Dying Embers

by Robert E. Bailey

“Bag something for me, will ya—pick something nice.” He turned back to me and said, “Stay here.”

  Van Huis walked over to the door of my office and reached through. Whatever he was given he held behind his back while he returned to where I stood. “I haven’t said anything, Mr. Hardin,” he said, and the “Mr. Hardin” came off with a lot of venom, “because of your reputation for lockjaw. I need you to listen carefully. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney—”

  I said. “You think I broke into my own office? Are you nuts?”

  “I don’t want to get caught with my procedures on hold.”

  I folded my hands. I deserved that one.

  “Now,” he said, “this belong to you?” He held a clear plastic evidence bag in front of my face with a magazine inside. The color picture on the cover was of two prepubescent boys engaged in blatant sexual activity.

  “Oh, my God,” I said. I backed up and turned my head. “It sure as hell does not!”

  Marg came down the stairs with the patrol sergeant a step or two behind her, her face as white as her blouse.

  Van Huis pushed the package back in front of my face. “Take another look, Hardin,” he said. “Make real goddam sure.”

  I snatched the bag out of his hand and threw it past him back onto the floor. He grabbed my wrist and I pushed my face up to his. Nose to nose I said, “Goddamit, Jerry, you know me better than that!”

  Van Huis is taller than I am. He pushed his forehead down on mine. “And maybe I just thought I knew you,” he said, his eyes narrow, and what I could see of his face, red.

  “Detective!” said the patrol sergeant, making it sound like an admonition.

  Van Huis backed up a step and looked past me. “What?”

  “A word,” said the patrol sergeant.

  Van Huis produced his handcuffs and snapped a cuff around my right wrist. He left the other dangling and stuck a pointed finger in my face. “Hold that thought,” he said.

  Marg stepped up and threw her arms around me. I hugged back. In the fifteen years I had known her, this was the second hug. The first was at Pete’s funeral.

  Van Huis and the sergeant walked down to the end of the hall and opened the fire door to the stairwell. Van Huis held the door ajar and, now and again, passed me a furtive glance while he and the sergeant conferred in low tones.

  “Who would have done this?” asked Marg. Her voice quaked. “He said they’re sending a copy of the report to the licensing agency in Lansing. I told him I’d never seen that trash. He said that if I testified against you I might not be charged.”

  I patted her on the back. “Sounds like you’re home free.”

  Marg backed up, and gave my shoulders a shake. “That’s not funny, Art. I told the son-of-a-bitch to snap the cuffs on.”

  “Potty mouth, Marg!” I said. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you resort to the Anglo-Saxon.”

  “This is the first time that I’ve ever been accused of peddling depravity!”

  “Since you’re not under arrest, maybe you should go home. I’ll call you when I get this cleaned up.”

  “My clients’ books and files are all over the floor,” said Marg. “I can’t leave it to you. Whoever did this spread that filth all over your office. They put it in the storage closet and in your desk.”

  “Lucky for me, Van Huis and Oates will bag it all up and take it away.”

  “They drilled the locks on the file cabinets in the investigators’ room,” said Marg. “The files are ankle deep on the floor.” The sergeant walked by in long strides, without a word or a nod.

  “Do you use a cleaning service?” asked Van Huis as he stopped beside us.

  I held up my right wrist. “You need to take this off or hook up the other wrist,” I said.

  He made a face and jangled a ring of keys out of his pants pocket. “How about it?” he asked as he unlocked the cuff.

  “Jerry, you had to remind me that you were a police officer doing your job. And I apologize for being a jerk.”

  Van Huis smiled.

  “A big jerk. I’m sorry,” I said. “But now I need to remind you that you accused me of a disgusting felony and read me my rights.”

  “Let’s start over.”

  “Interesting technique,” I said, “but I can’t think of any case law that says the phrase, ‘let’s start over,’ negates the fact that you read me my rights.”

  Van Huis closed his eyes and shook his head while he made a noisy inhale. When he opened his eyes he said, “Look, the sergeant is going to page your investigator and have her meet him at the station for an interview, but she works for you. If you have a cleaning service and they’ve never seen any of this crap, then that goes good for you.”

  “Detective,” I said, “the only thing that’s ‘going good’ for me is you actually brought in a technician and have a chance of catching the people who did this. Now, I can call my attorney from my telephone, or I can go across the hall. You can go with me if you think I’m going to crawl out the window.”

  “Wait a minute, Art,” said Van Huis. “First, just look through your office and tell me if anything is missing.”

  I threw my hands up. “Sure,” I said.

  We stepped around the clutter and up to the door of my office. The picture tube of my surveillance monitor had been hammered out with the base of one of my shooting trophies and the trophy left inserted into the void. The rest of my trophies had been reduced to a pile of rubble.

  “Patty,” said Van Huis, “maybe you got a spare pair of gloves?”

  “Who for?” she asked.

  “Me,” Van Huis said.

  We stepped into my office and Patty produced a pair of latex gloves from her print kit. The top of my desk had been swiped vacant, the usual clutter now a pile on the floor at the end of the desk. “PERVERT” had been carved into the desk top.

  “You take a picture of the art work?” I asked.

  “Why?” asked Oates as Van Huis snapped his gloves on. “Seems appropriate!”

  “Because a couple of nights ago someone trashed one of my investigator’s cars and scribed the words “Die Bitch” into her windshield. The handwriting looks the same to me.”

  “We don’t have the windshield,” said Van Huis.

  “Ask Lorna when she gets to the station. She probably took pictures for her insurance company.”

  “Dust some of the magazines in the desk,” said Van Huis to Oates.

  “I really need to do that in the lab,” said Oates.

  “Humor me,” said Van Huis, “You know, maybe just the covers.”

  Oates made a face. “Fine.”

  I stuck my hands in my pockets and walked over to the storage closet. The door stood open, the doorjamb split. Shards of wood lay on the floor.

  “They took it all,” I said.

  “Your library’s in there,” said Oates as she laid out magazines on the top of my desk.

  “What’s missing?” asked Van Huis.

  “Four FM radios along with the batteries and chargers, are gone. A half-dozen kevlar vests are gone. A couple of video rigs, blank tapes, and a tripod.”

  “There were video tapes?” asked Van Huis, already writing in his notebook.

  Marg walked up to the office door. “Are you done out here?”

  “Done out there,” said Oates as she ran white dust over the magazines with a small feather brush.

  “Can Marg clean up out there?” I asked.

  “You get pictures?” asked Van Huis.

  “Not out there,” said Oates. She blew the dust off a magazine, made a face, and then moved to the next.

  “Better wait,” said Van Huis.

  “I got a camera in my purse,” said Marg.

  “Jesus Christ!” said Oates. “Will you get these people out of here until I’m done?”

  “A quick walk-through and we’re out of here,” said Van Huis.

  “This guy’s mouthpiece is going to beat me to death with
this walk through,” said Oates with her hands on her hip. “There are no fingerprints on the covers of these magazines.”

  Van Huis turned his face to mine. I gave him arched eyebrows. “Anything else missing?” he asked.

  “I kept a big gym bag in the closet,” I said. “They probably used it to carry the stuff out.”

  Marg started taking flash pictures in the front office. Oates rolled her eyes and bent over to dig in her kit.

  “Any firearms?” asked Van Huis.

  “No,” I said. “I kept a cleaning kit and a box of ammo in my desk.”

  “Not here,” said Oates. She hustled by us with a camera in her hand and went out into the reception area.

  “So you’re telling me that someone broke in here to plant this crap in your office,” said Van Huis.

  “Sounds like a good question to ask my attorney,” I said. “Let’s go have a look at the investigators’ room.”

  A dozen file cabinets lined one wall of the investigators’ room. The long wooden table the street investigators used as a desk had been turned over and the legs broken off. We had to step over file drawers to get into the middle of the room. Scattered files covered the floor. On the top of one cabinet a ginger ale can stood—displayed as if enshrined.

  “I guess they were here for a while,” said Van Huis.

  “Had to be looking for a particular file,” I said. “This is way too much work for vandalism. They could have just poured paint or ink in the files.”

  “Why would they have to open all the files?”

  “The file titles are encrypted,” I said. “You can’t just look up something alphabetically.”

  “Isn’t there a list or key?” asked Van Huis.

  “In my head. Marg also knows, but the investigators have to ask for files.”

  “So this took hours.”

  “Yes, even if there were several of them,” I said and pointed at the soft drink can. “Looks like somebody got thirsty.”

  “These guys raid the refrigerator all the time.”

  “That one is a Michigan deposit can,” I said. “I don’t have that brand. I bought all my sodas in Indiana, remember? You bitched about bootleg sodas. They brought that can with them.”

  Van Huis’s face lit up. He picked it up with his gloved hand and wagged it gently to see if it was empty. Something rattled about inside the can. He turned the can toward the light and looked inside.

  “Cigar butt,” he said.

  “This is a crime scene,” Oates growled from the reception office. “You need to back out of here and take that cameraman with you.”

  Van Huis and I hustled for the front office but we had to pick our way through the clutter.

  “Delia Dumas, Live News at Five,” said the voice in a smoky alto. “We have information that Ladin Detective Agency is being investigated for the distribution of child pornography.” She pushed the microphone up to Oates’s face. “Can you verify that information?”

  “Out!” said Oates.

  Van Huis and I shambled over the litter into the reception office. Marg had turned away from the camera. Delia Dumas wore an inflated blond bouffant that didn’t match her eyebrows and made her head look too big for her body. Over a white silk blouse she wore a blue blazer with a Channel 9 logo on the pocket. The cameraman stood behind her—very tall—running footage over the top of her head.

  Oates put one hand on Delia’s shoulder and the other hand on the lens of the camera and pushed them backwards.

  “Don’t touch the camera,” said Delia, the syrup drained from her voice.

  “Out!” said Van Huis. “This is a police investigation!”

  Oates pushed the news crew back into the hall and pulled the door shut. Dumas and her cohort set up in the common area. The piece aired as a Five-O’clock Investigative Report and as a lead feature on the Eleven-O’clock News Final. The newsies cut in file footage of me handcuffed and being lead into the Grand Rapids Turnkey after the Talon murder—I was released. They had a shot of Oates carrying a cardboard box out to Van Huis’s van. The carton was diffused into a blurry dot. Dumas reported that the Kentwood Police would not comment and attributed her information to “informed sources.”

  Wendy filled me in on the details. I called to tell her that we weren’t quite done with the clean-up and I planned to rack it on the sofa in the office. She didn’t seem to mind that I wasn’t going to make it home. The woman’s a rock.

  13

  A GALE FORCE SHIT-STORM sounds exactly like a ringing telephone. I’d rolled off the sofa and fired up the coffee pot when I heard the first crack of thunder. Jeanne Peabody, the new claims supervisor at Pacific Casualty, sounded surprised to hear my voice. She said that Pacific Casualty would no longer be using contract investigative agencies.

  “Jeanne,” I said, “the story on the news was misguided and misinformed. I’ll probably have to sue.”

  “I don’t watch the news,” she said, her voice chilly enough to freeze the tuxedo off a penguin. She hung up.

  I folded my blanket and walked it out to my car. I found my windshield in sprinkles again. A chunk of broken concrete lounged in the passenger seat. The green dribbles on the asphalt autographed the mischief.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” I said, disgusted but not particularly loud. A woman walking in the parking lot turned her head away and scurried through the gathering maze of cars to claim sanctuary at the entrance to the building. I dropped my blanket in the trunk and slammed the lid.

  Brisk footsteps approached from behind. I raised both hands over my head and said, “Don’t shoot, I’m only the piano player.”

  A familiar voice asked, “Where were you around two this morning?”

  “Good morning to you, too, Shep,” I said and turned around.

  Detective Shephart, late of the major cases crew in Grand Rapids and, by news accounts, currently the Commander of the Metropolitan Task Force charged with solving a spate of hooker mutilation murders, approached, his face as pale and chisled as an insription on a tombstone. Tall but thin and old at forty, his eyes had aged more translucent than blue. All the hair had skidded off the top of his head, while the remainder formed a laurel of gray-brown stubble above his ears and trailing down the nape of his neck. The dry cleaner had issued a fugitive warrant for his blue permanent-wrinkle suit. He’d buttoned his sweat stained collar and had cinched up his rumpled tie.

  “Art, I need to know where you were.” His breath smelled of a “blast of mint-freshness” but could not overpower the eau d’bar towel that lingered around him like a shroud.

  “Right here,” I said. “Slept on the sofa.”

  “Who with?”

  “Nobody. It’s a narrow sofa.” I walked around to unlock the passenger door of my car.

  “Did you see anyone? Talk to anyone? What time?”

  I pulled the door open and glass nodules showered onto the blacktop. “Don’t you want to ask me what happened here?”

  “Somebody smashed your windshield,” he said. He shrugged. “Like I give a shit.”

  “My sidearm is in the glove box,” I said. I unlocked the glove box and stepped back. Reaching for a pistol just now would have been unwise, but with the windshield gone I couldn’t leave it in the car. “I thought you might want to reach in there and get it yourself—save patting me down.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Back the fuck up.”

  When I got back around the taillights he reached in and hauled out my Detonics. He smelled the barrel and then looked it over. He smiled. “You had my initials blued over.”

  “Yeah. You were so intent on making a trophy when you arrested me, I couldn’t see your work going to waste. Now, it’s sort of my trophy. What do you think?”

  “Screw you,” he said and scattered the contents of the glove box onto the seat to join the chunk of concrete and glass shards.

  “No spare magazine in there,” I said. “I picked up a couple and a box of ammo yesterday. They’re in my desk.”

  “Ho
w about a knife or letter opener?”

  “Nope. Once I shoot ’em I don’t feel any need to read their mail.”

  “You’re a funny guy, Art,” said Shephart, deadpan. “But I know you used to carry a pocket knife.”

  “They still rag you about that down at the Turnkey?”

  “Where’s the knife?”

  “In the pants pocket of my suit,” I said.

  “Is that what you put in the trunk?”

  “You want to read me my rights? Take me downtown?”

  “No,” he said, “I’d rather have some answers.” He stuffed my pistol into his hip pocket.

  I dangled my key ring by the trunk key and held it out to Shephart. He stepped up, snapped them out of my hand and opened the trunk, weaving a little when he bent to look inside. He caught himself with a hand on the spare tire. Just a guess—he was in need of a shot of carburetor cleaner to get his motor running.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  He took a breath. “Fine,” he said. He picked up the blanket, shook it, and then cast it aside to stir the rest of the rummage in my trunk. “Why do you have a blanket in your trunk?”

  “Same reason I have a shovel, tire chains, and a bag of kitty litter,” I said. “This is Michigan.”

  Shephart shut the trunk. “So, who saw you here last night?”

  “Marg and Lorna.”

  “Who’s Lorna?”

  “A snout.”

  “They gonna be in this morning?” asked Shephart.

  “We cleaned and straightened up the office until three-thirty or so. I don’t expect them too early.”

  “You were all together until three-thirty in the morning?”

  “That’s correct, officer,” I said. “C’mon in. I’ll get you their phone numbers. I put some coffee on—ought to be ready by now.”

  Shephart’s shoulders went round. “Coffee,” he said. “Coffee’d be great.”

  We left the car and started up the steps. “Heard about your promotion,” I said. “It was on the news.”

  “It’s a Buddhist barbecue,” he said. “Nobody with a career would touch it. Lucky for you I don’t believe everything I see on the news.”

  “You think maybe I cut up hookers, but I draw the line at perverted books?”