Good Lord, Deliver Us (13 page)

That decided, Z limped
into his own part of the office to look in one of the old, mostly
empty file cabinet drawers, the file where he kept his detective
paperbacks. (He had to keep
something
in the warped wood
cabinets, after all, his business seeming to generate less
paperwork than other occupations.)

Hire Bob Zapolska. Save a
tree.

And sure enough, the card he was
looking for was in the badly sticking third drawer, a card with
Addison's direct dial number on it. (Z would normally have the
number in his head. It was just that, because he never intended
dialing it, he'd never ever looked at it.)

Kicking the file drawer
shut -- instantly regretting his decision to do
that
-- taking the card, Z limped
back to his secretary's desk. (Sometime soon, Z had to get a
repairman out to fix the phone on his
own
desk.)

In the front part of the office again,
Z eased down on the table top, turned, and dialed the
number.

One ring. Two ....

It would be a miracle if Addison was
at his desk, the man ....

"Addison, here." Proving, like Z's Mom
used to say, that miracles never cease.

Addison. Short of six-foot
tall. Voice, the rumble of a lion. Cat-quick fingers. A bright guy
who also had a sense of humor and more than the normal ability to
sniff out clues. Plus, surprise of all surprises, a man who was
black as the ace of spades, with teeth like crooked ivory -- the
shine of his teeth (Addison being so black)
not
a surprise.

The
big
jolt was having Addison come to
Z's office last winter and talk like a
white
man. No jive. No street
hustle. Talked like an
educated
white man; like Professor
Calder
talked, for God's
sake!

"Z," Z finally answered,
realizing instantly that a simple "Z" wouldn't do. He and Addison
hadn't had
that
much contact with each other. "I mean, this is Bob Zapolska.
Detective. North. The Nelson art theft."

"I know a Z when I hear
one."

Smart.

Like a lot of guys, what Z knew about
blacks was what he saw on TV. Shooting each other; talking some
kind of shit-language. On the other hand, you'd have to be way
stupider than Z to believe what you saw on the tube.

"I got an interest in something you
might know about," Z started.

Addison didn't say anything -- a trait
Z liked. The man was patient. Didn't run off at the mouth until
there was something to say.

"In K.C. North, I hear you
got some ...." Ted's word was
bums
. "... guys looking for work.
Guys ... disappearing."

"Right."

"So, what's the story?"

"It's someone else's bust.
But I know about it. What's
your
interest?"

"Just interested."

Addison laughed, a sound like icicles
falling off a roof. "Seems to me that when you take an 'interest,'
all hell breaks loose." A reference to last winter's
case.

"Well ......"

"I don't want to pry. But, Z, if
you're looking into this, go easy."

"Something to it?"

"That's the trouble. There's too
little to it to say for sure. But there's a lot of smoke building
on this one, so much smoke that, if you start walking into it
blind, you could fall into the fire."

"Yeah."

"Friend of mine's on this one. Mostly,
on his free time. And he's not happy. He thinks we're taking it too
lightly."

"Why?"

"Some homeless men have been reported
missing. All from your area. Maybe all from one place in your
area."

"Overpass. Antioch and
I-35."

"You've been doing your homework, I
see." -- said with approval, Addison a "homework" kind of
cop.

"And that's not all. The worst of it
is that this other cop's got a theory about what's been happening.
Got to digging. Got lucky. You know how it goes?" Z did.

"Anyway, here's the story.
It seems that a couple of years ago, a Kansas City native attracted
local attention by bragging that he had a machete taped to the
inside door of his car so he could 'help' the police collar
criminals. Got
our
attention by charging out of his car in downtown Kansas City
and cutting some people. His lawyer pleaded insanity which actually
seems to have been the case, for once. So the nut gets sent to one
of those institutions they've got in New York for the criminally
insane."

Z thought he remembered
reading something about that in the
Star
.

"The thing is, a couple of months ago,
he broke out.

"The name's Dale Ruble -- though names
seem to change a lot these days. Always have in our
business."

Our
business. Though Z had never been a cop, he was pleased that
Addison was talking to him like he was family.

"Just walked away," Addison continued,
"if you can believe it. He was doing better, you see. That's what
his doctors said. So he had 'grounds privileges.' Meaning, doing
supervised yard work.

"A couple of his doctors won't be
making any more bleeding heart observations like that, believe me.
And bleeding hearts is what I'm talking about.

"So this Ruble guy gets away. What my
friend discovered was that, on a straight line to K.C., there's
been a string of murders. Stabbings. All, street people.

"What my friend figures is that it's
our chicken, coming home to roost -- an idea with substance since
Ruble told one of his victims -- the one who lived -- that he was
headed home."

"Could have arrived
already."

"Could have." Addison hesitated.
Caught a quiet breath. "He's crazy, Z. Something the matter with
his head."

"With crazy, you got to figure
that."

"I mean, something
physical
. Vietnam. Got
shot up. Steel plate in his head. That's how you can recognize him.
The plate's down below the hairline on his forehead, something
you'd think would be easy to spot. But who looks at anybody
anymore? Hell, you look hard at the wrong guy and you're apt to get
shot for being rude." Again, a short silence on the line. "The
trouble with crazy people is that they're hard to figure. It turns
out that, even before the head injury in 'Nam, he liked to mutilate
bodies. Skinned them -- and worse. Both ours and the enemy's. He
was slated for execution by the South Vietnamese government but our
State Department pried him out of a tiger cage and shipped him home
to Kansas City." Z could almost hear Addison shaking his head. "To
make it worse, he's big. Comes right at you is my understanding.
Nothing subtle about him. But you never know with
crazies."

"Kansas City's his home?"

"Parkville." Another town
North-of-the-River. "But he's here and there. Has a cousin in
Liberty."

"Name?"

"Name of Vivian Smith.
Both Liberty and Gladstone police checked her out. Doesn't seem to
be a connection with Ruble," Z not having much respect for either
Liberty
or
Gladstone checking out the cousin.

"Got an address?"

"Ah ... on the Q.T., sure. Take me a
minute to locate it. It's not my case."

"OK."

Nothing but air hum for maybe three
minutes.

"You there?"

"Sure."

"The number is, Twenty-six ten,
Pennsylvania, Liberty."

"So, the guess is, this
Ruble might be robbing, then killing ... vagrants?"
That
was the word Z was
looking for: vagrant.

"Seems a bad choice for getting rich:
stealing from the poor." A long string of words for Z's battered
voice to hiss out.

"No bad choices if you're
crazy."

Bright. Willis Addison,
Kansas City Missouri detective, was a bright man. And black as they
came. Z had heard some skinhead jerk on TV say the only blacks who
had any smarts were light-skinned "niggers" who got their
intelligence from all that white blood in them. Proving that
soldiers with steel plates in their heads weren't the
only
crazies.

"You going to look into this,
Z?"

"Just stand around. By the overpass,
most likely."

"Have a care. Remember. A big man.
With a piece of steel for a forehead. At the V.A., they gave him
some skin-tone material to cover the plate, but the word is, he
lost it. Still, he could be covering the insert with a hat, or with
a bandanna, or even have a wig pulled down low."

"Right."

"You find out something, I'll
hear?"

"Got a conflict there."

"Your friend on the Gladstone force?"
Addison had learned something of Z's situation on the winter
case.

"Yeah."

"Play this the way you've got to. But
it's a K.C. case.

"Do what I can."

And they hung up.

Unhappy from what he'd heard, Z felt
... worse! Rational murders had rational solutions; crazies were
perilously unpredictable.

To say nothing of this
nutcase skinning mutilating the dead, even
before
the metal plate had shorted
out his wiring!

Two times crazy. Crazy, with a
twist.

Z found that he was
shuddering.

* * * * *

So much had been
happening, that the approach of the Fourth of July had slipped to
the back of Z's mind. (Was it fireworks of
another
kind last night that had
made him forget the 4
^th
?)

But it wasn't too late, Z pulling
himself together enough by early afternoon for his annual trip to
Riverside to buy fireworks -- Riverside, one of the few places near
Kansas City where you could still get them.

It was not like the old days, though.
For Z's money, fireworks bans had spoiled the Fourth for today's
youth, fireworks forbidden almost everywhere because a few, mostly
stupid kids, had hurt themselves. If you were sensible about
shooting them, fireworks were perfectly safe.

Letting his memory take him back as he
drove to the fireworks stand in Riverside, Z thought fondly of the
days of his childhood leading up to each Fourth, days in which he
spent a considerable amount of time building things to blow up.
Little bridges made of sticks. Sand castles. Model airplanes.
(First squirting lighter fluid on the plane, it was a special
triumph if the firecracker that blew the airplane out of the air
also set fire to the fuselage!)

Z remembered nighttime fencing matches
with his friends, each "armed" with a white-hot sparkler; savored
the excitement of battles with Roman candles, trying to hit some
other kid from a distance while dodging the flaming balls the other
guy was lobbing down on you. He'd had cherry bomb battles with
explosions so near your feet you could feel the concussion on your
bare ankles.

Z chuckled as he remembered lighting
firecrackers, then dropping them in kids' back pockets. Or you'd
light TNT bombs, holding them until the last second so when you
threw them, they'd go off just as they fell past your opponent's
head. (Take a near hit like that and your ears would ring for a
month of Sundays.)

Yes! Those were the good old days! The
smell of gunpowder; the sting of smoke; the twinge of mercurochrome
being wiped on powder burns.

Sure, kids got hurt. But Z had always
figured that was part of the beneficial scheme of things, a warning
to careless kids not to take up dangerous careers for their life's
work.

Warm memories, indeed, taking him all
the way to Mike's fireworks stand in the heart of what passed for
class in Riverside -- a wide-bodied mobile park -- Z buying all the
fireworks he could afford. Though Z never knew how he'd use the
pyrotechnics he purchased each year (improvising so much a part of
the P.I. business) experience had taught him that no items of this
kind went to waste.

He bought pinwheels, Roman candles,
sky rockets, snakes, sparklers, torpedoes, cherry bombs,
whiz-bangs, flares, flowerpots, fountains, and punks.

Given his grownup connection to Jamie
Stewart, it was nice to "play child" again.

* * * * *

Twenty-six-ten
Pennsylvania, Liberty, Missouri.
Also
back of Bateman College, but to
the east of the ghost house.

By a sultry, one o'clock in the
afternoon, Z was coasting down Pennsylvania, the principal street
through another old neighborhood behind the Bateman hill, the
houses on the "Smith" side of the street backed up to what looked
like park land.