Killing Time

Twenty

I knew where they’d be. Now that old Joey was dead, his oldest son, Mike, would be heading the clan. Mike and another son, Sal, ran a trucking company, and one of their warehouses would be the inevitable place for a family get-together.

I told Art that I’d still be needing him and Ben, that Harcum had tried to pin it all on the wrong guy, and the three of us left the hotel. We hurried down the street to the Ford, Art joined me in front again, and Ben, silent as ever, took up once more his half-asleep pose in back.

Casale Brothers, Moving and Storage, General Trucking, occupied a square block on Front Street, down a ways from the Reed & King Chemical Supplies Corporation plant. On this square block were four buildings, all old and tall and dirty and red brick, three of them with boarded-up windows. These three were the storage warehouses and the garage facilities. The fourth building, which still had glass in its ground-floor windows, held the offices. The rest of the block space was covered with asphalt and used for off-street parking of company cars and trucks, most of it enclosed by storm fencing.

I told Art and Ben to wait for me in the car. I didn’t want Mike to get the idea I was coming to him with a show of force. “You’re a busy busy man, Mr. Smith,” Art told me, in that half-mocking half-impressed manner of his.

“Busy busy,” I answered, and hurried away from the car toward the office building. I could feel Art’s grin on my back.

The girl in the front office told me that Mike Casale, and the four other Casale brothers, and a few other people, were all over in the south building, but she wasn’t sure I could get in to see them. I thanked her, told her I’d just stroll over and see for myself, and went back out to the sidewalk.

The south building was right next door, but the entrance to it was around in the back. I went through the passageway between the two buildings, turned the comer, and there was Bill Casale standing by the door, his arms folded across his chest, still wearing the khakis and T-shirt.

“Your father inside?” I asked him.

“He’s busy right now, Tim,” he said.

“I want to talk to him, Bill. He’s making a mistake.”

Bill didn’t move a muscle. I was an outsider, not family, and only family could be trusted right now. “Let him decide that for himself,” he told me.

“Bill, for Christ’s sake, I’m on your side. You know that, for Christ’s sake. Let me in to talk to your father.”

“What about?”

“Ron Lascow didn’t kill your grandfather,” I told him.

“The radio said he did.”

“And the newspapers said Dewey was President. Harcum’s looking for a fall guy, that’s all. This whole thing is mixed up with politics, and Harcum can’t afford to dig too far.”

“That isn’t what the radio said,” he insisted. “The radio said he tried to kill you because you found out about some sort of crooked tax deal he was trying to work up, and he was afraid you’d tell this reform group in town.”

So now I knew why they’d picked Ron. They were going to try to make him stand double duty. The tax scheme was out the window, so they would make Ron do for the murder and also try to make him bear the brunt of the CCG investigation. And he was too recently one of the boys to be able to do much damage to them.

“It’s a frame-up,” I said. “Ron didn’t kill anybody.”

“The radio said he did,” he said doggedly.

“For Christ’s sake,” I shouted, “what is the goddam radio, the voice of God? Harcum had to find a patsy, that’s all. Bill, quit fooling around and let me talk to your father.”

He shook his head. “Nobody goes in,” he told me. “That’s what they said, nobody goes in. And that includes you.”

“Bill,” I said desperately, “would I try to cover for Ron if he really was the guy who’d been trying to kill me? There were four goddam tries on my life, Bill. Use your goddam head.”

“You could be wrong,” he said.

“And I could be right,” I told him.

He thought it over for a minute, and finally he said, “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll wait,” I promised him.

He went inside, and I heard the click of the door locking after him. I lit a cigarette and looked around at the parking lot. It was full, jammed with Casale Brothers trucks and with private cars. It looked as though the whole family must be inside, plus all the truckers working for the company. A small army. Enough to take Ron out of our rickety clink and hang him from one of the City Hall Park trees.

And Harcum wouldn’t exactly overexert himself to keep Ron from being lynched. The murderer dead, saving the delicacy and embarrassment of a trial. Everything solved, and everybody happy.

Bill was gone only a minute or two. When he came back, he closed the door carefully behind him, looked at me, and shook his head. “He said no.”

“Tell him to come out here, then,” I said. “I’ve got to talk to him.”

“He said no,” Bill told me doggedly. “This is family business, and you stay out of it.”

And the hell I would, too. I made a big show of reluctant departure, then scooted back down the alleyway to the street, Bill watching me every minute. I turned the corner, went back into the office building and said to the girl, “Mike sent me for a grammit.”

“A what?”

“He told me where it is,” I said, barreling around her desk. “Upstairs in the second flotsam on the right.” I left her gaping at me, went through a door, down a hall, and up a flight of stairs.

I knew these buildings. I probably knew them better than Mike Casale did. He’d only been occupying the place for nine years, and before that it had been empty, and a bunch of car-parts-stealing kids had used it as a base. They’d had hub caps and mufflers and tail pipes hidden all over the place. Fred Hutchinson, of Hutchinson’s Auto Dealers, had hired me to stop the thievery, and as a result of it I’d been all through these four buildings many times.

On the second floor, I turned right and found the wall I wanted, blocked by three high stacks of cartons. I was alone up here. It looked as though the whole crew was next door, tying the knot in the rope.

So I moved the cartons, which took a few minutes I didn’t want to spare and most of my energy as well, and then I poked and pried at the plasterboard that covered the entrance.

Here on the second floor, there was an old enclosed walkway between the two buildings. It had grown too rickety to be safe, way back before the war, so both entrances had simply been covered with plasterboard and the walkway forgotten. This is where the kids had stored a lot of their loot.

By walking very slowly and carefully, precisely in the middle of the walkway, so my weight would be on the main beam, it was just barely possible for a chunky type like me to get across to the other building and lean against the plasterboard over there. Which led me to a dark, dusty, debris-filled, abandoned little storeroom with a solid and very securely locked door. All that physical labor for nothing.

No, not exactly. For I heard Mike Casale’s voice, saying, “...then you guys with Sal go through those ground-floor windows around on the west side and...”

The voice was coming from my right. I headed that way, covered my hand with black crisscrosses by touching a ventilator grill, and said, “Damn!”

Mike’s voice said, “What? What the hell was that?”

Not only could I hear him, he could hear me. And this, come to think of it, might be even better than face-to-face contact. No chance of his tying me up and leaving me here while he and his army went off to raise hell at City Hall.

“Mike!” I shouted.

“Who the hell is that?” he demanded. “Where are you?”

Another voice, fainter, said, “It’s coming from the ventilator, Mike.”

“There’s somebody in the building!” shouted another voice.

“Mike,” I hollered, “this is Tim Smith. I want to talk to you.”

“Find that stupid bastard,” said Mike.

“That’s it, Mike,” I said. “Waste your time. I want to talk to you, and I don’t talk until everybody’s in that one room.”

“Where the hell is he?” cried a voice. “He can see us, for God’s sake!”

Just go on thinking that, buddy, I thought happily, and said, “Let me know when you’re ready to listen, Mike.”

“Come out here and talk face to face, Tim,” he snapped.

“Sure,” I said, and laughed at him.

“If it’s about Ron Lascow,” he said, “you’re wasting your time.”

“And you’re wasting your lives,” I told him. “Ron didn’t kill Joey.”

“How come he’s in jail for it?”

“He’s the fall guy.”

“Crap.”

“You don’t want to make a mistake, Mike,” I said. “You want to be sure you know what you’re doing.”

“I know what I’m doing,” he said.

“You ought to listen to me, Mike. I know more about this than you do.”

Another voice — Mike’s brother Sal, I thought — said, “We can’t move till after dark anyways, Mike. Let’s hear what he has to say.”

“It won’t make any difference,” said a voice I didn’t recognize. “He’s just covering for Lascow. They’re buddies.”

“I wouldn’t cover for a guy who’d tried four times to kill me,” I said.

“All right,” said Mike. “I’ll listen. Come on out here and talk.”

“I’ll stay here, Mike, if you don’t mind. I trust you, but I think you’ve got some firebrands there.”

“Say what you’ve got to say, then,” he said grumpily. “And don’t stall around forever.”

So I leaned up against the wall, my mouth inches from the ventilator grill, and hollered for a while. I told them that Ron was being framed, and I told them why. I pointed out that the first attempt on my life had been made the night before Ron had even heard about the CCG, and that he and I had talked to the CCG representative together, and Ron had known he had nothing to fear from me.

When I was finished, there was silence for a minute, and I suddenly had the fear they’d all left while I’d been talking, that I was now all alone in this building, shouting out a long story with nobody around to hear me.

Then Mike said, slowly, “How do I know you’re right? You sound fight, you got a good line, but how do I know?”

So he was still there after all. “Because,” I told him, “this is my business. Because I’ve been looking for the killer for the last two days, and if it had been Ron I’d have known about it long before this. And because you know how I felt about your father.”

Another long silence, only this time I could hear the faint buzz of whispering. Then Mike came back. “All right,” he said. “You’ve made your point.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said.

“One thing,” he said. “We’re still holding the rope. You point the finger, he’s ours.”

I really didn’t care whose he was, so I wasn’t about to argue the point. But there was a way I could now kill two birds with one stone. I wanted Mike to know for sure he could depend on me, and I wanted a side man I could trust more than Art and Ben. So I said, “I tell you what, Mike. You give me Bill, there. He can travel with me, see what I’m doing. And the minute I know for sure who it is, I’ll give him the word. All right?”

The conference was briefer this time, and then Mike said, “You’re on.”

“My car’s in front of your office,” I said.