The living room with its trestle tables and tough leather upholstery looked like a museum exhibit, only without the ropes strung up to keep tourists away from the props. The iron chandelier was lit, the manufactured melting wax still awaiting its cue to drop, and the stag embroidered on the framed scrap of tapestry turning its head my way on its muscular neck, one hoof lifted, poised to run. In the hallway I passed the same ruffled women and tighted-and-leotarded men, frozen behind the murk some conscientious forger had applied to the canvases.
I heard a voice then, a masculine rumbling coming from near the end of the hall. Calm, measured tones. I eased the deep-bellied revolver back into its clip. I’d drawn it without being aware of it.
That made twice in one case my career pessimism had taken me off track. I needed a hobby, a diversion, a sports team I could root for and expect satisfaction. I needed to move to another city for that.
Outside the room where Hoyle tweaked the recordings of books, I paused to mop clammy sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand. Spools of magnetic tape turned slowly, propelling the placid manly monologue I’d heard from down the hall through the speaker, which wasn’t any more visible than it had been the last time:
Elisa cast another glance toward the tractor shed. The strangers were getting into their Ford coupe. She took off a glove and put her strong fingers down into the forest of new green chrysanthemum sprouts that were growing around the old roots.…
Steinbeck. At least Hoyle wouldn’t have an issue with the American accent.
He was there in his chair. He would be, and he wouldn’t be any good to me now.
TWENTY-TWO
Stepping close, I bent down and turned my head sideways to face him on a level. The Lincolnesque face had lost much of its structure, the flesh bloated away from the strong bone superstructure. The escarpment of gray hair, formerly brushed aggressively into submission, hung in an arc over the side of his forehead nearest the pull of gravity. One of his long witchlike hands lay on the keyboard, the index finger crooked over the key labeled REVERB, as if he’d been interrupted in the midst of activating it.
A purplish hole marred the flat expanse of his exposed temple, puckered and blackened at the edges.
… It was a hard-swept looking little house, with hard-polished windows …
One of the row of metal switches that ran under the tape reels was out of line with the others, slanting up toward the ceiling. After a moment’s hesitation I reached up and tipped it down, using the back of a knuckle. The recitation stopped.
* * *
Hoyle was dressed much as he was during my first visit, in a plain shirt with the sleeves rolled past his forearms, chinos cinched with a woven leather belt, his feet stuck inside scuffed loafers, drawn up under his swivel chair, the way a man does when leaning into his work. Half his shirttail hung outside the slacks; but then while concentrating on the business at hand he wouldn’t adjust his appearance to greet a visitor he probably didn’t know was present.
That was guesswork, and as much detecting of his person as I cared to make. It had been a long time since I’d gotten satisfaction, personal or professional, from frisking a corpse.
I smelled it then. I don’t know how I’d missed it, except maybe because I’d been around it often enough not to consider it unusual: the cap-pistol stench of spent powder, strong as ozone after a lightning strike. That spared me the chore of touching his skin to test its temperature. He hadn’t been dead long enough for it to thin out.
The other thing it meant shouldn’t have taken me as long to notice. It was on its way, blinking on in sequence like runway lights toward an approaching plane, when a current of air moved behind me and a bus struck me on the back of the head. Red and black filled my skull and I thought I smelled chrysanthemums; but that was probably John Steinbeck’s fault. I don’t know now if I had time to form that opinion before I left that sphere.
* * *
Swish-click! Swish-click!
I was dozing aboard a fast-moving train, racing across Canada or Europe or Asia; somewhere anyway where transit is rapid and the tracks are maintained on a regular basis. Surely not America. My head ached, probably from diesel exhaust, but that wasn’t what I was smelling. It was an acrid odor of burned sulfur and cordite, the last thing I’d smelled before the bus hit me.
Swish-click!
I tried to open my eyes, but I hadn’t the tools for the job. In lieu of a pinch bar and a chain fall I groped for my face with a pair of hands wrapped in boxer’s gloves, came at last to the lids, and teased them open; a kneading operation, the opposite of closing the eyes of a cadaver.
The room I was in was a blur, but as my pupils expanded—slowly as water hollowing out a cavern—I saw George Hoyle’s loafers, still on his feet in the position I’d last seen them in, only then from a higher angle. I was sitting on the floor of the room containing his control board, my back propped against the wall opposite the panel.
Swish-click! For some reason the noise was louder when I could see the source. Albert White, Allen Park Police Commander emeritus, stood leaning against the closed door to the hallway, ankles crossed, manipulating a steel baton, a cop staple that folded into a compact package by way of a steel cylinder sliding into a hollow sleeve, like a car radio antenna, only sturdier and designed to inflict as much damage as the wielder cared to inflict; in this case a love pat on my cerebellum.
In ruthless or inexpert hands, even that could put the victim in a coma or kill him outright. In my case, surviving with my senses more or less intact was a combination of skill on his part and decades of calcium buildup where others had struck me in the same general location, with everything from blackjacks to pistol butts to high heels. I reached back with a clumsy paw. My scalp was tender to the touch, but he hadn’t broken the skin. When it came to blunt instruments he was a maestro. I let the hand drop.
White was dressed in his retiree’s uniform: starched denim shirt, slacks with pleats, brown shoes, old but polished. His crew cut, which he must have freshened once a week, was as level as the top of a flathead screw and his eyes glittered far back in their wrinkled sockets. His smile showed only his lower teeth, supported by the square pillar of his cleft chin.
“Go ahead,” he said. “It’s not my carpet.”
I leaned over and vomited. It was mostly liquid. I smelled stale Scotch and staler tobacco; groped for a handkerchief, but my thick fingers couldn’t find the pocket. I wiped my mouth on my coat sleeve.
“A little out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you?”
Whoever asked the question was trying to give an impression of my voice, but it came out as garbled as a flight announcement at the airport.
He swish-clicked the baton again, extending the business end with a flip of the wrist, then collapsing it with the palm of his free hand. His tongue bulged his pale slack cheek, deciding whether to answer.
“That’s one of the advantages of getting yourself busted down to private citizen,” he said. “All the fences come down.”
“How long was I out?”
“Three, four minutes. I didn’t time it.” He lifted the baton again.
I put out a hand before he could shoot it open. “Put that down, will you? Or hit me again so I don’t have to hear it.”
For a second he seemed to consider that. I reminded myself next time not to think with my mouth. Finally he laid the weapon on the control board. He pushed himself upright, fists hanging, kicked at something with a foot. Blue steel and glistening brown wood spun my way across the carpet, like a bottle in a kissing game: a .38 revolver. It had been lying under the dead man’s chair. If it had been there when I’d come in I hadn’t noticed. Maybe it was the one I’d seen before in Hoyle’s drawer; but they all look alike apart from the serial number. “Pick it up.”
I shook my head. My brain slid on a cushion of fluid, coming to rest against the wall of my skull and making my eyes water.
Something turned over with a crunch, like a sluggish engine. I
t was what he would call a chuckle. He raised his hands to his shoulders, palms forward. “I’m not going to shoot you in self-defense,” he said. “Too many cops have ruined that for the rest of us. Pick it up. It’s not loaded. I made sure of that before I put it back down.”
“If you want my fingerprints to be found on it, you’re going to have to put them there yourself.”
I shifted my weight from one hip to the other, as if I was getting a sore spot. I was; but I wanted to assure myself the Ruger was in its clip. I felt the solid lump of it when I leaned that way.
He wasn’t fooled. “It’s there. What makes you think I didn’t make sure of that too?”
“Why did I kill him? I just woke up and I’m fuzzy on the details.”
Retirement hadn’t slowed him down. He had the baton in his right hand before I saw him move. I managed to throw up my arm just as it swung around. The solid steel core struck bone. My forearm went dead to the elbow.
The bottom-feeding smile stayed in place as he watched me rubbing my arm. The baton hung at his side. “Don’t try that shit on me, disarming the enemy with blinding wit. I practically invented it. What happened here was an accident. The piece is Hoyle’s. He pulled it on you while you were pumping him about what happened to Paula Lawes. You fought him for it and won—only you didn’t, really, because he died before you could get any answers.”
“So that’s what happened. I’m your stand-in.”
“It’s messy, sure. Name a crime scene that isn’t.”
I shook my arm. Circulation marched up alongside the bone on tiny hobnailed boots. “What’s Paula Lawes to you?”
He raised the baton again. I shrank back against the wall, but he let it drop at the end of his fist, still showing his teeth. “She means about as much to me as the starving Africans. I wanted to hear from Hoyle what he knew about Marcus Root.”
“What makes you think he knew anything?”
“He was awful convincing the other times we talked.” He stooped to snatch the .38 off the floor where it had fallen when my arm gave out. “It’s got to be this way, to fit the crime scene. It’d look more natural if you put on the prints yourself, but even the forensics wonks like to get home at a decent hour. I don’t guess they’ll kick up a fuss.” A gray tongue slid along the top of his lowers. “Sorry I can’t make it clean and quick. Your heart had to keep pumping just long enough to snatch the gun from him and put a slug in his brain.” He stuck the baton under one arm, fished a handful of shells from his pocket, and loaded the cylinder, placing spent ones in the last two chambers. “Liver ought to do it. You’d have maybe twenty minutes.” He swung the cylinder into place, cocked the hammer, and aimed at a spot on my right side just above the belt.
It wasn’t a chance at all, really; especially with my arm still out of commission. But even a cornered animal will lash out. I leaned forward, changing my center of gravity, braced myself against the floor with both hands flat on the carpet, and swept my left foot up and sideways, hoping to hook his ankle.
No, it was no chance at all. The report of the gun in that small room was as loud as Krakatoa.
TWENTY-THREE
My eyes opened this time without resistance.
Hell was pretty much what I’d expected: no lake of fire, no furnaces to stoke, no round-the-clock barbershop quartets with accordion accompaniment, just the prospect of spending an eternity in the very place where I’d made my last mistake.
I was still sitting on the floor of George Hoyle’s recording studio, my head still expanding and contracting with each heartbeat, with the bonus of a high-pitched ringing in my ears and my nostrils stinging from a fresh infusion of spent powder; that sulfur stink at least was true to the Old Testament.
It came with a demon: eight feet of Chinese mythology in the same washed-out blue T-shirt and baggy green cargo pants I’d seen somewhere in life, although I couldn’t place where just yet. It stood inside the doorway, stooped to clear the ceiling, and enough to the side for another vaguely familiar figure to insert itself into my damnation. The chrome steel Howitzer, which had seemed in proportion to its carrier when the giant had held it, looked as big as the jawbone of an ass in Oakes Steadman’s hand.
It wasn’t smoking; modern loads don’t. But in my heightened state of awareness the big muzzle looked hot, as if an orange-red glow had just faded away.
“I replaced the firing pin.” He unchambered a handful of shells and held the gun across his body for Py to take.
Py. Things were coming back to me in shards, like ancient pottery. I had only to fit them together to know what had taken place. All I needed was a good light and a new head.
Five people were as many as the room could hold, even if two of them weren’t in a position to bump into anything. Albert White lay on his face at George Hoyle’s feet, his hand still wrapped around the .38 revolver with the arm flung out to his side. Miraculously—comically—the baton was still clamped under his other arm, like a British officer’s riding crop in a war film. The .44 magnum had turned the back of his head into a soup bowl filled with red blood and gray matter.
The big man accepted the weapon the way an infant closes its fist around a rattle for the first time, not knowing what to do with it. Steadman grasped his wrist with one hand, tightened the other around the hand holding the gun, and inserted his finger in the trigger guard.
Anticipating, I stuck my fingers in my ears. The drums will take only so much punishment before they stop performing.
The former gang-banger had left one unfired round in the cylinder. Muted as it sounded, the roar still shook the room. A star of plaster leapt from the wall a couple of feet above my head, letting a tendril of pale batting escape through the hole. Hoyle had soundproofed the room all around.
What his bodyguard had anticipated, I couldn’t tell. He’d fallen against the wall at his back and would have dropped the big revolver if Steadman hadn’t still been holding his hand.
“Sorry, Py,” he said. “They’re gonna test you, and I can’t be handling no guns. Remind me to wash my hands,” he told me.
Today it was a scarlet-and-black Red Wings warm-up jacket zipped to his neck and gray whipcord trousers stuffed into the tops of his lace-up boots. He wore a cap with the Red Wings logo at the required angle, with the bill cocked over his left ear, with his dreads spilling like tentacles out the bottom.
“Dex called you,” I said. “You made good time coming all the way from Jackson.”
“We was in Inkster: Trooper there got into a hole trying to bust what he thought was a fence operation. Turned out it was storage for a gang-sponsored charity rummage sale. His sergeant thought I had a better chance of shooing away that mob than a riot squad. When Dex told me where you was headed, I knew sooner or later you’d stumble into Albert White.”
“So White’s the reason for my babysitter; not your old friends in the gang.”
“They don’t like me much, but now they got religion, me and who I hang out with ain’t what you’d call a priority. Oh, they lay down scores, peddle dope, burn things, but considering my present circumstances and what I know about them, deals like this here are few and far between.” He cocked an elbow toward the dead men.
“What was White’s beef with Hoyle?”
He corked a thin smile by placing a finger to his lips. Turning a little, he found a switch out of line with the others and flicked it down. A second pair of tape reels stopped turning; I hadn’t noticed them. He browsed the controls, found a rectangular handle, twisted it left. The reels started up again, faster than before, reversing directions. After a few seconds he stopped them, using the switch, then twisted the handle right.
“… got to be this way, to fit the crime scene. It’d look more natural if you put on the prints yourself, but—”
Steadman stopped the tape. With White dead on the floor, his voice coming from the invisible speaker laid an icicle alongside my spine.
“You done that?” Steadman tilted his head toward the switches.
“Smart.”
“Unobservant. Hoyle must have been duping the reel I switched off. I didn’t notice the other one turning.”
“Dumb luck still counts. It’ll clear up questions when I face the shooting board in Lansing. You’ll sign a statement?”
“I’ll sign my firstborn child over to you. But what about White and Hoyle?”
Smiling still, he looked at a spot above my head: the sound-deadening insulation hanging out of the bullethole. “Couldn’t have picked a better place myself for all this gun stuff,” he said. “We shouldn’t have no interruptions.” He stepped across White’s body and extended a hand. I took it and together we got me up onto my feet. I stumbled, caught my balance with a hand on the back of Hoyle’s chair. It made a quarter turn, dislodging his hand from the board. It dropped past the arm of the chair, swaying in mid-air.
When Old Midnight Comes Along Page 12
