Read The Hours of the Virgin Online

Authors: Loren D. Estleman

The Hours of the Virgin (9 page)

BOOK: The Hours of the Virgin
12.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

The 1967 riots put an end to all that. The O'Haras and Rileys left office, the Washingtons and Kinshashas moved in, and the corridors of power shifted from Corktown to Twelfth Street. The Shamrock Club closed permanently when the surviving members found flashier things to spend their dues on, like open-heart surgery and oxygen. After the death of the bar's longtime owner, his widow sold the building to a corporation based in Honduras, which rented out the second-floor facilities for Saturday night Bingo and meetings of Smoke-Enders, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, and, sensitively, the Sons of Italy. Each day was a battle for supremacy between the fresh odors of tomato sauce and garlic and the old ones of cabbage and potatoes. But it was almost over. The Hondurans had submitted a plan to the city to tear down the building and erect a hotel and casino.

Today I shared the saloon with an old man drinking beer at the opposite end of the bar and a young Asian with a Mr. Moto moustache nursing a highball and clicking the keys on a laptop computer in a corner booth. The room was a dim grotto done in dark walnut and curly maple, with brass lamps over the bar and pool table, the last a massive slab of carved mahogany and slate with a felt top the color of Bob Cratchit's eyeshade. The wood was scratched and cracking, ropes of cobweb clung to the chains supporting the lamps where they were stapled to the ceiling. The boxers in the framed photographs behind the bar, smooth-muscled specimens with names like Dugan and Cooney and Dynamite Danny McGonigle, had long since faded into the scenery, like an eviction notice on the door of a building that had been condemned under Jimmy Carter.

“You can't be as sick as you look, or I'd be pounding your chest right now. What can I get to pick you up?”

I looked up at the man in the apron leaning on his hands on the bar, the only surface in the place that was still getting the attention it needed; spilled drinks and a million bar rags had polished it to a mirror finish. He had three inches and a hundred pounds on me and was as dark as Mr. Ruddy was pale. His head was shaved a shiny blue-black. Three gold rings glittered in one ear. He had as much Irish in him as a plate of pig's knuckles.

“I've got a bug,” I said.

“Man, you got the whole colony. They say there's a Mediterranean thing going around. Looks like it done washed right over you.”

“What've you got in the way of a cure?”

“There ain't no cure. You just got to sit it out.”

“You're the first person who's told me that since I came down with this thing. Everybody's got a remedy.”

“Folks don't like to admit there's anything can't be licked. That's why they build bomb shelters and bet against Jordan.” He wiped his hands on the towel draped over his shoulder. He could have palmed a grapefruit with either one. “Now, what can I pour you to keep you busy while you're waiting?”

“A Bubonic Plague.”

“Coming right up.”

I jerked up out of the fog and watched as he took down a bottle of creme de cacao and a fifth of Gordon's gin and set them on his workspace. He poured coffee from the carafe on the burner into a small steel mixing bowl and left it to cool while he got a jar of Brer Rabbit molasses from a low cabinet and measured the rest of the ingredients into a glass. He used tongs to drop two ice cubes into the coffee, whisked them around with a glass rod, then scooped them out with a strainer and threw them into the sink. Finally he poured in the coffee, added the molasses with a long-handled teaspoon, and stirred vigorously until the liquid was a uniform black. He dealt me a plain cocktail napkin and plunked the glass down on top of it.

“One Plague,” he said. “Friend of Merlin's?”

I turned the glass around, admiring. The drink had a gloss that had been missing the first time in the cigar bar. But that had not been a feat of alchemy.

“He told me he invented it,” I said. “I didn't know whether to believe him.”

“He invented it. Well, I suggested the creme de cacao. He wanted to use the molasses for a base, on account of he thought a drink called the Bubonic Plague ought to be black. I told him it'd take a half hour to pour, and then nobody but Mr. Ed would drink it.”

I sipped. On top of the flu the drink made sense. “Merlin prescribed hot Vernor's and Smirnoff's for what I've got.”

“I tried it last time I got sick. I heaved up my shoes. Seen him lately?” The muscles bulged under his white shirt as he wiped his hands with the towel.

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“He was in day before yesterday. Not since.”

“Ever known him to stay away this long?”

“Only every time I loan him money.”

“How much does he owe you?”

“Not a cent. Matter of fact, last time he was in he paid me back everything he borrowed and bought a drink for the house besides. We had eight customers then. Busy day.”

“He had fifty bucks burning a hole in his pocket.”

“Had him a lot more than fifty. I seen three fifties on that roll he was flashing, inside of a couple of C-notes.”

“Did he say where he got it?”

“You a cop?”

I gave him a card with a ten-spot folded around it. “He's helping me out with a case.”

He read the card and stuck the bill in his apron pocket without looking at it. No one bothers to counterfeit anything less than twenties anymore. “One of his women, probably. Merl lives off women.”

“Any names?”

He shook his big head. “He's kind of a gent when it comes to talking about women. I guess nobody's all asshole. He mentioned a sister once, but I think she's dead. I hope he's okay. The place don't seem right without him coming in and making up Irish holidays to get a free drink on the house.”

“He'll come back when his money runs out. Do you know his current address? His last one was a booth in the City-County Building.”

“Who knows that? Merl lives off women.”

I put down five for the drink and laid another ten on top of it. “Ask him to call me when he comes in. Tell him there's another fifty in it.”

“I'll give him the message.” He watched me climb down off the stool. “How'd you like your Plague?”

“If you can make gin and molasses taste like that, I'm going to have to come back and see what you can do with a real drink.”

“Better hurry. There might be a slot machine standing in this spot.” He polished the bartop.

10

Whether it was the gin or some biological eye of the storm, I was having a power surge when I parked in the police zone at 1300 Beaubien. I found a coroner's sign among the little collection I keep in the glove compartment, clipped it to the sun visor, and climbed the steps, staying close to the railing in case I slipped. The blue ice crystals someone had scattered on the concrete were fresh and hadn't had a chance to begin working.

The sergeant at the desk, an old warrior with fingers of scar tissue on the pink scalp showing through his close-cropped white hair, was too busy directing accident complaints to the proper department to throw me out, so I got on the elevator and punched John Alderdyce's floor. The motor whined a little under the weight of two street patrolmen who boarded when the car stopped at two. They were as big as trolleys and bathed in Aqua Velva. I disembarked at five and aired myself out in front of the wall directory.

I still wasn't used to the trip. Since making inspector, John had traded his glass cubicle amidst the typewriters and jabber of the Criminal Investigation Division for a quiet door at the end of a quiet hall on another floor with his name on the panel in platinum. The only thing that set the place apart from a thousand similar corridors in a hundred other buildings was the row of head shots framed in black metal on either side, a fraction of the Detroit police officers who had been killed in the line of duty since the department began keeping count. When I tapped on the door, the thick felt runner beneath my feet and the acoustical tiles above my head swallowed the sound, as if not to disturb the ghost gallery.

“Enter.”

The room had a high ceiling, the way they were designed during the Art Deco period when the place was built, and white leather on the walls. He was sitting in a green leather chair behind a cherrywood desk with a red leather top, holding a telephone receiver the size and thickness of a cigarette case to his ear. There was a blue leather visitor's chair in front of the desk and three more like it lined up against the wall, waiting for the gathering of suspects. I don't know what's become of leather; it's been years since I've seen it in its natural brown. Family pictures in brass frames crowded the top of the credenza under a window with a first-class view of the Wayne County Morgue. There wasn't a file cabinet or a cigar burn in sight.

When I came in he said, “Oh,” and pegged the receiver. “Who's the new operator at your service? She sounds like Melanie Griffith.”

“She looks like Andy.”

“How come you still use one anyway? They went out when the answering machine came in.”

“Once every three or four months, someone calls in scared. Some of those service girls could talk a suicide down off a ledge while they're doing their nails. When they invent a machine that can do that, I'll be first in line to buy it, just as soon as the price comes down.” I sank into blue leather, shook out a Winston, and put it back. There wasn't an ashtray in sight either. After a dozen years of trying he'd gone from four packs a day to one of the lesser vices. “If it's about those sixty-three parking tickets,” I said, “I never saw them. They must've blown off the windshield.”

“Bullshit. You don't get tickets. I know all about those signs you carry in your car.” He gave me the cop eye. “You're going to throw out your back walking around with one foot in the grave. How many places have you contaminated since you left home?”

“How's the bug going to get around if I don't give it a lift? What were you calling me about?”

“I wanted to ask you if that client of yours ever showed up.”

“I'd swear I dreamed him up if I thought I could dream up a checking account for him too. His address wasn't on the check and his bank won't give out that kind of information without a note from the pope.”

“What about the girl in the fur coat, you dream her up too?”

I used my handkerchief. I don't know why I bothered except to clear my head just long enough for a thought to come through. “What makes you still interested? Don't tell me your daughter's still holding that meeting.”

He shook his monolithic head. “My name on the door, Walker. Up here I do all the angling.”

“I haven't found her yet.” I always try to tell cops the truth. “Merlin Gilly either, comes to that. He's the one who handed me Boyette to begin with, I told you that. I'm expecting all three of them to show up in Kalamazoo with Elvis.”

“He won't. Gilly won't.”

I had started to cross my legs. I lowered the other foot to the floor. The floor was a long way down even for a sick man. “Which river did you pull him out of?”

“There you go again, forgetting you're the fish. What makes it we pulled him out of anywhere?”

“That door with your name on it still belongs to police headquarters. So do you. You only go home to sleep and change horses. The last time you called me socially you had two World Series tickets to Tiger Stadium. Reagan was in office. Okay, no river. Trunk of a car parked in the long-term lot at Metro Airport. If Merlin had gone to high school, that's where he'd have been voted most likely to wind up.”

“I was voted most artistic,” Alderdyce said. “My first job in plainclothes was drawing the chalk lines around the corpses. Gilly died in bed this morning. He had fifteen holes in him.”

“Why fifteen?”

“That's as many as a nine-millimeter Beretta holds. I guess she was too lazy to reload.”

“She?”

“I think the word's still politically correct. I didn't see today's list so I could be wrong.”

“Did her eyes match?”

“You can come see for yourself. We're interrogating her now.”

He locked the office and we took the elevator to the CID. It was Deco there too, but seventy years of spent tobacco had stained the ceiling the color of green tea and a couple of thousand pairs of fallen arches had worn the floor as wavy as a warped phonograph record. Here and there a flowering plant in a pot splashed color against the institutional beige and green—female cops work a little harder on their feminine side than their white-collar sisters—but even the buds had a hardboiled look and probably ate meat. The inspector asked a woman with a Ruger in a holster snapped to a Pierre Cardin belt where the Blessing woman was being questioned, then led me down a short hall to a steel-core door with a gridded window.

“Viola Blessing,” he said. “Her late father sat on the board at General Motors under Eisenhower. Trust fund's just about played out.”

Two male detectives in shirtsleeves, one I knew slightly, the other a stranger, were sitting at a table across from a woman in a white blouse with ruffles and a gray wool skirt, both expensive and fitted well to her slightly overblown figure. Her high heels were too young for her, and so was her red dye job. She wore it pushed back from her ears, not a good idea. She had a flat pudding face, made up at some counter by someone who thought the Dragon Lady look was back. Maybe it was, but it hadn't come back for her. She was in her middle forties. Thirty extra pounds made her older. A big horse of a girl the boys at Grosse Pointe Elementary could always count on to fill in for their absent tackle during recess. The reels were turning on a tape machine the size of a suitcase on the table. A white-haired party I didn't know sat between captors and caught with a leather attache case on his lap and a tragic face, watching them turn. That would be the trusted family retainer.

“It's not her,” I said.

BOOK: The Hours of the Virgin
12.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

This Girl Stripped by Dawn Robertson
Wonderland Creek by Lynn Austin
The Scroll of Seduction by Gioconda Belli
Black Site by Dalton Fury
Angel With a Bullet by M. C. Grant
Amaryllis by Jayne Castle
Seeds of Summer by Deborah Vogts