You Know Who Killed Me

by Loren D. Estleman

  She saw me looking at the desk, a giant curling stone. “Are you intimidated?”

  “Petrified.” I pointed my chin at a photo in a frame on the desk showing the lighthouse at Ludington at sunset. In that setting the orange was bright enough to scorch your eyes. “That didn’t come with the office.”

  “I took it myself, last fall. The place was beginning to intimidate me.”

  She got rid of her hat, shook loose her hair, and sat down, shrugging out of the coat in a graceful gesture that left it draped over the back of her chair. She wore a plain red wool dress that fit her as snugly as a swimsuit, no jewelry, little makeup. Her chair was upholstered in gray Naugahyde, the one on my side not at all. It was a granite-colored scoop with a steering-wheel base. I felt like p.i. on the half-shell.

  “Place bugged?”

  “Of course not.” She mouthed the word “Yes.”

  “I don’t guess it would matter if it was. You’ve already got me booked on the Alcatraz Express.”

  She slid open a file drawer in the desk, withdrew a gray cardboard folder, opened it, and put on a pair of reading glasses with steel frames. They made her look like the sexy librarian I remembered from before ocular surgery. “You graduated from Vicodin to Percodan, and from seventy-five grams to a hundred and fifty. Your blood-sugar level is one hundred and twenty. You’re plainly not porked up on Clark bars, so it’s probably alcohol abuse.”

  “Is that my medical record? What happened to HPPA?”

  “That’s just a suggestion, like the Bill of Rights.” She snapped shut the file and took off the specs. In the light coming through the single window her brown eyes had gold flecks. “We’ve put in for a court order attaching Dr. Jeanne Miernik’s notes on your session with her.”

  “Jeannie,” I corrected. “As in ‘meany.’ Except she’s a doll. Actually, I plan to ask her if I can quote her in my advertising. According to her I’m the only person in America who doesn’t need to have his head examined. You should’ve stuck with the guy who tailed me there and put Gesner to work emptying wastebaskets.”

  “Gesner was the night man. We used the first string because you’re more dangerous during the day, when all the offices are open. Or were, until you committed three felonies in front of this building.”

  “Breaking-and-entering and lying to a federal officer. What’s the third?”

  “Threatening his life.”

  “With antenna wire? It wasn’t even fiber-optic.”

  “The case can be made. It’s his story against yours.”

  “He’s a natural for cross-examination.” I got out a cigarette. She opened her mouth to say something predictable, but I just walked the cigarette across the back of my hand. “What makes me Lady Di to your paparazzi?” I asked.

  She stood and put on her coat. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  I thought from the coat we were going outside, but we took the fire stairs and stopped at the next landing. It was cold enough to see our breath.

  “The District,” she said, hugging herself. “Pay three hundred bucks for a toilet seat and save on heating and electronic surveillance in the stairwells. If you repeat this conversation, I’ll hit you with all three charges and as many more as we can dream up. Terrorism, how’s that? Leaking official secrets that can make their way back to the enemy.”

  “Put me on the stand.”

  “Old-fashioned thinking. We can keep it from going to trial for years while your lawyer files appeal after appeal for bail. Speedy and public? Everything’s relative.”

  I was still holding the cigarette. I put it to its intended use, blowing the smoke away from her. It seemed to warm the air. I shook out the match. “Okay. If it doesn’t get in the way of my thing.”

  A daddy longlegs scampered between us. Thaler’s reflexes were faster. She scraped the sole of her shoe on the edge of a step. “That drug activity we found on Yako’s computer contained a link to Donald Gates’s modem. They were working together.”

  “Sure Yako wasn’t trying to lay it off on him?”

  “We eliminated that first thing. We have one of those programs that traces vocabulary and style patterns, like the one the New York Times Book Review uses to expose established writers publishing so-called first novels under pseudonyms.”

  “That’s how they found out Mickey Spillane wrote Shakespeare.”

  “Mickey wasn’t bloody enough; but you’re catching on. Gates’s e-mails with Yako were unsigned, and he was savvy enough to cover his tracks, but our program compared the communications with his regular business correspondence and got a hit. It would hold up in court; but that’s a moot point now.”

  “What kind of drugs?”

  “Prescription. They started selling Ritalin, then expanded to include all the anti-ADD medications. You can’t keep those enhanced-concentration pills in stock during college finals.

  “The first few bottles of Ritalin were prescribed to Michel Gates on the recommendation of his school nurse,” she went on. “He was diagnosed just in time. His father had a balloon payment coming up on the mortgage and their savings wouldn’t cover it. Either he confided to Yako or Yako got wind of it and turned him. He already had the connections.”

  “So Yako killed him?”

  “It’s a theory. Gates was an amateur, Yako the one with mob ties. Probably Gates got scared and posed a liability. But the Ukrainians are taking a lot of heat right now over our shaky relations with Mother Russia, so his own people took him out before he could be busted for Gates and turn state’s evidence. The whole crime community caught paranoia after Whitey Bulger.”

  I said, “Gates’s wife said he seemed to be drifting away from her.”

  “Now we know why.”

  “It’s so tidy it stinks.”

  “I’d feel the same way if I were still with the department; a season with Al-Qaeda will cure you of that. Those boys put together a conspiracy like a Swiss watch, and organized crime is always on the lookout for new ways to crook the system. My hunch? Gates’s moonlighting is why Amelie doesn’t want you asking her son any questions. Wives are tough to fool. Kids are even tougher.”

  “Too bad they didn’t have a dog. We could pencil him into the conspiracy.”

  “He started by selling his son’s prescription,” she said. “Those billboards? Donald says ‘You know who killed me’? Maybe it was a dead man talking to his son.”

  * * *

  I dropped the cigarette and twisted it out under a toe. “That’s quite a leap just because the boy said, ‘I guess so’ when I asked him if he wanted me to find out who murdered his dad.”

  “The obvious answer is usually the best,” she said. “The investigation’s been trending this way a while. We had to know what you knew before we handed it back to the locals. If we were wrong, and you stumbled into TSA business, we’d have to debrief.”

  “So you’re leaving it there.”

  “It wasn’t a big enough operation for Drug Enforcement. Thank God.” Her smile was bitter. “One of the reasons I jumped ship to Washington is I wanted to get away from homicide. The Gates case was no way to finish out the old year.”

  “Where’s this leave Ataman?”

  “He ran down a witness who could connect Yako to the Gates kill. On the other hand, we haven’t been able to establish a definite link between a man who happens to have a Ukrainian name and the mob. When we cast around outside the area, the board lit up with priors for Grand Theft Auto, including two convictions, the last for five years in Illinois. A car thief isn’t the kind of citizen who hangs around after he runs someone over.”

  “That’s one tall coincidence.” But I kept hearing Barry say he couldn’t find a Boris Ataman in the mob playbook.

  “They happen. We’ll keep posted; but officially Ray Henty gets it back. Amelie likely told you the truth when she said she didn’t want to involve her son any further. How much she knows, or just suspects, is up to the lieutenant to find out.”

  Somewhere in the building a
metal file drawer shut with a boom. “She’s missing a bet. Ten grand’s good seed toward a college fund.”

  “The faster you can get the church to cancel that offer, the faster the case gets closed. That’s why you’re moonlighting for the sheriff’s department, isn’t it, to run down all the phony leads so they don’t have to?”

  I didn’t answer. That reward was getting to be as unpopular as thirty pieces of silver.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “When does this go public?” I asked.

  “Not for a while. We’re monitoring it, like I said. The problem with a working hypothesis is it has a way of throwing you a curve. After what happened with the IRS and the NSA, everyone in intel’s doing the Lambada to avoid stepping in a warm steamy cow chip in front of an audience.”

  I started downstairs. “Let me know when it goes to the network.”

  “Just for your own satisfaction?”

  I kept going. “Professional reasons. Until it’s Gates was a pusher, Yako shot him, and the Cossacks made Yako’s bed for him, all packed up and ready to ship to CNN, I’m monitoring the situation.”

  She stayed where she was, lifting her voice. “Damn you, Walker. You think I want you in Gitmo?”

  I couldn’t think of a punch line for that, so I turned at the next landing and took the stairs to the street.

  With my hand on the fire door I hesitated. Something Thaler had said made my neck itch, but it was gone before I could scratch it.

  * * *

  The tidy way the screenplay laid out wasn’t the only thing I didn’t like about it. It didn’t explain why Rich Perlberg had lied about how well Gates and Chuck Swingline got along. Casting around for a handy lie, his gaze had happened to fall upon a stapler that shared the Indian’s name. And there were at least one too many Ukrainians in the frame for the composition. Even in a melting pot like Detroit, you can go months at a time without running into one; when you can’t turn a corner without bumping into somebody doing the Saber Dance, the pot’s overflowing.

  I hadn’t eaten at the Blue Heron. The cold air and all that running around was burning calories. My appetite was returning from its long vacation.

  There was still a crowd awaiting tables in the Hockeytown Café, so I put in my name and had a beer at the bar while last night’s game with Toronto scraped and thumped on TV monitors and a harried typographer struggled to keep up with a panel of sportscasters doing a live broadcast on closed-caption. The poor sap added some new words to the vocabulary but spelled one Russian name right, probably by accident. When the Red Sea parted and a table opened up I sat under a monitor and ate a burger smothered in sauces containing the colors of the Italian flag, washed it down with another beer, and tried to think of anything but the screwball case I’d landed this time.

  The crowd cheered every Red Wing goal as if it weren’t put up in a jar. I didn’t hear my cell ring. When I looked at the screen, I had two missed calls, both placed from the same number. I settled the bill and called Florence Melville back on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, turning away from a double-bottom truck hauling a load of out-of-tune pianos and sticking my finger in the ear on that side.

  “Good news,” she said.

  The most frightening two-word sentence in the language, after “It’s malignant.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Our donor called ten minutes ago, withdrawing the reward for Don Gates’s murderer. It wasn’t anything I did or said,” she added quickly. “The call just came in, without explanation. Impatience, probably, over no progress.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So that simplifies things, doesn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’ll lead off my daily church blog with the announcement. I suppose the sheriff’s department will take its own measures to make it public. There should be a steep drop-off in bogus leads.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I heard a noise on her end: the rumble and squeak of a carpet sweeper scraping lint off the carpet runner in Christ Church; or maybe just ambient air stirring around her cavernous office. “You don’t seem very interested,” she said.

  “No, it’s great. I’m just talking to you on a noisy street. Thanks, Reverend.”

  Waiting for the car to warm up I drummed my fingers on the wheel. But it was too easy to talk myself out of what needed to be done, so I stopped thinking and drove.

  The friendly female party-store clerk took down a carton of Winstons and rang it up along with the rest of my purchases: chips, pretzels, a box of energy bars, four bottles of water, two apples, wet wipes, toothpaste, toothbrush, mouthwash, a can of Barbasol, and a package of disposable razors. “Going hiking?”

  “Looks like it.” I paid her and lugged the sack out to the car.

  I hadn’t staked out a place in nearly a year. As an afterthought I checked the trunk. The empty Folger’s can was there, with a snap-on lid. I put it on the floor on the passenger’s side, and now I was good for what I hoped was the duration.

  It was the second time I’d been to church that day, and I hadn’t spent one second in a pew. Christ Episcopal stood calm as moonlight, its spires outlined sharply against an oyster-colored sky. There were a few cars in the little parking lot. Florence Melville’s was easy to spot, a boxy Ford Flex with a crucifix embossed on the license plate: That would let her park in handicap slots and loading zones while she made house calls of a spiritual nature. I found a space in the far corner and backed into it. From there I had a clear view of the Flex.

  There’s nothing more uncertain in the work than a stakeout. You almost never know what you’re looking for, an incriminating destination, a clandestine meeting, or just a suspicious break in the routine. You don’t know how long it will take, hours or days or weeks, so you stock up and see to the immediate sanitary needs. You keep your passport current and handy in the glove compartment just in case you have to cross into Canada—or Mexico, for that matter—an up-to-date atlas on the backseat, a Scotsman’s purse full of change for tolls, a roll of bills for bribes and other incidentals tucked in a Kleenex box. I carry a credit card I’ve never used, and a speed-loader in a Vernor’s can with a screw lid.

  You take inventory of all that, and then you sit. On the passenger’s side, so it looks like you’re waiting for the driver. You sit, you watch, you smoke, you listen. Doors open, doors close. Cars pull into the lot, cars pull out. A pigeon pecks at the ants crawling over a box from Wendy’s. A hole opens in the overcast, lighter-colored clouds drifting from one side of it to the other, morphing into different shapes, a celestial Rorschach. Doors open, doors close. The radio squawks for a few minutes, just to keep you alert; too long and you start to listen to it. A blowhard talks about the president, an avant-garde saxophonist abuses a noble instrument, a giddy weatherman talks about pressures and fronts, another blowhard talks about the president, a hip-hop group sings an ode to cunnilingus. An ambulance howls and hoots and bleats and wah-wahs down a distant street. Doors open, doors close. A chirp close to your ear makes you jump, and the woman parked next to you opens her door, stares your way for a moment, then gets in and drives away. Cars pull in, cars pull out. A medivac copter with jet boosters churns up the air overhead, low enough to rattle your windows. Brakes screech, a horn blasts. (Light’s yellow, moron!) You reach behind your neck and pat the hairs back into place. Doors open, doors close. Your lids are heavy as sash weights and it’s the middle of the day. You crack a window to let smoke out and cold air in, splash some bottled water into your palm and dash it in your face, take a sip—a little one, so you don’t have to use the coffee can until it’s absolutely essential. Cars pull in, cars pull out. You eat an apple. The crunch makes you wide awake, so you crank up the window. People pay attention to open windows in freezing weather.

  From time to time you start the engine and let the heater run long enough to clear out the chill, and to keep the engine from getting too cold. You do it every fifteen minutes, which gives you something to look forward to.

&n
bsp; You think about your life. Then you stop, because that leads to asking why you’re sitting on a buttful of dead nerves in a car parked next to a church. You’ll have an epiphany if you’re not careful.

  Doors open, doors close. A commercial jingle sneaks into your head and you try to sing it on out, but it’s burrowed in like a tick and if you pull at it the head will stay in and fester and you’re stuck with a kid singing the same chorus out of tune forever.

  Cars pull in, cars pull out. You get out for a stretch and find out you’ve borrowed someone else’s feet. Stamp, stamp. A tingle. You put your hands on your hips and arch your back, but nothing pops. You windmill your arms a couple of times and sit back down and slam the door.

  And the day wanes.

  * * *

  The clouds were nearly black now, ponderous with the weight of the snow they held. The sun was below them, reflecting off their bellies, a torchiere effect and eerie, as if it were shining up from below. That always brought a sense of nameless anxiety, of something building toward something bad. The big red front door opened and the Reverend Melville came out.

  She was dressed for the cold, but not in the sexless heavy-duty gear she’d worn to shovel snow. Her black hair with its silver streak was gathered under one of those fuzzy white flowerpots and a green belted coat hung to the tops of fur-trimmed boots. She’d wound a red scarf around her neck and had a red mitten on one hand, holding its mate while she shook loose a ring of keys. The wind was stiffening; she bowed her head into it, hurried down the steps and across the lot to the Flex, started the motor, and let it warm up while she wriggled her bare hand into the other mitten. She turned on her lights and wound out into the street. I started the Cutlass and followed. It felt good to be going somewhere, even if it was just to her house followed by another long session of the same, and on one of the coldest nights of the year. In the work, you take all the pleasure you can out of the little things.

  * * *