The
Herald
was Huron’s only newspaper, a weekly. I pulled the telephone close and dialed the number listed there.
T
HERE WAS NO ANSWER,
so I smoked another cigarette and tried again. Still nothing. I frowned at the instrument. I couldn’t afford to wait. By now Fitzroy was talking to a judge, and I didn’t want to be there when he and Cranmer got back with a warrant. I left the Reliance report behind for seed and went out to get my tank filled.
Afterward I got change from the attendant and pulled my car around to the side of the station and called the
Herald
a third time from the pay telephone. Same story. I looked at my watch. It was past one o’clock, but you never know when anyone’s at lunch these days. Then I remembered Albert Gold’s business card. I wasn’t sure I had transferred it to this suit along with everything else from the pockets of the one I’d been wearing the night before, but I found it finally and gave his home number in Lansing a try. The whole world was out today. I had no reason to expect him to cooperate anyway, even if he had access to his agency’s report on Janet Whiting, which I doubted. I used the same dimes on another stab at the newspaper.
“Huron
Herald
.”
It had purred only once before the brisk feminine voice came on the line. I blanked out for a moment.
“Huron
Herald,
” repeated the voice, a trifle irritated this time.
“Is this the Huron
Herald?”
Well, it was something.
“No, it’s the local office of the CIA. We answer the phone this way so the Communists won’t know we’re here. You aren’t a Communist, are you?” The woman’s tone rang with irony. It wasn’t a young voice, but it refused to be dated. There was a twang somewhere under the polished shell, maybe Kansas.
“Not at the moment.” I introduced myself. “I’m a private investigator engaged to verify information included in an employment application to my client’s firm. The applicant, a woman named Janet Whiting, claims to hail from Huron. I wonder if your newspaper might have anything on her in its files.”
“May I ask the name of the firm?” I heard the racheting sound of a fresh sheet being rolled into a typewriter.
“Michaeljohn International.” They had hired me once to look into a suspected employee theft.
Typewriter keys plock-plocked in the distance. “When does she say she lived here?”
I gave her the dates. She tapped them out.
“Her address in Huron?”
“Four-four-two-six Agar Lane. Sounds like it’s in the country.”
“It is. Or it was, until the subdivisions started gobbling up all the available farmland.” She was typing as she spoke. Only reporters and doctors can divide their concentration like that.
She asked me a few more questions on the same order and plucked out the answers as I gave them. The operator came on the line to tell me my three minutes were up. I was about to deposit some more coins when the woman said, “Save your money, Mr. Walker. This will take a while to check. Would you care to come out this afternoon? I should have the information by the time you get here.”
“I wasn’t planning to make the trip. Can’t I call you back?”
“That would be your loss. It’s too nice a day to waste in the city.” She said “city” as if the word tasted unpleasant.
“You’ve persuaded me. How do I find the place?”
“You’re a detective. Detect.”
“Who should I ask for when I get there?”
“Anyone you ask will be me. It’s a one-woman office. Just for the record, though, the name’s Maggie.”
I grinned. “Thanks, Maggie.” The operator cut me off in the middle of it.
Half an hour on the Edsel Ford took me into another world, of rolling hills and tilled farms and jaded cows that raised their heads to watch the hissing traffic like patient old men on bus stop benches watching pigeons strut past on the sidewalk. The Huron exit channeled me onto a winding paved road past a tiny factory, a lot of houses less than ten years old, between two sprawling brick schools with rows of yellow buses parked in a lot, and finally into the village proper. At this point the road merged with another blacktop at the V of a tiny park to form a main street as broad as Woodward Avenue but a hell of a lot less congested. False-fronted buildings as old as the state charter lined the street for two blocks, after which it narrowed to pass beneath a stone viaduct and on to more villages like this one and yet not like it at all. I had the crazy notion that if I kept driving I would continue to encounter similar communities, factories, houses, and schools until I eventually came back to Detroit, towering over them all like the manor of a feudal estate that encompassed the globe.
The
Herald
occupied half the ground floor street frontage of a three-story building between the bank and a meat market and was identified by faded lettering on a plate glass window seven feet high and four feet wide. I pulled into an empty space in front of it and cranked a coin into a meter so old it still took pennies. A partition separated the office from the TV repair shop next door. This week’s issue was in the window and the glass in the door had an amateurish cartoon taped to it of a woman with a camera over her shoulder hurrying out a door over the promise
BE RIGHT BACK!
I tried the door’s brass handle. It was locked.
Twenty minutes and two cigarettes later, a wiry, sixtyish woman in a rust-colored pantsuit came clicking down the sidewalk with an early-model Polaroid slung over one shoulder from an elastic strap. She had pure white hair combed into brittle waves and wore glasses with jeweled frames attached to a black cord that went behind her neck. Her tiny feet were encased in brown leather half-boots with square, two-inch heels, which as she approached made her only a foot shorter than I. I looked from her to the cartoon in the window and back to her. It was a fair likeness.
“You’re Mr. Walker.” The way she said it brooked no denial. She had bright hazel eyes that darted from behind her glasses, and her handshake was firm. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“Depends on what you call long,” I said. “The Count of Monte Cristo wouldn’t have considered it any kind of wait.”
She produced a key from her purse under the Polaroid and inserted it in the ancient lock. “I had to take a picture of a group of cheerleaders. Those entertainers you see on television balancing spinning plates on flimsy rods never tried to get six high school-age girls to smile for a camera all at once.” She opened the door and ushered me inside.
The room was narrow, about eight feet by twelve, painted bile-yellow, and made even more cramped by two scarred desks on opposite ends and a black iron safe that didn’t look much older than a Ming vase, although it would be considerably less fragile. A stack of copies of the current edition stood on the near desk, next to a child’s red metal bank labeled
DEPOSIT 15¢ PER ISSUE
. There was a big square heat register in the floor inside the entrance. Beyond that, an unevenly faded red carpet was just something to cover the broken tiles. The ceiling was eleven feet high. An electric typewriter, the only modern thing in the room aside from the telephone on the far desk, stood on a rickety stand in that corner.
She charged past me, parked her camera and purse beside the newspapers, and went through a door in the end wall marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY
. A moment later she came out carrying a black-bound book fully eighteen inches wide and thirty inches long and thumped it down atop the far desk, after first sliding the telephone out of the way. As she was opening it to the page she had marked with a sheet of newsprint, I peeped through the open door at a dusty old platen press.
“Do you print the paper here?”
“Not in twenty years.” She found her place on the page and adjusted the book so that it wouldn’t slide off the desk. It contained bound copies of the
Herald.
“We’re printing in Jackson now, which is one more step away from the paper’s original ideals about remaining local. Next month we’re remodeling the office. The TV shop next door is moving and the partition will come down and we’re going to put up snazzy paneling made to look like wallpaper and drop the ceiling and change the carpet and scrap the Linotype and presses in back. We’ll get rid of the furniture that’s been here for half a century and replace it with vinyl-upholstered chairs and desks that look like folding card tables. The place will be modern and functional and as antiseptic as a dentist’s thumb. I’ve already given notice.”
“You’re not the owner?”
She laughed shortly. “This is just a hobby for the owner, who runs a bigger, slicker paper upstate. I’m just the typical town gossip who started with a gloppy column about senior citizens and suddenly found myself the staff writer. Staff writer, that’s what they call me. Takes up less space than editor, bookkeeper, receptionist, photographer, ad manager, and janitor. Pull up a chair.” She sat down behind the desk. Although she had the antique swivel chair screwed up as high as it would go, her shoulders barely came above the edge of the big book.
The only other chair in the office was a wooden straightback behind the other desk. No one had sat in it for a while. I dusted off the seat with my handkerchief and carried it to her desk and sat down.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” I got out the pack.
“Go ahead. What do I care if you shorten your life?” She pushed over a cheap tin ashtray and watched while I went through the ritual. When I had one burning: “First, let’s talk about who you really are and who you represent.”
I gave her my best dumb look. I could have saved myself the trouble.
“I looked up Michaeljohn International.” Her angular chin and the straight line of her mouth formed a perfect square. “They make the bolts that are used to fasten wooden packing crates going overseas. I wondered why they’d bother to hire an investigator to verify the details in a prospective employee’s application, not being the kind of firm that handles a lot of classified material. Also, no P.I. working for a big company like that is going to make a long distance call from a booth. He’ll make it from his own phone and charge his client as if he’d paid for it on the spot. Then he’ll turn around and take it off his income tax.”
“You have no reverence for the profession,” I suggested.
She looked at me levelly. “Eighteen years ago I divorced my husband. I’d hired a private investigator to follow him and gather evidence on the affair he was having with a fellow employee. He got it and sold it to my husband. No, I have no reverence for the profession.”
“It’s not fair to judge an entire group on the behavior of a single individual.”
“Maybe not. But I believe in the odds. If the only P.I. I hired in my entire life turned out to be crooked, the chances are that the majority of them can’t be trusted. You haven’t answered my question, Mr. Walker. Who are you and who do you represent really?”
I leaned forward and tapped my cigarette ash into the tray. Then I remembered that I was still wearing my hat and took it off and hung it on my crossed knee. I’d left my coat back in the city. “What difference does it make? If you don’t trust me you aren’t going to give me the information I’m after anyway.”
She smiled and reached out to pat my hand. I could have fallen off my chair. “I said I didn’t believe you. I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you. Your client is none of my business. Like I said, I’m the town gossip.”
I grinned. “Maggie, you’re priceless.” Her answering smile shone beatifically with the aid of store-bought teeth. “I can give you this much. I’ve been hired to find Janet Whiting. She may be in danger, and the danger may have something to do with her life here in Huron. But it may be tied into a bigger story, and for what it’s worth I can promise the
Herald
exclusive rights to print it in return for whatever help you can give me.”
“You’re sweet, but what works with the big city papers holds no water out here. We’re a weekly. Unless the dope gets in just before noon Wednesday we get scooped by every daily in the state. But you can give me five dollars.”
“Noon Wednesday,” I said, getting out my wallet. “I’ll remember that.” I laid a fin down on the yellowed newsprint in the book. A bony hand scooped it up and deposited it in the flap pocket of her jacket. She saw me watching and winked.
“The boss needn’t know about it.” Then her eyes dropped to the closely printed page and she ran a long finger down the third column until she reached the bottom. “Hold onto your Victorian values,” she cautioned. “This is juicy stuff.”
I
GOT UP AND PUT
my hat down on the chair and walked around to her side of the desk to read over her shoulder. The issue was dated twenty-four years ago. The item she was pointing to at the bottom of the column was less than half an inch long.
Mr. and Mrs. George Whiting and daughter Janet are moving to Detroit this week, where their new address is not known.
“I see what you mean,” I said, straightening. “My heart’s all a-flutter.”
She said, “Stop being sarcastic and sit back down.”
I responded to the authority in her voice, going back to my chair and returning my hat to my knee. I wondered if she had ever taught school. “This better be worth five dollars and the trip out here. What’s written there I knew before I left the city.”
“I don’t guarantee that what you get will be worth your time and expenses,” she retorted. “Do you, in your line of work? Anyway, it’s a good story. Too bad a family paper like the
Herald
couldn’t print it.” She swung the big book shut and removed her glasses, letting them dangle at the ends of the cord around her neck. Her eyes looked sharper without them, like unsheathed daggers.
“My reaction was the same as yours when I saw that personal,” she began. “We still get them, though not as much as we used to, and use them as filler. ‘Minnie Grubb spent last weekend visiting her son and daughter-in-law in Benton Harbor.’ That sort of thing. But that ‘their address is not known’ intrigued me. Why say that? On a small-town paper, when you can’t find something out you just don’t mention it; there’s no sense in advertising your inadequacy. There were two other ‘moving’ items in that week’s issue, and neither of them included an address nor apologized for the omission. Seen in that light, the disclaimer in the Whiting piece took on a special significance, as if it was some kind of snide innuendo on the writer’s part. So I started asking around.