The Baby Blue Rip-Off (12 page)

George was a plumber. And a TV repairman. And a farmer for hire. Also an auto mechanic. Anything, in fact, that could be broken George could fix. He was one of those guys who buys something and, before using it, takes the thing apart to make sure he knows how it ticks, in case a breakdown should occur.

He was also a bit of a con man, as his “poor man” routine might indicate. He could bullshit his way right into your heart, and your pocketbook, but he was very good about standing behind whatever it was he sold you, and generally fixed up whatever it was you bought from him even after his generous personal warranty had run out. For $250 I’d bought a color TV from George just last year, a like-new set that, as George put it, had “a picture more natural than my natural.”

Because he was black, and because he sold things cheap, many of his Port City customers assumed George’s merchandise was obtained in some less-than-legal way. I didn’t believe that, but since so many people did, I thought George would be a good bet for some information.

“How you doin’, Mallory? That TV set hasn’t conked out on you, has it? If it has, the poor man’ll fix it up for you. That’s how I keep my customers happy, you know; a poor man has to treat his friends right.”

I could picture his wide grin as I heard the deep bass voice roll out over the phone. I let him continue with his good-natured bullshit for a while, then cut in.

“George,” I said, “There’s nothing wrong with my set. It’s beautiful.”

“You need something else, then? How ’bout a videotape machine? You ain’t in control of your life if you ain’t in control of your TV, you know.”

“George.”

“Yeah, Mallory?”

“I’m not buying anything, George.”

“Not buyin’ anything?”

“No, George.”

“What, then?”

“I need some help.”

“That toilet of yours backin’ up again? We can get that took care of in a flush.”

“George, not that kind of help. Information.”

“Information?”

“Yeah. You know those break-ins that’ve been going on lately?”

“Sure do. Got my gun by my bed. Look after that whole damn block of mine. No no-good freeloader’s going to lift any of my stuff. What’s wrong with people? Don’t they know you got to work for what you get? Nothin’ comes free.”

“It does for these guys. There’s been eight break-ins so far, and an old lady got killed in the process of the last one.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. Shame. Say, weren’t you the guy that found the old gal’s body?”

“That’s right.”

“And now you want to find these guys yourself?”

“That’s right, George, and before you try to sell me a gun, let me ask you something. Can you tell me the names of anybody in town who might be peddling hot merchandise?”

“Mallory, you know me better than that. Don’t hurt the poor man’s pride. You know my prices are low ’cause I buy from people direct and I got low overhead, and—”

“George. I don’t think you’re involved with these rip-off guys. But lots of people would assume that you
do
deal in hot goods because you sell stuff right out of your house, your prices are low, and....” I hesitated.

“And ’cause I’m black. Yeah, I suppose you’re right. But so what? So what if people think that? I’m not into hot goods, and that’s that.”

“I just thought that, since some people do assume you handle that sort of merchandise, maybe somebody’s approached you about selling their stolen goods.”

“Using me as a fence, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Well. I don’t know, Mallory.”

“George, it’s important. So far these guys have stolen God knows how much, killed one lady, and beat the hell out of me twice.”

“And you’re still messin’ with them? You feelin’ all right?”

“No, I’m not. I won’t feel all right until these SOBs are put away where they can’t hurt anybody or steal anything again.”

“I don’t go for guys like that myself. People got to work for what they get.”

“I agree, George. Can you help me?”

“This is strict between us, right?”

“Strict between us.”

“There’s a place in South End. A used auto parts shop on one side, a big old empty garage on the other. Place is called Tony’s.”

“Living quarters above?”

“Yeah. It’s all one big double-story building, living quarters on top, garage and auto parts deal below. Ratty-lookin’ place. You know it?”

“I know it.”

“I hear—just hear, now—you can get whatever you need from a guy there. A guy named P. J. somethin’.”

“George, you’re a prince.”

“I’m just a poor man, Mallory, that’s all.”

“How can I thank you?”

“Forget it. But if you want to take a look at that videotape, we can swing you a deal.”

“I’ll think about it, George. Thanks again. See you.”

“You be good now, Mallory. And more important... be careful.”

We hung up.

Debbie was just finishing up the dishes. I joined her, took the towel from her, and dried the last few.

“What’s going on, Mal?” she said, nodding toward the phone on the wall.

“Nothing.”

“Are you into something dangerous?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you going to stay here with me today?”

“I’m going to take care of some errands this afternoon. I’ll be back this evening.”

“Won’t you please stay? I’m... I’m still scared of what Pat might do.”

“Keep the door locked and bolted. You’ll be okay. If you aren’t, call Lou Brown and he’ll help you out.”

“Lou Brown? Isn’t he the deputy sheriff?”

“He’s one of ’em. But he’s a friend and’ll keep it quiet, and nonofficial. Okay?”

“Come back as soon as you can?”

“I promise.”

“I’ll fix a nice supper for you.”

“Really? What are we having?”

She dried her hands and put them around my neck and kissed me, then looked at me and said, “Anything you want.”

“What time do you want me back?” I said.

Port City doesn’t have a slum. What it does have, here and there, is “substandard housing,” the largest concentration of which is located in that area of town known as South End. The word “slum” just isn’t in the Port City vocabulary. To understand that you must keep in mind that Port City is Middle America, U.S.A., where the corn grows tall, grass is something you walk on, and everybody but me votes straight Republican; pleasantly dull (“A nice place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit there”) and relentlessly middle-class. Even the millionaires like to think of themselves as middle-class joes. So do the slum dwellers.

And they have a point. If you tried to pass South End off as a slum to somebody born and bred in a big-city ghetto, you’d get laughed at or punched out. Because South End is, basically, a lower-middle-class residential district, having in common with East Hill a tendency toward conglomeration of different types of houses: everything from tumbledown shacks to brand-new prefabs. But the common denominator of South End housing is the one-story, rather run-down clapboard—in short, substandard. And so the bottom line comes to this: South End may not be a slum, but you’ll sure bump into one hell of a lot of substandard housing down there.

Something else you’ll bump into is industry. A good share of major local industry is situated in South End, the dominant
one being the grain-processing plant, whose seasonal emissions of soybean fumes can turn a summer breeze into something you wouldn’t care for. Another factory, where pumps of all sorts are manufactured, stands at the foot of West Hill bluff and marks the beginning of the End; a street cutting past the pump plant runs straight through the End and out of town, turning into Highway 61 South after a lengthy stretch littered with gas stations, used-car lots, hamburger palaces, and supermarkets, with the drab residential sections of South End cowering back behind all the plastic glitter. Just before the street turns officially into a highway, heading out to drive-in restaurants, motels, and melon stands, there is a big, many-laned intersection, and if you can maneuver your way into the left lane and turn, jostling across the railroad tracks, you’ll find yourself in the heart of South End, staring smack at the huge grain-processing complex on the left hand and at Port City’s literal wrong-side-of-the-tracks on the right. Just three blocks over those tracks was Tony’s Used Auto Parts.

Across from Tony’s, little raggedy kids were playing on the swings and slides in a large, well-tended park: two blocks’ worth of land donated by the grain-processing people to the city to make up for smelling it up. One block of the park is taken up by a Little League baseball field with a stand of bleachers, in back of which is a graveled parking lot. That’s where I left the van before crossing over to Tony’s.

Tony’s was an odd-looking, off-balance sort of a building; actually, it was two buildings slapped together: a tall, one-story garage fastened haphazardly to an equally tall but two-story arrangement of shop below, living quarters above. Together the joined buildings made for a big, long, sagging wooden ramshackle, with white-paint-faded-to-gray peeling to reveal
even grayer wood. But the strangest-looking thing about this strange-looking structure was the windows; every window in the place was painted out with flat black. It didn’t take Nero Wolfe to figure out the windows were black to keep people from seeing in.

Even the front shop-window was painted black. Nonprofessionally rendered lettering in white walked awkwardly across the black window, saying “Tony’s Used Auto Parts,” and in smaller, just-as-awkward letters: “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.” Okay.

I tried the shop’s front door. Locked. They hadn’t even bothered with a “Closed” sign. I walked around back of the building and found a rickety open stairway leading up to the back-door porch of the second-story living quarters. I climbed the stairs and knocked.

Nothing.

I knocked some more. Insistently.

The door cracked open, and one eye looked hesitantly out at me, like it was still Prohibition and the bathtub was full of gin. I repressed the urge to say Joe had sent me and said, “Is P. J. around?”

“Who wants him?” the eye said. It was a female voice and, as I studied it, a female eye, too. But from the sliver of pale face I could see along with the eye, I couldn’t tell much else about who the eye and voice belonged to.

I said, “I heard P. J. sells stuff.”

“He don’t sell stuff anymore.”

“But I heard....”

“I don’t give a damn what you heard. He don’t sell stuff anymore, and anyway, he don’t never sell stuff to people he don’t know, so get your goddamn ass off my porch.”

“Please—”

And, delicate little thing that she was, she slammed the door on me.

I knocked again, and kept knocking, having decided I would go on knocking until I got some kind of response.

This time when the door opened, it was all the way. I didn’t get much of a look inside the place, though, because something was blocking the view. What was blocking the view was a guy about the size of the Statue of Liberty’s brother.

I said, “I, uh, I, uh....”

“You get outa here.”

The voice was wrong, too high-pitched, but it didn’t make him any less frightening. He was a square-jawed guy with a blond crew cut and dark eyes crowding a several-times-broken nose.

I said, “I, uh....”

“You’re going down these steps. You get to choose how.”

He gestured over the railing of the porch, pointing a finger that was like a section of lead pipe.

I chose.

I walked down the stairs, waving a little good-bye to the hulking figure in the doorway, and suddenly realized who he was. Or who he damn well might be.

That same hulking figure in the green van.

The one I had encountered at Mrs. Jonsen’s that night, when I was trying to get license-plate numbers and instead ran into a glandular case loading up the van, who then ran into me and initiated all that Mallory-kicking.

Yes, he was the one. I was sure of it.

So I pretended to go away. I cut through the adjoining yard and headed down the street, which was a narrow lane lined
with shade trees. I walked several blocks before ducking behind one of those trees to rest, think, hide. I’d gone in the opposite direction from where I’d left my van, simply because if Hulk and his honey were watching my exit, I didn’t want to tip them as to where my car was. They hadn’t seen me arrive (I hoped) and would assume I’d left my buggy down here somewhere, assume I’d gone to retrieve it and go.

It was a quiet street. No traffic. The warm afternoon sun was filtered and cooled through the shimmering leaves. The homes along the street were modest, standard South-End one-story clapboards, but well kept-up. A pleasant little neighborhood. High wild grass was growing up around the base of the tree where I was sitting, and I plucked a stalk and chewed the sweet root. I didn’t mind sitting in the soothing shade of the tree, regrouping, waiting to see if Hulk or anybody followed me, waiting for five minutes to go by if he didn’t.

When the five minutes had gone, I got up. Headed back to Tony’s Used Auto Parts, circling around several blocks to waste some more time, and also in order to come up behind the building on the garage side. One nice thing about black-painted windows; just as I couldn’t see in, they couldn’t see out, and my approach was, I felt sure, undetected.

Next door to the garage was a run-down two-story gothic that was so close to its neighbor there was little more than a crawl space between them; it was a tight squeeze, but I had breathing room, and thanks to some bushes gone out-of-hand up by the gothic’s porch, my presence wasn’t likely to be noticed by passersby—out front, anyway. From the back I was pretty well exposed, though the passageway was dark enough to shelter me some.

I began examining the windows along the side of the garage. There were three of them, evenly spaced, and on the middle
one I found a spot in the lower corner where some of its black paint had worn away a bit, or had maybe been scratched off. Heart pumping, I peeked in and saw nothing but the green of a vehicle of some kind.

Green?

I kept peeking, trying to tell whether or not that green vehicle was the same green vehicle I thought it was—namely, the green van that had been used to haul loot away from Mrs. Jonsen’s.