“Stop. I can always look at my date book when I feel like being depressed.” Thaler finished entering data into her thingamajig. “Which leaves us just as out in the cold as when we started. We know the car that was used in the hit-and-run was either an Olds Alero, made the year GM dropped the Oldsmobile division, or maybe a Honda Civic—‘blue or gray in color,’ the report says, as if it could be blue or gray in anything else. It’ll have front-end damage and no doubt DNA on the undercarriage, but without a registration we can’t start looking for it until we actually find it. If he’s our man V-A-L, and he stole the plate, he could just as easily swipe another.”
The lieutenant tossed the printout onto his desk. “License registration is like a lock. It only keeps honest people honest.”
I got up.
Thaler looked up at me. “Where are you going?”
“I just remembered two things. I’m not in the car-finding business, and I’m not under arrest.”
“That’s no answer,” she said.
“I signed on to help find out who killed Donald Gates. Maybe it was Yako, maybe somebody wanted us to think it was Yako, and patched a pothole with Thompson to make it stick. I’m going to check out Gates’s hunting buddies. If anyone knows anyone else, he learned it living under the same roof for at least a week.”
“And if they can’t tell you anything?” Henty said.
“Then I’m going to find out how many of them are heeled enough to have put up the reward for his killer’s conviction.”
He took off his glasses. “I’ve been a cop longer than I wasn’t. I never saw a dipsy-doodle alibi like that stand up longer than a soap bubble.”
Thaler said, “Let him try to pop it. Maybe it’ll keep him out of the way while us grown-ups work.”
“Giving orders, Deputy?” asked Henty.
“Call it assisting,” I cut in. “It’s friendlier.”
* * *
The rain had subtracted itself from the equation, and finally we were getting snow: those hard tiny urban kernels that all look alike no matter what you hear, cling to the wipers in pale strands like freshwater pearls, and whipsnake across the pavement driven by the wind. I saw parkas, hoodies, camo, and the occasional case of denial in T-shirt and flip-flops plunging across the street without looking either direction and walking backwards into the teeth of the mini-blizzard. Pigeons perched on ledges were puffed up like stuffed squab.
The official groundhog in Pennsylvania had seen his shadow, auguring six more weeks of winter. His competitor in rural Livingston County had missed his, predicting early spring. For a while it seemed a third expert in Wisconsin had broken the tie, but he turned out to be a muskrat and was disenfranchised.
The season would grind on regardless, broken up by the thaws that seem exclusive to Michigan, that have you cranking down the air conditioner and cranking up the furnace in the same twelve-hour period. The climate’s been changing like that since before mastodons wandered down Woodward Avenue.
Meanwhile everyone in the frozen world was learning how to drive all over again. Five cars passed me on the right driving ten over the limit, and a minivan straddled the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t white line going slow enough to pass for reverse. A gull-wing yellow sports job whipped out of a side street, taking three lines in a sliding loop, and wound up facing west in the eastbound, two car lengths in front of me. I started moving again and pulled around it. I needed a wrecking bar to uncramp my fingers from the wheel.
My cell rang. I pulled over to take the call, my heart still throbbing in my throat. The number, which I didn’t recognize, turned out to belong to the tough little blonde in the rehab center in Highland Park.
“Have you made an appointment yet with that therapist?”
“One moment, Doctor.” I laid the cell on the passenger’s seat, plucked a cigarette out of the pack with my teeth, and spent a couple of matches getting it lit. I drew the smoke in deep, let it stagger out, and picked up the phone.
“I was just about to place the call,” I said.
“I recommend it. I meant what I said about turning you over to the authorities.”
“Are you calling me over a real phone or that runty laptop?”
“What difference does it make?”
“I’d hate to have you ruin those blue eyes staring at a screen. I’ll make the call today.” I gave the cheap cell a shake, which always made it crackle, and ended the call. People almost never do anything when they think it was dropped. They wait for you to call back. In light of that I’m prepared to let technology go on a little longer.
THIRTEEN
Amelie Gates frowned at her cards. “What’s a bower again? I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I had to bone up on the game myself before coming here.” I explained it, dealing a couple of hands to imaginary players. Playing euchre was like opening the cedar chest where my mother packed the hunting clothes: The smell of mothballs and evergreen and the motion of slapping a card down faceup took me back to a three-room cabin in Grayling that was out in the woods then but the last time I drove past it was well inside the city limits. The oil pig was missing, also the outhouse in back. What sort of people lived there now I couldn’t guess.
“Impatience was one of Don’s few faults. Every card game he tried to teach me wound up in a fight.”
“A good game of euchre sounds like one. My father was a Teamster. When I was five, I heard Jimmy Hoffa swearing in the kitchen. I thought he was killing my dad, but it turned out they were just playing cards. You can’t really play it properly without a little blasphemy.”
“Wasn’t Jimmy Hoffa some kind of gangster?”
“No.”
We were sitting in a combined kitchen and dining room in her house in Iroquois Heights, at a round oak table in a bay window. The place was spotless, as widows’ houses often are. It had stopped snowing. A car swept down the street, churning slush, and stopped for a light with a long slurring noise of warm rubber on slick asphalt. A cube pushed itself out of the ice maker in the refrigerator and landed with a clunk. It was one of those days peculiar to a Michigan winter, when you could hear a spider pat back a yawn in its web and watch a drowsy fly drift past. Now and then a hole opened in the overcast, drenching us both in warm sunlight, swirling with motes that glittered like gold dust as they turned. We were like two housecats napping with a bellyful of tuna.
She watched me arrange the two cards at my elbow. “Why don’t you keep score on a piece of paper, like in cribbage?”
“No reason. It’s just the way I was taught.” I moved the card I’d placed facedown on top of the nine of clubs, exposing two of the pips. “That’s two for me and one for you. I’m being hustled.”
“You’re sweet.” She drew a card from her hand slowly, biting her lower lip and looking to me for guidance. I nodded. She played it. In about twenty minutes she was beating the pants off me. It’s that kind of game.
“Oh, I have those names for you. Don’s old hunting buddies. I’m not sure if the addresses and telephone numbers are still good. It’s been years.”
“The names will help. I know someone who knows how to use a computer. He should be able to track them down if they’re still breathing.” I played a six of hearts.
“You don’t use one?”
“I try not to have appliances in my house that are smarter than me.”
“The world’s passing you by.”
“It keeps turning. I’ll catch it on the next pass, or the one after that.”
“I like this game. It’s reassuring, somehow.”
“Sure. You can’t play it without going by the rules.”
“Is that some kind of philosophy?”
“It’s just a game. Don’t make it out to be anything more than it is.”
She rearranged the cards in her hand. “Should we be doing this?”
“We haven’t even made a bet. Anyway I’m tight with the sheriff.”
“Not that. What would Don think? Gone just six weeks, a
nd here I am—”
She broke down then.
“Your play,” I said.
She swept the back of her hand across her eyes, sniffed, nodded, and laid down a six of hearts.
“It’s not just that,” she said. “I’m keeping you from your investigation.”
“Yeah. I’m that lazy.” I drew a three of clubs; no help there. “I’m here because I promised, but I could’ve done that anytime. There’s someone I want to talk to.”
“Who?”
Fate’s a good stage manager. Just then a door banged and noise shot through the house like thudding thunder or a helicopter flying low over the roof: seventy pounds of boy in blue jeans, clodhopper sneakers, and a lumpy Michelin Man parka, dumping a backpack on a table, a pair of mittens on the floor six feet apart, and a brown knitted watch cap that hovered in midair like a chimney cinder before it fell in a crumple to the rug, the rest of it streaking past us in a red-blue blur. All that was missing was the “beep-beep.”
“Michel! Slow down! We have company.”
The boy skidded to a halt, staring at me with his mother’s black-olive eyes in his father’s generic face. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said. “Just leave some of that for me.”
“Some of what?”
“Don’t be rude. This is Mr. Walker. He’s the man I told you about.”
He looked at me more steadily, a thin boy—a growth spurt caught in stop-motion—every follicle of his black hair fighting training. His energy had flattened into a quiet idle. “The man who’s going to find out who killed my father?”
“Do you want me to?”
“I guess.” He went into another room and shut the door.
I don’t know why I’d asked; or for that matter why I wasn’t surprised by the answer.
FOURTEEN
She started to get up. I waved her back down with my hand of cards. “I’m an expert on kids, never having had any. Give him a chance to wind down before you stir him up.”
She hesitated, then subsided into her seat. “He’s not usually like that. Well, he was, before the school nurse prescribed Ritalin. Even then it was a long time before he settled down. But for a week now he’s been more like a normal boy.”
“I’d like to talk to him, but not now. Maybe sometime when the slow-down juice kicks in.”
Her eyes were big. “Michel’s the one you meant? What could he tell you? He was sleeping at the babysitter’s house the night—”
“Where was he the day before?”
“At home; it was Christmas vacation. But so was I. What’s the day before got to do with anything?”
“Could be nothing. Someone saw a driver behaving strangely in front of this house that day. It might be nothing, but of two other witnesses I’ve spoken with, one’s dead and the other went missing, but not before he left behind a lot of blood.”
She put down her cards.
“When were you going to tell me this?”
“I wasn’t. Officially I shouldn’t have now; the cops get territorial when there’s a stiff involved. Between us, knowing it wouldn’t have done you any good. Not until either the cops or I find the holes the loose bricks fit into. This game’s one for the cat.” I threw in my hand and stood. “Can I have that list?”
She rose, opened a drawer in a maple secretary, and handed me a sheet of bright pink paper with a smiling yellow sun in one corner. She had a round, schoolgirl hand and dotted her eyes with circles. I forgave her for that, seeing as how she was so good at euchre.
* * *
I started local. The owner of the third name on the list had an office in Centerline, in a sprawling new redbrick building on a four-lane highway where the commuters played Grand Theft Auto with real cars. I sat in the turning lane two minutes before I caught a break, then had to gun it to avoid the driver of a low-slung yellow pickup who tried to close the gap with a spurt. The marks of my tires are still on the asphalt, probably.
A short hallway leading from the entrance made a T in the center. I eenie-meenied my way left, past three empty-looking smoked-glass offices to one in the corner, with a silver-etched sign on the glass reading:
RICHARD PERLBERG, P.C.
The door closed itself behind me, making as much noise as a cat yawning on a sunny sill, and I found myself in another shallow passage containing four chromium-and-black-leather chairs and a pile of swanky magazines on a glass table, with a receptionist’s nook at the cross of another T at the end. It was going unused at the moment.
I had an appointment, but I was five minutes early. I took a seat and opened a copy of Hour, a Detroit publication about the size of a plat book, with glossy pages and not much print to clutter up the photos. There was nothing in them I recognized; it publishes in the suburbs, with a well-dressed security man at the door.
“Mr. Walker?” A smiling middle-aged woman stood in front of the receptionist’s desk with her hands folded at her waist. She’d come in as quietly as the door closed. I was some detective that day.
I put aside the article I was reading about a sushi restaurant I’d never heard of and got up.
“Mr. Perlberg’s ready for you. Just down that hall.”
“Dandy.”
Another left turn brought me to a large square office with the door propped open. A young balding man got up from behind a glass-topped desk supporting a multiline telephone, an electronic calculator, and an electric stapler. Printed forms made orderly stacks on a credenza behind his chair. The outfit specialized in opening tax loopholes for small businesses.
“Quite a spread you have here, Mr. Perlberg.” I sat down in a comfy chair facing the desk.
“Richard, please. We try to put people at ease.” Squidging up his nose, he tilted back in his swivel and propped an argyle-clad foot on the desk. “Thanks for the compliment. I own the whole shebang, and Peggy and I are the only souls in it. I built it just before the wonks in Washington lowered mortgage rates straight into the second Great Depression. We’re offering the first three months free to anyone who’ll sign a year’s lease. You saw how many takers we’ve had on your way down the hall.”
“How long can you hold out?”
He cleared his throat, straightened his tie—silver, to match the lettering on the glass outside—and sat up, wriggling his foot into an unseen shoe. “I don’t mean to be unsociable, but I’m swamped this time of year. No time for small talk. I’d’ve put you off when you called until after April fifteenth, but since it’s about Don, I can give you five minutes.”
“That’s okay. I really don’t give a damn about the rest. You used to hunt with Gates in Canada. Did he have any enemies his wife doesn’t know about?”
“Jesus, no. Kind of hunter he was, even the elk didn’t have anything against him. Is that all you wanted to know? You could’ve asked over the phone.”
“I’ve got four and a half minutes coming. Anything about him didn’t seem to fit the rest of him?”
“I’m not sure I understand the question.”
“A bunch of men shut up together get to know each other, sometimes better than their wives: no guards, no games. Amelie helped her father run the hunting lodge. You were there when they were becoming close. Did he act or say something you wouldn’t have expected of him, knowing him as well as you did?”
He smiled.
“Who doesn’t, man? Who doesn’t, when the love bug bites?”
“How about later, after they were married and before he dropped out of the group?”
“Can’t help you there. He only made one trip after the wedding, and I wasn’t there. One of my clients was being audited, an important one. It was my rep on the line.”
“I got this from his wife.” I snapped open the pink sheet and laid it on his desk. “Rule out any who weren’t present that last trip.”
“Oh, they were all there. Rudy Johnson brought down a buck ran close to eight hundred pounds; could’ve been a moose if it didn’t watch its carbs. Amelie’s father took their picture wi
th it. The guys are still ribbing me about not being there. Here.” He swiveled, stretched an arm, scooped a standing frame off the credenza, and poked it at me.
It was a collector’s item: a Polaroid, with a greenish cast. Six men in checked flannel shirts, baggy woolen pants, and three-day beards with an eighteen-point monster hanging on an outdoor pole between them, towering evergreens in the background. Donald Gates stood at one end. He was the one who wasn’t smiling.
Which meant exactly nothing. Maybe the only time he’d ever grinned for the camera was when he was caught off-guard at Christmas.
“Gates’s eyes look red. Did he drink heavily on these trips?”
“Don? Hell, no. Beer now and then, just to fit in. You could get drunk off the dregs he left in the bottle. Rudy was the drinker in that crowd. I bet he polished off two six-packs a day. He must’ve been aiming at something else when he hit that buck.”
“His name’s not on the list.”
“No reason it should be. His liver gave up on him a couple of years ago. His wife and kids gave up on him a long time before that.”
I looked closer. It could have been ordinary flashbulb red-eye. The more I looked the more I was sure of it.
“Any of these guys closer to Gates than the others?”
“Well, Rudy, if you know what I mean. He was a huggy drunk, one of those ‘I love you, guys’ guys. I guess his folks never told him they loved him.”
“I mean still putting out carbon dioxide.” For a man with only five minutes to spare, he was hard to reel in.
“That’d be Chuck.” He pointed at a man standing next to Gates, close to his age and dusky, with whiskers blacker than the rest, to match his hair. “Chuck Swingline. He’s a half-blood Ojibway, the leader of our gang and the best hunter in three counties. He took Don under his wing the first day he showed up at the lodge; you know, giving him the benefit of Indian ways. Not that he ever gained anything by them, but Chuck never gave up. Between you and me?” Perlberg leaned forward, resting his forearms on the desk. “I think he had a man-crush, Chuck did, not that he ever did anything about it, I’m sure of that. You could chop wood using his chin for a block. But if there was anything ginchy going on with Don that last trip, he’s your man.”
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