Burning Midnight

by Loren D. Estleman

  If your head was full of the pitch you planned to make to the Lord, you might not have noticed the iron-front building across from the church and a little down the street. It was a hardware store once, and before that a tailor’s where the Tammany crowd bought its full-dress suits for the mayor’s inauguration. Before that it was an auto dealership, with chromework gleaming in rows behind plate glass and Chief Pontiac’s head in profile mounted above the door. Back further my history is weak: a stove foundry or Studebaker works—the covered wagon, not the automobile. The squat structure had the out-of-proportion look of a place that had been originally built to support more stories.

  It looked empty, like a place waiting its turn at vandalization or arson, but if you looked closer you saw the steel awning rigged to roll down over the entire front and lock with sliding bolts to the base, and here and there the glowing red eye of a surveillance camera. In just about any other town you’d think it was a pawnshop or an electronics store, maybe a cut-rate jewelry outlet, some place containing items that could readily be turned to cash if you knew a fence; and who didn’t, in that neighborhood? But if you jumped to that conclusion, and you were a certain type of person and decided to pull on a ski mask and take a crowbar to the fire door in back, inside you would find a pit bull waiting. Her name is Sister Delia.

  If you went by reputation alone, you’d expect a caricature of a parochial school nun with dewlaps and a weapons-grade ruler grafted to her fist. What you got was tall and stately, with red hair cut boyishly short and the general look of a woman who would not be out of place wearing a riding habit. She wore an unstructured jacket over a mannish white shirt and a pleated skirt that showed her muscular calves. I rescued my paw from her hickory grip and took a seat opposite her in a reclaimed armchair in a patch of sunlight coming through the plate glass behind. The overcast was breaking up for the first time in weeks.

  “The Tiger thinks you tried to burn down his garage,” I said by way of opening the conversation.

  Her smile was as tight. “Someone keyed my car a few days ago. Now I know who.”

  “Not his style.”

  “His kind has no style.”

  “I wish I knew the story of you two.”

  “It’s no mystery. I’ve devoted half my life to the people of this community, first with the Church, then on my own dime. He’s devoted half of his to tearing down what I’ve tried to do. Everything he does, everything he stands for, reinforces every stereotype that’s been applied to these people.”

  “Except sloth.”

  “Our definitions differ. If he had an ounce of industry he wouldn’t have taken the lazy way.”

  She’d left the order after the Vatican had instructed her to lower her profile. She’d been arrested once for trespassing—an organized demonstration to turn spectators away from a cockfight in Zorborón’s garage—and used the death of the old pope as an excuse to enter the laity, which was a neat way to obey the order and tell Rome to go shinny up a candle at the same time. Her expenses were paid through charitable donations. In her time she’d twisted more arms than Strangler Lewis.

  “He’s gone straight, sort of.”

  “A line that’s sort of straight is still crooked. Is he the reason for this visit? I helped you spring him from a bad rap once. That’s one more good turn than he rates.”

  I got out another print of the boy’s picture and gave it to her. “Name’s Ernesto Pasada. He’s been bitten by a tarantula and his family wants him back.”

  “The last thing this neighborhood needs is a litter of Tigers. I went down to their hangout once to give them the motherly talk. I was lucky not to get raped.”

  “From what I hear, luck’s no defense.”

  “Neither is faith.” She swung open one side of her jacket and let it fall shut. I glimpsed a checked walnut grip curving out of a chamois underarm holster. “Parting gift from the bishop. The papers are in order. I don’t know the boy.” She held out the photo.

  “Keep it and let me know if he shows up. He’s not missing—yet. The job’s to keep him from winding up that way, or worse.”

  “What’s worse?”

  “Earning his tattoo. What’s the story on the Maldados? All I could get out of Zorborón was a history lesson.”

  “He has a selective memory, like the people who know all the wrong Bible passages. As it stands, they’re just insurance salesmen. You know: a grease fire in the kitchen, half the staff calls in sick, a dead skunk wanders in through a dryer vent and spoils the customers’ laundry. No threats of physical violence yet, but that’s the logical next step. So far no one’s opted out of their payment plan. I assume they’re peddling dope; that’s a given.”

  “Any connection with the home office in Mexico?”

  “Not that I know of, but the Maldados down there wouldn’t mind opening a branch this far north. They killed a reporter a month or so back. Lopped off his head with a machete and sent it to his widow. Considering the quality of the Mexican postal system, it must have been plenty ripe when she took delivery.” Very little of life’s uglier side shocked Sister Delia. Nuns don’t hear confessions, but the seal of the priesthood didn’t prevent anonymous gossip. Some of what they heard would raise blisters on the ears of a veteran cop.

  “Not a U.S. reporter, I’m guessing.”

  “If he was, you’d have seen it on page one of USA Today. But it wouldn’t have slowed them down. The gangs down there are at war with each other and authority. Anyone with dry ink on his law degree has a shot at being a judge in Mexico. There are plenty of vacancies due to death and very few takers. Roman emperors had a better shot at life insurance.”

  “If a Detroit Maldado wanted to tie up with the border variety, would that person be named Domingo Siete?”

  “That little beast would butcher his mother just to get the cops to vacuum his rug for free. But he’s too stupid to be dangerous for long. He thinks he’s indestructible, which is as destructible as it gets. He takes too many chances, and I hear he’s his own best customer in the narcotics trade. If we’re still talking about him this time next year except in the past tense, I’ll re-up and wash the feet of the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

  That wasn’t likely to happen, so I moved Seventh Sunday down a notch on my list of Things to Fear Today. Not all the way to the bottom; I didn’t want to be his one chance too many. “What about Luís Guerrera? Another indestructible?”

  “No, and that’s what makes him dangerous. Being the power behind the throne suits him. He got pinched just once for possession of a concealed weapon, did six months for that in the Boys Training School in Whitmore Lake; he was a juvenile offender then. Nothing since. These days he lets another Maldado do his carrying. His goal is to be invisible. If he makes it, El Tigre del Norte will be a kitten by comparison.”

  What she’d said about mysterious grease fires had put an idea in my head. “Any chance that key job on your car and Zorborón’s fire are connected?”

  “I can’t answer for him, but no one’s tried to sell me protection. Kind of a wienie way for a bunch of hombres malos to do business, wouldn’t you think?”

  “They’re just getting established. Trouble is, kids are fast learners. If they wanted to make a push, taking out the two biggest influences in the community would be a place to start.”

  “I’ll let you know when they graduate to water balloons.”

  I gave it up as a waste of time. If anyone knew the dangers, she would. “Maldados still hanging out at the mission?”

  Her well-bred face grew furrows. “Please don’t call it that. I gave up the oath, not the Church. It’s just another crack house in waiting since the brothers abandoned it.”

  The Jesuits had set up a soup kitchen and salvation parlor in an Edwardian showplace a couple of blocks north of West Vernor. It hadn’t been a showplace since McKinley was shot, but it was too pretty to condemn in spite of paint deprivation and a beehive behind the lath-and-plaster walls that was solid enough to pass zoning regu
lations regarding construction. The brothers had moved out to save souls in Grosse Pointe; sold out, some said, for central air and a roof that didn’t leak, but if souls ever needed saving, the carriage trade in the Pointes would have no trouble electing a poster child.

  I looked at my watch. It was siesta time—if not for transplanted Mexicans, then certainly for an aging PI with a bum leg due to lead poisoning. “I’ll drop in on them bright and early tomorrow. What kind of ordnance are they packing these days?”

  “The usual. Sig-Sauers, some war surplus forty-fives—they never wear out, damn Sam Colt—a MAC-10 or two. The box cutters scare me the most. I’d rather take a nice clean round in the chest than show up at Receiving with my lower intestines in a bucket. This kid worth it?” She tapped the photo in her lap.

  “You tell me. You’re the sister of mercy.”

  She shook her head. There was a bitter snap to it. “I’m burning out. My worst fear. Some days I’d just as soon take a flamethrower to that mess of turrets and gimcrack and throw myself into a tank of Jack Daniel’s.”

  “My advice? Jack Daniel’s first.”

  She smiled; a real smile, not the inch and a half she measured out when the situation called for it. Then she got up and unlocked the file cabinet where she kept the records for the IRS. I couldn’t think of a better place for a bottle.

  * * *

  Back on the street I called Chata and asked if Ernesto had come home from school.

  “He didn’t go.” She sounded tired. “His principal called. It’s the third time this month. I’d hoped if you’re in Mexicantown you might have seen him.”

  “It’s not that small a place and it’s well-populated. I salted it with his picture. If he shows I’ll hear about it.”

  “Did you find out what you needed to know?”

  “I found out what everyone here seems to know, which is next to nada. The Maldados in Detroit are connected with the Old Country Maldados, or they’re not. They’re into the dope trade up to their sombreros, or they’re running a protection racket, or they’re practicing for their knot-tying badge from the Guadalajara Boy Scouts. Tomorrow I’ll talk to the source and strain out the rumors.”

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  “I’ll start early and be out by nightfall.” The secret to hunting werewolves is to finish up before the moon rises.

  SIX

  Bright and early I walked around Rosecranz, the building troll, waxing the linoleum in the foyer and carried a Sausage McMuffin and l,000 degrees of caffeine upstairs. I had a visitor in the private office, but there wasn’t a job in it. I’d set a trap for Wally the mouse and he’d tripped it and broken his neck. He was small enough to flush, so I did that in the little water closet, washed my hands, stuffed his hole with paper, and sealed it with duct tape from the professional detective’s kit I keep in the desk. After that the Sausage McMuffin wasn’t appetizing. I chucked it in the wastebasket and waited for my coffee to cool.

  It was just about fit to drink when the mail slot in the outer office squeaked on its hinges and a small bundle hit the floor. I went out and got it, but my rich uncle hadn’t died and there was nothing happening with my ten shares in whale oil futures, so I dragged over the telephone and went to work. John Alderdyce’s son had just left for the office.

  Ernesto hadn’t come home last night. That had happened before, so I told his sister not to waste time on worry and said I’d shoo him along if I came across him.

  Next I tried Barry Stackpole, my go-to guy for the latest on organized crime in America, but he wasn’t answering and I remembered he’d said something about Alaska in the spring, something to do with a Justice Department scheme to smuggle in members of the Russian Mafia to consult with on matters of Homeland Security; how a solo journalist got the drift of things that the State Department didn’t know about was a mystery no one was paying me to solve. I finished my coffee and left, listing a little toward my right hip where the gun rode.

  * * *

  A lumber baron had built the place, they said, using harder wood than the old-growth pine he’d made his killing cutting in the Upper Peninsula and shipping the logs down to the furniture factories in Grand Rapids. The virgin stands are long gone, and the coffee tables and bedroom sets they sell on the western side of the state are made in China for assembly in the home, but Lars Larson’s frame castle still stood that day, needing shingles and paint and glass panes where the plywood blocked out the sun. The surviving original shingles were rounded like chain mail links atop the turrets, and a front porch hung on by its fingernails, just big enough for a resident to sit in a rocker and spit tobacco at the rats in the shaggy yard. The place looked like you could knock it down by blowing a kiss at it, but those old Swedes knew their mortises and tenons. It had survived a dozen Deco sky-scratchers put up during the boom days of Prohibition and just about everything from the l970s. A street gang and before them the Jesuits with their nonexistent maintenance fund hadn’t done it any more damage than stone-chuckers and Michigan weather.

  Just for fun I grasped a bronze oval knurled with embossed oak leaves and gave it a twist. The bell actually rang, a raspy falsetto tinkle, like an old lady laughing over a scrapbook. No one answered. I tried again. Halfway through, the old lady choked, something snapped and jangled with a falling-away sound, and after that I couldn’t raise a thing. I was probably the first visitor to use the bell in ten years. It had been waiting all this time to let go.

  I snapped my cigarette butt at a can lying on its side in the yard and tried the thumb latch. The door wasn’t locked. I went on in with my gun still on my hip, which was dumb. But instead of a muzzle waiting on the other side I saw an empty entry hall with a scratched floor made of narrow strips of tongue-and-groove oak and patches of old varnish the color and finish of peanut brittle still visible outside the traffic area. A rug with no pattern left had snuggled itself into the cracks between the boards and there was one of those iron-spined hedgehogs to scrape your boots on with a dumb neglected look on its tiny rusted face.

  I smelled dry rot and marijuana, neither of which was new to the building by a long shot. Apart from the scorched weed, the place contained none of the odors associated with a residence of any kind. It might have stood empty since the mission closed, but that couldn’t be, because Detroit abhors a vacuum. Sooner or later any sort of shelter attracts a meth lab or a spot to score crack or just to practice the oldest profession, by some of the oldest professionals who can still wriggle their brittle bones into a miniskirt. There’s a woman on Michigan Avenue named Ukrainian Audrey who claims her pelvis is on the National Register of Historic Places.

  I waited, but the only sign of life was a muffled humming where the third-generation colony of bees continued building its hive between lath-and-plaster walls that provided shelter year-round.

  “Hola?” My voice rang back my way from the curving panels at the base of the ceiling, mocking my accent.

  A foot scraped the staircase, a lazy S framed by a mahogany banister missing several spindles leading to an open second-floor hallway. I looked up at five and a half feet of clear brown skin in white shorts and a pink halter top that fell short of her navel and a longer way short of her collarbone, with piles of shimmering blue-black hair and toenails too pink for her natural coloring, in cork sandals. Her makeup was all wrong, too, her lips a candy-corn shade of orange. She’d used a spray gun to put on a perfume that probably came in a drum. She was all of fourteen years old.

  She was chewing gum, and damn if she hadn’t matched it to her pink nails; I had a good view of it all the way to where it lost its flavor and she took it out and stuck it on top of the newel post. There she rested a hand on the banister with the other splayed on her hip, a pose straight from the manual.

  “Está policía, verdad?” she said. “O DEA?”

  “No está uno o otro, señorita. Está materia privada. Dónde están los muchachos?”

  She giggled, a loopy sound. She didn’t need the stairs. Sh
e could float from one level to the other all on her own. “Who taught you Spanish?”

  “An old friend. Speedy Gonzales was the name.”

  “I don’ know him.”

  “You’ll never get the chance. He broke his neck in a trap at my office sometime between midnight and seven A.M. Boys around?”

  Another giggle. It went straight up my spine. She turned her head an inch toward her left shoulder and yelled. “Domingo! Tíenes un visitante. Un puerco.”

  I had a cigarette in the corner of my mouth and both hands on the matchbook. “You shouldn’t go around calling strangers pigs. Especially when they told you as politely as they could they’re not cops.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “If I were, you’d be halfway to juvie by now, and everyone in this dump over the age of eighteen in County.”

  She spat something in border Spanish I just caught by the back handles. That culture is overconcerned with the mating habits of mothers. “Domingo! Muy pronto!”

  “Why don’t I go up and give him a shake? If he doesn’t get up soon he’ll miss siesta.”

  She rolled a bare shoulder. Her left halter strap slid down her arm. She left it there, switched her hips down the three steps remaining, and put plenty of Spanish on it on her way out the front door.

  I put the cigarette back in the pack and climbed up, unbuttoning my coat and loosening the revolver in its holster. The humming grew louder as I climbed; when I touched the staircase wall to steady myself I could feel the heat generated by all that insect activity.

  It didn’t take a detective to find out which door was Domingo Siete’s. He was snoring loud enough to drown out the bees and loosen the panels. It was unlocked. Resting my hand on the butt nudging my kidney I turned the knob and opened it. I got a faceful of locker-room air overlaid with more marijuana and a Homeric case of morning mouth that had spread to fill the room.