The Glass Highway (14 page)

M
Y CHAUFFEUR LET ME
out at my house without a word and took off in a full-throated roar of burning money. I’d disappointed her by needing rest, it seemed. Lately I’d disappointed everyone but Assistant Chief Mark Proust. He loved me.

The air in the shack was stale. I left the front door open to let it exhale and mined a bottle of beer out of the refrigerator. It tasted of jail. I poured the rest of it down the sink and went into the living room and sat down in front of the TV set without turning it on. When I’d had enough of that I called my answering service for messages. There were four. One was from a woman whose mother had walked away from her nursing home Christmas Eve and hadn’t been heard from since. One was from a place that wanted to sell me office furniture. Another was from a man named Horn who had tried to reach me that morning and said he’d try again later. The fourth was from the woman, canceling her earlier call. Her mother had been found and returned to the home.

I walked through the house slowly, but there were no signs that the cops had frisked the place. The dust was undisturbed on the half-case of nine-millimeter Luger ammunition on the shelf of the bedroom closet, courtesy of a dealer who didn’t share his colleagues’ fetish for official paperwork. When you own an unlicensed weapon you try not to leave tracks leading to it.

I found the outcounty telephone directory and dialed the Iroquois Heights Police Department. I asked for Dick Bloodworth.

“He’s gone for the day,” said the voice I got. “This is Sergeant Dingle. Something I can do you for?”

“It’s Bloodworth I want. What’s his home number?”

“Sorry, we can’t give that out.”

“This is Deputy Wedge, armorer for the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department. I just finished fitting a new grip to his side arm and I want to tell him he can pick it up.”

“I’ll call him and tell him.”

Cops. I gave him my number to give to Bloodworth and we stopped talking to each other.

The telephone rang while I was peeling off my shirt.

“I’m looking at my side arm right now,” Bloodworth’s voice informed me. “Grip’s the same one I been using since I got out of uniform. And how come I went across the line to Wayne County when we got an armorer of our own?”

I said, “I didn’t know his name, and for all I knew it was him I was talking to. This is Walker. Remember me? I was wearing iron last time we spoke.”

“Uh-huh.” He waited.

“Listen, I want to talk to you about the Royce case.”

“What Royce case? Ain’t no Royce case, man. It’s deader’n she is.”

He’d gone dialect on me, a healthy sign for my purposes. “Trade you a sympathetic ear for some information.”

“You’ll be getting the short end,” he said after a pause.

“There’s another kind? Where can we meet?”

“My dump.” He gave me an address in Iroquois Heights. “Make it at three. Right now I got to go out and shop for a new propeller.” Click.

That one kept me awake for all of five minutes.

Dick Bloodworth lived in a brick split-level in one of the older subdivisions north of the city proper, with a big picture window and a low hedge and a basketball hoop mounted over the garage door. An iron jockey stood on the porch. Someone had slapped a coat of white paint over its black face and hands. That tattered old racial joke.

Mrs. Bloodworth greeted me cordially in a bulky turtleneck sweater and tight slacks over everything Fern Esterhazy had, only in a more compact package. Her complexion was a smooth
cafe au lait
and her hair was sprayed into glossy black waves as hard as corrugated steel. She hung my hat and coat in the hall closet and showed me an open door across the entryway with steps leading down from it.

“Dick’s in the basement,” she said. “Just follow the smell of glue.”

The basement was carpeted and paneled. An oil furnace cut in with a click and a rush as I approached a lighted doorway from which crawled a sharp stench of acetate. I was showered and shaved and wearing fresh clothes. I felt like an ex-con checking in with his parole officer.

“Second,” Bloodworth said.

The room was small, paneled like the rest of the cellar and illuminated by two pairs of fluorescent tubes suspended from the ceiling in troughs. Model airplanes of every size, type, period, and color hung from wires and perched on tables and benches and steel utility shelves all over the room, so close together you needed a diagram to cross the floor without bumping into any. The detective was hunched over a British Spitfire with a fuselage as long as a man’s leg clamped in a vise on a plain wooden bench, hooking a wire across from a dry-cell battery to a terminal on a tiny electric motor in the nose. Straightening, he picked up a remote control device, pointed the antenna at the motor, and flipped a switch. The propeller spun with a sputtering noise that quickly became a drone. He flipped the switch back the other way and it coughed to a stop,

“So this is what you cops do with your spare time,” I said. “Another mystery solved.”

He put down the remote control and wiped his hands off on a smeared cotton rag. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and soiled jeans. Muscles leaped and twitched in his arms and chest as he kneaded the rag. “Depends on the cop. Some drink, some whore around. I play with toys. Keeps my mind off the drinks and the whores. There’s brew in the refrigerator. Toss me a can and grab one for yourself.”

A camp-size unit occupied the corner behind the open door. I got out two cans and handed him one, zipping the top off mine. It was starting to taste like beer again. He took a seat on a round stool next to the bench and waved me into a comfortable shabby overstuffed chair under a dogfight between a squadron of Fokkers and a French Spad, frozen in time and space like moths in a light fixture. I peeled the cellophane off a fresh pack and lit up and drank beer and smoked and watched him.

“My fly open?” he asked after a minute.

“I was just exercising my noggin. You strike me as reasonably honest.”

He slipped into dialect. “Some of us is, boss.”

“Cut that crap. You’ve got too much going for you to hide behind pigment. How’s a reasonably honest guy wind up packing a star in a place like Iroquois Heights?”

“You don’t know that I’m honest,” he said, “reasonably or otherwise.”

“You have to be. If you weren’t, times being what times are, you wouldn’t still be holding doors for deadwood like Reuben Zorn after four years in plainclothes. You’d be Cecil Fish’s chief investigator, or something else equally visible. My guess is you’re too dangerous even for window-dressing, which in this town means straight—reasonably speaking.”

He bolted the contents of his can and flipped it into a wastebasket stuffed full of glue-streaked newspaper. Some beer-drinkers are like that. “So what’s the pitch?”

“Who slammed the door on the Broderick shoot and why so fast?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know who, or you don’t know why?”

“I don’t know means I don’t know. All I do know is Rube and I were busy jacking up the neighbors for the inside track on Paula Royce when we got the call-back to the station. Twenty minutes later we’re turning a B-and-E at a drugstore downtown. The Royce girl was dead and it was all over but the paperwork, and there wasn’t even as much of that as we’re used to.”

“What’d you get from the neighbors?”

“The big 0, just like we got from Washington on her prints. No one on the block even knew her name before the story broke. We got eighteen months out of twenty-four years, and we don’t even have that, really. Where was she before she moved here? Where’d her money come from? She didn’t work, and young Broderick barely had enough in his savings account to support himself if he stayed low, let alone the two of them. I don’t think I like mysteries. If I did I wouldn’t have become a detective.”

He unrolled a pack and a book of matches from his T-shirt sleeve. While he was lighting up I said, “She told me she was from Bolivia. Her parents were—” I stopped.

He looked at me until the match burned down to his fingers, then dropped it and ground it out under his heel on the carpet. “Yeah?”

I leaned down carefully, tipped some ash into my pant-cuff, and sat back. “Her parents were both killed in an automobile accident, or so she claimed. With what happened to her that’s two in one family. What are the odds on something like that?”

“I’d say pretty good. There are a lot of cars in the world.”

“Maybe.” I sucked smoke. “Ever hear of a pusher calls himself Moses True?”

“He isn’t local or I would have.”

“Word is he was doing some peddling here. He took over for Johnny Ralph Dorchet about a year ago. You remember Johnny Ralph.”

“I remember what was left of him on the late news. Was this True supplying the Royce girl?”

I nodded, batting away smoke. “That tooth took a little longer to pull than it should have. He’s worth talking to again in the light of recent events.”

“Out of my jurisdiction. Anyway, the case is morgue meat, like I said, or it is for me and Rube. The department has a rule against cops moonlighting. And I hear you’re not even a P.I. these days.”

“You say ‘not even a P.I.’ like that’s lower than something stuck on a heel.” I drained my can and poked my stub inside. It sighed when it touched moisture. “Would you know anything about a gold Chrysler that’s been shadowing either me or Fern Esterhazy?”

“It’s not us.”

“What about Cecil Fish?”

“Why would he want to pin a tail on a busted peeper?”

“Why would anyone?” I got up, setting my empty down on the bench. “Thanks for talking to me. You ought to think about splitting this burg and trying your hand at police work.”

“I don’t think my system could stand the shock.” He flashed me his thousand-candlepower smile. “The pay’s sweet down in Miami, they say.”

“They even throw in a free burial plot.” I ducked under a B-17 Flying Fortress on my way to the door. The air stirred by the movement started most of the suspended airplanes in the room swaying.

“What fuel you running on, Walker?”

I looked back at him. He screwed out his butt on a leg of the bench and let it drop to the floor. “You stuck your neck out for this Royce twist and got it chopped off down around the kidneys,” he said.

“Fish wanted someone for the Broderick kill. Do you think Proust would have gone on looking once he had her?”

“Is that a confession? You helped her out of the country because you thought she was innocent?”

I grinned. “If it is, what good is it to you?”

“No good at all. Today. Which is why I’m not pressing it. Why are you?”

I pushed the model bomber with a finger and set it rocking. “Nice work.”

After a moment he grinned.

An old black woman was arguing with the manager behind the plate-glass window of the laundry on Twelfth Street, baring her dentures and shaking her fist in his crimson face. Between them, a shop model front-loader old enough to remember iron pennies drooled white foam all around the lid and down the front into a spreading puddle on the dirty linoleum. I walked past and mounted the stairs to Moses True’s place. On the way through town I’d stopped at my office, and the Smith & Wesson felt as good as a hot water bottle behind my hip.

I got all the way to his door before I figured out what was wrong. Not enough dogs were barking. I knocked on the door, and still there wasn’t enough barking. Nowhere near the usual amount. There was also no answer.

The animal stench seemed stronger today, even in the hall. I was breathing with my mouth open. Grasping the knob, I eased the .38 out of my waistband with the other hand. The door wasn’t locked. It opened a foot and a half and stopped. A dead dog was blocking it.

It was the brown Labrador, or what was left of it after something had caved in the right side of its skull. Its curved yellow fangs were frozen in the knowing grin of death. The exposed bone, white against black blood, bore teeth marks where the surviving dogs had gnawed the jagged edge. Whoever had hit it hadn’t known that its growling act was all bluff.

I stepped over the carcass. The mongrel that had attacked me lay with its back twisted, surrounded by a brackish stain on the carpet where its bowels had voided themselves. Its neck had been crushed. Threads of what looked like dark wool were pasted by blood to the pyramidal teeth in its gaping jaws. It had gone down fighting.

Corruption hung thick and sweet in the room. The yapping of the hairless mix and the deeper, kiyoodling bellow of a tragic-looking Bassett hound assumed a frantic pitch as I advanced. A slat-sided golden retriever came toward me favoring its right forepaw, sniffed my pantleg, slunk away, and lay down to lick the ragged pulp of a missing toe.

So far it was just dogs. I peeked behind the folding modesty screen that hid the toilet, checked out the kitchen area, went to a window and looked at the fire escape. Finally I grasped the bottom of the pulldown bed and tipped it up into the wall. Moses True lay fully clothed on his face on the floor where the bed had been. The starved dogs hadn’t left a great deal for the medical examiner to puzzle over.

The windows were painted shut. I looked around some more until I found a wrecking bar, worked the business end under a sash, and wrenched it up far enough to let some fresh air into the room. Then I went down to the car and lost the revolver and came back up and used the telephone. We had had three deaths, some cops, dope, a mysterious tail, and two days in jail for a stubborn P.I. who was no longer a P.I., just stubborn. Now we would have some more cops.

I
LEFT DETROIT POLICE
headquarters on Beaubien about dusk and drove back to the office. I’d had to repeat the whole story for a lieutenant named Madison, beginning with Sandy Broderick right through to my finding True’s body, leaving out the favor I’d done Paula Royce and a couple of other details just to smooth out the narrative. For now the M.E. was saying death by strangulation sometime late Christmas Day or early the next morning, which thanks to Cecil Fish’s hospitality left me in the clear. Nobody seemed interested in hanging me with breaking and entering a dead man’s apartment, but leaving the area was something they said they’d rather I didn’t do for a while. When I walked they were preparing to canvass the block for anyone who might have heard or seen something worth reporting. In that neighborhood they stood a better chance of finding one of Santa’s elves left over.