The Hours of the Virgin Read online

  “Just what you heard.”

  “You ought to take zinc tablets. How shall we manage the exchange?”

  I used my handkerchief. “I’ll be parked out front at six. You can’t miss my crate: blue Olds Cutlass, white vinyl top, battered fenders. You’ve probably got one just like it on display in the Mesopotamian Wing.”

  “We don’t have a Mesopotamian Wing.”

  “It’s an old car, Mr. Boyette. You wouldn’t look at it twice in this town. But it’s got a big Cadillac engine and burns regular gas like the Armored Cavalry. What kind of car do you drive?”

  “Yellow Toyota. This year’s model.”

  “Shame on you.”

  He smiled as dryly as one can with lips like his. “That’s not the first time I’ve heard that. I had my tires slashed three times before I caught on and started parking in a guarded lot.”

  “Next time buy an Expedition. I’ll follow in my car and go in and catch the show a couple of minutes behind you. I’ll be seated a few rows back where I can see everything. For obvious reasons they never turn the lights down at the Tomcat.”

  “I thought you only knew the place by reputation.”

  “That was a joke, like the one about my car. I don’t get to go to many book auctions in my work.” I gave him a moment to feel worse about that than I did. “My day rate’s five hundred, nights too. I normally charge three days up front, but since this one promises to wrap up before Ted Koppel I’ll let it slide.”

  “I offered you ten thousand.”

  “And I’ll take it, minus the five hundred, if we get the Virgin back in the vault where she belongs with her virtue intact. Until then I need to maintain a liquid operating fund.”

  He scribbled with a fat gold pen in a leather folder, tore out a check, and stuck it at me. “I’ll write up our agreement tonight and send it around to your office in the morning by messenger.”

  I put the check in my wallet. “Does your suspect have a name?”

  He fumbled getting the checkbook and pen back into his pocket, missing it the first time. The die was cast, he was going out to make a ransom drop.

  “He does. Accounts Payable fired him last month for embezzlement. It was a simple scheme, and ingenious: He opened accounts in several banks using the names of various companies the DIA does business with, drew the checks himself, and deposited them, withdrawing the money later. There was no telling how much longer he might have gone on if one of his own office-mates hadn’t happened to turn over one of the canceled checks and seen his signature on the endorsement.”

  “Is the DIA prosecuting?”

  “Individual cash contributions are important to the institution’s survival. That source would dry up rapidly if it got out a thief was employed here. The board of directors thought it wiser to just let him go. He cleaned out his desk Christmas Eve. Would that that were all he decided to clean out.”

  “Cheer up. He could have come back with an AK-47. I take it no one knows where he’s living.”

  “I doubt very much his last action was unpremeditated. I’m one historian who doesn’t believe in coincidence.” He considered my question. “He rented a house on Kercheval. I called his landlady. She said he moved out some time ago, naturally without leaving a forwarding address. He didn’t work here long, perhaps a year. His name is Earl North.”

  I hesitated, then went ahead and plucked a Winston out of the pack. I rolled it along my lips until I found the groove, but I didn’t light it. “Is there a picture?”

  “They may still have one in Personnel, but the fewer people who know about this the better. Anyway, it’s not necessary. I’m engaging you to help me get back the manuscript, not bring the man who stole it to justice.”

  “Describe him.”

  “Why? I just said—”

  “He might come in late. If I know what he looks like I’ll be more alert when he shows up. Maybe I’m getting old, but skinflicks just put me to sleep.”

  “I barely knew him well enough to say hello to. Your height, I think, slighter build. Red hair fading at the temples. I think he had a bald spot on the back of his head. Middle forties.”

  “Blue eyes?”

  “I think”—he screwed up his soft pale face, looking at the ceiling joists for inspiration—“yes. Sort of washed out, almost gray. How did you guess that? Do you know him?”

  “Well enough to say hello to. A long time ago he killed my partner.”

  4

  I cranked up the Cutlass and joined the rest of the statistics on their way home. I’d been feeling hungry, not having eaten since breakfast, and I never eat breakfast; but I’d left my appetite in that windowless room behind the green-faced Madonnas and bearded-lady Christs at the Detroit Institute of Arts. I passed the handful of restaurants that had managed to survive twenty years of local government-by-Swiss bank account like a eunuch in the locker room at the WNBA.

  Woodward was quiet at that hour, as it had been at most hours since plastic; the population had dipped below a million in the last census, prompting the old mayor to demand a recount and bus in enough of humanity’s loose change to keep the gravy flowing. The scraped gray of January without snow had the Motor City’s main street in its bony grip. Old sports sections and empty Styrofoam cups slid and capered along the pavement, rattling like loose teeth. The Detroit Public Library, my voting address when I wasn’t eating stale cheese sandwiches behind the wheel waiting for a door to open or a car to pull out of a lot, looked as bleak and uninspired as the spray-painted obscenity drizzling down the stone steps in front. I read it aloud and with feeling.

  I know you like the old movies, kid, Dale Leopold had said the day I joined the agency, doubling its size. Go ahead and watch, but don’t buy into ’em. They’re not liars, just selective. For every hour you spend pumping hard-asses down by the docks for leads, you’ll spend a week polishing a chair with your pants in the library or schmoozing with some gassy records clerk in the basement of the City-County Building; some mook you wouldn’t stop to throw a rope to if he was drowning in the Rouge. It ain’t so bad. You might even get to like it. That’s when you’ll know your edge is gone. You forget you’re still doing cop work, and that eye in the back of your head heals over. Then you might as well throw yourself down a stairwell, because you’re through.

  Good advice, and he proved just how good it was when he forgot it himself. Routine tail job: track the bored-to-the-balls-of-his-feet middle executive through the extramarital jungle, note where he stops and for how long, and report back to his wife, a slam-dunk. The infidelity was the only colored thread in the monochromatic skein of Earl North’s life. The scenario, chiseled in granite by Piltdown Woman’s divorce attorney and never revised, called for the wandering spouse to come across with a fat settlement when confronted with the evidence of his unimaginative little affair. North, a gray supernumerary chiefly engaged in taking up space for thirty years or so in a rabbit-warren of corporate cubicles—not counting two weeks each August in a time-share condo on Lake Michigan—was no challenge for any investigator with half Dale’s experience. He only took the job to cover a quarterly tax payment. The best he had to look forward to in the way of entertainment was an attempt to buy him off, and even that was way out of character for this particular pigeon.

  That the pigeon would suddenly turn into a cornered rat, swing around with a gun in his hand, and pump three bullets into his shadow was a scene from another movie slipped in between reels. Dale had once claimed that nothing had surprised him since the day his mother parked him at the Michigan Central station and stepped off the center span of the Ambassador Bridge, but he’d have been the first to laugh at the look on his face when a sleepy attendant pulled out his drawer for me at the Wayne County Morgue. He was fifty-one.

  The funeral was as bland and respectable as a covered dish. He’d have preferred the tragic poetry of Willie Loman’s, but he’d made too many connections in twenty-five years at the same stand. In addition to his estranged wife and grown daughter, the procession had included friends from the police department and the county prosecutor’s office, from which he’d been bounced as an investigator when the city administration changed color along with most of the area bureaucracies; the sheriff’s chief of detectives, who had partnered him on the old Detroit racket squad; and a couple of Jackson prison alumni whose kids had clothes because Dale had pretended the information they gave him was worth an occasional twenty, although he’d have broken your nose if you called him on it. There was a number of old girlfriends as well, tough-faced redheads with nicotine stains between their fingers, who bawled all through the eulogy, delivered by a former Detroit police chaplain, who closed with a reading of the epigraph from John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra.

  Instructions for the disposal of the remains, written in Dale’s thick scrawl and locked in a box in his desk, were specific. He was cremated, and the ashes were placed in the care of his surprised sister, who he’d once said was fond of complaining that he never gave her anything.

  The new county prosecutor didn’t like the case against Earl North. The gun used in the murder never surfaced, no eyewitnesses came forward, and thanks to Dale’s lone-saddle methods and refusal to maintain a formal log, there was nothing to place the accused at the scene. But he took it to the grand jury, possibly because he regretted canning his best investigator to make way for a Wayne State University graduate with a law degree and no practical experience, but more likely because Dale had left a partner to make sure he didn’t forget to regret it. The jury heard the case, deliberated for forty minutes, nol-prossed, and went to look for their umbrellas. North was headed home on the John Lodge before the judge left the Old County Building.

  Dale would have appreciated especially the role played by North’s wife, the woman who had hired Dale to tail him. Called to testify, she told the jury her husband was home with her in Redford Township at the time of the shooting, asleep in bed.

  People suck, kid. Thank Christ for it, or we’d both be calling folks at home trying to sell them storm windows.

  It could have been somebody else, of course. Had he bothered to keep one, the Leopold Enemies List would have run as long as Cats, and several of them were out on parole. But his eyes and reflexes were better than those of most detectives half his age, and his memory was a mug file of all the faces he’d seen since age ten; none of his anti-fans would have gotten that close. All three of the bullet wounds were in front and delivered at close range. If it was robbery, the thief had overlooked his Chronograph watch and his wallet with the five hundred dollars he carried for emergencies folded in the change compartment.

  The North case was the only thing Dale had had on at the time, and Mullett Street at 3:00 A.M. Tuesday, a street where it’s always Tuesday at 3:00 A.M., even at seven on a Saturday evening, wasn’t the kind of place he’d go jogging even if he lived within three miles of the place and didn’t think joggers had Ben-Gay for brains to begin with. There was nothing in the neighborhood to draw a middle-aged detective that far from his house to walk off a case of insomnia.

  What was there was a joint named the American Eagle Motor Lodge, frequented by a hooker who called herself Star LaJoie. It was a tinselly kind of name with a little bit of originality, rare among the breed, and you tended to remember it. Particularly when it appeared several times in Dale’s barely legible notes on the case. Particularly when the woman who went by it never returned from her annual convention migration to Miami Beach. That was as much as the night clerk at the Eagle, a needle hound with his own drawer at Detroit Narcotics, knew about his regular guest. He couldn’t even describe her, and if she had a record with Vice it was under some other name.

  The other coin on North’s side of the scale wasn’t evidence, even if I weren’t the only one who seemed to have witnessed it. It was the way his wife looked at him when the prosecutor was asking the big question, and the way North’s hands gripped the edge of the defense table during the long pause before she answered. And it was the way the smile bagged on his face immediately afterward.

  Three weeks later, husband and wife were back in court, agreeing on a divorce settlement whose terms were sealed. But I didn’t need the details. I’d seen the negotiation.

  The first street sign I was aware of since I’d pulled away from the DIA belonged to my street a block west of Hamtramck, and I had to jam on the brakes to make the turn. I might have driven through an artillery barrage for all I remember of the trip. Driving’s like that sometimes; the same as smoking and shaving and not blowing your skull through your scalp because you’ve got a dentist’s appointment Friday. Habit.

  The house isn’t much, like all the others on the block except for those with a new brick facade or a windmill on the lawn, two of the dozen or so things you can do to a 1946 tract job to express your uniqueness short of violating the anti-blight ordinance or putting up a Republican poster in a town still mired in the New Deal. Attached garage, shared driveway, white aluminum siding gone chalky like the paint on a junked Studebaker, an asphalt roof with a leak that was as easy to track down as Jimmy Hoffa. A home, when you’re in a good mood. Three rooms and a Michigan basement between you and the Perpetual Mission when you aren’t. I cranked up the thermostat, checked the cupboard above the sink for the bottle I knew damn well I’d put out with Tuesday’s trash, found a third of a six-pack in the refrigerator, and worked on that at the kitchen table until I felt warm enough to climb out of the overcoat. Coughing, I wandered into the living room and stood looking at the one good easy chair, the rows of records in their sleeves in the cabinet, the little bookcase containing Dale’s collection of first-edition John O’Haras; my inheritance. Looked at it all like the furnishings in someone else’s house. Someone I didn’t know too well. The antique clock said tick and then Russia fell and apartheid went out of favor and CD’s replaced LP’s and Carl Perkins died and eleven guys with medals of valor got the sack for using the F word to a female staffer and then the clock said tock. It needed cleaning and winding, so did I. The rest of the world was running on quartz.

  Into the bedroom and the scorched-metal smell of stale cigarettes and nobody lying on the west side of the mattress to nudge me and say I shouldn’t smoke in bed. A dresser drawer I opened only once a month contained a sprinkling of old curled snapshots and a box. I did a quick inventory: a couple of wedding pictures someone had taken with a Polaroid, the old kind you had to peel apart, because there’s not enough room for a professional photographer and all his equipment in a judge’s chambers; a formal posed shot before an American flag of a youthful roughneck in dress khakis, the edges of the picture still creased from the frame; the same youth in civvies, hair grown out, grinning and clasping the hand of a shortish square-built man twice his age with a crisp crewcut that would never go gray and a thicket of creases around his eyes from squinting at bad handwriting in old plat books and peering through binoculars. Behind them hung a pebbled-glass door lettered:

  APOLLO CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATIONS

  D. Leopold, Pres. A. Walker, Vice Pres.

  The black paint of the last four words still glistened, fresh as a second chance.

  The box that shared the drawer with the pictures had held White Owl cigars until the day Dale gave his word to his doctor he’d smoked his last one. The doctor didn’t believe it, but from that day to his death he kept his promise, depositing the precise amount that he would have spent on smokes at the end of each month in a college fund under his daughter’s name. He’d kept the passbooks there, but they had gone to her after the funeral. Now the box contained his obituary from the Free Press, gone as brown as the cigars that had preceded it, and a Colt .45 Army semiautomatic pistol. He’d carried it ever since Monte Cassino, but since V-E Day he had only fired it on the police range. The cops who investigated his shooting had found it in the glove compartment of his battered black Plymouth Fury, parked around the corner from where he’d fallen. It’s your wife and your best buddy, kid; are the top kicks still teaching that? If they ain’t, the hell with them and today’s army too. Friends and wives ain’t much good if you don’t keep ’em to hand. You can always tell authentic wisdom from idle blather. It’s the one most often ignored by the people who care enough about you to share it.

  I picked up the pistol. The heft of the M-1911 surprised people who were accustomed to modern nine-millimeters built on aluminum frames with plastic grips, half-loads in the magazines. The friction of handling had rubbed most of the hand-chiseled checking off the black walnut grips and the bluing had worn down to the bare metal in places; but the action moved noiselessly and without effort. When I worked the slide, the vanilla smell of fresh oil filled my nostrils. The reason I bothered to open the drawer once a month was to clean and oil the weapon. The pictures and obituary I knew by heart.

  The room was growing dark. Dusk silvered the window looking out on the house next door, making a smoky reflection on my side of the glass, vaguely human. It made as good a target as any. I turned sideways to it, extending the pistol at arm’s length at shoulder height, my left arm straight down at my side with the thumb parallel to the seam of my trousers; Dale’s old-fashioned stance. If a gun was meant to be held in two hands it would come with two handles, like a grass whip. I sighted down the barrel with both eyes open, the way they still teach downtown, focusing on the vaguely human shape in the window, and pressed the trigger. The hammer fell on nothing, deafening in the silence of the house.

  5

  Another dusk.

  This one guttered out of the low overcast, brimming over as if the clouds had become saturated with darkness and couldn’t hold any more, spilling down the sides of the gaunt, boarded-up buildings on Woodward and into a creeping pool on the pavement. Harold Boyette’s Toyota, a canary-colored thumb on a Japanese nose there in the middle of General Motors country, crept out of the driveway in front of the DIA building behind pale daytime running lights, hesitated even though there was no traffic coming from either direction, and swung north. I flirted the big 455 out of hibernation and followed. The same ten snowflakes jitterbugged in front of my headlamps all the way up to Seven Mile Road.