Midnight Man

by Loren D. Estleman

“Babies.”

  I said, “Don’t be intolerant. You were one once.”

  “I wish you could convince my kids of that.” A piece of asphalt the size of a softball glanced off his shoulder and landed on the pavement with a clatter. He spun on the crowd, glaring. No one stepped out to confess.

  “Getting ugly, John.” This from Hornet, who had just finished speaking over the radio in the unmarked unit. “It’s all that shit about police vengeance—Turkel and Gross. They’re saying the department offed the girl to try and smoke Smith out. That race thing, same as always.”

  “Why pick on me? Do I look white in this light?”

  The sergeant looked embarrassed. “Aw, hell, John. You know how they feel about black cops.”

  “No.” Alderdyce pushed his face close to Hornet’s. “How do they feel about black cops?”

  He shuffled around some. “Christ, you’ve heard them. Turncoat. Traitor.”

  “Uncle Tom?”

  Hornet hesitated, then met his superior’s gaze. “Yeah.” It was barely audible. Then he spoke up. “Maybe we need more uniforms.”

  “No.” Now the lieutenant was shuffling. He brushed asphalt dust off his brown coatsleeve, avoiding the other’s eyes. “Not yet, anyway. It’d be like waving a red flag in front of a bull.” Turning to walk around the sergeant, he saw me.

  “What are you gaping at?”

  I reached up and pushed my mouth shut.

  He made his way to the car, where the medical examiner was charging a new-looking briar pipe. Since he looked pretty new himself, the impression was of a kid playing Sherlock Holmes in a school play.

  “When’d it happen. Doc?” Alderdyce asked.

  The M.E. struck a match and applied it to the bowl. Speaking between puffs: “Beats (chug-chug) me. Leave a body (chug-chug) in a trunk (chug-chug) on a day like this (chug-chug), it’s anybody’s guess.”

  John stretched out an arm and took the pipe from the other’s mouth. “Guess.”

  The youth stiffened indignantly, then adjusted his glasses. “Not later than sunrise. Body temperature won’t tell me anything; it must have been a hundred and fifty degrees in that trunk. Rigor mortis is complete, but there’s a six-hour margin for error in figuring that. I’ll have to get inside and determine how far putrefaction has advanced before I can say anything definite.”

  “Early this morning, then.”

  “Or late last night. You wanted a guess. I won’t stand by it in court.”

  “That’s the D.A.’s headache. Thanks, Doc. Sorry about the chimney.” He gave back the pipe.

  “These things aren’t as easy to light as they show on TV.” He ignited a fresh match. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call me Doc. I don’t call you fuzz.”

  “Okay, kid.”

  The sergeant was standing where we had left him. Alderdyce directed him to take the photographer and check out the gymnasium, then escorted me to the unmarked car. As I climbed in:

  “You were kind of rough on Sergeant Honeybee back there.”

  “That’s Hornet.” He started the engine. “Worry about yourself. And plan on doing without wheels for tonight. You’re getting a free vacuuming, courtesy of the lab.” He executed a neat three-point turn inside the sawhorses, waited for the morgue wagon to pass on its way in, and started crawling through the simmering crowd. Something struck the rear window with a crack and bounded off the trunk. He ignored it and kept rolling.

  11

  IT WAS NEARLY SIX when I left headquarters. The air smelled of hot metal and monoxide. Even the hydrants were sweating. My stiff neck was worse, and if someone had come along smoking a cigarette while I stood stretching on the bottom step I’d have mugged him for it.

  Under questioning, I had repeated my story yet again, this time to a tape recorder, and squinted at mugs from the department’s file on black militants. Deak Ridder had been among them, but I didn’t point him out. He didn’t look like one of the group that had tap-danced on my skull, and since the cops weren’t tipping their hand neither was I. If any of the others were pictured I didn’t recognize them. Maybe if someone had held up a boot in front of each face—

  I took a cab to my office. It was a new crate with clean carpeting and no burn holes in the leatherette upholstery, but the driver had a blind spot for potholes and tried twice to put my head through the roof. “Sorry,” he said after the second near-concussion.

  “That’s okay,” I replied. “You’ll make it next time.”

  I had him wait in front of a drugstore while I went in and bought a carton of Winstons. The rest of the trip I smoked and watched the scenery hurtle past. Figuring how to square things with Alderdyce when he found out I was sitting on vital information. Because he would find out, and when it got around that Walker wasn’t playing by the rules I’d have to find somewhere else to ply my trade. Lansing? Too many politicians in those capital towns. I’d spend half my time following husbands and other husbands’ wives to cheesy motels and the other half trying to collect my fee. Flint? Nothing interesting ever happens in Flint. Another state? I’d be forty before I had the geography down to where I could operate, and a private investigator at forty I didn’t want to be. Not that I had the kind of skills that would be useful in any other line except police work—and a forty-year-old cop is even sadder.

  At my building the driver stared at my fifty-cent tip as if it were radioactive. “Invest in a helmet,” I advised him. He tried to leave tread marks on my toe. Cabbies have no sense of humor

  I had customers in my outer office the way I had six figures in my savings account. The new magazines on the coffee table dated even as I glanced in their direction. Go try and show consideration for the clientele.

  The sanctum sanctorum smelled like a refrigerator in need of a cleaning. I opened the window to let in fresh smog and switched on the circular fan they’d found left over from a previous civilization when they dug the foundation for the building. It wasn’t noisy at all when there was demolition going on across the street. Dust stirred on the desk and a corner of the cheesecake calendar on the wall opposite lifted, offering a tantalizing glimpse of Miss September.

  Sitting behind the desk I killed some time staring at the new wallpaper. Stylized brown butterflies on a shade of amber that didn’t show dirt, reminiscent of the pattern in my folks’ dining room when I was a kid. I wondered if they were still designing houses with dining rooms. All I knew for sure was that the wallpaper made the rest of the room look that much seedier.

  Holding out on the cops is a double-edged sword. I couldn’t count on them for simple information like Ridder’s current address. Just for the pure hell of it I looked him up in the city directory. He wasn’t listed. Then I got a brainstorm and dialed Barry Stackpole’s private number at the News.

  “Rumor mill.” He sounded alert and youthful. I hated him when he was like that, which was most of the time.

  “Walker” I said. “How’s the gangster beat?”

  “Amos the shamus. Hell, there’s no glamor in it anymore. Tony and Vito Jack are in and out of the slam and Tony Z’s up to his ears in indictments. You heard Morningstar’s dead.”

  “I heard.” I’d done a job for the old man a while back. “Listen, this might be out of your ballpark. Black militants.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Whatever I can about a party named Deak Ridder.” I spelled it. “I’m told he fronted for a while out at Rouge, but that’s not current. I would be ever so grateful if you can come up with an address.”

  “How grateful?”

  “A fifth of McMaster’s. Two if you can have it for me in an hour. I’m at the office.”

  “Fifths, remember,” he said after a pause. “None of that half-liter shit.”

  “Do I sound like a Canuck?” Barry was born in Montreal.

  “You’d never pass the literacy test. Later.” He cut the connection.

  It was time to report. I gave the Sturtevants a try, but the line was busy. It still wa
s five minutes later. Suddenly I was very hungry. I got the beeper out of the desk and clipped it inside my jacket just in case Barry called early, and hotfooted it down to the counter on the corner. Oscar of the Waldorf would have denied parentage of the tuna fish sandwich I got, but at least it came before I took a bite out of the waitress. At the register I bought a package of English walnuts. I was cracking the first one in my lap at the desk with the stapler I’d broken cracking the last batch when my door opened and a black man walked in.

  “You’re quiet,” I observed. I hadn’t heard him coming through the outer door.

  “I practice.” He had an effortless voice, drawly with a hint of a whine on the i’s and a’s. He was considerably over six feet tall and weighed about a hundred and forty pounds. His beanpole frame was draped in a shapeless paisley shirt, tail out, and stiff jeans with patches on patches. He had sandals on his feet. His lean face was all planes and hollows, with deepset gray eyes and a mouth as broad as an airstrip. I didn’t know him from George Washington Carver.

  “Quiet men don’t usually require my services,” I said. “How can I make your life easier?”

  “You can start by putting your hands on top of the desk.” He swung a long leg over the customer’s chair as if mounting a horse and sat. In the same movement he whipped a big automatic out of his hip pocket and pointed it at my breastbone.

  I looked at him rather than at the gun. Its expression never told anyone anything.

  “I don’t think so.”

  His eyes smoldered in their sockets, and for a moment he looked ready to squeeze the trigger. Then he flicked the gun nonchalantly in an armed man’s shrug. “Maybe you got jock itch. Anyway, I don’t think you sit with a piece in your lap day after day just waiting for someone like me to come in and stick one in your face, so have it your way. But wind your watch and you’re a mural on the wall.”

  “Colorful.”

  He grinned self-consciously. “I got it from Police Story.”

  I waited.

  “I hear the FBI is offering to help the local pigs look for Alonzo Smith,” he said.

  “I couldn’t say. I haven’t seen a paper since yesterday.”

  “Take my word for it, then. So why don’t you just park yourself somewhere till the traffic passes?”

  “Somewhere like where?”

  “The Upper Peninsula, maybe. I hear it’s peaceful out on Mackinac Island. They don’t allow cars there. A man can get run over in this town just standing on the corner.”

  “Move on to the threat,” I said wearily. “I get paid by the day.” The gun was very big and the room was very small. One shot would kick me backward on the swivel’s casters and through the window. When it hit the papers— not very hard, I was strictly third section—the news would sadden very few and brighten the day for a few more, not many. In two days it would be shelf liner. I didn’t want anyone standing a can of beets on my face, but that didn’t mean I’d sit still for much more Warner Brothers dialogue.

  “I’m a friend of a friend,” he explained. “This friend don’t care for private noses sniffing around his sandbox. He’s a friend, but he can get to be an enemy. People he’s an enemy of have a habit of not sticking around long enough to take off their hats. Or am I being too circumspect?”

  “Your vocabulary’s patchy. Circumspect stands out in that kind of speech like French cologne at a cockfight.” I pulled a curtain down between my face and my brain. “This friend—his initials wouldn’t by any chance be Deak Ridder, by any chance?”

  Something came into his gray eyes, but he poked it out of sight before I could latch on to it. The gun was steady in a hand so thin the bones showed through the dark flesh. “You ain’t scared enough,” he said calmly. “Maybe I should ice you right here and save a friend some trouble.”

  “Maybe you could.” It sounded like someone else using my voice. “If you were the Kaiser and that was Big Bertha in your paw.”

  “Big who? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That’s supposed to mean there’s a Colt magnum in a holster screwed to the left side of the kneehole in this desk, pointing at your belly. Don’t look for it; it’s behind the modesty panel. I admit your belly’s not much of a target, but we both know at this range a bullet from a magnum doesn’t have to come very close.”

  The dangerous look returned, chased by the toothy smile. On him it looked like the grille of a ’57 Buick. “You’re bluffing.” He sang the words.

  I grinned into the glare of his pearly whites. “Move your chair.”

  That didn’t get much reaction. We’d been kicking around so much clever parlance he was probably trying to translate the directive into English. I clarified.

  “Go ahead, try to move it. Bet you can’t.”

  A second slid past, and then he shifted his weight to the balls of his feet and pushed back with his rump, eyes and gun still on me. The chair didn’t budge. His brow knitted. The chair was vinyl and chromium and not that heavy.

  “Bolted down,” I said. “I prefer my targets stationary.”

  This time the smile lacked conviction. “I still think you’re running one past me.”

  The brittle crunch of a hammer drawing back took up all the available space in the office. “Fade, Raskolnikov.”

  He faded. Backing out, automatic in hand, he didn’t even brush the door casing. Oh, he was a pro.

  I waited until the outer office door closed, and then I took my hands out of my lap and put the damaged stapler and pieces of crushed walnut on top of the desk. My hands weren’t shaking any worse than a drunk’s on the fourth day of a seven-day cure.

  You see a lot of salesmen in the private-eye business whether you want to or not, and they all drink too much coffee. That’s why I’d fixed the customer chair so that they couldn’t move in too close. That caffeine breath is too much for me.

  12

  THE TELEPHONE SHRILLED. I’d heard louder noises, but not just after playing chicken with a hired killer. When I came down from the ceiling Barry Stackpole was on the line.

  “Fifths, remember” he said.

  “Yeah, yeah. Just a second.” I laid down the receiver, fired a match and grasped that wrist in my other hand to bring the burning end to the cigarette in my mouth. When I let go, the flame shook itself out. I retrieved the instrument.

  “Okay, what you got?”

  “Deacon Aloysius Ridder,” intoned the reporter. “Pipe those initials, will you? Booked once for armed robbery and twice for assault with intent to kill. None of them took. The witnesses experienced a sudden change of heart. Suspected former Black Panther, well-known pimp, and all-around prick with a chip on his racially downtrodden shoulder the size of a city councilman’s ego. Believed still to have relations with black revolutionaries. Shrinks have him down as paranoiac, possibly homicidal. Your common everyday garden-variety maniac.”

  I whistled. “Any address?”

  “Last known, an apartment on Mt. Elliott, across from the cemetery. Building burned to the ground a couple of months ago. Guess what three local notables, two deceased, are suspected of torching the place?”

  “Smith, Turkel, Gross.” I sounded like Alderdyce had at the hospital.

  There was a brief silence before he spoke again. “It’s no fun playing guess with a detective. Anyway, this wouldn’t be the first time disgruntled minority members matched a slum tenement to get back at the landlord. Say, you’re not after Smith, are you?”

  “I promised you Scotch, not a story. Keep unwinding.”

  “The hell with you,” he said cheerfully. “I called a friend in personnel at the Rouge plant, never mind her name, and asked her to run Ridder through the computer and find out if he’s still employed there.” He paused again, milking the moment.

  “Spill it, Hitchcock.”

  “Day shift, eight-thirty to five. Final assembly.” He sounded smug. Reporters always do when the routine clicks, which it doesn’t that often.

  “Security’s tight down t
here. Any idea how I can get in short of storming the front gate?”

  “I’ve got a police pass I could let you have for an exclusive.”

  I filled that one with water and tested it for leaks. “Keep my name out of it,” I said finally. “I’ll have a hard enough time getting the cops to eat this one without grabbing a curtain call to boot.”

  “I’ll just make myself the hero.”

  “You’ve had plenty of practice. As one pro to another, how’d you get all this?”

  “That’s privileged,” he purred. “First Amendment and all that. But if a certain policewoman in records asks you to be best man at our wedding, you don’t know me.”

  I laughed. “How many betrothals does that make, Barry?”

  “I’ll leave numbers to the boys in Circulation. Is there a dead alligator in your office?”

  “Let me check. Nope. Why?”

  “You sound as if you just finished wrestling one.”

  “Wrong. But I did just chase out a gorilla with a walnut. What do you know about a black trigger—tall, skinny, gray eyes, Southern accent?”

  “That description covers about a hundred in this town. Gun?”

  “Forty-five automatic.’’

  “That narrows it down to seventy,” he said. “Now tell me about the walnut.”

  “That’s privileged. Much obliged, newshawk.” I hung up. A little mystery is healthy in every relationship.

  The Sturtevants’ telephone was still tied up. Well, I had nothing else to do before eight-thirty tomorrow morning, when Ridder’s shift came on. I pulled my sore muscles down three flights to the street, flagged a cab, and gave the driver the address off Livernois.

  This time I had a sane driver. I settled back in the seat and skimmed the copy of the News I’d bought from the rack near my building. There was nothing in it about the dead girl on McDougall, but there was an early, unsubstantiated report of a near-riot in that neighborhood. The cops wouldn’t be able to sit on it much longer.

  Police in Ecorse had arrested a black man that morning as he was launching a rowboat onto the Detroit River. He looked a little like Alonzo Smith and they were convinced he was making a getaway for Canada. They released him two hours later when a local physician identified him as his retarded son, and explained that this was his third runaway fishing trip on the polluted waterway. Three men had turned themselves in at Detroit Police Headquarters claiming to be Smith, but they were shown the door on account of two were old enough to be his father and the third wasn’t even black. Some poor schnook from Alderdyce’s detail was in Toledo checking out that purse-snatching report on the off chance that the woman who made it wasn’t daffy. And General Motors didn’t build Chevies.