FIVE

“His case has come up again,” I said. “There’s some question of his guilt.”

He rotated the ball in his hands, looking for a new place to start. I didn’t know whether fishing line was so expensive it was worth salvaging or he used it to keep himself busy between customers. “I asked all the questions back then. Why should the answers be different now?”

“What put you on to him?”

“We got a positive ID from the victim at the showup.”

“I was there. Stackpole identified Ballista as one of the mobsters who’d threatened his life if he didn’t find something else to write about. Back then he averaged two death threats a month. It didn’t exactly narrow the field.”

“Snitch gave him up.”

“Who was the snitch?”

He leaned back, laid the snarl to rest at last on a work bench under the shaded windows, and folded his horned hands on his thick hard stomach. His eyes were pale in the deep red face with black pupils in the centers: pinhole cameras for the cop to photograph crime scenes and facial expressions. “Now, why would I give that up to you when I wouldn’t for a judge?”

“The world’s gone around a bunch of times. Whoever planted that dynamite, if it was Joey he’s paid for it, and if it wasn’t the law can’t touch him. Outing the snitch won’t put him in Dutch.”

“Ever hear of a guy named Arnold Schuster?”

“No. Was he the snitch?”

“Not in this deal. He fingered Willie Sutton, the big-time bank robber, from a wanted poster better than fifty years ago. Schuster got his fifteen; interviews, reconstructions, all that. Albert Anastasia, the boss of Murder, Incorporated, saw him on TV and said, ‘I can’t stand squealers. Hit that guy!’ Somebody shot Schuster down in the street a couple days later. Sutton wasn’t mobbed up, Schuster was just a working stiff. There was no good reason, business or personal, to take him out. Just because the person who sent Joey over can’t hurt anybody don’t guarantee somebody won’t hurt that person.”

“When someone says ‘that person,’ it’s usually female,” I said. “Joey was married. Still is, but they’ve been separated a long time. Was that the reason for the break?”

He smiled. His teeth were as yellow as old plaster and ground down to stumps. “Good luck getting so much as traffic directions from a hoodlum’s wife. When they marry the man they marry the outfit.”

“Girlfriend, then. These guys spend as much on their mistresses as their houses, but it doesn’t always take.”

“I sell fishing tackle. You want to fish, rent a boat and go out on the lake. Don’t light up in here,” he snapped. “I fill propane tanks out back.”

I left the cigarette unlit between my lips and put away the pack and matches. “Client in this case has deep pockets. You say business is good but I don’t see any customers.”

“It picks up in the afternoon. Weekends I hire a couple of kids to help out. But if it was a dozen years ago and I was still in hock up to my hair I’d knock you into the middle of the road over a deal like that. I’m supposed to keep my blood pressure on a leash, but I just might let it off if you don’t turn around and go back to that shithole you crawled out of.”

“Thanks for your time, Detective.”

“I’m not a detective. When I was I didn’t work for the left-handed dollar.” He drew the tangle of fishing line back onto his lap.

*   *   *

Anyway, it had been a pretty drive.

I had lunch in Pinckney, in a country restaurant with machine-woven tapestries of deer hanging on cement-block walls and a meatloaf-and-mashed-potato combination made from the cement that was left over and nursed the beginnings of a peptic ulcer all the way back to the city. Barry’s machine was still answering. I had something or nothing, but I couldn’t nail down which it was without access to my personal pipeline into the rich subculture of the American Mafia. He was probably busy extending that line himself.

Well, I had another choice, but it meant crossing the DMZ between the private and public sectors, with one-way spikes in place to make the process of withdrawal a challenge.

The government in Washington needs to kick the habit of naming its buildings after real people. Half of Congress wants to chisel J. Edgar Hoover’s name off FBI headquarters on account of his secret files and black-bag operations, and the federal building in downtown Detroit was christened MacNamara after a county executive who’d died while under investigation for decades of corruption. It’s one of several monuments to the left-handed dollar standing inside a few square blocks, with the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center standing smack dab in the middle.

Mary Ann Thaler, U.S. Marshal, had graduated from an airless afterthought of a room intended to shelter a Xerox machine into a stuffy second-guess of an office on the next floor, where an African violet in a pot occupied the only patch of sunlight coming in through the window at an oblique angle. I found her sitting in an upholstered scoop chair reserved for visitors, with her legs crossed in silver-black hose and a file folder open on her lap.

She looked up from the steno pad on her knee when I tapped on the open door. She wore a grayish-pink linen suit that brought out the color in her complexion and gave her brown eyes a vampirish cast. She was growing her hair out against the tide of fashion, still refusing to lighten the brown to blonde, and before she swept off her reading glasses to focus on me she looked like the sexy librarian type I’d met long before the operation, when she’d still needed corrective lenses to avoid tripping over corpses in her former line of work.

“We need better security,” she greeted. “Did you just come from a ball game?”

I looked down at my casual wear. “No, a lake. Deck shoes too much?”

“You almost drowned in a lake last spring, and froze to death in another one the winter before that. I thought by now you’d enlisted for desert fighting.”

“Beats sitting indoors reading. We don’t get many days like this.”

“Tip of the iceberg.” She pointed the clicker of her ballpoint at her desk, a thundering gray steel veteran of the Rosenburg investigation, now holding up a mountainscape of thick file folders identical to the one in front of her. “When they were busy looking around for something to keep me busy, someone found boxes of records that have never been entered into the mainframe. My considerable detective experience is currently employed hunting down keywords. I’m thinking of bailing and begging for my old job back.”

“Will they reinstate you as lieutenant?”

“Not in a million. I was daydreaming. The chief thinks quitting to go to work for the feds was an act of betrayal. Anyway, she’s the mayor’s lapdog and he never got over my turning down a spot on his security detail. He asked if I owned a bikini.”

“Couldn’t you have gone out and bought one?”

She didn’t answer. “How much trouble are you in this time?”

“I’m thinking of bailing and begging for my old job back.”

“Which was?”

“Shooting Vietcong snipers out of trees. Actually, I’m not in trouble yet, but the day’s only half over. Are you still on speaking terms with the records clerks at Thirteen Hundred?”

“Every day. The department’s been put in a kind of receivership, with Justice in charge. Too much coke walking out of the evidence room, you know. The brass hates the new setup, but those last-hired-first-fired types are as anxious to please as puppies. I can’t lend them to you,” she said.

“Why not?”

“National security.”

“I’m surprised you got through that with a straight face.”

“I was a little surprised myself. Personal protection, then. I’m still on probation. I haven’t made it through the manual yet, but I’m pretty sure there’s something in it about using a public facility for private purposes.”

“I’m ahead of you on points,” I said. “I hate to draw it.”

“You might at least make a face or something so it looks like you do.” She flipped shut the folder and crossed her legs the other way. She had long, muscular calves. I wondered if she practiced running in heels. “It hasn’t been that long since you scored those points. You might think before you put them in play. I don’t give them out like Hershey squares.”

“They had to do with helping out John Alderdyce, a mutual friend. This favor I’m asking involves another friend. Barry Stackpole.”

“But not a mutual one. I’ve met him twice and both times he was as cooperative as a coral reef.”

“John’s been the same with me since he made inspector. When I call him a friend I always expect lightning to strike me. But I tried to come through when you asked me to help him out. It almost got me blown into little pieces.”

“It didn’t do him any good either.”

“That wasn’t the deal. Anyway, that storm blew over. The police union backed down the mayor and the chief and we’ve still got inspectors and precincts. I need a rundown on a Combination connection.”

“Combination? Oh, organized crime. That’s Stackpole’s beat. Ask him.”

“He’s unavailable. Anyway, it’s about him.”

“Who’s the connection?”

“Joseph Michael Ballista. He’s second-generation. His father bootlegged liquor when it was popular and black market goods during war rationing. Joey pioneered in smuggling Mexican Brown into Detroit.”

“Before my time. I was just a margarita in my mother’s glass when that was going on.”

I counted back. “Didn’t you and I work the Jackie Acardo murder?”

“I worked it. You were an eyewitness. It’s ungentlemanly to do math in a lady’s presence. What’s the job?”

“I’m legging for Joey’s attorney. She’s working the Domino Principle on his priors, going all the way back to his first. We’re reopening the case: attempted murder and aggravated assault. Maybe unlawful discharge of unlicensed fireworks inside city limits.”

“Wait, dynamiting?” She had it then.

“So you do remember the case.”

“The old guard doesn’t clear out when the young turks join up. Listening to gossip’s part of the job. Have you told Stackpole you’re trying to clear the man who crippled him?”

“Allegedly trying. In case he’s innocent. The field of suspects covers a lot of ground.”

“So the answer’s no.”

“He’s unavailable, I said.”

She shook her head. “Ballista’s not the only one around town who likes to play with explosives. You come a close second. Do you need the job so badly you’d risk screwing a friend?”

“The friend. Cops don’t count. Someone else will take the job if I don’t. He might not be as tidy with the facts. If it turns out it wasn’t Joey, Barry will want to know.”

“You’re sure this is the thing you want to call in a solid over.”

“You have to use them before the sell-by date.”

She gave her head another shake, then turned the page in the pad on her knee and clicked the pen, waiting.

“I’ve got everything in the police files relating to the investigation,” I said, “except what wasn’t written down. What I need is the name of the snitch who set the dogs on Joey. The arresting officer wouldn’t give it to me this morning.”

“I should hope not. Every cop who ever spent a day in the tank for contempt would come back to haunt him if he did. It won’t be on the record, either. That’s what ‘confidential informant’ means.”

“I had to ask anyway. It’s bound to be one of Joey’s known associates. I can ask Joey, but he won’t be objective, and if the state of his health means anything, I don’t know if I can trust his memory.” I hesitated, not wanting to steer her in the wrong direction, then went ahead. “I’ve got a hunch it’s a woman.”

“Based on what?”

“The cop got cute with his pronouns. Attention to detail is good police work, but it can ball you up in casual conversation.”

“Wife?”

“He as much as said no. That might’ve been a blind, but I doubt it. When those Mafia wives get sore they tend to take things into their own hands. I’ll run it out, but I don’t need your help for that. She’s a Sunday supplement success story.”

She made two scratches and a question mark. “What’s the cop’s name? If Ms. X was his snitch and she had a sheet, he might show up on it as arresting officer. That’d narrow the search.”

“Randolph Severin. He retired to the life aquatic at a place called Portage Lake, out by Hell.”

“That explains your morning. I think I remember the name. He was going out as I was coming in. Tough rep.”

“Not as tough as Mrs. Severin. She almost blew his head off one time saving him from bad guys.”

“Sure it was the bad guys she was shooting at?” She wrote some more, reminders to herself for her eyes only. “Go through Hell while you were there?”

“No more than usual.”

“You will.”