MOTOR CITY BLUE

by Loren D. Estleman

  “The money’s all right. I don’t know about the report. I’d like to hear something daily if that’s possible.”

  I was going to say no, but something had happened to his eyes. The plums had dried. The shine was gone, I sighed. Walker, you weak-kneed son of a bitch.

  “I’ll give you what I can.”

  He nodded. The mere effort of moving his head down and up seemed to have taken his last reserves. “See Paul on your way out. He’ll give you your first day’s fee and a copy of the other dick’s report, if it’s any help.”

  I stepped into the bedroom and got my hat and coat. “One thing,” I said, stopping before his chair. “I’m working on an insurance case at the moment. I’ll be spending some of my time on that. But you’ll get a full day’s work every day. I don’t sleep. Got out of the habit.”

  “So did I.”

  I said a farewell of some sort and set out for the door.

  “Walker.” Barely audible. I turned back. His lids were closed behind the thick spectacles and his head was leaning back against the chair’s cushy support. His weight wasn’t enough to make it recline.

  “If I see my name in tomorrow’s paper, yours will be in the next edition. Bordered in black.”

  I let myself out.

  It was after two when Wiley dropped me off back at my place. I was too keyed up to sleep and all the good movie stations were off the air, so I snapped on the lamp next to my chair and settled down with a glass of Hiram Walker’s, no relation, and the sheaf of papers Paul Cooke had given me to read. The Lansing P.I., some guy named Stillman, couldn’t spell FBI and his grammar was strictly Remedial English 302, but he had a definite flair for narrative. The record of his nine-month search for Marla Bernstein engrossed me for a full five minutes before I passed out.

  The strident jangling pierced whatever I was dreaming without deflating it and I slept on, waiting for the alarm to wind down. It didn’t, and after a moment I realized it was the telephone. I untangled myself from the chair and the litter of typewritten pages scattered over my lap, stumbled over to the irritating instrument, tried to pick it up with my left hand, the one that was still asleep, gave that up and used my right.

  “Twelve rings. That’s some kind of record even for you.”

  It was John Alderdyce. I let my eyes focus on the dial of the watch strapped to my slowly wakening appendage and asked him if he knew it was 4 A.M.

  “I’ve been telling time for years now,” snarled the voice. “I want you to get your ass down here yesterday.”

  “Down where?”

  “The morgue. You ought to enjoy it. It’ll be like an army reunion.”

  That took a second to sink in. When it did I told him to expect me in twenty minutes and had my coat half on before I realized I was still holding the receiver. I replaced it and finished the job on my way to the garage.

  5

  I DRIVE THE KIND of car you don’t park next to if the itemized price list is still stuck to your side window. As Cutlasses go it’s no heap, but it has that archaic look that falls to any automobile more than two years old in this day of neurotic change, and in the right light it shows more dings than I can properly blame on General Motors. You’d never think to look at it that there’s a 455 Cadillac Coup de Ville engine under the hood, or that it can hit sixty-five while you’re still closing the door on the passenger’s side. Part of that is due to the fact that it has less pollution equipment to drag it down than a Model T Ford, but so far I’ve been able to duck those periodic traffic stops the cops engineer to make sure no one’s putting anything past the EPA. Since there’s almost nothing moving before dawn, however, I took it easy on my way down the Walter P. Chrysler to Brush and Lafayette, where the county morgue is located behind Traffic Court, to avoid calling attention to myself, at no time exceeding the limit by more than ten miles an hour.

  Alderdyce’s name got me into cold storage, where I found him standing next to a wall full of things that looked like oversize file drawers but weren’t, with a white-coated attendant and Inspector Proust, whom I recognized from my last visit to headquarters. I went over there anyway.

  John Alderdyce is the only truly black man I’ve ever known. His skin is the color of the business side of a fresh sheet of carbon, with the same high gloss, and nobody looks better in a yellow silk bowling shirt. Not that we’d bowled together in a long time. Today he was wearing a pastel blue number with matching tie, a well-cut herringbone over it and a hip-length belted leather coat over that. If you can be a fashion plate on a police lieutenant’s salary, John’s what you’d have in mind for a model. Like something from the pages of a magazine if Vogue and Police Times ever merged. He has pugnacious, simian features with a brain behind them and wears his hair cropped short in a style that in the right light does a fair job of concealing the thin spots. This wasn’t the light.

  Proust was white, very much so since he practically lived under a fedora that made mine look like a Shriner’s fez, and was partial to suits as gray as his hair and as rumpled as his face. He was a holdover from the days of the old city STRESS crackdown unit, before they started shooting at each other and arresting too many citizens of the wrong color. Part of the reason for his attitude toward people in general, and private investigators in particular, was that he thought he should be an assistant commissioner by now. That dated back to 1970, when, stepping out of a New York Central boxcar that had just been broken into by a young Negro, he screwed his .357 magnum into the youth’s ear and said, “Guess who, you black motherfucker!” This unorthodox method of identifying oneself as a police officer was recounted widely after the young man testified in his own defense at his trial, and had a habit of cropping up again every time the subject of Proust’s promotion came up before the predominantly black police commission. An inspector he remained.

  “You got square wheels on that buggy of yours?” he said as I approached. He was considered the cophouse wit, which should give you some idea of the caliber of the humor down there.

  “There’s an energy crisis,” I reminded him. “You want me to break the law?” I nodded at John, who nodded back. That was the level to which our friendship had deteriorated since the day the state police issued me my license. He nodded hardly less effusively at the acne-faced kid in the white coat, who grasped the steel handle of a nearby drawer and tugged it out a third of its length.

  The harsh overhead light did little for Francis Kramer’s baby-fat features, which had crossed that line and were on the path to total obesity. The thumb-size black hole in his left temple did even less. The bullet had burrowed behind his eyes, bulging them, and exited with more fanfare than it had made going in, blowing out the right side of his skull like an overinflated tire on a hot day. The color of his skin made me wonder if I’d ever again be able to enjoy a jar of homemade preserves once I’d seen the paraffin with which it was sealed.

  I gave them a positive ID and added, “That left a mess somewhere.” My throat felt tight.

  “All over the back seat,” confirmed the lieutenant. He nodded again and the attendant replaced the drawer, then left silently on rubber soles. “He turned up at City Airport at two-thirty, folded into the trunk of a blue ’78 Nova. The license number you know. Ever hear the word stupid? A whole parking lot to choose from, and they dump it in the president’s private slot. He called airport security; they noticed the blood and called us. The M.E. figures he left us about ten hours ago. That puts it pretty close to when you saw what you saw on Woodward.”

  “Told you so.”

  He scowled, an expression that gave his face a decidedly African cast. “That’s what I like about you, Walker. You never rub it in.”

  “What are we pissing around for?” snarled Proust. “Take him in and let’s grill him.”

  “Mr. Walker is an eyewitness, Inspector, not a suspect. He came down here of his own free will.”

  “All right, it’s your case and I won’t interfere. But this son of a bitch knows more than he’s spillin
g.”

  “I haven’t spilled anything yet,” I said.

  “That’s what I’m talking about!”

  “Let’s go down to headquarters, Amos.” That was strictly for Proust. John never called me by my first name, not even when his father and mine ran a garage on McNichols and we played together as kids.

  It was a brief, freezing walk from the morgue to police headquarters on Beaubien. I spent the next hour in a bare interrogation room in the C.I.D., repeating my story under questioning for the benefit of a squeaking tape recorder and a stenographer with nice legs but not much else, and when it was over we all knew exactly as much as Alderdyce and I had eleven hours earlier. I looked through mugs until my eyes got bleary, with results even less satisfactory. Then someone broke out the Identikit and together we came up with fair likenesses of the Hager Twins, which is about as close as you can expect from a department that’s too cheap to hire an artist. When Proust left to have copies made, followed by the stenographer–make what you want out of that, I personally don’t think he had it in him–I sat back in the scoop chair they’d given me and tapped a Winston, my third in that flyblown cell, against the back of my hand. The lieutenant watched me hungrily.

  “Still off the weed, John?”

  He nodded. “Eighteen days now. It’s a bitch.” In his pastel blue shirt sleeves now, he fished out a pen he had clipped to a plastic holder inside his shirt pocket, and rolled it back and forth between his dusty pink palms. I’d lost track of how many times he’d done that since we’d come in. “Off the record, Walker, what kind of guy was this Kramer?”

  I started to touch off the cigarette, then thought better of it and blew out the match, letting the coffin nail droop unlit. There was no sense in torturing the guy. “Off the record, on the record, I can’t tell you because I don’t know,” I said. “A Pfc doesn’t get too close to his company commander, even in combat. He struck me as kind of prissy. Fatigues always pressed and spotless whenever we were near water and an iron, clean-shaven, necktie tucked inside his shirt. He wanted us to look the same, ignored it when we didn’t go along. Kind of a junior league Georgie Patton, only without the blood or the guts. I don’t think he was a coward. Timid, maybe. Overcautious, they call it in Washington. Near Hue we lost more men than we should have because he made up his mind to take a hill too late. The company was threatening a general strike when someone got wise and he was yanked back to a desk job in the States. This is hearsay, but someone told me he got to be captain by snitching on the guy that was there ahead of him. You can take that for whatever it’s worth. But it would fit in with my opinion of his character. Yeah, and he was a nut on taking home movies. Picked up some nice equipment in Saigon for next to nothing.”

  “Real officer material. No wonder we lost over there.”

  “We didn’t lose, we strategically withdrew.” I did up my necktie. “What’d you get on the car?”

  “I had Auto Recovery process the license plate number right after you gave it to me. It was reported stolen yesterday afternoon in Ann Arbor. The lab is doing a Sherlock Holmes on the interior right now. The slug entered the back seat at a forty-five-degree angle downward and flattened against the frame. It was a forty-four, and judging by what it did to his head on the way out it was fired from a magnum. The car radio was tuned to a station that plays straight country and western.”

  “That plays with what I saw and heard. Not that it’d stick in court. That stuff goes big across the river. Or maybe the guy who owns the car listens.”

  He shook his head. “A.A.P.D. got him out of bed. He digs opera.”

  “Kramer might have lived in that building he was hurrying from on Woodward. Did you send anybody up there?”

  “They’re checking it out now.”

  “Get Johnny Cash on the horn. Find out where he was yesterday at six P.M.” He wasn’t laughing. I changed the subject. “What are you doing on this one, anyway? They take you off Freeman Shanks?”

  “No such luck. Maybe you haven’t heard. There are more than enough murders to go around in this town. Sure, the overall crime rate dropped last year, but the percentage of crimes of violence goes up as steady as the cost of living. The renaissance crowd tends to gloss over that last part. That’s like rooting for the Pistons when they’re down one-oh-three to sixty-four with two minutes to go in the fourth and they finally sink one; it’s nice, but what the hell good is it?” He was rolling the pen more rapidly now. “I wouldn’t mind it so much if it didn’t slop over into the department. Now they’ve got us doing PR work for the Chamber of Commerce. It’s worth a cop’s badge to use the words ‘Murder City’ in his own home. Meanwhile it spreads like venereal disease because everyone thinks it’ll go away if we stop talking about it.”

  “The GOP convention next year will change all that,” I fed him.

  “Bullshit. That’s one more headache we don’t need. What if, in spite of all the security, one of the candidates gets blown away? Dallas is still trying to live down November 1963. What do you think it’ll do to Detroit?

  “A popular young black labor leader disappears in the middle of a union rally and shows up fourteen hours later on East Grand River with three bullets in his back fired from a thirty-eight. Who did it? The man he beat out for the presidency of the local? The Mafia bigwigs he promised to purge from the union? Or some bigot who hates to see a nigger get ahead in anything? I used to go with his sister, so they tell me to solve it. Then they peel off half my manpower and put them to work busting whores and closing down porno shops because they’re supposed to be bad for the convention trade, even though they know damn well that’s what brings them here in the first place. And my kids ask me why I don’t tell jokes like the cops on ‘Barney Miller.’ ”

  “Feeling better?” I asked.

  He glared at me. Then, slowly, a grin broke through the stony facade. “A little,” he said. “Walker, we wouldn’t be so far along on this Kramer thing now if you hadn’t made that call last night. I owe you one.”

  “Every citizen’s duty. If you don’t want it hanging over your head, though, there’s one thing you can do for me.” I slipped the graduation photo Ben Morningstar had given me from my pocket and read off the description someone had penciled in a tight hand on the back. Alderdyce jotted it down on a yellow scratch pad with the pen he’d been trying to remold.

  “Placing an order?”

  “Too young for me. Her name’s Marla Bernstein, but if she’s still using it she’s even more naïve than I figure her. Almost a year ago she split with an unidentified male, age and race unknown, from the waltz-and-pinky school her old man had her enrolled in up in Lansing. There’s some evidence she’s got herself mixed up in the porno trade here. Hooking too, most likely. They go hand in hand. You used to work Vice. Got any friends there?”

  “My brother-in-law. He’s a plainclothesman.”

  “If anybody who answers that description has been hauled in since last December, I’d appreciate hearing about it.”

  “Who’s your client?”

  It was my turn to smile. “Go to hell, Alderdyce.”

  The city was getting in its last winks when I fired up my crate and left the morgue behind me. There was some traffic, but it was still dark and the early rush hour was more than an hour off. A couple of times I looked up in my rearview mirror and spotted what I thought was the same light-colored mid-size trailing me two or three blocks back, but when I turned west on Milwaukee it rolled past without stopping and I relaxed. As I approached the General Motors Building, however, it or one like it swung in behind me off John R.

  I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt a little longer. The city was full of yellow Pintos.

  6

  IF FOR ANY REASON you should ever find yourself looking through the microfilmed copies of the News, Free Press, or the old Times for the year 1931 at the Detroit Public Library, you may come across a photograph of a nondescript building with a Maltese cross superimposed over one of its windows. If you
read the accompanying piece, you’ll learn that the window marks an apartment where three men were gunned down by the Purple Gang one night in what was immediately tagged the Collingwood Massacre. The building still stands at the corner of Collingwood and Twelfth–excuse me, Rosa Parks Boulevard–and while it’s no more remarkable in appearance than it was during those days of Prohibition, it does hold the dubious distinction of being one of the few structures left intact there by the rioters a dozen years ago. There were lights on in a few of the apartments when I parked on Rosa P. and entered the sooty foyer, but I was interested in only one. The Pinto was nowhere in sight as I left the street, which meant exactly nothing.

  I selected a grubby black button under an even grubbier rectangle of paper bearing the name I was looking for and pressed it. It wasn’t the name my quarry was born with, nor as far as I knew was it one he used anywhere else. As a matter of fact, for someone as cautious as he was, his choice of buildings, considering its forty-eight-year-old reputation, was nothing less than perverse. More of that later.

  I had just about made up my mind that the buzzer wasn’t working when a lean figure I knew well appeared atop the landing of the staircase on the other side of the locked glass-and-grill door. He spotted me and came bouncing down the stairs with a friendly grin on his face that did proud the plastic surgeons who had labored so many hours to put it back together. Straight up he crowded something over six feet of athletic build with sandy hair and the kind of jaw they used to go nuts over in Hollywood, square but not too square, and set off by a pair of level eyes whose color you couldn’t appreciate if you’ve never seen Lake Superior on a clear day. He opened the door and offered me his left hand. He had a white cotton glove on the right to mask the missing fingers, and if it moved at all it wasn’t without the other’s help.

  “Hello, shamus.” His grip never crushed any bones or tendons he didn’t want it to. For me it was the same strong, self-assured grasp he reserved for friends and his tennis racquet.