Killing Time

Eleven

The Second World War caused quite a population boom in Winston, and with a population boom there comes a housing boom. The last couple of decades have seen the flowering in Winston of the ranch-style development. We have a number of them already, with another one going up every once in a while, and Hillview, where Hal Ganz lived, was the first of them.

Hillview was thrown together in ’47, in time to catch the veterans and the defense workers while they still had cash in their pockets, and while the veterans in particular were all getting married and starting families and looking for a place to live. Built on a filled-in swamp just to the west of town, Hillview is as flat as a pool table, though it is possible, on very clear days, to see the hills and mountains way over on the other side of town.

The builder of Hillview was a Winston man, now living in Florida on his profits, and he scrupulously followed the ideas of every other development builder in the country. The streets were blacktop and curving and named after flowers. The houses were two- and three-bedroom brick ranch-styles, most of them without cellars or attics. There’s a shopping center in the middle of it all, a school off in one corner, and a firehouse down the road toward town.

In ’47, it all looked pretty fine. Nice new houses, kind of shoe-boxy but sparkling and clean, with attached garages and curving flagstone walks leading to the front doors. The people living there were mostly young, either childless or with maybe one kid of preschool age. It was a pretty good place to live.

Hillview is now halfway through its second decade, and it hasn’t aged very well at all. A lot of the original owners got out from under in the first few years, before the floors got too warped and the windows began to stick and the plumbing went haywire. And the people who moved in after them were buying second-hand houses, and not very good second-hand houses at that, so they didn’t try very hard to keep them up.

And the kids began to grow, and the city and the county never did settle the argument as to which one of them had the responsibility for keeping up the streets in Hillview, so neither of them did anything, and a few of the houses were empty, and a couple of the houses were no longer safe for human occupancy.

Only a little more than a decade after it was built, Hillview was a bedraggled mess. Most of the lawns had been tromped into bare brown earth by kids playing Indian. The empty houses had had their windows broken. The blacktop streets had suffered from frost heaves after a few particularly severe winters, and were now crumbled and potholed. The whole area was littered with tricycles and wagons and hanging laundry and screaming kids and straggle-haired housewives and door-to-door salesmen. One of the empty houses, down near the shopping center, had caught fire and burned almost to the ground before any of the neighbors thought to call the Fire Department. The blackened remains, limp and soggy-looking after one winter, were still there.

As families grew, some people put on additions to their houses, and most of them knew even less about building than the original developer had. The resultant sheds and lean-tos and clapboard horrors jutted out here and there onto backyards and front lawns, and the whole development was looking more ramshackle and beat-up every day.

And, although the people of Hillview didn’t know it, the worst was yet to come. If Ron Lascow’s little double-shuffle got through, Hillview would have a historical right to start a second American Revolution, because they were about to get taxation without representation. And without street repair, too, which would probably bother them more.

The people who got the worst deal out of the whole thing were the vets who had paid for their nice new houses with GI mortgages. They could sell if they dared, let the new owner take over the payments, but a GI mortgage is different from any other. If the new owner misses a payment, the vet who thought he’d sold the house has to make it up. Very few vets wanted to take a chance on that, and so they stayed, no matter how lousy the neighborhood got. Most of them had twenty-year mortgages, and they planned to move in that twenty-first year. By then, they might get back a quarter of what they’d paid for their houses. If they were lucky.

Poor Hal Ganz was one of these vets. He lived deep within Hillview, where you couldn’t see the faraway mountains no matter how clear the day was, and he’d be there until 1968.

You could tell the houses that still had their original owners. Most of them had fenced-in lawns and relatively fresh coats of paint on the wood trim of their houses, and most of them had planted something in the front lawn, hedges or a row of flowers against the front wall or a rock garden.

Hal Ganz had a rock garden, and he was fooling around with it when I pulled to the curb in front of his house on Chrysanthemum Road, about twenty to five. Farther down the street, some subteen kids were playing the noisiest game of hide-and-seek ever heard. Farther up the street, somebody was attacking his sixteenth of an acre with a power mower. A teen-age kid across the street was tinkering with the motor of a car parked in the driveway.

I got out of the Ford, which felt right at home in these surroundings, and waved at Hal. “How you doing?”

“Doing okay, Tim,” he said. “What brings you way out here?”

“Wanted to talk to you,” I said. I hunkered down beside him and tried to look at the rock garden as though I were interested in it. “Planting?” I asked him.

“I planted in April,” he said, and then I noticed some little green things sticking up out of the dirt. “There should be more coming up than this,” he said. He sounded bitter, and I had the feeling it was more than the rock garden.

Hal Ganz was a rangy, hawk-nosed, sandy-haired guy with a perpetual expression of sober bewilderment. A not-very-bright plodder, an honest guy, a saver and a worrier, who would always try to do well by his job and his wife and his children and his community. He had a right to feel that Hillview was a punishment he didn’t deserve.

“Maybe they’re slow this year,” I said, pointing at the little green things and trying to be helpful.

“I didn’t know you had a green thumb, Tim. You want some beer?”

“I’d love some beer.”

I followed him through the garage and into the kitchen, where Joan Ganz was hacking an onion with a knife. We said hello to each other, Hal brought out two cans of beer and opened them, and then he and I went on into the living room and sat down.

He started the conversation. “You want something from me, Tim.”

I nodded. “Some help,” I said. “A pooling of interests.”

“Is this about the killing last night?”

“Uh huh. The person or persons unknown who shot Tarker is or are the same person or persons unknown who hired him to shoot me.” After that sentence, I took a long swig of beer. “I’m interested in that guy,” I went on, “maybe even more than you are. He tried for me again this afternoon and—”

“Again?”

So I told him about the shooting in City Hall Park, and when I finished he shook his head and said, “I was afraid of that. Chief Harcum kept trying to tell me Tarker must have known you from somewhere, from the Army or something, but I was pretty sure somebody local was behind it.” Hal had been sent away to the police academy in Albany, where he learned a lot of theory he seldom got a chance to try out in practice, and he’d come back to be the only person in town who called Harcum “Chief.”

“It’s more than somebody local,” I told him. “I can narrow it down to seven people for you.” And I gave him an edited story of the CCG and my little talk with the boys this afternoon.

When I finished talking, he grimaced. “Politics,” he said. “I was afraid it was going to get all mixed up with politics.” He took a swallow of beer and stared gloomily across the room. “I don’t like politics,” he said.

“There are times,” I told him, “when I couldn’t agree with you more.”

He sighed and shook his head. “All right,” he said. “It’s one of the seven. Can you narrow it any more than that?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Any one of them has the money to hire a gun. And they all go off to New York for a weekend of theater every once in a while, so any one of them had the opportunity to contact Tarker.”

“I suppose they all have hunting licenses,” he said.

That stopped me for a second, and then I got it. “Tarker was shot with a hunting rifle?”

He nodded. “Thirty-thirty. Deer rifle.”

“Deer hunting is pretty popular around here,” I said.

“I know.”

“I’ve told you all I’ve got,” I said. “What have you got?”

“Nothing,” he said. “A body and a used bullet. The New York police know Tarker, but they don’t have any way of checking back on him, to find out who might have hired him. And all he had on him was a key to one of the lockers at the Greyhound depot.”

“What was in the locker?”

“A suitcase. One of those small blue canvas things.”

“An AWOL bag.”

He nodded. “Nothing in it but clothes and his return ticket to New York. And the gun he was carrying was untraceable.”

“That wouldn’t have led to the guy who hired him anyway,” I said. “The gun would only lead to some New York pawnshop somewhere.”

“I don’t know, Tim,” he said. “There just isn’t anywhere to go. We figured out where the killer shot from — figuring the angle the bullet went into the body — and it was the roof of that movie theater across the street from the diner. We went up there and looked around, but there wasn’t a thing. Not even a used cartridge. He must have taken it with him. Sometimes, you can get a good fingerprint from the base of a cartridge. Where the guy pushes it into the gun.” That part had come straight from his police academy training. “But there just wasn’t anything up there,” he finished.

“How did he get on top of the movie?”

“Fire escape in back. He must have come down the next block over, Morton Street. There’s a short alley leading to the back of the theater, where the fire escape is. He went up that and onto the roof. There’s a fake wall in the front of the theater, sticks up about five feet above the roof. So he just steadied his arm on that, and fired. Then he went back down the fire escape and drove away.”

“We know how,” I said, “and we know why. Now all we need is who.”

He gave me a wan smile. “That’s the tough part,” he said. “It usually is.”

“I’d like to work with you on this thing, Hal,” I said. “We keep in touch, tell each other anything we find out.”

“You aren’t going to do something like these private detectives in books, are you? I mean, you aren’t trying to catch him yourself so you can shoot him or anything?”

“Hell, no,” I said. “I like my license too much for that. We find him, and you put him behind bars, and then he can’t shoot at me any more. That’s all I want.”

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll work together. But I don’t know what we’re going to work on. I don’t have a thing.”

“Something will break,” I told him.

“I hope so.”

“Mind if I use your phone?” I asked him.

“Go right ahead.”

I called Cathy, at City Hall. I’d just remembered I was supposed to go over to her place for dinner, so I told her to hang around for a while, and I’d pick her up and drive her home. Then I thanked Hal for talking things over with me, and we assured each other something would turn up.

Driving back through the sad community of Hillview toward town, I thought again about Ron Lascow’s little scheme, and I had the idea it would be a good thing if Ron came out here and looked at the people he was about to put the squeeze on. It might change his mind. I knew right now it was simply an abstraction on paper for him, something clever and intricate he’d worked out, and that he was proud of because it was clever and intricate and he had worked it out.

That’s the trouble with kids like Ron. They see the beauty of a clever plan, but they never see the people. I decided that was going to have to be my good deed of the day some day soon. Bring Ron Lascow out here and rub his nose in Hillview a little. It would be good for him.