The Midnight Man (16 page)

“You saying we wouldn’t?” His tone would cut paper.

“This isn’t
The Rookies,
Sergeant. Out of three cop-killers, two are dead. I’ll give you Turkel’s suicide, if that’s what it was. Don’t tell me every badge between here and the West Coast isn’t hoping to be the one who pulls off the hat trick. If you try I’ll throw up all over John’s desk.”

“I don’t know what happened when you were a kid to put you off police, but I don’t work that way and neither does John.”

“I don’t know you. I don’t even know John anymore. Do you?”

He looked down at his pudgy hands lying flat atop the desk. When he looked up again we were talking about something else. “Think the guy that threatened you in your office is the one that shot at you?”

I watched the fly on the wall. It hadn’t budged from its spot next to the door.

“He could be,” I said. “I doubt it. He had his chance. My bluff wasn’t that good.”

He reached into a side pocket of his goofy jacket and plinked two small brass shells onto my side of the desk. “These were found in the gutter in front of Ridder’s building. I guess the other one fell inside the van. Recognize the caliber?”

I picked one up and studied the flanged end. “I ought to. I handled them enough in Nam. It’s standard ammunition for the M-16 rifle. The Gun that Lost the East.”

“Also the gun Laura Gaye and her friends used to pry Smith out of custody.”

“Important bastard, aren’t I?” I put down the shell.

“Could be that’s the way they see you. Who besides the supervisor at Rouge knew you were going there to talk to Ridder?”

“No one.”

He watched me from under his lids. “I sure hope nobody’s leg’s getting pulled this time through.”

“I’m not hopeless.” I thought of the tinsmith I’d worked over at the plant.

“Maybe.” He picked up the shells. “Kind of puny slugs to do what they done.”

“That’s because the gun doesn’t shoot them, it throws them.”

“Huh?”

I made a somersaulting gesture with my index finger “They tumble through the air end over end. Makes them useless beyond about sixty yards, but within that range they tear hell out of anything they hit. You saw the wall.”

He pressed his lips tight. “Nice people, these militants.”

“They’re in a nice racket. Who do you like for Ridder?”

“Same as his sister. Bassett looked good for that one at first, but he’s aces up with the Oklahoma police and there was no motive. He’s been on the hot stick too long to lose control. It looks like Alonzo Smith’s good friends chilled her because she was a security risk, then did for her brother for the same reason, or maybe on account of he made a big stink out of her going down. Hell, it could of been Smith himself done it, for that matter.”

“Neat,” I replied. “For you. Hang Smith and you scrape two murders off the blotter on top of the Mt. Hazel shooting. Except that your theory sucks wind. If Ridder was already dead when I got to him, why try to kill me? If I were any good at interrogating corpses I’d invest in a pointed hat and a crystal ball.”

“So who said these nuts think rationally? Maybe they don’t even talk to each other. Organization ain’t their strong suit or they wouldn’t be fighting against it.”

“Got all the holes plugged, haven’t you, Sergeant?”

“Bullshit.” His irritated cheeks glowed hot pink through the white salve. “I been nineteen years a cop, thirteen with this department. I seen maybe two thousand cases presented to the D.A., and not one of them was airtight. You said it yourself, this ain’t TV. We don’t get one case at a time and all the time in the world to question every suspect and sift through all the evidence and then make a brilliant deduction resulting in an arrest and immediate conviction, just before the last commercial break. I can spend just so much effort tracing the lost button, the footprint in the zinnia bed, the charred match, knowing that if something does come of it, nine times out of ten a clumsy cop is responsible for its being there in the first place. So don’t talk to me about plugging holes.”

“That’s my job,” I said.

“Wrong again. Your job is to take pictures through keyholes and ferret out perjurers to help some shyster whittle down a charge of first-degree homicide to a suspended fine for pissing on the sidewalk. But not much longer brother. We’re recommending they lift your license in Lansing. And that could be just the beginning. Suppression of evidence is a felony in this state, but any charges coming out of that will be up to the D.A.”

“In the meantime, can I go?”

He smiled his fat man’s smile, as spare as the décor along Death Row and loaded with secret knowledge. “Aw. And here I was busting my ass to keep you entertained.”

“You were doing okay until you started making speeches at me.”

“Your story checks out with Bassett’s, so far as it goes. So dangle, wiseass.” The smile wasn’t even a memory.

I got up. My muscles creaked. Just being close to the wheels of justice had ground me down.

“And tell your friends we’re not an answering service,” he said to my back. “Someone named Iris called for you a while ago. She wants you to get back to her.”

I turned and looked down at him for the first time since he’d entered. The customer’s chair was built low on purpose, to intimidate the occupant. “If I can get you a crack at Alonzo Smith, will that make any difference in your report to Lansing?”

“If you’re talking, I can’t hear you,” he said, interesting himself in a paper from the
OUT
basket. “I’m deaf.”

At the door I found out finally why my fly hadn’t moved. It was a nailhead in the wall.

This time they’d let me drive my own car in. I pulled out of the police garage under an overcast sky and tried the radio, but the music was too lively for me all over the dial and I turned it off. There should have been organs. I deserved organs. They play them for the dead. I don’t know why. There’d be plenty of them playing for the next couple of days, thanks to my clever manipulation of the facts in this case. They ought to play one whenever I enter a room. Amos Walker, the Midnight Man. Watch out for him. His touch is death.

I bought a copy of the
Free Press
on my way to the office, mainly out of habit. The material relating to the Smith hunt was as stale as a tour guide’s jokes. Nearing my building, I cruised past a row of parked cars and cranked the Cutlass into a tight space half a block down from the entrance. My mind was so full of the case I didn’t react to the van standing across the street until I was in the foyer and the glass door was closing behind me. The painted sunset was distinctive.

G
ET OUT,
W
ALKER.

They were amateurs or they’d have ditched the van before this. That didn’t help me any. Assuming they were whom I suspected, they’d helped with the execution of two police officers and the maiming of a third, staged a successful raid on a heavily guarded courtroom, and if Sergeant Hornet was right, murdered two of their own without a qualm. Amateurs like those I didn’t need.

Get out, Walker.

That I was still alive was evidence enough that no one was in the van. So they were in the building. On the flip side, they might have planted the vehicle there just to give me heart failure, and split. Maybe they were miles away laughing at the petrified hoojie. But I didn’t figure them for a sense of humor.

Get out, Walker. Call the cops and have them send a riot team down to flush out the building. Don’t be a graveyard hero. Who’ll care a week from today?

It was good advice, except that they might have thought of it themselves and stationed a shooter in the van after all to close the trap. After the first attempt they might be leery of an execution on another public street, but that didn’t mean they’d chance a second escape.

A guy could stand there figuring all the twists and turns and end up chewing off his tail. The steel fire door to the stairs was propped open as usual, exposing the first of three narrow flights to my floor. I’d long thought it a prime spot for an ambush. This was my chance to prove it. Drawing the revolver, I took the folded newspaper from under my arm and underhanded it up the shaft. The pages exploded outward like frightened bats.

The waiting M-16 stuttered too fast to count, riddling the flying newsprint and knocking large chunks of brown plaster off the wall. The shots rang deafeningly in the echoing stairwell. Brittle blue smoke glazed the air.

Silence crackled at the end of the burst. Shaking myself loose, I ran noisily to the front door and heaved it open. While it drifted shut against the pressure of the pneumatic closer I lightfooted back the other way and withdrew behind the open stairwell door. It had received a fresh coat of thick green paint recently; turpentine filled my nostrils.

The front door settled into the frame with a barely audible click. A beat, and he came pounding down the steps, cradling the fat, sausage-shaped carbine along his forearm. The broad vented tails of an unseasonably long overcoat billowed out behind him.

I waited until he had a hand on the door handle, then cocked the Smith & Wesson. The crunch was loud in the silence following the shots. He hunched his shoulders and started to turn.

“Uh-uh,” I said. “Unless you want that hot coat ventilated.”

His shoulders went slack. He was black, not very tall, with a short thick neck and close-cropped hair on a bullet head. His back was mounded conspicuously with muscle. The barbells knew they’d had a workout when he was through with them. I thought I knew him from somewhere, but maybe that was prejudice.

“Put the chattergun on safety, squat down, and slide it this way,” I directed. “If you can do all that without turning around I would be ever so appreciative.”

“I can’t. It’s on a sling.”

He had a very deep voice.

“Aren’t you the clever one. Do your shoes explode too? Peel off the coat and climb out. Slow, like striptease.”

He obeyed, dropping the coat to the floor with a clunk that coats don’t usually make. The harness was fashioned crudely from belts, and fixed over one shoulder so that the carbine could be swung out from under his arm. Willie Lee Gross had worn a similar rig the day he was killed.

“Bad idea,” I told him. “This time of year the coat’s a dead giveaway.”

He undid the sling without comment. His white T-shirt clung wet and transparent to his lumpy back. Finishing, he sank to his haunches and prepared to propel the carbine backward. The scaly green door to my right opened and the building superintendent stepped through, climbing into his suspenders. He stopped when he saw what was going on. A toilet whispered and gurgled behind him.

“Something, Mr. Rosecranz?” I kept my attention on the gunman, still squatting with one hand on the M-16.

“I heard a noise. Shots, maybe.” The super’s eyes were large in his tattered face.

“Firecrackers, Mr. Rosecranz.”

“I don’t think firecrackers was it,” he said.

“Sure, firecrackers. Left over from the Fourth. You know kids.”

“No kids in this building.”

“Of course not. If you were a kid, would you set off fireworks in your own building?”

He looked from me to the crouching figure, and from him to the stairwell. “What about them holes? Who’s going to pay to replaster?”

“Send me a bill, Mr. Rosecranz.”

“Suppose the other tenants complain about the noise?” he persisted. “I should tell them firecrackers?”

“What tenants, Mr. Rosecranz? There are only four at the moment. I’m one, and two are off on vacation.”

“There’s Mr. Styles on the fourth floor.”

“Styles is in numbers, Mr. Rosecranz. The telephones alone would have drowned out the noise. You don’t see him down here, do you?”

He spent some more small change looking from one of us to the other. Then he blew his large nose into a red handkerchief that crackled when he stuffed it back into his hip pocket, and grasped the doorknob. “I hope this don’t become a habit.”

“It won’t, Mr. Rosecranz. See you later, Mr. Rosecranz. Mr. Rosecranz?”

He almost had the door shut. He paused.

I poked a twenty through the gap. “Firecrackers, right?”

“Happy Fourth.” The door closed with the bill on his side.

I smiled at the back of the black man’s head. “Mr. Rosecranz.”

“Who gives a fuck?” The carbine slid my way, its receiver and stock scraping loudly on the linoleum. I stopped it with my foot and told him to face the wall across from the super’s door. Bracing him, I bent and picked up the M-16. A lot of stamped metal with a cheap wooden stock, shaped like a grease gun. I broke loose the straight clip and inspected the load. Four gone, enough for the brief burst that had made confetti out of today’s
Free Press.
He would have reloaded after the attempt on Whittaker.

I leaned the gun against the wall behind the propped-open door to the stairs and went over to find out what had clunked in his coat. I knew what it was the second my hand closed on it in the right pocket. The Luger’s clip was full. It was nice having it back. I stuck it under my waistband and frisked my captive. He was practically defenseless. I put a set of brass knuckles in one side pocket of my jacket and a switchblade and jackknife in the other. He didn’t have any hand grenades or rocket launchers.

“White motherfucker,” he muttered.

I backed up a step. “Say again.”

He said it again.

“Just wanted to make sure I recognized the voice.” I reached out and slammed his forehead into the wall. He groaned. I brought a knee up hard between his spread legs, and as he was doubling over I grasped his belt, planted my feet wide, and whirled him clear across the room into the opposite wall. He struck on his back and began to slide. I walked over and hoisted him up by his damp shirtfront. Holding him with one hand, I started batting his large face with the other, left to right, right to left, left to right, in rhythm. Blood spurted from his nose onto the T-shirt.

At this point a fat guy carrying a briefcase entered by the main door. I paused, hand raised in mid-bat. He stopped long enough to take in the spectacle, then mounted the stairs and passed from sight. If he was an associate of Styles’s he’d seen it before. I went back to work.