The Midnight Man (6 page)

“The trouble with you amateurs is you think a gun is charmed,” I said, blowing out the match. “Wave it, and whoever’s on the receiving end is your slave. You spend too much time in front of the tube.”

“We’ll soon see which of us is the amateur. Who are you?” The barrel twitched.

“Relax, I’m not a kidnapper or an assassin. You should know that, having represented your share of them. Try not to shoot me while I go for my ID.”

His pistol hovered at waist level while I drew the wallet out slowly and opened it to the photostat of my license. He studied it as if it were the text of his next summation to a jury, then released his breath shudderingly, and fumbled the weapon into a clip under his left arm. He ran a quaking hand over his light brown hair, which started at his crown and grew in styled curls down to his collar.

“Two years ago, I was riding in a cab on Dequindre when a truck pulled out in front of the car and two men got out and shot the driver to death.” He stared at the floor behind the front seat. “They were after me, and they’d have killed me too if the police hadn’t arrived and scared them off. That’s when I got a permit to carry a gun. This is the first time I’ve drawn it on anyone.”

“It’s almost as bad as having one pointed at you.”

“It’s worse.” He raised his eyes to the red-smeared windshield, then glared at me. “Do you realize what it’s going to cost to have that stuff removed?”

Now he was all outraged lawyer. I said, “It’s just poster paint. You can wipe it off with a handkerchief and spit. You do spit.”

He was still looking at me. “When the occasion warrants.”

“Let’s talk about Alonzo Smith.”

“I’ve talked about him all I care to for one day, thank you. What do you think I was doing in police headquarters, fixing a parking ticket? And why should I talk to you at all when I should be breaking you for what you just did?”

“Even if you could link me to it, you’d just be handing the review board a laugh. Besides, we have time to kill. Your chauffeur is going to be busy for a while.”

He started. His face was narrow and small-boned, as delicate as a woman’s. “If you’ve had something done to him—!”

“I couldn’t have anything done to him with a four-inch shell. The kid’ll take him around the Grand Circle once or twice and have him back here in time to take you home for martinis. Who hired you to defend Smith?”

“That’s privileged,” he said automatically.

I mashed out my butt in the armrest ashtray and shifted in the seat to face him. I needed binoculars to see him clearly. It was a big car. “That’s lawyer talk. Fine in a court of law, but how’s it stand when some cop corners your client in a blind alley with a gun in his paw and no witness for blocks? I’m not out to kill him. I’m probably the only one looking for him who isn’t. If he comes in soles up I’ve failed. What good are ethics that won’t bend to save a life?”

“He deserves to die.”

I stared at him stupidly. Two women stopped to gape at the stained windshield and walked away asking what the city was coming to if a person couldn’t park his car safely in front of a police station. My ears were all right, all right.

“Maybe we’d better back up,” I suggested.

Rasmussen held up a thumb and forefinger. “I was that far from winning acquittal on a plea of insanity. The commissioner himself laid the groundwork for me by calling Smith, Turkel, and Gross mad-dog killers at the time of the shooting. Then my client’s spaced-out girlfriend showed up at the arraignment with two storm troopers and threw my case into the shithole. Whatever they get, they asked for it.”

“You took on the case gratis, didn’t you?” I said. “What’s in it for you, a book?”

“Movie of the Week. ABC called me Saturday and made an offer for my account of the trial. Provided, of course, I got him off.”

“Incentive.”

“It takes more than dedication to be a good attorney these days. Perry Mason didn’t have to contend with these assholes.”

“That’s show biz. Who besides you had access to Smith between the time he gave himself up and the arraignment?”

“No one, except the police. That Lieutenant Alderdyce and the men assigned to him.”

“How did Smith act during your conferences? I’m not asking you to repeat content.”

He smiled bitterly, without parting his thin lips. “He called me honky and a few other names less delicate. He thought I’d sell him out to my lily-white buddies in the system. What you might expect.”

“If he felt that way, why didn’t he demand a black to represent him?”

“Because the price was right, and he didn’t mean what he said. Because when you come down to it, his type of black is just as bigoted as they claim we are, and believes that only a white man has a chance pleading a black man’s case before court, even if the judge and jurors are as black as he is. Because he wanted to win.”

“What changed his mind?”

“So far as I know, nothing.” He met my gaze. “I consider myself a fair judge of what goes on behind a person’s expression. I have to be; it’s my stock in trade. When those people invaded that room with automatic weapons, Smith was just as surprised and frightened as the rest of us. He wasn’t any less so when he left with them. I think he thought he was going to be killed.”

I was still digesting that when something moved between me and the sun, and the door on my side was torn open, almost spilling me into the street. The monolithic chauffeur, red-faced and heaving, growled and closed a hand like a car crusher on my shoulder. It was a bad time not to be armed.

“It’s all right, Herbert,” said Rasmussen. “Mr. Walker was just leaving. We won’t see him again. Will we?” He looked at me as if he had just grown a yard.

“Not until after Herbert’s had his shots.” I got out. I felt the chauffeur’s eyes on my back until I reached my car, when he turned his attention to the paint on the windshield of the Continental.

Tomorrow’s answer to Bruce Jenner was sitting on the passenger’s side of the Cutlass, sweating but breathing about as heavily as a somnambulist. I gave him the rest of what I’d promised him and watched his narrow back loping away. When I was a kid, no black would have dared to be seen running near police headquarters. Times change both ways.

S
QUARE ONE FOUND ME
reading the late edition of the
News
between bites of roast beef sliced not too thin in a little supper place across from what used to be the Kern block on Woodward. The headwaitress was built like Cass Elliott, with arms like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and kept up a running patter of good-natured insults with the regulars as she went around freshening everyone’s coffee without being asked. The music was subdued, and though the lights were low you could see what was on your plate without having to set fire to a napkin. They ought to declare those places national treasures while there are still a few left. For all I knew this was the last one.

There were no fresh details on the courtroom raid beyond those released that morning, but that didn’t keep the reporters from padding the front section with speculation. Alonzo Smith had been seen crossing the Ambassador Bridge to Windsor in a yellow van with California plates, sucking a Coke at a service station on Chalmers, bagging groceries in a market down by the river. An Ohio woman swore it was he who snatched her purse while she was waiting for a bus in Toledo. On the strength of the bridge story, the Governor of California was calling for an investigation to learn if the fugitive had indeed spent time in that state. It wasn’t even an election year.

As if the cops didn’t have enough screwy leads to follow, the Detroit Police Officers Association was offering five thousand dollars for information leading to Smith’s arrest and conviction. Next to that item was a piece about a professional bounty hunter from Oklahoma named Munnis “Bum” Bassett, a six-foot-five former bail bondsman with more magnum-powered weaponry than it was safe to shake a stick at, who vowed, so help me, “to bring that critter in alive—or dead.” How he planned to collect on a corpse was something he either didn’t want to go into or the reporter didn’t think was worth asking.

That raised my spirits. A cowboy in town was just what the doctor ordered to keep the boys with badges off this peeper’s back. I was a criminological genius next to Bum, who came out of the interview sounding slightly to the right of Caligula.

The inside pages carried background on Smith’s outlaw girlfriend, which interested me more. She was a twenty-year-old white woman named Laura Gaye, a native New Yorker and a born-again Christian who had come out to enroll in pre-med at the University of Michigan, then left after six months for a job at the Ford River Rouge plant. Until the blowup at Mt. Hazel Cemetery, she had been living for some time with Smith in a commune frequented by drug peddlers, black revolutionaries, and hippies still coming down from the sixties on McDougall. She had a widowed father in New York who couldn’t be reached for comment. A picture lifted from her high school yearbook showed a pretty, serious-looking girl with bangs on her forehead, a far cry from the frizzy-headed scarecrow described by witnesses to the incident at the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice. Hitler’s baby picture was cute, too.

It seemed like a good enough place to start. I circled the McDougall address in pencil, left a buck for the waitress with the ready pot and Rickles’ best routines, and paid at the cash register wondering if I had enough time to buy a bulletproof vest before penetrating the inner city at night.

It was eight-thirty and still light out, although the sun was below the skyline, sucking red and purple streamers down with it. West of the city you could read a newspaper by natural light until ten, one of the advantages—if you could call it that—of living on the extreme western edge of the Eastern Time Zone, with a little help from Uncle Sam turning back the hands on the clock like a small boy trying to finagle an extra hour before bedtime. On the horizon the cylindrical towers of the Renaissance Center were lit up like a whorehouse on Saturday night. I’d had some trouble a while back over a man whose office was on the top floor of one of those towers, and I wondered idly if he was still working at this hour.

Most of the street lamps on the lower east side were broken, which was a blessing aesthetically. Warehouses and tenements wallowed in the mulch of decades, their windows boarded up as if in an effort to shut out the world around them. Yellow mortar oozed out of brick walls covered with obscenities sprayed in black and candy-apple green; slat-sided mutts with glistening sores and eyes bright with the madness of hunger rooted among the offal spilled out of overturned trash cans; heaps of stale laundry shaped vaguely like human beings snored in doorways with their heads leaning against the jambs and their open mouths scooping black, toothless holes out of their stubbled faces. As I swung onto McDougall the beam from my headlamps transfixed a bloated rat perched atop a mound of shredded plastic garbage bags, twin beads of red phosphorescence glowing from its eyes. Entering my intended block, I realized suddenly that I’d been breathing through my mouth for the past five minutes and closed it.

Many of the numbers had worn off the buildings, if there had been any to begin with. I parked under a functioning street lamp that might discourage the more timid vandals, got a flash out of the glove compartment, and climbed out to search for the place on foot. Twenty yards from the car I turned back and drew the unregistered Luger from its hiding place in the trunk. I made sure there was a cartridge in the chamber and shoved the works under the waistband of my pants. I’d left the Smith & Wesson in the office safe.

The air was the temperature of human saliva, the street solid black beyond the circle of lamplight except where the still-climbing moon made right triangles the color of milkwater through gaps between buildings. I felt clammy under my clothes—hardly an uncommon reaction for a white man abroad in Blacktown that late. The tiniest noise brought the automatic out of my pocket, the beam of the flash bounding toward the source of the disturbance. Terror grows in the dark like mushrooms.

When I located the number it was a faint outline in what was left of the darker paint on the front door, the metal numerals having fallen or rusted off in someone’s grandfather’s time and never been replaced. The brick structure had been a gymnasium the year the Marquis of Queensberry took First Communion. Anemic early moonlight lay on the few remaining stippled glass panes in the eight-foot windows near the roof, and the earth had begun to reclaim the broken concrete stoop under my feet.
PIGS KEEP OUT
, demanded the penciled legend on a square of paper nearly as old as the building, taped above the crusted doorknob. That didn’t apply to me, so I twisted the knob and went in. Two barrels of a sawed-off shotgun were waiting for me in the darkened entrance.

“What’s the matter, pig? Can’t you read signs?”

It was a girl asking the questions, in that twangy drawl some blacks can’t get rid of after several generations up North. In the icy light of my flash the weapon looked no longer than some pistols, stockless and supported in two dark slender hands with ragged nails. If it went off at this range I was ground meat.

I shifted the beam higher, but not too high or I’d have missed her entirely. Lashless eyes blinked in a flat face surrounded by a halo of frizzed black hair. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll turn that fucking thing off.
Now
, man.” The gun jumped.

I switched off the beam. A shaft of moonlight fell on two bare feet on the other side of the threshold. “I’m not a pig,” I explained. “You have the wrong barnyard animal.”

“That’s your opinion, fuzz. Buzz off, fuzz.” The rhyme amused her. She repeated it, giggling. It was not a reassuring giggle.

“I’m not with the police, I’m private.”

“Same difference. You want to leave or you want me to call someone to help you leave?”

“Neither.” I tromped on her toes and knocked aside the barrels of the shotgun with my elbow. For good measure I brought the flashlight down hard on the carpus in her wrist. She shrieked, and while she was shrieking I wrenched the weapon out of her grasp. I stiff-armed her away from me and groped for a light switch on the right side of the door. In this building it was on the left side. Light trickled down from neon tubes in two ceiling troughs. Three more remained dark, and one of the two flickered and buzzed like a June bug trapped between screens.