As it happened, I didn’t run into any of the three during the next few days. I inquired about them whenever I ran into another member of the Street Tigers, but no one else seemed to have seen them either. Finally I ran into a gang member who said he thought they were out of town, because he had overheard them discussing hitchhiking up north to Oxnard to look for work. Since the only work any of them had ever done was to push grass and smack, that seemed to me unlikely. I thought it more probable that they had made one of their periodic runs down to Tijuana to buy a few bricks of grass.
A week later I dropped by the delicatessen in the daytime when my landlady happened to be there also. She was all enthused over Mr. Olem’s hot potato salad. She asked me if I had tasted it, and I had to admit I hadn’t.
“You should, because it’s delicious,” she said. “What gives it that sort of tangy taste, Mr. Olem?”
“A certain spice packaged in Vienna, Mrs. Martin. I wrote for a supply when I first began negotiating with Mr. Rubin.”
“Oh, you have relatives in Vienna?”
Mr. Olem shook his head. “Just friends.”
She waited hopefully, but when he failed to elaborate, she finally asked, “What’s the name of the spice?”
Mr. Olem smiled. “That’s my secret, Mrs. Martin. If I told you my recipe, you could make your own potato salad instead of buying from me.”
“I probably would,” she admitted with cheerful candidness. “I don’t suppose you want to give out the recipes for your sausage and baked beans either, then.”
Mr. Olem shook his head again. “Sorry. Those are more of my secrets. But I will tell you that there’s real maple syrup in the beans and one of the spices in the sausage comes from Hong Kong.”
“Oh, you have relatives there?” Mrs. Martin asked interestedly, still grabbing at every opportunity to attempt to pry information about his background from her ex-roomer.
“Again, merely friends,” he told her.
“You sure have friends lots of places,” she said, giving him up and turning back to me. “Tony, have you tried Mr. Olem’s baked beans or sausage?”
“I haven’t tried anything he makes,” I said.
“Well, you should. I never tasted anything as good as his specialties.” The reason I hadn’t tried any of the delicatessen food was that I seldom ate at home, although I had what Mrs. Martin euphemistically called a ‘bachelor apartment.’ There was only one room, but an alcove contained a sink and apartment-size refrigerator and stove.
I sometimes made my own breakfast, though. After Mrs. Martin’s sales talk, I bought a half pound of the sausage and tried it with eggs the next morning. As my landlady had said, it had quite a unique flavor. I found it delicious.
The second week of the Merchant Patrol went as uneventfully as the first. I liked to think that word about the patrol had gone out over the underworld grapevine and had discouraged criminals from picking on any of the protected stores. Then that bubble burst during the third week the patrol was in existence. Three protected stores got knocked over the same night by the same pair of bandits.
Fortunately none were on my beat, but they were all only a few blocks away. A supermarket, a gas station and a movie box office were all held up within an hour by two tall men dressed all in black and wearing Halloween witches’ masks. The total take from all three jobs was around fourteen hundred dollars.
Two nights later a grocery store and a tavern in my area were hit by the same pair only fifteen minutes apart, with a total take of another nine hundred dollars. I wasn’t on duty yet, the first robbery taking place about seven-thirty and the second at a quarter to eight, but another member of the patrol was on duty, which gave us all a black eye. It sort of made us feel as though the bandits weren’t very impressed by us.
That was the last heard from that particular stickup team, though. Apparently the five stickups gave them enough of a stake to move on somewhere else. There wasn’t another holdup or burglary reported by any of the protected businesses during the next two weeks.
Then I ran right into the middle of an attempted burglary.
It was about eleven-thirty on a Thursday night. I was cutting down the alley behind the stores in the block where Olem’s Delicatessen was, checking all the rear doors and windows giving onto the alley. When I shined my light on the delicatessen’s back door, I saw it was standing wide open.
At that moment there sounded from inside a peculiar series of thuds, as though a number of heavy objects were falling to the floor more or less simultaneously. This was followed by the sound of a lot of threshing around and a considerable amount of cursing.
From the sounds, I decided the intruders were in too much trouble to be very dangerous. So, instead of heading for the nearest phone, as I was supposed to, I drew my gun, went over to the open door and shined my light inside.
Two figures were writhing around under the gill net I had last seen draped against a side wall. Apparently Mr. Olem had changed its location, for it must have fallen over the intruders from the ceiling. Its edges were weighted by heavy lead sinkers at intervals all the way around, which accounted for the thuds I had heard.
The overhead light flashed on, and a moment later Mr. Olem, in pajamas and a robe, stepped from the doorway of the staircase that led from the kitchen to the upstairs apartment.
When he saw me, he looked momentarily startled, but then he said cheerfully, “Good evening, Mr. Martinez. We seem to have caught some fish.”
By the increased light I could see the struggling figures under the net were a pair of teenagers from the neighborhood, both members of the Street Tigers. One was named Pancho Gomez and the other was a youth named Will Talley.
All their struggles were accomplishing was to get them more fouled up in the net. They had managed to thrust all four arms and all four legs through openings and back through other openings until they were hopelessly enmeshed.
Putting away my gun, I moved into the kitchen. Glancing upward, I said to Mr. Olem, “How’d you have this contraption rigged?”
“On retractable hooks,” he said. He indicated a series of small, oblong, open-fronted boxes attached to the ceiling at the edges of the room on all four sides. “You can’t see the hooks now, because they’re retracted into their receivers.”
“What made them retract?”
“An electric eye activates the device when an intruder gets within six feet of the office door. I also rigged a separate electric eye for use during business hours. It causes the hooks to retract only when someone walks through the office door into the office. I figured that in the event of a holdup, I would be forced to the office at gun point and would enter it first. The net would then drop over whoever was behind me after I was safely out of its way. After closing the store, I’ve been switching off that electric eye and turning on the other one.”
I gazed up at the series of boxes again wonderingly. “Where did you ever acquire the know-how to rig anything like this?”
“Oh, I was once a foreman in a Berlin plant that manufactured electronic equipment,” he said offhandedly.
I wondered if there were any specialized field, including brain surgery, in which he didn’t have at least a smattering of knowledge.
From under the net, Pancho Gomez called plaintively, “Will you get as out of here, Mr. Martinez?”
“You’ll be all right there until the cops arrive,” I told him. “Just relax.”
Mr. Olem cleared his throat. “Maybe it would be better to free them from the net before the police arrive, Mr. Martinez. You could keep them covered with your gun.”