Motor City Blue (26 page)

“You sure about this?”

“Jerry and Hubert had no reason to lie about it, and street dope is usually reliable. One question. Did you give orders for Wiley to follow me this morning?”

He looked startled. “No. Why?”

I nodded. “That explains it. Cooke was afraid I’d dig up his secret, so he put Wiley on my tail to see that I didn’t get too close to it. I wouldn’t blame Wiley, though. He slacked off after I let him know he’d been spotted. I think he’s loyal to you. But Cooke hired him, so he followed his orders if only nominally. Yesterday afternoon he paid a call to my office to make sure I’d report to you as promised. I don’t think he’d been told to do that.”

Morningstar’s fists were quivering with the effort of remaining clenched. His metallic voice grated when he spoke.

“Send Cooke in.”

I did, but not until he’d handed me the check.

Outside, the blue air was clammy with late November and was already beginning to curl up and turn brown at the edges. The wind coming from the Ford plant carried the rotten-egg stink of sulfur and other chemicals with names so long they’re referred to only by key letters. If it could taint the exclusive suburb it must have been especially bad in town. The taint would be in the hospital where Maria Bernstein and Ed Rinker lay still awaiting the attention of busy physicians and surgeons. It would have reached police headquarters, where cops like John Alderdyce tried to do their jobs in spite of cops like Proust and government agents like Vespers and Spain. It would be seeping through the filters on the top floors of the new Detroit Plaza, where the Colonel and the General would undoubtedly be staying on taxpayers’ money while they prepared a report for their superiors at the Pentagon that the taxpayers would never see. The taint was on me now as well, deep enough so that no razor or soap would remove it. I was like the drunk in the old joke who passes out at the bar and is revived by someone rubbing garlic under his nose, and who gets up, staggers out of the joint and sniffs, and staggers back in and sniffs and wails that it’s no use, the whole world stinks. The taint was part of me now.

I was right about its being worse in town. It hit me when I came out of the pawnshop on Warren with Iris’ tiny gold heart in my pocket and fifty dollars less in my wallet because I had to bribe the proprietor to sell it to me without the ticket. I stood there and sniffed and thought while the sidewalk traffic flowed around me, and then I went into a stationer’s shop a couple of doors down and purchased a mailer and dropped the trinket and the card of my ex-doctor friend in Hazel Park inside and scribbled Iris’ name—I’d never found our her last—and the address of Beryl Garnet’s place on John R on the envelope and stamped it and consigned it to the first mailbox I came to.

It didn’t remove the taint, but it made me feel a little better.

I
T WAS LATE AFTERNOON
. I was fresh from four hours’ sleep, a bath, a shave, and a meal, and sitting in my car parked illegally on Watson near the Woodward crossing with my Nikon on the seat beside me, watching the front of the grindhouse opposite.

I had begun to wonder if George Gibson was an honest man. For three weeks I’d been watching his movements and had yet to catch him without his canes or doing anything that a man with partial paralysis shouldn’t be able to do. If he was playing it straight on this one, it was just possible that everyone had him pegged as a crook when all he was was accident prone. If that was the case I had some celebrating to do, because I’d succeeded where Diogenes had failed.

I had both evening papers with me. The solution of the Freeman Shanks murder made Page One in both. The
Free Press
carried mug shots of Jerry and Hubert Darling taken in 1972 when they were sent up for six years after the Feds broke up an auto theft ring they were running in Georgia, and said that a service station attendant in Kentucky had identified them when they bought gas just below the Ohio border this morning. They were believed to be in possession of a couple of hundred thousand dollars that was never recovered when they were arrested on the theft charge. The
News
ran a picture of Alderdyce and Proust scowling at a gray metal canister said to contain the incriminating film in the Shanks case. It was probably a prop brought along by the photographer while the real article was in the lab. There was a late bulletin in that paper claiming that the Darlings had been picked up in Tennessee, but the radio news said that the pair turned out to be Toronto business partners motoring to Florida on vacation who were released after their stories had been verified. Kramer’s killing got three paragraphs on Page Six of the
News
but missed the first section entirely in the
Free Press,
rating only a caption beneath a picture of the abandoned Nova on Page Two of the second. Neither story made any connection between him and Shanks, and although both mentioned that two suspects were in custody no names were given. Lee Q. Story was identified in the
News
as the “proprietor of an East Side novelty shop” and in the
Free Press,
without the Q, as a “reputed dealer in underground literature.” In each case he got a paragraph buried so far down in the Shanks piece it was jumped to another page. The trailer park manager got zilch.

The rush hour had passed its peak when Gibson came out the front door supported on his canes and started pulling himself south on Woodward. I yawned and waited for him to get out of sight so I could go home.

He had started across Watson with the light when one of his canes slipped on a ridge of ice at the curb and he fell hard on his hip. I started to get out, then forced myself back into the seat and pulled the door shut. My instincts were tingling.

No one came forward to help him. He rolled over slowly, got one cane under him and used it to support himself as he climbed painfully to his feet. He didn’t appear to have suffered any serious damage. Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact.

The other cane had scooted out of his reach down the gutter. He got up, looked around, thrust its mate under his left arm, walked over, and stooped to pick up its errant mate. I used up a roll of film on him and went home to fill out my report and get drunk.

Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.

Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once
The Oklahoma Punk
was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.

Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s
Motor City Blue
, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel,
Sugartown
, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is
Infernal Angels
.

Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980,
The High Rocks
was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s
The Book of Murdock
. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author.
Journey of the Dead
, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.

Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.

Estleman in his study in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, in the 1980s. The author wrote more than forty books on the manual typewriter he is working on in this image.

Estleman and his family. From left to right: older brother, Charles; mother, Louise; father, Leauvett; and Loren.

Estleman and Deborah Morgan at their wedding in Springdale, Arkansas, on June 19, 1993.