Every Brilliant Eye (8 page)

“Yeah.”

He waited. Then he blew his nose again. “It’s not my hot handle, so who cares. It’s not even Fitzroy’s anymore; they’re closing it out as suicide. What’d you do, pull the son of a bitch out with your teeth?”

This last was directed away from the telephone. I heard Sergeant Hornet’s wheezy fat man’s voice and the word “bullet.” To me, Alderdyce said: “If it’s okay on your end I’m going to hang up in your face now. My hobby calls.”

“Blankenship was Fitzroy’s?” I asked quickly.

“Yeah, but you don’t want to talk to Fitz today. He’s awful mad at you for some reason I’d rather not know anything about. Sergeant Grice was the dick on the scene. He’s poking at a kill on Montcalm today. A bag lady. They’re going after the derelicts this season.” Click.

I cradled the receiver gently, the way a mortician lowers the lid on a coffin when mourners are watching. Montcalm, the part of it where a murdered derelict was likely to turn up anyway, was a two-minute drive from 14th and Myrtle, where Jed Dutt had said Amigo Fuentes’ junkyard was located. I cleared my desk into two drawers—the one on top was too shallow to hold Barry’s memories of Vietnam and Cambodia—and rolled on out of there. My wino was curled up in a fetal position on the floor next to the stairwell, snoring and hugging his green bottle.

Montcalm. The name conjures up images of crisp blue snow on a craggy peak with pines carpeting the slopes. The reality is a stretch of broken pavement with the lines rubbed off and the signs on the corners, where there still are signs, rusting around bullet holes. Three out of five Detroiters own guns, and one of them is going off somewhere every night. The curbs are lined with long low cars with tailfins and syphilitic decay around the wheel wells, a clot of gaunt young blacks in bomber jackets and Levi’s gone the same greasy shade of gray leaning on the fenders of every third one. They are there every hour of the day and night, cuffing one another’s shoulders and laughing through their noses with their eyes hooded. They live in a world where time is measured in empties and scar tissue.

I cruised with my foot off the pedal, letting the slant of the street pull the Olds along and flicking my eyes right and left, looking for official cars. The scenery was mostly the backs of buildings with rough yellow concrete stoops and green and black plastic garbage bags leaning in doorways. Nothing ever fronts on streets like Montcalm. It’s as if sixty years ago the architects knew there would be nothing to look at.

After six blocks I spotted a county wagon backed into an alley with its big red dome rotating lazily. A cruiser from the Tactical Mobile Unit was parked across the street, and on that side a black unmarked car with twin whip antennas blocked a hydrant. There were plenty of other places to park, but if they can they will leave them where no one else is allowed to leave his. Give some guys a cap and a whistle.

I pulled up behind the blue-and-white and crossed the street on foot just as a lot of suit and coat with a man inside came out of the mouth of the alley. His face was a weak lime tint and everything about him said cop except the color. “Got a cigarette?” he demanded.

I shook one out of the pack and lit it for him. He took a deep drag and started hacking. Then he puffed again, coughed some more. Spat phlegm.

“Bet you’d quit if you didn’t enjoy them so much,” I suggested.

His eyes moved over me for the first time. They were watering in a narrow young-old face under a snapbrim hat with a wide silk band. He wore a thin matinee moustache that looked inked-on against his pallor. He said, “I don’t smoke.”

I played with it a moment, then put it away. “Sergeant Grice?”

“Down there.” He jerked the crown of his hat toward the alley. “You with the department?”

“I’m private.”

“Okay. I had to ask. One more set of footprints won’t make any difference on this one.”

I put that away next to the other and walked past him. The alley fell off at a thirty-degree angle from the street, running out of pavement at the bottom, where it curved into a welted parking area behind a drugstore with a padlock on its back door and plywood where its windows belonged. Deep ditches lined the drive, making it too narrow to admit anything but foot traffic. A group of men stood at the bottom. Halfway down I lit a cigarette for myself, and I didn’t want it any more than the guy I had just finished talking to had.

I had smelled that stink a couple of times before. That meant nothing; when it comes to that particular odor you are always a virgin. Every man in the group had a cigarette in his mouth and was puffing up thick clouds. I was still coming when one of them, an officer in uniform, broke and strode past me double-quick time. He lost his smoke as he came but didn’t stop to crush it out, letting it roll. As he passed I could hear him breathing through his mouth in little sobs.

The trio remaining included another uniform, flat-nosed with flinty threads glittering in a thick horseshoe moustache, a round-faced Oriental I recognized from the coroner’s office in jeans and an orange zip-front jacket, and a black plainclothesman in the regulation three-piece suit that went like hell with his brilliantined hair and ducktail. The light shone blue off his high pompadour. They were watching a pair of white-coated morgue attendants in gas masks carefully separating a bundle of rags from a settling of wet newspapers and bloated cardboard cartons against the drugstore’s block foundation. A hand stuck out of the rags, its fingers fanned out stiff like spokes from a wheel. A cloud of flies boiled over the debris.

“Don’t expect lightning to strike on this one,” the Oriental was saying. “We’re going to have to go in with masks and decontam suits, and when we’re finished cause of death will be as good as a guess.”

“I already know cause of death.” The black detective leaked smoke out the side of his mouth. “Lateral laceration of the carotid, left to right, probably from behind, victim bled out in minutes. Just like the others. What do you figure, three weeks?”

“About that. You could’ve passed within two feet every day for the first couple of weeks and not noticed it in all that junk. After that you could hardly avoid it.”

“Neighborhood dogs led us to this one,” put in the uniform.

“Sergeant Grice?”

The detective turned my way and my stomach scaled my ribs. His right cheek was a map of sharp broken creases like crumpled cellophane. The last time I had seen that burn scar, the face that wore it had been in the path of my flying fist. He was the undercover cop I’d knocked out in the blind pig on Clairmount a month before.

He said, “Who’s asking?”

He hadn’t recognized me. I did some business with the ash on my cigarette. Covering up. “My name’s Walker,” I said. “I’m a private investigator on a missing person case. They told me at headquarters you caught the squeal on the Blankenship suicide this morning.”

“He the missing person?”

“It takes some telling. Can we go someplace where we can’t see the air we’re breathing?”

“That’s the first sensible suggestion I’ve heard since I got on this detail.”

The white coats had managed to scoop the body into a zipper bag and were transferring it onto a collapsed stretcher. We headed uphill, trailing the uniform and the medical examiner. The atmosphere got sweeter by degrees. As we walked I told Grice about the clippings in Barry’s file folder. He listened with his eyes on the ground.

“Blankenship snuffed himself, all right,” he said. “Just because I’m fresh off a year and a half on Vice don’t mean I can’t see the pattern. He had a busted marriage and at forty-eight he was washed out as a cop. Maybe your man just likes to collect newsprint.”

“I have to wonder why Blankenship walked two years shy of a full pension.”

“Burnout. The Fourteenth is a war zone.”

“He could’ve put in for transfer.”

Grice took a last drag and snapped away his butt. We were at street level. The detective with the hat and moustache was standing by the unmarked car with the uniform who had left just as I reached the parking area, comparing complexions. Grice said, “Maybe getting in your twenty is like climbing a mountain. The last two feet are the hardest. His record is so clean it hurts your eyes. Prints on the gun were his and the lab says he’d fired a gun recently. His wife’s staying with her sister in Grand Rapids and has been for the past week. And I’m pulling a double shift like it’s loaded with rocks. I don’t feel like crawling into anyone else’s head. Especially when he don’t have one no more.”

“Where’s it go from here, I.A.D.?”

“It don’t go. Internal Affairs don’t bother itself with civilians, which is what he was since January. The gun he used was his own, although it was the one he carried all the time he was in plainclothes. He’d turned in his departmental piece.”

“Did you know him?”

“To look at. Not to talk to.” He was studying my face. The whites of his eyes were just as blue by daylight. They reminded me of skim milk. “We met? You look familiar.”

“I’d remember,” I said. “Is the widow coming in?”

“I guess. To dot all the
i’
s.”

“When she does, would you have her call me? I’d owe you one.” I gave him a card.

He poked it into his handkerchief pocket without looking at it. “If I remember, and if I happen to be wearing the same suit.” He grinned suddenly. “Look at that, will you?”

His gaze was grazing my right shoulder. I turned around. I was looking at the opposite side of the street, anonymous but for a glass door in the building on the corner with
DETROIT POLICE DEPARTMENT
lettered on it in light blue. The interior was dark behind the glass. “You mean the ministation?”

“Yeah. One of Hizzoner’s bright ideas when he took office. A cop on every corner. If the old lady screamed, which she wouldn’t of because her vocal cords would of been slashed first thing, they would of heard it there, which they didn’t because it’s been empty for a year. Someone has to pay for that silk wallpaper downtown.”

Barry’s column was more widely read than I’d thought. I said, “You told the M.E. this bag lady wasn’t the first. I haven’t read anything about any others.”

“That’s because no one wrote about any of them. No one looks at the street trade when they’re alive, why should they bother when they’re dead? This one’s number six. It’s really number five, on account of she was drawing flies when last week’s turned up in a doorway on Sherman, but we number them by the reports. I do, anyhow. Right now it’s just some dead bums and bag ladies, my speed. It gets out we got another mass murderer loose, the case gets taken away from me and handed to those flashy killers in Major Crimes. I’m just the dirty-stick boy on this detail. Suicide? Dead wino? Call Grice.”

“You feel that way, how come you left Vice?”

He showed his teeth again. “Prestige. You sure we don’t know each other?”

“No way we could. I haven’t killed anyone lately and I don’t have any vices. I appreciate the time, Sergeant. I owe you, like I said.” I turned away quickly.

To my back he said: “You wouldn’t if you’d tell me where it was we met. Wherever it was I don’t remember enjoying it.”

T
HE JUNKYARD
—they call them Detroit cemeteries most other places—swallowed the whole block behind a twelve-foot board fence with hagman salvage painted on it in red letters as tall as a man, and an entrance on Myrtle. As I nursed my crate along the broken-asphalt driveway, picking my way between glittering carpets of shattered glass and twisted bits of molding, a yellow crane attached to an electromagnet shaped like an enormous suction cup lifted a late-model Buick with smashed fenders twenty feet above the aisles of stacked auto shells and set it almost noiselessly on the conveyor of a crusher busy knuckling an Oldsmobile two years younger than mine. The grinding, squealing inevitability of that machine made you cringe, like a hellfire minister holding forth in a church with no exits. The place smelled of dried mud and scorched metal.

The office was a tiny shack made entirely of corrugated roofing wired together at the seams, with a hole cut for a window. A pair of men standing in the open watched me park next to a dusty pickup bearing the salvage company’s name and get out. One of the two was a squat black in his early sixties, with iron-gray hair curling up around the edge of his green billed cap and an impressive belly spilling through his open workshirt over his belt, rivulets of sweat making tracks in the fine coating of dust on his skin. His companion was a Hispanic, short and thin, sporting a lion’s mane of wild black hair and a Fu Manchu moustache. He had on a frayed denim jacket over bare brown chest, jeans with threads showing at the knees, and expensive steel-toed workshoes that had seen plenty of combat. He could have been thirty. He was probably closer to fifty. You treat the two ages two ways, so I played it safe and split the difference.

“I’m looking for Amigo Fuentes,” I told him.

His eyes were black under lowered lids. “Are you a policeman?” He tried hard not to pronounce the
y
like a
j.

I said I wasn’t and showed him my ID. His glance raked it swiftly.

“Her parents send you?”

I went on looking at him and put away my wallet. “You’re Fuentes?”

“Let’s go inside. Cleon, bust them bolts if you got to, but yank that transmission. Man wants it by fi’ o’clock.”

“Yas,” said the old black man, and left us, slapping a ballpeen hammer against the side of his leg as he walked.

“Domb shits, these niggers,” Fuentes said over his shoulder. “Wanted Liquid Wrench to pop the bolts on a car was here ten years when I take over.”

“Good help’s hard to find.”

“Ain’ it the truth.” He snapped on a dropcord suspended over a steel desk, blinding me with 200 watts of sudden naked white light.

Something struck me hard across the stomach. When I doubled over, a hand snaked behind me and jerked the revolver from my holster.

The light went out. Green and yellow dots burst before my vision and glimmered away, like stones sinking in a deep pond. Fuentes was standing beside his desk with my Smith & Wesson in one hand and a jack handle in the other. I sucked for air and probed the sore spot on my abdomen.