Stress

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You’ll have to hang on to it for a while,” he said. “I don’t have the price yet.”

  “Ordinarily I might, but I’ve got a bleeding ulcer.” Which Joe Piper took to mean Angell was under some kind of surveillance. He hated this cloak-and-dagger shit, everyone talking around corners. If James Bond were genuine he’d be jabbering to himself in the Old Spies’ Home by now. “I’ve got a customer in Argentina willing to meet the market and take delivery next week.”

  Perón. He’d heard the Fascist asshole was planning a comeback. “We got a deal, Homer.”

  “Scott. I don’t know any Homers. Did I say this ulcer’s about to rupture? Surgery’s expensive.”

  “Who pays for most of your operations, you little shitpot Napoleon?”

  Angell made a noise in his nose. “Napoleon. That squirt thought strategy meant outnumbering the enemy twenty-five to one. If Murat hadn’t saved his Corsican ass with a suicide charge at Marengo, Waterloo would have come fifteen years early.”

  “Scotty boy, I don’t give a rat’s ass. Your market’s in Detroit. There’s a revolution going on here every night. If you can beat that in South America, my advice is to go ahead and brush up on your fucking español.” He slammed the receiver into its cradle.

  The bell rang again. He walked over to his chair and drained his glass, then came back and answered.

  “Josephine speaking.”

  Angell said, “I might be able to hold things off ten days. That’s the absolute limit. After that it’s buenas dias, Buenos Aires.”

  Joe Piper glanced at the incredibly tasteful calendar Dolly had hung on the wall next to the kitchen, Tahquamenon Falls rendered in watercolors by an Ann Arbor artist. Suddenly he missed Maureen’s pot roast-and-potatoes taste, big clunky crucifixes and fake jade lamps with fringed shades, her high color when she brought home a Day-Glo St. Sebastian on black velvet from a garage sale in Taylor. Grief swept over him in a wave. She had shot herself with a .38 Colt he had held out of a sale lot for their personal protection. From that day to this no firearm had come through his house.

  “Give me to the first and I’ll see what I can do,” he told Angell.

  “Two weeks?”

  “Well, fifteen days. ‘All the rest have thirty-one,’ remember?”

  “That’s a long time to live with a bellyache.”

  “Take Pepto.”

  After the conversation he went out on the glassed-in porch looking out on the rest of the subdivision and the peaks of the buildings in Pontiac’s crumbling downtown beyond. February, Michigan’s bleakest and least predictable month, was on its way, casting its steel point shadow over the snow-heaped rooftops. Two more months of shoveling and snow tires, not counting the annual St. Patrick’s Day blizzard. Big Jim would have embraced St. Patrick’s Day with the fervor of a transplanted Dubliner. Joe Piper had never met Dolan, dead some forty years, but he’d seen the old man’s photograph in the Shamrock Bar, his big mutton-chopped face above a cruel collar and stickpin, and he could picture him leading the parade on foot in a pressed-paper hat with a shillelagh in his bricklayer’s fist. Behind him, perched atop the back seat of an open touring car, would ride the mayor and the chief of police, possibly the governor. Why not? All three owed him their jobs.

  In those times, according to Joe Piper’s father, the fixers danced jigs in their shirtsleeves and garters with redheaded women to the old music performed by live bands, then met in back rooms. They played cards, larded the air with blue smoke, and propped their feet in big square brogans and pearl-gray spats on the tables, doling out money and favors to their constituents and arguing over who would run their city. Their speech, laced heavily with the Gaelic, throbbed with the bass tremble of a tuba band. Whiskey ran like water. St. Paddy’s was Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July rolled into one sodden orgy. Now it was just an excuse to swill beer tinted with green vegetable dye and listen to the Rovers. Half the people who dressed up as leprechauns weren’t even Irish. Some of them were black. The atmosphere in the Shamrock on that most glorious of days belonged to a Presbyterian wake.

  Again Joe Piper’s fingers traced the scar at his throat. More and more now he saw himself as Sebastian in Maureen’s bargain painting, his hide pierced at every angle with barbed shafts that glowed in the dark. At those times the wounds felt as tangible as the one he bore in reality. They let in the chill even through the windows of the porch.

  He bet that on February second nobody in California gave a shit whether the groundhog saw its shadow or not.

  Chapter Eighteen

  WEEDS MADE CHARLIE BATTLE CLAUSTROPHOBIC.

  The officer, who had spent hours last autumn drilling holes and installing cedar panels in his four-by-four apartment closet, had once crawled headfirst down a broken sewer pipe in ninety-degree weather to rescue a four-year-old boy who had fallen in and broken his leg, all without breaking a sweat. Yet he found himself laboring for breath less than a minute after climbing down a bank covered with thistles and timothy off Schoolcraft Road. The growth, flattened somewhat by an earlier snowfall and winterkilled yellow, was thick, and he had to stand on tiptoe and fill his lungs with cold air before he could steel himself to go on.

  He blamed the condition on fishing vacations with his Uncle Anthony, a lifelong urbanite who equated the wilderness with emancipation. Come the doldrums between wrestling’s busy spring season and the fall start-up, he would bundle nephew and tackle into the car at 4:00 A.M. and takeoff for some northern lake or river that could only be reached by a long trek down a tangled bank. By the time they got to the water, young Charlie would be bleeding from a dozen thorn-scratches, bumpy with insect bites, and itching from poison ivy. In the heat of day the atmosphere became tropical. When the pair started home at sunset, battling their way back through the undergrowth, the air would be as thick as meringue. Invariably fears of suffocation forced the boy to claw through the last few yards of weeds in a panic, gasping for the oxygen and monoxide of the highway.

  But he was unwilling to disappoint his uncle, and in twenty years he never missed a fishing vacation. In time he grew to dread the approach of summer. And so he had not been as regretful as he felt he should have when Anthony’s deteriorating health caused them to give up the annual trip.

  Now here he was again, and the absence of heat, mosquitoes, and noxious plants did little to lift that old sense of oppression. If anything, the knowledge of what awaited him at the base of the shallow slope contributed to it.

  The January morning was all hard edges and pewter gray. The culvert, installed thirty years previously to prevent swamp runoff from covering the road, was chalky to the touch, the trickle that came through it frozen solid in a glinty braid. The usual detritus of cigarette filters, spent condoms, and Styrofoam Big Mac coffins was stuck fast to the ground. Even the vapor issuing from the throats of the five men standing near the mouth of the culvert seemed sluggish in the frost, curling spastically in a kind of stop-motion effect. Four of them were in uniform, but only two of the uniforms belonged to the city.

  “Charlie, I almost didn’t recognize you out of the bluebag.” The officer who came partway up the bank to shake his gloved hand was black, and even bulkier-looking than usual in winter issue with a pile-trimmed collar and earflaps on his cap. Matt Kellog of the Public Vehicle Bureau was always fighting to keep his weight below the department maximum.

  “I don’t expect to be out of it for long, Matt. Thanks for the squeal.”

  “I broke chain of command there, but what the hell, I’m too young to make commissioner this year. I was reading this boy’s name off his driver’s license over my walkity-talk when it clicked where I heard it. Hell, it was on this morning’s turnout sheet. Gene Grundy told me you was on the shoot team, so I asked for you. What the hell, I never seen none of them 1300 guys’ wangs in the shower.”

  “Nor anywhere else, I hope.” Battle had already lost interest in his former academy classmate. He was watching the two men in the uniform of the Wayne Co
unty Morgue using fishermen’s gestures to argue the best way of getting the seventh man on the scene into the body bag they’d brought.

  It would take some doing. Obviously far more limber when placed in the culvert, the corpse had gone into rigor and congealed in a fetal position with its chin tucked into its chest and its arms and legs crossed. Hoarfrost had glazed flesh and fabric a consistent white, making it difficult to determine just where the man left off and his, clothing began. Battle could not even be sure the man was black until he was standing over him. Ice crystals glittered in his afro, which the officer was convinced would shatter like a glass lampshade if kicked. He had never before seen a human body frozen solid. The effect was like sculpture, and not at all connected with the mortal condition.

  He had to sit on his heels and twist his head to see the crystallized features. At first he thought the identification was a mistake, that this was someone many years older than Russell Littlejohn, perhaps his father; but it was only the illusion of age created by stalactites of white ice hanging from his eyebrows and the suggestion of a moustache. He recognized the face well enough. And he felt his own face growing haggard.

  “OD’s my guess. He’s got tracks between his fingers. They crawl in any old place once they start feeling all warm and fuzzy.”

  This was a new voice. Battle rose to face the only other man there wearing plainclothes, a tall lean pale Nordic in along black Chesterfield and black fur felt snapbrim hat who looked like a Swedish ski instructor. The only thing about him with any color was the end of his narrow nose, which was as red as a Christmas tree bulb. He dabbed at it from time to time with a handkerchief wadded in his gloved palm. In between dabs it dripped freely.

  Battle showed his badge and introduced himself. “I’m investigating the shootings at the Ogden mansion New Year’s Eve. Littlejohn was wanted for questioning. The BOL went out when he didn’t show up at work Monday and hadn’t been home.”

  “I saw the sheet. I put in a call to Lieutenant Zagreb, but I guess you’ve got more friends on road patrol. Daniel Iniskilling, lieutenant Homicide.” He didn’t offer his hand.

  “We’re all in the same boat. Who found him?”

  “Couple of kids looking for a place to smoke, though they said they were ice skating. Kellog and Anderson here cruised past and they flagged them down. That was about eight-thirty.”

  “I don’t guess we have time of death.”

  “The M.E. spent about five minutes. He said to call him when the stiff thaws. That’ll be about this time Thursday. The microwave downtown isn’t quite big enough.”

  “Any evidence on the scene of drug use?”

  Iniskilling’s face screwed up into what might have been an expression of contempt, but he sneezed into the handkerchief. Wiping up: “You can’t walk two feet in any direction down here without tripping over a syringe. When Forensics gets through sweeping, this shithole will be clean enough to set aside as a national park. Just in time for the 1980 tourist season.”

  “If they find a needle with Littlejohn’s prints on it I’ll eat it.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning what it means. Material witnesses don’t just overdose on cue.”

  “I guess that would be your long experience talking.” Iniskilling blew his nose energetically.

  “I’m not after your job, Lieutenant. This kid has probably been shooting up for years. It’s damn convenient for someone that he’d pick now to lose count. I was getting set to pull him in for questioning.”

  “Jesus, Officer, I’m glad as hell you’re not after my job. I spend most of my time worrying I’ll come back from the toilet and find some shit britches in his first pair of long pants with his feet up on my desk.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “I know what you meant. You should try getting ahead of your rent with some old-fashioned overtime instead of sitting home watching Get Smart. I’ve pried a hundred of these pukes out of culverts and doorways and stripped cars, all just as dead, and it wasn’t any of their first times. They don’t buy the stuff at Cunningham’s. They never know if what they just scored is one hundred percent pure Asian or D-Con.” He swung his head toward the top of the bank. “Okay, you got to play Sherlock all morning. Run along now and let the grownups get to work.”

  Officer Aaron Bookfinger and Sergeant Walter Stilwell were making their way down from the street, grasping fistfuls of weeds here and there to slow the descent. Bookfinger had on a black trench coat and Russian-style fur hat. Stilwell looked like Elmer Fudd in a plaid wool cap with earflaps and a Mackinaw. At the bottom he strode forward to grasp Iniskilling’s outstretched hand.

  “Dan, you scandihoovian bastard. I heard you went back home and got your sex changed.”

  “That’s Denmark, schmuck. My parents came from Norway. Who’s the Jew, your lawyer?” The lieutenant shook hands with Bookfinger. It was clear all three were old acquaintances.

  Matt Kellog touched shoulders with Battle. “Ain’t no talking to that crew, man. They can’t call us niggers no more and they run clean out of conversation.”

  Walking past, Bookfinger caught Battle’s eye and nodded quickly. Stilwell, trailing him by half a step, didn’t look in the black officer’s direction. Battle understood with no words having been spoken that there had been a shift in his relationship with the other two investigators.

  Stilwell nudged the clenched corpse with the black shiny toe of an unbuckled galosh. “Stiffer’n Gerald fucking Ford. You boys better not drop him on your way up,” he told the morgue attendants. “Ain’t enough Superglue in the metro area to piece the little prick back together.”

  “OD?” Bookfinger asked Iniskilling.

  “What else? Charlie Chan there thinks he was poisoned and airlifted here by helicopter.”

  Stilwell said shit. “We could’ve phoned in on this one. Heater’s piss-poor in the unit we drew. My balls fell off and rolled down the sewer clear back on Beaubien.”

  “Well, I thought you might want to take a look.”

  “Can’t think why. One dead junkie looks pretty much like all the rest.” Stilwell spun around and started back toward the bank. Bookfinger shook Iniskilling’s hand again and followed. This time neither of them glanced at Battle.

  Battle said, “That’s it? That’s your on-site?”

  At the base of the incline Stilwell paused and looked back over his shoulder. “We’re Special Investigations, sonny. We leave sticking fingers up dead assholes to the white coats at County. They went to college.”

  “Are we going to question Kubicek?”

  Bookfinger had begun climbing. Stilwell touched his arm. The pair faced Battle. The icy wind was making their eyes water.

  “Ask him what, if he’s bringing a date to the funeral?” Stilwell said.

  “I was thinking something more along the lines of where he was and what he was doing between Friday night when Littlejohn left work at the marina and this morning when the body turned up.”

  The sergeant’s face, already flushed from the cold, went as red as his hair. He took a step toward Battle. Bookfinger caught his sleeve.

  “We’re all cops, Charlie,” said the officer. “We don’t go around accusing each other of homicide without evidence.”

  “I’m just saying we should ask him the same questions we’d ask anyone else.”

  “Paul Kubicek ain’t everyone else,” Stilwell said. “He was running into empty buildings after armed robbers when you were eating strained collards. He’s what every cop ought to be. You tell me how tearing off a hunk of toilet paper and handing it to the mayor every time he takes a crap down at City Hall set you up to judge a cop like Paul Kubicek.”

  Bookfinger placed a hand on Stilwell’s shoulder. “Cut the kid some slack, Wally. He’s just trying to make an impression.”

  “I’ll make an impression in his ass with one of my size nines.” But the storm had passed. Stilwell swung around and started up the bank. His partner hung back.

  “Jus
t because I’m not coming out swinging doesn’t mean I think any different from Wally,” he told Battle. “The department isn’t America. Nobody’s created equal down at 1300.”

  No one in the ditch said anything or moved until the two investigators were almost out of sight. Then Kellog’s partner, a young black with sideburns shaped like scimitars, pursed his lips and sent a fleck of white spittle at the ground where they’d been standing.

  “I got to apologize for Merlin,” Kellog said to Battle. “He ain’t much of a conversationalist.”

  “I think he’s eloquent as hell.” Battle said his good-byes and left.

  Chapter Nineteen

  CARYN CROWNOVER OGDEN’S FIRST SIGNIFICANT CONfrontation was with a day nurse on Opal’s floor. It was also her last.

  Diagnosed with pneumonia, the six-year-old was placed in a private room for observation in the Hutzel children’s facility at Harper Grace Hospital. Caryn told the nurse, a pale undersize brunette whom she had at first mistaken for a teenage aide, that she wanted a cot set up in the room so she could spend the night with her daughter. The nurse frowned prettily.

  “I’m not sure we can do that, Mrs. Ogden. The child needs rest.”

  “If rest were that important she’d be better off in a train station. Anyway, I don’t snore and I’m not planning to throw a party. I’d appreciate it if you could dig up one of those egg-crate mattress pads. I have a bad back.”

  “The child is in the best possible hands. The personnel and equipment at Hutzel are—”

  “After visiting hours, the personnel is one nurse per floor, and the equipment is a monitor to tell her when something goes wrong with a patient’s heart or respiration. I intend to be here when Opal’s condition changes.”

  “Mrs. Ogden—”

  “I’ll discuss this with Mr. Dobrinski. Please do me the favor of calling him.”

  “The administrator is very busy.”

  “I hope so. His salary is sixty thousand.”

  Casimir Dobrinski was young for his position and, Caryn thought, far too good-looking to spend most of his time locked away in meetings. He was one of those tall blond curly-headed Poles more readily associated with white chargers and golden armor than with coarse jokes about the stupidity of the race. Although not a doctor, he affected tailored white sport coats for their subliminal suggestion, and striped ties in memory of the one semester he had audited at Cambridge following his army discharge. There was a time, earlier in Caryn’s marriage to an ambitious man who lived at the office, when she might have gone after this prize with all the single-tracked determination of a Crownover upbringing; but motherhood had changed all that.