Silent Thunder

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Can he talk?”

  “If you listen hard.”

  I stood in the doorway while she went in and put a hand on his shoulder. The difference in atmosphere in that room was acute, like stepping from bright sunshine into the flowered muffled silence of a funeral home.

  “Tom? There’s a Mr. Walker who wants to talk to you.” On her way out she touched my sleeve. “Not too long.”

  I went in and sat down on the hard chair next to the bed.

  Mrs. Myrtle was standing in the middle of the living room when I came back. She looked as if she’d been waiting there all along. Her face wore a question. It was not so much prematurely aged as cracked inside, like an old vase with fresh enamel.

  “Maybe something,” I said. “I have to check it out.”

  She nodded. “I’m used to not being told anything. The doctors are good at that.”

  “They’re also expensive.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why you’re selling the house?”

  “Certainly not. We—”

  “I just spent ten minutes with your husband. He’s past lying.”

  She ran her right hand up her left arm. Nodded again. “The insurance only pays part of it. I’m not suing the plant. We can’t afford a lawyer. But the plant should pay for everything. It killed him.”

  “Where’s your son?” Most of the pictures on the mantel included a redheaded boy of about six.

  “We—I sent him to camp. I want him to remember his father the way he was. As it is I can hardly remember him that way myself. And yet he’s only been like this a little over a month. So fast.”

  “After a while you’ll remember him the way you want to.”

  “It’s like he’s dead already. You know the worst part? The worst part is knowing I’ll have to go through it all over again when he does die.”

  I wanted a cigarette, but there wasn’t an ashtray in the room. “You both knew he was dying long before he quit.”

  “Yes. He went to the security director, the plant doctor, the union. Nobody would help. Everyone said they were very sorry, but the illness was unrelated to his work and so he wasn’t entitled to compensation. Wasn’t entitled. After twelve years without a single sick day, and breathing that poison the whole time. Lying there like—.” She broke. It didn’t last long. When it was over she said, “I have arrangements to make for Waldo, so if you’re finished.”

  I thanked her and left. It was warm out and the air was clean. I sucked it in in long drafts, clearing my lungs of the sweetish smell of decay, my brain of images of living skeletons as white as the sheets they lay between, speaking in short breathy bleats to strangers in darkened rooms with no son there to tell good-bye.

  I sawed the Mercury’s engine into life and took off with all four windows down and the fresh air rushing in.

  25

  I KNEW NOW what Sturdy had been up to and why he was so important to the Colonel. It was crazy as a frog’s hat, but then nothing about the case had made sense from the beginning. I might have been living in a Picasso painting for all the way things added up.

  I called the Macomb County Sheriff’s Department from a drugstore booth and asked for Calvin. While I was waiting I broke open a fresh pack of Winstons.

  “Galvin don’t come on till four,” said a gravel voice. “This is Sergeant Czolgosz.”

  I blew smoke at the glass. “Art Winfield, Eyewitness News. How’s that man doing who was shot at Emma Chaney’s place last night?”

  “They upgraded him to serious this morning. Hey, is this on the air?”

  “Tape. Has he been identified?”

  “Not yet. The docs won’t let us talk to him yet.”

  “Is Ma Chaney still in custody?”

  “You kidding? She didn’t even take off her coat.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant.”

  “Will this be on at six?”

  I said that was up to the news director. You never know when you might need someone later.

  I hung up and cracked the door to let the smoke out. A big woman in a flowered dress who had been standing near the booth earlier replaced a jar of cologne on a display and started in my direction. I pulled the door shut, got out my notebook, and called Constance Thayer at her sister’s place in Redford. The big woman stumped back to the cosmetics display.

  “Something?” asked Mrs. Thayer.

  “Everything except Doyle Junior,” I said. “Where can we meet?”

  “Are you going to try to talk me into firing you again?”

  “Never twice.”

  “Here’s no good,” she said. “Do you know the Blue Heron in West Bloomfield? It’s a restaurant.”

  “Only when I’m running an expense account.” I looked at my watch. “Can you make it by three?”

  “I’ll have to call ahead. It’s a popular place.”

  “I guess that means I have to buy a necktie.”

  “What happened to the ones you had?”

  “Long story. I’ll see you at three.”

  When I came out, the big woman set down a bottle of nail polish hastily, caught it when it fell off the edge of the shelf, put it back, and charged the booth. I barely got out of her way.

  The Blue Heron occupied a small building off Orchard Lake Road, built of orange brick with vines growing up the outside and young men in blue blazers stationed out front who soaked you a buck to move your car ten feet and leave it. A blonde hostess in blue taffeta and a scarlet bustier smiled at me coolly and led me to a booth in back, one of those awkward arrangements where you and your companion sat hip to hip and reacted out of the sides of your faces like cons in the exercise yard. Constance Thayer was there, looking red-haired and expensively tanned in a green satin blouse with a plunging front and a gold crescent-shaped pendant resting between her breasts. She had a black hat the size and shape of a melon wedge pinned to the side of her head, decorated with a green feather. Hats on women were coming back, and that was okay with me. It meant the end of utility hairstyles and everything that went with them, from lime-colored slacks with front zippers to colorless lipstick and men’s tuxedos in women’s sizes and stone-washed denims with designer patches, all the dumpy fashion paraphernalia of the unisex society.

  She smiled up at me. “You bought a good one.”

  I ran a thumb down behind the black-and-silver rep tie I’d picked up at a men’s store on the way there and sat down next to her. The gold-jacketed busboy who’d pulled the table out for me shoved it into my solar plexus. “Nice place. I think I saw Prince Philip handing out towels in the men’s room.”

  “The owner used to be a friend. I’ve been here fifteen minutes and he hasn’t been out to say hello.”

  “Did you expect him to?”

  “I suppose not. I’ve learned a lot about friendship recently. Mainly that it isn’t as common as we think. The genuine kind, anyway.”

  “There are friends and friends. Life’s easier if you don’t expect too much of them.”

  “Do you have any friends?” she asked.

  “None, if you mean the kind you can let out your stomach with at a barbecue. If you mean the kind you can call when you’re lying in an alley with a broken head, a couple.” My menu came. “You ordered?”

  “Yes. The stuffed breast of turkey is very good.”

  “So’s a Cadillac.”

  “I’m buying.”

  “Wrong.” I ordered coffee and a chicken salad sandwich with a Parisian accent. The waiter, a tall man no older than the car hops outside, with girlish features and large hips, carried my menu away. I slid around the semicircle until I could look at Mrs. Thayer.

  “Doyle Junior’s friends don’t get any better with time,” I said. “It was just dumb luck he lived long enough to get shot at home.”

  “I wish he hadn’t.”

  “I know a deputy police chief who wishes the same thing.”

  “What have you found out?”

  “Everything.”

  I shut up while the
busboy tonged ice into our glasses and filled them from a bottle, turning the neck as he finished to avoid spilling any. When he left I told Mrs. Thayer everything except what I’d learned at the Myrtle house. When I was through she set fire to the cigarette she’d been holding since before I started.

  “Two murders.” She spat smoke. “Three, if you count Doyle. That’s just the kind of thing I got out of films to avoid.”

  “It has a way of jumping social classes.”

  “I knew it was bad when you came in. You looked bleak.”

  “It’s the tie.”

  “Please don’t joke about it.”

  I shrugged. “It’s bad. It will probably get worse. Things generally do.”

  “You didn’t say what this man Sturdy had that everyone seems to want.”

  “I will when I can prove I’m not screwy. If I’m not, it makes Doyle’s little eccentricity a dangerous obsession, and that’s good for you, but I need evidence. I can buy the letter of introduction Sturdy gave Doyle to give to Ma Chaney if I meet her price. That’s a link, but it’s not enough.

  “The letter threw me off,” I went on. “I assumed Sturdy wrote it so Ma would accept Doyle. What he really did was send Doyle to Ma so Ma could vouch for Sturdy. He had something to sell, something no other small-time fence could get his hands on. He had one buyer, but with Doyle in on the auction there was no telling how high the bidding would go.”

  “Dangerous.”

  “When you’ve been diving off the low board your whole life, everything about the high board looks dangerous. You have nothing to compare it to. Sturdy missed and landed on his head; not his strongest feature, or he wouldn’t have gotten big eyes to begin with.”

  “What about the Polaris missile Doyle bought from the Chaney woman?”

  “A good saleswoman will make her pitch, even if you just came in to use the bathroom. The fact that Doyle bought it shows which way his thoughts were headed.”

  “But you won’t say which way that was.”

  “It’s nutty,” I said. “It’s like being in a cartoon, and I haven’t even met Daddy Warbucks yet.”

  “The Colonel?”

  I nodded. “I’ve got an appointment with him tomorrow morning.”

  “Alone?”

  “At first. Anything else would send him underground. If he comes in any way but hard, this whole thing has been just a dream. I’ll wake up with my car safe in my garage with no holes in it and the usual bills to pay. Shooter and Sturdy will still be in business and I won’t have shot anyone. That part’s okay. You’ll be someone whose face I saw on a magazine cover. I’m not sure how I feel about that part.”

  She rested her chin on the hand holding the cigarette. “Meaning?”

  “I’d hate to miss out on a chicken salad sandwich that would keep me in groceries for two days.”

  Our meals came. The young man set down our dishes with a minimum of clatter, filled my cup from a miniature silver pot, and parked the pot on a blue enamel trivet shaped like a long-necked bird. He had fine white hands with slender fingers like a croupier’s.

  “That’s not what you meant,” she said when he’d withdrawn. She hadn’t changed positions.

  “Maybe not. I’ve got a rule.”

  “May I hear it?”

  “Don’t fish off the company pier.”

  “I have one question.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  She took her hand away from her chin, flicked ash into a black ceramic tray with another long-necked blue bird in the bottom, and puffed at the cigarette like Marlene Dietrich. “Where were you planning on sleeping tonight?”

  26

  THE SISTER’S HOME was a frame saltbox on Pembroke, one of a row of them with small square lawns and a basketball hoop over the door of every third garage. An ancient yellow school bus bearing the name of a Bible academy let off some of its cargo in front of the house next door and pulled away from the curb with a snort of air brakes and a drum roll of old pistons, after which I turned into the driveway. Mrs. Thayer had taken a cab to the restaurant.

  “Jeanine’s in Toledo overnight,” she said, unlocking the front door. “She goes there sometimes to stay with my brother-in-law when he’s on the road. He sells office equipment.”

  “Somebody has to.”

  There was too much furniture in the small living room, too many fragile porcelain figures on spindly racks, too many pictures on the walls. It spoke of a home that had been lived in a while and had grown around the residents. I liked it fine.

  Mrs. Thayer laid her purse on a clear space of table otherwise cluttered with magazines and souvenir ashtrays. “Is it too early for a drink?”

  “A drink doesn’t know what time it is,” I said. “Scotch, if you’ve got it. Anything else if you haven’t.”

  She went out of the room and came back three minutes later with two tall glasses and handed me one. We sat down on a horsehair sofa, clinked them, and drank.

  “I’m out of practice,” she said. “Do I seduce you or do you seduce me?”

  “At four-thirty in the afternoon?”

  “A bed doesn’t know what time it is.”

  I lit a cigarette and deposited the match on Paul Revere’s face, compliments of Greenfield Village. “The papers said your son was home the night you shot Doyle. Is he going to testify?”

  “No.” She turned her glass around in her hands. “I haven’t even told Leslie what school I put him in. He’ll never be able to forget if people keep bringing it up around him.”

  “The prosecution will subpoena him if the defense doesn’t. Don’t think they won’t be able to find him.”

  “He didn’t see anything.”

  “What didn’t he see, the shooting or the beating earlier?”

  “Neither. He was in bed.”

  “I used to sneak out of bed to watch The Untouchables,” I said. “My parents never knew it.”

  “He didn’t see anything.”

  “He must have heard something. You can’t slap a woman around without making some kind of noise. It would be another penny on your side of the scale.”

  “No.” She drank.

  “You’re lucky you got Dorrance. A lawyer without a book contract would’ve dropped you long ago.”

  “What about a private detective without one?”

  “Lawyers are smarter.” I drained my glass and set it down. “It’s been a long day. Tomorrow’s going to be longer. If I can borrow this sofa and a blanket.”

  “You can sleep in the guest room. I’ll use the bedroom. Look, I’m not in the habit of shooting all the men I sleep with.”

  “You’re not in the habit of sleeping with all the men you meet either. All this publicity about the films you made is getting to you. You don’t have to be what they say you are just because they say it.”

  “Is that what you think I’m doing?”

  “Everyone does it.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I’m a detective. I just reflect light.” I got up. “Thanks for the bed. I’m moteled out.”

  “Thanks for dinner.”

  “Forget it. I’ve got a rich client.”

  She went into the guest room ahead of me and removed some of her things. Afterward it still smelled of her. I had another smoke by the window, thinking of exactly nothing, then undressed and hung up my clothes and stretched out between the sheets. I didn’t draw the curtains. An artificially darkened room would have reminded me too much of the one where Hilda Myrtle’s husband lay, waiting.

  I was waiting too.

  For a time I watched the spackled ceiling. Then I turned onto my left side and stared at the door. That was too obvious, so I rolled over and looked at the window. A maple branch hung low outside, heavy with leaves. The sun threw their gray shadows in a mottled pattern on the floor, and when the breeze stirred them the shadows shimmered like light on water. Someone next door was dribbling a basketball unevenly on asphalt, the hollow impacts punctuated at irregular interval
s by the flap and twang of the ball going through a hoop. Elsewhere a screen door banged shut. A helicopter wobbled overhead on its way to monitor the evening traffic back from the beaches.

  Somewhere in there, waiting, I fell asleep. I woke up in the dark, turned on the bedside lamp, and checked my watch. Just past nine. The door was still closed. I sat up for a while smoking, then put out the butt and switched off the lamp and settled back down.

  She came in a few minutes later and climbed in next to me. The warmth of her body filled the space under the covers. She was all heated flesh and cool silk and sinewy arms and legs and lips searching. This time I helped her.

  27

  SHE JOINED ME in the living room shortly after sunrise. I was sitting on the sofa cleaning the Beretta from a cheap kit I’d bought during my visit to Meijer’s and put in the car. She had on a blue chiffon robe and the sunlight through the window made a halo of her hair, still damp from the shower. The smell of scented soap mingled with the sharp gun-oil odor.

  “Do you think you’ll need that?”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “Isn’t it awfully early?”

  “I like to get there first.” I wiped off each of the cartridges and reloaded the clip. There was nothing wrong with the way Shooter had loaded it, but if there had been, there were much worse times to find that out.

  “Can’t you send the police in your place?”

  “Colonel Seabrook will just shake hands all around and go back to the wars. They’ve got nothing on him.”

  “And you do.”

  I rammed the clip home and chambered a shell. “Not yet.”

  “You’re going to make him confess by shoving a gun at him?”

  “Guns don’t work that way except on television.” I stood, seated the automatic under my belt behind my right hip, and put on my jacket.

  She crossed to the table that was holding up the magazines and ashtrays and took something out of a drawer. “In case you run out of bullets.”

  I took it. It was a nickel-plated Browning .25 automatic with a mother-of-pearl handle, shiny all over and full of sin. When I made a fist it disappeared. “Yours or your sister’s?”

  “Doyle gave it to me for our first anniversary. I was afraid to have it around when Jack was small, so I gave it to Jeanine. Even when Doyle started his collection I made him promise never to leave anything lying around loaded.”