Dying Embers (33 page)

“A lot of people were fooled,” said Lorna. “Including Sheldon, until he was sixteen.”

Whatever was on my face made Lorna laugh.

“No, really,” she said. “The doctor on the death certificate, Lionel Jaymuny—I found him.”

“Christ, he'd have to be ninety.”

“Ninety-one. He's in the Methodist home. He told me the story—I mean sort of—between catnaps.”

“How the hell did you do that?”

“He's a registered voter.”

I flopped on the sofa, looked at my burned foot—it was filthy—and dropped the papers in my lap. “So, tell me the story.”

“Once upon a time, before seats belts, kiddie chairs, and airbags, a family pick-up truck slid off an icy road and hit a pole. Father was killed. Shelly was in her mother's lap and crushed against the dash. Sheldon had been standing on the seat and went through the windshield. His larynx was crushed and he was cut up, including his private parts. Mother survived, but needed chemicals to deal with the fact that the little girl died in her lap.”

“Jesus,” I said. “How bad was it?”

Lorna bent her head down and rounded her shoulders. She stuck her hand out and shook it feebly as if it rested on the top of a cane. In an old man's voice she said, “That's none of your business, Missy. You just need to know that we done right by that youngster. Don't matter what happened. It was the best thing we could do.”

“They raised Sheldon as Shelly?”

Lorna straightened up and shrugged. “Mother did. Home schooled and loaded with hormones. When Sheldon was sixteen, his mother took a bath with an electric hairdryer. Sheldon was made a ward of the court and found out that what was in his pants was kind of hit and miss.”

“Oh, God,” I said and started working my pockets looking for a smoke. I didn't find any. Lorna said she was fresh out.

“From that point Sheldon was Sheldon. He finished high school at a state facility and when he was eighteen he found out that he was a rich man. He went to MSU and got a degree in veterinary science, but wasn't much of a party animal. He got arrested for assaulting a prostitute and was voluntarily committed.

“In two years Sheldon was Shelly again and amiable enough as long as she took the prescribed medication. Shelly went back to MSU as an assistant professor and kind of a celebrity, active in the gay community. Shelly and Anne Jones met and hit it off.”

“Yeah,” I said, “Shelly was still hitting the day we met her.”

“Anne tried to drop the charges but the complaining witness was the sheriff's deputy. The papers you've got there indicate that Sheldon pled ‘no contest,' paid a fine, and was sentenced to an anger management program.”

“All right,” I said, “what we need here is for you to put Anne and Shelly together at the penthouse restaurant in the Amway Grand the night that Anne was murdered. They'll remember because Anne got in a row with Scott Lambert that night. Maybe there's a security video. Lambert was escorted out of the building.”

“I need to go home and clean up,” said Lorna. “Tomorrow all right?”

“Sure, and there's a couple more things. I need the low-down on the houseman at the Frampton estate, and call Leonard Jones and tell him he can help by having his lawyer file whatever is necessary to stop the sale of Anne's sculpture,
The Dutchman.
Tell him it's in the main house of the Frampton estate—in the parlor—on the mantel, over the fireplace.”

“I need an expense check,” said Lorna.

She took the thirty-nine dollars I had in my pocket and left. I yelled for her to buy some cigarettes as she was going out the door. She laughed and said she already had some.

I locked up. Outside I found the sky clear and the air cool. I left the top up and started the Jag with the first key out of my pocket—the one with the green tab. I had half a tank of “petrol,” a good thing considering the fact that Lorna swung with all my cash.

A mile down Forty-fourth Street a Kentwood police cruiser cut me off. I slid off the shoulder trying not to bend Billy's ride. Detective Van Huis bailed out of the passenger door of the cruiser with a snubby .38 in his hand. In the rearview mirror a dark brown plain wrapper slid to a stop, blocking the back of the Jag. Detective Flynt exploded out the driver's door with a fat nine in his hand.

Someone yelled, “Throw the keys out the window!”

I stuck my hands out the window and dropped the key.

“Are there any firearms in the vehicle?”

“Got one on my hip,” I said.

“Get out of the car and lay on the ground.”

I yelled, “Not happening! I just got this suit out of the dry cleaner, and you guys know damn good and well who I am.”

On the far side of the cruiser someone racked a shotgun just as Matty pulled up in the black Blazer. The passenger door of the Jag opened and a man in a gray permanent-wrinkle suit crouched around the edge of the door opening and pointed a Glock .40 caliber pistol at me. “You're under arrest for carrying a concealed weapon,” he said.

“I have a permit in my pocket,” I said. “May I get it out?” He nodded and I gave him the DA 2818. He looked at it and made a face like a cat considering a hamster in a plastic ball.

“What the fuck is this?” he said.

“Who the fuck are you?” I said, trying to sound breezy and sincerely inquisitive, but it came off smug and accusatory.

“A police officer,” he said. “Get out of the car.”

Matty yelled, “Hold it right there! What the hell are you doing?” She had her FBI windbreaker on and her credentials in her hand.

I ended up in the back of the Kentwood Cruiser. They left my pistol on the roof of the Jag and stood around yelling at each other and pointing fingers at their own badges. That's when I saw the white van that had pulled onto the shoulder about fifty yards back. The cargo door on the passenger side slid open and the heavy barrel of an M60 with a folded bipod came out. I pounded on the window and yelled. Detective Flynt gave me an evil face but looked where I was pointing.

I
HIT THE FLOOR
and got a shower of glass as the windows of the cruiser exploded. “You can shoot back anytime now,” I said to the floor of the police cruiser. Nothing. “Hell, just show 'em those badges.” The second burst from the M60 cut through the seatbacks of the cruiser and hammered into the dash before I heard the .40 caliber bark an answer. Syncopated yips of 9mm followed, and the church mouse sneeze of Van Huis's detective special. I decided that spreading flat against the floor had it all over rolling into a ball.

I heard the van accelerate and the M60 lift its leg on the front of the cruiser. The tires exhaled, and the cruiser banged down on its knees. The handguns fell silent, doors slammed, and two vehicles scratched out in pursuit of the van.

I rolled my eyes around, trying to direct my hearing without moving my head. An approaching siren grew louder. I flexed the muscles in my arms and legs—nothing felt numb or wet. Pebbles of safety glass cascaded off my back as I eased onto my knees.

The backseat of the cruiser was devoid of door handles. I reached
through the air where the window had been, opened the door from the outside, and shook glass from my suit as I walked back to the Jag. Traffic had resumed and motorists rubbernecked the cruiser. People yelled as they passed. Horns honked. I ignored them. A whiff of cordite hung in the air.

The Jag had emerged unscathed. I did my best Eddie Izzard; “Dashed decent of the chap on the stutter gun.” My pistol and DA 2818 had been cast onto the driver's seat, but the key was nowhere in sight. I stuck my hands in my pockets to consider the situation as a Kentwood Fire Rescue truck pulled up with its rollers on.

Billy Clements had said I'd find a spare set of keys in a magnetic box in one of the bumpers. I was thinking how much I really didn't want to lie on the ground and look for it when a med-tech ran past me to look into the shot-up cruiser and I realized that the steel peg in my pocket was the key with the black shank. I hadn't been searched, just sort of sent to my room so the adults could argue.

The med-tech looked at me and then back into the cruiser. He wore yellow turnout pants with suspenders and a white shirt but had left his hat with his jacket in the truck. He opened the back door of the cruiser. Glass pebbles splashed onto the street.

“You see what happened to the guy that was in here?” he said, his face incredulous. In his late twenties, he wore his full head of sandy hair cut in a flattop except for the back, which he'd let grow long enough that he'd had to tuck it down the collar of his shirt. “They said there was a guy in here.”

“I opened the door from the outside,” I said. “The window was gone.”

He walked toward me, surveying me as he came. “You were in there?” I nodded.

“What happened?”

“Drive-by shooting,” I said.

“I was a Navy medic assigned to the Marines,” he said, and pointed at the cruiser. “Somebody stitched that up with a machine gun.”

I laughed.

“No, really,” he said.

“The pun,” I said. “You were a medic … and they stitched …”

“Yeah,” he said. He smiled and shook his head. “Well. I mean. Why'd they do that?”

“Detective Van Huis went after them. I expect he'll ask.”

“We got the call from a state police dispatcher,” he said and made it sound like a question.

“Van Huis and a patrol officer left with a couple of state cops,” I said, “their car being under the weather and all.”

“So, you're all right? I can look you over.”

I pointed to my nose brace and said, “No, I think I've had all the medical attention I can stand for a while. I think I'll just go home and quit hanging around policemen.”

I reached through the window of the Jag, picked up my pistol and put it on my hip. The med-tech watched me from the corner of his eye, his face doubtful.

“I'm a detective,” I said.

“Not from Kentwood,” he said.

“Private.”

“Cool,” he said. He fondled the Jag with a hungry gaze. “You have any openings—you know, like part-time?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I need someone to take beatings for me and occasionally sit in the back of police cars.”

“That's okay,” he said and started back to his truck. “My old Dodge gets me around just fine.”

• • •

Rusty met me at the door and leapt straight up in the air—all four feet off the floor. I caught him in my arms. He rubbed his neck on my face and ran his fat red tongue over my cheek and across my ear. It knocked the brace on my face loose and a rainbow of colors burned out of my sinuses into my eye sockets.

“Damn! Dog!” I set him down and caught the now whirling house by the handrail on the stairs. I inspected my nose with tentative fingers and found it still intact. Dancing a circle, Rusty stepped on my foot. “Geeze, dog! Whose side are you on?”

“He's been searching the house for you for three days,” said Ben. “He got up on the bed and dug through the comforter and the pillows looking for you. Mom had to put your coat on the floor before he'd lie down and go to sleep.”

Wendy met me at the top of the stairs. I pushed the brace back in place with one hand while I hugged with the other. She wore one of my knock-around flannel shirts over a sleeveless white sweater and red slacks.

“The roast is ready to come out,” she said.

“See?” I said. “Right on time.”

“I waited half an hour before I put the meat in.”

“You're a better man than I,” I said.

Wendy whacked me on the shoulder.

“Ow! What the dog missed, you caught up with.”

“Serves you right for not being home,” Wendy said.

“You weren't supposed to consort with the likes of me.”

She squeezed me and said, “I like to consort with you.”

I kissed her on the side of her head; it was all I could reach. “If they find out I came here, you're in big trouble.”

Wendy rubbed my back and said, “Nope.” I let her go and she headed for the oven. Pulling on her oven mitts, she said, “The guy they've had parked at the end of the drive knocked on the door after you called. He said the hearing was canceled and we could take the tape off the gun safe and my file cabinets.”

“What brought that on?”

“He said he didn't know. They just told him to give me the message and clock out because he was on overtime.”

“You didn't tell me about the surveillance,” I said.

Wendy pulled the roaster pan out of the oven and set it on the counter. “Given everything that's happened I would have needed my people if the state police hadn't been out there.”

I stepped up the last stair. The table was set for three.

“Where's Daniel?”

“Burger flipping,” said Ben. “He's working the dinner shift ‘til close.” He walked up to check my face. “Looks better—sort of a uniform yellow brown. You look like an albino raccoon.”

I should have roped a headlock on him and issued the Dutch rub. A couple of years ago I might have, but now he was as tall as I am, and the dog had already worked me over.

“Cuts down on the glare,” I said. “I'm saving a fortune on sunglasses.” I shrugged out of my suit jacket and hung it in the closet. “Why don't you cue up that tape your mother has for me?”

“I gotta find a place to save my game,” said Ben. He had a role playing game on the TV.

“Tape's on the end table,” said Wendy. She looked at me. “I need you to slice this.”

I took my pistol off my hip and set it on top of the refrigerator. Rusty
followed me, lock-step, into the kitchen. Wendy hung up her mitts and laid a platter on the island counter next to the roaster pan. I washed my hands in the sink and found the carving set.

“Get out of the kitchen, dog,” said Wendy, and waited for him to move so she could open the refrigerator for the milk.