Silent Thunder (7 page)

“January it was,” she said. “Maybe February. One of them cold months when I get to thinking about visiting my boy Floyd in Florida. They bum-rapped him down there. He told me himself he was in Arkansas when them boys shot that feller in Fort Lauderdale. My boys steal, but they don’t lie.”

“January or February,” I prompted.

“He had a letter with him. I got it here.” She took a fold of coarse paper out of the slash pocket of her overalls and handed it to me.

The sheet had yellowed in a drawer, been doodled on, and used to add sums of figures in Ma’s crabbed hand. The message had been badly typed on a machine whose
o
’s and
a
’s looked like fat periods.

Ma

Well how the hell are you i guess you remember your old freind Sturdy. This heres junior hes OK

The moronic signature at the bottom might have read “Sturdy.” It might have read John Hancock or Pontius Pilate. I said, “That’d be Waldo Stoudenmire, the Iroquois Heights fence?”

“Maybe.”

I returned the letter. “I didn’t know Sturdy dealt guns.”

“Sturdy’d peddle his grandmother’s teeth if there was cash in it.” She refolded the letter and pocketed it. “But he knows what’s good for him and he don’t give nobody the green light here that didn’t earn it.”

“Describe Thayer.”

She squinted up at me through the smoke of her cigarette. “Thirty. Your build, but soft around the middle. Be fat in a couple. Glasses, I think.”

“Sounds like his pictures. What was he after?”

“You come back with that other two-fifty and Ma will tell. Plus thirty for the lamp. I forgot about the lamp.”

“I could just ask Sturdy.”

“Sturdy’s dead, I heard.”

“I didn’t.”

“You will.”

I scratched my chin. “It’s like that, is it?”

“Not Ma. Ma don’t kill nobody. She just hears things. You young blades forget us old folks are around.”

“Did you make a sale?”

“I ain’t in business not to.”

“For how much?”

“Ten.”

“Thousand?”

She coughed. “No, Cadillacs. Of course ten thousand.”

“Cash?”

“Check.”

“Check?” For some reason that rocked me harder than the part about Sturdy being dead. “Since when do you put anything on the books?”

“The books say I sold him the truck I made the delivery with,” she said. “Or would of.”

“You didn’t deliver?”

“Bank wouldn’t cash the check.”

“He stopped payment?”

“Not him. His old man. The bank told me.”

“How could Doyle Thayer Senior stop payment on a check his son wrote?”

“He can when it’s drawn on his account.” She tidied the bills, folded them, and put them inside her bib pocket. “That there’s worth about two-fifty, I’d say. Come back with the rest and I’ll tell you the rest.”

I sighed, took out my wallet, and gave her the other half of the five hundred. “I still owe you for the lamp.”

She chortled; that’s all you could call it. She counted the money and put it with the rest. “Don’t never play poker with a lady from Logan County.”

“What was Junior buying?”

“Well, if I was the kind to deal in guns and such, and if Junior was the kind to buy from me, I might offer him a Polaris missile.”

“For ten thousand?”

“Just the shell. Ma don’t mess around with that nuke juice.”

“Where’d you get a Polaris missile?”

“I didn’t. I just told you, I ain’t the kind, and if I was, I wouldn’t say so for no five hunnert.”

I looked down at Hubert Darling, who had begun groaning again but showed no signs of moving. Sorting through my terminology. “Where would someone go around here to lay hold of a Polaris missile, shell or otherwise?”

“Talk to the Colonel.”

“Colonel who?”

Her face was a mask; but then it was anyway. “If you don’t know who the Colonel is, he don’t want you to know. Ma’s got to get lunch on the table.” She pushed past me, in the direction of the smell of frying onions.

“If it’s for Hubert, you better make soup out of it,” I said. “He won’t be chewing anything for a while.”

“I forgot to ask why you hit him.” She was in the kitchen now, banging pots and pans.

“Old times’ sake.” On my way out I crunched through pieces of broken lamp.

The onions had made me ravenous. I had lunch at a sausage palace a mile from the Chaney house. It was a block building made over to look like a barn, with a hip roof, red aluminum siding, and fat waitresses bound in tight pink uniforms. There was enough grease on my plate to lube a fleet of Chevies. I shoveled it in with both hands.

Afterwards I smoked and thought. I wondered who the Colonel might be and what army he belonged to. I wondered what a spoiled kid with too much money wanted with a nuclear weapon that didn’t work. I wondered what the article was that Ma had clipped out of last night’s newspaper and stuck in the pocket of her nutty kimono. I wondered, while digesting lunch, who was going to pay for supper.

My waitress, three hundred pounds with yellow hair in a bun and
Dora
stitched across her apron pocket, brought my bill. “Can I get you anything else?”

“Not unless there’s a copy of yesterday’s
News
in the kitchen,” I said.

“I think it was in your soup.” She laid the bill on the table, but she didn’t go away. “You look like a man with problems.”

“I’m out of work.”

“Put your wife to work. That’s what my husband did.”

“I don’t have a wife.”

“I wish I didn’t have a husband.”

I covered the bill, emptying my wallet for the second time in two days. “What would you call a man who gets fired, then goes on doing the same job without pay?”

“He working for a woman?”

“Yeah.”

She counted her tip and put it in her apron. “I’d call him a romantic. But only if he tips twenty percent.”

Back in the city I got some more cash and stopped at a corner bar for a cold beer and a slice of conditioned air. While the bartender was drawing the beer I used the pay telephone by the rest rooms to call my answering service. Waiting for the girl to come on the line I belched sausage.

“Yes, Mr. Walker, a Mr. Scooter called at ten o’clock. He wants you to call him back. You know the number, he said.”

“Shooter,” I corrected. “Anything else?”

“A woman called a few minutes ago, but she wouldn’t leave her name.”

“Maybe it was Dora.”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing. I just needed some advice.” I thanked her and hung up.

Shooter’s line was busy. I called Detroit Police Headquarters and asked for Inspector Alderdyce.

“Alderdyce.”

“Congratulations, John,” I said. “I didn’t get my invitation to your promotion party.”

“I’ll throw a party the day I leave this job. I inherited four murders and a series of home invasions from Crosse Pointe to Flatrock. How are you, Walker?”

“Working, sort of. I was wondering if some cold meat named Waldo Stoudenmire had happened across your desk yet.”

He jumped on it. “Who says Sturdy’s dead?”

“The word’s on the street, like they say on TV. Where
is
the Street, anyway?”

“Hollywood. If you hear anything else, let me know.

Sturdy’s the one I wanted to talk to about these home invasions. The scroats have to be laying the stuff off somewhere.”

“I’ll keep you in mind. You’re my first friendly inspector.”

“I’ll say.” He let the hard edge go. “Remember Proust?”

“I thought I could forget him when he left the department. Then he got indicted up in the Heights and I thought he was forgotten. He’s still in office.”

“He’ll be retired before he sees court. In the Heights they take crime off the streets and put it in city hall where they can keep an eye on it.”

I belched into a fist. “What do you know about a guy who calls himself the Colonel?”

“He’s got a white beard and sells chicken by the bucket.”

“I needed a funny inspector today,” I said. “That’s the only thing the day was missing.”

“We’re here to serve.”

We said good-bye. I worked the cradle and dialed again.

“You’re a hard man to reach,” Shooter said.

“What’ve you got for me?”

“Eleven o’clock tonight, same place. Leave the heat behind. Man hates heat unless he’s buying it or selling it.”

“What’s the man’s name?”

He laughed and broke the connection.

Three people were waiting to use the telephone. I pegged the receiver and went back to the bar to drink my beer, which was just cool by this time. I drank it anyway. When you’re broke you respect the little investments.

At my building I paused to poke through the trash basket on the corner. Any other day there would have been four or five old copies of the Detroit
News
in it; today it was the
Free Press
and sixteen not-quite-empty cartons from the Chinese take-out place in the next block. I gave up.

Upstairs in my reception room, Constance Thayer looked up from an old magazine and told me I had a piece of Mandarin orange on my lapel.

I
PLUCKED THE PIECE
of spoiled fruit off my jacket and dropped it in the smoking stand. The glamour of detective work never dims.

I unlocked the door to the inner office and held it for her. The suit was tan today, the blouse gold and caught at the neck with a jade brooch in an antique gold setting. She carried a brown leather handbag into the office and leaned it against one leg of the customer’s chair when she sat down. With some women the things are just props. Her hair was red in the sunlight.

On my way in I picked up the mail under the slot, sat down behind the desk, and shuffled through it. There were no checks today, just bills and a letter with the stylized owl that Reliance Investigations used for a logo printed in the corner. I knew what it would contain, but since she didn’t seem in a mood to talk just yet I opened it. It was computer-printed on stiff steel-gray stock to match the envelope and Krell’s shrapnel tie clasp. This one should have been pink. I read it a second time more slowly, just as if I were alone, then laid it aside and folded my hands on the blotter like Barry Fitzgerald.

“Was yesterday morning a special occasion, or does a drink any old time of the day sound better than a kick in the teeth?” I asked.

“I—I’d like a drink very much.”

I brought up the bottle and two glasses. I wasn’t sure about them, so I took them into my little water closet, washed them, and splashed an inch of water into each, letting it run first. Back at the desk I colored the water and handed her one. I raised the other.

“Carthage must be destroyed.”

She laughed slightly and we clinked glasses. Although she looked like a sipper, she took the top off hers like a steeplejack. An orange flush climbed her cheeks under the tan.

“Do you always keep it in the drawer?” she asked. “Like a gumshoe?”

“I did a job for a cabinetmaker once who offered to install one of those trick bars that come out from behind the paneling. But I’d have had to walk clear across the office.”

“I didn’t drink or use anything at all when I met Doyle, not even when I made those films. He got me started with Irish coffee. That was before the cocaine.”

“Still do it?”

She shook her head. “I’m allergic to the smell of hundred-dollar bills.”

“Me too.”

She smiled politely. I had some more and set my glass on the blotter. “You talked to Dorrance?”

“Yes. He was very angry with Mr. Krell for hiring you without consulting him.”

“Krell has some old-fashioned ideas. He thinks he can run his own business his own way.”

“You sound as if you admire him. Yesterday I had the impression—”

“The right one. But he’s his own man, even if it’s on his wife’s money, and he employs only the best. Those that will put up with him, anyhow; they generally don’t for long.” I folded my hands again. Body language. “You didn’t come here to write a book about Ernest Krell.”

“I came here to re-hire you.”

“Does Dorrance know?”

“He thinks I’m home. I tried to call you earlier, but your service said you were out. I took a chance on catching you here.”

“Where’s home these days?”

“I’m staying with my sister in Redford.” She studied me. “You think I’m a coward, don’t you?”

“No woman who ever shot a man for beating her up is.”

She dismissed that with a jerky impatient wave. Cocaine gestures are a long time going. “I have confidence in you, Mr. Walker. I realize my character judgment is suspect, considering the man I married, but I liked the way you refused to let Mr. Krell intimidate you yesterday. Leslie was impressed, too, based on his meeting with you last night. I think it would take a lot to make you give up an investigation.”

“More than you’d think.”

“I guess I really am a coward. If I weren’t I’d fire Leslie because of my faith in you. But—”

“But the hearing is in less than three weeks and a retired Supreme Court justice couldn’t do the necessary homework in that time to bring himself up to where Dorrance is now. You could get a continuance, but not in Iroquois Heights, and not in an election year, and not when the father of the man you killed is Doyle Thayer Senior. You don’t owe anyone any explanations, Mrs. Thayer. Least of all me.”

She picked up her purse, opened it, and laid a bank money order on the desk. It was made out to A. Walker Investigations in the amount of three thousand dollars. I’d been wrong about the purse being only a prop.

The ante was going up.

“Naturally,” she said, “the court has frozen our joint assets, Doyle Junior’s and mine. But as you can see, I have my own sources.”

I didn’t pick up the money order. I took the cap off the bottle and freshened our glasses. Said nothing.

She said, “For months I’d been selling off the jewelry Doyle gave me and putting the money in an account he didn’t know about. I had paste copies made so he wouldn’t miss the pieces. There’s much more where that came from.”

“Does Dorrance know that part?”

“He’s my lawyer, not my confessor.”

“Tell him.”

“Why? It’s not his business.”

“Your business is everybody’s business when you’re on the hook for murder. In this case he’ll need to know it for when the prosecution throws it at you as motive.”