“It wouldn’t be the first time someone tried to get tricky. If he shot her long enough before the complaint went through, he’d have plenty of opportunity to sneak out of the house, dump the gun in a storm drain a dozen blocks away, and sneak back in and fake a fight.”
“There’d be a record of a firearm purchase. He’s clean. Don’t you think I had that checked out? You’re not the only P.I. in town.”
“You’re right. Where would anyone go in Detroit to get a gun without leaving a paper trail?”
“He’s an unemployed auto worker, not a penny-ante hit man. He wouldn’t know where to look.”
I played with a cigarette. “All I’m saying is I’d like to run it out. You don’t want this blowing up in your face in public.”
“What do you want from me?” Now he sounded like a successful man being put upon by a poor relation.
“Two things. First: When did his wife file for divorce?”
He fired up the computer on his desk. “April eleventh.”
“This is part of the first thing. When did the cops screw up and kill that little girl on the East Side?”
“You can’t think those two things are connected. The circumstances—”
“—are almost identical. Your words. When?”
Keys got tickled. He frowned at the screen, showing the kind of reaction he never showed in court. “April fourteenth.”
I wrote both dates in my notebook, not that I’d forget. “Second thing: Which plant did Vale work for before he was laid off?”
• • •
I found Dix Sommerfield working the employee parking lot at the GM assembly plant in Warren. He was a third-generation member of a Kentucky family that had come North in a body to build tanks for the automobile factories-turned-defense plants during World War II. He could usually be found, a pot-bellied presence in a reverse ball cap, selling unlicensed bottles of whiskey and cartons of cigarettes and certain other contraband from the trunk of his wired-together Chevy Nova during shift changes. Tuesdays and Thursdays found him at Chrysler, Mondays at River Rouge, where he spent a lot of time looking over his shoulder for Ford’s private police force. The other days of the week you could depend on his being in Warren, his sentimental favorite; his father and grandfather had been loyal to General Motors ahead of Uncle Sam and the Southern Baptist Church.
“I’m looking for a thirty-eight revolver,” I said, after we’d exchanged greetings. I’d bought information from him in the past, cash on the barrelhead, and no backlash from the authorities.
Not that he wasn’t cagy; the balance had shifted after 9/11, and you never knew when interference from the amateurs in Washington might louse up a smooth system. “I don’t deal in that stuff no more,” he said, moving the toothpick that lived in his mouth from one corner to the other. “You want a piece, go to Dick’s Sporting Goods.”
“I want to know about one you sold. Dix, do I have to pull that spare tire out from under all those boxes of Marlboros and look into the well? It was a soft-nose slug, so it couldn’t have come from an automatic.”
“Wearing a wire?”
I unbuttoned my shirt and spread it.
“That ain’t nothing. Drop your pants.”
I kicked him in the shin, and when he bent to cradle it gave him a chop with the side of my hand on his elbow. Forget the groin: If you really want to make a painful point, go for the little knobs of bone that stick out from the joints. When the tears stopped flowing I took out a Free Press clipping with Claud Vale’s picture and stuck it under his nose.
He wiped his eyes with his sleeve and squinted. “Jeez. I been praying for days that one wouldn’t come back and bite me in the ass.”
“God answered. He said stick to cigarettes and booze. You can’t go wrong with the basics.”
• • •
One week after the story broke, Philip Justice announced he was dropping his suit and that he’d resigned as Claud Vale’s attorney. The cops, knowing what that meant, re-arrested his former client and went to work on him; no physical abuse, no coercion other than the reliable aggressive questioning in Supreme Court-mandated increments with periods of rest in between, tying the suspect up in his own lies until telling the truth was the only path to sanity. He confessed to murdering his wife, threatening the first responders so that back-up was required from 1300, and grabbing the arm of the first cop through the door, forcing his gun to go off, as guns will in that situation. A more thorough search of the crime scene turned up the ERT sergeant’s slug in a place where two baseboards met unevenly in a corner. That had been a break for Vale, who hadn’t considered what would happen if it were recovered anywhere but in Ernestine Vale’s heart. He’d had the foresight to score an X in the nose of the slug he’d used before firing it, making it burst apart on entry so that it couldn’t be traced to the gun he’d used; the rest was beginner’s luck.
The gun itself was never found, but it was no longer required for evidence. I didn’t have to go to jail for keeping Dix Sommerfield’s name out of the record.
Philip Justice bought me a drink at the Caucus Club downtown. He was still bothered by the loss of what looked like a big settlement and more crusading glory to his name, but he was grateful not to have been made a clown on the evening news. He sipped at his twelve-year-old cognac. “So you got all this on what a couple of cops told you?”
“Some of it.” I stirred the ice in my scotch and tossed the swizzle. “The timing cinched it. Vale was brooding about the divorce, losing half of what little he had in the outcome, when that little girl died. He saw a way to get clear and be rich besides.”
“That was an armed-robbery investigation, not murder.”
“It was enough the same as what he had in mind. When I first heard of Vale I was in a bar.”
“Imagine that.”
“I’ll ignore the implication. I’d told the bartender a joke. I got the idea from a picture of zebras he had on the wall.” I told it.
He didn’t laugh. “I heard that one. Seems to me a different animal was involved.”
“Sometimes it’s a hyena sold the place. It’s always a kangaroo behind the bar, for some reason. Who knows what makes these things work?”
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Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection Page 56
