The Big Drop

by Peter Corris

  The bookstore was like a cross between a junkyard and a library. The walls had books floor to ceiling with sliding ladders attached to the shelves. There were books on tables and in free-standing bookshelves. There were books and comics and magazines in bins and boxes. It was disorderly, paperbacks mixed with hardcovers and leaves were as likely to be facing outwards as spines.

  But one corner of the big room was tidy. It had the best light through a high window and was handy to the clerk’s desk and the cash register. It had a big, neatly printed sign hanging over a geometrically arranged table of glossy hardcovers—SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY.

  I drifted around checking this and that and resisting the impulse to straighten things up a little. In the Sci-Fi section a man was doing just that. He was small and pot-bellied with thin, sandy hair brushed across a pink, mottled skull. He moved books from a table to the floor, expanding the section. He dealt enthusiastically with customers for the fantasy corner, less so with others.

  Maybe it was just that he was busy with the little green men, maybe he wasn’t really there at all, but he didn’t seem to notice the shoplifter who carried out an armful of books with a technique that could only be called brazen.

  I selected a Robert B. Parker paperback and went up to the register.

  ‘I’ll take this, please.’

  He grunted.

  ‘He’s good isn’t he, Parker?’

  Another grunt. He rang it up and gave me change out of five.

  ‘Have you got A Canticle for Leibowitz?’

  He brightened visibly. His pudgy hands clasped in a fleeting attitude of reverence. ‘No, we’re out of it right now, but I could get it in for you. If you’d like to leave your name and number?’ He pounced on a scribbling pad and pen, whipped them down in front of me. I wrote John Watson and my Sydney telephone number and left after thanking him.

  It didn’t rain. I hung around looking in windows and watching the store. I bought a take-out coffee and drank it sitting on the bus stop seat opposite the store. When I dropped the container into a rubbish bin I looked inside for no good reason. I don’t think much of John D. MacDonald but I didn’t see why a brand new copy of his latest book should be sitting in the bottom of a rubbish bin. Along with it was a book about Agatha Christie by Robert Barnard, a Lew Archer omnibus and a fat biography of James M. Cain. I retrieved the books and went off to catch up with Swan on Market Street.

  ‘Any garbage today?’ I asked him.

  ‘Sure, same place. Came pelting down.’

  I showed him the books and told him about how his 2IC ran the depot.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Milt’s hot for all that shit. He persuaded me to include a section and it’s done okay.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, he runs it like Tiffany’s.’

  Swan hefted the books in his hands. ‘This is bad, maybe Milt’s eyesight is shot.’

  ‘He doesn’t wear glasses. He could tell an Asimov from a Zelazney at a hundred metres. Could he be trying to take you over and open the Six Rings of Uranus bookstore and brainwash?’

  He laughed. ‘Milt? Come on?’

  ‘I’ll look into him just the same. When’s the next tour?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Why?’

  ‘I fancy a rooftop view. When you’re back at the shop act normal. Don’t shoot the shoplifters.’

  He said okay and gave me his day’s takings again. I felt guilty grabbing the money he’d pounded the pavement and his tonsils for, but business is business. I went back to my hotel and read Early Autumn, in which Parker’s PI, Spenser, taught a kid how to run, pump iron, build a house and drink beer, all of which would be useful to him in later life.

  That night I followed Milton-Smith to a place on Washington Street in Chinatown which you got into by giving twenty dollars to an old woman who wove cane baskets on the doorstep. I played blackjack and lost ten or twelve dollars. Milt played poker and lost a lot more. He signed things and had a serious talk with a Chinese gentleman in an English suit.

  Two o’clock the next afternoon saw me on top of the computer games building. I looked down into the lane where Swan was due in about twenty minutes. The rooftop was flat with a rail around it; getting up to the fire escape was child’s play for a man who didn’t smoke and had once cleared five foot eight in the high jump. I hid behind a big box housing the building’s electrical system and waited.

  He came ten minutes later: sneakers, jeans and jacket, knitted wool cap. At the roof edge he laid out the goodies from a supermarket sack—water-bag, tomatoes, a soggy-looking parcel wrapped in newspaper.

  I stepped out and cleared my throat. ‘Conspiracy to litter,’ I said. ‘Ninety days.’

  He spun around and I recognised him as the shoplifter. I took a couple of steps and he backed to the rail.

  ‘Shoplifting, too.’

  He threw a slow right when I was out of range, and I stepped inside it and clipped him with my left. A fighter he wasn’t, he tripped on his own feet and flipped back over the rail. I jumped and grabbed his arm while his feet clawed at the sheer brick wall.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he sobbed. ‘Oh, Jesus.’

  His jacket had a slick surface and I could feel my grip slipping.

  ‘Swing your arm up and grab the edge.’

  He said something about Jesus again but he got three fingers over the edge. I reached down, grabbed his jacket and belt and hauled him back up under the rail like a net full of fish. The jacket tore and slipped up his back and off as he scraped skin from his fingers getting a hold.

  I was lying prone on the roof and gasping when I saw Swan come into the lane with his group. There was heavy breathing behind me, a sound like a knuckle cracking and something slammed into the side of my head. I looked down and thought I was falling, but it was only oblivion reaching up for me.

  A lucky kick, sneaky. I wasn’t out for long and when I saw my attacker’s bloody fingerprints on the roof I felt almost better. I was in better shape than him. Better dressed too; his torn jacket lay on the roof beside me. I laughed and sat up and then I didn’t feel good at all. I grabbed the jacket and lay down again.

  A little later I looked down into the lane which was empty. I congratulated myself on protecting Swan from the garbage. That was why I was up on the roof wasn’t it? Good job, Cliff, I thought. Let’s have a drink. Then I looked at the jacket clutched in my hand and remembered that there was a little more to it than that.

  It was a cheap jacket, and it had nearly caused its shoplifting, garbage-throwing owner to fall six storeys. Worse, it had a piece of paper in a pocket with his name and address on it. George Pagemill of 537 22nd Street had had the brakes checked and the tyres rotated on his 1969 Plymouth at a local service station.

  I went by my hotel, picked up my .38 and took a taxi to 22nd Street east of the railway. A rusty blue Plymouth was in the street outside 537, which was an old house divided into apartments and rooms. George was in room eight at the top of a dark set of stairs and opposite a gurgling toilet. The toilet was empty and the doorlock was the same as George’s, a cheap job that wouldn’t have deterred a determined Girl Guide. I listened and heard muttering inside. I held the gun in my left hand, crouched a bit and drove my right shoulder up and into the door opposite the lock. The lock broke, the door flew open and I spun into the room, changing hands on the gun as I came.

  George was sitting on the bed with a beer can held gingerly in his taped-up hands. It seemed to be taking all his strength to lift it. I pushed the door shut with my foot. The heavy stuff so soon after the fun and games on the roof had made my head throb. I felt mean.

  ‘Hi, George.’

  He gaped at the gun. ‘Hey,’ he said weakly.

  ‘Aren’t you going to talk to Jesus?’

  I chopped the can out of his hands with the muzzle of the gun; beer sprayed over his pants and the bed. I put the gun away and swept a quick look around the room—walnut veneer furniture, a stained hand basin under a dusty window, linoleum on the floor. George was no Mr
Big. He was as seedy as the room, with a thin, defeated face that was just waiting to get old.

  ‘Get outta here.’ His voice was flat and dull; his heart wasn’t in it.

  ‘Whose idea was it to throw the garbage?’

  He shook his head and put his bandaged fingers together. He rubbed them tenderly like a man who doesn’t expect to be hurt.

  ‘I could put you in for assault,’ I said.

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘I’ve got an armload of books with your prints all over them. Shoplifting.’

  ‘Crap. Anyone can look at books, open them and everything.’

  I stepped close enough to smell him, reached across and opened and closed a drawer on the chest experimentally. A smell of dirty shirt came up.

  ‘I could break your fingers.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why would you break my fingers?’

  ‘Because you’re being strong and silent about who got you to throw the garbage. You’ve got a choice, George; are you more afraid of him or me?’

  He glanced up and I gave him my hard look.

  ‘You,’ he said.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Bookstore guy. I met him in a bar. He offered me a hundred bucks to do it for a month.’

  ‘Shoplift and throw garbage?’

  ‘Yeah. He didn’t say why.’

  ‘Why’d you dump the books?’

  He looked at me as if I’d asked him to state the theory of relativity as an equation. ‘What else would I do with them?’

  I took the gun out and looked at it. ‘Your contract is cancelled as of now, got it?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I suggest you stay here for awhile. An hour say. I might be on the street I might not. You better play it safe.’

  He nodded again and I opened the door.

  ‘Hey,’ he whined, ‘where’s my jacket?’

  ‘On the roof with the other garbage.’

  The first thing I did was call Swan.

  ‘Where’s Milt?’ I said.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘If he gets a phone call, stall him, I’m on my way.’

  I called a cab, telling the operator it was urgent. The taxi came quickly and moved fast through the thin mid-afternoon traffic. I sprinted down the alley to Swan’s door. He opened it and put a finger to his lips.

  ‘He says he’s sick. He got a call. Wants to go home.’

  ‘Let him. Has he got a car here?’

  ‘I suppose. Why?’

  ‘Have you got one?’

  ‘I can borrow something.’

  ‘Something?’

  ‘A motor cycle.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘With a sidecar.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus. All right. Can you leave now?’

  ‘Sure, Maggie’s here.’ He ducked back through the door, shouted ‘Okay, Milt!’ down the steps and came back.

  ‘Out here.’ He led me down towards a dumpster in the alley. Beside it was his motor cycle, an old Harley Davidson. The sidecar was a World War Two relic with patches on the fabric and dents like bullet holes in the body.

  ‘Has Milton-Smith ever seen you on this?’

  He pulled out heavy goggles and a helmet like Lindbergh’s. ‘No. Friend in the next building lets me use it, but I don’t need it much.’

  I levered myself into the sidecar which was as comfortable as a coffin. The motor caught at Swan’s first kick and we puttered down the alley. Up the street Milton-Smith was trotting along on his short legs towards a garage. We stopped with a clear view of the exit and waited. After ten minutes, a green Dodge Dart rolled out.

  ‘That’s him,’ Swan said.

  ‘Follow that car.’

  The Dart crossed Market Street and began the manoeuvres designed to put it on a high road leading north-east. The wind was roaring and cold, and I only had a T-shirt and a light velour sweater between me and it.

  ‘Where’s he going?’ I shouted.

  ‘Oakland, Berkeley . . .’ The wind whipped the words away.

  I was disappointed, not the Golden Gate. The traffic moved fast but Swan was a good rider and he kept the bike steady and my sidecar out of harm’s way. I was starting to enjoy the ride when he waved and shouted at me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Toll.’

  I fished out coins and scattered them into the machine like birdseed. The Dart had got a smoother passage through and Swan had to change lanes and pick up speed to stay in touch. The sidecar swayed and I felt like a flightless fledgling teetering on a branch.

  Milt took a north-going turn off the bridge and Swan mouthed Berkeley at me. I thought about communes, marches, protests, but the streets were quiet and there wasn’t an untrimmed beard in sight. The Dart made a few turns and slid into a parking lot attached to a building with tinted glass, white pebbles and potted palms. Swan slammed on the brakes and the edge of the sidecar took me hard and low on the rib cage. I climbed out swearing, said ‘Wait’ ill-naturedly and hobbled off to where the sliding doors were closing behind Milton-Smith’s narrow shoulders and sticking-out bum.

  Inside it was dark enough to screen Casablanca When my eyes got used to the gloom I saw Milt waiting by the elevators with a flock of secretaries carrying files and folders. He was impatient, shifting from foot to foot, and nervous, scratching at his thinly covered skull. We all piled into the elevator and I lined up behind Milt as he touched button six.

  At six he got out, turned left and walked down a short corridor. I hung back and watched him go into an office marked Palmer F. Wong—Realty & Investments. I hung around for fifteen minutes and no one went in or out of the office. Milt was in conference.

  Back on the street, I filled Swan in.

  ‘What does it mean?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t know. He loses money to Chinese gambling, and here he is ensconced with a Chinese money man after getting a phone call from a guy he hired to harass you. It has to hang together somehow.’

  ‘We could shake it out of him,’ Swan said.

  Just then Milton-Smith came out of the building. Swan ducked his head and fiddled with his goggles but I took a good long look. The man with Milt was about six foot four and couldn’t have weighed less than two hundred pounds. He had a shaven skull and only one ear; the other side of his head was just smooth, waxed, yellow skin. He took long bouncy strides as if he liked to feel the sidewalk under his feet. I wondered what else he could do with his feet.

  Swan had shot them a quick look. ‘Guess not,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, the answer’s there, in that building.’

  I sighed. ‘Yeah, I know. You better go home. I’ll call you in the morning.’

  I was cold and tired by the time I had a fix on the security arrangements for what I was privately calling the Wong building. The place basically emptied at 5 o’clock with a few over-achievers hanging around till six or a little past. A security patrol van came by at seven; an armed man looked for lights, used a telephone in the lobby and then locked up. The van came back at nine; a guard checked the front door, a side service door and the small underground parking lot.

  I walked a couple of blocks to get warm, called a cab and went back to the city. I had a late dinner near the hotel and crawled into bed not looking forward to the next day, and wondering why I didn’t just chuck it and fly back to Sydney. I knew why—I liked Swan, I’d taken his money and I wanted to know what was going on.

  ‘I thought you were going to do it last night,’ Swan said when I called him.

  ‘That shows how much you know about the detective business. It’s tonight. Milt in today?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How’s he looking?’

  ‘Nervous.’

  ‘You see that big Chinese with the one ear?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s right, you wouldn’t. I’ll call you again tonight.’

  I spent the early afternoon buying a few things. At 4 o’clock I was back
at the Wong building in Berkeley. By 4.40 I was lying across the beams inside the acoustic tiles, maybe two metres above the toilets, in the men’s room on the sixth floor. I’d used the toilet before I’d climbed up into the space which was about half the size of a telephone booth. Among my effects I had a flask of whisky and a strong flashlight. I’d wound my watch.

  The time passed slowly and it was hard not to sneeze. I climbed down at 6.45 and snuck a look down the corridors. There was a light near the elevator, otherwise the whole floor was dark. At 7 o’clock, phones started ringing; one rang on every floor and then there was silence. Working by the flashlight, it took me ten minutes to get in Mr Wong’s secretary’s room and another five to get into the inner sanctum. In the strong beam I picked out individual objects—a big, tidy desk, a wet bar, chairs, two filing cabinets.

  Filing cabinets are a pushover and some systematiser had made it easy for me. The first cabinet contained a folder labelled SWAN. I took it over to the desk, sat down and went through it. The song it sang was clear if not sweet. Daniel Swan had filed a number of preservation requests on San Francisco buildings with the Heritage Committee and the City Hall when he began working as a tour guide. From his hastily written letter to the City, with the building designations filled in by hand, it seemed that this was a routine procedure. The applications had been put on open review by the City, which effectively blocked applications to demolish or substantially alter the said buildings. A proposal by Fenner A. Wong for a re-development of the Baltimore Building site had been refused, with Swan’s preservation request cited as the grounds.

  I looked in vain for Milt under ‘M’ but I found him under ‘S’. He owed Kwong-Ping Wong of Washington Street slightly more than fifteen thousand dollars, and had taken out an unsecured loan with Palmer F. Wong for just that amount.

  I used the Nashua copier in the outer office to make several copies of all documents, put the files back and locked up after me. At the bottom of the fire stairs was a door with a padlock on it which led out to the car park. I was ready for padlocks and this one didn’t give me any trouble.

  A light showed into O’Farrell Street from the shop. I rattled the door and Swan opened it with the hand that wasn’t holding money.