Border City Blues 3-Book Bundle

by Michael Januska

  “Hey, how about Chop-Shop Suey?”

  He squirmed a little and wondered himself what exactly it was he was asking for. “Not exactly, but I think you might have the right idea.”

  “Okay, I’m in.”

  “Great. And can you do me a favour?”

  “What?”

  “Leave Bernie out of it.”

  “Okay … so, why?”

  “Because I also don’t want it … to be a kind of joke.”

  “Oh … okay.” Vera Maude looked slightly confused. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, are you doing anything this afternoon?”

  “Depends,” said Vera Maude. She was still getting used to changing tracks when it came to talking to this man. “What did you have in mind?”

  The contractors, who had been sitting on the back of their flatbed truck eating their lunch, must have gotten their cue when Pearl and the Follies came out of the building because they re-entered the club, ready to get back to work, with silly grins on their faces and a sideways glance for Vera Maude.

  “Hi, boys.”

  The foreman nodded. “Mr. McCloskey.”

  — Chapter 22 —

  CROSSWORDS

  Campbell bracketed his eyes with his hands and pressed his face against the glass to stop the glare. He examined the menu card in the window, making the clientele on the other side feel not just a little uncomfortable over their club sandwiches and coffee. The bottom of the menu card read:

  The Businessman Knows — that the most delightfully quiet, cool and restful place to enjoy his lunch is here.

  He hadn’t checked in at Osterhout’s in a while. Yes, he thought. Yes, lunch for a change. He always had to remind himself to eat.

  An older gentleman walked out just as Campbell was about to enter. His face was unmistakable to the detective, with its high, pink cheekbones and bushy white eyebrows combed straight up, giving the man the appearance of being in a perpetual state of shock.

  “Mr. Gerald.”

  “Ah, young Campbell.”

  Mr. Gerald shifted his cane from one hand to the other — an affectation, Campbell was sure — so that the two could press palms. Gerald was a friend of Campbell’s father. They were members of the same lodge — the Prince of Wales, Campbell thought it was.

  “How are you keeping, sir? I haven’t seen you in ages.”

  Campbell noticed how his vernacular changed whenever he spoke to one of the old guard or his college professors. It was like a reflex, or perhaps a defence mechanism.

  “I’m well, very well, thank you,” said Mr. Gerald.

  “Keeping busy, then?”

  “Yes, yes — oh, and with something that might already be of interest to you, I’m sure: I’ve been attending court cases over in Sandwich. Found a fellow from the lodge who’s also quite keen on taking in the proceedings.”

  “Any wagering going on?”

  “Oh!” grinned the old gentleman. “No, it’s just fascinating stuff. And a different view of the city, I should say.”

  It felt like this was turning into a conversation, so Campbell moved out of the way of passersby trying making the most of their lunch break. Mr. Gerald followed Campbell’s cue, also shuffling over.

  “I’m sure it is,” said Campbell. “Do you attend very many?”

  “We try to attend as many as we can, health and weather permitting, of course. A lot of interesting characters have been taking the stands these past few weeks. But some of the spectators can be just as interesting, let me tell you.”

  Campbell chuckled politely.

  “Say,” said Mr. Gerald, “speaking of characters, do you have a detective on the force — at least I think he’s a detective — a blimp of a man, slightly unkempt?”

  Campbell smiled. “That sounds like Detective Morrison. Did you see him there this morning?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I did.”

  “He must have been testifying.”

  “No, no, he just sat there doing his crosswords, as always.”

  “His crosswords?” Campbell lowered his voice and hoped Mr. Gerald would follow suit. “How often do you see him there?”

  “Not that often … only for certain types of cases it would seem.”

  This detail piqued Campbell’s curiosity. “Oh? Which types of cases?”

  “Oh, the ones involving those nasty drug smugglers. Now there’s a bad lot. I hope they all get what’s coming to them, especially the one today that for some reason seems to think he’s above the law. Then again, so many of that kind do. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you, young Campbell?”

  Campbell’s wheels were turning. “Detective Morrison must be doing some research, or following up on cases.”

  “You would know.”

  I’d like to know more, thought Campbell. He looked around at the automobiles and citizens going about their business along the Avenue. Yes, I’d like to know more. He extended his hand. “It was nice catching up with you, Mr. Gerald.”

  Campbell was already leaning away.

  “Weren’t you going in for some lunch?”

  “I was, but I just remembered some work I was supposed to have finished up first. Hope to run into you again sometime, sir.”

  “The same, young Campbell.”

  Again with the “young Campbell,” thought the detective, as if I were still in short pants. Why do our elders insist on freezing us in time?

  “Good day.”

  They touched their respective chapeau brims.

  “Good day.”

  Almost walking into traffic, Campbell headed straight back to the police station. He thought he’d check the files on recent drug smuggling and possession cases to see if anything jumped out at him. It wasn’t really his area, but lately he’d been thinking more and more about how he should pay closer attention.

  And then that question popped into his head again: What’s Morrison up to?

  He walked along the Prince Edward Hotel side of Park Street, crossing at St. Alphonsus.

  And that sound? He nodded at a couple of constables he passed coming down the stairs. It’s your stomach, you fool, eating itself.

  ACCUSED CHINAMAN SAYS “NO CAN CATCH”

  Su Men Yen, typically Chinese, pleaded not guilty in police court this morning in illegally possessing narcotics. Yen was arrested last night when Sergeants Burns and Begg found him at 50 Chatham Street with 17 decks of opium in his possession. Yen asked for bail and was informed that $1,000 cash would be sufficient to secure him his liberty.

  “No can catch,” replied the accused, and he was led below.

  — Chapter 23 —

  DRIVING LESSONS

  “Did you ever stop to think maybe I don’t want to know how to drive a car?”

  “You should know how to drive a car.”

  “Let me rephrase that: I don’t think I need to know how to drive a car.”

  “Maudie, everybody needs to know how to drive a car.”

  “Are you shilling for Ford now, or did you just buy a dealership?”

  McCloskey leaned back. “You need some water in your rad.”

  “My who?”

  “C’mon,” said McCloskey, “give yourself a chance.”

  “At what?”

  The first thing he needed to do was calm her down. The roadster was parked in the middle of the grounds of the Jockey Club, on the fringes of the Border Cities, a place he figured Vera Maude could do the least amount of damage with an automobile, compared to the heaps of damage she could do on city streets. McCloskey knew a couple of stable boys here and they let him on the grounds in exchange for not asking them for any tips on the bullet work pulling stretches on the straights, whatever that meant. These boys had their own language.

  McCloskey had convinced Vera Maude to come out here on the pretense she would get to pet a few horses, maybe even pose on one and have her picture taken for a calendar. McCloskey kept the calendar idea to himself. If it happened, he’d hang it in the garage at the
Wrecking and Salvage.

  “Jack … seriously, I don’t know about this.”

  “You’re just going take it once around the track. Easy stuff. What’re you gonna hit?”

  “Don’t even say that! Jack — what are you trying to do to me?” She was bouncing in her seat, twisting her grip on the steering wheel and staring straight ahead as if it were mere seconds before the gun at Indianapolis.

  “Maudie, would you calm down?”

  “It’s a killing machine,” she muttered.

  “What? Where did you hear that? Look, no one’s around, no other cars, and nothing in your path. The worst you might do is take out a length of fence.”

  “Worst? Jack, you really are setting me up, aren’t you?”

  “This isn’t a five-pin bowl, Maudie. I’m right here, right next to you. In fact … tell you what.” McCloskey made sure the car was in park before he stepped out of the vehicle and walked around the grille while Vera Maude resumed bouncing in her seat.

  “Holy shit … Jack!”

  “C’mon, slide over a little bit.”

  She wiggled her hips in the other direction and he leaned in, holding the door half closed.

  “What are you doing?” She had a new, fresh look of panic on her face.

  “Relax. One step at a time; you’re gonna get used to the pedals and the wheel today, that’s all.”

  “What’s happening?”

  Improvising, mostly.

  “I’m going to stand on the running board, with the door open so that I can jump in if I have to. I’ll get her in gear — low gear — and then, like I said, all you’re gonna do is steer. Let’s just leave it at that for now.”

  “This is crazy.… Is this how you learned to drive?”

  “No,” he said. “I taught myself how to drive one Sunday after church. My pa was sleeping one off and I got a little ambitious and accidentally backed his truck into the shallows. It looked like it might actually slip further into the drink but I jumped out and tied the front bumper to a tree. I was a quick thinker.”

  “Can you tell me how that ended after we do our lap around the track?” said Vera Maude. “I’m choking on the fumes.”

  McCloskey steadied his feet on the running board and tightened his arm around the door’s open window frame. “Do you see that gap in the fence we came through?”

  She squinted at it. “Yeah.”

  “Hey — did you bring your cheaters?”

  “In my purse.”

  “Put them on.”

  Without looking, she fished them out and adjusted them on her face. He wondered why she hated wearing them. He thought about that calendar again.

  “I’m going to put the engine in gear now, and you’re going to take us toward that gap.”

  “Which pedal makes it go?”

  “That one.” McCloskey pointed. “I’ll handle the clutch and the accelerator.”

  “The whats?”

  “Okay … go.”

  The roadster lurched forward. McCloskey wrapped his other arm around the driver’s seat.

  “Are you all right?” shouted Vera Maude. The volume really wasn’t necessary.

  “I’m fine … just keep both hands on the wheel and aim between the goal posts.”

  “The what?”

  “Just try to make it through the gap.”

  It was twice the width of the car; she had to make it. And she did. The wheels hitting the track surface startled her, and she had to adjust her grip. “Whoops.”

  “You’re fine.”

  A couple of the groomers came out of the stables to catch the action, leaning on their rakes, silly grins on their faces.

  Vera Maude took the first turn.

  “That was good,” said McCloskey, “but don’t take the next one so tight; you’ve got lots of room here.” They were on a long stretch now. “I want you to play with the wheel a little bit here, get a feel for it.”

  “Like this?”

  She started gently working the wheel back and forth. McCloskey momentarily lost his footing on the running board and had to resist the impulse to grab the wheel back from her.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Okay, you got your next turn coming up. Remember what I told you.”

  “Not too tight.”

  “Just ease yourself into it and don’t force it. Let the car and its push and pull do some of the work for you.”

  Vera Maude took it a little wide and McCloskey almost spilled into her lap.

  “Was that better?”

  He straightened up and caught his breath. “Better. Now, before this next turn, as you approach it, move a little to the right first and then just before the curve, start turning the wheel to the left.”

  Her hands were losing their grip on the wheel. “Got it.”

  McCloskey braced himself. The stable boys were leaning on the fence now, their necks craned.

  It was a smooth, balanced, well-executed turn. Everyone, participants and spectators alike, relaxed a little bit.

  “Okay, Maudie, you’re in the home stretch.”

  “Woo-hoo, giddy up!” She paused. “Are we going to be driving back into the grounds?”

  McCloskey thought for a moment. He realized she would have to brake, stop, and reverse. And while he could do some things for her from where he was standing, those weren’t any of them.

  “When I grab the wheel and give you the go-ahead, you’re going to slide over and I’m going to jump into the driver’s seat.”

  For the first time during the lesson, Vera Maude took her eyes off the road and turned to McCloskey. “Really?”

  “Yeah, just be ready.”

  They motored along down the home stretch. One of the stable boys was pumping his rake in the air like a hockey stick and the other was whistling loud and hard.

  “Almost,” said McCloskey. “Almost.”

  Vera Maude shifted her bottom in the seat, preparing to make her move.

  McCloskey grabbed the wheel. “Now,” he said. He moved his right leg in too soon and got it tangled briefly with Vera Maude’s left. He jerked the wheel.

  “Shit. Maudie, move your leg out of the way!”

  “I’m trying to, but … my skirt.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got my eyes on the track. Now slide over.”

  “Jack — the fence!”

  “I see it.”

  Vera Maude completed her manoeuvre over to the passenger seat and straightened her skirt. McCloskey stole a glance when he dropped into the driver’s seat. He pulled the door closed with his free hand and then worked the clutch and the gearshift until he brought the roadster to a stop.

  The stable boys applauded and McCloskey wiped his brow with his shirtsleeve.

  “That was fun,” said Vera Maude. “When can we do it again?”

  — Chapter 24 —

  OCCIDENTAL

  Laforet dissected cadavers with bone chisels, articulators, knives, scalpels, and snips. In between cadavers, when he was bored or held up by forces beyond his control, he occasionally used his words to take apart the living. A nurse once referred to it as verbisection. Some got off easy while others went away with a limp of sorts.

  His cheek rested in the palm of one hand while the other hand slowly drummed a clipboard with a pencil, which made a sound like water dropping from a leaky gutter. This was also the tired, impatient Laforet sitting at his desk waiting for laboratory results, which suspended all of his other activities. Roger Smith, the newest orderly at the hospital, was seated across from him. He was being bounced around the hospital, told to become familiarized with the doctors’ and nurses’ responsibilities and how the facility generally functioned. Their conversation, if it could even be called that, was beginning to wander.

  “In this case, Smith, I prefer Chinese,” said Laforet.

  “To what?”

  “Orientals,” said Laforet.

  “But they clearly …”

  “Yes, clearly they.” Laforet straightened up. “You might ha
ve an oriental rug, go out for an oriental dinner, maybe have a taste for oriental costume, but when it comes to the people …”

  “But I always thought …”

  “Smith, whenever I hear someone utter that phrase I know right away that they themselves weren’t responsible for any of the thinking but rather conveniently left that difficult, messy business up to someone else. Try using the word as an adjective, not a noun.”

  “Oriental?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” said Smith, “that puts things in a different light, doesn’t it?” He paused for a moment. “So what are we then?”

  Laforet resumed drumming his pencil on the clipboard.

  “You could say we’re occidentals,” he said. “Not to be confused with the many accidentals I’ve delivered into the world over the years.”

  “We’re nouns, then?”

  “Yes. Except you, Smith; you are an adverb.”

  Quan and Li-Ling had just left Laforet’s lab. Quan had had an altercation with a few young men who didn’t feel he was giving them enough room on the sidewalk. He was pulled by his lapels into an alleyway off Chatham Street where he received a brief lecture, a black eye, and a split brow.

  “There,” one of the thugs had said, “now people will know how badly you misbehaved.”

  Quan had been on his way to the market, but after his altercation had turned around and headed straight to the laundry. Out of his good eye he could see the looks he was getting along the way. Li-Ling cleaned him up as best she could but he obviously required a few stitches. She walked him to Grace Hospital, knowing that in his condition they wouldn’t be let on a streetcar and the cabbies would drive right past them. Even Gladys at hospital reception hesitated. Luckily, Laforet was heading toward the front desk, having been informed that a package had just arrived for him: supplies he had been anxiously awaiting. When he saw the bloody handkerchief Quan held against his eye, and the look on Li-Ling’s face, and Gladys’s perplexed face, he asked the pair to come downstairs to his lab immediately, where he would have a look.

  “Does your friend speak English?” the doctor had asked Li-Ling as they made their way down in the elevator.