Handyman

By W.A. Winter

Minneapolis, Minnesota, during the steamy summer of 1953. When publishing-company heir Bower Stockman hires Frank Gates, a middle-aged, down-on-his-luck private investigator, to arrange a murder, Gates reluctantly contacts “handyman” Harry Fairchild. As Frank knows only too well, Harry, a childhood pal, has done that kind of “odd job” before, and is currently as desperate for cash as Frank is. But the situation is complicated. Detective Sergeant Pinky Moberg is determined to cap his long police career by solving the infamous Zola Shea homicide that has bedeviled him for 15 years. His prime suspect: Harry Fairchild, aided and abetted by Frank Gates. Further roiling these choppy waters, Raymond Gates, Frank’s troubled stepson who has recently returned from military service in Europe, has seduced Stockman’s alluring wife and will stop at nothing to steal her from her husband’s bed. The overlapping relationships and tangled objectives lead to an unlikely yet inevitable conclusion in which a broken man betrays an old friend, star-crossed lovers face brutal retribution, and only a latter-day Javert may emerge triumphant.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W.A. Winter
• Release date: May 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463516768

W.A. Winter

W.A. Winter is the pen name of a Minneapolis journalist and author.

Book preview

Seems there was a randy handyman who was asked by a pretty housewife to do some odd jobs around the house while her husband was at work.

Excited by the lady, the handyman enthusiastically fixed a leaky faucet, repaired a broken window screen, even replaced a couple of damaged shingles on the garage roof.

Anything else? he asked the housewife with a winning smile.

The lady smiled back. She was staring at his thick chest, broad shoulders, and muscular arms. Well, she said finally, there might be one more thing you could do for me.

Anything, said the handyman.

Well, I want you to understand, the lady said, that I wouldn’t be asking this if I thought my husband was up to it. But my husband, poor dear, is not as young as he used to be, and his back gives out on him at the worst times. Besides, he just doesn’t seem to have the interest anymore. But are you sure you can help me?

Oh, yes, Ma’am, said the handyman. I’m sure!

Thank goodness! said the lady. I didn’t think we’d ever get that old refrigerator out of the basement.

—An old joke, circa 1953

ONE

Harry Fairchild had planned to spend the afternoon at Lake Nokomis, sketching the Cedar Avenue bridge for an oil painting he’d maybe get to later. But heading south on Cedar, he thought he’d enjoy a beer or two first, so he got only as far as Forty-second Street, where there was a tavern called The Sailor Tap.

The Sailor had a nondescript red-brick front with a white and blue sign that ran the length of the narrow facade and a pair of tall, thin, curtained windows with neon advertisements for Grain Belt and Pabst Blue Ribbon hanging in them, unlit in the daytime. Between the windows the heavy front door, painted cerulean blue, was propped open with a brick. Harry parked his mother’s twelve-year-old Chrysler in front of the barber shop two doors from the corner, waited for the Thirty-fourth Avenue streetcar to clatter past, then walked across Cedar in the hot June sunshine.

The Sailor was only a few blocks from his mother’s house, the most prominent of the half-dozen similar 3.2 joints in the neighborhood, but this was the first time Harry had stopped there since his return to Minneapolis five days earlier. The outside hadn’t changed as far as he could tell, and waiting for his eyes to adjust to the smoky gloom, he didn’t suppose the inside had, either. Slowly, not wanting to draw attention to himself among the handful of customers scattered at seemingly regular intervals along the narrow length of the single room, he made his way along the bar, his eyes adjusting enough to pick up a bored face here, a ballplayer’s photograph there, wooden stools jammed up against the bar and high-backed wooden booths set perpendicularly against the opposite wall. The checkerboard linoleum, its colors indeterminate, was gritty with dirt and God knew what all under his feet.

Harry sat down on a stool at the far end of the bar. He could have sat down almost anywhere, but he was uncomfortable having too many choices and chose the stool at the far end because there was nothing but the back wall and a door leading to the toilets after that. He ordered a Grain Belt because he was looking at the stylized diamond-shaped Grain Belt sign behind the bar when the bartender, a heavyset man who looked vaguely familiar, asked him what he’d have.

Nice day, the heavyset man said when he put a cardboard coaster and a tall glass of foaming beer in front of him.

Harry replied with a tentative smile, wondering if he knew the man from the old days, and thought it was highly possible, even likely, that the man lived in the neighborhood and Harry had seen him around when Harry lived there, too. The man had the kind of plain, plump, everyday face that never seemed to change once it had matured in early adulthood.

The man didn’t seem to recognize Harry, though Harry himself had the same kind of changeless appearance. Harry was not as beefy as the man, but roughly the same ordinary height, with the same thinning, sandy-colored hair slicked down and combed straight back and the same pale blue eyes that could pass for gray or hazel in poor light. Harry Fairchild was fifty-three years old. The man behind the bar was older, but probably not much. He was down at the other end of the bar now, talking to a younger man in a white milkman’s uniform and a peaked white cap perched on the back of his head. The milkman was pissed off about something or someone having to do with baseball.

Beyond the milkman the open front door formed a rectangular blaze of mid-afternoon sunshine. On this side of the blaze the air was dark and warm and hazy with cigarette smoke.

Harry picked up his glass and drank. He noticed that the coaster was imprinted with an advertisement for Pabst Blue Ribbon, not Grain Belt, and he turned it over so the plain, unprinted side faced up. Little incongruities, like drinking one brand of beer while using a coaster that advertised another, grated against Harry’s sense of order.

Looking around, he saw no one among the handful of The Sailor’s other customers that he thought he knew. In the past five days it seemed as though he was always seeing familiar faces (the bartender’s, for instance), but few that he knew and could attach a name, address, or occupation to, and that was fine with him. He had not come back to Minneapolis for old time’s sake or to renew acquaintances. He had come back to Minneapolis to get rid of his mother’s house and settle whatever else his sister hadn’t taken care of in the six months since their mother passed on. The fewer old friends and neighbors he had to disturb in the process, the better.

He drank his beer, and after another glance around the dingy joint he kept his shoulders hunched protectively and his eyes facing straight ahead. Then he ordered and drank down a second beer because he was warm and enjoyed the all-but-forgotten taste of Grain Belt, which, as far as he knew, you could get only in this part of the country, and because no one in The Sailor was getting on his nerves.

He would have one more glass and then continue on down to the lake. The clear, bright afternoon light would wait for him a while longer. When he got there, that light would turn the graceful concrete bridge a marbly white against the glimmering blue water and the dark green shoreline on the other side, and as he sketched with a pencil he’d be fixing the colors in his mind’s eye. Then, even if he left for Florida or wherever tomorrow morning, he’d have both the sketch on his pad and the colors fixed in his head, so no matter where he ended up he could get the scene right.

Those were really the only things—the light and the colors and, yes, maybe the Grain Belt—that he missed about Minneapolis. Those were really the only things—except Pinky Moberg and Frank Gates and Zola Shea and, of course, his mother—that he thought about when he thought about his abandoned hometown.

Rita, his Havana-born common-law wife, would ask him about Mee-nee-ah-po-leece, which she believed was the frozen end of the world, and he would tell her, if he told her anything at all, about the blues and greens and the clean northern light that seemed to define objects as much as illuminate them. Rita would shake her head and insist that all she saw on the occasional television show mentioning the northern United States was white snow, and Harry would say, if he felt like it, Just wait until color TV.

More often than not Harry would be thinking about the colors when he was swathed in white coveralls, his arms and hands snow-white with plaster or sizing or wallpaper paste, or when he was stretched out with Rita on the sweaty white sheets of their trailer-home bed, their bodies, despite the relentless tropical sunshine outside, white as the bellies of certain fish.

The man with the changeless face walked over and pointed to the empty glass on the turned-over coaster. Harry nodded and watched the man’s broad, beefy back while he refilled the glass at the tap.

Setting down the refilled glass, the man said, The Millers ever gonna win one?

Harry forced a smile. I don’t know, he said. I don’t follow them the way I used to. He could sense the milkman looking his way, probably looking for him to agree with something he’d been telling the bartender, someone new to share his anger. Harry wished he hadn’t ordered another beer.

The man behind the bar shook a cigarette out of a crumpled Chesterfield pack that was sitting beside the taps. He lit up and exhaled a plume of blue smoke. Flicking a piece of tobacco off his lower lip, he said, Just as well, pal. Genovese and his girls are stinking up the league right now. Ain’t that right, Gene? Gene, it turned out, was the milkman’s name.

Gene muttered something Harry didn’t catch. The bartender, meanwhile, seemed to be looking at Harry a little closer than he had before, as though he was maybe beginning to recognize him from somewhere. The man said, You’re not a ball fan?

Harry said, I don’t live around here anymore—and immediately wondered what living around here had to do with being a ball fan. Then he wished he hadn’t said anymore. Without turning around, he believed he felt the eyes of the other customers swinging in his direction, maybe a little curious. Quickly, he said, I haven’t followed the Millers for years. In truth, Harry had played a lot of hockey as a kid and young adult; baseball had always been a lesser enthusiasm, though there was no point to explaining that now.

The man picked up a damp-looking cloth and swatted at something—a fly probably—out of sight behind the bar. So where you from, then? he asked. He didn’t sound particularly interested. He might have just been tired of talking about baseball.

Harry sighed. He wanted out now, but had started on the fresh glass and was afraid of attracting more attention by bolting for the door. Sarasota, he said. Gulf Coast of Florida. He was aware now not only of the eyes of the other customers, but of their ears, too. All other conversation, what there had been of it, seemed to have stopped.

The man behind the bar seemed more interested. Sarasota, Florida, he said, the Chesterfield jumping around between his lips. So what do you do in Sarasota, Florida—grow oranges?

Harry felt himself begin to perspire. He supposed the man was only trying to make conversation, but he couldn’t help but think there was more to it than that. He drank off the third glass of Grain Belt and set the glass back on the coaster. Pulling his billfold out of his back pocket, he said, Oh, a little of this, a little of that. Painting, plastering, drywall.

A regular handyman, the bartender said, palming the dollar bill that Harry dropped on the bar.

In one of the booths someone laughed out loud, and it occurred to Harry that a regular handyman was the punchline of a joke that everyone in The Sailor except him knew. Actually, Harry recalled a couple of jokes, both of them mildly off-color and neither particularly funny, that involved a handyman.

If you say so, Harry said. He wouldn’t wait, he decided, for his change.

Walking toward the door, he tried to remember the last time he was inside The Sailor. Oddly, he couldn’t. It hadn’t been the last time or even the next to the last time he’d been home. It might have been, it occurred to him as he reached the sun-blasted rectangle at the open front door, a good fifteen years ago now.

Outside, on the hot, dazzling sidewalk, waiting for his eyes to readjust so he could cross the street, he thought in quick and apparently meaningless succession of the colors at the lake and of Pinky Moberg and Frank Gates and of Harry the regular handyman fucking Rita his white-bellied mujer on her damp white sheets while The Big Payoff jittered silently on the TV atop the dresser.

Squinting against the glare, waiting to cross Cedar, Harry felt lightheaded, a little wobbly on his feet, and supposed he had tossed down that last beer too quickly for his own good.

TWO

That’s final, then, gentlemen, Robert Stockman said from the head of the long mahogany conference table. The vote, if my tally is correct, is six in favor and one against. The ‘aye’s have carried the day.

Robert Stockman, ignoring or avoiding his brother Bower’s glare, clapped his hands and pronounced the meeting adjourned. Four of the well-dressed men at the table pushed back their plush leather chairs, collected the papers in front of them, and stood up, three of the four fishing in their suit coats or vest pockets for cigars or cigarettes. Speaking among themselves in low, somber-sounding tones—nodding toward Robert Stockman and young Rusty Willard, but also ignoring or avoiding Bower Stockman’s angry eyes—the four quickly walked toward the conference room door.

When they had left the room, Mrs. Tisdale, Robert Stockman’s blue-haired secretary, discreetly inserted her head in the door. But seeing the three men still seated at the table—and perhaps catching a signal from her boss—Mrs. Tisdale just as discreetly withdrew her head and silently closed the door behind her.

The three seated men were silent. The long mahogany-paneled room, with its thick maroon carpeting and heavy maroon drapes (pulled back and tied in place by braided cords the thickness of a child’s arm), seemed unnaturally still. Thin blue clouds of cigarette and cigar smoke hung in the warm air, and countless motes of dust danced in the thick shafts of afternoon sunlight that angled through the leaded windows. After a long moment, Bower Stockman pushed his own chair away from the table and stood up. He pulled a pack of Herbert Tareytons from his pocket and lit one up. He flipped the top of his lighter closed with a sharp metallic click. He wasn’t looking now at either his brother or Rusty Willard. He was squaring the papers at his place as though he were the only one in the room.

Bower? Robert said from the head of the table. One moment, please.

Bower stopped squaring the papers and squinted at his brother through the cigarette smoke. He saw Rusty Willard, the little asshole, smirking at him from Robert’s elbow and thought again how much he’d enjoy grinding the heel of his shoe into that smug baby face. Then Robert, without taking his eyes off Bower, told Rusty that the two of them would appreciate a moment alone. Rusty slowly stood up, collected his own papers, and departed the table, his smirk replaced by a childish look of disappointment.

A spot of family business is all, Robert called after Willard as the younger man strutted out and closed the door.

Sit down, Bower, Robert said with what might have passed for a little smile. You know I can’t stand your looking down on me. It was a hoary family gag, which had any number of variations, none of which Bower would have found amusing under the circumstances.

Bower was forty-eight, three years younger than his brother. He shrugged and sat down—not in his own chair, but rather more casually on the edge of the heavy wine-colored table. Squinting through the cigarette smoke, he idly brushed away a piece of ash on the trouser leg of his dark blue suit. Despite the casualness of the pose, he knew his face—the long, bony, jut-jawed Stockman physiognomy—accurately reflected the degree of his inner fury.

From his perch at the far end of the table, Bower could see, lifting his eyes from his trouser leg to the room’s tall windows, the sun-splashed treetops rising above the park across the street. He’d always enjoyed the bird’s-eye view from the conference room without thinking much about it. But now the lovely view did nothing to diminish his anger. It was only something to look at while Robert said what he was going to say.

You’ve got no one to blame but yourself, Bower, Robert said.

Bower stared at the treetops in the park; they seemed ablaze in the afternoon sunshine.

Robert, as always when addressing him but even more so during the past year, sounded as though he were dressing down either a child or an imbecile. Bower didn’t have to sit there and listen to another one of Robert’s lectures, of course, but there was something oddly soothing about his brother’s condescension. Robert might have reminded him at such moments of his father, or maybe there was something else. It was, in any case, a phenomenon he’d almost begun to appreciate objectively, the way a biologist might appreciate an interesting, albeit extremely repellant insect. There was also Bower’s deep and rock-hard hatred that had long ago supplanted the slavish, younger brother’s love he’d once felt for Robert. That hatred now bound him to Robert just as tightly as the love once had. Maybe more tightly, when it came down to it.

Bower took a deep drag on his Herbert Tareyton, his eyes still fixed on the windows.

You made a choice, Bower, Robert continued, clearly as always enjoying the sound of his own voice. You exercised the free will with which you were born and chose a particular course of action. Now you’re paying the price. He paused, then added, You gained a sexy young wife, but lost your self-respect and credibility.

Bower laughed out loud, but the laugh was harsh and quickly became a hoarse, barking cough. He swung his eyes from the windows to his brother and said, I made a choice all right, but what I lost was my legitimate place at this table. I gained a sexy young wife, as you put it, but you and your little friend gained my father’s fucking company.

Please, Bower, Robert said, raising his hands. We needn’t be coarse.

Bower pushed himself off the edge of the table and ground out his cigarette in a large amber ashtray. Shaking his head, he said, You and Rusty and your cronies on the board have fucked me over, Robert. It was something you’d been wanting to do for years. Sunny just gave you the opening you needed.

Now Robert stood up and collected his papers and shook his head slowly as though the conversation—or, more precisely, his kid brother’s language—had reached the limit of what he could bear. All the same, he seemed to be wearing a little smile, a smirk like Rusty Willard’s, on his face. Bower understood that in the Willard-Stockman board room his second marriage was still and would forever be a dirty joke.

As though to confirm that understanding, the distinguished chairman of the Willard-Stockman board, apparently unable to contain himself, added, "Why, Bower, it seems to me that you were the one who made the most of Sunny’s opening."

With that, Robert nodded and left the room. Bower could hear his brother chuckling all the way out the door and down the corridor past Mrs. Tisdale’s office.

• • •

Five minutes later, back in his own office three doors down from the conference room, Bower Stockman noted the time on his wristwatch and dialed his telephone at home. He counted six rings, then waited through another two, then hung up.

He lit another cigarette and swiveled around in his chair and looked out on the treetops of Loring Park. The windows in his office were just as tall as the windows in the conference room, but here there were only two of them as compared with an entire wall full, and the view was not nearly as panoramic.

He closed his eyes and massaged his temples and listened to the telephone ringing in other offices of the Willard-Stockman Building. Even—or perhaps especially—in stressful times, the sound of telephones ringing in different parts of the building was soothing and reassuring.

The sound made him think of his father.

He recalled sitting in his father’s big upholstered chair down the hall, bumping his saddle shoes against his father’s massive mahogany desk while Robert, behind him, twirled the chair on its pedestal and his father and old Billy Willard (the latter no doubt three sheets to the wind, even on a Saturday morning) talking about what a carefree life modern boys enjoyed. Billy Willard had worked for William Randolph Hearst in New York. He supposedly covered Teddy Roosevelt’s campaign against the Spanish in Cuba and liked to complain about how soft and easy the journalism business had become in more recent years, though Billy himself was known to be the softest and easiest man in the firm—practically worthless, in fact, when there was real work to be done, according to Bower’s father. Old Billy was sure as hell softer and easier than Carroll Stockman himself, who not three years after he and Billy (they’d been fraternity brothers at Carleton College) founded the company in 1907, forced his partner out. Carroll Stockman then ran the place with the independence and ruthlessness of a Caribbean despot.

One day, not long before his father died, Bower recalled now, Carroll Stockman ordered the entire staff to—but a short rap on his open door interrupted his reverie. It was Ralph Tillinghast. Bower could tell by the rap. More to the point, Bower reflected, swiveling around to face the door, Ralph was the only person who’d have any reason to come see him that afternoon.

Ralph Tillinghast was all Bower had left in the way of allies or associates at Willard-Stockman. He wasn’t much. Ralph had been hired by Bower’s father two years before Bower graduated from Carleton, labored with scant imagination or distinction in the bowels of the organization for the better part of two decades, and finally stalled out as one of the company’s half-dozen senior editors. During the previous summer’s reorganization, Ralph was the only senior staff member who’d not immediately bolted to the Robert Stockman-Rusty Willard faction. Why he hadn’t wasn’t clear. In generous moments, Bower attributed Ralph’s loyalty to inertia. Other times, he suspected him of being a spy—like Freda Byrum, the menopausal bitch who’d taken Sunny’s job following Sunny’s marriage to Bower.

Well? said Ralph, standing at the door.

Six for it, one against, Bower said. We lose. I lose is what he meant.

Ralph hooked his thumbs inside his red suspenders and shook his head. Though in his middle fifties, Ralph still had a full head of hair. Its glossy auburn had gone mostly gray in recent years, but it remained thick and bushy as a bearskin cap. It was the single attribute that Bower, with his father’s high, gleaming forehead and thin, almost colorless hair, ever thought to envy.

So we’re going to sell the art books, Ralph said.

Stockman didn’t bother to reply. The art books referred to the company’s line of three quarterly magazines published for recreational artists, gift shops and small galleries, and art-supply merchandisers. The publications had been acquired and developed under Bower’s direction over the previous dozen-odd years, and thus their sale, upon the company’s recent restructuring, had been a foregone conclusion.

Jesus, Ralph said. When?

Stockman snorted. Today, tomorrow, next week—I’m sure Robert’s got his buyers in a row, he said.

It would fall to Ralph, in this instance, to tell the affected editors, staff writers, and art directors that they were out of a job, or, at the very least, that their days as Willard-Stockman employees were numbered. Fortunately for Ralph, the magazines’ staffs had months ago been cut to the quick and since been kept ridiculously small: the three publications currently shared a