Sweet Women Lie (18 page)

“You haven’t denied it.”

“All right, it didn’t happen.”

“Killers lie just like everyone else.”

“Not this one,” he said. “Not unless he has to. I’m probably the only good ol’ boy from my home county that don’t get a boot out of it.”

I blew some air. “I didn’t care for the story much myself. It took too many left turns for my taste. That’s why I thought the government had to be involved.”

“Well, I wish you luck with it, son. Just don’t get between me and Sahara. There’s no percentage in it for a citizen.”

“I wish to hell you civilized sons of bitches would make a threat when you make a threat. Every one of you borrows his dialogue from Graham Greene.”

“I wouldn’t know how to begin to make one. You got any rattlers up here?”

The change of subjects threw me for a second.

“Rattlesnakes? Some massasauga. They might bite you if you step on them hard enough.”

“I was thinking of the western diamondback. Pound for pound they’re the deadliest thing on this continent, but not one of them’s a match for your common barnyard hog. You want to know why?”

“Does it matter?”

“They rattle before they strike. Can’t help it, it’s in their nature. That hog, as soon as he hears that sound he goes after it with his hooves and teeth. Don’t take but a few seconds. I ain’t heard tell yet of a hog ever losing that fight.”

“So the moral is, strike before you rattle.”

“That ain’t it.”

“What is?”

“Stay away from hogs.”

We parted where we’d met, in front of Ford Auditorium. He changed hands on the stick and held out his right. “It’s been a pleasure, son. I been in the woods so long I forgot what a man looks like.”

“Leave Catherine alone.”

He shrugged and returned his hand unshaken to the stick. “I was going to tell her good-bye tonight anyway. Maybe you’ll say it for me. Tell her I died or I went back home or I got arrested for messing around with eleven-year-old girls. You can make up a lie just as good as I can. That’s a compliment. I made up some of the best.”

“You are a lie. You and your whole tribe.”

“That’s a fact. But like all lies we got to play out our string. Good luck again, son. Mind what I said about the hogs.”

I said nothing. He stepped onto the porch and went around the curve of the mica wall. I heard his stick tapping for a while.

The cold was thickening and there was a brassy smell of snow in the air. I took my coat and hat off the back seat and put them on before driving back to the office. There I shut myself in; a redundancy in that building, empty of a Saturday. As empty as my head. I sat behind the desk and swiveled my chair toward the window and looked at the roof of the building next door and listened to the foundation crumble under me. I thought about pouring myself a drink. I thought about it some more. Thinking about it was almost as good as drinking it, and a lot easier on the liver. I wondered if I was on to something. I could write a book:
The Cosmic Cockeye.
I might sell a million before the government figured out a way to tax metaphysical boozing.

“I guess if you have to work weekends that’s the way to do it.”

I swiveled to face Sergeant Trilby. I hadn’t switched on the buzzer that tells me someone has entered the outer office and he’d let himself through two doors with none of the club-footed telegraphy of the previous generation of peace officers. He had on a tan corduroy sport coat with chamois patches on the elbows over a V-neck sweater and a pink shirt with a maroon tie. Blue jeans and topsiders. All showing rough use, the uniform of the perennial undergrad, if the college had more green growing up its walls than on its grounds. He was carrying a briefcase under one arm, the soft vinyl kind without a handle.

“I thought the brass was favoring vests this year,” I said.

“In East Detroit we’re a little more casual. Especially on Saturday. When no one answered the phone at your house I thought I’d see if I could find you here. I’m on my way to Detroit Police Headquarters with some evidence for their lab and it wasn’t that much of a detour.”

“Nice of you to think of me. I’d offer you a drink, but I have to see your driver’s license first.”

“Never touch it. So this is where you get to work when you went to detective class.”

“I apologized for that crack.” I pointed my chin at the briefcase. “That the evidence? Nice case. Goes with your outfit.”

He laid it on his side of the desk without answering and sat down in the customer’s chair. He propped his right ankle on his left knee and grasped the ankle with both hands. “We got the cutter’s report on Pingree. Came in two hours ago.”

I lifted my brows politely.

“Hydrocyanic acid,” he said. “Thirty grains, give or take. Enough to kill a basketball team full of Pingrees and the mascot. You’d be surprised how easy cyanide is to lay hands on; I was, when I asked the toxicologist. Peach leaves, peach pits, apple seeds — cripes, it’s the poison in mercury poisoning, and you can get
that
from fish. So much for canvassing all the local pharmacists, although we’re doing that anyway. Any ninth-grade chemistry student can distill himself a batch in his basement with enough kick to wipe out the faculty. And we were worried about crack.”

“It’s a dangerous old world, Sergeant. But you knew that.” I wondered where this was going.

“You frisked Pingree’s office, didn’t you?”

I scratched my ear. I wanted a smoke, but I didn’t want him to think I was stalling. Finally I figured the hell with it and broke one out and got it burning. “I frisked it. It seemed like the thing to do. I thought I was more careful than that. Or are you just fishing?”

“We lifted a partial thumb from his appointment book. Prints don’t wipe so well off paper. When it didn’t match Pingree’s I played a hunch and Faxed it to Lansing. The state police have a full set of yours on file, as they do all private investigators they license in the State of Michigan. What’d you find?”

“Just a lunch date he’d made with Edith Hibbard, his roommate. She told you I kept it for him.”

“Did she?”

“Come on, Sergeant. I know the order of the universe. If she didn’t tell you, you got it from the staff at the Black Bull. I hope they were kind to me in their descriptions.”

“She told us. And we got the lunch date off the next sheet on the pad, the old edge-of-the-pencil trick like you read in Agatha Christie. It works about as often as that line about not leaving town. You didn’t find anything else?”

I used the ashtray. “If I did, I’d be pretty stupid to admit it now, having withheld evidence in a murder for more than twenty-four hours. By now you’ve checked me out with Thirteen Hundred downtown. Some of them have told you I’m square as the Old North Church and some of them have told you I’d lie about the time of day in a clock shop. All of them are right, so far as they go.”

“I want to hear it anyway.”

“I didn’t find anything but a little dust, and not much of that. The amount of business Pingree did in that office wouldn’t have distracted him from his housekeeping.”

He took a hand off his ankle and held his thumb and forefinger an eighth of an inch apart. “I came that close to sending a unit for you when the word came back from Lansing on that partial. Warrant, handcuffs, the works. Then I reminded myself I’m one of the New Breed. You know, Freud in one pocket, Blackstone in the other. We don’t clip our toenails in public or beat suspects to death in the squad room. Not on Saturdays. The part of me that was trained by the sort of cop who practices twirling his nightstick in front of a mirror wanted to get you into interrogation without your belt and shoelaces. The part of me that signed up for a night course in Abnormal Psychology wanted even more to come down here and ask you why you’re so interested in the murder of someone you say you only knew for fifteen minutes.”

I said, “I’m a curious man, Sergeant. It’s one of the reasons I sit here day after day on my college degree and take jobs a cat wouldn’t bury for no money to speak of. I get to study the human condition, and I don’t even have to sign up for a night course. The number of clients you didn’t trip over on your way in here tells you I’ve got some time on my hands just now. When a harmless little guy like Pingree gets himself killed in a flashy way, I don’t want to wait to read about it in the papers.” I looked at my watch. “If you’re going to feed me the lay-off-or-else speech I wish you’d get to it and go. Nine hours is as long as I’m willing to work on weekends.”

“You’re a liar.”

“That’s the Old Breed talking.”

“I think you two were working something,” he said. “It wouldn’t be the first time we caught a bereaved partner rifling the office for cash or dope or whatever. I think you know who killed him and why, and if you don’t know you’ve got a good idea. As long as we’re checking watches, you have forty-one hours left to come to us with the package. After that it won’t matter which breed I belong to, I’ll send the wagon and you can cool your curiosity at County until I’m good and ready to hear what you have to say.”

“You’ll need a charge.”

“We talked to the neighbors. The cleaning crew was in early yesterday, there was an old lady sweeping up and a window washer on the fifth floor. The executive in charge of real property for the corporation that owns the building is in the Cayman Islands with his secretary, probably surfing on his bank account, so we don’t know yet what company the crew works for. The only other visitor to Pingree’s floor seems to have been the owner of a man’s voice his closest neighbor heard through the wall. It could have been your voice. I don’t know how they do things down here, but in East Detroit, suspicion of murder sticks long enough to sort some things out.”

I leaked smoke. “Oh, that. I’ve been in County a couple of times. It’s my Cayman Islands. It wouldn’t change the fact that I don’t know who killed Pingree. You don’t think I did it or you’d have come in here with help and called the newspapers later.”

He put his foot on the floor, leaned forward, and unzipped the briefcase. “Pingree shared a toilet down the hall with the other offices on the floor. There’s a crawl space behind the radiator with a panel that comes off so the plumber doesn’t have to punch holes in the wall to get to the pipes. The screws were rusty, but there was fresh steel showing in the slots where someone had been at work recently with a screwdriver. Otherwise we never would have thought to look behind the panel.”

I watched him remove a thick manila envelope and put it on the desk in front of me. It was stuffed full, splitting at the seams. The pre-printed address label, from the Professional Investigators Book Service of Denver, Colorado, was made out to Herbert S. Pingree. I thought I knew what was inside, and it threw every theory I had straight into the dumper.

T
HE THICK SHEAF
of papers was sticking out through the wrinkled flap. I put out my cigarette, pinched the bottom of the envelope, and pulled it free of its contents. I went through the stuff slowly, as if I were reading it for the first time. The composition books made me think of school.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation,
by Herbert Selwyn Pingree. Camping, swimming, drinking hydrocyanic acid.
Lost something?
Only my best lead.
In trouble?
Just with the law.
Call A. WALKER INVESTIGATIONS today for a free consultation. A kick in the head is our stock-in-trade. I
felt Trilby’s eyes on me like twin augers. And I had thought they weren’t cop’s eyes.

I was looking for something, but when I found it I didn’t spend any more time with it than I had with the other stuff. The page had been typed on heavy stock with a ribbon that needed replacing, hence the fuzzy copy I had been rapping my head against since yesterday. I went on through the bills and other miscellany to the end. It didn’t take me as long as it had the first time, but I didn’t just thumb through it either. Trilby watched me the whole time. When I was done I put everything back in order, straightened the edges, poked it back into the envelope, and sat back.

“Any of it spell anything?” asked the sergeant.

“I wish I had his hand. I have to type up all my notes or I can’t read them the next day.”

“The penmanship is satisfactory and the grammar is well above average, not a dangling participle or a misplaced first predicate in a carload. His arithmetic is okay too. I don’t know where he stood in geography, because I never got the chance to ask him the state capitals. When I want a handwriting analysis I’ll ask my sister. She does horoscopes too. She told me to avoid the company of jackass private eyes today, but I didn’t listen. You know what I want.”

“Just an observation. He might as well have used Sanskrit for what I got out of it. He kept an adequate record of a crummy practice, that’s it.”

“What about that typewritten piece? Everything else is in longhand.”

“A list of things to do, maybe, places to go. Maybe he bought a machine, didn’t like it, and took it back. I know a P.I. who used a shotgun on a brand-new word processor the first time it stuttered and lost an entire surveillance report.”

“Funny you should mention a surveillance report,” he said.

I cocked a hand. “It could be that. A damn sketchy one. Standard procedure is to record the subject’s actions at the places he visits and who he meets. Take pictures if possible. I didn’t see a camera in Pingree’s office.”

“His girlfriend said he talked about buying one and kept putting it off because he didn’t know an F-stop from the FAA. Notice anything else about this stuff?”

“Only that he was flush toward the end, settling bills and things. Maybe he hit the daily double at Hazel Park.”

“The horses don’t run in November. If he had a client, why wasn’t it in his records?”

“Maybe for the same reason he went to so much trouble to hide them. Ask your sister. Astrology isn’t my racket.”

“I’m wondering what is.”

“Look around, Sergeant,” I said. “This is it, this and a secondhand car and a little place outside Hamtramck you could blow over with garlic on your breath. It’s a successful business as far as it goes, but I’d trade it for a corner bar in Sterling Heights in a hot minute. You listen to the same problems in that line of work, but you don’t have to offer solutions. If I’m working all the angles, I’m worse at it than Pingree was.”