The World's Finest Mystery Part 41

The line went fuzzy, and Monk stretched and scratched himself like a domesticated bear. The mowers were still going, but their engines were like a motorized melody to his overtired body. He lay still, curled up under the covers again. The world went about its business outside the bedroom, and no doubt bad actors were out there doing bad, bad things. And apparently one of them was a reprobate scarfing down his ill-gotten doughnuts. And he was probably washing down Monk's meager profit margins from the shop with cups of exquisite coffee.

The answers, he reminded himself, would have to wait until he joined the waking again. Although, he advised himself, a cup of coffee would be just the right nectar of nourishment right now. And for him, he could drink the stuff day or night and go right to sleep. He got up and traipsed into the kitchen. Kodama had left the coffeemaker on, and he poured a cup. He walked back to the bedroom carrying the morning L.A. Times.

Propped against the headboard, he leafed through the paper. In the Calendar section he saw a piece about a new film version being made from Ferguson Cooper's last book, Platinum Jade. This novel was the final in the series of sardonic and surreal tales Cooper had written about two South Side Chicago cops called Tombstone Graves and Hammerhead Smith. Cooper, a black writer who would later reinvent himself with "mainstream" novels about race and cla.s.s in the seventies and early eighties, would subsequently disavow the hard-boiled books as merely ways to meet the rent while living in Kenya and Cuba.

But toward the end of his life, Cooper admitted he'd had a lot of fun writing about Graves and Smith, and thus published Platinum Jade in 1983. The book was both running commentary on the coopting of the civil rights movement, women's lib and the Reagan-led backlash against social safety nets, as well as a pretty solid mystery. Monk sipped some coffee and put the paper and cup aside. He stretched and soon his head sagged against the headboard, blissfully sleepy.

"Carson is a carpenter. Honest Abe they call him. Ain't that sweet?" Hammerhead Smith snickered in his ba.s.so profundo voice and tossed aside the bio and photo of the man printed on card stock. He pushed the aged bowler back on his large head, crossing his size-seventeen Stacy Adams on the desk where he'd propped them up. His hand, as large as a car engine's fan, held up the next Criminal Investigations Division print off the desk.

"Peter Worthman, longtime labor organizer and general rabble-rouser," Smith's partner, Tombstone Graves, illuminated upon eyeballing the photo. "He's operated in some interesting circles over the years: backroom deal making with pols, getting thousands of workers to strike and stay united on the picket line, and been married to more brainy, good-looking women than I can shake your d.i.c.k at."

"You the one the chicks go for, man," Smith said, not without a touch of jealousy. "Here I am, all six feet eight big dark burnished inches of me, and with thumbs that are, shall we say, longish." He winked, chomping on the smoldering cigar in his mouth. "But no, you with your Savile Row and St. Laurent suits, alligator and ostrich skin ankle boots..."

The dig was coming, but Graves didn't mind, so much now anyway. It was his gruff partner's way of saying he liked him. "But to top it all off" -Smith flapped the file card in the air- "that bullet-scarred mug of yours seems to actually turn the ladies on. They love to feel your scars, Je-sus."

"Back to the case," Graves said, hiding his ego boost. "Worthman can be ruthless, so we can't rule him out."

Smith unlimbered his brogans from the table and straightened in his chair. "He's no pie-card union fat cat sitting on his can collecting his worker's cut from their dues check-offs,"

"Spoken like the son of a city hall clerk that you are," Graves said, adjusting his gold chain-mail cuff link.

"My point, fashion plate, is why in the h.e.l.l would Worthman- h.e.l.l, any of these supposed suspects- be involved in the theft of sixty-seven a.s.sorted doughnuts? In fact, why the h.e.l.l did the Captain a.s.sign this goofball penny-ante misdemeanor to us anyway?"

"Because there's more to it than what's apparent, Sergeant." The new voice belonged to Captain Mitchum. Phones rang, perps and cops bustled and argued, yet there was a quality to his baritone that cut through the inst.i.tutional din. He was standing near their desks, his lidded eyes at once giving nothing away yet taking in everything. He shoved his hands in the box-style coat he always favored. His barrel chest strained against the coat's b.u.t.tons.

"Word just hit the streets that the shop owner where those doughnuts were swiped is offering sixty-seven grand for their return."

"A thousand dollars a doughnut?" Graves asked rhetorically, gazing at his partner.

"It would seem," Mitchum confirmed. "Could be there's more missing than icing and jelly."

"Like something hidden in the doughnuts." Smith shoved the bowler even farther back on his broad forehead.

"And, ah" -Mitchum moved the file cards around on the desk- "don't forget that our good counselor Oh also legally goes by the name Kodama." He tapped the woman's card for emphasis.

Smith was staring at the photos, then suddenly clapped his mammoth hands together. "And she defended Willie Brant."

"How do you know that?" Graves asked.

"I was down at the courthouse last week on that Veese matter. So I'm strolling down the hall, and who do I see all huddled up on the bench outside one of the courtrooms but Oh and Brant? Me and her nod at each other and I keep going. But I recognize Brant from his picture here."

"We got to get out and circulate," Graves said.

"Keep me posted." In that particular gait of his, Mitchum stepped back into his office, whistling a tune.

The next thing Graves knew, he and Smith were tooling along Quincy in their big, beat-to-h.e.l.l-looking Ford. Underneath the hood, the gas-guzzling 425-cubic-inch V8 performed like a champ. It was nighttime, but Graves couldn't remember what he'd done after the conversation in the squad room. Presumably, he reasoned, he and his partner had been busy working the case.

Smith guided the car along several rain-slick streets. Lit neon announcing everything from c.o.c.ktail lounges to twenty-four-hour shoe repair was reflected in the shallow puddles. Odd too, Graves reflected, he didn't recall any rain storm either. Must be working too hard. The car pulled to a halt across the street from an office building that must have been constructed during the Warren G. Harding administration. From the upper floor the chiseled eyes of stone gargoyles looked down from their perches.

"She's in," Smith stated, glaring up at a lit window on a particular floor. He blew white cigar smoke into the ebon sky.

As he extricated himself from the pa.s.senger seat, Graves said, "Let's see what our beautiful defense attorney has to say about missing doughnuts."

The two men made for an imposing pair as they crossed the narrow thoroughfare, cars of various eras cruising by. The hem of each man's rumpled top coat came to mid-shin, and flailed behind him like dusters worn on the plains a century ago. Smith towered over most civilians, but people tended to forget that Graves, too, was large, six feet two and built like an aging linebacker. Together, the duo reached the vestibule of the building.

"How long we been doing this, partner?" Smith flicked the b.u.t.t of his cigar into the street. As it bounced, it gave off orange and yellow sparks.

"You thinking of retiring?" Graves replied. He didn't know how long they'd been chasing criminals. It seemed to him this occupation of theirs, if that was the right term, had been a forever job.

"Just making small talk," Smith deflected. His pale grin gave away his true feelings, but he didn't pursue the matter further as the night watchman let them in. Their flat cop feet slapped against the marble floor of the lobby, the sound bouncing everywhere in the cavernous area.

In the elevator, Smith said, "I was wondering, that's all, Tombstone. I've been trying to figure out what it all means, ya know?" He adjusted his bowler, shading his deep-set eyes.

Tombstone Graves said, slumped against the far wall, "Our lives of absurdity, you mean?"

The elevator stopped, and the doors opened on an opulently appointed reception area. "Exactly, my man, exactly."

"Gentlemen," Karen Oh, a.k.a. Jill Kodama, greeted them from a doorway to their right. She was a handsome woman of average height and a build belying her fortysomething years. Her hair was of a moderate length with auburn highlights. She wore a dark blue power suit and a magenta blouse underneath. Her look told them she was formulating several moves ahead of their questions even before they spoke.

"Come on in." She made a gesture with a sheaf of papers she held toward her inner office. They hung their top coats up.

"About these missing doughnuts," she said after everyone was settled. She grinned and lit a thin cigar after offering the two of them one from her humidor. "I can be unequivocal in that my client, Mr. Brant, had nothing whatsoever to do with these items being eaten."

"How do you know they were eaten?" Smith jabbed. His bowler rested on the mound of his knee.

"Why else would a hungry person take food?" She looked from the big man to his partner. Her eyes stayed on him for more than a beat.

"We think there may have been something hidden in one or more of the doughnuts," Graves put in. "We know that the doughnut shop owner has been involved in some questionable activities in the past."

"Allegations, not convictions," she averred.

"And we find it interesting that your other client happened to come to the doughnut shop at or around the time the doughnuts went bye-bye." Smith worked his tongue on the gristle stuck between his teeth from the pastrami sandwiches they'd scarfed down for dinner.

"What's your point, Detective?" Again, she did a sideways glance at Graves. As she did so, she repeatedly touched a ring on her finger. A particular kind of ring Graves had seen before.

"Of course," Tombstone Graves suddenly blurted out.

"What?" Smith glared at him.

"Of course," his partner repeated, snapping his fingers. Kodama, too, was standing, and he felt an irresistible urge to kiss her. So he did. And to his pleasure, she kissed him back. "You're terrific," he told her.

"So are you, big boy. I knew you could do it."

"You two mind telling me what the h.e.l.l's going on?" Smith was now dressed in a chef's ap.r.o.n with streaks of flour on it. He adjusted his chef's hat as he sank doughnut dough into the industrial deep fryer.

The oil crackled and popped to a beat that hummed in Graves's head. He and the attorney slow-danced to Nat King Cole singing "It's Only a Paper Moon." The fish in her aquarium sang the melody. As the great crooner went on, the sound of the doughnuts frying replaced his voice, and Monk woke with a start.

He rubbed a hand over his face and looked at the time: a few minutes past eleven in the morning. Scratching his side, he dialed Elrod. Idly, he considered mentioning to the big man how he looked in a bowler in his dream.

"I know why the doughnuts have been missing," he announced after pleasantries. "And why Moises did it."

"You talked to him?"

"Nope." He didn't explain further. "I'll be there around three, Elrod. See you then." With that he hung up and finally slept soundly.

Moises had been destroying doughnuts because the one material thing in his life, his high school ring, had disappeared. He was sure it had somehow been sucked off his thin finger by the sticky doughnut dough. He was also replacing the doughnuts as he learned how to make them by working with Elrod. His accomplices in this deed were the other employees Josette and Lonnie, whom he'd enlisted, swearing them to silence. He didn't want to seem like a flake to Elrod, his immediate boss.

Moises had figured once he knew how to make the various styles of doughnuts, he could sneak in and replace all of them.

As it turned out, the ring had been left on the shelf above the washbasin in the back. The young man had taken it off one time cleaning up and had forgotten it was there. Subsequently, a can of cleanser had been placed in front of the ring, and it was therefore out of sight.

Monk had recalled on a subconscious level the last time he'd seen Moises, the ring had been absent from his finger. While days before that, he'd observed the kid was very keen on keeping the ring clean. The private eye had seen him use a cloth to rub it after he'd laid down the chocolate on a rack of french crullers.

Karen Oh finally caught up with Monk. She wanted him to look into a matter for a client of hers. It seems this Nolan Masters was plagued by industrial thefts from his high-tech electronics firm.

And Monk soon tired of the regulars at his doughnut shop calling him the sleeping detective.

Stanley Cohen.

A Night in the Manchester Store.

STANLEY COHEN'S novel Taking Gary Feldman was perhaps the first original twist on the kidnap story since "The Ransom of Red Chief." And it wasn't a gimmick story, either, but a fully fleshed, poignant look at the troubled lives of a little rich boy and one of his kidnappers. Since then, Cohen has written other novels, most notably Angel Face, and continues to write excellent short stories as well. In "A Night in the Manchester Store," first published in the anthology Murder Among Friends, what starts as an unusual night out takes a decisive turn for the worse.

A Night in the Manchester Store.

Stanley Cohen.

It all started one night as we were driving home from La Guardia. Wally said to me, "Whaddaya say we go to The Manchester Store on our way."

Out of the clear blue sky? I said, "Wally, are you serious? Now? What the h.e.l.l for?"

"I want to check on something."

"Check on what?"

"Something. I might even buy it, tonight."

Or steal it, maybe? "Wally, it's almost nine now. And we're a good fifteen minutes away from there. Don't they close at nine?"

"Nine-thirty."

"Well, that still doesn't leave us much time. Can't it wait? Because I'd really like to get home. We've been away for three days. Is this something important?"

"Yes, it is, or I wouldn't have brought it up. And you'll be glad we stopped. You're going to have a great time. Count on it."

I'll have a great time watching him shop? Or I'll just have a great time? What the h.e.l.l did that mean?...

What was he up to? Was this going to be another one of his crazy-a.s.s things? ...It'd been a lot of years since the last one. A long time. Was there going to be some element of risk involved, this time? ...I decided not to bother responding to his comment about the "great time." Just sweat it out and hope for the best. So we'd be a few minutes later getting home. And he was the boss.

And since he didn't say anything further about it, we just lapsed into a period of quiet as he continued driving. He loved to drive, usually very fast. He thrived on doing reckless things, taking chances of all kinds, challenging fate, it always seemed to me, and I don't recall his ever failing, or getting caught, at anything he'd decided to do. He simply never got caught...

Wally Hunter and I go back a long way. We'd worked together at the national lab in Oak Ridge. He was a brilliant engineer, and he did his expected work, more or less, but he was also a cynic, always spouting sardonic humor about everything around us, knowing, as I guess I also did, that the project to which we were a.s.signed was never going to produce anything. An aircraft engine powered by a nuclear reactor was not a realistic objective and was never going to fly.

And so we joked and laughed a lot about it. And we attended the regularly scheduled progress meetings, listened to all of the optimistic feasibility reports, carried out our a.s.signed tests and experiments, compiled our data, and wrote up our results. It was, as they say, a living.

But that was only part of what made life with Wally Hunter in Oak Ridge so fascinating. I never thought of him as a close friend. He really wasn't that likable. And he wasn't someone I ever saw or even expected to see socially. I never met his wife. I thought of him instead as a very intriguing fellow worker, a sort of "what will this nut come up with next?" kind of guy.

And what made my a.s.sociation with him so unforgettable was that he occasionally sucked me into some wacko thing to do, either on or off the job, but mostly off. A Sat.u.r.day-morning adventure for two engineers with weekends free. I was always a little nervous about what he'd get me into, but somehow I was drawn to him, and I seldom resisted the opportunity to spend time joining him in one of the far from routine things he came up with, despite some element of risk or danger that was always involved.

Like the cave. He was, among a myriad of other things, a spelunker, someone who loved to explore caves, and he'd found one that contained this unique chamber he said I just had to see, so one Sat.u.r.day morning we drove to it, parked the car, and with his waterproof flashlight, which he'd probably stolen somewhere, we plunged ahead, into the depths of the cave.

We came to a pa.s.sage he'd known about, of course, but never mentioned, where we had to crawl through an opening no larger than our bodies, and which had water, very cold water, running through it. But it was summer, and our clothes would dry, so what was the problem? He went first and snaked right through the hole. Then it was my turn.

I started through and got stuck! I couldn't move in either direction! Although he was at first amused by this, I was in a state of panic, and despite having my belly in cold water, I began to sweat profusely. I absolutely couldn't move! Stuck in a hole in a cave? Who needed this? What kind of crazy business was this for a nice Jewish boy? Better I should have been in the synagogue, attending services with my wife! ...Not that we went that often, frankly. But at that terrifying moment, wedged tightly in that hole in solid rock, blocking the pa.s.sage of the freezing water, which was beginning to deepen under my chest and approach my face, my brain was also alive with poisonous snakes, water moccasins with dripping fangs, and all sorts of other fearful creatures, and with visions of being stuck there for who knew how long, wondering if I'd ever get out alive.

After he'd enjoyed his moment of amus.e.m.e.nt at my panicked state, he finally began reaching under me, cleaning out the small stones and gravel, and then he grabbed me by the hands, told me to exhale, and pulled me through the opening, leaving my poor chest and belly, and a couple of spots on my back, rubbed raw.

He led me to the subterranean chamber he'd brought me to see, and I guess it was everything he'd promised it would be, but all I could think about at the time was the return trip through that hole to get back to the outside world. And to this day, I still shudder at the thought of having been stuck there.

And then there was the abandoned quarry, just a stone's throw off one of the main roads inside the government-restricted area. On another Sat.u.r.day morning we went there with his .22 rifle and his .22 target pistol and all the bottles and cans we could scrounge up, and we set up our collection of targets on a rock, down in the quarry, and climbed up to the rim, sat there, and had a little target practice.

It was great fun but it was also very illegal. We were fooling around with firearms inside the government-restricted area and definitely had no business being there. We could have easily found ourselves trying to deal with the rotten local gendarmes, redneck deputy-sheriff types who were allowed access to the roads. Or maybe government security types, connected to the plants. But of course we didn't...

...And I still wonder where some of those shots might have gone as they ricocheted off that rock. What goes up must come down at virtually the same velocity it went up, it seems to me. Gravity is gravity. What if...? But that was years ago.

And Wally was a master thief. He simply loved to steal. He was constantly taking things home from the lab. Tools, expensive instruments, electronic stuff, whatever... At times he could hardly lift his briefcase when he left work and walked through guard stations to the parking lot. And of course he never got caught. The same was true when he visited the various stores in town, satisfying his love for thievery. He never got caught. I was with him one afternoon in a small downtown department store, and when he began lifting things, I didn't quite know what to say or do. All I wanted was to get the h.e.l.l out of there.

And being as smart as he was, he spent most of his time at the lab, on company time, writing for several technical magazines, articles totally unrelated to his job at the laboratory, and he was getting paid good money for them. And he was never questioned, even when he got our company secretary to type them. Because he never got caught at anything.

He left the job in Oak Ridge several years before I did, and I never expected to see him again. Finally, years later, when my wife and I decided we'd spent enough of our life in that unique community, we, too, decided it was time to leave. I went to an employment clearinghouse at a convention, got several offers, and took one which brought us to Connecticut. Senior engineer at Metals and Materials Technology, Inc.

On my first day on the new job, the personnel director said to me, "I understand you already know the section chief you'll report to."

"I do?"

And in walked Wally Hunter. "Welcome to 'Met'n'Mat Tech,' " he said with a wide grin. And he was wearing a suit and tie. All those years in Oak Ridge he'd worn nothing but jeans or suntans and sport shirts, while most of the other professionals around him, including me, "dressed for business" and wore jackets and neckties to work.

He led me to his s.p.a.cious office, and after we'd gabbed a few minutes about whether things had changed much in Oak Ridge since he'd left, he advised me that he'd been able to get me a separate office, and with a window, no less. "I refused to let them toss you into the bullpen where most of the fresh meat gets thrown," he said.

Then he added, "And the salary offer they made you? The one that you accepted? I insisted on having it increased a hundred a month. They don't do that too often, around here, once they've gotten an acceptance, but I told them you had special skills that our section needed badly, and I didn't want to take any chances on losing you." Listening to all of that, I was rapidly getting over the shock of running into him again and discovering that he was my new boss. I was even beginning to feel a little pleased about it.