THREE

Someone, maybe the houseboy, had stuck a birdhouse on a pole in a patch of watered lawn visible through a French door (in a Tudor house; there should be a three-day waiting period before hiring an architect), where a cardinal perched on a peg checked the place for suspicious wires. I reminded myself to pick up seed for my feeder on the way home. If it was intended to take Joey’s mind off his years in the joint, it was a waste of effort, because he sat with his back to it. He was a city squirrel.

“I don’t guess you got in to see the governor,” he told Lucille. “The old man wanted me to go into politics. Maybe if I listened I’d be in line for a pardon.”

“I’m waiting for a callback. I don’t overlook much.”

“That count the deal they offered?”

She waited in silence. She’d had too much practice not reacting to surprises in court to give him satisfaction.

He looked at me, cradling the glass in both hands. “They want to send me someplace so different from here no one’ll think to look for me there. What’s the opposite of Detroit?”

“Bisbee.”

“Bisbee, what’s that?”

“Little town in Arizona, near the Mexican border. The Clantons hung out there when they weren’t trading bullets with the Earps and Doc Holliday.”

“And that’s opposite how?”

I thought. “The tamales are better.”

Lucille said, “You should lend me your sources. I’ve been shuttling back and forth between here and Lansing, burning up the wires to Washington, turning over turf looking for witnesses, and you know as much as I do just sitting here swilling chianti.”

“French burgundy. Dago red gives me the Tuscan Two-Step. Did you think I’d take the deal if you told me about it?”

“Do you think you could sit around drinking French burgundy and watching ESPN in New Mexico or someplace and not get the bright idea to skim off an Indian casino?”

“What’re you, an injun lover?”

“Sit around feeding your gout in Seattle and not try selling protection to Japanese restaurants?”

“You got something—”

“Sit around twirling that stick in New Orleans and not cut yourself a slice of the graft? Do anything that won’t draw old enemies like maggots to shit?”

He understood then. Somehow I hadn’t thought he ever would. There’s a rumor making the rounds that if certain notorious ganglords would apply their genius to legitimate enterprise, the country would be up to its neck in Donald Trumps, but the people responsible for the rumor had never spent time with the mob. Legislate Wal-Mart out of the competition and the Rain Man could show profit.

“All I’m saying is you should’ve told me.” It sounded like a whine.

“I wanted to avoid this conversation. I’ll do everything I can to shield you from the system. Protecting you from yourself is a massive waste of billable hours.”

He sought distraction from the lecture and found it in me. “She said she’s hoping to assign you to my case. What’s it take to measure up to your standards?”

“You can’t afford it,” I said.

“Name a figure.”

“I can name nine. Eight dead, one crippled.”

“I get it. When was I ever convicted of killing anybody? When was I charged?”

I got up, poured a glass of wine, looked at Lucille, who shook her head. I brought it back to my chair. “I don’t care about the eight. They were in the business, knew the risks. Stackpole did, too, but he wasn’t in the business. That makes all the difference. He didn’t trust the system any more than you do; if they’d put him on the stand, he’d have sat out a contempt charge at County until the grand jury’s term expired rather than make the system the beneficiary of all his work and risk. Well, you didn’t ask him. Ever since then he’s been hobbling around on a Dutch leg with a glove on one hand like Michael Jackson and a tin patch on his head.”

“You know Stackpole?”

“They’re friends,” his lawyer said. “It’s a question of conflict of interest.”

“I wasn’t in that.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s your ticket out, if you can convince an appellate court judge.”

“I wasn’t in it.”

“You didn’t say that then. You stood mute at your arraignment and stayed that way until they let you out. There was a real future to be gained from the time investment, with the Combination. You even got a nickname: Joey Ballistic. You can’t buy that kind of PR, you have to earn it. Now you want to rewind and start over. I guess the good life isn’t so hot in blue denims.”

“You’ve worn ’em, too.”

That surprised me, though I hoped I was as good as Lucille at covering it. I had a small reputation—not small enough, it seemed, to escape the attention of a class I had no interest in attracting. He knew me, all right; I just didn’t know from where. It put me at a serious disadvantage and he knew it.

He drank from his glass and let a scarlet drop quiver on his lip while he fixed me with his black-walnut gaze. His skin was jaundiced, nearly the same shade of orange as his attorney’s blazer, with cigarette-ash gray in the hollows; that pruno they brew in prison toilets turns kidneys to rice pudding and swells livers to the size of gourds. He was the unhealthiest-looking man I’d ever seen outside ICU, and the circles I traveled in weren’t known for their fitness routines. Freedom for him would be brief, interrupted by midnight trips to emergency rooms and days spent listening to his own urine trickling into plastic bags, until they drew the respirator from his throat and shut down the equipment. I didn’t pity him, just the sordid fate of the brotherhood of mortal man.

“I never killed a man I wasn’t looking in the eye.”

I waited a couple of ticks before I took a sip of wine; sickly sweet stuff, with an aftertaste of Penzoil. You never see a thug at tastings, but the houseboy or whoever stocked his cellar had taken liberties. It did nothing to lift my sudden fit of depression. One of the curses of the life that has pressed itself upon me is I always know when someone is telling me the truth.

*   *   *

“You’re taking the job.” Lucille shifted lanes to give the road to a shift worker who rode bumpers to get back to whatever was waiting for him at home. I had a flock of disgruntled birds and the mammals who spent their nocturnal hours figuring out how to beat the system. I was in no such hurry.

“Did I say I was taking it?”

“You didn’t have to. You forget I’ve made a nice living out of reading jurors. You’re convinced he’s innocent.”

“They ought to strike that word from the dictionary.”

“If I waited for a client who could pose for a Precious Moments billboard, I’d be spending most of my time chasing ambulances. No matter what else he’s done—”

“He’s done plenty.”

“No matter what else he’s done,” she pounded on, “it doesn’t give the attorney general and his cronies in the District a wild card to clear their books just to make room for another entry. Better to let a hundred guilty men go free—”

“I’ve heard the anthem. Clearing Joey won’t put the real perp at the defendant’s table. There’s a statute of limitations on attempted murder.”

“If Stackpole’s truly dedicated to setting the record straight, that won’t matter.”

I didn’t address that. She’d spent too much time in courtrooms, where the jury knew less about the case under consideration than the channel-surfing public. It was one of the requirements of being seated.

“Where will you start?”

“I need expenses. I spent the discretionary fund on toothpaste.”

“Open the glove compartment.”

There was a No. 10 envelope inside with my name written on it in her splashy hand. It contained a cashier’s check for fifteen hundred, my standard retainer. It didn’t cheer me up. “I hate being a foregone conclusion.” I put the check in my wallet.

“I don’t make any other kind. What else do you need?”

“A look at the police file, including the forensics report. An original, if you can manage it. I might be able to make something of the part that got smudged.”

She took a hand off the wheel, reached behind the seats toward the back floorboard, and slung a fat ten-by-fourteen manila envelope onto my lap.

“Good luck with that. I paid a chemist a bundle to come up with a solvent that makes those blackouts on FBI files go away, but that shit that drips from ceilings is what carved the Grand Canyon. I threw in the report filed by the investigators I hired,” she added. “You know the firm, I think. Reliance?”

“You should’ve stuck with them. They’ve got equipment and manpower. I’ve got an envelope.” I undid the clasp and lifted the flap. A sour stench of neglected laundry rolled out. I resealed it before the odor got into her upholstery. The car smelled pleasantly of leather briefcases.

“Too establishment. Ernie Krell got his license under LBJ. When you’ve been around that long and government security contracts start coming in regular as Netflix, you fall into the habit of sharing information. They’re okay for the broad strokes, but you need a maverick when it comes to finish work. Staying one after twenty years takes work and concentration. I know my species when I see it.”

“Mavericks aren’t a species. They’re stray cows. They spend most of their time trying to keep from getting butchered.”

“Keeps ’em alert.”

She stopped for a light finally, one she could have beaten. Now that the question of the day was settled she seemed to have uncoiled a little. “The arresting officer’s still alive. Veteran of the old racket squad. Took a buyout a dozen or so years ago, operates a marina and sells sporting equipment on Portage Lake. Know the place?”

“I’ll find it. I’m a detective.” Sporting equipment meant guns. I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to arm myself on a cold case.

“There’s still plenty of light, and it’s his big season. You should find him in a mellow mood.” She was in her mind-reading phase.

“In the morning, when most of his customers are at work,” I said. “I have to see someone else first.”

“Stackpole? You don’t need his permission.”

“No, but I need mine.”

The conversation fell off after that. The light changed, we turned east, and in a little while I was unlocking the door of my haggard Cutlass and tossing Joey Ballistic’s case history into the passenger’s side. In the heat through the windshield the interior smelled like an old truck cab.

“I hope that heap has an alarm.” She sat idling at the curb, an elbow resting on her window ledge. “I can be disbarred just for letting an original police report outside the system.”

“Thieves go around banging on parked cars looking for alarms. That’s how they know there’s something inside worth stealing.” I punched down the peg and slammed the door. “I’ll be in touch, progress or no.”

“Not if no. At my rates I can’t afford small talk.” She put the car in gear.

I jacked some coins into the meter and took a stroll. It was too nice a day to drive a couple of blocks and there was no telling how long it would be before another space opened downtown. I don’t know where the people go who park in them. If the sidewalks were any less crowded you could grow corn in the cracks.

Apartments were one suggestion. Things are looking up there, away from the spreading dry rot of the neighborhoods and in spite of the open money drain that leads straight from the casinos to Nevada. Blitzed property values make for affordable rent, and cash left over to sandblast the gang graffiti off brick and stone, replace leprous fire escapes with Venetian balconies, and lure the third generation of refugees back from suburbia. For the first time in the city’s three-hundred-year history, flats threaten to outnumber one-family houses. The residents tend to be designers of computer games and builders of Web sites, people who can work anywhere because they work at home for customers far outside the Detroit area, where the Industrial Revolution has been lost. Glasses, pimples, and Famous Monsters of Filmland T-shirts are shoving out business suits and coveralls. It all has the appearance of life, but an eerie quality, too, because of the location, as if Greenwich Village had moved to Manhattan Midtown. It’s cosmetics, like nice white teeth in the mouth of a decaying gangster.

Barry Stackpole, capping a long nomadic existence spent skipping from one temporary address to another like bin Laden, had taken a long-term lease at last on a second-story apartment two blocks north of Lucille Lettermore’s building. The world had turned; the Sicilian Super Friends were too busy sandbagging themselves against the tide from the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act to tack targets on whistle-blowing reporters, and the bounty on his head had expired years ago. I’d put him on to the place after a murder was committed there, which gave him a break on the rent. Some Detroiters are leary about things like that.

I’d come to regret it. The place had bad memories.

I went past the elevator and climbed a stairwell that had been repainted in recent months. The smell was bright and crisp, like bubblegum. It would take another year for the memory of tobacco spit and sweaty icemen and bathtub gin to worry through two coats of latex. That was the kind of traffic the steps had attracted in the building’s department-store days, with its lifts and wooden escalators for the patrons.

The Edwardian bowl fixtures in the hallway ceiling, outside the old business offices, had been ripped out and replaced with fluorescents, which in turn had been scrapped in favor of new bowl fixtures made to look like the originals, only more expensive and of poorer quality. I stopped before the brass numerals on Barry’s door, knocked twice, got no answer. No sound came from inside. His working hours were filled with the cartoon noises that junk up the Net.

I unshipped my no-frills cell phone and dialed his number. I heard the recorded announcement in stereo, in my ear and from the other side of the door: “I’m on assignment. Call back.” No beep followed. Sources who would take a chance on leaving a message weren’t the kind that he encouraged. I climbed back down.