The Removal Company

by S. T. Joshi

  My head was too full now—I could hardly think coherently. Marge Schaeffer took pity on me—said I’d better get something to eat, then take a long rest. When Vance made a motion to join us, Marge put her arm on his chest as I had done, saying:

  “No, Arthur. He needs to get away from you for a while.”

  * * * *

  Marge was a good interviewer—but I’d known that before. Without being in the least obtrusive about it, she got me to say more about myself than I do to most people. It took a while, but she managed it.

  “You play things pretty close to the vest, don’t you, Joe?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “Oh, your likes, your dislikes, why you do what you do, what your goals and dreams are. Things like that.”

  I smiled wearily. “A good private investigator has to learn to button his lip—sometimes even to his clients.”

  “I’m not one of your clients.” She smiled.

  I smiled back. “No. You certainly aren’t.”

  I devoted myself resolutely to the steak and French fried potatoes on my plate. Marge had been a bit less indulgent and had ordered a chef salad.

  “Do you like what you do?” she said at last.

  “Sure,” I said. “It doesn’t pay very well, but it seems to be what I do best. Do you like what you do?”

  It was her turn to shrug. “I’m not so sure. Like Gene, I’d like to be something other than a society reporter. It’s pretty limiting. And there are times when I want to give a good swift kick in the pants to the ‘society people’ I’m supposed to be fawning over.”

  She grinned from ear to ear. She was one of the few women who didn’t look unattractive doing it.

  I grinned back. “Lady, you haven’t met some of my clients.”

  “Like Arthur?” she said, provocatively.

  “Vance? No, not Vance. He’s a good guy, basically. He stuck with his intuitions. It was an incredible long shot, and I understandably doubted him for a long time, but he was right. I’ll give him that much.

  “His problems are far from over; in some ways they’re just beginning. But at least he has his wife back.”

  We both ate some more.

  I got the impression that Marge was debating whether to say something. It appeared that my last remark had given her an opening, and she wasn’t certain whether to take it or not. In the end she did:

  “What about you, Joe? Any wife for you?”

  “No.”

  I didn’t mean to be brusque, but maybe it came off that way. Marge seemed hesitant to proceed, afraid that she’d offended me.

  “I don’t want to pry....”

  “It’s not that.” I shook my head. “I don’t see myself getting married. I don’t think any woman would have me....”

  Marge laughed. “Joe, that’s an old line! Very old!”

  “Okay, but it may still be true.”

  “Or maybe it’s a shield.”

  “Maybe.”

  There was another silence. Then Marge reached over and placed her hand gently on mine. “Look, Joe, I don’t mean anything by this. I was just curious—curious whether you have a place for women in your life.”

  “I did once.” It’s amazing to me how men—even those who play it close to the vest—jump at opportunities to lay bare their hearts to a woman. Do all men think of all women as potential replacements for their mother?

  All Marge said was: “Yes...?”

  It would have been awkward to have zipped my lip now, so I just let it out.

  “It was years ago—I couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and I’d been a p.i. only a couple of years. Yes, it was a client. A very bad thing to get involved with a client—I knew that, of course, but I was a lot less in control of my emotions then than I am now.

  “She was in an ugly divorce case, and I had to get some dope on her husband. She was so young—a few years younger than me—had married at a very early age, and realized pretty soon that it was a mistake. So did he, I guess, for he made no bones about fooling around. I had to do a lot of hand-patting—you know, letting her cry on my shoulder, that sort of thing. It was a tough situation for a man who hadn’t had a girl since high school.”

  I looked off in the distance, hardly seeming to talk to anyone in particular.

  “Yes, she was pretty, but more than that, she was the most feminine woman I’ve ever met—every word, every gesture of hers was so emphatically proclaimed her sex, and without the least suggestion of a ‘come-on’ or anything like that. And she was still so naïve—hard to believe she’d been married for five years.

  “Well, after her divorce went through we naturally talked about marriage. Of course, we didn’t want to rush into anything, given her bad experience, but it seemed clear to us that we had a future.

  “Then things just fell apart. She hated the city, wanted to move upstate. I knew that my life, my career, were here—and I loved the pace, the throb of New York. I couldn’t go anywhere else—I’d have to give up my job altogether and do something entirely different. We had bitter fights—all the more baffling to us because we still seemed to love each other so much. I was infuriated that she couldn’t see things my way, and I know she felt the same. But maybe there really was no misunderstanding: we both knew what the stakes were. We knew that one of us would have to give in, yield to the other. And neither of us was willing to do that.

  “And yet, toward the end I offered to do just that—throw up my job and live with her wherever she wanted. It was irrational, of course—and she knew it. She knew that if I did that, we might be happy for a while, but then I would come to hate her for what she had made me do. She loved me enough not to want that.

  “So we just went our separate ways. That was it. I never see her now, never write to her, don’t even know where she is.

  “She’s the only woman I ever really loved.”

  Marge had the good sense to remain quiet. She was still picking at her salad, even though she hadn’t eaten a mouthful during my talk. I hadn’t either.

  The food was cold. The waiter took it away. Finally over coffee Marge ventured:

  “There might be others, Joe. All it takes is one.”

  I said nothing to that.

  She lived close by, so I walked her back to her flat. It wasn’t late, but I was dog tired. Maybe a bit shaken also.

  She noticed that, and at the door of her building all she said was:

  “You better get some rest. You’re all in.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. But I’ve had a very nice time.”

  “So have I,” she smiled.

  I bent down to give her a peck on the cheek, but at the last moment she turned my face so that our lips met. Only for a moment.

  I gazed at her, a tangle of emotions running through me. She just looked back at me with a soft smile.

  We said nothing for several moments. Then:

  “I hope...I hope I can see you again sometime,” I said hoarsely.

  “I hope so too,” she whispered.

  Then she darted through the door without a backward glance.

  I walked home, undressed, and slept like the dead.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  How to find the Removal Company? That was the last obstacle.

  Sanderson had proved vulnerable: he had made a bad mistake in regard to the false memories he had implanted in Katharine Vance’s mind. And if—as seemed likely—he had engineered the murder of Dr. Grabhorn, presumably to shut him up, he was not immune to panic. Strangely enough, I felt little worry for my own safety, even though Sanderson clearly had a large contingent of miscellaneous underlings to do his bidding.

  But Sanderson himself continued to prove elusive. He had covered his tracks well. I couldn’t come up with even the first step in tracing him—he was a phantom, a ghost, a man who blended in anonymously with the human tidal wave of a great city, who pulled strings from the center of his web like an immense, bloated spider.

  Coul
d he have ceased his operations? By this time he must surely have enough money to have retired many times over. As soon as I thought of the idea, I laughed it away: if Priscilla James of Pasadena had been one of his victims, he was still in business as of a few months ago.

  He had changed his telephone number, but somehow I had a feeling that he was still in the same place he was when the Vances had seen him a year and a half ago. The Removal Company was an elaborate operation—that hexagonal white room at the top of a flight of stairs, a further room within, and God knows how many further compartments for the various other procedures Sanderson had to undertake after his victims had supposedly been put out of their misery.

  Another mystery was why Sanderson didn’t merely kill his victims rather than go through the incredible charade of imbuing them with a new personality. True, that would make him guilty of murder, and the disposal of corpses is not easy; but it nevertheless seemed easier than the Byzantine rigmarole he was engaging in. Did Sanderson get some bizarre kick out of being a puppet-master manipulating the lives of dozens, perhaps hundreds of people?

  Although Vance had got his wife back, we needed to put Sanderson out of business: otherwise he would hover over his victims for the rest of their lives. There was no telling what he could, or would, do with the information he had at his disposal.

  I had crawled into my office late in the morning, still exhausted from the cumulative rush of events over the last several weeks. The place looked dingy, so I rolled up the Venetian blinds, squinting at the bright April sunlight that met me full in the face.

  I sat heavily at my desk. It was, as always, nearly bare. So was my mind. I was drawing a complete blank.

  I fished the card for the Removal Company out of my suit pocket. In its mute blandness it seemed to mock me: a simple, euphemistic name and a disconnected phone number. Could I bribe someone at the phone company to check old records and see if there was an address attached to this number? Was that information even available?

  I leaned back in my chair, the blazing sun striking me full in the back. I held the card up to the light.

  Then I almost fell over in my haste to get up.

  There was some other writing on the card—or, more properly, embossed on it. It was the bottom end of a double circle, and within the two curving lines was some writing.

  A watermark.

  All I could make out were the letters RBURY LAID. Not very helpful—but maybe enough for an expert. I wasn’t one, but I knew someone who was.

  I flew out of the office, took the stairs two at a time, and rushed out into the heat of an unusually warm New York spring day. In minutes I was at the door of my regular stationery store, Samuel Weiss at 154 West 32nd Street. They hadn’t had much business from me lately, but I’d make sure to change that if they could be of help.

  Sam himself was in the back of the shop, doing some typesetting work. Without ceremony I lifted the gate from the front counter and walked right back to him. He looked up at me first in momentary alarm, then with a wide grin of recognition.

  “Joe! Where ya been all these mont’s? Gone to one o’ my competitors? I want your business, guy!”

  “You’ll get it,” I said hurriedly. “Sam, you gotta—”

  He held up a hand. “Just lemme finish this line, Joe,” he said, bending back to his work. “I never was much good at setting woids backwards.... Man, you’d think they could come up with some better way—”

  “Sam.” The urgency in my voice brought back that look of alarm in Sam’s face, and he quietly dropped some pieces of type and looked me straight in the face.

  “What’s the matter, Joe? You in some kinda trouble?”

  “Not exactly. Just look at this.” I handed him the card for the Removal Company.

  He snickered at the name. “What is this, Joe? A garbage disposal outfit?”

  “Jesus, Sam, will you cut the crap!” My harried tone wiped the grin off his face.

  “I’m sorry, Joe.” He peered at the card more intently. “What do you want to know? I’m pretty sure we didn’t do this.”

  “I didn’t think you did. But just hold the card up to the light, and tell me what you see.”

  He did as I asked, holding the lower left-hand corner of the card between thumb and forefinger and placing it under the bare light bulb directly above him.

  “You see the watermark?” I said.

  “Yeah, sure,” he mumbled, now professionally interested.

  “What is it? Can you tell?”

  “Sure.” He handed the card back to me nonchalantly. “Canterbury Laid. Pretty unusual.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Just a type of paper. Not often used in business cards—quite expensive, I’ll have you know. See those tiny ridges across the card?”—rubbing the card gently back and forth as I held it in my hand—“That’s what laid paper is. Most business cards of this kind are made with wove paper—helluva lot cheaper. So your pal here had a big wad o’ dough to shell out for this baby.”

  “Do you know who could have made this?”

  Weiss shrugged again. “I couldn’t say for sure. But I’ll tell you one thing: nine out of ten stationery stores or printers would have considered this out of their league. We don’t even have any Canterbury Laid paper—too rich for our blood.”

  I thanked him hastily and left the place.

  * * * *

  A quick check of the yellow pages revealed about six or seven establishments in the immediate vicinity where the card could have been made. I jotted them all down, then hit the road for another systematic canvass.

  This time I was lucky. At the second place I visited—a small printer on First Avenue and 29th Street—I got the response I was hoping for. The printer’s name was Bill Ford, and after looking at the card a few moments said:

  “Yeah, this coulda been ours....”

  When I pointed out the watermark, Ford became still more certain. “Yeah, yeah,” he murmured, as if racking his brains. “It was years ago...five, six years ago at least...you know, we don’t do business cards as a rule, but this guy was throwing a lot of money around, so we went ahead. He wanted the best paper he could get, and we had a big stock of Canterbury Laid stashed up for some limited-edition book...you know, one of those books ‘for private distribution only’....” He chuckled.

  “Do you remember what he looked like?” I said.

  “No.” Ford shook his head emphatically. “It’s funny: I have a horrible memory for faces, but a pretty good one for jobs. This card rings a bell, but not the guy who ordered it.”

  “Could he possibly have had a new card made?” I asked. “This card is old—the phone number is inactive.”

  “I couldn’t say,” Ford replied. “Not to my knowledge.”

  I felt at a loss. I seemed so close.... But then Ford turned around and called out: “Harry! Hey, is Harry Wendelson there? Get over here!”

  Presently a small, wiry fellow with thick glasses came up. “Yeah, boss?”

  He took the card from me and showed it to Wendelson. “Look familiar to you?”

  The underling looked at it for a moment, then beamed. “Yeah, sure, boss! The guy came in about a year ago—wanted a new card made, with a new phone number! Just like this, but a different number!”

  I thought my heart was going to stop beating.

  “Do you by chance have the invoice for that new order? Or even the old one?”

  Ford said: “The old one—probably not. The new one, maybe so.”

  He led me into his office, at the back corner of the shop. Setting me down at his own desk, he grabbed a big file drawer bursting with slips of paper and dumped it in front of me.

  “This is only arranged by date, not by name,” Ford said. “But if Harry says it was about a year ago, then that might be the place to start.”

  It took me half an hour to find it. It was even more than I had hoped for. The name on the invoice read: William Sampson, 548 Third Avenue. A differe
nt name, but our man Sanderson clearly enjoyed a certain variety in his nomenclature.

  But the thing I didn’t expect was that the actual wording of the new business card was jotted down—whether in Sanderson’s own hand or Ford’s I didn’t know, and it hardly mattered—right on the invoice.

  It read:

  THE REMOVAL COMPANY

  MUrray Hill 6-9884

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I wasn’t by any means in the clear. I had no idea whether the address that Sanderson/Sampson had given was real or bogus. He would have no reason to give his real “business” address, since that wasn’t going to be on the card.

  All I could hope for was that Sanderson wouldn’t think anyone would trouble to look up this invoice. Like most people, he probably lied only when it suited him; at other times it was simply less bother to tell the truth.

  Anyway, it was all I had to go on. I had his current phone number, apparently, and that might be useful later, but right now I wanted to hunt the man himself down.

  I did not overlook the irony that Sanderson’s presumed place of business—548 Third Avenue, between 36th and 37th Streets—was about three blocks from my own office. But that wasn’t important now. I had a lead—maybe—and needed to pursue it. For once using the luxury of a taxi, I had the guy take me right to the corner of Third and 36th.

  It was not by any means a wealthy area, but it was clean and reputable. A good place for running a quietly nefarious practice. 548 was in the middle of the block, a nondescript four-story building juxtaposed between two buildings several stories higher. The first floor was a deli, if you can believe it.

  That wasn’t what interested me. That was just a front—or even, perhaps, a legitimate business. The stout, balding chap behind the cash register seemed entirely innocuous and perfectly at home in his surroundings. My interest was in what lay in the three stories above the store—and what, if anything, was behind it.

  To that end I walked west along 36th Street, toward Lexington. About half way down the block I came to what I had hoped for—an alley separating the buildings facing Third Avenue from those on Lexington. Going down that narrow alley, scarcely large enough for a medium-sized car to traverse, I found myself looking at the back of the four-story building.