Motor City Blue (25 page)

“Your mistake was hiring a guy like Francis Kramer to do the watching. In some ways he was the ideal choice, because he was just dimwitted enough to fall for the patriotic spiel you probably gave him about national security and the public benefit. All those hearings and investigations into the various branches of Intelligence can’t have left you with many reliable agents to choose from. But dumb guys like Kramer sometimes get clever ideas that aren’t always honest. He did his job all right. No doubt some secret vault in the Pentagon is full of footage on Shanks’ comings and goings at Beryl Garnet’s house of joy, if it wasn’t burned or shredded when Shanks bellied up dead. Probably he held back some excerpts of his own for blackmail purposes. Then he stumbled onto a gold mine.

“He must have been tailing Shanks with his camera when he left the election-night rally to meet Maria, and saw the snatch. Then he followed and captured the scene of a lifetime on infrared film, a scene that could set him up for the rest of his days. Which it did, although not in the way he had figured.

“I didn’t put it together until this morning, when Maria told me that Kramer had been following Shanks. It explained a lot of things that hadn’t been clear to me, chief among them the hush you threw over Kramer’s murder. I’d thought it was just knee-jerk cloak-and-dagger reaction to an embarrassing incident. It didn’t occur to me you’d really have something to hide.”

“You can’t prove it!” It was Spain, his dry soldier’s voice lashing out like a muleskinner’s whip. He had turned halfway around in his chair and was letting me have it with the flinty grays.

“No,” I sighed. “I can’t. My only witness is a murderess twice over, and a gangster’s ward to boot. She’d be laughed out of any Grand Jury room in the country. This is just the little guy fighting back with a popgun against cannons.”

Vespers was studying me with a clinical expression. “Has it ever occurred to you, Walker, that we’re not the enemy? That we’re forced to do the unpleasant things we do for your protection?”

“Who protects us from the protectors?” I turned to John. “Am I free to go?”

He raised his eyebrows at Proust, who shrugged and said, “It’s still your case.”

Alderdyce scribbled something on a page torn from a pad on his desk and handed it to me. “Give that to the attendant at the impound for your car. I won’t waste breath asking you not to leave town. You’ll do as you damn well please.” He gulped the rest of his coffee and flung the empty cup at the green metal wastebasket in the corner. It circled the rim and landed outside on a buckled tile.

“A word of advice,” said Vespers.

I was at the door. I paused without turning.

“Stay out of espionage, Walker. You’re too nice a guy for it.”

“Yeah, I’m a prince.”

T
HE CITY WAS
a metallic blue beneath the brightening sky as I headed east on the Edsel Ford toward Grosse Pointe. It was sort of pretty until you realized that most of it was monoxide, and that by noon it would turn to an ugly granite brown only a couple of shades lighter than the average Detroiter’s lungs. Salt trucks had been out since before dawn, making the streets safe for everyone but the cars. The snow that had fallen during the night was a crusted fringe the color of dried urine along the gutters. Yesterday’s heavy winds had swept away the clouds, leaving the sky a scraped blue of which the cityscape was only a tenth carbon. It was hard to believe that the sun, a swollen orb swimming in blood above the horizon, was also shining down on crisp fields so white it hurt to look at them. Here, up close, its effect on the lurid grindhouse façades was harsh and indecent, putting me in mind of hookers caught out past their time in make-up designed for soft lights and shadows. But that made me think of Iris, so I shifted my thoughts to other things.

Nothing about Morningstar’s house had changed. I guess I hadn’t really expected it to, but so much had since yesterday morning that I did a take when the imperturbable young German came to the gate after I had stopped and tooted my horn, looking as if he were waiting out the same shift. He appeared to recognize me, spoke into a telephone receiver taken from a call box mounted on one of the marble gateposts, hung it up, and unlocked and opened the gate, waving me in.

By day the house didn’t seem quite so huge as it had under the kliegs, but it still looked as if it might seat the overflow from Tiger Stadium when the team was hot. I parked in front of the embarrassment of a porch and found the door open for me by the time I got up the steps. Wiley was holding the knob, looking funereal in a suit that couldn’t decide whether to be blue or black and a soft gray necktie that looked as if it would pawn for more than my overcoat—which, by the way, he didn’t offer to take. A number of suitcases and trunks messed up the clean sweep of the carpet behind him.

“You’re late,” he informed me grimly. “By about eight hours.” He let me by and closed the door.

“My watch stopped. Going someplace?”

He cocked his head toward the library doors at the other side of the foyer. “They are. I’m not. This is my town.”

While he was speaking, the doors glided open far enough to let Paul Cooke through. He saw me, drew them shut without turning, and came my way, striding like a man with too many places to go and too little time to get there. There was very little about him on this occasion that suggested the West. The checked shirt and Levi’s had given way to a beige business suit of some material too rich for my blood, and a wide, woven necktie of the same color had replaced the rodeo string that had made him look like an aging country singer. The change of attire softened the lines in his face, making it look less weathered. Only his deep tan remained to lend an air of the great outdoors to his appearance, and I began to suspect that he owed that to a sun lamp. He looked sore as hell about something.

“He’s waiting for you in there.” He jerked his thumb toward There. “He’s been waiting all night.”

A muscle worked in his jaw. He didn’t offer me the glad hand this time out, for which I was grateful.

I said, “He knows what I’m going to say, right?”

“What he knows or doesn’t know isn’t my business. I just work for him.”

“What happened to the drawl? I thought you were from the Lone Star State, where the deer and the buffalo roam and the counties are dry all the day.”

“That’s Oklahoma. And I haven’t seen Texas in thirty-seven years.”

“You could have fooled me. Is Donophan with him?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I’d rather he weren’t.”

He chewed on that one for a moment. Then: “Get ’em up.”

I got them up. Wiley frisked me swiftly and came up empty. The Luger was in police lockup and anyway we were all friends by now, so I’d come naked. Since no one appeared eager to give me the royal escort this time around, I left them standing there and was about to knock on one of the big doors when they opened.

Merle Donophan, ugly and immovable as ever in the same too-tight black suit and strangled tie, stood to the left of the space between the doors with his right thumb hooked in his lapel. His eyes looked penciled on as before, watching me, my face and my hands, and taking them all in at once. He was a good shield. The punk with the gun in his sock must have caught him on a bad day.

“Run outside and play, Junior,” I told him. “We grownups want to talk.”

He didn’t growl at me, but he might as well have. His head sank even farther between his shoulders and the fat bands of scar tissue over his brows drew together like two sausages copulating.

“Blow, Merle,” said a voice that was nothing like a voice from the other side of the room. “If I need you I’ll holler.”

This time he did growl, but just to get me to move. I stepped aside and he left, swiveling sideways to get through the space that was wide enough for my shoulders but not his. He left the doors open. I closed them.

He was sitting in the green Lazy Boy beneath the light of the copper standing lamp, looking as if he hadn’t moved since we’d talked earlier. His shirt was probably fresh but it was the only thing that was, right down to his brown shoes, which I now noticed had no wrinkles in them, as if they had hardly been walked in. He sat with his eyes closed and head tilted back and pale hands folded like a dead man’s over the place where the swell of his stomach would have been had he still had one. With his eyes sheathed, his face looked ancient and shrunken and fallen in, the face of a mummified monkey wearing a pair of man’s eyeglasses. The air had a sickly sweetish smell of medication and decay. I waded through a pool of silence to his chair and looked down at him and waited for him to say something. He neither moved nor spoke.

I got impatient. “Who told you?” I asked.

“Please,” he said. His eyelids sprang open, revealing the swollen, viscous puddles of black. There was a mind behind them, still alive, still struggling to free itself of its weary baggage. “I may look a hundred, but I haven’t been away so long my friends don’t know me.”

“I’ll bet one of them is named Inspector Proust.”

He waved it aside, or meant to. One of his hands twitched. “I got it twice removed. I want to hear it as you saw it. Before I visit the hospital. Before I go back to Phoenix to arrange things with my lawyers. Go ahead; it won’t kill me. Heart trouble I don’t have and isn’t it a wonder.”

So I told it all over again. He watched me unwaveringly as I plodded on, even when I repeated Maria’s own version of what had happened to her after Shanks’ death and described how she’d reacted when I put a bullet through her. He didn’t close his eyes again until I had finished.

“She never said, ‘I’m sorry.’” He was speaking so low now I could scarcely hear him. His artificial larynx sounded like a truck stripping its gears. “I used to beat the hell out of her for it when she was little. She’d do something wrong, like all little girls do, but she wouldn’t apologize. Not even when it would save her a spanking. I used to think it was just mule headedness. It wasn’t. She really wasn’t sorry. She never knew what it was like to have a conscience.”

“Psychopathic, the doctors would say,” I put in. “People like that can’t even fall in love, although they might think they have from time to time. She thought she had, with Shanks. When he was killed she was just reacting automatically. Something was taken from her and she wanted to take something in return. She wouldn’t recognize Shanks now if he walked into her hospital room.”

“Did you have to shoot her?”

He was looking at me again. I returned the gaze. Finally he nodded, moving his head down and up a tenth of an inch as if he were afraid it might topple off his wasted old neck.

“Yeah, I guess you did. What’s going to happen to her now?”

“That’s up to you. You’ve probably got the pull to reduce both murder charges to second degree, or if you don’t you know someone who does, which amounts to the same thing. Maybe the judge will give her five years on each count, to run concurrently. With good behavior she could be back on the street in a couple of years. I’m hoping you care enough for her not to let that happen.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you’ll get a lawyer who’ll have her examined by psychiatrists and enter a plea that she’s not competent to stand trial. The court will have her examined anyway, but with both sides working toward the same thing it should happen. She’ll be committed to a mental institution for however long it takes to straighten out her head. Maybe that’ll take three years, maybe a lifetime. The important thing is she’ll be inside where the only people she can harm are trained attendants paid to take that risk. If that isn’t done she’ll kill again. I won’t say when. Maybe not for ten or fifteen years. But she’ll kill again as sure as winter’s coming. By then you may not be around to smooth things over.”

That didn’t cause a ripple. I hadn’t expected it to. He’d been around too long and seen too much for that. He just kept watching me with those steady black eyes that I wouldn’t have wanted to face twenty years ago. What the hell, I didn’t want to be facing them now.

“I could have you killed, you know,” he said. “For being responsible for Maria going to jail. For shooting her. I’m still not sure I shouldn’t.”

“I know that. I knew it when I came. But I came anyway, because I’d promised to report and because you owe me another two hundred dollars plus a hundred and fifty in expenses.”

“And you risked not leaving here alive for that.”

“It’s what I do. I don’t work gratis.”

He sighed. Silently; his single lung didn’t hold enough air to make much of a noise when he emptied it. His head settled wearily against the backrest. “Tell Cooke on your way out to draw you up a check for five hundred dollars. Now get out of here and leave me the hell alone.”

“That’s another thing I have to tell you about,” I said. “Paul Cooke.”

“What about him?” Testily.

“You’d better run a check of the investments he’s been making for you. He’s holding out.”

“How do you know that? I don’t doubt it’s possible. I just want to know how you know.”

“The Darling brothers told me.”

He said nothing. I went on.

“They said the Detroit porno trade is in Ben Morningstar’s pocket. They said it was common knowledge on the street. It turned out they were wrong about the trailer studio, which was all Maria’s and Rinker’s, but generalizations like that are easy to fall into when one man owns so much. I figure that if you’d known your money was behind that kind of traffic you’d have been able to pick up something on Maria’s whereabouts without my help. Besides, I know your opinion on dirty pictures and you don’t strike me as a hypocrite. You told me Cooke handles all your investments. If he didn’t tell you when all this started that you had a direct pipeline into the business Maria was mixed up in, he must have had a good reason. That he was holding out on you seemed good enough.”

“He could have helped find Maria.” He was clenching his hands slowly into fists. “He could have prevented all this. He kept his mouth shut.”

“He’s an investment counselor. Pornography is a lucrative racket. It must have stung like hell to see all that dough being made by someone else while you refused to have anything to do with it. The same thing has happened to people with licenses to handle other people’s money. Why not him?”