And without waiting for him to answer, I put the receiver down on the table and crossed over to Ellen. She’d just picked up the little gray cat, which looked a bit ruffled, but unhurt. She was soothing and petting it and talking baby talk to it.
I said, “Gosh, I’m sorry I had to throw it, but— Maybe I can make friends with it again.”
And I reached out a doubtful hand, not knowing whether I’d get clawed or not. But I wasn’t. Ellen smiled at me, and the cat began to purr. And I put my arms around Ellen and she had to put the cat down because it was in the way.
I hoped it would be a long time before the police got there and I felt like purring myself.
The Missing Actor
“HUNTER AND HUNTER,” I told the telephone, and it asked me if this was one of the Mr. Hunters speaking and I said yes, I was Ed Hunter.
And I was, and still am. Hunter & Hunter is a two-man detective agency operated on State Street on the Near North Side of Chicago. My Uncle Am for Ambrose is shortish, fattish, and smartish; he’d been an operative for a private detective agency once back when and then had become a carney. We got together after my father’s death ten years ago when I was eighteen, spent a couple of seasons together with a carnival, and then got jobs as operatives for the Starlock Agency in Chicago, and after a few years of that started our own detective agency, just the two of us. It’s still a peanut operation, but we like peanuts. We get along with each other and most of the world, and we make a living.
“Floyd Nielson,” the phone said. “Like you to do a job for me. Be there if I come around now?”
“One of us will be here,” I said, “and probably both. But could you tell me what kind of a job it is? If it’s some sort of work we can’t or don’t handle, I can save you the trip.”
“Missing person. My son Albee. Want you to find him.”
“Have you tried the police?”
“Sure. Missing Persons. Guy named Chudakoff. Lieutenant, I think. Said he’d done all he could, unless there’s new information. Said if I wanted more done, I should get a private agency. Recommended yours.”
Sounded okay, I thought, getting into his laconic way of talking. Every once in a while some friend of ours in the department tosses something our way, and in that case it’s bound to be on the up and up. Only honest people go to the cops first and then sometimes turn out to want more help than the cops can give them.
“How soon will you be here, Mr. Nielson?” I asked.
“Hour. Maybe less. I’m at the Ideal Hotel on South State. You’re on North State. Must be a bus that takes me through the Loop. Probably faster’n getting a taxi.”
I told him the number of the bus, where to catch it, and where to get off. He thanked me and hung up.
I put down the phone and was just about to pick it up again to call Tom Chudakoff to see what I could learn about the case in advance; then I looked at my watch and realized Uncle Am was already a few minutes overdue back from lunch and decided to wait and let him listen in on the call. Either or both of us might be working on the case.
He came in a minute later and I told him about the call from Nielson, what there’d been of it, and suggested he listen in on my call to Lieutenant Chudakoff. He said okay and went into his office, the inner one, and picked up his phone while I was dialing.
I got Chudakoff right away and told him what we wanted.
“Nielson, sure,” he said. “He’s been heckling me and I got him out of my hair by sending him to you. If you make any money out of him, you owe me a dinner.”
“Okay,” I said. “But he’s on his way here now, and what can you tell us in advance?”
“That there’s no problem. His son owed a bookie eight hundred bucks and took a powder. It’s as mysterious as all that.”
“If his father’s solvent enough to hire detective work, wasn’t he solvent enough to stand a bite to pay the bookie?”
“Oh, he gave the money to Albee all right. But it never got to the bookie. Albee thought it was better used as a fresh stake, I’d guess. He’d just lost his job, so what did he have to lose glomming onto the money himself.”
“Tell me something about him. Albee, I mean.”
“Well, he had a fairly good job in a bookstore, and a padded pad, was fairly solvent and played ponies on the cuff with a bookie named Red Kogan. Know him?”
“Heard of him,” I said.
“Well, Albee booked with him and always paid up when he lost until, all of a sudden a little over a week ago, Kogan realized Albee was into him for eight hundred. One of his boys drops in at Albee’s pad and doesn’t connect. He goes around to the bookstore and learns Albee’s been fired from his job. So what’s mysterious?”
“A padded pad, for one thing. What is one?”
“Albee was a part-time hipster. He was square eight hours a day—or whatever—at the bookstore, hip in his spare time. Look over his pad and you’ll see what I mean.”
“When was he last seen, Tom?”
“Week ago last Saturday night, July sixth. He borrowed car keys from a friend of his, Jerry Score, on Saturday morning—that’s the day after he was fired from the bookstore. Gave ‘em back late evening. If any of his friends, or anybody else, has seen him since, they’re not talking.”
“Sure. Said he was in a jam and wanted to see his old man—that’s your client—to raise some scratch. Floyd Nielson was a truck farmer near Kenosha, Wisconsin—”
“What do you mean, was?” I cut in. “Isn’t he now?”
“Sold his truck farm ten days ago, getting ready to blow this part of the country. He’s in Chicago, trying to see his son for one last time first.”
“But he saw him only nine days ago.”
“Yeah. It’s not so much that, or rather, I shouldn’t have put it that way. It’s that he wants to be sure Albee is okay before he takes off.
“And he thinks he’s sure Albee wouldn’t run off, just to duck an eight hundred dollar debt—at least not when he had the eight hundred in hand. Says Albee likes Chicago and has a lot of friends here, that he wouldn’t leave just because of that. Maybe he’s got a point, I wouldn’t know, but hell, there’s no evidence of foul play or anything but a run-out, and we can’t spend any more of taxpayers’ money on it. I can keep it open on the books, and that’s all, from here on in. That is, unless something new turns up. If you boys take the case and can turn up something, like maybe a motive for somebody dusting him off, we’ll work on it again.”
“Isn’t his running out on the bookie a motive?”
“Ed, this isn’t the old days. Bookies don’t have people killed for peanuts like that. Besides, Kogan’s not that kind of guy. He might lean on Albee a little, but that’s all. Probably did lean on him, which is what scared the guy. If Albee’s stayed, he’d have turned over the money—it’s just that he figured he’d rather use it as a stake for a fresh start somewhere else, and he had to do it one way or the other. Take my word for it.”
“Makes sense, Tom,” I said. “But if it’s that cut and dried, aren’t we just taking money away from a poor old man to take the case at all?”
“He’s not that poor. Frugal, yes; don’t try to bite him too hard.”
He was just kidding, so I didn’t answer that. He and our other cop friends know that we don’t bomb our clients. Which is why they send business our way once in a while.
“Find out anything else interesting about Albee?” I asked.
“Well, he had a hell of a cute little colored sweetie-pie. These beat boys seem to go for that.”