“This fellow trouble?” He had a high thin tenor. I wanted to laugh, but that hammer wouldn’t let me. My gun was in my glove compartment. I should have left it there and brought the car.
“Private disagreement, partner,” I said. “She wouldn’t let me pick up the check.”
“So go Dutch.”
He fooled me. The hammer was just a prop. His unoccupied hand flashed up, fetching me a tremendous clout on the ear. It still rings when a moth flutters past it.
The file clerk slid out of her seat and ran for the door, still holding the fistful of cash. There wasn’t anything I could do about that.
Hammer time came next. I was reeling from the first blow, but I was chewing the scenery a little. When the hammer swung up, I was ready. I scooped my glass off the table and dashed what was left of my drink into his face. The gin ran up his nose and stung his eyes. His mascara ran. I caught the hammer by the head and twisted hard. The strategy was just to disarm him, but he had a grip on it like a man hanging onto a cliff; he howled when his tendons twisted with it. I didn’t exactly hear them pop, but he wouldn’t be practicing calligraphy for a while.
Still he held on.
I yanked the weapon toward me and with it his arm, pulling him forward and off balance. When his other hand flattened on top of the table to steady himself, I got hold of the edge and hurled it over. He went right along with it. He hit the floor hard enough to raise the South.
I was out of there before he got up, if he got up. There was no sign of the woman in the parking lot. I didn’t even know I was still holding the hammer by its head until I heard sirens.
*
They keep a clean jail in Wyandotte.
The bars of the holding cell had been whitewashed recently, the linoleum-tile floor swept, mopped, and disinfected with turpentine, a smell that brought memories of spring cleaning and hunting for Easter eggs. The sheets on the cot were freshly laundered and treated with fabric softener. I hadn’t a thing to complain about.
I wondered where they’d put the bouncer from the restaurant. Maybe they weren’t holding him. I was the cause of the disturbance and he was just doing his job. He’d need medical attention. I felt bad about that until I remembered the meat tenderizer. I wasn’t that tough.
The patrol cops who took me in were. I’d ditched the hammer by the time they arrived, but when they’d heard what they needed from the manager of Little Roundtop, they bent me over the hood of the squad car, patted me down, and cuffed me to last. I could still feel the pinch. All the way downtown they ignored me in the backseat. They were arguing about whether Dale Earnhardt, Jr., was any good behind the wheel or just lucky in his birth.
My head hurt, too, and my left ear felt as thick as a ham but seemed normal size when I touched it. I didn’t try touching it again after the first time.
The watch captain’s name was Van Buren, but he didn’t look like a Netherlander. He was black and ageless in a crisply starched uniform, his shaved head gleaming like an ebony newel post. He had a wide mouth with creases like knife cuts at the corners and always looked as if he was about to smile or had just finished smiling or was thinking about smiling. He never did, though, all the time I was there, and the pewter-colored eyes overlapped by sad-looking flaps of skin were as humorous as a wheelchair with a flat. A birthmark marred the white of his left eye, a stain shaped like a lopsided geranium. I couldn’t stop looking at it.
He came to the door of the cell making no noise at all in high-topped shoes as shiny as his head and laced to the ankles.
“Your man Alderdyce is on his way,” he said. He had a pleasant rumbling voice with no judgment in it. “He doesn’t have any authority here, you know.”
“I know. I’m counting on professional courtesy.”
“It won’t hold if the man you crippled presses charges. Man your age ought to be home watching American Idol, not out brawling in no restaurant.”
“I work most nights. Anyway, it’s just a sprain. He’ll be cracking open heads again in no time.” I tried to concentrate on something other than the purple stain in his left eye, but I couldn’t do it without looking as if I were avoiding contact. I bet his conviction record was A-l and that was the reason. “You’re not fooling anyone with double negatives, Captain,” I said. “These days all the police brass went to college.”
“Who’s the girl?”
“We’ve been over that. If Inspector Alderdyce wants to share it with you, he will. Meanwhile I’m saving the story for him. He knows part of it, so I won’t have to start from scratch.”
“I heard there was money involved, quite a bit of money. You know, in this town we put all the pressure on the johns; the girls are what they are, and they don’t contribute much to the local economy in jail. If the customer’s caught soliciting from his car, he loses it. Then we sell it at auction. In your case, you could get thirty days and a fine that’ll rattle your teeth.”
“It was her money. I was just giving it back. You saw the receipt. You’ve got my ID, you know the business I’m in. I aged out of the john demographic years ago.”
“Which would be just about the time that excuse went away. That gent who invented Viagra’s got a lot to answer for. Those scientists can’t cure cancer, but they sure took horny old goats off the Endangered Species list.”
“You didn’t find any on me, and the way your boys frisked me they know I hadn’t swallowed any.”
“They’re thorough for a fact. I trained ’em myself. I was a jailkeeper at County when this spot opened up.”
“I think your boys trained with Michael Jackson.”
“Forget what they did to your man business. It stopped being your business when it became my business. You paw women in my town, you get pawed.”
“You got me behind bars, you have to poke me with a stick while you’re at it?”
“It’s a slow night. Basketball’s on strike. You play cards?”
“When I’ve got circulation in my hands.”
He leaned in close and gripped the bars. His nails were neat but not professionally manicured. I was more interested in the scar tissue around the knuckles, like joints in an earthworm. You don’t get those from just working the heavy bag at the gym.
“This is Downriver, Mr. Detroit detective. We keep it tough and we keep it tight. There’s no FBI breathing down our collars, making sure we’re not carrying a couple kilos out of the evidence room under our hats. That wasn’t always true, but while you folks were busy trying to keep your mayor out of jail, we were cleaning house. If you’re delicate, don’t come down here intimidating our women and busting up our public places. We bust back.”
“Don’t waste your time, Captain.” This was a new voice. “He’s heard the same speech as far up as Iroquois Heights. It never sticks.” The big man in the beautiful suit stuck out a hand. “John Alderdyce. I’m investigating a drug-related homicide. My professional opinion is it trumps your disturbing the peace and assault and battery, but if you don’t like the way we do things in the big bad city we can take it up at the Murphy Hall of Justice in the morning.”
SEVENTEEN
We were traveling in John’s personal automobile, a Cadillac Escalade with seventeen payments left on it. He’d reached that point in life where comfort trumped efficiency, but he was still too much the egalitarian to be seen driving a sedan some benighted souls insisted on calling a pimpmobile. Also he had grandchildren now, with a DVD player in the backseat and a canvas carrier filled with all four Ice Ages and every Harry Potter to date. My Cutlass was safe in the impound lot in Wyandotte.
“Close of business day, I said.” He drove with his hands at ten-and-two and both eyes on the road. “What part didn’t you understand?”
“All of it. Your business day’s still in play or you wouldn’t have made such good time after Van Buren called.”
“There’s a shoulder chip the size of the Penobscot Building. What’re the odds he applied for a spot on the DPD and got his application shitcanned?�
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“I’m guessing that birthmark in his left eye spooked the interviewer.”
“Human Resources people got no imagination. You can get a lot out of an interrogation with a spooky thing like that.”
“What I thought. What happens to the complaint?”
“Not a damn thing. They forgot to Mirandize you, can you believe it?”
“Nope. They read me some rights. I lost concentration after the opening line. Like the National Anthem. Did you know there’s a whole other chorus after ‘home of the brave’?”
“Seems to me I remember a high school principal fooling us with it when we sat down after the first. Wyandotte needs Detroit more than Detroit needs Wyandotte. At the moment, anyway. I’d’ve been more diplomatic about it if he hadn’t made that crack about the FBI. A good cop ought to know a hundred bad cops don’t mean a hundred-and-one. We’re our own worst enemy.”
“Anything on that Arizona plate I gave you?”
He shook his head a thirty-second of an inch, which considering the density of its features measured 7.5 on the Richter scale. “You don’t get questions. I get answers. What are you working on?”
I’d worked it out while I was in Holding. The night had changed all my plans. If the woman I was meeting had turned out to be Cecelia Wynn, I could close that case and give Alderdyce what he wanted. But now I’d have to report to my client before I said anything official. So I gave him Smoke.
“The clerk at Elysian Fields found out Narcotics hit the place and wanted to know what it was all about before she talked to the cops. A long time ago she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and she didn’t want to repeat the experience.”
“Description I got from the report on Van Buren’s desk didn’t match the Wygonik woman.”
“I’ve got a personal life, John.”
“Bullshit. And if you did you wouldn’t be seen in a public place roughing up your date. You’ve got character flaws the size of the cracks in Hart Plaza, but that isn’t one of them. If you had to restrain her by force, it was business.”
“If it was business it had nothing to do with the drug operation. The place wound up in my rounds on an unrelated case.”
“An unrelated case that brought you to the attention of the Arizona branch of the Detroit Combination.”
“The plate came up?”
“Yeah, damn you. Your open tail ditched that piece of shit in the long-term lot at Metro. It was stolen in Grand Rapids last week—registration in the glove compartment matched the report—but the plate belonged to this year’s Trailblazer, which was still tooling around Phoenix until the owner was pulled over for driving without a plate; he hadn’t noticed it was missing. No information yet on what your guy put it on or where he dumped it after he got to Grand Rapids. Not important. What is is the prints we got off the Malibu at the airport. We didn’t even have to go to the FBI: Had ’em on record downtown.”
“Would I know him?”
“Only if you hung around with street soldiers before RICO blasted hell out of the Combination. Martin Maxwell Mondadori: ‘Yummy,’ they call him, on account of his initials. He broke arms for the Lucy and Acardo families, did four years in Jackson for Man One dealt down from first-degree. When the Colombians were muscling in on the drug trade he spent so much time being questioned in homicides he could list Thirteen Hundred as his voting address. After the Colombians won he retired to Arizona. Retired, that’s what they call it when you’re hauled in only three or four times a year for running illegal gambling operations and credit card fraud. He was also questioned in a laundry list of local heists. None of it stuck, but he’s the go-to guy there when the city and county cops investigate anything with a possible connection to the rackets.”
“Sounds kind of small-time for something this size.”
I was tired, and my bum leg was hurting, or I’d have paid more attention to what I was saying. He went on driving without reacting; but I knew I’d nailed myself and so did he.
“What size’d that be, Walker? All we got on him, if we get him, is wandering into the wrong building, which last I checked wasn’t even a misdemeanor.”
“I meant working out of state.”
“Too thin. Everyone knows your pipeline into national cooperative police investigations is Barry Stackpole. Why’d you enlist him if what went down on Livernois had nothing to do with your case?”
“I only picked him up after I visited the place. I wouldn’t have thought much about it except he was a stalking horse for the couple of pros in the Lincoln Town Car. When the stiff surfaced, I figured the more I knew about the operation the better I was fixed.”
He checked all his mirrors and leaned the Escalade into a howling U-turn. The right front tire squeaked against the curb just before he straightened out. I had to grip my door handle to keep my head off his lap. “I just remembered,” he said: “There was something in that report about you getting your Miranda. Maybe a night on the river will clear your head.”
I could do the night; I’d done a lot longer. But too much was happening I didn’t know about, and too much more was threatening to happen while I played canasta with Captain Van Buren. I asked him to turn around again.
“Where to, Homicide?”
I said my place. His office had bedbugs.
*
I asked him if it was okay if I smoked.
“Why get permission? It’s your house. It is, isn’t it? Don’t tell me you’re still paying on this little place.”
“I bought it for cash. I had cash then, from the army, and no wife yet.” I missed the cash. “But you’re always quitting, and I’m a sensitive guy.”
“Once I even quit quitting. But it took finally. One day I lit up my first over breakfast. Two puffs and I put it out. Tasted like I was using a bedpan for an inhaler. Haven’t had the urge since.”
“Maybe it’s not so hard as everyone says.” I lit one and blew a plume at the bluish patch on the ceiling, noticing a new crack in it. Nicotine seemed to be the only thing holding it up.
“It’s as hard as you let it be, like everything else. Ever consider quitting?”
“I’ve only got two vices. If I give it up and something happens to the other one, what’ve I got?”
“I don’t know; five more years, maybe?”
“The crappy ones at the end.”
He drank from his glass and shifted the tectonic plates of his face into something even less pleasant than usual. “This isn’t a vice, it’s a sin. What do you do, take home bar rags and wring them out over a mixing bowl?”
“I buy it in bulk. A tanker comes to the door and sticks a hose through a window into the laundry tub. I invited you to join me in a drink, John. I didn’t say Blue Label.” I sipped mine between shifting ovals of ice, bracing my elbow in the dent in the arm of the uneasy chair in my living room. Only one light was burning, the floor lamp I read by. I’d replaced the Edison bulb with one of those screwy mercury jobs that use one-tenth the energy and take ten minutes to shed enough light to read your wristwatch.
“Only two vices? I seem to recall you were hitting the pills with both fists for a while.”
“I took a high-powered slug through my favorite leg up in Grayling, the deer-hunting capital of North America. I wasn’t even in the woods. When I finally got used to it I figured what was the point. How’s your boy?”
“Which one’s that?” But he knew which one. He got along just fine with one, but he’d had to ask my help with the other. He’d never forgive me for it. I’d known John longer than anyone living; but after fifteen million years the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon are just passing acquaintances.
“So much for old times,” I said. “Or should I get out the yearbook?”
“We didn’t go to the same school. We still don’t. Who’s your client?”
“Smoke. I told you that.”
“You never knew her till you dropped in on her place of employment.”
I tipped my glass, just to hear the ice
shifting. It sounded like soggy bells tilting in a gale at sea; but I’d never been in a gale at sea, so it just sounded like ice shifting in a glass. “Ever hear someone say, ‘I don’t trust myself’?”
“Assholes, yeah.”
“Maybe not. But it’s a hell of a thing to say about yourself. You have to be careful who’s listening. Who else is there to trust?”
“God. Says so on money.”
“I mean someone you can afford to wait for.”
Alderdyce made a noise in his throat. He thought it was a chuckle. “‘Wait a minute.’”
“For what?”
“No, it’s a punchline. Tell you the rest if I’m in the mood by the end of this conversation. Go ahead.”
“I don’t think I ever heard you tell a joke.”
“The record isn’t in jeopardy, if this conversation goes on as it has.”
“It isn’t I don’t trust cops,” I said. “I don’t; but my father told me you can trust everyone or no one and it all comes out the same.”
“I knew your father. So did mine. I guess maybe you forgot. Thing about fathers is they say just as much horseshit as wisdom, then leave to let us sort it all out on our own.”
“Anyway, I trust myself first, because I know what my angle is. With everyone else all I can do is guess. But this job involves someone I can’t even begin to guess about. I’m batting T-ball against a major leaguer.”
Ice shifted in his glass, but he wasn’t philosophizing, just drinking. His brain wasn’t geared toward abstract concepts. He swallowed—two separate and distinct actions, the hatch shutting first, a defensive measure, then opening, passing the decision onto the digestive system. His thought process was identical. It was what made him a perfect cop and a flawed husband and father.
“I know who you’re talking about,” he said. “She’s flesh, Amos. Has all the same disgusting bodily functions as the rest of us. And we don’t know she’s even in the picture. Every government spook and beat cop in every country dreams about bagging her. Every schnook with his mortgage under water has her picture burned into his skull hoping to snatch that six-million-dollar reward. If she’s half as smart as she’s made out, she’s living in a cave or a split-level in some suburb of Malaysia, afraid to go shopping till after midnight when all the clerks in the Sungai Ujong Walmart are too busy yawning and looking at the clock to pay attention to the faces of the customers at checkout.”
Don't Look for Me: An Amos Walker Novel (Amos Walker Novels) Page 11