The Judgment

by William J. Coughlin

  Perhaps that was just as well. I still had her in sight. I took off after her, telling myself that it would be better to talk to her outside. If there was to be confrontation—and maybe there would be—it would be better to have it without an audience.

  We crossed Cass more or less together. I may have been about a step behind. Anyway, when we came to the slush and pool of water at the far curb, I muttered a courtly “Allow me,” and gave her a lift at the elbow. She leaped the mess gracefully. I didn’t do quite so well.

  She stopped and turned to me with a curious smile on her face. “Thanks,” she said. “You’ve been following me, haven’t you?”

  So much for Charley Sloan, private eye.

  “Which one are you?” she asked. “Are you Timmerman?”

  What did that mean? Who was Timmerman? I was tempted to play along and find out, and in my former, more adventurous legal life, I might have done just that.

  But these days, I played it strictly by the book.

  “My name is Charles Sloan,” I said. “I’m the attorney representing Mark Conroy. I was hoping we could talk.”

  The smile faded fast. “I don’t think so,” she said. “They said I shouldn’t talk to you unless I had to.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “If you don’t know, then I shouldn’t tell you.”

  “Look,” I said, “how about a cup of coffee? Just one. That’s how long we’ll talk. Frankly, my client hasn’t been very forthcoming. It’s pretty hard to help him, knowing as little as I do.”

  A frown wrinkled her forehead just above her sunglasses. “No. I have to go to a class.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re through for the day.”

  “You seem to know a lot about me. How’d you know where to find me? And hey, how did you know what I looked like?”

  “Well, in answer to your second question, I had this.” I took the photograph out of my pocket and showed it to her. “And maybe it answers the first question, too.”

  “That’s mine. Where did you get it? Did Mark have it?”

  “No,” I said, “he didn’t have it. I found it under a pile of odds and ends in one of the dressers in that place on Parker.”

  “You were nosing around my apartment!”

  “May I remind you, Miss Tucker, you moved out. It’s no longer your apartment. It belongs to Conroy, along with the rest of the building. He gave me the key.”

  She reached for the photo. I moved it away, just out of her grasp. “It’s still my picture.”

  “Like to trade it for a cup of coffee? A little information?”

  “Keep it. I don’t care.” She broke away from me and started walking purposefully up the side street that led to Woodward.

  I stuck the picture back in my pocket and caught up with her. “All right,” I said, “look, you’re going to your car, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll just accompany you there. We can talk along the way.”

  “Go ahead.” She shrugged. “Talk.”

  “You were on the list of witnesses at Conroy’s preliminary examination, but you weren’t called. In fact, you were the only one who wasn’t. Were you subpoenaed?”

  “I wasn’t served.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I’ve got a fairly good idea, but I’m not about to tell you.”

  “Why not? Wouldn’t ‘they’ like it?”

  “No, they wouldn’t, and I’m playing it just the way they say.” With that, she stopped, turned, and faced me. “This is as far as we go,” she said, and pointed at an old gray, rusted VW Beetle that had been squeezed between a full-sized Ford and a Jeep.

  “Is this your car?” I was disappointed. I thought I’d have at least five minutes with her.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “You’re only half a block from school.” The way I said it, it must have sounded like an accusation.

  “Guess I just got lucky.”

  “But I’ve got some more questions.” I didn’t really. I was just trying to get her to loosen up and give me something, anything.

  “Too bad. Maybe next time.”

  “Where can I reach you?”

  “You found me once. I guess you can just look me up on the class schedule.” She pulled off her sunglasses and gave me a fierce look with her blue eyes. “Aren’t you ashamed?” she said. “Going through people’s garbage?”

  And you know, when she put it like that, I really felt just a little ashamed. She started past me to the car. Then I had a thought. I put out my hand and detained her.

  “Tell me something,” I said. “If I gave you this picture of you and Conroy, what would you do with it?”

  She looked me straight in the eye. “What would I do with it? I’d destroy it.”

  I pulled out my cigar lighter and handed it to her. Then, gripping it tightly with my thumb and forefinger, I brought out the photo and held it between us.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Burn it.”

  The look she gave me was more than skeptical. She seemed to be asking herself if I was sane. At last she asked, “Are you serious?”

  “Go ahead.”

  With another dubious look, she struck the lighter, got a flame, and put it to the picture. The photo-print paper took a moment to catch. Once it had, it burned steadily. I looked around, suddenly aware that we’d attracted a little crowd of three—two boys and a girl. They watched, fascinated, not so much curious as enjoying the spectacle.

  I felt the heat on my fingers, watched the flame consume Mary Margaret and then begin eating away at Mark Conroy. It was getting harder to hold on. I shifted my grip, took it as long as I could, and with less than an inch patch left to burn, I let the photo drop to the sidewalk. My thumb and forefinger hurt like hell.

  The little crowd applauded. “Way to go, man!” one of them shouted. Then, the show over, they drifted away.

  “You’re crazy,” said Mary Margaret Tucker.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Well, have it your way. I’m getting out of here.” She put the lighter back in my sore hand and pushed past me to the Volkswagen.

  I followed her into the street, watched her fumble with her keys to unlock the car.

  “What about the negative?”

  “What about it?” She almost screamed it at me.

  “Have you got it?”

  “No!” She’d gotten the car door unlocked at last. She threw it open. I jumped out of the way. “He took that roll of film and burned it, said he didn’t want pictures of us together. That was our first fight. But I had two prints of that picture—one for me he never knew about. That was the one we just burned.”

  She jumped into the car and slammed the door shut. I stepped back and watched her bang into the Ford behind her and narrowly miss the Jeep ahead as she pulled out into the street and drove away. Before she left, though, I had my notebook out, and I wrote down her license plate number and the name Timmerman.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Fenton, “where’ve you been?”

  I thumped in, worn out from the drive to Pickeral Point. The roads were now deep in water and slush. My car had been splattered and smeared by every eighteen-wheeler in southeastern Michigan. I was in no mood for Mrs. Fen-ton’s unvoiced complaints.

  “Working on a case,” I said as I walked past her and headed for my office. “I take it there have been phone calls.”

  “Not many,” she called after me. “Nothing I couldn’t handle. There are a couple of please-call-backs on your desk.”

  I stopped, turned, and frowned at her. “Then why the third degree?”

  “I only asked you where you’d been.”

  “Why should it matter?”

  “Well, you were gone a long time, most of the afternoon. What if I’d had to reach you? What if there’d been an emergency?”

  Through force of will, I fixed a benign and gentle smile on my face. “Mrs. Fenton,” I said, “the places I was, you couldn’t have reached me by telephone, or even by
carrier pigeon. And besides, I have the utmost confidence in your ability to handle any and all problems that might arise.”

  That stopped her. She sat there, blinked once or twice, then at last said, “Well, thank you.”

  “You’re more than welcome.”

  I went into my office and shut the door gently behind me. Maybe I’d discovered how to deal with her at last. A little flattery can go a long way.

  One of the please-call-backs was from Jack Rivers. What would it be this time, the carrot or the stick? I wadded the note and threw it in the wastebasket.

  The other one was from Ernie Barker. He hadn’t received the bill yet. I wouldn’t expect any difficulty from him on that count, anyway. He was probably still celebrating beating that gun charge. Who knows? Maybe he just wanted to thank me some more.

  I picked up the phone and punched out the number on the note.

  “Yah, hello, this is Ernie.”

  “Charley Sloan here. You called.”

  “Oh, hey, Mr. Sloan, thanks for calling me back. I, uh … well, there was something I been thinking about, I just wanted to ask your advice.”

  “Okay, shoot.”

  “You know, I hate to say it,” he began, “but all the time I was carrying that .38 around in my glove compartment, I felt really safe. You know? I could go anyplace—down onto John R, or there around Gratiot—it didn’t matter, just as long as I had that gun along.”

  I sighed. “I can understand that, I suppose. What’s your point?”

  “Well, Detroit’s a pretty dangerous place. You said so yourself, right there in court. So I was just wondering, do you think maybe since they took that one I had away from me, I ought to get another one?”

  “What?” He couldn’t be serious.

  “Oh, I’d do it all real legal this time.” He was talking fast, trying to sound reassuring. “You know, I’d get a license and buy it at a regular gun shop, get a better one this time, maybe one of those big magnums that the cops all carry Man, they’d scatter when they saw that!”

  “Ernie, let me remind you of something. You’ve been put on probation for six months. Have you seen your probation officer yet?”

  “Got a date next week. Next Tuesday.”

  “Talk it over with him then.”

  “With her. It’s a her. Ms. Wodziak.”

  “All right, her. Talk it over with her.”

  “So that’s your advice, huh?” He sounded disappointed, cheated.

  “No, Ernie, my advice is a lot more simple: Don’t even consider doing anything without talking it over with her first. She’ll tell you the terms of your probation, and when she does, you pay attention and you do it just the way she says or you could still find yourself in the slam. I hope you understand that.”

  “Uh, yeah, I guess so.”

  “I predict your probation officer will tell you to forget about getting another gun ever again, legally or otherwise. If it’s not in the terms of your probation, then it should be. Have I made myself clear?”

  I realized then that I’d been practically shouting into the telephone. I took a deep breath to get myself under control.

  “Uh, yeah. I mean, yes, Mr. Sloan.”

  “All right then.” That came out in a fairly normal tone. I thought I was doing pretty well. “You’ll be getting my bill in the mail tomorrow or the next day. If you keep thinking the way you have been, Ernie, then the next time I see you, you’ll be up¡ for manslaughter or murder. And I charge a lot more for them.”

  After I hung up, I sat brooding at my desk for a long minute or two, angry at Ernie Barker, angry at the city of Detroit and all its problems, angry at the kind of idiocy that said that guns and more guns offered an answer to them.

  Without quite thinking about it, I swiveled my desk chair around and took a look out the window—at the river, the all-but-disappeared snow, and the fading afternoon light. That was when I remembered I’d promised to call Sue later in the day. I swung back to the telephone and punched out the number for her direct line at the police station.

  Two rings, and then: “Gillis.”

  “Sloan.”

  “Oh, Charley, you did call back. Thanks. I was about to call you.”

  “Why? What’s the matter?”

  “Well, nothing really, except that it looks like it won’t be easy for us to get together tonight. If that’s what you had in mind.”

  “Something come in on the little girl last night?”

  “Yes and no,” she said. Sue sounded better than she had earlier. There was life in her voice again. “Yes, there might be something on the Quigley case. We went out there this afternoon and may have turned up, well, something.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “But no, that’s not the problem. The thing is, there’s a retirement party tonight—Dominic Benda, thirty-five years with the force. You know him, don’t you?”

  I thought about that for a moment. “Yeah,” I said, “I guess we’ve had some contact.” What came to mind was a burly guy, a joker, who once got in trouble on a false arrest suit. Not my case.

  “I forgot about it completely,” Sue continued. “And I really have to go. You know, being the senior female officer and all.”

  “Yeah, I understand. But listen, Sue, you shouldn’t push yourself too hard. You didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  “Oh, I know. I won’t. But I’ve gotten kind of a second wind. I feel better. Really, I do.”

  “But watch it. Where’s the party? Maybe I’ll come over later on, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Would you? That’d be great. Maybe you could get me out of there early.”

  “I could try.”

  “It’s at the Glisten Inn. Do you know it?”

  I laughed. “Sure,” I said, “the go-go joint.”

  “Oh, Charley, come on!” She was embarrassed. “That’s only on weekends.”

  “Okay, maybe I’ll show up.”

  “Try. See you then.”

  I sat there, smiling, shaking my head. Wasn’t it just like a bunch of cops to pick a moderately disreputable place like the Glisten Inn for a retirement party? I’d gotten the owner, Papa Klezek, out of trouble a couple of times. He probably thought he was buying insurance, hosting the cops for their big bash. Come to think of it, maybe he was. Old papa didn’t just fall off the back of a turnip truck.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Come on in, Mrs. Fenton.”

  Glancing needlessly at my watch, I saw that it was five on the button. She always left at the stroke of the hour. Unless I said otherwise—and I hadn’t said so yet.

  She came in bearing a sheaf of letters and documents she’d typed up that day on the computer. Handing them to me across the desk, she said, “Here are some things for you to look over and sign.”

  “Is the Barker bill in this bunch?”

  “Yes?” Definitely an interrogative. She was curious.

  “Let’s hold that until tomorrow,” I said. “I think I’m going to find about a thousand bucks’ worth of extra time and expenses on that one. Don’t worry, I’ll justify it all.”

  “If that’s all then, I’ll be going.” She always said that, just like she was really offering to stay. A little game we played.

  “Have a good evening, Mrs. Fenton. Just leave my door open.”

  She was gone in the minute or so it took her to pull on her coat and struggle into her boots.

  That left me alone to think for a while. There was something that had been playing at the back of my mind, a possibility I wanted to explore.

  I pulled the notebook that I carried out of my pocket and paged through it until I came to what I had written down that very afternoon. There was the license number of Mary Margaret Tucker’s Volkswagen, and below it that name I hadn’t quite been able to remember. Timmerman.

  Then, going through my Rolodex, I found a number, reached for the phone, and punched in the number. I waited as it rang.

  Anthony Mercante had b
een, until recently, with the FBI right in the Detroit office. For years he had nursed a grudge against the Bureau. He was a good agent with a law degree and an exemplary record. But he was certain that he’d hit a glass ceiling because of his Italian name and because a distant relative he’d never met was connected in business dealings with someone who might be connected with the wiseguys. Back in my drinking days, I’d sat beside him at a bar and listened to him expound this theory. “Charley,” he had told me, “that’s all it takes. They can murder you with ‘mights.’”

  Eventually—and it was only a couple of months ago—Tony Mercante had found a solution to his problem, perhaps not the one he would have preferred but certainly an acceptable one. He’d resigned from the Bureau and taken a high-paying, grand-titled position in the security division of one of the Big Three automakers. It was about time I called Tony and asked him how he liked his new situation.

  So when he answered the phone, that’s how the conversation went for the first five minutes or so. He loved the new job, and he wondered why he had waited so long to leave the Bureau. He’d already moved his family out to a nice place in Birmingham to be nearer corporate headquarters, of course. Of course.

  “But you, Charley,” he said, “you seem to be doing pretty well yourself. You made a great comeback. I have to say I admire you for that.”

  “Thanks, Tony. I guess I found out a few things. About myself, mostly.”

  “I see in the papers you’ve got this Mark Conroy thing.”

  “Yeah, it’s a tough one, too.”

  “For what it’s worth, I always thought he was—is—a good cop. He may have cut some corners, but I think he’s essentially honest. And he’s committed to enforcement, too, which is more than you can say for his boss and fifty percent of the men in the department.”

  “It’s good to hear you say that,” I said. It was, too. A guy with Tony’s years in the FBI’s Detroit office had a special perspective on the local police. If he said Conroy was essentially a good cop, then you could take that to the bank. “There’s something that’s come up on that case I’d like to ask you about, Tony.”