The Midnight Man (3 page)

“I was wondering when you’d show up.”

I resisted the impulse to hunch my shoulders at the sound of the voice behind me, and turned around. John Alderdyce—black, balding, and impeccably tailored as usual in a gabardine suit and gray silk sport shirt open at the neck— was entering on silent rubber heels through the door I’d just used. The whites of his eyes glistened malignantly under heavy, blue-black brows. He was mopping his palms with a paper napkin like the kind you get in hospital commissaries.

“Was I that bad?” I started to place a cigarette between my lips, then put it back in the pack when the pubescent nurse or whatever with the clipboard glared at me.

“I’ve heard your Japanese accent before,” John said. “Follow me.” He turned and retraced his steps through the door and down a shallow corridor into a bite-size waiting room with pastel walls and some fruit salad hanging in frames. We had two short sofas and an ugly plant in an artificial wood stand all to ourselves. There were no ashtrays. That’s how they save on
NO SMOKING
signs today. Neither of us sat down.

“How’s Sturtevant?” I asked.

He looked grave, which meant nothing. He always did. “Still in surgery. The doctors say the bullet’s lying against his spinal cord and they won’t know how much damage it’s done till it’s out.”

“I heard he was critical.”

“You heard right. The best neurosurgeon in the place has been working on him for four hours.” He paused. “There’s about a ninety percent chance he won’t walk again even if the operation’s successful.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Why didn’t you identify yourself over the phone?” he asked.

I moved my shoulders. “I didn’t want you thinking I was mixing in your case. Lectures I don’t need.”

“Aren’t you? I was just thinking of getting in touch with you when you called the hospital.” He slid a pasteboard rectangle from an inside pocket and held it out. It was one of my cards. “This is a modern department, Walker. When someone gets shot and we want answers we send his shirt down to the lab for tests. The pockets get checked first.”

“That was personal,” I said. “It has nothing to do with the shooting.”

“Indulge a detective’s curiosity.”

I gave him a condensed version of the incident on the Edsel Ford. “I’m sure I can count on you to keep that off the books,” I added. “Sturtevant probably didn’t file a report, and a hole in the back is enough without Internal Affairs jumping up and down on it.”

He nodded absently and looked as if he needed a smoke. As usual. I couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t trying to quit. “I’ll ask Sturtevant about it when and if he pulls through. I hope for your sake your stories mesh.”

“So do I. You’re ugly when you’re mad.”

“That’s what my wife says. But we’ve got three kids, so I don’t credit it.”

“What you got on the shooters?”

The lines in his face deepened. “Everything but where they are right now. The usual stuff: Born in the ghetto of alcoholic parents, slashing tires at nine, in and out of juvenile hall at fourteen. Alonzo Smith’s kind of an exception. He was a bad kid like the others, but when he turned eighteen he joined the marines for a three-year hitch. Most of them don’t even bother to register for the draft, when there is one.”

“How was his record?”

“Not as bad as you’d think. Black marks here and there, and once he did a week in the stockade for insubordination, but on the whole he seems to have taken to military discipline. That could be why he was so eager to join this neo-Black Panther group he and the others belonged to.”

“Just them?”

He shook his head. “There are more, sad to say. Assholes all. They’ve been in and out of the slam so much their fingers are stained permanently with ink. We’re rounding them up now. One of them knows something.”

“I’m sure they can’t wait to get to the tape recorder.”

“Smith has a girlfriend. We’ll work on her.” His eyes darted toward the entrance and back to me. They were set deep and very bright. “Smith, Turkel, Gross. I never told this to anyone, but whenever I start an investigation I always write the suspects’ names on a slip of paper and tape it to the bathroom mirror. That way I see them every morning when I’m shaving and I remember not to think about anything else for the rest of the day. But, you know? This is one time I won’t have to do that. Smith, Turkel, Gross. Nope. No chance of me forgetting to think about them.”

“How well did you know Sturtevant and the others?”

“Never met them. They whisked Sturtevant into surgery before I could question him. But I still won’t forget. Maybe it’s the names: Smith, Turkel, Gross. Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

“It’s not the names.”

He shrugged. I got out my battered pack of Winstons and offered him one. He accepted it. I took one for myself and lit them both. To hell with hospital regulations. The match went into the phony wood pot.

Alderdyce drew the smoke in so deep that very little of it came back out. “What’s your interest in this?” His eyes probed me like physician’s fingers.

“Purely personal, like I said.”

“Because he did you a good turn?” He looked skeptical.

“Not just that, although that would be plenty. I’m used to my neck and am apt to be very well disposed to anyone who saves it.” I knocked some nonexistent ash into the pot. “When I was halfway through boot camp I saw a drill sergeant blown to pieces by a percussion grenade some wag had rigged to his footlocker. One second he was there and the next he was a bloody twist of hide in a shredded uniform. I didn’t know him, but I was a while getting over it. When I read about what happened this morning I thought immediately of him. You never met Sturtevant; I only met him once. Does it make any sense?”

He looked at me strangely. “Don’t mix in, Walker.”

“Who, me?”

My guilelessness laid a large goose egg. “We dick around a lot about your work and my work and whether you should or shouldn’t get involved in police business, but this time it’s for real. There are going to be bodies on this one. Make an effort not to be one of them.”

He screwed out his stub in the moist black earth in the pot and looked back at me. I was smoking in silence.

“Say it,” he said.

“I’m just being grateful.”

“For what?”

“For not having my name taped on your bathroom mirror.”

He left. I finished my cigarette and went out a minute later. A small trim blonde was standing in the corridor, sniffling quietly into a sturdy handkerchief. She wore a tight black dress as if she were already in mourning, and her hair looked as if she had done it up in a hurry hours before and hadn’t touched it since.

“Mrs. Sturtevant?” I asked gently.

She lifted a tear-swollen face from the hanky. “Y-yes?” Her eyes focused on a point halfway between us.

I wrote something on the back of the card Alderdyce had given me, placed it in one of her hands, and departed with a whispered inadequacy. At the end of the hall I turned to watch her mouthing the words I’d scribbled: “No charge.”

That was my second mistake.

A
S
I
ENTERED THE
lobby, a tall old bird in a green surgical gown was chewing out a young orderly in a coarse stage whisper in front of a dozen nurses, patients, and visitors. He had a small, round head with a wild shock of snow-white hair mounted high on a skinny wattled neck and emphasized each imprecation with a downward slash of his thin right arm, like Hitler conducting Beethoven. The orderly took it without interrupting. When the older man finished the orderly clamped white-knuckled fingers around the handle of his empty gurney and pushed it and himself out of sight in the direction of the elevators. An embarrassed silence was soon shoved aside by the usual lobby sounds.

“He must have done something pretty terrible to rate all that,” I said, approaching the old man.

He swung his face on me and gave me the once-over with sharp old eyes that weighed, analyzed, tagged, and catalogued all in one motion. Red spots the size of quarters glowed high on his otherwise sallow cheeks, but were already fading. “He’s always hanging around the nurses’ station when he should be working. This is a hospital, not a singles bar. Who are you, sir?” His voice quivered on an iron core.

“My name’s Walker. I’m investigating the Sturtevant case. Are you the surgeon who performed the operation?”

His parchment face shrank in on itself distastefully. “I just spoke with your Lieutenant Alderdyce. If the medical profession were run like your police department, we’d be trying to take out the same appendix three times. Don’t you ever talk to each other?” He started walking, eating up yards of tiled corridor with each lanky stride. I had to sprint to catch up.

“I’m not on Alderdyce’s detail,” I said truthfully. “How’d it go?”

“The operation went fine. The patient will never walk again, that’s all.” He spat the words. “I wish that were the worst of it.”

“What’s the worst?” My voice came from half an inch in back of my tongue.

He shucked the gown, stuffed it into a wheeled hamper under the supervision of a short jowly woman in a pebbled white uniform dress and black hairnet, muttered something pleasant in her direction, and went through a door marked
STAFF ONLY
with me on his heels. The woman’s eyes followed his high thin back adoringly. He’d be the Robert Redford of the rubber-stocking set.

The doctors’ lounge had more personality than the waiting room and no screwy paintings. A significant glance passed between the surgeon and a bearded youth in a turtleneck and shapeless white coat seated on a vinyl-upholstered sofa, and the beard put down his medical journal and left. The old man poured coffee from a glass pot.

“Off the record?” He offered me some in a paper cone stuck in a plastic doohickey with a handle. I shook my head to the coffee but indicated that off the record was fine. He sipped. His chest and abdomen formed a perfect cylinder beneath his sweat-heavy T-shirt. His eyes nailed me to the wall.

“If you repeat it, I’ll deny I said anything. Between us, the operation should never have taken place. Sturtevant’s blood pressure is so high you’d need a master’s degree in algebra to measure it. The anesthetic alone was enough to cause a stroke.”

“Whose decision was it to operate?”

“Mine.”

“I see,” I said. “I think I will have some of that coffee.”

“Help yourself.”

I splashed steaming yellow liquid into a cone and doohickey. “So why’d you go ahead and cut?”

“I think you refer to it as a judgment call in your work,” he explained, leaning his tailbone against a cafeteria table cluttered with papers and manuscripts in curled manila covers. “The bullet was lodged in the fibrocartilage between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, in such a way that a shift of a hundredth of an inch in any direction could cause paralysis, even death. We might have waited and tried to bring down his blood pressure before going in, but the risk was too great. A simple cough could have killed him. I judged his chances of survival to be greater with the operation than without it. Mrs. Sturtevant agreed when I explained the situation to her.”

“Yet he is paralyzed.”

He made a face and set his cup down on a clear space of table. It might have been the coffee. “There was too much nerve and tissue damage. What concerns me is what will happen if he suffers a series of strokes, which at this point is the only
if.
We can’t administer anticoagulants to prevent them without the danger of starting him bleeding again. He’s lost too much blood already. So he’ll have at least one seizure. If he has more, they’ll leave him either a vegetable or a corpse.”

I listened to the hum of the air conditioner for a moment. “Does his wife know?”

“I watered it down for her. Anything else could result in a suit for malpractice.” He watched me with hard yellow eyes, the color of the coffee. “That’s the main difference between medicine and the law, Mr. Walker. The law is an exact science.”

I drank up and ditched the cup. “You’ve been very candid and helpful. Thanks, Dr.—?”

“Praetorius.” Straightening, he drove his surgeon’s fingers deep into my fist to protect them from a gorilla like me. His palm was steel-belted and as dry as an AMA finding. “Alvin Praetorius.”

I gave him a grin I didn’t feel. “Praetorius? Wasn’t that the name of the evil scientist in
The Bride of Frankenstein
?”

“I wouldn’t know.” He spoke coldly. “I don’t watch children’s pictures.”

The humidity in the parking lot slapped me in the face like a mugger’s glove, soggy-hot and smelling of air breathed and rejected. Still, I preferred it to the blander atmosphere inside. Out here they strangled you, shot you, slipped poison into your soup
du jour,
knocked you in the head and sliced you up and mailed your remains all over the map, but at least when you died they didn’t leave you lying there with your eyes and mouth gaping and tubes sticking out everywhere. Or slip you something questionable and cut into you on the assumption that life as a cabbage is better than no life at all. I like horror movies. In them the mad doctor always gets his before he goes too far.

The heat wave dragged on through the next couple of days, not really a wave at all but a motionless mass of breathless nothing squatting over all of southern lower Michigan and part of Ohio. I spent them in my undershirt catching up on my solitaire, waiting for the telephone to ring, and listening to the radio inform me that the dragnet was drawing tight around Smith, Turkel, and Gross. I’d believe that when they stopped telling me. Two days after the ambush, Sergeant Maxson was buried in full barbaric state. I caught the 11:00
P.M.
recap and glimpsed John Alderdyce and one or two other cops I recognized among the plainclothes men following the casket down the church steps. The boys from the uniform division looked as alike in their dress blues as hairpins. Flynn’s parents came from out West to take his body back home. No long blue lines or official eulogies for this rookie.

Owen Mullett called on Friday with the dope on Dooley Bass’s trip to Monroe, and on Saturday, when everyone else was cooling off in the Upper Peninsula or boating on Lake St. Clair, I was breathing diesel exhaust on US-24 South with my knees in my chest behind the wheel of an inconspicuous rented AMC Spirit. I crapped out. Bass delivered his machine tools like a loyal trucker and returned to Detroit an hour ahead of schedule. At least this time he didn’t notice me, for which I was grateful. He could have run over me and never felt a bump.