Kopernick tilted the pistol upward, one hand gripping the opposite wrist in the approved manner. It was a SIG Sauer; you couldn’t miss the no-nonsense L-shape of the Budweiser of police sidearms. His mud-colored eyes looked past my shoulder, slid right and left the length of the stubby street. He lowered the hammer and stepped away from the door. I put up the .38, pushed in, and kicked the door shut.
Inside, the smell was overpowering. It might have been Riverside Park just after the Independence Day fireworks.
By day the room was no cozier than it had seemed at night. If anything, the smudgy light seeping in through the one unboarded window exposed it for what it was: the shell of something that hadn’t offered much promise in the beginning. A burst sofa sagged against a papered wall broken up by dark squares where pictures had hung. The oil lamp Kopernick had lit the night before stood on an end table with duct tape binding three of its four legs, next to the armchair, which even he might not have sat on had he seen it clearly; that was it for furniture. In that setting—a place where some family had survived until it didn’t anymore—the thing heaped on the floor among shards of fallen plaster, rodent droppings, and a mountain of dirty pink insulation from the fallen-in ceiling might have been part of the decorating scheme. It looked like just a pile of clothes, except for the shoes. They only land on their heels when the feet are still inside them.
“How many notches does this make?” I said.
“Go to hell.”
His tone was shallow, as if he was breathing through his mouth to avoid the stink of burnt cordite. It drew my attention away from the corpse. His face had a greenish cast. I’d seen that before, in the mirror the first time I’d shot to kill. You never know about people. Maybe it affected him that way every time.
I looked again at the body. It wore a gray hoodie that the last time it was washed might have been blue, jeans fraying through at the ankles, where the knobby bone gnawed at the cloth, filthy sneakers. The face was turned from me, a cheek resting on the floor. Clenching my jaws, I stooped, gathered a handful of jersey cloth, and pulled. The neck offered no resistance. With the dead man staring at the ceiling—through it, actually, all the way to forever—I looked at a plank of face so pale it made the inverted-horseshoe moustache look like a spill of fresh tar.
Bloody torn fabric traced a diagonal line across the front of the hoodie, just below the strings designed to close the hood. It looked like a continuous gash, but was probably three holes grouped within an inch of one another. Virgin or not, Kopernick had the training and the coolness under pressure of a man born to the blue.
“I didn’t know him from Bigfoot,” he said. “You?”
“Not to speak to. He’s been in my hip pocket for a couple days. Oh, and I shot him; I should’ve mentioned that.”
“I heard you shot somebody. Sure it’s him?”
Time to clench again. I took hold of the sweatshirt lower down and jerked it up above his navel. A square of gauze was taped to his ribs on the right side. He’d bled through it, but not much. The stain was yellowish.
I straightened. “I discouraged him, I guess. Anyway he switched targets.”
“I never spotted him. I thought he was you; stood here with my thumb up my ass and let him walk right in. Drew down on me with that.” He was still holding his pistol. He pointed it at a short-barreled revolver lying in a corner out of the corpse’s reach. It had a dull black finish and rubber bands wound around the grips. In Detroit you can get a Saturday Night Special any day of the week. Still, he’d upgraded his choice of weapons; if he’d had it with him when he was tossing my office, he wouldn’t have bothered with a sap glove.
Kopernick said, “I kicked it out of his hand when he dropped. Let some lab monkey do the picking up. That’s one less hour I’ll spend with the review board.”
I bent over the stiff again. Not to check vitals; one look at his face told me he was all through with those. “Wish I could place him,” I said. “Not anyone I met in person; at least not before this week. Some stranger at a party.”
“You’re not too picky about who you hang out with.” He slid the Sig into his belt clip. “He was gonna use that popgun on me. Why, I don’t ask. No limit these days on how many cops you bag. I liked him better when it looked random. Think he was self-employed or on somebody else’s clock?”
“He was new at it either way. Anyone with experience would’ve armed himself better. Call it in?”
“Not yet. I need a story. I’m not officially on this beef. Officially there is no beef. I already took it on the ear for being off the reservation when the shit flew. That time I saved a life. It won’t go down so good this time.”
“Give it to Alderdyce. He knows the rest of it, and he’s in a position to sell it downtown. I didn’t tell him,” I said, when he looked at me. “The plumbing’s full of holes. You said it yourself.”
“You gonna hang around?”
“I don’t know what I could add, apart from more paperwork. You’re already out of the running for Employee of the Month.”
The face under the hat brim darkened; but he slid a phone from an inside pocket.
I held up a hand. “First, what brought me down here? Not just to hear your side of the shoot. He’s still too fresh for that.”
He put away the phone, but kept his hand inside his coat. “Something you said last time we were here made me think of it.”
I gave him my best blank look; best meaning it was genuine.
He reached deeper under the coat and took out something bulky. I’d thought he’d looked a little more well-stuffed than usual.
When someone sticks something at you, taking it is almost automatic; a quirk of human nature. The last time I did that, I woke up in Detroit Receiving with steel pins in one of my ribs. I kept my hands at my sides. Not that the thing looked so sinister: It was a common hand towel in a fold, white with a green stripe at each end.
He shook it, daring me to take it. I gave in then. The towel smelled stale and didn’t feel crisp from the laundry, but then it had been plastered against Stan Kopernick’s abdomen for nobody but he knew how long.
“I won’t say where I got it,” he said. “Not yet. Funny, considering what I think of them lab monkeys, I should be the one to wonder what a fresh look at a twenty-year-old case might turn up.”
It dawned slowly, like a blossom opening in stop-motion. I said, “Why me? Give it to Alderdyce too.”
“I was going to, after I showed it to you, partner. Now it just might get lost in the shuffle. If I’m right, that rag and this rack of ribs here belong to the same party.” He grinned his shark’s grin. “I got the idea mucking around them files in the basement at the Second.”
He dialed the Second Precinct and asked for the inspector. Waiting, he fired up a cigar; it was an even bet which reek came out on top. I let myself out.
I pitched the towel onto the passenger’s seat and cranked the starter. I had everything I needed now. All I had to do was prove it.