It was one of those cockeyed days where the bright sun made you think you could shuck the jacket until you got outside, but not quite cold enough to run the heater, except to clear the fog that formed on the inside of the windshield when you breathed. After two minutes I switched it off and cranked the window down a couple of inches to equalize the pressure, or whatever the Weather Channel called it.
I had no place specific to go at that specific time. I was drifting with the current, which seemed to be flowing east-northeast along the big river. Anyway it was a route I’d traveled so many times the Cutlass practically made all the stops and turns for me, like a faithful old milk horse. That left time to wallow.
You were young for so long you took it for granted; you’d always be able to sprint, scale, take stairs three steps at a time, bend down and then stand straight without pulling yourself up hand over hand; middle-agers would go on calling you son. Then people began to retire: one by one to start, then in clumps, the way a sheepdog sheds in summer. Then before you knew it, you were attending more funerals than weddings. Turn around, and you were the last of something: the bison, the passenger pigeon, the Siberian tiger, the lamplighter, the private eye. They put your face on a commemorative stamp; doesn’t matter that in America you don’t rate that honor until you’re dead. In the end all things are equal.
When I looked again, I was downtown, slowing to a stop in the blue zone in front of the Second Precinct. That made it perfect. The old gluepot always found its way back to the barn.
John Alderdyce stepped down to the sidewalk just as I drew the brake. He was dressed as he had been that morning, from a mannequin in the window of Ira’s Big and Menacing. He saw me and crossed to the curb. I cranked my window the rest of the way down. “Not quitting time yet, Inspector. Making your own hours now?”
“That’s what puts the special in Special Consultant. I was just headed down to the icebox to look at a stiff.”
“He’ll keep. I want to show you something.” I reached back over the seat, scooped up the item, and stuck it out the window.
“It’s a towel,” he said. “I’ll send you a bill for the expert opinion. What’s the going rate with Chester Goss?”
“Funny you should say that.” I waggled the terry bundle.
He took it and wrinkled his nose. “Who used it last, the Olympic team?”
“Just a guy playing catch with himself. It wouldn’t be much good coming straight from the laundry.”
“Oh. Cootie call. You going to tell me who, or do I ask them to match it to one in three hundred million just for practice?”
“Hop in. I’ll drive you to the morgue.”
“When you put it that way, who could resist?” He went around and climbed into the passenger’s seat. A truckload of solid gristle and bone pressed the springs flat. I grabbed the shifting cane. A vise closed on my wrist.
“Not so fast. It’s a short drive, and I smell a long story.”
I pointed at the sign that read POLICE PARKING ONLY. “I could get ticketed.”
“I’ll fix it—if I like what I hear.”
“That’s one more expense I’ll have to charge my client. This stiff you’re on your way to see: Has it got three holes in its chest?”
A mountainous shoulder leaned against the back of his seat. The face that went with it had been blocked out with explosive charges; it was still awaiting the chisel to finish it off. “Ordinarily I’d ask if you made them, but I’ve got a preliminary report says different. Which one are you, Tonto or the Lone Ranger?”
“In this case Tonto. It’s a good shoot, John. He upgraded from blunt instrument to a garage sale thirty-two overnight.”
“Thirteen hours ago, to be precise. You spent only four of them not finding him in our files. Just in there.” It was his turn to point, at the precinct house. “You work pretty fast yourself; when you’re working for yourself and not the system of justice. Kopernick’s got some filling in to do; especially if not all three of those slugs turn out to have come from his sidearm.”
“They’re all his.” I indicated the towel in his lap with an elbow. “He called me down to the shack on Hastings to give me that. It belongs to Goss.” I gave him the rest, beginning with the dead man on the floor and circling back to the towel. “He didn’t tell me where he got it, or who from. I worked that out myself.”
He only looked like a slab of igneous rock: The brain behind those ledges and hollows worked like a NASA control panel. “That’s not just a leap,” he said. “Evel Knievel wouldn’t have made it halfway across.” But the doubt in his tone was only general; there was no shock in it. As familiar as Barry Stackpole was with the worst in human nature, he was after all just a visitor. Alderdyce lived there. He was concerned only with repercussions.
“Kopernick got the idea from me,” I said. “If I hadn’t told him about Goss’s genealogy kick, he never would have come to me with the towel.”
“Why you? He hates P.I.s on principle, and you like a personal case of stomach cancer, and even if he didn’t, only the department can order a DNA test.”
“The department’s already up to its elbows in one incident involving Kopernick and a place he wasn’t assigned to while he was on duty. He’s low on points when it comes to official cooperation, but if his hunch pays off, it could put him on the square, and with interest. He wouldn’t ask, even if I was best man at his wedding, and he sure wouldn’t admit it; but he wants me to grease this through. So do I.” I gripped the wheel; that at least I could control. “I appreciate your help, but he’s the only cop who’s been willing to put his job on the block by letting this bee out of the jar.”
“It was already on the block. He’s snatching at straws.” He crumpled the towel with one hand. “Without being able to explain how we got it and on what information, it isn’t evidence; it’s just a smelly rag. Even if it made it through channels, it’s illegal search and seizure. ‘Oops, my bad’ might work for you, not for the department. Goss has the legal clout to sue the city for millions for defaming his sterling character. The city attorneys can’t get them back from me, so they’ll settle for my hide.”
“Tell that to Goss. Who’d he call first? Not his lawyers. He thought that smelly rag was worth killing a cop to get it back.” I told him about Kenneth Whitelaw.
“Was I going to get that at all?” he said when I finished. “Were you just holding it in reserve in case I needed the shove?”
“It’s brand-new. I’m coming to you with it first. The only excuse Kopernick would’ve had for visiting Goss in his house so he could put that thing in your hands was to tell him he was turning down his job offer. I don’t know if Goss missed the towel, but when he found out his bribe didn’t work, he set his dog loose; his cutthroat dog. Same one he sent to toss my office to find out what I’d gathered.”
I lifted my hands off the wheel. “Okay, it’s not exactly ironclad. But how many coincidences have to pile up in order to see the fire for the smoke?”
“It’s not even strong enough to call coincidence. Goss has exposed hundreds of crooks. How many of them have already migrated to Detroit once they were cut loose? Our fair town is a clearinghouse for every perp in the continental United States.”
“And this one just happened to target me and Kopernick just when the April Goss case hotted up again.” I squinted against that two-faced sun. “Do this,” I said. “Find out who pulled what strings to spring Whitelaw before he served his full sentence. An endorsement from the celebrity who put him in the cage in the first place has to draw some water with a parole board.”
“You and Kopernick. Jesus Christ. I’d sooner expect Iran and Israel to team up in a sack race.”
“What can I say? He’s kind of warm and fuzzy once you draw his fangs.”
He sat back, gripping the towel with both hands. If we were moving and his window was open, I’m not sure he wouldn’t have been tempted to chuck it out. His expression was bleak, not stricken. As I said, he’d seen the worst. “I can try sending it out as a John Doe. That’s done sometimes in classified cases—I mean the red-hots—but it pisses off the smocks. Damn it, Walker! Ink’s not dry on my reappointment, and you want to send me back to the shuffleboard court.”
I made a sour face at the rearview. “Don’t say ‘retirement,’ John. Anything but that.”
“Bite me. You’re all out of favors.” He opened his door and got out.
“You don’t want a ride?”
“Whitelaw can wait; that’s what cadavers do best. I need to put this here key piece of evidence into official custody before it stinks up my best suit.”
That was a curtain cue, and it was a dandy; but he didn’t take it. Instead he tucked the towel under one arm and laid a hand on the dash. “Amos.”
It got my attention. I could count on the fingers of one thumb the times he’d called me by my first name.
“If you’re right—and you just might be, because a hunch is just a word for miles on the odometer—Goss isn’t the kind to roll over after taking just one on the chin. What’s the score now on his show, four figures?”
“About that. I’m two years behind.”
“That’s one deep bench of pinch-hitters for Whitelaw.”
I grinned. “Worried about me?”
He shot straight up. “Have it your way. You always do. There are plenty enough slabs to go around.” The door banged shut.
I sat there for a while, gripping the wheel with both hands like the ledge outside a penthouse window. Leave it to a cop to have more than one exit line.