The Sundown Speech (5 page)

“Tell your readers I get fifteen hundred up front. Juggling grandmothers welcome.”

The job was finished, and if it wasn't the record, it was close. Finding a corpse earned an asterisk at least. Another day, another five hundred dollars, less two parking tickets. Much as I'd have liked to have fobbed them off on my clients, it wouldn't be fair just because I didn't like them. It wasn't worth what I'd find at the bottom of that slippery slope.

I cranked the Cutlass out of its slot, this time ahead of the meter maid, joined the lockstep traffic downtown, and took the expressway home, where homicide is just something the hacks use to separate sports from weather.

The story made the second half of the TV news. Murder mysteries sell advertising, and roving reporters always like a change of scenery. Lieutenant Karyl—the legend at the bottom of the screen said Alexander was his first name—shrugged them off, referring them to headquarters for details. He looked twice as broad across the shoulders on the tube.

I mixed a drink, stretched out in my armchair, and started a book; noticing for the first time that I was reading these days at arm's length.

 

SIX

The
Free Press
had more details the next morning.

Heloise and Dante had been questioned and released, by reason of a plausible alibi: The medical examiner had placed Jerry Marcus' death between 3:00 and 7:00
P.M.
Saturday, when Michigan was hosting Northwestern at the Big House on Stadium Boulevard, and witnesses had placed the couple at a fund-raiser for the Green Party candidate for county commissioner at the Ann Arbor Country Club, twenty minutes away from Thompson Street by automobile, all that afternoon.

A Volvo answering the description of theirs showing up in the dead man's film didn't make it into print, so either the cops had been satisfied on that point or they hadn't been able to work it into the puzzle yet. One of those trees the city was so proud of had obscured the license plate, and anyone can buy the same bumper stickers they had. That wasn't enough for any cop, if he believed what I remembered about their placement and it matched the video, but any competent defense lawyer could cut that up for stew meat.

I got my statement out of the way early. The city police operated out of a low orange-brick building on Fifth Street, two blocks east of Main. It looked like a high school, except for a few more blue-and-whites in its parking lot. Karyl wasn't in. The young black plainclothesman who interviewed me for a video camera was polite; when he went back over some details I'd already supplied, he apologized, and it seemed genuine. Afterward we exchanged cards. He was interested in moonlighting as a private investigator, if the department would let him. I was back on the road by noon.

Driving home I thought about the case. It was the cleanest break I'd ever made from one with a body in it. Loose ends are a part of life, like lumpy mashed potatoes.

I don't like either, but then I have more time to poke at them than the police. The car thing kept coming back, along with the mental picture of Jerry Marcus' cramped resting place in his shabby little room off campus. I couldn't work Heloise or Dante into that. Confronting a possible con artist is one thing, forcing him to the floor and putting a slug through his brain another. Their support for gun control could have been a blind; but the way the thing had gone down didn't fit a couple who thought the Young Republicans were a dangerous cult. Their method would have been to spike his herbal tea with 100 percent vegetable alkaline.

That cardboard box bothered me too, the one the skinhead girl on the porch had seen Marcus carrying out to his car the day he was killed. Karyl hadn't seemed to think much of it; but from what little exposure I'd had to the lieutenant, I knew he hadn't forgotten it. He was a human vacuum cleaner if ever there was one.

Rosecranz, the Russian cocktail who kept my office building from falling into a heap of asbestos, was riding a buffer as big as he was over the linoleum in the foyer. I missed the point. You couldn't raise a shine there with a séance. I figured he had millions in pre-revolutionary rubles stashed in a hollow tree in Gorky Park and was just biding his time until he could go back and retrieve it. I gave him a thumbs-up in passing, just to keep me in his thoughts. He tugged at the lobe of an ear the size of a cabbage and went on buffing. I couldn't be sure, but I thought it made us comrades.

I ran square into a spiderweb on the way through the door of my office. I'd been gone only a day. Until then I'd thought I was a fast worker.

A patch of rug, a desk, some file cases, Chief Crazy Horse skunking Custer in a beer advertisement on the wall: the place where a thousand mysteries came to roost. Not the place I sleep, but home just the same. I checked my service, but the cool female voice said I hadn't been popular lately. There were days when she was my only human contact.

I sat in the swivel, made out a check for a thousand dollars, less gasoline, toll calls, and the beef and cheddar at the deli, and mailed it to the Gunnars along with a one-page typewritten report. Once again I left out the part about their car. For all I knew the cops were still sitting on that one, waiting for it to hatch.

After that I smoked a cigarette and wondered if it was too early to break the bottle out of the safe.

Instead I picked up the receiver and tried the last-number-dialed I'd gotten from Marcus' telephone. I hadn't told Karyl about that; he'd have thought of it himself, and wouldn't be any too pleased that I had and had acted upon it. It was bad enough I'd used the phone to call 9ll. That could be dismissed as a lapse in judgment, not obstruction of justice.

One of those canned announcements that come with the answering machine—no identification of any kind—asked me to leave a message. I thought about calling on Barry and his reverse directories, but I slapped the back of my hand.

Done is done.
John
Donne: “No man is an island.” Says who? Simon and Garfunkel: “I am an island.” If you know the Bible well enough you can argue any case. I bent to the safe.

Soon, though, I hadn't time to do anything else, even the office bottle. I'd scored some insurance work for a company whose client may or may not have arranged to have his 2000 GMC Sonoma stolen and set afire in a weedy lot near the Michigan Central tracks, and between interviewing witnesses and taking pictures of the garage the client said someone had broken into and canvassing the neighbors, my little tin office was just a place to rest my jaw and my feet. Three days of that, and all I had was dead certainty the client was a fraud, and as much of a chance of proving it as Rosecranz had of seeing his face in the linoleum in the foyer.

Who cares? Not the insurance company, or even the other clients who covered the bill; a few pennies more on the premium. What business was it of mine if some schnook got behind in his payments and took care of the problem with two bucks' worth of gas and a penny match? Big corporations do it all the time, on a much larger scale. What was I, a Communist? Not a bit. You go into a thing with justice in mind and finish up putting the screws to a guy who if you were in his place you might do the same thing.

Nope. Crooked is crooked. I slid what I had into an envelope and threw it on the
OUT
stack under the mail slot. Someone else would have to build a rock-solid case out of kindling.

Other things were in the fire. Some people still preferred to do credit checks through a professional agency rather than the Internet, where whales and dolphins were reported to migrate through the Great Lakes, Moby Dick waiting patiently for the locks to fill between Superior and Huron. Purely as a courtesy to an old flame, I set aside a career-long policy of not accepting divorce cases, only to find that the stockbroker husband was shoveling coke into the ovens at the Ford River Rouge plant to cover his losses on the New York Stock Exchange, and not spending his evenings with his teenage intern; I gave her that one on the house for old times' sake. I shot video of a chronic back injury doing the chicken dance at his cousin's wedding reception, then erased it. I could do a mean lambada myself with an open bar at my elbow. The company settled, and said it wouldn't be needing my services in the future.

So it's not all waterfront liaisons, running gun battles on fire escapes and across rooftops, Arab princesses trading places with their handmaidens to see how the other half died. I went weeks at a time with nobody shooting at me or coldcocking me with a sap or shanghaiing me into the hold of a tramp steamer bound for Singapore, or even Sioux Falls. There were times when the trench coat and fedora languished so long at the cleaners someone considered donating them to the shelter for retired private detectives; gray men with bunched chins, sitting in their wheelchairs staring at the wall, fingering the pulp at the back of their heads, and calling the nurses dames and tomatoes:
There, there, Mr. Rockhammer. Swallow what's in this plastic cup and tell yourself it's rye. There's a good little shamus. Nighty-night, and don't let the femmes fatales bite.

It's a job, not a crusade. Crusades are for martyrs, and we know what happens to martyrs. They wind up nailed to a cross or burned at the stake or bristling with arrows or fed to lions or having their intestines unwound from their insides with a windlass; which was my favorite. Modern-day villains have no imagination. Throwing a guy down on his face and putting an ounce of lead through his brain is for pussies.

I was back behind the desk stapling together a sheaf of affidavits when Heloise Gunnar called.

“Thank God,” she said; “not that I believe there is one. I've been trying to reach you all day.”

It was the first sign of emotion I'd heard in her voice. A carved head on Easter Island could have sneezed and I'd have been too surprised to say gesundheit. Ice cubes collided in a glass far away. I didn't think they were floating in turnip juice.

“You should've left a message,” I said. “I'd have called back.”

“I didn't know what message to leave. I didn't know who'd be listening. I didn't know who I could trust. Can I trust you?”

“If you don't know the answer to that question, it's dangerous to ask.” I went on stapling; or my hand did. That was one collection of papers that would stay together longer than the Stones.

“
Please!
”

That tore it. When an iceberg spews lava, you stop what you're doing and concentrate. I laid aside the pages and stapler and took the receiver out of the crook of my shoulder. “What kind of trust do you need, Ms. Gunnar?”

“The attorney-client kind, if you can give it. My husband's been arrested for murder.”

“
Dante?
They'll kick him before dark. He wouldn't kill a fly even with kindness. He'd apologize for interrupting it before it finished buzzing.”

“That's just it.” She spoke so low I had to screw the receiver into my ear to make it out. “I'm not sure it's a mistake.”

 

SEVEN

It was one of those houses you see perched on the tall hills looking down on Huron River Drive, the ones you catch glimpses of from below when the leaves thin out, a patch of siding here, a flash of glass there. The trees were as green and as fat as artichokes, so the first clue I was getting close came when I entered a sharp curve and a diamond-shaped sign leapt out of the bushes reading
HIDDEN DRIVEWAY
. The two-lane blacktop is a crazy serpentine scenic highway following the bank of a tributary of Lake Huron, a trade route for all the tribes and traders in the old Northwest Territory. LaSalle, Cadillac, and Pontiac had navigated it, long before their names were etched in chrome. When I downshifted for the turn, I couldn't be sure if the canoe I thought I spotted was there or if it was paddled by ghosts. I pushed my old Cutlass up a twisting stretch of black composition flanked by cedars hanging on by their teeth.

At length it flattened out and drew a loop in front of a big Tudor with three sharp gables sticking up like the points of a display handkerchief. There was a four-car garage attached and a satellite dish on either end of the roof. Offhand it looked like Dante could have blown off that fifteen g's like a white chip, but any lifestyle is possible in the age of the thirty-year fixed mortgage; for a while, anyway.

Heloise answered the door herself in a purple caftan robe with her bare toes sticking out under the hem. Her straight graying hair needed brushing and there was a thumb-size smudge on her rimless glasses. Half-melted ice cubes bobbed in clear liquid in a tall glass in her right hand. She shifted it to the left to take mine in a surprisingly warm grip.

“Thanks so much for coming. Did you have any trouble finding the place?”

“I turned into a couple of wrong driveways. If I'd known how far the addresses are from the road I'd have brought along the Hubble telescope.”

She led me into a ground floor that was really a balcony encircling a conversation pit, with carpeted steps leading down into it. There was a fireplace that looked as if it were made of black glass, a marble shin-buster of a coffee table, and contemporary seating upholstered in slate leather. Copies of
Mother Jones
and the
Ann Arbor Observer
were fanned out on the table.

“Amos Walker, this is Hernando Suiz, our attorney.”

I shook the hand of the fiftyish man standing inside the pit. He wore his salt-and-pepper hair in a brush cut and a summerweight suit the color of the Mediterranean at midnight, or how it ought to; the Gulf of Tonkin was as close as I'd ever come. The whites of his eyes glistened against brown skin. He was shorter than he appeared and not as friendly as his smile.

“I'm glad you wanted me present,” Suiz said, “although I'm a little surprised. Had Mrs. Gunnar confided to me her plans, I'd have advised her against calling you.”