Uncle Brick and The Little Devilz

by Allan Leverone

Have you ever wondered how many revolutions a ceiling fan makes on the low setting as it pushes the stifling summer air around an un-air conditioned second floor office? In Boston ? In July? I hadn't, either, until I started working in my uncle's Boston-based PI firm, Callahan Investigations.

A little background: My Uncle Brick Callahan operated the agency for decades with my father Dennis, while I went off to Los Angeles to seek fame and fortune—okay, mostly fortune—as an accountant. Then my wife divorced me, taking most of my money and all of my business, and my father managed to get himself murdered thanks to an investigation gone horribly wrong.

I returned to Boston , ostensibly to keep an eye on my now-eighty year old uncle but really because,

•  I had nowhere else to go,

B) Boston is three thousand miles away from LA and my ex-wife, and

•  I was determined to solve my dad's murder.

It turned out my Uncle Brick needed absolutely no one to keep an eye on him, certainly not me, but he did agree to allow me to work with him in the agency until I could get back on my feet. Oh yeah, and we were able to solve my dad's murder, turning the tables on the upwardly mobile mobster who killed him. That cold son of a bitch is in the ground now.

I can't say evening the score on my father's behalf made me feel any better about losing him, but the sense of satisfaction I got from seeing Harold Dawes get what he deserved was one sweet reward, despite the fact that I nearly ended up face down in the dirt myself, and on my very first case, no less.

By the way, the answer is about one hundred. Our ceiling fan makes roughly one hundred revolutions per minute on the low setting. Yours might be different.

The point, though, and believe it or not there is one, is that I had never gained a true appreciation for the meaning of the word “boredom” until I took the job working with my uncle. After wrapping up the investigation of my dad's murder we had been sitting around the office playing sports trivia—which Uncle Brick always won because he asked questions from the 1940's and ‘50's—while waiting for another case to come along.

I had begun to doubt it was ever going to happen. In my own private version of hell, we were going to sit around the Callahan Investigations offices, asking each other stupid sports questions day after day, until eventually the bank would come knocking and repossess all our furniture and office equipment and we would find ourselves shooed unceremoniously out into the street. That would be bad enough in LA, but Boston gets cold in the winter!

“How can you just sit there?” I finally asked. “Aren't you even a little bit antsy?”

“Why should I be?” Brick answered without taking his eyes off the Globe sports page. The Sox had just lost their fourth series in a row and Brick was certain he was going to get the call to manage the team any day now. “Waiting for a case to come walking through the door is nothing, kiddo. If you think this is tough, you should try sitting in a car with a faulty heater outside a seedy motel for three hours in the middle of a February snowstorm waiting for some dope to finish screwing his bimbo so you can obtain photographic evidence of his infidelity for his wife. Now that'll make you antsy, let me tell you.

“Hang in there, kid, a case will come along eventually, they always do.”

Right on cue, the door to our second floor office opened, squealing in protest, reminding me I had told Brick I would oil the hinges. I hadn't gotten around to it yet. We had been pretty busy, after all.

An older lady with a full head of snow-white hair—think Barbara Bush; the wife of George Senior, not the party-girl presidential daughter—peeked hesitantly inside as if worried she might be interrupting an important meeting or something. She had obviously never been in our office before; important meetings here were few and far between. She seemed unconvinced of her location, despite the fact CALLAHAN INVESTIGATIONS was prominently displayed on the frosted, pebbled window of the office door.

Instantly, Brick was on his feet, striding toward the woman with a welcoming smile as though he had been anxiously awaiting her arrival for the last few hours, rather than picking his teeth, which was how he had actually been spending his time. The newspaper he had been engrossed in simply vanished. I had no idea how he did that.

I finally got to my feet as Brick pulled the door open completely, ushering the woman inside with a courtly grace I knew I could never master if I lived to be two hundred. I felt like the class dullard.

“Welcome to Callahan Investigations,” Brick smiled, leading the woman across the office to a comfortable leather couch. She sat and began wringing her hands nervously. “I'm Brick Callahan,” my uncle continued, “and this young man is my nephew. How may we be of service to you, Miss—?”

Tears welled up in Barbara Bush's eyes. She seemed mere seconds away from a breakdown. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Where are my manners? My name is Lillian Saunders.”

“It's a pleasure to meet you, Ms Saunders—“

“Mrs., please.”

“Very well, Mrs. Saunders, how can Callahan Investigations help you?”

“It's my husband, Martin. He's dead.” The dam broke and the tears which had been threatening to let loose rolled down the distraught woman's face as a great wrenching sob shook her body. Uncle Brick produced a tissue, from where I had no idea, handing it to the grateful woman and waiting for her to compose herself enough to continue. Finally she did.

“He was found on a sidewalk in Chinatown next to an old apartment building. They . . . they say he got drunk and leaped from the roof.”

“And you don't believe he killed himself.” Brick phrased it as a statement, not a question.

“That's right; I most certainly do not. He wasn't drinking and he had no reason that I know of even to be in Chinatown .”

Lillian Saunders' continued, pausing every now and then to blow her nose and wipe her eyes. She adopted a look of grim determination, which she maintained until she had slogged through to the end of her narrative.

Her dead husband had been a highly successful real estate lawyer in the process of downsizing his business; spooling it down to a three-day-a-week enterprise in order to semi-retire while still retaining the ability to earn an income. According to Lillian, Martin came home from work three days ago, ate dinner, and then immediately went back out, telling his wife only that he needed to do a favor for his longtime secretary, whose daughter had found herself in some sort of unspecified trouble.

Martin refused to divulge any further information to his wife. “He didn't want to worry me,” she said tearfully, before blowing her nose and wiping her eyes. “It was the last time I saw him alive.”

“But you're certain he wasn't drinking.”

“Of course I'm certain!”

Brick was quiet for a short time, clearly deep in thought. I, too, was quiet, not so much because I was deep in thought but because I hadn't a clue what to say. Finally my uncle asked, “Had you noticed any change in Martin's demeanor recently?”

She nodded. “Yes, as a matter of fact I had. He was much happier. The police claim he was despondent over the downturn in his business and that's why he jumped off that building, but that's just a bunch of bunk. He was thrilled to be cutting back his workload. He wanted to spend more time with me and the grandkids. Martin was murdered, Mr. Callahan, and I wish to hire you to prove it.”

Brick nodded. “We will take your case, Mrs. Saunders. I don't know whether Martin was the victim of foul play or not, but I will be happy to look into the matter for you. Now, about our fee—“

“I have plenty of money,” the brand-new widow replied, “and I would be more than happy to spend it all, if that's what it takes, to find out what happened to my Martin, and to bring his murderers to justice.”

“I don't think bankrupting you will be necessary,” Brick answered. “Is there anything else you can think of that might be helpful?”

“Only this,” she said, handing a small white object to my uncle. “The police returned it with Martin's things when they closed the case following their so-called investigation. I've never seen it before, and can only assume he picked it up while he was out and about on the night he was killed.”

Brick glanced at it for just a moment before handing it to me and escorting the distraught woman to the door. I examined it as he offered his assurances that we would get to the bottom of the matter, and sooner rather than later. The object was an ordinary matchbook, plain white, and on the front was emblazoned the words, The Little Devilz. The “i” in “Devilz” was printed to resemble a pitchfork, and holding the pitchfork was a cartoon devil, horns sprouting from his head, leering madly at the world.

The rest of the matchbook was entirely unadorned, front and back. It was plainly a cheap promotional item, undoubtedly manufactured by the thousands, and I had no idea what use it might be to us. I stuck it in my pocket as Brick returned.

“Let's take a drive,” was all he said.

***

The murdered man's secretary was named Madge Simpson, and I couldn't help but picture the blue-haired mother from the long-running animated television show with the same last name as we navigated the busy city streets. Brick drove, as always.

You might think an eighty year old man would be overmatched mixing it up with Boston 's notoriously aggressive drivers, but not Uncle Brick. His driving style, if you could call it that, was to go wherever he wanted whenever he wanted, changing lanes seemingly at random, squeezing his silver Mercedes into spaces that seemed much too small for a Matchbox toy, much less a real, eighty thousand dollar automobile. When he drove, he left in his wake a nearly-continuous cacophony of angry honking horns, with a full slate of shaking fists and protruding middle fingers tossed in for good measure. He seemed blissfully unaware.

We pulled into a tiny driveway outside a small, single-family home in Revere , a gritty blue-collar city located just north of Boston , not far from Logan Airport . The pavement was rutted and cracked, badly in need of repair, a clear testament to a down economy and a family with more pressing monetary priorities than a repaved driveway. The intense heat struck like a fist as we exited the air-conditioned car and walked to the front door. The neighborhood seemed deserted and the heavy air felt moist and dirty and somehow ominous.

Madge Simpson opened the door, looking nothing like I had pictured. She was short and squat, close-cropped auburn hair framing a wide, remarkably unlined face. My uncle introduced us, telling her we were investigating the death of her boss and she smiled, the act more a display of dogged determination than genuine good humor. She was clearly stressed, working hard to hold herself together.

Mrs. Simpson invited us into her shabby but squeaky-clean living room and we took seats around a butcher-block style coffee table, Brick sitting in an overstuffed easy chair and me taking a seat next to the frazzled woman on the couch. Without waiting for a question, she exclaimed, “I feel so guilty about poor Mr. Saunders. Whatever happened to him was all my fault!”

I waited for my uncle to take the lead in questioning Mrs. Simpson. I figured his half-century of experience in private investigations probably trumped my half-month. “Mr. Saunders' widow,” Brick began, “is convinced her husband did not commit suicide. She said he left home immediately after dinner last Friday night to handle some sort of business for you involving your daughter, is that right?”

“That's exactly right. And you want to know what he was doing.”

“It would seem to be the key to unraveling this mystery, wouldn't you agree?”

The woman sighed, the sound deep and heartfelt, her despondence clear. “Of course,” she answered, and then was silent for a moment.

“It's just that I didn't know where else to turn” she finally continued. “I went to the police about my situation first and they did nothing, so I simply asked Mr. Saunders if, what with his legal background and all, he might take a look into the matter himself. You know, maybe throw his lawyerly weight around a little.”

Brick smiled politely and nodded, as if this cleared everything up in his mind. I had no idea what the woman was talking about and I assumed neither did Brick, but I had learned a long time ago you could never be too sure with Brick Callahan.

“I see. And what matter would that be?” Phew. My uncle was as confused as I was; he was just better at hiding it. I hoped that once I developed a little experience in this mystifying world of private investigations, I would be better able to roll with the punches, too. At least these punches were figurative ones rather than literal. So far.

“It's my daughter, Phoebe,” she said to Brick. “You see, she's only fifteen and she's turned into quite a handful. She's a good girl, really, but she's at such a difficult age. Anyway, Phoebe and I have been fighting recently and, well, she ran away a couple of weeks ago. I recently discovered she has been hired as a dancer at one of those . . . those awful . . . adult entertainment places.”

“Your fifteen year old daughter is a stripper?”

I couldn't help it; I blurted it out before my brain even realized what my traitorous mouth was saying. I mean, in fairness to me, that was the last thing I had expected to hear. Brick shot me a look like I had just set my hair on fire and he couldn't wait to douse it with gasoline.

He apologized to the woman before I could even react while I made a mental note not to say another word until we were back in the safety of the office. Judging from the look on Brick's face I thought even that might be pushing my luck.

“What my nephew was trying in his unique way to say, Mrs. Simpson, is that there are laws in place to prevent such things from happening to an underage girl. I believe you said you informed the police?”

“Yes, of course, that was the first thing I did! But like I told you before, that was a complete waste of time. They completed what they called an “investigation” in just a few hours, claiming she was completely unknown to the management of the club. But I know a lot of people in this town, Mr. Callahan, I grew up here and have lived here my whole life, and I have it on very reliable information that she is in fact working there. I just want my daughter back . . .”

It looked as though we were going to be dealing with a weeping woman for the second time in a matter of a couple of hours, but to her credit, Mrs. Simpson somehow pulled herself together at the last moment and managed to continue the conversation. “The name of the club is—“

“The Little Devilz.”

“Yes, that's right. How did you know?”

Brick ignored the question. “So following the inaction of the police you went to Mr. Saunders and asked him to threaten legal action?”

“Well, yes and no. I don't care about taking legal action; I just want my little girl back. I asked him to make it clear to the vultures running that . . . that snakepit that if they continued to employ underage dancers—Phoebe in particular—we would take them to court, file lawsuits, basically make their lives miserable until they came to their senses.”

Once again Brick nodded like it was all starting to fall into place. I had a feeling it really was for him this time, because I was starting to get the picture, too. It was a dirty and frightening picture, involving an aging real estate lawyer in over his head against some very, very dangerous people. After my little performance of a few minutes ago, though, I decided now would not be the time to inject myself into the conversation, so I put what I hoped was a look of sage wisdom on my face and waited for my uncle to continue.

Instead, he rose to his feet, clasping Madge Simpson's hands in his own and smiling warmly at her. “Please try not to feel guilty about what happened to Mr. Saunders,” he told her. “No mother can be faulted for wanting to rescue her child from the clutches of these people. You were not responsible for the death of your employer; the people who killed him were responsible.”

She breathed in sharply. “So you really believe he was murdered?”

“Oh, yes, ma'am, I do.”

***

“You must have had trouble retaining clients in your accounting business if you were as reckless with your mouth after inspecting their financial records as you were back there inside Mrs. Simpson's home.” I had known Uncle Brick was going to bring up my little misstep, and I didn't have to wait long. We hadn't even gotten as far as the Sumner Tunnel yet. My uncle raised his voice to make himself heard above the angry honks of frustrated drivers and the accompanying squeals of their protesting brakes as Brick forced himself into the line of cars moving sluggishly through the toll booths.

“I'm sorry about that, Uncle Brick. It's just that of all the things I thought might come out of that poor woman's mouth, her fifteen year old daughter stripping for money was pretty much last on the list. How is that even possible? Why would a club risk being shut down by the authorities for hiring such a young girl in the first place?”

“Excellent question, my boy. And I accept your apology, by the way. I was taken a bit by surprise myself. But to answer your question, The Little Devilz isn't risking anything. Or at least they weren't until they graduated from sleazy hiring practices to premeditated murder.”

“I don't follow.”

“You would have no way of knowing this, having spent the last decade-plus on the West Coast laundering the finances of the rich and famous, but the management of The Little Devilz has had the local authorities in their pocket practically since the first day they opened their doors.”

A middle-aged man in a battered green Toyota pickup screamed an impressive—not to mention creative—string of profanities through his driver's side window at Brick, who ignored him as though he didn't exist. The guy seemed to forget in his fury that his window was closed, smacking his forehead and raising a red welt, which, unsurprisingly, seemed to further anger him. “They've been permitted to operate with impunity,” Brick continued. “If I had to venture a guess, I would say Phoebe Simpson is not the first underage dancer to have taken their stage. It's going to be up to us to make sure she is the last.”

“But how can we possibly manage that if even the police refuse to take action?”

We burst out of the Sumner Tunnel and into the steamy afternoon sun, Brick traveling much too fast as usual. He made the right and left turns toward Government Center with one hand on the wheel as he turned to face me, seemingly paying no attention to the traffic, of which there was a lot. I was suddenly sorry I had not waited until we were back at the office to ask my question.

“It's one thing,” Brick said, “to grease a few palms and convince the authorities to look the other way regarding your hiring practices—as repugnant as they are—or the ages of the customers you allow through your door. It's another issue entirely, though, to take a man to the top of an apartment building and toss him off simply because he is asking too many questions. This the police cannot ignore.”

“Okay, I'll buy that. So what do we do?”

“Simple. We convince the responsible party to admit he's a murderer.”

***

Sure, it sounded simple when Brick said it. What self-respecting scumbag wouldn't want to admit to a private investigator that he had committed an act of cold-blooded murder this past week?

We were lounging in the office eating a late lunch and planning strategy, which is another way of saying that I was eating and waiting for Brick to tell me what we were going to do. He had been quiet for a while now, thinking hard, and I could see he had pretty much settled upon a course of action. What that course of action might be, I couldn't guess.

Finally I could no longer stand the suspense and got up the nerve to ask. “I realize it's probably patently obvious to anyone who's not a trained accountant, but how in the world are we going to convince the killer to implicate himself in front of us?”

He smiled and reached into his top desk drawer, pulling out a small voice-activated digital recorder and holding it up for my inspection. “I'm going to place this in my shirt pocket and then I'm going to ask him.”

“I know you're the professional and everything, so don't take this the wrong way. But as plans go, doesn't that strike you as, oh I don't know, a little thin, not to mention dangerous ? ”

“Well, there's no need to unnecessarily complicate matters, and over the course of eight-plus decades on this earth I've discovered the best way to get the answer to a question is to ask it.”

“But don't you think that even if you can somehow get the killer to admit his actions, he might find the recorder?”

“I certainly hope so.”

I must have looked completely flummoxed—I know I felt that way—and Brick finally took pity on me, explaining the plan in a way that almost made sense. He would enter The Little Devilz , make a nuisance of himself in precisely the manner we assumed Martin Saunders had done, and wait for the goon who had killed him to take similar action against Brick.

My uncle explained that once the thug confiscated the recorder hidden in his shirt he would feel free to implicate himself, knowing his words would never see the light of day. “After all,” Brick reasoned, “if he's going to throw me off a building and then destroy the only evidence implicating him, he has nothing to fear, and thus no reason not to talk freely.”

“Aren't you forgetting a couple of important details?”

“Hmm. I don't think so. Like what?”

“Like the fact that you will be dead and the bad guy will be in possession of the critical piece of evidence against him?”

Brick stared at me and grinned and I suddenly got a very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I knew what he was going to say before he said it. Hearing it out loud didn't make me feel any better.

“That's where you come in, sonny.”

***

I sat at in a corner in The Little Devilz, having arrived early so that I could secure a table which would allow me the most complete observation of the enormous room. Every now and then I sipped from an eight dollar ginger ale, wishing it was sour mash but figuring it might be a good idea to keep my wits about me.

The Browning Hi-Power semiautomatic pistol my uncle had given me sat heavy and portentous in the leather shoulder holster under my jacket as I sweated rivers around it. He had slapped a magazine filled with rounds into the handle, explaining the basics of its' operation before carefully engaging the safety and handing it to me hesitantly like he feared I might blow his head off or something. I felt completely exposed, like everyone in the place was watching me, although I knew that was nothing more than rampant paranoia on my part.

On the stage, a succession of young women, all gorgeous but tired-looking and old beyond their years, danced lethargically to music with a thumping bass track that poured from the enormous sound system. Each one flounced out from behind an enormous velvet curtain to an introduction by an artificially enthusiastic DJ worthy of a Celtics playoff game, shaking her assets for a few frenetic minutes before being replaced by another girl cut from the same sexy but hardened mold.

I wondered what the odds were one of them was Phoebe Simpson. I hadn't heard the announcer use that name, but all of the girls went by aliases like “Skye” or “Silky” or “Angel” so how would I know? The irony of a girl using the name “Angel” at a place called The Little Devilz was not lost on me and I wondered if it was done intentionally; like calling a fat guy “slim.”

Probably not. Nobody seemed to have much of a sense of humor here; you could practically smell the loneliness and desperation wafting through the smoky air; a mood projected by the dancers and the customers alike.

A young woman dressed in the skimpiest red devil outfit I had ever seen came along and smiled at me. Red satin horns protruded from her auburn hair and she carried a plastic pitchfork along with a small round tray of drinks. “May I freshen you up, sir?”

I returned her smile. “Thanks, but this is as fresh as it gets for me.”

She did a lousy job of hiding her disappointment and I could almost see her mentally revising downward her estimate of the night's tip income. Ah, what the hell. Easy come, easy go. “On second thought,” I said as she turned to go, “I will have another ginger ale, thank you.”

Her face lit up like a little girl's on Christmas morning and I felt an incredible sense of sadness for her as she scurried off to fill the order. Allison and I had never had any children—thank God, that was something we had done right in a marriage that was mostly wrong—but I tried to imagine how I would feel knowing my daughter was slinging drinks to horny men in a strip club and I found myself hoping Brick would hurry up and get here and do his thing; this place was more depressing than I had ever imagined possible.

On the stage the girls twirled and pranced and showed strangers parts of their anatomy that most people reserve for the privacy of their bedrooms, pretending to get off on their time under the harsh glare of the spotlight, and finally, off to my right, my uncle strolled through the front door and into the semi-dark club. He was dressed garishly in a powder-blue suit with wide avocado tie straight out of the seventies; an outfit that would ensure he was noticed immediately.

He paid the cover to the goon at the door and walked straight across the big room to the bar, calling one of the bartenders over and asking him a question I couldn't hear. The man looked at him for a moment in undisguised amusement, as if trying to decide whether Brick was serious, and then shrugged and pointed to a closed door located at the far end of a shadowy hallway to the left of the stage.

Brick skirted the front of the stage looking, as always, like he hadn't a care in the world. I couldn't say for sure, it was too dark and he was too far away, but I would have sworn he flashed a smile and a wink to the chick currently grinding and making creative use of the stripper pole a few feet away. Knowing Brick, she was probably a friend, or at least a friend of a friend. He rounded the stage, no one paying the slightest attention to him except me, and disappeared down the hallway.

This was my cue to leave. We had scouted the building earlier and I knew there was a single service entrance leading out the back of the club. It seemed unlikely the designated muscle would lead the potential murder victim out to his death through the front of the club in front of dozens of potential witnesses, even if their attention was on other things, so my job, for now, was to get to Brick's car and stake out that rear entryway.

***

It didn't take long, which was ideal for me because thinking about the role I was supposed to play in this little adventure was making me feel a little like I did on my wedding day. I was nervous and shaking and hoping I would be able to perform. I hoped this turned out better than my marriage, for Brick's sake as well as my own.

I had been seated in the Mercedes for maybe ten minutes, parked in a darkened corner of a used car lot under a huge maple tree which left me a clear and unobstructed view of the strip club's service entrance next door. The moon was full but the shadows thrown by the tree's bulk enveloped Brick's car like a gossamer blanket.

The door to the service entrance swung open and my uncle exited the club, followed by an almost comically large man pressing the barrel of a handgun into his back. Held in Brick's hand was an object I assumed was a bottle of liquor—cheap whiskey, probably; he had said they would likely make him drink some and then spill the rest all over him to make it look like he got drunk and depressed and decided to end it all—where had I heard that before?—and I found myself wishing he could toss it to me so I could slam down a slug or two myself.

The large man with the gun opened the passenger side door of an inconspicuous-looking Chevy Caprice and Brick bent down and entered, sliding across to the driver's side, while the other guy followed him in and closed the car door. The brake lights flashed once and then the car was moving, creeping along the side of the club to the street and turning toward downtown.

I started Brick's Mercedes and followed, wondering if I would ever see him again alive.

***

When I started doing this job, oh, way back, let's see, must be three weeks ago now, I was inept at tailing people, either on foot or in a vehicle. It's something that seems like it should be easy but isn't, at least for me. I might as well have tapped them on the shoulder or held up a flashing neon sign saying, “Hey, you, I'm following you! Yes, that's right, you!”

I shared my concerns on this score with Brick after he told me our plan—the one I had had no input on. I told him I was afraid I would tip off the man kidnapping him and get him killed. Predictably, he told me not to worry about it. “You need to learn how to relax. The guy is going to be amped; getting himself mentally prepared to push me off a building. He's not going to be worried about an eighty year old man, especially once I make sure he finds the recorder.

“It's human nature, junior, he'll figure he got the drop on the dimwit old man trying to put one over on him and he'll let his guard down. Trust me.”

I wasn't convinced, but what could I do? It was too late now to worry about it, anyway.

The Mercedes hugged the road as I concentrated on maintaining a three to four vehicle interval behind the big Caprice. The farther we drove, the more I became convinced we were heading to the same building in Chinatown where Martin Saunders had met his untimely demise last week. In fact, I became so certain this was the case that when we got close, I pulled to the curb right around the corner from said building and watched as the Caprice did the same directly in front of the entrance.

The level of arrogance of the people running The Little Devilz was astonishing. Did they really expect anyone to believe two separate people who had never met would each decide, within a matter of days, to end their lives in precisely the same manner, by throwing themselves off precisely the same roof?

Apparently that was exactly what they expected, because there was my uncle, marching up the sidewalk to the front door, head held high, engaging his presumptive killer in a conversation about what I could not imagine. Hopefully he was getting the evidence we would need to put these people away if we somehow managed to survive, a prospect which I was beginning to think was remote.

The man with the gun reached around Uncle Brick and slipped a key card into a lock, pulling the front door of the apartment building open and shoving Brick inside. The odd-looking pair disappeared inside and I reluctantly climbed out of Brick's Mercedes, noting with appreciation how solid and reassuring the CLUNK of the door sounded compared to the tinny noise made by my Subaru upon completion of the same task. It's strange how our minds work under pressure. Or maybe it's just mine.

I slouched toward the door, feeling exposed and conspicuous—like everyone could see the gun under my jacket—and wondering how out of place I must look to anyone peering out a window. In this area people probably saw worse all the time; it was the sort of neighborhood where if people knew what was good for them, they didn't see anything; even if they saw everything.

To the right of the door was a panel filled with white plastic call buttons. Next to each button was a small card listing the apartment number and the last name of the associated tenant. I shrugged and picked one at random, pressing it and waiting, hoping someone was home. Fifteen seconds went by and I began to sweat. I had no idea how long it would take for Brick and the guy with the gun to reach the roof, or how long the man would wait once they got there before throwing my uncle to his death.

Finally a tiny speaker under the buttons erupted to life with static. It seemed to be on its' last legs, a conclusion you could reasonably arrive at about the entire building, and I jumped even though I had been expecting it. My nerves were thrumming. “Yeah?” a disembodied voice demanded.

“Uh, this is Tommy in 3B,” I answered. “I went to the store and locked myself out; could you please hook me up?” I wondered how many of his neighbors this guy actually knew and was counting on the natural tendency of most city dwellers to keep to themselves and mind their own business. It was the first rule of city living and one I followed religiously when I shared an apartment with Allison in L.A. A second later the buzzer sounded, followed a half-second later by the barely audible CLICK of the door's lock disengaging.

I breathed a sigh of relief and walked into the building.

***

Access to the roof was gained by walking up a short stairway and stepping through a dilapidated wooden door. A rusting sheet metal entryway protected the door from the elements, although how long that would continue to be the case was open to debate. The entryway canted precariously to one side and long strips of peeling brown paint hung from both sides.

From the roof I could hear my uncle chatting with his abductor as if sharing coffee and a cinnamon roll at Beekman's Deli. I pulled the Browning out of its' leather holster and slipped off the safety, gripping the weapon in both hands like I had seen done on TV a million times. My hands were shaking and I had a sudden terrifying vision of the gun slipping from my hands and shooting me in the groin as it bounced off the roof. I took a deep breath and peered around the entryway.

Standing maybe five feet from the edge of the roof, five stories above the cement and pavement below, stood Brick and the gigantic man from The Little Devilz. The man held Brick's voice-activated recorder in one huge paw and was turning it over in his hand, looking at it with undisguised amusement.

“So lemme get this straight,” the man said, smirking at Brick. “You're a friend of that idiot lawyer and you decided you were just gonna march into the club and get me to implicate myself and my bosses? You didn't think it might occur to me to frisk you? Just how friggin' stupid do you think I am?”

“Is that a rhetorical question or do you actually want an answer? Because, after all, you did admit everything before it occurred to you to search me. And if you're waiting for specifics, I fail to see what will be gained by discussing your lack of intelligence.”

The man's face tightened in annoyance and I wondered briefly why Brick was pushing the guy, but it was a fleeting thought because I was focused most intensely on his hands and what he was holding in them. Or, more specifically, what he wasn't holding. The gun he had pressed doggedly into Brick's back as they left The Little Devilz was nowhere to be seen. He had apparently decided he could handle a lone octogenarian without benefit of the weapon and holstered it somewhere on his massive body.

He slid the tiny recorder, roughly the size of an MP3 music player, into his breast pocket and reached for Brick, placing one beefy hand on my uncle's shoulder and roughly shoving him toward the edge of the roof. It happened so quickly it almost caught me off-guard. I had been waiting for some big speech from the guy about what he was going to do to Brick, like the ones the bad guys always seemed to make on TV.

Apparently this particular bad guy wasn't bright enough to come up with such a soliloquy, or maybe he was just unmotivated and wanted to get this unpleasantness over with so he could get back to the club and all the naked women. In any event, he began pushing Brick toward his death. To my utter amazement, my uncle still looked completely unruffled.

I stepped through the door and made sure I cleared the sheet-metal entryway before training the gun on him and demanding, “Stop right there!” My voice sounded strong and confident and I wondered where the hell that was coming from. I certainly didn't feel strong or confident.

The man froze and for a long moment nothing happened. Far off in the distance I heard a siren wailing and I wished it was headed here although I knew it wasn't. The man swiveled his head and looked over at me, surprise etched in his eyes and maybe a little regret, too, as it dawned on him, much too late, that he hadn't been up against just one octogenarian. He had been taken down by one octogenarian and one mostly out-of-shape divorced accountant from L.A.

Brick removed the man's hand from his shoulder gently, almost apologetically, and straightened his jacket. I could see the man calculating the odds of grabbing my uncle and using him as a human shield in a desperate attempt to regain the advantage. “Don't even think about it,” I snapped as I pointed the gun at his chest. Incredibly, my hands had stopped shaking.

The man's shoulders slumped as the reality of the situation hit home. He shook his head and sighed. I almost felt sorry for him; this was the sort of thing he would never live down in the joint.

***

“I don't know how to thank you for getting to the bottom of Martin's death, Mr. Callahan, and so quickly. This won't bring him back, of course, but I simply couldn't live with the world thinking he committed suicide.” Lillian Saunders appeared to have aged a decade in the short time since we first met her following her husband's death. It was obvious she wasn't taking the tragedy well and I hoped the resolution of the case would give her the opportunity to achieve a little peace. It didn't seem likely to me, but what do I know?

The recently widowed Mrs. Saunders handed Brick a check. He folded it and placed it in his breast pocket without looking at it.

“Believe me when I tell you it was our pleasure to help,” he said. “Your husband died trying to protect a young girl who was being victimized. He was a hero, Mrs. Saunders.” He stood and took the elderly woman's arm, walking her to the door. “Please don't hesitate to call on us if there is anything we can help you with in the future.”

He escorted her to the elevator and when he returned he had a satisfied smile on his face. “I talked to my friend Lieutenant Fischer of the Boston Police this morning,” he said, “and Curt told me this thing is about to blow sky-high. That goon we took down is just the hired help. He's scared to death and not about to take the fall for his bosses. Even as we speak, he's spilling his guts. I'm telling you, sonny, heads are going to roll. Bigshot heads. Fatcat heads, both in the City Council and the BPD. All the people who were taking kickbacks, letting the scumbags running The Little Devilz employ underage strippers and eventually graduate to murder are about to wish they had made some different choices in their miserable lives!”

I had never seen my uncle so ebullient. He sat down at his desk and rubbed his hands together in glee, looking for a moment like Scrooge McDuck in the counting house. “I tell ya, sonny, there's not very much in this world I enjoy more than seeing self-important gasbags get what's coming to them. I wish your dad had been here to see it; he would be damned proud of this little agency along about now.

“And I'll tell you something else,” he said, looking me in the eye. “He would have been damned proud of you, too, the way you handled yourself last night.”

I tried to give him my best aw-shucks shrug, but I couldn't help grinning. I hadn't seen much of my dad the last ten years before he died and I have to admit it was nice to hear those words come out of his brother's mouth.

“I'm just glad I didn't have to shoot that poor bastard on the roof,” I said.

My uncle waved dismissively. “Forget about it, you couldn't have shot anybody.”

“Are you kidding? That big ox was about to toss you off a five-story building; of course I could have shot him!”

“No, I mean it literally. You couldn't have shot him . When I slapped the magazine into the Browning, I never racked the slide to chamber a round.”

“So if I had pulled the trigger . . .”

“Right,” Brick said. “Nothing would have happened. You could have pulled the trigger all night and all you would have gotten for your trouble is a blister on your finger.”

I looked at Brick incredulously, remembering the sheer mass of the big murderer and how close he had been holding my uncle to the edge of the roof. “But . . . what about the safety? You made sure the safety was on before you handed the gun to me.”

He shrugged. “That was all for effect. Come on, junior, I didn't want you to actually be able to fire the gun; you don't know what the hell you're doing. You could have killed someone, for crying out loud!”

My uncle chuckled. Until he saw the look on my face, that is. Then he burst out laughing and didn't stop for nearly fifteen minutes. Finally he stood, knees cracking, and slapped me on the shoulder, mostly stifling another round of giggles. “Don't look so glum, kiddo, you're a hero! Enjoy the satisfaction; that feeling doesn't come around very often in this line of work.”

I must have seemed somewhat unconvinced, because he continued, “Come on, let's hit Beekman's Deli. My treat. There's a BLT on toast quivering in fear with the knowledge that you're on your way and you're hungry.” He marched out the squeaky office door and down the hallway.

I sat brooding for a moment, then shook my head and followed him out of the office. By the time I reached the elevator, I was smiling, too. I just couldn't help it.