Black and White Ball

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Take a deep breath, then take another. I joke so I don’t have to.”

  She inhaled, exhaled. Again.

  He studied her. “Air tastes sweet, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t want it to taste sweet. I want it to taste like air.”

  The world these people lived in wasn’t hers. If she’d had any second thoughts about divorce, she didn’t have them now. Every mile she put between herself and Macklin and Walker and all their sort was a mile to the good.

  The detective twisted onto his own hip, and she saw he was holding a handgun, a revolver with a rubber grip and a short barrel. It seemed a cap pistol compared to most of the ones that floated around Peter’s world, heavy weapons with huge muzzles, although the overall shape was similar to the kind Peter armed himself with, when he armed himself; squat things built of separate components that could be broken down and put back together swiftly, like Legos. Peter was a different man once he’d ridden himself of one. The man she’d married.

  “Was it a gunshot?” she said. “I know that sounds stupid. I keep hoping it was a juvenile delinquent with a rock.”

  “Me, too. Where’s a juvie when you need one? It was a rifle, if I’m right about the distance; we’ll go into that later if you want. Not fired from the gazebo, not in broad daylight. There are some commercial buildings on the other side of the park, with flat roofs and no guards to keep people from using them. Why should there be, in Milford? Just one shot and then he’d be gone before anyone got around to tracing it to the source.”

  She shook herself loose of the image. “I thought you said I’d be okay until Roger heard back from Peter. Do you think he has?”

  “Macklin would’ve let us know; otherwise why hire me?”

  “A warning?”

  “Maybe; but not for you. Macklin said Roger was his lookout, not mine. That’s changed.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “What do I do now?” she asked.

  Walker said, “What do honest people do? Call nine-one-one. Just say someone broke your window. Don’t give them any more information over the phone except your name and address.”

  She was dialing when they heard a siren.

  He took away the receiver and cradled it. “I forgot. This isn’t Detroit. The neighbors here report this kind of thing. It’s better to leave it to them while you see to that cut. That’s what honest people do. Can you manage it?”

  “The cut? Oh, please.”

  “The whole thing.”

  “You talked to Deborah Stonesmith. What do you think?”

  “That’s what I meant. You were cool with her because you had to be. Here, cool’s bad. Your window exploded and a piece of glass cut you. You’ve got the jitters.”

  “I do, actually.”

  “Good. Turn them loose for the cops.” He went toward the door.

  “You won’t be here?”

  “I never was. You don’t want to explain why you were entertaining a plastic badge when someone busted your window.”

  “What do I say?”

  “You were heading for the kitchen and, crash!”

  “What if they ask if I’m married?”

  “You’re single, Miss Ziegler. Don’t volunteer anything. They may ask if you live alone, no more, and maybe not even that. Every day someone somewhere is shot at, and most of the time it’s at random. Not so often in places like Milford, but it happens. All you’re leaving out is a domestic mess that’s nobody else’s business and that you’re being protected by a hired hand. You don’t know why what happened happened. You don’t, you know. You don’t even know what broke your window. Remember that. If you say it was a shot, they’ll want to know how you know. Even I didn’t hear the report, and I’m supposed to notice such things.”

  “Can’t I just tell them I found the bullet in the wall?”

  Which they had. He’d paced a straight line to the wall opposite and found the blemish in the plaster.

  “You’re a civilian. You’re too dumb to think about looking for such things. Doesn’t matter that anyone who’s ever watched television knows how cops work. They like to think they’re exclusive.”

  “Okay.” The siren was getting closer.

  “I’ll come back when the coast is clear. Remember, tell them everything about the window, except without me, and you don’t know anything about a shot.”

  He left. She’d just finished cleaning and disinfecting the nick behind her ear and sticking on a Band-Aid when the siren wound down in front of the building.

  The officer who did most of the talking, pudgy, with a brush moustache and a spray of dandruff on his epaulets, took her identification and recorded the information in a notebook, the dime-store kind with a spiral at the top. His partner said little and did less. He was younger than she was. She’d been told that would happen someday.

  The older man was less perfunctory than the police in Detroit; he seemed genuinely concerned that a local citizen had been put in danger. He asked to see her injury and she turned her head and pushed her hair away from the Band-aid.

  “Are you sure you don’t need stitches?”

  She shook her head. “I was brought up in the country. I know how to deal with scrapes and bruises.”

  She answered all his questions in the same tone, the lies as well as the truth:

  No, sir, I have no enemies that I know of.

  Yes, I live alone.

  I’ve lived here almost six weeks.

  No special reason, except I got tired of Southfield. I told you, I’m a country girl.

  He asked more questions while the partner roamed the living room, being careful to avoid stepping on broken glass.

  “Gordy.”

  He was standing by the wall opposite the window. His partner joined him, peered at the hole, raised a hand and bored a finger inside. Turned back her way.

  “What do you think happened, Miss Ziegler?”

  She hadn’t told him she was married. As Walker had predicted, he hadn’t asked about that.

  “Someone threw something through my window,” she said. “A rock, I suppose. I haven’t looked for it. I didn’t think I should tamper with the—with the evidence, I guess you’d call it.”

  “It wasn’t a rock. This is a bullet.”

  She could feign curiosity better than surprise.

  “Are you sure?”

  “It didn’t sink deep. Must have been almost spent when it came through the glass. We’ll have someone dig it out. He’ll try not to do too much damage than has been done already. If they give you any trouble about your security deposit, refer ’em to the department.”

  He flipped his book shut. “I wouldn’t worry too much about this. It’s deer season. Someone fired too close to town, either with a high-powered rifle, which is illegal in this part of the state, or a muzzle-loader, which isn’t; but not pointed this direction. It was probably an accident, but it’s the kind we take seriously. We’ll find the idiot. He won’t be handling a firearm again any time soon. Odds are way on your side it won’t happen again.”

  He pointed his notebook at the window. “I’d get in touch with the landlord and have that window boarded up right away. The weather’s not going to stay this mild very long. I can feel a change coming on.”

  “Arthritis?” She put sympathy in her tone.

  “No, ma’am. Michigan.”

  * * *

  “They’ll be back,” Walker said.

  The man the realty office had sent to repair the window had come and gone. She’d swept up the shattered glass and he’d spent less than five minutes nailing a square of plywood over the frame. He said a glazier would be in Monday to finish the job. Now she and Walker were sitting in the living room drinking gin. He looked piratical with a rectangle of pink plastic pasted under his left eye.

  “You sound like you’re talking about hostile Indians.” She’d changed back into her warm quilted robe and stuck her feet in her favorite slippers. Her heart had slowed to normal, replaced with the kind of cont
entment that settles in after the shock of an accident has worn off and you’re okay; although part of it might have been the alcohol buzz. It was like drinking hot buttered rum in the lodge after a day on the slopes.

  “Indians wear warpaint. You never know when a cop’s gunning for you till he drops the hammer.”

  She’d turned the TV on for company while he was gone. It was muted now; the Weather Channel was tracking a blizzard through the Ohio Valley that threatened to dump six to eight inches on metropolitan Detroit in the next twenty-four hours. The purple blotch kept creeping in jerky stop-motion from left to right, reversing itself, then repeating the motion. It had been a late Indian summer at that, and none of the residents the locals spoke to were as excited about the shift as the on-air talent. There was nothing like a killer storm to sweep a stand-up reporter into an anchor job.

  “I checked out the park,” Walker said. “The frost was gone, so I couldn’t tell if anyone had walked through it or been in the gazebo. I still think he was shooting from an elevated position, most likely a roof; that bullet’s too low on the wall to have been fired at an upward angle. Let the locals find which roof. They’ve got the personnel and it’s what they’re paid for. They’ll bring in some techs from the state lab in Lansing with their calipers and measuring tape and whiz-bang three-D cameras, and when they’re finished they’ll know less than you and I do about who fired the shot.”

  “You knocked me down before it happened. Did you see something?”

  “Maybe. It’s hard to remember the order of things when they go that fast, but I don’t think I saw movement. I’m not Spider-Man; it just seemed time for something to happen. You get a feeling for it, something building up. If I knew anything about the stock market I’d be dressing better.”

  “I understand the building-up part. I can’t stand this waiting. How do you?”

  “Patience comes with practice. Someday I hope to have it. As it is I hate this part a little more every time.”

  “What else can we do?”

  “You? Nothing. Me?” He grinned into his glass. She’d seen more of his teeth in one day than she’d seen of Peter’s since the day they’d met. She never knew when either of them was actually enjoying himself. “That stuff you told the cops,” Walker said, “Heidi can’t wait to get shut of the big bad city; was it just for the yokels?”

  “Partly. Mostly I couldn’t wait to leave the farm. You spend all your time worrying about the weather. Even when it’s good, you wonder how long it’ll last, and if you’ll have new clothes the first day of school. When you don’t, the kids who live in town swoop down on you like crows. Then there’s the choice of who you’ll get to spend the rest of your life with. My mother made a strong case for the boy who stood to inherit six hundred acres of soy beans. He found someone after I married Peter, a girl I grew up with. I’m expecting this year’s form Christmas letter any time. Last year they were still living with his parents. One thing people in the country rarely do is die young.”

  “I’m guessing you’re missing the bright lights.”

  “The lights, anyway. Most people here turn them off around eleven.” She set down my glass and leaned forward. “On short acquaintance, Mr. Walker, I don’t think you’re any better at small talk than my husband is. This isn’t a first date. Why the sudden interest in what I like and what I don’t?”

  “Oh, I can talk the arms off an octopus when I need to.”

  “Are we discussing flying the coop?”

  He glanced toward the TV screen, where a young woman in a stocking cap and all-weather coat too heavy for fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit stood with her back to the Edsel Ford Freeway, shouting into a microphone over the roar of cars whipping past ten miles above the speed limit. When he turned back her way, his grin was broad, drawing a crease across the Band-Aid on his cheek.

  “You’re still thinking rural, Daisy Mae. I’m thinking more along the lines of a shell game, with a little help from Jack Frost.”

  ME

  TWENTY-TWO

  Dr. Chuck answered my call. My car was back where I’d left it, and the cops had gone home; my home, probably. I took another cab to Detroit and came back in my heap. After checking on Laurie I retired to my room to rest up for what Mother Nature might bring. The battery-operated radio I’d brought contained a weather band, and I tuned to it to track the storm. The NOAA announcer could barely keep awake: Cold fronts, dew points, and chill factors were a job to him, not a stepping-stone to the glamour game of network television. For once the forecasters seemed to have nailed it, as wind and snow scraped their way across the Midwestern states like a cake knife, icing lakes, laminating roads, and heaping snow up against fences, barns, and stuck cars.

  It was all music to me—if we didn’t end up stuck in a snowbank with a killer on our heels.

  Outside my little snuggery, the lit streets were still bare, but the wind had begun to whistle and whump up against the west wall, making the old house sway. Carpenters knew how to build them then, like poplars that gave a little before the blast and went back to vertical after it left, while stubborn oaks broke like pencils. That was before they found out that replacing roofs and siding paid more in dividends after the digging-out.

  I save Dickens for nights like that. When the sun’s bright and the grass is green he’s just depressing; but in high weather Bleak House wraps you in steamer robes with a coal fire blazing in the iron hearth, and oil lamps smell as good as roasting meat. I stretched out on top of the sleeping bag with my head propped against my frayed overnighter and cracked open the cover. The snarled case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, spanning generations of litigants, attorneys, and magistrates, and page after thick, cream-colored page of handset type, kept me busy looking up words in the dictionary I’d brought. But most of them had been crowded out of the last edition by “heart-healthy,” “politically correct,” and “ginormous.” I flung the dictionary at the wall where the storm was hitting, set aside Mr. Tulkinghorn, Lady Dedlock, William Guppy, and the rest and lit a cigarette, blowing insolent smoke at the disabled detector hanging from its wires like a giant glaring eyeball.

  I thought about the fifth of Old Smuggler I’d brought, nestled on its two-by-four crosspiece; decided against it. If Roger Macklin made up his mind to launch another assault, he’d do it before heavy blowing snow got in the way of his aim, and I needed those reflexes that age and a fairly battered life had left me. I got up, popped the top off a can of tuna packed in water, and ate it with the spoon attached to my Boy Scout knife, washing it down with evaporated milk; I felt like a cat. Fish is brain food. If that wasn’t advantage enough, I’d breathe in the enemy’s face.

  There’s something about being holed up, bracing for a gale, that sharpens the senses and makes the gray cells stand on end, like tire-shredders. I put them to work on what made Laurie Macklin tick. I didn’t buy into the old wheeze that today’s youngsters were cosseted against the ugliness of the world and unprepared to deal with it. People come in all flavors regardless of the time and circumstances of their birth. Still, she didn’t fit any sort of mold. Either she’d done a lot of growing up in the short time she’d been with her husband—anyone would, if she survived at all—or that pioneer strain you still sometimes found in children bred in the country had tempered her like the head of a good hammer. A lot of women, and just as many men, would have come apart just like her window when a bullet passed through it, but after the shock had worn off, it was as if a tree branch had broken loose and taken out the pane. A natural disaster, and not so big a one at that; nothing that couldn’t be fixed in minutes with a Band-Aid and a piece of plywood.

  Me, I was still spooked. But then I’d lived long enough to know everything always looks worse in the morning.

  * * *

  It came, when it came, with a brass band.

  The wind screamed like fabric ripping, blowing snow in towering billows that turned second stories into ground floors and built patio tables into nine-tiered wedding cakes. It played j
ump rope with the electric lines, whipping them and twisting the wooden poles until they snapped. When it was over and the copters were cleared to fly, half the state was as dark as North Korea.

  We always blame Canada for these monsters, but she’s not in the same weight class as the Rockies, the Badlands, and the plains states; or for that matter little Milford, which by morning would be a tabletop village in a Christmas window display, heaped to its steeples with drifts thick as fresh-poured mortar. But by then we were long gone.

  I was chasing Frosty the Snowman through an Arctic storm, waving his hat, when the first wave of snow smacked the side of the house, waking me. The luminous dial on my watch said the sun was up, but the sky lay on the ground like a fat lady with a broken ankle. She was hurling fistfuls of ice at the window to get my attention.

  I flicked up the wall switch. The ceiling fixture didn’t think much of that because it didn’t respond. I’d packed what I’d needed before going to sleep, so I groped in the dark for my overnighter and the foul weather gear.

  Laurie was up when I knocked, but just barely. She came to the door barefoot in blue flannel pajamas, no makeup, her hair matted on one side and sticking up on the other. That made her as homely as one of Degas’ ballerinas.

  “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,” I said. “Pack what you need while I warm up the buggy.”

  “Power’s out.” She sounded muzzy.

  I fished the pencil flashlight out of my coat pocket and gave it to her. “Just grab what you’ll need for a couple of days. We can pick up anything else. It goes on the expense account.”

  “I’d rather pay for it myself. Letting Peter dress me would be like—”

  “Going backward. Lady, I don’t care. Snap it up. When it blows like this there’s no telling when it will blow past.”

  “Can you drive in this?”

  “No one can drive in this. That’s why we waited for it.”

  “That doesn’t—”