I lit a weed. “You Lou Grant types do like your meat lean. I’ll try to swing something your way when this breaks.”
“And I’d have to run it under Stackpole’s byline. Forget it. He doesn’t need my help. How about fifty?”
“Dollars?”
“No, pencils.” His tone would etch steel. “I’ve got a week to cough up child support or I start the new year with numbers on my shirt.”
“Twenty. If the information’s good.”
“I wouldn’t get out of this chair for twenty, and it’s got a busted spring. Fifty, no guarantees. This isn’t negotiable. I don’t look good in gray.”
“Prisoners aren’t wearing gray this year, take it from me.” I leaked smoke. “Fifty it is. But I’ll tell Barry.”
“He’ll be sore I didn’t cut him in. But, hell, I’m going into TV anyway. What about this snuffer?”
“I can’t describe him. I just met him and already I forgot what he looks like. He said his name was Horn.”
Silence crackled. Under the dead air on his end I heard the clatter of a distant typewriter. Probably a secretary in the legal department writing a letter. It used to be all typewriters down there, but the whole world’s gone drunk on computers.
I said, “Reinhardt?”
“Sorry. Not Fletcher Horn?”
“We didn’t get to first names.”
Another pause, shorter. “Let’s meet.”
“Suits me. Barry’s office?”
“Not with these walls. You know the Sextant Bar on West Lafayette? It’s between the News and the Free Press.”
“Well enough to count my change after I’ve paid for a drink.”
“Seven o’clock?”
I checked my watch. “Make it seven-thirty. I haven’t eaten since stir.”
“Bring cash.”
I hung up carefully. I was starting to feel the Scotch, which is what two days’ enforced abstention will do for you. For a moment I considered pouring what was in my glass back into the bottle, then decided I couldn’t do that without spilling any and dumped it into a larger container instead. I felt it strike bottom. If my feet touched the broken glass on my way out of the office I didn’t feel it. I locked the outer door.
The Sextant was a narrow walk-in jammed between office buildings equidistant from the last two big-city dailies in the United States who were still trying to cut each other’s throat, with a canvas canopy erected out front in honor of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and a row of booths inside separated by a footworn aisle from the stools at the bar. A barmaid wearing a platinum cap of hair and too much make-up was smoking a little cigar in the first booth, across from a middle-aged man whose ink-smeared coveralls identified him as a press operator for one of the papers. The only other customer was a skinny kid with a receding hairline and wire-rimmed glasses nursing a drink in the back booth. I went over there and slid into the seat opposite.
“You look like a Gable Reinhardt,” I said.
He eyed me from under heavy lids behind his glasses. He was wearing sparse muttonchop whiskers and a threadbare combat jacket. He didn’t look old enough to have served in the army, but then he didn’t look old enough to have been married and divorced either, and fathered a child in the bargain. “How was supper?”
“Burned and late. It’s nice to be free.” I ordered Scotch and water from the barmaid, who had ditched the stogie and her companion. Reinhardt stood pat. When she had gone, he said: “There’s no resemblance.”
“To what?”
“Not what, who. Galahad. Sir Walter. Don Quixote; take your pick. You don’t look like any of them, and nobody else would go into the tank for a chick.”
“That what they’re saying around the News?”
“They’re not near as polite. Why did you, really?”
“Off the record?”
He shrugged. “I don’t work where I drink.”
“Proust and Fish could have had what they wanted if they’d bothered to treat me like a citizen instead of an accomplice. But they didn’t, so they didn’t.”
He was still waiting for more when the barmaid brought our drinks. I laid some money on the table and watched her walk away with it, then: “Horn.”
“Fifty bucks.”
I showed him a bill. Before he could get his hands on it, I smoothed it out on the table and stood my glass atop U.S. Grant’s stern countenance. Sat back, set some tobacco on fire, waited. Every move pure poetry. I was so sick of the whole dumb-show I could kiss Proust for delivering me from it.
“My information says he’s in Jackson,” said the research assistant.
“He’s out.”
He nodded, just to be doing something. “His name probably isn’t Horn. He’s Canadian, or was. State Department tried deporting him a few years back over some lies he told on his application for citizenship, but they weren’t such big lies and no one’s been able to pin him to a homicide yet.”
“How many homicides haven’t they been able to pin him to?”
“Eight anyway. That’s just since the cops started counting. One even got to a grand jury.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Witness lost his memory.”
“What witness?”
I searched his narrow features. “He’s that good?”
“He’s two police guards in a downtown hotel good. They went to roust their witness out of the bathroom for his day in court and found him ducking for apples in the toilet bowl. Drowned.”
“Not very original.”
“There aren’t any original ways left. From the variety of the killings, your man is proficient in firearms, demolitions, and cutting edges, but he appears to prefer his bare hands. He’s as strong as a bull and he has the equivalent of a black belt in karate.”
“No kidding. How’d he end up on ice?”
“Dime store stuff.” The reporter touched his lips to his glass for the first time since I’d sat down. “They lifted his thumbprint off the wheel of a Pontiac he boosted when the car he was using to crash a hit at Metro Airport laid down on him. It wasn’t solid enough to tack him to the kill, but the D.A. thought he might save a life or two by sticking him in the shade for a little.”
“It doesn’t hang straight,” I said. “A guy that can nudge a guy under police guard doesn’t leave a good print on a stolen crate.”
“Not unless he wanted a vacation. The stiff in the hotel wasn’t virgin. He had friends. Even the Al Kaline of hit men can wear lead from a punk with a Saturday Night Buster and the price of a lid in his pocket. It’s been done.”
“I just talked to you an hour ago. How’d you scrape all this together so fast?”
He sat back and sipped his something-and-tonic. I lifted my glass and pushed the fifty across the table. It went into one of the flap pockets of his jacket.
“The file was pulled already,” he said. “Barry wanted all he could get on freelancers that have worked this area before he went underground.”
I paused with the glass halfway to my lips. “What’s he working?”
“I don’t know that fifty goes that far.”
I set down the glass and reached over and took hold of his collar in one hand and twisted it. “I’m a P.I. with a busted license who just capped two days behind bars in my favorite county this side of Devil’s Island with a threat to have my lights put out by someone who knows a hundred and six ways to do it without a weapon. I don’t much care how far fifty goes, or how many times I have to hit this table with your head until you figure it out. Are you getting all this?”
The room was very quiet, but not like the second floor of the brick building in downtown Iroquois Heights was quiet. I could feel the barmaid and the press operator and the thin party behind the bar watching us. Gable Reinhardt’s glass lay on its side on the table, its contents running down into his lap. He didn’t appear to be paying it any attention. His face matched the maroon vinyl upholstery of the high seat behind his head. He managed to nod quickly. I let go of his collar.
<
br /> “Drugs,” he gasped.
“Drugs what?”
He shook his head, still gasping. I righted his glass and signaled the barmaid. She hesitated, then brought over a full one and took away the empty without looking at either of us. The usual bar noise resumed. I watched the research assistant put down half his drink without stopping. Then he used his napkin to mop off his lap. I finished my cigarette and fired up another while he was doing all this.
“Barry’s convinced a new organization is moving in on the drug trade in Detroit,” he said, looking at my left ear. “It started when Johnny Ralph Dorchet and his partners got gunned last December. Ten days later the cops scraped a family of pushers off the walls of a house in Redford Township, and then a trafficker the feds were getting set to bust on a tax beef got himself clubbed and gassed to death in his garage on Watson. Since then a couple of wild cards have turned up that may or may not tie in. Cops bought a conviction in one of them, but Barry thinks he was a stalking horse. He’s out digging for some hard answers.”
“What makes it new talent?” I asked. “These gang things blow up every couple of years.”
“It’s the pattern. Every time a new family moves into the neighborhood they bring in the Prohibition stuff, make a lot of noise. Then when they get a foothold they quiet down. They yank the cowboys, rely more on mechanics like your boy Horn to mop up. Not so many headlines. Each group thinks they invented it, but it happened the same way in New York and Chicago in the twenties when the Italians took over, and again when the blacks cruised in here ten years ago. It’s happening now with the Cubans and Colombians down in Miami.”
He was warming to his subject. He’d forgotten all about my mussing him up. Kid journalists are the ones to latch on to. They’re always busting to tell someone the story they can’t print yet.
I emptied my glass thoughtfully. “Where does Moses True hang his hat in all this? He got dusted the other day, probably by Horn.”
“I hadn’t heard.” He was wiping his glasses with a fresh napkin. His hooded eyes were a little fuzzy. He didn’t seem surprised by the news. “Barry predicted something like that. True was a stopgap to smooth the transition between the old and the new. He was more flexible than Dorchet. He wouldn’t care whose money he was spending. But he would be temporary, and this bunch pays everyone off in the same coin.”
“Who is the new kid on the block?” I twirled a finger inside the rim of my empty glass and made it wobble, keeping my eyes down so he couldn’t see the gleam in them. That could be expensive.
“We’ll know that when Barry comes up for air.” His tone dripped smug. “But have you noticed all the fresh Spanish accents around this town lately?”
“Colombians?”
He smiled.
A loose spring snapped into place in the back of my head. I felt flushed, but not from the Scotch. I got up quickly. Reinhardt started slightly at the sudden movement.
“Thanks.” I paid for his drink. “Sorry about the rough trade.”
“That’s okay. For another fifty you can break my arm if you want.”
“Another time, maybe.”
I met the barmaid in the aisle. She smiled, cracking the powder on her cheeks. “I’d of paid money to see that,” she said in a low voice. “That little punk is always jacking somebody up in here for somebody else’s dirt.”
“Glad to be of service.”
“I’m usually pretty good on faces. I don’t remember yours.”
“It’s just a face.”
She said, “I get off at ten.”
“I don’t blame you. It’s a good number.”
She was still puzzling it out when I left her.
My car was in a lighted city lot a block down from the News building. On my way to the booth I stopped to admire a gold Chrysler LeBaron cranked into a slot two cars down. The attendant was busy, so I opened the passenger’s door and leafed through the usual junk in the glove compartment until I found the registration. It was made out to Theodore Grundy. Of course I didn’t know anyone by that name.
21
THE ATTENDANT WAS a short round black wearing a faded red parka over a denim jacket over a sweatshirt over a flannel shirt over a thermal top with a hole chewed in the neckband. He catalogued me from behind thick horn-rimmed glasses as I approached his booth.
“Silver Olds, right?” he said.
“Right. Say, that’s quite a memory you have.”
He beamed, the tip of a pale pink tongue showing through the gap where his front teeth belonged, and took my keys off a peg under the window. “Sixty-five cents.”
I gave him a buck, collected my keys, and watched him make change from the dingus on his belt. “Bet you can’t describe the guy that belongs to that Chrysler.” I pointed my chin at it.
His lids came down, but he was watching me through the lashes. He played with the coins, clicking them together. “Depends on the bet.”
“Another buck on top of the change.”
He said, “That’s him pretending to tie his shoelace.”
I turned away to cough. A slim number with a dark moustache in a gray three-piece and leather trenchcoat had one foot propped up on the bumper of a green Toronado and was fiddling with his shoe. He was wearing loafers.
I gave the attendant another bill. “How much to lose his keys for five minutes?”
“A buck a minute. It’s the job if he complains to the city.”
“The hell it is. The city hasn’t canned anyone since Cavanaugh was mayor.” But I tipped him five.
He pocketed it along with the other bill and my change, lifted a ring of keys off a peg, dropped it into his change drawer, and bumped the drawer shut with his hard round stomach. I pointed an index finger at him with thumb cocked and made a snicking noise out the side of my mouth. He gave me back his cat’s-grin with his tongue showing. I turned around and walked past Slim to my machine. He finished adjusting his pantcuff and strolled over to the booth, whistling loudly. He had to be a fed. No one else carries airy nonchalance like it’s a sack of anvils.
He was arguing with the attendant when I backed out of my space and rolled out past him onto Lafayette. I turned east, hung a right onto Washington on the yellow, made another right onto Congress, and parked in a loading zone near the lot’s back entrance. Before climbing out I flipped down the visor with my honorary sheriff’s star pinned to it. It might confuse a cop long enough for me to get back before he called the wrecker.
My shadow was still too busy shouting obscenities at the guy in the booth to notice me hurrying along the other aisle. I let myself into his car and got down on the floor between the front and back seats and waited with my Smith & Wesson in my hand.
After a couple of minutes I heard rapid footsteps scraping asphalt and the door on the driver’s side was torn open and a body flung heavily into the seat. Keys jingled. I sat up and touched the gun’s cold muzzle to the back of a slender neck.
“Slow down, Ted,” I said quietly. “Or is it Theo?”
He took it well, just a little reddening at the base of his scalp and around the edges of his ears. I nudged him gently with the barrel to stop him before he got started. He relaxed just enough.
“It’s Theodore.” His voice was deep and full, as slim men’s often are. “I hate nicknames.”
“Hands on the wheel, Theodore.”
He complied, placing them precisely at ten and two. Somehow I was sure he would. I switched hands on the gun quickly and slid my right under his arm and around his chest. He had a .22 target pistol under his left armpit. That meant he was good, or wanted others to think he was. I laid it on the seat beside me and got his ID folder out of an inside pocket. The card said he was with the Justice Department. I flipped the folder onto the front seat and sat back, still covering him but holding the gun down where it couldn’t be seen easily from outside.
“Why the tail?” I asked. “I pay taxes, when I make enough to have taxes to pay.”
He started to take his hand
s off the wheel. I advised him to leave them there. He said, ‘Can we go somewhere? This is like a fish tank.”
“Uh-uh. Mama didn’t raise me to threaten other people with deadly weapons and then put them in charge of deadlier ones. This is Detroit. No one would look twice if I painted the windshield with your brains and then yanked your wheel covers and tape deck. I said why the tail and why the tail is what I said.”
“I’m just an employee. I was told to follow you and report on your movements and contacts. I wasn’t told why.”
“Oh lie. Go again.”
“I’m telling the tru—”
I grabbed a fistful of hair at the nape of his neck and bounced his head off the steering wheel. It sounded like someone kicking a tire.
“You dumb shit, I’m a feder—”
I bounced him again.
“You know what the pen—”
Again. This time the horn peeped. “We can do this all day,” I said. I was still holding him by the hair. “I’m unemployed, I’ve got the time. How about we go halves? I’ll tell you what I think’s going down as far as I’ve got it figured. You tell me how wrong I am. Sort of like comparing notes. You do that sometimes.” I let go.
“When you put it that way—”
“Yeah.” I sat back again. “Ready?”
He was busy rearranging his black hair over a small bald spot in back. His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. He nodded.
“Your interest is Paula Royce,” I began.
He said nothing. So far I was on target.
“She told me once she was from Bolivia, but she wasn’t. She was Colombian. I’ll get back to that later. She’s being tracked by a killer named Horn who doesn’t think she’s dead, but who wants to make sure because she once talked too much about something and she has to be made an example of so that no one else gets the same idea. The reason I think she’s Colombian is it’s the Colombians who are muscling in on the drug racket in Detroit. They’re the only Spanish-speaking people with the background and connections to undertake the job. They bumped a local dealer named Dorchet along with two of his associates because he wouldn’t listen to reason, put Moses True in his place because he would and because of his recognition factor among the customers, then had him bumped too when he outlived his usefulness. Horn again. He’s the peg I’m hanging all this on. You knew about True?”
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