Chapter08

 

 

Red and blue police car lights slashed across the face of the taxi garage as officers pour out into the streets as if reacting to a terrorists’ attack – a swat team van sending its legion onto the sidewalk in front where each armored officer took up position assault rifles aimed at the doors.

Miller’s dark unmarked Ford weaved through the gaps left by the slanted cars and came to a stop near, but not exactly in front of the old taxi facility.

“This is ridiculous,” he mumbled.

“What’s that, boss?” Ransom asked, turning off the ignition, his sallow face painted red and blue with the flashing lights of the other cars, giving him the look of a circus clown.

“All this,” Miller said, waving his hand. “Do we actually think we’re going to find the man we want here?”

“Better careful than sorry,” Ransom said.

“Can we go in now?”

“Not yet.”

“What are we waiting for?”

“The bomb squad.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Miller said. “We’re only here to interview the driver.”

“It’s just a safety precaution,” Ransom said. “The guy might have left something in the cab.”

“I know. I know, better safe than sorry,” Miller mumbled, and then saw the bomb squad vehicle stop behind them, and that crew pile out, these men wearing bright orange vests over their body armor, making the scene seem all the more like a three-ring circus.

 

 

Miller’s fingers gripped the interior handle of the car door, tightening and letting loose, as the dark figures spread across the landscape of the street outside.

The taxi stand was something out of the 1930s, a throw back to the late prohibition era, with fume-stained glass bricks through which the interior lights barely glowed. A small sign with the word “taxi” stood perpendicular to the brown brick of what had once served as some kind of public carriage house – no doubt a place that had rented out its services much the way the cabs did now.

This was old New York with roots that went deep into the soil and fed off some deeper well of which few of the newer residents of city knew anything about.

Some of these new citizens, rich and poor, immigrants from overseas or from some place on the other side of the Hudson, gathered along the far sidewalk to gawk, unable to resist the attraction of the lights and perhaps the possible sight of blood – the way those annoying people on the highways always did when passing the scene of an accident, feeding off other people’s misery, needing some disaster make their own petty lives feel more significant.

Finally, some officer near the main garage door lifted a hand as signal, and Ransom yanked open the driver side door, allowing Miller to do the same on his side. The cold hair swirling around Miller’s face in sharp contrast to the stifled air inside the unmarked police car. At first, the chill refreshed him, bringing him out of his dream state, and then it started to make his face ache. Miller followed the shorter Ransom, weaving through the barrage of warriors who had come in anticipation of some danger no one really believed existed here, but as a show of force for upper management. They all needed to show the chief and his henchmen that they were doing something about this.

After all, the chief’s friend owned the hotel where all this had started in, and no one wanted to piss of the chief by failing to look like they might have a part in solving the crime.

Miller, however, kept thinking about the Mauser, and that other crime years ago that the chief and his henchmen had given up on – everyone except for Miller had given up on – and how this remote and dingy place on the planet might provide the long-sought after clue Miller needed to finally find the man who had killed his partner.

This thought flooded his face with warmth, making the ache worse, even as it chased the chill out of him.

 

 

Miller stepped over the mounds of snow stained black with soot, the remnants of urban winter painted with the coming and going of traffic, up and down the street, but also from in and out of the ancient garage.

Ransom paused at the garage door to wait, frowning at Miller’s slow pace, and then when Miller reached him, both men stepped into what was a throw back to another era, only hinted at by the exterior. The dim light cast from banks of yellowed florescent lamps high up in the rafters painted the interior in deep shadow – although Miller could make out the shape of even more ancient cabs stuck in the far and dark corners of this huge garage, cabs that more resembled the remains better suited to an elephant graveyard than a fleet of vehicles designed to serve a modern urban population. A few faded checkerboard designs showed on the most ancient of the rusting vehicles in the real, old even when Miller was a boy, and rarely seen on the streets even then.

And even those that were still clearly used seemed ages out of date, an untrustworthy fleet launched for three shifts a day on the unsuspecting public, and around these stood packs of grumbling and disgruntled drivers, whom had been called back from their daily routes at the request of the police, grim men and women, mostly from other parts of the world, for whom each moment wasted here was a loss of significant income they could not recover. These drivers glared at the police and at Miller, and then at a small Latino man in blue jeans and a stained work shirt with red suspenders, who came out of a small office to one side of the garage, a cigar stub positioned in the corner of his mouth. He looked angrier than any of the drivers, and glared at Miller as he advanced, his thick black moustache wiggling with annoyance.

 

Miller and Ransom halted just beneath the large window that over looked the garage and the office beyond it from which the small man had just emerged, waiting for him to arrive the way someone might wait for the arrival of a storm, feeling the rush of angry air blowing ahead of it.

“I hope you’re happy now,” the small Latino said. “You have to know how much all this is costing me.”

“I don’t understand,” Miller said. “I didn’t ask for all this.”

“You asks for my cabs to come back and so they came back.”

“I asked for one cab, not the fleet,” Miller said, casting an angry glance of his own towards Ransom, who gave Miller a shrug.

“Something must have been mis-communicated,” Ransom said.

“This is not an inspection?” the manager asked, the rage in his dark gaze abating slightly, shifting into a puzzled look. He studied Miller’s face, then Ransom’s.

 

 

“No,” Miller said. “We just need to speak to one of your cabbies.”

The anger increased in the small man’s eyes, the dark brows folding down towards the bridge of his nose.

“You put me through all this for one of our drivers?” he scowled.

“It’s a murder investigation,” Miller said, the explanation seeming not to explain anything, since even he believed this show of force more than a little extreme. Something else was going on here, and someone higher up was leaving him in the dark as to what. “One of your drivers picked up a fair at the Biltmore Hotel a little while ago. We need to know who it was he picked up and where he took him.”

“Wait here,” the manager said turning back in the direction he had come to retrace his steps to the short set of wooden stairs that led up into his office. He vanished from sight for a moment only to reappear in the large stained window that overlooked the garage. He appeared to search for something, and then came produced a clip board, before vanishing again to appear again on the stairs.

“Later,” Miller whispered to Ransom, “you’re going to tell me whose idea this was to launch a full scale invasion.”

“I don’t need to tell you,” Ransom whispered back. “You know as well as I do who ordered this.”

“But why?”

“That is the central question,” Ransom mumbled, then grew silent with the manager’s approach.

 

 

The small man carried the clipboard, with a number of wrinkled and coffee-stained sheets fluttering with his hurried step.

The clipboard, as it turned out, contained a list of names and assignments.

“Which hotel was that?” the manager asked.

“Biltmore,” Miller said.

The small man’s forefinger moved down the list – one side which had the driver’s name, the other the area of an assignment, finally coming to a halt about half way down the sheet where the finger moved across the sheet from one column to the other.

“It’s Rogers, you want,” the manager said.

“Is he here?”

The manager turned to look across the garage, squinting to make out the faces in the dimmer light near the parked cabs, and then finally pointed to one of them.

“That’s him,” the manager said, indicated a gray-haired, broad shouldered man, who looked more like a mechanic than a driver, down to a smudge of oil on his left cheek, and faded green overalls. He wore a flat hat with a low brim long out of date and something that had been popular when the Irish had immigrated to America, a century and a half earlier, but a symbol of an urban life now become extinct with gentrification.

 

 

Miller and Ransom crossed the room, by-passing the parade of cabs and cabbies that had lined up to either side, their agitated faces filled with some old dread from places where government intrusion like this was not uncommon. Their heads turned as the two cops passed, relief registering in each set of eyes.

Rogers, the driver the manager had indicated, was one of the few native born, a gray-haired, stubble-chinned throw back to an era when other immigrants dominated the trade. He did not wince or shy away when it became clear the police attention focused on him, but spread his feet as if ready for a fist fight.

“We need to speak with you,” said Ransom, who was a step ahead of Miller and paused in front of the driver.

“About what?” Rogers asked gruffly.

“About a fair you picked up at the Biltmore earlier tonight,” Miller said.

“A man about 5 foot seven, 150 pounds, wearing an army field jacket,” Ransom added.

“Oh him,” Rogers said, the tension easing off his shoulders as he laughed. “The guy with the brief case – a queer fish him.”

“Queer?” Miller asked. “How so?”

 

 

Rogers wiped his cracked lips with the back of his hand and glanced down at a spot of oil on the concrete floor.

“He kept talking to himself,” the driver said. “I wanted to put him out of the cab. But he scared me a little. Besides, he was headed up to The Bronx. A fair like that made this a good night for me – that is until you guys dragged me back here.”

Miller glanced at Ransom, who nodded back, as if sensing some importance in this chain of events, a clue to something perhaps. Miller glanced back at the driver.

“And you can show us the place where you dropped him off?” Miller asked.

The driver’s gaze grew hard and annoyed, as he looked at Miller, and Ransom, and then at the taxi manager, who was a few yards farther away.

“Show you?” he mumbled. “Are you telling me this circus isn’t over yet?”

“Not for the moment,” Miller said.

 

 

Rogers glanced back towards his cab where a pack on non-uniformed police officers had all four doors and the trunk open, and appeared to be pulling it apart, drawing out the spare tire from the trunk and the back seat itself from the passenger compartment. All wore surgical gloves, some carried a strange array of detectors even Miller – being old school – did not completely understand.

“What the fuck are they doing to my cab?” Rogers snarled angrily in Miller’s direction.

Ransom answered: “Looking for information.”

“While I sit here going broke?” Rogers mumbled.

“Be patient, Mr. Rogers,” Miller said. “We will be finished here as soon as possible. This is important.”

“Yeah, so is paying my rent,” Rogers said.

Miller was as impatient as Rogers, but refused to show it. He could smell the prey he had hunted for years, and wanted the cab to show something, anything that would give him a clear trail to follow, rather than the ghostly dead end trails he had pursued in the past.

One of the investigators waved from the cab, and then made his way over to where Miller and Ransom stood. He handed Ransom a clear plastic bag that contained a piece of gold or brass metal.

Ransom studied it for a moment.

“What is it?” Miller asked, unable to keep the tone of impatience out of his voice.

Ransom held the bag up to the light and stared at it for a moment.

“It appears to be a part of a latch to a brief case,” he said.

“Then we have the right cab?”

“It would seem so,” Ransom said. “We also found traces of blood in the back seat.”