by C. J. Harper
C.J. Harper, pseudonymous writer and Minnesota lawyer, debuted in our Department of First Stories in 2008 with “The Coronation Coin,” the per-iod P.I. story that introduced Marlowe-style hero Darrow Nash. The tale was followed (3-4/’08) by “The Sleepless Soul,” in which Nash, who’d traveled from L.A. to Minnesota, was hired to locate a WWII vet. This third Nash story picks up where the last left off: when Nash is abducted by a crime boss before he can get a train home.
I was standing on the sidewalk of Holmes Avenue South, staring at Terry Bormann’s brass compass and wondering what to do next, when I heard the shot. I wasn’t sure of its direction because its report had sounded muffled, like it had been fired indoors, muted by the plaster flesh and wood bones of a house. But which house? There were more than a dozen two-story four-squares on this stretch of Holmes, hidden behind the swollen green canopies of the oaks and elms that shadowed the street.
But then I knew. In the short breath of time that lives between a shot and its echo, I knew everything. Where the shot had come from. Who had pulled the trigger. Who was dead.
I knew in that moment whose blood was on my hands.
* * * *
It had started at 8:20 that morning at the Milwaukee Road Depot with the ticket clerk, a young man with the bony limbs and antic restlessness of an organ grinder’s monkey. His brown hair, lingering freckles, and black conductor’s hat made me want to drop a nickel in his tin cup.
“Where are you headed?” he said, emphasizing the “you” as if he’d grown jealous of the travelers endlessly shuffling up to his window. The black steel bars that penned him inside the ticket booth may have added to his sense of imprisonment.
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On how much it costs.” I’d overspent in my efforts to trace a missing person and was short of cash, down to twenty bucks. The case hadn’t been a paying job. A freebie for a friend, something I’m usually dead set against.
On top of that, I’d left my checkbook in my dark blue suit jacket, the one hanging on the back of a chair in my apartment on Hollywood Boulevard fifteen hundred miles to the west. But even if I’d had it, a slow couple of months had turned what checks were left in it to rubber.
“Okay, mister,” he said with a smirk, “if you were a rich man, where would you go?”
Like any man in my condition—rich or poor—I wanted to go home. I was exhausted. I’d been up all night after I’d found my missing person. Found him just in time to watch him die. I’d been in Minneapolis barely a day and I was ready go home. “L.A. Union Station. Sleeping car. Double bedroom.”
He dug through a timetable. “The next one out is at noon. 12:01. The Rock Island Twin Star Rocket to Kansas City, with a connection on the westbound Imperial to Los Angeles. One double bedroom, with federal tax, comes to ... one hundred thirty-seven twenty-three.”
“That much?”
“It’s nineteen fifty, buddy. Everything costs more.”
“I fold,” I said, “but hold it for me.” I gave him my name and a two-dollar tip so he’d remember it. Then I picked up my tweed pullman suitcase and stepped out of line.
Now what? I scanned the waiting room of the depot. It groaned with the din of people dressed up for travel, heading in every direction, the scuffling shoes, the echoes of mumbling voices off the high ceiling, the bottomless thrum of engines idling beyond the double doors to the platforms. Vagrants from nearby skid row wandered among the crowds, searching for a place to rest or a dime to pick off the floor. Like the ticket clerk and me, the vags weren’t going anywhere either.
I sat down between a bum and a nun on a scarred wooden bench. I knew my only option was my least favorite: call Marlowe and have him wire me what I needed. He was a fellow private dick who, like me, had an office on the sixth floor of the Cahuenga Building in Los Angeles. He’d mocked me when I’d taken the M.P. case for free, because I’d always mocked him whenever he’d done the same. But now he’d have all the ammunition he’d need to torment me, and my only defense would be to endure the roasting with whatever smile I could dredge up.
But more than that was bothering me. I was broke again.
Broke.
Again.
Who could make a decent living being a private investigator? I’d been trying for three years and still lived month to month. Marlowe was one of the best, but he wasn’t getting rich at it either. We risked life and limb—often for strangers—for little or no money. Why? I’d risked my life in the war for little or no money, but that was different. That was a necessity. This was a choice. One that left me stuck in Minneapolis with no way home. $117.23 short. My grumpy mood turned sullen.
I hoisted myself to my feet, picked up my suitcase, and zigzagged around the waiting room benches to the Western Union window. There, I met a sign that said “Closed for remodeling.” It listed an address down Washington Avenue, “just a short six blocks away.” I thanked the sign with a curt gesture.
After I stowed the suitcase in a locker, I walked outside to a sun that felt like it was filtered through a magnifying glass. The hot spot was aimed at me. I was already sweating.
I sauntered along Washington Avenue, past a one-story government building, trying not to overheat. I reached the next block ready for a shower and stopped to cool off in the warm shade under the rectangular awning of the Minnesotan Hotel. Cars lined the curb in front of the hotel, including a black Packard that held two sweaty mugs who looked to be waiting for the concierge. They’d be waiting a long time. The Minnesotan wasn’t that kind of hotel.
After only a day, the Minnesotan held a special—and not so special—place in my heart. Not only was it the place where I’d spent some time—too little time—with a blond bombshell who had a lounge act mimicking Lana Turner, but it was also where I’d found my missing person dying from a knife wound in the chest. It’s hard to sleep after seeing something like that and I should have gone back up to Lana’s room and gotten lost in the illusions of her bed. Instead I’d walked the streets trying to shake the image of a dying face, one of many dark images I’d collected since going to war. The walk hadn’t worked. It never did.
But Lana was an image of a different kind. As I stood under the hotel’s awning, I lingered, hoping Lana would magically come walking out. She was an image worth seeing again.
At the curb next to me, both passenger doors to the black Packard popped open. A pair of goons, one in a dark gray pinstripe suit and the other with brown prickles for hair, hopped out and came at me. I caught a glint from Pinstripe’s gun just inside his coat. “Darrow Nash?”
I didn’t deny it, and that was as good as a yes.
They each clamped a meaty hand on my arms. I struggled, but their vise grips and the hard nose of Pinstripe’s gun against my spine made me stop. He pulled my gun from my coat pocket and stuffed it in his own. Then he leaned in close. “Get in the car.”
“How about a ‘please’?”
He opened the rear door, shoved me inside, and climbed in after me. The other mug, whose brown bristles matched his brown suit, slid behind the wheel.
As the car sped away, I finally got a good look at Pinstripe. There was nothing good about it. His dim, dark eyes sat much too close to a pockmarked nose that drooped from his long face like a blob of hardened candle wax. His thick lips sat in a permanent pucker on top of a round, doughy chin. He wore his dark gray fedora pulled down to the tops of his eyebrows and held his gun aimed at my guts.
The other goon didn’t say a word. He drove with one hand and used the other to wave his hat at his face, trying to cool a heat that looked less like it came from outside the car than from inside his thick, buzz-cut head. The collar of his suit was stained with sweat.
“Where are we going?”
“Shut up,” Buzz-cut said, staring straight ahead. His bristles glistened. Drops shinnied down his neck.
A minute later we pulled to the curb in front of a six-story wheat-colored brick building. Above the door, letters were chiseled into its facade that said “Greystone Mill,” and beneath it, “1889.” But apparently the mill had died, because painted on the door itself in formal black letters was the current occupant’s name, “Industrial Supplies, Inc.”
Pinstripe grabbed me by the collar again and dragged me out his side of the car. From the sidewalk I glanced around at other dead or dying mills. A handful remained in operation, but others were little more than rubble.
Buzz-cut held open the door to Industrial Supplies and Pinstripe pushed me in. A long L-shaped oak counter kept us penned into a small waiting area. Pictures of industrial machines—a cement mixer was the only one I recognized—decorated the beige walls. Out of the back room scurried a man wearing a welcoming smile and the cheap, light blue rayon sport coat of a clerk. When he saw Pinstripe, the smile fell away and he lifted a hinged section of the counter so we could pass through.
The back room—a space the size of a living room, furnished with the standard industrial office props of battered wood furniture, piles of paper, a girlie calendar, and an ashtray stuffed with butts—led to a short hallway and a narrow set of stairs leading up. Pinstripe led us behind those to a stairwell that angled beneath them into the cellar.
As we started down, a dank, musty smell told me that standing water wasn’t far away. Once inside the cellar, Buzz-cut headed for a corner and kicked aside a rug. Beneath it was a wooden trapdoor that fit snugly into the concrete floor. He pulled on its recessed handle and lifted the door open. A cold burst of fetid air drifted over us.
We followed a ladder down into a narrow passage where Buzz-cut picked up a flashlight from the floor and flicked it on. The tunnel ahead was barely the height and width of a grown man, and looked like it had been cut by hand into the oozing limestone. Dripping water echoed from a thousand subterranean leaks.
Buzz-cut led us through that passage into a larger, wider, more professionally constructed tunnel that gradually sloped downward as we walked.
“I forgot my pickaxe,” I said. “Where the hell are we?”
“Tailraces,” said Pinstripe. As we walked he began to halfheartedly tutor me on the history of Minneapolis. “In the 1880s, the mills wanted to use the drop of St. Anthony Falls for power, so they dug tunnels above the falls called headraces and tunnels below the falls called tailraces. The water ran through here and spun their turbines. There are dozens of these tunnels leading every which way. But once steam power came, the mills didn’t need the river so they sealed up the headraces.”
“And left the mills and tailraces,” I said, cutting into his lecture, “as hideouts for thugs like you.”
“Never mind,” he said as if I’d hurt his feelings. I didn’t care. Something about being taken hostage had worsened my already sour mood.
As we trudged through the dark, musty tunnels—in silence now—we took more rights and lefts than a punch-drunk boxer. Buzz-cut led us with his flashlight down tailraces where the masonry floor was slanted and dry, and through others still containing river water, where the only passage was over old wooden catwalks that creaked and shifted with our steps. Pinstripe followed a few steps back, more a shadow than a presence.
We finally stepped off the catwalk into a narrower passage with limestone and mortar walls. Buzz-cut’s flashlight settled on a four-foot-wide rusted iron tube that ran down from the chiseled ceiling and stopped a yard short of the stone floor. An iron ladder stuck out from the bottom of it.
Buzz-cut handed his flashlight to Pinstripe, then crawled under the pipe and started climbing, his feet pinging on the steel rungs. The pinging was eventually followed by a wooden creak. Dim light made a circle on the floor beneath the iron tube. Pinstripe aimed his beam at the foot of the ladder and prodded me in the back with his gun.
“Now you.”
I glanced at him but couldn’t see much. For a moment I considered running, but beyond us was a darkness so thick it seemed to vibrate. A shimmering maze. Even with a light I knew I’d never find the cheese.
Another prod from Pinstripe, harder this time. “Move.”
I stooped under the bottom of the pipe and looked up toward the light. It was farther than I’d expected, at least forty feet. The shadow of a head leaned into the round hole above me. I grabbed the cold rungs and started climbing.
And climbing.
And climbing.
As I neared the top, the silhouetted head became Buzz-cut’s.
“C’mon, Nash. We’re on a schedule.”
“I’m guessing it’s not mine,” I said as my head finally cleared the opening of a trapdoor.
Buzz-cut grabbed my arm and hauled me out. “He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
The room was small, maybe ten by twenty, filled mostly with cobwebs and dust-covered rows of empty wooden shelves. Two of the walls were made of rough limestone, but the other two were cinder block and looked new enough that I doubted they had come with the building. The door that was framed into one of the newer walls was a slab of shiny black steel that stood open to a hallway. Buzz-cut and Pinstripe grabbed me by the arms and led me from the room. I noticed on the way out that the steel door locked from the inside.
We stopped two steps later at a closed oak door with a brass knob. Not the kind of door typically found in the basement of a derelict mill.
Buzz-cut knocked twice.
“Enter,” said a muffled voice, more invitation than order.
Buzz-cut gently opened the door on a man in his sixties wearing a charcoal gray suit and the peaceful countenance of a preacher. His disguise was almost convincing, save for a tidy little white moustache and slicked-back white hair.
“Welcome, Mr. Nash.” He smiled brightly, trying hard to keep me focused on the preacher. “I’m John Callahan.” He stuck out a pampered hand.
I wiped dust and dirt from the sleeves of my suit coat and we shook. His grip was younger than he looked. “Honest businessman, I presume.”
His blue eyes twinkled as he smiled. “That’s right. The concrete business.”
“Specializing in shoes, I take it.”
His smile dimmed and he released my hand. Then he gestured me to a leather wing chair opposite his cherrywood desk. The rest of the room matched the furniture, plush and polished and the color of red wine. The carpet was the color of new money.
I took my assigned seat while Buzz-cut and Pinstripe took up their positions near the door.
I thought this party was just for the four of us until I heard the breathy swish of nylons come from the far back corner. I turned just in time to catch a pair of long legs in black stockings and high heels finish crossing themselves. They were perched on a stool in front of a wet bar, complete with mirror and brass rail, and led to a tight black cocktail dress and breasts that strained the seams.
In her hand, accented by blood-red nails, she held a crystal tumbler and a swirling fingerful of amber dreams. Her platinum blond hair and pouty mouth reminded me of a famous actress. When her blue eyes locked on mine, the foot that had just crossed, the one on top, began to move up and down. Slowly. Rhythmically. A sly smile swam just beneath the surface of her lips. Lips I’d been kissing the night before.
When I turned back to Callahan, he had settled into the slick leather chair behind his desk. He’d seen the look Lana had given me and he drew in a long, deep breath. “Mr. Nash, I trust you remember Diana Webber. I believe you attended her performance last night at the Persian Palms. She recommended you for this job.”
Actually, I hadn’t seen Lana’s act, but I’d had some questions for her about my missing-person case, and that had led to a more intense interview in her room in the Minnesotan Hotel later in the night. A short but intense give and take. I got the sense she hadn’t told Callahan about that part of our interview, knowing full well that mob bosses tend not to like their molls roaming, despite the fact that he was old enough to be her grandfather.
She nodded at me and I nodded at her.
Callahan cleared his throat. “As I was saying, Mr. Nash, I’m an honest businessman.”
I gestured over my shoulder. “An escape hatch to the tunnels with a steel door that locks from the inside to give you more time to get away. Honest to a fault.”
He smiled and shook his head, then stood up and came back around his desk. “That’s what I like in a private detective, that kind of ... fearlessness.” He made it sound like equal parts blessing and curse.
Callahan looked over at his two sentinels by the door. “Please excuse us, gentlemen.”
Pinstripe nodded, Buzz-cut adjusted his suit coat as if the muscles inside needed rearranging, and they left.
I glanced back at Lana. She had graduated to studying her nails as if they held the answer to something important.
“Diana, dear, would you please wait outside?”
She looked up at Callahan and pouted. “Me, too?”
“You too, dear.”
“But I recommended him.”
“I know that, dear, but this is business.”
She rose slowly off the barstool, adding such a smooth sexiness to such a simple move that it looked designed to attract attention. It worked. Her blue eyes locked on mine as she swished past. “Pleasure.”
“It was all mine.” I kept my smile to myself. She saw it anyway.
When the door closed, Callahan sat back against the front edge of his desk and folded his arms. “I take elaborate precautions, Mr. Nash, because I am a man with a certain reputation, deserved or not. Some people take action based upon that reputation. I need to be careful about who gets close to me and how much they know.”
I tossed a gesture at the door. “You should keep her as close to you as possible.”
“And you shouldn’t.”
His eyes said he wasn’t kidding. I offered no response. Staying away from her was not a promise I was willing to make.
Finally he moved on. “I need you to find something of sentimental value to me. A brass compass.”
“Why me?”
“Miss Webber seems to think you will be effective but discreet.”
I glanced back at Lana’s lonely barstool. “She may be right, but I doubt she knows how much those two things cost, particularly together.”
“No, but I do.” He pulled a stack of rubber-bound bills from his inside coat pocket. “You’ll receive half now and half when I get the compass. I trust five hundred dollars will buy the best of both.”
And then some, but I didn’t tell him that. I’d never thought of myself as someone who would work for a mob boss, but how else was I going to get home? “What’s so special about this compass?”
He took a deep breath and paced around to the chair behind his desk. “It was my son’s. He was an Air Force pilot. They shot him down over Germany. Dog tags and the compass were all that came back.”
He recited this with remarkable calm. In the infantry, I’d come across what had been left of airmen like his son. Often dog tags and a compass had been about it. “When did you lose it?”
“I didn’t lose it. It was stolen from me on Friday by a former employee by the name of Terry Bormann.”
“Your goons too dumb to look him up in the phone book?”
“We’ve already checked the obvious places, including staking out his apartment. He hasn’t been there since I fired him on Friday. I have no doubt he’s avoiding my men.”
“And that’s where I come in.”
“That’s right. He might not notice a stranger.”
“So you fired him and he took the compass as protection against a pair of your special concrete shoes. Is that about it?”
Callahan didn’t respond. He just gave me that saintly preacher smile, something like pleasant indifference. It was his way of saying that that was about it.
“Had you hired him for his mind or his muscle?”
“Mind. He worked in the County Recorder’s office. I had some real-estate transactions and I wanted to make sure the deeds were recorded properly.”
I nodded. “Nice to have direct access to what—or what is not—of record.”
I got the preacher smile again. After doing time in law school, I’d done a stretch as an examiner for a title company, so I knew there were things Bormann could do to sneak Callahan into “fee title” to properties he wanted, say in order to squeeze a competitor. A competitor whose warranty deed could be surreptitiously replaced by one in favor of Callahan. Bormann would be just the man for the job. It wouldn’t work for long, but it could be effective for a while.
I stood up and took the money—$250 in tens and twenties—from his lily-white hand. “I’ll see what I can find.”
“This needs to be done quickly. Within twenty-four hours. I suspect he may be preparing to leave town, if he hasn’t already done so.”
“What if I take longer than that? I suppose you’ll want a refund.”
“At minimum.”
He smiled, but I didn’t. I rarely smile at a threat.
* * * *
Pinstripe led me back through the tunnel maze to the Greystone building. I’d been through the tailraces twice now but still had no idea how anyone kept track of where they were going.
“How the hell do you find your way around down there?” I said once we’d reached the sidewalk in front of Industrial Supplies, Inc.
Pinstripe shrugged. “From doing it.”
“But how about when you started?”
“I kept a note inside my hat that I eventually memorized. You know, twenty steps forward, then turn right, ten steps forward, then turn left. Like that.”
He gave me my gun and the directions I needed for my first stop. Then he took ten steps forward, turned right, and walked back inside the dead mill.
I turned left and started on my first hundred steps down the sweltering sidewalk. I’d gone half a block when Lana pulled up next to me in a new red Lincoln Cosmopolitan with the top down.
“Need a ride?”
I opened the passenger door and climbed in.
She tapped her red fingernails on the steering wheel and gave me a silky smile. “I owe you for the one you gave me last night.”
I normally don’t care for women—or men, for that matter—who talk dirty, but with Lana it seemed natural, almost necessary. “You should tell people you’re a moll before you let them give you a ride.”
She accelerated away from the curb. “Haven’t had to until now.”
“Why did you tell Callahan’s goons to stake me out at the Minnesotan? I wasn’t staying there.”
She gave me a long look for someone driving in city traffic. “I was hoping you’d come back to see me.”
Then she did something that made me think she was telling the truth. Once we were out of sight of Industrial Supplies, she pulled back over to the curb, set the parking brake, threw her arms around me, and gave me a kiss. The best kind of kiss, the one that always means the most. The one for no reason.
Once we’d finished reacquainting ourselves, she slid back behind the wheel. “Who has he got you looking for?”
“Sorry, but I can’t tell you.”
She sat back in stunned indignation. “Why not? I’m the one who gave him your name.”
“I know, but you also told him I’d be discreet.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t tell me.”
“I’m afraid it does.”
She stared at me with her beautiful indignant mouth still open as her beautiful indignant eyes showed me just how fast a wall can be built between two people who had just kissed.
“I’d tell you if I could.”
She clamped her mouth shut and turned her head to stare at the world beyond the steering wheel. It was that cold Lana look-away that not even John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice was strong enough to overcome. I didn’t even try. I opened the door and climbed out.
She never looked my way, not even when she said, “Why do men have so many secrets?”
I placed my hands on the open door. “This isn’t a secret. It’s a job.”
“You’re all alike. You’ll let a girl into your pants but you won’t let her into your head, let alone your heart.”
I hated being compared to other men, but I couldn’t bring myself to lie to her. “Once you saw what was in my head, Lana, you wouldn’t want to get close to any other part of me.”
She let out a growl of frustration. “Shut the door.”
I did. And by driving away so did she.
* * * *
The Recorder’s office, located in Room 110 of the Hennepin County Courthouse, smelled of musty paper, cigarette smoke, and floor wax. The man behind the counter resembled one of those typical government clerks who sprout up like mushrooms where real-estate documents are buried. The wrinkles in his blousy white shirt and baggy brown pants looked like rivers on a road map, while the dime-sized birthmark on his forehead looked like a pond on an aerial map. The rest of him tended toward the cardinal points: the thin strands of white hair attempting to cover his scalp ran from east to west while his jowls ran north and south.
When he saw me come through the door, he pushed himself to his feet and shuffled around his desk toward the counter, wiping his hands on the sides of his pants. “Good morning.” His jowls shook. His half-moon cheaters clung to the end of his nose.
“Morning,” I said with a perky smile that couldn’t have been further from the truth. “I need to look someone up in the grantor/grantee index.”
He shuffled toward a rack of oversized books. “What’s the name?”
“Mind if I look myself?”
He stopped shuffling and looked back at me. He removed the glasses from his nose and began absently polishing the lenses with the front of his shirt. A strand of hair hung down over his forehead like a loose wire. “I suppose. It’s just faster if I do it.”
“I’m in no hurry,” I lied.
“Suit yourself. Initial of the last name?”
“B.”
He pulled down a book the size of a pillowcase and laid it open on the counter in front of me. I started leafing through the giant pages while he chaperoned.
“I’d be there by now,” he said.
I pointed toward his desk. “You could be there by now too.”
He put his hands up. “Just trying to help.”
I found “Bormann, Terence” and dragged my finger along the miles of entries looking for recent deeds that would have put him in title. He might not be in the phone book, but there were other ways to find out where he lived.
The clerk made a noise that mimicked spitting. “What do you want with him?”
I looked up. Of course. Bormann had worked here. “You don’t care for Terry Bormann?”
“Wouldn’t trust him to take out the trash.”
“Why not?”
“You a cop?”
I played a hunch and nodded. “I’m an investigator.”
“It’s about time. I’ve been trying to fix all the messes he left behind. Missing deeds, deleted entries, altered photostats. It’s been a nightmare. What took you so long?”
“Did you report this to the police?”
“Twice, but no one ever got back to me.”
Callahan wouldn’t have been the first mob boss to have someone inside the police department protecting him. “Well, I’m on it now. Do you know where Bormann can be found?”
He tapped the grantor/grantee index book. “You won’t find him in there. He’s too smart to leave a trail. Or at least he thinks he is.” A smirk gave his jowls a lift.
“Let me guess: He’s smart, but not as smart as you.”
The smirk swelled into a grin. “I’ve been waiting for you to get here.” He pulled a folder off his desk and spread it out on the counter. “He used aliases but I knew it was him.”
He showed me a series of deeds and reveled in his storytelling. All I cared about was how it ended. Finally, I asked him, “So where is he now?”
He stabbed his finger on the last warranty deed in his pile. Bormann had bought the house using the name Tony Baxter. The legal description was in metes and bounds, the method of identifying real property that describes each boundary line with a direction, an angle by degrees, and a distance. It seemed to describe the parcel well enough, but not the address. “Where is this?”
His eyes glimmered. “3010 Holmes Avenue South.”
* * * *
The 3000 block of Holmes Avenue South was a tree-lined street of four-squares in South Minneapolis. A streetcar dropped me off on 31st. As I walked down the sidewalk, I thought I saw Lana’s red Lincoln Cosmopolitan convertible cross over at the far end of the block. I wasn’t sure, but it made me wary enough to take a quick look around for tails. None was in sight.
I popped up the three steps at 3010 to Terry Bormann’s porch and buzzed the front door. After a moment, Bormann peaked through a side window, then opened the door a crack. “Yeah?”
He was an American, but had the sharp, angled features of every young German I’d fought against in the war. His hair was short and brown, neatly trimmed and oiled. His eyes were an impenetrable blue. Smart but suspicious.
“Is Max in?” I was being perky again. It took everything I had.
“Max who?”
“Max Rethwisch.” That had been the seller’s name on the deed transferring the property to Tony Baxter a.k.a. Terry Bormann.
“He doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Are you kidding me?” I acted crushed. “When did he move?”
“A week ago.” Bormann started to shut the door.
“Do you happen to have his new address? We were in the Third Battalion together and he told me to look him up whenever I was in town.”
“Sounds like the wrong guy. The guy who lived here was in his eighties.”
“Max Junior. That’s who I’m talking about. The son. Have you at least got Senior’s address? Maybe he can tell me where to find Junior.”
Bormann hesitated. “You really from out of town?”
I showed him my California driver’s license. He hesitated, then opened the door.
“I’ve got it here somewhere,” he said as I stepped into the foyer. A pair of suitcases stood patiently by the stairs.
The house was nicely furnished and the extensive woodwork was nicely polished. All I could see from the foyer was the open living room to the left and the bright kitchen through a door down the hall past the stairs. But everything, including Bormann with his snappy powder-blue sport shirt and light gray slacks, looked like it belonged. Everything, that is, but me. I was the only unpolished thing in sight.
“Can I trouble you for a drink of water?” I said. “It’s a steam room out there.”
“Sure,” he said over his shoulder as he strolled toward the kitchen. “Is lemonade okay?”
“Perfect.”
While he disappeared into the kitchen, I moved into the living room and started searching. It didn’t take long. The brass compass was hiding out in the open on the red brick mantel over the red brick fireplace. I picked it up. It was the size and shape of a pocket watch and had “U.S.” engraved on its protective cover.
Its condition was immediately recognizable to me. It was scratched and dented, its brass sheen worn off by time and miles spent bouncing around in a duffel bag or a bomber jacket. The scars of war.
“What are you looking at?” Bormann stood near the hallway with a tall lemonade in each hand, his blue eyes still impenetrable.
“You an airman?” I said, holding up the compass for him to see.
He nodded and started toward me. “Twenty-five missions. That compass was my good-luck charm. I carry it with me wherever I go.” He gave a short laugh. “I can’t seem to give up the habit.”
“Mind if I open it?”
“Not at all.” He set my drink on the mantel. I’d expected suspicion but was getting guarded amiability.
I opened the cover. Beneath the glass was a dial marked with 360 degrees in five-degree increments and a blue, jeweled arrow pointer. On the inside of the cover, tiny etchings of letters and numbers surrounded an engraved name: “Capt. Bormann.” I looked at him like there had to be some mistake. It should have read “Callahan,” after the mob boss’s son. Bormann mistook my confusion for a question.
“Those little marks? Directions. It’s a long story.”
I looked at the little marks. Letters and numbers. N90W12N15E20 and on and on. It looked vaguely familiar. Almost like ... metes and bounds. Directions. North 90 degrees West 12 feet, thence North 15 degrees East 20 feet. Pinstripe had put a note in his hat. Bormann had put them in his compass. That’s why Callahan wanted it. It wasn’t his kid’s compass. That story was probably bullshit. He wanted it so that Bormann wouldn’t let the directions to his hideout get into the wrong hands.
“It’s a beautiful piece,” I said as I closed the lid and set the compass back on the mantel.
“I owe my life to it,” he said with no trace of a smile.
“It was a dangerous place.”
He gave me an odd look, as if he wasn’t sure which place I was talking about. I’d meant Europe, but the same applied to the tailraces.
I kept on. “I guess all that matters is getting out alive.”
He nodded.
I glanced at the luggage by the stairs. “Leaving town?”
He nodded again and gave a sad smile. “If I get out alive.”
I cocked my head.
“Bad choices,” he said, “for the wrong reasons.”
We didn’t say much else while I finished my drink. I set the empty glass on the mantel in front of the compass. “Well, I won’t take up any more of your time. You said you have Max’s new address?”
“Oh, yeah.” He turned and walked back into the kitchen.
I met him by the front door, where he handed me a piece of paper. Then we shook hands. “Good luck,” I said. “Wherever you’re going.”
He squeezed my hand a bit tighter. “Thank you.” Then he opened the door and let me out.
I took my time moving down the front walk. I had the feeling I’d forgotten something. It wasn’t the compass. I’d grabbed that while Bormann had left the room to get Max Rethwisch’s address.
It came to me when I reached the sidewalk. Something wasn’t adding up. Why had Callahan lied about the compass? Why hadn’t he simply told me that Bormann owned a compass that contained information Callahan didn’t want to get out?
I walked up Holmes toward the streetcar stop fingering the brass compass in my pocket. I was starting to doubt my decision to take it. I stopped walking and pulled the compass out of my pocket and stared at the “U.S.” etched into its cover.
Bormann seemed like a decent enough guy. He’d made some bad choices, but who hadn’t? Wasn’t working for a mob boss—even for a day—a bad choice? Sure, Callahan had hired me to do a job and had two hundred and fifty bucks waiting for me upon delivery, but the compass had carried Bormann through twenty-five missions. It was his good-luck charm. I’d been through Anzio. I knew from experience that when there was nothing left but fear, the simplest item could supply a man with the courage he was sure he didn’t have. If Bormann thought a brass compass was the only thing that had kept him safe during that godforsaken war, that was his business. Because the truth was that whatever got a man through the hell of the war was something sacred. Even if he was the only one who knew it.
I hesitated.
That’s when I heard the shot. The answers followed it like an echo.
Who had pulled the trigger.
Who was dead.
Why I had blood on my hands.
* * * *
I burst through the front door with my gun drawn. Bormann was on his back on the floor of the hallway, halfway to the kitchen. A spreading stain of black blood oozed through the powder-blue threads covering his chest. Red spots stippled his light gray pants.
Pinstripe had his thumb to the man’s jugular. He stood up straight. “Nice job, Nash. You work fast.”
“So do you.”
He stuck his gun back in his coat. His nose looked more mottled than it had before. “Callahan told me to follow you, but he thought it would take you until tonight to find this bastard.”
“You followed me so you could kill him.”
He shrugged. “What else? Can’t let a guy like this talk to the wrong people. He knows too much.”
“And I led you straight to him.”
“Not a bad plan, was it?”
I raised my gun and fired. His right hand erupted in a burst of red. Pinstripe screamed and clutched at what fingers were left. I put another shot in his foot. He’d have trouble getting away before the cops arrived. I left Pinstripe squirming on the floor next to Bormann, their blood pooling together on the floor into a deep, angry red that made no distinctions as to whose blood was whose. Or who had sacrificed more.
Outside, I knew I had to run. The shots would bring the police in short order. As I raced down the sidewalk, I heard a car horn behind me. I turned my head but kept my feet moving. It was Lana in the convertible. She was waving for me to get in.
I thought about taking my chances on my own, but only for a second. I jumped in the passenger side without opening the door.
Neither of us said anything until we were almost downtown. I spoke first.
“You knew.”
“No, I didn’t. I swear. Not until I saw Perry waiting in the alley after you’d gone inside.”
Perry. Pinstripe’s real name.
“Why were you following me?”
“Curiosity. I wanted to know what you were up to.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“And I wanted to see you again. I didn’t want you to leave town without...” She started to say something more, but decided to leave it at that.
I acted like I didn’t care. “Did Bormann quit or was he fired?”
“He quit. He said he was getting tired of his conscience nagging him.”
“He must have bought the house for later, once Callahan stopped looking for him.”
Lana didn’t answer. She wasn’t supposed to.
I couldn’t bring myself to look at her, though I knew she wanted me to. I stared straight ahead as I told her where to drop me off.
There was alarm in her voice. “The courthouse? You’re not going to turn us all in, are you? He’ll kill you.”
Now I looked at her. “I helped your boyfriend find and kill a war veteran. A decent guy, all in all. Not perfect, but a guy with a conscience he listened to once in a while. Something most of us never do. And now he’s dead because of me.”
Tears filled her eyes as she pulled to a stop in front of the courthouse. “Callahan’s not my boyfriend. Not anymore.”
“Who are you trying to kid, Lana? You’re perfect for each other. You have to be or you’ll end up dead like Bormann.”
She began sobbing.
I got out and walked into the courthouse. Room 29 was easy to find, its pebbled glass door stenciled with the words “Minneapolis Police Department.”
* * * *
I had to hurry to catch the 12:01. Lana had dropped me off at the courthouse at 11:40, but she was gone by the time I left the building so I’d had to run the three blocks to the depot. The reservation was still there for a double bedroom in a sleeping car. I bought my ticket with the first half of the money—the only money—Callahan had paid me.
As I pulled my suitcase out of the storage locker, I heard the final boarding call for the Rock Island Twin Star Rocket on Platform 1. I hurried through the waiting room and pushed through the double doors to the vast train shed that covered the platforms. It was a dead-end station, so all of the trains were backed in, their engines pointing toward the way out.
I spotted Buzz-cut wading through the crowds to the left, moving slowly in the direction of the other platforms. There were no trains directly to L.A., so he had no idea which connector I’d take, or if I’d even be here at all. He was trying to look casual as he searched for me, as casual as someone can look while holding a loaded gun in their coat pocket.
The conductor on Platform 1 yelled, “All aboard!”
I sprinted to the train and hopped onto the first step of the vestibule to the last car as the Rock Island Rocket began to pull away. When I turned back, Buzz-cut was still looking toward the other platforms. He hadn’t seen me.
Not until he heard Lana call my name.
“Darrow! Darrow, wait!”
She’d just come through the double doors and was running toward Platform 1 in high heels and a yellow chiffon dress. Her platinum blond hair fluttered behind her like a white flag.
Buzz-cut spotted me and drew a black and oily gun from his pocket. Passengers near him on the platform screamed and scattered. His aim settled on us just as Lana reached me. I grabbed her arm and swung her up on the steps behind the protection of the metal vestibule frame.
I never heard the shot. I’m not sure Buzz-cut even fired one. When I looked around the corner of the vestibule, his gun was lowered and he was barking out curses that got lost among the screams of women and the groans of the engines. Then, as travelers pointed at him and yelled for security, he turned and ran for the exit.
As our train moved slowly out of range, Lana held her body hard against mine.
“Go home,” I said with conviction that was already beginning to fade.
“I don’t want to.” She tilted her head up at me. “I’ve always dreamed of going to Hollywood.”
A couple of questions clung to me just as tightly as she did: How had Buzz-cut known to come after me? Who had told Callahan what had happened at Bormann’s house? Only Lana and Pinstripe had that information. Pinstripe may have dragged himself to the phone and called, but that might have taken more dedication to his profession than I gave him credit for. And as Lana had come running across the platform, she’d been running for dear life. The problem was I couldn’t tell if the dear life she’d been running for was hers or mine.
The train was slowly picking up speed. We’d left behind the shadows of the depot’s shed and had moved into the afternoon sunlight.
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“Because I stopped at the courthouse when you asked me to.”
She had. She’d given me the chance to try to make amends. To drop off the brass compass and leave quick instructions as to how to use it to find Callahan. I’d felt confident this would put Callahan in jail, until I remembered what the document clerk had said. His requests to the Minneapolis Police Department had gone unanswered, which meant that Callahan probably had someone inside the department who made sure such things got lost. So there was no guarantee that the compass would lead anyone anywhere.
But I guess that’s the trouble with compasses. They tell you where you are, but not where you’re going.
At that moment I had no idea where my life was going. No idea whether being a private investigator was worth the trouble or not.
But at that moment there was one thing I did know. I knew what I had. I had Lana under my arm and a ticket for a double bedroom in my coat pocket.
I didn’t need a compass to tell me to head in that direction.