Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

Seeing Red by D. H. Reddall

I had lunch at the Rudder where I managed to gag down the special: some limp greens, an arid potato, and the usual mystery meat that Floyd swears is roast beef. I left feeling like I’d swallowed a shotput.

Some of the stores were piping Christmas music out onto the street as I walked back to my office, mostly the Chipmunks and female rock groups from the fifties whose songs were a bit more musical than a carpenter falling down stairs with all his tools.

It’s a short walk. My office is located on Ocean Street over a music store. I unlocked the office, collected the mail, and got my feet up on the desk.

Fifteen minutes later the door opened, and a thin, worried-looking man walked in. He was wearing a mud-brown suit, yellow shirt, and narrow brown knit tie.

“Mr. Stubblefield?”

“Right the first time. Have a seat.” He sat across from me and primly crossed one leg over the other.

“My name is Alfred Windle. I’m station manager of WVOC here in Hyannis. Are you familiar with the station?”

“Sure,” I said. “ ‘VOC, Voice of the Cape.’ An all-talk format, right?”

“Correct.” He straightened his chocolate-colored tie. “Have you had occasion to listen to the Archie Chandler Show? No? Well, Archie is the anchor, if you will, of our programing. He’s intelligent, articulate, and quite often controversial. I suspect that people like him and loathe him in equal numbers, which, of course, makes for good ratings. At any rate, he recently received a rather dire threat.”

“Dire?”

“Oh my, yes. A death threat, actually.”

“If Chandler is as controversial as you say he is, he must receive a certain amount of hate mail as a matter of course.”

“That’s true, Mr. Stubblefield, and some of it quite vulgar. This is rather more serious, I’m afraid.” He fumbled in his coat pocket. “I brought along a copy of the letter. It’s rather incoherent, but it will give you an idea of the writer’s complaint.”

The letter was two pages long, typed, single-spaced. As Windle had said, it was rambling, incoherent, and filled with misspellings. The gist of it, so far as I could make out, was that Mikhail Gorbachev was the Antichrist and that glasnost was an elaborate trick to get America to disarm and withdraw, after which the Russians would crush us and then proceed to enslave the world. Anyone who thought otherwise, the letter went on, was a dupe and a comsymp, and anyone who broadcast the big commie lie over the radio was a traitor. The penalty for treason, the writer pointed out, was “summery execution.”

“Archie often deals with international issues,” said Windle, “and since the upheavals in the communist bloc, he has devoted a number of shows to discussions of Gorbachev, the dissolution of the various communist regimes, that sort of thing.”

“Have you been to the police?”

“Oh yes. They have the original letter. Realistically, there is little they can do at this point.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Can you provide protection for Archie for awhile? Not full time, of course, but when he is coming from and going to the station, or making a personal appearance somewhere?”

I walked to the window. It was starting to snow. Wrong time of year for a summery execution. “Yes and no. If someone is really determined to kill Chandler, they’ll probably succeed. A foolproof defense is an illusion.” Windle looked crestfallen. “That’s not to say that nothing can be done. We can make it difficult for this guy. I’ll have to talk to Chandler.”

“Indeed, indeed you will.” He checked his watch. “Archie goes on at three. It’s half-past one now. Could you come by the station in the next hour?”

I said I’d be there and saw Windle to the door. From my window I watched him bundle down the street, his thin frame bent against the freshening storm.

Archie Chandler was a short fireplug of a man with a florid face and graying red hair. Both in manner and appearance he was a rooster.

“Look, Alfred, I’m busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest. Can we do this another time?” His desk was a welter of books, magazines, and newspaper clippings. “Who the hell are you?” he snapped, looking me up and down.

“Whittaker Chambers,” I said. “I just stopped in on my way to the pumpkin patch.”

Chandler threw some papers on his desk. “All right, Alfred. Who’s the wiseguy and what’s it all about?”

“This is Charles Stubblefield, Archie. He’s a private investigator. I’ve asked him to talk with you about the threat you received.”

Chandler snorted. “That wasn’t a threat. That was the demented ravings of some acrocephalic who spends too much time reading the National Review.”

“Man threatened to kill you,” I said.

Chandler stared at me truculently. “ ‘If a man hasn’t found something that is worth dying for, he isn’t fit to live,’ ” he quoted. “Martin Luther King.”

“ ‘A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it,’ ” I retorted. “Oscar Wilde.”

Chandler cocked an eyebrow and let go the faintest of smiles. “You begin to interest me, Snugglefeel.”

“It’s Stubblefield,” said Windle, “and it would seem advisable, Archie, that we make some arrangements regarding your safety.”

“For pity’s sake, why? Because some addled, right-wing, paranoid whacko scribbles an illiterate threat? If I worried about every cretin from Rip-socket, Vermont, who sent me a nasty letter, I’d be out of a job.”

“You intend to discuss the issue in future shows?” I asked.

“Of course I do. It’s the most profound event of the last forty-five years. I’m not about to be intimidated, start limiting myself to chatty little shows about seat belt laws or the big doings over in the finance committee, just because of a few screamers indulging themselves in their thumb-sucking rages.”

I looked at Windle. “Archie,” he pleaded.

“Absolutely not, Alfred. I will not be wet-nursed, and that’s final.” He returned to his papers. Windle beckoned me outside.

“I’m terribly sorry to have wasted your time, Mr. Stubblefield,” he sighed. “I really can’t insist on it if he’s opposed to it. Please send the station a bill for your time.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “There’s no charge. It’s not every day that I get to exchange aphorisms with an expert.”

Breakfast at the Rudder is comparatively safe. The next morning I sat at the counter and ordered up eggs with bacon and an English muffin. Floyd came by, all smiles, wiping his hands on his apron.

“Enjoying your breakfast, Charles?” I was, actually, but tradition demanded an insult.

“Stuff tastes like dog food, Floyd.”

“Well, that depends on who’s eating it, I’d say.” He laughed and drifted over to the coffee machine. The newspaper was chock full of bad news and alarms, so I left it for the next guy and walked over to my office under a sky that looked bruised and swollen and full of snow. Windle and Chandler were waiting for me in the hall.

“What brings you gentlemen out so early?” I asked, but I figured I already knew.

“Trouble, Mr. Stubblefield,” said Windle. “Someone attempted to kill Archie last night.”

“About twelve thirty last night,” Chandler said as I led them into the office. “I was finishing up some work and getting ready to watch the Letterman show. I need very little sleep,” he explained, “and I rarely go to bed before two.” He was subdued now, not the same man I’d exchanged bon mots with the day before. “Fortunately, my wife and daughter were in bed. Fortunately for me, I had gone to the kitchen for a snack. While I was in the kitchen, somebody unloaded several shotguns through the living room windows.” He threw his hat on my desk and sat down heavily. “What the hell kind of person does a thing like that? My God, when I think of my family—”

Windle cleared his throat. “The police were there last night and again this morning, looking for evidence. I met with the board of directors this morning. All are agreed that Archie should have protection.” He looked at Chandler, who nodded his assent. “And now I have another meeting. I shall leave you two to work out the details.”

We sat in silence for awhile. Below, in the music store, someone was trying out a saxophone. Finally, Chandler spoke.

“It’s ironic, isn’t it?”

“How’s that?”

“I got into this business because I felt that public discourse in this country had degenerated into grunts and monosyllables on the one hand, and into obfuscatory bafflegab on the other: television and politics, you understand. Talk radio seemed an ideal arena for an open and rational exchange of ideas.” He massaged the back of his neck. “For my trouble, I get several loads of buckshot in my living room. So much for rational discourse.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe the one listener who knows what acrocephalic means took offense. By the way, what does it mean?”

Chandler laughed. “It means pinhead.” He stood and walked to the window. “How do you plan to proceed? I won’t tell you that this hasn’t shaken me up.”

“Well, for starters, can you get your family to another location?”

“Done. Doris left this morning with the baby for her sister’s place in Providence.”

“Okay. From now on, you go nowhere without me. We’ll check you into one of the motels on the strip. Use an assumed name and pay by cash. All right so far?”

“Yes, but I can’t live like that forever.”

“Let’s not worry about forever right now. Day at a time, as they say.”

I drove Chandler home so he could gather some clothes and essentials. Next stop was a hideous aquamarine Quonset hut called the Jolly Fisherman on Route 28. Chandler registered as Henry Mencken, threw his briefcase on the bed in disgust, and reminded me to pick him up by noon.

The desk sergeant let me into Carl Olivera’s office.

“Good morning, lieutenant.” Olivera folded his large square hands and looked up at me without expression.

“Stubblefield. To what do I owe my enormous good fortune?”

“Archie Chandler,” I said, taking the chair that had not been proffered. Olivera appraised me with flat black eyes.

“What about Chandler?”

“He stopped by this morning, asked for some protection.”

“So you’re going to hold Chandler’s hand. Why do I need to know this?”

“Come on, lieutenant. How many malignant duck hunters do I have to look out for?”

Olivera leaned back and sighed. “Probably one.”

“Chandler figures he heard ten, twelve shots.”

Olivera nodded. “I expect that a dozen is exactly right. Are you familiar with Street Sweepers?” I said I wasn’t. “They’re semiautomatic shotguns, hold a dozen shells in a rotary magazine. If you’re in a hurry, you can let off all twelve in about three seconds. Ain’t technology grand?”

“Twelve shells.”

“Yeah. Let’s see, there are about twenty-seven pellets per shell. That’s what — over three hundred pellets. Chandler’s lucky he wasn’t walking around in his living room. The guy really hosed the place down.”

“So you’re figuring one guy?”

“Probably. We got one witness, says she saw a guy on a big fancy motorcycle tearing down the street right after the shooting. She didn’t see anybody else.”

“Fancy?”

“She’s sixty-eight years old and doesn’t know from motorcycles. However, after some succinct and penetrating questions from one of our well-trained, attentive officers, it turns out what she meant by fancy was that the front fork was extended way out. A long, shiny chrome fork. That’s what I got, except of course for this pile of work on the desk here.”

I took the hint. “Thanks, lieutenant.”

“You hear anything, you get in touch, Stubblefield.” It wasn’t a request.

At eleven forty-five I drove by the orange dory in front of the Jolly Fisherman, between the huge rusting anchors, past the mural of the cavorting bluefish, and around to Chandler’s room. He cannoned out the door before the car had stopped.

“I’m going crazy in there. They’ve actually painted the room aquamarine. I hate aquamarine! A man cannot formulate lucid, cogent arguments in an aquamarine room filled with blond furniture and fake Picassos. And the damn sink drips.”

Fortunately, it’s only a five minute drive to the station. I dropped Chandler off and told him I’d see him at six. The rest of the afternoon was spent on paperwork and trying to ignore the trumpet lesson that Emil conducts each week for some poor soul who sounds as if he is blowing into the wrong end of the instrument.

A little before six I unlocked the bottom drawer of the desk and hauled out my Sig 9 mm semi-automatic. Fifteen rounds in the clip, one more in the spout. A second clip went into my coat pocket. I’d read somewhere that the average firefight consumes two point five bullets per gun, so I was overloaded. But Olivera could be wrong. There might be more than just one guy with a Street Sweeper. And I tend to be conservative where my health is concerned. Forty-three doesn’t look so bad when you consider some of the alternatives.

Windle was all atwitter with excitement. He led me into a small cubicle crammed with electronic equipment. Chandler followed us in, lit a cigarette, and turned the “No Smoking” sign to the wall. “Let’s hear it, Alfred.”

Windle flipped on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. I heard Chandler’s voice say, “Hello, you’re on VOC.”

A high-pitched nasal voice said, “You lousy pinko. Did you get my message last night?” Some heavy breathing and traffic noise in the background. “No more warnings, you commie bastard. Get off the air, now, or I’ll cancel your show. Permanent.” That was all.

“Naturally, we are equipped with a seven-second delay, so none of it went out over the air,” said Windle.

“Why does he call you a commie?” I asked.

Chandler shrugged. “I guess because I’ve expressed admiration for Gorbachev, and because I’ve heralded the impending reductions in both troops and arms as a return to sanity. To accuse me of being a fellow traveler or a quisling because of that is ludicrous.”

“This guy apparently thinks it’s all a ruse to soften us up so the Rooskies can drop the hammer on us.” Chandler rolled his eyes at that.

“This guy’s a couple of quarts low,” he said.

“Which makes him dangerous,” said Windle. “Very dangerous.”

The weekend was quiet. Chandler wasn’t on the air, but we took meals together both days, out of town and at a different place each time. With an expense account I could avoid the ptomaine towers I usually frequent and indulge myself for a change. Chandler was grateful for the trips. He was planning a show, he said, on how parts of Cape Cod had been turned into a cross between Disneyland and Newark, with special emphasis on the motel industry. It was his intention, he went on, to tear some people’s heads off — discursively, of course.

Monday broke clear and sunny. I delivered Chandler to the station, had lunch at the Windlass, and waded back through “Jingle Bell Rock” to my office thinking that someday I’d find a place to eat that didn’t have a nautical name. Two bikers sat smoking on their machines in front of my building. They probably weren’t any bigger than Gino Marchetti. One of them called, “You Stubblefield?”

“That’s right.” They were dressed in full colors, with “Berserkers M C” emblazoned across the back of their denim vests.

“Soto wants to see you.”

“About what?”

He shrugged. “Just said to tell you that he had some buzz you might be interested in.” I nodded. “Follow us.” They kicked down on the starters and I climbed into my car wondering what the president of the Berserkers wanted with a private cop.

Our destination was a ramshackle house on Camp Street. A large window had been removed from its frame and heavy planks ran from the sill down to the patchy grass in the back yard. My guides rode up the planks and through the window. I took the more conventional approach through the back door.

Soto was a big man, rawboned and mean-looking. He sat with his feet up on a metal desk smoking a cheroot and reading a tabloid bearing the headline “Confederate Flag Spotted on Belly of UFO!” He threw the paper aside as I came in.

“Stubblefield. It’s been awhile.”

“Awhile,” I said. Soto stubbed out the cigar.

“I hear you’re a private detective now.” I nodded. “You know the cops are turning up the heat on us?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Oh yeah. Got us under the microscope. The other clubs, too.” He lit another cheroot. The room was beginning to smell like a dump fire. “Seems that someone on a chopper tried to croak some guy last week, guy that yaps on the radio.” He blew out some smoke and eyed me carefully. “I hear you’ve been hired to cover the guy.”

“Now where did you hear that?”

Soto waved his hand dismissively. “All this heat’s bad for us. We’re businessmen, if you know what I mean.” I knew. The Berserkers, like some of the other clubs, had found it profitable to traffic in drugs. “Hard to conduct business when everybody’s looking over your shoulder.”

“What’s this got to do with me?”

“Papers say that the shooter’s looking to clip this radio dude because he thinks he’s a commie stooge or something.”

“So?”

“So it happens that I know this guy, name of Cadillac Jack. Biker, but not rolled tight. He hangs around, has a nice hog, tries hard to participate, but he’s off the wall. I can’t afford to have somebody that loose in the business.”

“How off the wall?”

“Oh, man, bad temper. Flies off real easy. And he’s a gun nut, all the time rapping about guns and carrying pieces to impress. Just what I need, some bozo with a bad temper and a weapons Jones. But here’s what you’ll like. He’s a real patriot, stays true to the red, white, and blue, rides a Harley because it’s an American bike and screw the Japs. And he’s big on nuking the pinkos and the Russians.”

“Where can I find him?”

“He doesn’t come around here any more,” said Soto with a thin smile. “I had a couple of brothers — discourage him from dropping in. But he’s called Cadillac Jack because he works in a Cadillac dealership. Mechanic.” He shook his head. “I got him all riled up last time I saw him.”

“How did you do that?”

“Told him that starting next year, Cadillacs were all going to be made in Japan.”

I left Soto grinning through the industrial smog of cigar smoke and found a phone book. There were only three Cadillac dealers on the Cape. I scored at the second one, Sergeant Cadillac Motors.

“We had a mechanic here named John Rugg, but he failed to show up for work about a month ago and he hasn’t been back since. We checked at his rooming house, but the landlady said he left without so much as a goodbye. Too bad. He was a little odd, but a crackerjack mechanic.”

“Odd?”

“He was rather touchy, couldn’t take a joke. He never became friendly with the other men. They kidded him because he always tuned in those talk shows. God knows why. They drive me crazy.”

“Did he ride a motorcycle?”

Sergeant thought for a minute. “Not that I recall.” He shook his head. “A strange one, he was. When he left, he said something should be done, that it was a crime.”

“What was?”

“Cadillacs, being made in Japan.”

It was four thirty when I got back to the office. Olivera was waiting in an unmarked car. He motioned for me to get in. “Your boy is really hazing them today.” Chandler’s voice was on the car radio. “He’s been flogging the right-wingers. Hell, I guess that’s me. I think we should have flattened Russia in 1945, saved everyone a whole lot of grief.”

“What’s up, lieutenant?”

“You tell me, Stubblefield. You were probably just on the way up to your office where you were going to call me up, like any good citizen, and tell me what’s on Soto’s mind. Right?”

“Soto.”

“We’re a small department, but we aren’t feeble, yet. Talk to me, Charles.” I told him about Rugg and what I’d learned from Sergeant.

“Makes sense. He gives us Rugg, takes the heat off him and his greasebag gang.”

“Rugg sounds right.”

“I agree. His name is depressingly familiar. Among other things, he had a fling a couple of years ago with a local white supremacist group. He didn’t stay, though I don’t know why. He fit right in with those maggots.”

“You get to know the nicest people in your line of work,” I said. He gave me a weary look.

“People like Soto and Rugg lead me to believe that cowboys do, in fact, have congress with sheep.”

The next few days were uneventful. I was beginning to think that Rugg was going to draw back and play a waiting game. That would cause some complications on my end. Chandler was chafing at the restrictions on his daily life. I’d let him relocate to a guest house that was easier on the eyes. I’d probably have gone around the bend myself after a few days in the Jolly Fisherman.

After the show on Thursday, I drove him to his house. He needed more clothes and a number of books and articles that he hadn’t gotten before. The neighborhood was quiet. Outside of a kid being dragged around by an Irish setter, no one was on the street.

It was highly unlikely that Rugg was in Chandler’s house, but I went in first.

“Wait here,” I said, clicking on the lights. I made a quick check of the back door and the porch. All clear.

“Go ahead and do what you have to do on this floor,” I said. “I’ll take a look upstairs.” He nodded and headed across the living room for the den.

I was halfway up when a shot rang out. I got down the stairs in two strides. Chandler was curled on the floor by the den, moaning and writhing in pain. The door to the den was open about a foot. I was so intent on listening for an assailant that I didn’t see it at first. Then I noticed it, a thin wisp of smoke curling up from the door handle. The handle itself was blown apart. Chandler had triggered a booby trap.

I called the rescue squad and tried to stanch Chandler’s bleeding with a towel. He had taken the blast in his lower right side and it was messy.

As the adrenaline receded anger took over. I’d assumed that Rugg was a gun-crazy moron. He was crazy, all right, but he also possessed a considerable amount of animal cunning. I had underestimated him, and Chandler was paying the price for my carelessness. After the medics took him away, I called the cops and sat down to wait.

“Damn clever,” said Olivera. A team of men was going over every door and window in the house. “He got into the house somehow, removed the guts from the door handle assembly, and replaced them with a spring, a firing pin, and a .410 gauge shotgun shell. When Chandler turned the knob, he broke a sheer pin, which released the spring and the striker. Blammo.” He shook his head. “The son of a bitch. What if it had been the wife or the kid?” He saw the look on my face. “Don’t be too hard on yourself, Charles. Who could have figured something like this?”

“I should have. That’s what I’m paid for.”

“Yeah? Well, last I knew, you were just like the rest of us — a mite less than infallible. So ease up. They just told me that Chandler’s going to pull through. Thank God he wasn’t standing directly in front of the handle.” He shrugged on his coat. “And, Charles, don’t do anything foolish. We’ll get the little creep.”

Twenty minutes later I was back at the house on Camp Street. Soto was working on a cherry-red Harley in the large back room that served as the Berserkers’ garage.

“I need to have a talk with Cadillac Jack,” I said, “but I can’t locate him. Any suggestions?”

“I got a suggestion,” said a hulking grease-stained man, standing up from where he and another Berserker were working. “Why don’t you shag your ugly ass out of here before I pull your teeth for you.” A primary chain swung from one hand.

Soto waved him away. “Whoa, Flesher. Get your finger off the trigger, man. He’s okay.”

“He’s a cop,” said Flesher. His partner got up now, a squat man with a face that looked like it had once been on fire and somebody had put it out with a shovel.

Soto picked up a wrench and faced the two gang members. Very softly he said, “And I said it’s okay.” Something in his voice made the muscles in my stomach tighten. It also took the fight out of Flesher, who dropped the chain and turned to leave.

“That’s not quite right, Flesher,” I said. “You’re supposed to bob your head a few times and then say, ‘Duuuuuh, okay boss.’ ”

Flesher’s eyes narrowed. “Next time I see you, cop, we’re going to dance.”

“Now you’ve made a bad enemy there,” said Soto as the two left the room.

“So did he,” I said. “Can you help me out with Cadillac Jack?”

“Well, I don’t think he has any friends, but one of the brothers did mention that he’s big on shooting pool. And,” he raised a forefinger, “he doesn’t like the little bar tables. What do you suppose?”

“Smiley’s,” I said.

Soto’s eyes rounded in mock surprise. “Amazing, Stubblefield. That’s just what I was thinking.”

It really wasn’t amazing. Smiley’s was the only pool hall on Cape Cod. It was dark, smoky, and crowded when I walked in. A sign advised “No Swearing, No Gambling, No Drinking, No Massé Shots.” As far as I could see, everyone in the place was 0 for 4. The houseman was rocked back in his chair, watching the action on table one.

“Cadillac Jack in tonight?” I asked. He continued to watch the table.

“Who wants to know?”

“I do.”

“Who the hell are you?”

I stomped down hard on the front rung of his chair, bringing him upright all at once. “I’m a friend of Soto’s. I got a message for Cadillac Jack. You going to tell me if he’s here, or would you rather be selling kindling out of this dump tomorrow?”

“Okay. Okay. He’s over there, table twelve.” I looked to where he was pointing, and as I did, a thin, sallow man in a leather jacket looked up at us. When he saw the houseman pointing, he threw down his cuestick and bolted through the side door. It was a mistake. The door opened onto a blind alley that ran between Smiley’s and an A&P.

I went out the front door on the run, stepping to one side of the alley. “You’re all done, Rugg. Give it up.” I let the safety off on the Sig. “Rugg!”

The passageway was suddenly filled with the sound of thunder. Rugg was gunning his motorcycle down the alleyway toward the street, firing a handgun wildly as he came. I dropped to one knee, aimed carefully, and shot him once through the tinted insectoid visor of his helmet. The slug catapulted him off the back of the machine. I rolled out of the way as the bike careened out the alley and skidded across the street in a shower of sparks, coming to rest with its chromed front fork welded firmly under a tan Toyota.

Rugg was dead. A MAC-10 lay on the pavement beside him. People were gathering on the sidewalk as I sat down to wait for the cops.

Two weeks later I was sitting in the Rudder and wrestling with some chicken that was still fighting for its life. The door opened and Alfred Windle came in out of the snow.

“Well, Windle. What brings you here? On a diet?”

“Progress report, Mr. Stubblefield,” he said, all business as usual.

“Proceed,” I said, abandoning the battle on my plate.

“Archie came home from the hospital today. There will be a rather nasty scar, and I’m afraid he will walk with a limp from now on. His hip was damaged, but the doctors say he was very lucky indeed not to have received the full burst of the blast. It could have been much worse.” He swallowed some coffee. “And what about you? Have you had your hearing yet?”

“Yeah. Case closed.” The cops had traced Rugg to his apartment by means of a rent receipt in his wallet. The apartment was a virtual bunker: flags, right-wing literature, and an arsenal that included handguns, a couple of assault rifles, and a Street Sweeper.

When questioned, the landlady admitted lending her typewriter to Rugg on several occasions, and it proved to be the machine on which the threat had been typed. Finally, they were able to place Rugg in Chandler’s house through a couple of fingerprints he had left on the door handle of the den.

Olivera was not happy with me, but under the circumstances he couldn’t really try to pull my license.

Floyd appeared from the back to pour a cup of coffee.

“Afternoon, Charles. Like some coffee?”

“Just the cup, Floyd. I can use it to beat this roadrunner on my plate into submission.”

“That’s what I like about you, Charles,” he said, heading for the kitchen. “Nothing.”

Some things never change.