TWENTY-TWO

The police report Lucille Lettermore had smuggled out for me was still burning a hole in my passenger’s seat. I called her office number to see if she was in. There was a little hesitation after the fourth ring, and then her voice came on sounding as if she were shouting from Echo Point. I’d been transferred to her cell. She said she was on her way to meet a client and to slip the file through the mail slot in the door. Her building is an old one with some of the amenities still standing from a gentler age.

I caught a break when a car pulled out of a thirty-minute slot a few doors down from that pile and was getting out to feed the meter when I glanced up from habit toward her window. A set of pale green vertical louvers shielded it from afternoon sun. One of the blades shivered a little, as if someone had slid it aside to look out, then let it fall back.

It didn’t have to mean anything, even though Lucille no longer had help to leave behind in the office. An ambitious cleaner may have seized upon her absence to get a jump on the evening; stranger things have been known to happen even in Detroit. The air conditioner might have kicked in, stirring the blinds with a puff from the blower. They might not have moved at all, and what I’d seen was an illusion created by heat waves from the sidewalk.

I was pretty sure it was one of those things, but I jacked in a coin just for the hell of it, lit a cigarette, and strolled down the street shaking out the match and flipping it into the gutter. Two cars from the corner sat a spotless gunmetal-gray Chrysler sedan with a government plate. The windows were tinted too deeply to see inside unless I cupped my hands around my eyes and leaned in close.

I didn’t do that, and I didn’t risk another glance at that window. Instead I kept up my pace, loitered around the corner to finish the cigarette, then retraced my steps and got into the Cutlass. I didn’t start the motor. The city owed me twenty-two minutes. I rolled down the window for air.

Even then it didn’t have to mean anything. Downtown is stinking with banks and other federal institutions. Inspectors and things are always running in and out. Lucille’s building itself was still a bank despite a series of mergers, buyouts, and more name changes than Puff-Daddy-P-Diddy-plain-Diddy. But I was wasting Joey Ballistic’s time, not mine.

For the next twelve minutes all the activity in the neighborhood confined itself to ground level. A black-and-gold city cruiser slid down the street on ball bearings and turned the corner, a flock of executive types crossed Cadillac Square on foot four abreast, two sweating in suit coats, one carrying his over his shoulder, leading the way with his paunch, a fourth in shirtsleeves and Tweety Bird suspenders and carrying nothing, the lad who used the company gym. A seagull swooped at a candy wrapper cemented to the sidewalk. The cumbersome brown box of a UPS truck double-parked next to me. The driver climbed down in his brown uniform carrying a brown package, and went through a glass-and-nickel-plate door directly across the sidewalk.

That was par for the course. I sweated out five anxious minutes while he was inside, but then he came back out empty-handed, mounted to the driver’s seat, and rolled off after taking a minute to rearrange some packages on the floor. The gray Chrysler hadn’t moved. The meter next to it was flashing red. What’d he care? He worked for Washington.

Just as mine went red a stocky party wearing a blue suit too heavy for the season came out of Lucille’s building, shot a glance back up the street and across, and made his way down the sidewalk with a little mincing step, carrying a pigskin briefcase. He blipped open the government car and slid in under the wheel.

Traffic was picking up. I reeled him out for a quarter block, then fell in behind and followed him all the way to the McNamara Federal Building, where he parked in a restricted slot and carried the briefcase up the front steps, moving at the same constipated pace. I found a place around the corner where the suckers parked and hiked back to where a row of identical gunmetal Chryslers stood against the curb. On the way I dialed Lucille’s cell.

She was in her meeting, someplace with a tinkling piano and stemware shivering on metal trays. She listened to the short version, paused where under other circumstances she’d have inserted a “shit,” and said she’d call me back in thirty seconds. Thirty seconds later she came on from a place where the ambient noises of the restaurant or cocktail bar were absent and demanded details. When I got to the pigskin briefcase she said, “Well, at least we can be grateful it wasn’t a black bag.”

“I think that’s evening wear.”

“The sons of bitches don’t ever let up. Even atomic waste goes away eventually.”

“Could be nothing,” I said. “He could be a bank examiner. Some of them must look like J. Edgar Hoover. He even had the walk.”

“I could be a U.S. attorney but it ain’t likely. Where are you now?”

“I could strike a match on the Great Seal of the United States.”

“Can you see his car?”

“I’ve got a visual.”

“A visual, what the fuck’s that?”

“I heard it on 24.”

“Never saw it. I work nights and weekends. Talk like a person.”

“I can see it. It looks like part of a really dull parade.”

“Whatever he took from my office, discs or paper, he’ll make copies and put back the originals. That’s how they work, so I don’t know the stuff was ever missing. He knows where I am and how long I’ll be gone; the bastards can tap telephone lines from their own desks now. I want you to be there when he comes back.”

“I don’t guess you keep an extra key under the mat.”

“I can’t afford to have an extra key. The guy who made it might make more. I thought all you private eyes knew how to pick locks.”

“I thought all you lawyers stood up for the innocent.”

“Never mind that. Find a wall to blend into or make like Spiderman and glue yourself to the ceiling and catch him before he puts the stuff back where he found it.”

“And do what?”

“It’s burglary. Use your instincts.”

“Citizen’s arrest?”

“Are you stupid? If you get busted I’ll stand up for you, only don’t get busted. Come back to me with what he took.”

“What if it’s got nothing to do with Joey?”

“It may not. My face is on more dartboards than the bull’s-eye, but I’m no good to Joey if they suspend my license. Get moving.”

After the connection broke I wondered if this was one of those things John Alderdyce expected me to report. I stopped thinking about it short of the answer and drove back.

*   *   *

There weren’t any spaces left within six blocks of Lucille’s, but that was okay because I needed cover. I put the car in a city garage, popped the trunk, and rummaged in the bag of tricks I keep under the false bottom until I found the little suede case where I carry my set of picks, a handful of plastic zip ties, the kind electricians use to bundle wires, and a heavy athletic sock. The last two items were street legal and easily explained to a suspicious cop, but the picks meant six months in the Wayne County Jail if I was careless, and another page for Alderdyce’s file. I distributed the plunder among various pockets.

In the bank I handed a teller a ten-dollar bill and asked her to change it into quarters. The skinny redhead said I must have a lot of calls to make. It was just my luck to draw a curious one. I told her I was going to have to break down someday and buy a cell. The motor-driven camera behind the cages made two full passes during the transaction, recording my features for the ages—or a week, depending on how often they recycled the tapes. I stuck the roll in my pocket.

There was another surveillance camera in the elevator, so I left it there for the time being. On Lucille’s floor I scoped both ends of the quiet corridor for cameras. I saw none; there seemed to be one civil libertarian left in a position of authority. Maybe he was a cat burglar on the side. I went to work.

The picks were made in Belgium of case-hardened steel, but a tool is only as good as the laborer, and Lucille had a good lock. I stopped twice to let my arms hang and restore circulation, but at length the tumblers shifted with a little sliding whisper. No one came along all this time. Downtown looks busy, but the pedestrian traffic is scattered among a lot of buildings erected in the first flush of victory over the Kaiser. The elevator was just trundling down for its next load as I swept into the office and reset the lock. The car didn’t come back to that floor. Breathing out, I leaned back against the door, broke open the roll of coins, poured them into the heavy sock, twisted it tight, and dropped it into a side pocket, breaking some distant tailor’s heart in the process.

I left the lights off and took a turn around the room. After firing her last legal secretary, Lucille had pulled down the partition separating her private office from the reception area, creating a power center of space and sweep, with her desk and nerve-rattling collection of clocks at center back, a conversation area upholstered in leather dyed the color of ripe pears at front right, and a full bar enclosed in chromium and glass with a steel sink at front left. The carpet was an eye-watering green to match the walls, with an orange Greek-key pattern around the edge. I made shallow footprints walking across it that filled in by themselves before I could turn around to look at them. This center space was as empty as old Tiger Stadium and seemed nearly as big.

A gray scrim of sunlight through the shades softened the effect of the colors the tenant had chosen to shock confessions out of clients before getting down to the nuts and bolts of the wobbly system. To the left of the desk, the drawers belonging to a knee-high file cabinet—paneled alternately in green, orange, and yellow—were locked, but no one had improved on the standard bar mechanism since Clarence Darrow. The stocky fellow from the G would have sprung it in seconds and slid it back into place before he left. He’d have had less luck with the computer, although he’d have tried, until Lucille’s fail-safe programs slapped his hands away from the keyboard. I didn’t touch it. I’d never touched one yet, a condition of my contract with the Henry Ford Medical Center to inherit my brain when I was finished smoking it and pickling it in alcohol.

Clear Lucite frames on the wall above the cabinet held the lawyer’s diplomas from Princeton and the University of Michigan, as well as certificates of completion of study at various self-defense institutions. She’d picked out her area of practice early, and had taken steps to secure her most precious commodity from assault. Some of these documents were recent; she didn’t let anything slide. If ever an academy opened its doors to teach people how to avoid government spooks, she’d be the first to register.

As personal and professional spaces go—and in Lucille Lettermore’s case they were one and the same—this one said as much about its occupant as a daily diary. She kept no journal, for obvious reasons, but the instruments you gather around you write firm and clear. I wondered if her spook of the moment had paused to take pictures as well as hard evidence.

I must have been wondering too hard, because at that moment something tinked at the door lock. I hadn’t heard the elevator. He might have used the stairs, taking them with those baby steps. I crossed the carpet silently in six long strides and took up a post against the wall on the side where the door hinged, drawing the sock from my pocket and choking up on it so that the weighted end lay over on top of my fist like a jester’s cap.

He was more efficient than I was, but he’d had practice with this lock: a clink, a rattle, a click. A pause to put away the picks, then the doorknob started rotating.

Once you know your heart isn’t really beating loudly enough to give you away, you begin to perfect your timing. I waited until the door stood perpendicular to the wall and the man with the briefcase half turned to close it, then cocked my right arm above my head and tapped him ten dollars’ worth on the mastoid bone behind his right ear. He dropped like GM stock.