The Hours of the Virgin (22 page)

I didn't find what I wanted in that carton or the next. At the end of two hours I stood, stretched out the kinks, and walked around the basement until my right leg woke up. The studio laughter of a late-night talk show broke overhead like surf. I sat back down and tackled the third box.

It was in a bulging cardboard file folder right on top. I pulled out a sheaf of green-bar computer printouts, removed the king-size paperclip, and shuffled through them. Each sheet bore the name of one of the banking institutions whose initials Dale had written on the back of Dagwood. The deposits listed had all been made within four weeks in April 1978, in the form of computer transfers drawn on the corporate account of Paul Bunyan Mutual Life and Property, the insurance firm Earl North had worked for at the time Dale was following him for North's wife. The total on each page matched the numbers Dale had written next to the initials. It came to $62,000 all told. The names under which the accounts had been opened were nigglingly familiar. Burroughs. Pitney. Bowes. Adler. Victor. He'd lacked even the imagination to choose his aliases from beyond the names stenciled on the office equipment he used.

Upstairs the TV noise cut off abruptly. The basement door opened and the stairs squeaked under a pair of worn Italian loafers. Tom Burnchurch came in and asked if I was having any luck. I handed him the sheaf without comment.

He paged through it. He figured it out in half the time it had taken me. He was an investment counselor; he worked with numbers every day. “Dale must have suspected something to put Dad onto this,” he said. “Do you think North's wife tipped him?”

“Maybe. She'd want her cut. Or maybe Dale suspected there was more involved than the divorce settlement an ordinary clerk could afford and started digging. He must have told her about the sixty-two thousand. It never would have occurred to him he was naming the price of the alibi she gave North in front of the grand jury.”

“I bet I know how North did it. He was a computer whiz at a time they were few and far between. He transferred the money electronically from company files into these accounts, then went back and erased the transactions from the company computer. Paul Bunyan was a big company. The loss would have been investigated, but when it dead-ended they might have charged it to sloppy record keeping. We're talking Stone Age here, before the microchip; there was a lot of ignorance about the whole technology. In any case the company went bankrupt paying off fire claims in California in the early eighties. Sixty-two grand was a drop in the bucket.”

“North's bucket was smaller. It would have made a bigger splash.” I picked up my coat. “Somebody told me he was caught pulling off a scam similar to this at the DIA. It turned out to be a lie, but this may have been where he got the idea. North might have bragged about it.”

Tom Burnchurch curled the sheets into a roll and slapped it against his palm a couple of times. “This would have made a difference if the grand jury had known about it, wouldn't it?”

“It would have given the prosecution some backbone. The cross-examination of North's wife would have been sharper. She might have caved. Money's a motive everyone can understand.”

“If Dad hadn't had that stroke he would've come forward with it. Hell.” He unrolled the sheaf and looked at it as if he were viewing a corpse in state. “It feels like he just died all over again.”

“It wasn't his fault. If I'd been thinking straight I would have run down this angle at the time. Dale said something about Dagwood the night he died. He didn't mean it as a clue; the strip was just on his mind because of what he'd written on it. Your father must have given him the information over the telephone. I wasn't the detective Dale was. I'm still not.”

“That's a dead-end street,” he said. “I went down it myself. I'm not my dad, you're not Dale. That doesn't mean we're not as good. Just different. Are you going to take these to the police?” He held out the sheets.

I took them, folded them into quarters, and slipped them into one of the saddle pockets in my coat. “It won't do any good without a murder weapon. I need to put that thirty-two in North's hand.”

“Do you think it still exists?”

“It's a thin hope. But it's better than none at all.” I stuck out a hand. “Thanks.”

“Thank my father. He was the one who couldn't throw anything away.” But he shook my hand. He didn't seem to mind the dust.

24

It was as good a job as I'd seen in a long time. Getting around a deadbolt requires two picks, one to hold back the granny shield and another to work the tumblers. If you've got the control to do that without leaving telltale scratches on the outside plate, you could probably clean out the Federal Reserve in a fortnight.

Of course, there was a bare chance I'd gone out without locking the office, but that was less than likely. I'd lived in Detroit a long time.

It was the first sour note of the morning. I'd gone home and straight to bed from Tom Burnchurch's house and slept until the sun hit me in the face. What clouds there were were high, feathery, and easy to ignore. Shelves of icicles as long as javelins leaned in from the eaves on both sides of the street, refracting sunlight into colors unseen since last summer. I felt a hundred percent for the first time in a week.

I hadn't paid much attention when I found the door unlocked to the outer office, even when there was no one waiting inside. Rosecranz might have let someone in who'd decided to fade when I didn't show up by one minute after eight. The business I lost for lack of a secretary meant less than the luxury of not having to say hello to the same person all day long. The lock on that door had come with the building. The building had come with gargoyles, and it wasn't a revival.

I extracted the Smith & Wesson and swiveled into the Holy of Holies. I checked all the standard places: behind the desk, in the space between the window and the file cabinets, inside the little water closet. The face above the sink was scrubbed and clear-eyed, with a fresh dusting of talcum on the perpetual five o'clock shadow. The eyebrows were too high. I put them back where they belonged, holstered the revolver, and got to the inventory.

You couldn't call it a ransacking. Nothing had been torn or broken, and whoever had frisked the place had done it in order. Drawers had been pulled out and dumped, furniture turned over, the heat register unscrewed from the hole that had no duct connected to it because the 1967 renovation had been interrupted by the riots before the old-fashioned heating pipes could be ripped out. The joke of a safe had been sprung with a toenail and my change of shirts rumpled.

Something crackled underfoot. I glanced down at a sheet of my new stationery. There had been a major snowfall on the floor. That saved my opening the package.

I went out into the hall, where one of the asbestos workers sat perched on his stepladder drinking coffee from a Thermos cap. His protective hood lay crumpled at the foot of the ladder. I asked him if he'd seen anyone go in since he came on.

He swallowed coffee and thought. He had a broad, intelligent forehead and a full red beard. His name might be Randall Adams Stonybrooke III, but everyone would call him Red except his mother. He thought a long time and then shook his head. “Been on since seven. My partner didn't show up. Quietest building I ever worked in on a Tuesday.”

“It's that kind of building. I stuff pillows for Hudson's. The guy down the hall crochets engine blocks for bulldozers that operate in hospital zones. Aren't you afraid of breathing asbestos while you're on a break?”

“It ain't asbestos. It's rock wool, you could pad a crib with it. Don't tell no one, okay? Me and Julio need the hazard pay.”

“Your secret's safe with me, Red.”

“Clarence,” he corrected.

I went back in and set the swivel on its wheels and dropped into it. The belly drawer of the desk hung open like a tongue, but the earring I'd left there was still inside. So was the pint of whiskey. I tossed the cap over my shoulder and tilted the neck. The container tasted like water, bad sign. I got down on my hands and knees to find the cap and screwed it back on. Standing, I shook the last Winston out of yesterday's pack, lit it, looked around for the wastebasket, and righted it so I could dispose of the match and the crumpled pack. The tidy eye, I. That made me grin for as long as my face could hold it.

I leaned back against the desk, folded my arms, and smoked. Out there on the cusp of the millennium a siren gulped, a set of brakes locked with an animal yell. The air went thud and the building shook a little, exhaling a vapor of plaster dust from the ceiling; either a sonic boom from Selfridge or the Detroit Bomb Squad detonating a suspicious package on Belle Isle. The old pipes in the walls groaned soul-deep, passing rust like a kidney stone. And some called it a dead city.

They hadn't found what they were after, whoever they were, and who didn't matter yet. You don't pull up a couple of buckled linoleum tiles hunting for a secret compartment unless you've looked in all the easy places, and I hadn't had anything in the office valuable enough to get cute with in a long time except a pair of platinum earrings, and I had the mate in my pocket. Anyway they weren't looking for anything that small because they hadn't dismantled the telephone or taken Custer's Last Stand off the wall to pull the frame apart. The mail I hadn't bothered to open yesterday morning was scattered on the floor, the envelopes intact. Only the package of stationery had interested them and they'd given that a toss when they found out what it was.

Something about that size.

No larger than ordinary drugstore bond.

The telephone rang. I got my hackles down and answered it. It was John Alderdyce.

“It's alive,” he said. “I tried to reach you a couple of times yesterday and last night at your dump. I thought you'd died or hit the lottery.”

“I've been lucky so far and not lucky enough. Why didn't you leave a message with the service?”

“I did, twice. Why pay them if you don't call them once in a while?”

“I'm a little unorganized this morning. What's the rumpus?”

“I thought you'd like to know we took your advice and dug that slug out of the wall at the Tomcat. The manager wanted to call Strangeways but we convinced him we'd be in and out between the travelogue and the color cartoon. That was before I found out the head of the forensics team is a Marilyn Chambers fan. But we got both of them out finally.”

“Was it a thirty-two?”

“Way too big. It weighed out at 240 grains. Thirty-eight at least, and maybe bigger. Hard to tell for a certainty. It lost all shape when it hit the mortar. No copper jacket. Even if we had another slug from the same gun we'd never make a match.”

“So whoever killed Boyette had two guns. Or a partner.”

“I'd go with a partner. It's an odd set, like wearing one wing tip and one espadrille. As a general rule those large-caliber boys are hung up on size.”

I remembered my cigarette smoldering in the ashtray, a souvenir from Traverse City that had stood on the end table next to my father's favorite chair for ten years. I broke off a long column of ash and hauled in some smoke. “How's my balance sheet look on favors?”

“Friend to friend?”

“Whatever.” I'd had it with semantics and it wasn't even nine o'clock.

“Ask.”

“Send somebody down to the sub-sub-basement and shovel out the file on the Leopold murder, April seventy-eight. Find out if the slug the M.E. dug out of Harold Boyette lines up with the three you got from Dale.”

I couldn't hear his brain turning over. He kept the shaft well oiled. “I'm pretty sure I'd remember if you told me there was a link between this case and your partner's shooting.” He sounded as cold and flat as a flagstone.

“Just a wild hair. Not that many killings take place with a thirty-two.”

“I'll lend you the files. Where should I send the forklift? Are you withholding evidence again? Go ahead and lie. It shortens the balance sheet on your side.”

“Ideas aren't evidence. There's no law against hanging on to a hunch.”

“What was his name, North? If he is the one who pulled the trigger, he got rid of the gun ten minutes later. It's growing zebra mussels at the bottom of the river.”

“Probably. He's smart enough.”

He jumped on it. “‘Is'? When was the last time you saw him?”

“It's a small town,” I said. “They say if you hang out at Carl's Chop House long enough you'll see everyone you know.”

“The way I heard it, it was a café in Paris.”

“I don't like French restaurants. They put ice in the butter and give you a hard roll. Thanks, John. Leave a message when you know anything.”

I hung up quickly. The telephone rang again ten seconds later. I let the service get it. I got up, kicked shut one of the file drawers, wrenched up the window, and stuck my head out into the crisp sunny cold. A pigeon sat on the ledge of the building across the street, drying its feathers. It was puffed up as big as a squab. I pulled my head back in and closed the window and turned the latch. Pushing the reset button on my brain.

I turned around and poked at the mail on the floor with my foot. I would have done the same thing with a spray of clover. Bills, a marriage-mailer circular on Missing Teenager No. 1,000,008, bills, an offer to join a video club and receive the Horst Buchholz Collection, bills. No wonder they hadn't bothered to open them. I didn't want to myself. Not a four-leafer in the bunch.

I separated them with my toe, the way they said William Randolph Hearst used to read his
New York Journal
. Two of the bills were stuck together with something sandwiched between. I stooped and peeled them apart. Standard white envelope, letter size, addressed to me in block capitals with a Detroit postmark, no return. The machine stamp was at the end of its ink run; it might have been Wednesday's date. That was the day Boyette disappeared. The longer I looked at it the less sure I was about the number. Comparative graphology wasn't in my resumé, but when I felt like it I could go down to the bank and look at Boyette's signature on the document in my safe-deposit box. That would be as useless as the document, because he'd signed it in cursive.