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Authors: Loren D. Estleman

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BOOK: Peeper
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Ralph had a bad idea. What the hell, he thought.

He slid an arm behind the monsignor's back, saying, “Look alive, Johnny! How you feeling now?” He pushed the corpse's top half toward the dash. It groaned.

The officer relaxed. He took his hand off the gun.

“Sorry, sir. We can't be too careful in this neighborhood. It's hip-deep in weirdos. No offense, sir.”

“Yes sir. I mean no sir. I mean no.” Ralph had to grip the monsignor's coat to keep his head off the dash. “I guess you can't be too careful with all the weirdos in this neighborhood.”

“That's just the way we look at it. Listen, you better get your friend home as soon as your other friend shows. He doesn't sound much better than he looks.”

“Yes sir.”

“It's four-thirty ayem, you know.”

“Thanks, Officer.”

The officer continued down the block, rattling doorknobs as he went. Ralph let go of the monsignor and bit down on a fresh matchstick. Carpenter emerged from the building while he was spitting out the pieces.

“Jesus, what took you so long? A cop was here.” Ralph got out of the car.

“I saw. He smell anything?”

“Naw, I handled him. I got to tell you, I ain't spent this much time with the clergy since Sister Mary Immaculata.”

“You were raised Catholic?”

“My old man was a Baptist minister, you kidding? My wife tried converting me. It didn't take.”

“Where is she?”

“Iowa or Idaho, or maybe it was Illinois. One of them
I
states.”

“Divorced?”

“Got to be, by now.”

Carpenter climbed in behind the wheel. “I'll take him from here.”

“What you going to do with him?”

“What do you care?”

“Mister, I've known people twenty years I never kept this much company with at a stretch.”

“Well, it's over now.” He slammed the door.

“Listen, I'll keep my mouth shut.”

Carpenter had started the engine. “What?”

“I said I won't say anything.”

“Oh. Good.” He rolled up the window.

Ralph stood on the sidewalk until the station wagon glided around the corner out of sight. He wondered if he should have waved; at Monsignor Breame, not at Carpenter.

He had two hours before it was time to get ready for work, but he wasn't sleepy enough to go back to bed. He shut himself in his tiny bathroom with the camera, took some developing solution out of the medicine cabinet, and turned off the electric bulb, opening the camera by feel. After twenty minutes he hung up the film to dry and let himself out of the bathroom. Two beers later he went back in, turned on the bulb, and examined the negatives against the light. Ralph thought the monsignor would have been pleased to learn how photogenic he was in death. Even the embroidery on the panties had come through. He took a minute to admire the shots of Mrs. Supervisor Powell and her Pakistani-American friend at the beginning of the roll, then consigned it to an aluminum mailer and hid the thimble-size container behind a broken section of the medicine cabinet that lifted out of the back. It was better than a safe because it didn't call attention to itself. In the past, Ralph had concealed everything there from a complete run of phony Rolex watches to a bag of marijuana that had turned out to be Nabisco shredded wheat.

Yawning now, he went back to bed feeling uncommonly well for 6:00
A.M.
His hangover had lifted—even if he still couldn't remember where he'd been the night before—he had two hundred and forty dollars in his pocket, and photographs of a dead Catholic priest in a prostitute's bed. Things were looking up all around.

He woke up when a big black fireman chopped down his bedroom door with an axe.

“Where's the fire?” inquired the black man.

Ralph sat up and rumpled his hair. “Ain't that my line?”

“Wrong floor, Tyrell,” someone called from the hallway. “Some broad's apartment upstairs.”

“Sorry about the door.” Tyrell withdrew.

Ralph said shit and looked for his hat.

Chapter 4

The arson investigator's name was O'Leary.

His suit was smoke-colored and he had runny eyes that he kept wiping with a sooty handkerchief that left smudges. He was nearly as big as the fireman who had awakened Ralph and a couple of years Ralph's junior, with more smudges in his yellow hair and a big scorched-looking face with a small upturned nose that someone had tried to alter with a pair of pliers, leaving the end squinched and slightly twisted. He wrapped a smoky paw around Ralph's hand in greeting and ushered him out of the charred hallway into an empty apartment two doors down from Lyla Dane's. There he lit a cigarette and dropped the match at his feet. The carpet began to smolder.

“Too much smoke out there.” He puffed up a great cloud.

Ralph said, “Smells like a wienie roast.”

“That'd be the tenant. Know her well, did you?”

“To say hello to on the stairs. She going to make it?”

“By now she's on her way to the University of Michigan Burn Center in Ann Arbor, if she survived the trip to Detroit General. They do some nifty things there. What's she do for a living?”

“Hook. What happened, gas?”

“Probably. She entertain any visitors recently?”

“That's how she paid for the gas.”

“Get a good look at any of them?”

“You don't look at johns if you can help it. One of them could be the mayor.”

“Ever hear any loud arguments from her apartment?”

“There any other kind?” Ralph groped his pockets for a matchstick, then decided against it, given the company. “You saying the fire wasn't an accident?”

O'Leary wiped his eyes. “Just routine. You're not much help, Mr. Poteet.”

“You should be asking Vinnie this stuff. He's the landlord.”

“I tried. He wasn't any more help than you. What do you do?”

“Private dick.”

“Really? With an agency, or are you a loner like Sam Spade?” He tapped some live ash onto the carpet. There was a little flame burning there now.

“Fuck Sam Spade. I work for Lovechild Confidential Inquiries on Michigan. I got to be there in a half hour.” He had spent the past ninety minutes in the hallway with the other residents, watching the firefighters put out the blaze and the ambulance crew carry a blanket-wrapped Lyla Dane downstairs. Vinnie had found her crumpled at the base of the wall opposite her apartment door, where the blast had hurled her when she'd come home. Ralph had slept right through the explosion and the sirens afterward. “Listen, if some cookie is running around blowing up people in this building, I got a right to know it.”

“We've got no reason to think anything of the kind. Fire resulting in casualty is our beat, that's all. Does this Dane woman smoke?”

“She does now.”

O'Leary wiped his eyes, dropped the cigarette butt on top of its ashes, and put away his notebook. “Okay, I guess that's it. You got a number where you can be reached during the day?”

Ralph sorted through the cards in his grubby wallet and gave him one engraved on rose-colored stock with a flower in one corner. The arson investigator raised his eyebrows. “A dame runs the joint,” Ralph said.

“Thanks for answering my questions, Mr. Poteet.” O'Leary opened the door for him.

Ralph left after stamping out the fire in the carpet.

Vinnie was standing at the end of the hall by the stairs. With his hands in the pockets of his fuzzy robe and the light gleaming on his bald head he looked like Henry in the comic strips, except he had a mouth.

Boy, had he.

“What was you moving downstairs this morning, a load of bowling balls?” he asked.

Ralph had been expecting the question. “I tripped. You ought to replace that runner. It's been there since FDR.”

“You ain't bruised. Something must of broke your fall.”

“My hat. I got to go to work, Vinnie.”

“I didn't tell the cop about you being in Lyla's apartment this morning.”

“Why not? I got no secrets from cops.” A truck shuddered by on the street outside. Ralph jumped. He'd thought it was thunder.

“Where's the camera?”

He made an embarrassed expression. “Damnedest thing. It was in my car—”

“Hell of a mess.” Vinnie was looking at the damaged hallway. “My insurance won't cover it. I been meaning to kick it up, but the premiums are killing me now. The adult trade's gone to shit. You seen the stuff them video stores carry? I can't compete. There should be a law. Any kid can walk right in and rent a movie I couldn't show my wife.”

“You married a stag queen, Vinnie. The first time you saw her she was under three guys and a husky.”

“It was a malamute. That stuff's strictly PG next to them new videos. The business has gone to shit, all right. I guess peepholing's up.”

Here it comes, Ralph thought.

“Yes, that was some noise you made this morning, you and your skinny friend,” the landlord continued. His voice was low. “I thought it was them neighborhood vigilantes come back with an army tank. I got a good view of the foyer through my transom. Well, it was as big as a army tank, and there you was sitting on top of it. I hope I never get that fat.”

“Spit it out, Vinnie.”

“I ain't stupid. I guess I can put together a snooper and a camera and a whore and a dead guy on the stairs. I guess the cops could too. They tie it in with that big bang down the hall, there's trouble coming.”

“The guy said it was a gas leak.”

“That's how it could stay. If you follow me.”

“Vinnie, I was lost when you started.”

“You got till tonight to find your way back. That's about as long as I can expect the cops to buy that I forgot all about this morning. Half your action, that's all I want. What's half? You know where to find me when you make up your mind. Hell, I'm always here.”

“I'm late for work, Vinnie.”

He stepped out of the way. “I don't guess that matters if they throw you in the can.”

On his way downstairs, Ralph stopped at his apartment, took the roll of film out of its hiding place behind the medicine cabinet, and dropped it into his pocket. He didn't trust Vinnie and his passkey.

The car he drove to work was a brand-new red Riviera convertible with white upholstery and a white top. It belonged to a lawyer friend who had asked Ralph to sell it for him while he was serving two years in Jackson for suborning to commit perjury, only Ralph hadn't gotten around to it yet. The morning was overcast and the wide streets had that granite look they took on just before a rain. As he navigated his way around the abandoned cars and construction barricades, he thought about the explosion in Lyla Dane's apartment. The building had had gas leaks before, but he kept coming back to Carpenter and how he had refused to explain what he did for Bishop Steelcase, and that last trip upstairs without Ralph.
Coincidence, that's the dick's best friend
, old Gus Lovechild had said once.
When your client's husband and his secretary check into the same motel ten minutes apart, that bonus is as good as in your pocket
. Except for that time with Judge Morganthaler and a file clerk from the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, that is; which
had
been a coincidence. It had taken six months and a thousand dollars in an envelope addressed to a state police commander to get back Gus's investigator's license. But the rule was sound.

Still chewing over it, Ralph parked in a handicapped zone near the building on Michigan Avenue and spent a moment looking through the printed placards he kept in the glove compartment before selecting one that read
VISITING PRIEST
, which he thought appropriate. He clipped it to the sun visor so it could be read through the windshield and went inside.

The gilt lettering on the glass doors to the floor where he worked read
LOVECHILD CONFIDENTIAL INQUIRIES
. Beyond them the reception room was painted in rose and lavender on alternating walls with Lautrec prints hung on them in glass frames. The marble coffee table by the chairs and sofa supported current issues of
Vogue, GQ
, and
Architectural Digest
, and hidden stereo speakers piped Bach and Mozart into the room. It was impressive, but Ralph missed the old mustard-colored office with
EAGLE EYE DETECTIVE AGENCY
flaking off the window and geriatric copies of
National Geographic
, the African issues, on the yellow library table. Behind the kidney-shaped desk sat a receptionist with hair like a cloud of platinum powder and daggerlike nails painted fiery red.

“'Morning, Anita,” Ralph said. “I guess you got to be real careful when you use toilet paper. You could bleed to death.”

She didn't look up from her copy of
Working Woman
. “Mrs. Lovechild wants to see you.”

“What's she want this time, my body?”

“Just your testicles. She said to send in that asshole as soon as he decides to show up.”

“How'd you know she meant me?”

“A business is like a pair of pants. It can only have one asshole in it at a time.” She turned the page.

He leaned over the desk and lowered his voice to a gruff whisper. “I hear the Alamo Hotel on East Jefferson is running a lunchtime special: fifty minutes for five bucks.”

She looked up from her magazine for the first time, smiled, and aimed one of her nails at his good eye. “How'd you like to hustle pencils for the rest of your life?”

“Broads. Never a straight answer.” He shrugged and went through the door behind the desk.

In the short pastel hallway that led to Lucille Lovechild's office, Ralph's personality underwent a change. He straightened his necktie, took off his hat, and smoothed back his hair, which flopped forward again as soon as he took away his hand. Holding the hat, he tapped softly on the door with the occupant's name on it engraved in a brass plate. He remembered the matchstick he was chewing and put it in a pocket.

BOOK: Peeper
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