Burning Midnight

by Loren D. Estleman

  Buho looked up at me from behind the detritus in what might have been the same powder-blue suit and perfectly knotted bow tie. He looked as astonished as ever. I might have been his first client.

  “Is it the boy?” he opened. “I thought he’d be safer at home. I am frequently wrong.”

  I said, “Then you shouldn’t be giving advice. He’s fine, so far as I know. It’s your other clients I came to talk to you about.”

  “Naturally, I am constrained by the bonds of my profession. Within those bonds, I am at your service.”

  I moved a stack of torts or whatever they were from a tired desk chair on the customer’s side to the floor and dropped the old bones onto vinyl. I was still jumpy from the wrestling match with prescription drugs. “Someone torched Sister Delia’s place of business yesterday. You probably heard about it.”

  “I am as well informed as anyone who owns a television or reads the newspapers. I do not know the lady, but I am aware of her. She refused treatment, I understand. I hope this means she is as well as can be expected.”

  “That’s got to be the most self-contained phrase in the language. It answers its own question.”

  “You are free to say so. I am not, because I speak it with a foreign accent. No matter that my family has been speaking it since before the War of 1812. But we were discussing Sister Delia.”

  “She won’t be playing the violin any time soon, but I’m more interested in who torched the place. Any arsonists in your Rolodex?”

  “I see.” He sat back and set fire to one of his torpedoes. That law was running into more trouble than Prohibition. “All of my clients are innocent until proven guilty. Since it is my job to see that they are not, I can hardly answer that question as framed.”

  “Not bad. It’s no no hablo inglés, but I guess we’ve moved on from that. I’m not asking you to betray any confidences. I can go to the record and find out who you represented in cases of arson, but there’s a fee involved. I’m trying to keep the expenses down on this job.”

  He blew an imperfect smoke ring—I was pretty sure he could blow a perfect one any time he liked—and frowned at the finished product. He was a man who would step out of character if you punched him in the throat. “The person you wish to see is named Miguel Ortiz: Mike the Match, some Anglos call him. He served two years in Marquette for setting fire to a bar in West Bloomfield: Something about an outside partnership that could be made profitable only by an astounding claim on a fire insurance policy. I was not the attorney of record, or it could have been pled down to malicious destruction of private property. Patience costs nothing, but certain of my colleagues behave as if it came at fifty dollars the pound.”

  I said, “I’m beginning to see their point.”

  “Then I shall come to mine. I represented Señor Ortiz in another matter which is still pending. You understand that I cannot go into detail.”

  “Why him?”

  “It is the only case of arson I have handled. I dislike the crime. The effects are too random. You will find him in a halfway house in Iroquois Heights; he is in the process of parole on the West Bloomfield business. The prosecution is of the opinion that he employed his furlough in a manner not endorsed by the board. Do you suspect him for the fire that put Sister Delia on the street?”

  “Not until just now.” I got out my notepad and put it on top of the mess on the desk. “The address of the halfway house, please. It’s just an interview. He doesn’t have to know who gave me directions.”

  “You may name me or not. The whereabouts of a client are not in this case a question of confidence.” He produced a fat green fountain pen from an inside pocket and scribbled on the first blank page he came to. His wide-open eyes scrolled down the notations on the way there. “You have an intriguing shorthand. I doubt an experienced detective could make it out without the key to the code.”

  “My own invention, coupled with bad handwriting. I can’t figure it out myself if I don’t transcribe it onto a scratch pad five minutes after I wrote it.”

  “You’re a careful man. Careful enough to obfuscate your caution with a show of—how do you put it in your ingenious language?—improvisation. You’ve more of a professional frame of mind than you pretend.”

  “Yeah. You wouldn’t know anything about that. Gracias, Señor Buho.” I took back the pad. “How’s Nesto?”

  “You tell me. Your Inspector Alderdyce has him under constant surveillance. I myself cannot afford to spend so much time on one charge.” He blew a jet of blue-gray smoke past my shoulder, waving a hand at it to deflect it from my nostrils. A polite man, Buho. “You do not like me.”

  “Must I?”

  “It is of no consequence. Recently I addressed a meeting of local attorneys. In search of a light beginning, I sought a quotation about lawyers that was complimentary to the profession. I spent many hours with Bartlett’s and on the Internet in this pursuit.”

  “How’d that work out?”

  “I spoke of recent Supreme Court decisions. Mine is a thankless service.”

  “Lawyers are okay in my book. I get most of my work through them.”

  “But you wouldn’t want your sister to marry one.”

  “I’m an only child.” I stood. “Thank you again, Mr. Buho.”

  “De nada.” He squashed out his butt in an Indian pottery bowl and sat back without offering his hand.

  TRES

  Law of Flight

  NINETEEN

  I was still shaky in the joints when I drove away from Mexicantown. My nerves lay right on the surface. The vibration of the engine stung the soles of my feet on the pedals and the palms of my hands on the wheel. I’d known I wasn’t cured, that I couldn’t pop a single Vicodin when my head hurt without spilling back down into the deep well I’d spent months climbing out of, but no one had told me it could come back on me right out of the blue, like the stuff Jekyll drank. Maybe someone had; if you paid attention to the disclaimers at the end of the prescription-drug ads, you’d learn to live with your condition instead of taking something that duplicated all the symptoms you’d taken the drug to get rid of in the first place.

  Iroquois Heights. It isn’t particularly high and they ran out the Indians when knee breeches were still in style. In the Old West they’d have called the place Perdition or Purgatory; the pioneers were candid if not always honest. It was the kind of town the hotshot gunfighter rode into to do the job the locals hadn’t the sand for, then had the good sense to ride out of before it fell back into the same bad habits he’d found when he came. Gary Cooper didn’t go back to Hadleyville, nor Lot to Gomorrah, but it was my fate to cross the Iroquois Heights city limits ever and again until I found my salvation.

  I serpentined my way through the new downtown, with curbs laid out as jaggedly as a drift fence and clever tree plantings that when the leaves filled out would cover the speed limit signs—15 mph, ten lower than the average, to snag the unwary—and up the gentle elevation toward the old industrial district. Earth movers were spreading soil like spackle over a hundred years of lead and cyanide leeched from the foundries and coke ovens where a sign advertised the future site of Ottawa Lodge Estates: IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME.

  Miguel Ortiz sounded like a made-up name. Mike the Match was straight out of Dick Tracy. I had no reason to distrust Buho more than any other lawyer, but first-class arsonists didn’t leave evidence behind that would put them in need of good legal help; the very evidence required to identify and convict them went up in the act of their crime. Either this one was careless enough to do something rash when I braced him or he was incompetent enough to make the kind of mistake that got me killed.

  The halfway house, on West Tecumseh, was a venerable building with no charm built into it, and age hadn’t corrected the oversight. It had “transient hotel” scribbled all over it. It was four stories built Lego fashion, block on cement block, sided with tiles that had been white once but now looked like neglected teeth. The city would have scooped it up for
back taxes, hoping to sell it to a casino chain or for the detective squad to interview prisoners it didn’t want to be photographed entering the police station on account of what they looked like in photographs coming back out. But casino owners shop around for sweetheart deals, not graft, and a reform movement had put the police department on its good behavior until the movement lost steam and the same old city officials were shuffled around into different positions like a repertory company. But bad actors are just as bad in fresh roles.

  After that the place would have stood empty for a few years, attracting the homeless and traffic in controlled substances and contributing to sexually transmitted disease, until the governor decided to cut costs by emptying out the prisons. That meant shuttling the more serious felons into cooling towers, and state funds directed to communities willing to board them during the transition to responsible citizenship; in other times a place like the Heights would have distributed the money among its various pockets, then piled the wards of the state into the wagon on release and dumped them out on some rural road across the county line. But for the moment at least the world was watching.

  The front door wasn’t locked, but I passed through a metal detector on the way through, without tripping it; I’d had the foresight to lock the Chief’s Special in the car. The old institutional smell of must and disinfectant greeted me on the other side, also an alert-looking woman sitting on a tall stool behind the former registration desk. She had red hair harvested close to the scalp and the build of Rosy the Riveter. Her blouse was plain, but a prison matron doesn’t need the uniform to tell you who she is. She frowned as if I’d put something past the detector and asked what I wanted.

  “Miguel Ortiz.” I showed her my ID, folding back the half of the wallet with the star pinned to it so it was out of sight. It wouldn’t have impressed her other than unfavorably.

  As a matter of fact it didn’t impress her at all. “I’ve got one of those, too,” she said. “Can’t swing the country club on what I make here. Who’s the bankroll?”

  “Actually, I’m the client. Rafael Buho, Attorney-at-Law. He represents Ortiz, too. That makes us brothers.”

  “I doubt it.” Nuance was lost on this woman with freckled muscular forearms and no jewelry of any kind. “What’s the interest?”

  “I want to ask him a couple of questions about an arson.”

  “When?”

  “Right now, if it’s convenient.”

  “I meant when was the arson.”

  “Yesterday afternoon.”

  The desk was in a cubicle partitioned off from the rest of the old lobby by heavy pine, with only a door at the side and the opening through which we were communicating providing access to the rest of the building. She took a clipboard off a nail on the wall at one end of the desk and paged back through it, drew a spatulated finger down a column until she found what she wanted. “Uh-uh.”

  “‘Uh-uh’ means what?” I thought she was turning me away.

  “He checked out two hours yesterday morning to attend Mass—we have to let them do that—but was back here by noon. No one checked him out after that.”

  “Anybody go with him?”

  “An attendant. They’re to stay with them the whole time they’re out.”

  “Must’ve been crowded in the confession booth.”

  “Can’t do that, but last time I looked, St. Ambrose hadn’t installed any trap doors.”

  “All the same I want to talk to him.”

  “Buho, you said?” When I confirmed it she consulted another sheet, and with her finger planted on it she lifted a gray telephone receiver and dialed a number. She spoke with Buho briefly, then hung up and paged Ortiz over a prewar PA mike. “Have a seat.”

  “Had one already, thanks.”

  She didn’t care for that, but then she picked up a puzzle book folded to a page near the middle, retrieved a sharpened pencil from behind her right ear, and after that I didn’t exist. I’d barely been there to begin with.

  I’m an expert on waiting rooms. At the high end there is the showy front, with tufted leather chairs like in a cigar bar, swanky magazines on smoked-glass tables, black-and-white blowup photos of watchworks and steel girders in sleek frames on the walls, and a carpet you wade across to a curvy desk with a curvy receptionist behind it who is as expensive to maintain as an Italian convertible. There might be a lot of gaudy fish swimming inside a glass tank the size of an elevator car. A decorating team was involved in the creation, and odds were the room where the clients’ assistants originally waited to meet the team was the model. In the broad middle is the charmless chamber with airport seating, coffee rendering in a maker next to a stack of Styrofoam cups, thumb-smeared copies of People and Time long past their expiration dates, and a talking head on a flat-screen TV for company. At the low end lurks a grubby way station with nothing to read because most of the clientele doesn’t know Moby Dick from Moby, metal folding chairs that put your fanny to sleep after ten minutes, and a smell of boiling cabbage solid enough to bark a shin against. In the old days it came equipped with tarnished spittoons and smoking stands rounded over with White Owl stubs and unfiltered Camels and smelled like a building that had burned to the ground. This one still smelled a little like that.

  The first example stands outside places where bankers do business with bankers, cosmetic surgeons sit behind black volcanic glass talking about staples and rhinoplasty, and architects plan shopping malls. The second is where every automobile owner in America waits to hear if his problem is a faulty CHECK ENGINE light or a two-thousand-dollar overhaul, where visitors talk in low voices and hope Mom’s trip to the ER came with a return ticket, and where customers sit with accounting books and boxes of crumpled receipts on their laps wishing they hadn’t claimed their French poodle as a dependent, because unless the examiner is flexible, the next waiting room they use will be the third one, at the bottom: a desperate place populated with parolees, patients claiming slipped disks and sciatica but who are really there for the muscle relaxants, and people who have worn out their credit with every loan officer who doesn’t double all his negatives and use a blackjack for a paperweight. That one is hell’s waiting room and the time there is measured by the passage of the constellations.

  The room I walked around, looking at the necessary licenses framed on the painted-partition walls, hovered somewhere between the middle and the low end. The folding chairs were metal, but there were some Reader’s Digests curling at the corners in a heap on a low round yellow table that might have been where kids played with toys in a dentist’s office and the smell was mostly secondhand instant coffee and old cigarettes. I tapped on the glass of an ant farm—some former penal director’s idea of entertainment for the visitors—trying to raise the ants from the dead, and added the room to my collection.

  “Here he is.” The gargoyle behind the desk was looking up at something mounted inside the frame that enclosed her station; a monitor, probably. “Do not pass anything to the resident. Do not shake hands with the resident or make any other physical contact. Make sure both you and the resident remain in my field of vision at all times. Do not at any time block my view of the resident. Understand all that?”

  “I’ve been to halfway houses before.”

  “Lovely. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah.”

  She reached under the desk. Something buzzed and the inside door opened.

  I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t what I got. Miguel Ortiz looked like a Spaniard on both sides of his family, with black eyes straddling a strong, straight nose, a long upper lip, and a face that seemed even longer than it was with his hair receding toward the crown. He reminded me of a picture I’d seen of Picasso in middle age, fierce and aware and better than the place he was in. He was a solid six feet and two hundred pounds in a Polynesian print shirt exposing powerful forearms with the square tail hanging outside beige flannel slacks; no County jumpsuits on the way back into the general population, only on the way out. His
shoes were Hush Puppies, easy on the feet after the stiff institutional jobs they made in the prison shop.

  I told him my name and invited him to sit.

  He didn’t stir, standing there with his hands crossed at his waist. “All I do all day is sit.”

  His accent was Castilian. That together with what I’d seen of him so far sent my plan of approach out the window. You can browbeat a mestizo, but a purebred Iberian will just stare you down. For sure his wasn’t the faceless figure in the video behind Zorborón’s garage.

  But a man’s work inevitably leaves its mark. In his case, it was literal: an angry puckered red patch shaped like a salamander branding the left side of his face from just below the ear to the corner of his jaw, tightening the flesh and pulling at the corner of his lips on that side. It might have been a strawberry mark, but it wasn’t. A man who can make a mistake with the tools of his profession is a man you can get ahead of.

  “I’m investigating an arson at Sister Delia’s office yesterday,” I said.

  “You’re with the police?”

  “Private.”

  “So I don’t have to tell you anything.”

  “I just cleared you at the desk. I’m here to consult you, not grill you. The cops think a super accelerant was used, faster and hotter than anything on the open market. Any suggestion as to what it was?”

  “What’s my end?”

  “Civic responsibility.”

  He seemed to smile, but that was just the dead nerves freezing his mouth at one corner.