Burning Midnight

by Loren D. Estleman

  “It was too open. I didn’t know who might see me, a cop or somebody, maybe one of the guys from the rooster place or the truck, so I hit the dirt. I thought I’d wait for dark, but it was a long time coming. I don’t know how long I was there before I made up my mind to jump up and take my chances. I’m pretty good on my feet; I tried out for track, made the scrub team. But then I heard sirens and I figured somebody had spotted me and they were coming for me, so I stayed put, until—”

  “I was there for the rest,” I said. “What else did you hear besides sirens?”

  “I don’t know, city noises. I didn’t hear a gunshot, if that’s what you’re getting at. I didn’t know about what happened in that place till you told me.”

  I didn’t know if I believed him, but our time was almost up. “What do you remember about the truck? I’m not asking about spoilers and mud flaps.”

  “It was a truck. Big and square. Not a semi; the cab and the box were in one piece. It was old. There was rust on the fenders. I can’t tell you what kind it was, the year it was made. I don’t know much about cars and like that.”

  “Any markings?”

  “No. I mean, no words. Some scraps of paint still on the box. Some kind of picture. Balloons? Red and blue and yellow.”

  “Sounds like a lot of truck just for balloons.”

  “I’m telling you what I saw.”

  “How many in the cab?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t see on account of the angle.”

  Someone knocked on the door. “You have to go, Mr. Walker.” It was Chata’s voice. “He needs to clean up and rest. Mr. Buho’s coming for him at seven A.M.”

  I leaned in close and dropped my voice. “Tell it to the police the same way you told it to me. Don’t embellish. If they think you lied about one thing they’ll assume you lied about everything else. You may think you’re pretty good about keeping things from your sister and your brother-in-law, but they want to believe you. Don’t count on that with Jerry’s father. Cops aren’t related to anyone when they’re on the job. They expect lies and they go after them like rat terriers.”

  “Mr. Walker,” Chata said.

  Nesto said nothing. He was staring at his sweaty athletic shoes on the floor. One of them lay on its side.

  I said, “I need to hear an okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  Out in the hall I told Chata, “He’s all yours. Let him leave a light on tonight if he wants.”

  “I’ve never known him to complain about nightmares.”

  “You’d better hope he has them tonight. If he sleeps like a baby after today, you’ve got a young psychopath on your hands.”

  * * *

  I waited until I got home before I called John Alderdyce. He was still in his office in the old precinct house where Homicide had moved to escape the political and physical corruption at 1300.

  “I’ve been calling you all night,” he said. “The only place I didn’t get voice mail was at your house. There it just kept ringing.”

  “My cell turned into a pumpkin.” I told him what Nesto had told me.

  “Why’d he leave the truck out the first time?”

  “I didn’t ask. In his place, not knowing any more than he did, I’d think twice before I ratted out anyone who had access to those roosters.”

  “That’s more than I got from Buho. I don’t get mad at lawyers anymore. It’s like yelling at orange barrels on the highway. But if the boy isn’t here when we open up, I’m calling out the cavalry. I can’t cut him slack the way I could someone else.”

  I’d never heard him explain himself before. “He’ll be there. He didn’t kill anyone. He blushed when I caught him in a lie.”

  “I’ve seen plenty of killers blush. One of ’em embarrassed himself into two consecutive life sentences. What about the fire?”

  “He says he never saw the lighter until Guerrera gave it to him to wave under Zorborón’s nose. I couldn’t get any color out of him on that. It’s a misdemeanor, if you want to make anything of it. I don’t see how you could jack it all the way up to felony arson. It was a prank.”

  “Soaping windows is a prank. No one ever got burned beyond recognition from a prank.”

  “I didn’t say it was smart. But any p.d. could plead it down to a hundred hours of community service.”

  “I’ll make sure he doesn’t know that if he wants to dick around. That balloon story sucks.”

  “Could’ve been something else. He says scraps of paint were all that was left.”

  “I want the truck. I don’t give a damn about the roosters, but whoever took ’em made sure Berdoo and Django didn’t tell anyone where it went or who sent it.”

  “Whoever it was wasn’t covering up a cockfighting ring. It’s connected with the Zorborón kill.”

  “The chief wants this one over. Last thing we need is a zoot suit riot.”

  “He said that?”

  “He’s a student of criminal history. That’s who’s running things now. Job’s too cerebral for a cop.”

  The conversation was losing steam. We ended it.

  I went on sitting in the armchair until my leg began to seize up. It was trying to pass a baseball through the big artery. A drink would help, but I needed to put something in my stomach for it to sit on. In the little kitchen I found a slice of cheese and half a loaf of bread. I never got the twist tie off. I was going for the phone when it rang. It was Alderdyce, who’d figured out the same thing I had, and without the visual aid.

  * * *

  It’s a big old wreck of a building now, in a city overcrowded with derelict structures, but for decades it had provided most of the bread for America’s breakfast toast and peanut butter sandwiches. “Helps build strong bodies twelve ways,” the slogan said; it’s hardwired into every baby boomer’s memory, along with the Lord’s Prayer and the theme from Gilligan’s Island. It was all white bread then, the dough whipped and pureed to eliminate all those unsightly holes and turn it into library paste between your molars. The steel stencil sign that had greeted visitors driving down the John Lodge Expressway—greeted them backward, because when it was placed there, most of the motorists entered the city through surface streets running in the opposite direction—had been taken down when the Motor City Casino moved in, but now that that enterprise had decamped for a building of its own construction, even the neon replacement had vanished. The signs had contributed most of its charm.

  There was no sane reason for me to visit the factory. I don’t believe in psychic aura. But I thought rearranging my regular route to the office in order to drive past it might bring inspiration.

  It didn’t. The fleet of trucks Wonder Bread had employed to deliver its goods was gone, sold for scrap or to community libraries for bargain prices or donated outright to them for conversion into bookmobiles. The big square boxes, with no partitions separating them from the drivers, lent themselves to shelving half a mile of books for borrowing by rural and small-town residents who had no libraries within easy traveling distance.

  But bookmobiles have gone the way of the Detroit bread factory. Expressways have made driving more convenient, and the district library system has made it possible for most communities to designate brick-and-mortar venues for the books to circulate on a rotating basis. There are more places to buy books, too, and Americans prefer to own things rather than bother themselves with returning them. So most of the big diesel dinosaurs have wound up in junkyards and small kitchen appliances and their garage space gone to DVDs and video games.

  Wonder Bread. Helps build strong bodies twelve ways during the formative years. Look for the one with the balloons on the package.

  “Gives us something to look for,” Alderdyce had said the night before when he’d called. “There aren’t many of those old stink-pots left on the road, and the Secretary of State’s office can trace the registrations of those that are. This isn’t for publication,” he added. “The minute the bastards know we’re looking
for it, they’ll drive it straight into Lake St. Clair and jump to Canada.”

  “Not before they stow the cargo. Those roosters are a big investment. One champion’s worth five of those trucks. They need a place big enough to hold them, and it’s got to be a place where the clucking and squawking won’t be heard, or at least make anyone curious. Where they were, nobody much cared. But that was before double murder was involved.”

  “Yeah. Good thing there aren’t many chicken farms in the state of Michigan. We can finish the barn tour before the next census.”

  “Which makes the bread truck that much more important.”

  “Nesto, too. We better hope he’s right and nobody saw him in that alley.”

  * * *

  Every case—if it doesn’t resolve itself in an hour or a day—is like a newspaper maze. You drag your pencil between a pair of promising lines only to run into a dead end and have to start over between a different pair of lines. I’d run out of them. I sat in the office, but I didn’t go back to reorganizing the files. Turning over dead leaves seemed redundant. I waited for something to happen, a bulb to light up above my head or the telephone to ring with a bombshell clue or the captain of a tramp steamer to stagger across the threshold and fall over dead and dump the key to the whole thing on the floor. While I was waiting I called Chata. Ernesto, she said, had left with Buho an hour ago and was still with the police. She’d wanted to accompany them, but the lawyer had said it wasn’t necessary, that she was of more use to herself doing whatever she did at home than stagnating in a waiting room, because there was no way she would be allowed to sit in on the interview, either by the police or by him. Animals in zoos behave differently from animals in the wild and people give different answers when family is present.

  After we finished talking I checked voice mail, but there were no brainstorms there, not even an attempt to sell me a time share in a condo in Florida. I smoked a cigarette, staring at the door and willing it to open. I made sure the buzzer was working. When I got tired of all that I called Alderdyce’s office to find out if the interview was over.

  “We’re holding him for now.” He sounded tired. It wasn’t unusual for him to stay up all night on an investigation that didn’t involve him personally. “Material witness, for his own protection. I think he’s told us everything he knows, but they don’t; whoever they are. You just caught me on my way out. If you want to make yourself useful, meet me across from Holy Redeemer.”

  That stumped me until I remembered what had brought me there last. “Sister Delia’s?”

  “Yeah. Look for the place with fire engines in front of it.”

  SEVENTEEN

  The blaze was far enough along that the fighters were letting it burn. They’d done as much damage as they could with their axes and gushers and shifted their attention to the nearby buildings, spraying the walls and roofs with hoses to prevent them from catching fire. Holy Redeemer, up the street from the scene and across from it, avoided their notice. It might have been standing in a time warp for all it belonged to that fragile neighborhood.

  The storefront hadn’t that advantage, although it was nearly as old. Nothing remained but the iron façade, which was glowing in spots, and whatever was inside that was still feeding the flames. They stretched twenty feet above the caved-in roof, a twisting yellow-and-orange plume pouring black smoke into the overcast and reflecting off a quarter-acre of shattered glass from the plate windows. The engine crews bustled about in gas masks and glow-in-the-dark slickers, boots crunching the broken glass—they sounded like miniature icebreakers—no movements wasted; when a piece of burning goo landed on a coat sleeve and started licking at the resistant material, a firefighter passing by with an extinguisher paused long enough to blow it out like a birthday candle, then moved on. The man wearing the coat flicked two gloved fingers at the visor of his helmet and went in the opposite direction, trailing smoke from the sleeve.

  Alderdyce was in conference with a pair of uniforms and a plainclothesman I didn’t know in a leather trench coat and snap-brim hat, so I strode around the gawkers and approached the acid-green EMS unit parked against the curb. The attendants were trying to talk Sister Delia into letting them load her aboard. She was strapped to a gurney, in no position to make a fight of it, but they couldn’t by law take her anywhere without consent. Her short-haired head, not constrained, shook from side to side.

  “Do I look like I need treatment?” She sounded calmer than she appeared; her eyes were white around the irises in a drawn face with smudges of soot on cheeks and chin. “Get me out of this thing.”

  “You need those burns looked at.” The woman in an attendant’s uniform spoke in a peeved, singsong tone; she’d had this argument before.

  I saw then Delia’s hands were bandaged as far as the wrists.

  “They’re second-degree,” she said.

  “Third.”

  “You want to try for first? We’re not haggling over a used car. I’ve had nurse training. I’ll put Unguentine on them and it won’t cost me twenty-five bucks a smear.”

  “You’re in shock.”

  “You think? It happened somewhere between the time someone lobbed a Molotov cocktail through the window and my clothes caught on fire.”

  The other uniform, a male younger than his partner, said, “A lot of people at the scene of an accident think they’re just fine. Then they collapse after we leave.”

  “Accident? What part of ‘Molotov cocktail’ didn’t you understand? Look, give me a release and I’ll sign it. Just get me out of this Soap Box racer.”

  Alderdyce came over while they were unbuckling the straps. He’d overheard some of the conversation. “You can take the nun out of the Church, but—” He grinned; in his case it was just facial hydraulics.

  “She’s not a nun,” I said. “She’s St. Joan at the head of the hundred-and-first airborne. What’s the story?”

  “First responder got everything out of her before EMS showed up. She was working, she says, didn’t hear or see anything before the bottle came through the window, and after that she was busy putting herself out. What was that you said about the Maldados taking on the leaders of the community?”

  “I was spitballing. A crackpot theory’s better than none. Someone keyed the sister’s car, someone set a match to El Tigre’s garage. Draw a triangle anywhere on the city map, you’ll find two of the same or worse.”

  “It’s worse. Arson squad’s got witnesses—to the fire, not how it started. Nobody saw anybody, but based on how fast the place went up, some new kind of accelerant was used, three–four times more volatile than high octane. I can’t pronounce it, but according to them if she’d been sitting in her usual place, she’d be giving God an earful instead of those attendants.” He turned Delia’s way. She was free now, sitting on the edge of the gurney rubbing circulation back into her arms. The bandages looked worse than the injury. The pain of severe burns would be settling in and she wouldn’t be so concerned with where her blood was in her body.

  I put a hand on the inspector’s arm. “Give me first crack. She didn’t leave the Church because she’s a fan of authority.”

  “That’d be like preaching to the converted. Have at her. She already thinks King Herod was the chief of the Jerusalem Police.” He left to greet the fire marshal, who was just unfolding his six-feet-four from the front seat of the snazzy red station wagon he rode in during parades.

  “I thought the lake of fire was for nonbelievers,” I told Sister Delia.

  She looked up at me, shielding her eyes against the sun with a bandaged hand. “The wanderer in the wilderness,” she said. “Chasing fire engines now?”

  “Just wandering. Town’s running out of landmarks.”

  “I don’t care so much about the building. This place is full of empty storefronts; if we could figure out how to export them, we’d be back on our feet in a year. I can’t reconstruct those files. There are people who need help and people in a position to help them, and their names we
nt up with the internal and external hard drives and the papers. I had them all in one place. Talk about blind faith.”

  The female attendant cleared her throat. “You need to take this conference someplace else. The gurney’s for patients.”

  I offered Delia the crook of my arm. She grabbed for it automatically with a hand, drew her breath in sharply between her teeth, and hooked her arm in it instead. I exerted very little pressure and she was on her feet. She’s nearly as tall as I am, and strung with steel wire.

  We crossed the street away from the emergency traffic and sat on the steps of Holy Redeemer. She looked at her hands. “I’ve never been vain about my nails, that kind of thing. I took it all for granted. I hope there’s no scarring.”

  I took one hand gently, peeled back adhesive tape and folded back gauze. “Blisters is all. Your mother was right: Put butter on them and leave ’em alone.”

  “My mother was a Holy Roller; she only pretended to convert. She threatened to disinherit me when I got my hair cut.”

  “You’re running out of churches to drop out of. What happened in there?” I tilted my head toward the burning building.

  “I didn’t see it. I was writing genteel blackmail letters to prospective donors and got up to get some envelopes from the supply closet. They tell me if I hadn’t done that”—she shrugged—“anyway, the front window crashed and the place was in flames. I tried to get to the desk to salvage what I could. That’s when my blouse caught on fire.” She plucked at a sleeve where the material had been cut away by the paramedics. “It fused to the flesh. Natural fabrics for me from now on.”

  “How many people know when you’re in the office?”

  “Only everybody in the neighborhood. But I’m not important enough to murder.”