Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

They’ll Never Find You by Donald Olson

If the plan proposed in this new story by Donald Olson seems an “absurd caprice” to its participants, we should point out that it is not too dissimilar to a program we know to have been part of the course work of at least one university’s Sociology department during the 1970s, though fiction in this case is still wonderfully stranger than truth...

“You do know,” said Nobbs, “how risky this could be.”

“In what way?” Bair’s coolly superior tone mocked his colleague’s timidity. They’d never been close, and now, having said their goodbyes to the director, they waited in an atmosphere of mutual disapproval for the car that would take them and three other junior staffers from the Center to the station.

Nobbs fingered the sealed envelope identical to the one Bair had been given shortly after donning the clothes they now wore and which added to their discomfiture, castoffs donated to one of the Center’s charities, but too shabby for even the neediest of the poof.

Nobbs leaned closer. “Suppose one had an accident. Got run over or hit on the head and lost one’s memory. One might never be identified. Didn’t you say you’d never been fingerprinted either? God, I feel positively naked without a wallet. No credit cards, no driver’s license, nothing.”

“But that’s the whole idea,” said Bair drily, although personally he’d rather be seen naked than in these disgraceful rags. It seemed to him an absurd caprice, this brainchild of the director’s which required each of the staff members to live anonymously and without funds (except for the five dollars each had been given) for a month, among the lowest strata of society, in a strange town, the director’s theory being that without firsthand experience of how the deprived lived, one couldn’t fully appreciate the importance of one’s work at the Center for Advanced Humanitarian Studies.

Bair had lived and worked at the Center for six months, recruited by the director himself, who had been deeply impressed by Bair’s discovery, of a formula for the processing of a vital nutrient derived from the soybean.

Bair and Nobbs didn’t exchange another word. In truth, Bair was ashamed to be seen talking to Nobbs, whose skinny physique added a note of authenticity to his rags. Bair felt confident that he himself didn’t look half so seedy to others as Nobbs looked to him. He wondered where Nobbs was being sent; they’d all been sworn to keep their individual destinations a secret. When Bair opened his own envelope, the name inside meant nothing to him; he’d never heard of Grimley, Ohio.

Not until he changed buses at Cleveland did anyone choose to share a seat with Bair, and the looks of the young man who did made a disagreeable impression on him; he wore a white leather jacket and a falsely disarming smile; his raggedy black hair reeked of oil. The bus was no sooner on the road than he asked Bair for a light, and when Bair couldn’t oblige him, he pulled a book of matches from his own pocket and, wholly unabashed, asked Bair where he was headed.

“Grimley,” said Bair.

“Same here.”

This unlikely coincidence left Bair faintly uneasy, coupled as it was with a sense of his own self drifting away. His eyes grabbed at signs and streetlights and trees as they flashed by, each seeming to pluck away a tiny particle of himself.

“So why you goin’ there, man?”

Bair’s emotions were too confused for him to project a proper show of indignation. “I have business there.”

“Me too.” He gave Bair a more intense look, squinting his dark, liquid eyes and spitting a feather of smoke into the blue-rinsed hair of the woman in front of him. “A stranger, y’know, he ain’t gonna know where the action is, y’know what I mean, pal?”

“I’m sure you’re right,” said Bair noncommittally.

“Well, buddy, I’m the boy can tell ya where the action is.”

Bair, in his innocence, preserved through forty years of a solitary, sheltered life, discerned something so authentically evil about his seat companion he was thrilled to his toes and madly eager to learn precisely what sort of “action” the youth was hinting at. He giggled nervously.

At this, the young man once more whipped out the book of matches, ripped the cover in two, and with a stubby pencil wrote on the back of one piece: Call 488-0898. Ask for Deuce. With a sly wink he handed this to Bair. Before slipping it into his pocket, Bair noticed the matchbook came from a place called the Wing-Ding Club and showed pink bubbles tumbling over the rim of a cocktail glass.

“Deuce,” said Bair. “A nickname?”

“Yeah, ’cause my last name’s Wilde. This Deuce is wild, man.”

Presently the young man got up without a parting word and walked to the front of the bus and sat down with a booted blonde who might easily have been an habitué of the Wing-Ding Club.

This enlivening encounter occupied Bair’s mind for the rest of what proved a tiresomely uneventful trip; moreover, the meeting had served to demolish any lingering illusions that he still projected the image, despite his rags, of a man of substance; he began to feel like a bum. He didn’t like the feeling at all.

They’d been given little in the way of a briefing at the Center, merely instructions to pretend they were men down on their luck. Upon reaching Grimley, Bair had expected to find a Skid Row with no lack of accommodations where one could spend the night for fifty cents or a dollar in the company of fellow unfortunates with whom he would take pains to relate and empathize, distasteful and pointless an exercise as it seemed.

To his dismay, the few people who passed on the dingy streets were fairly well-dressed and had respectable working-class faces that regarded Bair with frank distrust; he had a scary vision of wandering like this for a month, a seemingly homeless pariah. Furthermore, it was cold, and he suspected the presence of a river, for the lazy wind blowing from the east carried a faint stench of pollution, like the smell oozing out of sewer grates on cold winter nights.

Bair thought of the matchbook cover and Deuce, but doubted the youth would be interested in extending the sort of Christian hospitality he required. Staring into bar windows, he saw charming scenes of good fellowship, reminding him sadly of his companions at the Center; not that he considered for a moment entering any of these bars, fancying that some ineluctable air of superiority would invite waves of silent hostility.

He ended up spending that first night on a bench in the bus depot, and next morning greeted the bad news of his whiskery face in the rest-room mirror with dull mortification. When the restaurant opened, he slunk to a stool at the far end of the counter and ordered orange juice, bacon and eggs, toast, and coffee, knowing it was stupid to blow that much of his five bucks on his first meal, but finding it imperative to appease the glowering disapproval of the waitress.

As he was paying his bill, he looked up and caught a glimpse of Deuce through the window, or someone who looked a lot like Deuce, but when Bair reached the street there was no sign of the young man.

Bair was tempted to catch the next bus back to the Center; his return ticket was in his pocket. What a joy it would be to vent his indignation on the director for being given a ticket to a town where there were simply no down-and-outers to be down and out among. He would demand another city: New York or L.A. or even Pittsburgh, any city with a high enough level of culture and prosperity to include a sizable slum district. But what was the use? The director ruled the Center like a benevolent despot. Bair lifted his head. If this was a test, he would pass it!

He wandered into a cemetery so vast it seemed to confirm his suspicion that most of the townspeople were already dead. Beneath a sycamore tree, Bair sat down to rest on an iron bench. Unlike in the bus depot, here among the silent sleeping dead it was warmly agreeable to relax and watch the squirrels cavorting among the tombstones. If all else failed, Bair proposed to spend the coming night here.

He awoke from a snooze to spy an old man in a tattered mackinaw rummaging in a trash bin from which he rescued a handful of fairly fresh-looking flowers and ferns.

Startled when Bair rose from the bench and confronted him, the old man clung to the rim of the can as if expecting Bair to wrestle it away from him. “This’n’s mine, mister,” he growled.

“Oh, quite, quite. I don’t want it, I’m sure.” The fellow had sparked a gleam of hope in Bair’s eyes. Who but a derelict could be reduced to scavenging for flowers in trash bins, no doubt in hopes of peddling them.

Ignoring Bair, the man dipped once more into the bin, extracted a bouquet of faded plastic roses. With a savage roar he flung it to the ground, as if it represented one more trick an unkind fate had played upon him.

Once having overcome the old man’s suspicion, Bair was allowed to accompany him into town, where a woman setting up a flower stall by the First National Bank was prevailed upon to buy the derelict’s offering for fifty cents. Moments later, Bair was sharing a booth with his newfound friend in a diner under the viaduct.

Thanks to this new acquaintance, Bair soon learned to revise his opinion of there being no down-and-outers in Grimley. Although he found no trace of what might be called the respectable poor, he did discover a rummy enclave of old soaks who idled their time away in the sleazy beer joints around Fenton Square. Bair was appalled by the apparent dullness of their lives. My God, he thought, what do they do on Sundays? Yet on none of their faces did he find that look of spiritual despair he’d anticipated, but only a soft glaze of boozy detachment.

Dragging his shadow through the cheerless streets, Bair was now able to brave the stares of the respectable with a jauntily obscene leer, and one afternoon while studying the modus operandi of a panhandler working the south side of Market Street, he surrendered to a rollicking urge to try his own hand at it, but with only indifferent success.

If there was little visible evidence of grinding poverty in Grimley, neither were their obvious signs of evil. Only occasional intriguing glimpses.

In a bar so nondescript it didn’t even boast a name, a woman calling herself Alfreda Drapenheimer bawled into Bair’s captive ear the story of her exceedingly tiresome and determined fall from grace.

“Do you know Deuce?” Bair asked her while she was still sober enough to concentrate, for Bair was almost certain he’d caught another glimpse of the young man through the window of a nearby poolroom.

Alfreda favored him with the juiciest of bawdy winks. “Ah, Deuce. Do I know Deuce.”

“You do?”

“Deuce is wild.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Buy me a drink first.”

It being the happy hour, Bair bought her a twenty-five-cent draft. She lowered her voice. “That Deuce, he’s what’s called a freelancer.”

“What kind of freelancer?” Bair suspected it might have something to do with prostitution.

“Don’t ask. Don’t ask nobody about Deuce, Mr. Man. He’s got connections.”

“To what?”

The woman shrugged. “Don’t ask. Steer clear of that boy Deuce. He is bad news.”

Having spent the last of his five dollars, Bair was forced to flee from the bar an absolute pauper and none the wiser.

Later, at the Hope of the World Mission, he was obliged to listen to an endlessly dreary homily as the air became suffused with the gripping aroma of steaming soup. At one point he groaned with boredom and hunger and the man sitting beside him whispered, “What the hell, soup for a sermon. Best deal in town.”

Sleeping in the rough had grown intolerable, so that Bair was forced to bed down in the reeking dormitory upstairs in the Mission, where one morning he awoke to find that a thief had stolen his jacket and the laces out of his shoes — though not, oddly enough, the shoes themselves — as well as his return ticket to the Center. This alarming loss seemed to crystallize a vague sense of having been spied upon and followed, or was this no more than that paranoia of the dispossessed he’d once read about in some psychology text? Surely it could be only paranoid fantasy that would suggest the theft of the ticket had been some deliberate means of testing his resourcefulness.

This whole adventure seemed witless to Bair. What could it possibly prove? He’d heard of organizations holding retreats for staff members, sending them off to consciousness-raising seminars and such activities, but what could this program accomplish? It might have made sense to send him and Nobbs and the others to some drought-ridden area of Africa where the sight of the starving masses might indeed inspire them in their work. But where were the hungry in Grimley? Whatever had possessed the director to send him here of all places?

Bair himself felt starved for companionship, so acutely that he’d overcome his squeamishness about frequenting crummy bars. Venturing into one of these, he was astonished to find himself in the midst of a carnival atmosphere. The place was packed, the noise deafening. What could be the occasion? He must have said this aloud, or words to that effect, for someone yelled into his ear: “Check Day!”

Suddenly someone pinched his cheek and, recoiling with a start, he looked into the face of the Drapenheimer woman.

“Mr. Man! You look like you need cheering up.”

“I seem to have come to the right place.”

“This here’s Big Mike.”

A man not much taller than a dwarf, with shaggy ginger-colored bangs and thick glasses, offered a tiny pale hand.

“Pleased t’meetcha, friend. What’s yer game?”

“Game?”

An irresistibly compelling urge to recapture his sense of pride and dignity overcame Bair’s scruples against breaking the Director’s rules. Who was to know?

“I’m in research,” he said grandly. “Soybeans.”

The pair laughed uproariously. “What the hell are soybeans?” Alfreda asked.

“The hope of the world.”

“That’s a mission on Market Street, not a bean, pal,” said Big Mike.

“No, no. I mean they hold the secret of relieving the world’s food shortage. Think of it. No more famine in the Third World.”

Alfreda pinched him again. “You on drugs, Mr. Man?”

Bair shied away. “I’m a scientist. I developed a formula for extracting a vital nutrient from the soybean. I’ll make millions out of it.”

Bair glanced around nervously, as if the director might have been eavesdropping. The Master Brain-Picker was what they all called him behind his back. It was by draining the brains of the gifted in exchange for a picayune grant and the use of the Center’s incomparable lab facilities that the director had enriched the Center and lined his own pockets, or so it was rumored. Bair considered himself the director’s equal in cunning. When he left the Center, he would take his formula with him. What could the director do about it?

“What kind of stuff you on, pal?” teased Big Mike with a nudge and wink at Alfreda.

Bair saw the hopelessness of trying to impress these idiots. Indeed, who would believe him in his present circumstances? That fool of a director was mad. To inflict upon a person of Bair’s intellectual eminence such a degrading experience. The man didn’t deserve to profit from Bair’s genius.

Gruffly spurning the offer of a drink, Bair flung himself off the stool and headed for the door. Some impulse caused him to glance back as he was about to escape. A pair of dark, mocking eyes gazed at him from the pool table in the corner of the bar. Bair hastily looked away, pretending he hadn’t recognized Deuce.

There had been a change in the weather. It had turned warmer, although the sky was thick with clouds, costive and grey, and sad as a grieving face. Bair couldn’t stomach the prospect of another night at the Hope of the World Mission and wandered aimlessly in the direction of the river. Where the streetlights ended, he paused indecisively and was about to turn back when a figure loomed out of the shadows.

“You lost, fella?”

Bair narrowed his eyes, recognized Deuce. “You’ve been following me!”

“You looked like a lost dog back there, man. What’s wrong? You lookin’ for a place to crash? You don’t like the beds at the Mission? Or is it the company?”

“How do you know where I’ve been sleeping?”

“Where else would you go?”

“I won’t go back there,” said Bair. “I’d rather sleep in the rough.”

“No need, man. All you had to do was gimme a ring. Come on.”

“Where?”

“I know a place. You’ll love it.”

Meekly, Bair accompanied the young man back toward the town through a twist of streets and alleys to a rundown building in an area of factories and warehouses. Deuce motioned him up the steps and through a door into a dimly lighted hallway stinking of dampness and decay. Wallpaper hung in streamers from the mildewed walls. Bair followed his guide up several flights of stairs, arriving finally at a door which opened only with a vigorous kick from Deuce’s steel-toed boots.

Bair cried out, “We’re on the roof!”

“Yeah. Up above the world so high.”

Bair recoiled at the touch of something cold and sharp against his neck. Deuce’s other hand tightened around Bair’s arm. He tried to wrench free as Deuce frog-marched him toward the roofs edge.

“Why are you doing this?” cried Bair. “What do you want from me?”

“Ain’t what I want, man. I’m just a hired hand.”

“Let me go! I’m not what you think I am.” Bair, in a panic, remembered that serial killer in-some big city — was it New York? — who preyed on derelicts. “My name is Harvey Osgood Bair. I’m a scientist. You can’t do this to me. Important people know where I am. They—”

“Wrong, baby. They’ll never find you. They’ll look for you in Chicago when you don’t come back.”

“Chicago?” What madness was this?

“That’s where the Big Man will tell them he sent you. Nobody’ll think of looking for you here.”

“But this is crazy! Why?”

“Don’t ask me, man. I guess you had something they wanted.”

“The formula?”

By now they were at the edge of the roof, the knife still pressed against Bair’s neck. A cold wind chilled the sweat on his face. As he looked down, a merciful wave of giddiness swept over him. It was hardly necessary for the young man to push him over the edge.