The Hours of the Virgin (27 page)

“Shut up. I'm talking.” His fingers did the opening lick from “Fever.” He was a Russian-American Buddy Rich. Then he unzipped the portfolio all the way around, spread it open, and dumped out its contents on the desk.

My wallet and badge folder and the Smith & Wesson .38 bounced all over. I had to slap a hand down on the gun to keep it from falling over the edge. It was reflex, and as I did it a shard of ice went straight up my spine; it could have been a trick to shoot me down and claim I went for the weapon. But he didn't budge. He was as calm as twilight on water.

“Get out,” he said. “We'll call you when we want you. And we will want you.”

I put the wallet and folder in their pockets, checked the load in the revolver—it hadn't any—and stuck it into my holster. I got up then and went out without saying anything. Slavic people have a way of changing their minds without warning.

“Walker.”

I had my hand on the glass door leading outside. I turned around and there was John Alderdyce standing in the sterile reception area, big as Gibraltar in Harris tweed and a woven club tie. He had a way of easing up on you unexpectedly, like a police cruiser in heavy traffic.

I found a cigarette and slid it into its permanent notch in the corner of my mouth. “Who's your daughter meeting with tonight, the Women's Wrestling Federation?”

“She's out with her sculptor. I don't need as much sleep as I used to. When I get a call at home I usually do something about it. How were you planning to get back to your car?”

“I thought I'd walk. The cold air will wake me up.”

“Temperature's zero, with a wind chill you don't want to know. After two blocks you'll be a Popsicle. I'll give you a lift.”

“I'll take it—if you promise not to ask any questions.”

He spun his keys around his index finger. The ring was attached to a silver-plated whistle, an old memento.

The frigid air constricted my lungs like a blow to the chest. It frosted the hairs in my nose. In the sky the constellations were as clear-edged as holes punched in carbon paper. There wasn't even a thin sheeting of cloud to insulate the earth from frozen outer space. John unlocked his gray Chrysler and we climbed into the unthawed leather seats. After a few blocks he turned on the heater. The blower pushed warm air at our ankles.

“So the butler did it,” he said.

Well, it wasn't a question. “He was a lot more than a butler.” I found the cigar lighter and blew smoke. The cloud flattened out against the windshield. “He was Gordon Strangeways' legs. Three years of that can make you kind of possessive.”

“I wonder what happened to North's gun.”

“If it doesn't turn up among Ben's things, it's probably gone for good. Maybe North got it back. He's tricky enough to have conned a simple organism like Ben into trading it for a lick and a promise.”

“If that had happened, Ben would have confronted him instead of you.”

“North might have convinced him I had the Hours. He'd know how to play it so Ben thought the information was worth giving him the gun. Don't forget, he was able to fool a grand jury.”

“He's not the only tricky one.”

I said nothing. I found the button that operated the window and snapped my cigarette out into the slipstream. It made an orange phosphorescence and vanished. The window slid back up with a sucking sound.

“The slug we got out of Boyette matched the one in the Leopold file,” John said. “I've been trying to reach you ever since. The way I see it, Ben would still be walking around and the Strangeways woman wouldn't be hooked up to half the equipment at Henry Ford if you'd told me what North had to do with anything.”

“Maybe. Did you ever read a book called
Appointment in Samarra
?”

“What is it, a spy novel?”

“It's just a story about a handful of people in a small American city. John O'Hara wrote it. He got the title from Somerset Maugham. The point is you can't cheat destiny.”

He drove for a while in silence. Turning onto Woodbine he said, “I thought you gave up on this white whale a long time ago. It won't bring Leopold back. For my money it wouldn't matter if it did. I talked to him a couple of times when I was in uniform. He had that squashed-hat, cigar-chomping bit down cold, called everybody kid. The rookies laughed at him.”

“Not to his face.”

“You can't love the dead more than the living.”

I snapped my head around. “What?”

He said it again.

“Where'd you hear that?”

“My mother used to say it everytime someone died in the family. It makes sense.”

“An old lady on Mullett told me the same thing. It made sense then too.” We were nearing That Touch of Venus. There was a Dearborn Heights cruiser parked in the lot and a light was on in the building. I was too tired to worry if the cops were searching the place. John pulled up next to my Cutlass and stopped. I opened the door. “Thanks for the ride,” I said. “And for not asking questions.”

His face was a brutish mask under the domelight. “You're not finished.”

“No.”

“I know it's a question, but the ride's over, and anyway I don't have to play by your rules. If what the old lady said makes sense, why don't you just walk away?”

I thought about that. My brain was on low trickle and I had to push it to turn it over. “If everybody did the sensible thing, you and I would be out of a job.”

“I wouldn't mind it,” he said. “I'd learn taxidermy at home and stuff ducks for a living.”

“It wouldn't work. By the third duck you'd be asking questions about how it died.”

He drove off and left me there. I slid onto the cold seat and ground the starter and drove home. Before I went to bed I called the hospital, but I got a suspicious nurse who wouldn't give out patient information over the telephone. I woke up still sitting in the easy chair with the receiver squawking in my lap and hung up and went to bed. I didn't dream about guns or ducks or Occidental women got up like Myrna Loy in
The Mask of Fu Manchu
. I slept the dreamless sleep of the Undead, and when I woke up nine hours later I knew how I was going to play it right to the end.

31

I waited.

Over coffee and the
Free Press
I called my answering service and asked them to forward all my office calls to the house until I left for downtown. That's when the waiting started.

The story on the shooting at That Touch of Venus was a bundle of facts and misunderstood information, as usual. Gordon Strangeways' name was in the headline and lead, and a file photo ran from around the time of the Little Rock beating. Mrs. Strangeways was reported injured and a bodyguard slain, but Ben's name didn't appear and there was no mention of a third party. That explained why my telephone wasn't ringing off the hook.

Before calling the service I'd tried Henry Ford Hospital again and got a different nurse this time, who told me Mrs. Strangeways' condition was still serious but stable. I didn't bother calling Strangeways. If he wasn't at the hospital, the ringing telephone alone would throw his heart into the red zone. It would be like calling the father of a teenager at midnight Saturday. I didn't have anything to talk to him about in any case.

When I left the house I called the service again and told the operator to take messages. There must have been something in my tone, because she asked if she should keep whoever called on the line until I got to the office. I told her not to risk it lest the party think she was stalling for another reason. I also told her to come see me when she had her investigator's license.

The work in the hallway outside my office was finished. They'd removed the last of the ersatz asbestos from the ceiling, blown in fiberglass to replace it, and re-laid the panels in the grid. The sharp stench of fresh acetate stung my nostrils like airplane glue.

I had no customers waiting; either they'd given up when I hadn't arrived by two o'clock or they'd found another reason to go another day without a detective, along with the other ninety-nine percent of the local population. Back behind the desk I dialed the service. There were no messages. I told the operator to put all calls through until further notice.

I didn't go out to eat. I didn't go out for cigarettes, even though there were just three left in the pack and the carton I kept in the deep drawer of the desk was empty. I could smoke the horsehair stuffing from my chair until the telephone decided to ring. I doubled the carton over twice and stuffed it into the wastebasket. The basket was full but I didn't go out to dump it. When I used the water closet I left the door open in case the running water drowned out the bell. I hadn't felt this way since my last job interview.

The telephone rang at four o'clock, but it wasn't the call I was expecting. It was Jillian Raider, Gordon Strangeways' lawyer and general factotum. I asked her right off if there was any news on Mrs. Strangeways.

“Her condition has been upgraded,” she said. “Her temperature is normal and she needs no further transfusions. Mr. Strangeways is with her now.” The climate-control apparatus in her throat was working. I couldn't tell from her voice if she wanted to brain me with the Michigan Penal Code or offer me a partnership in the firm.

“Who's with Mr. Strangeways?” I asked.

“Vernon. The other guard. I suppose you could say he's been promoted.” She paused, not long enough to invite interruption. “I need to meet with you in my office in an hour. Can you make it?”

“I'm waiting for a call. Can I get back to you?”

“I'm afraid not. It's extremely important I meet with you as soon as possible. You can forward your calls here, if you like.”

“Where is your office?”

“In the American Center Building in Southfield. Suite 2670. Do you know the location?”

I said I did and that I'd see her there in an hour. Then I went through my desk drawers until I found my pager, called the service to test it, and clipped it to my belt on the side opposite my revolver.

Raider & Associates, Attorneys at Law, peddled its briefs from a suite occupying half the twenty-sixth floor of the American Center Building, a black glass slab towering some forty stories above suburban Southfield. The employees would share the elevators with a couple of international credit brokers and a man known on Gratiot as Tony the Wop. The recession of the eighties had brought a relaxed attitude toward the references of certain prospective occupants.

The legal firm wasn't one of them. A pair of smoked-glass doors operated by an electronic system drifted open to admit me to a reception area done in steel gray with bands of mauve and shut themselves against rubber stops with all the noise of a feather floating down a well. The receptionist was a young man with close-cut blonde hair in a midnight-blue jacket over a slate-blue shirt and a pale orange tie. He took my name, gave it to someone over a gray telephone mounted flush with the top of his desk, and asked me to wait. I spent a couple of minutes admiring a framed panoramic shot of the Detroit skyline at night hanging opposite a panoramic view through a window of flat Southfield by day, and then the telephone purred and the young man answered it and said I could go in.

Jillian Raider's office was done all in white, with walls of brushed velvet and a pile carpet that retained footprints like a white sand beach. Books with white spines were arranged according to height in built-in bookshelves enameled white and a white leather sofa and pair of matching armchairs stood in a conversation area in one corner. More yet of Southfield spread beyond a window that took up the entire east wall, in front of which a sheet of plate glass laid atop two wicket-shaped pieces of white steel performed as a desk. Mrs. Raider was standing behind this with her weight resting on her fingertips on the desktop. Her red-gold hair was still combed back from the severe line across her forehead and her gray eyes had a sheen that looked almost—but not quite—like fresh tears. She wore an unstructured gray silk blazer over a white blouse with the top two buttons unfastened and a black suede miniskirt that caught her at mid-thigh. It was a young look for a woman close to my age, but in the indirect light she managed to get away with it just fine.

After a moment she said, “Do you undress every woman you meet, or should I feel special?”

“No undressing,” I said. “Just checking out the armor. Something tells me I'm not walking out of here with a million of Gordon Strangeways' dollars in my pocket.”

“I asked you here to discuss that. Do you mind if I have someone in to take notes?”

“Did Radio Shack repossess your recording equipment?”

“It's operating. But if I were a man I would be the kind of man who wears suspenders and a belt.” Without waiting for my answer she pushed a button on an intercom no thicker than a Big Chief tablet. “William?”

A moment later a door I hadn't noticed opened in one of the white velvet walls and another young man, black-haired with a fashionable blue shadow on his chin, entered. He nodded to me without pausing and took a seat in one of the armchairs with his legs crossed and a steno pad open on his knee. He was wearing a white turtleneck, Australian bush jacket, and khaki slacks. Tan moccasins gleamed softly on his feet. I counted through the days of the week and wondered if it was Casual Friday.

“Have a seat, Mr. Walker,” Jillian Raider said.

“Thanks, I'll stand. I sat all last night.”

She frowned at that. The armchairs were lower than the padded white swivel behind the desk and she'd lost her edge. She remained standing.

“First of all, it may relieve you to know that as of ten minutes ago Mrs. Strangeways' condition is officially listed as fair. Her doctors hope to release her in a week.”

“It's good to be young and strong,” I said.

“Hospitals are rigid when it comes to language. They never use critical when they mean serious, nor fair when they mean good. Can you see where this is going?”