“That’s the theory,” John Alderdyce said, “but a theory is all it is. These days you can order a Sherman tank online, and unless some government spook stumbles on the transaction while it’s in progress, you’ll waste less time later digging up Jimmy Hoffa.”
The inspector stood in the middle of my office, counting the fingers on the heavy glove over and over. His dress was more casual than usual: open-necked shirt, gabardine jacket, gray flannels, loafers with tassels. I’d called him at home.
I didn’t respond. The face I’d seen reflected in the window belonged to the man I’d spotted twice on my coattails. If Kopernick had lied about tacking him to me—playing both ends against the middle, just as he’d said he was doing with Chester Goss—I didn’t want Alderdyce to know just yet we’d agreed to work together. Trusting just one cop at a time was more than my share of risk.
I said, “He’d been through my desk and my file drawers. I’m not OCD, but I know when things have been rearranged and when a drawer I’d shut is left open half an inch. Nothing missing, based on the first pass-through. Anyway I don’t transcribe my notes to a typewritten file until I close a case or it closes me. If he’s interested in an old investigation, I wouldn’t know where to start. All I know is I might as well have stuck with my old lock.”
“Even if anyone ever bothered to pull on a sapper,” he said, “he’d have taken it off to thumb through the files. So we’ve got a souvenir, anyway—evidence, on the off chance he left behind a traceable amount of DNA and he’s in the database. He probably thought it would be as easy as checking your computer. Mazel tov! Took you thirty years to show a profit for staying stuck in the Stone Age.”
“Patience is a virtue.” My neck felt stiff and swollen, but the throbbing had faded to a dull timpani. It hurt to swallow; but then again I wasn’t stretched out in Detroit Receiving Hospital being fed through a tube. “What about the bloodstains? I didn’t look past the stairs.”
“I didn’t see any there, or on the sidewalk. He wasn’t hit so bad he couldn’t staunch the bleeding with a hand or a handkerchief on the run.” Once again he fingered the base of the slug in the wall opposite the desk; it had buried itself there after grazing its victim. “How close did you say he was when you shot him?”
“Go ahead, ride me. It was dark and we were both moving. Next time a paper silhouette on the police range jumps you from three feet away, let me know how you did.”
“Don’t get all pouty,” he said. “You’re lucky I don’t clip you for that unregistered cannon. Forensics is on its way. We’ll test the blood and the glove. Might have results by Memorial Day. Meanwhile you know where we’re headed.”
I was tired and sore. Making a face took no effort. “I hear most of the departments have transferred the mugs from those big smelly books to a computer file: Scroll through ’em fast and be done by lunch.”
“I heard that too. Better grab a bite now.”
The same eager young cop who’d printed me after the bank shooting—was it still the same week?—entered the interview room carrying a stack of atlas-size books, steadying it with his chin. He bumped the door shut with his hip and dumped his load on the table where I was sitting. Essence of Mummy puffed out from between pages and laid a fresh stratum on top of the tobacco in my lungs. I coughed into the crook of my elbow and asked him how far these things went back.
“I couldn’t guess,” he said. “We don’t date them, like yearbooks.”
“I only ask because I think one of these mug shots is Killer Burke. He’s been dead since 1940.”
The vapid smile I got said he’d had no idea the calendar went back that far. When he left, I slid the top tome off the heap and opened it to another album of known ne’er-do-wells.
Most ran pretty much to a type, except for the eyes. They were as many and as various as species of marine life: narrow-gauge and spread wide, hard as rivets and empty as holes in a bowling ball, pupils shrunken to invisibility, pupils so swollen they erased the irises; eyes burning so hot with hate it was like staring directly at the sun, eyes as cold as permafrost; animal eyes, wild eyes, calculating eyes, ravenous eyes, eyes bloated with sin, eyes disconnected from anything that resembled a brain; every now and then, say on one page in five, eyes so frankly astonished to find themselves staring into a police lens you were sure the owner had been railroaded by an uncaring system; and those were the most dangerous of all.
I thumped another book shut, sat back, and rubbed my own eyes. By now they would look as bad as the worst in the gallery.
My watch read either 12:10 or 2:00 A.M.; the face swam. Whichever it was, I’d pondered weak and weary over too many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten crime for one night. I stood, stretched, cracked my joints, peeled my shirt away from my back, and wandered out into the half-empty squad room.
Alderdyce had gone home; after all, it wasn’t his office the lab rats were turning inside-out. Compared to mine at that moment, Detroit Homicide was a mortuary. A plainclothesman in shirtsleeves and a shoulder rig lounged in a Staples chair with a stockinged foot perched on an open desk drawer, murmuring into a cell. An Adam-and-Eve team, a female detective and a male, sat opposite each other in joined desks, typing on keyboards connected to bulbous white computer consoles left over from All the President’s Men. Voices trickled from a loudspeaker mounted on a wall, paying no more attention to what they were saying than anyone on the receiving end. Nothing stirred, not even the dust.
A carafe gurgled on a hot plate. A hand-lettered sign fashioned into a tent told me, with three exclamation points, that the coffee wasn’t free; this wasn’t a car dealership. I tossed six bits into the tray and waited for it to finish brewing. Pouring took time. The black stuff glorp-glorped into a paper cup with folding handles and from there down my throat, cauterizing the walls still scratchy from the latest assault on my person. I wondered how many that made.
My guy wouldn’t be in any of the books. He wasn’t local. I couldn’t take that into a courtroom, but I was as sure of it as I was that a routine sweep of the clinics, hospitals, and doctors’ offices in the metropolitan area wouldn’t turn up a man being treated for a gunshot wound. At least not that man. He hadn’t bled enough, and no bullet needed extracting. Any first-aid kit would do the job.
Dick Tracy, Jr. came through as I was dropping the cup of medical waste into a lined trash can. He was schlepping another pile of literature. He didn’t see me standing there. I left as he was fumbling open the door to the interview room with a free finger. No one tackled me on the way out.
Pausing on the front step to light a cigarette, I admired our false dawn: The lights of the city reflected on the belly of the overcast. It was cold silver, contributing to the raw cold of the vernal equinox. Something black fluttered once around the lighted globe with POLICE stenciled on it and vanished into the icy mist; a rogue bat, too eager for prey to stick out hibernation. I wondered if it had an investigator’s license.
A pair of headlights swept around the corner, plowing my way, eerily without noise, as if it were being towed by the twin beams crawling with vapor. I dropped the cigarette and leaped back into the shelter of the doorway, reaching for the Magnum I wasn’t wearing now; an up-to-date carry permit doesn’t swing any weight in the cop house.
The car stopped as silently as it had approached. A window slid down, but no gun barrel came poking out through the opening, just a narrow face with a wide mouth, pleats in the cheeks, and gray eyes with no more expression in them than circles punched from cardboard.
“I can see you,” Chester Goss said. “That camouflage outfit only works in the dark.”
I stepped forward. “This can’t be coincidence. It can’t survive within a hundred yards of a police precinct. You got the place bugged or what?”
“You don’t turn over as many perps as I have without making friends in the department. This is taxpayer property. Anyone who walks in is automatically in public domain. Can I give you a lift?”
“I’ve got a car.”
“Just around the block, then. I feel bad about the way I treated you at my place. Give me a chance to make up for it.”
“It’s late. I thought all you on-air talents had to get your beauty sleep.”
“My studio’s downtown. I’ve been all night editing our annual season-end recap of the cases we worked. It takes me a long time to wind down. You can help.” He tilted his head toward the passenger’s seat.
I stepped down and around and got in. I was like the bat; too involved in the chase to hang myself upside-down safe at home.