Midnight Man

by Loren D. Estleman

  Rubber chirped on asphalt. The engine noise swelled. I pushed myself up onto my knees, straddling Smith as I clawed for the little Remington in my pocket. The world filled with naked light. I thrust the automatic straight out in front of me in both hands and fired three times. Glass fell apart with a noise like coins falling. I was breathing hot metal when the light raked past me. Tires screeched, a wheel bumped over the curb on the other side. The car accelerated. I leaped up and sprayed bullets after it until the gun snapped empty. By that time even the exhaust was fading. Tires squealed around corners farther and farther away. I’d had as much chance of getting the license number as I had of being named Miss Black America.

  Another thing I didn’t have was Alonzo Smith. When I looked around I was alone.

  26

  I SPENT THE NEXT HALF HOUR cruising the neighborhood, stopping here and there to train the powerful beam of the foot-long police flashlight into the shadows behind trash cans and between buildings. No Smith. If he had the smarts I gave him credit for he’d stashed a vehicle near our rendezvous for just such an emergency as this and was moondust by now.

  Bright boy, Walker. Talk them into going with you and then nail it down by leading them into a trap. The Midnight Man rides. I took out my frustration on the accelerator getting out of there. I had no doubts about my destination. I was on my way to meet an attempted murderer.

  I made the driveway on the fly, cutting across the front lawn and braking to a jarring, screeching, bouncing stop two feet short of the garage door. Leaving the lights on and the engine running, I piled out without bothering to slam the door and leaned my face close to the garage’s oval window with my hands cupped around my eyes. It was too dark to see if a car was parked inside, let alone if its windshield was smashed.

  She had the front door open by the time I got to it. In blue chiffon robe and backless slippers she looked small enough to wrap up and carry home in a pocket.

  “Mr. Walker” she said, clutching the neck of the robe. “What—”

  I tore loose the robe’s belt and tugged it open before she could stop me. She caught her breath. She was fully dressed underneath. I seized her right wrist and sniffed the palm of her tiny hand. Maybe I smelled cordite, maybe not. She might have worn gloves.

  “Let’s go inside, Mrs. Sturtevant.” I rode her in past the entrance, leaving the door gaping.

  “You must be drunk, thinking you can burst in here and—.” Fury distorted her features, painting fever spots high on her cheeks. She wasn’t wearing make-up.

  “Save it. Where’s your husband?”

  “In his bedroom, sleeping. Or he was before you—”

  “Nadine?”

  “Home. She doesn’t live here.” The gold specks in her eyes threw off angry light.

  “Where’d you ditch the gun?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Let go of me!”

  I was still grasping her wrist. I held on and towed her into the kitchen, where with my free hand I swung open cupboard doors and pulled out drawers and shoved curtains aside and lifted the lids off canisters and moved things around on the work shelf. I even tried the oven and broiler. Nothing.

  “Wives like to hide things in kitchens, but I guess you’re too smart for that,” I said. “You might as well help me. I don’t need it to place you on Antietam. You were the only one who knew I was meeting Smith there at midnight. He was speaking loud enough for you to overhear.The car you used is missing a windshield, and even if you wore gloves a nitrate test of your clothes will prove you fired a gun.”

  We glared at each other. Finally her chest rose and fell. “If you’ll let go of me I’ll get it for you.”

  I let go. She shook circulation back into her fingers and went into the living room with me on her heels. There she lifted the smoked-glass cover off a stereo turntable on a built-in shelf. A .38 Police Special stood upright with the record spindle threaded into the two-inch barrel. I reached past her and unspiked it.

  “Lousy hiding place,” I said, inspecting the piece. “That ‘Purloined Letter’ stuff doesn’t stand up to modern police search methods.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be permanent. I was planning to dump it into the river tomorrow.” She paused. “It was Van’s.”

  “What if they came tonight?”

  No reply. The fever spots still burned on her cheeks.

  The muzzle reeked. I rotated the cylinder thumbing out shells. Five were empty. I transferred the gun to my left side pocket. That made three on my person, with one usable cartridge among them.

  “You didn’t get him, you know.”

  “I thought not. You moved too fast. I didn’t want to hit you.”

  “If you wanted him dead in the first place, why hire me? The cops would have obliged soon enough.”

  “Come with me,” she said stiffly.

  I followed her into the bedroom. With the door open the light from the living room stretched across the floor and scaled the bed, failing dimly upon the motionless figure lying on its back under the blanket. Sturtevant’s eyes were open. They moved slowly from the ceiling to us. One arm, the good one, lay twitching in a loose pajama sleeve atop the cover. The wheelchair stood empty at the foot of the bed. Its owner didn’t look as if our entrance had awakened him. Unless his hearing was seriously impaired he’d heard every word we’d said, door or no door.

  The room smelled of medicine and sweet decay. I wanted out of there, bad. But Karen Sturtevant was standing in the doorway.

  “Thursday used to be his bowling night,” she said quietly. “He’d stay out too late and stagger home stinking of beer; and half those nights when we tried to make love he couldn’t. I hated him those nights. It was the one time we could be together when he wasn’t working a double shift or sitting on stakeout days at a stretch. Sometimes he didn’t even take his bowling ball. I’m stupid. It took me months to figure out that he was whoring around. After that I prayed that something would happen to make him stay home. That was the only one of my prayers that was ever answered.”

  Her voice broke on the last part. Then she straightened her back, ushered me out, and drew the door shut. It was like leaving the chamber where they lay out the corpse. She turned to me. Her eyes were dry.

  “Who knows what would have come of our marriage if Van hadn’t answered that assistance call? But I can’t leave him now. I’m as much a prisoner as he is, only it’s worse in my case because I’m healthy. I can live with that if the one to blame pays for what he did. I can’t knowing that someday he’ll be free. Sure, he might be killed. But what if he isn’t? It’s a chance I don’t care to take.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why I was brought in.”

  “Doesn’t it?” Her complexion was even now, the red spots gone. “He got a crafty lawyer once. He might again if he’s captured alive. With all the publicity his case has been getting it’s an easy matter to claim press prejudice and win acquittal. Van always said if you want something done right, do it yourself. That’s why I asked you to call me before anyone else when you had Smith in custody. I didn’t want him wriggling out from under this one. Since I’m going to be stuck in one spot for the rest of Van’s life, the prospect of imprisonment was no risk at all.”

  “Smith accused me of being a Judas goat,” I said. “I was too close to the case to realize he was right.”

  She did up the belt of her robe haughtily. “You have nothing to complain about. You were repaying your precious debt. As for being lied to, I’m sure you’re used to that by now.”

  “Being used to it and liking it aren’t even cousins. I promised Smith safe conduct to police headquarters. I may not have had much going in, but I had my word. You’ll excuse me if I don’t fall all over myself thanking you for taking it away.”

  She laughed. The laugh climbed too high too fast.

  “Listen to the cut-rate Lone Ranger. You’re just a backdoor peeper and a cheap one at that. A roll on the couch buys you.” She stopped laughing abruptly.
“I suppose you go to the police from here.”

  “No chance, sister. As much as I’d like to pipe your performance on the witness stand I’m not in the business of casting daytime dramas.” I patted the pocket in which nestled the abbreviated .38. “I’ll just hang on to this for now. In my line, a little leverage goes a long way.”

  “You’re dropping out?”

  I looked back at her from the front door. The one lamp burning in the living room cast a golden halo around her hair and placed shadows just where they belonged on her body. Her face was in darkness.

  “I can’t afford to, Mrs. Sturtevant,” I said. “Your husband is still holding my marker.”

  “You’re cheap and stupid. If this whole thing hadn’t happened he wouldn’t recognize you on the street.”

  Having the last word in an argument can get to be an obsession. I left without indulging myself.

  After six blocks my hands started pulling against each other on the wheel and I parked, killing the engine and lights. It was a quiet night. A grim face I didn’t know glared at me from the windshield. It didn’t look as if it belonged to someone I’d get along with. Just to be sociable, though, I got the pint out of the glove compartment and toasted the welfare of my new acquaintance. He drank, but he didn’t return the gesture. The hell with him. I upended it again.

  A scout car came cruising in the opposite direction a few minutes later. It slowed down as it drew alongside. The spot mounted outside the driver’s window sprang to life, cooking my eyeballs. I made as if to hurl the half-full bottle at it. The car took off with a squirt of rubber. I watched its lights in the rearview mirror as it spun into a composition driveway, backed out, and swung up behind me, springs squeaking. Powerful headlamps whited out the mirror and threw a solid black shadow twenty feet beyond the Cutlass’s hood.

  I gathered the guns from my pockets along with my own piece and holster; reached down and shoved them as far under the seat as they’d go. When I straightened back up there was a uniform on either side of the car.

  “Good evening,” said the cop at my window, leaning down to peer inside. He had a clean jawline, and amber-tinted Polaroids gave him that impersonal look cops love for some reason. “What are we celebrating?”

  “The sight of your blue backside going away,” I growled. “If I’m lucky.”

  “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that failure to show proper respect to a police officer is a misdemeanor?” He still sounded pleasant.

  I gave him a loud raspberry.

  His amiable expression slipped. “License and registration, Mack.”

  I got the wallet out carefully, handed him the license and reached across for the vehicle registration in the glove compartment. His partner was a lowslung belt and a thick midriff framed by the passenger’s window with a hand resting on the butt of his gun.

  “What’s that other card there?” asked Polaroids.

  I took the photostat of my investigator’s license out of its window and gave him that too. He read it swiftly. His eyes flicked across the roof of the car to his partner

  “P.I.”

  I said, “That a misdemeanor too?”

  “Not yet. D.U.I.L. is. Get out of the car.”

  I got out of the car. He told me to close my eyes and touch my nose. I closed my eyes and touched my nose. He scraped a line with his heel in the gravel beside the road and told me to walk it. I walked it. He fetched the breatholator from the scout car and told me to blow up the balloon. I blew up the balloon. It smelled of cheap rubber and stale liquor and foul breath. He squinted at the gauge.

  “A little on the shallow side,” he said, taking back the contraption. “That leaves driving while drinking.”

  “Who’s driving?”

  He frowned at that. Meanwhile his partner reached through the window of my car and scooped the flat bottle off the seat. He brought it over.

  Polaroids grinned then, flintily. “Open intoxicants. That’s good for a night in the can and maybe a hundred dollars, depending on which judge gets it.”

  “It isn’t open,” I pointed out. “Okay, it’s enough to haul me in as a suspicious person. I get a lawyer, you climb into a suit and testify, he makes you look like a baboon with arrested development, the judge tosses it out, and your watch commander makes that little notation in you record. And all because you don’t like me.”

  He was chewing on that when a garbled call came over the radio, which they’d left on full volume. “That’s us,” he told the partner. To me: “You’re no Darrow. Robbery-rape comes a little higher than open intox, that’s all.” He handed back my papers.

  “What about the bottle?”

  “That goes with us.”

  “I get it.”

  “No, you don’t.” He stabbed a finger at me. “I don’t give a damn about you, but just because something’s got you sore is no reason we should have to scrape someone else off the highway tonight.” He started for the blue-and-white.

  “Dilute it with water,” I called after him. “It’s eighty-six proof.”

  He didn’t hear me, maybe, as he pulled shut his door and screwed the car around in a neat three-point turn. It didn’t matter. I felt better for having said it. I felt better for the whole confrontation, in fact. Then I remembered something and reached into my pocket and felt the switchblade I’d taken off Alonzo Smith. That was good for ninety days if they’d searched me. I laughed at that. We Midnight Men thrive on adversity.

  Iris had left the hook shop on John R where I’d first met her for an apartment of her own downtown, in a building still considered respectable by people who were considered less than respectable themselves. A piece of paper taped over the bell button told me it was broken. I used my knuckles.

  After a minute the door opened. She was barefoot, in a piece of cobweb that hung to her ankles, through which the lines of her long tawny form showed with no little assistance from the lamp at her back. She was getting conservative. The first time I’d ever seen her she was naked.

  “Alone?” I asked, and got a faceful of door.

  I rapped again. She tore it open, her face furious. I spoke fast, before she could start in.

  “Sorry, but I had to ask. I had Smith tonight and lost him. Someone I thought I knew squirted lead and he melted. Maybe I wasn’t thinking straight on account of someone else I was sure I had pegged played Ping-Pong with my skull this morning. To cap if off I just this minute squeezed out of an invitation to spend three months at the county’s expense. I guess you could call this a shameless play for sympathy.”

  “You smell like a distillery.” Her spine was straight, her head tilted back to look at me from under her eyelashes. I knew that pose.

  I said, “Liquor’s losing its appeal. I’m thinking of giving it up for a uniform and a big bass drum. Sing hymns and collect donations in a tambourine.”

  She smiled sourly. Her head came down. “That straight dope about you losing Smith?”

  “I had him wrapped and stamped.”

  “You got blood on your face again.”

  I touched the crusted thread on my cheek, which I’d forgotten about. “I did that. I wasn’t sure you’d recognize me otherwise.”

  She laughed and stepped aside, opening the door widen “Let’s see what’s in the medicine cabinet.”

  27

  “YOU SNORE.”

  I was half-leaning over the bed when I said it, buttoning my shirt in the damp gray light of dawn, watching Iris stretch. She pushed two small fists toward the ceiling, cuffed me on the chin with one of them, then snuggled back under the covers and looked up at me sweetly. “Self-defense,” she said. “You punch things in your sleep.”

  “That’s what makes me such a lamb when I’m awake.” I stuck my head through the loop in the necktie and did up the knot, which I hadn’t bothered to untie when I took it off earlier.

  The bedroom smelled of lovemaking. The flimsy garment she’d greeted me in hung over the footboard, the hem stirring in a slight breeze drifting th
rough the screened window.

  “I’m sorry again about calling you so late the other day,” I told her. “A lot of things happened and I forgot.”

  She sat up, propping a pillow behind her, and, holding the sheet over her breasts, reached for cigarettes and matches on the lamp table next to the bed. She offered me one, but I turned it down. She smoked one of those feminine brands with a filter tip you couldn’t suck oxygen through. I wondered why she bothered to light them.

  “We’ve talked about this before,” she said, shaking out the match and puffing. “I’m not some canary in a covered cage you can uncover when you want to hear me chirp and cover up again when you don’t. I’ve never complained about your work, stupid as it is. We ain’t exactly star-crossed lovers. I expect some sort of consideration in return.”

  “You’ve been reading Cosmopolitan.” I grinned, but she didn’t respond. I wondered why I’d brought this up.

  “I don’t need a Goddamn magazine to tell me my time’s too valuable to waste sitting by the telephone.”

  “You’re right. I said you were right before. You’re still right. I was wrong before and I’m still wrong. I’m wrong and you’re right. Let’s see, have I forgotten anything? Oh, yeah. You’re right.”

  She giggled. “Okay, so maybe I overdid it. But at least we both know where I stand.” She watched me through the smoke. “You know what’s wrong with you?”

  “Everyone seems to have a theory about that. I must be pretty screwed up.”

  “That’s it. You joke too much. Every time I get near what makes you run you crack wise. Ask a question, get a joke. Make an observation, get a joke. I know you were married once, that you went to Vietnam, and that you had a partner in the detective business who got killed. Nothing else. When I try to find out more you make a funny and change the subject. Must be a cop thing. Some kind of built-in protective device, like a smoke alarm.”

  “Scratch Cosmopolitan,” I said. “Substitute Psychology Today.”

  “There you go again. Who the hell are you. Walker?” “Nobody knows. I’m an enduring mystery, like the Riddle of the Sphinx and where the yellow went.”