Never Street

by Loren D. Estleman

“Which one are you?” Alderdyce asked.

  “Thompson.”

  The inspector barely glanced at me. There was no recognition in the glance. “Did he resist?”

  “No, sir. We had a BOL on a blue nineteen-seventy Cutlass with a pick-up on the driver. Headquarters didn’t say what about. Precinct policy in a case like that is to go in heavy and save the baby oil for later.”

  “What precinct?”

  “Ninth.”

  “That’s Zabrinski’s yard, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your skipper’s a horse’s ass, Thompson. The reprimands in his jacket go all the way back to before they broke up STRESS.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that, sir.”

  “Take the cuffs off.”

  “We found this on him, sir.” Thompson pulled my revolver from his belt.

  Alderdyce took it from him. “Was he carrying paper?”

  The officer produced my wallet from his hip pocket. He took that too. “The cuffs.”

  Olready unlocked the manacles. The blood charged back into my hands, prickling like a fistful of straight pins.

  Alderdyce handed me a handkerchief. “Want to file a complaint?”

  “It’s hot. Everybody’s boiling over. Anyway, a complaint’s not much good these days without video accompaniment.” I daubed at my torn lip. “An apology would be nice.”

  The inspector looked at the officers.

  “Sorry about the hard handling.” Thompson wasn’t looking at me.

  Olready said, “Sorry.”

  “Now we’re friends.” Alderdyce gave me the wallet and gun and watched me put them away. I offered back the handkerchief. “Keep it. Care to tell me where you were this morning between midnight and two A.M.?”

  On my knees in my living room, looking for a bullet. “I was at home in bed.”

  “Anybody with you?”

  “I got a couple of telephone calls. What’s the squeal?”

  He took out a spiral pad. “You had contact last night with a party named Leander?”

  I felt a tingle that had nothing to do with my hands. “He called me. We spoke. Is this about Leander?”

  “His sister, Susan Thibido, told officers you came to her place yesterday looking for her brother. She said you made threats.”

  “She’s mistaken.”

  “She’s inside.” He tipped his head toward the door to Intensive Care.

  “I said I could keep him out of trouble if he agreed to meet me. It’s a stretch to call that a threat.”

  “It’s a bigger stretch to call you a fortune-teller,” he said. “But you came close.”

  “What happened?”

  “The sister’s phone rang a little after two this morning. She couldn’t make out what he was saying, but she knew it was him and he didn’t sound good. She’d spoken to him earlier. He was staying at an old girlfriend’s apartment on Watson while the girlfriend was out of town. Mrs. Thibido called the police. They found him on the floor of the living room with most of his bones broken and not much of what you would call a pulse.”

  “How is he?”

  “How would you be?”

  “He’s conscious,” I said. “If he weren’t you wouldn’t have had me brought here for him to identify.”

  “Will he?”

  “Not unless his brains have been shaken loose. We only talked on the telephone.”

  “About what?”

  “The heat and the storms. What else is there to talk about this summer?”

  “Try attempted murder. It could still be murder if those machines he’s wired into start flashing tilt.”

  “Let’s go in and talk to him before they do.”

  He put away his pad and squashed the button next to a speaker mounted flush to the wall.

  “Yes?” A woman’s voice, as flat as the speaker.

  “This is Inspector Alderdyce. I need to bring someone in for Leander to see.”

  There was a short silence. Then the speaker crackled.

  “One minute. Just the two of you.”

  A muted buzzer sounded. He twisted the broom handle on the door and we went in.

  We passed a pair of nurses, one female, one male, seated in front of a bank of monitors. On the way down the short quiet corridor we encountered Roy and Susan Thibido. Her red hair was still ratted, but she had put on a clean cotton dress and strap sandals and orange lipstick. Roy wore a green twill worksuit and blew his nose into a blue bandanna handkerchief as he passed us. If he felt his wife’s fingers digging into his upper arm when she recognized me, he didn’t react.

  The room was just big enough to contain the bed, an IV stand, a cartload of monitoring equipment, and two visitors of moderate proportions, which Alderdyce was not. He left me standing in the doorway while he approached the bed.

  Miles Leander looked like a character in a potentially hilarious scene from a slapstick comedy, although nobody was laughing. His head wore a helmet of bandages and he was in a total body cast with all four limbs hoisted upward on pulleys. Various wires and tubes trailed from holes in the plaster. He might have been a balloon drifted away from the Thanksgiving Day parade.

  Alderdyce leaned over him and spoke his name gently. One eye opened in a ring of blue-black bruises. The other was swollen shut. It took him a moment to focus on the face inches from his. Again the inspector spoke. There was a pause, then the eye slid toward the doorway where I stood. After a while he grunted and shook his head. The grunt ended in a groan; even that tiny movement was excruciating.

  “That narrows it down,” said Alderdyce when we were back out in the main corridor. “He won’t be able to give us any kind of description until they unwire his jaw.”

  “It’s not the way I work, John.”

  “People lose their tempers in the heat. You said it yourself.” He put a hand on the back of his neck and stretched. “I wouldn’t want to take on whoever it was without the whole TMU for backup. Doc says the fractured skull and internal damage would have killed most people. Leander’s a big guy, and his sister says he worked as an attendant in a mental institution. It takes muscle to subdue a psycho.”

  “I know someone who could take him,” I said.

  Alderdyce gave me a cop look.

  I shook my head. “Not evidence. You can’t tank anyone for withholding a hunch. If it turns out to be anything more I’ll run to you.”

  “That I’d like to see. I’d pay to see that.” He stretched again. “It’s not my squeal anyway. I only took it because I was close by on my way to lunch. If Leander croaks and it’s tied to something else he was involved in, it goes to Felony Murder. You can sing your old sad song to Mary Ann Thaler.”

  “Now I know how a pinball feels,” I said.

  “I’ll have Thompson and Olready take you back to your car.”

  “I’ll call a cab.”

  Passing a small waiting room down the hall, I spotted Susan Thibido seated in a chair upholstered in tan vinyl. She tensed up when I went in.

  “Relax,” I said. “Your brother cleared me. Where’s Roy?”

  “Getting a cup of coffee. They don’t know if Miles will ever walk again, if he does survive.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She made a short dry laugh. “Yeah.”

  “I mean it. When I spoke to you I thought Miles was dirty. Something he said last night started me wondering.”

  “My brother is an honest man, Mr. Walker. He’s impulsive, and that gets him into trouble sometimes, but he’d never do anything he knew was wrong. I may not have been the world’s best big sister, but I taught him that much.”

  “How’d you know where to send the cops?”

  “He called me earlier and told me where he was. That’s when I gave him your number.”

  “Who else knew besides his girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know. He might have told anyone, although he doesn’t have many friends. Most people think he’s too serious. No fun to be around.”

  “Did
you tell anyone?”

  “No. Well, Roy.”

  I touched my lip, where a scab had begun to form. “Where’d Roy go for coffee?”

  Thirty-one

  I FOUND ROY Thibido treating his condition in a little anteroom off the hospital cafeteria, pouring the contents of a pint of Southern Comfort into a waxed cup of coffee from the vending machine. He put on his baggy leer when he saw me.

  “Found out where they empty the bedpans.” He lifted the cup in a toast and drank.

  “What did you expect for eighty-five cents?” I asked. “Juan Valdez?”

  His face flushed when the liquor hit his stomach. It had been red to begin with. “They sure hung a hurt on Sue’s baby brother. I like to of puked when I saw him.”

  “Maybe it’s the brand you drink.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing. Your wife thinks I’m the one who hung the hurt on him. Or she did.”

  “You? Nah.” He poured himself another hit.

  “Why not? I’m big enough.”

  “You’re a cub scout. I guess I know a pro job when I see it. I was on the line a time or two.”

  “I thought maybe it was because you saw the guy who did it.”

  He took a swig and squeezed his eyes shut. “Now how would I do that?”

  “I thought maybe you got a good look at him when you told him where he could find Sue’s baby brother.”

  He opened his eyes, swirled the liquid around in the cup, looked down at it; thought better of that and said, “I guess maybe you spend too much time thinking. A thing like that can put all the wrong thoughts in your head.”

  “I’m pretty sure you saw him. You’re too cagey to give away valuable information like that over the telephone. You’d insist on having the cash in hand. How much was it? I don’t really have to know. I’m just curious what price a heel like you would put on the life of his own wife’s flesh and blood.”

  He had priorities. He reached up and set the cup and bottle on top of the coffee machine. Then he pivoted on the ball of his left foot, bringing his big knob-knuckled right fist around in a broad arc at the side of my head.

  I sidestepped it. Stumbling on, he made a wind like a passing cattle truck, lost his balance, and fell hard, emptying his lungs with a woof. He was drunker than he looked, or maybe he was just clumsy. I reached down and gave him a hand up. When he had his feet under him he tried again, with his left fist this time. I ducked it, caught his wrist, dug my shoulder into his armpit, and boosted him on over. He did a complete flip and piled up against the base of the vending machine. A cup dropped into the slot and filled with gurgling coffee.

  “Next time bring the baseball bat, Roy.”

  Again I bent to help him up, and this time he didn’t resist. Just then an intern came along—he wasn’t dressed loudly enough for a doctor—and hesitated at the sight of one man supporting the full weight of another with his arm across his back.

  “Inner ear,” I said.

  He nodded, all understanding. “Should I call an orderly?”

  I shook my head. “Happens all the time. He’s got surgery in an hour. He’ll be fine once he’s got a scalpel in his hand.”

  “He’s a surgeon?”

  “Best chest-cutter in Vienna.”

  When the intern had gone into the cafeteria, adjusting his glasses, I dragged Thibido into a corner next to a potted fern and sat him on the floor with his back against the wall. He was dazed but conscious. The exertion had accelerated the effects of the liquor.

  I took the bottle down from the top of the machine, wiped the mouth with the heel of my hand, and helped myself. The bitter-honey taste catapulted me back to college, before I learned to distinguish good booze from bad. I went over to Thibido and bent down and gave him a swig. He sucked on it as if it had a nipple.

  I pulled it away. He whimpered and reached for it, but I straightened up out of his range. “I’ll get you started, Roy. A real kick-sand-in-your-face type: broad shoulders, bent arms, bad haircut, neck like a leg. Answers to Gordon. Did you go to him or did he come to you?”

  “Why should I tell you?” His speech was starting to slur. In another minute he’d be weeping all over himself.

  “Nobody has to tell me anything. I’m just a private citizen with a plastic badge. All the metal ones are upstairs. You don’t have to tell them anything, either, but then you don’t get to go home.”

  “Shit.”

  “An overused word today.” I wiped off the bottle and drank. “But in your situation it’s appropriate.”

  “Nothing I do don’t turn to nothing but shit.”

  There was one too many double negatives in that for me, so I let it alone. “Gordon,” I prompted. “Who kicked, who received?”

  “He must of been watching the place.” It was barely audible. He was staring at the floor between his legs with his chin on his chest.

  “What place? Your place?”

  “He come up on the porch when I went out to get the paper. You say his name’s Gordon. He didn’t introduce himself. Looked like you said. I’m thinking, shit, this is it. I left my bat inside.”

  “When?”

  “Last night. Sue was upstairs. He said he just wanted to talk to baby brother. Just like you, only he wasn’t so shy about saying how much. Thousand bucks, he said. ‘How much up front?’ I said. ‘All of it,’ he said. I said, ‘What if I give you a bum steer?’ ‘You won’t,’ he said. Then he grabbed my wrist—Jesus, he near crushed it—and turned up my hand and counted the bills right into it: fifty, a hundred, two-fifty—like that, right up to a thousand. Only he didn’t let it go when he had it all counted out.”

  “Not until you told him.”

  The little room got quiet. Fine antiseptic dust settled into the wrinkles in his shirt and pants and the spaces between the linoleum tiles on the floor. The summer grew old and stale.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  I was tired then. I felt myself getting old with the summer. I’d already felt stale. I didn’t even feel like kicking Thibido’s chin through his scalp. I leaned down and set the bottle on the floor between his legs and walked out of the hospital, where the hot untreated air lay on my back like plagues on Egypt.

  The Renaissance Center.

  Symbol of Detroit’s regeneration from the ashes of rage, poverty, and the Stanley Cup playoffs. A cluster of glass and copper towers rearing above the brick-slobbering warehouses on the river separating the United States from Canada (and didn’t the Canucks thank God every day for that). Dreamed up by Henry Ford II, who when he sobered up was as surprised as anyone to find that the rest of the city had bought into it. Constructed along purely anti-Renaissance lines, with one way in and out (and that on the second floor), it needed only a bar dropped across the entrance and snipers deployed at the windows to withstand a siege from among the workforce that had built it. What it couldn’t do was prevent the shops and businesses that paid rent from trickling out when all the customers moved to the suburbs. Pull-down doors in the mall masked exposed wires and unwanted fixtures from the spectral shoppers who haunted the hallways, looking like dead cells in an extinct organism. A Manilow dirge was playing over the loudspeakers when I entered and made my way to the Westin.

  I shared the lobby of the 740-foot hotel with the desk clerk and the proprietor of the gift shop, seated in a folding chair smoking a cigarette outside the entrance to his place of business. Neither of them paid me an ounce of attention as I picked up one of the house telephones and asked the operator to connect me to Dr. Naheen’s room.

  “Yes?”

  I heard classical music in the background.

  “This is Walker, Doctor. I’m in the lobby. I have some information about Miles Leander.”

  “Please come up.” He told me the room number. “I’m in twenty-three-oh-six.”

  The elevator took me almost to the roof. I heard violins behind Naheen’s door. They stopped when I knocked.

  When he opened up I stepped inside and pushed the doo
r shut behind me. Most of Windsor spread out below the broad window on the opposite side of the room. Gunmetal clouds were rolling in from across the river. The city was lit up in their shadow, as in a kind of false night.

  The psychiatrist wore a brown mohair smoking jacket with a pale silk scarf around his throat, tan trousers, and cordovan slippers. He had one of his cigars in one hand and a balloon glass in the other. He looked like a chocolate Easter Bunny pretending to be Noel Coward.

  “Where’s Gordon?” I asked.

  “He has a room down the hall. We’re both heterosexual, in case you were wondering.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Can I interest you in some cognac? I’m afraid I haven’t a proper glass to spare, but the kind the hotel provides are serviceable.” He lifted a squat bottle from a tray on the low chest of drawers.

  “It’s a little early for me.” I pushed open the door to the bathroom and stuck my head in. It was unoccupied. That left under the king-size bed; but Gordon wouldn’t fit there.

  “We’re alone, Mr. Walker. No camera equipment.” Naheen chuckled.

  I went over and looked down at the river. The water was as black as oil.

  “Didn’t they have anything closer to the ground? Another couple of feet and you’d need an oxygen tank.”

  “I like heights. I selected Balfour House because of its position on a hill. I enjoy looking down.”

  “Kind of like God.” I turned around.

  He touched his glasses with the hand holding the cigar. “No, Mr. Walker. There’s no deity complex here. I’m as entitled as anyone to take innocent pleasure from a view.”

  “How long have you been taking pleasure from this one?”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  “Have you been in this room ever since you checked in yesterday?”

  “I went down to dinner last night, in the hotel dining room. I haven’t been out today. I hope I don’t offend you when I say I dislike this city. I only come here when I must, and I avoid being on the streets as much as possible. My years on the island have made me acutely sensitive to the honking of automobile horns and the casual profanity of pedestrians.”

  “I know: Clip-clop, clip-clop.”

  “The doctor is no less human than those he treats. I am sorry to disillusion you on that point.”