Peter Reed
Redheads Won’t Wait
I stomped into the office, brushing the early snow off my shoulders. Meg glanced up at me and then looked back at the work in her typewriter. I paused and looked at the part in her black hair. I usually get a grin, and sometimes a kick in the shins. I knew that there was something wrong.
“The boss in?” I asked her.
“Uh huh,” she answered — a quiet answer. She didn’t look at me. I began to wonder if George had sacked me again. I took a quick mental trip through the last few cases I’d handled. Outside of getting too tough with a certain Mrs. Foster, the record was clean as a lumberjack’s pockets on Sunday morning.
I pushed the door open. George had his chair turned. He was looking out his big window. He glanced at me and then continued his window gazing, tapping a pencil against his front teeth, changing the shape of his mouth so that he changed the pitch of the little tock, tock sounds. I noticed that chin number two was growing nicely, and the fuzzy blond hairline was back another half millimeter.
“Look, George! What’s this freeze play? What’s the matter with you and Meg?”
He let me stew for several long seconds, and then said softly, “I’ve had you working for me for four years now, Rich. I know you pretty well. You’re smart and quick and tough. But you’re hotheaded. You’ll never be a top flight private eye until you learn that you got to be cold all the time.”
“This the introduction to a mouth’s pay in lieu of notice?”
He spun around and glanced at me. I couldn’t read his eyes. “Sit down,” he murmured.
I shucked off my coat, parked in the visitors’ chair and lit a cigarette. I couldn’t figure it.
“Early this morning, at five o’clock in fact, there was trouble at the Mill House on Route 81, five miles from the city limits.”
“I know the place. Clip joint. Gambling in a building out in back. Run by Red Wandowski. Calls himself Red Warren.”
“That’s the one.”
Suddenly I realized what might be the matter with the two of them. “Hey! Nobody killed Harris?”
“No,” he replied. I sighed in relief. The stuff we get seldom call for more than one operative. When a job needs two. I like to work with Harris.
“But somebody did get it. A fellow lost all his cash. It included some company money. About two thousand five hundred of company money. Then he drank himself to sleep. He woke up about four-thirty this morning, vaguely remembered that he’d lost his money, and decided to get it back. His date was still with him. She had stuck by him when she couldn’t wake him up. He slept it off in his car. She couldn’t drive, or she would have taken him home. She tried to get him to go home, but he insisted on seeing Warren. The lights were still on in the gambling shed. He walked off through the night toward it.”
I yawned, a fake one, and said, “Come on, George. Get to the meat.”
“This is the girl’s story I’m telling. A few minutes later a man stepped up to the door of the car, startling the girl. He told her that her friend was in trouble up in the gambling shed. She walked up there. All the other customers had left. Men were spreading sheets over the dice tables and the roulette layout. They looked at her in surprise and said they didn’t know about any trouble. When she got back out the car was gone. She was worried. She knew her friend wouldn’t have left her.”
“Sounds like a rub-out from here.”
“She walked down the road. She was afraid to ask for a ride. Several cars passed her. About a mile from the Mill House she saw cars parked ahead, their lights on. She found her friend’s car wrapped around a big elm. He was dead. She’s hired the agency to find out what really happened.”
I picked it up from there, grinning as I said, “And Wandowski and his boys claim there was no trouble. A customer gets tight. There was ice on the road. He fights with his gal and piles up on the way home. But why the long faces?”
“We’re afraid of you.”
“Me!” I exploded.
“Yes, you, Kirk. We are afraid of what you’ll do. I’m not giving you the case. The man killed was your kid brother, Bob Kirk.”
Everything in the world seemed to stop. I hauled out another cigarette, lit it and walked over to the window. A dead fly lay on his back on the dusty window sill. Snowflakes hit the pane and melted. Little drops of water faltered, and rushed in crooked paths down the glass. I had to look at little things. I had to think of little things.
Bob with his wry grin and round, happy face. The businessman of the family. Good job as sales manager for a wholesale jewelry outfit. Dependable and funny as hell. Always laughing. Engaged to Sharon.
“The girl was Sharon Wester?” I asked. My voice sounded hoarse.
“That’s right.”
“Good girl.”
“Seems to be. Nice looking, too.”
“Yeah.”
I stood at the window and thought about Wandowski, his cheap layout, his crooked games and the slimy muscle-men he kept around him. I felt my neck swell and my nails bite into the hard palms of my hands. I caught a small piece of the skin inside my lower lip between my teeth. I shut my teeth on it and tasted the flat saltiness of blood. Then all the wild fury in my heart seemed to chill — and settle into a cold hard block — deep in my guts.
I turned to George and said quietly, “You better let me handle it.”
“I can’t trust you, Kirk. She doesn’t want Warren killed. She wants to know what happened. She’s a client. Clients get what they pay for — we hope.”
I bent over him and thumped my fist gently on the desk with each word, “I’ve blown my top. I know that. This time I won’t. I won’t.”
He sighed, shrugged, and said, “And if I say no, you’ll do it on your own. Go ahead.”
His hand was hard and warm in mine. I spun and headed out. Kirk, the hard boy, was going home. Home to weep like a lovelorn girl. Tears for the long-lost afternoons of summer, for the Saturdays when school was out. The tears were to be for what I had lost as well as Bob. But when I shut the apartment door behind me, they weren’t there... Maybe they would be — afterward.
Bob had been taken at Sharon’s instructions, to an undertaker on West Center. I identified myself, and the little man tried to tell me to come back later.
I grabbed the front of his coat and shook him gently, saying, “Maybe you didn’t hear me. I said I’m Richard Kirk and I want to see my brother’s body; now, not later!”
He pulled away and adjusted his coat. He glared like an offended fox terrier. I followed him through the place. They had Bob on a white porcelain table. I ordered the terrier and his dolt of an assistant out of the workroom. A little shove helped them along.
I had to force myself to forget who it was. I set my teeth and went over him. Skull crushed over the eyebrows. I measured what I could feel of the fracture. Roughly four inches long — an inch wide over the left eye and narrower over the right eye. Numerous cuts. I railed them back in and wrote out a description of the fracture. They signed it after I made clear that I was anxious to have their signatures. I tucked it away in my pocket and said, “And if I ever hear that you’ve opened your fat mouths about this, you better move your business to North Dakota. You won’t be happy here.”
Sharon’s apartment was in one of those big old houses which dewy-eyed decorators like to turn into apartments. I figured she wouldn’t be working. I had to wait nearly a full minute after leaning on her buzzer before the latch clicked. I had been to a party in her gay little place. I remembered its location on the second floor rear.
I knocked on her door and heard her call, “Who is it?”
“Rich, Sharon.”
The door opened and I walked in. The shades were drawn. The apartment smelled of tears and ammonia. She wore a faded blue corduroy robe. I could see her unmade bed through the open door to her room. She had a towel wrapped around her vivid auburn hair. Her eyes were puffy in her small white face. Her strangely heavy lips were pale.