Dead Bang (15 page)

“Finish the job?” I said. “C'mon, let's go.”

“What's in your hand?”

“A radio.”

“Put it down and give me your driver's license.”

I dropped the radio on the seat and showed him my detective's license from the breast pocket of my jacket. The officer lowered his weapon.

“That's not a driver's license.”

I fished out the driver's license and gave it to him.

“Mr. Hardin,” said the officer. “Maybe you would like to start by telling us why you left the gas station without paying for your gas.”

“The van!” I said. “The guys in the van!”

“You didn't call the police?” asked the officer. “You were just going to take care of it yourself?”

I pointed at the radio. “May I?”

“Sure,” he said, mocking.

“Five-six to five-zero base. Over.”

“Base. Over,” said Marg from the radio.

“Where are we at with the police? Over.”

“They switched my call to Wyoming Detective's Bureau,” said Marg. “I'm on hold. Over.”

“It's all right,” I said. “I've got the police here now. Five-six out.” I snapped off the radio and dropped it in my lap. The officer in the passenger seat sat silently staring at me, his face the mixture of doubt and horror I expect he'd set aside for his first encounter with a space alien.

I said, “I've got the police, and we're sitting here with our thumbs in our asses.”

“I don't think I care for your attitude, Mr. Hardin.”

I leaned forward to look over the seat and read the officer's name tag. “Officer Styles, a vanload of heavily armed men are pursuing a woman down Twenty-eighth Street.”

The officer behind the wheel hit the sirens and rollers, nailed the gas, and squawked the tires onto Twenty-eighth Street. “Green van?” he asked.

“Green Ford Windstar—Lincoln, Henry, Tom, five, six, nine.”

Officer Styles typed my name into the computer for wants and warrants. He came up blank and tried again, pecking out my name and date of birth slowly with his index finger. No joy, and his face hung as long as a stocking with a lump of coal in it on Christmas morning.

The radio dispatcher reported a hit-and-run involving a green minivan at Eastern and Twenty-eighth. We found the green Windstar sticky side up with the wheels still spinning. A ready-mix cement truck had splashed it across the intersection at Eastern Avenue. Officer Styles summoned the fire department.

A teenager with a spiked hairdo and a studded black-leather dog collar around his neck surfed up to the patrol car on a skateboard and announced, “Man, they's a dude still in there!” He waved an arm at the van. “And man, he ain't movin'!”

Witnesses agreed that the van had run the red. Two men, both bleeding, one with his arm in a sling and the other with his face bandaged, had crawled out of the wreck and walked away. The man in the back of the van had eaten a truck bumper sandwich and, sure as hell, wasn't moving.

A fishing license, the only ID in his wallet, indicated that he had been Amed Gemaal, which left the fire department scratching their heads over the roast they had found in his burned-out flat on Sigsbee—which had
been reported on the radio earlier in the day. The medical examiner later learned that Mr. Gemaal had two bandaged and sutured gunshot wounds to his leg. An X-ray of the burned corpse found in Gemaal's flat revealed a male pubic arch and a .30 bullet that shattered the sternum and lodged in the spine.

Officer Styles abandoned the milling witnesses, turned to me, and made a sarcastic announcement about looking for the “heavy artillery.” When he found two AKRs and four quarter-pound blocks of plastic explosives, his attitude brightened right up. But when a witness told him that the men who crawled out of the wreck had caught a bus, he got all cranky again.

I had to walk back to my car. As I left, Officer Styles wagged a finger at me and growled a threat about making me a “personal project” if I failed to settle up the tab I'd left at the gas station.

• • •

“Why you not pay?” demanded an Asian lady from inside her Plexiglas booth.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I had to go. An emergency. I'm sorry for any inconvenience.”

“No ‘mergency!” she said, her face growing red. “You pay.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said and gave her a dollar bill. “Please keep the change for the telephone call.”

“You no come back!”

Pennies, nickels, and dimes splattered around me. “Yes, ma'am.”

Women had not been my long suit all day. I hoped things would improve, so I stopped and picked up a dozen roses for Wendy. I wrote on the card, “When the roses are gone … Ovid.
Ode to Love.”

• • •

It's pretty hard to tell if my office has been ransacked. The basic rule of thumb is, if the crap is on the floor, the joint's been tossed. If the crap's still on the desk, well, a tidy desk reflects a vacant mind. Marg leaves my messages on the chair.

Making it to Mark Behler's show meant squaring away my business in seven minutes. Marg had sown doubt into that prospect with a telephone message from Virginia Hampton at Pacific Casualty marked, “URGENT!”

Mark “Bullshit” Behler or Virginia “Payday” Hampton? I pecked Virginia's number on the speed dialer. She picked up the line. “Ginny,” I
said, “Art at P.A. Ladin Investigative Associates. I've got a note marked ‘urgent' here.”

“Glad you called. You'll never guess who I saw at a bachelorette party last night.”

“Busy last night. I'd rather have been at the party.”

“James Hooper.”

“The hod carrier with a bad back?”

“Male exotic dancer,” said Ginny, “and he's still drawing full disability.”

“He must know he's toasted now.”

“We've never been in the same room, until yesterday.” I could hear Ginny shuffling papers on her desk. “I had to check the picture on his company ID to make sure.”

“If we set up an appearance for him, and he aggravates his injury, we're on the hook twice,” I said.

“Better than that,” said Ginny, “he left a card. He's appearing in the lounge at the Airport Bowl in Holland.”

“He push his walker around the stage while he dances?”

“Hard hat and a leather apron,” said Ginny. “No walker. I need some video to rebut the orthopod who testified at his last hearing.”

“I can do that job,” I said. And that's when the devil whispered in my ear.

“We have a three-day opening,” said Ginny. “I called, and they're shutting the show down until after the Tulip Festival.”

“Tucking dollar bills into wooden shoes lacks a certain cachet,” I said. “Three days is kind of tight. You don't mind if I sublet this one, do you?”

“I don't know,” said Ginny. “Who did you have in mind?”

“Silk City,” I said. “My wife's outfit. She can use my wireless chip-cam setup. Runs off a recorder in the van. You're in and out, and nobody's the wiser.”

“She always does good work,” said Ginny. “You think she can set this job up on such short notice?”

“Seems like a natural,” I said. “She and her ladies would have way more fun than me.”

“It's just, you know, cheaper for us if I call her direct and the job's not a referral.”

The devil made me say, “Wendy is a little cranky around the house when she gets a job because I'm busy.”

“Not a word,” said Ginny. “You'll still let her use the video setup?”

“Sure,” I said. “I hate sleeping on the sofa. The dog hogs all the room.”

“If she can't do it?”

“If she passes on the job, I'm your guy. One way or the other, you've got the job covered.”

“It's kind of late,” said Ginny.

“Wendy's in,” I said. “I just talked to her.”

Ginny hung up, and I could tell she wasn't happy about having to make a second call—definitely time to take her and her secretary out to lunch. Something swank.

Marg had run the license plates. The one on the van came back to a Dodge pickup truck, a tag they had no doubt stolen. The plate on the Navigator belonged to the vehicle—Mayada Jidah, Marshal Street, Southfield, Michigan. I oiled the Colt Gold Cup and strapped it on before I left.

• • •

Officer Styles had run my name for wants and warrants and had come up blank. With luck, Archer Flynt was on his way to Hamtramck and Van Huis would be looking for a donut in the morning, instead of me. Chet Harkness, Mark Behler's producer, had been looking for me long enough to develop a serious case of the ass.

“Dammit, Hardin,” he said, “It's three minutes to five. We've been teasing this spot all afternoon, and I was on my way to pull it.”

“You said I wasn't on until the end of the show.”

Chet showed me a writing tablet's worth of lines etched in his forehead. “I told you to be here a half hour before air time.”

“I still have a business to run,” I said.

“Great, go run your business.”

I turned and started walking.

“Fine,” Chet called after me. “Let Mark tell it his way, and you can spend the next week wading through news hounds just to get to your car.”

“You said this wasn't about Peggy Shatner,” I said over my shoulder without stopping.

“If you're there,” said Chet. “If you're not, Mark can chum for sharks.”

I stopped and turned around. “I have a couple of pet sharks that might rise for the bait.”

“See,” said Chet, jabbing his index finger at me. “That's it! You got an answer.” He snapped his fingers. “Right on the tip of your tongue.” Guile splashed across his face. “C'mon, Art. Four minutes. What do ya say?”

“No makeup.”

“No problem,” said Chet. He whisked me into a room commanded by
a grandmotherly black woman wearing a red nylon smock embroidered with the name “Rita.”

Rita thrust a coat hanger at me and said, “Gimme that coat, sugah.” Chet showed Rita his wristwatch and tapped the crystal with his index finger. “Don't you give me that, Chester Harkness. You get folks in this chair on time, you ain't gonna be in a hurry.”

I slid my coat off.

Rita latched large eyes on the Colt and said, “Day-yam, sugah.”

“I'm a detective,” I said.

“Well, Detective,” said Rita, “you sit down right here in Miss Rita's chair.” She patted the seat of a chrome and black vinyl barber chair.

I eased into the chair and asked, “What's going on here, Chet?”

“Fans on the set,” said Chet. “We just need to spray your hair in place.”

Rita snapped a drape over me and spun the chair toward the mirror. “That the way you want your hair on TV?”

I ran my pocket comb around my head. “I guess that's fine.”

“A little shiny here,” said Rita. She dabbed the back of my head with powder and loosed a cloud of hair spray.

“Chet, you're a lying sack of shit,” I said, shaking my head and waving my hands to clear the air.

“You sittin' there wearing that big gun, acting like a big baby,” said Rita. She banged the powder puff across my forehead.

Chet patted the makeup lady on the shoulder. “He's got a moustache. We can do without the lip paint.”

“I don't know,” said Rita, squinting her eyes and moving her head back and forth to examine my face.

“Work with me, here,” said Chet. He pulled the drape off. “There's no time, anyway.” I shrugged into my coat while Chet led me out.

Someone had painted the “green room” beige. Mix-and-match end tables guarded a battered sofa. An oval rope throw rug covered the center of the speckled tile floor.

“I made the coffee this morning, and the donuts are a week old. Help yourself,” said Chet. “I'll come and get you.”

“Wait,” I said.

“What?” Chet, already at the door, turned and showed me a pensive face.

“I have a question.”

“What? I have to go,” he said, holding the doorjamb with one foot already in the hall.

“You heard the tape that Mark Behler made at the restaurant.”

“I had to deliver it to the police,” said Chet.

“What did the Shatner woman say to Mark at the end of the tape?”

Chet looked at the floor and studied the tile. After a moment, he looked up and said, “I never listened to the tape.” He left.

One sip of the coffee revealed that it would jump-start a frozen mastodon out of the permafrost. I circled the donuts once but decided they were best left undisturbed. Just about the time I found a hazmat-safe place to abandon the coffee, Chet started bitching in the hallway. “Okay, Hardin. C'mon, c'mon, you're on.”

I found the Eurasian woman, Lily, without her name tag and already on the set. We had chairs facing Mark Behler, who occupied a tall stool behind a podium, which held his notes. He sported enough makeup to be a clown on a kiddie show.

Darkness shrouded anything not under the klieg lights. From the gloom, a male voice announced, “On the air in fifteen seconds. Watch for the red light, and don't look into the camera.”

“We need another chair,” said Mark.

Chet's voice answered. “I told you, Archer Flynt called.”

“Yeah?” asked Behler, panic in his voice.

“Yeah!” said Chet. “He's not going to be here.”

M
ARK
B
EHLER LATCHED
onto the red light like a hungry infant after a swollen nipple. “Thirty-two years ago John Vincenti, a Detroit-based labor organizer, took a short taxicab ride to meet with friends at the Rooster Tail restaurant on the Detroit River. He was never seen again. Today, we're here with Lily Vincenti, his daughter, and Arthur Hardin, a private investigator who may have concealed the key to this thirty-two-year-old mystery.”