“No. I never saw him before.”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know.”
“No identification on him?”
“I didn’t look. The sergeant at Central said not to.”
He seemed mildly astonished. “A man dies in your office and you don’t even show a little healthy curiosity? Don’t be afraid of me, Pine. I haven’t chewed off anybody’s arm in over a week.”
“I obey the law,” I said mildly.
“Well, well,” he said. He grinned suddenly, and after a moment I grinned back. Mine was no phonier than his. He snapped a thumb lightly against the point of his narrow chin a time or two while thinking a secret thought, then turned back to the body.
He went through the pockets with the deft delicacy of a professional dip. The blood, the knife handle, the sightless eyes meant about half as much to him as last week’s laundry. When he straightened again there was a small neat pile of personal effects on one of the couch pillows and the dead man’s pockets were as empty as his eyes.
The wallet was on top. Lund speared it, flipped it open. The transparent identification panels were empty, as was the bill compartment. Shoved into the latter, however, were three or four cards. Lund looked them over slowly and carefully, his thick brows drawn into a lazy V above his long, pointed nose.
“Credit cards on a couple Loop hotels,” he said, almost to himself. “Plus one of these identification cards you get with a wallet. According to what it says here, this guy is Franklin Andrus, 5861 Winthrop Avenue. One business card. It calls him a sales representative for the Reliable Amusement Machine Corporation, Dayton, Ohio. No telephone shown and nobody listed to notify. Any of this mean anything to you, Mr Pine?”
“Sorry.”
“Uh-huh. You ain’t playing this too close, are you?”
“I’m not even in the game,” I said.
“Initials in his coat don’t agree with the name on these here cards. That must mean something, hey?”
I stared at the bridge of his nose. “His coat and somebody else’s cards. Or his cards and somebody else’s coat. Or neither. Or both.”
His mouth hardened. “You trying to kid me, mister?”
“I guess that would be pretty hard to do, Sergeant.”
He turned on his heel and went through the communicating door to my inner office, still carrying the wallet. He didn’t bother to shut it, and through the opening I could see him reach for the phone without sitting down and dial a number with quick hard stabs of a forefinger. What he said when he got his party was too low-voiced for me to catch.
Two minutes later, he was back. He scooped up the stuff from the couch and said, “Let’s talk, hey? Let’s us try out that nice private office of yours.”
I followed him in and drew up the Venetian blind and opened the window a crack to let out the smell of yesterday’s cigarettes. On the outer ledge four pigeons were organizing a bombing raid. Lund shoved the phone and ashtray aside, dumped his collection on the desk pad and snapped on the lamp. I sat down behind the desk and watched him pull up the customer’s chair across from me.
I got out my cigarettes. He took one, sniffed at it for no reason I knew of and struck a match for us both. He leaned back and hooked an arm over the chair back and put his dull gray eyes on me.
“Nice and cozy,” he said. “All the comforts. Too bad they’re not all like this.”
“I could turn on the radio,” I said. “Maybe get a little dance music.”
He grunted with mild amusement. All the narrow-eyed suspicion had been tucked out of sight. He drew on his cigarette and blew a long blue plume of smoke at the ceiling. Another minute and he’d have his shoes off.
He let his gaze drift about the dingy office, taking in the Varga calendar, the filing cases, the worn tan linoleum. He said, “The place could stand a little paint, hey?”
“You drumming up business for your day off?” I asked.
That got another grunt out of him. “You sound kind of on the excited side, Pine. Don’t be like that. You wouldn’t be the first private boy got a customer shot out from under him, so to speak.”
I felt my face burn. “He’s not a customer. I told you that.”
“I guess you did, at that,” he said calmly. “It don’t mean I have to believe it. Client getting pushed right in your own office don’t look so good, hey? What the newshounds call a bad press.”
I bit down on my teeth. “You just having fun, Sergeant, or does all this lead somewhere?”
“Why, we’re just talking,” he said mildly. “Just killing time, you might say, until the coroner shows up. That and looking over the rest of what the guy had on him.”
He stuck out an untidy finger and poked at the pile. Besides the wallet, there were several small square transparent envelopes, some loose change, a pocket comb, and a small pair of gold tweezers.
He brought his eyes up to stare coldly at me, his mellow mood gone as quickly as it had arrived. He said harshly, “Let’s lay off the clowning around, mister. You were working for him. I want to know doing what.”
“I wouldn’t bother to lie to you,” I said. “I never saw the guy before in my life, I never talked to him on the phone, or got a letter from him. Period.”
His sneer was a foot wide. “Jesus, you must think I’m green!”
“I’m not doing any thinking,” I said.
“I hope to tell you, you aren’t. Listen, I can book you, brother!”
“For what?”
“Obstructing justice, resisting an officer, indecent exposure. What the hell do you care? I’m saying I can book you!”
I didn’t say anything. Some of the angry color faded slowly from his high cheeks. Finally he sighed heavily and picked up the necktie and gave it a savage jerk between his square hands and threw it down again.
“Nuts,” he said pettishly. “I don’t want to fight with you. I’m trying to do a job. All I want is a little cooperation. This guy just don’t walk in here blind. You’re a private dick, or so your door says. Your job is people in trouble. I say it’s too damn big a coincidence him picking your office to get knocked off in. Go on, tell me I’m wrong.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” I said. “I’m saying what I’ve already said. He’s a stranger to me. He could have come in here to get out of the wet or to sell me a slot machine or to just sit down and rest his arches. I admit he might have come here to hire me. It has happened, although not often enough. Maybe somebody didn’t want him spilling any touchy secrets to me, and fixed him so he couldn’t.”
“But you never saw him before?”
“You’re beginning to get the idea,” I said.
“Go ahead,” he said bitterly. “Crack wise. Get out the office bottle and toss off three inches of Scotch without a chaser and spit in my eye. That’s the way you private eyes do it on TV eight times a night.”
“I don’t have an office bottle,” I said.
The sound of the reception-room door opening and closing cut off what Lund was about to say. A short plump man went past the half-open door of the inner office, carrying a black bag. Lund got up without a word and went out there, leaving me where I sat.
Some time passed. Quite a lot of time. The murmur of voices from the next room went on and on. Flash bulbs made soundless explosions of light and a small vacuum cleaner whirred. I stayed where I was and burned a lot of tobacco and crossed my legs and dangled my foot and listened to the April rain and thought my thoughts.
Thoughts about a man who might still be alive if I hadn’t slept an hour later than usual. A man with mismatched clothing and no socks and an empty wallet. A man who would want to go on living, even in an age when living was complicated and not very rewarding. A man who had managed for fifty-odd years to hang on to the only life he’d ever be given to live before a switchblade knife and a strong hand combined to pinch it off.
I went on sitting. The rain went on falling. It was so dark for April.
After
a while the corridor door opened to let in two men in white coats. They carried a long wicker basket between them. They passed my door without looking in. There was more indistinct murmuring, then a young voice said, “Easy with them legs, Eddie,” and the basket was taken out again. It was harder to carry the second time.
Sergeant Lund walked in, his face expressionless. He sat down heavily and lighted a cigarette and waved out the match and continued to hold it. He said, “Andrus died between eight-thirty and ten. The elevator man don’t recall bringing him up. What time did you get here?”
“Ten-thirty, about. Few minutes either way.”
“You wouldn’t happen to own a switchblade knife, hey?”
“With a brown bone handle?” I said.
He bent the used match and dropped it in the general vicinity of the ashtray. “Seven-inch blade,” he muttered. “Like a goddam bayonet.” He put the cigarette in a corner of his mouth and left it there. “This is a real cute killing, Pine. You notice how Andrus was dressed?”
“No socks,” I said.
“That isn’t the half of it, brother. New coat, old pants, fancy shoes. No hat and no topcoat. In weather like this? What’s the sense?”
I spread my hands. “By me, Sergeant.”
“You sure you wasn’t work—”
“Don’t say it!” I shouted.
The phone rang. A voice like a buzz-saw asked for Lund. He grunted into the mouthpiece, listened stolidly for nearly a full minute, then said, “Yeah,” twice and passed back the receiver. I replaced it and watched him drag himself out of the chair, his expression a study in angry frustration.
“I had Rogers Park send a squad over to that Winthrop Avenue address,” he growled. “Not only they don’t find no trace of a Franklin Andrus; they don’t even find the address! An empty lot, by God! All right. Hell with it. The lab boys will turn up something. Laundry marks, cuff dust, clothing labels. It’ll take ’em a day or two, but I can wait. The old routine takes time but it always works.”
“Almost always,” I said absently.
He glowered down across the desk at me. “One thing I hope, mister. I hope you been holding out on me and I find it out. That’s going to be jake with me.”
He gathered up the dead man’s possessions and stalked out. A little later one of the plainclothes men slipped in with his kit and took my fingerprints. He was nice about it, explaining they were only for elimination purposes.
3
By one o’clock I was back from having a sandwich and coffee at the corner drugstore. The reception room was empty, with only a couple of used flash bulbs, some smudges of fingerprint powder here and there and the smell of cheap cigars and damp cloth to remind me of my morning visitors. Without the dead man on it, the couch seemed larger than usual. There were no bloodstains. I looked to make sure.
I walked slowly into the other room and shucked off my trench coat. From the adjoining office came the faint whine of a dentist’s drill. A damp breeze crawled in at the window and rattled the cords on the blind. Cars hooted in the street below. Sounds that made the silence around me even more silent. And the rain went on and on.
I sat down behind the desk and emptied the ashtray into the waste-basket and wiped off the glass top. I put away the cloth and got out a cigarette and sat there turning it, unlighted, between a thumb and forefinger.
He had been a nice-looking man. Fifty-five at the most. A man with a problem on his mind. Let’s say he wakes up this morning and decides to take his problem to a private detective. So he gets out the classified book and looks under the right heading. There aren’t many, not even for a town the size of Chicago. The big agencies he passes up, maybe because he figures he’ll have to go through a handful of henna-haired secretaries before reaching the right guy. Then, not too far down the column, he comes across the name Paul Pine. A nice short name. Anybody can pronounce it.
So he takes a cab or a bus and comes on down. He hasn’t driven a car; no car keys and no license on him. The waiting room is unlocked but no alert gimlet-eyed private detective around. The detective is home in bed, like a man with a working wife. So this nice-looking man with a problem sits down to wait . . . and somebody walks in and sticks a quarter-pound of steel in him.
That was it. That explained everything. Everything but what his problem was and why he wasn’t wearing socks and why his wallet was empty and why his identification showed an address that didn’t exist.
I got up and took a couple of turns around the room. This was no skin off my shins. The boys from Homicide would have it all wrapped up in a day or so. The old routine Lund had called it. I didn’t owe that nice old man a thing. He hadn’t paid me a dime. No connection between us at all.
Except that he had come to me for help and got a mouthful of blood instead.
I sat down again and tried the phone book. No Franklin Andrus listed. No local branch of the Reliable Amusement Machine Corp. I shoved the book away and began to think about the articles that had come out of the dead man’s pockets. Gold tweezers, a pocket comb, five small transparent envelopes, seventy-three cents in change, a dark blue necktie. There had been a department store label on the tie – Marshall Field. I knew that because I had looked while Lund was out of the room. But Field’s has more neckties than Pabst has bottles. No help there.
Is that all, Pine, I thought to myself. End of the line? You mean you’re licked? A nice, clean-necked, broad-shouldered, late-sleeping detective like you?
I walked the floor some more. I went over to the window and leaned my forehead against its coolness. My breath misted the glass and I wrote my name in the mist with the end of my finger. That didn’t seem to help any. I went on thinking.
Maybe what hadn’t come out of his pockets was important. No keys, for instance. Not even to his apartment. Maybe he lived in a hotel. Not even cigarettes or a book of matches. Maybe he didn’t smoke. Not even a handkerchief. Maybe he didn’t have a cold.
I sat down again. There had been initials in his coat. A C G. No periods and stitched professionally in fancy letters against a square of black satin. Rather large, as I recalled. Too bad I hadn’t looked inside the pocket for the tailor’s label. Unless . . .
This time I used the classified book. T – for Tailors – Men’s. I ran through the columns to the G’s. There it was, bright and shining and filled with promise. A. Cullinham Grandfils, Custom Tailor. On Michigan Avenue, in the 600 block. Right in the center of the town’s swankiest shopping district.
I closed the window, climbed into my trench coat and hat and locked up. The smell of dime cigars still hung heavy in the outer office. Even the hall seemed full of it.
4
It was made to look like a Greek temple, if you didn’t look too close. It had a white limestone front and a narrow doorway with a circular hunk of stained glass above that. Off to one side was a single display window about the size of a visiting card. Behind the glass was a slanting pedestal covered with black velvet and on the velvet a small square of gray cloth that looked as though it might be of cheviot. Nothing else. No price tags, no suits, no firm name spelled out in severely stylized letters.
And probably no bargain basement.
I heaved back the heavy glass door and walked into a large room with soft dusty rose walls, a vaulted ceiling, moss green carpeting, and indirect lighting like a benediction. Scattered tastefully about were upholstered chairs and couches, blond in the wood and square in the lines. A few chrome ashstands, an end table or two, and at the far end a blond desk and a man sitting behind it.
The man stood up as I came in. He floated down the room toward me, a tall slender number in a cut-away coat, striped trousers and a gates-ajar collar. He looked like a high-class undertaker. He had a high reedy voice that said:
“Good afternoon, sir. May I be of service?”
“Are you the high priest?” I said.
His mouth fell open. “I beg your pardon?”
“Maybe I’m in the wrong place,” I said. “I’m
looking for the tailor shop. No name outside but the number checks.”
His backbone got even stiffer although I hadn’t thought that possible. “This,” he said in a strangled voice, “is A. Cullinham Grandfils. Are you interested in a garment?”
“A what?”
“A garment.”
“You mean a suit?”
“Ah – yes, sir.”
“I’ve got a suit,” I said. I unbuttoned my coat and showed it to him. All he did was look pained.
“What I came by for,” I said, “was to get the address of a customer of yours. I’m not sure but I think his name’s Andrus – Franklin Andrus.”
He folded his arms and brought up a hand and turned his wrist delicately and rested his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “I’m afraid not. No. Sorry.”
“You don’t know the name?”
“I’m not referring to the name. What I am attempting to convey to you is that we do not give out information on our people.”
I said, “Oh,” and went on staring at him. He looked like the type you can bend easy. I dug out the old deputy sheriff’s star I carried for emergencies like this and showed it to him, keeping the lettering covered with the ball of my thumb. He jerked down his arms and backed away as though I’d pulled a gun on him.
“This is official,” I said in a tough-cop voice. “I’m not here to horse around. Do you cooperate or do we slap you with a subpoena?”
“You’ll have to discuss the matter with Mr Grandfils,” he squeaked. “I simply am not – I have no authority to – You’ll just have to—”
“Then trot him out, Curly. I don’t have all day.”
“Mr Grandfils is in his office. Come this way, please.”
We went along the room and through a glass door at the far end and along a short hall to another door: a solid panel of limed oak with the words A. Cullinham Grandfils, Private, on it in raised silver letters. The door was knocked on and a muffled voice came through and I was inside.
A little round man was perched in an enormous leather chair behind an acre of teakwood and glass. His head was as bald as a collection plate on Monday morning. A pair of heavy horn-rimmed glasses straddled a button nose above a tiny mouth and a chin like a ping-pong ball. He blinked owlishly at me and said, “What is it, Marvin?” in a voice so deep I jumped.
The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction Page 59