Angel Eyes (8 page)

As I rode down in the elevator, I decided that I couldn’t blame them.

A
T GROUND LEVEL
I used a public telephone to call the number Montana’s secretary had given me. When no one answered after eleven rings I hung up. Outside, the pressure had stopped building, to hang on the edge of something like a drop on a faucet, quivering but lacking the impetus to plunge. In the country, birds would be flying crazy and ants would be busy erecting dikes around their holes. Farmers would be corraling the livestock. Their wives would be hurrying to get the wash off the line, if any were left who didn’t own electric dryers. In the city we sit still and let the people who get paid for it do what has to be done. Like me. I climbed into my car and swung my nose west. There was no sign of my shadow, which meant exactly nothing.

The downtown branch of the Detroit Public Library in Centre Park occupies the site of the only execution under American Law to take place in Michigan. The spectacle of wife-murderer Stephen G. Simmons swinging from the end of a rope in the presence of a festive crowd and a lively band on September 24, 1830, led to the abolition of capital punishment sixteen years later. For some reason the executed party was on my mind as I entered the stone building and crossed from old habit to the microfilm room, where they keep the photographed copies of the
News
and
Free Press
going back to their founding.

The
News
carried an impressive spread on Judge Arthur DeLancey the day he was given up for dead. The front page featured pictures of the wreckage of his airplane and of the Judge himself in happier days, looking dignified and concerned in crisp white hair and handsomely creased face inclining to the oriental and a three-piece suit, no carnation. The names of the pilot and aide who were lost with him were mentioned. I didn’t recognize them. Inside, two pages were devoted to his controversial career. A photograph showed him whispering into Phil Montana’s ear during the Grand Jury investigation. The labor leader had dark hair back then, but DeLancey’s was already white. It happens earlier to some of us, as I well knew. Another caught him at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, his coat over one arm and his wife Leola on the other. He looked weary. She, taller and thin as befitted a former fashion model, with graying hair skinned back and clasped behind her neck, was facing the camera with a tight-lipped smile, as warm as a mortician’s handshake. The caption said that they had just arrived from a trip out West, where he had spent much of his time fishing and exploring. His reputation as an outdoorsman had been part of his legend.

In a third picture, he was sitting in a restaurant booth with Janet Whiting, the woman responsible for much of the controversy that had surrounded him. I recognized the three-quarter view of the woman I knew as Ann Maringer, looking elegant in a fur stole thrown back on her bare shoulders and a shift that looked as if it had been pieced together from two sheets of muslin and probably ran into three figures. In black and white her eyes lost some of their innocence, but she still resembled a Barbie doll. They were holding hands, which may have explained why he appeared uncomfortable. The picture would have been taken after their affair became common knowledge.

The text dwelt on his rise from part-time truck driver and charter member of United Steelhaulers while attending law school to his appointment to the federal bench, glossing over his brief and rather tepid career as a union mouthpiece. I grew bored with it quickly and switched to the microfilmed
Free Press
account.

This time there was no feature stuff. An exclusive photo taken the day of the ill-fated flight posed DeLancey, in old clothes, Windbreaker, and peaked cap, in front of the twin-engine Cessna with his aide and the pilot. The former, a pudgy, balding youth named Pelke, appeared to have reached an uneasy truce with his outdoorsman’s outfit. The pilot was wiry and capable-looking in a quilted jacket and canvas trousers and appeared familiar. I squinted at his narrow, dark face, at his hooked nose and large black eyes and glossy black hair, read his name, Lee Collins, squinted at his face again, and sat back and wished for a smoke.

If Lee Collins and Krim, the Arab who ran The Crescent, weren’t the same man, they were brothers. Either way it was worth looking into.

T
HE NIGHT WAS
still holding its breath as I approached the unmarked entrance to The Crescent. Shadows, emboldened by the evening’s youth, clung to the inside of the niche as if tensed to spring. The joint wasn’t scheduled to open until eight, but a thin blade of light showed beneath the door. I descended the concrete steps and tried the handle. It gave.

Fluorescent tubes I hadn’t noticed on my last visit caught the place naked. Beams that looked like heavy old oak by phony candlelight were painted plywood. Walls that seemed thirty feet apart during business hours were closer than twenty, painted blue at the bottom to match the floor and to add depth. There were ratholes in the corners. Under a baby spot, bombarded by the shifting glare of an electric light show, it all came together, but at this stage the establishment looked like a hooker the morning after.

The storeroom was in back, behind the bar. I threaded my way between tables the size of smoking stands with chairs overturned on top of them to the door marked authorized personnel and pushed it open. My hand was inside my coat, gripping the unregistered Luger the cops had failed to find in the secret pocket of the trunk when they impounded my car. I wasn’t going to make the mistake of walking into that storeroom unarmed a second time. It was empty except for the stacks of wooden crates, cobwebs, and the smells of liquor and rotting wood. All the broken glass had been swept away.

I closed the door and turned and froze. From behind the bar I could see a shelf containing a corroded metal cigar box, the kind saloonkeepers use to store the nightly receipts before locking them away in a safe. The lid was open and it was empty.

Which added up to zero. Whoever was responsible for banking the cash could have removed it for that purpose and forgotten to close the lid. That’s what I told myself as I crept the length of the bar, looking for something to go with the discovery.

I nearly tripped over him. A gate designed to prevent undesirables from sneaking up on the bartender from the other end cast a shadow that concealed everything but his shoe. I stood there for a long moment, breathing air that had suddenly gone foul, though of course there wouldn’t be any noticeable stench. Not yet. Then I reached over and swung open the gate. Light poured into the section.

There was blood, a lot of it. It formed a dark brown oval on the scuffed linoleum all around the body, where it had dried hours before. His head was twisted so that its smashed profile, and particularly the bold nose, stood out sharply against the stain. It was spoiled by a clotted dent in the temple, from which black blood and gray matter ran in spidery lines over his cheeks and down his neck into his collar, all but filling the socket from which his one visible eye stared at everything and yet nothing. He didn’t look much like Valentino anymore, and it was a shame about his expensive suit. Gingerly I nudged his outthrust leg with my toe. Steel girders should be that stiff.

I glanced around, searching for the weapon, but nothing looked suitable. If one of the bottles on the shelves behind the bar had been used, the floor would be littered with broken glass. The wound wasn’t shaped right to have been made by the edge of the cigar box, and anyway the box was neither stained nor damaged. The hell with it. Finding the instrument of destruction is rarely as important as it’s made to be in fiction.

If thoughts were actions I was out of there already and not going through his pockets, I wouldn’t know that he carried the usual stuff: loose change, a ring containing what looked like a key to a Mercedes among others, a ticket to Saturday’s performance at the Fischer, a flat wallet stuffed with fifties and a driver’s license made out to Rahman Hassim Ibn Krim. I would be back home typing up résumés to send to personnel managers in shoe stores. If thoughts were actions, there was no way I would still be in that room standing over a murdered corpse when someone came to the front door.

I heard the handle rattling and vaulted back into the storeroom, where I pushed the door almost shut, leaving a crack just wide enough to observe the newcomer. It was the thickset black I had seen pushing a broom on my last visit. Wearing a greasy jacket over his green work suit, his glowering features all but obscured beneath the bill of a soiled cloth cap, he entered in mid-grumble, muttering about the weather and the condition of the streets and the mayor and life in general with the singsong litany of a man who begins bellyaching in the morning and doesn’t stop until he’s turned out the light to go back to sleep or had his first drink. He was still at it as he drew near the storeroom. I noticed too late that I was sharing quarters with his broom. Releasing the knob gently, I flattened against the wall and pulled out the Luger.

His footsteps stopped suddenly. I waited for them to resume. They didn’t. I remembered then that I’d left the gate open at the other end of the bar and that the body was in plain sight of anyone who happened to glance in that direction. He didn’t scream or gasp. They don’t, in that neighborhood. He stood still for a space, the way I had, and then his crepe soles kissed the floor swiftly going away, toward where his boss lay. I put away the gun and then, easing open the door to keep the hinges from complaining, crept up behind him on the balls of my feet. He was standing with his back to me and his head bowed, ogling the corpse and breathing like an asthmatic. At the last instant he sensed something and began to turn.

I clamped my left arm across his throat and slammed him hard against me while gripping his right wrist with my right hand, wrenching it back and up. He made a single, guttural noise of raw animal fear, a chilling sound. I choked it off.

“I can crush your windpipe or I can splinter your arm like a bamboo pole,” I whispered in his ear. I managed to keep from slipping into the North Vietnamese dialect, but just barely. “Do you believe I can do that? Nod if the answer’s yes.”

He nodded. His neck was sweating and I could smell the corruption of panic. Something solid in his hip pocket was pressing against my pelvis. I asked him if that was what I thought it was. He nodded again.

“Handy. Or do you always carry it?”

He nodded a third time. He gave good hostage, I’ll say that for him.

“Man, scratch anyone over twelve this side of Woodward, you’ll find a piece.” The words tumbled out shallow and breathless, forced out by the pressure of my forearm against his throat. “Ain’t you heard? This here’s Dodge City.”

“Shame on you,” I said. “Renaissance and all.” In the advertising mirror behind the bar I glimpsed a face I would cross the street to avoid, strained, tight, and leering. I released him, stepped back, and took the Luger from my pocket. “The iron. Slide it along the bar.”

It was nothing, an Italian automatic of no particular make stamped out of sheet metal and exported in a hurry before it blew up in someone’s face. I picked it up off the polished counter top and sniffed the muzzle. It hadn’t been fired recently. The butt was clear of blood and hair. I dropped it into my coat pocket. Between it and the Luger and the diamond ring I was hauling enough metal to sink an ore carrier.

Turning, the janitor recognized me. I read his thoughts: He was calculating the life expectancy of a man who had seen his boss’s murderer. Others followed it, thoughts I liked even less.

“I didn’t kill him.”

He wasn’t convinced. I couldn’t imagine why not. I broke the magazine out of the Luger and showed it to him.

“See? Loaded. Why skull him when a bullet is so much neater and more certain?” I shoved the clip back in, just in case he forgot about the one in the chamber. His gaze roamed toward the corpse and back to my eyes, or rather to the bridge of my nose. The whites were dazzling.

“It’s noisier, though.”

I pointed the muzzle at the floor six feet away and fired. He jumped halfway up the bar. Concrete dust erupted around the fresh hole in the linoleum. I batted away the metallic gray smoke. “I don’t hear any sirens, do you?” My voice sounded strange coming on the heels of the nine-millimeter’s deafening roar. “You and I both know that one shot isn’t going to bring anyone running in this neighborhood. The exact opposite, in fact. So why bash in his head?”

That stopped him for a moment. Then his face lit up. “Maybe you’re one of them maniacs.”

I sighed. “I could be, but I’m not. Here.” I went for my wallet and he almost got down on the floor beside the dead man. I extended one of my cards. He accepted it like Socrates accepted the goblet, gingerly, between thumb and forefinger. “That’s my card. Would a murderer give you his card?”

He read it, moving his lips. “You couldn’t tell by me,” he said then. “I never met one before. That I know of.”

“You think I handed him his ticket because of what he was going to do to me today and because you heard him say I killed Bingo Jefferson. You know there’s nothing to the last part, because a cop was here and when we left I wasn’t wearing handcuffs. And don’t hand me any of that crap about white men looking out for each other. No one thinks that anymore, not this far north, not today. As for the other part, what happened here ended in stalemate; I’d have no reason to look for revenge. The fact is I’m here for the same reason you are, to do a job.”

He watched me the way a child watches the parent who’s told him he’s being punished for his own good and that someday he’ll be grateful. I stashed the Luger.

“All right, you don’t have to believe me. We’ll let the cops sort it out later. Here’s how it stands. Someone iced your boss not long after I left and tried to make it look like robbery by emptying the till. Any other time it could have been robbery, but not now, while I’m investigating another murder and he keeps figuring in. Besides, it was someone he knew or he wouldn’t have got this close. It’s barely possible that you knocked him down. I don’t think so or you wouldn’t be here now. The one guy who almost never returns to the scene of the crime is the guy responsible. But it could be you know who is, or at least why it was done.”