The Sundown Speech

by Loren D. Estleman

  It was a bookstore, and from the smell it dealt in used books mostly. The smell was of fusty paper, desiccated bindings, and petrified library paste; dry rot, to the unromantic. Fetid. The atmosphere of an Egyptian tomb exposed to the sun after three thousand years.

  I supposed; I’d never been closer than a midnight showing of The Mummy. It had its charms. I can read a book and let it go, but I’m not immune. Dead movie stars glowered out from posters and black-and-white stills hanging at Krazy Kat angles on the walls that weren’t entirely covered with books. Somewhere a stereo was playing swing. In Ann Arbor it’s possible to pass between three centuries in fifteen minutes.

  Ancient writings. Archaic music. A place out of time.

  A bookstore.

  The layout was split-level. I climbed a short flight of steps to where a long-haired refugee from Woodstock looked up from behind a desk piled with old paperbacks. He wore a T-shirt with a ferret on it over a raveled sweatshirt. He would smell like the store, couldn’t avoid it.

  “Welcome to Aunt Agatha’s,” he said. “First time?”

  “Yeah. What keeps the walls from collapsing into the basement?”

  He took me literally. “Previous owner had them double-reinforced.” His voice fell to a whisper. “It used to be an adult bookstore.”

  “The hell you say.”

  “Can I help you find anything?”

  I slid a cigarette into my mouth. “I’m looking for a man.”

  “Uh, this isn’t the place for that. Also there’s no smoking.”

  “I’m just gumming it. The man I’m looking for is named Karyl; looks like the third guy from the left in the evolution chart?”

  He paled a shade. I followed his gaze to the back of the store, where the lieutenant was flipping through the pages of something with a woman undressing on the glossy cover. She wore scarlet lipstick and black underwear. There was more of her in various hair colors and varieties of nudity on the walls, blown up to poster size. The artists must have ordered their pink paint by the barrel and applied it with a roller.

  “This is where I like to spend my lunch hour,” Karyl said, slipping the book back into its slot on a shelf. “I love a good mystery.”

  “I thought you professionals made fun of them.”

  “Not me. They help take my mind off work. My wife thinks I’m ruggedly handsome, by the way.”

  “I can see it.” I grinned. “I had to take the last couple nights out on somebody. I figured if I got you mad enough you’d finish me off clean.”

  “That’s not how we work here.”

  “It was a joke, Lieutenant.”

  “You’re a funny guy. Especially behind the wheel.”

  “I bet Blue Ford went straight to the airport.”

  “Both airports; and his name is Barlow. We got him straight off the mayor’s detail in Detroit, and cheap: Enough is enough, you know?”

  “More than enough,” I said. “It’s a great place for someone like me to work.”

  “I can see that. Barlow kind of liked you when you told him where you were going that first time, but I think that’s changed. He practically had to get a warrant to find out that no one answering the Zacharias girl’s description boarded a plane at either Metro or Coleman. Airline people these days are worse than lifers when it comes to prying anything out of them.”

  He opened a door in the back wall.

  “Sign says EMPLOYEES ONLY,” I said.

  “The owners are old friends.”

  A storeroom half the size of the shop had two-by-four shelves all the way to the ceiling, stuffed tight with books, but the inventory had outgrown the space sometime around Appomattox. The place looked as if Paul Bunyan had picked it up and given it a shake. Apart from the necessary aisles for foot traffic there wasn’t a square foot of unused space, and the books piled on the floor leaned against each other like a gang of drunks holding themselves up. We embroidered our way between knee-high stacks, cleared off a pair of folding metal chairs, and sat facing each other. Department regulations would require Karyl shaved daily, but his chin was blue already. If you watch a Slav closely enough you can actually see his whiskers grow.

  “I guess you want to know why I didn’t put out a warrant for your arrest.”

  “It wouldn’t be that you like me despite my quirky sense of humor.”

  “I like your quirky sense of humor better than I like you. You’ve got a rep for clamming up tight as a cell door when the cell doors come out.”

  I looked around the room. “If you thought this would be less intimidating than the county lockup, you’re full of hooey. Just being surrounded by all these perfect solutions brings out all my childhood feelings of inadequacy.”

  “Everything comes in threes in those stories, did you notice? The third key always opens the lock. Only there’s never a lock where we live. When there is one it leads to shit. Put away that fucking cigarette.”

  I poked it back into the pack.

  “Your girlfriend’s father picked her up at Union Station in Chicago last night,” he said.

  “Thanks for the information. One time I was stuck in Niles overnight when the engineer hit a cow. I wouldn’t ask my ex-wife to spend a night in Niles. Why did they ever get rid of cowcatchers?”

  “We think about trains, too; just not right away. I told you I read a lot of mysteries. I know stupid cops and smart cops. A department full of smart cops is too much to hope for, but one full of stupid cops like you find in a lot of these stories would fall apart in a year. Do you have any idea how long the Ann Arbor Police Department has been in existence?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither, but it’s longer than a year. I’ve been on it eight. It’s a college town. On this shift alone, ten officers are studying for the bar; I’m practically a legal aide by osmosis. You realize by smuggling a material witness across state lines you turned a simple case of obstruction into a federal beef?”

  “I hear they feed you good in the Milan pen.”

  “Shut the fuck up. I said I cut you a break by not having you brought here in cuffs. I don’t give those out twice in one day.”

  I reached for my cigarette pack. “I think better when this is in my mouth.”

  “You should never take it out.”

  I slid it into place. “You gave me a break, I’ll give you one back. I was on my way here to do that anyway. Send a couple of plainclothesmen up this street a couple of blocks. You’ll find Marcus in a doorway.”

  He went on looking at me without twitching a muscle. Cops are trained to get answers without asking questions.

  “A doorway,” I went on, “or an alley, or dressed up like a mailbox; someplace he can wait for me to come back to my car without attracting attention. He followed me here. Can I keep him?”

  Nothing; wrong room. I changed the subject. “I laid over in a dump in Ypsi. He picked me up somewhere between there and where I got pulled over.”

  “Why Ypsi?”

  “It was better than jail.”

  “You don’t know the town. Keep talking. I’ll tell you when it starts to make sense.”

  “I wish you would. I’ve seen cartoons in the New Yorker that made more.

  “I was so busy looking out for that damn blue Ford I didn’t notice I was pulling a second shadow,” I said. “I’m a crack detective, Lieutenant; I can find my reading glasses when they’re on the end of my nose. Marcus wants Holly as much as you do. I’m supposed to lead him to her. That’s been my part right along. I’m just that sap you read about in those books you like so much. Without the fall guy they’d be over in a hundred pages.”

  “You must have lost him when you lost my man or Marcus would be in Chicago. How’d he pick you back up?”

  “A lucky shot, maybe; say he staked out the interstate from the airport, looking for my ride. He’s that kind of a fanatic. You can ask him.”

  “I’ve got some other things to ask him first,” Karyl said. “Starting with why he killed his brother.”
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  I took the cigarette out of my mouth, reversed ends. The first was as wet as my armpits.

  “His brother,” I said.

  A muscle twitched then, near a corner of his mouth. Somewhere in East Asia a mountain slid into a village: It all had something to do with a butterfly. I’m not that kind of smart.

  “This isn’t a hobby,” he said. “We’ve been working the case. It gave us something to do while we were waiting for you to swoop in and tie it all up.”

  I struck a match. The whole damn store could burn down for all I cared.

  “Oh, I knew there had to be a brother involved. A twin, in fact.”

  I lit my cigarette while he waited. The smoke cleared my head in direct opposition to my lungs.

  “DNA,” I said. “Stands for Don’t Know Anything. I’m an expert on that.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The overage hippie came into the room, apologizing, glowered at my smoking cigarette, rummaged among the stock, and left carrying a stack of books under each arm with Post-it Notes sticking out from between pages. He kicked the door shut behind him. We said nothing until we were alone. Then Karyl took a cell from an inside pocket.

  He gave orders for two minutes, repeating them for clarity, giving no explanation.

  Just before he hung up—if you could call it that—he said, “What’s waiting for a wash?” Then: “Use it.”

  He tapped the antenna against his teeth. “If Marcus doesn’t show, I will feed you to the feds.”

  “He’s hung around this long just to eliminate the only witness against him. He’ll keep—if those Ypsi cops aren’t still hanging around.”

  “When Ypsi said they were bringing you here, I told them to beat it after. By now there’s an unmarked unit in the Kerrytown parking lot, with a clear view up Fourth. If he sticks out his head, there’s a circus wagon around the corner, out of sight. We’ll have his nuts in a cracker.”

  “I hope you’re not using the blue Ford. I spotted it right away. I don’t remember what I scored on my SATs, but it wasn’t nineteen-fifty.”

  “It’ll be the same make, but a different color. You heard what I said at the end.”

  I nodded. “Cop cars are supposed to sparkle. A little mud is as good as a brown paper bag. Rust would be better; but we can’t have that here, can we?”

  “I’ll catch enough hell just over the mud. How’d you figure Marcus was a twin?”

  “Something I heard once, about genes. But you broke the case; you tell it.”

  “We knew he had a brother building a bridge in Indonesia—he’s an engineer, serving with the Peace Corps—but we didn’t know he was back till yesterday. His mother didn’t know, when we finally reached her in North Dakota. She hasn’t heard from either of them since they left home years ago; something about some guy she started seeing after their father died, and blah-blah. She’s the one who told us they were twins. We didn’t know that either.

  “Identical twins have identical DNA,” he went on. “That’s what you heard, I guess.”

  “What about Forensics? They miss class that day?”

  “They printed the room, of course, and matched some of them to the stiff. Prints, that’s something twins don’t share. What most of these books leave out is just how many different sets a place picks up, from visitors and such, and how many of them are never identified. Neither brother had ever been arrested or served in the military, so the FBI database came up empty. When we get Jerry, we’ll know everything he touched in that room and sort it all out.”

  He stopped tapping his teeth. “Without a twin in the picture, I guess anybody can make a mistake. The dead man looked like Jerry, it was Jerry’s apartment. When the blood samples checked out against the saliva on some unwashed glasses, follicles and skin cells in the bed, urine traces in the toilet, the report practically wrote itself.”

  “What was the brother’s name?”

  His mouth made something resembling a smile. “Tom.”

  I had to laugh. “They had a legitimate beef against their old lady before she took up dating.”

  “Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been Bugs and Daffy. So now we knew it was Tom’s head with a slug through it. After the Bismarck cops spoke to the mother, we checked with the Peace Corps. He finished the bridge and flew home first of August. We figure he came to see Jerry, or Jerry lured him to his place. There he killed Tom and rabbited with the money he got off his investors. He knew about twins and genes. As long as we thought he was the victim, he was free to start up again someplace else with his getaway stake.”

  “‘Getaway stake,’” I said. “You do read detective stories.”

  “Love ’em. Most of the ones I read were written before they cracked the code. He’d planned it a while. It was kind of refreshing, actually. We usually find our murderers sitting in the same room with their victims, waiting for us to come calling.”

  “You still think it was all for money?”

  “Con artists are charming rogues at the cineplex. Most of them are supporting dope habits and worse. They’d as soon kill their pigeons as pluck them. Then they run.”

  “Jerry didn’t.”

  “I said he was smart,” Karyl said. “I didn’t say he wasn’t nuts. He decided what he’d done wasn’t clever enough, traced you and Holly to the Necto, and took a shot at her, which if it hadn’t been for that lug of a bouncer would’ve left no one to place him at the murder scene, carrying a box just like the one we knew he used to suppress the noise of gunfire when he killed Tom. Ballistics got a positive on the slug we took out of the bouncer. It matched the one in the apartment.”

  “How many psychopathic geniuses can one university turn out?”

  “Two’s the limit. After that we get mad.”

  My cigarette had gone out; they’ll do that when you forget to draw on them. I peeled it off my lip and tossed it in a corner. “There’s more to it than fraud.”

  * * *

  “You have been busy,” he said. “Why don’t I just give everyone downtown the day off and let you cap this one off by yourself?”

  I couldn’t help but think he was being sarcastic, so I didn’t answer. “I talked to Alec Moselle yesterday.”

  “Detail I assigned to you reported you holed up in his trailer a half hour. I thought you were trying to duck it.”

  “So you know him.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Some guys never get over those African issues of National Geographic. He’s a pain, but not in the neck of my division. Personally I think we’ve got better things to do than lock people up for flashing their tits and wienies in public. If we stopped, so would he. I got my son to stop cussing like a sailor when he was five years old by ignoring him. Moselle’s number came up on Marcus’ redial. He told us he broke up the partnership when Jerry turned dirty. He turned him down when he put the arm on him for an investment in Mr. Alien Elect.”

  “That’s not why they broke up. Moselle was covering his own ass when he told you that. They met in the U of M film program; Moze cowrote the Alien script. Jerry rewrote the ending to take place in the Michigan Theater.”

  “That doesn’t sound bad enough to dissolve the partnership.”

  “It wasn’t a case of professional differences. He planned to blow up the place for real.”

  “Why’d he want to do that?”

  I jumped a little. I’d never heard Karyl bark before.

  “Jerry’s first student film got panned there when he showed it. You know about the Cinema Slam.”

  “Crowd control’s worst headache, after the art fairs. You buy what Moselle said? He’s more slippery than one of his models covered in Vaseline.”

  “I can’t come up with a reason he’d make it up. He said Jerry showed him a barn filled with bags of fertilizer out in farm country. Fertilizer, Lieutenant.”

  He stood and pecked keys on his phone.

  “Karyl. Pick up Alec Moselle. Start with his studio on Washtenaw, but get out a BOLO at the same time. Yeah,
him. No. Christ. Who gives a shit about that?”

  He banged shut the antenna and looked at me. “How come I’m only hearing about this now?”

  “Slow down,” I said. “That was years ago. When those planes flew into the World Trade Center, Jerry backed off. Moze said he helped him dump the bags in a swamp. After that they broke up and Moselle swapped a conspiracy charge for nuisance citations. But a case could be made for the first for not reporting it at the time. Why would Marcus think he could squeeze money out of him, if he didn’t threaten blackmail? Moze says he hung up on him, but when you bring him in you can ask him yourself if he called his bluff. Fifty grand was cheap compared with what the feds brought against everyone involved in the Oklahoma City bombing.”

  He got back on his cell. “Karyl. Cancel the BOLO. We’ll pay him a social call instead.” He broke the connection. “No sense haring in there Code Three. Artists are sensitive.” He smacked the phone against his palm. “What put you onto him in the first place?”

  “Redial, same thing as you. I know all about these here telephone gizmos.”

  His phone rang. The tone was the Peter Gunn score.

  He listened, said, “Stay put. He might show yet.”

  “Moze?” I asked, when he was through talking.

  “Marcus. There was no sign of a van answering your description. Those officers from Ypsilanti must have spooked him finally.”

  “Either that, or he figured out where Holly wound up.”

  “Let’s hope. Chicago P.D. has more cops around her father’s place than the mayor, all in plainclothes. I don’t mind sharing the credit. As a matter of—”

  Peter Gunn thundered again. I knew I’d be hearing it the rest of the day.

  I could hear the tinny voice on the other end. I recognized Alec Moselle’s address on Washtenaw.

  “… shots fired.”

  I hit the street just behind Karyl. He looked up the north end of the street, brought one arm around in a long loop. Headlights came on. A late-model gray Ford crusted with old mud spun away from the curb and stopped alongside us in ten seconds. The lieutenant sprinted around to the passenger’s side and got in. No one said I couldn’t, so I swung open the back door and climbed in behind the driver.