Trouble at the Brownstone

Chapter 13

In fact, it was eighteen minutes later that Saul came into the shop and spotted me in a booth at the back. “This cloak-and-dagger stuff is pretty exciting, isn’t it?” he said out of the corner of his mouth as he slid in across from me.

“Yeah, a thrill a minute. Which of us gets to play Bogart?”

“That would be you. I’m more the George Raft type.”

“In your dreams. Now tell me about this ‘interesting evening’ you’ve had.”

“As planned, I went to McCready’s on the off chance that one of the bridge players might show up, and damned if one did — Sid, that’s Sid Meyer.”

“I remember him, the retired barber. Seems like he’s a nice fellow.”

“Agreed. He had read about what happened to Chester, but said he came back to the bar because he was curious about the details and thought somebody might know something.”

“Did he get there ahead of you?”

“No, I beat him by about five minutes. And when I stepped into the back room, I got these weird looks from the pool-playing longshoremen, as if I were a leper.”

“Maybe they were hoping they had seen the last of the bridge players in what they consider their private preserve, so you likely were a disappointment,” I said.

“Maybe. Anyway, I just looked around the room — what else was there to do? — when Sid walked in, wearing a dazed expression. I suggested to him that we go somewhere else to talk, anywhere else. He knew of another bar, a place about three blocks away, and he suggested calling Harvey, the other bridge player. He got hold of him at home, and the upshot was the three of us met in a quiet corner of a quiet saloon on Eleventh Avenue.

“It was like a wake. Those two guys and Chester had gotten really close over the years. They didn’t just play bridge together, they also went as a group to baseball and basketball games.”

“Did they have any ideas about what happened to Chester?”

“It was kind of hard getting them to talk because they were pretty broken up. I finally let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, and told them who I really was.”

“An intrepid and tireless private investigator?”

“In so many words, smart guy.”

“How did they react to that?”

“At first, I felt a little hostility, or at least strong reserve, from each of them. But then they softened when I told them how ‘Ted’ was someone I knew and was concerned about, and that I joined their bridge game to try to learn what might have befallen him. I did not, however, tell them who Theodore really was, or that he’s in a hospital. They still seem to think he is missing.”

“Fine to let them think so, even though it seems clear both of them probably figure it’s likely that he is dead.”

“I suppose so,” Saul said, sipping on the cup of coffee that had just been set before him. “It’s clear these two guys are scared, and who wouldn’t be in their situation? One from their bridge foursome is killed, another has disappeared.”

“I know these guys had been edgy around the longshoremen,” I said. “Theodore had been quoted as saying they acted like they were ‘up to no good,’ whatever that means, and Chester also said they ‘seemed to be hiding something.’ It’s all pretty vague.”

Saul nodded. “I pressed Sid and Harvey, trying to get the pair to be specific about what made them uneasy about the patrons in McCready’s, and neither one seems able to put a finger on specifically what made them nervous in that back room. The best I could get was when Harvey said, ‘It was like they all’ — he meant the pool players — ‘were hiding something, or had some sort of secret.’”

“Did either of them notice any kind of change in the makeup of the other customers at the bar?”

“I asked that,” Saul said, “and they didn’t seem aware of a shift, although Sid did mention that he thought a few of the people who sat at the bar had what he called ‘a foreign feeling about them, not necessarily bad, just foreign.’”

“Similar to the residents I’ve been running into at the Elmont, that five-story pile of bricks I’ve been staying at across the street from McCready’s.”

“Some people get to have all the fun,” Saul observed.

“Yeah, how’d you like to bunk there in my place? I’m willing to share the fun.”

“No thanks. So, assuming there are more ‘foreigners’ both in that apartment building and McCready’s salon, where are they coming from?”

“I may have at least a partial answer,” I said, proceeding to tell Saul about what Charlie King from the North River docks told me about a group of men who had been seen getting off a National Export Lines freighter just in from Europe.

“It sounds like they could be displaced persons who, for whatever reasons, didn’t qualify for residence here and are getting smuggled in,” Saul said. “And maybe that’s also the explanation for all those others in the Elmont and at McCready’s.”

“Okay, I will give you that. But how does it explain the violence against Theodore and the murder of Chester Miller, both events which seem to be related to the secretive nature in McCready’s and possibly at the Elmont as well? If anything, you would think these DPs who get smuggled in would try above all to avoid attention.”

“Good point,” Saul said. “What if it’s not the DPs who are behind the violence?”

“You’re suggesting the longshoremen?”

“I am not sure what I’m suggesting. But if I were you, I would watch my back while you’re staying at the Elmont and hanging around that saloon. Things are going on that we don’t fully understand.”

“I will keep that advice in mind,” I told him. And as it turned out, it was a good thing I did.