Midnight Man

by Loren D. Estleman

  “It takes more than dedication to be a good attorney these days. Perry Mason didn’t have to contend with these assholes.”

  “That’s show biz. Who besides you had access to Smith between the time he gave himself up and the arraignment?”

  “No one, except the police. That Lieutenant Alderdyce and the men assigned to him.”

  “How did Smith act during your conferences? I’m not asking you to repeat content.”

  He smiled bitterly, without parting his thin lips. “He called me honky and a few other names less delicate. He thought I’d sell him out to my lilywhite buddies in the system. What you might expect.”

  “If he felt that way, why didn’t he demand a black to represent him?”

  “Because the price was right, and he didn’t mean what he said. Because when you come down to it, his type of black is just as bigoted as they claim we are, and believes that only a white man has a chance pleading a black man’s case before court, even if the judge and jurors are as black as he is. Because he wanted to win.”

  “What changed his mind?”

  “So far as I know, nothing.” He met my gaze. “I consider myself a fair judge of what goes on behind a person’s expression. I have to be; it’s my stock in trade. When those people invaded that room with automatic weapons, Smith was just as surprised and frightened as the rest of us. He wasn’t any less so when he left with them. I think he thought he was going to be killed.”

  I was still digesting that when something moved between me and the sun, and the door on my side was torn open, almost spilling me into the street. The monolithic chauffeur, red-faced and heaving, growled and closed a hand like a car crusher on my shoulder. It was a bad time not to be armed.

  “It’s all right, Herbert,” said Rasmussen. “Mr. Walker was just leaving. We won’t see him again. Will we?” He looked at me as if he had just grown a yard.

  “Not until after Herbert’s had his shots.” I got out. I felt the chauffeur’s eyes on my back until I reached my car, when he turned his attention to the paint on the windshield of the Continental.

  Tomorrow’s answer to Bruce Jenner was sitting on the passenger’s side of the Cutlass, sweating but breathing about as heavily as a somnambulist. I gave him the rest of what I’d promised him and watched his narrow back loping away. When I was a kid, no black would have dared to be seen running near police headquarters. Times change both ways.

  6

  SQUARE ONE FOUND ME reading the late edition of the News between bites of roast beef sliced not too thin in a little supper place across from what used to be the Kern block on Woodward. The headwaitress was built like Cass Elliott, with arms like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and kept up a running patter of good-natured insults with the regulars as she went around freshening everyone’s coffee without being asked. The music was subdued, and though the lights were low you could see what was on your plate without having to set fire to a napkin. They ought to declare those places national treasures while there are still a few left. For all I knew this was the last one.

  There were no fresh details on the courtroom raid beyond those released that morning, but that didn’t keep the reporters from padding the front section with speculation. Alonzo Smith had been seen crossing the Ambassador Bridge to Windsor in a yellow van with California plates, sucking a Coke at a service station on Chalmers, bagging groceries in a market down by the river. An Ohio woman swore it was he who snatched her purse while she was waiting for a bus in Toledo. On the strength of the bridge story, the Governor of California was calling for an investigation to learn if the fugitive had indeed spent time in that state. It wasn’t even an election year.

  As if the cops didn’t have enough screwy leads to follow, the Detroit Police Officers Association was offering five thousand dollars for information leading to Smith’s arrest and conviction. Next to that item was a piece about a professional bounty hunter from Oklahoma named Munnis “Bum” Bassett, a six-foot-five former bail bondsman with more magnum-powered weaponry than it was safe to shake a stick at, who vowed, so help me, “to bring that critter in alive—or dead.” How he planned to collect on a corpse was something he either didn’t want to go into or the reporter didn’t think was worth asking.

  That raised my spirits. A cowboy in town was just what the doctor ordered to keep the boys with badges off this peeper’s back. I was a criminological genius next to Bum, who came out of the interview sounding slightly to the right of Caligula.

  The inside pages carried background on Smith’s outlaw girlfriend, which interested me more. She was a twenty-year-old white woman named Laura Gaye, a native New Yorker and a born-again Christian who had come out to enroll in pre-med at the University of Michigan, then left after six months for a job at the Ford River Rouge plant. Until the blowup at Mt. Hazel Cemetery, she had been living for some time with Smith in a commune frequented by drug peddlers, black revolutionaries, and hippies still coming down from the sixties on McDougall. She had a widowed father in New York who couldn’t be reached for comment. A picture lifted from her high school yearbook showed a pretty, serious-looking girl with bangs on her forehead, a far cry from the frizzy-headed scarecrow described by witnesses to the incident at the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice. Hitler’s baby picture was cute, too.

  It seemed like a good enough place to start. I circled the McDougall address in pencil, left a buck for the waitress with the ready pot and Rickles’ best routines, and paid at the cash register wondering if I had enough time to buy a bulletproof vest before penetrating the inner city at night.

  It was eight-thirty and still light out, although the sun was below the skyline, sucking red and purple streamers down with it. West of the city you could read a newspaper by natural light until ten, one of the advantages—if you could call it that—of living on the extreme western edge of the Eastern Time Zone, with a little help from Uncle Sam turning back the hands on the clock like a small boy trying to finagle an extra hour before bedtime. On the horizon the cylindrical towers of the Renaissance Center were lit up like a whorehouse on Saturday night. I’d had some trouble a while back over a man whose office was on the top floor of one of those towers, and I wondered idly if he was still working at this hour.

  Most of the street lamps on the lower east side were broken, which was a blessing aesthetically. Warehouses and tenements wallowed in the mulch of decades, their windows boarded up as if in an effort to shut out the world around them. Yellow mortar oozed out of brick walls covered with obscenities sprayed in black and candy-apple green; slat-sided mutts with glistening sores and eyes bright with the madness of hunger rooted among the offal spilled out of overturned trash cans; heaps of stale laundry shaped vaguely like human beings snored in doorways with their heads leaning against the jambs and their open mouths scooping black, toothless holes out of their stubbled faces. As I swung onto McDougall the beam from my headlamps transfixed a bloated rat perched atop a mound of shredded plastic garbage bags, twin beads of red phosphorescence glowing from its eyes. Entering my intended block, I realized suddenly that I’d been breathing through my mouth for the past five minutes and closed it.

  Many of the numbers had worn off the buildings, if there had been any to begin with. I parked under a functioning street lamp that might discourage the more timid vandals, got a flash out of the glove compartment, and climbed out to search for the place on foot. Twenty yards from the car I turned back and drew the unregistered Luger from its hiding place in the trunk. I made sure there was a cartridge in the chamber and shoved the works under the waistband of my pants. I’d left the Smith & Wesson in the office safe.

  The air was the temperature of human saliva, the street solid black beyond the circle of lamplight except where the still-climbing moon made right triangles the color of milkwater through gaps between buildings. I felt clammy under my clothes—hardly an uncommon reaction for a white man abroad in Blacktown that late. The tiniest noise brought the automatic out of my pocket, the beam of the flash bounding toward the
source of the disturbance. Terror grows in the dark like mushrooms.

  When I located the number it was a faint outline in what was left of the darker paint on the front door, the metal numerals having fallen or rusted off in someone’s grandfather’s time and never been replaced. The brick structure had been a gymnasium the year the Marquis of Queensberry took First Communion. Anemic early moonlight lay on the few remaining stippled glass panes in the eight-foot windows near the roof, and the earth had begun to reclaim the broken concrete stoop under my feet. PIGS KEEP OUT, demanded the penciled legend on a square of paper nearly as old as the building, taped above the crusted doorknob. That didn’t apply to me, so I twisted the knob and went in. Two barrels of a sawed-off shotgun were waiting for me in the darkened entrance.

  “What’s the matter, pig? Can’t you read signs?”

  It was a girl asking the questions, in that twangy drawl some blacks can’t get rid of after several generations up North. In the icy light of my flash the weapon looked no longer than some pistols, stockless and supported in two dark slender hands with ragged nails. If it went off at this range I was ground meat.

  I shifted the beam higher, but not too high or I’d have missed her entirely. Lashless eyes blinked in a flat face surrounded by a halo of frizzed black hair. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll turn that fucking thing off. Now, man.” The gun jumped.

  I switched off the beam. A shaft of moonlight fell on two bare feet on the other side of the threshold. “I’m not a pig,” I explained. “You have the wrong barnyard animal.”

  “That’s your opinion, fuzz. Buzz off, fuzz.” The rhyme amused her. She repeated it, giggling. It was not a reassuring giggle.

  “I’m not with the police, I’m private.”

  “Same difference. You want to leave or you want me to call someone to help you leave?”

  “Neither.” I tromped on her toes and knocked aside the barrels of the shotgun with my elbow. For good measure I brought the flashlight down hard on the carpus in her wrist. She shrieked, and while she was shrieking I wrenched the weapon out of her grasp. I stiff-armed her away from me and groped for a light switch on the right side of the door. In this building it was on the left side. Light trickled down from neon tubes in two ceiling troughs. Three more remained dark, and one of the two flickered and buzzed like a June bug trapped between screens.

  I put away the flash and stepped inside, kicking the door shut behind me. She was bent over, holding her injured wrist between bare knees. Her ensemble consisted of severely cutoff jeans and a dirty sweatshirt with no sleeves. Loose threads hung down everywhere. If she was fifteen, I was twenty-one and still in college.

  “Jesus Christ, you busted my wrist!” she moaned.

  “No, I didn’t. Next time don’t shove a gun in someone’s face unless you don’t want him to have a face. I smelled the bluff when you threatened to call someone instead of shoot me. Besides, I’ve stared down enough muzzles for one day. Where is everybody?”

  I felt as if I’d passed through a time warp and been catapulted back fifteen years. The old gym floor, which made tiny snapping sounds as I lifted my soles from its gummy surface, was strewn with rumpled sleeping bags, knapsacks, furniture out of Home and Orange Crate, and olive-drab blankets stenciled U.S. ARMY. Revolutionary slogans from another era were scrawled in chalk on the gnawed wainscoting, down to and including FREE HUEY. I seriously doubted that any of the current inhabitants was old enough to know that Huey wasn’t one of three ducks. There was even a poster of Che Guevara, the one that makes him look like the Messiah and not a greasy little bandit, killed eating grubs from trees in South America.

  A loft of sorts added in recent years ran the length of the rear wall, joined to the floor by a wooden ladder and murky with shadows beyond the reach of the ceiling fixtures. That gave me an uneasy moment, but the junior-size gun moll laid my fears to rest by answering my question.

  “There’s two guys with guns trained on you upstairs,” she said, testing her wrist for breaks. “I was you, I’d give back the shotgun and split.”

  “Just as well you’re not.” I broke it, drew out two 16-gauge shells to keep from blowing off my foot, and tossed them across the room. One bounced and rolled, the other stuck fast where it fell. The gun was short enough to hide in a shoe. “If there was anyone up there you wouldn’t be telling me, and if they were armed I’d be a carcass now. What are they doing, making a score?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Who writes your dialogue, Spillane? Any more guns around?”

  She shook her head. It was a pretty head, just like a bottlebrush. “Pigs confis—confiscated them after Laura busted Smitty out of the slam. They got no right. They’s all registered.”

  “This too?” I held up the abbreviated fowling piece. “It’s about two feet short of legal.”

  “That wasn’t here when they come. I wasn’t neither.”

  “What do they call you?”

  “Puddin’ ’n’ Tame.” She giggled again.

  I peered at her. Her pupils were shrunken to pinpoints. Coke, probably, or maybe just plain angel dust. There were no needle tracks in her arms or legs and she hadn’t yelled loud enough when I stepped on her toes to be shooting between them. Not on that foot, anyway. She appeared to have forgotten all about her wrist. I flipped the shotgun’s release catch, separating the barrels from the action, set the former down atop a broken packing case, and pitched the firing assembly up over the railing into the loft. The girl glared.

  “Temptation’s a dangerous thing,” I explained. “Where did Laura stay when she lived here?”

  She closed her mouth so tight it bulged, the way kids do when medicine’s coming. But her eyes wandered past my shoulder. I followed them to a door in the wall behind me and grinned. “Thanks, Puddin’.”

  It had been a locker room once. The nozzles in the gray-stalled showers were coated with orange rust and there was mold in the corners. Forty-year-old sweat soured the air. The toilet, sequestered in its own alcove, was an old-fashioned affair of white porcelain with a chain. The Pony Express man had given it a quick wipe with a rag when he delivered it and no one had cleaned it since. The smell in there would have revived a corpse.

  The lockers had been moved out of the main room and plasterboard partitions erected, forming a rats’ maze of eight-by-eight cells containing old exercise mats for sleeping and various personal items from clothing to coke spoons. There was graffiti here too, of the OFF THE PIGS variety, along with similar artifacts of the KerouaccumHoffman era that until tonight I had thought was as dead as John Lennon.

  I knew which stall was Laura Gaye’s the moment I saw it, even though it surprised me. A couple of pairs of jeans and some T-and sweatshirts had been flung into a heap in one corner, next to a small stack of hymnals and an army surplus footlocker with a sprung lock. A large crucifix carved from a single piece of wood was mounted on a nail in one of the partitions. But for the clothes, the place was as neat and clean and pious as a monk’s cell, and I’d have bet the clothes were too before the cops got to them. The footlocker was empty, which didn’t disappoint me. The cops would have been through it too, with tweezers.

  “They didn’t find nothing neither.”

  I hadn’t heard her approaching on bare feet. When I turned, Puddin’ ’n’ Tame was leaning against a partition looking into the cell. Her eyes glittered. She’d just had another snort or pop.

  “I thought you said you weren’t here when the cops came.”

  “Some of the others was.” Her voice was dreamy. “Pigs didn’t find nothing on account of there wasn’t nothing to find. Deak ain’t nobody’s trained nigger.”

  “Deak?” I seized the name. So far no one had identified either of the men who had accompanied Laura Gaye into the courtroom.

  Her hand drifted to her mouth. I suppose that in her mind it flew, but when you do dope your reactions go first. Something like terror stirred her sluggish features. Then she giggled.

&
nbsp; “I’m a teensy bit high,” she said, exaggerating the dreaminess. “I don’t think—”

  “Tallulah?”

  The name echoed in the big room outside. A man’s voice, deep and resonant. The whites of her eyes leaped out of the gray gloom.

  “Child, where the hell you at?”

  Another voice mumbled something unintelligible. My nerves did a wild tango. I sidled toward the door, Luger in hand. It started to open on complaining hinges.

  “Look out!” Tallulah lunged for the gun. I jerked it away. My arm collided with the door and the automatic clattered across the concrete floor. When I dived after it, a mortar shell burst at the base of my brain. I kept going, the Luger forgotten.

  For a euphoric moment I felt better than I ever had in my life, but that was the siren song of the unconscious. I rolled just in time to avoid another kick to the head. A hobnailed boot glanced painfully off my shoulder. I grabbed at the ankle, but a toe from an unexpected quarter caught me hard in the ribs and pain splintered up my side.

  “Get her out of here,” snarled the deep voice. The door opened again and swung shut.

  A boot like the one that had struck my shoulder—maybe the same one—left the floor aimed at my face. This time I got hold of it, flailed my legs until I had a heel braced against its mate and shoved upward. There was a splitting sound and a hoarse scream of agony. Then steel flashed in the corner of my eye. I ducked and something swished shrilly past my ear. Not quite past. A large fat drop plopped to my shoulder. The lobe stung.

  “No blades.” It was the first voice, though less deep, made shallow by range and pain and lost wind. “We’ll bust up this white motherfucker without help.”

  There were more than two, maybe as many as six. A hundred wouldn’t have made much difference. I glimpsed faces in the stark locker-room light, shining black faces, distorted with fury. But mostly I just saw legs and boots. I kicked back and grabbed and tried to get up, but there were too many legs, too many flying boots. They got me in the stomach and groin and neck and head, in the elbows and knees, and all the time that deep black voice kept repeating, “White motherfucking son of a bitch white motherfucking son of a bitch white motherfucking son of a bitch,” until the litany merged with the roaring in my head and then the roaring stopped and then there was silence and then there wasn’t even that. There wasn’t anything, least of all me.