Midnight Man

by Loren D. Estleman

  We parted company. Hornet wasn’t that cagey. If there’d been any new developments he’d have tumbled.

  At the impound I went around with the attendant about some scratches the lab crew had left on my rear fenders, with results predictable and profane. They hadn’t even put gas in the tank. I filled up at a station down the street and continued on to Barry Stackpole’s new place on Lafayette, three blocks away from his cubicle at the News, after a stop at a liquor store for two fifths of McMaster’s.

  “Park ’em anywhere,” said the columnist from behind his portable typewriter as I entered the apartment on his invitation. The fingers of his left hand flew over the keys. He seldom used its mate, two fingers of which had gone the way of his right leg and part of his skull when his car blew up in his face a few years back. There was also a steel plate under his reconstructed features that gave him fearsome migraines in cold weather. A big Luger lay close-at-hand atop a stack of pages next to the machine, but it wasn’t a paperweight. The kind of enemies Barry made didn’t forget.

  I swept some crumpled sheets off a glass-topped secretary and set down the paper sack containing the two bottles. He was using a folding card table for his work because there wasn’t room under the secretary to straighten out his artificial leg. A large suitcase stood next to the door, positioned for swift collection on the way out. “Still on the move, I see.”

  “Ten minutes later and you’d have missed me entirely.” He struck the final key with a flourish and tore the sheet out of the typewriter.

  “Another telephone call? Who from this time, blacks or Sicilians?”

  “Would you believe the Columbians?” After scooping the Luger into his hip pocket, he got up and shuffled the pages.

  “The cocaine connection,” I said.

  He impaled me with his crystal-blues. We were about the same age, but unlike mine his sandy hair was untouched by gray and he never seemed to tire. “That’s the title of my column. Who talked?”

  “Nobody had to. Next to Ted Getner at the Freep you’re the fastest man with a cliché I know.”

  “Screw Ted Getner and screw the Free Press, and while you’re at it, screw you.” He closed the typewriter case with the finished pages inside and tossed me a leather folder taken from his breast pocket. “Try not to lose that. I had to eat a carload of Crackerjacks for it.”

  I looked at his picture on the police pass. “It’s a lousy likeness,” I said. “I might get away with it at Rouge, except for the eye color.”

  “Slip the security man a twenty and watch him go colorblind. This isn’t World War Two. Sorry I can’t offer you a snort, but I’ve got the rest of my span to try and fill.” He juggled the bag with the bottles under one arm and picked up the suitcase with his free hand. Even with that and the typewriter in the other, he didn’t limp any more than a man with one tight shoe. “Get the door, will you?”

  I got it. “How’ll I get the pass back to you?”

  “I’ll call with my new address. Make an effort not to sell it to anyone.”

  “Your address—or the pass?”

  “My address, jerk. I know of eighty places in town where you can get a card like that printed while you wait. And don’t forget, you promised me an exclusive.”

  “I’ll deliver.” I accompanied him down a flight to the street and saw him off in a cab he’d had waiting. He told the driver to go where he directed. Barry had a melodramatic streak that was borne out by three attempts on his life. I had him beat numerically, but I still had all the parts I’d come with, give or take a molar and a couple of hundred thousand brain cells. I was young yet, however.

  14

  THE RIVER ROUGE PLANT. Henry Ford’s sprawling monument to the Industrial Revolution. One hundred miles of private railroad, a fleet of ships larger than some navies, and enough daily electricity to power two hundred and forty thousand households, fire its steel mills, coke ovens, glass plant, paper mill, and assembly operation, all in the name of economic parity with Japan. Cadillac and LaSalle camped on this site two centuries before their names fell to the products of Ford’s competitors, but they’d have needed more than a map and a sextant to recognize it the day I visited. Dirty pink smoke leaked from stacks, darkened buildings, obscured sluices, and scudded across piles of tailings, the whole gridded by rails as in a tabletop layout, while rust-streaked ore carriers crawled along the scarlet-tinged waterway like bloated sowbugs down a fissure in a wet rock. Pile drivers grunted and clanged rhythmically against the enraged roar of thousands of engines being block-tested. The air was nine-tenths sulfur. It would have been a fine location for a rest home.

  I parked in the visitors’ lot and bluffed my way past a bored guard in a booth without having to resort to my wallet. Forty years ago that would have made him a prime subject for government interrogation, but as Barry had pointed out, we weren’t at war at the moment.

  Here was where the tours I’d taken before the money crunch forced Ford to cancel them came in handy, for without at least a casual knowledge of the setup I could conceivably have wandered around the complex for a week before I found the area I wanted. As it was it took me an hour.

  Legend has it that Henry got the idea for the assembly line when he visited a Chicago meat-packing house and watched the efficient manner in which cattle were prodded one by one into a narrow chute and slaughtered. He didn’t do much with the process, just reversed it so that the end was creation rather than destruction, and founded a new world order on that one change. I watched a string of auto shells, blue-green in the fluorescent light overhead, roll along a conveyor belt lined with men in safety shields, pause just long enough for torches to splatter blinding white-orange sparks off various portions of the frame, then roll on, like mechanized convicts lock-stepping along a prison corridor. There were more robots than on my last visit, but the operation was the same, and had been for over sixty years. It would take more than four wars, a worldwide depression, and a list of political assassinations as long as an unemployment line to interrupt production at Ford.

  “Get a good eyeful, bub?”

  I turned to face a short chunky construction in white coveralls with the Ford emblem stitched in red script over the breast pocket. The echoing racket in the vast room had strangled whatever noise he might have made approaching on rubber soles. He had a shock of rumpled brown hair going gray, and his puffy features were turquoise in the light reflecting off the steel shells on the conveyor His desk-sergeant eyes, tired and suspicious in dark sockets, remained on my face as I hauled out Barry’s folder, then shifted grudgingly to the ID.

  “Stackpole, huh?” He didn’t shout, but his flat voice carried over the splash of the torches and the hum and bang of the great belt. “Yeah, you look like this picture. And people are all the time mistaking me for Gregory Peck. Let’s go talk to security.” A hand closed around my arm.

  “Just a second.” I put away the folder and produced the wallet with my license photostat. He studied the new picture.

  “That’s closer. Keep going. We’ll get a good likeness yet.”

  “The police pass was a gag to clear security,” I said. “I’m investigating some murders. You the pit boss?”

  “I’m the supervisor on this shift. Who’s croaked?”

  I removed his hand from my bicep. My fingers had gone dead. “Is there someplace we can talk? I’m not used to exchanging confidences at the top of my lungs.”

  “Who’s listening? Robby, here?” He jerked a thumb at one of the robots, a one-armed mass of steel and multicolored spaghetti that looked about as much like the Buck Rogers conception of a mechanical man as I looked like a parking meter. “All right. You walk ahead of me. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

  After a hundred yards or so he directed me into a large room with a linoleum floor and two rows of Formica-topped cafeteria tables and benches folded down from the walls. A row of vending machines stood next to the doorway. At the far end of the room sat a young black man in coveralls, drinking coffee and rea
ding a magazine. We selected a table equidistant from the door and the lone diner and sat down facing each other I offered my companion a cigarette. He shook his head.

  “The doc says no. Who’s dead?”

  I lit up. “A pair of cops named Maxson and Flynn, at Mt. Hazel Cemetery. Likely you’ve heard about them. And a young black girl on McDougall. That one won’t be public until later.”

  “I know about the cops. What’s Alonzo Smith got to do with Rouge?”

  “I was hoping there’d be someone here who could tell me. Someone named Deak Ridder.”

  His eyes showed all the expression of screws in a doorframe. “Ridder’s on my shift. What about him?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

  “He didn’t show up today.”

  “That happen very often?”

  “Depends on what you call often. He’s better than some. Others, not so good. But what’re we gonna do when half the alphabet threatens to strike if we can one employee? Don’t get me wrong; I’m union all the way. But everything’s gotta have its limit.”

  I smoked. Give me a bellyacher every time. “I guess the machines will make a big difference.”

  His face clouded over. Away from the fluorescent lights his normal color was gray—not as gray as Sturtevant’s, but the gray of someone who worked by artificial illumination day after dreary day. “The fucking machines. What’s not to like about them? They don’t complain about the conditions, they don’t call in sick, they don’t strike. All they do is their jobs. A fat lot of use the company’ll have for supervisors when robots is all there is on the line. I heard one of them computer whizzes on the radio the other day. ‘Machines don’t take away jobs,’ he said. ‘They create new ones.’ Jobs for college graduates. And if they create as many jobs as they do away with, I wish someone would show me where the company gains by going to them in the first place. Every time we gripe they throw words at us. My kids can’t eat words.”

  “There is no gravity,” I said.

  He grinned lopsidedly. “The earth sucks. Ain’t it the truth.”

  “Deak Ridder.” I tapped ash into a black porcelain tray with a wad of petrified gum in the bottom. “Was he at work Monday?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning what I said.”

  “What’s it worth to you?”

  “Not a damn thing. Just proving a little theory of mine.” Monday was the day Laura Gaye and her two companions sprang Smith. “Where can I find him?”

  He took a pencil from a plastic carrier in his breast pocket and poked the eraser end at a live spark in the ashtray. “You pipe them pygmies out there on the line? They get much smaller we’ll be wearing them instead of driving them.”

  “There’s not a lot you approve of about this part of the century, is there?” I wondered where this was leading and what it had to do with Ridder.

  “Nothing since the polio vaccine,” he said. “When I was a kid, big was the way to go. Maybe that’s because this used to be a big country. Now everything’s shrinking: Cars, computers, movie screens—hell, even my oldest girl is two inches shorter than her mother was at her age. Maybe a million years from now they’ll dig up someone’s left shoe and put it in some museum as proof of giants. If there is a million years from now, and there’s anyone left to dig.”

  “Nice speech. I bet the Kiwanians eat it up.”

  “I ain’t made my point. Thing is, we’re paying more for less all the time. So where do you get off thinking you can pry dope out of me gratis?”

  “So far I haven’t seen anything worth bidding on.”

  He shook his head. “It don’t work that way. I’m facing layoff in a couple of weeks. My kids need clothes, not promises. I got all of those I need.”

  “Who do I look like, Mother Waddles? Check out the Perpetual Mission.”

  “I’m sticking my neck out just talking to you.” His tone was as close to a whine as it would ever get. “I’m supposed to report unauthorized visitors.”

  I sighed. “Twenty bucks.”

  “Save that green for rabbits. I can have security on your ass in five minutes.”

  “You’d better cover yours if you do. We’ve been seen talking when you should have been reporting.” I tilted my head toward the guy reading the magazine.

  He glanced in that direction, then back to me. “He won’t say nothing. I’m his boss.”

  “Could be if he does say something he’ll be boss. You never heard of Affirmative Action?”

  “I heard of it. I also heard of earthquakes and tornadoes and other natural disasters.” He shifted his weight from hip to hip. “Look, I got a family. Dentist bills. My youngest wants to be in the school band, play the saxophone. You know what a sax costs? Can’t you do better than twenty? Hell, I spend more than that on a tank of gas.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “All right, all right!” He dropped his voice when the man in back looked up. “But don’t be surprised if three ghosts visit you Christmas Eve.” He consulted a pocket pad and gave me an address and an apartment number on Whittaker. I took both down in my own pad.

  “Thanks.” I rolled a twenty around my index finger and held it out. He almost amputated the digit taking possession.

  “He wasn’t, by the way.”

  I looked up at him stupidly. He’d risen and left the table and I hadn’t expected him back.

  “Ridder,” he said slowly, as if talking to a backward child. “You asked was he at work Monday. He wasn’t.”

  Wordlessly I got out a five-spot and handed it to him. His face lit up like a Chinese lantern. Next I’d be sending Care packages to people I didn’t know in Asia.

  He left me to finish my cigarette. The racket outside the room seemed to have abated, or maybe I was just growing used to it. The black guy flipped his magazine shut, got up, and started out past me as I was crushing the butt. I stuck out a leg and he went down hard.

  Cursing breathlessly, he started to push himself off the floor, but by that time I was up and I kicked his arm out from under him. His teeth snapped together loudly as his chin hit the floor. I leaned down and got hold of the hair at the nape of his neck. He gasped.

  “What’s your hurry, Big Ears?” I asked. “Looking for someplace to sell what you just heard, or is someone already waiting for it?”

  “Let me go, man! My break’s over” The words were distorted bouncing off the floor.

  “What do you do?”

  “Sheet metal work. I’m a tinsmith. C’mon, man! That was my boss just left. I need this job.”

  I let go and stepped back. “Let’s see something.”

  He struggled onto his left side to get at a wallet in the hip pocket of his coveralls. He was built heavy and wore a chin beard as sparse as a mandarin’s. His work card looked genuine. Cunning, Walker. What’s next, mugging seminarians?

  “Sorry.” I put out a hand to help him to his feet. He stared at it a moment, then brought up one of his own. There was a barber’s straight-razor in it.

  “I ought to cut you,” he said, getting up. His eyes were nasty. “But I’m late.”

  I watched him leave, razor in hand, and pondered a new career for when the world finally ran out of victims.

  15

  BY TEN-THIRTY I had a handle on the hangover, and decided that my stomach could do with something to occupy it before the acids dissolved my belt buckle. The something turned out to be sausages and eggs at the counter down the street from my office, served by my favorite waitress, a college girl whose eyes were haunted by the ghosts of a half-dozen busted affairs. But she had a smile for me, even if it had begun to go bad around the edges, and I left a big tip. She swept it up as if it were another crumb on the linoleum.

  The telephone started up as I was unlocking the door to my think tank. I grabbed it on the third ring.

  “I think the girl at your answering service knows I hook,” greeted Iris. “Every time I finish talking to her I get the feeling she sprays the phone.”


  “That ‘girl’ is forty-seven and is in electrolysis. What’s on your mind, angel?”

  “Sex, mostly. Then you, though the two aren’t necessarily linked. Where were you all last night? I tried three times to get you at home.”

  That made two people I’d missed, her and Robert Mitchum. “I didn’t hear the bell. Were you worried?”

  “You’re always saying goodbye with bruises on your face and going out to talk to the ones that put them there. Why should I worry?”

  Her tone dripped irony. I started to say something flip, but nothing flip came to mind. Instead I said, “I’ve got an appointment with a certain party later. He doesn’t know I’ve got it, but I’d like you to know.” The open line was no place for names.

  After a long silence on the other end: “I don’t suppose it would do much good to try to talk you out of it again.”

  “That doesn’t mean you won’t try.”

  “Yes, it does. The only words you listen to are spoken by people with guns. Don’t go alone, Amos.”

  “On this one I have to. If I bring the cops in they’ll take it away from me. I promised some people I’d see this one through.”

  “It doesn’t have to be cops.”

  “Who, then? I’ve got exactly three friends in this town I can count on. One’s a cop and one’s crippled. You’re the third.”

  “And you won’t take me because I’m a woman,” she said.

  “Don’t hang dogma on me, angel. I won’t take you because you’d get us both killed. And you know it.”

  She made no reply to that. I spent some time breathing back some of my own breath off the receiver. Then she spoke again.

  “I don’t know which is worse, you or the needle.”

  “I don’t leave scars.”

  “You want to bet?”

  I changed the subject, a talent I have. “If I don’t call you by one, send the cops to this address.”

  “Just a second.” There was a rustling on her end. “Okay, shoot.”

  I gave it to her. “One o’clock, remember. Help too early can be hazardous to my health.”

  “It seems to me we did this once before.”