Peeper (7 page)

She cackled. It sounded like someone pulling nails. “Well, now, I guess it might be at that. And this here's beef Wellington for supper.” She pulled a dead rat out of a sweater pocket and dangled it by its tail.

“You going to
eat
that?” He shrank from it.

“I'll let you have a bite if you'll give me them pants.”

He bent down to pull them up. Blackness overtook him and he grabbed the dash to keep from rapping his head against it. The glove compartment popped open. The old woman lunged for the flat pint bottle that came sliding out, but he caught it first. He unscrewed the cap and took a long pull. As the heat climbed his belly, he thought about Neal English expecting his call at eight o'clock and peered at his wrist in the moonlight. It was bare.

“Gimme my watch.”

“Ain't got no watch.” The old woman's face became a caricature of craft.

He held out the bottle. When she grasped at it, he hung on. She shrugged, mounted an excavation inside her clothes, and came up with Ralph's Timex.

“Takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Only it don't keep time for shit.” She held it against her breasts.

Ralph proffered the bottle again. “One swallow.”

She gave him the watch then and took the bottle in both hands. He held on while she tilted it. The bourbon spilled over her chin and down inside her sweaters. He wrenched it free, started to lift it again to his lips, looked at the neck, and gave it to her. In seconds she and the bottle were gone out the open door on the driver's side.

He put on the watch and turned its face into the light. It read 8:37. “Shit.” He pulled up his pants carefully, noticing as he did so that two of the pockets were turned out, slid over behind the wheel, and slammed the door. The key was in the ignition. He started the motor and turned on the lights. In front of him a large headstone sprang into view reading
FUCHT
. He swung the car out into Mt. Elliott Street. It was one of Detroit's worst blocks, home to street gangs, crack peddlers, and prostitutes, a far cry from Bishop Steelcase's study. Even Carpenter must have stepped lively after driving Ralph all that way.

Ralph's thoughts were still fuzzy. Whatever the bishop had slipped him, it must have been in the hollow stem of his glass before it was filled, because Ralph had been watching him too closely during the pouring and had waited until the bishop drank from his own glass before committing himself. He didn't know what they had thought to accomplish by drugging him, but he wished he knew what the stuff was called, because it had restored his memory. He now knew every place he'd been the night before. As it turned out, he'd had a great time.

He drove several blocks before he found a telephone that looked safe, inside the entrance of a drugstore that was offering a ten percent rebate on condoms and pantyhose. He parked the Riviera where he could keep an eye on it and called Neal's office. When there was no answer he got his home number from Information.

“Hello?”

“Neal, this is Ralph.”

“Go away.”

“Quit kidding around. You didn't send that stuff to the cops yet, did you?”

“What stuff?”

“The film, for chrissake!”

“Oh, that. No, I still got it.”

“Jesus, that's a relief. How come?”

“How come what?”

“If you didn't hear from me by eight you were supposed to send the film to the cops. What stopped you?”

“You didn't say that.”

“I didn't figure I had to. That's the whole reason I had you hold it, in case someone wanted to croak me.”

“You don't sound croaked.”

“That ain't the point! What's the good of having somebody hold the evidence if he don't do like he's supposed to?”

“You get the money?”

“I got doped.”

“The bishop slipped you a mickey?”

“There I was, guzzling wine and talking about Charlemagne, and the next thing I know a bag lady's taking off my pants in the cemetery.”

“Just like in the public-service announcements.”

“Listen, if you don't hear from me in twenty-four hours, stick that film in an envelope and send it to a guy named O'Leary at police headquarters. He's with Arson.”

“When do I get my cut?”

“Neal, if it comes to you sending O'Leary that film, I'll be too dead to give it to you.”

“Hell, I can't lose.” The line clicked and buzzed.

Ralph hung up, turned to leave, then remembered Vinnie. The landlord had given him until that night to decide whether to cut him in on his action, then he was going to the cops. Ralph dialed the adult bookstore, then Vinnie's apartment. He let both phones ring eighteen times before giving up.

Vinnie never left the building and rarely ventured above the ground floor. Where could he be?

“The cophouse.” Ralph hurried out of the drugstore and spun the Riviera's wheels.

Vinnie didn't own a car—had never learned to drive, in fact, and was too cheap to ride in taxis. Buses didn't run at night. If he was on his way to Detroit Police Headquarters on Beaubien, Ralph would see him on the street. He took that route to his building.

None of the pedestrians he spotted on the way had Vinnie's bald head or cartoony walk. Ralph thought he saw him once, but it turned out to be an inflatable doll someone had leaned against a pile of garbage bags on John R. The streets were full of bums with bladder-control problems—Christmas was too far away for them to be called “the homeless”—and youths looking for telephone booths to vandalize. The bad element stayed indoors during brisk weather.

The bookstore was dark, with the Closed sign in the window over Harry Reems's crotch. Ralph pulled into the space where Carpenter's station wagon had been early that morning and bounded into the foyer next door. The security buzzer hadn't worked since Nixon.

The door to Vinnie's apartment was locked. Ralph knocked, waited, then slipped the lock with the celluloid window from his wallet that displayed a picture of Tom Wopat. The layout consisted of a bedroom, bathroom, and living room with kitchenette—sparsely furnished, almost antiseptically clean, and containing nothing that couldn't appear in a Disney film. At work in the bookstore, Vinnie read Fu Manchu novels and played one-handed pinochle. The smart money in the building said he had never had his cork popped, nor wanted to. Vinnie's wife was in California six months out of the year, making 16-mm films for the Battlefield Production Company and posing for those ballpoint pens that presented lessons in the female anatomy when turned upside down. Ralph could only guess at their relations when they shared the place.

No Vinnie.

Ralph drank a bottle of Bartles & Jaymes wine cooler he found in the refrigerator, helped himself to a cut-crystal salt shaker Vinnie would never miss, and sat down to think. The residue of the bishop's wine made his thoughts come slowly and in ragged order, like a line of cars crossing a stop street. It wasn't like Vinnie to go to the cops without hearing from Ralph first. It wasn't like Vinnie to go to the cops, period; especially when there was money to be made by not going. Not doing something and getting paid for it was Landlords' Heaven.

Wondering if he might be in Lyla Dane's apartment figuring how to jack up the damages for the insurance company, Ralph mined himself out of the horsehair sofa, locked up (the building was full of thieves), and climbed the stairs to the third floor. The hallway smelled of smoke and firemen's rubber boots.

No Vinnie there either. The door to the apartment, what was left of it, was closed, with a yellow seal taped across it reading
POLICE CRIME SCENE—KEEP OUT
.

Ralph went down to his floor. There was a chance Vinnie was waiting for him in his apartment. He wouldn't even really need his passkey, thanks to Tyrell the fireman and his little chop for whores.

Ralph's first thought when he opened the shattered door was that he hadn't noticed how messy his housekeeping had gotten lately. Then he saw the stuffing from the slashed sofa cushions among the broken, torn, and overturned bric-a-brac, and he mulled that over for a drug-induced minute. Very slowly he remembered finding his pockets turned out in Mt. Elliott Cemetery, and the way the disarranged contents of his glove compartment had spat out the pint of bourbon when the lid popped open. The bag lady wouldn't have done all that without taking the bottle and his wallet.

Carpenter would have.

He knew then why he'd been drugged.

At that moment, a lucid Ralph would have started running and not stopped this side of Eight Mile Road. For all Carpenter's resemblance to a Christian from the catacombs, he would not be likely to forgive being interrupted before finishing the job Vinnie had started. A befogged Ralph looked around for a weapon. He hadn't seen his revolver since August, when it came back from the gunsmith's shop with new grips after that time he'd caught it on an escalator railing at the Northland Hudson's and almost shot off his right ham. He pulled the loose leg off the capsized coffee table, fisting it like a club, and charged into the bedroom. Inside the door he tripped, clawed for balance, and knocked himself cold with the makeshift bludgeon.

When he came around moments later, he was staring up at the burning bulb of one of the lamps he had adjusted to illuminate Monsignor Breame during the photo session that morning. It appeared to be glaring back with a cyclopean intensity, and for a moment (it must have been the company he was keeping) he thought that he had come to Judgment. He put a hand down to push himself into a sitting position, stuck it with the nail from the coffee table leg, sucked at the stigmata, and looked at Vinnie. Vinnie was what had tripped him.

The landlord was sprawled on his back on the floor in a cartoon attitude, arms and legs splayed and his sweatshirt ridden up to expose his round hairless belly. His round eyes were wide open, his mouth a perfect O with his tongue sticking out of it, his naked scalp throwing off light from the lamp. A green polyester tie with orange planets on it was knotted around his neck, the knot sunk deep in fat. It was Ralph's lucky tie.

Chapter 9

“'Eevening, Mrs. Gelatto,” Ralph said.

The old woman in the babushka and black leather jacket paused on her way downstairs, fished her glasses out of her purse, and peered through them at Ralph. “Oh, it's you. Who's that with you?”

“Just a friend.” He leaned harder into Vinnie's sagging frame to keep it from sliding into a heap on the landing.

“Mr. Capablanca, ain't it?” she said. “You was supposed to come up and fix my faucet a week ago. Don't you stick your tongue out at me, young man.”

After removing the strangling necktie with difficulty, Ralph had tried pushing Vinnie's swollen tongue back inside his mouth, but it kept popping out. Ralph said, “He's just got a little stomach flu. I'm taking him out for air.”

“Pickles is the thing for that. They absorb all the poisons. Mr. Gelatto—”

“Smelled like Vlasic. You told me, Mrs. Gelatto. Ain't you on your way to work?”

“I know that. I was scrubbing floors when you was crawling on them.”

“No argument. Good night, Mrs. Gelatto.”

“Terrible thing, what happened to that woman on my floor.”

“Sure was. Terrible thing.” His shoulder was going to sleep.

“Mr. Gelatto wouldn't have gas in the house. He had plenty in bed, though. It was all them pickles. Hee-hee.”

“Ha-ha. Well, good night.”

“Get your friend home okay this morning?”

“Yeah. He needed rest, was all. He's resting now.”

“Mr. Capablanca don't look no better than he did. You boys got to stop living so high.”

“I expect Vinnie will. Good night, Mrs. Gelatto.”

“Don't forget that faucet.”

“I'll remind him.”

She toddled past them and down. Ralph waited until he heard the street door slam, then pulled Vinnie's arm back across his shoulders and descended the stairs a step at a time; his feet first, then Vinnie's. The landlord was a lot lighter than Monsignor Breame, but with the monsignor Ralph had had Carpenter's help. Also, the earlier hour made for more haste if he was to avoid being seen by any more tenants. Mrs. Gelatto didn't count. Ralph had considered waiting past midnight, but he knew the limits of his nerve, and they didn't include a long vigil in his own apartment with a man who had been murdered with Ralph's own necktie. Fortunately, he hadn't as many flights to negotiate this trip. One or two more corpses and he'd have the routine down cold.

He reached the foyer without further incident and parked Vinnie on the bottom step while he used the window from his wallet to slip the lock on Vinnie's door once again. Inside, he dumped the landlord on the living room floor, arranged his arms and legs in roughly the same position he'd found them in, and went through the apartment carefully smearing everything he'd touched on his last visit. Items wiped clean of prints attracted almost as much cop suspicion as a decent print. Reluctantly he took the crystal salt shaker out of his pocket, rubbed it between his palms, and returned it to its place on the table in the dining nook. Someone knocked on the door.

“Mr. Capablanca? Vinnie Capablanca?”

Ralph froze. The voice belonged to O'Leary, the arson investigator.

“Is anybody home?” He knocked again.

Ralph stood over the splayed body, not breathing, as the doorknob began to turn. He couldn't remember if he'd locked the door behind him.

The knob stopped turning. Someone rattled it. After that there was a long silence, during which Ralph wanted a drink. He became nostalgic for the farting dog at Richard's. He was afraid even to shift his weight because of the squeaky floorboards. It would be just like a sneaky cop to slip the lock.

Finally he heard footsteps withdrawing. The staircase creaked as someone climbed it.