Angel Eyes (22 page)

Montana said, “Bill, relax. You checked out Walker yourself. You know he’s into no one but himself.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to like him,” snapped the other. “He’s got a lot of smart mouth.”

I had stood to face him. We were about the same height. “You’re Janet Whiting’s son?”

“And Arthur DeLancey’s. Not that he ever acknowledged it, even in private.” He fingered the object in his pocket idly. It didn’t make much of a bulge. I figured it for a small-caliber weapon, possibly a .25. Not that the size of the bore mattered much at this distance.

“I knew there was something familiar about you. She raised you?”

“As best she could, under the circumstances. You grow up fast when you have to spend three nights a week on the streets while your mother’s home entertaining.”

He spat the last word. I said, “DeLancey wouldn’t help?”

“She never asked him for anything. He never even knew she was living in Detroit until they happened to meet at a taxi stand. That’s when she picked up where they had left off. She had to. I was in jail on a breaking and entering rap and she needed the money to raise bail. Even then, he was the one who made the offer. He thought he was buying her a new wardrobe. A man like Judge Arthur DeLancey couldn’t be seen with a part-time whore in bargain basement clothes.”

“Don’t talk about her like that!” Montana snarled.

“Who’s the gun for?” I asked.

The union chief started. He seemed to notice his secretary’s hidden hand for the first time. “Take that damn thing out of your pocket! All I need is you getting pinched for carrying a concealed weapon. I’m trying to change this union’s image, not propagate it.”

“Call it an heirloom. Handed down to me by my beloved father.” He took out the hand, revealing a one-shot derringer in his palm.

It was the Forehand & Wadsworth that Billings had told me about, a cheap belly gun cranked out by the hundreds between 1870 and the turn of the century. The nickel plating had worn down to dull steel in spots, and the ivory grip was as yellow as horses’ teeth. It was scarcely longer than a man’s index finger. But it could kill. So could a man’s index finger, for that matter.

I put out my hand and he gave it to me, just like that. I sniffed the barrel. It smelled of freshoil, like vanilla extract. I found the release, pivoted the barrel, and tapped out the cartridge. It was a modern centerfire, which this model was equipped to handle. I pointed the pistol toward the window and peered inside the barrel. No dust. It had been cleaned and oiled recently. I replaced the cartridge and rolled the barrel back into place.

“I’ll hold onto this for now, if you don’t mind,” I told Clendenan, putting it in my pocket. “You don’t look like the sort of man who’s used to carrying a gun around. Where’s your father?”

“This is news to me.” Montana was standing behind his desk with his hands flat on the top, staring at his secretary. “Why didn’t you tell me he was still alive and that you knew where he was?”

Clendenan stared back. “I didn’t trust you. I didn’t trust anyone. Especially not him.” His eyes flicked in my direction, then back to his employer.

“Maybe you trust the police.” I took a step toward the desk, reaching for the telephone.

“Try calling them with two broken arms.”

The secretary’s voice was hoarse with warning. It made me hesitate. Hard knots showed at the corners of his jaw.

“Who are you going to get to do it?” demanded Montana. “Not my bodyguards. They take their orders from me.”

“Is that what you think?” Clendenan crossed in front of me, leaned over the desk and flipped on the intercom, which Montana had turned off. “Okay.”

The bodyguards entered, the one wearing glasses in front. They closed the door and took up positions on either side of it, their hands folded before them. Except for the Ivy League look they might have stepped off a B-movie set. Every once in a while Hollywood nails it square on the nose.

The union chief tore off his own glasses with a savage gesture. “What the hell is this? I didn’t call you in here. Get back outside where you belong!”

Neither of them moved.

The secretary smirked. “I spend more time with them than you do. One of the disadvantages of being dedicated and locking yourself in the office twelve hours at a stretch. The eight months you spent in stir helped. They take your pay, but they take mine too, and more of it. You’re always asking me why I need such a large expense account. Now you know.”

Montana ignored him. He stalked from behind his desk and confronted the bespectacled guard, glaring up at the man, who towered nearly a foot above him. “I told you to get out.”

A brief look passed between the guard and Clendenan. Suddenly a huge hand lashed out and Montana went reeling. The guard hadn’t moved another muscle, just his forearm. But his employer had to clutch at the edge of the desk with both hands to keep from falling. The right side of his face was red, and he was wheezing like an asthmatic. I suddenly realized that he wasn’t healthy.

“You’re always saying that the public is afraid of violence.” His secretary’s voice was taunting. “That it’s the brutal few and not the meek that will inherit the earth. You’ll be happy to know I haven’t forgotten a thing you taught me.”

“I treated you like a son,” gasped the other. He was staring at the battered and discolored object on his desk, scribbled over with names like Kaline and Freehan and Northrup and

Lolich, names that rang no longer from loudspeakers on sunny days where men gathered to play ball before cheering crowds.

Clendenan laughed harshly. “Why? Because I once gave you a moth-eaten souvenir of a dead baseball team for Father’s Day? Or to salve your conscience because of what happened in Huron? The only father I’m interested in is my real one. He’s got millions. He’s no washed-up jailbird. Show him, Tim.”

The other guard, slimmer than his partner, towheaded and freckling at the tops of his cheeks, tugged a big automatic from inside his coat and covered the room. In his hand the Army Colt looked like a lady’s purse gun. Clendenan held out his hand.

“The derringer, Walker. Carrying guns is like eating peanuts, hard to give up.”

I fished it out carefully and watched him return it to his own pocket. “Shall I wrap us up, or will you kill us here?” I asked.

“Always the card. No one’s going to be killed if I can help it. You’re getting your wish, to meet the late Judge DeLancey. And my mother.”

“They’re together?” Montana had managed to pull himself upright, though he continued to use the desk as support. His color was returning in patches, under a sheen of perspiration. “Where?”

“At my house. The one you bought for me in Grosse Ile. I assume you want to accompany us out there. I’m no kidnaper.”

I indicated the towhead’s .45. “What’s that, a corsage?”

The secretary smiled wearily. “Like the farmer said, ‘First you got to get his attention.’ Okay, Tim.”

The automatic returned to its hiding place beneath the bodyguard’s left arm.

“Just don’t forget he has it,” warned Clendenan. “Let’s go.”

The staff hardly glanced at us as we passed through the outer office. Montana in the middle of a flying wedge made up of his secretary, the guards, and me. If anyone noticed that the boss looked a little under the weather, none reacted. The uniformed guard got up to hold the door open for us. No one said anything in the elevator on the way down.

The situation in the parking lot was still simmering as we emerged from the building. The gang of steelhaulers spotted us and crowded in tightly, shouting to attract Montana’s attention. They made “Phil” sound like a royal title. The harried cops moved in to clear a path.

My eyes met those of the blocky leader just before Tim shouldered him into the waiting arms of a husky young officer with a walrus moustache. To my back he snarled, “Sell him a policy yet?”

“What’s that about?” Clendenan wanted to know. We kept moving, striding swiftly through the momentary opening in the wall of humanity.

“Mistaken identity,” I replied.

We waited in the aisle while Tim brought around our wheels, a midnight blue Cadillac limousine with blacked-out windows and a finish like patent leather. With both guards up front there was room enough for the three of us and a bowling alley in the deep back seat. There was a telephone in the car and a portable bar.

“Where do you keep the stewardess?” I asked. “In the glove compartment?”

“You’ve got wit, shamus. What you lack is timing.” The secretary watched the scenery slide by the window as Tim wheeled us expertly through the lot and out onto Jefferson.

We turned west, where the street lights were just coming on. The sun was below the Detroit skyline. Tim turned on the heater against the gathering chill. It hissed softly, like snakes in a barrel.

“Why the tour?” I reached for a Winston and came up with an empty pack. Clendenan offered me one of his. Kools. I accepted it resignedly and lit up.

“To get you off my back. I’ve seen enough to know you don’t stop rooting around until you’ve uncovered something. This way maybe you won’t do so much damage.”

“That stinks.”

He shrugged and watched the buildings go by.

“How’d you get the gun away from DeLancey?” I sucked hard on the coffin nail, but it still tasted like the cotton that dentists stuff into the mouths of helpless patients.

“He gave it to me.”

I said, “I guess I’m trying to come up with a clever way to get you to tell me the whole story.”

“Krim took the derringer away from the Judge when he tried to threaten him out of his blackmail scheme.” He continued to gaze out the window. “DeLancey—you’ll excuse me if I don’t call him Father—wasn’t so good at killing when he was face to face with his intended victim. The Arab held onto it because an unregistered firearm can be a useful item. He had it with him the night he followed Bingo Jefferson to my mother’s apartment, and used it to kill him when he figured the bodyguard had too much education. Mother had a gun, too, but Krim had another, a thirty-two automatic, and it didn’t take long to disarm her.

“DeLancey was staying in an apartment in Troy, where he’d moved from the house he’d been living in under another name out West since his disappearance. There were rumors that the IRS was about to nose into Griffin Carbide’s affairs, wondering why the business was still making investments five years after it filed for bankruptcy; he came back to juggle all the company’s holdings into several other dummy firms he’d set up at the same time, just in case. He thought if he tangled things further, not even the computers would be able to sort them out. Krim stashed Mother with him, along with a reminder that if she got away, everything would be out in the open. DeLancey agreed. He had assistants, of course, though none of them knew their employer’s real name. By now they’re halfway to Peru. They cut and run the minute Krim bellied up dead. Let me know if I’m lapping you.”

“So far I’m still in the race.” I glanced at Montana on the other side of me. He was staring at the pile carpeting between the front and back seats.

“Krim thought he had them both buffaloed,” he continued, pausing only to fire up a cigarette for himself with the aid of a throwaway butane lighter. “He even boasted of killing Jefferson, knowing that neither DeLancey nor my mother could go to the law, as he couldn’t risk exposing himself and she was wanted in connection with the murder. He wasn’t even suspicious the next day when the Judge came to see him at The Crescent, supposedly to meet his latest blackmail demand. He was contemptuous enough to turn his back while he opened the cash box to salt away the money. He didn’t know his visitor was carrying a claw hammer, the ideal murder weapon if the police were to believe it was the work of a strung-out hophead looking for a score. He probably didn’t even feel it crush his skull.

“That ended that threat, but DeLancey didn’t count on the murder hitting the headlines so heavily, or on his flunkies panicking and clearing out, letting my mother escape. The Judge wasn’t anyone’s fool, though. He knew there was only one person in the city she felt she could trust not to betray her, and looked me up. She wasn’t at my place an hour before he crashed in waving that silly derringer.”

The limousine cruised through DelRay, a populous community of workers once known as Boneville, when the Michigan Carbon Works started taking in tons of buffalo bones in 1881, following the great slaughter out West. The air in the car began to stink despite the sealed windows. We were passing Zug Island, that 325-acre toilet occupied by Great Lakes Steel and Allied Chemical, spiny with smokestacks belching great columns of toxic waste into the air daily. On the opposite side of the car, farther away, an eerie surrealistic glow reddened the bellies of low-hanging clouds and the sluggish surface of the River Rouge, a garish reminder that Ford continues to make cars while the rest of the world shakes itself apart. It was a weird sight, like St. Elmo’s fire illuminating a ship at sea.

The smell was overpowering, and not all of it was coming from the plants.

I put out my cigarette in the recessed ashtray behind the front seat. “So how come you’re here to tell me all this? And how’d you find out what went before?”

“My mother told me. Some of it she got from DeLancey and she figured out the rest. As to why I’m not lying somewhere with a hole in me, you’ll see when we get there.”

I looked at him, at his profile sliding in and out of focus as we passed between street lights. The orange tip of his cigarette flew to his lips, brightened, then faded again as he lowered it and returned his attention to the street. He was drawing inward again. I wondered if that had anything to do with the growing nearness of his parents. His parents. The phrase seemed mundane for the situation.

“Where’d you get the name Clendenan?”

“It’s my middle name. It belonged to my great-grandmother. I was born Bill Whiting. I dropped it in a fit of shame for my mother’s lifestyle. I’ve gotten over being ashamed, but it’s too late to change back.”

“Where’s she been the past year?”

“Who knows? I suspect out West, tracing my father. When he came back so did she. I don’t know why. She raised me, she loves me, but she’s never confided in me.”