At Christmas, McReary’s mother burst her appendix and spent six weeks recovering in Detroit Receiving Hospital. The third week of January, his favorite cousin wired him from Toledo for money to bail out her husband, who’d been medically discharged from the army after a jeep accident during basic training and now did all his fighting on a timber leg in gin mills. McReary’s savings dwindled. In the mail with the hospital bill came a letter from a government auditor telling him he owed taxes and penalties on undeclared income he’d earned moonlighting as an usher at the Capitol Theater.
The Bureau of Internal Revenue, he thought. How poetic. He stewed for a week, then went to the California Hotel when the Four Horsemen had no business there and rang for the elevator.
“What you do,” Hank said, handing him a beer in the apartment on Gratiot, “you use bolt cutters on the padlock. After you come out, you replace it with one from the hardware store. One Yale looks like all the others.”
McReary shook his head. “They’d smell a rat the minute their key didn’t work, and guess who they’d suspect first? If we’re going to do this, it has to be in such a way they never know it happened. If police work has taught me anything, it’s how to slip the latch on a window.”
“I didn’t know cops and crooks thought so much alike.”
“You would if you talked to one once in a while. The guys I work with are the best in the business. If they knew what I was up to, they’d have me busted down to civilian. Maybe not Burke; but he wouldn’t snitch an apple off a pushcart.”
“What changed your mind? Last time you was here I offered you a fifty-fifty split of a million smackers and you acted like I spit in your face.”
“I found out life’s a crock. If your grandson joined the army instead of the navy, wrecked a jeep instead of ate a torpedo, you and I never would’ve got past the elevator.” He smiled. “Too deep? Try this: I don’t want half. Just enough to put me back in the black.”
The old man’s mouth fell open. Then his jaw clenched. “That’s just dumb. It’s my property. I’d rather divvy it up with you than let Uncle Sam blow it on a private train car for some fat general.”
“That’s the deal, Hank. Otherwise, no dice.”
“Damnedest haggling session I ever heard of. See what I mean about war? It fouls up everything.”
They clinked bottles.
Dan McReary’s first venture into crime was anticlimactic. He’d gotten more thrills during the drive over, and that had been uneventful.
They went there in broad daylight; it was a working neighborhood on the southeast side, the risk of witnesses at home minimal, and poking around with a flashlight after dark would have invited attention. The house was old enough to have stood outside the original city limits along with a silo and barn, and needed everything, from shingles to paint to new windowsills. The government notice tacked to the front door glared white against the discolored wood.
He left Hank in the Model A, to blow the horn if he saw trouble coming, and went around back, where thirty seconds’ work wit
h his pocket knife freed a latch from rotted wood. The window stuck, but he put his back into it and raised it far enough to crawl inside.
The place smelled of shut-up house and eau de old coot. He found the suitcase where it was supposed to be, shoved back in a bedroom closet hung with stale clothing, heaved it onto a single bed whose springs rocked and creaked, unbuckled the shabby leather straps, and opened it to look at the stacks of stock certificates inside, each bound with a brittle-looking rubber band. Then he fastened it back up and when he was satisfied no one was watching the window, he pushed the suitcase through it and followed it out. Resettling the latch and brushing away yellow wood exposed by his pocket knife took just a little longer than working it loose in the first place.
Hank was standing outside the roadster when he got back and put the suitcase in the rumble seat. The old man looked nervous enough for both of them. “Check it?”
“Sure I checked it. Get in. Patrol’s not due for ten minutes on this street, but those beat cops don’t always go by their watches.” He slid under the wheel, turned the key, and pressed the starter. The loose lifters knocked.
“Any problems?”
McReary sneezed. “Just the dust on my hay fever.” He blew his nose and steered away from the curb. “I know less about petty thieves than I did before. I can’t see what the shouting’s about.”
“You call this petty?”
“That’s just it. If stealing a million doesn’t give you a charge, why snatch a purse?”
In front of the apartment house he got out to carry the case upstairs, but Hank beat him to it. He hauled it out of the seat and stood on the sidewalk holding it with both hands. “Come on up and I’ll give you your cut.”
“I’ll wait for the cash. Two people showing up with shares to sell after all this time might make somebody suspicious.”
“Ain’t you afraid I’ll duck out on you?”
McReary grinned and opened the door on the driver’s side. “I’m a detective. Don’t you think I could track down the only millionaire elevator operator in the world?”
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine Page 9
