The Hours of the Virgin (29 page)

“First question.”

“You and Dale talked about something just before you shot him. What was it?”

“Who told you that?”

“No one who can do you any harm. Is that when you tried to buy him off?”

“I made him an offer. He took it. I said that. I had no reason to kill him.”

“Then it shouldn't matter to you what I do with this gun. My guess is you offered him a good chunk. You had more than sixty thousand to spend. He knew how much you stole from your bosses at Paul Bunyan, so you couldn't poor-mouth him. All I want to know is what he said when you made the offer.”

“I'll think about it. Second question.”

“How'd you manage to get your hands on the Hours of the Virgin in the first place? You didn't steal it from Harold Boyette's office at Christmas like he said. He'd been fired five months by then.”

“Poor Harold. He was a victim of poor timing. The priest who went to the DIA to deliver the manuscript didn't know Boyette from the Apostle Paul or that he'd been let go. He asked me for directions to Boyette's office. He had a bundle under his arm and a look on his face like he'd just robbed a bank by accident. It looked promising. I told him I was Boyette. After he left the manuscript with me I met with Harold to authenticate it. I couldn't go to anyone legitimate, or I'd have wound up with nothing except maybe a cheesy certificate of thanks with the Queen's signature. I offered him a split, but he didn't want that. He wanted to be the one who presented it to the British government and reclaim his reputation.” He blew a jet of vapor and stamped his feet; the dank cold of the basement was worse than the open air at ground level. “Maybe it's the manuscript. Maybe it makes people see the light.”

“Not you.”

He shook his head. “Don't feel sorry for me. It's not so bad, this not having a conscience. If you're born with only one arm you don't miss the one you never had. I only got interested when he came back and offered me the gun in trade. I'm kind of nostalgic about it. I wondered what had happened to it all these years.”

“I figure you got your cue from Strangeways to make up that gag about having a date with Laurel in Louisiana. You knew she was the daughter you fathered with Star LaJoie and that the gun offer came from her. After the exchange blew up at the Tomcat Theater you thought she still had the gun.”

“Mistakes, I've made a few,” he said. “Let's swap.”

“You didn't answer my first question.”

“Fuck you.”

“What?”

“‘Fuck you.' I'm quoting. That's what your dear old dumb dead dick buddy Dale said when I offered him twenty thousand to let me alone.”

I filled my lungs with the clear stinging January cold and let it out in a thick cloud. Then I spun the pistol in an old-time border roll and held it out butt first. He extended the bundle. We reached out simultaneously with our free hands. As his fingers closed on the .32's butt he dropped the bundle.

I almost stooped to pick it up. I caught myself, but for a chair-warmer he was fast. I heard metal slide against metal, punctuated by a full stop of a snap. They were the noises made by a fresh clip sliding into the handle of a pistol and a shell snapping into the chamber.

“Let it sit. I'll pick it up after you leave.”

I looked into the muzzle of the .32 and did nothing.

“I knew you were too smart to hand me a loaded gun,” he said. “I bought an extra clip from the same back room of the same store where I bought the gun. I think it was even the same salesman. Funny how all the good restaurants have left the city while the illegal weapons merchants keep prospering. Maybe it's cause and effect. We accountants spend a lot of time studying that kind of thing. Now take your gun out and drop it at my feet.”

The pistol was a rock in his hand. I reached slowly under my coat, slid the Smith & Wesson out of its holster between my thumb and forefinger, and bent to lay it atop the bundle containing the Hours of the Virgin. Then I straightened again and backed away.

“I'm greedy,” North said, “but you knew that. I wanted the gun
and
the manuscript. If you thought I was going to settle for just one or the other you're just as dumb as your partner.”

“I'm dumb.” I nodded. “I soaked up a little culture there for a while, but it'll drip out. Don't you want the first page? It's in my car.”

“That old wreck of a Cutlass? You'd put a Rembrandt in a J. C. Penney safe. Give me the keys.” He snapped the fingers of his free hand.

I reached into my other coat pocket and brought out the hard heavy object that had been slapping my leg ever since I got out of the car. The light from the Coleman lantern painted a stripe along the oily blue-black barrel of Dale Leopold's .45.

North was one fast office drudge. The big gun had barely cleared my pocket when he pulled the .32's trigger.

Nothing happened.

Not even a click.

His mouth formed a round black hole in the pale blur of his face. The trigger lay flush to the back of the guard now and would have to be pried forward in order to be squeezed again, and it wouldn't work then either.

“If you thought I was going to put a pistol in your hand without removing the trigger sear first, you're as dumb as Boyette.” I reached into the pocket from which I'd taken the .32, took out a plastic Ziploc bag, and shook it open. “Drop it in there.”

When he obeyed, I doubled the bag around the pistol one-handed and slid it into the pocket. “I needed your prints on the gun that killed Dale,” I said. “The ones you put on it before evaporated twenty years ago. There was nothing to connect you to the murder weapon until tonight.”

And I hit him with the .45.

It was just a light tap along his jaw, but it dropped him like a piano. The Colt Army has a frame as heavy as an engine block; it pulled me off balance and I had to spread my feet to keep from falling on top of him. I thumbed back the hammer and waited. I had all night. That's why I'd picked a place as remote as the old LaSalle.

He was out only a few seconds. He awoke with a twitch, then pushed himself up onto his knees and looked around, as slowly as a dopey old hound coming out of a doze. When he lifted his gaze and it went up the big bore, his eyes grew as large as manholes. He pressed his lips together and tried to form a
P
. He was shaking from his head to his knees.

Just then a sour earthy stench mixed with the damp odors of the urban underground, overpowering them. It was thick, primeval, unspeakably corrupt.

It was my signal. I placed the muzzle against Earl North's slick forehead and pressed the trigger. The pin snapped on the empty chamber.

My mouth was stretched into a rictus so tight I couldn't get the words out. So I thought them.

Bang
.

You're dead
.

33

“If I were you, I wouldn't be too proud about the way my job got done,” John said.

I ate a mini-pretzel from the bowl and washed it down with Scotch. “Dale always said if you can't do it right, do it wrong.”

“He was a rotten role model.”

“He told twenty grand where to get off.”

He looked around at the faux mahogany and tin advertising signs distressed to look as if they'd hung out in the weather for years. We were in the same cigar bar where I'd spoken with Merlin Gilly. “I don't know why we couldn't have this talk in my office. I keep expecting the Rough Riders to come charging through the door.”

“I've had it with offices. I'm going to hang an out-of-order sign on mine and work out of my basement.” I watched him shake snow off his camel-hair coat. “I guess it's still snowing.”

“If you can call it snow. It looks more like gorilla turds.” He sat down.

“I like January,” I said. “It's the only time you can't tell Clairmount from Lake Shore Drive. Democracy in action.”

“Don't you believe it. In Grosse Pointe it comes down white and stays that way. The servants come out every hour and spray it with appliance enamel. How's the cigar?”

I'd bought a package of Grenadiers in honor of Merlin, pulled twice on the first one, and parked it in the General Grant ashtray to smoke itself out. “Okay, if you can get used to the not-inhaling part. It confuses my lungs.”

“You should quit.”

“You never know where a thing like that will end. You might wind up with nothing left to quit.”

“That statement you gave needs backup. If you get it we might not throw the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice at you for withholding evidence and tampering with a crime scene.”

“It'd be worth it.”

“See if you still feel that way when North walks in two years. Old crime, first offense, solid citizen. Assuming it gets that far. The jury has to buy his prints suddenly showing up on a weapon no one's seen in twenty years. Laurel Strangeways' testimony is hearsay. He might get a clean bill of health.”

“I don't care. I killed him.”

“You and Freud.” He sat back and caught the eye of the woman bartender, the same heavily made-up blonde who had served Merlin and me. When she came over, he ordered Jack Daniel's. I tapped my glass of Scotch. She went away, disappointed again. When I'd sat down, she'd recognized me from before and came up eager to experiment with another trick drink. To hell with her, I thought. Molasses is for spreading on toast.

“Going over to visit Strangeways' wife before she leaves Henry Ford?” John asked.

I shook my head. “They've got talking to do. I'd be just somebody they met somewhere once and can't quite remember why they bothered.”

“What'd they say at the DIA when you delivered the Hours?”

“I think Mr. Ruddy's beginning to warm up to me. He didn't have security throw me through a plate-glass display case. I'm getting a certificate to toss in the drawer with my army discharge papers.”

“You should have turned it over to us along with North's thirty-two.”

“Buy a ticket. You might check out the Goya exhibit while you're there. After that you can subpoena the manuscript and paper the police gym with it for all I care. If the Duke of Plymouth or whatever he was had bought his wife a chafing dish like any other bridegroom, there'd be two more vacant drawers in the cold-room downtown.”

He drank Jack. “Like you wouldn't trade any number of Boyettes and Brodericks to nail Earl North.”

“That's not how a friend talks.”

“So we're friends again. What's my address?”

“Thirteen hundred Beaubien. Fifth floor.”

“Go to hell, Walker.”

We clinked glasses.

Outside the air had grown granite cold since the raw morning, slicing the descending clots of mixed rain and snow into rice-paper wafers that skidded on the air currents and folded themselves onto the Cutlass' roof and hood with a rustling whisper. They cloaked street and sidewalk blue-white, erasing sharp angles, filling potholes, and covering refuse. I left the motor to warm up while I scraped the windows, then drove away from the curb, plowing fresh twin furrows that filled in behind me; the captain of the only ship abroad on a virgin sea. The noon rush hour had come and gone.

It seemed a shame to mess up the office all over again, but I didn't cry over it. I locked the door, took out the desk drawers I seldom used, and upended them onto the square of rug. Then I sat on the floor and sorted squares and rectangles of old yellowed newsprint into a pile and dumped the rest of the stuff back into the drawers. I reached inside the cavities in the desk and rescued the crushed and accordioned flotsam that had spilled over the sides and slipped through cracks. When I was finished I had gathered enough of Dale Leopold's favorite cartoons and comic strips to fill a small anthology, the Dagwood strip on top.

I replaced the drawers, sat in the swivel, and studied each clipping. I stopped once to pour myself a drink from a bottle I'd left standing on the desk the other day, then resumed, giving each clipping its full measure of attention before moving on to the next. Probably I'd seen most of them before, but I'd forgotten many of them and I hadn't always paid attention when Dale showed me one; he was always doing it. I'd spent twice ten years pushing them around to get to something else in the drawers.

Some of them made me laugh out loud even now. Others didn't rate more than a smile, if they rated that, and were probably personal to Dale. One or two missed me completely. Humor's like that: a tailored prescription that works on different people different ways and sometimes not at all. As a profession it was almost as uncertain as sleuthing.

When I was through I drummed all the cuttings together, snapped a rubber band around them, and stuck them in the side pocket of my jacket, where they made a substantial bulge. I put away the bottle and went out, locking both doors behind me. Closed due to a death in the family.

The snow was picking up. I crawled home behind a salt truck. Rather than try to break through the berm piled up at the foot of my driveway by a plow, I left the car at the curb and waded up to the front door, soaking myself to the ankles. The living room smelled of stale tobacco smoke. I opened a window. Immediately the furnace gulped and fired and I closed the gap to two inches.

My bed was a tangle, the way I'd left it after two hours of tossing and twenty minutes of sleep. The tobacco stink was in that room too, along with the flat desperate odors of a wakeful night. I opened the almost-empty drawer in the bureau and looked inside; as if I had to, as if I didn't carry around a mental inventory of the contents. The snapshots could stay. I was casting off, not erasing. On my way out of the office waiting room I'd taken Dale's dented old hat off the peg, and now I put the cartoons in the White Owl cigar box that held his obituary and stuck the box inside the crown.

I tested the heft. It seemed insubstantial. I had a brainstorm and went through the kitchen into the garage, where one of Dale's old raincoats—he'd had a dozen in the time I knew him, kept leaving them places and snagging them on things—made itself useful protecting the lawn mower from dust. He wouldn't have minded the gasoline smell; he'd started Apollo Investigations above a garage on Woodward, and when he began to forget things and went to see a doctor he was told he'd been suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning for three years—hadn't he noticed the fumes?
Christ, Doc, this is Detroit. If I smelled petunias I'd of come to see you right away
. I wrapped the raincoat around the bundle and secured it with the belt. Hefted it. It still lacked weight.