MR. OLEM’S SECRET

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, August 1971.

When United Security advertised for retired men to serve as security guards on the newly formed Merchant Patrol, I jumped at the chance. The pension of a retired bus driver, even supplemented by social security, doesn’t permit many luxuries.

The job was made to order for a retired man who needed a little extra income but wasn’t interested in overworking. My trick ran only four hours a day, from eight p.m. until midnight, and the work was so easy I was almost ashamed to take the money. All I did was stroll along the street in my assigned area, checking the doors of business establishments and peering through windows to make sure night lights were burning and no intruders were inside. I was also supposed to keep an eye on stores still open for business, but as none in my area stayed open beyond nine p.m., I only had this duty for the first hour of my trick.

Of course, theoretically, there was some risk in the job, because my beat was in the heart of a section of Los Angeles that was rated as a high-crime area, but the risk was more theoretical than real. While police uniforms were so unpopular around there that cops answered calls only in pairs, the Merchant Patrol was accepted right from the beginning.

One reason was that United Security wisely hired only residents of the areas they were assigned to patrol. Probably an equally important reason was that we neither were regarded as cops nor acted much like them. Our gray uniforms were deliberately designed so that we couldn’t be mistaken for members of the LAPD, and the community quickly came to understand that we had no intention of noticing crime that had no bearing on the business establishments we were hired to protect. Pushers and numbers runners, for instance, didn’t have to worry that any member of the Merchant Patrol might finger them to the cops.

Even in the event that we ran into a burglary or robbery in progress, the risk wasn’t great. Although we all carried guns, they served mainly to deter muggers from selecting us as targets as we made our lonely rounds. We were instructed to use them only in self-defense, and never to attempt personally making an arrest. If we spotted a crime in progress, all we were supposed to do was head for the nearest phone.

United Security never explained this policy, but probably the fact that all of us were over sixty and some were pushing seventy had some bearing on the regulation.

Mr. Olem took over Sol’s Delicatessen only about a week after the Merchant Patrol was formed. It had been common knowledge for some time that Sol Rubin had been trying to unload it. The place did a brisk enough business, but for the past couple of years most of the profit had gone to heist artists and burglars. Poor Sol had been held up nine times and had been burglarized four times, with the result that his insurance had long since been canceled. Shortly before Mr. Olem bought him out, he had privately informed me that one more knock-over could bankrupt him.

Sol probably held the record in that area for being held up the most times, but there were a number of runners-up. Heists and break-ins were so routine in the neighborhood, businessmen had stoically come to accept them as an unavoidable hazard of staying in business. Before the formation of the Merchant Patrol, that is. It was their first real effort to fight back.

I got to know Mr. Olem several weeks before he took over the delicatessen, because when he came to town in answer to the ad Sol Rubin had placed in a national food-retailing magazine, he moved into the same rooming house where I had lived ever since my wife died. A lean, hawk-beaked man of indeterminate age, withered but still sprightly, with closely-cropped snow-white hair that made him look as though he were wearing a fuzzy woolen skullcap, he might have been a well-worn sixty or a well-preserved seventy-five. He deftly avoided letting anyone know which, if either.

He also deftly avoided letting anyone know much of anything else about his personal life, even our inquisitive landlady, Mrs. Martin. He never disclosed if he were a bachelor, a widower, or had a wife somewhere, although he did deign to give Mrs. Martin a negative answer when she once bluntly asked if anyone would be joining him after he took over the delicatessen. He never even disclosed his first name, always formally introducing himself to new acquaintances simply as Mr. Olem. I’m not sure that this was another symptom of his reticence, though. I got the curious impression that perhaps he had no first name.

What his nationality was, I have no idea. His name seemed vaguely Mid-Eastern, and his dark, hawk-nosed visage seemed to confirm it, but he once casually mentioned that he had grown up in Australia and he still had a slight Australian accent.

He also casually dropped a few other items of information about himself to me that he didn’t divulge to the other roomers or to Mrs. Martin. When he first arrived at the rooming house, I had not yet started working for the Merchant Patrol, and we fell into the habit of smoking our pipes together on the front porch each evening. Possibly because I never attempted to pry, he became much less reticent with me than with the others.

At any rate, I learned from his casual remarks that he had been all over the world and had done a bit of everything. He had punched cattle in Australia, had prospected for gold in New Guinea and had been the chef of an exclusive restaurant in Hong Kong, just to mention a few of his more exotic adventures. He also let drop that his most recent venture had been operating a commercial fishing boat on Lake Champlain. It was quite obvious that none of these claims were mere braggadocio, because he spoke with too much authority about each of his many vocations. For instance, his claim of having been a chef was bolstered by an encyclopedic knowledge of the gourmet dishes of many lands.

One item of information about him I got from another source. Apparently he was pretty well-off financially, because Sol Rubin told me he paid $25,000 in cash for the delicatessen. Why, with that kind of money, he chose to go into the delicatessen business in the heart of a ghetto area was never clear to me; but again, perhaps the $25,000 was all he had, and he felt that a small business that wouldn’t require strenuous work would provide security for his old age. Despite his reserve, it was apparent the man took a personal liking to me, and I grew to like him quite well too. This caused me some mental struggle, because I felt I ought to warn him that the delicatessen was a favorite target for heist artists and burglars; but Sol Rubin was a good friend too, and that might have spoiled his chance to make the sale. In the end, I solved the dilemma simply by following my lifelong policy of minding my own business.

Sol Rubin and his wife bought a farm near Fresno with the proceeds from the delicatessen. When they vacated the apartment over the store, Mr. Olem moved in there.

The deal cleared escrow in the second week of August. As soon as he became the legal proprietor, Mr. Olem closed the place for a couple of days in order to do a little reorganizing, and also because he had a van of furniture and personal possessions scheduled to arrive from back east. The delicatessen opened for business under its new management on Monday, August sixteenth.

Like Sol Rubin, Mr. Olem planned to stay open until nine p.m. I dropped by Monday evening shortly after I went on duty at eight.

The sign on the window had been changed from Sol’s Delicatessen to Olem’s Delicatessen, but otherwise I could see no noticeable change in the place. The same tempting array of cooked and smoked meats, cheeses, salads and relishes was on display, and the same spicy odor of dill and garlic filled the air.

Mr. Olem, wearing a spotless white apron, was waiting on a woman named Mary Conners whom I knew because she used to ride my bus to work. Both of them threw me friendly smiles. She said, “Hi, Tony,” and Mr. Olem said, “Good evening, Mr. Martinez.”

I returned both greetings and waited while he finished waiting on his customer. When she left, I asked, “How’d it go today?”

“Business has been quite good,” he said in a satisfied tone. “Surprisingly good, in fact. I think I’ve made a sound investment.”

Now that it could no longer hurt Sol Rubin, I saw no point in continuing to keep the new owner in ignorance of the hazard from criminals in this area. I said, “Just hope the hooligans around here let you keep your profits. Sol Rubin was both held up and burglarized several times, you know.”

Mr. Olem nodded. “Nine holdups and four burglaries, I believe. He could no longer get theft insurance. As a matter of fact, I can’t get it either.”

I was surprised that he knew about the previous owner’s misfortunes, and was even more surprised that he had bought the place anyway. I said, “Well, maybe the Merchant Patrol will discourage some of these punks.”

“It was a factor in my decision to buy out Mr. Rubin,” Mr. Olem said. “It should cut the local crime rate.”

I said, “It already seems to be doing that. At least none of the protected businesses has been stuck up or broken into this past week. I’ll check you again about closing time. Just before nine was when poor Sol usually got hit.”

“Well, thanks, Mr. Martinez. I appreciate your concern, but even if I get held up, the robber can’t get very much. I’m only keeping enough in the cash drawer to make change. Every hour I’ve been transferring the bulk of the receipts to the safe in back.”

I said dubiously, “Sol did that, too. But they always made him come up with the key to the safe.”

“Oh, but I got rid of his old-fashioned safe and bought a new one. Come, I’ll show it to you.”

He led me through a swinging door into the back of the building. The first room we entered was the kitchen. There was a storeroom off one side of it and a small office off the other. Mr. Olem led the way into the office and switched on an overhead light. In one corner was a small but substantial-looking safe.

“So what’s different from the old safe about it?” I asked after examining it.

“A couple of things. First, it’s bolted down from inside. Mr. Rubin was lucky his was never carried away. Second, it’s a combination safe.”

After thinking this over without seeing what advantage this had over a safe that required a key, I said, “So?”

“There’s no key to produce,” he explained. “If I simply refused to open it, what could a robber do?”

I stared at him wonderingly. I could think of a number of things, such as holding lighted matches to the soles of his feet.

Then I decided that such thoughts mast have occurred to him, too. With his broad background of experience all over the world, he must have encountered enough violence during his life to be aware of the unpleasant possibilities that might ensue if he refused some bandit’s order to open his safe.

Examining him more closely, I realized that beneath his formal but rather amiable reserve there was a hard core of stubbornness. Perhaps he couldn’t be forced to open it; I suspected that in his quiet way he could become as immovable as a stalled tank.

The trouble was that the courage to endure torture probably wasn’t enough to beat the average modern hoodlum. The widespread use of drugs made it at least an even bet that anyone who stuck up a store would be hyped to the eyebrows, and a gunnie riding high on smack was quite capable of pumping bullets into a stubborn victim out of spite, even though that would kill all chance of learning a safe’s combination.

I said, “Well, let’s just hope you never get stuck up.”

As we went back into the kitchen, I noticed that a long, wide net made of tough-looking cord completely covered a side wall. On wooden pegs protruding through various places in the net were hung a variety of odd items that looked as though they might more appropriately have been displayed in a museum.

Halting when he saw me looking that way, Mr. Olem emitted a self-deprecating little laugh. “The visual record of my ill-spent life,” he said. “That rope and branding iron are souvenirs of my cattle-punching youth, and also that broad-brimmed hat. That shoulder pack is called a tucker-bag, and I carried it in the Australian bush. That short-handled pick dates back to my gold-prospecting days in New Guinea. About all I salvaged from that venture, incidentally. What little gold I mined I had to use to ransom my life when I was captured by headhunters.”

I looked at him wide-eyed. “That must have been some experience.”

“It was,” he assured me. “I also lived with a friendlier native tribe for a time, in a Negrito village. The headhunters were Papuans. Sometime when we both have more time, I’ll tell you more about it.”

“You’ll have a willing listener,” I told him. “You’ve certainly led a fascinating life.” I looked more closely at the huge net. “Is that a fishing net? The holes seem too big.”

“It’s what’s known as a gill net,” he said. “The way you use it is to attach lead weights at intervals to the lower edge, then hook buoys to the top edge. That makes it set in the water vertically, sort of like a tennis net. Fish attempting to swim through it get their gills entangled in it. It’s quite effective, except that it grabs everything that comes along, without distinguishing between fish and inanimate objects. I’ve pulled up everything from beer cans to tree stumps, even a full keg of nails once. When it grabs hold of something, it doesn’t let go.”

“It makes an interesting wall decoration,” I said.

“Well, I really hung it there because it will rot unless it’s stored wide open like that, and I didn’t know where else to put it. I don’t know why I’m saving it. I’ll probably never use it again, and I can’t sell it because they’re a glut on the market. Commercial fishing on the Great Lakes is rapidly coming to an end. Lake Erie is already dead from pollution, and the rest of the lakes are dying.”

From the front of the store the musical chime that signaled the entrance of customers sounded three times. He pushed open the swinging door and I followed after him.

The customers who had come in turned out to be three members of the Street Tigers, a juvenile gang whose members ranged in age from about sixteen into the early twenties. I had known all three since they were born, and they were now all approaching twenty.

Joe Ramirez was a thin, swarthy boy with dark hair just long enough to cover his ears. Tommy Coster was a burly youth with an Afro haircut. Jimmy Elias, whose father had recently kicked him out of the house because the boy was busted for marijuana possession, was tall and lean and wore his hair to his shoulders. All three wore the hip-hugger, bell-bottomed slacks, black leather jackets and yellow-lensed sunglasses that were the uniform of the Street Tigers.

I happened to know that all three also were on probation for various offenses ranging from pushing to assault. They seemed surprised and a trifle disconcerted to see me.

Jimmy Elias, the customary spokesman for the group, said with a touch of diffidence, “Hi, Mr. Martinez.”

“Hello, boys,” I said. “What’s on your minds?”

“We just come in to look around, sort of,” Jimmy said with a curious air of defensiveness. “To see if Mr. Olem was stocking anything different from old man Rubin.”

I let my eyes narrow. “If that’s all you want, why are you acting like I caught you with your hand in the till?”

“Well, geez, you’re looking at us like we’re ax murderers or something.”

Mr. Olem said equably, “Customers are welcome just to look, Mr. Martinez. I don’t have any new items in stock yet, boys, but I plan to offer a few of my personal specialties as soon as I have time to make them up.”

“Like what?” Joe Ramirez asked.

“Well, I make a pretty good hot potato salad and some tasty homemade sausage, just to mention a couple of my specialties. I also have my own recipe for Boston baked beans.”

“Are you still going to handle some kosher stuff like old man Rubin did? I always liked his kosher corned beef,” Tommy said.

“I’ll have kosher-type food. It won’t be real kosher.”

“You mean it won’t be blessed by a rabbi?” the youth asked with a grin. “I don’t think old man Rubin’s was either. There aren’t any orthodox Jews around here, so all his customers cared about was the taste.”

Jimmy Elias, who had been gazing around contemplatively, suddenly seemed to tire of the conversation. Abruptly he said, “Come on, you guys, let’s split out of here.”

When they were gone, Mr. Olem asked, “Do you know those boys well, Mr. Martinez?”

“I used to tan their bottoms for cutting up on my bus when they were in grammar school,” I said. “They’re pretty wild kids. They didn’t come in just to see what changes you’ve made.”

“You think they planned to rob me, and your presence discouraged them?” he asked with raised brows.

I shook my head. “They’re probably not above armed robbery, but they’re too well-known in the neighborhood to risk it so close to home. They may have planned to bully you into offering them a free treat. They sometimes came in and smarted off to Sol until he’d make them free corned beef sandwiches or something just to get rid of them. They always played it cool enough so that they couldn’t be charged with extortion. They just hung around and got in Sol’s way and made wisecracks until he voluntarily paid off with a snack.”

“I see,” Mr. Olem said. “The way the long-haired boy was gazing around, it occurred to me they might have come in to case the layout with the idea of later trying a little burglary.”

“That’s a possibility,” I conceded. “They’re probably not above burglary either. I’ll have a private word with them the next time I see them.”

“About what?”

“Burglary. I’ll let them know that if any of the protected businesses in the neighborhood are knocked over, I’ll suggest to the cops that they look their way first. They’ll listen to me. The memory of those tannings I gave them as kids still lingers.”

As it happened, I didn’t run into any of the three during the next few days. I inquired about them whenever I ran into another member of the Street Tigers, but no one else seemed to have seen them either. Finally I ran into a gang member who said he thought they were out of town, because he had overheard them discussing hitchhiking up north to Oxnard to look for work. Since the only work any of them had ever done was to push grass and smack, that seemed to me unlikely. I thought it more probable that they had made one of their periodic runs down to Tijuana to buy a few bricks of grass.

A week later I dropped by the delicatessen in the daytime when my landlady happened to be there also. She was all enthused over Mr. Olem’s hot potato salad. She asked me if I had tasted it, and I had to admit I hadn’t.

“You should, because it’s delicious,” she said. “What gives it that sort of tangy taste, Mr. Olem?”

“A certain spice packaged in Vienna, Mrs. Martin. I wrote for a supply when I first began negotiating with Mr. Rubin.”

“Oh, you have relatives in Vienna?”

Mr. Olem shook his head. “Just friends.”

She waited hopefully, but when he failed to elaborate, she finally asked, “What’s the name of the spice?”

Mr. Olem smiled. “That’s my secret, Mrs. Martin. If I told you my recipe, you could make your own potato salad instead of buying from me.”

“I probably would,” she admitted with cheerful candidness. “I don’t suppose you want to give out the recipes for your sausage and baked beans either, then.”

Mr. Olem shook his head again. “Sorry. Those are more of my secrets. But I will tell you that there’s real maple syrup in the beans and one of the spices in the sausage comes from Hong Kong.”

“Oh, you have relatives there?” Mrs. Martin asked interestedly, still grabbing at every opportunity to attempt to pry information about his background from her ex-roomer.

“Again, merely friends,” he told her.

“You sure have friends lots of places,” she said, giving him up and turning back to me. “Tony, have you tried Mr. Olem’s baked beans or sausage?”

“I haven’t tried anything he makes,” I said.

“Well, you should. I never tasted anything as good as his specialties.” The reason I hadn’t tried any of the delicatessen food was that I seldom ate at home, although I had what Mrs. Martin euphemistically called a ‘bachelor apartment.’ There was only one room, but an alcove contained a sink and apartment-size refrigerator and stove.

I sometimes made my own breakfast, though. After Mrs. Martin’s sales talk, I bought a half pound of the sausage and tried it with eggs the next morning. As my landlady had said, it had quite a unique flavor. I found it delicious.

The second week of the Merchant Patrol went as uneventfully as the first. I liked to think that word about the patrol had gone out over the underworld grapevine and had discouraged criminals from picking on any of the protected stores. Then that bubble burst during the third week the patrol was in existence. Three protected stores got knocked over the same night by the same pair of bandits.

Fortunately none were on my beat, but they were all only a few blocks away. A supermarket, a gas station and a movie box office were all held up within an hour by two tall men dressed all in black and wearing Halloween witches’ masks. The total take from all three jobs was around fourteen hundred dollars.

Two nights later a grocery store and a tavern in my area were hit by the same pair only fifteen minutes apart, with a total take of another nine hundred dollars. I wasn’t on duty yet, the first robbery taking place about seven-thirty and the second at a quarter to eight, but another member of the patrol was on duty, which gave us all a black eye. It sort of made us feel as though the bandits weren’t very impressed by us.

That was the last heard from that particular stickup team, though. Apparently the five stickups gave them enough of a stake to move on somewhere else. There wasn’t another holdup or burglary reported by any of the protected businesses during the next two weeks.

Then I ran right into the middle of an attempted burglary.

It was about eleven-thirty on a Thursday night. I was cutting down the alley behind the stores in the block where Olem’s Delicatessen was, checking all the rear doors and windows giving onto the alley. When I shined my light on the delicatessen’s back door, I saw it was standing wide open.

At that moment there sounded from inside a peculiar series of thuds, as though a number of heavy objects were falling to the floor more or less simultaneously. This was followed by the sound of a lot of threshing around and a considerable amount of cursing.

From the sounds, I decided the intruders were in too much trouble to be very dangerous. So, instead of heading for the nearest phone, as I was supposed to, I drew my gun, went over to the open door and shined my light inside.

Two figures were writhing around under the gill net I had last seen draped against a side wall. Apparently Mr. Olem had changed its location, for it must have fallen over the intruders from the ceiling. Its edges were weighted by heavy lead sinkers at intervals all the way around, which accounted for the thuds I had heard.

The overhead light flashed on, and a moment later Mr. Olem, in pajamas and a robe, stepped from the doorway of the staircase that led from the kitchen to the upstairs apartment.

When he saw me, he looked momentarily startled, but then he said cheerfully, “Good evening, Mr. Martinez. We seem to have caught some fish.”

By the increased light I could see the struggling figures under the net were a pair of teenagers from the neighborhood, both members of the Street Tigers. One was named Pancho Gomez and the other was a youth named Will Talley.

All their struggles were accomplishing was to get them more fouled up in the net. They had managed to thrust all four arms and all four legs through openings and back through other openings until they were hopelessly enmeshed.

Putting away my gun, I moved into the kitchen. Glancing upward, I said to Mr. Olem, “How’d you have this contraption rigged?”

“On retractable hooks,” he said. He indicated a series of small, oblong, open-fronted boxes attached to the ceiling at the edges of the room on all four sides. “You can’t see the hooks now, because they’re retracted into their receivers.”

“What made them retract?”

“An electric eye activates the device when an intruder gets within six feet of the office door. I also rigged a separate electric eye for use during business hours. It causes the hooks to retract only when someone walks through the office door into the office. I figured that in the event of a holdup, I would be forced to the office at gun point and would enter it first. The net would then drop over whoever was behind me after I was safely out of its way. After closing the store, I’ve been switching off that electric eye and turning on the other one.”

I gazed up at the series of boxes again wonderingly. “Where did you ever acquire the know-how to rig anything like this?”

“Oh, I was once a foreman in a Berlin plant that manufactured electronic equipment,” he said offhandedly.

I wondered if there were any specialized field, including brain surgery, in which he didn’t have at least a smattering of knowledge.

From under the net, Pancho Gomez called plaintively, “Will you get as out of here, Mr. Martinez?”

“You’ll be all right there until the cops arrive,” I told him. “Just relax.”

Mr. Olem cleared his throat. “Maybe it would be better to free them from the net before the police arrive, Mr. Martinez. You could keep them covered with your gun.”

“Why?” I asked with raised brows. “They’re safer where they are.”

“Perhaps, but if we simply turn the boys over to the police with the story that we captured them in the act of committing burglary, the story won’t draw more than a line or two on the inside pages of the papers. But if news of my burglar trap leaks out, some reporter may play it up as a human-interest story. And once the thing receives any publicity, it will be forever after useless.”

After thinking this over, I nodded. “I see your point. Okay, you peel that net off them while I keep them covered. I’ll let you get it out of sight before we phone the police. I doubt that the boys will care to mention how they were trapped to anyone, because it makes them look kind of silly.”

I drew my gun again.

The story did only rate brief mention on the inside pages of the local papers. Because they were both juveniles, the boys’ names weren’t even given.

Later, I got to wondering if there hadn’t been a potential page-one story in Mr. Olem’s device, though; not just because of its cleverness, but because of possible catches it might have made previously that went unreported.

I don’t know that it ever made any previous catches, of course. It’s pure speculation based on what may well be merely my overactive imagination, but young Joe Ramirez, Tommy Coster and Jimmy Elias still haven’t reappeared in the neighborhood, and none of the other Street Tigers seem to know where they are. They’ve dropped out of sight before, but never for this long. No one but me is likely to get worried about them, because Joe and Tommy don’t have any parents, and Jim’s father disowned him.

Also, it was odd the way that bandit pair in the witches’ masks so abruptly ended their crime spree. Their first night of activity they made three hits. It occurs to me as possible that they again planned three hits instead of only two on their second night out—and maybe the third was Olem’s Delicatessen.

If I hadn’t happened along just as the net dropped over the Gomez and Talley boys, I wonder if the break-in would have been reported.

For a time the seeming lack of any motive on Mr. Olem’s part stymied me. Then I started thinking about his experience of living with a native tribe in New Guinea in his youth. I looked up New Guinea in the encyclopedia and it is one of the few places left in the world where some natives still practice cannibalism.

After stewing about the whole thing for several days, I finally decided to continue my lifelong habit of minding my own business—but I’m not going to eat any more of Mr. Olem’s delicious sausage.