Silent Thunder

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Leslie hopes to establish a new precedent. It wasn’t the first time Doyle worked me over, but it was one of the worst. Many more like it and he’d have killed me. I just didn’t want him to hit me again.” As she said it, I could see the bruises under her make-up. It didn’t matter whether they were actually there. It was in the way she spoke about being hit; her voice lost its cushion. Mrs. Krell, who had brought her bourbon while she was speaking, set it down on the coffee table and withdrew without pausing. What spouses think of the things they overhear I couldn’t begin to guess.

  “What the press says about you doing dirty movies,” I said. “Is that hype?”

  “No, I made two of them when I was in college in California. I was brought up to believe sex was clean, a beautiful act. I couldn’t see anything wrong with making tuition money out of it.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  “They never changed the sheets.”

  “The work takes a strong stomach. Walking away from it takes guts. I have to wonder why someone who could come out with her head still on would let herself get slapped around.”

  “In the end, of course, I wouldn’t,” she said. “But I see what you mean. All I can say is you didn’t know Doyle. He was wonderful when he wasn’t zonked, a beautiful creature with a sensitive soul.”

  “And a couple of million dollars’ worth of U.S. Army ordnance in the basement.”

  “Everybody’s interested in something. He was like a little boy whenever he got a new one. They weren’t weapons to him at all, really. Just shiny baubles. I’ll never forget the day he took delivery on the German eighty-eight.” She smiled, remembering.

  “Who was his connection?”

  “I never knew. He’d get a call, and then I’d overhear him bargaining. He never used names.”

  “You never answered when a call came in?”

  “Once. Doyle grabbed the receiver from my hand when I was asking the man his name. He had a Southern accent, that’s all I remember. It was at least a year ago.”

  “Black?”

  “I really couldn’t say.”

  I made a note. I had my pad out now. “What about when Doyle took delivery? What kind of vehicle?”

  “Different ones at different times. They came to the basement door. The smaller things like the pistols and rifles came in cars, and once an old beat-up pickup truck. They delivered the heavy stuff in one of those big trucks with a canvas top, like you see in National Guard convoys on the expressway. No,” she added, before I could ask, “I never got any license numbers.”

  “You and your husband had a boy, I think. Would he remember anything?”

  “Jack’s away at school. I sent him. He’s not going to be involved.”

  The way she said it, staring at me through the smoke from her cigarette, closed that street. “Where does Doyle Senior stand?” I asked.

  “Foursquare in favor of reinstating the death penalty in Michigan. He had Doyle all primed to replace him as board chairman of Thayer Industries in a couple of years. Now he wants to get his hands on Jack. That will be a lot easier if I go away for murdering Jack’s father.”

  The air was becoming thick with smoke and something else. Krell got up and slid open one of the light panels a few inches, letting in fresh air. “Leslie Dorrance has filed a motion for a change of venue,” he said. “If there’s a judge in the Detroit area that Doyle Thayer Senior hasn’t played golf with, he doesn’t play. You might want to look for a lot of heat from that quarter.”

  I felt myself relaxing. Krell’s stated reason for throwing the case in my lap had been bothering me. Now I could concentrate on the interview.

  “How’s chances of getting the venue changed?” I asked.

  Constance Thayer laughed shortly, not a pleasant sound. “That decision is made by a judge.”

  “What’s the date for the preliminary hearing?”

  “July thirty-first,” Krell said. “We have three weeks.”

  “Short date.” I was looking at the woman. “You make enemies with style.”

  That brought a brief smile. She took one last drag at the Pall Mall and squashed it out in the bottom of the saucer. “The thing about marrying money is you can’t ever make a clean break, even by killing. If I’m found not guilty, I stand to inherit a third of Doyle Industries’ stock. That puts me in partnership with Doyle’s father.”

  “You could give it up,” I said.

  “No. No, I earned it. If I charged only ten dollars per black eye, I earned every penny. Also I want to have something to give Jack that he didn’t get from his grandfather.”

  Krell was standing by the fireplace again. He liked to strike a pose with the portrait at his back. “What’s your decision, Walker? If it’s no I have to make some calls.”

  I smoked. “I’ll take it.”

  Constance Thayer said, “May I ask why?”

  “Two reasons,” I said. “Well, three. I don’t like seeing anyone get ganged up on, especially a woman who’s been bounced around enough. And when you had a chance to cop a plea on grounds of diminished capacity you didn’t, on account of it wasn’t true. Anyone who’d do something that stupid has got to be telling the truth.”

  She smiled again. “And the third reason?”

  “You don’t want to just come out even. You want the cake and the box it came in. To me that says you’ve got the tickets not to change your mind a week before the hearing and plead guilty so that I’ve wasted two weeks.”

  “That’s important to you?”

  “A guy likes to think he’s doing something more than ripping pages off calendars. One question.”

  “Why isn’t Leslie here?”

  I nodded. Her habit of reading thoughts took some getting used to.

  “He’s in New York, having lunch with his publisher. You haven’t a publisher, have you, Mr. Walker?”

  I shook my head, then added, “I read a book once.”

  “Cervantes?” She was enjoying the conversation.

  “Blomberg. So You Want to Be a Private Eye. Third edition.”

  “When can you start?” Krell was not enjoying the conversation.

  I flipped the pad shut, killed my cigarette, and got up. “I think I already did.”

  3

  THE BOARD OF HEALTH had closed down the burger place near my building, after which a delicatessen had bustled in, scoured the griddle, and named all the sandwiches after well-known Detroiters. My favorite booth had been ripped out and replaced with three tables the size of golf tees. I claimed the least wobbly of the three, had the Tommy Hearns—two fried eggs beaten to a pulp, served on toasted canvas, and vastly overrated—and went to work.

  It’s an old building, but I like old buildings. There are few surprises. In my little water closet I could smoke a cigarette waiting for hot water to wheeze its way up the rusty pipes, and sitting at my desk I could tell by the chords the old boards in the hallway struck when someone passed over them if it was Rosekranz the super or the guy who sold aluminum doors over the telephone in the office next to mine or the man in the corner suite who only came in three times a week to collect his mail.

  There had been changes. The building maintenance crew had paid its annual visit to my office, steam-cleaned the rug, and found a pattern. I had grown tired of looking at the framed original Casablanca poster across from my desk—Bogart’s stare in my direction had taken on more than its usual contempt—hung it on a different wall, and put up in its place a print of the Remington Arms Company’s painting of Custer’s Last Fight. Every time I looked at it I hoped to see the tide turning in Custer’s favor, but it hadn’t so far. Apart from that the place was the same as it had been in every other year, from the furniture that had come with the door and windows to the view of the roof of the building next door to the butterflies on the wallpaper. I liked it fine. I had my name on the door and a fresh three-year lease in the safe with my change of shirts.

  The mail was looking up. I had two checks from former clients, a fat p
ackage containing a reverse directory so I didn’t have to depend on my contact in the fire department when I had a telephone number and no name to go with it, and a certificate that entitled me to one free lesson in forensics from a correspondence school in Kansas City. I put the checks in the safe, found room for the directory in the top drawer of the desk, crumpled the certificate from Kansas City, and caromed it off Custer’s forehead straight into the metal wastebasket in the corner. A day that began with a job and no bills was better than most.

  The buzzer sounded in the outer office. I waited, and when the knock came at the brain box I said it was open. In came a long stretch of black youth in gray sweatpants and a black tank top with RETURN OF THE EVIL DEAD silk-screened across the front in dripping red letters. He had a flattop and a gold ring in one ear. With a little grunt he plunked the stack of old newspapers he was carrying onto the desk. Dust skinned out from between the pages. “Them the ones you wanted, Mr. Walker?”

  I leaned forward to check the dates. “Them are those. Ten do it?” I stopped sitting on my wallet and thumbed out a bill.

  He thanked me, folded it lengthwise and sidewise, and poked it into the top of his sweats. He started to leave.

  “Second, Marcus.” He stopped. “How’s things at the store?”

  “Things is things.”

  “Ever miss Young Boys Incorporated?”

  He smiled without showing teeth. “They never was no Young Boys, Mr. Walker. Well, maybe at the start, but by the time the tv and the papers heard the name and started using it, nobody else was. Same with Pony Down. What’s to call a bunch of kids running shit? No, I don’t miss it. ’Cept the money.”

  “Still clean?”

  He held out his forearms and turned them over.

  “Doesn’t mean anything, Marcus. You always shot behind your knees.”

  “You want me to strip?”

  “I’d rather pass. I’ve seen some ugly things in here, but that’s one more than the landlord allows me.”

  He grinned then all the way up. “You wouldn’t say that if you seen my knees.”

  I waved at him and he left. I had pulled Marcus out of a crack house on Sherman when I was looking for another woman’s son, got him into a rehab program, and practiced a little creative extortion when he came out to snare him a job stacking cans in a party store two blocks from my building. Sometimes he scratched up old copies of the local papers from the back room for me, saving me a few hours in the Detroit Public Library. Every ten years or so I do something for someone who isn’t a client, and while it never works out, all the precincts hadn’t reported in yet on this one. I never found the son either.

  I spent the morning following the Thayer killing through the papers and making notes. The Free Press ran the usual sidebars calling for stiffer handgun laws, the News made a case in favor of a get-tough-on-murder stance on the bench, and USA Today described the black taffeta shift Constance Thayer wore to her arraignment. One of the names connected with the story came as no surprise and I dialed a number at Detroit Police Headquarters. A woman whose voice I didn’t recognize answered on the private line.

  “Lieutenant Alderdyce, please,” I said.

  “You mean Inspector Alderdyce?”

  I took my feet off the desk. “How come hell froze over and nobody called me?”

  “The promotion came down last week. He’s testifying in court today. This is Detective Deming. Perhaps I can help.”

  Another lady detective at 1300 Beaubien. It made me wonder again about the temperature down below. Aloud I said, “This is Amos Walker, a friend of John’s. He was one of the Detroit people called in to help with the Doyle Thayer Junior homicide. I thought he could tell me the name of the federal agent in charge there now.”

  “I’ve heard your name.” Her tone sounded less professionally cordial, if you can trust the telephones at headquarters. “The Thayer killing took place in Iroquois Heights. That’s out of this jurisdiction.”

  “Detective Deming, you know and I know and everyone but the voters in Iroquois Heights knows the cops there couldn’t tell a murder from a tufted titmouse. If you don’t, their chief does, and that’s why he called your chief.”

  “Even if he did, it’s their case now. Certainly it isn’t federal. What’s your interest, Mr. Walker?”

  I made some doodles in my pad. “The metro cops wouldn’t hear anything about the Feds clearing several hundred long tons of military arms out of a private house ten miles from Detroit, huh.”

  “I didn’t say that. But I’d be interested in where you heard it.”

  “Don’t tell me. John Alderdyce approved your promotion from Records.”

  “Traffic. Good-bye, Mr. Walker. Remember, we’re only a phone call away.” This one had a way of hanging up delicately that was worth any sweaty male sergeant’s slam-dunk in my face.

  Cops. Way back when, I had entertained the idea that the women would change things downtown, but when you mix fresh water with salt you still can’t drink it.

  Iroquois Heights was growing; noxious weeds generally do little else. It had a brand-new school, construction had begun on a civic center to incorporate all the city offices under one roof for the first time, and there was the usual talk of building a domed stadium where a dozen sports could be played indoors on artificial turf. Athletes of the future will be known by their silver skins and white eyes, like aquatic lizards that spend their entire lives in subterranean pools and never see sunlight. The well-heeled local citizenry, who had fled Detroit to avoid having their skulls cracked open and their pockets picked, would be emptying their wallets for that project for years to come, and the mayor and the city council wouldn’t even have to raise a lead pipe.

  The Thayer home was a large brick colonial occupying four acres at the end of a cul-de-sac, surrounded by great oaks planted in martial rows and black with shade. That was as much of it as I saw, because a seven-ton truck with a square silver grille blocked the entrance to the street facing out. Its box took up the entire street.

  I parked against the curb, got out, and waited, smoking, with my back against the Chevy’s roof. If what Krell and Mrs. Thayer had told me was true and it wasn’t just someone moving into or out of the neighborhood, I wouldn’t have to wait long. In any case the day was warm and I could do worse than lean there listening to a squirrel perched high in one of the oaks chattering angrily at the big metal thing spoiling its view of the acorns below.

  After a couple of minutes a young man in a brown leather jacket and jeans came my way along the sidewalk in front of the Thayer house. They had progressed from the old days of Robert Hall suits and skinny ties, but they hadn’t gotten it right just yet; the jacket was brand new and the jeans were pressed. His hair was black and fashionably long, although long wasn’t the fashion that season. And no one but a Fed strolls quite that way, as if he’s got no place to be and all the time in eternity to get there.

  “Hi,” he said, when he got within earshot. “Are you looking for an address?”

  “Thanks, I found it.”

  He scratched his ear. It stuck out a little, even under the hair. If he cut it short the way they were wearing it now he’d have looked like Norman Rockwell’s favorite PFC. He said, “I think it must be the wrong one.”

  Behind him, the truck lurched on its springs, as if something heavy had been lifted into the box. He didn’t flinch or offer any other indication that he was aware of it, I had to hand him that. They’re calling it “plausible deniability” in Washington now. If Noah Webster were alive he’d commit suicide with a rusty infinitive.

  “Who’s quarterbacking today?” I asked.

  “Quarterbacking?”

  “Calling the plays. Barking the show. Dealing the aces. Warping the speed. Beam me up, Scotty. I want to talk to your leader.”

  “I’m afraid you’re a little out of your neighborhood.”

  “You said it, brother.” I snapped away the butt and took out one of my cards. He made a little move toward his
jacket while I was fishing for it, then scratched his shoulder when I didn’t haul a sawed-off out of my wallet. I hadn’t thought anyone was still wearing those underarm rigs; in warm weather they’re a little less comfortable than a chastity belt. I scribbled a name on the back of the card and held it out.

  He took it and read both sides. “Is this supposed to mean something?”

  “Not to you. Show it to your boss. I’ll wait. Coffee? No, thanks, I just had lunch. It’s sweet of you to ask.”

  I watched him study the choice. He was going to go on running the bluff. Then he wasn’t. You can read these younger field men like a blackboard menu. He turned around and walked behind the truck.

  When he came back he had someone with him, and this model was off the old line. He was a stout number with narrow lapels, a thin black tie on a white shirt through which I could make out the scoop neck of his undershirt, and a snapbrim hat whose brief brim had seen all of its snap. It was on the back of a big head of curly gray hair and under it was one of those rubber faces that you just know got that way by being rubbed a lot. He had a paunch and didn’t care who knew it, and a smile with his mouth slightly open and no teeth showing. He was born too late to be played by Wallace Beery, which was a shame. He was carrying my card.

  “Know this person well?” he asked me without preamble, waving it.

  “Not very. I did a job for him a couple of years back.”

  “Official?”

  “Personal.”

  “I’d like to know what it was.”

  “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be worth a dime in the field.”

  He waited, not too long. Then he stuck out a big soft paw, which I took. “Horace Livingood, ATF. Want to see the ID?”

  “Naw. Want to see mine?”

  “What’s the point? In this town they can stamp you a bronze star while you’re inside getting a tan. What can we do on you, Walker?”

  “I’m working for Mrs. Thayer’s attorney. I’d like to get a look at what you’re carrying out of the basement. I already know some of it.”

  “That’s classified,” piped up the younger man.