NINETEEN

The female sergeant in charge of the little room where the servant met the public gave me a pass for the elevator and directed me to the second floor. She was medium brown with short hair bleached a defiant shade of yellow, built close to the ground on a wide frame. They don’t recruit them off the runway.

Upstairs a sandy-looking party in his forties was sitting in one of the four hard chairs against the wall outside the office. He had a gunslinger’s moustache with the ends dipped in nicotine and left his lanky legs stuck out in front of him when I approached, forcing me to walk around a pair of big-booted feet crossed at the ankles. He wore a beige uniform with an enameled shield pinned to the shirt and the hickory handle of a replica Frontier Colt in a holster leaning out from his hip. I figured he’d won it in a Tom Mix trivia contest.

“Hello, Homer,” I said.

That made him raise his chin off his chest, but I didn’t see his eyes until he slid his aviator’s glasses down his veined nose for a better look. The mirrored lenses helped hide his bloodshot eyes from the world. “Do I know you?” His reedy tenor didn’t go with the outfit.

“Save it until there’s a witness present.”

The slot next to the door had Lieutenant Hornet’s name in white letters on black plastic. I didn’t let it deter me. The occupants of two upper floors, John Alderdyce included, were bivouacing elsewhere until they were declared fit for occupancy. The historic old building was rotting from the top down, just like the city. I knocked and entered without waiting for an invitation.

An academy class picture of Hornet, thirty years younger and forty pounds lighter than the one I knew, hung on the wall beside a large-scale street map on a corkboard with tiny golf course flags pinpointing high-crime areas. From the look of it, locating the safer neighborhoods would have put far less strain on the office supplies.

“I’m mellowing,” Alderdyce said. “Time was I’d have you pulled over, thrown on your face, cuffed, and perp-walked all the way up Beaubien.”

“Thanks. I hate it when that happens.”

I didn’t take a seat, and he didn’t offer to get up and clear the liquor carton off the only other chair in the ten-by-ten room. The box appeared to contain personal items, a bowling trophy and family photos in stand-up frames. The room was too small to share, so the lieutenant had been bumped, but the fact that its current occupant hadn’t bothered to unpack or change the name beside the door was a vote of confidence in favor of the city’s stalled plans for renovation.

“If you’d called me on my cell, I’d have driven myself and saved the chief the price of gas.” I leaned my back against the door and stuck my hands in my pockets.

“I tried six times. When was the last time you plugged it in to recharge?”

I took it from my pocket and tried my office number. Dead, like me. I was still waiting for the boom to come down. “I’m not used to it yet.” I put the phone away.

“Where’ve you been all day? When you didn’t answer at work or at home I sent someone both places.”

“Canton.”

“Michigan?”

“China.” Which was almost true.

“What the hell’s in Canton?”

“Why don’t you just call in Marshal Dillon and get this over with?”

He made no move except to slide a thumb down the back of his tie. Today it was maroon on maroon, nearly as dark as his complexion. He’d imported his private filing system to the big yellow desk he was sitting behind: files and arrest reports stacked neatly in columns arranged according to subject. “After you put me on to the arresting officer in the Stackpole case I sent Hornet and a sergeant out to Portage Lake to talk to Severin. That character outside was already on the scene.”

“Homer S Bruno,” I said. “No period after the S.”

“The surprises keep coming. I expected you to play dumb like usual.”

“It got so I don’t have to play it anymore.”

He remained tilted back on his swivel, riffling the corner of a stack with a thumb. I didn’t know who he was turning on the spit, me or the constable from Portage Lake. Finally he put both feet on the floor and got up and came around and pushed me aside to open the door and lean out. Something creaked, furniture or long loose bones, and the sandy-looking man in the uniform came in and slid down his shades for another glimpse. He gave it two beats to make my heart thump faster, then slid them back up.

“Nope.”

“Sure?”

“Yup.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“That what you brung me clear out here for?”

“Yup.”

He turned and strode out, creaking like a peg leg. The noise came from his gun belt; in addition to the big Colt, a pair of cuffs and a leather sap and a square Motorola the size of a gin bottle hung from it. A flat can made a circular bulge in his left hip pocket. I’d have been disappointed if it hadn’t made an appearance.

Alderdyce swung the door shut. “It’ll be a sad day when the last of those colorful characters retires.”

“There’s always comic books.”

He went back to his swivel and returned it to its tilt. I transferred the liquor carton to the floor and took the hot seat. It was as hard as the ones outside looked. “What did he see?”

“Turns out he was at the marina when the storm was on its way, telling Severin he’d better close up till it passed. That’s what the township pays him for, to tell people who’ve lived there for years what to do in heavy weather. Severin had a visitor. The description didn’t fit you, but when do they ever fit anyone? I had to put the period on it. That’s what the city pays me for, to waste as many taxpayer dollars as possible.”

“So it’s your case now.”

“We’re assisting, because of the possible Detroit connection, same as with River Rouge. We don’t get enough local murders to keep us busy.” He slanted his big bony forehead toward the forest of flags on the street map.

“He didn’t see the murderer. Anyone that handy with a forty-five would’ve done Homer, too, or scrubbed the operation.”

“Sure, but it helps fix time of death. Thirty minutes from the first stumble of thunder to when the first witness showed up. The first official witness,” he added, watching me with no expression.

“Ballistics said it was a forty-five?”

“Most like. Those unjacketed rounds the big-bore magnums fire would’ve done more damage to the window after Severin’s skull got through with them. How much frisking did you do?”

“Just the blinds and his hands, to see if he slashed them up garroting Frances Donella.” I watched him with plenty of expression on my face. I was still waiting for the blow.

“M.E. says the callosities make that part inconclusive.”

“He said ‘callosities?’ ”

“It’s a word. I looked it up. It isn’t like you to resist tossing a crime scene. Seems to me we’ve gone a few rounds over that in the past.”

“I didn’t have that kind of time. It’s his busy season.”

“Bruno and the county mounties got the call from a customer. Customer’s sixty, one of those pillars of the community you read about in the obituaries. Severin was still warm when my team showed up. That’s part of why I’m not all over you like boils on Job.”

“What’s the rest of the reason?”

“State can’t afford to feed the prisoners it has, and it wouldn’t do any good anyway. What took you out there so soon after our talk?”

“The M.E. said something about fishing line. I remembered Severin was monkeying with a big tangle of it all the time I was there.”

“Thin as hell.”

“What I thought, but I had to put the period on it. Did it turn up?”

He slid a sheet out of a stack and ran his eyes down it, put it back. “No tangle in the inventory, but our button-counters are still running it. Even a penny-ante store like Severin’s puts a week into it after closing, to keep the governor happy. Couple of hundred miles of line on spools. Not enough to take him in and sweat him over, even if his glands were still working.”

“Interesting if it’s missing.”

“Not to me. Maybe he got sick of wrestling with it and put it out with the trash.”

“Maybe he threw it in the river with Frances. The current would’ve taken it miles from where the body bobbed up.”

“You haven’t told me yet why you like him for it.”

“I thought if the Stackpole case was a frame and Severin couldn’t be sure his snitch would back him up when it reopened, he’d be out his pension and probably face jail time, even if the governor had to pardon a carjacker to feed him. He fit right into the box until that chunk of lead spoiled it.” Something else I’d found out had done even more damage, but I didn’t mention it. I was sorry I’d brought up Canton—the police file on Lee Tan would be at least as thorough as the one Lucille Lettermore had dug up, and cops could connect dots as well as anyone—but I have a policy of telling the truth on occasion. “Whoever fired it might have taken the fishline to implicate him, except he’d have dressed the scene to look like suicide. Trading one murder for another is fuzzy math.”

“Maybe he didn’t have that kind of time either, or maybe he’s scared of thunder. The twerp in the morgue said it could’ve happened during the storm just as much as after. Did you keep your lights?”

“I did. A lot of people farther west weren’t so lucky. It’d just passed when I got to the marina.”

“Mine are still out at home, and I live only twenty blocks west of here. My wife gets testy when there’s no hot water. Me, too. I break a lot of cases when I’m shaving.”

I’d noticed he had more stubble than usual for that time of day. It was coming in pure white now. “It shows. What’ve you got against the M.E.?”

“He’s a cocky little bastard ever since that TV show came on. We got a wall of photos downstairs of police officers slain in the line of duty and not one forensics expert, but if you watch television you’d think all the crimes that get solved get solved with egg scales and tweezers.”

“That’s what makes convictions.”

“So does cornering suspects into tripping themselves up. That’s a skill, too, and a damn hard one to learn. Some never do, and that’s where we get police chiefs. God help us all when the pocket-protector brigade gets the green light to sit in on interrogations.”

I watched him, fighting hard to play poker. I could almost see the first wisps of blue smoke from a full-scale burnout in progress. It made me sad. All the acquaintances of my tender years were bearing down hard on retirement, and all my investments were tied up in office supplies and ammunition. “Here’s something else to think about next time you get to scrape your face,” I said. “Severin had nervous hands. Most cops do; it’s what puts some of them in hot water. If he wasn’t working on that snarl of nylon, he had to have something to keep them busy when that door opened. But he was just sitting there with them empty when I found him.”

“A gun, maybe. He had a case full of them and a chamois cloth damn near worn out in a drawer. Maybe he got one off first. I’m still waiting on a report on the carbon test we did on his hands. That’s SOP.”

“I didn’t think to sniff them, but I doubt I could have told anything. I still smell charred powder from the store every time I breathe in. Anyway, I’m pretty sure the shooter never came more than a foot or two inside the door. Taking a gun out of Severin’s hands would’ve been an afterthought. If he was enough of a pro to make a shot like that, he wasn’t the type to second-guess himself. That bit about removing the tangled line was snatching at straws.”

“Pros slip up too. We got a lot of ’em in Jackson.”

I waited. Silence sagged and settled. “So am I still a suspect, or am I just up the same old creek for the price of my user minutes?”

“No to the first. I’ve seen you on the range. You couldn’t hit a target at that distance with a forty-five if you threw it. As for the other—” He rummaged through one of his stacks, hauled out a file folder thick enough to strain the rubber band that held it shut, and stuck it out.

I took it and opened it. After shuffling through the dog-eared papers inside I said, “I guess it’s too much to hope you’re writing my biography.”

“Unauthorized, if I were. There’s enough here to bust your license six ways from Sunday if I sent it to state police headquarters in Lansing. Every obstruction of justice, breaking and entering, lying to the FBI—my favorite; you can tell tall tales to the cop on the beat every day for a year and we can’t touch you, except maybe with a rubber hose—and tampering with evidence, all typed out with bullet points for the really salty stuff, the stuff that could put you in those shitty shoes they issue in the corrections system. Still got that unregistered Luger?”

“I’d answer that, but the Bill of Rights still had a couple of teeth in its head last time I looked.”

“When was the last time you looked? Seems to me you used that piece a time or two. That’s another six months right there.”

“I didn’t know you kept score.”

“I’ve been a great one for keeping records ever since I did ninety days’ desk duty for something a department commander told me to do. I’ve had this one in my desk for years; Hornet’s, now, but you get my drift. Locked away. Not on computer. That’d be like putting it on a party line, and I like to keep the credit right here at home. There’s a fresh crisp sheet on the bottom. I put it there not ten minutes before you knocked on my door.”

“How far would I get if I tucked it under my arm and ran?”

“I’d put a slug in your good leg before you got a hand on the doorknob.” He put out a palm, waggling his fingers. I laid it there. I’d seen him on the range too.

He opened a drawer, laid the fat folder inside, and locked it with a key he had on one of those gimmicks you attach to a belt. Then he folded his big hands on one of the stacks on the desk. “Run straight to me with whatever you dig up. Trip and fall down on the way and I’ll show up at every parole hearing for the next ten years. Tough love, baby. The only kind you respond to.”

I said, “Is that all you got?” But the Edmund Fitzgerald was sunk and I knew I was looking up at it from underneath.