“Your feet aren’t flat,” she said.
It was there in her tone. I drank. “I don’t feel like being seduced tonight. If it’s okay.”
“I see.” The temperature in the room fell off two degrees.
“No, you don’t. If you did you wouldn’t say you did. The kind of guy that likes to keep box scores could do very well in this line. I get offers from clients and informants and housewives and runaways. A good P.I. with a normal libido and no more scruples than you could poke with a sharp stick could while away his whole career in bed. But he wouldn’t get a chance at a woman like you.
“It’s not that I don’t know what I’m turning down,” I said. “It’s that men get tired too. We just don’t admit it as often.”
“I do see. Also it’s easier to turn down when you’ve had it once already.”
I put away the rest of my whiskey sour and set the glass on top of the television set. “I knew I was just wasting oxygen. I had to try.”
The music went on. The station was playing a transcription of a remote broadcast from the ballroom of a hotel in Chicago that was a parking, garage by now. The ancient recording made the announcer sound as if he were speaking through a paper tube. Louise peeled off her shoes and tucked her feet up under her in the chair. She said, “I don’t know why I’m still here. I finished my work with Andrei yesterday. By all rights I should have caught a plane to New York this morning. I think it’s you.”
“It’s not me.”
“Why couldn’t it be?”
“I’m an unsuccessful man in an obsolete profession. You’re a book editor.”
“An unsuccessful one.”
“There aren’t any unsuccessful book editors. You don’t keep up your average you get traded, like a big-league ballplayer. No one calls them unsuccessful as long as they’re still playing. Under ordinary circumstances we wouldn’t even know each other. If we passed each other on Broadway you wouldn’t look at me more than once.”
“Nothing lasts.”
“If it does it can’t, because the more time you have the sooner you realize it wasn’t anything to begin with. Aw, hell.”
The dead band had hurled itself into one of those jam sessions that keep starting up again just when you think they’re getting ready to stop, like a dripping faucet. I turned off the radio and went to the door.
Louise uncoiled herself and came over on silent stockinged feet. Standing toe-to-toe with me without heels, she just came to the tip of my nose Jasmine rode the air silkily. “Drive me to the airport tomorrow?”
“I better not. The car would be too empty on the drive back.”
“This is it, then?” She touched the corner of my lips with a pink nail.
“Nothing was it from the start. Weren’t you listening?”
“Kiss me?”
I took some time brushing loose hairs away from her forehead, and then we touched lips. Hers tasted faintly of wild berries. We pressed foreheads. With her arms resting around my neck she sighed. Her eyes were lowered. She spoke in a hoarse whisper.
“When you find Barry, tell him we’ll pay an advance of fifty thousand for his book.”
I laughed until the door closed between us.
The weather turned brisk overnight. In the morning I got up shivering, closed the window on a sill white with frost, and broke out my blue regurgitated wool suit. The weatherman on the radio—meteorologist, excuse me—had a high of fifty degrees for us. I made six pancakes and charred a dozen link sausages for breakfast and had three cups of black coffee you could stand a shovel in. If everything worked out it was going to be a long day and I didn’t know when I’d be sitting down to my next meal.
I put on a hat for the first time in weeks and walked out the door at half-past seven, into the teeth of a woody breeze that stiffened my face and made the seat crackle when I slid under the steering wheel. The engine turned over a couple of times before starting. I waited for it to warm up before letting out the clutch. I hadn’t thought to ask Schinder if he’d winterized the car.
I didn’t go to the office. It was Saturday. Travel agencies were open but not investigation firms, not this one anyhow. I took Woodward up to McNichols and swung west. Light Mackinaws and knit caps were starting to appear near the schoolyards. Fallen leaves jumped and skidded along the sidewalks like grasshoppers on linoleum. It was early October and if this kept up we could expect snow by Halloween.
Zodiac Travel kept its west side office in a fairly new building between Livernois and Wyoming, with a small paved parking lot behind. I walked around to the front door and read the building directory and went past the elevators to the fire stairs. On the third floor I passed some darkened glass doors belonging to a couple of bailbondsmen and a bone specialist and knocked on a lighted one with the signs of the Zodiac stenciled in a circle on the glass. When no one answered I tried the knob. It turned freely. “Uh-oh,” I said.
The door opened noiselessly into a big square room with a row of windows along the back and bright green plants spilling out of redwood buckets lining the broad ledge inside. The ubiquitous posters made the same old promises on the walls and a stereo in a walnut console like a deep coffin played “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” at a volume just above breathing. There was a desk with a plastic wood-grain top and a chromium frame and behind the desk a pair of bicycle wheels showed.
I wasn’t armed. I didn’t need to be. A bathroom with an extra-wide doorway stood open to the left of the desk and from where I was standing I could see all of it and my reflection in the mirror over the sink. I was as alone as alone can get.
I crossed to the desk and looked at the man in the wheelchair. The back rested on the floor and his feet, encased in brown heelless moccasins, were braced against the stainless steel footrest. He wore a striped shortsleeved shirt with a red plastic penholder in the pocket containing three ballpoint pens and the shirt was tucked inside a pair of unfaded brushed cotton blue jeans. No socks. He was lean and freckled and wore his reddish hair over his ears to his collar. The freckles were misleading; he was my age. The blue hole in his left temple looked too small to have done so much damage. But a hole in the head doesn’t have to be big. All it has to be is a hole.
I walked around the desk on china legs. There was no need to feel for a pulse but I did that. His flesh was cool but his muscles hadn’t begun to stiffen. I frisked him and found a set of GM keys in his left pants pocket and a worn brown leather wallet on his hip containing some cash, a set of business cards, two credit cards, and a driver’s license, the license and the cards all bearing the name Edward Sunburn. I smeared everything between my palms and put it back.
The desk came next. The top was pretty clean: a couple of printout trip itineraries, some odd travel pamphlets, a stack of scribbled telephone messages on a spindle. I leafed through those quickly, not expecting to find anything. I wasn’t disappointed. There was just one drawer, a long one pulled out a little. I used my handkerchief to pull it out a few more inches. Desk stuff. The drawer was lined with green blotter paper with an oval stain along the edge. I rubbed it with two fingers and sniffed them. An oily smell.
A steel folding chair stood parallel to the desk on the customer’s side. I sat in it and practiced my fast-draw with a stiffened index finger. It could have happened that way. It could have happened any one of a dozen others. There are just too many directions to go in a real murder, if murder was what it was.
I got up and wandered around the office. I looked in the planters. I looked in the foot of space between the stereo and the corner of the room. I got down on my hands and knees next to the body and peered under the kneehole of the desk. Then I turned my head the other way and spotted the slim curved silhouette of a High Standard .22 magnum pocket pistol lying in shadow under the base of the overturned wheelchair.
I left it where it was and sat down on the floor. I put myself in the wheelchair and put a bullet in my brain with my left hand and fell over backwards, dropping the gun between my legs
where it would bounce once on the carpet and come to rest under the chair. I lifted Sunburn’s left hand and sniffed. Maybe I smelled something burnt, maybe I had it on my mind. A carbon test would find the proper crystals embedded in the skin, I was sure of that.
It was neat as hell, as neat as any self-killing a tired homicide investigator could hope to find. Sunburn was left-handed; he kept his car keys in that pocket. It would be the hand he would use to put a hole in his left temple. Ballistics would fire the gun and match the bullet to the one in his brain. Maybe they would match it to the ones in the bodies of Morris Rosenberg and Philip Niles, but I doubted that. Cops hate easy jobs.
I stood up, brushing incriminating fibers off my clothes, and glanced around one last time. There were no file cabinets or other promising repositories of information. The place was just a telephone number and a place to pick up mail, as Dave had said. Yesterday’s mail would have been kicked downtown already and today’s wasn’t due for another hour. I stooped to pick up the High Standard, dropped it into the pocket of my jacket, and let myself out quietly. No one hollered cop.
32
HOME IS A PLACE you can go where they have to take you in. There was no one to take me in but it was closer than the office and there’s a long list of things I’d rather do than drive anywhere near downtown on a Saturday morning with a murder weapon in my pocket.
The coffee was still warm. I poured myself a cup, leaving a quarter-inch space on top, then remembered I was out of whiskey and brought the surface level with the rim. I sat in the living room warming my hands around the cup with the pistol lying on the end table and drinking the bitter stuff. Thinking was hard without whiskey.
When the cup was empty I called my office building and let the telephone ring until the super picked it up.
“This is Walker in 307,” I said. “Which one of my neighbors discovered the dead bum in the foyer the other day?”
“Which one, how do I know which one?” His voice was thicker than usual. I’d gotten him out of bed. “The police bang on your door, you don’t ask who invited them.”
“Who did the banging, the black cop with the scar or the white cop with the hat and moustache?”
“The black one. The one was here again this morning.”
I uncrossed my legs. “When this morning?”
“When, how do I know when? Early. I got up to fix a busted pipe and he walked right past my door. Didn’t say hello.”
I hung up, lit a cigarette, and dialed John Alderdyce’s extension at 1300.
“Alderdyce.”
“Walker, John. I wasn’t sure I’d catch you on duty Saturday.”
“We never close. What’s on your mind that I’d rather not have on mine?”
“I need the personnel file on a Homicide dick. You know him. Sergeant Grice.”
“Christ.”
“That mean you won’t do it, or it’s tough?”
“I’d have to know why you want it. Just for my own peace of mind, what’s left of it.”
“I can’t say till I’ve seen it. I could be way off and I don’t want any more enemies on the department than I have now.”
“Meaning I do.”
“It’s a favor,” I said. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t ask, because it means your talking to too many people. But this one transferred over from Vice not long ago and the file might still be lying around Homicide. If not, forget it. All I’ve got is a guess.”
“Am I in on the kill?”
“I don’t think so. If I’m right this is one for Major Crimes.”
“Where do I come out ahead, then?”
“Name it.”
I didn’t like the length of the pause after that.
“I’d rather not,” he said.
“Blank check?”
“Call it a blind loan. My favor to call in any time the urge lands.”
“You wouldn’t settle for dinner.”
“Not in any place you can afford.”
“Okay,” I said. “There’s just one thing I need from the file. I need to know if Grice served in Vietnam. Specifically if he was stationed in Hue about the time of the Cambodia invasion.”
“Why?”
I told him then, leaving out Edward Sunburn for the time being. After a long silence he said: “You better be right.”
“If I knew that I wouldn’t be calling you.”
“I’ll get back to you. You at home?”
I said I was. Twenty minutes slithered by, one by one on their bellies. I poured myself another slug of caffeine, lingered over it. Outside, the gutters clogged with dead leaves. I caught the telephone halfway through the first ring.
“Hue,” Alderdyce said. “He was a sparks with ARVN, one of the first in after the Cong bugged out in ‘67 and he was still there three years later.”
“Anything else?”
“Anything else isn’t part of our bargain. But that’s it. They don’t leave much room for biography in those little blanks.”
“Thanks, John.”
“Who you working with on this?”
It was my turn to pause. “Ysabel.”
“Good choice,” he said. “Yeah, good choice. Don’t get killed, okay? I hate wasting favors.”
I thanked him again and broke the connection. With the receiver still in my hand I dialed 911. I didn’t know how the Pinkertons did it before A.G. Bell. When a black female voice came on I said: “This is Amos Walker, 614 Russell. There’s a dead derelict in my backyard. I think his throat’s been cut.”
She asked me to repeat the message. I did and gave her my name and address again. She said an officer would be calling on me.
I worked the plunger again and called police headquarters again. An unfamiliar male voice came on after four rings and said Lieutenant Ysabel had stepped out for a half hour. I left a message and had him read it back to make sure he got it straight. I didn’t like that part of it at all.
My ear felt hot from the receiver. I got up and walked around, working my limbs and neck. Someday I was going to invest in one of those telephone headsets like reporters have. It was on the list after air conditioning and a desk chair that tilted back and turned into a waterbed.
While I was thinking about it I drew out the live cartridge remaining in the two-shot .22, put the cartridge in my pocket, and got my Smith & Wesson out of the drawer in the telephone stand and made sure there was one in the barrel. For now I would go with the tools I had.
33
MAYBE IT WAS the caffeine.
Sitting in my one and only easy chair waiting for the door buzzer, I was an insomniac staring at a dark ceiling and projecting pictures on the blank space. Thoughts charged through my mind in a hot string like a thousand-car train barreling through a long black tunnel. In the lighted windows flashing past I glimpsed faces: Barry and Catherine and Dale and John and in the caboose a character with graying brown hair and gentle eyes and a chin that would always be blue, someone familiar, but whose name I couldn’t think of because I never called him by it. I wanted to run ahead and get a look inside the engine cab, see who was driving, but by then the last window had streaked around the long curve and the train was gone, chuckling in the distance. I didn’t need to see the engineer’s face anyway. It would be the same face I had seen in the caboose. I knew now what was meant by the term “waking dream,” and why no one much liked them.
When you are small the whole world turns on your axis. Countries are being built up and torn down and people are slashing at one another all around you and none of it means anything because no matter what happens you’re safe there in the center. Then when you get to adolescence and the college money has dried up you have to go to work for it and you’re part of the turning outer circle. You adjust to that and have a picture of yourself and you think that’s who you are. You go out in the world with your new degree under your arm and maybe there’s a war on and you get sucked up into it and the world you find yourself in has no axis at all. The sun rises in the wrong place and the li
ttle man walking behind the yak in the rice paddy could as well be the enemy as not and there are roads but you can’t use them because the roads are mined, so you hack your way through the jungle and if you’re lucky you won’t run smack into the middle of an NVN patrol or get bitten by a mosquito and drop into a coma, and if you’re still lucky you won’t find out ten years later that your own army’s defoliants have made you sterile or given you cancer.
Say you’re lucky and you come out all of a piece. You have a new picture of yourself and you think that’s who you are. You prance around for a while in the white helmet and MP armband, closing bars and breaking up fights and scraping GIs and the occasional officer off the floors of alleys, and then you muster out and buy yourself a suit of civilian clothes and have your picture taken and you look at it and you think that’s who you are.
Then you use your veteran’s points to get into the Detroit Police Department’s twelve-week training course. You train harder than you ever did in the army, tightening your gut and expanding your brain and grinding your reflexes down to a granite point. With one week to go in the program you pose for a picture in your new uniform with the shiny visor square over the eyes and the proofs come back and you lay them out and compare them and you think that’s who you are. But something happens and you don’t finish. Instead you get married and go to work for General Motors security. You’re a family man now and your job is to help push the world around on someone else’s axis. Then you aren’t and it isn’t, as suddenly as finding a note on a kitchen table, and for a long time you don’t know who you are, you don’t even have a picture of yourself. But then someone steps in and shows it to you, and you know better than you ever knew before that this is who you are, know it so well that even when the someone who showed it to you is no longer there, is a bald head and a battered hat lying upside-down in the street, you still know. It’s so simple that you wonder why you didn’t figure it out a long time ago.
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