Midnight Man

by Loren D. Estleman

  “And tell your friends we’re not an answering service,” he said to my back. “Someone named Iris called for you a while ago. She wants you to get back to her.”

  I turned and looked down at him for the first time since he’d entered. The customer’s chair was built low on purpose, to intimidate the occupant. “If I can get you a crack at Alonzo Smith, will that make any difference in your report to Lansing?”

  “If you’re talking, I can’t hear you,” he said, interesting himself in a paper from the OUT basket. “I’m deaf.”

  At the door I found out finally why my fly hadn’t moved. It was a nailhead in the wall.

  This time they’d let me drive my own car in. I pulled out of the police garage under an overcast sky and tried the radio, but the music was too lively for me all over the dial and I turned it off. There should have been organs. I deserved organs. They play them for the dead. I don’t know why. There’d be plenty of them playing for the next couple of days, thanks to my clever manipulation of the facts in this case. They ought to play one whenever I enter a room. Amos Walker, the Midnight Man. Watch out for him. His touch is death.

  I bought a copy of the Free Press on my way to the office, mainly out of habit. The material relating to the Smith hunt was as stale as a tour guide’s jokes. Nearing my building, I cruised past a row of parked cars and cranked the Cutlass into a tight space half a block down from the entrance. My mind was so full of the case I didn’t react to the van standing across the street until I was in the foyer and the glass door was closing behind me. The painted sunset was distinctive.

  17

  GET OUT, WALKER.

  They were amateurs or they’d have ditched the van before this. That didn’t help me any. Assuming they were whom I suspected, they’d helped with the execution of two police officers and the maiming of a third, staged a successful raid on a heavily guarded courtroom, and if Sergeant Hornet was right, murdered two of their own without a qualm. Amateurs like those I didn’t need.

  Get out, Walker.

  That I was still alive was evidence enough that no one was in the van. So they were in the building. On the flip side, they might have planted the vehicle there just to give me heart failure, and split. Maybe they were miles away laughing at the petrified hoojie. But I didn’t figure them for a sense of humor.

  Get out, Walker. Call the cops and have them send a riot team down to flush out the building. Don’t be a graveyard hero. Who’ll care a week from today?

  It was good advice, except that they might have thought of it themselves and stationed a shooter in the van after all to close the trap. After the first attempt they might be leery of an execution on another public street, but that didn’t mean they’d chance a second escape.

  A guy could stand there figuring all the twists and turns and end up chewing off his tail. The steel fire door to the stairs was propped open as usual, exposing the first of three narrow flights to my floor. I’d long thought it a prime spot for an ambush. This was my chance to prove it. Drawing the revolver, I took the folded newspaper from under my arm and underhanded it up the shaft. The pages exploded outward like frightened bats.

  The waiting M-16 stuttered too fast to count, riddling the flying newsprint and knocking large chunks of brown plaster off the wall. The shots rang deafeningly in the echoing stairwell. Brittle blue smoke glazed the air.

  Silence crackled at the end of the burst. Shaking myself loose, I ran noisily to the front door and heaved it open. While it drifted shut against the pressure of the pneumatic closer I lightfooted back the other way and withdrew behind the open stairwell door. It had received a fresh coat of thick green paint recently; turpentine filled my nostrils.

  The front door settled into the frame with a barely audible click. A beat, and he came pounding down the steps, cradling the fat, sausage-shaped carbine along his forearm. The broad vented tails of an unseasonably long overcoat billowed out behind him.

  I waited until he had a hand on the door handle, then cocked the Smith & Wesson. The crunch was loud in the silence following the shots. He hunched his shoulders and started to turn.

  “Uh-uh,” I said. “Unless you want that hot coat ventilated.”

  His shoulders went slack. He was black, not very tall, with a short thick neck and close-cropped hair on a bullet head. His back was mounded conspicuously with muscle. The barbells knew they’d had a workout when he was through with them. I thought I knew him from somewhere, but maybe that was prejudice.

  “Put the chattergun on safety, squat down, and slide it this way,” I directed. “If you can do all that without turning around I would be ever so appreciative.”

  “I can’t. It’s on a sling.”

  He had a very deep voice.

  “Aren’t you the clever one. Do your shoes explode too? Peel off the coat and climb out. Slow, like striptease.”

  He obeyed, dropping the coat to the floor with a clunk that coats don’t usually make. The harness was fashioned crudely from belts, and fixed over one shoulder so that the carbine could be swung out from under his arm. Willie Lee Gross had worn a similar rig the day he was killed.

  “Bad idea,” I told him. “This time of year the coat’s a dead giveaway.”

  He undid the sling without comment. His white T-shirt clung wet and transparent to his lumpy back. Finishing, he sank to his haunches and prepared to propel the carbine backward. The scaly green door to my right opened and the building superintendent stepped through, climbing into his suspenders. He stopped when he saw what was going on. A toilet whispered and gurgled behind him.

  “Something, Mr. Rosecranz?” I kept my attention on the gunman, still squatting with one hand on the M-16.

  “I heard a noise. Shots, maybe.” The super’s eyes were large in his tattered face.

  “Firecrackers, Mr. Rosecranz.”

  “I don’t think firecrackers was it,” he said.

  “Sure, firecrackers. Left over from the Fourth. You know kids.”

  “No kids in this building.”

  “Of course not. If you were a kid, would you set off fireworks in your own building?”

  He looked from me to the crouching figure, and from him to the stairwell. “What about them holes? Who’s going to pay to replaster?”

  “Send me a bill, Mr. Rosecranz.”

  “Suppose the other tenants complain about the noise?” he persisted. “I should tell them firecrackers?”

  “What tenants, Mr. Rosecranz? There are only four at the moment. I’m one, and two are off on vacation.”

  “There’s Mr. Styles on the fourth floor.”

  “Styles is in numbers, Mr. Rosecranz. The telephones alone would have drowned out the noise. You don’t see him down here, do you?”

  He spent some more small change looking from one of us to the other. Then he blew his large nose into a red handkerchief that crackled when he stuffed it back into his hip pocket, and grasped the doorknob. “I hope this don’t become a habit.”

  “It won’t, Mr. Rosecranz. See you later, Mr. Rosecranz. Mr. Rosecranz?”

  He almost had the door shut. He paused.

  I poked a twenty through the gap. “Firecrackers, right?”

  “Happy Fourth.” The door closed with the bill on his side.

  I smiled at the back of the black man’s head. “Mr. Rosecranz.”

  “Who gives a fuck?” The carbine slid my way, its receiver and stock scraping loudly on the linoleum. I stopped it with my foot and told him to face the wall across from the super’s door. Bracing him, I bent and picked up the M-16. A lot of stamped metal with a cheap wooden stock, shaped like a grease gun. I broke loose the straight clip and inspected the load. Four gone, enough for the brief burst that had made confetti out of today’s Free Press. He would have reloaded after the attempt on Whittaker.

  I leaned the gun against the wall behind the propped-open door to the stairs and went over to find out what had clunked in his coat. I knew what it was the second my hand closed on it in the right
pocket. The Luger’s clip was full. It was nice having it back. I stuck it under my waistband and frisked my captive. He was practically defenseless. I put a set of brass knuckles in one side pocket of my jacket and a switchblade and jackknife in the other. He didn’t have any hand grenades or rocket launchers.

  “White motherfucker,” he muttered.

  I backed up a step. “Say again.”

  He said it again.

  “Just wanted to make sure I recognized the voice.” I reached out and slammed his forehead into the wall. He groaned. I brought a knee up hard between his spread legs, and as he was doubling over I grasped his belt, planted my feet wide, and whirled him clear across the room into the opposite wall. He struck on his back and began to slide. I walked over and hoisted him up by his damp shirtfront. Holding him with one hand, I started batting his large face with the other, left to right, right to left, left to right, in rhythm. Blood spurted from his nose onto the T-shirt.

  At this point a fat guy carrying a briefcase entered by the main door. I paused, hand raised in mid-bat. He stopped long enough to take in the spectacle, then mounted the stairs and passed from sight. If he was an associate of Styles’s he’d seen it before. I went back to work.

  I lost my victim a few cuffs later. His eyes rolled over white and he got too heavy to hold. Still hanging on to the shirt, I dragged him over to the super’s door and dumped him into a heap to free a hand for knocking. When it opened:

  “Bucket of water, please, Mr. Rosecranz.”

  His creaky old eyes lowered to the mass of humanity almost at his feet. He nodded and moved away, allowing me a view of two unmatched overstuffed chairs with floral-print slipcovers, a swaybacked sofa, and a console TV on a square of brown rug on a gray concrete floor. He hadn’t changed a thing in the seven years I’d been a tenant. Water roared against metal beyond sight of the doorway. A minute later he reappeared lugging a galvanized pail three-quarters full.

  “Thank you.”

  “For what? I’m not even here.”

  The door shut, I swung the bucket back in both hands and dashed its contents over the unconscious black. It made a noise like wet laundry slapping a board fence. He coughed and spluttered and sat up, scooping water from his eyes. His features were starting to discolor and swell.

  “White motherfucking son of a bitch!” he gasped.

  “Your record’s stuck, parrot. Get a new writer.” I was breathing hard from the exercise. “How many you got stashed in the van?”

  He thought about that. He had a brutal face, the lower half pushed out like a baboon’s muzzle. I remembered it vaguely from the locker room in the defunct gymnasium on McDougall. “Three,” he said finally. “All armed. I was you, I’d duck out the back way before they come looking to see what happened.”

  “You would if you were me, but you’re not so I won’t. You took too long answering. That means you’re alone. See how it works? Now, where’s Alonzo Smith?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  I swept the empty bucket backhand against the side of his head. The impact made a satisfying gong and left a big dent in the vessel.

  “Again. Where is he?”

  He was still reeling from the blow, but he managed to make an obscene gesture. I put a matching dent in the other side of the pail and set it down. The lobby was beginning to sound like the bell tower at Notre Dame.

  “You owe Mr. Rosecranz a new bucket. Where’s Smith?”

  He spat at me, missing by six feet. This was sizing up to be a large job. I changed my tack.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Imagine that,” I said. “Señor Wences is alive and well and smarting off in the foyer of my building.” I aired the Luger. “Who killed Deak Ridder and how come?”

  He leered, his upper lip a smear of red mud from his smashed nose. “You won’t shoot.”

  I moved the barrel a little and shot the heel off his left hobnail boot. The explosion filled the room and shattered a tile. He grabbed his foot as if he’d been hit.

  “Son of a bitch!” It was a shriek.

  “Watch your language in my building, Ridder. Who punched his ticket? Next one goes in the foot.” I pointed the gun at it.

  “Man, save that jive for some dumb J.D. Deak ain’t dead no more’n me or you.” He picked up the broken heel.

  “You’re left-handed, correct?”

  “What the hell’s that got to do with nothing?”

  “From the way you were strapped into that harness I’d say you’re left-handed. That means you favor the left foot. So I’ll shoot the other one first. I’m not unreasonable.” I shifted my aim accordingly.

  He stared at me. “If Deak’s dead, you done it.”

  I sighed. You can’t argue with a fanatic. “Okay, we’ll park that for now. Who told you I was on my way to talk to Ridder? The tinsmith on his shift at Rouge?”

  Again he said nothing.

  “I’ll take that for a yes,” I said. “The cops will want to question him too. Not that he’s a militant, but groups like yours stand or fall on the sympathy of brothers. So you thought I might get something out of Deak and tried to take me out at his apartment. Who did the job on his kid sister?”

  “I figure you know that better than me,” he snarled.

  “Grow wise and prosper. If I’d wanted to get back at someone for that beating I took, it wouldn’t be her I’d pick.” I paused, not for lack of another question to ask. I was sorting them out. “Who helped Laura Gaye crack Smith out of court, you and Ridder?”

  “Pretty slick, huh?” There was pride in his voice.

  “Slick as spit. Why?”

  “It was just our little way of telling the motherfucking white system where it can stick its motherfucking judges and lawyers.”

  His Oedipus complex was getting on my nerves.

  “Not good enough,” I said. “We’ll come back to that. Where’s Smith?”

  He clamped his mouth shut. I raised the gun a little higher

  “You’re going to shoot me anyway,” he said then. “Why not now?”

  “A martyr yet. You know why your movement is going to die out? You don’t trust anyone. No one. That’s one of the two Great Mistakes. The other is trusting everyone.”

  He shrugged. I rapped on Rosecranz’s door.

  “More noise,” said the super, opening up. “I’m quitting, maybe.”

  “Before you do, I want you to make a telephone call.”

  Watching the prisoner, I gave Rosecranz the number and Alderdyce’s extension and told him what to say. It might not have been in my client’s best interest, but it was fourth and four and time for the first string.

  18

  IRIS WAS MAD AS HELL when I finally got around to calling. Nearly six hours had elapsed since she’d telephoned police headquarters as I’d requested, and I was two sheets to the wind to boot. She held on just long enough to determine that I was healthy and then hung up in the middle of my apology.

  I put the receiver back on its hook and threaded my way between tables to the back booth, where Alderdyce sat nursing a beer. The saloon, operated by an old county horse patrolman, was located a few blocks over from headquarters and served as a watering-hole for cops between shifts. A blowup of the manager’s class at the Academy—rows of visored adolescent faces in sepia ovals—occupied the place of honor behind the bar, surrounded by prints of great steeds. Police patches from all over the country plastered one whole wall. At a nearby table, a boisterous party of six was comparing hair-raising episodes from the annals of the department, punctuated by whoops and obscenities. “I Shot the Sheriff” blared from the juke. Police humor

  My Scotch had gone flat. I signaled for a fresh slug and touched off a weed. I didn’t catch fire, which meant I hadn’t exceeded my drinking limit. John saw things differently.

  “What’s that, your fourth?”

  “I’m anesthetizing myself. Is that the beer you started with?”

  “I’
m on duty.” He was sitting with his forearms resting on the table and his head sunk between his shoulders, glaring into the amber liquid in his glass. Bar lighting brought out the blue in his roughed-out features.

  “So you went and bartered back your license,” he said. “How long you figure to keep all the balls in the air?”

  “I sometimes wonder.” I swapped glasses with an overripe barmatron who had black eyebrows to go with her platinum hair, paid, and put down half of the replacement. The ache in my ribs had spread to my back. I’d stood two hours in an interrogation cell watching the sniper I caught exercise his right to remain silent. Even the man’s name remained a mystery. His prints drew a shrug from the computer and the cops were waiting for an answer on their Telex to Washington.

  I said, “I think I fell asleep on my feet for a space there. What came of sending those uniforms to the tinsmith’s place?”

  “Zilch. Landlady said he packed up and got missing this afternoon right after he got home from work.”

  “Advice from our friend in the lockup, no doubt.”

  “He’ll turn up. There’s an APB out on him all over the state.”

  “He might know our sniper’s name,” I said. “I doubt he’s one of them. Some of them are pretty clumsy, but he’s a neon sign.”

  The conversation faltered. We soaked up some atmosphere.

  “Hornet told me what you said about me in the office.” John’s words were brittle. “You and I used to be friendly.”

  “It was a pretty good relationship.”

  He shook his head. It was the first time he’d moved except to lift his glass in almost an hour. “When birds start hanging out with bats someone’s going to get bit.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but I was drunk. “You’re too close to this investigation, John. You ought to ask off it.”

  “My wife said the same thing night before last. I’ll give you the answer I gave her. No.”

  A burly cop at the big table was imitating a machine gun, complete with sound effects. His companions didn’t seem to mind being sprayed with saliva.

  “It’s a no-win situation,” I said, watching the pantomime. “If you don’t break it, the commissioner hangs you out to dry. If you do, the blacks on the east side brand you traitor. Either way you stink.”