The Glass Highway (16 page)

I shrugged.

He squinted at me a moment longer, then let go. “I’m going to go on looking for Paula Royce,” he said. “The other half of my job is to see no one else does.”

His chest swelled, and then he spun on his left foot and lashed out horizontally with his right, snapping the leg perpendicular to his body. The ball of his foot struck the edge of the connecting door, splintering the heavy crossbar and shattering the pebbled glass. Furnaces explode with less noise.

“That’s one. There are a hundred and five more where that came from.” He backed out, footsteps crunching on the broken glass. He moved like someone who was used to leaving rooms that way.

I waited until the door to the outer office closed against the pressure of the pneumatic closer, then got out the gun and the bottle and put them both on top of the desk. My hands had been steadier.

I
FORCED MYSELF
to drink slowly. Alcohol blessed alcohol. Makes lions out of mice, and when applied properly allows a frightened ex-snooper to use the telephone, provided he speaks more slowly than he drinks and holds the receiver in both fists. The office was growing dark. I switched on the desk lamp, which just made the shadows more ominous. I started to dial Barry Stackpole’s private number at the
News,
forgot it, looked it up in the special book I kept locked in the file cabinet, and tried again. No one knew local talent better than Barry, whose column on organized crime was syndicated throughout the country.

“Stackpole.”

“Like hell,” I said after a pause. “I know Barry’s voice since Nam and this ain’t it.”

“This is Gable Reinhardt, his research assistant.” The voice was a good ten years younger than Barry’s, almost boyish. I pictured Jimmy Olsen, bow-tie and freckles.

“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“Would you, if your name was Gable Reinhardt?”

“Where’s Barry, who never to my knowledge had a research assistant until this moment?”

“He asked for a raise. He got me. He’s under cover right now, working on a story. Who is this?”

I told him who it was.

“No shit?” He spoke more quickly. “I read where you were in jail.”

“They let me out when they clean my cage. Where can I reach Barry?”

“You can’t. Under cover is under cover. I can’t even get a message to him. What’s the story?”

“Who am I talking to, you or your sheet?”

“Me, when you put it that way, damn it.”

I sighed. Well, I was a free agent now. “What do you know about heavyweights in these parts?”

“Not much. Try Sports.”

“I’m not talking about fighters. I mean mechanics. Lifetakers. Soldiers. Button men. Choose your own cute name for people who kill other people for pay.”

“Okay, I know what you mean. I just wanted to hear you say it. Pros or part-timers?”

“Pros.”

“I’ve got some stuff. I don’t know that it’s current.”

“This one’s been out of circulation a while.”

“What you paying?”

I lit a weed. “You Lou Grant types do like your meat lean. I’ll try to swing something your way when this breaks.”

“And I’d have to run it under Stackpole’s byline. Forget it. He doesn’t need my help. How about fifty?”

“Dollars?”

“No, pencils.” His tone would etch steel. “I’ve got a week to cough up child support or I start the new year with numbers on my shirt.”

“Twenty. If the information’s good.”

“I wouldn’t get out of this chair for twenty, and it’s got a busted spring. Fifty, no guarantees. This isn’t negotiable. I don’t look good in gray.”

“Prisoners aren’t wearing gray this year, take it from me.” I leaked smoke. “Fifty it is. But I’ll tell Barry.”

“He’ll be sore I didn’t cut him in. But, hell, I’m going into TV anyway. What about this snuffer?”

“I can’t describe him. I just met him and already I forgot what he looks like. He said his name was Horn.”

Silence crackled. Under the dead air on his end I heard the clatter of a distant typewriter. Probably a secretary in the legal department writing a letter. It used to be all typewriters down there, but the whole world’s gone drunk on computers.

I said, “Reinhardt?”

“Sorry. Not Fletcher Horn?”

“We didn’t get to first names.”

Another pause, shorter. “Let’s meet.”

“Suits me. Barry’s office?”

“Not with these walls. You know the Sextant Bar on West Lafayette? It’s between the
News
and the
Free Press.”

“Well enough to count my change after I’ve paid for a drink.”

“Seven o’clock?”

I checked my watch. “Make it seven-thirty. I haven’t eaten since stir.”

“Bring cash.”

I hung up carefully. I was starting to feel the Scotch, which is what two days’ enforced abstention will do for you. For a moment I considered pouring what was in my glass back into the bottle, then decided I couldn’t do that without spilling any and dumped it into a larger container instead. I felt it strike bottom. If my feet touched the broken glass on my way out of the office I didn’t feel it. I locked the outer door.

The Sextant was a narrow walk-in jammed between office buildings equidistant from the last two big-city dailies in the United States who were still trying to cut each other’s throat, with a canvas canopy erected out front in honor of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and a row of booths inside separated by a footworn aisle from the stools at the bar. A barmaid wearing a platinum cap of hair and too much make-up was smoking a little cigar in the first booth, across from a middle-aged man whose ink-smeared coveralls identified him as a press operator for one of the papers. The only other customer was a skinny kid with a receding hairline and wire-rimmed glasses nursing a drink in the back booth. I went over there and slid into the seat opposite.

“You look like a Gable Reinhardt,” I said.

He eyed me from under heavy lids behind his glasses. He was wearing sparse muttonchop whiskers and a threadbare combat jacket. He didn’t look old enough to have served in the army, but then he didn’t look old enough to have been married and divorced either, and fathered a child in the bargain. “How was supper?”

“Burned and late. It’s nice to be free.” I ordered Scotch and water from the barmaid, who had ditched the stogie and her companion. Reinhardt stood pat. When she had gone, he said: “There’s no resemblance.”

“To what?”

“Not what, who. Galahad. Sir Walter. Don Quixote; take your pick. You don’t look like any of them, and nobody else would go into the tank for a chick.”

“That what they’re saying around the
News?”

“They’re not near as polite. Why did you, really?”

“Off the record?”

He shrugged. “I don’t work where I drink.”

“Proust and Fish could have had what they wanted if they’d bothered to treat me like a citizen instead of an accomplice. But they didn’t, so they didn’t.”

He was still waiting for more when the barmaid brought our drinks. I laid some money on the table and watched her walk away with it, then: “Horn.”

“Fifty bucks.”

I showed him a bill. Before he could get his hands on it, I smoothed it out on the table and stood my glass atop U.S. Grant’s stern countenance. Sat back, set some tobacco on fire, waited. Every move pure poetry. I was so sick of the whole dumb-show I could kiss Proust for delivering me from it.

“My information says he’s in Jackson,” said the research assistant.

“He’s out.”

He nodded, just to be doing something. “His name probably isn’t Horn. He’s Canadian, or was. State Department tried deporting him a few years back over some lies he told on his application for citizenship, but they weren’t such big lies and no one’s been able to pin him to a homicide yet.”

“How many homicides haven’t they been able to pin him to?”

“Eight anyway. That’s just since the cops started counting. One even got to a grand jury.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Witness lost his memory.”

“What witness?”

I searched his narrow features. “He’s that good?”

“He’s two police guards in a downtown hotel good. They went to roust their witness out of the bathroom for his day in court and found him ducking for apples in the toilet bowl. Drowned.”

“Not very original.”

“There aren’t any original ways left. From the variety of the killings, your man is proficient in firearms, demolitions, and cutting edges, but he appears to prefer his bare hands. He’s as strong as a bull and he has the equivalent of a black belt in karate.”

“No kidding. How’d he end up on ice?”

“Dime store stuff.” The reporter touched his lips to his glass for the first time since I’d sat down. “They lifted his thumbprint off the wheel of a Pontiac he boosted when the car he was using to crash a hit at Metro Airport laid down on him. It wasn’t solid enough to tack him to the kill, but the D.A. thought he might save a life or two by sticking him in the shade for a little.”

“It doesn’t hang straight,” I said. “A guy that can nudge a guy under police guard doesn’t leave a good print on a stolen crate.”

“Not unless he wanted a vacation. The stiff in the hotel wasn’t virgin. He had friends. Even the Al Kaline of hit men can wear lead from a punk with a Saturday Night Buster and the price of a lid in his pocket. It’s been done.”

“I just talked to you an hour ago. How’d you scrape all this together so fast?”

He sat back and sipped his something-and-tonic. I lifted my glass and pushed the fifty across the table. It went into one of the flap pockets of his jacket.

“The file was pulled already,” he said. “Barry wanted all he could get on freelancers that have worked this area before he went underground.”

I paused with the glass halfway to my lips. “What’s he working?”

“I don’t know that fifty goes that far.”

I set down the glass and reached over and took hold of his collar in one hand and twisted it. “I’m a P.I. with a busted license who just capped two days behind bars in my favorite county this side of Devil’s Island with a threat to have my lights put out by someone who knows a hundred and six ways to do it without a weapon. I don’t much care how far fifty goes, or how many times I have to hit this table with your head until you figure it out. Are you getting all this?”

The room was very quiet, but not like the second floor of the brick building in downtown Iroquois Heights was quiet. I could feel the barmaid and the press operator and the thin party behind the bar watching us. Gable Reinhardt’s glass lay on its side on the table, its contents running down into his lap. He didn’t appear to be paying it any attention. His face matched the maroon vinyl upholstery of the high seat behind his head. He managed to nod quickly. I let go of his collar.

“Drugs,” he gasped.

“Drugs what?”

He shook his head, still gasping. I righted his glass and signaled the barmaid. She hesitated, then brought over a full one and took away the empty without looking at either of us. The usual bar noise resumed. I watched the research assistant put down half his drink without stopping. Then he used his napkin to mop off his lap. I finished my cigarette and fired up another while he was doing all this.

“Barry’s convinced a new organization is moving in on the drug trade in Detroit,” he said, looking at my left ear. “It started when Johnny Ralph Dorchet and his partners got gunned last December. Ten days later the cops scraped a family of pushers off the walls of a house in Redford Township, and then a trafficker the feds were getting set to bust on a tax beef got himself clubbed and gassed to death in his garage on Watson. Since then a couple of wild cards have turned up that may or may not tie in. Cops bought a conviction in one of them, but Barry thinks he was a stalking horse. He’s out digging for some hard answers.”

“What makes it new talent?” I asked. “These gang things blow up every couple of years.”

“It’s the pattern. Every time a new family moves into the neighborhood they bring in the Prohibition stuff, make a lot of noise. Then when they get a foothold they quiet down. They yank the cowboys, rely more on mechanics like your boy Horn to mop up. Not so many headlines. Each group thinks they invented it, but it happened the same way in New York and Chicago in the twenties when the Italians took over, and again when the blacks cruised in here ten years ago. It’s happening now with the Cubans and Colombians down in Miami.”

He was warming to his subject. He’d forgotten all about my mussing him up. Kid journalists are the ones to latch on to. They’re always busting to tell someone the story they can’t print yet.

I emptied my glass thoughtfully. “Where does Moses True hang his hat in all this? He got dusted the other day, probably by Horn.”

“I hadn’t heard.” He was wiping his glasses with a fresh napkin. His hooded eyes were a little fuzzy. He didn’t seem surprised by the news. “Barry predicted something like that. True was a stopgap to smooth the transition between the old and the new. He was more flexible than Dorchet. He wouldn’t care whose money he was spending. But he would be temporary, and this bunch pays everyone off in the same coin.”

“Who is the new kid on the block?” I twirled a finger inside the rim of my empty glass and made it wobble, keeping my eyes down so he couldn’t see the gleam in them. That could be expensive.

“We’ll know that when Barry comes up for air.” His tone dripped smug. “But have you noticed all the fresh Spanish accents around this town lately?”

“Colombians?”

He smiled.

A loose spring snapped into place in the back of my head. I felt flushed, but not from the Scotch. I got up quickly. Reinhardt started slightly at the sudden movement.

“Thanks.” I paid for his drink. “Sorry about the rough trade.”

“That’s okay. For another fifty you can break my arm if you want.”

“Another time, maybe.”

I met the barmaid in the aisle. She smiled, cracking the powder on her cheeks. “I’d of paid money to see that,” she said in a low voice. “That little punk is always jacking somebody up in here for somebody else’s dirt.”

“Glad to be of service.”

“I’m usually pretty good on faces. I don’t remember yours.”