The Midnight Man (28 page)

“Good to see you, hoss. I was afeared we’d miss each other.” He wiped his hands on a stained rag, biceps straining the material of his shirt as he worked the fingers.

“I wanted to apologize for leaving you dangling today,” I said. “It wasn’t my idea.”

“Well, you never know which way the spit’s going to fly.” He kneaded the rag some more. “I got to admit, I had him pegged for the Chrysler. That was damn good figuring, crowding him into that there tunnel. Like treeing a possum.”

“That was Alderdyce, not me. I was just along for the scenery.”

“I guess you got to be one to think like one.”

“They’re talking promotion,” I said, ignoring the slur. “For setting himself up as a decoy, not for killing Smith. He’ll be lucky if he gets a letter of commendation. It would look too much like they were rewarding him for the other thing. The civil rights people are already screaming execution. Could be they’re right.”

“You know him better than me.”

“That’s not what I mean. I think John saw a gun when he spotted Smith hiding behind that bus. After all the publicity his case got I don’t think it was possible for an angry, exhausted cop to look at him without seeing one, whether he had one or not. But we’ll never know for sure, because Hornet got to the body first. I wouldn’t put it past his type to plant a throwaway piece on Smith just to protect his superior. A lot of cops carry one for just such an emergency.”

“It don’t really matter,” he said. “Some men need killing.”

“Especially this one. Right?”

Something in my voice alerted him. “Hold on there, hoss. I told you that dead or alive stuff was just for the rubes. He wasn’t worth an iron penny to me cold.”

“You didn’t care about the bounty,” I countered. “This one was on the house.”

The sun was shining full on his big red face. He reached up and tugged down the curled brim of his hat, then unhooked the cane from his pocket and stood fiddling with the crook. Not leaning on it. “Let me know when you start making sense, hoss.”

It was beginning to grate, that
hoss.
I jumped in swinging. “It’s all in the way you look at things. In your case, bounty hunting was the perfect disguise, like hiding something in the most obvious place. It’s such a bizarre occupation I couldn’t see around it. Mysteries like your sources of information seemed explained by your larger-than-life image. The wardrobe, the John Ford dialogue, the chewing tobacco no one actually saw you chew—they were all camouflage to keep guys like me from asking too many questions. It was when I stopped thinking of you as a bounty hunter that things started figuring. Am I boring you?”

He was frowning down at the cane. “Not so far. I got a long attention span.”

“Deak Ridder held the key to Alonzo Smith’s whereabouts,” I continued. “He planned the raid on the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice. That much I got from his kid sister Tallulah. When she turned up dead—police thought at the hands of the other militants—he got sick enough of the whole business to talk. Some of us thought that was why he died. It wasn’t, though it
was
why he died the way he did, strangling himself with his own bonds. There are only two reasons for killing a man slowly like that. Revenge is one. The other’s information.

“If there was any reason to doubt that you’re a master of misdirection, Bum, you proved me wrong on that one. When I got to Ridder’s apartment and saw you lurking outside the door I assumed you were going in. I didn’t suspect that you’d been on your way
out
and just reversed directions when you heard me coming up the stairs. As tricks go that one dates back to the last ice age, but I bought it because of that subliminal cowboy ethic you carry around with you.” I paused. “What did you do, promise to cut the ropes if he told you where to find Smith?”

“You’re telling the story. Did I?”

I said, “It didn’t come to me in a blinding flash of inspiration. The suspicion was there all the time. I just didn’t want to entertain it, because it didn’t work. There are plenty of ways to obtain information without committing murder. Ridder’s death had a ritual nature, like a sentence pronounced and carried out. I couldn’t fit you to that. Besides, I’d made up my mind by this time that whoever cooled him was also his sister’s murderer, and
that
was an act of pure passion. I couldn’t see you getting that het up over a five-thousand-dollar bounty. I kept spinning my wheels on that notion. It took a good jolt to get me loose. A whack on the head with a cane was what it took.”

He looked down at it again and smiled, but said nothing.

“We were talking about your first wife when you let me have it. I’m a nosy person or I’d pursue a more rewarding line of work, like raising chinchillas. After I came to and remembered who I was I got hold of a firm of investigators in Tulsa and asked them to look up that part of your life. They got back to me a little while ago.

“You had two sons by that marriage, Thomas and William. I imagine they were the boys I saw in those pictures the day I frisked your trailer. They were eight and six, respectively, when you were divorced. Irreconcilable differences. Your wife got custody. She remarried soon after and her new husband adopted the boys. The report gets sketchy after that. I don’t know what became of Thomas.”

“He sells real estate in Texas,” Bassett said. “Got a wife and three kids, and he don’t know a revolver from a shotgun or which end to point.”

“Bully for him. I do know what happened to William. I didn’t, until I found out his stepfather’s name, the name your younger son took when he was adopted. He was known as William Flynn from the age of seven until almost three weeks ago, when he was shot to death near Mt. Hazel Cemetery in the same ambush that killed his senior partner and crippled Van Sturtevant for life. You were on your way here to kill Alonzo Smith before there ever was a bounty, to avenge your son’s murder.”

“I was hoping to kill all three.”

His voice was strained. The fingers on the crook of the cane were cramped and white.

“The law moved too fast,” he continued jerkily. “I was still packing when they got Gross. Then Turkel went down, and then when I was on the road Smith turned himself in. But he was alive, hoss. That was the main thing. He was alive.

“Billy was the one that wanted most to be like me. But too many folks back home knew he was my son, so he come up here to make his own reputation as a police officer. He’d of done it, too, if anyone had gave him half a chance. If he wasn’t murdered while he was still learning.”

“From the standpoint of justice,” I told him, “Smith and Ridder deserved what they got. But you shouldn’t have killed the girl, Bum. She never hurt anybody. She just happened to be Deak’s sister, and she couldn’t help that any more than Billy could help being your son.”

“She was doped up to the eyes. I got Ridder’s address out of her but I didn’t know who he was. I wanted to know where Smith was hiding. She kept drifting in and out. I shook her. I slapped her. I reckon I slapped her too hard. I didn’t mean to. I was blind crazy.”

He was teetering. I lowered my voice. “You slipped this morning, when you said you lied about going into the commune because you didn’t want to get involved with a murder investigation. At the time you told me you didn’t go in no one knew there had been a murder. No one but the murderer. You.

“You’d cooled off by the time you came out of the place and saw me staggering up that alley. I must have been there a while by then. After I passed out at your feet you went through my wallet, and when you found out I was an investigator you had a good idea what I was doing there. You took my keys and loaded Tallulah’s body into the trunk of my car and locked it and threw away the keys so I’d think I lost them in the fight. I was a prime candidate for a frame.”

“Not you,” he corrected. “It was too weak. When the law heard your story I knew they’d think the niggers done it to keep her quiet and tried to pin it on you. The double-double cross, we call it.”

“You could have left me in that alley, but I’d seen you, so you took me to your place for doctoring. Why’d you call Iris?”

“I wanted someone to hold you there while I checked out Ridder’s place. Not for long—I just wanted time to follow up my lead before you found the girl in your trunk and we all went in for questioning. Only Ridder wasn’t there.”

“He was working down at Rouge,” I said. “But you didn’t know that, any more than I knew where he lived. We came at him from opposite ends and met in the middle. It must have taken him a long time to die or you wouldn’t still have been there when I showed up.”

“Seven hours.” He was watching the salesman extolling the virtues of mobile-home living to a young couple on the other side of the lot. The cane’s crook rotated rhythmically between Bum’s calloused palms. “A man can hold out longer than you’d think when he knows if he relaxes he’ll choke. I stood watching him the whole time, after I got him to tell me about the place on Bagley.”

“Was it worth it?”

He looked at me. His marblelike eyes were startling in the ruddy-tan face. “It would of been, if I got to Smith first.”

I heard sirens in the distance. They might have been going anyplace. I kept him talking.

“You’re pretty open about all this.”

“So far we’re just two guys talking. There’s no proof.”

“Proof enough to hold you. The cops don’t need me to make the connection between you and your son; they’d have done that eventually after the confusion died down. That’s motive. Means and opportunity they’ve got. Most convictions in this country are obtained on circumstantial evidence alone.”

“I can’t see your percentage in this,” he said. “Still sore about that knock on the head?”

“It’s not my head. It’s the girl. You can justify wanting to kill Alonzo Smith till the cows come home, but you can’t explain away her death. That one you’ll have to go down for.”

“I got to go in before I go down.” He choked up on the cane until he was holding it in the middle, the tip foremost.

“You’ve been playing cowboy too long. Bum. These days you can’t just ride out to the Territories and duck the law. They’ll come after you. You won’t like being on the other end of a manhunt.”

“They don’t build cells to fit me, hoss.”

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Don’t say, ‘They’ll never take me alive.’ Spare me that.”

He grinned. “The good lines have all been took, hoss. So I reckon I just won’t say anything.”

He threw the cane at me, but I’d seen that coming and sidestepped it, drawing the Smith & Wesson at the same time. He already had his .44 out. Death measured me. But he hesitated with his finger on the trigger.

I didn’t. I shot him in the right arm. He grunted, fell back a step, and switched hands in a neat border shift. I shot him again, in the chest this time. He coughed. A little cough for such a big man, as if to get someone’s attention. But there was blood on his lips. His teeth still showed in a grin, but he wasn’t looking at me anymore, or at anything else. He wasn’t there to look.

He toppled forward, all of a piece like a great tree until his knees touched the trailer hitch and he jackknifed. His muscles bunched twice and relaxed. The big gun slithered out of his grasp onto the ground.

The corners of my mouth ached. I realized then that I was grinning too, grinning like a demented gargoyle. The sirens, louder now, sounded like something on the dark end of a terrifying dream.

From where I stood they might have been organs.

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.