Peeper (13 page)

The second officer drew his leaded leather sap from his belt and tapped the raging prisoner behind the left ear. He sagged and the officer caught him.

“Are you all right, sir?” The young officer placed a hand on Ralph's shoulder.

Ralph covered the lower half of his face, bleeding between his fingers, and assumed a high, singsong voice. “Oh yes, Officer, I am being fine, very very fine, thank you.”

“You don't look fine, sir.”

“Oh yes, I am always looking this way. Very very fine. Thank you, thank you.” Bowing maniacally, he backed toward the exit.

“Wait, sir. Haven't we met?”

“Oh no, I would be very very sure if we had met. Very sure. Thank you.”

Outside, he leaned back against the door and blew his nose into his handkerchief. He was busy mopping up when a blue 1963 Corvair with a green right-front fender pulled into the curb. Its driver leaned across the seat and rolled down the window on the passenger's side. “Ralph, you okay?”

“Oh yes, I am fine, very very—” He recognized April Dane. His voice came down. “Oh. Hiya. I'm swell.”

“Sure? For a minute there you sounded like one of my professors.”

“Joke. How'd you find out I was here?”

“When you didn't answer your phone I called Sergeant O'Leary at police headquarters. He said you'd been arrested. For what?”

“It don't matter. They sprung me. Can I get a lift?”

“That's what I'm here for. Where to?”

“My place.” He gave her directions.

“
O-kay!
” she said lasciviously.

He climbed into the passenger's seat. A spring broke and his knees hit his chin. His nose started bleeding again. “Jesus.” He fumbled for his handkerchief.

“Sorry about that.” She pulled into the street. There was no traffic; the sky was just beginning to lighten in the east. “When I started at Michigan, Lyla wrote me a letter offering to buy me a new Camaro. Our parents found the letter and tore it up. They're still paying on this heap. Everything else goes to the church.”

“Uh-huh.” He tipped back his head and pressed the wadded handkerchief to his nostrils.

“Last night was nice,” she said.

“My hormones are still humming.”

She giggled. It sounded better than the transvestites.

“Who taught you that stuff, your sister?”

“No, I didn't talk to her for years, and there was just that one letter. I guess knowing what she did for a living made me curious. You'd be surprised how many boys in high school were willing to help satisfy my curiosity.”

“I bet I wouldn't.”

“Listen, you don't have any diseases or anything like that, do you?”

“Just my liver.”

They rode for a few blocks in silence. The Corvair's tires hissed on the dewy pavement.

“I guess you didn't get a chance to look into what I asked,” she said.

“Maybe when you talk to your sister I won't have to.”

“Maybe. Sergeant O'Leary thinks you know more about what happened than you're saying.”

“That's my building.”

“It's a dirty bookstore.”

“That's what everybody says. Pull in there.”

“The handicapped zone?”

“If they can't wait for this month's copy of
Leather Lovers
, they can damn well send somebody to pick it up for them.”

In the foyer she said, “Place needs a good cleaning. Your landlord's supposed to take care of that.”

“He's been preoccupied lately.” Ralph sniffed surreptitiously as they passed Vinnie's door. No smell yet. He wondered if he should have turned down the thermostat.

Upstairs, April gaped at the door to Ralph's apartment.

“Termites,” he said, unlocking it.

She went in ahead of him and stopped in the aisle he'd cleared to his bedroom. When she reached for the light switch, Ralph said, “No!” and placed his hand over it. He took a deep sniff, decided he didn't smell gas, and flipped the switch. “It's a little tricky,” he explained.

“My room at home never looked like this. You need a woman.”

“What're you, blue cheese?”

“I mean to clean. The place looks like it's been ransacked.” She continued to the bedroom and turned on the light. “Wow.”

He joined her. “I got out of bed in a hurry.”

“It's like one of those murder rooms you see in detective magazines.”

“I guess it could use a dusting.” He picked up a slashed pillow and stuffed it into a dresser drawer, releasing a cloud of feathers. “Want a drink?”

“What've you got?”

He lifted the blanket on the bed, found a bottle with some liquid in it, and held it up to the light. “Looks like bourbon.”

“No thanks.” Her tone changed as she turned to face him. “We don't need it.”

Ralph's nose started bleeding again.

It was light out when Ralph climbed out of bed onto his hands and knees, pulled himself hand over hand into a standing position with the aid of the bedpost, and dragged himself naked into the cramped bathroom. There he jerked on the light and looked at himself in the mirror over the sink. There was a smear of dried blood on his upper lip—it had stopped oozing finally—and his genitals were plastered to his stomach. They looked depressingly flat. His tongue was pale and his face was tongue-colored. He tried taking his pulse, but couldn't find any spaces between the beats. He drew some water with a clatter of ancient pipes into the smeared glass he kept there and threw it at his face. After a moment he washed himself above and below and crept back into the bedroom.

He stubbed a toe hard against something solid and stuffed a fist into his mouth to avoid crying out. He was deathly afraid of waking April, who was breathing evenly on her back with her eyes closed and the sheet pulled down to expose one white breast. She looked fresh and ready for another round. He felt as if he'd been carrying anvils up and down stairs all night. He wondered if Monsignor Breame had felt the same way, and if this sort of thing ran in the Dane family. The Dane curse. He moaned into his fist.

When the spasm had passed he bent down and picked up the object he'd struck. It was his suitcoat. Carefully he removed the items from its pockets and set them down gently on the telephone stand by the bed, employing the shelf beneath when he ran out of surface. The last was the pigskin-and-gold notepad he'd removed from Bishop Steelcase's desk in the St. Balthazar rectory.

He let the coat drop back to the floor and turned the pad toward the light coming through the window. The top five pages contained names and telephone numbers recorded in the bishop's fine copperplate hand. Ralph recognized the names of several local Catholic Church officials and a number of city politicians and area celebrities, but the rest were unfamiliar. The remaining pages were blank. The third page was too, except for a solitary unidentified telephone number with an area code Ralph couldn't place.

April sighed and turned over, displaying a naked length of back.

Quietly, Ralph picked up the telephone, standard and all, and carried it into the bathroom. It barely reached, just allowing him to close the door on the cord. Bracing the standard against the door with his bare belly, he lifted the receiver and dialed the mysterious number.

Waiting for someone to answer, he scratched himself. There was no good reason to stand there with the breeze blowing up his ass, calling someone he didn't know. It wasn't like he was some kind of crusading sleuth who had to get to the bottom of a bishop's murder and the almost-murder of a hooker, regardless of whether the hooker's sister was in his bed. There was no good reason at all, except for the fact that the bishop who had been murdered had been going to pay Ralph's bills for the next decade or so.

“Justice Department.”

It was a female receptionist kind of a voice. Ralph said, “The one in Washington?”

“Sir, is there another one?”

“Well, are we talking about the state or the place with the big white buildings?”

“Sir, the state of Washington doesn't have a justice department. It has apples.”

“Okay. Let me talk to the cheese.”

“Sir, do you mean the attorney general?”

“No lawyers. I want the head honcho.”

“Sir, I was referring to United States Attorney General Willard Newton.”

Shit. “Well, if you got nobody better.”

“What name shall I give him, sir?”

“Just tell him Detroit is calling. Miss?”

“Yes, sir?”

“You got a brother with the Detroit Police Department?”

“No, sir. My brother's with the Washington Redskins. Why do you ask?”

“Just a hunch.”

“One moment, sir.”

Ralph was placed on hold. After a moment, a raspy, Harvard-leaded voice he recognized vaguely from television news interviews came on the line.

“Carpenter, I told you never to call me here.”

Chapter 17

Immediately after Ralph hung up in the most famous face he was ever likely to, April Dane opened the bathroom door, allowing the telephone to drop on his foot. When he was through jumping around, she said, “Important call?”

“Just getting the weather. Jesus.” He propped his foot up on the toilet lid and dabbed at the three cut toes with Mercurochrome from the medicine cabinet.

“When I woke up and saw you were gone, I was afraid you'd run out on me. Then I saw the cord and followed it in here.” She started to giggle.

“What's funny?” He wiggled the toes. They didn't seem to be broken.

“You are. When you're naked.”

He put his foot down and sucked in his stomach. “I don't jog or nothing like that. I got a car.”

“I meant the hat.”

He looked up at it. “I think I forgot to take it off.”

“I couldn't help staring at it. I kept waiting for it to fall off, only it never did.”

“Shit.”

“What's wrong?”

“I seen your eyes rolling up. I thought it was for another reason.”

She grasped him by the most available handle and drew him near. She was naked too. Her dark hair was tousled and her face looked fresh without makeup. He could feel the heat from her body, or maybe it was from his. Every part of him protested except the part she was holding.

“It wasn't
just
the hat,” she said.

“No?”

“Uh-uh. Come back to bed.”

“I got work to do.”

“You can't start work until I finish paying your retainer.”

“I think I owe you change now.”

“Well, pay up.” She gave him a squeeze.

“What about your sister?”

“Let her find her own detective. You're my private dick, right?”

“Uh-huh.” He gritted his teeth.

“Hardboiled dick.”

“Jesus.”

“The heat.” She applied a hydraulic motion.

“Damn.”

She looked down at him. “Whoops.”

He let out his stomach then. There wasn't much point in holding it in any longer.

“Go away, Ralph.”

Neal English was seated in a semicircular booth upholstered in red leather in the Cadillac Club on West Lafayette, under a framed caricature of Herve Villechaize. The insurance actuary's monolithic face, ripe for a caricature of its own, was framed by a white bib with a scarlet lobster on it. The remains of a similar life form lay on his plate, where he was busy dismantling it with a mallet. Ferns decorated the room, swaying to classical music turned down very low.

“The girl in your office said I'd find you here.” Ralph slid into the booth.

“Next time you talk to her, tell her she's fired.”

“You get anything out of them big cockroaches, or do you just like to wrestle?”

“I see nobody killed you yet.” Neal crushed the lobster's skull and picked out its brains with a miniature fork.

“That's why I'm here.”

“I'll do you after this lobster.”

“You always was a card, Neal.” Ralph returned his menu to the waiter, a plump man with white hair and a red face. “Ain't you got no burgers?”

“The ground sirloin is quite good, sir.”

“Okay, burn one and slap on a slice of Velveeta. None of that Swiss crap.”

“Would you like a beverage?”

“What's on tap?”

“We have a full assortment of imported beers.”

“That Mexican piss gives me the trots. Bring me a Blatz in a can. I found a rat hair in a bottle once,” he confided to Neal. “What're you waiting for, Maurice, your tip?”

“May I take your hat, sir?”

“Why, your head cold?” When the waiter had withdrawn, Ralph winked at Neal. “What do you think, he does it to the busboy or the busboy does it to him?”

“Jesus Christ, Ralph.”

“They're the only people that can carry a tray without dropping it. It's all in the hips.” He took a gulp of Neal's ice water. “Listen, you still a whiz with computers?”

“I never was to begin with.”

“Sure you were. I seen you put Arnie on line when we was with Great Lakes.”

“I helped him set his digital watch.”

“You got a computer where you are now?”

“I'm on timeshare, with an office-system Kaypro.”

“No shit? Congratulations. What I want to know is, you got a computer where you are now?”

Neal broke the lobster's neck. “Why?”

“I want to bust into the computer files at the Justice Department.”

“Okay, don't tell me. I wasn't going to do anything for you anyway.”

“No, I mean it.”

“You're talking about the Justice Department in Washington, D.C.?”

“They don't have one in the state of Washington. I asked.”

“What is it you want to find out?”

“Why Willard Newton would want to kill a prostitute and a bishop, and what that has to do with a dead monsignor.”