The Sundown Speech

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Which you won’t pay.”

  “I let them pile up, then go in and settle my bill with a brick of cash. That’s always good for the front page of the feature section.” He tipped up his bottle and let it gurgle for thirty seconds, lowered it, and wiped his lips with the back of a hand. “In this country you can film two guys shooting each other to pieces with Uzis, but the minute they drop their pants you’ve got a date in court.”

  “What’s the difference between you and a flasher? Remote control?”

  “You mean because I keep my clothes on? I helped put myself through college posing for life-drawing classes. Endomorph, you know? Very much in demand.” He smacked his nonexistent stomach. “I’m putting together another book: Ann Arbor Exposed.”

  “You published one before?”

  “The Naked Mile. Ever hear of it?”

  “Sounds like a stretch of unpaved road.”

  “It was a harmless bit of celebration, but to hear some people talk it was the end of civilization as we know it. Until a few years ago, students at the university had a tradition of streaking starkers across the Diag every spring to mark the end of the semester. It drove the cops and the board of directors apeshit.”

  “Well, this is the cultural center of the world.”

  “I heard it was the Athens of America.” The corners of his mouth twitched. “The adults here are puritans under all that enlightenment crap. They issued statements condemning it, the cops threatened arrests, the News editorialized against it—rapists’ bait, that old saw. No dice, until the rise of the camera phone and YouTube. Kids who don’t mind flopping their privates around in public go all queasy when someone puts them on video. The Naked Mile was gone in a year. But it lives on in my book.”

  “You shot it?”

  “Infrared film at high speed. It was a bitch, and my publishers made me put black bars across their eyes so they couldn’t be identified and sue. I don’t bother much with releases.”

  “What was the point?”

  He made air quotes with his fingers. “‘There are no atheists in foxholes and no hypocrites in the altogether.’ I write my own cover copy ever since they tried to sell me as ‘Rembrandt in the Raw.’”

  I’d known plenty of atheists in Cambodia, but I didn’t argue.

  “They sold copies in the university bookstore. I was invited to sign. I figured it was a trap, so I turned it down.” His lips twitched again. “They call me a pornographer every time I come to town to shoot, but put the stuff between hard covers and suddenly I’m a street artist.”

  “It’s a cockeyed old world.” I rocked the chair once, then gave up. It was like hanging off the side of a sloop. “What do you have in common with Jerry Marcus, aside from an interest in photography?”

  He sucked on the plastic bottle, caving in the sides and also his cheeks. He was Warsaw Ghetto thin, but he looked healthy. Absent baby fat I put him just past thirty. He shook his head.

  “Uh-uh; not yet. You came to me. What about him, aside from the fact I’m not shedding salty tears over his grave? You don’t look like a cop.”

  “Thanks for that.” I drank. Introducing water to an empty stomach made me gassy. I tamped down the squirter and set the bottle on the floor. “I’m private, working for a couple he fleeced out of seed money for his film. The number of your studio on Washtenaw came up on Marcus’ phone. You were the last person he called.”

  “That’s it?”

  I belched, nodded. “I’ve gotten more from less.”

  “I’m surprised I haven’t heard from the cops.”

  “You will. Right now they’re trying to make the investigation sound like something other than the bottom half of a double bill with Mr. Alien Elect.”

  When he raised his brows his whole scalp shifted. “Meaning?”

  I crossed my legs and sank my hands in my pockets.

  “Okay,” he said. “Myra put him through. My receptionist. She’s new, or she’d have known to tell him I was out on a shoot or dead. I hadn’t had a chance to change my number since the last time we spoke.”

  “Did she say what he wanted?”

  “He had an inflated idea of how much money there is in publishing. He tried to tap me for fifty K on that damn space opera. I told him if he called again I’d turn him in to the cops.” He crumpled the empty bottle and tossed it at a plastic wastebasket. It circled the rim and came to a stop hanging by the crease, like something by Dali.

  “You knew he was running a scam?”

  “No, it was something else.”

  I waited, but he just slung one pipe-cleaner leg over the other and sank his hands in the pockets of his duffel jacket.

  I said, “Marcus only skinned my clients out of fifteen. At the rate he was going, he stood to clear his first million before he finished one reel. I’m surprised he shot as much as he did.”

  “Oh, he was serious about it when we were partners.”

  “You were partners?”

  “Three years ago. I co-wrote the script, about invading aliens who combust simultaneously when cornered. We were shooting digitally and computer-generating the special effects.

  “We had the same brainstorm at the same time,” he said, becoming animated. “If you can fake an organic explosion, why not fake the organism? He was years ahead of the bulge in Hollywood when it came to simulation. He found a way to make the characters look like real people instead of inflated dolls. I told him he should hire himself out, but he said he couldn’t work for anyone else. I don’t understand how he did what he did, but I’m a still photog. I prefer working the old-fashioned way, with film and older processes. Back at the studio I’ve got equipment designed by Louis Daguerre. It was fun, though, making movies; or it was until he changed.”

  “You mean turned crooked.”

  “Not crooked. Not then. Shit.” He twirled a finger next to his temple, reminding me of Shaky Jake. “He rewrote the ending to herd the aliens into the Michigan Theater and send them up like Roman candles, and the building with them. Make Independence Day look like a Looney Tune.”

  “Exciting.”

  “More exciting than my heart could take,” he said. “He wasn’t planning to do it on the computer.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Cars swished by outside. The traffic jam he’d created was breaking up, with or without the assistance of the big man in the mahogany-colored suit. I said nothing while Moze plunked the heels of his combat boots onto a low table littered with aluminum film canisters and curling Polaroids of uninterrupted flesh. He folded his hands behind his head. The cords in his neck stood out like umbrella staves.

  “Jerry made a student film when he was studying at the U of M, entered it in competition at the Cinema Slam. Know what that is?”

  “Sounds like a stretch of unpaved road.” I plugged my grin with a cigarette.

  “Go ahead and light up if you want to see the moon before you die. Just give me two blocks’ head start.” He patted a floor cabinet. “It took a permit to transport some of these chemicals. Can’t fight the AAPD and ATF.”

  I put it back in the pack.

  “It’s an amateur film festival,” he said. “The entrants screen their masterpieces for the public at the Michigan Theater during the art fairs. All the Spielberg wannabes try to turn them into a gig in Hollywood, or at least a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The audiences get in for free and watch the films, eat bratwurst, drink beer, and fill out critique cards to be mailed to the filmmakers later.”

  “How’d Marcus do, as if I couldn’t guess?”

  “They were less than impressed.”

  “Was it the sci-fi?”

  “No, it was one of those allegorical pieces of tripe you hear students read out loud in creative writing courses the world over, only with shaky-cams and long lingering close-ups at the end of the scene so you know it’s Significant, with a capital S. Symbolism by the long ton. It was technically sound—he was a world-beater there—but naïve to the point of pain.
Some people liked it. Most thought it was pretentious and boring.”

  “I take it he didn’t react well to criticism.”

  “I didn’t know him yet then; he shot the film when he was a sophomore. I only saw it when he showed it to me our senior year. But he couldn’t stop talking about that night. He never forgave Ann Arbor.”

  “Still, it’s a big jump from there to blowing up a theater.”

  “The Michigan isn’t just another theater. It’s one of those grand motion-picture palaces from the twenties. It languished for years—at one point the owners painted over all the fretwork and gold leaf in university maize-and-blue—and then it was going to be pulled down and turned into a parking lot. They love parking lots here the way Detroit loves crack houses; you can park in one to visit another. Then a group of preservationists took up a collection and bought the building and got the city to invest in restoring it. You have to see it before you go home: It’s like they hung the Hanging Gardens of Babylon inside the Taj Mahal and shoved it up the ass of the Colossus of Rhodes.”

  “You paint a pretty picture, but I don’t know if I’ll find the time.”

  “Your loss. It’s a local institution, like Zingerman’s and stoplights. By destroying it, Jerry would be getting back at the Slam and the community both at once. I think by the time we split he’d forgotten the whole thing started out as a movie production.”

  “He said that, about getting back?”

  “He showed me. You know Whitmore Lake? Don’t say it sounds like a stretch of unpaved road.”

  “I know it. I helped enroll a couple of juvies in the reform school there.”

  “Nice little town, if you like ice cream cones in the summer and freezing your ass off pulling pike out from under the ice in winter. I like Edy’s and Mrs. Paul’s. He took me out to a storage shed there, which he had stacked to the rafters with a couple of hundred bags of fertilizer. He wasn’t planning on going into farming.”

  I nodded. It was the same volatile ingredient used in the Oklahoma City bombing.

  “He said he’d spent six months putting it together, buying two and three bags at a time from places all over southeastern Michigan and northern Ohio. Buy too much in one place and you’ll find ATF agents camping on your doorstep when you get home.”

  “A lot of people died in Oak City,” I said. “Was he talking about blowing up just a piece of architecture?”

  “He said. But the theater’s on Liberty, in one of the biggest commercial districts in the city and just off campus. You’d have to evacuate it for five blocks in every direction.”

  I wanted a cigarette, but I didn’t care to see the moon that season. I wanted to rock, but I felt queasy enough just from the conversation. “He knew how to make a bomb?”

  “He studied demolition. In Hollywood you have to be a certified explosives expert to work in special effects: squibs and things, so it looks like an actor got shot to pieces instead of just getting ketchup stains all over his costume. That’s before he found out he was a genius and that geniuses don’t work for wages. Pauline Kael’s book on Citizen Kane changed his life.”

  I hadn’t seen a copy in Marcus’ room. I wondered if that was significant.

  “So he showed you the fertilizer, and that’s when you broke away.”

  He got up all of a piece, like a Swiss Army knife folding itself, and paced the length of the trailer. It shifted on its springs.

  “If I had, I’d have tipped off the authorities first. I didn’t really think he’d go through with it. Acting out his fantasy as far as he had was as good as the real thing, I thought. You’d have to have known Jerry. I doubt he ever went so far as to bait a mousetrap, knowing what would happen to the mouse.”

  “Not to mention what would happen to the guy who helped bait it.”

  He stopped pacing, glared down at me. His eyes rolled like marbles in those naked sockets. “If I thought I might be implicated in a real atrocity, don’t you think I’d have run, not walked, to the nearest police station?”

  “Before today, I never thought I’d meet a man who took pictures of mobs in the altogether and sold it as art. I don’t know you, Moselle.”

  “Sure.” He slung himself back onto the love seat. The bill of his cap got in the way when he tilted his head against the cushions. He tore it off and flung it at the wastebasket. This time he scored. “Anyway, he gave up the idea after September eleventh. Those high-flying bastards spooked him sane. I helped him truck the bags of animal shit out into the country and dumped ’em in a swamp. It must be pretty green there by now.”

  “What swamp? Someone may want to check.”

  “How the hell should I know? I was brought up in Chicago. He rented a U-Haul and did the driving—he could hardly have fitted that load in that circus-wagon Mustang of his—and it was dark. By the time we finished dumping it I was soaked through with sweat and slime and cowshit; the fucking bags leaked. Next morning I felt like I’d been rolled by a pack of gorillas; I’d’ve needed a crane to pull my pants on, so I spent the day in bed. It was enough to make me look for another line of work where my training would pay off; not movies, and not for chrissake unloading offal into Okefenokee.”

  He scratched his bald head. It was so pale between freckles his nails left pink marks.

  “Frankly, I was happy when he decided to swap terrorism for fraud. Even serial killers seem warm and fuzzy after those guys.”

  “Marcus skews smart,” I said after a moment.

  “That’s an understatement. He scored fifteen-fifty on his SATs. Next to him, Ted Kaczynski is Forrest Gump.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean he read your reaction to his plan and decided it was worth going to all that trouble to convince you he’d abandoned it.”

  He stopped scratching. “You got that from what?”

  “Dead reckoning. Anyone who can fake his own murder by salting the corpse with his own DNA can drag a dead skunk across his path well enough to throw off the one man who could stop him from collecting on the debt he thinks he’s owed.”

  “One of my bottles must’ve sprung a leak. Either that, or you were drunk when you came in here. What do you mean about faking his murder? Jerry’s dead. I knew him better than anyone. You think I wouldn’t know if he were still alive?”

  “ESP.” I yawned; not for effect. I hadn’t spent so many hours awake since the Tet Offensive. “Stands for Every Silly Presumption. He’s as alive as that future Sports Illustrated model you just sent to the clink. Where were you a week ago Saturday?”

  He smiled full out; I realized then why he’d resisted before. He looked like the label on a bottle of poison.

  “Cheering for the enemy. I was at Northwestern two years before I met Jerry. It’s the only game I ever attend. I was there all afternoon, with friends. They’ll remember, because I was lucky not to get the crap beaten out of me for calling the home team Nectarines. You can ask them right now, if you like.” He excavated a cell from a cargo pocket.

  “No point. If you were guilty they’d be coached. Anyway, if your only beef was with Jerry Marcus, I’d have to go back to square one for a motive. He’s alive.”

  The smile set in concrete. “You said that before. Sell me.”

  “I don’t have the training. You’ll have to go to the boys and girls in ice-cream jackets for that. Jerry Marcus isn’t dead. The cops think he’s the murderer, not the victim.”

  He sprang to his feet again, like a drawerful of scissors; clawed open the refrigerator, mangled the cap off another bottle of water, and drained it in one draft. The look on his narrow face said he wished it were something else.

  EIGHTEEN

  “Impossible.”

  He was pacing again. The trailer felt like a tugboat entering the English Channel.

  “That’s what the cops say,” I said. “I haven’t heard from the white coats, but I doubt you could quote them in a family newspaper.”

  “No one can manufacture DNA, not even Jerry. I know you can’t just mix it u
p in a test tube and inject it into a corpse and expect the police to think it’s you lying there, and I flunked science.”

  “Hey, me, too. Should we start a club?”

  He stopped, his head bowed to keep from colliding with the curved ceiling. “Does murder always tickle you like this?”

  “Depends on the murder. For the record, I’m with Lieutenant Karyl. Fingerprints have been around long enough to stand the test of time. Even then I’m not convinced that no two sets are alike until they print the entire population in the history of the world. I saw a snowflake last January that looked exactly like one I saw in ’seventy-eight.”

  “So who’s dead, if it isn’t Jerry?”

  “We’ll ask him when we find him.”

  “That’s police work.”

  “They’re shorthanded. I help out where I can.”

  “You wouldn’t be sweet on this Holly character, by any chance?”

  “Too young. I’d have to explain too much to her just to have an argument. I hired on to find Jerry Marcus. I don’t know why I have to keep reminding people of that.”

  “I guess you don’t have to take your pants off after all to prove you’re not a hypocrite.”

  “Thanks, though I am proud of my legs.”

  He looked at a watch strapped to the underside of his wrist. “Shit. I’ve got to bail out my model. All she’s got on is a raincoat.”

  I put a card on the low table, stood my water bottle on top of it, and got up. “Call me if you hear from Marcus.”

  “I won’t hear from him. After I turned him down, he topped off his getaway stake somewhere else. Otherwise he wouldn’t have gone ahead with the murder. He wasn’t—isn’t—the impulsive type. Damn. Now I have to change my tenses all over again.”

  “You better hope you’re right. If what you said about blowing up the Michigan Theater wasn’t just a fantasy, you’re one of two witnesses who can tie him to a major crime—conspiracy, in your case. Sooner or later he’s got to remember you might throw him to the wolves to save your own skin. He’s a murderer now. He’s got nothing to lose by finishing what he started.”