A siren sliced the air just as I was getting into Boyd’s car to move it to the taxi lot. The high-pitched whine was nearing when I started the car and leisurely drove it around to an alley that three blocks later brought me up behind the taxi building. I pulled the Mustang around into the space I’d leased, parked and locked the car, and started walking back to the rental Ford. By the time I was passing the building where Boyd had recently lived-and-died, both ambulance and police car were parked zigzaggedly, half in the street, half up on the sidewalk, and half-ass overall when you consider there were plenty of open spaces in front of Albert Leroy’s building. But then, parking sensibly isn’t in the spirit of an emergency. As if rushing around was going to do Albert Leroy any good.
Actually, the rushing around was pretty well over by now. Two cops were standing with hands on butts as two guys in white were coming down out of the stairwell carrying a stretcher with a sheet-covered Albert Leroy. A few people were milling around, mostly women from the Laundromat down a couple doors, but there was no crowd really, still too early for that. A tall man in his forties, well-dressed, was standing next to one of the policemen, who was asking him questions in a respectful, next-of-kin sort of way. An older man, who’d been standing in the background, moved forward and touched the tall man on the shoulder and seemed to be offering condolences. The tall man nodded his head sadly and the shorter, older man nodded back and turned and walked across the street, in my direction.
As he approached I saw that he wasn’t just short, he was very short, maybe five-four, but he carried himself erect and he was a handsome old guy. His features were well-defined and though deep-set in his face, unmarred by age, and the character lines down his cheeks were straight, slashing strokes. He was wearing a white shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, and loose brown trousers and when he passed by me, he muttered, “Poor old soul,” as though he expected me to know what he was talking about.
My eyes followed him as he entered Boyd’s building, through the front door on street level. As the door closed I noticed the sign in the draped front window: “Samuel E. Richards, Chiropractor.”
I stroked my shoulder, said to myself, “Why not?” and followed the old guy inside.
“Sir?” I said.
He turned quickly and smiled. A kind smile, but shrewd. “Yes, young man?”
“You’re Dr. Richards?”
“I’d better be,” he grinned, “otherwise I’d be breaking the law using his office.”
“I could use some help.”
“Most people could. Wellsir, I’ll tell you, I’m not open for business just yet. The wife’s cooking up some breakfast and I’ll have to take care of that before I take care of you. How about coming back in thirty minutes, half an hour?”
“I can smell the bacon frying. Smells good.”
“We got a little apartment set-up to the back of the office. The wife and me’re getting on in the years, couldn’t manage an office and house both. And she’s got arthritis, don’t you know, and the steps in our house weren’t doing her any good. You know, you got to compromise sometimes, so here I am.”
I told him it sounded like a nice arrangement. I looked around; we were in a waiting room, with several chairs and a stand with some old magazines on it. There was no receptionist. “You don’t mind if I wait here, do you?”
“Not at all. What you say was wrong with you?”
“My shoulder. Had an accident an hour or so ago.”
“What sort of accident?”
“Slipped on the soap in the shower, would you believe it?”
“Surely would,” he said, smiling gently. “You’d be surprised how many accidents take place in bathrooms. Well, you come on in the other room, we’ll get you on the table and get you relaxed. Shouldn’t take more than five minutes to throw my breakfast down.”
His working office was small, just large enough for a desk and chair and two chiro tables, one of which stood upright waiting to be lowered. That was the one he had me climb onto and eased me down and it was comfortable, so comfortable it was hard resisting the urge to sleep.
I turned my head to one side, a painful move considering my shoulder, and studied the room; the walls were a soothing pastel green, recently painted, but everything else was old: the desk and chair were scarred with age and the chiro tables had been in action for some time. On the wall was his diploma, or first license, and it was brown with age. I squinted and read the date: “1921.” I was still in that position, looking over the room, when he came back from a very hasty breakfast.
“Get your head back in the slot, there, boy, twisting your neck to the side isn’t doing your shoulder any good.” I followed his advice and felt his fingers on my neck. He probed my neck and upper back, said, “Oh yes, here’s the problem,” and went to work.
He was good. Very. A pro. His fingertips were super- sensitive and his moves were powerful but painless. He had a knack for catching me off guard. He’d say something conversational, like, “Going to be a rainy one,” and as I’d start to reply, down he’d come, like a man twice his size and half his age. “That was my Sunday punch,” he’d laugh softly, and go on to something else. He gave me fifteen minutes of adjusting, most of it spent on my shoulder, but some of it on my neck and lower back, and when he lifted the table up and I got off, I felt fine. I told him so.
“Glad to hear it,” he said. “That’s my real satisfaction, getting quick results. Good idea getting here soon after you took your fall, too. Easy working on something like that right after she happens. Couple days go by and all kinds of tension sets in.”
“You don’t use X ray?” I asked him, remembering bills I’d paid to a chiro in Wisconsin.
He held up his hands, flexing his fingers. “These is X ray enough.”
I nodded, said, “Listen, how old are you, anyway?”
“Eighty-one, this January past.”
“That’s remarkable.”
“Maybe so, I don’t know. I’m not so good as I was once, but I guess I’m still good enough. When I get past a certain point, I’ll give it up.”
“Oh?”
“You got to be sure you get results, every time. Otherwise you should give up what you’re doing. Do it right or not at all.”
“You get results, take my word. How much I owe you, anyway?”
“Four bucks,” he said, and I gave it to him. He explained in detail how all the other chiros in town had gone up to six, but he couldn’t see charging that much. He was one of those talkative old guys who enjoy having someone to do their talking at. I wondered if maybe I couldn’t work that to my advantage.
“Say,” I said, “what was all that commotion across the way?”
He shook his head. He sat at the chair at the desk and I sat on the table next to it. He said, “Terrible thing, terrible thing, that. Poor old Albert Leroy. Poor old boy. Old, I say . . . I’m eighty some and he was, what, maybe forty, but he was older than me. Much. He didn’t have a soul. No wife, wasn’t particular close to his relatives. Didn’t have a profession to speak of. No goals, no pride in anything.”
“What happened to him, anyway?” I had him going good now, all I had to do was prod him gently now and then. What a find.
“Somebody shot him, appears. Appears he was robbed.” He shook his head some more. “Doesn’t surprise me, people getting the wrong idea about old Albert. Figuring he had money stashed in his place somewheres. I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts he didn’t have a penny hid. So somebody shot him and for nothing, I’ll wager.”
He was right about that. I said, “Why would anyone think this fella had money?”
“Well, his family’s got money. You from around here?”
“No. I’m a salesman, passing through.”
“Still, you might’ve heard the Kitchen Korner program. They sell the Kitchen Korner products all over the Midwest.”
“No, don’t think I have.”
“There’s this radio program, don’t you see, called Kitchen Korner, and it
’s out of Port City but they syndicate it all over this part of the country. It’s nothing fancy, just some women sit around and gabble. Recipes, folksy talk and the like. It was started up years ago by an old gal name of Martha Leroy.”
“Leroy?”
“The same. Albert’s momma. The program usually consisted of old Martha and one of three or four aunts what live in the area, and her little girl, Linda Sue. Wellsir, Martha passed on ten years ago, and her husband, old Clarence Leroy, followed right on her heels. Martha was the pants and Clarence, who had a pretty fair business head, got to feeling his oats with the boss dead and buried, and took up with some filly and died of a heart attack within the month. But that’s beside the point. The program, the Kitchen Korner program—that’s ‘comer’ with a ‘K,’ don’t you know—got carried on by the daughter, Linda Sue.”
“They make a lot of money with the radio show?”
“Piles, and more off the products. They got a line of foodstuffs, called likewise Kitchen Korner. Jam and soup, mostly, some other things.”
“All of it made in Port City?”
“They make the jam here. The soup, too. They sell all other sorts of business that’s made elsewhere, farmed out to manufacturers who ship the stuff here, where it gets a Kitchen Korner label pasted on. Old Martha’s on the label, smiling from eternity. The old gal’s immortal, if you call sitting cold as can be in a thousand refrigerators immortal.”
“Why wasn’t this Albert in on the money?”
“Wellsir, Albert was a funny one. Always kind of quiet-spoken. Stayed to himself as a kid. One of my sons went to school with him and said the other kids used to pick on Albert and make fun of him, ’cause he was something of an odd-looking duck.” Again, he shook his head. “And kids can be cruel. Real cruel. Near as cruel as adults.”
“Yes.”
“Anyway, he was pretty good in the brains department, Albert was. High I.Q. and all. High school salutatorian. But when he went off to college, well, he had problems . . . some folks said it was a girl he got stuck on who played him foolish . . . others say he couldn’t get along without his momma at his side, he always was sort of sheltered by old Martha. However the reason, he come back from his mental treatment even stranger than before, different . . .” He whispered this, as though Albert might be listening in. “. . . sort of a vegetable, don’t you know. Not bright like before, nosir. Mumbling, stuttering, shuffling . . . it was a sad sight, I mean to tell you.”
“Has he been an embarrassment to his family?”
“I hope to shout. But Albert never caused ’em any harm. He went his own way. He’s always been a friendly sort, in his quiet manner, and most people speak kindly of him, if they speak of him at all. Matter of fact, I always thought it was kind of low of that family, the way they didn’t look after Albert.”
“Oh?”
“His momma wasn’t near so partial to him after his breakdown, and his poppa never paid him much mind to begin with. After the mother and father died, Linda Sue . . . which seems to me kind of a silly name for her, now that she’s a woman of forty-five . . . Linda Sue told Albert to move out of the house. The Leroy home is one of those mansion-type things up on the West Hill, looking out on the river, don’t you see, one of those real old beauties up there, know the ones mean?”
“Yes.”
“They gave him a janitor job down in South End where they make the soup, but that’s all they done for him, far as I know. Some folks think Albert had money left to him, others think his janitor pay was high, like as if he was an executive, but was storing it away, hoarding, like a hermit. I suppose that’s what led to what happened to him. Somebody took a gun up there and shot him and went searching for buried treasure.” He laughed. “Dollars to doughnuts whoever-it-was didn’t find a thing.”
“You were talking to somebody across the street, a tall man. Who was that?”
“Raymond Springborn. Linda Sue’s husband. His family has money, too, got a lot of land holdings and property round town.” He leaned over, confidentially. “Some folks don’t know it, but I hear he’s part owner of that nightclub place, the one run by that girl who did that nudie thing in that Bunny book. Ah, that’s the name of the place, Bunny’s. He’s in it with that gal, and isn’t that pretty company for the hometown Kitchen Korner boy.” He cleared his throat. “Not to be disrespectful. I’m sure he isn’t having anything but business dealings with that gal. Mr. Springborn’s okay. Got a hell of a fine business head.”
“Sounds like you know him pretty well.”
“I sure do. He’s my landlord, don’t you know. Why you’re sitting in one of his buildings right now. If you look out front you’ll see it carved in the stone: Springborn Apartments.”
20
* * *
* * *
CYPRUS WAS IN the valley between East and West Hill and was a street which seemed to slash the town in half. Located on Cyprus was the local newspaper’s office, the county hospital, a public high school, a Catholic grade school, half a dozen churches and, just before the street turned into Highway 22, a drive-in movie playing a couple of skin flicks. I didn’t care about any of that. I was on Cyprus not for a guided tour of Port City, but because I was looking for Fuller Street.
Fuller was an offshoot of Cyprus and ran up the edge of West Hill, just as West Third Street ran up the outer edge of the Hill, on the riverfront side of town. Fuller cut through a respectable middle-class residential area, mostly two-story white clapboards that had seen better days but were far from rundown, while West Third crossed through the section filled with near-mansions that were old but not visibly decaying. Raymond Springborn and his wife Linda Sue lived in one of those near-mansions on West Third. Peg Baker lived in an apartment house just off Cyprus on Fuller, in the dip before the rise of the Hill. Between them was Port City.
The apartment house was two-story red brick trimmed in white, white wrought-iron handrails along the upper floor winding down around a wide cement stairway that came up the center front of the building. The structure had a blandly ageless quality: it could’ve been put up twenty years ago or yesterday. The parking lot was bigger than the ten-apartment complex required, and looked as though it might’ve been installed by a landlord who disliked mowing lawns; there were little squares of grass and shrubbery stuck here and there around the concrete lawn, like sprigs of parsley on a big empty plate.
I pulled the rental Ford into the largely vacant lot, only a third-filled now as it was past nine and folks were off to work, these cars remaining being second cars, or belonging to people who worked nights, like Peg Baker. I snuggled in between a station wagon and a Volks and turned off the engine and got out.
The phone book had listed Peg Baker’s address as 121 Fuller, and this was 121 Fuller, all ten apartments of it. Some of the tenants had their names on their mailboxes, six of the ten did anyway, but not Peg Baker. Knowing six of the places weren’t hers narrowed the field, but not enough. And the curtains on those four remaining apartments were all closed, too, in case I wanted to risk getting busted for window-peeking. I could always check with the manager to see which apartment was Peg Baker’s, but the manager lived elsewhere. On the door of a laundry room was a notice giving the manager’s name and address and hours at which to call. The hours were in the evening, but I used the pay phone in the laundry room anyway and tried the manager’s number and a recorded voice asked me to leave a message after the tone and I hung up. Damn.
I was just getting ready to pick one of the four doors at random and knock when I spotted what had to be Peg Baker’s car. Her registration would probably be visible, and on that would be her address. Hopefully that address would be more specific than “121 Fuller.”
It was no chore figuring the car as hers. The surprise was I hadn’t spotted it immediately, but I hadn’t, because it was hidden down there in the end stall on the opposite side of the lot from where I’d parked. It was crouching there behind a big blue four-year-old Caddy.
It was
a pink Mustang.
Several years old, but shiny and pink and dentless like new, a sheltered pink baby that never grew up, a Peter Pan of a car, parked way down on the end where nobody could hurt it. The upholstery was pink. The carpeting was pink. The dashboard was pink. The gearshift knob was pink. I was afraid to look under the hood.
My joy at finding the car subsided at once: her registration was taped inside the front window, staring up at me in the face, the useless “121 Fuller” address thumbing its nose at me. It said, “Margaret Anne Baker,” and it said, “State of Iowa Motor Vehicle Licensing Bureau,” and “Port City” and sundry other bureaucratic bullshit, but nowhere did it say Apartment Number Such-and-Such.
What now? Back to pick a door and ask? I’d have to be careful how I went about it, as the laundry room and several windows were decorated with signs saying “No Solicitors Allowed,” warning that a city ordinance called for the immediate jailing of anyone practicing that forbidden art. I reminded myself not to spit on the sidewalk.
I was one hell of a fine detective.
So I wandered back to my car, head hanging low, to regroup my thoughts. I’d intended getting at Raymond Springborn via an indirect route, namely Peg Baker. Just how I would do that, I didn’t know; I would improvise, as time allowed for nothing but improvisation, and then what else could I have done but improvise, never having done this sort of thing before. My only other option would be a frontal approach with Springborn, and what with the body of his murdered brother-in-law Albert Leroy just fresh found, now was a decidedly bad moment to approach Springborn frontally. I could picture myself dropping in on the mournful family, perhaps while Springborn was gathering the sympathies of the Port City Chief of Police. Such a situation could bring up some embarrassing questions, such as, “Who are you?” or “What are you doing here?”
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