A One-Pipe Problem Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A ONE-PIPE PROBLEM

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 2017 by John Gregory Betancourt. Originally published in Mystery Most Historical. Published by permission of the author.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This story originally appeared in Mystery Most Historical, the convention anthology for Malice Domestic. It features Joe Geller—the grandfather of my regular mystery character Peter “Pit Bull” Geller.

  A ONE-PIPE PROBLEM

  BROOKLYN, APRIL 24, 1946

  Late in the afternoon, a familiar-looking blue Packard Twelve sedan cruised slowly down the street. Boys playing stickball moved to let it pass. I’d seen the Packard a dozen times over the last few months, so I didn’t give it a second thought. Its owner visited Madame Anastasia, our neighborhood crackpot spiritualist, on a regular basis.

  As the Packard pulled even with my truck, I grabbed a rag and wiped my hands clean of grease. I’d spent the last half hour replacing spark plugs and tuning the engine till it gave a strong, throaty growl. Best you could expect from a fifteen-year-old Ford.

  To my surprise, the Packard’s driver stopped and rolled down his window. Mid twenties, dirty blond hair peeking out under his gray chauffer’s cap, piercing blue eyes. Good looking in a James Stewart sort of way.

  “Mr. Geller?” he asked.

  “That’s what is says on my truck.” I grinned and jerked my thumb toward the side panel, which proclaimed—optimistically—GELLER & SON, PLUMBERS. My boy was not quite a year old and hardly ready for a partnership, but I liked the name. “What can I do you for?”

  “I’m looking for Madame Anastasia. I can’t seem to find the address. Do you know where . . . ?”

  I pointed. “End of the block. The house one with the yellow pansies in the flowerbox. She has a sign in the window.” I’d read it often enough—Madame Anastasia, Palmist.

  “Thanks.”

  He drove half a block and double-parked. I watched, still cleaning my hands on the rag, as he leaped out and opened the rear door. Behind me, boys returned to their stickball game, shouting something about Ed Head and the no-hitter he’d pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers yesterday. Someday my own boy would be doing that. I couldn’t wait to take him to his first Dodgers game.

  A woman dressed all in black emerged from the car. She spoke to the chauffeur, he nodded, and she went up the steps. Madame Anastasia’s front door opened. In she went.

  After the door closed, the chauffeur backed the Packard into the only empty space on the block, directly in front of my truck. He killed the engine and got out. His left knee was stiff; he had a slight limp.

  “See action in the war?” I asked, folding my truck’s hood closed with a heavy clang.

  He nodded. “I was in the 7th Armored. Didn’t make it to the end, though—I got shot up pretty good on D-Day. How about you?”

  “81st Infantry.” I’d spent two years slogging through mud in the Philippines and other Japanese-held islands.

  He pulled a pack of Fatimas from his shirt pocket. “Smoke?”

  “Thanks.” I pulled one from the pack. “Name’s Joe. Joe Geller.”

  “Randall Carter. Randy to my friends.”

  We both lit up and puffed for a few minutes. He kept glancing toward Madame Anastasia’s house.

  I gave him one of my business cards. “If you ever need a plumber, give me a call. I do good work, and I’m reasonable on the prices.” You never knew where your next job would come from. And with all the competition from newly-released G.I.s, I certainly needed it.

  “Sure.” He stuck it in his breast pocket.

  “New chauffeur?” I guessed.

  He nodded. “This is my first day driving for the Countess. She doesn’t pay attention to addresses. Couldn’t tell Queens from Flushing.”

  That explained why he’d had to stop and ask for directions.

  I said, “Countess?”

  He closed his eyes. “Contesa Maria Habsburg Gruber von Osterling. Yeah, I think that’s all of it.”

  “Sounds German.”

  “Russian. Second cousin to the last Czar, according to her cook. She’s a queer old bird. Kept escaping by the skin of her teeth—apparently she got out of St. Petersburg minutes ahead of the Bolshies, then out of Paris as Nazi tanks rolled down the Champs-Élysées. Kept her cash and her family jewels both times, too.”

  I whistled. “Lucky.”

  “Yeah.” He glanced up the block. “So what’s the deal with this Madame Anastasia? You’ve never met her?”

  “No. Never goes out. Never talks to anyone in the neighborhood. I hear she’s some sort of spook chaser. Holds séances, talks to the dead, reads the future in tea leaves. All a bunch of hooey, if you ask me. Lots of women visit her trying to get in touch with dead husbands, or dead mothers or fathers. There oughta be a law against it.”

  He shook his head. Then Madame Anastasia’s front door opened, and out came the Countess. She couldn’t have been inside more than five minutes. Shortest séance on record?

  “Catch you later, Joe!” Randy threw his cigarette into the gutter and scrambled into the Packard. Gunning the motor, he raced to pick up his employer.

  * * * *

  The next morning, the phone in our hallway rang at 8:30 sharp. Madge, my wife, took the call like a professional switchboard operator: “Geller Plumbing, how may I assist you?” She waited a heartbeat, then motioned me in from the kitchen.

  “It’s a Mr. Randall Carter, sir” she said, grinning.

  I grinned back, passed over the baby, who wasn’t screaming for once, and picked up the receiver.

  “Nice to hear from you, Randy!” I said.

  “Glad I caught you,” he said. “I thought I might throw some business your way. The Countess has a clogged drain, and I haven’t been able to fix it. Think you can take a look?”

  “Sure. Let me check my schedule.” Mentally, I ran down my list of appointments. One job tomorrow afternoon, and that was it for the week. “It looks like I have some free time this morning. What’s the address?”

  He gave it to me, and I jotted it down: a brownstone in the East 50s, Manhattan.

  * * * *

  Traffic over the Brooklyn Bridge wasn’t bad, and I reached the Countess’s four-story brownstone twenty minutes later. It was in a ritzy area. The houses all had intricate stained glass panels over doors and windows, and men in suits and ties headed for the subway.

  I cruised around the block, found parking, and lugged my toolbox over to the Countess’s address. I rang the bell at the basement door, and a few moments later, a stern-faced maid in a black-and-white uniform opened up. She gave me the fish-eye, but when I introduced myself as the plumber, she nodded.

  “Come in,” she said, voice heavy with a Russian accent. “It is this way.” It came out, Eet ees zis vay.

  She led me up a wide marble staircase. We passed oil paintings of sour-faced old men in 19th-century military uniforms, reached the second-floor hallway, and turned left into the Countess’s bedroom. Plush oriental rugs covered the floor, and a huge bed covered in white satin sat against the far wall. There were two dressing tables with round mirrors and two walk-in closets with open doors. It looked like the Countess owned a lot of clothes.

  The maid steered me to the Countess’s private bathroom. The floor was a mosaic of tiny pink tiles, with a pink pedestal sink, white porcelain toilet with an overhead tank and dangling flush chain, and an ancient bathtub with huge clawed feet. The white enamel had chippe
d in several placed along the tub’s rim.

  Randy, still in his chauffeur’s uniform but with the jacket off and the shirt-sleeves rolled up, was having a go at the tub with a hand plunger. He set the plunger aside when he saw me.

  “Thanks for the call, Randy,” I said. “Let me see what I can do.”

  I set my toolbox down and peeked into the tub. Six inches of dirty brown water swirled slowly to a stop at the bottom.

  Randy mopped his forehead with a hand towel. “Thanks for coming so fast, Joe. The drain is really jammed up.”

  “It’s these old houses . . . the pipes aren’t big enough. I get calls like this all the time. I’ll have it open in a minute.”

  I rolled up my right sleeve, reached into the water, and felt around for the drain. At least the stopper had been removed. You’d think anyone with a clogged drain would check first for a stopper, but I’d found them wedged in place more than once over the years.

  When I stuck my index finger down the hole, I felt no resistance. Probably a hair clog at the elbow joint.

  Flipping back the toolbox lid with my left hand, I pulled out a coil of rough, triple-braided wire. The “drain buster,” as I called it, had a hand crank at one end and a spray of iron bristles at the other. I’d built the gizmo myself from spare parts. It didn’t look like much, but it usually did the trick.

  I guided the bristle-end into the drain, stood up, and started cranking. The corkscrew action forced the bristles and wire down the pipe, and sure enough, after the first foot had played out, I saw a sudden rush of air bubbles. I’d reached the clog.

  Giving a few more turns for good measure, I pulled the wire out. It came free with a gurgling pop, then a miniature whirlpool formed and dirty water began to empty.

  As the last half inch flowed away, I reached down to clean the drain-buster . . . and froze. I’d expected a knot of soap-scum covered hair, and sure enough, a rat’s nest of human hair stuck to the bristles. But among the long, black hairs were shorter gray ones attached to what looked like a couple of half-inch chunks of very white, very human scalp. And—was that a broken tooth? I swallowed hard. I’d seen enough bits and pieces of dead bodies during the war to recognize stray bits of human anatomy.

  I took the towel Randy had used and worked the clump free. Slowly I turned it over. Definitely a tooth, complete with gold filling. And those gray hairs went into the scalp . . . and they were so short, they could only have come from a man’s head. The scalp part looked relatively fresh. No older than a day or two.

  “Geez!” Randy said with a gulp, looking over my shoulder. “Is that . . . ?”

  “Yes,” I said. I sank back on my haunches. “Is there anyone with hair like this in the house?” And is he missing a tooth?

  “I—I don’t think so. I’m the only guy here. All the Countess’s other servants are women.”

  “Is there a Count?”

  He shook his head. “Widowed. Years ago in Paris, I think.”

  A floorboard creaked behind us. I folded the towel over the tooth and hair, then glanced over my shoulder.

  Countess von Osterling stood in the doorway. She wore black again, but with an old-fashioned white lace collar. She regarded us both with a cool, detached gaze, like a scientist examining insects through a magnifying glass.

  I stood up. “Ma’am,” I said.

  “The job, is it finished?” she asked. She had the same accent as her maid, only not quite as heavy.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Just cleaning up.”

  “Leave your bill with Randall. He will see you out.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She gave a short nod, turned, and continued down the hall. I heard slow, heavy steps on the staircase.

  I don’t know why, but I had been holding my breath. I let it out and looked at Randy.

  “She gives me the creeps,” I said softly.

  “The old chauffeur!” he whispered. “The cook said he retired and went to Florida. He’d been with the Countess since St. Petersburg—”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “Fyodor . . . Klonski? Something like that. He left a few papers in my room.”

  I glanced at the towel again. If he’s been with her since the days of the Czar, Klonski would have had gray hair . . . like the owner of the chunk of hair from the drain. But how could Klonski have lost a chunk of scalp in here? If he’d been hurt or killed . . . he’d be in the hospital or the morgue, not Florida.

  A chill went through me. I set the hand-towel and its grisly contents inside my toolbox and shut the lid.

  “Hey—why are you keeping that?” Randy said. “Shouldn’t you flush it, or something?”

  “Think about it. How could a chunk of scalp and a tooth get lodged in this particular drain?”

  “Maybe . . .” He bit his lip, looked away.

  I said, “Maybe he was murdered. Maybe someone washed up in here. Or cleaned the murder weapon in the bathtub.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “Is it?”

  “The Countess is an old lady. She doesn’t go around murdering people. There has to be another explanation.”

  “If so, I want to know what it is.”

  “If we go to the cops, she’ll fire me. I need this job, Joe. This is the best job I ever had.”

  I sighed, looked away. Still, I couldn’t very well go to the cops and say, “I found some skin and hair in a drain, can you question everyone in the house?” They’d laugh me out of the police station.

  “Okay. We won’t do anything rash.”

  Randy gave a sigh of relief.

  “But if there was a murder, she’d have to dispose of the body. Right?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Does she drive?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Then she would have to stash it in the house somewhere.”

  He nodded. “Maybe . . . the basement?”

  “Makes sense. If we find a grave, we call the police.”

  “And if there’s nothing, we forget about it.”

  “Agreed.”

  We shook on it.

  * * * *

  Randy and I went to the basement to “check the pipes,” which generated no suspicion with the maid who’d let me into the house, nor with the kitchen staff. We trooped down rickety wooden steps and found ourselves in a dim, dusty packrat’s hoard. Evidently the basement had been used for storing everything unwanted or unneeded for generations. I had never seen such a jumble of broken furniture, old dishes, steamer trunks, and miscellany in all my life. A junk dealer would have had a field day.

  Randy found an old hurricane lamp with some kerosene in the base, lit it, and we prowled through the dusty debris looking for evidence of murder. No bodies. No blood. Nothing. Even the pipes looked sound.

  I was about to give up when, at the foot of the stairs, sitting atop an old desk, I spotted a shiny metal kitchen hammer, the kind my wife uses to tenderize meat. I waved Randy over and pointed to it.

  “So what?” he said, frowning. “There are tools all over the place. I don’t see any blood.”

  “Look at it,” I said. “Then look at everything else on the desk.”

  He stared. Then he paled when he, too, realized a thick layer of dust coated everything except the hammer. It was spotlessly clean, as though recently scrubbed.

  “But there’s no body,” he said. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

  “That has to be the murder weapon,” I said, raising the lamp and turning slowly, taking in the room. “Is there anything else down here that isn’t covered in dust? And why wouldn’t it be in the kitchen.”

  He bit his lip, shrugged.

  After that, we prowled through the basement again, trying to hurry. Finally, as we were about to give up, I lowered the hurricane lamp and peered under the d
esk. I hadn’t paid much attention to the boxes beneath it, since they weren’t big enough to conceal a body, but this time one caught my eye. It was an old tin breadbox, and like the hammer, it had no dust on it.

  I picked it up and set it on the desk. It was a lot heavier than it should have been.

  I passed the lamp to Randy, then pulled open the little door. Inside sat a black leather notebook. I pulled it out, flipped it open, and found tables of numbers and plenty of writing in what looked like the Russian alphabet. I couldn’t make sense of anything.

  “What the Hell is that?” Randy whispered.

  “I don’t know. Maybe a code book?”

  “That’s nuts! Why would the Countess need a code book? I bet it’s a diary, or a log of household expenses.”

  “Well . . . maybe. But why hide it down here?”

  He had no answer.

  I put everything back into place, closed the little door, and stowed the breadbox under the desk where I’d found it.

  “Are you doing anything tonight?” I asked Randy.

  “If the Countess doesn’t need me to drive her anywhere, I get off at six.”

  “Come out and see me. And wear your civvies. I . . . I think we need to talk to Madame Anastasia.”

  “About the Countess? Do you want to get me fired?”

  “Would you rather go to the police? We can bring them the scalp, the tooth, and the code book.”

  He shut up. But I could tell he wasn’t happy.

  “We’ll be discreet,” I promised.

  “This was the best job I ever had,” he muttered.

  * * * *

  Randy showed up in front of my house at 6:40, dressed in a plain brown suit, an ugly brown necktie, and a brown fedora with a little white feather in the band. I was tinkering with my Ford’s engine between sips of beer while the neighborhood boys played kick the can. Madge was inside with our son cooking dinner. Spaghetti, from the smell.

  I’d already stopped by Madame Anastasia’s place and made an appointment for us to see her. I’d told her a friend wanted to contact his dead uncle. Of course, she ate it up.