Private Heat

by Robert E. Bailey

  “Sure,” said Tina.

  “I’m trying to reach my house, but I can’t get through. I wonder if you would look out the window and see if my son’s car is in the yard.”

  “Don’t have to,” she said. “I heard him start that thing up and roar off just a couple of minutes ago.”

  I looked at Wendy and said, “You heard them leave a couple of minutes ago?” Relief washed over Wendy’s face.

  “That’s right,” said Tina. “You know, you really need to do something about those mufflers.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. The elevator stopped at the fifth floor and the door opened. Finney reached over and stuck his finger on the hold button. “One more thing,” I said. “Could you look out on the lake side? I’m expecting a couple of guests. They’re both police officers from Grand Rapids. One of them is a black fellow and the other guy is white and has a bandage on his face. I told them they could come out and fish.”

  “They’ve been out there for about an hour,” said Tina, “but they’re using a rental boat from over at the Willis’s.”

  “They should have used mine,” I said. “I guess they didn’t want to impose.”

  “The guy with the bandage on his face is doing more talking on his cell phone than fishing.”

  “They’re probably looking for me. I promised to grill up some burgers. Thanks a ton, Tina. I’ll talk to you later.” I punched off the line and handed the telephone back to Ron. “The boys made it out, and Chuck and Paulie are still in the rowboat.”

  “As long as your sons are safely away,” said Finney, “it might be best to hold off taking Karen back to your house until we have things sorted out.”

  I looked at Wendy.

  “I guess,” she said.

  “I know I’d rather wait,” said Karen.

  “Good,” said Finney. “Let’s go back up and see if Ralph Sehenlink is in his office.” We filed off the elevator.

  “Are you going to need the video?” asked Ron.

  “We’ll make do with the photographs for now,” said Finney.

  “Go and delouse my house,” said Wendy.

  The elevator door closed. We picked up our sidearms and the marshal surrendered Ron’s equipment. We tried to talk him into carrying the equipment downstairs but he wasn’t having any.

  “So what’s the plan?” asked Ron as we exited the building. “I suppose we can sit on the porch and stare back at them.”

  “Not much else we can do, now. Too bad. I hoped they’d lead us to the Russian.”

  At the van we loaded up the equipment. “I always heard that those mob guys agreed not to blow each other up,” said Ron.

  I closed the slider and opened the passenger door. “I think maybe the only rule is: The last guy holding the money wins.”

  Ron fired up the truck. At the ticket booth Ron rolled down the window and held out his parking stub and a couple of singles.

  The woman in the booth didn’t reach for the stub or the money. She leaned forward to look at me, then craned her neck to examine the van.

  “You guys named Craig and Hardin?” she asked.

  “That’s right,” Ron said.

  She took Ron’s money and stub and laid them on her desk, then picked up her telephone and dialed.

  “What’s up?” Ron asked.

  She showed Ron a wait-a-second finger. “Marshal Johnson, please,” she said into the telephone. She put the parking stub into her machine. The sign on the side of her booth lit up with a charge of a dollar and seventy-five cents. “Yeah, Marshal Johnson? This is Patty down in the booth. The guys you wanted to talk to are here. … Okay!”

  She handed Ron a quarter and the handset from the telephone in her booth. Ron had to hike up in his seat and lean out to get the phone all the way up to his face.

  “Yeah, this is Ron Craig … Yeah, he’s sitting right next to me. … No, we didn’t. … Oh, my God … there shouldn’t be anyone in there. … Yeah, we’re on our way.”

  The black-and-yellow striped parking ramp arm rose. Ron handed the telephone back.

  “What the hell is going on?” I asked.

  Ron nailed the gas and we roared up the ramp to the street. “A police officer was just shot in front of your house.”

  “Who?”

  “The marshal didn’t say, but they think that the shooter may be holed up in your house.”

  “There shouldn’t be anyone in the house.”

  “That’s what I told him.” Ron squealed the tires turning right onto Ottawa and floored it. “He said that the state police had sent for their SWAT crew, but they wanted you there in case one of your boys was in the house.”

  “Gimme the phone,” I said. Ron handed me his cell phone. I dialed up the house. I got the answering machine. I recited the time and then yelled into the telephone, “Ben, Daniel, if you’re there, pick up the telephone! C’mon, if you’re there, pick up the phone!” I waited. “Anybody—Chuck, Paulie, if you’re there, pick up the phone.” I waited some more. Nothing.

  Ron laid on the brakes and then accelerated through a right turn onto Pearl Street. “C’mon! Ben! Daniel! If you’re there, pick it up!” No response. “There’s no answer,” I said. “Where the hell are you going?”

  “Johnson said he’d meet us at the ramp that comes out from under the federal building onto Michigan and lead us out to your place,” said Ron. He turned right onto Monroe and honked on it. We had to stop at the crosswalk while a half-dozen pedestrians meandered across the street from the Hall of Justice. When the last of the group was clear of the bumper, Ron stepped on it. One of the pedestrians flashed us the bird and yelled something obscene. “Johnson wanted to know if we’d called in a complaint about Chuck and Paulie loitering in front of your house.”

  “Wasn’t us,” I said. “Maybe Wendy called.”

  “Said it was a man and that the call came from a pay phone.”

  “Doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that Finney would do.”

  We rounded the corner onto Michigan Ave and found Johnson already waiting on the apron in his tan government sedan. He had one of those magnetic blue rollers on the roof, and red and blue lights flashed from the grill. He pulled out without waiting for us to slow down. The marshal led the way toward my place at speeds exceeding those available to mere mortals or any such lesser lights, especially civilians. A deputy doing radar duty in an unmarked county car on the Beltline Highway launched himself after us, and Ron and the marshal pulled over. After a brief conversation with the marshal, the deputy took the lead with lights and siren at full code.

  I dialed the hospital. “Can you tell me if Officer Milton is still a patient?”

  The hospital operator put me on hold. When she came back, she said that Officer Milton was in room four-fifteen. I asked her to connect me. A male voice answered. Moaning and mumbling, he said that he was Officer Milton. He wasn’t.

  “This is Mike Lyle,” I said. “How ya doing?”

  “Quite well, considering the accident.” I knew the voice. I’d listened to hours of it on surveillance recordings. “The doctor said that I’ll be here for another day or two.”

  “You don’t sound much like Paulie,” I said.

  “My face is bandaged.”

  “How were da ribs?”

  “Not as good as the borscht, Colonel,” he said, “and congratulations on your promotion.”

  “I’d like to know how you came by that information.”

  “I have found business makes for very much stranger bedfellows than politics. Please to stop by, won’t you?”

  “Kind of busy right now. How long you going to be in town?”

  He laughed. Then he hung up.

  “Who was that?” asked Ron.

  “Paulie’s alibi.”

  “Sounded like you knew him.”

  “You got that recorder on?”

  Ron checked the dash. “No,” he said. The van heeled into a hard right as we turned onto Cannonsburg Road.

  “Colonel Vo
lody Rosenko.”

  “The guy in the pictures Elizabeth dropped off?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “Need to know, pard—and now you need to know.”

  “Small world.”

  “He had a partner, Sasha Solutzkof—a guardian-angel type—people don’t see him until he’s the last thing they ever see.”

  “A couple of old Soviet hoods?”

  “Spatnez trained GRU types. When I first met them they were hot on the trail of a Society of Manufacturing Engineers trade show. They followed it through four states trying to get their hands on some computer-guided laser machine tools.”

  “How’d they do?”

  “They found a design engineer who had tax problems and paid him a quarter million for a retro-engineering prototype.”

  “Bet they got medals for that little coup.”

  “No. We slipped Solutzkof a Mickey Finn in his room service orange juice and put him on an airliner bound for Caracas. My partner and I carried him on board and told the stewardess he was so afraid of flying that he had to be medicated to make the flight. We covered him with a blanket but my partner took his trousers.”

  “Roger?”

  “He was only a lieutenant commander then.”

  “Boxers or briefs?”

  “Boxers—you know the European kind, no fly.”

  Ron laughed and said, “He flew to Venezuela in his no-fly shorts?”

  “Wore the blanket to the Soviet Embassy. We have pictures.”

  “But the machinery?”

  “Shipped to Toronto as farm equipment—except we substituted an old lawn tractor with a rod knock.”

  “What about Rosenko?”

  “Figured he needed to go to Toronto to pick up his tractor. We thought that was the end of it until the design engineer turned up with a bullet in his brain and a Mauser twenty-two lying on his chest. The bug sweepers found a shaped charge in the earpiece of the telephone on my desk. Turns out our boys hijacked trailerloads of cigarettes in Virginia and sold them in New York to get their money back. Guess they dropped off a resumé while they were in town.”

  “Why didn’t you roll them up when you had a chance?”

  “They hadn’t harmed anyone or destroyed any property to gain custody of the machinery. Since they’d come up short a quarter million in hard currency, the plan was to let nature take its course, Soviet style—tidier for us that way.”

  The trip to my house took twenty-six minutes. We found my yard awash in lights of red and blue. As we approached, an air ambulance pulled pitch off my lawn. A county patrol officer stopped us at the entrance to my drive, but the marshal flashed us in with his tin.

  A twelve-foot aluminum skiff drifted on the lake about twenty yards from the opposite shore. A police helicopter coursed over the cornfields and apple orchards that filled the bluff above the lake on the east side of the far strand. To the west and across the lake in the heavily wooded section, tracking dogs could be heard baying in the heavy cover.

  We could get only halfway down the drive, so we parked on the lawn. I looked for my son’s car—it was blessedly gone.

  As I walked toward the house, an officer clad in black and wearing a heavy ballistic vest approached me. He wore a gas mask in a pouch on his hip. At first glance he appeared to be in his late thirties, but his close-cut hair was speckled gray.

  “Are you the property owner?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Lieutenant Lear. I command the State Police Special Weapons and Tactical Unit. Did you dial nine-one-one and report that there were two men, in a row boat, exposing themselves to children?”

  “No, sir. I did not. Who got shot?”

  “A state trooper responded to the call I mentioned,” he said. “She walked out on the beach, called them in, and a white male suspect shot her.”

  “She gonna make it?”

  “Took one in the vest and one in the leg.”

  “Did she get any rounds off?”

  “She was pretty sure she hit the black male suspect who was rowing the boat.”

  “We’d like to have your permission to go in and look for the suspects. Are any members of your family in the house?”

  “No. I called my neighbor, and she told me that she had heard them leave.”

  “Are there any firearms in the house?”

  “Yes, locked in the gunsafe, downstairs in the den.”

  “You have any dogs in the house?”

  “A chocolate Lab,” I said, “but he’s a big goof.”

  “I’d want you to call him out when we get the doors open.”

  “I have to tell you,” I said, “things on the lake drift north and east. That skiff drifting out there had to have been abandoned on that side of the lake and probably several hundred yards west of where it is now.”

  “We’re looking over there, sir.”

  “The way the uniformed people are lolly-gagging around here, I’d say that you don’t really think there’s anyone in the house.”

  “I can’t guarantee you’ll be safe unless we clear the house.”

  “You may search only spaces large enough to conceal a human being. That includes closets, large cabinets, shower stalls, and the crawl spaces above the ceiling. Short of an exchange with the suspects, you may not expend any ordnance.”

  “I hear you, sir,” he said. He walked down to the house, detailed his crew, and I dug the door key out of my pocket. He finally gave me a nod, and I went to open the door.

  He moved to the side of the doorway, swung the door open, and left the screen door ajar. I stepped back and whistled for Rusty. The dog bounded out of the house with his Frisbee in his mouth and his tail on full rotor. I nodded to the officer and walked back to Ron’s van with Rusty close on my heels. I found Ron shooting the breeze with the marshal and calling him Harlan.

  “Think they’re in there?” asked Ron.

  “I think their rowboat is on the other side of the lake. On the other hand, I don’t want to wake up dead in the morning.” Rusty studied me with expectant eyes and started keening. I took the Frisbee out of his mouth and sent it sailing across the lawn. Rusty launched after it like a furry ground-to-air missile.

  “What do you think spooked them into a shooting match?” said Harlan.

  “Beats the shit out of me,” I said. “Paulie is psyched out on steroids and probably chock full of painkillers.”

  A breeze caught the Frisbee and it curled across the rear of a county patrol car, about eight feet off the ground. Rusty didn’t break stride. He leapt onto the rear deck lid of the cruiser and went airborne. His jaws snapped shut on the Frisbee as his body made a half turn in the air.

  A county patrol officer standing by the door of the car ducked and grabbed his hat as the dog passed over the back of the car. He said one word. “Jesus!”

  Rusty landed in stride and circled back toward me. His feet made an audible gallop on the ground. The county officer peeked up over the vehicle and looked hard at me. I waved and said, “Sorry!” Hoots, whistles, and applause erupted from the gathered crowd of policemen.

  Rusty dropped the Frisbee at my feet, backed up a half-dozen steps, and crouched. “Throw it again,” the officers called out, and I sailed the Frisbee.

  “Somebody called nine-one-one,” said Harlan. “Maybe somebody called them and told them about your visit to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

  “That sure as hell narrows the field,” I said.

  “It wasn’t a secret that you and your attorney were on your way to the federal building. Carter announced it in the coffee room when he told me to meet you at the door.”

  Rusty made another airborne capture, to the loud approval of the crowd. Ron pointed up toward my house. The SWAT team stood poised to make its entry, a file of black-clad men each with a weapon in his right hand and his left hand on the shoulder of the man in front of him. The patrol officers in the yard crouched around the corners of their vehicles.
Some drew their weapons. Others just rested a hand on their holsters. Rusty delivered the Frisbee, and I put it on top of the van. He lay down next to my feet, with about a foot of tongue lolling out.

  The crew was quick. I had a minute and thirty-five on my wristwatch when they began emerging from the house. The SWAT commander returned and said, “The house is clear. I guess your answering machine is the reason we got a couple of busy signals from your telephone.” He handed me a scrap of paper. It read, “Dad, we went to the show. It’s on you—Daniel.”

  He signaled his crew and they deployed to search the garage and the shed. We started toward the house, and he handed me a card, printed with the state seal and his name and telephone number. “If there’s a problem with your property, please call me first,” he said.

  “The shit’s hit the fan down at the city police department,” said Ron as we walked in the front door. Rusty brushed by us for a noisy stop at his water pail on the landing.

  “Doesn’t matter, it was their shit and their fan—not like I was one of their favorite people anyway,” I said and climbed the stairs up to the kitchen level. “Want some coffee?”

  “No,” said Ron, “I’m going out on the deck to watch the festivities.” Harlan went with him.

  I got out the drip coffeemaker. While I fired it up, a uniformed state police lieutenant knocked on the open front door. “Come on in,” I said and beckoned to him—Howard Dunsel, the man the Kentwood detectives had selected as the candidate to receive my next lunatic.

  “Howie,” I said, “your boys already had their way with this house. Knocking on that door is like calling a whore ‘ma’am.’”

  “I always call whores ‘ma’am,’” he said and passed through the door to trudge up the stairs. “That’s why I find it so easy to call you ‘sir.’”

  “I guess you know more whores than I do,” I said and resolved to give the Kentwood crew their wish at my first opportunity. “We’ll have some coffee here in a heartbeat,” I said and went to the cupboard to corral mugs with both hands.

  “Didn’t come here for coffee,” he said and took a mug. He pulled the glass pot out of the coffee maker and held the mug under the brewed brown stream.

  “Brighten up, you’ve always wanted to search my house.”