I LOOKED DOWN at him for a while without moving; trying to siphon off some of the wisdom from those half-open eyes. Now I noticed the one smell that didn’t belong in a garage, a mixture of sulphur and saltpeter that stung my nostrils like nettles. It would have hung on longer than usual in the motionless air, but in another few minutes it would be gone entirely.
The expression on Arsenault’s face was serene. It belonged in a Renaissance painting. It was the same one he had turned to the camera eight years ago; fleshier now and pinched at the corners of the mouth, but still youthful. Nothing removes stress from one’s life like leaving it.
I sat on my heels and touched his skin. It felt warm, but the close air would have preserved his body temperature longer. I wiped off my DNA, then used the handkerchief to mop my palms. Despite that they were as cold as the concrete.
I stood and looked around. From where the shooter had stood I could see the attendant asleep in his booth. Nothing in that. His back was turned, and a small-caliber report in those surroundings would have sounded like someone dropping a pen on the floor. It wouldn’t have awakened a man with a hearing disability. It wouldn’t even have carried ten yards beyond the entrance, where I had sat in my car listening to the weather report on the radio. The telephone men wouldn’t have paid it any attention. Or it might have happened before we got there.
I had a thought.
I was either getting old or the muggy conditions were rusting my reflexes.
Just to prove that wasn’t it, I sprang the Detective Special from its clip in a fast-draw. There was no one in view to impress, but the porous rubber grip absorbed perspiration from my hand and the weight of the frame steadied my arm.
There were a dozen more vehicles parked on that level. I inspected them all, jerking open doors that weren’t locked and thrusting the gun inside. Nobody was hiding in any of them. I crept up to the fire door by the elevator on the balls of my feet, swung it open by the handle and pivoted, drawing down on a flight of empty steel steps. The heavy door made a lonely sound drifting shut.
Putting away the revolver I went back to the body and frisked it. His suit, gray gabardine with an eggshell silk lining, was made in London. He had an antique Curvex wristwatch worth a couple of thousand on a gold link band and a calfskin wallet full of gold and platinum cards with no compartment for cash. Rich people are always broke. He had an ivory comb, a roll of breath mints, and an unopened package of condoms with a conquistador on the box.
I found one more thing in his breast pocket, an envelope containing a zany-looking paste-up note, a convincing composite photograph, and a clipping from the Yellow Pages. That fixed time of death: somewhere between the morning forecast on WJR and a Ford commercial, with a trained detective sitting fifty feet away. I put the last discovery in my own pocket.
Lynn Arsenault. A sexually responsible young man, with nice hair and sweet-smelling breath. He’d spoken twenty words to me over the telephone.
The geezer in the booth was still sawing logs by the board foot. I could have driven a herd of longhorns past him and never been part of his life. I almost did—go past him, that is, without the beef—but then I remembered the Ameritech workers. They were gone now, but they’d logged in, and they were drilled by the company’s PR consultants to keep their eyes and ears open for suspicious activity. If you consider a stranger sitting alone in a car without air conditioning on the hottest day of the year suspicious.
I sighed and rejoined the system.
I separated my ID folder from the honorary Wayne County sheriff’s star I used to serve papers and tapped the metal against the glass of the booth.
The snoring changed pitch. The attendant stirred and transferred the weight of his head from his right hand to his left. Then he fell into the old cadence.
I tapped again. He swiped at his face as if a fly were tickling the hairs curling out of his eyebrows. His eyes stayed closed.
I went on tapping until they opened. I watched the pupils contract. His bottom lids were red-rimmed and loose and I could see a sty on one of them the size of a BB.
“What the hell.” His voice grated like a rusty flywheel. I could tell right through the glass he needed one of Arsenault’s breath mints.
“Rise and shine. It’s not Woody Woodpecker.” I showed him the buzzer.
His lips moved over the embossed lettering on the enamel. The corners of his mouth were stained white with Maalox.
I put away the badge. “I’m looking for a car involved in a hit-and-run last Saturday on Seven Mile. Green Porsche, vanity plate Peter Robert Edward David Numeral Eight Oscar Robert. The computer in Lansing kicked out a registration in the name of Lynn Arsenault who works at this address. You got a car here answers that description?”
He worked his lips again, reading the letters I’d given him. Recognition broke the surface like a whale breaching. Then he shoved it back under.
“I don’t see no warrant. What kind of a hit-and-run?”
I broke eye contact. Two small color portrait shots of dark-haired boys in Sunday shirts were taped to the glass on the other side of the booth. They were about eight and ten and looked like brothers, if they weren’t pictures of the same boy taken two years apart.
“Nine-year-old boy got run over on his bike,” I said. “He’s critical.”
“Oh, shit.” He reached for a gold chain inside the collar of his uniform shirt. I like Roman Catholics. Confession comes second-nature to them.
“That’s pretty much what his parents said. He’s an altar boy at St. Boniface.”
“Predator. Pred-eight-or, get it? It’s in back by the elevator.”
“Show me.”
“I ain’t supposed to leave the booth.”
“Are you supposed to snooze in it?”
“I was resting my eyes.”
“On what? Let’s go.”
He touched the chain again, adjusted his bifocals, and reached for the doorknob.
“Nice-looking grandkids,” I said when he came out.
“They’re my sons. The oldest starts sixth grade in September.”
“What grade is your wife in?”
“That ain’t nice.” When he stuck out his lower lip he showed a bottom row of nicotine-stained teeth.
“Sorry. I take it back. I take back what I said about your snoozing too. You need all the sleep you can get.”
“Her too.” He locked up, chuckling, and led the way. He had slits cut in his black Oxfords through which white socks bulged like escaping dough. His wide belt divided his spare tire into duals.
“Get much traffic through here?” I asked.
“Same old. It’s restricted to employees. I don’t think Mr. Arsenault’s your man. He runs the show here, and he’s—” He stopped walking. “Mother of God.”
I hadn’t disturbed Arsenault’s position. Corpses are like road maps: You just can’t get them back the way they were. The hole in his temple showed and blood had leaked into a round garnet-colored pool on the floor around his head.
“Stay here.”
I went over and bent down and made a business of looking for the carotid. His skin seemed to have cooled, but that was just projection; it had only been a few minutes. I straightened.
“Dead. Who’s been in here since you came on?”
“Just the regulars.”
“Any of them come back out?”
He shook his head. His face was gray. “They never do before lunch.”
“They wouldn’t get past an alert party like you.”
“I got to work the gate,” he said. “I wasn’t asleep.”
“You wouldn’t need to work the gate if they came out on foot.”
He said nothing. There wasn’t anything in it anyway, unless I’d been asleep too. It was just a question someone with the sheriff’s department would ask.
“Got a telephone in that booth?”
“I ain’t supposed to call out on it.”
“You won’t have to. Give me the key. Stay here and don’t let anyone near the body.”
The inside of a cheek got chewed. Then he unclipped the retractable steel case from his belt. “The brass one.”
I closed the door and dialed Stuart Lund’s suite at the Marriott. After two rings a male switchboard operator came on and told me Mr. Lund had asked not to be disturbed. He asked if he could take a message.
I hung up and dialed 911. The old attendant rapped on the glass.
“Get back to Arsenault,” I said through the speaking grid.
“I can hear the elevator and the door to the stairs from here, and there’s the entrance. If anybody’s going to mess with the body any other way, I ain’t equipped to stop ’em. Who you calling?”
“The cops.”
“You’re the cops.”
“I mean the locals.”
A human voice answered on the eighth ring, some kind of record for the emergency line. I told it what it needed to know and broke the connection. When I came out of the booth the old man’s face was a stack of scowls. “I guess I’ll have another look at that badge.”
I gave him back his keys. “It’s a loaner. I’m private.”
“What about that hit-and-run? That a loaner too?”
“What say we just tell them what we found and let John Law ask the questions?”
“I ain’t holding nothing back.”
“I didn’t figure you would.”
“They might want to know how is it you didn’t ask me if that was Mr. Arsenault laying there if you never saw him before.”
“Now, why would they ask that?”
“They ain’t. I am.”
“Well, is it?”
“Too late, Mac.” He went inside and banged the door shut. The clear glass separating us might have been lath and plaster for all the attention he paid me after that. He had a lot more bark on him than he looked.
I ignored him back. While I was doing that, he must have broken the rule about not making any calls out, because in ten minutes we were up to our hips in office brass.
There were just two of them, but they made as much noise as a crowd. One was a director of design who looked like an accountant, bald to the ears with a pair of eyeglasses on a chain around his neck and the full spectrum of colored pens in a pocket protector. His companion was a chief accountant who looked like another accountant. They disagreed about which of them had spoken to Arsenault last, they were at odds over whose responsibility it was to speak to the cops, they were not in concurrence that a full-time office security force would have prevented this tragedy from taking place at all. That last appeared to be an old argument.
They both thought the parking attendant, whose name was Gregory, had been hasty about notifying the authorities. Gregory stayed in his booth and didn’t say anything until the chief accountant lifted his glasses to peer at me and asked him if I’d been searched for the murder weapon.
“You do it,” Gregory said. “I ain’t your private police force.”
The design director turned his back on all of us. I had the impression he was mad at the chief accountant for getting to be the one who said “murder weapon.” Neither of them had paused by the elevator long enough to give the corpse any more than a passing glance.
I winked at Gregory. His face was space for rent.