Tom thought about it. It would get Wyatt out from underfoot during the day and he wouldn’t be wondering why the other four were on guard. He looked at Robert, who shrugged as to say Go for it.
Tom called Gary, who grumbled about Robert being an ingrate but agreed he needed a replacement, fast, at least for the mornings. Robert gave Tom the keys to the Plymouth and went to patrol Beth’s property with cheap binoculars, a can of Pepsi, and one of her baseball bats. Tom packed his belongings in the Plymouth trunk and drove to the store with Wyatt following him in the muscle-bound Firebird, of which Tom was by now blatantly jealous.
Looking at the exterior back of the store, the apartment part, he decided to put in his first day’s work before moving his worldly goods into so dubious a dwelling. Gary installed Wyatt at the front counter without ceremony, telling him to come and get him if he needed help, but he had to talk to Tom whom he motioned to the back of the store. “Why did Robert quit me, Tomahawk?”
Tom wasn’t going to discuss his problem with Harv and Marv unless he had to. It might scare Gary and get Tom fired. He said, “Robert’s girlfriend has a problem, thinks she is in danger and needs his protection.”
“Does she?”
“I don’t know. She’s a strange woman. Also, he says fronting for you has got everyone in the county mad at him and he is going to lay low for a while. He’s convinced some of your deferment clients were going to scrape a county road with him.” Tom described the visit to Mildred’s.
Gary sighed. “That lad needs to grow a pair. He’s afraid of the IRS, the draft, the elders, the students, and from what you say, Mildred.”
“That’s about it.” Of course, Robert had also been kidnapped by two mobsters looking for Tom.
Gary whined, “I really hoped we could nail down the deal with her. I could go to seventeen thousand on the mineral rights if I had to.”
“Gary, she wants to sell the whole place, not just the mineral rights. She wants a hundred grand.”
“Nuts. That’s what I get for keeping this store open to spare her pals having to drive their charcoal gray and pink De Sotos to Houghton for groceries. She’s one mean old lady. You think someone’s putting her up to this?”
“I have no idea. She’s dating the Chief. They went out last night.”
“Aw, triple nuts. We’re going to have to be careful those two don’t cut us out. I can’t afford to buy her whole place. Look, I’ve got to pull some legal stuff together to go to court. You have to go across the street and see Mildred at work; make sure you guys understood her right.”
“Across the street?”
“Yeah, she works over there three doors down at the Chamber of Commerce office.”
“Gary, I’ll go, but I know what she said, she said a hundred grand for the whole place.”
“Well, maybe she’s changed her mind. Maybe the Chief gave her some sugar last night and she’s feeling more reasonable. Just go over and ask, will you? I’ll finish training Wylie.”
“Wyatt.”
“Uh-huh.”
A small sign on the Chamber office door informed visitors the place was closed for thirty minutes. Like so many such messages, it didn’t tell when the thirty minutes had started. Tom reported back to Gary in that little tiny office. He was not pleased. He complained, “We absolutely have to talk to her again. Robert has screwed this up. He screws everything up. From now on you’re my number two, Tomahawk. You help me with every part of the operation while I deal with these chicken shit lawsuits.
“Robert will come crawling back. You can use him for a gopher or fire his sorry ass if Wynn works out. I don’t care. You’re my right-hand man now.”
“I can’t just walk in and pick up on everything, Gary. I need to see the mine, the factory, all of your businesses.”
“Oh. Well, sure, but I may not have time to take you to our other operations today.”
So Beth was right. There weren’t many tangible assets to Gary’s empire besides the grocery store. “I still need to somehow understand what it is you do around here if I’m going to help you. So what can I see this morning? How about a look at your books? You have to be open with me if I’m to help you.”
Gary’s eyes flickered nervously. He stood motionless for several seconds. Finally he insisted, “If you’re going to see the books, then you have to be open with me too. You’re hiding from the law, Tomahawk, isn’t that right?”
Tom sat in stony silence.
“Come on. I’m not going to rat you out. You’ve got cop problems.”
“Yes, sort of.”
“I knew it. Relax, kiddo. That might be your biggest charm for me. Come on.” He took him further to the rear of the building, into a storeroom with a door straight ahead to his living quarters, and another to the left with a heavy rotating latch. Next to that door was a cracked interior-wall window.
“What the heck is this?” Tom wanted to know.
“This was a walk-in freezer.” He opened the latch and the door. “The refrigeration is off now but it still works. The place is super-insulated. But now, it’s the core of my operation.” He opened the door, triggering an overhead light. It smelled of paper dust, not meat. The far wall was filled with scratched and dented file cabinets, each with a sturdy lock.
“This is where you keep the ‘pizzas’ and stuff, then?”
“Bingo. And the books, but that’s not to go any further, Tomahawk.” He unlocked a file cabinet. “Okey-dokey then, I wonder which set of books would get you started sooner.”
“Which set?”
“Yeah, in the top drawer there’s the set Robert keeps for me that has basically everything. Then in the bottom drawer there’s my simplified set that I use for the IRS, the bank, and the university folks. I probably shouldn’t have brought this up. Robert doesn’t know about my set. He gets rattled so easily by this sort of thing.”
“Can I ask a question?”
“Sure, anything, you’re my main man now.”
“What you’re doing, keeping two sets of books, that’s illegal. Yet you’re telling me all about it, letting me rummage through them. How do you know I won’t turn you in, Gary?”
Gary looked disappointed in Tom. “I thought we’d just been through that. You’re in trouble with the cops yourself and you’re hiding here. If one of us goes down, we both do. As to the books, after you go through them you’ll see most of my operation is either legit or harmless to anyone but Nixon and General Westmoreland. My second set of books is more to keep life simple for everyone than to cheat Uncle Sam or the local bankers. And by the way, if this does get out, Robert takes the fall.”
“I see. I need to look at both sets so I don’t screw anything up for you.”
“Fine then, knock yourself out.” Gary took out two battered ledgers and re-locked the cabinet. “There you go. When you’re done we’ll talk about Mildred’s mining rights.” The street doorbell tinkled and Tom took the ledgers to the office. Gary headed to the front of the store to watch Wyatt serve a customer.
Both sets of books were abominable. Robert could be jailed for sloppiness and Gary for wildly crooked numbers. Gary was forgiving of his elderly grocery customers, who bought on credit and had trouble paying. The store ran at a loss, but Gary’s books showed a profit to deflect suspicion. Was he some sort of food basket Robin Hood?
The records alleged minimum wage pay to numerous student “employees.” Maybe Gary actually gave them money; probably not. It was harder to figure how he handled the student’s payments to him for stolen final exams, fake early scheduling letters, and bogus critical skills jobs in science and engineering.
The Grant mine was the derelict property adjacent to Aunt Mildred’s place that he’d stumbled upon the day before. From the look of it, if Gary had ever conducted any operations there, it had been at about age six. He did have a factory six or seven miles away where the defense widget for the Navy was made.
Gary returned, whistling happily, seemingly satisfied with Wyatt’s
work and unconcerned about his court date. Whatever his defects, the man was optimism personified. He inquired, “Okay, Tomahawk, what do you think?”
It would not be tactful to characterize the bookkeeping, so Tom said, “I think I can be of most help to your manufacturing operation. I want to go and see the plant. But there’s no need for you to babysit me, I can go out there alone.”
Gary shook his head. “Not now. I’ve got to get over to the courthouse, so I need you to watch Wyatt watch the store so we’re sure he can handle it. We’ll both go over and talk to Mildred when I get back. Then, when that’s done, we can go and look at the factory.”
Gary left to drive off in a blue Thunderbird with a crease in the left quarter panel. Tom watched Wyatt wait on a couple of elderly customers; bent-over women and pot-bellied men. One senior woman smiled at Tom and commented on how tall he was. Ha. Dani should hear this.
****
Beth Kessler was at her bedroom desk near the open door to her room. The three women were alone in the house. Tom and the new boarder, Wyatt, had gone to the grocery store, and Robert was on guard patrol.
Although reared in Midwestern Protestant orthodoxy, Beth felt no guilt about what she had done last night. She was twenty-six years old and a believer in first impressions, even first impulses. Tom Hawk impressed her. Maybe she wasn’t in love, but she guessed she was on the way there. How else could they have found the passion to have done what they had after he’d told her about Renada and the Stasi and Dani and the mob?
Before breakfast, Renada had insisted on invading her kitchen and Beth, spent after a night with Tom, had not complained. The German had prepared a fantastic breakfast strudel that they had all raved about. Her coffee had been heavenly, and Beth told herself that wasn’t just because she’d had a busy night: first fretting about the dead man and if she’d help kill him, and then screwing a big Marine.
She thought that Tom and she had acted naturally at breakfast. If anyone suspected what they had done, they covered it well. Wyatt had seemed as clueless about her and Tom as he did about everything else, and Robert had been preoccupied with quitting Gary and the defensive arrangements for her house. Renada’s breakfast conversation had turned toward ideas, overconfidently stated but good ones, for the success of the B&B. Only Dani had seemed to cast the lovers some sideward glances.
Renada appeared beside the desk and interrupted her daydreaming. She smiled at Beth. “Have you been in your parlor since breakfast?”
“No, why?”
“I have been a bad girl. And I made Dani to help me. Come.”
They had moved furniture. The area rug and twin flanking sofas were at forty-five degrees to the walls of the room. Now any seated person could look out the bay window. The room no longer looked under-furnished, and the traffic flow was improved. A pair of chairs and a lamp table had been relocated, and Beth saw at once that this astonishingly made a more intimate grouping and yet better tied them to the rest of the seating, if that was what you wanted. “This is fantastic, Renada.”
“It is just an application of some proven Oriental principles.” The words were modest, but her posture and eyes brimmed with pride.
Beth bit her lip as she always did when formulating important words to speak. She ventured, “You’re a great cook and you really have a lot of good decorating ideas. I was wondering, are you thinking of getting work locally?”
“Yes, I want to stay and I must therefore work.”
“I could use you here. I can’t pay you much, maybe a little over our minimum wage, but the room would be free as part of the deal.”
“I could also make breakfasts?”
“As many as you like, Renada.”
“Done.” They shook hands solemnly. Renada made a sort of a bow and was out the door.
Robert came in swinging his ball bat. He bubbled, “Beth, I have an idea, a simple way to wire the house to set off an alarm if there is an intruder. I can get the parts from one of my pizza customers. He can’t pass differential equations to save his ass, but he’s a whiz with electrical hardware.”
Beth was skeptical. Still, what harm could it do? Anything was better than him marching about outside the place with the bat. Sooner or later he’d be seen, and there would be hell to pay explaining it to the neighbors. Better to keep him close to the house with a project that might calm him down.
“What will it cost me?”
“It’ll be peanuts. I’ll start with that cellar door that you worry about.”
“Can you really do electrical work?”
“Sure. I’ve got a book. And this math client will help me if I get stuck. I’ll need your station wagon to get some stuff.”
“I suppose it’s all right. Please do alarm the cellar door first.”
“Super.” Beaming, he was gone before she could speak again. There was a sweet innocence to Robert. She felt bad that Renada had so little warmth for him. Actually, Beth might be imagining it, but the German woman seemed to have become interested in Wyatt Stone. Who was he, really? Why was he so vague about his degree program and classes? Why did he deflect personal questions as though West Coast gangsters were after him?
She headed for his room. This was getting to be a habit. But her life was filling up with assaults, kidnappings, and a murder/drowning. She had a right to know who was in her house. Nothing in Wyatt’s bedroom was out of the ordinary until she opened a drawer in the old student desk stuck in the far corner of the room. There she found a small notebook. It listed the Quonset hut room Tom had been burned out of. It had a reasonably accurate written description of Tom. There were downstate telephone numbers, including a couple for police agencies. Wyatt was not a student; he was something quite different. And now suddenly he seemed dangerous.
She returned to her bedroom, closed the door, picked up the telephone, and called the grocery store. Tom answered, “Grant’s Grocery.”
“Tom. Thank God. We need to talk. Is Wyatt with you?”
“No.”
“Good. Tom, he may be with the people trying to kill you. I found some very strange stuff in his room.”
“Aw, damn it, him too? Why am I not surprised? Can you come down here?”
“I’m on my way.”
****
Tom hung up the telephone and tried to look casual as he wandered up to the front to take a fresh look at Wyatt Stone, the latest threat. He stared nonchalantly out the window waiting for Beth to show. As he watched for her, he saw Gary pass in his Thunderbird, headed for his usual parking spot.
Then he saw the green Suburban from yesterday park across the street one door down. Harvey and Marvin Sartorelli went into the hardware store. He stood stock still, mesmerized, until the tinkling of the doorbell roused him. Gary.
“You feeling well, Tomahawk? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I need to talk to you.” He motioned him to the far front corner of the store, still a scant twenty-five feet from Wyatt.
“We can go to the office.”
“‘No. I need to watch out this window too. And I need you to get rid of Wyatt while we talk.”
“Geez. Big secrets.” Gary turned to Wyatt. “Hey, kiddo, go to the storeroom and see how much canned asparagus we’ve got.”
Wyatt threw him a puzzled look, but walked to the back.
“Okay, why so mysterious, Tommy boy?”
Tom told him.
Gary leaned close to him and lowered his voice to say, “Do I understand this? The mob is after you, not the cops, but you don’t trust the cops? One of the mobsters died in or near the river behind Beth’s place the other night after scuffling with Beth? Dani was tied to the crooks herself?”
“Yes.”
“And this dippy red-headed kid, Wyatt, is part of it?”
“I’m not sure. It starts to look like it, but I need to talk to Beth. She’s coming here. He has some involvement, but maybe not as part of the gang that Dani was in.”
“He doesn’t actually look much like s
ome Mafia hit man.”
“Dani’s sure he isn’t, but I don’t know. I don’t know why he’s here.”
“Dani is a hot-tempered airhead. And with what you’ve told me today, I don’t trust her. Do you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, not to worry, we can handle it. There’s only been the fat guy and this kid Wyatt, right?”
“No, I wish. Tony’s twin brothers are across the street in Art’s Hardware right now.” Tom kept watching the hardware store intently. “They’ve shown no interest in this place yet. When they come out, I need to follow them and learn where they’re staying.”
“I get it. And…?”
“There’s where I need your help. I also need to find out what Wyatt is up to, if he’s with them or not. His half shift is up in ten minutes. I need you to keep him here until I come back. But I don’t know how you are going to do that.”
“No problem. We’ll use my document room, the old walk-in freezer.”
“You mean you’ll lock him up?”
“Yup, it’ll be an accident. Like I said, the place is super-insulated. Once he’s secure in there, he can scream his head off and never be heard. If we find that he’s really dirty, you and I can have a discussion with him through that little window.”
“How will you get him in there?”
“The kid is curious, too curious, I think now. I’ll tell him the freezer room is the core of my operation. I’ll have to show him the locked file cabinets and he’ll walk right in.”
“I guess it might work. You capture him and we find if he’s part of our opposition. What if he won’t talk?”
“Ah, there’s the beauty part, Tomahawk. The refrigeration still works. I can make it twenty-eight degrees in there. He’s wearing a polo shirt, sandals, and Bermudas. He’ll talk. Hey, are those your guys coming out of the hardware?’
Tom turned and saw Harv and Marv bobbing down the three stairs of the place on short, heavy legs. “Yes. I have to go. Watch for Beth.”
“Done. You run along and find their lair. We’ll have a chat with young Wyatt when you get back.”
The last thing Tom heard was Gary calling to Wyatt. “Hey kiddo, forget about finding the asparagus for a minute. I have something real interesting to show you before I go to my settlement meeting at the courthouse.”
Hiding Tom Hawk Page 13