Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels (14 page)

Hornet said, “Homicide.”

Thaler said, “My office.”

Once again they’d spoken together. The charm of their Frick & Frack was chipping off like paint from a trade-in.

“Let’s make it my coop downtown,” I said. “I’ve been neglecting the place lately.”

The lieutenant shook his head. The displacement of flesh was equal to a snow shovel heaped with slush. “You’ll like our new billet. They cleared us out of that shithole on Beaubien finally. It’s at Grand River and Schaeffer. You can walk from there to your dump, seeing as how your car’s still in the shop.”

“The old second precinct.” I shook mine. Little cartoon lightning bolts jumped from my neck. “I was there a few times back when it was local. They raced cockroaches during coffee breaks. The super in my building sprays once every two years.”

“If he’s more comfortable there,” Thaler said, before he could continue the argument.

I sat up with the bag in my lap. Neither of them stirred. “My underwear’s in here.”

“Go ahead and put it on,” she said. “I’ve got brothers.”

“Me, too. Worthless sons of bitches that they are.” A shred of pastrami fluttered between Hornet’s front teeth.

The lieutenant at least turned his attention to the window while I shinnied into my shorts and pants under the foam blanket. Thaler watched me shuck the gown and thread myself into my shirt. The morphine was wearing off; all the muscles in my body rallied to its defense. I swung my legs over the side, put on my shoes, and stuck my socks in a pocket.

Thaler smiled. She looked even better when that happened, no matter what triggered it. “So how’s this line of work treating you?”

“My mother wanted me to be a mailman, but I’m afraid of dogs.”

The genteel, insurance-mandated custom of ferrying patients out in a wheelchair went unobserved. The ankle I’d barked on the Buick’s shifting cane left me without a leg to favor, but I soldiered on; neither of them offered me an arm.

Her white government car was waiting in the lot. Hornet showed some humanity then, taking the backseat and letting me stretch my legs beside Thaler. When I sank into the cushions with a sigh I couldn’t suppress, she reached inside her economy-size shoulder bag and handed me a foil square containing four Vicodin in blister wraps.

“They gave me these at the nurses’ station. I didn’t think to ask for water. Sorry.”

“You don’t put out this kind of fire with water.” I poked out all four and chewed.

“You’re supposed to take two in four hours,” she said.

“Four in two is faster.”

“It’s your body.” She started the car.

“Only until the University of Detroit gets it.”

Hornet said, “I’m just sorry it’ll be Narcotics takes you down.”

The pills were kicking in when we got to the stairs to my office, in a building John Brown had passed when he’d come North looking for someone to underwrite the raid on Harpers Ferry. Rosecranz, the superintendent who’d been sweeping the floor at that time too, scarcely looked up at us as he cornered a dust bunny with his push broom in the foyer. He’d seen me stagger in under worse conditions and hadn’t asked questions since Lenin was in rompers.

I tarnished my palm on the brackish brass of the bannister. At the top of the steep two flights I led the way through the half-liter reception room, which I never lock, shook out the key to the little isolation booth where I work out the problems of the universe, and held the door for my guests. That crack of Hornet’s about Emily Post had cut me to the quick.

I let them find seats while I hoisted the window behind the desk. The air turned over like a sick old man in bed.

In the swivel behind the desk I opened the deep file drawer out of habit, then shut it when I remembered I’d stopped keeping a bottle there when I’d added pills to my daily vices. I regret most of my decisions.

“These walls are a foot thick, the way they used to make them,” I said. “They don’t have any more ears than a snake. Who’s taking the investigation away from the U.S. Marshals?”

“We’ll come to that.” Thaler reached inside the woven leather shoulder bag. I’d been wondering about it. It was too big for her service piece and too small for a Saint Bernard.

SIXTEEN

The package was shaped like a brick, but smaller, and sealed tightly in transparent plastic. She leaned forward to put it on my desk. I let it sit for a second, then hefted it. It was as pliable as bread dough and weighed a little more than a pound. I slid it back her way.

“That’s how the FBI nailed those dumb cops who substituted confectioner’s sugar for the dope they took from the evidence room,” I said. “The real thing isn’t that white. Not in this town.”

“Go ahead and taste it,” said Hornet.

“I’m not a cadet facing initiation. I’d be tasting cocaine all day long.”

Thaler said, “No danger of that. Heroin has no taste.”

I frowned at the brick. “I’m not buying it.”

Hornet grinned. “You couldn’t afford it.”

“No one can.” Thaler dived back inside the bag and thumped another brick down next to the first. “Kilo even. There are two more just like these. One’s on its way to the FBI lab in Quantico, and this is as much as I’m authorized to carry around. If my purse gets snatched I’m on my way to Leavenworth. It looks uncut, but no one can quite believe that. We’d need to requisition more zeroes to calculate its worth.”

“You didn’t find it on the street. Mexican brown’s as good as it gets here. After the local dealers finished doing the Flamenco on a shipment like this it’d last a year.”

“They ain’t dancing,” Hornet said. “Right there’s the reason we got OD’s stacking up like cordwood in the morgue. None of the locals has the experience to knock the horns off quality like this. The customers think they’re pumping brown and it blasts through their veins like a comet.”

“Only the mob has the organization to smuggle in that kind of cargo, but it wouldn’t distribute it here. The economy won’t support it.”

“The guy we picked up with it lives in shelters and doorways.”

I looked at Thaler to confirm what the lieutenant had said. She was busy scooping the dope back into her bag and didn’t seem to be listening. Transporting that kind of valuables takes concentration.

“Rudy’s the name,” Hornet went on. “He’s got more priors for petty than Bernie Madoff. Pair of officers in a city cruiser pulled over to talk to him last night when they spotted him walking down the street lugging a suspicious-looking box. He was so full of crack and Crown Royal he tried to climb aboard. He thought the unit was a bus.”

“Why settle for crack when he had his hands on a fortune in high-grade horse?”

“He didn’t open the box.”

I was starting to see where the conversation was leading. Not having anything in my stomach helped. All the circulation was going straight to my brain.

Hornet said, “He said he found it. We know he stole it. We don’t know where from. He’s clean now, screaming about getting swarmed by bees in holding, but he’s blank on the last twenty-four hours. He ain’t faking. The blood they drew at the clinic would light up the northwest side.”

“That’s where you picked him up?”

Thaler fastened the snaps on her bag. “That’s why we want to know what you were doing there today.”

“What kind of box was he carrying?”

“That’s why they called me,” said Hornet. “It was on the BOLO sheet.”

“And that’s why he called me. Rudy the street person had a dummy converter box under his arm with a manufacturer’s plate on the back.”

“MacArthur Industries,” I said.

“Good guess. When they popped the box open at Thirteen Hundred, they found these inside.” She patted the bag on her lap.

I frowned again. “Two kilos, that’s a piece over four pounds. The box I held at Crossgrain’s wasn’t anywhere near that heavy. I remember thinking how light it was for all those wires and circuits.”

“Components are mostly air, to keep the package from appearing too small for the price,” Thaler said. “You told us Crossgrain had ordered the one he showed you first, to test it out. If it had turned out to be a dummy he wouldn’t have ordered more. Depending on his honesty, if it came filled with drugs he might have gone into another business.”

“He liked the one he was in. He’d have reported it.” I stroked a burn crater on the desk with my thumb. “Someone made a mistake, mixed up his customers, and sent him a load of heroin when he placed his second order. He was out of town when someone came back to correct the mistake. When he showed up on TV still in possession of a box, that same someone paid another visit. Whoever it was couldn’t be sure it didn’t contain drugs, but in any case Crossgrain had to be eliminated before he could connect the police to his source.”

“Even a criminal mastermind has a senior moment now and then,” said Thaler. “The DEA wants this one. It would be a mistake if it gets it, because it’s still national security. The mob doesn’t have the capital. We’re talking tending the poppy fields, refining the pollen, packaging and distribution across two hemispheres, and guarding it at every step. Those dregs they bring up from Mexico have about as much in common with this stuff as Chicken McNuggets and chateaubriand. It’s Asian or Middle Eastern, possibly a combination of both, for backup in case of a government crackdown in one place or the other, or a UN air raid. The same mistake that put those boxes in Crossgrain’s hands put this stuff on the streets of Detroit. Whoever pressed the wrong button probably isn’t around anymore to interview. Ruthless methods, deep pockets. Same cast and play, different act.”

Hornet said, “You got to hand it to them for balls, using one illegal smuggling operation as a front for another. A hell of a lot riskier one, to boot. Forgetting the rough characters you’re competing with and every country in the world at war with what you’re selling, some of that merch finds its way into the arms of your own employees, which dollars to dog shit is what happened in this case.”

“A hell of a lot riskier,” agreed Thaler, “and several hundred times the profit potential. What’s in this bag would buy a nuclear warhead.”

“I miss the mob,” I said. “Serial killers. Street gangs. Cut-your-throat-for-a-nickel muggers. They’re all Smurfs in retrospect.”

“We got all them, too,” Hornet said. “Every time something else comes along we slide ’em down a notch, like weekend box office receipts. Always something opening every Friday.”

Thaler said, “This is as far down the street as this goes for now. If it gets around that this stuff is available, we’ll have every dope-sniffing dog in the country at our throats in three days. The terrorists will break off the operation and start another from scratch. Something worse, maybe. It’s taken us months to find out this much, and part of that was by accident. It may take years to bring us to this point on the next. Each mistake makes these drooling types smarter. We can’t count on them slipping up again.”

Hornet leaned forward to rest his hands on his knees and his belly between his thighs. “What were you doing violating a traffic ordinance just six blocks from where we picked up Rudy?”

“The truth, Walker. No half measures, lies of omission, wiseass punch lines. You don’t want to be a hostile witness on Homeland Security’s books. It’s a lot easier to make the case for treason than it used to be.”

So it was back to Walker. I was stroking the burn crater again when my office door opened and let in John Alderdyce, inspector in charge of Detroit Homicide. He wasn’t the genie I’d been trying to summon.

*   *   *

His suits always looked fresh and well cared for, and he always looked tired. The hair he cropped close to his skull was a gray haze now and the lines from his nose to the corners of his mouth looked like guy wires erected to support the bags under his eyes. His head still looked as if it had broken off a quarry and his skin was so black it shone purple when the light struck the places where it was stretched over bone.

Mary Ann Thaler caught my unasked question. “I made a call when we were leaving the hospital. You were busy matching your feet to the steps.”

Alderdyce remained standing, but then he had no other option but the floor. I usually had two more seats than customers, but today was a sellout. “I don’t give a shit about some guy who wears his underpants on his head in some cave,” he said by way of hello. “Not during business hours anyway. He’s Thaler’s job, not mine or Hornet’s or I might add yours. I got dead junkies blocking doorways all over town. I can’t take a chance some honest citizen’ll trip and fall over one of them and break his neck. One more successful lawsuit against the city and then I’ll have all the time in the world to give a shit. So what’s the deal?”

I was outgunned. I struck a kitchen match off the crater and set fire to a cigarette, blew smoke at the dark spot on the ceiling. Following it up and out the open window was off the table.

I told them about both visits to Johnny Toledo’s and what I’d found there the second time. I edited out one detail only. Luis Quincy Adams didn’t have to exist for them just yet. Whoever had taken Johnny’s cell phone had a complete record of his contacts. If it was his killer, he’d start with the last one called. Heavyweights are orderly and don’t leave potential witnesses rattling around. Up to a bureaucratic point, I trusted John and Mary Ann to sit on a secret, but I didn’t trust Hornet any farther than I could roll him uphill. He liked to hear himself talk and didn’t pay much attention to whoever else was listening.