II
The next day I took the early train from Chicago to Burlington, and a series of motor buses from there all the way out to Newfane. As I went on the buses got older and crankier, the towns got further and further apart, the roads ran higher into the hills, and the trees got bigger. Newfane was the end of the line. I got out of the bus behind an old couple returning from a day trip in the glitzy metropolis of Manchester, population two thousand.
The bus turned around and went back down the road. Wade’s instructions told me to check in at Pretski’s Rooming House, where the doctor would meet up with us.
The main street was the only paved road; after that it gave out onto farm tracks in all directions. Newfane was a farming community of a couple hundred people, mainly farmers. The houses were clapboard, and so mossy they could be growing out of the wooded hillside. Frilled toadstools sprouted from the deep shade under every house. There was a white church, a store, a battered schoolhouse, and that was it. Newfane might have been picturesque once, but I doubted it. The place had a hunched-over, awkward feel as though it were an unwanted intruder in the Vermont forest.
There was nothing that advertised itself as Pretski’s Rooming House. I walked up and down the streets with my valise—which took all of ten minutes—without finding anything of interest. There were two skinny hunting dogs on a front porch and some barefoot kids running down the street. The only other person was a fellow in overalls leaning against a wall. He watched me after I came off the bus, but slunk away when I went to ask him where Pretski’s was.
I walked around a little. There were more dogs, and signs of them: food bowls, dog houses, chains, and hasps. Almost every house seemed to have one. Dogs and locks. Country places leave their doors and windows wide open, but in Newfane everything was shut up tight. I stopped by one house to inspect a pattern of holes in the clapboard. Buckshot, if I’m any judge.
It was a poor place. The only sign of wealth was the fancy roadster parked outside one house, a car which didn’t belong there. My guess was that it marked Pretski’s.
I’ve been around some. I was born in Chicago, but I grew up in South London; I guess everyone has their story. I spent time in Paris, in Munich, in San Francisco. I’ve never seen another place like Newfane. Call it cursed, or haunted, or whatever you like, but there was something flat wrong about that town. I guess I know the reason for it now.
I dropped by the store. It looked the same as the other houses except for a sign, so faded that you could hardly read the name: “Hooker’s Hardware & General Store—Groceries & U.S. Post office.”
Inside a man in dungarees stood at the counter. He had spread a bucket of nails out in front of himself and was sorting them into piles. He was moving slowly, a man with a whole day to fill up. I was halfway across the room before he looked up and nodded at me. He did not seem surprised or curious. City folks were as rare out here as hen’s teeth, and a stranger in town had to be as hot a story as Isaiah Smith’s cow drying up, but in some places it’s not polite to be inquisitive.
In among the hanging rows of brushes and mops and buckets, there were a few pairs of boots. The streets were muddy, and I figured that unless Dr. K.’s lab was on Main Street, I was going to need some better footwear than the city shoes I was wearing.
“I’ll take a pair of those hunting boots please—size eleven.”
He got them down using a stick with a hook on it, and I asked if he knew where Pretski’s rooming house was.
“Pretski’s?” he said after a pause. For a moment I thought he was going to tell me he’d never heard of the place. “Place with the green roof, next down but three.” From the sound of it he did not care for Pretski. “You’d better try these on.”
I unlaced my shoes.
“Goin’ into the woods?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I said. I took a few turns up and down the store in the boots, which fit well enough.
“Looks like good hiking country. It’s safe enough hiking here, isn’t it?”
“I guess,” he said. Then he added, “But don’t be out there at night.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” he said with slow emphasis, “then it ain’t safe.”
I thought about three unsolved killings and did not bother to ask what he meant.
“The boots are fine, I’ll break them in.” I took a note out of my billfold. “Say, do you know a German fellow lives near here, a doctor?”
“Everybody knows him,” said the storekeeper.
“Regular customer of yours, I guess,” I said. “Is it dangerous for him out there in the woods?”
“Folks like him always think they’re safe,” he said. “Then one day they don’t come back.”
The storekeeper slapped my change down on the counter. I was with the German, and he did not approve of either of us. He was already counting out nails again before I reached the door.
I followed the storekeeper’s directions, watched by the man in the overalls. As I thought, Pretski’s was the house with the car parked out front. It was the same as the other houses, without even a faded sign. But the man who opened the door, short and balding, assured me that he was Pretski and this was his rooming house. There was no need of a sign, because everybody knew where it was. Pretski said his place was mainly for hunters in season, but he put up city folks on business too.
The house had a one-storey extension out back, a corridor with six single bedrooms, a shared washroom with cold water, and an outhouse in the yard. Pretski charged four dollars a night, meals were another dollar, cash payable in advance, or sleep in the street.
Pretski told me he had known Dr. K. since he showed up about a year ago. The doctor stayed out yonder—jerking his head toward the forest—but would be back tomorrow.
“He’s got a log cabin out there?” I asked.
“I don’t know nothin’ about it,” said Pretski, shaking his head as though I’d asked about some place beyond Timbuktu. “I don’t know a thing about them out there and that’s the truth.”
“You know that fellow in overalls that loafs around Main Street?”
“That’s Walter Brown. He won’t tell you nothin’ either, so don’t ask. You’re in here,” he said, opening a door. The room had a bed and a window, a bare wood floor and faded brown wallpaper. The only other things in it were a wooden chair and a strong smell of mildew.
“It’s not the Palmer House Hotel,” a deep voice said behind me. “But it’s the best place in town. Because it’s the only place in town.”
He was a big guy with a jutting chin and skin pulled tight over his face. I’d put him at about one-eighty pounds and not much fat at that. He crushed my hand in his.
“James Moran,” he said with a big smile.
I took in the suit, the gold tie-pin, and the gun, not too discreetly holstered at his armpit. His accent aimed for something toward Long Island, and his hair was cropped short instead of slicked back like most of them. But he had Chicago mob written all over him. I just knew that back home he probably went by Big Jimmy, or some such.
“Ed Jones,” I said. “Pleased to meet you.”
“You’re out in the boondocks to meet Dr. K. too,” he said. “Welcome to the club. I’ll introduce you to the other members. Jones—don’t think I know the name.”
“I’m an investigator,” I said. “Representing a certain party from Lincoln Park.”
“A Sherlock, huh? Whaddya know.”
“You’re from a business interest in the North Side, I guess?”
The Irish gangsters all belonged to the same mob in those days, and Moran didn’t sound like an Italian name to me.
“You figured that out quick—you really are a Sherlock,” Moran said, beaming and slapping me on the back hard enough to make me stagger.
That was James Moran all over. Big and loud and throwing his weight around. Chicago was full of them. The sort who shoved you out of the way to show they could, who thought any practical joke was funny if someone els
e got hurt. A few years previously Jimmy Moran must have been the class bully, and he hadn’t changed a bit, except for the gloss he was trying to put on it. Prohibition meant good times for guys like him.
“You’d better meet Wilson,” he said. “He’s not much to look at, but the outfit thought enough of him to send him here.”
Wilson was a quiet, grey-haired man with a moustache. We interrupted his reading an old copy of Life magazine in the dining room downstairs. He was wearing glasses and a sober necktie, and I might have put him down as a librarian or a bookkeeper. But his eyes were too quick and alert, and those shoes were handmade and brand new.
He made me before our hands touched.
“Jones—say, aren’t you the fellow with the big fancy office in the Home Insurance Building?” He winked at me. “You’re a ways from the Second City.”
“I go wherever I get paid to go,” I said. He had a point, though. My license was only good in Illinois, so they’d better not catch me doing any P.I. work here. “Don’t I know you from someplace?”
“Well, do you, don’t you?” he asked playfully.
I scrutinised him while gears and cogs in my memory slowly fell into place.
“Didn’t you used to run Three-Card Monte on LaSalle Street some years back?”
I did not know whether Wilson would pretend not to understand, act outraged, or just deny it outright. Three-Card Monte—or ‘Find the Lady’ to the suckers—is a card scam they do on the streets. Its practitioners are generally on the lowest rung of Chicago’s tall ladder of crime. Wilson smiled broadly, his eyes twinkled at the recollection.
“Sweetest game in the world. I had a ball playing that scam.” He sighed. “But you know how it is. You move up in the world and you end up stuck behind a desk. Or being sent out to the boonies.”
“You think this is the boondocks?” asked Moran. “Hell, this is nothing.”
Moran started to tell us about how he chased some fellow who owed money a thousand miles to a village in Canada. Whatever you said, Moran would top it and keep on going.
Dinner was served at six, and that was when we met the other two, a couple of boys from the South Side. They had come in the fancy roadster parked outside. Neither of them looked much over twenty, but in times like those days you didn’t need experience or maturity to get ahead. All it took was a talent for violence.
Phil Ricca was the boss, the one with more brains. Louie Cristillo, with the knife scar over one eye, was his slow and steady sidekick. There wasn’t that much in it for smarts between them, though. Neither one was a criminal mastermind; they were strictly foot soldiers.
The four gangsters all got along well enough. This was in the days before the Syndicate and big-time organisation, but the gangs knew how to co-operate when there was money in it. They might start cutting each other’s throats again the next day, but they could ceasefire for profit.
The five of us sat around the small dining table, eating. The meal was a stew with dumplings and potatoes, cooked up by Pretski’s silent wife. The gloom was settling down outside. It was dark out there, and the quiet was disconcerting.
The two Southsiders had come back from an unsuccessful angling expedition to the local creek. They thought they’d pass the afternoon catching a few fish, and the shopkeeper had sold them a couple of rods. Now they had nothing to show for it except muddy shoes and pants, and stories of the ones that got away.
“The bait that guy sold us was a dud,” complained Ricca. “These hillbillies see a guy in a good suit, and the first thing they think of is cheating him. Why, I oughta teach him a lesson.”
“Yeah, right,” said Cristillo. “We oughta teach him.”
“You gotta know where to fish,” said Moran. “You can’t just go anywhere and expect them to bite. What sort of fish were you planning on catching?”
“Ones that swim,” said Ricca. “What do you know about fishing anyhow?”
“Oh, I’ve caught a few in my time,” said Moran. “Rock bass, bluegills, walleye in season. Plenty of catfish, of course—some fly fishing, too, when I get a chance—”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Ricca. “Big deal.”
Outside the night had stealthily closed in, and was now pressed up against the window panes, a big black thing surrounding us on all sides. You could practically feel it pressing on the roof. The only sound was the creaking and rustling from the trees, and the sound of our forks on crockery.
“Stew’s good,” said Wilson, helping himself to a little more. It wasn’t bad, if you didn’t mind having your meat chewy. Maybe Wilson, like me, had memories of an Irish grandmother who made it the same way.
“It’s all right for this joint,” said Moran. “But I could take you to some places in Paris where they serve the best boeuf bourguignon in the world. Now that’s a real stew.”
“Paris, France?” Wilson asked, winking at me.
“Sure, I was there during the war,” said Moran. “Guess you were too old for that one, Wilson. How about you, Jones?”
“I was with the Canadian Expeditionary Force,” I said. “What about you?”
“Seventh Infantry,” said Moran. “That’s the most decorated unit in the U.S. Army, in case you boys didn’t know. That’s where I learned to use a machine gun. The Lewis Gun weighs twenty-eight pounds fully assembled, but if you’ve got the muscle, why you can tuck it under your elbow and mow down Krauts like sprinkling the lawn.”
“Is that right?” said Ricca.
“One in each hand, that’s why they call him Jimmy the Gats,” said Cristillo, mocking. “The big-shot war hero.”
“You guys don’t know what real fighting is,” said Moran.
“Oh yeah?” demanded Ricca.
Challenging Moran to a bragging contest was a mistake. Once he got started on his war reminiscences, they just rolled out one after the other. We heard about machine-gunning row after row of advancing Germans, crawling through mud to lob grenades, hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches. Wilson and I prodded him along a little to keep him going, while the others dropped in frequent remarks. Moran was enjoying himself whether or not we were listening. Mainly, I was not.
I was sizing up the place, the people. Moran’s accent kept slipping, but I could tell how he saw himself. In five years’ time he could be Spencer Wade’s richer neighbour, taking him fishing on the yacht and fixing to marry his sister. Cristillo and Ricca were punks who would blow every cent they made and wouldn’t last long. They were the type who’d push one time too many and get stabbed in the back in a bar someplace. Wilson, though, he was a survivor if I ever saw one. He’d be in the game forever. If he ended up in an old folks’ home, he’d be the one card-sharping at bridge, running a black market in cookies stolen from the kitchen, and lifting cigarettes from the matron’s handbag. Just for the devil of it. Wilson was only happy when he was putting one over on the other guy.
Moran’s tales of blood and glory were purely second-hand stuff from cheap fiction. But when he explained how to kill a German sentry silently by garrotting him from behind, he seemed to know what he was talking about.
“You’ve gotta use a strong piece of wire, pull it tight in one move,” he told Ricca. “And be ready for a lot of blood. It ain’t a clean job.”
I don’t know about France, but I know there were a few stiffs in Chicago who got theirs from a garrotte. Right after the war, Moran ended up on a scheme which allowed ex-officers to go to oxford University, of all places.
“I ran with a pretty swell crowd in oxford, you know. Some of them were lords and other members of the elite of society,” he said, as if it were a phrase he had read. “There was one smart guy who’ll probably be Prime Minister of England one day.”
Oxford might have seemed tame, but that was where it fell apart. Moran had gotten mixed up in some business with stolen Turkish rubies and the deal turned sour, forcing him to leave on the next boat. Moran wound up back in Chicago, a broke war hero—he said—who just wanted what was coming to him. He was
looking for a new racket when Prohibition started. His particular skills of talking big and cold-blooded killing were in demand. Moran never looked back.
When Moran finished, an owl started up a block or two away. Not that they had blocks here.
“Jeez, listen to that,” said Ricca, disgusted. “This really is the back of beyond. I hope it’s worth it.”
“It could be a sweet deal,” said Wilson. “If our Dr. K. really has the goods, out in the woods.”
“We gotta go out there?” said Cristillo.
“Sure,” said Wilson. “He ain’t going to bring it here in his pocket. We’ve got to go out in the woods somewhere. See if he’s the real deal or a con artist. I’ve seen scams that look a lot like this set-up.”
“Takes one to know one. But if he’s trying to pull something, he’s just one more dead Kraut,” said Moran.
“I heard guys disappear in those woods,” said Ricca.
“Three cases in two years,” I said. “Last ones were two G-men looking for moonshiners. I guess the moonshiners didn’t want to be found. Case never solved.”
“That’s what I heard. And you know who the other one was?” Ricca was looking at me. “A private dick. Only thing on him was a business card in his pocket from Boston. Quite a mystery.”
“No mystery about me,” I said.
Ricca turned to Moran. “And when they found the bodies, the G-men and the gumshoe,” said Ricca, “the skulls were sliced open and the brains were scooped right out. Just like a pumpkin. How d’ya like that one, North Side?”
“I don’t scare easy,” said Moran. “If there’s trouble, we’ll see whose brains end up on the floor. But you fellows don’t have to come if you’re afraid.” He pushed back his chair. “Now, who’s for a drink?”
He produced a bottle of brown liquid from his bag and shouted to Pretski for some more glasses.
Pretski came in to ask why and looked uncomfortably at the bottle.
The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 15