Chapter 10: Tail Job
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We went around to the front of the apartment house and I got out. There was nobody in the lobby, just an automated reception machine on a desk. I looked the names it displayed over. A man named Joseph Brody had Apartment 405. A man named Joe Brody had received five million dollars from General Sternwood to stop playing with Carmen and find some other little girl to play with. It could be the same Joe Brody. I felt like giving odds on it. I went around an elbow of wall to the foot of tiled stairs and the shaft of the elevator walled in a transparent tube. Through the glass, I could see the top of the elevator was level with the floor. Beside the shaft was a door labelled "Garage." I opened it and went down narrow stairs to the basement. The elevator door was jammed open and the man in new overalls was grunting hard as he stacked heavy crates in it. I stood beside him and lit a cigarette and watched him. He didn't like me watching him. After a while I said: "Watch the weight, bud. It's only tested for half a tonne. Where's the stuff going?" "Brody, four-o-five," he said. "Manager?" "Yeah. Looks like a nice lot of loot." He glared at me with pale white-rimmed eyes. "Books," he snarled. "Fifty kilos a box, easy, and me with a forty kilo back." "Well, watch the weight," I said. He got into the elevator with six crates and the door shut behind him. I went back up the steps to the lobby and out to the street and the cab took me down-town again to my office building. I gave the fresh-faced kid too much money and he gave me a dog-eared business card which for once I didn't drop into the recycle bin by the elevator bank. I had a room and a half on the seventh floor at the back. The half-room is an office split into two to make reception-rooms. Mine had my name on it and nothing else, and that only on the reception-room. I always left this unlocked, in case I had a client, and the client cared to sit down and wait. I had a client.
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Part 2