Silent Thunder (2 page)

“I get it. You want a ground mole.”

“Does that offend you?”

“I’d be in the wrong business if it did. I just wanted to hear you say it.”

“We’ll pay two thousand a week, first week in advance. Can you start immediately?”

“I haven’t said I’ll take the job.”

“Well?”

“I don’t know yet.”

He came away from the fireplace and stuck his hands in his pockets. He didn’t look even a little like Lincoln. “Your opinion of Reliance and the way I run it is no secret. I could tell you what I think about dog-and-pony shows like yours, but there wouldn’t be any point in it. We need each other from time to time.”

“No argument.”

“So why are you being coy?”

I drank coffee in place of the third cookie I wanted; which was a placebo for the smoke I really wanted. There were only two left in the dish, with another guest coming. “I’m as coy as a breed bull, Mr. Krell. I just want to meet the lady before I commit myself. For all I know she may have shot her husband because there wasn’t an axe handy.”

“Dear me. If lawyers felt as you do, the prison population would outnumber civilians ten to one.”

“If we’re talking about the Wayne County Jail, I think it already does.” My cup came up empty. As there didn’t seem to be any refills coming I returned it and the saucer to the table. “I don’t own much. One house, a couple of suits, a partnership with my bank in a two-year-old Chevy. And a big fat illusion about myself that I’d hate to lose. I want to meet the lady.”

“I see,” he said, sounding like he didn’t.

We were looking at each other when the doorbell rang. It works that way sometimes, even outside of novels.

A
T
K
RELL’S REQUEST
Mrs. Krell brought her in a few moments later, and nobody ever looked less like Lizzie Borden. She went medium height and not much past a hundred and ten in a tailored pink suit with a grayish cast—ashes of rose, I think they call it—over a blue silk blouse, the jacket pinched at the waist. Her hair was of that shade that can’t decide to stay blond or throw away caution and go red. She had a tan she hadn’t gotten in jail and hazel eyes, if eye color means anything in this time of tinted contact lenses. The thin chain around her neck was gold and from what I could see it was the only jewelry she wore. She looked Irish.

“Constance Thayer, Amos Walker,” Krell said.

She lent me her hand long enough to feel coolness and an instant of pressure, then called it in. Her perfume reminded me of wildflowers growing on the other side of a hill.

“Mr. Krell told me you’re a capable detective,” she said. Her voice was light, without a regional accent of any kind. “You look big enough to do the job.”

“Not next to Mr. Krell.”

Krell made a burring noise in his throat that passed for a chuckle. Large men always respond positively to comments about their size. “Let’s sit down. Can Esther get you something? Coffee?”

“Some bourbon would be nice.”

“Water? Ice? A mixer?” If a drink order at 9:00
A.M.
surprised him, he didn’t show it.

“A glass will do.” She was looking at me when she said it, and I thought I saw something; but it was still early and I was out of my head with hunger. The lemon cookies had only made it worse.

I shared the sofa with Constance Thayer while Krell made easy work of filling the love seat adjacent. She opened her purse, a blue clutch the size of a poker chip. “May I smoke?”

Krell didn’t pause five minutes. “If you must.” He shoved an empty saucer at her.

I watched her pluck a cigarette out of a gold Pall Mall package and get it burning with a slim platinum lighter. Tipping her head back to inhale she exposed the long line of her throat. There were no creases in it. I counted her rings mentally and came up with thirty.

“Before we begin,” Krell said, “and regardless of whether you decide to represent Reliance in Mrs. Thayer’s behalf, I need your promise that everything that’s said in this room will be held in absolute confidence.”

“ ‘Courtesy, efficiency, confidentiality,’ ” I quoted.

He winced. “I’m considering changing that motto. It sounds old-fashioned.”

“It always has been. And I made the promise when I agreed to come.”

“Since technically you’ll be working for Mrs. Thayer’s counsel, the privilege is legal. Of course, you might cool your heels in jail forty-eight hours waiting for the judge to agree.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve got two of the coldest heels in town.”

“The Pirates’ Oath,” Constance Thayer said. “Pass the dead cat. He didn’t move, you know.”

I said, “He didn’t?”

She shook her head minutely and used the saucer, although there weren’t any ashes yet. “I guess I saw it on TV too many times. You see it so much there you get to think you’ve really seen it. I expected him to jerk or try to get up. Well, he did jerk the first time, but it might have been just the bed swaying under him. There wasn’t that much blood. The bullets made little blue holes.”

“I heard you were bunged up at the time,” I said.

“Not so much I didn’t know what I was doing. That’s not the defense we’re using. Leslie wanted to use it, but I said no, it wasn’t true.”

“Leslie?”

“Leslie Dorrance,” Krell offered. “Mrs. Thayer’s principal attorney.”

“I read that. I just never heard anyone call him Leslie before. Not bad.”

She looked at me, and there it was again. “Is that all you can say? Most people seem to want to genuflect whenever I mention him.”

“He writes a lot of books and sells a lot of books and nobody seems to notice that most of his clients go to jail anyway. Maybe not for as long as if it was any other attorney, so I say not bad. Perry Mason spoiled my generation for the real legal profession.”

“As a matter of fact, he is planning to write a book about this case. He had me sign a release when he offered his services. What’s funny?”

She’d caught me grinning. “It’s just that if I were up for murder I wouldn’t think of it as ‘this case.’ ”

“That’s how long I’ve spent cooped up with lawyers lately. You start to talk like them.”

“How soon before you shot him did Mr. Thayer beat you the last time?”

“An hour.”

A little more smoke wouldn’t hurt Krell further. I got out a Winston and was patting my pockets for matches when Constance Thayer lit it for me with the platinum lighter. I looked at her, but it wasn’t there this time. She was just doing a fellow smoker a favor. “The law’s clear on self-defense in this state,” I said when she had put the lighter away. “There has to be immediate danger.”

“Leslie hopes to establish a new precedent. It wasn’t the first time Doyle worked me over, but it was one of the worst. Many more like it and he’d have killed me. I just didn’t want him to hit me again.” As she said it, I could see the bruises under her make-up. It didn’t matter whether they were actually there. It was in the way she spoke about being hit; her voice lost its cushion. Mrs. Krell, who had brought her bourbon while she was speaking, set it down on the coffee table and withdrew without pausing. What spouses think of the things they overhear I couldn’t begin to guess.

“What the press says about you doing dirty movies,” I said. “Is that hype?”

“No, I made two of them when I was in college in California. I was brought up to believe sex was clean, a beautiful act. I couldn’t see anything wrong with making tuition money out of it.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“They never changed the sheets.”

“The work takes a strong stomach. Walking away from it takes guts. I have to wonder why someone who could come out with her head still on would let herself get slapped around.”

“In the end, of course, I wouldn’t,” she said. “But I see what you mean. All I can say is you didn’t know Doyle. He was wonderful when he wasn’t zonked, a beautiful creature with a sensitive soul.”

“And a couple of million dollars’ worth of U.S. Army ordnance in the basement.”

“Everybody’s interested in something. He was like a little boy whenever he got a new one. They weren’t weapons to him at all, really. Just shiny baubles. I’ll never forget the day he took delivery on the German eighty-eight.” She smiled, remembering.

“Who was his connection?”

“I never knew. He’d get a call, and then I’d overhear him bargaining. He never used names.”

“You never answered when a call came in?”

“Once. Doyle grabbed the receiver from my hand when I was asking the man his name. He had a Southern accent, that’s all I remember. It was at least a year ago.”

“Black?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

I made a note. I had my pad out now. “What about when Doyle took delivery? What kind of vehicle?”

“Different ones at different times. They came to the basement door. The smaller things like the pistols and rifles came in cars, and once an old beat-up pickup truck. They delivered the heavy stuff in one of those big trucks with a canvas top, like you see in National Guard convoys on the expressway. No,” she added, before I could ask, “I never got any license numbers.”

“You and your husband had a boy, I think. Would he remember anything?”

“Jack’s away at school. I sent him. He’s not going to be involved.”

The way she said it, staring at me through the smoke from her cigarette, closed that street. “Where does Doyle Senior stand?” I asked.

“Foursquare in favor of reinstating the death penalty in Michigan. He had Doyle all primed to replace him as board chairman of Thayer Industries in a couple of years. Now he wants to get his hands on Jack. That will be a lot easier if I go away for murdering Jack’s father.”

The air was becoming thick with smoke and something else. Krell got up and slid open one of the light panels a few inches, letting in fresh air. “Leslie Dorrance has filed a motion for a change of venue,” he said. “If there’s a judge in the Detroit area that Doyle Thayer Senior hasn’t played golf with, he doesn’t play. You might want to look for a lot of heat from that quarter.”

I felt myself relaxing. Krell’s stated reason for throwing the case in my lap had been bothering me. Now I could concentrate on the interview.

“How’s chances of getting the venue changed?” I asked.

Constance Thayer laughed shortly, not a pleasant sound. “That decision is made by a judge.”

“What’s the date for the preliminary hearing?”

“July thirty-first,” Krell said. “We have three weeks.”

“Short date.” I was looking at the woman. “You make enemies with style.”

That brought a brief smile. She took one last drag at the Pall Mall and squashed it out in the bottom of the saucer. “The thing about marrying money is you can’t ever make a clean break, even by killing. If I’m found not guilty, I stand to inherit a third of Doyle Industries’ stock. That puts me in partnership with Doyle’s father.”

“You could give it up,” I said.

“No. No, I earned it. If I charged only ten dollars per black eye, I earned every penny. Also I want to have something to give Jack that he didn’t get from his grandfather.”

Krell was standing by the fireplace again. He liked to strike a pose with the portrait at his back. “What’s your decision, Walker? If it’s no I have to make some calls.”

I smoked. “I’ll take it.”

Constance Thayer said, “May I ask why?”

“Two reasons,” I said. “Well, three. I don’t like seeing anyone get ganged up on, especially a woman who’s been bounced around enough. And when you had a chance to cop a plea on grounds of diminished capacity you didn’t, on account of it wasn’t true. Anyone who’d do something that stupid has got to be telling the truth.”

She smiled again. “And the third reason?”

“You don’t want to just come out even. You want the cake and the box it came in. To me that says you’ve got the tickets not to change your mind a week before the hearing and plead guilty so that I’ve wasted two weeks.”

“That’s important to you?”

“A guy likes to think he’s doing something more than ripping pages off calendars. One question.”

“Why isn’t Leslie here?”

I nodded. Her habit of reading thoughts took some getting used to.

“He’s in New York, having lunch with his publisher. You haven’t a publisher, have you, Mr. Walker?”

I shook my head, then added, “I read a book once.”

“Cervantes?” She was enjoying the conversation.

“Blomberg.
So You Want to Be a Private Eye.
Third edition.”

“When can you start?” Krell was not enjoying the conversation.

I flipped the pad shut, killed my cigarette, and got up. “I think I already did.”

T
HE BOARD OF HEALTH
had closed down the burger place near my building, after which a delicatessen had bustled in, scoured the griddle, and named all the sandwiches after well-known Detroiters. My favorite booth had been ripped out and replaced with three tables the size of golf tees. I claimed the least wobbly of the three, had the Tommy Hearns—two fried eggs beaten to a pulp, served on toasted canvas, and vastly overrated—and went to work.

It’s an old building, but I like old buildings. There are few surprises. In my little water closet I could smoke a cigarette waiting for hot water to wheeze its way up the rusty pipes, and sitting at my desk I could tell by the chords the old boards in the hallway struck when someone passed over them if it was Rosekranz the super or the guy who sold aluminum doors over the telephone in the office next to mine or the man in the corner suite who only came in three times a week to collect his mail.

There had been changes. The building maintenance crew had paid its annual visit to my office, steam-cleaned the rug, and found a pattern. I had grown tired of looking at the framed original
Casablanca
poster across from my desk—Bogart’s stare in my direction had taken on more than its usual contempt—hung it on a different wall, and put up in its place a print of the Remington Arms Company’s painting of Custer’s Last Fight. Every time I looked at it I hoped to see the tide turning in Custer’s favor, but it hadn’t so far. Apart from that the place was the same as it had been in every other year, from the furniture that had come with the door and windows to the view of the roof of the building next door to the butterflies on the wallpaper. I liked it fine. I had my name on the door and a fresh three-year lease in the safe with my change of shirts.