The Midnight Man (5 page)

She turned to him. “Van, do you agree with me so far?”

We watched his face. Slowly his eyelids moved down and up, down and up. She looked at me.

I said, “I gave you that card because I didn’t know what else to do. I was flush and could have supplied cash for medical expenses, but that would get Internal Affairs on all our backs and besides, the department’s insurance will cover the money end. You probably wouldn’t have accepted it anyway. I didn’t mean to make it sound as if I could succeed where the cops failed. I don’t think you believe that either. So why did you call me?”

“I’ve been a policeman’s wife a long time,” she replied. “Some of it was bound to rub off. I went down to headquarters today and asked some of Van’s associates about you. I was careful not to approach any of the officers investigating the shooting; I didn’t want to get you in any trouble. Most of what I heard I liked, and when I repeated it to Van he liked it too.”

I was smothering. It was that damn fan, whirring merrily in a place where no one could benefit from it. I loosened my tie and unbuttoned my jacket. The suit was new, bought out of Owen Mullett’s bonus, and fit well even when I was wearing a gun, which I wasn’t today. Not in a cop’s house. I drew on what remained of my cigarette, which didn’t help.

“Outside of John Alderdyce, who’s up to his neck in the case,” I said, “I can’t think of any cop that would have much good to say about me. As a rule we get on like soap and dirt.” I didn’t say which I was. It varied with the telling.

Her tight smile returned, as automatic as a gesundheit.

“One or two of them were polite. What swung us over was what the ones who don’t like you said, and who said it. If
they
had recommended you, we’d have looked somewhere else.”

“I think I know the ones you mean.”

This time the expression was genuine. The cleft disappeared from between her brows and the shadows faded out under her eyes. I knocked five years off my estimate of her age. Then the humor evaporated and time rushed in to fill the vacuum. Her hand sought her husband’s, lying motionless atop the blanket.

“It’s a matter of attitude. With every police officer between here and Mexico hoping to send Smith to the morgue, one man willing to take him in alive might have a better chance of laying hands on him.”

“Or getting dead.” I blew some smoke. It hung in the thick air for a moment, then gathered its strength and started drifting toward the window. “What you say might have been true a week ago. Why didn’t you call me before he turned himself in?”

“We were preoccupied.” Her tone would chill champagne. “‘Maybe someone you cared about has never been shot and you don’t know what it’s like.”

I did, but my biography wasn’t part of the deal. I motioned for her to continue. Sturtevant’s eyes slid from my face to hers and back. Cop’s eyes. No bullet could change that.

“Something changed Smith’s mind about facing the courts,” his wife said. “Between Friday afternoon and this morning something happened that made him choose to risk death rather than life in prison. Find it, and maybe you’ll find him.”

“There might not be anything in that. Maybe he didn’t want to leave custody, but you don’t argue with an assault rifle. And if I corner him, what then? I’d have to call the cops. That citizen’s arrest stuff is mainly a democratic myth.”

She shrugged, deepening the hollow between her breasts for a breathless instant. “The moment of greatest danger comes just before the cuffs are applied, Van says—said. Subdue him before the law gets there, and they won’t have an excuse to do anything but bring him in intact. All we ask is that you call us first. If you accept the job.” Her face was as easy to read as a crooked optometrist’s chart.

“I might have to farm it out,” I said, thinking aloud. “There’s no reason to expect him to still be in the city.”

“We’ll pay all expenses. Van has a pension coming.”

“I’m not worrying about that. I told you, I’m flush. Let me get my tired old computer working.”

While she waited, Karen Sturtevant tapped some more ash off her husband’s cigarette. I watched it start growing all over again. Chimes bonged in the hallway.

“That’s the nurse.” She got up. “She’s the condition under which the doctors agreed to release Van.”

I killed my stub, stood. I felt as if I’d been sitting for a month. Then I felt guilty for feeling that way in Sturtevant’s presence. “I’ll give it a week. After that, you pay expenses. And arrange for my funeral if I screw up. I’ll keep you posted on my progress, or lack thereof.”

The doorbell sounded again. She looked at the man slumped in the wheelchair. He blinked once, twice. I almost heard his lids creak. “Fair enough. Excuse me,” she said, and breezed past me trailing a faint scent of something half-remembered.

I studied Sturtevant. His weary cop’s eyes remained on mine, one lid drooping as if frozen in the middle of a wry wink. “Sorry for talking around you like a footstool,” I told him. I wanted to say more. He looked as if he was waiting for more. I didn’t have anything more to say. On my way out, the nurse, a tall woman with a face like a stomach cramp, stared at me the way an antibiotic looks at a virus.

T
HE BASEBALL GAME
had ended by the time I left the house. Boys of twelve and thirteen were walking down the street in pairs and groups, bats over their shoulders with mitts and gloves swinging from the ends, earth-colored and shiny in the palms. Somewhere in the neighborhood a power mower sputtered and started with an angry raspberry, and a private plane droned sadly through a blue hole in the smog over Detroit. The smell of cooking food floated out of open windows on both sides of the street. It was suppertime for everyone but me, the pilot, and the guy cutting his grass.

I hadn’t wanted to admit it in her presence—professionals seldom do when an amateur makes a decent suggestion— but Karen Sturtevant was dead right about Alonzo Smith’s reason for escaping being a good place to start. In criminal investigation it isn’t so much the partial fingerprint or the lost button you concentrate on, but the inconsistencies in human behavior.

Philip R. Rasmussen had represented Smith at the aborted arraignment. He was one more of Detroit’s shaky claims to fame, a trouble-shooting criminal lawyer with a flashy track record and one eye screwed to his next book contract. I opened both car doors to let the oven-air out and looked up the attorney’s office number in last year’s directory, dusty from bouncing around in the trunk for the past eight months. Committing it to memory, I started the engine and hunted for a telephone booth. The cool air rushing in through all four windows revived me like a shot of liquor.

At a service station on Chicago I told the attendant to fill the tank and headed on foot to one of three instruments on a pole next to the sidewalk. Twice I got a busy signal. On the third try I struck pay dirt.

“Rasmussen and Riley.” A feminine voice, as individual as a gum ball. Typewriters made noise in the background, stuttering over briefs and requests for writs.

“Mr. Rasmussen, please.”

“Whom shall I say is calling?”

I had been wondering where words like
whom
were living these days. “Amos Walker. I’m investigating the Mt. Hazel police shooting.”

“Are you with the police, Mr. Walker?”

Well, I hadn’t really expected it to work a second time. “No, I’m a private agent.”

“I’ll see if Mr. Rasmussen is in.”

“What’s he got, an escape tunnel?” I was speaking into a dead line. She’d put me on hold. It’s a lonely place, hold. At least Owen Mullett’s secretary played music.

She came back on. “I’m sorry, Mr. Walker, but Mr. Rasmussen is out.”

“Bet you were surprised,” I said dryly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Did he leave a number where he can be reached?”

She gave it to me. I didn’t have to write it down. It was the number of Detroit Police Headquarters. The extension was John Alderdyce’s.

Detroit’s center of law enforcement is a mammoth block structure designed by Albert Kahn and erected in 1922 at 1300 Beaubien, a street named after the French belle who is supposed to have warned the commander of Fort Detroit that Pontiac’s warriors were planning to smuggle sawed-off muskets into the garrison under their blankets and take over. The story’s probably a myth, but the building is real enough, severe and orderly looking with arched windows creating a dungeon effect along the ground floor. Just parking across from it made me feel like confessing.

A royal blue Continental Mark IV was parked in front of the entrance on the Beaubien side, in a slot designated for police use only. On the steps that led up to the door sat a sweating giant in a blue serge suit reading a comic book. He had a big head on a short neck, and you could have placed both your palms side by side between his eyes without touching either one. But you wouldn’t have wanted to, for fear of getting your arms broken. A cap with a shiny visor lay bottomside up on one of his massive thighs, the sweatband turned inside out to dry.

“Nice crate,” I observed, admiring my reflection in the deep finish on the hood. I decided that what looked like gray in my hair was an optical illusion.

“Yeah.” He eyed me suspiciously over the top of the page he was reading.

The plate read
SHYSTR
. I pointed at it. “I know that. Didn’t I read somewhere it belongs to Philip Rasmussen?”

“Yeah,” he said again, and grunted. “Big joke. These lawyers got senses of humor. I know one’s got a plate says
CROOK-1.”

“Bars or cars, I guess the truth’s got to come out someplace.”

He laughed. It sounded like the air horn on Dooley Bass’s diesel. I joined him. When we were finished:

“How’s chance me getting a word with your boss when he comes out?” I produced my wallet and flagged a five-spot.

He stared at it. His big jaw hung open, which it had to if he was going to breathe. His nose was flush to his face and bore the impression of its last fist. Then his mouth closed and he swallowed.

“I’d like to,” he said. “I sure would. But I got orders. Nobody bothers Mr. Rasmussen outside of the office.”

I poked down the fin and showed him the corner of a ten. Fresh drops of perspiration glittered along his hairline. He shook his head. The building hardly shivered when it moved. “Sorry, Bud.”

“Suppose I staked you to plastic surgery,” I offered.

He rose. The cap and comic book slid off his lap. His arms hung bowed, the hamlike hands dangling in front of his thighs after the fashion of weightlifters and certain primates.

I said, “I’m going.”

“Wise choice.”

He didn’t sit down again until I was back in the driver’s seat of the Cutlass. I smoked and drummed my fingers on the wheel. Thinking.

While I was doing that a lanky black youth in tank top and gym shorts came jogging around the corner, all arms and legs and glistening sinew. The bodyguard-chauffeur was immersed in his comic book across the street. I hailed the kid over. He obliged, and stood next to the car breathing in short athletic bursts and looking down at me suspiciously. He would have looked down at me if I were standing up. He was damn near seven feet tall.

“U of D?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Wayne State.”

“This is a little out of your neighborhood.”

“So’s the next Olympics,” he said. “But I’m going there anyway.”

“Basketball, right?”

“Decathlon.”

“Would five bucks spoil your amateur standing?”

A broad grin spread over his spare features. “Illegal?”

“A little.”

“Make it ten. That’s the world’s biggest pigpen across the street, man.”

Five minutes later we came out of an art supply store on Gratiot. I handed the Olympian the sack containing my purchase and a five-dollar bill. “Half now, the rest et cetera.”

He nodded. We parted a block south of my car.

The Continental was still in front of police headquarters. Goliath had finished reading and appeared to be dozing with his big fingers laced across his stomach. I had time for another cigarette, and then Rasmussen appeared atop the steps.

He resembled his newspaper pictures, slight, bald in front, and wearing a suit of the same soft gray material they make clouds out of. He descended the steps with a nervous jerky gait, pumping his arms like a long-distance runner. The giant got to his feet hastily, dwarfing his employer as he tugged on his cap and lumbered down the steps to beat Rasmussen to the rear door of the sedan and hold it open, his comic book rolled and stashed in his hip pocket. It’s surprising what a lot of money can do for a small man.

The chauffeur was just climbing under the wheel when the black youth sprinted around the corner, raised the small sack I had given him, and dashed it against the windshield of the Continental, all without stopping or even altering his pace. Bright red paint splattered over the glass, hood, and part of the roof.

Kong’s roar shook the windows on my side of the street. The horn blatted as he clambered out, rocking the big car on its springs, and he took off running after the kid like a rearing bear, swaying from side to side with his arms extended over his head and the blue serge jacket bunched up around his chest. Meanwhile, the kid was doing everything short of falling on his face to keep from outdistancing his pursuer by more than two blocks.

I left the Cutlass, snapping away my butt, and crossed the street to the Continental. When I got the rear door open I found myself looking down the bore of a .32 automatic in Rasmussen’s slender hand. I ignored it and shoved into the seat, swinging the door shut behind me.

“Put it up,” I said, when he continued pointing the piece with his scrawny frame crowded into the corner opposite. “You aren’t going to shoot anyone.”

His eyes were wider than a sixteen-year-old virgin’s, if there still are such creatures and if anything is capable of shocking them. He licked his lips with a pointed tongue, “You don’t know that.” He tried to make his voice tough. It sounded like gravel in a squeaky axle. The gun was steady but nothing else about him was, as if the weapon were shaking him.

I struck a match and touched it to the tip of a cigarette I didn’t really need, just being casual. I didn’t feel casual. If I have to have a firearm shoved up my nose, I’d rather the one doing the shoving be a professional, someone who knows how very little pressure is required to fire a bullet from an automatic.