The Hours of the Virgin (21 page)

Other books he read and discarded, marking his place by turning down the page-corners. He treated the O'Haras like fragile children, removing the jackets when he read and using bookmarks. The bookmarks themselves didn't matter. He never bought the decorative ones on display at the cash registers in bookstores, just grabbed whatever was handy or tore a piece off a newspaper and stuck it between the pages.

I might not have thought of any of this if I hadn't had recent practice going through the books in Harold Boyette's house. I started with the top shelf left to right. The battered, jacketless copy of
Appointment in Samarra
yielded nothing, even when I held it open upside down by the covers and shook it. I replaced it and pulled out
The Farmers Hotel
. A triangular tear of colored newsprint fluttered out. When I picked it up and examined both sides I learned that someone was offering something for $1.98 a pound.
Hellbox
and
Hope of Heaven
were even less communicative. One of Dale's old business cards fell out of
A Rage to Live
. Nothing was written on the unprinted side. At that point I thought about the jackets. I stripped them from the books I'd checked already, spread them out, and looked at them under the lamp. All I got was a paper cut off
Hellbox
.

By
Pipe Night
I was pretty sure there was a special place in hell for prolific writers. It would contain one typewriter, without keys. Then I slid out
Butterfield 8
—and there it was, sticking out of the top a hundred pages in.

It was too fragile to pull out without tearing. I opened the book to that spot and looked at it and didn't touch. In the second panel, thumb-blurred and faded, a very dapper Dagwood, in dark sport coat and white flannels with his hair slicked back and parted in the center like Valentino's, was dragging a ditzy, curvy bombshell of a Blondie into the room to meet his father, a ferocious old baldy who resembled J. P. Pennybags on the
Monopoly
box. The narrow strip of paper, yellow-brown and beer-stained, was worn soft and ragged where it had been folded too many times into Dale's wallet and was coming apart at the edges. I lifted it free, cupping it in my palm, closed the book gently, and slid it back into its place on the shelf. The strip was rubbed so thin I could tell without turning it over that something was written on the back.

I carried it to the lamp and turned it over. Dale's writing—it had been done with one of the cheap skippy ballpoint pens he bought by the package in drugstores—was just rooster-scratches to most people, but I had had plenty of practice typing up formal reports from his hasty notes. Some printing and a piece of another comic took up part of the back, but he had written a series of letters and numerals on the blank part in a vertical column:

DMB—9

CNB—8.5

NBD—9

DSB—9.5

AAF—8

AAB—8.5

TSB—9.5

I put on the table lamp beside the good armchair, laid the comic strip on the table, and went into the kitchen and fixed myself a drink from the bottle in the cupboard and two crisp ice cubes from the refrigerator compartment. I brought the drink out and sat down and picked up the strip and looked at it and drank. When the glass was empty except for two half-melted cubes I got out the directory and looked up Tom Burnchurch.

He wasn't listed in Detroit. I called Information and gave the operator the name and said I wasn't sure what city but that it should be in the metropolitan area. She gave me an argument, but I waited her out.

“I have a Thomas Burnchurch in Royal Oak.” Without waiting for a response she hit a button and a female voice with all the personality wrung out of it read me the number off a recording. I let Ma Bell do the dialing.

“Burnchurch residence.”

A youngish male voice. It would always sound young until it soured overnight, somewhere around sixty. He had twenty-five years to go.

“Mr. Burnchurch, I wonder if you remember me. My name is Amos Walker. We met once or twice at your father's house when I went there with Dale Leopold. You were fourteen or fifteen.”

“Dale's partner? Oh, hell, yes.” He sounded younger still. “He always talked to me like I was an adult, even when I was twelve. Dad thought the world of him. What are you doing these days?”

“The same thing I was doing then. This is business, I'm afraid. Your father and Dale passed away about the same time, didn't they?”

“About six weeks apart. Dad had a massive stroke and dropped into a coma. He hung on for thirty-six days before they pulled the plug on him at Receiving. He had no more brainwaves than a cauliflower. He was just forty-eight. The job killed him.”

The job was director of the regional office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Dale had once done Frank Burnchurch a good turn—neither man would ever say what it was—and the G-man repaid the debt by allowing him access to information denied the president of the United States: bank records, IRS files, sealed Justice Department cases, personal medical histories. If any of the services he provided got back to Washington, Burnchurch had stood a better-than-even chance of being prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Whatever the favor had been, it was big.

“You aren't by any chance with the Bureau yourself,” I asked.

“Oh, hell, no. The old man would haunt me right out of the office. I'm an investment counselor.”

“This is a longshot. Do you know if your father kept any records of cases he was investigating at the time he had the stroke?”

“Oh, sure. The Bureau was just starting to put everything on computer then. He never trusted those big mainframes. Made hard copies of everything. I've still got boxes and boxes in the cellar. About once a year my wife tries to talk me into getting rid of them.”

I excused myself, laid the receiver in my lap, and mopped off my palms on my trousers. When I picked it up again my voice was normal. Breaks like that are too good to last. “I wonder if I could come over and take a look.”

“Tonight?”

“I'll try not to disrupt your evening too much. I'll go through the stuff myself if you'll trust me.”

“Is this about Dale's murder?”

I said it was.

He gave me directions to his house. “I'll look for you in twenty minutes. How good's your lead?”

“It looks promising. I may have found the Bumstead millions.”

23

It was one of the older homes in Royal Oak, a narrow brick two-story with a steep roof and a trellis up one side where ivy would grow in summer, dense as a blanket. The front was calm and honest in the glow of the corner streetlamp. From attic to basement it was one-tenth the size of Gordon Strangeways' shack in Grosse Ile.

A small pretty woman of about thirty, with curly dark hair, let me in. She was Tom Burnchurch's wife and she didn't like me any better than a splash of purple among the muted grays and earth tones in her living room. But her husband had invited me, so she excused herself and went into the kitchen while we shook hands. Burnchurch was tall and fair and going prematurely bald in a steel-gray cardigan, brushed blue jeans, and expensive Italian loafers that had been demoted to comfortable house shoes when his toes began to wear through. He had his father's blue eyes and cleft chin.

“Jean doesn't like anyone from the old days coming around,” he said. “Her father was a fire chief in a small town. She's afraid somebody's going to take me away in the middle of the night.”

“Does anyone come around from the old days?” I asked.

“Once every couple of years. Dad used to slip his snitches cash when they needed it, whether they had any fresh information for him or not. The survivors never forget. Jean keeps after me to get an unlisted number.”

“Do you give them money?”

“Yeah, but don't tell Jean.” He raised his voice. “The basement's through here. I pulled the stuff out from behind the furnace. Hope you don't mind dust.”

I followed him through a kind of den. I recognized the huge yellow-oak desk from his father's house. The wall above it was plastered with photographs and documents in frames: Frank Burnchurch shaking hands with J. Edgar Hoover, a much younger Frank in a fedora and shoulder holster, posing with another agent on either side of a bed with pistols and hand grenades and a Thompson submachine gun laid out on the mattress, a letter typed on White House stationery congratulating Special Agent Francis X. Burnchurch on the breakup and arrest of a band of kidnappers called the Tri-State Gang. It was signed by Harry S. Truman. There were certificates of merit, a front-page spread from the old
Detroit Times
with a picture of Burnchurch escorting mobster Sam Lucy into the Federal Building in manacles, the top half of a silhouette target from the FBI range with six holes bunched together where the heart had been.

“It's a shrine,” admitted his son when I paused at the desk. “Dad would have hated it, especially the shot with Hoover. He stuck it in a drawer and forgot it. He said the old sham stood on a box so he wouldn't look like a circus midget.”

“He'd be happy you're proud of him.”

“He'd never say it. Jean complains about it all the time. They'd have gotten along a lot better than she thinks.”

We descended a flight of unpainted pine stairs into a basement recreation room with walnut paneling and a Ping-Pong table. I followed him through a door in a partition into a bare concrete area lit by hanging bulbs, with a furnace and water heater in the corner and next to it a washing machine and electric dryer. The room smelled of detergent and slightly of mildew. A mountain of dusty cardboard cartons stood on the floor with jagged towers of file folders and stacked sheets sticking out of the tops.

“Sorry it's such a mess. Dad was a bloodhound as a field agent, but an absolute pack rat as an administrator. It's a little more orderly than it looks. Do you know what you're after?”

I took a sheet of notepaper out of an inside pocket and handed it to him. “I copied this from Dale's scribble. What do you think?”

He looked at it under a bulb. “They're bank initials,” he said after a moment. “Detroit Manufacturers, City National, National Bank of Detroit, Detroit State. Two
A
's, that'd be Ann Arbor; Ann Arbor Federal and Ann Arbor Bank. TSB, that's Toledo State Bank. What do you think the numbers represent, deposits? Thousands?”

“You tell me.”

“Thousands. Nine, eight-point-five, nine again, nine-point-five. Never ten. You know why?”

“Ten thousand's the cutoff point,” I said. “Whenever an account reaches ten thousand, banks are required to report it to the IRS. You can hide millions from the government as long as you break them into increments of less than ten thousand and don't run out of banks.”

“Not hide. If the spooks from Internal Revenue smell something, you're better off burying the money in your back yard or in a Swiss bank. But you can stash it this way for a while. You need to monitor the accounts, make withdrawals or close them out before the interest pushes them over the red line. It's a lot of work. Almost as bad as earning it honestly.” He handed back the sheet. “Is this what Dale was working on when he was killed?”

“That's what I'm hoping to find out. He couldn't have gotten this information without a court order unless your father helped.”

He nodded. “Clear violation of the Privacy Act, and what's worse, Bureau policy. But Dad and Dale operated by their own set of rules.” He stopped nodding. “Of course, there's a different interpretation.”

“I'm trying not to think about that. What's your take?”

He gave it a blink of thought. Then he shook his head. “I'd sooner imagine Dad hiding money than Dale. And Dad made me walk halfway across town to return a package of baseball cards I stole from a drugstore when I was ten. I had to apologize to every clerk in the store.”

“Ever steal anything after that?”

“Not even first base. I lost my taste for the game.” He pointed. “You'll find most of the financial stuff in the second box from the top. If you don't find what you need there, I'm afraid you'll have to go through the rest. Like me to give you a hand?”

I took off my coat and draped it over the dryer. “I've already taken up part of your evening. I don't want to be named co-respondent in your divorce.”

He looked relieved and regretful. “It's tax season. This is the first night I've been home this early in a week. Jean's got a crazy idea husbands and wives should see each other now and then.”

“She'll grow out of it.”

“Now you sound like Dale. Raise a whoop if you need anything.” He left me.

I got the top carton onto the floor without stirring up a cloud, although the contact smeared my shirt with dust. I upended a wicker laundry basket, sat on it, and dived into the second carton with both hands. The TV set was directly overhead. They were watching a medical drama; lots of people yelling “Stat!” and bickering with one another. I'd spent enough time in emergency rooms to use them as voting addresses, and I'd never heard anyone raise his voice in one. But you can't get a thirty-nine share of the ratings asking patients about their insurance.

The contents of the box provided plenty of entertainment if you were interested in the credit history of some white-collar felons and a politician or two who had long since cleaned out the war chest and gone home to spend more time with their families. The really juicy stuff, about organized crime figures and money launderers, would fit onto a three-by-five card. Racketeers deal strictly in cash and don't leave paper trails. There were a lot of names I didn't recognize, a few I did but couldn't remember why, and an occasional surprise, including a police commander with a running tab at a male escort service and a cardinal who seemed to have been paying the bills for a woman named Heather.

It was at times like those that Frank Burnchurch's honesty hit me like a clean gust of wind. He could have climbed that pile of paper into a four-acre house in Grosse Pointe, but he had lived all his adult life in a shotgun-style ranch house in a Sterling Heights development and went to his rest in a three-hundred-dollar coffin in a plot earned by his military service.