Private Heat

by Robert E. Bailey

  “He said he was sorry,” she sobbed. Her head collapsed into her hands in short jerks. “Last night, he said he loved me. We were going to work it out. I was going to call him.”

  I looked at Wendy; I didn’t think it would be right for me to comfort Karen. It must have been written in neon across my forehead because Wendy laid a gentle arm across Karen’s shoulder.

  “I talked to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. They want to see you this morning. They’re sending a marshal out to pick you up. It’ll take them an hour or so to get here. I’ll follow you in.”

  Wendy looked at me like I’d smashed a puppy with a brick. I took my coffee out to the garden and inspected the tomato plants. When I came back in, the shower was running downstairs.

  Wendy waited for me at the top of the steps. The tail of the pink shirt hung down to her knees. She put her arms around me and said, “You’d better be careful, mister. I don’t ever want to hear about you like that.”

  I didn’t have a ready answer, so I just hugged her back. It took five minutes of back rubbing and top-of-the-head kissing before I could get loose and go and get a tie and jacket.

  When I came out I had a second cup of coffee. The shower was still running. Wendy was puttering in the kitchen. “Hon?” I asked, “Could you go down and see if she’s all right?”

  Wendy went down and knocked, then pounded on the door. Karen didn’t answer. I went down the stairs. Karen wasn’t in the guest room. I took a celluloid bank calendar from my ID case and slipped the lock on the bathroom door.

  Karen sat on the floor of the shower, fully clothed, with a mouthwash bottle in her right hand and an empty brown prescription vial in her lap.

  The contents of her purse lay scattered about on the floor. She’d scrawled, “I’m going to be with Randy,” on the mirror in lipstick. I turned off the water, lifted her out of the stall, held her head over the toilet, and stuck two fingers down her throat. She gagged and retched—twice—but then didn’t inhale. I turned her face up and wiped it with the hand towel from the sink. Her eyes were half-open slits but there was nobody home. I pinched her nose, tilted her head back, and levered her jaw down. Vomit blocked her throat at the back of her tongue. I cleared it with my fingers, clamped my mouth over hers and blew. Her lungs filled and her body jerked. I got out of the way just in time to evade an arc of vomit she splashed onto the mirror, sink, and wall.

  “Jesus, Pop!” said Ben from behind me. “What’s going on?”

  “Karen took some pills,” I said. “We don’t have time for an ambulance. We’re taking her to the hospital in Greenville.”

  Karen took the next breath on her own so we wrapped her in a blanket and loaded her into the back seat of Wendy’s old Cadillac along with the pill vial—barbiturates—and the mouthwash bottle. I careened the eleven miles to the nearest emergency room with Wendy kneeling on the floor of the back seat, exhorting Karen to take each breath. It probably took only ten minutes but, measured one thready breath at a time, it seemed like a century.

  There are two hospitals in Greenville. In the winter, with no leaves on the trees, United Memorial can be seen from Mount Hollowview. Mount Hollowview looked a whole lifetime closer.

  The emergency room doors swept open and a gurney appeared in a flurry of latex-gloved hands and people attired in a monotone of pale blue. It was easier to tell them what she had done than it was her uncle. They didn’t seem to mind. Van Pelham’s end of the telephone went silent for a long time. I thought we might have been disconnected, but then he said that he was on his way. I went to the door and waited while I worked on a cigarette that I’d cadged from Wendy.

  A marshal pulled in driving a tan government sedan with my youngest son riding shotgun. Ben had volunteered for the ride to finger the turns. The marshal, a tall and lanky fellow with a prominent nose, put me in mind of a stork in a blue blazer and khaki slacks. He had a thick Georgia accent.

  “Harlan Johnson,” he said and displayed his star. “I came to take Karen Smith into custody.”

  I stuck out my hand, and he took it. “Art Hardin,” I said, “I’m afraid Karen made some poor choices this morning. She took a handful of Seconal and drank a bottle of mouthwash.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” said Harlan. “What’s the prognosis?”

  “They’re pumping her stomach,” I said. “The doctor says that even if she comes around, it may be several days before she’s out of the woods.”

  He nodded and searched his pocket for change. “I have to call Carter,” he said. “You cranked his tail pretty good this morning, and he’s not going to take this well.”

  Ben held me up for change for the soft drink machine. I added my cigarette butt to the collection on the ground by the door and went back to check with Wendy. The nurse quizzed her about the extent of Karen’s use of barbiturates. We told her that Karen had only been a house guest for one night, but that her uncle was on the way.

  “I’m afraid it will take at least half an hour for her uncle to get here.” She said sometimes families didn’t know that either, but to ask as soon as her uncle arrived.

  About twenty minutes later, I went to see if Van Pelham had arrived and got the surprise of the day—Detectives Jim Cox and Bart Shephart were in the waiting room. They each flipped a coin, which they caught in their right hands and then trapped, hidden, on their left wrists.

  Detective Bart Shephart had the faded parchment complexion of a man whose diet consisted mostly of gin and olives. All the hair had skidded off the top of his head except for a thin patch, which in more bountiful days had been a widow’s peak. His remaining hair, a wreath of gray-brown worn just above his ears and trailing down the nape of his neck, needed to be cut and spilled over his collar. His permanent-wrinkle suit was on its second or third day with baggy knees and accordion elbows.

  Cox called it. “Even,” he said. He was wrong, as usual.

  James Watson Cox, the senior member of the team, looked younger than his partner. He had a full head of black hair, with a hairline that made me suspicious of a transplant. He wore a blue wool blazer and khaki trousers. While trim and athletic, Cox was taller and heavier than Shephart and liked to show off a mouthful of baking-soda-white teeth. He wore a pastel-colored shirt and black leather loafers without socks.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “What did you win?”

  “This,” said Shephart and showed me his handcuffs and a smile so big I was afraid it would tear his face. “You’re under arrest for the murder of Police Officer Randal Talon.”

  I shook my head and looked at him again. “What?”

  “You’re busted.” He grinned. “Right now, it’s open murder, but we think we can improve on that.”

  The marshal stepped out of the hallway. Karen’s tether dangled from his left hand. With his right hand he held me in the sights of his Beretta nine millimeter. Waiting people fled.

  I opened my coat. Shephart reached in and took my sidearm. “Give me the can of gas, too,” he said. “We heard how much you like to use it.”

  “Sorry,” I said, “I used all my gas on a wife beater yesterday.” Actually, I hadn’t thought to take the second can out of the jacket I had worn the day before. “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”

  Cox stifled a laugh.

  I leaned on the wall and Shephart patted me down. He was putting the cuffs on me when Wendy came out.

  “What the hell is going on?” she said.

  “Call Finney,” I told her. “Bert and Ernie here just arrested me for the murder of Randy Talon.”

  “Yuck it up, funny man,” said Shephart. “We’ll see if the judge thinks you’re amusing.”

  8

  The “Turn Key”—the Grand Rapids City Jail—is located in the bowels of the Hall of Justice Building, in the basement under the police department, and has that nouveau unfinished basement look, with gray cement walls and black steel bars. The guards wear blue police coveralls with a name tag and city police patches on both shoulders.
/>   Sheila Cantor ran the intake desk. She was about thirty-five, with green eyes, and what would have been an ocean of red hair had it not been in a French braid. Her coveralls hung loose but couldn’t hide her athletic figure. She put my property in an envelope and said, “I have to pat you down. If you prefer I can have one of the male guards do it.”

  “Just don’t tell my wife,” I said and winked.

  When she was done—I guarantee you I had nothing she didn’t know about—Detectives Jim Cox and Bart Shephart steered me to the booking room. We found the guard, “Monty Madison” on his name tag, vigorously inking a glass fingerprint pad.

  The first palm print card didn’t suit Monty; he dropped it into the waste can. Detective Cox circled like a vulture while we did a second palm series. Monty examined the second attempt under a desk lamp and pronounced it good. Cox snatched it and hurried off, flapping the card to dry the ink.

  Monty gave me a moistened disposable paper towelette to clean up. “You got to be kidding,” I said.

  He nodded at the sink and said, “There’s some pumice soap over there in the dish.” It took a full five minutes of hand washing to remove the mark of Cain from my hands.

  “I want to shut the door on you personally,” said Shephart.

  “Suit yourself,” the guard said, “but right now, he gets his phone call.” They walked me over to a room with three pay telephones hanging on the wall and no furniture. Battered telephone books and a dog-eared yellow pages littered the floor. I dialed the office collect.

  “Do you have any idea what it costs to call here from the jail?” said Marg. “I already talked to Wendy and put in a call to Pete Finney, so I hope we can keep this short.”

  “Wendy say how Karen was doing?” I asked.

  “She hasn’t come around yet,” said Marg, and her tone softened, “but she’s breathing on her own and has a good pulse. They said without the heavy meal, she might not have made it.”

  “How about the feds?” I asked.

  “They wanted to move her, but the doctor won’t let them.”

  “How’s Van Pelham taking it?”

  “He says you’re fired.”

  “He’s upset about Karen. I don’t blame him, but I think he’ll change his mind if he gets to talk to her. Where’s Pete?”

  “Finney’s already at the Hall of Justice doing motions up at Circuit Court. He called and said he’d be down when he’s done.”

  “I finally caught a break.”

  “If you call that a break. He costs two hundred and fifty dollars an hour!”

  “Van Pelham is on the arm for this one.”

  “It had better be a long arm.”

  Shephart started pounding on the window.

  “I’ve got to let you go,” I said. “Tell Wendy to empty my pockets before she takes anything to the dry cleaner. The agreement to pay for Finney is in my sport coat.”

  “Wendy said that she was going to stay at the hospital.”

  Shephart pounded away, his face contorted. Some color actually washed into his barroom pallor.

  “I have to go before Bart Shephart has a heart attack and they charge me with that one, too.”

  “There was another guy out here this morning after I called you—wait a minute—let me get his card. Lieutenant Philip Emmery,” she said. “He had a warrant and asked for your report about last night at Karen Smith’s house. I told him that you hadn’t been in the office to do one but he searched the desks and closets anyway. He cut a two-foot-square piece out of the carpet from under your desk.”

  “Oh, just great. Anything else?”

  “Ginny called and said she wants the surveillance you discussed as soon as possible.”

  “I guess she doesn’t listen to the radio. If she calls back, tell her we’ll have it on the calendar for Monday.”

  “What about bail?”

  Shephart opened the door and stuck his head in the room. “Let’s go, hotshot!” he said. “There’s a cell waiting for you!”

  “I don’t think I’m going to need bail,” I said.

  Shephart bared his teeth.

  “See ya soon, Toots,” I said and smiled at Shephart.

  “Good luck,” she said and hung up.

  I put the handset back in the cradle. Shephart led me back to the booking room, but Monty was busy with another client.

  “Cop killers don’t get bail,” said Shephart.

  “Let me know if you ever catch one,” I said.

  “You want one of the interview rooms?” the guard asked. He made it sound like he was admonishing a child.

  “I just want to lock this asshole up,” said Shephart.

  “Leave him,” said Monty. “I’ll take care of it in a minute. Just handcuff him to the bench over there.”

  “No chance.”

  “Sheila!” Monty called out through the door. In a few seconds she walked in.

  “You got anybody?” asked Monty.

  “No.”

  “Good. Take this booking for a minute.” He got the keys and we were off to the holding tank. After the first door, there was a small anteroom space, and then a second door. The guard wouldn’t allow Shephart to go through to the second door, so he had to make do with dramatically slamming the outer door.

  “I’ll bet you were a noisy child,” I said with a grin.

  “Fuck you,” he mouthed without giving it voice.

  “And rude, too.”

  “We can talk about that later.” He made an evil smile.

  “Pack a lunch,” I said. A skinny bastard like Shephart should also call an ambulance, but I left that part off—probably was written on my face anyway.

  “You threatening me?” he said, stepping up to the bars.

  “I’m inviting you to a picnic,” I said.

  Monty tugged at Shephart’s sleeve and pointed at a white line painted on the floor about three feet out from the bars. “That’s as close as you get to the cell,” he said.

  Shephart jerked his arm loose and stalked up the hallway. From within the cell, behind me, came hoots and taunts.

  I was in a cage with horizontal bars, about thirty by forty feet, that came furnished with a cement bench and half a dozen new playmates. In the far corner, away from the door but in the front of the cell, two men stood together talking. The fellow with his back to the bars appeared to be in his late fifties. He wore a suit without a tie and wingtips without laces.

  “I’m just a huggy, lovey, touchy kind of guy,” he told his companion.

  His companion was a little younger but would never see the cheap side of forty again. He wore jeans and a T-shirt. The tongues of his buff-colored, cement-encrusted work boots lolled unguarded. “And that don’t make you no pervert!” he said.

  Three other men, all of whom were just barely, if not quite, twenty, huddled together, talking in street language. They’d provided the chorus for Shephart’s departure. They wore T-shirts festooned with the names of sports teams and their pants shackled low over colorful boxer shorts. One showed me an open raised palm as I proceeded into the cage toward the bench in the back. I smacked his hand.

  “Chilly,” he said and exposed a lot of teeth.

  I nodded but didn’t lose a stride. At his age I would have said “cool.” My arrival hardly interrupted his conversation.

  “Be stayin’” refers to where you or somebody else lives. That could be “the house,” “the crib,” or “the crash,” even if you only rent the sofa to sleep on. “Leffout” means you recently departed and you may soon return. “Bees gone” means you moved. They were talking about the T-man, whoever he was. They were excited about the T-man being “gone,” meaning the T-man was dead.

  I sat on the bench, pulled off my boots and laid them crisscross in the corner, and then removed my sport coat, rolled it up, and placed it on top of the boots. I laid down on the bench and used the pile as a pillow.

  The last of my new companions eyeballed me and started over. He wore old army fatigue pants, the oli
ve-drab kind, and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves torn off. Maybe in his mid-twenties, he had a shock of blond hair that hung down to his shoulders. A patchy two-day growth of beard shaded his face and shared space with a thready light-brown mustache. He wasn’t old enough to have been issued the trousers, his teeth were too good, and he lacked that certain olfactory street patina.

  “What’s the happs, man?” he said. “Why’d they bust you?”

  “Mopary,” I said and closed my eyes.

  He sat on the bench along the intersecting wall. “What’s that, man?” he asked. “I ain’t never heard of mopary.” He did the line pretty good. Not a hint of a smile.

  “Pretty serious, man,” I said, “a felony in this state.”

  Silent a moment, he said, “Just what did you do, man?”

  I opened my eyes and turned my head to look at him. “Unclean thoughts in a railway station.”

  He almost laughed, but he hung on and fought off a grin. “Oh, you mean like in the bathroom?” he said. His face went from amused to malicious.

  “No,” I said. “That ain’t mopary, that’s just being a pervert. There ain’t no perverts in here, are there?”

  “Well,” he said and thumbed at the two middle-aged fellows, “that’s what them two said they didn’t do.”

  I nodded, closed my eyes, and turned my head back.

  “So what do you do when it’s mopary?” he asked.

  I looked at him again. “When you’re standing by a car that has a Blaupunkt disc player and you’ve got a coat hanger in your hand and it ain’t your car, that’s misdemeanor mopary.”

  “Oh,” he said and considered my answer. Then his face turned quizzical. “But you said it was a felony.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but we’re talking second offense here. One more and they hit me with the ‘bitch!’” In Michigan, ha-‘bitch’-ual criminals do life.

  He shook his head. “Man, you don’t look like you need to be hanging around no rail station to steal no stereos.”

  I turned my head back and closed my eyes. “Then I guess they got the wrong guy.”