Ed McBain - The House That Jack Built

Toots drove to another part of the lot, made a turn, came circling back to where she’d been parked. Leona Summerville was taking a long time starting her car. Toots made yet another circle. On her third pass, Leona had finally got the Jag moving. Toots dropped in behind her.

She was wondering why Leona had purchased a gun.

There were times when Warren Chambers felt that everything in Calusa was Mickey Mouse.

Take the morgue.

Not the morgue at Calusa’s Good Samaritan Hospital, which Warren had never had the privilege of seeing, but the morgue at the Calusa Herald-Tribune where — at nine o’clock that Wednesday night — he and Toots Kiley tried to assemble some data on the Brechtmann family.

Now normally, if you ran a newspaper morgue the way it should be run, everything on any given topic was in a master file, with duplicates of individual stories in appropriate subfiles.

As, for example, take Warren Chambers.

There was not, in fact, a file on Warren — master or otherwise — in the Herald-Tribune’s morgue. But if there’d been such a file, it probably would have been labeled chambers, warren, and there’d be everything anyone ever wanted to know about him in that file — where he was born, what his parents’ names were, where he’d lived, his various occupations over the years, and so on, right up to the present. A complete dossier on Warren Chambers. Anything about him that had ever appeared in the newspaper, right there in the master file.

But this primary source would also generate copies that filtered down into various other files. For example, if there was a story about Warren having worked for the St. Louis PD., then a copy of that story would pop up in the file labeled ST. LOUIS and also the file labeled POLICE. The main file was like a smash-hit sitcom. It generated spinoffs. But you didn’t have to look through all the spinoff files to understand what the initial programming had been. You just went back to the smash-hit CHAMBERS, WARREN file.

Well, in this Mickey Mouse morgue in the Mickey Mouse city of Calusa, Florida, there were no master files on anyone in the Brechtmann family.

Nothing.

Zilch.

Nothing on BRECHTMANN, JACOB, who’d opened the city’s one and only brewery and built Calusa’s most luxurious private dwelling.

Nothing on BRECHTMANN, CHARLOTTE, the great beauty Jake married and carried to Calusa.

Nothing on their son BRECHTMANN, FRANZ, who’d married Sophie.

Nothing on BRECHTMANN, SOPHIE, either.

Or BRECHTMANN, ELISE.

Who, according to Sophie Brechtmann, was the end of the Brechtmann line here in America, in that Elise was as yet unmarried and still childless.

But who, according to Abbott pere et fille , was the mother of Helen Abbott, now the proper heiress to the Brechtmann fortune.

There was no file labeled ABBOTT, HELEN.

There was a file labeled SINATRA, FRANK.

Who did not live in the city of Calusa, Florida.

Warren shook his head. So did Toots. It was going to be a long night.

The man who’d let them into the morgue was a reporter Warren knew. He told Warren that if anyone asked them what they were doing there, they should say they were researching a story for Andy Marquez. That was the reporter’s name. So now, at nine o’clock on a Tuesday night, with lightning flashes intermittently streaking the sky beyond the high windows, distant thunder indicating rain over Sarasota or yet farther north, Warren and Toots tried to get a handle on the newspaper’s filing system because they knew for damn sure there had to be something on one of the most prominent families in Calusa.

“How about we look under ‘Breweries’?” Toots said.

“Yeah,” Warren said, and they went together to the “B” files. “Where’d she take you this afternoon?” he asked.

“To a gun shop,” Toots said.

“What?”

“Yeah. Our lady bought a gun. At least circumstantially. She spent a half-hour, forty-five minutes in a place called Bobby’s Gun Exchange, on the Trail and West Cedar. Came out carrying a wrapped package, I have to assume it was a gun.”

“Why the hell would she buy a gun?”

“Maybe she plans to shoot somebody.”

“God, I hope not,” Warren said. “Nothing under ‘Breweries.’ What the hell kind of a newspaper is this?”

“Try under ‘Beer,’” Toots said.

“Yeah,” Warren said. “What time did you tuck her in?”

“I waited outside the house till her husband got home. At least, I assume it was her husband. He let himself in with a key.”

“What was he driving?”

“Brown Mercedes.”

“Yeah, Frank Summerville,” Warren said.

There was nothing under BEER.

“Jesus,” Warren said.

“Try ‘Alcoholic Beverages,’” Toots said.

“This is worse than the Yellow Pages,” Warren said.

They found a thick folder labeled ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES.

“Bingo,” Warren said, and carried the folder to a long table positioned between the windows and the filing cabinets. There were two green-shaded lights over the table. Lightning flashed outside. There was a rumble of thunder that sounded somewhat closer. The room felt cozy. They sat side by side and began leafing through the clippings in the folder.

There was no chronological order to the file.

“This is impossible,” Warren said.

“Infuriating,” Toots said.

They found a June 10, 1935, story about the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous in New York City.

They found a May 16, 1985, story about the Soviet Union cutting production of vodka, raising the drinking age from eighteen to twenty-one, and banning the sale of liquor before two RM. on workdays.

They found an obviously misfiled story about the drug-overdose death of John Belushi on March 5, 1982.

They found an October 7, 1913, article about the death of the brewer Adolphus Busch.

There was a December 5, 1933, story about the jubilant repeal of the 18th Amendment.

And a January 16, 1920, article announcing the official start of National Prohibition.

And a November 23, 1921, piece about the Anti-Beer Bill, which made it illegal for doctors to prescribe beer for medicinal purposes.

And…

“I can’t believe it!” Warren said.

A front-page story dated September 14, 1906.

The headline read:

The subhead read:

The story told all about the new brewery on U.S. 41 and explained that it was not expected to raise local employment levels by very much since the actual brewing of beer was not a labor-intensive industry, and since management would still be operating out of the New York office. But the city of Calusa was nonetheless proud to have been chosen as the site of the first Brechtmann brewery outside of New York, and equally proud to welcome the Brechtmann family as neighbors. The article went on to describe the “beauteous European beauty Charlotte Brechtmann” and the “exquisite Spanish-style estate” the Brechtmanns had built on Fatback Key. It discreetly mentioned that Mrs. Brechtmann was expecting her first child in November.

There was nothing else about the Brechtmanns in the ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES folder.

“Where do we go from here?” Warren asked.

“Try ‘Births’,” Toots said.

There were eight folders labeled birth announcements.

Each of them was at least four inches thick.

“Please let them be chronological,” Warren said.