Peeper (10 page)

The Riviera's tires bit asphalt, wailed, and threw the car into a two-wheeled turn that dumped over the trash receptacle on the corner. The single wad of Kleenex that was inside stayed there, but as the basket skidded around it swept the orange skins, broken bottles, previously owned condoms, and
REELECT THE MAYOR
handbills that littered the sidewalk around it out into the street, where the Chrysler, giving chase, lost traction in the wet garbage, spun around, and shattered a taillight against a fire hydrant on the opposite curb. O'Leary backed the car around and started forward again in Ralph's wake. The yelper came on.

Ralph made another right turn, then a left, going through a red light and narrowly missing an eighteen-wheeler trundling across the intersection. The truck braked and swerved, jarring open the doors of its trailer and spilling a shipment of Porta-Potties into the middle of Michigan Avenue. The tan Chrysler careened between the bouncing johns. Ralph cut down an alley and across a disused parking lot with grass growing through cracks in the pavement and found himself heading back the way he'd come minutes earlier, the Chrysler in pursuit.

At that point Ralph remembered the old saying about being nice to people on the way up.

Four angry wet senior citizens waved their canes and shouted obscenities at the red Riviera as it streaked past. A mailman, his uniform plastered with mud, reached into his sack and started throwing packages, some of which burst when they struck Ralph's back window and released a torrent of Civil War chess sets and mail-order toupees. A soaked dog snapped at the Riviera's rear tires.

A very wet bum wearing a Tyrolean hat like Ralph's took a seat on the vacant bus stop bench, drank from a bottle wrapped in a paper sack, and watched the commotion.

Ralph tried for a smuggler's turn at the end of the block. One of his tires hooked the curb and threw the car into a spin. The dog, suddenly finding itself the object of a vehicular chase, ran whining and yipping down the street with its tail between its legs and an orange toupee on its head. Ralph fought the steering wheel as the Riviera struck the curb, bounded off, bumped up and over the one opposite, and came to rest on top of a mailbox with its front wheels spinning.

The sudden stop threw Ralph against the door handle on the driver's side. The door sprang open and he tumbled out onto the sidewalk, catching a glimpse as he fell of the Chrysler stopped in the middle of the street. As he lay on his back, dazed, the dog trotted up, sniffed at him, and lifted its leg.

“Bummer,” said the bum.

Chapter 12

“I didn't know old people knew them words.”

“Words can't hurt you,” O'Leary told Ralph. “It's the canes you got to look out for. What'd you do, tell them you were lobbying against Medicare?”

Ralph didn't answer. He was riding in the Chrysler with O'Leary driving. The other man, a uniformed Detroit police officer, had surrendered the shotgun position for the backseat. Ralph was reclining with the back of his head against the headrest. It still hurt to breathe, but he didn't think he'd cracked or broken any ribs. “What about my car?”

“I called for a tow. I'll give you a chit to spring it from impound. It came off a lot better than the mailbox.”

“Don't guess I'll need it where I'm going.”

“Ann Arbor?”

“Yeah, yeah. Have your laugh. I didn't croak him.”

“Croak who?”

Ralph brought his seat forward. They were on the northbound John Lodge Freeway, passing the Wonder Bread plant. “Hey, police headquarters is the other way.”

“Always has been,” O'Leary said. “Just like this always has been the way to Ann Arbor. Well, as soon as we hit the Edsel Ford west.”

“What's in Ann Arbor?”

“Later. Who didn't you croak?”

“Who said anything about anybody getting croaked?”

“You did, just now. You said, ‘I didn't croak him.' Didn't he?” He glanced over his shoulder at the uniform in the backseat.

“That's what he said, Sarge.”

“Don't call me Sarge. You sound like Beetle Bailey. So who got croaked?” he asked Ralph.

“Forget what I said. I'm drunk.”

“You smell like it. Drive like it, too. If I was Traffic, I'd bust you. What's the idea of rabbiting when you saw us in front of your place?”

“What was you doing in front of my place?”

“You first.”

“I thought you was a process server. I had my fill of them.”

“Who hasn't?” O'Leary looped the Chrysler around onto the westbound Ford Freeway. “Step on somebody's toes, did you?”

“The fucking business I'm in is paved with toes. What's in Ann Arbor?”

“You mean the fucking business you
were
in. We stopped in at Lovechild. The lady told us about you getting fired.”

“I quit.”

“She said different. That woman hates your guts and the box they came in. What'd you do, mistake her office for the men's room?”

“I sent her some albums.”

“Jesus, they must have been pretty bad.”

“Not if you like yodeling. What's in Ann Arbor?”

“You weren't home, so we knocked on your landlord's door. He's still out, or maybe he's out again. Did you get to see him last night?”

“No.” He said it too quickly. “No, I missed him. Maybe he got lucky.”

“Not without a rabbit's foot and the strongest aphrodisiac known to science. He looks just like that bald-headed kid that used to be in the comic strips. What was his name?” O'Leary glanced back at the uniform.

“Don't look here, Sarge. I'm a
Doonesbury
man.”

“Don't call me Sarge. Anyway, that's why we waited for you outside, Poteet. I guess you want to know what's in Ann Arbor.”

“You read my mind.”

“What's in Ann Arbor is the University of Michigan Burn Center. Where they sent Lyla Dane?”

“I remember you telling me.”

“She came out of the coma this morning. The docs think she'll make it. Trouble is, she won't talk to any cops.”

“Can't think why not. She knows so many.”

“Anyway, we need to find out who she made mad enough to try to fricassee her in her own apartment. She's the only one who can tell us, only she won't.”

“So why am I going? Oh, shit.”

“He's got it,” O'Leary told the cop in the backseat, who grunted. “Any idea at all why she wants to talk to you and nobody else?”

Ralph said, “I got a way with broads.”

“That explains why you're farting through silk in that penthouse apartment of yours, getting laid every other Tuesday by the wife of a General Motors board member.”

“Maybe his member ain't bored,” suggested the man in uniform.

O'Leary ignored him. “I don't know what you are to her, Poteet; friend, pimp, favorite John, what, it doesn't matter. She wants to talk to you, which does. We need you to ask her who it was rigged that blast.”

“Why the hell should I?”

“Let's just say if whoever it was isn't you, we won't have to bother you anymore about where you were night before last and who you were with.”

“That why you brought reinforcements?”

“Excuse my crappy manners. This is Officer Mileaway. Officer Mileaway, this is Ralph Poteet.”

“Pleased,” said Ralph.

“Yeah.” The uniform watched the scenery.

“I brought Officer Mileaway along to remind you what it's like when we bother you.”

“I can live with it. Just drop me off at the corner there.”

O'Leary drove past it. “Just for the hell of it I ran you through the computer downtown. The information just kept coming out and out. You've spent more time at headquarters than I have. I'm surprised I never saw you there.”

“Too much smoke.” Ralph opened the window for air. The arson investigator had a cigarette between his fingers and another burning in the ashtray.

“That disturbing-the-peace beef on Livernois last year was a hoot. How'd you get an ordinary camera to work underwater in a Jacuzzi?”

“Saran Wrap. I was proud of them shots. I sent them to
National Geographic
but they bounced them back. I told them they were narwhals.”

“Too bad that was his own wife State Senator Coopersmith was with.”

“People that age shouldn't be doing that kind of stuff in a public pool.”

“I guess it's okay, with a buddy.”

Ralph got out a matchstick. “So I had a couple of run-ins with the law. It's the job.”

“Bonnie and Clyde had a couple of run-ins with the law. Two more weeks on the premises and you'd qualify for a departmental pension. What I can't figure out is why you aren't rich or dead.”

“Luck.”

“Which kind, good or bad?”

“It evens out. Am I busted or what? 'Cause if I ain't, this here is kidnapping.”

“Technically it's abduction. But that's for private citizens. For a guy with your rap sheet it's an afternoon drive. Relax and enjoy.”

Ralph gave up. He had no place to go but home anyway, and if the bishop called, it would do him good to stew a little. Ralph watched the big Uniroyal tire display sliding by and jets taking off and landing at Metro Airport. He had never been on an airplane. He had had a chance once, but arrived late and it left without him, carrying a load of hijacked microchips to Colombia in trade for twelve hundred kilos of high-grade cocaine. On the return trip, a mechanical malfunction had forced the plane down on some jerkwater island in the Gulf of Mexico, where the pilot and copilot were immediately elected to head the revolutionary government. The U.S. State Department was currently considering sending $300 million in military aid to President Ziggy Blumberg and Vice President Oscar Torporino. Ralph had lied to O'Leary about his luck. He always got the short handle.

Inside the Ann Arbor city limits they took the State Street exit and parked in a towaway zone outside the University of Michigan Medical Center. A nurse at the desk in the lobby informed them that the patient had been removed from intensive care and transferred to the third floor of the Burn Center. There a young resident in a white coat with a fresh crop of acne on his chin directed them to a ward at the end of the hall. He hesitated.

“Er, there are rules against that,” he said, pointing. “Even if there weren't, don't you think it's, er, inappropriate, considering why these people are here?”

O'Leary apologized and dropped his cigarette butt into a pot containing a rubber tree.

Outside the door to the ward, he showed his badge and ID to a uniformed officer and the three newcomers went in. It was a turquoise room containing four beds, two of them enclosed by curtains. A third was empty, and Lyla Dane lay in the fourth.

Ralph had prepared himself for—what, the Phantom of the Opera? A lot of scars and oozing, anyway. However, except for the white bandages encasing her head like a chain-mail hood and the perennially surprised look of a face with its eyebrows singed off, she appeared to have sustained no frontal damage, for her face was exposed and unmarked. Ralph guessed that she had turned her head at the instant of the explosion. Her arms were swathed in gauze and a tube ran from one to a bottle suspended upside down in a rack beside the bed. Her eyes were closed.

O'Leary bent over her and whispered something Ralph didn't catch. Her eyes opened then and she nodded feebly. Straightening, O'Leary beckoned to Ralph. Ralph shuffled forward reluctantly. He wondered why she had asked for him. What could she have to say to the man who was supposed to have been blown up by the blast she had walked into?

“Nng wu.”

He bent down. “What?”

“Ng yu.”

“Say again?” He took off his hat and brought his ear very close to her lips.

“Fuck you.”

Chapter 13

“Fuck you?”

“I beg your pardon?” A stern-faced nurse stopped in the act of passing O'Leary to glare at him.

“Talking to a friend.” When she'd gone on, he lowered his voice. “Fuck you? That's what she said, fuck you? She had us haul you all this way to say fuck you?”

“I don't think Hallmark has a card for that.”

Ralph had told O'Leary the truth because he wasn't sure how much he and Officer Mileaway had overheard. The three were standing in the hallway outside the ward, where the pimple-faced resident had herded them after Lyla Dane had delivered her message and gone to sleep. “Maybe she was delirious,” Ralph added.

“I don't think so. I can't figure out this ass-backwards charisma you've got. People go out of their way to tell you what a scuzzbucket you are. How can one man mark up so many enemies before he's sixty?”

“I'm forty-three.”

“No kidding? Jesus, what did you do to yourself?”

“Hey, you ain't nobody's Bob Barker neither.”

O'Leary lit a cigarette and flipped the match back over his shoulder, narrowly missing Officer Mileaway's left ear. “Back to square one. Where were you night before last?”

“The Vinegaroon on Cass from five to eight-thirty. I got into a chug-a-lug contest with a colored guy named Arvil. Lost by half a mug.”

“What was the bet?”

“Loser sprang for the pay toilet.”

“No good. You could have gone to Lyla Dane's apartment anytime between eight-thirty and sunup and rigged the switch. Where else?”

“The Macedonian Room from a little after eight-thirty till about ten. A broad belted me with her purse when I followed her into the ladies' room. It was an honest mistake.”

“It'd be the first honest thing you ever did. Name?”

“She didn't introduce herself. She had a butterfly tattooed on her ass, if it helps.”

“Which cheek?”

“Both of them. It was a big sucker.”

“Anyone else who might remember you?”