“A detective’s post with a real police department would.”
“Maybe. A man may take chances, but not with his wife and daughters.”
I stood up. The air was getting thick and the cigar wasn’t Cuban. “I’m not talking about the Thayer killing, either. I mean the armed home invasions that have been taking place in the area over the past two weeks. And maybe something behind them, much bigger.”
He rested the cigar on the edge of the writing desk. “I’m listening.”
I told him it, all of it, starting with the attempt on me in the warehouse district where I had gone to meet Shooter and ending with my telephone conversation with Colonel Seabrook. He didn’t interrupt me.
“I wondered about that shooting at the fairgrounds,” he said when I’d finished. “That one went to Schiller. When Schiller was with Narcotics, he was the one they sent down in the sewer to catch the drugs when the suspect flushed them.”
I said, “He’s still pulling the same duty. Shooter kept his ear to the ground so much it had roots. I figure he caught wind of the Colonel’s action, probably the home invasions, and dealt himself in. Seabrook played him a while, then jerked him when he had the time to do it. The sloppy way his killer tried to frame me says it was the same hired hand who killed Sturdy and didn’t think to search him or his room. Sturdy had something the Colonel wants. Whatever it is it costs, because after pulling in a hundred and ten grand from the robberies he still hadn’t enough to buy it. When I declared myself a partner I forced his hand. I didn’t know then that Sturdy was out of jail. You could say I got him killed.”
“He set himself up when he got hungry. Maybe he talked before he died. That would explain why there was no search.”
“In that case we’re out of luck.”
“You keep saying we.”
“I’m being rhetorical.”
“Like hell you are.” His Castilian reserve was beginning to flake off.
“If you were going to do this by the numbers you wouldn’t have taken me in here.”
“You read much into people you don’t know.”
“So do you. We’re trained to.”
He showed his teeth in a grin for the first time since I knew him. It wasn’t a pleasant expression.
“The system is the same everywhere. They teach you the job and then they won’t let you do it. Wherever I go I’m still a peón.”
“Not if you won’t be one.”
“You were born with that attitude. It’s not so simple for me.”
I said nothing.
He poked among the items on the desk. At length he picked up the notepad, balanced it on his palm for a moment as if weighing it, and held it out, still wrapped. “Your handkerchief, I think.”
I took it. “What are you going to tell the others?”
“I don’t have to tell them anything. I’m the ranking officer on the scene. Wait until the morgue crew gets here before you leave. I’ll have different uniforms downstairs by then.” He opened the door.
“Can I expect you Monday morning at eight-thirty?”
“I’ll be free.” He went out into the hall and closed the door behind him.
23
WHERE DO YOU GO when you’re asleep on your feet and you can’t go home?
The system has an answer. You can go to a hotel, motel, an inn, or the mission, where you’re advised to sleep with your shoes on lest you lose them to a roach who wears your size. The hotels have room service, the motels have vending machines on every floor, the inns have country charm in bales, including antique bedpans which if you’re caught using one you get tossed out on your bladder. You can get a single room or a double, or maybe a suite with a refrigerator and a cabinet stocked with liquor in little plastic bottles like the airlines sell, with a door that makes a cash register ring somewhere every time it’s opened. You can get poolside, outside, no side; a corner room by a busy elevator or a shoebox between the ice machine and a room full of AA dropouts having a party; single bed, double bed, queen size, king, where you need a compass to find your way out and no reminder—if you ever needed one to begin with—that you’re all alone in a bed that could sleep a family of Cuban refugees. (I had Cuba on my mind for some reason.) Closed-circuit television, cable television, or just television, but always television, except in the fleabags; and even some of them have radios, connected to the baseboards with cables as thick as your wrist. The big chains equip the bathrooms with moisturizers and shampoos. The mom-and-pop places hang Handi-wipes over the sinks in place of towels and washcloths. The fleabags have no private bathrooms, just a community closet on each floor with a sink, a toilet, and a shower, and no lock on the door in case somebody hangs himself from an exposed pipe.
There are as many kinds of places to stay as there are people to stay in them, and every one of them smells to varying degrees of mildew and suitcases and daylight sex. If you strung out all the neon from all the motels on all the strips in all the cities of North America you’d have enough to wrap the world twice around in a glowing pink tube with some left over to twist into script reading vacancy for the benefit of weary interplanetary travelers—but they’d better bring their own soap, because you can lose one of those toy cakes in an armpit. At every hour of every day and night someone is on his way somewhere, and everyone needs a place to sleep. I was in the wrong business.
I wound up in the same place I’d stayed the day before. It was the same room, although the number on the door was different and it was on a different floor. Everything was the same, except this time I didn’t have a bottle for a roommate.
That was deliberate. The local Meijer’s was open twenty-four hours. I’d bought a shirt, pants, socks, a change of underwear, a jacket to cover the gun, and a razor, then stepped into the supermarket section to buy a roast beef sandwich at the deli counter. The liquor section was next to it and I thought about it, all those lovely bottles in provocative shapes with attractive labels and contents ranging from liquid-diamond transparency to golden amber; but when liquor starts to look better than a woman’s calf or a frisky pup, one drink leads to eighteen, and I couldn’t afford to lose all of Sunday. I got a pint of milk instead. Aesthetically there was no comparison.
I ate the sandwich in the room and washed it down with milk over Sturdy’s notebook. It wasn’t any use. Even the dry pages were starting to blur. I considered a long bath, but kept seeing Sturdy in the tub, so I showered off Macomb County and Iroquois Heights, put on the clean underwear, and turned in. I dreamed Sheriff’s Investigator Galvin was trying to drown me in a glass of Southern Comfort. I didn’t seem to be struggling too hard.
Four hours later I shaved and dressed and brought a steaming Styrofoam cup back with me from the coffee shop and tried again. Late-morning sunlight was canting in through the glass doors leading to the balcony. I was clean and rested and the headache was better, but what I was reading didn’t make much more sense than it had before I went to bed.
The first six pages were stuck together, and when I got them apart finally I was looking at indecipherable smudges. The last half of the pad, and the dryest, was blank. This left eight relatively legible pages covered with Sturdy’s neat round schoolboy script. The notations weren’t coded, but they might as well have been. They consisted of a series of surnames followed by numbers that might have been times, possibly of appointments. I recognized the name of a well-known local Lithuanian antique dealer—there couldn’t be two walking around in the area with a mouthful of letters like that—and two or three others, more common, that were shared by bric-a-brac retailers in and near Detroit. None of it meant anything in a court of law, although considering Sturdy’s trade it raised some questions about their legitimacy, as what else was new. I didn’t figure it was worth killing him over. One name in particular caught my eye, both because it appeared to be a Christian, not a last, name, and because it was underlined. The number following it was 10:07. Whether it was a.m. or p.m. and what date it was for had gone to rest with the man who h
ad written it. Myrtle was the name.
It could have been something. It could have been just a name in a book. That’s the trouble with real life. You never know what pieces belong to which puzzle.
I started with the obvious. Leaving the room key in the ashtray for the maid, I cranked up the gray bomb and burned some gasoline visiting the furniture and antique dealers whose names I’d recognized. It was a balmy Sunday and they were all open for business. Of the four I spoke to, one had heard of Sturdy, but would never, never do business with him. Two more, the Lithuanian included, had no time for me as soon as they found out I wasn’t shopping for furniture. The fourth, a tall woman leaning hard on fifty with eyeglasses hanging from a chain around her neck and hair dyed brittle black and combed into crisp waves, said she didn’t know anyone named Stoudenmire and invited me into the back room to convince me. I declined.
Some of them were lying, of course. The antique trade in non-tourist towns is a paying hobby at best and if it’s going to be even that you have to do some business with your eyes closed, just like every other shoestring industry forced to operate in a state with a crazy single-business tax. But none of them knew anything about what Sturdy was into when he was killed, and I was pretty sure none of them had killed him. If I was wrong I’d be back. After you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth—unless you were a little too hasty the first time. For now I was back to revving my engines on the runway with no place to fly.
The last shop I’d been to, the woman’s, was a Queen Anne house in Hazel Park, around the corner from a pancake joint smelling of hot grease and flour in the waitresses’ hair. It was full, and while I was waiting for it to thin out I bought the late edition of the Sunday News from a stand on the sidewalk out front. When a booth opened up I ordered coffee and a short stack and read the article about the body in the bathtub in Iroquois Heights. It was a sketchy three inches and neither Lieutenant Romero nor I was mentioned. Two lines at the end said that no services were planned, according to the deceased’s sister, Hilda Stoudenmire Myrtle.
24
MOTIONS.
Going through them is what the work amounts to most of the time. You scratch up a lead and tug at it until it breaks loose and dumps you over backwards, then you get up and start scratching again. Each lead might be the magic one that takes you all the way to the prize, and the minute you forget that and expect it to be another dud it comes to life and sinks its fangs in the back of your hand. It’s just as true that if you behave all the time as if you’re on to something hot you burn out early. Either way you burn out. There is no winning in the work, only surviving.
Nor was there anything for a detective in a man writing down an appointment with his sister in his notebook. That he would refer to her by her married surname instead of her first was worth a closer look. Maybe.
The article identified Hilda Stoudenmire Myrtle as a resident of Birmingham. When I finished my pancakes I called Information from a pay telephone outside, got her number, and used it. The woman who answered listened to my short spiel and agreed to see me.
Birmingham started expanding after the last big war as the waiting room for Grosse Pointe, a place where new money was left to mellow and season in brick splitlevels before moving into the great Prohibition-era mausoleums on Lake Shore Drive. Then when inflation, taxes, and the servant problem began converting the mansions into museums and homes for the elderly, the new money, growing slightly used now, decided to stay in Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills, its richer bastard child. The streets are resurfaced regularly and the homes, while considerably less imposing than the glandular cases in Grosse Pointe, are beginning to look suspiciously like mansions, although their tax-shy residents are quick to deny any such assertion. Nobody wants to be called rich in a democracy.
The Myrtle home was an older ranchstyle in one of the less pretentious neighborhoods, with brick facing up to the windowsills, white aluminum siding above that, and a tricycle on the lawn, one of the new plastic jobs that no one will ever find affectionately preserved in a middle-aged citizen’s garage. An impressive display of irises and poppies with big orange petals like crepe paper grew under the windows. There was a for sale sign by the curb with the name of a local real estate firm printed on it. I pushed a button on the front porch and got Dvorak.
Mrs. Myrtle was small and neat like her brother, with silvering brown hair brushed straight back in an abrupt manner that said she did it mostly to keep the hair away from her face, which was oval and pointed at the bottom. The frames of her tinted glasses matched her hair and made no statement beyond that. She had on a plain gray dress with a black patent-leather belt buckled around her waist and gray shoes with low heels. Her eyes were a crisper shade of gray.
She was late thirties and could pass for early fifties. The extra years looked recent.
After we established that I wasn’t there to see the house she invited me into a tidy living room done in a taste that Ma Chaney would never even suspect, let alone have: all beige and gray and vacuumed and dusted to within an inch of its life. A small cluster of family photographs on the mantel saved the place from the cool impersonality of a hotel room. Sturdy appeared in none of them.
“Are you moving out?” I asked.
“When someone meets our price.” She closed and locked the front door. “The house has been on the market for six weeks.”
“You can see Eight Mile Road from here. People who can afford to live in Birmingham can afford to move farther from Detroit.”
“Who can afford to live in Birmingham?” Her tone wasn’t bantering.
“I’m sorry about Sturdy.”
“Sturdy? Oh, you mean Waldo. Yes. He was a disappointment. Did you say you were investigating his death?”
“If I’m not interrupting something more important.”
“It’s not your place to judge me in my house,” she said quietly.
“I’m sorry about that too.” I showed her the id. “I was hired to look into the activities of a man who had business dealings with your brother. His name was Thayer.”
“I never heard the name.”
“Did he ever mention a man called the Colonel? Colonel Seabrook?”
“I don’t recall that either, but we didn’t speak very often. We weren’t close. Waldo was eleven years older than I. He left home just as I was starting school. I told this to that nice Mexican detective from Iroquois Heights.”
“Cuban.”
“Whichever. He was very polite. I wish I could say the same for the officer he had with him.”
“Did he have a crew cut and a pair of dark glasses bolted to his face?”
She looked annoyed. “If you know them, why are you here? Don’t you people compare notes?”
“I’m not with the police.”
“You don’t look it. But then neither did the Mexican.”
“You knew what your brother did for a living?”
Something more than annoyance wrinkled the smooth neatness of her face. “Don’t call it that. He could have made a real living honestly. My husband offered to put in a word for him where he worked. Waldo turned him down.”
He and young Thayer had that in common. “Where does your husband work?”
“Worked.” She said it quickly. “He was assistant director of plant safety at Fermi Two.”
“The nuclear plant? Did he retire?”
“He quit to die. The place gave him cancer. He left there two months ago.”
“I’m sorry.” It was the third time I’d apologized since we met.
“No, you’re not, and neither are they. But they will be. I’m suing them and I don’t care if it takes ten years.” She looked down at the floor, then back up at me. “You’ll have to forgive me. Sometimes I lose control.”
“I guess it’s just as well your brother didn’t take the job.”
“At least he died faster.”
The words had no emotion at all. She was a neat woman as I sai
d. I got away from it.
“Waldo wrote something in his notebook about an appointment with someone named Myrtle. Did he ever call you that?”
“We were on a first-name basis. Brothers and sisters usually are, no matter how seldom they see each other.”
“That’s what I was thinking. Might he have meant your husband?”
“I can’t think why. Except for that job offer they never had anything to talk about.”
“When did they discuss the job?”
“Oh, years ago.” She studied me. “Do you know who killed Waldo?”
“He bought and sold stolen merchandise. You rub up against some rough hides in that line.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I’m pretty sure who. I’m trying to find out why. Did your husband leave any papers?”
“What kind of papers?”
“Notes. Memos. An appointment calendar. Lists of Things To Do Today. Knowing what the meeting was about would be one place to start. When a man is murdered in his bathtub, anything he did out of the ordinary toward the last goes under a bright light.”
“My husband wasn’t much for writing things down,” she said. “Why don’t you ask him in person?”
I hesitated. “I thought he was dead.”
“Not dead. Dying. This way.”
She led me through an arch and down a short hall to a room with shades drawn over the windows. There was a bed in the middle with someone in it and a cloying sweet smell in the overheated air, an unmistakable sickroom odor.
“This was the dining room.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper. “I had the table taken out and the bed put in when he couldn’t climb stairs any longer.”
Silent Thunder Page 14
