When Old Midnight Comes Along

by Loren D. Estleman

  So what did I know, two busy days on the job? Everything the police did, provided they weren’t holding something back, which of course they were, cops being cops the world over, plus the possibility that what had happened to Root just after he was first officer on the scene of Paula’s disappearance had had nothing to do with that case. Everything Steadman had given me fit the blank space in the puzzle: the erratically driven Impala and the trajectory of the bullet that had killed him, suggesting it was fired from the low angle of a gang-driven hot rod. That being true, Paula’s fate landed back in Francis X. Lawes’s lap, right where John Alderdyce had said. But the piece popped right back up out of the puzzle when it came to why her murderer—if it was murder—would reopen the investigation because he had an uncontrollable urge to walk down the aisle. The insurance angle was too police-pat: No creditor was so impatient he couldn’t wait a year for a piece of a million.

  Was it simply a matter of someone who’d read too much of Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie, hoping to clear himself of suspicion by placing himself back in the spotlight of official scrutiny?

  Nuts to that. He was a politician, even if he’d never run for office. Perception is reality. Clear in the eyes of evidence is clear. Only a masochist would do a 180 and willingly place himself back in the hot seat, like a horse running back into a blazing stable.

  Anyway I had to believe that, if I intended to continue shaving in front of a mirror.

  For the time being at least.

  * * *

  When old midnight came along this time I was still asleep, but just beneath the surface. I could hear myself snoring, and was beginning to be aware that I wasn’t really standing on the deck of Captain Hook’s ship in Jockey shorts and a cowboy hat; that old recurring dream that bore no resemblance to anything I’d been exposed to recently, and meant nothing to anyone but a therapist. Something tinkled in the kitchen, a clean crisp sound I wouldn’t have heard if I’d been under any deeper. It was probably a spoon sliding into a bowl in the sink, a victim of gravity.

  Just in case the spoon had eyes and sinister intent, I lifted the .38 from the nightstand, put on my street shoes, and headed that direction through coconut-milk moonlight. In shorts and oxfords I was no fashion plate, just a disappointment to anyone who wanted to stomp on my feet.

  I crept along the living room wall and paused beside the square arch to the kitchen, breathing through my mouth and listening. A solitary cricket played the same two notes over and over, stopped when I stirred, waited, then when I didn’t move again went back to the first bar and started over. The refrigerator thumped and purred. Apart from that nothing. I took in a lungful of air and swiveled around the edge of the arch, gripping the revolver against my hip and palming up the light switch on the wall.

  I was alone with the cricket, the major appliances, and something that glittered on the table in the breakfast nook.

  I left it there and checked the garage for unwanted guests. I was alone. The window was open. There was a fresh yellow scar where someone had pried loose the catch with a knife. Someone else had broken in that same way once, and although I’d refastened the screws I hadn’t gotten around to replacing the rotted frame. This one, too, had picked the lock on the door to the kitchen. That used to be a semi-skilled process, but anyone with an Internet connection can download a tutorial. I hadn’t bothered to install a dead bolt. I had nothing in the house worth the effort.

  Until now.

  Back in the kitchen I put down the .38 and picked up the foreign object. It was a ring. A diamond the size of a grape nested in an elaborate setting of white gold or platinum. I fetched my glasses to read what was etched inside the band: Francis to Paula: Semper Votre.

  FIFTEEN

  My go-to guy for evaluations and such didn’t put up a glossy front on the ground floor of a downtown skyscraper, surrounded by glass cases and a plainclothes guard trying to look like an unobtrusive customer. His a/k/a this season was Harry Lauder; last time it was Ben Bernie, and Rod LaRoq the time before that. He always named himself after forgotten movie stars.

  “Beats John Smith and Bob Jones,” he said. “It’s the next best thing to being invisible. Cops are getting younger all the time. Kids today got no interest in learning anything that happened thirty seconds before the miracle of their birth. By the time they catch on to Harry Lauder, I’m Vilma Banky.”

  “Vilma was a woman,” I pointed out.

  “So they waste their time looking for some dame.”

  Yeah, he talks like that; straight from the bottom half of a double bill.

  His given name is Eugene Orbit. At least that’s the name on his one and only arrest report, for selling saxophones from a shipment that went missing in Sandusky, Ohio. The judge dismissed the case when the arresting officer failed to show up at the preliminary hearing, owing to incarceration for transmuting two kilos of heroin in the police property room into plaster of Paris.

  Orbit’s a bizarre-looking creature, assembled in a hurry from odd lots. His ears blossom out only a third of the way down from the top of his hairless head; his eyes are set far apart and stand out so far, some swore, he could swivel them independently like a chameleon. His beak hangs down in front of a tiny mouth, the bulbous tip quivering like a drop of water on the lip of a faucet. From there on down his face plunges into his frayed collar without pausing long enough to form a chin. He isn’t tall, he isn’t short, and as for his age he could pass for sixty or a hundred and six. I know from rumor that he’s been fencing stolen merchandise all over the city since LBJ conducted affairs of state from the toilet.

  The nearest thing he takes to a foolish risk is refusing to conduct business outside Detroit proper. The metropolitan area is such a sprawl he could squirrel himself up in any one of some forty-five independent communities, playing a constant shell game with the authorities and their separate jurisdictions, always a step outside their line. But he was born in a house Henry Ford himself had built for the workers in the River Rouge plant, is proud of his origins, and to my certain knowledge has never ventured north of Eight Mile Road or west of Telegraph.

  This particular spring he’d set up shop in a one-story brick building with a flat asphalt roof on the cusp of Dearborn, with CORKY’S TV REPAIR scripted in green neon above the entrance. Steel utility shelves set up in stacks perpendicular to the walls contained dusty, obscenely naked picture tubes, amputated knobs, cartons of screws and washers, smaller tubes lying on their sides with tags attached to them like ancient scrolls, and an array of mystery components not quite as old as the Sphinx. A coffin-shaped walnut console minus its TV, radio, and turntable made a workbench behind the counter, with a metal Curtis Mathes chassis turned over on its side on top, its bundle of wires curled around it like the tail of a sleeping fox. There was a plain door leading to a back room where the real merchandise would be stored: Waterford crystal, giant flatscreens, maybe a set of Maserati rims, smoking hot.

  “Kind of high-profile for you,” I said, tilting my head toward some of the obsolete bric-a-brac. “These days a TV fix-it shop sticks out as far as Chapel Rock.”

  “Sometimes a yuppie living in one of them converted warehouses on the river drops in to keep the retro thing going in his apartment. If it’s a busted plug, I fix it. If it’s anything else I tell ’em I’m backed up to December; by which time I’ll be in business someplace else. Apart from that nobody bothers me but the legits.”

  In Orbit-LaRoq-Bernie-Lauder’s world, the crooks he deals with on the supply side are legits; everyone else is a chump. “Who’s Corky?”

  “Nobody, now. His widow threw in the sign with the lease. So far it’s kept them spooks in that lunch wagon down the street from coming in here.”

  “Local cops?”

  “Naw. Only the feds are dumb enough to peddle ham sandwiches in a Muslim neighborhood.”

  All the time we were speaking he was wrapping a square package the size of a toaster oven in brown paper and string from an old-fashioned dispensing spoo
l bolted to the counter. It could be a vintage portable television, but I wouldn’t lay odds on it. I lent him a finger while he tied the cord, then he slid the package aside and placed his palms flat on the countertop. That was my signal to finish the small talk and state my business.

  I took a twist of tissue from a side coat pocket and opened it on the counter. The diamond caught cold fire in the light of the ceiling fluorescents, with a touch of green from the neon glowing outside the big plate-glass window.

  He picked it up, hefted it on his palm. Then he screwed a jeweler’s loupe into one of his distended eyes and turned the ring around in his fingers, examining it from all angles, including the inscription inside.

  “‘Semper Votre,’ what’s that, French?”

  “Latin. ‘Always yours.’ It sounds more poetic in the language of Rome.” I met his naked eye. “You pick up some things in the craft.”

  “Nothing worth jackshit in this one. Who’s Francis, the Pope?”

  “Sinatra. Is it genuine?”

  Keeping the loupe in place, he produced an eyedropper and a bottle of water from the shelf under the counter. He drew some water into the dropper, squeezed it onto the stone, and studied the effect through the lens. “Oh, it’s the goods. Look how the drops puddle in the imperfections.” He held out the loupe. I passed. Whatever was wrong with his eyes might be contagious.

  “It’s flawed?”

  “All diamonds have flaws. That’s how you know they’re diamonds. I should charge you for these lessons.” He put the loupe in his shirt pocket and used the tissue to wipe off the ring. “So when’d you decide to stop being a chump?”

  “It’s not for sale. I’m asking what it’s worth.”

  “In that case, it’s worth plenty. Carat and a half minimum, platinum setting worked by a true artist. I was going to offer a couple of thou, but you’d get twenty times that on the open market; more if you separate the stone from the ring and approach two different dealers. A lot of them that call theirselves honest try to Jew you down on engagement and wedding rings, on account of all the couples that split, flooding the market with returns. The crooks.”

  “It’s worth forty grand?”

  “Hang on.” A jeweler’s scale materialized from the shelf underneath. He put the ring on one of the pans and placed some coin-shaped weights in the other; played mix-and-match with the weights. “Quarter over one and a half. Make it forty-five. Seriously, I can go thirty cents on the dollar if you give me a couple days to line up a buyer.”

  “I’ll think about it.” I rewrapped the ring and put it back in my pocket. “What’s the damage?”

  “You on an expense account?”

  “If I were, would I tell you?”

  “That means you are. Hundred, out the door.”

  “Spoken just like a TV repairman.” I slipped him a century from Francis Lawes’s stash. He scribbled on a receipt pad as old as the contents of the shop, signing it “Corky.”

  I stepped outside, turned up my collar against an icy snotty rain, and went back to my car, richer than I’d been in my life. I just didn’t know what to do with the windfall. Not what the ring was worth: That belonged to Lawes, if he stood to inherit Paula’s estate. As for what it meant in terms of useful information, so far as I knew I was still as poor as Job.

  SIXTEEN

  You could call the Lawes house a ranch style, but cheesy builders had been heaping offal on that term since Eisenhower. This one occupied some four thousand square feet on an oblong lot of close-shorn grass at the end of a paved cul-de-sac in Birmingham, which was no longer the community where the newly rich stopped for cocktails before stepping into old money in Grosse Pointe, where the Dodge brothers used to squirt their chaw into gold-plated spittoons. For decades now it’s been the chief local employer of Micronesian gardeners, Guatemalan housekeepers, and chauffeurs named Fritz. The contractor had tricked out the brick exterior to make it look as if the courses had been laid by Rameses the Great and a carefully corroded tin likeness of the Greek goddess Diana aimed its bow-and-arrow toward Bloomfield Hills, the city’s rival, from its rooftop perch. Four big windows with functional green shutters pierced the front wall on either side of a door with crystal panes in X-shaped leaded frames.

  The doorbell disappointed, making an ordinary chiming noise when I pressed the button. After George Hoyle’s Big Ben, anything else was bound to let me down.

  Holly Pride answered it. Today it was a simple sleeveless top, powder-blue, charcoal slacks with a cutthroat crease, and blue strap sandals. Her bangs still slanted, but this time the rest of the outfit left my equilibrium intact.

  “Small world,” I said.

  “You act surprised.”

  “I expected a bell-shaped woman named Constanza, with a moustache. You could bring down the neighborhood property values opening the door yourself.”

  “If you must know, I came to drop off some papers that needed signing. Francis took a personal day.”

  “Is he available?”

  “He’s resting upstairs. I know better than to disturb him when his bedroom door is closed.”

  “I don’t. I need to see him.”

  “You found something?”

  “Something found me.”

  A cheek got sucked, emphasizing the sharp line of the bone. “I’ll never learn your language.”

  “You don’t have to. You’re not my client. Seriously, I need to talk with him before I can take another step.” I had a hand in a flap pocket, Noël Coward style, fingering the diamond ring.

  “You’re forgetting I tried to pay you to take no steps at all.”

  “I remembered. Do I wait till he wakes up, then tell him you stopped me from conferring with him? Not a good move on the part of the eager bride-to-be.”

  “Oh, shit. Come in.” She swiveled away, giving me room to pass.

  We were in a cool dim living room, illuminated only by weak sunlight. A big fireplace built of the same prematurely aged brick as the outside supported a gray marble mantel, with squishy-looking silver-colored leather chairs arranged at angles facing the hearth and above the mantel a framed greatly enlarged print of a thistle. This matched the tattoo on Holly’s ankle. She’d marked her territory.

  To the left was a pony wall, beyond which a hallway led to the east end of the building. To the right, a paneled door painted gloss white stood open to a room with granite counters. That made it the kitchen; by the process of elimination, the hallway that ran left would lead to the master bedroom. I started that way.

  “Wait,” she said. “It’s better if he hears my voice outside his door. Francis keeps guns. He was broken into once.”

  “I’ve got him beat.” I made a gentlemanly gesture toward the hallway with my hand.

  It was a broad passage, nearly wide enough to partition off into two small rooms, with the kind of art you usually see in houses like that on the walls: swirls of color that looked like oil on water, primary hues gridded into squares of varying sizes, a zombie wailing on a bridge, comic-strip panels blown up as big as king-size beds. Certain homeowners buy such things by the cubic foot.

  The hall ended at another shiny white door. I stood aside while Holly rapped her knuckles on a panel. “Fran? It’s me, sorry. Walker wants a sit-down.”

  Silence answered.

  She went through it all again.

  Again, nothing.

  I felt a tingle I’d felt before. I’d learned a long time ago not to try to talk myself out of it.

  She looked a question at me. I grasped the knob. It turned without resistance. Closing my hand around the butt of the Chief’s Special and flashing Holly a signal, I pressed the door gently with my palm and let it drift open on its own as we moved in two directions parallel to the walls on either side of the opening.

  Nobody screamed. No shots rang out. A boulder didn’t roll down a ramp, sending us scrambling for safety. The place was as silent as any can be in a world filled with automobiles, jet engines, dogs, children, and rolling bo
omboxes. Birmingham, at least, is wrapped in cotton wool, so that all that row was part of a soundtrack belonging to a different theater. We unpasted ourselves from the walls and I led the way inside, still gripping the .38.

  No lights were burning, but the rheumy rays of the sun picked out a king-size bed with an upholstered bench at the foot, a highboy too tall to have been built in any recent century, a five-bladed fan suspended motionless from a high ceiling, and a pair of nightstands in a room large enough to accommodate three times as much furniture.

  Francis Lawes lay atop the bedspread, fully dressed except for his feet in lisle socks, a white dress shirt tucked into his slacks with the collar open, no necktie. His legs were spread slightly and one arm hung over the left edge of the mattress. A bottle of Glenfiddich stood on the nightstand on that side and the sour essence of liquor smelled secondhand hung in the air. He should have been snoring, but the only breathing I heard belonged to Holly Pride and me. Maybe he hadn’t drunk enough to soften his adenoids, or whatever it was that caused the roaring and spluttering of a sot at rest.

  There was nothing for a detective in that. Times are stressful. We’re all of us entitled to take off work now and then for a good toot, especially Scotch in the right bottle. I didn’t see anything I disapproved of, except for the slender square semiautomatic pistol lying on the fawn-colored carpet below his dangling hand.

  * * *

  “Is that his gun?” I was whispering, God knows why.

  “I wouldn’t know.” The words grated against her throat.

  I stepped over and crouched over the weapon. It was a Glock 17L, the competition model with the extended barrel. It was too much gun for the room. I put my ear almost to the carpet—sculpted, with a pad under it thick enough to withstand a season at Comerica Park. I might have been an Indian listening for an iron horse to come thundering up the tracks. I couldn’t smell spent powder, but to do the thing right I’d have to pick up the pistol and stick the muzzle up my nose. Adding my prints to the mix wasn’t an option.