Even taking my time like that I pushed it a little. A uniformed cop was standing on the lawn in front of the smashed window with his hands on his hips, looking around, while his partner leaned on the roof of the cruiser, speaking into the radio mike. I turned and walked down a side street before either of them spotted me. If they collared me and looked at my ID it would be tough explaining what a Detroit P.I. was doing walking in Harper Woods after dark. After two blocks I turned again. I was heading back in the right direction when the blue-and-white rolled away up the street with its roof light off and no siren.
Just in case someone was watching I circled the house, then stepped over a low grille fence in back. The back door was dead-bolted as expected. I stood in front of a window and pulled off my sweater and jabbed straight out from the shoulder with my other forearm across my eyes. The glass caved in with less noise than the window in front had made. I hesitated, poised to run, but no sound came from inside. The police had found the turnoff switch to the burglar alarm and used it. They were peace officers, after all. I cleared away the rest of the glass and let myself in over the sill.
24
THERE IS NOTHING quite so quiet and remote-feeling as an empty house at night. The air lay in room-size blocks and didn’t move. Where I was, moonlight reflected flatly off triangles of glass at my feet. Somewhere a section of foundation settled under the new weight with a noise like a human palm makes dragging across an inflated balloon.
I was in one of those damp-smelling unfinished chambers that get called utility rooms, although except as a place to hang a mop and stack cases of dusty empty deposit beer bottles, this one wasn’t being utilized at all. I got bored with it quickly and mounted a step that took me through a vacant doorway into a fair-size kitchen with a stove and refrigerator built into one wall and a sink and drainboard that extended into a half counter. A row of glasses stood bottomside up along the edge. I drew a finger down the side of one. A faint streak showed in the pale light.
The tiny refrigerator bulb rinsed me in blue when I opened the door. The inside was empty except for a six-pack of Molson Canadian with a bottle missing, an open package of sliced bologna with the top slice starting to curl, and a quart of milk in a cardboard carton. The freshness date had run out two days before. I sniffed at the open spout, took a swig. It hadn’t started turning yet. Well, it had only been nine days. I put it back and closed the door.
That was it for the kitchen. Moonlight threw barred patterns across the floor of the living room, where the rock I’d thrown lay in a litter of broken glass. The cops hadn’t come inside to retrieve it. Other cops who had helped themselves before calling the owners had made them wary of internal investigations. The room reflected Irene’s arid taste: scoop chairs, a sofa that could ruin the man who tried to stretch out on it, a pale rug with a stripe along the edges, set at an angle like a baseball diamond in the middle of the floor, pedestal tables with round glass tops holding up nothing. One of the framed canvases on the walls was blank except for a dot that was a little off center. When you looked again it was in the exact center. Then it wasn’t. Hours of fun. Fashion and architectural magazines were spread in a fan atop the coffee table. My finger made a streak on those too. Barry hadn’t touched them since Irene left.
The bed was made in the bedroom and the dresser contained men’s shirts and slacks and socks and underwear. I had no way of knowing if anything was missing or how much. I used my flash to examine the stuff on top, Comb, brush, loose change, some ballpoint pens. No wallet. A couple of suits hung in the closet. I went through the pockets and came up with a handkerchief and a book of matches from the Peacock’s Roost. In Barry’s case a lifetime of traveling light was a long time going away.
The bathroom was clean. No interesting drugs in the medicine cabinet. Barry didn’t use them.
I had seen most of this before, of course. But not after dark with the only light sliding in guiltily through two smashed windows and me alone in mid-felony. On the first day of sleuth school they tell you what tools you’ll need: camera, fingerprint kit, eavesdropping paraphernalia, arch supports. They never mention the latchkey, the jimmy, the well-placed heel. No room for that stuff in the display case with the blank affidavits and the FBI-approved portable lab. I had found my way around more locks than a balcony rake in the age of chastity belts. I had spent more time in other people’s homes and offices without their knowledge than a fly with a muffler. I had housemaid’s knee from climbing through windows and when a burglar alarm went off anywhere in the city I started running, like a punch-drunk prizefighter throwing left jabs every time the telephone rang. It’s funny work for an honest man.
I went into the only other room in the house. Barry’s study.
It had been a second bedroom and it still had that look, but he had moved out the bed and moved in a cheap desk and chair and a steel bookcase jammed with reference material and a wicker magazine rack to hold his file folders and hung a framed eight-by-ten blowup of an angel-faced young man nattily dressed in wide lapels and a Panama hat with a broad silk band. It was Jerry Buckley, the crusading radio commentator slain by Purple Gang killers in the lobby of the Hotel LaSalle in July 1930. The picture had kept Barry company everywhere he had lived for no matter how brief a period. I never knew if it was because he felt a kinship with another journalist who had fallen victim to the underworld or if because on later investigation, Buckley had proven as corrupt as a factory second. The Stackpole sense of humor didn’t run to anything so simple as pratfalls and seltzer.
I flipped through the folders in the magazine rack. Mob stuff, mostly tearsheets from published sources. He had crossed out a lot of the information, sometimes drawing X’s across whole pages, and added corrections in the margins in his hasty block printing. Some of these were pretty interesting, but I wasn’t learning any dangerous secrets or he wouldn’t have left the stuff out in the open. I saved my batteries for something better.
A Smith-Corona portable, out of its carrying case for maybe the first time since he had acquired it, shared the desk with a stack of blank sheets in an ocher box. There was nothing in the machine. I tried the top drawer of the desk. Locked. I sighed and broke out the picks I’d brought.
I was sitting in Barry’s chair hunched over the lock when a shaft of hard white light rammed through the window over my left shoulder.
I fought down a nearly overwhelming urge to throw myself to the floor, and froze. My shadow, black and solid, leered at me from the wall. For a long time the shaft remained motionless, lying across my shoulders and the back of my neck like a bar of white-hot steel. Then the light moved on, sliding across the wall until the window frame cut it off. The door to the living room was open and I watched the beam glide over the furnishings there. After another long interval the shaft vanished. An engine started up and purred away.
My night vision returned slowly. I looked at my watch, turning its face to the moonlight. Quarter to ten. With luck the cops wouldn’t patrol the place again this shift. But I started working faster.
The lock was all show. There was just the one keyhole, which indicated a rod affair that secured all three drawers, and those never are much. The tumblers shifted and I put away my picks and tugged out the drawer. Inside I found a divided steel tray cluttered with pencils and erasers and paperclips and jars of rubber cement. Nothing underneath the tray. The second drawer held more blank sheets and carbon paper. The bottom drawer contained a lead strongbox.
The metal’s in disrepute now. It connotes poison, which some people think is communicated by biting. But for safe places to keep things, it has it all over steel. You can pound on it with a sledgehammer and pry at it with a jimmy and it will just keep changing shape and never let you inside. But this one wasn’t locked, or even closed. The papers jammed inside wouldn’t let the lid down. I hoisted the box out of the drawer and placed it on the desk and snapped on my flash.
It was all financial stuff, pay receipts and old passbooks and check stubs. Overstuffed th
ough the box was, it wasn’t much for the average person living in the age of Xerox and American Express. Barry owned no credit cards and had only started a checking account to keep his tax man happy, preferring to deal in cash rather than leave a trail of paper for his enemies to follow. The passbooks told me nothing, other than that the pattern and size of his withdrawals had stepped up considerably during the months Irene had been living with him. None of them was big enough to agitate my jaded mind. The deposits jibed with the sort of income a journalist with a column syndicated across the country would be making. I should have felt like a kid with his ribs exposed peering through a window at a turkey dinner with all the trimmings, but they were just numbers to me. When you get above the poverty level, everything’s in the abstract.
Most of the odd receipts were deductible expenses: typewriter repair, telephone, books for research. I riffled through the little bundle of check stubs bound with a rubber band and found more of the same and one that interested me. It was made out in the amount of three hundred sixty dollars to “Z Travel,” and dated September 23. That was the day I’d gone to the Detroit Press Club with Barry, the last day anyone had seen him. I pocketed it, went through the rest quickly the way you do when you figure you’ve found what you’re looking for, put it all back, and returned the heavy box to its drawer.
That was it for the study. I closed the drawers and flipped off the flash and went back into the living room. A low bleached cabinet stood in one corner. I tugged open the door, used my light to read some labels, and lifted a bottle of Scotch off a shelf. I uncapped and tilted it. The liquid slid down my throat and landed with a dull thud. I took another drink to cushion the blow. My mind started clearing, as from a draft of clean mountain air.
The desk was awfully neat for Barry. I hadn’t known many writers, but those I had known weren’t the tidiest people I’d met, and even the tidy ones left clutter. There wasn’t a scrap of writing in the study. Someone, probably Barry, had been through the place with a new broom. I drank again. My mind was getting clearer by the minute. I screwed the cap back on and put away the bottle and went back into the study.
The wastebasket was green plastic and tucked away in the kneehole of the desk. I untucked it, upended it. Baseball-size crumples of paper cascaded out and bounced all over the bare floor. I tossed away the empty wastebasket and sat on the floor to inspect my booty.
The first three pages I uncrumpled and turned this way and that in the moonlight were blank. It seemed a waste of paper. I saw Barry sitting and staring at a sheet in the machine just so long before he yanked it out and balled it up and tossed it, just to be doing something. He would go on that way until there were words on one of them. The fourth had a piece of a paragraph starting about a third of the way down the page. In the upper right-hand corner he had typed “Steel/Lead, I.”
The doctor’s name is Willard. He is a tall man with a tan and a rumbling bass and gray curling hair at his temples, the rest of it chestnut. He asks me how I am, and there is just the right amount of concern in his tone. He says he has brought
The passage ended there. I laid the wrinkled page aside and picked up another crumple, smoothed it out on the floor.
The doctor’s name is Willard. He is tall and tan with chestnut hair curling and going gray at the temples. He asks how I am, and there is just the right amount of concern in his rumbling bass. He says he has brought something for me. He places it on my lap and hinges back the cover and I am looking at a book of noses.
I straightened out another ball of paper.
… and I am looking at a book of noses. Hopes and Barrymores, Durantes and Eckstines, pugs and roman hooks, they are all there in front view and profile, a mug book of probosci. My puzzlement must show through the chinks in my bandages, for Dr. Willard says, “We don’t often have as much leeway as we have in this case. The extent of the damage to your face calls for substantial restructuring, and as the taxidermist said when the poacher brought him an eagle he blasted with a shotgun, ‘How do you want it, duck or eagle? I can go either way.’” And he chuckles.
That finished the page. I rooted around until I found page 2.
Using old photographs, Dr. Willard rebuilds my face along the old lines and when at last the bandages come off he places a mirror in my good hand and I look and say that he has done a wonderful job, which he has. Not a scar is visible. But the face is not mine, more like a close relative’s. Little things have changed, and I know that it will take some getting used to. I
The rest of that one was blank. I dropped it and went through the others, looking for the thread. All I found were pieces of what I’d already read and something else, a close mass of single-spaced lines smudged on a torn sheet without a number or identification.
I wear a Judas face but I am Cain. Cain ably killed Abel in a canefield and trod to Nod to find a wife and a new life without strife. Instead he lost his face and even Abel wouldn’t know the face he placed in its place. No tied-off blood vessels or gray cooked flesh stuck to the sheets for Cain, the swain. Just new sheet metal work and fresh trim and a coat of paint, a Detroit makeover for the man who burned the candy man. Candy Cain.
It was nutty stuff, a college freshman’s idea of stream-of-consciousness. It didn’t sound like Barry at all, but it had been typed on the same machine as the other stuff. I got up and rolled one of the blank sheets into the portable on the desk and pecked out something original about a quick brown fox, then unrolled it and compared it to what I had just read. It was the right machine, all right. I figured he was drunk when he wrote it. They say that a complete personality change is one of the signs of alcoholism. They say a lot of crazy things that don’t hold up outside the laboratory where they torture monkeys and white mice. I folded both sheets and put them in different pockets and scooped the remaining crumples back into the wastebasket and parked it under the desk. Then I let myself out of the house through the back window.
I walked back downtown and used a pay telephone to call the operator and ask her to report a fresh disturbance at Barry’s address to the police. This time maybe they’d put an officer in front until morning and keep some opportunist from getting inside the way I had, someone whose moral character was not as high as mine. I hung up while the operator was asking my name, then used the quarter that had come back to dial Louise’s room at the Book Cadillac and tell her I’d be late and to meet me in the hotel dining room. She said okay and didn’t ask any questions.
There wasn’t much chance of catching a cab cruising Harper Woods at that hour, so I started walking west. My knee was good. Cool air touched my face like a hand carved out of ice. That’s when I realized I was sweating.
25
THE DINING ROOM at the hotel was one of those places where a waiter named Armand, snowy hair and crepe soles, sets the little silver-plated coffee pot down at your elbow and ghosts in every five minutes to empty the ashtray. There wasn’t much business in the place late on a Thursday night and he was all ours. He was going to be disappointed by my tip. Dessert was a cold pink cloud in a stemmed glass with whipped cream and half a strawberry on top. I finished mine, Louise ate her strawberry, and we went out to hail a cab. We weren’t going anywhere, just riding around.
“Why, this is a beautiful city.” She watched the lights sliding past the windows like colored glass on a black satin lampshade.
“At night,” I agreed. “And depending on where you are in it.”
“What’s that blinking light?” She pointed.
“Broadcast tower on top of the Fisher Building.”
“It looks like a landmark.”
“The Lone Ranger was born there, the Green Hornet too.”
“It is a landmark.”
“Was. WJR’s moving.”
“Into some flat dull box, I suppose. Like the churches they build now.”
“Steeples have no resale value.” I pointed south, where a spidery span strung with colored lights seemed to hang in space. “That’s the Ambassador Bridge.
Windsor on the other side.”
“Isn’t that the wrong direction for Canada to be in?”
“There’s a little neck of it down there hiding out from the Queen.”
She sat back. Light from the street lamps along Michigan fluttered across a shimmery off-white thing to her ankles. A light shawl draped her bare shoulders and she had on a silver band around her neck, so thin it showed only when the light struck it. Her hair was up. I’d cleaned up and shaved and put on a suit before meeting her and I was just barely adequate. “You like living here, don’t you?”
“You can get used to being stuck in the eye with a finger if that’s how you wake up every morning,” I said. “Yeah, I like it.”
I told the driver to take us along the river and we jogged over onto Jefferson and turned east. The lights from Windsor scalloped the choppy surface. Ahead and to the right, the glittering canisters of the Renaissance Center seemed to be turning with the play of light like huge interlocking gears. The place had all the sinister beauty of a stiletto with a jeweled handle. If you had an infrared scope you could look out through any of its windows and witness two crimes of violence per night.
“You haven’t told me what made you late,” Louise said then. “I’ve been wonderfully patient.”
I reached up and slid shut the safety shield between the front and back seats. The driver’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, then back to the road. I lowered my voice to a murmur.
“It takes time to burgle a house.”
Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 06 Page 16
