Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 04

by The Glass Highway

  “Charge?” Bloodworth had stopped fooling with the loose thread.

  “We’ll fill in that part later.”

  Zorn said, “Then can I check out, Chief? I’m working for free now an hour.”

  Proust wasn’t listening. He was looking at the black detective. “You stay here, Officer. We’ll talk about your loose gums and why you look at me like you just stepped in something every time I give a simple order. Just because the mayor says I got to take you don’t mean I got to take your crap.”

  “Okay.” Bloodworth’s jaw muscles twitched.

  “Okay what, damn you?”

  “Okay, Chief.”

  “Okay.” He swung both barrels on me. “I’m not half as stupid as you think, Walker. No one could be. I know you’re looking for headlines. ‘Private Eye Refuses to Betray Client.’ Pick up a little free advertising at the city’s expense. Only it won’t dry with me. I got an in with the local press and I can make you stink so high no client will come near you without a gas mask. That’s if I get soft and don’t bust your license in the meantime. Just try me if you don’t—Yeah!” Someone had tapped at the door.

  A skinny plainclothes man in shirtsleeves and a shoulder holster opened the door and leaned inside. “Silver Bells” trickled in from a radio in the squad room. “Prosecutor’s here, Chief.”

  “You mean someone from his office?”

  “No, it’s the cheese himself.”

  “Christ, he must have radar.” Proust stuck the end of his tie inside his jacket and did up the knot. “Okay, shoo the camera-happy bastard in.”

  The unidentified dick backed out. I remembered my cigarette and knocked half an inch of ash off onto the rug. Making myself at home. Because if “prosecutor” meant who I suspected, the fun was just getting started.

  14

  CITY PROSECUTOR CECIL FISH strode in and stopped to look around as if wondering what the hell had happened to the trumpets he’d ordered. He was a smallish man in a neat brown three-piece suit under a trenchcoat and sporting a fresh carnation that on him looked like a sunflower. His graying blond hair was cut in youthful bangs, but the black-rimmed glasses he wore to mask the bags under his eyes put back every year the hairstyle took away. His expression said he was aware of that and he didn’t like it one damn bit. He had pale blue eyes and a wart on one cheek painted black to resemble a mole. He looked ten years older and three inches shorter than he did on television.

  I said before that you could buy Iroquois Heights for less than you’d stoop to pick up from the sidewalk, but you wouldn’t get the prosecutor, not for that, not with a state senator’s chair coming up empty next November. He couldn’t see a thousand-dollar bill. A ten-grand campaign donation, however, would get you the key to the city and the promise of an appointment in Lansing after the swearing-in ceremony. He was famous both for raids on gambling hells and drug dens that made the front pages and for acquittals for lack of evidence that got buried among the obituaries. His kind is as American as Legionnaires’ disease and twice as common. They can smell publicity from the downwind side of a stockyard.

  Today he couldn’t smell much of anything, because he had a cold. He reached into his jacket right past a crisp white handkerchief showing above the inside breast pocket and took out a Kleenex, into which he blew his slightly red nose with a delicate little honk. “This the suspect in the Broderick case?” His words were muffled by the tissue. He was looking straight at me.

  Proust said, “He didn’t do it, but we think he knows where the one who did is and helped her get there.”

  “What’ve you got on him?”

  The assistant chief filled him in on the events of a week ago, mentioned my card and where it was found, and finished with my refusal to make a statement. I was beginning to feel like the guy who had wandered into his own funeral.

  Fish tossed his wadded tissue into the wastebasket by the desk and came over and stood in front of me. “Your part in this is pretty transparent, mister,” he said. “What’ve you got to say in your defense?”

  I blew smoke in his face.

  Bloodworth grinned suddenly, his bright teeth lighting up the room. Proust shot him a hard look, but met only grave respect.

  “He’s a hardcase, Cecil,” snarled the assistant chief. “He knows we don’t have anything he couldn’t slide out of with a little spit.”

  “Then we’ll just have to make sure he doesn’t spit.” He turned to Proust. “I just got off the phone with Esterhazy. Maybe you never heard of him before today, but he draws a lot of water with the mayor and half the city council. Then there’s the fact that this boy who was killed is the son of a popular Detroit television personality. I’m going to be shaking reporters off my lapels in a couple of hours. I sure hope you have something for me to tell them other than the usual dreck about all the leads you’re following.”

  “I thought talking to the press about ongoing police investigations was my job.” Something like color had come into the assistant chief’s face.

  “Not on something this big. Don’t forget you only got this job because you kept the chief’s nephew’s name out of that drug raid you made on the Detroit school system. As a spokesman for this department you have all the media presence of a poisonous land snail.”

  Proust said something about which of them was more suited to fit inside a snail’s shell and they were off. Bloodworth caught my eye and winked. I leaned over in my chair and whispered, “How long they been like this?”

  “What time is it?”

  Zorn, who had been consulting his wrist watch every ten seconds, took his partner literally. “Quarter after ten, for chrissake.”

  I twisted out what was left of my cigarette against a shoe sole and got up, flipping the butt at the wastebasket. “I’ll just be on my way,” I announced. “I won’t even ask anyone to drive me back. I’ll call a cab. That’s my Christmas present to the taxpayers of Iroquois Heights.”

  “You aren’t going anywhere!”

  Some of Fish’s authority was lost in that he was shouting at my Adam’s apple. I said, “Charge me or release me. You know the lyrics better than I do, or you should. I can hook a lawyer up here, but it’s long distance and he’d just say the same thing anyway.”

  It got quiet enough in the office to hear “Winter Wonderland” playing on the other side of the door. I grasped the knob. Got that close.

  The telephone on Proust’s desk whirred. He picked up the receiver and barked his name into the mouthpiece. Then he listened, and as he listened his face subsided to its normal pasty color. He said, “Yeah,” and hung up.

  The prosecutor was looking at him, but as Proust turned away from the instrument his eyes went straight to Sergeant Zorn, standing next to the door. “He stays.”

  Zorn made a slight movement we both understood, I let go of the knob and moved away.

  “That was Detroit,” Proust told Fish. “I got out an APB on young Broderick’s Jeep Cherokee when we couldn’t turn it at Paula Royce’s place. They just found it.” He told him where.

  Fish sucked his cheek, watching me. “Find him accommodations at County. Book him as a material witness for now, but show him the process. Whether we tack on accomplice after the fact and aiding and abetting is all up to you, Walker.”

  “Feed him his Miranda,” Assistant Chief Mark Proust directed the sergeant.

  The county lockup was a four-story brick box squatting on a block of prime downtown real estate with a twelve-foot wall around the exercise yard and a narrow alley separating it from the Lawyers Building next door. It had been built back when criminals were punished instead of recycled, and although some reform-minded chief turnkey had had the plaster walls repainted a soothing turquoise, the tough old government green had begun to show through, bringing with it memories of leg irons and rubber truncheons and homosexual rapes in the shower room. Very little sunlight penetrated the iron mesh outside the windows to the corridors, lit day and night by fluorescent tubes and reeking of Lysol. The cells
were medium gray all the time and had a dank stony smell, and a quieter place you will never see.

  Zorn and Bloodworth ran me over after pictures and prints at the station and delivered me through a back door that led directly into the basement. A gray-haired guard signed for me there and took me to a brightly lit little room where a younger colleague sat reading a Michener novel at a yellow oak table with initials carved all over the top. For the next fifteen minutes they discussed last night’s hockey game, taking time out from the play-by-play every few seconds to address me in the flat tones of men saying the same things they’d said a thousand times already. Empty the pockets. Leave them hanging inside out. Take off the tie. Take off the belt. Take out the shoelaces. Leave them on the table. Strip. Open your mouth wide. Spread your arms. Spread your legs. Turn around and face the wall. Bend your knees. Stoop. Get dressed. Hold on to that receipt for when you leave us. No receipt, no valuables.

  “What, no stripes?”

  Grayhead gave me the deadpan. “Funny, pal. Denims come after the prelim. That goalie couldn’t catch a punch in the mouth if the coach caught him screwing his wife, Eddie. Later. Okay, comedian.”

  Out the door and a clanking elevator ride up to the second floor. The felony tank. Clackety-clack, clackety-clack down a waxed corridor to a cell two thirds of the way down. A couple of wolf-whistles from inmates along the way, but mostly no reaction at all. White-enameled bars worn down to dull steel where many hands had gripped them. Clang of the door, the guard’s footsteps clacking away. Then silence.

  My world measured eight feet by ten by my calculation, with a narrow creaking bunk bed and a lidless toilet that worked about as well as they do in most institutions, meaning unpredictably. By climbing up onto the top bunk and kneeling with the side of my face pressed against the barred window, I could just see through the thick glass and wire mesh to the handkerchief-size lot where the lawyers and judges parked their cars next door. It’s not often you see that many Mercedes in one place. Directly under the window a pair of trustees were busy unloading a bread truck backed up to a dock opening off what was presumably the kitchen storeroom. No matter what time it is on what day, someone is always working somewhere.

  I climbed back down and sat on the bottom bunk. I could feel the metal slats through the mattress, which was about as thick as a deck of cards and stuffed with cotton batting that was mostly bunched up toward the head end. At least I had the cell to myself. Cecil Fish’s orders, most likely. Let the bastard stew for a while alone, make him desperate for someone to talk to, even if it’s a cop. Everyone’s a psychologist these days. Everyone didn’t know me.

  I wondered where Paula Royce was. I wondered who she was and what she was running from besides the law. I wondered who had handed Bud Broderick his ticket and why. I wondered what I was doing sitting all alone on a thin mattress in a quiet cell with a semifunctional toilet if I didn’t know any of those other things. I wondered when they served supper. I hadn’t eaten in close to twenty-four hours.

  It was served at dusk, Monte Cristo style on a metal tray through a port in the bottom of the door, and consisted of some gray meat sliced paper-thin, powder and water pretending to be mashed potatoes under canned gravy, loose kernels of corn, a slice of bread, and a half-pint of milk in a cardboard carton. Plastic utensils. I consumed everything edible, using the bread to scoop the last of the gravy into my mouth. The food had an institutional flavor, but it filled all the empty spaces. Afterward I pushed the foul matter back out through the port for pickup as instructed by the trustee who had brought it, a harelip who walked with his right foot turned inward forty-five degrees. His shambling limp was distinguishable a hundred feet down the corridor. I would come to identify it with food and start salivating like Pavlov’s dogs at the sound of it.

  Dusk became evening, measured by a barely perceptible thickening of the shadows in the corners farthest from the light in the hall. Then interminable night. Writhing and stretching to burrow an acceptable configuration in the lumpy batting, finding it, then writhing and stretching again five seconds later. Staring at the slats in the bunk overhead. Doubts chasing thoughts through the dark abyss of the idle mind. No screams up there in felony, at least; those were all below in the drunk tank, where the inmates were wrestling with the furry purple things that came out when the buzz wore off, and on the top floor, which was a way-station before the upholstered rooms at Ypsilanti. Where I was was quiet. Backaches and doubts and quiet and the nagging nighttime fear of spending one’s life in their company. The bland eternity of a night that didn’t end until the morning shift came on to say it had. All for a promise no one much cared if I kept.

  Happy holidays, Walker. Many more.

  15

  SOMEWHERE BETWEEN BREAKFAST and lunch on the second day, I was taken back down to the basement, steered into a tiled room off the showers with a row of sinks under a long streaked mirror, and handed a safety razor and a can of shaving cream. I hadn’t seen my reflection in a while and it startled me. I looked like every mug shot I’d ever seen. Under a guard’s supervision I scraped off two days’ stubble, washed my face, combed my hair with my fingers—there was more gray in it today—and I still looked like every mug shot I’d ever seen.

  “Why the spruce job?” I asked the turnkey, a young deputy in the county uniform.

  “I just take ’em where they tell me,” he said. “I don’t ask how come.”

  I put on my shirt, gave back the razor and can, and was escorted out; but instead of turning left toward the elevator we bore right and followed the corridor into the receiving area, where Zorn and Bloodworth were waiting.

  “How’s Mrs. Zorn?” I asked the sergeant. “Or did she run off with that parole cop?”

  He wasn’t smiling. “Back to the station, criminal. We got questions.”

  “New ones, I hope.”

  “You wish.” He reached behind him under his coat and brought forth handcuffs. Bloodworth signed me out.

  Police interrogation rooms are neither designed nor decorated. They just happen, like Dutch elm disease. Four blank walls set too close together around a table with a dozen cigarette burns in the top, a couple of hard chairs, butts in the dusty corners, that same stench of sweat and stale fear soaked deep into the walls. Nothing you couldn’t pick out of a picture in the October 1948 issue of Police Times. The only thing missing was the heat lamp. In its place, an ordinary hundred-watt bulb protected by a steel cage in the ceiling shed even, medium-bright light into every corner. In a way that was worse, like the frank lighting in a morgue.

  Zorn was the heavy. For an hour he pelted me with questions, now circling behind my chair so that I couldn’t see what he was doing, now inserting his large nose before my face, spattering me with saliva, and giving me the full benefit of his nicotine breath. He kept coming back to Paula Royce; where was she? I grinned at him. He seized my collar in both fists and lifted me off the chair. Bloodworth pulled him away, said maybe he’d better go out for a cup of java. Zorn went out for a cup of java, slamming the door behind him hard enough to rattle the bulb in the ceiling.

  The same tired routine.

  Silence swelled the room on the sergeant’s heels. I watched Bloodworth watching me, one foot planted on the seat of the other chair, arms folded on his raised knee, smoke dribbling out the end of a filtered Pall Mall between his brown fingers. Shirt cuffs turned back, spotted tie at half-mast. I said, “You the one that offers me a cigarette and calls me by my first name?”

  He grunted, got his pack out of his shirt pocket, and tossed it to me. I slid one out and flipped back the rest.

  “That wasn’t really an act.” He lit mine with a Zippo. “Rube is one cop who’s as tough as he seems.”

  “I just came from a place where they pick their teeth with tough guys like him. They don’t have to strut and make with the tight talk; they’re the real thing.”

  “You caught him on a bad year. We all make allowances for Rube. He’s got an eighteen-year-old wife that�
�s making him crazy.”

  “I thought that was just a gag about the parole cop.”

  “The parole cop and just about everyone else on the department who is not named Dick Bloodworth.” His grin came and went quickly. “Also it’s this case. It’s screwy.”

  “Screwy how?”

  “Oh, the Royce girl’s guilty, all right. One thing about this detective business is surface facts usually turn out to be everything they seem. Four years in plainclothes and I’ve never had a murder you could call a mystery. They’re mostly open and shut. It’s the girl’s background giving us hell. She doesn’t have one.”

  I sucked hard on the filter for taste and waited. After almost twenty-four hours without, it tasted enough like a Winston not to complain.

  He said, “She was issued a Michigan driver’s license sixteen months ago, which is about the time she registered the Buick Skylark we found in the garage. Her gun registration is dated a week later. According to her landlord she moved into the house that same week. No lease, but she got up first and last month’s rent and a security deposit. Fifteen hundred. Cash. So he didn’t bother to ask for references. Before that, nothing. She didn’t exist.”

  “Probably an alias. What’d you get on her prints?”

  “We’re still waiting on Washington. Holidays. A set we lifted at the house matches what’s on file with the gun permit in Lansing. It’s obvious she was hiding from something. Could be when we find out from what we’ll clear up somebody else’s headache too.” He lowered his eyelids, then raised them. “Proust would fry my ass if he knew I was telling you all this. But what the hell, he fries it whenever he gets the chance anyway.”

  “He was the same way down in D. Why do you think he stayed an inspector eight years?” I added some ash to the fine mulch on the floor. “So what’s good old Rube squawking about?”

  He found a scuff mark on the toe of the shoe he had propped up on the chair and rubbed it out with his fingers. “I’m not one to dump on his partner the minute his back’s turned, but you know the River Rouge down by the Ford plant? Where the water’s so warm from the chemicals you can boil an egg in it—only you wouldn’t want to eat it afterwards? Sergeant Reuben Zorn’s idea of a productive day involves sitting on the bank fishing that river.”