by Jack Kline
“Now you, mister.” She pointed a .45 caliber finger at me. “You get out of here. Visiting hours begin at eleven.” She seemed to be swelling larger. “If I see you here again outside of visiting hours, we’ll need to find a bed for what’s left of you.”
It appeared that she both meant it and was capable of backing up the threat.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “So long, Russ.”
“So long, gumshoe,” he whispered.
On the way to Holloway’s, I decided that I would be the ransom’s bag man. I’d make the exchange by instinct, though mine hadn’t been too keen lately. Depending on the setup for the swap, maybe I’d play it straight—the six-hundred Gs for the kid. But I’d be looking for an opportunity. Though the job called for retrieving the kid bullet-hole-free, payback had become a significant priority.
I arrived around half-past nine and parked behind two swanky sedans in Holloway’s circle drive. Colleen’s Duesy wasn’t in sight. It had probably been garaged. I banged three quick times with the massive door’s lion head brass knocker and was about to try again when Hannerty opened the door.
“Good morning, Mr. Morris.” Hannerty sounded pleased. “I have been trying to telephone you, both at your office and your home.” Hannerty loomed in front of me, preventing my entrance to the house.
“Oh, yeah? About Tom Junior?”
“Yes, sir.” He did not stand back or step aside. It looked like I was getting the bum’s rush. “The boy has been located, and Mr. Holloway will have no further need of your services. He will allow you to keep the advance, and additionally, he will cover all documented expenses you incurred. Mr. Holloway instructed me to thank you for your diligent efforts.”
“That’s it?”
“I’m not sure I understand the question, Mr. Morris.”
“You’re not going to tell me that kidnappers are holding him? That they’re asking for a sizable ransom? That they want me out of the picture?”
Hannerty’s eyes widened—the sole betrayal of his outward calm. “You must have received some faulty information,” he said, again stone-faced.
The big guy was starting to get my dander up. “Look, Mr. Hannerty, I like you. But I’m not going to stand here in the doorway playing twenty questions with you. I know what’s going on, and I want to talk to Mr. Holloway.”
I thought I detected Hannerty’s effort to stifle a smile, but he still played Rock of Gibraltar in the doorway. “Mr. Holloway is in a meeting.”
“That’s fine; I’ll wait.” Still no movement from the big guy. “Shall I wait out here on the porch steps?”
That brought a brought a full-fledged grin. “You are not going to leave, are you?”
“Not until I see your boss, or the cops drag me off. But I got a hunch your boss doesn’t want a bunch of cop cars hanging around his house today.”
“I could make you leave,” Hannerty said, his smile undiminished.
He had me grinning too. I gave him an up-and-down eyeball examination. “I expect you could, Hannerty. But we’d both be the worse-for-wear.” His demeanor did not change. “And someone would have to toss me in a car and drive me away because I’m not leaving while I can still stand.”
We remained at an impasse. I rubbed the lumpy side of my head. “Besides, I’m getting used to a good beating every few days.”
He stood stock still, his face rigid. My arms hung loosely at my sides, hands clenching and unclenching, ready to tussle.
Instead, Hannerty stepped back inside, his arm making a sweeping gesture. “Won’t you wait in the library, Mr. Morris? May I take your overcoat?”
I entered and began to remove my trench coat when Hannerty moved behind me. With my arms immobilized by the half-way off coat, I knew what was coming, and steeled myself for the first blow.
Hannerty expertly slid the coat off, turned and walked toward the coat rack. Without turning back my way, he said, “I believe you know the way to the library, sir.”
I was beginning to like that lug.
It was just like old home week in the library. That room was where everything started. And it seemed as if it were months ago. But it had been less than six full days. I walked straight to the Fitzgerald book, the one about a Holloway-like Gatsby. I slid it off the shelf and plopped on the same couch Colleen and I had shared. The smell of her perfume, of her, seemed to linger around me. But I had no time for such thoughts. I lit a cigarette.
Flipping through the pages was just something to do with my hands. My mind rarely registered any words on the pages, but rather it began to process possible troublesome situations I might encounter later that day. One side of my brain posed situations. The other side visualized strategies to overcome them, to survive, to get the kid home safe. To exact retribution.
“Mr. Morris?”
I turned to the doorway. “Yeah, Hannerty?”
“May I bring you something to drink?”
“Sure thing. Coffee would be swell if you have any already made.”
“We do, sir. Cream and sugar?”
“Black, please.” Hannerty nodded as if he already knew.
I flipped to Chapter VI, to the party at Gatsby’s place, and how the old-moneyed East Eggers looked down on people like Gatsby. Gatsby, like Holloway, represented the new rich who didn’t possess the requisite nuance and social graces. Holloway could buy a mansion on Ward Parkway and hire a butler, but he’d never fit in with the hoitytoity Mission Hills crowd.
I could hear Holloway and several men in his adjacent office. Words and a few phrases came through when their voices were raised, which was often. They talked money, sometimes loudly.
Hannerty showed, along with a cup and saucer, and a small porcelain pot. He set the cup and saucer on the wing table next to me, poured a cup, and placed the pot nearby.
“Say, Hannerty, is Colleen upstairs?”
“Miss Holloway? No, I believe she’s not home at the moment, sir.” His eyes bored into me as if he could read my thoughts.
“Up and at ’em early today, huh? Surely she’s not in church?”
“No, Mr. Morris. Miss Holloway has not attended Mass in several years, I believe.”
“Why out so early on a big day like this, a life or death day for her kid brother?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, sir. Keeping track of the children’s comings and goings is not a part of my charge. And they are not required to check in and out with me.”
“Okay, big guy, I didn’t mean to impugn you.” His eyebrows lifted at the fancy two-dollar word. Hannerty was pretty smooth and chock full of surprises.
“That’s quite all right, sir. Will there be anything else?”
“No thanks, Hannerty.” I carefully lifted the cup, which must have cost at least a day’s pay for a gumshoe. Hannerty still stood beside the wing table, a funny look on his face, a look like two factions were having it out inside his noggin. I waited for the victor.
Hannerty’s quizzical look faded and he returned his focus to me. “Mr. Morris?” There was both question and hesitation in his voice.
“Yeah?”
“May I trust you?”
“Absolutely. Though my charge is to find Tom Junior, I’m looking out for the best interests of the whole family. Just like you are, big guy.”
Silence. Hannerty’s head produced a slight nod. “We have not seen much of Miss Holloway this week. She’s rarely here for more than an hour or two at a time. Some nights I do not believe she comes home at all, including last night.” He watched me without accusation. “These behaviors have happened before, but never for more than a day or two at a time.” He paused. A long pause that might have meant he was done, or ready to clam up.
“What do you figure is going on?” My question broke the dam.
“Miss Holloway and Master Tom have always been close. Though the young master has a lot of friends, Miss Holloway does not. I think her brother may be her best friend. I think that, with her intimate knowledge of his life, she’s been out lookin
g for him.” Another long pause.
In some ways, Hannerty was as hard to start as my Plymouth, which by then must have been in the police impound lot. “Go on, Hannerty,” I said, giving his engine another crank.
“Well, sir, based on how little we have seen of her these last few days, I think she may have found Master Tom. She may be trying to rescue him herself.”
Shit.
That’s not what I wanted to hear. What lay ahead on this day was fraught with a pot full of problems. Some of them might get a guy chilled off. Then someone tosses in a pretty girl that I might be falling in love with and stirs her into the cauldron. Shit.
“Have you seen her at all today?”
“No, sir.”
“Yesterday?”
“Briefly in the late afternoon. She left shortly after supper time.”
“Does she always leave in her Duesenberg?”
“Oh, that’s not her car. It’s Mr. Holloway’s.”
“What car does she normally drive?”
“That one. She thinks the Duesenberg is more carefree than the family’s sedans. But she must ask Mr. Holloway before taking the Duesenberg.”
“So he knows when she comes and goes?”
“No, sir, not exactly. She hasn’t been asking him lately, and his mind has been on other things.”
“I nodded toward Holloway’s office. “Have you told him any of this?”
“No, sir.” Hannerty gestured with his palms. “I don’t exactly know how to phrase this, sir. Using your vernacular, one might say that Miss Colleen and I are in cahoots.”
I laughed.
“What I mean, sir, is that Mr. Holloway can be a very hard man, particularly hard on his family, and even more so on his children.”
“I see.”
“Ever since she was little, Miss Colleen and I have had a bond, you might say. I have either looked the other way or actively helped her keep secrets from her father. They were harmless secrets that would only upset him and cause him to needlessly lose his temper. I have been her confidant.”
“What about the boy?”
“Oh, no, Master Tom preferred open rebellion. He and his father have been at war since the boy was twelve. Occasionally they go through periods of peace, but even so, those periods could best be described as uneasy.”
I slid out my cigarette case and popped it open. “Cigarette?”
“Oh, no, sir, I don’t smoke.”
“Never?”
Hannerty’s eyes glittered. “On duty, sir; never on duty.”
“Fair enough.” My thumbnail fired the match on the first try.
Hannerty looked impressed.
“How’d the gang here get along right before the boy disappeared?”
“The gang?”
“The family. Peaceful enough before he disappeared?”
A bell tinkled in the foyer. “That would be Mrs. Holloway. I must go upstairs now.” Hannerty turned toward the door. He stopped in the doorway and swiveled around. “To address your question—good, Mr. Morris. Young Tom had a job, and though he stayed out till all hours he made it to work each day. Not many flare-ups between the boy and his father.”
“What about Colleen?”
He frowned. “For some time, Miss Colleen has seemed melancholy. Some months ago she told me there was a great hole in her life, and it was growing larger. I suggested that she needed a man.”
“What’d she say to that?”
The bell tinkled again.
“I really must attend to Mrs. Holloway now. Excuse me.” He drew the doors closed and three seconds later I heard his toes tap up the stairs.
I tried to shake that last bit of the conversation. A question hung in neon on my frontal lobe: Could I be that man? I resolved to keep a ten-foot pole’s distance from that one.
What mattered immediately was what our young heiress was up to. Did she conduct her own investigation of her brother’s disappearance? I’d had the feeling more than once she wasn’t being square with me. She knew a lot more about the Cresto dame than she let on. I felt sure of that. And there was something about the way she always knew so much about what was going on, including how quickly she knew about the break-in at my place where the goons croaked Sammy.
Each time I questioned Colleen about her knowledge, she had a ready answer: eavesdropping at the old man’s door; Hannerty told her; Tommy had mentioned Cresto. With each explanation, the skeptic’s hair on the nape of my neck prickled. Maybe she was trying to find him on her own. Or maybe she had help. That made more sense. But not enough sense to jibe with the facts and the situation.
What seemed both logical and preposterous was the notion that Colleen was involved in her brother’s kidnapping. If so, it was logical Colleen would want to keep an eye on the sleuth her father had hired. And she had kept more than her eye on me. If true, she’d made a rube out of me. And if she was involved, logic suggested that she would often need to be where Tommy’s captors were keeping them from overdoing the rough stuff.
What made it preposterous, among other things, was that she had no reason to kidnap her brother—her best friend, according to Hannerty. Why would she extort money from her father? Colleen had the brains and the cunning, but not the motive. Or maybe she had every reason to extort money from her father.
If Colleen knew something about the kidnapping but wasn’t actually involved, then she might have been snooping around, trying to find Tommy herself. She might have discovered who the kidnappers were and where they held him. She might have already gotten herself into a jam or be on the verge of one. I heard voices in the foyer.
Holloway and his money people had either worked things out or reached an impasse. I figured Hannerty would get me in to see Holloway as soon as the hubbub in the foyer faded. I set the book down and waited, eavesdropping as much as I could. Apparently, Holloway was assembling the money—six hundred Gs to be delivered to his home by noon, a tall order. But for those bankers, he stood as the biggest client they had or coveted. Loaning a lot of cabbage to him, even in this Depression, must have seemed as safe as loaning it to FDR.
The voices moved outside. I resisted the impulse to peek out the library window—seen one banker, seen ’em all anyway. Then Holloway raised his voice in the foyer. I caught a “Goddam it, Hannerty,” and my ears burned. The voices calmed.
I heard a door slam, and Hannerty opened the library doors. “Will you please come with me, Mr. Morris?”
Trouble. Hannerty didn’t say, “Mr. Holloway will see you now.” I wondered if I was about to be shown the door.
I found the spot where Gatsby belonged and slid the book back in. “Right behind you, Hannerty.”
Instead of the front door, Hannerty led me to the old man’s office. He pointed to the chair I had grown accustomed to. “Have a seat, Mr. Morris. Mr. Holloway will return in a few moments.” Hannerty left, shutting the door behind him.
Mr. Holloway must have owned a liberal definition of “a few moments.” It was twelve minutes by the Regulator on the wall. At one point, temptation nearly forced me to pick up the telephone on his desk to see what he might be saying and to whom—that is, if he was on another phone somewhere in the house. Instead, I set about chain smoking and taking laps around the office.
Holloway had a lot of photos on the wall, him with dignitaries of one type or another. In one he sat in the back of a convertible with FDR and FDR’s wife. Couldn’t remember her name—Eleanor maybe. There were loads of plaques, too. Masons, Lions Club, Knights of Columbus, all presenting him with one award or another, and all of them probably for donations he’d made or arm twisting he’d done getting other richies to give. I didn’t open any desk or file cabinet drawers, though I was sorely tempted. And I didn’t touch any of the papers on his desk, though I did take a gander at the top layer.
There were blank loan papers from two banks. I supposed the old man would fill them out when he had more time. I wondered if anyone else in this town could borrow that kind of dough without
filling out loan papers first.
I wanted to sit in the big man’s chair and take a spin or two. Almost did. And if Holloway showed in mid-revolution, he’d most likely go off like Union Station fireworks on the Fourth of July.
I had squashed the glow of my third cigarette in the desktop ash tray, returned to my assigned seat, and commenced some Rusty-style thumb twiddling when Holloway showed. He slammed the door behind him and marched to his desk without a glance my way. Holloway opened a drawer and pulled out a humidor. From that, he extracted a tree-stump-sized cigar.
“You don’t follow instructions very well, do you, Morris?” He bit off the end of the cigar and spat it into the corner by the file cabinet.
“How’s your English? Didn’t understand the question?” Holloway lit and puffed for a while before he got the whole end of the stump glowing red.
I kept silent, watching the performance.
“You mute, too?”
“No, sir, I don’t exactly follow what instructions you refer to.”
He blew a huge lungful of smoke at me, though I was out of range for most of the damage. “Hannerty tells me he told you to scram, that your position with me had been terminated. He said he gave you my generous offer allowing you to keep the one-thousand dollar retainer as well as any additional reasonable expenses.”
He rested his cigar on the ashtray and leaned over his desk towards me. “Hannerty said you threatened to sit on our porch until I spoke to you.” He tried to stare holes in my head.
Time for turnabout.
Without looking away, I reached into my pocket for my cigarette case and blindly selected my next candidate before returning the case. With a flourish, I produced a stick match from my vest pocket, gave it a dramatic thumbnail flick, and, damn. It didn’t light. Nor did the second flick. I surrendered the stare and lit the match on the sole of my shoe. Once my lungs filled, I jettisoned my modest smoke stream in his general direction. I leaned back in the chair, tempted to try Dominic’s balancing act. Discretion nixed the idea.