TWO

“You’ll be glad you agreed to come along,” she said. “He’s not the punk he used to be. Those years in and out of institutions changed him.”

“If they didn’t change his DNA, I’m not interested. You’re paying me to take a ride, not for my good opinion of Joey Ballistic.”

“I’d shitcan the nickname. He’s unreasonable about it.”

“Right. No sense lighting his fuse.”

We were heading north on Telegraph Road in the mauve Volvo station wagon Lucille had been driving for twenty years. I think she’d acquired it with just a few thousand miles on the clock from a client who wouldn’t be needing it for three to five years, in lieu of her fee. She maintained it with all the care of a woman who had no time for pets or children, no personal life worth talking about; we had that in common if little else. The clock had turned over a couple of times and all she’d had to replace was the battery, brakes, and tires. The unbroken string of Best Buys, Targets, Home Depots, and PetSmarts on each side of the eight-lane highway slid its oily reflection over six coats of Turtle Wax on the hood.

“You and Barry Stackpole have a real history,” she said.

“If I had a bottle of Scotch as old as our history I’d save it for my wedding day.”

Barry and I had shared a shell hole under enemy fire, a dozen cases of strong spirits, and mutually beneficial information over a period that had outlasted most marriages, not counting one long dry spell when we weren’t speaking. I’d been an MP at the start, he a correspondent with Stars and Stripes, and we hadn’t wandered far from the gate. In my case an experiment in organized law enforcement had led to the disorganized variety I was still practicing, while Barry had parlayed a spot on The Detroit News police beat into a syndicated column, then a cable TV show, and finally a Web site that news and police agencies alike paid to download information on criminal activity the world over. Back on the News, he’d been too preoccupied ducking a subpoena to testify to a grand jury investigating the old Combination to pop the hood of his Chevy Impala and see the explosive charge that had taken the car, one of his legs, two fingers, and a saucer-size piece of his skull when he turned the key.

“Joey was just a button back then,” I told Lucille, as if I’d been talking right along instead of just remembering. “Even the old man was only a subcapo or something, with a vending machine route and a cathouse on Michigan Avenue. That bit Joey did for attempted murder was the turning point for them both. He did it standing up, not naming names, and when he got out, his father was in charge of the Guerrera brothers’ old outfit and made Joey his lieutenant. That put him in line for boss when the old man died.”

“Not counting a few vacations courtesy of the local and federal authorities.” Lucille drove with her hands at ten and two, a couple of miles under the limit in the slow lane with everyone passing her. Her reputation for recklessness didn’t extend to the road. “Detroit cops fitted him to a partial print on the wad of chewing gum the dynamiter used to paste down the wires. I’m pretty sure the lab rat fudged on the number of points of resemblance when he took the stand, but you can’t sweat a dead man, and the forensics report is water stained beyond legibility. They ought to fix the fucking roof at Thirteen Hundred instead of juicing up the riverfront for tourists.” Detroit Police Headquarters, an eighty-year-old landmark at 1300 Beaubien, was alternately scheduled for renovation and demolition, with no change in the situation of the uniforms and plainclothes detectives dodging drips and rotten floorboards. “A chemical test will settle the point if I can get my hands on that piece of gum.”

“Yuck.”

“All they had to go on back then was blood types,” she said. “Every new weapon in the war on crime is another nail in the coffin of sloppy police work.”

“What’s stopping you?” We’d left the strip malls behind and were gliding past tree plantings and upscale restaurants, breathing the bottled-in-bond air of the Bloomies. Names of lakes had replaced the mile numbers on the road signs and suburban prowl cars squatted on the median, looking for broken taillights and patches of rust and similar evidence of invasion from the city to the south.

“Not stopping me, boyo; just slowing me down. The system, what else? They store the evidence separate from the paperwork, and somebody lost it. I figure it’s stuck to the chief’s bedpost.”

“It could’ve been honestly misplaced. It’s been years and years. DPD isn’t Scotland Yard.”

“Scotland Yard isn’t Scotland Yard. I put in farmout work for a firm of London solicitors over the Official Secrets Act over there. The dumb fucks in Washington have nothing on those tweedy inspectors when it comes to trying to find their asses with both hands.” She gunned the Volvo through an intersection a split second before the light turned yellow. I don’t think we caught one red that whole trip. In addition to being a careful driver, Lucille was a very good one, with a course at the Bondurant school of race driving on her lengthy resumé. She’d foiled a kidnap try, or maybe just an attempt to scare her, by doubling back on her pursuer long enough to catch the number on his plate before disengaging. There’s no law against following someone one time, but the cops had paid a visit and there had been no more such incidents. Her enemies had fallen back on the usually reliable practice of bribing someone to challenge her license, but she’d survived that, too. She was the beep-beep-Roadrunner of defense lawyers.

She said, “I’m bragging, not complaining. They’re afraid of me or they’d have come up with something more original than the old shell game. I’ve filed with Freedom of Information, but that takes too long. I expect one of my snitches to come through anytime. If the Man were serious about putting the kibosh on me, he’d raise the salaries of his civil servants. I’m their annuity.”

“So why the offer? I’ve got almost as much bad blood against me in the system as you, and a hell of a lot fewer resources.”

“Because I dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s, and when I’ve dotted and crossed them all, I make up some more. You’re a pit bull, Amos, just like me. If they flush that piece of gum, you’ll find something maybe not as good, but good enough to sweat out whoever flushed it, and I’ll swing a new trial on prima facie. There’s never just one smoking gun. When they’re this committed, there’s usually an arsenal.”

“You’re counting too heavily on me changing my mind. I don’t get as many jobs as I need, but I need the friends I’ve got more.”

“You can always make new friends. There are three hundred million Americans now. Your odds are improving by the day.”

There was no use arguing that point. She had no friends that I knew of, but work enough to keep her mind off the fact. She was like the multimillionaire who said money wasn’t important.

“I’m talking about justice,” she went on; “small j. It deserves the capital, but those crumbs in Washington have pissed all over it just like everything else.”

I looked at her, at her bulldog profile against the greenery and wrought-iron skidding past the window on her side. “Do you really buy that, or is it just another one of your notorious summations to the jury?”

“Honey, I was sold when I passed the Bar. Don’t you think I could be rich enough to bankroll Bill Gates if I’d offered my considerable services to a corporation? I’m not talking about Big Tobacco; they were going down for the third time when I joined their team. Someone has to look out for the Rule of Law when it’s out of favor.”

There was a philosophical discussion there, if we’d had the time, but my Plato was rusty, and she’d slowed for the turn onto Squirrel Lake Road, where the gin joints and roadhouses of the giddy postwar world had gone to the wrecking ball and baronial estates had sprung up on their foundations. We sprayed gravel on the apron of a private road named for Joseph Michael Ballista’s Castellammarise mother’s family and followed it to a turnaround in front of the rambling Tudor mansion that Joe Balls had had built by Old World stonemasons and carpenters on four acres wooded with American walnut trees, with a clear-cut circle around it designed to discourage assassins from seeking cover during assaults on the ancestral estate. There was just enough wind to keep the plywood sawyer in the front yard busy gnawing at his log; never underestimate the capacity of the newly rich to junk up a piece of residential real estate.

I stood with her in front of a sheltered panel door while she waited for someone to answer the chimes: They seemed to be ringing out the theme to The Sound of Music, but it might have been Puccini. There’s not much room for nuance when just four metal tubes are involved in the performance. In due course of time, the summons was answered by an East Indian houseboy in a white coat with gold frogs, and we measured out a portion of mortality while the manservant excused himself to see if the master of the house was in residence.

“As if he could get more than five hundred feet outside the door without alerting the constabulary,” Lucille said.

We heard him stumping for a while before he entered the foyer, which was as bare of furniture as if he were moving out. He came in leaning on a cane with a faux ivory grip poured into the shape of a leaping fish. There are various degrees of being sixty, and you can look like forty if you take care of yourself and the genes are sound, but neither of those circumstances was present in Joey Ballistic’s case. The leg he needed the cane for ended in a gnarled root of an appendage in a white sock in a sandal, and the pain of the gout that throbbed there had drawn the blood from his face and the color from his scant hair. Deep gullies in his features made him a twin of his father in his last days. Those were fifteen years in the past, caused by complications from syphillis, the disease that sought out gangsters the way lung cancer stalked Hollywood.

“Counselor.” His lips peeled back from shockingly white veneers and he changed hands on the cane to grasp hers. “Hope you brought a pair of bolt cutters. This thing itches like a case of crabs.” He waggled his good foot in a soft Italian leather loafer with the bulge of the tether showing just above the spot where the cuff of his trousers broke at the instep.

“When the time comes, I’ll have the attorney general take it off himself. Joe, meet Amos Walker. I’m hoping to assign him to investigate your case.”

He turned a pair of eyes on me with no more shine to them than petrified black walnuts. But I saw a dull glimmer of recognition. “Frankie Acardo; long time ago. You tried to warn him the Colombians were laying for him.”

“I didn’t try all that hard.” His memory impressed me. Except for grudges, his kind didn’t encourage the faculty.

“His old man Jackie partnered with my father for a little. Dumb as fireplugs, Jackie and Frankie. Frankie’s Uncle Tommy was the brains of that family. Somebody shoved him over the side of one of his own quarries and spilled them all over the bottom.”

“Good times.”

I felt the woman at my side stiffen, but we were spared the awkwardness of his offering his hand and my not shaking it. His face went as dead as his eyes. Then he showed the dentalwork again, like fresh plaster on a condemned building, and turned to lead us into the bowels of the house, changing hands again on the cane to get all the good out of it.

His saggy body wore a vintage-looking yellow sports shirt tail out over tan poplin slacks, with a wide vertical brown stripe on either side of the placket. The silk suits almost never come out any more exept at weddings, christenings, and the weekly funeral. Casual wear is the uniform of Las Vegas, their real Vatican.

Lucille had called the place Joe Balls’s barn. It was as empty as one before the harvest. Our footsteps on the marble and ceramic rustled among the exposed oak beams high above our heads. In the old days, I’d heard, the shining time between Batista’s rise to power in Cuba and the police raid on Apalachin, the rooms had been packed with Grecian urns, Deco panels, Impressionist paintings, Turkish rugs, Japanese screens, and medieval European armor, a woozy compost that made visitors stagger as if they’d been mixing beer with port and malt whisky with applejack. Then Joey’s mother passed (a suicide, some said), and Joseph Senior’s gray cells began to spoil while the gorillas in the boardroom discussed whether to let nature take its course or make a call before he babbled all he knew about Albert Anastasia, Jimmy Hoffa, and the grassy knoll. He’d died awaiting a decision and Joseph Junior auctioned everything off and went minimal. FBI listening devices were getting smaller and smaller and there was no point in providing so many places to hide them.

No doubt the ephemeral quality of Joey’s freedom had led to more yard sales, with his wife separated from him by legal decree and a county line, and no one else to enjoy the comforts for long stretches. Or maybe he favored the open space after a nine by twelve cell. In any case the walk seemed longer than it was and awakened the agoraphobe in me.

We came to a stop finally in a completely furnished room: plush chairs with worn arms, low tables with ashtrays, a bleeding heart in a frame, and the smell of expensive cigars. Wine glittered in a spinsterish old decanter on the dropleaf of a maple secretary with a few books on the shelves, thumbworn long ago, titled in Italian; neither he nor his father had seen fit to add to a library that had come over with Joey’s grandfather from Sicily when the first Roosevelt was in the White House.

He poured himself wine, diluting it with water from a less ornate container, a concession to gout, and sat without offering us any of either, propping his foot on a hassock and hooking his cane over an arm of the chair. When Lucille and I sat down I caught him watching me curiously, as if having placed the name he might remember where he’d seen the man.

He wouldn’t. The only time we’d been face-to-face he’d been standing on the wrong side of a one-way mirror, when I wheeled Barry Stackpole into a police lineup room to identify him.