by Alan Glenn
The crack of a gunshot down the street startled him, the hollow boom echoing and re-echoing about the frame houses. He didn’t move. Another example of what was called by his fellow cops “a shot in the dark.” Like the gunshot at the railroad tracks, these firearm discharges—scores being settled, somebody being robbed, an argument ending—were ignored unless they were officially reported. Not a way for a good cop to respond, but he had no choice. Besides, he had his hands more than full with a corpse, the pile of paperwork on his desk, and his convict brother.
One could pick one’s friends, but one could never pick one’s relatives. Or in-laws. And both were giving him a headache.
At the bottom of the steps, he tripped over a small shape. He turned on the back porch light and stooped to see what had tripped him.
By the steps were three rocks piled on top of one another.
Three rocks.
He was positive they hadn’t been there when he had gone up to Walter’s apartment.
He bent down, picked up the rocks, then tossed each as hard as he could out into the darkness. Two fell within the yard, and he had a moment of satisfaction as the third splashed into the Piscataqua River.
* * *
The radio was off, as were most of the lights, and he moved through the silent living room and into the kitchen and to their bedroom. The only light came from the bedside radio, which was on. Sarah liked to fall asleep to the sound of the radio, music or news or a detective tale. He, on the other hand, couldn’t fall asleep if the radiator was ticking.
Sarah had laid his pajamas out on his side of the bed. He changed clothes and slid in under the sheets. Sarah murmured and he leaned over and pressed his lips against her neck. “Sorry,” she murmured. “I know you had something in mind tonight … I just couldn’t stay awake …”
“Don’t worry, dear, I’ll take a rain check—if you offer one.”
She sighed, took his hand, and placed it on her breasts, the soft lace of the nightgown pressing against his palm. In the darkness, he smiled. Sarah could stretch a food budget or a utility budget, but she never skimped on nighties and lingerie. She called them her tools for keeping Sam in place, and he had to admit they did a very good job of at least keeping him in bed.
“Rain check offered, then,” she murmured. “Just make sure you use it and don’t lose it.”
He moved up against her, his hand on the softness of her flesh and the delicacy of the lace. “Rain check accepted, and it won’t be lost. Not ever. Good day at the school department?”
“Not bad. Getting ready for another round of budget cuts.”
“Anything I should know about?”
He felt her tense under his touch. “The usual.”
“Sarah …”
“I’ve been careful, honest. Nothing going on just right now, though we’ve heard rumors of a refugee roundup sometime soon. Have you heard anything?”
“No. But watch yourself. Leaflets stuck under windshield wipers, registering new voters, dropping off pamphlets at the post office at night. That’s one thing for you and your fellow revolutionaries.”
He waited for a reply and heard nothing but cold silence from her and soft music from the radio. He gave her a squeeze and said, his voice a low whisper, “But Sarah … being a stop on the Railroad, that’s another. We’ve got to close it down. Now. Besides the marshal dropping that big-ass hint to me earlier, we’ve got Long’s Legionnaires in town, watching things. I ran into two of them tonight, at the Fish Shanty. Two losers and they made everyone in the restaurant freeze in their seats, scared out of their wits.”
Unexpectedly, she turned her head and kissed him, hard. “Sam … I don’t know what I can do. There’s one in the pipeline coming to Portsmouth in the next couple of days. I just got word this afternoon.”
“Can you delay it?”
“I don’t know. I can try, but sometimes it’s hard letting the right people know.”
“You’ve done enough already. Time for somebody else to take up the burden. We can’t take the chance, Sarah. We’ve got to close it down.”
She sighed. “Sam, I said I’d try. It’s not like I can make a phone call and stop it cold. And look, we’re just a bunch of schoolteachers. And secretaries. That’s all.”
“There’s a whole bunch of schoolteachers from Hyde Park in New York, breaking rocks in the Utah desert because they were suspected of harboring FDR’s widow, Eleanor. Your pretty hands and face won’t last long in the desert.” He heard the cruelty in his voice and winced. “Look, Sarah, I worry about you. We need to think of Toby.”
She moved some, and he thought she was rolling over in anger, but she surprised him again by raising up her face and giving him another, deeper kiss. “All right, Sam, I’ll be careful. I’ll try to stop the visit here. You be careful, too, Inspector.”
“I’m always careful.”
“If you’re right about what the marshal said and those damn Legionnaires being in the area, then I don’t know. Even the careful ones can get into trouble.”
Sam lay there, blankets and sheets pulled up to his chest, as his wife’s breathing slowed. The radio was on his side of the bed, the shallow glow of light from the dial reassuring. He could reach over and shut it off, but instead, he listened. It was the top of the hour, and time for the news. He closed his eyes, started to feel himself doze away, while the headlines droned on through the static.
“… bombing raids upon Berlin by a number of long-range Ilyushin bombers took place tonight. Officials reported that no military targets were struck but that a number of homes and hospitals were destroyed and scores of civilians were killed.
“On the Russian front, house-to-house fighting continued in the city of Stalingrad, while Russian armored units have reportedly engaged German panzer groups on the outskirts of Kharkov.
“In London, Prime Minister Mosley met again with German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. The talks were conducted to review terms of the armistice agreement signed between Great Britain and Germany two years ago. One of the main areas of disagreement, according to Washington diplomatic sources, is the number of German troops that are allowed to be based in Great Britain and some of her overseas possessions.
“In Montreal, a surprise visit from a trade delegation from the Soviet Union raised suggestions in some quarters that the government of Canada may be seeking closer ties to its neighbor to the west.
“Closer to home, President Huey Long signed a bill today ensuring that all Americans receiving federal assistance of any type sign a loyalty oath to the government, guaranteeing, as the President said, that patriotism will continue to thrive during his second term. The bill, called the Patriot Enhancement Act, will be enacted into law immediately. A violation of the loyalty oath will mean an automatic prison term.
“On Capitol Hill, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, fresh from his attendance at a meeting of the World Jewish Congress, was unsuccessful in his attempts to convince Congress to increase the number of Jewish refugees allowed into the United States this year.
“Also from Washington, unemployment figures released from the Department of Labor indicate that more Americans are working today than at any time before and that—”
Sam reached out and switched off the radio. News of the world. Mostly lies, half-truths, and exaggerations. Everyone knew that the unemployment numbers were cooked. Every month more and more Americans were supposedly working over a decade after the stock market crash. But he saw with his own eyes what was true, from the hobo encampments by the railroad tracks, to the rush of unemployed men at the shipyard gates when a rumor spread that five pipefitters had been killed in an accident, to the overcrowded tenements in town.
That was the truth. That desperate numbers of people were still without jobs, without relief, without hope. And nothing over the radio would change what he knew. He rolled over, tried to relax, but two thoughts kept him awake.
The thought of three stones piled up on his rear porch.
&nbs
p; A series of blurry numerals, tattooed into a dead man’s wrist.
Both mysteries. Despite his job, he hated mysteries.
INTERLUDE II
Now he was back in the shadowy streets of old Portsmouth, where there were lots of homes from the 1700s, with narrow clapboards, tiny windows, and sagging roofs. He kept to the alleyways and crooked lanes, ducking into a doorway each time he saw an approaching headlight. When he got where he had to be, he crouched beneath a rhododendron bush, waited some more. He thought about these old homes, about the extraordinary men who had come from this place, had gone out to the world and made a difference. Did they feel then what he felt now? The history books claimed they were full of courage and revolutionary spirit. But he didn’t feel particularly full of anything; he was just cold and jumpy, knowing that behind every headlight could be a car full of Interior Department men or Long’s Legionnaires.
Across the street, the door of an old house opened and a man stepped out, silhouetted by the light. The man looked around, bent over, put two empty milk bottles on the stoop, then went back inside.
In the darkness beneath the bush, he smiled. All clear. One bottle or three, and he would have left. But two was the sign. He crossed the street, through an open gate to a picket fence, then to a cellar door. He opened the door and went down the wooden steps. The cellar was small, with a dirt floor, an exposed rock foundation, and three wooden chairs set about a wooden table. There were two men in the chairs, only one of whom he recognized, and that was a problem.
The man on the left had a thick mustache and swollen hands, scarred with old burn tissue. The owner of the house, Curt Monroe. He looked to him and said, “Curt.”
“Boy, I’m glad to see you, pal,” the scarred man said.
He said, “You tell me who this other guy is, Curt, or I’m out of here.”
The other man had thinning hair and a prominent Adam’s apple. Curt said, “This is Vince. He’s all right.”
He thought about that. Then he took the spare chair and sat down. “How’s he all right?”
Vince said, “Look, I’m—”
He stared at the second man. “I don’t remember asking you a goddamn thing.”
Vince shut up. Curt tapped his fingers on the table. “I used to date Vince’s sister back when I was working, before my hands got burnt. I know him, he’s okay, and he can get what we need.”
Now he looked to Vince. “Where?”
“Huh?”
He had to struggle to keep his temper under control. “We need something particular. Something that’s hard to get nowadays, with the latest confiscation laws for firearms. So. Where the hell are you getting it from?”
“A guy up the street from my sister. He’s got a ready supply. I already paid him with Curt’s money. You just tell me where you want it.”
He thought about that and said, “I want it delivered to Curt.”
Vince was confused. “I … that wasn’t the deal. The deal was, I get paid half for making the buy and the other half for delivering it where you want it.”
“Fine. And I want it delivered here, to Curt.”
“But—”
He stared right at him. “Bud, last time I’m going to say this. I know Curt. I worked with him back when we were both employed. I was one of the first guys to get to him when his hands got burnt. So me and him, we got a history. You, I don’t know shit about you. Curt’s vouched for you, but I’m a suspicious bastard, you know? Last time I trusted somebody I didn’t personally vouch for, I got my ass arrested. So the deal’s changed. All right? You deliver it here. You get paid. And then you forget this all happened. Got it?”
Vince looked to Curt, and Curt shrugged, and then Vince got up and left, going up the wooden steps, his feet thumping hard. Curt said, “Pal, you’re even a bigger prick since you’ve gotten out.”
“All that government attention will do it to you,” he said. “Be back in a sec. Don’t leave.”
“What?” Curt asked, but by then he was at the cellar door, swinging it open. There was movement out on the street, and he followed Vince in the shadows as he strode away, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched forward, moving fast. Idiot, he thought, trailing him with no difficulty at all. Damn fool isn’t even checking who might be behind him.
Vince walked four blocks, then stopped at a corner. This part of town was more commercial, with two bars and a corner grocery and an abandoned bank building, the former Portsmouth Savings & Trust, one of many abandoned banks across the country. He stood in a doorway, watching. Vince took a cigarette out, stuck it between his lips. It took three tries to light it up. Nervous twit, he thought, and then a sedan came down the street and stopped.
Vince tossed the cigarette into the gutter and got into the rear of the sedan. The vehicle quickly drove off. It was too dark to see the license plate or who was inside the car, a model he didn’t recognize, knowing only it was a pricey set of wheels.
He stayed for a few moments, looking at the now empty street corner. He started walking back to Curt’s place, thinking of another chore that had to be done later the next day.
Revolutions were so damn tricky.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The dingy lobby of the Portsmouth Police Department was crowded the next morning with poorly dressed men and women checking on family members or friends picked up the previous night for the typical offenses in a hard-drinking and hard-living port city. Upstairs at his desk, Sam found a note propped on his typewriter: Sam. See me soonest. H. There was also a single sheet of brown paper with a penciled handwritten note:
TO: Inspector Sam Miller
FROM: Patrolman Frank Reardon, Badge Number 43
A canvas of a 2 block area surounding the dead man discovered on May 1 determined that no witnesses could be produced that had any nowledge of the dead man, his identity, or any other clues to facilitat your investigation.
There was a scrawled signature, also in pencil, on the bottom of the sheet. Sam shook his head at the memo’s misspellings. He was sure Frank and his young partner had spent ten minutes walking around in the rain before coming back to the warm station and spending an hour on this report. Sam put the useless report down, looked again at the note.
Sam. See me soonest. H.
H being Harold Hanson. Something about last night had gotten Hanson’s attention—what was one dead guy, even if it was a possible homicide? He looked over to Hanson’s secretary, a woman whose gray hair was always tied at the back of her head in a severe bun, and who wore vibrantly floral dresses no matter the season. He called out, “Mrs. Walton? Is he in?”
Linda Walton looked up from her typing, eyeing him over her black-rimmed reading glasses. She had been working for the city for decades; nobody knew her husband’s name, and the jokes were that she actually ran the department, a joke nobody had the balls to mention in her presence. She was also responsible for religiously maintaining a leather-bound book known as The Log, a record of where every senior police officer was day or night, week or weekend. With the city in a continuous budget struggle, The Log also made sure the city wasn’t cheated on its meager salaries.
“Yes,” she said, looking down at her telephone and its display of lights. “But he’s on the phone and— Oh, he’s off now.”
He lifted the note as though it were a hall pass and she were a high school geometry teacher. “He says he needs to see me.”
“Then go see him already.” She went back to her typing.
He got to his feet, not liking the way she talked and knowing he would do nothing about it. Cops who irritated Mrs. Walton often found their overtime hours mysteriously went away at a time when scraping for overtime meant the difference between soup or ground round for dinner. He went past her, detecting a scent of lilac, and after a brief knock on the door, went in.
Hanson looked up from his desk, and if it weren’t for his clean shirt, he would look like he’d spent the night there. He told Sam, “This won’t take long. Have a seat.”
He thought about that poor man pleading to be let free and how he had delivered him as ordered. “Yes, it was successful. And I don’t want to ever do it again.”
“Sorry, Sam. Can’t promise you that.”
He kept his mouth shut, and his boss said, “Did Frank and Leo find anything concerning your dead John Doe?”
“Not a thing.”
“You’re on your way to see the medical examiner?”
“In just a bit,” Sam said.
“Good. Let me know what you find out. And remember what I said last night. If this guy died from hunger or cheap booze, leave it be. Now. I need to ask you something else. You were at the Fish Shanty last night, am I right?”
“Yes, I was.”
Hanson picked up a sheet of paper, and Sam felt uneasy, as if a tax assessor were about to double his property tax bill. “An interesting coincidence, then, since about the same time you were at the Fish Shanty, two fine members of Long’s Legionnaires said they exited the restaurant and found two tires on their car slit. I suppose you have nothing to tell me about this.”
“That’s right, sir. I don’t have anything to tell you.”