Chapter Four

I came to with the front door buzzing. And that wasn’t all. The door would buzz for a minute, and then my head would buzz right back. They were having a little contest and I think my head was winning. It was buzzing a lot louder.

It was daylight. It was morning. Maybe it was afternoon. How was I to know? All I knew was my face was down in the hard blue linoleum of my kitchen floor. My nose was a little flat and tired from being slept on. Around my head, as I lifted it a few inches, was a wide green halo of broken beer bottle glass. I wished I’d been more faithful in my prayers to the patron saint of barroom brawlers.

I moved my eyes a little to the left and the right. They moved in creaky jerks, like an outdoor gate in the wintertime. Over to the right I saw a quantity of dried blood on the floor where I’d slugged leather-face with the chair, and that made me happy. I noticed another pool of blood, nearer me and bigger, and got unhappy again. It struck me the bigger pool was probably my own blood.

I had a problem on my mind. To some people it might look like a skull, but to me it was just a problem. I got my hand up to the back of my head and it felt soft and spongy. The hair was matted and caked with blood. I pulled two small chunks of glass out of the matted hair, and it was like pulling teeth with your bare hands and no novocaine.

The door buzzer kept on nattering. So did my head. I made the supreme effort and crawled to a sitting position. To make things complete, I sat on a sharp piece of broken glass.

I pulled up my trouser leg to look at my ruined knee; that is, I tried. The knee was so swollen I couldn’t get the cloth rolled up over it. I gave up, got my sound leg under me, and stood.

The door buzzed. Maybe you will forgive me. I lost my temper. I picked an empty beer quart off the table and whaled it at the buzzer, high on the wall. I hit it the first time, and it didn’t buzz any more after that.

I hopped two hops to the sink. I had a vegetable spray attachment on the tap, and I shot cold water through it and ducked underneath. Blood roared to my head but then the cold water began to bite into the spongy patch of skull. It smarted like iodine, but I began to come around. Little bits of dried blood slowly detached themselves from me and built up in the drain filter.

I turned off the cold water and shoved myself upright. Then I heard my front door opening. There was one hesitant step in my entry. I picked up another empty beer quart and hobbled to the corridor. It was costing me five cents for every bottle that got broken, but I was willing to sacrifice another.

There was a girl standing beside my open front door.

She was petite and not aggressively female of figure. She was wearing a simple light frock that gave her a little-girl look, and she was glancing around as though she wondered whether she should have stepped in and was about eighty per cent sure she shouldn’t have.

“My God!” I said in brittle tones. “Another brunette!”

She jumped about six inches at the sound of my voice. She turned and saw me, and then she did more than jump. She put her fist up to her mouth and almost swallowed it keeping back her scream.

I hadn’t looked in a mirror yet, but I could imagine what she was screaming at.

“Shut the door behind you, and come in,” I said crossly. It didn’t sound like my voice. It sounded very far away and full of gravel. Only the crossness sounded like what I’d meant.

“Look,” I said as the kid continued to stand there, “you don’t have to be scared. It’s only old Teed recovering from an all night binge. I’m quite sober now, thank you. And I seem to have hit myself on the back of the head, where I can’t reach to put a bandage on.”

She stood. “So come in!” I yelled, so loud she jumped again. “I don’t care who you are or why you came here. I just want help. You can at least make coffee, can’t you?”

Tears started in her eyes and she bobbed her head gravely, yes, like a little school girl getting hell from the head mistress. She took her fist out of her mouth. “Mr.—Teed?” she gulped.

“I wish it were Harry Truman,” I assured her.

“Mr. MacArnold of the Clarion sent me here to see you because I was working for Mr. Foster and he won’t pay me and I can’t find him and Mr. MacArnold thought you might help me because he said you knew Mr. Foster and might have an interest in finding him and getting me—” At that point she had used up all her small lung capacity and her voice ran down.

“Sure, sure,” I said. “I’ll do anything for you, after I pick up all the little pieces of my skull from the floor and fit them back into my head. Come on out here and help.”

She followed me meekly back into the kitchen.

“My!” she said. “Did you have a party?”

It seemed awfully close to a crack, but you couldn’t mistake the innocence in her voice. What a kid to be mixed up with Crawfie Foster!

“I was suckered,” I said. “Without going into too many details, the story is that a woman came in here on a pretext. When I wasn’t watching she slipped the latch off the front door. Then she came out here and talked to me while two bozos sneaked up on me from behind.” I looked at the shambles. There was broken glass all over the floor, along with blood; the furniture was all shoved crooked, one kitchen chair was smashed and the other lay on its side in the corner. “I am happy to say I put up a fight.”

I hobbled to the unbroken chair, righted it and sat down heavily. “Does the sight of open wounds bother you?” I asked.

The kid came into her own. She walked around behind me and looked at the back of my skull. “I’ve seen worse than that when a skier hit a tree,” she said calmly. “I’m a Ski Patroller, and I know first aid. I’ve also had to use it before, so don’t think I’ll just make things worse. None of my patients has ever died.”

“What you need is a basin—look under the sink. Sterile gauze, a big roll of it, in the bathroom cupboard—out and down the corridor to your left. And there’s some fairly pure soap in the bathroom, too.”

She assembled the material, drew a basinful of hot water, and went quietly to work. Her efficiency extended to putting a pot of coffee on the stove at the same time. I lit cigarettes one after the other and let her clean up the damage. After she got most of the corruption out of the way she studiedthe gashes in my scalp and said, “You’re all right. You haven’t got a skull fracture, or you’d have concussion. You could have the concussion, of course, without a fracture, but you wouldn’t be as operational as this with any concussion.”

“If I had concussion, I slept it off,” I said. “What time is it?”

“About ten o’clock.”

She put a thick gauze pad over the wounds and covered my head with a skull cap anchored by adhesive tape. I picked up a shiny frying pan and studied myself in it. “Doctor Brent,” I said, “call surgery. All I need is a nose mask.”

It wasn’t too good, but she giggled. Then she poured the coffee. I drank three cups black and felt nearly human. I was getting low in cigarettes, but that was all right because she didn’t smoke.

“Well, my friend and benefactor,” I finally said, “tell me your story now. Who are you?”

“Priscilla Dover.”

“They call you Pris?”

“No,” she said solemnly. “Priscilla.”

“How in the name of the Sistine Madonna did you manage to get mixed up with Foster?”

“Photography is my hobby,” she said. “I do a lot of skiing in the wintertime, and hiking around the Laurentians in the other seasons, and take landscapes with my camera. It’s a Voigtlander reflex with an f3.5 Voigtar lens.”

“I don’t know an f3.5 lens from the Palomar telescope,” I said, “but go on.”

“About a month ago this classified ad appeared in the Clarion, for girls who could take photographs to work as picture-takers in night clubs. I was looking for a job at the time and I thought it might be fun. Besides, the ad said the pay was good,” she told me ruefully. “The promised pay was good all right, but I never was able to collect.”

“So you answered this ad, and met Crawfie Foster?”

“That’s right. He gave me the job, and a Speed Graphic. I had three night clubs to cover each evening.”

“What did you think of Foster when you met him?”

“Oh—I don’t suppose I liked him very much. Remember, I was trying to get this job from him, so I was trying to impress him. I paid more attention to my attitude than to his. But he didn’t strike me as anyone who would be troublesome. Not a—” she hesitated and stammered a little, “—a wolf, or anything.”

“No, his weakness isn’t sex,” I admitted.

“He seemed to know his business. He was going to run the dark room and develop the pictures. He had a pretty nice set-up for turning out prints rapidly—you know, automatic drum dryer and so on. Three of us were working for him.”

“If there were three of you, each covering three clubs, you had a lot of the business in town sewed up,” I mused. “There have been people with those concessions for years. I wonder how Crawfie wormed in and took over.”

“He said something about that. Said he was paying a higher price than anyone for the concessions, and he could afford to pay us well too and still stay in business because he was turning out a superior product and could charge the customers a higher price.”

“Was there any truth in that?”

“Yes. We had coupled range finders on the cameras and we had to be very careful to get good focus—sharp negatives. Then Foster blew them up to about twice the size of usual night club snaps. There’s very little extra cost in doing that—just the increased amount of paper you use. But the pics look a lot more expensive, so we charged plenty for them.”

“All sounds fairly reasonable,” I admitted. “If I didn’t know Crawfie so well, I’d think it was on the up-and-up.”

“This is what happened,” she went on, and her voice was very angry. “We were to be paid at the end of the month. Of course, we got some tips, but they didn’t amount to a great deal. Crawfie had promised us two hundred each for the month—good pay. Well, I guess he expected to make it a profitable business by welching on us. The end of the month, when we showed up in the early evening to get our cameras and go to work—and incidentally to get paid—the studio was locked.”

“Where was the place?”

“On Peel above St. Catherine—the other side of the street from the Mount Royal Hotel.” She gave me the number. “It was a small office building, with a tavern on the ground floor.”

“The Elephant Tavern.”

“That’s right. Well, the three of us waited around, thinking Foster was late. That had happened before. After an hour, though, one of the girls went for the janitor. She thought we might at least get our cameras, so we could start work. The janitor said Foster had moved out of the studio, with all his equipment, that afternoon. He had a month-tomonth lease on the space, and he’d given it up after just the one month.”

“He’d have to give a month’s notice,” I said, “or pay the second month’s rent. I can’t imagine him doing that, so I would guess he only took the place for a month in the first instance.”

“It fits in with my idea,” she said. “That means he expected all along to skip out at the end of the month, with his bills and our wages unpaid. That way he probably ran the business for the whole month with the studio rent his only cost. Everything else would be pure profit, and believe me, there is money in the night club picture business. One night I brought in three hundred dollars, and it was seldom under a hundred.”

I thought it over a little bit. I went absently over to the fridge and pulled out a pint of Dow. I waved it at Priscilla. “Have one?”

“No thanks. I don’t drink.”

“Don’t drink beer? How about a rye and ginger, or—”

“I just don’t drink, thanks.”

“Well, a Coke?”

“I’ve had coffee,” she said. “That’s my caffeine for this morning. I’ll settle for a ginger ale.”

I poured one for her, silently. It all sounded a little oldmaidish, but somehow her attitude suited her. It went with that wholesome, little-girl appearance. And it also impressed me that however she felt, she gave no faint signs of disapproval as I poured myself the beer.

I drank half the beer and went through a State Express, still trying to think the business through. Finally I frowned and shook my head. “It doesn’t add up at all. If he went to all that trouble to set the business up, it wasn’t a one-month proposition. Something happened to make him skip. And of course, being Crawfie, he skipped without paying anyone off.”

“Perhaps he thought he could work the racket over and over again, moving every month.”

“Not in Montreal, he couldn’t. And it would hardly pay to try the stunt each month in a different city.”

“Well—whatever happened, I’d like my two hundred dollars. I could use it. But I don’t suppose I’ll ever see it.”

“How much looking for him have you done?”

“The other two girls and I reported the whole business to the police. They checked. Foster had been living in a cheap hotel on Windsor Street; he checked out of there, leaving no forwarding address, of course. He had settled with the landlord of his business block and left no address there. And no one has been located who remembers the truck that moved him away. The police put out a routine check to all registered trucking companies, asking if they’d moved him, and if so, to what address, but they aren’t too hopeful. They think he probably picked up a couple of men, with a truck, casually, to avoid being traced.”

“Doesn’t sound too promising. We don’t even know whether he moved to another place in town, or right out of the city.”

“No. No one has seen him since the end of the month.”

“It’s possible, if he weren’t going to start a business again right away, that he’d have his equipment stored.”

“The police are checking storage companies, too.”

I shrugged.

“Will you be able to help me? I don’t imagine I could pay your usual fees, but we three girls would chip in—”

“Skip it,” I said. “I’ll help you, all right. For free—if you won’t tell the detective’s union. Not because I love you but because I hate Crawfie.”

“Why?”

“You want the story? A few years ago, a little Montreal druggist named Herbinger was a go-between in a big drug racket here in Montreal. He received dope off ships that berthed here from Europe, and passed it on to another party who smuggled it into the United States. How I tangled with them is part of another story—the hide-out where the dope was transferred from Herbinger to the smuggler was the scene of another crime. But anyhow, Crawfie Foster was a friend of Herbinger’s. He stumbled onto the fact that Herbinger was dealing in dope, and demanded to be cut in. They gave him the local business—he got a supply from the druggist and peddled it around the city. I fixed him by telling the Mounties the whole set-up, and Crawfie landed in a federal pen. He didn’t stay there half as long as he should have. I’m naturally interested in what he’s doing now that he’s out.”

“I see. But why should you hate him?”

“You wouldn’t know anything about dope,” I said, “but if you ever saw what it did to people, you’d hate dope-sellers the way you hate cockroaches in your kitchen. And Crawfie actually introduced people to the stuff—made addicts out of them. At the end of this old case Herbinger committed suicide and most of the other dopers got shot. Crawfie is the only one loose. I’m checking on him, as long as he’s around—to make sure he never sells dope again, first of all. And if he does anything else that could put him back behind bars, I’ll be happy to help him there.”

I’d done too much talking, or maybe it was the pint of beer. My head was trying to crack itself open from the inside. There was a pain that started right behind my eyes and shot back through my skull like a shell fired from a naval gun, hit the soft spot on my skull and tried to burst right through. They came about every five seconds, and in a minute or two one would burst out and ricochet around the room.

I got to my feet weakly, and my bad leg tried to buckle under me. I shifted all my weight to the good one.

“I don’t feel so well,” I told Priscilla. “I’m going to lie down awhile. Call me sometime tomorrow, and maybe I’ll have an angle. I’ll work on it.”

She looked at me sympathetically. “Can I stay and help?”

“Nope. Just got a cracking headache, for obvious reasons. I’ll take some stuff and lie down.”

I limped to the front door with her. I locked it after she left, and put on the night lock, and secured the safety chain. Enough of this nonsense. If the building caught on fire they’d have to use axes to get me out.

I limped to the bathroom and fished in the cupboard. I found a little vial and took two Frosst 292s, with about a grain of codeine in them. I washed them down with the last of the beer and went in and sprawled on my bed. After a while the headache dulled, and I went to sleep.

I woke later, with the sun still high. It was early afternoon. I crawled into a shower and stayed there for some time, and when I got out I felt almost able to eat. It was the first intimation I’d had that my system was back to running on anything but codeine and ethyl alcohol.

I tested the bad knee. I felt it and as far as I could tell through the swelling, there was nothing seriously broken. I put a little weight on it. I got the roll of one-inch adhesive and taped it up tighter than a fat girl’s best shoes. I couldn’t bend the knee, and that gave me quite a limp, but I could walk.

Then I heard a heavy pounding on my door—a metallic clanking, as though someone was beating it with an old tire iron. Ah, yes. I’d broken the buzzer. Whoever was there had likely been buzzing for a long time and decided only noise would waken me.

I draped myself in a four-foot towel and gimped to the door. I opened it about two inches. There was a revolver butt poised in the air, ready to hit again. I slammed the door faster than a jet plane takes off.

There was a roar from outside: “Hokay, hokay, Teed. It’s only me. W’at you scare’ of?”

Detective-Sergeant Framboise was now in this mess, whatever it was going to add up to.

For not the first time in the past few hours, I shrugged. I unlatched the door and shambled back to the living room. Framboise came in behind me. “You must be off duty, this time of day,” I said. “The beer’s in the frig.”

I was sitting on the chesterfield when he came in from the kitchen. He had ignored the Dow pints at the front of the frig and burrowed in behind the milk to provide himself with a quart of Molson. Framboise, neatly dressed in a blue serge suit, with his hat still on and bottle and glass in his hands, looked quite the picture of the hearty, young French-Canadian heading for his table in a taverne. He had short legs and long arms and trunk, and walked with a roll, sort of like an ape who has served in the merchant marine. He had a hard, pasty face the color of unbaked bread and the consistency of a cemetery headstone. He was a bluff, blustery, emotional man, not half as smart as he thought he was but not at all dumb, either.

He sat down and poured his beer. Then he pulled out a large brown envelope he’d held tucked under his arm and spun it across the room to me. “I ‘ave somet’ing there which may interes’ you,” he told me.

I opened the envelope. It was full of large photographs. I won’t describe them in any detail, because they were a little nauseous. Besides that, they didn’t show very much.

“You can’t tell anything from these,” I protested. “Have you got any ‘before’ pictures?”

He took a smaller studio print from an inside pocket and showed it to me. The man in the picture was past middle age, prosperous, smiling. He looked like a wealthy manufacturer or merchant. But he looked like a boy who had come up from sweeping the factory or the shop. There was hardness and the marks of a very rough life in the face, and the overlay of prosperity couldn’t hide the cold determination in the eyes. ‘I’m out for what’s mine,’ the eyes said.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “I read about it. A guy found him dead on Mount Royal yestermorning.”

“T’at’s a new word,” Framboise said delightedly. He took out a small, dirty notebook and a greasy pencil stub and painfully wrote ‘yestermorning’ on one of the pages. “Trying to himprove my Henglish,” he said in explanation.

“Why come to me with this?” I put all the photographs back in the envelope, the shots of the bashed corpse and the one of the guy still alive, and skimmed it back across the room to him.

“Someone w’ispered to me t’at you might know ’im.”

“I never saw him before. I don’t know anything about him. I read the story in the papers, and before that I never heard his name before. I have about as much interest in him as you have in crimes committed on the front steps of the Kremlin in Moscow. I’m a private detective, like you so often have to remind me. I’m not interested in a case unless I get paid to work on it. You go ahead with your job. Have fun. I don’t want any of it.”

Framboise lifted his hands in a Gallic gesture of protest. He was drinking my beer, so he didn’t get mad. And he wanted to stay there until he finished the quart, so he tried to explain.

“I’m honly trying to do my job. Someone said you might know somet’ing about ’im. I have to hask you.”

“Who in hell told you that?”

“MacArnold.”

“I might have known. Well, it’s no go. I’m out of the case. And right now I’ve got a killer of a headache and I don’t even want to hear about it.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh, I was slugged over the head last night. Two characters broke in here and worked me over.”

“W’y? W’at you been doing lately?”

“Nothing,” I said disgustedly. “And they didn’t rob me.”

Framboise got up to leave. “Then, w’y?” he said. “W’y?”