Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — Book 6
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Eleanor Varga had not been inside a bar since her father’s wake. In the ladies’ room she put a tablet under her tongue from the bottle in her purse, which was one of three. The others were in her desk at the plant and on the shelf over the sink at home.
The man at the register said Mr. Brannock was busy. The card over the register had been set in three faces of type and pulled with too little ink. She read it twice while he went down the bar to a woman at the end.
The woman came up the bar with a pencil behind her ear.
“You’re the sister,” she said.
“I am Eleanor Varga.”
“That’s what I said. Rita Dunphy. I do the books.” She lifted the flap at the end of the bar. “Come on back. He’s not gonna see you, and you don’t want to sit out here with this bunch.”
In the back wall of the office behind the bar a window with wire in the glass offered a view of a hall and the foot of a stair. Eleanor sat without being asked.
“You want a drink?”
“No, thank you.”
“Coffee?”
“No.”
“What’d your brother tell you?” Rita said.
“That he had borrowed forty-two thousand dollars against his half of the building. That it was due Friday. And that there was a second paper with it, giving a company the right to buy his half on Monday for the amount of the note.”
“What company?”
“A name. I don’t recall, but nobody I know.”
“Nobody anybody knows. That’s the kind of company it is. When’d he tell you all this?”
“Last night, after dinner. He put the papers on the table beside my plate and then it all spilled out.”
“And what’d you say?”
“I told him to go home.”
“Well, he didn’t. He hasn’t been in here since Saturday either. He’s into the house for six hundred and forty, separate, and he knows I know it.”
“I will pay that too.”
“Don’t. He’ll only run it up again.”
“I came to find out what it will cost to clear his note before Friday.”
“Forty-two thousand even. And he won’t take it.”
“I have not offered it.”
“You got forty-two thousand dollars on a Wednesday night?”
“I have thirty-one in the company’s account and four of my own. The bank will lend the rest against the new offset press when it has done the appraisal.”
“When’s that?”
“The week after next.”
“You’d hock your presses for him.”
“They are my presses.”
“He’s a grown man. Why’re you doing it?”
“Because it is due on Friday.”
Rita looked at her for a while.
“Huh,” she said.
“So go up there with what you got. He’ll say he’s sorry, the paper’s at his lawyer’s, come back Monday. Monday’s too late. That’s the whole idea of Monday.”
“He holds the note, he will take payment on it. That is how it is done.”
“Not upstairs it isn’t.”
The clock on the wall ticked. Twice.
“What happens on Monday?”
“Monday it’s not Sid’s paper anymore, and it’s not your brother’s problem. It’s yours.”
A girl in an apron put her head in at the door. “Rita, Sid wants the Tuesday sheet.”
“Tell Sid I’m busy.”
Rita turned the book a quarter turn toward herself.
It was a lender’s book and not a bar’s, green cloth ruled in red and blue: initials in the left-hand column, then dates, then sums in a small upright hand in pencil, every total closed with two short strokes. The adding-machine tape ran off the desk to a pile on the floor. Halfway down the page were the letters L.V., and forty-two thousand, and the fourteenth of March. Three lines under it a line had no initials, only Acct. and a figure.
“You can read that upside down?” Rita said.
“I set type for my father when I was twelve. For four years everything I read was upside down and backward.”
“Then you saw your brother’s name.”
Eleanor did not answer. Les had done this. She had known it since last night, and she knew it again now, in pencil, in another woman’s hand.
“Who is Mr. Brannock to you?”
“I used to go with him. Now I do his books. Here’s the part you want. Your brother signed in March. Sid had the papers drawn in February. I typed the letter to the lawyer. That’s weeks before Les ever sat down to sign ’em, and it wasn’t Les’s idea. Somebody at your place has been writing to Sid since the winter.”
“Nobody at my place writes to anybody without my signature on it.”
“Then you’ve been signing some funny letters.”
“I want to see them.”
“You and me both. They go upstairs, and Sid keeps ’em. I’ve got copies.”
“Of the letters.”
“Of this.” She laid the pencil across the open page. “Enough of it.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough that somebody downtown would have to read it.”
“Then give them to me.”
“Not in this building.”
“Then I do not see what use they are to me.”
“If anything happens to me they turn up somewhere nobody can stop them.”
“What would happen to you?”
Rita laughed. “I keep the books for a man who lends money on Lorain Avenue. You figure it out. You’re the one who’s good with figures, Les says.”
The telephone on the desk rang. Rita said “Crescent” into it, and listened, and said, “He’s upstairs,” and hung up. She looked at the window and the stair beyond it, then closed the book.
“You should go home,” she said. “Go out the back. It’s quicker to the lot.”
“My car is on the street.”
“Go out the back anyway.”
“I will speak to Mr. Brannock on Friday.”
“He’ll let you.”
Rita opened the door onto the hall. The back stair went up past the office window, and at the top a door stood open with a light behind it. A heavy man in a rust-colored shirt, the cuffs unbuttoned and folded back once, stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame and an inch of ash on the cigarette in the other.
Rita stopped at the foot of the stair.
“I’ll call you, Miss Varga,” he said to Eleanor, but his eyes were on Rita.
“Page eleven,” Miller said. “The second paragraph says what the first one says, only longer.”
“Then the first one goes.”
“The first one has the citation in it.”
Sterling read the two paragraphs again. The citation would sit in the second as well as the first, so he drew a line through the first and wrote the case name in the margin, small, where the typist would find it. The clerk’s window at the Court of Appeals opened at nine.
The night line rang on Miller’s desk in the outer office. She went out to it with her pencil still in her hand.
“Mr. Sterling’s office.”
She listened, and wrote on the pad by the telephone.
“Yes. He’s here.”
“Where are you now?”
“Stay there. I’ll come down for you.”
She put her head in at his door with one arm in her coat. “Eleanor Varga. Varga Lithographic, on Train Avenue. She’s in the lobby. She went to see a man tonight and he was dead when she got there, and a detective has been to her house.”
“Is she under arrest?”
“She drove herself downtown.”
“Then bring her up.”
She was sixty or a little past it, in a gray spring coat buttoned to the collar, and she took the client’s chair before Miller could come around the desk to offer it. She held her purse in her lap by the clasp. She looked at the brief spread across the blotter, and then at the paneling, and Sterling had the impression she knew to the dollar what the paneling had cost.
“Who sent you to me, Miss Varga?”
“Nobody sent me. You are in the book under Attorneys, and the night number is under the other one. I have driven past the Terminal Tower every working day for forty years.”
“And tonight you came in.”
“Tonight I had a reason.”
Miller sat at the end of the desk with her pad on her knee.
“Tell me about the man,” Sterling said.
“His name was Sidney Brannock. He owned a bar on Lorain Avenue called the Crescent Club, and he lent money. In March he lent my brother forty-two thousand dollars against my brother’s half of our building. It falls due tomorrow.”
“Your brother’s name?” Miller said.
Eleanor Varga looked at her. “Are you a lawyer?”
“No. I run this office. Irene Miller.”
“Leslie Varga. Les.”
“What does he do?”
“He sells cars on Brookpark Road. He has never worked at the plant.”
“And the building?”
“The plant on Train Avenue. My father built it. When he died it came to Les and me in halves. The company came to me.”
“When did you learn about the loan?” Sterling said.
“Tuesday night, after dinner. He brought the papers to my house and put them down beside my plate.”
“What papers?”
“The mortgage. And a second paper that gives a company the right to buy his half of the building on Monday, if the note has not been paid, for the amount of the note.”
“What company?”
“I did not read it for the name. I read it for the date.”
“Could you have paid it?”
“Not by Friday. There is thirty-one thousand in the company’s account and four thousand of my own. The bank will lend me the rest against a new press, after an appraisal the week after next.”
“What did you do on Wednesday?”
“Wednesday night I went to his club to find out what it would cost me to clear the note. He was busy. A woman who keeps his books talked to me in an office behind the bar.”
“What did she tell you?”
“That he would not take my money.”
Sterling waited.
“Did she say why?”
“She said it would not be his paper on Monday.”
“What else did she say?”
“She offered me coffee.”
“You were with her for how long?”
“Half an hour. She was interrupted a good deal. It is a bar.”
“Did you see Brannock?”
“From the foot of a stair. He said he would call me.”
“And did he?”
“At a quarter to four this afternoon, at the house. I had come home early from the Clinic.”
“What did he say?”
“Nine o’clock tonight, at his warehouse in the Flats, off Columbus Road, and bring five thousand dollars. For that I would have my brother’s paper, and a name besides.”
“Whose name?”
“He did not say. I took him to mean the company’s.”
“Did you have five thousand dollars?”
“Not at four o’clock in the afternoon. I took my checkbook.”
“Did you write him a check?”
“There was nobody to write it to.”
“What time did you leave the house?” Miller said.
“Twenty minutes to nine.”
“And got there?”
“Five minutes to nine. I parked in front of the door.”
“What did you find?” Sterling said.
“The door was standing open with a light over it, the kind they put over a loading dock. There was liquor inside in cases, stacked higher than my head on both sides, and an office at the back with the light on. I called his name from the door of the office.”
“And?”
“He was on the floor.”
Miller’s pencil stopped at the end of the line.
“You may write that down,” Eleanor Varga said to her. “It is what happened.”
“Behind the desk?” Sterling said.
“Behind the desk. On his side. His eyes were open. There was blood under his head, more than I would have thought there could be. I did not touch him.”
“What time was it?”
“A minute or two past nine. I did not look.”
“What did you do?”
“I looked for my brother’s papers. In the desk and in the file cabinets. There are two. I opened every drawer and I did not find them.”
“How long did that take you?”
“Twenty minutes. Perhaps less.”
“What else was in that room?”
“The desk. The two cabinets. A safe in the corner, shut. A telephone on the desk.”
“You didn’t use it,” Miller said.
“No.”
“What time did you leave?”
“Twenty past nine. Before that I was dizzy. I sat down on a case of whiskey inside the door and took a tablet, and when it had worked I went out to the car and drove out the far end of the street, under the bridge, so I would not have to turn it around.”
“A tablet of what?” Sterling said.
“Nitroglycerin. I had a heart attack in January. I was on their treadmill at noon today with wires on me, and the doctor told me I would be tired tonight.”
“Where do you keep the tablets?”
“In my purse. There are three bottles, one in my purse, one in my desk at the plant and one at home on the shelf over the sink. The doctor says they have to be glass, and I am never to put them together in one bottle to save myself the trouble, and so I have three bottles where anybody else would have one.”
“What happened at the house?”
“At half past ten a detective came to the door. Sergeant Rusnak. He asked me whether I owned a gray Buick and whether I had been in the Flats tonight, and I told him yes to both. He said a bottle of pills with my name on the label had been found beside Mr. Brannock.”
“What pharmacy?” Miller said.
“Adler’s, on Lorain Avenue.”
“The prescription number?”
“It is on the label. I do not carry it in my head.”
“How did he know about the Buick?”
“He did not tell me.”
“What’s the plate?”
“DKR 316.”
Miller wrote it down. Somebody had given the police her car inside of an hour, then.
“What did you tell the sergeant?” Sterling said.
“That Mr. Brannock was dead when I got there. And that I noticed nothing on the floor.”
“Did he ask you about the desk? Or the cabinets?”
“He did not ask me about the desk.”
“Did he arrest you?”
“He said somebody would be in touch with me. He was very polite. He stayed until twenty past eleven.”
“And after he left?”
“I looked in my purse. The bottle was gone.”
“The one they found.”
“It had my name on it, Mr. Sterling.”
For an hour she had given him a note to the dollar, a quarter to four, five to nine, and the number off her license plate. Twice she had gone short. Asked about the woman at the Crescent, she had given him one sentence, and asked about the office she had given him its furniture. On both she had answered a smaller question than the one he put. He had no idea what she had left out of either one.
“Where is your brother tonight?” he said.
“He is not at his apartment. I telephoned at eleven and let it ring.”
“Where is he?”
“I do not know.”
She said it to the brief on his desk.
“What will this cost me?” she said.
“We will talk about money when I know what I am being paid to do.”
“That is not how it is done. A man quotes the job before he takes it.”
“Then Miss Miller will have a figure for you by noon, in writing. Until then you have a lawyer. If Sergeant Rusnak or anyone else from the police comes to your door, you will tell him so, and give him my name, and you will say nothing else. Not about the warehouse, not about the club, not about your brother.”
“I have nothing to say about my brother.”
“Then that is what you will say.”
He took the telephone off its cradle and dialed a number he did not have to look up and let it ring eight times, or nine, before Dan Cruz answered it.
“It’s Sterling. I’m sorry about the hour. There is a warehouse in the Flats, off Columbus Road, that belonged to a man named Brannock until about nine o’clock tonight. The police will have it. I would like you to go and stand as close to it as they will let you, in the morning, and tell me what you see.”
“Who’s the client?”
“A woman who runs a print shop.”
“She do it?”
“Come by here first. Seven.”
He put the telephone down.
“Who is that?” Eleanor Varga said. She had not moved in her chair.
“Dan Cruz. He investigates for me. He did the same for the Coast Guard, on the lake, for a good many years before that.”
Miller turned back a page of her pad and read something there and turned it forward again. It was ten past one.
“Miss Varga,” Sterling said. “Who else knew you would be at that warehouse at nine o’clock tonight?”
“Nobody.”
Miller wrote that down as well, and the time beside it.
Rusnak let him come as far as the office door and put a hand up there.
“That’s the line, Mr. Cruz. You can look from here.”
Cruz looked from there.
The office was about twelve feet by fourteen, with one window at the back painted over from the inside. The desk faced the door. The lab had been over the front of it with gray powder, every drawer pull and the edge of the top where a hand would go, and the powder had worked down into the grain. The safe stood in the corner with its door shut. There was powder on the telephone receiver too. Two file cabinets stood against the wall on the hinge side of the door, where he could not see them without leaning, and he did not lean. He could not see behind the desk either, and from the door that was the only part of the room worth seeing.
“What time did your car get here?” he said.
Rusnak had a notebook out before the question was finished. “I have it here. Nine forty-four, the car. I got here at ten-oh-five.”
“Who called it in?”
“A call came in.”
“Man or woman?”
“A call came in, Mr. Cruz.”
“What’d he weigh? Brannock.”
“Two-thirty. About. The coroner will have it to the pound.”
“Big man.”
“He was a big man.”
“Any other way in?”
“Loading door on the side, rolled down and padlocked from the inside. I observed it myself at ten-fifteen. Window in the back’s painted shut. There’s that door and there’s this one.” He meant the street door behind them. “Nobody went in or out of here but by that door.”
“Door open when your car got here?”
“Standing open. The light on.” Rusnak put the notebook in his inside pocket and buttoned the coat over it. “Anything else I can do for you? I have someplace to be at eleven.”
“You been polite,” Cruz said. “I’ll tell Sterling.”
“Tell him the woman was polite too.”
He left a patrolman on the street door and drove off toward Columbus Road.
The light over the door was still burning. It was a loading-dock fixture in a wire cage, and nobody had thought to turn it off, and nobody would until the police were done with the building. Cruz stood under it and looked both ways along the street.
It was a short street and it did not go straight. From the warehouse door he paced about seventy steps toward the tavern end before the street turned, around the corner of a machine shop’s cinderblock wall, and from there it ran straight for about eighty yards to Columbus Road. The Riverbend sat on the corner with its door facing up the street. The other way, past the warehouse, the street narrowed to one lane and went on between the piers of the bridge approach, in the dark under the deck, and came out on Columbus Road again about a quarter mile south. He walked that end too. There was broken glass under the bridge, old, and a hubcap somebody had nailed to a pier.
He went into the Riverbend at ten.
It was a long room with the bar down the left side and a coffee urn at the near end of it, and six men from a tug down the river sat along the bar drinking coffee out of beer mugs. The barman saw him come in and took a mug off the back bar without being asked.
“The Coast Guard,” he said. “Somebody finally drown?”
“Not this time.”
“Sugar?”
“Black.”
The barman drew it from the urn and set it down. “You’re up there with the cops.”
“I’m up there. The cops are up there with me.”
“Every cop in the Flats was in here last night till one. In and out. A woman, did I see a woman. I didn’t see no woman. Nobody in here saw no woman. I got a room full of men who never saw a woman in their lives, you ask ’em.”
One of the tug crew laughed into his mug.
“Anybody in here hear anything?”
“From back there? No. You can’t hear nothing from back there. Freighter goes by, you can’t hear the TV.”
“Busy last night?”
“Thursday. It’s never busy Thursday. Payday’s Friday.”
“Brannock drink in here?”
“Sid? Sid never drank in here in his life. Man owns a bar, he don’t drink in another man’s bar. Trucks in and out of there at night. Liquor. Nobody asked him and he didn’t say. Fella used the phone out there, though, about half past nine. In the vestibule. Didn’t buy a drink.”
“How do you know half past nine?”
“’Cause I put the urn on at half past nine for this bunch.” He tilted his head at the tug crew. “They come off at ten. I’m filling it, I hear the outside door, I hear the dime go in. I figure he’s coming in after. He don’t come in. I hear the door again.”
“You see him?”
“Through that?” The inner door had frosted glass in it with RIVERBEND on it backward. “I seen a coat. I don’t look at people who ain’t buying.”
“You tell the cops?”
“They asked did I see a woman.”
Cruz drank the coffee. It had been in the urn since half past six, but it was hot.
“What do I owe you?”
“Coast Guard don’t pay in here. Coast Guard never paid in here.”
“I’m not Coast Guard anymore.”
“You’re the same face.”
On the way out he stopped in the vestibule. It was four feet deep between the two doors, with the payphone on the left wall, a black box with the directory hanging under it on a chain. The outer door had clear glass in the top half. Standing where a man would stand to use the phone, he could see up the street as far as the turn, and the machine shop’s wall where it turned, and nothing past it. He could not see the warehouse from there, or the light over its door. He went out and walked back up to his car.