Whistle Pass (14 page)

In the center of the storeroom stacked with cases of beer and shelves of liquor, bags of pretzels and cartons of cigarettes, directly under a cage-covered shop light on an extension cord, stood a card table with four folding metal chairs around it. Tom sat on the empty one. The three other men ranged from the midtwenties to fiftyish. Smoke from a cigarette and one cigar in glass ashtrays spiraled to the ceiling. A man in a checkered flannel shirt shuffled a deck of cards. Dull snaps from the cards bounced off the walls. Another man in a black shirt with the top two buttons open fidgeted with a pencil over a scorecard. Open bottles of beer rested on the floor next to the feet of the men.

Tom pointed at each one during the introductions. “Terry, Tony, Ted.” A chuckle clattered out of Tom’s throat. “We call this our Sunday T party.” He pointed with his chin to a man seated between two stacks of metal shelves. “That there’s Edgar. He doesn’t play euchre. Everybody, this here’s Charlie Harris, a railroader staying at the hotel. Edgar, you might already know him.” Congeniality drained from Tom’s face as he focused on Edgar.

Charlie understood he was being checked out. His muscles tensed,
and he clamped his teeth together in readiness for the night clerk to reveal Charlie wasn’t any railroader. He clenched his hands into fists in his pockets, just in case he had to fight his way out of there.

Edgar merely nodded once, then took a sip of gold liquid in a glass and petted the sleeping dog on the lap of his bib overalls. But his gaze didn’t leave Charlie.

Tom’s stern voice said the man wasn’t convinced. “Everything all right, Edgar?”

Edgar glanced at Tom and shrugged. “Yeah. Fine. He’s a freelancer
for the CB&Q.” He looked back to Charlie. “The Burlington. Freelancers sometimes have to hang around for an extra day or two until a crew needs an extra hand.” The man shifted his focus back to Tom. “So don’t go getting your nuts in a vise if you see him around more than some of the other men.” He took another sip and ignored Charlie.

Tom settled into the chair. “Deal the damn cards. I’m down forty cents.”

Charlie’s chest sank in relief as he uncurled his hands. Why Edgar lied was a mystery, but a grateful one.

“I order it up and I’ll play it alone. Help yourself to a beer out of the fridge. Leave a quarter on top.”

Charlie meandered over to the round-top refrigerator and pulled out a Busch. He snapped off the metal cap on an opener screwed into the wall. Setting the bottle on the floor, he pulled his rubber change holder from his pocket. A quarter hid under the pennies and dimes, and he dropped it into a glass half-filled with quarters. He returned to the game in progress and leaned against the wall.

“Ha! Ran ’em. Mark down four points, Terry.” Tom shot a look to Charlie. “What brings you out this morning?”

Charlie watched Tom’s partner rub his nose and fondle the top of the second card in his hand. The man to Tom’s left, Tony, dug in his right ear with a fingertip. When Ted, Tony’s partner, scratched his chin, Tony dug in his left ear. Charlie stifled a laugh. This cadre of friends was cheating. No doubt they knew each other’s signals as well as they knew the back of each worn card, so the playing field was still even.

“Had some time to kill. Figured I’d get a beer.”

Tom growled. “How’d we lose a point?”

Tony offered the answer. “You pulled the hair in your left nostril for spades when it should have been your right. You confused your partner. Jeez, Tom, get your signals down.”

Tom grumbled and gulped a few swigs from his beer. He set the bottle aside while the next hand was dealt. “You staying away from the butt packer?”

Charlie tensed. His hand went to fist. He really didn’t like Gabe being talked about that way. He noticed Edgar squint an eye at Tom, then take a long drink. Edgar closed his eyes.

The old man not only knows, he doesn’t want to be a part of the talk.

“Yeah. I’m curious, though. What if I find somebody doing that queer stuff?” Charlie asked.

“You tell us.” The gruff voice belonged to the fiftyish Tony. “We’ll take care of it.” He swiveled and stared at Edgar. “No matter who it is.”

Edgar’s glassy eyes snapped open and burned hot. “Gabe’s okay. He never done nothing wrong while I was around. You leave him out of this conversation. You want to give somebody a knuckle sandwich, you find somebody else. I may be an old drunk, but me and Muffin can still kick your butt.”

Tom turned peacemaker. “Edgar’s right, boys. We don’t talk about anybody local unless we have proof. Those are the house rules. But if we ever do”—he looked at Charlie—“we’ll clean his clock and then some. You see a queer, you just let us know.”

Terry chuckled. “Got that vat of tar over at the roofing company. I’ll bet we could get some feathers from old pillows at the furniture store.”

“Thought we were saving the tar for that colored family who moved in on Becker Street,” Ted said.

Tom took charge. “I’ll take coloreds over queers any day. Pretty easy to spot one when we want to play a little, even for a nearsighted fool like you. Pink undies are a bitch to see without getting in a queer’s pants, though. ’Course, maybe you’d enjoy unzipping some flies for us, Ted.”

Snorts and guffaws fell out of the card players. Edgar quietly petted the dog.

Charlie took a hit off the beer in his hand and studied the quartet over the bottle. Apparently, this was the heart of Whistle Pass’ version of vigilantes. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with this information yet, but something chipping at his brain hinted these morons could come in handy.

“If you’ve got another chair, I’ve got a couple hours to kill”—he tossed his red rubber change holder on the table—“and money to lose.”

Tom slid his chair to the side. “By the fridge. You can slip in beside me. That way I won’t have to reach so far for my winnings.”

Charlie grabbed the back of the folding chair and snapped his wrist to fling it open. He slid the open seat across the floor to the table. Turning, he stuffed a dollar bill into the glass on top of the fridge. “You boys ready for another round? I’m buying.”

“Hell yeah,” came the unified response.

Charlie watched closely as the four men chugged down the remnants in the bottles. He pulled four beers and walked over to the table. Tom produced a church key and popped off the bottle caps, which clattered onto the floor one by one. Charlie sat and angled his seat to prevent the men at his sides from seeing his cards. They’d all exposed their signals while he’d patiently waited, and now he’d use their own signals against them. He also had another advantage. When these beers were half gone, he’d buy another round, and the men would chug the remnants of these just like they had the last ones.

Chugging beer numbed common sense.

He stole a glance at Edgar.

The old man leaned over and hugged the dog. A subtly raised thumb appeared from behind the Chihuahua’s head.

Charlie gave a short, slight smile in return and focused on the cards being dealt.

Gabe had an ally in Edgar. And now, for whatever reason, Charlie did too. But would the unspoken alliance extend beyond the few paltry dollars he’d pilfer from the pockets of these backyard bigots?

He didn’t know. That chipping at his brain said he might soon find out.

H
E
’
D
kept the fleecing to a minimum. Four bucks—two for the beers he bought, and two for supper later on. Tom and the boys invited him back any Sunday morning he was in town for a shot at winning their money back.

Edgar sipped his whiskey and offered no acknowledgement when Charlie left Captain Tom’s. Unsure which way Edgar would lean when the chips were down, the old man remained an unknown in Charlie’s mind.

He rounded the corner from Chicago Avenue onto Fourth Street.

On the next block, across the street, stood two old three-story brick buildings. One housed a café—closed. The other, a secondhand shop—also closed. On the corner ahead of him, a yellowish concrete building with a flat roof sat like a building block out of place. The side facing him was a blank wall. The few houses in the area were all two- and three-story with peaked roofs and lattice. A cement box just didn’t fit in—more “get it up and screw the aesthetics” than anything else.

A solitary porcelain-on-metal Old Milwaukee sign dangled from a black iron support. Charlie guessed he’d found the Nugget.

He crossed the street to the next block littered with a dozen or so parked cars. Two windows too small to crawl through were nestled into the cement fronting about eight feet up from the sidewalk. A windowless gray steel door simply had “Nugget Club Members Only Knock for Entry” painted in gold lettering. He continued on to the next doorway in the structure. Same kind of gray steel door: “Archer’s Place Come On In
.
”

Charlie tried the door—locked. He shrugged. So much for the “Come on in” part.

He walked back to the Nugget and focused on the E in “Nugget.” A peephole.

A diesel locomotive revved its whirring engines. Charlie leaned back and looked down the street. An orange and black Milwaukee Railroad engine eased out of the roundhouse where the street met the multitude of tracks. Black smoke heavy with unburned diesel billowed, sank, and sloshed around the slow-turning wheels. The stench flowed through the neighborhood.

Charlie swiped at his nose and gazed up at the sign above his head—Old Milwaukee. He smirked at the irony. Somebody had a sense of humor. He banged on the door with a fist.

Locks turned and the door opened.

“Well, well,” Charlie said to Phil Austin. “I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise.”

“Mayor’s expecting you.” Austin, clad in black slacks, white dress shirt, and black pencil tie glowered and nodded toward a closed metal door at the back of the room off the end of the immense bar.

Charlie scuffed the soles of his boots across the coarse concrete. The floor had been poured without much concern for professionalism. The bar, as long as the wall, minus the door at the end, was constructed of painted plywood and pine. Mirrors reflecting the varied colors of the contents of liquor bottles hung behind the shelves, but the mirrors were all beer and whiskey advertisements, not built-ins. Three sets of long-stemmed tap handles poked up from the counter. Stools lined along the front had round wooden seats on chrome legs. The bartender, thirties probably, wore the same apparent uniform as Austin and stood chatting with the one visible customer. Metal-legged tables with linoleum tops and a variety of undoubtedly secondhand chairs haphazardly covered the floor. Each had a large glass ashtray in the middle. The walls had been painted gold with no decorations of any sort.

Charlie scrubbed the back of his teeth with his tongue and wondered if Roger owned the used furniture shop across the street too. Owning the place you bought your accoutrements from had to be a benefit, and a tax dodge of some sort.

What struck deep in his mind was how quiet the place was. No music, no sounds of slot machines, no… nothing, except for the idle mutterings of the two men talking to one another—until he gauged the width of the room. The quiet took a backseat to the fact quite a few feet seemed to be missing. He wanted to go back outside and take another look at the length of the building, but Austin walked around him and rapped on the door. It opened to a man in, again, black slacks, white shirt, and black pencil tie. The shirt strained against well-developed muscles.

Whirs of slots, clinks of pulled metal arms on the one-arm bandits, laughter, an occasional curse, a scrapbook of voices, and odors of cigars, cigarettes, and smoked meat climbed the narrow stairway to the right.

“Mayor wants to see him.” Austin turned and strode away.

Charlie raised a brow. The scars on the man’s face resembled gravel roads. This guy had been worked over more than once, and probably learned some hard, painful lessons from it—lessons he’d be only too willing to share with anybody he got turned loose on.

Roger had himself a junkyard dog of a bouncer.

The man stepped aside. Charlie took mental note that there were two doors, each with thick layers of Styrofoam attached to the back—sound buffers. The whole building had probably been decked out with sound insulators.

Which Charlie found interesting. The entire town seemed to know about the slots and gambling, but serious effort had been made to abort the actual physical awareness from inside the building.

On the other side of the landing, the man knocked on a door, then opened it. “Somebody Mr. Austin says you wanted to see.”

Mr. Austin?
Another interesting quirk.

The man gripped the doorknob and walked, pushing the door until it was fully open. Charlie entered the room and the door closed behind him. He checked. The man hadn’t stayed.

The room’s walls were covered in dark paneling. A Moroccan leather couch rested against a wall. Two matching armchairs sat across from it, a coffee table in between. Floor lamps in three corners provided diffused lighting. Roger swiveled back and forth in a black leather chair behind a wooden desk. A rug echoing the leather covered the floor. A hint of lemon permeated Charlie’s nostrils.

“Nice digs.”

Roger selected a pencil from a holder on the desktop and slid it from one hand to the other and back again.

“What did you want to talk to me about? Did you hear something about whoever’s threatening me?” The stony look on the man’s face didn’t suggest he expected any news. He also didn’t invite Charlie to have a seat.

Charlie spun one of the armchairs around on its leg and sat facing his former lover.

“I think you already know.”

A smile sprang across Roger’s face. “I heard you met Dora. She’s quite a woman, isn’t she?”

Inside, Charlie cringed. He’d blindly thrown out a dart and hit the target.
If
Roger was being threatened, the culprit was none other than Roger’s own wife, and Roger knew it. So, once again, just what the hell was he doing here?

“What game are you playing, Roger? You don’t need me here.”