You are the one who takes the pictures.
The door buzzer had been going for a while before I heard it. I shook myself loose with a physical effort, stood, took the High Standard out of my left pocket, transferred it to my right hand, and went over to open the door. Sergeant Grice looked me up and down.
“What’s the gag?” he demanded. “I get a call—”
“I placed it. Come in, Sergeant. Where’s Waddell, out blocking his hat?”
“It’s his day off.” He hadn’t moved. The bum scar on his right cheek twitched. “I guess you know it’s a felony to point a gun at a police officer.”
“Here.” I reversed ends and thrust the .22’s grip at him. His hand closed around it automatically and I withdrew mine.
“What’s the gag?” he said again.
“It’s an American trait. Push something at somebody, even a complete stranger, and nine times out of ten he’ll accept it. People who give out handbills find it valuable. We’re letting the flies in.”
He entered finally, balancing the gun on his palm. I closed the door and turned to face him with my back to it. He was wearing a blue wool blazer over one of his yellow shirts and a red knitted necktie. Indoors the milky blue in the whites of his eyes was pronounced.
“So why’s it so important I take it at all? They told me the bum you found had a cut throat. Nobody said anything about he was shot.”
“There isn’t any bum, Sergeant. You knew that the minute I answered the door. I called that in because the bum-killings are your meat and I knew they’d send you. And I wanted your fingerprints on that gun. It’s the one you used to kill Edward Sunburn.”
He didn’t jump or throw himself through any windows. I hadn’t expected him to, really. He said, “I don’t know any Sunburns. And if I was to kill somebody I wouldn’t use no twenty-twos. Department issued me a thirty-eight.”
“Yeah, but cops that kill for a living on the side don’t use department pieces. They use what the professionals use—quiet, efficient guns that don’t make enough noise to turn heads. You should’ve used something heavier on Sunburn, though. Suicides generally place their faith in weapons they know will do the job the first time. And they don’t worry about noise.”
“That’s twice you said Sunburn. Why’d I kill him? I forget.”
“You didn’t go there fixing to kill him, or if you did you wanted to pump him for information first, find out where Barry Stackpole was hiding.”
“I don’t know any Stackpoles neither.”
“You knew him in Vietnam, where your friend Mark Harney got himself fried for doing dope business with the wrong people. You knew him here, when he started looking into that old murder. Only he found a lot more than he was looking for. Didn’t he?”
His face gave up nothing. “You’re telling it.”
“Asking around about you he found out you were part of Ray Blankenship’s murder machine. Maybe that’s the handle he got hold of that opened the door on the whole mess. I looked up your record, Grice. You were stationed in Hue when Harney was fragged there, and back home, before you switched to Downtown Vice, you were a third-grader in the Fourteenth Precinct, where Blankenship ran his contract business. Barry got too close too fast and skipped out until things cooled. He’s more cautious about such things than the average reporter, as who wouldn’t be, given his experiences? You had to find him and take him out before he exposed you as a murderer all the way back to Nam. Remind me to come back to how you found out about the travel agency Barry used.
“Vietnam vets tend to arm themselves,” I went on. “Sunburn kept a gun in his desk. Maybe he had a chance to fire it before you killed him. That was convenient for the paraffin test, but it wouldn’t have been a twenty-two; that would’ve been too neat. You took it away with you to cut down on confusion. If he did fire it, the bullet will be found, probably in the wall behind a travel poster. I don’t guess you had a chance to get any information out of him before it happened.”
While I’d been speaking, Grice had circled the room. I rotated to keep him in front of me. His back was to the front door now. He flashed a quick white grin with no humor in it.
“You spin a good one,” he said. “You’re a better writer than your friend Stackpole. Only that’s all it is, a story. You got nothing to back it up.”
“I’ve got your prints on the murder weapon. It’s empty, by the way.”
He inspected the barrels, saw I was right, wiped it down his pants leg on both sides, and deposited it on the sofa. By the time he had his service .38 out of its holster I had drawn the Smith & Wesson from my right pocket. I gestured at his cheek with the barrel.
“What happened, your incendiary go off before you could get clear?”
“You’re turned around, Sherlock. I got this pulling Mark out of the fire. He was my partner over there. I don’t know how you came up with that.”
“I didn’t. I just guessed. Thanks for the confirmation.”
He moved a shoulder. “You want his killer, talk to your friend Stackpole. He’s the one threw the bomb.”
“That isn’t Barry,” I said. “If he wanted to kill Harney, he’d have shot him clean, looking at him. Rolling grenades into bedrooms is your speed.”
“Lose it, Walker.”
This voice was new. I made an effort to react slowly, backing around in a short arc and keeping my eyes on Grice while the rest of the room came into my periphery. Waddell, the sergeant’s partner, had entered through the bedroom and was standing in the doorway with his snapbrim hat low on his forehead and one of the new ten-millimeter automatics in his right hand.
A couple of seconds knocked by on the antique clock behind me. I lowered my arm and let the revolver slide out of my hand. It thudded the carpet.
“I thought I closed that window this morning,” I said.
“I opened it.”
Grice said, “Toss him.”
Waddell threw me up against the wall, patted me down, and stepped back, shaking his head at the sergeant, who laughed suddenly.
“I like it.” Grice had picked up the .22 again and was feeding cartridges into it from a pocket. He wasn’t the kind of cop to get caught short. “You take your work seriously. When Sunburn wouldn’t tell you where Stackpole is you shot him. Then you came back here and shot yourself with the same gun. It doesn’t have a history. That’s why I left it with him. This is more complicated, but it’ll go.”
“What about Barry?”
“Him when it’s time.” He closed the action. “What made you figure me to begin with? I’m a detective and I got to know.”
“Can I stand naturally?”
Waddell moved back another step and I pushed myself away from the wall and dropped my arms. The ten-millimeter was trained just above my belt buckle. Grice had holstered his .38 and was holding just the High Standard.
I said, “You were everywhere. You investigated the Blankenship shoot, probably at your request, and you bent around Willy the Wino’s death in my building to justify your presence there as part of your investigation into the bum killings. Was he sleeping in the outer office when you let yourself into the private room or what?”
“He came in while I was at it. I drew the piece and he ran. I caught up with him at the top of the stairs and gave him the other end on the back of his head. He fell. Then I called Waddell to come help mop up.”
“You bugged my office. That’s how you learned about Sunburn being Barry’s man in Zodiac Travel.”
“No James Bond shit, just one of those little voice-activated tape recorders with adhesive on the back. I snuck it back out this morning.”
“I know. The building superintendent saw you leaving. You got kind of careless there. Gerald Page was better at that sort of thing. He hung a tail on me I never did spot. You killed him, right?”
“He went against orders. Your body would of been one too many just then. He was only supposed to warn you off. I threw it up to him and he got pissed, said maybe the department would ap
preciate him more if he blew the top off the whole operation. Sure, I killed him. Just for the record, though, Blankenship popped himself. I asked in to make sure he didn’t leave no mash notes. He didn’t. That’s why it didn’t do no harm to let you talk to his widow. God bless the Old Guard; they always go down alone. Honor, I love it.”
“I’m surprised you recognized it,” I said. “Let me finish. Before you made the move to Homicide, you were inside man on the raid on the Inner City Action Council a month ago. Barry must have known that was coming, from his sources in the department. He made sure he was there when it went down, to get a look at you in action. He was that thorough. Either he wasn’t as drunk as he pretended or his drinking got away from him. I kept tripping over you. I only have to fall down and hit my head so many times before it starts to work.”
The scar jumped. “What do you know about the Inner—”
He stopped talking. Recognition crawled into his eyes. He touched two fingers to the jaw I’d slugged in the blind pig. The .22 came up. I took a short step and chopped him backhanded across the throat.
He fell back against the door wheezing. The blood slid from his face and I reached down and wrenched the High Standard out of his grasp. Then I brought my knee up hard enough to lift him off his feet and swept the gun against the side of his head. He was sliding when I spun on Waddell.
I had moved purely from instinct, without thinking. I’d been expecting a bullet in the back any time. But when I came around with the .22, instead of shooting me Grice’s partner thrust the automatic out in front of him in two hands and bawled at me to drop it.
It made me laugh. “Why the hell should I?”
“Because Officer Waddell is ours.”
Voices were starting to come at me from all over. This one I knew right away, but I didn’t move this time.
“Come on, Walker. Even you can count.”
I lowered the gun then and turned to look at Lieutenant Ysabel standing on the other side of Grice’s twitching mass. He had the front door open and he was just slipping a short-barreled .44 magnum into his armpit holster.
“We’ve been watching Grice for weeks,” he said, nudging him with a scuffed leather toe. “Waddell there was moled in at the Fourteenth for three months and when the arrows started pointing at the sergeant we got him transferred downtown to stay on top of him. Grice was rabbity, though. Wouldn’t do anything while Waddell was around to witness.”
“So you dangled me for bait.”
“Well, we didn’t expect him to move this fast. But yeah. I didn’t see you shying from the hook.”
“It’s starting to look like home,” I said.
Waddell said, “Better get Grice’s pipe looked at, Lieutenant. He’s got talking to do.”
“If he didn’t I’d let him choke. Call the fast-wagon.”
While Waddell was using the telephone, Ysabel relieved Grice of his revolver and cuffed him. The sergeant came around groaning. His breath whistled. Ysabel pulled Grice’s own Miranda card out of his handkerchief pocket and read:
“You have the right to remain silent, asswipe. If you give up the right to remain silent, fucker, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney, shithead. If, cocksucker, you desire an attorney and cannot afford one … ”
After that his language got colorful. I fired up a Winston and listened to the music.
34
MONDAY SLID IN GRAY and damp. The thermometer stayed at forty-eight all morning and started the long crawl down just after lunch. Headlamps burned on West Grand River at noon and a couple of enterprising souls in silver disco jackets were hawking umbrellas on the street at five bucks a pop. They had bought them in Greektown for a dollar ninety-eight.
I spent the morning fielding telephone calls. Some Mondays are like that. Others are like listening to an interpretive reading of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Either way they usually set the mood for the whole week. One was from a woman named Raeburn in Ypsilanti who wanted me to look for her husband.
“How long has he been missing?” I asked.
“Eight months.”
“What did the police say?”
“Nothing. I didn’t go to the police.”
“Your husband’s been missing eight months and you haven’t reported it?”
“Well, at first I wasn’t so disappointed he was gone. Living with Howie hasn’t exactly been like a movie, unless you count that one with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, and I ain’t talking about Cleopatra. But yesterday right in the middle of General Hospital they said on TV that the holder of this year’s winning Sweepstakes ticket ain’t come forward and they give the number, and, well, Howie was always buying Sweepstakes tickets out of the grocery money and I got to thinking maybe that’s him. So that’s what I want you to do, find Howie and ask him is it his ticket, because if it is I’m entitled to half. I got the number right here.”
“What if it isn’t?”
“If it ain’t he can stay lost. I got all the pets and plants I can feed now.”
“Lady, you don’t need me. You need a lawyer named Swifty who wears loud checked suits and beats the cops to traffic accidents.”
“Yeah? Well, you blew it, mister. I was fixing to cut you in.” She hung up in my face.
Most of the calls ran to that sort of thing. I was thinking of taking the telephone off the hook or getting into greens-keeping when the buzzer went off that told me someone had just come into the outer office. I called to whoever it was to keep coming.
Barry looked tan and healthy. He had let his hair grow out a little and the sun had yellowed it so that it appeared almost white against his brown skin. He was wearing a white knit shirt with a soft collar under a dark plaid sport coat and a pair of gabardine slacks whose cuffs touched the tops of his suede shoes. He smiled cockily and hurled himself into the customer’s chair, hooking the artificial leg over the arm.
“And another thing,” he said.
“Hello, Barry. How was the grand jury?”
“They ought to re-name it. I pled the Fifth from the time they asked me my name and finally they let me go. You don’t give them traction they can’t run over you.” His blue eyes were very clear against the tan. “You were pretty sure I showed.”
“I didn’t figure you’d give the News grounds to can you this year. Not until the book hits six figures anyway.”
“Maybe not even then. This being an author is hard work. Are you sore at me?”
“Hell no. Why should I be? I almost got killed for you while you were down in Miami or someplace taking the sun.”
“Fort Lauderdale,” he corrected. “I rented a little bungalow down there. And I wasn’t out in the sun the whole time. I got a good jump on the book. Hell, I got five chapters and an outline.”
“Congratulations.”
“I’m sending them tomorrow to that editor you recommended.”
“You should’ve come back Friday. You could have given them to her in person.”
“Friday I was still clattering away. What do you mean?”
I told him. He cursed. “Why didn’t you say something when I called?”
“Would you have come back?”
“No. Probably not.”
For a space neither of us spoke. Then his expression changed. “Hey, you owe me for two windows. If it was you that broke them.”
“Sorry. Send me the bill. I also have to get your book back to you, the first one.”
“Keep it. I like the new one better. I want you to read it when it’s finished.”
“Why?”
“You’re the only person I know who will tell me if it stinks, that’s why. Jesus, I thought you’d be interested. You gave me the title.”
“No thanks. I’m all read out on you for a long time.”
He wasn’t listening. “Who scooped me? I bought the Sunday News when I got in last night and read all about Sergeant Grice under Jed Dutt’s byline.”
“You walked away f
rom the story.”
“I wasn’t hiding. Well, I was, but not from Grice or anyone else. I had to get away, get a handle on the book. You don’t really think I ran scared, do you?”
“I think you went away to get a handle on the book.”
“So how come you’re sore? And what’s this crap about almost getting killed? I didn’t see your name in Dutt’s piece.”
“I told Lieutenant Ysabel he could leave it out when he spoke to the press, and I made sure it was Dutt he spoke to. I owed both of them.” I lit a cigarette and flipped the match into the ashtray. “I talked to Grice about Sergeant Mark Harney. He said you killed him.”
He watched the match smolder.
“Maybe that’s the way he sees it,” he said.
“You said so too. I read your wastebasket.”
“I was drunk when I wrote that. It wasn’t entirely a lie, though. You had to have been there.”
“I was.”
“Yeah, there. But not there. Not in that camp outside Hue the night Grice pulled his dope partner out of that hut and rolled him over and over on the ground until the flames gave out.” He stopped looking at the match and looked at me. “It took Harney three weeks to die. They had him pumped full of morphine the whole time. You could still hear him screaming clear across camp. Until the last day, anyway.
“I didn’t roll that grenade into his hut. But I know who did. He told me he was going to do it and I didn’t do anything to stop him. Which I guess makes me an accessory. But you know what it was like over there. All the rules were suspended.”
“Who was it?”
“Keith Porter.”
I squinted through my smoke. “Who’s Keith Porter?”
“You mean who was Keith Porter. I told you about him the last time we were together. At the Press Club.”
“The guy that fried himself with a power drill in Colorado.”
“That’s him. Appropriate.”
“That’s what got you thinking about the whole thing,” I said.
“I never stopped, really. It got worse when I was writing the book. The first version. Then when I heard Keith was dead it got even worse. I was the last one left who knew. I had to go back over it, try to understand it. Grice was my time machine. If I could understand him … ” He shifted his leg. “Anyway, it’s in the book now, the new version. There’s no statute of limitations on murder so I guess I’ll have to stand some heat.”
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