Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 36, No. 6, June 1991

Accounts Payable by D. H. Reddall

I wasted part of the morning trying to solve a logic puzzle. According to the problem, seven guys using seven brooms can sweep up seven tons of sand in seven hours. I was supposed to figure out how long it would take ten guys using ten brooms to sweep up ten tons of sand.

Right away I rejected the obvious. They wouldn’t have bothered to put the thing in the paper if the answer was ten hours. After kicking it around for awhile I lost interest, just like I used to lose interest in the sixth grade when trying, unsuccessfully, to solve problems involving Airplane A and Airplane B.

I tossed the paper aside just as the door opened, admitting a tall gangly number wearing a suit that had gone out of style with the big bands. He looked to be in his sixties, and from the scowl I figured he wasn’t selling insurance.

“I’m lookin’ for a Stubblefield.”

“Congratulations. You just found one.” He looked me over pretty closely for a minute, then lumbered over to the other chair.

“Name’s Luther Kessler.”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Kessler?”

He stared at me as if I were simple. “Why, you can get the animals that killed Earl.”

“Who’s Earl?”

“My brother. They killed him.”

“Who did?”

“Now how would I know that? If I knew who killed him, do you suppose I’d be settin’ here and jawin’ with you?” He slapped the desk with a calloused palm. “They killed him. Blew him up on his doorstep.”

I remembered then. It had been in the news a few weeks earlier. Earl Kessler had been bookkeeper for a local trucking outfit. He’d taken a vacation in Maine, rented a cabin on a lake, and the next morning had picked up a package that was left on the porch. The ensuing explosion had flattened the cabin and killed Kessler.

I said, “The police are working on it.” Kessler nodded vigorously.

“I know they are. But there’s nothing wrong with bringing in a freelance. Reckon a man like yourself might be able to find out things the police can’t.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Cops don’t appreciate having people blown up in their jurisdiction. They’ll be motivated.”

“Well, I’m damn well motivated myself. I come all the way up here because I want some justice done. And not next year, or the next life neither. Never did have any truck with that karma nonsense. I figure if there’s any justice in this world you got to see to it yourself. Now, you interested or not?”

I was. It had seemed odd at the time that an anonymous bookkeeper from Cape Cod, an older man of modest means at that, should be the object of such an attack. It still seemed odd.

“Your brother have any enemies?”

“None I know of.”

“Had he made any changes in his life recently, or done anything unusual?”

“I don’t believe he had, but then I didn’t see Earl much. I’ve been fanning out to Illinois since ’53, sort of lost touch.” He shot me a look. “You ever work on a farm?” I said I hadn’t. Kessler snorted.

“Figured not.”

I let it go. Kessler struck me as the kind of guy who believed nothing of value had transpired in America since 1945. Hell, he could be right, but I didn’t want to get into it.

“All right, Mr. Kessler.” I slid a pad and small pencil across the desk. “Write down where I can reach you.”

He paused in his scribbling. “Another thing. Maybe you’ve noticed what a mess the courts are in these days, all them killers and drug fiends walking away free on account of the liberals all the time hollering about their ‘rights.’ ” He jabbed the pencil at me. “You find the people blew Earl up, don’t waste the taxpayers’ time and money, if you know what I mean.”

I assured him that I understood, took his retainer, and saw him on his way.

Bob Gilliat was a corporal in the state police. We’d played basketball together in high school and had managed to stay in touch in the years since. We were sitting at the counter in the Rudder.

“The bomb was heavy duty, Charles. Gelignite. Completely erased the cabin. There wasn’t enough left of Kessler to use for bait.”

“Time device?”

“Uh-uh. Motion sensor. Mercury switch. Very tricky, but once Kessler picked it up he was a dead man.” Gilliat took a bite of his eggs. “Jesus, what is this, rubber cement?”

Floyd strolled by, wiping his hands on a filthy towel.

“What do you time your eggs with, Floyd, a calendar?” I asked.

He gave me a disgusted look. “And who styles your hair, Charles? Your gardener?”

Gilliat grinned. “You guys been married long?”

“Say, Floyd. I’m having trouble with this puzzle.” I recited the problem of the ten guys moving the ten tons of sand. He hardly missed a beat.

“That’s simple, Charles. It takes them seven hours. A schoolboy could have figured that out.” He smiled smugly and disappeared into his kitchen.

Yeah. A schoolboy. I tried not to appear too humiliated.

“Any motive for someone swacking Kessler?”

“No. He was a nonentity: widower, bookkeeper, quiet, smalltime all the way. No bad habits, no known enemies.” He took a tentative sip of his coffee. “The way we figure it, the bomb was meant for someone else.”

“Why?”

“Well, it’s early in the season yet, and there were only two other cabins rented: couple of old guys up for the fishing. And Kessler. But here’s the interesting thing. The owner said that he gave Kessler a cabin that had been vacated just that morning. Seems that a homeboy, guy named Richard Manso from Provincetown, reserved the cabin for two weeks but only stayed a couple of days, then checked out.” He paused to bang some ketchup onto a pile of greasy fries.

“Manso is a part-time fisherman and a full-time drug dealer: coke and pot mostly, some steroids. Been arrested a couple of times. Used to be a dealer and also a thief in New York before gracing our peninsula with his presence.”

“What was he doing in Hay-shaker, Maine?”

Gilliat shrugged. “He told the camp owner that he was up for the fishing, getting away from the girlfriend for a couple of weeks. We haven’t proved otherwise, mainly because we haven’t been able to locate him. Yet.”

It seemed right. Small-time dealer gets too ambitious, maybe rips off the wrong people. Goes to northern Maine to cool off, but doesn’t go far enough. Someone, from either New York or the Cape, had been very angry with him.

Gilliat reached for his coffee, thought better of it, and downed a glass of water instead. “Looks like a mistake was made. It’s happened before. What’s your interest here, Charles?”

“Kessler’s brother. He wants to make sure justice is served.”

Gilliat raised an eyebrow. “Justice?”

I shrugged. “I have no problem with revenge. It’s an honest emotion, and it helps balance the books a little.”

“You’re starting to sound like a courthouse shrink, Charles. You know, the kind that hums a little Austrian waltz on his way to the witness stand to testify on behalf of some kink who sprayed the post office with an Uzi. ‘It vas, you see, a vay for dis conflicted man to lash out at the fadda figure—’ ”

I picked up the check, thanked Bob, and headed for my car.

A couple of hours later I was in Provincetown. I started at Manso’s last known address, an apartment just off Commercial Street. I was met at the door by a thin, tired-looking woman wearing jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. When I asked for Manso, she snarled three words at me, two of them rather impolite, and slammed the door.

It went downhill from there. No one knew where Manso was, if they admitted to knowing him at all. I’d expected it. This was a small, tight-knit community where outsiders asking questions are routinely shut out. I ended the day with nothing but sore feet to show for my efforts.

The next day was more of the same, and by midafternoon I’d had enough and headed for the Windjammer for a beer. The ’Jammer was the place of last resort for the fishermen and tradesmen in a town overrun by restaurants featuring salmon en croûte, medallions of pork in sweet potato sauce, and fusilli with capers and sun-dried tomatoes. Shot and a beer, pork rinds, maybe a burger — that was the order of the day in the Windjammer. I got a beer and settled into a booth.

I’d lived in Provincetown for awhile a few years earlier, and I still knew some people. One of them was Phil Cook, a personal injury lawyer specializing in dogbite cases and Jack Daniel’s. Especially Jack Daniel’s.

“You aren’t getting any better looking, Charles,” he said, sitting down across the knife-scarred table from me.

“It’s indelicate of you to say so, Phil. How’s the ambulancechasing business?”

He shrugged. “ ‘Sero venientibus ossa,’ my friend.”

“Say what?”

“ ‘For latecomers the bones.’ Or, to put it in the common vernacular, with which you are no doubt more conversant, ‘You snooze, you lose.’ ” He signaled for another drink. “Business is, unfortunately, a bit slow at the moment, although the bills arrive with depressing punctuality. It is the usual case of ‘a fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi.’ I fear.”

“Philly, can you for chrissake speak English?”

He shook his gray head sadly. “I said there is a precipice before me and wolves behind. Don’t they still teach Latin in the schools?”

“They don’t even use it in church any more, Phil. Decline of the empire and all that.” The waitress brought his drink and made a point of waiting for the money.

“And you, Charles. What brings you to town. Beach getaway?”

“I’m looking for a guy named Richard Manso. Know him?” There was the slightest pause as he brought the glass to his mouth.

“Nope. Never heard the name.” He sloshed whisky around in his mouth and swallowed. I waited a long minute.

“Maybe you remember a disgruntled fellow — what was his name — Starr. As I recall, couple of years back you owed him some money. He was threatening — correct me if I’m wrong here — to make you so ugly that you’d have to tie a porkchop around your neck before a dog would even come near you.”

“That barbarian!” He looked up from under his bushy eyebrows. “So it was you that cooled, Starr out?” I didn’t say anything. He threw back the rest of his drink.

“You’re a romantic, Charles. You were born several hundred years too late. This is not a propitious point in history in which to practice the romantic’s trade. We live in an age when minds are beclouded by materialism and greed. ‘Things are in the saddle and ride mankind,’ quoth the poet.”

“You sit there jabbering in Latin and quoting poetry, and you tell me I’m a romantic?”

Cook burped, got up, and made ready to leave. “By the way, Charles, do you remember the Laura B, Manny Cordeiro’s old dragger?” I nodded. “Well, Manny died, and the boat’s been on the beach for over a year. Word has it that a couple of the local wharf rats have taken to living aboard her.” He gave me a sloppy salute.

“Have a care, Charles. ‘Homo homini lupus.’ Man is, indeed, a wolf to man.”

The Laura B lay bathed in moonlight not far from Macara’s Wharf, her hull warped and her blue paint chipping. From my position among the pilings I had a clear view of the boat. Phil’s advice had been oblique, but I knew him well enough to follow it up.

I had no plan as such. I just figured on bracing Manso if and when he returned to the boat. He’d be easy enough to spot: Gilliat had described him as big, blond, and bearded, with a tattoo circling his left forearm that said “Hellraiser” in old English script. Bob also advised me that Manso enjoyed hitting people.

It was twelve twenty. The bars didn’t close until one. I settled down to wait.

Twenty minutes later Manso walked out of the shadows and onto the beach. I couldn’t see the tattoo, but the rest fit. I called his name and he swung around to face me.

“Who are you?”

“Easy. I just want to talk to you.”

He sighed and shrugged. “Cop, right?”

“Private cop.” His piggish eyes widened a bit at that.

“Oh, a private cop.” He moved towards me. “That’s different. I don’t have to talk to a private cop if I don’t want to.” He looked past me, around the beach, to see if I was alone.

“Might save you some grief if you do.”

“You think so?”

I nodded.

“Know what I think? I think cops are the lowest form of life on the planet. Lower than whale crap, and that’s on the bottom of the ocean.” He had been drinking, and it hadn’t done anything for his disposition.

“And I think I’ll teach you to mind your own business.” As he spoke he charged, swinging a beefy right hand at my head. I slipped the punch and hit him in the solar plexus with a right hook. He doubled over with a grunt and fell to the sand, struggling for breath. When he got it, he swore a bit and sat up.

“Now about that talk.”

“Screw you.”

“Be smart. The sooner the cops nail whoever blew up the cabin, the better for you. Somebody’s serious about folding your hand.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Come on, Manso. The guys that missed you in Maine aren’t going to give up.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. Nobody’s looking for me except the cops, and most of them couldn’t find their ass with both hands and a road map.”

“You don’t know what happened in Maine after you left?”

“No, man. I don’t know nothin’. I called the old lady third day I was there. There was a beef back here needed attention. I came back, took care of it. Right away the law’s on my case. I figured it had to do with this beef: I had to lay a beating on a guy. So I been keeping a low profile.”

I told him about Kessler. He thought it over for a minute.

“Look, Ace, I got enemies, but nothin’ heavy like that.”

“You sure?”

He got up and wiped sand off his clothes. “You think I’d be walking around out here, alone at night, no weapon, nothin’? Man, guys with bombs were looking for me, I’d be in goddam Australia. Yeah, I’m sure. You got the wrong guy.”

I believed him. As I had with the logic puzzle, I’d rejected the obvious. Only this time I’d made a mistake. The bomber had gotten the right man.

The cops released the contents of Earl Kessler’s apartment to his brother. I picked Luther up and we drove over there.

Earl Kessler had lived modestly. There were the bare necessities and not much more: a television, a few prints on the walls, a couple of dozen books, mostly on fishing and nature related topics.

I don’t know what I expected to find, but I gave the place a thorough toss. I even checked the undersides of the drawers, dumped out the coffee and the sugar, and unrolled the toilet paper and looked inside the cardboard tube.

“You reckon there’s a clue hidden there in the bumfodder?” Kessler’s voice dripped with sarcasm.

“You got an idea, maybe?”

“That’s what I pay you for,” he snapped. “Bright ideas.”

“Well, I’m fresh out. There’s no loose end to tug on here. Your brother lived like a monk: no vices, no girlfriend, no close friends at all. He didn’t even play cards or belong to a club.”

“He fished. He loved the outdoors. Always did.”

“Well, he loved it alone, looks like.”

“Never understood it myself.”

“What?”

“Fishing. Damned silly waste of time, and cruel besides. Fishing, hunting, trapping — cruel.”

“What’s the difference between raising deer and raising cows?”

“I got no livestock, mister. Corn and soybeans. No animals, save for my dog and a couple of barn cats. I couldn’t live with an animal only to send it off to slaughter. No, sir, I couldn’t.”

“Corn and soybeans?”

“Yep.”

“No endive?”

“What’s endive?”

“Never mind. It’s a bad Massachusetts joke.”

“We left no closer to Earl’s killers than when we came, but I liked Luther rather more than I had before.”

We drove to the industrial park and found the offices of Four-Lane Trucking. Kessler waited in the car. A receptionist passed me in to Ralph McIntyre without delay.

McIntyre’s office was functional: no chrome or leather or exotic wood, just a steel cubicle with a steel desk. A piston served as a paperweight, a miniature truck tire as an ashtray. The owner of Four-Lane Trucking was a large man with a military haircut. He lit a Camel and I asked my questions.

“Nah. Earl never mentioned anything about any problems. But then he was pretty quiet. Good bookkeeper, and naturally, we’re sorry as hell about what happened.” He took a long drag on the Camel, reducing fully half of it to ash.

“Any idea as to who would conceivably want to kill him?”

“Nobody’d want to kill Earl. It had to be a mistake. They were looking to clip someone else, way I figure it.” Another drag, the cigarette was gone. He saw me looking. “Filthy habit. I been trying to quit for years.”

“It wasn’t a mistake.”

“What wasn’t?”

“The bomb. Kessler was the intended target.”

McIntyre squinted at me. “You prove that?”

“Not yet,” I said, getting up, “but I will. Something smells in this whole thing. I intend to find out what it is.” I hoped McIntyre wouldn’t ask me how I planned to do it. I didn’t have an answer.

“Yeah, well, if I can help let me know, Stubblefield. Anything I can do, you know.” I thanked him and saw myself out. The receptionist flashed me a dazzling smile with all the sincerity of a campaign promise.

“You have a nice day now.”

“How well did you know Kessler?”

“Well, I’ve been here a little over three years, so that long.”

“He strike you as the kind of man who might have a secret life?”

“Mr. Kessler? No way.” She smiled at the suggestion.

“I get the impression the man was a saint. Didn’t he, say, ever make a pass at you?”

She did something you don’t see too much any more. She blushed.

“Go on! He never.”

“A perfect gentleman. Never even lost his temper, I’ll bet.”

“We-e-ll, I’ve seen him lose his temper a few times.”

“At the boss?”

“Oh no, never that. It was whenever there was an oil spill or something like that. He was savage over that big Exxon thing in Canada.”

“Alaska.”

“Yeah, Alaska. Whatever. And that business with the loggers and the little owl. That kind of thing made him very upset. He used to say that we had no right to do those things, that they were crimes against nature.”

I wished her a nice day and started for the door.

“Oh, Mr. Stubblefield, maybe you should know, being a policeman and all.”

“Private investigator.”

“Right, whatever. Anyway, Mr. Stoller, the man that owns the camp up in Maine where Mr. Kessler got — where he died — he called while you were with Mr. McIntyre. He wanted to know what to do about Mr. Kessler’s car. He seems to think it might be valuable.”

I walked out into the late afternoon sun. A plane was coming in for a landing, and the birds were scattering as if it were a huge hawk. It was a long drive, and it was grasping at straws, but the car was the last possible place I could think of to look for evidence bearing on Kessler’s murder.

Luther Kessler and I left the following morning and arrived at the Pine Lodge Cabins late that afternoon. The whole way Kessler provided a running commentary on what was wrong with America. His thesis seemed to be that our economic situation could only worsen. The reason for this decline, he said, was that the people who fought in World War II were the last generation of Americans who knew how to work, or even wanted to work. Now that they were all reaching retirement age the future of the Republic rested in the hands of hippies, dope fiends, welfare cheats, and other assorted wastrels. It was a long nine hours.

The cabins were all unoccupied. We decided to take one for the night and drive back the next day. Kessler checked out the cabin while Mrs. Stoller pointed out the car and gave me the keys.

I saw what Stoller meant by valuable. Kessler’s car was a 1939 Studebaker Commander in near mint condition. Not the most graceful automobile ever made, but compared to the anonymous little boxes on the road today, it was a thing of rare beauty.

I looked in the trunk, under the mats, behind the visors, and then, sinking into the plushly upholstered front seat, I went through the glove compartment. In a folder containing the owner’s manual was a sheaf of papers, mostly gasoline receipts and maintenance bills. I riffled through them and had started to put them back when one caught my attention. It was an accident report dated two months earlier. One vehicle belonged to a Kenneth Marduk of Sherman Mills, Maine, a town not far from the lake. The other was a truck registered to Four-Lane Trucking.

I looked through the rest of the papers more carefully. There were photocopies of a number of fuel receipts stretching back over a period of four months, all for Four-Lane Trucking, all from the same station in Island Falls, also nearby.

As bookkeeper, Earl Kessler had processed the company’s bills. But why had he kept copies of these? And what had brought him here for his vacation?

It was getting dark as I headed for the cabin. Kessler was just coming out.

“Wonderin’ where you were.”

I held the papers out to him. “I think we’ve got something. Have a look at these.” As he reached for them a shot rang out from the trees. Kessler whirled and fell.

“Godamighty! Godamighty!” he cried over and over. I hit the ground and rolled to the nearest cover, a pair of stumps used as chopping blocks. Two more shots kicked wood chips in my face as I ducked behind the stumps. Kessler was still down, holding his neck.

“Kessler, get out of there!” He had the presence of mind to scramble across to the cabin and under the porch. I pulled out my Browning and tried to see our assailant, but it was too dark to make anything out in the dense trees forty yards distant.

“What the hell’s going on here?” It was Stoller, coming around the cabin and into the lamplit zone of fire.

Before I could yell a warning, a bullet tore some wood off the cabin by Stoller’s head. He swore and ducked back around the corner.

This time I saw the muzzle flash. I fired at it and immediately bracketed it with four more rounds, rapid fire. Part of a tree detached itself and fell to the ground groaning. For a minute there was no other sound in the clearing. Then a voice.

“Okay, that’s it.” A pause. “I’m bleeding bad.”

“Throw the gun out here.” A rifle bounced and slid on the pine needles. I crawled forward, unwilling to stand until I was sure he had no more weapons.

McIntyre lay curled on the ground. I called to Stoller and told him to get a first aid kit and start with Kessler. One of my slugs had furrowed McIntyre’s thigh. A second had smashed his shoulder. I packed the wounds and waited for Stoller.

“The wife’s with your buddy. He’s got a crease in his neck, not serious. Who is this guy?”

McIntyre glared at me. “Lucky, Stubblefield. You’re one lucky bastard.” He grimaced in pain. “Hit me at that distance with a damn automatic.”

“Not lucky, McIntyre. I practice.”

“Lucky bastard.”

“Yeah. Well, like the man says: the more I practice the luckier I get.”

The lunch crowd at the Rudder was thinning out. Floyd was sitting with Kessler and me, taking a breather from his tiny kitchen.

“These people regulars, Floyd?”

“Most of them.”

“Amazing.”

“What’s amazing?”

“That they don’t all rise up in concert against you some afternoon to give vent to their gastric distress.”

“Charles, how long have you been eating here? Seven, eight years?”

“Something like that.”

“Why? If the offerings of my humble victualry don’t appeal to you, why don’t you eat somewhere else?”

“Food here’s good,” said Kessler, mopping up gravy with his bread.

“Compared to what?” I asked. Bob Gilliat joined us at the table.

“So, fill me in, Charles.”

“McIntyre spilled his guts when he realized he was facing a murder charge for Kessler, never mind the rest of it. He didn’t plant the bomb, though.”

“Who did?” said Kessler, wiping his chin. I shrugged.

“Some soldier from New Jersey. McIntyre was doing business with the mob. He was contacted by a firm that needed some hauling done. Discreetly.”

“Toxic waste,” said Gilliat.

“Right. They hired a number of small outfits that were already doing business in Jersey. Four-Lane was one of them. McIntyre’s trucks would haul legitimate cargo into the state, unload, then swing by another location and load up with barrels of God-knows-what. They were told to pick an isolated area in Maine and simply dump the stuff in the woods.”

“How did Kessler get onto it?”

“Fuel bills, a minor accident report, all from the same place in Maine. Four-Lane didn’t do any business in Maine, you see, so Kessler probably figured one of the drivers was skylarking, had a girlfriend up there, something. He must have brought it to McIntyre’s attention and was told to forget it.

“But then more bills came in. Kessler may have gone to McIntyre again, I don’t know. We do know that he became suspicious. He took the trouble to copy the fuel bills and conceal them among his own papers. Somewhere along the line he must have put two and two together and decided to see for himself. He loved the outdoors, and the possibility of illegal dumping of toxic waste would have been anathema to him. So he took the cabin, but before he had a chance to nose around, he got taken out.”

“But,” said Kessler, “how did they get to him so fast?”

I shrugged. “He must have slipped up, not realizing the full extent of the danger he was in. He may have mentioned to someone at work where he was going. Word got back to McIntyre, who panicked and called the organization in Jersey.”

Gilliat shook his head. “Clumsy way to do it. A fishing accident would have been neater.” He glanced at Kessler to see if he had offended him.

“Who knows, maybe they figured a bomb would put the cops off the track by suggesting a shady past, or a case of mistaken identity, which in fact it did.” Floyd started gathering up the dishes.

“Say, Floyd,” I said. “You did such a bang-up job on that logic puzzle, I was wondering if you’d help me out with another one.”

“Certainly, Charles. What is it?”

“Well, there are these two airplanes: Airplane A and Airplane B—”