TWENTY-EIGHT

My cell rang while I was driving. Lucille Lettermore’s number came up. I hadn’t anything to report that couldn’t keep, so I didn’t answer. A couple of minutes later the gong went off that told me I had a message. It was Lucille, saying she hadn’t heard from me since Pluto was a pup and what the fuck was going on, she had news herself to report. I turned off the phone. My news would stand up against hers whatever it was.

The sun had made its appearance, then drawn a dirty bedsheet between itself and the earth. The overcast offered no shelter from the heat, just screwed it down tight so it had no place to escape. When I rolled down the window the pressure from inside joined the pressure from outside with a blow that took my breath away.

I wasn’t a fugitive from justice. Alderdyce had opened the coop, taking care to remind me just how short the leash I was on was; but I knew four blocks from the hospital just how short it really was.

I drove at a consistent speed. So did the powder-blue Chevy strolling along a few car lengths back. In Detroit, where they let you drive, no two vehicles maintain the same rate of speed for long. The city was driving General Motors products that season, rotating as it did among the Big Three. This was an insult.

They were being stupid on purpose, and that made me careful. For sheer driving skill they don’t come any better than the Motor City. But I was older and slower than most of the cops on the street and played dirtier.

The light was yellow as I drew along a row of orange-and-yellow construction cones sealing off an inside lane. I stopped, forcing the car stuck between me and my tail to chirp its brakes. When the light turned red I yanked the wheel hard to the right and hit the gas.

I knocked over half a dozen cones and wailed down the cross street a breath ahead of a city bus. Air brakes gasped, a horn lifted my shoulders to my ears—bracing for impact—but I found traction and laid down a plume of black smoke pulling away.

The Cutlass looks like a beater on purpose. The outside’s a disguise, like a wig and a rubber nose. Underneath the dented hood and between the mismatched fenders the 455 is as clean as a cat’s testicles. The tires are new and I get a tune-up every month even if it means I can’t afford lunch.

I have luck, too; I had it that day. You don’t depend on it, but you can’t dismiss it out of hand. Whatever it was, blind chance or a drop in sugar, I left the plainclothes team staring at the stream of crosstown traffic and made a bracket turn west. Out in the neighborhoods I opened up the carburetor.

The ghost of Joseph Michael Ballista’s mother hovered somewhere above the private road bearing her name. It had been a sad life and short. I’d gone through a couple of incarnations myself since my last visit. The Elizabethan pile at the end of the limestone brooded under dirty cloud, the circle of lawn surrounding it as level as a crap table. The grass was trimmed and the windows sparkled, but it bore a sad air of neglect just the same. Where were the guards, the automatic weapons, the dogs that were part Doberman, part Stanley chain saw? There was nothing inside to protect. Joey hadn’t put up much of a squawk when he found out Lucille had refused witness protection; he had nothing to deal. All the wiseguys had been trampling all over the code of silence so long no one had any secrets left worth killing to keep. It made you nostalgic for the old days of meat hooks and cement shoes.

I’d lost the registered .38 to the police pending investigation into the latest Detroit shooting. The holster was too small for the Luger, so I stuck it in my belt and put my coat on over it. It had no paperwork, but plenty of history.

The little plywood man on the grass wasn’t sawing his log today. No air stirred this side of Canada. A bird started to sing, then ran out of breath. It reminded me I hadn’t filled my feeder in days.

I introduced myself to the East Indian houseboy all over again. He gave no indication we’d met. Life at that address seemed to rewind itself to the beginning every time the door opened and closed. He let me into the naked foyer and went out to poll the master. His crepe soles made no noise at all, on a marble floor in an empty room. It was like a place in a dream.

In a season or so the boy returned—a boy wrinkled all over like old vellum, his brown bare toes showing thick yellow nails in the openings in his slippers. It was an Oriental establishment in an English house with a Mediterranean resident. Very American.

“Mr. Joey will receive you, but he asks you to forgive him the informality of the circumstances.”

“He’s not naked, is he?”

“He is having a difficult morning. We are expecting his doctor at any time.”

“A house call?”

“Dr. Nagler is a family friend. He treated Mr. Joey’s father during his last days.”

We passed through a series of echoing empty rooms like the looted chambers of a minor pharaoh, past the plush parlor where Joey had received Lucille and me the first day, and down a bare hall to a door the servant opened after one knock. The household seemed to be living on the ground floor exclusively. Climbing stairs would be torture for a man suffering from gout and everything that came with it.

“Mr. Walker.” The houseboy withdrew, pulling the door shut behind him.

Joey Ballistic was sitting propped up in a big sleigh bed, one of the few pieces that would have been left over from the days when the house was filled with bric-a-brac from three continents, the lavish hoard of a first-generation father with the taste of a Sicilian goatherd. His cane leaned in a corner and he watched me with his dull dry eyes, hands twitching in his lap. The tops of his shoulders stuck up like staves under the green silk of his pajamas. “You don’t remember me,” he said.

“Sure I do, Joey. We met the other day.”

“I mean before. I used to stock jukeboxes for the old man. We hired your old partner to ride shotgun, keep Jackie Acardo’s boys from roughing me around and busting up the Sinatra records. Jesus, was you green.”

So that was where he knew me from. He’d dropped right out of my head, a punk with a route. “I hear you had a bad morning.”

“I had a rotten night. Try counting sheep when your heart’s doing ninety. Gimme a slurp, will you? I’m spitting cotton.”

A tall plastic container shared a bowlegged nightstand with glass and plastic bottles and droppers and a thermometer in a shot glass. The room smelled turpentiny with medicine. I handed him the container. It shook in both hands as he sucked on the straw.

“God, that’s better than Blue Label.” He gave it back. “I used to be a fair bowler. I almost joined the pro circuit. Now I can’t lift a glass of water.”

“Your old man wanted you to go into politics. You’re a disappointment to everyone.”

“Where’s Lucy?” he said after a still moment. “You jump sides?”

“I’m still working your case. Couple things have come up.”

“I know all about them fresh stiffs. Cops was here, but I had a character witness.” He twitched a hand toward the electronic tether bulging under the covers.

“You haven’t done your own killing in years. Frances Donella and Randolph Severin took you down once; that’s the theory. They might’ve done it again.”

“Fran didn’t know nothing. She was just smart enough to wiggle her ass when it counted. That’s the only reason I kept her around. And if there’s one thing the old man pounded into me it’s never kill a cop, ever. That’s like declaring open season on yourself.”

The room’s only window looked out on a triangle of lawn with a surveillance camera purring in an arc right and left. I figured it was a dummy, to discourage kids from scaling the fence and spraying dirty graffiti on the walls. I watched it make two passes.

He’d nailed the basic weakness in the frame someone had tried to put around him. Dopers killed cops, gangbangers killed cops, cops killed cops. The mob didn’t. It was the only rival brotherhood Joey and his crowd feared. If one of them broke ranks, there would be no disclosure, no hearing, no motion to dismiss. John Alderdyce had once said there is no appeal from the court of instant retribution. If the cops didn’t get to him first the mob would, for its own safety.

Well, I’d never really suspected Joey for Severin, with or without the tether nailing him down. A cop is a cop from the oath to the grave. Retirees count.

I didn’t cut him loose, though. He was the only thing that tied Donella to Severin to Barry. None of it made sense without him.

None of it made sense anyway. I was dealing with a brain as loopy as old Joe Balls had been at the end, and Joe was dead.

“Maybe the killer wasn’t sure about Frances,” I said. “And maybe the cop killing was rigged to look like someone else did it. It would have to be, to clear you.”

“If Severin said she sold me out, he lied. Why would she? I was damn good to her: clothes, sparklers, a swell place with a view of Lake St. Clair, which I can tell you was a long way from cheap even then. I couldn’t swing it now.

“Hell,” he said, “it’s less hassle staying home with the wife, even a bitch like Iona. But you can’t show up at the K of C Hall without fresh pussy on your arm. You lose respect. I should of wrote her off as a business expense.”

“Severin didn’t name his snitch. He referred to whoever it was as a person. That’s usually code for ‘her,’ so I made a tour of all your women. Your wife—”

“That bitch.”

“Marcine Logan.”

I couldn’t read his reaction. He looked like a man watching his mother-in-law drive his new car off a cliff. “Mm. Marcy, let me tell you, you felt like a movie star when you stepped out with her. Photogs shot her more than me. She was ice, though, and too smart. At least with Fran I didn’t think I had to read Moby Dick just to hold up my end of the conversation.” His hands twitched.

“Lee Tan.”

“Holy Christ. What’s she up to these days? I heard the supply dried up when Hong Kong went Red. I don’t see her working with A-rabs.”

“Talk to her recently?”

“Hell, I wouldn’t know where to start looking. What’s the point? I ain’t thought about her in years. Is she still even in the country? Seems to me she had some trouble with Immigration. The old man—”

“Your number came up on her caller ID.”

“When?”

“Couple of days ago.”

“Ojha!”

The houseboy came in. He had to have been listening at the door. I was starting to have some interest in him.

“Who used the phone?”

“Myself, sir. I called Dr. Nagler.”

“Who else?”

“No one, sir.”

“When’s the last time you saw me make a call?”

“Weeks, sir. A month.”

When Joey dismissed him I said, “He’s on your payroll.”

“I don’t even like the things. My friends don’t call or drop by, so the hell with them. It’s just me and Ojha for company. He can’t play euchre for shit, don’t know his right bower from his left nut.”

“How many extensions in the house?”

He thought. Those petrified-walnut eyes lost any resemblance to life when his brain turned inward. “Eight, including three upstairs, but no one goes up there but him, to sweep up cobwebs. He wouldn’t call someone like Lee. He wasn’t around when I knew her, and if you think I keep an address book you’re dumber than Fran ever was.”

“What about a phone card?”

“Oh, hell, seems to me I had one once, but I ain’t used it all year. What good’s it? I’m always home. Ask Ojha what he did with it. This sure seems like a mess of trouble over a broad I wouldn’t know if I saw her on the street.”

“I know. They all look alike.” I saw her niece’s face then. I was getting my fill of Joey. “Somebody tried to spray suspicion her way, to cloud up the investigation. That’s just the kind of thing—”

Ojha, the houseboy, knocked and entered, as always without waiting for an answer. “Dr. Nagler, sir. Should I show him in?”

“Christ, I forgot.” He looked at me. “We done?”

“Not quite. Where’d Marcine get the money to buy her way into your wife’s interior design firm?”

“How the hell should I know? Maybe she sucked it out of Hank Ford’s dick. She was working her way up from the floor at Cobo Hall when I found her.”

But his head had started twitching, worse than his hands. It was catching. I shoved mine in my pockets to keep them still.

“I’m working a theory of my own,” I said. “That she invested the money she got from the Detroit Police Department to rat you out in the Stackpole case.”

“That’s horseshit. I wasn’t in on that, I told you. I thought you was in my camp.”

“I wouldn’t be if I didn’t ask these questions. Start-up costs dough. You gave her clothes and stones and a crib, too, but they wouldn’t go far in legitimate enterprise.”

He looked at Ojha. “Go out and step on some hot coals.”

“I’m not a Hindu.” The houseboy’s tone was as smooth as a dirk. But he left us.

“What do you need this for?” Joey said. “Lucy didn’t send you.”

“The case against you swings on how much Severin had to get the warrants he needed to hang you. I need to find the snitch and get her to change her story so Lucille can wash you in the blood of the lamb in front of a judge.” I don’t lie to people in sickbeds as a rule. But gangsters don’t count.

“Shit.” He rolled his head, pointed his chin, stretched the wattles that hung like bunting from his slack jaw. He looked like an old tortoise fighting the temptation to withdraw into its shell. “She stole it, the cunt. Took it from the safe I used to keep upstairs. She must’ve seen me work the combination. Seed money I got from my partners for a thing I had planned.”

“What thing?”

“None of your goddamn business, but they expected it back with interest. I was thin just then. I had to sell most of the furniture in the house to keep from paying it back with my hide. I took a bath, missed out on my thing, but it wasn’t like I could declare Chapter Eleven. You ever see what a blowtorch does to a man?”

“Actually I have.” I shook my head. “You’re still thin. What’s Marcine doing walking around?”

“I thought about it. Don’t think I didn’t. I was going through separation proceedings at the time. You been through a divorce?”

“Yeah. Don’t knock the blowtorch.”

“I couldn’t hack it. Iona threatened to go public and name Marcine as a co-respondent. If Marcine turned up missing, I’d still be inside, and for all the wrong reasons.” He put a hand to his heart as if to slow the galloping; drew a deep breath and let it out in a rattle that stood the hairs on the back of my neck. I thought about the doctor waiting outside.

“Well,” he said then, “let her have it. She’s the one has to deal with Iona. Hitting her would of been too quick.”

I left him then.

I passed a tall man in the hall carrying a black alligator medical bag; I didn’t know they made them anymore. He was thinning on top, in his sixties but fitter-looking than his patient by miles, wearing glasses with brushed-steel frames that matched his suit. He gave me a look of passing interest and kept walking. He’d have seen more interesting characters come and go in that house.

I found Ojha in a kitchen of polished granite and ceramic with a monster of an eight-burner stove designed for a hotel restaurant, probably a relic from Joe Ball’s day, when gang wars came in seasons like hurricanes and street soldiers turned private homes into military barracks. The room was spotless, but the ghosts of ancient pasta and tomato sauce and anchovies haunted every corner. The garlic alone would stampede a colony of vampires.

He was smoking a cigarette near the range hood with the fan going to suck out the smoke. It was a pungent blend of Asian tobacco and smoldering dung. When he saw me he tossed the butt into a copper sink and ran water into it.

“Not on my account.” I took out the pack of Winstons and shook one loose. One side of his upper lip lifted at the sight of the filter, but he took it, stuck it between his lips, turned on a gas burner, and leaned down to light it before I could come up with a match. I struck it on the edge of a counter and lit one for myself.

“We don’t mention this to the doctor,” he said. “I am a bad influence.”

“Look who you’re working for. Your boss told me to ask what you did with his phone card.”

He ran smoke out his nostrils. “I have no personal calls to make. All my people are dead since Madame Gandhi. I am Sikh, you see.”

“I thought you all wore beards and turbans.”

“An animal is hunted for its skin.”

“I’m rusty on my Kipling. All I want to know is what happened to his phone card. Whoever called Lee Tan could’ve left his number from anyplace, and if the card was used his number would’ve come up. I don’t have to explain that,” I added. “Your ear and Joey’s door aren’t exactly strangers.”

“Are you suggesting I’ve overstepped the boundaries of my station?”

“You tell me. You’re the only houseboy I’ve met since Agatha Christie.”

“Houseboy; I dislike this term. I am forty-seven years old.”

“Phone card.”

He sucked in half the cigarette and laid it next to the burner to burn itself out. “I will show you.”

I followed him into what had been the living room, where a handset rested in a formfitting standard on a bare maple floor. He bent, lifted the standard, and turned it bottomside up. A triangle of Scotch tape stood out against the dust.

“I placed it here,” he said. “I am sure of this.”

“Me, too. Who used this phone last?”

He thought, hard. When his brow cleared I knew what was coming. It was all I could do to pronounce the name before he did.