The Sundown Speech Page 6

  “It’s a toaster oven, not Al-Quaeda.”

  “Who said it was a toaster oven?”

  “You did. Are you changing your story?”

  “Shit. Stop talking like the Man. You’re going to dress like us, act the part.” She shot another blank at the ceiling. “Could’ve been a baby microwave. Something I’ll never have. I eat my veggies raw.”

  “How was he carrying it?”

  “On his head, like those women on the Exploration Channel. Where you think? In his hands.”

  “High? Low? Did it look like it had something heavy inside?”

  “You mean like Jerry’s head? I didn’t see anything about that on the news.”

  “If you’re going to ask a question every time I ask one, this is going to take a really long time.”

  “Okay, okay. Keep your Depends on.” She squinted, scratching a fresh tattoo and playing a video from the past. “I’d say it was empty or close to it, the way he handled it, but he used both hands. He set it on the seat gentle.”

  “Front or back?”

  “What difference—?”

  “Holly!” I snapped. Murph the Surf turned his head our way while talking with the bartender, a lady shot-putter with rings on every finger, like twin sets of brass knuckles.

  “Sorry. Front, passenger’s side, though I don’t see why it’s anything.”

  “It isn’t, except the more details you try to remember, the more come back on their own.”

  “You mean like hypnosis? Awesome. Now I think of it, he did seem careful about not spilling anything out the hole. You think it was dope?”

  “What hole?”

  “There was a big hole in the side. Didn’t I say that?”

  “You left that part out.”

  “Shit. You were right about remembering.”

  “You were drinking when we talked.”

  “Beers don’t affect me. Not like Sean. Dude I was with on the porch? You could’ve been molesting me the whole time, he wouldn’t’ve woken up. That’s why the cops talked to me and let him walk. I just forgot about the hole. It was round, like it’d been cut out. Maybe that’s where he hid his movie camera. Candid, you know?”

  “Cops know about the hole?”

  “If I mentioned it, I don’t remember.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table, the cigarette leaking smoke straight up along her temple. “Maybe I need hypnotized again.” She thought a lopsided smile was sexy.

  “I’ve got underwear older than you. Focus.”

  A lower lip made a pout. “I don’t guess it matters if I told them. They didn’t seem too interested anyway.”

  “They’re trained not to. What else did you forget?”

  She laid the cigarette in a shallow tin tray to smoke itself out and folded her arms on the table. “You can take off those bogus sunglasses. You look just like Tom Cruise. Not.”

  I took them off and put them in my T-shirt pocket. I’d been wondering why the place still seemed dark. “Let’s talk about Marcus’ yellow Mustang.”

  “Do we have to? It’s what old guys drive when they can’t get any action.”

  “Marcus was thirty.”

  “Duh. I said old.”

  I jammed my stub into the tray. “Were you still on the porch when he came back in it?”

  “Uh-uh. The game let out and we watched the jock lovers honk at each other and then I went back to the dorm.”

  “That was when, about?”

  “It was getting dark. Seven, I guess; in there. I’m not really into time.”

  I sat back and watched the smoke from my dying cigarette climb toward the lights. My brain envied it. “The medical examiner said Marcus was killed sometime between three and seven. That makes him dead when you went home.”

  “Maybe he parked around the corner and walked in through the back. That game traffic’s thick as snot.”

  “Cops found the Mustang torched on a country road. I got that from the radio on the way here. They think their suspect took it to get back to where he left his own car and someone stole it afterwards. That theory works until you picture the murderer having to look for it because it wasn’t parked out front.”

  She rolled a bare shoulder. When she did that, the six-pointed star tattooed on it seemed to open and close like one of those folded pieces of paper with different predictions written on it. My body remembered I’d slept, but my brain knew what time it was.

  “You’re the detective,” she said. “I don’t like cop stories. I only sat down with you ’cause I’ve been on my feet all night. My roommates are in bed and I can’t go to sleep for a long time after I get off work.”

  The bouncer detached his forearms from the bar and came over on the balls of his feet like a dancer. His arms bent out from his body in a loving-cup effect; pumping iron shortens the tendons.

  “Closing, Holly. Tell your pickup it’s time to fall out.”

  “Ewwwww!” I hoped she was reacting to his cologne. He’d swum two laps in it.

  He leaned his knuckles on the table, bringing his face within three inches of mine. He wore braces with hinges. “You should be ashamed of yourself, mister. Ain’t the women in the nursing home good enough for you?”

  I used my cigarette stump to tamp out Holly’s, which was still smoldering. I gave this all my attention. “Not tonight, Blondie. I get cranky when I’m up past Matlock. I might chastise you.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “’Roids.” I grinned at Holly. “Shrinks ’em at both ends.”

  She laughed. She had one of those husky laughs you feel clear down to the floor. “Step off, Merle,” she said. “They pay you to stop fights, not start them.”

  He straightened, opening and closing his fists at his sides. “Get your asses out of here, both of you.”

  I stood, put out a hand for Holly, but she was up already. I asked if she had a ride.

  “I walk. It’s not far.” She started toward the door.

  I caught up. Merle hung back by the table, burning holes in my shoulder blades. I said, “It’s the short walks you don’t get to finish.”

  “Oh, macho it down a little, Peter Parker. This isn’t Detroit.”

  “I have to save face for Merle.” I raced her for the door handle, and this time I won. “Humor an old man and tell the cops everything you told me. The more people who know, the safer the walk.”

  The door was open. It might have been the light from the streetlamp, but her face looked pale. “The killer, you mean. A box, that’s all I saw.”

  “If it’s more than a box, and Marcus told someone you saw it, Ann Arbor might as well be Detroit.”

  “You’re not so old,” she said. “My father’s older than you and he just bought a Harley.” But she kept close as we walked, with me on the gutter side.

  I talked to keep her mind off the walk. “What are you studying?”

  “Marine Biology. I’m gonna work at SeaWorld.”

  “Great job.”

  “Gonna hang around long enough to win their trust, then I’m gonna open the gate and let Shamu swim out to sea.”

  It had rained while I was inside the club. Liberty Street shone like the business side of a sheet of carbon, which was a reference Holly wouldn’t get. I felt old. Water sprayed in fine mists from tires on the pavement. There’s always traffic in a college town, no matter the hour. A white Crown Victoria boated into the curb. It didn’t have to mean anything. People are always picking up customers when the bars close. It didn’t have to mean anything; but I wished I hadn’t left my .38 in the car. I hadn’t known whether I’d be patted down at the door. I grasped Holly’s arm firmly above the elbow.

  A hand as heavy as a chain mail glove closed on my shoulder, a dozen times harder than I was holding the girl. “I’m off the clock, creep.”

  I bent forward at the waist, pulling Merle off balance with his hand locked on my shoulder. He wrapped his other arm around me, tight enough to make my ribs creak. I shoved Holly hard
enough to take her off her feet. She was young; her bruises would heal fast. Suddenly I was supporting all the bouncer’s weight. I twisted, bringing up my right shoulder and going for the snap that would send Merle into a beautiful arc above my head and land him on his back.

  I heard a flat cough, the way gunfire always sounds in open air; those ear-splitting reports in the movies are dubbed in back at the studio. Holly yelled. Tires wailed, scratching for traction on wet asphalt. Then I sank under two hundred ten pounds of dead weight.

  TEN

  Lieutenant Karyl’s office in the brick municipal building was a perfect cube of corkboard, with a chip-and-laminate desk, telephone, fax, and computer, a tower filled with discs to back up the computer, and a two-drawer sheet-metal file cabinet to back up the discs. He was a belt-and-suspenders kind of cop.

  The only thing unofficial in the room was a large framed aerial shot of the University of Michigan football stadium—the Big House, they call it—numbered and signed by the photographer, hung with levels on one wall. The whole place looked as if it had been put up by carnies and could be struck and stacked aboard a flatbed truck in five minutes flat. But they’d have to do it around the lieutenant, who sat behind the desk as solidly as an iron bell in a cathedral.

  He was stuffed tightly as ever into his blue suit, and his broad Hungarian peasant’s face wore no expression at all, which is as hard to bring off as a blank mind. To look at him you wouldn’t know he’d gotten out of a warm bed into the chill predawn of the first day after the end of Indian summer. He said yes a couple of times into the telephone, listened without moving his face, and cradled the instrument.

  “That was Saint Joseph Mercy,” he told me. “Merle won’t be throwing any drunks down steps for a couple of months, but he’ll survive. He took one in the thigh. Missed the femoral by a centimeter.”

  “Must’ve ricocheted off a quad.” I rubbed my eyes. That afternoon nap was a hundred years ago.

  “We caught a break on that Crown Vic. Sheriff’s deputy saw it burning on the shoulder of Ann Arbor–Saline Road and put it out with the extinguisher in his car before it was totally involved. Forensics lifted some prints off the wheel. What do you want to bet they belong to the guy who reported it stolen?”

  “No bet.” I yawned bitterly. I’d been up all night, shot at, helped cure two cases of hysterics—one of them mine—talked to an ambulance crew and half the Ann Arbor Police Department, and still saw nothing but Karyl at the end of the tunnel. “This torching of stolen cars is getting to be a fad.”

  “You’d think we were Michigan State after a big game.” His brow was black and unbroken, like the space bar on a typewriter. “Whoever took Marcus’ Mustang and torched it doesn’t have to be the same person who shot the bouncer and set fire to the car he shot him from. You said yourself the bouncer has a personality problem, which by the way is in the job description at dumps like the Necto. Close one down, three more open up; it’s like plucking gray hairs. If they didn’t hire these gorillas they wouldn’t need them. Maybe he was the target all along. You and the Zacharias girl just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “That’s the title of my autobiography. But I’m not buying it and neither are you.”

  “No, but someone had to say it. Either whoever killed Jerry Marcus thinks you’re getting close or he’s afraid Holly saw or heard something important around the time of the murder. It was the bouncer who had the rotten timing and the bad sense of direction.”

  He folded his hands on the desk; they were surprisingly fair and fine-boned, the hands of a blackjack dealer rather than the great-great-grandson of a bricklayer or stonemason; but for all I knew the old man had been a surgeon.

  “If this were the Old West, I’d run you out of town. We don’t get many shootings here, and we’ve had two just since you breezed in.”

  “That’s the second time you gave me the sundown speech,” I said. “I’m starting to think that WELCOME TO ANN ARBOR sign is disingenuous.”

  “Maybe if you’d told us more about that box Holly saw. She calmed down enough to tell us what you talked about in the club before we took her home.”

  “You shot it down the first time I mentioned it. I had the part about the hole five minutes when the fireworks came. You’re going to have to do better than that if you want to make the case for obstruction of justice.”

  “Were you going to tell us?”

  “She couldn’t remember if she’d told you herself. She’s immune to the effects of alcohol, she says. I’ve got my doubts. Tell me the cop who took her home has orders to stick.”

  The iron bell behind the desk shifted its weight. I braced for the gong.

  “Who wants to know, the cradle robber or the detective? I’m asking because as far as you’re concerned the case was over when you found Marcus’ body.”

  I got my wallet out of my hip pocket and gave him Hernando Suiz’s card. “That’s Dante Gunnar’s lawyer. He hired me to investigate the case against his client.”

  “I’ll confirm it when he gets to his office.” He parked the card in the center of the desktop. “This puts us on opposing teams.”

  “Not if your suspect’s clean. He can’t sit on a cot in the county jail and shoot a bouncer on Liberty at the same time.”

  “He can if his lawyer sprang him on his own recognizance yesterday afternoon.”

  “He moves too fast for his clients’ own good.” I swallowed another yawn. “You’re not the stone wall you pretend to be, Lieutenant. You know Gunnar’s innocent.”

  “I don’t know that at all. That was his car parked in front of a house he supposedly didn’t know existed.”

  “Even if you identify it definitely, Suiz will get it thrown out without opening his briefcase. There’s no law against parking in Ann Arbor, as long as it’s a legal spot and you don’t overstay your welcome. Just between you and me it stinks, but it’s not evidence.”

  “Let’s talk evidence,” he said. “The slug the techie dug out of the apartment floor came from a three-fifty-seven Magnum. The one the surgeon got out of Merle is on its way to the lab in Lansing. If it’s a Mag round and the striations match, we’ve got the chance to solve two shootings at one stroke.”

  “Let’s hope. I didn’t come here to export murderers from Detroit, whatever you think.”

  “Go back there and get some sleep. The Zacharias girl’s okay. We mean to keep her that way. She’s the only real witness we’ve got; although what a hole in a box has to do with anything, I sure don’t know.”

  “Jerry seemed to think it was important. So did someone else. I haven’t made anybody mad lately, not counting you, and targeting Merle just when I’m working a homicide doesn’t scan.”

  He accompanied me out into the hallway. The skeleton crew was still on and we had it to ourselves. Pinkish gray light seeped in through the windows. Nothing is colder or more hollow than a deserted government building. It’s like a body without a soul; even the ghosts seemed to have gone home at quitting. Somewhere on the other side of the Milky Way a vacuum cleaner whined, a sound more monotonous than dead silence.

  It was an appliance, for God’s sake. I wax poetic when I go without sleep twenty-two hours out of twenty-four. My back hurt from supporting Merle’s tenth of a ton and my stomach was empty to the point of pain. I hadn’t eaten since lunch, and come to think of it I’d skipped lunch.

  “Gunnar’s not the only suspect, if that means anything,” Karyl said. “Since the story broke, three more investors in Marcus’ movie have come forward. He tapped one poor sucker for twenty-five thousand; that alone, on top of Dante’s cut, comes to more than a hundred percent in shares, based on the budget. Only hotels and airlines can get away with selling more than a hundred percent of anything. Lucky for the sucker, he was in Florida over the weekend. The other alibis checked too.

  “We got a court order and opened a safe-deposit box in Jerry’s name at the Bank of Ann Arbor. It was empty. No one pays to keep a box empty,
so the theory is he’d cleaned it out recently. We’ve put in for a warrant to search the house on Thompson. He might have stashed it in another room just in case he was targeted.”

  “It’s a wonder he lasted as long as he did.”

  “This town has a soft spot for white-collar criminals. So far the U of M’s accepted almost a hundred million in donations from an alumnus who went to the federal pen for insider trading.”

  I stopped walking, leaned against the wall, and hung a cigarette off my lower lip. “Drop the charges. You can always reboot them if you have a case. Right now Suiz is working gratis. The minute he smells a suit for false arrest and unlawful imprisonment, you’ll be buried under so much paper you’ll never make an arrest that will stick.

  “And there’s a bonus,” I said. “You won’t see me again until I take in the summer art fairs.”

  He blinked for the first time since I knew him. “Sold. If I can sell it to the brass.”

  A telephone rang somewhere in the building. At that hour it had a lonely sound, like the last robin of fall signing off.

  “That’s mine.” He shook my hand again and hurried back to take the call. He was the damnedest combination of old-school and new school law enforcement I’d ever met. They would either make him chief someday or force him out as a threat to his superiors.

  I was lighting up in the parking lot when he came out, moving faster than before. His face wore something like an expression.

  “Good, you’re still here. Saves the taxpayers the price of a long-distance call. You know Forensics ID’d Jerry based on DNA. It was him, all right. You can’t buck science.”

  “Who’s bucking it? Last time I tried I failed the course.” But I wasn’t sleepy anymore. Some kind of tide was coming in and I had to be ready to wade or swim.

  “That was them again just now. FBI called back on the prints we lifted from that Crown Vic that shot at you last night; this morning. They belong to Jerry Marcus. Positive.”

  I drew in smoke and held it, letting my brain cure. It went out in a blast. “He’s a better shot than I thought. Dead men usually miss by a mile.”