Waiting for the Cops in the Bar Across the Street
“They’re running a chop shop.” I said more to myself than to anyone else. “Right out of Hank Kellerman’s place, they’re chopping up stolen cars to sell the parts.” Walt, David, Scofield, and I stood in a row at the window of the nameless tavern. We looked out of the sun-streaked glass to watch the hive of activity across the street at H&H Auto. The wide garage door was up to its fullest extent while four men within the warehouse-sized repair facility worked to disassemble two cars which were parked next to each other.
By the time we arrived at our vantage point, the crew inside the repair shop already had the fenders removed from both vehicles as well as the hoods and some of the glass. Two men, including Ted, were working to connect an overhead hoist to the engine of one of the cars, presumably to remove it. One other man worked to strip the interior of the opposite car. Smug Stanley moved between the two vehicles to supervise the process and to give instruction to the men.
Behind us, Mike, the regular barman at the tavern, and presumably the owner, yawned great, wet-sounding walrus yawns while he polished glasses. Harrison Stiles, the other investigator, sat at the bar to drink his breakfast from a tankard mug and a rocks glass. The man had turned out to be a sloppy-fat, bleary-eyed, barely functioning alcoholic who looked like he’d slept in his clothes for several successive nights.
Immediately after the four of us arrived at the tavern, I’d pulled Scofield into a quiet corner to ask him about his investigator.
“He’s as reliable as they come.” Scofield had sworn with his right hand in the air like he was taking an oath. “I know all about his appearance but believe me when I tell you that Mister Stiles has never let me down. He doesn’t drink when he is working. Unfortunately for him, when he is not working, drinking is the only thing he does. I despise watching the poor man destroy himself, but he has refused my help as well as that of everyone else. I employ him in nearly full-time capacity as an investigator for the public defender’s office. I believe that every man has a right to make a living, no matter his habits.”
“What’s his problem?” I asked.
Scofield moved to stand next to me so we could both look toward the sloping shoulders and sagging girth of the man we spoke of. “He’s sad.” Scofield announced. “He’s a miserable, pathetic, sad man. He drinks because he would rather not feel his sadness. He is a homosexual and he hates his homosexuality. My heart breaks for that poor creature. All I can do is hold my hand out to him, as I have held it out for the last eight years. It is up to him to grasp my hand. I have not given up hope, but the more time which goes by while he continues to live the way he has, the less likely he is to accept my offer.”
I was struck by the idea that Scofield seemed to surround himself with queers. I wondered how he found them. I had a passing concern that Scofield would make himself a target with a group of queers around him. As soon as the thought entered my head, I realized Scofield was already a target. The memory of the attorney’s cramped little office flashed in my mind. Scofield was stuffed in a corner at the end of a service corridor, and he apparently didn’t give a damn. My opinion of the man increased with my realization.
Scofield lifted his sharp, searching eyes toward mine. “Surely you have known people like him.”
I nodded and thought of Charlie. My stomach crawled as my mind darted between three images. The first memory was Charlie as I knew him at Mitch’s back in 1929, beauty personified with his crooked smile and his hard, sculpted body. The next memory was how I’d rediscovered him when I was working for Bea Arlott on the case of her brother’s murder in 1944. Charlie was a bartender in a seedy queer hangout. He looked and presumably lived much like Harrison Stiles. The final image was of Charlie from a few years later, when I was called to identify his bloated, jaundiced corpse.
I received the telephone call during a particularly busy evening shift in the kitchen of Walt’s Special. Julie, the hostess, came to get me when the call came through. The detective on the line said they had a dead man who needed to be identified. He asked if I could come right away. I’d gone as I was asked to go, to the address of a filthy rooming house which stood opposite of an automobile wrecking yard. Inside a dimly lit room which stunk of urine and sour vomit, I was shown to a yellow, waxy-looking corpse and asked if I knew the man who had once lived within it.
“Charlie…Charlie Drake.” I said to the detective once I could remember the last name which I knew but had never used. “Why call me?” I asked out of curiosity. “Charlie was a friend, but that was years ago. We didn’t stay in touch. Why call me?”
The detective showed me an old business card from when I was a private eye. The card was yellowed with age, but otherwise clean and well-preserved. ‘Law Edwards, Private and Confidential Investigations,’ it said in block-face typeset on a white background. My old Moyamensing telephone number was printed at the bottom in a less-urgent script. On the back, written in an unsteady hand with a dull pencil, was the telephone number of Walt’s Special.
“This was in his nightstand.” The detective explained. “He didn’t have a current ID or a book of numbers. He kept business cards in his Bible. Yours was the only one with a handwritten number on it. I guessed that meant you were friends.”
“We were.” I agreed. “Long ago we could have been more, but Charlie never wanted things that way.”
The detective didn’t know what I meant by ‘more,’ and I didn’t offer to explain. I signed the report to identify the body and left. I went back to the restaurant and started to prep another tray of the side dish for that evening, potatoes au gratin. Soon my work swam before my eyes like I’d been dicing onions instead of peeling potatoes.
Walt saw my tears and escorted me into the alley behind the restaurant. “Tell me what’s wrong.” He insisted.
I broke down in a fit of grieving misery and howled at the man who wasn’t yet my husband. Through wracking sobs, I told of poor dead Charlie. I told Walt who he’d been and how he died. I wept over the bitter unfairness of life and the desperate sadness I felt when I imagined my old friend as he took his last miserable breath alone in that filthy, stinking room.
“Please,” I begged Walt, “let me claim the body. I didn’t do anything for Charlie when he was alive. I don’t know what I could have done. Let me do something for him now. Let me give him a decent burial instead of letting the city bury him in their potter’s field. Please!”
Walt agreed to let me look into the matter, which I did the next day. Sadly, as much as I wanted to do something for Charlie, and as much as Walt wanted to help me, in the end we simply couldn’t afford the cost. Walt’s Special hadn’t been open for very long and there wasn’t any money to spare. We had no choice but to let the city bury Charlie.
The city put him with the rest of the homeless, the lonely, and the misfits, in a grave dug from land which had been reclaimed from a stagnant waterfront marsh. As his headstone, the gravedigger drove a wooden stake with a number painted on it instead of a name. No one mourned him. No one cared.
I wept again on the day the city chucked Charlie in the ground. It was a Monday, and Walt’s Special was closed. Walt and I had been taking inventory of the dry goods. I broke down in tears half-way through. Walt held me as I wept over Charlie and over the cruelty of life. “Is that all there is?” I asked Walt. “You’re born and you live a life of struggle and pain, then you die? Doesn’t anything matter?”
Walt, with his steady, sensible nature, told me his philosophy on life. “What matters are the lives you touch as you live. Charlie ended the way he did because, from what you’ve told me, he never let anyone get close to him. You and I have each other. I love you and you matter to me. You love me and I matter to you. Neither of us will die alone, because whomever goes first, they will take the love of the other with them. Whomever dies last, will go with the knowledge that the other is waiting for him in the hereafter. That’s the point. Life doesn’t matter. Love matters.”
Walt’s words soothed the sadness which threatened to overwhelm me. I cried myself out into his shirtfront and dried my eyes on the bottom of his apron. When I had myself under control, Walt made a promise to me. “I called the office of grave registration this morning. The man there told me they’ll release Charlie’s body to us anytime we want as long as we can show we have a new grave to receive it, and we can pay to exhume it. Once we make a little money, we’ll see that Charlie gets laid to rest the right way.”
True to his word, two years later, when we could afford the cost, we paid to have Charlie exhumed from the potter’s field. We shipped his body up to Reading and had it reinterred in the churchyard of the same Episcopal Church which Walt had attended in his youth. The same broad-minded priest who had married us the year before said a requiem mass for Charlie’s soul. We laid flowers on the grave and had a simple granite monument erected.
I don’t know if what we did brought any peace to Charlie’s soul, but it did something for mine. I felt better in the knowledge that Charlie could rest under carefully-tended green grass in the shadow of an ancient stone church. I liked that the music of the pipe organ would sound over the churchyard on Sundays. I took comfort in the idea that the jangle of the church bells would call the faithful to worship, just like the horn of Gabriel would one day call all believers to rise from their graves to live forever in the service of the Lord.
“We should telephone for the police.” Scofield said.
“What?” I asked as the lawyer’s words snatched me from my memories.
“We should telephone for the police.” Scofield said a second time. “Mister Stiles said the men across the street are disassembling stolen cars to sell the parts. This is what we wanted, to have both Stanley and Theodore taken into custody. We need to act before they finish their work and depart. If we miss this opportunity, we don’t know when we might have another.”
I thought Scofield’s idea was a good one, but I wanted to make one telephone call first, out of courtesy. I crossed the barroom to ask Mike the barman if he knew how to reach Hank Kellerman at home. Mike took a black desk phone from behind the bar and dialed it. He yawned a sucking, walrus yawn into the receiver as he waited for an answer. The line connected and Mike spoke into it.
“Hank, this is Mike. Party here wants a word.” Mike handed the receiver to me.
“Hank, Law Edwards.” I said to introduce myself. “Do you know that Stan is using your place today?”
“Yeah,” Hank Kellerman’s big voice agreed, “he uses it every weekend. I take a little out of his pay to cover the electric he burns up. Him and his racing friends work on their cars.”
“That’s not all they’re doing.” I announced. “They’re chopping cars, right out in the open.”
Hank Kellerman heaved a deep, weary sigh into the telephone. The sound came over the wire like airy static. “Yeah,” Kellerman agreed, “I guess I knew that too. What about it?”
“I’m going to call the cops on them.” I explained. “I wanted you to know. I don’t want to cause trouble for you, Hank, but I’ve got to do it to help Larry.”
“I’ll be right there. Don’t do anything until I get there.” Kellerman said and hung up in my ear.
I gave the receiver back to Mike, who returned it to the top of the telephone behind the bar. “He’s coming over.” I announced to the group. “He asked us not do anything until he gets here.”
Scofield objected to the idea of waiting. “We do not have time to dawdle around. We need to act!” He insisted. I was surprised at the sudden sense of urgency from the man who had previously acted like we had all the time in the world. Scofield explained his pressing manner. “When Harrison said they were disassembling cars, I expected they’d be busy for hours. I had no idea that something as complex as an automobile could be reduced to its component parts in a matter of minutes. We do not have the time.”
I agreed that we needed to act soon, but I thought it only right to wait for Kellerman. The garage belonged to him after all.
David didn’t want to wait. He nodded vehemently to Scofield’s speech like he agreed with the lawyer. I was about to make a plea for time when all of us heard a creaky door open and slam somewhere at the back of the tavern. Barely a second later, Hank Kellerman strode into the barroom from a door at the back marked ‘Private.’ He wore a pair of old house pants and a plain white t-shirt. His hair was mussed like he hadn’t cleaned up yet.
Mike eyed a glass he’d been polishing. “Hank lives on the other side of the alley.” He muttered to explain how the big man had managed to appear barely a minute after he’d hung up the telephone.
Kellerman ignored everyone else in the barroom and came straight up to me. “What’s it all about?” He asked.
As a way to answer his question, I pointed through the front window of the bar toward where the team of men were using the overhead chain-hoist to lift the engine from one of the cars. The man who pulled the chain to operate the hoist had bright red hair combed up high on his head. Kellerman gasped and exclaimed what the rest of us already knew. “THAT’S TED!”
* * * *
Once Hank Kellerman saw that Ted was alive, he agreed to let us call the police. Scofield handled the call from Mike-the-bartender’s telephone. He returned to the window where Kellerman and I stood to announce the results of his conversation. “They’ll be along in twenty minutes or so.”
“Twenty minutes!” I complained. “What’s the hold up?”
Scofield explained. “There’s some trouble at the waterfront that’s taking a lot of men to handle. The desk sergeant wouldn’t say anything more.”
Walt spoke with reason and calm, like he usually did. “I guess we wait.” He said.
While we waited, I brought Kellerman up to speed on what David and I had discovered the night before and what we’d worked out since. Kellerman shook his head at the scene across the street in the shop he owned. “I can’t fucking believe it.” He said bitterly. “Ted and Stan, that smug son of a bitch, were just gonna let poor Larry go to the chair so they could chop cars in my shop.”
Kellerman hung his head like a wounded bull who could no longer support the weight of it. He turned his fat body to face David so he could apologize. “I’m sorry, Mister Ploughman.” He said. “I could have saved everyone a lot of trouble if I hadn’t been such a bleeding-hearted sap. I should have called the fucking cops the day Mike told me about what Stan was doing.”
David shook his head even though Kellerman couldn’t see him do it. I guessed David didn’t want an apology. He just wanted to understand why Kellerman said what he had. I wanted to know as well, so I asked. “Why didn’t you?”
Kellerman lifted his head slowly, like it was still too heavy for his neck. He looked out the window and jammed his hands in his pockets. He felt around and swore. “Damn! Forgot my tobacco AND my pipe.”
I automatically reached into my pocket for my cigarettes to offer one to Kellerman, but I drew my hand back with nothing in it. I’d forgotten I hadn’t put a pack of cigarettes in my pocket that morning. I’d wanted to in case the nicotine cravings got too bad, but I decided to tough it out. Since the mystery of the case had started to unravel like a poorly woven sweater, I hadn’t thought much about a smoke.
Mike the barman filled the need which I could not. He took a fresh pack of Trafalgar Square Kings from the display case on the bar and peeled the cellophane. He coaxed the first cigarette from the green paper pack and offered it up. Kellerman accepted with a grateful nod and lit up. He sighed the first draw of smoke from his lungs and shook his head at the glass again. “Mike called me a while ago, months. I forget exactly when. He told me he thought Stan was chopping cars. I didn’t want to hear it. I guess I just…I didn’t want to call the cops on a young guy.”
Kellerman drew on his cigarette and blew the smoke at the window. The smoke hit the glass and flattened out as it dissipated into the air. “I used to think I knew how everyone should live.” He said. “I always told my son how he should live. Henry was a good boy. He always did as I said. When the Japs bombed Pearl in ’41, I told my boy he should join up and fight. He did as I said. Now, when I want to see him, I have to go to fucking Belgium and talk to the marble stone on top of his grave. I was wrong with my boy. Now I find I was wrong with Stan. I guess I’m wrong all around.”
Kellerman stuck his cigarette in his mouth and moved away from the window. He sat at the bar and propped himself on his elbows. He asked Mike for a whiskey and threw it back when it was served. Kellerman didn’t ask for another. Mike served another shot and a beer to Harrison Stiles, then went back to polishing glasses.
David seemed at a loss for something to do while we waited for the police. He fidgeted around. He looked out the window, then he looked to me like he wanted me to tell him what to do. I didn’t have any advice for him. Finally, David went to sit with Hank Kellerman. He leaned close to the sad man and offered what comfort he could.
“It’s hard to know what’s right when you’re a father.” David said in a low, confidential voice. His voice reached my ear, because even when David spoke quietly, his big voice carried. He added to his thoughts for Kellerman to consider. “My son is in prison because I made the wrong choice. Thank you for helping me to fix my mistake.”
Hank Kellerman nodded to his empty glass. He didn’t say a word. I got the impression that the big man was deep inside his own hell. I knew he would have to find his own way out of it, so I left him to it. I went back to the window to watch the action across the street. Walt stood with me on one side, while Scofield moved to the other.
As we watched, Ted and the other man moved the overhead hoist to remove the engine from the other car. I didn’t see the engine from the first car anywhere and wondered where it had gone. As I wondered, I realized that none of the parts from either of the vehicles were visible. The fenders and glass and the interior pieces were nowhere in sight. I squinted through the sun glare to try to see where the parts had gone.
Walt was the one who discovered what I hadn’t. He pointed through the glass. “Is that a grocery truck?” He asked.
I moved to the edge of the window and looked where Walt pointed. Deep inside the huge H&H Auto shop was a straight truck I hadn’t noticed. It had an open back and wooden stakes for sides. The back of the truck was crammed with parts from at least two cars. Walt referred to the truck as a ‘grocery truck’ because the dealer who delivered dry goods to Walt’s Special used the same type of truck.
“Now we know how they plan to transport the parts.” I observed. “I wonder what they’re going to do with what’s left of the cars.”
As if to answer my question, Smug Stanley, who I hadn’t noticed was absent from the activity in the shop, drove up to the garage door in an ancient tow truck with a hand-cranked boom on the back. I assumed the truck had been parked in the alley behind the shop and Stan went to get it as the men finished with the cars.
Stan backed the truck into the shop and stayed in the driver’s seat to light a cigarette. One of the men who had been stripping the vehicles of their interiors jogged to the back of the tow truck to hook up the car which had been the first to surrender its engine.
Scofield commented on the presence of the tow truck. “This isn’t good.” He observed. “If we can take the police at their word, they are still more than fifteen minutes away. Both of the cars across the street seem to be thoroughly devoid of usable parts. I suspect the team is getting ready to depart. If they leave before the police arrive, we don’t know when we will have another opportunity to see they are arrested. What shall we do?”
“What shall we do?” I said to parrot Scofield’s question. I stuck my hand into my inner pocket and drew out Larry’s quarter. It came out tails up, so I tossed it in the air and caught it in my palm until it showed heads. I had to toss it three times to get it to come up the way I wanted it to. I stowed the coin away and used the same hand to check that my gun was in place.
I knew the gun was still where I’d put it because I could feel it against my ribs, but I checked it anyway. I drew it from its holster and broke the cylinder from the frame to inspect the load. There were six chambers and five cartridges. I rotated the cylinder to put the empty chamber under the hammer and snapped it back in place. My burned left palm smarted when I used it to close the cylinder, but it didn’t hurt as bad as it had the night before. I still swore mildly over the pain. “Fuck.” I muttered.
Walt watched my preparations with alarm. “What are you going to do?” He asked.
I put the gun away under my jacket and looked into my husband’s eyes. “I’m going across the street. I’m going to do whatever I have to. We have this opportunity and I’m not going to see it wasted. I’m going to keep those four men in the garage until the cops get here.”
Walt’s face creased with worry. I could tell he was going to try to argue me out of doing what I knew I had to do. I also knew that I wasn’t going to listen to him. Before Walt could utter a word, Hank Kellerman stood from his place at the bar and pledged his help. “I’m going with you. That’s my place over there and some of this is my fault. I’ve got to make it right.”
Kellerman held a hand out toward Mike the bartender. “Give me the old bulldog you keep under the register.” Kellerman said.
Mike took a black .45 revolver from under the bar and handed it to Kellerman, butt first. The gun had a medium length barrel and a checked grip. Kellerman accepted the weapon and hefted it to get the feel of the balance. The way he handled the gun made me think he was familiar with them. As a business owner in a rundown part of town, I expected he was used to dealing with firearms.
Mike issued a warning. “She’s loaded all the way around, so don’t go dropping it.”
Kellerman hung the gun in the right pocket of his house pants. When he took his hand from the weapon, he looked at it to see a smear of oil on his palm. He wiped the oil across the front of his shirt and stood ready.
I wasn’t sure I wanted Kellerman with me across the street, but I acknowledged that I needed help. One man with a gun could hold one man, maybe two. He couldn’t hold four. Kellerman would help me even the odds a little. I accepted his help because I didn’t see another choice.
David stood next. He was less sure of himself than Kellerman, but he bucked up his courage quickly. “I’m going too. I’m not going to let you risk your life without me. It’s my fault this happened. I’ve got to help.”
“How can you help?” I asked my friend. “You’re unarmed.”
Hank Kellerman answered my question for all of us. He snapped the fingers of his right hand and held it out toward Mike again. The honest bartender moved down the bar and drew a double-barrel sawed-off shotgun from under the counter. He offered it to David.
David accepted the short-barreled gun by its battered wooden stock. He breached it to check the shells and found the gun loaded in both barrels. David cocked both hammers while the gun was still open and pulled the triggers to check the action. Both hammers snapped forward with a crack like ice breaking in a hot drink. Apparently satisfied, David closed the weapon and held it at his right side with the barrel pointed toward the floor. He asked one question of Mike the bartender and apparent gun enthusiast. “Buck shot or bird shot?”
“Bird shot.” Mike said dryly. “Will cut a man in half point blank. Any farther than that, all it’ll do is piss him off.”
“Thanks.” David said to Mike. He looked toward me. “Ready when you are, Law.”
I was tempted to ask David if he was certain he could handle a showdown like the one we were about to have. I had some concern that of the three of us, I was the only one prepared to shoot to kill. I knew David wasn’t, nor did I want him to have to be. Hank Kellerman was a self-described bleeding-heart. He hadn’t called the cops or even confronted Stan when he knew Stan was chopping cars in his shop. I didn’t think Kellerman could point a gun at a young man, someone who would make him think of his dead son, and pull the trigger. Similarly to the way I felt about David, I hoped Kellerman wouldn’t have to.
Harrison Stiles glanced up from his second breakfast beer. He drew on what was left of a nub of a cigarette and blew the smoke out toward the ceiling. “You need me?” He asked and patted the right breast of his jacket with his left hand. “I’m heeled.” He said to let me know he had a gun in a shoulder holster under his coat.
‘Left-handed.’ I thought of Stiles. ‘Queer and left-handed. Poor bastard. It would be funny if it wasn’t so damn sad.’
I asked Scofield what he thought about letting his man help us. Scofield gave his permission. “Harrison is an independent contractor. His involvement will not necessarily indicate meddling on the part of the district attorney’s office. If his involvement becomes a matter of record, you will need to testify that Harrison was here as your agent and not mine.”
David piped up before I had a chance to say anything. “I’ll hire him!” David exclaimed to all of us. He directed his next words to the alcoholic investigator. “Whatever they pay you, I’ll double it.”
Harrison dropped his cigarette in the ashtray on the bar and left it to smoke. He downed his shot of whiskey and stood ready to help.
I moved over near Harrison to address myself directly to his slack expression. “Can you manage it?” I asked.
Harrison held his left hand out in front of his body. He did it to show his hand was steady. The demonstration didn’t prove anything to me. “That just means you don’t have the shakes. It doesn’t mean you’re fit to help.”
Harrison closed his bloodshot eyes in a slow blink. When he opened them, he gave me one more demonstration. He let his steady left hand disappear inside the right side of his jacket and reappear with an automatic pistol in it. He pointed the gun to his right and brought the side of the barrel up under my chin until I felt the top of the slide on my skin. Harrison’s hand moved so quickly, the action was a blur. I was impressed.
He holstered the weapon and straightened his jacket. “I can do it drunk or sober and I don’t scare easy. Actually, I don’t scare at all because I don’t give a shit…not about anything. You want my help or not?”
“Yes, please.” I said.
With the matter of Harrison’s participation settled, I turned to lead the way across the street and almost ran smack into the front of my husband. He stood between me and the door. “I’m going with you.” Walt insisted.
My stomach lurched harder than it had all morning when I heard my husband’s assertion. “You’re not going anywhere.” I insisted back. “You’re unarmed and even if you weren’t, you’ve never pointed a gun at a man in your life. I can’t do my job if I’m worried about you. Stay here with Scobie and Mike and be ready to tell what you saw when the cops get here.”
Walt was unconvinced. He refused to listen to reason. “I’m going.” He said grimly.
I leaned toward him on my hips. “You’re not.”
Walt’s emotions burst forth in a torrent of pleading words. “What am I supposed to do?” He demanded. “Just stand here and watch you risk your life. What if something happens? What if you get shot? I won’t be able to do anything from here.”
I pointed at the window and blasted Walt with frustration over his intractability. “You won’t be able to do anything out there either!” I shouted. “I used to do this shit for a living! I still know how. Get outta my fucking way and let me do my job!”
“YOU PROMISED TO BE MORE CAREFUL!” Walt reminded me at the top of his voice.
The hollow sound of a roaring engine interrupted my argument with Walt. Every eye in the bar was drawn to the noise. We looked out the front window to see that Stan was revving the engine of the tow truck inside the garage. Smoke belched from the tailpipe to cloud the interior of the space with a bluish pall that looked like early morning ground mist. Stan beat the steering wheel with an impatient fist. He tossed his cigarette from the window and shouted after it. We couldn’t hear what he said, but I assumed he was urging his co-criminals to hurry.
“Goddamnit.” I said to everyone and no one. “We’re out of time.” I sidestepped Walt and hurried to the door. “Do whatever the fuck you want.” I called over my shoulder as I jerked the door open and strode through it.
