The Hours of the Virgin (16 page)

I gave her the emergency fifty I kept in the ID folder. “For the collection plate.”

It went down inside the front of the print dress like a pelican diving for breakfast. “Maybe not
all
of it,” she said. “God's house ain't got no toilet needs fixing.”

“I said I'd fix it, Ma.”

“I never thought you wouldn't, son.”

I put on my hat. “Thanks, Mrs. Spurling. I know a little more about how much I don't know.”

“Clark. Nesta Clark. Don't you mention it.” She put on a scarf that didn't go with the gloves or the coat or the hat. The outfit made perfect sense now. “What you figure them two was talking about that time of night?”

I used the doorknob. Cold came into the house like a bill collector. “That's one of the things I don't know,” I said. “They're piling up.”

17

Mondays are okay. They come at you scrubbed, bright of eye, and wearing a clean shirt. Unlike Saturdays they don't ram a crowbar between rich and poor, between a broken windowpane waiting to be replaced and an eighty-foot Criscraft burbling its twin Chryslers in a Grosse Pointe slip. Nor do they, like Sundays, demand a frantic effort to stuff as much recreation into a twenty-four-hour period as the human body can stand. Everybody's a working stiff come Monday.

As weekdays go, this one was starting better than some I'd had lately. My sinuses were open, nobody shot at me, and there weren't any second-generation Deadheads who put their babies in the snow waiting for me in the outer office. The asbestos crew was back at work, whistling the theme of the flying monkeys from
The Wizard of Oz
as they pulled the pink stuff out of the ceiling like entrails and packed it into yellow industrial-strength Hefty bags labeled
WARNING
—
TOXIC MATERIAL
. Even the mail had come early. I picked it up from under the slot and carried it into the heart of the great machine that keeps me in socks and cigarettes.

Dumping the mail on the desk I remembered that four days had passed since I'd asked John Alderdyce to pry Harold Boyette's address out of his leasing company. I was reaching for the telephone when it rang and it was John. This string couldn't last.

“So bright, so early,” said the inspector. “I was under the impression you private types slept off the weekend till Wednesday.”

“You public types ought to read a higher grade of fiction. What's the word on the street?”

“Same one that's always there, the only one the scum can spell. I've got good news and bad news.”

“Like hell. Cops never have good news.”

“Well, drive this one around the block and see how it corners. We found your client.”

The
we
said it all. I put both feet on the floor, centering my gravity. “Just read me the method and time of death. I'll ask where later.”

“You got a reason to think he's dead?” He kept it light. John's rattle is often mistaken for bells.

“Just playing the percentages. There are a lot more people dead than alive. So is he?”

“Someday before I retire, which I can't ever on account of my daughter tells me she's in love with a sculptor, I'd like to poke around inside that skull of yours with a flashlight. I bet I find Jimmy Hoffa in there. Sure Boyette's dead. Reason we think it's him, the Toyota he turned up in has the license number you gave us.”

“Natural causes, of course.”

“Of course. They mine lead, don't they? Diggers in the coroner's office mined ninety-eight grains of it out of his brain this morning. It went in behind the right ear, mob style. Fired from the back seat or else from the passenger's side in front when he turned his head, which would make the shooter a southpaw.”

“My ballistics is rusty. What's that come to in calibers?”

“Thirty-two, jacketed.”

I changed hands on the receiver. It was getting slippery. “The mob doesn't use thirty-twos.”

“Oh, hell, nobody follows the rules anymore. They never used to cap them at home either, but we're pulling them out of their kids' nurseries these days.” Air stirred on his end. “Maybe you've got an alternative.”

“Where'd he bob up?”

“O'Hair Park. Kids went there to toss the football around yesterday and found him slumped over the wheel of his Toyota.”

“That's not far from where I lost him. How long?”

“Since before the rain Thursday. The car looked like an iceberg. A car can stand a long time before anyone looks inside. When we know what time he ate last we'll know what time he died.”

“What about the bundle he had with him at the Tomcat?”

“No bundle. No illuminated manuscripts either, unless you count the owner's manual. Care to meet me at County and positive him?”

I said I'd see him there in a few minutes. But a minute later I was still sitting there, turning over the facts with a fork.

Not that many premeditated murders are committed with a .32. For reasons best left to the consumer research team at
Guns and Ammo
, it lacks both the velocity and the accuracy of the much lighter .22, currently the assassin's weapon of choice for close range work because of the low noise quotient. I'd asked questions in maybe three killings in which a .32 was used. Two of them in the past twenty-four hours.

The Coroners' Court Building, erected seventy years ago at the corner of Brush and East Lafayette, is a gray Deco box of the type that the city delights in tearing down in favor of something sleek and glossy with the life expectancy of a campaign poster; only new charnel-houses don't skew politically, so it stays. Somebody in those Prohibition days had had an inkling of what was to come, and although the morgue's capacity is often strained, the attendants haven't had to resort to stacking the clientele on the sidewalk just yet. They came close during the race riots of 1943 and 1967.

Improvements have been made since fedoras. These days there's no reason to visit cold storage unless you're actually a customer. In a rare fit of sensitivity, the coroner's office has installed a closed-circuit TV system so spouses and children and parents can view the remains of their loved ones on monitors and avoid carrying away the sting of ammonia in their nostrils. Everything's televised today: births, deaths, court trials, police beatings, the act of love. The joke's on George Orwell. Big Brother is us.

I found Alderdyce standing by the monitor, in conversation with a small man who looked like a circus barker. This was Noel Beman, the county's chief medical examiner. His shaved head, waxed mustache, and padded shoulders appeared on the TV news whenever a dismemberment or a satanic sacrifice made the evening deadline, lingering over the graphic details with all the loquacious poise of a man who truly enjoys his work. Which of course he did. Nobody winds up carving on cadavers by accident.

“Fascinating case,” said Beman after the introductions, gripping my hand with his small strong one. “I just got my hands out of his insides.”

I put mine in my pocket and wiped it on the lining. “I thought you preferred them with their heads cut off and stuffed with garlic.”

“Wrong case,” John told Beman. “Walker's here for the head shot we brought in yesterday.”

The examiner's black Eastern European eyes lost their shine. “Oh, that. Boom-boom, no imagination. His fatty tissue would have killed him in ten years anyway. What is
your
cholesterol count, Mr. Walker?”

“I don't know right now. I'm hoping for the record.”

John said, “Thanks for your time, Doctor. We'll call you first if any more parts turn up.”

“A single metacarpus would tell me a great deal. You'd be surprised.” Beman offered his hand again but I pretended not to see it and he left.

“That the jigsaw case?” I asked John.

He nodded. “Ford plant maintenance found the torso this morning clogging an intake pipe at Rouge. We're still missing the head and hands but it looks like we've found Hector Matador's missing bodyguard. Part of the payoff for the Acardo killing. You ought to remember that one.”

“I testified against Matador. If those Colombians held a grudge as long as the Sicilians, you'd be spiking up pieces of me all over the metropolitan area.”

“I hope not. It's a bureaucratic pisser. We're still hassling with the cops in Warren and Dearborn over who has jurisdiction based on the importance of the body parts and whose backyard they turn up in. Let's see what's on TV.” He flipped the switch to an intercom. “Okay.”

The screen snowed over and suddenly cleared. I was looking at Harold Boyette's face for the first time in days.

Encountered unexpectedly in tall weeds or on the floor of a city apartment, corpses in general look like mannequins. Powdered and painted under the pink lights of a funeral parlor they look asleep. In the morgue they just look dead. This one's eyes weren't quite closed, allowing thin semicircles of white to show with a gluey shine through the lashes. The hair was slicked back and darkened with water, but I recognized the putty cheeks, and his complexion wasn't that much paler than it had been when blood was feeding it. The full lips were gray as liver and pulled back from his teeth in a kind of surprised smile.

“That him?”

I nodded and lit a cigarette. Twelve inches of block wall separated us from the cooling room but I smelled formaldehyde anyway. I always did, even upstairs in the inquest rooms.

The inspector inspected me. “You look like you lost someone close.”

I shook the match and my head. “Not as close as the ten thousand.”

“Yeah, you're a mercenary son of a bitch. Rolexes up to your elbows and diamond faucets in the kitchen. Save the act for those bent cops up in Iroquois Heights.” He flipped the switch again. “Show's over.” The screen went dark.

“What shape's the slug in?”

“Good enough to match, if we find something to match it with.”

“Try the one in the wall at the Tomcat. I doubt they bothered to dig it out even if they mortared it over.”

“I almost forgot about that. Who do you like for it?”

“Boyette's boss at the DIA told me he fired him six months ago for passing off phony manuscripts as genuine. Maybe his partners thought he was getting ready to crack.”

“Why would they think that if the DIA chose not to prosecute?”

“Maybe he was shaking them down. He wasn't happy with his cut and threatened to turn them in if they didn't sweeten it. The ransom drop was just a gag to get me to back him up when he went to the theater to collect. I never saw inside that mailer. He might have been carrying his shirts.”

“It fits the facts. So you think this Hours of the Virgin thing was a fake?”

“That's the part I don't like,” I said. “The page he showed me could have been anything. I wouldn't know the real article from a letter to
Penthouse
. Why the elaborate forgery? He could have made up an easier story to support.”

He grunted. He had a whole vocabulary without an intelligible word in it.

“How sure are you the Blessing woman killed Gilly for the reason she said?” I asked.

“You're barking down the wrong hole there. Any one of his tootsies could have been the one that got the bee up her pants over the wife in Corktown. It was Viola's bad luck it turned out to be her.” He adjusted his cuffs; more or less than an inch and a quarter could spoil his day. “Did you ever track down that woman with the eyes?”

“I came to the conclusion I fell asleep and dreamed her up.”

“That'd be a first.”

“Which one, dreaming or concluding?”

“Take your pick. You own a thirty-two?”

“I ditched it right after I shot Boyette. How'd that work its way around to me?”

When he moved a shoulder it was as casual as pushing over a tree. “I have to ask. Sometimes I get lucky. Not today, though. Boyette's address was on his driver's license in his wallet. It checked out with what I got from his leasing company this morning. You want to come along? I'll let you work the siren.”

“If it's all the same to you I'll follow. You drive like an axe murderer.”

“Go to hell. When I was on the mayor's detail I took the Bondurant driving course. The diploma's in my office.”

“You must've worn your gun to the graduation ceremony.” I shook out my keys.

The address was in Madison Heights, a community of tract houses and sidewalk-planted trees fighting the noxious clouds drifting north from Detroit. On the way we stopped at a precinct station and Alderdyce picked up a local named Smithson, regulation sideburns and fresh academy creases in his uniform. The house was a small ranch on a quarter-acre near the end of a cul-de-sac: vinyl siding, clumps of broccoli planted between the flagstones and the foundation. John peered through the window of the attached garage, shrugged, rang the bell on the little front porch. When no one answered he tried the knob. The door opened. He looked at me. “Trusting little fart, wasn't he?”

“Either that or somebody beat us here,” I said.

He scowled at me just for the pleasure of it and lifted his eyebrows at the Madison Heights officer, who tipped his palm in a gesture of invitation. I got the impression he wasn't as green as he looked. John pushed the door the rest of the way and we went in.

A fresh lead is like the bright wrapping on a gift package. Too often, when you finally get it open, the paper turns out to be the best part. The house was five rooms in search of a personality. Boyette had slept in one, cooked in another, watched television in a third, washed and performed his bodily functions in the fourth, and done his laundry in the last, leaving only his clothes, a pile of
Smithsonians
and some books, scholarly and otherwise, and a French fry moldering behind the electric stove to mark his passage. There were no papers of interest, no telephone messages on the machine; not even a smeared glass on the coffee table with a lipstick stain on the rim for pepper. That opened another possibility, but there was just as much nothing on the premises to indicate his tastes had turned in any other direction. No pornographic publications of either kind, no sheep smell on the unmade bedding. No signs that anyone else had tossed the place either. The furniture and wall art looked as if it had come straight from the showroom. He hadn't even bothered to remove the tags from the armchairs and sofa.