“Not so much an exodus as a migration,” I put in. “Over here, anyway.”
“I guess. Mr. Stackpole is a friend of yours, isn’t he?”
I had to scramble to jump the gap. “Yes.”
“I know by the way you talked about him over the phone. Is he in trouble?”
“I don’t know. Probably. He almost always is. We’re a lot alike that way.”
“I had a brother. The Nazis put him on a train to Poland. I heard about it later. By the time I wanted to help he was gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“They were talking about it on the radio the other day. They call it the Holocaust now. For thirty years it didn’t have a name and now they’ve given it one. I guess that makes it something they can handle. It’s wrong. You can’t give a thing like that a name, like a pet you can make do tricks. It’s a horror without a shape. You try to step back so you can see it all, but there isn’t that much room in the world. It’s too big to call big.”
I agreed by saying nothing.
“Amos,” she said. “A good Old Testament name. He was the shepherd who warned Syria and Palestine of the wrath of God.”
“I’ve heard.”
She looked out through the screen. “‘Hate the evil, and love the good.’ What else? Oh, yes. ‘Let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.’ Are you Jewish, Mr. Walker?”
“No. I was named after ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy.’”
“I didn’t think so.” She refilled our cups. “The name means ‘burden,’ you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, the Bible is like the Talmud. You can make it say what you want.”
My stomach hurt, so I let it ride. She sipped tea and watched the leaves turn.
17
A COUNTY WAGON was skinning away from the curb in front of my building as I cruised past looking for a place to park. With its light off and its sirens still, it made all the noise of embalming fluid filling a vein.
I felt my heart give a little hop. It was like driving home and seeing a column of smoke rising over your neighborhood. I doubled next to an unmarked car I recognized and walked back. Sergeant Grice was just coming out of the building. He had on a yellow shirt like the one I had seen him in at the blind pig, under a red tie and his three-piece. The crinkled flesh on the right side of his face glistened in the sunlight. When he saw me his brows bunched. “You must have a scanner. That, or you’re following me. Which?”
“Neither. This is my building. Who’s dead?”
“A connoisseur of the grape that called himself Willy, according to the super. We probably never will know his real name if he don’t have a record.”
“Black, army coat, knit cap?”
“That’s him. One of your neighbors tripped over him in the stairwell an hour ago.”
“You made good time.”
“I was in the area when I got the squeal.”
“The slasher?”
He grinned with one side of his mouth. The burned side didn’t move. “Which one, Philo? We got at least four, way the M.O. pisses all over the lot. No, this one was a bad call. He took a pull and missed the stairs. Folded his head neat as you please and stuck it in his pocket. Or he would of if he didn’t already have an extra bottle in it. Someone got generous.”
“I slipped him a five yesterday.”
“You didn’t do him any favors. Or maybe you did, depending on how you look at it. I bet you feed pigeons too.”
“Rats with feathers.” The white cop with the thin moustache and snapbrim hat appeared from inside. “Bastards shit on every hat I got.”
“What you get for dressing like Dick Tracy,” Grice said. “Let’s go, Waddell.”
They started toward the unmarked car. I fell into step. “An employee of a bearing plant on Eight Mile Road was shot to death about eight years ago. That’s the Fourteenth, isn’t it? Blankenship’s old precinct?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Go down to headquarters, look at the map. This your bucket?”
“I’ll move it.” I got out my keys.
He watched me get in and start the engine. “That where we met? Headquarters?”
“Could be. I’m down there a lot.”
“No, it wasn’t headquarters. I’ll get it yet.”
He was rubbing the jaw I’d slugged. I took hold of the inside door handle. He stopped leaning on the door and I pulled it shut. I put the Olds in Drive but kept my foot on the brake. He was still staring at me through the open window. I said, “You know a lieutenant in Major Crimes named Ysabel?”
“Yeah, I know Izzy.”
“What sort of cop is he?”
“A killer, like the rest of his detail.”
Major Crimes had a big room to itself on an upper floor at 1300 Beaubien, Detroit Police Headquarters. A row of windows made of the same tough bullet-resistant plastic that they cover telephones with overlooked the corner of Macomb, across from an American flag tacked to the plaster wall above the wainscoting. In the center of the room rose a square pillar paved with wanted circulars, duty rosters, interdepartmental communiqués, and hand-printed advertisements selling used cars and registered puppies. The light came through frosted panels in the ceiling, and the floor was covered with squares of linoleum with a marble pattern under a glaze of dirt. There were too many desks in the room and too many detectives for the desks.
I buttonholed a big sergeant in uniform shirtsleeves, who glanced at the visitor tag on my breast pocket and pointed out a dark man sitting at a desk on the far end of the room. On my way there I passed a plainclothesman at another desk polishing the chambers of a Colt Cobra. It had four notches in the handle.
When the old STRESS undercover unit was disbanded under the present administration, most of its veterans were shunted into a special squad created to handle priority cases—terrorism, hostage situations, transportation for the mayor’s sister—anything that could cost votes in an election year if not handled properly. Nothing else had changed, and it was still pretty much the same cast doing pretty much the same things, although fewer black fugitives were getting blown away in boxcars. If there was a man in that room who had never killed anyone it was the guy emptying wastebaskets near the windows.
The cop who had been pointed out to me was on the telephone. He was all squares and hard angles in a suit and tie with no more color in them than the well-trod floor. He had a broad dusky face set off by a thick moustache and brown hair cut in bangs. His features had a Mediterranean look, but more Greek than Italian. He spoke low into the receiver with his eyes cast down and his elbows on the desk. The desk was big and old and relatively uncluttered, with arrest forms and file folders and blank sheets arranged in separate stacks and a battleship-gray manual typewriter on a sliding wood leaf at his left elbow. His nameplate read LT. K. YSABEL.
I moved a straightback chair to a spot where I wouldn’t feel so much like a job applicant and sat in it and lit a cigarette. I had it half smoked when he said “Okay” and cradled the receiver. He was one of those who put it down backwards, with the cord looping around in front of the instrument.
I said, “K?”
“Konstantin.” He looked at me. He had liquid brown eyes, and for a change they had more depth than a pair of soup stains. “You’re Walker?”
I said I was Walker. I had called at four and caught him as he was signing in. He said:
“I talked to Alderdyce in Homicide like you said. He said you were good for a favor. Right now I can’t picture any fix bad enough I’d need private help to get out of it, but in this business the one thing you know is you never know. I have to go from memory on the Niles burn, though. When I came down here my records stayed in Royal Oak.”
“I always said a cop’s memory is as good as a bulldog’s handshake.”
“Too true.”
“I talked to Amigo Fuentes, tire shark, and Niles’s partner, Wally Petite. I wondered which one you liked for it.”
He leaned back in his chair, li
nking his hands behind his head. Even his elbows made a square angle. “Detroit handed us Fuentes. We questioned him. I took along a Hispanic officer just in case he wanted to trot out that no hablo ingles shit, but he didn’t. That little spick can talk like an English lord when he feels like it. I hated his pepper-burning guts. But he didn’t kill Niles. Those boys don’t step on the clientele no matter what you read. Re-hang their noses, maybe, when they don’t pay through them fast enough, but they don’t even do that anymore, much. Hell, some of them are demanding collateral up front these days. It’s getting so you can’t tell them from the suits in the bank buildings, as when could you ever. It wasn’t Fuentes. Why take the loss when you don’t pay taxes in the first place?”
“Petite, then.”
“I like Petite,” he said. “I like him a lot.”
“He had an alibi?”
“Couple of buying trips for parts upstate. Nothing we couldn’t blow down. But he was a cool order. He had some old priors for embezzling and petty theft, did ninety days at Cassiday Lake for cannibalizing parked cars at public access sites. He knew the routine. We couldn’t budge him.”
“You figure he had it done?”
“Yeah. You don’t go from Larceny Under a Hundred 130 Dollars to Murder One without something in between. The cells are full of law-abiding citizens that suddenly turned Lizzie Borden, but damn few petty thieves kill in cold blood. I could show you the stats. But we couldn’t link him to any of the known local talent and we keep an eye on the stone killers in from out of town. The case was still open when I left. Nobody was doing anything about it.”
I watched him squaring off the edges of the stacks of paper on his desk. He was a neat cop. I wondered if he read John T. Molloy. “Has Barry Stackpole been in asking about Niles?”
“That’s the guy from the News?” I nodded. “He hasn’t talked to me. He the guy you’re looking for?”
“Yeah.”
“You find him, ask him for me where that guy in the City-County Building found that silk wallpaper. I want to show it to my wife. Maybe she’ll get the hint and go easy on the tile in the new bathroom.”
I said I’d be glad to, and got up. “Oh, would you know anything about the murder of a factory worker on Eight Mile Road about eight years ago?”
“Not me. Eight years ago I was chasing skinny-dippers out of the community swimming pool in Royal Oak.”
“Would Eight Mile have been Ray Blankenship’s territory when he worked out of the Fourteenth?”
“Could be. Funny you should mention him.”
I waited.
“Blankenship was the arresting officer on one of Wally Petite’s priors,” he said, flicking a shred of paper off the top file folder on the desk. “I don’t know which one. I wouldn’t have remembered except he’s been on my mind since he croaked himself yesterday.”
I thanked him and left one of my cards.
The foyer of my building smelled of lemons from the floor wax the building superintendent used. He had rushed the season this time because Willy the Wino had landed on his jug when he jackknifed down the stairs and splashed Tuesday’s grapes over the linoleum. At this rate the tenants would have to chip in and buy the super a new can in five years or so.
I crossed the spot where the old man had landed and went upstairs. I didn’t feel any manifestations. If he’d had enough left of himself to bequeath the place a ghost he wouldn’t have spent my whole five bucks on wine, but would’ve held out some for a new old coat or a pair of socks to keep the corrugated insides of his shoes from rubbing holes in his feet. But he hadn’t come for the five. All he’d wanted was a place to snooze where the neighborhood brats wouldn’t set fire to his beard. Instead, Big-Hearted A. Walker had bought him his last ride to a broken neck. No, someone had handed him fare for that several stops back. Big-Hearted A. Walker had just called out his destination. Last stop, West Grand River Avenue: Pimps, whores, rummies, and Michigan State licensed private investigators. Everybody out.
You see them poking through cans in alleys for a piece of twine to hold the soles on their shoes and standing back out of the sidewalk traffic muttering to themselves and occasionally snoozing in a fetal position in the middle of Cadillac Square at rush hour with thousands of pairs of feet whispering around them, which is like a hunger-crazed coyote wandering into the middle of a busy village with its tongue dusty and eyes bright with fever, only not quite, because you’d look at a coyote. They don’t want your help. They wanted it back when the plant they worked for twenty-two years closed and their son needed bail and their wife walked off with the meter reader and the joint savings account, but when they came to you you told them things were tough all over and go try food stamps. Now all they want is your spare change and your back.
They sleep in weedy lots and abandoned cars and cardboard boxes lined with rags, and on bitter December mornings someone has to rip open the boxes and place the clenched cold corpses like gnarled apple limbs into the county wagon and bury them the way they are in children’s coffins rather than attempt to straighten them out. They have to sleep in those places because the city council voted to combat rape by tearing down the empty buildings, and don’t tell the city council about burning the barn to get rid of the rats because they’ll understand about rats but not about barns. So the buildings came down and now when it starts to get dark the homeless gravitate toward the tall weeds and the deep doorways, and the five percent of them that are women, the lucky ones who are not yet all the way hags anyhow, smooth their ratty coats and adjust their men’s hats and trade the only thing they have to trade for a few hours out of the wind. Then in the morning those that get up start scouting for a place for when it gets dark again.
Well, Willy had a place now. They’d lay him out for a while naked on a steel table with a drain hole at one end and his rags in a paper sack between his legs, and when nobody came to claim him he’d go into a cold drawer and when nobody came then he’d go into a hole in county soil. He’d get more attention in the coming week than he’d gotten in ten years. All on five dollars.
I didn’t have any loonies or anyone else in my waiting room. I let myself into the office and sat down behind the desk. The half-drawn blinds sliced a bar of dusty sunlight into stripes in the corner next to the old-fashioned water closet, where the stripes lay in that motionless pattern that suggests a stopped clock and a spider dozing in its web, an autumn afternoon with nowhere to go and no pressing need to get there this week, the moment hung in time like a miner’s hat on an oaken peg in a saloon abandoned ninety years ago. I spoiled it by picking up the telephone and calling my service for messages. I had a message.
18
“MRS. BLANKENSHIP?”
She jumped a little when I spoke. I’d caught her at a corner table in front of the segmented front window, looking out at the street in front of the restaurant. I’d walked right past her nose and come in the door and glanced around and come up to her without her noticing. Her eyes flicked from my face to my shoes and back to my face in a meaningless little darting movement, and then the corners of her mouth bent to form a smile. “Mr. Walker? I’m sorry. I didn’t know what you looked like.”
She raised a smooth hand with cherry-colored nails and we touched fingers and I slid into the chair opposite hers. She was a trim woman of about forty-five and she had been handsome, but her face had gotten too thin, the skin tugged into sharp lines from her nose to her mouth, and dark thumb smears had filled the hollows under her eyes. She wore her wavy auburn hair swept behind her ears and pinned loosely in place with a black hat the size and shape of a cantaloupe quarter nested on top. It was the only black thing she had on. Her blouse was royal blue and her skirt, what I had seen of it coming in, was dark green. Hasty mourning.
The restaurant was on West Davison, one of those places with a striped awning out front and captain’s chairs inside and the Catch of the Day paper-clipped to the menu. When a hippy blonde waitress cruised by to refill Mrs. Blankenship’s cup from a st
eaming glass pot I righted the cup at my elbow and she filled that too, leaving me with a sealed thimbleful of what passes for cream in restaurants on West Davison with captain’s chairs and awnings.
My companion was looking outside again. The street had that coppery glow you see a couple of times a year just before dusk, that interrupts conversations and has everyone glancing toward the windows.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. “I was admiring it when you came. I guess that’s why I missed you. It looks like an old tintype.”
I said, “It’s supposed to precede bad weather. A storm. Something about the nitrogen in the air.”
“The meteorologists can’t let pretty light just be pretty light.” She sipped her coffee.
We watched the pretty light for a while. Soon the gray sifted down and we stopped looking. She played with the foil on her cup of ersatz cream.
“You said Sergeant Grice gave you my card?” I started.
She nodded jerkily, her eyes on my left lapel. “He said you wanted to talk to me about Ray’s—about Ray.”
I picked up my spoon and stirred my coffee. There wasn’t anything in it to stir. “You found him?”
“The paper boy did. He rang the bell to collect for the month. When no one answered he looked through the window in the door.” She stopped.
“Were you separated?”
“I guess that’s what it was.” She was speaking rapidly now, getting away from it. “I’ve been living in Grand Rapids with my sister. I couldn’t stay and go on watching him lose pieces of himself.”
“He was depressed?”
“‘Despondent,’ I think, is the word. That’s what they call it after you’ve killed yourself.”
“Did he kill himself?”
She met my gaze then. “Are you investigating his death? Sergeant Grice told me they were closing it out.”
I rotated the spoon in the cup one more time and held it above the liquid, waiting for the quivering drop on the end of the bowl to fall. “The article on your husband’s retirement was among the items left behind by a man I’m looking for. There were other clippings with it, including one about a corpse found in the trunk of a car parked at Metro Airport and another about the life of Alfred Kindnagel, the Jewish labor czar, you should pardon the expression. The murdered man’s name was Philip Niles. He ran a body repair shop called Acme Collision in Royal Oak with a man named Wally Petite. Does any of these names mean anything to you?”
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