“I hear—just hear, now—you can get whatever you need from a guy there. A guy named P. J. somethin’.”
“George, you’re a prince.”
“I’m just a poor man, Mallory, that’s all.”
“How can I thank you?”
“Forget it. But if you want to take a look at that videotape, we can swing you a deal.”
“I’ll think about it, George. Thanks again. See you.”
“You be good now, Mallory. And more important... be careful.”
We hung up.
Debbie was just finishing up the dishes. I joined her, took the towel from her, and dried the last few.
“What’s going on, Mal?” she said, nodding toward the phone on the wall.
“Nothing.”
“Are you into something dangerous?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you going to stay here with me today?”
“I’m going to take care of some errands this afternoon. I’ll be back this evening.”
“Won’t you please stay? I’m... I’m still scared of what Pat might do.”
“Keep the door locked and bolted. You’ll be okay. If you aren’t, call Lou Brown and he’ll help you out.”
“Lou Brown? Isn’t he the deputy sheriff?”
“He’s one of ’em. But he’s a friend and’ll keep it quiet, and nonofficial. Okay?”
“Come back as soon as you can?”
“I promise.”
“I’ll fix a nice supper for you.”
“Really? What are we having?”
She dried her hands and put them around my neck and kissed me, then looked at me and said, “Anything you want.”
“What time do you want me back?” I said.
18
Port City doesn’t have a slum. What it does have, here and there, is “substandard housing,” the largest concentration of which is located in that area of town known as South End. The word “slum” just isn’t in the Port City vocabulary. To understand that you must keep in mind that Port City is Middle America, U.S.A., where the corn grows tall, grass is something you walk on, and everybody but me votes straight Republican; pleasantly dull (“A nice place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit there”) and relentlessly middle-class. Even the millionaires like to think of themselves as middle-class joes. So do the slum dwellers.
And they have a point. If you tried to pass South End off as a slum to somebody born and bred in a big-city ghetto, you’d get laughed at or punched out. Because South End is, basically, a lower-middle-class residential district, having in common with East Hill a tendency toward conglomeration of different types of houses: everything from tumbledown shacks to brand-new prefabs. But the common denominator of South End housing is the one-story, rather run-down clapboard—in short, substandard. And so the bottom line comes to this: South End may not be a slum, but you’ll sure bump into one hell of a lot of substandard housing down there.
Something else you’ll bump into is industry. A good share of major local industry is situated in South End, the dominant one being the grain-processing plant, whose seasonal emissions of soybean fumes can turn a summer breeze into something you wouldn’t care for. Another factory, where pumps of all sorts are manufactured, stands at the foot of West Hill bluff and marks the beginning of the End; a street cutting past the pump plant runs straight through the End and out of town, turning into Highway 61 South after a lengthy stretch littered with gas stations, used-car lots, hamburger palaces, and supermarkets, with the drab residential sections of South End cowering back behind all the plastic glitter. Just before the street turns officially into a highway, heading out to drive-in restaurants, motels, and melon stands, there is a big, many-laned intersection, and if you can maneuver your way into the left lane and turn, jostling across the railroad tracks, you’ll find yourself in the heart of South End, staring smack at the huge grain-processing complex on the left hand and at Port City’s literal wrong-side-of-the-tracks on the right. Just three blocks over those tracks was Tony’s Used Auto Parts.
Across from Tony’s, little raggedy kids were playing on the swings and slides in a large, well-tended park: two blocks’ worth of land donated by the grain-processing people to the city to make up for smelling it up. One block of the park is taken up by a Little League baseball field with a stand of bleachers, in back of which is a graveled parking lot. That’s where I left the van before crossing over to Tony’s.
Tony’s was an odd-looking, off-balance sort of a building; actually, it was two buildings slapped together: a tall, one-story garage fastened haphazardly to an equally tall but two-story arrangement of shop below, living quarters above. Together the joined buildings made for a big, long, sagging wooden ramshackle, with white-paint-faded-to-gray peeling to reveal even grayer wood. But the strangest-looking thing about this strange-looking structure was the windows; every window in the place was painted out with flat black. It didn’t take Nero Wolfe to figure out the windows were black to keep people from seeing in.
Even the front shop-window was painted black. Nonprofessionally rendered lettering in white walked awkwardly across the black window, saying “Tony’s Used Auto Parts,” and in smaller, just-as-awkward letters: “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.” Okay.
I tried the shop’s front door. Locked. They hadn’t even bothered with a “Closed” sign. I walked around back of the building and found a rickety open stairway leading up to the back-door porch of the second-story living quarters. I climbed the stairs and knocked.
Nothing.
I knocked some more. Insistently.
The door cracked open, and one eye looked hesitantly out at me, like it was still Prohibition and the bathtub was full of gin. I repressed the urge to say Joe had sent me and said, “Is P. J. around?”
“Who wants him?” the eye said. It was a female voice and, as I studied it, a female eye, too. But from the sliver of pale face I could see along with the eye, I couldn’t tell much else about who the eye and voice belonged to.
I said, “I heard P. J. sells stuff.”
“He don’t sell stuff anymore.”
“But I heard....”
“I don’t give a damn what you heard. He don’t sell stuff anymore, and anyway, he don’t never sell stuff to people he don’t know, so get your goddamn ass off my porch.”
“Please—”
And, delicate little thing that she was, she slammed the door on me.
I knocked again, and kept knocking, having decided I would go on knocking until I got some kind of response.
This time when the door opened, it was all the way. I didn’t get much of a look inside the place, though, because something was blocking the view. What was blocking the view was a guy about the size of the Statue of Liberty’s brother.
I said, “I, uh, I, uh....”
“You get outa here.”
The voice was wrong, too high-pitched, but it didn’t make him any less frightening. He was a square-jawed guy with a blond crew cut and dark eyes crowding a several-times-broken nose.
I said, “I, uh....”
“You’re going down these steps. You get to choose how.”
He gestured over the railing of the porch, pointing a finger that was like a section of lead pipe.
I chose.
I walked down the stairs, waving a little good-bye to the hulking figure in the doorway, and suddenly realized who he was. Or who he damn well might be.
That same hulking figure in the green van.
The one I had encountered at Mrs. Jonsen’s that night, when I was trying to get license-plate numbers and instead ran into a glandular case loading up the van, who then ran into me and initiated all that Mallory-kicking.
Yes, he was the one. I was sure of it.
So I pretended to go away. I cut through the adjoining yard and headed down the street, which was a narrow lane lined with shade trees. I walked several blocks before ducking behind one of those trees to rest, think, hide. I’d gone in the opp
osite direction from where I’d left my van, simply because if Hulk and his honey were watching my exit, I didn’t want to tip them as to where my car was. They hadn’t seen me arrive (I hoped) and would assume I’d left my buggy down here somewhere, assume I’d gone to retrieve it and go.
It was a quiet street. No traffic. The warm afternoon sun was filtered and cooled through the shimmering leaves. The homes along the street were modest, standard South-End one-story clapboards, but well kept-up. A pleasant little neighborhood. High wild grass was growing up around the base of the tree where I was sitting, and I plucked a stalk and chewed the sweet root. I didn’t mind sitting in the soothing shade of the tree, regrouping, waiting to see if Hulk or anybody followed me, waiting for five minutes to go by if he didn’t.
When the five minutes had gone, I got up. Headed back to Tony’s Used Auto Parts, circling around several blocks to waste some more time, and also in order to come up behind the building on the garage side. One nice thing about black-painted windows; just as I couldn’t see in, they couldn’t see out, and my approach was, I felt sure, undetected.
Next door to the garage was a run-down two-story gothic that was so close to its neighbor there was little more than a crawl space between them; it was a tight squeeze, but I had breathing room, and thanks to some bushes gone out-of-hand up by the gothic’s porch, my presence wasn’t likely to be noticed by passersby—out front, anyway. From the back I was pretty well exposed, though the passageway was dark enough to shelter me some.
I began examining the windows along the side of the garage. There were three of them, evenly spaced, and on the middle one I found a spot in the lower corner where some of its black paint had worn away a bit, or had maybe been scratched off. Heart pumping, I peeked in and saw nothing but the green of a vehicle of some kind.
Green?
I kept peeking, trying to tell whether or not that green vehicle was the same green vehicle I thought it was—namely, the green van that had been used to haul loot away from Mrs. Jonsen’s.
I couldn’t be sure.
There just wasn’t enough of a peephole in the blackened window; not enough paint had been scraped or worn away. No way to tell for certain.
Except to get inside the garage and see for myself.
The street out in front of Tony’s was well traveled, since it passed the grain-processing plant with its many employees, and also because it was one of the main entries to this South End residential section. But it was mid-afternoon, an off time, and the darkness of the space between garage and gothic, as well as those bushes blocking the way, made it hard (not impossible, but hard) for anyone going by in a car to see what I was going to do.
And what I was going to do was break the window.
Now wait a minute. I didn’t go off half-cocked. I went off fully cocked. I first plastered my ear against the glass to check for any activity that might be going on in the garage. Not a sound. Then I very carefully slipped out of my short-sleeve sweatshirt and folded it, laid it gently against a pane of black-painted glass, and rammed my elbow into it.
The glass cracked.
It didn’t shatter and go clattering to the floor, waking the dead and scaring hell out of the living; it just cracked, so that when I took the folded sweatshirt away, the framing wood still held the glass, slivered now in the formation of an interesting but simple jigsaw puzzle, and all that remained was to carefully, piece by piece, take apart that jigsaw puzzle, and then where a pane of glass had been would be a hole. I shook the loose glass from the sweatshirt, got back into it, and started picking the shards of glass from the window frame.
When I was done, I had a hole through which I could see the green vehicle completely. It was indeed a green van, but if it was the same green van, some changes had been made. For one thing, there were license plates, or one anyway; I had a back-angle view of the truck and could see a license plate where the van at Jonsen’s had had none. Not that it was any great trick to take off or put on a plate, but it was a difference. A bigger difference was the red lettering on the side—GARDENING SERVICE—big, bold letters that hadn’t been on the van I’d seen. Either the letters had been added since, or that night they’d been covered up somehow. Or this wasn’t the same van.
But it had to be. And that Neanderthal upstairs just had to be the same Neanderthal who had jumped me at Jonsen’s. Running into both Hulk and the van cinched it.
Especially added to the contents of the garage. Instead of the filthy, greasy pit you might expect, full of old auto parts salvaged from junkyards, this was a clean, tidy, cement-floored room, with crates and boxes stacked around. The garage was a damn warehouse! And not for used auto parts, either. This was where the ripped-off loot was stashed.
I wanted to let out a whoop of victory, but now wasn’t the time. I could almost feel the adrenalin flowing into my veins. What you should do now, I told myself, is call Brennan and tell him to get out here and whip a John Doe warrant on these people and confiscate the goods and have that garbage living upstairs tossed into a more-or-less permanent can.
What I did instead was reach my hand through where the pane of glass used to be and unlock the window. I pushed it up and crawled inside. They call it breaking-and-entering, gang, and I just couldn’t help myself.
Because I had to know.
I had to know it was the same van. I had to know those crates and boxes contained what I thought they contained.
Once inside, I walked softly and wished I had a big stick. There wasn’t much light in here. Some little came through the open pane, and a single but fairly bright bulb was burning, hanging over a workbench affair built into the back wall, next to the open door of a toilet in the far corner. I felt fortunate at first that the bulb was lit, though on second thought its being on could easily mean someone would be coming back soon.
I started looking. The van, first. No way to be absolutely sure about it, but other than the license plates and the red lettering, it was a ringer, and I was convinced. I started poking into boxes, crates. Found everything from kitchen appliances to an antique vase. In one corner I found Mrs. Jonsen’s grandfather clock, under a tarp. In another I found, crated up, her color TV.
In yet another I found, neatly boxed, the blue Christmas plates.
And for a quiet moment there, I was very angry.
Most of the stuff in the room was Mrs. Jonsen’s. Not all, but most, and the way I figured it was these people moved out whatever they stole as quickly as possible. Mrs. Jonsen had been Thursday night and the stuff wasn’t moved yet, but this was just Saturday, and with the van here, maybe tonight was the night. I didn’t know what they did with their goods, but my guess was that they sold as much as possible to fences in the Quad Cities. Chicago wasn’t that far away, either, and the not-easily-traced items (like a color TV with serial number “worn” away) could be fenced or sold locally. Antiques and such would have to be fenced outside of the area.
I’d seen enough.
I decided that, before leaving, it would be best for me to try to patch the window somehow, cover it up so they wouldn’t notice anybody had broken in. But how? I remembered the workbench affair over under the hanging bulb; the workbench had a bunch of drawers down below, and I went over there and rummaged through them until I found black masking tape in one and a pile of rags in another, from which I selected a chuck of thick black cloth. I used scissors from another drawer to cut a square hole in the cloth.
I grinned. I was a genius. I would climb back out the window, close it shut, reach my hand up and in through the open pane and flip the lock, then tape the square piece of cloth over the empty space, stretching it taut and taping it tight. It was heavy cloth and, blended with the black of the rest of the window, would do as good a job as I could hope for keeping anybody in there from noticing the break-in for a time.
I tidied the workbench, got things put away and—still grinning, still proud of myself—I turned to go back across the big room to the window to tape the black cloth in plac
e.
That was when I heard the shuffle of feet and voices, one saying, “Damnit! Look at the window over there! Somebody busted in!”
19
So there I stood: Mallory, master cat burglar, caught with my metaphorical pants down. My self-congratulatory thoughts fizzled out like wet firecrackers and were replaced with a rush of emotions, including terror, panic, and the ever-popular despair....
I blinked all that away.
Only for a split second had I allowed myself to wallow in self-pity and fear, but that was one split second too many in a situation as tight as this.
The rest of the second I used more wisely, used it to appraise the situation; the footsteps belonged to two people, it seemed, and they had entered through a doorway in the front of the building, a corner door directly opposite from where I was standing, back by the workbench. They hadn’t seen me (and I hadn’t seen them) because the view was blocked by the green van between us. But I couldn’t think of making a dash for the window, which they had already noticed as being broken, and I wouldn’t have had an ice-cube-in-hell of a chance to make it over there and not get caught, much less seen. Could I circle around the van and sneak out the door behind them?
“Lock that door up,” one of the voices said.
Any other questions, Mallory?
“Already did,” another voice said, with irritation that implied doing so was standard operating procedure. This was a high-pitched voice that belonged, I thought, to my old pal Hulk. He was saying, “Why so uptight about the door?”
“If somebody’s in here, I don’t want ’em getting out.”
“I don’t see nobody,” Hulk observed.
“Probably just some goddamn neighbor kid broke the window to see what was in the big mystery garage. Well, we’ll have a look-see anyway and make sure.”
During that last exchange of dialogue, beginning at “Already did,” I came to the conclusion that my only possible course of action was to duck into the lavatory that took up the corner nearest me next to the workbench. Before I did, I hastily opened up a drawer and traded the piece of black cloth and masking tape for that pair of scissors I’d used, then got shut soundlessly inside the can, all before the guys out there could get past the van to the point where they could see me.
The Baby Blue Rip-Off (A Mallory Mystery) Page 10