The Witchfinder Page 14

  Twenty-nine hours.

  “The pictures,” I said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Where are my things?”

  “Your clothes and valuables are locked up in that cabinet. You won’t be needing them for a while.”

  It was one of those sheet-metal numbers that open with a sharp look.

  “There’s a detective waiting outside to talk to you,” he said. “I can say you’re resting.”

  “No, the longer they wait the uglier they get.”

  “Not this one.”

  “That bad, is he?” I groped for the buttons on the bedrail. The motor hummed and I sat up. My head throbbed in long steady swells. More nautical stuff. Phooey.

  Ebersole glanced at the watch on the underside of his wrist. It had a cartoon character on the face. “I can still make the third inning. I’ll look in on you tomorrow.”

  “Personal question.”

  At the door he turned to grin. “I’ll be thirty at the end of August.”

  “Happy birthday.”

  The door closed behind him.

  A cheesecloth curtain on a rolling rail separated my bed from my neighbor’s. I could hear his heart monitor measuring out his life in uncertain blips, the trickle of his damaged kidneys draining down a plastic tube. Dusty-brass daylight crept between vertical blinds on the room’s only window.

  The right side of my head felt tight and puckered. I reached up and touched a square patch of adhesive and thick cotton and smooth flesh around it where there used to be hair. I made a bet with myself it would grow in even grayer.

  “You look like crap.”

  I had closed my eyes for a moment. I may have dozed. I hadn’t heard the door opening.

  At first I thought it was the drugs they were feeding me through the tube taped to my arm. Impressions only, to start. A trim waist and legs in a snug black evening dress of some material that ate light, a slit that showed a flash of white thigh when she walked. Bare shoulders and deep cleavage, pearls against skin dusted lightly with freckles. Enormous blue eyes and light brown hair, almost honey-colored but not quite, pushed to one side and free for once of the plastic band that made her look like a cheerleader. Instead she looked like prom night. Saying I looked like crap.

  “You don’t,” I said. “Working undercover, Lieutenant?”

  “So to speak?”

  I grinned; weakly, I hoped. It didn’t take much acting.

  She said, “I’m on my way to dinner at Carl’s Chop House and then the show at the Fisher. Cops have lives, too. Just thought I’d drop by and see if you were dead yet.”

  “What time did you draw in the pool?”

  Mary Ann Thaler smiled. It wasn’t a thing she did often, because her fellow officers in the Detroit Detective Division might not take her seriously. Before she could speak I pointed at her purse, a silver mesh clutch the size of a Montana belt buckle.

  “That big enough for the cuffs and your departmental piece?”

  “Just the gun. I can always tie you up with my pantyhose. Unless there’s something you want to tell me.”

  “I thought you were Felony Homicide.”

  “I am. You committed the first and almost became a victim of the second.”

  “Where are your glasses?”

  “Contacts. Tortoiseshell rims don’t go with pearls. Don’t change the subject. Do you always carry walnuts and related utensils?”

  “You’ve been through my personal effects.”

  “Only dead people have personal effects. How come I never see you eating walnuts?”

  “It isn’t polite in front of ladies and cops. Who’s your date? Has he got a job?”

  “Shut up and let me do mine. You’re no Jimmy Valentine; you scratched up the lock on your way in. What did you find in Millender’s apartment?”

  “What did you find on me?”

  “Nuts.”

  Assuming that was a legitimate answer, whoever had shot me had taken the envelope from my pocket. If so he’d also gotten the pictures and the negative I’d found. “Do I get a lawyer?”

  “You’re not under arrest. All you get is me.”

  “Off the books?”

  She spread her arms. “Where would I be wearing a wire?”

  “No comment.” I groped for my shirt pocket out of habit. I was wearing a paper robe. “I guess you don’t have cigarettes either.”

  “Don’t use ’em. Quit stalling.”

  “Millender’s got a twenty-three-foot sailing sloop to support. He supports it with a keyhole lens. I was after some pictures.”

  “Homosexual pictures?”

  I looked at her for a second. “I don’t think they have sex.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Laughter is the best medicine,” I said. “Who said anything about homosexuals?”

  “I pulled Millender’s sheet. He’s got three lewd-and-lascivious beefs in highway rest stops, one conviction, and just finished probation on a federal rap for sending pornography through the mails. He’s his own favorite model.”

  “Sort of like Rembrandt.”

  “Rembrandt kept his jerkin on. This guy’s a state-of-the-art sicko. Who’s your client?”

  “Excuse me, Lieutenant. I’m having a relapse.”

  “Impossible. The bullet only hit your head.” She tapped a glossy nail against the purse containing her artillery. “Okay, we’ll start slow and work our way up to Double Jeopardy. Who shot you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was it Millender?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s the capital of South Dakota?”

  “Pierre.”

  She nodded. “I just wanted to hear you tell the truth once.”

  “I guessed about Pierre.”

  “I used to tease John Alderdyce whenever he got his blood up over something you did,” she said, “or didn’t do, or said, or didn’t say, or wouldn’t. He told me I should count myself lucky I hadn’t tripped over you yet on a case of my own. I’m counting now.”

  “How is John?”

  “Sitting in his inspector’s office with his inspector’s shoes up on his inspector’s desk, dictating a memo to all the other inspectors. You know what I want to be when I grow up?”

  “Blonde?”

  Her face went blank as a slab. She was all cop in spite of the Dior. “Who shot you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This hospital has a security floor: One door in and out, wired for alarm, with a guard. No patient release without the signature of the chief of police.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “It could. The man I’m going out with is on the board of directors.”

  “And all you want to be is inspector?”

  She said nothing.

  I made my face haggard. “All I saw was a movement. Not even that. My reflexes were down.”

  “Brother, they were out of the country. Half an inch to the left and you’d be trying out your stand-up routine on a whole different audience.”

  “Half an inch to the right and he’d have missed me completely.”

  “In which case I’d be questioning you as a suspect instead of a victim.”

  “Unless I just shot the gun out of his hand.”

  She jumped on it. “His?”

  “The general pronoun, Lieutenant. If you’re going to go feminist on me there’s no hope for this relationship.”

  “We have a relationship?”

  “Mongoose and cobra. Except I’m not feeling especially venomous.” I groped at my chest again, then tried the drawer in the bedside table, holding my brains in with my free hand. I found tongue depressors and a package of rubber fingers. Either one would have done, but there was no lighter. I sank back against the mattress. “If this was just a B-and-E with an attempted homicide, you wouldn’t be standing here letting the ice melt in your shrimp cocktail. Why the heat?”

  Now she was tapping a corner of the silver purse against her teeth.
It made my fillings ache worse than my head. She caught the look on my face and stopped.

  “I play poker,” she said. “When I asked if it was Millender who shot you I was looking for a tell. Either you don’t have any or you’re just ignorant. When was the last time you saw or spoke to Nate Millender?”

  “Yesterday. Well, Thursday. I forgot about the gun lag. He was casting off from the marina in Grosse Pointe.”

  “That makes you one of the last. His sloop ran aground near Flatrock sometime yesterday. He wasn’t in it, but he’d left some of his brains on the sail boom. Or someone’s brains if not his. The cops downriver arc busy dragging for the rest of him.”

  Nineteen

  SHE WATCHED IT SINK IN. I couldn’t decide whether that cop stare was worse with or without glasses.

  “Stray booms have killed more sailors than storms at sea,” I said. “It could have been an accident.”

  “Could have. Probably was. When the computer kicks out a sheet like Millender’s we look a little harder. When a P.I. named Walker bounces a bullet off his skull in the victim’s apartment we break out the microscope.” She leaned on the footboard of the bed. Mary Ann Thaler’s style was a lot more direct than Sergeant St. Thomas’s, but they were both cut from the same bolt of blue serge.

  I got the Allen Park detective out of my head in a hurry. When you’re in the room with a badge, that police telepathy is as sharp as an earache.

  I equivocated. The only thing I needed more than a handful of aspirins and two months in Europe was a little time before Detroit found out about Lynn Arsenault and the common denominator he shared with Nate Millender. That common denominator being me.

  “You nailed me, Lieutenant,” I said. “I swam out into the middle of Lake St. Clair, brained Millender, dumped him over the side, and swam back to shore and a change of clothes. Except I swim like a headstone.”

  “That’s easily checked. There are other ways you could have done it, including dumping the body somewhere else and smearing hair and gray matter on the boom to make it look like another tragic boating accident. You just gave the sloop a hard shove from some dock and never got your feet wet.” She straightened. “Just for now, though, I’m operating on the theory that murder’s not your style. Which opens up the probability that you know whose it is and that’s why you were shot.”

  “Harder to make that look accidental.”

  “It’s never easy except in stories. My first day out of uniform, Alderdyce told me the easiest homicides to clear up are the ones somebody tried to make look like something else. A nice clean bullet in the head is a blank wall more often than not. Who shot you?”

  “What’d you get from the bullet?”

  “We didn’t get it. After it grazed you it shattered a window and kept on going. Maybe that’s what made him decide not to stick around and put another one in you to grow on. The officers who found you were answering a citizen complaint of a shot fired.”

  “Just one and they called the cops?”

  “Things must be looking up.”

  Nurse Tarnower came in, if that was the name of the woman who had missed her last electrolysis appointment. She was carrying a tray with a small plastic cup on it and a container of water, also plastic. The recycling frenzy hasn’t gotten to hospitals yet.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to end your visit. It’s time for Mr. Walker’s sleeping pill.”

  “I’ll be back later.”

  “Not before morning. Visiting hours begin at ten.”

  Thaler dug her badge folder out of her purse. “This man is a witness in a homicide.”

  “He almost succumbed to one. It’s my job to sec he still doesn’t. You have to leave.”

  The war of wills ended when I accepted the cup. It contained a white pill half the size of an aspirin.

  “How powerful is that thing?” Thaler asked.

  “He’ll sleep until morning.”

  I tossed back the cup and took in water through an articulated straw. It tasted like liquid cotton. The lieutenant watched me swallow, then put her hand on the steel broom handle that worked the door.

  “I posted a uniform in the hall,” she said. “Just in case our friend decides to try for best two out of three.”

  “What if I say no thanks?”

  “This one’s on us. Remember that the next time you pay your city income tax.”

  The back of her dress was scooped down to the waist. She had a tiny crescent-shaped scar on her right shoulderblade where a mole had been removed. Or maybe it was her Marine Corps tattoo.

  “Good luck with Mr. Board of Directors.”

  “Don’t need it. It’s our fourth date.”

  The nurse finished punching my pillow out of shape and went out behind her, switching off the light. I caught a glimpse of city blue outside the room, then the door closed, When it latched I opened my fist and flicked the sleeping pill off my palm. The trick takes longer to explain than to perform.

  The tubes required a little more effort, but I got free of them and found the catch on the bedrail and swung it down. I tried to hold my head level as I got up. Someone had left the lid off my skull and I was afraid if I tipped it too far this way or that my brains would spill out and I’d have a hell of a time finding them and putting them back. The little blackouts, the second or two of blurred vision that followed, were like refreshing naps.

  I felt drained, literally. As predicted, the lock on the cabinet was no match for a smart blow with the heel of a hand; any hand but mine. It took two, covered by loud coughs, before the door sprang open. Then I leaned against the wall and waited for the dizziness to pass before reaching for my clothes.

  My wallet, watch, and keys were on the top shelf. My pockets were empty. That broken window hadn’t rattled the shooter so much he forgot to frisk me. The holster was still clipped to my belt, but the gun was missing. Time enough to find out who had it, crook or cops, later. I dressed quickly, while I was lucid.

  My head was pulsing like a big squishy heart, but most of the blood seemed to have slipped to my feet. I thought about going back and sitting on the edge of the bed until it returned. I took a step in that direction. The sleeping pill I’d ditched crunched under my foot. I lurched past the bed into the bathroom and slapped my face with water. A face carved out of that same water gawked at me from the glass above the sink. Hair stuck up like quills around a big wad of bandages stuck to the side of its head. I wanted to laugh, but the owner of the face might not have gotten the joke. I smoothed down the hairs with water, rasped the back of one hand against a carpet of beard. The sound went straight to the quick of my skull.

  Back in the room I peered around the curtain between the beds. My roommate was black, very young but lean-muscled, with tubes in his wrists and nostrils and disappearing under the thin blanket that cloaked him. A transparent breathing mask covered the lower half of his face. His eyes were closed, but his chest moved rhythmically up and down and the green line on the monitor wired to his heart peeped in cadence.

  I stepped around the curtain and examined the monitor. It was the only machinery hooked to him, and wasn’t life-sustaining. If he needed dialysis for his damaged kidneys it hadn’t been diagnosed yet.

  I found where the wire plugged into the machine and yanked it out.

  The reaction was quieter than anticipated, and none of it came from the patient. The green line went flat, the peeping turned into a high thin whine. He went on sleeping. Any hospital show worthy of its ratings would have had the lights flashing, horns and buzzers sounding, a frantic voice on the P.A., running feet in the corridor. Real life needs a script doctor. I stepped into the bathroom and cracked the door. Nurse Tarnower came in, moving quickly but without noise on rubber heels, jerked open the curtains, glanced at the monitor, and flipped the P.A. switch.

  “Code Blue, room three-one-eight.”

  She might have been calling out a Bingo number; but lack of excitement doesn’t mean inefficiency. In less than thirty seconds we had all
the drama required. The room filled with personnel of both sexes and all races, a crash wagon, and half the pharmacy. The cop on duty, a pale kid younger even than Dr. Ebersole, with a moustache not nearly as well established as Tarnower’s, leaned in through the open door, didn’t like his view, and stepped the rest of the way inside, craning to get a look past the whitecoats huddled around the bed. I slipped out of the bathroom and into the hall behind his back. With an exclamation, someone discovered the disconnected plug just as I reached the nurses’ station.

  “Hey!”

  I didn’t turn to see if it was the officer calling or a hospital employee. It might not have been directed at me. I was almost to the elevators. I picked up my pace, but I didn’t stop to ring. The door to the fire stairs was unlocked.

  The bronze light on the street was growing grainy with dusk. The gutters were dry and there was no trace of rain on the pavement. The air was as stale as ever. It hadn’t moved all the time I was out of the loop. The city gets the worst of every season.

  I kept to the shadows. I didn’t expect anyone to put out an APB for a hospital walkaway, or even for a maybe-witness to a possible murder without a citizen complaint attached, but a ghost in yesterday’s shirt and last year’s sportcoat with a patch on its head just naturally draws passing scout cars. Once, a Tactical Mobile Unit slowed down and I started to put together a story, but then it slid into the curb behind a Subaru stopped at the corner. The girl on the corner, six feet tall in five-inch platforms and a micro-miniskirt, broke off her conversation with the driver, turned, and clip-clopped away double-time; the car took off with a chirp of rubber. The lights and siren came on and the blue-and-white gave chase. I crossed to the opposite side of the street where the shadows were deepest.

  Three blocks from the hospital I was drenched in sweat. I couldn’t tell if it was the heat. I wasn’t even sure it was hot. My knees wobbled and my head banged in delayed tempo behind my heart, like two-handed handball. I stopped and laid my palm against the corner of a building, more to feel the cool granite than to support myself. And the building contained a party store, and the store contained a telephone.