“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 with 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?”
That night he thought he’d dream about being out of debt.
He didn’t dream. He didn’t even sleep.
At three A.M. he gave up, brewed a pot of ersatz coffee, and listened to a nasal-voiced radio announcer make guesses about what FDR and Churchill were discussing in Casablanca. There wasn’t enough caffeine in a carload of the wartime stuff to keep him awake, but when he tried again later all he did was tangle the sheets. At half past five he dressed and went to 1300.
Lieutenant Zagreb was already in the squad room, as McReary knew he would be, chain-smoking Chesterfields and going over the blotter from the night desk. Zag lived on work and was a professional insomniac. McReary hoped to keep his amateur status, which was why he’d decided to talk to his superior.
The leader of the Horsemen pushed his hat back from his bulbous forehead. “You’re up with the roosters or still out with the tomcats,” he said. “Those steamer trunks under your eyes could go either way.”
“I couldn’t sleep, L.T. I don’t know how you stand it.”
“The Krauts bombed London fifty-seven days and fifty-seven nights. Anybody can get used to anything. Pour yourself a slug from the pot. It’s the McCoy. Bought it off the black market.”
“Aren’t we supposed to be breaking up the black market?”
“All the more reason to snap up the inventory. We never fail.”
He got the coffee and pulled a chair up to the lieutenant’s desk. He sipped, but the real thing was wasted on him this morning. Now that he had Zagreb all to himself, he was more reluctant than ever to confide in him. These might be the last friendly moments they ever shared. But the others would be showing up before long, so he started.
Zagreb heard him out without interruption. He watched the speaker the whole time and his eyes never blinked. Burke and Canal were fond of saying that that basilisk stare had broken more alibis than everything else in the Third Degree combined. When McReary finished, he dealt himself a cigarette and slid the pack toward the detective.
“I don’t smoke. You know that.”
“Looks like I don’t know you at all. Jesus. Twist Washington’s tail in the middle of a damn war? You want to be gang-raped by a better class of con than we got in the state pen?”
“I could be wrong, but I think I’m in the clear with the feds. Not with me, though. Should I turn myself in?”
“That would make the sex consensual. You want to confess, see a priest. I’m short-handed enough as it is.”
“I stumbled, L.T. I disgraced the shield.” He took out his badge folder and put it on the desk.
“Pick that up before it scratches the finish.” Zagreb extinguished his cigarette in a burn crater. “You think you’re the only cop ever stepped off the curb? When I was one Vice I ate oysters every night in the Hotel LaSalle and never paid a cent. Everybody was doing it. That’s why a grand jury got convened. I drew thirty days’ suspension without pay, but it was just oysters. The brass with cash were arrested or canned or both. Canal was driving a prowl car, but he got caught up in the same net for delivering policy slips on his beat. He spent six months putting blisters on his feet in Paradise Valley. Burke— Oh, hell, what hasn’t Burke done?”
“I never knew.”
“Point is, we got it out of our systems. I wouldn’t play poker with either one of them for big stakes, but when we bust up a brawl in a beer garden I’d rather have them at my back than the hundred and first Airborne. You, too—if you’ve got this out of your system.”
McReary blinked; one of them had to. “Yes, sir! I swear on my mother’s life.”
“Better not, till she gets the roses back in her cheeks. And call me Zag, or Lieutenant, or L.T., or ‘Hey, you, jackass,’ but don’t call me sir. I work for a living.”
“Yes, si—Zag.” He picked up his folder.
Zagreb smiled for the first time in the meeting. “I’ll say this: You’re the only one of us who kicked over the traces for a cut of a million. What’s Ford stock look like?”
He described it.
The lieutenant’s lids flickered then. “‘The Henry Ford Motor Company,’ that’s what it said? Not ‘Ford Motor Company’?”
“I’m sure it was Henry Ford.”
“When did you say he bought the shares?”
“He said 1901. Why?”
Zagreb laughed. The sound of it and the sigh of his red face startled the detective. He’d heard his boss chuckle, snicker, let out a “ha-ha” when someone got off a good one, but this was as close to losing control as McReary had ever witnessed with
anyone. Canal and Burke came in just as he was winding down.
“Let us in on it, Zag.” Canal took the slimy cigar stub out of his mouth. “We ain’t heard a good Pat-and-Mike story for weeks.”
“Watch your mouth, you hunky SOB,” growled Burke.
The lieutenant wiped his eyes with his handkerchief. “Just a history lesson, boys. Henry Ford finally hit pay dirt in 1908 when he built the Model T. Most people don’t know he failed the first time. If you’ve got stock issued in 1901 by the Henry Ford Motor Company, you couldn’t buy a stick of Blackjack Gum with it.”
“Lucky I didn’t buy any.” Canal put back his cigar.
The floor dropped out of McReary’s stomach. Then he heard someone else laughing. It was himself. He couldn’t have held it back with both hands.
Burke said, “Stop trying to butter up the boss. It ain’t that funny. What’s the palaver about, anyway? We’re left out. Zag don’t care about cars and you ain’t interested in history.”
McReary caught his breath. “I was hitting up the lieutenant for an advance. I’m busted flat.”
The next time the Four Horsemen gathered at the California, the detective could tell right away Hank had gotten the news, probably straight from Ford, the company if not the man. His expression was more sour than usual and his grip on the lever would strangle a rhinoceros. When their gazes met, he saw that Hank saw that he knew too.
“How’s it going, old-timer?” McReary asked.
“Good as can be expected, punk.” The elevator started up.
Copyright © 2012 Loren D. Estleman
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FICTION
WINDOW OF TIME
JOHN H. DIRCKX
For the occasional visitor to the Spaulding Tower Apartments, the open-cage elevator with its sluggish pace and ominous clanking embodied and enhanced the antique charm of the building. But as a focus for complaints by tenants, it easily outranked the unreliable heating system and the periodic hikes in the rent. The rent kept on climbing, not in proportion to the prestige of the locale but rather to the rising cost of maintaining security in an inner-city district where the tenants were best advised not to venture outdoors on foot after nightfall.
A little before ten o’clock A.M. on a chilly Monday in April, Ralph McConnahay parked in one of the visitors’ slots along the east side of the apartment building and made his way to the outer lobby. A uniformed guard at the desk went through the invariable rigmarole of phoning Conrad Sleate’s apartment on the top floor to announce his visitor and secure permission to send him up. Then he handed McConnahay a pen on a chain and invited him to sign in. Finally, he twisted a key somewhere below the counter to release the electric catch on the door that gave access to the inner lobby and the solitary elevator.
At eight stories this building scarcely qualified as a tower, but its early twentieth-century builder had declined to inflict the cacophony of “The Spaulding Building” on the citizenry. And so, even though structures of twenty and thirty stories now cut off the horizon to the southeast, a tower it remained.
McConnahay, his briefcase tucked under his arm, made the grinding ascent to the top floor with a dour, preoccupied air. His knock at Sleate’s apartment door elicited the usual “Come in” in a petulant, reedy whine. As always, the door was unlocked.
He found his host hunched at his desk in a window that overlooked River Park and, nearer at hand, a dreary expanse of abandoned factories and warehouses. Smoking a blue cigarette in a short amber holder designed to accommodate its oval shape, Sleate scowled at his visitor and the world with the saturnine leer of a chronic invalid who also happened to be a born misanthrope.
McConnahay unbuttoned his coat, sat down on a dusty plush sofa, and unlocked his briefcase.
Nobody had asked him yet if he wore silk pajamas or was afraid of spiders. But they were getting close.
The review board was forbidden by law to inquire about Cyrus Auburn’s ethnic origin, political affiliations, religious beliefs and practices, marital status, alcohol use, or psychiatric history. But they could plainly see that he was an able-bodied and highly presentable African American male in his mid thirties. And they all knew he was a bachelor, a devout idealist, and a top-notch police detective because they’d been his colleagues or superiors for several years past.
Too many years, it now seemed. Auburn had been eligible to apply for promotion after completing five years as a detective sergeant, but hadn’t done so. Now that he had spent seven years in that grade the Public Safety Administration had only two choices: promote him to detective lieutenant or discharge him.
Maybe that was why this session felt, at least to Auburn, more like a disciplinary hearing than a milestone in his career. Because the question why he hadn’t ever applied for promotion kept turning up in various guises. After all, even a couple of years ago his promotion would have been a virtual certainty in view of his seniority, his consistently superior performance, and his unfailing fidelity to the mission and ideals of the department.
An hour after the meeting broke up, with his lunch now doing a romping square dance in his interior, Auburn was still brooding over the question of his promotion as he shuffled papers on his desk. Surely it must be as evident to his colleagues as it was to him that he had been denied an executive temperament when such things were passed around—that he had an overly generous share of self-doubt, usually being able to see the other guy’s point of view at least as clearly as his own—and that he chafed and squirmed under regulations and protocol that he found irrational and counterproductive.
Above all, he detested personality clashes. He didn’t mind the occasional scrap with punks, felons, and other nasties, but conflicts with citizens, and especially the members of his own team . . .
Suddenly he realized that his immediate superior, Lieutenant Savage, was standing in the doorway to his office and had just asked him if he knew where Spaulding Tower was. Savage hadn’t been part of the review board. More protocol of dubious rationale.
“Dollinger’s got a homicidal shooting over there,” said Savage. “The victim’s Conrad Sleate.” Auburn recognized the name as that of a local gossip columnist whose writings everybody professed to loathe but nonetheless devoured regularly with perverse delight. “Apparently this just happened within the last couple hours. No suspects yet. I already called the coroner’s office, and I’ll send an evidence tech as soon as one is available.”
It was a day of sharp wind, with billowing gray clouds and intervals of cold raw sunlight. Traffic in the downtown area was just thinning out after the noon-hour scramble. Whenever Auburn traveled this particular route, it seemed like a trip backward through time as he passed by scenes representing various stages of his past life—his grandmother’s house, John Mellon High School, the deli where he’d worked while in his teens, the vaguely remembered house, now a firetrap falling into ruins, where he and his family had lived until he was six.
Meanwhile he reviewed what he knew about Conrad Sleate.
In his column entitled “Local Affairs,” which appeared every Tuesday and Friday, Sleate practiced a brand of journalism that was as yellow as mustard. If a news item elsewhere in the paper noted the retirement of a civic leader, Sleate’s treatment of the event was sure to suggest that the man had been fired for incompetence, if not fraud or embezzlement.
In commenting on the centennial of a local firm, he couldn’t resist mentioning that it had employed blacks in strictly menial positions until a landmark civil suit in 1977. If a business was closing down, Sleate contrived to alienate all concerned by castigating the workers for forcing the company into bankruptcy with their outrageous demands, while nonetheless implying that mismanagement at the top was ultimately at fault for the failure of the business.
The title of his column carried a hidden meaning for regular readers, because his specialty was affairs of the heart, chiefly those in
volving straying spouses with public images as models of integrity, prominent physicians with very private practices, and churchmen who had forfeited all hope of canonization. He was a master of double entendre and innuendo, of the discreet wink and the knowing nod. Although few could resist the temptation to scan his columns for titillating tidbits of scandal, the majority of his readers found him crude, arrogant, and revolting. Which, as any journalism major can tell you, is precisely the sort of thing that sells newspapers.
The Spaulding Tower stood, grim and grimy, amid similarly aged and neglected structures. With heavy grilles protecting all the ground floor windows, the place looked more like a jail than an apartment building. The masonry needed tuck-pointing. The terra-cotta detailing was beyond restoration. Signs in two of the barred windows announced a vacancy and gave a phone number.
Auburn parked on the street near Patrolman Fritz Dollinger’s cruiser and, with collar turned up against the wind, jogged along the refuse- littered sidewalk to the entrance of the building. In the outer lobby, garish fluorescent lighting and a few pieces of clearance-sale vinyl furniture clashed with old-fashioned wood paneling and brass trim. A flush of enveloping warmth and a faint hiss of steam reminded him of Saturday mornings spent at the downtown library during his high school years reading tales of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Thorndyke.
Dollinger was conferring with a uniformed guard at the security desk.
“You all by yourself?” asked Auburn, as Dollinger came away from the desk to meet him.
“Yes. The other guard is upstairs making sure Sleate doesn’t come back to life. She’s the one who found him.”
“Just two guards on duty?”
“One patrols inside the building while the other signs visitors in and out. They change off every hour. This one,” he added, with a barely perceptible tilt of the head, “thinks he’s still running a Marine platoon.”
The man at the desk, squarely built, rugged, and about Auburn’s own age, pretended to be deeply engrossed in some papers. He wore a gray uniform and a cap but no sidearm.
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 11/01/12 Page 10
