Midnight Man

by Loren D. Estleman

  “It worked that time.”

  “Only because I didn’t do exactly what you asked me to. Amos?”

  “Be careful?”

  “I don’t think you know what that means. Stay alive.” She clunked off.

  I held on long enough for the recording to kick in, then replaced the receiver and squatted to open the safe and withdraw the Smith & Wesson in its holster. After inspecting the chambers I snapped it onto my belt so that the butt snuggled against my right kidney. I hoped I could hold on to this one; I didn’t have any others.

  The building on Whittaker had stood too long for a city obsessed with the illusion of renaissance. Pigeon splatter iced its brick facade, broken chunks of which littered the cracked sidewalk like flecks of bloody spume at the base of a park bench where an old man sat waiting for his heart to stop. Soot and discoloration had given the windows a senile look. A bill advertising someone’s candidacy for an office that hadn’t existed in ten years had weathered down to a faded legend on a yellow oval as much a part of the building as the crusted fixture over the door. The bulb was smashed and there were cobwebs and dead moths inside it.

  Fourteen noisy-looking steps led almost straight up from the door, but there’s a way to get up that kind soundlessly if you’ve had practice. I crept along the edge nearest the right wall, loosening the revolver in its holster as I neared the landing, just in case I wasn’t as lightfooted as I hoped I was.

  The hall was narrow and illuminated naturally through a tall window that faced the street. The walls were tobacco-colored above the wainscoting, the floor runner made of ribbed brown rubber and worn through to the boards in some places. The man standing in front of a door at the far end was big enough to tip a truck scale. His ten-gallon Stetson added a foot to his height he hardly needed.

  “A little off your range, aren’t you, cowboy?”

  He stiffened and turned to squint at me against the lighted window. Today he had on a fringed buckskin jacket over a shirt with smaller check than usual. But it was the same .44 magnum in his huge right hand, and it was pointed at me as usual. Then he recognized me and relaxed just enough. I had drawn mine just before hailing him.

  “You set the law on me, hoss,” he rumbled. “That wasn’t very friendly considering what I done for you.”

  “In my place you wouldn’t have acted any differently, if you’re smart. And you must be or you wouldn’t be here. What say we put up the hardware?”

  He lifted his eight-inch barrel and replaced the hammer without a sound. I did the same and we holstered our respective widowmakers. Every time we met it was High Noon. “How’d you tumble to Ridder?”

  He smiled in his beard, cracking his face from mouth to eyes. “How’d you?”

  “I get it.” I jerked my chin in the direction of the door. “He in?”

  “I was just fixing to check.” He rapped the old varnish with the second knuckle of his little finger. We waited, but no one answered. He rapped again.

  We listened for movement. An engine in need of a muffler roared past in the street outside. Bassett tried the door. It gave. He looked at me.

  “It was standing open, right?”

  I nodded. We moved off to either side and took out our guns again. He finished twisting the knob, pushed, and ducked back behind the jamb. No one shot at us.

  “Me first,” I whispered.

  “How come?”

  “I’m a smaller target. Besides, there’s a little matter of a debt I owe this big cowboy.”

  It was his turn to nod. I wound myself up tight, took a heading on a sturdy-looking studio couch five feet beyond the open door, and dived for it. I landed on hands and knees behind the tall back and waited. Again nothing. I gave it a few more seconds, then duckwalked to the other end and peered Kilroy-like around the edge, where the steel frame showed through the worn red fabric.

  The apartment was neat but shabby, the furniture sagging and spraddle-legged, the rug trod patternless, the wallpaper bubbled just this side of peeling. A portable black-and-white television set stood on a table piled high with TV magazines and pamphlets I recognized from the hate library at the McDougall commune. From where I squatted I could look straight into the kitchenette, set off from the rest of the room by its linoleum floor and a low counter. I wondered about that counter.

  Holding the crouch, I scuttled in that direction, stuck my gun over the top and followed it up. Someone had spilled coffee down the side of the counter onto the linoleum, where it had dried into a yellow-brown stain. Nothing else.

  I stood up and called to Bassett. He came in, ducking to clear the top of the doorway. The magnum looked like a toy in his fist.

  “I’ll take that one.” He waved the barrel toward a door in the wall adjacent to the midget kitchen. I said okay and headed for another opposite that.

  In an earlier generation the room had been used for storage, but a toilet and sink had been added to make what realtors today call a half-bath. It wasn’t big enough to contain anything else. It was also uninhabited except for a lone cockroach on the wall next to the medicine cabinet.

  “Stop looking.”

  There was a new quality in Bassett’s voice I had never heard in anyone else’s except maybe half a dozen times. I closed the bathroom door and crossed to where his bulk filled the other doorway. He shifted sideways to give me a hinge at the room and its contents.

  The curtains were drawn over the only window, and the light from the living room fell on the whites of the occupant’s eyes, so that they seemed to glow through the gloom. Naked but for a pair of dirty jockey shorts, he lay bound in the shape of a jackknife on his stomach on a bed with a white-painted metal frame. His eyes had outgrown his lids and his purple tongue seemed longer than a tongue should be. His face was purple too, under the natural brown pigmentation of the skin. The rumpled sheets were soaked and the room smelled like a public toilet.

  Out of habit I stepped inside and felt the big artery on the side of his bulging neck. He wouldn’t be needing it any longer. The flesh was still warm and moist. I wiped my hand with my handkerchief. He had the fluffed-back hair and the Fu Manchu moustache, but aside from that he bore little resemblance to the mug shot I had studied at police headquarters. I was seeing him at a disadvantage.

  It wasn’t the classic hogtie. Whoever did it had cut the plastic clothesline after binding the victim’s wrists behind his back, looped his ankles to his neck, and drawn the works guitar-string tight, probably bracing a knee against Ridder’s spine, before setting the knot. Ridder had tensed his muscles as long as he could, but eventually sheer fatigue had forced him to relax and strangle himself. It would have taken hours.

  The bed claimed most of the space in the room. A three-drawer chest at the foot appeared undisturbed, but a small bedside table on casters was tipped against the wall and a white china lamp lay in pieces at its base. Other bedside-table stuff was scattered across the bare floorboards: an unbroken bottle of cough medicine, some Kleenexes, a paperback book with a lurid title and an even more lurid cover illustration, cigarettes and matches, other odds and ends of a cumulative nature. He had put up a fight.

  A wallet on the chest held two hundred and forty dollars in tens and twenties, Ridder’s work card from Rouge, and three driver’s licenses made out to three different names, none of them his but all bearing his picture.

  “What you suppose they was after?” Bassett’s voice was normal now, which was more than I could say for mine.

  “It’s a cinch it wasn’t money. Maybe revenge.” I spoke through my teeth. “You know anything about knots?”

  “Do I look like a sailor?”

  “Bluto, a little. Ellery Queen would take one look and tell you whether they were tied by a Lascar or a Malay hangman, and whether he was right-or left-handed,” I said. “He’d throw in the guy’s astrology chart free of charge. He wouldn’t stand here like a mongoloid.”

  He gave me a look I could feel in my shoes. “You all right?”

  “I’m j
ust dandy. Finding prime suspects who’ve had the life choked out of them is the way I like to start every day. How about you?”

  He shrugged.

  “One more dead nigger, right?” I snapped.

  “Did I say that?”

  I exhaled. “No. That was just me talking. It’s the atmosphere in here. Funeral parlors affect me the same way. Let’s get out.”

  “Out of this room, or out of the apartment?”

  “This room,” I said. “We’d better holler cop. There’s a bare chance no one saw me come up here, but you’re about as inconspicuous as a great woolly mammoth.”

  “Watch that kind of talk, hoss. I’m sensitive.”

  “You’re also extinct.” We moved into the living room. “There’s a service station around the corner on Green, about five blocks down. Who calls?”

  “You done it last time,” he pointed out. “I reckon it’s my turn.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that. I’m not sure what effect the combination of my voice and this news will have on Alderdyce.”

  “You afraid of him?”

  “I’m afraid of him. I’m afraid of the Detroit Police Department and the criminal court system and the license review board and unemployment and poverty. There’s precious little I’m not afraid of in this town, but those are the top six. Don’t forget to come back and help me wait.”

  After he left I tossed the apartment. All I learned from it was that Ridder had lived just like Barry Stackpole. He didn’t have anything that couldn’t be thrown into one suitcase, and I found that in the bedroom closet. It takes a dedicated fanatic to stick with a cause long after the glamor has worn off, and that was as much eulogy as Mrs. Ridder’s boy would get from me.

  I burned a cigarette and gazed out the living room window, which looked out on Whittaker and my car parked in front of the building. This was where all the half-truths and suppressed evidence got me, looking down the wrong end of a busted license. One of those vans with a sunset painted on the side panel was cruising past and I longed to be on it, or on anything that would take me away from there before the cops arrived.

  I got tired of that and turned away. Then the window blew apart.

  16

  A SHARD OF GLASS four inches long brushed my left cheekbone a half-inch behind the eye, accompanied by a rapid snapping, like typewriter keys striking a stiff sheet of paper. I hit the floor rolling and drew the .38 as I came up on the other side of the reliable studio couch. Tires cried down in the street, an engine wound up and then was swallowed by distance. I waited, but there were no more shots.

  Something trickled down my left cheek. The hand I put up to wipe it away came back with blood on the fingers. The piece of glass had opened a two-inch cut in my temple. I pressed my folded handkerchief to it until the bleeding stopped. My own razor had done worse damage. I was getting up when Bassett hurtled through the door behind his big magnum.

  “Who’s dead?” he demanded. “I heard busting glass on my way up.”

  “Not now. I’m having palpitations.”

  Leathering the Smith & Wesson, I examined the wall facing the window. They weren’t hard to locate. Three separate dish-shaped depressions grouped in a pyramid, exposing fist-size circles of broken lath beneath the plaster. I’d seen slug holes like those before. I wondered where.

  I watched a fly take off from the mound of paper in the IN basket on Alderdyce’s battleship-gray desk, execute a series of stalls and barrel rolls in the stale air near the ceiling, then light beside another fly on the wall next to the pebbled-glass door. Having failed to strike up a relationship, the newcomer buzzed away when the door opened. Sergeant Hornet paused a beat on the threshold, then came the rest of the way inside, closing the door behind him. The fly escaped into the squad room a quarter of an inch short of being squashed. Oh, to have wings.

  “You still here?” Hornet eased his bulk into the chair behind the desk. The springs creaked.

  “John said to wait. He let you sit there often, or do you hold off until he’s out of the room?”

  His eyes were water-colored in folds of fat, but they were cop’s eyes just the same. They hand them out in the twelfth week of the training course. He’d smeared something white on his heat rash, making him look like an obese Indian in warpaint. “He’s mad as hell at you,” he said. “I don’t think I ever seen him madder.”

  “You haven’t known him as long as I have.”

  “That wasn’t smart, not telling us the girl on McDougall was Deak Ridder’s sister. We’d known that, we could of picked him up for questioning and been on Smith’s case right now. Why’d you do it?”

  “What is this, relays? I made a statement.”

  He shook his head. “You never said why. John told me to ask. He don’t trust himself to be in the same room with you just now.”

  I started to tap out a Winston, then decided against it. My throat was raw already. “Ridder was the only lead I had that you didn’t. He was my chance to bring Smith in alive, which is what my client ordered.”

  “You saying we wouldn’t?” His tone would cut paper.

  “This isn’t The Rookies, Sergeant. Out of three cop-killers, two are dead. I’ll give you Turkel’s suicide, if that’s what it was. Don’t tell me every badge between here and the West Coast isn’t hoping to be the one who pulls off the hat trick. If you try I’ll throw up all over John’s desk.”

  “I don’t know what happened when you were a kid to put you off police, but I don’t work that way and neither does John.”

  “I don’t know you. I don’t even know John anymore. Do you?”

  He looked down at his pudgy hands lying flat atop the desk. When he looked up again we were talking about something else. “Think the guy that threatened you in your office is the one that shot at you?”

  I watched the fly on the wall. It hadn’t budged from its spot next to the door.

  “He could be,” I said. “I doubt it. He had his chance. My bluff wasn’t that good.”

  He reached into a side pocket of his goofy jacket and plinked two small brass shells onto my side of the desk. “These were found in the gutter in front of Ridder’s building. I guess the other one fell inside the van. Recognize the caliber?”

  I picked one up and studied the flanged end. “I ought to. I handled them enough in Nam. It’s standard ammunition for the M-16 rifle. The Gun that Lost the East.”

  “Also the gun Laura Gaye and her friends used to pry Smith out of custody.”

  “Important bastard, aren’t I?” I put down the shell.

  “Could be that’s the way they see you. Who besides the supervisor at Rouge knew you were going there to talk to Ridder?”

  “No one.”

  He watched me from under his lids. “I sure hope nobody’s leg’s getting pulled this time through.”

  “I’m not hopeless.” I thought of the tinsmith I’d worked over at the plant.

  “Maybe.” He picked up the shells. “Kind of puny slugs to do what they done.”

  “That’s because the gun doesn’t shoot them, it throws them.”

  “Huh?”

  I made a somersaulting gesture with my index finger “They tumble through the air end over end. Makes them useless beyond about sixty yards, but within that range they tear hell out of anything they hit. You saw the wall.”

  He pressed his lips tight. “Nice people, these militants.”

  “They’re in a nice racket. Who do you like for Ridder?”

  “Same as his sister. Bassett looked good for that one at first, but he’s aces up with the Oklahoma police and there was no motive. He’s been on the hot stick too long to lose control. It looks like Alonzo Smith’s good friends chilled her because she was a security risk, then did for her brother for the same reason, or maybe on account of he made a big stink out of her going down. Hell, it could of been Smith himself done it, for that matter.”

  “Neat,” I replied. “For you. Hang Smith and you scrape two murders off the blotter on top of
the Mt. Hazel shooting. Except that your theory sucks wind. If Ridder was already dead when I got to him, why try to kill me? If I were any good at interrogating corpses I’d invest in a pointed hat and a crystal ball.”

  “So who said these nuts think rationally? Maybe they don’t even talk to each other. Organization ain’t their strong suit or they wouldn’t be fighting against it.”

  “Got all the holes plugged, haven’t you, Sergeant?”

  “Bullshit.” His irritated cheeks glowed hot pink through the white salve. “I been nineteen years a cop, thirteen with this department. I seen maybe two thousand cases presented to the D.A., and not one of them was airtight. You said it yourself, this ain’t TV. We don’t get one case at a time and all the time in the world to question every suspect and sift through all the evidence and then make a brilliant deduction resulting in an arrest and immediate conviction, just before the last commercial break. I can spend just so much effort tracing the lost button, the footprint in the zinnia bed, the charred match, knowing that if something does come of it, nine times out of ten a clumsy cop is responsible for its being there in the first place. So don’t talk to me about plugging holes.”

  “That’s my job,” I said.

  “Wrong again. Your job is to take pictures through keyholes and ferret out perjurers to help some shyster whittle down a charge of first-degree homicide to a suspended fine for pissing on the sidewalk. But not much longer brother. We’re recommending they lift your license in Lansing. And that could be just the beginning. Suppression of evidence is a felony in this state, but any charges coming out of that will be up to the D.A.”

  “In the meantime, can I go?”

  He smiled his fat man’s smile, as spare as the décor along Death Row and loaded with secret knowledge. “Aw. And here I was busting my ass to keep you entertained.”

  “You were doing okay until you started making speeches at me.”

  “Your story checks out with Bassett’s, so far as it goes. So dangle, wiseass.” The smile wasn’t even a memory.

  I got up. My muscles creaked. Just being close to the wheels of justice had ground me down.