Silent Thunder (17 page)

“How’d you know, Lieutenant?” he asked.

“See what else he has on him.”

I was relieved of wallet, keys, and Sturdy’s notepad wrapped in my handkerchief. I had left my own notebook in the car.

“Well, what do you know for asking?” Flask said. “He’s a private eye named Walker. And he’s loaded.”

“Give them here. Cuff him, Sergeant.”

The younger cop hooked cold metal around my left wrist, yanked it behind my back, and cuffed the right. I turned around. Romero had the Beretta in one hand and my wallet and Sturdy’s pad and the keys to the Mercury in the other.

The sergeant spoke. “Think he’s our man, Lieutenant?”

“Maybe. Stoudenmire wasn’t shot.”

“I told you he didn’t come in with the tramp.” Triumph glittered in the desk clerk’s nasty little eyes.

“Thanks for your help,” Romero said. “We’ll call you.”

The clerk pouted, but it didn’t work without lips. “You won’t tell the papers the name of the hotel. I like this job.”

“Nobody but you cares.” Romero waited.

The clerk bent to pick up my cigarette, stamped out the smoldering carpet runner, and retreated toward the stairs. The lieutenant went on waiting until the steps stopped squeaking. “What happened, Walker?” he asked then.

“It was love at first sight. I mean Corinne and the bottle.”

“You’re not talking to the chief now.”

He sounded a little hurt. It was too far past my bedtime to wonder if it was a trick. “Do we need the Praetorian Guard?”

He thought about it. “Officer, secure the front of the building,” he said. “Sergeant, call downtown, tell them we need the medical examiner and a wagon. Use the telephone in the lobby. The print men are late as always.”

“Procedure is two men with a suspect at all times,” the sergeant pointed out.

“I’ve read the manual, too.”

The sergeant moved his shoulders around disapprovingly, touched his moustache, holstered his gun, and started stairward. I made a chirping whistle in his direction and half turned, wriggling my fingers.

Romero said, “Take back your cuffs, Sergeant.”

“I just put them on.”

“That was for the clerk.”

“Procedure—”

“I’m sure you’ll tell Chief Proust all about it. He’s paying you enough to spy on me.”

He unlocked and removed the cuffs more roughly than he had applied them and took them downstairs. Flask handed me one last muddy glance and followed.

Romero tapped on the door to the room opposite Corinne’s with the Beretta’s barrel, waited, tapped again. When no one answered the second time, he produced the passkey and opened it. He motioned me in first.

It was a dusty front room with a bare mattress on an iron frame and the shade drawn over the window. The Cuban turned on the overhead light and closed the door behind him, double-locking it. There were no chairs in the room. I sat on the mattress. “Where’s your other half?”

“Pollard? We’re not joined at the hip.” He laid my things on a child’s-size writing desk with a skin of dust on top and put his hands in his pockets. Waiting.

“Who hollered cop?” I asked.

“A woman in the building. She tried calling down to the clerk to complain about the loud television in three-ten and when he didn’t wake up she called us. I recognized the room number; Stoudenmire spent more time downtown than the night cleaning crew. I thought it was worth a look. It was.”

“Whoever turned up the volume did it to cover the noise when he drowned Sturdy,” I said. “If he drowned. I found heart medicine in his pocket and in the medicine cabinet.”

“I guess that’s when your pants got wet.” It was an invitation.

“I got a bad tip a couple of days ago that he was dead,” I said. “When I heard he was alive I came here to ask him how come. Then you showed up.”

“Who told you he was dead?”

“Emma Chaney.”

“I don’t know her.”

“She sells guns in Macomb County, or did until the sheriff’s men picked her up tonight. She will again. She said she heard it around,” I lied.

“What does Stoudenmire have to do with the Thayer killing?”

“That’s the other thing I came here to find out. Ma Chaney did some gun business with Doyle Thayer Junior. Sturdy recommended her and gave young Thayer a letter of introduction.”

“I heard you were off that case.”

“I was for a while. Now I’m back on.”

“Sort of like Billy Martin.”

“The money’s smaller,” I said. “Are we going downtown or what?”

“Should we be?”

“If you’re planning to charge me with breaking into Corinne’s room. You’ll need a motive to prove murder.”

“Who has one?”

“Strictly speaking, nobody. I think he died on whoever was trying to soak information out of him in that bathtub. The autopsy will show if his heart gave out.”

“That could have happened while he was drowning.”

“Only if there’s water in his lungs. If there isn’t we’re in business.”

“Are we.”

“You’ve got his notebook. I’m holding the other cards, or at least some of them. What’s it worth to a cop in Iroquois Heights to solve the biggest case his town’s seen in years, right out from under the federal government and the Detroit Police Department, and in an election year to boot?”

“Stoudenmire isn’t that big.”

“That’s not the case I’m talking about.”

He took a lacquer box from his inside breast pocket, removed one of his long slim cigars, and set fire to it with the gunmetal lighter. Blue smoke turned in the stale air. “Mrs. Thayer has confessed to killing her husband,” he said, watching it. “Thayer Senior wants her convicted quickly and with as little noise as possible. The policeman who stirs things up won’t be a policeman long.”

“Not here. You don’t want to be an Iroquois Heights cop your whole life.”

“Sometimes it seems like I already have been.” He blew a series of rings. “I was hired through Affirmative Action. When I placed first in the sergeant’s examination they had to promote me from uniform or look bad. I made lieutenant last year when I broke an auto-theft operation involving three states and all the television stations in Detroit covered it; there was an opening and they couldn’t very well ignore me. But I make Proust worry. An honest policeman who is very good at his job is always a threat to policemen like Proust. He has people watching me on duty and off. I have to be very careful. Other officers may fudge the details. Not Romero, or he’s out. Unemployment doesn’t pay enough to buy my family’s freedom.”

“A detective’s post with a real police department would.”

“Maybe. A man may take chances, but not with his wife and daughters.”

I stood up. The air was getting thick and the cigar wasn’t Cuban. “I’m not talking about the Thayer killing, either. I mean the armed home invasions that have been taking place in the area over the past two weeks. And maybe something behind them, much bigger.”

He rested the cigar on the edge of the writing desk. “I’m listening.”

I told him it, all of it, starting with the attempt on me in the warehouse district where I had gone to meet Shooter and ending with my telephone conversation with Colonel Seabrook. He didn’t interrupt me.

“I wondered about that shooting at the fairgrounds,” he said when I’d finished. “That one went to Schiller. When Schiller was with Narcotics, he was the one they sent down in the sewer to catch the drugs when the suspect flushed them.”

I said, “He’s still pulling the same duty. Shooter kept his ear to the ground so much it had roots. I figure he caught wind of the Colonel’s action, probably the home invasions, and dealt himself in. Seabrook played him a while, then jerked him when he had the time to do it. The sloppy way his killer tried to frame me says it was the same hired hand who killed Sturdy and didn’t think to search him or his room. Sturdy had something the Colonel wants. Whatever it is it costs, because after pulling in a hundred and ten grand from the robberies he still hadn’t enough to buy it. When I declared myself a partner I forced his hand. I didn’t know then that Sturdy was out of jail. You could say I got him killed.”

“He set himself up when he got hungry. Maybe he talked before he died. That would explain why there was no search.”

“In that case we’re out of luck.”

“You keep saying
we.”

“I’m being rhetorical.”

“Like hell you are.” His Castilian reserve was beginning to flake off.

“If you were going to do this by the numbers you wouldn’t have taken me in here.”

“You read much into people you don’t know.”

“So do you. We’re trained to.”

He showed his teeth in a grin for the first time since I knew him. It wasn’t a pleasant expression.

“The system is the same everywhere. They teach you the job and then they won’t let you do it. Wherever I go I’m still a
peón.”

“Not if you won’t be one.”

“You were born with that attitude. It’s not so simple for me.”

I said nothing.

He poked among the items on the desk. At length he picked up the notepad, balanced it on his palm for a moment as if weighing it, and held it out, still wrapped. “Your handkerchief, I think.”

I took it. “What are you going to tell the others?”

“I don’t have to tell them anything. I’m the ranking officer on the scene. Wait until the morgue crew gets here before you leave. I’ll have different uniforms downstairs by then.” He opened the door.

“Can I expect you Monday morning at eight-thirty?”

“I’ll be free.” He went out into the hall and closed the door behind him.

W
HERE DO YOU GO
when you’re asleep on your feet and you can’t go home?

The system has an answer. You can go to a hotel, motel, an inn, or the mission, where you’re advised to sleep with your shoes on lest you lose them to a roach who wears your size. The hotels have room service, the motels have vending machines on every floor, the inns have country charm in bales, including antique bedpans which if you’re caught using one you get tossed out on your bladder. You can get a single room or a double, or maybe a suite with a refrigerator and a cabinet stocked with liquor in little plastic bottles like the airlines sell, with a door that makes a cash register ring somewhere every time it’s opened. You can get poolside, outside, no side; a corner room by a busy elevator or a shoebox between the ice machine and a room full of AA dropouts having a party; single bed, double bed, queen size, king, where you need a compass to find your way out and no reminder—if you ever needed one to begin with—that you’re all alone in a bed that could sleep a family of Cuban refugees. (I had Cuba on my mind for some reason.) Closed-circuit television, cable television, or just television, but always television, except in the fleabags; and even some of them have radios, connected to the baseboards with cables as thick as your wrist. The big chains equip the bathrooms with moisturizers and shampoos. The mom-and-pop places hang Handi-wipes over the sinks in place of towels and washcloths. The fleabags have no private bathrooms, just a community closet on each floor with a sink, a toilet, and a shower, and no lock on the door in case somebody hangs himself from an exposed pipe.

There are as many kinds of places to stay as there are people to stay in them, and every one of them smells to varying degrees of mildew and suitcases and daylight sex. If you strung out all the neon from all the motels on all the strips in all the cities of North America you’d have enough to wrap the world twice around in a glowing pink tube with some left over to twist into script reading vacancy for the benefit of weary interplanetary travelers—but they’d better bring their own soap, because you can lose one of those toy cakes in an armpit. At every hour of every day and night someone is on his way somewhere, and everyone needs a place to sleep. I was in the wrong business.

I wound up in the same place I’d stayed the day before. It was the same room, although the number on the door was different and it was on a different floor. Everything was the same, except this time I didn’t have a bottle for a roommate.

That was deliberate. The local Meijer’s was open twenty-four hours. I’d bought a shirt, pants, socks, a change of underwear, a jacket to cover the gun, and a razor, then stepped into the supermarket section to buy a roast beef sandwich at the deli counter. The liquor section was next to it and I thought about it, all those lovely bottles in provocative shapes with attractive labels and contents ranging from liquid-diamond transparency to golden amber; but when liquor starts to look better than a woman’s calf or a frisky pup, one drink leads to eighteen, and I couldn’t afford to lose all of Sunday. I got a pint of milk instead. Aesthetically there was no comparison.

I ate the sandwich in the room and washed it down with milk over Sturdy’s notebook. It wasn’t any use. Even the dry pages were starting to blur. I considered a long bath, but kept seeing Sturdy in the tub, so I showered off Macomb County and Iroquois Heights, put on the clean underwear, and turned in. I dreamed Sheriff’s Investigator Galvin was trying to drown me in a glass of Southern Comfort. I didn’t seem to be struggling too hard.

Four hours later I shaved and dressed and brought a steaming Styrofoam cup back with me from the coffee shop and tried again. Late-morning sunlight was canting in through the glass doors leading to the balcony. I was clean and rested and the headache was better, but what I was reading didn’t make much more sense than it had before I went to bed.

The first six pages were stuck together, and when I got them apart finally I was looking at indecipherable smudges. The last half of the pad, and the dryest, was blank. This left eight relatively legible pages covered with Sturdy’s neat round schoolboy script. The notations weren’t coded, but they might as well have been. They consisted of a series of surnames followed by numbers that might have been times, possibly of appointments. I recognized the name of a well-known local Lithuanian antique dealer—there couldn’t be two walking around in the area with a mouthful of letters like that—and two or three others, more common, that were shared by bric-a-brac retailers in and near Detroit. None of it meant anything in a court of law, although considering Sturdy’s trade it raised some questions about their legitimacy, as what else was new. I didn’t figure it was worth killing him over. One name in particular caught my eye, both because it appeared to be a Christian, not a last, name, and because it was underlined. The number following it was 10:07. Whether it was a.m. or p.m. and what date it was for had gone to rest with the man who had written it. Myrtle was the name.