The Good Old Stuff (39 page)

“Horowitz,” Johnny Maclaren said, “listen to the guy give orders!” He turned to Brock. “Just where do you fit?” he said in a flat tone.

Brock heard Brasher come out of his office, knew that he was a few feet behind him. He said loudly, “I’m representing the company in the investigation.” He turned around. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Brasher?”

Brasher coughed and licked his lips. He gave one startled glance at Brock’s eyes and said, “Yes. Yes, that’s right. I’m the manager here. Mr. Brock is handling it for us.”

Maclaren glanced at Brock’s dirty coveralls, at his reinforced
shoes, sneered, and said, “You ought to dress your key personnel a little better, Brasher. Let me use your phone.” Without waiting for an answer he went into Brasher’s office, called the hospital, and asked for a report. When he got it, he called headquarters, got hold of Captain Davis of Homicide, and said, “A girl was shot in the back at Brasher Scrap Metal twenty minutes ago. The intern says she’s in bad shape. Maybe you want one of your people to cover this with me just in case.… Okay, I’ll brief him when he gets here.”

He walked around the desk and sat in Brasher’s chair. He flapped a hand at Brasher. “Shut the door on your way out.”

Brock leaned on the wall near the window. Horowitz sat on the edge of Brasher’s desk.

Because of Brock’s background, little time was wasted. In ten minutes, Maclaren knew that because of the danger of theft there were only two ways in and out of the grounds, the main entrance and the truck gate. There was a guard at the truck gate and a receptionist at the lower hall at the main entrance. The fence around the property was a nine-foot hurricane fence with three strands of barbed wire at the top. No one had left the area since the shooting.

The property was roughly square, with the office building running along one side at right angles to the road. The shop was in the back, parallel to the road, forming an L with the office building. The truck gate was at the other end of the front and was wide enough to include the spur track. A magnet crane was located near the loading platform. The entire center of the area was filled with mounds of scrap, some over twenty feet high.

Throughout the questioning both Horowitz and Maclaren treated Brock with amused contempt. Brock ground his fingers into the palms of his hands and managed to keep all expression off his heavy-boned face.

Cantrelle of Homicide arrived just as Maclaren had started to question Brock about the girl. Maclaren stopped and briefed Cantrelle on the information so far and then continued with Brock.

“How well did you know this Miss Stella Galloway?”

“I’ve been out with her several times.”

“Girl friend, eh?”

“Not exactly. A friend. She roomed with Jane Tarrance, that dark girl in the far corner of the office. Miss Galloway was a quiet girl, well-educated. She left here and worked for three years in Washington, D.C. She came back to Louisavale and got her job here a month later. She had been here over a year when I started work. She … she took an interest in me. Her parents are dead. She has a married brother in California and a married sister in Toronto. She has a very small income from her father’s estate. I don’t know of any enemies, or any reason why she should be shot.” Jud Brock had managed to keep his voice low, his tone calm and unhurried.

Cantrelle snickered. “You have bad luck with your women, don’t you, Brock?”

Brock started across the office toward Cantrelle, his chin lowered on his chest, his fists clenched. Maclaren grabbed Brock’s shoulder and spun him around. “Try anything funny, Brock, and I’ll gun-whip you.”

Brock stood perfectly still and tried to force the anger to run out of his big, raw-boned body. At last he shrugged and stepped back against the wall, the anger still with him but changed to a small hot glow deep inside of him.

It was bad because they all knew about it. They all knew the story of Jud Brock. He had put in six years with the Louisavale police, going on the force directly from college. He had advanced rapidly, had been transferred to Homicide, where he worked under Captain Davis. He was looked on as one of the bright young men in the department. Since Louisavale was a city of two hundred thousand, he could plan on merit promotions to the point where he would make a good living and have a responsible position. He was popular and he liked his work and he was good at it.

During his sixth year on the force he became engaged to Caree Ames. She was a slender, enchanting blonde, the only daughter of the city manager.

They were engaged for just two months before they were married. She seemed pleasantly but curiously anxious to be married, as though it would be some sort of haven for her.

Five weeks after the wedding and three weeks after they
had returned from their Bermuda honeymoon, he came home to their new suburban house to find that a man with whom Caree had been intimate before he had ever met her had broken into the house, shot her twice in the skull, and then shot himself. She was dead. The man was still breathing. She had died almost within reach of the telephone. The man lived in a coma for five days before he too died.

He could not get that kitchen scene out of his mind, the two of them on the vinyl pattern he and Caree had selected, both face down in the pattern of a grotesque T, the still-breathing man lying across her dead legs.

Later he found out that quite a few people had known of her affair with the man who killed her. Her father had been anxious for her to be married. The man was demonstrably unstable, potentially dangerous.

For two months after the funeral he had continued his duties, walking through each day like a mechanical man. He had found he could not forget that scene; it was inextricably mixed somehow with some of the bloodier episodes which had happened during his years of police duty before he had met Caree.

During those two months, all the reality of the world around him took place dimly behind the shining screen of memory, and at last he had discovered that alcohol would dim the memories. At first he had been suspended for a month and had managed to get himself in shape to go back to duty at the end of the month. The second suspension was for six months.

After a long period of forgetfulness, he had walked into headquarters, his broken shoes flapping on his feet, his gray face dirty and whiskered, and found out that his suspension had been up for over three weeks and that he had been suspended indefinitely.

The period after that was impossible to remember. There were vague memories of a ward and of people strapping him down while he fought to get away from the incredibly slimy things that were creeping across the floor toward his bed.

One morning he had stopped and looked at the reflection of himself in the plate glass of a store window. He had frowned at it for a long time, trying to see in the watery eyes and hollow cheeks of the reflection something familiar—something of Judson
Brock. There were coins in his pocket, and he waited until the bars opened. He bought a beer and held the first swallow in his mouth, looking across and seeing in the mirror of the back bar the same face that had looked back at him from the store window. Then he had spewed the beer onto the floor, turned, and left.

He had scrubbed his body with harsh yellow soap at the mission and put on the suit and shoes from the Salvation Army. There was no money in the bank. The house had been sold, the money spent.

Two days later, in spite of his weakness, Brasher had hired him, sensing that here was a man whose spirit was so far gone that he would accept without question the long hours and the small pay.

He had gone to work in the yard, learning dully what was expected of him. The heavy sheets and plates cut into his soft flesh through the canvas gloves, and he could work for only an hour at a time before weakness hit him.

Brasher had given him an advance, and with it he rented a cheap room and bought food his stomach could retain.

At the end of a month his eyes were clearer and the moments of weakness came less often. During the second month he began to fill out, and with a thick, stubborn pride in the strength that had come back to him, he punished his body, working at high tempo so that at the end of the day he could fall exhausted into bed, into dreamless sleep.

For a time one of the office men brought his orders into the yard, copies of the material shipped in and the manner in which it should be sorted. Gradually he became conscious of the fact that it was a girl who came out with the orders, and that each time she came she smiled at him and that he liked the way she walked and smiled.

No longer could he completely exhaust his body with the day’s work, and in order to fill his evenings, to keep from remembering, he went to dull movies, sat in his room, and read books, fighting against the face of Caree that threatened to come between his eyes and the printed page.

One night he grew tired of fighting, and when the face came before his eyes he saw that it wasn’t the face of Caree, but the
face of the girl who brought the orders out to him as he worked in the yard.

The next day he asked her clumsily to have dinner with him, and to his relief she acted neither coy nor haughty. She accepted with pleasure, and later, as they sat over coffee and she told him about herself, he realized that at last he had begun to heal.

He found out that she knew all about him from one of the girls in the office whose brother worked in Identification at headquarters. He had tried to tell her one night, and she had stopped him and said that she knew about it and it was probably better if he didn’t talk about it until some day when it would be easier.

She became a habit, and more than a habit. She became as necessary to him as warmth and food and shelter. And yet he was awkward and uncertain with her. He felt as though somehow, in the past, his soul had been dug out of him with a hasty spoon and the bits and fragments of it left inside him were too few to offer to anyone.

And, as he was gradually coming back to life, as each night he managed to be more cheerful, less strained, she walked out of the doorway and moments later the wind plucked the orders out of her limp hand, danced them over the piles of scrap, and plastered them flat against the wire mesh of the fence.

Brock said, “I was standing in this exact spot. Here is the sheet that I had picked up when I saw her coming. I was going to carry it over and lay it on that pile over there, but when I saw her coming, I put it down and waited. John, you’re standing exactly where she was when the slug hit her. She came toward me, her head tilted back with the force of the blow, her right side turning half toward me. She landed on her side on that pile of copper scrap and bounced off. She lay with her cheek against the dirt, her face turned away from the scrap pile.”

“How was she facing when it hit her?”

“I couldn’t be sure. You see, with the junk about here, she didn’t come on a straight line but sort of picked her way through on a zigzag. If I had to guess, I’d say that she was heading almost directly at me, turned maybe a little to her left.”

Maclaren took off his soft felt hat and scratched his thinning
hair. He looked back at the direction from which the slug, and Stella Galloway, had come. He said, “What happened to your head, Jud? That shot was fired either from the back end of the office building, the far end of the shop, or from behind one of the piles of scrap. If you’d been on your toes …”

Brock managed a tight grin. “Since when does a police officer get to call a lush by his first name?”

Maclaren looked angry for a moment and then sighed. “The hell with scrapping, Brock. Did the shot seem far away?”

“Somewhere between maybe sixty and a hundred feet from me. Not much farther. You can’t hit anything with a forty-five much farther than that. I figure that because she was between me and the pistol, or whatever it was, if it had been much over a hundred feet, I’d have seen her lurch before I heard the shot. As it was, the two things happened at the same instant.”

Horowitz said softly, “That makes sense.” He drifted over to Maclaren and whispered in his ear.

Maclaren stared at Brock for a few moments. He said, “Any chance that somebody was gunning for you and hit the young lady by mistake?”

It was a new thought. Brock said, “Could be, but somehow I don’t think so. I haven’t made any enemies lately, and if somebody wanted to knock me off for old stuff, they could have had me while I was … on the town.”

“Maybe somebody didn’t like the girl being friendly with you and wanted to knock you off and hit her instead. She mention any ex-boyfriend?”

“Told me of a few locals who had made passes. One guy works here that she used to know. Fellow named Hodge Oliver.”

“Where was he when Galloway was shot?”

“You’ll have to get the stories on that. I haven’t had a chance to check on anybody.”

Maclaren walked close to him and looked full into his eyes. “Okay, Brock,” he said gently. “I don’t know your angle, but Brasher says you represent the company in this so we’ll deal with you, even if I don’t like it. Just get one thing clear in your mind. When you were on the force you liked to bang off on angles of your own. Don’t try it this time. Don’t get in our way, and do just what we ask you to do. Understand?”

“You need me for anything right now?” Brock asked.

Maclaren shook his head. Brock went to his locker, changed into street clothes, and took a taxi to the hospital.

The intern said, “Galloway? Doing very nicely. Very nicely.”

“Don’t give me customer talk, friend, I represent the company, private investigation. I asked you how she is.”

The intern shrugged. “She’s all chopped to hell inside. The slug hit flat against her shoulder blade and smashed it. The lead split into two hunks. One went up through the top of her right lung and stopped just under the skin. The other hunk sliced down through her lung and belly, perforated her intestines twice, and came out just above the left hip. A hunk of the shoulder blade was driven over against her spinal cord, and we don’t know what damage that did. She just came out of the operating room ten minutes ago. We gave her two transfusions, and she’ll probably need another. Providing there’s no spinal injury, she’s in bad enough shock so that she’s got maybe one chance in ten of lasting through the next twelve hours. There’s a cop in her room with her just in case she comes out of it. I just gave a full report of her condition to Police Headquarters.”