The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 (27 page)

I parked across the street and watched for a while: I could see in through the double-width doorway that there were two men working in the garage, both dressed in mechanics’ overalls. One was young, maybe eighteen, and I guessed he was the apprentice. The older man was about forty and moved slowly but purposefully with quiet method from car to bench to parts shelves. As he worked, Davey Wilson had the quiet ease of someone content with his lot, who had found his place in the world. Watching him was like looking through a window into a different universe, a world of quiet acceptance and contentment that misfits and outsiders the likes of me or Tommy Quaid would never understand.

I waited for the rhythm of a regulated life to take its course: at five-thirty the younger man changed out of his overalls, emerged from the garage and left for the evening. The older man came out a few minutes later, dressed in a battered tweed jacket and corduroy trousers bagged at the knees.

I got out of the car and crossed the road. Wilson had his back to me and was pulling down the garage’s shutter-style slatted metal door.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Davey Wilson?’

He turned, the door half-closed. Up close I could see he was nearly the same height as me, maybe a couple of inches shorter. He was lean and wiry with hair that might have been blond in childhood but had dulled as he had grown up, as if losing interest. His eyes were a grey-blue colour.

‘I’m just closing.’ He stated the obvious. ‘Did you want to book your car in?’ He looked me up and down, then across the road at my gleaming, one-year-old Sunbeam Alpine, doing a quick calculation. His sum clearly totalled
gangster
. I could almost hear the rattling of chains as a mental drawbridge was pulled up.

‘My name is Lennox.’ I smiled as ungangsterly a smile as I could summon. ‘I’m looking for your brother Jimmy. It’s very important that I speak to him.’

‘I’ve no idea where he is.’ The greyish eyes frosted. ‘You’re obviously no’ the polis, so what’s it to you? Why do you want to know? What do you want to talk to Jimmy about?’

I cast an eye up and down the street, checking no one who might have been following me was watching. I regretted it right away, realizing it must have made me looked shady –
shadier
– to Wilson.

‘Listen, believe it or not I’m here to help. I know Jimmy’s in a bit of a spot.’ I nodded to the garage beyond the half-closed roll-down door. ‘Could we talk in private? I’m here to help . . .’

Davey Wilson took a moment to think about it, still appraising me. He still looked suspicious, rather than aggressive or tense. He shrugged and ducked under the half-shut door, back into the garage.

The couple of inches or so of difference in height caused me to duck more to get under the door, something he had been counting on. I felt a boot pressed against my shoulder and suddenly I was on my side on the oily garage floor. It had been a shove, rather than a kick, and when I looked up Wilson had a heavy wrench clutched in his right fist, raised as if ready to bring it down on my head. Except he didn’t and he wasn’t going to. He’d clearly caught up on the whole aggressive and tense thing, but this was as far as it was going to go.

I’d been in scrapes with a lot of men and you can tell the ones with the killer instinct – with my kind of fury or Baines’s kind of professional cool. There were the others who were scared, the ones who cowered and took it. Strangely they could be dangerous too: if by chance they suddenly found themselves with the upper hand, they were terrified of losing it, beating their opponents until they were incapable of re-turning tables and hurting them. Fear can be more deadly than anger.

And then there were the types like Davey Wilson: the thinkers. In a fight, you can’t afford to think; or at least think about anything beyond the fight itself. You have to be committed to win; your head has to be totally in the moment. I could see that Wilson’s head was dealing with cause and effect, action and consequence. He stood with a lump of metal in his hand that could send me to the hospital or the graveyard and he knew it. Wilson was of the type that really didn’t want to hurt their opponents and would fight only if pushed.

I started to get up and he tensed the arm with the wrench in it. ‘Stay where you are,’ he said. ‘Move and I’ll batter you.’

I held one hand up appeasingly as I eased myself into a sitting position. Examining the elbow of my suit, which had taken most of the force of my fall, I sighed: it had a thick black streak of motor oil on it. Another suit ruined. I decided I was going to start a new trend in enquiry agent workwear: dungaree overalls and a fedora.

‘Take it easy,’ I said wearily.

‘I’ll take it easy when you bastards leave my brother alone. I’ve told you I don’t know where Jimmy is, and even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. Now get in your fancy car and fuck off back to whoever you work for. Tell them to leave Jimmy alone. He’s no threat to anybody.’

‘Who is it you think I work for?’

‘I don’t know who you work for. I don’t know why you’ve got Jimmy so scared. But I’m telling you to leave him alone.’

‘Has there been anyone else here, looking for him?’

‘It’s time you got on your bike.’ He braced the arm with the wrench again.

‘Okay, okay – I’m going. Take it easy.’ I stood up and tried to brush down my suit. I pondered on why everybody seemed to feel the need to hit me, kick me, strangle me or otherwise do me bodily harm: I maybe just had that kind of face.

‘Just get out and don’t come back.’ Davey Wilson kept the wrench raised as if ready to strike.

‘I’m going,’ I said, again holding up my hands appeasingly.

Wilson did his best to look resolved and not relieved. I made my move. As I passed him, I crossed one of my appeasingly held-up hands and snap-punched him in the face twice in fast succession, with my other hand grabbing and twisting the wrench free from his grasp. I followed up with a jab into his midriff that robbed him of his breath and any fight that was in him. It hadn’t taken much and I was sorry that I’d had to lay hands on him at all: the poor guy wasn’t a fighter and had just been looking out for his brother. Unlike when I’d been jumped in the street, I’d given this small workmanlike beating without heat; probably with the same amount of passion with which Wilson would have carried out an oil change. As he doubled over I grabbed him by the shoulders and eased him over to the workbench, leaning him against it.

‘Listen, Davey,’ I said calmly but firmly. ‘I don’t want to hurt you and I wouldn’t have if you hadn’t been waving big chunks of ironmongery at me. And I sure as hell don’t want to hurt your brother. I’m here to help him if I can. I have a pretty good idea about the kind of mess he’s in and the people he’s up against. Now – can we talk this through quietly without you waving tools or car parts at me?’

He glowered at me. ‘And if I don’t tell you where he is, you’re going to try to beat it out of me, is that it?’

I picked up the wrench and handed it back to him. ‘Would you feel better if you had your comforter back? I guess I couldn’t make you tell me anything that would endanger your brother and, in any case, I have no intention of trying. I understand why you don’t trust me. Believe me, I’ve had people come to me claiming to be one thing and they turn out to be the other.’ I took out my silver pocket case, took out a cigarette then offered the case to Wilson. He glowered some more but then took one. I lit us both up.

‘Listen, Davey, I was a good friend of Quiet Tommy Quaid and all I’m interested in is getting to the people who killed him. I think I know why they killed him and I think it’s the same reason they’ve maybe been looking for Jimmy. But they got what they wanted. The evidence. So my guess is that they’re not going to make a big effort to find Jimmy, but it’s still best that he doesn’t make it too easy for them to find him.’

‘So why do you want to talk to him?’

‘I need to know who and where the evidence came from. I have a pretty good idea, but I’m guessing Jimmy can tell me for sure. I also need him to tell me as much as he can about anything else that could help me.’

‘And you expect me just to tell you where to find Jimmy?’ There was more suspicion forced into the question than was in his expression.

‘Not at all. What I want you to do is to tell Jimmy who I am – Lennox – and that I was a friend of Tommy’s, and everything else I’ve told you. Tell him that I’m looking for an officer type with a lopsided face who may or may not call himself McNaught. And tell him that I know that the whole malarkey about Tommy Quaid and Nazi loot is being used as a smokescreen – that I know what Jimmy and Tommy found and the names they found involved in it. Then – and only then – if Jimmy’s okay with it, we can meet. I’ll meet him anywhere and at any time he chooses. Does that sound fair?’

‘How do I get in touch with you?’

I handed him a business card. ‘I’ve written my home 'phone number on the back.’

‘You’re a private detective?’ He frowned as he read the card; I heard drawbridge chains rattling again.

‘My interest in this is personal, not professional. Although I am looking into it for Tommy’s sister as well as for myself. Trust me, I have a lot of personal interest in getting to the bottom of why Tommy was killed.’

‘I told you I don’t know where Jimmy is.’ He held the card back out to me. It was a gesture as unconvincing as his spanner waving and I made no effort to take the card back.

‘Maybe you don’t,’ I said. ‘But keep that just in case he gets in touch. Jimmy needs all the friends he can get and, believe me, I
am
a friend.’

*

I had meant every word of what I had said to Davey Wilson. But I was, it has to be said, a less than trusting soul and while I hoped Davey would arrange the meeting, I decided to take a belt-and-braces approach.

After I got back into the car I made a big show of driving all the way down Crow Road to Dumbarton Road, then turning towards the city. I swung the next left and, putting my foot down, hooked back round until I was parked at a junction where I had a clear view of the garage across the street.

The shutter door was still only half-closed and there was no sign of Davey. On the sign above the garage was a business telephone number and I had seen a wall 'phone when I’d been inside talking to him. My guess had been that he would have 'phoned his brother as soon as I had left and there was always the remote chance that he would head off to see him face-to-face, leading me straight to Jimmy and saving me a lot of time and running around.

Davey Wilson reappeared and drew down the door, locking the padlock. Wherever he was headed, I was going to stick to his tail. Hopefully I could be discreet enough: Davey had commented on my ‘flash’ Alpine and he would be watching out for someone following him.

He was making his way over to his car when a Jag saloon and a Rover P4 pulled up fast into the forecourt. Davey turned, surprised. Two pairs of oversized shoulders got out of the Rover and moved purposefully across to Davey and flanked him. I could see right away that they were helpful types: they grabbed Davey by the elbows and guided him back over to the garage with such helpfulness that his shoes didn’t touch the ground.

The driver of the Jag got out and leisurely crossed the forecourt, saying something to Davey and indicating the closed door of the garage. He was shorter than the other two but very solidly built and carried the air of authority. He had a hat on and from a distance you couldn’t see the lopsidedness of his face. But I recognized him.

It was McNaught, all right.

I reversed the Alpine a few yards, hiding it behind the shoulder of a tenement. Cursing the nobility of my motives in leaving the gun and knife back at home in the drawer, I got out, went round to the trunk and took out the Alpine’s tyre lever.

By the time I was back around the corner, everyone except one heavy had disappeared back inside the garage and the door had been closed. Avoiding the guard goon’s eyeline, I headed down the street in the opposite direction from the garage before crossing the road. Two doors down from the garage was a cheerless-looking pub, its doors closed till opening time, and I slipped up the alley beside it and into a high-walled backyard. A stack of metal beer kegs against the yard’s back wall served as steps and I climbed over, dropping down on the other side.

The lane I landed in, as I had guessed it would, ran along the back of the pub, its two neighbouring tenements and the garage beyond them. I ran along it until I reached the back of the garage building, which had no doors directly onto the lane. The garage’s back joined seamlessly to a six-feet-high perimeter brick wall that ran around the yard and forecourt; I used the full width of the lane to take a running jump and managed to hook my elbows over the top without dropping the tyre lever and haul myself up and over the soot-grimed wall. The logic of having a tailor run me up some dungarees was gaining appeal as my day progressed.

I was now at the side of the garage and was able to work my way around without McNaught’s burly lookout spotting me. I tried to stay close to the wall, but had to weave in and out of piles of tyres and exhaust pipes leaning against it. Coming to a metal-framed window, I had to duck down. Hazarding a quick look through the grimy glass, I could see that McNaught and his other heavy had Davey Wilson hemmed into a corner. He didn’t look like he’d been worked over, but he didn’t look like they’d dropped round for high tea either. Coercion and threat, of one form or another, hung over the snapshot scene. McNaught said something to the heavy, then turned and headed out of my sight. I heard the door roll up, McNaught say something to the man he’d posted on guard, then the door closing again.

There was the sound of a car starting and driving away. I guessed my opposition had just been reduced by a third.

I edged to the corner of the garage, took a breath and swung around it.

‘Hello,’ I said cheerily. ‘I’m from the better business bureau . . .’

The heavy at the door was built like a weightlifter, was taller than me with a busted nose and red hair cropped short. He looked surprised for a split second, then took a step towards me, recovering his air of authority.