by Robert Upton
Dear Amos,
I trust you have returned rested from the Caribbean and are ready to resume your lately neglected duties as security officer aboard the . . .
McGuffin opened the door to his office and apartment, dropped the note in the waste can with the others, then walked across the cabin and began rummaging through his desk drawers. He was looking for a ring of keys which he hadn’t seen in years. He found several keys to unknown locks, but not the one he was looking for. Finally, he found them, hanging from a hook beside the main hatch. He snatched the ring from the hook as he pushed through the hatch and hurried down the gangway. One of these keys opened the door to the engine room, converted now to storage bins for the tenants of the boat. Not knowing what else to do with his ex-boss’ files and few personal possessions after his murder, McGuffin had packed everything in a large trunk, then dragged it after him for the next eighteen years. He walked to the green hatch at the end of the main deck and then tried several keys before finally opening the hatch.
The big diesel engines were gone, replaced by rows of chicken-wire bins piled high with old records and discarded office furniture. McGuffin’s bin, the only one without a padlock, was at the end of the line. Pushing through skis, crutches and abandoned appliances, McGuffin began hauling cartons aside. Miles Dwindling’s ancient trunk, a turtleback affair with oak ribs, was at the bottom of the pile, wedged tightly against the bulkhead. Wisely, McGuffin had left it unlocked for eighteen years. A cracked, leather-bound appointment book bearing the faded embossed name “Miles Dwindling, Private Investigator” lay atop a sheaf of yellowed papers. McGuffin had gone carefully through the appointment book and papers some eighteen years before, hoping but failing to find some connection between his boss and a stranger named Otto Kruger. He pushed the book aside and began digging through the layers of memory, like archeological strata, searching for the newspaper account of Otto Kruger’s trial for the murder of Miles Dwindling.
Beyond the first layer, he found a single faded photograph of a little girl with Shirley Temple curls, the only evidence of the marriage that had come apart early on, due no doubt to Miles’ relentless pursuit of his profession. McGuffin had phoned her mother to tell her of her ex-husband’s death, but the woman had expressed little concern. Miles Dwindling was an honest and honorable man, a learned scholar, and a wonderful conversationalist, but to her he was just a failed husband. Like me, McGuffin thought, as he plunged deeper into the trunk.
There was Miles’ checkbook, showing a little over $200 in his account, $105 of which belonged to McGuffin for a week’s work. Nobody could ever say Miles was on the take. He went out of the world only a little less poor than he had come in. There was an empty wallet in the bottom of the trunk, an unused passport, a Swiss army knife, an empty shoulder holster (the district attorney’s office had never returned Miles’ revolver, which Otto Kruger had used to kill him), a silver humidor, a large fountain pen, a tin statue of a black crow stamped “Souvenir of Tijuana,” a tarnished basketball trophy, an equally tarnished pair of captain’s bars, and last but hardly least, Miles’ magical mystery bag.
Staring at this pathetic collection of a lifetime filled McGuffin with a great sadness. He had been pursuing Miles Dwindling’s profession for more than eighteen years, and he had little more than this himself to show for it. McGuffin found the Kruger file at the very bottom of the trunk, removed it and closed the lid. He would look at it upstairs in his office.
Eighteen goddamned years, he said to himself as he walked through the engine room, heels echoing hollowly on the steel deck. It was a grim joke played on a young man who had intended to be a lawyer. He had just graduated from college and intended to enter the University of San Francisco Law School in the fall. However, in the meantime he needed a summer job, so he had answered a vague but apparently harmless classified ad in the Examiner. He could still remember it.
Young man interested in the field of law, contact Miles Dwindling at. . . .
He had forgotten the number, but he’d never forget Miles Dwindling, lean as a plank, all suspenders and cigar, pacing about in his nearly bare, Post Street office while holding forth on the “ineluctable verities of the case at hand.” There was nothing on the door to identify Dwindling or his profession, the fledging law student saw when he arrived at the given number. He knocked, and a moment later the door was opened by a well-preserved older man in a striped shirt and tie, wearing a dark felt hat low over his eyes. He removed the cigar from his mouth and stared down his nose at the young man in the hall.
“Master McGuffin, I should say,” were his first words.
“Yes, sir,” Amos replied.
“Come in, come in,” Miles Dwindling beckoned.
The air in the small room seemed yellow, whether from the cigar smoke or the reflection from the bare floor and few pieces of oak furniture. “I didn’t know if I had the right place,” McGuffin said. “There’s no name on the door.”
“Thanks for reminding me,” Dwindling said, pulling the door closed after McGuffin. “I’ve been meaning to say something to my landlord about that for thirty-odd years.”
“You’ve been in business that long, have you?” McGuffin asked, hoping to learn what that business was.
The “field of law,” it turned out after several minutes of circumlocution, was a broad one indeed.
“That’s right, I’m a private investigator,” Dwindling finally admitted. He paced while McGuffin sat in the oak chair beside the desk.
“You mean you want somebody to take pictures of people in motel rooms and repossess cars, stuff like that?” McGuffin abruptly inquired.
A look of grave concern crossed the old man’s face. He stopped pacing and placed his cigar on the edge of the oak desk. It was burned uniformly on four sides as if done by an interior decorator. “I fear, Master McGuffin,” he began, notching his thumbs in his suspenders, “that despite your sunny appearance, you harbor a dangerous predilection for the gloomier aspect of life. True, sometimes the private investigation business is good and sometimes it’s not so good. But I assure you, Master McGuffin, it is almost always exciting.”
“You mean dangerous, don’t you?” McGuffin replied.
“On rare occasions,” the old detective answered.
McGuffin knew better, but if the job paid well enough, he might be willing to risk it for one summer. “How much does it pay?”
“Aha!” Dwindling said, reaching for his cigar. “There, I’m afraid, your pessimism is more than warranted.”
“I have to have at least $150 a week,” McGuffin warned, hoping for $125.
“Would that I could.”
“A hundred and twenty-five?”
“One hundred, which is $25 more than the budget allows. Plus a host of experiences that will enrich and ennoble you beyond all coin.”
“I can’t do it,” McGuffin said, starting out of the chair.
“With the possibility of a bonus,” he added, laying a hand on the applicant’s shoulder.
“What kind of bonus?”
“The private investigation business is an unexpectedly changeable one, Master McGuffin. If a particularly lucrative assignment should come our way, I should feel morally constrained to see that you partake of it.”
Knowing better, Master McGuffin eventually allowed the old detective to persuade him to take the job. He began that very evening, trailing a suspected embezzler as he made the rounds of the North Beach night spots. At about midnight, when both the suspect and McGuffin were quite drunk, the suspect got up from his table at the Matador and staggered over to McGuffin at the bar. Even drunk, the man was big and dangerous, McGuffin sensed, as he looked up at the narrowed eyes glaring intently at him. McGuffin was ready to dive off the barstool and quit his job when the drunk smiled and asked pleasantly, “Don’t I know you from someplace?”
McGuffin heaved a sigh of relief and answered, “You know, you look familiar to me, too.”
“Let’s have a drink,” the suspect p
roposed, to which the detective readily agreed.
Although McGuffin had never been in the army, it was decided after the second drink that that was where they had met. And after two more, it was decided that they had been close friends in dangerous times. Then, when the suspect and the detective were the last customers in the bar, the suspected embezzler threw an arm over the detective’s shoulder and weepily informed him, “I got somethin’ botherin’ me real bad, buddy, and you’re the only guy I can tell it to.”
“Sure, pal, tell me about it,” McGuffin urged.
The next day, Miles Dwindling sat at his desk listening with a slowly sagging jaw as his new employee read his first report, listing every penny that was stolen and where it was now hidden.
“How did you do that?” the old detective asked when McGuffin had finished.
“I don’t know, I guess he just wanted to talk,” McGuffin answered.
“That face, Master McGuffin, is a gift from the gods. You will go far in this business.”
McGuffin smiled sheepishly. He hadn’t told the old man that he was leaving in the fall. And when Dwindling’s client rewarded him with an extra $1,000, which Miles, true to his word, split evenly with his new employee, McGuffin realized that quitting on the old man would be the hardest and cruelest thing he had ever done.
And eighteen goddamned years later I’m still at it, McGuffin said to himself as he opened the ship’s door to his office, adorned with the brass plate that had eluded Miles Dwindling for thirty-odd years: AMOS MCGUFFIN: CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATIONS.
With a swipe of one arm, McGuffin cleared a place on the desk and opened the Kruger file. The pages smelled damp and musty. There were several newspaper articles, along with copies of the homicide and medical examiner’s report and a legal pad filled with McGuffin’s notes. He arranged the clippings in chronological order, discovered that the original report of the murder was missing, then remembered the yellowed newsprint in his pocket. He placed it on top of the pile and began to read:
PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR SLAIN IN OFFICE
Late yesterday afternoon, as his partner was stepping off the elevator just outside the door, San Francisco private investigator Miles Dwindling was shot and killed in an apparently motiveless crime. “If I’d been there a minute sooner I might have saved him,” his young partner, Amos McGuffin, wept.
McGuffin tossed the clipping aside. There was no need to read it. He knew better than anyone except the murderer what had happened that day. He had just returned from what was to have been a routine background investigation for an insurance company. A logger had lost a finger to a brand-new chain-saw when one of the links gave way. He wanted $10,000 for his trouble and McGuffin assumed he was entitled to it, until he got a surprised look at the rest of the family. They were seated around a cable spool in their junk-laden backyard, eating a lunch of grits and okra, but having some difficulty with the utensils. Every member of the family, down to the smallest child, was missing two or three fingers, all of them neatly chopped off by their mother with a bloody ax. This was the fifteenth attempt, each time under a false name, to run the old chain-saw scam.
The young detective walked slowly down the corridor, utterly depressed by the depraved greed he had witnessed that day. He was scarcely twenty feet from the door when he heard the shot and bolted for the office. He pulled open the door and collided with a small, moon-faced man with great bulging eyes.
“Let me go!” the little man hissed, but McGuffin held tight to his lapels.
When he squirmed and kicked and tried to bite, McGuffin slammed him hard against the wall, once, twice, and he was out. He let him slide to the floor, then lunged across the room to his boss, slumped in his desk chair, blood staining his striped shirt from suspender to suspender.
“Hold still, I’ll get a doctor!” McGuffin said, not knowing yet if Miles was alive or dead. He scrabbled across the desk for the phone, dialed the emergency number and ordered an ambulance. As he was hanging up, he saw the first glint of life in Miles’ eyes. He was warning McGuffin of something going on behind him. McGuffin turned to see the little man inching his way across the floor to the gun at the opposite side of the room, near the oak coat tree where it usually hung from Miles’ shoulder holster. McGuffin put himself between the little man and the gun, then raised his foot and brought his leather heel down on the man’s hand as hard as he could. The scream and the feel of cracking bones underfoot cheered him up after the ordeal of the children with the missing fingers.
“Who is he? Why’d he shoot you?” McGuffin demanded, lunging back across the room to his partner.
Miles seemed to smile as he shook his head slowly and helplessly. He tried to speak but managed only to summon up a froth of bloody bubbles and a gurgling sound. McGuffin put his ear close to Miles’ mouth and strained to hear.
“. . . out of his bird,” Miles Dwindling said weakly.
They were his last words. A second later, his chin dropped to his chest, and he was dead.
The ambulance attendants had to pull McGuffin off the murderer when they arrived. McGuffin had slapped him around the room for more than fifteen minutes, opening several cuts on the moon face with his new college ring, but the little man said nothing. Nor would he speak to the police or the district attorney, or the psychiatric panel that examined him. There was no evidence that the murderer and his victim had ever met or had dealings with each other through a third party. He was apparently a nut who had wandered into the office, spied the gun in its holster and decided to shoot its owner. He was unemployed at the time and living in the Europa Hotel not far from the office.
McGuffin picked up the next clipping and began to read, hoping to find some clue as to Otto Kruger’s present whereabouts, but found nothing. Most of what was known about him was supplied by Immigration. He had been an officer in the German army, serving during most of the war with the occupation forces in France. He was neither a Nazi nor a war criminal, according to Immigration.
Suddenly McGuffin remembered. There had been a friend, a comrade-in-arms who had arrived in the United States several years after Kruger. The two of them had shared a house together somewhere until shortly before the murder. McGuffin had not met the man; he had testified only briefly at the sanity hearing and then disappeared. McGuffin leafed quickly through the newspaper articles until he found the one he was looking for.
Klaus Vandenhof, a friend who had at one time shared a house in Marin County with the accused, testified that he had not recently been in touch with his old friend and could not comment as to his state of mind.
“Klaus Vandenhof!” McGuffin repeated, going to his notes. The name was familiar. It was possible that he had investigated the witnesses’ backgrounds more fully at the time than had the district attorney. Leafing quickly through his longhand notes, he found the underlined name, Klaus Vandenhof, at the top of a yellow page halfway through the sheaf of papers. Vandenhof had served as a captain in the quartermaster corps with the German occupation forces in Paris during World War II. Although he was not a member of the party, he was not allowed to immigrate until 1961, when he was sponsored by an American citizen, Otto Kruger, who had served with him in Paris. The D&B in the left margin indicated to the detective that he had ordered a Dun & Bradstreet report on him at the time, but it had apparently availed him little. Vandenhof had taught languages at Marin Junior College for a year before becoming an antiques dealer, with offices in his home.
His home? McGuffin questioned. He had assumed that the house had belonged to Kruger. But no, he had purchased a house in his own name on Marin Hill Drive near San Rafael in 1961, the year he arrived in the United States. So it was really Otto who got the free room in exchange for sponsoring his old boss’ citizenship application. There was no record of any mortgage on the house according to Dun & Bradstreet, and “the subject lives in a luxurious manner.”
So what do you make of that? McGuffin asked himself, as he leaned back in his chair and crossed his hands over his paunch
as he had often seen Miles do. Vandenhof took his old comrade in out of gratitude, then a few years later threw him out. This pissed off old Otto, so he went out and shot a total stranger right between the suspenders? It made no more sense now than it had then.
“Unless -!” McGuffin said, reaching again for his notes.
He found what he was looking for at the bottom of the page, pressed tightly against the right edge, “‘25 S.” It was McGuffin’s shorthand for “born in 1925 and single.” Otto Kruger was approximately the same age as his roommate and precisely single. When one heterosexual throws another out of the house, it’s not serious. But when a homosexual throws his lover out of the house, hell hath no fury to match. Could that have been the blow that hurtled Otto Kruger over the edge? And could McGuffin have overlooked something at that sexually innocent and youthful time that might have been significant?
Maybe Otto Kruger didn’t just wander in off the street, after all. Maybe he came to Dwindling’s office seeking some form of redress for a broken heart. Miles tried to explain that California was a heart balm state, but even if it wasn’t, there was still no remedy for breach of contract between homosexual lovers, no matter how unjust the situation might be. Otto blamed Miles for the unjust state of the law, grabbed Miles’ gun and shot him. Of course! Miles had to have talked to Kruger for a bit in order to have come to the conclusion that he was out of his bird. If a stranger had walked in and shot him without a word, Miles would have assumed he was a professional hit man, not a crazy.