“Who is he?”
“Donald Gates. Thirty-eight. We scraped him out of his basement New Year’s Day, shot twice in the head.”
“Drug killing?”
“If he was pushing, he was craftier than any dealer I ever heard of. No sign of drugs on the premises, nothing showed up at the autopsy. I had to bet? No. No out-of-the-ordinary deposits or withdrawals in his banking records, no history of gambling. The only one he owed money to was his mortgage lender, and he was on top of his payments. Anyway Fifth Third isn’t employing strong-arms this year.”
“What’s the status?”
“We’re following up on some promising leads.”
“I’m not a reporter, Lieutenant.”
“Okay. We’re tapped out. Average Joe, by all accounts: not rich, not important, stay-at-home wife, one-point-five kids, a few friends, fewer enemies, and they’re all accounted for. Robbery’s out; wife found nothing missing.”
“Where’d he work?”
“City of Iroquois Heights. Maintained the computer that operates the traffic lights.”
“Maybe somebody got stuck at a red and took it out on him.”
“I’ve heard stupider reasons. The last person to see him was the guard in the building where they keep the mainframe. He told his fellow workers he was going home to change, then join his wife at some friends’ New Year’s Eve party. When he didn’t show and didn’t answer his cell or the phone at home, she went there and found him in the rec room in the basement. Two nine-millimeter slugs behind the right ear.” He pointed a finger at the spot behind his and waggled his thumb twice.
“And I come into this how?”
He leaned back against his workbench, crossing his arms. “Legwork. His wife thinks we’re dragging our feet, hoping the case will go away; that’s why the billboards. She’s thinking of the wrong cops, but I guess I can’t blame her for that based on past history. Gates’s life insurance is footing the bill probably. The local press picked it up and put it out on the wire. It’s national now.”
“No surprise. It’s a catchy line.”
“Yeah. So now we’re getting calls from all over the country on top of the tips we always get locally, on top of all the routine meshuga that goes with a homicide investigation. They all have to be run down, and I’ve only got fifteen deputies to do the running.”
I crushed out my cigarette on the concrete floor. “I don’t like where this is going.”
“Maybe you’ve got something better to do.”
“Maybe you know more about what rock I’ve been under than you made out.”
“My old partner is deputy chief in Highland Park. He made the call to stick you in rehab instead of the county lockup. We go out for a beer now and then. Listen, if you’re not up to it—”
“Leave that reverse-psyche stuff to the shrinks. What can I do that fifteen men good and true can’t?”
“It isn’t that they can’t. I need people to answer the phones and sift through the evidence and stay on top of the state cops to report on DNA before another New Year’s rolls around, and refill the coffeemaker.” He straightened up, opened a drawer in a rolling toolbox, and took out a green file folder stamped PROPERTY I.H.P.D.; the new management hadn’t had time to change the name on all the stationery.
I took the folder, flipped it open, and looked at three pages of telephone numbers.
“You want me to run down all the tips?”
“The U.S. Army couldn’t run them all down by summer. Those are just the ones that came without names.”
“Anonymous tips come with phone numbers?”
“Thanks to caller ID. Don’t let it get around. If people find out it’s all Kris Kringle and Peter Cottontail, they’ll stop calling. Once in a couple of hundred times it pays off.”
“This is where I ask what’s in it for me.”
“A deputy’s salary. And something you’ve never had before: the good will of the authorities in Iroquois Heights.”
I riffled the rest of the papers in the folder. There were at least thirty pages, including a copy of the original complaint, information based on notes taken by the responding deputies, and progress reports.
I snapped it shut. “Nosy neighbors, gossip addicts, cranks, pranksters, axe-grinders, attention hounds, and fruitcakes. Thanks for the job, Lieutenant.”
“Throw fortune hunters into the mix. The church the Gateses attended is offering ten thousand dollars for information leading to a conviction.”
“I knew something was missing.”
“Now raise your right hand.”
I looked, but there was no sign of humor on the chiseled face. “I hope we’re getting ready to say the pledge of allegiance.”
“No such luck. I can’t justify paying department wages to a private op. It’s against regulations to give those reports to a civilian. It’s still dicey this way, but swearing you in gives me something to say in my defense at the hearing. I’m not issuing you a shield, and that honorary star you break the law with every time you flash it belongs to the wrong county. Leave it home.”
I wondered how he knew about that.
“Do I get a whistle?”
“Just raise your right hand.”
When that was done, he opened another drawer and gave me a portable tape player. “It’s a two-hour tape. The calls were recorded in the order the numbers are listed. There’s a sheet with names and addresses in the folder, taken from a reverse directory. Which ones you follow up on is up to you. The comedians and nutcases generally give themselves away, but not always; which is why I decided to put a trained detective on this detail. The ones I have are too busy pulling Gates’s life apart and putting it back together.
“I’m only giving you the details of the case so you can separate the wheat from the chaff. Don’t interview any other witnesses, stay away from the wife, and don’t tell anyone you’re a deputy. My neck’s stuck out far enough as it is.”
“What do I tell the callers when they ask where I got their number?”
He smiled. “That’s why I gave the job to an outsider. You’re going to take the flack for crooking the system. When it gets out a private snooper found his way into our files, I’ll call a press conference to express official outrage.”
“They can use you in Washington.”
“One more thing. If you put this job on your résumé and anyone checks, you lied.”
“This just keeps getting better and better.”
He stopped smiling. “I can’t turn it down, but you can. Nobody’d blame you.”
I stuck the folder under my arm. “It’s either this or a gig at the Eureka Cyber School of Criminal Science.”
“Thanks, Amos.”
Both my arms were occupied, so I got away from there without any more pulverized bones in my fingers.
Outside, I turned my collar up against the cold. Donald Gates smiled at me. It was one of those pictures that follow you around.
THREE
I smoked half a pack in my easy chair, listening to the voices on the tape player, checking off numbers to follow up on and drawing lines through the rejects. There weren’t nearly enough of the last. At midnight I switched off the machine, went to bed, and dreamed I lived in a cubicle, trying to sell storm doors to whoever answered the telephone.
Operator: Sheriff’s tip line. What’s your information?
Caller: Yeah. I know who killed Donald Gates.
Operator: I’m listening.
Caller: Not over the phone. How do I know you won’t just nab the guy and stiff me on the reward?
Operator: Sir, that reward is being offered by Christ Church, not by this department.
Caller: Okay, forget it. I’ll call the church.
Operator: If you’re certain of your information, withholding it from the authorities is a crime.
Caller: You’ll get it after I talk to the church.
He’d hung up then. He had a deep voice with a hint of a twang. I looked up his name on the sheet take
n from the reverse directory: Alvinus C. Adams, 1207 Daniel Boone Drive, Iroquois Heights; a lot of streets got their names from people who fought the Indians the town was named for. It put him a couple of blocks over from the Gateses, a hopeful sign. I finished my morning coffee and dialed the number.
“Hello?” The same voice.
“Mr. Adams? My name is Amos Walker. I’m a private detective.”
“No shit? I thought they went out with black-and-white TV.”
“Not just yet. You called the sheriff’s tip line two weeks ago, claiming to know who killed Donald Gates.”
“Where the hell’d you get that?” he said after a silence. “It’s supposed to be anonymous.”
I’d lain awake much of the night working on an explanation. I’d decided just to duck it.
“How far did you get with Christ Church?”
“What’s it to you?”
“I’m guessing from your attitude you didn’t get far.”
“I didn’t get dick, same as from the law. Why do they set up tip lines and offer rewards if they don’t want the help?”
“If your information’s good, I might be able to help you get half that reward.”
“Who gets the other half, as if I don’t know the answer already?”
I grinned at the empty seat opposite me in the breakfast nook.
“Mr. Adams, that’s the most pointless question I’ve ever been asked. Did you mean what you said about Gates’s murderer?”
“I’ll axe you the same question I axed the bitch at the sheriff’s. What’s to keep you from taking what I give you and keeping the whole thing for yourself?”
“Have you got a pencil?”
“Sure I got a pencil. I just ain’t got a job. That’s why I’m going against ten generations of Adamses and turning stool pigeon. What am I writing?”
I gave him the names and numbers of three references, one of them a congressman who’d served his Michigan district more than thirty years. “Ask them the same thing you asked me. You can believe them or not, but there will be a record you asked, which would make it difficult for me to snipe you out of what you’ve got coming.”
“What’s your name again?”
I repeated it.
“Then again, you could be somebody else saying you’re Walker, and nobody’ll ever know who took that money.”
“You just screw yourself into bed every night, don’t you?”
“I wasn’t born this way, pal.”
“They’d know at Christ Church who took the money. But after you make those calls—and the numbers are easy enough to check, in case you think they belong to accomplices—we’ll meet, and I’ll show you my bona fides. What’ve you got to lose?”
“Not my job, that’s for sure.” He took my numbers, home, office, cell, and the call was over.
* * *
I tried three more numbers from the record, got a recording, no answer, and a harried-sounding woman with children slaughtering each other in the background who told me her husband wouldn’t be home till six. I thanked her and said I’d call then. I didn’t leave my name or any message.
I opened the folder again. Christ Episcopal Church, the Gateses’ place of worship, had stood near downtown Detroit since 1863. Its current pastor was Florence Melville.
My ear was sore from holding the receiver against it. A little face-to-face spirituality is never a bad idea.
When I put the cordless phone back in its cradle in the living room, the card the tough little blond doctor had given me poked out from under the standard. It belonged to a private therapist in Redford Township; but it wasn’t the time to make good on the deal.
The Cutlass’s cold engine turned over twice and caught. On the way to the river I saw another “YOU KNOW WHO KILLED ME!” billboard, Donald Gates smiling in his festive sweater. I might have seen it before, but only through a cloud that still hadn’t quite passed.
The sign didn’t mention the reward, but it was the widow behind the advertising, not the church.
I peeled the cigarette I’d just lit from my lip, wound the window down two inches, and poked it into the slipstream. It had all the flavor of a toothpick. My belly ached and the “Jingle Bells” dogs were barking in my head. You know you’re going to survive when you least feel like it.
I paralleled the chalk-gray water until I got to Rivard and swung into the parking lot next to the old pile.
The churches are almost all that’s left from the days before Henry Ford, and there isn’t much left from those days either. The city is North America’s leading manufacturer of vacant lots. Christ Episcopal has loads of spiked railings for pigeons to curl their toes around and a belfry screaming for bats and plenty of them. It’s probably haunted. All the self-respecting spirits have moved out of city hall.
There was no service in progress. In the echoing nave, a novice or whatever he was stopped pushing his carpet sweeper to direct me to the rectory. I went that way, smelling candle wax, furniture oil, and dust. I’d been raised Episcopalian, but had drifted. It was the first time in many years I felt the urge to genuflect. I resisted; the saints in the alcoves were watching, and they didn’t get there by being gullible. The non-martyrs, anyway.
I needed a battering ram to make sure my knock would be heard on the other side of the rectory door, but after a second a voice called out for me to enter. The door swung open easily on a system of counterweights or something and I eased it shut behind me. The ceiling was high enough to vanish beyond reach of the sunlight coming through the leaded-glass window. Gray as it was, the light was still bright enough to blur the figure sitting at a desk in front of it.
The desk itself resembled a beached Spanish galleon, all beveled panels and carved laurels, with a red leather top. There was plenty of red in that room, in the deep rug framed all around by eight inches of polished floor, in a dim gilt-bordered painting of some bloody biblical battle leaning out from the wall on guy wires, and in a bronze pen stand studded with garnets on the near edge of the desk. Red’s the boss color in the spectrum of the faith. It took me back to the red front door on St. Erasmus, a long time ago.
Erasmus: put to death, they said, by having his intestines unwound from his body by a windlass. I’d let go of just about everything else I’d learned there, but I wasn’t about to forget that.
“Yes?” The woman behind the desk looked up from her writing.
“Reverend Melville?”
“Yes,” she said. “That Melville, in answer to your next question. Unfortunately the copyright on Moby Dick ran out a hundred years before I was born.”
Close up, she was a sturdy brunette with a heart-shaped face and gray eyes behind gold-framed glasses. She wore a white silk blouse with a ruffle and a touch of gloss on her lips; it was a progressive parish, for all its antiquity. A streak of silver started at her hairline to the right of the center part, spreading whisk broom–like for three inches. She wasn’t decrepit; I figured her for early thirties. An old church superstition said that when the Call was genuine, it left just such a mark.
Florence Melville smiled. She’d caught the path of my gaze.
“Yes,” she said again. “Started, no doubt, by a clergyman with the same streak. It’s a birthmark. It goes as far as the scalp, as I found out when I hit my head on a swing when I was nine and they shaved it to patch me up. Back then I was going to be a country singer.”
“I wanted to be Robert Mitchum.”
“You came close.”
“Don’t go by these eyelids. I haven’t been sleeping a lot.”
“Is that what you came to talk about?”
You can spend all day making up your mind or letting it make up itself. I spilled the beans.
“My name’s Walker, ma’am. I’m a private detective, working with the sheriff’s lieutenant in Iroquois Heights on the Gates murder.” I showed her my ID. “I’d appreciate it if that didn’t leave this room. Some of the people I might have to ask questions open up easier when they think they’re
talking to a free agent.”
Her smile went away and a crease of pain split the skin between her eyebrows. “Sit down, please, Mr. Walker.”
I hauled a walnut chair formerly used as a throne by Charlemagne up to the desk and sat. It felt more comfortable than it looked.
The Reverend Melville folded her hands on the yellow pad she’d been scribbling on. “I’ve met Lieutenant Henty. My guess is he’s in favor of keeping your secret.”
“He’s a good cop. Unfortunately, he works for a public servant, whose opponents in the next election would say he couldn’t do his job without outside help. It’s hogwash, but the voters love to watch politicians mud wrestle. Anyway you don’t strike me as someone I can string along with a fish story, and I seem to remember something about priests being good at keeping secrets.”
“Most priests, yes. I can’t name exceptions without becoming one myself. The Gateses were beloved of this congregation. Whenever volunteers were needed, they were in front of the line. Amelie made items for the bake sale and Don donated a thousand dollars toward the new roof three years ago. Both sold candy bars in front of Wal-Mart to support Youth Camp. To go on would be redundant. Can you tell me anything you’ve learned about this vile crime?”
“Sorry, no. I just started, and in theory I’m not working the case except to run down some anonymous phone tips. That way those involved with the actual investigation can concentrate on that instead of—”
“Trivia.” She sat back, deflated.
“I was going to say ‘the minutiae.’ There wouldn’t be a tip line if concerned citizens didn’t shed light sometimes.”
“It helps if there’s profit in it. I’m sure you know about the reward. It was offered by a loyal parishioner who doesn’t want publicity.”
“Then he should button up his pocketbook. Mixing money into a police investigation is like throwing honey on an anthill.”
“May I ask why you’re here, if you’re not really investigating? I’m not one of your anonymous callers.”
I almost said, “I know”; but you can load someone with only so many secrets before she collapses. “Professional hazard. You can’t just nibble at a potato chip.”
You Know Who Killed Me Page 2
