The Midnight Man (18 page)

The door buzzer ended the nightmare, though I sat up for a moment separating illusion from reality. The face was gone. I couldn’t summon it back. It seemed important that I try. Then I couldn’t remember why it was important, and I ended up thinking that maybe it wasn’t so important after all. The other details were already fading. I got up.

The buzzing droned on as I stumbled through the living room, turning on lights as I went. The wall clock read 12:06. The kids in my neighborhood weren’t above jamming the button with a safety pin and running, but I went back for the .38 just in case. At the door I called for my visitor to identify himself.

There was a long stretch of nothing but buzzing. Then came the words, distorted by the panel.

“My wife in Oklahoma calls me Munnis, but mostly I’m just plain Bum.”

It took him a long time to say. It sounded like him; it didn’t sound like him at all. Gripping the gun tightly, I snatched open the door and stepped back.

The giant cowboy smiled wearily at me from the side of the tiny porch, where he was leaning on the buzzer. He was hatless and there was a sheen of perspiration on his broad red brow. Then he rolled off the button, the buzzing ceased, and I went down beneath three hundred pounds of dead weight.

D
ON
W
ARDLAW
finished cleaning and dressing the wound in Bassett’s thigh, swished his surgical probe around in the bowl of alcohol on the table next to the bed, wiped it off, and laid everything away carefully in the bottom of his scuffed black bag. He was a scrawny rooster with no chin and a mop of curly brown hair that came off when he took a shower. He’d once had a license to practice medicine but he didn’t anymore, and still doesn’t. His name isn’t Wardlaw either, but I owe him too much to blow any whistles.

He picked up an object the size of a pencil eraser from a piece of stained gauze on the table and handed it to me. “A souvenir.”

It was made of dull gray metal with a copper jacket and retained its conical shape. “Twenty-five,” I said. “Kind of small for so much blood.” Some of it had come off on my clothes when I broke Bassett’s fall.

“There could have been a lot more. It entered the fleshy part of his thigh, just missing the main artery. A hair to the left and he wouldn’t have needed me. He’d have read empty before he was halfway here. He might still have, if you hadn’t applied that tourniquet when you did.”

“I owe it all to Ho Chi Minh and the local draft board. Thanks, Don.” I handed him a C-note. “Another session with the cops tonight would have been five too much. Just helping me get Godzilla into bed was worth the century.”

“I ought to soak you more, considering the hour. But you’re good for business.” He folded the bill lengthwise and sidewise and poked it into the watch pocket of his vest. He always took the trouble to put one on, even when summoned in the middle of the night. When it came to clothes, he and Alderdyce were soulmates.

Suddenly he asked, “Are you in pain?”

“I’ve got a cracked rib, maybe two, and three hundred yards of adhesive tape around my middle. I didn’t know it was that obvious.”

“It isn’t. With you I stand a fifty-fifty chance of asking that question and getting a yes. Let’s see it.” He indicated a kitchen chair in the corner.

I stripped off my shirt and sat down. He whistled.

“Nice work. Who did it?”

“You just met him.”

“Where’s the pain?”

I circled the area with a forefinger. He pushed against it lightly with the heels of his hands. “That hurt?”

“A little.”

He moved his hands. “How about that?”

“A lot.” I bit my lip.

He straightened. “You can take off the tape. If it’s cracked I’m the President’s personal physician.”

“What’ve you got, x-ray eyes?”

“You’re not Gary Cooper,” he said. “If that rib were anything worse than bruised they’d have heard you yelling in Toronto when I leaned on it. That’s one ex-doctor’s opinion. Get it x-rayed.”

I stood and climbed back into the shirt, leaving it unbuttoned. “The way I feel it ought to be broken. At least cracked. It’s not fair.”

“Could be you tore a muscle. I wouldn’t try busting any broncos for the next month or so.”

I escorted him to the front door. “Any instructions?”

“Find another line of work.” He smiled thinly.

“I mean about Bassett.”

“Change the dressing daily. Keep the wound clean. If his temperature goes up, call me. And don’t let him out of that bed for at least two days, except to go to the toilet.”

“I never talk about letting or not letting where anyone over two hundred and fifty pounds is concerned. But I heard you.” I started to open and door and paused. “By the way, I saw Iris the other day. She says she took your cure.” Don ran a drug rehabilitation clinic in Hazel Park and was a former user himself.

He nodded grimly. “I hope it takes.”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“If she were anything but a hooker I might be more optimistic. Too many of the people she hangs out with are addicts. It distorts your judgment. You get to thinking that everyone else is turning on and you’re outside looking in. Peer pressure isn’t restricted to teenagers.”

“She’s pretty level-headed,” I said.

“If she were level-headed she wouldn’t have needed me in the first place.” He opened the door himself and went out without saying good-bye. He never said it. We all have our own demons to fight. But Don never asked questions, which was another mark on his side of the board.

His heap started with a clatter in the street out front and plowed away, bringing me around to my demon of the moment. I went out in the dark to find a GMC four-wheel-drive pickup parked at a crazy angle at the end of my driveway. The key was in the ignition and there was a lot of blood dried brown on the seat. Knobs, dials, and speakers studded the dash, few of them standard equipment. The glove compartment contained a road atlas and an Oklahoma registration made out to Munnis Bassett, under a .357 magnum revolver that looked like the one from his trailer. It hadn’t been fired recently and the cylinder was full.

But for mine, none of the windows in the neighborhood was lit. I opened the garage door as quietly as possible and pulled my Cutlass out onto the lawn. Leaving it idling, I got out and climbed up into the driver’s seat of the pickup. My foot kicked something on the floor. I picked up Bum’s .44 magnum, reeking of cordite. All but one chamber had been fired. I stuck the gun under my belt, ground the big engine into life, and drove it into the garage. From inside I tugged down the door and rummaged through some junk on the workbench until I found an aerosol can of blue paint I’d bought to touch up my car. It took only a minute to spray over the garage’s only window. Finally I went back out through the house and put the Cutlass in the driveway. The perfect coverup, provided none of my neighbors had witnessed the game of musical parking spaces.

Bassett was still unconscious when I checked on him. He would be for a while. He was pale under the sunburn but his breathing seemed normal. I unloaded the magnum and laid it atop the dresser. I wondered what the hell I was getting into this time.

The clock in the living room struck two. I peeled off my bloodstained clothes, leaving them in a heap on the floor, and started unwinding tape. There was enough of it to line a football field. I put on my robe and slippers, gathered up the debris, and carried it into the kitchen, where I dumped it into the wastebasket. Cleaners get curious about things like bloodstains. Then I filled a bucket with water and scrubbed the blood from the linoleum at the front door and the boards of the porch. I felt like Macbeth’s maid.

I was hungry as the devil when I finished. There was a period in my life, not so long ago, when the sight of blood would have slaughtered my appetite. But I was growing a shell. The time would come when I’d be able to crack jokes in the presence of death, like some cops, because I’d be dead inside, deader than the stiff. In the cupboard I found a box of cornflakes I’d missed on my last search. I poured some into a bowl and added milk. When that was gone I felt like going out and belting a baseball over the back fence. I settled for a smoke.

The buzzer razzed. I was getting not to like that sound a lot. I slid out of the nook and opened the door to John Alderdyce. He was dressed as he had been hours earlier, in dark slacks and a sport jacket with a tiny check. He hadn’t been home.

“You’re up late,” he observed.

“I’m up early. How about you?”

“
I
didn’t kill half a bottle of Scotch just a few hours ago. Do I get invited in or what?”

“Like you said, John, it’s late.”

His eyes roamed the living room beyond my shoulder “Seen anything of Bum Bassett this
A.M.
?”

“What’s he done?”

“I didn’t say he did anything.” He spoke offhandedly. Never trust a casual cop.

“Yes, you did.”

He met my gaze. “I talk better sitting.”

I hesitated, then stepped aside. He came in and I closed the door. When I turned I found him staring down at the rug. It was buckled where Don and I had dragged Bassett’s heels across it.

“I was doing some cleaning.” I straightened it out with a foot.

“At this hour? In your bathrobe?”

“Some people play solitaire. I clean. And my wardrobe is none of your business.”

He held up his palms in a sign of surrender. “I see you’re not parking your car in the garage these days.”

“Too much junk. You know how it is.”

“Yeah. Did you know someone’s painted over your garage window? From the inside. It looks fresh.”

“I’m building a birdhouse. The sun hits me square in the eye when I’m working. Can I get you a drink?” The moment I asked it I wished I hadn’t. I didn’t want him snooping around while I was in the kitchen.

“I’m still on duty.” He pulled up the knees of his trousers and sat down on the sofa. “Couple of officers answered a disturbance call about eleven last night at a house on Bagley. They found three corpses in the living room and a guy on his knees in the back yard coughing blood. He was DOA at Detroit Receiving twenty minutes later. Only one of the victims was white, a woman.”

“I’m listening.”

“Prints match Laura Gaye’s.”

I lowered myself into the easy chair, feeling vulnerable in robe and slippers and practically nothing else. “I take it food poisoning was not involved.”

“Not hardly. The M.E.’s still working, but we dug a forty-four slug out of a wall. Ballistics has it right now. We also found a cowboy hat on the floor, which checks out with the DOA’s babble about John Wayne before he threw it in. Where is he, Walker?”

“What makes you think I know?” I fumbled cigarettes and matches out of the robe pocket.

“We followed a trail of blood out the front door and across the lawn to the street, where it stopped. Someone got into a car and drove away, someone who was hurt and needed help. Someone who knows only one person in town who’s not a cop. That person is you.”

I trotted out the routine—striking, lighting, drawing, shaking out, and discarding, all those things that smoking gives you to do while waiting for your brain to warm up. The Surgeon General hasn’t come up with any ammunition against that yet. “Just because I euchred you once doesn’t mean I plan to make a career of it.” I laid down a smokescreen between us. “Have you tried his trailer?”

“It wasn’t in the K-Mart lot in Warren,” he said. “We called the manager at home and he says he told Bassett yesterday to move it or he’d have the police come and tow it away. I’ve got men running down all the courts and free parking lots in the area. Then I thought of you. Is he here?”

“That would make me an accessory after the fact, if there is a fact. I’d be taking a whale of a chance with my license.”

“That’s hardly unfamiliar territory for you. You won’t mind if I take a look around.” He started to get up.

“Not if you have a warrant.”

He paused with his hands braced on the cushions. “I can get one without any trouble.”

“That’s a TV line, John. First you’ll need the ballistics report linking the slug you found to Bassett’s magnum, and then you’ll have to convince the judge we’re close enough for me to risk my ticket and my freedom hiding him. Even then he may want to wait until you’ve scoured all the trailer courts and lots. But I’ll be here when you get it, if you get it.”

He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees with his hands dangling in front.

“It’s taken me years, but I’ve finally got you figured out.” His eyes were bright under the shelf of his brows. “When you’re doing a number on me you never answer my questions directly. A lie’s a lie, Walker. Are you harboring Bum Bassett?”

I matched his level stare. “No.”

The wall clock click-clunked five times while we dared each other to blink. Then he stood up with an oath.

“Well, it seemed like a good idea when I had it.”

I filled my lungs with smoke and let some of it curl back out on its own. “Alonzo Smith wasn’t among the dear departed, I take it.”

“That would be too neat. I want you at the morgue to view the cargo, by the way.”

“How come?”

“If you pipe any faces from that reception you got on McDougall, we’ll at least have a link between Ridder and Smith, for whatever that’s worth.”

“I’ll be down later, if that’s all right. I’m still not quite sober. What was it, an ambush?”

“We’re still sorting it out. Right now it looks like everyone pulled off at the same time. One of the stiffs was stretched belly-down across an M-sixteen, we found a thirty-two revolver in the back yard near the DOA, and there were two automatic pistols on the living room floor, a thirty-eight and a twenty-five. Upstairs we found a Winchester thirty-ought-six with scope, a sniper’s piece. Of the rest only the M-sixteen was unfired. It’s my guess Bassett got him first. The woodwork looks like beavers gnawed it.”

“He did all right for himself.”

“Not good enough, or he wouldn’t have taken that bullet.” He yawned bitterly. “Hornet got the owner out of bed. He says he rented the house to the woman last week. She wore dark glasses during the transaction and a scarf over her head, so he didn’t recognize her picture in the papers after the courtroom raid Monday. Stupid son of a bitch didn’t even ask for references. It made a good hideout for Smith as long as he didn’t poke his nose outdoors. The others were there to make sure of that.”