“How’d you do it?”
It was a new day, but it didn’t make me feel any less old. I’d gotten home just in time to catch some dark, but I was too exhausted to sleep, and the weak drink I made only woke me up wider. Something’s gone wrong with the universe when liquor lets you down. I’d finally caught a couple of hours, but I’d have been better off, more alert, if I’d just stayed up.
Now I was sitting in the breakfast nook over coffee and toast, talking to Chrys Corbeil on my cell. She’d called just as I was filling my mug, asking me in her low, clear voice how I did it.
“I can’t discuss trade secrets,” I said. “I can tell you the dove was never in the handkerchief.”
“I mean how’d you get Dan to change his mind? He called me last night from Huron Valley to apologize for losing his temper with me and to tell me he agreed to be your client.”
“Not me. Michael Mihalich; that’s the lawyer who defended him at his trial. I’m still working for you. He’s my tin mitts in case the police decide to take me down for withholding evidence. Lawyers can do that, up to a point. I can’t. Doesn’t mean I don’t; but you can’t do legwork with chains on your ankles. This way I avoid that.”
“Why would Dan agree to engage the lawyer who lost his case?”
“Maybe because it means he’ll try harder this time, and with more experience under his belt. But mostly because there’s not much else to do in stir but look for a way out, and I talked him out of the first one he had planned.”
“You said something about chains on your ankles. What reason would the police have to stop you?”
“None, except with them, stopping people comes naturally. Between us, I think it’s unlikely this time: The only active member of the department who was directly involved with the original investigation says he’s working with me, and I’ve decided to take comfort in what he says. But to get back to what you asked, your brother’s turned an important corner. He’s given up giving up.”
“I’m so happy! But—”
I thought I heard a thumb being bitten.
“Yeah, there’s that,” I said. “Don’t think I haven’t considered it. If I fumble the ball, he’ll be right back where he was. No, he’ll be worse off because he let himself hope.”
“That makes your job harder, doesn’t it?”
“Nothing could make this one harder, but it ratchets up the entertainment value.” I gulped coffee, forgetting it was still steaming from the carafe. I made a noise.
“Are you all right?”
I cleared my throat. “Nothing. Until a second ago I forgot I had a little blunt-force trauma to my neck last night.” I told her about that.
“My God! Are you all right? What’s a sap glove?”
“If I thought that’s something you’d ever need to know, I’d use one to clobber myself. I’m okay. A Whac-a-Mole’s got nothing on me when it comes to taking hits from the neck up.”
“Do you think it had anything to do with what you’re doing for Dan?”
“The cops asked me the same thing. The answer is I don’t know, but I’m going to proceed as if it did.”
“How is that?”
“No idea.”
A beetle buzzed in my ear. I looked at the screen. Alderdyce was trying to call. I hit Ignore, munched toast. “There are other developments, which may or may not have any bearing on the job. I’ll report about them when I know.”
“Thank you, Mr. Walker. You’ve—oh, you don’t know what you’ve done.”
“I usually don’t.” We said a couple more polite things and were through talking to each other. I was about to punch Call Back when I heard footsteps on the wooden porch.
I’m a connoisseur of footsteps. Two hundred ten pounds of department brass ought to have punched holes in the boards, but this one took his cue from the elephant; its tons leave shallow tracks, treading lightly and testing the ground as it goes.
I dusted the crumbs off my shirt and got up to answer his knock.
“’Morning, Inspector. Nice of you to drop in. Why bother to call when you were on the way already?”
John Alderdyce crossed the threshold in a steel-gray double-breasted with a splash of yellow at his throat. He shut the door behind him and lowered himself into the overstuffed chair, unbuttoning his coat in the same movement.
“I couldn’t get you at the office,” he said. “You’d think this was a hobby, the hours you keep. But like you said, I was on my way.”
I didn’t press it. He was under the impression his physical presence was more intimidating than his voice on the phone. He was wrong. He could be just as formidable by carrier pigeon.
“Coffee? I made a big pot.”
“I gave it up. It keeps me awake nights, just like you. You stole out from the Second without saying good-bye. You hurt Officer Cochran’s feelings. There he was, standing in an empty room with a stack of mug books and a silly look on his face.”
I sat on the couch between the broken spring and the Bermuda Triangle in the middle.
“So that’s his name,” I said. “My guy’s not in there, John. Whoever put him on me wouldn’t use anyone local. He’s too cagy to risk my recognizing his guy.”
“To know that, you’d have to know who it was put him on to you.”
“At this point it’s just a guess. I’ll tell you when it’s more.”
“Tell me, or Stan Kopernick?”
I didn’t ask how he’d found out we were working together. I knew enough about Alderdyce not to be curious. “Who’d I call after I saw my visitor out of the office?”
“Who you call when you just got jumped isn’t the same thing as who you call when you turned up the right rock and saw what was under it. This is still a police case, Walker. They’re never really closed, just like no volcano’s ever really extinct.”
I excused myself to go to my bedroom closet and came back with lawyer Mihalich’s card from my suitcoat pocket. “Ask him. I doubt he’ll give you much. He’s my client. You know what that means.”
He looked at the card and slapped it down on an oaken post of thigh. “Just how many clients do you have on this one case, and is that ethical? Look who I’m asking.”
“It is when all their interests coincide. I’m only being paid by one, if you don’t count the buck I got from Mihalich. I looked it up in the penal code.” I grinned. “Ain’t the law grand?”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t understand it. I only enforce it—when it lets me.”
I got it that I was supposed to feel sorry for him. I threw him a bone.
“I’m not supposed to recognize the party who gave it to me in the neck, but I’ve seen him somewhere before he wandered into my building the first time; I thought that then and I know it now. Can’t quite finger him, but it wasn’t in person and it wasn’t in a mug shot.”
“That’s specific.”
“It’s as close as I can come. Chances are I’ll remember where it was and under what circumstances when I’m thinking about something else. That’s a challenge at the moment.”
He picked up the business card, stretching it between his fingers like Silly Putty. The fingers were long and tapering, more like a pianist’s than a cop who’d served his time in the trenches with a nightstick. He scaled it onto the coffee table between us. “So where do you go from here? I’m not expecting a straight answer. I have to go through the motions or the city won’t pay.”
“Weighing my options.” I weighed one right then; decided to use it. “Chester Goss offered me a bribe last night.”
When he frowned he looked like a Tiki god. I saw black clouds gathering. Then they parted. He turned up a palm. “Not even a misdemeanor. You’re not a public servant.”
“Aren’t you the least bit interested why?”
“I know why. I’ve seen his show. If this town had a bat signal he’d spend all his nights looking out the window. He treats every violent crime like a personal insult. When it is personal, like say his daughter’s murder, I wouldn’t put it past him to offer a Supreme Court justice a month in Bermuda with hot-and cold-running wahins to get what he wants.”
“I don’t think they have wahins in Bermuda.”
“Like I’d get the chance to find out for myself. What’s the going rate now for an over-the-hill P.I. with the bit in his teeth?”
“A Paris suite, champagne on takeoff, and a dental plan. For that bit in my teeth,” I added.
“If I were you, I’d take it.” He looked around the room. “Maybe you could afford to hire a decorator. This dump has all the charm of a monastery.”
“It’s just a place to change horses. He made the same pitch to Kopernick, Goss did. One like it.”
“Him I wouldn’t have to advise. He’s probably out shopping for a beret right now.”
“He says he’s just stringing Goss along. Could be I’m on the same string.” I rolled a shoulder. “I wish I could tag that guy. Just when I think I can trust him not to be trusted, he flips over and shows me his belly. Once a cop’s bent he should stay that way.”
“Now I think of it,” Alderdyce said, “I don’t see him bought, not with money. Put down an unarmed suspect, then plant a throwaway on him, yeah; pinch an apple off a street cart, maybe. Meet a guy on Belle Isle at midnight with a suitcase full of cash, no.” He frowned again, shook his head. “No. Cop with his seniority has had plenty of opportunities to flip off his pension and retire early. This one time he might be on the up-and-up.”
“Bummer. Hating him was simple. Just disliking him’s going to take work.”
The phone rang next to the armchair. I got up and lifted the receiver, listened to the voice on the other end, cupped my hand over the mouthpiece. “A minute, John? The Phoenix Cremation Service wants to give me a sweetheart deal.”
“Sure.” He stood, all of a piece, without bracing his hands on the arms. His big bony head just cleared the ceiling. “Don’t tell him what I said about the throwaway piece. I may have to work with him myself someday.”
Alderdyce’s built-in smoke detector was dead-on. Kopernick announced himself with his trademark, clearing twenty years of cigar exhaust from his throat. I snatched away the receiver, a half-second too late to avoid bruising my eardrum.
“Something,” he said.
“I heard it. You ought to give up smoking old tires.”
“Tell it to the Surgeon General. It ain’t evidence, but I learned a long time ago to pay attention when my gut starts barking.”
“Pepto-Bismol.”
“You gonna keep dicking around or what? Meet me.”
I cleared my throat in a positive response. I didn’t have to ask where. I made the necessary arrangements and made sure I had no company when I left, from either side of the law.
Hastings—the obstructed bowel that was left of it—didn’t look any less dismal in daylight; more so, in fact. A ground mist made up entirely of its murky past hung at windowsill height above the jungle of urban alfalfa, forty-ounce empties, and car batteries. The asbestos tile was dingy with yellow jaundice. When I slammed my door, a startled pheasant exploded out the broken window with a noise like an outboard motor, cackling as it wheeled into the sun. A city of vacant lots makes a swell game preserve.
This time I’d prepared myself better, shaking the dead spiders out of a pair of insulated boots and lacing them up to my knees. Whatever had bitten me on my last visit had left a red welt on the ankle that burned like brand-new when I put alcohol on it. The boots pinched my feet; pounding a few thousand miles of pavement had spread them out since my hunting days. Nevertheless I went for the land-speed record sprinting across the shaggy lawn.
The door was bolted this time, and I didn’t like that any more than when I’d found it unlocked before.
I unholstered the .38 and rapped the stump of muzzle against a panel. The heavy-duty Ruger was for formal wear after six o’clock.
A throat got cleared on the other side. It sounded like a log collapsing in a fireplace grate. “Walker?”
“Room service.”
Boards shifted. Metal grated against metal, the door opened, and a blue steel barrel poked through a space the width of the detective’s face; which was wide enough to let out another pheasant if there was a colony inside.
No pheasant came out. What did was less welcome: an acrid stench that would be with me for the rest of the day, like a tune I couldn’t shake and had never liked in the first place.