You’ve seen it in movies, read about it in books: the big bare room, divided into iron bedsteads with their legs stuck in coffee cans filled with kerosene to discourage roaches; maybe stern signs warning residents not to spit on the floor. But roaches are rare in Michigan and spitting’s optional even if smoking is not. The homeless shelter next door to the Annunciation Greek Orthodox cathedral was built along the lines of a YMCA, partitioned into private rooms with comfortable beds, reading lamps on stands, and simple but sturdy cabinets for clothes, complete with plastic hangers. Throw in a TV and a bottle of Scotch and for me it was home sweet home.
The majordomo was a sturdy party of indeterminate age—and for that matter sex—in a smock, sweatpants, and canary-yellow Crocs, leaning on a cane with four sturdy tips, who met me in an eight-foot-square foyer paved with sturdy linoleum and painted in sturdy beige. Our city is constantly tearing itself down and putting up nothing in its place; but its homeless shelters are as solid as the Coliseum. The creature had a stack of clean towels folded over one forearm. I tucked my card into a terry fold, faceup.
“I’m looking for a man named Frank Nelson. Social visit.”
“Are you of the faith?” The voice was a contralto, if it was feminine. Tenor if not. I flipped a mental coin and it came down female.
“Do I have to be to see Frank?”
She shifted the towels to the other arm. “Are you carrying a weapon?”
“No. Should I be?”
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Let’s start over.” I got out my license folder and showed her the honorary sheriff’s star. “He’s not in any trouble. He might be a witness in a police case.”
I spoke quietly, but two men got up from a bench just inside the door, gathered up their tattered bundles, and left.
“Please keep your voice low. The police aren’t exactly popular here.”
“What about Frank?”
“We don’t ask them their names.”
“He’s got a tattoo of a shipwreck on his chest.”
“Last room, end of the hall. Take this to him, please.” She separated a plain white towel from the stack and held it out.
The rooms were separated by painted plywood, smudged with greasy telephone numbers and the odd phallic cartoon. They were open to the aisle. My hot dog man lay on a rollaway bed with an army blanket folded at the foot, a copy of National Geographic spread facedown on his stomach. It was hot in the building, despite window fans humming throughout. The fisherman’s vest hung on the back of a plastic deck chair, giving me a clear view of the doomed ore carrier decorating his hairless chest. It wasn’t moving.
I didn’t linger long.
I found the woman with the towels, hanging them on rails attached to the partitions.
“Wouldn’t he see you?” she asked.
“Couldn’t. Is there a phone? I left my cell in the car.”
“Is it a local call?”
“Nine-one-one. Someone smothered him with a pillow.”
* * *
I didn’t think Lieutenant Child had missed his regular barber’s appointment. More likely whoever had touched him up that day had been better with the brush. His collar was free of clipped hairs, but he smelled like a fresh-squeezed lime. He had on a flat cap with a plaid to match his suit, and damned if he didn’t uncover his head in the presence of the dead man. The woman from the medical examiner’s office was already at work with her tool kit, which included a temporal thermometer she passed over his forehead and a little tape recorder. “Ninety-two-point one. At a guess, he died within the hour.” She was talking to the gadget.
The pillow lay where I’d found it, next to his head with a dent in it the size of his face. Bits of lint from the case clung to his stubble. His eyes were two white semicircles, the irises rolled all the way back, and his mouth was frozen in a silent scream.
“And nobody saw nothing,” Child said. “How’s that?”
I said, “Only reason anyone saw me was I asked for him. Killers do their own looking.”
“How’d you know to look here?”
“DPW. Frank was a champion rat-catcher.”
“What else was he?”
“A possible witness in the Fannon murder.”
“Based on what?”
I took a deep breath and told him how we’d met.
“I’m just learning about this now why?”
“At the time I didn’t know what was waiting for me in the basement. Later it slipped my mind.”
“What jogged your memory?”
“Cecil Fish. I traded him Frank for that Peaceable Shore tip I told you about.”
“You fingering Fish?”
“Much as I’d like to, this isn’t his style. I believed his assistant when he said he didn’t have any luck finding Frank.”
“He said this when?”
I told him.
“You’re just a busy little bee, aren’t you? In too much of a hurry to stop and clue me in on my own goddamn investigation.”
“It wasn’t my investigation when we spoke.”
“What do you think Frank saw?”
“Maybe nothing. Maybe whoever went in that building and came out before I showed up.”
“What makes it your investigation all of a sudden?”
“I’m working for Gwendolyn Haas to clear her father of the Fannon kill.”
“I thought you were working on Fannon’s dime.”
“That was then. On this case all I have to do is stand still and the clients come wrapping themselves around my ankles like old sports sections.”
“Funny thing. Haas showed up in my office a little while ago with his lawyer, saying he wanted to do the same thing. You wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“I suggested it a couple of hours ago when we ran into each other in the Liberty Inn. I was going to tell you all about it after I talked to Frank. One of the reasons I came down here was to try to persuade him to go to you with what he knew.”
“What brought you to the Liberty?”
“Just a hunch. It’s where all the two-legged rats in the city wind up sooner or later.”
Gwendolyn wouldn’t have thanked me for telling him she’d gotten a note from Haas on Liberty stationery. I didn’t know Child well enough to trust him not to slap her with a sheltering rap. I didn’t know any cop well enough for that, including cops I’d known for thirty years.
“While I’m at it, tell Lieutenant Stonesmith she can stop looking for Barry Stackpole. I stumbled over him in Haas’s room. He took off on his own. No foul play involved.”
“So you say. It’s so foul in here I could throw up, and I’m not talking about the stiff on the bed.” He started patting his pockets. “You’re under arrest, Walker. Withholding evidence to start. Got a Miranda card?” he asked the medical examiner.
“Why should I? I don’t have any authority to arrest anyone. You’ve been watching too many episodes of CSI.”
“Well, shit. You know your way around County,” he told me. “What they said last time still goes.” He reached under his coattail and jangled loose a pair of handcuffs.
* * *
Checking into Holding in the old Third Precinct was something I could cross off my bucket list. I’d spent enough time in the cage at 1300 to use it as my voting address, but that was before a chain of corrupt and inept mayors had let the place go to the birds and the beasts of the field. Homicide had been in those digs long enough to wear out that invigorating new-hoosegow smell, but the bars had a fresh coat of whitewash and the beige-painted walls weren’t yet scribbled over with the legacies left by former occupants. There was no steel grid to protect the bulb, but the LED fixture behind the opaque pebbled panel in the ceiling was too high for a Pistons center to reach. The toilet had a lid and the triangular corner sink drained like sixty.
The bed was another story. Recently bankrupt cities don’t go to Art Van’s for new furniture when they move offices. I was pretty sure I’d used this one before, and my tired old muscles confirmed it. They hadn’t even bothered to change the walnuts in the stuffing.
Jails are quiet, whatever you’ve read in books or seen on TV. The cell to my right was empty, the mattress rolled up at one end on naked metal slats, and my neighbor on the left slept more or less peacefully, making a little “pah” sound every time he exhaled. Sleeping’s the best way to pass the time in the can once you’ve committed all the graffiti to memory. You don’t even have to be sleepy: You just close your eyes and pretend you’ve got the flu.
When Lieutenant Child to the dark tower came, accompanied by a uniformed officer, I was dreaming about hunting grizzlies in Alaska. I’d never been to Alaska, had never gotten any closer to a bear in the wild than Animal Planet, and nothing I’d been exposed to lately was even slightly related to what I dreamt. It was an episode from Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, dredged up from childhood. You know you’re past middle age when your brain’s too far gone to process anything but stock footage. The rattle of the officer’s key in the lock woke me.
“Man, you were out,” Child said. “Must be them fine linen sheets.”
“I just now dozed off. I think there’s a pea under the mattress.” I swung my feet to the floor and scratched my grouty scalp.
Someone cleared his throat. I looked up. There was a second man with him, six-and-a-half-feet high with hair as sleek and as close to his head as a bathing cap. The color scheme he wore was the same as his office on the nosebleed floor of the Capital One Building in Southfield, gray gabardine on yellow silk with a steel-gray necktie. He had the distracting habit of blinking constantly, from exposure to all those hot TV lights, but he shut it down cold when addressing juries. I’d done some sleuthing for him in the case of a police-siege-gone-wrong, but it hadn’t worked out as well for his client as he’d hoped. Underdogs were his specialty, but he’d wound up exonerating the authorities, so he didn’t like me any more than I liked him.
Philip Justice was his real name, and he swung it like an axe, in court and during press conferences. The founder of the family had represented Lucrezia Borgia or somebody like that, and the surname had been granted to him like a knighthood.
“You’re sprung, Walker,” Child said. “You kind of left this one out of your references.”
“If I knew the lieutenant forgot to Mirandize you, I’d have saved a trip to the Frank Murphy Hall for a habeas.” Justice’s voice lacked the rusted barbed-wire edge he reserved for witnesses on the stand. “But he volunteered that information, so I don’t see any reason to bring suit.”
“I don’t have a lawyer,” I said.
Child said, “Duke it out between you outside. I only tanked you because it’s good for my blood pressure. That wouldn’t have been necessary if you’d told me you got Charlotte Sing in your sights. Now I can dust my hands of this one, Carl Fannon too, right into Washington’s lap.”
* * *
We adjourned to a sports bar in the next block, a cop hangout. You could cut the testosterone with a knife; and at least half of it was coming from female officers. A soccer game was playing on the big screen above the bar with the sound turned down. Not that anyone in the joint would listen any more than watch. A couple of talking heads were discussing the NFL drafts, with football season months away, and whoever was typing the closed-caption couldn’t spell.
One lonely screen featured that day’s Tigers game in Atlanta, taped earlier and abridged to cut out the boring parts; like whenever the Braves came to bat. A waitress wearing a Tigers jersey over a bandanna skirt brought us spicy chicken wings and a beer apiece.
“Let’s tip twenty percent,” I told Justice after she left. “She’s the only one in here who knows what season it is.”
“I have a box, if you ever want to see a game. I got a utility infielder off a date-rape beef and he’s the grateful type.”
He ate caveman style, one arm curled around his plate and looking up and around between bites. “We should’ve gone to my place in Southfield. Every time I come into one of these dumps I expect to get shot down fleeing arrest.”
I said, “You can always bring suit from hell. You’ll have your pick of representatives. I’m too busy doing Child’s job to fight rush hour traffic. Who told him about Sing, you?”
“That’d be a violation of client confidentiality.”
“How would tipping him off to an international fugitive get you in Dutch with Emil Haas?”
“Who said I’m representing him?”
“I left him calling his lawyer. Since guys like him don’t normally truck with criminal attorneys, I figured his rep farmed it out to you.”
He blinked more rapidly than usual. “We’ve never met. I’ve been retained by our mutual friend from Korea.”