Ambient air stirred on Barry’s end. After a moment: “Pleasant as that is to contemplate, it could be what he said. Once you’ve been in the spotlight you miss the heat.”
“Just the fact my job exists acts on him like a flesh-eating virus. If it’s all about making a splash with the chief, he’d find a way to do it without busting an ulcer.”
“The minute I start asking around, Kopernick will know it,” he said. “Sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Practically never. But the client’s feet are getting cold, and I’ve got to pull an ace out of my sleeve before she jumps ship. Or in any case a card that will pass for one.”
“That hard up?”
“No more than always. This case is starting to turn. If I don’t follow it through I may never get the stink out of my nose.”
I heard him shaking his head twenty-six blocks uptown. “I used to wonder why a guy like you would stick in such a rotten line of work. That was before mine took the turn it did.”
“Poor baby.”
“Fuck you.”
I went to bed.
Over coffee and what passed for breakfast I thumbed through the notes I’d taken in the library downtown. The name of the young public defender who’d stood up for Dan Corbeil was Michael Mihalich. I craned up the metropolitan directory and ran a crust of toast down the columns under ATTORNEYS and found a smiling middle-aged face in a quarter-page display ad for M. C. Mihalich in Eastpointe, specializing in disability cases. On his end of the line a minty cool female voice repeated my name and offered to set me up with an appointment next week.
“Actually I was hoping to see him today.”
“I’m afraid that—”
“Tell him it’s about the Corbeil case.”
That meant as much to her as the capital of Belarus. From the timbre of her voice she was playing Easy-Bake Oven with her girlfriends when that one went down.
“What is your business, Mr.”—pause to retrieve the name, I didn’t think—“Walker?”
“Detective.”
That got about as much reaction as expected. These days everyone’s had enough business with the criminal justice system not to scamper up any walls when they come into its orbit. She asked me to please hold and played me sixteen bars of Air Supply. Already I didn’t like M. C. Mihalich.
A man came on the line in mid-whimper. “This is Michael Mihalich. What department are you with?”
“No department. I’m a private investigator representing a client.”
“Daniel Corbeil?”
I hadn’t anything to lose by showing my cards. It was the nature of this beast that almost everyone I made contact with guessed the truth. “His sister.”
He was silent a tick. “I guess she’d be grown up now.”
“You were the lawyer who defended him during his trial?”
“If you can call it that. I didn’t have much to work with.”
“That’s what I want to talk with you about.”
“I can’t discuss this over the phone.”
I grinned at the window looking out on my neighbor’s cedar fence. “Mr. Mihalich, I was just about to say the same thing.”
Eastpointe had spent most of its history as East Detroit, in spite of the fact that it lies north of the city the residents don’t want any part of; maps are strictly for pirates and world explorers. Changing the name of the suburb didn’t make the situation any clearer. It’s west of Grosse Pointe, Grosse Pointe Woods, and Grosse Pointe Farms, all places ritzier than a community struggling just to stay in the middle class.
It was a long straight sweep at a forty-five-degree angle up Gratiot, an avenue that might have been drawn by an architect using a steel rule, and probably was. The local transportation authority, after it got around to scrapping the mainframe computer that had been directing traffic locally since Nixon, finally got the timing down; if you started out on the right beat, it turned the lights green all the way. I glided past a dizzy succession of side streets lined with cozy-looking houses with sleeping flower gardens, followed blocks of automobile dealerships, car washes, and party stores, and swung right on Nine Mile Road. There the old downtown stood preserved in jars containing free-standing extinct hardware stores with fading Coca-Cola signs painted on the brick, and inside them antique furniture in rented booths. Past them and along a string of one-story mini-malls, flat-roofed and sheltering shops linked by common walls.
M. C. Mihalich Legal Services was in one of these. I knew the general address; the building had housed an H&R Block, and before that a Hallmark, and a pharmacy before that. From the look of it, before long it would host a dollar store, as likely as not in Mihalich’s place. There was nothing shabby about the setup. The brickwork was good, the big front windows sparkling, the infrastructure probably sound, but it had the impersonality of one of those places that swept businesses in and out like blown leaves.
The establishment was a far cry from L.A. Law. A copper bell mounted on a spring clip above the door tinkled when I pushed it open, and a slim receptionist of nineteen or so looked up at me from behind a desk eight feet in. Her black hair was cut short and clung to her long skull like a polished onyx bowl. From the waist up she was dressed professionally, in an autumn-orange blazer over a plain black top, but the desk was transparent Lucite, showing a pair of brown legs in white shorts, flip-flops on her bare feet. Her fingers hovered above the keyboard of a laptop computer.
“Amos Walker,” I said. “I think we spoke earlier.”
“Oh, yes. I’ll tell him you’re here.” Her crisp cool tone confirmed it. She pressed a key on a flat intercom and did that. I didn’t hear his response, but I guessed what it would be.
“He’ll be with you in a few moments, Mr. Walker. Please have a seat.”
A row of connected seats faced the desk and beyond it a door with PRIVATE fixed to the printed woodgrain in stick-on gold letters. The seats were made of black Naugahyde stretched over hollow aluminum and might have come that way the last time they remodeled Metro Airport. I took one and wanted a cigarette while I browsed the wall art, daubs of color I’d seen in Pier One, in the same glass frames. Mihalich, on his side of the wall, would be rearranging things on his desk or sharpening pencils or learning to yodel. Disability cases are handled by boilerplate correspondence and are rarely urgent.
His practice wasn’t lively in any event. In the ten minutes I spent recrossing my legs the telephone didn’t ring once.
When the big moment came the brunette got off the speaker and said Mr. Mihalich would see me.
He was courteous, rising from behind a sleek oval of imitation black walnut and reaching out a hand that had a reasonable amount of resistance in its grip. He looked like his smiling picture in the directory: shaved head, long eager face without a wrinkle, eyebrows so pale they looked shaven too, so that he appeared permanently surprised and delighted to greet you. He had on a gray-and-black small-check sport coat, an open-neck shirt without a tie, and tan Dockers; never a wise choice when you’re packing a spare tire. The mesh belt made a hammock for his belly. He looked younger than he was, but at my age you see youth everywhere.
“I was half expecting a hat and a trench coat,” he said.
“No, you weren’t. Even disability attorneys meet their share of private investigators.”
The humorous expression slipped just a notch. “It was meant to break the ice; but I see you have your own formula.”
I followed his open palm into a varnished plywood chair on my side of the desk, an Eames knockoff that was almost as uncomfortable as the real thing. There was a photo cube on the desk. The two sides I could see contained a pretty strawberry blonde in a printed sundress squinting against the sunlight and a little boy with a bulbous forehead and jaw and a sweet expression. That sponged the bad taste out of my mouth that had been left by his choice of music. I’m a bucket of mush.
“Nice little family,” I said.
Mihalich sat on a swivel that sighed pneumatically under his weight. “My wife’s a school nurse, which comes in handy. The boy has Down syndrome.” He slung an arm over the back of his chair. “How is Corbeil? I assume you interviewed him.”
“In prison. How do you think?”
He didn’t blink. “If you’re trying to make me feel guilty he’s there, it’s no go. I gave him as good a defense as anyone could, two years out of law school.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. That word gets batted around too much, like ‘starving’ and ‘killing.’ It takes on a different meaning when it comes from twelve jurors and you’re sitting in the hot seat. Anyway, when you’re forced to skate with a blindfold on, you can’t be expected to pull off a triple Axel.”
“What blindfold is that, Mr. Walker?”
“Would it have made any difference if you were able to introduce the results of April Goss’s autopsy during the trial?”
“They were introduced. The prosecution introduced them. I couldn’t shake the medical examiner during the cross from his conviction that she didn’t take her own life.”
“I didn’t mean that, the blood work, last meal eaten, progress of digestion. You’d have to look in a fallout shelter for a juror who isn’t familiar with all that from Law and Order and Police Academy Three. I mean the pregnancy examination.”
He’d rested one of his palms on the glossy desktop. There wasn’t a wet patch there when he lifted it in a gesture that didn’t mean anything. “After all this time, I couldn’t say. I do know that the entire experience persuaded me not to go into criminal law.”
“Pension cases can be just as dirty. Fly-by-night trucking companies will spend a couple of thousand to avoid paying out five hundred in benefits.”
“You don’t know the half of it. But I’ve been at it long enough to spot all the angles, and on the rare occasion I miss one, it doesn’t involve locking up an innocent man for life.”
“So you think Corbeil’s innocent.”
Mihalich sat back, releasing a fresh gasp from his chair. His smile was thin as electroplate. That, and his general deportment, told me all I wanted to know. This wasn’t the same green lawyer who’d represented Dan Corbeil.
“I didn’t say that,” he said. “I can’t tell you if I ever thought he was: Honestly. Some people are cut out to try such cases, go home, crack open a beer, and watch the Pistons lose without another thought to the day, just as some people can work in a pet shelter and get so used to it they don’t smell the cyanide gas anymore. And that’s good, because they’re no use to anyone if they can’t separate themselves from the action and do the job with a clear head. A sentimental slob like me would be the worst thing that could happen to a client fighting for his freedom. I would do it if I could, but I can’t, so I don’t.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, because what happened twenty years ago isn’t what I came here to ask.”