Midnight Man

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Where’ll we meet?” I asked.

  “Pretty sure of yourself, ain’t you, pig?”

  “You dropped the dimes, not me. And if you keep calling me that we can consider this conversation terminated.”

  “Okay, okay. Don’t get hot on me, man.” He paused. “There’s an old brownstone on Antietam. You can’t miss it. It’s got a great big CONDEMNED sign on the front door.” He gave the address.

  “I know the area,” I said, scribbling the number on the calendar pad.

  “Not as good as me. I grew up there. Midnight. Come in the Antietam side. No weapons. Wait for me in the lobby. I’ll be watching good and close, so don’t get cute.”

  “Is it all right if I come alone?”

  “You’re a riot, Walker.”

  “That’s almost twelve hours,” I said. “Think you can hold out that long?”

  “Just worry about your own self. My face might just be the last thing you ever see.” On that blinding note he hung up.

  “Are you going?” Mrs. Sturtevant was studying me.

  “It’s my party. Can I call you a cab?” I got up from behind the desk.

  She rose. “I drove. Be careful, Mr. Walker. I suppose you’ve been told that before.”

  “Not as often as I’d like. This conversation doesn’t leave this room, okay? Wait till after midnight to tell your husband. Neighborhoods like yours are full of ears.”

  “You have my word. You won’t forget to call once you have him?”

  I said I wouldn’t forget and put a hand on her elbow to turn her toward the door. She didn’t budge.

  “He’d have nothing to lose by killing you, you know,” she said. “What I’m saying is, if worst comes to worst, don’t feel bound by my request to bring him in alive.”

  “That dedicated I’m not. Thanks for dropping by, Mrs. Sturtevant. I’ll call you, one way or the other.” I went over to get the door for her and here was one women who let me.

  24

  MY NEXT CALL was to Barry Stackpole, asking him to be available around midnight and to be prepared to share the event with colleagues. He was too good a reporter not to press me on the details, but when I didn’t comply he was too good a friend not to back off. We ended the conversation on a note best described as amiably obscene.

  The rest of the day passed routinely, which is to say soporifically. After lunch I came back to the office and started spelling my name across the pad with pencils taken from the cup on the desk, but I ran out before finishing the K. I turned on the radio in time for the news. The manhunt for Smith had dropped to third place behind the mayor’s address to council and the Bagley shooting. Bassett’s name wasn’t mentioned and no connection was made between the bloodbath and Smith. The victims remained unidentified. When it comes to aggressive reporting, broadcast journalism ranks next to blue cheese.

  A patch of Venetian-blind-striped sunlight had by this time shifted from the right wall to the floor. I made a bet with myself on how long it would take to reach the desk and won on points.

  At half-past two a fortyish woman came in and sat in the customer’s chair and dangled a ten percent finder’s fee under my nose for the return of a hundred-dollar bracelet she swore had been ripped off by a co-worker at the office where she was employed as a secretary. She named the co-worker. I told her that although the ten bucks was tempting I was involved with something else at present, and gave her the name of a fellow P.I. I had never liked. She was the only visitor I had all afternoon.

  I played six games of solitaire and lost every one. Then I played a seventh under my own rules. I lost that one too.

  The telephone rang twice. The first caller tried to sell me wall-to-wall carpeting for next to nothing if I agreed to let his company use my office as a model, and the second was a drunk looking for somebody named Madeleine. I tried to strike up a conversation with each of them, but they lost interest when they found I didn’t have what they were after My practice, always at low ebb, all but dried up during the vacation season. When the clock hand finally crept around to five I locked up and went home.

  I fixed supper and ate it in front of the television set, where John Wayne was fighting Indians in Hondo, a favorite. When that was over I set the alarm for ten and stretched out fully clothed on the bed. For a change I slept without dreaming.

  At quarter-past eleven I left the house with my .38 snapped to my belt under the jacket. Instructions to the contrary, people who keep late-night appointments with killers on streets like Antietam without arming themselves first don’t deserve to come back.

  25

  THERE WAS A NEW MOON that night. The stars glittered like steel bearings on a black cloth. To the south a lone jet crawled silently westward between winking red and green lights, separated from the hollow whooshing of its engines by an entire sky.

  The building was a slightly denser mass than the blackness that surrounded it, sensed rather than seen, blank, silent. The beam from my flash picked out six concrete steps leading up to the entrance, worn hollow by the passage of feet that no longer trod anywhere, steps as old as the battle for which the street was named. Even the CONDEMNED notice tacked to the door looked mature enough to vote. At the top of the steps I snapped off the flash and pocketed it.

  It was the drying perspiration of a long day, and not a premonition of death, that chilled me as I pulled open the door on crusted hinges. But I upholstered the Smith & Wesson just the same and kept my hand on it in the side pocket of my jacket. The ruins of a padlock and chain jingled from the scaly iron door handle.

  I stepped across a crumbling threshold—and was instantly whisked back to the alley next to the gymnasium on McDougall. Suffocating darkness wrapped itself around me, smelling sourly of urine and old garbage and rats. The pain of that earlier awakening raked my rib cage and arms and legs and head, the last still suffering from Bum Bassett’s symphony for cane and gun. I moved sideways quickly to avoid being outlined against the lighter rectangle of the doorway and stood without moving, my back against the wall, breathing shallowly between parted lips while waiting for my eyes to adjust.

  They did, with the gradual coming-to-realization of the sun rising or a clock hand moving. The minimal starlight sifting through the open door—not at all through the windows, which I assumed were boarded over—touched litter on the floor, curlicues of old spray paint on part of a naked wall, the indistinct looming solidity of a standing staircase. Beyond here were dragons. I fingered my gun and breathed and waited. I could have heard my watch ticking if I were wearing one. I was a figure in an unfinished charcoal sketch, crowded into one corner with the whole brooding emptiness of the canvas before me. I was at the mercy of the artist, and of whatever dark thing he chose to place in that emptiness. Portrait of a sleuth beyond his depth.

  Hard fingers clamped themselves around my right wrist. I pulled back instinctively, and a point of cold fire found the pulse beneath the left corner of my jaw. I sucked air.

  “Move just one hair and I’ll carve you up like a Halloween punkin.”

  The voice was the same in person as over the wire, only sharper, more electric. His face was a dark steaming reality two inches from mine. I smelled chicken on his breath.

  “I’m carrying,” I told him. “I stand a fair chance of hitting something vital by firing through my pocket.”

  “You better move fast after you pull the trigger ’cause your jugular goes next.” He was breathing raggedly. “You ever see arterial blood? It’s orange.”

  He was commando wise and suicide smart. I relaxed my grip on the .38. “You’ve got the wheel.”

  “I do like a man with a clear sense of his own mort—mortality.” He worked his hand down my wrist and into my pocket, where he got his thumb behind the trigger and tugged out the gun, hand and all. He pried it out of my grasp.

  The blade was withdrawn. His hands probed my whole length, even patting my hair for a hideout shiv. He relieved me of my wallet and flash.

  I knew what was coming
next and rolled with it. The gunsight raked stingingly across my cheek without drawing blood. I made a noise as if it had.

  “I ought to make you eat it,” he spat. “Didn’t you hear me when I said no weapons?”

  “Would you, in my place?”

  That time I wasn’t ready for it. A cut that was just starting to heal split open and a warm trickle coursed down my cheek into my mouth. I was getting used to that salt-and-iron taste.

  He backed away then, out of my reach. He wasn’t stupid or he wouldn’t have remained at large this long. The flash snapped on and he studied the cards and papers in my wallet. The yellow light reflecting off the celluloid windows glowed dimly on even, ginger-colored features recognizable from an early mug shot used again and again in the papers and on television. He sported a week’s growth of beard, and his hair frazzled out untidily from under a worn cloth cap with a creased peak. His eyebrows slanted away from the bridge of his nose, giving him a surprised look. He removed some bills and turned out the light.

  “Getaway stake?” I said.

  He came forward and thrust the wallet back inside my jacket, keeping the flash. “Let’s call it a deposit in case you don’t turn out to be everything you said.”

  He retreated again. I could make out some highlights on his face now, but nothing else. He was wearing dark clothes.

  “I got you white folks all figured out. You’re full of brotherly love long as you got the gun. But when one of us gets it you holler ‘nigger’ and go for a rope.”

  I grunted. “Roots, right?”

  “So you heard it before. This time listen to the words.”

  “There’s a little more to it than that,” I said. “There’s a matter of two cops killed and another paralyzed from the waist down.”

  “I didn’t invite them out there, man.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  He breathed some air. “Keep talking, whitey. Make sense.”

  “It wasn’t like you to leave evidence linking your group to the arson that brought those cops out to Mt. Hazel. You weren’t as dumb as the others. Like the fisherman said, if you expect to catch trout you got to dangle bait.”

  “For someone who says he ain’t a pig, you sure talk like one.”

  “Sometimes it pays to think like one. You know that. That’s what you were doing that night at Willie Lee Gross’s place.”

  “Who’s paying your way, flapjaw?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It does if it’s John Blue. Maybe you’re their Judas goat. Get me out in the open so’s they can do for me just like they done for the others.”

  “Would I have come alone if that were the case?”

  “You tell me. I’m the original endangered species.”

  “All broke up over your woman, aren’t you?” Easy, Walker. He’s got the hammer.

  He laughed nastily. “She was my woman like she was Deak’s woman like she was Felix’s woman like she was everyone else’s woman. She’d ball anything in pants and then she’d go to church to save her soul and then she’d ball anything in pants again. I didn’t ask her to come get me out of the slam. If she didn’t I wouldn’t be here. I’d be in a nice cozy cell dictating my mem—memoirs.”

  “Speaking of here, why’d you pick this spot?” Keep him talking.

  “Why not? I was born in this building. Like it?”

  “I can’t see much of it.”

  “You ain’t missing nothing.” His feet scuffed the worn linoleum, the sound echoing. “I know this place better than anywhere. We used to pitch pennies against that wall. Kids don’t do that no more, I guess. When I was nine I fell down them stairs. Landed right there and busted my arm. Ma took me to this old white doctor with onions on his breath. I can smell them onions now. He set the bone but he didn’t do a good enough job and it had to be busted again later and reset. Sometimes, when it’s cold out and that arm starts hurting, I dream about finding that son-of-a-bitch doctor and busting his arm. Stupid kid stuff.”

  He stopped walking, and sniffed loudly. “Smell that? Cabbage and piss and puke. I grew up with that stink. It’s in my nose and I can’t get rid of it. I joined the marines and they sent me to Germany, but it followed me. Guess I’ll die smelling it. That and the onions on that white doctor’s breath.”

  “Tallulah Ridder didn’t smell much better.”

  Something creaked. He was leaning on the staircase banister. “Everything dies, man.”

  “Not at fourteen, man,” I said. “Not stuffed into a hot trunk with a broken neck.”

  The building settled in the silence that followed.

  “My father took off when I was little,” he said then. “So did the fathers of most of my friends. Where do all the fathers go, man? Tell me that.” He didn’t wait for me to tell him. “There was hookers in the lobby when it rained. They used perfume instead of soap. First time I had the bread I took one in a doorway two blocks down from here. I was thirteen. It was all over in two minutes. She took my money and my cherry and gave me the clap. Some trade.”

  I wasn’t there. He’d been on the run so long he was talking to himself. I’d mentioned Tallulah to flush him out from behind the Selma-to-Montgomery rhetoric, hoping for a glimpse of his true face. I was just starting to realize he didn’t have one. Corpses were only broken parts in his vengeance machine. He bored the hell out of me. My skull ached. I needed air. I got more words.

  “My mother scrubbed white folks’ toilets and hooked a little on the side. She drank. I didn’t think nothing of it; all my friends’ mothers was drunks and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be. They found her on her face in a mud puddle on Sherman five years ago. She drowned in less water than they used to cut the drinks in her favorite bar. She was too drunk to lift up her head.”

  I breathed some of the fetid atmosphere. “Sorry to hear it. But you were already pretty far gone by then.”

  Floorboards shifted. He was standing upright again. I’d reminded him I was there. I pressed on.

  “Is that why you knocked down those cops? Because you got a dose from a working girl and your mother died breathing dirty water?”

  He let loose a string of curses. I caught a dull flash of teeth. “Man, you wouldn’t understand if I tattooed it on your lilywhite chest. You think juicing folks is all we stand for? I been years working up to this. I even went into the service just to learn all you motherfuckers could teach. That’s what the Indians done toward the end. Sent the young braves east to study in the white man’s schools so they’d know how to deal with him. But it was too late. Well, it ain’t too late for us.”

  “Working up to what?”

  “Say what?”

  “You said you’ve spent years working up to this. What’s ‘this’?”

  The building groaned like an old man lowering himself to a bench.

  “Nothing,” he said finally. He sounded played out. “Just the cause, man. Just the cause.”

  I almost brought up the mayor. But I was too far away from having him bagged to slam that door. “So what’s the punch line? Do we go to police headquarters or what?”

  More silence. An ambulance siren started up many blocks away and climbed fast, as thin as an exposed nerve. Someone’s always bleeding somewhere. Smith sighed.

  “Davey said it would come out like this. I told him to be more positive.”

  “Davey?”

  “Luke David Turkel.” Rhythmically, like a tired instructor prompting a difficult pupil. “He said going in we’d all end up in the slam or dead. I said he shouldn’t talk like that. By this time I expected the brothers and sisters to be rioting in the streets, torching and trashing and dumping over cars. I figured the revolution would be on. Willie Lee agreed with me.”

  “That should’ve tipped you off. Never go with a nineteen-year-old kid’s hunch.”

  He wasn’t listening. “Bet ‘I told you so’ was the last thing Davey was thinking when the bastards spilled him in Carolina.”

  I said, “You were as
late as the Indians. Ten years too late. Too many of the brothers and sisters are making steady wages to riot. They got sucked into that white system you hate so much. Pancho Villa’s defunct.”

  “That’s e. e. cummings.” He responded wearily. “Only he said it about Buffalo Bill. ‘Buffalo Bill’s defunct.’ I finished school in the marines. See, we ain’t all illiterate.”

  Something struck the floor with a tapping sound and rolled to a stop. The noise was repeated five times. Boards sighed under the linoleum as he came toward me.

  “Hold out your hands.”

  When I obeyed, he slapped a heavy steel something into my right palm and a lighter something into my left.

  “Careful with that blade,” he said. “I oil it a lot and it slips out if you breathe on it.”

  I put it away in a pocket and poked the empty revolver into its holster. “What about the flash?”

  He handed it over. I turned it on and frisked him, making a chiding noise with my tongue against my teeth when I found a .32 Remington pocket pistol in his right sock.

  “Man’s got to have an edge,” he said.

  I dropped the little automatic into the pocket containing the knife, retrieved the bills he’d taken from me, and stuck them back into my wallet. “My car’s down the street this side. We’ll stop on the way to the cophouse to call the press. You first, Spartacus.”

  The street looked a little less dark than it had going in. I gave Smith plenty of time to descend the steps before I followed. On my way down, the night exploded in a brilliant flash of blinding white light.

  The headlamps of a car parked facing us in a driveway across the street bleached out the shadows, impaling Smith to the sidewalk in front of me like a bug on a card. The engine caught with a shriek. I hurled myself from the steps, tackling my charge around the waist and forcing him face first into the gutter. I suppose he’d consider that symbolic. He woofed when we struck.

  The first bullet whacked one of the boarded-up windows from the sound of it, like a wooden bat breaking on a fastball. The second went somewhere into space, and a third twanged off the curb a few inches short of my face. Concrete dust pelted my cheek. There may have been others. I wasn’t counting.