Dead Bang (27 page)

I tried for a faceful of “Who, me?” innocence. Wendy said, “Our waitress just rang up a sale and gave the man a couple of envelopes with his change.”

“The guy mowing her lawn told me she gets a ton of mail, and most of it's for people who don't live with her. I guess they pick it up here.”

“She's coming,” said Wendy.

She brought Wendy's tea, my coffee, and little packets of coffee creamer. “I am thinking I know you,” she said.

“I was here a couple of days ago for breakfast with my roofing crew,” I said. “T-shirt and jeans with a Carhartt vest. We had the special.”

“Yes,” she said, but shook her head no as she walked away.

“Think you're toasted?” asked Wendy.

“She's thinking about it,” I said.

Wendy smacked both her hands on the table and startled the shit out of me. Suddenly on her feet, she snatched her purse off the table and stormed for the door, announcing as she went, “I'm tired of your fooling around!”

I stood and dropped a fin on the table for our drinks. “Honey, I had breakfast here!” At the door I turned, showed the stunned customers and employees my spread arms and sniffled, “I only had breakfast.” I followed Wendy out into the lot—the door stifling the sound of laughter that had erupted in the restaurant.

In the car Wendy asked, “Cool 'em off?”

“Frosty,” I said.

After a quick tour of the neighborhood, we drove through Mickey D's for sandwiches and parked across the street from the American Patriot in the lot of the former gas station that now did service as a dry-cleaning establishment. The giant flag painted on the window of the Coney Island made it hard to see what transpired in the dining room. Over the next hour and a half, we picked up license plate numbers of cars with drivers who left the restaurant with mail in their hands.

“Should have brought a camera with a long lens,” I said. “Had one in the Buick.”

“I haven't seen anyone that looked like Manny,” said Wendy.

“Let's cruise the house on Stuart.”

“That neighborhood has eyes,” said Wendy. “The lady I talked to sits and looks out the window with her cat all day.”

“What did she think of the subject?”

“Says Mayada gets a lot of visitors in cars with Ontario plates,” said Wendy. “Says her blinds are always down.”

We rolled by the house. The drive remained vacant. The trash waited at the curb.

“Hey, doll,” I said. “I got a hot date for you tonight.”

“Great,” said Wendy. “I can hardly wait. What do we do in the meantime? If we stay around here, we heat up the neighborhood.”

“Let's go to the Detroit City-County building to check the Detroit Recorder's Court records.”

“What for?” asked Wendy. “None of these people use the same name twice.”

“The Vincenti case,” I said. “Detective Flynt told me Hamtramck was a dry hole.”

“We still don't know where Karen is,” said Wendy.

“I'm open to suggestions,” I said. “I can't sit around and wait. By the time it gets dark, I'll be a wreck worrying about Karen.”

Wendy shook her head. “I know this Mayada looks wrong. We don't know what she's up to, or if it has anything to do with Karen.”

“She's what we've got.”

“Then we need to go straight at her,” said Wendy. “And plenty hard. Karen is running out of time.”

“We steal her trash tonight. If we come up blank, plan B.”

“We can turn what we have over to the Feds,” said Wendy.

“They'd take a week to think about it. PIs rank somewhere below psychics on the law-enforcement credibility scale.”

“Let's go downtown,” said Wendy. “I think you should call Matty.”

I took the ramp down to the “ditch”—M-10, an expressway that winds its way to downtown Detroit at the bottom of a towering cement canyon. Just before the Detroit River, M-10 turns east and runs under the Cobo Arena. The City-County Building is on the left just before the tunnel to Canada at the Old Mariners' Church.

A group of Japanese tourists filled the sidewalk, taking photos of the
Spirit of Detroit,
a one-story brass sculpture of a seated man with spread arms, clad in an afterthought metal fig leaf. Wendy and I locked our firearms and ammo in the trunk of the Camaro. Before we could enter the City-County Building, we had to return to the car to lock up our pocket lighters, nail clippers, and sharpest wit.

On our second foray, an elderly gentleman in a rumpled suit and battered wheelchair led the charge. At the metal detector, he learned that he couldn't take his briefcase into the building. He left it with the guard, who promptly ran it to the door and pitched it onto the sidewalk, where it splattered open and spewed its contents into the street. Wendy and I picked up what we could—mostly papers, a sandwich, and a bottle of water, but not a single grenade, bazooka, or flamethrower.

The man rolled his wheelchair out after us in a panic. Wendy handed him the briefcase. “I guess security is pretty tight,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Who'd want to hurt those people?”

I asked the guard for directions to Recorder's Court records. He pointed into the building. I asked him, “Where exactly?” and he wanted
to know if I was “stupid.” I told him “just ignorant,” and he told me to look for the signs. Records turned out to be in the basement.

The alphabet had been passed over as a method of filing records, in favor of a “Soundex” system that I have never mastered. Luckily for me, Wendy was a whiz. Prior to 1966, John Vincenti had led a police-encounter-free life. After that, we waded through an ebb and flow of misdemeanor charges for trespassing, assault and battery, and disturbing the peace. Most of the docket cards had been stamped “nolle pros” in red—the charges hadn't been dropped, but the prosecutor had elected not to prosecute. We found no card for Vincenti's arraignment on the racketeering and bookmaking charges.

More interesting, a search for the name Jack Vincent yielded three divorces spread over the late fifties and early sixties. All of his spouses had Asian or Filipino names, and the first two divorce complaints listed “abandonment” as the cause of action. The last cited irreconcilable differences.

The files from that era were not available—fire in the old courthouse. Social Security numbers were not available from the docket cards, but we gleaned Detroit addresses for both Jack Vincent and John Vincenti, along with a birth date in November of 1913 for Jack Vincent.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “We're looking for Methuselah.”

“You said he was dead,” said Wendy.

“Yeah, and when he was born, the airplane was a new-fangled contraption.”

“And your beloved Colt was old news,” said Wendy.

“Worked better than the airplane for a very long time.”

“Anything else we need to look for?”

“No,” I said. “Let's get out of here before all this hospitality has us selling our lakefront home so we can move back to Detroit.”

North down Woodward Avenue, we found the Detroit Main Public Library across the street from the Detroit Institute of Art. We parked at a meter—the guard in the parking lot informed us, “The library parking lot isn't available for public use.”

Finally inside the library, I stunned myself by finding a well-pummeled Polk Cross Index from 1968. John Vincenti had not been listed in the alphabetical index and his address turned out to be a Laundromat. Jack Vincent's address, on Salem between Seven Mile Road and Grand River, listed “No Response.” The alphabetical index listed Jack Vincent as retired.

“So, who is Jack Vincent?” asked Wendy.

“A guy who retired by age fifty-five,” I said. “Other than that, I'm not
sure. Could be a coincidence. You know, same initials. Slip of the tongue on the part of Archer Flynt.”

I'd forgotten the glory of Detroit expressway traffic. In the winter, the pavement is always wet, except for the days when it's iced over. In the summer, road repair has traffic down to one lane—never the one you're in. It took an hour and fifteen minutes to get to Maple and Woodward—about twenty-five miles.

American Budget Gas didn't advertise any particular brand of gasoline. A painted American flag covered most of the window in the front of the building. Eight gas pumps stood watch—with their fingers in their ears—under a candy-striped canopy. A soft ice cream window had been added to the convenience store, which featured mostly beer, cigarettes, and lottery tickets.

Hanan-Mayada wore a white smock and a name tag that read “Irshad.” What's in a name anyway? All of her customers bought ice cream. Some of them picked up their mail.

I filled up the tank on the Camaro and kept my back to the building. Wendy went inside for a pack of cigarettes and checked the name on the sales tax license. Mayada/Irshad stormed out of her soft ice cream booth and steamed up to my gas pump, those black eyes glistening with fire. She chopped the air with her forearm to meter out a loud, “What? What? What you are doing here?”

“Buying gas?” I said. “Who are you?”

“You are at my work this morning.”

“Oh, shit,” I said.

“Yeah? Oh shit what?” she asked.

“Oh shit, here comes my wife.”

“You rotten weasel!” yelled Wendy, waving her arms. “I knew you were lying!” Wendy walked up to Mayada and shoved her by the shoulders toward me. “You want that lying, cheating sack of shit? You have him. Give him a big wet kiss!”

Mayada, if that was her name, turned to face me, found she was half a step away, and backed up with her mouth and eyes wide.

Wendy shook a finger at me like a priest blessing a flock with holy water. “In the name of God and all that's holy! I've had it with you!” She folded her arms to her bosom and stomped out of the drive toward the sidewalk.

I whined, “Hon-nee,” after Wendy and snatched my receipt out of the gas pump. “Are you nuts, lady? What the hell is the matter with you?”

“You were at the restaurant.”

“Tell me where else you work. I'll stay away.”

“The deli counter at the party store on Twelve Mile,” she said.

“I'll never eat again,” I said and jumped into the Camaro.

“In sh'Allah
that crazy woman takes you back and makes you miserable,” she snapped as I pulled away.

With the passenger window down, I crept along and yelled out to Wendy, “C'mon, honey.”

“She still watching us?” asked Wendy.

In the mirror, I could see Mayada observing us.

“Yeah.”

“Go away!”

I snapped on the flashers, stopped the car, and got out and walked over to Wendy. “I thought Middle Eastern women were shy and retiring.”

“Not that one,” said Wendy. “She's hypervigilant, too.”

“She's headed back to the store.”

“Let's go steal her trash,” said Wendy. “The sales tax license is made out to Rashid Erekat.”

“That's the name her telephone is listed to,” I said as we headed for the car. “Says she works at a party store on Twelve Mile.”

“Which one?”

“I don't know. Maybe we should look for one with a big American flag in the window.” On the way to Mayada's house, we passed three party stores. They all had a flag in the window.

A half dozen houses south of Mayada's brick ranch, I pulled up to the curb and hit the trunk release. Wendy stepped out and rescued a small wicker basket from the pile of trash at the curb. At the next house, she picked up a cracked hand mirror in a metal frame. By the time we got to Mayada's house, the neighborhood eyes should have been satisfied that we were trash picking. Mayada had three black trash bags and a white kitchen bag in her green plastic trash cans. We took it all and put some of her neighbor's trash in her cans. At the next house Wendy picked up a duck decoy that she later made a lamp of, which we still have.

In Garden City, the first bedroom community west of Dearborn Heights down Ford Road, we pulled up at Wendy's mother's house. After coffee, tea, and a game of “Chicken-Foot” dominoes, I left Wendy to share the intimate mother-daughter stuff and retired to the garage with Mayada's trash. Yard refuse tumbled out of the first black plastic bag. The kitchen trash held more productive items. I picked up a telephone bill, and whoever Rashid Erekat was, he'd just received two new credit cards—the nondescript envelopes and the letters with the globs of glue were in the bag. The next bag yielded a big red bow. The last time I'd seen it, it had decorated the handle of a suitcase full of money.

A F
ULL NIGHT'S SLEEP
in a real bed constitutes one of life's greatest luxuries. I'd gotten complacent since leaving the military, but I still woke up if the dog walked into the room, the refrigerator made a noisy start, or the drone of night critters went silent outside the window.

Faces came to me in my sleep—dead men watching with dead eyes. Men I knew well, men I never knew, and men whose names escaped me—men who died in the arid, fetid, and frozen places where blood is spent to pay for the rages of tyrants.

Around three Wendy came to bed with her hair damp and smelling fresh from a shower. We spooned up, and I kissed her on the shoulder. She tucked my palm under her cheek on the pillow. The faces faded to wisps and stretched to strings that folded into the currents of my always-watchful slumber.

In the morning, I sat in the dinette, stirred instant coffee into a cup of hot water, and dialed Special Agent Matty Svenson at her desk. She said, “What were you doing in Holland, Michigan, night before last?”

“Went to pick up Karen's suitcase.”

“Why?”

“She finally broke down and bought some underwear,” I said. “I didn't want her to misplace it.”

“The real reason,” said Matty.