“Who the hell cares, Sue? When did you start growing a halo?”
“Money doesn’t have moral standards,” I said. “The sum I’m talking about is enough to change Leander’s life, but not enough to affect my client’s. No one will suffer from the transaction. There are no drugs or white slavery involved, no guns or government cover-ups or child pornography or treason. No foreign democracies will fall. Call it severance pay from a generous former employer.”
“It can’t be that easy,” she said. “Nothing that’s right is that easy.”
“Christ.” Roy scuffed back to his game, the cut-down bat swinging at his side.
I wedged the card between the screen door and the frame. “Next time Miles gets in touch with you, please give him my number. He’s an adult. You should let him decide.”
“I always have. I wish I could say his decisions have always been sound.” She nodded then. “I’ll give him your number and tell him what you said.” But she made no move to claim the card. She was waiting for me to leave before she unhooked the door. I thanked her and went away.
On Michigan I stopped and used a pay telephone to call Spee-D-A Couriers and confirm that the manager, whose name was Mr. Blint, wouldn’t be in the office until the following day. Fresh out of leads, I cashed Dr. Naheen’s check, caught supper down the street from my bank, and went home.
I was dozing in front of an oil fire in Madagascar when my telephone rang. I got up and turned down the sound on the set.
“Walker?”
A low voice for a woman and even some men, with fine grit in it, like a cat’s lick.
“Vesta?” I sat down and groped for a cigarette. I was awake now.
“I went to see a lawyer like you said. He thinks I ought to be able to get at least fifteen percent out of the insurance companies, plus his fee. That’s almost fourteen thousand for me.”
“Congratulations.”
“I need to make sure you’re not mad because I didn’t use you as a go-between.”
“You don’t owe me any explanations.”
“I don’t owe anyone anything. I don’t intend to ever again. I made that decision before I knew anything about the money. I especially don’t want to owe you. That’s no way to start a relationship.” After a short silence she said, “Hello?”
“I was just lighting a cigarette. Are we starting a relationship?”
“That’s what I called to ask. You don’t have to be polite. I mean, I don’t even know if you’re married or involved or dead set against women. I’m pretty sure you’re not gay.”
“I’m not any of those things. Are you asking me out?”
“Hell. I’m no good at this. I guess I’m not a woman of the post-feminist era after all. Please forget I called.”
“Don’t hang up. I’m not any good at it either. Half the women I meet are clients. The other half I’m following for the first half. I spend most of my Saturday nights in my car watching a window with the shade pulled down. Incredible as it may seem, the few women I run across who don’t fit either category aren’t interested in watching it with me.”
“So is that a yes?”
“Where would you like to go?”
“Someplace where we won’t trip over anyone either of us knows. I know a neat little place in Brighton, if that’s not too much of a hike. Tomorrow night?”
“As it happens, my calendar is clear. Who picks who up?”
“You drive. I’ve done my bit for the sisterhood. Six-thirty’s comfortable if we want to make an eight o’clock reservation.”
“Aren’t we civilized.”
“Only where it counts.” She said good-bye.
I put out the cigarette and went to bed. The telephone rang again as soon as I got in.
“Change your mind?” I asked.
“About what? Who do you think this is?” It was John Alderdyce’s voice.
“My wake-up service, apparently.” I sat down. The chair was still warm. “Thanks for the package, John. I was starting to think I’d spend Labor Day in the Iroquois Heights lockup.”
“I don’t know what package you’re talking about, and neither do you. You’re still dreaming.”
“I get it. So who’s dead now?”
“A fourteen-year-old girl in a crack house on Woodrow Wilson and an old man who took a midnight walk into the River Rouge, for two; but you’re not hooked in with either of those. At least I don’t think you are. I thought you’d like to know you can stop looking for Neil Catalin.”
“You found him? Where and in what condition?”
“He’s still missing, but his car isn’t. We found it parked in the long-term lot at Metro Airport. That puts it in the FBI’s wheelhouse. He’s now wanted for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. So there’s nothing you can do or think that the boys and girls in suits didn’t think of first and follow up on yesterday.”
“Did the county boys pop the trunk?”
“That’s always the first order of business. No body. No blood on the upholstery either. He took a flyer on a big silver bird and now he’s Fed bait.”
“It doesn’t matter. I got my walking papers yesterday. Did Ballistics kick back anything on those slugs where Webb was killed?”
“I thought it didn’t matter.”
“I’m writing my memoirs.”
“Webb and Elwood were killed with the same gun, a nine-millimeter. The slug from the staircase wall was too messed up to be anything but a probable, but the one in Webb’s chest matched. Catalin registered a nine-millimeter S-and-W year before last. We searched his house and office yesterday, but we didn’t turn it. That’s because he’s either still got it on him or he chucked it in the sewer after he shot his partner. He’s getting better. He only fired once at Webb.”
“What about powder burns?”
“Webb had ’em on his shirt. That just means there was a struggle. You think the shooter wrestled the gun away from him and it went off. We think Webb wrestled the shooter for the gun. We’ll let the lawyers sort it out once Catalin’s extradited back here.”
“If he’s arrested.”
“Like I said, that’s a federal headache now. I’ve got enough on my hands with the teenage girl and the old man.”
“Thanks, John.”
“That’s another one you owe me. I mean, if you owed me one before.” The line clicked and hummed.
I was deep asleep the next time it rang. I clawed my way up from the bottom of a shaft filled with black crankcase oil, untangled myself from the bedding, and stumped on raw nerve-ends into the living room, shaking circulation back into the arm I’d been lying on.
“This damn well better be good.”
“Is your name Walker?”
A voice unknown to me, male with an edge. I had a premonition. It was still there when I switched on the floor lamp. “I’m Walker.”
“This is Miles Leander. My sister says you went to her place looking for me. Why?”
“I’ve been retained by Dr. Ashraf Naheen to talk to you about the tapes.”
“What tapes?”
I let that one wither on the branch.
“I’m not interested in talking to anyone who’d take a dime from Naheen,” he said finally. “Tell me something. What do you call someone a snake pays to do his slithering for him?”
“A private detective. When and where can we meet?”
“Never and nowhere. I only called you because Susan asked me to.”
“She worries about you.”
“She should worry about herself. I’m not married to a lump like Roy.”
“My client has authorized me to offer you a lot of money. Not as much as you’re asking for, but without fear of prosecution. Running from the law is expensive.”
“Who the hell needs money? I’d rather have a good opinion of myself and three squares a day in jail. Look, I don’t know what Doc Schlock has told you, but you can tell him for me he’s through. I don’t have the tapes. I sent them to all the people who should have th
em.”
“Who would that be?”
“You’re the detective. Work it out.”
I was growing weary of that one. “You didn’t send a copy of one of the tapes to Naheen along with a fifty thousand-dollar price tag for the originals?”
His end was quiet for a beat. Then he made a nasty laugh and hung up.
I stood there in my robe for a long moment, jigging the receiver in my hand. Finally I cradled it and reached over to switch off the lamp. Just then the glass pane in the window across the room separated into three pieces and fell with a clank. The report came right behind, as loud as the first shot at Fort Sumter.
Twenty-eight
I GAVE THE LAMP a shove, hit the floor hard on my right shoulder, and rolled behind the chair. The room was dark now. I listened to my heartbeat and waited for my pupils to adjust. Gradually I began to make out features in the room in the dusty starlight, the slightly lighter oblong of the broken window in the black expanse of wall.
It was quiet outside, or as quiet anyway as a suburban neighborhood entirely surrounded by a great city ever gets in summer. Crickets stitched in the yard, traffic whirred past on the Chrysler and Ford freeways nearby, one of my neighbors was watching Letterman by an open window with the sound cranked up, the eternal dog went on barking long after it had given up hope.
My .38 revolver, shiny new screw and all, was in the bedroom, where I would have to cross in front of the window to get it. I decided to wait.
I was good at that. In Cambodia I had remained in a crouch for nearly three hours, waiting for a sniper I wasn’t sure existed to make a move of some kind. Then a branch had stirred, halfway up in a hardwood tree without a breath of air moving between me and Saigon. I shot him out of it, an irregular not more than thirteen years old, wearing a dirty loincloth and sandals made from U.S. Army Jeep tire recaps and armed with a Russian AKM, rate of fire six hundred rounds per minute. I had used one in a hundred and eighty.
But in Cambodia I had been twenty years old, and I knew who the enemy was.
Ten minutes crept past, one by one on their bellies.
The dog barked and barked.
The telephone rang and kept it up twelve times before it quit. I hadn’t been this popular since the end of the sexual revolution.
A dull ache awakened in my right hip and began the slow blind crawl toward the knee, burning as it went. When the time came to move, the whole leg would be as dead as I was supposed to be.
A door slammed, loudly enough to make me flinch. A motor started. Rubber scraped asphalt. A pair of high beams swept the room like the light on the conning tower of a U-boat. The engine growl climbed to a thin whine and became someone else’s disturbance down the block. I had heard that sound once before.
I waited two minutes, just in case he’d left a friend behind. Then I stood up, went to the bedroom for the Smith & Wesson, and went out the back door.
The blue mercury light on top of my neighbor’s garage made snipers out of every shadow. It took me five minutes to work my way around to the front of the house, and five more to satisfy myself that I was the only living thing awake on the street, not counting the dog. Even if the shot woke someone up, he had had time to convince himself he was dreaming and turn over and go back to sleep. He wouldn’t have any reason to look out his window and see one of his fellow taxpayers standing in his bathrobe in his own front yard, a gun hanging at his side like Wyatt Earp’s after the civil infraction at the O.K. Corral. I went back inside.
I righted the floor lamp, found the bulb had a broken filament, and replaced it. I searched the living room walls for a half hour and had begun to wonder if I’d been dreaming myself when I found at last where the slug had gone. On my hands and knees in the same spot for the fifth time, I happened to look up and saw a fresh white scar in the walnut finish on the underside of a curio shelf left over from my marriage. The curios had departed along with the other half of the union, leaving me with a convenient place to stand a beer bottle when I went back in the kitchen to make a sandwich. The thing had been invisible for years.
I got up, placed my palm under the shelf, and lifted. The nails securing the board to the wooden brackets were loose in their holes and the board moved easily, exposing a neat round hole in the painted plaster behind it. The slug had burrowed along the bottom of the shelf with just enough pressure to nudge it upward half an inch, then buried itself in the wall. The shelf had then settled back into its original position, concealing the hole. Malicious destruction of property had never been more discreet.
I retrieved my Swiss Army knife from the litter on the bureau in the bedroom and performed surgery. After shattering the window, crossing the room, and hoicking up the shelf, the lump of lead had nearly spent itself by the time it came to rest against a stud. I pried it out and examined it. It might have come from a nine-millimeter weapon. It might have been a .38 Special or a freak European caliber. I’d left my slide rule and calipers back at the lab. I tossed it up and caught it a couple of times and when the novelty went out of that I dropped it into the pocket of my robe.
It was strictly a souvenir. If I went to the cops with it and it turned out to have come from the same gun that had killed Brian Elwood and Leo Webb, the investigation would come back to Detroit and sit on me like a fat drunk on a bar stool. They would want to know why Neil Catalin had it in for me, and when I didn’t give them the answer they were looking for they’d tank me as a material witness, or stake me out like a goat on a lion hunt. Either way my days as an effective investigator were over until they had their man.
And they would never have their man as long as they thought he was Catalin.
While I was working all this out, a moth the size of a kite sailed in through the broken window, splatted against the lamp shade, and plopped to the carpet, dead as the USSR. I had some home maintenance to do.
I found some scraps of plywood in the garage, but nothing that would fit the empty window frame. I picked up a hammer and a sack of nails, punched the bottom out of the silverware drawer in the kitchen, and nailed the piece over the hole. After picking up and throwing out the broken glass I took the hammer and nails into the bedroom and pounded a nail into the bed’s wooden frame halfway between the head and foot, leaving an inch and a half of shaft sticking out.
The telephone rang. I carried the revolver with me into the living room.
“Walker’s All-Night Construction.”
“Are you okay?”
It was Vesta.
“It depends on what scale you’re using. Did you try to call earlier?”
“You didn’t answer. I was worried.”
“Why?”
“I had a visitor right after I got off the phone with you. After he left I went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I got to thinking he might be on his way over to your place. I was right, wasn’t I?”
“I’ll guess. It was Orvis Robinette.”
“I kept the door on the chain all the time we were talking. He could have broken it, but he was on his good behavior. I told him I didn’t have the ninety-two thousand, that my lawyer had it and he’d put it in a safe deposit box and that we were giving it back.”
“Was he still on his good behavior?”
“For him, I suppose. He didn’t call me anything I hadn’t heard before, but he didn’t try to break in. That means he believed me. He wanted to know whose idea it was to give the money back. I wouldn’t tell him, but I think he figured it out for himself. He left then. When you didn’t answer your phone I thought—”
“He was here. I didn’t see him, but I know the sound of that souped-up Camaro he drives. I heard it at your place the night he killed Leo Webb. He wasn’t as lucky with me. He missed.”
“Did you call the police?”
“What for? I’ve already been violated.”
“But you’re okay.”
“Okay enough to do a little midnight carpentry. He won’t be back tonight. I’m pretty sure he won’t be back at all.”
&
nbsp; “What makes you sure?”
“He’s hotheaded, but he’s no psycho. He went into crime for the money, not the buzz. The cash is gone. There’s no percentage in carrying on a vendetta. That doesn’t mean he won’t try again if I happen to cross his path, but he won’t go out of his way to cross mine after the risk he just took. By now he’s planning his next heist.”
“I hope you’re right. All my relationships lately seem to wind up in jail or wanted by the cops or dead. I’m starting to wonder if I’m the opposite of a rabbit’s foot.”
“Let’s just say your biorhythms are due for an upswing. Go back to bed; that’s what I’m planning to do. I’ll see you tonight”
“Just don’t walk under any ladders between now and then, deal?”
I grinned and told her good night.
When the receiver was in the cradle my grin faded. With the gun in my hand I checked the locks on every door and window in the house. In the bedroom I draped my robe over the footboard, hung the revolver by its trigger guard on the nail I’d hammered into the bedframe, and stretched out on the mattress, checking a couple of times with my hand to make sure the weapon was within reach. A gun under a pillow is too hard to get to. A gun on the nightstand is too easy for the wrong people to get to. And as confident as I’d sounded when I spoke to Vesta, too many of my assumptions had gone wrong lately to trust any of them as much as I trusted that nail.
Twenty-nine
IN THE MORNING I showered, cleaned my gun, shaved, loaded the cylinder, dressed, checked the load, drank coffee and juice, snapped the holster to my belt, and went to work. Nobody shot at me when I fished the Free Press out of the junipers, so I counted it the start of a good day.
A high-speed early-morning chase involving a stolen car, three Detroit police cruisers, and an innocent thirty-three-year-old mother of two killed crossing with the light at an intersection had bumped the Elwood-Webb murders to an inside page. The story led off with the discovery of Catalin’s car at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, went from there to an all-purpose quote from the FBI special agent who had inherited the case, then went on to rehash the familiar details. The same trio of pictures of Elwood, Webb, and Catalin ran as filler.
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