And I did, right after I stopped at his bank to cash the check.
The Rivertown jail is in the basement of the police department, which is within spitting distance of city hall. People used to joke that the close proximity was deliberate, so that when reform came, the lizards who’d corrupted the town wouldn’t catch cold perp-walking between city hall and the jail. Nobody in Rivertown joked that way anymore. Nobody believed reform was coming.
I didn’t know the cop at the desk, but I knew his DNA. He had the same last name as the mayor, village clerk, and two of the city’s trustees. He didn’t bother to look up from his soft-porn magazine when he told me to wait in the green cinderblock room down the hall.
Albert Petak came in wearing an orange jumpsuit. I expected that, like I expected the beard stubble and the build-up of oil in his hair. Jail can change a man in a hurry, make him jettison hygiene along with hope. But no way had I figured the missing teeth, nor the eyes that darted around nervously, like a rodent scanning for lunch. Albert Petak didn’t look like somebody who could afford Harry Ruffino.
He sat down at the brown-grained, plastic table and played those nervous eyes across my face.
“Harry Ruffino asked me to look into your case.”
“You a private investigator?” His voice had a twang, Deep South.
“I nose around sometimes. I’m not licensed.”
His eyes left my face, started looking at the baseboards. “They got rats here.”
“What can you tell me?”
“I didn’t figure Ruffino would pop for a professional,” he said, checking the far corner.
“I meant about the stamping-factory fire.”
Petak stood up, went to tap on the door. A cop in the hall opened it almost immediately.
“I need smokes,” he said. “Marlboros.” And then he went out.
I walked outside, took out my cell phone, and called downtown.
“Bonjour,” the Queen of France breathed into my ear.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle. Monsieur Ruffino,s’ il vous plait.” It was all I remembered from high school.
She hesitated just a fraction, then put me through.
“Your man is reticent, all right,” I said when Harry picked up.
“That’s it, then.” He didn’t sound surprised.
“I’ll chase down Wildcat Ernie.”
“You’re done. I’ll try to muddy things up in court.”
“Why Albert Petak, Harry?”
His little smoke vacuum started whirring, and his lighter clicked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s been living under cardboard someplace. Not your kind of client.”
“Sometimes I do pro bono.”
“Admirable, you working for free.”
“Don’t believe all the lawyer jokes.”
“I still owe you a few hours from that five hundred. I’ll look around the factory.”
He exhaled quickly. “Don’t uncover anything that can hurt us.”
I went back inside, asked the sergeant at the desk who was working the stamping-factory fire. This time he looked up. He told me it was an officer named Brockhouse, and that he was in.
Brockhouse was in his mid twenties. He led me to a small room similar to the one where I’d met Petak, except the cinderblocks were beige.
“Albert Petak has been around for a couple of years, doing odd jobs,” he said. “Lately, he’s been scrapping in the stamping factory.”
“Which means many people could have seen him there regularly?”
“Sure,” Brockhouse said, understanding my inference that Petak could have been set up.
“Homeless?”
“Depends. If the scrapping’s good, Petak sleeps at the Health Center. Otherwise, he’s under a viaduct.”
“I thought Rivertown was scrapped out years ago.”
“The copper wire has been gone for years. Same with the aluminum. But scrappers collect all kinds of stuff. I’m hearing now they’re after clinkers, those old dark bricks rich people use to build fireplaces.”
“A scrapper named Wildcat Ernie placed Petak at the factory just before the place went up?”
He nodded. “He’s at the Health Center sometimes, too.”
I was starting to like Brockhouse. He didn’t make me beg for information.
“How about the dead guy? Petak have any link to him?”
“You never know. Sometimes one gets on another’s nerves, next thing knives are out, or bottles are broken. Or, I suppose, fires started. Scrappers have their own rules.”
I thanked him for his time, started to leave, but stopped at the door. Brockhouse wasn’t a Rivertown name. “College man?” I asked.
He grinned. “Northwestern. Bachelor’s in Criminology.”
It didn’t make sense, not in Rivertown. Unless...
“What’s your mother’s maiden name?” I asked.
He gave me the name of the mayor, and the village clerk, and the two village trustees.
I left, grinning too. Maybe there was hope for Rivertown if the lizard DNA was beginning to get washed by universities.
At first glance, the Sherman Stamping Works squatted low in the heart of Rivertown exactly as it had for eighty years, a four-block long, dark brick building hard by the railroad tracks. But then the eye picked up the double row of shattered windows, the rust on the hundreds of yards of rail siding. And the newest indignity, the rubble of scorched bricks lying where an entire wing had stood.
I walked through an opening made jagged by its doors being ripped away, and entered one of the main stamping rooms. It was a huge brick cavern, at least two hundred feet long. Fenders and floor pans had been punched out of sheets of steel there once, but now puddles of rain water lay between the square concrete islands where the presses had stood. High up on the dark trusses, pigeons fluttered at my intrusion, and then went silent. There were no light fixtures, no hardware on the windows. The gutted building still stood because land wasn’t worth anything anymore, not in Rivertown.
The pigeons started fluttering again. Above the rustling of their wings came a slight pinging sound. Somebody was hammering.
The huge room led into another great hall, identical to the first except that the concrete pads were smaller and set closer together, for smaller machines. A man in stained, torn clothing was using a claw hammer and a chisel to loosen the clinker bricks on an interior wall. A scrapper.
I gave the room a cough.
The scrapper turned. I raised my hands. “Got somebody who likes old bricks?”
He gave me the once-over, decided I wasn’t a cop, and nodded his head. “A couple of snazzers in a Mercedes Benz. They’ll give me twenty bucks for a hundred of them.”
“If you load them in their trunk?”
He looked at me, confused. “Sure.”
They must have been real snazzers if they were throwing around money like that.
“You know Wildcat Ernie?” I asked.
“This about Albert?”
I pulled out a twenty — a trunkload of bricks, in the current currency of the realm — and handed it to him. “Ernie fingered Albert for setting the fire.”
“Lots of guys come here. Could have been anybody set that fire.”
“Did you know the dead guy?”
“Never seen him, and I been around here plenty. I think he just wandered in that night. Bad luck, him getting dead.”
“Ernie around?”
“Not since the fire. Heard he came into some jingle. He’s roosting at the Health Center.”
“How well do you know Albert?”
“People keep to themselves.”
“Albert set fires?”
“If he did, he had a reason.”
I thought about that, walking out: A man has to have a reason.
The Rivertown Health Center used to be a residential YMCA. That was back when people came to Rivertown to make new things in the factories and new starts in their lives. Nowadays, the factories were dead, and all that got made in Rivertown were the girls who worked the curbs along Thompson Avenue, and the bets in the barrooms behind them. But the Health Center still served as a transient center, except now its guests were in transition either to the viaducts or to the afterlife. I’d stayed there for a night, once, in a room just vacated by someone who’d expired in the remains of his supper. One night had been enough.