Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories (16 page)

"Hell, that's not necessary."

"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth—to coin a phrase. Listen, I owe you something myself. You want to come over tomorrow night for a home-cooked dinner and some beer?"

"As long as it's Dana who does the home cooking," I said.

After we rang off I thought about the reward from Murray's niece. Well, if she wanted to give me money I was hardly in a financial position to turn it down. But if she left it up to me to name my own reward, I decided I would not ask for money at all; I would ask for something a little more fitting instead.

What I really wanted was Thomas Murray's run of
Private Detective
.

I
.

T
he Brinkman Company, Specialty Imports, was located just off the Embarcadero, across from Pier Twenty-six in the shadow of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. It was a good-sized building, made out of wood with a brick facade; it didn't look like much from the outside. I had no idea what was on the inside, because Arthur Brinkman, the owner, hadn't told me on the phone what sort of "specialty imports" he dealt in. He hadn't told me why he wanted to hire a private detective either. All he'd said was that the job would take a full week, my fee for which he would guarantee, and would I come over and talk to him? I would. I charged two hundred dollars a day, and when you multiplied that by seven it made for a nice piece of change.

It was a little after ten A.M. when I got there. The day
^-
was misty and cold, whipped by a stiff wind that had the sharp smell of salt in it — typical early-March weather in San Francisco. Drawn up at the rear of the building were three big trucks from a waterfront drayage company, and several men were busily
engaged in unloading crates and boxes and wheeling them inside the warehouse on dollies and hand trucks. I parked my car up toward the front, next to a new Plymouth station wagon, and went across to the office entrance.

Inside, there was a small anteroom with a desk along the left-hand wall and two closed doors along the right-hand wall. A glass-fronted cabinet stood between the doors, displaying the kinds of things you see on knick-knack shelves in some people's houses. Opposite the entrance, in the rear wall, was another closed door; that one led to the warehouse, because I could hear the sounds the workmen made filtering in through it. And behind the desk was a buxom redhead rattling away on an electric typewriter.

She gave me a bright professional smile, finished what she was typing and said, "Yes, may I help you?" in a bright professional voice as she rolled the sheet out.

Along with a professional smile of my own, I gave her my name.

"Oh, yes," she said, "Mr. Brinkman is expecting you." She stood and came around from behind the desk. She had nice hips and pretty good legs; chubby calves, though. "My name is Fran Robbins, by the way. I'm the receptionist, secretary and about six other things here. A Jill-of-all-trades, I guess you could say."

The last sentence was one she'd used before, probably to just about everyone who came in; you could tell that by the way she said it, the faint expectancy in her voice. She wanted me to appreciate both the line and her cleverness, so I said obligingly, "That's pretty good—Jill-of-all-trades. I like that."

She smiled again, much less impersonally this time; I'd made points with her, at least. "I'll tell Mr. Brinkman you're here," she said, and went over and knocked on one of the doors in the right-hand wall and then disappeared through it.

The anteroom was not all that warm, despite the fact that a wall heater glowed near Miss Robbins' desk. Instead of sitting in the one visitor's chair, I took a couple of turns around the room to keep my circulation going. I was just starting a third turn when the left-hand door opened and Miss Robbins came back
out.

With her was a wiry little man in his mid-forties, with colorless hair and features so bland they would have, I thought, the odd reverse effect of making you remember him. He looked as if a good wind would blow him apart and away, like the fluff of a dandelion. But he had quick, canny eyes and restless hands that kept plucking at the air, as if he were creating invisible things with them.

He used one of the hands to pat Miss Robbins on the shoulder; the smile she gave him in return was anything but professional—doe-eyed and warm enough to melt butter. I wondered if maybe the two of them had something going and decided it was a pretty good bet that they had. My old private eyes were still good at detecting things like that, if not much else.

Brinkman came over to me, gave me his name and one of his nervous hands, and then ushered me into his office. It wasn't much of an office—desk, a couple of low metal file cabinets, some boxes stacked along one wall and an old wooden visitor's chair that looked as if it would collapse if you sat in it. That chair was what I got invited to occupy, and it didn't collapse when I lowered myself into it; but I was afraid to move around much, just the same.

Sitting in his own chair, Brinkman lit a cigarette and left it hanging from one corner of his mouth. "You saw the trucks outside when you got here?" he asked.

I nodded. "You must be busy these days."

"Very busy. They're bringing in a shipment of goods that arrived by freighter from Europe a few days ago. Murano glass from Italy, Hummel figurines from West Germany, items like that."

"Are they the sort of things you generally import?"

"Among a number of other items, yes. This particular shipment is the largest I've ever bought; I just couldn't pass it up at the bulk price that was offered to me. Deals like that only come along once in ten years."

"The shipment is valuable, then?"

"Extremely valuable," Brinkman said. "When those trucks
deliver the last of it later today, I'll have more than three hundred thousand dollars' worth of goods in my warehouse."

"That's a lot of money, all right," I agreed.

He bobbed his head in a jerky way, crushed out his cigarette and promptly lit another one. Chain-smoker, I thought. Poor bastard. I'd been a heavy smoker myself up until a couple of years ago, when a lesion on one lung made me quit cold turkey. The lesion had been benign, but it could just as easily have gone the other way. For Brinkman's sake, I hoped he had the sense to quit one of these days, before it was too late.

"The goods will be here in about a week," he said. "It will take that long to inventory them and arrange for the bulk of the items to be shipped out to my customers."

"I see."

"That's where you come in. I want you to guard them for me during that time. At night, when no one else is around."

So that was it. He was afraid somebody might come skulking around after dark to steal or vandalize his merchandise, and what he wanted was a night watchman. Not that I minded; nobody had wanted me to do any private skulking of my own in recent days, and there was that guarantee of wages for a full week.

I said, "I'm your man, Mr. Brinkman."

"Good. You'll start right away, tonight."

I nodded. "When should I be here?"

"Six o'clock. That's our closing time."

"What time do you open in the morning?"

"Eight-thirty. But I'm usually here by seven."

"So you want me on the job about thirteen hours."

"That's right," Brinkman said. "I realize that's a much longer day than you normally work; I'm willing to compensate you for the extra time. Would two hundred and fifty a day be all right?"

It was just fine, and I said so.

He put out his second cigarette. "I'll show you around now," he said, "get you familiarized with the building and where everything is. When you come back tonight I'll show you what I want you to do on your rounds -"

There was a knock on the door. Brinkman was half out of his chair already; he stood all the way up as the door opened and a heavyset guy around my age, early fifties, with a drinker's nose and the thick, gnarled hands of a longshoreman poked his head
inside.

"See you a minute, Art?" the guy said.

"Sure. Come in, Orin; I want you to meet the man I've hired to guard the new shipment."

The heavyset guy came in, and we shook hands as Brinkman introduced us. His name was Orin McIntyre, and he was the
firm's bookkeeper. Which was something of a small surprise;
even though he was wearing a white shirt open at the throat and a pair of slacks, I had taken him, foolishly enough, for a warehouseman or a truck driver because of his physical appearance. He could have gone on the old "What's My Line?" television show and nobody would have guessed his occupation. So much for stereotypes.

"If you don't mind my saying so," McIntyre said to me, "I think Art is wasting his money hiring a night watchman. This place is built like a fortress; when it's locked up tight nobody can get in."

Brinkman gave him an irritated look. "You don't know that for certain, Orin. Neither do I."

"Well, the place has never been broken into, has it?"

"Not yet. But there's a first time for everything."

McIntyre said to me, "This building used to belong to an import-export outfit that dealt in high-priced artwork. They installed a number of safeguards: steel shutters over the windows on the outside, iron gates that you can padlock across the doors and windows on the inside. How can anybody get in through all of that?"

"It doesn't sound as if anybody can," I said. "But then, it didn't seem anybody could get into the Bank of England, either, and yet somebody did."

"Exactly," Brinkman agreed. He lit another cigarette; his hands plucked and fidgeted in the air, like a magician doing conjuring tricks behind a screen of smoke. He was one of the most nervous people I had ever encountered; he made me nervous just watching him. "I don't want to take any chances, that's all. This shipment is important to us all -"

"I know that as well as you do," McIntyre said. "Probably better, in fact."

Brinkman gave him another irritated look. There was some sort of friction between these two; I wondered what it was. And why Brinkman, the boss, put up with it.

I said, "I've been a cop of one kind or another for thirty years;
if there's one thing I've learned in all that time, it's that there's
no such thing as too much precaution against crime. The more prepared you are, the less likely you'll get taken by surprise."

"That sounds like a self-serving statement," McIntyre said.

"No, sir, it's not. It's a statement of fact, that's all."

"Uh-huh. Well, if you ask me —"

"That's enough, Orin," Brinkman said. "You've got better things to do than stand around here questioning my judgment or this man's integrity. So have I. Now, what did you want to see me about?"

"One of the bills of lading on the shipment is screwed up." McIntyre sounded faintly miffed, as if he didn't like having been put in his place. It was what he'd tried to do to me, but the "Do unto others" rule was one some men never learned; he knew how to dish it out, but he couldn't take it worth a damn. "You want to talk here, in front of him"—he gestured in my direction—"or in my office?"

"Your office." Brinkman looked at me. "This won't take long. Then I'll show you around."

"Fine," I said.

The three of us went out into the anteroom, and Brinkman and McIntyre disappeared into McIntyre's office. Miss Robbins was busy at her desk, so I went over and stood quietly in front of the wall heater. From there I noticed that, as McIntyre had said, there was an iron-barred folding gate drawn back beside the front door. When it was extended and bolted into a locking plate on the other side of the door, it would provide an extra seal against intruders.

Brinkman was back in five minutes, alone. He fired another cigarette, hung it on his lower lip, did the conjuring trick with his hands and then led me off on the guided tour.

II.

T
he warehouse door off the anteroom led into a short corridor, beyond which was a section partitioned off with wall board: bathroom on the right, L-shaped shipping counter on the left. And beyond there was the warehouse itself, a wide, spacious area with rafters crisscrossing under a high roof, a concrete floor and white-painted walls. A cleared aisle-way ran straight down its geometrical center to the open rear doors where the warehousemen were unloading the drayage trucks. Built into the joining of the right-side rear walls, ten feet above the floor, was a thirty-foot-square loft; a set of stairs led up to it and its jumble of boxes and storage items.

To the right of the aisle, down to the loft stairs, were perpendicular rows of platform shelving, with narrow little aisles between them; some of the shelves were filled with merchandise both packed and unpacked, the unpacked boxes showing gouts of either straw packing or excelsior. To the left of the aisle was open floor space jammed with stacked crates, pallets, dollies, bins full of more straw packing and carts with metal wheels—all arranged in such a mazelike way that you could, if you were careful, move among them without knocking or falling over something.