When Old Midnight Comes Along

by Loren D. Estleman

  The former gang member sneered down at him. “Always happens. They crack the till and come up with a fistful of shit. You’d think they’d learn.”

  He left the room, Py backing out behind him with the magnum, empty now of ammunition, pointing at me. He’d need a calm steady voice and diagrams to understand what had taken place; but then so would I. I followed them down the hall into the living room.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Only one lamp burned in the room, which helped complete the medieval effect. I wandered over to one of the big distressed-leather sofas, concentrating on not limping, and lowered myself onto it without making any extraneous noise. That scraped the bottom of my stores of energy.

  Steadman remained standing. “Where’s the man keep his booze, do you think?”

  I inventoried the room, lighting on an oaken cabinet with fittings of verdigreed brass. “What are the odds Pope Julius stored his Gutenbergs there?”

  “Some things don’t change. Guy makes himself some jack, the days of the old serf system start to look good. Py, whyn’t you mix us up a coupla highballs?” He looked at me. “Don’t stare. If he’d stopped at six feet, he could be running the show in the Hyatt lounge.”

  “Everybody’s good at something,” I said. “I’ll find mine someday. Don’t speak so ill of the dead. Hoyle said he rented the place furnished.”

  “No disrespect intended. You’ve seen my crib. Had my way, it’d be Danish Modern. We got the same climate.”

  The giant threaded his magnum under his waistband and bent double to open the door to the cabinet. The shelves were stocked with premium brands. He transferred two tall gold-veined glasses to the top, selected a bottle of Gentleman Jack and a leaded-glass seltzer jug, and went to work.

  “Man must have some ice in the kitchen,” Steadman said.

  “I came in here to drink, not skate.”

  Py lived up to his hype. He filled the glasses two thirds of the way, topped them off with a squirt, and clinked a long-handled spoon inside the concoction, all with a minimum of fuss. He brought mine over with a paper cocktail napkin wrapped around it and handed Steadman his. The gang consultant leaned against a wall and sipped. So far I’d never seen him sit.

  Py seemed content to stay on his feet as well. The twelve-foot ceiling suited him. He let his arms hang to his sides as if he didn’t know what else to do with them.

  “Lansing’s had White under investigation for eighteen months,” Steadman said. “The joint savings account he shares with his wife takes a hit of several thousand bucks four times a year, going back almost seven years. Coincidentally enough, George Hoyle’s checking account goes up roughly the same within a week of each of White’s withdrawals. Not the exact same, of course; folks hold out walking-around money. Anyway as patterns go this one’s louder than a Christmas tie. In this here cashless society we got, blackmail leaves a paper trail you could stub your toe on.”

  I drank. The big Chinese was wasted watching the other’s back. I’d watched him make the drinks, but I knew I could duplicate every move and not come close. “How’d the state police get a court order to tap into their accounts?”

  White had said the former gang member had diamonds in his teeth. He showed me one above the rim of his glass. “One perk of not being swore in as an officer is you don’t have to deal with judges and such. I still got some friends on the street. You think we ain’t progressed beyond zip guns and switchblades?”

  “Fly on the wall.”

  “Say what?”

  “What I’d like to have been in the commander’s office in Lansing when you pitched having an old crony hack into a retired cop’s financial records.”

  “My old man said it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission; ’course, he died in stir. I had the printouts.

  “I never thought the rot in the Allen Park Police Department stopped with Marcus Root,” he went on. “We found enough knickknacking all along the chain of command to seat a grand jury, but with White we hit the mother lode. Question was what was he paying to keep quiet?”

  “Seven years,” I said. “Paula Lawes?”

  He shook his head. “Marcus Root.”

  I took another sip. Compared to what I was hearing the bourbon had no more kick than Gatorade. I waited.

  “Based on what we delivered in Lansing, the Jackson post got the go-ahead to crack the P.D. records in Allen Park. We didn’t know just what we was looking for, so that took months, including going back over what we read looking to see what fit and what didn’t.

  “Two days after Root was killed, the civilian employee in charge of the police impound lot reported a discrepancy in the mileage recorded on a ’sixty-eight Plymouth Duster seized during a drug raid when it was parked and when the employee took a routine inventory first of the month: Somehow while the car was sitting in the lot it managed to rack up an additional eight and sixth-tenths of a mile. That’s roughly the round-trip to the crime scene and back. The car was a low-rider, chopped by a kid waiting in a cell for his case to come up at County.”

  I leaned forward and set my glass on the heavy table in front of me. My hand shook a little, but that could have been fatigue; the day was wearing on. It wasn’t fatigue.

  Steadman helped himself to another sip, licked his lips. He was enjoying himself, but he’d had more time to digest the information. “Root was more careful than his boss. We never found anything in his records to back up what us homies knew about how he squoze us. He probably stashed it in cash, someplace it won’t show up till somebody tears down a house or moves a statue in the park. There was some substantial healthy activity in White’s account from time to time that didn’t jibe with his commander’s pay, so we know he and Root had a partnership deal. We can’t prove it, but now we won’t have to. What exactly convinced him to kill Root, whether Root wanted a bigger slice of the pie or got religion and wanted to spill everything to Internal Affairs, we’ll never know. But thanks to that tape, we can prove he killed Hoyle.

  “The impound wasn’t guarded that night,” he continued. “Detroit’s bankruptcy at the time trickled down to most of the suburbs, leading to cost-saving measures. White borrowed the car, knowing that would make it look like one of us did it. Probably he got the squeal on Paula Lawes, so he knew right where to find Root, do him, and take his notebook so it would look like the cases were connected. The more mud you stir up in an investigation, the harder it is to clear it up.”

  “But what could Hoyle know that was worth paying him all these years to keep quiet?”

  The diamond vanished behind a frown. “That we don’t know, but he must have had evidence of some kind. Anyway we’ll hook up with the Harper Woods cops and take this place apart brick by brick if we got to. One thing I found out working this side of the fence is file clerks don’t like folders flapping open.”

  “If White could have finished Hoyle anytime, why choose today?”

  “You scared him. Digging into the Lawes disappearance, which happened the same night as Root’s death, you might turn up something. He’s probably been planning this for some time, figuring to get him to cough up what he had—that baton’s a persuader, I can tell you from experience—but you helped him make up his mind to act when he did. Hoyle spoiled things by throwing down on him, but then you showed up and gave him just the fall guy he needed. Once you and Hoyle killed each other while you were pumping him, he hoped like us to find what he was after by searching the place.”

  I looked at Py, to see if he was buying any of this any more than I was, but he wasn’t present. He was staring somewhere into the middle distance between himself and the Sea of Japan. “That’s another one I owe you, if that pile of by-guess-and-by-God pans out. I had you cold for Root.”

  “That was my fault. You were fucking up my case.” Steadman took another hit, swallowed, stood his glass on the heavy fireplace mantel. “I don’t like the odds either. We’ll see what White’s widow has to say. Her name’s on that account too. They been married too long fo
r him to make up stories about good days crawling the casinos.”

  “Cop’s wife,” I said. “Good luck with that.”

  * * *

  All the stars were wrapped in black cotton when I got away from there. The Harper Woods police were clerkly in their approach to a little thing like violent death, got my story and Steadman’s—as much as they applied to the crime scene, minus extraneous details like the specific investigations that had brought us to Hoyle in the first place—and my promise to drop by headquarters and sign my name to what amounted to perjury by omission. If St. Peter keeps tabs on police blotters, I might as well save myself the trip.

  My house had a shut-up smell, as if I’d been gone a week. I could live with that; I was too wiped out to open a bottle, much less a window. Unpacking my personal gear in the bedroom, I checked the cylinder in the Ruger. All the chambers were loaded. White had run a bluff, not that I’d been in a position to throw down on him, sitting on the floor with him standing over me and the Seven Dwarfs swinging pickaxes at my skull. That was a dull ache now, running tenth place behind every muscle in my body and a leg that would never heal completely. I stripped to my shorts, threw myself on top of the blankets, and was leagues under when Doc, Grumpy, and company traded their picks for sledges and set them clanging against raw ore. I swung my feet over the side of the mattress, groping my grouty scalp with both hands and waiting for the ringing to stop.

  It wouldn’t do that, not until I caromed my way into the living room and lifted the telephone receiver off the cradle.

  “Wake you?” Alderdyce asked.

  “No. I’m still asleep.”

  “Good.” He wasn’t listening. Cops don’t when it’s just social intercourse. “I’m reconsidering your proposal of marriage. That ring you gave me is one of a kind.”

  Somebody was breathing, drawing long ragged breaths. They were mine. I waited.

  “Yeah,” he said, as if I’d responded. “This won’t play over the wire. You know where I live?”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I’d known John Alderdyce for nearly a biblical span, since we’d replayed every episode of Combat and The Gallant Men with sticks and cap pistols in various alleys, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to his house.

  There were a number of reasons for that, one in particular.

  There’s nothing wrong with Redford Township, if living there was your decision. The school dropout rate’s lower than in many of the local districts and the crime statistics aren’t as high as in, say, Dearborn, just a few blocks south; one characteristic of the local lowlife is it observes natural breaks, as rain does when it falls habitually on one side of the street while the sun shines on the other. The same chain restaurants you see everywhere else are conveniently located, and the residents know which ones are reliable and which haven’t been monitored by the franchiser since Colonel Sanders was a buck private. There’s everything to recommend the place, except when you have no other choice.

  When the Alderdyces moved in, the Detroit Police Department required its personnel to live inside the city limits, which chained them to the brick box they’d called home for more than thirty years; a nice enough house, but not their first choice, or even their second. No matter what they did to it, for them it would have all the personal character of a factory house.

  When the restriction was lifted finally, it was too late. They’d raised their two sons, seen them off to start their own families, and paid off the mortgage. There was no point in tossing a police inspector’s pension and semi-retirement income down another hole that no bank in the world would give them another thirty years to fill in, so here they were and here they’d stay until the deep stranger came to their door.

  Accepting the situation, Marilee Alderdyce had decked the place out with the patient care of a passionate homemaker, a skilled occupation, and one she nailed. Ivory-colored curtains shimmered in the windows and copper chimes hung from the eaves, chanting gentle hymns when the breeze tickled them. As I climbed the front stoop, a security bulb clacked on, frosting the plants set out in window boxes in chilly white light. They were dormant, but when spring decided to put in an appearance they would explode into domes of Kodachrome color like aerial footage of a bombing run.

  There was no bell, just a stirrup-shaped knocker that didn’t look as if it had ever been used. I bare-knuckled the panel. Marilee opened the door almost before I could lower my hand. A tall woman, medium-dark, reddish highlights in her hair, which swept forward in twin points at the corners of her jaw; high cheekbones and eyes the color of cherrywood. A powder-blue top with a boatneck collar—usually avoided by women her age—exposed few lines in her long neck. She was slim-hipped in gray slacks and her feet were long and narrow in gray Topsiders. She greeted me in a tone cool as mist—not hostile; almost cordial, in fact—and stood aside for me to get in past her.

  She didn’t care for me. Why this was I couldn’t quite fix to a certainty, and wouldn’t ask. It may have had to do with my dropping out of the Detroit Police training course a week short of finishing, or because I was the one who’d talked John into signing up for it with me in the first place. Possibly it was a combination of both, although I leaned toward the second. Every time she swept a floor she hadn’t picked out, or pulled a weed from the garden she’d planted to cover the concrete foundation that should have been fieldstone, it’d be me she thought of. You have to put a face on a blame, and mine was the only one that didn’t change.

  I found John in the mudroom at the back of the house, where he got up from what looked like the same padded hydraulic chair he’d used for years in his old office at 1300 Beaubien to shake my hand. The place smelled of laundry detergent and cornstarch. Here, in a workspace he’d set up opposite a washer-dryer set and an ironing board supporting a succession of dress shirts in every color, a fat venerable CTR monitor sat on a some-assembly-required computer desk, facing a wall newly plastered with the family photos he’d stuffed into his carton when he gave Reliance his notice. At home, he dressed more like a regular person and less like a model for the Men’s Wearhouse, in a Wayne State University sweatshirt, khaki trousers, and black sneakers. The homey surroundings and weekend clothes brought his brutally hacked-out features into stark relief.

  The monitor on the desk—flat white, with a bulbous screen—was so far out of date it looked like a prop from a Molly Ringwald movie. The image on the screensaver was the arched façade of 1300, the old Detroit Police Headquarters, inspired by the prison-palaces of Venice during the Inquisition. He wouldn’t have put himself out to download it: Along with the office chair he’d appropriated the computer and everything that came with it, down to a stapler heavy enough to double as a blackjack; which most likely it had in gentler times.

  He caught me looking. “The chief said I was welcome to carry anything away I wanted. He had the computer scrubbed of everything sensitive. Saved the department the expense of carting it all to the dump. City’s more interested in fixing up the old Michigan Central train station than it is in keeping a roof over its police force.”

  “Maybe the Chinese’ll buy the place, make a matched set with all the others.” I reached for my cigarettes, then changed my mind. I could never keep track of when he was smoking and when he was quitting. “Tell me about the ring. You’ve made me the happiest man on earth, by the way. Where should we go for the honeymoon?”

  He sat down without answering or inviting me to sit. Here at last was the Alderdyce I knew. I drew up a chair with a folding step stool built into it and used it while he took something from a drawer in the desk. He leaned back, holding the ring I’d given him by the band, suitor style.

  “I rousted out half a dozen fences from the old days,” he said, “reliable snitches. Some of them were retired, they said, but they stood in their doorways looking like I couldn’t blast ’em loose with dynamite. Not my concern now, if it ever was; the boys in B-and-E can look after their own. I even talked to your boy Orbit.”

  That gav
e me pause until I remembered Harry Lauder, the current alias, belonged to Eugene Orbit, the fence I’d gone to in quest of information on the ring some magpie had decided to deposit on my kitchen table. “I’m sure he was helpful.”

  “No worse than some. No better, for sure; but you learn to read between the lies. I figure the dope he gave me was straight; if you stretch the term. Anyway he pointed me in some directions.

  “I won’t give up my snitches even now, but the one that rang the bell led me to an old friend in Robbery Armed, who worked a crash-and-grab job that went down back when Archer was mayor. You know the M.O. in those scores.”

  “Uh-huh.” Like everything else that originated in Detroit, the procedure added horsepower to the old smash-and-grab: Instead of invading a store on foot and shattering the glass display cases, our pioneers steal a truck, ram it through the front door, jump out, shovel the swag into the bed, and blow. It’s more scientific than it sounds; the ones that aren’t busted right away have cased the precinct for weeks, breaking windows and kicking in doors for show, noting the police response times, arriving at an average, and on the big night are in and out in half that, leaving behind what they can’t fit into the schedule.

  “This one was more sophisticated than most,” Alderdyce said. “They bought the truck secondhand, cash, no paperwork; size of the score, I guess they didn’t want to chance getting picked up on the way. The place was called Monte Carlo’s, in Southfield. It was a clearing-house for several mall chains, tons of wholesale merch in a safe sunk in a yard of concrete. They just jerked it out with a chain and took it with ’em. We found it in the ditch they dumped it in after blowing it at their leisure. Going by photos of the jewels provided by the owner, R/A and the FBI traced the stuff to fence operations in Minnesota, Texas, and California, recovered a lot of it but by no means all, and got some convictions. This”—he gestured with the ring—“was one of the items that weren’t recovered. Routinely, those strays are bought by private parties for cash, no names attached. They’re the toughest to find. Whoever made you the beneficiary of this one gave us a break.”