Burning Midnight

by Loren D. Estleman

  He pointed at the rubber tube on the floor for the benefit of a CSI man, a tub with gold rings in both ears who said, “Thanks, Inspector. What should I look for on it?”

  “Fuck you.” To me: “We’ve been tracking black tar for a couple of years. I thought we might have a little more time. It was in Toledo last month, but Detroit’s a depressed market; a dime bag of pot is primo stuff here, so why waste dynamite? In Chicago the junkies are dropping like turds. Who do you like for it?”

  I said, “Who’s to like? There’s the paraphernalia, all inside his reach.”

  “Go ahead, play dumb. Waste my time.”

  I put a cigarette in my mouth, then peeled it off my dry lip and stuck it back in the pack. I couldn’t seem to work up a mouthful of saliva. “Okay. The fire makes it not accidental. Whoever shot him up planted the bomb to cheat the coroner out of his autopsy fee and make it look like Siete miscalculated his own Roman candle. That would get the firebug off the hook for Sister Delia. Lucky I came along, huh?”

  “You’re going to charge me for that suit, aren’t you?”

  “I haven’t decided. I go through them like Kleenex.”

  “Just what brought you here?”

  “I was hoping for Luís Guerrera. If it was old-school Zaps who torched Delia’s, he might’ve had a line on them, if only to keep his gang from another police sweep.”

  Alderdyce peeled a braid of cobweb clinging to the lapel of his gray worsted and flicked it to the floor. The maid hadn’t been around for a couple of decades. “I like Guerrera. I like him a lot. With Domingo out of the picture, the Maldados are all his.”

  “They were his anyway. The piece of meat on the bed lost interest when he found dope. If anything, El Hermano preferred to drive from the passenger’s side and let Siete take the heat. As it were.”

  “He wasn’t fooling us.”

  “These boys aren’t afraid of cops. They just don’t like interruptions.”

  “I think I’ll let the APB on him ride just the same. If it’s okay with you.”

  “Okay, grouch.”

  “I’m a little out of sorts. The chief wants Mexicantown out of the headlines, and I’m spending more time here than the locals. I don’t even like burritos. What’d you get from Charla?”

  “Turns out anyone with a semester in chemistry can mix up the kind of accelerant that’s been going around. That narrows down the suspects to every high school and college yearbook in three counties.”

  “Why stop at three? Gimme one of those plant spikes you smoke.”

  I found a fresh one and lit him up.

  “Inspector, you mind? I’d like the use of my lungs another forty years.” The CSI scowled up at him from his tackle box.

  Alderdyce blew a bitter stream at the missing window and led the way out. On the front porch he said, “Jesus, I hate those twits and their ’tude. When are they going to cancel those TV shows?”

  I dragged in secondhand smoke from his cigarette and coughed. My throat was as dry as my lips, with tremors in my hands to boot. Near-death experiences are always worse after the thrill is over. “I’m hoping they bring one to Detroit so I can play a cadaver.”

  “You almost got your wish. Those bottle bombs aren’t kid stuff. Nothing like making demolition easy for anyone with a Kroger card.”

  “They take a lot of the grunt work out of Molotov cocktails. You don’t even have to throw them, or be around when they go off.”

  Right away I regretted saying it; but he wasn’t paying attention, watching crowd control and looking for something else to criticize. The unworthy thought was still in my head, and I wasn’t going to get rid of it until I did something about it all by myself.

  * * *

  That could wait. I couldn’t remember when I’d eaten last, but my stomach was keeping track of the time.

  My car was hemmed in by police cruisers and lab vans, so I walked to La Riata. I took off my coat, inspected my shirtsleeve for burns and didn’t find any. I carried the coat and when I got a table I folded and stashed it on the chair opposite to keep the smell of char from interfering with my meal. It was too early for the Anglo crowd in Zorborón’s restaurant, but half the tables were occupied by locals, some of them discussing the rumor of Domingo Siete’s death in English and Spanish. Nolo Suiz, El Tigre’s surly cousin, was nowhere in sight. I remembered Zorborón was being buried that day. A pretty Hispanic waitress with red eyes and nose brought me a sizzling plate of fajitas with a hill of rice and a bottle of Dos Equis. I guessed she was in mourning and that Suiz had been too cheap to give her time off to attend the funeral.

  The piped-in music was syrupy with strings and the male vocalist sounded like his heart was breaking. I could take the CD home if I asked the waitress to add it to my bill.

  I ate too fast. I was more tired than I was hungry and wanted to be home. I left a fat tip, feeling like a sucker; for all I knew she was crying over the death of a treasured cat. With a full belly and the beginnings of a four-alarm case of heartburn I went back to the car, found it free of obstacles, and drove home, belching into the slipstream. The house smelled musty from being closed up in high humidity and the air was hotter inside than out. I opened windows and set a fan in one to move the atmosphere around.

  I drank another beer to tamp down the heat in my chest and watched a news report of the funeral at Holy Redeemer. A monster chain of limos and low-riders followed the casket to the Catholic cemetery, with here and there an unmarked Crown Victoria full of plainclothes police officers taking pictures of the attendees. I couldn’t pick out Emiliano Zorborón’s daughter among the mourners, but she’d be a woman now with kids in tow, and there were plenty of those present, draped in heavy black veils with diaper bags slung from their shoulders, Dora the Explorer adrift among the weeds. Half the Mexican underworld had turned out to pay respect, but the youngest of them was middle-aged, and the oldest were on oxygen and casting their sad black-olive eyes around for comfortable-looking plots. I could feel the world beginning to turn under their feet; mine too. I looked for Luis Guerrera, not expecting to see him and not disappointed when I didn’t. By now he’d know what took place at the old mission and was smart enough to guess the dragnet was out. The reporter the station had sent—one of those pretty quasi-masculine faces Louis Pearman found no use for—had a lot to say about the passing of the old guard.

  Back at the station, the first official reports of Siete’s death and the fire were just coming in; there was nothing I didn’t already know and very little that I did. The funeral reporter was in for overtime. He was in the neighborhood, and even the media was feeling the crunch from Wall Street and the rising price of fuel.

  The mood in the newsroom lightened considerably when the meteorologist started monkeying with his maps. An amorphous green cold front was locked in deadly combat with a globular red cold front from Alberta, whatever that meant; the explanation left me more ignorant than I had been at the start, and I had serious problems with the color coding. The official thermometer at Metro Airport had climbed to eighty-one, not quite the record but making it the warmest March in a couple of years.

  Next morning it snowed.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I remembered something from a long time ago. At first I thought it was a dream, because I was in bed and hadn’t been thinking of anything remotely connected when it came hurtling back in vivid detail. But it was too linear. You always have to rearrange the parts of a dream in order to take it in later, like cards in a hand of poker.

  It was one of those episodes you knew were important for some reason, but stored away for another time, like a book that needed concentration or a movie you stopped watching halfway through the first scene, not because it was bad but because you weren’t in a frame of mind to get everything out of it that went into it.

  Anyway I knew I was awake to the point of awareness but not action. The sheet I’d barely tolerated in last night’s heat was no cover at all now that the bottom had fallen out of false sprin
g, but I couldn’t summon the effort to reach down and pull the cotton blanket over me. So I lay there feeling the chill and thought of something that had happened in Emiliano Zorborón’s garage.

  At the time he’d happened to be committing a misdemeanor, but it had nothing to do with me and by then I had a free pass anywhere in Mexicantown because of a favor I’d done him in connection with another visit. This trip I was just there for local information.

  He nodded at me politely and returned to what he was doing. “Quántos años?”

  It wasn’t my age he was asking. He was examining the rooster on his desk, a cruelly handsome specimen of fighting cock with a comb like a Prussian helmet and the glitter of the undefeated in its eye. It was red and teal and tawny and blue-black, glossy as a showroom Cadillac, and its spurs were as long as switchblades. That last part was breeding, and evidence of possession for illegal purposes. He was holding the bird firmly by the legs.

  “Dos, jefe.” The obvious owner, a sad-faced mestizo with hair sprouting from his ears and the rusty black coat he saved for funerals hanging off his bony shoulders, wore the expression of the born penitent. He wore his hair combed straight down onto his forehead and the calluses on his red raw hands sizzled against one another as he wrung them at his waist.

  “A little more, I think.”

  “Qué?”

  El Tigre smoothed the rooster’s feathers; immediately they sprang forward, forming a ruff around its muscular neck. It tried to peck at his hand, but by then he was gripping it by that neck tightly. He glanced up at the owner wearing the look of Lear in the last act. “Such beauty. What a waste.”

  “Qué?” The owner reversed the positions of his hands and the sizzling resumed.

  “Vea.” Increasing his grip, holding the bird immobile now, he touched its beak with an elegant forefinger. “This groove, it has been placed there with a thin file. A very faint depression. One must know what to look for to see it.”

  The mestizo asked “what” again. It might have been the only word he knew in any language, but the tone had changed slightly. He was deliberately not understanding now. Anyone could see where Zorborón was pointing.

  “As I am sure you are aware, it is standard practice at the beginning of a fight for the owner of each bird to hold its head down to oblige the opposing bird to peck its head, precipitating the aggressiveness required for a satisfactory fight. Roosters are smarter than people and will not harm each other without sound reason.”

  The other man chuckled uncertainly. The lift in Zorborón’s tone and then the pause in conversation seemed to invite something of the kind. I wondered why he insisted on continuing in English.

  “I am equally sure you do not know, being an honest man and unschooled in the ways of the wicked world, that there are some unscrupulous individuals who will attempt to increase the odds in their favor by introducing a drop of poison into grooves such as this. During the belligerent opening ceremony, that poison enters the opponent’s blood stream, causing the bird to drop dead in the course of combat. The effect is delayed, you see; and who after all conducts postmortem on a dumb brute?

  “I know you are unaware of this,” he continued tonelessly, “and that some bastardo has taken advantage of your honorable nature and sold you a tainted bird. Entiende?”

  “Sí, mí jefe.” And I knew then the man had followed every word.

  Zorborón sat back, drawing the rooster onto his lap and stroking its feathers as if it were a cherished pet. The bird made a cooing sort of noise and fixed me with a glitter in its eye I could have sworn was intended for me alone. I felt a vague sense of pity.

  He smoothed its ruff. “Arrogant, foolish creature; he thinks he brings the dawn with his crowing. There is a word for this, yes?” He looked at me.

  “Vainglorious.” I was sorry I’d spoken. I didn’t want to be drawn in.

  “Of course. English is rarely so poetically precise. If I were a rich man,” said The Tiger, “I would yield to my charitable instincts and take this damaged creature off your hands for the price you bought it for—not, I need hardly add, the price you are asking—and see to its destruction, that it will never have the opportunity to bring disgrace to the sport we both love. However, I am not so wealthy. Nolo?”

  Nolo Suiz, who had been hovering in a corner the way he hung in the shadows of La Riata surveying his customers and staff, stepped forward and took the rooster from his cousin’s hands. The bird, disturbed from its cozy perch, flapped its wings once before Suiz wrung its neck with one swift motion of his steel-strung fists. The bird made a short, surprised squawk and hung limply in his grasp.

  Zorborón shook his head, sad as Job. “Such beautiful promise. Such profanity. I shall dispose of this worthless pound of poultry at my own expense. Take this gift I offer and do not enter my presence again.”

  The owner of the dead bird withdrew, his hands still at last.

  * * *

  “You could have put him out to stud,” I’d said.

  The lord of Mexicantown shook his head again and brushed feathers off his lap. We were alone, Suiz having left with the dead rooster dangling by its legs from his fist. “Someone would see it in my possession and leap to an unfortunate conclusion. People are always prepared to think the worst.”

  “I wouldn’t have bet you cared what people think.”

  “Pero sí. My reputation does not belong to me alone. I have responsibilities to my neighbors that require trust. In any case, the bird would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of puercos like that fellow who just left. When I was younger, I would have had his neck wrung as well.”

  He smiled his sad, carefully trimmed smile. “I am not the cynic you might think, who stews in his own bitterness to the point of inaction. My business will not allow it. Now, what can I do for you, my friend?”

  “You can tell me that poison-toting chicken won’t wind up in the pollo pasta in Nolo’s restaurant.”

  * * *

  Such beautiful promise. Such profanity. It meant something, if only I could raise the aristocratic son of a bitch from his grave and ask him. I fell back to sleep with that thought and woke up with it when the alarm went off. Latins are long on romance and short on exposition.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  There was just enough coffee left in the can to make a cup, if I dumped it into the filter and used a Dustbuster to collect the rest. I was plucking lint off the surface of the brew when the telephone pulled me into the living room. It was Chata Pasada. I’d almost forgotten about her, about her brother Nesto, and about her husband Gerald, who hadn’t spoken to his father the police inspector in years. That soap opera had long since turned into an action melodrama.

  “Can you come out?” she asked. “Ernesto has something to tell you.”

  “I’m guessing it’s something he can’t say over the phone.”

  “I’d prefer it that way.”

  I said I’d be there in a half hour and drained my cup, lint and all.

  The drive took a little longer. Snow was falling in big floppy flakes that clung to the windshield like sodden doilies until the wipers slung them aside; they turned the streets to grease and the traffic reports on the radio into breathless commentary on piled-up cars and jackknifed semis. I kept off the expressways, but the plows and salt trucks were out and I poked along behind every last one of them.

  Alderdyce’s son, Jerry, answered the door. He wore a blue denim shirt and scuffed jeans over his athletic frame. I felt overdressed in my second-best suit; but you never know where the day will take you, into a glass palace in West Bloomfield or a restaurant with a dress code. If your subject ducks out all of a sudden, ditching the rented jacket and tie slows you up that much more. You don’t read these things in The Dangerous Boys’ Book of Private Investigation.

  “Working at home?” I asked.

  “I’m taking some personal days,” he said. “I can’t put in eight hours and then come home to this.”

  We were seated in the bright
living room with Jesus on the wall. He was holding a narrow glass with what looked like orange juice in it. When he drank from it I caught a whiff of pure grain alcohol. Whoever invented the screwdriver understood the need for an excuse to drink away the morning.

  I said, “Your father says Nesto passed the lie detector test. The murder part.”

  “I think it’s the other part he wants to talk to you about. That Chata wants him to talk to you about. I’m not sure. They don’t let me in on everything. These old Spanish families lock up their secrets and don’t let any extra keys float around.”

  “You don’t have to be Spanish for that.”

  He gave me one of his father’s looks, up from under the granite outcrop of his brow. “You think I should talk to my father, clear the air, that it?”

  “Did I say that? I must not have been listening to myself.”

  “Maybe he should be the one to make the first move.”

  “I thought I was here to talk to Nesto.”

  He didn’t hear me. “You don’t know what it’s like being John Alderdyce’s son. There’s no one else I can share that experience with.”

  “No one except your brother.”

  “Him less than anyone. They always got along. I might’ve been dumped here from a spaceship for all we have in common. Maybe there’s something in that.”

  “Probably not. What would be the point of a black alien?”

  He raised his glass, looked down inside it. “I’m becoming a lush. You think that’ll give us a stronger bond?”

  “I’ve never seen your father drunk.”

  “You didn’t live with him, see how he was after a tough tour. He never abused us, drunk or sober, I didn’t mean it was anything like that. In fact, I think he was tougher on me when he wasn’t drinking. I just wasn’t used to seeing him not in control. Anyway I hear he doesn’t hit the stuff hard anymore. Mom said.”

  “Maybe you should go out and get drunk together.”

  “That might make it easier.”

  I got irritated. “I was kidding. Am I wearing a collar? Talk to your wife’s priest.”