The James Michael Ullman Crime Novel
Page 18
“Thanks, but I better not. Can I hit the freeway on the street?”
“No. It dead-ends. You have to turn around and go back the way you came.”
“Goddam. Who could remember that?”
As Sam pulled his cab into Lorene’s driveway, six small boys piled out of the open garage door. Abruptly Sam braked to avoid hitting them. The boys ignored Sam and ran toward us. One of them hollered, “Hey, it’s my birthday. I got a road race. Can you make it work?”
Jackie had light brown hair and Lorene’s eyes and nose, complete with bump. His square chin was an inheritance from his father.
“I’ll try,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
‘“We can’t figure out the wires.”
“Mr. Kolchak will wire your road race after lunch,” Lorene said. “We’re all starved. So let’s join the girls in the back yard.
The boys ran on. Lorene and I started after them.
Sam’s cab still sat in the doorway. Then, slowly, he backed out. As the cab straightened, I turned and waved. Sam didn’t see me. He crawled by at about fifteen miles an hour, no doubt pondering how to find his way back to the freeway leading to the city.
It occurred to me, as the cab disappeared around a corner, that I should have tipped Sam more. He’d have to drive back to the city without a fare.
Guests were still arriving. Lorene introduced them, but in general they ignored me. Jackie displayed mild interest when I handed him his present, a plastic model kit of a Colt Peacemaker. But an impromptu wrestling match distracted him.
In the kitchen I removed my coat, rolled up my sleeves, and helped Lorene make hamburger patties.
“You have a nice home.”
“It’s wonderful for Jackie. He can go to school out here with his new friends. I don’t worry about him if he’s out alone. It’s a long drive to the city, but for Jackie’s sake I don’t mind making it every day.”
“What do they say about your father?”
“Even if he comes home, he’ll be an invalid.”
“How much longer do you think you can go on this way? Doing the work of two people, seven days a week?”
“I don’t know.” She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. “I hired an assistant manager, but I can’t expect him to take the interest in the business I take, or put in the hours I do. I was ready for anything but this—Pop’s getting sick, leaving me alone with the whole enterprise. I’m finding out it’s quite a burden. But my gosh, never mind me. What about you?”
“About the same. Only half the places on Clay Street throw me out now. Thanks to Schell and Phil Amber.”
“Real nice guys.”
“Yeah. I drive out on the Capitol Freeway now and then. In the off-chance of picking up a lead to my brother’s body. And practically every cab driver in town is looking for Mexoil.
“Never heard of it. Sounds like a cosmetic.”
I smiled. I told her about Mexoil. “Doyle’s checked about twelve people known to have had the stuff so far,” I added. “Until now, nothing. But Sam has a list of some more locations, and I’ll give those to Doyle tonight. Were trying to keep this out of the newspapers as long as we can, so don’t tell too many people.”
“Mum’s the word.” Lorene winked. “And now, friend, the bad news. I’m behind schedule. So while I put the finishing touches on this potato salad, you’re going outside to broil hamburgers. The briquettes are already warmed up. Think you can handle it?”
I charred a few burgers but nobody seemed to mind. Everything I cooked was consumed. The guests were sloppy eaters. One dropped a hunk of birthday cake in the bean pot. Nobody minded that either.
After lunch I wired up the road race, laying it out on the rec room floor. The little cars buzzed round the figure-eight track like grounded hornets. It was all great fun until a guest stepped on a car and squashed it.
“It’s busted!” Jackie howled.
“We’ll get you another car,” Lorene said consolingly. “Hey, how’d you kids like to play croquet? Get the set, Jackie, we’ll organize a tournament. And if any of you kids have to go to the bathroom, go through the garage and use the one down here. I don’t want you tramping dirt on the carpets upstairs!”
The kids began tearing the lawn apart with their croquet game. Lorene gazed at them for a moment through the kitchen door. Then she turned and walked slowly into the living room. She pulled the drapes on the picture window. She sat down on the sofa.
“That’ll hold ’em,” she said. “For nearly half an hour.”
She closed her eyes. She leaned her head back. Awkwardly I sat beside her.
The top two buttons of Lorene’s blouse had become undone. She didn’t seem to care.
“I should be out in the yard with ’em,” she added. “It’s Jackie’s birthday. But I just can’t. I wish I could send them all away. To a movie or something. But the kids can’t walk to a movie from here. The movie is too far away. I have only one car here, Pop’s car is down at the restaurant, for running errands. It would take all afternoon to ferry those kids back and forth from the movies. So we can’t do that. I’m very tired. More tired than I’ve ever been in my life. All I want to do now is be alone with you. For just a quiet hour or two. For that little time, I could forget everything else. Pop, the restaurant, the payments on the cars and on this house. I’ve decided I need that now, to forget. With someone like you. You understand?”
“I think so.”
“Then what are you waiting for? Kiss me, at least…”
She responded with uninhibited passion. Her arms encircled me, her hands dug into my back.
Then she rested her head on my chest. She closed her eyes.
“Stephen, I know it’s wrong. With the children out there. My own son.”
“I’d be taking advantage of you, Lorene. You might not think so much of me afterward.”
“I knew you’d say that. We could, you know. The doors are locked. There’s a bedroom a few steps from here. You could undress me, I’d undress you. If we love each other, nothing we’d do in there would be a sin, would it? As for afterward—I’m not a little girl, Stephen. I might not feel so ashamed afterward as you think.”
“Would you be unhappy, Lorene, if we didn’t go into the next room?”
“Of course not.” She smiled. “I’m happy that you want to wait until we’re really alone. It will be so much better. But for now just hold me. No man has done that for such a long time. And if you change your mind about waiting—I’ll understand.”
At five o’clock Lorene sent the kids home. She and Jackie and I walked into the attached garage and got into her car. Lorene took the wheel and Jackie was in the middle.
“We’ve just got time,” Lorene told Jackie, “to pick up another road racer from the store before it closes.” She looked at me. “Would you mind, Stephen, if I dropped you off at the railroad station? There’s a suburban train to the city in fifteen minutes. Jackie likes to eat early Saturday so he can see his favorite television shows. If it wasn’t his birthday, I’d drive you, but…”
“Sure.” I looked at Jackie. This was the first chance I’d had to talk to him.
As Lorene started the car, I asked, “You ever do much traveling, boy?”
“Not much. I did when I was a baby. My father was a pilot. Do you travel a lot?”
“Stephen is an engineer,” Lorene explained. “He goes all over the world. He builds bridges and dams. All sorts of things.
“That must be fun. I’d like to go all over.”
“Maybe,” I said, “you will one day. Lorene, when will I see you again? I still don’t think it would be wise for me to show up at the restaurant.”
“I wish you’d change your mind about that. I wish—I wish very much you’d move back upstairs. We don’t have another tenant yet.”
“I can’t take the chance.�
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“Very well. I’m still afraid to leave the restaurant in a stranger’s hands, Stephen. People who go there regularly expect to see Pop or me.”
“You can’t work sixteen hours every day.”
“I’ll have to.” She sighed. “You know what Pop’s doctor told me? He said, ‘You better take a few days off. Get on a train, bus, or plane to someplace where nobody knows you, and just rest. If you don’t, you’ll be in here beside your father.’”
“That’s a good idea.”
“I might do that before I go back to work. It would give me a chance to think. All of a sudden, I have a lot of things to think about.
The deskman at my apartment building checked my mailbox. But Sam Alban hadn’t dropped off his list of Mexoil owners yet. The electric clock on the wall registered six fifteen.
I rode an elevator to my apartment, picked up the telephone, and dialed Don Collins’ number. I didn’t have anything special to say to Don. I just wanted to invite him down for a drink. I wanted to talk to someone, anyone, to avoid thinking what I’d been thinking on the train.
Don didn’t answer.
I hung up. I had to think anyway. About all the time I’d spent looking for Ed, and how I still seemed a million years from the answer. Could I have gone wrong somewhere? I couldn’t see how. I had done everything a man could do. I’d questioned people in every dive on Clay Street. I made myself a permanent fixture down there, so anyone with information to impart could find me.
I brought Irma to Clay Street, to determine if she could recognize anyone. She didn’t—and Doyle could be right. A perfect stranger, acting on a warped, momentary impulse, could have attacked Irma.
I’d even checked every newspaper printed a week before and a week after Ed disappeared. I’d probed every abnormal death or unexplained occurrence. The newspapers were still piled in a corner in the bedroom.
Thumbing through the newspapers, I had run into a few familiar names. Hiram Schell dedicated a playground a block off Clay Street the day before my brother vanished. Harry Bagwell lost a case a day earlier; he’d defended one of Phil Amber’s hoodlums, accused of assaulting a customer who had protested a bill in one of Amber’s joints. Amber himself, three days after the disappearance, refused to testify on grounds of self-incrimination before a Congressional rackets hearing in Washington. Pete Ordway, on the day of the disappearance, held a press conference at CGL headquarters and announced the county sanitary district had let a river-clearing contract to a firm headed by the mayor’s son-in-law. Don Collins, four days before the disappearance, was named one of the “Ten Young Men on the Way Up” by the city’s Chamber of Commerce. Martin Moss, a day later, was appointed publicity chairman of a committee formed to promote Dollar Daze on Clay Street. And on the morning my brother disappeared, George Nesbitt broke an exclusive series of articles in the Journal on narcotics sales to teenagers, especially in the Clay Street area. His prime source for most of his information was Captain Ware. The same edition of the Journal earned an account of how Doyle, at the head of a squad of detectives, raided a heroin den in a back room of a pizza parlor.
But while some names were familiar, nothing seemed to fit a pattern. I admitted to myself, at long last, that I was getting absolutely nowhere. And that perhaps I rated as the biggest fool on God’s green earth…
I reached for a cigarette and the telephone rang.
“This is Kolchak.”
“Steve? Van Doyle.”
The lieutenant had never called me “Steve” before.
“Yeah, Van. I planned to drop in at the precinct later with a new list of Mexoil can locations from Sam Alban. The list is probably downstairs at the desk now.”
“I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean?”
Doyle paused. “Steve, I wish I didn’t have to tell you this. But your friend Sam Alban, he’s dead.”
Silently, I huddled in the back seat of a squad car headed into a part of town I’d never seen before. The neighborhood was mostly residential and declining, much like the neighborhood around Bronson’s bakery. The patrolman at the wheel kept his mouth shut and his eyes on the road. By the time we pulled up to the police barricade, it was beginning to get dark.
A block ahead, alongside a coal yard, I saw Cab 444 parked alone by the curb.
Van Doyle opened the squad car door for me. A homicide detective named McGovern, who worked out of the uptown police headquarters, was with Doyle.
They led me to the cab.
“I came out here as soon as I heard about it,” Doyle said, “because of Albans connection with you. Your brothers disappearance is still my case. He disappeared in my precinct during the hours I was in charge. I knew how close you were to Alban and that’s why I called you. But I don’t think there’s any connection.”
“You don’t? What happened?”
“Some kids found him in the cab,” McGovern said. “The body’s already on the way to the morgue. It’s plain enough. His wallet and everything else is missing. It happens to a few cab drivers each year. A cabbie picks up a fare. The fare orders a ride to a spot where nobody can see what happens, like here. The fare kills the cabbie and takes whatever he can find. Nine times out of ten, a job like this is pulled by a dope addict who needs a few bucks for a fix.”
“What time was he killed?”
“As best we can tell so far, late this afternoon.”
“When you went through his pockets, did you find a list?” McGovern frowned. “What kind of a list?”
“You’d know a list if you saw one.” I walked around the cab. “Sam had a list in his shirt pocket. Locations where Mexoil cans were seen.”
“He didn’t have anything in his pockets,” McGovern said. “His killer took everything.”
I looked at Doyle. “How about that? First Irma Bronson. Then Sam Alban. And Sam’s list of Mexoil locations is missing.
“It could have happened that way,” Doyle said. “There’s no second-guessing a junkie.”
“This time you’re kidding yourself. No junkie stole Sam’s list. Sam Alban was murdered for only one reason. Sam was on my team. And he was close to something or he wouldn’t have had to die. Thirty minutes ago I was about ready to throw in the towel myself. But not any more.”
Sam Alban had many friends. When I arrived Sunday evening the funeral parlor was jammed. I paid my last respects. Alban’s wife and two sons looked at me and I looked at them. There didn’t seem to be much to say.
Two news photographers took my picture when I stepped outside. A light rain had started to fall. A boyish reporter I didn’t know asked me a question but I brushed him aside.
George Nesbitt of the Journal followed me down the street “Hey, Kolchak,” he called. “No hard feelings, right? I know he was a good buddy of yours. I’m sorry it happened.”
I stopped and turned.
“Thanks.”
“A miserable thing. Leaving the wife and kids. That’s always the worst. The hundreds of times I’ve interviewed the bereaved, I never can get used to it.”
Cautiously, Nesbitt moved closer. He seemed sincere. Probably he was. I still disliked Nesbitt, but I didn’t intend to punch him again. He’d taken enough knocks in his life already. Fuller’s investigation had disclosed that Nesbitt was an alcoholic, a diabetic, and a widower. He lived alone in a cheap hotel a few blocks from his newspaper. He had one daughter, a lush herself, who had run off with a door-to-door salesman to California. She didn’t even bother sending Nesbitt Christmas cards, much less a letter now and then. Nesbitt was his publisher’s pet, for scoops obtained decades earlier, and it was common knowledge on the Journal that Nesbitt would be eased into a dead-end desk job as soon as the elderly publisher died, which would be any time. The Journal’s news executives didn’t approve of Nesbitt’s often vindictive tactics any more than the city’s other crime reporters did.
“Neither will I.”
“I’ve been around long enough not to break a story that would compromise an investigation into a homicide. No cop in town would ever give me the time of day again if I ever pulled a bush stunt like that. I wouldn’t print the story until Doyle or McGovern gave me approval. And maybe I could even help you find this Mexoil stuff. You think Alban’s murder had something to do with your brother?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have absolutely no comment now. And if I ever do have anything to say, you and your publisher can read all about it in the Beacon.”
I pulled my hat down and walked away.
CHAPTER 16.
It rained all night and most of the next morning.
At eleven o’clock the sun came out. I left the apartment building and began hiking west. I had no destination. I wanted only to get as far from my telephone, which had been ringing constantly, as I could.
At a diner, I had coffee and a sandwich. And a little after four I walked into the Clay Street Precinct Technically, Van Doyle wasn’t supposed to report until eight. But I found him in his office.
Doyle looked up with mild surprise.
“Where’ve you been?” he asked. “I just talked to McGovern. He said he tried to call you twice this morning and you didn’t answer.”
“I was in. I just didn’t want to talk to anyone for a while. But that’s all over now.” I pulled up a chair. “What have you learned?”
“Still feel the same way?”
“You bet.”
“I wish you were right.” Doyle shuffled papers. “It would make things easier. We could try to tie everything together. But cab drivers lead hazardous lives. What happened to Alban…”
“Skip the lecture. I don’t suppose your underworld informants have come forward yet with a tip about the dope addict you assume is responsible.”
“It’s still early.”
“Uh-huh. Your Clay Street informants drew a blank when they looked for Irma’s attacker too, didn’t they? What about Sam?”