Out of Time Read online

  I’ve just been offered six months’ continuous work,’ I said.

  ‘Good heavens!’ My lady friend was impressed.

  ‘Or maybe a year.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure.’

  She studied the menu. Not that there is much to choose from lunch time at Joe’s Fine Food. ‘I gather from your vagueness that you have declined six months’ continuous work.’

  ‘Nope. I’d take it like a shot.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘He wants me to start full time today. Tomorrow at the latest. But I am committed to another case.’

  She studied me. Knowledgeable enough to ask, as Bates had, whether I could farm it out to someone else, and knowledgeable enough to know the answer was that I wouldn’t.

  ‘I can tell when you are working on something unusual,’ she said. ‘You get this air of sad preoccupation.’

  ‘I’m trying to find a woman named Daisy Wines.’

  ‘What kind of name is that?’

  ‘If I knew, I’d be that much closer.’

  ‘Perhaps one of the French Wines?’

  Mail and a telephone call had arrived while I was out. I went for the white envelope among the brown. List of wedding guests at the Belters’ wedding.

  None of the names meant anything to me.

  Then I sorted through the four new bills before listening to the message on my answering machine.

  If there’d been four calls and one bill I’d have been a lot happier.

  The single message was, ‘Hi. I’m Wendy Winslow and I work for CCC, the Champaign Cable Company based in Champaign, Illinois, the bubbly city. We’ve got an Indianapolis franchise now and when we saw you on TV we wondered if you might be interested in a regular spot as a TV private eye, helping our viewers and making reports on your cases. Can we talk about it?’ She left a telephone number.

  You can get a lot of message on tape if you’re a fast talker.

  I played it again and sat for quite a while wondering if there was any chance at all that this wasn’t some kind of joke.

  At a quarter past four Miller called.

  ‘Why is it,’ he asked, ‘that when I need a boost all you give me is junk to do?’

  ‘Are you telling me something, officer?’

  ‘I’m telling you that I have drawn a blank, blank, blank and blank on adoption, hospital, death and arrest records for a Daisy Wines. I also had the voting register, social security and the IRS check for her.’

  ‘Very good,’ I said. ‘I’m impressed.’

  ‘And I drew more blanks. Seems like you’re looking for a healthy, law-abiding living lady without a sense of civic duty, who has never held a job or earned more than four hundred bucks in any one year. There can’t be many around like that in this city.’

  Which left me depressed by the rather simpler explanation that Daisy Wines had not remained in this city. Not, however, the time to mention this possibility to Miller.

  ‘How old is this broad supposed to be?’ he continued.

  ‘She had a child in 1936.’

  ‘Mmmm. So, she was at least what at the time? Ten?’

  ‘I think we can safely assume she was a little older than that. Why?’

  ‘If she qualified she might have applied for Medicaid or some other age benefit somewhere. Just a thought.’

  He hung up to work on it.

  I called Birth Certificates. My moustached buddy reported that he had been unable to find any record of Daisy Wines’ birth any time since 1885.

  A lot of doors marked ‘maybe’ were closing quickly.

  I called Miller back.

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  ‘Show more enthusiasm,’ I said. ‘It means I’m trying hard for you.’

  ‘Make it quick, Al. I’m planning to throw myself under a train and it leaves Union Station in six minutes.’

  ‘I want to know any arrest records on Samuel H. Garrison, G. Bennett R. Edwards, Mrs G. Bennett R. Edwards, Michael P. Carson and Edward C. Carson.’

  ‘Just who might these distinguished members of the social register be?’

  ‘Past and present owners of a house where Daisy Wines once lived. And can I have these quickly, Jerry? I’m going out to meet one of them tonight and if there’s something to know, I’d like to know it.’

  ‘You’re lucky to live in the computer age,’ he said.

  While the silicon chips were pulsating, I thumbed through the phone book. Of past New York Street owners, only an Edward C. Carson had a current listing.

  Miller called back in less than half an hour.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘More blanks.’

  ‘Some live rounds this time, for what they’re worth.’

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘The interesting ones first, eh? For instance, George Bennett Raymond Edwards. He was shot to death in his own home on April 21st, 1940.’

  ‘Well, well.’

  ‘And the delightful Mrs Edwards was tried for his murder in July 1940, But she got off.’

  ‘You say he was shot in his home. That was the New York Street house?’

  ‘No, no. On North Meridian. I deal only in high-class stuff. I have the address. You want it?’

  Sombrely I said, ‘I want it.’

  After he read it out to me, he said, ‘These were big money people, Al. It’s got all the signs of a big scandal case at the time.’

  ‘It says that in your computer, does it?’

  ‘It says there are newspaper reports in the paper file, that the victim was the Bennett heir, whatever that was, and that he had half a dozen drunk arrests but no convictions. Sounds like playboy time to me. Stands to reason.’

  ‘Can I have a copy of what you’ve got?’

  ‘As long as you don’t show it to anyone, pick it up yourself, and say thank you.’

  ‘Thank you. What else is there?’

  ‘A bad cheque arrest and conviction on Samuel H. Garrison. Michael P. Carson is now deceased. Edward C. Carson is his son. Michael Carson ran a few clubs through the thirties and forties.

  He had some gaming convictions and an assault arrest. The suggestion was that by the end of the forties he was mostly on the wrong side of the fast buck tracks. But there are no arrests after ’43 and he was never a very big hood. He was questioned several times, including for the vice arrests you asked me about, but nothing stuck. He died in ’72. The son is clean apart from three speeding tickets.’

  ‘Is there any indication how long his New York Street place had been operating as a brothel?’

  ‘He said he had rented it out and that it was just a boarding house when he bought it in 1945.’

  ‘Do you have an occupation for the son?’

  ‘Self-employed. But it doesn’t say at what.’

  ‘Jerry, you are a friend. I’m grateful. I’ll do something for you one of these days.’

  ‘How about making it sooner rather than later,’ he said. ‘Considering you made me miss my train.’

  His mournful tone gave me an idea.

  I called Wendy Winslow of the Champaign Cable Company.

  ‘Mr Samson!’ she said. ‘How pleased I am to hear from you! Are you interested in my proposition? I think it might be a real goer!’

  Champaign may or may not be bubbly, but Ms Winslow certainly was.

  ‘Can I ask you a question first?’

  ‘But of course!’

  ‘Is this a gag?’

  She was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t know what kind of friends you have, Mr Samson, but my job is to open this franchise up. It’s a tough market, so I have to offer my potential customers something different and better. Ideas are my strong point. One in ten comes to something. So I try to have a lot of them. I think there might be a nugget in what I suggested when I called you. If you are interested, I want to know.’

  ‘Well, I’m not interested,’ I said.

  ‘Oh. All right. Have a good life, Mr Samson.’

  �
��But, I know someone who might be.’

  Miller left the copies of the arrest records in a sealed envelope at the Central Information desk the police maintain in the ground floor hallway of their wing of the City-County Building. The whole floor is a low security one, with easy public access to the Traffic Fines section, the Chaplain’s Office and Missing Persons. There are elevators to the higher floors where they deal with the lower crimes, and a passageway to the City-County Tower and points administrative. The press room, with its ten tiny individual offices, is on the ground floor too.

  The civilian on Information was suffering from something uncomfortable. He demanded identification before he would let me have Miller’s envelope. I showed him my library card.

  I took the files out for a sandwich and a cup of coffee at my mother’s diner. It was a social visit, so I read the files through only once.

  She closed up at eight and I helped to wash the day’s last dishes.

  I made light conversation not touching on the state of my employment. She talked mostly about her faraway granddaughter and I left at eight-forty a sadder man.

  Rovers Lounge was quiet and restful at nine except for the clap of a go-go dancer’s tassle-tipped bosoms as they applauded themselves in time with muted music.

  It was not a large place but there were tables as well as booths, a dance floor, a genuine coat check at the entrance and a couple of beefy gentlemen propping up walls like pugilistic statuary. Apart from the terpsichorean, I felt I’d walked into the past.

  I made four men around a table and one couple in a booth to be the only paying trade. It seemed thin even for a Wednesday. But maybe it was the sort of place one went to after someplace else.

  The sole barman sat on a stool reading a comic, but by the time my elbow hit a beer mat on the bar he was standing at attention in front of me.

  I asked for Charlie.

  ‘He’s in the back. You know your way? First door past the John, on the left.’

  I knocked, heard a muffled sound that I took for encouragement, and went in.

  I faced a huge heavy man whose pouchy face and features were so menacing that I checked to make sure I had an unobstructed way back to the open door. He glanced up from thumbing through a stack of invoices and said, ‘Hang on.’

  I stood uneasily and watched him work. He sat at a wooden desk which was in the centre of a room whose walls were totally covered with framed autographed photographs of people shaking hands, turning to smile or lifting their cups to toast the lens.

  Finally the man finished his work.

  ‘Charlie Carson. I don’t know you, do I?’

  ‘No. There might have been a message that I was coming though. I called your home number and talked to a woman who said you’d be here tonight.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said appraisingly. His eyes and manners were as gentle as his visage was fierce. ‘The singer.’ He cocked his head in the manner of an experienced impresario. ‘You must know how rough times are for singers who aren’t sexy.’

  ‘You haven’t heard my voice,’ I said.

  He looked at me patiently.

  I put him out of his misery. ‘I’m not a singer.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Gladys told me but I forgot. I knew you was or you wasn’t.’

  I showed him my I.D.

  He smiled a funny smile which I took for a ‘you-look-the-part-but-I-didn’t-believe-they-made-them-like-that-in-real-life’ reaction.

  ‘I’m trying to locate a woman. I have almost no lead on her and chances are that you won’t be able to help either. The one lead I do have concerns a property you own.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Which one is that?’

  ‘A house on New York Street.’

  He nodded and puffed out his cheeks for a moment. ‘My slum,’ he said.

  ‘The woman lived there, years and years ago. In 1936 for sure but I don’t know for how long before or after. I know you’ve only owned the place for ten or twelve years, but your father had it before you, didn’t he?’

  The lips drew slightly tighter. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Is there any chance you could put me on to someone who might know about a woman who lived there in the thirties?’

  ‘Pop didn’t own the place till after the war,’ Carson said cautiously. ‘Do you know anything about the property?’

  ‘I knew there were vice arrests there during your father’s proprietorship.’

  Carson just nodded. It would have been an opportunity to say that his father had had nothing to do with that sort of thing.

  ‘You might, for instance, be able to tell me whether your father bought the house as a going concern,’ I said.

  ‘Naw. It was just a rooming house then. Not that I was involved in it. Neither when he bought it, because I was a kid, or later, because I don’t play that way. But the old guy kept records and when he pegged out, I went through them all. Right from his own club days. He ran this place from 1931, you know, this very place. Kind of got swallowed up in the war. People spent more time working, in the defence plants and that, instead of partying their troubles away in clubs.’ He gestured to the pictures around the wall. ‘Most of these were his. Some surprising people have come out here, you know. Surprising who ends up in Indianapolis sometimes.’

  I nodded, wondering whether to try to pull him back to my question, Wondering whether there was any answer worth pulling back to.

  But Carson did it himself.

  ‘Only other thing I know about that house was what he paid for it. He got it cheap.’

  ‘What about records of any sitting tenants? I’m looking for anyone who might have been around when the woman I’m looking for was there.’

  ‘I can check the rent books.’

  ‘You have them?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. A man’s whole life is in things like that, ain’t it? I can’t throw that kind of stuff away.’

  ‘I would be grateful. It is even possible that the woman I’m looking for was still there in 1945 herself. So if you could keep an eye out for the name, Daisy Wines, I’d appreciate it.’

  He looked at me with a questioning frown. ‘What was that name?’

  ‘Daisy Wines. Do you know it?’

  ‘I never heard the actual name,’ he said.

  Then he didn’t say anything.

  ‘But you reacted when I said it. What’s that about?’

  Carson leaned back. ‘Well, when Pop ran this club here, he used to hire singers, you know?’

  I glanced in the direction of his bar, thinking of the dancer who could hardly have been more mis-named as topless.

  He knew what I was thinking. ‘Yeah. Well, I hear sometimes today ain’t that much different from those days, you know?’

  ‘You were going to say something.’

  ‘One of the things he did was give a lot of young kids breaks. This was while it was all still going pretty good for him. And maybe it was just by way of getting cheap acts, but he used to take these kids and let them sing or whatever and he used to give them stage names.’

  I was listening attentively.

  ‘And thing is, he always used to name them in connection with booze. Maybe to make people think drink? I don’t know but it was part of the gimmick. I don’t remember a Daisy Wines, but Ginny Tonic I remember, and Brandy Bottle, ‘cause they both did pretty good for themselves. Brandy was still on the circuit until about five years ago. Never sang again here, but I was going to bring her back, only she died. There was a lot of them went through that didn’t make it. Pink Lady was another one.’

  ‘Could you go through your records to see if there was a Daisy Wines?’

  ‘Sure, sure. Glad to. Only the stuff is at home, not here. So it ain’t going to be till, maybe, late afternoon tomorrow.’

  ‘I would be very grateful,’ I said with sincerity. Fearsome appearance notwithstanding, people didn’t come more cooperative.

  I ordered a drink before I left the Rovers. Out of my gratitude. But before I finished it I was aware that
while when I’d come in I’d had a name for Paula Belter’s mother, I was leaving not even sure I had that.

  A term of six months’ employment seemed very far away.

  Chapter Nine

  While I was out Douglas Belter had left a message to call him in the morning before eight-thirty, so I obliged by setting my alarm clock.

  Being employed is corrupting. I tried to impress him by calling at ten past eight.

  ‘I was rather expecting to hear from you last night,’ he said.

  ‘We didn’t talk about how you wanted my reports. What suits you?’

  ‘More often rather than less. Paula is pretty agitated about all this, and waiting uncertainly is a living death.’

  Before I could respond he said, ‘But I don’t want you to call me at the office and would want to be here if you talked to Paula.’

  ‘Sounds like mornings, evenings and weekends in some combination.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve pursued a number of lines,’ I said, ‘but I don’t have substantive news yet. It is possible there may be one or two things of interest by the end of today.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you want me to call you tonight, then?’

  He thought. ‘Maybe you could come around,’ he said. ‘I feel it might be better to have you talk to Paula face to face.’

  ‘I’ll come tonight. About eight, unless I call to change the time.’

  ‘Fine.’

  There just hadn’t been a place in the conversation for me to ask how he would react to my giving the case over to someone else.

  I ate breakfast, read the newspaper and then drove through the light morning rain to North Meridian Street.

  The building which had formerly housed two of the owners of the New York Street house could not have been a greater contrast to it. A vast two floor brick structure evenly balanced, side to side, behind the challenging tower which held the front door, it was immaculately maintained. And it was fronted by a design piece of flower beds and leafless shrubs ornately trimmed into geometric shapes. The centre of the area, an oval fishpond empty except for a small puddle of rainwater, stared at me like a Buddhaic eye. Plinths awaiting summer busts or decorative pots stood at the bottom of a ripple of stairs which led from the pond towards a flagpole, bare of salute, near the road. The whole place seemed to be in storage, waiting for warmer times.