The Glass Highway (13 page)

“Nuts to that. You’re just looking for a big trial to grandstand your way into Lansing. I’ve done some things I won’t admit to in this life, but helping hoist a showboater like you into a position where he can do some real harm over the body of a girl who was just standing in the wrong place at the wrong time in a wrong city won’t be one of them. I’d like to go back to my nice quiet cell now. All this hobnobbing with cops and politicians is spoiling what’s left of my good name.”

Fish’s face was scarlet. He walked on stiff legs to the door and tore it open. Zorn and Bloodworth were loitering in the reception room. “Tank this son of a bitch,” snarled the prosecutor. To me: “Get a lawyer. You’re going to want someone to work on your appeal after we hang you.”

“Thanks. I’ve had my fill of them this trip.”

Zorn whistled on the way down in the elevator. He’d been eavesdropping.

I’d missed lunch, which was no accident on Fish’s part. Supper and night and breakfast again and the motionless lump of dead time in between. I had grown used to the mattress, and even the silence got so it didn’t make my skin crawl anymore. Only forty-two hours inside and I was becoming institutionalized. One of the inmates in the cell next to mine, a lean young black with sideburns as wide as my hand, helped kill some of the hours asking and answering trivia questions about old movies. Fred Astaire musicals were his specialty. He was awaiting trial for raping and beating a seventy-year-old woman in her apartment and making off with a portable television set.

Sometime during the night, a kid busted for shoplifting tried to hang himself in his cell on the third floor and was cut down by a guard. We knew he was DOA at the emergency room of the local hospital before the jail administration did.

Footsteps in the hall at lunchtime, but not the scrape and shuffle of the trustee who brought the meals. They stopped outside my cell. I looked up from the bunk at the blue-chinned deputy who pulled the
a.m
. shift. He unlocked the door.

“Where’s the priest?” I asked.

He said, “When you criminals going to get some new writers? Let’s go.”

He took me down to Receiving. The grayhead who had checked me in Christmas Day was standing behind his desk, upon which my overcoat was folded, the hat perched on top. He handed me a paper sack containing my wallet, keys, wristwatch, pad, and pencil, pushed a property slip across the desk, and held out a ballpoint pen. “Give me your copy of the original receipt and sign this. Make sure it’s all there first.”

I didn’t move. “Who sprang me?”

“Authorization just came down from the city prosecutor’s office.” He wasn’t going to say anything more. Then he did. “The Mounties fished a three-year-old Mustang out of Lake Ontario this morning. Your girlfriend was still in it.”

“H
EY, BEAUTIFUL HUNK.”

I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the jail like an immigrant on Ellis Island, sucking free air and fingering a stale Winston out of my battered pack. Last night’s snowfall had already melted off the street and been swept into yellow piles against the curb. Fern Esterhazy was sitting there behind the wheel of a green Jaguar with the top down. Her long red hair was windblown and she was wearing dark glasses and a leather coat with a standing collar.

I went over and said, “Crank the top up. The Ann-Margret look doesn’t include blue skin.”

“You ex-cons have no adventure in your souls. Hop in.”

I hopped in. The soft leather seat wrapped itself around me like an amorous stingray. “Let’s just make circles till I can smell something besides Lysol.”

We took off with a chirp of expensive rubber. I caught my hat and stuck it on the floor under the dash. The engine whined up the scale, gathering breath during the gear changes. She shifted like a Daytona veteran. I turned up my own collar against frostbite.

She said, “I tried to bail you out when I heard. They wouldn’t let me.”

“There’s no bailing out a material witness. Who told you I was sprung?”

“Dad got a call from Cecil Fish this morning.”

“What about Paula Royce?”

“Every time we meet you ask me the same thing. A Mountie spotted her last night driving a stolen car near Kingston and gave chase. They don’t ride horses anymore, except in parades. She ran him around for a while, then went off a curve straight into the lake. She drowned.”

“She wasn’t that stupid.”

“To steal a car, or to run it into the lake?”

“Both. Pull over a minute.”

We were doing sixty through the business district. She down-shifted, braking at the same time, and we skidded into the curb. Gasoline romped around inside the tank. I pried my fingers loose from the padded dash, got out, and walked back a block to drop a quarter into a newspaper stand on the corner. A picture of Cecil Fish fielding questions at a press conference took up a fourth of the front page under a headline reading witness held in broderick slaying. Below the fold was a smaller picture of me. I recognized it from my investigator’s license photostat of two renewals ago. I paged through the paper, but there was nothing in it about the chase that had ended in Lake Ontario.

Fern appeared on foot beside me. “They just released the story,” she said. “It won’t be in print until tomorrow.”

I stuck the paper under my arm. “How about a lift down to the police station?”

“Let go of it, Amos.”

In broad daylight, her face showed faint lines like her stepmother’s.

I said, “Just for a minute. I want to thank Assistant Chief Proust for his hospitality.”

We went back to the car. She touched off a cigarette with the dash lighter and wheeled us into the traffic lane. “Bud was a sweet kid. I never thought I’d miss him but I do.”

“You think the girl killed him?”

“I don’t hate her for it. I wouldn’t if she were still alive. It’s not as if she planned it, or as if she knew what she was doing. You’d think she did it too, if you weren’t still gone on her.”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever been gone on anyone,” I said, “and neither do you. It’s more complicated than that. I’d buy the police version of what happened—maybe—if I wasn’t sure she was looking back over her shoulder all the time she was here. I want to know who it was she expected to see.”

“Maybe it was herself. God, I’m Freudian today.” She raised her cigarette above the windshield and tapped ash off into the slipstream. “I was in analysis, you know. Two years.”

“Who wasn’t, in your tax bracket? There’s the cop house. Dump me here. I’ll walk across.”

I had a hand on the door handle when she spun the Jag into a tight U and we shrieked to a halt in front of the steps leading up to the front door. When the shocks were through squeaking I picked my hat up off the floor and stepped up onto the curb. I resisted the urge to get down and kiss the concrete.

“How long will you be?” she asked.

“As long as it takes my knees to stop wobbling.”

She smiled beatifically. “I’ll be here when they do.”

On my way up the steps I met a uniformed officer coming down. His cop’s eyes flicked from the car to me and he said, “That’s police parking only. Who’s she, the Pope in drag?”

“Close. She’s Charles Esterhazy’s daughter.”

His face got tired. He knew the name, “That figures. In this town everybody’s somebody’s.”

Inside, the bald desk sergeant spotted me heading up the stairs and called out. I pretended not to hear. But he must have made a call to the squad room, because by the time I reached the second floor a detective was waiting for me. It was the same plainclothes man who had poked his head into Proust’s office to announce the city prosecutor’s arrival—was that only two days earlier? My life had fallen into two parts, before the slam and after.

I said, “Chief in?”

“Not to you, Jim.” He was a thin twist of hide with a pockmarked face and an obvious Adam’s apple that cleared his collar with three inches to spare. The strap of his under-arm holster defied gravity clinging to his almost nonexistent shoulders. “No civilians above the street without an accompanying officer.”

“I didn’t see the X-rating downstairs.”

“Look for it on your way out.”

“Let the son of a bitch pass, Epstein.”

At the guttural command, the detective glanced back at Proust leaning out through his office door, then moved just enough so that I had to walk around him to enter the squad room. The assistant chief held the door for me as I went into the office. I hear they do that for you in the gas chamber too.

He closed the door. “Seat.”

“No thanks. My keister’s still flat from that two-by-four in the icehouse.”

“Suit yourself. How’s county food these days?”

“They got food?”

He snickered and circled behind his desk, walking with a jaunty step. Same well-cut blue suit, but today he was wearing a maroon silk tie with a musical clef embroidered in gold just below the knot. I didn’t know he’d been a musician.

“You got angels on your shoulder, Walker. If we’d latched on to Paula Royce anything but dead, the grand jury would’ve indicted you along with her for complicity. We could still hook you for withholding information in a felony case, but why bother? There’s no percentage in holding a grudge.”

I waited for the kicker. He lowered himself into his swivel chair with a pleasant little sigh and cracked a weary humidor on his desk to look over the cigars inside like a prom queen choosing from an assortment of chocolates. Then he sighed again, a little less contentedly, and flipped shut the lid without taking one. He was in too good a mood for someone who had just surrendered a plum to the Canadian authorities and was cutting down his tobacco consumption in the bargain. And he could hold a grudge till it sprouted leaves.

“You’ll find a letter from state police headquarters in Lansing waiting for you at your office.” His muddy eyes looked dreamy. “I called them yesterday early. They’ve yanked your license on charges lodged by this office.”

“I can petition for a hearing,” I said after a moment.

“Sure, but why mess around with it? You’re guilty. I guess they’ll be sending someone around to collect your plastic badge. You better give it to him. You know how hot those boys in the Hollywood Division get when they have to come get you and lose the crease in their pants.”

“All that means is I can’t do what I do and get paid. I’ve had plenty of practice at that.”

He smiled, with both sets this time. “Everybody needs a hobby. Oh, and they’re pulling your CCW too, so don’t go around packing anything more lethal than a rubber in your wallet. I’m big on gun control.”

“Yeah, I heard about your Howitzer collection.” I scratched a match on the edge of his desk just to kick the smile off his face. It wasn’t worth it. It had been done before. “What about the Broderick kill?”

“What about it?”

I hesitated before setting flame to tobacco. “That’s how it is, huh.”

“That’s how it is. In this department we don’t waste time sucking bare bones.”

“Who ID’d Paula Royce’s body?”

“Us. She fit the APB reader, so the moose patrol took her prints and telexed us a copy. Confirmed.”

“Who’d you send up for the eyeball?”

“Prints is prints, citizen. We got to save on gasoline for the President.” He unwound the string from a large manila envelope full of traffic accident reports and started reading. “Walk, now. You’re in my light.”

I used the door. When a cop tells you to walk you walk.

Fern was still parked in the
verboten
zone in front of the station. As I approached, a young motorcycle officer encased in glistening black leather from collar to toes turned away from the car and passed me, humming. He didn’t have his ticket book out. His fat Harley was standing between the Jag and a gold Chrysler LeBaron in the first of the metered spaces behind.

“You must be sitting upwind of the kennel today.” I climbed in beside Fern.

She studied me through her cheaters. “I heard prison is embittering. I didn’t know it worked so fast.”

“You’re right. Sorry. Did I interrupt you and Brando while you were setting the date?”

“No chance. Too young and poor.”

I tilted my hat forward over my eyes and rested the back of my head against the seat. “Drive, Kato.”

“Where to?”

“The nearest office of the Michigan Employment Security Commission.”

“Welfare cheat.” She let out the clutch.

My eyes burned behind my lids. I was bled out, but I didn’t sleep right away. My head was too full of why no one had gone to Canada to finger Paula Royce’s remains, in a racket that demands two witnesses’ signatures to requisition a roll of toilet paper.

I dreamed I was back in jail, trying to shut out the clanging of barred doors reverberating through my cell. The hard bunk beneath me jumped with each impact. I opened my eyes. Fern Esterhazy’s Jaguar was bucking over a series of traffic bumps in a residential neighborhood I knew well.

“Slow down,” I said, sitting up. “That’s what those things are for.”

She eased back on the accelerator. I hooked out my pack, but it was empty. She offered me one of hers. I shook my head. My throat was still getting used to them. “How’d you find out where I live?”

“You’re in the book, remember? My place was closer, but you need a shave and I don’t have a razor. Whiskers are like snow scenes, nice to look at but not to feel.”

“Unless my body is the price of the ride”—I yawned—“I’ll just pass for now. All I’m hot for at the moment is sleep.” I adjusted her mirror to monitor the growth on my chin. The gold Chrysler LeBaron reflected over my shoulder looked significant. I tried to remember why. Then I remembered. “Make a right,” I said.

“This is your street.”

“Make it anyway. While you’re at it, make three more.”

She understood then and glanced at her side mirror. We circled the block.

“He’s gone,” she said, checking the mirror. Her tone was relieved.

“Yeah.”

He was bright, but not bright enough. He’d left us after two turns. If he’d been wide awake he’d have dropped us after the first. I readjusted the mirror and settled back for the rest of the ride. So far I hadn’t noticed much difference between the life of a private citizen and that of an investigator.