“Using me as a fence, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Well. I don’t know, Mallory.”
“George, it’s important. So far these guys have stolen God knows how much, killed one lady, and beat the hell out of me twice.”
“And you’re still messin’ with them? You feelin’ all right?”
“No, I’m not. I won’t feel all right until these SOBs are put away where they can’t hurt anybody or steal anything again.”
“I don’t go for guys like that myself. People got to work for what they get.”
“I agree, George. Can you help me?”
“This is strict between us, right?”
“Strict between us.”
“There’s a place in South End. A used auto parts shop on one side, a big old empty garage on the other. Place is called Tony’s.”
“Living quarters above?”
“Yeah. It’s all one big double-story building, living quarters on top, garage and auto parts deal below. Ratty-lookin’ place. You know it?”
“I know it.”
“I hear-just hear, now-you can get whatever you need from a guy there. A guy named P. J. somethin’.”
“George, you’re a prince.”
“I’m just a poor man, Mallory, that’s all.”
“How can I thank you?”
“Forget it. But if you want to take a look at that videotape, we can swing you a deal.”
“I’ll think about it, George. Thanks again. See you.”
“You be good now, Mallory. And more important… be careful.”
We hung up.
Debbie was just finishing up the dishes. I joined her, took the towel from her, and dried the last few.
“What’s going on, Mal?” she said, nodding toward the phone on the wall.
“Nothing.”
“Are you into something dangerous?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you going to stay here with me today?”
“I’m going to take care of some errands this afternoon. I’ll be back this evening.”
“Won’t you please stay? I’m… I’m still scared of what Pat might do.”
“Keep the door locked and bolted. You’ll be okay. If you aren’t, call Lou Brown and he’ll help you out.”
“Lou Brown? Isn’t he the deputy sheriff?”
“He’s one of ’em. But he’s a friend and’ll keep it quiet, and nonofficial. Okay?”
“Come back as soon as you can?”
“I promise.”
“I’ll fix a nice supper for you.”
“Really? What are we having?”
She dried her hands and put them around my neck and kissed me, then looked at me and said, “Anything you want.”
“What time do you want me back?” I said.
18
Port City doesn’t have a slum. What it does have, here and there, is “substandard housing,” the largest concentration of which is located in that area of town known as South End. The word “slum” just isn’t in the Port City vocabulary. To understand that you must keep in mind that Port City is Middle America, U.S.A., where the corn grows tall, grass is something you walk on, and everybody but me votes straight Republican; pleasantly dull (“A nice place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit there”) and relentlessly middle-class. Even the millionaires like to think of themselves as middle-class joes. So do the slum dwellers.
And they have a point. If you tried to pass South End off as a slum to somebody born and bred in a big-city ghetto, you’d get laughed at or punched out. Because South End is, basically, a lower-middle-class residential district, having in common with East Hill a tendency toward conglomeration of different types of houses: everything from tumbledown shacks to brand-new prefabs. But the common denominator of South End housing is the one-story, rather run-down clapboard-in short, substandard. And so the bottom line comes to this: South End may not be a slum, but you’ll sure bump into one hell of a lot of substandard housing down there.
Something else you’ll bump into is industry. A good share of major local industry is situated in South End, the dominant one being the grain-processing plant, whose seasonal emissions of soybean fumes can turn a summer breeze into something you wouldn’t care for. Another factory, where pumps of all sorts are manufactured, stands at the foot of West Hill bluff and marks the beginning of the End; a street cutting past the pump plant runs straight through the End and out of town, turning into Highway 61 South after a lengthy stretch littered with gas stations, used-car lots, hamburger palaces, and supermarkets, with the drab residential sections of South End cowering back behind all the plastic glitter. Just before the street turns officially into a highway, heading out to drive-in restaurants, motels, and melon stands, there is a big, many-laned intersection, and if you can maneuver your way into the left lane and turn, jostling across the railroad tracks, you’ll find yourself in the heart of South End, staring smack at the huge grain-processing complex on the left hand and at Port City’s literal wrong-side-of-the-tracks on the right. Just three blocks over those tracks was Tony’s Used Auto Parts.
Across from Tony’s, little raggedy kids were playing on the swings and slides in a large, well-tended park: two blocks’ worth of land donated by the grain-processing people to the city to make up for smelling it up. One block of the park is taken up by a Little League baseball field with a stand of bleachers, in back of which is a graveled parking lot. That’s where I left the van before crossing over to Tony’s.
Tony’s was an odd-looking, off-balance sort of a building; actually, it was two buildings slapped together: a tall, one-story garage fastened haphazardly to an equally tall but two-story arrangement of shop below, living quarters above. Together the joined buildings made for a big, long, sagging wooden ramshackle, with white-paint-faded-to-gray peeling to reveal even grayer wood. But the strangest-looking thing about this strange-looking structure was the windows; every window in the place was painted out with flat black. It didn’t take Nero Wolfe to figure out the windows were black to keep people from seeing in.
Even the front shop-window was painted black. Nonprofessionally rendered lettering in white walked awkwardly across the black window, saying “Tony’s Used Auto Parts,” and in smaller, just-as-awkward letters: “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.” Okay.
I tried the shop’s front door. Locked. They hadn’t even bothered with a “Closed” sign. I walked around back of the building and found a rickety open stairway leading up to the back-door porch of the second-story living quarters. I climbed the stairs and knocked.
Nothing.
I knocked some more. Insistently.
The door cracked open, and one eye looked hesitantly out at me, like it was still Prohibition and the bathtub was full of gin. I repressed the urge to say Joe had sent me and said, “Is P. J. around?”
“Who wants him?” the eye said. It was a female voice and, as I studied it, a female eye, too. But from the sliver of pale face I could see along with the eye, I couldn’t tell much else about who the eye and voice belonged to.
I said, “I heard P. J. sells stuff.”
“He don’t sell stuff anymore.”
“But I heard….”
“I don’t give a damn what you heard. He don’t sell stuff anymore, and anyway, he don’t never sell stuff to people he don’t know, so get your goddamn ass off my porch.”
“Please-”
And, delicate little thing that she was, she slammed the door on me.
I knocked again, and kept knocking, having decided I would go on knocking until I got some kind of response.
This time when the door opened, it was all the way. I didn’t get much of a look inside the place, though, because something was blocking the view. What was blocking the view was a guy about the size of the Statue of Liberty’s brother.
I said, “I, uh, I, uh….”
“You get outa here.”
The voice was wrong, too high-pitched, but it didn’t make him any less frightening. He was a square-jawed guy with a blond crew cut and dark eyes crowding a several-times-broken nose.