TWENTY-SEVEN

I hadn’t seen Lieutenant Hornet in years, not since before he was promoted from sergeant and then shuttled off to hold the mayor’s hand when he crossed the street. He’d been fat then, but the good life of shrimp puffs, bacon wraps, and strawberry mousse had turned him into a barn. He waddled back in from the hall carrying coffee in a silo and made a noise like a sail collapsing when he lowered himself onto the vinyl cushion next to mine. “Still here, I see.”

I said nothing. I was handcuffed to the arm of the bench.

“You look beat. Sip?” He tilted the container my way. Coffee slopped to the floor. I’d moved my leg just in time.

“Not with that junk you dump in it. Don’t all you cops have to have a physical once in a dog’s life?”

“I got a drawer full of commendations and the department’s understaffed. Also Hizzoner likes me. He was sorry when I transferred back to Homicide.”

“I know how he felt.” I asked him if there was any news on Barry.

“I didn’t ask. Guy you shot’s still in surgery. He’s the one you should be worrying about. You don’t go around shooting folks in the belly in this town. It’s bad for tourism.”

“Next time someone cracks open a friend’s skull and clocks me one on the jaw I’ll just ask for a restraining order.”

“You didn’t know about Stackpole when you pulled the trigger. I’m going to enjoy my job for once. Alderdyce’d be commanding a precinct by now if he didn’t look the other way every time you wandered into a police case.”

I let the conversation lapse. It was the same one we’d been having the last time we were together in a room, all those years ago. The room at present belonged to Detroit Receiving Hospital, where most of the shooting and serious assault victims in town go for treatment. I’d spent some time myself on the table there and was still paying down my last bill. A P.I.’s license doesn’t come with a group health plan.

I was under arrest for questioning. The first officer on the scene in Barry’s apartment had read me my rights and put me in holding while Barry and the character from the stairwell were being loaded into EMS units, or maybe one unit; there were a lot of official vehicles in the street by then and I didn’t know what the policy was on separating assailants and assaultees since the price of gas went up. I’d cooled my heels there for a couple of hours until someone got around to a possible connection between the .45 in Barry’s desk and the weapon used in a recent homicide with a suspected link to an old case in which he’d been involved. But instead of taking me to an interrogation room, the officers who checked me out had driven me in cuffs to the hospital and handed the key to Lieutenant Hornet in the lobby. It was unorthodox as hell and smacked of Inspector John Alderdyce.

Hornet was slurping the last of his coffee when Alderdyce entered the waiting room. The lieutenant had on a sport coat and size-fifty trousers that matched in some lights; the inspector wore a summerweight suit with functional buttons on the sleeves that hung on him the way clothes almost never do outside a magazine.

“Lose the goddamn bracelets,” he told Hornet. “I told you he isn’t a flight risk. You want to stampede all the visitors?”

“Regs.” But the fat man leaned over on one ham and dug the key out of his pants pocket.

When he had them off I worked the blood back into my fingers.

Alderdyce told Hornet to go get a candy bar.

“I’m diabetic.” He showed the inspector a fistful of Splenda packets from his coat pocket.

“I know.”

He spread his feet and grunted and his face turned purple and he got up and trundled out carrying his coffee.

“You ought to assign him to the hospital full time,” I said. “Save the department the cost of an ambulance.”

“I’ve known him since his second chin. He used to be a good cop. Now he’s just honest. I could wash him out on his fitness record, but he’s only eight months away from his thirty. He can pilot a desk okay.”

“He could be the desk. What about Barry?”

“Out of X-ray. Severe concussion, no fractures. That titanium plate or whatever it is may have helped deflect the blow. They’re holding him a couple days for observation. Your boy’s more touch and go. That bullet knocked around inside him before it came to rest. Might have nicked the liver, they won’t know till they track down all the fragments and reassemble the slug. That’s how they do it, like the FAA and airplanes.”

“Who is he?”

“Bobby Lee Jayson, Jayson with a y. His grandpappy came up from Kentucky to build Liberty ships for Old Man Henry, and that’s about the last Jayson to hold down a job. Bobby’s been in every precinct at least once, which is more than I can say for the chief. He’s been busted for possession, using, home invasion, and aggravated assault. Did a two-year bit in Jackson for violating probation and entered the program. It didn’t take. Pair of squad car officers picked him up with a rock of crack in his pocket last month. He’s out on bail awaiting trial.”

“You don’t inject crack, you smoke it. I saw old tracks.”

“The day you leave rehab, you go one of three directions: ahead, back, sideways. Bobby Lee took the third and traded habits. I’m surprised it took him this long to put himself back in trouble.”

“Is it his MO to scam admittance in a home invasion?”

“No, he’s an axe and baseball bat kind of guy, although the cue ball was a clever variation. There’s nothing to prove that police folder had anything to do with the break-in and assault.”

“Why would Barry keep a police file with nothing in it but gibberish?”

“He wouldn’t. He knows our folders on sight, so it might have been enough to make him drop his guard. He ought to be locked up, the way he gets his information. We can’t ask him what happened until he wakes up, and if Bobby Lee doesn’t wake up we can’t ask him anything at all. I’m considering adding today to your resumé.” His tone was light, but it didn’t extend to the brutal planes of his face.

“Sure, put it on my tab. I’ve only got one license.”

A thickset man in Ford Motor Company coveralls came in, pawed through the magazines on the various end tables, and left, probably to buy a paper. It was all Prevention and pamphlets about what to expect after surgery. I asked Alderdyce what he’d gotten from the .45 Jayson had planted.

“You say.” He opened a green leather notebook with gold corners. “Army Colt, military issue, model nineteen-eleven, fired recently. One shell short in the magazine.”

“Prints?”

“Smeared. You hardly ever get a legible off a piece. We traced the serial number to the inventory on a batch of weapons stolen from a private collector in Harper Woods two years ago. Redford PD recovered most of them ten days later when they responded to a noise complaint at an apartment, ran a check on the party animals, found two outstanding warrants, and frisked the place on grounds of p.c. One of the suspects broke under questioning. It seems they were planning to use the guns to celebrate the anniversary of Columbine at a local school.”

“Which school?”

“They couldn’t agree on one. That’s what they were yelling about when the neighbors called downtown. The oldest of them was only two years out of school. They all went different places and didn’t exactly fill their yearbooks with autographs.”

I couldn’t decide if I remembered the case. Those things were beginning to run together like cheap summer reading.

“This piece”—he smacked the page with the back of his hand—“was the only one of the handguns that didn’t turn up inside of a few months. They held on to the shotguns and full-auto rifles and sold or otherwise got rid of the hardware they had no use for, mostly without obtaining the proper social introductions. But guns have a way of bobbing back up to the surface in this town.”

“Barry doesn’t collect stolen guns.”

“Only stolen police property.”

“It was a cardboard folder. The Dumpster behind headquarters is full of them. What’s the maximum on that?”

“He’ll collect anything he needs to sell a story, and he’s a paranoiac who’s changed addresses more times than a floating crap game, to protect his skin. Where else would he keep a gun if not in the drawer of his computer desk? It’s the only place he’s ever stayed put long enough for someone to draw a bead on him.”

“What was it doing in the drawer?”

He blinked. “I just explained that. I thought you were paying attention.”

“You just explained why he’d have it in his hand when he answered the door, like any good paranoiac.”

That made him quiet suddenly. The volume had been building until then and the silence rang.

“Why’d Bobby Lee knock Barry out if not to plant a gun that might have been involved in a killing he’s already a suspect in?”

“We don’t know that. The slug went into the lake and can’t be compared with the weapon that fired it.”

“What else would draw a homicide inspector to a case where nobody got killed?”

“That part may be just a question of time,” he said. He was calm now. He always had been. His rages were generally staged to shortcut his way through interrogations. “I don’t know much about computers, but the equipment Stackpole has lying around would buy a lot of crack and maybe a decent defense attorney when he goes to trial. Maybe it’s our good luck Bobby Lee picked that address. Stackpole’s got no alibi for either Frances Donella or Randolph Severin. Either one might have cleared the man he’s convinced made him a cripple, and now we have a possible murder weapon in his possession.”

“It’s circumstantial. You said yourself you can’t connect the gun to the Severin killing.”

“I didn’t say that. I knew you weren’t paying attention. I said the slug wasn’t recovered. Our team found a spent shell casing in a patch of grass outside the front door of the marina. The strike mark on the base didn’t match the firing pin of the forty-five in Severin’s display case, so we can rule it out as a practice round. Forensics agreed with you; the shooter probably fired from the doorway. We could use him on the range if he weren’t a fucking cop killer.”

I rapped the arm of my bench with a knuckle. “That’s the other shoe dropping. I’ve been waiting for it ever since Severin. The murderer couldn’t let the case hang there or the cops would never stop investigating. That’s why the pistol didn’t go into the lake right after the bullet.”

“You can’t make Bobby Lee for either kill. He can swing a cue ball hard enough—a little too hard for your version—but he’s a druggie and way too shaky on his pins to handle a garrote with someone squirming on the other end. Plus he has no gun history, and between the eyes at that distance with a hand cannon takes beginner’s luck to a new level. We’ll set aside motive for now, which he ain’t got, and dig into those would-be school shooters, but I’m telling you right now we won’t hook up a gang of amateur terrorists with a garden-variety lowlife like Bobby Lee, so how’d he come to have the gun? Stackpole’s the one with all the underworld contacts.”

I glanced at the notebook in his hand. He was standing in front of my bench pointing a corner of it at me and if it had been a .45 I’d be dead where I sat. He saw what I was looking at and returned it to his inside breast pocket.

“No Bobby Lee,” he said, “and I’ll tell you why else. We ran down most of the people in Severin’s address book. He wasn’t the live wire in the group, but his relationships were mostly business, and he comes off as a square shooter on that account. Ten minutes before you found his corpse, he was on his cell phone ordering live bait from a wholesale supplier in Muskegon. He discontinued his landline when he got the cell because of all the storms out there bringing down wires. The supplier’s caller ID confirmed the time. That morning, Bobby Lee kept an appointment in the City-County Building here with the public defender assigned to him in the possession case. The meeting broke up less than twenty minutes before Severin placed that order. Bobby Lee couldn’t have made it to Portage Lake in time to pop anyone even if he had a car, which he sold to buy dope.”

“He didn’t have to be there at all. I didn’t say he popped Severin or Donella. I knew you weren’t listening. The only place he had to be is in Barry’s apartment just before the pistol turned up. I saved him calling in an anonymous tip. He had the gun because someone gave it to him and told him to put it there.”

He stood with his feet spread and his fists hanging at his sides: Rocky in his corner waiting for the round to open. I hoped he’d hit me someplace other than my jaw. It crunched like gravel when I wobbled it. “Someone doesn’t cut it, Walker. Out with the name.”

“Nope. A guess isn’t evidence. A guess is my property and you can’t have it. I’ll tell you when you can. Did you get a record of any other calls Severin made from his cell?”

“We put in a request for a court order to get that from his server. So far we haven’t found the phone. We figure the murderer took it for reasons of his own.”

I felt like ducking then. It can’t be safe having so many shoes hitting the ground all at once.