When Old Midnight Comes Along

by Loren D. Estleman

  “He left Root’s wallet alone, his service piece, the riot gun under the front seat. Why take his notebook if not for what was in it? Root hadn’t worked anything worth a line in a weekly shopper in a month, and what he had before that was public record. Someone followed him from where her car was found, caught up to him while he was concentrating on a possible drunk behind the wheel, and capped him for what he had on paper.”

  “What made whoever it was so sure he had something that would come back on him?”

  He paused with his can halfway to his lips. His face pitied me. “What made him sure it wasn’t?”

  “I don’t like it,” I said. “One side of it hangs together so well it stinks and the other falls apart based on sheer recklessness.”

  “Name one theory that doesn’t.”

  “Leads?”

  “We figured whoever snatched the woman had to have time to stash her someplace—her or her body—so he planted an accomplice at the scene to wait for the cops and do the rest. I never said either one of them was dumb. If she was taken it had to be fast, and fast can ball you up six ways from Tuesday; you can’t expect to erase every possible incriminating detail in mid-stride. So you appoint somebody else to clean up, yeah?”

  I nodded. It seemed the only appropriate response.

  “Well, he’d better be good; both of ’em better. We had a gang operating here then, slick as eels. Started in drugs in Detroit, graduated to hired killing, splintered off into the suburbs when a new chief made gangs Priority One in the big city: You remember all those sweeps, seemed like there was one every Friday night and a matinee Saturday. Anyway the gang was in the catering business so long they made Murder Incorporated look like junior achievers. But that isn’t the reason we lit on them first.”

  “Angle of the slug,” I said.

  “Grab another beer. You hit the bonus round. The vehicle it was fired from had to be riding low enough the bullet took an upward trajectory: thirty degrees, according to the lab monkeys in Detroit. First thing these gang-bangers do when they score a set of wheels is chop it so low when they drive over a dime they can read the date with their ass.”

  “And?” As if I didn’t know the answer.

  “And we made a sweep of our own. The impound looked like a convention-center parking lot in Scrote City.”

  Scrote was short for “scrotum.” The language hadn’t changed since I’d taken police training.

  “Wasn’t strictly wasted time,” he said. “We bagged one for carrying without license or registration, two others for possession for sale of crack—three-time losers, the lot; Trifecta. Had a rape victim ID a fourth in a lineup. He’s in the boys’ school in Whitmore Lake till he turns eighteen in a year or so. Sweated the rest.” He shook his head. “These pukes don’t scare. To them the slammer’s like graduation day, and if any of ’em lives to see thirty he’ll get a block party.”

  “The gang leader still around?”

  “Yeah, he’s around.” The next swig he took seemed to have given him lockjaw. He made a bitter face and threw that can after the last, slopping beer all the way. But this one landed in the bucket. “He’s with the state police, Jackson post. Got him a steady job as a consultant on youth gang activity. That’s how we enforce the law now. If you can’t pin a rap on him, make it a badge.”

  I rested my palms on my thighs. I hadn’t taken up his invitation to help myself to another brew. I was getting a contact high just watching him. “He sounds like he might be worth talking to.”

  “Why, because he switched sides? The only light Oakes Steadman ever saw came from the gold stud in his dick. He beat, killed, and raped his way to the top of the shitheap and stuck so long he got the attention of the other side. That’s how we fight crime now: We make it legal.”

  * * *

  Cynthia White—she could only be the retired commander’s wife—let me out the front door without a trace of strain. That didn’t mean Albert had ducked the bullet for that crack he’d made; when it came to the dodge, the rook, the Judas smile, a cop’s wife can’t be beat.

  The sun bled over the western suburbs, leaving the river in shadow. I’d been at it all day and the farthest I’d gotten from that crooked stretch of water was the hour I’d spent in the library. I went home to count my losses.

  The place needed a new roof, new windows, faucets that didn’t drip, a more efficient furnace, and while we were at it an elegant mistress with an employee discount at Victoria’s Secret. I parked in the garage, leaned shut the swollen door that led to the kitchen, and applied my investigative skills to the refrigerator.

  Not much progress there either: a hard-boiled egg sealed in knockoff Tupperware, half a block of Velveeta, a bunch of wilted celery, two bottles of Heineken. The food didn’t appeal to me and I sure as hell didn’t feel like drinking any more beer. I smoked a cigarette for supper, scoured outer space for a TV program that wasn’t as stale as the contents of my refrigerator, and mixed a highball; but I didn’t drink that either.

  Liquor hadn’t been my friend lately. It made me drowsy, but it shook me awake the same time every night, after which I lay there for hours, fully alert, falling back to sleep finally just before the alarm rang. For several weeks now I’d opened my eyes in darkness, switched on the lamp, and the minute hand was always stuck just before or after midnight. It was so consistent I’d stopped looking.

  So that night I laid off the booze, only to find myself conscious again two hours later. I swung my feet to the floor and sat there in my shorts, scrubbing my hair and taking inventory of all the things I regretted, as if the one that kept me from sleeping the night through would step up like a man and cop to it.

  It didn’t; but then again I may have overlooked it in the jumble. Couldn’t be the latest, taking on a job that involved a missing person who’d stayed missing six years and change with two police departments looking for her, an organized band of psychopaths, and now a cop killing, just for garnish. The insomnia had been going on without help before I stepped into that pile of grief.

  Just for laughs I looked at the alarm clock, standing in a moonbeam like the woman in white. Twelve o’clock on the nose.

  NINE

  It was a brand-new spring day in the Rust Belt. Gray clouds squatted on the roof, drooling a mix of rain and soupy, half-formed snowflakes. I drank a pot of coffee, smoked three cigarettes, and watched the slimy things licking streaks down the window over the sink. I was waiting for it to be eight o’clock.

  A minute past I called the firm of Baylor, Schneider, Baylor, and Baylor. The fish I finally landed this time told me my helpful telephone acquaintance of yesterday was out. I read off the names of the two clients Paula Lawes had represented who were still with the service and asked if either was available.

  “May I ask what it’s about?” A female voice, clipped and brittle.

  “You may.”

  The little silence that followed didn’t do much for the quality of her tone. “I can’t give you that information. Our clients’ privacy is our number-one priority.”

  “Funny, I thought the purpose of public relations is to rescue them from too much privacy.”

  The voice got cautious. It hadn’t been reckless to begin with. “Are you in the business?”

  “I’m investigating a possible murder.”

  “Are you with the police?” She was practically whispering now.

  “I’m working in cooperation with them.” I’d always wanted to say that and mean it. It wasn’t the thrill I’d expected.

  Keys rattled. “Andrea Dawson’s in a meeting in California. She won’t be back until tomorrow. George Hoyle may be able to spare you some time. He works at home. I can call him.”

  I said so could I and pinky-swore not to invade his privacy. She gave me the number and hung up.

  I entered the digits and counted the tones. Someone picked up just when the recording was due to come on offering repeat dialing.

  “According to Hoyle.”

  I coughe
d to cover a moment’s hesitation. “George Hoyle?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Amos Walker. I’m an independent investigator. They told me at your office you knew Paula Lawes. I’ve been hired to look into her disappearance.”

  He had one of those deep voices that could be warm or cold. It fell on the warm side. “I’m glad somebody is. I hope I didn’t throw you off with the way I answered the phone. It’s the name of my business. That’s the line you called.”

  “I got it from someone at Baylor etcetera.”

  “I bet you talked to Theresa. She’s a company girl. When something strikes her as dicey she directs it away from the customers. No one can convince her it wouldn’t mean a damn thing when it comes to trouble.”

  “Maybe the boss was eavesdropping. Where can we meet?”

  “I’m not sure I’d be any help.”

  “So far my only contact who knew her personally is her husband. We’re all of us different things to different people. You might have something to contribute that he couldn’t.”

  “Here’s good.” He gave me an address in Harper Woods. That was a welcome change, as far inland as it was. Another day near the river and my mercury would be off the charts.

  * * *

  You can spend a lifetime in metropolitan Detroit and never get to visit all the suburbs. They lie north, south, west, and east—if you count Windsor, which the Canadians would take issue with—and in some cases actually inside the city limits. Harper Woods sits just south of the Macomb County line, close enough to smell the swill from its county seat but far enough away to refresh itself with the scent of roses and good cocktails when the wind blows from Grosse Pointe. Somehow it manages to pack some twenty thousand souls into a piece of property about the size of a Home Depot without bruising any knees or elbows. But just where the woods went, nobody knows except the founding fathers.

  George Hoyle lived and worked in two stories of more or less authentically Tudor-style house on a street with tree-plantings in the sidewalks, young enough to need gauze wraps to protect them from the wintry blend of snow and icy rain. The building was ivory-colored stucco with timbers stained mushroom gray and casement windows with real mullioned panes. The place looked like money without shouting it.

  The door chimes went bing-bong-bing-bong, bing-bong-bong-bing, the cadence of a bell in the steeple of a cathedral. The man who answered them had half an inch on me, making him six-one, with a long, handsomely seamed face topped with a pompadour of brown hair with gray in it. He was a five-dollar bill without the chin whiskers. He wore a white shirt open at the neck and rolled to his elbows, the tails neatly tucked inside gray corduroys. His feet were shod in black leather loafers slightly scuffed at the toes.

  “Mr. Hoyle?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.”

  I reminded him. “What does According to Hoyle do?”

  “We produce audiobooks.”

  “I used to listen to those sometimes. Not since they stopped recording them on tape. That’s all I can play in my car.”

  “Pretty soon they won’t be available on disc. MP-three’s the latest twist in the race to avoid communication with the rest of our species. That’s why I need public relations consultants, to assure each new generation I’m up to speed. The minute you start talking about tradition, you’re sunk.” He shook my hand. The fingers were corded and woody, like his voice and appearance. He let go and stepped aside, holding the door for me.

  The living room would have provided Henry VIII with a pleasant transition into the twenty-first century: Heavy dark trestle-type tables, a lot of leather, an artificially faded and machine-moth-eaten tapestry mounted in a frame above the stone fireplace, and an iron chandelier equipped with bulbs in the shape of candles. Drops of fake wax adhered permanently to the sides of the sockets.

  “Butt-ugly, isn’t it?” he said. “I’m sub-leasing from an interior decorator. She’s in Santa Fe, polluting movie stars’ homes with clay pots and Mexican tile. The only reason I took it is she had a spare studio I could convert into an editing room.”

  I followed him down a short hall lined with dim portraits of women in ruffled collars and men in codpieces, and we turned into a small room containing a control board and monitors. It resembled the technician’s space at WDIV, but instead of pictures the screens displayed a series of jagged lines like in a business chart, frozen in place. He closed the door. It was upholstered with some kind of fabric that had not been grown anywhere outside a test tube, shutting off all the ambient sounds from the rest of the house. Snow and rain slobbered steadily past a triple-paned window in complete silence. A bomb could have gone off in the little side yard and you’d never know it if you didn’t happen to look up and see the flash.

  “Excuse me just a moment,” he said, seating himself in an office chair, the bare bones type covered in padded gray vinyl. “This reader’s okay, but…” He trailed off, flipping a pair of switches and twisting a dial. A voice nearly as deep as his issued from an invisible speaker, stirring the jagged slashes on the monitors with each change in pitch.

  “… memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking…”

  He squashed his thumb on a key. The voice stopped, the oscilloscope (or whatever it was) readings stood still on the screens. “There! Did you hear it?”

  “The voice sounded familiar.”

  “It should, for what I pay him. Hang on.” He touched the key again, then the one left of it; paused again, and replayed what we’d heard. I turned my better ear—the one opposite my shooting hand—toward the source. This time I heard it. The consonants at the end of the phrase “in little honey-voiced congregations” were crisp and tweedy. At, “nodding, strutting, winking,” they lost shape. I said, “He went from London to L.A. in one jump.”

  “Exactly. Prick forgot the British accent. It wasn’t great to begin with, but at least up to this point he didn’t sound like a Beverly Hills cabbie. The floor manager should’ve caught it at the time and done another take. The customers pick up on such things; plucks ’em right out of the story. Now I have to go back and listen straight through four hours of boring English country shit to find out how many times he dropped the bloody ball.”

  “Tish-tush. That’s no way to talk about Evelyn Waugh.”

  He turned his attention from the board. “A detective who reads. Now I know you’re not with the police.”

  “You’d be surprised. Just yesterday I heard a detective in Major Crimes say ‘whom,’ and she used it correctly. What are you going to do to this guy, stick him behind Traitors’ Gate?”

  “As much as Waugh might approve—which if you know anything about the old crank, you wouldn’t be so foolish as to expect it—I can’t. This clown makes twenty million a picture. Someone might miss him. So I have to schedule another studio session, work my way around his busy shooting schedule, get the publisher to go halfsies on his first-class plane ticket and eat the cost of his mountain-grown chamomile tea and Caesar salad—dressing on the side and hold the anchovies—and maybe break even on sales, if anyone reads classical literature anymore. Can’t count on that, so we wheedle box-office favorites into pimpery. Never mind that their particular gift doesn’t necessarily transfer to this medium. Sure doesn’t in this case.”

  He scribbled digits from a small LED screen on the control board onto a pad. The gizmo seemed to be an odometer of some kind. “When the publishers don’t kick I use professional readers. They use a different tone for every character: men, women, foreigners, English majors, gutter rats. You never have to rewind to know who’s speaking. In the golden age of radio they’d be major stars. As it is they make the industry minimum.”

  “On the plus side, no one hounds them for their autograph in a public toilet. Can we talk about Paula Lawes?”


  “Before we do that, can I see something that says you’re who you say you are?”

  I got out my folder and snapped it open. “Don’t pay attention to the badge,” I said. “It’s pure milk chocolate under the foil.”

  He shook open a pair of black-rimmed glasses, put them on, and read the works, including the sell-by date. He returned the readers to his shirt pocket and the folder to me. “I’m forced to be suspicious,” he said. “When you run a business from your home, of course you have a safe. I don’t; but try telling that to a certain class of people.” Without looking he slid a drawer under the control board open far enough to show the curved walnut grip of a revolver.

  “Someday they’ll stop printing cash and then we can all hang up our weapons for monuments.” My coat spread open as I was putting away the folder, just enough to show the fisted rubber grip of the Chief’s Special in its clip.

  His face scowled from forehead to chin, which was a long way to stretch a scowl. “You can stop quoting the classics now. Just because you know Shakespeare and Waugh from Smith and Wesson doesn’t mean you can find my Paula.”

  TEN

  There was a faint smell of cigarettes in the house. Probably there were ionizers in place to scrub the air, but the odor was getting to be rare indoors, so I noticed it, along with a shallow glass ashtray on top of the control board. I showed him my pack and lifted my brows. He nodded, accepted one of the two I shook out, and I lit us both up. No one ever dropped a spent match into a tray with more care. “Your Paula?”

  “That’s right.” He blew it out with the smoke. His face was something I could shoot pool on.

  “How long?”

  “Six months, two weeks, three days.”

  “Lawes know?”

  “I have no idea. I was able to account for my whereabouts the night she disappeared. The Detroit inspector in charge of the case promised me it wouldn’t get into the record unless it bore on the investigation. I forget his name.”