An overheated radiator on a Toyota parked on the apron and five hundred gawkers slowed me to a stop just north of Eight Mile Road. By the time I got to the office it was almost seven and I had two women waiting in my little reception room.
”… sense of humor isn’t always appropriate, but I’ve never known him to violate a confidence, no matter how trivial,” Louise Starr was saying when I opened the door. She turned her cool smile on me. “Hello, Amos. Was the drive as bad as all that?”
I was feeling unbuttoned and my shirt was stuck to my back. I’d have felt the same in white tie and a cutaway with her around. She was seated on one end of the upholstered bench with her legs crossed in sheer hose with gray suede pumps on her feet. Today it was a business suit, gray, with a skirt that came to her knees and an unlined jacket not much heavier than her blouse, eggshell silk with a maroon scarf tied bandanna fashion around her neck. Platinum obelisks dangled from her ears, which she’d left exposed by drawing her hair back with barrettes. She was one of the few who had the ears for it, small and well-shaped and flat to her head.
“Cadillac had it worse,” I said. “Hello, ladies. Thank you both for waiting.”
“Just as long as you don’t thank us for our patience,” Mary Ann Thaler said. “That would be assuming way too much.”
The lieutenant was sitting on the other end of the bench with both sneakered feet flat on the floor and her forearms resting on her thighs. She had on loose faded jeans threadbare at the knees and a University of Detroit sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows. Her hair was gathered inside a black baseball cap with a curled bill and POLICE embroidered in yel low block capitals on the front of the crown. She wore her glasses and no makeup. The only thing missing from the expression on her face was the gun that belonged in front of it.
That made my decision easier. I hadn’t been sure which one got first crack, client or cop. The Miss Manners Guide to P.I. Protocol didn’t cover the situation. But I had to work in Detroit.
I pointed at Thaler. “You. They’re reviving Dirty Harry tonight at the DIA. You probably want to change.”
She stood and looked at the other woman. “Depends on your point of view, Mrs. Starr. In my line, people who are good at keeping confidences are a pain in the butt.”
“I never thought of it that way.” Louise took a card out of her handbag and held it up. “It was good talking with you, Lieutenant. You can reach me here if you ever change your mind.”
Thaler took it. “You’ve got my number if you need me. Nine-one-one.”
I excused myself to Louise and unlocked the door to the private office. Before I could get it open the lieutenant scooped a thick bundle bound with a rubber band off the coffee table and went inside.
“Home sweet stinkhole,” she said when we were seated on either side of the desk. “I thought you’d at least have changed the wallpaper by now.”
“It’s got tenure. Who put the hitch in your holster?” I reached back and switched on the fan on the win-dowsill. It purred and blew ash off the topsoil in the tray of butts on the desk.
“An hour in your waiting room.”
“I’ve got new magazines.”
“I saw. Architectural Digest; who do you think you’re kidding? I’ve seen your house.”
“Waiting is what cops do best. It wouldn’t be that Louise is got up like Katharine Hepburn and you look like one of the Dead End Kids. What happened to the revolution?”
She put on a smile then. A gun could still have gone in front of it. “She’s too tall. And someone should tell her you don’t wear dangling earrings with a business suit.”
“She’s wearing earrings?” I was grinning, first time that day. “Change your mind about what?”
“Change my mind.” Her face went flat. “Oh, that. She wants me to write about my experiences. You know: Betsy Billystick, Girl Cop. I said no. People who write up their life experiences have a habit of not hanging around long enough to have any others.”
“That’s just superstition.”
“Hello?” She tapped the POLICE on her cap, then rapped her knuckles on the desk. “Anyway, I’m no writer. Not like your man Booth. Is he still around, by the way?”
I plucked out a cigarette and smoothed it between my fingers. “He was last time I spoke to him.”
“He your client?”
“No.”
“Right, that would be Katharine Hepburn. Editor, writer, detective. Triple play.”
I lit up and blew smoke at the nicotine smudge on the ceiling.
“Fine,” she said, “have it your way. I only put on the back of my closet today and turned down lunch in West Bloomfield with a good-looking inspector from the Fifth to grub around amongst the spiders and forgotten bootleggers in the basement as a favor to you.” She shoved the bundle across the desk and sat back.
I unwound the rubber band, releasing a sprinkle of paper shavings and dust into the litter of same already on the blotter pad. “I heard the Fifth’s under investigation.”
“That’s why he had the time for lunch. The feds don’t like suspects getting in the way of a paper search. They’re just clerks with shoulder holsters.”
“Quantico turn down your application again?” I spread open the tattered cardboard file folder. The contents smelled like someone’s attic.
“To hell with Quantico. I’m studying for the bar.”
“And hoping to marry someone who is not a cop.”
“Who’s getting married? I was talking about lunch.”
“I’ll take you to lunch. Not in West Bloomfield, though. How about Greektown?”
“I see more cops in Greektown than at roll call. Anyway I can’t be seen breaking bread with no plastic badge. I’m up for city hall detail: nine to five and I don’t have to race the rest of the squad to the calendar for my vacation days.”
We were both silent while I paged through the old reports, eyewitness statements, inventories of evidence, newspaper clippings, and photos. The grainy black-and-white shots were printed on cheap police stock, without gloss, but the details were sharp enough to liven up anyone’s nightmares. Allison Booth didn’t look so pretty folded over and stuffed into the concrete square of a basement window well with one shoe off and her skirt hiked up to expose her girdle. Stretched naked on a porcelain table in the morgue she looked less like a department-store mannequin and more like a corpse: one eye swollen shut, the other open and staring, and dark bruised patches all over her chest and abdomen where the knife had gone in.
“The husband’s statement,” Thaler said when I came to a sheaf of typewritten sheets stuck together with a pitted paperclip, one of the old-fashioned kind that came to a point. “We went after his alibi hard when we found out about that last day, but it wouldn’t bend. He was having dinner with his editor and an assistant in New York at the time the coroner figured his wife died in Detroit. The restaurant staff backed them up.”
“ ‘We.’ “ I laid aside Booth’s statement unread and picked up another. “You were how old then?”
“My mother was still in elementary school, thank you. My father was starting junior high and they wouldn’t meet for ten years. When I say we I’m referring to the sacred and fraternal order of law enforcement professionals. The good guys for short.” “Tell that to the Fifth Precinct. What happened the last day?”
“I told you to read the newspapers. Didn’t you take my advice?”
“I never fail. The sacred and fraternal order of law enforcement professionals wasn’t any more forthcoming with the press then than it is now. That’s why I asked you to grub around amongst the forgotten bootleggers in the basement.”
“Spiders too. Don’t forget the spiders. One of them tried to steal my hat.” She tugged down on the bill as if to make sure it was still there. “You’re looking at the eyewitness statement now. A perfume counter clerk at the late lamented downtown Hudson’s happened to look out the glass doors just as a car pulled into the curb and the driver got out and opene
d the door on the passenger’s side for Allison Booth and she got in. The clerk didn’t know the Booths and she assumed it was the lady’s husband picking her up. Apparently they were pretty friendly. There’s a description.”
I looked at the second sheet. The clerk, whose name was Washington, said the car was dark blue, a late model, and thought it was either a Chevrolet or an Oldsmobile but couldn’t say for sure. The driver was six feet tall and well built, in his early thirties, with sandy hair worn in a crewcut. “That’s not a description of Booth,” I said.
“The detectives figured that out. Saunders and O’Hara their names were, both deceased. I checked them out in the computer. Anyway the fact it wasn’t her husband was all the more reason to take a second look at the husband. Especially when Miss Washington picked the driver out of a group of interviewees at headquarters later. That’s the next report. No, I’m wrong. That’s the autopsy sheet. Keep going.”
Death by desanguination was the verdict. I turned over the post-mortem and found a report signed by Detective Michael Patrick O’Hara of Homicide. It was full of typos and strikeovers. He’d have been a lot more comfortable swinging a nightstick than hunched over a department Remington hunting and pecking with two fingers.
Thaler translated. “You can’t blame O’Hara and Saunders for thinking they were onto something. The husband and the driver knew each other. It wouldn’t have made the papers, though, because they both had alibis that held and there were no other eyewitnesses to back up Washington. The name’s there in the last paragraph. Birdsong or something.”
“Birdsall,” I corrected, reading. “Lowell Birdsall, Senior. Artist.”
18
Right.” Thaler was watching me. “He illustrated Booth’s books or something. They were pretty tight, or were before the murder.”
“Afterwards, too. According to Birdsall’s son.” I turned to the next sheaf. It was a typewritten transcript of Sergeant Owen Saunders’ interview with Birdsall, with no strikeovers and fewer typos; the work of a professional stenographer.
“There’s no accounting for people. But Birdsall was cleared, so I guess that was good enough for Booth. The model he was painting that night vouched for him. Fleta Skirrett?”
“Uh-huh.” Fleta’s statement was there too. She and Birdsall were shut up in the Alamo from a little before six until almost eleven that night. The autopsy report fixed time of death between seven and nine. Her Alzheimer’s or something had caused Fleta to leave all that out when we’d talked. “What about the Racket Squad? Booth had a beef with the local mob.”
“News to me. There’s nothing about it in the file. Didn’t they used to have some kind of rule about not going after wives or children?”
“That was the theory.”
“Yeah.” She made a theoretical sound in her throat. “Saunders and O’Hara closed it out as robbery-murder, assailant unknown. A pair of diamond earrings—a gift from Booth to celebrate a new contract with his publisher—was missing from Allison’s jewelry box, and two eyewitnesses in Hudson’s said she was wearing them in the store. Her wedding ring was gone too. If any of those items had ever surfaced in a pawnshop or anywhere else, it would have been in the file. E ither the thug had a good fence or he dealt them out of town or he panicked and threw them down the sewer grate.”
“Didn’t there used to be some kind of rule about not wearing diamonds before six?”
“That was the theory.” Her tone was arid. “The clothes she had on are in the inventory: blue silk blouse, black skirt, black high-heel pumps, one of those tricky butterfly-shaped hats women used to pin to their hair. It was black too, and so was the little clasp purse she was seen carrying in the store. The purse was never found. She was dressed for a night out.”
“Is that the opinion of a cop or a woman?”
“Both. You wouldn’t listen if it was just a woman.”
“I’d resent that, only I’m too tired. It doesn’t sound like you subscribe to the mugging theory.”
“I’m Felony Homicide. Murders committed in the course of robbery are my meat. The taxi companies had no record of a fare answering Allison Booth’s description leaving Hudson’s that night. No one saw her board a bus or a streetcar. The items she bought were easy to carry, but she had them delivered. She wasn’t going straight home, and no woman would willingly walk more than a few blocks in high heels. And she wouldn’t go shopping carrying a date purse unless she was meeting someone afterwards. Just because no one backed up the perfume clerk doesn’t mean she didn’t see what she said she saw. Even if she was mistaken about the man she thought she saw giving Allison Booth a lift.”
“Maybe it was a friendly thing that turned out not so friendly,” I said. “The running-out-of-gas gag was old even in fifty-six, but it still got used. Maybe she smacked him and got out to walk home.”
“Maybe. But I’d’ve made more of an effort to find the man and ask.”
“Not if you were Saunders and O’Hara, maybe. And maybe not if you thought she was a tramp and got what she had coming for whoring around while her husband was gone.”
“You act surprised. You wouldn’t if you were me and spent as much time in police locker rooms as I have. So what if there’s one more murderer walking around than there was last week? There’s one less two-timing wife.”
My cigarette had burned half away in the ashtray. I closed the folder and poked out the glowing coals with the eraser end of a pencil. “How long can I hang on to this file?”
“I doubt anyone will be asking for it any time soon,” she said. “Or will they?”
I returned the pencil to the cup. Then I sat back and took another Winston out of the pack; but to play with, not to smoke. “They might. If a sheriff’s detective named VaxhÖlm up in Black Lake decides Eugene Booth didn’t hang himself this morning in his motel cabin.”
“I knew when you walked into my office yesterday my weekend was going to be spoiled,” she said.
“No reason it should. It’s not your jurisdiction. Anyway there’s a note and the cabin was locked from inside. A cop like VaxhÖlm spends most of his time investigating break-ins at vacation cottages. He’ll probably be satisfied with suicide.”
“ ‘Satisfied with suicide.’ Sounds like the title of a Gangsta Rap album. Only you don’t care if it does rhyme.”
“One or two things about it don’t. Can you trace an out-of-state license plate?”
“Depends on the state.”
“New York.”
“New York’s dicey. There an officer has to enter his badge number every time he runs a check. Questions can get asked. It seems some members of the sacred and fraternal order of law enforcement professionals have been running a cottage industry on the side. It’s the Information Age. Everybody wants some and is willing to pay to get it.”
“Thank God.”
We were quiet for a moment. I wondered if Louise had read all the magazines in the reception room.
“I’d like to break the Allison Booth case,” Mary Ann Thaler said then.
“You won’t get any medals. The brass would be just as happy if it stayed forgotten. That’s the nature of old cases. You might even lose your shot at city hall.”
“Yeah, well. You can only fetch sandwiches for the chief so many times before it gets old.”
“Like maybe once.”
She took off her glasses and pulled up the bottom of her sweatshirt to wipe the lenses. She had a nice tanned midriff, but it couldn’t compete with her eyes, blue as robin’s eggs and nearly as large. “Even if it is suicide, it could have something to do with what happened in fifty-six. It could shake something loose. If she was a tramp—okay, but it didn’t entitle her to a death sentence. And if by some chance her killer is still around, I’d have the satisfaction of clamping the cuffs around his withered old wrists. That’s why I took the oath and the twelve-week course. Doughnuts make me bloat. Is the plate connected?”
“I won’t know that until I know who it belongs to. Maybe not eve
n then.” I told her about the man in the Yankees cap in Cabin Five.
“Robert C. Brown,” she echoed. “The middle initial is a nice touch. It’s safe to assume he had a gun if he kept his hand covered. Keep me current and I’ll run the plate. I got on pretty good with a sergeant with NYPD Narcotics when he was here last year on an extradition. He might be able to slip it in with a bunch.”
“I’ll call you right behind my client.” I took out my notepad and gave her the number.
She put on her glasses, wrote the number in her pad, and put it back in her hip pocket. “What was Booth’s beef with the mob?”
“He knew something and got drunk. He might have opened his mouth. He wasn’t sure. His wife might have been killed as a warning.”
“What did he know?”
“He swung from his belt before he could tell me.” I didn’t want to confuse her with details. One confused detective in town was enough.
“It doesn’t wash,” she said, and I thought my poker face had slipped. “They don’t kill wives as a warning. That’s what dogs are for.”
“They can’t all be Don Vito Corleone. Anyway it worked, if gagging Booth was what was intended. He shut his mouth and the weight of it broke him and his career.”
“Then he opened it again and the weight of him broke his neck.”
“Ironic,” I said, “but not accurate. He strangled.”
“They always do. A crime writer of all people ought to be able to come up with a better way to clock himself.”
I picked up the cigarette I’d been playing with earlier. “If you spend all your time with inspectors and sergeants, you’re never going to marry that dull character with the gas grill.”
“Look who’s talking. Your gig is missing persons. Your job ended at Black Lake.”
I centered the butt on the blotter and circled a finger around it; part of a trick I couldn’t get the hang of in Southeast Asia and hadn’t had any luck with since. “You know a limerick that begins, ‘There once was a lady from Niger?”
“I’ve heard about the man from Nantucket, but nobody ever finishes it. What are you doing?”
A Smile on the Face of the Tiger Page 13