Stress (17 page)

“I don’t expect to be out of it for long, Matt. Thanks for the squeal.”

“I broke chain of command there, but what the hell, I’m too young to make commissioner this year. I was reading this boy’s name off his driver’s license over my walkity-talk when it clicked where I heard it. Hell, it was on this morning’s turnout sheet. Gene Grundy told me you was on the shoot team, so I asked for you. What the hell, I never seen none of them 1300 guys’ wangs in the shower.”

“Nor anywhere else, I hope.” Battle had already lost interest in his former academy classmate. He was watching the two men in the uniform of the Wayne County Morgue using fishermen’s gestures to argue the best way of getting the seventh man on the scene into the body bag they’d brought.

It would take some doing. Obviously far more limber when placed in the culvert, the corpse had gone into rigor and congealed in a fetal position with its chin tucked into its chest and its arms and legs crossed. Hoarfrost had glazed flesh and fabric a consistent white, making it difficult to determine just where the man left off and his, clothing began. Battle could not even be sure the man was black until he was standing over him. Ice crystals glittered in his afro, which the officer was convinced would shatter like a glass lampshade if kicked. He had never before seen a human body frozen solid. The effect was like sculpture, and not at all connected with the mortal condition.

He had to sit on his heels and twist his head to see the crystallized features. At first he thought the identification was a mistake, that this was someone many years older than Russell Littlejohn, perhaps his father; but it was only the illusion of age created by stalactites of white ice hanging from his eyebrows and the suggestion of a moustache. He recognized the face well enough. And he felt his own face growing haggard.

“OD’s my guess. He’s got tracks between his fingers. They crawl in any old place once they start feeling all warm and fuzzy.”

This was a new voice. Battle rose to face the only other man there wearing plainclothes, a tall lean pale Nordic in along black Chesterfield and black fur felt snapbrim hat who looked like a Swedish ski instructor. The only thing about him with any color was the end of his narrow nose, which was as red as a Christmas tree bulb. He dabbed at it from time to time with a handkerchief wadded in his gloved palm. In between dabs it dripped freely.

Battle showed his badge and introduced himself. “I’m investigating the shootings at the Ogden mansion New Year’s Eve. Littlejohn was wanted for questioning. The BOL went out when he didn’t show up at work Monday and hadn’t been home.”

“I saw the sheet. I put in a call to Lieutenant Zagreb, but I guess you’ve got more friends on road patrol. Daniel Iniskilling, lieutenant Homicide.” He didn’t offer his hand.

“We’re all in the same boat. Who found him?”

“Couple of kids looking for a place to smoke, though they said they were ice skating. Kellog and Anderson here cruised past and they flagged them down. That was about eight-thirty.”

“I don’t guess we have time of death.”

“The M.E. spent about five minutes. He said to call him when the stiff thaws. That’ll be about this time Thursday. The microwave downtown isn’t quite big enough.”

“Any evidence on the scene of drug use?”

Iniskilling’s face screwed up into what might have been an expression of contempt, but he sneezed into the handkerchief. Wiping up: “You can’t walk two feet in any direction down here without tripping over a syringe. When Forensics gets through sweeping, this shithole will be clean enough to set aside as a national park. Just in time for the 1980 tourist season.”

“If they find a needle with Littlejohn’s prints on it I’ll eat it.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning what it means. Material witnesses don’t just overdose on cue.”

“I guess that would be your long experience talking.” Iniskilling blew his nose energetically.

“I’m not after your job, Lieutenant. This kid has probably been shooting up for years. It’s damn convenient for someone that he’d pick now to lose count. I was getting set to pull him in for questioning.”

“Jesus, Officer, I’m glad as hell you’re not after my job. I spend most of my time worrying I’ll come back from the toilet and find some shit britches in his first pair of long pants with his feet up on my desk.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“I know what you meant. You should try getting ahead of your rent with some old-fashioned overtime instead of sitting home watching
Get Smart.
I’ve pried a hundred of these pukes out of culverts and doorways and stripped cars, all just as dead, and it wasn’t any of their first times. They don’t buy the stuff at Cunningham’s. They never know if what they just scored is one hundred percent pure Asian or D-Con.” He swung his head toward the top of the bank. “Okay, you got to play Sherlock all morning. Run along now and let the grownups get to work.”

Officer Aaron Bookfinger and Sergeant Walter Stilwell were making their way down from the street, grasping fistfuls of weeds here and there to slow the descent. Bookfinger had on a black trench coat and Russian-style fur hat. Stilwell looked like Elmer Fudd in a plaid wool cap with earflaps and a Mackinaw. At the bottom he strode forward to grasp Iniskilling’s outstretched hand.

“Dan, you scandihoovian bastard. I heard you went back home and got your sex changed.”

“That’s Denmark, schmuck. My parents came from Norway. Who’s the Jew, your lawyer?” The lieutenant shook hands with Bookfinger. It was clear all three were old acquaintances.

Matt Kellog touched shoulders with Battle. “Ain’t no talking to that crew, man. They can’t call us niggers no more and they run clean out of conversation.”

Walking past, Bookfinger caught Battle’s eye and nodded quickly. Stilwell, trailing him by half a step, didn’t look in the black officer’s direction. Battle understood with no words having been spoken that there had been a shift in his relationship with the other two investigators.

Stilwell nudged the clenched corpse with the black shiny toe of an unbuckled galosh. “Stiffer’n Gerald fucking Ford. You boys better not drop him on your way up,” he told the morgue attendants. “Ain’t enough Superglue in the metro area to piece the little prick back together.”

“OD?” Bookfinger asked Iniskilling.

“What else? Charlie Chan there thinks he was poisoned and airlifted here by helicopter.”

Stilwell said shit. “We could’ve phoned in on this one. Heater’s piss-poor in the unit we drew. My balls fell off and rolled down the sewer clear back on Beaubien.”

“Well, I thought you might want to take a look.”

“Can’t think why. One dead junkie looks pretty much like all the rest.” Stilwell spun around and started back toward the bank. Bookfinger shook Iniskilling’s hand again and followed. This time neither of them glanced at Battle.

Battle said, “That’s it? That’s your on-site?”

At the base of the incline Stilwell paused and looked back over his shoulder. “We’re Special Investigations, sonny. We leave sticking fingers up dead assholes to the white coats at County. They went to college.”

“Are we going to question Kubicek?”

Bookfinger had begun climbing. Stilwell touched his arm. The pair faced Battle. The icy wind was making their eyes water.

“Ask him what, if he’s bringing a date to the funeral?” Stilwell said.

“I was thinking something more along the lines of where he was and what he was doing between Friday night when Littlejohn left work at the marina and this morning when the body turned up.”

The sergeant’s face, already flushed from the cold, went as red as his hair. He took a step toward Battle. Bookfinger caught his sleeve.

“We’re all cops, Charlie,” said the officer. “We don’t go around accusing each other of homicide without evidence.”

“I’m just saying we should ask him the same questions we’d ask anyone else.”

“Paul Kubicek ain’t everyone else,” Stilwell said. “He was running into empty buildings after armed robbers when you were eating strained collards. He’s what every cop ought to be. You tell me how tearing off a hunk of toilet paper and handing it to the mayor every time he takes a crap down at City Hall set you up to judge a cop like Paul Kubicek.”

Bookfinger placed a hand on Stilwell’s shoulder. “Cut the kid some slack, Wally. He’s just trying to make an impression.”

“I’ll make an impression in his ass with one of my size nines.” But the storm had passed. Stilwell swung around and started up the bank. His partner hung back.

“Just because I’m not coming out swinging doesn’t mean I think any different from Wally,” he told Battle. “The department isn’t America. Nobody’s created equal down at 1300.”

No one in the ditch said anything or moved until the two investigators were almost out of sight. Then Kellog’s partner, a young black with sideburns shaped like scimitars, pursed his lips and sent a fleck of white spittle at the ground where they’d been standing.

“I got to apologize for Merlin,” Kellog said to Battle. “He ain’t much of a conversationalist.”

“I think he’s eloquent as hell.” Battle said his good-byes and left.

C
ARYN
C
ROWNOVER
O
GDEN’S FIRST SIGNIFICANT CON
frontation was with a day nurse on Opal’s floor. It was also her last.

Diagnosed with pneumonia, the six-year-old was placed in a private room for observation in the Hutzel children’s facility at Harper Grace Hospital. Caryn told the nurse, a pale undersize brunette whom she had at first mistaken for a teenage aide, that she wanted a cot set up in the room so she could spend the night with her daughter. The nurse frowned prettily.

“I’m not sure we can do that, Mrs. Ogden. The child needs rest.”

“If rest were that important she’d be better off in a train station. Anyway, I don’t snore and I’m not planning to throw a party. I’d appreciate it if you could dig up one of those egg-crate mattress pads. I have a bad back.”

“The child is in the best possible hands. The personnel and equipment at Hutzel are—”

“After visiting hours, the personnel is one nurse per floor, and the equipment is a monitor to tell her when something goes wrong with a patient’s heart or respiration. I intend to be here when Opal’s condition changes.”

“Mrs. Ogden—”

“I’ll discuss this with Mr. Dobrinski. Please do me the favor of calling him.”

“The administrator is very busy.”

“I hope so. His salary is sixty thousand.”

Casimir Dobrinski was young for his position and, Caryn thought, far too good-looking to spend most of his time locked away in meetings. He was one of those tall blond curly-headed Poles more readily associated with white chargers and golden armor than with coarse jokes about the stupidity of the race. Although not a doctor, he affected tailored white sport coats for their subliminal suggestion, and striped ties in memory of the one semester he had audited at Cambridge following his army discharge. There was a time, earlier in Caryn’s marriage to an ambitious man who lived at the office, when she might have gone after this prize with all the single-tracked determination of a Crownover upbringing; but motherhood had changed all that.

But the young nurse was no one’s mother, and as the hospital administrator approached the floor station twirling the tortoise-shell eyeglasses he never wore, Caryn could feel the vibrations emanating from the young woman at her side. It was a mystery to her how women who spent all day looking at naked men with nothing but professional interest—or men looking at naked women, for that matter—managed to melt into a puddle of hormones at the first sight of a pleasant-looking member of the opposite sex in full dress. She supposed it had something to do with the resemblance of a hospital corridor to a high school hallway.

“Mrs. Ogden, it’s been much too long. I only hope your next—”

She sliced through the greeting. “I know this young lady has explained the situation, so I won’t waste your time. You’ve enough on your mind as it is. I wouldn’t be surprised, given your preoccupation with your responsibilities, if I had to remind you that I’m the director of the Charlotte Gryphon Foundation, which pumped two point four million dollars into the construction of this facility after the city bailed out.”

Dobrinski folded his glasses with a click and socked them into the alligator case in his breast pocket. “Nurse, please see that Mrs. Ogden is comfortable.” To Caryn: “I’m afraid we can’t offer room service. This isn’t the Book-Cadillac.”

“I don’t expect it. If it weren’t for this back of mine I wouldn’t even ask for a bed.”

A rollaway was brought to the room that evening. Caryn, who had seen Crownover Coaches evolve from a patriarchal company owned and run entirely by her father to a sprawling corporation operated by committee, was scarcely surprised to learn that in a hospital complex dedicated to the eradication of human suffering, not one orthopedic mattress pad could be found in time to make her first night more bearable.

Not that it mattered. Her sleep was so light, with all her senses tuned to her daughter’s faintest whimper and slightest restless movement, that she might as well have spent the time sitting up in a chair. Washed in liquid luminescence from the lights in the hall, her hair tied back, a tube in her nose and wires trailing from under her white gown to the bank of equipment beside the bed, Opal looked small and diaphanous, her fair skin barely discernible from the pillowcase and sheets. She seemed—transient; and Caryn did not dare to let go of her damp flexing hand lest she float away.

She was holding on to herself as well, so desperately that it was difficult to refrain from squeezing the blood out of the child’s hand. For she knew that that brief life was all that sustained her from the abyss of an alcoholic middle age. And to her Opal’s illness was so very much her fault that the thought of living with the knowledge constricted her lungs. Oh, she would not lack for concerned voices to assure her that her presence at home would have made no difference, that the girl would have gotten sick whether her mother were by her side or at Sinbad’s ordering her third highball. She would be awash in soothing reassurances, when in fact blame and recriminations would be less cruel.