* * * *
It wasn't a sports bag but a small suitcase let down on a rope by an unseen hand, and the Lobsterman grabbed it, untied it in seconds, and handed it over to Beemer. A minute later they were moving away again, the big ship quickly falling astern.
Beemer led the way down into the cuddy, a small table down there between two bunks. He switched on a lamp. “See what we got,” he said. There were two locks. Beemer got out his penknife.
"Careful you don't rag those,” Benny said, “or it won't shut right after."
"I know what I'm doing."
In a moment the suitcase was open, the lid thrown back. The contents were done up in bundles carefully wrapped in thin paper, held together with rubber bands, another bunch or two shoved in loose to pack the top inch or two for a firm fit. They were Pinball tickets. Beemer grunted. He scooped up one of the loose ones. He closed the case and set it on the floor.
"Business cards,” he said. “Sure."
"He has to call them something."
"Right."
Benny took the ticket, held it to the light. “You know what, though? It looks pretty good. That printer in Bar Harbor must know what he's doing.” He glanced at Beemer. “Got that ticket you had this morning?"
"The fifty thousand winner? Absolutely."
Beemer reached inside his jacket to his shirt pocket and brought out the pristine ticket he had showed Benny earlier. Benny took it from him, laid it on the table, and placed Sweet's ticket alongside it.
"Beauty. Can't tell the difference.” He glanced up. “But what's the spin? You can't make much. It would be like running off five dollar bills."
"Sure, but he does this once a week, don't forget,” Beemer said. “How it works, his customers already sell these things. Grocery stores, bars, filling stations. Approved vendors, right? They keep these special jobs under the counter, mix them in as they go. Difference is, when they sell these ones they get to keep the whole five bucks."
"They're perfect,” Benny said, moving the two tickets around on the table, comparing them. “Absolutely perfect."
"Easier to make than money. You don't need the special paper, an’ they don't have all those anticounterfeiting gimmicks. One problem, they got a shelf life. Only good for a week. Which explains why he needed us out here, he couldn't hang loose until his guy got better."
They heard the engine throttling down.
"Almost there,” Beemer said. He reached down for the suitcase, brought it up to the tabletop, the lid dropped open and the loose-packed tickets fell out.
"Scheisse!” Beemer said. Benny helping, they got the tickets back in the case and snapped it shut.
Then he put out his hand. “Give me my own ticket back."
Benny hesitated. There were still two tickets on the table, side by side.
"I'm just wondering, are these the two we were looking at?"
"You mean you don't know?"
"I'm not certain."
"You lost my ticket?"
"I didn't lose anything. It's right here.” Benny pushed the tickets across the table.
"But which one's mine?"
"I don't know. You didn't mark it?"
"No, I didn't mark it! Why would I mark it? I only had the one—the fifty thousand dollar winner!"
"Well, if you'd marked it, then we'd know, wouldn't we?"
Beemer scooped both tickets up and held them close to his eyes. “I can't tell them apart!” His voice tightening now.
"Why are you getting so excited?"
"I'm not getting excited!"
"You're yelling."
"WHY SHOULDN'T I YELL!"
They stared at each other. Benny took a deep, steadying breath.
"I told you, it isn't lost. It's right here in front of us. All's you do, you take and scratch them both. You're so sure you had the winner, the one with the fifty grand payout has to be yours."
The engines grumbled down to an idle.
Beemer put both tickets on the table in front of him. He took his penknife out, held it over them. Then he lowered it again.
"I can't do it."
"Why not?"
"What if one of them is the winner?"
"What if? You're not so sure now?"
"Listen to me!” Beemer looked at the tickets again. “If one of them is the winner, I'd have to kill myself. First you, an’ then me."
"Why?"
"Because I won't be able to claim it! It could be Sweet's ticket. If it is, they're sure as hell not gonna honor it. They'll call in the ticket inspectors. The mounted police. An’ if I can't claim it, then I don't wanna know."
He closed his eyes, clenched his teeth, and with an expression of exquisite agony, tore both tickets into shreds.
"Brutal,” Benny said.
That wasn't the half of it. As they climbed awkwardly out of the boat and onto a rock, right up close to shore this time, the case fell open again and dumped its entire contents in the water. And it got better. Back at the Rob Roy, they found the front door slathered with an especially large unintelligible graffito, the white paint running down onto the street.
"Picasso,” Beemer said. He made it sound like a swear word.
"Take the door off and save it till he's famous, cover expenses,” Benny advised.
* * * *
Stevie Sweet put his head in the door, looked carefully around, then stepped inside the Rob Roy. “Somebody tagged your door,” he told Beemer.
"No kidding. How could I have missed that?"
Sweet was staring at the bloated suitcase before he even climbed up on the stool.
"Okay, what happened?” he asked.
"You sure you want to know?” Beemer asked him.
"Some kinda screw-up, or what?"
"You could call it that,” Benny said. “It fell in the water."
"It fell in the water,” Sweet said, repeating the statement as though he couldn't quite get his mind around it. His eyes were inscrutable behind the dark glasses. “And how did that happen?"
"A little accident,” Benny explained, “when we were climbing out of the boat down there.
Sweet glanced around. The place was empty. “You about ready to close?"
"Another ten minutes,” Beemer said. “But yeah, I guess I could.” He went to the door, locked it, came back to the bar, and shut the outside lights off.
"Just see what we got here,” Sweet said. He brought out a key and reached for the swollen case. Beemer stopped him. “The money first,” he said.
Sweet hesitated. They could see him struggling with it. He let out a rasping sound and then brought out the money. Peeled it off in hundreds, two piles of ten on the bar, another pile of five. Beemer passed Benny his share, pocketed his own, then pushed the case at Sweet.
Sweet fitted the key in one of the locks, felt around with it, and his lips tightened. “Somebody jimmied this."
"Somebody in Bar Harbor, maybe,” Beemer said.
"You'd lie to your mother, too, wouldn't you?"
He turned the key in the second lock, and the lid bulged upward pretty much by itself. Sweet threw it all the way back. “Jesus,” he said.
Each bundle of tickets had swelled to the size of a paperback novel. The thin paper had split. The ink had run. The elastic bands had pulled through the soggy cards, nearly cutting each of the bundles in two.
"What am I supposed to do with this?” Sweet demanded.
"If it was me,” Beemer said, “I know what I'd do. I'd toss the whole damn mess in the dumpster out back."
"Thirty grand,” Sweet said, “you'd toss it in the trash?"
"What else you gonna do with it?"
"Well,” Sweet said, “you can do that yourself, I guess, soon as you write me a check for what you ruined here."
"Don't hold your breath,” Beemer said, “on that one."
Sweet's voice tightened up. “You expect me to eat it? Thirty large?"
"Business loss,” Beemer said. “Like when I drop a case of champagne out back."
"What're you talking about! Don't give me that!” Sweet was losing control now, his voice getting shrill. “The champagne you sell here, I can buy Windex for what it costs. An’ you don't pay nothing for breakage, the tops of the bottles still sealed, you get straight replacement. Who do you think you're talking to?"
"If I was you,” Beemer said, “I'd calm down a little."
"Don't tell me to calm down! Write me a check and I'll calm down!"
"Actually,” Beemer said, “you owe me."
"What?” Sweet looked apoplectic. His face turned as dark as his sunglasses. “I owe you?"
"That's right. See, you used an inferior product here. This suitcase. It fell open because it's so cheap. My own legit Pinball ticket, fifty-thousand-dollar prize, got mixed up with your crap. Now I can't redeem it."
"Why not?"
"Because on the off-chance it's one of yours, I had to throw it away. I couldn't risk it. I don't need no cops here poking round."
"You threw it away."
"That's right."
"You dummy. I don't have no winning tickets. Same reason. If one got brought in for a prize, they'd know right away, the Lotteries, an’ I'd have walls around me the next six years."
Beemer stood there a minute behind the bar, jaw muscles working, eyes slowly narrowing. He looked at Benny. Benny shrugged.
"Now cut me a check,” Sweet said. “I'm out thirty grand!"
Beemer reached under the bar, brought out his Al Capone bat with the big purple stains on it, and whacked it on the bar.
"I'm the one that's out. The fifty. You're only out printing costs for this pile of crap. I been around the block myself, you know!"
He glared at Sweet. Sweet glared at the bat.
"I think,” Benny said, “if we look at it, what we got here is a draw."
Sweet continued to glare a moment longer, then slid off the barstool. He reached for the suitcase, struggled to close it but couldn't, swept the bulging thing under his arm, and stormed to the door. He fumbled with the lock there a minute, then slammed out into the street.
"A draw?” Beemer said, putting the bat away. “How do you figure that?"
"You both took a hit. Call it even."
Beemer said, “Even nothing. He owes me twenny grand, that skug."
"Now who's making the rules?” Benny said.
Copyright (c) 2007 Jas R. Petrin
[Back to Table of Contents]
NEEDLE by Loren D. Estleman
The old man said his name was Doto. I don't know if it was short for something or if someone had hung it on him when he was a boy in Warsaw. There was no sign of it on his mail or in the string of names that appeared later with his picture in the paper or on local TV. For years I only spoke with him when the carrier put his mail in my box or I rescued his Free Press from a snowdrift.
When he came to my door it was spring, no snow for a week, and the mail hadn't run. I let him in and we sat down in the breakfast nook. I poured coffee from my second bucket of the morning.
My three-room hut stood on the Detroit side of the street facing his in Hamtramck, a suburb surrounded entirely by the city. The houses there resemble one another, not through the arbitrary vision of a designer of tract homes but because the people who built them had come from the same place and culture, and they had stood for most of the twentieth century, with an invisible line drawn between the Polish and Ukrainian neighborhoods by a sense-memory of Cossack wars. The cars in the driveways are held together by wire hangers and tape, but the lawns are cropped and the houses repainted every five years.
"Your coffee is strong, Mr. Walker. How do you sleep?"
"At night I cut it with bourbon. Would you like milk?"
"I would like bourbon."
I got the bottle down from the cabinet and topped off our cups. He put both hands around his and inhaled the fumes. He was in his seventies, with a low center of gravity and small features set out generously to take up space on his broad face. He needed a shave. His forearms were thick, and where a white thermal cuff was turned back over a plaid sleeve, the last two digits of a faded blue tattooed number showed.
He saw me looking and tugged down the cuff as if to hide a stain. “Treblinka,” he said. “I was nine when I came. Nine hundred when I left. The odd thing is I remember best the way the needle stung like red ants."
I said nothing, which started the flow. He made no more mention of the Nazi concentration camp, but I found out about his two wives, one dead of fever during the crossing to America, the other dead of cancer twenty years ago. He'd worked at the Dodge Main plant until it was torn down in a conspiracy involving Mayor Young of Detroit, the Hamtramck city council, and General Motors to condemn the Poletown neighborhood for a Cadillac plant that was never built. I gathered he was some kind of artist who'd taken advantage of his enforced retirement to open a shop in Detroit, where he'd sold his work exclusively, but he'd retired from that as well and lived on Social Security. He had no children, and his silence on any other blood relations suggested they'd disappeared in the ovens of Treblinka and Auschwitz.
The Polish are emotional as a rule, not ashamed to shed tears in healthy bales, but he spoke in an even tone and his face never cracked. I didn't know the why of it, or why me, but he was old and alone and I hadn't anything pressing at the office, so I sipped and listened. The lost-diamond season was over, it was too early for stolen racehorses, and the credit-check business had gone the way of the dot-com bubble. Anyway, I was alone, too, and not young.
Then he surprised me.
"You are a detective?” he asked.
I nodded. “Private."
"What means private?"
"It means I work for one person at a time and pay my own hospital bills."
"It sounds expensive."
"So's health insurance."
"How much do you charge?"
When I told him, his face didn't change, but an opaque shadow slid across his wintry blue eyes.
"What do you need done?” I asked. “On simple jobs I charge by the hour."
He seemed to brighten at that. He slid off the seat, apologizing for not touching a drop of his spiked coffee. “I have good vodka at home,” he said, “not that Stalin's piss they make in Russia."
"It's a little early for me. I was only joining you to be polite."
"You can be polite across the street."
It was as close to a command as I'd heard from him, in the tone he'd probably used as a foreman at Dodge. We went across the street.
He unlocked his front door and led me through a small, overstuffed living room, a dining room with piles of books and newspapers on the table, and a spotless kitchen, each stacked behind the other like plant rooms in a greenhouse. We stepped out onto a screened back porch, where I caught a puckery whiff of a stench I'd never liked. A twelve-gauge Remington shotgun leaned in a corner. It didn't mean anything. You don't have to register a shotgun in Michigan, and in Detroit it's the self-defense weapon of choice, as well as a handy noisemaker on New Year's Eve.
It didn't mean anything, except longtime Detroiters know better than to keep them in a place as easy to break into as a screened porch. Especially when there's a ragged hole gaping in the nylon screen on the outside door.
I stepped over and leaned down to sniff at the barrel. I felt older then.
He pulled open the door against the pressure of the spring. The body on the winterkilled grass was a pile of limbs in a dirty T-shirt, filthy and tattered jeans, and a pair of athletic shoes run down thin as paper at the heels. It lay facedown. I picked up the shotgun, holding it by the middle to avoid smearing prints, and straddled the body, one foot on the wooden stoop, the other on the ground, to reach down and grope for a pulse in the thick vein on the side of its neck. There wasn't any. The skin felt cool.
"I heard scratching,” Doto said. “It sounded like an animal trying to get in. It was still dark. I came out with the gun. The light hit him from the kitchen. I don't remember even raising the
gun."
I straightened. “How long ago?"
"Five. Five thirty, maybe. I waited for the police. I thought someone would hear the shot and call. When the sun came up and they didn't come, I waited another hour. Then I got dressed and went across the street."
I tried to remember if I'd heard anything that early in the morning. It's the tool of the town, as I said, and a night without a long bang somewhere is as rare as virgin timber. “Know him?” I asked.
"I didn't see his face too clear."
I like turning over dead bodies as well as the next guy, and the cops are specific on where they stand on rearranging the centerpiece; it's a union thing. But he'd come to me and told me his life story. No rigor yet, so I was able to turn the top half enough to see the face, patched purple where the blood had settled. The age surprised me; he looked seventeen or younger. His shaggy, dirty, fair hair had looked almost white from the back.
There was a mark on the right cheek that hadn't been made by post-mortem lividity. It was a swastika, etched delicately in turquoise-colored ink.
* * * *
I told Doto he needed a lawyer, not a private detective, and he needed to call the police. They get woolly when you fail to report a gunshot corpse on day of issue.
"I can't afford a lawyer."
"The court will appoint one.” I climbed back onto the porch, realized I was still holding the shotgun, and returned it to its corner. I'd seen there was a telephone in the living room, but I made him lead me to it.
"One question.” I rested my hand on the receiver. “Did you see that swastika before you fired?"
"I don't remember. I told you, I don't even remember shooting."
"You might want to stick with that answer. The law's clear on defending yourself in your home with deadly force, but a hungry prosecutor can fog it up quicker than a doggie in the window. Right now your two best friends are that tattoo on your arm and the one on his cheek."
"I don't even know him."
"Better and better.” I dialed 911.
* * * *
The first uniforms on the scene were a sergeant and an officer, both black. The Hamtramck department used to be mostly Polish descent, but the established ethnic groups had been migrating to the suburbs since before we landed on the moon, leaving behind the senior citizens on fixed incomes and new faces from the Middle East and what remained of the Jim Crow South. The team took turns confirming there was a body, never leaving us alone on the porch. We could have skedaddled anytime after I made the call, but you can't fight procedure with logic.
AHMM, October 2007 Page 2