This was in the F Street Cafeteria, where I generally take my breakfast on the way to the office, and the blonde’s face was on page one of the Washington News-Herald. Pictured from the waist up and wearing a bathing cap and the pleasantly skimpy bra of a two-piece bathing suit, she shared the cut with a squat, muscular, hairy-chested guy with a hard, brutal face and sleepy-looking eyes. The over-cut caption said double trouble for union leader. The under-cut caption said that the picture had been taken at the Nassau vacation hideaway of Mr. and Mrs. Mike Sand several months ago.
An accompanying article explained Sand’s double trouble. “A Senatorial probe by the Hartsell Committee and a separation from his wife have further complicated the life of The National Brotherhood of Truckers’ Boss Mike Sand who, it is rumored, is fighting for his labor-leader life with a West Coast splinter group of the Union and past-President Nels Torgesen, now residing in Virginia, who was deposed two years ago after Senator Hartsell’s first legislative attack on the racket-dominated Union,” the article began. But Sand, the article also speculated with typical journalistic mixed metaphor, might be a tougher nut for Senator Hartsell’s free-wheeling committee to crack, for he had been the power behind Torgesen’s throne for five years, had had two years to consolidate his own position, and was strongly entrenched with the rank-and-file of truckers.
There was one brief paragraph about the beautiful Mrs. Sand’s defection—she had been quoted some place along the line as saying, “Mike and I have simply fallen out of love.” It wasn’t hard to see why, since the black and white cut made them look like beauty and the beast. And the writer pointed out the irony of the situation: theirs had been a secret marriage, revealed only within the past twenty-four hours, when it was on the verge of a break-up.
I took the paper outside with me and walked down the block to the Farrell Building, where I have my office. Upstairs behind the frosted glass door that said chester drum—confidential investigations, I found a smaller article that dismissed the demise of hackie Hank Cambria in a few terse lines. Cambria, it said, was beaten to death in his own cab on Mt. Vernon Memorial Parkway early last night. The Alexandria M.E. believed the beating to have been administered by brass knuckles. Closing on a line of speculation, the article said, “Usually reliable sources indicate that another vehicle was at the scene of the brutal slaying during last night’s early snowfall. Apparently it had some mechanical trouble, because treadmarks in the snow give evidence of a tow-truck hauling it away, yet none of the garages in the area have a record of any call at all last night on the Mt. Vernon Memorial Parkway.”
That one bothered me for a while, but then I remembered Veterans’ Cab Company’s two-way radio. Assume Cambria, who had helped set up the phony snatch, had driven back toward D.C., then stopped when he saw the guy in the trench-coat and Glasses stranded on the shoulder of the road. Why they were mad enough to beat him to death I didn’t know yet, but they could have used his radio before or after the killing to call for help. Assuming the mysterious tow-truck had belonged to the National Brotherhood of Truckers, that left a bald-headed dispatcher named Charlie with a bag that needed opening.
I decided to try my hand at opening it, but first I made a phone call.
“Senator Hartsell’s office.”
“The Senator, please. This is Chester Drum.”
And, a moment later, the Senator’s familiar booming voice. “Drum? When’d you get back from Richmond?”
“Last night,” I said. A few days ago I had used the Richmond affair as an excuse for not accepting a job as special investigator for the Hartsell Committee. Offering it to me, Senator Hartsell had clued me in on some of the Brotherhood shenanigans. I had done some work for him in the past because he liked my ex-F.B.I. background, but this time I hadn’t felt like getting tied up in any long legislative hassles and the public hearings of the Labor Investigating Committee.
“Ready to work for us, boy?” the Senator asked. “We always have a place for Chet Drum.”
“Thanks. And the answer’s yes—provisionally.”
“Provisionally?”
“I have a personal reason for wanting a special investigator’s badge pinned to my wallet.”
“Such as?”
“I’d rather not say right now.”
“Any tie-in with the Brotherhood?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“That’s good enough for me,” the Senator boomed. “And I can tell you this: the Committee can use a really hot-shot investigator now.”
“What’s the trouble?”
“We had a star witness all lined up. The sort of man who knew enough and had enough of a reputation in high government circles to blow the lid off the union: The only trouble is, he disappeared.”
“And that doesn’t leave you with much?”
“Gideon Frost was just the kind of witness we needed. There’s apathy, Chet, when it comes to union-busting. You know that. You’ve really got to blueprint the shakedowns and the kickbacks and the six-for-fiving and the abused welfare funds or you don’t get anywhere. Gideon Frost could have spelled it all out. He lives out in L.A. and was supposed to fly East, but never did.”
“Got a man on the Coast looking for him?”
“Moody,” the Senator said. “The Committee’s special investigator out there. So far he’s got nothing but fallen arches.” The Senator paused. Then, “A funny thing, though. Moody says there’s another P.I. tearing up L.A. trying to find Dr. Frost.”
“Who for?”
“Search me. Man’s name is Scott.”
“Shell Scott?” I said.
“Yes. Yes, I believe so,” the Senator said, brightening. “Know him?”
“I know of him.”
“Good man?”
“Well, a news magazine once ran an article on both of us. They said Shell Scott was the Chester Drum of Los Angeles, or maybe it’s the other way around. Seriously, though, Scott’s got a good reputation. One of the best. Why doesn’t Moody get in touch with him?”
“I think he tried, but he’s up to his ears in about six thousand things and hasn’t been able to reach the man. Why don’t you try to contact him? Hell, boy, if he comes equipped with the same kind of Robin Hood complex you have, maybe he can help us.”
“It’s worth a try,” I said.
The Senator told me I could pick up my identification papers and badge at his office any time today. The moment I hung up, the phone started ringing.
“Drum speaking.”
“Good morning, Mr. Drum. Do you know who this is?” a woman’s voice asked me.
“The luggage lady,” I said.
“Right you are. Any luck?”
“Nothing yet, Mrs. Sand.”
I heard her sharp intake of breath. Then she said, “Well, you are a detective, aren’t you?”
I let that one ride. “There are complications. The taxi-driver was murdered last night—”
There was a silence. Then, “What happened to my luggage?”
“The Virginia State Police impounded the cab. Your bags went with it.”
“Then there’s nothing you can do about it, is there?”
“I’m working for the Hartsell Committee, Mrs. Sand,” I said.
Another silence while she digested that. “Were you working for them last night?”
“Would that make any difference?”
“Were you?”
“No.”
“I—I guess I never should have come to Washington.”
“You came here to do what?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Drum. If you send a bill for your services to me care of the Statler Hotel, it will be forwarded.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all. Definitely.”
I let it go at that, depressed the phone cradle and had long distance get me the information operator in Los Angeles. They had a Sheldon Scott, Investigations, listed in the Hamilton Building in downtown Los Angeles. They had a home address in the Spartan Apartment Hotel in
Hollywood. While the first number was ringing, I sat there thinking about Shell Scott. Ours is a lonely business, and it’s filled with everything from rotten apples to knights in shining armor. What I’d heard about Scott on and off over the years made him one of the good ones, so I figured he might be able to help me help Senator Hartsell.
An answering service told the long-distance operator Scott hadn’t checked into his office yet. She tried his apartment, and after four rings a voice said, “Hello?”
“Shell Scott? Drum’s my name. I’m calling from Washington.”
“Chester Drum?” Scott had a deep voice. He sounded surprised. “The private detective?”
“Well, if you’ve heard of me, that makes this easier. We’re trying to find a Dr. Gideon Frost and—”
“Who’s we?” he interrupted.
“Get to that in a minute, okay? The grapevine has it you’re looking for Frost too. Any luck?”
“Plenty, but all of it bad. I haven’t been able to find a trace of him. Who did you say wanted to find him back there in Washington?”
Instead of answering the question, I asked one of my own. “You’re looking for him why?”
“The usual reason. I have a client.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Who?”
“You ought to know I can’t answer that.”
“Would you answer it for the United States Senate?”
That also must have surprised Scott. He said, “Come again?”
“I’m a Special Investigator for the Hartsell Committee. Frost was going to be their star witness against the National Brotherhood of Truckers. We’ve got to find him.”
“So?”
“Well, if you tell us who hired you, that might give us a lead.”
“Yeah, if you’re working for the Hartsell Committee.”
“Hell,” I said, getting a little annoyed. “Call the Senator if you want to.”
Then he asked a funny question. “How long has this been going on?”
“What been going on?”
“You working for Senator Hartsell.”
“Actually, about fifteen minutes. But—”
“That’s convenient, isn’t it? Fifteen minutes for Hartsell—and how long for Mike Sand and Ragen?”
I shouted, “What did you say? What the hell—”
“I can’t tell you who I’m working for.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Take your pick.”
“Look,” I said, “I don’t want to lean on you, but if you make it necessary we can force that information out of you.” Scott didn’t answer me. I went on. “Go ahead, play hard to get. We have a man on the Coast who can slap a subpoena on you so fast you’ll—”
Scott didn’t let me finish. He said, “Don’t scare me, friend. Maybe your man can slap a subpoena on me. But he won’t have fun doing it.”
The line went dead. I banged the phone down, smoked a cigarette, wondered what Scott could have against me, said, “Who says news magazines are right all the time?” out loud. Then I climbed into my coat and hat, went downstairs and outside and drove through the inches of snow that covered Washington’s streets back to the Veterans’ Cab Garage.
Round one? Call it Scott’s. But that was only the beginning.
“Bald-headed guy named Charlie?” the morning dispatcher repeated my question. “That would be the four p.m. to midnight dispatcher, Charlie Derleth. So?”
“So I’d like his home address.”
“We don’t give out our employees’ home addresses, mister.”
“Real cloak-and-dagger, huh?”
“Just company policy. I don’t look for no trouble.”
I took out the photostat of my license and showed it to him. He wasn’t impressed. “You’re a private eye. So what?”
“So if you call Senator Hartsell’s office, they’ll tell you I’m a special investigator for the Hartsell Committee.”
He accepted that without making the call. He looked interested but pugnacious. “What’s Charlie done?”
“I’ll discuss that with Charlie.”
“I mean, him being an ex-trucker and all.”
“When was he a trucker?”
“He came over here when they give Boss Torgesen the ax, two, three years ago.”
“Would that be about the same time Hank Cambria started pushing a hack?”
“Cambria? I said all I’m gonna say.”
“Except for Charlie Derleth’s address.”
He sighed and gave it to me.
On the way over there I stopped at the Senate Office Building and picked up my identification card and special investigator’s badge at Senator Hartsell’s office. The Senator wasn’t in. I batted the breeze a few minutes with his receptionist, a stacked redhead called Luscious by everyone including the Senator, and then drove north across Washington on New Jersey Avenue almost to where it ends at Florida Avenue near Griffith Stadium.
Charlie Derleth had an apartment in a seedy residential neighborhood that had been rezoned for industry. It was a couple of blocks off New Jersey Avenue and within easy walking distance of the National Brotherhood of Truckers D.C. headquarters. The apartment was on the third floor of a walkup. An owl-eyed kid playing with a rubber ball in the dimly lit hallway watched me as I knocked at the door. There wasn’t any answer.
“Nobody’s home, mister,” the kid said. His ball rolled down to me and I tossed it back at him.
“I thought he might still be sleeping. Doesn’t he work nights?”
“He does. She don’t,” the kid said importantly. “His sister. Hope. She’s nice.”
“You know where I can find him?”
“Nope. But I know where she is.”
“Where?”
“She works at that truck place. You know, on New Jersey Avenue?”
I thanked him. He sneezed, bounced his ball against the hallway wall, blew his nose, sniffed and bounced it again. He waved as I went downstairs. The National Brotherhood of Truckers was like a magnet drawing all the pieces of the case toward it like iron filings.
The place was a big Victorian monstrosity, gabled and gambreled, that must have had fifty rooms in it. The setback lawn had been converted to a parking lot, and the rows of high-priced new cars lined up there were the only outward signs of undue prosperity.
I went in through the wide door under a sign that said:
National Headquarters
national brotherhood of truckers
Welcome, Brother
In the enormous downstairs room a couple of dozen rank-and-filers were seated around bare wood tables drinking coffee and playing cards. They were dressed in jeans or old corduroys or fatigue trousers and windbreakers. In a tweed suit and a gabardine topcoat I looked as out of place as a gob of blood-red ketchup on a slice of seven layer cake.
A tough kid in a turtleneck sweater came over to me and said three words out of the side of his mouth. “You want what?”
I could have said I wanted to see Hope Derleth. I could have said I was from the Hartsell Committee. I could have said the sign says welcome, brother, and to hell with you. But what I did say was, “I want to see Townsend Holt. Tell him it’s about Mrs. Sand.”
“Yeah?”
“It won’t bite you, sonny. Go on and try it.”
The “sonny” got a glower from him, but he turned, called, “Sit tight, dads,” over his shoulder, and went across the big barn of a room and out of sight up a flight of stairs.
He was back before I could finish a cigarette. “Mr. Holt ain’t in, dads. You wanna,” he added grudgingly, “you can see his assistant.”
I said I wanted to and followed him upstairs. The second floor hall was carpeted, the walls were paneled in mahogany and there were no signs that said, “Welcome, Brother.” Apparently the second floor was out-of-bounds for the rank-and-filers. The tough kid swaggered ahead of me to a door that bore the legend, townsend holt, public relations.
“Go on in, dads,” he said, and snickered. “But if
you get to first base with that iceberg, I’ll eat your bat.”
I didn’t get the Freudian symbolism of what he had said, unconscious or otherwise, until I saw who held down the front room of Townsend Holt’s suite of offices. The tough punk opened the door for me and shut it behind me, remaining outside.
It was a large office furnished in blue—blue carpet, blue metal desk, blue filing cabinets, soft blue walls. The girl was wearing blue too, a dark blue suit cut close to her figure. It went well with her pale skin and the jet black hair that she wore not much longer than the duck-tail of the tough kid waiting outside.
She stood up and offered me a brief, fleeting smile. She had small, even, very white teeth. She was a small girl and she wore sensible office flats on her feet and blue-bowed glasses over her dark eyes. Despite the flats and the glasses, or maybe in part because of them and counterpointing them, she was a tight little bundle of sex appeal. There was a charged, almost electric quality in the way she moved her trim body, in the frank thrust of rounded thighs against the tight skirt, in the straight shoulders and the suggestion of saucy tilt of breasts restrained by the tight-fitting jacket.
I had been staring too long. She was that kind of woman. “You didn’t come here to buy me, did you?” she demanded icily.
I went along with that. “Are you up for sale?”
The reluctant fleeting smile again as she said, extending her hand, “Maybe I deserved that. I’m Hope Derleth Mr. Holt’s girl Friday.”
She pumped my hand vigorously, giving me the same kind of looking over I had given her. Hope Derleth, I thought. Charlie Derleth’s sister. Well, well, well.
She let go of my hand and waited for me to introduce myself. I didn’t. I said, tough and fast, to throw her off balance, “Where the hell was Townsend Holt last night when Mr. Abbamonte set up the snatch for him?”
The dark eyes widened. “Set up the snatch? What are you talking about? Who are you, mister?”
“Never mind me,” I said. “Let’s talk about Charlie.”
“Charlie—?”
“Charlie getting a couple of Abbamonte’s goons off the hook Townsend Holt put them on by forgetting to show up last night. That shows good sense on Charlie’s part. But where does that leave Holt? Not to mention you?”
Double in Trouble (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 6