I rode down with him in the elevator that day and we walked through the chill lobby and out into the warmer autumn air and got into the car together and drove away from there. Funny how you can love someone without liking him and work with him and love someone else in another way without liking her and not have a marriage worth telling anyone about. After the note I didn’t remember much of the meetings with lawyers, but I remembered Sergeant Leopold in his blue uniform shirt starched platter-stiff, borrowing detectives’ desks to fill out his mountains of forms and shouting in that dead cops’ chant that everything was being done, etc. Catherine Walker, Sergeant Leopold. Five-seven and self-conscious about her height, stoops a little walking, weight one-twenty, black hair, brown eyes. Pouts when she’s thinking. Dimple, right cheek, chin slightly square, white half-inch scar left side of forehead at the hairline. Fell out of a tree and landed on a red wagon when she was ten, Sergeant Leopold, she was a tomboy. Appendectomy scar, right abdomen. Birthmark on her right hip, but you won’t need that in your report, Sergeant Leopold. Nothing? Okay, I’ll be back tomorrow. Thanks for your time.
Missing Persons, with pictures of teenage runaways on the walls, high school shots; substitute a ratty sweatshirt for the ruffled blouse, dirty the hair a little, paint a sneer on the smiling lips—that’s our little Sheryl, Officer. She made the Honor Roll last year. A fat black woman sitting beside a desk listening to a young patrolman with pimples telling her a little boy answering her son’s description just floated to the surface of an undrained swimming pool in an apartment complex in Taylor, the woman watching his lips closely as if trying to read them. The quietest conversation I had ever overheard. Six weeks of that, then the summons, and then the call to Sergeant Leopold, yanking the report. “Sorry to hear it, Walker. Come see me when it’s done. No, not here. This is my last week. Got a pencil?”
A brown fedora lying bottomside up against the curb, a bald head on the asphalt, gray eyes growing soft and muddy in a slack face. Rule One: Never get emotionally involved in a case. Rules Two through Ten: Observe Rule One.
Jed Dutt was standing in front of the elevator when I got off at Barry Stackpole’s floor in the News building. He had a lanky frame he did nothing whatever to maintain and a backward-leaning stance that accentuated his slight pot, a tallish man who combed his hair back from a thinning widow’s peak and wore half-glasses on the end of his long nose and polka-dot bow ties and gray wool sweaters with patches on the elbows. He looked like a professor in a small college. He pulled a long freckled hand out of his pocket and laid it in my palm.
“Glad you called first,” he said, withdrawing it. “All hell’s busting loose up here, as when isn’t it?”
I pocketed the tag the female guard had given me in the lobby. “As if I could get into Fort Horace Greeley without calling first. What sort of hell?”
“Heat.”
We were walking down a paneled corridor hung with prize-winning articles and photographs in frames toward the partitioned cubicles where the columnists and department editors worked. Dutt’s vocabulary didn’t go with his place on the Entertainment desk. He had been police beat until the chief barred him from headquarters for taking the chief’s picture dozing on the sofa in his office. Now he interviewed blonde TV sitcom starlets and strung-out forties band singers on tour. Just by way of transition, his first column as Barry’s replacement had been about a crooner in his sixties appearing that weekend at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn who had got his start four decades earlier with the help of a freelance entrepreneur named Willie the Hammer.
The farther we went the noisier it got. A white-haired editor I recognized was standing in the opening of Barry’s cubicle, reading the Bill of Rights from memory and tapping out the punctuation on the quilted chest of a large fat man in a tight brown suit and a gray felt hat with the brim turned up all around. The fat man was yelling something back and waving a folded length of paper while a trim young black man in a Wayne County Deputy Sheriff’s uniform stood off to one side with his hands on his belt, jaw working at a lump of gum. He was waiting for a lull and didn’t look in any too much of a hurry to get one. They had attracted the same small crowd of bored interested noninvolved reporters that a fire in a steel wastebasket draws at two hours to deadline.
I put on my cop’s voice. “What the hell is this? You’re drowning out the presses.”
“Fat chance,” said the editor. “They’re clear out in the suburbs.”
The man in the hat looked me over. His chins were glistening blue and the whites of his eyes had a pinkish cast. He had Sen-Sen on his breath and I could live next door to him ten years and not know him any better than I did in that instant. “Who’re you?”
“My question, friend,” I said. “You’re the one with the lungs.”
“Spengler. I’m an officer with the governor’s grand jury.” He flashed a state buzzer in a leather folder.
I said, “I’ve got one of those too. So far it hasn’t got me into a theater on Gidget night.”
“Private, huh? Well, I got me a court order to go through the papers in that office and take away evidence pertaining to the current investigation.” He got it all out in a breath.
I held out a hand. He hesitated, then laid the fold of paper in it. I glanced at the fine print and he snatched it back. “Looks legitimate.”
“Damn straight.”
“Better let him in,” Dutt told the editor.
“Fucking Democrats.” But the white-haired man stepped aside. Spengler and the deputy rumbled into the office. The rest of us stood at the opening. There was room for only two inside.
“Hold it.” The deputy threw an arm in front of the court officer.
The enclosure wasn’t any neater than I remembered. Barry treated shelves like gunnysacks, stuffing rather than stacking books and manuscripts into them, and the overflow mounded the desk and the packing crates he used in place of file cabinets. A piece of twisted metal the doctors had dug out of his chest after the explosion, encased in Lucite, held down a sheaf of curling receipt slips on the computer terminal that had replaced his typewriter. The same old telephoto snaps of old men named Carlo and Don Cheech covered the walls.
Nobody there was looking at any of that. Those eyes not blocked by Spengler’s bulk were on the two-foot stack of papers and looseleaf notebooks standing in the center of the floor with a hand-lettered sign on top:
DANGER!
WIRED FOR DEMOLITION
A length of flat insulated wire circled the stack twice and vanished into the bottom drawer of the desk.
“Bluff,” Spengler said. “Them newspaper snoopers.” But he didn’t move a grain of his two-sixty.
“Primacord.”
The fat man quarter-turned my way. “Huh?”
I said, “They carried it in coils over Khe Sanh in ’copters whose pilots could set down in a field of crackers without a crunch. It’s volatile stuff.”
Spengler’s little eyes went back to the stack of papers.
A pale pointed tongue came out and slid along his lips. “Aw,” he said. “Aw.”
“It’ll take out this floor and some of the Lively Arts,” I went on. “The book section anyway.”
“What do they want to go and mess around with that stuff for?” His voice got shrill. “Can’t a guy do his work without he gets shipped back in an envelope?”
The deputy lowered his arm. “I’ll radio police headquarters, get the city bomb boys down here.”
“Well, I ain’t paid to babysit no bombs.” Spengler pointed a finger the size of a zucchini at Jed Dutt. “The stuff stays till we get back.”
“Peddle your fat butt, Lionheart. It’s private property until you get ready to serve that order.”
“You got God in a box, smart guy. You went to college.”
The two intruders went out of there on a crackle of applause and Bronx cheers.
“They don’t make them like that anymore,” I told Dutt.
“Only five times a week and twic
e on Sundays.”
As the white-haired editor shooed the reporters back to their desks, Dutt said, “That sign’s been giving me the willies. I’m afraid to use the office.”
I stepped inside and pulled the end of the wire loose from the drawer. It ended in two frizzed tails of shredded copper, like the ones you hook to the antenna terminals on a television set, which is what kind of wire it was. He stared at me over the tops of his glasses. “How’d you know?”
“Nobody who lost pieces of himself to a dynamite charge is going to be fooling around with Primacord. Can I look through this stuff?”
“We got orders to cooperate. I can’t let you take any of it out of the building, though. House rules.”
“I won’t be able to read all of it here,” I said.
“The line is we can bend all the regulations we want out there, but in here they’re stone city.” He touched his bow tie. “Seen our new copying machine? It takes a few minutes on your way back to the elevators, but it’s worth it.”
I grinned. “I’ll be sure and take the time.”
He put his hands in his pockets, nodded. “You get anything on this would look good in print.” He let it flutter.
“Yeah.”
He nodded again and left me, his rounded shoulders and back-tilted posture describing a lazy S.
I rolled Barry’s swivel around the desk and sat down and started picking through the stack. I wasn’t going to find anything. I didn’t know for sure if the series he’d been working on had anything to do with why he had gone underground, and knowing him I figured the papers were a decoy anyway. If there was a danger of them falling into public hands he’d have destroyed his notes and relied on his phenomenal memory. I was bobbing for wax apples.
Five minutes in I bit into real fruit.
9
I DIDN’T KNOW THAT’S what it was when I found it, of course. You hardly ever do, which is why it’s called detecting. Before I got to it I skimmed through a dozen sheets of dog-eared copy paper bearing the typewritten beginnings of several columns, watching Barry grind down the leads to that famous Stackpole edge—he never composed on the computer, refusing to share his dynamite with the office system until it was ready for show—tried to make sense out of his pencil scrawl on some loose sheets torn from his telephone pad and gave up on that. There were check stubs made out to cash in unspectacular amounts, a reminder to himself to buy Irene something for her birthday, random figures in columns; the usual impedimenta of life in an imperfect world. It will take more than machines with memories to make us give up our little scraps of paper. He had apparently emptied his drawers to build a convincing pile for the Spenglers he knew would be dropping in.
When I got to it, it was a three-ring folder bound in slick black plastic with the name of a local heating and cooling firm stamped in green on the spine and cover, one of those things they give you when you buy a new furnace, containing your guarantee and operating instructions and numbers to call when you screw them up. They always outlast the furnaces and usually wind up holding family recipes and newspaper clippings. This one was jammed tight with double-spaced, neatly typewritten sheets. It weighed at least three pounds. When I flipped back the cover, the title page went over with it and I was looking at the first page.
In August, after the defoliants have done their work, the trees around the harbor stand naked and it looks like November in Michigan. Only it’s August in Southeast Asia and with no shade to protect it the water gives forth crawling waves of heat like sun on concrete and those fish that are too large to loll in the shade of the sunken timbers lie on the surface with their sunburned fins turning white.
I peeled the title page away from the cover.
Cold Steel, Hot Lead
by
Barry Evan Stackpole
“Barry, you bastard,” I said.
I had suggested the title to him when we were in that hole in Cambodia, and at the time, with Charlie spraying orange tracers into the bushes all around us, it had seemed a pretty good joke, the way a chance reference in a certain context that wouldn’t make you smile on a straight sober morning blows the roof off a late-night party after everyone’s stopped counting his sloe gin fizzes. It had been our toast for a long time and had come to mean nothing more than throwing spilled salt over a shoulder. I’d thought. All the while he’d been writing the book and, no doubt, grinning every time he typed the title at the top of a fresh page.
I riffled the pages with a thumb, reading the numbers. They went up to 462. I’d be the best part of my retainer making copies, and dollars to bullets there was nothing in it that would lead me to where Barry was cooling leather. I cast a glance behind me to make sure the doorway was empty, popped open the steel rings, folded the block of pages inside the topcoat I’d been carrying all day, and replaced them with a like quantity of blank newsprint from one of the shelves in the office. Then I returned to the stack.
It gave up a number of scratch sheets with unidentified telephone numbers written on them, a fresh-looking manila file folder containing dated clippings from old copies of the News and Free Press, and a trio of Detroit Metropolitan telephone directories for the past three years. He’d once told me he never kept personal address or telephone books because they were always getting lost, and that when his mental Rolodex failed him, every other Leap Year Day, there was usually a directory handy. He never forgot an unlisted number. Half the time I had to look up mine. I took down some of the scribbled numbers into my pocket notebook and opened the most recent directory and copied some of the ones circled there in ink. I felt like a goat in the city dump.
There was nothing else for me. I rebuilt the heap, replaced the wire and warning sign so as not to disappoint the bomb detail, took a last quick look around for purloined letters, and left the office carrying the folder full of clippings and the package wrapped in my topcoat. The editor who didn’t like Democrats sat in his cubicle next to Barry’s, scowling at someone’s story on his VDT, and a woman reporter at one of the open desks was changing from high heels into brown loafers. She had slim feet and wore no stockings. Jed Dutt fell into step beside me from somewhere on the way to the copying machine. “Anything?”
“Couple of telephone numbers,” I said. “And this.” I handed him the folder.
He read the clippings as he walked. I adjusted the coat over my left arm, bunching it to conceal the square corners underneath. It was getting heavy.
He said, “Some of these stories are mine from back when I was on cophouse. They go back a few years. What’s the connection?”
“If I knew that I wouldn’t have to make copies. I think best on my keister.”
“It’s that pressure on the brain.” We stopped at the machine and he watched me lower my coat carefully to the floor before laying the clippings face down on the glass cover. “That knob controls the number of copies. Just push the button when you’re ready to print.”
“Thanks.
“And you better carry that stuff you’re hiding out in the open when you pass Lady Patton in the lobby. Otherwise she’ll call out the troops.”
I looked at him.
“I got off police beat just in time,” he said, with his shy grin. “When you start to think like a cop it’s time for a change.”
He left me. I stood there for a moment rubbing the back of my neck. Then I started twisting knobs and pressing buttons. There was something to be said for not being in show business while Jed Dutt was on the Entertainment desk.
The building wino was using the upholstered bench in my waiting room to kill a fifth of Annie Greensprings. He was a gray-stubbled black man who wore a blue knit cap and brown jersey gloves with the fingers out and an olive-drab army overcoat the year around, which was okay because I was pretty sure he didn’t wear anything underneath. I didn’t ask him how many customers he’d scared off while he was sitting there. He wouldn’t have remembered anyhow. “Out,” I said. “There’s an astrologer next door. You can gaze at the chart of Venus and
plan your next vacation.”
He got up, looking at me with glistening spaniel eyes, and shuffled toward the door I held open. He smelled of dago red and a stopped-up toilet. When he was almost in the hall I said oh hell, clawed out my wallet, and jammed a five-spot into his slash pocket. The look it bought wasn’t worth it. It never is.
Inside the cloister I picked up my mail and went over to the desk and boomed down my armload of papers and skinned through the envelopes. I was very popular with Publishers Clearing House and the Readers Digest, and the quick-print place I had do my business cards and letterheads had sent me a 5 x 7 greeting card with a cartoon of a chicken being held upside-down by a hairy fist clamped around its legs and the message inside: “Now will you pay?” I peered at the fine print on the back. It wasn’t a Hallmark so I filed it under the blotter with the others.
I hung up my coat, which was showing wear from all the carrying around, and took my seat behind the desk, dialing my answering service as I shuffled through the newspaper clippings I’d copied at the News. Two of the pieces, dated several months apart, were about bodies found in the trunks of cars parked at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. They could have been connected. They could just as easily not have been. One good way to relieve traffic congestion at the airport would be to direct the cars with stiffs in them to their own part of the lot: Visitors, Passengers, Corpses. There was an article about a Detroit police inspector taking early retirement after eighteen years with the department, dated last January, a long Sunday magazine profile of a local labor union chief, dead two years, and a scattering of three-inch fillers on various assaults, shootings, and hits-and-runs in the metropolitan area. A five-year record of random violence with nothing but a manila folder in common. On the face of it.
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