Minnesota Strip, page 1
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
About the Author
By the Author
More on Piccadilly Publishing
Copyright
Chapter One
I HAD JUST come back from Pittsburgh after riding out there with a hooker who was Polish but not so dumb because she had managed to hold back five thousand bucks from her black pimp, and wanted to quit the streets and get married. In certain Polack circles they still believe in dowries and the five grand was hers.
She was a big bulky blonde who smoked those skinny little cigars so she wouldn’t get lung cancer and ruin her magnificent chest. She had a last name like any eye chart and for seeing her safe home I got fifty bucks plus two of those delicious sandwiches they serve at places along the road where you stop to piss and eat.
Yes, I had had carnal knowledge of this lady long before she came to see me about shaking loose from her pimp. This fine specimen of the Negro race was highly attached to the lady. She was pulling down good bread and he hated to see her leave. He said so while holding a taped-up razor to her throat. All but the last inch of honed steel was taped up; it was a weapon to maim rather than to murder.
She came into my office on Broadway early one morning and wanted to know what about this pimp, and after I argued for a hundred I finally settled for fifty and ten minutes with her on the couch. She was very sincere with me on the couch, as if her life depended on it, and in a way it did. After we zipped up and buttoned up I told her we’d take the Hudson Tubes to Jersey City because I guessed this black protector of hers would be watching the Port Authority bus terminal. So we went over to Jersey without getting sliced and just in case there was any danger of that I took along my unlicensed .38 detective special. In Jersey we caught a Greyhound to Pittsburgh and after we got there many gritty hours later there was no more problem. Her hulking Polack relatives would see to that.
Now I was back in New York with stubble on my face and a ring around the collar. I had that long-distance bus smell all over me. I still had forty-five dollars left; five dollars and some change had gone to buy a quart of Nikolai vodka on the way back from the bus station. If I didn’t dig any deeper into the forty-five bucks I still had just enough to pay another week’s rent at the Buckminster Hotel, which is where I usually flop when I’m not flopping at the office. The Buckminster is on West 38th Street and it is definitely not the Plaza, but it does have its own wicked charm. By that I mean the lobby is always jammed with hustlers and starving character actors. The Buckminster changes ownership at about the same frequency it changes its sheets: once a week.
I dumped some vodka into a paper cup and filled up the rest with water from the rickety old-fashioned water cooler I inherited from some old guy, an importer of rubber goods, who died at his desk down the hall and the cops left the door unlocked after they took away the body. I drank my vodka and it was good; the second was better. Anything was better than a round-trip bus ride to Pittsburgh.
There was a tentative knock on the frosted glass door of my office. First I thought it was the shitty building agent looking for the rent. Then I remembered that the rent was all paid up for a change. That left the black pimp as my only other important caller so I took the .38 out of my pocket and put it on the desk and covered it with a copy of the Daily News.
“It’s open,” I called out.
The middle-aged guy who came in was a stranger to me, but I could see that he had been dancing with a couple of other guys. Or maybe just one guy with the weight and size of Leon Spinks. Whoever had rearranged his face had done a sweet job of it. There must have been a lot of blood when that was being done, but now it was all washed away. What remained was a hunk of punched-up meat that wouldn’t be a face again for quite some time. His right ear was torn and the stitches showed clearly. Though the guy was well into his fifties he was wearing one of those awful playsuits people fight to buy at Korvette’s. It was light blue, the pants were flared, and the stitching along the seams was coming apart. He had thinning sandy hair trying for the Dry Look and not making it. One thing he didn’t look like was money.
I showed him the other chair and he sat on the edge of it. He looked around my office and was not impressed. It’s a one-room office with an old wooden desk, two chairs, a telephone, a wastebasket, a hatrack. I didn’t mind that he wasn’t impressed by my office because I wasn’t impressed with him. I was tired and I was rich—forty-five bucks rich—and I was ready to throw him out.
“Are you Pete Shay the private investigator?” he asked me, looking at my bottle at the same time. He held himself stiffly as if somebody had been doing a number on his ribs as well as his face. I guessed they were tightly bandaged. He gave the bottle another appealing glance, but I didn’t offer him a drink. It could be that he was just another of those weird guys who sneak around older office buildings to see what they can see.
“I’m Shay,” I said, “and if you’re looking for spare change I already gave. Otherwise what’s the problem?”
“I want to hire you to get my daughter back, Mr. Shay. I’ll pay any reasonable amount. Will you take the job?”
A roach came out of the drawer of the desk and began to investigate one of the sticky rings left by the bottom of the paper cup. I reached out and put the Manhattan telephone book on top of the roach. The stranger didn’t seem to notice: he was looking hard at my face.
I said, “I’ll probably take the job, whatever it is, provided you keep the money part straight. What kind of money sounds reasonable to you?”
He said he didn’t know.
I told him what the going rate was, a hundred bucks a day. And did that sound reasonable to him.
“I don’t know, Mr. Shay. I guess it sounds like a lot of money to me.” He said this in some kind of hunky Midwestern accent.
It sounded like a lot of money to me, too. It had been three months since I had made a hundred a day, and that lasted only six days. No matter what kind of bullshit they hand you, don’t let yourself be kidded that there is a lot of loot to be made in the private investigation business. It’s like any other business: a few guys at the top make the big money, the rest take what they can get and are glad to get it. A hundred a day! Man, I would have been glad to work for seventy-five or even fifty.
“If you think a hundred is too much, why don’t you handle it yourself?” I suggested, my tone of voice letting him know that I already knew the answer to the question before I asked it.
He raised the back of his right hand toward his battered face without touching it. “You mean how I look?”
Now was the time to offer him that first drink, and he nodded when I lifted the quart and jiggled it.
““Okay,” he said, “but no water. Make it a big one, will you?”
That figured. He needed a big straight hit to kill the pain. The drink was gone in two nervous gulps and he seemed to relax as the booze worked its magic on his twitching nerves. “Ah, yes,” he said, and his watery blue eyes got very bright, and I thought he was going to cry.
To head that off I said briskly, “All right, what’s your name and how did you happen to pick me? But first, what about the money? You got it or not?”
I didn’t want to listen to a long sad story if there was no money, or not enough money, at the end of it. When the money is right and up-front I can even grind my teeth and put up with a few tears. In the bottom drawer of my desk there is a large box of Kleenex tissues for people who come to my office to cry over the problems they want me to solve.
“My name is Thomas Jannssen,” he told me, “and I have the money.” Telling me he could come up with the scratch made him feel better. I could tell that he was the kind of hard-working loser who had never made a soft buck in his life.
Reaching into his hip pocket, a sucker place to keep money in the city, he found a cracked leather wallet and riffled through a thin slice of bills. “I have enough to pay you for a week, seven hundred, right? That leaves me three hundred, all I’ve got. I’ll give you a hundred now, the rest when you get back my daughter.”
“You’ll give me three-fifty now and three-fifty the end of the week’s work. That’s how it works whether I find your daughter or not. Otherwise …”
That was an empty threat, mild mannered though it was, and I would have taken the hundred if he had pressed the point, and I might even have done some work for it. Truth to tell, though, I wouldn’t have broken my hump for just a hundred. I couldn’t really get a good look at this guy because of the tenderized face, but I felt there was something stingy about him and it wasn’t just because I knew he had worked like a bastard all his life. Now I have been married and still am, come to think of it, and I hardly ever see my old lady except when she dogs me for the money I’m always behind in, and we never did have any kids of any kind, yet I know if I had a kid in trouble I wouldn’t hold back on any money I had, if laying out that money might make it all right for the kid.
Besides, I needed that seven hundred bucks in Thomas Jannssen’s moldy wallet.
He caved in and counted out the three hundred and fifty dollars with immense care. Just four bills, three hundreds and a fifty. Just four bills and he did it twice. I didn’t have to be so elaborate be
And that didn’t make me love him any more than I did already. Jannssen was putting his wallet back on his hip and I couldn’t stand it any longer. I would have called him Asshole but after all he was a client and three-hundred and fifty bucks in that wallet belonged to me. By the rather loose laws of the State of New York that $350 was mine.
Genuinely I was worried about my client and my money.
“Put it in your inside coat pocket, Mr. Jannssen,” I suggested. “Now that we’re friends and clients I suggest you do that.”
“In Duluth you don’t have to worry about pickpockets,” he informed me with pride, after he put the wallet where I told him to put it, and after I had given him another big one. “That’s where me and my daughter Ruthie used to live. I give her the name Ruth after my mother. Now she calls herself Barbie. I think after the big-selling doll. Barbie! A Barbie with a last letter, an I or an E I don’t know. Anyway, Barbie is what she goes by now. I have a Polaroid of her took just last summer when I was back from a trip on the Lakes—I been a deck hand on the Lake boats all my life.”
He took the trimmed snapshot from one of the cellophane windows of his wallet and handed it to me. I guess he thought she was something special but I had seen her a hundred times before, on the street, in the newspapers, in the morgue. She was pretty in a heavy sort of way. There was fat under her chin. I don’t know why these young ones from the Midwest always have that soft roll under the chin, but they do. I said she looked about twenty and Jannssen said eighteen. Oh yes, he’d been playing detective sure enough: he had written her name, age, height, weight, hair color on the back of the picture. I could just see the clown going in and out of the cowboy bars on Eighth Avenue trying to show the snapshot to the animals who hang out there.
“Nice looking kid,” I said, mustering all the sincerity I could. It’s hard to feel sorry after the first hundred times of feeling sorry for people who manage to fuck up their lives and the lives of those around them. You can’t cry for the whole miserable world or you’d walk around all the time with inflamed tear ducts. “Suppose you tell me the whole story,” I said, after I made two more drinks. I thought I knew a great deal of the story I was about to hear, but I wanted to hear it from him.
It was a standard story and I’m sure a true confessions publisher with a computer could have reduced it to a few beeps, a few whirls of the tape. Thomas Jannssen said, “I guess it was all my fault. I should of spent more time with Ruthie but you know, Mr. Shay, I had to make a living. The cost of living these days don’t come easy. With her Mom dead and me out on the Lakes all the time I guess Ruthie got kind of restless. These kids today don’t know when they’re well off.”
He paused to get a nod from me and he got it. Listening to him drone on I wished to Christ I had learned a useful trade when I was still young enough to do that.
“I’d come back from a tour on the Lakes and the house’d be a mess,” Jannssen went on. “Empty liquor bottles in the trash, under the sink. Dirty dishes stacked up in the sink. In the bathroom I found a used rubber behind the toilet bowl. I guess the guy missed the bowl when he thought he’d flushed it down. And the fucking phone, excuse me, never stopped ringing. I tell you this, Mr. Shay, me and Ruthie had some fights. Real beauts, real lulus. Well, sir, I realized I had some wild kid on my hands. I didn’t know how wild until I got an anonymous letter from one of the neighbors, probably I think it was from one of the neighbors, who else?, and the letter said my Ruthie was selling it for money. Jesus Christ, Mr. Shay, you know how a man feels when he hears stuff like that?”
I said no.
“I hope you never do,” Jannssen informed me, his Swedish blue eyes getting wet again. “The time I found the sticky rubber in the bathroom, the letter in the mailbox, was the second time from last I come home from the Lakes. I had money in my pocket and I stopped off in a couple of bars on the way from the docks. Well, I got a right to have a few drinks, don’t I? I work like a son of a bitch, don’t I?”
“Absolutely,” I said, deciding not to give the clown any more drinks.
“You’d think a man’s only daughter would be there to greet him when he come home,” Jannssen said. “She knew I was due back that night, only she wasn’t there when I got there. So what time do you think she finally got in? Four in the morning. By that time the pint I had on my hip was down to nothing. She come in the back door with some guy about my own age, only all dressed up, and the both of them was laughing. Then when this guy spots me sitting at the kitchen table he pulled back and I told the creep he better get the fuck out of my house and away from my daughter or I’d cave in his fucking skull with the empty pint. Ruthie, still laughing, now in my face, told the creep to stand his ground. It was her house too and you better believe that made me mad, Mr. Shay.”
There was another important pause in Thomas Jannssen’s doleful story and I filled it in with, “I do.”
Jannssen said with some pride, “All I could think of was to slip my leather belt and start whacking, first Ruthie, after that the creep. The creep took off out the door he come in. Ruthie though stood her ground. I even gave her a couple with the belt across the face and that didn’t faze her. I called her a whore, a dirty rotten fucking whore, and that didn’t faze her either. The creep who had come in with her had dropped a full, wrapped quart of scotch, and after the name-calling stopped we got started on that and when the sun come up we were still working on it and long after that. Finally the both of us passed out though I’m pretty sure Ruthie made it up to bed. I just fell asleep with my head on the kitchen table.”
A storybook American family, I thought, but all I said was, “Go on.”
Thomas Jannssen said, “To make a long story short”—which was something he seemed incapable of doing—“when I came up about noon Ruthie was gone and so was two hundred dollars from my back pocket. There was no note, no nothing. I went up to her room and she had taken both of her suitcases. So that meant it wasn’t just a three-day shack-up with some creep. I don’t know what it was with Ruthie, but she was always hanging around with creeps. Guys a lot older, married guys that give her a hot line of shit.
“Stay on the track, Mr. Jannssen,” I said. “That way I’ll get to work a lot faster. So you went down to the bus terminal ... Take it from there.” Jannssen seemed irritated at having his narrative interrupted. After all I was charging him seven hundred bucks and still wanted him to talk like a telegram.
“First I had to draw a thousand bucks out of the bank,” he said. “Then I went to the bus station. That was the first place I thought of. Down there I asked them did they see a young good-looking blonde girl in the last couple hours. That didn’t ring a bell with any of the ticket sellers till I remember the couple licks I give across the face with the belt. The crud that remembered that wouldn’t tell me where she bought a ticket for until I slip him a five dollar bill. I get to New York and, you know, I read Time and Newsweek when I’m out on the Lakes, so I know all about this Minnesota Strip and where it is. I checked my bag first thing before I go looking for Ruthie. That big bus station is right in the middle of the Strip.”
“You’re lucky to be still alive, hanging out in that part of town,” I said. “How many dumps you been in before they jumped you? Let me guess. Two guys, probably two guys, probably black guys, said they’d seen your daughter that morning. They’d seen her coming up Eighth Avenue carrying two suitcases. You had told them that already, but you were hungover as hell and didn’t remember anything straight after a few drinks.”
“I guess I told them about the suitcases. They were black guys, real big ones, and they said they’d seen Ruthie going into one of the hotels across the street from the bar when I met them. It was called the St. Andrew, nice name for a dump like that, and like a fucking fool I let one of them go in the hall in front of me. Me in the middle, the other black behind. There was no lobby, just a short hall with a glass door a few feet from the street door. Next thing I knew the guy behind me had a stranglehold on me, the other one was working me over. If they hadn’t worked me over so much they would have had my wallet before some other black started banging on the street door and yelling something about cops. With that they let me drop without getting the wallet. They ran into the hotel before the two cops opened the street door and there I was taking a bath in my own blood. I never seen so much fucking blood and it was all mine. I started yelling about the two muggers, but the cops didn’t seem all that anxious to run in there after them. They had their guns in their hands when they came in but now they put them away. One of them looked jumpy, the other was just bored. Dripping blood though I was I kept asking them why they didn’t go after the two blacks. The young one, the one who was bored, was mad because I got a few spots of blood on his uniform. ‘Don’t be telling us your business, Pop,’ he said. ‘You look like you’re just drunk and fell down.’
