Dog in the Manger: An Eli Paxton Mystery Page 16

  It was a crock, of course. I knew exactly what their lives were like: half of my divorce clients lived there, and the other half lived in the even posher Indian Hill area to the north. In fact, as they laid out half-million dollar settlements on wives and kids they couldn’t stand, they probably saw me sitting in the back of the courtroom after giving testimony and wondered what I had done right with my life.

  Still, they were on the other side of my fence, and their grass sure looked a hell of a lot greener. I decided to spend another few minutes driving up and down the winding streets of the Rookwood area just off Grandin Road, looking at more Tudors and dreaming more dreams.

  I slowed down a bit to enjoy the drive, and saw a jet-black Lincoln Town Car behind me doing the same thing. I felt a sharp stab of envy: the guy had probably been transferred to Cincinnati and was cruising around to see just where he wanted to shell out four or five hundred thousand dollars to live. In my mind he became a hotshot sales executive, a couple of years younger than me, with a wife who looked like Joan Linwood and two sons who started on the high school football team. He had all modern furniture that would look terribly out of place in a Tudor, but it wouldn’t bother him in the least: he’d move right in, furniture and all, and be happy as a clam. It might take him five years to learn that the town even had a West Side, let alone that private eyes whose names weren’t Bill Striker were probably going to live there for the rest of their lives.

  I got so mad thinking about the guy in the Lincoln buying one of the homes that I could never afford that all the pleasure of driving through the area evaporated and I decided to go back to work. I emerged from Rookward on Edwards Road and took a hard right, turning left half a mile later when I hit Grandin Road. I checked the readout, which I had taken along with me, and headed off toward Cotter’s home.

  When I reached it I found it to be everything the report said it was: tasteful, expensive, elegant, and surrounded by one hell of an iron fence. I couldn’t see the Dobermans that were supposed to be running loose on the lawn, but I had no reason to doubt they were there. There was a huge metal gate at the head of the driveway, and a sleepy-looking man in his fifties was standing next to it. He didn’t look all that formidable, but the bulge under his arm made up for it.

  I kept going, turned around in a driveway about half a mile up the road, and then passed by again. No question about it: the damned place looked impenetrable.

  I went back to Edwards Road and took a right, planning on returning to my office, when I noticed that the black Lincoln was still following me. On a hunch, I went through Hyde Park Square and headed south a mile to Walnut Hills, an area of stately old homes that had become a slum in the 1950s and was just starting to come back.

  The Lincoln stayed right behind me. I drove a little further into Walnut Hills, into a totally black area where the houses were smaller and the interior and exterior decorators hadn’t made any inroads yet. He kept right on my tail, and I knew he wasn’t any sightseer or prospective home buyer; he could be interested in one area or the other, but not both.

  Which was when I figured out that, my assurances to Joan to the contrary, I wasn’t out of the woods yet.

  15.

  There wasn’t much I could do in Arizona, with its long empty highways, but we were back in my ball park now and it didn’t take me long to lose the Lincoln. I zipped down a couple of side streets, made a U-turn under a viaduct, ducked into an alley, and suddenly I was all by myself. I drove back to my office by a circuitous route, parked a couple of blocks away, and walked the rest of the distance—and saw the Lincoln parked across from the doorway of my building.

  I backed out of sight before anyone in the car could have seen me, went back to the LeBaron, drove home, and got my remaining pistol, another .38, out of a dresser drawer. I also made a mental note to bill Nettles for the one I had lost in Mexico.

  Then, feeling a little more secure, I drove back downtown, parked a good distance away from the office, and went through a pair of alleys to the service entrance.

  I took the freight elevator up to my floor, walked out to the fire escape platform that ran the length of the building, and looked into my office.

  No one was there, so I eased the window open, climbed inside, pulled my gun out, and walked gingerly to the door. I couldn’t see any shadows in the hall, but just to be on the safe side I stood motionless on my side of the door for a couple of minutes, listening for the sound of someone who might be waiting for me by the elevator or the staircase. Finally I heard a shuffling of feet, and I threw open the door, jumped into the hallway, pointed the gun in the direction of the sounds, and hollered “Freeze!”

  It turned out to be Shelly, the receptionist from the label company down the hall. She took one look at me, screamed, threw about a million invoices into the air, and made a beeline for her office.

  It took a minute for the tension to leave my body. Then I went down the hall to apologize, but as soon as Shelly recognized me she crawled under her desk and yelled at me to go away, so I shrugged and walked back to my office. I thought about calling her on the phone to explain, but decided that my landlord might take a dim view of renewing my lease if he thought there was a chance the building might get shot up, so I decided to tell her I was a practical joker and buy her some flowers or candy to make it up to her.

  Then I took the elevator down to what was laughably referred to as the lobby, and peeked out the door. The Lincoln was still there. Evidently I was just being watched and not hunted, which, while annoying, was a definite improvement over what had been going on for the last week or two.

  I went back up to my office and locked the door behind me. Then I pulled out my bottle of C&G, poured myself a drink, leaned back on my chair, and tried to figure out what to do next.

  Breaking into Cotter’s home was out of the question. It was as heavily guarded as the San Benedicto drug room should have been—and besides, I didn’t know what the hell I was looking for.

  Furthermore, whatever it was, it wasn’t likely to be at Cotter’s home. It had been shipped by Amalgamated Laboratories, and since the shipment had been lost it stood to reason that they’d be making up some more of it.

  So Amalgamated had to be the next stop on my agenda. I sure as hell didn’t want to present myself as a private eye unless I had a search warrant, and I couldn’t get a search warrant until I knew what I was looking for, which meant that I’d have to masquerade as a potential customer.

  I checked the white pages for Amalgamated’s address, which turned out to be about ten miles north of me in Kenwood. Then, since I needed at least a general idea of what they sold, I tried to hunt them up in the yellow pages. They weren’t there, so I turned next to the Business-to-Business directory and found out they were a pharmaceutical manufacturer and wholesaler. Which figured: I couldn’t imagine this being anything but a drug ring, no matter what Pratt had said about the traffic being all south to north.

  Of course, the boxes could have been filled with money to pay for a shipment they had received from Monterrey, but I could think of half a hundred easier and safer ways for a company as large as Universal to transfer funds, and I wasn’t a financial wizard like Cotter. No, it all fit together too neatly: it had to be drugs.

  I took the freight elevator back down, ducked out into the alley, and a couple of minutes later was taking the LeBaron north on Interstate 71. I got off at the Kenwood exit, already wondering how to spot an illicit drug in a laboratory that probably had every legal right to have a few tons of opium and coke on hand, and continued on to the address I had gotten out of the phone book, where I found my problem had been solved for me. I wasn’t going to have to pose as a customer or rummage through their storerooms after all.

  Amalgamated had burnt down to the ground.

  I stopped at a chili parlor across the street and got the details: a faulty electrical system had erupted in flames during the middle of the night six days ago, and the place was in ashes before the fire department
could get the blaze under control.

  Which didn’t make any sense at all. Why would they bother burning down the building when they had every right to handle drugs? Besides, they wouldn’t be stockpiling the stuff; they’d have it out on the street within a day of receiving it.

  Of course, there was always the possibility that they weren’t licensed to carry the hard stuff, but it took just one visit to a local drugstore to determine that Amalgamated was their chief source of morphine-based medication.

  So that wasn’t it.

  I felt just the way I had felt when Pratt told me the vaccines checked out. I had put the case together in my head and it came out neat and perfect; then I had tried to get one single shred of corroborating evidence, and it had blown up in my face.

  I hated getting beaten up and shot at, but even more than that I hated being wrong—and I had been as wrong as people get to be. I had even doped out what had happened to Baroness and Federated 308 (although now I even wondered about that), and I was still wrong.

  In fact, if it wasn’t for the Lincoln I would have sworn that Cotter was sitting in his little castle overlooking the Ohio River and laughing himself sick watching the Hero Cop run around in circles. But the Lincoln meant something. I didn’t know what, yet—probably it was just waiting to see how close I got to the truth before moving in for the kill—but as long as they were interested in me, I must still pose a potential threat.

  I drove back downtown feeling frustrated as all hell, parked in my regular lot, and walked in the front door of my building, just to let the driver know that I’d managed to sneak out while he was watching me. It didn’t occur to me until I entered my office that he hadn’t even known I was in.

  I picked up the phone and called Jim Simmons.

  “You missed a good game last night, Eli,” he said pleasantly. “We held them to three hits, and Morris put one in the upper deck in right field.”

  “Yeah, I read about it in the paper,” I lied. “Listen, Jim, I’m going to need some help.”

  “Is this still the dog case?” he asked.

  “Yes, but it’s gotten a lot bigger than that. What do you know about the fire at Amalgamated Labs last week?”

  “They took a huge loss,” he said. “Something like three million dollars worth of damage. I heard it was due to a faulty electrical system.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

  “Arson?”

  “Not in the normal sense. They did it themselves.”

  “Can you prove it?” he asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “What the hell does all this have to do with a dog, Eli?”

  “The dog’s just the tip of the iceberg,” I said. “This thing is big, Jim, bigger than you can imagine. I should be hearing from Mike Pratt in Arizona sometime today. Once he fills in the missing pieces, I’ll turn the whole thing over to you on a silver platter.”

  “But?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on, Eli—there’s always a but.”

  “Okay, “ I said. “First of all, there’s been a guy tailing me ever since I got back to town. He’s driving a brand-new Lincoln Town Car, and you can find him parked right outside my building.”

  “So?”

  “I want you to take him in and find out who he is and who he’s working for.”

  “Take him in on what charges?”

  “I don’t know: parking illegally, spitting on the sidewalk. Find something. It’s important, Jim.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, “ he said dubiously. “I hope he’s not the kind of guy who sues for harassment.”

  “I have a feeling he’s going to want publicity even less than you do.”

  “All right, Eli. What else?”

  “I need some phone numbers and addresses that I can’t get out of the book.”

  “Unlisted?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Wait’ll I get a pen.” I heard him scuffling around on his desk. “Okay—shoot.”

  “I need a number for Wilson Cotter, and addresses and phone numbers for James and Richard Cotter if they live in Cincinnati.”

  “That’s asking an awful lot, Eli,” said Simmons slowly. “Do you know who Wilson Cotter is?”

  “I know.”

  “What about the other two?”

  “They’re his brothers. I don’t know if Richard lives in town, but James ought to: he’s the company comptroller.”

  “And you think Cotter’s mixed up in this?”

  “I’m pretty sure of it.”

  “Eli, I don’t know how to phrase this delicately, so I’m just going to come right out and say it: Are you sure you know what the hell you’re talking about? You’re trying to tie a dognapping and a fire and a bunch of murders together and lay it at the feet of a guy who’s got more clout than the governor. Hell, I still can’t prove Dent and Raith weren’t accidents, and I’ll lay you even money you’re not going to be able to prove Amalgamated didn’t burn down due to faulty wiring.”

  “You’re going to have to trust me on this for a couple of days,” I told him. “But I know what I’m talking about.”

  “I hope so, Eli,” he said, “or else you and I are going to have to seriously reassess our relationship.”

  “You’ll bring in the guy and get me the numbers?” I persisted.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said unhappily, and hung up.

  I hung around the office for another hour, waiting for Simmons to get back to me. When he didn’t call, I decided to go out for lunch. I took the elevator down to the lobby and walked out the front door. The Lincoln was gone.

  I went into a chili parlor across the street and ordered a five-way. Cincinnati chili isn’t like any other chili in the world; in fact, if you think of it as chili you’re going to be disappointed, but once you start looking upon it as the greatest junk food ever created you become addicted. It comes with shredded cheese and chopped onions and spaghetti, and if they’d just find another name for it they could market it nationwide and make a fortune—though from the number of Skyline and Empress and Gold Star franchises just in the Cincinnati area it seems pretty obvious they aren’t hurting for money.

  Anyway, I got my chili fix, realized how much I had missed it while I was out in Arizona, paid the tab, and went back to my office, where I pulled out a copy of my biography and chuckled over it for maybe the thousandth time while waiting for Simmons to call.

  When he finally did, I was just coming back from apologizing to Shelly down the hall—she didn’t believe a word of it, but at least she resisted the urge to jump out the window when I approached her—and I didn’t get to the receiver until the sixth ring.

  “Eli, this is Jim.”

  “Hi. Did you pick up the guy in the Lincoln?” I asked. “He was gone when I went out for lunch.”

  “We picked him up.”

  “And?”

  “He’s not a hit man and he doesn’t work for Cotter.”

  “Then who is he and what is he tailing me for?” I persisted.

  “You’ve got nothing to fear from him, Eli. Take my word for it.”

  “Jesus, this is like pulling teeth! Who is he?”

  “Leave it alone,” said Simmons. “I told you: you’re in no danger from him.”

  “What the hell is going on, Jim?” I insisted.

  “You’ve opened up one hell of a can of worms, Eli.”

  “I told you it was bigger than you imagined,” I said smugly.

  “Eli, it’s even bigger than you imagine,” he replied. “I’ve been getting pressure you wouldn’t believe for the past couple of hours.”

  “From high up?”

  “From very high up.”

  “Did you get me the numbers and addresses?”

  “One of the brothers, Richard, lives in New Jersey. I got the other stuff for you.” He read off the phone numbers and the address.

  “Thanks, Jim.”

  “You really want to thank me
, Eli?” he said. “Don’t ask me for any more favors on this case.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “I mean it, Eli. For friendship’s sake, don’t put me on the spot again.”

  I thanked him and hung up the phone, puzzled.

  Bigger than a drug ring?

  Bigger that four murders?

  What the hell had I stumbled onto?

  The more I thought about it the less sense it made. Finally I got so restless and frustrated sitting around the office and coming up with blanks that I decided to get some air. I checked James Cotter’s address and figured I might as well give his place a drive-by.

  He lived in Indian Hill, which is to Cincinnati’s suburbs what Hyde Park is to the city, only moreso. It’s about twelve miles long, maybe three or four miles wide, and covers just about all of a heavily forested hill. Most of the homes are on five acres or more, and are hidden behind long driveways on streets with names like Willow Springs and Council Rock and Shawnee Run. If there’s a straight street in Indian Hill, I’ve never found it.

  Another thing I couldn’t find was James Cotter’s home. Oh, I found the mailbox, all right—but the house was so far back from the road, hidden behind a small pond and a batch of sycamore trees, that it couldn’t be seen from the head of the driveway. I considered driving up to it when I saw a GUARD DOGS ON DUTY sign on the lawn and decided that it probably meant what it said. I was just as happy to turn around and leave, because if push came to shove and I had to break into one house or the other, I preferred Wilson Cotter’s: at least I could see what I was getting into.