by Angel Eyes
“To get you off my back. I’ve seen enough to know you don’t stop rooting around until you’ve uncovered something. This way maybe you won’t do so much damage.”
“That stinks.”
He shrugged and watched the buildings go by.
“How’d you get the gun away from DeLancey?” I sucked hard on the coffin nail, but it still tasted like the cotton that dentists stuff into the mouths of helpless patients.
“He gave it to me.”
I said, “I guess I’m trying to come up with a clever way to get you to tell me the whole story.”
“Krim took the derringer away from the Judge when he tried to threaten him out of his blackmail scheme.” He continued to gaze out the window. “DeLancey—you’ll excuse me if I don’t call him Father—wasn’t so good at killing when he was face to face with his intended victim. The Arab held onto it because an unregistered firearm can be a useful item. He had it with him the night he followed Bingo Jefferson to my mother’s apartment, and used it to kill him when he figured the bodyguard had too much education. Mother had a gun, too, but Krim had another, a thirty-two automatic, and it didn’t take long to disarm her.
“DeLancey was staying in an apartment in Troy, where he’d moved from the house he’d been living in under another name out West since his disappearance. There were rumors that the IRS was about to nose into Griffin Carbide’s affairs, wondering why the business was still making investments five years after it filed for bankruptcy; he came back to juggle all the company’s holdings into several other dummy firms he’d set up at the same time, just in case. He thought if he tangled things further, not even the computers would be able to sort them out. Krim stashed Mother with him, along with a reminder that if she got away, everything would be out in the open. DeLancey agreed. He had assistants, of course, though none of them knew their employer’s real name. By now they’re halfway to Peru. They cut and run the minute Krim bellied up dead. Let me know if I’m lapping you.”
“So far I’m still in the race.” I glanced at Montana on the other side of me. He was staring at the pile carpeting between the front and back seats.
“Krim thought he had them both buffaloed,” he continued, pausing only to fire up a cigarette for himself with the aid of a throwaway butane lighter. “He even boasted of killing Jefferson, knowing that neither DeLancey nor my mother could go to the law, as he couldn’t risk exposing himself and she was wanted in connection with the murder. He wasn’t even suspicious the next day when the Judge came to see him at The Crescent, supposedly to meet his latest blackmail demand. He was contemptuous enough to turn his back while he opened the cash box to salt away the money. He didn’t know his visitor was carrying a claw hammer, the ideal murder weapon if the police were to believe it was the work of a strung-out hophead looking for a score. He probably didn’t even feel it crush his skull.
“That ended that threat, but DeLancey didn’t count on the murder hitting the headlines so heavily, or on his flunkies panicking and clearing out, letting my mother escape. The Judge wasn’t anyone’s fool, though. He knew there was only one person in the city she felt she could trust not to betray her, and looked me up. She wasn’t at my place an hour before he crashed in waving that silly derringer.”
The limousine cruised through DelRay, a populous community of workers once known as Boneville, when the Michigan Carbon Works started taking in tons of buffalo bones in 1881, following the great slaughter out West. The air in the car began to stink despite the sealed windows. We were passing Zug Island, that 325-acre toilet occupied by Great Lakes Steel and Allied Chemical, spiny with smokestacks belching great columns of toxic waste into the air daily. On the opposite side of the car, farther away, an eerie surrealistic glow reddened the bellies of low-hanging clouds and the sluggish surface of the River Rouge, a garish reminder that Ford continues to make cars while the rest of the world shakes itself apart. It was a weird sight, like St. Elmo’s fire illuminating a ship at sea.
The smell was overpowering, and not all of it was coming from the plants.
I put out my cigarette in the recessed ashtray behind the front seat. “So how come you’re here to tell me all this? And how’d you find out what went before?”
“My mother told me. Some of it she got from DeLancey and she figured out the rest. As to why I’m not lying somewhere with a hole in me, you’ll see when we get there.”
I looked at him, at his profile sliding in and out of focus as we passed between street lights. The orange tip of his cigarette flew to his lips, brightened, then faded again as he lowered it and returned his attention to the street. He was drawing inward again. I wondered if that had anything to do with the growing nearness of his parents. His parents. The phrase seemed mundane for the situation.
“Where’d you get the name Clendenan?”
“It’s my middle name. It belonged to my great-grandmother. I was born Bill Whiting. I dropped it in a fit of shame for my mother’s lifestyle. I’ve gotten over being ashamed, but it’s too late to change back.”
“Where’s she been the past year?”
“Who knows? I suspect out West, tracing my father. When he came back so did she. I don’t know why. She raised me, she loves me, but she’s never confided in me.”
“She seems to have told you plenty about what’s happened lately.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
The house was one of the fine old French homes located beyond the naval base on Grosse Ile, trimmed delicately with gingerbread and flanked on both sides by private sculptured gardens, miniatures of the grounds at Versailles, bathed in soft white light from hooded outdoor lamps set at ground level and complete with trees planted in bullet-straight rows and trimmed into upright cylinders. This would have been what Cadillac had in mind when he stepped ashore not six hundred yards away and said, “Here I shall build a city.”
Of course, he wouldn’t have counted on the man standing in the open doorway with a gun in his hand.
25
SILHOUETTED AGAINST THE YELLOW oblong of lighted doorway, he was a man of medium height, trimly built, and wearing a light-colored shirt tucked into the tops of tight-fitting pants. His features were in shadow, but the large, nickel-plated revolver in his hand gleamed brightly in the glow of the garden lamps. He had caught us just as we were climbing out of the car. No one moved. Cars swished by on Jefferson, but they might as well have been a hundred miles off.
“Reach for the sky, sidewinders!”
His tone was an exaggerated guttural, rough as cactus. We complied, the two bodyguards leading the way. No one has more respect for firearms than a man who carries one regularly.
At that moment the porch light came on above his head. He stood blinking in its unexpected glare. His breath rode the frosty air in vapor. He had dark hair, thinning in front. His features were dominated by deep-set eyes and a wide mouth and the light shone off his medium tan. But something had gone wrong with his face.
The left side sagged as if gravity had gotten its hooks into his mouth and eyelids and was tugging downward with all its might. The arm on that side hung limply, and the way he leaned against the door jamb said that his left leg was just as useless. He’d dragged himself across the room. His hair and skin said he was forty, but his ravaged body was at least twenty years older. I might not have recognized him but for that, so completely had the dye job and face-lift altered the appearance of the man whose photographs I had studied earlier. He’d lost weight as well. He fit Maggie’s description of the last man to rent the house near Huron.
Judge Arthur DeLancey was dressed in a white cowboy shirt with an ornate black yoke embroidered in gold. His Levi’s were brand new, held up by a broad leather belt with a big square silver buckle, and hung stiff over square leather cowboy boots with two-inch heels, intricately tooled. The whole outfit was new, including the gun belt he was wearing, slung low and strapped down like in the movies, and the gun in his hand. Its mate was in the other holster near his dead arm.
I shifted my stare from one firearm to the other. There was something…
“Come inside, Arthur.” The voice, coming from behind the man in the doorway, was feminine, conciliatory, familiar. “It’s too late to go out and play.”
Too late to go out and play. Again I studied the object he was holding and the one he wasn’t.
“Those aren’t—”
Things got noisy then. A hoarse roar was followed by a crack as something sped past me too fast to see and struck DeLancey with a ripe thump. He dropped his gun, placed his good hand over his right eye in a clumsy salute, sobbed, and slid down the jamb, something dark staining his face. A high-pitched scream shredded the air. That’s the part of it I still hear from time to time, the scream.
I turned around. Phil Montana was standing with one foot still inside the limousine, both arms stretched in front of him and with something smoking between his hands. His eyes were wide.
“You son of a bitch!” Clendenan, standing beside him and slightly in front, backhanded his boss, who sprawled against the side of the car, lost his balance, and went down hard on one knee in the driveway. The revolver he had been holding struck the asphalt, skidded under the Cadillac, bounded off a tire, and came to rest against my left foot. All eyes were on Montana. I ducked swiftly and came up holding the gun behind my leg.
“That was a toy gun DeLancey had!” shrilled the secretary.
“God, my God!” The union chief lowered himself to a sitting position on the pavement. He ran shaking fingers through his stiff gray hair. “My God, I didn’t know!”
Clendenan spun on the nearest of the two bodyguards, the one wearing glasses. “Why the hell didn’t you frisk him before we left the office?”
The bodyguard looked hurt. “You didn’t tell me to.”
“Do I have to tell you everything, schmuck?”
I was watching Montana. “Where’d you get the piece?”
“I’ve carried one for twenty years, not counting the time in stir and my parole. Ever since some nut took a shot at me during a union rally. I used to have a permit. My God!” He was staring at the ground now, and rubbing his hands between his thighs. He looked like a big kid playing in a mud puddle.
More sobs were coming from the doorway. A woman was kneeling next to DeLancey’s twitching body, cradling his shattered head in her lap and rocking back and forth. Janet Whiting. Ann Maringer. Something about the spasms running through the man’s limbs said his problems were about over. It had taken five years for the plane crash to catch up with him. The bodyguards had their guns out now and had the woman covered, waiting for instructions from Clendenan.
“Find that gun,” he told the towhead, jerking his chin in the direction of the Cadillac.
Tim grumbled something about just having gotten his suit back from the cleaners, holstered his .45, and got down on his hands and knees to peer under the car. I moved back a step.
“He had a stroke.” Clendenan was watching the tableau in the doorway. “Not five minutes after he burst in looking for Mother. He collapsed, and when he finally came to, it was obvious that his brain was affected. Sometimes he’s lucid. The rest of the time he’s like a ten-year-old. I’ve been putting off calling a doctor. It would be all over the papers and TV if I did.”
I recognized the symptoms of shock and let him ramble on.
“We found a key to his apartment in one of his pockets, along with a paper with the Troy address written on it. That’s where the outfit he’s wearing came from. It had never been worn. Maybe he bought it as a joke, or to go with his new collection. I suppose you know that the old West was one of his hobbies. Dressing him that way calmed him down.”
“It isn’t under there.” Tim climbed to his feet and dusted off the knees of his trousers.
“Look on the other side,” said the secretary.
While he was watching the bodyguard circle the car I slipped the revolver into the side pocket of my jacket and left it there with my hand around it. It felt like a .38. It was like coming home.
Tim came back. “It isn’t there either.”
Clendenan said, “Keep looking. It’s got to be somewhere.”
“I’m telling you it isn’t.”
Three pairs of eyes—the secretary’s and those of the two bodyguards—turned toward me. The one with glasses brought around his gun, a twin of his partner’s .45. I showed him mine.
“Now that we’ve all got one, let’s put them away and be friends,” I suggested.
The bodyguard hesitated a beat, then glanced at his superior. The towhead was frozen in mid-step with his hands spread at his side. The air got still.
“This isn’t necessary,” Clendenan pointed out. “You aren’t in any danger.”
“Not anymore.”
The bodyguard and the secretary exchanged fresh glances. They had communication down to a science. The automatic went into its holster. When the hand that had been holding it came back out empty I pocketed the .38 and stepped up onto the small front porch.
The woman was still cuddling the dying man and rocking, though the sobbing had stopped. She had on a cheap thin cotton dress and nothing underneath. The pattern was spoiled by a spreading stain—a greasy black in the harsh overhead light—beneath the Judge’s head. It was leaking from the place where his right eye had been. His breath came in short gulps. His lungs and heart hadn’t heard he was dead.
I pulled a brown woolen blanket from a chair on the porch and draped it over her shoulders. She didn’t acknowledge my presence. She looked old in that light, and drawn. Only her eyes remained bright and new. Lake Superior wasn’t that blue on the clearest of days. Tears silvered her cheeks.
I went back and asked Clendenan for his pack of Kools. On my way back to the house I lit two, bent down and slid one between her lips. She accepted it without moving. But the glowing tip brightened and I knew she was smoking it.
“You’re pretending deeper shock than you’re in,” I said gently. “I did a job for a shrink once. He told me about people with emotional problems. Mainly about how they like to exaggerate them.”
“What do you know about it?”
She spoke emptily and sniffled, rather sloppily. I gave her my handkerchief. “What I don’t know about the brain would fill Joe Louis Arena. Why don’t we go inside and talk?”
“I don’t want to leave him.” She used the handkerchief to mop up the blood around his empty eye socket.
“It won’t make any difference.”
She jumped as if I’d slapped her. Oh, but I was a callous bastard. That was something else I had learned from the shrink, not to humor them when it was obvious they were faking. I hoped he was right. Just in case he wasn’t I hedged my bet.
“Carry him inside,” I told the bodyguards. To her: “Is there a couch or something we can lay him on?”
“Yes. Yes, there is. In the living room.”
Neither of the gorillas had moved. “What are you waiting for, a resurrection?” I demanded.
Tim stuck out his chin. “Who elected you president?”
“Do what he said,” advised the secretary.
It was a clumsy operation, the towhead trying to keep the blood off his suit while the guard in glasses handled the other end and the woman tried to follow along, holding the Judge’s unresponsive hand. My stomach did a slow turn just watching them.
The house was decorated in quiet good taste, whatever that is. The living room carpet was sculptured and held no footprints. The beige wallpaper went well with dark brown upholstered furniture, and suspended panels brought the ceiling down to a sensible height. Only one lamp was burning, which left the room’s corners in deep shadow. Rumpled bedding and a dented pillow on the sofa showed where someone had been sleeping. Gently the reluctant attendants lowered the convulsing body to the cushions. She lifted his head, sat down on the end and returned it to her lap. Somewhere along the way she had lost her cigarette.
I turned to Clendenan, who had entered on Montana’s shambling heels. “W
here do you keep the liquor?”
He was watching the wreckage of his father. He gestured vaguely in the direction of a console stereo under the curtained front window. “This is a hell of a time to think about getting pie-eyed.”
“Can you think of a better one? Anyway, it’s for her.”
“I don’t want anything,” she said petulantly.
“You’ll have something. Bourbon do?” I hoisted a well-tapped fifth of Ten High out of the record cabinet and looked around for a glass.
“Have I got a choice?”
The kitchen was almost as big as the living room, a French touch. I splashed some whiskey into a heavy tumbler and drank long and deep. Then I rinsed it out, splashed in more whiskey and water, and brought the glass into the living room, where I pressed it into her hand and closed her fingers around it. “Drink.”
She did, sipping at first, the tumbler cupped in both hands, but, as the liquid burned her tongue, she tilted it higher, too high, so that she choked and began coughing. She had to shove most of her fist into her mouth to stop. I finished my cigarette and watched. She recovered, took another sip, and set the vessel down on a glass-topped coffee table. Her face was flushed.
“Did you ever find the will?”
“The will?” She resumed rocking, cooing to the thing in her lap as if it were a cranky baby. “Oh, that. There never was a will. I made it up.”
“You made it up.”
Her eyes sought mine. They were slightly out of focus. “I knew Arthur wasn’t killed on that fishing trip. Before he left, whenever I brought up the subject, he’d change it. I knew him better than anyone, including his wife.” She spat the last word. “I was sure he wasn’t planning on going. Afterwards, I started that rumor about a new will because I thought it might open an investigation. I didn’t have any evidence that he was still alive, but I thought that if enough people looked into his affairs something might turn up. I didn’t count on being ignored by everyone involved.”
“You’re lying, sister.”
She said nothing, just went on rocking. The injured man’s face was gray, and his breathing was growing shallow.