The Judgment (13 page)

I sighed. “I can understand that, I suppose. What’s your point?”

“Well, Detroit’s a pretty dangerous place. You said so yourself, right there in court. So I was just wondering, do you think maybe since they took that one I had away from me, I ought to get another one?”

“What?”
He couldn’t be serious.

“Oh, I’d do it all real legal this time.” He was talking fast, trying to sound reassuring. “You know, I’d get a license and buy it at a regular gun shop, get a better one this time, maybe one of those big magnums that the cops all carry Man, they’d scatter when they saw that!”

“Ernie, let me remind you of something. You’ve been
put on probation for six months. Have you seen your probation officer yet?”

“Got a date next week. Next Tuesday.”

“Talk it over with him then.”

“With her. It’s a her. Ms. Wodziak.”

“All right, her. Talk it over with her.”

“So that’s your advice, huh?” He sounded disappointed, cheated.

“No, Ernie, my advice is a lot more simple: Don’t even consider doing anything without talking it over with her first. She’ll tell you the terms of your probation, and when she does, you pay attention and you do it just the way she says or you could still find yourself in the slam. I hope you understand that.”

“Uh, yeah, I guess so.”

“I predict your probation officer will tell you to forget about getting another gun ever again, legally or otherwise. If it’s not in the terms of your probation, then it should be. Have I made myself clear?”

I realized then that I’d been practically shouting into the telephone. I took a deep breath to get myself under control.

“Uh, yeah. I mean, yes, Mr. Sloan.”

“All right then.” That came out in a fairly normal tone. I thought I was doing pretty well. “You’ll be getting my bill in the mail tomorrow or the next day. If you keep thinking the way you have been, Ernie, then the next time I see you, you’ll be up¡ for manslaughter or murder. And I charge a lot more for them.”

After I hung up, I sat brooding at my desk for a long minute or two, angry at Ernie Barker, angry at the city of Detroit and all its problems, angry at the kind of idiocy that said that guns and more guns offered an answer to them.

Without quite thinking about it, I swiveled my desk chair around and took a look out the window—at the river, the all-but-disappeared snow, and the fading afternoon light. That was when I remembered I’d promised to
call Sue later in the day. I swung back to the telephone and punched out the number for her direct line at the police station.

Two rings, and then: “Gillis.”

“Sloan.”

“Oh, Charley, you did call back. Thanks. I was about to call you.”

“Why? What’s the matter?”

“Well, nothing really, except that it looks like it won’t be easy for us to get together tonight. If that’s what you had in mind.”

“Something come in on the little girl last night?”

“Yes and no,” she said. Sue sounded better than she had earlier. There was life in her voice again. “Yes, there might be something on the Quigley case. We went out there this afternoon and may have turned up, well, something.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“But no, that’s not the problem. The thing is, there’s a retirement party tonight—Dominic Benda, thirty-five years with the force. You know him, don’t you?”

I thought about that for a moment. “Yeah,” I said, “I guess we’ve had some contact.” What came to mind was a burly guy, a joker, who once got in trouble on a false arrest suit. Not my case.

“I forgot about it completely,” Sue continued. “And I really have to go. You know, being the senior female officer and all.”

“Yeah, I understand. But listen, Sue, you shouldn’t push yourself too hard. You didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“Oh, I know. I won’t. But I’ve gotten kind of a second wind. I feel better. Really, I do.”

“But watch it. Where’s the party? Maybe I’ll come over later on, if that’s okay with you.”

“Would you? That’d be great. Maybe you could get me out of there early.”

“I could try.”

“It’s at the Glisten Inn. Do you know it?”

I laughed. “Sure,” I said, “the go-go joint.”

“Oh, Charley, come on!” She was embarrassed. “That’s only on weekends.”

“Okay, maybe I’ll show up.”

“Try. See you then.”

I sat there, smiling, shaking my head. Wasn’t it just like a bunch of cops to pick a moderately disreputable place like the Glisten Inn for a retirement party? I’d gotten the owner, Papa Klezek, out of trouble a couple of times. He probably thought he was buying insurance, hosting the cops for their big bash. Come to think of it, maybe he was. Old papa didn’t just fall off the back of a turnip truck.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come on in, Mrs. Fenton.”

Glancing needlessly at my watch, I saw that it was five on the button. She always left at the stroke of the hour. Unless I said otherwise—and I hadn’t said so yet.

She came in bearing a sheaf of letters and documents she’d typed up that day on the computer. Handing them to me across the desk, she said, “Here are some things for you to look over and sign.”

“Is the Barker bill in this bunch?”

“Yes?” Definitely an interrogative. She was curious.

“Let’s hold that until tomorrow,” I said. “I think I’m going to find about a thousand bucks’ worth of extra time and expenses on that one. Don’t worry, I’ll justify it all.”

“If that’s all then, I’ll be going.” She always said that, just like she was really offering to stay. A little game we played.

“Have a good evening, Mrs. Fenton. Just leave my door open.”

She was gone in the minute or so it took her to pull on her coat and struggle into her boots.

That left me alone to think for a while. There was something that had been playing at the back of my mind, a possibility I wanted to explore.

I pulled the notebook that I carried out of my pocket and paged through it until I came to what I had written down that very afternoon. There was the license number
of Mary Margaret Tucker’s Volkswagen, and below it that name I hadn’t quite been able to remember. Timmerman.

Then, going through my Rolodex, I found a number, reached for the phone, and punched in the number. I waited as it rang.

Anthony Mercante had been, until recently, with the FBI right in the Detroit office. For years he had nursed a grudge against the Bureau. He was a good agent with a law degree and an exemplary record. But he was certain that he’d hit a glass ceiling because of his Italian name and because a distant relative he’d never met was connected in business dealings with someone who might be connected with the wiseguys. Back in my drinking days, I’d sat beside him at a bar and listened to him expound this theory. “Charley,” he had told me, “that’s all it takes. They can murder you with ‘mights.’”

Eventually—and it was only a couple of months ago—Tony Mercante had found a solution to his problem, perhaps not the one he would have preferred but certainly an acceptable one. He’d resigned from the Bureau and taken a high-paying, grand-titled position in the security division of one of the Big Three automakers. It was about time I called Tony and asked him how he liked his new situation.

So when he answered the phone, that’s how the conversation went for the first five minutes or so. He loved the new job, and he wondered why he had waited so long to leave the Bureau. He’d already moved his family out to a nice place in Birmingham to be nearer corporate headquarters, of course. Of course.

“But you, Charley,” he said, “you seem to be doing pretty well yourself. You made a great comeback. I have to say I admire you for that.”

“Thanks, Tony. I guess I found out a few things. About myself, mostly.”

“I see in the papers you’ve got this Mark Conroy thing.”

“Yeah, it’s a tough one, too.”

“For what it’s worth, I always thought he was—is—a
good cop. He may have cut some corners, but I think he’s essentially honest. And he’s committed to enforcement, too, which is more than you can say for his boss and fifty percent of the men in the department.”

“It’s good to hear you say that,” I said. It was, too. A guy with Tony’s years in the FBI’s Detroit office had a special perspective on the local police. If he said Conroy was essentially a good cop, then you could take that to the bank. “There’s something that’s come up on that case I’d like to ask you about, Tony.”

He hesitated. “Hey, Charley, you know I can’t tell you anything about a case that is, or even might have been, under investigation.”

“Absolutely. No, this is something that’s probably public record, or the next thing to it. I just thought I might be able to find out from you a little quicker. It’s a personal matter.”

“Personal? Okay, try me.”

“Is there anybody, any agent, working in the Bureau’s Detroit office named Timmerman?”

Tony didn’t take long to answer, just a moment or two. “No,” he said with convincing certainty, “and there’s nobody who’s come in since I’ve left. I haven’t been replaced. Government cutbacks, Charley. The Detroit office is in the process of downsizing.”

“Well,” I said with a sigh, “okay, just a thought. I appreciate it, Tony.”

“But Charley,” he said, “I don’t know what has you thinking the Federal government might be involved in this Conroy thing. It
is
the Conroy thing, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“To my knowledge, not a chance of Bureau involvement. I’ve been out of the Detroit office almost two months, but I know the kind of operations that were in planning when I left, and there was absolutely nothing like this even contemplated. The Bureau’s been out of the dirty-tricks business for years.”

I’d evidently stepped on his pride as an ex-FBI man.

“Sorry, Tony,” I said, sounding contrite, “just a thought.”

“And besides,” he went on, “if, just if, something ever was planned in Detroit, Mark Conroy would be the last one anyone would think of targeting. I told you I thought he was a good cop. Well, I think I can safely say that opinion is shared by every Fed operating in and around southeastern Michigan.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry I asked.”

“You ought to look a little closer to home, Charley.”

“How’s that?” He’d taken me off guard. “What do you mean?”

“I mean there’s a Timmerman on the Mayor’s Squad. He’s the number-two man, a sergeant, got án office right there in Manoogian Mansion, next to the mayor’s kitchen.”

There was a long pause at my end. I was wondering, among other things, why Tony hadn’t told me this in the first place. He had his ways, I suppose. “What is it, exactly, that the Mayor’s Squad does, anyway? I take it that they do more than guard the mayor in his mansion.”

“It’s a private police force answerable only to His Honor. There’s the Detroit Police Department and the Mayor’s Squad, separate entities. Ask your client. He’ll tell you how things really work.”

“I will, and thanks, Tony. Sometimes I have to be led by the hand.”

“Sometimes we all do. And by the way, we’re still getting settled in the new place, but we’re planning an open house around Christmas, one of those all-day, stop-in things. I hope you can make it.”

“Just let me know the date and the new address. I’ll be there.”

“Okay, I’ll see you around Christmas.”

“You bet.”

Hanging up, I took a moment to reflect on Conroy’s situation. It was evidently as bad as he’d said. Or worse. Someone, and it looked like it had to be the mayor, was doing everything possible to get him.

Just inside the Glisten Inn, I met a naked woman. At least I assumed she was naked behind that bundle of clothes she held tightly to her body. As she passed, there was no eye contact between us. She was probably on her way to the ladies’ room to dress. Gentleman that I am, I didn’t turn around to check.

This meant that the Strip-O-Gram, a predictable event in the evening, had come and gone. Off-duty cops showed no more class than a gang of construction workers. Kerry County’s finest were no finer than any of the rest.

I paused at the entrance to the main room and surveyed the chaos. In the words of the immortal Fats Waller, the joint was jumpin’.

They were two-deep at the bar. Most of the crowd was male. There were a few policewomen and some female office help mixed. Off to the side, sitting at the tables, was a scattering of wives and good-sport girlfriends, talking among themselves, apparently wishing they were somewhere else.

With all this, the noise level was at a high screech. A jukebox blared. But the shouted conversation and idiot laughter was competing with the crashing sound of heavy metal. One way or another, it all seemed to blend together in a single, sustained roar.

Someone yelled my name nearby. I felt a tug at my sleeve. It was the host himself, Papa Klezek.

“Hey, my lawyer man! You come, enjoy the party. That’s good.”

Klezek was almost eighty, not too tall but thick enough and obviously strong enough to give pause to any potential troublemaker. Up until three years ago, he had served as his own bouncer. That was when I got him off on an assault charge occasioned by a rowdy customer who kept grabbing at the girls one Saturday night. Since then, on my advice, he’d left the rough stuff to his fifty-year-old son.