The Sundown Speech

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Crank it up!” Karyl said. “Twenty-three south.”

  “Code Three?”

  “Fuck yeah!”

  The cop behind the wheel flipped on the siren and popped the clutch. Our start threw me back so hard I felt the spare in the trunk against my kidneys. We made a howling right against the light, scattering jaywalkers like crows.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  We swept our lane clear of traffic all the way down Main Street and entered US-23 with two wheels to spare. I scrambled into a seat belt somewhere between ninety-five and a hundred, but that speed was history when we came up on the Washtenaw Avenue exit. At the bottom of the ramp we skinned left on the far edge of the yellow.

  The light was red at Carpenter, with the eastbound lanes blocked solid, but we didn’t brake, slaloming into the opposite lane and swinging back into the right a centimeter short of a city bus waiting at the light. I waited for the driver to blast his airhorn, forgetting for the moment the vehicle I was riding in. We continued at expressway speed along one of the busiest streets in the city, smearing the scenery on both sides like an angry artist swiping his turpentine rag across wet oils. A cataract of potholes loosened a filling in one of my molars.

  I leaned forward. “Can we stop at a drugstore? I’m out of cigarettes.”

  Nothing. Just as well; my voice fluttered up and down the scale. I pushed my imaginary brake pedal deep into the floorboards with both feet.

  A bicyclist glanced back at us, twisted his handlebars, and bounded up over the curb, nailing the landing in a Park ’n’ Ride. I almost applauded.

  We took a piece off the curb swinging into the parking lot of the strip mall where Alec Moselle developed his nudescapes on the upper deck. Ann Arbor Police cruisers were parked in an orderly row in front of the line of shops, their lights flashing red and blue. Our driver found the brakes then, laying down four permanent black patches on the asphalt while the gasoline whomped around inside the tank. We’d stopped square between the yellow lines.

  “Nice.” Karyl’s voice was as calm as a deejay’s on a classical station. “Try to pare off a couple of seconds next time.”

  “Crate needs a tune-up.” Our driver yanked the key out of the ignition.

  The lieutenant laid his elbow on the back of his seat and looked back at me.

  “You all right? You look a little green.”

  The son of a bitch sounded pleased with himself.

  “I can’t recommend the steak-and-eggs at the Chicken Palace,” I said.

  “Where are my manners? Amos Walker, Officer Kinderly. Three generations at Daytona.”

  Kinderly reached back a hand. I pried my fingers out of the back of the front seat and took it. He had a long upper lip and a reddish moustache you could wipe off with a towel. “The lieutenant’s a jokester. I just got my learner’s permit.”

  Cop humor. They’d drain the brake fluid from a wheelchair just for kicks.

  “Thanks for the boogie ride,” I said. “Can we go again?”

  I had to wait until Kinderly came around and opened my door. There are no handles in the perp’s seat. I got out on rubber legs.

  A half-dozen radios buzzed and crackled between scraps of sentences that buzzed and crackled also. The usual gang of spectators had gathered, but the local gawkers were housebroken; they stood at a respectful distance, watching a uniform unwind yellow tape from a fat roll.

  “Everything seems in hand,” Karyl said, tugging down the hem of his suitcoat. “Guess there was no hurry after all.”

  I got it then; I’m pretty quick when you drop a safe on my head. Eleven and a half minutes from Fourth Street to Washtenaw Avenue was the price of obstruction of justice and just generally being a pain in the ass of appointed authority. I entered it in my commonplace book.

  The officer guarding the steps to the second story recognized the lieutenant. He nodded a greeting, no salute. That department would respect Casual Friday.

  “How bad?” Karyl said.

  “It don’t get any worse, L.T.” He drew a finger across his throat.

  “Doesn’t. Who’s in charge?”

  “Sergeant Rogers.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Ypsi Township.”

  “A pro. Good.”

  “Bad mix, that beat,” Kinderly told me; we’d bonded, it looked like. “Harlem and Louisville, fighting Bull Run every Saturday night.”

  “Did the lieutenant tell you I’m from Detroit?”

  “Point taken. Any openings?”

  “Only every Saturday night.”

  The reception area looked the same as yesterday, plastered with poster-size pictures in black and white of people in open areas, without clothes. He’d taken some down, added others: an unbroken sea of flesh. I couldn’t figure it. Even Picasso had burned out on the Blue Period after a while.

  One thing had changed. The door behind the doughnut-shaped counter that operated by manipulating a woman’s mammary stood open. Myra, the receptionist, stood outside the doughnut, sobbing out a statement to a scribbling officer in uniform and a plainclothesman half Karyl’s age, wearing tweeds over a V-neck sweater and a tie printed all over with wolverines. Myra had exchanged her Route 66 muumuu for a horizontally striped blouse just as loose, with the tail out over faded jeans, relaxed-fit to accommodate a pair of hips that would feed a cannibal village for a week. The arrows shaved into the base of her red woodpecker crest needed trimming; the stubble was brown.

  Karyl showed his shield to the man in tweeds. They shook hands.

  “Looks like robbery,” Sergeant Rogers said. “These places have a lot of expensive chemicals and equipment you can turn into cash quick as a cashier’s check. We’ll turn ’em up even quicker; we know all the places. Only reason they’re still in business is if we shut them down we’d have to start all over again from scratch.”

  Karyl pumped a fist up and down. “Fast-forward, Sergeant. This isn’t the class tour.”

  “Sorry. Perp walked straight past the desk and into the back. Receptionist got up to stop him, heard shots, and called nine-one-one. Dispatch told her get out. She hung out on the deck, then went back inside. Just what part of ‘Get out’”—he shifted gears before a glower straight out of Transylvania—“Back door open. Place upside down, her boss on the floor with two bullets in him. Still breathing, she thought, but not for long. Not long enough anyway to say diddly. No sign of the perp.

  “We got a description,” he added.

  Karyl looked as interested as a husband listening to the wife’s day. He walked around him, inserted himself between the scribbling officer and the receptionist, drew a rolled-up photograph from an inside pocket, and spread it between both hands, six inches in front of her face. He showed enormous control while she wailed, blew her nose into a limp wad of Kleenex, then nodded.

  “Out loud,” he said, not unkindly. “County prosecutor’s a dick on details.”

  “That’s the man.” A phlegmy whisper.

  The lieutenant showed the picture to Rogers.

  “You got one of these at roll call, yes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Suspect Jerome Marcus, brother of Thomas, deceased. Wanted for murder and attempted. Armed, extremely dangerous. Last seen driving gray minivan, may have dumped it by now for something else.”

  Rogers jerked his chin at the officer with the notebook, who flipped a page and scribbled.

  “What are you waiting for, the Rose Parade? Call it in. Jesus Christ. They told me you were with Ypsi.”

  The sergeant’s face went blank.

  “Drug killings, L.T. Passion killings. Guy-wiggles-his-eyebrows-at-your-girl killings. Wifie-runs-over-hubby-with-her-SUV-over-his-chippie killings. I got a ten-year-old kid killed his six-year-old sister with a Luger their uncle left loaded on the top shelf of his closet, like he thought that was Mount Everest. Nudie photog shot dead in his studio? Fuck you—with all respect, Lieutenant.” He took out a cell while the uniform barked into a microphone hooked to a shoulder
strap.

  Karyl blinked at Rogers. “Feel better?”

  “A little.”

  They shook hands again.

  Cops.

  “Okay,” Karyl said. “Let’s see the dessert tray.”

  We went through the door into Alec Moselle’s photography studio. The room took up most of the shop’s footage, with all the standard paraphernalia in place, arranged in the standard state of clutter, a letdown after the carnal display out front.

  Someone, presumably the first cop on the scene, had drawn up one of the black shades that covered the windows to let light in. Combined with the fluorescents in the ceiling, the sun made the room obscenely bright, with all the cold shadowless efficient artificiality of a county morgue.

  A black-and-silver camera on a tripod, a flat covered in blue fabric, lights on aluminum stands, white umbrella reflectors tilted every which way, a tall stool for the model to sit; a stone-lithograph table older than the building, rescued, probably, from a defunct printshop—cluttered with X-Acto knives, discarded blades, and scraps of photo paper cropped from negatives and positives, cross-lit by natural-light bulbs in gooseneck lamps, still burning with a slight sizzling noise like bacon frying in the next room.

  More cameras—motor-driven Polaroids, steel-cased Nikons, Kodak Instamatics, sleek pocket-size digitals, a black-box Speed Graphic, the kind newspaper photographers used in old movies, lay about on low tables and the tops of cabinets among disembodied lenses, aluminum canisters, and Polaroid shots curled like empty chrysalides. An ancient thing of burnished oak and brushed steel mounted on bamboo legs stood aloof in a corner, complete with a black shroud for the photographer to duck under, hold up his hodful of magnesium powder and a rubber squeeze-ball to set it off: Watch the birdie!

  Smocks and costumes, a full suit of medieval armor, cowboy hats, top hats, bowler hats, straw hats, picture hats, slouch hats, all kinds of hats: wizard’s conicals, Mexican sombreros, caps, berets, cloches, Easter bonnets, homburgs, fedoras, trilbies, Tyroleans, tri-colored beanies with propellers: Heaven, to the bald man. Stage properties enough to furnish a community theater through every production from My Fair Lady to Sweeney Todd: Pistols, swords, snuffboxes, codpieces, a human skull I took as plaster until I picked it up and a tooth fell out.

  A working traffic signal flashed sequentially in red, yellow, and green; at the very least it broke up the flat bright light of a homicide scene.

  The floor was linoleum, dirty, and worn through to the subflooring in leprous patches. Alec Moselle—“Moze” to his public—lay on it as if he were just another prop.

  He was sprawled on his back, one leg flung casually across the other, like a man relaxing in an armchair. He’d been shot twice in the chest, but he hadn’t bled much, because one of the bullets had stopped his heart. There was a sharp powder stench in the air, fading by the second.

  Oh, and he was nude.

  A tie-dyed T-shirt lay in a heap atop carpenter’s jeans with an empty loop designed to hold a hammer. Gray undershorts, a crumpled pair of white tube socks, and a worn pair of Reeboks had been flung into a corner; flung was the word that came first to mind. There is something about the evidence of undressing that says everything about whether it was performed by the person who had been wearing the clothes or someone else.

  Karyl saw what I saw the moment I saw it. He pointed at the T-shirt. “Blood. The motherfucker stripped him after he killed him. Nothing like a psychopath with a sense of irony.”

  The police photographer’s flash flooded the corpse at just that second.

  “Moze’s masterpiece,” I said. “I should’ve bought one of his originals yesterday. I could’ve retired.”

  “On behalf of law enforcement everywhere, I wish to hell you had.” Karyl turned away, rubbing his hands. “What else we got?”

  Plenty, as it turned out.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “This is how the uniforms found the place,” Sergeant Rogers said. “Looks like he put up a fight.”

  “How many photographer murders have you investigated?” Karyl asked.

  “This makes one.”

  “All their studios are mare’s nests. Yes?” He lifted his heavy brows at Myra.

  “It’s always like this.” Her Kleenex was disintegrating. The officer who’d been taking her statement produced a nifty little cellophane packet of tissues and gave it to her. It was the damnedest department I’d ever seen.

  “Always running around, snatching up lenses and fresh rolls of film, monkeying with their lights and reflectors,” Karyl said. “Plenty of time to tidy up later. Only Moze didn’t have a later.”

  He poked the square toe of a shoe at a brass shell casing on the linoleum. “Magnum round, I’m guessing. He’s getting careless, forgetting to pick up after himself and not bothering anymore about the noise. Normally that’s a good sign.”

  “I don’t like it,” I said.

  “Me neither. When a nice neat killer forgets himself, it means he’s coming unglued. What’s in there?”

  The plainclothesman followed his pointing finger to a narrow open door in back, shingled all over with Polaroids. “Darkroom, L.T. It’s a mess too. We figured our thief ransacked it for equipment and chemicals, stuff he could turn into cash; but Bonaparte there’s a dabbler, and says everything that should be there still is.”

  A black officer built like a linebacker, only too short by six inches, nodded when Karyl looked at him. “I do friends’ weddings and like that, sir. I squeak by, but I can’t afford half the stuff he’s got. Had.”

  The lieutenant stepped into the darkroom, stepped out a second later. “No good. Place is a wreck.”

  “But if all photographers are as messy as you say—”

  He cut Rogers off. “Never in their darkrooms. They’re as tidy as Aunt Tillie in there.”

  Bonaparte said, “That’s right. I was too busy checking out the supplies and equipment to think about it. You have to move fast once the stuff’s in the soup. Can’t afford to bump into stuff and waste time looking for things. Our victim wouldn’t tear up his own place unless he was desperate.”

  Karyl looked around. “Anybody we know answers that description?”

  I wandered over to another door standing open, on the other side of the model setup. It was an outside door. Gridded steel steps led down to a stretch of gray asphalt where Moselle had parked the ten-foot Airstream trailer he took out on location. I went down to it. The door was unlocked.

  A mug with a photo screen-printed on it of a sea of naked flesh—probably one of his—stood on the table in the dinette area with the tag of a tea bag hanging outside the rim and some greenish-brown grains pasted inside at the bottom. It was the only thing that hadn’t been there before, or anyway that I’d noticed. I tried reading the tea leaves, but I needed Lieutenant Karyl’s Gypsy blood for that.

  Just to be thorough I swung open a couple of doors mounted at floor level, looked at what was inside, and shut them. Empty.

  I had a thought, almost; it was stillborn.

  I went back upstairs, shaking my head. It might come back, or not. I’d worn all the whorls off my brain, and lost gripping power.

  The uniform with the notebook was escorting Myra into the studio with a hand cupped under her elbow. She made a whimpering noise when they passed Moselle’s body, but he patted her arm and took her into the darkroom. Karyl was back inside.

  “What’s he keep in these cabinets?”

  I leaned in for a look. The room was no bigger than a half-bath, with a pair of stainless-steel sinks, shelves like the ones in the trailer, all in use, and some sleek black electronics, including an enormous copy camera for blowups that took up most of the space. A plastic clothesline with some glistening photographic prints still pinned to it dangled by only one hook above the sink; it had come loose from the hook opposite and hung nearly to the floor, which was littered with similar prints that had probably come loose from it when it fell or was torn loose. Bottles of developing fluid stood and lay o
n their sides in both sinks and there was an eye-stinging stench of solvent; an expensive spill, I thought.

  The receptionist was looking at a built-in recess under the sink. The steel doors that belonged to it were flayed open. The cabinet was empty.

  “Big plastic jugs.” Her voice wobbled. “I don’t remember what was on the labels. He said he kept them there because if he dropped one taking it down from above, he’d blow up the building. I thought he was joking.” She started sobbing again.

  “Magnesium and silver nitrate.”

  Everyone looked at Sergeant Bonaparte.

  “Obsolete process,” he said, “but some photogs still use it for artistic effect. They have to know what they’re doing, though. He wasn’t joking. Magnesium powder’s what they used to call flash powder; goes up faster than gunpowder at the touch of a match. Silver nitrate is a rapid oxidant; they stopped using it in photography because it was self-destructive. Mix the two and you won’t need the match. A gallon of each could take out the block.”

  The thought came back. It was a breech birth.

  “He had more in his trailer.”

  Now everyone was looking at me.

  “Just a guess. I checked it out just now. Every shelf was packed tight, like here, but a floor cabinet was empty. I didn’t make the connection. Space is limited in a trailer. You need every inch, like in here. So why waste it? Last time I visited, he warned me against lighting a cigarette in there. He even patted the cabinet.”

  “They’re big jugs.”

  Myra had taken center stage again. She’d begun to take a clinical interest. “He couldn’t carry them far on foot. He came in the front, and no one drove out of that part of the lot while I was outside.”

  I felt an icy breath on the back of my neck. “Where did Moselle park his truck?”

  “Truck? Oh, the pickup. In back, always. He used it to pull the trailer.”