“Sungai Ujong, seriously?”
“The wife went back to school. I help with the homework.”
I shook my head, not at their study group. “Those rewards are like Bigfoot. When it comes time to collect, they vanish. The accountants turn their pockets inside out and say it all went into the investigation. And this woman can outbid whatever bounty they put up. Anyway, she’s not wired to be afraid. She’s a psychopath with a two hundred IQ and more liquid assets than an emirate.”
“Bullshit. Now who’s talking Bigfoot?” He leaned forward from the couch and set his glass on the coffee table. “There are monsters enough under the bed here at home. Forget her. You can be sure she’s forgotten you.”
I hadn’t told him I’d heard from her since the last time her subject came up. There wasn’t any point in reporting a threat that could have come from the other side of the world, possibly Sungai Ujong; but busy woman that she was, sooner or later she made time for everything, and she never forgot.
“John, what I’m working isn’t a homicide, that I know of. A woman’s wandered off. Her husband would like her back, but if it doesn’t play out that way he wants to know is she okay and does she need anything.”
“Meaning money.”
“She doesn’t seem to have taken any with her. Or much of anything else.”
“You know what they say about not taking it with you.”
“I thought of that. I’ve been on the job as long as you. She left a note, but it was undated, so maybe. Nothing suspicious otherwise, not even that little clunk you hear when a lead slug drops into the slot. It said don’t bother looking, and the woman I met in Wyandotte tonight”—I glanced at my great-grandmother’s clock groaning and ticking on the shelf—“last night, said the same thing, only she turned out not to be the one I was looking for.”
“Whose mistake was that, yours or hers?”
“Not mine. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t her idea: I heard the clunk that time. But somebody wants me to stop looking. If the jokers who are dogging me are there to make sure I do, it doesn’t hang on your case.”
“Unless making sure you stop looking means you stay away from Elysian Fields.”
“Why bother? You cops know all about the place.”
“Maybe there’s something we don’t know about it. Some little morsel a big cat might overlook but a little mouse browsing around might not.”
“Squeak, squeak.” I finished my drink. It tasted bitter as hell.
EIGHTEEN
After John left, I put my glass in the sink, undressed, and got horizontal in the bedroom. I was wired, didn’t expect to sleep, but I surprised myself. When someone tapped on the window, it drew me up from deep bottom like a hook attached to a lead sinker. It was dark out. I couldn’t see the features on the blur of face pressed nearly against the glass. The luminous dial on the nightstand told me it was 5:10. I saw these things on my way to retrieve the gun that wasn’t in the drawer. Wyandotte still had it.
“Mr. Walker?”
I recognized the voice. Propped up on one elbow, I gestured toward the front of the house. The pale smudge of face vanished.
I tied my robe on the way to the door. Smoke stood on my stoop, wearing a forest-green hoodie, scuffed blue jeans, and ankle-high brown suede boots trimmed with sheepskin, with heels that brought her up to six feet. The hoodie made her eyes moss-colored. She could rob a bank and no two eyewitnesses would be able to agree on their color.
“The cops have been at my place. Can I stay here? I’ve been walking around all night and I can barely stand up.”
“They’re going to find you sooner or later. It’s what they do, and you’re not exactly the type that blends into a crowd. Turn yourself in, and you’ll be out in an hour. A little longer if you killed your boss. Then you’ll have a place to sleep.”
“I’m not sorry he’s dead. I’ve had better bosses. Less grabby ones, anyway. But I was a dodgeball champ in high school, and I’m saving my one shot at a life sentence for somebody I’ll enjoy murdering, whoever he or she turns out to be. I’ll turn myself in later, I promise. When I’m not exhausted. You can even give me a ride.”
“Right now I don’t have a ride.” But I stepped away from the door.
I got my other set of bedding from the closet and laid it on the couch. “Two pillows. One to put on top of the wonky spring in the middle.”
She stood in the middle of the living room hugging herself. It was a dank morning, and I’d turned down the heat before going to bed. “Do you have anything to drink? Something strong? I’m chilled to the bone.”
“You came to the right door. How’d you find it, by the way?”
“Internet café. You’re on the grid, like it or not.”
“Not.” I went to the kitchen for the bottle, pausing on the way to crank up the thermostat. The furnace in the little Michigan basement buzzed for a full minute, then the blower kicked in, stirring the hairs on my ankles in front of the baseboard register as I filled two glasses at the counter. My guest was standing in the kitchen doorway when I turned that direction. She’d ditched the hoodie and it was all her under a cobalt-colored T-shirt.
“You weren’t kidding about being chilled,” I said.
She looked down at herself, but made no effort to cover up. “I had to get out of that thing. It was like wearing a clammy shroud. Offended?”
“Shocked. You want a sweater or something?”
“I’m good. Or will be.” She took one of the glasses. “To excess.” She drank, shuddered, and grew roses on her cheeks.
I knocked the top off mine. No roses, but I felt a little less groggy. Thirty minutes in the sack don’t do as much for me as they used to. “Let’s adjourn to the drawing room.”
She’d made up the couch already, but I let her have the armchair and turned back the bedding to keep from contaminating it with private eye.
She looked around brightly. “You’re neat for a bachelor. Not too neat, if you know what I mean.”
“That’s the effect I was going for. I’m straight. You?”
“Never tried it any other way. Think we’re the only ones left?”
“We’re still rounding them up on reservations. I was in a lesbian bar recently.”
“I guess your work takes you all sorts of places.”
“Yours too. The marijuana was just an illegal front for something a lot worse.”
“How much worse?”
“Heroin. International operation.”
I was watching her closely. The blossoms faded. She gulped from her glass, but this time it didn’t help. That satisfied me. Experienced liars have been trying for hundreds of years to get their circulatory system to go along and so far it’s been no dice. She had no idea what had been in that padlocked basement.
“That’s something I’ve never understood,” she said after a moment. “Firing up a doobie’s one thing; I draw the line there, but I can even see coke. What has to happen to a person to make him stick a needle in his arm and fill up on that crap? You know what it does?”
“Causes drowsiness, severe constipation, vomiting, strangulation—”
“Strangulation?”
“Severe respiratory depression, same result. What else? Really bad acne leading to permanent scars. Your blood pressure drops like a rock, you lose muscle control—at least that takes care of the constipation, but it’s sudden and messy. What am I leaving out? Coma. Cardiac arrest. Death.
“Except what this outfit peddles isn’t that patient. If you take a dose of what you think is garden-variety horse and it turns out to be their stuff, it’s cheaper to put a shotgun in your mouth. Users have been found dead as Cleopatra’s cat with the needle still in the vein.”
It had become a drinking game on her part: Hear a symptom, take a swig. Her glass was almost empty. Her eyes kept focus, though. There’s nothing like a good scare to cure hiccups and prevent inebriation. The color had changed again, to something gray and murky.
“Health food.�
�� She might have been talking to herself. “That’s what it says in the advertising.”
“I didn’t want you sitting in the precinct thinking I’d sandbagged you. But you need to go in before they start to think you’re playing hard-to-get. When that happens they assume everything that comes from you is a lie. They don’t show it right away. The first time through, they keep interrupting to ask if you’d like a cup of coffee or a snack from the machine. The second, they look like they’re not paying attention. On the third pass, they act like that’s just to make sure it’s all down in order, keep the pencil pushers upstairs happy. Along about the fourth, you’ll slip on some little thing, everyone does, but they’re not even looking at you, so you think you’re okay. Seventh time around is when they grin and crack their knuckles and spit on their hands and go to work. Cops like being lied to. It keeps them on their game, and they love playing it. No one pins on a shield because he couldn’t get into medical school.”
“Is this a ghost story, some kind of initiation thing, first-time suspect bullshit?”
“A little. They don’t really crack their knuckles and spit on their hands anymore. These days they all went to college. Some of them can even work a Rubik’s Cube. That doesn’t mean they aren’t as tough as they used to be. You’re young, maybe too green to be afraid. The minute they get that impression, they’ll pull every trick they know to make you cry. I don’t like to see children bullied.”
“I’m not exactly a child.”
“I saw that when you took off your sweatshirt.”
“You think they’ll hold my record against me?”
“They don’t hold anything against anyone. Cops don’t have feelings. They’ll try to use it as leverage, but unless you left something out when you told me about it, it isn’t really a record. It isn’t enough to tip you over if you don’t let them. Compared to what they see every day, it’s not even an unpaid parking ticket.”
She swirled the yellow stuff in the bottom of her glass, then looked up. “What’s a Rubik’s Cube?”
“Get some sleep,” I snarled.
*
I had a bughouse dream. I was in Old China, in a room decorated with silk hangings and a couple of muscular celestials in breechclouts and sandals guarding the door with scimitars at parade rest. Someone was stretched naked on a rack, and a satanic grinning face that belonged on the cover of an old-time pulp magazine was bent over him. The owner of the face wore a shimmering green robe and a skullcap with a jade button on top. I felt sorry for the fellow on the rack. No one should have to put up with that and look just like me to boot.
I’d never been to China, old or new, and I bet it had never really looked like that: The sentries’ oiled biceps could only have come from steroids. The hangings looked steam-pressed and screen-printed besides, and the character in the mandarin getup bore a close resemblance to Christopher Lee in Oriental makeup. I’d frittered away my childhood reading comic books based on Sax Rohmer stories. It had taken all this time for my bad taste to catch up with me.
It’s never a good idea to go to bed on a stomach full of cheap liquor and a head full of Madam Sing.
This time I woke up all on my own. It wasn’t the sun, although it was there, and from the strength of it I figured it had been there a while. Air stirred, and I turned my head and saw Smoke Wygonik standing in my bedroom. She’d shucked everything but a pair of pale blue bikini panties. Her long blond hair hung over one shoulder and she held it spread with one hand to cover her breasts.
“Still cold?” I asked.
She shook her head carefully, then frowned and swept her hair back over her shoulder. Her breasts were small but well-shaped. I’m not a mammary man, anyway. I like a good collarbone, and she passed that test; it was shaped like Diana’s bow, polished-looking where the sunlight lay across it. She had a deep navel in a flat belly with some definition and her legs were long, ending in high-arched feet with unpainted toenails. No tattoos or piercings.
She frowned again, misreading my silence. “Is it all right?”
“How old are you?”
“Don’t worry. I’m street legal.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“You’re not too old, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I’m old enough one more regret won’t kill me. You have to learn that all by yourself.”
“Maybe I’d better start.” She paused with her thumbs inside the waistband of her panties. “I’m kind of natural down there. Any objections?”
I’m not into banter in the morning. I folded back the covers and shoved over. She slid the panties down, stepped out of them, and got in.
NINETEEN
Black mold and bats had finally driven the Homicide division out of the historic police headquarters at 1300 Beaubien; the budget for routine maintenance had gone into the silk wall coverings in a late longtime mayor’s office and onto the broad hip of the fat little mama’s boy—currently awaiting federal sentencing—who’d tried to out-corrupt him. But the new digs are clean and well-ventilated, and schoolbus drivers have stopped pulling up in front of it, no longer mistaking it for Murray Wright High.
Inspector Alderdyce was home catching up on sleep, but he was expected anytime. The polite young third-grade detective who told us that offered to take Smoke’s statement while we were waiting. She looked at me. I nodded. The kid in the yellow tie and powder-blue shirt fashionably untucked under his suitcoat hadn’t looked me in the eye once since he’d spotted the tall blonde in the hoodie. I thought we’d caught a break.
I’m wrong two times out of six. After setting up camp in an interview room with a video camera fixed on a tripod, the file on the Elysian Fields case spread before him on the chipboard table, he shot questions at her rapidly and out of anyone’s conception of order, a trick as old as the Praetorian Guard. The object is to disorient the subject into blurting out the truth.
But this particular subject remained cool under fire, pausing just long enough after each question to take it in and frame her response, but not so long she gave the impression of constructing a lie. After a nerve-wracking beginning I settled back in one of those folding metal chairs that destroy parental backs at school band concerts and reflected on the morning. Mostly it was a confusion of writhing muscles and breathing in each other’s gasps for air, bordering on violence, but when it came down to cases it had been conventional enough not to frighten an old dog, while various enough to hold interest. That she was holding back was obvious. She was like a singer with natural talent who left the impression there were notes she could reach easily but chose not to for that particular selection.
The old dog, of course, had given it everything he had.
Afterward we’d showered separately, got dressed, and I’d called a cab for the trip downtown. We hadn’t talked about the sex, then or just after or during. There are some things you just don’t beat to death with language.
I listened to her answers with professional as well as personal interest. She spoke as if she hadn’t fielded the same questions three or four times, and her language varied just enough it didn’t come off like a speech she’d rehearsed. Either she was telling it straight or she was a better liar than I’d met in a long time; and I’m a connoisseur.
The detective seemed satisfied as well. While we were waiting for her statement to be typed up he asked her where she was from, seemed interested in the fact that they’d attended Wayne State University the same couple of semesters, and volunteered the information that he and his wife were celebrating their second anniversary in June. If it was detective work, it was a kind I wasn’t familiar with. I took mental notes.
Alderdyce arrived, wearing lightweight tweeds and a knitted tie and looking as if he’d slept a week instead of about four hours. When the statement came he read it, then asked Smoke a couple of questions the detective hadn’t thought of but whose answers didn’t alter the essentials. She signed it with a department pen and he gave it to the detective to file. In th
e hallway outside the interview room, he asked her if she had a ride home.
“No.”
He buttonholed a uniform on his way past and told him he had a passenger.
“Just one?” She glanced at me.
“I’m borrowing your detective,” Alderdyce said. “Sorry if you’ve got plans.”
She shook her head and stuck a hand my way. “Thank you, Mr. Walker.”
I took it and let it go. When she and the uniform were gone, Alderdyce said, “How was she?”
But I didn’t tumble. The old tricks I know. “What do you want, John?”
“We found Yummy. An ID from you would give us a reason to hold him till we find something to charge him with.”
“Where is he?”
“Northwest side, staying with a cousin couple of times removed: We think. Neighbors say he’s been keeping his lights on later than usual. Some of them heard two men talking. Couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the cousin lives alone and doesn’t entertain. DTE lineman, retired on a disability. Gets a check first of every month for electrocuting himself on a pole a couple of years back.”
“And we thought Yummy lived dangerously. Early Response Team in on this?”
“We’re leaving the vests and tear gas behind. Not enough for a warrant. If we double-team the cousin, we might smoke him out.”
“I thought I was just for ID.”
“Times are tough. Everybody’s got to pull twice his weight.” He reached under his suitcoat, took something from his belt, and thrust it at me, handle first. It was my .38 Chief’s Special.
I didn’t take it. “How long have you had that?”
“Don’t worry, I wasn’t holding out on you. I sent a uniform down to Wyandotte this morning before I punched out. It was on my desk when I got in. You’ll have to make your own arrangements to spring your wheels. It’ll cost you, but your mother should have told you to stay away from strange women in bars.”
Don't Look for Me: An Amos Walker Novel (Amos Walker Novels) Page 12