Sweet Women Lie (20 page)

“Freeze!”

Well, some of them still say it, in spite of the bad rap it’s gotten from television, and just then it sounded as sweet as anything I’d ever heard, because Sahara’s hand was out of his pocket now and I was looking up the inside of the suppressor screwed to the barrel of his Walther GSP, a twin of the automatic I’d taken away from his man Wessell. The shout, coming from the far end of the car, rattled him, but he didn’t take his eyes or the gun off me: SOP in a situation like that is to shoot your primary target and deal with the third party afterward. But the split second the shout brought me was enough to let me bring around the .38, which was still in my hand after all. The fact that I’d need a bulldozer to pull the trigger in my present condition was immaterial. It was one too many guns for him and he froze.

I was sitting up on the floor now with my shoulder against the vertical pole I’d been holding before. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the tramp in fatigues standing with his legs spread in the aisle, a revolver thrust out in front of him in both hands. “Drop it!” he shouted, adding another sterling phrase to the lexicon. “Now!”

I put an oar in. “Bill Sahara, meet Officer Mark Ashley of the East Detroit Police Department, Criminal Investigation Division. I think the wardrobe’s his.”

“Burack,” he corrected. “Ashley couldn’t make it. Drop the piece or I’ll blow you into the next car!”

He was getting better, but I didn’t have time to congratulate him. In the excitement, I’d missed the announcement that we were heading into the Grand Circus station. The car slowed and stopped. The doors opened at Sahara’s elbow and a woman in a fur coat stepped off the platform. Sahara hurled an arm across her throat, drew her against him, and rammed the suppressor under her chin. She had another chin to spare, and they both began to quiver. “Your turn, the pair of you,” he said. “I don’t have to tell you what happens if you don’t.”

A transit cop built along the lines of his counterpart in Trappers Alley, but with more hair and less birthmark, drew his Colt. Sahara changed his angle a notch to bring him into his field of vision. “You, too, brother. Let me hear them drop.”

It seemed longer than it was; the doors don’t stay open beyond thirty seconds. We were like that for a while, painted there like the artwork on the tiles, and then there was a flash of movement outside the windows and a noise that for an instant I thought was the report of the suppressed automatic, only it was too dull for that. Sahara arched his back, loosening his grip, and the woman ducked out from under with admirable reflexes and ran off kiyoodling toward the station exit, which was her earned right. Meanwhile Sahara’s legs did a slow fold and he slid down the pole at his back for a foot or so before sagging forward to his knees and then, ostrichlike, onto his face. The left bow of his eyeglasses came away from his ear. It all took probably less than ten seconds. Enough time anyway for Papa Frank Usher, wearing the same cut-rate sport coat and golf greens he’d had on when I met him, to take another step and swing his stick a second time, a short brutal expert arc. This time the noise was more emphatic. A black stream of the fluid the brain floats in joined the puddle of red on the floor from the first blow.

The doors tried to close, encountered Sahara’s gun arm lying across the threshold, and reversed directions, sending a silent signal to the central computer to shut down the entire system. As a symbol it was pretty poetry.

T
HERE WERE PLENTY
of cops around after that. A gang of uniforms from the Detroit Tactical Mobile Unit arrived minutes after the first officers on the scene and set up sawhorses to keep the Saturday night crowds at bay, followed closely by a pair of plainclothes detectives I knew slightly from 1300 Beaubien, Detroit Police Headquarters, who split us up for questioning. Officer Burack showed his East Detroit badge and credentials, but Usher stole his thunder with the impressive-looking CIA card in its neat leather folder and declined to provide any answers on the scene. He was as calm as a fence rail. The rest of us were still in the preliminaries when the detectives elected to take us down to 1300 and drop us in the inspector’s lap.

One more thing before we leave the Grand Circus station.

While the transit cop was busy holding back citizens before reinforcements arrived, I directed Burack’s attention away from Usher while he went through Sahara’s pockets. Later, amid the orderly confusion of cops at work, I got Usher into a corner.

“Did he have it on him?”

He nodded. “Also a pair of airline tickets one way to Panama, today’s date. I left those. Not the best place to hide from the Company, but from there he could have caught a boat or a plane to anywhere. Both tickets were in the name of Henry Deimling. Recognize it?”

“No, but I bet if you go back far enough you’ll find Henry’s obituary. Died in infancy. You know that dodge.”

“First week of training.” He got out a cigar and slid it along his lower lip, moistening the end. “Thanks for the diversion.”

“You didn’t have to hit him twice.”

“Sure I did. Just like I had to ride in the next car. He might have recognized me. Anyone ever tell you you’re not an easy man to follow?”

“I figured you’d keep up.”

He looked at his cigar. “Find out what you needed to know?”

“Only what I suspected going in. Sahara didn’t kill Pingree. He barely knew Pingree existed.”

“He’d have killed you, though. You and Burack and the woman and the rent-a-cop would’ve been dead thirty seconds after you dropped your guns. I’ve seen it before. When a field man of Sahara’s classification slips the harness he turns into a natural disaster.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“What would you have done if I hadn’t come along?”

“Shot him.”

“He’d still have killed the woman. He had trained reflexes.”

“That’s why I’m glad you came along.”

“It’s my job, son.”

“Just for the record, I think your job stinks.”

“It don’t smell any prettier from my side.” He produced an orange plastic throwaway lighter, looked around, spotted the no smoking sign, and put it away, smiling faintly behind his moustache; the rules you keep, the rules you break. “I know you don’t like what I stand for, son. I didn’t like what that little storm trooper Strendle stood for either. When you’re going down for the third time and a hand reaches out over the side of the boat you don’t look at it too close.” He put his out, tentatively.

This time I took it.

I was drinking a cup of paint thinner at a table in one of the interrogation rooms downtown when John Alderdyce came in. We hadn’t seen each other in months, and the change threw me. He had lost some more hair, throwing the bones of his coarse African face into even greater relief. Naturally bulky, he had in the months of physical inactivity behind an inspector’s desk put on at least thirty pounds. Soon he would be fat. He walked like a fat man and his camel’s-hair jacket, fashioned as always from the best material, was cut like a tent. He made his way around the table and dropped heavily into the only other chair, sitting with his knees spread to make room for a belly he didn’t have yet.

“How’s your arm?” he asked.

I rubbed it. “I banged the elbow when I fell. My fingertips are still numb, but I don’t have any piano recitals coming up for a while.”

“I read your statement. It doesn’t say why you brought along an East Detroit officer without notifying Detroit.”

“It was their case. Pingree was killed in East Detroit. Anyway I didn’t bring him along. I called up there and they sent down Burack. I was told he’d be wearing the homeless look.”

“He was out of his jurisdiction. I don’t have to tell you what you’re out of.”

“Take that up with his chief. Maybe they were afraid you’d fill the place with uniforms and scare Sahara off. It isn’t as if no Detroit cop ever made a bust up there without telling the locals what he was about.”

“Cops can get away with it, sometimes. Don’t forget it’s always open season on private heat.” He fished a half-empty pack of Chesterfields out of his shirt pocket and played with it, propping his elbows on the table. He’d been quitting smoking almost as long as he’d been smoking. “Why’d Sahara poison Pingree? Your statement wasn’t clear on that.”

“He didn’t.”

“Then maybe you can tell me why Sahara’s taking up morgue space here.”

“What did Usher tell you?”

“Usher?”

“Here he’s Pym, sorry. Spies.” I shrugged.

“He didn’t tell me anything. We’re all just kind of sitting around waiting for Washington to open shop so he can get orders. I thought maybe you’d help kill some time.”

“It’s goofy,” I said. “I wouldn’t buy a ticket if someone described it to me. I think Sahara agreed to meet me so he could clean house before he left the country. I think he had that in his mind from the start, once I’d established a new identity for him and made all the arrangements. I would have been the only thing to link him to his new life and he couldn’t afford to leave me in a talking condition. That business with Gail Hope and the quarter million proved I was honest, but he’d seen honest men broken when it was in someone’s interest to break them. He’d probably broken his share.

“Some of it was pride; an unaffordable luxury when your greatest goal in life is to be inconspicuous. He was a man who was supposed to know all the angles, he was being taken for a ride on a little death like Pingree’s, and I knew about it and was rubbing his nose in it. I admit I was shoving him pretty hard. He went over quicker than I expected. Usher happening along when he did made things a little less messy.”

“Usher — Pym, whatever — he had the contract on Sahara, that it?”

“So I gathered. The Company gets sore when you quit without two weeks’ notice.” I had left all mention of the list of agents out of my statement. It had seemed like enough without the list.

“So who killed Pingree?”

“Why ask, John? That’s East Detroit’s wagon.”

Someone knocked. He let whoever it was knock again, looking at me. Finally he got up and went to the door. There was a whispered conversation and Alderdyce left the room. A few minutes later he came back and stood by the table. “You must have voted right in the last election, Walker. You know the way out.”

I didn’t move. “Washington get back to you?”

“They called the commissioner, got him out of bed. He called me. I never knew what I was missing when I was just a lieutenant. You get your ass chewed out by a whole different class of people up here.”

“Sorry, John. If there was any other way to play it.”

“My ass can stand a little chewing. God knows it’s big enough these days. I’m still a peace officer, even if I do spend most of my time stapling crime statistics together. I like to think I’m making a difference. Only just about the time I think I’m doing that, along comes a piecework sleuth and a government spook to start dropping bodies in my lap, as if the four hundred others that got there ahead of it since January weren’t enough. Then as soon as I finish with my little broom and dustpan, someone whose window looks out on the Capitol Building instead of an airshaft snatches it away. Do me a favor and take it down the street. I’ve got a press statement to write and only two hours to make it sound like I didn’t just get back from Oz.”

I rose. “I wasn’t going to mention the weight gain. You ought to take up handball.”

He went out, leaving the door open.

Outside 1300 the sky behind Windsor was getting rosy. The freezing rain had left a knobby crust on the sidewalks and pavement. A salt truck grumbled around the corner on Jefferson. As the light in the east intensified, it prismed through the hoarfrost on the street lamps and on the concrete supports of the People Mover, as quiet now as bones in a museum; needling the downtown area in rainbow colors. The colors reminded me of where I wanted to go from there.

The cops had picked me up in a blue-and-white and turned me out without a ride, same as always. On Brush, a Checker cab let off a fare who smelled too freshly of liquor as I stepped past him to have come from anywhere but an after-hours joint. I sank into a black leather seat permeated with tobacco to its springs and closed my eyes. The driver’s “Where to?” woke me up.

“The Club Canaveral.”

I
PAID THE DRIVER
, a dark-skinned Arab who held my bill between his teeth while he made change from a White Owl cigar box in his lap. “You sure I can’t take you someplace else, mister?” he said. “The place looks closed.”

“Thanks. I’m sure.”

As he rolled off, tires spinning a little on the slick asphalt, I went down the alley next to the building and stopped in front of the brown fire door. Dead-bolt locks are only effective if your intruder doesn’t know how to pick the oldest, simplest Yale in existence. I made some scratches and barked a knuckle hard enough to start it bleeding and was inside in three minutes.

In the orange light of an exit sign I navigated my way past the rest rooms and across the dance floor, echoing like an aircraft hanger, to the office. Some of the dawn was coming in under the shades on the windows.

This lock was an ordinary spring latch and I slipped it in two seconds with one of the celluloid compartments from my wallet. There being no window in the office, I snapped on the ceiling light. The room was anonymous but for the Impressionist street scene hanging behind the desk, a no-nonsense place of business in contrast to the splashed pastels and camp posters in the nightclub itself. The air smelled faintly of something I recognized as Gail Hope’s perfume. Daughter Evelyn watched me wandering the room from her Lucite stand on the black steel desk.

I found it in the only place it could have been hidden, a wooden two-drawer file cabinet supporting a yellow fern in a hand-thrown clay pot. The typewriter was a Royal, one of the old gray manuals with rounded edges like a tank’s. I lifted it and carried it over to the desk, where it went like hell with the computer terminal on the nearby stand. I sat down and opened and closed desk drawers until I found some stationery and cranked a sheet into the machine. When I was through typing I tore out the sheet and compared it with a paper I took from my pocket. I’d typed the names of as many of the People Mover’s downtown stations as I could remember. The Royal’s lower-case
w
had a piece broken off and the
a
was slightly out of line. The sheet from Herbert S. Pingree’s effects showed the same flaws. The ribbon needed changing.