When Old Midnight Comes Along

by Loren D. Estleman

  He held the card by one corner, as if a rat dangled from it. “Reliance is in the domestic defense business. We haven’t worked with independent operators in years.”

  Alderdyce’s face went flat. “I’ve known Walker most of my life. A little professional courtesy goes a long way.”

  “With Krell, maybe. That marble head you pass in the lobby every day is all that’s left under this roof.” He stuck the card back at me.

  “Keep it. I got it on a twofer.”

  Dale Grange looked at his watch. He wore it strapped to the underside of his wrist. That settled his account as far as I was concerned. People who wear it that way like to sneak looks when you’re boring them. “At Reliance, we measure time in microseconds. We’ve already wasted a couple of hundred of them discussing this. Thank you for dropping in, Mr.—”

  “Hawkshaw,” I said. “I guess you were too busy counting microseconds to listen when we were introduced.”

  Alderdyce rewound the ring in tissue and put it in a cashmere pocket. “I’ll get back to you with what I find out.”

  The white grapes swam back his way. “Mr. Alderdyce, if you don’t like the way we do things around here—”

  “I don’t.” When he rose to his feet, it was always an event, like Gibraltar shrugging its shoulders.

  “In that case, pack your things.”

  He stooped and lifted a stout cardboard carton from inside the kneehole of the desk. “I never unpacked.”

  * * *

  “God, that felt good.”

  We were riding down in the elevator. I asked if a favor for a friend was worth losing his job.

  “Since when are we friends?”

  “Since the last time you tanked me for obstruction of justice. You could have had me broken in Lansing, but you forgot. You never forget anything.”

  “That’s one of the things I regret not forgetting.”

  “Not an answer to my question.”

  He toggled his big head on his big neck, cracking bones. “I lost a shot at chief of detectives and twice the amount of my current pension for worse reasons. I’ve been looking for an excuse to tell that son of a bitch to screw himself since the day I signed on. What have you dug up, besides an ugly piece of expensive jewelry?”

  I filled him in on what White and Oakes Steadman had said about Marcus Root.

  He remembered the case. “I know Steadman. We worked with Allen Park on a protection racket the gangs were working both sides of the line. I wouldn’t trust him as far as the end of my arm. Probably why the staties recruited him. You can expect a crook to be untrustworthy. Legits are a crapshoot.”

  “What about White?”

  “Fellow cop. Also a crapshoot. What else?”

  “Paula Lawes may have known Root.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Don’t crowd me, John.”

  The doors opened. We walked through the drafty lobby. Ernest Krell paid us no attention from his pedestal.

  Out in the parking lot, Alderdyce unlocked his car by remote. It was a silver Mazda, that year’s model. He dumped the box into the backseat, scraped nonexistent dust off his palms, and faced me. “What happened to ‘I don’t have to scribble on a blotter’?”

  “Not the same deal. This was a personal promise, in return for information. I’ll throw some expense money your way.”

  “Not if it’s Lawes’s.”

  “If this clears him, it won’t bend your almighty principles.”

  “Maybe not, but it’d chafe my ass. I’ve spent too much time not liking him to change my tastes.”

  I shook out a cigarette and speared it in the corner of my mouth. I didn’t light it. Cigarettes are good for many other things besides destroying your lungs. “Then I’ll put it on my account.”

  He laughed. You don’t want to hear John Alderdyce laugh. “You couldn’t cover my gas. Anything else?”

  I thought about the low-rider I’d dusted off my tail. There was no sign of it in the lot or the street that ran past it. I hadn’t expected one, but I’d been wrong before when I thought I was in the clear.

  I said nothing. I didn’t know why, except that it was my headache. He had enough on his mind, beginning with filing for unemployment.

  NINETEEN

  Our most bipolar season was running true to form. Sunshine skulked in at an oblique angle, hoping not to attract the attention of a solid shelf of indigo overcast hanging low above it. The light in those circumstances is Turneresque, an angry mix of orange and green, pregnant with foreboding.

  I didn’t feel any of that. With my only solid lead out of my hands, I stood before a blank wall that offered no handholds to hoist myself over it. At such times I run to ground to drink, smoke, and think. Rosecranz was in the middle of his quadrennial spring cleaning, heaving open windows in the vacant offices to change out the stale air for the variety that came from the street, pushing dust bunnies, dead skin cells, fly husks, and stained cotton swabs out into the halls with a long-handled broom, and touching up the wainscoting with a fresh application of dollar store shellac over a generation of dirt. The building reeked of Pine-Sol and forgotten tenants. I stepped over a pile of sweepings, collected my mail from under the slot, and sorted through it on the way to the desk. A coupon promising 50 percent off a jar of pickles at Sam’s Club was the only piece that made it past the wastebasket.

  The super hadn’t opened my window, the office being under current lease and the door locked. I cracked it to expel the stench of World War II disinfectant, poured a glass from the bottle in the safe, lit a cigarette, and sat back to decipher the hieroglyphs in my notebook. But both the liquor and the cigarette tasted like turpentine, so I continued the work without benefit of refreshment.

  Andrea Dawson was the other client still with Baylor, Schneider, Baylor, and Baylor who’d worked with Paula Lawes at the time she dropped off the grid. She was away in California when I’d called last time, but had been expected back the next day. I dragged over the phone and dialed the PR firm’s number. My luck was good for once. I reached the cooperative soul who’d been so eager to help the first time, and he hadn’t changed his mind.

  The number he gave me belonged to a pharmaceutical lab operating out of a professional building in Southfield, with a menu as long as the Bayeux Tapestry. I entered Dawson’s extension and got a voice I’d have called flinty if not for a faint dialect that stretched one-syllable words to two. The South had risen yet again. Most of the flint flaked off when I introduced myself and told her what I was working on.

  “Ye-es, I remember Paula well. I’m not sur-ah what I can say that will help after all this ty-um.” I’m breaking the spelling rules just once to establish the flavor of the magnolia marinade.

  “That’s what all the polite people say, Ms. Dawson.”

  “Miss, please. I dislike the smell of burning bras.”

  “Miss. May I ask what you do for your company?”

  “I translate scientific shoptalk into plain English. Whenever we deliver a breakthrough in medical treatment, I stand behind a lectern and tell the boys and girls of the press what we’ve found in terms they don’t have to look up in the Merck Manual. To put it bluntly, my bosses think I cut a better figure in front of a camera than some frump in a lab coat.”

  “So you’re a spokesmodel.”

  “That doesn’t offend me. When a serious public-image issue rears its ugly head, some of these muckrakers choose not to hurl embarrassing questions at a pretty face. But don’t think I didn’t serve my time in the trenches first.”

  “That happens? The embarrassing questions, I mean.”

  A moment got milked. “This is all off the record, isn’t it, sugar?”

  “When you put it that way, how can I refuse?”

  “As I said,” she purred. “Let’s just say that when the Food and Drug Administration overlooks a fatal side effect and clears a medication for distribution, it’s we who sell it who take the hit. Who was it said a government bureau is the nearest th
ing to eternal life?”

  “Ronald Reagan. Let’s talk about Paula. How well did you know her?”

  “We’re like sisters. No, I’ll amend that. Sis and I get along like two cats in a gunnysack. Paula’s an only child, and with Belinda trying so hard to be a bee-eye-tee-see-aitch, we just naturally drifted into each other. If she had secrets I didn’t know about, she’d forgot ’em.”

  My heart sped up a little, but I let that one steep. “Why so candid? We just met, and we haven’t even done that, really.”

  Silver bells—tarnished a little and scratchy—rang back in her throat. That would be Viagra to most of the male population. “You can trust everybody or trust nobody, and get in the same trouble either way. Why not enjoy the company?”

  “Who said that?”

  “My daddy. When you needed chicken manure and lots of it, he was the man to see in North Carolina.”

  I believed that.

  “Did Paula ever mention George Hoyle?”

  “Oh, the record man.” The molasses had gone clean out of her accent. “Well, it was discs back then. I don’t know what it is now. Maybe he shoots Little Black Sambo straight into people’s brains.”

  “For shame, Andrea. New South and all.”

  “I’m not Robert E. Lee, sugar. I kept my sword.”

  “You’re not a fan of Hoyle’s.”

  “You could say that. You could say if a gator swallowed him whole, I’d treat the gator to a free sample of our new gastric gummy.”

  “You know him, then.”

  “Never met him. Never care to. He got his fill of her favors, then dumped her over dessert in some hole-in-the-wall no self-respecting cockroach’d be found dead in.”

  “Was it the Gamesman Inn?”

  “Maybe. Someplace you can’t see your hand in front of your face—or the lady from next door nuzzling the mailman’s neck. It was in Allen Park, that much I remember.”

  “Why’d he dump her?”

  “He never said, according to Paula. She sobbed into my blouse all the rest of that night. Said she felt doubly damned on account of she was stepping out on her husband and had no right to carry on so. I said the one thing hadn’t any to do with the other. A snake’s a snake and it don’t matter where the mouse came from or why. Then I poured her another glass of Southern Comfort.”

  “During all this confessing, did the name Marcus Root come up?”

  Computer keys rattled on her end. I didn’t think she was looking at the name, just killing time while she accessed her own memory. She was a multi-tasker. “Marcus Root. No.”

  “He was a police officer in Allen Park, if that helps.”

  “It sure does! She said a policeman she knew slightly dropped by their table that night. It was after he left that Hoyle’s mood changed. I asked her if she thought the two things had anything to do with each other. She thought about it, then said no. I can’t tell you if she believed what she said. When someone’s in that state I doubt anyone could.”

  Something clanked, startling me. It was the steel rule I kept on the desk. I’d been standing it on end with my free hand, sliding my fingers down it, reversing ends, and starting again. I laid it aside. “Is there anything else about that night you remember?”

  “Just that I was mighty glad when she went into the bathroom to freshen up and left. It must have been about three A.M. and I was exhausted. She hugged me at the door. That was the last time I saw her. I got busy not discussing a class-action lawsuit against the firm and I didn’t hear from her, so I assumed she’d flung herself into her work. She was helping elect a governor at the time, which I suppose made a welcome distraction.” She paused. The rattling had stopped. “Should I call you if I remember anything else? Or even if I don’t?”

  That last question came with an extra ladle of mint julep.

  I grinned at the door to my waiting room. “Now, Miss Dawson. I could be a serial killer for all you know.”

  “A better-looking axe murderer I never heard tell of. I’m looking at your picture right now. The Free Press puts all its local morgue photos online. Did you really shoot that nasty hit man outside your office last year?”

  “Oh, that picture. They dredged it up from the base of the Aswan Dam. It was taken ten years ago. I’ve put on a couple of pounds since then and gone grayer than a goose.”

  “This old gal don’t mind a little snow on the roof.”

  I said I’d keep her number and rang off before she brought up my rap sheet.

  My fingers drummed the receiver in its cradle. Sometime during the conversation, an imp had blown moist warm air in my ear. Whatever significance it carried had vanished along with the sensation. All I knew about it with any certainty was that it had been important.

  I checked voice mail, in case Alderdyce had called with information on the ring I’d left with him. Nothing. Same with the cell. It was early yet.

  My notebook opened to George Hoyle’s number. That was a sign of some kind. I dialed it. I was working from the playbook some distant ancestor of Alderdyce’s had assembled back when Caesar was dividing up Gaul like a personal-pan pizza. I’d been Dr. Jekyll the first time. After what I’d gotten from Andrea Dawson I was ready to dust off Mr. Hyde.

  No answer. I looked at my watch. I had time for a late lunch, somewhere on the way to Harper Woods and Hoyle’s medieval house.

  My belly wasn’t ready for food. Too much nicotine and too little useful information had irritated the lining.

  I remembered my drink then. It had gone flat. The tank wash I could afford resumed the aging process as soon as it left the bottle, and not to the good. I got up, dumped the glass into the sink in the water closet, half-filled it from the tap, and drank from it as I walked to the window and looked out at the weather. Under it, a car I recognized idled close to the curb, smoke stuttering from its gleaming tailpipe. If it rode any lower it could have struck sparks off its bumper.

  TWENTY

  For a generation I’d parked on the lot belonging to the one-story building across the street from the office, a glazed-brick relic that had by turns sheltered a garage, a music shop, a distributor of medical marijuana, a dollar store, and a string of Mexican, Italian, Indian, Thai, and Vietnamese restaurants, each one as successful as the United Nations; but the scrap rats had finished the place for good. When they were through harvesting the copper wire and plumbing, they’d taken the hardware off the doors, pried the rebar out of the concrete slab, and severed the iron posts that supported the roof; all but one. They sawed halfway through it when the north end of the building fell in. The mortuary that got the city contract buried the pair in Mt. Elliott Cemetery in manila envelopes.

  The half that remained standing was condemned, to await demolition at the end of the line of HUD hovels, crack houses, smash-and-grab ruins, and chain bookstores already selected to join the pattern of vacant lots that have turned Detroit into a jack-o’-lantern when seen from the air. The site, grandfathered in before local building codes prohibited construction on lots smaller than an acre, wasn’t likely to attract visionary entrepreneurs, so that would continue to be the situation for the foreseeable future. There was no room to leave a car that wouldn’t wind up under a pile of rubble come the first stiff wind from Canada, so I’d made arrangements to store the Cutlass in a patch of gravel behind a microbrewery three blocks down Grand River Avenue.

  Low-Rider didn’t know that, apparently; which was why he was waiting at the curb to see which way I turned after leaving my building.

  It was one of the new Dodge Chargers, chopped and retro-fitted until it bore as much resemblance to a Chrysler product as a crocodile did to a French poodle. It was painted matte black, a finish that gave off no reflection, would be nearly invisible in darkness, and even in broad daylight could be overlooked if you were thinking about anything else while you were staring directly at it. Say what you like about paranoia, it has certain advantages.

  I sipped water and thought. I’d already explored two of my options, str
inging the tail along until I knew more about it and shaking loose of it in traffic. The hour had come to brace it.

  Not head-on, though. If there’s one thing age teaches a man, it’s to avoid a frontal assault given other options.

  Of all the code violations Rosecranz collected like phony green cards, the one requiring fire exits to remain accessible was what most concerned me at present. The door leading to the alley behind my building had been chained and padlocked since before Japan switched from plastic toys to automobiles. There was the fire escape on my floor, but I’d burned through my luck there once before; it’s finite, after all. Just thinking about it set all my warning buzzers into action.

  So it came down to a frontal attack after all. A man could save himself a lot of time just by embracing the most unpleasant plan at the start.

  * * *

  Uber wouldn’t do, even if I landed a driver who wasn’t a psycho; not conspicuous enough. What I needed was flash—so bright it could be seen from the space station, or at least a gang-banger driving a speed-bump on wheels.

  Hollywood Limo ran a quarter-page display ad in the metropolitan directory, with the silhouette of a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, the slogan “Highway to the Stars,” and a phone number that read TOP GLAM. It would be an enterprise established back when the state capital was peddling sweetheart tax deals to the motion picture industry to shoot movies in our state. Since that idea had been shot down by legislators, the business would be hanging on by its eyelashes with Chapter 11 snapping at its heels.

  I called. I doubted I’d get the parade float pictured in the ad, but if the size of the notice meant anything, the place would be working hard to keep up appearances. In that neighborhood, even a modest town car with a vanity plate would draw lightning like a golfer with a tin hat.

  “Hollywood Limo, you’re the star.”

  I almost thumped the receiver on the desk to clear it of static. The voice sounded like an amateur impressionist imitating a professional imitating Cary Grant.