“Well I... uh...”
“Davie, we haven't seen you in two weeks. Papa is so hurt, you mustn't ignore us.” Her voice was full of shrill pleading.
“Aw, Ma, I'm not ignoring you. I've been busy. Okay, we'll be up for dinner. Around six-thirty. And Ma, it's hot, don't make nothing heavy.”
“Don't you worry about my food, it will stick to your ribs. Don't bring me any candy or other dreck. You're not a guest, you're my son.”
“Okay, Ma, see you tonight.
The phone company was getting rich off me. I dialed Mary and she blew her top when I told her. “Dave, this is Friday night, I want to go out, see a movie, have a drink.”
“We'll see a movie tomorrow. You know how Ma and Pop are, and we haven't been up there for weeks.”
“Tomorrow? Sure, you have to be at your lousy job by midnight! Why didn't you go up and see your mother this afternoon?”
“I was busy and she wants us up in the evening when Pop's there. I'm on my way to see Uncle Frank now. Come on, Mary, you know this family stuff, I can't get out of it.”
“Dave, it's been a long week for me, I'm tired. I'm definitely not in the mood to eat one of those heavy meals, listen to your folks gab in two different languages or—”
“You mean language-wise you're bored because they don't talk that cocktail drip like the queers in your office?”
There was a heavy silence at the other end till Mary said calmly, “Dave, I'm not going to make a scene. I'll phone and beg off, tell them the truth: I'm tired. You go up and—”
“You bet I'm going!” I said and hung up.
Sore as a boil I tried Rose again and she was still out. I might as well see Uncle Frank and get some peace at home. I took a bus down to his sweatshop. All the time Wales and Owens and the money kept turning over in my mind, like those little steel balls you try to wiggle into holes in hand puzzles—only nothing fitted.
I'd heard a lot about Uncle Frank's joint but I'd never visited the place before. It actually was a beehive of activity, or something. And it really wasn't his place, he was a one-third partner. They had the basement and first floor of a large building in the heart of the garment district, and the whole place was a lacework of conveyer belts and endless tracks of rollers with packages moving in a steady stream on top of the rollers.
Uncle Frank looked as though he was made up for laughs— an old pair of dungarees straining to cover his medicine ball gut, a dirty loud plaid shirt, a dead cigar in his mouth like a whistle, and a pair of pince-nez glasses on his fat nose. He looked a little like Mary's father, something about him that still shouted hayseed.
Frank never stood still for a second; walking and running all over the place, taking packages from one conveyer belt to another, or throwing them down a chute, bawling out people, screaming orders. There seemed to be thousands of packages, from thin tie boxes to big crates. At the end of each roller, where the chutes started, there were scales and girls, mostly colored, perched beside the scales and writing down the weights and addresses as men and boys lifted the packages onto the scales, then tossed them down the chutes where they were stacked, or put on skids and pulled out to trucks.
Uncle Frank always was a jerky talker and as he showed me around he would break off a sentence with a nervous yell to somebody about, “Why are you shipping dresses today? It's Friday. All dress goods go express. Express, goddamn it!”
He asked me, “Well, how do you like it, Davie? Plenty of action, and this is the start of the slow season. Around November we're busy as crows at seeding time—packages stacked right to the ceilings. The way it should be, we pay rent for space up to and including the ceilings and then...” He stopped to grab a large carton marked “fragile—glass" off a roller and throw it on a pile across the room as he shouted at a kid who didn't look over sixteen, “Where's your eyes, Paddy? That was plainly marked 'air freight.' See that it gets to the last chute and be careful.”
He ran a hand over his big lantern jaw and whispered loudly to me, “The breakage these darn kids cause. I don't know, when I was coming up kids were... How do you like it, Davie lad? We go like this from eight in the morning up to ten or eleven at night.”
“Sure a lot of movement. What's it all about?” I asked, thinking it was odd about Wren coming across a retired cop in a bar just when he needed one.
“This is a very big operation,” Uncle Frank said, blowing up his chest as if making an after-dinner speech. “New York is the style center, the clothing center. Let us suppose you own a shop out in Dayton, Ohio. Well, you have to buy here, either directly or by mail, and you have to pay the shipping costs. Now say you buy a dress for two dollars and plan to retail it at three-fifty. The shipping—hey, you in the blue sweatshirt on the south roller, don't pile those boxes so high, they'll fall and jam the roller. What was I saying, Davie?”
“A dress for three-fifty,” I said, watching an old man neatly toss a flat dress box on top of a pile of boxes about ten feet high, tossing it like a basketball player sinking a foul shot. Did the four grand have anything to do with the Owens killing, or was it another blind alley? As a motive it wasn't so hot-why wait, six, seven weeks?
“Oh, yes, you buy the dress for two dollars. If you have it sent parcel post, insured, the postage will amount to, say... about seventy cents. This means you can't retail the dress for under four dollars. A dress weighs about three to four pounds, packed. Suppose you're buying fifty dresses, that's over forty dollars in postage alone. Are you following me?”
“Right behind you.” Had Wales and Owens been doing private work all along? That would account for the wad Wales had on him. But the private eye business wasn't that good... unless they were doing blackmail. Then why the crummy messenger jobs? A cover? And why wouldn't Mrs. Owens know? Or had she been lying all the time? No, then she would have kept quiet about the four grand.
“... And so you have all your orders delivered to us—the manufacturers deliver free within the city. We wait till you have a hundred pounds of freight and ship by hundred-pound lots, thus cutting your shipping costs in half, including the few cents per item for our service. Handling thousands of packages per day, we make a nice profit, although we carry a terrific overhead and have to... Tom, did you call West-side Motors for another truck? Well what are you waiting for? It's late. Come on, Davie, we'll go up to my office. We'll be able to hear ourselves think there.”
We climbed around and over wooden crates, walked through zigzag aisles of packages. I was watching my clothes while Uncle Frank was barking instructions at people as he walked, most of the people not even listening to him. We went up some stairs where a bevy of elderly women were working adding machines fast as typewriters, and into a battered office. Uncle Frank sat down behind his old desk and relit his cigar, mouthed a couple of pills as he said, “Always around now, when business is slow, my stomach acts up.”
“Is any business worth a nervous gut?” I asked, studying Uncle Frank. I was screwy. He'd never have anything to do with a murder. And neither would Wren, they were businessmen not goons.
“Ulcers, nervous stomach, piles, I've had them all. But I have an appointment in a few minutes, so let me tell you our proposition. I've talked this over with my partners and they agree you're the ideal lad for us.”