“What’s important varies from person to person. They didn’t need a state-of-the-art accelerant to take down a vacant building.”
“Amos, I didn’t know anything could catch fire that fast, I mean the whole place in an instant. I’d swear it was napalm.”
“Pretty sophisticated for someone who started out by keying your car.”
“Do you think they’re connected?”
“Maybe. They went from a little scrap fire at Zorborón’s to first-degree murder.”
“I heard about that. I won’t be attending his memorial service, but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, including my worst enemy. Which he was.”
“He didn’t have any more control over what’s been going on here than you did. This new breed is too close to what’s happening down on the border. Zorborón was just a symbol. They tipped him over to make their point: This isn’t your father’s Mexicantown.”
She shivered a little. She wasn’t dressed for a Detroit street in late winter. I left her for a moment to beg a blanket off the EMS team, came back and draped it around her shoulders. She smiled thanks and drew it together at her throat. She was acclimating herself to the pain in her hands.
“Was that on the level about the gangs selling protection?” I asked.
“Street talk. No one approached me.”
“They wouldn’t, if all they were interested in was taking you out of the picture. The Tiger didn’t say anything about it, so I’m assuming they didn’t try to sell him either. Why waste your pitch on a carcass? Who’s running the Zapatistas these days?”
“What makes it them and not the Maldados?”
“I talked to El Hermano. I’ll talk to him again. I was asking you about the Zaps.”
“They take turns.”
I looked at her.
“I’m serious,” she said. “Whoever’s in charge depends on whether the rank-and-file are satisfied with the job he’s doing. They model themselves after the Old Country Zaps: True Marxists don’t believe in centralizing leadership. They take a vote on everything, and if someone dissents, he goes his own way, no consequences. Trying to talk to them is like taking a swing at Jell-O.”
“That Indian thing again. Marx was a Johnny-come-lately. But what happened here and at the garage weren’t committee decisions.”
“What about the rooster house?” she asked. “I heard about that this morning.”
“I don’t know. It feels different somehow. Not Maldado, and not Detroit Zaps. I could be wrong.”
“A third wheel?”
“I could be wrong,” I said again. “My leg says different.”
“I see you limping on it sometimes. I’ve been curious about it.”
“An old mistake. These days it only acts up when I live wrong or something doesn’t hang together. I always had it, I guess. It’s just gone into the bone and curled up there.”
“Where I came from we called it divine guidance.”
“Kind of like what made you go to that supply closet.”
“That was dumb luck. Part of the trick is knowing the difference.”
“Got a place to stay?”
“I have a room. I only slept in the store when I worked late. When I’ve had some rest maybe I’ll be able to reconstruct some of those files from memory. When Arson’s through maybe they’ll let me stir among the ashes.”
“They’ll have them all sorted out for you. Those boys get plenty of experience every Devil’s Night.”
“Apart from that I’ll start from scratch. Someday I may even find it in my faith to forgive the rotten sons of bitches.”
* * *
When I left her, a heavyset blonde with big eighties hair was doing a stand-up in front of a TV camera. She managed to crowd “conflagration,” “holocaust,” and “inferno” into one sentence.
Alderdyce was just finishing up with a reporter from another station. When the lights went out I told him what I’d gotten from Sister Delia. I threw in the third-party speculation at no charge.
“Let’s keep that a wild guess,” he said. “We got plenty to work with as it is. We kicked Mendoza over to INS this morning. He’s their jurisdiction now, theirs and Mexico’s over those two dead rurales a while back. He didn’t do his boss.”
“Wild guess?”
“His hands and clothes tested negative for gunpowder residue. He didn’t have time to wash up and change and ditch his old clothes and get greasy again between the time Zorborón was shot and you found him.”
“Where are you holding Nesto?”
“We’re not. Buho sprang him. He plays bridge with a judge. I asked Chata to keep the boy home a few days. It didn’t take much persuading. I put a car in front of the house. I doubt this bunch would try anything that far outside the neighborhood, but I’ve been wrong more often about what won’t happen than about what will.”
“Anything on that bread truck?”
“Not yet. Secretary of State’s priorities aren’t ours.”
“Mind if I look into that end?”
“You play bridge too?”
“Not with Lansing. My source wouldn’t pass a civil service background check.”
“Too much information. Have fun. Just come to me with what you get.”
“Don’t I always?”
He inserted a thumb under his necktie and turned the dimple into a blister; dimples offended his sense of order. “Jesus, I’ll be glad when this one’s finished and I can go back to hating your guts.”
EIGHTEEN
Petey Kresge had been holding down a corner booth in the Sextant Bar on Lafayette since before cell phones. In the old days he’d had a line installed so he could take and place calls without leaving the table and the pitcher of beer that was always on it, just like the old-time news hawks whose black-and-white photos decorated the walls in their fedoras with cigars in their kissers; the place was a five-minute walk from both the News and Free Press buildings—the originals—and from Prohibition until the Joint Operating Agreement reduced both papers to daily shoppers, if you’d hung out there and kept your ears open you’d have known tomorrow’s headline and saved yourself a nickel.
That’s history; so’s Detroit. Today’s journalists—the ones who still write for print—drive home straight from the office and their phones don’t ring in the middle of the night. That’s good for family, but it’s taken all the sense of anticipation out of fishing the paper out of the bushes, and even that happens only three times a week now.
Petey claimed relation to the family that founded Kresge’s Department Store, later Kmart, but the rest of the family hadn’t gone along with the claim, so he made rent forging vehicle registrations in cases where the VIN on the engines didn’t match the numbers on the chassis. It paid well in the town that invented carjacking. I was banking on the theory that whoever had arranged a bread truck for a chicken run wouldn’t have gone through the Michigan Secretary of State’s office and risked leaving a paper trail.
If you didn’t know him you’d think him younger than he was by ten years, a slender lad with a long jaw always working at a wad of gum under a Red Wings cap, who didn’t need a razor more than every other day. His eyes were blue and clear and he had less than 10 percent body fat. Beer was his only vice, and he could make a glass last all afternoon. Unless you joined him in the morning just after he set up shop, you found the stuff in the pitcher invariably lukewarm. That was if he asked you to join him.
I found him in his usual circumstances, with a laptop open on the table and his cell, pager, and Etch A Sketch electronic notebook lined up side by side next to it. His glass steeped on a paper coaster, but a puddle of condensation had formed around the base of the pitcher. His fingers were a blur on the keyboard.
“How’s the transportation business?” I slid into the seat opposite him.
He answered without looking up. “Shitty. GPS has got all the best boosters too spooked to jump a wire. The cowboys who aren’t I won’t work with. State cops are promising to have an onb
oard computer in every prowl car by next year. What’s next? I may have to join my brother-in-law in the green card racket. I hate my brother-in-law. Green cards are for saps who want to get butt-fucked by an entirely different class of convict.”
“There’s always life on the square.”
“Don’t think I haven’t been tempted.” He paused in his typing long enough to call out for another glass.
“Not on my account,” I said. “I manufacture my own spit.”
“Eighty-six the glass,” he told the man behind the bar. “Maybe the car-key business, but I’ll need case dough. They put microchips in them now, the car won’t unlock or start without ’em. Used to be all you needed was a hardware store key-maker and you were good to go.”
“Society’s tough on free enterprise. Ever do any business in Mexicantown?”
“Best quesadillas this far north.”
I wrapped a bill in a paper napkin and slid it across the table. He tapped a few keys more, then unfolded it in his lap. “One of the new ones, huh. More colors than the Polack flag. I know a guy who can beat ’em. All’s you need is the right equipment; expensive as hell. They’ve taken counterfeiting away from the boys with a printing press and a green visor and dropped it in the lap of Al-Qaeda. Took care of the competition.”
“You know anybody who doesn’t have a sheet?”
“My bookie. He works out of the Woodward branch of the U.S. Post Office.” He stuck the hundred-dollar bill in the flap pocket of his twill shirt. “I wasn’t kidding about the quesadillas. Real lard; what the Greeks called ambrosia.”
“I didn’t come here for a recommendation. I’m looking for a Wonder Bread truck. Somebody used it to clear out a bunch of fighting cocks.”
“I heard about that. Didn’t hear anything about a bread truck.”
“You weren’t supposed to.”
“I just know makes and models and whatever VIN they’re using now. Nobody tells me what they were used for, and I don’t want to know what they’re going to be used for. I haven’t worked with a Mexican in a couple of years. Ones I see usually have a chop shop going, operating across state lines: Mercedes goes missing from a garage in Chicago at midnight, five o’clock that same morning it’s getting a fresh paint job in Southfield. What started out as a local beef is now federal. These days, you go up against the feds, they tie you to bin Laden and yank all your rights. I’m a crook, not a terrorist.”
“This is probably local, being Wonder Bread. It would be an old truck, plenty of tonnage. It would throw oil like a son of a bitch, because they don’t care about the Blue Book. By now it’s dropped off its load and is on its way to Alaska, all cut up into transportable parts to shore up the Bridge to Nowhere. Nobody cares about two dead men, but PETA’s got a hard-on against abusing domestic fowl. If this bunch knew you shied away from Mexicans, they might have had an Anglo front for them, maybe somebody you know and have done business with in the past. My guess is they wouldn’t have had it for long before they put it to use. Why hang on to a hot vehicle that big and obvious unless you need it right away? Possibly as late as yesterday, after Zorborón got popped.”
His fingers resumed moving. I got out a cigarette, just to play with; you can’t smoke anywhere anymore, not even in a bar where you could make pictures out of the old nicotine stains on the ceiling, like cloud formations. After a little while I felt neglected. I put the cigarette back in the pack. “If I had one of those, we could play Battleship.”
He shut the laptop. “You know what I was looking at? South African gorillas. If I saw a piece about gorillas in the paper I’d go to the sports section, because I got no interest in gorillas. But everything on the Net’s fascinating. It’s not really an addiction. Nobody ever died going offline for a day. Jacking off, that’s what it is. I didn’t do any truck business yesterday.”
“That was speculation. They might have been planning to move anyway. They’d store it inside, maybe in a barn or storage unit, something outside the city. The job might have come in from a county with plenty of rural real estate. If they left a contact number, the area code would belong to one of those. Go back say a month. Go back farther if we have to, but these guys don’t take much in the way of chances. They didn’t waste any time clearing out the inventory after I told their caretaker the cops would be getting around to them sooner or later; took out the caretaker and his partner while they were at it. Where they come from, what they’ve been doing, chickens are worth more than humans.”
He’d opened the laptop again. He didn’t seem to have been aware he had. Now he slapped it shut again and pushed it away as if it were a salad and he’d found a bug in it. His lids were sleepy. He always looked like he could barely keep his eyes open, just before he pulled the emergency cord. “You tipped ’em?”
“I was looking for a kid I figured had gone there to ground. It was friendly advice. I couldn’t get a reaction otherwise. If I thought it would lead to double murder, I’d probably have gone about it differently. I’m a sleuth, not a seer.”
He played around with that. Inside his head, keys were rattling.
“’Kay,” he said after a minute. “I don’t care about rats one way or the other. I just try to keep clear of ’em. Let me get back to you.”
That was the brush-off, to give him time to check me out and make sure I hadn’t gone over to the other side, whichever side that was; the underworld isn’t a two-headed coin so much as a rough-cut diamond, with a new facet every time you turned it in the light. Cops worked with crooks, crooks worked with crooks who worked with cops; you couldn’t be choosy, but you liked to know whose team you were playing. It was no wonder he needed a computer to keep it all straight. His whole life was right there in that laptop, with a ducky little feature that would wipe it clean clear back to Eden at the touch of a key. He could stroke his mouse and tell you what he’d had for breakfast five years back from today. But if I put up an argument, he’d just go into sleep mode.
How the criminal classes managed before Silicon Valley was one for the social historians.
I left him one of the new cards with my cell on it. It went into the same pocket with the C-note. He had the laptop back open and the keys rattling by the time I got to the door. The gorillas of South Africa: Sell that one to Dian Fosse. He probably had my whole history flayed out in front of him, as far back as Basic Training.
I had lunch at the Caucus Club, a brisk walk from the Sextant. The Reuben sandwich they served there had nothing on the place I’d left, but I didn’t want to look as if I was hovering. I washed it down with a Stroh’s—no longer a local product, but it had the virtue of being ice cold—got back into the Cutlass, caught a movie at a cut-rate theater on the way to the house—a superhero flick whose plot I lost track of among the computer-generated special effects—and went home to catch the news on TV.
It was a slow news day, with the Zorborón kill behind the weather report and the murders in the chicken coop down to “the police are asking citizens for help” and the fire across from Holy Redeemer claiming a full minute. It seemed like overkill for a two-alarmer, but no mayors had been caught fondling strippers lately and the cardinal said the Vatican had the pederasty situation well in hand. Alderdyce looked tired on camera, Sister Delia impatient with the interviewer. They could both use a week in Florida. So could I, come to that. None of it looked like anything I had had something to do with. They should run a banner at the bottom saying it was for entertainment purposes only.
I woke up in the dusty light of dawn with a gnawing at my gut I knew well: Somewhere there was a Vicodin with my name on it, and it was working its way down my street peering at addresses. I lumbered into the bathroom, shoving bottles back and forth on shelves, knowing damn well the plastic vial I was looking for had long since gone out empty with the trash. Clawing at my stomach, I lurched out in the direction of the kitchen and the bottle in the cabinet above the sink, when my eye lit on a tiny white oval lying on the floor at the edge of the shag mat.
/> I plucked it up, knowing it for a pill I’d dropped six weeks before and had been in no shape to track, a beautiful oval with a score line in the middle for those who cared to cut it in half. I’d never used that feature.
I didn’t care what sort of microbes had been crawling on it for a month and a half; a shot of Scotch would kill them and break down the pill more quickly than water or chewing.
I spent a minute looking at it. My leg wasn’t hurting so badly I needed it for the pain. I needed it for the Vicodin. All I had to do was toss it into my mouth and swallow.
My eye wandered to the mirror, and the face that didn’t belong there, drawn and old and hungry. I shook myself like a dog and brushed the pill off my palm into the sink and pulled on the faucet full blast. Then I went to the kitchen. That little decision cost me the rest of the night and most of the next morning.
* * *
I had a bright idea, and when it still hadn’t lost its glimmer after a plate of scrambled eggs and two cups of coffee I could have used to re-tar the roof, I called Rafael Buho. He could see me at eleven o’clock in his office.
The trim soft little Mexican practiced above a gift shop on West Vernor, filled with laminated frogs playing guitar and bottles of hot sauce with names like Forty Miles from Hell and Call the Coroner; the stuff was made from caramelized habañeros with Tabasco stirred in to take off the edge. They manufactured it on the premises, with welding masks and steelers’ gloves. I had to stop twice on the narrow enclosed staircase to wipe my eyes and blow my nose.
It was a stuffy little office with mustard-colored law books crammed into the shelves at every angle and scurvy-looking leather portfolios scaling the corners to a pressed-tin ceiling left over from the Gilded Age. Young Abe Lincoln pled the case for the railroad in a steel-point engraving in a frame that had come with it. The desk was made of pebbled iron with a black Formica top, a ring burned into one corner where a bottle of battery acid had stood when it belonged to a garage. Dog-eared file folders stuffed with tattered papers had settled into compost on nearly every other square inch, leaving just enough room for a telephone, a fax machine, and the usual computer equipment, some of it balanced atop a stack of case histories. A window looked directly into the window of an office-supply warehouse next door, a case of spite between rival architects back when soft collars meant the end of civilization. All of it was so true to the template there had to be a decorator involved, with two years of pre-law in his misspent youth. The only things missing were a sampler with the Bill of Rights in Spanish and a marimba band.
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