Update On Crime (8 page)

Nancy spotted a tiny roadside restaurant and pulled into the parking lot. “Let's stop here for lunch,” she suggested. “I don't know about you, but all this sleuthing has made me hungry.”

Nancy and Bess devoured a delicious lunch of soup and apple fritters. Then they continued their drive back to River Heights. They drove past the River Heights airport on their way to find KSM Express, which was located in an industrial area on the east side of town.

The company lay at the end of a road near some railroad tracks. The company's large parking lot was crowded with eighteen-wheel trucks.

Bess held her nose as one of the huge trucks pulled past them, belching out a cloud of thick black exhaust from its smokestack. “Yuck!” she cried. “This definitely isn't the most glamorous assignment we've ever been on.”

“I'm afraid trucking companies tend to be short on glamour, as a rule,” Nancy said with a laugh.

She pulled her Mustang into the parking lot, and she and Bess got out and went to the double glass doors of KSM Express. A receptionist looked up from her desk.

“May I help you?” she asked pleasantly.

“Yes,” Nancy said, thinking fast. She glanced at a stack of business cards in a holder on the desk. The top card read: KSM Express. Kurt Milhaus, President. “I have an appointment to see Kurt Milhaus,” Nancy finished smoothly.

The receptionist looked confused as she checked a calendar on her desk. “I'm afraid Mr. Milhaus just stepped out of the office for a minute. I don't seem to have a record of an appointment for him. You said your name was . . . ?”

“Nancy Drew and Bess Marvin,” Nancy supplied.

“I'm so sorry,” the receptionist told her. “I can set up an appointment with him for Monday, if you like.”

Nancy shot Bess a quick look, then said, “We'll just wait for him, if you don't mind.”

“Well . . .” The receptionist seemed as if she were about to object, but Bess spoke up before she could.

“Do you have a ladies' room we could use while we're waiting?” Bess asked.

The receptionist looked annoyed, but she pointed to a doorway at the end of the hall. “It's through that door and down to your right,” she said.

“Good job, Bess,” Nancy whispered as they hurried down the corridor. Looking ahead, she spotted a door at the end of the long hallway. “Let's try that door,” she said. “Maybe it leads to
Kurt Milhaus's office. He's the president of the company.”

The two girls stepped through the door and were surprised to find themselves outside on a vast loading dock. At the far end of the dock, they could see a crew of workers loading crates into the back of a tractor-trailer truck. The entire warehouse seemed to vibrate with the rumbling of heavy machinery and the shouts of the workers. No one seemed to notice Nancy and Bess. They stood in the doorway and quickly surveyed the scene.

“The trucking business seems like such a plain-Jane kind of operation,” Bess whispered. “Why would a company like this want to bribe a politician?”

Nancy pointed to the truck that the workers were loading. “Hal told me that Milhaus wants to avoid complying with safety laws and pollution controls,” she said. “So he bribed Gilbert to write exemptions into the legislation.”

“So that's why I got a lungful of black smoke as we drove in here!” Bess said indignantly.

Nancy nodded. “I still want to find Milhaus's office,” she said. “Let's see if we can locate it before the receptionist realizes we've disappeared.”

Nancy and Bess skirted around some huge packing barrels, heading back toward the door to the main office. Suddenly, Nancy heard a low rumbling behind her, followed by a screech of brakes.

She whirled around and looked up in horror. A forklift, loaded with heavy wooden boxes, was bearing down on her and Bess. In the next instant, the forklift slammed to a halt.

Nancy gasped as the crates tumbled from the forklift, heading straight for her and Bess!

L
OOK OUT
, Bess!” Nancy cried, shoving her away from the wall of falling boxes.

Nancy barely managed to leap aside herself and fell hard on the concrete floor. A split second later one of the crates crashed onto the spot where she had just been standing. The heavy wooden crate splintered apart with a sickening crack.

“Nancy, are you all right?” Bess's face was white with shock as she came over to help Nancy to her feet.

“I'm okay, but I can't say the same for my panty hose,” she joked, brushing some dirt off her torn stockings.

The forklift driver, who was wearing a
foreman's hard hat, leapt off his vehicle. “What are you girls doing in this area!” he shouted.

“We took a wrong turn,” Nancy replied, half-truthfully.

“Accidents happen when you go snooping around where you don't belong,” the foreman continued angrily. “I'll bet that's
your
Mustang I saw outside with the Channel Nine sticker on it! We don't want any more reporters poking around here!”

He certainly wasn't acting apologetic! Nancy thought. In fact, it was almost as if he had deliberately tried to run them down with the forklift.

“But of course it
was
an accident,” another voice smoothly interrupted the foreman's tirade. “Right, Merrick?”

Nancy turned to see a well-dressed businessman who looked about twenty-five years old. He was standing in a doorway to the office building and was carrying a leather attaché case.

“Right, Mr. Milhaus. Of course I didn't see them,” the foreman said, tugging at his hard hat.

“You can go tell the crew to clean up this mess,” Kurt Milhaus told Merrick, gesturing toward the heap of broken crates.

“Yes, sir,” the man replied. He glared over his shoulder at Nancy and Bess as he headed toward the back of the warehouse.

Milhaus turned to face the two girls. “I'm sorry about Merrick's bad manners. He tends to be a hot-under-the-collar type, but he's a good foreman. I hope neither of you was hurt.”

Bess, who still appeared to be in shock, said nothing. Nancy shook her head. “We're all right, except for getting quite a scare.”

Milhaus motioned for them to follow as he opened the door to the main office building. “This area is off limits to visitors for safety reasons just like this,” he explained. “The receptionist told me you had gone to the ladies' room. How did you wind up out here?”

“We must have taken a wrong turn,” Nancy said.

Milhaus nodded thoughtfully. “I guess that could happen to anybody,” he said slowly. “You said you had an appointment?”

“Well, we didn't exactly have an
appointment,”
Bess said, springing back to life. She gave Kurt Milhaus her most appealing smile. “We were just hoping you might be able to make time to see us.”

Milhaus chuckled as he glanced from Bess to Nancy. “I have a meeting in a few minutes, but I guess I can squeeze in the time for two attractive young ladies.”

Good going, Bess, Nancy thought. She followed Kurt Milhaus down a second hallway and into his private office. She and Bess sat down in the office's green leather chairs, while Mr. Milhaus leaned casually against his desk. Above the desk was a picture of him with Steve Gilbert at some sort of ribbon-cutting ceremony.

“Now, what did you want to see me about?” Milhaus asked pleasantly.

“I'm working as an intern at Channel Nine,”
Nancy explained. “We're just doing some fact-checking on a story about trucking deregulation.”

“Fact-checking, huh?” Kurt Milhaus leaned back in his chair and clucked his tongue reprovingly. “Look, I don't hold this against you personally, but I had a very unpleasant interview with one of your reporters, Hal Taylor, about a month ago. He implied all sorts of slanderous things about this company and about me in particular. I'm prepared to sue the station if he broadcasts any of those lies. There's a ‘fact' that you can tell him for me.”

“I can understand why you'd be upset,” Nancy said sympathetically. She spotted a pen cup on Mr. Milhaus's desk. Taking out her reporter's notebook, she pretended to search for a pen. “I'm sorry, I can't find a pen. May I borrow one of yours, Mr. Milhaus? I just want to take a few notes for Hal.”

The man nodded and handed her a novelty pen with the KSM company name on it. It was exactly the same as the one she had found at the station and in Steve Gilbert's office.

“This is so cute!” Nancy gushed, turning the pen over so that the truck ran back and forth. “It even has your company name on it.”

Smiling pleasantly, Mr. Milhaus said, “We had those custom-made to give to friends and clients. Handing out little gifts like that is good for business.”

I'm sure it is, Nancy thought, thinking of the cash “gifts” that Kurt Milhaus had given to Steve
Gilbert. She smiled brightly and said, “I'm sure I saw one of these pens just the other day, over at Channel Nine. Does one of your friends work there?”

Milhaus's face reddened slightly. “Certainly not,” he replied. Nancy thought she could detect a slight nervousness in his voice. “These pens—we hand out so many. They could end up anywhere, I suppose.”

Nancy found herself studying the businessman's face. She was certain that she had never met him before, yet there was something oddly familiar about his appearance. She couldn't shake the feeling that she had run into him before.

“I have to get to my other appointment,” Mr. Milhaus said, checking his watch. Nancy and Bess rose, and he escorted them to the door. “I hope you can convince Hal not to run that interview he shot here the other day. He's way off base.”

“I'm sure he's only interested in telling the truth,” Nancy replied carefully.

For just a moment, the mask of congeniality dropped away from Kurt Milhaus's face. A hard, calculating look came into his eyes. Then the look was gone, and he smiled. “That's good,” he said evenly. “Tell Hal we'll meet again soon.”

Nancy was taken aback by the man's tone. Was that a threat? She resolved to ask Hal about the exact nature of his dealings with Kurt Milhaus when she returned to the station.

• • •

“What do you think, Nancy?” Bess asked as the two girls got back into Nancy's Mustang.

Nancy turned on the ignition. “I think Kurt Milhaus is pretty nervous about Hal's upcoming story, but that doesn't prove he's behind the attacks,” she said, backing out of the parking lot.

“I got the feeling that the foreman was deliberately trying to scare us—or worse,” Bess said with a shiver.

“They certainly aren't fans of Channel Nine,” Nancy said. “Milhaus obviously knows that Hal is implicating him in his story. That could explain the foreman's reaction.”

Her blue eyes narrowed thoughtfully as she headed toward downtown River Heights. “So far the only tie-in I have between Milhaus and the attacks is that KSM Express pen I found in the tape booth—and that isn't much to go on,” she admitted. “But there's something else that bothers me about Milhaus.”

“What is it?” Bess asked.

“I'm not exactly sure—it's something about his face, I think,” Nancy answered. “He looks very familiar to me.”

“That's odd. Is there any way you two could have met or seen each other before today?”

Nancy shook her head. “No. I have a good memory for faces. With those bushy black eyebrows of his, I know I would have recognized him if I'd ever seen him before. So I can't understand why I have this eerie feeling that we've met.”

Bess opened her purse and pulled out a compact. “Maybe you're having déjà vu?”

“Maybe,” Nancy said. “But I can't help feeling that if I could figure out why he looks so familiar, it would help solve this case.”

Seeing a convenience store just beyond a highway overpass, Nancy signaled, then pulled her car into the parking lot. She stopped next to a pay phone outside the store. “I'm just going to call Mr. Liski to check up on Hal and let him know I'm heading back,” she told Bess. “I'll drop you at the restaurant on the way so you won't be late for work.”

“Okay,” Bess said, sighing dramatically. “I guess I'll just have to wait another day for my big chance to meet Hal Taylor.”

Nancy laughed. “Believe me. As long as Marilyn Morgan is on the scene, you're better off staying miles away from him!”

She opened her door and started to get out. All of a sudden, the quiet afternoon was shattered by the shrill blast of a truck's air horn. Nancy barely had time to turn around when she heard the sickening sound of metal crashing against metal.

“Get down, Bess!” Nancy cried, ducking back inside the car. The next thing she knew, the car was rocked by a powerful explosion!