Silent Thunder

by Loren D. Estleman

  “So what’s the big thing?”

  “Ask Shooter.”

  He looked at the corpse. “Poor old Shooter. How do you suppose he got tangled up with the big kids?”

  “Sometimes the small fry get large ideas. Sometimes it works out. More often they wind up floating in formaldehyde down at County.”

  “Words to live by.” He was looking at me now. He took my gun out of the plastic bag and held it out. “In case you can’t swim.”

  I took it. “What’s it going to cost me?”

  “The usual. You turn something, you don’t run to the locals with it. Here’s my card.” He produced it from a leather folder. I holstered the .38 and put the card in my wallet.

  “He’s a smoking gun!” complained Pardo.

  Livingood stood up with a grunt. “The work’s hard enough without doing the city cops’ job for them, Victor. Especially in this city. Even if murder was our lookout, nobody ever shot anybody and then cold-cocked himself repeatedly.”

  “Maybe he’s got friends.”

  “If they were any friendlier he’d be feeding the flies just like Shooter.” He looked at me again. “You need doctoring?”

  “What I need is a drink.”

  “We’ll give you a lift as far as Detroit. You can walk from there and join the crowd waiting for the bars to open.”

  “What about the cops outside?” I asked.

  He flicked aside the canvas covering Shooter with his foot. “Must leave things as we found them. No telling how much time they’d waste looking for a hitter polite enough to throw a wrap over the mark.”

  “Is there a Lieutenant Romero out there?”

  “Which one’s he?”

  “The one who looks like a young Gilbert Roland. He’s hard to bluff.”

  “He’s not there. They all look like Sydney Greenstreet, just like every other bent dick I ever met.” He picked up his handcuffs and put them away. “Let’s go, Ironskull. I’m expecting my wake-up call any minute.”

  16

  THE WEEDY LOT was awash in the glare of police cruiser spotlights and the inevitable rotating red and blue beacons. Garbled voices came over two-way radios cranked up to full volume. Once outside, Livingood put on his Fed face, flashing his shield around the group of uniforms and plainclothesmen—they smelled of cigars and cheap after-shave, like cops everywhere—and making material witness noises in my direction. Pardo said nothing, a vote in his favor. Livingood kept us moving as he spoke and before the cops could work up the impetus to stop us we were in his unmarked Ford rolling toward the opening in the fence.

  “Bolt cutters,” he said, when I asked him how there came to be an opening. “Field agents and second-story men shop at the same stores.”

  I had him exit the expressway at a Ramada Inn north of Detroit.

  “Taking the day off?” He stopped under the canopy and switched off the ignition. The sun was breaking red over the scattered cars in the lot.

  “It’s Saturday,” I said. “I don’t feel like spending it talking to the Detroit cops about my broken car.”

  “You’re lucky. Washington doesn’t recognize Saturdays.” He rested his elbow on the back of the seat. I was sitting next to him with Pardo in back. “What about that drink?”

  “I was just kidding. I’d rather sleep.”

  He popped open the glove compartment and handed me a pint of Southern Comfort.

  “I did deep cover in ’sixty-nine with the White Panthers in Ann Arbor,” he said. “I got the shit kicked out of me once and there wasn’t anybody to offer me a bottle. I’ve carried one ever since.” He started the car. “You’ve got my card.”

  I waved at him from under the canopy.

  The clerk at the desk, a Japanese girl in a gold blazer and ruffled blue blouse, looked at my rumpled clothes as I was filling out the registration card. “Sir, do you have luggage?”

  I patted the pint in my pocket and smiled. She shoved the key at me.

  There was an ice machine at the end of my corridor. I filled the plastic container from the room, skinned cellophane off a glass, and poured Southern Comfort over the cubes. It tinted them pale orange, like the sun as it cleared the window. The room was large, with twin beds, a big bath, and a terrace overlooking the parking lot. All the rooms in the motel were the same size. I was in the mood for a flyblown little cell with a dusty bulb and a bed with springs that sounded like a Vincent Price movie, but the nationwide chains have just about made them extinct. They’ve eliminated the worst along with the best and left us with the middle ground.

  I felt greasy under my clothes. I took off my shirt and shoes and worked my toes in their damp socks into the carpet. It felt cool from the air conditioner. In the bathroom I ran cold water onto a washcloth, gingerly scrubbed the blood from the lump behind my ear, held the cloth to the back of my neck for a moment, then to each of my wrists. Then I washed my face and looked at it in the mirror. Finally I went back out for my drink. It tasted sweet, the way Southerners liked their liquor and their women, or so I was told. I’d never been there. The world was full of places I’d never been. Vietnam didn’t count. Working in Detroit most of my adult life, I felt like a spinster who’d wasted her youth taking care of an invalid parent. Except spinsters hardly ever woke up on their backs in empty buildings on deserted fairgrounds with their heads pounding and dead men at their feet.

  Stop complaining, Walker. You made your choice the day you stepped off the plane carrying your duffel and turned right toward the office of Apollo Investigations and not left toward the post office, where they give the civil service exams.

  Things were starting to fall into some kind of order. Colonel Seabrook had pulled off the home invasions for case dough to finance some operation or other. Ma Chaney had sold him the weapons so he wouldn’t have to dig into his own stores. Shooter’s part was still smoky, but selling guns he would cross the Colonel’s path from time to time; maybe he had smelled something and cut himself in. Sturdy had been fencing the items taken in the home invasions, and was killed for one of two reasons: Either the Colonel had all the money he needed and was covering his tracks or, more likely, Sturdy had gotten hungry and tried to arrange a partnership. My poking around put me on the clean-up list. It was the easiest case I’d ever solved. Now all I had to worry about was the one I’d been hired for.

  I finished my drink, stretched out in my clothes on one of the beds, and slept without dreaming.

  I woke up at three, hungry and not sure where I was. When I remembered, I called the desk and asked for room service. The clerk, a man this time, said there wasn’t any but recommended the motel coffee shop.

  A copy of the Free Press lay outside my door. I took it with me to the coffee shop and went through it over a steak sandwich and a glass of water. The fairgrounds killing was on an inside page in a column of late-breaking stories from the greater metropolitan area. There were no names, just a paragraph saying a body had been found. There was nothing in the paper about Sturdy. I finished eating, paid, and had the clerk call for a taxi from the desk.

  It was another steamy day, but there was a dark fringe of clouds in the west and by the time the cabbie let me off at my house it had cast its shadow over the entire west side. Thunder trundled in the distance.

  The house smelled like a freshly opened Egyptian tomb. I left the door open, flung up all the windows that weren’t painted shut, and stood under the shower for fifteen minutes. When I came out I wrapped a towel around myself and plugged in the telephone. I caught it in mid-ring.

  “Where the hell were you all night last night and all day today?”

  “John?”

  “Answer the question,” Alderdyce said.

  “As good as can be expected, John. And how are you?” I sat down in my towel and crossed my legs. It was growing dark out now, although it was barely four-thirty. The wind was coming up.

  “I’m fine, you’re fine. Everybody’s fine. Your car’s sitting by the river with more holes in it than a fleet of
Buicks. You want to tell me how it got there?”

  “Gasoline.”

  “Say that again, you son of a bitch.”

  “John, I never knew you to get so worked up over a car.”

  “Witnesses heard automatic fire and the pattern of the bullet holes bears that out. I’m investigating a series of crimes involving men armed with automatic weapons. You’ll excuse me for getting worked up when I find out you’ve been standing this close to the mouth without tipping me.”

  “Quite a jump.”

  “I’m in shape for it. How about you? Any holes to match the ones in your chassis?”

  “None.”

  “Good, good. You going to come down here and make a statement or do I have to send out the Huns?”

  “What if my car was stolen?”

  “Come down and file a complaint.”

  “What if I do?”

  “I’ll stuff it down your throat.”

  “I didn’t think inspectors did that kind of thing.”

  “That kind of thing is what got me made inspector. What about it?”

  “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  “Make it a half hour.”

  “I might be thirty minutes late.”

  “Then your story better be thirty minutes better.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Thought you might be. Oh. About your friend Sturdy.”

  “Yeah.” I felt my fingers cramping on the receiver.

  “We picked him up for questioning this morning. He’s in Holding with a bad case of the sniffles, but that’s as close to dead as he’s been lately. You better check your sources.”

  “Maybe I’d better.” We stopped talking to each other.

  17

  THE DOORBELL RANG while I was sitting there thinking. I wasn’t expecting anyone. I had turned on the lamp beside the chair when it had grown dark. Now I switched it off and went to the door in my towel with the Smith & Wesson in hand.

  Constance Thayer said, “Is that how you dress on weekends?”

  “The artillery is optional.” I put it down on the table by the door. “Come in and sit down while I go put on a hat.”

  “You don’t have to on my account.”

  I let that one slide and closed the door behind her. She was dressed a lot more casually herself, although casual for her was another woman’s idea of dressing up: long-sleeved black-and-white checked blouse tucked into tailored charcoal gray denims with a crease you could cut your finger on and white sandals with two-inch heels over stockings. Her reddish hair was teased into bangs on her forehead and tied into a loose ponytail behind her head. She looked seventeen.

  “You’re a tidy bachelor,” she observed.

  “I’m never here long enough to mess it up.”

  A long crackling peal of thunder uncoiled directly overhead, rattling all the crockery in the house. She jumped straight into my arms.

  Immediately she put a hand against my chest to push away. It stayed there. She was wearing sandalwood.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m a coward after all.”

  “Just two clouds bumping together.” We separated. “I’ll be back in two minutes.”

  It was nearer five. I went at my beard with the scraper, combed my hair, and put on a sport shirt, slacks, and loafers. This time I left the Brut in the medicine cabinet. I found her sitting on the sofa with her legs crossed, smoking. She had switched on the lamp. Rain was clouting the west side of the house. I closed a window on that side and asked her what she was drinking.

  “Nothing today. I’m in danger of becoming a lush.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  She was staring at me. “Are you all right? You look like you’ve been in a fight.”

  “I thought I left all that in the shower.”

  “It’s just a look you have.”

  “Technically it wasn’t a fight,” I said. “He had my body but he didn’t have my soul. I guess you’re here for a progress report.”

  “I hope you don’t mind. My sister is a wonderful woman, but I can only spend so much time with her before I have to strangle her or get out. All this sitting around waiting is hell. When there was no answer again at your office I looked you up in the directory.”

  I sat down in the easy chair. “Your husband did business with some heavyweight bad guys. A woman with three sons doing time or about to be and a Mongoloid top hand with a hearing aid is the best of them.”

  “So you have made progress?”

  “It depends on what you call progress.”

  “Now you sound like Leslie.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “No, I haven’t. I got off on a tangent. It’s a common hazard. Cecil Fish will challenge Dorrance to prove in court that Doyle did anything more incriminating than buy an occasional gun from the crowd I’m talking about, and he won’t be able to. That’s all Doyle did.”

  “It might be enough, if the crowd is as bad as you say.”

  “Maybe. More probably I’m wasting your money.”

  “It isn’t worth anything to me if I go to prison.”

  Lightning lit up the dark window, turning the street outside into something etched on tin. I waited for the answering clap, then: “Did you tell Dorrance about the money and me?”

  She nodded. “He threatened to withdraw when I told him I’d re-hired you.”

  “Threatened?”

  She smiled.

  “Okay, you’ve still got Dorrance. I’ll give him what I’ve got. He can do what he wants with it.”

  “You’re not quitting.”

  “Not because I got knocked around, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s part of the life, like getting busted when you pick the wrong pocket. Whichever way I go from here will just take me farther away from what you hired me to do.”

  “But you can’t know that until you follow it to the end.”

  “Call it a feeling.”

  The rain was coming harder now, yammering on the roof and smearing the windows. The air smelled of iron oxide. She had to raise her voice.

  “Please don’t give it up. I’ve got so few people on my side.”

  I didn’t feel like shouting. I left the chair and walked up to the sofa and bent over her.

  “Buy a calendar, lady. The Middle Ages closed out of town. The moat’s a duck pond and they sell souvenirs in the tower. Prince Albert’s in a can, the convent’s a Wendy’s, and horses run in the money or they feed the dog. This year’s big hero is a cartoon rabbit. I’m on your side because you paid me to be.”

  Our faces were closer than when I’d had my arms around her. She lifted hers and closed her eyes and I kissed her.

  When it was over I went back to my chair and sat down. She opened her eyes and gave me the look. “What happens now?”

  “The sun will come out. It always does. Then it will get hotter.”

  “It always does,” she said. “I mean, what about us?”

  “That noise you heard was thunder.”

  “I didn’t hear it. What are you grinning at?”

  I stopped. “Summer re-runs.”

  “What?”

  “I knew a P.I. once, young guy and pretty good-looking, thought he was the best thing to happen to women since pantyhose; broke hearts like the rest of us break shoelaces. He disappeared one whole winter, and some of us thought he’d eeled his way inside some rich widow’s garter belt and gone to Texas. Everyone was going to Texas that year. Then spring came and the Ferndale cops found what was left of him stuffed into a culvert with his handsome face battered in and eleven dollars in his wallet. They arrested the woman a month later in San Francisco. Seems he’d been working for her husband and took pictures of her in a motel with the husband’s business partner. She found out and offered to fall in love with him if he tore up the pictures. Which he did, knowing women couldn’t keep their hands off him and that any double-cross she might be planning would go out the window once she had a taste of him in bed.

  “Turns ou
t she and the partner had been emptying the till for months and had bought two tickets to California and a leather briefcase to carry the cash. While she was keeping the P.I. occupied, the partner shot the husband as he was working late in the office, cleaned out the safe, and rigged the place to look as if somebody had broken in. When she got the all-clear call, the woman hung up and hit the P.I. a couple of dozen times with the telephone. The partner showed up in the company station wagon, they ditched the body, and took off for a more agreeable climate.”

  Mrs. Thayer said, “I bet there’s a moral.”

  “No matter how good you think you look, there’s always someone or something that looks better. And I’m not nearly as good-looking as he was. A couple of times a year someone tries to convince me otherwise, usually when I have something they want or am doing something they don’t want me to do or am not doing something they wish I would. Sex is the closest thing we’ve got to a nickel on a string; you can spend it all over town and still have it to spend. I’d rather have a drink. It’s already paid for when you get it.”

  “If you feel that way, why did you kiss me?”

  “I said I didn’t trust it. I didn’t say I gave it up.”

  She took her cigarette out of its tray and broke off the ash. “I guess I deserved some of that. But I’m not a whore. When Doyle was charged up on booze and pills, the only way I felt safe with him was during sex. It got to be a weapon of self-defense. Once it becomes a tool, well.” She took a last drag and put out the cigarette. “The rain’s letting up. Thanks for the shelter.”

  I watched her get to her feet. “I’ll stay with it a little, see where it takes me. I’m not making any promises.”

  “Do you ever?”

  “Not often. They’re not a renewable resource. When you let one go it should count.”

  She nodded. At the door she paused. It had grown lighter out and the runoff from the roof was the loudest sound, gurgling through the gutters. “Was that a true story?”

  “Most of it. They didn’t kill the husband. The money wasn’t that big.”

  “What about the private eye?”

  “He was practicing in Flint last I heard, bedding the occasional city councilman’s wife in return for favors. The business partner broke into his office and stole his file on the case with all the pictures and negatives while the P.I. was sleeping with the woman. He woke up with a hangover was all. I thought the part about having his face bashed in was a nice touch. The object lesson is the same.”