The Sundown Speech (7 page)

“Finished?” I said.

He touched a folded handkerchief to his upper lip. “Finished. Sorry I went on.”

“Don't be. It was wasted on me, for what it's worth. If it weren't for lawyers I'd be doing bodyguard work. I remember that rape case. The reporter's a Washington correspondent now.”

“Serves the bitch right.” He returned the handkerchief to his pocket and fussed with it until it stood to attention. “I'm going to make the case that Gunnar isn't a flight risk and try to get him released on his own recognizance. I feel sure I can at least get him out on bail. You can meet with him then, if he agrees.”

“What'll they use for money? She runs a bookstore and he's a cubicle rat for the university. When the owner of this place gets back from Spain, it's back to an efficiency apartment for them.”

He looked wry again. “It's back to pro bono for me, as a favor to a partner. He's representing the bookstore in a suit to shield its records from the Patriot Act. He's a dedicated civil libertarian.” He frowned. “I'm fairly certain this is a nonsmoking house.”

I shook out the match I'd used to light the cigarette and got up to wash it down the drain. I switched on the exhaust fan above the stove. He watched the smoke slither toward it, then broke a long tan cigar out of a leather case shaped like a rack of ribs and stuck a butane lighter under it. It smelled of Old Havana. You can get anything in Ann Arbor, and to hell with the embargo.

“I wouldn't read anything into Dante's silence,” I said. “He opened his mouth exactly twice the first time we talked, the second time to bellyache about the fifteen grand he'd paid Marcus for a share in his movie. If he killed him, he'd have made some effort to get it back. The place was a mess, but it hadn't been ransacked. Also I don't see him for an execution-style murder. When I say I'm a good judge of character, it's not idle boast. I've been thirty years developing it.”

“What do you suggest as an alternative?”

“Either his luck's worse than mine or he's in some kind of frame. I'm still curious about that toaster-oven box this Holly Zacharias saw Marcus take out to his car the night he was killed. People don't remember everything they saw right away. I want to ask her more about it. What was in it may tell me something.”

“I doubt it.”

“Me, too; but I've never been good at sitting on my hands.”

He clamped the cigar between his teeth and went into conference with his electronic pocket reminder. When he gave me the bald girl's number I wrote it in my low-tech notebook, lifted the receiver off a wall extension with a brushed-aluminum finish, and dialed. I spoke with two giggling intermediaries before a voice I recognized came on.

“The detective dude.” She sounded mellow. She'd progressed from beer to something stronger. “Naughty, naughty. You're no cop.”

“Next time don't assume.” I asked if we could meet.

“I'm late for work, but I'm off at two. I'm a waitron at the Necto.”

“What language is that, Frangi?”

“I push liquor in a nightclub. It's on East Liberty. Ask anyone in town.”

I looked at my watch. Four o'clock. Two meant 2:00
A.M.

“Past your bedtime, old-timer?”

“Mom's strict, but I'll climb down the trellis.”

“Lose the suit,” she said. “Last time one came in, half the customers took off out the back.”

The timber of Heloise Gunnar's snoring changed as I hung up. “You might want to stash the alcohol,” I told Suiz. “Somehow I don't think she's had the practice.”

He puffed a smoke ring and watched it crawl toward the exhaust fan. “I suspect it belongs to the owner of the house. The refrigerator's full of Perrier.”

“I thought you said you weren't sneaky.”

“I didn't.”

I grinned and washed the cigarette down after the match. “How far will my license bend if I invoke attorney-client privilege with the cops?”

“You're an officer of the court while you're in my employ. If they refuse to disclose anything about the case, call me.” He stood and gave me a card engraved on Louis XIV stock. “What's next? You've got hours before your appointment.”

“I've got twenty years on Holly. I need my beauty sleep.”

I drove back home, caught two hours, then put on a black T-shirt and the jeans I wore to the Laundromat. I'd bought a pair of black Nikes and seasoned them by throwing them a couple of dozen times against the wall of my garage. I rumpled my hair and put a pair of dark glasses in my shirt pocket. I didn't think I had time to stop off and get a tattoo.

The mirror said I was a middle-aged man skipping out for a night without the ball and chain. Just in case, I broke out the mad money and stuffed my wallet. That would make any door bouncer mistake me for Brad Pitt.

*   *   *

I didn't need an address; the place was lit up like a jukebox and the thump of bass set every window in the Cutlass buzzing. There was a line waiting to get in and no parking for six blocks. When I found a spot, behind a bank that had closed for the night, I took my time hiking back, but the line wasn't any shorter.

It was Goth Night; but then it would be. The clientele had hit every Halloween store in southeastern Michigan and there was enough armpit hair on display to knit a cyclone fence. The ogre at the door was built low to the ground, but bulged all over; even his triple chin had muscles. I gave him ten bucks to unhitch the velvet rope, skirted a small dance floor filled with the bobbing cast of an Anne Rice novel, and sat at a table the size of a Chiclet. The little combo plugged into the bandstand wasn't making any more noise than a six-engine jet carrying a cargo of loose ball bearings, but by the time a server appeared, my eardrums had grown enough callus to stop the bleeding.

“Detective dude! Looking less Republican. Last call.”

Strobes shot across the surface of my shades, but I recognized Holly Zacharias' mown head and the metal glittering on her face. A black jersey sheath hung straight down from her bare shoulders to the floor, where the hem splashed out in shards. She'd painted dark circles under her eyes and was holding up a tray of drinks. Now I knew where she got that rasp; shouting over that din would raise blisters on a slide trombone.

I shouted back that I was on the wagon and asked her to join me. She fished a cell phone from between her breasts, checked the time, shrugged, parked the tray on a vacant table, and plunked herself down in the chair opposite. A bouncer built like the chunk at the door, only extruded to six-and-a-half feet, gave me the hard eye from under a mop of peroxided bangs. I always bring out the worst in people who can cause me the most physical harm.

 

PART TWO

CUTAWAY

 

NINE

They closed down the Necto years ago; not for what happened that night, but for what happened on too many others. The combination of too many amateur drinkers, an overheated box of a room, and bad music provides its own brand of spontaneous combustion.

In a little while the lights came up, obliterating the purple twilight, and the patrons fled like startled bats. The band pulled the plugs on their instruments and started putting them away in cases. Impossibly youthful employees drifted through, scooping up glasses and bottles and dumping ashtrays, looking like players in a high school production of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
. One, squatter than Humpty Dumpty at the door but all suet, garters on his chubby legs, didn't look old enough to sling drinks; but then I got the impression it wasn't the only law the Necto regarded as a polite suggestion. The lumpy surfer-haired bouncer cracked his knuckles and yawned. Goth Night was history.

“Can I have one of those?”

I looked at the girl over the pack of cigarettes I was playing with. At 2:00
A.M.
, under the eight-ball haircut and behind the studs and Vampira makeup, she looked as fresh as spring water. I felt like rusty trickle from the faucet, and I'd had a nap.

“How old are you?”

“Old enough to play with matches. Teen smokers keep you up nights?”

“They're shooting each other in school hallways. I don't care if they smoke.” I dealt us each one and lit both. She squirted a jet at the ceiling without inhaling; she was addicted to the idea, not the tobacco. I felt a little less guilty then about her lungs. Sure, I cared. Refusing a request was no way to start an interview.

In that light I realized she was an attractive young woman. If she grew her hair out a little she'd have a Jamie Lee Curtis thing going on. The name would mean nothing to her, or anything else that predated the precise moment of her birth. The world never seemed to run out of lost generations.

“Tell me about that box you saw Jerry Marcus carrying to his car Saturday.”

“You stayed up past your bedtime for that? It was a box, Bee-Oh-Ex. Picture of some tacky appliance on it. One of those counter jobs no one really needs. Dude, our world's gonna turn into one big landfill long before global warming gets us.”

“It's a toaster oven, not Al-Quaeda.”

“Who said it was a toaster oven?”

“You did. Are you changing your story?”

“Shit. Stop talking like the Man. You're going to dress like us, act the part.” She shot another blank at the ceiling. “Could've been a baby microwave. Something I'll never have. I eat my veggies raw.”

“How was he carrying it?”

“On his head, like those women on the Exploration Channel. Where you think? In his hands.”

“High? Low? Did it look like it had something heavy inside?”

“You mean like Jerry's head? I didn't see anything about that on the news.”

“If you're going to ask a question every time I ask one, this is going to take a really long time.”

“Okay, okay. Keep your Depends on.” She squinted, scratching a fresh tattoo and playing a video from the past. “I'd say it was empty or close to it, the way he handled it, but he used both hands. He set it on the seat gentle.”

“Front or back?”

“What difference—?”

“Holly!” I snapped. Murph the Surf turned his head our way while talking with the bartender, a lady shot-putter with rings on every finger, like twin sets of brass knuckles.

“Sorry. Front, passenger's side, though I don't see why it's anything.”

“It isn't, except the more details you try to remember, the more come back on their own.”

“You mean like hypnosis? Awesome. Now I think of it, he did seem careful about not spilling anything out the hole. You think it was dope?”

“What hole?”

“There was a big hole in the side. Didn't I say that?”

“You left that part out.”

“Shit. You were right about remembering.”

“You were drinking when we talked.”

“Beers don't affect me. Not like Sean. Dude I was with on the porch? You could've been molesting me the whole time, he wouldn't've woken up. That's why the cops talked to me and let him walk. I just forgot about the hole. It was round, like it'd been cut out. Maybe that's where he hid his movie camera. Candid, you know?”

“Cops know about the hole?”

“If I mentioned it, I don't remember.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table, the cigarette leaking smoke straight up along her temple. “Maybe I need hypnotized again.” She thought a lopsided smile was sexy.

“I've got underwear older than you. Focus.”

A lower lip made a pout. “I don't guess it matters if I told them. They didn't seem too interested anyway.”

“They're trained not to. What else did you forget?”

She laid the cigarette in a shallow tin tray to smoke itself out and folded her arms on the table. “You can take off those bogus sunglasses. You look just like Tom Cruise. Not.”

I took them off and put them in my T-shirt pocket. I'd been wondering why the place still seemed dark. “Let's talk about Marcus' yellow Mustang.”

“Do we have to? It's what old guys drive when they can't get any action.”

“Marcus was thirty.”

“Duh. I
said
old.”

I jammed my stub into the tray. “Were you still on the porch when he came back in it?”

“Uh-uh. The game let out and we watched the jock lovers honk at each other and then I went back to the dorm.”

“That was when, about?”

“It was getting dark. Seven, I guess; in there. I'm not really into time.”

I sat back and watched the smoke from my dying cigarette climb toward the lights. My brain envied it. “The medical examiner said Marcus was killed sometime between three and seven. That makes him dead when you went home.”

“Maybe he parked around the corner and walked in through the back. That game traffic's thick as snot.”

“Cops found the Mustang torched on a country road. I got that from the radio on the way here. They think their suspect took it to get back to where he left his own car and someone stole it afterwards. That theory works until you picture the murderer having to look for it because it wasn't parked out front.”

She rolled a bare shoulder. When she did that, the six-pointed star tattooed on it seemed to open and close like one of those folded pieces of paper with different predictions written on it. My body remembered I'd slept, but my brain knew what time it was.

“You're the detective,” she said. “I don't like cop stories. I only sat down with you 'cause I've been on my feet all night. My roommates are in bed and I can't go to sleep for a long time after I get off work.”

The bouncer detached his forearms from the bar and came over on the balls of his feet like a dancer. His arms bent out from his body in a loving-cup effect; pumping iron shortens the tendons.

“Closing, Holly. Tell your pickup it's time to fall out.”