The Sundown Speech Read online

  ELEVEN

  I asked Karyl if the prints were fresh. He shook his head.

  “No help there. Summer and fall were dryer than usual; this morning’s rain was the first one worth measuring in weeks. Latents evaporate under those conditions. Maybe not entirely, but we wouldn’t get the beauties we got if they’d been there since before Marcus was killed.

  “I had to go to court tomorrow?” he continued. “I’d have to testify Jerry Marcus, a stiff we autopsied yesterday, shot a bouncer outside the Necto Nightclub five hours ago. I’m glad I don’t have to go to court tomorrow.”

  “Me, too. You don’t look like you’re ready to retire.”

  “I love you too. One thing I have to do today is get Dante Gunnar’s charges dropped. If the John Doe we’ve got on ice isn’t Marcus, we’ve got no motive.”

  “What’s your best guess?”

  “We have a thriving little Wiccan community here. Ask them. Meanwhile I’ll be asking the lab rats how it’s possible a corpse that looked like Marcus, living in Marcus’ room with Marcus’ DNA, managed to sew his guts back up inside, sneak out of the cold room down at County, and steal a car.”

  “Still think the bouncer may have been the target?”

  “Man, I don’t know what I think, other than we need to put Holly Zacharias in protective custody.”

  “Good luck with that. You can’t make her go if she doesn’t want to, and she won’t want to. She walks half a mile home from the club every night. If rapists don’t scare her—”

  “That’s not so much of an issue here. This isn’t Detroit.”

  “So people keep telling me. The last town where folks didn’t lock their doors was taken apart and reassembled in the Smithsonian. If she’s not afraid of rapists, I doubt a little thing like a bullet will, as opposed to sleeping on county linen. Anyway she told me she doesn’t like cop stories.”

  “I don’t either, and I’m in one.” He frowned again. “There’s an alternative.”

  I picked up. “I’ve got a couch.”

  “It’s your idea, if the brass finds out. What’s your home number?”

  I wrote it on the back of a business card and gave it to him. He glanced at it and put it in his shirt pocket. “See she stays put, and make yourself available. I don’t know what that box she saw means, or if the hole’s just a hole, but it’s all she saw, and someone doesn’t want her testifying about it in court, if this thing ever results in an arrest.”

  “Seems to me I heard that somewhere before.”

  “So the department will make you chief for a day, just like one of those Make-A-Wish kids. You can even run the siren.”

  I took that one away with me. It was too good to leave behind.

  Then I came back to the building. Nothing was open yet. In the lobby I put fifty cents on the expense sheet to tell Heloise Gunnar I wanted to talk to her husband. She was up, but sounded like a warped record. I remembered I’d left her out cold on her love seat, saturated in pure grain alcohol.

  “He’s sleeping. Can’t you see what an ordeal he’s been through?”

  I looked at my watch. “He can have till noon.” While she was protesting, a thought hit me bang out of outer space. My brain’s always clearest when my stomach’s empty. “Hold on. You said Jerry Marcus showed you some of what he’d shot?”

  She’d stopped yammering. I could feel her head throb clear through my handset. “Yes, with a cutaway. That’s—”

  “We’ll discuss that at Cannes next time,” I broke in. “Did he tell you he did all the camera work himself?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  I blew air at the phone, fogging the shiny steel cradle. “Do you have any of that vodka left?”

  “Certainly. What do you think I am?”

  “An amateur. A career drunk knows all about hair-of-the-dog. If you fix yourself a brisk one and drink it off all of a piece like Bromo-Seltzer, you’ll hear the choir and your head will be as clear as an alpine stream.”

  “Actually, any body of water exposed to the air we’ve poisoned—”

  “Just drink the damn booze.”

  She set down the receiver with a thump. I fed the slot another quarter and listened to some clinking in the ambient noise on her end. A season of silence, then:

  “My goodness! I thought that was a myth spread by drunks to justify taking another drink. I never—”

  “Jack Dempsey said it’s possible to knock a man out, then knock him back awake. He said that’s how he lost the Tunney fight.”

  “Whatever are you talking about?” Her voice was strong, and as dripping with disapproval as during our first meeting. It was better than making small talk with the ghost of Kurt Cobain.

  “Just that you can drink yourself sober. Did Marcus tell you he did all the camera work himself?”

  “I don’t know that he’d done it all himself,” she said. “I just assumed.”

  “He had a poster and some books on film in his room, but no motion-picture equipment. Those other things could have been props, bought to impress people when he had enough seed money to rent a respectable-looking office, which would help him squeeze more from the pigeons. I’m not using ‘pigeons’ in a pejorative sense, Mrs. Gunnar,” I said, when she took in her breath; “it’s just how these people characterize their victims: things that exist for no other reason than to be plucked. But he needed bait, and the tools necessary to make it. Did he say anything at all that indicated he had a partner or an employee? Most confidence men like to create the illusion of a legitimate association. It seems less fly-by-night.”

  “Come to think of it, he did mention an associate. Wes? No, Les.”

  “Just Les? No last name?”

  “Dante might know. Information Services is a kind of journalism. It’s his job to get names and the correct spelling. I’m the artistic one. I saw the potential in Mr. Alien Elect before he did.”

  I said, “It looks like I’ll be talking to Dante.”

  A breath got breathed, then another. I heard a creak. She was gripping the receiver hard enough to pop something loose. When she spoke, the warped record was back on the turntable. “We were cheated, weren’t we? We’ll never see a penny of that fifteen thousand dollars. Unless we sue Jerry Marcus’ estate.”

  She hadn’t heard the latest, and it wasn’t my place to fill her in. I looked at a drawn face in the gleaming surface of the phone cradle; a fun house image, distorted by curvature, but I couldn’t lay it all on that.

  “Money’s a big deal,” I said. “No one knows that better than me, who’s got none. But Treasury prints more every day. Think what Jerry Marcus is out. Even a cheat deserves better than a bullet in the brain.”

  She breathed again, deep, and let it out in a whoosh. “Of course you’re right. Dante will be ready to speak with you at noon. I’ll make sure of it.”

  * * *

  The building was beginning to come alive; the first heels tapped linoleum, greetings murmured, the merry chime of a computer booting up, the window shades flapping open on a bright new day. I felt as bright as dead flowers in a dry vase. I used my last two quarters and caught Holly Zacharias in her dorm room. She was awake, and mean as a snake.

  “There’s a cop camped out in the hall!” she snapped. “What is this, house arrest?”

  “Protection. I signed off on it, but the cops beat me to it. You okay?”

  “Am I okay? I was shot at!”

  “‘At’ is the operative word in that sentence. How sure are you that was Jerry Marcus you saw the day of the murder?”

  She forgot she was mad then. She’d said she didn’t like cop stories, but all God’s creatures are curious.

  “It was him. I’m good with faces. Why?”

  “Everyone’s good with faces, to hear them tell it. When was the last time you heard anyone say, ‘Did you see that guy? I can’t for the life of me remember his face’?”

  “Well, I am. I guess I should be asking if you’re okay. That could easily have b
een you that got shot. Have you heard anything about Merle?”

  “You can’t kill guys like Merle. You have to pump them full of cyanide, bludgeon them, strangle them, shoot them full of holes, and dump them in the Neva River, like Rasputin. He’ll be back throttling patrons in no time at all, good as new.”

  “Half the time I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “Merle isn’t as bad as you make out. He’s got an old man doing life in Marquette for beating his mother to death and a sister cutting herself in a private facility. If he stops paying the bills, off she goes to Ypsi State: thorium and Edison’s medicine: K-k-k-k-k-k!” It was a serviceable impression of electroshock treatments.

  “I’m still hazy on how beating the crap out of me would help his sister. Anyway he was lucky, apart from standing too close to you and me. Have you got any family?”

  “My parents, in Chicago. Well, Chicago and Evanston. They’re divorced. What’s it to you?”

  “You might want to cut classes and bunk with them for a few days. It’s that or county food. You may be a material witness.”

  “To what? I told you everything I know.”

  “What you know just might be dynamite.”

  “Well, I’m not going to call my parents. I haven’t heard a word from them since I moved here. I’m putting myself through school, with what I make at the Necto and a student loan. They’re too busy swinging to pay much attention to their one-and-only daughter.”

  “You can put up at my place.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  A thousand years of inherited female experience went into those two words.

  “I’ll put a padlock on your side of the bedroom door,” I said. “You can rent a rottweiler. I’ll pay the freight, but you’ll have to walk him yourself. I might proselytize him.”

  “You’d do that to a dog?”

  I had to laugh; it was better than beating myself to death with the receiver.

  “You’re attending one of the great universities of the world,” I said. “Go to the library and look in the dictionary under p. I’ll call you back after you’ve had a chance.”

  “Did you just give me a homework assignment?”

  I laughed and hung up. I wasn’t sleepy anymore. Holly was like a caffeine pill.

  TWELVE

  So I was awake, and more alert than when I got in my eight hours. I went to a hotel called the Bell Tower, in the shadow of its namesake, and waited out the morning with a copy of the Ann Arbor News from a complimentary stack on the registration desk. Either the bombshell about Jerry Marcus being alive and homicidal had missed deadline or Karyl was holding it back. The three people claiming Marcus had conned them into investing in his movie were on the front page, with a jump to the back of the first section, and a photo of Karyl showing Marcus’ empty safe-deposit box to reporters. Empty is the new full; but only if you’re the press.

  The point was Jerry Marcus had brought in enough revenue to make ten low-budget pictures, but had promised each investor a hundred percent of one. The clip I’d seen had been impressive enough to reel in a number of reasonably intelligent people with disposable income. I couldn’t make the connection between it and the room where he’d died.

  If he’d died. DNA said yes, fingerprints said something else. There was a zombie picture in it, if I could sell it to the kind of intellectual who knew what the hell Emerson was writing about, but didn’t know a cutaway from a cutpurse.

  There was a sidebar feature on the so-called murder victim’s past as well: He was a North Dakota transplant with a widowed mother in Bismarck and a brother serving with the Peace Corps in Southeast Asia. The mother hadn’t heard from either son in years. Gunnar was mentioned only as a suspect whose name wouldn’t be released pending arraignment.

  It never would, now. A much bigger story was about to break.

  A paragraph in the police column announced the shooting in front of the Necto. No details were known as yet.

  After a while I yawned again, wide enough to creak a hinge, got up, stamped circulation back into my right foot, and ordered a massive breakfast of steak and eggs in the hotel restaurant. I was so famished I plowed through the hash browns, setting aside the opposition of a lifetime to potatoes in the morning. I chased them with three cups of black coffee and a glass of orange juice, clearly made from concentrate; but then fresh-squeezed is just too chirpy for me at that time of day. I smoked a post-prandial cigarette and put boots on the ground.

  “Hello, Mr. Walker.”

  Heloise Gunnar had transformed herself. She wore a yellow sundress showing off a figure I hadn’t known she had, a touch of color on her cheeks and lips, and had ditched the granny glasses: I could just make out the rims of colorless contact lenses inside the mossy-green irises of her eyes. She led me into the conversation pit, just as if I’d never been; for her, I might not have. You can block anything you want given the choice. “Would you like a refreshment?”

  “No thanks. Is he decent?”

  She led me upstairs, walking dreamily like a character in Jerry Marcus’ film. She wasn’t drunk, as she’d been on vodka the last time; I figured she had a standing order at a local pharmacy. I went in alone and shut the door.

  Dante sat propped up by a pillow in the master bedroom. His graying hair was more rumpled than usual, and his face looked as if a commune of hippies had moved out of it, loose and pouchy beyond his years. A gray tank top stood in for his pajamas, the cotton sunken into the gaps between his bones. He greeted me with the wan smile old men reserve for visitors they don’t remember.

  I drew a chair up to the bed. “Amos Walker. We met.”

  “I know. I’m not the idiot Heloise thinks I am.”

  “So you know you’re a suspect in Jerry Marcus’ murder.”

  “How could the police make such a mistake?”

  “They’re one for two. They know you’d been to Marcus’ place before the murder. Marcus had it on film.”

  “On disc, actually. They tried to use it to pry a confession out of me.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. His head ached, of course. Giving up one more sentence at a time would exhaust all his resources.

  “If you knew where he was, why’d you hire me?”

  “That was Heloise’s idea. Why should I tell you what I wouldn’t tell the police or even my lawyer?”

  “Because you’re not out yet. Someone got killed, and your country club alibi’s rusted clean through. Just because their motive went south doesn’t mean the cops won’t find another. They’re like snapping turtles; won’t let go even if you chop their heads off.”

  “I left the country club to go home and have a drink. I had several. If you’ve ever attended a political fund-raiser, you know why. I can’t stomach those people. They have all the fixed convictions of a human kaleidoscope.”

  “Did anyone see you go home?”

  “Why would they? I’m invisible.” He almost spat the word.

  I was close to losing him. I took another tack. “Did Marcus ever mention someone named Les?”

  The change of subjects struck him dumb. He’d been all set to pull the plug on the interview. “Les? I don’t—”

  “Your wife said he referred to him as an associate.”

  “Heloise is computer illiterate. I prepare the press release whenever the university makes a technological breakthrough, so I have a working layman’s knowledge of the industry. LES is an acronym, not a person. It stands for Laser Electronic Substitute. The laser part’s hogwash, and of course it’s electronic. Substitute is the operative word. It means there are no human actors in his film; they’re all computer-generated.”

  “You mean like in video games? They looked genuine to me on his own computer.”

  “There’s something eerie about the movements, like when a silent film is played back at the proper speed, not herky-jerky like the Keystone Kops; some people like that. It’s a brand-new program, and expensive. That was where our money was going, according to Marcus, the single biggest
outlay of the venture, hence the biggest share of the profits. It excited Heloise. Like most people who know nothing about computers, she thinks they’re a miracle of science and not just another office machine no one ever gets full use of.

  “That’s the charitable viewpoint,” he added bitterly. “My wife is the kind of greedy anticapitalist who wants to squeak through the golden gate and yank it shut behind them.”

  His hands plucked at the fibers of his blanket; they seemed to be working independently. “Later, when the buzz wore off, the implications hit me. Are we so willingly plunging headlong toward making the human race obsolete? No professional actor will ever sit still for being replaced by a bunch of pixels. The Screen Actors Guild would go to court and make sure Mr. Alien Elect never saw the light of day.”

  “You should be less invisible,” I said.

  “Is that supposed to mean something?”

  “It’s the quiet ones who do the best thinking.”

  “An active brain isn’t worth a damn thing when it comes with a cowardly streak. Are you married, Walker?”

  “No.”

  “If you ever do, make sure she isn’t stronger than you.”

  “Let’s talk about how your car wound up in front of Jerry Marcus’ house on Thompson.”

  I’d sprung it, catching him by surprise. He forgot to be angry.

  He wrestled with the answer, or with the headache. He lost on both counts. “I saw him driving one day in that ridiculous yellow sports car. We hadn’t heard from him, and I was beginning to suspect we’d been gulled. I followed. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. People who know me would tell you I’m incapable of spontaneity. But no one really knows anyone, does he?”

  I let that one drift as a rhetorical question. I’d never heard anyone say “gulled” out loud before.

  “I lost him,” he said; “or he lost me. I don’t know if he saw me. Anyone can lose a Volvo. I drove around, looking down side streets and in driveways, and just as I was about to give up I saw it, parked next to the house. Would you mind?” He tilted his head toward the nightstand.