The Midnight Man (4 page)

While I was in Monroe, Willie Lee Gross swung a stockless .30-caliber carbine out from under a long coat while being questioned by police on a street in Atlanta, Georgia, and was shot to pieces where he stood. That made one name gone from the mirror of John Alderdyce’s bathroom.

I typed out a report on my Monroe excursion on the pre-Columbian Underwood in my office and delivered it in person to Mullett in his private thinking parlor on West Outer Drive Monday. He read it leaning back in a quilted leather chair behind a glass-topped desk you could have used for a skating rink, said something indelicate around the stem of his dead pipe, and filled me in on a load of Arrow shirts awaiting Dooley’s attention in Flint.

“How long you want to keep this up?” I asked him, for what had to be the dozenth time. “What if Bass turns up clean?”

“Then you’re free to meet with him and strike a deal for his biography. It should sell millions.”

I liked that. I didn’t care for Mullett and the brand of corporate bastard he represented, but somewhere under that two hundred and fifty pounds of executive luncheon there beat the heart of a born pain in the ass.

The next morning I was waiting at the warehouse in Flint when Dooley arrived to pick up the shirts. I ate a breakfast of dried dates washed down with stale cooler water while he was loading, and followed him down 1-75 fifty miles north of where it becomes the Chrysler. This time I was driving a green Citation, a little more roomy than the Spirit but just as gutless. Nowadays you stick out like a bug on a butter knife if you drive anything you can get into without a shoehorn.

Things began to look interesting when Dooley made an unscheduled exit just above Pontiac. I stayed several car lengths behind him for ten miles along a two-lane blacktop until he ran out of pavement, where the traffic thinned out and I got right on his rear bumper to avoid being seen in his side mirrors. When he pulled into a driveway leading to a sagging farmhouse with a weather-battered barn, I kept going until there was a hill between us, parked as far off the roadway as I could get, and sneaked back on foot with my Nikon, screwing on the telephoto lens as I went. Birds squawked in the trees and gravel crunched under my shoes. I switched to the overgrown roadbank.

By the time I got there, my socks clotted with burrs, the barn door was open and three men in work clothes were carrying cartons inside from the big trailer. Dooley was smoking and watching beside a fifth party in faded jeans and a red-and-white-striped tank top over a skinny frame. The party was holding a sawed-off shotgun with the muzzle pointed at the ground. He didn’t appear to be threatening anyone with it, least of all the driver. I clicked away.

I had exposed sixteen frames when one of the workers shouted and pointed to the big Edison pole I was crouching behind. He must have seen the sun glinting off the lens. I snapped one of him pointing for my trophy wall and took off at a gallop. There was shouting behind me, running footsteps, and then a hoarse roar that had no echo because it didn’t need one. Shot rattled down through the trees in front of me at the base of the hill. A door slammed. A mighty engine growled over and over and caught with a racket like balloons exploding in close succession. Brakes let go with a whoosh, followed by the familiar groaning of the gear-change.

I reached the Citation just as the great truck lumbered into the road, jackknifing for the turn and bringing down a shower of leaves and branches from the trees on the other side. I got the little motor started and floored the pedal. The rear wheels spat gravel and grass. I pulled away just as Dooley’s big square grille filled the rearview mirror.

Striped Shirt leaned out the passenger’s window and his shotgun appeared in the mirror on the right side of the car, which had been what sold me on the midget machine in the first place. I threw myself sideways in the seat and the back window disappeared. When I straightened, the seat was covered with pebbles of glass. A couple of dozen black pellets studded the windshield, hairline cracks spreading out from them like strands in a web.

I gained ground on the hills—of which, fortunately, there were more than a few—but on long downward grades and the straightaway they struck sparks off my rear bumper. Then we went into a series of twisting turns that put me well out in front. I finally lost them by pulling around a circular driveway behind a farmer’s house, waiting for them to thunder past, and piling back into the road going in the opposite direction. The last time I saw the rig, it was half obscured behind its own cloud of dust, turning a row of mailboxes into scrap metal and kindling as Dooley tried to swing around in a driveway too short for the purpose. The transmission whined and bellowed, the amplified baby’s cry of an enraged grizzly.

When the man at the rental agency was through bewailing the loss of the rear window I gave him Owen Mullett’s name and number. I smoked a cigarette in the sarcophagus the rental agent used for an office while he listened to music and then spoke with the man himself. After a minute he handed the instrument to me.

“Did you nail him?”

“In living color,” I replied. “That’s so you can see the red on his hands.”

I gave the receiver back to the rental man behind the desk. He listened for thirty seconds and hung up, all smiles.

I took the film to a custom place for developing and slid the eight-by-tens and negatives into a folder with my typewritten report. During my drive to Mullett’s office, police and helicopters cornered Luke David Turkel on the roof of a college dormitory in Raleigh, North Carolina. Half an hour later his broken body was taken to the Wake County Morgue, where pathologists dug out a slug from a Police .38 and another from a .357 magnum said to have been in Turkel’s possession at the time of the attempted arrest. The fatal wound had been self-inflicted. Police said.

There was only one name left on John’s mirror.

Mullett loved the pictures and authorized a thousand-dollar bonus on the spot. I didn’t argue. I obtained his permission to use his firm’s name as a reference and collected my check from his personal secretary, who had a brisk face to go with her voice. After banking the bonus, I ate that evening in a restaurant where, for the first time in a long while, I didn’t have to place my order through an outside microphone. It didn’t change my mood. My mind was miles away in the intensive care ward at Detroit Receiving.

The media had a ball with the continuing manhunt for Alonzo Smith. Network television crews and reporters from as far away as California camped out in front of Detroit Police Headquarters on Beaubien waiting for word that he’d been slain while resisting arrest. It was like the countdown to John Dillinger. Then on Friday, the fugitive spoiled everything by walking into the First Precinct and emptying his pockets before a bewildered desk sergeant, remanding himself into police custody. The out-of-state newspeople packed up and went home. Nothing spoils a good story like anticlimax.

At his arraignment three days later, Smith’s girlfriend and two unidentified black male accomplices strolled into the courtroom on the fourth floor of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice armed with M-16 assault rifles and strolled out with the defendant. No one saw them leave the building, but a search of the premises uncovered nothing.

That afternoon, Mrs. Van Sturtevant called me at my office.

I
T WAS A TRACT HOME
off Livernois, all on one level with lilac bushes out front and flagstones leading across a nice lawn to a tiny porch with a black-enameled iron railing. It had been described to me in detail over the telephone, but I went past the place twice because every other lot in the neighborhood was just like it. Why people wanted to live like ants was a question for greater brains than mine.

I parked behind Sturtevant’s blue Datsun and got out under a blossoming locust where bees hummed somnolently like plantation darkies in an old musical. The sun was hot on the back of my neck, the air heavy with scent you can’t get too much of unless it comes from a bottle. Kids’ cheerful obscenities and the crack of wood on artificial horsehide nearby testified to the existence of a sandlot baseball diamond down the block. Another day made for snoozing in a hammock with a portable radio tuned in to the Tigers, and here I was in harness again, and on the cuff to boot.

The doorbell was warm to the touch. I waited while footsteps approached from inside, wondering how many hours I had spent waiting for footsteps in front of how many doors on how many days like this one. Down the street there was another crack, louder this time, and a general tangle of shouted encouragement and shrieked insults. Extra bases at least.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Walker. I’m Karen Sturtevant. We met the other day. My husband is in the living room.”

I hadn’t seen her at her best in the hospital. When she opened the door I probably still wasn’t seeing it, but the improvement was more than satisfactory. She was a small blonde without seeming like one, that category having been swallowed up by the pert type with freckles and that air of good sportsmanship you can expect to find anywhere but in sports. She wore her hair in a modified page boy with a wave in front instead of bangs, framing a face that was just saved from being doll-like by a chin that came to a point. Her eyes were a cloudy green and she had a kewpie mouth. No lipstick.

“I thought he was still in the hospital.” I stepped inside and she closed the door.

“So does the press. My brother and I smuggled him out under cover of darkness.” She smiled tightly, just to be doing something with her mouth. “The doctors don’t like it. He had a stroke, you know. They think he might have another. But I’ve spent time in hospitals, and if strokes can be carried those nurses are all potential Typhoid Marys.” Her voice was rough-smooth, like velvet dragged over fine sandpaper. June Allyson was born with it, Lauren Bacall screamed herself hoarse to get it. That’s how potent it is.

“I don’t think they can be,” I said. “Carried, I mean.”

“What modern medicine doesn’t know about the human body and its ailments would sink an ore carrier. The living room is this way.”

She led me past a spotless kitchen into a living room with imitation wood paneling and a picture window looking out on the picture window of the identical house next door. Today she was all in green, with a leaf-print blouse tucked neatly into a solid green skirt with a modest slit up the side. Her heels seemed high for ordinary house wear, but her legs didn’t seem to mind. I decided I wouldn’t either.

“Van?” She placed a hand on the shoulder of the man seated in a wheelchair in front of the big window. “Van, Mr. Walker’s here.”

He opened tired eyes to look at me. If not for them I wouldn’t have recognized him. The strong, square face had fallen, its lines drawn deep by the weight of the grayish flesh and of the broad lower lip, pushed out in the bitter pout of the very old. His mouth wasn’t humorous anymore. In two weeks his hair had turned the color of house dust. He had a blanket over his knees and a heavy sweater draped across his shoulders on the hottest day I had seen that season.

One side of his mouth twitched in a sign of recognition, and I knew then that the other side couldn’t.

“He can’t talk, but he’ll understand everything we say.” She half leaned on the arm of a houndstooth sofa next to his chair and waved me into the armchair opposite. “Can I get you something to drink?”

I shook my head. Somewhere in the house an electric fan whirred. I couldn’t think who it was for. Mrs. Sturtevant appeared unaffected by the oppressive atmosphere in the room and the stirred air never reached me. Almost immediately I regretted turning down the drink.

“Okay if I smoke?” I tried to keep my eyes off her crossed ankles.

“Of course. There’s an ashtray on the coffee table in front of you. What brand?”

I showed her the red-and-white pack.

“May I have one for my husband? The doctors say he shouldn’t, but he’s put away a pack a day for twenty-five years and I can’t think of anything that would do him more damage at this point than quitting cold.”

I lit two, Hollywood fashion, and reached one over. She placed it between Sturtevant’s lips on the good side. The tip reddened and one of his nostrils quivered.

“That last night, Van told me what happened on the Edsel Ford between you and those truckers,” she said. “We were talking about it again today, and somehow I knew you were the man we wanted.”

I must not have been wearing my poker face that day, because she explained: “We communicate. He can write a little with his good hand, but it’s slow and he shouldn’t exert himself. We’ve worked out a system. If he’s holding my hand, he taps it with his finger. Once for no, twice for yes. If not, he blinks his eyes. You’d be surprised how refreshing a conversation can be without meaningless small talk.”

“In that case,” I said, “I’ll spare you mine. I’m not an executioner. If you’re looking for someone to kill Alonzo Smith, you’re still looking. That much I don’t owe your husband.”

“That’s exactly what we don’t want. That’s the reason I called you.”

“You’d better go on. My brain molds up in muggy weather.”

Half an inch of ash quivered on the end of Sturtevant’s Winston. She took it gently from his mouth, flicked the dead matter into the copper ashtray on the coffee table, and put it back. Then she leaned forward with her hands pressed between her knees.

“If we wanted him dead, all we’d have to do is sit back and wait. The police will be more than happy to oblige. We’re interested in justice, not revenge.”

She had a tiny mole where the line between her breasts vanished into her blouse.

“Look at Van,” she said. “He’s forty-three, Mr. Walker. He could live thirty or forty more years in that chair— provided another stroke doesn’t confine him to a bed or kill him. Do you really think a quick, antiseptic death would be appropriate for the man responsible? Even if Smith spends the rest of his life in a cell he’ll never know this kind of imprisonment. But we’d settle for that.”

I forgot about the mole and concentrated on her eyes. They weren’t cloudy now. “How much of this does your husband want?”