Angel Eyes (2 page)

“I’m about to disappear, Mr. Walker,” she said. “Very suddenly and very soon.”

“Voluntarily?”

“No.”

“Have you been to the police?”

She laughed again. This time there was an edge to it. “I’ve danced professionally since I was fifteen. I know what cops think of dancers, and they aren’t likely to spend many tax dollars looking for one that’s missing. Or one that’s about to be. It’s one of the hazards of the profession, like rape for prostitutes. Besides, I’m a rugged individualist. I prefer to choose my own rescuer.”

“You lie lousy, Miss Maringer.”

Anger flushed her cheeks, only to fade when she saw it wasn’t reflected in my face.

“Does it bother you?” she asked.

“I’m used to it. Only priests hear the truth first time through. I don’t have their clout. When you’re ready to part with it, I’m in the book.”

We locked glances for a moment, like two strange cats sizing each other up in the gloom of a back alley. The nymphet who had been dancing when I came in finished a second number. The music paused for a beat, then started up again. “Angel Eyes.” It made my companion anxious.

“That’s my number. I’m covering for another girl. Here’s my address; it’s right down the street.” She fished a folded scrap of paper out of the valley between her breasts and handed it to me as she got up. “I’m off at two. We’ll talk there. That is, if you’re interested.” The blue eyes brimmed over with entreaty.

I rose. “Can you afford me, Miss Maringer?”

She glanced impatiently toward the stage and the vamping band, then, impulsively, tugged the sparkler off her finger and pressed it into my palm. “That will bring seven hundred and fifty from any honest jeweler. It’s worth far more. It should buy me three days.”

“After that, what?”

“After that, don’t bother.” She hurried away.

I turned back toward the table and almost bumped into the hulking waiter.

“Did you get an earful?” I asked him.

He handed me the bill and moved off without a word.

I finished my drink, paid, and left while she was still dancing. Pausing before the door to adjust my hat and coat, I heard someone shifting his weight on the other side and moved to make room for the customer’s entrance. The door remained closed. Nerves tingling, I transferred my Smith & Wesson from its snap holster to the right-hand pocket of my coat and depressed the thumb latch on the door. It swung inward of its own weight. Someone’s vaporized breath swirled in the cold air outside.

“It does my heart good to see a waiter waiting,” I said.

He’d been standing on the sidewalk. Silently, with that economy of movement an athlete never forgets, he leaped down into the shallow stairwell that led up to the street. He had drawn a sheep-lined jacket on over his red shirt. And he was carrying a baseball bat.

“Gimme that ring.” He brandished the club.

I fingered the gun in my pocket but decided against using it. His choice of weapons was too tempting. Taking my hesitation for obstinance, he whooped and swung the bat at my head. I ducked and jabbed the stiffened fingers of my right hand into his solar plexus. His heavy jacket prevented the blow from penetrating too deeply, but he doubled over retching and I got my hands on the bat. Grasping it by both ends, I twisted it from his grip, stepped sideways, and brought my arms down over his head, pulling back and forcing the weapon against his throat.

I didn’t have to do anything more, just increase the pressure and it would have been all over except the inquest. Instead, I let go of the bat and brought my right hand chopping against the side of his neck. He whimpered and oozed into a puddle at my feet.

“Never stick-fight with an ex-MP,” I told the twitching mess on the landing. It was lost on him.

No one inside had heard the scuffle. I was still standing there when a flamboyantly dressed black with a white woman on his arm started coming down the stairs. He saw me and stopped. I read the emotions on his ginger face and knew that I was never going to explain the situation to his satisfaction. I sighed and aired the revolver.

The woman gasped. She was a redhead with a complexion that looked impossibly pale beside her companion’s. I said, “Go in and have a good time, folks. The lounge is closed.”

He considered the situation. He hadn’t acquired the wherewithal to buy those clothes by taking foolish chances. I was relieved, but not surprised, when at length he tightened his grip on the woman’s arm and ushered her past me without looking back. I closed the door behind and, stepping over the waiter, sprinted for my car before a posse could be rounded up. I didn’t know then how much grief that little scene would cost me.

I
T HAD BEEN
a long time since my last bar fight, and by the time I got to my office on Grand River I had the shakes pretty good. I hoisted the bottle out of the desk, poured my first unwatered-down drink of the evening, and nursed it thoughtfully. Then I switched on the desk lamp and got out Ann Maringer’s ring to study it. That bought me exactly nothing. Glass or not, it went into my ancient safe to await appraisal while I made another donation to my alcohol system.

I checked my watch. It was too late to go home and too early to meet my client, and in any case I didn’t want to show my face there again until I was sure the lynch mob had dispersed. I propped my feet up on the desk and went to sleep.

When I awoke it was almost two o’clock. The drinks had caught up with me. My eyes ached and my mouth was glued shut. Donning Polaroids against the glare of street lights and headlamps, I cranked up my battered Cutlass and took my time negotiating the labyrinth of thaw-slick streets that are Detroit in early spring. As a result I was half an hour late by the time I reached the address on Cass.

Cass Corridor. Fire Alley, the boys on the Detroit Fire Department call it, that neighborhood being the arson capital of the so-called inner city. Most people avoid it even in broad daylight, some from righteous indignation over its thriving hooker trade, others because the Cass Corridor Strangler remains at large five years after the killing ceased. After two in the morning, when the bars and bowling alleys vomit their clientele out onto the street, the area boils briefly, then settles back into sullen dark complacency as it waits to swallow the occasional lone transient. The magic word
Renaissance
opens no doors on Cass.

Ann Maringer’s building was a grimy brickfront as old as the eight-hour workday, its upper floors scorched and their windows boarded up after a recent fire, not its first. The foyers dark but for a streak of greasy moonlight sliding through a broken pane, was strewn with cracked and curled linoleum tiles and stank of cooked cabbage. The smell grew stronger as I climbed the narrow, complaining staircase. Rats’ claws clattered behind the walls as I advanced, their owners scrabbling ahead of me like nasty leaves before a fresh gust.

The apartment was on the third floor, at the end of a flyblown hall painted mustard-yellow above the wainscoting. Harsh light spilled through the open doorway over the gnawed rubber runner. Something else had spilled out with it. A man’s arm.

The rest of him lay on his stomach just inside the threshold, where he had collapsed after using his last ounce of strength to reach up and pull open the door. Part of his red uniform shirt showed garishly above his sheepskin collar. I reached down and felt his neck for a pulse. I could have saved myself the trouble. He had swung his last baseball bat. His flesh was still warm. There was pink froth on his lips and his eyes were white gashes in the mottled face.

Fighting back nausea, I stepped over him into the apartment. The room was cheaply furnished but clean, except for a dark crimson smear some six inches wide matting the carpet from the body to a door on the opposite side of the room, which yawned open. This led into a bedroom just large enough to contain the object for which it was named, a stand supporting a lamp with a white china base, and a peeling dresser. Here the stink of cordite was stronger than that of the cabbage.

The top of the dresser was littered with bottles and jars containing the things women use to ward off time, nothing very costly or difficult to obtain. Woman’s clothing, neatly folded, filled the drawers, their labels bearing the names of chain stores in the area. An open box of sanitary napkins lay demurely beneath a stack of nylon slips.

The unmade bed yielded nothing more interesting. There was room for only one on the narrow mattress, which would disappoint a lascivious cophouse reporter I knew on the
Free Press.
A faded pair of woman’s jeans and a brown cotton pullover had been flung carelessly across the footboard. A brassiere lay on the floor beneath. Near that was a worn track shoe, too small for most men. I found its mate under the bed.

A light spring jacket hung in the narrow closet next to an empty hanger. Two pairs of shoes designed for fancier and more feminine dress than that required by the track shoes were lined up on the floor like patient sentinels. On the top shelf reposed an expensive calfskin suitcase, not new. I hoisted it down, getting dust on my clothes, and opened it. It was empty.

In the other room, besides the dead man, were the usual furniture, a carton of Bel Airs with three packs gone, magazines, dime-a-dozen landscapes in frames bolted to the walls. A black vinyl shoulder bag slouched wearily on a table near the door. Among the normal junk inside I found one of the missing cigarette packs and a wallet containing three twenties, a couple of fives, and a single. And a bank book showing a balance of three hundred and forty-six dollars.

There was no kitchen in the apartment. The bathroom would be down the hall. Something was missing. No doubt Miss Marple would finger it right away, the presence of a corpse notwithstanding. I was still working on it when I turned and spotted the uniformed cop watching me from the doorway. His youthful face looked frightened, but his gun was drawn, and in that moment I realized with an empty feeling that so was mine.

“It’s a stinking shame they took away our cattle prods.”

The speaker was a plainclothes sergeant, black, in shirt sleeves, with a round slick face the unhealthy gray of cooked liver. The room, claustrophobic and bare but for the chair I was sitting in, was one of the interrogation cells I’d seen a dozen times at police headquarters. This was my first time in the seat of honor. I asked him what time it was. They’d taken my watch.

“Where you’re going they measure time with calendars.” He thrust his face to within two inches of mine. His breath smelled like an ashtray. “Like I was saying, a jab or two with one of those little electric mothers and you’d remember everything right down to the Preamble to the Constitution.”

I said, “I’m surprised you’ve heard of it.”

“Don’t smart-mouth me, nigger-killer. Who’s to say you didn’t attack me and force me to defend myself by turning that pretty face into Silly Putty?”

I grinned. He backhanded me across the mouth. I grinned again, feeling blood trickle down my chin from my split lip. He reached back for a swipe in the other direction. His partner caught his arm.

“That’s how guys get rich in this town,” the partner told him calmly. “Suing the police for brutality.”

Shorter than his partner but built more solidly, this one had a mop of curly yellow hair and stiff eyebrows to match, which stood out against his ruddy complexion like bristles caught in fresh paint. His light blue eyes were inclined to sparkle and his mouth was fixed in a constant tight-lipped smile. He looked like somebody’s uncle.

His partner didn’t think of him that way. Their gazes locked for a moment, and the gray went out of his face as suddenly as if a tap had been thrown open somewhere in his system. He said, “Okay,” quietly, and his arm was released. Pouting, he rubbed circulation back into his wrist while the other handed me a handkerchief to stop the bleeding.

“You fell, right?”

I looked at him, at his twinkling eyes, and said, “Yeah, right.” I mopped my chin with the handkerchief. There wasn’t as much blood as I’d thought. Not as much as there could have been. He watched me.

“You’ll have to excuse Sergeant Cranmer. He hasn’t been the same since the Miranda decision. You might say it broke his spirit.” He fished a crushed pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and offered me one.

“What kind?” I asked.

“Luckies.”

“Forget it.”

He shrugged and put away the package without taking one for himself. “It’s almost five,” he said, answering the question I’d forgotten about. “You’ve been in here an hour and a half. Too long to stick with that story you gave us.” His voice was soothing.

“But long enough to run a ballistics test on the slug you dug out of the waiter’s body and prove it didn’t come from my gun,” I replied. “And your good cop, bad cop routine has whiskers.”

His smile faltered, and for a moment it looked as if he might cuff me himself. But his gyroscope held true. Calmly he said, “We’re still waiting for the report, but it’s a fact your gun hadn’t been fired recently. It wouldn’t be the first time a job was done with a throwaway piece, ditched in favor of another weapon for protection.”

“Brilliant deduction, Lieutenant. I bet in high school you used a corkscrew for a slide rule.”

“You were seen fighting with the victim earlier, after which you made your escape in a blue ’70 Cutlass, license number GJZ-600. The uniform who took that report spotted the vehicle parked in front of the apartment building and found you standing over the victim with a gun in your hand. The apartment’s being searched and I’ve got men combing the alley next to the building. When they find a murder weapon we’ll see what we can do about bringing back capital punishment in this state.”

I didn’t like it. His case was flimsy as a hotel room chair, but if the killer had happened to dump the widowmaker in the vicinity, I wouldn’t see daylight for a week. “Who called the cops?”

His smile was blandly diabolical. “Nice try, Walker. This department doesn’t invest in revenge.”

“What’s my motive? I won the fight.”

“Maybe that wasn’t enough. Maybe you were interrupted before you had a chance to finish the job and came back later to follow him until a better opportunity arose.”