A Dismal Thing To Do (26 page)

“Tasted it, did you?”

“Marshal Olson did. He’s a braver man than I am.”

“Fred’s all right. We went to school together. I suppose he told you they used to call me Eyeball.”

Major Grouse selected a pastry from the plate on the tea tray, ate it, and wiped his mustache. “Funny thing, everybody had a nickname, but we never called Fred anything but Fred. So Jelly’s in another jam.”

From the look on his face he didn’t mean that to be funny, as in fact it wasn’t. “He’s only a kind of second or third cousin of mine, you know.”

“There’s one in every family,” Madoc apologized. “About this still, Major Grouse. Was it something you’d be willing to explain?”

“Oh hell, why not? Can’t expect me to go into technical details, naturally. You wouldn’t know what I was talking about. Neither would I.”

Major Grouse took another pastry. “Gist of it is,” he went on with his mouth full, “some of the higher-ups—I’m not saying of what country, mind you—got hold of a bright idea about a new kind of ground-to-air missile. Dull afternoon at the officers’ mess, I suppose. So they spent a few million dollars getting it designed and having an experimental model made up. Then of course they had to test it out.”

He took another swig of tea to wash down the pastry. “For undisclosed reasons, they decided to shoot it out over the ocean, so they brought it to a place that shall have to remain nameless, stuffed it into a silo, and pushed the button. Damn thing didn’t work, naturally. So they got a team of expert technicians and a bunch of mechanics to monkey around with it. Well, the technicians got bored with it pretty quickly and went off to think up another idea. That left it to the mechanics, who found out that by shoving the guts around and throwing out all the electronic garbage, they could convert it, as you deduced, into a remarkably efficient still.”

“More tea, Major?” said the deputy commissioner.

“Thanks. Where was I? Oh yes, out in the woods under the silo. Anyway, there it sat and the technical staff were going hot and heavy on the next idea and nobody wanted the confounded thing back, so the mechanics were ordered to chop it up and scrap it, which needless to say they didn’t. Lugged it off into a different part of the woods and set up in business, as any damn fool might have known they would. In fact, I gather it was fairly well common knowledge around the base, which was why nobody stopped ’em. Long as enough joy juice got passed out to the right people, it was regarded as sort of a company joke, like—” he glanced over at Madoc.

“Like Ed McLumber’s family tradition,” Madoc filled in smartly.

“Right. Just testing. But what the company didn’t know was how really efficient that still was. They were draining off the booze about a gallon a minute when they could find anything to distill, which was most of the time, I gather, since they were none too fussy about what they bunged into the hopper. And the beauty of it was, they were running the still on—well, if not rocket fuel, something that might, loosely speaking, fall into that general category. This was a special propellant that had been developed specially for the missile that didn’t work. A sufficient amount had been shipped to fuel all the experiments that had been intended for the apparatus. Considering the confounded thing fizzled on the first try, that gave ’em enough left over to run the still from here to hell and gone.”

“Bit of luck for the bootleggers,” remarked the deputy commissioner.

“It was that and then some. Way they had it rigged, they didn’t need to use more than a dribble at a time. In fact, they’d have blown the damned thing apart if they’d used more. That meant no smoke, no smell to give them away. They had a perfect setup until somebody who’d also better be nameless twigged on to the fact that they were shipping the bulk of their squeezings away from camp.”

“When was this?”

“The day they got shut down, of course. Must have been going on for months. Those mechanics were found on investigation to have a damned sight more money stashed away than they’d had any chance of collecting legitimately unless they played incredibly good poker, which they didn’t and never had, according to reliable testimony from their bunkies. What beats me is where they got hold of the bottles to ship it in.”

“Those were supplied to them by Badger, who hid them until they were needed inside seventeen used portable privies in Elmer Bain’s junkyard.”

The deputy commissioner, who had never before been known to evince any strong emotion, murmured a faint, “My God!”

“Or how they managed the distribution,” Major Grouse went on. Knowing Jason Bain of old, he had accepted the seventeen privies with equanimity.

“I think the liquor must have been got out of the base by army personnel, who probably were supplied with civilian transport by Badger. You’d know that better than I, no doubt. Anyway, disguised as hardware supplies, it was brought to Ed McLumber’s hardware store and put in the basement. Local distribution was handled by Buddy McLumber in his uncle’s truck. The larger and more distant customers were served by a rather complicated system. Jason Bain’s truck would be loaded with cartons marked floor wax, turpentine, and whatnot—this was all done in the dead of night, needless to say—and Bain would drive the truck over to that abandoned barn where my wife was caught by the explosion.”

Madoc took a sip of his own now cold tea to steady his voice. “Bain would leave the truck and walk up into the house, until Jellicoe Grouse and Wolfman Wombatte had come along with another vehicle which he claims he never did see, and transfer the cargo. They’d then honk to let him know the job was done, and drive off. Bain would walk back to his empty truck and go back home. As you know, Major, people are so used to old Bain pottering around at all hours in that wreck of his loaded with anything under the sun that nobody would ever think twice about seeing him. If Jellicoe Grouse, on the other hand, had ever been spotted driving away from the store in a loaded truck—”

“They’d naturally have assumed he was robbing his uncle blind,” Major Grouse finished for him. “At least I would. Though I’m not sure Ed is Jelly’s uncle, come to think of it. Seems to me his father was half-brother to Jelly’s mother’s cousin. I’d have to sit down and work it out.”

“Do,” said the deputy commissioner. “Genealogies are always interesting. Could you explain to us, please, Inspector, why the man known as Badger happened to shoot that chap you call Buddy McLumber Saturday night in a snowmobile at Bull Moose Portage?”

“Because he hadn’t found a chance to shoot him sooner, I suppose,” Madoc answered. “Perhaps we might, for the moment, try to see the situation through Badger’s eyes. Here’s a convicted murderer on the run. He’s learned, possibly through a chance meeting with Jelly Grouse, that a respected hardware dealer is supplying a selected clientele with bootleg liquor from a small family-owned still. He also learns, being a man with an inquisitive turn of mind and a desperate need to reestablish himself, that a successful distilling operation is being conducted at a point close enough on one side or the other of the border to make a liaison feasible and a middleman necessary.”

“Tea, Rhys?” said the deputy commissioner.

“Thank you. So Badger makes contact with the distillers, who have plenty of merchandise but no distribution facilities, and McLumber, who has excellent distribution facilities but only limited means of production. Keeping tight control by his roundabout system of never letting the various sectors of his operation interconnect, Badger works up a surprisingly lucrative business in a short time. He pays his people well to keep them content with the arrangement and it’s all going like clockwork until suddenly the still is seized and ordered shipped away to a place where he can’t get at it.”

“Possibly in a friendly foreign country,” Major Grouse interposed.

“Thank you. Badger then conceives a plan to hijack the still, no doubt with the intention of operating it himself. That will in fact suit him better, because he won’t have to go on paying his military confederates and they won’t dare complain at being cut off for fear of exposure and court-martial.”

“Damn right,” snapped Eyeball Grouse.

“Naturally he doesn’t let the military personnel know they’re being dealt out of the game. Instead, he enlists their help to deactivate the army drivers. He gets his other set of henchmen to steal an unmarked van and Perce Bergeron’s bull box. I assume it was Buddy who took the box. Apparently he’d had a youthful habit of joyriding in his relatives’ cars. If he was caught, he could pass it off as a mere prank.”

“Took mine once,” growled Eyeball Grouse. “I was going to warm his bottom for him, but his mother wouldn’t let me.”

“Too bad,” said Madoc. “Anyway, we all know how the hijacking was effected. Jellicoe Grouse has confessed it was he and Wombatte who manhandled the two retching soldiers into the van and left them there. They drove off in Wombatte’s car while Buddy drove the truck to where they’d left the bull box. They then shifted the still, not without considerable difficulty because it was a heavy weight for three men to handle. They’d been warned not to tip the still for fear of disturbing the delicate and sophisticated mechanisms inside.”

“Is that what they called them, Rhys?” asked the deputy commissioner.

“Grouse referred to them simply as ‘the guts.’ Anyway, they propped the still up inside the bull box as best they could, and set the barrels of fuel around it. Badger’s instructions had been for them to take it to the abandoned house and set it up in the barn next to the road until a better place could be found.”

“Thus knocking this Bain fellow off the payroll, too, I assume?”

“Badger might have run into a problem there. Bain’s a great one for demanding his rights. Perhaps the bombing of the junkyard was originally planned to discourage him from any such demand. But getting back to the bull box, it’s obvious that the hijackers’ efforts at securing the still in an upright position weren’t good enough. Despite Buddy’s expert driving, the still fell over and toppled the truck on that last rise. Out there alone, frightened of being caught with the still and no doubt none too happy about all that fuel sloshing around the box, Buddy panicked.”

“He would,” snorted Major Grouse.

“Yes, that would have been a normal reaction for him, according to my sources. He hid in the cab until my wife left her car and went into the barn, then stole her car and took off, leaving her stranded. Whether he knew who she was, or whether he deliberately ignited the fuel before he left, I couldn’t say.”

“Wouldn’t have to,” said Major Grouse. “Stuff was highly volatile. Had to be shipped in special drums. Must have smashed a few when the still fell over. Soon as a concentration of fumes built up inside the bull box—my God! What would Elzire Bergeron have thought? A part of my own heritage gone. Hell, I can remember when our old cow Geraldine—” in some embarrassment, Eyeball Grouse stuffed another pastry into his mouth. In respectful silence, Madoc sat and watched him chew.

When he’d got his emotions under control and his mouth back in working order, the major stood up. “Well, I’d say that wraps it up. Good staff work, Commissioner. You—er—needn’t bother submitting a written report.”

“We shall be happy to refrain from doing so,” said the deputy commissioner. “Might I offer you a bite of lunch, Major?”

“Got to get back, thanks. Make sure nobody’s parked another still on my base, eh. Sorry about your wife’s washstand, Inspector.”

“No regrets, sir. Fred Olson had one that was just the ticket.”

“Hunh. I might have known. Give her my regards. Hell, give ’em all my regards. No, don’t bother, I’d better go do it myself. Need a bit of straightening out, eh.”

“There’s a new chap named Pierre Dubois who could use some advice on paramilitary tactics,” Madoc suggested. “He’s semiengaged to Cecile Bergeron and planning to blow up Detroit.”

“That so? Well, Detroit shouldn’t be much of a problem. Might have trouble with Cecile. See you.”

The deputy commissioner walked his visitor to the door, came back and considered the last pastry on the plate, but decided against it. “It sounds as if you’ve had a most interesting weekend, Rhys. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?”

Madoc weighed the prospect of an afternoon with Janet against the prospect of an afternoon at his desk, and went. Janet was delighted to see him.

“I’m so glad you’re home. Muriel was just here telling me about this absolutely marvelous Victorian hall rack with a boot box and a mirror and millions of brass curlicue hooks with porcelain knobs she’s seen—”

“Jenny!”

“She’s seen in that antique shop on Regent Street. What’s the matter with you, Madoc? You’re getting awfully jumpy lately.”

“Lack of sufficient tender loving care, I expect. Come on, love. Give the old man a kiss. Then we’ll take a nice, slow, gentle walk down to Regent Street hand in hand, and buy our hall a curlicue.”

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copyright © 1986 by Charlotte MacLeod

cover design by Mauricio Diaz

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