Ransom Game Read online

  “Then you’ll see what you can do?” she asked, her smile showing a nice set of white teeth.

  “I’ll play around with it for a few days. If I’m getting anywhere, you can decide whether to keep me going. If I crap out, you can always say you tried. I’ll do what I can. For the full treatment, and that means shoving everything else out of the way so that this gets top priority, I get a hundred a day plus expenses with an extra hundred at the start to keep me honest and interested.” I felt like a cop reading her her rights “This kind of thing, as I told you, is a little out of my line. That Yates case was an exception. I fell into that. Have you got anything else you can give me, Miss Falkirk? I can’t see that I’m going to get very far with Johnny Rosa’s friends with my private investigator’s licence.”

  “I see what you mean. Information doesn’t flake off those guys easy. You could use my name. If they know that you’re working for me, they might open up a little more than if you were the law. It’s not much.”

  “You’re right, it isn’t. Okay, who else is after Johnny? Have we covered the field?”

  “I hate to say it, but I guess every hood in the country is interested more or less. I mean, we couldn’t go out like normal people. It was like he was a movie star, only not so nice. It always started friendly—somebody’d send over free drinks to our table, then there’d be an argument and we’d have to grab our coats. Sometimes there would be cars following us. Once we were nearly pushed off the road. It was scary. So we didn’t go out much. Besides, he had shift work at the foundry.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “It was something I was able to arrange. Something to satisfy the parole board. It’s the Grantham-Niagara Foundry. You know, that red-brick building you can see from the High Level Bridge?”

  “You said it was shift work?”

  “Yeah,” she said a little bitterly. “I thought I’d seen the last of a shift-working man ten years ago. Johnny used to duke in and out of that noise-works in my car. I couldn’t see him on public transportation with a lunch pail, could I?”

  “Has the car turned up?” She was looking at the big green stone in her ring again, like she was trying to remember where the secret catch was that opened it up. I wondered what she imagined was inside.

  “It wasn’t much of a car, but it was handy.”

  “Can you give me the details on it: the year, make, model, licence number, colour, that sort of thing?”

  “Sure. It was a yellow Volkswagen, about ten years old and looking like it had been on the road closer to twenty. It was in and out of the garage once a month for repairs.”

  “Did you report it missing?”

  “I didn’t report Johnny missing. How could I report the damned car?” She had a point.

  “Do you have the licence number?” She gave it to me and at last I had a fact to write on the yellow legal foolscap pad in front of me.

  She now looked like she wanted to be going. She glanced to each side of her and then took her first impatient breath.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ll certainly give the case my full attention.” She reached into her handbag and brought out a matched set of hundred-dollar bills. She laid them out on her end of my desk like she was setting up the bank for an evening of Monopoly. She also fished up a pencil stub from her bottomless purse, and, at my request, gave me her address and phone number. She wrote both in an unpracticed schoolgirl’s hand. She folded the paper and handed it to me with a movement that was almost a flounce. Her eyes grabbed mine with a look of complicity. I kept mine fixed on the bridge of her nose. I was already drunk on angora, and something of an expert after the last half hour in how the knitting stands up to regular deep breathing. As a respectable private investigator, I had to make sure that she didn’t get the wrong idea about me. I guessed that in her time she’d met a few who’d got the wrong idea about her.

  At soon as she’d gone, I looked at the money lying there so reassuringly and started wondering what I might do to earn it. For a minute, I played with the notion of picking up Johnny Rosa’s trail, far from the February chill of Grantham, in the hotels along the ocean front at Miami Beach. I let this thought thaw me for a few minutes, and then came back to the reality of my mother’s pet rubber plant and the dieffenhachias that had to be attended to regularly right here at home. My mother wouldn’t be able to run suntan lotion on her freckled shoulders down there if she doubted for a moment that I was on the job up here.

  I was beginning to feel I’d earned lunch at least, and thought of closing up the shop. Before I did, I put in a call to the Regional Police and gave a voice, which sounded like it wanted its lunch too, the details Muriel had given me about her car. I left my name and the voice promised on its mother’s grave that it would get back to me if anything developed. On the whole, cops shouldn’t try to be comedians.

  TWO

  The wind whipped under my overcoat feeling for my liver. As I cut across St. Andrew Street in search of a bite of lunch at the United Cigar Store, all of February concentrated its power on the small of my back. I could feel needles playing with my eyeballs and my knees felt numb where they touched the cloth of my trousers. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself when I saw a girl come out of the United in a little jacket and a wispy skirt. She headed into the wind and out of sight. They must be built differently I thought. Inside the door of the United, I shed my hat and coat and stood for a while rubbing my red wrists like a car salesman closing a deal until something like circulation returned. A chill wind blew through the door whenever anyone went near it, and sent invisible fingers riffling through the magazine rack. In this weather, even the magazines that nobody picked up looked shopworn.

  I perched in my usual spot at the green marble counter and ordered a chopped egg sandwich on white, toasted, with milk and vanilla ice cream to follow. The girl wrote it down like I was dictating the Ten Commandments in the original. There was a picture of a smiling waitress in a cap printed in blue at the top of the check she left beside the salt and pepper shakers. I compared the grim girl behind the counter with the portrait on the check, and wondered what the world was coming to.

  I was at a complete loss as to how to go about trying to find Johnny Rosa. When a cheap hoodlum doesn’t want to indulge in social intercourse, there are few ways to compel him to come out of his hole. I figured he was in a hole. He was alive in it or he was dead in it, but he was in there all right. This was a lot harder than standing under a dripping eavestrough waiting for a clear view of illicit love in bloom. I could start looking in Papertown, I thought. I didn’t think I’d find out anything, but the word would be out that I was looking. If he could still hear and got curious, he could always find me.

  Two teenage girls in nylon parkas blew into the store. The wind that followed them tried to grab the magazines from the dirty fingers of the regular boys in the chorus line who stood facing the magazine rack. The girls blew on their hands, tears glistening on their cheeks, as they cut through the line to find what they wanted. The boys were less direct. They didn’t just buy the girlie magazines of their choice, as is every man’s right in a free country. No, they preferred to look and to handle but not, in the end, to buy. Buying a girlie magazine represented life without a ginger ale mix; it was too strong a shot for most of them. One day, maybe one of them would change his luck, make a real commitment to life, and buy one. But I only half believed it. The two girls by this time had their magazines paid for and sat warming their hands on mugs of coffee.

  I paid my bill, the waitress saluted me by tipping the toothpick in her mouth so that it pointed to her short nose, and I made it back through the February wind to my office. A bowel-clawing wind pushed me to my door. Safe upstairs and overheated again, I put in a call to a poolroom I knew in Papertown, asking the owner, whose falsetto surprised me, to get Binny Logan to call. Binny walked and talked like an extra from Guys and Dolls, but there wasn’t much he didn’t know about life in the south end. Naturally, I didn’t expect him to be there. No selfrespecting poolhall operator would deliver a message while it was fresh. Like fine wines, a phone message gets better the longer you hold on to it.

  Then I called Ella Beames at the public library and told her I was coming down to read some old papers on the iron lung. She laughed and asked what dates I wanted. She knew me pretty well. I told her I wanted everything she had on the Warren girl’s kidnapping. She didn’t insist on my having the exact date. Ella was like that; she liked doing her job well.

  The new library in town couldn’t be more different from the old one if it tried. The old place had been full of books on racks in rows with people scattered all over the place, some reading under green porcelain lamps, some chatting to the girl at the check-out desk, sometimes exchanging views about the books around them. This new place started out trying to fool people into thinking that it wasn’t a library at all but a picnic ground. There were pools and a fountain, and even a cobblestone bridge crossing a babbling brook. Wherever you went, you were followed by the sound of running water, which is not the easiest sound to live with when you’ve settled down to a good read. The carpets on the three floors were colourcoded, each being a slightly different shade of burnt orange. At the time the place opened, the Beacon carried a story about how the architect had been inspired by an empty egg-cup. I was glad that they’d brought people like Ella Beames over from the old place. You needed the human touch under those bright triangular lights.

  I found Ella at her desk in the Special Collections department. She handed me three boxes of microfilm and a key to the microfilm room. It took me less than twenty minutes to find it, and half that again to fit the film on the machine My machine was the only vacant viewer in a line of five. To an observer we might have been a bunch of paraplegic exiles from the magazine rack at the United.

  The Beacon had had a field day with the Warren case. Only a war could have filled more space. There was a profile of George Warren, the wealthy chairman of Archon Incorporated, one of the largest and most diversified conglomerates on the exchange. I found that the cornerstone of the Warren fortune was shoepolish. First Warren Blacking in Britain, where the first of the Warrens employed the youthful Charles Dickens as a bottle labeller near Hungerford Stairs on the Thames. Then Warren Shoepolish in North America at the time of the first World War. It was after the second that the big push came: a branching out into wider and wider fields. In the records of Archon, the holding company that linked all these fields to a common Bay Street address, George Warren’s name was prominent at the time, but in the most recent history his name was hard to find. For the ten years or so preceding the kidnapping, Warren appeared to have contrived to stay out of the papers.

  There was a picture of the large house he had built up on the Escarpment so that it looked down on the few thousand acres of prime real estate he owned through one of his minor holdings. Passing mention was made of his private yacht club, built out of pique after a disagreement with the local millionaires-only club on the Niagara River, his fleet of Lear jets, his private island in the Caribbean, and his beautiful daughter, Gloria, who had become the focus of a kidnapping drama. There’d been an older brother, killed in a car accident shortly before the kidnapping. There was rather less said about him than the others, and I made a mental note to find out why. Warren’s wife had divorced him for a handsome settlement a decade before and had quickly spent that and the remainder of her active life at the gambling tables in the south of France. Now she lived quietly in genteel poverty near Ste-Maxime.

  I got the feeling that the family had been out of bounds to reporters on the paper before Gloria Warren’s abduction. I wasn’t surprised to see that Archon Incorporated owned the Beacon. Most of the pictures looked about thirty years old and came from out-of-town sources. Several showed the summer cottage at Dittrick Lake, a fashionable piece of vacation-land not far from Grantham. The paper’s artist had had a good time marking an X where the door to the frame cottage had been forced, arrows where the kidnappers’ car had been parked and more arrows and dotted lines criss-crossing maps of the whole territory involved in the case.

  Gloria had been staying for the long Labour Day weekend at the lakeside cottage. Her friend, Robert H. Jarman, had driven up for the day to go waterskiing with her. When they returned from the wharf to the cottage, about twenty yards distant, Gloria, entering the house first, was grabbed from behind. At the same moment, Jarman was sapped on the head. Neither saw a face. Jarman woke up tied hand and foot in the kitchen of the cottage with the ransom demand pinned to his beach robe. Immediately he got loose, he telephoned George Warren. He and Warren knew one another, but Jarman wasn’t one of the family circle, I gathered. They contacted the Regional Police here in Grantham, and they brought in the Provincial Police because the lake was in their part of the forest. A joint war-room was established, the ransom note was studied and the police advised Warren to pretend to go along with the ransom demand. The kidnappers promised to return the girl unharmed on the payment of one million dollars. Warren was told to be at a certain public telephone booth in a crowded Grantham shopping mall at a certain time. He was warned not to go to the police, and told that his movements were being watched at all times. Very, very neat.

  Warren and Jarman took the money in two suitcases to the phone booth. They only brought five hundred thousand, which was haggling a little, I thought. The kidnappers could take it or leave it and kill the girl. Warren figured they’d jump for five hundred and take their licking like the honest hoods they were. Warren had raised the money through a bank he directed on the side. Jarman got to carry it. The police stood by in unmarked cars, but might as well have been disguised in T-shirts bearing the Inscription Police Athletic Club. A bugging device had been placed in one of the suitcases so that the bad guys could be traced and followed by the modern miracle of electronic tracking. Only somebody forgot to put in fresh batteries or something, and the modern miracle gave way to road blocks and tracking dogs on loan from the Provincial Police. At least they used real money. The temptation to use cut-up strips of paper instead must have been all but irresistible.

  “We could have used phoney money,” a senior policeman explained, “but anything could have happened. How much money is a woman’s life worth?” I hope he asked George Warren that one. Not a cent over half a million.

  Soon the money was exchanged. Again, nobody saw anybody. Warren and Jarman were told to move to another country phone booth and there they were given instructions about where to drop the money and where to go to discover the missing girl. They found her wrapped up in a sleeping bag, trussed up like Sunday dinner, in an abandoned shed, an hour’s drive from where the pick-up was made. She was unharmed if you overlook a little shock and dehydration. She didn’t see a face or hear a word. There was a photograph of her with her head lowered and Jarman protecting her with one arm and making an ugly gesture at the camera with the other. His was a face you wouldn’t want to meet coming the opposite way along a cinder path.

  With the failure of the electronic bugging device, the police sealed off all highways and secondary roads within the Niagara Peninsula. They searched thousands of cars, upsetting countless tourists homeward-bound after the long holiday weekend. When the cops began getting their breaks they came from tips. There were lots of those, but in the end one of them paid off. Someone drew their attention to some swinging bachelors who met regularly in Suite 616 of the Norton Apartments. After a few discreet calls, a few questions. and answers, one group of men was isolated. In less than two weeks the four kidnappers were in custody. In three months, they had begun serving long sentences in Kingston Penitentiary.

  Crime doesn’t pay. Except that somewhere on the Niagara Peninsula, probably not twenty or thirty miles from where I was sitting, half a million dollars lay bundled up in two suitcases, just waiting to be picked up. I wondered whether I’d missed the item about the recovery of the money, but I hadn’t. The money was still there all right, and only Johnny Rosa knew where to pick it up. I could get interested in Johnny myself with big bucks like that riding just over the top of the next hill.

  That’s the sap of what I found in the main newspaper clippings. Then there were notices of parole hearings, a journalistic flurry of agitation about the fact that the Grantham kidnappers were serving a bigger part of their sentences than some kidnappers from Toronto in another case, and finally reports of who got released when.

  On my way out, I dug into a pile of recent Beacons for the account of Warren’s death. I found it six weeks down in the stack. It told how the millionaire financier had drowned in his heated pool at home. He was 72 and in the habit of taking a morning swim. He’d been discovered at the bottom of the pool by a servant who’d brought him his morning coffee and paper. And it continued for a dozen more paragraphs telling about his estimated wealth—in excess of thirteen million a year—and the funeral arrangements. It gave another recapitulation of the kidnapping, and some speculation about the effect of his death on Archon Corporation. It ended with a bit of news I’d missed:

  Warren is survived by his daughter, Gloria, Mrs. Robert H. Jarman.

  That fellow Jarman knew a good thing when he saw it, no mistake about that. I thought that maybe I’d pay a call on the couple. Since I was trying to locate Johnny Rosa, I felt practically one of the family.

  THREE

  I was surfing a few hundred yards from shore, just coming up beautifully on the crest of a wave that peeled away under me, when I heard a sharp warning from a big cabin cruiser trying for the same stretch of ocean. It hooted at me about fifty times, without changing course. It came toward me like a shark only a hundred times bigger. I shouted at the top of my voice, but it overwhelmed me and everything went blue. And then I was sitting up in sweaty pajamas with the phone in my hand and the bedclothes tangled about my knees.