The Good Old Stuff

by John D. MacDonald

  “Computer, M-eighteen. Do you remember it?”

  “Yeah, I remember it, but what’s the tieup with police business?”

  “How big a contract was it?”

  “Two thousand units at a price of eighteen hundred a unit. Three million six hundred thousand. That was what they called an experimental quantity. They were for the Artillery Section of the Office of the Chief of Ordnance. You can tell that by the ORD in the contract number. We made those … let me see, now … about four years ago. Then we found out that some other device had made them obsolete anyway.”

  “Suppose somebody managed to buy the whole lot at twenty bucks a copy?”

  Beeson laughed. “I don’t know what the hell they’d do with them. Maybe they’ve got a—” He stopped, and Brock, his heart pounding, heard the man gasp. Beeson’s voice was shrill. “Hey! Wait a minute. Our unit price was only eight hundred bucks, and the reason it became eighteen hundred was when we found out that the damn specifications called for a lot of platinum wire for each one. About a thousand bucks’ worth, if I remember rightly.”

  Brock thanked him, hung up, and stooped over the metal suitcase. He picked out the reels of white wire and put them on the desk in front of Maclaren. “This stuff is platinum,” he said.

  As Maclaren picked up one of the reels, Karkoff jumped for the doorway. It was unexpected. Horowitz made a grab for him that missed and then yanked the Positive from his hip holster. There was no point in shooting. Karkoff had disappeared into the shadows. He thumped down the side stairs.

  As the three of them, hearing Karkoff clatter against a pile of scrap, spread out and followed him across the yard, the light in the shop went out suddenly.

  Brock realized he was without a gun. He fumbled in the darkness and found a two-foot length of one-inch bar stock. It fitted his hand snugly.

  Their eyes were getting used to the darkness. The glow of the city against the low-hanging clouds faintly illuminated the yard. Following Maclaren, Brock drifted out to the side, hurrying around the far end of the shop. A dark figure was struggling against the fence, drawing himself up. Maclaren aimed carefully and fired. The figure screamed like a woman and dropped heavily to the ground. A dark shape ran back into the shop.

  Horowitz took the main entrance and Brock and Maclaren covered the back door through which the figure had run.

  “Where are the lights?” Maclaren whispered.

  “I think there’s a set just inside the door on the left. Let me try.”

  “Okay. But stand back when they go on. He might have a gun.”

  His fingers found the switch, and the sudden glare of light threw the shop into sharp illumination. The massive baler, hydraulic plungers silent, stretched squat and powerful along one side of the shop. The crane hook dangled without motion.

  Maclaren bellowed, “Come on out!”

  Gun ready, Maclaren walked into the shop. Brock saw Horowitz standing framed in the main door, his gun in his hand.

  The shop seemed to be empty. The three of them stood stupidly. Brock caught a glimpse of movement high overhead, hissed, “Up there! On the catwalk!”

  A shadowy figure ran quickly along the catwalk to a skylight. Brock knew then what the plan was. Smash through the skylight and run down the sloping roof. From the edge of the high roof, an active man could jump the fence.

  Horowitz fired, but the figure didn’t stop. There was a smash and tinkle of breaking glass. As Maclaren fired, Brock turned and ran out the back door, along the side of the building. He heard the pound of running steps on the roof.

  He drew back the heavy bar in his hand. The figure appeared and seemed to hesitate, balanced on the very edge of the roof. With all his strength, Brock threw the bar, leading the figure outlined against the glow in the sky by a few feet.

  There was a thud as the figure jumped into midair. A hoarse cry. It fell against the barbed wire, clawed for a moment, and then dropped inside the fence. There was a small bubbling noise, and then silence.

  Maclaren squatted beside the body of Hodge Oliver and lit a match. Brock looked down.

  “Hitting him in midair like that put him off balance, I guess,” Maclaren said calmly. “Or maybe he wouldn’t have made it anyway. That barbed wire caught him right in the throat and ripped it wide open. He was probably dead ten seconds after he hit the ground.”

  Captain Davis, lean, gray, and quiet, shoved the pack of cigarettes across the desk to Jud Brock. Horowitz sat by the window. Maclaren leaned against the closed door, his face relaxed.

  “Better tell me the whole thing from the beginning, Brock,” Davis said.

  “I got onto it because a lot of little things all of a sudden added up. She was shot by one of the people we narrowed it down to. Oliver was working in the rear end of the shop. He could go outside and shoot her and go back in in seconds. Her roommate said that Stella was trying to remember something long ago and far away. That pointed to Washington. Oliver was in Washington. But the disposal of the gun had me licked. Also the motive. Oliver came and told me his private difficulties with Brasher. Oliver was a gambler. He was afraid I might have overheard the argument, and he wanted to kill off my suspicions by telling me himself. He was too eager. Also he was too nice about it when I slapped him around in his room.

  “Stella was shot with a forty-five. He wanted the girl dead. He notched the slug to make certain of it, knowing that if he missed a vital spot when he fired, the slug would spread and smash her all to hell inside. The problem began to shape itself up. The motive had some connection with Washington.

  “I pulled the cornball play, the old gimmick about her recovering, and Maclaren covered all the angles. Karkoff started to run. We grabbed him. I knew that he couldn’t have done it, but he must have started to run because he had helped somehow. I remember his baler. It looked as though maybe Karkoff had been paid off for not noticing when Oliver came back into the shop and tossed the gun into the scrap that Karkoff was baling. That tied in with Karkoff’s telling Lavery to go get a smoke. He couldn’t chance having Lavery, up on the crane, see Oliver toss the gun into the scrap, see Karkoff compress the batch of scrap into a neat little bundle with the gun in the middle.

  “Even if it had happened that way, I couldn’t see how Karkoff had been paid off for his help. It didn’t make sense. Then Karkoff wanted to drop his stuff off at his room. That indicated that maybe Horowitz hadn’t seen something of value in the stuff.

  “As I looked down at the suitcase, a lot of things popped into place in my mind. Both Oliver and Stella Galloway worked in a procurement section. Oliver had told me that he had bought some war-surplus stuff that Brasher couldn’t see any value in. Maybe that war surplus was the angle.

  “I went out into the shop and got the contract number and company name off the cases. Oliver was out there working. I realized that he was out there because he had heard that on the next day Stella would be able to talk and she would point the finger right at him. It didn’t make sense to have Oliver opening all of the cases. Hell, if the things were all alike, he could just unpack one. He was filling a bag with wire. Karkoff had wire in his suitcase. I went back and phoned the company who made the stuff and found out that Oliver was stripping a thousand bucks’ worth of platinum wire off each one. I guess he intended to get as much as he could and try to clear out of town at dawn before Stella could pop off about him.

  “Karkoff heard the phone call and knew that was the end of the road because he was carrying five thousand bucks’ worth of the wire in his suitcase. He made a break, tipped off Oliver, and they tried to go over the fence. Maclaren smashed Karkoff’s knee, and Oliver killed himself when he jumped short and hit the barbed wire.”

  Captain Davis sat in thoughtful silence for a time and then said, nodding, “I can see how it was. A civil servant in military procurement, a man with some mechanical and electronic engineering background, discovered that these computer gadgets with two millions’ worth of platinum wire in them had become surplus. Maybe Mis
s Galloway happened to mention it to Oliver, in an ironic way. It would intrigue anyone, that much platinum in an obsolete device. Oliver quit and found work with a scrap company which could bid on the devices, because he didn’t have the forty thousand. It was his rotten luck that he picked a scrap outfit in the city of Louisavale, Miss Galloway’s home town. Maybe she said nice things about our city. His terrible luck was compounded when she came back and went to work at the same place.

  “He must have prayed she would never remember what had probably been a very casual conversation over coffee, after Brasher made such a loud stink over the waste of forty thousand dollars. But she did. She must have confronted him, then foolishly gave him time to think it over. He knew that she brought your orders out into the yard, Brock. He bribed Karkoff, shot her, and tossed the weapon into the baler. He must have felt pretty safe. In the vast, confusing picture of military procurement, he must have thought that his motive would be hidden.” He paused. “Two million dollars is a great deal of money, gentlemen.”

  Brock stood up, stubbed out his cigarette. The weariness was fogging his brain and he knew that at last he could sleep. “Do you need me for anything?” he asked.

  Davis looked at Maclaren and then at Horowitz. Both men nodded briefly. “Yes, Jud. We need you for something. We need you to walk a beat for six months or a year. At the end of that time, if you’re still in line, we need you back in here.”

  Brock couldn’t answer. His mouth was dry and his eyes stung. He said, hoarsely, “Thanks,” turned, and left the small room.

  The intern said, “We can’t tell yet, Mr. Brock. She’s done well lasting until now. Respiration is a little deeper, but”

  With one hand, Brock smoothed the dry, dead hair back from her damp forehead. Her eyelids fluttered and opened, and she stared up at the ceiling, unseeing.

  He leaned close to her and said thickly, “Don’t go away! I need you.”

  She turned her head the barest fraction of an inch, and he caught the flicker of recognition in her eyes before they closed once more.

  He got up and slid the chair back. The intern said, “That’s what they need. They need to be given the will to fight. I hope she heard you.”

  “She heard me.”

  The intern said wistfully, “She must have been a lovely girl.”

  Brock looked at him, staring heavily. “Just for the hell of it, son, let’s say that she is a lovely girl.”

  The intern stood outside the door to the private room and watched Judson Brock walk down the corridor toward the exit. Something of almost frightening intensity had looked out of the big man’s eyes when he had spoken. The intern noticed that he walked with a step of infinite, dogged weariness.

  As Brock stepped out into the dawn, the intern turned and looked back into the room. He said softly, “Something tells me, lady, that you better get well. I don’t want to have to face that guy if you don’t.”

  Dead on the Pin

  My name is Joe Desmon, and I’m manager of the Wonderland Bowling Alleys on the turnpike three miles out of town. I’ve held the job ever since I got back from Vietnam. The hours are long, but I’m not kicking. I’ve got a little stashed away and I’m getting the experience, and someday I’m going to have my own layout and hire some stupid guy to keep the crazy hours I keep.

  The town needs more alleys, and so the leagues are stacked. The way it is now, they’ve got me working twenty-six hours a day during the season. All the time I’m yapping at the waitresses or calming down some clown full of beer or ducking the big looping passes made by the members of the Industrial Girls’ League. That in addition to paying all the bills, keeping track of the cash, running the snacks and beer business, seeing that the equipment stays in shape, renting shoes, and giving lessons.

  So it seemed like almost too much to expect when one day about three months ago this little guy showed up and asked if I could hire him to do jobs around the place. Said his name was Johnson. He was edging close to fifty, with the top of his head up to about my chin. He was the sort of little man you would push out of your way, but not if you looked close. There were hard, blunt bones in his face and a pair of pale-blue expressionless eyes and a tight slit for a mouth. He had a thick look through the shoulders, and his arms hung almost down to his knees, with big square wrists.

  He was well dressed, and I figured he’d be out of my salary range. I asked him how much he had to make and he said, “Whatever you can give me, kid.”

  “How about seventy-five a week, and I’m not kid. I’m Mr. Desmon.”

  “That’ll be fine, Mr. Desmon. Just dandy.”

  “For that dough you brush down the alleys whenever they’re clear, mop the floors, empty the ashtrays, check the equipment, and scrub the restrooms. And anything else I can think up.”

  He said mildly, “I’d like a chance to bowl a little, too.”

  I took a quick look at his right thumb. It had that swollen, bent-back look of a man who has done a lot of it. But I didn’t see any calluses. His hands looked pink and soft.

  I wasn’t behind and it was a slack hour. I said, “How about a quick one?”

  I had my own ball and shoes behind the counter. He picked a pair of shoes out of the rental rack and spent at least five long minutes finding a ball to suit him.

  With my double and spare in the first three frames and his two splits and a miss, I felt pretty arrogant. When I got my strike in the fourth, it made my fill on the third frame a fat 69 to his 27. I started to get bored, but in his fourth frame, his ball ducked into the pocket for one of the prettiest cleanest strikes I have ever seen. His ball had been curving in too fast before that, giving him those thin Brooklyn hits.

  And so while I got spare, strike, spare, he got three more of those boomers, where all the pins jumped into the pit in unison.

  He looked at me and said, “Mr. Desmon, do you fire people you can’t beat?”

  “What do you think I am? No. And I’m not beat yet.”

  “Just asking, ki—Mr. Desmon.”

  So he kept chucking them in there, and in the end he had put eight strikes in a row together, and he wiped me out, 235 to 202.

  So I said, “Okay. And I think you could keep right on wiping me out. You’re not fired.”

  He grinned for the first time. It came and went so quickly I almost missed it. He wanted to know if he could practice a little when his work was done. I told him to be my guest.

  I kept an eye on him. He did his work and got along well enough with the rest of my people. He got along by staying out of the way. After the first month I began to throw some lessons his way, giving him a cut. He had perfect style, laying the ball down so smoothly it wouldn’t have dented the top of a custard pie. He could pick up the flaws and point them out and demonstrate how to cure them. He eased the pressure on me, but I never did really get to know the man.

  When he bowled, it was either alone or with me, just before we closed the joint in the small hours. I began to keep a pocket score on him.

  As he was leaving one night I said, “Hey, Johnson. Wait a minute.”

  He turned around. “What?”

  “In the last ten games you’ve rolled, you’ve averaged two-twenty-one.”

  “So?”

  “So I’d like to wangle you a spot on one of the pro leagues. You’re as steady as a rock. How about it? I know an outfit that could use a new anchor man.”

  He walked slowly back toward me. For one funny moment he was the boss and I was a stooge working for him. He said, “Drop the idea, Desmon. I don’t like it.”

  “But why? I should think it would please you.”

  “Just say that I don’t like to bowl with people. Maybe I blow up under pressure. Put it any way you want, but don’t go talking up my game. Understand?”

  I almost said, Yes, sir.

  He walked off into the night. I shrugged and went back to the books.

  All of that should have been a tip-off. I should have gotten wise, maybe, the night Billy Carr
came in. Billy has the sort of reputation that makes me wish I had the nerve to tell him not to come back. He’s young and tall and sleek, somehow like a big cat. He had two of his boys with him. He’s considered locally to be a pretty heavy stud. Anyway, the three of them came in, got shoes, shucked off their coats, and changed shoes down at the semicircular bench, ready to do some bowling.

  Johnson was walking down the alley pushing the wide brush, wearing the lamb’s wool mitts over his shoes.

  I was too far away to stop it. Billy Carr grabbed a ball off the rack and rolled it down at Johnson. Johnson heard it coming. He looked around and sidestepped it, but it hit the brush and knocked it out of his hands.

  He turned and walked slowly back up the middle of the alley toward where Billy stood laughing.

  Between laughs, Billy said, “Did I scare you, pop?”

  “You scared me plenty,” Johnson said mildly. He grabbed the front of Billy’s shirt and tossed him into the rack. Billy tumbled over it and landed on his shoulders. One of the hired boys reached for a sap as he moved in on Johnson. Johnson caught his wrist, ripped the sap out of his hand, and belted him flush across the mouth with it. The hired boy sat down and began to spit out teeth.

  The other hired boy was reaching. “I wouldn’t!” Johnson said in a low voice. And the boy didn’t.

  Their sole remaining gesture of defiance was to throw the shoes at me as they went out.

  I said to Johnson, “That wasn’t smart. They might give you a bad time outside.”

  He gave me a look of surprise. “Those three? Grow up, ki—Mr. Desmon.”

  They didn’t bother Johnson, and they didn’t come back.

  Last week I woke up and there was a man sitting on a chair beside my bed. I shut my eyes hard, and when I opened them again he was still there.

  “Good morning, Joe,” he said.

  “How did you get in here? What do you want? Is this a gag?”

  He handed me a picture. A double picture. Full face and profile. With numbers. “Know this man?”