The Sundown Speech (11 page)

The female dispatcher or whatever who answered said the lieutenant was at lunch. She wouldn't say where.

“Amos Walker's the name,” I said. “He left me a message.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Walker. He's at Thano's, on East Liberty.”

Thano's Lamplighter belonged to a blue plastic awning down from the Michigan Theater, a renovated movie palace with a gaudy marquee chased with electric bulbs. I almost missed the restaurant, because one of the city's sacred trees obscured the sign. I parked in an echoing structure across from the downtown Borders and entered a narrow front next to a record shop; in Ann Arbor, you can still watch Rudolph Valentino loving up Nita Naldi on the big screen and buy Sinatra on vinyl.

Inside was a shotgun arrangement going straight back between a counter and a row of narrow booths. Karyl took up all of one side of a booth facing the door. He hailed me and I slid into the opposite seat. He was slurping Coke through a straw from a tall plastic glass.

The sharp smell of cooking onions stung my eyes. I blew my nose into a napkin. “Did they do an environmental impact study before they opened this place?”

“Best-kept secret in town,” he said. “Greektown should serve moussaka this good.” His fork cut into a square of cheese, ground meat, nutmeg, and batter as if it were meringue.

I'd gone there feeling more tired than hungry, but I'd slept since I'd eaten, and the way he rolled his eyes when he forked the morsel into his mouth would make a monk break his fast. When a sweet-faced young waitress built like Zorba boated over, I glanced at a laminated menu stained all over with tomato sauce and ordered the lamb shank and a glass of water.

“Holly turned down my offer,” I said, when she'd left. “She's moving in with her father in Chicago, where when you get shot at you usually know the reason. I'm taking her to Metro this afternoon.”

“She's not going.”

I watched him scoop a pile of brown rice into his face. He was using those delicate hands for loaners while the paws he'd been born with were in the shop. I said nothing.

“She leaves,” he said, “Marcus goes underground. We still don't know who the dead man in his apartment was. They tested the scientific evidence in Lansing twice and it came up Marcus every time. They can't both be Marcus. Me, I'm a print man. Prints on the steering wheel of that Crown Vic say Marcus. Marcus it is. If it's Holly he's after, we need her here, doing whatever it is coeds do now, to smoke him out.”

“That rarely works out so well for the bait.”

The waitress returned with my lamb shank steaming on a plate, my water, and a refill on Karyl's Coke. When we were alone again he said, “She'll have more plainclothes cops around her than the governor.”

“That makes me feel better. You can always spot them by the Blues Brothers shades and Sta-Prest suits. He won't come within rifle range of her. So what's the point?”

“This coming from a middle-aged private cop who thinks dressing like Bono's opening act makes him invisible under colored lights.”

I put the shades in my T-shirt pocket again. I felt grungier then. I'd gone twenty hours without a change of clothes.

That was a mistake, letting him see my eyes. He slid his fork into his plate and pushed it aside. “Don't even think about sneaking her out, Walker. I'm all hotted up to arrest
some
one.”

“That's my first jail threat today.”

“You don't want to test it. I'm just nailing down all the flaps,” he said. “By now Marcus is running the other direction. He fired his last arrow when he missed you and Holly.”

“I think you're other-estimating him, Lieutenant.”

“What's ‘other-estimating'?”

“Neither over nor under, just outside the normal criminal perimeters. If he was the running type, he wouldn't have risked this morning. He's working on his defense now. A good lawyer can stir up enough dust to bury attempted, but Holly can tie him to the murder.”

“That box again.”

I carved off a piece of lamb and chewed. It was tender, cooked with just the right touch of pink, but the chef might have made it from the picture in a grocery ad for all I tasted it. I was only eating it to keep my hands busy. My appetite was as dead as the lamb.

“I figured it out,” I said. “Also why he cut a hole in one side.”

“Me, too.”

He fished in a side pocket. “I'm an old-fashioned cop. I let the people who know about such things monkey around with microscopes and blood spatters. DNA? Stands for Don't Nag About it. I work with evidence you can pick up and feel and sniff.” He slapped something on the table between us.

I'd seen the Ziploc bag before, and the bits of white Styrofoam he'd scooped up from the murder scene. I'd handled one.

“Sheriff's deputies had a case just like it last year,” he said, “in a rural community twenty miles from here. Guy snared a couple in a pyramid scheme, and when they pressed him about their money in their house, he excused himself, went outside, and came back in with a box just like Marcus', hole and everything. He'd filled it with Styrofoam peanuts, the kind that everything comes in through the mail and private parcel services, and stashed a revolver inside. Shot them each once, right between the eyes.” He pointed a finger between mine and worked his thumb twice, then tapped the bag. “None of the neighbors heard the shots. That how you saw it?”

I nodded. “Any connection?”

“No. Those county cops are good. They nailed the guy in less than two weeks. It was written up, even made the Detroit TV stations. It may have been where Marcus got the idea.”

“I don't remember the case, but I couldn't stop thinking about how someone could fire a heavy piece like a Magnum in broad daylight in the middle of crowded student housing, with a couple of kids swilling beer right on the front porch, and not be heard. Guns are easier to get than suppressors, and if it was a revolver—” I looked the question.

“It was. Unjacketed slug.”

“Settles the point. A revolver isn't self-contained, like a semiautomatic pistol; the noise leaks out of the firing mechanism and the cylinder, not just the barrel. But if he packed the box tightly enough with shipping material, it would sound like somebody dropping a book on the floor. Who'd remember that in Ann Arbor?” I tapped the bag. “Can you make a case?”

“The state police lab found scorching and traces of spent powder on some of the pieces, but we need more. The box is long gone, but it was his hard luck someone saw him carrying it out of the house, and remembered. He probably thought she was as fogged up with beer as her friend Sean. Her mistake was asking him about the box.”

“His was worse. The longer we thought he was the victim, the more time he had to clear out with the money he'd swindled from his investors. With Jerry Marcus dead, he could start all over again under a new name. Now he's got to use some of that getaway time to stay out of jail.”

Karyl's straw gurgled. He set down the glass. “We can't count on him blundering a third time all on his own. He's smart. Crazy-smart: He figured a way around the latest thing in criminal science, and no one else has been able to do that. Beyond that, he doesn't think things through. That's why we need Holly here in town, to force him into making his last mistake.”

Our waitress came back, saw that I'd given up on the lamb shank, and asked if I wanted a takeout box.

“No boxes!” I barked.

She paled. I apologized. “Thanks, but I don't think it'll keep. I've still got a lot of running around to do.”

She took away my plate. “I hope that means visiting the Hands-On Museum,” Karyl said. “We're proud of it. I'm tired of giving the same speech every time I see you.”

“You've got Marcus wrong. Psychopath, yeah. Monomaniac too. He wants to control this case from start to finish. It isn't about money anymore. Maybe it never was. People to him are like the ones he makes from scratch on his computer; they don't whine about motivation or argue about interpretation or push for percentages of the gross. He's the kind of movie director who has to call all the shots.”

“He won't call the last. You got Dante Gunnar off the hook. Take that home.”

“You forget I was hired first to find Jerry Marcus.”

Our checks came, shattering the chilly silence with a crack, like ice breaking up. The lieutenant grabbed them both. “Let the city buy your lunch,” he said. “You might as well get used to it.”

I'd thought of asking him if he knew anything about Alec Moselle. Then I remembered he was a cop, and that he'd have traced the same number from “Jerry Marcus'” phone I had, and it would remind him I was still working an ongoing police investigation. Not that he'd forget; but there was no percentage in making him any angrier at me than always.

I walked back to the parking garage and climbed the stairs to the level where I'd left my car. Another pair of feet made echoes in the well a flight below, ascending also. I stopped to light a cigarette. The other footsteps stopped. I flipped away the match and climbed the rest of the way, moving at a faster clip. So did the other pair of feet.

The man who belonged to them hovered inside the open door to my level, just inside the shadows. He fumbled at his pockets, looking for those darn keys.

He'd lost them; as I drove past on my way to the street, the screen of a cell phone glowed inside the doorway. I made it to Liberty before I picked up a plain blue Ford in my rearview. There is nothing so well marked as an unmarked police car.

 

FIFTEEN

I didn't try to shake loose my shadow. Cops are hard to lose, and after you've gone to all the trouble they just come back angrier. Even when they weren't mad at me I had as much leash as they cared to give me, and not an inch more. I couldn't make a buck without their benediction. They'd find out what I was up to soon enough, tail or no. As it was, the jump I had on them was a rare break.

Anyway, Ann Arbor's not big enough to lose them for long, and they knew the place better than I did.

Driving, I flipped open my notebook and read the address Barry had given me for Alec Moselle, the owner of the last number the dead man in Jerry Marcus' apartment had called. The place was on Washtenaw Avenue. In the downtown Borders I'd picked up a visitor's guide to the city. Jackson Avenue wound eastward past fraternity houses, then metamorphosed into Washtenaw at the foot of a water tower shaped like a bicycle horn with the bulb up top, where the scenery changed from residential to commercial as if someone had flipped a switch. I passed a huge gourmet market and a Barnes & Noble bookstore sharing a jammed parking lot, another Borders, and the usual snarl of sit-down restaurants, coffee shops, takeout joints, coffee shops, auto parts stores, coffee shops, PetSmarts, and two stories of glass with a French name and several yards of neon bent into the shape of a coffee mug leaking scripted steam out the top; I figured none of the natives had slept eight hours straight in years.

The street was multiple lanes of mirror-to-mirror traffic, with just three cars making it through for every green light. I crept along the slow lane, studying the signs in a string of strip malls, spotted the number I was looking for just in time to turn but not in time to signal, and rode the sonic blast from a string of horns into the asphalt lot of a commercial center containing eight businesses separated by common walls on the ground floor and as many on the second. The address I wanted belonged to an outdoor walk-up above a hearing-aid emporium.

I found a diagonal space in front and pretended to be studying my visitor's guide while the anonymous blue Ford drifted past and pulled into a slot between a smoke shop and a place with block M jerseys hanging in its display window. The driver, a clean profile with a flattop haircut, stayed inside while I got out and climbed the metal steps to the second floor. He didn't seem to be taking any precautions to preserve his secret. So far as I could tell he was alone.

An airlock with nothing in it but a linked rubber mat on the linoleum led into a large reception area papered with super-size black-and-white blowup photographs of naked people. Some were artistic studies of lithe young women pouting at something outside the camera's field of vision, others of fat men and white-haired grandmothers, all naked as eggs. The majority were panoramic shots of crowds of men and women of all shapes, ages, and sizes standing on flat roofs and on sidewalks and in parking lots, many of them covering their private parts but just as many putting everything on display, with only the occasional pair of running shoes and caps and scarves with the U of M logo to break up the expanses of skin; these last had all the erotic appeal of a Laundromat. They looked like odes to cellulite.

“Bring along plenty of sunblock,” Barry had said. I grinned.

The door behind a doughnut-shaped counter appeared to open by twisting a woman's left nipple. The woman seated inside the doughnut had not posed for the picture. She wore a muumuu printed all over with Route 66 road signs and her hair had been combed into a Woody Woodpecker pompadour only redder, with directional arrows shaved into the temples. She would dress out around three hundred pounds.

“Moze doesn't audition models for the mob shots,” she said. “If you'll give me an e-mail address, I'll include you in the next cattle call. All you have to do is show up, and bring along a gym bag or something to put your clothes in when you take them off.”

I started to say I wasn't there to audition. Then something beeped and she jerked her head back to look up at me. I saw the headset then, a black band threaded through her topknot with earbuds and a serpent-shaped Madonna transmitter in front of her mouth. She hadn't been talking to me. Like many overweight women she had a pretty, pleasant face, but the expression was stern.

“Moze isn't here, if you're with the police.”