Crang Mysteries 6-Book Bundle. Jack Batten
a double office that looked out the back windows of the building. Harry liked that. No one passing in the street could see him at his clandestine labours. The department consisted of several desks, a medium-sized computer, and a wall of filing cabinets. Harry opened his briefcase and took out three sharpened pencils, a pad of foolscap, and a pocket calculator that ran on batteries. He laid out his tools of the trade on one of the desks and walked over to the filing cabinets.
“You want us to give you a hand?” I asked. James and I were standing at the door into the accounting area. I didn’t feel useful.
“No,” Harry said. He pulled open one of the drawers in the wall. A row of brown file folders filled the length of the drawer. Each folder had an indicator tag sticking out of the top at the left side. Harry flipped through the folders, stopped, and looked back to James and me.
“No, for chrissake, Crang,” he said. “Bad enough in here without you guys hanging over my shoulder.”
James and I stepped into the hall.
“You’re on guard duty,” I said to James. “I’ll snoop.”
I posted James at a window that gave him a view of the street.
“Anything fishy,” I said, “let out a shout.”
“What’s fishy?”
“You’ll recognize it.”
I walked down the hall past the accounting department. At the end of the building, two roomy offices faced one another across the hall. The office on the street side was Alice Brackley’s. It had a blonde wood desk and armchairs with chintz covering. On the desk there was a photograph in a silver frame of Alice and a man with grey hair who looked old enough to be her father. He probably was her father. Same thin lips.
The office on the other side of the hall didn’t display any personal photographs, but the ambience announced Charles Grimaldi. Its furnishings were heavy and masculine. Oak desk, leather sofa and chairs, a LeRoy Neiman drawing on the wall of a halfback crashing through the line. In one corner, a rectangular silver machine that stood waist high gleamed at me. I went over and patted it. It was a photocopier.
At the desk in the accounting area, Harry was intent over an opened file folder. A sheet of foolscap at his right showed a list of one-word notations with numbers opposite the notations. The fingers of Harry’s left hand danced on the keys of the pocket calculator, his right hand held a pencil and jotted on the foolscap. Harry’s handwriting made up in speed what it lacked in legibility.
“Harry,” I said, “a copy machine in the boss’s office. That in the usual line of executive furnishing?”
“You want me to get through this stuff,” Harry said, “don’t interrupt.”
“How you making out?”
“This is going to be strictly a sampling,” Harry said. “Anything definitive, I’d need four, five days.”
“All I’m asking is hints,” I said. “Trends.”
“One thing I can say already, General Motors doesn’t keep books the way these people do it.”
I turned back to the door.
“The answer to your question is negative,” Harry said from his desk. “It makes no sense for the boss to put a photocopy machine in his personal office.”
Two short flights of stairs led from the first-floor hall down to the building’s basement. At the bottom of the first flight, I looked through the window in a door opening on to Ace’s back property. Two hundred trucks waited in their spaces. In the silence and shadows, they took on anthropomorphic features—ominous, skulking creatures at temporary rest. Another minute and I could have worked myself up for the Robert Redford role in Out of Africa. Herd of beasts out there, Karen, dangerous when roused.
A time clock jutted from the wall of the landing just inside the door. Rows of cards in slots covered the rest of the wall space. The cards were light brown and each had a name and an employee number printed at the top. There were twenty-six cards in the line of slots along the bottom row and I pulled every one of them. Made for exciting reading, times punched in to work, times punched out after work. Some employees came on at eight a.m. or a few minutes thereafter and left at six p.m. or a little earlier. Some worked noon till eight or nine at night. And some had a shift that brought them to Ace at six in the morning. Those early birds better not catch the burglars.
Down the second short flight of stairs, the basement was given over to a locker room. Beat-up grey metal half-lockers ran lengthwise along two sides, and in the middle of the room there were two groupings of wooden tables and chairs. One table had a deck of cards on it, and a Playboy calendar hung on the back of a closet door. Miss July bore more than a passing resemblance to the nurse on duty at the Majestic. The locker room seemed the preserve of Ace’s drivers. They must come in from the yard through the back door, change clothes, play cards, shoot the breeze between trips on the monsters outside. There was a shower stall off one end of the room, and an electric kettle, some mismatched mugs, and a jar of instant coffee sat on a rickety table in a corner. I made three cups and carried them upstairs. Harry took his black, James wanted double sugar.
At three-fifteen, Harry spoke.
“Make yourself useful, Crang,” he said.
On his desk, Harry had organized papers and documents into three orderly piles. The tallest pile was of file folders from the wall cabinets, the smallest was his own stack of notations on the sheets of foolscap. The medium-sized pile seemed to be made up of waybills and invoices. Harry pointed to the third collection.
“Them, I want copies of,” he said to me. “Use that machine you found in the boss’s office, whatever his name is.”
“Grimaldi.”
“And keep the papers in the same order I gave them to you,” Harry said. “That way, I know exactly what file to put them back in, and nobody’s going to know we’ve been looking at this stuff.”
“What are these papers I’m copying?” I asked.
“Could be your smoking gun.”
The nervous Harry of earlier in the night had been replaced by the confident accountant.
I made three more cups of coffee at four o’clock. Thirty minutes later, Harry sent me back to the photocopier with a second bundle of documents. At five o’clock a thin line of yellow dawn showed across the eastern sky. Time to urge on the troops. When I suggested to Harry that we close down operations, he said he’d reached the limits of immediate information. He began returning the file folders to the cabinets and packing the copied documents in his briefcase. At five-thirty, James walked down the hall.
“Cops out there,” he said.
“Son of a bitch,” Harry said. He dropped a folder from his hand and the papers inside spilled across the floor. While he hastily gathered them, I went back down the hall with James and peeked through the window. A yellow cruiser was parked across the street in front of the Majestic. Two policemen sat in front talking to one another.
“Same cops that came by when I was doing the alarm,” James said in his best matter-of-fact voice.
“You recognize them?” I asked.
“Not the cops,” James said. “The numbers. I saw the numbers last time and this car’s got the same.”
The numerals 3148 were printed in blunt black on the side door of the cruiser. The driver got out of the car and raised his arms in a leisurely stretch. The other cop came around from his side of the car. He was smoking a cigarette. The driver reached through the cruiser’s window and brought out a brown paper bag. He opened it and offered a sandwich to his partner the smoker. The smoker shook his head and the driver bit into one of the sandwiches. He was a methodical chewer.
Harry joined James and me at the watch. He carried his briefcase in both hands. It was much fatter than when we’d arrived.
“Why