Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places

by Loren Estleman

  “I had worse.” Ralph’s tongue moved sluggishly. “Did I get the son of a bitch?”

  “No, you missed rather badly. It required persuasion to get Morgan to carry you down here to the basement instead of killing you on the spot. He was quite upset.”

  “Tell him I’ll try to do better next time.” Ralph squirmed. There was something familiar about the position he was tied in. For some reason he thought of Mrs. Thornton, his ninth-grade American Lit. teacher. What is the significance of Poe’s “Pit and the Pendulum” to the transcendentalist movement?

  His organs shriveled.

  “Another antique,” said the bishop. “The Inquisition did not end when General Lasalle entered Madrid, but went on for several years in the provinces. This particular rack was still in use after Torquemada’s death. The gears are original. The wheel is new, and of course I had to replace the ropes. Morgan?”

  A shoe scraped the floor and a spoked shadow fluttered across Ralph’s vision. His arms tightened. He gasped.

  “That’s enough. We don’t want to put Mr. Poteet back under.” To Ralph: “Morgan just returned from your apartment. He found neither pictures nor film nor even a camera. Where are they?”

  “I was lying. I didn’t take no pictures.”

  “Morgan.”

  Ralph shrieked.

  “Enough!” Stoneman’s fallen-away face moved into Ralph’s vision. His eyes were fanatic. “A few more turns will sever your spine. You could be spoon-fed for the rest of your life. Do you think that after failing to kill you in that apartment I would hesitate to cripple you? Where are the pictures?”

  “I didn’t take none!”

  “Morgan!”

  “No!”

  It ended in a howl. His armpits were on fire. The ropes creaked.

  The bishop’s face jerked away. The spoked shadow fluttered. The tension went out of Ralph’s arms suddenly, and relief poured into his joints. A shot flattened the air. Two more answered it. Something struck the bench Ralph was lying on and drove a splinter into his back. He thought at first he’d been shot, but the pain was nothing; he’d just been through worse. He squirmed onto his hip and saw Morgan, one black-clad arm stained and glistening, leveling a heavy automatic at a target behind Ralph’s back. Scrambling out of the line of fire, Ralph jerked his bound hands and the rack’s wheel, six feet in diameter with handles bristling from it as from a ship’s helm, spun around. One of the handles slapped the gun from Morgan’s hand. Something cracked past Ralph’s left ear and Morgan fell back against the tile wall and slid down it. The shooting stopped.

  Ralph wriggled onto his other hip. A man he didn’t know, in a houndstooth coat with a revolver in his hand, had Bishop Stoneman spread-eagled against a wall and was groping in his robes for weapons. Dale English came off the stairs with the Ruger he’d carried since Ralph was his partner. He bent over Morgan on the floor, then straightened and holstered the gun. He looked at Ralph. “I guess you’re okay.”

  “I am if you got a pocketknife.”

  “Arson boys found the circuit breaker in the wall switch just like you said.” He cut Ralph’s arms free and sawed through the straps on his ankles. “When you didn’t answer your phone I went to your place and found Stoneman’s note.”

  “He confessed to the hooker’s murder.”

  “I know. I heard him.”

  “How the hell long were you listening?”

  “We had to have enough to pin him to it, didn’t we?”

  “You son of a bitch. You just wanted to hear me holler.”

  “Couldn’t help it. You sure got lungs.”

  “We even now?”

  “We’ll never be even. But we’re closer.”

  “I got to go to the toilet.”

  “Stick around after,” English said. “I need a statement to hand to the City boys. They won’t like County sticking its face in this.”

  Ralph hobbled upstairs. When he was through in the bathroom he found his hat and coat and headed out. At the front door he turned around and went back into the bishop’s study, where he hoisted St. Thomas More’s Bible under one arm. He knew a bookseller who would probably give him a hundred bucks for it.

  The Used

  I was impressed with how well this one held up after more than thirty years. It was the first story I sold to Cathleen Jordan after she became editor-in-chief of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; before that, she’d been my editor at Doubleday. Sadly, this great lady is no longer with us. But apart from the satisfaction of the sale, I had the bonus of meeting John Lutz, whose fine story “Time Exposure” appeared in the same issue, and beginning a friendship that has lasted to this day.

  • • •

  “But I never been to Iowa!” Murch said.

  His visitor sighed. “Of course not. No one has. That’s why we’re sending you there.”

  Slouched in the worn leather armchair in the office Murch kept at home, Adamson looked more like a high school basketball player than a federal agent. He had baby-fat features without a breath of whisker and collar-length sandy hair and wore faded Levi’s with a tweed jacket too short in the sleeves and a paisley tie at three-quarter mast. His voice was changing, for God’s sake. The slight bulge under his left arm might have been a sandwich from home.

  Murch paced, coming to a stop at the basement window. His lawn needed mowing. The thought of it awakened the bursitis in his right shoulder. “What’ll I do there? Don’t they raise wheat or something like that? What’s a wheat farmer need with a bookkeeper?”

  “You won’t be a bookkeeper. I explained all this before.” The agent sat up, resting his forearms on his bony knees. “In return for your testimony regarding illegal contributions made by your employer to the campaigns of Congressmen Disdale and Reicher and Senator Van Horn, the Justice Department promises immunity from prosecution. You will also be provided with protection during the trial, and afterwards a new identity and relocation to Iowa. When you get there, you’ll find a job waiting for you selling hardware, courtesy of your Uncle Sam.”

  “What do I know about hardware? My business is with numbers.”

  “An accounting position seemed inadvisable, on the off chance Redman’s people traced you west. They’d never think of looking for you behind a sales counter.”

  Murch swung around. “You said he wouldn’t be able to trace me!”

  Adamson’s lips pursed, lending him the appearance of a teenage Cupid. “I won’t lie and say it hasn’t happened. But in those cases there were big syndicate operations involved, with plenty of capital to spend. Jules Redman is light cargo by comparison. It’s the senator and the congressmen we want, but we have to knock him down to get to them.”

  “What’s the matter, they turn you down?’

  The agent looked at him blankly.

  Murch had to smile.

  “Come on, I ain’t been in this line eighteen years I don’t see how it jerks. Maybe these guys been giving your agency a hard time on appropriations or—” He broke off, his face brightening further. “Say, didn’t I read where this Van Horn is asking for an investigation into clandestine operations? Yeah, and maybe the others support him. So you sniff around till something stinks and then tell them if they play ball you’ll scratch sand over it. Only they don’t feel like playing, so now you go for the jugular. Am I close?”

  “I’m just a field operative, Mr. Murch. I leave politics to politicians.” But the grudging respect in the agent’s tone was enlightening.

  “What happens if I decide not to testify?”

  “Then you’ll be wearing those numbers you’re so good at on your shirt. For three counts of conspiracy to bribe a member of the United States Congress.”

  They were watching each other when the doorbell rang upstairs. Murch jumped.

  “That’ll be your escort,” Adamson suggested. “I’ve arranged for a room at a motel in the suburbs. The local police are lending a couple of plainclothesmen to stay there with you until the trial Monday. It’s u
p to you whether I ask them to take you to jail instead.”

  “One room?” The bookkeeper’s lip curled.

  “There’s an economy move on in Washington.” Adamson got out of the chair and stood waiting. The doorbell sounded again.

  “I want a color TV in the room,” said Murch. “Tell your boss no color TV, no deal.”

  The agent didn’t smile. “I’ll tell him.” He went up to answer the door.

  He shared a frame bungalow at the motel between the railroad and the river with a detective sergeant named Kirdy and his relief, a lean, chinless officer who watched football all day with the sound turned down. He held a transistor radio in his lap; it was tuned to the races. Kirdy looked smaller than he was. Though his head barely reached the bridge of Murch’s nose, he took a size forty-six jacket and had to turn sideways to clear his shoulders through doorways. He had kind eyes set incongruously in a slab of granite. No-Chin never spoke except to warn his charge away from windows. Kirdy’s conversation centered around his granddaughter, a blond tyke of whom he had a wallet full of photos. The bathroom was heated only intermittently by an electric baseboard unit and the building shuddered whenever a train went past. But Murch had his color TV.

  At half past ten Monday morning, he was escorted into court by Adamson and another agent who looked like a rock musician. Jules Redman sat at the defense table with his attorney. Murch’s employer was small and dark, with an old-time bullfighter’s handlebar moustache and glossy black hair combed over a bald spot. Their gazes met while the bookkeeper was being sworn in, and from then until recess was called at noon, Redman’s tan eyes remained on the man in the witness chair.

  Charles Anthony Murch—his full name felt strange on his tongue when the court officer asked him for it—was on the stand two days. His testimony was complicated, having to do with dates and transactions made through dummy corporations, and he consulted his notebook often while the jurors stifled yawns and the spectators fidgeted and inspected their fingernails. After adjournment the first day, the witness was whisked along a circuitous route to a hotel near the airport, where Kirdy and his partner awaited their duty. On the way, Adamson was talkative and in good spirits. Already he spoke of how his agency would proceed against the congressmen and Senator Van Horn after Redman was convicted. Murch was silent, remembering his employer’s eyes.

  The defense attorney, white-haired and grandfatherly behind a pair of half-glasses, kept his seat during cross-examination the next morning, reading from a computer printout sheet on the table in front of him while the government’s case slowly fell to pieces. Murch had thought that his dismissal from that contracting firm upstate was off the books, and he was surprised to learn that someone had penetrated his double-entry system at the insurance company he had left in Chicago. Based on this record, the lawyer accused the witness of entering the so-called campaign donations into Redman’s ledger to cover his own thefts. The jurors’ faces were unreadable, but as the imputation continued, Murch saw the corners of the defendant’s moustache rise slightly and watched Adamson’s eyes growing dull.

  The jury was out twenty-two hours, a state record for that kind of case. Jules Redman was found guilty of resisting arrest, reduced from assaulting a police officer (he’d lost his temper and knocked down a detective during an unsuccessful search of his office for evidence), and was acquitted on three counts of bribery. He was sentenced to time served and fined five thousand dollars.

  Adamson was out the door on the reporters’ scurrying heels. Murch hurried to catch up.

  “You don’t live right, Charlie.”

  The bookkeeper held up at the hoarse comment. Redman’s diminutive frame slid past him in the aisle and was swallowed up by a crowd of well-wishers gathered near the door.

  The agent kept a twelve-by-ten cubicle in the federal building two floors up from the courtroom where Redman had been set free. When Murch burst in, Adamson was slumped behind a gray steel desk deep in conversation with his rock-musician partner.

  “We had a deal,” corrected the agent, after Murch’s panicky interruption. His colleague stood by brushing his long hair out of his eyes. “It was made in good faith. We gave you a chance to volunteer any information from your past that might put our case in jeopardy. You didn’t take advantage of it, and now we’re all treading water in the toilet.”

  “How was I to know they was gonna dig up that stuff about those other two jobs? You investigated me. You didn’t find nothing.” The ex-witness’s hands made wet marks on the desk top.

  “Our methods aren’t Redman’s. It takes longer to subpoena personnel files than it does to screw a Magnum into a clerk’s ear and say gimme. Now I know why he didn’t try to take you out before the trial.” He paused. “Is there anything else?”

  “Damn right there’s something else! You promised me Iowa, win or lose.”

  Adamson reached inside his jacket and extracted a long narrow envelope like the airlines used to put tickets in. Murch’s heart leaped. He was reaching for the envelope when the agent tore it in half. He put the pieces together and tore them. Again, and then he let the bits flutter to the desk.

  For a numb moment the bookkeeper goggled at the scraps. Then he lunged, grasping Adamson’s lapels in both hands and lifting. “Redman’s a killer!” He shook him. The agent clawed at his wrists, but Murch’s fingers were strong from years cramped around pencils and the handles of adding machines. Adamson’s right hand went for his underarm holster, but his partner had gotten Murch in a bearhug and pulled. The front of the captive agent’s coat tore away in his hands.

  Adamson’s chest heaved. He gestured with his revolver. “Get him the hell out of here.” His voice cracked.

  Murch struggled, but his right arm was yanked behind him and twisted. Pain shot through his shoulder. He went along, whimpering. Shoved out into the corridor, he had to run to catch his balance and slammed into the opposite wall, knocking a memo off a bulletin board. The door exploded shut.

  A group of well-dressed men standing nearby stopped talking to look at him. He realized that he was still holding pieces of Adamson’s jacket. He let them fall, brushed back his thinning hair with a shaky hand, adjusted his suit, and moved off down the corridor.

  Redman and his lawyer were being interviewed on the courthouse steps by a TV crew. Murch gave them a wide berth on his way down. He overheard Redman telling the reporters he was leaving tomorrow for a week’s vacation in Jamaica. Ice formed in the bookkeeper’s stomach. Redman was giving himself an alibi for when Murch’s body turned up.

  Anyway, he had eighteen hours’ grace. He decided to write off the stuff he had left back at the hotel and took a cab to his house on the west side. For years he had kept two thousand dollars in cash there in case he needed a getaway stake in a hurry. By the time he had his key in the front door lock he was already breathing easier; Redman’s men wouldn’t try anything until their boss was out of the country, and a couple of grand could get a man a long way in eighteen hours.

  His house had been ransacked.

  They had overlooked nothing. They had torn up the rugs, pulled apart the sofa and easy chairs and slit open the cushions, taken pictures down from the walls and dismantled the frames, removed the back panel from the TV set, dumped out the flour and sugar canisters in the kitchen. Even the plates had been unscrewed from the wall switches. The orange juice can in which he had kept the rolled bills in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator lay empty on the linoleum.

  The sheer, cold logic of the operation dizzied Murch. Even after they had found the money they had gone on to make sure there were no other caches. His office alone, its contents smeared out into the passage that led to the stairs, would have taken hours to reduce to its present condition. The search had to have started well before the verdict was in, perhaps even as early as the weekend he had spent in that motel by the railroad tracks. Redman had been so confident of victory he had moved to cut off the bookkeeper’s escape while the trial was still in progress.
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  He couldn’t stay there. Probably he was already being watched, and the longer he remained the greater his chances of being kept prisoner in his own home until the word came down to eliminate him. He stepped outside. The street was quiet except for some noisy kids playing basketball in a neighbor’s driveway and the snort of a power mower farther down the block. He started walking toward the corner.

  Toward the bank. They’d taken his passbook, too, but he had better than six thousand in his account and he could borrow against that. Buy a used car or hop a plane. Maybe even go to Jamaica, stretch out on the beach next to Redman, and wait for his reaction. He smiled at that. Confidence warmed him, like whiskey in a cold belly. He mounted the bank steps, grasped the handle on the glass door. And froze.

  He was alerted by the one reading a bank pamphlet in a chair near the door. There were no lines at the tellers’ cages and no reason to wait. He spotted the other standing at the writing table, pretending to be making out a deposit slip. Their eyes wandered the lobby from time to time, casually. Murch didn’t recognize their faces, but he knew the type: early thirties, jackets tailored to avoid telltale bulges. He reversed directions, moving slowly to keep from drawing attention. His heart started up again when he cleared the plate glass.

  It was quarter to five, too late to reach another branch before closing, and even if he did he knew what would be waiting for him. He knew they had no intention of accosting him unless he tried to borrow money. They were running him like hounds, keeping him within range while they waited for the go-ahead. He was on a short tether with Redman on the other end.

  But a man who juggled figures the way Much did had more angles than the Pentagon. He hailed a cruising cab and gave the driver Bart Morgan’s address on Whitaker.

  Morgan’s laundromat was twice as big as the room in back where the real business was conducted, with a narrow office between to prevent the ringing of the telephones from reaching the housewives washing their husbands’ socks out front. Murch found the proprietor there counting change at the card table he used for a desk. Muscular but running to fat, Morgan had crewcut steel-gray hair and wore horn-rimmed glasses with a hearing aid built into one bow. His head grew straight out of his T-shirt.