Burning Midnight (19 page)

He'd opened the laptop again. He didn't seem to have been aware he had. Now he slapped it shut again and pushed it away as if it were a salad and he'd found a bug in it. His lids were sleepy. He always looked like he could barely keep his eyes open, just before he pulled the emergency cord. “You tipped 'em?”

“I was looking for a kid I figured had gone there to ground. It was friendly advice. I couldn't get a reaction otherwise. If I thought it would lead to double murder, I'd probably have gone about it differently. I'm a sleuth, not a seer.”

He played around with that. Inside his head, keys were rattling.

“'Kay,” he said after a minute. “I don't care about rats one way or the other. I just try to keep clear of 'em. Let me get back to you.”

That was the brush-off, to give him time to check me out and make sure I hadn't gone over to the other side, whichever side that was; the underworld isn't a two-headed coin so much as a rough-cut diamond, with a new facet every time you turned it in the light. Cops worked with crooks, crooks worked with crooks who worked with cops; you couldn't be choosy, but you liked to know whose team you were playing. It was no wonder he needed a computer to keep it all straight. His whole life was right there in that laptop, with a ducky little feature that would wipe it clean clear back to Eden at the touch of a key. He could stroke his mouse and tell you what he'd had for breakfast five years back from today. But if I put up an argument, he'd just go into sleep mode.

How the criminal classes managed before Silicon Valley was one for the social historians.

I left him one of the new cards with my cell on it. It went into the same pocket with the C-note. He had the laptop back open and the keys rattling by the time I got to the door. The gorillas of South Africa: Sell that one to Dian Fosse. He probably had my whole history flayed out in front of him, as far back as Basic Training.

I had lunch at the Caucus Club, a brisk walk from the Sextant. The Reuben sandwich they served there had nothing on the place I'd left, but I didn't want to look as if I was hovering. I washed it down with a Stroh's—no longer a local product, but it had the virtue of being ice cold—got back into the Cutlass, caught a movie at a cut-rate theater on the way to the house—a superhero flick whose plot I lost track of among the computer-generated special effects—and went home to catch the news on TV.

It was a slow news day, with the Zorborón kill behind the weather report and the murders in the chicken coop down to “the police are asking citizens for help” and the fire across from Holy Redeemer claiming a full minute. It seemed like overkill for a two-alarmer, but no mayors had been caught fondling strippers lately and the cardinal said the Vatican had the pederasty situation well in hand. Alderdyce looked tired on camera, Sister Delia impatient with the interviewer. They could both use a week in Florida. So could I, come to that. None of it looked like anything I had had something to do with. They should run a banner at the bottom saying it was for entertainment purposes only.

I woke up in the dusty light of dawn with a gnawing at my gut I knew well: Somewhere there was a Vicodin with my name on it, and it was working its way down my street peering at addresses. I lumbered into the bathroom, shoving bottles back and forth on shelves, knowing damn well the plastic vial I was looking for had long since gone out empty with the trash. Clawing at my stomach, I lurched out in the direction of the kitchen and the bottle in the cabinet above the sink, when my eye lit on a tiny white oval lying on the floor at the edge of the shag mat.

I plucked it up, knowing it for a pill I'd dropped six weeks before and had been in no shape to track, a beautiful oval with a score line in the middle for those who cared to cut it in half. I'd never used that feature.

I didn't care what sort of microbes had been crawling on it for a month and a half; a shot of Scotch would kill them and break down the pill more quickly than water or chewing.

I spent a minute looking at it. My leg wasn't hurting so badly I needed it for the pain. I needed it for the Vicodin. All I had to do was toss it into my mouth and swallow.

My eye wandered to the mirror, and the face that didn't belong there, drawn and old and hungry. I shook myself like a dog and brushed the pill off my palm into the sink and pulled on the faucet full blast. Then I went to the kitchen. That little decision cost me the rest of the night and most of the next morning.

*   *   *

I had a bright idea, and when it still hadn't lost its glimmer after a plate of scrambled eggs and two cups of coffee I could have used to re-tar the roof, I called Rafael Buho. He could see me at eleven o'clock in his office.

The trim soft little Mexican practiced above a gift shop on West Vernor, filled with laminated frogs playing guitar and bottles of hot sauce with names like Forty Miles from Hell and Call the Coroner; the stuff was made from caramelized habañeros with Tabasco stirred in to take off the edge. They manufactured it on the premises, with welding masks and steelers' gloves. I had to stop twice on the narrow enclosed staircase to wipe my eyes and blow my nose.

It was a stuffy little office with mustard-colored law books crammed into the shelves at every angle and scurvy-looking leather portfolios scaling the corners to a pressed-tin ceiling left over from the Gilded Age. Young Abe Lincoln pled the case for the railroad in a steel-point engraving in a frame that had come with it. The desk was made of pebbled iron with a black Formica top, a ring burned into one corner where a bottle of battery acid had stood when it belonged to a garage. Dog-eared file folders stuffed with tattered papers had settled into compost on nearly every other square inch, leaving just enough room for a telephone, a fax machine, and the usual computer equipment, some of it balanced atop a stack of case histories. A window looked directly into the window of an office-supply warehouse next door, a case of spite between rival architects back when soft collars meant the end of civilization. All of it was so true to the template there had to be a decorator involved, with two years of pre-law in his misspent youth. The only things missing were a sampler with the Bill of Rights in Spanish and a marimba band.

Buho looked up at me from behind the detritus in what might have been the same powder-blue suit and perfectly knotted bow tie. He looked as astonished as ever. I might have been his first client.

“Is it the boy?” he opened. “I thought he'd be safer at home. I am frequently wrong.”

I said, “Then you shouldn't be giving advice. He's fine, so far as I know. It's your other clients I came to talk to you about.”

“Naturally, I am constrained by the bonds of my profession. Within those bonds, I am at your service.”

I moved a stack of torts or whatever they were from a tired desk chair on the customer's side to the floor and dropped the old bones onto vinyl. I was still jumpy from the wrestling match with prescription drugs. “Someone torched Sister Delia's place of business yesterday. You probably heard about it.”

“I am as well informed as anyone who owns a television or reads the newspapers. I do not know the lady, but I am aware of her. She refused treatment, I understand. I hope this means she is as well as can be expected.”

“That's got to be the most self-contained phrase in the language. It answers its own question.”

“You are free to say so. I am not, because I speak it with a foreign accent. No matter that my family has been speaking it since before the War of 1812. But we were discussing Sister Delia.”

“She won't be playing the violin any time soon, but I'm more interested in who torched the place. Any arsonists in your Rolodex?”

“I see.” He sat back and set fire to one of his torpedoes. That law was running into more trouble than Prohibition. “All of my clients are innocent until proven guilty. Since it is my job to see that they are not, I can hardly answer that question as framed.”

“Not bad. It's no
no hablo inglés,
but I guess we've moved on from that. I'm not asking you to betray any confidences. I can go to the record and find out who you represented in cases of arson, but there's a fee involved. I'm trying to keep the expenses down on this job.”

He blew an imperfect smoke ring—I was pretty sure he could blow a perfect one any time he liked—and frowned at the finished product. He was a man who would step out of character if you punched him in the throat. “The person you wish to see is named Miguel Ortiz: Mike the Match, some Anglos call him. He served two years in Marquette for setting fire to a bar in West Bloomfield: Something about an outside partnership that could be made profitable only by an astounding claim on a fire insurance policy. I was not the attorney of record, or it could have been pled down to malicious destruction of private property. Patience costs nothing, but certain of my colleagues behave as if it came at fifty dollars the pound.”

I said, “I'm beginning to see their point.”

“Then I shall come to mine. I represented
Señor
Ortiz in another matter which is still pending. You understand that I cannot go into detail.”

“Why him?”

“It is the only case of arson I have handled. I dislike the crime. The effects are too random. You will find him in a halfway house in Iroquois Heights; he is in the process of parole on the West Bloomfield business. The prosecution is of the opinion that he employed his furlough in a manner not endorsed by the board. Do you suspect him for the fire that put Sister Delia on the street?”

“Not until just now.” I got out my notepad and put it on top of the mess on the desk. “The address of the halfway house, please. It's just an interview. He doesn't have to know who gave me directions.”

“You may name me or not. The whereabouts of a client are not in this case a question of confidence.” He produced a fat green fountain pen from an inside pocket and scribbled on the first blank page he came to. His wide-open eyes scrolled down the notations on the way there. “You have an intriguing shorthand. I doubt an experienced detective could make it out without the key to the code.”

“My own invention, coupled with bad handwriting. I can't figure it out myself if I don't transcribe it onto a scratch pad five minutes after I wrote it.”

“You're a careful man. Careful enough to obfuscate your caution with a show of—how do you put it in your ingenious language?—improvisation. You've more of a professional frame of mind than you pretend.”

“Yeah. You wouldn't know anything about that.
Gracias, Señor
Buho.” I took back the pad. “How's Nesto?”

“You tell me. Your Inspector Alderdyce has him under constant surveillance. I myself cannot afford to spend so much time on one charge.” He blew a jet of blue-gray smoke past my shoulder, waving a hand at it to deflect it from my nostrils. A polite man, Buho. “You do not like me.”

“Must I?”

“It is of no consequence. Recently I addressed a meeting of local attorneys. In search of a light beginning, I sought a quotation about lawyers that was complimentary to the profession. I spent many hours with Bartlett's and on the Internet in this pursuit.”

“How'd that work out?”

“I spoke of recent Supreme Court decisions. Mine is a thankless service.”

“Lawyers are okay in my book. I get most of my work through them.”

“But you wouldn't want your sister to marry one.”

“I'm an only child.” I stood. “Thank you again, Mr. Buho.”

“De nada.”
He squashed out his butt in an Indian pottery bowl and sat back without offering his hand.

 

TRES

Law of Flight

 

NINETEEN

I was still shaky in the joints when I drove away from Mexicantown. My nerves lay right on the surface. The vibration of the engine stung the soles of my feet on the pedals and the palms of my hands on the wheel. I'd known I wasn't cured, that I couldn't pop a single Vicodin when my head hurt without spilling back down into the deep well I'd spent months climbing out of, but no one had told me it could come back on me right out of the blue, like the stuff Jekyll drank. Maybe someone had; if you paid attention to the disclaimers at the end of the prescription-drug ads, you'd learn to live with your condition instead of taking something that duplicated all the symptoms you'd taken the drug to get rid of in the first place.

Iroquois Heights. It isn't particularly high and they ran out the Indians when knee breeches were still in style. In the Old West they'd have called the place Perdition or Purgatory; the pioneers were candid if not always honest. It was the kind of town the hotshot gunfighter rode into to do the job the locals hadn't the sand for, then had the good sense to ride out of before it fell back into the same bad habits he'd found when he came. Gary Cooper didn't go back to Hadleyville, nor Lot to Gomorrah, but it was my fate to cross the Iroquois Heights city limits ever and again until I found my salvation.

I serpentined my way through the new downtown, with curbs laid out as jaggedly as a drift fence and clever tree plantings that when the leaves filled out would cover the speed limit signs—15 mph, ten lower than the average, to snag the unwary—and up the gentle elevation toward the old industrial district. Earth movers were spreading soil like spackle over a hundred years of lead and cyanide leeched from the foundries and coke ovens where a sign advertised the future site of Ottawa Lodge Estates:
IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU'D BE HOME
.

Miguel Ortiz sounded like a made-up name. Mike the Match was straight out of
Dick Tracy.
I had no reason to distrust Buho more than any other lawyer, but first-class arsonists didn't leave evidence behind that would put them in need of good legal help; the very evidence required to identify and convict them went up in the act of their crime. Either this one was careless enough to do something rash when I braced him or he was incompetent enough to make the kind of mistake that got me killed.