“Your grandson.”
“My grandson. I haven’t many years left, but I mean to make my stamp on the boy, as I never could with his father. As I said, I’ve always found time for business. It’s taken me this long, and the tragedy of my son, to realize that in this case family is business. His mother won’t have him. Not while there is blood in these veins.”
“Even if it means framing her for murder?”
His chin came up another centimeter. “Where is the frame? She admits she killed him.”
“She confessed to it,” I said. “Whether or not it was murder is why the case is going to court.”
“Michigan law is clear on just what constitutes self-defense.”
“I’m glad it is for you, Mr. Thayer. It never has been for me or the local legal community, on anything. That’s why the shelves in this room would be groaning with law books, if Deputy Chief Proust read books.”
“Be that as it may. Please understand that vengeance is not my motive; Doyle was dead to me a long time before he stopped breathing. I simply do not wish to see my legacy squandered on strangers. I want custody of my grandson.”
“That’s not up to me.”
“It is if you succeed in having her acquitted. That’s why you’re working for Reliance.”
“I’m not working for Reliance.”
For the first time he faltered. “My information—”
“Is correct up to last night,” I finished. “Mrs. Thayer’s attorney fired me. I got the official notice from Ernest Krell today.”
“Are you saying this meeting is a waste of time?”
“In my business, no experience is wasted unless you wake up with a bump on your head, or don’t wake up at all. I can’t speak for your business.”
“Why didn’t Proust say something?” His head began to shake again.
“I gave up trying to think like people like Proust a long time ago.”
“He’s begun to take my support for granted.” He folded his hands behind his back, filing Proust in a new drawer. “I’m very sorry to have taken up so much of your day. You’re free to go, of course. Not that you ever weren’t.”
I stayed put. “As long as we’re both here, I wonder if you might help me clear up a couple of things I’m curious about.”
“I?”
“A woman named Chaney told me you’d stopped payment on a check your son gave her for ten thousand dollars. It had to do with the purchase of a Polaris missile, although it went down on the books as a flatbed truck. I can guess why you stopped payment, but I’d like to know how he came to draw a check on your account.”
“Why would you want to know that now?”
“You like to watch the numbers going up on the big board; I imagine it has something to do with your success. I like answers. When a question goes unanswered my brain goes to bed hungry. I’m pretty good at what I do myself and I guess that’s the reason, or one of them.”
“Perhaps you’ve earned it,” he said. “In any case, there is no harm in telling you now. Doyle Junior was forging checks in my name. The allowance I gave him wasn’t enough, it seems, to feed his ridiculous hobby. As long as he didn’t involve me or the business, I didn’t care what he spent it on, but I won’t have my own son playing me for a fool. A bank employee became suspicious and called to ask if I’d authorized the check. I stopped payment immediately, as I would have with the others had I known about them.”
“Others?”
“There were four in all, made out to cash. The first three weren’t questioned and showed up on my monthly statement. They were for considerably less than ten thousand. The statement arrived about the time I learned of the last check. My son was killed before I could confront him.”
“There was no mention of it in the press.”
“Certainly not. I just said I won’t be made the public fool. Anyway, it had nothing to do with what happened.” He had a sudden inspiration. “Unless you’re accusing me of conspiring to murder my own issue over money.”
I shrugged, not as well as Lieutenant Romero did. “You paid the bank employee to keep his mouth shut?”
“He is now assistant comptroller in my Iroquois Heights plant.”
“Nice.” I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers. Well, it had to be asked. “Was there a job for me if I quit the Thayer case?”
“Head of plant security. But only if I approved of what I saw during this meeting. My new assistant comptroller proved his worth by spotting the forgery. If I were to start offering employment to everyone who did me a favor, I’d be in receivership by Christmas. You’d have earned your salary, I promise you.”
“I figured you’d be the carrot. I already got the stick from Proust.”
“You said you were curious about a couple of things,” he said. “What’s the other?”
“Just a wild shot. Have you ever heard of a local character who calls himself the Colonel?”
“I know several colonels. Thayer Industries provides fuel solenoids for the army. You’ll have to be more specific.”
“This one deals in arms. I doubt he’s connected with the military, but you never know. I thought maybe your son might have mentioned him.”
“We never discussed his hobby except that one time. A good deal of bile came up during that conversation, but no colonels.”
“Thanks for your help, Mr. Thayer.”
“You mean, for satisfying your idle curiosity.” The dark eyes glittered.
I paused. I’d made a mistake others probably had, to their regret: seen a sick old man where Doyle Thayer was standing.
“Yeah,” I said.
After a long time he shook my hand. The palsy was under control now. Maybe it had been an act from the beginning. “Please ask Mr. Proust to come back in.”
I did that and left the house before the two could compare notes.
Lieutenant Romero was leaning back against the Pontiac, smoking a long slim cigar in the shade of a big maple. Pollard sat behind the wheel. It was hot even there, but the Cuban hadn’t sweated a drop. I asked him for a match. He tossed me a gunmetal lighter.
I used it and tossed it back. “What’s a guy like you doing working for someone like Proust?”
“You don’t know what kind of a guy I am.”
“Call it a hunch.”
“I was a policeman in Havana, before I got into trouble with the government. It’s work I know. You don’t step off the boat and join the New York Police Department, or even the one in Miami. Nor Detroit. But I like the weather here, I mean in the winter. Where I come from it’s always like this.”
“How do you stay straight?”
“By being a very good policeman. And by knowing when to look out the window.”
“How do you stand it?”
“I think about my wife and daughters in Cuba.”
“I see.”
“Do you have children?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t see.”
I finished the cigarette in silence and snapped away the butt. “Thanks for the light.”
“De nada,” he said. “That means—”
“I know what it means.”
He shrugged.
13
I DIDN’T GO BACK to the office or call my answering service. I knew there would be a message from Proust or Thayer. I bought a fresh copy of the News and pulled it apart over coffee and a sandwich at a counter, but there was nothing new on the home invasions and no mention of Sturdy Stoudenmire, or of any stray corpses that might have been his. I left the paper there and went home, where I unplugged the telephone. It looked like it had been ringing.
My appointment with Shooter was for eleven. I undressed, set the alarm for nine-thirty, and stretched out on top of the sheets, but I didn’t sleep for a while. It was a humid evening and the fan was just pushing the same sweaty air around, but that wasn’t why.
Lying to an old man who had just lost his son wasn’t restful. Letting him think what you wanted him to
think in order to get information without even bothering to lie wasn’t any better. Even when it was an old man whose son and now whose grandson represented nothing more to him than the survival of the family trade. Sometimes in the work you took shortcuts, then spent the time you saved wondering if you shouldn’t have gone the long way to begin with. Then wondering about it you went to sleep and dreamed you had, and everything was fine and everyone was happy until you woke up. When you woke up that way enough times you found yourself old and alone and asking yourself why you bothered to wake up at all. Or maybe you didn’t feel any different from all the other times; and that was worse, because as far as anything that counted was concerned, you were dead.
Fortunately, I woke up feeling rotten.
The temperature had gone down with the sun. A light ground fog rolled along the shiny pavement and lay in pools in the hollows. The Chevy dipped into them between hills, where moisture condensed on the windows and my own headlamps shone back at me, showing a tired jaundiced face in the windshield. The jaundice was from the yellow in the lamps.
I reached the warehouse district early as planned. I cut the lights and engine, coasted to a stop, and sat listening to the engine crackling as it cooled and the river slapping against the seawall on the other side of the railroad tracks. Then I reached up and loosened the bulb in the domelight so it wouldn’t go on when I opened the door.
Outside the car, the night air touched the back of my neck like a scythe. The sky was still overcast, blocking out the moon and stars, but the river had a phosphorescence all its own, made of reflected electric light and luminous microscopic organisms and chemical pollutants, casting a blue-green glow over the squat ugly buildings and heaped rubble. Every few seconds a car would pass along Jefferson Avenue with a swish and a click. It was Friday night, and except for this one little dead spot the city writhed.
Using a stack of old pallets for a staircase, I climbed onto a worm-eaten dock and retreated into the shadows until my back touched clammy brick. From there I had a clear view of my car, or at least of those parts that shone in the phantom glow from the river. The butt of the Smith & Wesson .38, the one registered gun in my two-piece arsenal, made a solid knot against my right kidney; if there was one thing you learned in the work, it was to deck yourself in iron whenever they told you to come in unarmed. There, untouched by the lamps of the cars passing a block away, their beams smoky in the fog, I waited. The air lay like metal against my skin.
Somewhere on the Canadian side of the river, a tower clock struck eleven, the gongs carrying in the damp air with a resigned loneliness, like a single plane hanging in an empty sky. The last stroke had trailed off when Shooter’s rattletrap pickup rolled with its lights off between two warehouses at a blind angle to where my car was parked and stopped with a creak of brakes. I stayed where I was. I was close enough to smell the heated metal of his radiator.
When after two minutes nothing happened, I started to come out of the shadows. Then I stopped. Behind the pickup, also with its lights off, a late-model sedan coasted between the warehouses and crunched to a halt with its front bumper almost touching the vehicle ahead. All its doors opened—no domelight came on—and four men came out in dark clothes with knitted watchcaps on their heads, cradling something in their arms. Their faces reflected no light and when they passed me, twenty feet away and four feet down, I saw that their faces were artificially blackened. I also caught a sharp whiff of gun oil.
Sprinting silently on rubber soles, they fanned out, two on each side of the Chevy, stopped, raised their weapons, paused, and began firing all at once. The guns rattled, spouting smoke and fire and brass cartridges that twinkled as they arced and fell, while bullets raked the car from one end to the other and back again, but concentrating on the front seat. Glass burst, metal clanged, a tire blew with a report louder than the weapons and the car sagged toward one corner. Steam whooshed out of the radiator and drifted in a great cloud toward Jefferson.
Then, as suddenly as it began, the firing stopped. A piece of glass fell with a tiny clank. By then the four were running back toward the sedan. Most of the doors were still open when the lights and engine came on with a roar and the car swung backward in a tight half-circle and then took off the way it had come, its tires spraying gravel.
I was moving too. I had drawn the Smith & Wesson without realizing it, and now I leaped from the loading dock onto a pile of discarded rails, caught my balance, clambered over it, and stepped onto another platform, this one made of crumbling concrete. Now I was directly over Shooter’s pickup. As it started forward I lowered myself into the bed of the truck.
If Shooter felt the extra weight on the springs, he didn’t show it. He turned on the headlamps, aimed the hood into the path where the rails had been pulled up, and accelerated with a lurch that almost took me off my feet, toward one of the side streets that led to Jefferson. Sirens hiccoughed in the distance.
The pickup’s engine was as much of a surprise as its sound system. We must have been doing eighty when he hit the avenue and turned east, knocking a piece off the curb and throwing me into a sitting position, this time with my back against the tailgate. I held on to the gun and crawled forward along the bed, where he couldn’t see me in the rearview mirror. The truck peeled rubber and swayed on its springs on the curves, but the tires never left the road. It was a bucket of rust on a brand-new frame with a mill that was built in heaven, or Indianapolis at the very least.
He didn’t slow down until we had left the river far behind and were in the neighborhoods, the sirens falling off behind us. Then we glided down into a legal speed and observed stop signs and lights. I waited until we stopped at one, then threw a leg over the side of the box and reached down and grasped the handle on the passenger’s door. It was unlocked.
14
“HELLO, SHOOTER.”
His reaction when I tore open the door and swung into the seat beside him holding the revolver was classic. He looked at me, his eyes and mouth fell open, and he tried to do a number of things: claw for the Beretta on the dashboard, punch the accelerator, bail out through the door on his side. I swept the Smith & Wesson’s barrel against his forehead, twisted the pistol out of his grip—its weight said he’d loaded it this time—hurled it over my shoulder through the open door, and grabbed the wheel. We were rocketing across a quiet intersection toward a light-pole on the corner. I threw us into a sliding stop and hit him again. He groaned and sagged against me. I pushed him back and held him.
“I’d give you another lick, but I don’t want to bend the barrel, and I need you awake,” I said, panting a little. “Can you drive?”
“Man, I can’t even see.”
“If you can talk you can drive. You’re going to do both.”
“What about my gun?”
“It landed in a ditch with all the other hot iron in town. Turn the key.” The engine had stalled.
“Where we going?”
“We’re paying a visit to the Colonel.”
He gave me a sideways look. His right eye had swollen almost shut. “Colonel who?”
“My line. That was who you were going to introduce me to tonight, wasn’t it? The man to see about a fifty-caliber machine gun or a Polaris missile? Pesky private eyes disposed of while you wait?”
“Man, you must of hit me hard. I don’t understand a word.”
I grabbed a fistful of his shirt—another tank top—and rammed the muzzle under his chin. “Not as hard as if I use it the way it was designed. Drive.”
He started the engine. I let go of him, pulled my door shut, and rested back against it with the gun propped on my knee while he swung the pickup back into the lane and headed deeper into the neighborhoods.
I said, “That was a military operation. Military operations mean commanders. What’d you tell him that made him put the bee on me?”
“Snuffings ain’t my scene, man. What happened back there was a surprise.”
“It was supposed to be. What’d you tell him?�
�
“What you said. You was a customer looking for heavy shit.”
“A man who does business like that runs out of customers in a hurry. What else did you tell him?”
“Nothing.”
“Shooter …”
“Okay, okay. He a man likes to axe questions. I said you a P.I. named Walker.”
“Is that when he asked you to finger me, or did he do some checking and get back to you?”
“I didn’t finger you, man.”
“Shooter, Shooter,” I said. “I won’t cap you for setting me up. You get stuck in the middle, you take sides to live. Just don’t insult me by denying it. That makes me angry. An angry man with a gun.”
A blue-and-white passed us heading in the opposite direction, its lights and siren going. Its slipstream shook the pickup’s rusty sheet metal.
“He called me back,” Shooter said then.
“He say why he was taking me out?”
“Man, he didn’t say he was taking you out. I just sell guns.”
“Yeah, yeah. What’s his name?”
He licked his lips. “Seabrook.”
“Never heard of him. What’s he colonel of?”
“I never axed him. He buys and sells.”
“Did he do business with Doyle Thayer Junior?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about Waldo Stoudenmire?”
“Sturdy?” He grinned lopsidedly, favoring the right side of his face. “Sturdy don’t know a butt from a trigger.”
“Somebody taught him. Just before he died.”
“Sturdy’s dead?”
“That’s what Ma Chaney said. Know anything about it?”
“Man, I hardly knowed Sturdy. We didn’t have the same clientele.”
“Sure you did. Doyle Thayer Junior.”
“I don’t know no juniors.”
“Too fast, Shooter.” A fire truck wailed past, one of the new ugly yellow-green jobs. “I don’t care what business you had with him. I don’t even know if Sturdy getting dead, if he’s dead, has anything to do with anything. What I want to find out is what the Colonel thinks I know that’s worth calling out the militia. Speaking of which, would they be the same four that’s been knocking over houses in this area over the past couple of weeks?”
Silent Thunder Page 8
