Twenty Plus Two

Chapter 20

He had just finished his snack and pushed the table to one side when the telephone rang.

He crossed to it. “Yes?”

“Tom? Miller Hastings. You said it was urgent, so I ran over. All right if I come up?”

“Yes. Room 1424-S.”

Hastings arrived in a couple of minutes. He had a tall, dark young man with him. He reminded Alder of an old picture of Valentino, the one-time film idol.

“Shake hands with Steve Szabo, Tom,” said Hastings, a heavy-set man who had been a police lieutenant before opening his own private detective agency. “Steve is a Hungarian, besides being a very good operator.” He grinned. “Women like him. Go ahead, Steve.”

“As Mr. Hastings said, I’m a Hungarian. A Magyar. My people are from the old country and if there’s a Hungarian in Chicago my father doesn’t know, he’s keeping it a secret. Some of his friends have a little group living near Elgin. Truck farmers, asparagus, stuff like that. Istvan Kovacs is one of them. Istvan is Stephen, like my own name. The description pretty much fits them. A woman visits them once in awhile. A very beautiful woman, who’s supposed to be married to a big man in California. It could be the Kovacs’ daughter. Old Istvan is a close-mouthed man. He’s spent a few hundred-dollar bills in the last few years. One of them was brand new, smelled of perfume. He gave it to Father Benes at St. Stephen’s Church. One of the parish women whispered the story. It came to my mother, who told it to my father.”

“Elgin,” said Alder, “that’s about forty miles from here.” He looked at his watch. “It’s after eight.”

“Can’t it wait until morning?” asked Hastings. “Steve will drive you out.”

“Kovacs lives out in the country a few miles. We’d have to ask directions,” said Szabo.

“I’d like to go now.”

Szabo shrugged. “I get time and a half for overtime.”

“He’s paying for it,” said Miller Hastings.

In twenty minutes, they were clearing the western suburbs of Chicago and then the handsome young private detective opened up the throttle of his little convertible.

“Stepped-up job,” he explained to Alder. “Police don’t like it, give me hell when they catch me. Haven’t been lost on a tail job, though. Not since I fixed up this motor.”

“Like this kind of work?”

Szabo shrugged. “It’s better’n the drugstore. My Dad wanted me to be a pharmacist like himself, but I wouldn’t be any good mixing pills. Make a mistake and somebody’d get theirselves awfully sick. I’m thinking of going into politics. Maybe next year, the year after. Our alderman’s pretty old and the party’s going to dump him. The Hungarians in our ward throw a lot of weight. Jacobs, our ward committeeman likes me. His son and me went to high school together.”

The stepped-up motor whipped the car along the roads and by nine o’clock they were in Elgin. Young Szabo stopped at a gas station, asked a few questions and they were soon rolling along a highway that ran beside the Fox River.

At nine-twenty-two, they cleared a small town and Szabo turned left on a narrow macadam road. He slackened speed and began to watch mailboxes.

“Kovacs,” he said suddenly.

A rural mailbox carried the name. It was in front of a neatly kept white cottage, which adjoined a small truck farm. Fifty feet from the white cottage was its twin, but there was no mailbox outside of this one. Lights were on in both houses.

Alder and Szabo got out by the mailbox. They went down a drive, through a picket fence and up to the porch of the white cottage.

A knock on the door brought Istvan Kovacs to the door. He was about sixty-two or three, a work-worn, slightly stooped man with gnarled hands.

“Mr. Kovacs,” said Alder, “my name is Alder. I am a friend of Mrs. Nikki Collinson.”

“No speak the English,” said Kovacs promptly.

“I believe Mrs. Collinson is your daughter,” Alder persisted. “I am anxious to get some information about her and I have reason to believe...”

“Sorry, no speak Anglis.” The Hungarian truck farmer’s accent became even stronger.

Alder gave Szabo a nod and the young man started over in Hungarian. The truck farmer listened, but the gathering cloud on his face showed that he did not like the trend of Szabo’s remarks.

He spat out an answer and gestured with his hands.

Szabo said, in English, to Alder: “He says he has no daughter. He has only a son who is ashamed to admit that he is of Hungarian descent. His name is Stephen Schneider. Schneider is German for Szabo, which means tailor. Stephen, his son, is the owner of a bowling alley on the North Side of Chicago and seldom visits his mother or his father...”

“Mrs. Collinson,” said Alder. “Ask him if he knows her, if she has visited here.”

“He denies everything. He raises asparagus. People sometimes come here to buy from him, although he prefers to sell wholesale to the vegetable houses.”

He turned again to the farmer, who responded as vehemently as before.

“It’s no use trying to talk to his wife,” Szabo said, shaking his head. “She will not talk, if he does not want her to. The woman I asked him about lives in Elgin. They bought the farm from her, seven or eight years ago, and she comes to collect the payments. That’s a lie, Mr. Alder, but he’s said it and he’s going to stick with it.”

“Ask him,” said Alder, “ask him if the woman he makes the payments to gives him the change in hundred dollar bills. Bills that are perfumed.”

The young detective grinned and rattled off some more Hungarian.

For answer old Kovacs slammed into the house, locking the door on the inside.

“He said, ask next door.”

The lace curtain in the house a short distance away was fluttering. Alder nodded. “We’ve been watched. Let’s go!”

They crossed from Kovacs’ house to the identical twin next door. The front door was opened when they approached it. A woman of sixty-five held it. “Come in, gentlemen,” she said heartily. “Come right in.”

She was a big woman, solid, of considerable girth and large breasts. She weighed a good hundred and eighty-five pounds and was tightly corseted. Her hair was black, although not dyed, for a few white hairs showed.

Szabo and Alder entered a living room that was furnished like a Beverly Hills bungalow. “Sit down, boys,” invited the big lady. “Take the load off. I don’t get many visitors. Tea? Or would you prefer something in a glass with a stick in it?”

“Nothing, thank you,” said Alder.

“My brother gave you a bad time, eh? Heard him. He couldn’t talk English and that means he was mad at you. Yep, my brother. A Hunkie. So am I, but my pa brought me over when I was only four. He was two and stayed with ma in the old country. That was — well, never mind, a lady don’t like to reveal her age. Little Stevie didn’t come over until 1926. You’d think he’d learn to speak English in thirty-four years, but no, he sticks around with his crowd. Never gets out in the world. But you don’t want to hear the story of my life, although I’d like to tell it to you if you’ve got the time. What’s the beef?”

“Your brother,” said Alder carefully, “he denies that he has a daughter, but I know that there is a woman who claims that he is her father.”

“That’s it,” said the big woman. “I thought so.” She pointed a finger at Szabo. “You’re a Hunkie!”

“My name is Szabo. Steve, or Istvan, like your brother’s. Yes, I am of Hungarian parentage. I speak it fluently, but I was born in this country.”

“That takes care of you,” snapped the woman. “You, laddy boy!” The finger stabbed at Alder.

“I am a friend of Mrs. Collinson.”

“Don’t give me that. You smell like a John Law.”

“No,” said Alder, “it’s true that I am an investigator of sorts, but that has nothing to do with Mrs. Collinson. It’s just, well, she’s disappeared and her husband has engaged me to find her. She told him that she was going to visit with her parents. Which she has done before.”

“All right, what’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing — if Istvan Kovacs is her father.”

The big woman seated herself on a sofa, crossed her hands in front of her corseted waist and regarded Alder heavily. “You’re one of these smart lads,” she said, after a moment. “Hard as nails, too. You get your teeth into something and fire wouldn’t make you let go. You’re going to worry the hell out of this unless you get what you want. Well my handsome investigator, or what-not, I’m as tough as you are. Tougher, maybe, but I’ll make a deal with you. Get the hell out of here and I’ll think about it. Maybe I’ll give you a jingle on the phone tomorrow and maybe won’t. Either way, it’s all you’ll get.”

“Your name is Kovacs?” asked Alder.

“I said so, didn’t I?” “You could have a married name.”

“Never got married. That’s why I live here now. I wouldn’t trust a man as far as I could throw him. Two-faced double crossers, the lot of you.” She sized up young Szabo. “How old are you, Sonny?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Too young for me. Your looks, you ought to be in Hollywood. You didn’t make the grade you could always become a gigolo. I hear the ladies are giving up French poodles and going back to men. You’d fit in all right and one of them movie queens might even marry you. You’re a good-looking squirt, even if you are a Hungarian.”

“Thanks,” grinned the young Hungarian. “And I don’t think you’re as old as you’re trying to pretend I’ve known women older than you. I like ’em a little older.”

“Damn you,” said the woman who would never see sixty-five again. “You got the gift. If I’m still around in a couple of years by the time you’re say thirty, why, I might give you a little fling.” She shot at Alder: “You’re more my age.”

“Yes,” said Alder.

“How old are you?”

“Forty-one.”

“You don’t look it, but you keep in good shape. California, eh? We meet there?”

“No.”

“Thought we might have. You look familiar.”

“Miss Kovacs,” said Alder, “is it you Nikki visits?”

“Nikki. It’s Nikki now, not Mrs. Collinson.” She studied Alder again. “Mrs. Collinson is a happily married woman.”

“Her husband is very much in love with her. But he is worried.”

“He can always count his money.” Miss Kovacs swore. “You got me saying things I don’t want to say. That’s the Hungarian in me. I’m romantic, see. No, I never married, but that don’t mean I never wanted to. Been busy all my life. Now I’m an old woman. I’m retired and I don’t know what the hell to do with my time. That fool brother of mine, he talked: me into settling down next door to him.”

Suddenly, “Why don’t you leave her alone, Mr. Alder? She’s a fine girl, there’s none better in this whole damn world. If she says she’s visiting her father, her mother, her nephew, if she had one, what difference does it make?”

“I know Mrs. Collinson,” Alder said. “She is possibly the finest woman I have ever met. If I thought my being here would hurt her in the slightest, I would walk out of here. I’d tell Collinson to go to hell.”

Her face became sober, thoughtful.

“Like I said, I’m retired. Used to run a chain of beauty shops in California. She was a customer. I had the best shop on Telegraph Hill and she used to come in—”

“She lived in Burlingame,” said Alder.

“Damn you, I had a shop there, too, but she liked the one in town better. I used to do her hair myself, when I only had the one shop. You should have seen her then, Mr. Alder! There wasn’t a woman in the Bay area had her looks, her style. She could have had any rich man she looked at. The hell with Collinson, Mr. Alder. She could lift her finger and men’d fall over each other rushing to kiss her foot and she’d still be too good for them. Collinson, with his nasty mind.”

“You’re getting it wrong, Miss Kovacs.”

“Miss Kovacs, hell. Kitty Kovacs, baptized Katerina in Hungarian. I don’t go for this Miss stuff. Kitty’s good enough.”

“Kitty. Collinson isn’t spying on her. He’s worried. His wife has disappeared. She’s in some sort of trouble. I know that, Miss Kitty. That’s the only reason I’m sitting here questioning you. I’m trying to help her — not hurt her.”

“She can take care of herself. She wants to disappear a while, let her disappear. She’ll come back when she’s good and ready — and she’ll be as good as she’s always been. And don’t get any ideas about that. I’ll crucify you, you say anything about her. So help me.”

“Tell me just one thing, Kitty. Has she been here within the last day or two?”

“If she said she has, she has.”

“She hasn’t said so.”

“I say nothing then. Not no, not yes. Drop it. You sure you don’t want that snifter? I’m going to have me one. A good big stiff drink.”

“We’re going, Miss Kitty,” Alder said, rising.

“All right. Remember, I’ve got a little of the grease to throw around. You harm a hair of her head and you’ll have me on you like a ton of bricks. I don’t think you will, boy. You strike me as a kinda decent fella, in spite of being so damn — so damn smart and tough. Goodbye, Mr. Alder.”

She gave him her hand. She had a strong grip, almost like a man’s. Yet her flesh was soft, warm.

She chucked the young Hungarian under the chin. “Look me up in a couple of years, sonny. If you don’t make it in Hollywood.”

“You can be my hostess,” Szabo grinned. “When I become Mayor of Chicago.”

“Dammit, you’re all right. Mayor, huh? A Hungarian Mayor.”

They returned to the car. Alder was silent as they climbed in. Szabo started the motor. “Back to town?”

“Yes.”

They drove for ten minutes, then Alder said, “I’m going to drop it. We’re on the wrong track.”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Alder.”

“Forget it. I’m calling off your boss.”