“Of course he’s innocent. They all are; just listen to ’em. It’s our job to scare up men and women who have never committed an offense against society, and if we can’t shoot them while they’re in cuffs, we can at least load the dice in court. I’m on my third nightstick; ran out of space on the others for my notches.”
It was another day, and it must have started all of a sudden for John Alderdyce. I’d tracked him down in the Second Precinct men’s room. He’d sloughed off his suit coat, shirt, and tie, and bent before the long mirror above the sinks with a ribbed undershirt tucked into his pleated slacks, buzzing his shotgun stubble with a noise like a grinder plowing through iron grit. His heavy muscles didn’t seem to have lost any definition, but the tattoo on his right biceps, of a grinning skull wearing a straw boater at a jaunty angle, had faded from deep blue to a washed-out turquoise. He’d had it done after a former police chief issued a ban on skin art. The chief had since served his time in Jackson over a pile of cash that fell out of his ceiling when his house was being remodeled, but John’s tattoo was still there, if less vivid.
I said, “I can never tell when you’re being serious or just joking.”
“What do you want, Walker?”
“Whatever you’ve got on the April Goss murder. I read the papers. Now I want to know what happened.”
“At the risk of derailing the fake-news express, I have to say this time they got it pretty much right.” He stopped to blow whiskers out of his cordless razor and caught my eye in the mirror; he read my expression. “Yeah, I reviewed it. You didn’t think I’d miss the connection between an eyewitness to bank robbery and a high-profile murder case, did you?”
“I toyed with the idea. That’s your fault. During the week and a half you were retired the whole criminal justice system lost a couple of yards.”
He slapped on aftershave lotion; something with a woodsy scent, probably hemlock spruce, heavy on the hemlock. “Do me a favor and keep that to yourself. Otherwise the chief will make a photo op out of me and I’ll be back out on my can next time the administration changes hands. Pets are for home.”
“So what’s your take? Was the case locktight or looser than usual?”
“It had holes. If it didn’t, I’d have ordered it reopened. Like a conspiracy theory, you know? All the pieces fit because someone put in overtime making ’em fit.”
“As for instance.”
“As for instance the autopsy report. It was sealed. The jury never got to hear that Goss wasn’t pregnant after all.”
“My client knew that. Someone must have unsealed it at some point.”
“The point being it was after conviction. A go-getter with the News filed for it under the Freedom of Information Act. Not that it got him a byline, or even three inches in Section D, right next to the government contracts. By that time Corbeil was doing his second year in Jackson. He was old news, one hundred and fifty times removed by way of fresher homicides.”
“Would it have made any difference if it had come out during his trial?”
“The defense might have tried to make the case that she’d found out she wasn’t pregnant and told him; I suppose that might have occurred even to the glorified law clerk he drew in the p.d. lottery, but short of another pee stick or a record of a medical exam to confirm the possibility, the state’s attorney would’ve brushed it aside without getting up off his ass. As far as anyone can prove, she died thinking she was in the family way. I don’t think any attempt was made for a new trial based on the gag order.”
“Why was the report sealed?”
Alderdyce hooked his shirt off the radiator and shook out the wrinkles. It was gunmetal-colored cotton with removable collar stays. “Ignorance may not be an excuse when you’re in the dock, but it sure helps the incumbents when offices have changed hands. There’d been an election since the verdict came in. How much effort does it take to jerk your thumb over your shoulder and blame the guy that just left? And what’s the guy who’s no longer in the hot seat got to gain from a sudden attack of memory?”
“Take a wild guess.”
“You should’ve asked me that back when I was a private citizen. Now I’ve got the weight of the System back on my shoulders. You know how tough it is prying anything out of us Establishment types.”
“I would have asked back then—if I’d had a reason to know Dan Corbeil at the time.”
I watched him adjust his silk necktie, taking the better part of a minute to eliminate the dimple, shrug his shoulders into his coat, smooth it down, and examine the effect in the mirror. His attention to his appearance wasn’t effeminate, more a matter of military precision; he was a general preparing to review the troops. Without so much as issuing a memo, John Alderdyce had boosted most of the plainclothes division from TJ Maxx to Abercrombie & Fitch. Several chiefs had avoided being photographed next to him because he made their tailoring look like upholstery.
Notwithstanding all that, I said, “Anything else? Lip gloss? Glitter dust?”
He turned away from the mirror. You could never tell whether he was deep in thought or about to blow off the top of his skull; that Tiki god face never changed. “It’s a mystery to me why you haven’t raked in enough to open branch offices in all the major cities, the way you ask a favor from authority.”
I hung a cigarette from my lip. It’s against the law to set one afire in any public building in the state, but I needed to be doing something while I was waiting for the ocean to come to a boil.
“I can’t help you,” he said finally. “Maybe Chester Goss can; but he won’t.”
Chester Goss. That was worse than him losing his temper. I’d had the case two days and still I’d failed to make the connection: why April Goss’s murder still resonated when so many more sensational crimes had dried up and blown away. Forget expanding my operation beyond Grand River Avenue; how I’d managed to keep even one office open was a mystery to me.
True to their name, Bloomfield, Bloomfield Hills, and Bloomfield Village had sprung up sometime past mid-century as suddenly as desert blossoms after a shower. As the money migrated north, the swank suburbs had swollen and split and multiplied, until today you need a certified mechanic to distinguish between the Corvettes and the Ferraris in the cobblestone driveways and tell you where the six-figure incomes end and the sevens begin. On the way I drove the Cutlass through an automatic car wash and popped for the deluxe scrub-and-wax. It didn’t do anything for the dings, but in that area code, a mud wagon draws cops like fried cakes. I thought about asking the attendant for a receipt and charging it to expenses, but I figured Chrys Corbeil was still paying off her student loans, and anyway it was the first time I’d washed the heap since before Thanksgiving.
I steamed up Woodward shining like a tin trumpet, turned left onto Long Lake Road, once the site of Prohibition roadhouses and bobcat habitats, and slummed through a neighborhood of six-thousand-square-foot micromansions on the way toward the real currency. There, the contractors had salvaged old-growth oak from streams in Canada, imported monastery doors from Tuscany and the steppes of Russia, and numbered and dismantled stones from medieval Irish smokehouses for reassembly in backyards to store Jet Skis and snowmobiles.
Chester Goss lived in Pawnee Village, one of the newer tracts built during the brief hiatus between the end of white flight from Detroit and the return of the prodigals after the city came out of bankruptcy. It was virtually self-contained, with a Whole Foods market, high-end Italian and Mexican restaurants biting their thumbs at each other across a divided drive, a pocket-size movie theater, a boutique bookstore, and a gas station that sold everything from calamari embalmed in plastic to official Major League Baseball caps and, as long as you were there, gas. The HO-scale streets were christened after Native Americans and branched off into steadily diminishing estuaries, each bearing the same name as the original, only with a twist at the end: This was an effective ploy to confuse and discourage undesirable visitors.
I was more intrepid than that. I followed Geronimo Street to Geronimo Lane to Geronimo Court and finally entered Geronimo Circle, which like all the others had been resurfaced as recently as last week. It swept lagoon-fashion around an oval lot, where I steered into the curb in front of a low sprawling French country house built of native stone with a slate roof. Some clever architect had designed it to create the impression of a cozy cottage, an optical illusion to disguise the fact that it was the biggest house for blocks; it wouldn’t fool the tax assessor, but might keep the neighbors from sneering over their cocktails about the unwashed new rich. A smaller oval next to the driveway contained an explosion of scarlet, indigo, magenta, and velvety white blooms that had been allowed to hang their heads casually over the whitewashed stone border in the style of an English garden. All the neighborhood architecture, in fact, seemed to fall into either the Gallic or Anglo-Saxon camp; in this case both. It appeared to be some sort of tribute to the French and Indian War.
The place whispered money. It had to whisper, given the circumstances. It was the house April Goss built.
At the time of his daughter’s death, Chester Goss had worked as a regional assistant programming director for a group of premium TV channels owned by a corporation based in New Jersey. He’d publicly quit that job in order to devote his full time to investigating her reported murder on a local cable-access channel, turning up the heat on the criminal justice system five days a week. After Dan Corbeil’s conviction he’d branched out to probe other unsolved crimes of violence. Six months later he was invited by a network to go coast-to-coast. As the show’s talking head he publicized the cases, analyzed suspects, and racked up an impressive number of arrests and convictions with the help of tips supplied by viewers through his toll-free hotline. Fifteen years since it went national, Cutthroat Dogs had broken its own record for reality-programming viewership a half-dozen times. As I mounted the front porch, I wondered how he’d react to being on the receiving end of an interview.