Chapter 10

 

There are times when you walk into a room and you just know something is wrong. People were working, but it was too quiet—the kind of quiet that tells you there’s a bear on the trail behind you. As I made my way up front to my office, I found out why. 

“Where’s my boat part?” the gentleman demanded. This time it was not George Grosse facing Ashley across my desk. He was another charter boat skipper, judging by his black fisherman’s cap with the gold braid stitched on the bill. He stood taller than I did— maybe about six feet two—and I could tell he was used to getting answers. The crinkles around his eyes did not look friendly.

“May I help?” I asked.

He looked from Ashley to me. “Yeah, maybe you can. I ordered a prop from Seattle two weeks ago. They say they sent it out the next day, and it isn’t here yet!” He poked my chest with his finger. 

I looked him in the eye, real . . . steady like, and braced myself. He didn’t look angry enough to hit, but one never knew.

“Sir, do not poke me,” I said quietly.

He’d been around long enough to know the sound of authority. Authority that said, “I mean what I say.”

He dropped his hand and nodded. “Fine, but where’s my prop?”

I looked at Ashley, who shrugged. I turned my head back to look him straight in the eye. “Sir, if that package is in this station, we’ll find it. Was it insured?”

He looked away and sighed. “No, I think insurance is a post office scam. It’s just a way to get more money out of people!”

I chose to let him have his mad. No need to tell him the Postal Service handles millions of packages every day. 

“Well, we’ll do all we can, sir, to find your package. Where did it come from?”

“Oregon.”

Something clicked in my mind. “From a company that deals in boat parts?”

“Yeah, it’s a big place down there in Portland.” He went on to tell me the name and address. 

I cast a quick nod to Ashley, who immediately wrote it on a sheet of paper. I knew the name well, but writing it down made us look like we knew what we were doing. 

I held out my hand. “My name is Leo Bronski. And yours?”

There was a pause while he figured out whether a handshake was the right thing to do. I waited patiently. Sometimes it’s hard to shake hands with someone you’re angry with. Finally, with another sigh, he put out his hand. “Bill Stevens,” he said as we shook.

“Okay, Mr. Stevens, we’ll see what we can do.”

He nodded and left the office, his face full of resignation. There was no doubt what was in his mind. He wasn’t going to get his part. It was lost, and he would have to order another one right away.

As soon as the door closed, I turned to Ashley. “All right, Ashley, you and I are going to turn this place upside down.”

“Yes, sir. And may I say, sir, you handled him well.”

I gave her a small smile. “It’s what I get paid the big bucks for. Now, let’s go out to the package shelves and start looking.”

She gave me a dazzling smile of admiration that made me feel about ten feet tall. We spent the next two hours verifying packages. Of course the one we were looking for wasn’t there. I didn’t think it would be, but we had to check.

“What’ll we do now, sir?” Ashley asked.

I smiled. It was nice being called sir, but when it came to employee relations, I decided to stick to my name. “It’s Leo, Ashley, remember? You can call me “sir,” but Leo is better.”

She gave me another one of those smiles. That must be how she got promoted. Who could resist?

“You want me to spread the word about the package?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

On the way back to my office, I rounded a corner and ran into the janitor that looked like Mr. Clean. 

“Oops! Sorry!”

I looked down at my Wellington’s now covered with floor wax, sighed, and remembered to smile. “It’s okay, uh . . . Ralph. These things happen.”

His face reddened. “Really sorry, sir.” 

 I again told him it was okay and left him standing there, hopefully reassured his job was safe. The incident reminded me of another time when I was on R & R in Okinawa at the Kadena BX when I backed up from looking at a display case directly onto a two-star general’s shoes. I had practically fallen to my knees. I sighed again. Old memories like that I didn’t need.

Back in the safe confines of my office, and after making sure the window blinds were closed, I put my feet up on the desk to relax and think, all the while trying to ignore the white stain of floor wax on my black boots. Was something shady, going on with the Oregon firm, or was someone in their shipping department simply being sloppy? Just when I realized I was getting nowhere, the phone rang. Without thinking, I picked it up. 

“Bronski.”

“Yes, boss, ” I answered in a voice meek and mild.

“What the hell is going on down there?” In a quiet voice I could barely hear. A voice that I knew to be the quiet before the storm. 

 “Going on?” I asked.

“Now, Bronski, don’t get coy with me. I get enough of that stuff around here! I’m talking about that missing prop!”

There was a moment of silence when I again was privileged to listen while the Boss lit up his cigar. Then came the long drawn-out whoosh of air. I waited for the cough, but none came. 

“You see, Bronski, I just got off the phone with a guy down there in Fire Bay. He was mad, and when a customer gets mad at me, somebody else is gonna catch hell. Get my meaning . . . Bronski?” 

“Yes, sir.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Well, we’ve started turning the place upside down.” I went on to tell him the boat part came from the same company in Portland as the boat part that Mr. Grosse was missing. 

Then came a long silence. Just when I was beginning to think the Boss had fallen to sleep, he spoke in a tired voice. “Keep at it, Bronski,” he said, and hung up. 

I slowly hung up the phone, dropped my boots down to the floor, and walked over to the window that looked out on the lobby. I eased the blind open ever so slightly and looked at the people standing, waiting patiently for a window clerk to handle their respective problems. Some were mailing packages; some were receiving packages too large to fit in a PO Box. It was my responsibility to make sure everything went smoothly and I wondered if I was up to the task. I slowly shut the blind and regained my chair. It was time to do more input to the computer.

Come five o’clock I was out the door. I had my hand on the Jeep’s door handle when a hunch about the missing package occurred to me. I slung my briefcase onto the passenger seat, closed the door, and walked over to the outside garbage bin. Taking a deep breath, I opened one of the lids and peered down, looking for actual garbage. No need to get slime all over myself. Seeing none, I crawled over the side and started shuffling paper and old envelopes around. Talk about a needle in a haystack. I looked back over my shoulder to see if anybody had seen me. Since everybody else stopped work either at four o’clock or five-thirty, there was little chance anyone had. I dove back into the trash, determined to inspect the whole bin. I knew it as soon as I saw it: a large package, two feet on a side, with writing all over it, naturally at the very bottom of the bin.

It was my first inclination to haul the box out and call its owner. It was not just its weight—probably better than forty pounds—that made me pause. There was no way it had been put in the bin by mistake. Not a box that large. I laid it back down on the bottom of the bin. Garbage pick-up was not due for the next two days. Did I play amateur detective, or did I hand the “case” over to the postal inspectors? There was no way they could get here before morning, and meanwhile the culprit might make off with the package. 

I climbed out of the bin without the package. If we had a stolen parts ring here in Fire Bay, then it was up to the US Postal Service to solve it. But I had to cover my rear. I knew the Boss wasn’t a great admirer of John Crouch, the postal inspector, so he might support me for a day or so. 

I climbed into the Jeep and hustled to the B & B. Maybe I could catch the Boss before he left work.