You Know Who Killed Me (12 page)

The office was furnished straight from the Property Department: wood-print desk, documents on the walls, a pot full of Spanish bayonet, chairs and a sofa covered with green Naugahyde. It was attached to a private house with a child's-size sled on the front lawn. “Okay if I sit?” I asked. “I fall asleep in five minutes stretched out on a couch.”

“Of course. I only tolerate the damn thing because one of my first patients was disappointed I didn't have one. If I were a mechanic, I suppose I'd have to wear one of those crowns made from a felt hat and hang up a girlie calendar. I hate that plant,” she said, scowling at the pot. “I haven't watered it in a month, but it won't die, just to spite me.”

We sat facing each other in the conversation area. She held up a tape recorder that looked like an oversize Pez dispenser. “Okay? I find it easier to concentrate when I'm not taking notes.”

“Sure. Just don't play it back when I'm around. I like to think I sound like Gregory Peck.”

She turned it on and set it on a marble-topped coffee table.

“Is this a nonsmoking office?” I asked.

“The law says so, but ignoring it often saves me a whole session putting people at ease.”

She got up, fetched a glass ashtray from a desk drawer, switched on a doohickey the size of a camp refrigerator on the floor near the window, and sat down while it was whirring, sliding the ashtray across the table. I lit up. The smoke made a beeline for the air filter or whatever it was.

“The doctor in rehab sent me your file,” she said. “I had time to go over it before the appointment. Are you really a private detective?”

“Why would I lie?”

“Do you carry a gun?”

“I tolerate it for my clients. If I were a therapist I'd have to have a couch in my office. No plant, though; the city keeps hiking the water rates.”

“You quit Vicodin. Why'd you go back?”

I told her about the dead little girl in the sex offender's house. She listened with a poker face, but her eyes flicked toward the sled outside.

“Of course that was just an excuse,” she said. “Better than most, but you can admit you were looking for one.”

“I was looking for a little girl.”

“What are you working on now?”

“A homicide.”

“Now that's two that I know about. I didn't think private investigators got involved with that kind of case.”

“It has a way of involving me more often than I like.”

“Did you ever think of turning it down? Stress plays the biggest part in re-addiction.”

“Every time. But starving to death is stressful too.”

“There are other jobs.”

“Not at my age, and not with my résumé.”

“Can you discuss the case?”

“I can, but I won't.”

“Confidentiality?”

“Not this time. It's on billboards all over three counties. But once I start talking about an investigation it takes all the wind out of my sails. I can't afford to sleepwalk my way through a job with a corpse in the equation. Murder's contagious.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“No reason you should. On my side, there's no reason I should ask complete strangers if they hated their mothers.”

“That's a hoary old cliché. I'm a Jungian, not a Freudian.”

I filed that away in my collective unconscious.

“In Highland Park you said you got addicted the first time after you were shot. What happened?”

“A client's husband mistook me for a deer. Then he mistook himself.”

“You're starting to sound like one of those private eyes on television.”

“I wish I were. Those TV dicks shake off lead like dandruff.”

She was quiet for a minute, during which the recorder made no sound at all. I figured it had a chip instead of reels. I was starting to feel like a wart on a dinosaur's tail.

“Your file says you're divorced. How long?”

“Long enough to drop ‘divorced' from my self-description.”

“Children?”

“No, thank God.”

“Why ‘thank God'?”

I jerked my thumb in the general direction of the sled in the yard.

“That could have been the trigger you were looking for when that little girl turned up,” she said. “Empty-nest syndrome isn't confined to people who raised children.”

She was good. It had taken me weeks in rehab to work that one out.

“When was the last time you took a Vicodin or anything similar?”

“Last night.”

“You realize you could go to jail for that, after what you were told.”

“I had a drink. That's been legal a long time. You said anything similar.”

“Now you're just being difficult.”

“I'm being shrunk. But you're right. I'm sorry.”

“I wasn't asking for an apology. I'm not exactly an amateur when it comes to dealing with people's defense mechanisms.”

“You're trying to pour a sidewalk and I'm walking straight through the cement. No one needs that.”

A pair of strong eyebrows got lifted. “Thank you.”

“Ask me anything. I loved my mother, by the way.”

“Lucky you.”

I grinned. I was liking her more and more.

“When was the last time you wanted to take a prescription painkiller?”

“I want to right now.”

“Are you always this candid?”

“No. A doctor's office is like the confessional. Why go and then lie your head off?”

“But you're not here under your will.”

“I could've fought that; I know more lawyers than most people, and some of them owe me favors. But I didn't think it would hurt, and it might help. At my time of life I don't bounce so well.”

“Are you concerned about getting old?”

“A little. Fortunately I'm no good at math.”

“Joking is just a way of dealing with what terrifies us.”

“If you read my file, you know I started out to be a cop. I still am, in a left-hand way. You're not telling me a thing I didn't already know.”

“I didn't intend to. Psychotherapy is nine-tenths common sense.”

“What's the other tenth?”

“One hundred thousand dollars in student loans.” Her legs were crossed also. She bounced a slim foot in a low-cut cordovan. Then she leaned forward and switched off the recorder.

“I'll have Susan prepare your bill.”

“That's it? I'm cured?”

She pursed her lips. “In my profession you learn not to use such words. Plumbers can afford to guarantee their work. I can't. But in my opinion, you're at less risk of re-addiction than some of my esteemed colleagues.”

“You'll tell that to the doctor in Highland Park?”

“Not the part about my esteemed colleagues. You might have noticed she's still recovering from a humorectomy.”

“You don't have to like someone just because she saved your life, but I'm glad she did.”

“You're something different in patients, Mr. Walker. I'm almost sorry to let you go.”

I squashed out my cigarette and put a card under the ashtray.

She smiled. She had nice teeth: At sixty dollars an hour she could afford them, with or without the loan payments. “I'm not planning to be part of any murders.”

“That's encouraging,” I said. “It means you're bound to get hungry sometime. I just read about a new sushi place in
Hour
magazine. Where do you stand on raw fish?”

She smiled. “And you claim to be a detective. You saw that sled in the yard.”

“It's what I didn't see that made me ask.”

She glanced down at her ringless left hand. She folded her right on top of it.

“Divorce is a hazard of the profession, like cops and lawyers. I like my food cooked, thank you; especially this far from any ocean.” She unfolded her hands, picked up my card, and slid it down inside her top.

 

SIXTEEN

Walter Cole led me into his den in a house built of golden logs, a comfortable room paneled in cedar with a row of scoped rifles in a glazed lock rack and the mounted heads of an elk, a couple of whitetail, a mule deer, and something brown with white fur at the throat and a pair of horns as long and straight as knitting needles. I think it was some kind of African jackalope. We sat in deep leather armchairs and sipped twelve-year-old Scotch from barrel glasses belonging to a fully stocked bar made out of a wine cask. The place smelled of good cigars and single malt and looked like Clyde Beatty threw up.

Cole himself was a lean fifty or so with square shoulders, a narrow waist, and a thick mat of hair in the V of his open-necked shirt. He had a full head of brown hair with gray splinters and wore glasses with black rims.

“You'll have to speak up a little,” he said. “If I'd known about ear protection when I was fourteen, I wouldn't be so deaf.”

I raised my voice. We talked about this and that, compared hunting stories; people with a hearing disability take time to draw out. When he was in a conversational mood I switched gears.

“Richard Perlberg says Rudy Johnson was the best hunter in the outfit. It looks like he had competition.”

“Had; even when he was still with us.” He adjusted his eyeglasses. “Ever hunt elk?”

“Just deer.”

“Deer can be quiet when they sense danger, walk through dry leaves knee-deep and make no more noise than an ant farting in a box of cotton. Elk don't bother. They think they're indestructible, especially the bulls. They walk loud, they breathe loud, they shake their ears and you'd swear it's a seven-forty-seven taking off. When you get so you can't hear an elk, your hunting days are through.” He glanced around the room. “I think I'll donate all this stuff to the Fred Bear Museum and hang paintings. I can't look at them anymore. It's like a has-been athlete looking at a picture of himself when he could still fit into the uniform.”

“Paintings are nice. I like clowns and kids with big cow eyes.”

“I dream about that lodge up in Canada,” he said, drinking. “In the dream, I'm in the woods, and when I realize I left my rifle behind I go back for it, but the door's locked and I've lost the key. What do you think that means?”

“There's a doctor right in this neighborhood you can ask. How well did you know Don Gates?”

“Better than most. You know what they say about hunting camps?”

“It's true. He looked a little threadbare in the last picture he posed for with you and the rest. Did he seem different from other times?”

“Quieter than usual, I thought; and he was a quiet guy. But I wasn't really in the game. I was going through my third divorce at the time. She turned vegan just to spite me.”

“I can't find anyone who'll say anything against Gates.”

“Being dead will do that. But if that's what you're looking for, I'd talk to Chuck Swingline.”

“Perlberg said they were close.”

“He said that?”

There are times when I like the work; one of them is when sources clash. I let the bobber ride and waited for the strike.

A square shoulder rose, fell. “Well, maybe he saw something I didn't. That miserable Indian didn't open his mouth more than six times in six years, and then it was to tell us what rotten hunters we white men were. The more time you spent with him, the more you understood Custer. We'd have dropped him after the first year if he didn't have such a talent for finding the best spots. Call me a racist if you like, but they're born with it.”

“I wonder where Perlberg got the impression he and Gates liked each other.”

“Who knows? Those handlebucks don't think like the rest of us.”

“No love lost there, I guess.”

“Don't make anything out of that. So long as a guy kicks into the kitty for smokes and bacon, he's good for another season. We didn't have anything in common apart from that and a taste for venison. At least that's one thing I haven't lost. You?”

“It was my first solid food.” I took a sip of the smoky stuff in my glass. “Did Gates ever talk about his family?”

“Now that you mention it, he did say something funny about it that last trip. He wasn't the type to make jokes about wives and kids; he'd laugh when one of us did, but he didn't join in. Well, I asked him how Amelie was—we were there, you know, when they fell for each other—and he said she's a wonderful mother.”

“What's strange about that?”

“It was the way he said it.” He hesitated, tipped up his glass, but he didn't drink right away, just spoke into it, as if to hear the echo. “I'm hard of hearing, remember. Probably I imagined it. But to me it sounded like he envied her.”

*   *   *

It was dark when I left. Snow fell in flakes too small to see, touching my face when I was unlocking the Cutlass and then the windshield in the backwash from my headlights, starring like pebble-cracks when they touched glass. The wind was picking up and the air smelled of iron oxide. A storm was predicted, complete with cub reporters doing breathless stand-ups in front of traffic whizzing along the highway at sixty. The plows were out, but they were parked, with the operators drumming their hands on the wheels, blowing smoke out the windows and counting the hours in dollars.

While I was waiting for the defogger to warm up, I called Amelie Gates to ask if Michel was in a mood where I could talk to him, but her line was busy. Then I tried Mary Ann Thaler's cell to ask about the drug activity the marshals had found on Yuri Yako's computer. It went straight to voice mail. I didn't leave a message. Everybody was sure busy for an hour after quitting time.

I turned down the blower and switched on the radio just as the local news was coming on. Then I forgot all about the calls.

It was a two-bagger: The police in Royal Oak had found Yako's body, and the Detroit cops were questioning a person of interest in the hit-and-run killing of Roy Thompson, the man who'd heard the Ukrainian as much as threaten Donald Gates's life.