The Sundown Speech Page 3

  I sat between them. A seceding spring poked me in the haunch. The girl saw me wince.

  “That’s why we don’t sit in the middle.” She was watching me now with a spark of interest: One buck can always lead to another.

  I shifted my weight away from the prod and crossed my legs. “When’s the last time you saw Marcus?”

  “He wasn’t there? You spent a long time up there.”

  “I waited. When was the last time?”

  “You still investing?”

  “No. Bottom fell out of the market. When?”

  She lowered her eyelids. A bit of metal glinted in one. It set my teeth on edge. “You’re like a cop?”

  “I’m like a cop.” I didn’t ask again. I couldn’t shorten it any more except to a grunt.

  “Ask Sean. He lives here. I just hang.”

  “That Sean?” I tilted my head toward the snoring boy.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I can’t wait for spring. I’m still asking you.”

  “Must’ve been game day,” she said.

  “Game day?”

  “Football! Jeez. Where you from?”

  I waited.

  “Saturday. When the game’s in town we hang and watch the jock-lovers honk at each other trying to get to the Big House and back. It’s better than Animal Planet.” Her nose ring jiggled when she snorted. “It’s so bogus. Bunch of meatheads piling up on each other over what? A dead pig.”

  “What time?”

  “It was about dark; traffic was thinning out. Jerry came out of the house carrying a box.”

  “What kind of box?”

  “A box! Jeez. Cardboard. Square. You know, a box. Had a picture of something on the side, a toaster oven or something. I remember, ’cause I asked him what was in it, like I cared. Only it didn’t seem polite not to say anything. I guess he didn’t hear me, though. He put the box in his car and got in and drove off. I’m pretty sure that’s the last time I saw him.”

  “What was he driving?”

  “Old Mustang convertible, yellow. Viagra-mobile, you know?”

  “How well you know Marcus?”

  “Not. When I heard he made movies I asked was he looking for actresses. He said no. That was our longest conversation.”

  “You an actress?”

  “When I’m with Sean.”

  The police came to rescue me from that exchange. They pulled up without flashers or siren, in a city cruiser driven by a uniform with a man in plainclothes on the passenger side. I hauled myself up from the sofa.

  “Are you Mr. Walker?”

  Plainclothes was built like a peasant farmer. His hair started almost at the bridge of his nose and grew black and shiny as licorice to his collar. They couldn’t tailor a suit that would fit him looser than the membrane on a peach. He shook my hand and read my credentials, which I’d taken out of the badge folder. Most of the Detroit cops I deal with know me, but he might be a stickler.

  “I’m Lieutenant Karyl.” He showed me his ID. A Hungarian name from the spelling.

  He asked me some questions he seemed to know the answers to already, left his driver with Sean and his friend, and followed me upstairs with a palm on my back, as if I might bolt. Even climbing single file there was barely space for his shoulders.

  Inside Marcus’ room he wrinkled his nose at the stench, tsk-tsked at the corpse folded and packed like a shirt, squatted over the new stain on the carpet, picked up one of the Styrofoam fragments, sniffed at it, and scraped if off his fingers into a Ziploc bag along with some others he’d scooped off the floor. He put the bag back in his pocket and stood. His pale blue eyes went as deep as the brass plating on the bed.

  “What phone did you use to call?”

  “That one.”

  He tsk-tsked again. “No cell?”

  “Why does everybody ask me that?”

  “We’ll need your prints.”

  “State cops have them.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “Marcus makes movies. He promised my clients a return on their investment, then lost touch.”

  “Who are your clients?”

  “That’s confidential.”

  “No good.”

  “It’s as good as it gets until I clear it with them.”

  He reached inside his suit coat, exposing the fisted butt of a Glock in a holster on his belt, and held out a sleek silver phone. “Call them.”

  I shook my head. “Just because I don’t carry one doesn’t mean I don’t know anything about them. It’d be the same as telling you their number.”

  “If they think he swindled them, they’re good suspects.”

  “You wouldn’t if you met them.”

  “I’ll be asking again.” He put his phone away. “Who are your friends outside?”

  “Couple of strays.” I told them what we’d talked about.

  “You said you were a cop?”

  “She asked if I was like a cop, and I said I was. It’s not the same thing.”

  “I wouldn’t want to live on the difference.” He looked down at Marcus. “Thank God I haven’t had the chance to become an expert, but I’d say this happened not long after the girl saw him last. We’ll find out if anyone saw him when he came back.”

  We returned to the porch. Sean wasn’t much more help awake than asleep. He hadn’t lived in the house long enough to know anything more about Marcus than his girlfriend did; the frat house he’d lived in before that had shut down when the university yanked its credentials for serving alcohol to minors. The cop in uniform was clearer on the police-impersonation point than the lieutenant, but then the EMS van came and after it the forensics team and Karyl seemed to forget all about it. He gave instructions and then we waited. It was a balmy afternoon in early fall, no nip yet. The leaves hadn’t started to turn.

  A crowd was gathering on the sidewalk. More police arrived to deal with it, and by the time the body bag came out the barricades were in place. A woman wearing steel-framed glasses and a pantsuit followed it out, carrying a coroner’s tackle box.

  “What do you think, Doctor?” Karyl asked her.

  She walked past him without turning her head. “He’s dead. Do I look like the Science Guy?”

  He made a dry sound in his throat. “You should see how she gets when somebody calls her Doc.”

  We retreated upstairs, where the crew in latex were putting away their gizmos. The photographer was checking his results on his little screen; no popped flashbulbs, no Polaroid litter, no chemicals back at the office. I’d been at too many homicide scenes over too many years. I hope to be retired when they give it all to drones.

  Karyl told a Hispanic kid going over the cordless phone with a black light that I’d pawed the thing. That bought me a bleak look.

  A pretty young Asian woman got up from the floor. A square of carpet had been cut out where the bloodstain had been. She held up a bloody hunk of metal in a glassine bag. “Thirty-eight; maybe three-fifty-seven mag. The scales will tell.”

  “What about the glasses, prescription?” Karyl asked.

  She took another bag out of a pocket and showed him the horn-rims. “Drugstore readers, sorry. Very low magnification. He was only slightly impaired.”

  I felt older then. I’d thought they were clear glass.

  When the print man or whatever they called him told him Marcus’ computer was clear, Karyl drew up a chair.

  “We know Marcus,” he said. “He applied for permits to shoot on public property. If he was scamming your clients, he made it look good. If they’d called us when he went missing, the trail might still be warm.”

  “They’re not fans of the police department.”

  “Who is, until they need us?” He tapped a key. The movie montage vanished.

  “A sergeant I know studies film at the U of M; no one in this town is a cop or a waiter or a pizza guy, they’re all writing screenplays. He says the business will all be digital in a few years. Everything shot on disc and edited on a computer.”<
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  “How’s your screenplay coming along?”

  “Not me, Jack. I’m the only cop in the department.” He flexed his fingers and hovered above the keys.

  “Don’t you need a password?”

  “Permit clerk’s name is Pilsner,” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “When Marcus kept bending his ear about Bergman, Pilsner told him the Michigan Theater shows Casablanca free for students the first week of classes. Marcus said, ‘Wrong Bergman.’ The clerk had never heard of Ingmar. Maybe I’m not the only working stiff in town after all.” He typed I-N-G-M-A-R. The computer came back saying the password was incorrect. Same thing when he tried B-E-R-G-M-A-N.

  “Try them both,” I said.

  He did. A white bar appeared onscreen and began to fill from left to right. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  The bar filled quickly. A new screen appeared, stacked with names of files. Karyl scrolled through them, stopped at MR. ALIEN ELECT. “If that’s not just a working title, your clients were screwed from day one.” He selected it.

  A new screen came up. Objects began moving.

  It was like watching a TV movie, only the action had a dream quality, like people running underwater. Marcus’ script called for the extraterrestials to spontaneously combust to avoid capture; they kept going up like bottle rockets. It looked cheesy, but maybe on the big screen, with music and sound effects, it would play like Lawrence of Arabia. You could put everything I know about moviemaking in a shot glass. The locations were all in the neighborhood. I recognized the common area of campus known as the Diag, with its obsidian cube perched on one of its corners like a giant die, the bell tower, and some university buildings on State Street. The house we were in appeared, an establishing shot. The camera began to dolly in. There was no dialogue.

  “Whatever this guy did with the fifteen grand, he didn’t spend it on cab fare,” Karyl said.

  Seeing the house reminded me of something.

  “What do you think was in that box Marcus carried out to his car Saturday?”

  “Toaster oven, probably. Who says a box can’t be just a box?”

  I barely heard him. “Can you pause?”

  He flicked a key. The image froze.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  I pointed at a car parked in front of the house on the screen; the house Heloise and Dante didn’t know about because they’d lost contact with Jerry Marcus. The color was a little off. The Volvo looked more coppery than pale rose. But all the Gunnars’ bumper stickers were in place.

  FIVE

  I told him about the Gunnars then; had to. They were suspects now.

  “There’s no law against lying to a private cop,” Karyl said. “But hiring one to find a guy you killed is batty even for a couple of recovered hippies.”

  “Which is just what they might want you to think.”

  “That only works in movies, and not for long even then. You’d have to have ice in your veins to stand the risk. Most killers don’t, though as I said I’m no authority on that. A psychopath, maybe. What are the odds of two psychopaths getting hitched?”

  “Maybe there’s a Web site.”

  A pair of flat blue eyes turned my way. “This funny to you?”

  “Relax. It’s a defense mechanism.” I lit a cigarette. The crime scene posse had cleared out, but the smell of death lingered. “Maybe they got nervous waiting for the body to be found. A thing like that can weigh you down if you’re not used to it.”

  “Who says they’re not?”

  “Fair question. Maybe they’ve left a string of dead movie producers leading all the way back to Berkeley. If you saw them you wouldn’t be so sure. Ma and Pa Barker they ain’t.”

  “I hope to hell you’re right. Dante works for the university, you said. The zillionaire alumni get all worked up when it looks like the local law’s beating up on the old Maize and Blue. They threaten to throw it off the tit, the sports program dries up, the university president rags on the mayor, the mayor rags on the chief, and I wind up staring at a bank of monitors on the midnight shift at Holiday Inn. My daughter’s a freshman. She’ll take it hard if she has to transfer to Washtenaw Community College.”

  He banged a key, hurling Jerry Marcus’ aliens back into space. “I’ll talk to them, but only after I talk to the neighbors. Somebody had to have heard something. You can’t suppress a heavy round the way you can a twenty-two.”

  “It was a game day, don’t forget. If the Wolverines won, they might have been out celebrating.”

  “They did. Those that stayed home might have been distracted by all the shouting and horn-honking. They don’t set fire to cars here, not as a rule, but it can get pretty rowdy. Still, a heavy caliber going off in the middle of student housing—” He shook his sleek head.

  “Yeah, they built these places cheek by jowl.”

  He got up, looking dour all over his broad Slavic face. “Well, you can dance in the end zone: found your clients’ man between lunch and supper. I don’t guess you guaranteed them against damage, even if they’re not dirty. Now hit the showers and let the home team mop up. And don’t tell anyone what you saw in Marcus’ movie.”

  I blew a stuttering stream of smoke, screwed out the butt against the sole of my shoe, and dropped it into a pocket. “I wasn’t expecting the sundown speech. I had you pegged for the ‘Don’t leave town’ type.”

  “We’ll need your statement tomorrow. After that, come back anytime. Spring’s good. We’re proud of our trees.”

  “I still have to report.”

  “Sure. Just remember what I said about the movie. It’ll spoil the ending.”

  And then damned if he didn’t shake my hand.

  * * *

  I’d been run out on rails a lot less comfortable. He had breaking-and-entering against me if he wanted to lean—pushing open a door, even an unlocked one, is enough—but I’d given him a head start of a day or two before the neighbors complained about the odor, so we were square. In homicide, a day or two this way or that can make all the difference. I’d even given him a lead. I felt so gooey I thought I’d pay the fresh ticket I found on my windshield.

  I walked a block over to the student union building, a brick pile built during the Gilded Age, when the corruption was honest and open. It was as likely a place to find a phone as any. A broad staircase led to a former ballroom on a second floor done in marble and golden oak. I walked right past a row of varnished doors with beveled-glass panes, then went back and swung one of them open. Inside I sat on upholstered leather and placed my first completely private call from a public convenience in years. Dante Gunnar answered.

  “Hold on. I’ll get her.”

  When Heloise came on, I told her about Jerry Marcus, leaving out the address where I’d found him and that I’d seen the Gunnars’ car on his video. For a few seconds I didn’t hear anything on her end, even ambient noise. She was relaying the information to her husband with her hand cupped over the mouthpiece. Then:

  “Are the police sure it wasn’t an accident?” She sounded as if I’d told her she needed new tires. You can’t tell anything from her type.

  “It’s possible he shot himself cleaning his own gun,” I said. “Getting rid of it afterwards and climbing in with the ironing board takes more doing. The cops think someone will come forward with information. You couldn’t park a bike between those houses.”

  She fell for that like a piece of goose down. “What houses? You didn’t say where it happened.”

  “Is it important?”

  “I suppose not. Did you find the money?”

  “I didn’t look. The job was to find Marcus, not the fifteen grand.”

  The temperature on her end dropped twenty degrees. It hadn’t been anything to bask in under normal circumstances. “Since you found him in one day, we’ll expect a check for the other two. Minus your expenses, of course. I’m sorry if that sounds cold. As Dante said, we aren’t so comfortable we can take a loss like this without it hurting.”

/>   I listened to the dial tone and hung up. She sounded sorry; and I sound just like Harry Connick, Jr. in the shower. It didn’t make her a murderer.

  * * *

  I remembered past promises. I got the Ann Arbor News features editor on the line and sketched the picture, without the Volvo and without the Gunnars. She could get them from the cops.

  “My, my,” she said. “We’re getting to be quite the big city. Our police reporter’s there now, as a matter of fact; he heard it on the scanner, only without those details. If you’ll let me quote you, he and I can share the byline. You can only write about so many juggling grandmothers before you forget why you got into this racket in the first place.”

  “Tell your readers I get fifteen hundred up front. Juggling grandmothers welcome.”

  The job was finished, and if it wasn’t the record, it was close. Finding a corpse earned an asterisk at least. Another day, another five hundred dollars, less two parking tickets. Much as I’d have liked to have fobbed them off on my clients, it wouldn’t be fair just because I didn’t like them. It wasn’t worth what I’d find at the bottom of that slippery slope.

  I cranked the Cutlass out of its slot, this time ahead of the meter maid, joined the lockstep traffic downtown, and took the expressway home, where homicide is just something the hacks use to separate sports from weather.

  The story made the second half of the TV news. Murder mysteries sell advertising, and roving reporters always like a change of scenery. Lieutenant Karyl—the legend at the bottom of the screen said Alexander was his first name—shrugged them off, referring them to headquarters for details. He looked twice as broad across the shoulders on the tube.

  I mixed a drink, stretched out in my armchair, and started a book; noticing for the first time that I was reading these days at arm’s length.

  SIX

  The Free Press had more details the next morning.

  Heloise and Dante had been questioned and released, by reason of a plausible alibi: The medical examiner had placed Jerry Marcus’ death between 3:00 and 7:00 P.M. Saturday, when Michigan was hosting Northwestern at the Big House on Stadium Boulevard, and witnesses had placed the couple at a fund-raiser for the Green Party candidate for county commissioner at the Ann Arbor Country Club, twenty minutes away from Thompson Street by automobile, all that afternoon.