THE BRINKMAN COMPANY, Specialty Imports, was located just off the Embarcadero, across from Pier Twenty-six in the shadow of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. It was a good-sized building, made out of wood with a brick facade; it didn’t look like much from the outside. I had no idea what was on the inside, because Arthur Brinkman, the owner, hadn’t told me on the phone what sort of “specialty imports” he dealt in. He hadn’t told me why he wanted to hire a private detective either. All he’d said was that the job would take a full week, my fee for which he would guarantee, and would I come over and talk to him? I would. I charged two hundred dollars a day, and when you multiplied that by seven it made for a nice piece of change.
It was a little after ten a.m. when I got there. The day was misty and cold, whipped by a stiff wind that had the sharp smell of salt in it—typical early-March weather in San Francisco. Drawn up at the rear of the building were three big trucks from a waterfront drayage company, and several men were busily engaged in unloading crates and boxes and wheeling them inside the warehouse on dollies and hand trucks. I parked my car up toward the front, next to a new Plymouth station wagon, and went across to the office entrance.
Inside, there was a small anteroom with a desk along the left-hand wall and two closed doors along the right-hand wall. A glass-fronted cabinet stood between the doors, displaying the kinds of things you see on knick-knack shelves in some people’s houses. Opposite the entrance, in the rear wall, was another closed door; that one led to the warehouse, because I could hear the sounds the workmen made filtering in through it. And behind the desk was a buxom redhead rattling away on an electric typewriter.
She gave me a bright professional smile, finished what she was typing and said, “Yes, may I help you?” in a bright professional voice as she rolled the sheet out.
Along with a professional smile of my own, I gave her my name.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “Mr. Brinkman is expecting you.” She stood and came around from behind the desk. She had nice hips and pretty good legs; chubby calves, though. “My name is Fran Robbins, by the way. I’m the receptionist, secretary, and about six other things here. A Jill-of-all-trades, I guess you could say.”
The last sentence was one she’d used before, probably to just about everyone who came in; you could tell that by the way she said it, the faint expectancy in her voice. She wanted me to appreciate both the line and her cleverness, so I said obligingly, “That’s pretty good—Jill-of-all-trades. I like that.”
She smiled again, much less impersonally this time; I’d made points with her, at least. “I’ll tell Mr. Brinkman you’re here,” she said, and went over and knocked on one of the doors in the right-hand wall and then disappeared through it.
The anteroom was not all that warm, despite the fact that a wall heater glowed near Miss Robbins’s desk. Instead of sitting in the one visitor’s chair, I took a couple of turns around the room to keep my circulation going. I was just starting a third turn when the left-hand door opened and Miss Robbins came back out.
With her was a wiry little man in his mid-forties, with colorless hair and features so bland they would have, I thought, the odd reverse effect of making you remember him. He looked as if a good wind would blow him apart and away, like the fluff of a dandelion. But he had quick, canny eyes and restless hands that kept plucking at the air, as if he were creating invisible things with them.
He used one of the hands to pat Miss Robbins on the shoulder; the smile she gave him in return was anything but professional—doe-eyed and warm enough to melt butter. I wondered if maybe the two of them had something going and decided it was a pretty good bet that they had. My old private eyes were still good at detecting things like that, if not much else.
Brinkman came over to me, gave me his name and one of his nervous hands, and then ushered me into his office. It wasn’t much of an office—desk, a couple of low metal file cabinets, some boxes stacked along one wall and an old wooden visitor’s chair that looked as if it would collapse if you sat in it. That chair was what I got invited to occupy, and it didn’t collapse when I lowered myself into it; but I was afraid to move around much, just the same.
Sitting in his own chair, Brinkman lit a cigarette and left it hanging from one corner of his mouth. “You saw the trucks outside when you got here?” he asked.
I nodded. “You must be busy these days.”
“Very busy. They’re bringing in a shipment of goods that arrived by freighter from Europe a few days ago. Murano glass from Italy, Hummel figurines from West Germany, items like that.”
“Are they the sort of things you generally import?”
“Among a number of other items, yes. This particular shipment is the largest I’ve ever bought; I just couldn’t pass it up at the bulk price that was offered to me. Deals like that only come along once in ten years.”
“The shipment is valuable, then?”
“Extremely valuable,” Brinkman said. “When those trucks deliver the last of it later today, I’ll have more than three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of goods in my warehouse.”
“That’s a lot of money, all right,” I agreed.
He bobbed his head in a jerky way, crushed out his cigarette and promptly lit another one. Chain-smoker, I thought. Poor bastard. I’d been a heavy smoker myself up until a couple of years ago, when a lesion on one lung made me quit cold turkey. The lesion had been benign, but it could just as easily have gone the other way. For Brinkman’s sake, I hoped he had the sense to quit one of these days, before it was too late.
“The goods will be here in about a week,” he said. “It will take that long to inventory them and arrange for the bulk of the items to be shipped out to my customers.”
“I see.”
“That’s where you come in. I want you to guard them for me during that time. At night, when no one else is around.”
So that was it. He was afraid somebody might come skulking around after dark to steal or vandalize his merchandise, and what he wanted was a nightwatchman. Not that I minded; nobody had wanted me to do any private skulking of my own in recent days, and there was that guarantee of wages for a full week.
I said, “I’m your man, Mr. Brinkman.”
“Good. You’ll start right away tonight.”
I nodded. “When should I be here?”
“Six o’clock. That’s our closing time.”
“What time do you open in the morning?”
“Eight-thirty. But I’m usually here by seven.”
“So you want me on the job about thirteen hours.”
“That’s right,” Brinkman said. “I realize that’s a much longer day than you normally work; I’m willing to compensate you for the extra time. Would two hundred and fifty a day be all right?”
It was just fine, and I said so.
He put out his second cigarette. “I’ll show you around now,” he said, “get you familiarized with the building and where everything is. When you come back tonight I’ll show you what I want you to do on your rounds—”
There was a knock on the door. Brinkman was half out of his chair already; he stood all the way up as the door opened and a heavyset guy around my age, early fifties, with a drinker’s nose and the thick, gnarled hands of a longshoreman, poked his head inside.
“See you a minute, Art?” the guy said.
“Sure. Come in, Orin; I want you to meet the man I’ve hired to guard the new shipment.”
The heavyset guy came in, and we shook hands as Brinkman introduced us. His name was Orin McIntyre, and he was the firm’s bookkeeper. Which was something of a small surprise; even though he was wearing a white shirt open at the throat and a pair of slacks, I had taken him, foolishly enough, for a warehouseman or a truck driver because of his physical appearance. He could have gone on the old “What’s My Line?” television show and nobody would have guessed his occupation. So much for stereotypes.
“If you don’t mind my saying so,” McIntyre said to me, “I think Art is wasting his money hiring a nightwatchman. This place is built like a fortress; when it’s locked up tight nobody can get in.”
Brinkman gave him an irritated look. “You don’t know that for certain, Orin. Neither do I.”
“Well, the place has never been broken into, has it?”
“Not yet. But there’s a first time for everything.”
McIntyre said to me, “This building used to belong to an import-export outfit that dealt in high-priced artwork. They installed a number of safeguards: steel shutters over the windows on the outside, iron gates that you can padlock across the doors and windows on the inside. How can anybody get in through all of that?”
“It doesn’t sound as if anybody can,” I said. “But then, it didn’t seem anybody could get into the Bank of England, either, and yet somebody did.”
“Exactly,” Brinkman agreed. He lit another cigarette; his hands plucked and fidgeted in the air, like a magician doing conjuring tricks behind a screen of smoke. He was one of the most nervous people I had ever encountered; he made me nervous just watching him. “I don’t want to take any chances, that’s all. This shipment is important to us all—”
“I know that as well as you do,” McIntyre said. “Probably better, in fact.”
Brinkman gave him another irritated look. There was some sort of friction between these two; I wondered what it was. And why Brinkman, the boss, put up with it.
I said, “I’ve been a cop of one kind or another for thirty years; if there’s one thing I’ve learned in all that time, it’s that there’s no such thing as too much precaution against crime. The more prepared you are, the less likely you’ll get taken by surprise.”
“That sounds like a self-serving statement,” McIntyre said.
“No, sir, it’s not. It’s a statement of fact, that’s all.”
“Uh-huh. Well, if you ask me—”
“That’s enough, Orin,” Brinkman said. “You’ve got better things to do than stand around here questioning my judgment or this man’s integrity. So have I. Now, what did you want to see me about?”
“One of the bills of lading on the shipment is screwed up.” McIntyre sounded faintly miffed, as if he didn’t like having been put in his place. It was what he’d tried to do to me, but the “Do unto others” rule was one some men never learned; he knew how to dish it out, but he couldn’t take it worth a damn. “You want to talk here, in front of him”—he gestured in my direction—“or in my office?”
“Your office.” Brinkman looked at me. “This won’t take long. Then I’ll show you around.”
“Fine,” I said.
The three of us went out into the anteroom, and Brinkman and McIntyre disappeared into McIntyre’s office. Miss Robbins was busy at her desk, so I went over and stood quietly in front of the wall heater. From there I noticed that, as McIntyre had said, there was an iron-barred folding gate drawn back beside the front door. When it was extended and bolted into a locking plate on the other side of the door, it would provide an extra seal against intruders.
Brinkman was back in five minutes, alone. He fired another cigarette, hung it on his lower lip, did the conjuring trick with his hands and then led me off on the guided tour.
The warehouse door off the anteroom led into a short corridor, beyond which was a section partitioned off with wall board: bathroom on the right, L-shaped shipping counter on the left. And beyond there was the warehouse itself, a wide, spacious area with rafters crisscrossing under a high roof, a concrete floor and white-painted walls. A cleared aisleway ran straight down its geometrical center to the open rear doors where the warehousemen were unloading the drayage trucks. Built into the joining of the right-side and rear walls, ten feet above the floor, was a thirty-foot-square loft; a set of stairs led up to it and its jumble of boxes and storage items.
To the right of the aisle, down to the loft stairs, were perpendicular rows of platform shelving, with narrow little aisles between them; some of the shelves were filled with merchandise both packed and unpacked, the unpacked boxes showing gouts of either straw packing or excelsior. To the left of the aisle was open floor space jammed with stacked crates, pallets, dollies, bins full of more straw packing, and carts with metal wheels—all arranged in such a mazelike way that you could, if you were careful, move among them without knocking or falling over something.
Brinkman led me through the clutter to the nearest window. An iron-barred gate was drawn across it, firmly padlocked to an iron hasp, and through the windowpane I could see that the outside shutter was in place. When I’d had my look at the window, he took me to the rear doors and showed me that they had double locks and their own set of iron-barred gates. He also mentioned the fact that the walls and roof were reinforced with steel rods.
The place was a minifortress, all right. About the only way anybody was going to break in there was with blasting caps or chain saws.
After we finished examining the security, Brinkman showed me some of the items in the big shipment from Europe and explained what the rest were. In addition to the Hummel figurines and the Murano glass, there were special flamenco dolls from Spain, crystal from Sweden and Denmark, pewter from Norway, Delft porcelain miniatures from Holland, intricate dollhouse accessories from France.
Looking at all of that, I thought that this was going to be a pretty easy job. I could understand how Brinkman felt, why he was so nervous about the possibility of theft, but the plain fact was, he had very little cause for alarm. In the first place, there was the fortresslike makeup of the building. And in the second place, his merchandise may have been valuable, but it was not the kind that would tempt thieves, professional or otherwise. There are people around who will steal anything, of course, but not very many who were likely to get hot and bothered over Italian glass candy dishes or Delft miniatures. And where would you fence stolen flamenco dolls or French dollhouse accessories?
I mentioned those facts to Brinkman, just for the record, but it didn’t make him think twice about hiring me; he was bound and determined to have a nightwatchman on the premises for the coming week, as an added precaution, and nothing and nobody were going to make him change his mind. Nor did what I said reassure him much. He was a worrier, and there’s never anything you can say that will reassure one of that breed. The more you tell them everything is going to be all right, the more fretful they get.
Through all of the tour, the warehousemen continued to unload the trucks and wheel crates inside and stack them here and there. There were four of them, three part-timers and Brinkman’s full-time “warehouse supervisor,” a guy named Frank Judkins. Brinkman intercepted Judkins on his way in with a hand truck loaded with boxes and introduced him to me.
He was a brawny guy in his forties, tough-looking—the kind you used to see, and probably still could, in longshoremen’s bars along the waterfront. He had lank black hair that grew as thickly on his arms, and no doubt on the rest of him, as it did on his head; he also had vacuous eyes and a wart the size of a dime on his chin.
He said, “How’s it going, pal?” as he caught hold of my hand and made an effort to crush the bones in it, either by accident or to show me how strong he was.
I’ve got a pretty good grip myself; I tightened it to match his and looked him square in the eye. “Pretty good, pal,” I said. “How about yourself?”
Judkins liked that; he laughed noisily. Some of his teeth were missing, and what remained were either yellow or black with cavities. He let go of my hand and stood there grinning at me like a Neanderthal.
Brinkman said to him, “Everything going all right out here, Frank?”
“Yeah. Almost done with the first load.”
“They’ll bring the rest of the merchandise after lunch?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” Brinkman told him I would be coming in at six to assume my nightwatchman’s duties. “You’ll have everything off-loaded and inside by then, won’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“See to it that you do. I don’t want this place open after dark.”
“Yeah,” Judkins said. It seemed to be his favorite word, probably because it had only one syllable and required no mental effort to utter.
Judkins grinned at me again and looked at my hand as if he wanted to shake it some more, to see if my grip was really as strong as it seemed. But I didn’t have to put up with any more attempts at bone crushing; Brinkman told him to get back to work and steered me away through the shipping area and into the office anteroom.
Fran Robbins was on the phone when we came in. She said, “One moment, please,” into the receiver, took it away from her ear and put her hand over the mouthpiece, and tilted her head toward Brinkman. “It’s the Consolidated chain,” she said. “I think you’d better talk to them, Arth—uh, Mr. Brinkman. There’s some problem about their order.”
“Damn,” Brinkman said. “Okay, tell them just a second and put ’em on hold.”
She gave him her butter-melting smile. They had something going, all right; I could see it in her eyes. I wondered what those eyes saw in him. But then, de gustibus non est disputandam. Which was a Latin phrase I’d read somewhere that meant there was no accounting for taste. In this world, there was somebody for everyone; and Brinkman was obviously Miss Robbins’s somebody.
He turned to me as she spoke again into the telephone. “I think we’ve covered just about everything for now,” he said. “Unless you have any more questions?”
“No, I can’t think of any.”
“I’ll see you at six, then.”
“Right. Six sharp.”
“Your check will be ready when you get here,” he said, and hurried into his office to take his call.
I said good-bye to the Jill-of-all-trades, went out to my car, and drove downtown to my office on Taylor Street. I checked my new answering machine first; there hadn’t been any calls. Then I prepared one of my standard contract forms for Brinkman to sign, stipulating the payment we had agreed upon. And then, because I had no other work to attend to, and because I was going to be up all night, I went home to my flat in Pacific Heights and took myself a nap.
At five o’clock I was up and dressed and ready to go, and at ten minutes to six I was back at the Brinkman Company, Specialty Imports. The drayage trucks were gone and the warehouse was closed. Miss Robbins and Orin McIntyre and the warehousemen were gone, too; Brinkman was there alone. I gave him the contract form to sign, exchanged a countersigned copy for my retainer check. After we got that taken care of, he took me out into the warehouse again and showed me what he wanted me to do “on my rounds.” Which amounted to checking the doors and windows periodically, and making sure none of the straw packing and excelsior caught fire, because they were highly combustible materials. He also warned me not to let anyone in, under any circumstances; there was no reason for anyone to come around, he said, and if anyone did come around, it had to mean they were there to steal something.
I assured him, with more patience than I felt, that I would do what he’d asked of me and that I was competent at my job. He said, “Yes, I’m sure you are,” and fluttered his hands at me. “It’s just that I worry. I’ll call you later, before I go to bed, to check in. So it’s all right for you to answer the phone when it rings.” He paused. “You don’t mind if I call, do you?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t mind.”
“Good. It’s just that I worry, you know?”
He went away pretty soon and left me alone with his $300,000 worth of knick-knacks.
The warehouse was unheated, and Brinkman’s office, where I spent most of my time, tended to be chilly even with the wall heater turned on. Time crawled, as it always does on a job like this; there was nothing to do except to read the handful of pulp magazines I’d brought with me, eat a late supper, and drink coffee from the thermos I’d also brought, and listen to foghorns moaning out on the Bay. Nobody tried to break in. Nobody called except Brinkman at a little before midnight. And the only real nightwatching I did was of the clock on the wall.
Ah, the exciting life of a private eye. Danger, intrigue, adventure, beautiful women, feats of derring-do.
Thirteen hours of boredom and a half-frozen rear end.
Where have you gone, Sam Spade?
I got home at seven-thirty, gritty-eyed and grumpy, and slept until two o’clock. When I got up I packed another cold supper, made fresh coffee for the thermos and put everything into a paper sack with some issues of Detective Tales and Dime Mystery from my collection of pulp magazines. Then I drove down to my office to find out if anybody else was interested in hiring me.
Nobody was. The only message on my answering machine was from somebody who wanted to convert me to his religion; he was reading from some sort of Biblical tract in a persuasively ministerial voice, when the message tape ran out and ended his pitch. I did a little paperwork and then sat around until five-thirty, in case a prospective client decided to walk in. It was a decision nobody made. And the phone didn’t ring either.
I pulled into the Brinkman Company lot and parked my car next to Brinkman’s station wagon at two minutes to six. The weather was colder and foggier than it had been yesterday; the wind off the Bay made wailing noises and slashed at me as I hurried to the office entrance with my paper sack.
The door was locked, as it had been last night; I rapped on the glass, and Brinkman came out and opened up for me. “I’m glad you’re on time,” he said. “I have an engagement at seven-thirty and I’ve got to rush.”
“Everything locked up, Mr. Brinkman?”
“Yes, I think so. But you’d better double-check, make sure the windows and doors are secure.”
“Right.”
The door to Orin McIntyre’s office opened and McIntyre came out, carrying a briefcase in each hand. He seemed upset; he was scowling and his face was heavy and dark, like a sky full of thunderclouds.
I said automatically, “How are you tonight, Mr. McIntyre?”
“Lousy,” he said.
“Something wrong?”
He looked past me at Brinkman—a look that almost crackled with animosity. “Ask him.”
“Don’t make a scene, Orin,” Brinkman said.
“Why the hell shouldn’t I make a scene?”
“It won’t do you any good.”
“Is that a fact?”
Brinkman sighed, made one of his nervous gestures. “I’m sorry, Orin; I told you that. I wish you’d understand that my decision is nothing personal; it’s just a simple matter of economics—”
“Oh, I understand, all right,” McIntyre said angrily. “I understand that you’re a fourteen-carat bastard, that’s what I understand.”
“Orin—”
“The hell with you.” McIntyre glared at him and then switched the glare to me. “And the hell with you,” he said, and went to the door and slammed out into the windy dusk.
Through the glass I watched him walk across the lot to his car. When I turned back Brinkman said, “I suppose I can’t blame him for being angry.”
“What happened?”
“I had to let him go. His work wasn’t all it should be, and I really can’t afford his salary. Besides, I’ve been thinking of promoting Miss Robbins, turning the bookkeeping job over to her. She’s had accountant’s training, and she can handle it along with her other duties.”
Uh-huh, I thought. The firing of McIntyre may have been for economic reasons, but I doubted there was nothing personal involved; I had a feeling Brinkman’s relationship with Fran Robbins had had more than a little to do with it. But then, Brinkman’s private life was really none of my concern. Nor, for that matter, were his business decisions, except as they pertained to me.
So I just nodded, let a couple of seconds pass and then asked him, “Everyone else gone, Mr. Brinkman?”
“Yes.” He shot the cuff of his gray sports jacket and looked at his watch. “And I’ve got to be gone, too, or I’ll be late for my appointment. I’ll call you later, as usual. Around midnight.”
“Whatever you say.”
I followed him to the door and we exchanged good nights. When he’d gone out I closed and locked the door, using the latchkey he had given me. I made it a double seal by swinging the barred gate shut across the door and padlocking it. And there I was, sealed in all nice and cozy until seven a.m. tomorrow.
The next order of business was to shut off the ceiling lights, which I did and which left the anteroom dark except for the desk lamp glowing beyond the half-open door to Brinkman’s office. I went in there and put my paper sack down on the desk, came out again and crossed to the door that led back into the warehouse.
A dull, yellowish bulb burned above the shipping counter, casting just enough light to bleach the shadows past the partitions. None of the overheads was on in the warehouse proper; it was like a wall of black velvet back there with all the windows shuttered against the fading daylight. I located the bank of electrical switches and flipped each in turn. The rafter bulbs were not much brighter than the one over the counter, but there were enough of them to herd most of the shadows into corners or behind the stacks of shelving and crates.
I made my way through the clutter on the right side of the aisleway, to the nearest of the windows. The barred gate was as firmly padlocked as it had been last night. There was a second window several feet beyond, to the rear; I had a look at that one next. Secure. Then I moved over to the shelving, down one of the cross aisles past several hundred unpacked crystal candleholders that caught and reflected the light like so many prisms. The single window on that side, too, was both shuttered and barred up tight.
That left the rear doors. I went down there and rattled the gate and padlock, as I’d done at the windows, and peered through the bars at the double locks on the doors themselves. Secure. A team of commandos, I thought, would be hard-pressed to breach this place.
To pass some time, I prowled around for fifteen minutes or so, shining my flashlight into dark corners, examining glass vases and tiny pieces of dollhouse furniture, poking through what few purchase orders there were on the shipping counter. Lethargy was already starting to set in; I caught myself yawning twice. But it was as much a lack of sleep as it was boredom. I had never been able to sleep very well in the daytime, and I hadn’t had enough rest during the past two days; by the end of the week I would probably be ready for about fifteen hours of uninterrupted sack time. I could have curled up in a nest of straw right here and taken a nap, of course, but my conscience wouldn’t allow it. I had never cheated a client in any fashion and I was not about to start now by sleeping on the job.
So I shut off the overheads and went back to Brinkman’s office, leaving the warehouse door open. It was almost as cold in there as it was in the warehouse, which was probably just as well; the chill would help keep me awake. I got my thermos bottle out of the paper sack and poured myself a cup of hot coffee. Sat back with it and one of the pulps I’d brought, bundled up in my coat, feet propped on a low metal file cabinet to one side of the desk.
And I was ready to begin another long night in my brief career as a nightwatchman.
The minute hand dragged itself around the clock on the office wall. In the pulp—the December 1936 issue of Detective Tales—I read “Satan Covers the Waterfront” by Tom Roan and “The Case of the Whispering Terror” by George Bruce. Outside, the velocity of the wind increased; I could hear it rattling a loose drain gutter on the roof as I read “Malachi Gunn and the Vanishing Heiress” by Franklin H. Martin.
Eight-forty.
I poured another cup of coffee. None of the other stories in the issue of Detective Tales looked interesting; I put it down and picked up the May 1935 Dime Mystery. And read “House of the Restless Dead” by Hugh B. Cave and “Mistress of Terror” by Wyatt Blassingame. The wind slackened again, and the only background noises I had to listen to then were creaking joints and the distant moan of foghorns on the bay.
Ten-oh-five.
I read “The Man Who Was Dead” by John Dixon Carr, which was a nice little ghost story set in England. The “Dixon” was no doubt a misspelling and the author was John Dickson Carr, the master of the locked-room mystery; I’d read somewhere that Carr had published a few stories in mid-1930s pulps, one other of which I’d read in the third or fourth issue of Detective Tales.
My eyes were beginning to feel heavy-lidded and sore from all the reading; I rubbed at them with my knuckles, closed the magazine, yawned noisily, and looked at the thermos and the three salami-and-cheese sandwiches and two apples inside the sack. But I wasn’t hungry just yet, and the coffee had to last me the rest of the night. I got to my feet, stretching; glanced at the clock again in spite of myself.
Ten thirty-three.
And something made a noise out in the warehouse—a dull thud like a heavy weight falling against another object.
The hair poked up on my neck; I stood frozen, listening, for three or four seconds. The silence seemed suddenly eerie. Sounds in the night seldom bother me, but this was different. This was a building in which I was alone and sealed up, and yet I was sure the thudding noise had come from inside the warehouse.
I grabbed my flashlight off the desk, switched it on and ran into the anteroom. Just as I reached the open warehouse door, I had an almost subliminal glimpse of a streak of light winking out beyond the night-lit shipping counter. Somebody else with a flash? I threw my own beam down the corridor, went through the doorway after it.
In the clotted darkness ahead, there was a faint thumping sound.
Without slowing I veered past the shipping counter and over to the bank of light switches. The flash beam illuminated the near third of the main aisleway, but its diffused glare showed me nothing except inanimate objects.
Another thump. And then a kind of clicking or popping. Both noises seemed to come from somewhere diagonally to my left.
I threw all the switches at once, slapping upward with the palm of my free hand. When I hurried ahead into the aisle, the pale rafter lights let me see the same tableau as earlier—nothing altered, nothing subtracted, nothing added. Except for one thing.
There was a dead man lying a few feet to the left of the aisle, half-draped across one of the wooden crates.
I saw him when I was no more than twenty feet into the warehouse, and I knew right away he was dead. He was facing toward me, twisted onto his side, features half-hidden behind an upflung arm; there was blood all over the leather jacket and blue turtleneck sweater he wore, and the one eye I could see was wide open. Hesitantly, gawping a little, I moved to where he was and bent over him.
Sam Judkins, the warehouseman.
He’d been shot once in the left side, under the breastbone, at point-blank range with a small-caliber gun: scorch and powder marks were visible around the hole, and there was no exit wound.
His jacket and trousers were wet in front. And they smelled of … wood alcohol?
Ripples of cold flowed over my back. The eerie silence, the dead man, the bullet wound, the wood-alcohol smell all combined to give me a feeling of surreality, as though I were asleep and dreaming all of this. I backed away from the body, shaking my head. He couldn’t have got in here, but here he was. He couldn’t have been murdered in here, but here he was. It was murder, all right; there was no gun near him, which had to mean that whoever had shot him still had it. And what had happened to him? Where did he go?
Still in here somewhere, hiding?
I stopped moving and made myself stand still for thirty seconds. No movement anywhere. No sounds anywhere. Over to my left, lying on a metal-wheeled cart, was one of those curved iron bars used for prying lids off wooden crates; I caught it up and held it cocked against my shoulder, wishing that I hadn’t decided I would not need a handgun for this job.
But nothing happened as I paced back into the aisle, along it through the shipping area. Nor was there anything more to see or hear.
In Brinkman’s office, I dialed the number of the Hall of Justice. Eberhardt, my sober-sided cop friend, was on night duty this week, and I got through to him with no problem. He grumbled and did some swearing, told me to stay where I was and not to do anything stupid, and hung up while I was reminding him I used to be a police officer myself.
I went back into the anteroom and took another look through the door leading to the warehouse. But if whoever had killed Judkins was still here, why hadn’t he come after me by now? It didn’t make sense that he would let me call the cops and then hang around to wait for them.
The front door seemed to be as secure as before; that was the first thing I checked. Nobody could possibly have come in through there when I was in Brinkman’s office earlier, or gone out through there after I heard those noises. I walked back into the warehouse again, taking the pry bar with me just in case. Not touching anything, I checked the gates and padlocks on all the windows and the rear doors. And each of them was also as secure as before.
So how had Judkins and whoever killed him got in?
And how had the killer got out?
When the banging started at the front entrance I was back in Brinkman’s office, just hanging up the telephone for the third time. I hurried out and unlocked the gate and swung it aside; unlocked the door and opened it.
“What the hell are you guarding in there?” Eberhardt asked sourly. “Gold bullion?”
There were a half-dozen other cops with him: an inspector I knew named Klein, two guys from the police lab outfitted with field kits, a photographer and a brace of patrolmen. I moved aside without saying anything and let all of them crowd past me into the anteroom. Then I shut the door again to cut off the icy blasts of wind.
Eberhardt made a gnawing sound on the stem of his pipe and glowered at me. The glower didn’t mean anything; like the pipe—one of twenty or thirty battered old briars he owned—it was a permanent fixture, part of his professional persona. The only times he smiled or relaxed were when he was off duty.
He asked me, “Where’s the victim?”
“Warehouse area, in back.”
I led him and the others out there. The two lab guys and the photographer headed straight for the body; Eberhardt told Klein and one of the patrolmen—the other had stayed in the anteroom—to have a look around, and then made it a foursome around the dead man. The alcohol smell coming off Judkins’s clothes was strong on the cold air; I retreated from it, across the center aisle, and stood waiting against one of the platform shelves.
Nine or ten minutes passed. I watched Klein and the patrolman poking around, peering at the windows and doors, checking for possible hiding places. The patrolman climbed up into the loft and shone his flashlight among the boxes and things. More light flashed over near the body as the photographer began taking his Polaroid shots.
Klein came back from the rear doors just as an assistant coroner bustled in from the anteroom; the two of them joined Eberhardt for a brief consultation, after which Klein disappeared up front, the coroner’s man moved to the corpse and Eb came over to where I was.
“You got anything to add to what you told me on the phone?” he asked.
“Not much,” I said. “There’s nothing missing from among the merchandise in here, at least as far as I can tell, and the place is still sealed up tight. I tried calling Brinkman after I talked to you, but there was no answer.
“Any idea where he might be?”
“He said he had an engagement at seven-thirty. I figured it might be with the receptionist, Fran Robbins, because it looks like they’ve got a thing going. But there’s nobody home at her place either; I found her number in Brinkman’s address book and tried it.”
“Dead man worked here, too, that right?”
I nodded. “He was the warehouseman.”
“Was he around when you got here tonight?”
“No.”
“How many other employees?”
“Just one. Bookkeeper named Orin McIntyre. But he’s an ex-employee as of today.”
“Oh? Quit or fired?”
“Fired,” I said. “Brinkman told me his work wasn’t up to par and that he couldn’t afford McIntyre’s salary. McIntyre left just after I got here; he didn’t look any too happy.”
“You think there might be a connection between that and the murder?”
“I don’t know. I tried McIntyre’s number, too, just before you came. Third straight no-answer.”
“All right. Let’s go over your story again, in detail this time. Don’t leave anything out.”
I gave him a complete rundown of the night’s events as I knew them. And the more I talked, the more he glowered. What we had here was a mystery, and mysteries annoyed the hell out of him.
Klein returned just as I finished. He said to Eberhardt, “I looked around outside. Nothing in the parking lot or anywhere else in the vicinity.”
“You check the doors and windows?”
“Yep. All secured with inside-locking shutters.”
“You’re certain they’re locked?”
“Positive.”
“Same thing in here, too, huh? With the gates?”
“Afraid so, Eb.”
Eberhardt muttered something under his breath—and up front, in the anteroom, the telephone began to ring. I glanced at my watch. Almost midnight.
“That’ll be Brinkman,” I said. “He said he’d call about this time to check in.”
“You get it,” Eberhardt said to Klein. “Wherever he is, tell him to come here right away.”
“Right.”
When Klein had gone again Eb said to me, “What is it with you? Every time I turn around you’re mixed up in some kind of screwball case.”
I said wryly, “Where have you gone, Sam Spade?”
“How’s that?”
“Just something I was thinking earlier today.”
“Yeah, well, from now on try to keep it simple, will you? No more homicides. Do skip-traces or find somebody’s missing cousin like other private eyes.”
“At least I don’t go around getting hit on the head.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you much if you did,” he said.
The assistant coroner called to him before I could say anything else, and he went over for another short conference. Just after they broke it up, Klein reappeared from the anteroom. He and Eberhardt converged on me again.
Eb said, “Was that Brinkman?”
“Uh-huh. He’ll be right down.”
“Where was he calling from?”
“The apartment of one of his employees,” Klein said, “a woman named Fran Robbins. He says he’s just given her a promotion and they’ve been celebrating all evening—at her place for dinner, then out for a couple of drinks around ten. They just got back. He sounded pretty upset when I told him what’d happened here.”
“Wouldn’t you be?” Eberhardt got a leather pouch out of his coat pocket and began thumbing shag-cut tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, scowling all the while.
Klein asked him, “Coroner’s man have anything to say yet?”
“Confirmed the obvious, that’s all. Shot once at close range, death instantaneous or close to it. Small-caliber weapon, looks like; we’ll know what size and make when the coroner digs out the bullet and Ballistics gets hold of it.”
I said speculatively, “Maybe a twenty-two with a silencer.”
“Why a silencer?”
“Because I didn’t hear the shot.”
“The gun could have been muffled with something else. Heavy cloth, cushion of some kind—anything along those lines.”
“Sure. But it was pitch-dark in here except for the killer’s flashlight; it’d be kind of awkward to hold a flash on somebody and muffle and fire a gun all at the same time.”
“Well, a silencer seems just as doubtful,” Eberhardt said. “They don’t leave powder and scorch marks like the ones on Judkins.”
“Then why didn’t I hear the shot?”
None of us had a ready answer for that. Klein said, “What about the alcohol smell?”
“Wood alcohol, evidently,” Eberhardt told him. “Judkins had a bottle of it zipped inside his jacket pocket; the bullet shattered the bottle on its way into him.”
“Was he drinking it, you suppose?”
“He was crazy if he was; that stuff will destroy your insides. No way to be sure yet, though. There’s a strong alcohol odor around the mouth, but it could be gin.”
I said, “Was there anything else on the body?”
“Usual stuff people carry in their pockets.”
“How much money in his wallet?”
“Fifty-eight dollars. You thinking robbery?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“Yeah, but not of Judkins so much as by him and somebody else. Of what’s in this warehouse, I mean. That would explain what he and whoever killed him were doing here tonight.”
“It would,” I said, “except that it doesn’t add up. Nothing seems to be missing; so if two guys come to a place to rob it, why would one of them shoot the other before the robbery?”
“And how did they get in and out in the first place?” Klein added.
Eberhardt jabbed his pipe in my direction. “Listen, are you sure you were alone when you locked up after Brinkman left?”
“Pretty sure,” I said. “I came out here first thing and checked the windows and doors. Then I wandered around for a while, looking things over. I didn’t see or hear anything.”
“But somebody—Judkins, say—could have been hiding in here just the same.”
“It’s possible, I guess. Up in the loft, maybe; I didn’t go up there. But Brinkman told me Judkins had gone for the day, and it just isn’t reasonable that he could’ve slipped back in without somebody seeing him. And I still think I’d have felt something. You know when you’re alone and when you’re not alone, at least most of the time. You get what the kids nowadays call vibes.”
“Yeah,” Eberhardt said. “Vibes.”
Klein said, “Even if Judkins was hiding in here, what was the point in it? To steal something? Hell, he worked here; he could have committed theft during business hours. And it doesn’t explain how the killer got in and out either.”
“There’s one explanation that’ll cover all of that,” I said. “But I don’t like it much; it’s pretty farfetched.”
“Go ahead.”
“Nobody got in and out of here because there’s no killer. Judkins committed suicide.”
Eberhardt made a growling noise. “Suicide,” he said, as if it were a dirty word. “If he shot himself, where the hell is the gun?”
“He could’ve dropped it somewhere and staggered down here and fallen where he is now. A thorough search would turn it up.”
“Why would he pick a place like this to knock himself off in?”
“He wasn’t too bright, Eb. Suppose he hated Brinkman for some reason and figured the publicity would damage the business. Suppose he wanted familiar surroundings when he pulled the trigger.…” I spread my hands because Eberhardt was shaking his head in a disgusted way. “Well, I told you it was pretty farfetched,” I said.
“The other possibilities are just as improbable,” Klein said. “One person, or even two, could have been hiding in here tonight without you realizing it; but there’s nobody hiding in here now. Which means Judkins’ killer had to get out, if not in—and how could he do that when all the doors and windows are double- or triple-sealed?”
“Maybe he’s a magician or a ghost,” Eberhardt said with heavy sarcasm. “Maybe he walked through the damned wall.”
The patrolman who had been searching the warehouse came up and reported that he hadn’t found anything of significance, unless you wanted to count an empty gin bottle tucked under some rags in the loft. Then a couple of white-coated interns entered with a stretcher and a body bag, and Eberhardt moved over to talk to the assistant coroner again before he gave them permission to remove the body. Klein, at Eb’s instructions, returned to the anteroom to try again to get in touch with Orin McIntyre.
And I went into Brinkman’s office, where it was quiet, to drink another cup of coffee from my thermos and do some thinking.
It was twelve thirty-five when Brinkman showed up. He came sailing in with Fran Robbins on one arm, looking more agitated than ever; his hands fluttered here and there, creating more of those invisible things out of the air. Robbins looked bewildered, nervous and a little frightened. She kept brushing a lock of her red hair out of one eye and casting glances around the anteroom as though she’d never seen it before.
Brinkman veered over to where I was standing in the doorway to his office. He gave me an accusing glare, as if he thought I had betrayed him somehow, and breathed stale tobacco and whiskey fumes at me; the heavy sweetness of enough cologne for a regiment was almost as unpleasant.
“What’s been going on here tonight?” he demanded. “The officer on the phone told me Frank Judkins is dead, murdered.”
“I’m afraid so, Mr. Brinkman.”
“But how? By whom?”
“He was shot,” I said. “The police don’t know who did it yet. They think maybe you can help them.”
“How can I help them? I don’t even know what’s going on.” He fumbled a package of cigarettes from the pocket of his brown suit coat, got one into his mouth and fired it. “Is anything missing, stolen? Could it have been robbery?”
“Nothing stolen as far as I could tell,” I said. “You’ll be able to judge that a lot better yourself after you’ve talked to Lieutenant Eberhardt.”
“Is he the man in charge?”
“Yes. He’s out in the warehouse.”
Brinkman nodded, started to turn away and then faced me again. “Orin McIntyre,” he said, as if he were making some sort of revelation. “Maybe he had something to do with this. You heard what he said to me tonight. He’s always struck me as the vindictive sort.”
“The police got him on the phone a little while ago,” I said. “McIntyre claims he spent the evening barhopping alone, drowning his anger at being fired, and didn’t get home until just before midnight.”
Brinkman’s cigarette bobbed and weaved in his restless fingers. “Do the police believe that?”
“They’re reserving judgment until they check out his story. Lieutenant Eberhardt sent a patrol car for him; he’ll be here pretty soon.”
Brinkman hung his cigarette on his lower lip, said, “I’ll go talk to the lieutenant,” and headed through the warehouse doorway trailing smoke. Fran Robbins hesitated, glancing at me and biting her lip, and then went after him; the patrolman by the door watched the movement of her hips with the intensity and admiration of a confirmed ladies’ man.
I shut the office door and returned to Brinkman’s desk and poured the last of the coffee into my cup. It was quiet in the room—but not at all quiet inside my head. Things had begun to go clickety-click in there, like a sturdy old engine warming up and about to run smoothly.
I sat on a corner of the desk, sipping coffee and concentrating. Vague ideas sharpened and took on weight and shape; bits and pieces of information slotted themselves neatly into place. And finally—
“Sure,” I said aloud. “Hell, yes.”
I went into the anteroom, through the warehouse door and past the shipping counter. Ahead, near where Judkins’s body had lain, Eberhardt and Klein were talking to Brinkman and Fran Robbins. And to Orin McIntyre. It surprised me that McIntyre was there; I hadn’t heard him being brought in. But when I looked at my watch I saw that it was one o’clock. A good twenty minutes had passed since the arrival of Brinkman and Robbins; I had been so deep in thought that I had lost track of both the time and my surroundings.
McIntyre, I saw as I came up, looked rumpled and bleary-eyed and upset. He was talking to Eberhardt but glaring at Brinkman as he spoke. “I didn’t have a damned thing to do with what happened to Judkins. I told you, I was out drinking all evening.”
“You haven’t told us where,” Eberhardt said.
“I don’t remember where.” McIntyre’s voice was still a little slurred; he rubbed at his slack mouth. “A bunch of bars out in Noe Valley. Listen—”
“You never did get along with Judkins,” Brinkman interrupted. “You were always arguing with him.”
“That was because he was a half-wit. And you’re a bastard, Brinkman—a lousy bastard.”
“I don’t have to take that from you,” Brinkman said indignantly. “For all I know, you did murder poor Judkins—”
I said, “No, McIntyre didn’t do it.”
All eyes flicked toward me. Eberhardt took the pipe out of his mouth and waved it in my direction. “How do you know that?”
“Because,” I said, “Brinkman did it.”
Fran Robbins made a little gasping sound. Surprise opened up Brinkman’s face for an instant: guilt flickered there like a film clip on a screen. Then it was gone and his stare was full of shocked indignation.
“You’re crazy,” he said. He turned and appealed to Eberhardt. “He’s crazy.”
Eb said, “Maybe,” and narrowed his eyes at me. “Well?”
“He did it, all right.”
“You got proof to back that up?”
“Enough,” I said, which was not quite the truth. All I had were solid deductions based on circumstantial evidence and plain logic. But I knew I was right. There was only one person who could have killed Judkins and only one way the whole thing made sense; it was a simple matter of eliminating the impossible, so that whatever you had left had to be the answer. So I was pretty sure I could prove, at least to Eberhardt’s satisfaction, that Brinkman had to be the murderer. After that it would be up to Eberhardt to make a homicide charge stick.
McIntyre said, “I might have known it,” in a satisfied voice. His eyes were still on Brinkman, and they were wolfish now.
Brinkman drew himself up, all bluff and bluster, and ripped at the air with his hands. “This accusation is ridiculous,” he said to Eberhardt. “I had nothing to do with what happened here tonight. I spent the entire evening with Fran; I’ve already told you that.”
“So you have. Is that your story, too, miss?”
Robbins looked at Brinkman, wet her lips and said, “Yes.” But the word came out almost as a question. She sounded anxious and uncertain.
I said, “You’re sure about that, Miss Robbins? Being an accessory to insurance fraud is a minor offense; being an accessory to murder gets you a lot of years in prison.”
That sharpened the anxiety and confusion in her eyes. She put a hand on Brinkman’s arm. “Arthur?”
“It’s all right, Fran. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.”
Eberhardt asked me, “What’s this about insurance fraud?”
“That was the idea from the beginning,” I told him. “This outfit isn’t as profitable as Brinkman wants people to believe; I think he’s been operating in the red and doesn’t have enough capital to pay off on the merchandise that just came in from Europe, or enough buyers to take it all off his hands.” I looked at McIntyre. “Am I right, Mr. McIntyre?”
“Damn right,” he said. “I warned Brinkman about making the deal; I told him it was liable to put the company under. He told me to mind my own business and went ahead with it anyway. But how did you know?”
“Some inferences you made yesterday, for one thing. He also let it slip tonight that one of the reasons he fired you was that he couldn’t afford your salary. And there are only a small number of purchase orders on the shipping counter, not enough to account for more than a third of the total shipment.”
“So what are you suggesting?” Eberhardt said.
“That the same bright idea occurred to Brinkman that’s occurred to too many small businessmen these days,” I said. “Burn the place down and collect the insurance.”
I watched Brinkman as I spoke. Still all bluff and bluster, still plucking away at the air; the shrewd eyes weren’t admitting anything.
“Only he was smart enough to realize arson would be suspected and there’d be a thorough investigation,” I went on. “So he decided to set up a neat bit of camouflage. Hire a private detective with a good reputation to act as nightwatchman, arrange an alibi for himself and then have a fire started right under the detective’s nose. I wasn’t supposed to get hurt; I was supposed to testify later that I was alone in a completely impenetrable building when the fire broke out. Nobody could have set it except me, and I’d be exonerated because of my record. The cause would go down as spontaneous combustion, which wouldn’t be hard to believe with all the straw packing and excelsior lying around in here; he’d already planted the seed by warning me to watch out for fire during my rounds. The insurance company would have no recourse except to pay off on the claim.”
“You’re making sense so far,” Eberhardt said. “Now where does Judkins come into it? The hired torch?”
I nodded. “He had to be. It explains the wood alcohol he had in his pocket. That stuff is inflammable as hell; you can use it to start a dandy fire.”
“But then why would Brinkman kill Judkins before he could torch the building?”
“It doesn’t figure to be a premeditated homicide; murder was never part of the original plan. Judkins died because of something that happened between him and Brinkman tonight, something that made Brinkman come down here around ten o’clock—”
“I don’t have to listen to any more of this,” Brinkman said. His expression still showed defiance, but a muscle had begun to jump under his left eye so that he seemed to be winking spasmodically. He lit another cigarette. “I wasn’t anywhere near here at ten o’clock, I tell you. I was with Fran—”
I said, “You went straight to her apartment when you left here at six?”
“That’s right.”
“And had dinner and then went out for a few drinks afterward?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you change clothes?”
“What?”
“You were wearing a gray sports jacket when you left here; now you’re wearing a brown suit. Why the change? And when and where? Unless maybe you got the gray jacket wet and bloody when you shot Judkins, and went home to change before you went back to Miss Robbins’s apartment. And why splash yourself with so much cologne? You weren’t wearing any earlier tonight, and now you reek of it. Unless it was to cover up the smell of wood alcohol; it was all over Judkins’s body, and if it got all over you, too, you wouldn’t be able to get rid of the odor just by taking a shower.”
The muscle kept on jumping under Brinkman’s eye. He looked over at Fran Robbins; she had long since let go of his arm and backed off a couple of steps. She would not look at him now; there was a dark flush on both cheeks. She was just starting to admit to herself that he really was a murderer, and once she accepted the truth she would turn on him. That would be all Eberhardt needed.
“Keep talking,” Eb said to me. “Something happened between Brinkman and Judkins tonight?”
“Right. An argument of some kind, probably over how much Judkins was to be paid. Maybe he tried to shake Brinkman down for a bigger payoff before he did the job. In any case, they met here, and one of them brought a gun, and Judkins ended up getting shot dead.”
“Are you saying the shooting took place outside or inside?”
“Outside. That’s why I didn’t hear the shot; the wind muffled it.”
“Then why put the body in here?”
“Because it probably seemed like the best alternative at the time. If Brinkman left it outside for somebody to find, the arson scheme would be spoiled and the police investigation might implicate him. And taking the body away somewhere was too risky. Both he and Judkins had to have come here on foot, because they wouldn’t have wanted to alert me by driving into the lot; he couldn’t carry the dead man all the way to wherever he’d left his car, and he couldn’t bring the car onto the grounds for that same fear of alerting me.
“But if he took the body inside and started the fire himself, there was a chance the corpse would be burned badly enough to conceal the fact that Judkins had died from a gunshot wound. Which wouldn’t have happened, forensic medicine being what it is today; but he had to have been rattled and desperate, and it looked to him like his only way out. And afterward he could claim that Judkins had set the fire on his own, for his own reasons, and been caught in it and died as a result. The insurance company, at least as he saw it, would still have to pay off.
“Only that plan backfired, too. He’s a small guy and Judkins was a big guy; he got the body in here all right, but he lost control of it as he was setting it down. It landed on top of a crate and made that loud thudding noise I heard. Brinkman knew I’d come to investigate, and he was afraid I’d see him and recognize him; he panicked, shut off the flashlight he’d been using and got out.”
Brinkman was standing ramrod stiff, both hands bunched together at his waist, his head wreathed in cigarette smoke. The only change in the way he looked was in the color of his face: it had gone paper-white.
“Now we come to the sixty-four-dollar question,” Eberhardt said. “This place was sealed inside and out, like a damned tomb; it still is. How was Judkins supposed to get inside in the first place, and how did Brinkman get inside with the body?”
I said, “You told me the answer to that yourself a little while ago, Eb.”
“I told you?”
“You said something sarcastic about the killer maybe walking through a wall. But you were right; that’s just what Brinkman did.”
“Don’t give me double-talk, damn it. Say what you mean.”
“He came in through the window,” I said.
“Window? What window?”
I pointed to the nearest of the two in the left-hand wall, the one closest to where I had found Judkins’s body. “That window.”
“Nuts,” Eberhardt said. “The gate is padlocked; I can see that from here. And the outside shutter is locked down—”
“Now it is,” I said.
“What?”
“Eb, the beauty of Brinkman’s little plan is that it’s simple and it’s obvious—so simple and so obvious that everybody overlooked it.” I went to the window and demonstrated as I talked. “Like this: I come in here on my rounds and I test the padlock on the gate; it’s firmly in place. I glance through the bars, and what do I see in this dim light? The window is closed and the shutter is lowered outside. So I automatically assume, just as anybody would, that both the window catch and the shutter catch are locked, because I expect them to be and because I know the gate is locked. For that same reason I don’t bother to reach through and check either one.
“But the fact is, neither the window nor the shutter was locked at that time; just closed far enough to make me think they were. And the only person who could have rigged them that way is Brinkman. He was the one who locked up tonight. He even asked me to double-check him; he figured his little trick was foolproof, and he wanted my testimony that the building was sealed when the fire broke out.
“What he did after he shot Judkins was to lift the shutter from outside, then the window sash—slow and quiet so I wouldn’t hear anything—and then reach through the bars, open the gate padlock with his key and swing the gate to one side. On his way out after he dropped the body, he closed the gate and relocked the padlock. Then he lowered the window—a little too hard in his haste, which explains the thumping sound I heard. But he couldn’t have secured the window latch from the outside.…”
I reached through the bars, caught hold of the sash and tugged. It glided upward a few inches in well-oiled slots. “And he didn’t. The clicking noise I heard just before putting on the lights was him closing the shutter hard enough to make its latch catch at the bottom—something he could do from the outside.”
“And with all the inside gates and outside shutters in place,” Klein said, “who’d think to try one of the windows sandwiched between them? Or attach the right significance to it if they did.” He shook his head. “I see what you mean by simple and obvious.”
Brinkman saw, too. He saw the expression on Fran Robbins’s face: anger and fear and a congealing hatred. He saw the expression on McIntyre’s face, and on the faces of the law. All the bluff went out of him at once, and along with it whatever inner force had been holding him together; the cigarette fell out of his mouth and he sat down hard on one of the crates, like a doll with sand-stuffed legs, and covered up his own face with both hands.
They never learn, I thought. The clever ones especially—they just never learn.…
“The way it happened with Judkins,” Eberhardt said, “was pretty much as you called it. He telephoned Brinkman at Fran Robbins’s apartment and told him he’d been thinking things over and didn’t want to go ahead with the torch job for the five hundred dollars Brinkman was paying him; he wanted another five hundred, and he wanted it right away. Brinkman tried to tell him he didn’t have that much cash available, but Judkins wouldn’t listen. Either Brinkman delivered the money immediately or not only wouldn’t he set the fire, he’d blow the whistle to the insurance company.”
“I told you Judkins wasn’t very smart,” I said.
“Yeah.” Eberhardt fired up the tobacco in his pipe. It was the following afternoon and we were sitting in a tavern on Union Street, having a companionable beer—his treat—before he headed down to the Hall of Justice for his evening tour of duty. “Anyhow, Brinkman didn’t have any choice; he agreed to meet Judkins and did, just outside the company grounds. All he had on him was fifty bucks, but he promised Judkins the rest as soon as he could get it.”
“Only Judkins wasn’t having any of that, right?”
“Right. He was half-drunk on gin, Brinkman says, and in a belligerent mood; and he’d brought a gun with him. He started waving it around, making threats, and Brinkman got scared and ran into the lot toward the building. He says he was going to call to you for help. But Judkins caught up with him; there was a struggle, and the gun went off. End of Judkins. Brinkman threw the gun—a twenty-five-caliber Browning—away later, into a trash bin a couple of blocks from there. He led us right to it. Cooperating to beat the band, which probably means he’ll cop a plea later on.”
“Uh-huh. What did he tell Robbins when he got back to her place?”
“Fed her a line about some hardcases being the ones who wanted to burn down his company for the insurance; said he had to go along with them or they’d muscle him around—that kind of thing. So would she say he was with her all evening? She went along with it; she’s not too bright either. After he called the company and talked to Klein, he told her it must have been the hardcases who’d killed Judkins. She went along with that, too, until you laid everything out in the warehouse. Now she can’t wait to testify against him.”
“Good for her.”
“One other thing, in case you’re wondering: Brinkman giving McIntyre the sack doesn’t fit into it, except as a ploy to throw off the insurance investigators even more. Would a businessman about to burn down his own company fire one employee on the day of the blaze, and promote another? Like that.”
“Cute. And when things got tough, he tried to steer the blame for Judkins’s death onto McIntyre—the old vendetta motive.”
“Some smart guy, that Brinkman.”
“Some dumb guy,” I said. “Judkins may not have been very bright, and Fran Robbins may not be either. But Brinkman’s the dumbest of the three.”
“Yeah. I wish they were all like that—all the damned criminals.” Eberhardt picked up his beer. “Here’s to crime,” he said.
“I’ll drink to that,” I said, and we did.
Late that afternoon I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge for an early dinner in Sausalito. I got a window table in one of the restaurants built out into the Bay; the weather had cleared, and it was near sunset, and from there I had a fine view of the San Francisco skyline across the water.
It was a beautiful city when you saw it like this—all the buildings shining gold in the dying sunlight, the bridges and the islands and the dazzling water and the East Bay and Marin hills surrounding it. It was only when you got down into its bowels, when you came in contact with the people—the few bad ones spoiling things for the rest—that it became something else. A jungle. A breeding ground for evil, a place of tragedy and unhappiness.
I loved that city; I had been born there and I had spent half a century there and you couldn’t have paid me enough to make me move anywhere else. But sometimes, my job being what it was, it made me angry and sad. Sometimes, in a lot of ways, it made me afraid.
The waitress had brought me a beer and I lifted my glass. Here’s to crime, I thought, but I didn’t drink to it this time.
I drank to the city instead.
And I drank to the victims.
