The Long Wait Read online

  “It was real funny at first, then it wasn’t so funny. I picked up an old safe on a dump heap and tried to open it. You know how long it took? Four minutes working the dial. The boys caught me at it and I showed them how to blow the thing apart with a little soup. That door came off like it was sliced off.”

  I looked at Logan and grinned. “See what you can do with that angle. Maybe I’m wanted for burglary someplace.”

  “And if you are?”

  I held out my hands where the fingerprints used to be.

  He shrugged. “Lindsey says they can still bring out impressions.”

  “Okay, let ’em try. I’m willing.”

  “You seem to be pretty cocky about it.”

  “Why not? You think I didn’t try to find out who I was? Hell, man, I went to the Army, Navy, Marines and Veteran’s Bureau trying to see what they could do. I’ve had a half-dozen doctors and experts try to bring out even the faintest sign of a print. They didn’t get anywhere.”

  Logan nodded, the warning plain in his face. “I’ll look around then. If I dig anything up I’ll let you know.”

  “Before or after you give it to Lindsey?”

  “That depends on how good it is,” he told me.

  He swung the car around and headed back up the highway. Traffic was light in both directions and we just loped along taking it easy. I knew he was feeling around for words, then he came right out with it. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Find this Vera you spoke of.”

  His face got tight again. “Why her?”

  “Because she’s the key, that’s why. I told you what was in that letter Johnny wrote. They took everything he had and she laughed while they did it because she was part of it.”

  “Goddamn it!” His hand smacked the wheel violently. “Don’t push everything on her. You’re not sure, you knowl”

  “You still in love with her?”

  “No.” He glanced at me and his face wrinkled up. “No, I’m not. But I was and maybe that makes the difference.”

  “How well did you know her?”

  “Well enough and long enough to know she wasn’t a tramp.”

  “Logan,” I said, “in the few years that I remember anything, I’ve found out that no man knows a damn thing about any woman and that goes double when he’s in love with her.”

  I handed him a cigarette and held up a light. “This newspaper of yours. Does it have any police photos?”

  He looked at me over the light. “Some. Why?”

  “Maybe it has one of the murder room where Minnow was shot?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Let’s go see, huh?”

  He looked at me again without saying anything, took a drag on the cigarette and shoved the car in gear.

  He drove through town to the News building and I waited downstairs while he was gone. Ten minutes later he walked over to the car with a brown folder between his fingers, got in and handed me four blown-up photos.

  The first one showed Minnow dead, slumped forward on his desk, the blotter soaking up the blood that ran down his face. All around him were papers that he had been working on. In one hand was a pencil that had snapped in two when it dug into the desk with a convulsive movement. A stack of letters had been knocked to the floor by the same final twitch and showed spread out on the floor in the corner of the photo.

  The other two pictures were angle shots of the body taking in part of the office background, showing one of the filing cabinets open. Minnow’s coat and hat on a clothes tree, a bookcase that apparently contained his law books and an umbrella stand. The last picture showed the gun on the floor.

  I turned them to odd angles, checking them again. They were pretty clear in detail and a lot of the papers on the desk were readable. Most of them were parts of briefs, one a copy of an indictment and the rest of a general legal nature. Some of the letters scattered around had canceled stamps on them while a few were outgoing. One or two had something written across the face to identify the contents and nothing else.

  When I finished I tucked them back in the folder. Logan said, “Well. What do you make out of them?”

  “Nice gun,” I said.

  “Police positive. Fully loaded and one shot fired.” His mouth tightened. “Your prints were all over it.”

  “Not mine.”

  “That’s right. His. It didn’t take long to check them, either. The bonding company the bank used had them on file right here in town. They checked with Army files in Washington.”

  I could feel the frown start creasing my forehead. Something was wrong as hell. I pulled the photos out, looked them over carefully again and shoved them back in disgust. I said, “How easy would it be for somebody to get in the building?”

  “It wouldn’t be hard to force a window. Not that it would have been necessary. A couple were open. One was in the hall off the back court that led directly up to Minnow’s office.”

  “I see.” I handed him the stuff back and sucked on my cigarette. I couldn’t get it out of my mind that something stunk and my nose wasn’t big enough to catch the smell. Without thinking I finally asked, “What was Minnow working on that night?”

  “The same thing he always worked on. He was after something that would incriminate Servo and get rid of the rottenness in this town.”

  “Is it just Servo?”

  “There’s a lot of them. Servo’s the boy with the brains. No, that’s not the word. Let’s say nerve. He’s ruthless. It’s a sort of gentlemanly ruthlessness that he’s acquired. He owns everything and everybody. Hell, you got to face it, nobody in the city government wants to make a move against him.”

  “Wonderful situation.”

  “For Servo. Someday it’ll change.”

  I said, “Well, thanks for the stuff. Having you around is a big help.”

  His eyes squinted under the scarred lids. “That’s okay. I’m still waiting for that big story. Maybe more.”

  “Vera?”

  “Yeah. I’d still take her back no matter what she was.”

  “You mean as long as she wasn’t a killer or an accessory before the fact,” I grinned at him.

  He said something nasty.

  “There’s something I forgot to ask you,” I said. “Vera and Johnny worked together until the monkey business in the bank came out. How long after it happened did she continue to work there?”

  “Not very long. The two of them took their vacations together. It was during that time that the auditors checked the books and uncovered the theft. I never got to see Vera to talk to after that. She just left the bank and started hanging around the gambling houses in town. She was making quite a splash when Servo picked her up. After that she was with him constantly until the day she just dropped out of sight.”

  “No trace of her since?”

  “No trace,” he repeated dully.

  “I want a picture of her, Logan. Got one?”

  He reached his hand into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. “There’s one in the cardcase,” he told me, “on the bottom of the pile.”

  I shuffled through the cards until I found it, a two-by-three-inch photo on heavy linen paper. And there she was, a lovely natural blonde with hair like new butter flowing down to her shoulders. The photographer had caught her in a coquettish pose, but there was a freshness about her that had to be real. Her mouth was full and soft, her nose tilted gently, ready to laugh. It was hard to tell much about her eyes. They might have been soft eyes or they might have been hard. I couldn’t tell.

  Logan said, “What do you think?”

  “BeautifuL”

  “She was that all right. You can keep that picture if you want it.”

  “Thanks.” I stuck it in my pocket and handed his wallet back.

  “You still didn’t tell me what you were going to do about it,” he said.

  I watched the houses flash by the window a minute. “Logan, Johnny was run out of town because he was involved in something big. Like two hundred t
housand bucks is big. I don’t think Johnny took that dough.”

  “Frame?”

  “Maybe. Vera was involved and when I find her I’ll find the answers.”

  There was a red light up ahead and Logan slowed down for it. When he came to a stop he stared at me meaningly. “I’m pretty well convinced you’re not McBride, but when you started telling me about those unnatural talents of yours I started thinking of something.”

  I caught it fast. “You mean did I discover I was a handy man with figures too?” I asked him.

  “Yeah.”

  “Chum, the only figures I’m good with walk on high heels. I still count on my fingers. I’d make a lousy bank teller.”

  “And the Johnny McBride you knew?”

  I bobbed my head. “He was a mathematical whiz, that guy. He kept the company accounts.”

  The light changed and the car rolled ahead. We were on the edge of town now and Logan took the time to point out some of the bigger hot spots. Most of the places were just starting to get a play and before the hour was out they’d be packed to the doors. Most of the cars in the parking lots were from out of town and about half from out of the state entirely. Lyncastle had the kind of reputation to draw the tourists.

  I noticed little blue signs in a lot of the windows and mentioned it to Logan.

  “Members of the Business Group,” he said, “Servo’s outfit.”

  “What happens if you don’t belong?”

  “Oh hell, there’s no rough stuff involved. About a tenth of the places are independents, but they don’t make out so well. If there is any trouble and you are a member of the group, there’s a lot of money for the best lawyers. Besides that, Servo has a liquor monoply in town and if you don’t belong you don’t get the kind of stuff the customers want.”

  “Never any trouble from the public?”

  Logan grunted mirthlessly. “There would have been at one time. There would still be if the damn public would get the merchants out of politics and run the town themselves. What the hell, you can’t blame them too much. There’s a lot of new money in town now if you can stand to live with the kind of people who have it.”

  “You ought to have an opinion on it, Logan. What is it?”

  I saw his lips come back in a sneer. “I’ve covered murder cases, I’ve seen kids who were raped on the streets, I watched them pull young mangled bodies from the wrecks of cars that had a drunk at the wheel, I’ve had to live under laws set up by a pack of ignorant bastards who take all the cream and throw the rest to the people who vote for them. Now you know what my opinion is.”

  “Who runs the town now?”

  “Balls.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Who the hell knows?”

  “You should know, you’re a newspaperman,” I said.

  “Yeah, I should know, a lot of things. Look, feller, whoever is at the top pulling the strings does it under the nicest cover you ever saw. There’s more money in this town than you can imagine, but it isn’t going down into any books. We’ve had the feds in here and boys from the attorney general’s office trying to get to the bottom of it and they all come up shaking their heads.

  “A lot of people try to put it on Servo, but he’s clean. He pays his taxes and stays out of trouble. They try it on the mayor and the city council and what happens? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Nobody knows from nothing.”

  He stopped abruptly and looked at me sidewise. “What are you getting at?”

  “Nothing special.” We were in the center of town by then and slowing down for another light. “Let me out on the corner, Logan.”

  He pulled in to the curb and stopped. I swung out of the car and slammed the door shut. He said, “If you stay alive long enough to find out anything, you can reach me at the office.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I’m going to backtrack over your story, you know.”

  “I expected that.”

  “Where can I find you?”

  I laughed at him. “You can’t, pal. I’ll find you. If I’m still alive, that is.”

  I watched him pull away into traffic, then went into a joint and had a beer. The place was called Little Bohemia and had a blue sign in the window. There were slots all around the walls going full blast, an ornate juke box to drown out the sound of more money going into them than was coming out, a sheet-covered roulette wheel and two crap tables in the back and a chrome and plastic bar forming a huge oval in the center of the place.

  Beer was two-bits a throw.

  A sign said something about not serving minors, but I’d like to have a buck for every overpainted chippy in the place who hadn’t seen eighteen yet. Most of them were there for strictly one reason, sipping their drinks until they found a sucker to finance some faster drinking.

  I had my beer and went next door where there was no blue sign in the window. Beer was a dime, but there weren’t any customers, either. The bartender was feeding the relic of a slot machine until he saw me. I said, “Where’d that come from?”

  “Boss had it in his cellar ever since Prohibition. What’ll you have?”

  “Beer. Where’s the crowd?”

  “You new around here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh. They come in later. They get squeezed outa the other joints or run out of dough. Then we get ’em here.”

  “You ought to get in some slots.”

  “Yeah, tell that to the boss. He’s one of them rugged individuals, he is.”

  “He won’t play Servo’s game, hey?”

  “I thought you was new around here.”

  “Hell, this town makes the news all over.”

  “Yeah. Another beer?”

  “One more.” He set it up for me, had one with me, then I asked, “Look, maybe you can help me out. I’m looking for a girl named Vera West. She’s a relative of mine, see? About five years ago she got in some kind of a jam at the bank here in town, then went to the dogs. She used to go around with Servo.”

  The bartender sipped his beer and made circles with the glass on the bar. “Servo has lots of women.”

  “This one was a blonde, a real honey blonde.”

  “Nice build?”

  I couldn’t say for sure, but women take care of those things if they haven’t already got them so I just nodded.

  “He had one tomato a long time ago who was a knockout. She was a blonde.”

  “Remember her name?”

  He made more circles with the glass. “Mac, if I did know I don’t think I’d tell you. I’m a family man. I work here and let it go at that.”

  “Servo’s trouble?” I tried to act surprised.

  “Not personally .. he’s too much of a big shot to do his own knuckle-work. Let’s quit asking questions.”

  “Sure, sure,” I agreed “but you know how it is. I’d like to find her.”

  He spoke more to the open door than to me. “The babes Servo makes usually wind up in the cellar. Try the red light district once.”

  I tossed the beer down and pushed the change out to him. “I’ll do that Thanks.” He picked up the change with a nod and was feeding it in the slot when I went out the door.

  It was hot as hell again. The sky was a hazy gray and over in the east I could see the outlines of an early thunderstorm building up. It didn’t seem to bother any of the people on the street Not with all those nice air-conditioned places with the blue signs in the window to wait out the weather. That was another monopoly Servo seemed to have.

  I took it easy walking down the street, acting like I had all the time in the world on my hands. I spent an hour at it, getting an idea of what made the city tick. There were a lot of things that helped, like the cops who poured the coal on the residents for parking overtime while anybody with a tag from outside the city got away with murder. Practically.

  Like the candy store where I bought the paper and saw a guy in a flashy sports outfit stuff a roll of bills in a briefcase and hand it over to another guy who had a car waiting outside
.

  Like the women who had everything but “for rent” signs hanging from their nipples cruising the streets for customers.

  Like the expensive-looking guy who had an early load on being helped into a police car very gently with orders from the bar owner to see that he got to the train station safely.

  Like the shoeshine boys who charged a half a buck for a polish and rub then griped when there wasn’t any tip besides.

  Oh, Lyncastle was a great town. Great.

  Then I saw Lindsey. He was having a coke at the counter of a modern version of an old general store. The sign over the front read “Philbert’s” in neon script and a directory listed what was to be found inside. Food and drugs on the left. Sodas on the right and beer further back. Hardware, paints and home supplies up the middle aisles. Printing, photostating and office supplies in the back.

  I walked in and sat down beside him. Like the spider and Miss Muffet. I said, “Howdy, pardner,” and he didn’t even look at me. His face seemed to puff up around his mouth and the straw flattened out from too much pressure at the top. I said, “Cat got your tongue?”

  He turned around slowly. “Johnny, you’re too goddamned wise for your own good.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “I’m telling you again.”

  “Then get some smarter cops. That deal you pulled this morning stunk.”

  “You seem to know a lot about cops.”

  I ordered a coke and a sandwich for myself. “I do ... about the kind you have in this burg. You know about them?”

  “I know about them.” His voice was a flat snarl.

  “Then keep them off my back, Lindsey. When you slap me with a murder charge you can do what you damn well please, but until then, lay off.”

  “You bastard!” He almost whispered it.

  I took a bite of my sandwich and grinned at him. “You know it’s a wonder you don’t at least ask me whether or not I killed your friend.”