“You’re letting me go?”
I hadn’t gotten through to him. You never do when they’re that age. I lifted my glass from the nightstand and gulped. The liquor had gone flat, like my brain. “What do you want, dinner? Don’t forget your coat.”
He stood there a moment longer, fidgeting, then turned and left. Back to report. I heard his wheels tearing hell out of my lawn as he backed around the Cutlass.
You never know whether it’s better to let a guy like that go or to turn him over to the cops. As often as I’d seen the picture, I never could remember if it was priest Pat O’Brien or gangster Jimmy Cagney who as a kid got collared and sent to the reform school in
Angels with Dirty Faces
, but I knew it had a lot to do with how each of them turned out. Not that I had any choice, with my description on every police radio between here and Canada.
The suitcase was a neon sign. I put it away and changed my clothes, choosing the suit that didn’t wrinkle easily. The gun and holster went onto a different belt. Then I called for a taxi and left the address of the bar around the corner. The first thought the cops would have after finding my car here and me gone would be to call the cab companies. Their having to sift through all the fares coming from the busy nightstop might buy me a few hours’ sleep. I grabbed my coat and hat, made sure that Gold had remembered his coat, dropped a razor and a new tube of shaving cream into the pocket, then locked up and legged it to the bar, feeling as inconspicuous as an orangutan in Hudson’s lingerie department.
T
HE MOTEL ROOM
had a working radio, which at fifty dollars a night was a real bargain. The news reports that night spent a lot of time on tornado damage in northern Monroe County and no time at all on Krim’s murder. A sniper had put a bullet through the windshield of a steelhauler’s rig from an overpass above the John Lodge late that afternoon. No one was hurt, and the culprit was gone by the time the cops arrived.
The next morning, after I had shaken the moss out of my head, they started off with the killing at The Crescent. Dave the cop was wrong. Someone had made the connection between Jefferson and Krim, and the airwaves crackled with speculation over whether the murders had something to do with the impending strike. Phil Montana was unavailable for comment. The police had no suspects as yet and were proceeding on the assumption that robbery was the motive. They said. I turned off the radio and stumbled into the bathroom.
I came out toweling my head, sat down next to the telephone and dialed Barry Stackpole’s number at the
News.
I’d heard he was back in town after negotiations to take his crime column to network television had fallen through. A copy boy answered and told me Stackpole had left the night before to cover the jury-tampering trial of a former Detroit Mafia chief in New Orleans. I thanked him, thumbed down the plunger, and tried Getner at the
Free Press.
He was in.
“Ted, this is Amos Walker. What have the cops dug up on the killing?”
“Which one, peeper?” He didn’t like me much, but he never forgot a favor and he owed me one. “We get several hundred a year. I think. The cops don’t furnish body counts no more.”
He hadn’t heard. Well, it was early. “A guy named Krim, over at a place called The Crescent on Cass. Somebody didn’t like the shape of his skull and made some modifications. You haven’t got anything on it?”
“Oh, that. I got everything there is. What you want to know?”
He didn’t have everything or he’d know I was a suspect. Diplomatically I said, “The radio says the cops are treating it as a robbery. How are they handling it really?”
“I’ll be damned. The radio finally got something right. You called it, shamus.”
I rumpled my already rumpled hair. It didn’t make my thoughts any less confused. “What about suspects?”
“Zilch. Zip. Police Are Baffled. The butler was in the pantry with the downstairs maid and Cousin Roderick was at the polo matches. In other words, they don’t have the proverbial pot.”
“Sure they aren’t holding out on you?”
“Listen, Walker.” His tone grew raspy. “I’ve been covering cophouse six years. The commissioner doesn’t change his brand of toilet paper I don’t know about it. The uniforms are out pulling in the usual ex-cons and hopheads and the C.I.D. is making out its robbery statistics. If they were handling. it any other way you’d read it in the afternoon edition.”
“Thanks, Ted. This makes us even.”
“That’s what you think, gumshoe.” He banged off.
I sat and thought and reached inside my shirt pocket for a smoke, then realized I’d used my last one the night before. It wouldn’t have helped. Ted Getner was a bastard, but he was the best reporter I knew after Barry Stackpole. If he said the cops were approaching Krim’s murder as a robbery, that’s the way they were approaching it. The cop at the diner had mentioned a lieutenant. I wondered if that was Fitzroy. If it was, there was no way the janitor would sell him on a screwy angle, and in any case there was no reason he should want to, especially not after I had promised him a hundred bucks and delivered an Excedrin headache. I considered calling John Alderdyce to find out what was what, but as long as there was a bare possibility that Getner was wrong and there was a warrant out for me I wasn’t about to risk a trace.
That left the question of a trap, but I wasn’t worth all that time and trouble even if I had murdered Jefferson and Krim. Anyway, there’s no need for that Mission Impossible stuff when standard operating procedure is so effective.
There were two ways I could play it: Lie low and let whatever was going to happen happen without my interference, or keep my appointment with Mrs. DeLancey and proceed until the long arm of the law snared me—or not, as the case may be.
There was never any choice in it, not while I still had two thousand dollars’ worth of Ann Maringer’s diamond ring in my pocket. A private eye with a code may be nothing more than a pebble on the beach, but at least he stands out from the grains of sand. I washed and shaved and hailed a cab for home and my own means of transportation.
The house looked innocent enough. There were no machine guns poking out of the windows, no unmarked vans parked in the neighborhood, no lineman looking nervous and uncomfortable atop the corner Edison pole. I peeped inside my car. No one was hiding in the back seat. There was no reason for anyone, not even Fitzroy or Cranmer, to plant a bomb under the hood, but I opened it and checked anyway before I got in and started the engine. I was halfway to Grosse Pointe before the back of my neck stopped tingling, and even then I made an ass of myself circling blocks twice when I was sure I was being followed. Paranoia is easier to catch and harder to shake than the common cold.
I’d calibrated each of the five buttons on my car radio to give me a jazz station. Today four of them were playing progressive—Miles Davis and Bird Parker with music to shoot up by—and the fifth had on Sarah Vaughan. I hummed along with “Dancing in the Dark” and found myself identifying with the lyrics. I hadn’t the faintest notion what I hoped to gain from this morning’s visit.
A mile of private road wound among sixty-foot pine trees to the DeLancey estate, a sprawling brick ranch style on the shore of Lake St. Clair, really just a broad spot in the Detroit River separating Michigan from Canada. It was the first nice day of spring. Last night’s rain had washed away the oppressive humidity. Sailboats sprinkled the lake, tiny bursts of color against the reflected blue from the sky. Birds greeted each other in the trees, and a squirrel bounced across the road in front of the car, paused, and got going again just as the left front wheel was bearing down on it. They all play like that, but they don’t always win. Squirrels are the private investigators of the animal kingdom.
A bright red Trans Am, parked in the circular driveway, was being waxed by a chauffeur straight out of P. G. Wodehouse—powerfully built, in puttees, jodhpurs, and a white shirt open to the navel and folded back at the cuffs. I pulled up behind the car far enough back to prevent my trail of dust from drifting over its spotless finish and got out. The chauffeur, dark-complexioned, black of hair and moustache, and handsome in a Gulf Stream kind of way, stood kneading his yellow chamois cloth and sneering at my car and, as I approached, at my suit. It hadn’t borne the wrinkles nearly as well as I’d hoped.
“Nice car,” I said. “They pay you to drive it?”
The sneer sharpened. No one sneers quite like a Puerto Rican. “I weesh,” he replied. “The car, she belong to
Señor
Jack, the
señora’s
son. He drive, I take care. Eef not for me, the engine she seize up for no oil, the block she crack for no water. I drive the Mercedes for the
señora.
” He indicated the attached garage.
“Not the same.”
He rolled his eyes. “Ees like drive the jar of mayonnaise.”
“How long have you been working here?” I stripped the top off a fresh pack of cigarettes and stuck one in my mouth.
“
Siete años.
Seven years.”
“Then you knew the Judge.”
His face shut down like a ticket booth window at a sellout. I’d taken him for no more than thirty, but when he did that his skin broke into dozens of sharp creases. He was older than I was, though by how much I couldn’t say. “I drive the Mercedes, I take care of the sport car. You have questions you go up to the door and ring the bell. The maid, she is
mi esposa.
My wife. She take you to see the
señora,
you ask her the questions.
Comprende?
”
“Comprendo. Y saludo.”
His features crumpled up some more. “
Por que?
”
“It takes hard work, twenty-four hours a day, to hold on to a Spanish accent after seven years in Grosse Pointe. Or do you have a coach?”
He said something you won’t find in a Spanish-English dictionary, but by then I had my back to him and pretended not to hear.
The porch was built of redwood planks ten inches wide and ran the length of the building. I pushed a doorbell button of artificial mother-of-pearl set in bronze scrollwork. Distant chimes played a familiar tune I couldn’t quite remember. A lot of silence followed. I had my cigarette half smoked and was about to ring again when the door opened its full width. A pretty, brown-skinned girl in a maid’s uniform said, “Yes?”
I said, “He has good taste.”
A little line appeared between her rather thick brows. “I’m sorry?” It was the voice that had answered the telephone last night. Though she had an accent it wasn’t nearly as obvious as the chauffeur’s, nor as phony.
“
Su esposo.
He is a fine judge of feminine beauty.”
She blushed, or seemed to. It had been so long since I met a girl who could that I was no longer any kind of judge.
“Gracias, Señor—?I
“Walker. I have an appointment with Mrs. DeLancey.” I handed her a card with just my name printed on it. They still pass them around in Grosse Pointe, though not as much as they used to. She glanced at it, asked me in, and took my hat and coat. Her high heels clicked efficiently on the parquet floor going away.
The entrance hall was horseshoe-shaped, closed in by curving walls of crinkled yellow plaster made to look like adobe. A ceiling of translucent colored glass or acrylic allowed sunlight to cast a mosaic over the floor’s glossy surface. Arches opened on either side, the one to my left affording a glimpse of rust-colored carpet, more artificial adobe supported by what looked like real redwood columns, more redwood in the furniture, and framed Russells and Remingtons depicting Indians and buffalo and hell-for-leather cowboys and red-eyed steers pounding clouds of fine yellow dust out of parched desert. They might have been originals. The arch opposite that one led into a room or passage paneled with knotty planks eighteen inches wide and rough as forty acres of unplowed field. The barn they had come from had been old at the time of Pontiac’s siege.
I had finished the butt and opened the door to ditch it when the maid returned. “Mrs. DeLancey will see you now.”
Her English was impeccable, if a little too precise. I had a notion to advise her to slur her consonants and toss out such lines as if all the newness had worn off them on their way to her lips, but it would have sailed right past her. Give her another seven years. I followed her along the rustic passage and through another arch into the damnedest room I had ever been in.
It was an acre across, sunken, and carpeted in mottled orange and black. The walls were paneled in the weathered stuff of the passage and hung with paintings commemorating more dusty scenes from the Old West. A diorama of Custer’s Last Stand fully eight feet square dominated the space above the mantel of a fireplace large enough to play handball in, the latter built of charred, angular stones a little smaller than the ones Polyphemus hurled at the fleeing Argonauts. A flintlock Hawken like the ones mountain men used to carry was perched horizontally below the painting, a powder horn hanging from a leather thong beside it. There was no ceiling; the roof peaked seven feet above my head, the airspace between webbed with rafters, again of redwood, from which hung a chain attached to a chandelier made from a Conestoga wheel. The rim was studded with candles that I suspected hadn’t seen a flame in nearly a century.
Something was missing. I looked around and finally spotted it mounted over the arch I had just come through, a set of long-horns with a twelve-foot spread, black at the tips, and polished to a high ivory gloss. Burnt-orange curtains obscured a picture window across from me and, presumably, a view of Lake St. Clair beyond. I was tempted to stride across and draw them open just to make sure they didn’t conceal a desert dotted with yucca and bleached buffalo bones. Whoever had decorated the place had not taken the term
ranch style
lightly.
“Are you properly impressed, Mr. Walker?” asked the woman standing below me in the middle of the great room, next to a man in a soft gray suit. “The frontier was my husband’s first love. Perhaps his only love. Like all hobbies, I’m afraid it carried him away at times. Will you have tea?”