Silent Thunder (8 page)

“Doyle gave me the jewelry. I had a right to sell it and I have a right to use the money as I see fit.”

“That’s how you see it. The other side will say you’d been deceiving Doyle for months and were afraid he’d catch on. Then they’ll use his history of wife-beating against you. They might even say you’d been planning to kill him all that time, that you were preparing a getaway stake. Given the time lapse between your last workover and when you shot him, your self-defense plea is already too shaky to withstand that kind of reasoning.”

“They won’t know about it. Unless you tell them.”

I scribbled four names on my telephone pad, tore off the sheet, and slid it across the desk. “Is one of these the jeweler you sold the stuff to?”

She looked at the sheet. Her expression said it all.

“What you’ve been doing isn’t new,” I said. “Those four specialize in buying jewelry from housewives in Grosse Pointe, Bloomfield Hills, and the Heights, making good copies, and reselling the originals outside the state. That last part’s important. Their sources can’t afford to have the diamond choker Hubby gave them last Christmas show up in the local stores on Valentine’s Day.” I pointed at the money order. “That’s your maiden name?”

She hesitated, then nodded.

“If Cecil Fish, who is the Iroquois Heights prosecutor, hasn’t run your married and maiden names and every possible combination past every bank in the area in search of a secret account, he’s a lot more stupid than he was the last time I saw him. By now he knows about the money, has put two and two together, which is what two and two are for, and is already working on those four names. Crooked politicians aren’t always dumb. Not even usually.”

The speech had had its effect. Her fingers shook a little when she took the pack of Pall Malls out of her handbag and put one to her lips.

“That’s the trouble with being basically honest.” I lit it for her. “When you do get tricky you haven’t had any practice.”

She blew smoke deliberately at the money order. “Do you think it was a getaway stake?”

“It doesn’t make any difference what I think. People are always asking anyway.”

“Well, that’s just what it was. I was getting set to run. I had no chance of taking our son with me if we divorced; Doyle’s father would’ve seen to that. Without me around to hit, it would be just a matter of time before Doyle got zonked enough to hurt Jack. The money was for us to get away and to live on until I found a job somewhere else, under another name.”

“What kind of a job?”

It must have come out differently from the way I’d intended. Anyway her hazel eyes got hard.

“I’d make films again if I had to. You do what you can to survive. When it’s you and your son you do more.”

“Why didn’t you run?”

“I should have. I didn’t.” She used my ashtray. “I told myself I wasn’t ready, that I needed more money to be truly secure. That’s the kind of trap you get into when you go to live in a big house where someone else pays the bills. I’d probably still be there, playing the good wife during the week and selling pearls on Saturday, if that one night he hadn’t beat me so hard I’m still passing blood.

“No, I’m not a coward, Mr. Walker. No more than most. I’m not courageous either. Or I wasn’t, until that night.”

I looked at the money order. I still hadn’t touched it. “Did you see anyone following you here?”

“No one followed me.”

“Sure they did. You’ve had a tail on you since you made bail. That’s how it works. Well, if the law has access to your bank records they know about this money order and who it’s for, so it doesn’t much matter. Tell Dorrance about the account. And tell him I’m back on the case.”

“Are
you back on the case?”

I picked up the money order and put it in the top drawer of the desk. “It’s more than I ask for in a retainer, but the expenses are running high on this one. If there’s anything left when the thing is done, you’ll get it back, minus my day rate.”

“Can you start right away?”

“I never stopped.”

The look I’d seen before came into her eyes then. I cut her off.

“Don’t put on the cap and veil just yet, Mrs. Thayer. It so happened I had nothing to do this morning and no bills to pay. I’m not in the hero business.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that you were.” She put a hand on one of mine. It was cool and dry as before. “Thank you.”

“Where can I reach you?”

She picked up the pencil I’d used before and wrote a Redford address and telephone number on my pad. Then she rose. “I hope Leslie doesn’t quit when I tell him.”

“He wouldn’t quit this one if you confessed to first-degree murder on
Donahue.”
I got up to let her out.

When the outer door closed behind her, I went back to the desk and finished my drink. Then I poured myself another without water and read the money order. It had a lot of zeroes, just like the case so far. After a while I put it in my wallet and left for my bank, where the girl behind the counter smiled at me for the first time in two days.

From there it was only a block to the party store where Marcus worked. In the storeroom I mopped the back of my neck with a handkerchief and watched him stacking crates of bottles until he had time to pull a copy of last night’s
News
out of a pile. I gave him two bucks.

“You know, Mr. Walker, you can get that free if you ask up front.” Today he had on a yellow T-shirt, dark with sweat, with a Monster truck rampant on his chest.

“Yeah, but then I wouldn’t get to come back here and read your clothes.”

“You after a killer?”

“Actually, I’m working for one.”

Outside the store I unfolded the paper and looked at the lower right-hand corner. The item that Ma Chaney had clipped out of her copy and stuck in a pocket ran a column and a half, with a double heading:

FIFTH AREA HOME INVADED

Intruders Threaten Couple with Automatic Weapons

T
HE SIDEWALK WAS
no place to give the article any concentration, but I wasn’t ready to go back to the office. I folded the paper and carried it to the little lot where I parked my car. Sitting there sweating in the sun with all four windows open, I read it.

Police have linked the armed invasion of a house in the 1600 block of Pembroke last night with four previous robberies conducted in the Detroit metropolitan area over the past two weeks.

Shortly after 8:00 p.m. yesterday, police said, four men in ski masks and armed with light automatic rifles burst through the front door of a house occupied by Dr. Anton Juracik and his wife Marian and threatened to kill the couple if they did not surrender all the cash and drugs in the house. When Dr. Juracik resisted, one of the intruders struck him in the face with the butt of his weapon, knocking him unconscious, police said.

According to police, Mrs. Juracik then turned over an undisclosed amount of cash, whereupon she was struck on the side of the head with a blunt instrument which police believe to have been either the barrel or the butt of an automatic rifle. Police said the bandits then ransacked the house and left with a videocassette recorder, two color television sets, a number of stereo components, and jewelry valued at $18,500.

Dr. Juracik was treated for a broken nose at Detroit General Hospital and released later in the evening. Mrs. Juracik remains in critical condition there with a fractured skull and a severe concussion.

“This robbery is definitely connected with similar actions which occurred in Detroit, Grosse Point, Iroquois Heights, and Flatrock within the last two weeks,” reported Inspector John Alderdyce of the Detroit Police Department, who has been placed in charge of the investigation. “The police of all four communities are cooperating in this effort and we have a number of definite leads.”

The article, which continued inside the first section, recapped the four previous robberies, including a casualty count of six injured homeowners and an estimated take totaling $110,000.

Alderdyce’s statement was half lie and half sin of omission. The police of four neighboring communities couldn’t cooperate in the same life raft, and the “definite leads” would number around ten thousand. I read the article again, then put the paper back together and tossed it into the back seat.

Despite her taste in clothes, make-up, furniture, and personnel, Ma Chaney was fastidious. She wouldn’t save an article just because it caught her eye, but she’d be the type to keep a record. The targets of the five home invasions, all located in high-income neighborhoods and belonging to professional people approaching middle age, hadn’t been chosen at random. The careful planning extended to the choice of weapons, full automatic rifles instead of the usual run of cheap revolvers and pump shotguns. You don’t buy military assault weapons behind a diner on Sherman. For that you go to Macomb County.

I was weighing the pluses and minuses of going back there myself when the door on the passenger’s side opened and a man climbed in beside me. He was slender, in an unlined powder-blue jacket and white duck pants that made him look cool despite the heat, and a cocoa straw hat with a narrow brim turned down in front. He had a thin,
café au lait
face with a mealy complexion and one of those pencil moustaches that would have looked more at home, like the man himself, with an all-white drill suit and a pitcher of margaritas on a verandah overlooking a firing squad.

“Amos Walker, I think.” He had a slight, almost too slight, Latin accent. It had been worked on, then allowed to slip back, possibly in a fit of ethnic pride.

“Is that a question?”

“I’m Lieutenant Philip Romero. My chief would like to speak with you.”

“Which chief would that be?”

He unbuttoned his jacket, exposing a bone-handled .38 in a holster with a gold shield pinned to it bearing the elaborate old-fashioned Iroquois Heights city seal.

“Oh,” I said. “That chief.”

L
IEUTENANT
R
OMERO
indicated a man in uniform standing next to the car on the driver’s side. “That’s Officer Pollard. He’ll drive our car back while I ride with you. Unless you’d rather leave yours here.”

Somehow I knew before I looked that Pollard would have a crew cut and Ray-Bans. “We met yesterday,” I said. “What’s the charge?”

“No charge. This isn’t an arrest. It would just be a lot more convenient all around if you’d come with us.”

“If that’s a threat you did it nicely.”

“When I make a threat, people don’t ask me if I made one.” He was waiting for an answer.

“I’ll drive.”

He shrugged; eloquently, of course. Where he came from shrugging is an art form.

Pollard got into an unmarked Pontiac parked in the next aisle and I started the Chevy. Romero wound up the window on his side.

“No air conditioning, sorry,” I said.

“Don’t need it. Take I-75.”

We tooled along Grand River with the Pontiac behind. “Puerto Rico, right?”

“We’re all Puerto Ricans to you Anglos. I came with the boatlift.”

“It’s a long way from Mariel to a gold shield in Iroquois Heights.”

“We aren’t all convicts. Some of us are baseball players.”

“I thought you looked like a shortstop.”

“Catcher. I was scouted for the Tigers.” There was pride in his voice. “Ah, but you can’t feed your children on a boy’s dreams.”

“Lousy batting average, huh.”

“Worst in Toledo.”

We didn’t say much once we entered the expressway. It was Friday afternoon and all the lanes were clogged with RV’s and boats on trailers pointed north. I lost sight of the Pontiac.

“Take the next exit,” Romero said.

“That’s the wrong way for downtown.”

“I know it.”

With him directing we followed a narrow paved road west of Iroquois Heights past a couple of shopping centers and then some houses. After a while the houses thinned out and we ran out of pavement. From there on, our way led between deep woods on both sides, with here and there a farm hacked out of the foliage. Crawling waves of heat flooded the hills ahead with imaginary pools of water. The Pontiac was visible now in the dust clouds behind us.

“Turn in here.”

We had been traveling for three quarters of an hour. I swung around a dusty unmarked mailbox and followed two ruts through a stand of virgin pines with trunks nearly as big around as the car, over a hill, and into a clearing where a long white house with bottle-green shutters stood on ten acres of fresh sod. A large red barn loomed behind it and horses grazed inside whitewashed fences between the buildings.

We stopped in front of the house. Pollard braked behind us and our combined dust drifted forward and disappeared into the grass. As we were getting out, a rider who had been cantering a big chestnut around one of the corrals leaned down, unlatched the gate, and trotted up to the Chevy. It was Mark Proust, the Iroquois Heights deputy chief of police.

“Any trouble?” he asked Romero.

“No.”

“I’ll see you inside.”

Gathering the reins, Proust looked down at me for the first time. He looked much older than he had the last time we’d met, his white hair thinner, his face grayer and more pouchy; but then I was used to seeing him in a business suit. He appeared thicker but strangely fit in an open-necked shirt, whipcord breeches, and knee-length boots. He turned the horse and cantered back toward the corral without a word in my direction. Lieutenant Romero and I watched.

“How long you figure he sat in that saddle waiting for us?” I asked.

“Horas.”
The lieutenant made a hoarse noise in his throat. “Hours.”

Inside, a Hispanic maid in a white starched blouse and an orange skirt led us into a sun-drenched living room full of rustic furniture, exchanged pleasantries with Romero in Spanish, and left us.

“When did he get the ranch bug?” I asked.

“About the time his first granddaughter graduated high school.”

Pollard said nothing. His uniform creaked when he shifted his weight. I looked at a recent painting over the fireplace of Proust in his riding clothes.