Burning Midnight (25 page)

“‘If'?”

I nodded. “Whatever ‘if' is in Latin, it should be on my coat of arms.”

*   *   *

Driving away from there I put on the radio to distract me from my racing thoughts. Warren Zevon was singing “Werewolves of London.” Life can be like that. I turned it off in mid-howl.

My cell rang. Alderdyce's cell came up on the screen.

“That Wonder Bread truck was two inches taller than the swamp water they drove it into in Macomb County,” he said without so much as a good morning. “Partial print the deputies lifted off the inside of the steering wheel belongs to Antonio Molina. The FBI, Border Patrol, and Mexico City Federales all have a file on him the size of the El Paso phone book. He split with the revolutionary Zapatistas twelve years ago over creative differences. Dope, but cockfighting's his hobby. We think we got him holed up in a duplex on Bagley. Want to go with?”

“You got coffee?”

“I got a Thermos.”

“I'm there.”

“Don't you want the address?”

“I'll just follow the yellow tape.”

The drive back into the city was getting treacherous. The thermometer had slipped ten degrees, polishing the pavement and harvesting fender-benders two or three to the mile. The only really safe way to get around was aboard a Zamboni, but I gunned the Cutlass through the crunchy slush and let the tires find their own way back to the straight and true. A couple of daredevils operating SUVs powered past me as if they were on the way to the beach. I passed one of them in a ditch.

The carnival was in full swing, complete with a midway lined with cops and rubbernecks bustling about inside, preoccupied with their marching orders: a psychological no-man's zone, a pickpocket's paradise. Today's law enforcers, mindful of the public image, chew gum instead of cigars in that situation. If I had the Nicorette concession I'd have cleaned up. It's the new donut.

When the uniforms at the barricades let me through I found the inspector going over a floor plan spread out on the trunk of a black-and-gold cruiser with an Early Response Team cop sporting gold leaf on his storm-trooper helmet. They were both wearing vests. I said, “Can I get one of those? Is there a deposit?”

“Unless he hauled a Howitzer up two flights of stairs, we're out of range. I'm only wearing it to keep from freezing my nuts off. Where do we live?” Alderdyce blinked a fresh fall of grainy snow off his eyelashes and pointed at a squat square brick building two blocks down the street. The block was cordoned off with more barricades and a steel band of cruisers and armored vans. All the cops had
POLICE
spelled out on their flak jackets in big reflective letters. The usual TV satellite trucks were parked on the outside perimeter and a helicopter batted the air with its blades, too far up to see anything but the same view you got from the Goodyear blimp above Ford Field. “The talk boy's busy asking him about his dreams and why he has the hots for his mother. He—” A fresh bellow from the negotiation expert's bullhorn interrupted him; the expert had a soothing, Perry Como voice that had fallen into a singsong like a tour guide's spiel, especially when he spoke in Spanish. “There might be a hostage. Maybe not, but there's a family living on the first floor, so that rules out flash grenades. He opened fire on the first responders from a window when they knocked on the street door.”

I asked about the coffee. He reached under his vest and drew out a steel Thermos with a battered chrome top. “Don't burn your tongue. Nothing like steel wool and Kevlar to hold in the heat.”

I filled the chrome top and sipped. The stuff was strong enough to stand on its own without the container. “Why not just chuck it through the window?”

“Molina's been questioned in a dozen homicides on the border and did eighteen months in Marion for assault with intent to commit great bodily harm on an agent. His lawyer pleaded it down from attempted homicide. One thing you can afford with dope money is a smart attorney. Close range, long distance, guns, knives, habañero breath, it's all the same to him. If anybody shotgunned Roscoe Berdoo and cut his partner's throat, it was Antonio. So we got first-generation Zapatistas. Makes you nostalgic for the swine flu.”

“What's the plan?”

“Commander?”

There were more commanders in on this case than you found at the policemen's ball. This one was a white version of the inspector, carved from the same stratum of granite but with a red handlebar moustache fussily curled at the ends and set with wax. “Wait him out for now. We cut power to the building and the landlord says the stove and refrigerator aren't working anyway, so unless he stocked up with freeze-rations and cans, he has to get hungry sometime. Just to push things along I sent a man for a charcoal grill and steaks and onions. Wind's in our favor. That's how Pat Garrett flushed Billy the Kid out of hiding once.”

Most veteran cops are outlaw historians. I said, “What if he's a vegetarian?”

Neither of them made an answer to that.

“There has to be a partner,” I tried next. “One man couldn't have loaded all those roosters into the truck in the time I was on stakeout by Michigan Central.”

Alderdyce said, “We're running down his known associates. There's plenty, that's the hitch. There's always a big payroll when dope's involved.”

The commander crumpled the floor plan and hurled it into a streaming gutter. “This thing's only good for historical reconstruction. When they drew it up, that building was a whorehouse, decked out with brass and plush curtains. I'd sooner go by dead reckoning.”

Alderdyce pointed at the sodden crumple drifting toward the storm drain. “The chief'll take that out of your salary. I think it belongs to the Stanford White Collection.”

“Out of my pension, you mean. I hoped to make my thirty, but the budget won't hold out that long. Hell with it.” He excavated a box of Grenadiers from under the chain mail and set fire to one with a wooden match. The thick smoke looked gray but cast a brown shadow in the only patch of sun for twenty blocks. He seemed to notice me for the first time; he'd been too busy studying stairwells that no longer existed and secret passages long since stuffed with fill dirt. “Who's this monkey?”

“Curious George,” I said. “Mind if I take a hit off that? I'm out of smokes thanks to the inspector.”

He turned tired eyes on Alderdyce, who said, “Private cop. He was on the scene of the double homicide.”

The Grenadier box came out again. I took one, zipped off the cellophane, and wasted two matches setting fire to it against the wind. It gave me a coughing fit, but the things aren't meant to be inhaled. He offered one to Alderdyce, who shook his head. “I'm working on quitting.”

“I'm quitting working; just as soon as we put this scroat in a cruiser. Or a body bag.”

 

TWENTY-FIVE

Alderdyce said, “I vote cruiser. I've got questions to ask.”

“I got men to send home all of a piece. Guess which tops the list.”

“Your call, Commander. I'm just auditing this course.”

The ERT man ran up the antenna on his Motorola. “Snipers, what's your twenty?”

Alderdyce jerked his monolithic head to the side. I fell into step beside him going away.

“I want that Zap,” he said, walking with his head down, as if we were bucking a gale. The wind was stiff, blowing steel shavings into our faces, but it was a different storm he was walking into. “Bad enough, almost, to write a couple of letters to police widows. Am I burning out?”

“Yeah. If you're serious and not just flushing out the poison.” I took the cigar out of my mouth to spit out a soggy piece of wrapper and never put it back. The burning tip made a bitter hiss when it struck the snow at my feet. “What's new with Guerrera?”

“Nothing's new. Those people have more family than a colony of Mormons, and the ones who aren't related to him wouldn't give him up to God if He showed up with an army of saints. We'd have to turn out every attic, basement, and garage in sixteen square miles just to smell one of his chili farts. This is the Motor City. You know how many garages there are?”

“I'll tell you just as soon as I finish counting all the offensive statements you just made about an honest, hardworking people.”

“Oh, go to hell.”

“Yeah, I'm sick of it too. But I still think you're barking down the wrong hole with Guerrera. That little prank with Nesto was a Hispanic's idea of subtle. The man who thought it up would find a better way to dump dead weight than stick a needle in him and set him on fire.”

“Well, point me to the right hole and I'll bark down it twice as hard.”

We were at the barricade. A young uniform with a pubic moustache pivoted a sawhorse like a gate and we stepped through. Another uniform, saggy-faced with eyes fished out of the bottom of a sump, a pale inverted triangle on his sleeve where a sergeant's chevron had been removed, stepped in double-quick to bodycheck a redheaded young thing from Channel Two. She and her cameraman argued with him while we made distance down the street.

“This Mexicantown business has got you in blinders,” I said. “The answer's right in front of you, but you're too busy with gangs and cockfights and dope and the revolution that's been going on since the Alamo to see it.”

“You can?”

“I'm closer to it. I don't mean that animal you've got cornered up on the second floor. He's still waiting to grow into his great-great grandfather's bandoleers. I'm talking about Molotov cocktails.”

He stopped so short I had to retrace two steps to turn around and face him. “What's to talk about? You fill a bottle with gas—cyclostyrene, whatever—stick a rag in it, touch it off with a Zippo, and throw it through a window. You don't need to be Justin Verlander to pull that off.”

“So why tape it to a bottle bomb? Ray Charla says if you know a little bit of chemistry and how much air to leave between the accelerant and the cap on the bottle, you can lay it down wherever you want and split. Be eating baklava in Greektown when the stuff goes up in Birmingham. Or Mexicantown.”

He realized he was still wearing his bulletproof vest; the weight of it seemed to have just gotten to him. He tore loose the hook-and-loop straps and let it hang open. His shirt was soaked underneath, despite the cold. “You've got a dirty mind. I don't know why it's taken me this long to see it.”

“It's a dirty world.”

“Only it didn't go down in Mexicantown while the baklava was coming out of the kitchen in Greektown. It damn near claimed the wrong victim.”

“Timing. Luck, if you like, because there's no rule of thumb in murder. Turned out okay, though, for the arsonist. The way it went down took away all trace of suspicion.”

“You're wrong. You have to be wrong.”

“I hope to God I am.”

“God,” he said. “Who's He?”

“A guy you hang up on the wall and expect Him to stay put.”

“So why come to me with it? It's your hunch.”

“It's your case.”

He reached inside the vest and rubbed the spot where it had hung most heavily. “Run it out. That's what you came to ask. I wouldn't touch it with oven mitts.”

I shook myself, releasing a bale of snow from my shoulders. “Nesto set that fire behind Zorborón's garage. He told me this morning.”

“Hell, I knew that.”

“How?”

“I put Old Man Hanover's iron jockey on his porch roof on Halloween when I was ten. The son of a bitch is eighty-seven years old. He still prowls his front yard with his army-issue forty-five every October thirty-first looking for his shot. Kids are rotten.”

“So that's it for Nesto?”

“That's it for Nesto.”

“What about Jerry?'

“What
about
Jerry?”

“Nothing, except I think he's ready to talk.”

“Why, what'd
he
do?”

“I meant talk, not confess.”

“Who're you, Oprah?”

“Go to hell.”

“Short walk.” He jerked his head toward the duplex.

My hands were numb. I stuck them deep in my topcoat pockets and worked the fingers until circulation stung. “I don't figure you need me for the rest.”

“Where you headed, as if I couldn't guess?”

“I'm not going over there yet. I need to hear back on a couple things.”

“Shouldn't take long here. I'm getting hungry myself. Molina must be licking the wallpaper right now for the flour. You know how a Mexican knows it's time for his next meal?”

“You know how you can tell when a cop's been using the computer?”

He nodded. “Next time, let's just throw out punch lines.”

The charmer came back on the bullhorn, saying something in soothing Spanish. I got in the car, ground the cold engine to life, and pulled into the slick street just as a squad car passed carrying a charcoal grill in its open trunk.

*   *   *

Rosecranz, the little man who lived in the lobby, had unlocked the door to my kneehole reception room for the odd customer to come in and read my old magazines, just as he had for twenty years, and for twenty years I had yet to find anyone waiting there in the morning when I got in. This time was the same, with a twist: Someone was moving around inside the private office, which I keep locked.

I unshipped the Smith & Wesson once again, stood aside from the frosted glass panel in the door, grasped the knob in my free hand, and went in fast and hard, cocking the hammer for a lighter pull on the trigger in the same movement.

I caught Luís Guerrera in mid-pace. He crouched and spun, a box cutter materializing in his palm as he did so and the blade flicking out like a gas jet. His T-shirt was sweat through and his jeans sagged from his narrow hips, the material heavy with the weight of perspiration and dirt. He looked as if he'd come in straight from a marathon. Which was probably pretty close to the truth.