The Glass Highway (17 page)

“It’s just a face.”

She said, “I get off at ten.”

“I don’t blame you. It’s a good number.”

She was still puzzling it out when I left her.

My car was in a lighted city lot a block down from the
News
building. On my way to the booth I stopped to admire a gold Chrysler LeBaron cranked into a slot two cars down. The attendant was busy, so I opened the passenger’s door and leafed through the usual junk in the glove compartment until I found the registration. It was made out to Theodore Grundy. Of course I didn’t know anyone by that name.

T
HE ATTENDANT WAS
a short round black wearing a faded red parka over a denim jacket over a sweatshirt over a flannel shirt over a thermal top with a hole chewed in the neckband. He catalogued me from behind thick horn-rimmed glasses as I approached his booth.

“Silver Olds, right?” he said.

“Right. Say, that’s quite a memory you have.”

He beamed, the tip of a pale pink tongue showing through the gap where his front teeth belonged, and took my keys off a peg under the window. “Sixty-five cents.”

I gave him a buck, collected my keys, and watched him make change from the dingus on his belt. “Bet you can’t describe the guy that belongs to that Chrysler.” I pointed my chin at it.

His lids came down, but he was watching me through the lashes. He played with the coins, clicking them together. “Depends on the bet.”

“Another buck on top of the change.”

He said, “That’s him pretending to tie his shoelace.”

I turned away to cough. A slim number with a dark moustache in a gray three-piece and leather trenchcoat had one foot propped up on the bumper of a green Toronado and was fiddling with his shoe. He was wearing loafers.

I gave the attendant another bill. “How much to lose his keys for five minutes?”

“A buck a minute. It’s the job if he complains to the city.”

“The hell it is. The city hasn’t canned anyone since Cavanaugh was mayor.” But I tipped him five.

He pocketed it along with the other bill and my change, lifted a ring of keys off a peg, dropped it into his change drawer, and bumped the drawer shut with his hard round stomach. I pointed an index finger at him with thumb cocked and made a snicking noise out the side of my mouth. He gave me back his cat’s-grin with his tongue showing. I turned around and walked past Slim to my machine. He finished adjusting his pantcuff and strolled over to the booth, whistling loudly. He had to be a fed. No one else carries airy nonchalance like it’s a sack of anvils.

He was arguing with the attendant when I backed out of my space and rolled out past him onto Lafayette. I turned east, hung a right onto Washington on the yellow, made another right onto Congress, and parked in a loading zone near the lot’s back entrance. Before climbing out I flipped down the visor with my honorary sheriff’s star pinned to it. It might confuse a cop long enough for me to get back before he called the wrecker.

My shadow was still too busy shouting obscenities at the guy in the booth to notice me hurrying along the other aisle. I let myself into his car and got down on the floor between the front and back seats and waited with my Smith & Wesson in my hand.

After a couple of minutes I heard rapid footsteps scraping asphalt and the door on the driver’s side was torn open and a body flung heavily into the seat. Keys jingled. I sat up and touched the gun’s cold muzzle to the back of a slender neck.

“Slow down, Ted,” I said quietly. “Or is it Theo?”

He took it well, just a little reddening at the base of his scalp and around the edges of his ears. I nudged him gently with the barrel to stop him before he got started. He relaxed just enough.

“It’s Theodore.” His voice was deep and full, as slim men’s often are. “I hate nicknames.”

“Hands on the wheel, Theodore.”

He complied, placing them precisely at ten and two. Somehow I was sure he would. I switched hands on the gun quickly and slid my right under his arm and around his chest. He had a .22 target pistol under his left armpit. That meant he was good, or wanted others to think he was. I laid it on the seat beside me and got his ID folder out of an inside pocket. The card said he was with the Justice Department. I flipped the folder onto the front seat and sat back, still covering him but holding the gun down where it couldn’t be seen easily from outside.

“Why the tail?” I asked. “I pay taxes, when I make enough to have taxes to pay.”

He started to take his hands off the wheel. I advised him to leave them there. He said, ‘Can we go somewhere? This is like a fish tank.”

“Uh-uh. Mama didn’t raise me to threaten other people with deadly weapons and then put them in charge of deadlier ones. This is Detroit. No one would look twice if I painted the windshield with your brains and then yanked your wheel covers and tape deck. I said why the tail and why the tail is what I said.”

“I’m just an employee. I was told to follow you and report on your movements and contacts. I wasn’t told why.”

“Oh lie. Go again.”

“I’m telling the tru—”

I grabbed a fistful of hair at the nape of his neck and bounced his head off the steering wheel. It sounded like someone kicking a tire.

“You dumb shit, I’m a feder—”

I bounced him again.

“You know what the pen—”

Again. This time the horn peeped. “We can do this all day,” I said. I was still holding him by the hair. “I’m unemployed, I’ve got the time. How about we go halves? I’ll tell you what I think’s going down as far as I’ve got it figured. You tell me how wrong I am. Sort of like comparing notes. You do that sometimes.” I let go.

“When you put it that way—”

“Yeah.” I sat back again. “Ready?”

He was busy rearranging his black hair over a small bald spot in back. His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. He nodded.

“Your interest is Paula Royce,” I began.

He said nothing. So far I was on target.

“She told me once she was from Bolivia, but she wasn’t. She was Colombian. I’ll get back to that later. She’s being tracked by a killer named Horn who doesn’t think she’s dead, but who wants to make sure because she once talked too much about something and she has to be made an example of so that no one else gets the same idea. The reason I think she’s Colombian is it’s the Colombians who are muscling in on the drug racket in Detroit. They’re the only Spanish-speaking people with the background and connections to undertake the job. They bumped a local dealer named Dorchet along with two of his associates because he wouldn’t listen to reason, put Moses True in his place because he would and because of his recognition factor among the customers, then had him bumped too when he outlived his usefulness. Horn again. He’s the peg I’m hanging all this on. You knew about True?”

He kept silent.

“I’m on shakier ground here, so let me know when I step wrong. Paula Royce’s history goes back eighteen months and stops. Even the Iroquois Heights cops can’t go any deeper, and this is the age of computers. Her prints go to Washington and nothing comes back. No one person is that good at hiding his past. Only the government can do that, and it’s a specialty of the Justice Department. Paula Royce, who is not named Royce at all, testified against some of her compatriots in the drug trade, probably though not necessarily in Miami, in return for a new identity and relocation courtesy of Uncle Sam, with a steady allowance thrown in so that she doesn’t have to work for a living. She told me herself she had an outside source of income. Her nationality was changed for extra protection and she was given that dumb story about her parents having been killed in an automobile accident, just in case someone asked about her family. That was unworthy of you fellows; a real paste-up job.”

“No, that part’s true,” Theodore Grundy broke in. “Her parents actually were killed that way. We like to incorporate bits and pieces of a witness’s actual past where we can, for authenticity.”

“Could be you were right. It’s just corny enough to be swallowed by anyone but a suspicious private star. Where you fell down was in failing to cure her of her dependence on prescription drugs. Dorchet was supplying her, or at least he was supplying the parties she went to in Grosse Pointe, until the takeover, when True replaced him. Somewhere along the line True got on to his new employers’ interest in Paula, because he took the trouble to find out where she lived. My thought is he sold them the information and then they sicked one of their cowboys on her.

“He botched the job, as cowboys will. I read it that Paula’s roommate, Bud Broderick, got iced trying to protect her and that the killer panicked and ran without doing the job he came to do. Now the Colombians had to forget about her until things simmered down, and clean up. True knew what had gone down and he was a semi-outsider. This trip they waited until real talent was available, and then they didn’t waste any time. Horn got out of stir Christmas Day. Next morning True was literally dog meat. Which leaves just one question.

“Where’s Paula Royce?”

“She’s dead.”

“That’s my line,” I said. “I used it on Horn for the same reason, and he didn’t believe it any more than I did. Somebody in your department has his record stuck, Grundy. Too many people in her family died in traffic accidents. If she did, you wouldn’t be shadowing me. And that brings me back to what I started with. Why the tail?”

He averted his eyes from the mirror, drummed fingers on the edge of the wheel, looked back at my reflection. “The alias program is one of the strongest weapons we have, Walker. Your poking around threatens to uncover too many of the seams. If how it works gets to be public knowledge we’re back where we were at the time of the old Kefauver Committee hearings. You wouldn’t remember those.”

“I would, barely. You wouldn’t. According to your ID you were born the year they would have aired on television. Feed me the rest.”

“The point is they weren’t very effective, short of kicking off a shortlived campaign to nominate Senator Kefauver for President. The witnesses that could have made a difference there and in similar investigations later were afraid to step forward. It wasn’t until we had developed a system whereby we could offer a ninety-nine percent guarantee of protection from reprisal that we began winning indictments against leading figures in organized crime. The program is—”

“I know what it is. This isn’t a high school auditorium. What you’re trying hard not to say is that your precious program’s fate rests on the fates of the witnesses you help take a powder. You can’t afford the headlines if somebody gets to one of them. For some reason, maybe because it was Christmas Eve, Paula Royce wasn’t able to get hold of a fed the night Broderick was killed in her own house and she knew her cover was blown. So she came to me and asked me to get her the hell away from the area fast. She let me know what had happened, but she didn’t confide the rest, because she had every reason to believe that Yankee Doodle Dandy would be able to take over in a day or so when all the wrapping paper was in the incinerator and the leftover turkey was eaten. And she was right. Two days after I drove her into Windsor so she could crash in a nonexistent cabin belonging to Bud’s stepfather—Mrs. Esterhazy would have told me about it when Bud was missing if there were such a place—while I was cooling my heels in the tank, ‘Paula Royce’ went into Lake Ontario and Thelma Ingolstadt, or whatever new name you gave her, was whisked away to Wyoming or some such place equally inaccessible. You haven’t told me I’m wrong so far.”

“You haven’t given me much chance.” He drummed his fingers again. “If what you say is true—and I’m not saying for one minute that it is—her safety would depend on your going home and forgetting about her. That would be one good reason why I’m following you, to make sure you do. It doesn’t appear that you have.”

“There’s a little matter of my license,” I said. “My license which I don’t got no more on account of I was there to help out when you weren’t.”

“I’ve been wondering about that. She helped us because the bunch we were after killed her brother, who was a low-level guard on their drug shipments until they found out he was funneling some of it off for his own business on the side. We helped her because her testimony was instrumental in breaking up one of the biggest drug rings in Florida. Why did you agree to help her? What did you have to gain?”

“It was Christmas.”

His eyes in the mirror looked confused.

“Forget it. Let’s just say it’s not all Gene Autry and hysterical reminders in the newspaper about how many shopping days are left.” I holstered my .38. “I take it you know as much about who pulled the trigger on Bud Broderick as I do.”

“We don’t have any interest in finding out. He was never our concern.”

“Even if the killer is your star witness?”

He was looking at me over the back of the seat now. His moustache twisted. “They call us the Justice Department. It’s just a name. No one expects us to live up to it.”

I gave him that one. I’d have had to untangle it before I could top it anyway. I broke the clip out of his automatic, ejected the shell from the chamber, stuck it in the clip, and dropped the gun on the front seat. “So long, Grundy. I’ve told me all I need to know.” I tossed the clip onto the ledge under the back window and opened the door.

“Just a second,” he said. “Are you going to continue looking for Paula Royce?”

“As long as Horn is. It has something to do with my picking up a key early on a holiday morning. It doesn’t matter that it was a phony. You wouldn’t understand.”

I got out and slammed the door. He cranked down the window on his side. The glass had frosted over just since we’d been talking. He blinked up at me in the glare of a spot mounted on a pole overhead. “I’m not making any promises. I have to speak with my superiors. Suppose things could be fixed so you got your license back. Would that interest you at all?”

“I hear you talking, Mr. Grundy.”

He smiled the crooked smile. “I thought you might. You’ll be hearing from us.”

He rolled the window back up and started the engine. I stood watching as he backed around and left, one rear tire spinning a little on a slick spot on the pavement. I trotted back to my car. The badge on the visor had bought me a ticket for parking in a loading zone, nothing else.