The Devil You Know (8 page)

Some more thought and she nodded. “I am liking how you think, though you do not look like a nosy burglar. I will not lie to my mister, but I could not mention everything to him in the interest of doing him a favor for his own good.”

“I’m sure you have his best interest at heart.”

“Which I do. In that case, a nosy burglar would find the address in that file box—not that one, that one!—under the letter B for Brogan Trucking. A nosy burglar can write the address down, but not using the note paper with our letterhead on it as that would be a bad thing.”

I wrote what I needed on an unadorned scrap and thanked the lady, putting things back as I’d found them, including the flimsy. “I’m sorry we startled you, Mrs. Stannard.”

She gave a regal nod. “Next time ring the bell. As I missed committing a perforation to Mr. Barrett’s person—do not get me wrong, I am glad of that now—I shall be devoting effort toward improving my aim.”

“Quite rightly, Mrs. Stannard,” said Barrett.

“Now if you two are done here, you will please to make an exit and I will lock up behind and proceed with my evening. The mister will want his dinner and it does not cook itself.”

 
“No, ma’am.”

We obediently shuffled out.

She clip-clopped after, still pointing the gun more or less in our direction as though herding us. “I will say this to you, since I cannot say this to the mister, I will say this: that as nosy burglars and creeps go, you two are not so bad.”

 

* * * * * * *

 

* * * * * * *

 

It was good that Barrett continued to be the driver. I was laughing so hard I’d have wrecked the car.

He didn’t see the humor
. “You weren’t there when she pointed that cannon my way and touched it off.”

“It was just a thirty-two, nothing to get excited about. Stings a lot, but you can vanish.”

“That banshee scream of hers froze me in place—”

“Yeah, I heard that. Healthy lungs.”

“It fair split my eardrums. God in heaven, her husband must be a man of iron to deal with such a woman.”

“She’s a sweetheart. You just have to get her to warm up. You’re not used to dealing with armed dames.”

“And you are?”

“It’s a knack.”

He made a sound low in his throat. I took it to mean he thought it was eyewash.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Into the city to the address of Brogan’s Trucking. Since those interlopers made away with that man’s body—”

“Or reburied it.”

“—or reburied it—we don’t have so much as a shoe to take to Marnucci and Sons for identification of the owner. This Brogan or his two henchmen require our attention.”

“Yeah, and if it’s the Brogan I’m thinking of, then Mrs. Stannard was just the opening act of a full bill, if you know what that means.”

“Your slang is mildly annoying but comprehensible. I’m not that far removed from modern idiom.”

“I talk how I talk and I was referring to the fact she had a little thirty-two, while the bird we want plays with machine guns. Not good. I’m thinking that seven years ago when Stannard needed help, someone with Brogan Trucking came out, saw an opportunity to dump an inconvenient body, and did just that. Stannard might not know details, but he’d have been told to keep shut.”

“Why would Stannard agree to such a devil’s bargain? I’ve always found him to be an honest, hard-working man.”

“Mrs. Stannard said it’s a wicked hard world. Her husband is in no position to argue with certain types who have bodies to bury. He turns a blind eye to protect himself and his wife and with simple silence. Maybe he’s getting money under the table, maybe he thinks it’s none of his business, but keeping shut is safer than saying no.”

“Then when I hired equipment from him. . .”

“He’d have phoned someone to warn them you were digging. They came out to keep an eye on you.”

“You think someone was watching me the whole time?”

“Plenty of cover nearby. Binoculars would help. They didn’t care when you recovered Maureen’s remains—God knows what they made of that. They probably wondered why you didn’t call in the cops.”

“Instead I arranged for a funeral.”

“But for a lady, not a man. If you took a break in the work, they might have slipped in for a look. Maybe they thought you had your own secret to hide.” Wasn’t that the truth? “But when you showed the second body to a witness who helps you dig it out, they had to shut us down.”

“Which they did not.”

He was probably thinking about retribution again. I was all for it, but we’d have to be careful. “If Brogan Trucking is connected to the victim—you ever hear of Fleish Brogan?”

“No, but the name suggests a rich heritage.
Fleish
is German for meat, and if one is not referring to Saint Patrick’s nephew, Saint Brogan, then the surname might be connected to
bróg
, which is a kind of boot or shoe, leading us back to Marnucci and Sons by way of Ireland. Would the appellation ‘Meat Boot’ be some cruel joke on the part of his parents?”

“I’m getting out now. You can stop at the next corner.”

He kept driving, his mood having improved to judge by his faint smirk. “Very well, please, if you would, who is Fleish Brogan?”

“He is what the press and public call a gangster, or was the last time I heard the name. We need something more current about him than a trucking firm address or a shop where one of his dead pals bought shoes seven years ago.”

“Where do we obtain that?”

“At a newspaper, of course. I know people.”

“Good lord, do you? You amaze me, Mr. Fleming.”

“The next corner, pull over. I mean it.”

But he kept going, wearing the smirk all the way through Queens and across the Queensboro bridge into Manhattan.

 

* * * * * * *

 

* * * * * * *

 

The traffic at this time of night
was about the same as it would be in Chicago, just more of it
in
a narrower space and no one stopping unless it was inconvenient to someone else. Barrett was not intimidated by the crowds. I asked him how long he’d been driving. He asked if I meant cars or carriages, because while it was appropriate for a gentleman to drive a car it was not gentlemanly to drive a carriage.

So I told him to forget it and stuck to giving directions. How Escott could stand the guy was a mystery.

It had been less than two full years since I’d last seen these streets. Little had changed about them, but I was sure as hell different. Familiar landmarks like diners and bars—lots of the latter—no longer held their original appeal. We passed the entrance of a building where I’d rented a flat, and I could not summon any nostalgia for its previous importance in my life. It was a place where I slept and changed clothes. I’d not made a home there. After Maureen vanished, it turned into a cross between a waiting room and a jail cell.

I’d spent most of my time either in a boozy fog from drinking or half blind from a skull-breaking hangover while recovering from the boozy fog. It was astonishing that I’d not been fired, but plenty of others in my former profession had been in a similar state, making it hard to pick me from the herd. I did notice when they got chosen over me to go after stories; it was always after those lunches where I’d slugged down a more than just a couple beers with my sandwich.

The way things were at my paper I could see I wasn’t going to get out of dog watch duty chained to the city desk phone without a lot more effort and cutting back on the drink. Younger, faster, hungrier kids were sweeping in and making the job look easy. I had to compete with them.

It got harder to interview people, too. I’d once been able to grab the facts concerning some luckless schmuck’s life-destroying disaster, dash off the hard news, and move to the next without a second thought.

Maureen had changed that. Being in love opens your eyes to a lot of things, including the fragility of happiness. When she disappeared,
I
became the luckless schmuck with my own private life-destroying disaster, and no one wanted to read about it.

One too many bad nights followed by worse mornings and even I wised up that I was killing myself. Before I was too far along and turned into a male sob-sister with a bad liver, I packed what I wanted, sold or gave away the rest, and bought a ticket out of town.

Chicago had been recommended to me as a good place to start over. It was closer to my mid-western roots than New York, and I had a few names to look up for help finding a job. I could not have predicted that I would be taking a train straight to my own violent demise or that anything good could have come from it.

Going back to my old paper felt like trying to pull on old clothes I’d long outgrown. None of the drinking buddies who’d passed for friends back then had expected anything of me. That I’d done well wouldn’t matter; they weren’t the type to offer applause.

Anyway, I wasn’t here to impress people. A few years back it might have mattered, but not anymore.

I pointed out the building we wanted, which was on the left. We were in the far right lane. “Take the next corner, circle the block, and come back on—”

Barrett gunned the motor, speeding up to pass a car, and made a surprise U-turn in front of it, hauling the wheel around sharply. The startled driver gaped as we skidded by, facing him. Barrett smiled and waved, having a whole five inches to spare between car bumpers. The other guy found his horn and cursed if I read his lips correctly, but by then Barrett hit the brakes with enough well-timed force to get the back wheels to lock and slide in the turn. The Studebaker spun sideways into a parking space, its nose pointing the wrong way on the one-way street, perfectly parallel to the curb—which we did not so much as nudge.

Damned show-off.

There’s never a cop when you want one. On the other hand, Barrett would have simply whammied—pardon
me—
influenced
him out of writing a ticket.

“Where to now?” he asked, getting out.

I did not further startle the gawking passersby on the sidewalk by popping him one in the nose.

We took an elevator up to the city room, which was mostly deserted. Only one bored guy hovered by the phone, waiting for someone to call in a last minute story. Unless they changed the schedule, it was just a few minutes to deadline for the morning edition. As Barrett and I walked in, a sweaty copyboy ducked between us, moving as though his life depended on it. Considering the temper of some editors I’d worked with, that might well have been the case.

The bored
guy was not a familiar face. He didn’t ask if I needed help, not wanting to delay his own exit. When I’d put in my time on that desk I’d also grown incurious, an undesirable quality for a newsman.

I heard the seductive clatter of typewriters coming from the small offices on the other side of the room. Those were partitioned off and had doors, but no ceilings. You could tell which ones had occupants from the cigarette smoke rising toward the lights.

“Done!” a man shouted, followed by a rattle as paper was yanked from a roller, and another copyboy bolted from the office with his prize. A moment later the triumphant reporter appeared in the doorway, lighting a cigarette in celebration. He was in shirtsleeves, but had kept his hat on. “I beat you, Izzy,” he called out to the office next to his.