When Old Midnight Comes Along

by Loren D. Estleman

  No blood, no unexplained DNA, none of the obligatory signs of struggle; just the sudden and complete non-existence of a fellow carbon-based creature, with nothing to fill the space she’d left for days, then weeks, then months, then more annihilation yet when the media shifted their attention to other events.

  We stared at the blank screen for a moment. Then the bald technician worked a switch and the meteorologist sprang back into view, pushing a big yellow H across Lake Huron with both hands.

  Rusty said, “Man, that’s one ice-cold potato. They must be paying you by the hour.”

  I thanked Sid and slapped Local 299 on the back. “Miami Beach, here I come.”

  THREE

  The old gray lady at 1300 was still standing, with no sign out front announcing it was under new management. Every time I go there I expect it to have been sold to China along with the rest of downtown.

  Most of the Detroit Police Department had bugged out of the Romanesque building on Beaubien to escape dry rot, vermin, roof leaks, and carcinogenic building materials, taking up temporary residence in various precinct houses around the city. “Temporary” is one of the more worked-out adjectives in our town: Everything’s waiting, from condemned HUD houses to jungle-growth empty lots to a multimillion-dollar graft job of a jail, decaying in an unfinished state. The city itself bumps along under the provisional oversight of the state treasurer and the FBI, with no say from its couple of dozen voting citizens; elections here draw as much attention as washday.

  Deborah Stonesmith was a steel post amid all this cardboard. She’d been on the force fourteen years, working her way up from Stationary Traffic to the Criminal Investigation Division (Major Crimes Unit) with the rank of detective lieutenant. She’d staked out permanent territory in an office partitioned off from the rest of the third floor at venerable 1300, mostly to make use of the lateral space left behind by most of the department: Give her a table, a ream of paper, and a month of uninterrupted concentration and she’d find the princes in the Tower.

  In the ground-floor lobby a desk sergeant sat frowning at a clipboard across from a dusty gift shop, where you can browse a display of baseball caps, coffee mugs, shot glasses, and swizzle sticks all bearing the DPD logo while you’re waiting to post bail for a loved one. The metal detector shuddered a little when I passed through it, but that was just the pins from an old rib injury, so no one tackled me. Two medium-size patrolmen joined me in the elevator, inserting themselves sideways. On the third floor I pried myself loose with a shoe horn and stumbled out.

  I was in the stomping ground of the old Racket Squad, where if you closed your eyes and subtracted mildew and rat urine, you could still smell cigars, rye whiskey, and eau de rubber hose.

  The usual tarry coffee made gargling noises in an urn on a metal table under a corkboard shingled with wanted circulars going back to Dr. Richard Kimble. She was there, dandling a tea bag in a stoneware mug labeled WORLD’S GREATEST AUNT.

  “Garage sale find?” I said by way of greeting.

  A pair of eyes like brown asteroids registered no surprise at my presence. “My sister’s kid,” she said. “I raised her after her mother went into rehab the third time. Kept her clean, gave up all my weekends to soccer, which is only a little more exciting than watching dead goldfish float, put her through vocational school, paid her rent for a year, and all I got was this crummy mug.” But she smiled as she sipped from it.

  She was tall for a woman and some men, but it was all distributed so that you didn’t notice it until she was standing in front of you, with prominent facial bones and dark reddish-brown hair worn lately in a shoulder bob. Her suit, coral trimmed with gray, was cut loosely, but followed her contours closely enough that you wouldn’t mistake her for a man from any angle. Not a beautiful woman or even pretty, but striking; a black Katharine Hepburn.

  “I need a favor,” I said. “At this point I can’t remember who owes who.”

  “Horseshit. I know all about your little blue notebook. You can trace every marker back to Coleman A. Young.”

  “They don’t go back that far, mostly because Hizzoner had a little blue book of his own, only his had dollar signs. How’d you find out about mine, drones?”

  “On this city’s budget? We farm out all our black ops to jail trusties. Don’t try to bluff the house, Walker. You’re so deep in the red you look like Jack the Ripper.”

  “So get out your little blue book and compound the interest.”

  “Uh-uh. I’m not as easy as Mary Ann Thaler. Hear from her lately?”

  “You ever hear from a cop you helped put in stir?”

  “Christmas card, every year. Posed with his sweetie last time. Sweetie had him a tattoo of Evander Holyfield on his right cheek.”

  “Which right cheek?”

  “There’s a lady present.” She took another sip, pulled a face, gave the bag a couple more ducks. “What wringer are they in, and who belongs to ’em?”

  “Matrimonial bliss, and Francis X. Lawes.”

  “He calls it bliss? What’d he do, go out and get himself born again?”

  “Next thing to. He says he wants to remarry, but there’s this obstacle that he’s still hitched unless and until a man with a rubber stamp says his wife’s dead.”

  “Tell him to wait. The statute must be coming up, and then it’s just a matter of a sit-down with a judge.”

  “Just over a year to go. Apparently it’s too long.”

  “For whom, the groom or the bride?”

  “He didn’t say, so of course it’s the bride. Anyway I’d like to see the file. Me and the Eyewitness News team got different ideas of what’s fit for the folks at home.”

  “No objections, so long as it doesn’t leave this building. We won’t be tripping over each other. I’ve got obsessions of my own without taking on hand-me-downs.”

  * * *

  Our paperless society has killed more trees than an army of Paul Bunyans; nobody, Silicon Valley included, trusts memory banks. Cops especially never throw anything away. If you have the time to waste you can browse the Ls in storage at 1300 and bone up on every case from the Lindbergh kidnapping back to Lot’s wife. Evidently they all had a local connection.

  A civilian employee of the department, a retired officer from the look of him, whose face had frozen into a grimace around the time of the ’67 riots, rode up from the basement and pushed a stiff cardboard storage carton on a mail cart into an unused office on the floor above Stonesmith’s. A row of departed file cabinets had left square footprints in the asbestos tile and a Girls of Baywatch calendar hung at an expressionistic angle from a nail on a wall: In that room, time had stopped at March 1993.

  When the cart trundled off on a rickety wheel I was left alone with a gray steel desk, a swivel that listed to starboard, and stacks of green cardboard folders, each bound with a rubber band, the first of which crumbled when I touched it, without any effect on the bundle of onionskin reports, grainy photographs printed on cheap stock, old skin cells, coffee rings, and stale nicotine.

  That last made me want to commit a misdemeanor. I found the smoke detector, a grubby white plastic Frisbee mounted in a corner of the suspended ceiling, and got up on tiptoe to dismantle it. I could have saved myself the trouble; the four AAA batteries inside were leprous bulges of corrosion. I sat down, got a Winston going, and used an open drawer for an ashtray. I wasn’t the first; when I drew it out, a flock of gray flakes fled across the bottom like silverfish.

  As page-turners went it wasn’t Tom Clancy, or even Thomas the Tank Engine. I spotted some trademark phrases a certain breed of prowl-car cop uses to stay awake to the end of the shift, a couple of inside jokes, the usual creative misspellings, and a lot of patrician vocabulary—almost invariably cocked up—intended to land a cushy job as a department spokesman, but mostly the reports were a lesson on how to make a possible murder investigation read like a pitch for pet health insurance.

  The transcripts of interviews told a different story. Frances Xav
ier Lawes had been subjected to more intense scrutiny than had been reported by the press. Most people assume the wealthy can buy anything they want, without questioning the cost. Like most wealthy people, the Laweses were broke; not the way you and I and the majority of the race are broke—they can always swing seven figures in credit, if they cared to stand for the legal loansharking—but manicured hands wring as frequently as the working man’s. The couple was overextended at home and in vacation houses in Arizona and Florida, barely making payments on a small fleet of automobiles, and no closer to getting out from under their credit cards than they were at the start. Husband and wife had their lives insured for a million apiece; and then there was the old adage that when a spouse vanishes or dies under a cloud of suspicion, most investigations needn’t look beyond the surviving partner. All told, Lawes had spent more time at headquarters than most of the lightbulbs, and search warrants were executed on his office and all three of his residences; but as the days, weeks, and months wore on and no body was recovered, common sense kicked in: Before considering to lift a finger to discuss cutting a check, insurance companies insist on proof of death. If money was the motive, Lawes would have arranged a discovery somehow. That’s how cops think, in a line as straight as the ones they draw for suspected drunk drivers, and it pays off usually. Lawes got a clean bill of health—without prejudice in case the smoke drifted back his way—and so far as the record was concerned, that was still the situation six years later.

  I got a whiff of something, though; call it gut instinct or jaded expectations or the Police Pox—extremely contagious if you spent too much time in their proximity—but if, say, the Michigan Department of Transportation plowed up a pile of bones digging a new exit ramp for I-696 and they bore a scrap of Paula Lawes’s DNA, Frances X. would open his door to a Homicide detective with a new warrant in his paw inside twenty-four hours; not counting Sunday when the courthouse is closed.

  Someone’s foot bent a board outside the room and kicked a piece of 1300 across linoleum. I extinguished a cigarette, more from respect for the someone’s intelligence than guilt, and blew smoke out through the gap in the window frame. Deb Stonesmith opened the door without knocking, sniffed the air, shrugged. “You had an hour and a half; should be plenty. Want me to gather the suspects, ask Archie to bring a fresh orchid down from the plant room?”

  “I’m not Nero Wolfe,” I said. “I’m not even near enough. Is this everything? Blu-ray was new when the last report was filed.”

  “Perps don’t stop perpetrating while we chew over old cases. You know what we know, unless you skipped the boring parts.”

  “There should be a record of the last time Lawes pressed for news.”

  “There is. You read it.”

  I shuffled papers, found it. “He hasn’t asked for an update in four years?”

  “Touching, ain’t it? Just pining away.”

  “Is that why someone decided he killed her?”

  She played with the latest tea bag. “Did someone decide that? Maybe I should brush up on the file.”

  “Not everything makes it into writing. Who’s got a hard-on against my client and why?”

  “I can answer the first question. He’ll have to answer the second. John Alderdyce.”

  “The inspector’s retired, I heard.”

  “From the department. I never heard of any detective giving up detecting. He’s with the Reliance agency now.” The smile she built bore no resemblance to the one she’d kept for her niece. “Stay on your toes, Amos. The competition just got stiffer.”

  FOUR

  The late Ernest Krell was the offspring of a bat and one of those fish that live so many fathoms from sunlight they’re born without eyes. Sometime in the seventies he bought a vacant warehouse on the river for pennies, converted the vast hollow interior into offices, and covered the brick exterior with polished aluminum, eliminating all the windows. The excuse was that as a security consultant he preferred his walls solid and unbreachable, but my personal opinion is he was as crazy as wax fruit. For years the place looked like a bouillon cube wrapped in foil.

  That had changed with the founder’s death. His grandchildren had come to town long enough to hear the will and appoint someone to manage the business, then caught the return flight to Seattle. The contractor the manager hired carved slits from the roof to the foundation, installed tinted Plexiglas in the spaces, and covered the rest with ruddy stucco. Copper letters in relief spelled out RELIANCE SECURITY SERVICES across the front of the building. A row of squat concrete posts discouraged car bombers from rushing the entrance.

  I’d spent much of my career giving Reliance no discernible competition, and part of it running errands for it; the kind Krell didn’t consider worth creasing his pumps over. Since his passing, the firm had concerned itself more with anti-terrorism and less with pesky flea-bites such as missing persons and embezzlers; my meat.

  A map of the continental U.S. decorated the floor tiles in the vaulted lobby, studded with brass stars to mark the cities where the company had branches; you could hopscotch from Detroit to Denver on them without straining your groin. An oiled-bronze bust of Krell scowled on a pedestal atop Topeka. The sculpture was the size of the tub they scald hogs in. A brass plate riveted to the base read:

  JULIUS ERNEST KRELL

  (1928–2011)

  Beneath this were engraved likenesses of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Purple Heart, and the Oak Leaf Cluster. Krell had completed two tours in Korea and retired from the United States Secret Service after fifteen years. Steel-framed photos of the great man chatting up various commanders-in-chief encircled the walls; not that he’d ever served on any of the presidents’ details. He was photo-bombing long before anyone thought to give it a name.

  A middle-aged woman in a blue serge suit with a necktie-and-handkerchief set occupied a cockpit in front of the elevators. I told her I was there to see John Alderdyce. I handed her a card.

  “Appointment?”

  I shrugged, looking sheepish. She lifted the handset from a piano-like console and pressed a key. When someone answered she read my card into the mouthpiece, listened, hung up. “Four-ten.”

  A corridor painted buff and blue—FBI colors—encircled the top floor. More 3-D copper characters identified otherwise blank doors. I passed a series of vertical slits facing the river, glancing in at a couple of open doors where men in vests sat drinking coffee and diddling keyboards. The vests were a holdover from the previous management. It was worse when the old man was in charge: Jackets were required at all times as a condition of employment. I rapped at 410, which was closed.

  “Okay, Walker.”

  I’d known John Alderdyce since we sneaked smokes behind Munger Junior High, and I can count on my elbows how many times he’d addressed me by my first name. I opened the door and found him stretched out in shirtsleeves and stocking feet on a pale blue Naugahyde couch, scribbling on a sheet of paper using a folded copy of the Free Press for backing. A metal desk, pale blue also, stood in front of glass shelves lined with family photos in stand-up frames, a baseball on a wood pedestal signed by the 1968 Tigers, and that official-office staple, the Michigan Penal Code, interred in red-cloth coffins for all eternity.

  Apart from a pair of black-rimmed reading glasses, he hadn’t changed much since he’d made detective lieutenant with the Detroit Police Department, before we went to war for some reason in Grenada. A few extra pounds rode comfortably enough on his six-foot-two, rawboned frame, and retirement from the civil service hadn’t changed his taste in tailoring; from salmon-colored linen shirt to gray lisle socks, he wouldn’t be sniffed at by the editors at GQ. Black men, whites too, tend to get paler with age, but his face still looked as if it had been carved from a solid block of anthracite. Steel shards glittered in his close-cropped hair.

  When he turned the sheet over I got a glimpse of what he’d been working on: a fair amateur rendition of Tweety Bird in a cage.

  “Don’t they usually put the brea
k room on the ground floor?”

  He started doodling on the blank side. “This is as busy as it gets. When the old snoop died, he took the company’s gravitas with him. I came at the end of a long line of former state attorney generals, G-men, and specialists in animal control, all of whom turned down the job. ‘John J. Alderdyce, Detroit Police Inspector, Retired, Consultant’ looks good on the letterhead, with the occasional appearance behind a podium for the benefit of the ladies and gentlemen of the press when the firm cracks a case they give a shit about. They pay me more than the Chief of Police to lie here and whack off with a company pen.”

  “What’s the J stand for?”

  “I’m thinking Jupiter; it’s got the ring of smiting to it, don’t you think? I don’t have a middle name, but the straw boss of the moment says that just looks common in embossed lettering.”

  “I don’t see it lasting. I’m not talking about the middle initial.”

  “I figure I’ll stick till I run out of stationery. Then I’ll go down to H.R. and date the letter of resignation they’ve got on file.” He folded the sheet into an airplane and sent it sailing into a corner. He scowled. “Don’t look at me in that tone of voice. Our grandson moved in with us: ‘Just till I pay off my student loan, Pop-pop.’ Care to know what four years at Michigan cost?”

  “Seriously, ‘Pop-pop’?”

  He snapped his glasses shut, slid them into his shirt pocket, swung his feet to the floor and into glossy cordovan slip-ons. “What do you want, Walker?”

  “Paula Lawes.”

  “Christ. Why not start with who blew up the Hindenburg and work your way forward?”

  “Her husband says he wants to get married again, and society frowns on a man taking a new wife when the old one’s unaccounted for. He wants me to account for her.”

  “I bet he does. There’s a little matter of a million in life insurance benefits waiting in escrow until you do.”