Stress

by Loren D. Estleman

  “It’ll just take a few minutes. Your commissioner offered us the complete cooperation of the police department. I’m sure he won’t mind.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll see you get tickets to the premiere. Think how proud your wife will be to see you up on the screen.”

  “I’m divorced.”

  “Your girlfriend, then. Don’t tell me a big strapping hunk like you doesn’t have to beat them off with your baton.”

  “I guess it’s okay.”

  “Great. This is Grace, our wardrobe supervisor. She’ll put you in a nice suit.”

  “What’s wrong with my uniform?”

  “You’ve got plainclothesman all over you. Surely your boss sees that. A forty-four long, I think, Grace. Make sure there’s room for a shoulder holster.”

  This was Kubicek’s job. “Corky, the department doesn’t much use shoulder holsters any more. They’re uncomfortable as hell and it’s a bitch to get your gun out in a hurry when you have to. This is standard.” He unclipped the belt rig from behind his right kidney and showed the director his standard issue .38 in its shiny black sheath. (Imitation alligator, $29.95 from the Police Times catalogue plus $1.95postage and handling.)

  Corky laid a hand on Kubicek’s upper arm. “Thanks, Paul. It is Paul?” The sergeant nodded. “Paul, I’ve got the same hard-on for realism as you. I’m shooting for mean and gritty. I mean, this ain’t Adam 12: ‘Take the license out of your wallet, please, lady. By the way, Jim, how’s your hemorrhoids?’ But the studio’s competing with double-oh-seven. Art?”

  The assistant director, always close, moved in tighter, and Corky rested his free arm across the little man’s shoulders, creating a huddle with Kubicek in the center. “Fetch me one of those shoulder harnesses from Props, okay? And a gun. That’s the ticket.” Art bustled off with a pat on the butt. “I see what I’m doing here as a kind of Satyricon of crime pictures: Real backgrounds, genuine cops and crooks in the cast—hey, my second lead did seven months at Q for uttering and publishing—none of that glitzy Hollywood shit. But the studio doesn’t see it that way. Burt fucking Reynolds takes on a team of hit men with flamethrowers and the next thing you know fifty percent of the budget on every film in production is set aside for fire suits for the stunt crew.

  “I could piss and moan,” he went on. “I could throw up my hands and say if it’s shit they want, I’ll give ’em shit. Only I’ve been around a long time. Did you know I directed an episode of Leave It to Beaver? Got an Emmy nomination. Point is I know the game: Give ’em something small so they think you’re playing by the rules, then while they’re busy congratulating themselves and kissing each other’s asses, kick ’em in the nuts. Ah.”

  He took the shoulder holster Art had brought, brown suede with a torso strap, the kind of rig Kubicek hadn’t seen since he was a rookie. “Sure, it’s old-fashioned, but it’s got romance. That thing you use looks like a bicycle clip.”

  “It’s got me this far alive. The underarm setup I wear when I’m off duty is a speed release. If I’d been wearing this thing New Year’s Eve I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you now. Also we got a regulation against magnums. That hogleg could get a cop busted.”

  “You got to admit it’s photogenic.” Corky worked the big .44 out of the holster, nickel-plated with a mother-of-pearl grip, as big as a T-square. “The boys in Special Effects goose up the charge for night scenes. Powder flare’s brighter. We’ve got a firefight on page twenty-three that’s going to make you forget every fireworks show you ever saw.” He socked the revolver back into its sheath and thrust the tangle of straps into Art’s hands. “Thanks for the information, Paul. Just keep on calling ’em as you see ’em. Okay, let’s try to get one decent take in before Mr. Sun goes down.”

  The actors stood on their marks and began the scene for the cameras. The Godfather guy tripped over his lines halfway through and they went back to the beginning. On the next try the soap queen started giggling and they took it again from the last cue. Technical problems spoiled the next two takes. By then tension was high and Corky called a five minute break while a woman from makeup fixed the actress’s eye shadow and the sound crew checked their equipment. A lighting technician with a walrus moustache peered at the lowering sun, shook his head, and spat a wad of pink gum at the base of a streetlamp.

  Kubicek wondered when the glamor kicked in.

  Everything went well right up to the end of Take Seven. The actors were wrapping up the scene when an ear-splitting screech turned every head on the street in the direction of the police barricades. A gold Chevy Nova pitted with rust slammed through the brightly painted sawhorses, scattering uniformed officers and spectators from its path. Kubicek’s .38 was in his hand before the car came to a grinding halt just short of the curb where the two actors were standing transfixed. The pale, confused face of a girl not much older than sixteen showed behind the windshield.

  In the silence that slammed down after the smoking tires stopped rolling, the clatter of something metallic striking the pavement swung heads back the other way, where Officer Horace Hyde had dropped his service piece trying to claw it out of his prop shoulder holster. One of the other cops-turned-extras, younger and childish looking in a suit from Wardrobe that hung on him like an awning, had snagged the hammer of his own .38 in the lining of the coat and he was still struggling to extricate it.

  Holstering his gun, Kubicek caught Corky’s eye as he was getting out of his canvas chair.

  “See, that’s why,” he told the director.

  When he got home he found a note from his wife in the kitchen, informing him there was a pot of homemade chop suey in the refrigerator that only needed to be microwaved. He was famished, but chose instead to warm it up the slow way on top of the gas stove. The Amana Radarange, a square silver box the size of a chopping block, had scared the living shit out of him ever since a pound of butter his wife was melting inside had exploded, setting the neighbor’s dog to barking and lathering the inside of the oven with grease. The device had been an anniversary present from his father-in-law.

  While the chop suey was warming, he went through the living room into the bedroom without turning on a light, put his revolver and belt clip into the strongbox, and locked it out of long habit, even though his daughter was grown and out of the house. He peeled off his suit coat and hung it on the back of the wooden chair and on top of it his necktie, whose knot he merely pulled loose so he could slip it off over his head. His shirt clung to his back like wet cellophane.

  “Paul?” Jean Kubicek’s voice was sleepy, muffled by the bedcovers.

  “Go back to sleep,” he said. “I’m coming to bed right after I eat.”

  “No, you’re not. You’ll go to the toilet first and read the paper for an hour. What time is it? I thought you’d be home early.”

  “Corky wanted to shoot the shift changing at Thirteen Hundred. The eight o’clock came and went while he was still setting up, so we had to wait till midnight. That picture shit ain’t such a soft spot after all.”

  “Umm-hmmm. Oh, someone called from Special Investigations.”

  “Shit. That pest Battle?”

  “No, Stilwell, I think his name was. He wants you to call him back. It’s on the pad by the phone.”

  “Okay, go to sleep.”

  In the living room he switched on a lamp. On the ruled tablet next to the black telephone on the walnut stand, Jean had written Stilwell’s name and home telephone number. He dialed it and sank into his old green recliner. Stilwell answered on the second ring, a surprise. He was sure he’d catch him asleep.

  “Wally, it’s Paul.”

  “Yeah, I been waiting for your call. Saw you on Channel Seven at eleven o’clock, back there in the crowd. What happened out there?”

  “Not a lot. Some little cunt got confused and drove through a barricade. She got a ticket. What’s the rumpus?”

  “Just keeping you posted. Looks like Battle’s got a line on your speedboat pilot
.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The black son of a bitch is playing it close to the vest, but I got it out of his notebook tonight when he went to the can. Got a pencil?”

  He picked up the pen Jean had used and swiveled the pad. Listening, he wrote. “Common spelling Russell? Okay. Littlejohn two words or one? Got it. Pinky’s Marina, shit, I know that place. Thanks, Wally. I owe.”

  After hanging up, he sat chewing on the end of the pen and reading what he’d written until his nose told him the chop suey was burning. He tore off the sheet and folded it into his shirt pocket on the way to the kitchen.

  Chapter Fourteen

  JUNIUS HARRISON’S MOTHER LIVED IN ONE HALF OF A duplex in East Detroit on the Stephens Highway, a steep-pitched frame house that had started out Georgian sometime in the twenties, lost its distinctive colonnaded front porch in either the Depression when lumber was negotiable tender for groceries or the postwar period when the stripped-down ranch home became the ideal to emulate, and acquired Victorian gingerbread probably during the nostalgia binge of the sixties. Charlie Battle, who had flirted with a career in architecture, thought it construction’s answer to the geological timetable: Slice into it, examine the substrata, and it would tell you everything you needed to know about the peripatetic nature of American culture in the twentieth century. It had been painted recently, gray with red trim, and there was a strip of lawn in front and flower boxes in the windows, heaped with fresh snow like scoops of ice cream. An almost desperately well-kept place in a community constantly striving to avoid being sucked down the same hole as its much larger namesake to the south.

  Battle stamped the snow off his Totes on the freshly swept concrete stoop and used the brass door-knocker. After half a minute the isinglass curtain on the other side of the stained-glass pane stirred. He made his face look innocent in the few seconds it took for the person inside to determine whether to unlock the door. Finally a latch snapped and it swung inward.

  “Mrs. Harrison?”

  It came out sounding more uncertain than intended. This tall woman in a knitted ivory dress caught at the waist with a wide black leather belt didn’t fit his picture of a grieving mother, although her expression was serious enough. Her hair, grayed only slightly, was pinned up in patrician waves and the powder on her face, matched perfectly to her nutmeg coloring, was skillfully applied. It was a long face without creases, wide in the mouth and mahogany-eyed.

  “My name is Randolph,” she said. “Mr. Harrison was my first husband.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m Charles Battle. I’m investigating Junius Harrison’s death.” He showed her his shield.

  “My son was no criminal.”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I were sure he was.”

  “The department you work for is. The day after it happened a dozen police officers came here with a search warrant. They said they were looking for stolen merchandise. I made them wait outside while I called my brother-in-law. He’s a paralegal. He came over and followed them through every room, just in case they tried to plant something. The sergeant in charge was angry he was here. He threatened to arrest him for obstruction. I really think if he wasn’t here they’d have ‘found’ something. But they went away empty-handed.”

  This was news to Battle; who had seen nothing about a search in the file. “Do you remember the sergeant’s name?”

  “I’m sure my brother-in-law has it. I can call him.”

  “Thank you. I can come back later if this is a bad time. I tried to call, but your line was busy.”

  “I took the phone off the hook. The newspapers and TV have been calling ever since it happened.” She stepped aside to let him in.

  The living room looked as if it had been done over in the recent past, not in keeping with any of the house’s stages of evolution. A pale orange shag carpet hugged the walls and there was a lot of heavy dark wood furniture rounded at the edges to look like aged oak. Pictures of someone he assumed to be Junius taken at various ages crowded an octagonal table with a shelf for magazines: Ebony, Argosy, Better Homes and Gardens, TV Guide.

  Another feature of the room looked as solid and roughhewn as the furniture, but unlike the furniture gave no impression that it was merely veneer. As Battle entered, this fixture stirred and rose from a wood-framed sofa upholstered in red velour.

  “Mr. Battle, this is Quincy Springfield.”

  The chairman of the American Ethiopian Congress was even bigger than he looked on television—a first for Battle, who usually found the opposite to be true—bull-shouldered and heavy-boned, with a head the size of a medicine ball, a fact which may have influenced his decision to forego the ubiquitous afro in favor of a skinhead cut reminiscent of Malcolm X’s. His features were even coarser than the policeman’s, and frozen in a brutal scowl, the kind of expression that made even white liberals cross the street when it came into view.

  “Detective Battle, I think.” His voice, light for his size, still had resonance, a byproduct of public speaking. “I couldn’t help overhearing.”

  “Just officer. When the investigation’s over I go back in uniform.”

  “Maybe not. If Kubicek walks for murdering Junius.”

  There was no anger in his tone, only deep conviction. Springfield didn’t shake hands. His hands were enormous. The delicate rose-patterned cup and saucer he was holding looked like part of a child’s tea set pinched between his thick fingers. Without thinking he could have crushed them to powder, and had probably done a good deal worse in his past life as a mover in the Detroit numbers racket. His flamboyantly tailored bright blue sharkskin suit, another holdover, was a startling incongruity encasing so much personal gravity.

  “Murder’s an emotional word,” Battle said. “When an officer’s involved we call it ‘deadly force.’ I’m here to find out whether it was necessary in this case.”

  “I believe you, brother.”

  “Well, thanks for that.”

  “Don’t thank me till you learn something. I believe you when you say you’re here to find out what you’re here to find out. You’re a tame bird dog. You shuffle here and shuffle there and sniff around and bring back what you dug up like a good yard nigger before anybody else can dig it up and your lily-white boss rubs your head and says, ‘That’s fine, boy, now you go put on a clean pair of overalls and drive the commissioner’s wife down to Hudson’s.’ And what you brought goes into a locked file if they don’t just haul off and throw it out and Paul Kubicek goes right on back to what he does best, which is what John Nichols calls keeping the peace and what the history books call genocide, and when the black brothers and sisters howl, Massah John he say, ‘We put a darky on the case, what more you people want?’ ” He threw an internal switch and shut off the redneck honk. “They still lynching us, boy. Only now they got one of us fetching along the rope.”

  “I’d have more faith in that if you stumbled over some of the words,” Battle said. “I get the feeling I’m just a guinea pig for something you’ve got planned for a bigger audience.”

  “I’m no public speaker. All I got on my side is a great big mad. I don’t guess you’re old enough to remember a fellow who called himself Mahomet. That was a speaker.”

  “I remember hearing about him. I never heard him speak. I was in junior high when he was shot.”

  “They gunned him down like an animal on Kercheval in sixty-six. You know what he done wrong? He tried to stop a riot. He stopped three bullets instead. We laid him out in one of his white suits. Mayor Cavanagh and Governor Romney came to the funeral. See, they knowed how much us people like all them flowers and big cars and hymn-singing and carrying on. It didn’t take, though. Well, you know what happened in sixty-seven.”

  “You’re the first person I’ve met who thought the riots accomplished anything. Forty-three families might give you an argument.”

  “Saints, the lot of ’em. Martyrs to the cause. Like Junius. He’s dead, and he looks better than you. Not every Jew followed Jesus, but none of them
put on Roman armor neither.”

  Despite everything Battle found himself liking Springfield. It was clear the activist had some education, which he hid behind his studied street talk, and that made the officer wary; still, he believed in what he said. Battle had heard mayors, city council members, and the police department brass speak and it had always sounded like something that had been put up in jars and labeled and taken down and opened for this or that particular occasion. He remembered the solemn dignity with which his Uncle Anthony would out-fit himself, inside and out, for the travesty of the professional wrestling ring, the way he would channel all the anger and frustration of a circumscribed life into a ceremony whose major moves and outcome were preordained according to the receipts at the gate, and he respected the pride if not its application. Certainly Battle felt a stronger bond with this hoodlum-turned-rabble-rouser than he did with the other members of the shooting team at 1300.

  Mrs. Randolph’s voice startled him. He’d forgotten she was in the room. “Please sit down. I never saw a fistfight start between two men who were sitting.”

  Springfield lowered himself back onto the sofa. He actually looked shamefaced. Battle chose a rocker with the marks of a chisel manufactured into its frame. Mrs. Randolph offered coffee. He seldom drank coffee after breakfast, but he accepted. He remembered his first partner telling him that saying yes cut through a lot of bullshit. His hostess filled another dainty cup from a china carafe on a matching tray on the coffee table. He said yes again to cream and sugar and sat back balancing the cup and saucer. Junius hadn’t come from the sort of household that usually bred armed robbers.

  His mother perched on the edge of a straight chair and rested her hands in her lap. They were calloused at the fingertips, not from handling porcelain dinnerware. Battle had noticed, too, that her face was scarred at the corner of one eye and to the right of the center of her lower lip. She had covered the marks expertly with makeup, but they were raised slightly and showed when the light struck her at certain angles.