Never Street (26 page)

“Not necessary.”

“He paid cash. I told him I couldn’t hold anything longer than thirty days. He said if it hadn’t come by September first, it never would.”

“What did he look like?”

“It was a busy day. I was shorthanded, as usual, and working the counter always gives me a stiff neck. He had on a baseball cap, bill to the front, and I think a Windbreaker. I don’t remember the colors, so don’t ask. Pair of shades, the neon kind the kids like. He was young. A kid. When he came in I thought he was looking for a job.”

“Race, height, weight, facial hair?”

“White. A smudge of beard, maybe. I’m not sure. I don’t notice people’s height as a rule. They all look like basketball players from down here. Medium to tall, I guess. Skinny. This sucks, doesn’t it? I was a much better witness the time I was shot.”

“You had more reason to notice details then. I wouldn’t sweat it. Witnesses who remember too much are worse than witnesses who don’t remember at all.” I frowned at my notebook. “He sounds young for the guy I’m thinking of. Could he have been disguising his age? A cap and snazzy glasses can go a long way in that direction if there’s some doubt.”

“I’m around kids all the time. This one wasn’t much past twenty, if he was that.”

“He didn’t give you any information beyond calling himself Bell?”

“No, and I didn’t ask. He didn’t behave like a druggie, and he didn’t dress the way kids that age deck themselves out when they’re making more money than they should; not enough flash. So I figured he was ordering back issues of
Anal Delight
and didn’t want his parents to know. If I’d thought he was using my business for a blackmail drop, I’d have thrown him out on his ear.”

“How was he going to claim delivery without some kind of ID?”

He twisted in the chair, tore the top sheet off a square pad on the corner of the desk, and held it out.

I took it. It was a receipt blank bearing Spee-D-A’s logo in blue and orange.

“I wrote ‘Mr. Bell’ on it, initialed it, and gave it to him,” Blint said. “All he had to do was show it at the counter. It didn’t even have to be him. The receipt is all that’s needed.”

I couldn’t think of any more questions. I didn’t like the answers I’d gotten to the ones I’d asked. I gave him back the blank and put away my notebook. “If you hear from him again, I’d appreciate a call.”

“What I’d like to do is call the cops and jail his young ass.”

“They won’t thank you for it. My client will, and he’s in a better position to help out with your retirement.”

Turning, I almost bumped into Janet.

“Rebecca quit,” she told Blint.

“Why?”

“She’s mad because I got a raise and she didn’t.”

Driving back to the office, I felt like a white rat in a maze designed by a sadistic scientist. None of the directions I took led to a pellet. Mr. Bell wasn’t Miles Leander. Miles Leander didn’t want money. I had a blackmail case without a blackmailer. I wonder what Blint’s computers would have made of it, or if they would just shut down their circuits in protest.

On Vernor west of Grand, I picked up a Detroit police cruiser in my rearview mirror. I glanced down at the speedometer, but I wasn’t violating the limit by much; certainly not enough to attract official attention in a town where they let you drive. The car lagged twenty feet behind me for two blocks. Then it closed the distance and kicked on its flashers.

“W
HAT’S THE TROUBLE
, Officer?”

“Step out of the car, please.”

That old cop
please,
lined with steel and backed up by DPD blue filling both side windows and their thumbs on the checked butts of their revolvers.

I stepped out of the car.

“Hands on the roof, please. Lean forward.”

I put my hands on the roof. The metal scorched my palms.

“Spread your feet.”

I spread my feet, knowing they would be kicked farther apart. Now I couldn’t abandon the position without falling.

“I’m carrying a revolver. The permit’s in my wallet.”

Hands thumped me from armpits to waist and jerked the .38 from its holster. After that there was no more please. My feet were kicked out from under me. I fell forward, splitting my lip against the doorpost. A hand snatched my collar, another hand twisted my right arm back and up, and I was hustled forward and flung across the blistering hood. In another second my wrists were cuffed behind me. Only then did one of the officers yank my wallet from my hip pocket and rummage through the contents until he came to the concealed weapons permit.

“Looks legit.”

“Put him in the car.”

They were both black, and efficient with the nerveless efficiency of the veteran who knows his job well enough to have lost his passion for it. One of them forced my head down to clear the roof of the cruiser and pivoted me into the back seat while his partner leaned against the door and radioed the precinct house. I sat and sweated and bled onto my shirt and ignored the curious gaping of passing motorists. The unit was new, but the showroom smell had already begun to retreat before the onslaught of tobacco smoke, take-out barbecue sauce, and the bodily effluvients of the chronically busted.

After a long time the pair climbed into the front seat and we began rolling.

“What’s the beef?” I asked after a block.

The driver, who was the older and bulkier of the two, with white temples and a thick roll of hard fat at the base of his skull, glanced up at the rearview mirror, then returned his attention to the windshield. He said nothing.

I tried again. “When did the Supreme Court strike down Miranda?”

The younger officer—who wasn’t young—rode with his window down and his elbow resting on the sill. “Just kind of shut up, okay?”

I kind of shut up. We were heading down Woodward now at a cop clip, eeling through spaces in the traffic and pinking all the lights. The broad main stem’s infinity of rathole bars, overgrown lots, and empty storefronts gaping toothlessly whipped past like a Third World documentary on fast forward. Pedestrians stumped along carrying laundry in duffels and decaying baskets, indistinguishable from the homeless who punched in at twilight. We passed the public library and across from it the Detroit Institute of Arts, where I had watched
Pitfall
and spoken with Gay Catalin, three days and a hundred years ago. A banner stretched across the front advertised the motion picture festival leading up to the premier of Austin Alt’s new movie tomorrow night at the Fox.

A voice crackled over the two-way radio, too low for me to make out the words from behind the grid separating the front and back seats. The officer who had spoken to me unhooked the microphone and said something into it. The voice crackled in response. He returned the microphone to the dash and spoke to his partner, who nodded and swung the car into a tight right turn from the inside lane. The car behind us in the right lane stopped with a chirp.

The officer on the passenger’s side propped his elbow on the back of the seat and looked back at me. “Your lucky day, perp. No lockup for you just yet. We got a little detour to make first.”

“Where to?”

“Detroit General.”

“The hospital?”

“If there’s another one I sure don’t know about it, and I was born on Adelaide right where the Grand Trunk crosses.”

“How’d you wind up on that side of the badge?”

“I guess I ain’t as lucky as you.”

“Cut the gab,” his partner told him.

Adelaide took his elbow off the seat and faced front.

We parked outside the emergency room in a slot reserved for ambulances. Adelaide helped me out and took me by the arm. Inside his partner spoke to a black nurse who hadn’t seen anything new that day. She said something back and we caught the elevator to the second floor.

The recessed-lit, linoleum-paved hallway was congested outside the door to Intensive Care: uniformed Detroit officers, hospital personnel in white, and Inspector John Alderdyce, a black hole in an unstructured silk jacket and foulard tie. I felt a tingle.

“Officers Thompson and Olready, Inspector,” said the younger half of my escort.

“Which one are you?” Alderdyce asked.

“Thompson.”

The inspector barely glanced at me. There was no recognition in the glance. “Did he resist?”

“No, sir. We had a BOL on a blue nineteen-seventy Cutlass with a pick-up on the driver. Headquarters didn’t say what about. Precinct policy in a case like that is to go in heavy and save the baby oil for later.”

“What precinct?”

“Ninth.”

“That’s Zabrinski’s yard, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your skipper’s a horse’s ass, Thompson. The reprimands in his jacket go all the way back to before they broke up STRESS.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, sir.”

“Take the cuffs off.”

“We found this on him, sir.” Thompson pulled my revolver from his belt.

Alderdyce took it from him. “Was he carrying paper?”

The officer produced my wallet from his hip pocket. He took that too. “The cuffs.”

Olready unlocked the manacles. The blood charged back into my hands, prickling like a fistful of straight pins.

Alderdyce handed me a handkerchief. “Want to file a complaint?”

“It’s hot. Everybody’s boiling over. Anyway, a complaint’s not much good these days without video accompaniment.” I daubed at my torn lip. “An apology would be nice.”

The inspector looked at the officers.

“Sorry about the hard handling.” Thompson wasn’t looking at me.

Olready said, “Sorry.”

“Now we’re friends.” Alderdyce gave me the wallet and gun and watched me put them away. I offered back the handkerchief. “Keep it. Care to tell me where you were this morning between midnight and two A.M.?”

On my knees in my living room, looking for a bullet. “I was at home in bed.”

“Anybody with you?”

“I got a couple of telephone calls. What’s the squeal?”

He took out a spiral pad. “You had contact last night with a party named Leander?”

I felt a tingle that had nothing to do with my hands. “He called me. We spoke. Is this about Leander?”

“His sister, Susan Thibido, told officers you came to her place yesterday looking for her brother. She said you made threats.”

“She’s mistaken.”

“She’s inside.” He tipped his head toward the door to Intensive Care.

“I said I could keep him out of trouble if he agreed to meet me. It’s a stretch to call that a threat.”

“It’s a bigger stretch to call you a fortune-teller,” he said. “But you came close.”

“What happened?”

“The sister’s phone rang a little after two this morning. She couldn’t make out what he was saying, but she knew it was him and he didn’t sound good. She’d spoken to him earlier. He was staying at an old girlfriend’s apartment on Watson while the girlfriend was out of town. Mrs. Thibido called the police. They found him on the floor of the living room with most of his bones broken and not much of what you would call a pulse.”

“How is he?”

“How would you be?”

“He’s conscious,” I said. “If he weren’t you wouldn’t have had me brought here for him to identify.”

“Will he?”

“Not unless his brains have been shaken loose. We only talked on the telephone.”

“About what?”

“The heat and the storms. What else is there to talk about this summer?”

“Try attempted murder. It could still be murder if those machines he’s wired into start flashing
tilt.”

“Let’s go in and talk to him before they do.”

He put away his pad and squashed the button next to a speaker mounted flush to the wall.

“Yes?” A woman’s voice, as flat as the speaker.

“This is Inspector Alderdyce. I need to bring someone in for Leander to see.”

There was a short silence. Then the speaker crackled.

“One minute. Just the two of you.”

A muted buzzer sounded. He twisted the broom handle on the door and we went in.

We passed a pair of nurses, one female, one male, seated in front of a bank of monitors. On the way down the short quiet corridor we encountered Roy and Susan Thibido. Her red hair was still ratted, but she had put on a clean cotton dress and strap sandals and orange lipstick. Roy wore a green twill worksuit and blew his nose into a blue bandanna handkerchief as he passed us. If he felt his wife’s fingers digging into his upper arm when she recognized me, he didn’t react.

The room was just big enough to contain the bed, an IV stand, a cartload of monitoring equipment, and two visitors of moderate proportions, which Alderdyce was not. He left me standing in the doorway while he approached the bed.

Miles Leander looked like a character in a potentially hilarious scene from a slapstick comedy, although nobody was laughing. His head wore a helmet of bandages and he was in a total body cast with all four limbs hoisted upward on pulleys. Various wires and tubes trailed from holes in the plaster. He might have been a balloon drifted away from the Thanksgiving Day parade.

Alderdyce leaned over him and spoke his name gently. One eye opened in a ring of blue-black bruises. The other was swollen shut. It took him a moment to focus on the face inches from his. Again the inspector spoke. There was a pause, then the eye slid toward the doorway where I stood. After a while he grunted and shook his head. The grunt ended in a groan; even that tiny movement was excruciating.

“That narrows it down,” said Alderdyce when we were back out in the main corridor. “He won’t be able to give us any kind of description until they unwire his jaw.”

“It’s not the way I work, John.”

“People lose their tempers in the heat. You said it yourself.” He put a hand on the back of his neck and stretched. “I wouldn’t want to take on whoever it was without the whole TMU for backup. Doc says the fractured skull and internal damage would have killed most people. Leander’s a big guy, and his sister says he worked as an attendant in a mental institution. It takes muscle to subdue a psycho.”

“I know someone who could take him,” I said.

Alderdyce gave me a cop look.

I shook my head. “Not evidence. You can’t tank anyone for withholding a hunch. If it turns out to be anything more I’ll run to you.”