Dying Embers

by Robert E. Bailey

  “We searched your office after the Talon murder,” said Shephart. “We didn’t find any shit like that.”

  “Maybe I just expanded my business.”

  “That kind of shit’s a hardwiring problem. It doesn’t come on suddenlike.”

  I opened the door and held it for Shephart. “A vote of confidence,” I said. “Maybe I should call you as a character witness.”

  “Do me a favor and don’t mention my name.”

  “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

  “Coffee first,” he said. “Then tell me about this break-in. You keep business cards here?”

  We stepped into the reception area. One of Marg’s clients was talking to the answering machine and bailing out.

  “Cream? Sugar?”

  “Hot and black,” he said.

  I filled a couple of mugs from the rack and set them on my desk, which was—for the first time in recent memory—neat and organized. A big desk blotter covered the inscription. Shephart took my pistol out of his hip pocket and set it in the middle of the blotter.

  “Next time, wag your own pistol in,” he said. “You ain’t quick enough to shade me.” He picked up his cup and sat in the wing-back chair under the monitor I’d replaced the night before.

  I picked up the pistol, put my hand over the ejection port, racked the slide to the rear, and locked it in place. Shephart froze mid-sip. A fat .45 caliber-two-hundred-grain-semi-jacketed-hollow-point bullet pressed itself into my left palm and I stood it on end in front of me. “They broke in night before last. About the only thing they didn’t rifle was my business cards.”

  Shephart made a hard swallow and lowered his coffee. I punched the magazine out and laid it on the desk with the pistol.

  “Jesus!” said Shephart. “I forgot that you carried one in the spout.” He rocked to his left. I figured he must have been carrying his service piece on his right hip. His face got a little paler. After a sip of coffee he was sitting straight again. “Just what did they get into?”

  “Everything. They trashed the place. Stole one file—still has me guessing.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s a copier in the investigators’ room. All they had to do was make a copy and I’d never have known what was taken.”

  “So what’d they take?”

  “Privileged,” I said, “We’ve already been around that corner.” I opened my top right-hand drawer and extracted a squeeze can of gun oil.

  Shephard produced a clear plastic evidence bag from the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket and flopped it onto my desk. In the bag was one of my business cards, encrusted with a rust-brown blood stain.

  “There’s a million of those things circulating,” I said. “I pass them out like beads at a Mardi Gras Parade.”

  “Woman found dead by a payphone on the river walk at two o’clock this A.M.,” said Shephart. “The handset was hanging by the cord and she had this in her hand.”

  My telephone rang.

  “You want to get that?” Shephart asked.

  “Machine will get it,” I said and held the Detonics upside down to oil the rails and the bulbous end of the barrel. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “I thought you might explain what’s written on the back,” said Shephart. He flipped the bag over and showed me Scott Lambert’s telephone number. “The number’s a private line into some outfit called Light and Energy Applications.”

  I looked up. Shephart was working me with those fluoroscopic eyes cops have. I said, “Five foot one or two, thin, mid-forties, brown hair bobbed off about ear level?”

  Shephart set his coffee down and hauled a pad and pen out of the side pocket of his coat. “Yeah.”

  “Oh, my God.” I let the pistol and oil can clunk onto the desktop.

  “Who was it? There was no purse or ID.”

  “I gave that card to Anne Jones.”

  Shephart wrote it down. “Who’s Anne Jones?”

  “Anne Frampton,” I said. On the fourth or fifth ring the tape machine picked up. Nate Saxon, the owner of the biggest contract adjusting firm in the state—six offices and eighty adjusters—gave me the kiss-off.

  “The artist?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She know this Anne Jones?” asked Shephart.

  “Anne Frampton is Anne Jones.”

  “Jesus,” said Shephart. He rolled his eyes up and collapsed back into the wing-back chair with his pen and pad in his lap. “You sure?”

  “Got a picture?” The description didn’t match the harridan Anne lived with, but maybe she had some other playmates.

  Shephart groped a picture out of the side pocket of his jacket and sailed it, spinning face down, onto my desk blotter.

  Not that I wished anyone else dead: I just made a silent “please-God” prayer and turned over the color Polaroid head shot taken at the morgue. It was Anne—lips blue and eyes vacant.

  “What a waste,” I said. “It’s Anne. She has a brother. I can give you his address and phone number. He’ll know how to contact their mother.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  “Somebody stabbed her once, downward, behind the clavicle with a blade long enough to sever her aorta. She was dead when she hit the ground.” Shephart worked me with the cop eyes some more. “Tell me about Light and Energy Applications,” he said, like it was an afterthought.

  “One thrust?”

  Shephart looked up from his pad and demonstrated a downward thrust using his pen clenched in his fist as a prop. “Downward from the right, two inches from the neck, some kind of straight-bladed dirk. We can’t get a casting because the doer rocked the blade side to side.” He rowed the pen to demonstrate.

  “Anne sure as hell wasn’t a hooker,” I said. “Were there any other lacerations?”

  “No, but it was in the slasher’s neighborhood. Even the Son of Sam worked on his marksmanship.”

  “This wasn’t a psycho. A psycho likes to cut. He gets off on the screams, the terror, and the spray of blood. One thrust wouldn’t do it for him. If he’d been interrupted, you’d have two bodies this morning instead of one. This wasn’t your guy. This was an assassination.”

  “Maybe,” said Shephart. “Chief says it’s a Task Force case.”

  “He doesn’t know who this is.”

  “My case,” said Shephart, his eyes hot.

  “Get real. This ain’t your guy.”

  “I ask the questions. You tell me what you fucking know.”

  “Okay,” I said and studied him. Under the ashen face lurked the remnants of fire. I’d known him for years, not always pleasantly. If a breath, a word, could burn off the cocoon of alcohol, I judged it unlikely we’d end up with a butterfly—more likely a moth that hung out in your closet and ate your sweaters.

  “That’s the stolen file,” I told him. And then I told him the rest—including the parts about Lambert, about the lake shore, and how Lambert wanted the address but I wouldn’t give it to him. I told him about the Andys, the trip to Brandonport, the guy with the broken neck, and how Dixon maybe did or didn’t eat his gun. He wrote it all down, but the part he liked best was when I got to the ginger ale can with the cigar butt in it.

  “See Van Huis over at Kentwood,” I said.

  Shephart snapped his pad shut, swilled his coffee, and bolted out of his chair. He left a “stay available” hanging in the air somewhere between Marg’s desk and the front door.

  I picked up the telephone, someone was on the line.

  “Hello, hello,” he said, “I didn’t hear it ring.”

  It wasn’t a familiar voice. He could have been one of Marg’s client’s. Maybe he needed time to rethink what he was going to say. I punched the button twice and got a dial tone.

  I dialed up Light and Energy. Lambert had stepped out. Did I want to speak to Dunphy?

  “This is Art Hardin,” I said. “Please have Mr. Lambert call me.”

  She said that she had to h
ave a subject to write down—that Mr. Lambert generally didn’t answer open calls.

  “You tell Scotty that if I don’t hear from him right-most-rikki-tick I will definitely call back and tell whoever answers the phone exactly what this is about.”

  I let the handset slide back on the cradle. The telephone started ringing. I opened my drawer and put the gun oil away. By the time the Detonics was loaded and on my hip the answering machine picked up.

  It was the fellow I had hung up on. Said he was the producer of the evening news and did I want to make a comment.

  “How about this,” I told the empty room. “You now head the short list of people who’d better pray I never get diagnosed with anything terminal.”

  I picked up the telephone. “This is Art Hardin. My lawyer will be contacting you. Why don’t you just chat him up for a while?” I banged the phone back down.

  “That was brilliant, Art,” I said. “Now the bastard knows where you are.” I picked up the handset and parked it in the middle of my desk blotter.

  I stood up to go to the investigators’ room and my pistol slid out of the waistband of my sweats and down the leg. I caught it before it hit the floor and laid it on the desk pointed at the telephone.

  The Prestige Motors file—along with the rest of the files—was back where it belonged. I looked up Tracy’s telephone number and went back to my desk. The handset was making a “neep, neep, neep,” sound.

  “Gonna be hard for Lambert to call you that way,” I said and put the handset back in the cradle. I sat and drummed my fingers on the desktop while I stared at the telephone.

  “Better call Tracy while you still have some short term memory,” I said and dialed her up. I got an answering machine and instructions to leave a message after the tone.

  “This is Art Hardin. You gotta quit smashing my windshield. I’ll give you the first one because you were pissed, but last night is definitely it. Quit.” I started to hang up but put the phone back to my face, “And fix your hydraulic lines. You’re leaking green slop all over my parking lot.”

  I banged down the telephone, and it started ringing. I let the machine get it. Lambert. He was sorry about the misunderstanding with Dunphy … he’d talked to Wendy … good job … just send the bill … no problem … he needed me to recover the computer discs when the cops were done with them. I picked up the telephone.

  “Why don’t you have Andy pick them up?”

  “Art?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who’s Andy?”

  “At least two people,” I said. “Maybe I haven’t met them all yet.”

  “Art, you’re losing me.”

  “I only took this job because I thought I could protect her. Why didn’t you just leave her the hell alone?”

  “Anne?”

  “Joan of Arc!”

  “Dunphy gave me your message. I went to meet Anne but it was a little strange. Maybe she’ll cool off in a couple of days.”

  “She’s dead,” I told him. “She’s laying on a slab in the morgue. That’s as cool as they get.”

  I hung up, but that didn’t seem to do it for me, so I banged the receiver onto the cradle four or five times, hard enough to ring the bell.

  Still no joy.

  I ripped the phone out of the wall and threw it into the wastebasket.

  14

  THE IDEA OF A HEART-TO-HEART conversation with Hank Dunphy suddenly held considerable charm. The errand got off to a slow start. I stashed a couple of spare magazines in my pockets and after some scouting and deliberation I settled on concealing my pistol in a Mickey-D’s burger bag rescued from Marg’s trash can.

  A white Chevy Suburban wallowed in the shade at the back of the parking lot. The front end sported a flat black push-bar covering the grill and, painted on the side, a gold leaf “Cable News” sign, which left you wondering if they were collecting news or installing cable. When I pulled my car over to the dumpster a man in a “Cable News” ball cap and blue coveralls stepped out of the truck with a video camera. I never should have talked to the news director on the telephone.

  Once I had the corner of my windshield loose—I had to kick it from the inside—the rest of it peeled out of the tracks like a big stick of gum. I tossed it in the dumpster and chased it with the chunk of concrete. What’s newsworthy about that I don’t know, but the man with the camera kept grinding away.

  The crap Shephart had scattered around went back in the glove box, and I brushed the glass off the seat with the snowbrush the boys gave me for Christmas. My bag of McPistol went under the armrest. When I was younger, I always had a convertible. No windshield is a lot windier than no top.

  The Suburban showed up in my mirror at the stop sign at Forty-fourth Street. I signaled a right turn. So did he.

  Twenty years ago Forty-fourth Street had been the back road to the airport. Now it’s a commercial strip that sprawls from the airport in the east to Jenison in the west. The traffic is usually crazy, but at lunch time it’s psychotic.

  “Never do anything in traffic that requires someone else to have brakes.” Good advice when my father gave it to me, but advice I ignored to rocket through eastbound traffic into a slim opening, turning left into westbound traffic. The woman driving the car in my rearview mirror flashed me a well-deserved bird.

  I got my eyes forward just in time for a panic stop. The traffic light was red at Kalamazoo. I stole another glance in the mirror. The cameraman had jumped out of the Suburban and run up to the corner to eyeball me until his partner could get the van up to the corner. I cut through the parking lots to turn north. At Thirty-sixth I cut back east—no more white Suburban, but a red Dodge sedan made the turn with me.

  Just to be fastidious I turned north again at Breton and the Dodge came with me but laid way back. I slowed, but the Dodge wouldn’t close up, so I went east at Twenty-eighth. At the Beltline I went north again; so did the Dodge.

  The Beltline is a boulevard that skirts the eastern side of the Grand Rapids metropolitan area. It moves pretty good until about three o’clock when the commuters tie it up as they head for the northern suburbs. I burned a couple of yellow lights. The Dodge burned the reds to stay with me.

  I took the left lane and honked on it as we approached Michigan Avenue. The Dodge had to come out or give me up. I watched the mirror. The Dodge pulled out and cranked on, and I veered into the left turn lane. The car in front of me didn’t take the yellow arrow. I stopped and the Dodge was first in line behind me. The driver ducked his head like he was digging for a station on the radio but I made him anyway: Fidel/Andy.

  I put my hand into the burger bag and dog-eyed him in the mirror. He kept his face tipped down. He was losing hair at the crown of his head. “That ain’t no halo, Andy, ole buddy,” I told him in the mirror.

  They had worked hard to gaslight me, but a suicide at a stoplight would be hard to sell. He had to be an idiot not to know he was toasted. On the outside chance that he was still chilly I decided not to get out and screw my gun into his nose.

  We got the green arrow and turned onto westbound Michigan Avenue. After we cleared the light, Fidel junior lagged behind until he had a couple of cover cars. As we went east, Michigan Avenue opened up from a quiet residential into a four-lane commercial strip.

  Downtown Grand Rapids is located in the Grand River valley. Eastbound traffic gets a postcard-scenic view of Grand Rapids as Michigan Avenue rockets down a long steep hill into the legal and financial hub of the city.

  At the top of the hill, across from the hospital, I pulled into a carwash. The Dodge took a parking meter on the downgrade, a half block past the carwash—just before some orange safety cones blocked the curb lane for a road crew laying fresh asphalt.

  The attendant had a spray-wash wand in his hand. He was in his late teens wearing a rock groupie T-shirt, frayed cut-off jeans, and yellow rubber boots with black soles.

  He told me, “You ain’t got no windshield, man. We can’t wash a car what ain’t got no windshi
eld.”

  “You wash cars here?”

  “Well, yeah but …”

  “Wash this one!”

  “We can’t be responsible for damage to your car, man. There’s a big sign over there.” He pointed to a large black and white block-lettered sign with a wide red border.

  I said, “I’m pretty sure that my antenna and rearview mirrors are safe.” I pushed the shift lever up to park, stepped out, and telescoped the antenna into the fender.

  “I got to ask the manager, man.” He shook his head.

  “Good idea,” I said. “Go get him.”

  “You got to pull it outta line.”

  I opened the door and took the burger bag off the seat. “Park it anywhere you want,” I told him. “I got to use the rest room.”

  “Hey! What are you doing?” asked the attendant. He spread his arms. “Where are you going? You got to move this car.” The lady in the car behind started on her horn.

  “I’ll be right back, pard. I got an urgent call of nature. The keys are in it.” I gave him a nod, stepped through the back door of the carwash, and walked along the line of sudsers, waxers, and blow-dryers to the front door.

  Fidel/Andy, already out of the Dodge, eased cautiously up the sidewalk toward the carwash. He wore black shorts, a blue floral Aloha shirt, and black felony flyers—high-top tennies with a red ball logo on the ankle. He had spent some time as a brushbeater. Hauling a heavy combat pack had given him legs so muscular that wearing trousers had rubbed the hair from the back of his calves. His shins were a mass of scars from the knee down.

  He stopped, hauled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and turned toward the car-wiping crew like he was turning his back to the wind. He took his time lighting up and stared at the cars and men over the top of his lighter. Finally he exhaled a cloud of smoke and strolled toward the back of the carwash.

  When he passed, I went out the front door. Traffic on the street by the rear entrance to the carwash was backing up and punctuated with a lot of horns and squealing tires.

  Fidel/Andy’s Dodge wasn’t locked. I climbed into the passenger seat. The automatic shoulder belt hummed down the track above the door and strapped me diagonally across the chest. In the glove box I found a cellphone. The “low battery” light was on. I pushed redial.