The next morning was Saturday, and while Mycroft supervised Captain Bill’s men in the arrangement of the new apartment, Basil and I went back to the old apartment to finish the final packing. I was glad because it gave me an opportunity to talk with him alone.
“You know, it annoys me that Mycroft insists details are essential to solving the crime, but he deliberately hides details from us. He seems to have found all sorts of clues in the ledger and appointment book—clues he won’t share with us.” I crumpled a sheet of newspaper and stuffed it between the plates I was packing. “Apparently he’s been able to crack the code that Ragan used in the ledger.”
Basil slapped his hand on the kitchen counter, making me jump. Apparently my nerves were still a bit frazzled. “It just occurred to me—I know someone who may be able to decipher that ledger for us.”
I leaned my elbow on the edge of the box I was packing. “Who?”
“Melvin Bemish, Mr. Ragan’s bookkeeper. He doesn’t live far from here—we could walk over there right now.”
I shut the box and grabbed my hat. “I’m tired of packing anyway. Let’s go!”
Bemish lived at the Chelten, a “residential hotel”—a fancy name for a rundown joint that rents rooms by the week, just a step or two above a flophouse. Obviously, a bookkeeper for a speakeasy owner wasn’t getting rich on the job if he had to live in a place like that. Faded, greenish-gray wallpaper, of a pattern that was popular at least a generation ago, graced the lobby, in which an attendant was seated behind a cage for his own protection. The sour smell of sweat (and possibly other body fluids) lingered in the hallways.
We found Number 17 and knocked on the door.
“Who is it?” a muffled voice answered from inside.
“Mr. Bemish,” I said with some attempt at a professional tone, though as quietly as I could and still be sure my voice carried through the door. “I’m Thomas Watson, a newspaper reporter. I have a few questions for you about your late employer, Harry Ragan. May I come in?”
The door opened a crack, and the tarnished barrel of an old pistol appeared. “Get out. Leave me alone, do you hear?” The voice behind the door seemed to quiver in time with the oscillating gun barrel. “I’m warning you . . .”
“Mr. Bemish,” I began hesitantly, “I’m not here to harm you. I just wanted to ask a few questions—”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve got the wrong person. I’m not—”
“Mr. Bemish?” Up to this point, Basil had been silent, and I was grateful that he chose this point to chime in—especially since it seemed to do the trick. The gun disappeared, and the voice behind the door, now sounding a bit more confident, said, “Basil? Is that you?”
“Yes.”
The door closed, followed by the sound of a rattling chain, then it swung wide open to reveal a short man in slacks and an undershirt. The ribbed fabric stretched tightly across an expansive belly. His hands hung down at his sides, the pistol dangling uselessly from two fingers. He took one step into the hallway.
“What are you doing here, Basil?” His gaze shifted to me. “And who are you?” He eyed me like I was something fished out of the gutter.
I tightened my lips and looked over to Basil. If a few words from him could produce such a massive transformation, I’d let him do most of the talking. Basil took the cue, making introductions as if we were meeting at a garden party.
“This is my friend, Thomas Watson. Thomas, Melvin Bemish.” I smiled, nodded, and held out my hand, hoping to relieve the tension with a mundane gesture. Bemish began to raise his hand, then looked at the gun as if he’d never seen it before. With a self-conscious cough, he leaned inside the apartment and set the weapon down onto something that made a clattering sound. He took my hand reluctantly, but withdrew it quickly when Basil added, “He’s a newspaper reporter for the Herald, investigating the explosion that killed Mr. Ragan.”
“Are you sure he’s okay?” Bemish looked back and forth between the both of us, and for a second, I wondered which of us he was talking to. “Basil, I’ve been laying low since the explosion.” He grabbed Basil’s arm and pulled him down to whisper something in his ear.
“Oh, don’t worry, Mr. Bemish! You can trust Mr. Watson. He’d never write anything that would put you in danger.” Basil looked my way and lifted his brow. “Now would you, Thomas?”
From the tone of his voice and the pleading look on his face, I knew that I had better play along, whatever my reporter’s instincts told me. “Oh, of course not, Mr. Bemish. Anything you say is strictly off the record. No one need know we were even here.”
The relief on both their faces told me I had said the right thing.
“Not that I have anything to feel guilty about,” Bemish said. He opened his mouth to say more, but glanced down the hall at the sound of a door opening. “Look, can we talk about this inside?” I nodded, and as we followed him into the apartment I caught a glimpse of a neighbor lady in curlers, just closing her door.
As we took a seat on an old couch, my eyes wandered the room. The walls were bare, except for the one facing me. It sported a cheap painting of a sailboat, which only partially covered a tear in the faded rose wallpaper. The curtains on the back window were little more than rags. A disheveled pile of papers lay on a writing desk in the corner. The curious collection on the coffee table — yesterday’s newspaper, two pennies and a nickel, a butter knife, and a tin of shoe polish—completed the picture of a middle-aged bachelor’s apartment.
I began to have second thoughts about my promise to keep things off the record. We had not even identified our suspect. What if Bemish had killed Ragan? Then I took another look at him: a short, overweight man with wisps of graying hair pasted across his skull in a vain attempt to hide his baldness, living in a dumpy apartment that screamed poverty and deprivation, and continually rubbing his hands together as if trying to wash away his fear. Could this be the face of a cold-blooded killer? Impossible!
“Forgive me for pulling the gun on you, but my nerves are shot.” He flopped into a stuffed chair with a sigh. “I’ve been expecting a visit from the Hoff gang ever since the explosion. You know, the bookkeeper is always the first one they blame.” He closed his eyes and nodded, as if such a statement were a commonly accepted fact.
“I doubt you have anything to worry about,” I said.
“You don’t understand. No one trusts the bookkeeper. They figure he’ll be the first one the cops will get to talk. And it makes sense, in a way. The cops think the guy who keeps the books knows the whole operation, and if they can’t make a case on rum-running, they’ll use the bookkeeper to nail the mob bosses on tax evasion.”
Bemish paused to rub his sweaty palms on his knees, and a distracted look came into his eyes. “Look at what the Chicago mob did to Tony Murano’s bookkeeper back in ’21.” He raised his eyebrows, crossed his arms, and nodded sagely. Who Tony Murano was, and what happened to his bookkeeper, I had no idea. But I decided it was best to play along.
“Mr. Bemish, would it help to tell you that Boo-Boo Hoff doesn’t know who killed Harry Ragan any more than you or I do?” I paused to see how that information registered on his face. “He asked me to let him know when I find out who the killer is. He’s not worried about anyone speaking to the police. He just wants to avenge Harry.” I was pouring it on a bit thick, but I felt this guy needed some reassurance.
“Really?” Bemish looked at me doubtfully, then seemed to relax when Basil nodded his head in agreement. “Well, that’s a relief. You’ll tell him, won’t you, that I have no intention of talking to the cops?”
I smiled and nodded, ignoring Basil’s raised eyebrows. Bemish didn’t need to know that I wasn’t planning on talking with Hoff again—I hadn’t planned on talking to him the first time. But if the opportunity arose, sure, I could put in a good word for Bemish.
He slapped his knees, let out
a deep, shuddering sigh, and said, “So, what can I do for you?”
Basil hunched forward on the couch. “We have a ledger here that came from Ragan’s office, and we’re hoping you could help us make sense of it,” he said, then looked over at me with a question in his eyes. I smiled and nodded my head to indicate that I didn’t mind him joining in on the interview. At this point, my estimation of Basil’s innate wisdom had grown, and anything he might add to help Bemish open up was okay with me.
I laid the ledger on the coffee table (discreetly setting to one side the shoe-polish tin) as Basil said, “I would consider it a personal favor if you could give us a hand. You see, the police think I’m involved somehow, and Mr. Watson is trying to prove my innocence.”
Bemish opened the ledger and flipped through the first few pages. After checking several entries very closely, he looked at me and screwed up his face in a mask of mistrust. “Just what kind of game are you playing here? Where did you say you got this?” I stared at him, dumbfounded.
But once again Basil came to my rescue. “We picked it up in Mr. Ragan’s office. Is there something wrong with it?”
“Well, it’s just that it has the same entries I made for Ragan in the books of the business.”
“You mean these aren’t the books?” I asked.
“That’s just the point—I’ve never seen this ledger before. I’ve got the records to the business right here.” Bemish jerked his thumb toward a shelf above the desk in the corner, where a set of hardback, leather-bound volumes were lined up in a neat row—virtually the only evidence of order in the room. He reached for one particular volume and started comparing his ledger with ours.
After a few minutes, Bemish leaned back and laughed out loud. “This ledger is a bit abbreviated, but otherwise it’s practically a mirror image of the books I kept. Ol’ Harry must not have trusted me! I took such pains to keep the books right, and now I find that he kept track of every item himself. Why did he even pay me to do the books when he was going to do them in his own private ledger?”
“Oh, I don’t know that he didn’t trust you, Mr. Bemish,” Basil said. “Perhaps he wanted you to keep the books because he didn’t trust himself.”
Bemish laughed again. “Good ol’ Basil, always ready to think the best of everybody!”
“So you can read the code?” I asked.
“Goodness, boy, this isn’t code! It’s just Harry’s quirky abbreviations. Here, let me go through and make a list. Then you should be able to understand it.” Taking a piece of scrap paper, Bemish whipped through the ledger and soon had a fairly long list of employees and suppliers. “The abbreviations are mostly names. I suppose Harry thought that might keep some people out of trouble if it fell into the wrong hands.” Another trace of fear crept into his eyes. “You’re not going to show this to the cops, are you? It could get me killed.”
“No, sir,” I said, “I’m not connected with the police, I’m only looking for a story. So I don’t see that I’m obligated to share the results of my investigations with them.” That appeared to calm Bemish considerably. He leaned back in his seat and the lines in his face smoothed out as the tension drained from his face.
To wind up the interview, I said, “I have just one more question, Mr. Bemish. We’re looking for a man who goes by the name of ‘Painless’,” and I waited to see how he would respond. I was disappointed. Bemish seemed to register no emotion whatsoever. I wondered if perhaps he had learned a long time ago to keep a poker face, at least when it came to financial issues. After all, Ragan sounded like the kind of guy who might react violently to any suggestion that his spending habits were questionable.
“That name is unfamiliar,” he said after a pause. “Why would you think I’d know something about that?”
Basil was about to speak, but I quickly said, “Oh, no reason. It’s just that his name appears several places in the ledger.”
“Really?” Bemish began flipping through the book again. “Oh, yes, Painless! I remember that. He must have been one of Harry’s card players—and not a very good one by the looks of it. His name appeared just in the last couple of months, right after Harry’s Monday-night card games, along with the amount he had lost to Harry. I didn’t recognize the name at first because he’s not on the payroll, and it’s an entry related to Harry’s personal finances. I tried not to appear too curious about that information.”
Basil smiled. “A wise decision.”
CHAPTER 16
After wrestling with the other end of the sofa that Basil wanted to move into just the right position (for the fourth time), I set down my end and flopped into a chair, exhausted and a little unnerved. I needed to apply what little information we had received from Bemish to my investigation, so I was anxious to finish the moving work. Arranging the furniture was the last of it, but it seemed to be an endless task.
As Basil put his hand to his chin and began eying yet another bare section of the room, I put my foot down. “That’s it, Basil! The couch stays where it is. You’ve wasted enough of my time.”
Turning to me with an open-eyed look of innocence, he waved his hands in protest. “Oh, no, Master Thomas! Of course we will leave it here.” He cast a final disappointed glance at the bare spot in the room. I imagined he was silently willing the couch to levitate itself to the new location.
“In fact, Basil, I just can’t spend any more time setting up this place. We’ll have to make do with what we’ve got.”
His usual deadpan expression deepened, emphasizing the lines of his face. “Yes, well . . . I had hoped you would help with my own room. I still need to put away my belongings.”
I had just spent the last two hours indulging his fickle tastes in furniture arrangement. Now he wanted me to help put away his rubbish? Who did he think he was? I stood, stretched my arms, and turned my back to him to look out the window, acting as if I hadn’t even heard him. “The clock is ticking. The mystery must be solved by Tuesday morning or I’ll lose the bet. I need to tackle that appointment book and ledger.”
“Well, I can set up my room alone. And don’t worry, Master Thomas. You’ll get to the bottom of this.” Basil said it good-naturedly, and I mentally kicked myself for treating this kind man more as a servant than as a friend. Mycroft, of course, treated him that way, but it was second nature to the old goat, having been brought up in an era of privilege and class distinction. I, on the other hand, had lived in egalitarian America for years and prided myself on my modern views. Now here I was, acting superior.
I sat at the dining room table and turned the pages of the ledger slowly, willing a clue to jump out at me. I scanned the list of employees and suppliers that Bemish had provided. He was nothing if not thorough—he appeared to have included the names of people who had been employed years ago.
On a whim, I flipped to a payroll page from a few years back and browsed the names, listed in no particular order: Murphy, Jimmie; Fryberg, Otis; Lacy, Mary. A woman? Oh, yes, probably a barmaid. Several barmaids were listed—Mary Lacy, Frieda Smith, Lucy Van Heusen, Rose Flanagan—yes, Rose. She said she had served drinks at Ragan’s place. But what was this other name I recognized?
I slammed the ledger shut, jumped from my chair, ran up the stairs, and pounded on the door to the McBrides’ apartment. Maggie answered the door, and when she saw me she smiled disarmingly.
“Thomas, how nice to see you. It is a bit late for company, but —”
“You lied to me!” I shouted, then realizing I was in someone else’s home, lowered my voice. “You worked for Ragan as a barmaid, didn’t you?”
“Well . . . yes, I did, but I didn’t lie to you.” Her voice faltered at the end of the sentence and her lower lip started to tremble.
“All right, you didn’t lie, but you kept the truth from me. What else do you know about Ragan that you’ve been hiding?”
Her eyes grew wide and filled with tears. Witho
ut warning, she ran from the room. I started to follow her, but then her father, up to this time a silent witness to the drama, stood up from his chair, laid down his paper, and faced me.
“Young man, I think you should leave. You may be my future landlord, but you have no right to burst in here and upset my daughter.” His jaw tightened, and I realized the awkwardness of the situation. Without a word, I turned on my heel and left. Mycroft met me at the downstairs door.
“Thomas, you were unfair to that girl. You need to apologize for what you said.”
“How would you know what I said?” I asked.
“I believe most of the neighborhood heard your conversation.” Mycroft leaned against the doorjamb (which creaked under his weight) and began to meditatively clean out his pipe. “You may have discovered something in that ledger, something even I didn’t notice, but I assure you, it’s a coincidence that Miss McBride worked for Ragan, and it’s unlikely that she knows anything that would be of help to you.”
I ran my fingers through my hair in frustration. “But why wouldn’t she tell me she had worked for Ragan if she has nothing to hide? I think she’s keeping some information from me.”
Mycroft chuckled softly and sighed. “My dear boy, you are so dense sometimes that it astounds me. So much like your father . . .”
“Look, Mycroft, you can insult me all you want, but don’t start on my father.”
Mycroft shook his head and gave me a dark look. “Are you so blind, young man, that you don’t see how much that girl admires you? She holds you in high regard. She’s impressed by you. She . . . she . . .” He raised his hand as if to grasp the word he was looking for. “She likes you, my boy.”
To have my own private suspicions confirmed so bluntly startled me, but I attempted to dismiss it. “Well, then, what does that have to do with it?”
The Case of the Exploding Speakeasy Page 12