The Midnight Man (17 page)

I lost my victim a few cuffs later. His eyes rolled over white and he got too heavy to hold. Still hanging on to the shirt, I dragged him over to the super’s door and dumped him into a heap to free a hand for knocking. When it opened:

“Bucket of water, please, Mr. Rosecranz.”

His creaky old eyes lowered to the mass of humanity almost at his feet. He nodded and moved away, allowing me a view of two unmatched overstuffed chairs with floral-print slipcovers, a swaybacked sofa, and a console TV on a square of brown rug on a gray concrete floor. He hadn’t changed a thing in the seven years I’d been a tenant. Water roared against metal beyond sight of the doorway. A minute later he reappeared lugging a galvanized pail three-quarters full.

“Thank you.”

“For what? I’m not even here.”

The door shut, I swung the bucket back in both hands and dashed its contents over the unconscious black. It made a noise like wet laundry slapping a board fence. He coughed and spluttered and sat up, scooping water from his eyes. His features were starting to discolor and swell.

“White motherfucking son of a bitch!” he gasped.

“Your record’s stuck, parrot. Get a new writer.” I was breathing hard from the exercise. “How many you got stashed in the van?”

He thought about that. He had a brutal face, the lower half pushed out like a baboon’s muzzle. I remembered it vaguely from the locker room in the defunct gymnasium on McDougall. “Three,” he said finally. “All armed. I was you, I’d duck out the back way before they come looking to see what happened.”

“You would if you were me, but you’re not so I won’t. You took too long answering. That means you’re alone. See how it works? Now, where’s Alonzo Smith?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

I swept the empty bucket backhand against the side of his head. The impact made a satisfying gong and left a big dent in the vessel.

“Again. Where is he?”

He was still reeling from the blow, but he managed to make an obscene gesture. I put a matching dent in the other side of the pail and set it down. The lobby was beginning to sound like the bell tower at Notre Dame.

“You owe Mr. Rosecranz a new bucket. Where’s Smith?”

He spat at me, missing by six feet. This was sizing up to be a large job. I changed my tack.

“What’s your name?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Imagine that,” I said. “Señor Wences is alive and well and smarting off in the foyer of my building.” I aired the Luger. “Who killed Deak Ridder and how come?”

He leered, his upper lip a smear of red mud from his smashed nose. “You won’t shoot.”

I moved the barrel a little and shot the heel off his left hobnail boot. The explosion filled the room and shattered a tile. He grabbed his foot as if he’d been hit.

“Son of a
bitch!”
It was a shriek.

“Watch your language in my building, Ridder. Who punched his ticket? Next one goes in the foot.” I pointed the gun at it.

“Man, save that jive for some dumb J.D. Deak ain’t dead no more’n me or you.” He picked up the broken heel.

“You’re left-handed, correct?”

“What the hell’s that got to do with nothing?”

“From the way you were strapped into that harness I’d say you’re left-handed. That means you favor the left foot. So I’ll shoot the other one first. I’m not unreasonable.” I shifted my aim accordingly.

He stared at me. “If Deak’s dead, you done it.”

I sighed. You can’t argue with a fanatic. “Okay, we’ll park that for now. Who told you I was on my way to talk to Ridder? The tinsmith on his shift at Rouge?”

Again he said nothing.

“I’ll take that for a yes,” I said. “The cops will want to question him too. Not that he’s a militant, but groups like yours stand or fall on the sympathy of brothers. So you thought I might get something out of Deak and tried to take me out at his apartment. Who did the job on his kid sister?”

“I figure you know that better than me,” he snarled.

“Grow wise and prosper. If I’d wanted to get back at someone for that beating I took, it wouldn’t be her I’d pick.” I paused, not for lack of another question to ask. I was sorting them out. “Who helped Laura Gaye crack Smith out of court, you and Ridder?”

“Pretty slick, huh?” There was pride in his voice.

“Slick as spit. Why?”

“It was just our little way of telling the motherfucking white system where it can stick its motherfucking judges and lawyers.”

His Oedipus complex was getting on my nerves.

“Not good enough,” I said. “We’ll come back to that. Where’s Smith?”

He clamped his mouth shut. I raised the gun a little higher

“You’re going to shoot me anyway,” he said then. “Why not now?”

“A martyr yet. You know why your movement is going to die out? You don’t trust anyone. No one. That’s one of the two Great Mistakes. The other is trusting everyone.”

He shrugged. I rapped on Rosecranz’s door.

“More noise,” said the super, opening up. “I’m quitting, maybe.”

“Before you do, I want you to make a telephone call.”

Watching the prisoner, I gave Rosecranz the number and Alderdyce’s extension and told him what to say. It might not have been in my client’s best interest, but it was fourth and four and time for the first string.

I
RIS WAS MAD AS HELL
when I finally got around to calling. Nearly six hours had elapsed since she’d telephoned police headquarters as I’d requested, and I was two sheets to the wind to boot. She held on just long enough to determine that I was healthy and then hung up in the middle of my apology.

I put the receiver back on its hook and threaded my way between tables to the back booth, where Alderdyce sat nursing a beer. The saloon, operated by an old county horse patrolman, was located a few blocks over from headquarters and served as a watering-hole for cops between shifts. A blowup of the manager’s class at the Academy—rows of visored adolescent faces in sepia ovals—occupied the place of honor behind the bar, surrounded by prints of great steeds. Police patches from all over the country plastered one whole wall. At a nearby table, a boisterous party of six was comparing hair-raising episodes from the annals of the department, punctuated by whoops and obscenities. “I Shot the Sheriff” blared from the juke. Police humor

My Scotch had gone flat. I signaled for a fresh slug and touched off a weed. I didn’t catch fire, which meant I hadn’t exceeded my drinking limit. John saw things differently.

“What’s that, your fourth?”

“I’m anesthetizing myself. Is that the beer you started with?”

“I’m on duty.” He was sitting with his forearms resting on the table and his head sunk between his shoulders, glaring into the amber liquid in his glass. Bar lighting brought out the blue in his roughed-out features.

“So you went and bartered back your license,” he said. “How long you figure to keep all the balls in the air?”

“I sometimes wonder.” I swapped glasses with an overripe barmatron who had black eyebrows to go with her platinum hair, paid, and put down half of the replacement. The ache in my ribs had spread to my back. I’d stood two hours in an interrogation cell watching the sniper I caught exercise his right to remain silent. Even the man’s name remained a mystery. His prints drew a shrug from the computer and the cops were waiting for an answer on their Telex to Washington.

I said, “I think I fell asleep on my feet for a space there. What came of sending those uniforms to the tinsmith’s place?”

“Zilch. Landlady said he packed up and got missing this afternoon right after he got home from work.”

“Advice from our friend in the lockup, no doubt.”

“He’ll turn up. There’s an APB out on him all over the state.”

“He might know our sniper’s name,” I said. “I doubt he’s one of them. Some of them are pretty clumsy, but he’s a neon sign.”

The conversation faltered. We soaked up some atmosphere.

“Hornet told me what you said about me in the office.” John’s words were brittle. “You and I used to be friendly.”

“It was a pretty good relationship.”

He shook his head. It was the first time he’d moved except to lift his glass in almost an hour. “When birds start hanging out with bats someone’s going to get bit.”

I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but I was drunk. “You’re too close to this investigation, John. You ought to ask off it.”

“My wife said the same thing night before last. I’ll give you the answer I gave her. No.”

A burly cop at the big table was imitating a machine gun, complete with sound effects. His companions didn’t seem to mind being sprayed with saliva.

“It’s a no-win situation,” I said, watching the pantomime. “If you don’t break it, the commissioner hangs you out to dry. If you do, the blacks on the east side brand you traitor. Either way you stink.”

“There’s no going back to the deck in this business. You play what they deal.”

“The hell with that. You’re doing this because you want to. Check that. It’s because you think you have to. You’ve got Alonzo Smith’s name taped on your bathroom mirror and it won’t come down till they tag his toe.”

He turned hot eyes on me. “What makes you so different?”

“I’m not out for blood. That wouldn’t fit my client’s conception of justice. Smith made him a prisoner of his body, he wants to make Smith a prisoner, period. Or she does. Sometimes I have trouble peeling them apart. Remember the opening scene in
The Godfather
? A guy comes to Don Vito asking him to kill the two punks who raped and beat up his daughter. The Don says that wouldn’t be justice, because the girl was still alive. But he agrees to make them suffer as she did.”

“That’s vengeance, not justice. Eye for an eye. We’re not even talking about the same thing.”

“Sometimes it’s hard to figure out where one leaves off and the other starts up. Isn’t it, John?” I watched him over the lip of my glass.

He looked at me. “I’m a police officer, not a samurai warrior.”

“Next you’re going to tell me a healthy percentage of the contract killings done in this country aren’t done by police officers.”

There was silence at the big table. I could feel six pairs of cops’ eyes on me. It seemed a long time before the various conversations resumed.

“Smart, Walker,” John said. “What else do you do for fun, flash the peace sign at John Birch Society meetings?”

“I have a death wish. That’s why I’m in the business I’m in.”

“It isn’t so much that they killed two cops.” He revolved his glass slowly between his palms. “It’s the way they did it, with that specific end in mind. I can understand blowing down an officer while making a getaway from another crime. I’d want their heads, but I can understand it. This execution stuff gives me chills. The only way to stop that kind of thing is to stop it cold.” He finished his beer in a swallow.

“The hell with that too. If you won’t face up to the fact that it’s revenge you’re after, if you keep backing your play by claiming the greater good, you’re going to start losing pieces fast.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Glad to hear it. I’d hate to think I’ve been sitting here wasting my time and money. Anyway, did you ever know me to talk this way when I wasn’t drunk? Stop trying to change the subject.”

The party was beginning to break up. The cop with the machine gun impression scraped back his chair and took a heading on the men’s room. He didn’t jostle any more than six or seven imbibers on the way. Two of his friends paid for their drinks and left.

“Then there’s the race thing,” I said. “You don’t even have the release of calling Smith a nigger, because you’re black too. It was like that in Nam. The brass kept telling us to waste gooks, but they forgot it was gooks we were over there fighting for.”

“Nam, Nam, Nam.” It sounded like a mantra. “I’m sick of hearing about it every time we talk. You’re back now, so forget it.”

“I’d like to. I’m sicker of talking about it, but I find myself doing it more and more the longer I’m away. I hope it’s not nostalgia.”

He picked up his empty glass, set it down, and picked it up again, arranging the wet rings on the table into the Olympic symbol. “There could be some truth in what you said before. But if you don’t want to stop me from killing Smith, why is it I haven’t made a move in this case without tripping over you?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to stop you. My client wants me to, and I want what my clients want. That doesn’t mean I don’t agree with you.”

“I must be drunk too,” he said. “I haven’t understood one word of this conversation.”

“Me neither. How about a refill?”

When I got in that evening I gave the Sturtevants’ number a whirl and reached a busy signal. Nadine was on duty. I wondered how many lawyers an invalid cop’s wife has to keep her from home. Then I decided I was being unfair. Too much Scotch on an empty stomach brings out the detective in me. Resisting the urge to flop, I lowered me and my injured rib cage carefully onto the bed without undoing even my tie, after which I don’t remember much of anything except the dream.

I was seated alone in a dimly lit room. Someone knocked at the door, but when I tried to get up to answer it I could move only my left arm and leg, and those feebly, as if they had each gained a hundred pounds overnight. I was in a wheelchair.

Cadaverous Nadine appeared from another room and opened the door to admit Van Sturtevant, upright in full uniform and looking as he had the day we’d met on the Edsel Ford Freeway. He came forward to greet me and my eyes went past him to a figure standing in the shadows just beyond the threshold. The figure showed no weapons, made no attempt to enter, and yet the sight of it filled me with hollow dread. I couldn’t even summon strength to lift my good hand to clasp Sturtevant’s. I felt the dread’s icy breath on my face. Then Nadine closed the door, separating me from the faceless apparition, and the feeling evaporated.

Not for long. She turned up the lights and I saw that we were in the bedroom of Deak Ridder’s apartment. His corpse lay trussed like a rodeo calf on the bed, sticking its purple tongue out at me. I looked away quickly—right into the shadowy face of the Figure, now looking at me from outside the window. It held Tallulah Ridder’s body in its arms, curled in the fetal position in which I’d found her, her head twisted nearly all the way around so that her sightless eyes fell on me. I started screaming for help, in that strangled, tongueless voice that tells you even in the midst of a dream that it can be heard in waking life. But no one in the room could hear me for the organ music that swelled and swelled until I couldn’t even hear myself. I screamed not because of the corpse, but because the shadows had lifted and I recognized the face of my Figure, grinning at me like a demented gargoyle, and it wasn’t the face I’d expected, not at all ...