John MacDonald - The Good Old Stuff

“It makes a hell of a racket. It stopped after she was down and I had my fingers on her pulse. You have to have a guy on it to keep it running.”

By noon they had worked on Barnes and Schortz for an hour apiece and gotten nowhere. Brasher complained that they were slowing down operations and wasting time. At noon, Brock took Jane Tarrance down to the lunch wagon down the street.

He could see that she had been crying, and she told him that she had phoned the hospital just before noon and they had said there was no change in Miss Galloway’s condition.

“Jane, you lived with her, roomed with her. Have you got any hunches? Did she act differently the last few days?”

Jane sipped her coffee. “I... I think so. She was dressing last Tuesday night. You were coming to pick her up, remember? She was looking in her mirror, and I looked at her and she seemed to be miles away. I asked her if it was an old boyfriend and she said no. She said that there was something she was going to try to remember, and that if it didn’t come back, she was going to phone an old friend of hers and he’d help her remember. I tried to tease it out of her, but she just smiled sort of mysteriously and said that I could sit back and watch the fireworks. Those are the words she used.”

Brock stirred his coffee, said, “You realize, of course, that if she had told you, you’d now know the reason why she was shot.”

Jane’s eyes went wide. “You think so?”

“Elimination. It is the only clue to motive that we have. Therefore, it must be the clue. Did she make the phone call she talked about?”

“No. The next night she came back from the date with you. She was happy as a lark. She woke me up and told me that she had remembered that little thing she was thinking of on Tuesday night, but that before she jumped she’d have to make certain that she wasn’t being tangled up in a coincidence that would just make her look silly.”

“Jane, please try to remember her exact words on each occasion. Tell me what you said too, and I’ll write them down. They may be the answer.”

Back at the plant he met Maclaren, who said that he was going home and get some sleep and the hell with it. Maclaren said that it didn’t look like it could be any one of the five and yet he felt it had to be. He said that he’d feel clearer in the head if he got some sleep, and he advised Brock to do the same. Brock felt the weariness in his back and legs, and his eyes felt as though there was grit in them, but he knew that he could keep going. He knew that if he went back to his bed it would be impossible to sleep.

He didn’t tell Maclaren about the conversation with Jane. He had cautioned Jane to be silent, knowing that sooner or later Maclaren or one of his men would come around to her. The information he had was too vague to go on. He took the notebook out of his pocket and stood by the water cooler, reading the conversation.

Oliver came down the stairs, grinned at him, and said, “Did you hear the peeling I just got?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, this whole mess has got little Walter into a foul humor, and he’s been taking it out on me. I am no longer his fair-haired boy. Now I’m a dope who wasted forty thousand bucks of the firm’s money.”

Hodge Oliver leaned over the fountain and drank. As he straightened up, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, Brock said, “I don’t get it.”

“Heck, Brock, I talked myself into this job on the basis of some mechanical engineering background. You see, the old idea was that Brasher bid on miscellaneous mixed scrap, performed the sorting and baling, if necessary, with cheap labor, and then resold the clean scrap for enough to cover his costs and make himself a profit. I sold him on the idea that I could go around and buy junk equipment whenever I could find a good price and felt certain that, with the dismantling of it, we could get our dough back plus a profit. He sent me around to auctions and sales, and now he doesn’t like the last forty thousand I spent. I was working on the stuff at the time Stella was shot.”

“What is the stuff?”

“Oh, two thousand gimmicks that were Vietnam surplus. I got ’em for twenty bucks apiece. Sort of a computing gadget. They’re all out in the back end of the shop. I’m certain that I can rig them around some way so that we can unload them at a profit, but now little Walter thinks I’m nuts and he’s sorry he ever got off the straight, semifabricated, and unfabricated scrap business.”

Once again Brock stood by her bed and looked down at the face, darkening with the shadow of death. He stood, large and brooding, looking at her dry lips, at the painful slightness of her under the hospital blankets — and for a long time he thought.

From the lower corridor of the hospital, he phoned Maclaren, who was back on duty. Maclaren objected at first, but at last he listened to Brock’s plan.

Brock went back to the plant and went into Brasher’s office, managing to smile. “The doctors just told me that Miss Galloway will be okay. She’ll be able to talk tomorrow.”

He also told Jane and Karkoff and Oliver and the switchboard girl and the guard and the office boy. Every one of them looked pleased. Everyone told him that it was swell, that Galloway was a good kid.

Horowitz and Maclaren sat in Brasher’s office and the overhead light shone out across the shadowy expanse of desks, across the hooded typewriters. Brock stepped over to the desk and reached for Maclaren’s cigarettes. He missed the pack, staggered slightly, and got it with his second grasp. Maclaren looked up at him suddenly. “When have you slept, Jud?”

“Not for quite a while.”

“Go to bed. We’ll take care of this.”

“I couldn’t sleep if I did, John. I’m okay.”

“All we can do is wait,” Horowitz said.

“Have we got good men on Galloway?” Brock asked. Neither of the two seemed to notice the use of the word “we.” Somehow Brock had gained acceptance.

“The best,” Horowitz said. “Plus good guys on each of the others. The only one we don’t have to fret about is Oliver. He’s over in the shop working on something. I guess he fouled up and he’s trying to redeem himself with the boss.”

The minutes passed in silent monotony while the three men smoked and glanced at the phone. Maclaren sent a man out for coffee and more cigarettes.

Maclaren snatched the phone when it rang. “Yeah? What! Sure. Grab him. Don’t lose him. Bring him right back here. Thanks.” He hung up.

He looked puzzled. He said, “For the hell of it, just to play safe, I stuck guys at the bus station, railroad station, and on the two bridges. I figured that if any of the tails slipped up, we’d have a second line of defense. Walker, over on the Anders Avenue Bridge, has picked up Karkoff in his jalopy headed out of town. He’s bringing him over. Hell, we didn’t even have a tail on that boy. According to the noise of that baler, he couldn’t have done it.”

Brock felt a lot of his weariness disappear, felt the muscles bunch along his thick arms as he clenched his hard hands. This was a start. Maybe this was it.

Karkoff slouched in the straight chair and said, “I tell you, you guys are on the wrong track. Sure, I got a record. That was a hell of a long time ago and I’ve been straight ever since. But that don’t do me no good when it comes to a thing like this. I figured that if you guys couldn’t find out who did it, you’d pin it on me somehow. I was skipping out of town, sure. But I don’t know anything about it.”

Brock stepped over to the chair, clubbed Karkoff in the side of the head with a clenched fist, picked him up off the floor, and jammed him back into the chair.

Karkoff shook the mist out of his eyes and said, “That stuff won’t do you no good, pal. I got nothing to tell you.”