Triple Play, page 20
part #1 of Jake Hines Series
“Anybody else here?”
“No. Well, Babe was downstairs, but I didn’t know that. All the lights was out, the air conditioning was off, I figured I was the first one in. Turned everything on, started the grill up, made the coffee.
“Then Dozey come in, he’s the dishwasher. Peeled some potatoes while I cut up cabbage for slaw.”
“He have a key too?”
“Nope. I left the back door unlocked for him, like always. You wanna talk to him? He’s swampin’ out the johns.”
“I’ll see him next, thanks. Then what?”
“Bartender come in. Then we all started sayin’, ‘Well, where’s Babe?’ Time she got the tills out, set up the registers. We’re supposed to open by eleven. I needed some sugar and catsup out of the storeroom, I said I’ll go get that and then if Babe’s not here I’m gonna call her.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, put his hands over his mouth and breathed through them like a man fighting frostbite.
“I still can’t hardly believe this next part,” he said softly. “I turned on the lights ahead of me as I went downstairs. Had a bus box in my hands, for carrying stuff back up. The office lights are on the same switch, but the door was closed, so I didn’t pay no attention to the light under the door…but when I went by it I heard these funny noises comin’ out of there. Like to made my heart stop. I told myself, must be a rat, but it didn’t sound like no rat. I tried the door, holding the box out in front of me, ready to hit whatever come at me, but it was locked. So I knelt down and looked through that screened vent in the middle of the door. Boy, my ol’ heart was just goin’ like this, y’know? And then, hell’s fire, there was Babe’s eyes starin’ right at me. An’ her fastened up every which way to the desk and the chair, and doin’ her best to holler through that tape.”
“Did you try to get her loose?”
“I couldn’t! I don’t have the keys to her office!” Jack raised his arms, palms up in an I-give-up gesture. “I’m just the cook…” It seemed to be his mantra. “I hollered through the door, ‘I’ll call the cops, Babe, hang on!’ and I run back upstairs to the phone. Dialed nine-one-one, answered all the questions they asked me, best I could, and hung up and run back down and told her help was on the way. She nodded her head a couple times and rolled her eyes towards upstairs. So I said, ‘Don’t you worry, we’ll get ‘er open,’ and that’s what we done, Dozey and me and Red, he’s the bartender. Only we still ain’t got no money to work with. Lucky we only had a couple of regulars so far, we’re just gonna have them sign chits till Babe gets some new tills ready.”
She came up the stairs at that moment, dressed in clean clothes, with her hair combed and her lipstick on straight. She carried two cash boxes with a couple of bills and a few pieces of change in each one. Over her shoulder, she told an impressed-looking Mary Agnes Donovan, “ I always keep a little extra change in the cracker box. Only place they didn’t look. Bastards even cleaned out my purse.”
Al Stearns followed them, looking the way Stearns always looks on duty, like just possibly a few sticks of dynamite up his nose might get him excited. He’s seen everything twice, and the closer he gets to retirement the less anxious he is for the third time.
“Here, Jack,” Babe told the cook, “this is pretty sparse but you can…” She gave him rapid-fire orders for dispensing change, moved to the bartender and repeated them. “Listen,” she said, turning to us, “I gotta run to the bank right now…”
“Babe, Red can go to the bank,” Jack said. “I can cover the bar till he gets back. Why don’t you sit down and eat this burger I’ve got on the grill? Mooney ain’t in no hurry for it. Are you, Art?”
“Huh?” Mooney’s bald head and bushy white eyebrows appeared over the top of his newspaper. “Who, me hurry? Hell, I don’t do nothin’ all day and I don’t start that till afternoon.” He lowered the paper to the counter and smiled at Babe. “Better sit down, darlin’. You look a little pale.”
“Well. . . .” Babe looked uncertain for a couple of seconds, then smiled shakily, and said, “Okay. Thanks, I appreciate it.” She sat down on the stool next to mine, and Jack poured her a big glass of orange juice. She took a swig, sighed gratefully, wrote a check and a change list and walked them over to the bar. After a short conference with Red she came back and sat down again, sampled the coffee Jack had poured for her and said, “You’re right, I just realized I’m starving. Make that a cheeseburger with everything, will you? And plenty of fries?”
“Can I ask you some questions while you eat? “ I knew she needed to eat in peace, but I wanted to get as many answers as possible while the shock was still fresh. Victims often reject their memories as soon as they can.
“Sure. You want some coffee?” She looked at me with sudden interest and asked, “How come you’re not in uniform, by the way?”
“I’m an investigator now, “ I said.
“Like, a detective?”
“Yeah. Like that.”
“Jeez, Kid.” The old barn-burner smile made a momentary reappearance. “Lotta water over the dam since I showed you how to carry a bus box without gettin’ a hernia, huh? Remember how we used to herd drunks out the door together on Saturday night? One on each side and both talkin’ so sweet?” She chuckled, lit a cigarette, blew smoke in the air and sighed. “Can you believe it? All these years later, I’m still doin’ it.” She stretched, stuck her fist against the side of her neck and rotated her head against it. “God, I got cramped in that chair. All my muscles are tied up in knots.”
“I wish I could tell you to go home and take a long hot bath,” I said, “but the sooner you tell me this story, Babe, the better chance we’ve got of nailing those guys.”
“Oh, right,” she said, not sounding confident. Jack slid the cheeseburger in front of her and she began wolfing it down. “Well. Where shall we start?”
“Start wherever it started. Were you the first one in the building yesterday?”
“I was the only one. We don’t open on Monday any more. It’s the slowest day and I needed one day off a week to get caught up at home.”
“So why were you here?”
“I came in about two in the afternoon, to make up the weekend’s deposits and go to the bank.”
“Is that what you usually do on Monday?”
“Yes. I was a little earlier than usual yesterday because I knew I had a lot of cash to count. We had the biggest weekend of the summer, the regional pool tournament, and we were swamped for three days.”
“Okay. So you came in the front door, back door?”
“Back. Parked where I always do, in my space in the lot on Seventh Avenue, and walked down the alley.”
“Let’s start there,” I said. “When you’re done eating,” I added, apologetically, but she waved one hand in a “no problems” gesture as she stuffed the last bite in her face and got up to lead the way. We walked through the open arch into the long, dim room full of pool tables, silent at this hour. I followed her to the rear, where she pushed the panic bar on the heavy back door, and we stepped outside. The alley smelled like dumpsters. The back door was grease-stained and flyspecked, but surprisingly solid, a heavy steel door that made a snug fit in a steel frame. It had a heavy-duty closer with a spring-operated latch bolt, and a deadbolt above.
“Door looks newer than the rest of the building,” I said.
“OSHA made the landlord do some remodeling a couple of years ago,” Babe said. “Remember how we used to have to lock the back door from the outside to keep it closed if the wind was blowing? Feds said it would be a death trap in a fire. Long as they had to fix it I persuaded them to go first class.”
“You got a good lock.”
“The best. Spring lock in the closer, see, always locked unless you set it on open.” She showed me. “Whoever gets to work first, usually Jack, unlocks the dead bolt and sets the closer in the unlocked position, till the rest of the help gets to work and we open for business. Once we open the front door, I reset the spring lock on the back door. For the rest of the day, nobody can open this door from outside, but in an emergency anybody can get out by pushing on the panic bar. When I close up at night I lock the dead bolt on the way out.”
“Sounds like a good system. Deliveries come in the front?”
“Mostly. Anybody wants to deliver from the alley has to arrange it with me first. And the crews for the later shifts come in the front, too. Jack has one set of keys and I have the other one. Nobody touches the locks but the two of us. We watch who comes in the front and we don’t have to worry about the back. Getting to be kind of a rough neighborhood around here, Jake.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Lotta smoking going on.”
“Yeah, and these days some of the smoke is from crack. Can you believe it? Right here in little old Rutherford? You know, with pot smokers, you don’t have to worry too much, those dodos just get dreamy and worthless if they use too much. But crack users are something else. Crackheads like to fight. Tell you the truth, if it wasn’t for my old-timers, I might think about selling this place.”
“Does Helmer Krogstad still play pool in here? And Willie Finch?”
“Helmer’s in a rest home now. Willie still comes in. Pat Fogarty, Mitch Carlson, you remember both of them, don’t you? Tony Pease, Pete Peterson, Larry Tuohy. They may not be rocket scientists, but at least they seem to be able to choke down a burger and a beer without breaking up the place.”
“So,” I said, playing with the spring lock a minute longer, “when you come in on Mondays to do the weekend deposits, you unlock the door and then…?”
“Lock it right up again, leave it locked till I’m ready to go to the bank. Drive to the bank, make the deposits, come straight back here with the change. Lock up again while I put the money in the safe, phone in some orders, pay a few bills and then I’m outa here.”
“And you feel pretty sure you locked the door like always, yesterday?”
“Not pretty sure. Damn good and sure. I’ve had a couple of bad scares here in the last year, Jake. I’m careful. Nothing distracts me while I see to the locks.”
“Any chance whoever robbed you was already in the place when you got here?”
“No. Randy locked up Sunday night.” She smiled. “You seen Randy since he grew up? He’s way taller than I am now, eighteen his last birthday.”
“Hard to believe.” I vaguely remembered a sulky little boy in the back booth, eating ice cream while his doting mother finished her shift. Babe never talked about his father.
“Randy’s closed up before?”
“Yeah, he earns his spending money looking after the place for me on Sunday night. To give me a break. We close at nine Sundays. Other nights we’re open till one, so I stay.”
“Makes a long day.”
She shrugged. “I don’t trust anybody else to do it. I usually grab a nap in the afternoon.”
“Does Randy have another set of keys?”
“No. I leave mine with him. He brings ’em home when he’s done.”
“He still lives with you?”
“Oh, sure, he’s still in school.”
“Can I talk to him? Will he be in soon?”
She shook her head. “He went fishing yesterday and stayed last night with the kid whose dad owns the boat. They were going out again this morning. I don’t expect he’ll be back till around five.”
“Okay. Let’s walk on through this. You locked the back door…”
“Right. I turned on the lights, went downstairs to my office–”
“Let’s do it,” I said. At the door of her office, she began going through the motions, naming them like a child reciting a lesson: “Went inside. Closed the door. Opened the safe…” Her voice took on a jumpy edge.
“Sit down,” I said. “Don’t hurry. Take all the time you need.” She fished a cigarette out of a pack on her desk and I lit it for her. “You never heard anything?”
“Not a sound.” She blew smoke for a minute. “I was just finishing the third deposit when they came through the door.”
“How many?”
“Two. One big guy. I’m five-six and he towered over me. The other one was a little shorter and a lot slimmer. But I never saw their faces. They had on”–her voice wavered ominously–“ski hats, I guess…those knit things with holes for the mouth and eyes? Looked like…terrorists…” She shivered and began to whisper. “Black sweat pants. Dark T-shirts with l-long sleeves.” A couple of tears slid through her fresh makeup.
“Babe.” I picked up a straight chair that was sitting against the wall, set it down facing away from her, and straddled it so that our knees almost touched. “Listen, I know this is tough. But I urge you now: don’t get scared, get even. Help me catch these guys.”
She put her hands over her face and made three painful sounds that combined the worst aspects of grunting and moaning. I handed her the box of tissues on her desk; she grabbed a handful and disappeared into it, blowing her nose. Then she gulped air, blew it out, and said, “The worst thing was, they never made a sound.”
“No kidding? They didn’t talk at all?”
“Didn’t talk, didn’t grunt, didn’t even point. I swear, Jake. Like a pair of goddamn spooks. Just grabbed me and slapped that piece of tape on my mouth. Then, while the biggest one held me like this,” she got behind me to demonstrate a bear-hug, with one leg wrapped around my lower torso, “the other one started wrapping me up. When they had my legs taped clear up to the hips, they sat me down and taped my arms to the chair. That’s the part that hurt the most. They taped me up tight while my legs were straight, and then they bent them anyway to get me in the chair.” She rubbed her knees to comfort them.
“After that they taped my ankles to the desk. But they did all of that without making a sound, can you imagine? It was like the worst nightmare I ever had. I actually kind of wondered when I was gonna wake up.” She gave a shaky laugh.
“Then they started scooping up money. Methodical! They used a picnic cooler they had brought along. Went in the safe and got out the rest of the change. Went through my purse and the drawers of the desk. Moving right along but not hurrying. When they were sure they had it all, they turned off the lights, and left. Never even glanced in my direction while they went out and closed the door.” She shivered.
“Babe, did you check the rest rooms when you came in? Could they have been in the men’s room?”
“Damn, I hate to think so,” she said, fretfully. “But no, I didn’t. Randy must have checked them, though, I’ve taught him well enough how to close up! Last thing we do, always, is check the rest rooms and make sure they’re empty.”
“Hiding in one of the storerooms, maybe?”
“Shouldn’t be. Storeroom doors are supposed to be kept padlocked every minute they’re not bringing out supplies. I mean, I have systems for all this, Jake.”
“We’ll take another look at both doors,” I said, “but I don’t see any signs of forced entry.”
Babe shook her head. “Pretty tough to force an entry though the doors I’ve got now,” she said. “Almost need dynamite.”
“Think about it,” I said. “This basement has no windows. What about the roof?”
“Vent fans for the heat and cooling, and the grill. Maybe eight inches of access if you could pry off the fan housings.”
“No trap door?”
“No.”
I waited a minute. “How long has Jack Pfluege worked for you?”
“Oh…nine years? Going on ten. Jack’s okay, Jake, don’t worry about him. He was washing dishes here when Art’s old cook—remember Bodie?—Bodie said he’d be damned if he’d ever work for a woman. The day after I filed for divorce, when he saw Art wasn’t coming to work, he took off his apron and walked out. Jack said, ‘I know how to cook, gimme a chance.’ He burned a few fries at first, but he learned fast and he’s been here ever since. Comes to work on time, does his job and nothing extra. Just right for here. I watch everything like a hawk, I’ve never seen him try any funny business at all.”
There was a lot of loud talking on the stairs. Ollie Green and Nick Kranz, the fingerprint team from downtown, appeared in the doorway. Between them stood a plump, excited-looking adolescent who seemed vaguely familiar.
“Hey, Jake,” Nick said, and at the same moment, the kid yelled, “Ma!” and Babe said, “Randy!” Mother and son began hugging each other, both talking at once. “Jeez, you okay?” Randy asked, and Babe said, “What are you doing here so early?”
“You sure you’re not hurt? How come you didn’t call me?”
“I thought you said five o’clock!” Babe said.
I met Nick Kranz’s eyes, nodded toward the hall, and we walked outside.
“We won’t get any useful prints from the office, I guess,” I said. “Babe says the thieves wore gloves in here. I’d like you to lift what you can from the desk and safe, though, for comparison with employee prints. The front door is hopeless, everybody in town has a print on there. But try to get everything off the back door. I’ve got a hunch they came in that way and they might not have wanted to put the gloves on till they got inside. And we want a full set from each employee.” We went back inside and I introduced them to Babe. “Give them the name and address of any employees you have who are not working now, they’ll follow up. We’ll need your prints, too, Randy.”
“Oh, sure,” Randy said. He seemed to be enjoying the excitement.
Babe’s phone rang. She answered and passed it to me. Sally said, “Milo Nilssen’s waiting in your office. Says you have a date for a pre-trial interview?”
Damn! His appointment was written on the desk calendar that I hadn’t unpacked yet.
“Can he wait? I can come back right now.”
“That’s what he wants. He said, ‘Tell him to get his ass back here. I’ll wait in his office.’ Evidently it has to be done today.”
“Right. Ten minutes, tell him.”
I handed the phone to Babe and told her, “Green and Kranz are going to be here a while, working in this office and on the back door. Will you keep everybody out of here till they’re done? Oh, and Babe? Let me borrow your deposit book, will you?”
