To Brew or Not to Brew (20 page)

There was a twinkle in her eyes as her smile got wider. “The police don't know everything.”

I was starting to think I was wrong about her. Maybe she really was the nutcase I thought she was earlier. The only thing she could possibly know that the police didn't was if she was the killer. My phone was still in my hand, and I wondered how fast I could dial 911.

Fran stood and walked over to the wall, where she removed one of the photos. “They don't know about this.” She handed the picture to me and returned to her seat.

It was a grainy black-and-white shot of a cavernous brick
room filled with wooden kegs. I didn't understand. “What does this have to do with the brew house?”

She clapped her hands together, very pleased with herself. “If you look at the date on the photo you'll see it was taken in 1928, well before the end of Prohibition.”

“So?” I had no idea where this was going.

“Those kegs are filled with beer, and not
near beer
, either.”

Near beer was an almost nonalcoholic beer that some breweries had produced back then. “I still don't see what you're getting at.”

“So how did the brewers get that bootleg beer out of the brewery?”

I blew out air in a big sigh. “I have no idea.”

“They did it the same way your murderer is going in and out.” She leaned forward. “By using the tunnels.”

“W
hat tunnels?” I said. Fran wasn't making any sense.

“There are tunnels that run under the brewery.”

What a ridiculous notion. It wasn't possible. “I would certainly know about it if there were tunnels under the brew house,” I said. “It would have been disclosed when I bought the building. That's not something a real estate agent is going to keep from you.”

Fran leaned back in her seat. “The real estate agent wouldn't have known about them. They're not on any building plan, since they were illegal. But they're definitely there. I've been in them.”

I still didn't buy it. “Then where is the entrance? My basement walls are concrete block.” Then I remembered the old shelves on the walls. Could it be behind one of those?

“It's there. I'm sure of it.”

I couldn't wrap my mind around it. If she was right, how could I not have known about this? It was my building, for heaven's sake. “Tunnels. Under the brewery.”

“Yes. Do you want to hear about them?”

“You bet I do,” I said.

Fran told me that despite—or maybe because of—the ban on alcohol, there was a huge demand for it, and the ice cream and pop business wasn't enough to keep the business afloat. They needed a way to get beer to barges on the Allegheny River, and a series of tunnels was the safest way. After Prohibition was repealed, the tunnels were used for a while until shipping by boat was no longer cost-effective. The tunnels were eventually closed off and forgotten, except by the old-timers like Fran's father, who'd taken her to see them when she was a girl.

One thing about this story bothered me. The building that housed the actual brewery was gone. My brew house was in the former office building. I mentioned this to Fran.

“There were half a dozen ways to enter the tunnels. And that's only the ones I knew about. From what I remember my father telling me, there were entrances from some of the other businesses in the area. Alcohol came in as well as went out.”

“You're sure there's one under my building?”

“Positive.”

All this made sense now. Someone else knew about these tunnels and was using that knowledge to get in and out of the brewery without being detected. Except for the one time the alarm had been activated, of course, when he'd solved that problem by repositioning the motion sensors. I needed to see these tunnels.

Fran agreed to meet me at the brew house at ten the next morning to show me the entrance. It was going to be a long night.

*   *   *

I
arrived at the pub before seven a.m. raring to go. I'd spent a sleepless night thinking about those tunnels and trying to figure out where the entrance could be. Even though Fran said they'd been closed off years ago, it was amazing nothing had been discovered during the renovation. I'd had all the interior partitions removed, the exterior walls taken down to the bricks, and the hardwood under the old linoleum refinished. There wasn't anything special about the basement. There were old steel shelves along the walls, but I didn't store anything there because it was damp and I was afraid mice would get into the grain. The rest of the space was empty except for an ancient six-foot-tall safe that was too heavy to move. If I ever expanded into this space and made it a rathskeller, it would make an interesting conversation piece. The combination lock on the safe was missing, so it was no longer useful for much more than that.

When Jake arrived at seven-thirty, he found me in the cellar on my hands and knees examining a space under one of the built-in shelves. “Hold that pose a second while I get out my phone. I have to get a picture.”

“I hope you want a new phone, too, 'cause you're gonna need one.” I pushed myself to my feet.

He laughed. “What are you doing down here?”

“Looking for a secret door.”

Jake raised an eyebrow. “Let me guess. You found a bunch of those old Nancy Drew books you used to read as a kid and you're reenacting
The Mystery of the Secret Door
.”

“Did anyone ever tell you you're a smart aleck?” I said as we climbed the stairs.

“All the time.”

“And for the record, there's no Nancy Drew book with that title.”

He slid onto a bar stool. “What are you really doing?”

“I just told you.”

“You're serious?”

I took the seat beside him. “Yep. Remember that meeting I went to last night?”

He nodded.

“It didn't go very well.” I told him about Fran storming out of the meeting and what happened after that. As soon as I got to the part about the rat, he interrupted.

“I thought you were going to call me when you were going to be here late.”

Good thing I skipped telling him about the note. “I stopped on the spur of the moment and I thought I'd be in and out.”

“That's not the point. It could have been much worse. You could have been hurt.”

“I know that, but I'm not going to let someone scare me out of my own brewery. If I'd planned on being here more than a minute or two, I would have locked the door and set the alarm.”

“I'm not going to lecture you—not that it would do any good. But call me the next time,” he said. “What happened after that?”

I filled him in on my visit to Fran Donovan's house and what she told me about the tunnels.

“It's kind of hard to believe,” Jake said. “Are you sure this Fran isn't just making all this up?”

“That's what I thought at first. I didn't think it was possible. I've never seen any kind of door—even one that had been closed off—in the basement. She's adamant about it, and she even showed me an old photograph of this large space that she swears is part of the tunnel. Anyway, she's coming here at ten to show me where the opening is.”

“So that's why you were down on the floor.”

“Yep.”

“Great.” He stood and slipped his phone out of his shirt pocket. “Can you do that pose again? I really want to get a picture.”

I jumped up and snatched the phone from his hand. “You were warned, Lambert.” I skipped around to the serving side of the bar.

He leaned over the wide bar top trying to get the phone from my hand. It was just out of his reach. “Give it back, Max.”

“I don't think so.” I sidled up to the other end of the bar. We were both laughing as Jake kept grabbing for the phone.

“You're going to be sorry,” he said.

“Ha! You have to catch me first.”

Jake vaulted over the bar and landed in front of me, only inches away. My pulse accelerated, much like a car going from zero to sixty in two seconds flat.

“What was that about catching you?” he said.

Still holding his phone, I put my hands behind my back. He reached around me and grasped my hands. Any retort I
had caught in my throat, because the next thing I knew, Jake was kissing me.

We parted a minute later, both of us breathless. “I told you you'd be sorry,” he said.

“Who said I'm sorry?” My voice was shaky.

I was pretty sure he was about to kiss me again when I heard “Ahem.”

We jumped apart.

“Little early in the morning for hanky-panky, isn't it?” Elmer said with a big grin on his face.

“It's not what you think,” I stammered.

“I may be old, but there's nothing wrong with my vision, you know,” Elmer said.

“Maybe not,” Jake said. “But you do have rotten timing.” He put his palm out and I gave him back his phone. He squeezed my hand. “I'll be in the kitchen. I have another recipe I want to work on.”

Elmer grinned again. “Looks to me you were cooking something right here.”

I heard Jake laughing as he went through the door to the kitchen. I went around the bar and dropped into a chair.

“I knew something was going on between you two.” Elmer took a seat on the other side of the table.

“There's nothing going on,” I said. “We're just friends.” Meanwhile, my brain was screaming,
Jake kissed me!

“Whatever you say. Where do you want me today?”

I told him about Fran and the tunnels.

He nodded. “I heard rumors about them, but I figured they were just stories. Who would have thought there were bootleggers in Pittsburgh?”

Indeed.

*   *   *

O
nce again, Candy discovered what was going on before I had a chance to tell her. This time I blamed it on Elmer, who'd gone to the bakery to get some sweet rolls. It was a little after nine when she tracked me down in my office, where I was struggling to fill out a report of brewing operations for the state. It was my first one, and it didn't help that my thoughts kept wandering back to Jake.

“Why didn't you call me?” She stood in the open doorway to my office. “I had to hear this secondhand.”

I laughed. “That's a first, isn't it?”

“And it better be the last. You know I like to keep informed.”

“You're just nosy.”

Candy held her hands over her heart. “You wound me, Max. I am not nebby. No one around here would know what to do if I didn't keep up on things.” She pulled a chair up to my desk. “So spill. Elmer told me a little bit—that Fran Donovan told you about some tunnels. How did you get her to talk to you?”

“I didn't tell Elmer everything because I didn't want him hovering any more than he already is.” I told her about coming back here and what I'd found—including the note, and that was why I'd paid a visit to Fran. “When I accused her of leaving that little present, she was appalled that I thought she'd do something like that and she invited me in.” I told her the rest of the story.

“I can't believe I never thought of tunnels,” Candy said.

“You knew about them?”

“No, I didn't,” she said. “I didn't grow up in Lawrenceville. But entering inside the building instead of the outside
is the only thing that makes sense. It's so simple and it explains why I didn't see anything the couple of nights I sat in the parking lot.”

“You actually staked out the place?”

“Of course I did.”

I just shook my head. We talked for another minute or two, then she had to get back to the bakery. Before she left, she made me promise to keep her informed. I didn't have much choice in that matter—she'd find out somehow, like she always did.

I tried to get back to working on the report, but I couldn't concentrate. I got up and went back to the brewery. While I checked the gauges, I kept thinking about Jake. I'd wanted that kiss since forever, and now that it had happened, I wasn't sure what it meant. I wanted it to be the beginning of something, but what if Jake didn't feel the same? Maybe he only kissed me because I was convenient. A spur-of-the-moment impulse that didn't mean a thing to him.

Which was probably true. Sure, he'd shown concern for me at times, but he'd never voiced any notions of a romantic relationship. We were good friends. Good friends who shared a kiss. A kiss that didn't mean anything.

Oh, who was I kidding? It certainly meant something to me. But if Jake didn't feel the same, well, so be it. It wouldn't be anything new. I'd just carry on as I always had and keep my feelings to myself.

*   *   *

F
ran Donovan arrived promptly at ten. Jake was still in the kitchen. I wasn't sure what he was working on, but I smelled tomato and garlic. Elmer sat at one of the tables,
and he'd begun telling me another war story when Fran opened the door and peeked in.

I went over to greet her. “Thanks for coming.” I then introduced her to Elmer.

She looked around the room. “This isn't what I expected.”

“It ain't the den of iniquity you thought it would be?” Elmer said.

“Elmer!” If Fran weren't standing between us, I would have elbowed him.

Fran smiled. “Not exactly.”

I waited while she took everything in and asked Elmer to see if Jake could join us.

She finally turned to me, and said, “This is very nice. It's hard to believe this used to be offices.”

“Would you like to see the brewery?”

“I would. Very much.”

I led her through the swinging door and into the brewing area.

“Oh my.” She touched one of the gleaming stainless tanks. “It's beautiful. Just like I remember from the old brewery, except they were larger.” She walked to each tank and peered at the gauges. She appeared years younger when she turned to me. “My father took me to work with him sometimes. He showed me quite a bit about brewing.”

When she asked, I explained what was fermenting and when it would be ready for kegging.

“I take it you don't bottle any of this,” she said.

“No. At least not for the near future. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure I want to grow that much.”

She seemed surprised at that. “Why not?”