AHMM, October 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  An hour later and Stone's would be busy with men lined up at the bar and early diners on the other side of the barrier, but at four o'clock there were only a couple of others in the place. When we were seated on barstools, Pyle repeated the strange story told to him the previous evening by a man he had met at the Mayflower. After winding it up he said, “It's interesting, but it's not something I can use. If you think you might, I'll be talking to him again about seven thirty at the hotel."

  After a grand dinner of Mrs. Bauer's meat loaf and mashed potatoes with apple pie for dessert, I drove back downtown, was introduced to Roman Stankowski, heard his story firsthand, then phoned Jack Eddy. An assistant manager at the Akron office of Wellington's National Detective Agency, Jack had the room across from mine at the boardinghouse.

  Stankowski was a husky man of about forty with a round Slavic face tanned and creased by hard years spent in the sun and wind. He walked with a pronounced limp and a tic kept his right eyelid in motion. He wore a cheap brown suit and a red-and-blue-striped necktie decorated with a few stains from meals long eaten. As he repeated his story a third time, skepticism was written all over Jack Eddy's face.

  In as few words as possible it went like this: Stankowski was a sailor on a Great Lakes ore boat, the kind longer than a football field, or even two. It was one of many plying the waters between the west end of Lake Superior and the ports on Lake Erie. From Duluth it carried iron ore from the Misabi Range to Cleveland, Ashtabula, Conneaut, and Erie, then made the return trip loaded with coal from the bituminous fields in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and southeast Ohio. The season began with the Blessing of the Fleet in April, ended in late November or early December when the lake waters began to freeze over. The Great Lakes are plagued by deadly and, in some years, frequent storms that in an hour's time can turn placid blue water into towering waves twenty feet high. On Erie, the shallowest of the lakes, the storm-driven waves hit in rapid succession, so there is no time to recover from one before the next hits. They say that six thousand ore boats and other craft have gone to the bottom on the Great Lakes, taking thirty thousand people with them. It's a dangerous way to earn a living.

  I recalled an early December day when I had stood in a light rain on an embankment overlooking the harbor at Conneaut. An ore boat, probably the last of the season, was trying to fight its way past the breakwater into the open sea beyond but was making only slight progress. I watched, cold and wet but too fascinated by the battle between man and nature to leave. At last it made it through the breakwater, so after a few more minutes I turned and headed for my car, thankful that I was on shore and not on that long, wave-battered ore boat.

  Roman Stankowski was born in 1900 and had grown up near the lake in Lorain. He married an Akron girl named Marie Strabic the day after Christmas in 1922. She was pregnant when he returned to his boat, the John W. Morgan, in early April 1923. On the first trip of the season, Stankowski had a run-in with the captain of the Morgan and left the ship at Duluth. Another, the Carty-Jamison No. 2, was ready to head out and was short a man, so Stankowski signed on at the last minute. While heading east on Lake Erie the boat was caught in a vicious storm a dozen miles east of Cedar Point. Stankowski had just gone off duty and was ready to climb onto his bunk when there was a terrific crash. He made his way on deck and found the boat had broken in two. The last thing he recalled was being hurled across the deck, then inky blackness.

  That was in April 1923. He awoke in a hospital bed, his head swathed in bandages. Semiconscious, he was aware of people coming into his room every now and then, looking at him and shaking their heads, then leaving. He was lucid the following day and was told he had been picked up by a small lumber-hauling boat out of Saginaw. That didn't make sense to him because his ore boat had been on Lake Erie, not Huron. Late in the day he was given a newspaper by an orderly. Some of the stories on the front page also didn't make sense, so he looked at the date. He let the paper fall and for a few minutes sat there stunned, thinking his head was hurt more than he realized and his mind was playing weird tricks on him. He managed to get out of bed, stumble unsteadily to the bathroom, and look in a mirror. Instead of seeing the reflection of a twenty-three-year old, he saw the grizzled face of a middle-aged man.

  The date on the Saginaw paper was correct, it was May 27, 1938, not an April day in 1923. He was totally bewildered. According to the story, the ore boat he had been on when it went under was the Lewis J. Russell, not the Carty-Jamison No. 2, and he had never heard of the Lewis J. Russell. Nor had he heard the name the nurses were calling him, Mr. Cermak—Joseph Cermak. Doctors examined him, one after another, and he gradually came to accept the fact that he was the victim of some form of amnesia that had blotted out fifteen years of his life.

  At a library after being released from the hospital he read the story of the earlier sinking of the Carty-Jamison No. 2 on a day when several boats were lost. Two men from his boat had been rescued by the Coast Guard. One was hospitalized, the other disappeared before anyone had an opportunity to talk to him. That, he decided, could have been him.

  As Joseph Cermak he had received a check for a goodly sum from the owners of the Lewis J. Russell. He knew that wasn't his real name and so wondered if there really was a Joseph Cermak who had gone down with the ore boat. Or, difficult as it was to believe, had he been Joseph Cermak for fifteen years?

  He traveled to Akron by train, wondering what he would find when he arrived. It turned out some things were just as he remembered, others far different. There was no trace of Marie Stankowski after all those years, and he was bewildered as to what to do next. He had been hanging around for weeks doing odd jobs to augment the check he had received.

  Jack Eddy wasn't buying it. “So you want to find your wife,” he said, “and you want to know what this Joseph Cermak was doing during the missing fifteen years, right?"

  "That's it. Can you help me?"

  "I'll think about it.” Jack handed Stankowski a Wellington's National Detective Agency business card and said, “If you're still interested in the morning, come to the office and we'll talk some more about it."

  We left then and Ernie Pyle headed to the depot to meet his wife. When we were back at the boardinghouse I followed Jack Eddy to his room. “You don't believe him, do you?” I said.

  "I don't know, buddy. I don't place much stock in this amnesia business. Hell, even the medics don't know much about it."

  "If he's not on the level, why come up with the story?"

  "How do I know? Look, friend, maybe he's off his rocker, or maybe he's concocted some sort of alibi for a crime he committed during those years he claims are a blank. I don't have much truck with this kind of stuff, but if he shows in the morning I'll give it some thought. Provided he's got a fistful of cash for a retainer. I'm not tying the agency up on a thing like this without it."

  * * * *

  After finishing my afternoon rounds the next day, I decided to stop by City Hospital to see my sister Catharine. We were young kids when our parents died in a car crash, so we had grown up at the Children's Home. Catharine had recently graduated from nurses’ training and now worked in the emergency room. I didn't see her as often as a big brother should. This was made clear when she saw me after I had been standing around for a few minutes and said, “What are you doing here, Bram?"

  "Just wanted to say hello, see how you're doing."

  "I'm doing fine. So what do you really want?"

  "Well, I did want to ask what you know about amnesia. Is there really such a thing?"

  "Of course."

  "Could a man have it for fifteen years and not remember anything about those years?"

  "Of course."

  "Can it be faked?"

  "Of course."

  "Will you quit saying that? Tell me what you know about it."

  "Not much, really. There are differing opinions about what is genuine and what isn't. In some cases there's no doubt, in others the doctors don't always agree. There's a lot about amnes
ia that is still unknown."

  "For Pete's sake, Catharine, this is 1938, not the Civil War era. I thought you people knew all about such things."

  "You're wrong. Now I have to get back to work."

  I turned to leave, then said, “That poor guy they helped in here while I was parking the car, the one that could hardly breathe with asthma or something. How is he?"

  "Dead,” she replied, then walked away.

  I left shaking my head. She could stand a little work on her bedside manner.

  * * * *

  Jack Eddy pulled his 1932 Auburn sedan up in front of the boardinghouse shortly before supper time. I stepped out on the porch to meet him. “Did you take Stankowski's case?"

  "Yeah. After he gave me a thousand dollar retainer."

  "A thousand bucks? Wow! That's a lot of money."

  "We'll earn it, buddy, and probably more than that."

  "I've been thinking, Jack. Would Stankowski be better off forgetting the whole thing?"

  "Not if he's on the level, friend. What's worse, finding out the truth, good or bad, or spending the rest of his days moping around barrooms with those questions in his head? That could drive a man haywire. Or make a souse of him."

  "So now what?"

  "Our Detroit office is checking out his story in Saginaw. I've got Cliff Austin and a new man, Mac McKelvey, chasing down the long-lost wife, and Cal Andres is up at the lake seeing what he can find out about the sinking of the Carty-Jamison No. 2 in 1923."

  "You still don't believe his story, do you?"

  "I don't know, buddy. I'm keeping an open mind."

  "Think it's time for me to write a story on it?"

  He walked on into the house with a shrug of his shoulders. “That's your department. I don't care one way or the other."

  So I went back downtown after supper and wrote up what I knew, although making sense of it wasn't easy. When I walked in the newsroom the next morning Ben Goldsmith was all excited. He loved the story and wanted to know when there would be a follow-up. That made me begin to regret ever hearing of Roman Stankowski.

  * * * *

  Sue Baney was full of questions about my story when I picked her up that evening for a ride around town and maybe an ice cream soda someplace. She kept calling Stankowski “that poor lost soul” and nearly bit my head off when I suggested he might be a con man. “Con men don't pay a detective a thousand dollars,” she said. I admitted she had a point.

  Her reaction was like that of many people, and it puzzled me. Not once had I ever heard her express concern that the world seemed headed for another big war, but mention some down-on-his-luck slob and she got all choked up and teary eyed. I just couldn't understand people. At Sue's insistence we took in a movie, Mickey Rooney in Love Finds Andy Hardy, but my mind was on things more important than the escapades of a precocious, puffed-up kid.

  * * * *

  I hadn't seen Jack Eddy for a few days before he came swaggering into the newsroom, perched himself on a corner of my desk, and, as if he were announcing some world-shaking piece of news, said, “We found Marie Stankowski."

  "I assume that was an editorial ‘we’ and it really was one of your operatives that found her. So where was she?"

  "Here in town. And don't get flippant with me if you want to hear about it. Anyway, Cliff Austin found she had Stankowski declared legally dead years ago. After that she remarried and is living up in Cuyahoga Falls with her second husband and Stankowski's fifteen-year-old son. She got hitched to a Myron Bullington up in Ravenna, which is why Cliff didn't track her down the first day. He says Marie is a shriveled-up harpy and the kid is a totally obnoxious pain in the butt."

  "Then she isn't living here in town but up in the Falls."

  "So who can tell the difference? You're really in a mood today, aren't you, buddy? Combative, I'd call it."

  "Does Stankowski know yet?"

  "Two days ago. And an hour ago he gave me another five hundred bucks to check out the new husband. He nosed around a little and thinks there's something fishy about the guy."

  "Like what's so fishy?"

  "I said it was an hour ago. Sorry I don't have it all wrapped up yet, but do you think you could give me the rest of the day to work on it?” He jumped up off the desk and headed for the door. “You're really something today, pal. Better take an aspirin or a good-humor pill."

  * * * *

  Artie Bauer, twelve-year-old son of my landlady, was sitting on the front porch steps when I arrived home in late afternoon. In passing I said, “How's it going, Artie?"

  "What's it to yuh?"

  I pulled up short. “What's your problem, kid? Forget how to act civil?"

  "Aw, hell. Maw wants to know why I ain't goin’ to the Boy Scout meetin’ tonight."

  I sat down beside him. “And why aren't you?"

  "'Cause me'n Hawkeye got throwed out last week."

  "For what, not being able to speak a recognizable form of the English language?” I laughed a little. Artie didn't.

  "Nothin’ like that. The scoutmaster said some kids just ain't cut out to be Scouts."

  "What in the world did you do, Artie? What brought this on?"

  "Nothin'. Well, yuh know that Camporee out at Camp Manatoc two weeks ago? Me'n Hawkeye won the fire buildin’ contest."

  "And for that they threw you out of the Scouts?"

  He grinned, then started laughing. “Well, yuh see Hawkeye brung along a little can uh lighter fluid and I had these matches. You shoulda seen it, Bram. Them other kids was rubbin’ sticks together and me'n Hawkeye had flames shootin’ ten feet in the air. They give us first prize, then took it away again."

  I got up and went on inside the house. That scoutmaster was right.

  * * * *

  Sue Baney and I had hamburgers at the Spotless Spot drive-in a few evenings later, then went back to her place and danced to some numbers on the radio. Visions that I didn't tell her about flashed through my mind when Larry Clinton's band played the big hit of the day, “I Married an Angel.” Before going to bed I tapped lightly on Jack Eddy's door, opened it when he called, “Come in.” He was sitting in his easy chair—something I didn't have in my smaller room—wearing just his shorts and undershirt and reading the latest issue of Liberty Magazine. He said, “Come to pick another fight, buddy?"

  I ignored that. “I've been wondering what it was that Stankowski thinks smells bad about Marie's new husband. Have you found anything out yet?"

  "Not much, but we're working on it. This Myron Bullington impressed our man who checked him out as a weakling that has the idea he's a big shot. A phony who doesn't realize he is one. He works at an old two-story building on Orleans Avenue, but nobody seems to know what kind of an operation it is. No sign on the place, the front door is always locked, a dozen or more employees that have to knock to get in every morning. If somebody knocks on the door during the day, no one answers. When they get a delivery at a loading dock at the side, a few employees come out and do the work so the driver never goes inside. Stankowski saw a truck load up with merchandise and drive off a couple of times. No lettering on the truck, no identifying marks."

  "How big a truck?"

  "Good size. Not a tractor-trailer rig, but big."

  "Doesn't sound like much to me."

  Jack Eddy laughed. “Why doesn't that surprise me, buddy?"

  * * * *

  A few days went by before I heard anything more. In the meantime I had driven down Orleans Avenue, a dreary street in the shadow of the Goodrich plant at the south end of downtown just a couple of blocks from the Times-Press. Calling it an avenue was someone's idea of a joke because it ran for only a single block south off Exchange Street. The buildings that lined both sides were a hodgepodge of dilapidated one- and two-story structures that at some point in the distant past might have been halfway respectable. Now they were a display of failed enterprises that brought to mind the song “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” Except, of course, that boulevard was an even bigger mis
nomer than avenue.

  What Jack Eddy had to tell me after supper at the boardinghouse wasn't exactly earthshaking. “Cal Andres got a job at that dump on Orleans Avenue today, buddy."

  "No kidding. What did he find out?"

  "Not much so far. They had him unloading and then unpacking crates from a truck all day. From what little he saw, most of the people were just packing up other boxes for shipment. He should know more in a day or two."

  "If it's some kind of shady operation couldn't he be in danger?"

  Jack gave me a one-knuckle punch on the arm that stung like fire. “That's what our line of work is all about, buddy. Cal can take care of himself. He didn't go in and start asking questions and stand gawking around, you know."

  "How did he ever get a job there?"

  "Watched the place one afternoon until the employees started leaving, then followed a couple of them to a bar on Main Street. Once there he struck up a conversation and one thing led to another with Cal kind of steering things. Cal was back at the bar the next day, and one of the guys told him to meet him the next morning because the plant manager agreed to talk to him about a job. The manager, by the way, turned out to be Myron Bullington."

  I thought about it before turning in that night. It took a real adventurer to have a job like Jack Eddy's or Cal Andres's. I could see where the excitement, the living on the edge of danger, could be appealing to a certain breed of man. I decided I wasn't one of them.

  I was sitting alone on the front porch swing listening to Kenny Baker sing “Loved Walked In” on someone's radio across the street when Jack Eddy parked his Auburn sedan in front of the boardinghouse late in the afternoon a couple of days later. Jack came bounding up the steps, excitement written all over his face. Before I could open my mouth, he said, “It's a record counterfeiting operation, buddy."

  "A what?"

  "They're counterfeiting phonograph records down there on Orleans Avenue. A first-class operation with top-grade equipment, a press for printing labels, the whole shebang."