The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (75 page)

I spread my hands. “By me, Sergeant.”

“You sure you wasn’t work—”

“Don’t say it!” I shouted.

The phone rang. A voice like a buzz-saw asked for Lund. He grunted into the mouthpiece, listened stolidly for nearly a full minute, then said, “Yeah,” twice and passed back the receiver. I replaced it and watched him drag himself out of the chair, his expression a study in angry frustration.

“I had Rogers Park send a squad over to that Winthrop Avenue address,” he growled. “Not only they don’t find no trace of a Franklin Andrus; they don’t even find the address! An empty lot, by God! All right. Hell with it. The lab boys will turn up something. Laundry marks, cuff dust, clothing labels. It’ll take ’em a day or two, but I can wait. The old routine takes time but it always works.”

“Almost always,” I said absently.

He glowered down across the desk at me. “One thing I hope, mister. I hope you been holding out on me and I find it out. That’s going to be jake with me.”

He gathered up the dead man’s possessions and stalked out. A little later one of the plainclothes men slipped in with his kit and took my fingerprints. He was nice about it, explaining they were only for elimination purposes.

By one o’clock I was back from having a sandwich and coffee at the corner drugstore. The reception room was empty, with only a couple of used flash bulbs, some smudges of fingerprint powder here and there and the smell of cheap cigars and damp cloth to remind me of my morning visitors. Without the dead man on it, the couch seemed larger than usual. There were no bloodstains. I looked to make sure.

I walked slowly into the other room and shucked off my trench coat. From the adjoining office came the faint whine of a dentist’s drill. A damp breeze crawled in at the window and rattled the cords on the blind. Cars hooted in the street below. Sounds that made the silence around me even more silent. And the rain went on and on.

I sat down behind the desk and emptied the ashtray into the waste-basket and wiped off the glass top. I put away the cloth and got out a cigarette and sat there turning it, unlighted, between a thumb and forefinger.

He had been a nice-looking man. Fifty-five at the most. A man with a problem on his mind. Let’s say he wakes up this morning and decides to take his problem to a private detective. So he gets out the classified book and looks under the right heading. There aren’t many, not even for a town the size of Chicago. The big agencies he passes up, maybe because he figures he’ll have to go through a handful of henna-haired secretaries before reaching the right guy. Then, not too far down the column, he comes across the name Paul Pine. A nice short name. Anybody can pronounce it.

So he takes a cab or a bus and comes on down. He hasn’t driven a car; no car keys and no license on him. The waiting room is unlocked but no alert gimlet-eyed private detective around. The detective is home in bed, like a man with a working wife. So this nice-looking man with a problem sits down to wait . . . and somebody walks in and sticks a quarter-pound of steel in him.

That was it. That explained everything. Everything but what his problem was and why he wasn’t wearing socks and why his wallet was empty and why his identification showed an address that didn’t exist.

I got up and took a couple of turns around the room. This was no skin off my shins. The boys from Homicide would have it all wrapped up in a day or so. The old routine Lund had called it. I didn’t owe that nice old man a thing. He hadn’t paid me a dime. No connection between us at all.

Except that he had come to me for help and got a mouthful of blood instead.

I sat down again and tried the phone book. No Franklin Andrus listed. No local branch of the Reliable Amusement Machine Corp. I shoved the book away and began to think about the articles that had come out of the dead man’s pockets. Gold tweezers, a pocket comb, five small transparent envelopes, seventy-three cents in change, a dark blue necktie. There had been a department store label on the tie – Marshall Field. I knew that because I had looked while Lund was out of the room. But Field’s has more neckties than Pabst has bottles. No help there.

Is that all, Pine, I thought to myself. End of the line? You mean you’re licked? A nice, clean-necked, broad-shouldered, late-sleeping detective like you?

I walked the floor some more. I went over to the window and leaned my forehead against its coolness. My breath misted the glass and I wrote my name in the mist with the end of my finger. That didn’t seem to help any. I went on thinking.

Maybe what
hadn’t
come out of his pockets was important. No keys, for instance. Not even to his apartment. Maybe he lived in a hotel. Not even cigarettes or a book of matches. Maybe he didn’t smoke. Not even a handkerchief. Maybe he didn’t have a cold.

I sat down again. There had been initials in his coat. A C G. No periods and stitched professionally in fancy letters against a square of black satin. Rather large, as I recalled. Too bad I hadn’t looked inside the pocket for the tailor’s label. Unless . . .

This time I used the classified book. T – for Tailors – Men’s. I ran through the columns to the G’s. There it was, bright and shining and filled with promise. A. Cullinham Grandfils, Custom Tailor. On Michigan Avenue, in the 600 block. Right in the center of the town’s swankiest shopping district.

I closed the window, climbed into my trench coat and hat and locked up. The smell of dime cigars still hung heavy in the outer office. Even the hall seemed full of it.

It was made to look like a Greek temple, if you didn’t look too close. It had a white limestone front and a narrow doorway with a circular hunk of stained glass above that. Off to one side was a single display window about the size of a visiting card. Behind the glass was a slanting pedestal covered with black velvet and on the velvet a small square of gray cloth that looked as though it might be of cheviot. Nothing else. No price tags, no suits, no firm name spelled out in severely stylized letters.

And probably no bargain basement.

I heaved back the heavy glass door and walked into a large room with soft dusty rose walls, a vaulted ceiling, moss green carpeting, and indirect lighting like a benediction. Scattered tastefully about were upholstered chairs and couches, blond in the wood and square in the lines. A few chrome ashstands, an end table or two, and at the far end a blond desk and a man sitting behind it.

The man stood up as I came in. He floated down the room toward me, a tall slender number in a cut-away coat, striped trousers and a gates-ajar collar. He looked like a high-class undertaker. He had a high reedy voice that said:

“Good afternoon, sir. May I be of service?”

“Are you the high priest?” I said.

His mouth fell open. “I beg your pardon?”

“Maybe I’m in the wrong place,” I said. “I’m looking for the tailor shop. No name outside but the number checks.”

His backbone got even stiffer although I hadn’t thought that possible. “This,” he said in a strangled voice, “is A. Cullinham Grandfils. Are you interested in a garment?”

“A what?”

“A garment.”

“You mean a suit?”

“Ah – yes, sir.”

“I’ve got a suit,” I said. I unbuttoned my coat and showed it to him. All he did was look pained.

“What I came by for,” I said, “was to get the address of a customer of yours. I’m not sure but I think his name’s Andrus – Franklin Andrus.”

He folded his arms and brought up a hand and turned his wrist delicately and rested his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “I’m afraid not. No. Sorry.”

“You don’t know the name?”

“I’m not referring to the name. What I am attempting to convey to you is that we do not give out information on our people.”

I said, “Oh,” and went on staring at him. He looked like the type you can bend easy. I dug out the old deputy sheriff’s star I carried for emergencies like this and showed it to him, keeping the lettering covered with the ball of my thumb. He jerked down his arms and backed away as though I’d pulled a gun on him.

“This is official,” I said in a tough-cop voice. “I’m not here to horse around. Do you cooperate or do we slap you with a subpoena?”

“You’ll have to discuss the matter with Mr Grandfils,” he squeaked. “I simply am not – I have no authority to – You’ll just have to—”

“Then trot him out, Curly. I don’t have all day.”

“Mr Grandfils is in his office. Come this way, please.”

We went along the room and through a glass door at the far end and along a short hall to another door: a solid panel of limed oak with the words A. Cullinham Grandfils, Private, on it in raised silver letters. The door was knocked on and a muffled voice came through and I was inside.

A little round man was perched in an enormous leather chair behind an acre of teakwood and glass. His head was as bald as a collection plate on Monday morning. A pair of heavy horn-rimmed glasses straddled a button nose above a tiny mouth and a chin like a ping-pong ball. He blinked owlishly at me and said, “What is it, Marvin?” in a voice so deep I jumped.

“This – ah – gentleman is the police, Mr Grandfils. He has demanded information I simply haven’t the right to—”

“That will be all, Marvin.”

I didn’t even hear him leave.

“I can’t stand that two-bit diplomat,” the little man said. “He makes the bottom of my foot itch.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Unfortunately he happens to be useful,” he went on. “The women gush at him and he gushes back. Good for business.”

“I thought you only sold men’s suits,” I said.

“Who do you think picks them out? Take off that coat and sit down. I don’t know your name.”

I told him my name and got rid of the trench coat and hat and drew up a teakwood chair trimmed in silver and sat on it. He made a quarter-turn in the big chair and his glasses flashed at me in the soft light.

“Police, eh?” he said suddenly. “Well, you’ve got the build for it. Where did you get that ridiculous suit?”

“This ridiculous suit set me back sixty-five bucks,” I said.

“It looks it. What are you after, sir?”

“The address of one of your customers.”

“I see. Why should I give it to you?”

“He was murdered. The address on his identification was incorrect.”

“Murdered!” His mouth dropped open, causing the glasses to slip down on his nose. “Good heavens! One of my people?”

“He was wearing one of your coats,” I said.

He passed a tremulous hand across the top of his head. All it smoothed down was scalp. “What was his name?”

“Andrus. Franklin Andrus.”

He shook his head immediately. “No, Mr Pine. None of my people has that name. You have made a mistake.”

“The coat fitted him,” I said doggedly. “He belonged in it. I might have the name wrong but not the coat. It was his coat.”

He picked a silver paper-knife from the silver trimmed tan desk blotter and rapped it lightly over and over against the knuckles of his left hand. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “My coats are made to fit. Describe this man to me.”

I gave the description, right down to the kidney-shaped freckle on the lobe of the left ear. Grandfils heard me out, thought over at length what I’d said, then shook his head slowly.

“In a general way,” he said, “I know of a dozen men like that who come to me. The minor touches you’ve given me are things I never noticed about any of them. I’m not a trained observer and you are. Isn’t there something else you can tell me about him? Something you’ve perhaps inadvertently overlooked?”

It hardly seemed likely but I thought back anyway. I said, “The rest of his clothing was a little unusual. That might mean something to you.”

“Try me.”

I described the clothing. By the time I was down to where the dead man hadn’t been wearing socks, Grandfils had lost interest. He said coldly, “The man was obviously some tramp. None of my people would be seen on the street in such condition. The coat was stolen and the man deserved what happened to him. Frayed slacks! Heavens!”

I said, “Not much in his pockets, but I might as well tell you that too. A dark blue necktie with a Marshall Field label, a pair of gold-plated tweezers, several transparent envelopes about the size of a postage stamp, a pocket comb and some change . . .”

My voice began to run down. A. Cullinham Grandfils had his mouth open again, but this time there was the light of recognition in his eyes. He said crisply, “The coat was a gray flannel, Mr Pine?”

“Yeah?”

“Carlton weave?”

“Hunh?”

“Never mind. You wouldn’t know that. Quite new?”

“I thought so.”

He bent across the desk to move a key on an intercom. “Harry,” he snapped into the box. “That gray flannel lounge suit we made for Amos Spain. Was it sent out?”

“A week already,” the box said promptly. “Maybe ten days, even. You want I should check exactly?”

“Never mind.” Grandfils flipped back the key and leaned into the leather chair and went on tapping his knuckles with the knife. “Those tweezers and envelopes did it, sir. He’s an enthusiastic stamp collector. Less than a month ago I saw him sitting in the outer room lifting stamps delicately with those tweezers and putting them in such envelopes while waiting for a fitting.”

“Amos Spain is his name?”

“It is.”

“He fits the description I gave?”

“Physically, exactly. But not the frayed slacks and dirty shirt. Amos Spain wouldn’t be found dead in such clothes.”

“You want to bet?”

“. . . Oh. Of course. I simply can’t understand it!”

“How about an address on Spain, Mr Grandfils?”

He dug a silver-trimmed leather notebook out of a desk drawer and looked inside. “8789 South Shore Drive. Apartment 3C. It doesn’t show a telephone, although I’m confident he has one.”

“Married?”

He dropped the book back in the drawer and closed it with his foot. “We don’t inquire into the private lives of our people, Mr Pine. It seems to me Mrs Spain is dead, although I may be wrong. I do know Amos Spain is reasonably wealthy and, I think, retired.”

I took down the address and got up and put on my coat and said, “Thanks for your help, Mr Grandfils.” He nodded and I opened the door. As I started out, he said: