Midnight Man

by Loren D. Estleman

  “There’s no going back to the deck in this business. You play what they deal.”

  “The hell with that. You’re doing this because you want to. Check that. It’s because you think you have to. You’ve got Alonzo Smith’s name taped on your bathroom mirror and it won’t come down till they tag his toe.”

  He turned hot eyes on me. “What makes you so different?”

  “I’m not out for blood. That wouldn’t fit my client’s conception of justice. Smith made him a prisoner of his body, he wants to make Smith a prisoner, period. Or she does. Sometimes I have trouble peeling them apart. Remember the opening scene in The Godfather? A guy comes to Don Vito asking him to kill the two punks who raped and beat up his daughter. The Don says that wouldn’t be justice, because the girl was still alive. But he agrees to make them suffer as she did.”

  “That’s vengeance, not justice. Eye for an eye. We’re not even talking about the same thing.”

  “Sometimes it’s hard to figure out where one leaves off and the other starts up. Isn’t it, John?” I watched him over the lip of my glass.

  He looked at me. “I’m a police officer, not a samurai warrior.”

  “Next you’re going to tell me a healthy percentage of the contract killings done in this country aren’t done by police officers.”

  There was silence at the big table. I could feel six pairs of cops’ eyes on me. It seemed a long time before the various conversations resumed.

  “Smart, Walker,” John said. “What else do you do for fun, flash the peace sign at John Birch Society meetings?”

  “I have a death wish. That’s why I’m in the business I’m in.”

  “It isn’t so much that they killed two cops.” He revolved his glass slowly between his palms. “It’s the way they did it, with that specific end in mind. I can understand blowing down an officer while making a getaway from another crime. I’d want their heads, but I can understand it. This execution stuff gives me chills. The only way to stop that kind of thing is to stop it cold.” He finished his beer in a swallow.

  “The hell with that too. If you won’t face up to the fact that it’s revenge you’re after, if you keep backing your play by claiming the greater good, you’re going to start losing pieces fast.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Glad to hear it. I’d hate to think I’ve been sitting here wasting my time and money. Anyway, did you ever know me to talk this way when I wasn’t drunk? Stop trying to change the subject.”

  The party was beginning to break up. The cop with the machine gun impression scraped back his chair and took a heading on the men’s room. He didn’t jostle any more than six or seven imbibers on the way. Two of his friends paid for their drinks and left.

  “Then there’s the race thing,” I said. “You don’t even have the release of calling Smith a nigger, because you’re black too. It was like that in Nam. The brass kept telling us to waste gooks, but they forgot it was gooks we were over there fighting for.”

  “Nam, Nam, Nam.” It sounded like a mantra. “I’m sick of hearing about it every time we talk. You’re back now, so forget it.”

  “I’d like to. I’m sicker of talking about it, but I find myself doing it more and more the longer I’m away. I hope it’s not nostalgia.”

  He picked up his empty glass, set it down, and picked it up again, arranging the wet rings on the table into the Olympic symbol. “There could be some truth in what you said before. But if you don’t want to stop me from killing Smith, why is it I haven’t made a move in this case without tripping over you?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t want to stop you. My client wants me to, and I want what my clients want. That doesn’t mean I don’t agree with you.”

  “I must be drunk too,” he said. “I haven’t understood one word of this conversation.”

  “Me neither. How about a refill?”

  When I got in that evening I gave the Sturtevants’ number a whirl and reached a busy signal. Nadine was on duty. I wondered how many lawyers an invalid cop’s wife has to keep her from home. Then I decided I was being unfair. Too much Scotch on an empty stomach brings out the detective in me. Resisting the urge to flop, I lowered me and my injured rib cage carefully onto the bed without undoing even my tie, after which I don’t remember much of anything except the dream.

  I was seated alone in a dimly lit room. Someone knocked at the door, but when I tried to get up to answer it I could move only my left arm and leg, and those feebly, as if they had each gained a hundred pounds overnight. I was in a wheelchair.

  Cadaverous Nadine appeared from another room and opened the door to admit Van Sturtevant, upright in full uniform and looking as he had the day we’d met on the Edsel Ford Freeway. He came forward to greet me and my eyes went past him to a figure standing in the shadows just beyond the threshold. The figure showed no weapons, made no attempt to enter, and yet the sight of it filled me with hollow dread. I couldn’t even summon strength to lift my good hand to clasp Sturtevant’s. I felt the dread’s icy breath on my face. Then Nadine closed the door, separating me from the faceless apparition, and the feeling evaporated.

  Not for long. She turned up the lights and I saw that we were in the bedroom of Deak Ridder’s apartment. His corpse lay trussed like a rodeo calf on the bed, sticking its purple tongue out at me. I looked away quickly—right into the shadowy face of the Figure, now looking at me from outside the window. It held Tallulah Ridder’s body in its arms, curled in the fetal position in which I’d found her, her head twisted nearly all the way around so that her sightless eyes fell on me. I started screaming for help, in that strangled, tongueless voice that tells you even in the midst of a dream that it can be heard in waking life. But no one in the room could hear me for the organ music that swelled and swelled until I couldn’t even hear myself. I screamed not because of the corpse, but because the shadows had lifted and I recognized the face of my Figure, grinning at me like a demented gargoyle, and it wasn’t the face I’d expected, not at all …

  The door buzzer ended the nightmare, though I sat up for a moment separating illusion from reality. The face was gone. I couldn’t summon it back. It seemed important that I try. Then I couldn’t remember why it was important, and I ended up thinking that maybe it wasn’t so important after all. The other details were already fading. I got up.

  The buzzing droned on as I stumbled through the living room, turning on lights as I went. The wall clock read 12:06. The kids in my neighborhood weren’t above jamming the button with a safety pin and running, but I went back for the .38 just in case. At the door I called for my visitor to identify himself.

  There was a long stretch of nothing but buzzing. Then came the words, distorted by the panel.

  “My wife in Oklahoma calls me Munnis, but mostly I’m just plain Bum.”

  It took him a long time to say. It sounded like him; it didn’t sound like him at all. Gripping the gun tightly, I snatched open the door and stepped back.

  The giant cowboy smiled wearily at me from the side of the tiny porch, where he was leaning on the buzzer. He was hatless and there was a sheen of perspiration on his broad red brow. Then he rolled off the button, the buzzing ceased, and I went down beneath three hundred pounds of dead weight.

  19

  DON WARDLAW finished cleaning and dressing the wound in Bassett’s thigh, swished his surgical probe around in the bowl of alcohol on the table next to the bed, wiped it off, and laid everything away carefully in the bottom of his scuffed black bag. He was a scrawny rooster with no chin and a mop of curly brown hair that came off when he took a shower. He’d once had a license to practice medicine but he didn’t anymore, and still doesn’t. His name isn’t Wardlaw either, but I owe him too much to blow any whistles.

  He picked up an object the size of a pencil eraser from a piece of stained gauze on the table and handed it to me. “A souvenir.”

  It was made of dull gray metal with a copper jacket and retained its conical shape. “Twenty-five,�
�� I said. “Kind of small for so much blood.” Some of it had come off on my clothes when I broke Bassett’s fall.

  “There could have been a lot more. It entered the fleshy part of his thigh, just missing the main artery. A hair to the left and he wouldn’t have needed me. He’d have read empty before he was halfway here. He might still have, if you hadn’t applied that tourniquet when you did.”

  “I owe it all to Ho Chi Minh and the local draft board. Thanks, Don.” I handed him a C-note. “Another session with the cops tonight would have been five too much. Just helping me get Godzilla into bed was worth the century.”

  “I ought to soak you more, considering the hour. But you’re good for business.” He folded the bill lengthwise and sidewise and poked it into the watch pocket of his vest. He always took the trouble to put one on, even when summoned in the middle of the night. When it came to clothes, he and Alderdyce were soulmates.

  Suddenly he asked, “Are you in pain?”

  “I’ve got a cracked rib, maybe two, and three hundred yards of adhesive tape around my middle. I didn’t know it was that obvious.”

  “It isn’t. With you I stand a fifty-fifty chance of asking that question and getting a yes. Let’s see it.” He indicated a kitchen chair in the corner.

  I stripped off my shirt and sat down. He whistled.

  “Nice work. Who did it?”

  “You just met him.”

  “Where’s the pain?”

  I circled the area with a forefinger. He pushed against it lightly with the heels of his hands. “That hurt?”

  “A little.”

  He moved his hands. “How about that?”

  “A lot.” I bit my lip.

  He straightened. “You can take off the tape. If it’s cracked I’m the President’s personal physician.”

  “What’ve you got, x-ray eyes?”

  “You’re not Gary Cooper,” he said. “If that rib were anything worse than bruised they’d have heard you yelling in Toronto when I leaned on it. That’s one ex-doctor’s opinion. Get it x-rayed.”

  I stood and climbed back into the shirt, leaving it unbuttoned. “The way I feel it ought to be broken. At least cracked. It’s not fair.”

  “Could be you tore a muscle. I wouldn’t try busting any broncos for the next month or so.”

  I escorted him to the front door. “Any instructions?”

  “Find another line of work.” He smiled thinly.

  “I mean about Bassett.”

  “Change the dressing daily. Keep the wound clean. If his temperature goes up, call me. And don’t let him out of that bed for at least two days, except to go to the toilet.”

  “I never talk about letting or not letting where anyone over two hundred and fifty pounds is concerned. But I heard you.” I started to open and door and paused. “By the way, I saw Iris the other day. She says she took your cure.” Don ran a drug rehabilitation clinic in Hazel Park and was a former user himself.

  He nodded grimly. “I hope it takes.”

  “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “If she were anything but a hooker I might be more optimistic. Too many of the people she hangs out with are addicts. It distorts your judgment. You get to thinking that everyone else is turning on and you’re outside looking in. Peer pressure isn’t restricted to teenagers.”

  “She’s pretty level-headed,” I said.

  “If she were level-headed she wouldn’t have needed me in the first place.” He opened the door himself and went out without saying goodbye. He never said it. We all have our own demons to fight. But Don never asked questions, which was another mark on his side of the board.

  His heap started with a clatter in the street out front and plowed away, bringing me around to my demon of the moment. I went out in the dark to find a GMC four-wheel-drive pickup parked at a crazy angle at the end of my driveway. The key was in the ignition and there was a lot of blood dried brown on the seat. Knobs, dials, and speakers studded the dash, few of them standard equipment. The glove compartment contained a road atlas and an Oklahoma registration made out to Munnis Bassett, under a .357 magnum revolver that looked like the one from his trailer. It hadn’t been fired recently and the cylinder was full.

  But for mine, none of the windows in the neighborhood was lit. I opened the garage door as quietly as possible and pulled my Cutlass out onto the lawn. Leaving it idling, I got out and climbed up into the driver’s seat of the pickup. My foot kicked something on the floor. I picked up Bum’s .44 magnum, reeking of cordite. All but one chamber had been fired. I stuck the gun under my belt, ground the big engine into life, and drove it into the garage. From inside I tugged down the door and rummaged through some junk on the workbench until I found an aerosol can of blue paint I’d bought to touch up my car. It took only a minute to spray over the garage’s only window. Finally I went back out through the house and put the Cutlass in the driveway. The perfect coverup, provided none of my neighbors had witnessed the game of musical parking spaces.

  Bassett was still unconscious when I checked on him. He would be for a while. He was pale under the sunburn but his breathing seemed normal. I unloaded the magnum and laid it atop the dresser. I wondered what the hell I was getting into this time.

  The clock in the living room struck two. I peeled off my bloodstained clothes, leaving them in a heap on the floor, and started unwinding tape. There was enough of it to line a football field. I put on my robe and slippers, gathered up the debris, and carried it into the kitchen, where I dumped it into the wastebasket. Cleaners get curious about things like bloodstains. Then I filled a bucket with water and scrubbed the blood from the linoleum at the front door and the boards of the porch. I felt like Macbeth’s maid.

  I was hungry as the devil when I finished. There was a period in my life, not so long ago, when the sight of blood would have slaughtered my appetite. But I was growing a shell. The time would come when I’d be able to crack jokes in the presence of death, like some cops, because I’d be dead inside, deader than the stiff. In the cupboard I found a box of cornflakes I’d missed on my last search. I poured some into a bowl and added milk. When that was gone I felt like going out and belting a baseball over the back fence. I settled for a smoke.

  The buzzer razzed. I was getting not to like that sound a lot. I slid out of the nook and opened the door to John Alderdyce. He was dressed as he had been hours earlier, in dark slacks and a sport jacket with a tiny check. He hadn’t been home.

  “You’re up late,” he observed.

  “I’m up early. How about you?”

  “I didn’t kill half a bottle of Scotch just a few hours ago. Do I get invited in or what?”

  “Like you said, John, it’s late.”

  His eyes roamed the living room beyond my shoulder “Seen anything of Bum Bassett this A.M.?”

  “What’s he done?”

  “I didn’t say he did anything.” He spoke offhandedly. Never trust a casual cop.

  “Yes, you did.”

  He met my gaze. “I talk better sitting.”

  I hesitated, then stepped aside. He came in and I closed the door. When I turned I found him staring down at the rug. It was buckled where Don and I had dragged Bassett’s heels across it.

  “I was doing some cleaning.” I straightened it out with a foot.

  “At this hour? In your bathrobe?”

  “Some people play solitaire. I clean. And my wardrobe is none of your business.”

  He held up his palms in a sign of surrender. “I see you’re not parking your car in the garage these days.”

  “Too much junk. You know how it is.”

  “Yeah. Did you know someone’s painted over your garage window? From the inside. It looks fresh.”

  “I’m building a birdhouse. The sun hits me square in the eye when I’m working. Can I get you a drink?” The moment I asked it I wished I hadn’t. I didn’t want him snooping around while I was in the kitchen.

  “I’m still on duty.” He pulled up the knees of his tro
users and sat down on the sofa. “Couple of officers answered a disturbance call about eleven last night at a house on Bagley. They found three corpses in the living room and a guy on his knees in the back yard coughing blood. He was DOA at Detroit Receiving twenty minutes later. Only one of the victims was white, a woman.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Prints match Laura Gaye’s.”

  I lowered myself into the easy chair, feeling vulnerable in robe and slippers and practically nothing else. “I take it food poisoning was not involved.”

  “Not hardly. The M.E.’s still working, but we dug a forty-four slug out of a wall. Ballistics has it right now. We also found a cowboy hat on the floor, which checks out with the DOA’s babble about John Wayne before he threw it in. Where is he, Walker?”

  “What makes you think I know?” I fumbled cigarettes and matches out of the robe pocket.

  “We followed a trail of blood out the front door and across the lawn to the street, where it stopped. Someone got into a car and drove away, someone who was hurt and needed help. Someone who knows only one person in town who’s not a cop. That person is you.”

  I trotted out the routine—striking, lighting, drawing, shaking out, and discarding, all those things that smoking gives you to do while waiting for your brain to warm up. The Surgeon General hasn’t come up with any ammunition against that yet. “Just because I euchred you once doesn’t mean I plan to make a career of it.” I laid down a smokescreen between us. “Have you tried his trailer?”

  “It wasn’t in the K-Mart lot in Warren,” he said. “We called the manager at home and he says he told Bassett yesterday to move it or he’d have the police come and tow it away. I’ve got men running down all the courts and free parking lots in the area. Then I thought of you. Is he here?”

  “That would make me an accessory after the fact, if there is a fact. I’d be taking a whale of a chance with my license.”

  “That’s hardly unfamiliar territory for you. You won’t mind if I take a look around.” He started to get up.