“Why the hell are you here?” He didn’t shout. He didn’t keep his voice low either. The other two people weren’t there for him.
“Chipped a tooth opening a beer can. Meldrum says I’ve got a case against Stroh’s. Or maybe it’s a case of Stroh’s. My Latin’s rusty.”
“Stay out of my murder.”
“Okay if I investigate Curtis Smallwood’s?”
“That what you’re investigating?”
“You want to see the tooth? I wrapped it in evidence tape.”
“Where’s that gun I told you to bring around?”
I reached under my suitcoat and took it out of its holster. He gripped my hand when I offered him the butt. My fingers pressed fresh holes in the cylinder. “Not here, goddamn it. Bring it to the City-County Building.” He looked around, appearing to notice for the first time we weren’t alone.
Meldrum cleared out some phlegm. “My office is down on your left, Sheriff.”
“Captain.”
The lawyer sliced his way down the middle of the hall and turned through a door near the end. Judy had drifted away on a zephyr.
Hichens watched me put away the .38. “I had someone call the TV station. The Letter started at noon. The first gunshot on film took place two minutes and forty-two seconds into the broadcast. That checks with the hostess, who said West called just before twelve, asking you to meet him in his room; provided the killer turned on the set and timed his shots to coincide with the shots on the soundtrack. That’s consistent with time of death as estimated by the coroner. In thirty years I’ve never had a more precise estimate.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“Life isn’t Legos. I get nervous when all the pieces fit. Shooter could’ve done it as much as twenty minutes earlier, called downstairs pretending to be Garnet, then switched channels on the TV so we’d think he used the movie to cover the noise. Almost any other program could be cranked up loud enough to do the trick.”
“I’m still covered. I got there a half-hour early. Ask my waiter. He’s a light heavyweight named Joseph Sills.”
“I talked to him. He said you were interested in someone else who ate in the restaurant, same time as you. Morgenstern was the name. First name Jeremiah.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“He said he told you he heard someone address the man as Mr. Morgenstern.”
“I didn’t know Jeremiah was his first name. Did you talk to him?”
“I talked to a woman who said she was his companion; a redhead I wouldn’t mind spending quality time with myself. She said he was in a meeting. She also said someone else had been asking about him. He even left his name and number.”
“Guilty,” I said. “If there’s a law against it.”
“There is when it gets in the way of an official investigation. What made him so interesting?”
“Mr. Morgenstern is the kind of person who calls attention to himself.”
“Think he called attention to himself for a reason?”
“I didn’t at the time. Maybe, if everything happened twenty minutes earlier. He was in a meeting when I called. If it was the same one, I hope for his sake he got a lot of work done. Who is he?”
“Venture capitalist, the redhead said. I don’t know what that is, but whatever he does he does out of an office in Manhattan. His flight got in at eleven-twenty; plenty of time to do West and meet his party outside the restaurant for lunch. We’re tracking down the party now. Of course, that would mean he slipped the gun through security at LaGuardia.”
“Guy got a barbecue grill through the Seattle airport last week.”
“This killer hedges his bet too much to count on that kind of break,” Hichens said. “Seems to me you said something on the same order yesterday.”
“What about prints?”
“We’re still running ’em. Come next Christmas we should have a record of everyone who touched anything in that room over the past six weeks. FBI database matched West’s with Delwayne Garnet’s, by the way. A vacancy just opened up on the Ten Most Wanted list.”
“Think I’ve got a chance?”
He wasn’t listening. “We retrieved your prints from Lansing this morning. Not one set matched from that room.”
“I said I didn’t touch anything.”
“That’s what you said.”
I blew air. “I took the job Garnet offered. When a client gets killed, I get curious.”
“For free?”
“I’m working on that.”
He gouged a hole in the air with his finger. “You’re still my favorite. You could have shot him after you conned your way into his room. If I stumble over you again, I’ll book you as a material. Chances are I will anyway, but why fuck with chance? Stay out of my murder.”
He left me there and let himself into Meldrum’s office without knocking. Fifteen minutes later he came into the reception room alone. He stopped when he saw me. He had on the same black-on-black suit he’d worn the day before or one just like it. He looked like an exclamation point. “Why are you still here?”
I put down my magazine and held out my wrists.
He told me where to put them and went out the main entrance. The pneumatic closer prevented the door from slamming.
Something purred on the receptionist’s desk. Judy lifted a receiver, listened, and cradled it without a word. “Mr. Walker, Mr. Meldrum would like to see you in his office.”
I got up. I lingered in front of the desk. “Do you date white guys?”
She sat back, showing the long line of her torso, and tapped a gold pencil against her teeth. They were nice teeth, small and even and sharp. “I don’t date poor guys.”
I tilted my head toward the inner sanctum. “I’ve got a rich client.”
“I date the client.”
I knew my luck couldn’t hold. I went down the hall.
FIFTEEN
On a nice day in June it was a brisk walk from Meldrum and Zinzser to Walker and Nobody on West Grand. On an airless day like we were having, under a smut-colored sky screwed down to the rooftops, it was like crawling uphill through a dirty air duct. I stopped at my bank for a hit of conditioned air and to deposit Lawrence Meldrum’s check, then resumed crawling. Back in the penthouse I hung my coat on a chair in front of the office fan, bathed from the waist up in the water closet sink, put on a fresh shirt from the supply I keep in the safe, and called the Airport Marriott. The telephone rang seven times in Morgenstern’s room before the operator came back on to tell me no one was answering. I drew a question mark next to the Venture Capitalist’s name on the desk pad. He was my obsession of the week. He tickled my throat like the first sign of a bad cold.
At the second number I tried, a computer-generated voice gave me a pager code. I dialed that, followed the instructions provided by another machine, and hung up to wait. It was getting to be possible to spend all day on the telephone and never hook up with the owner of a respiratory system.
The bell rang while I was going over my notes, the most I’d ever made on a case before I landed it.
“Where you been keeping yourself, super sleuth? I was beginning to think you’d tapped into a wealthy divorcee.” Barry Stackpole’s voice was a fresh breeze in my ear.
“Wealthy divorcees don’t trade down; you know that. When’d you go on an electronic tether? I thought you took a vow.”
“It’s a loaner. I’m working a deal, and I’ve got competition.”
“What’s the deal?”
“Host of a reality-based crime series on CBS. Five grand a week to stand in front of a camera for twenty minutes.”
Barry was an investigative journalist, currently and frequently without a journal; but never for long. He was a walking database on every lefthand operation that had taken place in Detroit since Chief Pontiac. The Pulitzer committee had tagged him twice and the mob once, with six sticks of dynamite and an artificial leg.
“I need about twelve hundred dollars’ worth of your time,” I said.<
br />
“Try me tomorrow. They’re also taking meetings with a former attorney general and one of the guys from Baywatch.”
“There were guys on Baywatch?”
“I have to keep the line open.”
“Tomorrow’s no good,” I said. “I’ve got competition too. Its name is Captain Hichens.”
“Wayne County Hichens? That’s serious competition. He cracked the stewardess killing at the airport.”
“I thought Forensics cracked that one.”
“For the jury. Hichens collared the suspect a week after it went down. The guy walked for insufficient evidence. Modern science took eleven years to catch up with Hichens’ hunch. After the arrest, the department reopened fourteen old cases and got eight indictments based on DNA testing, all against suspects who’d been interviewed and released. Hichens was investigating officer in all but one. That’s how he made captain.”
“He ought to be sheriff.”
“Sheriffs are politicians. If you’ve met him, you may have guessed he’s cuffed more hands than he’s shaken.”
“What makes him your hobby?”
“He threw me out of his office when I asked him how Frankie Acardo managed to board a nonstop flight to Phoenix the day he was subpoenaed to testify to a grand jury. I keep track of all my friends and enemies.” He slurped something, probably a Coke. He was on the wagon since throwing a chair through a control booth window at WXYZ and thought bottled water was for French bicycle racers. “This have anything to do with the Marriott shooting?” he asked.
“Not if it’s what it takes to get you that CBS gig.”
“I’m ahead on favors, Maigret. Throw me a bone.”
“Call you right after I call the cops.”
“When the cops get it, so does everyone else. Call me before.”
“I’ll put you on speed dial.”
“You mean I’m not already? What’s the question?”
“Jeremiah Morgenstern.”
“That’s an answer, not a question. The question is, ‘Who put the M back in Mafia?’ ”
I’d known there was something familiar about that tickle in my throat. “How come I never heard of him? I thought I knew all the players.”
“That’s because you’re weak in German. Morgenstern in English is Morningstar.”
“Oh, hell. I took Spanish. Ben Morningstar’s kid?”
“Grandkid. Jerry made his bones when everyone else his age was marching on Washington. He went to New York to beat the heat, opened up a branch of the family business, and muscled in on the concession racket in the Broadway theaters. Short hop from there to costumes and set decoration, but all that was strictly for something to declare on his ten-forty. Jerry’s a throwback. The mob spent fifty years trying to go legit, and all it bought them was congressional hearings up the yazoo and racketeering laws they couldn’t kill or bribe their way around. He’s spent the last twenty getting back to basics: labor, numbers, drugs, smuggling. He’s got the corner on every carton of bootleg cigarettes that finds its way into high tax states like Michigan. I bet you’re smoking one now.”
I wasn’t, but I got out the pack I was working on and looked at it. “Mine’s got a stamp.”
“That’s the idea. When Lansing adopted it, it took all the profits away from the independents and put them back in the pockets of the boys who can afford the counterfeit presses. Give the seal a rub.”
I scrubbed it with the ball of my thumb. “It didn’t come off.”
“The state’s does. The printing contract went to the lowest bidder, just like it says in the charter. The Sicilians have more class. Those aren’t cubic zirconiums winking on their pinkies.”
“Morgenstern’s Jewish. Or Morningstar was.”
“Someone has to keep the books. Vegas and Havana were hemorrhaging greenbacks until Grandpa Ben got hold of the accounts.”
“Sounds like an anti-Semitic slur.”
“The mob never learned to spell ACLU. What makes the New York franchise your hobby?”
“He’s in town. Morgenstern is.”
“Detroit?”
“Metro. He’s staying at the Marriott.”
“He’s not your boy. He’s no Grandpa Ben but he’s got too many smarts to stay under the same roof with one of his hits.”
“Could be he’s counting on the cops thinking the same thing.”
“Uh-uh. You can’t work the Statue of Liberty play with cops. They’re too literal-minded. Anyway, he hasn’t handled his own wet work for years. It’s more his style to brown his toes at Far Rockaway and let his buttons munch on the pretzel sticks in Economy Class.”
“Well, he’s at the airport and so’s a stiff. How come Hichens didn’t know him?”
“County only gets a connected case when a chiseler shows up cold in a trunk in Long Term Parking. Then they kick it over to Lansing or the Federal Bureau of Incompetency. Even so, I bet Hichens knows who he is by now. The captain’s the kind of cop who has his shield tattooed onto his chest in case he has to bust someone for picking pockets in the YMCA shower.”
I rolled my eyes at the ceiling and saw something there. “Morgenstern’s traveling with a redhead, a fox. Anything on her?”
“Nope. He married a Polish princess, black hair and breeder’s hips. The redhead would be this year’s travel model. You going to seduce her, make her spill her guilty secrets?”
“Yeah, I’m Jack Kennedy. Thanks, Barry. You saved me a morning with Playboy’s Illustrated History of Organized Crime.”
“That piece of—”
I never found out what it was a piece of, because I fumbled the receiver into the cradle without taking my eyes off the bowl fixture that hung from the ceiling—original to the building, not a hip nod to Lawrence Meldrum’s theory of postmodern regression. A new shadow had joined the collection of flies and ladybird beetles mummified on the other side of the milky glass. I wouldn’t have noticed it except it seemed to be suspended between the glass and the bulb, defying gravity. It might have been dangling from a strand of cobweb.
Well, the fixture was past due for cleaning. The crew that had the contract never worked higher than the doorknobs, and I had a swanky front to keep up. I planted the customer’s chair in place of the wheeled swivel, climbed onto it, and unscrewed the bowl.
It didn’t look like what it was, just a tiny cylinder no larger than a .22 short casing sealed in black plastic, perforated on the free end. Whoever installed it had connected it to the existing wiring. That made me mad. I don’t mind being eavesdropped on so much as paying for it on my monthly bill.
SIXTEEN
I left the bug where it was, reinstalled the bowl, and went downstairs to talk to the superintendent. Rosecranz was older than sixty and younger than a hundred, and had evaded Cossacks and an NKVD hit squad in order to come to America, if he hadn’t gotten all his stories out of the adventure pulps he used to teach himself English. I hoped he hadn’t, because without them he was just a worn pair of overalls sitting in a little room filled with old-man fug and dusty shawls on every surface. He told me no one but the building cleaning crew was allowed inside the offices in the tenants’ absence. Under cross-examination, he admitted doors were left open for indefinite periods while the workers went out to empty wastebaskets and borrow supplies from one another, and that the turnover in personnel provided a constant stream of unfamiliar faces. An unauthorized stranger wouldn’t have had to train too hard to penetrate the inner sanctum.
“Something is missing?” he asked.
“No, something is added.”
He thought about that. Then he blew his nose rattlingly into a blue bandanna handkerchief and shook his head. “I will never learn this language.”
I told him I was struggling with it myself and asked to use his telephone for a long-distance call.
“How long?”
“Toronto. Take three or four minutes.”
He demanded two dollars. I gave them to him and he pushed a black steel rotary with a ballerina w
aist across the desk. The mouthpiece smelled of boiled parsnips. I was pretty sure no electronic listening device could stand up to them, even if my office wasn’t the only target. I made arrangements with the party on the wire, hung up, and left the old man to his tattered copy of Soldier of Fortune.
I drove to the City-County Building, unloaded the .38 Chief’s Special, gave it to the guard by the metal detector to look over along with my permit, got them back, and traded the revolver to a distracted-looking clerk down the hall for a receipt. I asked if Captain Hichens was on the premises. He directed me to another clerk, just as distracted, who kept me waiting while he prowled a computer screen with a mouse, then picked up a telephone and asked. He told me Hichens had returned to the airport after checking in with the sheriff that morning.
I went to Records and signed out the public documents on the deaths of Stuart Pearman and Karl Anthony Mason, the anti-war activists who had paid the ultimate price for the cause when their explosive device detonated prematurely.
There was quite a bit that hadn’t made it into the papers, but very little I could use. Both men were unmarried. Pearman was an orphan, without siblings or known associates apart from Mason and Delwayne Garnet. He’d left school in Ypsilanti at sixteen, and there was no one from his class who could say anything about him except that he kept to himself and didn’t participate in sports or other extracurricular activities; not the warning signs in 1968 they would become in light of more recent criminal history. His foster parents were elderly, and aside from filing a missing persons report when he ran away from home—about the same time he’d dropped out—hadn’t made any effort to establish contact with him for years, ditto him with them. His grades went up and down, apparently according to his level of motivation. He seemed bright enough when they were up, particularly in reading and social studies. Garnet had said he was the idea man in their little revolutionary society. Mason’s story was as different as it gets: popular in high school and his freshman year at the University of Michigan, letter man in basketball and track, proficient in the sciences, chief among them chemistry, which had earned him a scholarship, forfeited when he left after two semesters. You can’t ace the midterm and make bombs at the same time. Parents divorced when he was five; father deceased, mother remarried.
Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro Page 9