Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2023 11:10:54 -0500
From: Samuel Stefanik <churchphilips@yahoo.com>
Subject: Wasted Life.  Chapter 21

Dear reader, how do you think it's going so far?  Bea and Law certainly
aren't making much progress, or are they?  In this chapter they address a
piece of evidence they so far have ignored.  Will it help them solve the
mystery?  Maybe.  You'll have to read to find out.

I hope you like the chapter.  Drop me a line if you want.  I'd be pleased
to hear from you!

NOTE: Check out my other stories in the Sci-fi / Fantasy Section
Crown Vic to a Parallel World
From Whence I Came
Stolen Love

Disclaimer:

If you're younger than 18 or find these kinds of stories offensive, please
close up now and have a great day!  If you are of legal age and are
interested, by all means keep going.  I'll be glad to have you along for
the journey.  Please donate to Nifty.  This is a great resource for great
stories and a useful outlet to authors like me and readers like you.



Wasted Life
a Law Edwards Mystery by Sam Stefanik

21
The Key to the Mystery

When lunch was over, Bea and I dug through everything again.  We read
letters, reread some, flipped through year books, and paged every single
blue book to look for notes or anything else that would give us a clue.
Bea even telephoned the people who hadn't answered the phone the previous
day.  The few she reached either hadn't heard from Preston or they told the
same story about him needing a hundred dollars and help.  None of them gave
him anything.

One of the last envelopes we paid attention to was the one with the key in
it.  I examined the envelope more closely and noticed something about it in
light of the timeline we'd started to assemble.  "This was postmarked the
13th, which was Saturday.  That means it was mailed either very late on
Friday or before five o'clock on Saturday.  Preston was home all-day
Saturday.  I say he mailed this on Friday night."

I jumped to a conclusion and explained my reasoning.  "I have an idea that
this key and the blueprints are related.  We know that Preston had the
blueprints at Simon's on Friday.  He wanted Simon to keep them safe, but
Simon refused.  Now we don't have the prints, but we have this key.  I
think when Simon wouldn't help, Preston locked-up the prints and mailed the
key to safety."

I shrugged at the fact that everything I'd said was pure conjecture, little
more than a wild guess.  "It's a long shot, but we've got nothing else to
go on.  The horseracing thing seems like a blind alley because there's no
evidence that he ever used it.  I think that this whole mystery has
something to do with the blueprints we haven't found yet.

"Let's try to recreate Preston's Friday night.  We'll start at the Navy
Yard gates like he would have when he left work that day.  We'll retrace
his steps as much as we can, and see if we can find the lock that this fits
in."  I held the key up to the light to add force to my suggestion.

Bea agreed that we had nothing to lose except some time.  We left the
office and boarded a full trolley car headed south.  I checked my watch out
of habit as we boarded.  It was almost four.  The bustling city had started
to bustle even more as early shifts ended.  We got off the trolley at the
Navy Yard gates and had to push through a crush of people who were trying
to board.

Bea and I moved up to the gates and stood in the same shadow of the brick
pillar that I'd stood in when I met with `Call Me Frank' Beedle of
Consolidated Hull and Ship.  We watched as people streamed into and out of
the Navy Yard.  They passed harried guards in both directions.  No one
bothered to check identification or to look in bags or parcels.  The guards
didn't have a chance to do an effective job given the sheer volume of
people moving through the gates.

I pointed this out to Bea.  "If they weren't so big, Preston could have
carried an entire ship through that gate, and no one would have stopped
him."

"You're probably right."  She agreed.  "Do you see anything that key would
fit?"

I didn't.  There wasn't anything near us that would even have a lock on it
except maybe the wrought iron gates themselves.  Bea and I took a stroll a
couple hundred yards in each direction along the fence line to look for
anything that we might have missed, but we found no locks at all.

We returned to the trolley stop and waited for our turn to board.  After
the arrival and departure of two or three trolleys, we were able to get a
spot on one, but it was standing room only.  We trundled up Broad Street as
each of us tried to look at the passing scenery through the eyes of Preston
Arlott.

I tried to put myself in his shoes.  He would have been on that trolley, or
one just like it, on Friday the 12th.  He would have ridden with the tube
of blueprints.  He would have a plan of some kind for them.  I wondered
what it was.

As we moved away from the Navy Yard grounds and passed League Island Park,
I noticed the shuttered attractions, the ballfield and the old stadium.  I
thought it certain there would be many locks that might fit Preston's key
on that great, big piece of mothballed property.  I considered whether
Preston would have thought to hide his blueprints there.  I didn't consider
the possibility for very long.

That site would have required a big backtrack from Simon's place up near
the Reading Terminal Market.  We knew he had the prints there.  I used a
similar line of reasoning when the trolley stopped at the green space of
Marconi Plaza at Oregon Avenue.  I was sure that there were places to hide
things within the plaza, but they seemed too unlikely to explore.

Bea and I rode all the way up Broad Street to the Broad Street Train
Station, then changed to the Market Street Trolley line to reach the
Reading Terminal Market.  From there we walked the four blocks to Simon's
building.  Bea checked the ground floor of the rooming house because I
didn't want to go in.  I didn't want to risk putting my eyes on Simon.  I
worried if we saw each other and he said anything to me, I might rearrange
his face with my fists.

Bea went in and came out quickly.  She said that the key didn't match the
room doors or the mailboxes and there was nothing else to put a key in.

I looked around and spoke my thoughts aloud.  "This is the last place we
know he had the prints if we assume that's what was in the tube he carried.
Let's go very slowly to his old rooming house and see if we can find
anything along the way."

We left the building that Simon lived in and walked back to the Reading
Terminal Market.  We made a careful search there but found nothing that the
key would have fit.  We left and walked the long blocks down Filbert
Street, parallel to Market, instead of returning to the Market Street
trolley.  The walk was Bea's idea.  "If Pres needed to think, he would have
walked.  He always walked or ran when he needed to work something out."

That sounded reasonable to me.  "He certainly needed a new strategy when he
left Simon."  I commented.

"And Pres was probably mad at himself for punching him."  Bea said to
remind me of what had transpired between the two young men.

We walked and looked, but the walk did nothing except fill my exercise
quota for the next three or four months.  As the area that we passed
through was mostly residential, we were surrounded by homes.  None of them
would have had locks on their doors that would have fit the key we had.
Even if they did, it was highly unlikely Preston had rented a whole house
to store his drawings.

When we struck out at Simon's building and at Reading Terminal, I tried to
reason out what it was we were searching for.  I assumed we were looking
for something small.  The key was small and simple looking.  It wouldn't
have fit a high-quality lock.  Whatever it fit wasn't terribly secure.  I
thought it possible that the key was for a trunk, or a briefcase, or
something like that.

I'd had a passing idea that Preston had acquired a piece of luggage to
store the prints and then had taken that to a parcel check.  That idea
didn't make much sense though because if he checked a trunk with a lock, he
likely would have mailed the claim check to safety along with the key.
There had been no claim check.  That meant he probably hadn't checked a
bag.

I was still chewing over what kind of lock our key might fit when Bea and I
approached City Hall and started to pass it.  Beyond City Hall, Broad
Street Station came into view.  I commented on it for lack of anything else
to talk about.  "That place is kind of an eyesore."  I said and pointed at
the vast, gothic stack of stone that was the train station.

Bea pointed up at the building and unleashed a torrent of information.
"Wilson Brothers built it, and Frank Furness expanded it in 1893.
Furness's favorite style was gothic, but his windows are arched instead of
pointed.  That station is one of the first buildings in this country to
have a steel frame.  None of that stone is structural."

Bea's chatter surprised me enough that I stopped walking to stare after
her.  She got several steps ahead of me while she pointed and talked like a
tour guide in a museum.  She realized I wasn't next to her and stopped to
look back.  "What in the world are you talking about?"  I asked when I had
her attention.

Bea chuckled sheepishly.  "Sorry, my father loves this building.  He tells
me about it every time we come to the city.  He hates City Hall.  He calls
it `a hideous monument to corruption,' but he loves this station."

`He would like something that fucking ugly.' I thought uncharitably.
"Well, it's a big building."  I said and swallowed my angry thoughts about
Elliott Arlott.  "I bet there are a lot of locks in a building that big,
and a lot of places to hide a tube of blueprints."

Bea agreed and we went inside.  The interior of the building was a stark
contrast to the outside.  The exterior was fussy and overly ornate.  On the
inside, that fussiness gave way to styling like that of a cathedral, or
Roman monument.

Bea gave me a quick lesson on architecture of the interior, something I'd
never noticed before.  She pointed out the features of the space, including
its signature sand-colored marble columns.  I was thoroughly impressed with
both the architecture and Bea's knowledge of it.

After the lesson, we started to look around with purpose.  That's when I
noticed the crowd.  We were at the station during the height of the evening
rush hour.  The place was a hive of activity.  Thousands of anonymous
people were moving and going and coming on local trains, on express trains,
and on trolleys that connected the great station to the city.  I realized
that same level of activity would have been what Preston experienced on
Friday evening.

Bea and I waded through the mass of humanity and methodically scoured the
building from the main gallery, to the platforms, to the parcel check.  I
even bribed an elevator operator to take us up into the railroad offices
above the public areas of the station.  With all that searching, we still
found no lock to put our key in.

We spent two long hours exploring the station.  When we finished, both of
us were frustrated and again found ourselves with no clear path forward.  I
was half tempted to take the trolley all the way back to the Navy Yard and
start again.  I turned that idea over in my mind as Bea and I headed for
the trolley terminal.  Whatever destination we chose, whether we went to
the Navy Yard or Preston's rooming house, or back to my office to regroup,
we needed to take the trolley south.

I knew it would be a long ride on the crowded trolley.  The car was sure to
make frequent stops for people to get on and off.  I figured I'd better
relieve myself while I had the chance.  I excused myself from Bea's side
and cast my eyes about for the restroom.  I noticed a block letter sign
perched on a marble screen wall that bore the word I looked for.  I moved
toward the `RESTROOMS' sign and went around the back of the screen wall to
where I expected to find the doors to the mens' and ladies' rooms.

I found the rooms I sought, and I also found a bank of black-painted-steel,
nickel-in-the-slot lockers.  The visible end of the keys that projected
from the locks on the unrented units looked familiar.  The only difference
between the key that we had and the ones in the locker locks was the locker
keys all had a stamped brass number tag fastened to them to identify the
locker they served.

I shouted for Bea, and she came at a run.  I took the key from her and
tried it in the locker locks.  It fit!  Our key didn't have a number tag.
I assumed Preston had removed it to make the key easier to mail.  Bea and I
had to try each locker individually until we found the right one.  It was
Bea who finally found it.  She twisted the key in the lock and opened the
door.  I reached in and extracted a pile of carefully folded blueprints and
other papers.

Bea seized them from my hands and hugged them to her body like they were
her brother.  She expressed her understanding of how they came to be folded
instead of rolled in a cardboard tube.  "I guess the tube wouldn't fit, so
he folded the paper and threw the tube away.  Now we know he took them, but
not why."

I added my own confusion to hers.  "And why would he leave them here?  And
why did he move to a slum?  And who was he waiting for on Monday?  And why
was he killed?"  I rattled off the questions we still had no answers to.
Nothing the boy did made any sense to me.

We weren't going to find those answers outside the bathrooms in the Broad
Street Train Station, so Bea and I split the papers between us to make them
easier to carry and got on the crowded trolley going South.  As we rode
along, I thought over the case some more.  I recalled each discovery that
had given us what we thought were answers about Preston's motivations.  I
also thought about how each of those discoveries had turned into blind
alleys.

When we learned about Preston's horserace system, everything made sense,
then it didn't when we found out he never got a chance to use it.  Now we
had the blueprints he'd taken from his job, the same prints that he tried
to force on a friend, only to abandon them in the train station.  We had
the papers but still no understanding of why he took them in the first
place, or why he did any of the other things that he did.  We also had the
unanswered question of why he mailed the key away.  Who was he protecting
it from?  We kept turning up more of the puzzle pieces, but still had no
idea what the puzzle picture was supposed to look like.

"We're missing something."  I said to Bea over the noise of the crowded
trolley car.  "I don't know what it is, but we're missing it."

I tried to put myself into Preston Arlott's shoes, to see things the way he
had seen them.  I tried to think back to who I was when I was twenty-two.
I reasoned that wasn't much help because my experiences were very different
than his.  `That was a different time and I'm a different person.' I told
myself. `I was twenty-two in 1923.  That was in the early days of
Prohibition.  Everything was wide open.  I was drinking and getting laid
every day of the week.  So were a lot of guys my age, both queer and
straight.'  I thought about that some more.

Another question entered my mind, and I asked it aloud.  "How much money
did you send to Preston over the last year?"

"Thirty dollars when he had to move out of the dorms, then some small money
here and there."  Bea reported.  "Whenever I had five or so, I'd send it.
Maybe another thirty in total.  Why?"

That sounded fine, except for the money Bea had when she first came to me.
"If you sent money any time you had five, how did you have twenty-eight
that first day?"

Bea explained.  "I worked late for a month.  Father needed a big project
duplicated.  I finished a week early, and he gave me twenty-five dollars as
a bonus.  I got the money just before my letter came back `unable to
forward,' so I brought it with me just in case."

"Makes sense.  How much did Preston have with him?"

The question muted Bea.  I guessed it reminded her that her brother was
dead, and the adventure she was on was more than just a scavenger hunt.
"Twelve dollars."

"It doesn't make sense."  I said for the millionth time.  "You sent money,
he was earning money, living cheaply, and now we find out he wasn't even
gambling much.  Where is the money?  He had no bankbook and no safe deposit
key.  Where is the fifty-odd dollars he saved?  What happened to it?  He
gave the impression in some of his letters that he lost it gambling.  He
didn't blow all that on quarter bets."

"I don't know."  Bea cocked her head sideways in puzzlement.  "It's not
like he had anything.  All his clothes were old."

I chewed that over until I found that I had an idea after all.  I decided
that my experience as a young man wasn't that far removed from Preston's.
Young men have needs, whether those men are queer or straight, rich or
poor, sad or happy.  I assumed Preston was getting his needs met somewhere.
Perhaps it cost him a little money.

I announced my thoughts to Bea but kept my meaning vague.  I had no
intention of exposing the vulgarity of my line of logic to the young woman
who had been my unlikely partner in the investigation.  "I think I have an
idea.  After we get these prints safely back to my office, you should go
home.  I can look into my idea and let you know what I find tomorrow."

Bea didn't want to be left out of anything.  She pressed me to be included.
"What is it?  Can I help?"

I refused her participation with more vague language.  "You need to leave
this to me.  I'm...let's say I'm uniquely suited to this phase of the
investigation."

Bea wasn't satisfied with my lack of detail.  She pressed me some more.  "I
don't understand why I can't help."

I knew I was going to have to tell her something, but I didn't know what.
I didn't want to explain at all.  I regretted even telling her that I had
an idea.  She wasn't going to let it alone, so I decided to tell her the
bare minimum.  "I'm guessing Preston was pretty depressed most of the year
he spent since your father did what he did.  Maybe he found a place to be
around people like himself.  There are places that cater to people like us.
I'm going to take his photo and try some of them tonight."

Bea jumped to a conclusion about why I didn't want her along with me.
"They won't let me in because I'm a woman."  She assumed in a sad voice.
She deflated to the point that she lost her excellent posture, but just for
a moment.

I corrected her.  "They'd let you in gladly, but I'm not about to take an
eighteen-year-old girl into a bunch of queer hang outs.  I don't think
Preston would want that for you.  Just trust me.  Come back in the morning
and we'll see where we are.  We have to be getting close."

It was almost eight o'clock at night when we pushed through my office door.
I gathered Bea's half of the blueprints with mine and locked them in the
wardrobe in my room.  Bea had another try at convincing me to let her come
along on my nighttime search.  I turned her down flat and herded her out
the door.

I watched her walk along the sidewalk until she was out of sight.  When she
was gone, I spoke aloud to my office door.  "I guess I get to keep you now.
I can turn the prints over and get my cash tomorrow.  Just in time."  I
shook my head.  "Why don't I feel better about that?"