Stress

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Windshield.”

  Dobrinski and Riordan looked at Caryn. An arm snaked around her shoulders and squeezed; Ted. “A face behind glass,” she said. “It was a windshield. In a car, watching.”

  “Where?” demanded the agent. “What kind of car?”

  “Thass him. Like Tonto, only short and squatty-like.” Dwight Littlejohn handed the sheet back to Battle.

  The officer was seated with the middle-aged couple among the plastic schooners in Lieutenant Zagreb’s office at 1300. Zagreb had left early on a personal errand, his night-watch replacement didn’t come on for another hour, and Battle didn’t trust any of the interrogation rooms, whose walls literally had ears. He’d wanted Russell’s parents alone in the first lucid moment after identifying their son at the Wayne County

  Morgue around the corner. Bookfinger and Stilwell were out, ostensibly interviewing yet another witness who had been present at the Crownover-Ogden mansion at the time of the shootings New Year’s Eve. More likely they were stretching a ten-minute routiner into two hours of saganaki and brews at the Grecian Gardens.

  Littlejohn pére bore no resemblance to his male offspring. Shorter and thick through the shoulders, running to fat and beginning to stoop, he cropped his graying hair almost to a stubble as if in some kind of reverse rebellion against Russell’s afro. His face was big, soft, and sad—its perennial expression, Battle suspected—and his hands, relatively small for the maintenance work he did for a living, were broken-nailed and shone with calluses. Wife Elizabeth was four years younger but looked ten years older than her actual age of forty-four, with her hair up and pinned and white-framed eyeglasses attached to a gold chain around her neck, which she’d used to study the drawing of the man her husband had described, the man he had seen climbing the outside stairs to his son’s room over the garage recently, he didn’t know just when.

  “Could it have been New Year’s Day?” Battle asked.

  Littlejohn looked at his wife, who said, “You saw him. I didn’t.”

  “Coulda been,” he said. “Coulda been a Sunday after. Anyway I was home. I only just seen him through the window. Russell’s friends they come—came and went.” His adam’s apple worked. “I only remember this one on accounta he some kinda injun. You see Two Rode Together?”

  Battle hesitated. “Uh, no.”

  “Woody Strode, he played a injun in that. Only he black. Well, this one didn’t look like him. This one he all injun. Woop-woop, you know?” He patted one cupped hand to his mouth, holding two fingers of the other behind the crown of his head like feathers.

  “Dwight,” Mrs. Littlejohn said.

  He looked at her, eyes bright as a child’s leaving a movie theater. A dark shade slid down behind his face when their eyes made contact. The big soft sadness came rushing back in. “Oh.” He lowered his hands to his lap.

  Battle gave the charcoal sketch back to the artist, a blonde officer in the regulation cheap white shirt and pleated pants with a .38 in a holster strapped to his belt. Reedy and pale, he would have looked more natural in a paint-streaked sweatshirt and sandals. Battle had to wonder at the chain of circumstances that would lead a man from the north light and nude models of an art-school studio to the fluorescents and dumpy uniformed matrons of Detroit Police Headquarters.

  “You say you didn’t see if he came by car?”

  Littlejohn shook his head. “You thinking he the one kilt Russell?”

  “Do you think someone killed him?”

  “You do, or you wouldn’t of took us back here to talk. Nobody done that when my brother got kilt.”

  Battle’s chair squeaked. “Your brother was killed?”

  “During the riot it was.”

  He sat back. “Sixty-seven?”

  “Hell, no! That wasn’t no riot. I’m talking about nineteen forty-three. At Paradise Valley it was. The dance hall, you know?”

  Battle didn’t know, but he nodded anyway. It seemed the quickest way to get back to business.

  “It started on Belle Isle. They was some kind of fight. Blacks said a black woman and her baby got throwed off the bridge. Whites said a white woman was raped. Wasn’t none of it true, but it got around. They mixed it up in front of Paradise Valley downtown. My brother Earl got his head stomped in the middle of the street. Cops that come told my mother what happened said it was more like a hurricane than a murder, and that’s the last we seen of them till the funeral.”

  “They came to the funeral?”

  “Oh, they come to all the funerals. Twenny-five of them there was. Black funerals, that is. I think maybe nine or ten whites got kilt. Cops figured we’d get out of hand if they didn’t come to pay they respects. ’Course, they took along guns and sticks.”

  “Things were different then,” Battle said.

  “Yeah, they got on different uniforms now.”

  He returned to the subject. “Were you aware your son used heroin?”

  “No,” said the woman. “Yes,” said the man. The responses were simultaneous. Littlejohn said, “I figured he was using something. I didn’t know heroin.”

  “You didn’t figure anything of the kind,” his wife said. She was holding a handkerchief twisted in one fist, but had yet to use it. Shock, Battle thought; or maybe she’d run out of tears a long time before. “If you did, you’d of said something.”

  Littlejohn was looking at Battle. “You know everything the little woman and I said to each other in the past year?”

  Battle waited.

  “She say”—screwing his voice up high—“ ‘Dwight, get out of that toilet, Mannix is on.’ And I say, ‘Well, he just have to wait, my bowels don’t just up and move with that big old minute hand.’ Thassit.”

  Battle could see this wasn’t going any further. He stood. “Thanks for coming down, Mr. and Mrs. Littlejohn. I’m very sorry about your son. Just so you know, we’re not treating this one as a hurricane.”

  The old man—he was old now legitimately, too many notches past middle age to claim it—moved one of his thick rounded shoulders. “It don’t matter. Earl and Russell, they never knowed each other, but they might just as well be one and the same. It don’t matter when you lived. Once you dead, you dead all the time.”

  Battle said nothing. Dwight Littlejohn sat working his hands in his lap for a moment, like a warrior steeling himself for some dramatic act. Then he got up and scraped his heels going out, without looking back to see if his wife was following.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  KUBICEK LIT ABOUT HIS HUNDREDTH PALL MALL OFF the butt of the last, shook out the match, and flipped it in the vicinity of the heaped ashtray, a homemade clay job left over from some proud papa’s stint at 1300. By now that kid had probably turned in his summer-camp trunks for a bandanna and Old Glory on his butt. Kids today were pukes.

  The interrogation room, steeped as were its lath-and-plaster walls in the sharp sweat-and-vomit stench of fifty years’ worth of accusations, identifications, commiserations, refutations, genuflections, and the occasional confession, held no terrors for him. He knew where the mikes were hidden, the location of the dents in the floor where heads had struck in simpler days when the Supreme Court was just a building on the D.C. tour, where was the best place to stand on the other side of the two-way glass so the perp at the table couldn’t see you watching him. He was pretty sure this was the room where he and Silverman cracked the Krikor Messerlian murder in ’67 when they obtained a confession from the young looter who had bashed in the Armenian shopkeeper’s skull with a baseball bat. Messerlian had been the first person killed during the riots. That was the week the city went to shit and it hadn’t been back since. The sergeant felt no loyalty to the city, its residents, or his superiors. The first was just a collection of buildings, most of which needed work they wouldn’t get from the people who lived in them, and the people themselves were animals who fucked and shit and stole to pump shit into their veins. If they were anything more than that they’d move out. His superiors spent their time at
the office shuffling all the Kubiceks from one duty sheet to another, striking Kubiceks from the sheets when they got killed, sending their dress uniforms to the cleaners between funerals, then going to their real homes in the suburbs, stopping off on the way to pick up their mail at the addresses they maintained in the city to fulfill the department residency requirement. Kubicek felt protective toward his house and wife and daughter, but STRESS was home. The squad and he understood each other. Punch in on time, punch out at quitting, let it know where you were when you went out on a call, pick up your three hundred minus withholding on Friday, and you were both square. Run down the wrong alley too fast, turn too slow, and your wife got a pension and Old Glory from the captain of the Color Guard, folded into a neat blue triangle. What could be more tidy?

  He’d been thinking these thoughts when Charlie Battle walked past the interrogation room door, purposely left ajar lest Kubicek get the impression he was being detained. With him was an older black couple the sergeant didn’t know from a thousand he’d seen on sidewalks and in numbers parlors and in shabby living rooms where they laced their stained fingers together in their laps and swore on the Bible that little Tyrone was home with them eating the Colonel when poor Mr. Aboud was getting his brains blown out for the $63.50 in his till. The man, rounded all over like a stone from a stream and beaten-looking, paused and looked in at Kubicek for along moment, then moved on with the others, shaking his head. Kubicek felt the corners of his mouth tightening in a wolfish smile. Rookie, he thought, and he went ahead and said it out loud. If you were going to pull off the old hidden-ball play, it helped to coach your players first. Back on Riopelle he’d been a little worried when the black officer pulled out his Miranda card, but he saw now things were going to be all right.

  He wondered why he felt disappointed.

  A long time later—just twenty minutes by his heavy-duty wristwatch, but clocks had a way of moving slowly in those rooms—Battle returned alone, closing the door behind him. Another tip-off that he didn’t know what he was doing; did he think the sergeant would take that to mean no one was listening in?

  Well, play the part. “About fucking time,” Kubicek said, squashing out the butt in an old burn-hole on the scarred wooden table. “You through showing your mammy and pap around the office?”

  “That’s raw even for you.” Battle leaned back against the door, folding his arms. “But I shouldn’t be surprised. You killed Junius Harrison because he happened to be black at an all-white party in Grosse Pointe.”

  “Know that for a fact, do you?”

  “There’s nothing to link him to Kindu Nampula and Leroy Potts, nada. Nampula and Potts were heavyweights. Harrison’s record squeaked except for a penny pop for selling joints. Just on the off chance he made some kind of contact with Nampula when they were both in Jackson, I checked with Records there. Since about two weeks into his orientation, Harrison worked as a file clerk and errand boy for the deputy warden; slept in the bedroom the deputy didn’t use because he had a house and family in Albion. Both the warden and the deputy warden provided references when he was released. Those references helped land him his job in the legal firm that sent him to the Ogden party that night with a message for one of the Ogdens’ guests. Harrison never mingled with the general population all the time he was behind bars. If he saw Nampula at all it was in passing. Not much opportunity to forge a criminal partnership there.”

  “Harrison’s old man beat his old lady. He didn’t grow up no Ricky Nelson.”

  Battle stared. “Who told you that?”

  “I’m a cop. Lessons cost extra.”

  “Never mind. I can guess. Okay, he had a bad childhood. You didn’t know that when you shot him. All you saw was the color of his skin.”

  Kubicek shook a cigarette out of the pack and tapped it against the back of his hand. “I’m out on the streets, pal. I don’t see a whole hell of a lot of Swedes running away from smashed plate-glass windows with color TVs under their arms.”

  “What if one’s a TV repairman running to catch a bus?”

  “Shit.” Chuckling, he lit up. “Say Harrison had a legit reason to be there. Even the Grosse Pointe cops said there had to be someone inside.”

  “Inside men know the layout. New Year’s Eve was his first visit.”

  “Anybody can get hold of a floor plan. They needed a layoff man to watch their backs.”

  Battle counted a beat. “What if I told you the Grosse Pointe police have the inside man in custody?”

  Kubicek extinguished his match by pressing it between thumb and forefinger. The stinging burn established calm. “What if I told you Nixon wore Pat’s panties to the Kremlin? Buddy, you stink at this.”

  “Inside woman, actually. Cops up there found men’s clothes and Kindu Nampula’s fingerprints all over the apartment of a server who worked for the company that catered the party. She’d worked the house once before, last Easter. The public defender’s cutting a deal: No jail time if she testifies.”

  “Stupid fuckers, them Pointers. Heist guys don’t tell their cunts shit.”

  “But if she plugs the hole, where’s that leave Junius Harrison?”

  “Back-up, like I said. Most messenger boys don’t pack a piece, even in Detroit.”

  “Harrison never saw that thirty-two. You dropped it next to his corpse. It was a throwaway piece you carried around just in case you shot an unarmed man.”

  “Prove it.”‘

  Battle straightened, walked around the table. Kubicek blew an elaborately unconcerned plume of smoke and flicked ashes at the overflowing tray. Gently, the black officer took the sergeant’s wrist and turned up the knuckles. Kubicek snatched his hand away.

  “That’s a bad scrape,” Battle said. “Were you in some kind of fight?”

  “Banged it on a doorjamb putting on my coat. Keep your fucking mitts off me, by the way. I didn’t come here to hold hands with no”—he took a drag—“rookie.”

  “Sure you didn’t bang it on Russell Littlejohn’s hard head?”

  For a bad second he thought he was going to choke on a lungful of smoke. He felt his face grow red. But he let out a shallow hack and cleared his throat and the moment passed. “Who the fuck’s that?”

  “You probably heard the name and forgot it. Just another OD they pulled out of a culvert out in the neighborhoods. The ME said he’d been roughed around some shortly before death. Life’s never easy for an addict, I guess. Especially not the last part.”

  “Don’t bleed all over the floor, son. Maintenance don’t like it.”

  “Bad break for you,” Battle said, “if you’re telling the truth. Littlejohn was the pilot of the speedboat that was supposed to carry away Potts and Nampula and the plunder from the Ogden place. If anyone knew whether Harrison was in with them, it would’ve been him.

  “He had pork in his stomach, and rice. After his Bronco turned up on Chicago, I beat a little leather near there and wound up at Greenleaf’s on Linwood. A waitress there who knew him slightly thought she saw him come in around six P.M. the evening before his body was found. Assuming that’s where he ate—Greenleaf’s famous for its hamhocks and rice, did you know that?—he stopped digesting somewhere between seven and nine. Would you happen to know where you were about then, Paul? Can I call you Paul?”

  “You can call me Sergeant Kubicek. And you got to tell me what night it was before I can tell you where I was. That is, if I even want to.”

  “You’re right. I didn’t really think you’d trip over one as old as that. Just boxing the compass. Like when I bothered to read you your rights before I took you in for questioning. I want to make sure nothing gets overlooked when I pull you down.” He was leaning over the sergeant’s shoulder, close enough to smell his aftershave.

  Kubicek spat a grain of tobacco off his lower lip. “For what, wasting some junkie puke accomplice to armed robbery? Make it stick, Sambo. That didn’t look like no positive ID from the coon in the hall. Littlejohn’s old man, right? As much as any of yo
u knows who’s whose old man.”

  “I’ll make it stick. If Littlejohn could’ve told us Harrison was in with Nampula and Potts, he could’ve told us he wasn’t. And if he wasn’t, he didn’t pull a gun on you any more than you scraped your knuckles shadowboxing in your bedroom. So you took out Littlejohn. If I don’t make that stick, I’ll make Harrison stick. I’d rather it be the junkie puke: That’s Murder One. But I’ll settle for the messenger boy. It’ll get you out of the department anyway, and put one more nail in STRESS’S coffin.”

  “That’s your wagon, ain’t it? Just like a nigger. Burn down the whole fucking barn to clean out the rats.”

  “I’m glad you see it. It’s not every rat knows what he is.”

  “You ain’t no cop. You don’t know what being a cop means.”

  Battle blinked. He unfolded to his full height. “That’s rich. Coming from someone who’s no better than Leroy Potts or Kindu Atticus Nampula Geary. Hell, you’re worse. They never pretended to be anything but the punks they were.”

  Kubicek stood suddenly. His chair skidded back and clattered over. Facing Battle, he was shorter by several inches but broader and, despite his apron of beef fat and doughnuts, harder. “Unless the oath changed since I came through, it don’t say nothing about putting your black skin ahead of the shield. Why’n’t you just quit and join up with Quincy fucking Springfield?”

  “Probably because that would leave the department in the hands of guys like you.”

  The door opened and Walter Stilwell came in, brows arched to the roots of his carroty hair. Battle and Kubicek turned to look at him.

  “Chance meeting?” Stilwell asked.

  “Shit.” The STRESS sergeant pushed out past Aaron Bookfinger standing in the doorway.

  Stilwell put his hands in the pockets of his plaid polyester slacks, eyeing Battle with his tongue bulging his right cheek. “You’re just a team all by yourself, aren’t you? I guess me and Aaron missed a memo.”

  Battle’s jaws ached from clenching. Willing them to relax, he took a deep breath and looked from Stilwell to Bookfinger and back.