"It bad to be you. Nobody else knew it was important. That pile of junk! I told Miles not to put it in the garage."
"But it somebody did swipe it, I doubt if they could make it work. You still had all the notes and instructions and drawings."
"No, we didn't either. Miles, the fool, had stuffed them all inside it the night we had to move it to protect it."
I did not fuss about the word "protect." Instead I was about to say that he couldn't possibly have stuffed several pounds of paper into Flexible Frank, he was already stuffed like a goose when I remembered that I had built a temporary shelf across the bottom of his wheel-chair base to hold tools while I worked on him. A man in a hurry might very well have emptied my working files into that space.
No matter. The crime, or crimes, had been committed thirty years ago. I wanted to find out how Hired Girl, Inc., had slipped away from them. "After the Mannix deal fell through what did you do with the company?"
"We ran it, of course. Then when Jake quit us Miles said we had to shut down. Miles was a weakling... and I never liked that Jake Schmidt. Sneaky. Always asking why you had quit. as if we could have stopped you! I wanted us to hire a good foreman and keep going. The company would have been worth more. But Miles insisted."
"What happened then?"
"Why, then we licensed to Geary Manufaturing, of course. You know that; you're working there now."
I did know that; the full corporate name of Hired Girl was now "Hired Girl Appliances and Geary Manufacturing, Inc." although the signs read simply "Hired Girl." I seemed to have found out all I needed to know that this flabby old wreck could tell me.
But I was curious on another point. "You two sold your stock after you licensed to Geary?"
"Huh? Whatever put that silly notion in your head?" Her expression broke and she began to blubber, pawing feebly fox a handkerchief, then giving up and letting the tears go. "He cheated me! He cheated me! The dirty shiker cheated me...he kinked me out of it." She snuffled and added meditatively, "You all cheated me... and you were the worst of the lot, Danny boy. After I had been so good to you." She started to bawl again.
I decided that euphorion wasn't worth whatever it cost-or maybe she enjoyed crying. "How did he cheat you, Belle?"
"What? Why, you know. He left it all to that dirty brat of his after all that he had promised me... after I nursed him when he hurt so. And she wasn't even his own daughter. That proves it."
It was the first good news I had had all evening. Apparently Ricky had received one good break, even if they had grabbed my stock away from her earlier. So I got back to the main point "Belle, what `was Ricky's grandmother's name? And where did they live?"
"Where did who live?"
"Rickey's grandmother."
"Who's Ricky?"
"Miles's daughter. Try to think, Belle. It's important."
That set her off. She pointed a finger at me and shrilled, "I know you. You were in love with her, that's what. That dirty little sneak... her and that horrible cat."
I felt a burst of anger at the mention of Pete. But I tried to suppress it. I simply grabbed her shoulders and shook her a little. "Brace up, Belle. I want to know just one thing. Where did they live? How did Miles address letters when lie wrote to them?"
She kicked at me, "I won't even talk to you! You've been perfectly stinking ever since you got here." Then she appeared to sober almost instantly and said quietly, "I don't know. The grandmother's name was Haneker, or something like that. I only saw her once, in court, when they came to see about the will."
"When was that?"
"Right after Miles died, of course."
"When did Miles die, Belle?"
She switched again. "You want to know too much. You're as bad as the sheriffs... questions, questions, questions!" Then she looked up and said pleadingly, "Let's forget everything and just be ourselves. There's just you and me now, dear... and we still have our lives ahead of us. A woman isn't old at thirty-nine: Schultzie said I was the youngest thing he ever saw-and that old goat had seen plenty, let me tell you! We could be so happy, dear. We--"
I had had all I could stand, even to play detective. "I've got to go, Belle."
"What, dear? Why, it's early... and we've got all night ahead of us. I thought-"
"I don't care what you thought. I've got to leave fight now."
"Oh dear! Such a pity. When will I see you again? Tomorrow? I'm terribly busy but I'll break my engagements and-"
"I won't be seeing you again, Belle." I left.
I never did see her again.
As soon as I was home I took a hot bath, scrubbing hard. Then I sat down and tried to add up what I had found out, if anything. Belle seemed to think that Ricky's grandmother's name began with an "H"-if Belle's maunderings meant anything at all, a matter highly doubtful-and that they had lived in one of the desert towns in Arizona, or possibly California. Well, perhaps professional skip-tracers could make something of that.
Or maybe not. In any case it would be tedious and expensive; I'd have to wait until I could afford it.
Did I know anything else that signified?
Miles had died (so Belle said) around 1972. If he had died in this county I ought to be able to find the date in a couple of hours of searching, and after that I ought to be able to track down the hearing on his will... if there had been one, as Belle had implied. Through that I might be able to find out where Ricky had lived then. If courts kept such records. (I didn't know.) If I had gained anything by cutting the lapse down to twenty-eight years and locating the town she had lived in that long ago.
If there was any point in looking for a woman now forty-one and almost certainly married and with a family. The jumbled ruin that had once been Belle Darkin had shaken me; I was beginning to realize what thirty years could mean. Not that I feared that Ricky grown up would be anything but gracious and good
but would the even remember me? Oh, I did not think she would have forgotten me entirely, but wasn't it likely that I would be just a faceless person, the man she had sometimes called "Uncle Danny" and who had that nice cat?
Wasn't I, in my own way, living in a fantasy of the past quite as much as Belle was?
Oh well, it couldn't hurt to try again to find her. At the least, we could exchange Christmas cards each year. Her husband could not very well object to that.
CHAPTER 8
The next morning was Friday, the fourth of May. Instead of going into the office I went down to the county Hall of Records. They were moving everything and told me to come back next month, so I went to the office of the Times and got a crick in my neck from a microscanner. But I did find out that if Miles had died any date between twelve and thirty-six months after I had been tucked in the freezer, he had not done so in Los Angeles County-if the death notices were correct.
Of course there was no law requiring him to die in L.A. County. You can die anyplace. They've never managed to regulate that.
Perhaps Sacramento had consolidated state records. I decided I would have to check someday, thanked the Times librarian, went out to lunch, and eventually got back to Hired Girl, Inc.
There were two phone calls and a note waiting, all from Belle. I got as far in the note as "Dearest Dan," tore it up and told the desk not to accept any calls for me from Mrs. Schultz. Then I went over to the accounting office and asked the chief accountant if there was any way to check up on past ownership of a retired stock issue. He said he would try and I gave him the numbers, from memory, of the original Hired Girl stock I had once held. It took no feat of memory; we had issued exactly one thousand shares to start with and I had held the first five hundred and ten, and Belle's "engagement present" had come off the front end.