The Sundown Speech (16 page)

All to be expected, although not always all at once. That kind of dead-solid consistency belongs only to the inevitable sibilant sound of the bill sliding under the door at four in the morning, marked up 50 percent to address taxes.

A bulb in one of the lamps was burned out. The air in the nonsmoking room smelled of stale Chesterfields. I dismantled the smoke detector attached to the ceiling, but I needn't have bothered; the batteries were caked with green mold. I hung my jacket and tie in the open closet, kicked off my shoes, joined the bedbugs on the slick green coverlet, lit up, and blew a cloud of smoke toward a ceiling stained gold with nicotine. I broke the seal on the bottle and took a swig of putative Scotch. It tasted like gym socks put up in heather.

I had to laugh then. It was just the kind of place Mrs. Stevens had warned me I'd wind up in if I didn't play well with the other children in third grade.

 

TWENTY-ONE

Old motels are excellent conductors of sound. A TV murmured in an adjoining room, toilets flushed, a shower whooshed, whistled, and shut off with a thump. An alarm clock buzzed and kept buzzing for five minutes. A wing of the place was reserved for extended-stay guests; this one was a nightwatchman or a jazz musician or worked the graveyard shift at a plant, and he slept as hard as a bear in January. I anesthetized myself with a second glass and drifted off, but liquor has a backlash effect, snapping you into full wakefulness an hour or two after you pass out. I got up, cleared the coins out of the track, opened the window, and stood there smoking. Nothing doing down in the parking lot: no shadowy figures smoking cigarettes in doorways, not even a muttering old dog lifting its leg against a lamppost. But always the hum of tires on Washtenaw Avenue and on the US-23/I-94 interchange. If you closed your eyes and used your imagination it might have been the surf off Maui; but only if the heater worked.

It was a time for quiet reflection, of taking stock of one's choices, past and present; but all I saw was my own tired reflection in the glass, and my portfolio was empty. I ditched the butt, put the window back together, and went back to bed.

*   *   *

The same construction crew that had been working on every motel I'd ever checked into was up at dawn, pneumatic hammers whirring and thudding, roto-mills chewing up asphalt, power saws wailing like Godzilla on the pot. I stood under needle spray for ten minutes, scraped my chin, put on the same suit but fresh everything else, and went down to savor the pleasures of the continental breakfast.

The same fly was drifting around inside the glass cover, browsing this time among a pile of bagels that looked hard enough to bust a window. There was the usual mess of scrambled eggs, runny as a rain gutter, bruised bananas, individual-size boxes of Sugar Frosted Diabetes, and not enough flatware. I decided the coffee wouldn't kill me, but the yellow stuff that trickled out of the spigot argued the point. I dumped it, cup and all, in the trash can and went to the desk in the lobby.

A different clerk, this one a short blonde, was at her computer. They used to be all the time sorting mail; now their eyes are pasted to an Etch A Sketch. She asked if I'd enjoyed my stay.

“You forgot my spa appointment.”

“I'm sorry?”

“It was fine. You need to replace one of the lightbulbs.”

After I left, I felt ashamed of myself for the spa remark. I'd stayed worse places.

A chicken wearing a chef's hat on the sign of the restaurant next door advertised family dining. Inside the converted double-wide house trailer I sat at a laminated table near the windows and ordered steak and eggs and coffee. A white-haired couple at the next table discussed storm windows the whole time I waited.

The waitress brought back a shoe heel and a single fried egg; but the coffee turned my electrolytes back on.

A six-year-old boy dressed like Dennis the Menace—striped shirt, overalls, the works—toddled my way and stood watching me eat. I was getting a lot of that lately; I must look like someone's grandfather.

I glanced around for the boy's parents, but the only likely candidate, a thirtyish woman reading the classifieds in the
Observer,
wasn't paying attention. I smiled at the kid and asked if he was going to grow up to be a cowboy.

That ended his interest in me. He toddled off straight to Mr. and Mrs. Storm Windows and climbed onto a chair. I wondered, not for the first time, if I was in the wrong line of work.

Passing the crew in the motel parking lot, I kept alert. Nobody ducked in and out of hedges, no helicopters buzzed me. I wasn't worth the fuel.

But I was worth something.

An Ypsilanti cruiser passed me going the other direction on Washtenaw, slowed as it drew abreast of the Cutlass. At the stoplight at Carpenter Road, I watched in the rearview as it swung into a strip mall, then out through the exit into my lane, stopping a couple of cars back.

It didn't have to mean anything. It might have had nothing to do with Lieutenant Karyl enlisting all the neighboring departments to look for an ancient blue Oldsmobile fastback with my number on the plate. The prickling on the back of my neck could mean there was too much starch in my collar.

When the cruiser followed me onto I-94 West and then onto the State Street exit, I knew I'd moved up on Karyl's list. That meant he wasn't any closer to laying hands on Jerry Marcus than he had been, and he needed Holly Zacharias more than ever to smoke him out. He'd have checked all the flights, and probably thought I had her stashed somewhere instead of on a train to Chicago.

Anyway, that was the hope. As long as he kept the tag on me, the better her chances of her not opening the door of her father's house to the local constabulary.

After crossing Eisenhower Parkway, the lights flashed and the siren sounded, a brief warning growl. I pulled over. After the usual wait designed to make you sweat through the upholstery, both doors swung open and they came my way, walking in Quentin Tarantino slow-motion the way they do, hands resting on sidearms. They sandwiched me. I never saw the partner's face on the passenger's side, just his midsection in a crisp shirt and the junk wagon belt with all its paraphernalia. The one on my side was fortyish, with a brown moustache clipped military fashion, a pedal-shaped jaw, and the standard mirrored sunglasses.

“Good morning, Officer. There's a revolver in the glove compartment. I've got a permit.”

He asked for it, along with my license, registration, and proof of insurance. He had a light Southern accent; Kentucky, maybe.

He looked at the stuff. “You're Amos Walker?”

I had a number of clever answers ready, none of them appropriate. I said I was.

“Get out of the car, please.”

I did, and stood for the frisk, feet spread, leaning on my hands on the hood, while the faceless partner opened the glove compartment.

Kentucky said, “Will you follow us, please?”

“I'm not under arrest?”

“Someone just wants to see you. If you prefer, you can ride in the cruiser and Officer Brindle will follow in your car.”

I elected to drive.

We headed downtown, as of course we would. I switched on the radio. There was a traffic update, then the weather, then a teaser promising an important new development in the Ann Arbor murder, after the station break. The light baritone at the mike made it sound like he was reporting the results of a contest.

“The Ann Arbor murder;” quaint. In Detroit we just assign them a number.

*   *   *

I slid the pointer all the way right and left, but the old conspiracy was still in place: All the stations had gone on break at the same time. I went back to the first. The news reader's voice, resonant and lighthearted, announced that the murder victim the Ann Arbor Police had identified as Jerry Marcus wasn't, despite DNA evidence that had seemed to confirm the matter, and that Marcus was now being sought for the murder. Who the victim was, and how modern forensic science had managed to confuse him with his killer, had turned a fairly routine killing into a mystery. It was no wonder this guy was having such a good time. Last night's Pistons victory was a letdown after that.

A woman at the next station I tuned into had more. Fingerprints and ballistics had established a direct connection between Marcus and the shooting of a bouncer in front of the Necto Nightclub early the previous morning.

None of this was new, of course; Karyl had sat on the details as long as he dared. Just like in a romantic comedy, you have to come clean before the woman finds it all out by herself, and the media is nothing if not a woman you had to court the old-fashioned way or plunge into a world of pain. But I listened to it all as if it were new, on the off-chance hearing it laid out by a stranger might trigger something. It didn't.

As I leaned over to switch off the radio, I spotted a gray minivan in my right-hand mirror, tailgating the car in the lane next to mine. I wouldn't have thought anything about it, except for the driver's curly head and elfin face.

Where he got the wheels didn't matter. Even an amateur movie director knows a little about a lot of things, and this one needed a trailer just to carry his IQ around.

His resemblance to the dead man was eerie. I felt a theory beginning to sprout, in the dark, like the eyes on a potato. It made as much sense as anything else in the case, and as much as anything else nothing at all.

 

TWENTY-TWO

We turned off Main Street onto Fourth, a block short of the street where the police station stood. It wasn't a mistake; the Kentucky Kop signaled the turn a hundred yards ahead to make sure he didn't lose me. When two unoccupied meters came up, the cruiser swung into the curb. I took the one behind. When I got out, the officer who'd been driving pointed at my meter. I went back and cranked everything I had into it: For all I knew I wouldn't be back for not less than one year nor more than five.

So he was a company man. Only not so much he dropped a lousy two bits into his own meter; it was blinking red. I knew there was something about his moustache I didn't like.

He left his partner to monitor the radio and we walked south. The sun was bright, but our breath curled in the air. There were still some tank tops, shorts, and flip-flops about. I put my summer wear away in October, but it was a local thing. In Florida the polar coats and mukluks would have come out.

We'd lost the van, or it had lost us, at the last turn. I figured Jerry Marcus had found a space past the corner. Where he'd go from there was the first easy thing about this job.

At Washington we crossed to the other side. There was a barbecue place up ahead, with an orange neon sign. I asked who was buying.

The cop said nothing; he was as good as his moustache.

We passed the place. Just beyond it he opened a door and held it for me. He reached behind his back and brought out my Chief's Special in its clip. “He says you can have this back.” He didn't follow me inside.

It was a bookstore, and from the smell it dealt in used books mostly. The smell was of fusty paper, desiccated bindings, and petrified library paste; dry rot, to the unromantic. Fetid. The atmosphere of an Egyptian tomb exposed to the sun after three thousand years.

I supposed; I'd never been closer than a midnight showing of
The Mummy.
It had its charms. I can read a book and let it go, but I'm not immune. Dead movie stars glowered out from posters and black-and-white stills hanging at Krazy Kat angles on the walls that weren't entirely covered with books. Somewhere a stereo was playing swing. In Ann Arbor it's possible to pass between three centuries in fifteen minutes.

Ancient writings. Archaic music. A place out of time.

A bookstore.

The layout was split-level. I climbed a short flight of steps to where a long-haired refugee from Woodstock looked up from behind a desk piled with old paperbacks. He wore a T-shirt with a ferret on it over a raveled sweatshirt. He would smell like the store, couldn't avoid it.

“Welcome to Aunt Agatha's,” he said. “First time?”

“Yeah. What keeps the walls from collapsing into the basement?”

He took me literally. “Previous owner had them double-reinforced.” His voice fell to a whisper. “It used to be an adult bookstore.”

“The hell you say.”

“Can I help you find anything?”

I slid a cigarette into my mouth. “I'm looking for a man.”

“Uh, this isn't the place for that. Also there's no smoking.”

“I'm just gumming it. The man I'm looking for is named Karyl; looks like the third guy from the left in the evolution chart?”

He paled a shade. I followed his gaze to the back of the store, where the lieutenant was flipping through the pages of something with a woman undressing on the glossy cover. She wore scarlet lipstick and black underwear. There was more of her in various hair colors and varieties of nudity on the walls, blown up to poster size. The artists must have ordered their pink paint by the barrel and applied it with a roller.

“This is where I like to spend my lunch hour,” Karyl said, slipping the book back into its slot on a shelf. “I love a good mystery.”

“I thought you professionals made fun of them.”

“Not me. They help take my mind off work. My wife thinks I'm ruggedly handsome, by the way.”

“I can see it.” I grinned. “I had to take the last couple nights out on somebody. I figured if I got you mad enough you'd finish me off clean.”

“That's not how we work here.”

“It was a joke, Lieutenant.”

“You're a funny guy. Especially behind the wheel.”

“I bet Blue Ford went straight to the airport.”

“
Both
airports; and his name is Barlow. We got him straight off the mayor's detail in Detroit, and cheap: Enough is enough, you know?”

“More than enough,” I said. “It's a great place for someone like me to work.”