Росс Макдональд: Dark Tunnel

When we turned the corner of the building, I saw the green coupe parked at the curb.

I whispered to keep from shouting, “That’s Peter Schneider’s car.”

“It looks like it,” Gordon said.

He parked and we got out and looked at the coupe. It was a 1938 Ford V-8, an ordinary enough car but I didn’t like it. It had chased me down a dirt road at dawn. Now it sat at the curb, quiet and dead, like an empty green beetle shell.

Gordon searched the back of the seat and the dashboard cupboard. The ignition key was in place but there was nothing in the car. He got behind the wheel and started the engine. It started smoothly enough but I noticed that the needle of the tank gauge pointed to Empty. Gordon saw it, too:

“He may have seen that he was running out of gas and left his car here so he wouldn’t have to abandon it on the road.”

“Maybe he ran out of coupons,” I said.

Gordon said unsmilingly: “He must have got here this morning about when the shift changes. That would give him a good chance to take a bus to Detroit without being observed.”

The engine coughed and Gordon switched it off. A weather-beaten man in a blue uniform with wide shoulders and a narrow waist hugged by a black Sam Browne belt came round the corner.

“My name’s Killoran,” he said. “You’re Mr. Gordon, isn’t that right?”

“Yes. Where did you pick up this car?”

“We went over the parking-lots when you phoned us and found this over behind the Bomber School, and we brought it here. I don’t know if it’s the one you want but it answers the description.”

“You keep a file of the employees’ license-numbers, don’t you?”

“Yeah, only this crate is listed under a guy called Ludwig Vlathek”

“It is, eh?” Gordon looked at me and I looked at him. “I want your complete file on Ludwig Vlathek.”

Killoran turned to the fat guard, who had trailed him around the corner at a distance. “Raym, get the file on Ludwig Vlathek. V-L-A-T-H-E-K. If there’s more than one Vlathek, it’s the one with the California birth-certificate I want.”

Raym heaved himself out of sight. I wondered about the birth-certificate, but remembered that they can be forged.

“What’s this guy wanted for?” Killoran asked.

“Read it in the papers,” Gordon said, “if it’s the right man. Was there anything in the car?”

“Not a thing. Just a jack and crank under the seat. Oh, yeah, and an old newspaper. I swiped it to take home. I don’t often get to see a Canadian newspaper.”

“Give it to me,” Gordon said. “And in future leave things as you find them.”

Killoran produced a wooden, “Yessir,” and brought the paper out of his inside breast pocket.

Gordon unfolded it and I looked at it over, his shoulder. It was the Toronto Globe and Mail of the day before. He riffled through it hurriedly, scanning it page by page. Near the top of page eight, directly below a picture of Wendell Willkie, there was a piece torn out.

“It would be interesting,” Gordon said, “to know what our friend tore out of a Canadian newspaper.”

“Our good friend. Bonamy,” I said cryptically because Killoran was standing beside us with his ears perked up. “I can find out, the university Library takes it. Let’s see, third column on page eight.”

“I’ll have a man check it in the Detroit Library,” Gordon said.

Raym appeared with a heavy paper folder under his arm. He handed it to Killoran and Killoran handed it to Gordon.

“It’s all here, is it, captain?” Gordon said. “Thanks for your co-operation. Hold the car until you hear from us, will you?”

“Yeah. Good luck.” He went away with Raym at his heels.

Gordon and I climbed into the black sedan and he opened the folder. Attached to one of the sheets there was a small photograph, hardly bigger than passport size, of a man’s head and collar.

“Do you recognize Ludwig Vlathek?” Gordon said and handed me the picture.

Vlathek’s hair was dark and curly but his skin looked very fair. The eyebrows on the prominent eye-ridges were long and thin and curved, like a woman’s eyebrows which have been plucked and lengthened with a pencil. The eyes were pale behind rimless spectacles and the general impression of the face was one of almost grotesque earnestness, emphasized by the sharp triangular chin and thick straight nose.

I knew the eyes under their bulbous ridges, but the last time I had seen them they were set under eyebrows so faint they were almost invisible.

“This is Peter Schneider, with a dark wig and eyebrows and glasses.”

“I never got a good look at Schneider,” Gordon said, “but I’d have my doubts of Vlathek if he looked like a typical Rabbi. Now we’ve got two versions of Schneider to look for.”

“I don’t like either of them. I’d like Peter best as a bare skull that had been dead a long time. Alas, poor Vlathek.”

Gordon started the car and we circled the Employment Office and went out through the Exit gates. Killoran saluted as we passed.

We turned into the expressway and headed for Detroit at a speed that wasted rubber.

“What was Vlathek’s job?” Gordon said. “Can you find it in the folder?”

I picked it up from the seat between us and went through it. Born in California – the certificate must have been forged. Experience at the Skoda works in Czechoslovakia. That was possible, but the Nazis had controlled the Skoda records for years. I found what I wanted:

“He’s an inspector in the machine tool division.”

“No wonder they’ve been having production trouble. Where does he live?”

I found the address and told him, “215 Pequegnat Street, Detroit.”

Gordon said nothing, but the speedometer climbed so that the wind blasted the windshield.

“Does that mean anything to you?” I said.

“Uh-huh. Something,” he said with painful smugness. “215 Pequegnat Street, eh? A small world.”

“Well?” I said not with a bang but a whimper. Gordon smiled secretly. The car was whistling down the expressway like a long, black bullet. I looked at the speedometer again. The airblast on the windshield was a ninety-mile-an-hour hurricane now. When we hit the top of a rise the wheels soared off the road for a fraction of a second.

Gordon flicked an eye at the speedometer and said, “We’ll hold her there – no use taking risks.”

“Of course not,” I said. “That would be foolhardy, indeed. Why the warm, mysterious glow about Vlathek’s address?”

“Rudolf Fisher lives at 215 Pequegnat Street.”

Pequegnat Street was in a lower middle-class residential section near Gratiot and Seven Mile Road, the kind of section where people are neither high-class nor the low-class enough to know their neighbors. The houses were all the same, middle-sized frame buildings too old to be smart and too new to be interesting, each with a patch of lawn big enough to turn a somersault on.

There was nobody turning somersaults on Pequegnat Street when we got there after breaking all the speed-laws of the County of Wayne and the City of Detroit. Except for a few parked cars, the street was empty as far as I could see. The houses had a blank, closed-up look like the secretive look of a woman who has no secrets. The house with 215 painted on its glass number-plate had Venetian blinds which gave it a more secret look than the other houses, but it had the same number of windows of the same size and shape in the same positions.

Gordon drove past the house without slackening speed and I said, “Hey! We passed 215.”

“That’s right.”

He turned the next corner, parked fifty feet from the intersection, turned off the motor, and waited. In a minute a blue Ford roadster which I had noticed when we passed it on Pequegnat Street came round the corner and parked behind us. A burly young man who looked like an insurance agent got out of the roadster and came up to our car on Gordon’s side.