Peeper

by Loren D. Estleman

“He looks dead. You boys should eat when you drink. It ain’t healthy on an empty stomach.”

  Ralph made a sickly smile. “Well, good night, Mrs. Gelatto.”

  “Mr. Gelatto, he ate pickles. He said the dill absorbed all the intoxicants. The undertaker didn’t even have to embalm him.”

  “We’ll remember that. Good night, Mrs. Gelatto.”

  “He was a drinking man, but he was faithful.”

  “I’m sure he was. Good night.”

  “He didn’t have no choice. Who’d sleep with a man smells like the kosher plate?”

  “Ha-ha. Well, good night.”

  “Just be sure he don’t drive.”

  “We’ll call a cab.”

  “Better call a truck. Hee-hee.” She put away her glasses, mounted the landing, and let herself through a door down the hall.

  “Mrs. Gelatto,” Ralph told Carpenter. “She cleans two floors of the Penobscot Building nights.”

  “Think she suspects anything?”

  “She can’t see to the end of her mop.”

  “Okay, give me a hand. We’ve got to turn him to get him down the stairs.”

  “Can’t we just roll him down? I got a medical problem.”

  “Better a hernia than postmortem bruises.”

  Once again, Ralph wondered what Carpenter did for the bishop. He was beginning not to enjoy his company.

  The monsignor was getting stiff. Ralph put a headlock on him from behind—saying, “Excuse me, Father”—and, bearing most of the weight, backed down a step and then another while Carpenter held up the feet to keep from snagging the heels on what was left of the staircase runner. They stopped every few steps to rest. Ralph’s nose was in the monsignor’s collar most of the time, long enough for him to develop a lasting distaste for Old Spice.

  Coming off the second-floor landing, his foot slipped. He felt himself toppling, tried to slow the descent by hitting the wall, managed to squash himself between the wall and his burden, said, “Woof!” and let go his grip.

  “Catch him!” Carpenter barked. Ralph caught him.

  Executing a graceful pirouette, the monsignor tipped forward down the stairwell with Ralph embracing him from behind. Ralph landed on top and tobogganed down the steps and through the narrow linoleum foyer, coming to rest with a crash against the heavy steel fire door that led to the street.

  Carpenter joined them at the bottom. “Nice catch.”

  Ralph, sprawled atop the corpse, said, “I think I got a postmortem bruise.”

  Chapter 3

  The car parked in the loading zone in front of the adult bookstore was a midnight-blue Buick station wagon, full size. It looked black under the streetlight, and Ralph thought at first it was a hearse. He stood in the open doorway while Carpenter checked the street. Monsignor Breame lay on his face at Ralph’s feet with his suitcoat rucked up under his arms. Ralph thought of a National Geographic special he had seen once when Gilligan’s Island was preempted, about whales that beached themselves. He wondered with a grunt where he’d put his truss.

  “Clear.” Carpenter looked gaunter than ever and scarcely more alive than the monsignor under the forty-watt bulb in the foyer. “We’ll put him in the front seat on the passenger’s side.”

  “Why not in back?”

  “It’d look like I was carrying a corpse. Besides, I need to see out the back window.”

  Ralph thought it would be more fun to put him behind the wheel, but said nothing. The door on the passenger’s side was open. They cradle-carried him across the sidewalk—Ralph waddling now and sucking in his breath with each step—sat him on the seat, got his feet inside, and poked and shoved and pulled him by his lapels into an upright position facing the windshield. Carpenter adjusted the dead man’s clothing and buckled the shoulder harness, straining it to its limits.

  “Peaceful, ain’t he?” Ralph’s voice sounded a trifle high to his own ears.

  “Watch him while I go up and make sure we didn’t forget anything.”

  “Where in hell would he go? Sorry, Father.”

  “Just watch him.” Carpenter went inside.

  The street was chilly. Ralph closed the monsignor’s door and went around and climbed into the driver’s seat, drawing that door shut. After a minute he cranked down the window to let out the Old Spice. Just then a police officer came around the corner testing doorknobs.

  Ralph said shit and slid down in the seat. The officer came over and shone a flashlight in his face.

  “Something I can help you with, sir?”

  Ralph sat up. “No sir, Officer, sir. I’m just waiting for my friend. He forgot his coat. Sir.”

  The officer directed his flashlight past Ralph, who shifted his position to prevent the shaft from falling on the monsignor’s face. “Sir, is your other friend asleep or passed out?”

  “He’s hypoglycemic. I warned him not to have that second slice of lemon meringue.”

  “Looks like it was the whole pie.”

  The flashlight’s angle changed. Ralph leaned forward, then sat back when the officer moved it that way. The beam shifted forward again, then darted back. Ralph was caught leaning in the wrong direction while the light settled on the monsignor’s mauve profile. It rested there a long time.

  “Does your friend need medical help, sir? He doesn’t look so good.”

  “No sir, Officer, sir. A few hours’ sleep and he’ll be fine. That’s why we’re taking him home, my other friend and me. Sir.”

  “Sir, are you making fun of the way I talk?”

  “No, sir. I mean no.”

  The officer sucked a cheek. He was in his twenties, with a clean jaw and a sandy moustache and flat pale eyes under the squared visor of his cap.

  “Wake him up,” he said.

  “Oh, you don’t want me to do that.” He bit back another sir.

  “I said wake him up. If you can. Your friend looks dead to me.”

  “Dead?” Ralph arranged his face into a grin he knew was tortured. “Dead, that’s a ripe one. Ha-ha, dead.”

  “Let’s hear him laugh.”

  “He don’t have much of a sense of humor.”

  “Or any other kind.” The officer retreated a step and rested a hand on his revolver. “Get out of the car.”

  Ralph had a bad idea. What the hell, he thought.

  He slid an arm behind the monsignor’s back, saying, “Look alive, Johnny! How you feeling now?” He pushed the corpse’s top half toward the dash. It groaned.

  The officer relaxed. He took his hand off the gun.

  “Sorry, sir. We can’t be too careful in this neighborhood. It’s hip-deep in weirdos. No offense, sir.”

  “Yes sir. I mean no sir. I mean no.” Ralph had to grip the monsignor’s coat to keep his head off the dash. “I guess you can’t be too careful with all the weirdos in this neighborhood.”

  “That’s just the way we look at it. Listen, you better get your friend home as soon as your other friend shows. He doesn’t sound much better than he looks.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “It’s four-thirty ayem, you know.”

  “Thanks, Officer.”

  The officer continued down the block, rattling doorknobs as he went. Ralph let go of the monsignor and bit down on a fresh matchstick. Carpenter emerged from the building while he was spitting out the pieces.

  “Jesus, what took you so long? A cop was here.” Ralph got out of the car.

  “I saw. He smell anything?”

  “Naw, I handled him. I got to tell you, I ain’t spent this much time with the clergy since Sister Mary Immaculata.”

  “You were raised Catholic?”

  “My old man was a Baptist minister, you kidding? My wife tried converting me. It didn’t take.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Iowa or Idaho, or maybe it was Illinois. One of them I states.”

  “Divorced?”

  “Got to be, by now.”

  Carpenter climbed in behind the wheel. “I’ll take him from her
e.”

  “What you going to do with him?”

  “What do you care?”

  “Mister, I’ve known people twenty years I never kept this much company with at a stretch.”

  “Well, it’s over now.” He slammed the door.

  “Listen, I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

  Carpenter had started the engine. “What?”

  “I said I won’t say anything.”

  “Oh. Good.” He rolled up the window.

  Ralph stood on the sidewalk until the station wagon glided around the corner out of sight. He wondered if he should have waved; at Monsignor Breame, not at Carpenter.

  He had two hours before it was time to get ready for work, but he wasn’t sleepy enough to go back to bed. He shut himself in his tiny bathroom with the camera, took some developing solution out of the medicine cabinet, and turned off the electric bulb, opening the camera by feel. After twenty minutes he hung up the film to dry and let himself out of the bathroom. Two beers later he went back in, turned on the bulb, and examined the negatives against the light. Ralph thought the monsignor would have been pleased to learn how photogenic he was in death. Even the embroidery on the panties had come through. He took a minute to admire the shots of Mrs. Supervisor Powell and her Pakistani-American friend at the beginning of the roll, then consigned it to an aluminum mailer and hid the thimble-size container behind a broken section of the medicine cabinet that lifted out of the back. It was better than a safe because it didn’t call attention to itself. In the past, Ralph had concealed everything there from a complete run of phony Rolex watches to a bag of marijuana that had turned out to be Nabisco shredded wheat.

  Yawning now, he went back to bed feeling uncommonly well for 6:00 A.M. His hangover had lifted—even if he still couldn’t remember where he’d been the night before—he had two hundred and forty dollars in his pocket, and photographs of a dead Catholic priest in a prostitute’s bed. Things were looking up all around.

  He woke up when a big black fireman chopped down his bedroom door with an axe.

  “Where’s the fire?” inquired the black man.

  Ralph sat up and rumpled his hair. “Ain’t that my line?”

  “Wrong floor, Tyrell,” someone called from the hallway. “Some broad’s apartment upstairs.”

  “Sorry about the door.” Tyrell withdrew.

  Ralph said shit and looked for his hat.

  Chapter 4

  The arson investigator’s name was O’Leary.

  His suit was smoke-colored and he had runny eyes that he kept wiping with a sooty handkerchief that left smudges. He was nearly as big as the fireman who had awakened Ralph and a couple of years Ralph’s junior, with more smudges in his yellow hair and a big scorched-looking face with a small upturned nose that someone had tried to alter with a pair of pliers, leaving the end squinched and slightly twisted. He wrapped a smoky paw around Ralph’s hand in greeting and ushered him out of the charred hallway into an empty apartment two doors down from Lyla Dane’s. There he lit a cigarette and dropped the match at his feet. The carpet began to smolder.

  “Too much smoke out there.” He puffed up a great cloud.

  Ralph said, “Smells like a wienie roast.”

  “That’d be the tenant. Know her well, did you?”

  “To say hello to on the stairs. She going to make it?”

  “By now she’s on her way to the University of Michigan Burn Center in Ann Arbor, if she survived the trip to Detroit General. They do some nifty things there. What’s she do for a living?”

  “Hook. What happened, gas?”

  “Probably. She entertain any visitors recently?”

  “That’s how she paid for the gas.”

  “Get a good look at any of them?”

  “You don’t look at johns if you can help it. One of them could be the mayor.”

  “Ever hear any loud arguments from her apartment?”

  “There any other kind?” Ralph groped his pockets for a matchstick, then decided against it, given the company. “You saying the fire wasn’t an accident?”

  O’Leary wiped his eyes. “Just routine. You’re not much help, Mr. Poteet.”

  “You should be asking Vinnie this stuff. He’s the landlord.”

  “I tried. He wasn’t any more help than you. What do you do?”

  “Private dick.”

  “Really? With an agency, or are you a loner like Sam Spade?” He tapped some live ash onto the carpet. There was a little flame burning there now.

  “Fuck Sam Spade. I work for Lovechild Confidential Inquiries on Michigan. I got to be there in a half hour.” He had spent the past ninety minutes in the hallway with the other residents, watching the firefighters put out the blaze and the ambulance crew carry a blanket-wrapped Lyla Dane downstairs. Vinnie had found her crumpled at the base of the wall opposite her apartment door, where the blast had hurled her when she’d come home. Ralph had slept right through the explosion and the sirens afterward. “Listen, if some cookie is running around blowing up people in this building, I got a right to know it.”

  “We’ve got no reason to think anything of the kind. Fire resulting in casualty is our beat, that’s all. Does this Dane woman smoke?”

  “She does now.”

  O’Leary wiped his eyes, dropped the cigarette butt on top of its ashes, and put away his notebook. “Okay, I guess that’s it. You got a number where you can be reached during the day?”

  Ralph sorted through the cards in his grubby wallet and gave him one engraved on rose-colored stock with a flower in one corner. The arson investigator raised his eyebrows. “A dame runs the joint,” Ralph said.

  “Thanks for answering my questions, Mr. Poteet.” O’Leary opened the door for him.

  Ralph left after stamping out the fire in the carpet.

  Vinnie was standing at the end of the hall by the stairs. With his hands in the pockets of his fuzzy robe and the light gleaming on his bald head he looked like Henry in the comic strips, except he had a mouth.

  Boy, had he.

  “What was you moving downstairs this morning, a load of bowling balls?” he asked.

  Ralph had been expecting the question. “I tripped. You ought to replace that runner. It’s been there since FDR.”

  “You ain’t bruised. Something must of broke your fall.”

  “My hat. I got to go to work, Vinnie.”

  “I didn’t tell the cop about you being in Lyla’s apartment this morning.”

  “Why not? I got no secrets from cops.” A truck shuddered by on the street outside. Ralph jumped. He’d thought it was thunder.

  “Where’s the camera?”

  He made an embarrassed expression. “Damnedest thing. It was in my car—”

  “Hell of a mess.” Vinnie was looking at the damaged hallway. “My insurance won’t cover it. I been meaning to kick it up, but the premiums are killing me now. The adult trade’s gone to shit. You seen the stuff them video stores carry? I can’t compete. There should be a law. Any kid can walk right in and rent a movie I couldn’t show my wife.”

  “You married a stag queen, Vinnie. The first time you saw her she was under three guys and a husky.”

  “It was a malamute. That stuff’s strictly PG next to them new videos. The business has gone to shit, all right. I guess peepholing’s up.”

  Here it comes, Ralph thought.

  “Yes, that was some noise you made this morning, you and your skinny friend,” the landlord continued. His voice was low. “I thought it was them neighborhood vigilantes come back with an army tank. I got a good view of the foyer through my transom. Well, it was as big as a army tank, and there you was sitting on top of it. I hope I never get that fat.”

  “Spit it out, Vinnie.”

  “I ain’t stupid. I guess I can put together a snooper and a camera and a whore and a dead guy on the stairs. I guess the cops could too. They tie it in with that big bang down the hall, there’s trouble coming.”

  “The guy said it was a gas
leak.”

  “That’s how it could stay. If you follow me.”

  “Vinnie, I was lost when you started.”

  “You got till tonight to find your way back. That’s about as long as I can expect the cops to buy that I forgot all about this morning. Half your action, that’s all I want. What’s half? You know where to find me when you make up your mind. Hell, I’m always here.”

  “I’m late for work, Vinnie.”

  He stepped out of the way. “I don’t guess that matters if they throw you in the can.”

  On his way downstairs, Ralph stopped at his apartment, took the roll of film out of its hiding place behind the medicine cabinet, and dropped it into his pocket. He didn’t trust Vinnie and his passkey.

  The car he drove to work was a brand-new red Riviera convertible with white upholstery and a white top. It belonged to a lawyer friend who had asked Ralph to sell it for him while he was serving two years in Jackson for suborning to commit perjury, only Ralph hadn’t gotten around to it yet. The morning was overcast and the wide streets had that granite look they took on just before a rain. As he navigated his way around the abandoned cars and construction barricades, he thought about the explosion in Lyla Dane’s apartment. The building had had gas leaks before, but he kept coming back to Carpenter and how he had refused to explain what he did for Bishop Steelcase, and that last trip upstairs without Ralph. Coincidence, that’s the dick’s best friend, old Gus Lovechild had said once. When your client’s husband and his secretary check into the same motel ten minutes apart, that bonus is as good as in your pocket. Except for that time with Judge Morganthaler and a file clerk from the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, that is; which had been a coincidence. It had taken six months and a thousand dollars in an envelope addressed to a state police commander to get back Gus’s investigator’s license. But the rule was sound.

  Still chewing over it, Ralph parked in a handicapped zone near the building on Michigan Avenue and spent a moment looking through the printed placards he kept in the glove compartment before selecting one that read VISITING PRIEST, which he thought appropriate. He clipped it to the sun visor so it could be read through the windshield and went inside.

  The gilt lettering on the glass doors to the floor where he worked read LOVECHILD CONFIDENTIAL INQUIRIES. Beyond them the reception room was painted in rose and lavender on alternating walls with Lautrec prints hung on them in glass frames. The marble coffee table by the chairs and sofa supported current issues of Vogue, GQ, and Architectural Digest, and hidden stereo speakers piped Bach and Mozart into the room. It was impressive, but Ralph missed the old mustard-colored office with EAGLE EYE DETECTIVE AGENCY flaking off the window and geriatric copies of National Geographic, the African issues, on the yellow library table. Behind the kidney-shaped desk sat a receptionist with hair like a cloud of platinum powder and daggerlike nails painted fiery red.