All Chickens Must Die: A Benjamin Wade Mystery (3 page)

I swept my eyes past him, hoping I appeared as nonchalant as
possible. “Let me ask you a question. This Peete fellow, he wear a dark gray
fedora? Have a face that’s long in the chin with a dimple?”

The color that had pinked Clara’s face vanished. She stared at me
and started to turn around.

I reached out and clasped her hand. “Don’t turn around. You might
tip him off.” I reached around and slipped my wallet from my pocket. I didn’t
want Peete to see me doing this for fear he’d book it. I slid a five-dollar
bill out and placed it on the table. “Look, I know this is going to be awkward,
but I need to have you go and pay for our lunch.”

“Why?”

“Because I want him watching you while I slip out the back. And
don’t stare at him. Act like you’ve not seen him.”

Clara swallowed. She nodded and gathered her purse.

“I’ll call you later.”

A partial smile returned to her face. “You’re too kind, Mr. Wade.
I think the outlook on my fate just got better.”

She rose, covering my view for a moment. When she breezed up to
the counter, I watched his gaze follow her. I slipped out of the booth and
backed into the kitchen.

“Hey,” a man wearing a greasy apron said, “you’re not allowed
back here.”

I doffed my hat and smiled. “Just trying to avoid a jealous
husband.” Mollified, the man pointed to the back door. I opened it, hurried
around the east side and peered around the corner. I saw the men standing in
line at the shoe shine and I watched as Clara exited the front door. Sure
enough, the man who had to be Peete followed her with his head. I crept up
close to him, avoiding the other passersby.

His head did a double take back to the front door then to her
walking toward her car.

“Right here,” I said.

He whirled. I’ll admit I wasn’t ready for the swinging fist. His
right came at me high. I ducked, but the bulk of his hand got me behind the
ear. I saw stars and fell to one knee. Then I heard his footsteps hurry away.

“You okay, mister?” A man helped me up.

I shook my head to clear it. “Which way?”

The Good Samaritan and others pointed to a fleeing man. He was
half a block away and seemed to be gaining speed. Even if I hadn’t been groggy,
I couldn’t run that fast.

The shoe shine man gave me a look. “Shine your shoes, sir? They
got scuffed.”

I looked down. So they did. I shrugged. “Might as well,” I
muttered to myself. “Now I have two cases.”

Even
though I now had two cases, there was
still the matter of the burglary near Smith’s house. If there was anyone who
might have a line on the police activity that occurred the previous week, it
was my good friend Gordon Gardner. The man was an ace reporter for the
Houston
Post-Dispatch
who got his big break on the same case I got mine: the search
for Lillian Saxton’s brother and the papers he smuggled out of Germany last
month. I found the body. Gardner found the papers. He read them, but, under the
influence of the Army and his editor, agreed never to utter a word about what
he had read. Gardner kept to his word, even when he was writing at his big new
desk as payment from his editor for his silence. Hey, silence has a price,
right?

I strolled into the news room. The smell of ink, cigarette smoke,
and coffee assaulted my nose. The click-clack of the typewriters made the room
sound more like a huge machine than a place where men formed thoughts and wrote
sentences. Perhaps it was only to keep pace with our rapidly moving world.

A few of the reporters gave me waves or nods. I had known a few
of them from my time as a beat cop. Back then, we were on opposite sides and
the relationship was more antagonistic than necessary. Some of those reporters
had forgiven me. Others, not so much.

I started walking to the far corner where Gardner’s big desk sat,
then halted. Another guy was in the seat. What was his name? Flynn, I think. He
looked up and our gazes met. He sneered. I rolled my eyes and tried to remember
where Gardner sat now that he was demoted down to the society page. He still averred
it was a demotion but he got to spend his working days with photographer Lucy
Barnes, a stunning example of womanhood.

At the far corner, next to the window, sat Gardner. Stacks of
papers lined the perimeter of his desk. A small pile of cigarettes moldered in
the ashtray. The white coffee cup was stained inside and out. A cigarette hung
from his lips, unlit. Perhaps he was just too busy to light it.

“How’s it going?” I sat in the chair next to his desk.

Gardner looked up and took a puff on his cigarette. He frowned at
the non-smoke, then took it out of his mouth and looked at it like it was some
sort of defective machine. I flicked my Zippo and held the flame at the ready
for him to light up. He did, then leaned back in his chair.

“How’s it going, Wade? It’s going blazes. The damn Nazis are
invading western Europe, Norway’s being lost by the Brits and the Frogs. The
Nazis already invaded Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and France.” He puffed and
blew smoke out of his nose. “But the French should stop Hitler. It’s what they
got the Maginot line for, right? We got news reports coming in from all over.
We’re just trying to compile and get a handle on’em.”

“So, not much. Anything local?”

“War coverage edges out lots of local news. We still have cow
reports and the weather and whatever the governor is doing, but not much else.
And, to top it all off, I get to sit on my ass and report about bigwigs and
their damn parties. You know how infuriating it is to sit over here while
everyone out there”—he gestured to the news room at large—”gets to cover real
events?”

“You get to work with Lucy. Isn’t that a nice reward?”

A smile cracked his face. “Yes, that is extremely nice. I’ve been
to more highfalutin’ parties since I got this assignment than the rest of my
life put together. Having her on my arm, even in a professional context, is
well worth it. But you didn’t come here to chitchat about who’s who. Why are
you here?”

“I was wondering if your paper covered something from last week.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you read my paper?”

“Every day.”

“Then you should know if whatever you’re asking was in the
paper.”

“But that’s the thing: I don’t memorize everything I read, and I
only got a new case this morning. Two actually.”

Gardner sat up straighter. He enjoyed hearing the details of my
cases. It helped him when he moonlighted as a writer of pulp stories. “Tell
me.”

“I got hired by a farmer to look into why the animal health
department has scheduled his entire flock to be slaughtered.”

Part of his enthusiasm vanished. “Really?”

“Really. But there’s more.”

“Hope so. Otherwise, you got the short end of the curiosity
stick.”

“Nice. The same night, there was some sort of police chase. The
farmer, my client, says he saw the cops storm through his land looking for some
sort of fugitive.”

Gardner rubbed his hands together. “Now, we’re talking. What’d
this fugitive do?”

I held out my hands and shrugged. “That’s why I’m here. Figured
I’d get the real story first before I head over to HPD for the official police
report.”

Gardner stood and slapped me on the back. “See, you’re finally
thinking correctly. Not like you used to when you were a cop.”

I shrugged again. “Who does your police beat?”

“Lorenzo Barr. He’s a cub reporter, wet behind the ears, but he’s
got a knack for reading between the official lines.”

“He here?”

“Let’s go see him.”

Lorenzo Barr was that squirrelly type of man who was too small in
stature to match his likely vivid imagination. Around his desk were photos, cut
from magazines and newspapers, of boxing greats, handsome actors, and the like.
One look at Barr and you saw why he favored the arch-typical example of
masculinity. I wasn’t one, either, but I think I had Barr beat.

Barr was small and thin. He looked like he might break if a
hurricane blew through town. Check that. A decent gale might do the trick. He
styled his hair in the latest fashion made famous by Hollywood’s leading men,
but the puffy top of his head wafted in the breeze of the nearby fan.

He stood when Gardner and I approached. My friend made introductions.
I gripped Barr’s little hand. “Wade here is a bona fide PI.”

Barr’s eyes widened in awe. Still gripping my hand, he squeezed
harder. It could have been your elderly aunt grasp. I had to restrain myself.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Barr.” I gave my hand a gentle tug.
“Mind if I have that back?”

“Oh, right, right, right,” Barr muttered, suddenly noticing his
own cluttered desk. “I’m not usually this messy.”

“Don’t care.” I placed a hand on his shoulder. I swear I felt his
collar bone through his suit. “I need to ask you about the police beat from
last week.”

He stood straighter, as if President Roosevelt himself had just
asked a favor. “What do you need to know?”

Gardner hooked a thumb at Barr. “He hears a lot of things over
the police band and forgets little.”

“Good. Last week, there was a ruckus out west of town. Some sort
of police chase and a fugitive running through some farm land and such.”

Barr snapped his fingers. “I know what you’re talking about. It
was a burglary in progress. Three units were called out. One was close to the
house in question and got there before the others did. Two officers went up to
the house and knocked. The burglar, hearing the cops show up, took off out
back. They gave chase, but lost him.”

Gardner gave me an admiring look. “See what I mean?”

I nodded. “Excellent. What day did you publish that? I need it
for the time line I’m making.”

“Oh, it was last Tuesday, but we didn’t publish it.”

“Didn’t publish it? But you seem to know all the details.”

“It was on the police band, and I’ve got a friend down at the
station, but it was one of the cases we didn’t publish.”

Gardner asked, “Why not? Space considerations?”

Barr thought for a moment. “No, not really. The boss reviews the
stuff I write and makes decisions. Sometimes it’s for space, other times it’s
just something the police don’t want published. It happens sometimes.”

“Which was it this time?”

Barr pursed his lips. “Don’t know.”

I stepped forward and sat on the edge of his desk. “Just now, you
gave a detailed rundown of what happened that night. From the way you described
it, the chase was just a chase. But why was the man running?”

“I’m not sure. The location seemed a bit out of the way, you
know. It was west of here, out past downtown, out toward the country. It was
that part of town where the farms come right up against the new ritzy
neighborhood. I forgot the name of the area, Tanglewood maybe?”

I thought about that area of town. It was relatively new, full of
nice homes and well-manicured lawns. However, the poorer farmland jutted right
up against it. I suspected, given a decade or two, the farms would be gone and
new houses would occupy that land. “Did you happen to hear the address the cops
gave each other? You know, where the other units had to get to?”

Barr opened a drawer and pulled out a thick hardbound notebook.
It looked more like a bank ledger than a journal, but he opened it and thumbed
a few pages back from the end. Running a finger down the page, he stopped.
“Here you go. It was 1888 Meadowlark Lane.”

I pulled my own notebook and flipped a few pages until I found
the address of my client. 1868 Blackbird Lane. Whoever built that land must
have loved birds. “You got a city map?”

We all went to one of the center walls of the news room and stood
in front of a large map that showed the major and minor roads of Houston,
including the train tracks and the path of Buffalo Bayou. I picked up the
county atlas and found the grid where Meadowlark Lane was located. It was a
north-south street in the northwest part of the county, outside the city
limits. Sure enough, parallel to Meadowlark, was Blackbird.

I turned and looked at the two of them. “Who lives at 1888
Meadowlark Lane?”

“As background to my story, I had to find out. Oliver Aldridge
lives there with his wife and two kids. He’s a banker at University Savings and
Loan over near Rice Institute.”

Gardner must have seen the blood drain from my face. “What’s
wrong, Wade?”

My mouth decided to imitate a drought and the pit of my stomach
went on a vacation to my shoes. My voice suddenly sounded like a frog. “I know
Aldridge. We have,” I said, pausing for the right word, “history.”

Gardner eyed me closely. “What kind of history?”

“From back on the force. But that doesn’t have any play here.” I
felt like changing the subject fast. “So, the police are called out to
Aldridge’s house on account of a burglary. They show up, but the thief
hightails it out of there. Somewhere along the way, the chase makes its way to
my client’s farm. He hears things, but nothing comes of it. A day or so later,
he gets the order from the county that his birds have to be killed.” I tapped
my finger on the map. “Why?”

Gardner said, “If the burglary was at the Aldridge place, was
there a police report filed?”

“Don’t know,” Barr said. “Once the boss told me not to run the
story, I stopped doing research.”

I gave Gardner a funny look. “Care for a ride to the station?
Maybe we can find a copy of the police report.”

Gardner looked around the news room. Most of the reporters had
their heads down, plying their trade. Across the room, Johnny Flynn sat at
Gardner’s old desk, pounding away at his typewriter. Gardner sighed. “Ever
since I got demoted, I ain’t even had a sniff at a juicy story. My editor has
kept me far away from any investigative reporting. In fact, the owner might
even fire me if I write one.”

“So, that’s a no?”

“Are you kidding? Let me get my hat.”