Ed Lacy - Lead With Your Left

“I'd be a combination straw boss and cop?”

“Now don't get a wrong slant. We don't have trouble every day or every week, but it does happen, and it jacks up our insurance premiums. Lad, the secret of this business is to knock off every penny of overhead possible, to save every second of—” Uncle Frank pointed to my wrist watch and shot out of his chair as if he was goosed. “Lord, where does time go to! It's three-thirty. I'm late for my appointment. Think it over, my boy, a long-range opportunity. You may be boss of the place by the time you're thirty-five. Phone me here tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow is Saturday,” I said as Uncle Frank opened a locker, took off his dungarees and shirt, standing in faded pink silk shorts for a second, his legs veined and skinny. Then he changed to a dark brown suit that was sloppy around the shoulders.

“Phone me, I'll be here. Saturdays, Sundays, I'm always here.”

I stood up. “I'll think about it but I'm pretty sure this isn't for me. If I'm going to be a cop I want to be a real one, not a store badge.”

“My tie straight? Don't make any snap judgment you'll regret. You won't be a 'cop' here, you'll be a junior executive. Talk it over with Mary. When are you two coming over for supper? We have to get together more. Tie straight now?”

I fixed his tie and he grabbed his hat and almost flew out of the office. I stood there for a moment, wondering why I didn't have the guts to tell him to stick his job. Mary and her great ulcer deals.

I used his mirror to comb my hair, take a few specks off my suit, then picked up his phone and told the switchboard operator I wanted an outside line, dialed Rose. She was home and I said I was on my way up.

“I'll be in the rest of the day, working. I haven't had any more trouble, not even a phone call. I'm grateful. What do you want to see me about?”

“A few questions about something else.... I'll be up in a half-hour.”

After the bedlam of the freight company the street was practically quiet and the sunlight clean. I wanted to buy Ma a box of candy or some flowers but I had less than a buck on me. On the subway ride uptown I kept thinking of the blackmail angle: Owens and Wales might have been working with a third character, perhaps a licensed private jerk—although what made having a license so important? They got shady jobs—nobody turns to a private dick unless there's a reason why he can't go to the police—and worked small-time blackmail on businessmen like Wren. If they got four or five grand at a clip, made a couple of scores a year, that could account for Wales' money belt—he could have saved eleven grand over a span of half a dozen years easily, the frugal way he lived.

But where was Owens' dough? Or was this their first job and Owens refused to split, that's why Wales gunned him? Couldn't be their first job. Where did Wales' bundle come from?

But I couldn't buy that at all, or any part of it. You don't kill because somebody holds out a grand. Maybe a punk did but not an old time conservative cop like Wales. Cop—damnit they were good cops, why should they be doing something crooked in the last years of their lives? Why was everybody so sure Wales had killed his partner? Wasn't for the gun, there wouldn't be any connection between the crimes. But there was the gun. Perhaps the gun had been planted in his room when the killer finished Wales? Or was Wales so dumb as to keep a murder weapon around?

I made a note of that, wondered why I'd overlooked the angle before. A planted gun added, kept Wales in character. Only what kind of character if they were shakedown artists? And to use Wales' gun, then plant it, a guy would have to be a close friend of Wales. That could be the third party, the private dick, perhaps using Wales and Owens without their suspecting? Nuts, they were old hands, they'd know. And they had to know or how did Wales get all the dough, Owens the four grand?

I made another note, as I got off the subway, to have a talk with Data, Inc. Saturday morning. Not impossible Owens had been working for them, or if Wren had wanted to get Owens, he would have arranged it through Data. They could give me the dope on what was cooking in the private eye racket. Be a joy talking to them: when I mentioned murder they'd squirm, forget their toy gadgets!

Rose was barefooted in thin black cotton Chinese pants and a loose red pullover that showed curves whenever and wherever the shirt touched her. A warm smile followed her “Do come in.”

The place looked even smaller, maybe because of the piles of papers and open books next to her typewriter. As I sat down on the couch I told her, “Turn around, please.”

She spun around, looked puzzled.

“I like the outfit. You look good enough to have for dessert.”

She hesitated, smiled and said “Thank you” and added, “Do you want to take off your coat? It's been so muggy.”

“I'm okay, won't keep you long. How's the article coming?”

“Fine. I'll be finished in a few days. Want a cool drink? I have an interesting concoction—coconut milk and ginger beer.”

“I'll try some. How did you dream that up?”

“Always drank it down in the islands,” Rose said, walking to the tiny refrigerator, moving like a dancer. She poured two glasses of what looked like thin milk.

She sat beside me as she handed me a glass, watched my face as I took a cautious sip, then gulped it down. It was cool and spicy. “This is the best. Can you buy coconuts around here?”

“Science marches on. Coconut milk is now canned in Puerto Rico.”

“Ought to take a can up to my mother. She's always experimenting on the stove.”

“I'll give you a can,” Rose said sipping her drink. “I get them on the cuff—I write advertising copy for one of the Spanish-speaking newspapers. Want some more?”

“A little.” She poured part of her drink into my glass and I got so excited I was certain I was blushing. It was crazy but the intimacy of it gave me ideas—and the cold drink ended them. I said, “Your buddy, Edwin Wren, must have had this in mind when he told me about a new drink.”

“Edwin Wren? What were you talking to him about?”

“He suddenly cropped up in another case. Why I'm here. What do you know about him?”

“Almost everything. He's fifty-seven, an engineer, married, has two daughters—one goes to Smith and the other is married to a doctor out west someplace. His wife is active in the usual middle-class civic organizations. They live in an old duplex apartment on Riverside Drive and Eighty-second Street and he goes in—”

“He lives on Riverside and Eighty-second?” I asked. That was only three blocks from where Owens was killed.

“That's right, lived there for many years. He goes in for modest cars—in fact the Wrens live modestly, although over a five-year period he has averaged $25,000 a year, above taxes. Wren & Company was almost a one-man affair till the war. He landed a couple of big subcontracts, and was able to expand and—”

“Was he ever in any trouble—criminal stuff?”

“Never. This case—what's it all about?”

“I'm working on a double murder and his name popped up in connection with a... check,” I said, knowing I was talking too much. Wales had warned me about that. Had he talked too much himself? “Where is Wren from?”

“Born here, graduated into the depression, tried to get a job in South America but—”

“Hold it. What part of South America and when?” I cut in. Susan Owens worked in S.A.

“He never got the job, he lacked experience and in those days a company could get its pick of engineers. He worked on WPA for a few years and along about 1934 opened a small factory in the Bronx, made doorbells and cheap electric chimes. He moved to his present plant in 1949 and has been growing ever since. If they can swing this wire-paint monopoly he'll be in the millionaire bracket. All this of any help to you?”

“He sounds like a solid, aggressive business joker. You sure he's never been in any beef with the law?”

“Not the criminal law.”

I must have looked blank for she gave me a full smile and said, “Mr. Detective, let me remind you there are such things as civil laws too and they also can be broken. As my article will prove, Wren and the others are acting in restraint of trade and—”

“Easy there. I'm too tired for a lecture. What I want to know is, was he ever in any lawsuits, jams, anything like that?”

“Plenty,” she said going over to a file cabinet and returning with a folder of notes, newspaper clippings and booklets. She sat on the couch, feet under her, stubby painted toes near my hand. Dumping the folder out all over her lap, she said, “He's had the usual manufacturer's lawsuits—suits claiming he had received damaged raw material. Here, in 1939 he was sued on a buzzer patent and won. One of his trucks ran down a man in 1946 and Wren settled out of court for $2,700. In 1949 he sued a bank for $20,000 claiming somebody named Butler had forged his name to a check for that amount and it was the bank's responsibility to check his signature. Handwriting experts agreed it was a forged signature and the bank had to make good to Wren.”

“In 1949. What month? You know Butler's full name, if he was ever collared?”

“Collared?” “Arrested?”

“No. I only have a brief note on it. You said 'he.' I don't recall if Butler was a man or woman. But you can check the '49 papers or a newspaper morgue. Can't you tell me what you're looking for? I might be of more help.”

“I'm hunting for that corny needle in the haystack. Fishing blindly, hoping I'll come up with something.”

“But how does Wren fit into this 'something'?”

“I'm not sure he does except I don't believe in coincidences and he's beginning to figure in too damn many. But it doesn't add: I'm looking for a killer and he's just a business sharpshooter.”

Rose gathered up her notes. “Do I detect a chamber-of-commerce sanctimonious sound when you said 'business'? The bigger the business, the more ruthless the—” “Hey, get off the soapbox.”

“It's true. In the name of business whole islands and countries have been—and are—kept in poverty, strikers have been killed.... Hitler went to war to increase German markets and in my own Puerto Rico the—”

“Honey, I'm looking for a cold-blooded thug who has shot one man, maybe two. Much as you dislike Wren I doubt if you'd call him a murderer, a killer.”

She shrugged and the red shirt did a rumba. “No, I doubt if he would use a gun. But remember, a gun and a knife are the more obvious weapons, poverty has killed more people than all the bullets ever made....”

I grabbed one of the catalogues of Wren & Company, made believe I was going to shut her lips with it. “Now don't give me speeches. This killer is the kind who didn't hesitate to use a gun in daytime on the street, in a furnished room with—” I stopped talking, stared at the cover of the catalogue. There was a little brown bird on the corner of the cover. “What's this?”

“An advertising tag Wren used at one time... wren—a small brown bird.”

A warm glow started up my spine and then faded away. “You see, another damn coincidence. There was a man involved, after a fashion, in the... Anybody ever call Wren, or was he ever known as, The Bird?” And I thought, I have to take it easy, make a bad collar with Wren as The Bird and I'll sure have to take Uncle Frank's job.

“I never heard him called that. I still don't know what this is all about.”

I stood up. “Forget it, I talk too much. I'm keeping you from your writing and I'm due at my mother's for supper and she'll be sore enough without my being late. If you'll let me have that can of coconut milk, I'll scram. And don't worry about Wren ever bothering you again, he told me he's given you up. Tell me, when these calls and the shadowing first started, did you ever notice a plump, middle-aged man asking around about you? Shabby dresser. Have you ever heard the name Francis Parker?”

“No. I never saw anybody except those men who pushed me on the street. First time I didn't see who pushed me. Then the time before you saw them, they had reversed things—the tall one did the jostling. My curiosity is eating me up. What... ?”

“When did the calls first start, when did you first think you were being shadowed?”

“About a week ago.”

“Only a week ago?” That could still figure. Once Owens gave him the dope it might have taken Wren time, to find the right private eye. Only the woods were full of starving private badges, why should it take him a month to find one? And even if Wren was The Bird, why should he kill Owens and Wales twenty-five years after Sal Kahn burned? Still it was a hell of a lead to look into. I glanced at my watch. “I'm late. Where's my coconut?”

She took a can down from the shelf, even put it in a bag for me. “But you can't leave me hanging like this. What's it all about?”

“Honey, that old saying about what you don't know won't hurt you may be terribly true in this case. We're dealing with a killer. And if I told you the wild idea batting around In my noggin, the least might happen to you would be a rough libel suit. Forget I ran my big mouth. I'll let you know what Ma thinks of this coconut milk. Good-by now.” I winked at her and opened the door.

Rose looked astonished, then laughed, deep real laughter. “I never had anybody wink at me before.”

“Then you're long due. I'll drop in again.” I waved and ran down the steps.

I walked slowly up to the corner, not sure what to do. Crime cases follow set patterns. If it had been a killing done in a moment of anger it could be anybody. But both these were obviously carefully planned killings. And a successful businessman isn't a gun for hire, doesn't go to a man's room and kill him, or gun a guy in an alley. If anything, he hires a goon and a guy like Wren would have to be out of his mind to hire a killer, be paying off the rest of his life. Actually, the only real link Wren had to the case was the job he gave Owens to do on Rose and that wasn't much of a link. As for his being The Bird, the phone book was full of Eagles and Robbinses. And if Wren was involved it sure wasn't a one-man job nailing him down. A dozen men should be digging into his past, his home Me, his neighbors, his plant should be staked out. And the same thing went for the Owens family. And the Data jerks.

I'd given myself a deadline and it was past that. Although they might hand my head to me on my badge for not reporting all this sooner, I headed for the precinct.