“That’s the only kind I ever get to meet.” I took the revolver, checked the cylinder for rounds, and stuck it under my coattail.
*
The place was on Greenview off McNichols not far from Mercy College, a solemn block of gray-painted brick that looked like a church rectory, which is what it might have been before it was partitioned into smaller rooms for student housing. It was an apartment house now. Alderdyce cruised the Escalade past a tan two-door parked across the street, got a nod from the plainclothesman behind the wheel, and turned into the narrow lot alongside the house. A stern tin sign said it was for residents only. He parked perpendicular to three cars already there, blocking them.
“If I were Yummy, I’d be in Toledo by now,” I said. “I wouldn’t hang around after the cops started talking to the neighbors.”
“One cop, in a polyester suit. They thought they were talking to a city census taker. He only talked to the ground floor. The cousin’s apartment is upstairs, and he doesn’t socialize.”
“The city doesn’t take a census.”
“And schools don’t teach civics anymore.” He got out, climbed the front steps, and pushed the buzzer.
A red-faced manager answered. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses nested in his head of gray curls. Alderdyce flashed his gold shield. The manager flipped down the glasses like a visor to look at it.
“Anthony Pirandello, in two-C,” the inspector said. “He’s got a houseguest.”
“Not if he don’t pay.”
“You own the place?”
“No, I work for a living.”
“You can keep what he slipped you under the table. It’s the guest we want.”
“Got a warrant?”
I reached past Alderdyce and snatched the spectacles off his nose.
“Hey!”
“My old man told me never to hit a man with glasses,” I said.
“Bullshit.” But his voice lacked conviction.
Alderdyce put away his shield. “My partner hit the lottery. He’s just filling out the month, then he’s retiring to Bimini. One reprimand more or less in his jacket doesn’t mean anything.”
I grinned. The manager’s complexion lost some of its ruddiness and he stepped out of the way. I folded his glasses, slid them into his shirt pocket behind a plastic protector full of pens, and patted it.
On the way upstairs I said, “How come I never get to be Father Duffy, the gruff-but-kind department chaplain? Why am I always Darth Vader?”
“You don’t have a pension to protect.”
Two-C was at the end of a hallway carpeted with a pattern I recognized from one of the auto shows. Cobo Hall cut it up after the doors closed and sold the pieces cheap. It had been trodden on by half the human race; or that part of it that still cared what the Motor City had to show. We drew our weapons and held them down at our sides while Alderdyce reached over and knocked on the door. A voice that had been put up in tobacco and alcohol asked who it was.
“Police.”
“How do I know that? Neighborhood’s gone to shit.”
Alderdyce winked at me and slid his Miranda card under the door. It was as crisp and shiny as if it had never been used.
A series of locks came undone and the door opened wide enough to expose a bloodshot eye in half a face shot through with broken dreams. A puff of air that had been put down in malt liquor came out from behind it. I saw the family resemblance.
“Anthony Pirandello?”
“What do you want?”
“Yummy.”
“Come again?” The eye looked genuinely puzzled; mob nicknames are often a media invention, like health care.
“Martin Maxwell Mondadori. Your cousin.”
“I ain’t seen Marty in months.”
“Then who’s staying with you?”
“Nobody. Just me and the bedbugs.”
Something crashed inside. The eye blinked but didn’t move in its socket, an impressive effort of will.
“Man, you should’ve called the exterminator before this,” I said.
Alderdyce had lost interest in the conversation. He used his shoulder on the door. Pirandello, gripping the knob on his side, swung around with it; he had to, or be trampled. He wore a scuffed leather windbreaker and a golf cap; we must’ve caught him on his way out. I came in on the inspector’s heels, but fear was faster than us both. A floor lamp lay on its side in front of an open window directly opposite the door. We went that way and leaned on the sill, guns in hand. The plainclothes cop from the tan two-door stood in a fenced-in yard filled with clumps of dead grass and filter-tipped butts, snapping a pair of cuffs on the man I’d seen trolling the directory in my building. He had on the same outfit of corduroy sportcoat, yellow polo shirt, and tan Dockers: At least I hoped there wasn’t another like it in town. His face was as red as the apartment manager’s, swallowing up the surgical scar on his cheek, and he was standing off-balance, favoring a sprained or broken ankle. Just thinking about that one-story leap made my bad leg start throbbing all over again.
“Hold him there.” Alderdyce put away his piece.
When we turned from the window, Pirandello had gone. The door hung open the way we’d left it.
I felt a bad tingle. My whole body became the left arm of a man having a heart attack.
It was a small apartment, with a kitchenette opening onto the living room, where all the living seemed to be done on a stained red crushed-velour sofa in front of a seventeen-inch TV on a metal stand, with an end table stocked with the Blue Ruin in forty-ounce bottles and a saucer domed over with more butts. The only other door led to a bedroom, where the woman who’d tried to sell herself to me as Cecelia Wynn lay on ravaged bedding wearing the clothes she’d worn in Wyandotte, soaked through with blood.
I belted the gun then. All the killers had left the building.
TWENTY
Alderdyce finished describing the cousin and put away his cell. He looked down at the dead woman.
“Shot or stabbed. Shot, probably. And not in here. She didn’t bleed enough onto the sheets.” He placed the back of a hand against her cheek. “Cold. Couple of hours, anyway. Sure about that ID?”
“There can’t be another woman in town who looks that much like Cecelia in her picture. And she’s got on the same clothes.” I tried to make eye contact with her, a hobby of mine. You never can, quite. They’re always looking at something out beyond the Milky Way. Someone let out a gust of air then. It was me. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath.
She was still wearing the white car coat. He went through the slash pockets, came out empty-handed. Even he wasn’t ready to search closer to the body. “Help me toss the place. Gently. Don’t want the lab monkeys thinking we’re out to bust the union.”
“Grid or spiral?”
“Just start looking, okay? Shit.”
I didn’t ask what we were looking for. He wouldn’t know any more than I did. In the nightstand I found a half-smoked box of Marlboros, an unopened package of Trojans, and a revolver. It was a Ruger LCP, a nice little concealed-carry piece in a pocket holster that covered the trigger guard and prevented accidental discharge when drawn. I let the inspector examine it with a hand wrapped in a handkerchief: I have another set of manners when I’m frisking a murder scene alone.
“Not it,” he said, taking his nose away from the muzzle. He turned the barrel toward the light and looked inside. “Some dust.”
“Serial number?”
“Intact. Not that it won’t come out virgin at the other end, if it’s Yummy’s. The bright boys don’t buy their ordnance out of car trunks on the street.”
I opened the closet door. Blue suit on a hanger, a couple of dress shirts, a bowling shirt, some polos, a pair of brown shoes and a pair of black. They needed polishing. Baseball caps and a fedora with a stingy brim and a yellow feather in the band on the shelf.
Mixed black and gray hairs in a brush on the dresser. More clothing in the drawers. I took a thick envelope from under a nest o
f rolled-up socks and thumbed through the bills inside. “Three thousand in fifties and hundreds,” I said. “Getaway stake.”
“Should’ve had it on their hips. I’m thinking they weren’t expecting company.”
“Not such bright boys after all. Unless the phony Cecelia was a surprise package somebody left on their doorstep.”
“Who’re you, their lawyer?”
I put the envelope with the money back where I’d found it. “The mob may be rusty after all those RICO convictions, but they don’t collect corpses, not with a river handy and twenty minutes from the Long Term lot at Metro Airport. Pirandello was wearing a cap and jacket. Maybe he and Yummy just got in. They didn’t have time to work out a plan.”
“We’ll ask Tony when we find him. Yummy’ll give us squat.” He went up on tiptoe to peer at the air vent near the ceiling.
While he was busy wondering if the screws had been loosened recently, I turned back toward the bed. From that angle I saw the corner of something red and shiny sticking out from under a tangle of bedding. I pulled out a pocketbook bound in red imitation alligator with a strap that snapped in place. It was the one she’d had in the restaurant. It must have fallen out of a pocket when she was dumped onto the mattress. I opened it. A folded sheet stuck out above the cash. I glanced at Alderdyce, whose back was still turned, and put the paper in my pocket.
“Alison Garland,” I read off the Ohio driver’s license in the window.
He turned back. “Where’d you get that?”
I told him. “She would’ve been twenty-six next month.”
“Hope her people kept the gift receipts.” He took the pocketbook from me.
“At least they didn’t have to go far to find a double.”
He riffled through the bills. “Couple of twenties and some singles. If they paid her, she spent it or banked it or somebody swiped it. No reason not to take it all, though; and the Sicilian Social Club doesn’t go around leaving IDs on stiffs. I’m starting to think you’re right about Yummy and Tony. Somebody wanted her in their laps. But—”
A siren turned into the block.
I said, “I thought I heard you order Code Two.”
“You did. I wish all my questions could be answered before I ask them. Dollars to dogshit somebody placed an anonymous call to nine-one-one. We just got here a little faster.”
The first uniform through the hallway door was a black sergeant built like a professional wrestler gone to seed. His partner was younger, white, and constructed along narrower lines. The apartment manager brought up the rear, puffing and redder than ever. Alderdyce showed his shield and shut the door in the manager’s face. The inspector led the way into the bedroom, filling them in on the way.
“Bag this.” He gave the sergeant the pocketbook. The white officer tipped back his cap and whistled at the sight of the woman on the bed.
“Louder,” said his partner, fishing a Ziploc bag out of a pocket. “They don’t wake up easy from a hole in the heart.”
The officer’s face went stiff. He cast around for a diversion and lit on me. “This guy a suspect, Inspector? He doesn’t look like a cop.”
I said, “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day.”
“Leave the detecting to the detectives, Boyd.” The sergeant looked at Alderdyce. “We caught the descriptions on the radio, sir. Want us in?”
“The others have a head start. Who called it in?”
“Dispatcher said he didn’t leave a name.”
“It was a he?”
“I don’t know. I just said he out of hab—”
“It’s a bad habit.”
I didn’t hang around to hear the rest of the lecture. He was still warming up when I took myself out. Down in the little foyer the manager stood shaking his head and wiping his congested face with a sodden tissue. He looked at me as if he wanted to ask something, but I kept walking. I had all the questions I needed.
*
I let my cabby wait while I hit an ATM, then had him take me to the police station in Wyandotte.
Van Buren wasn’t in. That was a break. The day captain, a redhead with a Marine cut, checked me out on the computer and filled in the blanks on a release for my vehicle. How much drag a Detroit detective inspector draws downriver depends on the inspector, and when there is a platinum shield, this one will be the first on his block to own one: If any charges had been filed in my case, they’d dropped off the screen. I was going to be a while repaying that debt, especially after Alderdyce found out I was packing important evidence in a homicide on my hip.
I wasn’t entirely clear on why I’d taken the risk, except his back had happened to be turned and I’d been playing things by-guess-and-by-gosh so long my better judgment had dried up.
I showed the garage man the paper signed by the day captain, paid the exorbitant storage fee, and went away in the Cutlass. The officer who’d driven it there from the restaurant hadn’t monkeyed with the seat or the mirrors, but when I turned on the radio I got a bellyful of how Congress was blowing its collective nose in the Bill of Rights and snapped it off. Nothing’s sacred anymore, not even a man’s pre-fixed stations.
The receipt belonged to The Wolverine Hotel on Jefferson, and was the one a guest signed when she checked in. Alison Garland had registered under her own name, probably because it belonged to the Visa card she’d used. In the old days, when the Wolverine was known as the Alamo, clerks weren’t so fussy about people paying cash. The new management was eager to keep its clientele from speed-dating by the hour or shooting up in the rooms. There’d been plenty of that in the old days, and halfway-house convicts staying there on their way toward respectability. One of them had been a client of mine.
The old neon sign had been replaced by brushed-metal letters on granite. Apart from it, a new roof, and some indoor improvements like brighter lightbulbs and johns that worked, the joint hadn’t changed so much I wouldn’t recognize it from bad times. The zigzag arrangement of outside staircases and walkways remained, with some wire-brushing and a fresh coat of black enamel on the railings, and a shiny ice machine in the tunnel between the north and south wings stood on the same spot where the old one had been removed after a local rapper who’d called himself Man One was found slowly decomposing inside it. They might not have found him even then, except when all the hotels were filled the last time the Tigers were in the Series there’d been a heavy run on ice and the last several highballs had tasted strongly of Dead Gangsta.
The paint smelled fresh, but only because the Hollywood film crew who’d chosen the place for an important scene had spent half a million bucks regentrifying it as agreed after it had spent the first half-million restoring it to its earlier sleaze.
It was comfortable enough for a family traveling on a tight budget. My thought was whoever had farmed in Cecelia Wynn’s lookalike had wanted her stashed in an out-of-the-way place where her husband or whoever he hired to find her wouldn’t be likely to run into her. The joke was on them, though: I generally start at the bottom and work my way up. The bottom being closer to where I am at the beginning.
Cheery fluorescents in the lobby ceiling had shoved out the dim green banker’s lamp on the desk and the Coolidge-era black-and-white floor tiles had made way for cork, a delight to sore feet. Crisp brochures advertising area attractions stood in a Lucite rack. A bright-eyed blonde in a green vest showed me her white veneers from behind the desk.
“Checking in, sir?” A chirpy accent, crisp as fresh pickles.
“Where’s Floyd?”
A smooth forehead tried to wrinkle. “Floyd?”
“The old clerk, looked like an extra from a George Romero film. He was grandfathered in so deep I thought they’d have to blast him loose with Primacord.”
“I wouldn’t know, sir. I’ve only been here six months. The man who had this job before me doesn’t sound like the one you described.”
“I’m not complaining. Floyd took kickbacks from the inmates and picked his teeth with a
switchblade. I’m looking for this woman. Is she still registered?” I took out the hotel receipt and spread it on the faux marble on the desk.
She looked at it and rattled keys on her computer. “She is, but I can’t give out her room number. I can call her for you.”
“That won’t do. She’s a person of interest in a criminal case.” I passed the folder with the honorary deputy’s badge pinned to it in front of her face, not fast enough for a hotel clerk.
“Are you a policeman?” She slapped a not-quite unfriendly expression over the bright smile.
I was in too deep with the law that day to say yes. “I’m working with Detroit Homicide. You can send Security up with me if you like.”
“I’m sorry.”
I put away the folder next to my wallet, lingered with my hand there, then thought better of it. Floyd would’ve let me up for a fiver. The angles I work don’t work on earnest-looking blondes in green vests. I took my hand out empty. “Okay. Thanks for being polite about it. Can I at least ask you not to tell her I asked about her?”
“Is there really a murder?”
“Unfortunately. She’s not a suspect”—and how—“just someone who might have seen something. I’m a private investigator. I was telling the truth about working with the police, but I guess I can wait until they show up.”
“I won’t say anything.”
I grinned thanks at her, picked up the receipt, and went out. I sat in the car smoking a cigarette and watching the clock in the dash inch its way toward noon. I was waiting for the shift to change. It was a small chance at best, and if it didn’t pan out I’d have to look up Barry Stackpole and see if he could hack his way into hotel records for the room number. That would take time, which was all the cops needed to find out about the Wolverine on their own. The snooper life was so much easier when all you had to do was wait for the clerk to go to the bathroom, then rifle through the registration cards on the desk.
Don't Look for Me: An Amos Walker Novel (Amos Walker Novels) Page 13