Find a Victim

Chapter 5

The road bumped over railroad tracks, twisted through pine-smelling lumberyards, ducked under the overpass that carried the highway. Night-running trucks went over my head like thunder. The Meyer yard was almost in the shadow of the overpass, a black-top square hemmed in by high wire fence and flanked by a storage building. A truck was backed in to the loading dock, another stood under an open-sided shelter supported on concrete columns, and two others were parked inside the gate. The gate was open. I drove through and pulled up at the platform.

A bald man in an oil-stained T-shirt was sitting on a packing case at the back of the platform. A thousand-watt bulb over the door of the warehouse held him in pitiless light. He was freckled and blotched all over, head and neck and arms, as if his maker had flicked a paintbrush at him. His scarred brown hands were rolling a Bull Durham cigarette. When I got out of the car, his pinkish lashless eyes moved in my direction.

“What can I do for you, bud?”

“I’d like to see Mr. Meyer.”

“Meyer ain’t here. He went off with his son-in-law.”

“His son-in-law?”

“Brand Church. The sheriff. Maybe you can catch him at home. Is it business?”

“More or less. I hear you lost a rig.”

“That’s right.” He licked the edge of his tan cigarette paper and pressed it into place. “And a driver.”

“What kind of a rig?”

“Twenty-ton semi-trailer.” He lit a kitchen match with his thumbnail and held it to his cigarette. “Cost the old man forty grand last year.”

“What was it carrying?”

He came to the edge of the platform, blinking down at me suspiciously. “I wouldn’t know. The old man told me not to talk about it.”

“Why not?”

“He’s sore as a boil. The rig and the payload was both insured, but when a firm loses a truck, shippers start getting leery.” He glanced at the license number on the front of my car. “You from a newspaper?”

“Not me.”

“The bonding company?”

“Guess again.” I climbed up the concrete steps to the platform. “What was the payload?”

Turning quickly, he stepped inside the open back of the truck and came out with a long curved piece of steel like a blunt saber. He swung the tire-iron idly in his hand. “I don’t know you. Now what’s your interest?”

“Take it easy–”

“The hell. A chum of mine gets shot like a dog in the road and you tell me to take it easy. What’s your interest?”

His voice was a fox-terrier yap, a high bark that sounded strange coming from a body like a flayed bear’s. The tire-iron swung faster, moving in a tight circle beside his leg. The muscles in his arm knotted and swelled like angry speckled snakes.

I lifted my weight forward onto the balls of my feet, ready to move either way. “Take it hard, then. I found your friend on the highway. I didn’t like it, either.”

“You found Tony after they killed him?”

“He wasn’t dead when I picked him up. He died at the hospital a few minutes later.”

“Did he say anything, tell you who drilled him?”

“Tony wasn’t talking. He was unconscious, in deep shock. My interest is finding the people that did it to him.”

“You a cop? State police?” His iron weapon was still, forgotten in his hand.

“I’ve worked for the state police. I’m a private detective.”

“Old man Meyer hire you?”

“Not yet.”

“You think he’s going to?”

“If he’s smart.”

“That’s what you think. Meyer still has his first nickel.” His rubbery mouth stretched in a broken-toothed grin. He laid the iron on the packing case behind him, ready to his hand.

I reached for my cigarettes, then thought better of it. “I’m out of smokes. Can I roll one?”

“Sure thing.”

He handed me his tobacco and papers and watched me critically while I rolled a cigarette. My fingers remembered the knack. He lit it for me.

“So you’re a detective, eh?”

“That’s right. My name is Archer.”

“Tarko.” He thumbed his chest. “They call me Hairless.”

“Glad to meet you, Tarko. What was Tony’s run?”

“It varied. Mostly he drove the San Francisco run. He was coming up from L. A. today, though. Special shipment.”

“What kind of a truck was he driving?”

“One of the new semis, GMC tractor, Fruehauf box. A twenty-tonner, same as that one there.”

He pointed across the yard with his cigarette, to one of the trucks that were standing inside the gate. It was a closed semitrailer the size of a small house. Its corrugated metal sides were bright with aluminum paint, except for the red and black sign: Meyer Line – Local and Long Distance – Las Cruces, Calif.

“And the payload?” I said.

“You’ll have to ask the old man. I’m not supposed to know. I’m just watchman here since I had my accident.”

“But you do know?”

He didn’t answer for a minute. He looked behind him, then up at the long lighted arc of the overpass where the big night trucks were rolling, southward to Los Angeles and the Imperial Valley, northward to Fresno, San Francisco, Portland. His eyes glazed with desire. He wished that he was rolling, headed north for Portland or south or east, anywhere so long as he was wheeling with horsepower under his toe.

“Can you keep: it under your hat?”

I told him I could.

He lowered his voice. “I heard the old man talking to the sheriff. He said it was bonded bourbon.”

“The whole truckload?”

“Must have been. The load alone was insured for sixty-five gees.”

“Was Tony bonded?”

“For a hundred, yep. He’s our bonded driver. I thought at first you was from the bonding company. The first idea they ever get in their little pointed heads is jumping on our necks.”

“Tony’s in the clear, anyway.”

“Yeah. But I can’t figure it. He had his orders not to stop for anybody or anything. The old man always says we shouldn’t stop for the governor himself if he wanted a lift. Anybody tries to cut over on us, we’re supposed to bull on through, smash them if we have to.” He brought his right fist up and smacked the inside of his other hand. “Only way I can see it, Tony forgot his orders and stopped on the highway for somebody. The poor little son of gun.” His left hand clenched his fist in a grip that left fingernail marks.

“You were fond of Tony.”

“Call it that. We live – we lived in the same boarding-house. I liked him better than most. I owed him something. The time my brakes went out on the Nojoqui grade, he was my helper. I was driving a tanker full of high-octane stuff. Took the ditch at a hundred. Tony jumped out at the top of the hill and ran the hell down and pulled me out of it. All I lost was my hair.”

“Who would he stop for?” I said. “I heard he liked women.”

“Who doesn’t?” He smiled ruefully. “The broads run like a deer when I take off my hat now.”

I brought him back to the subject: “What about Tony’s women? Drivers have been fingered by a woman before.”

“You’re telling me.” He was quiet for a moment, thinking hard. “There was a dame, yeah. I don’t hardly like to say it. I don’t know nothing against the dame for sure.”

“It wouldn’t be a woman called Anne Meyer?”

“Annie Meyer? Hell, no. She’s Meyer’s daughter. What would she be doing fingering one of her old man’s trucks?”

“I understood that she was Tony’s love interest.”

“She was in a way, I guess. He talked about her a lot. Sure, he was stuck on her. But she could never see him. Annie’s got other interests. That was the big sorrow in his life. But it didn’t amount to anything real. Know what I mean? This other dame was different. She made a big play for Tony the last week or so. He told me she was nuts about him. I dunno. It appeared to me he was stepping out of his class, same as he tried to do with Annie Meyer. The dame is a nightclub singer, a real doll. I never seen her, but he showed me her picture in the front of the club.”

“In town here?”

“Yeah. The Slipper, out at the end of Yanonali Street. He spent a lot of time there the last few days. And the way he talked, he’d stop a truck for her.” It was the highest compliment he could pay.

“What was her name?”

“I don’t remember her last name. Tony called her Jo.” He massaged his scalp. “The thing that makes me suspicious, she fell for Tony awful hard and fast, and she must of had a reason.”

“He was a good-looking boy, if she liked the Latin type.”

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll tell you, though, dames didn’t go for Tony usually. He frightened them off, kind of – got too intense about it, you might say. When he went overboard for some beast, he couldn’t leave her alone. Like with Annie Meyer now.” He paused and looked behind him. The lighted warehouse was empty, except for piles of cases along the walls.

“What about her?”

“Nothing much. He got in a little trouble over her. I guess I shouldn’t be flapping at the mouth. Only you brought her up.”

“Did he get too intense about her?”

“You can say that twice. But what do you say we skip it? The guy’s dead now. He won’t be bothering women any more. He never did mean them any harm. And most ways he was a decent guy for a Mex, as straight as any white man.” He searched his mind for an illustration, and added: “He had a damn good record on the road.”

“This trouble he got into over Annie Meyer,” I said. “What kind of trouble was it?”

Tarko looked uncomfortable. “Tony was a little bit of a nut, see. Just about dames, I mean. Especially Annie. She let him take her out a couple of times last year, and then he got in the habit of following her around at night, peeping in her apartment window, stuff like that. The poor guy didn’t mean any harm, but he got himself picked up for it.”

“Who picked him up?”

“The sheriff. He gave Tony a tongue-lashing, said he was nuts and he ought to go and see a head-doctor. Tony told me all about it at the time.”

My handmade cigarette was out. I dropped it and ground it under my heel. It had served its purpose.

“About this girl of his – Jo – did you give the sheriff the dope on her?”

“Not me. I wouldn’t give the chicken sheriff the time of day.”

“You don’t seem to like the sheriff much.”

“I know Brand Church too well. He drove a truck for the old man one summer when he was in college. I knew him way back before that, even, when his father ran a barbershop downtown. Brand was all right in those days, he was a damn good football-player in high school. Only going to college changed him. He came back to town with a lot of big ideas.”

“What kind of big ideas?”

“Psychology, he called it. Everybody was crazy except him. Hell, he even tried to pull it on me, said that I was accident-prone or something. He as much as told me I ought to get my head examined. Me.” An old anger reddened his scalp, blotchily. “Maybe he can put it over on the rest of the town. I don’t buy it. The old man don’t like him much, either, but he’s stuck with him for a son-in-law.”

“How many daughters has Meyer got?”

“Just the two. Church married the older one, Hilda. She was helping around the office that same summer, and she went for him. I never could figure out why. The old man raised a hell of a stink about it.”

“Where does the old man live?”

He gave me directions, and nudged me confidentially with his shoulder. “Don’t tell him what I said, eh? I like a guy that can roll his own, and I talk too much sometimes.”

I thanked him for his information and told him I could hold it.