The Hours of the Virgin (14 page)

I don't know why I thought of it. At Christmas I'd surprised myself with the gift of a VCR, the dividend from a credit check I'd given up on getting paid for until the mail came on December 23rd, and I started thinking about Dale and his comic strips while standing in the classics section of the video store two streets from my house, three minutes to closing on the way back from Grosse Ile. The movie I was thinking of renting was
The Harder They Fall
, which didn't belong to the same world as Nancy and Sluggo. I wound up renting
The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle
and watched it straight through at home without taking off my coat. It didn't help, although Mr. Peabody reminded me a little of Gordon Strangeways.

Watching Boris and Natasha getting ready to roll a boulder onto Frostbite Falls, I wondered what Laurel Strangeways and Earl North had in common besides hot blood, and what it had to do with Harold Boyette and the Hours of the Virgin. This was no more successful than the boulder. While the tape rewound I mixed a drink and poured it into the vacuum, but that was no good either, so I poured another one on top of it and turned in. I dreamed I was married to a woman named Blondie and working for a man named Dithers, who was depending on me to do something important, but I was too busy making giant sandwiches and tripping over the mailman to hear what it was. Every time I opened my mouth to say something, Dudley Do-Right's tenor came piping out. When I woke up I was grateful I hadn't rented
Scream
.

The next morning was Saturday. The sky was the color of crude but there was no sign of snow or freezing rain. I stayed in and read the paper, sucking on a cough drop. You can't make bricks without clay and I was fresh out. There was nothing on any page about anyone I knew or anything I was connected with, unless it was in the comics section, and for once I skipped that.

In the afternoon I walked to the video store and returned the tape. I checked the classics section but it looked like a meat locker to a vegetarian. I knew everything there by heart. All the titles in New Releases either had Roman numerals or starred someone from
Saturday Night Live
. I walked home through the iron cold and watched a bowling tournament. That sparked the question of which was sadder, being a professional bowler or watching one on TV. Saturday, what a day.

Sunday I had coffee and half a grapefruit for breakfast. I hate grapefruit, but I wasn't sure when I'd have lunch and didn't want my blood supply messing around with a load of eggs and sausages in my stomach when I needed it in my brain. I had awakened with a mission.

I put on jeans, boots with felt liners, a heavy cable-knit sweater from my hunting days, a navy peacoat, and a hat with not much shape in the crown but plenty of brim, big and soft enough to pull down over my ears if the wind came up. The Smith & Wesson fit in a coat pocket. I felt like Boris Badenov. Frost made white cobwebs of the cracks in the asphalt and crunched like tiny ribcages under the Cutlass' tires.

Mullett Street had changed in the years since I'd had any business there, but neither up nor down, only sideways. The city had knocked down some crack houses but put up nothing in their place, so the druggies had to do their dealing in empty lots with weeds tickling their ears. The adult theater had moved out of the truss building on the corner and a massage parlor and escort service had moved in. The sign in the window said
OPEN
but the front door was padlocked. The remains of a cease-and-desist order from Detroit Recorder's Court fluttered from the frame. The paper had outlived the body that had issued it. In a little while someone would smash the window and turn the building into a trysting place, with or without the consent of his companions. Progress. Across from it a municipal basketball court languished inside a chainlink fence with a locked gate, thistles growing through holes in the pavement. Shotgun pellets had punched morsels of daylight through the steel sign bearing the old mayor's name. Look on my works, ye mighty.

Before it was a basketball court it had been the Grand Marquis Hotel. Before that it had been the American Eagle Motor Lodge and before that, in a time of reduced circumspection, it had been the X-T-C Retreat, complete with parallel bars in every room and a costume rental shop in the lobby. It was the American Eagle the night Dale Leopold followed Earl North there from the offices of Paul Bunyan Mutual Life and Property in the National Bank Building downtown, where the subject earned his salary supervising the transfer of the company's files from cardboard folders in steel cabinets to its new mainframe computer.

Dale never wrote anything down for anyone but himself to read, but from the bits of paper covered with his crabbed common-law shorthand found on his body and in his desk, it wasn't the first trip there for either of them. Detroit Vice had nothing on the name “Star LaJoie” found among the notes, and a hooker sweep by Homicide drew only vague descriptions of a teenage female caucasian without outstanding physical characteristics. Whether she was the one North kept company with or just another source of information in the network of grifters, pushers, shopping-cart ladies, cigarette-smugglers, and concrete concubines Dale liked to call his Baker Street Irregulars, the notes didn't say. The Eagle night clerk, a methadone addict whose window faced a narrow lobby lit by a fifteen-watt bulb, told the city detectives that the only thing all of Star's gentleman friends had in common was a tendency to stand in the shadows while she paid for the room. She'd been in three times that night and he hadn't seen any of them well enough to furnish a description. He said. Forty-eight hours in holding without a needle to his name might have leeched a different story out of him, but it wouldn't have stood in court, and anyway he OD's a month later on an uncommonly rich heroin mixture that was floating around the city, and then he was doing his talking for ears that had heard it all.

Star wasn't around to ask either. The Detroit Major Crimes Division, then made up almost entirely of veterans of the late controversial STRESS crackdown unit, which included friends of Dale's, filed copies of all the prints and partials they'd managed to lift from the room she'd used that night, including three they couldn't match. None of the prostitutes they interviewed could recall having seen Star since the night of the shooting. Encouraged to guess, one or two remembered she usually caught a train that time of year to work the southbound convention trade, making back her fare in the sleepers on the way. Circulars went out to all the larger police organizations between Toledo and Key West. Sometime after that a sergeant named Richman drove down to Raleigh, North Carolina, matched one of the unknown Detroit prints to the body of an unidentified young woman found stuffed in a county storm drain with her throat slashed, and Star LaJoie's file was pulled from the drawer marked
MISSING
.

Evidence found at the scene helped convict a suspect in six rape-murders committed in three southern states over a period of a year and a half. Meanwhile North's wife alibied him for the night of the shooting and the case went away. In time even Dale's friends forgot.

All except one.

Mullett was quiet on a Sunday morning. It's generally quiet in that continent-without-boundaries that's called the Neighborhoods, regardless of the day or hour; not like Hollywood's idea of a ghetto with its teeming streets and squalling children. Each block is a separate country with its own laws and government, and since no passports are honored, a foot trip anywhere is made under penalty of death. There hadn't been any gang activity in that area in a while, but the longer that went on, the greater the risk. Everything that was there was necessary. Nothing that was there was beautiful. The cement fronts of the stores were as blank as the faces of convicts in lock step. The paint on those houses that had paint was just something to protect the wood from the weather. A generation of children had come to majority—or died short of it—never having seen a view through a window that hadn't been mitred into grids by tungsten bars. The place was done in a thousand shades and all of them were gray. It needed Ted Turner.

The officers who answered an anonymous tip that night had found Dale bleeding on the sidewalk with his head on the edge of a burned-out lawn belonging to a frame house with its shades down. He'd lost a gallon of blood by the time the EMS unit came and hadn't regained consciousness when they put him in the ambulance. He had three .32 slugs in his chest and stomach—not much penetration power, but one had pierced a major artery. The bullets had come from just the sort of lightweight piece a computer expert might carry when visiting a place like Mullett Street late at night. Of course a search warrant turned up no such weapon and no record surfaced of Earl North's ever having purchased a gun of any kind; but guns without pedigrees are as hard to buy in Detroit as stolen tape decks. Dale's car was found the next day parked around the corner with his .45 locked in the glove compartment.

Kid, the only thing wrong with knowing as much as I do about living is I got no excuse for dying
.

It was still dark when the call had come through—the place marked
NEXT OF KIN
in Dale's old personnel file at the sheriff's department had more strikeovers than a Teamster with a short memory, and his daughter was hitching her way across Europe—and when I drove up, the strobes mounted on top of the parked cruisers were making their own dawn. The chalk line was fresh. I'd just missed the ambulance. I was talking to a young plainclothesman named Battle when the report from Receiving Hospital came over the radio in his unmarked unit. He acknowledged it and returned the microphone to its hook.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. “I don't feel anything yet.”

“It'll come. It's like stubbing your big toe. They'll want you down at County tomorrow for the positive.”

“Did you know him?”

“Everybody downtown knew him. There aren't a lot left like him. Class of Forty-five, you know?”

“I know.”

Twenty years of rain had washed away the chalk, but not the rusty stain. That had soaked deep into the porous concrete and would remain there until the earth finished reclaiming it, as it had begun to do, crumbling the corners of the sidewalk into perpendicular wedges like dry bread. Any day now someone would get a bright idea and fling the pieces off the nearby expressway overpass at the windshields passing below. It was one of the few pedestrian walkways not yet enclosed by a barrel-shaped grid like the razor wire on top of a penitentiary wall. In time the whole city would look like the approach to Sing Sing.

The house was still there, but the next Devil's Night would take care of that; it was ripe to burn. At the time of the shooting it had sheltered two families separated by a firewall with not a witness between them. It was empty now and had been for a long time, its windows cataracted with yellow plywood, gray clapboard splintering through stubborn traces of paint on the siding. Day-Glo graffiti—urban ivy, nocturnal cousin to the variety that grows on brick walls at Harvard—had spread across the front. There would be crack vials rolling around on the floor inside. Running sores just like it existed all over the city, drawing flies and hatching maggots. Evil abhors a vacuum.

I paced off the distance from the stain on the sidewalk to the fence surrounding the basketball court. That was the approximate location of the three cement steps that had led up to the front door of the American Eagle Motor Lodge. The forensics team had concluded from the angle of entry and depth of penetration that all three bullets had been fired from the top step; or from the bottom, provided that the shooter was at least eight feet tall.

I climbed those steps in my mind, turned, drew the Smith & Wesson, and sighted down my arm at the stain on the sidewalk. There had been a quarter moon that night and no clouds. Following North from the spot where he'd parked his car—a block and a half in front of Dale's, if I knew anything at all about his tailing method—Dale would keep to the shadow of the house, but there wouldn't have been much of it at three in the morning when the moon was at the top of its arc. Arthur Rooney, North's lawyer, had made a lot of noise before the grand jury about the marksmanship involved and his client's unfamiliarity with firearms; but the distance was less than twenty feet and North was shooting down. An ape could have done it.

But an ape hadn't, and Rooney was on the ground floor of a career that would eventually put him in charge of the legal affairs of several prominent local corporations. A courtroom is not a motel on Mullett Street. A courtroom is an orderly place where facts are sorted into primary colors and geometric shapes. It stands on an antiseptic platform at the opposite end of the universe. No indictment. All rise. All except Dale.

I had stood on that same spot before, when I didn't have to imagine steps or the high disinterested eye of a broken moon. It was twenty-four hours after the shooting and there was still a motel and occupants in the duplex and yellow police tape everywhere, circumscribing the last few yards between the cradle and the grave. And, forty-five degrees to my right, directly across the street from the duplex, there had been a brick house, well kept for the neighborhood, with windows looking right out on the spot.

And there still was.

Still well kept for the neighborhood: Windows scrubbed, shutters painted, roof and gutters in good shape. After twenty years it looked like a color photograph taken the day after the murder.

Couldn't be.

Everyone moved.

No one stayed in the same place for two decades.

Well, hell.

I holstered the .38, buttoned my coat over it, and took a walk.

The steps to the screened front porch were wooden and solid and had been repainted about the same time as the shutters. The screen was a heavy nylon one without rips or patches. The door fit snugly in its frame. I rang the bell. I had rung ten thousand doorbells, and no two sounded alike. There were lonely ones that echoed hollow as hope in houses where dusty smiles lay in state in frames on the mantels; happy ones that chirped like parakeets; sullen ones that snarled like dyspeptic dogs; sexy ones that purred; terrified ones that gasped and clutched at the door; broken empty ones that coughed deep from the lungs and said come ahead in, there's nothing left worth stealing anyway. This one sounded as if it had been through all that, with a cheerful little flirt at the end, like an old man at Hospice insisting he had no regrets. I couldn't remember if it had had that last bit the first time I'd rung it.