Killing Time

Ten

Ordinarily, Jordan Reed’s guarantee is rock-solid in Winston, something you can rely on absolutely. But there was nothing ordinary about the current situation, so I did my best to shore up Reed’s guarantee with some guarantees of my own.

The first thing to take care of was my ace in the hole, my files. Leaving City Hall, I went back across the park without being shot at, smiled at Gar Wycza for the thousandth time that day, and walked on down DeWitt Street to the Western National Bank Building, and beyond it to the bank parking lot. I traded hellos with Jakey, the uniform-capped old man who presides over the parking lot, and looked around to see if Ron Lascow had come back with my Ford.

He had. It was over in the comer, in its usual place, and Ron Lascow himself was emerging from the back seat, coming out rear first. I went on over, and he turned as I reached the car. “Just in time,” he said. He brushed his hands together in an exaggerated gesture, and said, “I’ve done all your work for you.”

I looked in the window, and saw the cardboard cartons sitting on the back seat. “Thanks, Ron,” I said. “I appreciate that.”

“What the heck you got in those things, anyway?” he asked me. “They weigh a ton.”

“Just some old out-of-date files I’m getting rid of,” I told him.

“One of the nice things about our office building,” he said, “is the janitor service.”

“I thought I ought to burn this stuff myself,” I explained. “It’s all old stuff, pretty useless to me, but there’s no sense taking any chances with it.”

He took off his horn-rims and removed perspiration from the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger. “I kept all the good stuff,” he told me. “I knew you wouldn’t mind. All about divorces and juicy stuff like that.”

“Paperbacks are hotter,” I suggested. I stepped around him and opened the driver’s door of the car. Sitting in it, my feet hanging out the side, I looked up at him. “In case I stop being lucky,” I said, “I’d like you to do me a favor.”

He frowned. “What do you mean, stop being lucky?”

“If I’m killed,” I said. I was doing my damnedest to think of some way to say it that wouldn’t sound like dialogue from a Grade B movie.

“You mean that business last night?”

“Some day I’ll tell you the whole story,” I said. “In the meantime, will you do me the favor?”

Puzzled and curious, he nodded and said, “Name it.”

I motioned at the cartons in the back seat. “I’ll let you know where I stash this stuff,” I told him. “Or, if I don’t get the chance, ask old Joey Casale. You know him?”

“The grocer out your way,” he said.

I nodded. “In case I’m, well, killed, I’d like you to give those cartons to Masetti.”

He looked doubtful. “Well—”

“There’s nothing in there on you,” I assured him. “And Masetti looked to me like the kind of guy who wouldn’t spread it around where he got the stuff, if you asked him not to.”

“All right,” he said. “But I don’t expect it to happen.”

“Hell, neither do I. If I did, I’d be in Florida by now.”

“Is that why you wanted me to bring the cartons down?” he asked me. “So nobody would see you carrying the stuff out of the building yourself?”

“Partly,” I said. “But mainly, I was beginning to worry about that waistline of yours. You haven’t been getting enough exercise lately.”

“If you stir things up around here, Tim,” he said, “I’ll get all the exercise I need.”

“Every cloud has a silver lining,” I told him, and slid around to face the steering wheel. “Don’t take any wooden defendants,” I told him.

“Hang by your thumbs,” he suggested.

We nodded to each other, and I started the car and drove away, headed home.

Home, for me, is a four-room apartment on Bleecker Street, the full second floor over Casale’s Grocery. I have no neighbors to speak of, which is exactly the way I like it. The building is on the corner, with a garage-and-loft next door on the other side. There’s no third floor, the grocery closes at eleven, and the Casales live across the street. It’s a great place for wild parties, so maybe I’ll have a wild party there some day.

Now, I left the Ford in my parking space behind the building and went around front and into the grocery. Joey, the patriarch of the huge Casale family, was on duty alone, sitting on a backless kitchen chair behind the counter and reading the comics in the newspaper.

Joey Casale had arrived in the States in the classic manner, that is, with no money, no command of the English language at all, and a card with his name on it tied to a buttonhole. He’d spent his adolescence in Brooklyn, with an aunt and uncle, learned English, fought with the uncle, got married, and moved upstate to Winston. He started the grocery store and a family. The grocery store hadn’t grown much, but the family had gone wild. He had four sons, each of whom had at least four kids of his own, and some of those kids were now having kids. There were Casales all over town, most of them in one kind of small business or another, from Mike Casale’s trucking company to Ben Casale’s laundromat.

Old Joey, at seventy-three, was still the iron-fisted patriarch. The family revolved around him, a cohesive and clannish unit. He was a short, wiry, dehydrated old man, with sharp unblinking black eyes in the middle of a lined and weathered face. I’d known him since I was a kid, and his oldest boy Mike and I were baseball buddies. He was a second father to a lot of kids of my generation, and when, after the war, I came home and, my father having died in ’43, started looking around for a place to live, I was glad for a chance to rent the apartment over Casale’s Grocery.

Joey put the paper down when he saw me come in, smiled, and got to his feet. “A six-pack of beer,” he said, “and what else?”

“Nothing to buy this time, Joey,” I told him. “I’d like you to do me a favor, if you would.”

He spread his hands in an is-there-any-doubt movement, and said, “Of course I would. What do you think?”

“I’ve got a couple of tomato-soup cartons out in the car,” I told him. “They’ve got stuff in them I want to stash away for a while.”

“Well, sure,” he said. “Don’t be silly, bring them in.”

“Thanks, Joey.”

“Where’s the car, around back?”

“Uh huh.”

“Okay, I unlock the back door.”

“Fine.”

While he went off to remove the bolt and wiring and padlock from the back door, I went out the front way and around to the car. I looked up and down the street, but didn’t see anybody, and then the back door creaked open, and I carried the two cartons in, one at a time.

Joey scuttled ahead of me, off to a far corner of the storeroom, and said, “Here. Put them back here.” I did so, and he looked at the result clinically. “Looks good,” he decided. “Looks all right. Two tomato-soup cartons in a grocery store, what’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I answered. “It looks natural.”

“Sure,” he said.

“If Ron Lascow ever should come looking for this stuff,” I said, “give it to him. But nobody else.”

“Ron Lascow,” he said, and added a few more lines to his face by frowning. “That young lawyer kid? With the dark rims on his glasses?”

“They all look like that,” I told him. “But you’ve got the right one.”

“Okay,” he said. “Him or you. Anybody else, I don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“Fine. And I guess I’ll get a six-pack after all.”

I got the six-pack, and went on upstairs. Joey Casale owned the building, and my apartment had originally come furnished, with the kind of stuff you always find in furnished apartments, but over the years I’ve replaced it all with my own things, piece by piece. Every once in a while, I’d call Joey to have a couple of his kids move something out. The only things left that I don’t own are the refrigerator and the stove.

The apartment, now that I’ve got it the way I want, is a pretty good one. From the street, you go in the door to the right of the grocery windows, up the stairs, and into what was originally supposed to be the dining room. I use that as my living room, with the usual sofa and armchairs and lamps and tables, and the walls rubber-base painted a light green. The rug is gray and wall-to-wall.

I added double doors to separate this dining room from the old living room, which I now use as a kind of den, library and office-away-from-office. There’s an old desk in there, and some glass-doored bookcases, and a filing cabinet containing stuff less important than the files I’d just removed from downtown.

In the other direction from the living room, a hall leads back to the kitchen, with the bedroom on the right and the bath on the left. There used to be a back staircase, but I didn’t want it much, and when Joey’s kids made his storeroom larger downstairs, they’d ripped that staircase out and made the second-floor space a huge storage closet.

I went into the kitchen, opened a beer, put the rest in the refrigerator, washed hands made dusty by the soup cartons, and changed my limp shirt for a fresh one. I finished the beer, and looked at my watch. It was four-twenty, time to go.

I wanted to talk to Hal Ganz. He was the detective Harcum had put on the Tarker killing, and he was good at his job, in a limited way. He wasn’t very bright, but he was strictly honest, the plodding, patient type. And he had the facilities of the Police Department to help him.

I knew Hal went off duty at four o’clock, so he’d be on his way home now, out to Hillview. I’d go out and have a talk with him, suggest a merger. Since he was a cop, there were things he could do that I couldn’t. Since he was scrupulously honest, there were things I could do that he couldn’t. We ought to make a great team.