“I’m a detective, Mrs. Polter. I’ve been asked to find Mr. Kruger. So far as I can tell you’re the last person who saw him.”
I had called Conrad Rawlings, a police sergeant in my own district, to find out whether Mitch had been picked up drunk and disorderly in the last few days. The police don’t have computer capability to check on something like that. Rawlings gave me the name of a sergeant in Area Four, who obligingly called all the stations that reported to him. None of them had picked Mitch up recently, although the guys at the Marquette Station knew who he was.
“What, he dead or something?” Her hoarse voice shredded words like a cheese grater.
“Just gone missing. What did he say to you when he left?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention—those damned spies were out riding around, just like they do every day when school’s out. I can’t keep my mind both places at once.
“You saw him walk down the stairs, though,” I persisted. “And you knew he hadn’t paid you. So you must have wondered when he was coming back with his money.”
She smacked her forehead with a giant palm. “That’s right. You’re so right, honey. I hollered at his back as he was on his way down the stairs. ‘Don’t forget you owe me fifty bucks,’ something like that.” She smiled, pleased with herself, and rocked so that the metal chair creaked.
“And what did he do?” I prodded in response.
She twisted again in her chair and picked up her fire extinguisher, menacing it at the three laughing kids down below. When they had retreated to the street she said, “What was that, hon?”
I repeated my question.
“Oh. Oh, sure. He turned and winked at me. ‘No need to spray me with that thing,’ he says, meaning the extinguisher, of course, ”cause I’ve got plenty of money. Least, I will have pretty soon. Pretty soon.‘“
“Did he turn left or right at the bottom of the stairs?”
She puckered her forehead up to her wispy yellow hair in an effort to remember, but she couldn’t call it back; her mind had been on the kids down below, not on one more desiccated lodger.
“I’d like to look at his room before I go.”
“You got a warrant for that, hon?”
I pulled out a twenty from my purse. “No warrant. But how about a refill for your gizmo there?”
She eyed me, then the money, then the kids down below. “You cops can’t come barging into someone’s house without a warrant. That’s in the Constitution, in case you didn’t know. But just this once, seeing as how you’re a female, and dressed neat, I’ll let you in, but you come back with any men, they’d better have a warrant. Go up to the second floor. He’s two doors down from the bathroom on your left.” She turned her head abruptly to the street as I opened the screen door.
Her house had the sharp, sour smell of rank dishcloths. It was a dark place, built deep and narrow with windows only on the front and back walls. By the smell, they hadn’t been opened for some time. The stairs rose steeply in front of me. I mounted them cautiously. Even so, I caught my feet several times on pieces of loose linoleum.
I fumbled my way down the second-floor hall to the bathroom, then found the second door on the left. The room was standing open, the bed made with a careless hand, waiting for Kruger’s return. No individual locks or much privacy in Mrs. Poker’s domain, but Kruger didn’t have much to be private about. I rummaged in his vinyl suitcase, but such papers as he had related to his union membership, his union pension, and a form to send to the Social Security Administration to let them know his change of address. He’d also kept some old newspaper clips, apparently about Diamond Head. Maybe the company stood in for his vanished family as a source of human connection.
His only possession of any possible value was a portable black-and-white TV. Its rabbit ears were bent and one of the knobs was broken off, but when I flipped it on, the picture came with respectable clarity.
Mitch’s clothes were sufficiently greasy to make me stop in the bathroom on my way out to wash my hands. A look at the towels convinced me that air-drying was healthier.
A middle-aged man in a frayed undershirt and shorts was waiting outside the bathroom door. He looked me1 over hungrily.
“ ‘Bout time the old bitch brought in someone like you, sugar. Sight for sore eyes. Sight for sore eyes, that’s for damned sure.”
He rubbed up against me as I passed him. I lost my footing and kicked him on the side of his exposed leg to steady myself. I felt his malevolent gaze on the back of my neck all the way downstairs. A better detective would have taken the opportunity to ask him about Mitch Kruger.