My stomach was scraping my spine. In Southfield I pulled into a strip mall and ordered a steak sandwich and a martini in a sports bar next door to a pet-groomer’s. On the TV monitors a couple of ex-jocks in loud blazers were conducting a post-mortem on last night’s Pistons match. My waitress was a blonde with no-nonsense eyes who would always be forty. She got everything right, including how I liked my steak and the gin-vermouth ratio. I told her. She glanced down at my tip.
“Next time ask for Claire. Your station’s my station.”
Barry Stackpole was sitting behind the desk in my office with his ankles crossed on the top. One of them was made of graphite. I remembered when it was hickory. He’d come back from the slaughter in Cambodia with all his pieces intact, only to lose some of them to a TNT charge wired to the ignition of his Buick Skylark. Back then he’d specialized in covering the mob, which didn’t approve.
Now he studied truly hazardous issues: international terrorism, human trafficking, and local politics.
He tossed aside the Obama-era newsmagazine he’d taken from my waiting room. “Can’t remember when I was here last. Nothing’s changed, including the dead flies on the sill.”
“I change them out now and then. My super owes me an apology. He guaranteed the dead bolt.”
“It’s not the lock. Your door’s got erectile dysfunction; sagged just enough the bolt won’t make contact with the socket. I slipped the spring latch with my Medicare card.”
He didn’t look as if he was eligible. His tanned features, thick fair hair, and athletic build had stopped deteriorating years before that magazine hit the racks. Apart from some laugh lines around his pale eyes, he could’ve passed for my baby brother. We were the same age.
I made myself uncomfortable in the customers’ chair. “What brings you to the Million-Dollar Mile?”
“Curiosity, what else? Did Corbeil do it?”
“You and Alderdyce. It doesn’t take Stephen Hawking to connect my teller to the April Goss case, but you both act like the canary that swallowed the cat. What do you think? You’ve had time to bone up.”
“I’m not Perry Mason. I couldn’t care less who’s innocent. I feed on the guilty.” He waggled the hand missing two fingers. “For what it’s worth, I never was satisfied with how it came out.”
“The pregnancy test cover-up?”
“Before that. That media blitz Goss engineered made me ashamed for my profession. Defendants are supposed to be tried in court, not between a Faygo ad and the weather; says so somewhere in the National Archives.”
“That doesn’t make him innocent.”
“It makes you want him to be. Who’d you talk to, apart from the off-and-on police inspector?”
“Who would I?”
“Goss and Corbeil.”
“Other way around.”
“Raise anything?”
I shook out a cigarette, but paused before lighting it. “Who am I talking to, Barry, you or your earbuds?”
“Look who’s gone publicity shy. Just the other day you begged me for as much as you could get.”
“I was younger then, and naïve.”
Same hand, different gesture. I took that to mean we were off the grid. “A fistful of hunch,” I said. “Corbeil’s hanging on by his eyelashes; could blink any time. I’m pretty sure it was Goss threw the wraps over the pregnancy results.”
“Big ratings are no shield from an indictment for evidence-tampering.”
“I said it was a hunch. The judge who signed off on the deal is dead. I’d never get a court order to look at the file for action, and even if I did, get whoever put it in motion to admit it and what he got for it.”
“You sure won’t if you don’t try. Let me rattle a few cages.”
I lit up and squinted through the smoke. “Literally?”
“You know how many lawyers have batted in the exercise yard for mixing up the letter and the spirit of the law?”
“What’s the tariff, a case of Jack or an exclusive?”
“Can’t a friend do a favor for a friend?”
I grinned. “‘Someday, and that day may never come…’”
“I said ‘favor,’ Don Vito. I didn’t say I’d come to you with a cadaver.” He put his feet on the floor and stood. “You and I go back, Amos. That means something.”
I wanted to agree; but genuine sentiment wasn’t in Barry’s tackle box. Like he said, he and I went back.
He was barely gone when someone triggered the buzzer in the waiting room. Without that, I might not have heard the knock on the door marked PRIVATE. It sounded like a woodpecker with a headache. I called out an invitation.
Vail Goss took her fashion tips from the 1952 Sears & Roebuck catalogue. She wore a moss-green tweed suit tailored to her trim waist and square shoulders, low heels, a gray felt hat bent into an inverted U, and white cotton gloves. The hat was trimmed with a black veil that barely reached to her hairline. I couldn’t see the point.
I rose. Given her general appearance I didn’t feel self-conscious doing it. I asked her to sit.
She closed the door without making any noise and perched on the edge of the chair with her knees together and rested her hands on the clutch purse in her lap. She’d put something on her face that masked the few lines it wore, but although the suit and hat brought out the smoky hazel in her eyes, they looked old and tired and sick.
“I came to apologize for the way my husband acted. He’s really not in the habit of throwing visitors out of the house.”
“He’s pretty good at it for someone who doesn’t practice.” I sat.
“You don’t know what he has to put up with all the time. People seldom write to TV stations because they’re pleased with what they saw, and now that most of them do it by e-mail, they’ve lost all semblance of decency. The language they use! And it’s always the ones who claim they’re offended by something he said on the air.”
“I’m not offended, Mrs. Goss. Neither is my client. We’re just trying to get at the truth. If that means Dan Corbeil belongs in prison, I’ve done my job. Your husband is a journalist. He doesn’t need anyone to explain that.”
“He doesn’t; but there’s a difference between objective reporting and what happened to—to our April.” Her breath caught in her throat.
“Would you like a drink of water?” It was lame.
“I don’t suppose you have anything stronger.”
That made me feel less idiotic. I swiveled to the safe, broke out a bottle of Cutty, and held it up. She nodded, her face brightening a little. I grabbed two Old Fashioneds and got up to use the tap in the water closet.
She guessed what I had in mind. “Neat, please.”
It didn’t go with her outfit. She should have asked for something tall and green with a garden in it. I poured two inches into each glass and slid one across to her.
She dipped her upper lip in the Scotch and smacked it against the lower; she was drinking not just because she needed it, but also because she enjoyed it. I hoped I wasn’t going to start liking her. It would interfere with the clean metallic workings of my ice-cold brain.
“Does your husband know you’re here, Mrs. Goss?”
“He’d be furious. I told him I was going to Somerset Mall. I will, after I leave. I need some things and I don’t like to lie.” She took another sip and smiled nervously. “This is the first time I’ve been to Detroit in years.”
“It’s not so bad, if you know which parts to stay away from.”
“I suppose you do.”
“They’re where I work. You didn’t have to come all the way down here to apologize for Chester. You could have phoned.”
She drank another quarter-inch and leaned forward to set the glass on the desk; just enough out of her reach to avoid going for it automatically. When she sat back, she looked more relaxed, or at least less like she was going to jump up and dart into a hole like a chipmunk.
I took my first drink and sat back myself, rolling the glass between my palms. “Why are you really here?”
“You implied Daniel Corbeil is innocent. Is he?”
“Only he knows the answer to that. It’s unlikely, statistically speaking. Our system’s pretty sound.”
“Then, why—?”
“I said pretty sound. ‘Beyond reasonable doubt’ leaves a hole big enough for some people to fall through.”
“I must warn you, if you manage to free that young man, you’ll make a powerful enemy in Chet.”
“It shouldn’t have to be that way. If it turns out Corbeil is innocent, it means whoever killed your daughter and rigged it to look like suicide is still out there.”
That made stretching her arm to retrieve her drink worth the effort. It brought dawn to her cheeks. “I hadn’t really thought of it that way. I guess it’s a no-brainer; but, you see, I’ve spent twenty years certain the man who did that ghastly thing is paying for it.”
“It’s not my job to convince you. It’s not even my job to spring him, only to go over all the columns and make sure they add up. If they don’t and he walks, it won’t be because of a technicality. It’ll be because he’s spent twenty years paying somebody else’s bill. Do you know if Chester’s the one who got the evidence your daughter wasn’t pregnant quashed at the trial?”
“No.” But she said it quickly enough it was clear the question came as no surprise.
“No, he didn’t, or no, you don’t know?”
“Both.”
I shook my head. “It can’t be both. If you know he didn’t, you can’t not know, and if you don’t know, you can’t say he didn’t. See how it works?”
“Now you sound like that defense attorney in court, trying to trip up the witnesses against Corbeil.”
“Which is it, Mrs. Goss?”
“No. I don’t know. But if he did, can you blame him? You said innocent people don’t go to jail often, but I’m sure you’ll agree that the guilty go free all the time. Sometimes the system needs a little help.”
I said nothing.
She set her glass back in the wet circle it had made on the desk. It already had more rings than the Olympics flag. “If Corbeil didn’t kill April, and if whoever did is still around, will you set out to find that person?”
“If someone hires me to.”
“Someone will.” She stood, holding her purse in front of her like a shield. “Thank you for seeing me. Somehow I trust you.”
“Thank you for that.” I got to my feet and accepted the hand she offered. Her grip was as firm as Goss’s.
A cloud passed across her face. “You won’t—”
“Not a word.”
After she left I finished my drink, dumped hers out into the water closet sink, and rinsed the glasses. The buzzer came again as I was shutting the safe. Chrys Corbeil came in, bringing with her a fresh breeze of youth. Today it was business wear, a white nylon blouse with a tan jacket, a blue scarf around her neck, black slacks with a crease, and sandals, no purse. She’d swept her pale blond hair behind her ears, which accentuated the diamond shape of her face.
“Back at work?” I said when we were both seated.
“Tomorrow. I’m acclimating.” Her eyes asked the question she’d carried in.
I said, “Nothing I’d take to your bank, but it’s early days. I’ve barely dented your retainer.”
“Keep it, please. I’ve decided not to go ahead with the investigation.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“There comes a moment on almost every job when the client wants to call it off. Sometimes I let them, but they have to make the case first.”
“I went to see Dan this morning.”
“Did he bawl you out for hiring me?”
“Yes! I’ve never seen him so angry. He asked me what right I had to stick my nose into his problem; he shouted it, over and over. The guard had to pull him out of the visitors’ room. He was afraid Dan would attack me physically.”
“Good.”
“Not good. He’d never lay a hand on me or anyone else. That’s what I hired you to prove, but it’s not worth it if it makes him more miserable than he already was. Mr. Walker, I’m terribly afraid he’ll do something to himself.”
“He won’t. That’s why I said ‘good.’ I wasn’t talking about what the guard did. I was talking about your brother no longer being a zombie. If he can raise enough of a mad to scream at you, it means he’s got the bottom to stick it out till we’ve got an answer, one way or the other.”
She shook her head violently enough to swing her hair out from behind her ears. “How could you know that? You’re not a psychiatrist.”
“Yesterday, when I offered to bring him some reading material, he made a joke about escape. If he can talk about that, and even poke fun at it, he isn’t beyond help. I was sure of it then and I’m even more sure of it now. This isn’t my first job. It’s not even the first time I’ve represented the interests of a convict. I’ve been behind bars myself; not hard time, but with no clear idea of when or if I’d get out, which is just as bad if not worse. When are you going back?”
“Not until the weekend. The bank’s already given me more time than I should have taken. I can’t count on the vice president’s goodwill forever.”
“Make you a deal. Let me work this until your next visit. If neither one of you has changed your mind, I’ll step off, and you won’t owe me a cent.”
She agreed.
I placed a few calls, made some appointments for tomorrow, and clocked out. A slab-sided midnight-blue sedan sat in front of my house, its twin pipes smoking thickly in the chill air of evening. The windows were tinted too dark for state law. That and the bilious green glow of its onboard computer made it a police vehicle. As I slowed to swing into my driveway, the driver’s door opened and Detective First-Grade Stan Kopernick got out. I wondered what had taken him so long.