Dying Embers (19 page)

“Sure,” he said. “Back the fuck up.”

When I got back around the taillights he reached in and hauled out my Detonics. He smelled the barrel and then looked it over. He smiled. “You had my initials blued over.”

“Yeah. You were so intent on making a trophy when you arrested me, I couldn't see your work going to waste. Now, it's sort of my trophy. What do you think?”

“Screw you,” he said and scattered the contents of the glove box onto the seat to join the chunk of concrete and glass shards.

“No spare magazine in there,” I said. “I picked up a couple and a box of ammo yesterday. They're in my desk.”

“How about a knife or letter opener?”

“Nope. Once I shoot 'em I don't feel any need to read their mail.”

“You're a funny guy, Art,” said Shephart, deadpan. “But I know you used to carry a pocket knife.”

“They still rag you about that down at the Turnkey?”

“Where's the knife?”

“In the pants pocket of my suit,” I said.

“Is that what you put in the trunk?”

“You want to read me my rights? Take me downtown?”

“No,” he said, “I'd rather have some answers.” He stuffed my pistol into his hip pocket.

I dangled my key ring by the trunk key and held it out to Shephart. He stepped up, snapped them out of my hand and opened the trunk, weaving a little when he bent to look inside. He caught himself with a hand on the spare tire. Just a guess—he was in need of a shot of carburetor cleaner to get his motor running.

“You all right?” I asked.

He took a breath. “Fine,” he said. He picked up the blanket, shook it, and then cast it aside to stir the rest of the rummage in my trunk. “Why do you have a blanket in your trunk?”

“Same reason I have a shovel, tire chains, and a bag of kitty litter,” I said. “This is Michigan.”

Shephart shut the trunk. “So, who saw you here last night?”

“Marg and Lorna.”

“Who's Lorna?”

“A snout.”

“They gonna be in this morning?” asked Shephart.

“We cleaned and straightened up the office until three-thirty or so. I don't expect them too early.”

“You were all together until three-thirty in the morning?”

“That's correct, officer,” I said. “C'mon in. I'll get you their phone numbers. I put some coffee on—ought to be ready by now.”

Shephart's shoulders went round. “Coffee,” he said. “Coffee'd be great.”

We left the car and started up the steps. “Heard about your promotion,” I said. “It was on the news.”

“It's a Buddhist barbecue,” he said. “Nobody with a career would touch
it. Lucky for you I don't believe everything I see on the news.”

“You think maybe I cut up hookers, but I draw the line at perverted books?”

“We searched your office after the Talon murder,” said Shephart. “We didn't find any shit like that.”

“Maybe I just expanded my business.”

“That kind of shit's a hardwiring problem. It doesn't come on suddenlike.”

I opened the door and held it for Shephart. “A vote of confidence,” I said. “Maybe I should call you as a character witness.”

“Do me a favor and don't mention my name.”

“To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

“Coffee first,” he said. “Then tell me about this break-in. You keep business cards here?”

We stepped into the reception area. One of Marg's clients was talking to the answering machine and bailing out.

“Cream? Sugar?”

“Hot and black,” he said.

I filled a couple of mugs from the rack and set them on my desk, which was—for the first time in recent memory—neat and organized. A big desk blotter covered the inscription. Shephart took my pistol out of his hip pocket and set it in the middle of the blotter.

“Next time, wag your own pistol in,” he said. “You ain't quick enough to shade me.” He picked up his cup and sat in the wing-back chair under the monitor I'd replaced the night before.

I picked up the pistol, put my hand over the ejection port, racked the slide to the rear, and locked it in place. Shephart froze mid-sip. A fat .45 caliber-two-hundred-grain-semi-jacketed-hollow-point bullet pressed itself into my left palm and I stood it on end in front of me. “They broke in night before last. About the only thing they didn't rifle was my business cards.”

Shephart made a hard swallow and lowered his coffee. I punched the magazine out and laid it on the desk with the pistol.

“Jesus!” said Shephart. “I forgot that you carried one in the spout.” He rocked to his left. I figured he must have been carrying his service piece on his right hip. His face got a little paler. After a sip of coffee he was sitting straight again. “Just what did they get into?”

“Everything. They trashed the place. Stole one file—still has me guessing.”

“Why?”

“There's a copier in the investigators' room. All they had to do was make a copy and I'd never have known what was taken.”

“So what'd they take?”

“Privileged,” I said, “We've already been around that corner.” I opened my top right-hand drawer and extracted a squeeze can of gun oil.

Shephard produced a clear plastic evidence bag from the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket and flopped it onto my desk. In the bag was one of my business cards, encrusted with a rust-brown blood stain.

“There's a million of those things circulating,” I said. “I pass them out like beads at a Mardi Gras Parade.”

“Woman found dead by a payphone on the river walk at two o'clock this
A.M
.,” said Shephart. “The handset was hanging by the cord and she had this in her hand.”

My telephone rang.

“You want to get that?” Shephart asked.

“Machine will get it,” I said and held the Detonics upside down to oil the rails and the bulbous end of the barrel. “I don't know what to tell you.”

“I thought you might explain what's written on the back,” said Shephart. He flipped the bag over and showed me Scott Lambert's telephone number. “The number's a private line into some outfit called Light and Energy Applications.”

I looked up. Shephart was working me with those fluoroscopic eyes cops have. I said, “Five foot one or two, thin, mid-forties, brown hair bobbed off about ear level?”

Shephart set his coffee down and hauled a pad and pen out of the side pocket of his coat. “Yeah.”

“Oh, my God.” I let the pistol and oil can clunk onto the desktop.

“Who was it? There was no purse or ID.”

“I gave that card to Anne Jones.”

Shephart wrote it down. “Who's Anne Jones?”

“Anne Frampton,” I said. On the fourth or fifth ring the tape machine picked up. Nate Saxon, the owner of the biggest contract adjusting firm in the state—six offices and eighty adjusters—gave me the kiss-off.

“The artist?”

“Yeah.”

“She know this Anne Jones?” asked Shephart.

“Anne Frampton is Anne Jones.”

“Jesus,” said Shephart. He rolled his eyes up and collapsed back into the
wing-back chair with his pen and pad in his lap. “You sure?”

“Got a picture?” The description didn't match the harridan Anne lived with, but maybe she had some other playmates.

Shephart groped a picture out of the side pocket of his jacket and sailed it, spinning face down, onto my desk blotter.

Not that I wished anyone else dead: I just made a silent “please-God” prayer and turned over the color Polaroid head shot taken at the morgue. It was Anne—lips blue and eyes vacant.

“What a waste,” I said. “It's Anne. She has a brother. I can give you his address and phone number. He'll know how to contact their mother.”

“Thanks.”

“What the hell happened?”

“Somebody stabbed her once, downward, behind the clavicle with a blade long enough to sever her aorta. She was dead when she hit the ground.” Shephart worked me with the cop eyes some more. “Tell me about Light and Energy Applications,” he said, like it was an afterthought.

“One thrust?”

Shephart looked up from his pad and demonstrated a downward thrust using his pen clenched in his fist as a prop. “Downward from the right, two inches from the neck, some kind of straight-bladed dirk. We can't get a casting because the doer rocked the blade side to side.” He rowed the pen to demonstrate.

“Anne sure as hell wasn't a hooker,” I said. “Were there any other lacerations?”

“No, but it was in the slasher's neighborhood. Even the Son of Sam worked on his marksmanship.”

“This wasn't a psycho. A psycho likes to cut. He gets off on the screams, the terror, and the spray of blood. One thrust wouldn't do it for him. If he'd been interrupted, you'd have two bodies this morning instead of one. This wasn't your guy. This was an assassination.”

“Maybe,” said Shephart. “Chief says it's a Task Force case.”

“He doesn't know who this is.”

“My case,” said Shephart, his eyes hot.

“Get real. This ain't your guy.”

“I ask the questions. You tell me what you fucking know.”

“Okay,” I said and studied him. Under the ashen face lurked the remnants of fire. I'd known him for years, not always pleasantly. If a breath, a word, could burn off the cocoon of alcohol, I judged it unlikely we'd end
up with a butterfly—more likely a moth that hung out in your closet and ate your sweaters.

“That's the stolen file,” I told him. And then I told him the rest—including the parts about Lambert, about the lake shore, and how Lambert wanted the address but I wouldn't give it to him. I told him about the Andys, the trip to Brandonport, the guy with the broken neck, and how Dixon maybe did or didn't eat his gun. He wrote it all down, but the part he liked best was when I got to the ginger ale can with the cigar butt in it.

“See Van Huis over at Kentwood,” I said.

Shephart snapped his pad shut, swilled his coffee, and bolted out of his chair. He left a “stay available” hanging in the air somewhere between Marg's desk and the front door.

I picked up the telephone, someone was on the line.

“Hello, hello,” he said, “I didn't hear it ring.”

It wasn't a familiar voice. He could have been one of Marg's client's. Maybe he needed time to rethink what he was going to say. I punched the button twice and got a dial tone.

I dialed up Light and Energy. Lambert had stepped out. Did I want to speak to Dunphy?

“This is Art Hardin,” I said. “Please have Mr. Lambert call me.”

She said that she had to have a subject to write down—that Mr. Lambert generally didn't answer open calls.

“You tell Scotty that if I don't hear from him right-most-rikki-tick I will definitely call back and tell whoever answers the phone exactly what this is about.”

I let the handset slide back on the cradle. The telephone started ringing. I opened my drawer and put the gun oil away. By the time the Detonics was loaded and on my hip the answering machine picked up.

It was the fellow I had hung up on. Said he was the producer of the evening news and did I want to make a comment.

“How about this,” I told the empty room. “You now head the short list of people who'd better pray I never get diagnosed with anything terminal.”

I picked up the telephone. “This is Art Hardin. My lawyer will be contacting you. Why don't you just chat him up for a while?” I banged the phone back down.

“That was brilliant, Art,” I said. “Now the bastard knows where you are.” I picked up the handset and parked it in the middle of my desk blotter.

I stood up to go to the investigators' room and my pistol slid out of the
waistband of my sweats and down the leg. I caught it before it hit the floor and laid it on the desk pointed at the telephone.

The Prestige Motors file—along with the rest of the files—was back where it belonged. I looked up Tracy's telephone number and went back to my desk. The handset was making a “neep, neep, neep,” sound.

“Gonna be hard for Lambert to call you that way,” I said and put the handset back in the cradle. I sat and drummed my fingers on the desktop while I stared at the telephone.

“Better call Tracy while you still have some short term memory,” I said and dialed her up. I got an answering machine and instructions to leave a message after the tone.

“This is Art Hardin. You gotta quit smashing my windshield. I'll give you the first one because you were pissed, but last night is definitely it. Quit.” I started to hang up but put the phone back to my face, “And fix your hydraulic lines. You're leaking green slop all over my parking lot.”

I banged down the telephone, and it started ringing. I let the machine get it. Lambert. He was sorry about the misunderstanding with Dunphy … he'd talked to Wendy … good job … just send the bill … no problem … he needed me to recover the computer discs when the cops were done with them. I picked up the telephone.

“Why don't you have Andy pick them up?”

“Art?”

“Yeah.”

“Who's Andy?”

“At least two people,” I said. “Maybe I haven't met them all yet.”

“Art, you're losing me.”

“I only took this job because I thought I could protect her. Why didn't you just leave her the hell alone?”

“Anne?”

“Joan of Arc!”

“Dunphy gave me your message. I went to meet Anne but it was a little strange. Maybe she'll cool off in a couple of days.”

“She's dead,” I told him. “She's laying on a slab in the morgue. That's as cool as they get.”

I hung up, but that didn't seem to do it for me, so I banged the receiver onto the cradle four or five times, hard enough to ring the bell.