MOTOR CITY BLUE

by Loren D. Estleman

  His partner had retreated to her original position near the door. Inflation wasn’t as steady as the revolver she was holding. Her dark Jewish eyes glistened, but not with tears.

  “You’ve asked a lot of questions,” she said sharply. “Let’s see if you’re as good at answering them. Who are you?”

  I told her. She seemed satisfied. A man doesn’t lie when death is staring him in the face.

  “Never heard of you. I should have, a clever detective like you. How’d you figure out Story was murdered?”

  I said, “First you call me clever and then you insult my intelligence. There was a little matter of a fractured skull and a shop turned inside-out that was shipshape when I visited him yesterday morning. And three matches.”

  “Three matches? What are you talking about?”

  I sat up on the end of the bed. The revolver jerked. I spread my hands in a gesture of peace, then began counting on my fingers. A silly thing, but it got her used to me moving. “One to sterilize the needle. Another to melt the sugar so the stuff would mix with it and be ready to shoot up. That’s all anyone ever needs. There were three burned-out matches in the bathroom. Story didn’t smoke; there weren’t any butts or ashtrays in the joint. The explanation was that he’d just finished fixing himself when you interrupted him, and after Ed split open his head, probably with one of the joy-toys he had on display, and helped you get him into the toilet, you used a third match to melt a fresh supply. You wouldn’t have bothered with heating up the needle, so there wasn’t a fourth. You knew how to operate a syringe, and even if you didn’t, Ed had been around the dope-rock scene long enough to show you, just as he showed you how to prepare the overdose. I didn’t know that when I figured it out, but it fits. Most of it clicked home tonight when I saw another girl with a syringe.”

  “Maybe Ed killed him.” She smirked. Her face wasn’t made for smirking.

  “Maybe, but I doubt it. He’s not the type to commit that kind of cold, deliberate murder. Just holding that gun is giving him the screaming willies. In any case you’d be an accomplice, which in the eyes of the law is supposed to amount to the same thing.”

  “Only you and I know it doesn’t,” she said, still smirking. “But very good. You’re a regular Lord Peter Wimsey.”

  “It works one time out of six.”

  “I think you’re underestimating yourself. I’ll bet you can even tell us what happened to Kramer after he left here, and how you ended up working with him.”

  “I’m not working with him.”

  “Prove it.”

  “It’s difficult to strike up a working relationship with someone who refuses to climb out of the porcelain tray he’s lying on in a refrigerated room. I’ve never had the patience for it.”

  “You talk funny, Mr. Private Investigator. Maybe I ought to have Ed do to your head with that gun what he did to Story’s with one of his dirty souvenirs.”

  “I was trying not to offend your finishing school sensibilities. Kramer’s dead.”

  She stiffened. I bored in.

  “Croaked,” I said. “Iced. Offed. Stiffed. Slabbed. Gone west. Knocked down. Blown away. Or, if you’re poetically minded, had done what was done when ’twas best ’twere done quickly. In other words, murdered.”

  “Shut up! Who did it? You?”

  I shook my head. “I had my chance near Hue. That was a little number of the Darlings’. They swatted him down night before last. He turned up the next morning in the parking lot at City Airport.”

  “Now I know you’re lying!” Triumph glittered in her eye. “I haven’t missed a paper or a radio broadcast since he went out to track down the film and didn’t come back. Nothing’s been said about any bodies turning up at City.”

  “Get it through your head, doll. He was a government agent. As far as the media’s concerned, they don’t die until the Feds say they stopped breathing. He was found jammed into the trunk of a stolen Chevy with a hole in his head and the thing that had made the hole buried in the back seat. It was a bullet from a forty-four magnum. That’s Hubert’s. Jerry’s would be the thirty-eight used to kill Shanks. Not that Kramer would have come back in any case. He was selling you out, doll, and to the highest bidder. They don’t come any higher than Uncle Sam.”

  “That means what?”

  “I’m guessing again.” I was keeping her occupied. The padded table with the videotape and movie cameras on it was just within my reach, a hundred miles away as long as she was watching me and not engrossed with what I was saying. Rinker I wasn’t too worried about. The Luger’s safety lever had gotten flicked down while he was wresting it out of my hand and he hadn’t adjusted it. It wouldn’t fire if he hit it with a hammer. “You were pushing too hard. Kramer was an opportunist–if he weren’t he would never have snitched his way into the command of our outfit in Vietnam–but he wasn’t aggressive. He would have been content to use the film to tap the Darlings and split. But you wanted revenge. You wanted to smoke them out and do to them what they did to your boyfriend. Kramer was the one who had approached them first, so he became the intermediary, which means exactly what it says. He was in the middle. Probably he was already thinking of cutting himself loose when the film came up missing. But he was afraid of you, doll. A guy like him would be. So he made a halfhearted search, and when it didn’t look as if it would turn up the first time around he made an appointment to meet another agent and spill what he knew in return for protection. Frankly, doll, I’d have suspected you for his killing if I hadn’t seen Jerry and Hubert pluck him off a public street in broad daylight.”

  “You seem to have all the answers.” Her voice was taut, and her face wasn’t pretty anymore. It had the scraped-bone look I’d blamed earlier on the harsh light of the headlamps shining through the window.

  “I should,” I said. “I’ve had plenty of time to think it out. Mostly on the wrong end of people’s guns.”

  “Maybe you know where the film is, too. You must, or you wouldn’t know what’s on it. Maybe you’ve got it.”

  Her knuckles were white from gripping the .22 hard enough to crack it. I watched her hands and her eyes and tried not to look at the table to my left. Then I shook my head.

  “No deal,” I said. “What if I had it and I told you where it was? Killing gets easier each time you do it. You were planning on clearing out or you wouldn’t have come back to pick up the trailer, which is your only means of support. Now I’m your last chance for revenge–assuming I have what you’re after–and you’d have nothing to lose by offing me. I’d just be punching my own ticket.”

  I spread my hands on the last sentence for emphasis. That put my left within a couple of feet of the table.

  “You left out one thing, Mr. Private Investigator.” She raised the gun a fraction of an inch in both hands so that it was pointing at my collarbone. “I’d about given up on finding the film when you showed up. What you just said hasn’t raised my hopes. I’ll kill you even if you don’t tell me. For Freeman, a good man. The best man this rotten town will ever see.” Her voice broke on the last part. She bent her thumb over the hammer and drew it back to ease the trigger pull.

  A high, thin keening noise that none of us had paid any attention to grew louder suddenly as it turned into the trailer court, where it was joined by a lower, gulping wail. It started to wind down somewhere near the manager’s office, then whipped up again and grew deafening on the main stem approaching Anthony Wayne Drive. Marla swung her gaze toward the window in the door. That was enough. I didn’t bother to see what Ed was doing. I reached out with my left hand and propelled the pedestal table directly at her. It was heavier than anticipated. Instead of taking flight it merely tipped over, pitching the heavy equipment toward the floor at Marla’s feet. The cameras struck with an ear-splitting crash. She fired, but the shock had thrown off her aim and I was already up and charging her in a crouch. The bullet pierced the louvered window behind me at the same time as I hit her low and locked my arms around her knees in a footbal
l tackle. She grunted and slammed against the door and the gun sprang from her hands and thudded to the carpet six feet away. She lost her balance and fell sprawling with my arms still hugging her legs.

  Something swished past my left ear as we were struggling and I caught a glimpse of Ed Rinker standing over me holding the Luger like a club. He couldn’t figure out why it didn’t shoot when he pulled the trigger. While he was still off balance from the violence of the miss I let go of Marla and brought the four stiffened fingers of my right hand up in an uppercut that caught below the arch of his ribcage. He wheezed and released the pistol and pitched forward onto his pimply face.

  Outside, the scout cars–there were two or a dozen–were howling to a stop, their throbbing lights bathing the windows in blue and red and blue again. Their radios were a deafening jumble of voices half-human and half-electronic. Doors slammed, sounding like strings of firecrackers going off in uneven order.

  Marla was on her hands and knees scrambling for the revolver where it had come to rest near the base of the opposite wall. Her wavy black hair was in her eyes and she was hissing constantly now, like a sidewinder coming out of its hole. Then she had the gun and was rolling over onto her elbow to fire at me and I scooped the Luger up from the floor and thumbed off the safety catch and shot her. I had a flash of her with her eyes and mouth wide open, and then the door bumped against my leg and I couldn’t see her for a room full of shouting men in dark brown uniforms with guns.

  26

  I’D ASKED FOR JOHN Alderdyce, so of course they sent a plainclothesman with the lyrical name of Christoforo, a blocky Puerto Rican with shining black hair in which you could see the marks of the comb, delicate features, and soft, almost feminine black eyes. His jacket was a size too small around the shoulders, so that the gun he wore beneath his left arm stood out like a Swede on Twelfth Street–excuse me, Rosa Parks Boulevard. He succeeded the herd of tall, good-looking fellows in charcoal-brown uniforms and flat-brimmed hats of the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department and the ambulance that had taken away Ed Rinker and his wife, Shirley, a.k.a. Martha Burns, a.k.a. Marla Bernstein, of whom Rinker was the more injured, that chop to the solar plexus having nearly killed him. Marla had a nine-millimeter hole through her right shoulder, which would probably cost her some of the use of that arm but not her life. Christoforo was a detective with the sheriff’s department. The night captain at metro had kicked my report of the trailer court killing over to his bureau because it was in the county’s jurisdiction.

  It turned out the cops had been on their way to the manager’s office when the old lady who lived across the main drive waved them down and told them something funny was going on in Number Six. She thought she’d seen someone through the window holding a gun. Which meant she’d come snooping, bless her nosy old heart.

  I told Christoforo what I’d told the uniforms after they’d frisked me and read me my Miranda, and then he was gone, to be replaced by other detectives, this time from town, who didn’t give a damn about the manager’s murder but wanted the dope, excuse the expression, on the Story knockdown. Alderdyce wasn’t with them either. I told that one a couple of times before they were satisfied for now, and then one of them handed me my hat and I was escorted out to an unmarked unit and shoved, not impolitely, into the back seat and taken to headquarters. A uniformed city officer drove my Cutlass. Alderdyce was waiting for me in his office when we got in. Proust was there too, and two others. Colonel Vespers and General Spain.

  John was leaning on the edge of his desk, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup and looking about as disheveled as I’d seen him, meaning no necktie. He acted disgruntled and sleepy. The Inspector, in rumpled suit and overcoat and ubiquitous fedora, was standing red-faced off to one side. Army Intelligence was well represented sartorially, as trim, youthful Vespers and severe Spain sat side by side in folding chairs near the desk, their tailored suits looking fresh and white shirts crisply laundered and starched. They looked as if they’d come here straight from a night’s rest and a shower. Vespers’ expression was annoyed, Spain’s that of a man with an ulcer acting up, which for him was normal. The electric clock on the one wall that wasn’t made of yellow pebbled glass said it was ten to seven. It would be getting light soon.

  “We got a copy of Christoforo’s report from County,” said Alderdyce after my uniformed escort had left, closing the door behind them. He was talking to the opposite wall. “That kind of cooperation we don’t usually get unless the case is so screwed up one department can’t handle it. It’s still muck. How about letting us in on a day and a half in the life of a modern P.I.? Starting with five-thirty P.M. the day before yesterday.”

  So I told it again. Everything. Beginning with a cigarette I never got lit on Woodward, through a telephone call during The Barefoot Contessa, Ben Morningstar, Barry Stackpole, Beryl Garnet, Vespers and Spain, Barney Zacharias, three visits to Story’s After Midnight, a private screening of a film of an execution that had itself led to three more murders, and finishing with the Vistaview Mobile Home Park and what had happened there. I left out one thing, a girl named Iris. She was none of their business. When I had finished, the clock on the wall read five after seven. Life always takes longer to live than talk about. The silence that came in on the heels of the last dotted i was loud and long, but Alderdyce put a stop to that.

  “Why didn’t the Darlings recognize Marla when they saw the picture?”

  “It wasn’t that great a likeness,” I said. “Morningstar and his nameless associate recognized it because they knew her better than most. Just about everyone else had to be prompted, or had her on the brain enough that it clicked. And the graduation shot was retouched almost beyond recognition. The Darlings didn’t even know she was the one behind the blackmail scheme. As far as they were concerned she was a dead issue.”

  “Damn it, Walker, you said you were working on another case entirely.” He didn’t yell. He was too tired for that. For some reason I found myself wishing he had.

  “I was at the time. Or at least I thought I was, which amounts to the same thing. Am I under arrest or what? Because if I am, I want a lawyer.”

  “Are you wearing handcuffs? We cuff prisoners. Witnesses come in of their own free will. See how neat that works? So you don’t get to have your lawyer present.”

  “I don’t see why he ain’t in cuffs,” snarled Proust. He was looking at me but talking to the lieutenant. “I can count five criminal offenses he’s committed just in the last twenty-four hours. Withholding evidence. Failure to report a felony. Breaking and entering. Assault and battery. I bet he don’t have a license for that kraut gun he shot the girl with, so let’s add possession of an unregistered firearm. Reckless driving, which makes six. That’s just for openers. I bet once the D.A. sits down and figures it out–”

  “We’d be cutting our own throats, Inspector,” Alderdyce broke in wearily. He sounded like a record winding down, and he’d had a few hours’ sleep. I wondered what I sounded like. “We can tie the girl to the trailer court slaying through the gun, but we’ll never build a case on the rest without Walker’s help. There was no hard evidence at Story’s to suggest anything other than accidental OD. We’ve got an APB out on the Darlings, but without the film–!” He turned to me. “Where is it, by the way?”

  I was lighting a cigarette. I spoke between puffs. “In my mailbox, across the road from the house.”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Proust.

  Alderdyce looked dismayed. He pushed himself away from the desk, tore open the door, and relayed the information to the squad room. There was a general scraping of chairs and hasty shuffling of leather soles on linoleum, on which he closed the door and treated me to Withering Gaze Number Nine.

  “Couldn’t you think of anywhere else?”

  “Where would you suggest?” I blew smoke and used my hand to fan it away. “My place was tossed once today already. It’ll be safe in the box until the mailman comes. The neighborhood thieves must know by now I get only junk
mail.”

  “Don’t be smug. If you’d come to me earlier, that trailer court manager might still be breathing. Don’t think just because of what I said I won’t throw you to the wolves. I’m considering it.”

  “Who’s being smug? I’ve been beaten and pistol-whipped. I’ve been shot at and threatened. I’ve been frisked and kidnapped and tailed and arrested and questioned, and in all that time I’ve had exactly two hours’ sleep. Smug? Who’s got time for smug? My jaw aches just thinking about it.”

  “Did you expect any better?”

  “No, and I’m not complaining. Just tired. Tired as hell.”

  “All the same, the lieutenant’s right.”

  I shifted my attention to the folding chairs, where Colonel Vespers sat with his legs crossed staring at the floor. General Spain was seated next to him in his customary stony silence. I’d forgotten they were there until the younger man spoke. That was undoubtedly one of the requirements of the job, a talent for being overlooked.

  Vespers looked up at me. He had the most ordinary-looking face I’d ever seen on any man. There wasn’t a single feature worth mentioning. “Your silence, Walker, has cost us all unnecessary time and effort, to say nothing of taxpayers’ money. We had Jerry and Hubert Darling under surveillance until the afternoon rush hour, when they slipped us. If the film had been in our custody at that time we could have made a pinch and they’d be behind bars right now. You could have broken up the Legion and saved yourself a beating in the bargain.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  Proust glared at me as if I’d just spat on the flag. Alderdyce said, “Careful, Walker.”

  I ignored both of them. I was facing Vespers. “Don’t talk to me about silence. There was too much before I came in or these last thirty-six hours would never have happened. You told me Intelligence was working to break up the Black Legion. I know better. I found out this morning. You never gave a damn about the Darlings or the Klan or who they killed or didn’t. You said you were interested because they’d infiltrated the army, but if that’s true the outfit is a hell of a lot bigger than I picture it. You weren’t even watching Jerry and Hubert until they blundered into your sights. I doubt if you even knew they existed. You were watching Freeman Shanks.”