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Robert L. Iles is the author of two previous fiction works about the mythical Cass County Ohio Sheriff's Department, the 1999 novel Dead Wrong and the 2001 short novel The Ten Spot Murders in the Eppie Award winning anthology Blood, Threat and Fears. He is also the author of a short story collection featuring 1950s Manhattan private investigator Peter B. Bruck, The Burning Woman, and a Lake Ozark Theater Guild first-prize winning play, "All's Swell."

A Thousand The Hard Way by Robert L. Iles

March, 1948. Almost six on a Friday evening, time for Ella to get her $48.50. When I had it. Which I didn't, again, and she knew I didn't. I knew she knew it because I could hear her in the outer office slamming file drawers, muttering, "Laziest man… Quit... Kill him…" And I knew that any minute she would march in shaking her finger, saying, "Now you listen to me, Mr. Bruck."

But, saved by the bell. As she steamed in, my phone rang. She picked it up and said as sweetly as if earning vast sums in a financially stable enterprise, "Peter B. Bruck, Discreet Investigations Incorporated."

Until yesterday I had been just plain Peter B. Bruck, Private Investigator, then she started adding the Discreet Investigations. "To give us a touch of class," she told me. Then today she'd added the Incorporated, "to give our clients more confidence." Us? Our? What next? Would I come to work tomorrow and find the name on the door had been changed to Ella Raymond, Discreet Security Services, Incorporated?

A pause as she listened to the caller, then, "This evening? Let me check Mr. Bruck's schedule."

I wigwagged no and pointed down my mouth. She curled a lip in a silent snarl but said into the phone as sweetly as before, "Sorry, but it appears Mr. Bruck… Let me go check the appointment book on his desk." She grabbed my Daily Racing Form, rattled a page near the phone, and told the caller, "Yes, here we are. I believe he has some time after his dinner meeting with the Mayor's Select Committee on Crime Prevention. Say, seven o'clock?"

She almost popped a gasket when I wigwagged no again.

"Hold on, please," she said into the phone. "I have to pin something down." She started around the desk at me, holding the receiver like a club, fire in her eyes. I couldn't help it, I laughed and put my hands up. "Okay, okay," I said. "Seven."

"Yes, seven o'clock," she told the caller. "And you know he's using his old office on lower Broadway while the uptown suite is being remodeled? Very good."

"Who?" I asked when she hung up.

"Said his name is Jones."

"He say what it was about?"

She shook her head. "Confidential."

"It's okay, I work here, you can tell me."

"Will you stop it? He sounds like a real client. Now I'm hungry and you are taking me to dinner."

We walked up Broadway to Lei Ping Loo's Chinese Restaurant. I ordered the moo shoo gai pan, she got the grilled hot dog with noodles. I told her, "You know, in a Chinese restaurant when you order something with 'dog' in the name…." I raised my eyebrows.

She said. "You're trying to make me lose my appetite so I won't order dessert, but I know your tricks and I've already decided on plum cake and green tea."

"Tea will keep you awake."

"One of us has to be sharp when this guy comes in," she said.

"Shows what I know," I said. "I thought I was going to walk you to the subway after dinner."

"You need a secretary to impress him."

"By golly, call Ripley, that's twice I've been wrong. I thought you just wanted to stick around in case the mysterious Mr. Jones coughs up a retainer. Can you ever forgive me?"

She smiled in that icy way people do when they don't have a comeback.

After her cake and tea, she said, "Mr. Bruck, you are going to have to face facts. The bank called again to say they are going to cancel your account if you don't maintain a minimum balance. And someday you're going to walk through that door and find out there is no heat, light, phone, or even an office. Do you know that last week the landlord caught me sneaking into work from the fire escape? I told him I thought I heard a burglar out there, but he just laughed and said there wasn't anything worth burgling in the office. He's been waiting downstairs for me every day since then and I've only gotten past him by walking in with some other girls and talking to them real fast, but this morning he left a note reminding me how much you owe. Do you know how much that is, Mr. Bruck?"

"I give up."

"You see, to you it's all just some kind of game. But I can't stand that man. Do you know he actually said to me there are other ways to take care of the rent? If he ever says that again, I swear I'll drill him right between his piggy little eyes."

I almost laughed but Ella didn't. She was serious.

Lei Ping Loo let me put the check, $2.75 with tip, on my bill, and Ella and I walked back to work down the Great Dark Way.

A little after seven, I heard her say to someone in the outer office, "Go right in. Mr. Bruck is expecting you."

Which turned out to be about as true as a whore's heart, because the guy who waltzed in was Rudy Vaccarelli, missing the past five years and, according to conventional wisdom, resting in pieces around the five boroughs. The last anyone would admit to seeing him alive was backstage at the Paramount Theater where he was the bodyguard for April Palmer, a dark-eyed beauty on the rise in the movies and not incidentally the daughter of Big Sid Palmeiro, who ran almost everything that was fun and unlawful in Brooklyn. She was in town doing personal appearances to promote her movie, something about a girl from Brooklyn who makes it big in show biz—inspired casting—and Big Sid against all sense appointed Rudy Vaccarelli to watch over her. Rudy was no slouch in the looks department. It was said he could draw a crowd of female admirers if dropped down a mine shaft in Antarctica.

All was well until after April's final stage show, when everybody gathered at Sardi's for a celebratory dinner. Everybody except April and Rudy.

Big Sid put out the word he would pay a thousand dollars for Rudy dead or alive and fifty thousand for the safe return of his daughter.

A month later, a body, or what was left after the eels and crabs had dined on it, was fished out of the East River. When the coroner said it had been a female, five-feet-four, about twenty-one years old, Big Sid raised the ante on Rudy's head to sixty thousand, preferably alive but dead acceptable. A lot of people, including me, figured that bought him results and the story faded from the newspapers.

But here was Rudy, live and clicking, looking as casual, comfortable and prosperous as ever in a midnight-blue suit cut by a tailor who knew Rudy's business as well as his own. I had to look hard to see the bulge over the shoulder holster.

Ella came in from hanging up his topcoat and hat and parked herself on my side of the desk, the better to drink him in.

"Aren't you going to say you're glad to see me?" Rudy asked me.

"I'll say it was nice to have seen you if you're out that door in two seconds," I said.

He laughed. "Don't worry, nobody even knows I'm in town."

"As far as you know."

He made a show of looking around. "You see any of Sid's goons in here? Don't you think they'd be climbing down my neck by now?"

"Maybe they're waiting for him to get here to hear your last gurgle."

"You've seen too many movies."

"No, too many people who crossed Big Sid—and the poor saps who were around when he caught up with the crossers. Think you can find your way out?"

"For a smart guy, you're a little behind the times, Bruck. Sid's just a bitter old man now, forced into retirement by the young turks, and they have bigger things in mind than settling some old man's score."

"Retired or not, he'll still pay for your head. And you know it too, or you wouldn't have snuck in here after dark and used a phony name."

"Okay," he said, "there's maybe one or two punks out there still hoping to collect the reward."

"And I'd be just as dead from some punk's stray bullet as from a four-star hoodlum's. So if you'll just—"

"I gave this a lot of thought before coming here. No harm in hearing me out, is there?"

"Sorry, we're full up. Lots of other P.I.'s in the phone book."

He said to me while looking at Ella, "I've checked around. I need you."

I said, "Get your coat, Ella. I'm taking you home." She didn't budge, sat mesmerized, grinning like a schoolgirl.

Rudy said, "I'm offering five hundred bucks for an hour's work."

That brought her out of her daze. "Wow!"

I fought conflicting urges—to strangle her and to wrap her protectively in my arms. Rudy went on. "Look, my mother's sick, could die any time. I've got to get a package to her. You have no idea how happy it will make her. If anyone tries to stop you, you can tell them you and Ella are my mom's nephew and his wife, or cousin, whatever. Just get the package in to her, say goodbye, and you're out."

The story smelled to high heaven and I said so, but Ella bought it. "Mr. Bruck," she said, "what can you possibly have against this? Just deliver a package. To a dying woman. Five hundred dollars."

I told Rudy, "You don't need me, you need a mailman."

"No, I have to have somebody I can trust to put it right in her hands. You and me's been on opposite sides now and then, but you've always been a square guy, and that's what I need. What's the problem? It's all legal, a twenty-minute trip over to Brooklyn, in and out of the house, and you get five hundred bucks. And you make a dying woman happy."

Ella said, "Look, Mr. Bruck, that kind of money…. If you won't do it, I'll get my neighbor Homer. He's only seventeen but he's got a suit and—"

That did it. I was in, like it or not. Ella determined is as hard to stop as a battleship, and there no way was I going to let her sail into this mess with a 17-year-old Homer as first mate. I asked Rudy what the package was.

"A family treasure."

"I don't see any package."

"Too valuable to carry around."

"Where is it?"

"In my room, at the Gravenhall."

Another thing that didn't make sense. Like most of lower Broadway, the Gravenhall Hotel was a ghost of its former self. Not yet a dump but on its way and certainly not the kind of place Rudy would pick.

"Why there?" I asked.

"Close to your office."

Curiouser and curiouser. A room at the Gravenhall was about as easy to burgle as blind beggar's cup, and nowhere near the luxo kind of digs Rudy was known for frequenting.

Before I could question him about it, he had a wad of bills out and was slapping fifties on my desk. "Half now, the other half after."

Ella's eye bulged. She grabbed the money, stuffed some down her bodice, said, "I'll put the rest in the bank's night depository. It's right on our way."

"Don't strain yourself," I told her. "Put it in the safe." To Rudy I said, "The job's a thousand. Five hundred now."

"Sold," he said and counted out another two hundred and fifty. Why hadn't I said two thousand?

Ella went to the picture of Chief Sitting Bull on the wall behind me and swung it aside to get at the safe we hadn't had any use for in months. I said to Rudy, "If this is such a simple job, why the big pay-off?"

Looking at Ella as she twirled the safe's knob, he said, "I pay top dollar for top talent."

***

The Gravenhall lobby was empty, not even a night manager in sight. Rudy led us to a room on the second floor, but instead of going in knocked once, paused, knocked twice, paused, and then knocked three times. I was about to tell Ella that a guy shouldn't have to knock on his own door if nobody even knows he's in town, but decided to let her figure that out for herself.

A soft voice on the other side said, "Who is it?"

Aha! He had a broad stashed in there.

Rudy answered, "Mickey Mouse." The door opened on the chain and a hag with hair stringing across her face looked out.

"Shh," she said, closing the door and taking the chain off to open it wider. "She's asleep." So there was another woman in there.

Rudy put a wad of money into the hag's hand and she hurried past us down the hall to a maid's cart. He motioned us to follow him into a bedroom off the sitting room. I hung back because I didn't feel right tiptoeing into a woman's bedroom. Not with other people.

Ella stopped in the doorway, hand to her mouth. "Oh, my goodness." Rudy grinned at her. Now I had to go take a peek. Tucked in the oversize bed, raven curls spread out on the pillow, was the reason Rudy had taken the hotel closest to my office—an angel fast asleep with her thumb in her mouth, maybe two or three years old, a miniature version of April Palmer. Or of Rudy. Hard to say.

I don't think Ella realized it but she cooed.

I herded her and Rudy into the parlor. "Who is that?"

"Shh," Rudy said. "My daughter, May."

"Ohhh, she's so cute," Ella said, pleading with her eyes to go back for another look. Rudy motioned for her to go.

"All right now," I said, "gimme the package and we'll get out of here."

"It's in there," he said, indicating the bedroom.

"Get it."

"Give me a minute to get her ready."

"Let the kid sleep," I said. "The maid can look in on her."

"No," Rudy said. "You don't understand. She's the package."

"What?"

"Shh. You'll scare her."

"You got us up here to take a little girl—you said a package. I—"

"Mr. Bruck," Ella said from the bedroom doorway with the girl in her arms. "What's the difference? She doesn't weigh much, do you, darling? And look how sweet she is."

"Daddy." The tot was reaching for Rudy.

Rudy took her and kissed her. "Hi, punkin. Have a good nap? We're going on a little trip to see where I used to live."

"Mommy there?" the girl said.

"No. Remember, I said Mommy is in heaven, way up there?" He pointed. "But my mother is where we're going and she wants to see you, so these friends are going to help us get there. You go wash your face and get dressed." He put her down. "Ella, you want to help her?"

She jumped at the chance.

"Her mother's dead?" I asked Rudy.

"Yes," he said.

"April?"

He nodded and told me the story. They had fallen in love the minute they laid eyes on each other, a week before her appearance at the Paramount, and made plans to disappear to a dot on the map in the mountains of northern California after her New York shows. They did, and he found work as a salesman at the local Chevy dealership, soon rising to sales manager, while April dedicated herself to being a housewife.

"I have no idea whose body that was they fished out of the East River," Rudy told me, "but April and I didn't hear about it till months later. Nobody was ever as happy as us, and it only got better when May was born. Then April came down with something the doctors couldn't do anything about and she died. It woke me up to things, how life can change just like that. I realized I had to get May back here to see my mom right away. I contacted the one person here I could trust, my cousin, and she told me Mom had only weeks to live at the most. You know the rest."

Ella had come in to hear most of this. "May's getting her doll dressed," she said. "Your mother doesn't know she is coming?"

"No. Mom doesn't even know May exists—or that I'm still alive. Until tonight, when I made my deal with you and Bruck, I didn't know if or when I could get her in to see Mom."

"Why didn't you phone or write your mother?" Ella asked.

"I've thought about it the last five years, but Mom had already accepted I was dead, and if I had let her know I was alive, the strain of wondering if or when I could come back, and if Big Sid would get me as I was coming to see her…it would have all been too much unless I told her when I was coming back. Now I've decided I have to at least get May in to see her. After that, I'll see about getting in myself. My cousin says since word got out that Mom is failing fast, strange cars cruise the neighborhood. My guess is it's guys who think I'm bound to show up now."

"And you want me to risk my neck, being mistaken for you," I said.

"C'mon, Bruck. We don't look anything alike."

I guess my reaction showed. He said, "I'm taller and thinner. Plus you'll have a ‘wife' and kid. Nobody has me figured for that kind."

It was damned thin reasoning, but before I could say so, Ella jumped in with a different concern. "Sixty thousand is a lot of money. Don't you think your cousin could try to collect it herself?"

Rudy laughed. "We're like brother and sister, grew up together. And she's devoted her life to taking care of Mom."

May came in, the doll under her arm. Ella swooped them up. "All ready, darling?"

Rudy looked at his watch. "You better get started."

"Aren't you coming?" I said.

"You two go ahead with May in your car, I'll follow in mine."

"What kind you got?"

"A new Chevy coupe. Red."

"Your mom's going to have a lot of questions once she finds out who May is. What am I supposed to tell her?"

"At that point, you can spill the beans—tell her I'm okay and hope to get in tonight after Ella and May are safely out." He gave me the street address and said he'd see us there or back at the office.

I put the girls in the back seat and drove across the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, went south on Flatbush Avenue to Linden Boulevard, then east to Brownsville. I couldn't catch Rudy in my rearview mirror, too many headlights switching back and forth. All the time, I was thinking that I was driving into a trap with two innocents. But I couldn't think of a way to stop Ella, not with the little darling clasped to her bosom.

A light drizzle had begun by the time we reached the neighborhood where Rudy's mother's lived. Trees arching over the street blocked most of the illumination from the streetlights, and nobody on the block was wasting money on porch lights.

A dark sedan came down the street toward us as I pulled to a stop at the curb, its high beams blinding me. I held my head down and to the side, hat pulled low, planning to sneak a look as it passed.

The other driver seemed to have the same idea. All I could catch was his head turned toward his front-seat passenger, but I thought there was something familiar in the guy's square head and his ape-like grasp of the steering wheel.

I watched the car out of sight down to the end of the street where it turned left.

I kept the two girls in the car another five minutes, watching for something else to move. Nothing. Not even a sign of Rudy.

When I said, "Okay, let's go," Ella hissed at me and nodded up the street. A dark sedan was rolling our way again. The same one? I couldn't tell. I touched the gun under my coat. This time there was only one guy in the car, a Caspar Milquetoast look-alike— little eyes behind thick specs, no chin. I laughed, and the guy scowled at me the best a guy with a face like that can. He probably thought I was laughing at him, but I was laughing at myself for having worried about someone like him. More likely an assistant to a bookkeeper's clerk than a gunman.

As I went to help the girls out, I noticed a car had parked far behind me at the end of the block. It must have slid in while I was watching Caspar go by. Was it the sedan that had passed earlier?

I kept a hand on my gun as I rang the doorbell and Ella kept up a whispered conversation with May. "Porky? You have a dog named Porky? Why did you name him that?"

A curtain at the front window moved. The curtain fell back and the door was opened by a muscular woman with a fleshy nose.

"You Rudy's cousin?" I said. She nodded. "Rudy sent me. My name is Bruck. Peter B. Bruck, private detective. This is May, Rudy's daughter, and my secretary, Ella."

She couldn't seem to digest what I'd said, just stood there looking from me to Ella to the kid, and back around. Finally she said, "Is he coming?"

"He might show up. But first he wants his mother to see the little girl."

She waved us in, hurried down the hall, came back, waved for us to follow.

"Did you tell her who we are?" I asked. "Does she know about the little girl?"

"I told her you're friends of Rudy. She'll know who the little girl is soon as she sees her."

The grey old woman propped up in bed just smiled politely at first, then showed puzzlement as her eyes fell on May. Then wonder replaced puzzlement, and finally recognition spread across her face like sunshine. Ella put May down.

The old woman reached out for her. "Can you come here, dear? Come see me?"

May looked around, maybe for her dad, hesitated, backed up between Ella's legs.

Mrs. Vaccarelli was patient. "Can you come see me?"

May smiled a little. Took a step. And another.

I thought Ella was going to bawl when the old lady finally got the girl in her arms.

Then it hit me, why Square-head had looked familiar. I told the girls to stay put and went out the back door, then down what had once been an alley but was now grown up in weeds. I went far enough so I could go out to the street and up behind the parked car. Two guys were slouched in the front seat drinking coffee. I recognized them as detectives from Manhattan HQ—English was the square head behind the wheel, Crull was next him.

I rapped on the driver's window. "You guys on a date?"

English jumped, spilling some coffee. Without looking, he said, "Buzz off, mac. Official police business."

"Don't make me laugh," I said, and for the first time he took a look at me. I told him, "Two Manhattan dicks sitting around a Brooklyn neighborhood on official business? You're trying to luck into Sid's sixty thousand. Let me give you some advice. Leave an old lady in peace. If you don't I'll call your boss and tell him where you are when he thinks you're on the job in Manhattan."

English made a move to get out of the car and come after me, but Crull grabbed him, leaned across him to say, "Thanks for stopping to see us, Bruck. Now we know Rudy's around here or you wouldn't be here."

"Unless I'm doing what I say I am, escorting a little girl to see her sick old grandmother. Last I heard that's legal, even encouraged by normal people. I'm going back up there now. If you guys are still here or I ever hear of you prowling around here again, I'll make that call to your boss. Your choice."

I stopped in my car on the way back to the house, killed a couple of minutes to give my warning time to sink into their thick skulls. They stalled but eventually started the car and disappeared up the street. I stayed put another couple of minutes to see if they were dumb enough to try circling back. They weren't.

I was going up the back steps to the kitchen when somebody stuck a gun in my back and said, "Hold it right there. Do what I say and nobody gets hurt."

I ducked, turned and dove for where I thought the gunman's legs were. Missed. Got a clunk over the head with the barrel of a gun that hurt like lightning, wrestled my attacker to the ground and was raising a fist when another gun was stuck in my back and another voice ordered, "Hold it."

This voice I recognized. Ella's. "What the—"

"Mr. Bruck. It's you! Oh, my goodness."

The guy under me took this chance to squirm away, was up on his knees when Ella said, "Hold it right there, buster, or you get a hole in the head."

Wise man. He believed her.

I had been expecting to see Crull or English, but the guy shaking with fear and raising his hands was my least likely candidate, the Caspar Milquetoast look-alike. "Don't shoot. Don't shoot. Please don't shoot."

I sent Ella to call the local cops while I held him at gunpoint. After they came and went with Caspar, and I told Ella we had things to talk about in the kitchen.

"Where's the cousin?" I asked.

"In the spare bedroom. She was exhausted, went in and went to sleep when Mrs. Vaccarelli and May dozed off. Left me with nothing to do but wait for you."

"Where'd you get that gun?"

"Your safe. When I put the money in."

I had forgotten I even had one in there. "You got some nerve, stealing the boss's gun."

"I borrowed it. You had a gun, Rudy had a gun, seemed like a good idea for me to have one. And where would you be if I hadn't taken it? You're making a big deal out of nothing."

"Which is what's in that gun—nothing."

She went a little white around the eyes and mouth. "You're kidding."

"Give it here." I rocked the cylinder out, showed her the empty chambers. "You risked everybody's neck with this dud. Stick to being a secretary, you aren't going to make it as a gun moll."

We got May from the arms of her grandmother and drove back to the office. Ella made a bed for May on the front office couch. When Rudy showed up a good while later, I asked him, "Do you know what happened in the backyard? Some guy thought I was you."

"Yeah. I saw most of it. Who was he?"

"One of the nut cases out to collect Sid's reward."

Rudy said, "I was up the alley keeping a lookout for cars and keeping an eye on the back door when that guy jumped you. Before I could get there, you had him down and Ella had everything under control. After the cops got there, I waited till you and they were gone before I went in to see Mom. Everything turned out swell."

"Yeah, swell." I rubbed the swelling where I'd been conked by Caspar. "Now, it's time for you to settle up accounts and hit the road."

"Johnny One-Note," he said. "You still think Big Sid's going to come through that door, don't you?"

"Ella, get his hat and coat."

Rudy was peeling off the second five hundred when she came back. He started to hand her the dough. I said, "Un-uh. You pay me."

"Come on, Bruck," he said. "She saved your skin. Have a little trust"

"Exactly what I have. Very little."

He said to Ella, "Maybe you should go where you're appreciated. There's a guy in northern California who could use some help taking care of a little girl."

She didn't say anything, cocked her head at him, then at me. I could almost hear her saying, Let me get my coat. But after a long moment, her eyes now fixed on me, she said, "No, thanks, Mr. Vacarelli. I have a child here to take care of."

THE END