Midnight Man

by Loren D. Estleman

  One of the most intensive manhunts in the city’s history …

  And so it went, lousy with attributing phrases in a careful ballet around the libel laws, broken into fragments of columns and scattered throughout the first section so that I had to take it up to the office to finish it without being fined for littering. When I was done the place looked like Que Noc after Charlie’s propaganda plane and then ours had passed over, jettisoning leaflets like bird droppings. I was tidying up when the telephone rang. It was the brisk voice from the secretarial pool, asking me to hold for Owen Mullett. I hung up almost gently.

  It rang again half a minute later. I finished putting the mess back together poured myself a slug from the office bottle, put it down in a lump, and lifted the instrument.

  “Do you realize how much work I could get done in the time it takes to get you back on the line, for chrissake?”

  “No,” I said. “How much, Mr. Mullett?”

  “How much what?”

  “How much work could you get done in the time it takes to get me back on the line, for chrissake?”

  “I don’t know,” he said confusedly. “A lot.”

  “Figure it out and call me back.” I cut the connection.

  I got one out and lit it, shaking the match the way a terrier destroys a rat in its jaws, and flipping it in the general direction of the glass souvenir ashtray on the desk. This time I answered on the third ring.

  “What kind of shit are you trying to pull, Walker?”

  “Your language is offensive, Mr. Mullett. Goodbye, Mr. Mullett.”

  “No! Wait! Don’t hang—”

  I nailed it on the first ring the next time. “I don’t like your taste in music, either.”

  “Don’t hang up!” he pleaded. “Walker?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Listen, I can’t figure out what I did that put the bee on you, but don’t you think I’m entitled to the report I paid for?”

  I breathed some air. “You’re right, Mr. Mullett. Hang on.” I laid the handset down on the calendar pad and hiked around the desk three times, going faster each turn. I did sixty pushups. I boxed with my shadow and won on a technicality. I walked over to the original Casablanca poster in its imitation wood frame and sneered at Bogart. Flattened out in a forty-year-old, badly painted portrait, he still sneered better than I did. The bitterness out of my system, I went back to the desk and sat down and picked up the receiver and recounted yesterday’s adventure, leaving out Van Sturtevant’s name. He hadn’t paid for that.

  “Hm,” he said. “Hm. Do you think Dooley Bass would recognize you again?”

  “Only my car.”

  “What about the other drivers?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think it really matters. The way I see it, they were just helping out a fellow driver. He reported me as a hijacker. If they were in with him, their all being in the area just when they were needed stacks up to a pretty healthy coincidence. Unless the operation is a lot bigger than you think, in which case I’d call ICC. Not bloody likely, as Benny Hill says.”

  He cleared his throat. More shoe polish. “Are you still working for us, Walker?”

  “That’s up to you, Mr. Mullett. I was smarting off fairly heavily there. I guess I’m myself today.”

  “Don’t give it another thought,” he said expansively. I let him expand. People hear what they want to, and if he’d heard an apology on my end it wasn’t my place to set him straight. “I’ve done business with all the car rental agencies in this area,” he went on. “Give them my name and pick out something appropriate. Meaning inconspicuous.”

  That ruled out the red Jaguar with leopard-skin seats I’d had my eye on. “Dooley Bass again?”

  “Yes. He’s got a load of machine tools to Monroe Saturday. I’ll call later with the particulars. The newspapers got to Ann Arbor, by the way. We’re going to keep following him until he tries stealing from us again.”

  I wondered where Mullett was planning to ride. “He’ll be wary now. Let’s give him some slack.”

  “I’m not paying for slack. Trust me. This guy’s got suicidal guts like the guy that killed Kitty Genovese. He’ll tumble.” He hung up on me this time.

  I turned on the radio. There was nothing new on the shooting, except that now the 22-year-old cop was the one who nailed LaRue on the fly. They were still milking the wire report they’d received hours ago. A rookie isn’t likely to hit much of anything with all that lead screaming around his ears. It’s hard enough when no one’s shooting back. I turned it off and winched the city directory out of its drawer.

  “Detroit Receiving.” A woman’s voice.

  “This is Alex Wainwright at the News,” I announced. “I’m checking on Sergeant Sturtevant’s condition.”

  “One moment, sir.”

  A new voice came on. “Hello? Who is this?”

  That was no nurse or doctor. That was Lieutenant John Alderdyce, childhood friend, adult nemesis, and Homicide detective in good standing. I shifted into my Sessue Hayakawa impression.

  “Herro? Herro? This Fujiyama’s Fine Libs?”

  A pause. “No, it isn’t. Who’s speaking?”

  “Ah. So solly. Call lestaurant. Long numbah. Goo-bye.”

  “Wait a minute. Who—”

  I scowled at the receiver in its cradle. Department procedure would call for a man on duty at the hospital desk. The fact that he was from Homicide didn’t necessarily mean the worst. But I was sorry I’d called.

  My shirt was already clinging to my back when I reached the car, and as I pulled into the hospital parking lot the main building shimmered like the lost palace of Atlantis behind rising waves of heat. The pavement was tacky under my feet and the air was thick with the sweet smell of melting tar. I was gasping by the time I stepped from oven heat into the cool, muted atmosphere of the central lobby.

  This was my first visit to the facility at its new location. I’d been wheeled into the old structure, nursing a bullet-splintered rib, shortly before the move. At the desk a fortyish nurse with a scrubbed look and the preoccupied air of a company commander in the midst of a bombardment directed me to the emergency room and promptly wiped out all memory of my existence. At least I think she was a nurse. She was wearing a pink pantsuit and nothing on her head. These days the whole world is in mufti.

  Hieronymus Bosch might have taken inspiration from that emergency room. An old man in a crushed fedora and a fuzzy coat sweater—despite the heat—was sitting on an upholstered bench rocking back and forth, moaning loudly and cradling an obviously broken wrist in his other arm, while a dumpy, middle-aged woman seated next to him tried to comfort him with her arm around his skinny shoulders. At the other end, what looked like a ten-year-old kid sat sniffling with a bloody handkerchief to his eye, beside a woman whose overly made-up face was pale and contorted as she scolded him. To one side of the wide entrance, a teenaged nurse or something in a yellow shirt and designer jeans had a clipboard in one hand and was asking a young woman shivering on a gurney under a thin blanket if she was with Blue Cross. Men in white coats and women in pants hurried in and out through swinging doors, looking grim and efficient. Restaurants should do such business.

  “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

  I resisted the impulse to hunch my shoulders at the sound of the voice behind me, and turned around. John Alderdyce—black, balding, and impeccably tailored as usual in a gabardine suit and gray silk sport shirt open at the neck— was entering on silent rubber heels through the door I’d just used. The whites of his eyes glistened malignantly under heavy, blue-black brows. He was mopping his palms with a paper napkin like the kind you get in hospital commissaries.

  “Was I that bad?” I started to place a cigarette between my lips, then put it back in the pack when the pubescent nurse or whatever with the clipboard glared at me.

  “I’ve heard your Japanese accent before,” John said. “Follow me.” He turned and retraced his steps through the door and down a shal
low corridor into a bite-size waiting room with pastel walls and some fruit salad hanging in frames. We had two short sofas and an ugly plant in an artificial wood stand all to ourselves. There were no ashtrays. That’s how they save on NO SMOKING signs today. Neither of us sat down.

  “How’s Sturtevant?” I asked.

  He looked grave, which meant nothing. He always did. “Still in surgery. The doctors say the bullet’s lying against his spinal cord and they won’t know how much damage it’s done till it’s out.”

  “I heard he was critical.”

  “You heard right. The best neurosurgeon in the place has been working on him for four hours.” He paused. “There’s about a ninety percent chance he won’t walk again even if the operation’s successful.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Why didn’t you identify yourself over the phone?” he asked.

  I moved my shoulders. “I didn’t want you thinking I was mixing in your case. Lectures I don’t need.”

  “Aren’t you? I was just thinking of getting in touch with you when you called the hospital.” He slid a pasteboard rectangle from an inside pocket and held it out. It was one of my cards. “This is a modern department, Walker. When someone gets shot and we want answers we send his shirt down to the lab for tests. The pockets get checked first.”

  “That was personal,” I said. “It has nothing to do with the shooting.”

  “Indulge a detective’s curiosity.”

  I gave him a condensed version of the incident on the Edsel Ford. “I’m sure I can count on you to keep that off the books,” I added. “Sturtevant probably didn’t file a report, and a hole in the back is enough without Internal Affairs jumping up and down on it.”

  He nodded absently and looked as if he needed a smoke. As usual. I couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t trying to quit. “I’ll ask Sturtevant about it when and if he pulls through. I hope for your sake your stories mesh.”

  “So do I. You’re ugly when you’re mad.”

  “That’s what my wife says. But we’ve got three kids, so I don’t credit it.”

  “What you got on the shooters?”

  The lines in his face deepened. “Everything but where they are right now. The usual stuff: Born in the ghetto of alcoholic parents, slashing tires at nine, in and out of juvenile hall at fourteen. Alonzo Smith’s kind of an exception. He was a bad kid like the others, but when he turned eighteen he joined the marines for a three-year hitch. Most of them don’t even bother to register for the draft, when there is one.”

  “How was his record?”

  “Not as bad as you’d think. Black marks here and there, and once he did a week in the stockade for insubordination, but on the whole he seems to have taken to military discipline. That could be why he was so eager to join this neo-Black Panther group he and the others belonged to.”

  “Just them?”

  He shook his head. “There are more, sad to say. Assholes all. They’ve been in and out of the slam so much their fingers are stained permanently with ink. We’re rounding them up now. One of them knows something.”

  “I’m sure they can’t wait to get to the tape recorder.”

  “Smith has a girlfriend. We’ll work on her.” His eyes darted toward the entrance and back to me. They were set deep and very bright. “Smith, Turkel, Gross. I never told this to anyone, but whenever I start an investigation I always write the suspects’ names on a slip of paper and tape it to the bathroom mirror. That way I see them every morning when I’m shaving and I remember not to think about anything else for the rest of the day. But, you know? This is one time I won’t have to do that. Smith, Turkel, Gross. Nope. No chance of me forgetting to think about them.”

  “How well did you know Sturtevant and the others?”

  “Never met them. They whisked Sturtevant into surgery before I could question him. But I still won’t forget. Maybe it’s the names: Smith, Turkel, Gross. Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

  “It’s not the names.”

  He shrugged. I got out my battered pack of Winstons and offered him one. He accepted it. I took one for myself and lit them both. To hell with hospital regulations. The match went into the phony wood pot.

  Alderdyce drew the smoke in so deep that very little of it came back out. “What’s your interest in this?” His eyes probed me like physician’s fingers.

  “Purely personal, like I said.”

  “Because he did you a good turn?” He looked skeptical.

  “Not just that, although that would be plenty. I’m used to my neck and am apt to be very well disposed to anyone who saves it.” I knocked some nonexistent ash into the pot. “When I was halfway through boot camp I saw a drill sergeant blown to pieces by a percussion grenade some wag had rigged to his footlocker. One second he was there and the next he was a bloody twist of hide in a shredded uniform. I didn’t know him, but I was a while getting over it. When I read about what happened this morning I thought immediately of him. You never met Sturtevant; I only met him once. Does it make any sense?”

  He looked at me strangely. “Don’t mix in, Walker.”

  “Who, me?”

  My guilelessness laid a large goose egg. “We dick around a lot about your work and my work and whether you should or shouldn’t get involved in police business, but this time it’s for real. There are going to be bodies on this one. Make an effort not to be one of them.”

  He screwed out his stub in the moist black earth in the pot and looked back at me. I was smoking in silence.

  “Say it,” he said.

  “I’m just being grateful.”

  “For what?”

  “For not having my name taped on your bathroom mirror.”

  He left. I finished my cigarette and went out a minute later. A small trim blonde was standing in the corridor, sniffling quietly into a sturdy handkerchief. She wore a tight black dress as if she were already in mourning, and her hair looked as if she had done it up in a hurry hours before and hadn’t touched it since.

  “Mrs. Sturtevant?” I asked gently.

  She lifted a tear-swollen face from the hanky. “Y-yes?” Her eyes focused on a point halfway between us.

  I wrote something on the back of the card Alderdyce had given me, placed it in one of her hands, and departed with a whispered inadequacy. At the end of the hall I turned to watch her mouthing the words I’d scribbled: “No charge.”

  That was my second mistake.

  3

  AS I ENTERED THE lobby, a tall old bird in a green surgical gown was chewing out a young orderly in a coarse stage whisper in front of a dozen nurses, patients, and visitors. He had a small, round head with a wild shock of snow-white hair mounted high on a skinny wattled neck and emphasized each imprecation with a downward slash of his thin right arm, like Hitler conducting Beethoven. The orderly took it without interrupting. When the older man finished the orderly clamped white-knuckled fingers around the handle of his empty gurney and pushed it and himself out of sight in the direction of the elevators. An embarrassed silence was soon shoved aside by the usual lobby sounds.

  “He must have done something pretty terrible to rate all that,” I said, approaching the old man.

  He swung his face on me and gave me the once-over with sharp old eyes that weighed, analyzed, tagged, and catalogued all in one motion. Red spots the size of quarters glowed high on his otherwise sallow cheeks, but were already fading. “He’s always hanging around the nurses’ station when he should be working. This is a hospital, not a singles bar. Who are you, sir?” His voice quivered on an iron core.

  “My name’s Walker. I’m investigating the Sturtevant case. Are you the surgeon who performed the operation?”

  His parchment face shrank in on itself distastefully. “I just spoke with your Lieutenant Alderdyce. If the medical profession were run like your police department, we’d be trying to take out the same appendix three times. Don’t you ever talk to each other?” He started walking, eating up yards of tiled corridor wi
th each lanky stride. I had to sprint to catch up.

  “I’m not on Alderdyce’s detail,” I said truthfully. “How’d it go?”

  “The operation went fine. The patient will never walk again, that’s all.” He spat the words. “I wish that were the worst of it.”

  “What’s the worst?” My voice came from half an inch in back of my tongue.

  He shucked the gown, stuffed it into a wheeled hamper under the supervision of a short jowly woman in a pebbled white uniform dress and black hairnet, muttered something pleasant in her direction, and went through a door marked STAFF ONLY with me on his heels. The woman’s eyes followed his high thin back adoringly. He’d be the Robert Redford of the rubber-stocking set.

  The doctors’ lounge had more personality than the waiting room and no screwy paintings. A significant glance passed between the surgeon and a bearded youth in a turtleneck and shapeless white coat seated on a vinyl-upholstered sofa, and the beard put down his medical journal and left. The old man poured coffee from a glass pot.

  “Off the record?” He offered me some in a paper cone stuck in a plastic doohickey with a handle. I shook my head to the coffee but indicated that off the record was fine. He sipped. His chest and abdomen formed a perfect cylinder beneath his sweat-heavy T-shirt. His eyes nailed me to the wall.

  “If you repeat it, I’ll deny I said anything. Between us, the operation should never have taken place. Sturtevant’s blood pressure is so high you’d need a master’s degree in algebra to measure it. The anesthetic alone was enough to cause a stroke.”

  “Whose decision was it to operate?”

  “Mine.”

  “I see,” I said. “I think I will have some of that coffee.”

  “Help yourself.”

  I splashed steaming yellow liquid into a cone and doohickey. “So why’d you go ahead and cut?”

  “I think you refer to it as a judgment call in your work,” he explained, leaning his tailbone against a cafeteria table cluttered with papers and manuscripts in curled manila covers. “The bullet was lodged in the fibrocartilage between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, in such a way that a shift of a hundredth of an inch in any direction could cause paralysis, even death. We might have waited and tried to bring down his blood pressure before going in, but the risk was too great. A simple cough could have killed him. I judged his chances of survival to be greater with the operation than without it. Mrs. Sturtevant agreed when I explained the situation to her.”