ELEVEN

I used up some of my minutes getting handed off until someone connected me with a sergeant I knew who told me I’d find Inspector John Alderdyce at the Wayne County Morgue. “Standing up,” he assured me; there’s always plenty of high comedy to be had at 1300.

Officially it’s the Coroner’s Court Building, but nobody’s called it that since running boards went out of style. I parked in a loading zone on Lafayette, went through the emergency cards in the glove compartment until I found a medical one with a serpent-and-staff, and fixed it to my visor so it could be seen through the windshield. The gag almost never spared me a ticket, but it usually slowed down the tow truck. I walked three blocks to Brush and entered the tidy corner building shaped like the prow of an ocean liner that some visitors mistook for the Detroit Athletic Club.

The clerk at the desk took my name, found Alderdyce’s in the day register, spoke over a telephone, and had me sign in. I stuck the pass he gave me in a pocket and went to the viewing room.

In recent years they’d furnished the waiting room outside with a closed-circuit monitor for friends and family to identify the deceased without actually going into cold storage, but medical students from Wayne State University gave it more of a workout observing autopsies over a sack lunch. Today the room was deserted and the screen was black. I went on in without knocking, into a dry cold that always smelled like ammonia and formaldehyde to me, even though experts claim the chemicals have long since been replaced by something more efficient and odorless. Anyway it’s a less sinister smell than the underlay of open carcasses, like the back room of a butcher shop.

John Alderdyce stood conversing in murmurs with a Pakistani medical examiner in gold-rimmed glasses and a white coat across one of the sheet-covered tables that took up most of the space in a room the size of a handball court. He was darker than the M.E. and twice as large. He wore a chocolate brown suit, tailored by one of the Chosen, with a thin lavender pinstripe and a shirt-and-tie set that matched the stripe. It was an elegant package for something that ought to have come in a crate. You could pound Swiss steak on his forehead and strike matches off his cheekbones.

In contrast to the lumps under the other sheets, the one on the table where the pair was gathered lay uncovered to the waist. If this was Frances Donella, she hadn’t aged as well as either Marcine Logan or Iona Cuneo Ballista, but then I wasn’t seeing her under the best circumstances. They’d pulled her out of the water before bloating, but the immersion had turned her skin slate blue. Her breasts were empty flaps and violent patches of postmortem lividity made broad angry streaks across her puffy face. The vicious black ragged scar of a first-class job of throat-cutting may have had something to do with those. Her hair was leaden gray, plastered to her forehead and scalp.

I played with a cigarette. I couldn’t light it there, but the stage business made my fingers busy and kept them from shaking. Lying in state in parlors, the dead looked as if they were sleeping, and stumbled upon unexpectedly in woods and bobbing in currents they looked like mannequins, but in that whitewashed room in halogen light they just looked dead.

“Who ID’d her?” I said by way of greeting. My voice fell automatically to a murmur.

Alderdyce worked his shoulders, loosening the muscles that bunched there like fallen boulders. “Who’s asking, you or your bankroll?”

“Me, of course. I’m a cadaver buff, can’t get enough of that necro rush. Lovecraft and Poe are Mother Goose to me.”

The medical examiner nodded, acknowledging a comrade. They make Trekkies look like society.

“You’re babbling. Sure sign of concussion.” Alderdyce reached across the corpse, took my chin between a thumb and forefinger the size of steam pistons, and turned the rotten patch his way. “Past life catch up with you?”

“Feels like more than just one. I must’ve been Stalin last time around.”

“You’re getting too old to keep on running into bridges. I hear a man’s pension goes further in Central America.”

“Farther.” I tipped my head back, freeing myself from his grip. He could crush a hockey puck when he was distracted. “I didn’t know inspectors sat in on floaters. You get at least five a month, like phases of the moon. What’s the attraction?”

“I get interested when the phase in question used to bump pelvises with Joey Ballistic. What about you?”

“I heard about it in my car. I thought there might be a nickel in it. The dog days are hell on private work. All the party wives and husbands in heat are with the kids in Florida, taking advantage of the summer rates.”

“You don’t do divorce work and you don’t chase coroner’s vans. Take another swing.”

“Okay, I was kidding about the wives and husbands. It’s still my slow season. If she had family or a boyfriend, they might want to know something you cops aren’t releasing.”

“Like who put her in the water?”

“Like what she was doing before she got put in the water. Knowing about those last hours is important to survivors.”

“And you’re just the character that can get us to open up when the press can’t.”

“I’m just the character who knows what questions to ask.”

Alderdyce’s brain peered out at me through the holes punched in his skull. Then he turned to the Pakistani and spoke as if I wasn’t there. “Two hours, you said?”

“Around that. Much more and the tissues saturate and they sink. Then it’s three days before the gas brings them back to the surface. No decomposition here. Rigor’s still in place.” He flicked a finger at her chest. It made a noise like a plank, only less pleasant. “I wish they could all be floaters; it makes the job simple. I wouldn’t put her in there much before two.”

The inspector asked me what I’d been doing at two A.M. I pictured myself gargling Scotch to relieve mandibular stress.

“Sleeping.”

“Alone?”

“I said it’s my slow season.”

“Stackpole said he spent the night at home. I thought you single guys lived more gaudy.”

“I don’t get out much lately. I’m getting brittle.” So Barry had told the cops he hadn’t left his house. I started to put the shopworn cigarette between my lips, but my mouth was so dry I thought it would snatch away skin when I took it out. I put it back in the pack. “You talked to Barry?”

“First call I made when we pulled her driver’s license out of her pocket. He had a bag on. He said he didn’t know any Donellas. He didn’t sell it, but I let him think he did, this pass. She was never public record, but the bureaucracy’s no proof against a newshawk like him. I don’t guess you forgot his interest in Ballista is personal.”

“Did Joey identify her?”

“Her pimp did, after her sheet came up and we brought him in. She fell on hard nails after she and Joey split, just about the time he went away for that fireworks stunt. She started out working for an escort service and wound up on the Michigan Avenue assembly line, thumbing rides with her hips along with the rest. Priors up the ass for soliciting and possession, went into the program the first time to stay out of County. She lasted about a day. Two uniforms were waiting for her when she got back to her apartment. She got six months in DeHoCo. Didn’t learn a trade there, looks like. I never saw one go straight outside a movie theater.”

“Holding the pimp?”

“Would I be spending any time in this human landfill if we could bend his alibi?”

“Who’s sweating Joey?”

“Lieutenant Hornet, but he’s just collecting paperwork. Joey’s on an electronic tether. We talked to his P.O. He hasn’t stirred from his crib in days.”

“I knew Hornet when he was a sergeant. I thought he quit the department.”

“As good as, until he transferred back to Homicide from the mayor’s security detail. They’re all fat, have you noticed? Hizzoner’s diet plan: How to look skinny without losing a pound.”

“It’s not working. Talk to Joey’s wife?”

“She told us to call her lawyer. We’ll run it out, but I don’t see a motive after all these years and her and Joey separated. Also this isn’t a woman’s kind of kill unless you count shot-putters and body builders.”

“How much upper-body strength does it take to slit a woman’s throat?”

“Who says her throat was slit?”

I set my teeth and looked again at the wound. It looked slit to me.

I said, “It looks slit to me.”

“Tell him, since he’s here. He’s an awful pest.”

The medical examiner touched his glittering glasses. “Color’s a dead giveaway. Excuse the expression. Blue skin means cyanosis. Not enough oxygen in the blood. That takes place when something happens to prevent it from getting there.” He slid a finger with a very clean nail along the top edge of the gash. “The purple contusions are caused by ligatures. This woman was strangled.”

“Hanging?” I asked.

“That diagnosis is inconsistent with the lack of ligature marks on her wrists. When you hang someone against his will it’s advisable to prevent him from grabbing the rope and holding on until help arrives. It’s possible our victim was insensible, but I can’t comment on whether she was sedated until the toxicity report comes back from the lab. Absenting hanging by suicide”—he smiled shyly, touching his glasses—“one seldom if ever releases oneself afterward and throws oneself in the river—I’d say a garrote was involved.”

I took out a fresh cigarette and started to ruin it. “That’s a Mafia signature. Anyone else and it’s infringement of copyright. It puts Joey back in the race.”

“If he hired it, he still needed a reason,” Alderdyce said. “He’d have to be as bugs as his old man was to risk it over an old grudge.”

I said, “I hear he’s in bad health. Maybe he’s putting his affairs in order.”

“Where’d you hear he’s in bad health?”

I looked down at the cigarette. I’d nearly walked right into it. That clip I’d taken must have knocked my brain off one of its rubber mounts. “I heard he almost clocked out in the federal pen.”

“I heard it was more than almost,” Alderdyce said after a moment. He sounded disappointed. Whether it was because the same rumor I’d heard had been overly optimistic or because I’d sidestepped the snare he’d set, I couldn’t tell. “He got well enough to finish out his time. Anyway, he’s not acting like a man waiting for a shovel. Guess who’s representing him now?”

I looked at him, shook my head.

He told me, watching my face.

“Lefty Lucy,” I pursed my lips. “I thought she only stood up for anarchists.”

“Everyone’s changing lays this year. Look at you: You hear a siren, you take off after it like a greyhound. The point is no one retains a red-hot to dig him out of a pile of legal trouble, then turns around and makes the red-hot’s job twice as tough by ordering a hit. Our friend here would say the diagnosis is inconsistent with the sense God gave a cockroach.”

“Maybe he’s counting on you thinking that way.”

“He doesn’t think cops are that smart, and he’s right. We never look an open-and-shut case in the mouth.”

I agreed, but not for that reason. I looked at the M.E., who appeared a little hurt to have heard himself mocked; considering the job, their hides are surprisingly thin. “What’d he use, wire?” I asked. “Looks like it cut deep.”

“Five centimeters.” The dark little man brightened. “I used a magnet to extract any particles, but that’s only a shortcut if it was steel; magnets don’t attract copper or brass or aluminum. I haven’t peeled back the epidermis yet, but I doubt I’ll find metal. My guess is it was monofilament, thin but extremely strong. It wouldn’t have existed even ten years ago. Chemists have made some real strides developing high-test line for the fishing industry.”

“Fishline?”

He nodded, beaming now. A dull bell swung in a dim room I didn’t visit very often. I wondered what it was shouting about.