Dead Bang (37 page)

“Long way from here,” I said.

“Cops have to live in the city,” he said. “A lot of them live here in the sixteenth precinct. McNeal lives two blocks over. We just had a beer.”

“Big town, small world,” I said.

“C'mon in,” he said. “I'll get you a beer.”

“Coffee,” I said. “I didn't get much sleep, and I've got to drive out to Grand Rapids tonight.”

The “J” turned out to be for “Jack.” At around five-ten, Jack made a pretty hard and square 180 pounds. His full head of black hair had gone gray at the temples. He'd done his house in bachelor Renaissance. The dead plants hinted that there'd been a woman, but she'd been gone for a while. The pizza boxes on the sofa and the pyramid of beer cans decorating the TV didn't suggest much grief at her absence. I took a seat at the poker table in the dining room. Cigar butts basked in the ashtray. I set fire to the cigar I'd unwrapped and fondled for two days.

“Instant all right?” Jack wanted to know from the kitchen.

“Just right,” I said.

“I got sugar, but no cream.”

“Black.”

In the kitchen, I heard Jack fire up the microwave. After the ding, he walked in with mix-and-match mugs and a jug of Old Number 7 under his arm. I got the mug with a bloodhound wearing a trench coat. He set the condiments in front of me and took a chair. I dribbled just enough booze into my coffee not to appear judgmental and passed the bottle.

“You said it was about my dad,” said Jack.

“Yeah,” I said and took a sip of my coffee to leave a space for him to take the lead. The whisky went down warm and seemed to cut some of the sand out of my eyes.

“I never really knew my dad,” said Jack. “Police work and divorce must be genetic.”

“Your dad was a cop?”

“State,” he said and spiced his coffee. “He got banged up in a car chase and retired early.”

“His eye?” I asked.

Jack looked at me and nodded.

“Blind?”

Jack fluttered a finger by his eye. “Twitchy,” he said, and chuckled. “Made it hard to qualify on the range.”

“What did he do after he took his retirement?” I took another casual sip on my coffee.

“Beats me,” said Jack. “My parents were divorced when I was five. We moved to California. I never saw him after that. I was walking point in the Republic of Vietnam when he died.”

I knocked the ash off my cigar. “What brought you back to Detroit?”

“Ahh,” he said and shrugged. “I'd been back in Fort Benning for a
year—the end of my enlistment was coming up—and a JAG officer came down to the company with some papers. My dad left this house, but it took the executor a year to track me down.”

“So you stayed?”

“Had to have a roof, and the Detroit Police were hiring.”

“So, where's your father buried?” I asked.

Jack studied his coffee while he sloshed it in a circle. “Roseland Park Cemetery, up on Woodward across the street from the Shrine of the Little Flower. He's buried with my grandparents.” He looked up to give me a hard eye. “I think you need to tell me what this is about.”

“You have a half sister,” I said.

The brights flashed on in Jack's eyes. “No shit!”

“She lives out in Seattle. Owns a coffee shop.”

Jack stood up and turned to look out the window. “She outside or something?”

“No,” I said. “I'll give her your number if you want to get together. I always let the ladies make the first contact.”

Jack made slow work of a slug of coffee, rolling it around his palate under distant eyes. He swallowed, rubbed his chin, and said, “She's half Asian?”

“Her mother was from Okinawa.”

“The old bastard!” Jack shook his head and closed his eyes. “They gave me a box of his stuff—full of Cherry Blossom catalogs and S&M skin books. Did he divorce her mother too?”

• • •

I took Woodward Avenue north. Approaching Twelve Mile Road, the five-story gray stone monument of the National Shrine of the Little Flower loomed above the strip malls and car dealers that line the street. Christ on the cross, depicted in thirty feet of stone relief, gazed across Woodward into the Roseland Park Cemetery.

Roseland Park spread over a few hundred acres of what had become very expensive suburban real estate. I stopped at the office, signed the guest register, and learned that Jack Vincent had been laid to his eternal rest north of the Spanish American War vets and east of the VFW plot.

Among all the upright granite, Corporal Jack Vincent's marker was the flat brass plaque provided by the Veteran's Administration. I checked my pocket notebook: Jack Vincent and John Vincenti had been born on the same day; ditto on checking out.

The shadows had stretched to stripes, and I was alone. I said, “Found
ya, you old bastard. Guess they had to plant your ass to keep you from wandering around.”

The dead keep their secrets. There's only so much room on a grave marker. This one offered a single tidbit: “Beloved Son.”

“Guess they didn't have room for the whole message, did they, sport?”

I harbored little doubt that Jack Vincent, retired state policeman, had, in fact, been John Vincenti, a mid-level Mob associate. But in the days when John Vincenti got it, the Mob would never have killed a policeman. They would have whacked everybody stupid enough to have entrusted him.

Franky called Jack the Lookout a “rat,” an informant. Hence the bullet in his mouth, followed by the dead canary. But the murder had been expeditious, which reflects a certain amount of respect for the victim. And Vincenti couldn't have risen to the position he had without breaking a few eggs himself.

On the other hand, only the government could make a dead Jack the Lookout disappear so that Jack Vincent could be quietly interred next to his family. But Jack Vincent had laid down his tin and could have gone to work for the Mob without changing his name. And here comes Archer Flynt—busy as a cat in a sandbox.

“I came to apologize,” I said. “I didn't have any right to turn my back when I found your body. I lied to the police. My boss told me to do it, but I was glad of it. I was young, horny, and my wife had invited me to hurry home. I've never admitted that to anyone. I did think about it. Maybe that's the reason I didn't want to tell the story to Mark Behler. The truth is, I hadn't exactly covered myself in glory.

“You've used a lot of women and discarded them like toilet paper. And now your daughter has come to me and paid me a lot of money to finish the abuse you started. I am not going to do it.”

I bent over and tidied up a couple of weeds at the edge of Vincent's marker. “What is it Marc Antony said of Gaius Julius Caesar? Something like, ‘The good that men do is oft interred with the bones, whilst the evil lives long after.' We're going to do it the other way, just for you, Sport. You're going to be a hero. You bastard.”

• • •

Give or take a few, it's a hundred and forty miles from Detroit to our place on the lake. I had to stop for coffee in Lansing. By the time I pulled into the yard, the moon teetered on the edge of the big dipper.

Daniel bolted out the door with the dog hard on his heels. The boys
had fixed the screen in the storm door. “Oh, wow!” he said. “Is that my car?”

Ben, barely a step behind, asked, “Can we get that in black cherry?”

Rusty snorted and bounded around my legs. I fended him off the Camaro. “Wait till you see it in the sunlight,” I said. “We've got to get a new steering column and lockset. For now, you'll have to start it with the screwdriver I left on the passenger seat. Call around in the morning.”

The boys hauled the luggage in and took the car out to turn some heads in Belding and Greenville. Wendy met me at the top of the stairs. I still had a step to go when she threw her arms around me. She didn't say anything.

“See, I made it,” I said. Wendy said nothing. I kissed her on the temple and rubbed her back. I wanted to ask where Karen was—I'd fantasized about wringing her rubber-chicken neck for most of the drive up from Detroit. I went with, “How's Karen?”

Wendy recited her list to my chest with her eyes closed. “She has a kidney infection. They had to put her under to get the tape off her face. They gave her a shot to keep her calm. She's asleep now. Matty is coming back to talk to her tomorrow.”

“She brought this on herself,” I said.

Wendy straightened up, pushed away with her hands, and chopped out with her finger, “Don't you start. She feels terrible.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let's let her rest.”

“Out on the porch,” said Wendy, pointing the finger now. “I don't want her to hear us. I'll be out in a minute.”

The moon cast a silver causeway across the lake that beckoned widest at our dock. Fireflies blinked traces of light over the lawn. Wendy brought coffee for me and a tea for herself out to the table. Rusty crumpled into a pile at our feet.

“Karen had the money in the trunk of her car,” said Wendy. She sipped her tea. I looked out over the lake and watched martins swooping to harvest mosquitoes. “When she went back to the kitchen, she piled money into the washer and put her laundry on top of it. After the tub filled, she clicked off the timer. Manny and his friends shot up the washer with the rest of the kitchen. The water leaked all over the floor. I guess nobody wanted to stand in the mess to really search the machine.”

“I never should have let her play with the money,” I said.

Wendy said, “Honey, they destroyed everything she owned. She didn't know who Manny was or what he was doing.”

“Maybe that's what bothers me most,” I said. Wendy stirred her tea. “Where's the money now?”

“Matty took it,” said Wendy. “Karen told her everything. How much trouble is this going to be for Karen?”

“Could be a lot,” I said. “She concealed evidence.”

“She wasn't trying to help Manny.”

I had a mouthful of coffee and had to stifle a laugh so it didn't shoot out my nose.

“Okay,” said Wendy. “She was trying to help herself.”

I wiped my mouth and nose with my hand. “How much money did they get out of the trunk?” Wendy gave me a tissue.

“Matty made two trips,” said Wendy. “But the money
was
soaked in water.”

“Good,” I said. “The FBI crime scene crew released Karen's car without a search, and the Khans held her for several days.”

“What's one thing have to do with the other?”

“The FBI doesn't like bad press. A sharp journalist could stretch it all out to, if the FBI had searched Karen's car, there wouldn't have been a reason for the Khans to kidnap her.”

“You think?” asked Wendy, smiling for the first time since I walked into the house.

“I hope,” I said. “Anyway, she has information that may be of more value to the FBI than a prosecution.”

“You're still angry,” said Wendy, knocking a cigarette out of her pack.

“I found money in the dryer,” I said, and lit Wendy's smoke.

“Karen said it must have stuck to her laundry.” Wendy took a deep drag and exhaled. “Matty took that, too, and searched the rest of her stuff.”

“She had our son driving the car with the money in it!”

“I don't think she thought of it like that—”

“I'm at a complete loss as to how Karen thinks.”

“I'm angry about that too,” said Wendy. “But we can't just throw her out on the street.”

“You were ready to toss her out for walking around half-dressed.”

“Yeah, you didn't mind that,” said Wendy, her eyes narrow.

My eyes fell shut. I couldn't stand the smug “gotcha” look on Wendy's face. I said, “My mother had this glass swan—”

“And you were five years old. And you broke it. And she still nags about it. So what?”

“So, if I had just looked at it and not picked it up, I could have saved myself a half century of bitching.”

“Sorry,” said Wendy. She ground out half a cigarette in the ashtray, walked around to me, gripped my upper arm with both hands, and gave
me a peck on the cheek. Pulling on my arm she added, “C'mon, we need some rest. We can think about this tonight and discuss it tomorrow.”

I stood and draped an arm around Wendy's shoulder. “I think we need to get something straight between us tonight.”

“Promises, promises,” said Wendy.

“You'll be asleep before I get out of the shower.”

• • •

By ten o'clock, Marg Ladin, my secretary, had panicked and dialed the house. Ben slogged down the hall and knocked on the bedroom door. I stumbled up the hallway to the kitchen to take the call. She said, “Lily Vincenti will be here at eleven. Do we have anything, or do I hand her back the check?”

Ben nodded sideways toward the lake, and I looked out to see Matty, Agent Azzara, and Karen on the deck. Clad only in my boxer shorts, I retreated to the bathroom and shut the phone cord in the door. “I made some progress on the case.”

“You just wake up?” asked Marg, sounding snippy.

“Yeah,” I said.

Someone pecked on the door.

“I'll be out in a second,” I said.

“I doubt that,” said Marg.

The knock on the door became urgent and rapid.

“Not you,” I said into the telephone. “Hang on.”

I opened the door a crack and peeked out. Matty peeked back. She mouthed the words, “Your line is tapped.”

“State police?”

Matty kept her eyes riveted on mine and shook her head slowly.

I eased the door closed. “I can't talk right now.”

“I'll stall until you get here,” said Marg.

I wrapped a towel around my waist and marched the telephone back to the kitchen. Holding the towel in place left me only one hand to operate, but I got the coffee on before retreating to the bedroom.