Philip Justice was the name of the attorney the Gosses had engaged to put the screws to the police investigating April’s murder; some dim ancestor had been granted the surname by European royalty for his success in chasing horse-drawn ambulances. “Rough Justice” (the line decorated every bus in town) was too tall, too loud, and had won most of his decisions by making a nuisance of himself in court. His firm still advertised on local TV, racking up totals earned for its clients in big fat numerals followed by strings of zeroes, but the man himself was gone, a victim of one of the very people he represented; tossed aside like a chicken bone once he’d served his purpose. I’d been within yards of him at the time. Since then I’d made it a point not to stand too close to a lawyer in the open.
After saying good-bye to Chrys Corbeil in the DIA I crossed Woodward Avenue to the main branch of the Detroit Public Library, a marble pile that might have been deliberately designed to frighten away anyone who wanted to use it; but I was on a first-name basis with the vagrants who slept at the carrels, so it was like dropping in at the club for brandy and a cigar. A couple of hours scrolling through ancient numbers of the News and Free Press on microfilm didn’t put me much further ahead on the details of the murder and the trial that followed, but I recognized an acquaintance in one of the pictures taken at the crime scene.
That was no treat.
Stan Kopernick had taken on girth and some gray hairs since swapping his uniform for plainclothes, but no one would have called him callow even then. He’d looked like a beefier, swarthier version of Dick Tracy, poured into starched blues and left to set. The photographer had posed him pointing at the tub from which the victim had been removed and identified him in the caption by name as an officer with the Eleventh Precinct. Neither the shot nor Kopernick’s presence was necessary, but probably he’d leaked details of the investigation in return for the plug. Face-time wins points with the front office. The more often a particular grunt shows up in the news, the more inclined the department brass is to credit it to hard work and efficiency. Pretty soon he’s on the fast track to the CID.
It isn’t even corrupt, really. Any public service is a sieve, and the organization keeps an entire division to spin sensitive information into good public relations, or release enough false leads to bury anything that would hinder the investigation. The local media were aware of it, but all they cared about was the next news cycle. Even so, it increases the possibility of putting someone in a position of power who’d be better employed stunning cattle. Detective First-Grade Kopernick was a case in point.
I had a personal interest, that’s all; no one can clean up the system all by himself. My track record with him since he’d joined Major Crimes was untidy, to put it delicately. He wouldn’t go out of his way to break me in two, but if the opportunity presented itself he’d be on it like bruises on a banana. He was just what I needed to spice up the prospect of reopening an old case the police had shut with a bang.
Going over his head would be a fine way to give him his chance.
It was a warm day in late April, just the kind to make the trees bud before the frost. I groped for a signal on the library steps and called the Second Precinct.
The voice I got was youthful enough to belong to the officer who’d printed me; even desk sergeants have to take bathroom breaks. He told me Inspector Alderdyce wasn’t in today.
“Out sick?”
“He only comes in three days a week. He’ll be here tomorrow.”
I thanked him, hit End, and was halfway through pecking out Alderdyce’s home number when I changed my mind. I’m not man enough to risk antagonizing two cops at the same time. I was already on John’s list for inviting the press in on my arrest; you don’t get that far up the ladder—twice, the second time after coming out of retirement—without developing a keen nose for a double-cross. I canceled the call.
Next I dug out my smudged notebook and looked up the number of the Huron Valley Men’s Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti to find out if the visiting hours were still the same as last time.
It’s an old town, named for the Greek revolutionary leader, with rows of crazy-quilt Victorian houses built by lumber kings and railroad barons, a picturesque Depot Town filled with pubs and architectural salvage shops, Eastern Michigan University’s green and ivy-grown campus, bookstores that buy and sell used school texts, a Masonic temple, and one of the worst crime districts in the state. Institutions of justice like police stations and penitentiaries attract the worst neighbors; it has something to do with the notion that such locations are psychological No-Man’s Zones. The men’s correction house fronted on Bemis Road, announcing itself blocks ahead with signs warning motorists not to pick up hitchhikers; especially those in denim jumpsuits with homemade tattoos carved into their arms.
It doesn’t look like the medieval dungeons in prison flicks. They exist, but from a time before the system began hiring contractors uninfluenced by Traitors’ Gate. This one resembles a modern-day hospital, with the bricks pre-stacked in orderly cubes lowered into place by cranes and the bars discreetly camouflaged behind glass block panes. I parked in a two-hour zone separated by a grass median from blue-and-whites and vans with steel-gridded windows, locked the .38 (and the contraband honorary Wayne County Sheriff’s shield) in the glove compartment, and put myself through the same metal detectors you see everywhere these days, from Comerica Park to the Seventh Day Adventist Church.
A female turnkey with a sleeve patch modeled after the Michigan State flag looked at my driver’s license and P.I. ticket, dropped them back into the steel tray, and chunked it out for me to retrieve them. From my side of the bulletproof Plexiglas she was an attractive brunette in her mid-thirties, her hair fixed behind her ears with barrettes and clear gloss on her nails.
“Who are you here to see?” Her tone was polite, pleasant, and burnished like chrome steel.
I’d left my name when I’d called, and of course it was right there on her metal clipboard, but I said, “Daniel Corbeil.”
She nodded without checking the information against her list and directed me to the visitors’ room.
I passed into a long narrow chamber brightly lit by LEDs through frosted panels in a suspended ceiling, where another turnkey—this one male, with a shaven head the color of toffee—instructed me to keep my voice at a normal conversational level, to make no physical contact with the inmate, and under no circumstances to pass anything to him without first submitting it for inspection. For all that, he came off as no firmer than a security guard in a suburban middle school. The really tough ones never feel the need to show it until push comes to shove; then it’s a chokehold you’ll still be feeling come Christmas.
A long laminated table divided the room, with no partition standing between resident and visitor; good lighting, stern training, and a rotation system in place to prevent routine boredom from leading to complacency made such restrictions superfluous. All of the warnings I’d been given were spelled out on signs mounted on the walls between the Bill of Rights and the smiling faces of the governor, the Michigan Secretary of State, and the members of the parole board. Cut-out construction-paper hearts pasted to the walls, signed by generous donors to the state corrections system, designed probably to soften the effect of enforced confinement, only contributed to the ghastly reality: Nobody from the entrance on the other side of the table was leaving the room except through that same door.
It wasn’t much of a door, to look at. The steel core was faced with oak veneer, with a square window set into it, like the entrance from a doctor’s reception area to the consulting rooms. Everything had been done to make the place seem like an ordinary professional building, from all appearances; there was even a unisex restroom for visitors. Somehow it made the whole experience seem all the more depressing. Too much money had been spent in order to preserve the clean cold efficiency of life on the outside, and too little to see to the comforts of those condemned to life on the inside. They were fed well, clothed adequately, hygiene and medical needs attended to, and sheltered from the worst of the history of incarceration; but it was all for show.
An inmate sat on the other side near the far end, across from a fat man in pinstripes with a glistening brown leather briefcase leaning against the leg of the table. They were speaking in tones too low to be heard from where I was, but evidently in what the guard considered a normal conversational level. He’d staked out his corner near the door from outside and stood at parade rest with his hands folded behind him.
I drew out a chair halfway down the table and sat down to wait and yearn for a cigarette. I wasn’t sure just why I was there, apart from killing time until Alderdyce was available to furnish me with inside dope. Nothing Corbeil could tell me would add anything to the record; in fact, time could only have eroded what was fresh in the beginning, and artificially sweetened details grown stale, like eyewitness memories of the JFK assassination.
No, my reasons were entirely personal. The impression he made would be what I’d take away, either to go on from there or return his sister’s check. Lawyers can afford to sweat for the guilty; I couldn’t.
While I was waiting, the lawyerly type in pinstripes gathered up his briefcase and left and a guard buzzed himself in to return the inmate to his cell; nothing got past the surveillance camera mounted in a corner of the ceiling. The kind of quiet you don’t find on the outside settled in.
The buzzer shattered it. A lock clunked and the door with the window in it opened. This uniform could have been the first one’s twin, except he was three inches shorter and had a full head of hair, cut close and dyed dandelion yellow, Dennis Rodman fashion. He stood aside, holding the door for the man he’d escorted there from the cells.
Dan Corbeil was still recognizable from the photos taken of him in the late nineties, despite the sagging flesh of drastic weight loss, putty-colored jailhouse pallor, and a widow’s peak that had thinned to a few colorless threads. His eyes were bright under boggy lids, but it was more the glitter of glass than alertness. That and the way he walked, sliding his feet on the waxed floor, and the aimlessness of his progress, coming up short against the chair on his side as if he hadn’t seen the obstacle, painted a portrait of a man who’d abandoned all hope long before I came along.
I’d known it would be bad, but I hadn’t guessed how bad. Springing an ostensibly innocent party from confinement is tough enough with authority stonewalling you at every turn; but you can usually draw strength from the party’s cooperation. That wouldn’t be the case this time. Where he was concerned, walls and bars and locks were only set-dressing. He was incarcerated in a penitentiary of his own mind.
I hoped to hell his sister was wrong about his innocence and I could return the advance and walk away from this one. If not, I’d be running a race against suicide.