Transgressions Vol. 3: Merely Hate/Walking the Line/Walking Around Money

by Ed McBain

  They didn’t spend a lot of time contemplating the Berkshires, but drove back to Sycamore, ignoring the traffic that piled up behind them because they insisted on going so slowly down the twisty road, trying to see signs of the printing plant inside the wall of trees. Here and there a hint, nothing more.

  “So if he’s careful,” Kelp said, “with the light and the noise, it should be okay.”

  “I’d like to get in there,” Dortmunder said, “just give it the double-o.”

  “We’ll discuss it with him,” Kelp said.

  11

  It was still too early for lunch. Kelp parked the little car in the parking lot next to Sycamore House, in among several cars owned by people who didn’t know it was too early for lunch, and they got out to stretch, Dortmunder doing overly elaborate knee-bends and massaging of his thighs that Kelp chose not to notice, saying, “I think I’ll take a look at the League.”

  “I’ll walk around a little,” Dortmunder said, sounding pained. “Work the kinks out.”

  They separated, and Kelp walked up the block to Seven Leagues Travel, the middle shop in a brief row of storefronts, a white clapboard one-story building, with an entrance and a plate glass display window for each of the three shops. The one on the right was video rental and the one on the left was a frame shop.

  Kelp pushed open the door for Seven Leagues, and a bell sounded. He entered and shut the door, and it sounded again, and a female voice called, “Just a minute! I got a bite!”

  A bite? Kelp looked around an empty room, not much deeper than it was wide. Filing cabinets were along the left wall and two desks, one behind the other, faced forward on the right. Every otherwise empty vertical space was covered with travel posters, including the side of the nearest filing cabinet and the front of both desks. The forward desk was as messy as a Texas trailer camp after a tornado, but the desk behind it was so neat and empty as to be obviously unused. At the rear, a door with a travel poster on it was partly open, showing just a bit of the lake formed by the dam and the steep wooded slope beyond.

  Kelp, wondering if assistance was needed here—if a person was being bitten, that was possible—walked down the length of the room past the desks, pulled the rear door open the rest of the way, and leaned out to see a narrow roofless porch and a woman on it fighting with a fishing pole. She was middle-aged, which meant impossible to tell exactly, and not too overweight, dressed in full tan slacks, a man’s blue dress shirt open at the collar and with the sleeves cut off above the elbow, huge dark sunglasses, and a narrow-brimmed cloth cap with a lot of fishing lures and things stuck in it.

  “Oh!” he said. “A bite!”

  “Don’t break my concentration!”

  So he stood there and watched. A person, man or woman, fighting a fish can look a little odd, if the light is just so and the fishing line can’t be seen. There she was with the bent rod, and nothing else visible, so that she looked as though she were doing one of those really esoteric Oriental exercise routines, bobbing and weaving, hunching her shoulders, kicking left and right, spinning the reel first one way, then the other, and muttering and grumbling and swearing beneath her breath the entire time, until all at once a fish jumped out of the water and flew over the white wood porch railing to start its own energetic exercise program on the porch floor. The fish was about a foot long, and was a number of colors Kelp didn’t know the names of.

  She was gasping, the woman (so was the fish), but she was grinning as well (the fish wasn’t). “Isn’t he a beauty?” she demanded, as she leaned the pole against the rear wall.

  “Sure,” Kelp said. “What is it? I mean, I know it’s a fish, but what’s his name?”

  “Trout,” she said. “I can tell already, I give you one more word, it’s gonna get too technical.”

  “Trout is good enough,” he agreed. “They’re good to eat, aren’t they?”

  “They’re wonderful to eat,” she said. “But not this one.” Going to one knee beside the flopping fish, she said, “We do catch and release around here.”

  Kelp watched her stick a finger into the fish’s mouth to start working the hook out of its lower lip. He imagined a hook in his own lower lip, then was sorry he’d imagined it, and said, “Catch and release? You let it go again?”

  “Sure,” she said. Standing, she scooped the fish up with both hands and, before it could shimmy away from her, tossed it well out into the lake. “See you again, fella!” she called, then said to Kelp, “Just let me wash my hands, I’ll be right with you.”

  They both went back into the office and she headed for the bathroom, a separate wedge in the rear corner of the room. Opening its door, she looked back at him and waved her free hand toward her desk. “Take a seat, I’ll be right with you.”

  He nodded, and she went inside, shutting the door. He walked over to the diorama of tornado damage and noticed, half-hidden under a cataract of various forms and brochures, one of those three-sided brass plaques with a name on it, this one JANET TWILLEY.

  He wandered around the room, looking at the various travel posters, noting there was none to tout Guerrera, and that in fact the only South American poster showed some amazing naked bodies in Rio, and then the toilet flushed and a minute later Janet Twilley came out, shut the bathroom door, frowned at Kelp, and said, “I told you, take a seat.”

  “I was admiring the posters.”

  “Okay.” Coming briskly forward, she gestured at the chair beside the front desk. “So now you can take a seat.”

  Bossy woman. They both sat, and she said, “So where did you want to go?”

  “That’s why I was looking at the posters,” he said. He noticed she kept her sunglasses on. Then he noticed a little discoloration visible around her left eye.

  She peered at him through the dark glasses. “You don’t know where you want to go?”

  “Well, not exactly,” he said.

  She disapproved. “That’s not the usual way,” she said.

  “See,” he told her, “I have this problem with time zones.”

  “Problem?”

  “I change time zones, it throws me off,” he explained, “louses up my sleep, I don’t enjoy the trip.”

  “Jet lag,” she said.

  “Oh, good, you know about that.”

  “Everybody knows about jet lag,” she said.

  “They do? Well, then, you know what I mean. Me and the wife, we’d like to go somewhere that we don’t change a lot of time zones.”

  “Canada,” she said.

  “We been to Canada. Very nice. We were thinking of somewhere else, some other direction.”

  She shook her head. “You mean Florida?”

  “No, a different country, you know, different language, different people, different cuisine.”

  “There’s Rio,” she said, nodding at the poster he’d been admiring.

  “But that’s so far away,” he said. “I mean, really far away. Maybe somewhere not quite that far.”

  “Mexico has many—”

  “Oh, Mexico,” he said. “Isn’t that full of Americans? We’d like maybe somewhere a little off the beaten path.”

  Over the next ten minutes, she suggested Argentina, Belize, Peru, Ecuador, all of the Caribbean, even Colombia, but not once did she mention the name Guerrera. Finally, he said, “Well, I better discuss this with the missus. Thank you for the suggestions.”

  “It would be better,” she told him, a little severely, “if you made your mind up before you saw a travel agent.”

  “Yeah, but I’m closing with it now,” he assured her. “You got a card?”

  “Certainly,” she said, and dumped half the crap from her desk onto the floor before she found it.

  12

  The less said about lunch, the better. After it, Dortmunder and Kelp came out to find Querk perched on the porch rail out front. Dortmunder burped and said, “Well, look who’s here.”

  “Fancy meeting you two,” Querk said.

  Kelp said, “We should all shak
e hands now, surprised to see each other.”

  So they did a round of handshakes, and then Dortmunder said, “I feel like I gotta see the plant.”

  “I could show you a little,” Querk said. “Not inside the buildings, though, around the machines, the management gets all geechy about insurance.”

  “Just for the idea,” Dortmunder said.

  So they walked to the corner, crossed with the light, and turned left, first past the Italian restaurant (not open for lunch, unfortunately), and then the abrupt stand of pines. Looking into those dense branches, Dortmunder could occasionally make out a blank grayness back in there that would be the sound-baffle wall.

  At the no-trespassing sign, they turned right and trespassed, walking down the two-lane blacktop entrance drive with the creek down to their left, natural woods on the hillside across the way, and the “forest” on their right.

  A big truck came slowly toward them from the plant entrance, wheezing and moving as though it had rheumatism. The black guy driving—moustache, cigar stub, dark blue Yankees cap—waved at Querk, who waved back, then said, “He delivers paper. That’s what I’ll be doing this afternoon, move that stuff around.” With a look at his watch, he said, “I should of started three minutes ago.”

  “Stay late,” Dortmunder suggested.

  At the entrance, the shallowness of the tree-screen became apparent. The trees were barely more than two deep, in complicated diagonal patterns, not quite random, and behind them loomed the neutral gray wall, probably ten feet high.

  Passing through the entrance, Dortmunder saw tall gray metal gates opened to both sides, and said, “They close those when the plant is shut?”

  “And lock them,” Querk said. “Which is my specialty, remember. I could deal with them before we get the truck, leave them shut but unlocked.”

  And the closed gates, Dortmunder realized, would also help keep light in here from being seen anywhere outside.

  They walked through the entrance, and inside was a series of low cream-colored corrugated metal buildings, or maybe all one building, in sections that stretched to left and right and were surrounded by blacktop right up to the sound-baffle wall, which on the inside looked mostly like an infinitude of egg cartons. The only tall item was a gray metal water tower in the middle of the complex, built on a roof. The roofs were low A shapes, so snow wouldn’t pile too thick in the winter.

  Directly in front of them was a wide loading bay, the overhead doors all open showing a deep, dark, high-ceilinged interior. One truck, smaller than the paper deliverer, was backed up to the loading bay and cartons were being unloaded by three workmen while the driver leaned against his truck and watched. Beyond, huge rolls of paper, like paper towels in Brobdingnag, were strewn around the concrete floor.

  “My work for this afternoon,” Querk said, nodding at the paper rolls.

  “That driver’s doing okay,” Dortmunder said.

  Querk grinned. “What did Jesus Christ say to the Teamsters? ‘Do nothing till I get back.’”

  Dortmunder said, “Where’s the presses?”

  “All over,” Querk said, gesturing generally at the complex of buildings. “The one we’ll use is down to the right. We’ll be able to park down there, snake the wires in through the window.”

  Kelp said, “Alarm systems?”

  “I’ve got keys to everything,” Querk said. “I studied this place, I could parade elephants through here, nobody the wiser.” Here on his own turf he seemed more sure of himself, less, as May had said, rabbity.

  Kelp said, “Well, to me it looks doable.”

  Querk raised an eyebrow at Dortmunder. “And to you?”

  “Could be,” Dortmunder said.

  “I like your enthusiasm,” Querk said. “Shall we figure to do it one night next week?”

  “I got a question,” Dortmunder said, “about payout.”

  Querk looked alert, ready to help. “Yeah?”

  “When do we get it?”

  “I don’t follow,” Querk said.

  Dortmunder pointed at the building in front of them. “When we leave there,” he said, “what we got is siapas. Money we get from Rodrigo.”

  “Sure,” Querk said.

  “How? When?”

  “Well, first the siapas gotta go to Guerrera,” Querk said, “and then Rodrigo has stuff he’s gonna do, and then the dollars come up here.”

  “What if they don’t?” Dortmunder said.

  “Listen,” Querk said, “I trust Rodrigo, he’ll come through.”

  “I dunno about this,” Dortmunder said.

  Querk. looked at his watch again. He was antsy to get to work. “Lemme get a message to him,” he said, “work out a guarantee. What if I come back to the city this Saturday? We’ll meet. Maybe your place again?”

  “Three in the afternoon,” Dortmunder said, because he didn’t want to have to give everybody lunch.

  “We’ll work it out then,” Querk said. “Listen, I better get on my forklift, I wouldn’t want to get fired before vacation time.”

  He nodded a farewell and walked toward the loading bay, while Dortmunder and Kelp turned around and headed out. As they walked toward the public street, Kelp said, “Maybe the dollars should come up before the siapas go down.”

  “I was thinking that,” Dortmunder said. “Or maybe one of us rides shotgun.”

  “You mean, go to this place?” Kelp was astonished. “Would you wanna do that?”

  “No,” Dortmunder said. “I said, ‘one of us.’”

  “We’ll see how it plays,” Kelp said. They turned toward the intersection, and he said, “I talked to Seven Leagues.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Her name is Janet Twilley. She’s bossy, and she’s got a black eye.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Dortmunder was surprised. “Querk doesn’t seem the type.”

  “No, he doesn’t. I think we oughta see is there a Mr. Twilley.”

  13

  Roger Twilley’s shift as a repairman for Darby Telephone & Electronics (slogan: “The 5th Largest Phone Co. in New York State!”) ended every day at four, an hour before Janet would close her travel agency, which was good. It gave him an hour by himself to listen to the day’s tapes.

  Twilley, a leathery, bony, loose-jointed fellow who wore his hair too long because he didn’t like barbers, was known to his coworkers as an okay guy who didn’t have much to say for himself. If he ever were to put his thoughts into words (which he wouldn’t), their opinion would change, because in fact Twilley despised and mistrusted them all. He despised and mistrusted everybody he knew, and believed he would despise and mistrust everybody else in the world if he got to know them. Thus the tapes.

  Being a phone company repairman, often alone on the job with his own cherry picker, and having a knack with phone gadgets he’d developed over the years on the job, Twilley had found it easy to bug the phones of everybody he knew that he cared the slightest bit about eavesdropping on. His mother, certainly, and Janet, naturally, and half a dozen other relatives and friends scattered around the general Sycamore area. The bugs were voice-activated, and the tapes were in his “den” in the basement, a room Janet knew damn well to keep out of, or she knew what she’d get.

  Every afternoon, once he’d shucked out of his dark blue Darby Telephone jumpsuit and opened himself a can of beer, Twilley would go down to the den to listen to what these people had to say for themselves. He knew at least a few of them were scheming against him—Mom, for instance, and Janet—but he hadn’t caught any of them yet. It was, he knew, only a matter of time. Sooner or later, they’d condemn themselves out of their own mouths.

  There are a lot of factors that might help explain how Twilley had turned out this way. There was his father’s abrupt abandonment of the family when Twilley was six, for instance, a betrayal he’d never gotten over. There was his mother’s catting around for a good ten years or more after that first trauma, well into Twilley’s sexually agonized teens. There was the so-called girlfriend, Re
nee, who had publicly humiliated him in seventh grade. But the fact is, what it came down to, Twilley was a jerk.

  The jerk now sat for thirty-five minutes at the table in his den, earphones on as he listened to the day the town had lived through, starting with Janet. Her phone calls today were all strictly business, talking to airlines, hotels, clients. There was nothing like the other day’s “wrong number,” somebody supposedly asking for somebody named Frank, that Twilley had immediately leaped on as code. A signal, some kind of signal. He’d played that fragment of tape over and over—“Is Frank there?” “Is Frank there?” “Is Frank there?”—and he would recognize that voice if it ever called again, no matter what it had to say.

  On to the rest of the tapes. His mother and her friend Helen yakked the whole goddam day away, as usual—they told each other recipes, bird sightings, funny newspaper items, plots of television shows—and as usual Twilley fast-forwarded through it all, just dropping in for spot checks here and there—“ … and she said Emmaline looked pregnant to her …”—or he’d be down here in the den half the night, listening to two women who had raised boringness to a kind of holy art form. Stained glass for the ear.

  The rest of the tapes contained nothing useful. Twilley reset them for tomorrow and went upstairs. He sat on the sofa in the living room, opened the drawer in the end table beside him, and his tarot deck had been moved. He frowned at it. He always kept it lined up in a neat row between the coasters and the notepad, and now all three were out of alignment, the tarot deck most noticeably.

  He looked around the room. Janet wouldn’t move it. She wouldn’t open this drawer. Had somebody been in the house?

  He walked through the place, a small two-bedroom Cape Cod, and saw nothing else disturbed. Nothing was missing. He must have jostled the table one time, walking by.