Until one morning a plane carrying Powers and four other men took off on a routine patrol. It never returned. A few days later, a destroyer sighted floating wreckage and a life raft a hundred miles to the west.
There were no relatives on Powers’ side. Lorene took Jackie back to Clay Street. For two years they lived above The Dugout. Lorene’s mother had died. At first Lorene was too busy with the baby to give The Dugout much thought. But as time passed, her dream of developing a first-class restaurant took hold again. She added hot dishes to the noon menu. Clay Street’s business and professional men soon learned that The Dugout served an excellent plate lunch for a dollar.
When Jackie was two, Lorene moved to a small apartment in a good residential area just off uptown. She didn’t want the boy to roam Clay Street as she had. A neighbor helped watch the child. Lorene worked nights and weekends in swank uptown restaurants to learn more about restaurant operation. When Jackie was six, she enrolled him in a private day school. She bought an old car, so she could drive Jackie to school mornings and pick him up evenings.
Lorene had concluded that her original plan, to build up The Dugout alone and then sell it, would not work. The kind of restaurant she envisioned required an immense amount of money, much more than the government insurance on Powers’ life, which she regarded as earmarked for Jackie anyhow. But if she and her father could get outside backing and the restaurant succeeded, their salaries and percentage of the profits would allow them to live comfortably while they saved for a restaurant all their own.
Lorene prepared a small dinner menu, a few entrees she made best, including some of her own invention. She hired a waitress and a part-time cook, a Puerto Rican boy named Tony. She priced the meals high, to discourage the wrong crowd. She served dinners only between six and eight-thirty or nine. Her purpose was not to make an immediate profit; it was to impress potential investors.
Lorene approached the local banks first. The bankers turned her down. Next she sought to induce some Clay Street merchants to form a syndicate. The merchants didn’t have that kind of money. She sought out the backers of uptown restaurants where she’d worked, but those fellows couldn’t have cared less.
Lorene kept plugging. She never got much of a dinner crowd, which was just as well: the old Dugout had space for only two dozen diners. Still, word of her excellent food spread. And one night a criminal lawyer and quasi-political figure named Harry Bagwell wandered in with two other middle-aged bachelors and a trio of call girls.
Bagwell dined on Lorene’s specialty, hamburger stroganoff on wild rice. He asked for the chef. Lorene appeared. Bagwell demanded to know why she wasted her talents in such shoddy surroundings. Lorene said she and her father owned the restaurant. She told him about her late husband, her son, and her efforts to attract capital.
The next night, Bagwell returned with more friends; those friends brought wives. By week’s end, a syndicate of seven investors had been formed, with Bagwell at its head. Lorene had the financing. The rest was up to her.
The Dugout was remodeled, with the bar in the original quarters and the dining room in what had been the adjoining store space. The bar was decorated as an immense shell hole, the dining room as a French cafe. The World War I relics were moved to the foyer. A shack south of the building was purchased and torn down to make a parking lot.
Bagwell insisted on the oil portrait of Lorene, which he paid for himself. An incurable lecher, he probably hoped the gesture would cause her to regard him as more than a business associate. But Lorene didn’t let him touch her.
Lorene had thrown me out seven months after the grand reopening. When I went back, I was clean-shaven and wore a new suit. Lorene served me coffee. She said she recalled the night Ed disappeared because the police came around the next day. Business had been slow; Lorene, the waitress, and the cook had gone home early. John Heineman said he knew nothing about Ed either. Lorene invited me to stop at The Dugout any time I was nearby.
I returned often. Lorene was rarely present evenings now, when her father acted as host and greeter, but she was on hand every morning and afternoon. Without realizing it, I began telling her about myself—my boyhood, my days in the army, my life abroad. One night I caught the landlady at my Jackson Street apartment prowling my dresser drawers. She’d rented to me without knowing my identity; she had distrusted me ever since she learned it. I accused her of snooping and she charged that my presence frightened the other tenants. She ordered me out by the end of the week.
Lorene suggested I move into the apartment over the restaurant. She and her father had already moved to a house in the suburb; the boy, Jackie, would enroll in a suburban school that fall, away finally from Clay Street and the city. Heineman had planned to use the apartment on nights he remained later than usual, but he was driving home to the suburbs every night anyhow. They were already considering finding a tenant.
I accepted the offer. It would give me a Clay Street location where tipsters could reach me quickly. And I’d see more of Lorene.
After my shower, I dressed, walked downstairs, and opened the mailbox in the vestibule. I had received one letter. The envelope bore the imprint of the local chapter of the American Society of Engineers.
Upstairs I opened the envelope and found another report from Max Fuller. This one concerned a man named Martin Moss, who ran a schlock little advertising and public relations firm. Moss had just talked Lorene and her father into allowing him to handle advertising and promotion for the restaurant.
I’d met Moss in the restaurant a few nights previously. However, I’d spoken to him on the telephone once back in April when I was still living at the Moreland. Moss called and offered to plant me on some local television shows to spread my story. In exchange, he said, all I had to do was mention on the air that I could be reached every night the remainder of that week in Booth No. 4 of a certain night club, by no coincidence a Moss client. The booth would be reserved for me and so long as I occupied it, I would not have to pay for a thing.
My response had been to hang up. But since Martin Moss had now intruded upon my life a second time, an investigation seemed in order.
Fuller said Moss, thirty-five, was married and the father of four children. He lived six blocks east of Clay and maintained a small office a block west of Clay. His neighbors regarded him as a devoted husband and parent. Moss grew up in the Clay Street area. Until drafted in 1951, he sold advertising for a community newspaper. He served with no particular distinction in Korea and then obtained a minor job with a small advertising agency. After a while he picked up so many accounts on the side that he went into business on his own. His clients, most of them from Clay Street, included four night clubs, two restaurants, a savings and loan, a bank, a merchant’s association, and a pizzeria. Phil Amber owned one of the restaurants and two of the clubs.
I dropped the Moss report into a box with the others. In fourteen weeks I’d collected reports on about thirty people, ranging from Doyle, Betsy, and Ronnie Layne to Lorene, her father, and Harry Bagwell. On dull nights, the reports made dull reading.
Downstairs in the restaurant, Lorene’s father brought me coffee and a roll at the bar. I took it there because the dining room was still filled with the tail end of the luncheon crowd. Lorene’s father put the cup down and asked, “What did you say to Lorene just now? She’s mad as hell.”
“It’ll pass. She was upset about last night.”
“You did overdo, you know.” John Heineman was a large man. He stood maybe 6‘1” and weighed about 240. His hair was close-cropped, his face square, ruddy, and open. His big nose had a bump on it like Lorene’s. His brows were thick and blond, like his hair. His eyes were gray, his lips full. “When you got up at closing time, I had to point the way to the door.”
“It was Bagwell. Dammit, he kept shoving drinks into my hand, all the while trying to bait me into an argument. I’d have been okay if I’d eaten a decent dinner.
But all I had was a sandwich around eight o’clock.”
Heineman forced himself to smile. I sensed he really didn’t like my presence in the apartment upstairs, that he was being polite to me for Lorene’s sake. “Don’t take Bag-well too seriously. He’s not the most pleasant guy in the world when he’s drinking. But as a lawyer, he’s helped a lot of people in trouble.”
“He also represents the underworld. Whenever a hoodlum is arrested, Harry shows up at the station house with a writ.”
“Look at it this way. He uses that money to defend someone like that colored boy. The one those suburban cops were railroading on a fake assault charge. Or the old Polish lady who poisoned her husband…”
“But with what tactics? He was nearly disbarred three times. Once for a wiretap scandal, when he and some politicians put a tap on a district attorney. And twice for bribing jurors…”
“He was a marine in the war,” Heineman replied defensively. “At Iwo, he won a medal.”
That, to Heineman, ended the argument. Anyone who had won a medal could do no wrong. Scowling, the old soldier wandered away to draw a beer. For a man of sixty, he moved with amazing ease. It must have been a family trait. Fuller had noted that Heineman suffered from a mild cardiac condition. It didn’t seem to have slowed Heineman down much. Lorene’s father arrived for work before noon every day and stayed until 2 a.m.
From a booth in The Dugout, I telephoned the Moreland Hotel. The desk switched me to the doorman. I told the doorman to ask Sam Alban to pick me up at the restaurant. Ordinarily, Sam cruised the uptown area near the Moreland. Since he rarely got a fare to Clay Street, we used the Moreland doorman to shuttle my messages. Sam would get into the Moreland cab line whenever he was in that block, every hour or so. If I wanted a ride, the doorman would tell Sam, and Sam would come get me. I offered to pay the doorman for his trouble, but he refused to accept my money. I guess he had a brother of his own.
Sam picked me up at half past two.
He asked, “Where we headed?”
“First, the convention hall. Betsy wants to see me. Then we’ll run out to the bakery.”
Sam pulled the cab into traffic. “Gonna hit the street again tonight?”
“Sure. I’m down to the seven-hundred block for the second time. Flophouse row.”
“Anything new?”
“No. But I had that feeling again. As though someone was following me. I thought I glimpsed the guy about a block behind me as I was walking back to my apartment. So I stopped at the bar downstairs to see who’d come in after me. Nobody came in. While I was watching, Harry Bagwell and some of his friends lured me into their booth. After that, I don’t remember much.”
“Maybe it was another of Doyle’s detectives.”
“I doubt it. They never tried to hide. And they haven’t dogged me for nearly two months.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m hoping,” I said grimly, “this is the nibble I’ve been waiting for. And if it is, someone may make a move before long.”
CHAPTER 5.
The municipal convention hall, a huge, new, oblong structure, occupied a landscaped block near the business district. The state bankers’ association was meeting there. Betsy had arranged for my admittance to a trade show being held in conjunction with the convention.
I found the little model in front of Booth 94, garbed in a wide-skirted, white fairy queen outfit. She was handing ball-point pens to passers-by. The pens were imprinted with the name of a distributor of office machines, the firm that had engaged her from the modeling agency. Inside the booth, a lean, crew-cut boy in a one-button gray suit lounged in a chair amidst rows of gleaming tabulators, waiting for a strolling banker to express interest in the merchandise.
When Betsy saw me, she grinned. She waved a fistful of pens.
“Hi, Steve. You bring ’em?”
“I brought ’em.”
“Then gimme.”
She led me into the booth. The young man had been staring at Betsy with curiously vacant eyes. Now he roused himself and paid attention to me.
“This is Don,” Betsy explained. Don rose. We shook hands. “Don, this is the man I was telling you about. Steve Kolchak.”
“I saw you on television once.” Don’s voice had the genial, confident ring of a well-born and prematurely successful youth. He was twenty-five at most.
“Don,” Betsy added, “is a vice-president of his company.”
“You’ve done well,” I observed, “for a man your age.”
“That’s because I’m the best salesman M. J. Collins, Inc., ever hired,” Don replied casually. “The fact that my father happens to be M. J. Collins has absolutely nothing to do with it.”
Betsy said, “Steve brought me more copies of the design on the ring his brother was wearing.”
I hauled the sketches from my jacket pocket. Betsy took them.
“Betsy,” I said to Don, “is my cavalry. She charges all over town with these.”
“Excuse me,” Betsy said. “I promised some to that nice boy in Booth 48. He’s going to distribute them to bank tellers.”
Betsy skipped away.
“She sure thinks a lot of you,” Don said, a little enviously.
“Betsy feels sorry for me, that’s all. She’s still a little girl who brings home lost kittens and birds with busted wings. But I can’t turn down the kind of help she’s offered. She’s got every model in her agency showing those sketches around.”
‘You’re lucky. She’s not just another cute model. She has real character. And she’s a lot smarter than most people think.”
“How long have you known her?”
“I first met Betsy,” Don Collins said, “about an hour ago.” Traffic at the trade show was light. When Betsy returned, we chatted awhile. I didn’t think it my place to tell Collins how I’d first met Betsy, in Ronald Layne’s cluttered studio apartment a half block from Clay Street. Nor did I tell him how Betsy had telephoned me at the Moreland a few days later to thank me for, as she put it, “exposing” Ronald Layne. My crack to Layne about pornographic pictures, and Layne’s reaction, had disturbed her. So while putting her clothes on in Layne’s studio dressing room, she conducted a search and found a bundle of pornography in a carton behind a screen. That so angered her that on the way out, without a word, she slapped the photographers face. She also quit the agency that had sent her to Layne and landed a job with another one. During our phone conversation she offered to enlist her roommates and other friends in the search for my brother’s ring. Thus I took Betsy to lunch one day and inducted her into my army.
Max Fuller’s report on Betsy Ryan disclosed that she’d grown up in a small town near the state capital. Her mother was a waitress, deserted by Betsy’s father when Betsy was still an infant. Betsy’s mother died shortly after Betsy finished high school. Betsy came to the city with the pittance remaining of her mother’s insurance money. She used her inheritance to enroll at a modeling school. She lived with two other models in an apartment approximately two miles from Clay Street.
Don Collins expressed polite interest in my search. He asked some innocuous questions. Then his eyes strayed down the aisle. “Excuse me. But here comes a very live customer.”
“Sam’s outside with the meter running,” I said. “I’d better get back before it explodes.”
Betsy reached for her ball-point pens. “What are you working on now, Steve?”
“I’m going to have another talk,” I said, “with the people who found my brother’s watch.”
Sam pulled up in front of Bronson’s Bakery. The real watch had turned up here, seven miles from the intersection of Jackson and Clay. The neighborhood was old. Frame homes and brick walk-up apartment buildings lined its quiet streets. The bakery itself was on a block of dusty little stores and shops. Several store fronts were vacant. The few pedestrians in view—an ol
d man, a woman pushing a perambulator, two subteens in shorts—gave eloquent testimony as to why. Business could hardly be deader.
I had no doubt as to the watch’s authenticity. The baker’s daughter, Irma Bronson, had found the watch when sweeping the floor one evening. That had been seven months after my brother disappeared, five months before I came to the city. The watch lay under a radiator near the front door. Apparently it had fallen from someone’s pocket.
The watch had stopped. The baker, Kurt Bronson, opened it to assess the damage. He noted the name “ED KOLCHAK” scratched crudely inside. He shook the watch; it began to tick again. Once more, it was keeping perfect time.
The baker and his daughter posted a sign on their counter. The sign said: FOUND – TIME-O POCKET WATCH, OWNER MAY HAVE BY IDENTIFYING NAME INSIDE CASE. No claimant came forward. After a few weeks, the baker took the sign down. He dumped the watch into a drawer and forgot it. Until, four months later, he heard and saw me describe the watch on his television screen.
Bronson didn’t call me immediately. He delayed one day. He didn’t want to get mixed up in a police investigation. But Irma nagged at his conscience and finally induced the baker to dial the Moreland. By then I was dubious of anyone claiming to have found Ed’s watch. I had examined and rejected five fake watches so far. For future claimants, I had memorized a little speech.
“I’m grateful for your information,” I told Bronson. “I hope you won’t mind. But before I pay the reward, I’d like you to take a polygraph test, at your convenience and at my expense. You’ll be asked only one question. Specifically, did you or anyone you know scratch my brother’s name in that watch?”
“You’ve got some nerve!” Bronson hollered. “We found the watch months ago. And I can produce at least fifty people who’ll remember seeing the sign I put up seeking the owner!”
Just barely, I persuaded Bronson not to hang up before giving me his name. The lie test proved unnecessary. One look, and I knew the watch had been Ed’s. I noted a slight chip on the crystal. I recalled that I’d put it there myself when I accidentally knocked the watch off a table. Kurt Bronson got his hundred dollars. But although payment of the reward was covered in the newspapers, three more people tried to sell me watches during the remainder of the week.
The Neon Haystack Page 5
