I’d been so caught up in Vail’s absence, I hadn’t considered the possibility of two men waiting in some dark room within earshot of where we sat. And when Goss called out to them I should have done something; oh, say, bring the Ruger around from behind my back. Instead I was still sitting there like a pet rock when they came in through a side doorway, armed to the gunwales.
The bigger of the two fit the profile of one of those suspicious characters that cause the police to brace them on a hunch, frisk them, and come up with an unregistered gun or a switchblade or a set of brass knuckles or maybe just a set of burglar tools. He ran a little over six feet and a little under a yard wide at the shoulders, going to fat in the middle but not enough to slow him down in a brawl, with a flat face that looked as if he’d smacked into the back of a bus. He cut his own mud-puddle-brown hair, or someone had done it for him with a pair of dull pruning shears, and if his eyes protruded any more or were set an inch wider apart he might have been part chameleon; a congenital condition, I guessed. His mother had drank or smoked or done drugs all the time she was carrying him. I don’t remember what he wore. I was too busy concentrating on the spur-hammer semiautomatic in his grubby right hand to find fault with his tailor. It would fire a slug that would punch a hole through a two-inch pine board and still have enough velocity to ventilate an over-age private operative.
His companion was smaller and slighter in a baggy navy zip-front sweatshirt that hung to his thighs. It was too big for him; he’d rolled up the sleeves, but sloppily, so that the right one had crept back down to his wrist and the left was making progress against his forearm tattoos. That hand held an unfamiliar-looking pistol, an auto-loader also, in some European caliber that would probably make a smaller hole than his partner’s .45, but the end result would be the same.
He had on a floppy cap drawn down over his ears, a knitted thing with multicolored stripes. I couldn’t tell if he’d swiped it from Snap or Crackle or Pop.
And he looked like someone I’d met, or seen somewhere; thinner in the face, without the strong jowls, but with the same banked fury in the eyes, a kind of armor worn against the civilized world. That made him the second one I’d come across on this job, after Kenneth Whitelaw. There’s no harm in failing to match faces with names—if you’re a toll gate collector or a nurse in an emergency room.
Time to deal with that later. If there was a later.
Goss finished his drink and set it back down. “It’s your own fault,” he said. “You couldn’t resist twisting the knife in me over the phone. If you’d just asked for an interview, I might not have called in my markers. That’s Noble Kady there in the party hat. He didn’t convert when his big brother did.”
I made the connection then; if it hadn’t been for the eyes I wouldn’t have wondered about him at all. Brother Jared had worn a similar pair to his session with a police photographer.
“Who’s his friend?”
“Company. The gun, Walker. You squirm around too much for someone who doesn’t have a hunk of iron carving a hole in his back. You know how to take it out. You’ve seen enough surveillance footage on the show.”
Two muzzles watched me like snakes’ eyes as I reached back with my left hand and brought around the Ruger, the butt between forefinger and thumb.
“Kady.”
Abrahim Ibn Said’s brother stepped forward to claim the revolver, pausing to ruck the restless sleeve back up to the elbow of his gun arm. I filed that away for future reference.
Goss held out his hand. Kady gave him the Ruger. He turned it over, examining it from both sides, then laid it on the table next to his glass. “Kind of gaudy for you. I’d figure you for something more modest.”
“I paint my toenails too.”
Kady retraced his steps and swept the foreign pistol across my face. I’d seen it coming and started to roll with the punch, but the pain shot straight through to the other side. Something trickled down into my collar, tickling my neck, and my brain was walloping off the walls of my skull as if it had come loose of the spine.
The big lunk with the bad haircut giggled. That threw me almost as much as the blow. It didn’t go with his build.
“Let it bleed,” said Goss, when I made a reflexive move toward the handkerchief in an inside pocket. Kady was still there close, flipping a coin whether to pistol-whip me again or save energy and pull the trigger. I let the hand drop into my lap. The blood continued to slither down my cheek and drip off the corner of my jaw.
Goss said, “That DNA evidence is nothing, just an embarrassment. I was upset when the police told me about April; my brain went into denial and I blocked out ever having been in her apartment. That visit hadn’t gone well, so my conscious mind was anxious to let it go; but that’s for a psychiatrist to explain. Later, when I remembered, it wasn’t worth bringing up. Her killer was in custody.”
He’d forgotten again just yesterday, talking to me; I let it slide.
“Embarrassing, sure.” My cheekbone felt huge and hot. “Especially since you also forgot to leave any fingerprints behind except Dan Corbeil’s.”
“He took care of those when he wiped his off the doorknobs.”
“Why bother? They were involved. He’d already marked his territory everywhere else in the place. Removing that bit of evidence was what led them to treat it as a homicide.”
“You forget I’m an expert on crime. Murder is the one most often committed by amateurs. Most killers are caught because they slipped up somewhere. In this case, he compounded that mistake with trying to make it look like she killed herself: drugging her, stripping her naked, running a bath, and wearing gloves or using a handkerchief or something like that so he wouldn’t leave evidence on the razor he killed her with.”
“Amazing,” I said.
“Not really. Not being amazing is what got him caught.”
“Not Corbeil. You. You talk about your daughter’s violent death as if you were dictating a letter to one of your sponsors. Your voice didn’t even break when you said she was drugged and stripped and cut open.”
“It was almost the last century. What’s the statute of limitations on grief?”
I touched my split cheek. A lightning bolt shot straight to the top of my head, but when I took my fingers away they were sticky. The blood was slowing. “There’s more,” I said; “or I should say less. If Corbeil stripped her, he’d have left prints on the buttons of her blouse and the snap on her jeans.”
“Wiped them off too.”
I shook my head. “Forensics at the time reported finding partials on a couple of those surfaces; complete enough to identify them as April’s. They weren’t wiped, and if anyone had handled them, with gloves or a handkerchief or bare-handed, they’d have been smudged. The detectives overlooked that—not from incompetence, but because no case is ever clear-cut. There are always anomalies that can’t be explained. Nine times out of ten, when there’s a romantic interest involved, they don’t need to look beyond the lover.
“You shouldn’t have interfered, getting the judge to quash the evidence that April wasn’t pregnant, which would have weakened Corbeil’s motive. The machinery was already in place. Chances are he’d have gone to prison regardless, and I wouldn’t have had a foothold that would make me reopen the investigation.”
“You can’t prove I had anything to do with that.”
“Then why the sister act?” I jerked my head toward the gunmen.
“Insurance. There’s a bare possibility Noble’s brother might be compelled to explain how he tripped and stumbled into Corbeil; Corbeil himself might be able to help with that. While I thought he’d died, that seemed remote. If I bribed Jared/Abrahim to send that message, the police might look harder into the late Kenneth Whitelaw, he being a fellow Dogs alumnus. The way the criminal justice works, they could pile his death on top of an attempted murder charge. It seemed fitting that the associations I have that got me into this mess should be what gets me out.”
I turned my head. “I got some blood on the back of your chair. You could probably sponge that out. A corpse on your carpet might take a little more than Mr. Clean.”
He gave me that friendly smile he reserved for his sign-off on-screen. “Then you should have dropped by when it was still light out.”
Noble Kady spoke for the first time; he had a speech impediment, a lateral lisp that made the saliva buzz between his teeth. “We got us a van in the garage; boosted it from the long-term lot at Metro. Time the owner gets back from Miami or wherever, you’ll be shaking hands with Whitelaw.”
“Two-car garage.” I nodded. “You do luck out, Goss. Be a tight squeeze if Vail hadn’t taken her car when she ran out on you. How much does she know?”
“I told you she’s visiting her aunt.”
“So you did. You left out her name, her Social Security number, and the name of her first pet. She’s smart; that was obvious when we spoke in my office. If she doesn’t know or suspect exactly what you did, the atmosphere around this place these last few days was enough to convince her you were guilty of something, and with April’s case back under a microscope, she’d know it was connected. She was strong enough to go on after the death of her only child, and she’s strong enough to jump ship knowing you had something to do with how it came out.”
A sharp spasm in my cheek made me wince. I touched it automatically, drawing my feet back at the same moment. My center of gravity shifted forward a fraction of an inch.
“I’m no Jimmy Hoffa,” I said, “but I’m not living in a refrigerator carton on Michigan Avenue either. When I’m tagged as a missing person, do you think she won’t connect the dots? Maybe she remembers something from twenty years ago that would turn the whole thing up all over again, only with a ton of state-of-the-art scientific evidence to back it up. The cops won’t need it, though. They’ll have a fresh case of suspicious disappearance to furnish them with a whole new set of leads.”
He was considering that—he wore the concerned face he used when laying out the first details of the felony du jour—when Kady grunted, a noise of impatient disgust. His loose sleeve had slid down his wrist and he raised his arm to shake it back from his gun hand.
I threw myself forward then, onto the balls of my feet, aiming a stiffened right hand at his solar plexus. It was a desperate move, and mathematically doomed to fail. I was facing two guns, not one. The big lug with the eyes of a tropical lizard aimed the .45 between my eyes and pulsed his finger on the trigger.
“Police! Drop it!”
Rhinoceros that he was, Stan Kopernick could be quiet, even when breaking down doors. He filled the entrance to the room, feet spread, pistol in both hands.
Forty-five had good reflexes for all his bulk: too good. He pivoted too fast, firing wild when Kopernick’s slug tore into his chest. That made two for Kopernick: He was a double-O now.
I had the advantage of being already in motion, also of dumb clumsy luck; I recalculated my direction, dove for the Ruger on the table next to Goss’s seat, managed instead to knock it off its pedestal, and goggled a little when I snatched the gun out of the air. I fired low, at Kady, hitting a kneecap; my second that week.
All this happened while Kady’s partner was still falling. He twisted slowly from the hip, spiraling down to the floor with the kind of balletic grace that would have been new to his experience, if he were still in a position to appreciate it. He was through with having that luxury.
Kady was on the floor as well, grasping his knee with both hands and making a noise like a punctured tire. Ironically, the sleeve on his right arm had stayed rolled. His pistol had hit the carpet, made a lazy spin, and came to a rest against his partner’s with a click. I kicked them both into a corner, purely from habit. Their owners weren’t interested in them anymore.
Chester Goss stayed seated. He appeared as calm as he had all evening, except for his legs no longer being crossed and the greenish cast of his face. He didn’t even raise his hands when Kopernick and I both drew down on him, and that’s a knee-jerk reaction even among those who have never faced a gun. That studio calm approached paralysis.
“Got it?” I asked the detective first-grade.
“Yeah.” He drew a cell phone from an inside breast pocket. “Better use it on an ambulance first.”
That call having been put through, he pressed another button. Goss’s voice sounded tinny coming from the tiny speaker; he reserved his rich tones for TV.
“Insurance,” it said. “There’s a bare possibility Noble’s brother might be compelled to explain how he tripped and stumbled into Corbeil…”
That accomplished what no one else had been able to achieve before; the emcee’s face crumbled into a pile of confused rubble.
I took out my own cell. It wasn’t as sleek as Kopernick’s and had a lot fewer functions, but it worked as a telephone, which was why I got it in the first place. I broke the connection, frowned at the screen. “One bar. Wouldn’t have had enough for a full confession anyway.”
“We don’t get ’em that often.” Kopernick paused, listening to a siren pitched not as high as the wounded man’s complaints. “My money’s on the patient here.”