When Old Midnight Comes Along

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You think Frances Lawes proposed with a hot rock?”

  “The rich didn’t get that way by not recognizing a bargain when they saw it.”

  I said, “He’d argue the rich part. According to his press he works on salary, like everyone else at City Hall.”

  “And yet everyone who leaves that building for the last time retires to some island in the tropics.”

  I didn’t bother to field that one. Wondering how people who are smarter than I am turn everything they touch to gold lost its appeal a long time ago.

  “Receiving stolen property is a couple of football fields away from murder,” I said.

  “It would explain why he refused to identify the ring as the one he gave his missing wife.” He huffed on the diamond, buffed it on his shirt. “So much for your theory it proved he didn’t kill her because recovering it would reopen the investigation into her disappearance.”

  I shifted my weight on the metal chair, shifted it back when the Ruger dug a hole in my hip. I’d become so accustomed to packing iron on this case I’d clean forgotten I was entering a career cop’s house lugging an unregistered handgun.

  I shook my head, as much to distract his attention from the maneuver as to refute what he’d said. Just because he was retired didn’t mean he wouldn’t blow the whistle on me on a charge of insulting his hospitality. “Doesn’t hold water. The statute of limitations on a robbery charge would have run out years ago.”

  “Not if it linked him to another murder.”

  * * *

  Smug wasn’t an emotion in John Alderdyce’s toolbox. He’d stared down too many grand juries to have use for it. But as I said, I’ve known the man since sticks and cap pistols. He fingered the ring in both hands, admiring the way the harsh overhead light in the laundry flashed off the facets, reflecting off the walls and ceiling like a disco ball.

  “The bookkeeper at Monte Carlo’s was working late that night, trying to account for thirty-five cents in cash receipts that weren’t in the ledger. When he came running out of the back room, thinking a tornado had hit, the perp behind the wheel stepped on the gas and pinned him to a wall. The driver and his accomplices grabbed what they could, then tore into reverse, leaving the bean-counter still pasted to the Sheetrock. He died at Receiving the next day. Internal injuries. Don’t know if his employers ever solved the mystery of the extra thirty-five cents.

  “It’s the police equivalent of a throw-out at home plate,” he went on, “avoiding an RBI. If we can’t get him life for Paula, we can snag five to ten for accessory after the fact to Felony Homicide.”

  He turned in the swivel and tossed the ring onto the desk. “Ever have one of those days that start out shitty and wind up like Christmas morning? I may have lost my job, but I gained a collar. Thanks, Santa.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  “Don’t set out the milk and cookies just yet,” I said. “To make stick a charge of receiving you have to prove the defendant knew it was hot, which is where those things usually blow up. Say you clear that hurdle; then to beat the statute of limitations you have to prove he knew there was a murder involved. That’d be like winning the lottery twice in a row. No prosecutor worth his pinstripes would touch it. If it blew up, the whole case would fall apart like government housing.”

  That brought him close to tears—and there was peace in the Middle East. “Did I say I was finished? San Diego P.D. raided a roach motel a week after the score, a place that specializes in guests waiting for the all-clear to jump the Mexican border: No name in the register in return for room rates that’d make the manager of the Waldorf choke on his goose liver. We’ve got the same thing here on Jefferson, different border. Well, it was a good day’s catch. Along with a bent commodities broker, a couple of cocaine cowboys, and a road-show Kevorkian who strangled his terminal wife to death with her pantyhose, the Dago cops bagged one Allen Zog, known to the pack he hung with on West Michigan as Albanian Al; his common-law wife sold him out when he forgot to split his share of the take with her before he split, period. His prints were all over the truck that turned Monte Carlo’s into Mount St. Helens when we found it abandoned in the warehouse district.

  “Jury hardly left the box,” he said. “Thirty years in Marquette. I don’t know our current headhunter in office personally, but if he runs to type, that sparkler could put the Zogster back behind the wheel, delivering fresh headaches to my former employers. How’s that for your diamond in the rough?”

  “Provided he cooperates.” I was counting on my fingers. “Provided he was there when Lawes bought the ring, and provided he can testify Lawes knew the circumstances. All of which hinges on whether he even bought the ring. You can’t establish if he’s the one who had it engraved or someone else named Frances intended it for someone else named Paula. If all that doesn’t gum up the wheels of justice, your star witness is a convicted felon who’d pimp his sister to get out of Marquette.” I ran out of fingers and put them to use fishing out a cigarette; I should care about his sensibilities any more than he did mine. But I didn’t light it.

  “I didn’t say it didn’t need homework. I got all the time in the world, thanks to you. Now I can draw unemployment.”

  I stuck out my hand. “Gimme back my ring.”

  “Nope. It belongs to the insurance company.”

  “I’ll put it in safekeeping till they come to claim it. I’ve got as much right to it as you; maybe more. You’re not a cop anymore. You’re not even a private detective.”

  “What do you want with it?”

  “I might want to propose to someone.”

  He reached back without looking, scooped up the ring, juggled it in his palm. “This is the only evidence I’ve got. How do I know you won’t throw it in the river to protect your client?”

  “The same way I know you won’t hire a couple of Zog’s fellow inmates to bounce his head off the shower tiles till he agrees to implicate Lawes.”

  I kept my hand out all this time. He bounced the bauble once more, then leaned forward and dropped it into my palm. “Don’t put it in that cheese box in your office,” he said. “I could crack it with a blunt word.”

  “I’ll take out a safety-deposit box.” I dandled it a couple of times myself, then recovered the scrap of tissue, retwisted it inside, and put it in my inside pocket. I made the decision then I’d been playing with. “You’ll hear some gossip from your friends in the department about a cop killing in Harper Woods. Retired cop, not that that counts in your crowd.”

  “Albert White. I heard already.” He tilted his massive head toward a police-band scanner murmuring on a shelf next to a stack of towels, another piece of office plunder. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to be the one who brought it up. I feel a little better now about giving up the ring. Let’s hear your side.”

  I blew a jet of smoke. I didn’t remember lighting up. “I went back to George Hoyle’s—you remember him, during the Paula Lawes investigation you gave him a break on his extracurricular activities—to pick up some sticks I missed the first time. He was no help, having been shot to death in the room where he edited his recorded books. Next thing I knew I was on the floor at his feet with a bump on my head courtesy of White, who was no slouch with a baton. How can I get one of those, by the way?”

  “You can’t. Stop picking daisies.”

  “Okay, I’ll skip the dialogue. It’ll all come out anyway; but I’ll get to that. He laid out a plan to hang Hoyle’s murder around my neck, which I took as a confession; not that I could do anything with it after I went on the record as killed in the shoot-out with Hoyle. That was the plan, anyway, only fate intervened. It’s on tape, every word: happy accident. That’s the part I was saving.” I took another drag, pinched out the butt, and parked it in a pant cuff. “This next part is just mudroom gossip until the party involved makes his own statement.”

  “I’ll put on the tea.”

  “Oakes Steadman, remember him?”

  “I’m an elephant where his kind is concerned. Proc
eed.”

  “He may change your mind. He pinned a tail on me after we met; strictly for my protection, he said later. He and his shadow, a Chinese who could peek over the Great Wall on tiptoe, got there in time to put a bullet in White before he put one in me. According to Steadman, White and Marcus Root, the Allen Park officer who was killed not long after finding Paula Lawes’s abandoned car, were shaking down the local gangs. Hoyle may have known something about that; Steadman thinks he knew something worse. When I started turning over old rocks, White got spooked and did Hoyle. This wasn’t a new strategy. Steadman’s evidence implicates White in Root’s murder, another hush-up job.”

  “So why didn’t Steadman move on White before he got to Hoyle?”

  “The root—no pun intended—of ‘implicate’ is ‘imply.’ What he had, unexplained extra mileage on a low-rider that was supposed to be still under glass in the police impound, wouldn’t get him an indictment, much less a conviction. Whatever Hoyle knew might, which is why the ex-commander paid him a visit, armed with a baton to beat out of him what he knew, whether he had proof, and where he had it, and a gun to finish him off afterwards. But Hoyle had a revolver and put up a fight that ended with him being killed with the wrong gun. That complicated the scenario, but it wasn’t anything White couldn’t work with. My wandering in when I did gave him a patsy: everything as it happened, only I was the one who struggled with Hoyle, and we both wound up dead with matching bullets.”

  I stopped to take in air. “I hope you’re getting all this. I may need prompting when it comes time to dictate a statement.”

  Alderdyce leaned back, resting an elbow on the desk. His expressions changed as often as a solar eclipse.

  “I’d give you an argument,” he said, “or I would have, when I was still in harness. Being a civilian alters your perspective. It’s no longer my responsibility to defend the thin blue line. I’ve seen my share of dirty cops, and more than my share of cover-ups. I had my doubts about White when we worked the Lawes case; nothing you could take to the spooks at IAD, but you don’t roll with skunks and come up smelling like Old Spice. What did Hoyle tell you about Marcus Root’s connection to Paula Lawes?”

  “Only what he saw, or what he said he saw, in an Allen Park dive called the Gamesman Inn. Know it?”

  “I knew it before I interviewed Hoyle about their relationship. The department keeps tabs on all the places in the metropolitan area where the pavement princesses meet their johns, especially when the john gives her a lift across the city line. No secret it’s municipal policy to catch and release the pros, charge their male escorts, seize any cars employed in the offense against decency, and sell ’em at auction. That leaves the girls on the street to troll for more contributors to the slush fund.”

  I hung another cigarette on my lip. “Shame on you. City making a comeback and all.”

  “What did Hoyle see in the Gamesman? It’s cleaned up its act, by the way. Same name, different management. It’s a real sports bar now: Sip your six-dollar beer and watch the Lions lose on ten flatscreen TVs.”

  “That’s one of the things I went to his house to ask him about. One of Paula’s friends said Paula cried on her shoulder over Hoyle’s dumping her, a detail he overlooked the first time we spoke. He said Root—or a cop I would like to have been Root, since it would tie the two cases—came to their table and had a conversation with her that Hoyle couldn’t make out, apart from that it seemed pleasant. If he forgot to tell me how things ended with Paula, he might also have forgotten what he did hear that night.”

  When Alderdyce nodded his head, it was like the Matterhorn shifting. “If he could connect Albert White to the Root killing, that conversation becomes important.”

  “Steadman stayed behind to see what he could turn. Maybe Hoyle wrote something down.”

  “Or took pictures with a zoom lens and high-speed film. I mean, as long as we’re dreaming. You trust this guy?”

  “At this point I’d look for some way to alibi him out of a mass-murder charge backed up on CNN in living color. In this day and age I don’t think there’s any fate worse than death. Especially mine.”

  “You were out like the cat when White’s ticket got punched. You sure it was Steadman’s big stooge that did it? A convicted felon in possession of a firearm gets a direct flight back to the steel stable.”

  “All I can tell you is I saw it in Py’s hand; Py, that’s his official security. Even a mitt as big as his couldn’t palm a forty-four magnum with an eight-inch barrel so it’s out of sight.”

  “That’s all you can tell me, huh.”

  “I wasn’t so groggy I couldn’t repeat it on the stand.”

  “And you’d alibi him out of a mass-murder charge in living color.”

  “Did I say that? It doesn’t sound like me.”

  He stood, making none of the noises a retiree usually makes when getting upright. “Go home. You’re groggier than you think.”

  “You’re the one got me out of bed. It could’ve waited till tomorrow. You just needed someone to crow to about nailing Francis X. Lawes.”

  “Just make sure that ring winds up in a safe place. After that, you’re officially between cases.”

  I rose, making all the noises he’d neglected. I peeled the cigarette from my lip—it was dry, as they always were when I met in closed session with John Alderdyce—and poked it back into the pack. “Not from where I stand,” I said. “Lawes hired me to prove whether Paula’s dead or alive. Everything else I’ve accomplished so far is a sideshow. That belongs to your friends on the force. From now on I’m performing in the center ring.”

  “So does a clown.”

  He stuck out his hand. I shook it. On rainy days I can still feel his grip.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  No mind is ever at rest. Even in sleep, Albert White’s square head came between me and the light, his nasty length of steel slapping his thigh and his hand wrapped around the gun he’d used to kill George Hoyle, its muzzle trained on my chest. As if that wasn’t enough, a rat or some other burrowing animal kept gnawing at my side, trying to make a hole for itself between ribs.

  I sat up straight as an L brace. My brain was crystal clear. I knew what the animal was and why it had been pestering me all that long, long day. I exploded out from under the covers and made for the telephone in the living room.

  The clock my grandfather had bought for his mother was knocking on heaven’s door: knocking loud. The noises it made between strokes sounded like an old man coughing things loose from his lungs. When the last stroke came—there were twelve, what else?—I walked away from the phone. It was too late to call; not from courtesy, but because this was a conversation that needed to take place in person and to call first would give the party all night to cook up a convincing lie.

  In any case, I had another stop to make first; one that needed a night’s rest and a fresh outlook. I went back to bed, but I didn’t get much rest, and the outlook was as stale as a celebrity roast.

  * * *

  Sometime in the early hours the climate had shifted gears, warming the earth and whipping yesterday’s glacial rain into a lead-colored froth that cut the visibility back to my hood ornament and made the stretch between stoplights feel like paddling the wrong way up the Amazon. If the morning commuter traffic—never more than a crawl—slowed down any more it would be going backwards. The sun was a bloodshot eye, giving neither warmth nor cheer, and the potato-chip-thin ice in the potholes made crunching sounds when my tires broke through. On the plus side, the weather wizard on the radio said a fresh cold front was on its way from Alberta, bringing snow, straight-line winds, and probably a plague of mimes. I covered the eight miles to Allen Park in just under an hour.

  The Gamesman Inn wasn’t any harder to find than the resting place of King Arthur; which in its glory days of stone-age lighting, smirking waiters, and pre-dawn regrets had been the whole point. It was tucked in a side street off Outer Drive between a sandy brick building with prosthetic limbs hanging
in its display window and the kind of professional building whose tenants put “As seen on TV” in the Yellow Pages.

  For all that, the place looked respectable enough, with an iron front and its name painted in pointy Gothic letters on a shield above an oak door with iron bands and probably a steel core. The intention was to suggest a London pub where Dickens and Thackeray would feel at home quaffing bitter ale over steak-and-kidney pie, and it was successful so far as impressionable Americans were concerned: just the sort of place George Hoyle would pick for his liaisons with Paula Lawes, whatever he’d said about subletting his faux-vintage-English house from someone else.

  Parking was prohibited on the one-way street, but a small lot behind the building hosted a handful of cars at that early hour. I parked next to a Dumpster, got out, grasped the handle of a no-nonsense steel door with CUSTOMERS WELCOME stenciled on it, and tugged. It didn’t budge. I hadn’t expected it to, but I had to try in spite of the hours posted on the door. I knocked, and went on knocking until a vest-pocket blonde in a handmaid’s dust cap stuck her head outside. It came just to the top of my rib cage.

  “I’m sorry, sir. We don’t open for another hour.”

  “I’m not hungry.” I showed my folder. The deputy’s badge picked up the light from inside. “Is there anyone around who’s been working here since the place changed hands?”

  She gave my ID a pouty frown. Fog turned sluggishly in the partially enclosed area. I couldn’t tell if she could read it.

  “Are you the police?”