| |
All the way downtown I entertained the small suspicion I might have been bamboozled. Was Tabby Warren simply a charmer unlike any I’d ever met? Or was she up to something and hiding it beneath her eagerness to help and her chatter about Seamus? She was clearly used to calling the shots, yet I somehow wasn’t ready yet to call her spoiled.
A parrot.
Unbelievable.
Maybe I was nursing a grudge because Seamus had waxed on about her so. His comment that she was a lot like me rankled more than ever now that I’d met her. I had nothing in common with Tabby Warren, except maybe a firm handshake. Still, she was making it possible for me to take a step forward. Or she’d appeared to.
I went to Culp’s Cafeteria and had a bowl of soup and some pie to placate my belly. At five til two I presented myself at the real estate office.
Judging by the number of file cabinets and the folders stacked in wire baskets on several desks, the place was on the up-and-up. A secretary typed placidly at one of the desks while a man paced back and forth beside her, tugging his tie. When I introduced myself another man, a sturdy fellow with a fixed smile, hurried forward to greet me and tell me his name was Thompson.
“Boss parking the car, is he?” he asked cheerfully.
“Boss?”
“Well, I sort of assumed that’s who you were setting up the appointment for. Guess it’s your husband, huh? Either way, you gals save us men a ton of time handling things like that.” He winked.
“I don’t have a boss. Or a husband. It’s just little ole me.”
I winked. And matched his smile.
“Uh...” The smile faded. “You mean it’s you who wants to see the place on Fifth? Who wants to rent it?”
“I’d have to see it before I decided that.” I trilled a laugh so silly I practically gagged on it.
“Well, uh, like I told Miss Warren, who I guess you know somehow, the building’s already rented—”
“And she assured me you’d be glad to let me look at it anyway. She said things sometimes go wrong at the very last minute. In fact...” I saw an opportunity to squeeze out more information. “...she thought it unlikely you’d managed to get an actual lease drawn up and signed in such a short time.”
“Well, yes. The papers won’t get signed until Monday or Tuesday. They’ve made a deposit, though, so it’s a binding agreement. Frankly, honey, you’d probably just be wasting your time going over there, and we’ve got one or two other places that might interest you.”
“Oh, I don’t mind wasting time. Not a bit. And like they say, Preparation oils the hinges in case Opportunity knocks.”
“Sure. Okay. Let me grab my hat.”
“Oh, and information on how to get in touch with the last man who leased it. I want to ask about, ah, noise and such. And trash pickup.”
He blinked.
“Trash. Uh, sure.” Going to one of the desks, he opened a drawer. He took out a folder, ripped a sheet from a desk pad and wrote. “I think he already left, though. For Arizona or wherever it was he was headed. Yeah, it is Arizona. Bad lungs.” He thumped his own chest. “Only address he gave there is a post office box, for sending him monies he’s owed for deposits and that.”
I looked at the paper he gave me and tucked it into my breast pocket. He put on a gray fedora and we set out. I sort of liked the line I’d made up about hinges and opportunity.
***
“What kind of place are you thinking of starting? Dress shop? Hair salon? Books?”
Thompson unlocked the middle front door at the former lamp shop.
“A detective agency.”
I’d anticipated the question, and on the ride from his real estate office had concluded there might be advantages to telling the truth about what I did. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times. He stared at the card I extended.
“You need someplace this big, do you?”
“Another firm has approached me with a very enticing merger offer. Multiple detectives, office staff and that.” Clem Stark hadn’t exactly proposed a merger, and his offer was anything but enticing, but it made good fodder for my fabrication. “Of course we’d sublet the ground floor, probably to a secretarial service that wants to expand.” I was starting to fall for my own make-believe.
“You sure you want to see this place? The party who’s already spoken for it put down three months’ rent, so chances it’ll become available are just about zero.”
There was the barest hint of nervousness about his reluctance. Not the level he’d be wrestling with if he had Gil Tremain locked in one of the closets, or even knew anything about him. It was the sort of nervousness that went with cutting corners. Of taking money under the table, maybe.
“We’ve got two other listings that would be dandy for what you’re talking about,” he said eagerly. “Plenty of space, but smaller, so you wouldn’t have the headache of sub-leasing.”
“Maybe Monday. I just have the feeling this one might work out.”
“Okay. Up to you.”
He launched into his real estate spiel, ticking off how old the place was and pointing out features as he squired me around the ground floor with its maze of lamps. I got an up-close gander at the frolicking nymph. Her nipples were nicely defined. I wondered whether there’d ever been lamp with a frolicking satyr. Somehow I doubted it.
“Gee, the health trouble that made the man who had this place decide to close must have been awfully bad for him to just walk out and leave all this,” I said.
“I guess. I have to say, though, he didn’t look nearly as bad as I’d expected when he came in to sign the paperwork that had to be signed. Maybe he was wheezing more, but then he was always wheezing. At least he wasn’t making snide comments and expecting everyone to jump when he snapped his fingers the way he usually did. He was downright chipper.” Thompson chuckled. “I guess coming into money must do that to a fellow.”
One of the insurance men in the neighboring building had said something about a small bequest, so the stories matched.
“Maybe it was having the weight of running a business off his shoulders,” I said sympathetically.
“Say, now, I never thought of that. I guess you’ve learned a lot about human nature in your line of work.”
I smiled and looked and listened, I wasn’t sure for what. The muffled sound of a man bound and gagged in a closet? A matchbook or a conveniently dropped business card from C&S Signals that would indicate Gil Tremain had been here?
The building had two staircases, a public one at the front of the building and service stairs at the back that led into the alley. It stood more or less on a corner. On one side the brick walkway separated it from buildings across the way, including the one where Steve Lapinski had his accounting office. On the other side of The Pompeii, but only half its height, squatted the box-like structure of the insurance company.
A three-foot gap between the two buildings was bridged by gates front and back. They hid trash cans, and probably weeds in season. The Pompeii’s unused coal bin, which I insisted on peeking into, greeted the real estate agent’s flashlight beam with a billowing curtain of cobwebs. No one had been in there since long before Gil Tremain had gone missing.
Inside again, we toured the top two floors. The middle one had been the speakeasy. One end wall was elaborately carved and fitted with shelves to hold glasses and bottles for the long bar in front of it. Now it held lamps and shades awaiting repairs. Work tables, cabinets, and a few wooden crates of merchandise coming or going filled the center of the room where patrons once had danced and knocked back illegal booze, and Seamus and my dad along with other cops had charged up the stairs to make arrests.
I chattered questions about square footage and Thompson answered. I asked about utilities and insurance. He said he could have figures for me on Monday. All the time, I was making my way carefully around the room, trying to shake off thoughts of what this place must have been like in its heyday, trying not to miss anything in the present. Finally we climbed the stairs to the top floor.
Once it had been home to three apartments. Now their bathtubs and basins sat darkened by years of disuse. One apartment was empty, the thick coat of dust on its floor marred only by my own footprints as I went in to look in closets. Another served as storage space for new lamps and empty cartons. The third apartment was saddest of all. Stacked there, sometimes three tall, were dozens of small tables, and chairs whose velvet seats had succumbed to moths and sunlight.
Unpalatable as it was to admit a trail that I had thought promising led to a dead end, maybe it was time for me to do just that. I followed Thompson back downstairs weighted down by the sense my attempt to find some connection between this place and Gil Tremain amounted to one very wild goose chase.
Then I saw it.
Caught in a piece of molding next to the stairs to the ground floor was a single strand of yarn dyed bright, unnatural blue.