Burning Midnight Read online

  “It doesn’t sound like you.”

  “What? You think I wouldn’t be kicking in the doors of meth labs right now if I didn’t swap solids with the gentlepeople of the press from time to time?”

  “I meant the show of stealth. I never knew you to come in from the side.”

  “It was just until I got you onto neutral ground. Homicide’s worse than a Tupperware party for spreading gossip, and I didn’t want to pay a call on you and answer questions from anyone who spotted me going in or coming out. It’s like one of the Fords being seen going into a Kia dealership.”

  “Couldn’t you at least make it Chrysler? A man has feelings.”

  He didn’t bother to react to that. Lately he’d taken to cropping his hair close to the skull—he never let Mother Nature have an idea he hadn’t had first—and now there was nothing about him that appeared remotely organic. His skin had lightened with middle age from a deep eggplant to indigo, but the way it was stretched over bony outcrop made him look like a project three sculptors had given up on. The suits he wore, made by a retired Greek tailor who’d brought his bolts of cashmere and silk home when he’d closed up shop, toned down the effect in his body while calling attention to the brutal head and his hands, large and squared off at the fingertips with veins as thick as baling twine on the backs.

  “Gerald turned out fine. We worried about him for a long time; everything you hear about a cop’s son starts with real life. He’s an accountant with a bus company, which is about as far from police work as you can get, and his wife, Chata, belongs to a family with ties to Spanish aristocracy. Her great-great-something grandfather got Sonora in a grant from Philip the Second for killing a lot of Indians in his mines. That might not be what it said on the parchment, but those old royals didn’t reward you for charity work. Anyway the only real estate anyone in the family owns now is a corner lot in Lathrup Village, and Gerald and Chata were generous enough to let Comerica Bank in on that little piece of heaven.”

  “Is this a long story?”

  His face made a scowl. It didn’t have far to go to finish it. “Late for brunch?”

  “No, but I charge by the day. Tell me about the brother.”

  “His name’s Ernesto Pasada. It’s an old family name, with a string of others in the middle. Ten or twelve Pasadas had it before, going back to Cortez. His friends call him Nesto. These friends run with the Maldados in Mexicantown. I see you’ve heard of them.”

  I reminded myself not to sit down with him at a poker table without a set of false whiskers. “I’ve done business in the neighborhood. I had to get their permission to do it. They’ve got a branch office in every city between here and Juarez, where they swap bullets with the Border Patrol every day but Sunday. God’s the only authority they recognize, and that’s on approval. I’m sorry Nesto didn’t fall in with the Mafia instead. The mob won’t touch a cop.”

  “Downtown policy is never to go into Mexicantown without backup. Unofficial policy is when in doubt, start shooting. Let the brass sort it out with the public when the smoke clears. So of course we don’t go in. Their idea of sorting it out involves throwing the uniforms to the hyenas.”

  “I didn’t know the gangs recruited in the suburbs.”

  “Nesto sleeps at his sister’s. He lives on West Vernor. He’s sixteen. That’s when the cultural issues set in, right after the hormones. You can’t get up a decent piñata party in Lathrup.”

  “How does his sister know he’s ganged up?”

  “The Maldados had a dustup with the Zapatistas last summer. The Zaps came out on the short end, but they inflicted a casualty. This is a detail from a crime-scene photo.” He slid a four-by-six manila envelope from an inside breast pocket and flipped it across the desk.

  I undid the clasp and slid out the grainy shot, printed on ordinary copy paper from a laser scanner. It showed the back of a hand in tight close-up with a tarantula tattoo nearly as big as the hand. Nothing looks deader than a body part in a police photo. I put it back in the envelope and flipped it back his way. “That’s the gang insignia,” I said. “I saw it wrapped around a Beretta Nine once. I take it Nesto came home with it on his hand one day.”

  “He tried to hide it with a gauze patch, said he’d cut himself building a table in the garage; he’s good with wood. His grandfather was a master cabinetmaker, so he’s the hope for the family in Los Estados Unidos. Women don’t count down there. After a couple of days Chata became suspicious and braced him on it. He tore off the bandage and got snotty. Stayed away overnight. She was about to set the juvies on him when he came in the door. They haven’t done a lot of talking since. I got sent for. I tried that tough-love deal, but the spiders brainwashed him pretty good. Cops don’t scare him.”

  “I’m supposed to?”

  “You’re not ugly enough. Stop interrupting. I went against conventional wisdom and had the Early Response boys send a squad into Maldado territory to shake them up, tell ’em Nesto’s off-limits, but these characters have seen cops crucified in Durango: I’m talking literally, nails and crosses. Some of them may even have spelled those mestizos on the hammer. They know we can only go so far. Jail time for them is a rite of passage, like First Communion, and since none of them expects to reach thirty, they just laugh when you offer to bust a cap in their ass. The job needs somebody who isn’t trussed up by the system.”

  “The job needs Bruce Willis. I can’t help you, John.”

  “I’m not suggesting you bring down the gang. Just make hanging onto Nesto not worth the trouble.”

  “They’ve got the DEA and RICO on their necks. They eat and drink trouble. They don’t scare; you said it yourself. A day without a death threat for them is a day lost.”

  Another breast pocket delivered another envelope. I looked at a face I’d seen before, on that occasion without numbers underneath it. The long crease on his left cheek had been inflicted at birth, by forceps in the hands of a careless OB-GYN. The scar on his right was more recent and came from a box cutter, the twenty-first century’s answer to the straight razor. It was a young face despite the rough handling, handsome if you liked the undernourished type, with black hair tousling down on the forehead and an arrogant Elvis twist in the upper lip.

  “Luís Guerrera,” I said. “The quiet half of the Guerrera brothers. Or he was until Jesus got shot out from under his baseball cap by a police round. We’ve had some words. He doesn’t run the gang, but the one who does listens to him when he’s got something to say. He the one you want me to drop the hammer on?”

  “He’s your excuse for being in the neighborhood. Luís dropped out of sight last week. He didn’t really, but who’s to know? The Maldados think the Zapatistas took him, so they’re polishing up their box cutters for a fresh round. You’ve been hired by his family in Mexico to find him before blood gets shed and maybe some of it Guerrera’s. While you’re at it you can spot a mess of grass lying around and maybe some crack, give us probable cause to come in and tear the street apart and tie them in with the smugglers on the border. That’s federal. They might come out the other end clean and they might not, but it’ll take months, long enough for Nesto to lose interest and concentrate on his carpentry.”

  “And just in case I don’t spot any dope, I carry it in on my back?”

  “The evidence room can use some clearing out.”

  “Suppose Guerrera shows up before I start asking questions?”

  “He won’t.”

  “Where are you holding him?”

  “You don’t need to know any more than what I’ve told you.”

  I poured myself a drink. He watched me finish it in four swallows.

  “Now that you’ve thought it over,” he said when I didn’t resume the conversation.

  “I know my answer. I was just wondering how many schemes you drew up and threw out before you came up with this one.”

  “You think I’d put my pension on the line if it weren’t the last resort?”

  “You love this kid that m
uch?”

  “I only saw him the one time. Gerald and I don’t exactly take each other to lunch. I said he was a handful once. I took the wrong tack. After he moved out of the house he had his name legally changed so people wouldn’t keep asking him if he was related to a police inspector who stands in front of a camera now and then. He doesn’t know I’m in this. It was Chata who came to me.”

  This was all news, including the fact that the two boys I’d seen in the family picture on the desk in his office had outgrown youth soccer. I’d known John since we were younger than that, but socially we were strangers. We’d spent too much time with that desk between us to pine over the purity of boyhood friendship.

  “Let Guerrera go,” I said.

  He nodded. Cops seldom ask a question they don’t already know the answer to, but that doesn’t stop them from going ahead and asking anyway. “Your credit downtown’s a long way in the red,” he said. “You could fix that with one word.”

  “If I gave it to you, every time I tried to cash in on it you’d hate me worse than you hated yourself. And, brother, that’s hate.”

  “I’m not your brother.”

  “I wasn’t trying to bridge the racial gap.”

  “I don’t use it in that sense either. It ought to be retired from the language, buried in effigy like the N word. I guess we’re through here.”

  “Don’t get your Kevlar in a twist. I wasn’t turning down the job, just the shot at a conspiracy rap and altering my good opinion of myself. I’ll take a crack at what you should’ve tried at the beginning.”

  “What’s that? I lost track.”

  “If talking ever hurt anyone, I’d be in traction. I’ll start with the adults and work my way up to the child.”

  “Gerald won’t let you past the front door. His opinion is it’s a problem he can handle himself. He thinks just because I bungled the job with him, the other way will work better. He’s got a lot to learn, but he sure as hell won’t learn it from me even if I had anything worthwhile to contribute.”

  “Then I’ll go over his head.”

  What he put on his face would be a smile on any other. When he tugged the corners of his mouth that direction it was usually to let out bad air. “Waste of time and money; but it’s my money.” He went back into the first pocket and gaffed a checkbook bound in brown pebbled leather. “Is it still fifteen hundred?”

  “That covers three days, more than enough for most jobs. But I’d rather work on that credit problem you mentioned.”

  “I’d rather you took the money.”

  “No deal, John. Expenses only.”

  He hesitated with the book open and gold pen in hand; it looked like a toothpick between that thumb and forefinger. Then he put them away.

  I said, “Just for the record, we’ve been talking about the weather all this morning. People in Michigan get plenty of mileage out of that this time of year.”

  “You didn’t have to say it. I’ve learned from bitter experience you wouldn’t open your mouth to yell help if you were on fire. Not if a client asked you not to.”

  “Bitterer for me than you.”

  “The same goes for what I said about Lou Pearman. He lost someone close that day, his mother or someone. One of those occasions they invented liquor for.”

  “I read somewhere it was an accidental invention.”

  “So was nitro.” He looked at his watch, a simple gold circle on a plain band. He’d gotten as far up in the department as he had through merit, but good taste in his personal furnishings hadn’t held him back. “I could stand such an accident. Got another glass?”

  I wiped the dust off a third glass with a fresh tissue from the dispenser on the desk and leveled off his and mine. That made two personal bests in one morning.

  He took a healthy gulp and made his face less handsome. “Just where do you find this stuff?”

  “Different places, just like the Ten Most Wanted. It stands to reason it doesn’t want to be found. Another hit?”

  “Better not. The chief we got after we bounced the last one wouldn’t approve.” As he said it he pushed his glass my way. I took a hit off mine and bought another round. “How far were you prepared to go with that little passion play?”

  “Not much farther. I’m a little worried I put it out there to begin with.”

  “Luís isn’t really in custody, is he?”

  “Doesn’t matter. We know where to find him. They’ve got a little Casbah going there in Mexicantown. One block east or west, he’s just another immigrant with a green card just a little off the right shade. We snared him with the rest of the fish in a rooster roust a couple of months ago. Shook him back out. Who really cares if a chicken goes down with his spurs on or in a pot pie?”

  “The chicken, probably.”

  “We got heat from PETA. Who said people who care so much about animals don’t have anything left for their fellow human beings?”

  “Hemingway. He was talking about bullfights.”

  He looked around. “This isn’t such a bad setup. At least the walls go all the way to the ceiling. Anything in it?”

  “Just what you see. Looking for a change of scenery?”

  “Not just yet. Maybe after the next election. Did you know no successful reform ticket has ever succeeded itself? Voters get a dose of integrity and it doesn’t go down as well as they thought. Then the rats get back in and lock it up for eight years minimum. I almost lost my billet last time. If you’re still around, the new crowd thinks you had to have played with the same dirty ball. That, or you’re too competent and might show them up. You get so you can’t take a drink on the house in case it’ll find its way into your jacket. One little slip, that’s all it takes.”

  “You can put a buck on the desk if it makes you feel any better.”

  He picked up his glass and swirled the contents. “That’s one hell of a markup.”

  “So sorry. Next time I’ll break out the Johnny Walker Blue. I’m due for a bonus. Ten trips to Detroit Receiving and the next one’s free.”

  “You want to compare scars?”

  “Extra points if they’re in front?”

  “Hell, no. A cop that never ran away from a fight is a cop I don’t want in my division. They’re always standing next to the guy who gets to be guest of honor at the next department funeral.” He emptied his glass, thunked it down like a tankard somewhere in France, and launched himself to his feet. “I’ll send over a khaki with all the contact information you’ll need. I’m guessing you don’t have a fax machine.”

  “They tell me they come in handy when you’re expecting a communication from l993.”

  “I don’t see how you do it. My grandson has a laptop, and he still wears rubber drawers.”

  “I like to be the smartest thing in a room I pay rent on.”

  “You’re still aiming for the moon.”

  I let him keep that one. It wasn’t so bad at that.

  “Don’t call me with what you don’t know,” he said. “Understand?”

  “Plan I’m on, I don’t have that many minutes.”

  After he went out I poured what was left in my glass back into the bottle. Any case that involved Mexicantown needed a clear head and good reflexes.

  THREE

  The house was a ranch style with fresh pale-yellow siding and probably a filled-in bomb shelter in the backyard. It had a two-car garage—if you knew how to get two twenty-five-pound turkeys into a toaster oven. Someone had planted a dense juniper hedge along one side to cut down on the glare of headlights coming around the corner and there was what promised to be a really spectacular floral display on either side of the concrete walk. I assigned the credit to the mistress of the house. Some women can grow flowers on sheet metal.

  “Yes?” She was a plump, pretty brunette with hair to her shoulders and probably halfway down her back, in a yellow sundress and sandals on her bare feet. She wore no makeup except for vivid red lipstick that brought out the olive tone of her skin. Her eyes were a war
m shade of hickory, rimmed with black lashes.

  I gave her one of my cards and asked her if she was Chata Pasada.

  “Conchata, actually. Chata is a family nickname. As a girl I couldn’t pronounce the whole thing. Are you the man John told me about?” Her light accent softened the J.

  I hadn’t heard anyone refer to Alderdyce by his first name in years. I did it myself just to get his goat. “Yes. Are you alone?”

  When she hesitated I got out my leatherette folder and showed her the state license with my picture and the star that said I was an honorary deputy with the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department. “The badge is a toy,” I said. “Cost me three hundred tickets at Chuck E. Cheese’s.”

  “Come in. Yes, it’s just me here. Jerry’s at work and Ernesto is in school. Shop class right now, so I know he’s there.” Her smile was meant to be ironic, but eyes that color have difficulty hiding pain.

  I stepped into a living room done in bright colors with a spray of cut flowers in a terra-cotta vase on the coffee table. It was too early in the season for them to belong to the display out front but they’d been arranged by someone who knew something about the art. A copper-sepia Christ in His crown of thorns looked pensive in a print about the size of a postcard in a white mat the size of a TV tray hung above a gas hearth. It was the first thing of its kind I’d seen in a private home that didn’t make me want to turn away in embarrassment.

  She offered me coffee and I said yes. With the social contract out of the way we sat down in facing chairs with our cups. “You speak very good English,” I said.

  “Thank you. So do you.” She smiled again, this time without pain. “I was born in Arizona. I have a bachelor’s degree from the state university in Tempe.”

  “Blew it right off the bat, didn’t I?”

  “Don’t be embarrassed. Almost everyone makes the mistake. How do you know my father-in-law? He didn’t say much about you, only that you might be able to help us.”

  “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know him. Our fathers were business partners. We were in the same training class at the police department.”