The Midnight Man (11 page)

Alderdyce grunted. “The medical examiners’ lament. Time we had another conversation with Mr. Bassett.”

“ ‘Another’?” I echoed.

Hornet flashed capped teeth in a quick grin. “He stopped in at headquarters when he hit town. Just like the old bounty men used to do at the marshal’s office. Horsey as hell, ain’t he?”

“You said Warren?” The lieutenant got his note pad from an inside pocket.

I nodded. “At least, that’s where his trailer was earlier this afternoon. The K-Mart parking lot. I guess he likes to save his money for ammunition.”

He wrote it down, tore out the page and gave it to the sergeant. “Get on the horn to the Warren Police and have them send a couple of men out there. I want that cowboy in my office today.” To me: “Stick close. I want you there, too, to look at pictures.”

Hornet was first out the door. There was a lot of shouting going on now, only part of it by cops. The street looked like the overflow from Cobo Hall during an Aretha Franklin concert. Black faces everywhere. On his way through, Alderdyce half-turned and said, “About that cuffing. I was out of bounds. That doesn’t mean you didn’t have it coming.”

I waited for the kicker. Some of the spectators had begun chanting civil rights slogans from the sixties.

“You in a mood for advice?” He raised his voice above the din.

“Everyone’s Judge Hardy today,” I said loudly. “Do I have a choice?”

“No.”

“Then I guess I’m in a mood to listen.”

He scrutinized me, his eyes white slashes in his shiny black face. Then he nodded a nod that if I had blinked I would have missed completely. “I guess that’s as much as I’ll ever be able to expect from you. If I remember right you were raised Catholic.”

“Episcopalian. Now I’m an agnostic. Atheists don’t ask questions I can’t answer and believers don’t answer questions I don’t ask. They both think there’s hope for me.”

“Who cares? Just light a candle, if that’s what Episcopalians do, and pray that your playmates from last night chilled that girl. Because if they didn’t, guess who’s got the best motive in their eyes. There’s no appeal from the court of instant reprisal.”

“Catchy,” I said. “Any line on Smith yet?”

He said something unworthy of him and plunged into the sea of surging bodies.

The boys from the Tactical Mobile Unit had drawn a broken line of sawhorses around the area where my car was parked and stationed officers in the spaces between. They were young, and held absolute faith in the varnished brown nightsticks in their hands. No one had told them during training that more officers had been beaten with their own sticks than had beaten others, or that at the first sign of riot the experienced cop’s instinctive reaction was to hurl his stick as far away from him as he could. Alderdyce got out his folder and stuck it in his outer breast pocket with the badge showing. I had a badge too, from the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department, but it was honorary and wouldn’t have gotten me past the ticket window at a Don Knotts film festival. The lieutenant instructed the uniforms to let me through. The clamor of voices was terrific.

A group of strangers in suits and sport jackets were gathered around the open trunk, badges twinkling in the slanted afternoon sunlight. One, a slim youth straight out of the 1955 high school yearbook—complete with crewcut hair and horn-rimmed glasses—was putting instruments away in a shiny black metal case balanced atop the Cutlass’s rear bumper. Medical examiners were getting younger too. The whole world was under thirty and I was Genghis Khan’s saddle.

Another lad, black, with a modified afro and a leather case of different design under one arm, stepped forward to greet Alderdyce.

“Two or three clear prints, Lieutenant. Looks like we got a match on the driver’s door handle and steering wheel. Want me to run ’em through the computer, or what?”

“First check them against Walker, Amos,” John growled. “Way things have been going, you probably won’t have to do anything else. And dust the gym. That shapes up to be the murder scene.”

The other’s grin was broad and blinding against his coffee-colored skin. “Got a suspect already, huh? Gee, that’s great work.”

“Meet Walker, Amos.” The lieutenant jerked a thumb at me.

The smile fell. Fingerprint experts aren’t used to dealing with suspects face to face. I picked up his grin and tried it on for size.

“I don’t bite,” I told him. “Hard.”

“Well—” he said, and stood there gazing at a point halfway between John and me. Then he turned and strode purposefully away. Alderdyce watched the retreat, shaking his head.

“Babies.”

I said, “Don’t be intolerant. You were one once.”

“I wish you could convince my kids of that.” A piece of asphalt the size of a softball glanced off his shoulder and landed on the pavement with a clatter. He spun on the crowd, glaring. No one stepped out to confess.

“Getting ugly, John.” This from Hornet, who had just finished speaking over the radio in the unmarked unit. “It’s all that shit about police vengeance—Turkel and Gross. They’re saying the department offed the girl to try and smoke Smith out. That race thing, same as always.”

“Why pick on me? Do I look white in this light?”

The sergeant looked embarrassed. “Aw, hell, John. You know how they feel about black cops.”

“No.” Alderdyce pushed his face close to Hornet’s. “How do they feel about black cops?”

He shuffled around some. “Christ, you’ve heard them. Turncoat. Traitor.”

“Uncle Tom?”

Hornet hesitated, then met his superior’s gaze. “Yeah.” It was barely audible. Then he spoke up. “Maybe we need more uniforms.”

“No.” Now the lieutenant was shuffling. He brushed asphalt dust off his brown coatsleeve, avoiding the other’s eyes. “Not yet, anyway. It’d be like waving a red flag in front of a bull.” Turning to walk around the sergeant, he saw me.

“What are you gaping at?”

I reached up and pushed my mouth shut.

He made his way to the car, where the medical examiner was charging a new-looking briar pipe. Since he looked pretty new himself, the impression was of a kid playing Sherlock Holmes in a school play.

“When’d it happen. Doc?” Alderdyce asked.

The M.E. struck a match and applied it to the bowl. Speaking between puffs: “Beats (chug-chug) me. Leave a body (chug-chug) in a trunk (chug-chug) on a day like this (chug-chug), it’s anybody’s guess.”

John stretched out an arm and took the pipe from the other’s mouth. “Guess.”

The youth stiffened indignantly, then adjusted his glasses. “Not later than sunrise. Body temperature won’t tell me anything; it must have been a hundred and fifty degrees in that trunk. Rigor mortis is complete, but there’s a six-hour margin for error in figuring that. I’ll have to get inside and determine how far putrefaction has advanced before I can say anything definite.”

“Early this morning, then.”

“Or late last night. You wanted a guess. I won’t stand by it in court.”

“That’s the D.A.’s headache. Thanks, Doc. Sorry about the chimney.” He gave back the pipe.

“These things aren’t as easy to light as they show on TV.” He ignited a fresh match. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call me Doc. I don’t call you fuzz.”

“Okay, kid.”

The sergeant was standing where we had left him. Alderdyce directed him to take the photographer and check out the gymnasium, then escorted me to the unmarked car. As I climbed in:

“You were kind of rough on Sergeant Honeybee back there.”

“That’s Hornet.” He started the engine. “Worry about yourself. And plan on doing without wheels for tonight. You’re getting a free vacuuming, courtesy of the lab.” He executed a neat three-point turn inside the sawhorses, waited for the morgue wagon to pass on its way in, and started crawling through the simmering crowd. Something struck the rear window with a crack and bounded off the trunk. He ignored it and kept rolling.

I
T WAS NEARLY SIX
when I left headquarters. The air smelled of hot metal and monoxide. Even the hydrants were sweating. My stiff neck was worse, and if someone had come along smoking a cigarette while I stood stretching on the bottom step I’d have mugged him for it.

Under questioning, I had repeated my story yet again, this time to a tape recorder, and squinted at mugs from the department’s file on black militants. Deak Ridder had been among them, but I didn’t point him out. He didn’t look like one of the group that had tap-danced on my skull, and since the cops weren’t tipping their hand neither was I. If any of the others were pictured I didn’t recognize them. Maybe if someone had held up a boot in front of each face—

I took a cab to my office. It was a new crate with clean carpeting and no burn holes in the leatherette upholstery, but the driver had a blind spot for potholes and tried twice to put my head through the roof. “Sorry,” he said after the second near-concussion.

“That’s okay,” I replied. “You’ll make it next time.”

I had him wait in front of a drugstore while I went in and bought a carton of Winstons. The rest of the trip I smoked and watched the scenery hurtle past. Figuring how to square things with Alderdyce when he found out I was sitting on vital information. Because he would find out, and when it got around that Walker wasn’t playing by the rules I’d have to find somewhere else to ply my trade. Lansing? Too many politicians in those capital towns. I’d spend half my time following husbands and other husbands’ wives to cheesy motels and the other half trying to collect my fee. Flint? Nothing interesting ever happens in Flint. Another state? I’d be forty before I had the geography down to where I could operate, and a private investigator at forty I didn’t want to be. Not that I had the kind of skills that would be useful in any other line except police work—and a forty-year-old cop is even sadder.

At my building the driver stared at my fifty-cent tip as if it were radioactive. “Invest in a helmet,” I advised him. He tried to leave tread marks on my toe. Cabbies have no sense of humor

I had customers in my outer office the way I had six figures in my savings account. The new magazines on the coffee table dated even as I glanced in their direction. Go try and show consideration for the clientele.

The sanctum sanctorum smelled like a refrigerator in need of a cleaning. I opened the window to let in fresh smog and switched on the circular fan they’d found left over from a previous civilization when they dug the foundation for the building. It wasn’t noisy at all when there was demolition going on across the street. Dust stirred on the desk and a corner of the cheesecake calendar on the wall opposite lifted, offering a tantalizing glimpse of Miss September.

Sitting behind the desk I killed some time staring at the new wallpaper. Stylized brown butterflies on a shade of amber that didn’t show dirt, reminiscent of the pattern in my folks’ dining room when I was a kid. I wondered if they were still designing houses with dining rooms. All I knew for sure was that the wallpaper made the rest of the room look that much seedier.

Holding out on the cops is a double-edged sword. I couldn’t count on them for simple information like Ridder’s current address. Just for the pure hell of it I looked him up in the city directory. He wasn’t listed. Then I got a brainstorm and dialed Barry Stackpole’s private number at the
News
.

“Rumor mill.” He sounded alert and youthful. I hated him when he was like that, which was most of the time.

“Walker” I said. “How’s the gangster beat?”

“Amos the shamus. Hell, there’s no glamor in it anymore. Tony and Vito Jack are in and out of the slam and Tony Z’s up to his ears in indictments. You heard Morningstar’s dead.”

“I heard.” I’d done a job for the old man a while back. “Listen, this might be out of your ballpark. Black militants.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Whatever I can about a party named Deak Ridder.” I spelled it. “I’m told he fronted for a while out at Rouge, but that’s not current. I would be ever so grateful if you can come up with an address.”

“How grateful?”

“A fifth of McMaster’s. Two if you can have it for me in an hour. I’m at the office.”

“Fifths, remember,” he said after a pause. “None of that half-liter shit.”

“Do I sound like a Canuck?” Barry was born in Montreal.

“You’d never pass the literacy test. Later.” He cut the connection.

It was time to report. I gave the Sturtevants a try, but the line was busy. It still was five minutes later. Suddenly I was very hungry. I got the beeper out of the desk and clipped it inside my jacket just in case Barry called early, and hotfooted it down to the counter on the corner. Oscar of the Waldorf would have denied parentage of the tuna fish sandwich I got, but at least it came before I took a bite out of the waitress. At the register I bought a package of English walnuts. I was cracking the first one in my lap at the desk with the stapler I’d broken cracking the last batch when my door opened and a black man walked in.

“You’re quiet,” I observed. I hadn’t heard him coming through the outer door.

“I practice.” He had an effortless voice, drawly with a hint of a whine on the
i’
s and
a’
s. He was considerably over six feet tall and weighed about a hundred and forty pounds. His beanpole frame was draped in a shapeless paisley shirt, tail out, and stiff jeans with patches on patches. He had sandals on his feet. His lean face was all planes and hollows, with deepset gray eyes and a mouth as broad as an airstrip. I didn’t know him from George Washington Carver.

“Quiet men don’t usually require my services,” I said. “How can I make your life easier?”

“You can start by putting your hands on top of the desk.” He swung a long leg over the customer’s chair as if mounting a horse and sat. In the same movement he whipped a big automatic out of his hip pocket and pointed it at my breastbone.

I looked at him rather than at the gun. Its expression never told anyone anything.

“I don’t think so.”

His eyes smoldered in their sockets, and for a moment he looked ready to squeeze the trigger. Then he flicked the gun nonchalantly in an armed man’s shrug. “Maybe you got jock itch. Anyway, I don’t think you sit with a piece in your lap day after day just waiting for someone like me to come in and stick one in your face, so have it your way. But wind your watch and you’re a mural on the wall.”