Lady Yesterday (17 page)

Coming up on my knees I groped for it. Ang was flopping like a trout, snarling something in what I assumed was Korean and trying to free his leg from the broken window in the truck’s door. He had found his leverage and was starting to pull it out when my hand closed on the gun underneath the Fiero. I pitched forward, getting my feet under me, and brought the butt down hard on his cropped head. It made a sickening sound and he went limp. His foot hung up in the ragged hole in the glass. He dangled there.

I was sluggish. My lungs were filling slowly and my eyes stung. I wiped them with the back of the hand holding the gun. It came away bloody. I stumbled out into the aisle.

“Heads up!”

It was Flynn’s voice. Instinctively I pivoted in the direction of the office, but there was nobody inside now. At that instant the world went up in white flame and two square headlamps came down the aisle at me with a roar. I dived back between the vehicles just as the big gray Lincoln swept past with Felipe at the wheel. The slipstream almost took me off my feet. I caught my balance and turned and saw Flynn standing spread-eagled in the glare of the headlamps at the end of the aisle, both hands stretched out in front of him clasping the automatic. He fired. The copper-jacketed bullet glanced off the windshield with a thin scream. Then the car struck him and he went up in the air, heels over head, his gun spinning away. He missed the ceiling, hanging just under it for an impossible length of time, then came back down in front of the Lincoln as it swung around the line of parked cars. It bumped over him twice and kept going into the turn. I sent two shots after it, but I was afraid of hitting Iris. I shattered a taillight. Then the car was gone. Tires yelped as it spiraled down to ground level and then out onto Griswold.

I heard sirens. I lurched down the aisle to where Flynn lay. His hat had come to rest upright nearby, untouched, display perfect. It wouldn’t fit him now. I stood there with my lungs aching, trying to breathe. I thought of George Favor struggling with emphysema. A trickle of blood from my forehead reached my lips then.

It was that salt-and-iron taste that did it. I heard my gun clatter on the concrete, and that was the last thing I heard for a while.An angel brought me to.

She had light brown hair that could have been honey blonde with no trouble, worn in bangs under a red plastic hairband, and baby blue eyes that were nowhere near the size of hen’s eggs. The tortoiseshell glasses disappointed me a little. I had angels figured for twenty-twenty vision.

The walls of the place I was in were sea-green and so was the ceiling. I was in a bed with a sheet and a thin blanket drawn up under my chin and my head propped up on a foam-rubber pillow as thick as a book jacket. There was a steel rail on either side of the bed. That disappointed me a lot. Heaven looked a lot like a hospital room.

The angel had a message for me. “Boy, is your head going to hurt.”

I dredged a hand out from under the covers and touched three or four yards of gauze folded and taped on my forehead. “Feels numb.” I whispered it. There wasn’t any moisture left in my mouth.

“That’s the local. They dug out enough glass to rebuild the Crystal Palace and took sixteen stitches. Here.” She put a blue plastic glass to my lips. I drank from it noisily and pulled a face.

“I didn’t think they’d have to chlorinate the water in heaven.”

“You’re in Receiving. They’re kicking you out of here as soon as you can stand up. Someone told them you don’t have insurance.”

It was starting to come back, in little bright sharp pieces, like flying glass. I put Lieutenant Thaler back in mortal perspective. “Flynn?”

“If you mean your buddy, they tagged him DOA. Dead on arrival at the floor is more like it; every bone in his body was broken. Hornet wants to nail you with felony homicide. It’s why I came in his place. In his state they wouldn’t let him in the door.”

“He wouldn’t fit through the door. What about the Korean?

“Concussion and torn tendons. He’ll be here a little longer. You want to tell me how he came to be in that condition? Otherwise I bust you for trespassing and assault.”

“He won’t press charges.”

“He won’t have to. We’ve got a dead man like I said.” She waited. She was sitting in a lavender chair with her legs crossed in flesh-colored knit slacks, low-heeled brown boots on her feet with buckles on them.

“What time is it?” The vertical blinds were drawn over the windows and I couldn’t tell if it was still dark out.

“Four A.M. My shift ended two hours ago. But I’ve been pulling doubles so long I wouldn’t know what to do with time of my own.”

I winched myself up on one elbow. I had on one of those Kleenexes they throw at your modesty in hospitals. I found the handle on the drawer of the nightstand and pulled it open. My cigarettes weren’t inside. “I don’t suppose you smoke,” I said.

“No one does here. It’s like Utopia.” She was still waiting.

I doubled the pillow in the small of my back. “Sam Mozo snatched my client. We were trying to get her out.”

“We?”

“Flynn, that’s the only name I knew him by. He worked for Frank Acardo.”

“Generous of Frankie.”

“He likes Mozo less than the cops. You’re the one told me that. I got just close enough to see they were holding my client in the garage when Ang jumped me. That’s Mozo’s pet Korean, the one with the bump on his head. By the time I was finished with him the Colombian got the woman into his car and his driver tried to make a road kill out of me. Flynn saved my hide by yelling. It didn’t do him any good. Your team missed Mozo by five minutes.”

“It wouldn’t have if you’d called us.”

“I had this crazy idea that riot guns and bull horns wouldn’t be too healthy for my client.”

“You think she’s any healthier this way?”

“Maybe it was the wrong call,” I said. “Maybe there wasn’t a right one.”

She touched her glasses. “This have anything to do with an Acardo soldier Emergency Medical Services scraped out of a house on St. Antoine tonight named Albert Jones?”

“That’d be Jonesy. He was guarding her when they took her. How is he?”

“They’ve got him upstairs too, with a fractured skull. He should make it. You go through Acardo men like I go through cotton balls.” She paused. “You going to tell me who your client is and what Mozo wants with her?”

“Probably not.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“Don’t get your glasses in an uproar, Lieutenant. After last night she has a one-in-fifty chance of still being alive. Bringing the cops in would take it down to zero.”

She didn’t say anything for a minute. The morphine or whatever they had given me was keeping me drowsy. I was starting to float off on a warm cloud when she spoke. “You know who owns the motel where Charm was killed?”

“Someone named Gordenier.”

“Where’d you get that?” Her voice was sharp.

I came awake. “I looked it up,” I lied. I thought of Lester Hamilton telling me about the A. G. that Charm had a noon appointment with on the day he was stabbed. “I got curious. I told you murder is interesting.”

“Andrew Gordenier is a retired realtor. He fronts for Sam Mozo. Mozo owns the motel. Have you got anything to say about that?”

“No.” I had to think for a long time before I said it. It was like swimming upstream in Jell-O. “I’m going to go night-night now, Lieutenant. Kick me if I snore.” I closed my eyes.

I heard her get up after a minute. Behind my lids I was fighting to stay awake. I must have lost, because I never heard her leave. When I opened my eyes again, light was edging in between the window blinds.

The catch on the bedrail was a week coming undone. Finally I swung it down and rested a while before moving again. Getting up was like leaving the womb. The thin blue carpet was cool under my feet.

I found my clothes in a tin cabinet painted lavender to match the chair and put them on. I wondered if hospital decorators ever touched ground. The clothes were dirty from lying on the gritty oily floor of the garage, but my cigarettes were in my shirt pocket. I smoked one to gas the dope out of my veins and tied my shoelaces as tightly as I could on the theory that they would force blood to my head and I put on my hat and coat and walked out of there. The shoelace gimmick worked too well; my head was starting to throb.

There was no uniform at the door to the room. Mary Ann Thaler’s brain didn’t work in that straight a line. I was counting on that. The sun was coming up red in a cold sky through a window at the end of the deserted corridor. I found the elevator and pushed the button for the lobby.

The gray-haired floor nurse was on the telephone when I walked past the station. She didn’t call out after me. I used the telephone in the waiting room near the entrance to order a taxi. I was told one was in the neighborhood and would be there in a couple of minutes. I shared the room with a man reading a magazine on the sofa. Visiting hours didn’t start for another hour.

The cab pulled up in front of the glass doors and I went out. As I pushed open the door, in the glass I saw the man on the sofa put down his magazine and raise a hand to his mouth. His partner was on the taxi’s rear bumper in a blue Plymouth before we left the parking lot.

I
HAD A TICKET
for leaving my car parked on Griswold during snow-removal hours. It could have been worse. If there’d been a storm it would have been towed. I put the ticket in my pocket and got in behind the wheel. Rigor mortis had taken claim of the upholstery.

The blue Plymouth had pulled in behind a station wagon at the curb while I was paying off the cab driver. Its pipe was smoking in the morning chill. The Chevy’s engine cut in with a touch of the key. I let it warm up for a minute, then put it in drive and swung into a U-turn. Halfway through I kicked it and shot through the entrance across the ground floor of the Park-a-Lot Garage.

The beefy attendant was just scrambling out of the booth when I exited on the Shelby side. The unmarked police unit, following, stood on its nose to avoid hitting him. I took off hard. I had two blocks on the Plymouth before it got shut of the building. After that we lost touch. I hoped for his sake the driver would answer to Mary Ann Thaler and not Acting Lieutenant Hornet.

Alderdyce hadn’t closed his garage door. The snow had drifted in and formed quays around the foreign compact’s rear tires and the jumble on both sides. When he didn’t answer the bell I tried the knob. The front door wasn’t locked. I passed through stale, shut-up air into the living room, where he was sitting slumped in the padded scoop chair in the same cardigan and jeans I had seen him in two days earlier. He hadn’t had them off. His socks were dirty. His mouth was open and loud noises were coming out. It looked like the same bottle of Miller in his hand. It wasn’t. Several generations of empties were lined up on the coffee table and on the floor around the base of the chair. One of the orphans had rolled and come to rest against the butt of the deer rifle in the corner.

“John.” I shook him by the shoulder. He stopped snoring, smacked his lips, shifted his position, and didn’t wake up. I caught the bottle before it toppled to the floor. It was half-full. I took a sip—the beer was flat—and stood it next to the others on the coffee table.

The television was on. A hard-looking brunette in her late forties, dressed in a leotard and shaggy knee-high socks without feet, was trying to tie herself into a bow on a padded studio floor with her ankles gripped in both hands. I figured she was accepting kickbacks from the American Chiropractic Association. I turned it off and lit a cigarette. I blew a lungful of smoke into John’s open mouth.

He came awake rolling his eyes and coughing and turned in the chair and retched. There was nothing to bring up. He turned back and saw me and his confusion slid away. Pure hate took its place.

“You son of a bitch.”

“I left my smelling salts at home. You all right?”

“I will be.”

His tone was urgent. He clawed his way to his feet, almost fell back down, and wobbled out of the room, caroming off a wall. Water trickled in the bathroom. After a long time he came back and dropped into the chair. Relief and contentment softened his dark savage face. He looked around.

I picked up the half-full bottle and held it out. “Carbonation’s gone.”

He took it anyway and drained it at a gulp. Then he put his head back and closed his eyes. “I thought you left.”

“Five six-packs ago.”

“Time flies.”

“I need your help.”

He said nothing. He was either listening or asleep.

“A little hood named Sam Mozo is holding a woman,” I said. “In a little while, if he hasn’t killed her already, he’s going to call me at my office to arrange a trade, the woman for some murder evidence I don’t have. I can’t go to the cops. If they find out she’s a witness against him they’ll slap her in protective custody, only there isn’t any where the Colombians are concerned. She’ll fall out of a hotel window or slip in the shower at County and break her neck. The Acardos want Mozo bad but I can’t go to them because I’ve already cost them two men and Frank’s the kind to teach me a lesson by letting Mozo burn the woman before he steps in. I have to have back-up at this meet. Mozo let his guard down last night but he won’t today, and the trade won’t be clean. Not after last night.”

John’s eyes were still closed. I was starting to think I’d lost him.

“I’m a cop,” he said.

“A suspended one, who isn’t feeling a lot of loyalty to the department just now. Also a good one.”

“Hold the bullshit. What do you need?”

“If Mozo does call he won’t let me pick the spot. I need you in your car in front of my building. It’s a tail job.”

“Can’t do it. I’m ripped.”

“I need you, John.”

“
Don’t
need me!”

He was wide awake now, his face savage again. “Everywhere I look there’s someone else needing me. My wife, my kids, the fucking department. Why the hell do you think I dropped out? I’m drowning, man.”

I waited until he subsided. It didn’t take long. His chest was working as if he’d just tried lifting something heavy and given up. My cigarette was singeing my fingers. I put it out.