by Jack Lynch
I was able to tell them it looked like a simple case of self-defense to me, having been there when mysterious men began to poke around the place and some idiot hurled himself through the front, plate glass window with a gun in his hand. He hadn’t looked like a subpoena server and Deputy Taylor and a sheriff’s lieutenant from Port Angeles agreed. I did give them a few blind leads, telling them what Catlin had said about his preferring to come and go in the middle of the night, and pointing out the book matches laying around from the MGM Grand Hotel in Reno, and other casinos in Las Vegas, and hotels in Palm Springs and far off Miami. It didn’t prove he’d been to any of those places but it certainly established the possibility. The one thing I wished I’d thought to do before they all arrived was check the roof to make sure there weren’t some sort of baubles wrapped in oilskin up there. But most likely Catlin had taken them with him, and I would have looked pretty silly clambering around on the roof in all that rain when the law arrived.
The dead man’s identification showed him to be a man named Peek, with a Seattle address. Along with some extra bullets for his gun, he had a genuine set of brass knuckles in his coat pocket, which added a bit of substance to my own thin explanation of things.
It was after ten o’clock when they told me I could go. I went. In weather of the sort that had settled over the Pacific Northwest, it would take me too long to drive back to Kingston, where you caught the ferry that went back across Puget Sound to a small town north of Seattle. So I decided to spend the night in a motel in Port Angeles, but before drifting off to sleep, there was one more thing I spent a while considering.
While at Catlin’s place, Deputy Taylor had summoned over the man Catlin used to play chess with, a wheezy old sport named Guftesson. Taylor tried to squeeze some information out of the old fellow to do with Catlin, but Guftesson didn’t squeeze much. But he did tell one story that made my ears tingle. He said Catlin had once told him he’d been in the Marines during World War II, out in the Pacific. He also said, and Guftesson had thought it to be a joke at the time, that after the war he’d decided to rob a bank to get a little working capital. He told Guftesson he’d had to kill a man in the course of it, over in Seattle.
It sounded just nuts enough to be true, so the next day when I got to Seattle I spent a couple of hours at police headquarters downtown, asking about old bank robberies just after World War II. I eventually was put in touch with a retired lieutenant who’d been around back then, and he recalled one such robbery because his partner had been the man who was killed in the course of it. Four or five men had scored big at a bank on North 85th Street, which then was the northern city limits of Seattle, in the Greenwood district. They’d taken several hundred thousand dollars. In addition to the police officer, a bank guard had been killed, and not from close up. The retired police lieutenant said the robbers had been very good marksmen. Another cop was shot up so badly he had to retire within the year. The robbers wore masks. Other than their seeming expertise, the only identifying characteristic the lieutenant could recall was that one of the bandit gang had a game leg when he ran.
On the flight back to Oakland International that afternoon I tried to put all that old business out of my mind and take Catlin’s advice to work on the Polaski puzzle. I opened my notebook and made some lists. On one page I wrote down possible ways that Polaski might have transported cash and maybe something else of value that hadn’t been found on his body or in his luggage on the flight from New York to San Francisco. It wasn’t a long list. On the opposite page I wrote down what Polaski said to me when he was dying. Or what it sounded like he said to me. Air and car. Or caw. Or, with the little catch in his throat when he began to choke, maybe cog. No bright lights went on in my brain. No bells sounded.
Finally I put away the pad and stared out the window at the gray moist clouds that enveloped us. And my mind started drifting along a trail I’d tried to stay off until then. I thought about my current boss, Erica, and wondered just how much she was mixed up in things. Her husband and a man he was doing business with were dead. Her recovery from Harry’s untimely death had been little short of phenomenal. Another man was now dead up in Forks, the victim of yet another figure tied in with Harry’s business deal. Everybody seemed to know more than they were telling me and I didn’t see why the same shouldn’t be true of Erica. Her visit to the office had pretty well stripped away the cuddly, vulnerable image she liked to offer the world. She was a tough dame and I suspected she had her own line in the water one way or another.
I’d tried phoning her from Seattle, but nobody answered out at Stinson Beach. It didn’t mean anything, but I wondered a lot of things about her. I wondered where she was from. What sort of upbringing she’d had! I wondered how she’d ever gotten mixed up with Harry. And once she was mixed up with him, since she didn’t have kids to worry about, I wondered why she had stayed with him. I wondered if I could trust her. I wondered something else and tried to put it out of my mind.
I took out the notebook and stared at the two pages I’d written on earlier. It didn’t do the trick. I put away the pad again and stared out at the clouds. And I wondered what it would be like to make love to Erica.
There was a break in the rain when we landed back in Oakland. It lasted for almost the entire drive back over to Marin County and for most of the way through the wet oak and eucalyptus trees and ferns on the shanks of Mt. Tamalpais.
It started raining again just as I reached Stinson Beach. The Shank station wagon was in the parking area and a couple of floodlights were on, although it was little more than the middle of the afternoon. I ran from the car up the boardwalk to the front door and rang the bell. Nobody answered. I rapped on the door. Still nothing. It was a long drive to make for nothing. I waited another couple of minutes, ringing and rapping. Then I thought about the key she left out for Harry to use when he forgot his own. It still was on the ledge over the door. I decided to go in out of the rain for a minute. Erica wouldn’t want a sick investigator on her hands.
It was cold inside the house, and dank and gloomy. I took off my coat and rain hat, turned up the wall heater to high and crossed to open the drapes flanking the fireplace to let in a little light. Waves were crashing down on the beach with proper winter enthusiasm. Out in the kitchen things were all put away and tidy. I found a bottle of bourbon and poured myself some, then wandered briefly through the rest of the house. Things were spick and span in the bedroom as well. It almost told me something. Not that Erica was an untidy housekeeper, but everything looked buttoned up the way you’d expect it to look if somebody were going away for a while. There was an irregularity about the perfumes and ointments at her makeup table, as if some had been taken and others left behind. I looked in the closet, but that didn’t tell me anything except that she hadn’t cleaned out Harry’s things yet. I wandered back to the bathroom and checked the medicine cabinet. There were spaces in the racks there as well, but then maybe the Shanks hadn’t kept theirs as crammed with junk as most people do.
I went on back to the front room and stood in front of the wall heater. When my drink was finished I repressed an urge to sneeze and went out to the kitchen to pour another bourbon. I carried it out and around the corner to look at the photograph of Erica that I had paused at so many times before, only this time I didn’t spend all that much time appreciating her bared bottom. This time I studied her face, looking for the cold steel that lay just in back of the smiling lips and teasing eyes. She was too good an actress for me to find it. I wondered if Harry ever had.
I moved around the room to Harry’s gallery of wartime photos, again searching out the one I’d seen the other night with several men standing in a jungle clearing, Harry and Buddy Polaski among them. When I found it I spotted Henry Catlin immediately. He was a couple of inches taller than the men with him. The years had mellowed him considerably. Back in those days he’d looked sullen and mean, the way a lot of men look after extensive combat. I tried again to find Edward Bowman, the gray man. He w
as a tall, fleshy man today. Could only have been an inch or so shorter than Catlin. There was one beefy sort. He had a fierce-looking mustache, but he stood nearly as tall as Catlin, at the opposite wing of the group. There also was a spindly legged man in shorts wearing an Australian bush hat with the brim snapped up along one side. He was the shortest of the lot. But there wasn’t any gray man, I was certain of it. I studied Polaski. He was stocky even then, and looked fit and composed. What looked like a carbine rested lightly at an oblique angle across one of his shoulders. He also wore a holstered sidearm. An officer? It seemed unlikely, although nobody would flaunt identifying bars if they were in a combat area. I looked at Catlin some more. He and Polaski must have gotten to know each other fairly well, but there was no sign of it here. In fact all of these men looked a bit aloof and self-sufficient. Rather than men posing for a photo, this just looked like a group of soldiers you’d run into unexpectedly along the trail. There were no smiles. No mugging for the camera. They wore light field packs, meant for traveling. I wondered if they even then were unknowingly hauling the treasure that was causing the stir today.
I went over to the window and stared out at the waves. My mind went over the stuff I’d written down in my little pad before lascivious thoughts of Erica had washed over me in the plane coming down from Seattle. I had broken down the list of things Buddy might have done with the money and his part of the treasure. I titled one list physical control and the other remote. Physical control meant on his body, in his luggage or in the possession of another passenger or crewman on the same flight. If you could trust the San Mateo sheriff’s investigators, and I had no reason not to, it hadn’t been on his person or in his luggage. His plane’s disembarkation point along the airport finger pier had been close enough to the terminal building so that even from behind the metal detector checkpoint I’d watched him almost from the time he’d left the plane. And if he’d given it to another passenger or crewman to carry, unlikely as that seemed, he would have instructed them to make contact with somebody else if anything should happen to him. And something had happened to him. Of course they could have disobeyed such orders, but Polaski wasn’t apt to select anybody who might do that to him.
The remote list had a lot of uncomfortable possibilities on it, ranging from his use of the mails, freight forwarding outfits or messenger services, but even these had to take into consideration the time element. Henry Catlin wanted quick access to his souvenirs, so he wrapped them in oilskin and tossed them out on the roof, a good scheme the more you thought about it. Polaski would want to get to his as fast. And Catlin said Polaski had probably told me something as he was dying. Air and car, or caw, or, with the blood and all, cog.
I thought about that some. Maybe even without the blood he said cog. And then there was what he had started to tell me just before he was shot. He had an errand for me to run, something I could do “on the way out of here.” Meanwhile he was going into the city ahead of me for an errand of his own.
And it all began to catch up with me then and I roared out a sneeze of my own, but I didn’t care, as I groped in a back pocket for my handkerchief, because now I figured I knew approximately what it was that Buddy Polaski had done with at least some of the stuff that everybody was after.
I went out to the kitchen and rinsed out my glass. There weren’t any phone books there so I looked in the bedroom and found a couple on the bottom shelf of a night stand. A phone with an extension cord was on Erica’s makeup table. There were directories for both Marin County and San Francisco. I used the city book and made some calls. I found what I wanted on the fourth try. One of the air freight companies at the airport was holding an old GI footlocker in Will Call. It was to be picked up by either a Mr. Polaski or a Mr. Bragg. I told them I was on my way and hung up. It had to be either the money or his share of the treasure. I already knew what money looked like. I hoped it was the treasure.
At the airport I learned the wooden footlocker had arrived on a flight thirty minutes after Polaski’s own plane had landed. He’d done the next best thing to having it with him by putting it on a companion freight plane that would land soon enough after he did, so the footlocker and whatever it contained could be claimed once he’d picked up his own luggage. He’d gone to some pains to disassociate himself from it, even to having stenciled my name on the top of the footlocker.
I asked them to double-check and make sure it was the only article in the name of Polaski or myself that had arrived on that particular flight. They checked and were sure. I signed for it and they had a man wheel it out to my car on a handtruck and help me boost it into the trunk. It was heavy, as if he’d filled it with old books or broken pieces of concrete. Maybe it held both the money and the treasure. I got in and drove away from there, but I had to have a look at what I carried, so I pulled over again on an airport service road. I went around and opened the trunk lid. The scuffed box didn’t even have a lock on it. The lid was secured by mechanical latches, and the locker had been banded at both ends by several wraps of gray duct tape. I knifed through the tape where the lid met the front wall and undid the latches. I couldn’t lift the lid all the way while the locker still was in the trunk of the car, but it opened enough so I could see that Polaski had indeed wrapped old building bricks inside of newspapers to give the box some weight. I couldn’t figure out why. Maybe the bricks had something to do with the treasure. I pried up a few of them and laid them to one side. Beneath the bricks was a pad fashioned of several folds of green plastic. I lifted a corner of that and saw more green. It was the money.
I rearranged things and closed the lid and latched it. I fitted the knifed edges of the duct tape as best I could and slammed shut the trunk lid, sneezed and got back into the car. I just sat for a moment. Now that I had one of the missing ingredients I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. The men who had killed Polaski would willingly have separated my head from my shoulders to get at it. Technically I was engaged in recovering it for Erica, presumably so she could give it to Bowman and his woman friend in exchange for some more pieces of the treasure. But a given situation takes on a different cast when it puts my own life in great jeopardy. I decided to drive back to the office and think about it some. Before leaving the airport complex I had another idea and pulled over to a pay phone and tried calling Ceejay at the office, figuring maybe I could stash the money in the small safe Sloe and Morrisey kept in their end of the suite of offices I shared with them. But I was too late. Everyone was gone for the day.
It was after six when I got back to the city and it was raining again. I didn’t feel like hauling the locker the two blocks or more from the parking garage to my office. I managed to find a parking spot on a street that intersected at an angle with Market, along one side of the office building. I’m no slouch physically, even when sneezing and coming down with a cold, but I couldn’t carry the footlocker in both hands and still walk. I managed to get it up on one shoulder and slammed the trunk lid. I staggered down the walk to the building entrance. The locker felt as if it were going to permanently disfigure me. I had to bend over some more and ride it more on my back. I got through the doors and over to the elevators. I pushed the button and sneezed again. I must have looked like the hunchback of Notre Dame coming down with something. I got onto the elevator when the door opened and let the locker down onto the floor by one end. When I straightened, a stab of pain said hello to my shoulder. I pushed the button for my floor and rode up. I heaved the locker up onto my shoulder again when the door opened, and started down the corridor for the office.
From my hunched-over position I was aware quite suddenly of being joined by a pair of figures on either side of me, as if they’d been waiting for me.
“Here, pal, let us help,” said a voice, and somebody grabbed the strap on the other end of the locker.
I knew I was in trouble even before I straightened up. Holding the other end of the locker was one of the two gunmen who had slain Polaski. The other one was striding on the other side of
me with his hand in his pocket and a dirty smile on his face. They knew that I knew who they were. I did the only thing left to do. I sneezed.
EIGHT
“Come on, let’s get on down to your place,” said the one on the other end of the locker. “We don’t want to cause a scene out here.”
He moved swiftly and I had to keep up while his companion kept pace beside me. “What’s there to cause a scene about?”
They both laughed, briefly, but didn’t say another word. A little knot of fear rose in my throat. It doesn’t happen often, only when I feel as if I’ve gotten myself into some very serious trouble. I half expected them to take me into the office, open the footlocker, find the money and shoot me the same way they’d shot Polaski. When we got to the reception room door I had to put down the locker to get out my keys. I unlocked the door and picked up my end of the locker and we went inside.
The man with his hands free turned on some lights and shut the door behind us. The man on the other end of the locker looked around. “Where’s your office?”
I led them through the inner door to my own office. The man lugging the locker pointed to a side wall. We dropped it there and he shoved me around so that I was facing the wall.
“Stretch,” he ordered, while giving me a shove on the back so that I was leaning in against the wall. He worked swiftly. My own weapons were down in my suitcase, but he lifted my wallet and handed it to his companion. “He’s clean, Elmo.”
Elmo grunted and sat down behind my desk. He began going through the wallet. The other one took a .357 magnum revolver out of his coat pocket.
“You can turn around now, jerk.”
They were both younger men than I’d remembered from the airport. They were tall and well built. Beneath their raincoats they wore suits and ties. The man with the gun was chewing a wad of gum. He seemed wound up tightly, but the gun hand was steady, pointed at my midsection. His companion fished the license photostat out of my wallet and studied it a moment.
