When Old Midnight Comes Along

by Loren D. Estleman

  “The accent.”

  “Exactly. Who would doubt the word of a refined Southern belle?”

  “So it was two years before she made face-to-face contact with anyone in your office?”

  His chuckle was like flour pouring down ridged glass. “That sounds like a mystery woman; but I’ve been here fourteen years, and I can tell you I’ve never interviewed anyone who’s more open and forthcoming.”

  “Isn’t that the kiss-of-death for PR work?”

  The chuckle choked off. “She’s a spokesperson, not a spin artist.”

  “But she consulted with one: Paula Lawes.”

  “We have no record of that, but if she did, it would have been on her own responsibility, and at her own expense. The FDA might look unfavorably on such an association with our firm. If that’s all, Mr. Walker—?”

  It wasn’t, but it was as much as I would get out of the conversation. There’d been no hesitation between my dropping the Lawes bomb and his response. When it came to being open and forthcoming, Van Fleet was a human firewall.

  I clicked off, hit Redial, and entered the extension number I’d memorized.

  “Well, good morning, sugar,” she said when I told her who was calling.

  “You, too, Scarlett. How’s every little thing at Chicamauga?”

  “I’m not just sure which of us is more determined not to let Dixie rest in peace; we Southerners or you Yankees. You know, your accent’s just as obvious to me as mine seems to be to you.”

  “Go on with you; it’s as bland as custard pie. Are you free anytime today?”

  “As air. Have you breathed it lately, by the way?” Keys rattled on her end. “I’m speaking at Wayne State at one. I should be able to give you ten minutes after the Q-and-A. It won’t take that long. I’ve told you everything I knew.”

  “Maybe you can give me some tips on improving my image. It’s taken some hits lately with the authorities.”

  “My consulting fee’s forty an hour. Will your expense account stand it?”

  “Provided I can deduct five dollars for every lie you tell me.”

  Air stirred. I couldn’t tell if any of it had to do with breathing the local monoxide. “This much I can give you free of charge: Any negatives must be sandwiched between phrases of fulsome praise.”

  “I’m trying to please a client, not cover up a mass poisoning in India. Can I get in without a pass?”

  “The centurion at the door should take her seat after the first thirty minutes. If not, you must serve your purgatory in the outside corridor.” She gave me the number of the lecture room. I committed it to memory. One more sample of Edgar Badderleigh’s mixology would have had me searching for a pencil.

  My belly drowned out the rumble of the 455 under the hood. The last time I took on fuel, George Hoyle was alive and counting his next take from Albert White. In Dearborn I steered into the curb in front of a restaurant with its English name lettered under a jumble of Arabic characters, where the lamb shank came to my table in a nest of new potatoes against a piped-in musical score composed by Suleiman the Magnificent on a diet of hashish, with a chaser of goat’s milk and marinated dates. I was still tamping down the bleating when I pulled into the parking garage off the Cass Corridor.

  Andrea Dawson’s centurion turned out to be a young woman dressed in an unsuccessful attempt to conceal her physical charms behind a heavy sweater, hairpins, and clear-glass lenses in tortoiseshell frames. She explained that a ticket was required for attendance. I thanked her and took up a position in the paneled hallway, walking an unlit cigarette against the back of one hand: The ubiquitous red circle with a diagonal bar across it decorated the wall every eight feet. A hand-lettered placard on an easel advertised THE POWERS OF PERSUASION: ACCENTUATING THE POSITIVE. The place smelled of chalk dust and patchouli, probably piped in since the introduction of white-erase board and airborne allergies.

  A bell clanged: All out for Calculus, Phys. Ed., and Study Hall. The double doors swung wide, releasing a general rout of students of every age from acne to liver spots, regurgitating at warp speed the wisdom they’d just ingested.

  I sidled in past them, swimming against the current.

  I hadn’t seen a picture of Andrea Dawson, but she was easy to spot, standing at the base of a horseshoe-shaped auditorium with stadium seating funneling down to a small stage where she stood leaning an elbow on a wooden lectern, speaking animatedly with a professor-type from the modern school: spiked hair, neck tattoo, torn jeans, and a gray sweatshirt with Einstein sticking out his tongue on the front. Her hair, worn in a shoulder-flip and teased to nosebleed height, was the color of polished copper and she wore a tailored mulberry-colored jacket on top of a black turtleneck, her flared lapels spread in a heart shape, framing a pair of breasts under which nothing could grow in the shade. Notwithstanding that, her hips curved out and then in, wineglass fashion, under a gray hobble skirt. Runners’ calves in black leggings and long narrow feet strapped into open-toed shoes to match the jacket. Her face was pleasingly plump, rouged artistically, with wide-set eyes, a long upper lip with a deep dimple, and a nose not quite too small to spoil the effect. She could have used more chin, but the lips, carved by the dimple, would have put the final touches on a Tintoretto.

  Small wonder Van Fleet had promoted her on the spot. A face and a body like that, complete with the magnolia brush to her speech, could make a bottle of E. coli taste like almond M&M’s.

  I was still doing acrobatics with the unlit cigarette. I tucked it back into the pack and the pack back into my inside pocket and waited at the top of the tier of seats while Dr. Grunge took a slim white hand, managed not to kiss it on the return, and floated up the steps grinning in his five-o’clock shadow. I waited until he was outside, then stepped over and flipped up the hinged doorstop gizmo with a toe. The heavy door whooshed shut against the pressure of the pneumatic closer.

  Andrea Dawson stepped back behind the lectern to shuffle her notes and slide them into an eggplant-colored leather briefcase with twin handles.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “Looks like you hit it into the cheap seats.”

  The place had fine acoustics. I’d barely spoken above a murmur, but every syllable seemed to have reached the woman on the stage. She looked up with a smile quivering on the edge of caution. “Thank you, sugar. Yes, it seemed to go over quite well. Are you with the university?”

  “Amos Walker. We spoke over the phone.”

  “Oh.” She was accustomed to fielding questions and accusations without moving a muscle in her face. “I thought we’d covered everything about poor Paula.”

  “She’s not so poor. If she can prove how much her husband knew about the engagement ring he gave her, she’ll never have to spend another day spinning silk out of burlap.”

  The smile went away. The expression now was attentive and not at all cautious in appearance. “You-all have your tenses mixed up, I’m afraid. And it isn’t polite to speak ill of the dead.”

  “Wrong note,” I said. “A real clinker. No Southerner says ‘you-all’ unless she’s addressing more than one person. As long as you were going to all the trouble to change your looks and your history, you should have taken time to hire a voice coach. George Hoyle was a stickler when it came to accents—he went ballistic just because one of his readers slipped from Southampton to West Hollywood—but if you went to him for help, it didn’t take as well as it should have.”

  “I never met the man. Is it a crime to sweeten one’s speech in pursuit of a good job? If you were to start prosecuting folks for fudging their résumés—”

  “Sure you met him. I doubt even an expert face job would fool someone who worked for the Gamesman as long as my source did, especially when it belongs to the only woman who ever came there with Hoyle more than once.

  “I didn’t mix up my tenses. You did. Over the phone you said, ‘Paula’s an only child.’ Is, not was. No one would speak of someone in the present tense after as many years as she’d been consid
ered dead. John Alderdyce tagged Lawes for your murder when he made the same slip, only in reverse. I was too preoccupied with all the twists the case was taking to jump on it. I forgot to remember; a serious flaw in a detective. But it kept festering, like a splinter in my foot. It might still be, if not for my insomnia. I woke up last midnight, positive Paula Lawes is alive.”

  The silver bells in her throat tinkled. “That’s your evidence? A slip of the tongue and a restless night?”

  “Proof is the cops’ job. I’m just making small talk.”

  I was moving, descending the long flight of broad steps leading between rows of seats down to the stage, feeling my way with my feet. One of her hands remained inside the briefcase she was holding and I didn’t want to take my eyes off it. The university was a gun-free zone, by law; I’d left the Ruger behind in the car. Talking was the only weapon I had.

  “If Paula fought with Hoyle, it was because she made him jealous, being friendly with Marcus Root that night in the Gamesman. Of course, the only reason to accept the fact that there was a fight was what you told me about that night Paula was supposed to have shown up at your house looking for a sympathetic ear. Whether it happened or not, Hoyle was charged up enough to come back to the bar, which was a hangout for Root and his fellow officers, and follow him when he left, to see if he linked up with Paula. Thing about these tomcats is they can’t stand any woman treating them the way they do women in general.”

  “That much is true. When a woman behaves that way, they say she’s a bitch in heat.”

  “You’ll be glad to know at least one man shares your opinion. He thought ‘whoremonger’ was still too genteel for the Hoyles of this world.”

  “I think you’d better stop where you are, Mr. Walker. You know how things are in universities these days. If I were to scream—” The hand inside the briefcase moved.

  I stopped three steps from the bottom, arms hanging at my sides. I turned my head from side to side, studying her face at close range. “Women have the advantage in one thing. Changing hairstyle and color go a long way toward altering their looks. You put on a few pounds, but on a Daughter of the Confederacy they look good. The rest was modern medicine.

  “You got your money’s worth and more,” I went on. “I doubt even Lawes would recognize you after all this time. The bone structure’s the same, eyes the same color. Breaking the cheek straps and the bridge of the nose to reset them would slow down the recovery by months, and if you wore contacts there was always the chance of losing one and someone noticing, which leads to thinking. No, I think you took it as far as it could go.”

  With the smile dead as dust she resembled her photos, or at least someone who was related by blood to the woman who’d posed for them. Despite the corn-fed curves she had the lean, almost feral look of a horsewoman; someone athletic, anyway. I wouldn’t lay a bet as to whether my reflexes would be any match for hers.

  “And I think,” she said, “that you’re taking the long way around the barn when you should come out and say what you mean.”

  I grinned. That allowed me to take in extra oxygen between my teeth. I needed all I could get. “The dialogue’s spot on, but you forgot the accent. Without the magnolias, it’s pure Rust Belt. Welcome back, Paula. A lot of people have been asking for you.”

  THIRTY

  The briefcase took a jump, along with my heart; but it was just her body reacting to the shock. I shifted my weight to my good leg anyway. I could have used another step closer. I’d made longer tackles, but back then I’d had youth on my side. What I still had was words.

  “I’m not just spinning yarns from spring fog. Whatever plastic surgeon made Andrea Dawson out of Paula Lawes would keep records, even if he thought there was something smelly about the reasons you gave. A nose job’s one thing, eye work’s another, but a drastic makeover raises questions. He’d keep at least a private file, in case it came back on him by way of the medical board or the police.

  “Where’d you go, Mexico?” I shook my head. “Canada makes better sense. It’s only minutes away from where your car was found abandoned. The chances of being identified were a lot less than if you made the trip through six states. More convenient for you, but also for the FBI. Our neighbors to the north are cooperative, and their files are in better order.”

  There was a sea change in her expression. If I let my imagination run free, I’d have seen several thousand dollars’ worth of medical reconstruction melt away, leaving Paula Lawes standing behind that lectern, unchanged after six years. For sure Andrea Dawson’s honeyed tones were history. The hand hidden inside the briefcase stopped stirring; she straightened, looking me square in both eyes with Paula Lawes’s.

  “What of it?” she said. “Where’s the crime in trading a life that had become unbearable for another? There were times when I actually envied battered wives; they at least have shelters to go to, and a support group as big as the majority of the population. A woman trapped in an arid marriage is a joke, and hardly an object of pity. If I come off as overly poetic, it’s because I’ve had years to work on the speech.

  “What’s the worst that can happen? Divorce? I never knew a divorcée who didn’t drag around all the same baggage into so-called independence. It’s common knowledge: That’s why GlobalCare was so quick to accept the lawyer ex-husband I made up to explain my long absence from the workforce. I had money; still have. Don’t think I did all this on a whim, without taking steps to secure it. As long as account numbers and signatures check out, foreign banks couldn’t care less about a client’s status; although there are certain complications to be overcome when she’s been declared dead. There was a time factor involved.”

  I worked my thigh muscles, to keep them from locking. As long as that hand was out of sight I was an obstacle. A trapped animal is the most dangerous.

  “You haven’t committed a real crime—yet. Rigging your own disappearance made for an expensive investigation, but after all this time I doubt anyone would bother to collect. A woman who wore a ring that’s supposed to be a symbol of commitment, but that turns out to be a chunk of hot ice, has unresolved issues. Blackmailing her ex would be one way of obtaining a resolution, if only to make him sweat; the money paid for your silence might be nothing more than a number on the scoreboard, proof you’d won. Just what did you get out of Marcus Root?”

  “I was no starry-eyed wife. I had doubts about that ring from the start; call it woman’s intuition, but I saw something in Francis’ eyes when he slipped it on my finger. It festered; your word, and appropriate. A woman can live with a thing for years, piling grievance upon grievance, until it becomes a symbol of something more important.

  “I helped elect a governor,” she said. “That gave me a passport into places a civilian can’t enter. Marcus had a reputation for dealing with the local gangs; just what it was, its nature, didn’t concern me. When I found out about the robbery in Southfield, and saw the inventory of what was stolen, I went to him with what I had. He wanted to run for president of the Detroit Police Officers Association, which represents most of the officers in the metropolitan area. Possibly it was his way of breaking off his arrangement with his commander, but that didn’t concern me. In return for my assistance in his campaign, he gave me this.”

  The hand came out of the briefcase; I braced myself for the tackle.

  The hand came out holding a slim spiral notepad.

  I relaxed my muscles. Circulation tingled all the way up my thigh. “A lot of people have been looking for that. The cops think it was taken from Root’s patrol car after he was murdered, to cover up what he wrote about the scene of your disappearance.”

  “There’s nothing in it about that; he gave it to me before that night. It does contain everything he found out about the jewelry theft and how much Francis knew about the circumstances when he bought the ring from one of the robbers. You’re welcome to it, for what it’s worth. He only gave it to me to prove he’d made a good-faith effort.”

  She held it ou
t: just like that. I came down the last three steps and took it.

  “It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Like everything else someone wants so badly, it’s disappointing.” She finished shoveling paperwork into the case and snapped it shut. “We’re finished here, Mr. Walker. If you don’t mind—or even if you do—I’m expected back at GlobalCare. A men’s sexual enhancement drug we’ve been selling is facing a class-action lawsuit: something about kidney disease. I’m needed to spin it into a minor infection.”

  I held up both hands, one gripping the notebook. I hadn’t been hired to play watchdog over Big Pharm.

  “We’re almost done,” I said.

  She paused with both hands on the briefcase. “What more could there be?”

  “Not much; only everything. I had all these answers before I came; I only needed to hear them for the record. The only question I couldn’t answer myself is why you broke into my house and left the ring. If what you say about the notebook is true, the ring was your only hole card. Why give it up?”

  Her face went blank, almost stupid. It was Paula Lawes’s now; there was no trace of Andrea Dawson’s apart from the superficial.

  “How could I have done that?” she said. “I didn’t know you existed until you called me the other day.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know why I hadn’t come up with it before. I was as stupid as she looked, only without her excuse.

  We spoke a bit more. I had all I needed then. I stepped back and watched her slide her briefcase under her arm and climb the stairs to the exit.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The day was fine, according to the standards of April on the Great Lakes. The sun was as bright as a new coin, and some birds were cautiously trying out their throats, with due regard to a possible wind shift from Ontario. The rip and snarl of chainsaws—as much a part of the vernal equinox as grumpy crickets and thawing frogs—rang throughout the city of Redford. Tree limbs, waterlogged by a week of relentless weeping rain, had cracked through at the groin and transformed each block into an obstacle course of budding branches and shattered mailboxes. John Alderdyce stood in his front yard in a striped shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows and his hands in the pockets of pressed black jeans, watching a hardhat crew turning a stately maple into kindling.