The Sundown Speech Read online

  She took a long draft from her glass. “It’s just possible Dante slipped away long enough to—kill Jerry Marcus, and return to the club without anyone noticing he’d been gone. The drinking, the too-loud conversation, the goddamn band—the fucking band, ‘Don’t go changin’,’ for chrissake—” She threw another slug on top of the last. Bad music and strong alcohol went together like beer and pretzels.

  I looked at Suiz. “What else have they got?”

  “I spoke with a lieutenant named Karyl. He’s much more certain of his suspect than he is of his case. He has a motive: Mr. Gunnar thought Marcus cheated him of fifteen thousand dollars he and Mrs. Gunnar had invested in his independent film, a science-fiction thriller to be shot entirely in Ann Arbor, employing local actors. Karyl hasn’t found the weapon, a nine-millimeter automatic pistol—”

  I broke in. “Tech on the scene thought it was a thirty-eight, or a three-fifty-seven Magnum.”

  “I’m a criminal attorney,” Suiz said stiffly. “A lot of things get said on a crime scene that don’t hold up in the lab. To be fair, it’s a matter of a few grains on the scale. Either way it’s a big enough caliber to put a serious hole through anyone’s plans for the future, yes?”

  “Don’t badger me, counselor. How many times I’ve been shot is my business.”

  He backed off, lowering his lids over the whites of his eyes.

  “So no murder weapon yet, but Karyl has opportunity, thanks to the confusion at the country club, and a bit of film Marcus shot showing what may be the Gunnars’ automobile parked in front of Marcus’ place of residence, indicating although not proving he knew where to find him. I understand you supplied that intelligence.”

  “They’d have found it out soon anyway. I’ve got a license, just like you. What else?”

  “There’s nothing else. Gunnar’s clammed up on my advice. If they had any case at all they’d go after Mrs. Gunnar as an accomplice before and after the fact. And they have a whopping loose end that can destroy them in court.”

  “Jerry Marcus’ yellow Mustang.”

  All the air went out of him then. He’d tagged me for a gum sole and the brain of a draft horse, and I knew he’d never forgive me for disappointing him on that issue.

  I lit a cigarette, depositing the match in a pottery dish on the coffee table. I didn’t want it especially, just the pause for devastating effect. Outside, a cricket yawned and scratched its butt. “The last witness who saw him alive told me she saw Marcus load what looked like a toaster-oven box into an old yellow Mustang and drive away. No vehicle answering that description was parked anywhere near the house when I found the body.”

  Suiz produced something the size of a pinochle deck from a pocket and thumbed some buttons.

  “Holly Zacharias,” he said. It sounded like an oath. “Undergraduate at the University of Michigan. She lives in a dormitory on campus. Police found a Mustang registered to Marcus burned out on a country road north of town. They think Mr. Gunnar drove his Volvo to within walking distance of Marcus’ house, walked the rest of the way to avoid having his car seen in the neighborhood at the time of the murder, and drove the Mustang back to where he’d parked. They think he left the keys in the ignition and some obliging joyrider came along and stole it. Very convenient—for a mastermind.”

  “No mastermind would have hired me to find Marcus after he’d already driven his car to Marcus’ house once,” I said. “Even if he didn’t know Marcus had it on film, he had to have known someone might have seen it and remembered. What’s Gunnar’s story?”

  Suiz shook his head. He looked as heartbroken as any lawyer ever could, if any lawyer had a heart and you could break it with a sledge.

  “I don’t know. He won’t confide. He’s being foolish.”

  “First he’s a mastermind,” I said. “Now he’s foolish. The middle ground? Guilty as hell.”

  Heloise moaned and fell off her chair, out cold.

  EIGHT

  Heloise Gunnar’s body barely had time to make a thud when Hernando Suiz threw himself out of his chair, dropped to his knees, and put an ear to her breast.

  “She’s alive, thank heaven,” he said. “She fainted.”

  “Let’s say that.” I picked up the glass she’d dropped and stood it next to the half-empty decanter of clear liquid on the coffee table. She was snoring by then, loud enough to drown out a block plant, and filling the air with fumes; the same guy who’d sold Ann Arbor a bill of goods about being the cultural center of the world had started the rumor about vodka being undetectable on the breath.

  I took her arms, the lawyer her feet, and we stretched her out on the slate-colored sofa. Suiz unhooked her glasses from the ear they dangled from and folded them on the table. “Should we do anything?”

  “We could shove a dish towel in her mouth, but she might suffocate.”

  “I meant, should we call a doctor?”

  “Let her sleep. In the morning she’ll have Whitney Houston screaming in her head, but no one ever died of it.”

  “What makes you an expert?”

  “The last time I was in a bar during happy hour, I woke up in the middle of a cockfight in Tijuana. Let’s find someplace where we don’t have to yell.”

  We ascended from the conversation pit and found a stainless-steel kitchen with granite counters and a cluster of copper pots hanging like a chandelier from the ceiling. Here, Mrs. Gunnar’s snoring sounded as gentle as pounding surf. I asked Suiz if he thought Dante Gunnar had killed Jerry Marcus.

  “We haven’t met yet; for some reason he refuses to see me. But whether he did it isn’t my concern. Mine is whether the Washtenaw County prosecutor’s office can prove it. Without a murder weapon or a witness or evidence to place him at the scene, they’ll have to release him.”

  “We won’t know there’s no weapon until we toss the house.”

  “We can’t do that without Mrs. Gunnar’s permission.”

  “By the time she sleeps it off the place could be crawling with cops.”

  “I’m an officer of the court,” he said. “I’m bound to report it if we find anything.”

  “Better you know it now than in discovery.”

  I took the second floor, he the basement. There was nothing under the king mattress in the master bedroom, nothing in the drawers or on the top shelf of the walk-in closet that belonged in an evidence room. I went through the pockets of all the clothes hanging there and came up with a handful of fluff and a ticket stub from a Springsteen concert. The guest bedroom was even less enlightening; the closet and drawers were empty. I figured they didn’t play host often. No arsenal in either bathroom or in the attic, accessed by a pull-down hatch and ladder. I caught up with Suiz while he was pulling the cushions off the love seat in the sunken living room. We exchanged a wry look over the snoring woman on the sofa and off-loaded her to the love seat to frisk the sofa.

  When we finished with the kitchen, I fetched the decanter and poured two inches apiece in two water tumblers. We sipped from them facing each other in the breakfast nook.

  “They’ll just say he threw it in the river,” I said. “He’s still their number one till they get a better offer. I want to talk with him.”

  “He won’t talk to me. Why should your luck be better?”

  “If my luck were any good I wouldn’t be groping through people’s underwear drawers for a living,” I said. “Mostly I’m sneaky. Being a lawyer you wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  For the first time his face showed something stronger than chronic disapproval.

  “Okay, I’m a shyster, a mouthpiece, a spring expert; I’d represent the devil himself for a share in hell. When I prove a cop’s a crook on the stand I twisted his words. A sweet young thing lies through her teeth in front of a jury and I have to handle her with oven mitts or the jury thinks I’m a bully, so I have to call someone who can refute her, only he looks like Charles Manson and ‘fuck’ is the only adjective he knows, so I’m better off not having called him at all.
When I win a case I slipped one past the panel, and when I lose it’s because I’m incompetent. People watch Court TV and suddenly they’re experts. A few years ago, a high-profile defendant in a rape case was acquitted for lack of evidence and the network reporter covering the case called it ‘a flaw in the system.’ Lady, that is the system. I put myself through law school working in a laundry, shaking maggots out of sheets and tablecloths, and it took me six years because they were both full-time jobs. The Michigan Bar exam’s one of the toughest in the country; I aced it, only to spend another six years doing pro bono work for a storefront firm in Grand Rapids. I’ve been with my present firm fifteen years, been passed over for a partnership twice, and they tell me I have to wait for the senior partner to die before I get another shot. The senior partner’s forty-two years old, plays tennis five days a week. I cry every time I lose, and when I win I’m too tired to celebrate. So I go home and flop down in front of The Tonight Show and listen to lawyer jokes that if they were about black people or women, the comedian would be arrested for committing a hate crime. And I’m the guy he’d call to represent him, because I’m sneaky.”

  “Finished?” I said.

  He touched a folded handkerchief to his upper lip. “Finished. Sorry I went on.”

  “Don’t be. It was wasted on me, for what it’s worth. If it weren’t for lawyers I’d be doing bodyguard work. I remember that rape case. The reporter’s a Washington correspondent now.”

  “Serves the bitch right.” He returned the handkerchief to his pocket and fussed with it until it stood to attention. “I’m going to make the case that Gunnar isn’t a flight risk and try to get him released on his own recognizance. I feel sure I can at least get him out on bail. You can meet with him then, if he agrees.”

  “What’ll they use for money? She runs a bookstore and he’s a cubicle rat for the university. When the owner of this place gets back from Spain, it’s back to an efficiency apartment for them.”

  He looked wry again. “It’s back to pro bono for me, as a favor to a partner. He’s representing the bookstore in a suit to shield its records from the Patriot Act. He’s a dedicated civil libertarian.” He frowned. “I’m fairly certain this is a nonsmoking house.”

  I shook out the match I’d used to light the cigarette and got up to wash it down the drain. I switched on the exhaust fan above the stove. He watched the smoke slither toward it, then broke a long tan cigar out of a leather case shaped like a rack of ribs and stuck a butane lighter under it. It smelled of Old Havana. You can get anything in Ann Arbor, and to hell with the embargo.

  “I wouldn’t read anything into Dante’s silence,” I said. “He opened his mouth exactly twice the first time we talked, the second time to bellyache about the fifteen grand he’d paid Marcus for a share in his movie. If he killed him, he’d have made some effort to get it back. The place was a mess, but it hadn’t been ransacked. Also I don’t see him for an execution-style murder. When I say I’m a good judge of character, it’s not idle boast. I’ve been thirty years developing it.”

  “What do you suggest as an alternative?”

  “Either his luck’s worse than mine or he’s in some kind of frame. I’m still curious about that toaster-oven box this Holly Zacharias saw Marcus take out to his car the night he was killed. People don’t remember everything they saw right away. I want to ask her more about it. What was in it may tell me something.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Me, too; but I’ve never been good at sitting on my hands.”

  He clamped the cigar between his teeth and went into conference with his electronic pocket reminder. When he gave me the bald girl’s number I wrote it in my low-tech notebook, lifted the receiver off a wall extension with a brushed-aluminum finish, and dialed. I spoke with two giggling intermediaries before a voice I recognized came on.

  “The detective dude.” She sounded mellow. She’d progressed from beer to something stronger. “Naughty, naughty. You’re no cop.”

  “Next time don’t assume.” I asked if we could meet.

  “I’m late for work, but I’m off at two. I’m a waitron at the Necto.”

  “What language is that, Frangi?”

  “I push liquor in a nightclub. It’s on East Liberty. Ask anyone in town.”

  I looked at my watch. Four o’clock. Two meant 2:00 A.M.

  “Past your bedtime, old-timer?”

  “Mom’s strict, but I’ll climb down the trellis.”

  “Lose the suit,” she said. “Last time one came in, half the customers took off out the back.”

  The timber of Heloise Gunnar’s snoring changed as I hung up. “You might want to stash the alcohol,” I told Suiz. “Somehow I don’t think she’s had the practice.”

  He puffed a smoke ring and watched it crawl toward the exhaust fan. “I suspect it belongs to the owner of the house. The refrigerator’s full of Perrier.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t sneaky.”

  “I didn’t.”

  I grinned and washed the cigarette down after the match. “How far will my license bend if I invoke attorney-client privilege with the cops?”

  “You’re an officer of the court while you’re in my employ. If they refuse to disclose anything about the case, call me.” He stood and gave me a card engraved on Louis XIV stock. “What’s next? You’ve got hours before your appointment.”

  “I’ve got twenty years on Holly. I need my beauty sleep.”

  I drove back home, caught two hours, then put on a black T-shirt and the jeans I wore to the Laundromat. I’d bought a pair of black Nikes and seasoned them by throwing them a couple of dozen times against the wall of my garage. I rumpled my hair and put a pair of dark glasses in my shirt pocket. I didn’t think I had time to stop off and get a tattoo.

  The mirror said I was a middle-aged man skipping out for a night without the ball and chain. Just in case, I broke out the mad money and stuffed my wallet. That would make any door bouncer mistake me for Brad Pitt.

  * * *

  I didn’t need an address; the place was lit up like a jukebox and the thump of bass set every window in the Cutlass buzzing. There was a line waiting to get in and no parking for six blocks. When I found a spot, behind a bank that had closed for the night, I took my time hiking back, but the line wasn’t any shorter.

  It was Goth Night; but then it would be. The clientele had hit every Halloween store in southeastern Michigan and there was enough armpit hair on display to knit a cyclone fence. The ogre at the door was built low to the ground, but bulged all over; even his triple chin had muscles. I gave him ten bucks to unhitch the velvet rope, skirted a small dance floor filled with the bobbing cast of an Anne Rice novel, and sat at a table the size of a Chiclet. The little combo plugged into the bandstand wasn’t making any more noise than a six-engine jet carrying a cargo of loose ball bearings, but by the time a server appeared, my eardrums had grown enough callus to stop the bleeding.

  “Detective dude! Looking less Republican. Last call.”

  Strobes shot across the surface of my shades, but I recognized Holly Zacharias’ mown head and the metal glittering on her face. A black jersey sheath hung straight down from her bare shoulders to the floor, where the hem splashed out in shards. She’d painted dark circles under her eyes and was holding up a tray of drinks. Now I knew where she got that rasp; shouting over that din would raise blisters on a slide trombone.

  I shouted back that I was on the wagon and asked her to join me. She fished a cell phone from between her breasts, checked the time, shrugged, parked the tray on a vacant table, and plunked herself down in the chair opposite. A bouncer built like the chunk at the door, only extruded to six-and-a-half feet, gave me the hard eye from under a mop of peroxided bangs. I always bring out the worst in people who can cause me the most physical harm.

  PART TWO

  CUTAWAY

  NINE

  They closed down the Necto years ago; not for what happened that night, but for what happened on to
o many others. The combination of too many amateur drinkers, an overheated box of a room, and bad music provides its own brand of spontaneous combustion.

  In a little while the lights came up, obliterating the purple twilight, and the patrons fled like startled bats. The band pulled the plugs on their instruments and started putting them away in cases. Impossibly youthful employees drifted through, scooping up glasses and bottles and dumping ashtrays, looking like players in a high school production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. One, squatter than Humpty Dumpty at the door but all suet, garters on his chubby legs, didn’t look old enough to sling drinks; but then I got the impression it wasn’t the only law the Necto regarded as a polite suggestion. The lumpy surfer-haired bouncer cracked his knuckles and yawned. Goth Night was history.

  “Can I have one of those?”

  I looked at the girl over the pack of cigarettes I was playing with. At 2:00 A.M., under the eight-ball haircut and behind the studs and Vampira makeup, she looked as fresh as spring water. I felt like rusty trickle from the faucet, and I’d had a nap.

  “How old are you?”

  “Old enough to play with matches. Teen smokers keep you up nights?”

  “They’re shooting each other in school hallways. I don’t care if they smoke.” I dealt us each one and lit both. She squirted a jet at the ceiling without inhaling; she was addicted to the idea, not the tobacco. I felt a little less guilty then about her lungs. Sure, I cared. Refusing a request was no way to start an interview.

  In that light I realized she was an attractive young woman. If she grew her hair out a little she’d have a Jamie Lee Curtis thing going on. The name would mean nothing to her, or anything else that predated the precise moment of her birth. The world never seemed to run out of lost generations.

  “Tell me about that box you saw Jerry Marcus carrying to his car Saturday.”

  “You stayed up past your bedtime for that? It was a box, Bee-Oh-Ex. Picture of some tacky appliance on it. One of those counter jobs no one really needs. Dude, our world’s gonna turn into one big landfill long before global warming gets us.”