The Midnight Man (12 page)

“Colorful.”

He grinned self-consciously. “I got it from
Police Story
.”

I waited.

“I hear the FBI is offering to help the local pigs look for Alonzo Smith,” he said.

“I couldn’t say. I haven’t seen a paper since yesterday.”

“Take my word for it, then. So why don’t you just park yourself somewhere till the traffic passes?”

“Somewhere like where?”

“The Upper Peninsula, maybe. I hear it’s peaceful out on Mackinac Island. They don’t allow cars there. A man can get run over in this town just standing on the corner.”

“Move on to the threat,” I said wearily. “I get paid by the day.” The gun was very big and the room was very small. One shot would kick me backward on the swivel’s casters and through the window. When it hit the papers— not very hard, I was strictly third section—the news would sadden very few and brighten the day for a few more, not many. In two days it would be shelf liner. I didn’t want anyone standing a can of beets on my face, but that didn’t mean I’d sit still for much more Warner Brothers dialogue.

“I’m a friend of a friend,” he explained. “This friend don’t care for private noses sniffing around his sandbox. He’s a friend, but he can get to be an enemy. People he’s an enemy of have a habit of not sticking around long enough to take off their hats. Or am I being too circumspect?”

“Your vocabulary’s patchy.
Circumspect
stands out in that kind of speech like French cologne at a cockfight.” I pulled a curtain down between my face and my brain. “This friend—his initials wouldn’t by any chance be Deak Ridder, by any chance?”

Something came into his gray eyes, but he poked it out of sight before I could latch on to it. The gun was steady in a hand so thin the bones showed through the dark flesh. “You ain’t scared enough,” he said calmly. “Maybe I should ice you right here and save a friend some trouble.”

“Maybe you could.” It sounded like someone else using my voice. “If you were the Kaiser and that was Big Bertha in your paw.”

“Big who? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That’s supposed to mean there’s a Colt magnum in a holster screwed to the left side of the kneehole in this desk, pointing at your belly. Don’t look for it; it’s behind the modesty panel. I admit your belly’s not much of a target, but we both know at this range a bullet from a magnum doesn’t have to come very close.”

The dangerous look returned, chased by the toothy smile. On him it looked like the grille of a ’57 Buick. “You’re bluffing.” He sang the words.

I grinned into the glare of his pearly whites. “Move your chair.”

That didn’t get much reaction. We’d been kicking around so much clever parlance he was probably trying to translate the directive into English. I clarified.

“Go ahead, try to move it. Bet you can’t.”

A second slid past, and then he shifted his weight to the balls of his feet and pushed back with his rump, eyes and gun still on me. The chair didn’t budge. His brow knitted. The chair was vinyl and chromium and not that heavy.

“Bolted down,” I said. “I prefer my targets stationary.”

This time the smile lacked conviction. “I still think you’re running one past me.”

The brittle crunch of a hammer drawing back took up all the available space in the office. “Fade, Raskolnikov.”

He faded. Backing out, automatic in hand, he didn’t even brush the door casing. Oh, he was a pro.

I waited until the outer office door closed, and then I took my hands out of my lap and put the damaged stapler and pieces of crushed walnut on top of the desk. My hands weren’t shaking any worse than a drunk’s on the fourth day of a seven-day cure.

You see a lot of salesmen in the private-eye business whether you want to or not, and they all drink too much coffee. That’s why I’d fixed the customer chair so that they couldn’t move in too close. That caffeine breath is too much for me.

T
HE TELEPHONE SHRILLED
. I’d heard louder noises, but not just after playing chicken with a hired killer. When I came down from the ceiling Barry Stackpole was on the line.

“Fifths, remember” he said.

“Yeah, yeah. Just a second.” I laid down the receiver, fired a match and grasped that wrist in my other hand to bring the burning end to the cigarette in my mouth. When I let go, the flame shook itself out. I retrieved the instrument.

“Okay, what you got?”

“Deacon Aloysius Ridder,” intoned the reporter. “Pipe those initials, will you? Booked once for armed robbery and twice for assault with intent to kill. None of them took. The witnesses experienced a sudden change of heart. Suspected former Black Panther, well-known pimp, and all-around prick with a chip on his racially downtrodden shoulder the size of a city councilman’s ego. Believed still to have relations with black revolutionaries. Shrinks have him down as paranoiac, possibly homicidal. Your common everyday garden-variety maniac.”

I whistled. “Any address?”

“Last known, an apartment on Mt. Elliott, across from the cemetery. Building burned to the ground a couple of months ago. Guess what three local notables, two deceased, are suspected of torching the place?”

“Smith, Turkel, Gross.” I sounded like Alderdyce had at the hospital.

There was a brief silence before he spoke again. “It’s no fun playing guess with a detective. Anyway, this wouldn’t be the first time disgruntled minority members matched a slum tenement to get back at the landlord. Say, you’re not after Smith, are you?”

“I promised you Scotch, not a story. Keep unwinding.”

“The hell with you,” he said cheerfully. “I called a friend in personnel at the Rouge plant, never mind her name, and asked her to run Ridder through the computer and find out if he’s still employed there.” He paused again, milking the moment.

“Spill it, Hitchcock.”

“Day shift, eight-thirty to five. Final assembly.” He sounded smug. Reporters always do when the routine clicks, which it doesn’t that often.

“Security’s tight down there. Any idea how I can get in short of storming the front gate?”

“I’ve got a police pass I could let you have for an exclusive.”

I filled that one with water and tested it for leaks. “Keep my name out of it,” I said finally. “I’ll have a hard enough time getting the cops to eat this one without grabbing a curtain call to boot.”

“I’ll just make myself the hero.”

“You’ve had plenty of practice. As one pro to another, how’d you get all this?”

“That’s privileged,” he purred. “First Amendment and all that. But if a certain policewoman in records asks you to be best man at our wedding, you don’t know me.”

I laughed. “How many betrothals does that make, Barry?”

“I’ll leave numbers to the boys in Circulation. Is there a dead alligator in your office?”

“Let me check. Nope. Why?”

“You sound as if you just finished wrestling one.”

“Wrong. But I did just chase out a gorilla with a walnut. What do you know about a black trigger—tall, skinny, gray eyes, Southern accent?”

“That description covers about a hundred in this town. Gun?”

“Forty-five automatic.’’

“That narrows it down to seventy,” he said. “Now tell me about the walnut.”

“That’s privileged. Much obliged, newshawk.” I hung up. A little mystery is healthy in every relationship.

The Sturtevants’ telephone was still tied up. Well, I had nothing else to do before eight-thirty tomorrow morning, when Ridder’s shift came on. I pulled my sore muscles down three flights to the street, flagged a cab, and gave the driver the address off Livernois.

This time I had a sane driver. I settled back in the seat and skimmed the copy of the
News
I’d bought from the rack near my building. There was nothing in it about the dead girl on McDougall, but there was an early, unsubstantiated report of a near-riot in that neighborhood. The cops wouldn’t be able to sit on it much longer.

Police in Ecorse had arrested a black man that morning as he was launching a rowboat onto the Detroit River. He looked a little like Alonzo Smith and they were convinced he was making a getaway for Canada. They released him two hours later when a local physician identified him as his retarded son, and explained that this was his third runaway fishing trip on the polluted water-way. Three men had turned themselves in at Detroit Police Headquarters claiming to be Smith, but they were shown the door on account of two were old enough to be his father and the third wasn’t even black. Some poor schnook from Alderdyce’s detail was in Toledo checking out that purse-snatching report on the off chance that the woman who made it wasn’t daffy. And General Motors didn’t build Chevies.

I had trouble concentrating on the words. I kept going over the confrontation in my office and coming up with more questions I didn’t need. If the gunsel had come from Ridder, he must not have heard about his sister’s death or he would have sent him in shooting. On the other hand, the look I got from the errand boy when I mentioned Ridder’s name made me wonder if he was the one behind the visit after all. On the
other
hand, if Ridder hadn’t sent him, who had? That was three hands, too much for one man. I made my mind blank and concentrated on the pavement slipping under the cab, trying to hypnotize myself into believing I was Sherlock Holmes. I couldn’t even manage Dr. Watson. It had been a long day, and it wasn’t over yet.

I was too late for the baseball game. There was a golden light over the Sturtevants’ subdivision that made each house look a little different, something the developers hadn’t counted on or they’d have had the sun rezoned. This time the nurse answered the bell. She was almost my height, and her dyed-black hair skinned back into a knot at the nape of her neck gave her already severe face the look of a diamond in the rough, hard and homely. She didn’t like my face either, or maybe it was just the bruises.

“My name’s Walker” I said. “We met yesterday, sort of. Is Mrs. Sturtevant in?”

“No, she’s not. You’ll have to come back later.” She started to put the door in my face. I braced a hand against the panel.

“Can I wait for her? We have kind of an appointment.”

“I don’t know. Mr. Sturtevant shouldn’t be disturbed. It’s time for his speech therapy.”

“In his place I’d welcome a little disturbance now and then.” I showed her the county buzzer. She made a show of reading the embossed legend as if it meant something. At length she backed up a step and opened the door just enough for me to squeeze my shoulders through one at a time. If the Japanese had been that obstinate we’d still be busy in the Pacific.

On the way into the living room I saw that the telephone was off the hook. The recorded message that instructs you over and over to hang up and the peevish alarm that follows it had recognized their match in the nurse and given up a long time ago.

My client was in his wheelchair facing the window. The sunlight took on a copper tinge coming through the glass and lent his features the look of rosy health. It was the veneer of veneers. He was as dead as a man could be and still be breathing. His eyes were in the shadow of his brows and I couldn’t tell if he was watching me or the television that was going in the window across the way or the pictures in his brain. He had a bathrobe on over striped pajamas and his bare feet were thrust into backless slippers. A paperback copy of one of Wambaugh’s police novels lay open face down on the arm of the chair I had occupied on my last visit. She’d been reading to him when the doorbell interrupted.

Somewhere in the house the fan was still whirring, still with no effect upon the shut-up room.

The nurse drew the drapes, and the illusion of health was gone. He looked grayer than he had the day before. Maybe everything did, and it was just me. I got out a cigarette and tapped it against the back of my other hand.

“Could I have a few minutes alone with him? It’s a private matter.”

She pressed her lips tight. They were painted scarlet, which was a mistake. They made a raw slash against her pale skin. “Five minutes,” she said. “He must be under my close observation. And no smoking.”

I made a thing of putting the weed away. When she had withdrawn into another room, I held up the pack for Sturtevant to see. His eyes were visible with the drapes shut. The lids moved down and up twice. Yes. I lit two and placed one between his lips.

I didn’t sit for fear my joints would seize up. Standing with my hands in my pockets, I filled him in, beginning with my ill-timed visit to the commune on McDougall and continuing through my recovery in Bum Bassett’s trailer, the corpse in my trunk, and that bit of pulp that had taken place in the office that evening. “Right now Ridder’s the only handle I’ve got,” I wound up. “I don’t usually tip my leads to clients, but I’ve got a funny feeling about this one. I’d like someone to know where I’ll be tomorrow morning. Which is why I’m waiting for your wife.”

I paused. I don’t know why, maybe from force of habit. I like to talk, and I have to kick myself every few minutes to give others a chance to comment. Sturtevant didn’t, of course. He just sat there without moving while the ash grew on his cigarette. I continued.

“What I can’t shake is the feeling that there’s purpose in all this. Laura Gaye and her friends didn’t bust Smith out just because they wanted to stick it to the white establishment. The raid was too well organized for aimless fanatics, the escape too well planned. No one even saw them leave. Then there’s the girl’s murder. If that was the work of militants, it was to shut her up. She was a doper and inclined to let things slip. For the sake of my faith in human nature I’d like to believe that Ridder had nothing to do with his sister’s death. And I’m still trying to fit the joker in my office into the deck. Everything swings on the conviction that the group needed Alonzo Smith for something specific. My theory is that whoever took the trouble to tidy up Laura Gaye’s cell after I left the place last night knows what it is.”

Sturtevant’s exhausted eyes were looking right through me. His left hand came up slowly from the padded arm of his chair to the cigarette, took it from his mouth, tapped ash onto the carpet, returned it, and lowered back to the arm. I started at the movement. It was as if the Lincoln Memorial had scratched its nose. I’d forgotten he wasn’t totally paralyzed.