Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places Page 6

  He shook his head sadly.

  “A web of books, spun from leather and buckram and paper. Murchison used a book to help conceal the book he’d committed murder to obtain. That book, and Carlisle’s obsession to have it, drove him to murder the murderer, before the murderer could murder him. A book made me suspect him, and another book led to his identification and apprehension. And now, Sheriff”—he paused uncomfortably and adjusted the spectacles on the thin nose—“I imagine it’s your intention to, er, throw the book at him.”

  Sheriff McCreedy stared at him in mute accusation.

  “Yes. Well.” Sharecross turned back in the direction of the bookshop.

  State of Grace

  This is the only lighthearted story in the collection. When I was asked to write a story for a private eye anthology, I’d just finished an Amos Walker novel and needed a break from the character. Ralph Poteet is the flip side of the coin: a sleazy grifter who will do almost anything for a hundred dollars. His more lovable qualities include dimness of intellect and phenomenally bad luck. I got one complaint claiming I’d maligned the Catholic Church (which was not my intention), but I felt vindicated when the pedophilia scandal broke. As of this writing, the Vatican is making a saint out of the pope who presided over the cover-up.

  • • •

  “Ralph? This is Lyla.”

  “Who the hell is Lyla?”

  “Lyla Dane. I live in the apartment above you, for chrissake. You ask me for a freebie almost every day.”

  “The hooker.” He’d never asked her name.

  “You live over a dirty bookstore. What do you want for a neighbor, a fucking rocket scientist?”

  Ralph Poteet sat up in bed and rumpled his mouse-colored hair. His scalp felt like grout. He fumbled the alarm clock off the night table and held it very close to his good eye. He laid it facedown and scowled at the receiver in his hand. “It’s two-thirty ayem.”

  “Thanks. My watch stopped and I knew if I called you you’d tell me what time it is. Listen, you’re like a cop, right?”

  “Not at two-thirty ayem.”

  “I’ll give you a hundred dollars to come up here now.”

  He blew his nose on the sheet. “Ain’t that supposed to go the other way around?”

  “You coming up or not? You’re not the only dick in town. I just called you because you’re handy.”

  He resisted the temptation to ask her just how many dicks there were in town.

  “What’s the squeal?”

  “I got a dead priest in my bed.”

  He said he was on his way and hung up. A square gin bottle slid off the blanket. He caught it before it hit the floor, but it was empty and he dropped it. He put on his Tyrolean hat with a feather in the band, found his pants on the floor half under the bed, and pulled them on over his pajamas. He stuck bare feet into his loafers and because it was October he pulled on his sportcoat, grunting with the effort. He was forty-three years old and forty pounds overweight. He looked for his gun just because it was 2:30 A.M., couldn’t find it, and went out.

  Lyla Dane was just five feet and ninety pounds in a pink kimono and slippers with carnations on the toes. She wore her black hair in a pageboy like Anna May Wong, but the Oriental effect fell short of her round Occidental face. “You look like crap,” she told Ralph at the door.

  “You look like the girl on the dashboard of a ’57 Chevy. Where’s the hundred?”

  “Don’t you want to see the stiff first?”

  “What do I look like, a pervert?”

  “You could be the poster boy.” She opened a drawer in the telephone stand and counted a hundred in twenties and tens into his palm.

  He stuck the money in a pocket and followed her through a small living room decorated by K-Mart into a smaller bedroom containing a Queen Anne bed that had cost twice as much as all the other furniture combined and took up most of the space in the room.

  The rest of the space was taken up by Monsignor John Breame, pastor of Our Lady of the Agonies, a cathedral Ralph sometimes used to exchange pictures for money, although not so much lately because the divorce business was on the slide; No-Fault was killing the P.I. trade. He recognized the Monsignor’s pontifical belly under the flesh-colored satin sheet: Cheez Whiz on the Communion wafers wasn’t such a good idea. The Monsignor’s face was purple.

  “He a regular?” Ralph found a Diamond matchstick in a pocket and stuck it between his teeth.

  “Couple of times a month. Tonight I thought he was breathing a little hard after. Then he wasn’t.”

  “Try CPR?”

  “I don’t kiss johns on the mouth. It’s a personal principle.” She lit a joint.

  He took a hit off the secondhand. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Spray-paint him gold and set him up in the living room as a holy icon. What do you think? Get rid of him. Cops find him here the Christers’ll run me out of town on a cross. I got a business to maintain.”

  “Cost you another hundred.”

  “I just gave you a hundred.”

  “That was for coming up here. You’re lucky I don’t charge by the pound. Look at that gut.”

  “You look at it. He liked the missionary position.”

  “What else would he?”

  She drew in smoke, held it, let it stutter out, then got the hundred and gave it to him. He stuck it in another pocket. He kept a meticulous filing system. The rest of his life was chaos to the point of apocalyptic.

  “Scram,” he said.

  “Where to?”

  “There’s beds all over town. You probably been in half of ’em. Or go find an all-night movie if you don’t feel like working. I think Hung ’Em High’s still playing at the Tomcat on Eight Mile. Just don’t come back before dawn. It’ll take me at least that long to get this tub of lard down six flights of stairs.”

  He crossed himself. He’d been an altar boy until Father Emmanuel caught him shooting craps behind the rectory.

  She dressed and started toward the door, then went back and emptied the money drawer into her shoulder bag. Ralph, disappointed, consoled himself by spearing his toothpick through the roach she’d left smoldering in a tin tray and taking a toke; it was better than he could afford. Then he looked up a number in the city directory and called it from the telephone in the living room. A voice like ground glass answered.

  “Bishop Stoneman?” Ralph asked.

  “It’s three ayem.”

  “Thank you. My name is Ralph Poteet. I’m a private detective. I’m sorry to have to inform you Monsignor Breame is dead.”

  “Mary Mother of God! In bed?”

  He was in the middle of a hit. He smothered a giggle. “Yeah.”

  “Was he—do you know if he was in a state of grace?”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Ralph said.

  The man Bishop Stoneman sent was tall and gaunt, with a complexion like wet pulp and colorless hair cropped down to stubble. He had on a black coat buttoned to the neck and looked like an early martyr. He said his name was Morgan.

  Together they wrapped the Monsignor in the soiled bedding and carried him down six flights of stairs, stopping a dozen times to rest, then laid him on the back seat of a big Buick Electra parked between streetlamps. Ralph stood guard at the car while Morgan went back up for the Monsignor’s clothes. It was nearly 4:00 A.M. and their only witness was a scrawny cat who lost interest after a few minutes and stuck one leg up in the air to lick its balls.

  Ralph said, “If a man could do that, Lyla’d be out of business.”

  Morgan threw the bundle of clothing into the front seat and handed Ralph an envelope containing three hundred dollars in fifties. He said he’d handle things from there. Ralph watched him drive off and went back up to bed. He slept the sleep of the innocent, or at least of the well-set-up; he’d made five hundred dollars in one night. A piano player in a first-rate lounge couldn’t do better than that.

  He woke up to the sound of fire sirens grinding d
own in front of his building. He hadn’t even heard the explosion in Lyla Dane’s apartment, directly above his own.

  “Go away.”

  “That’s no way to talk to your partner,” Ralph said.

  “Ex-partner. You got the boot and I did, too. Now I’m giving it to you. Scram. Skedaddle. Take it on the ankles, and please let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.”

  Dale English was a special investigator with the sheriff’s department who kept his office in the City-County Building, since renamed for a deceased former mayor, beloved and corrupt. Dale had a monolithic face and fierce black eyebrows like Lincoln’s, creating an effect he tried to soften with pink shirts and knobby knitted ties. He and Ralph had shared a city prowl car for two years, until some evidence went missing from the property room. Both had been dismissed, English without prejudice because none of the incriminating items had been found in his possession; unlike the case with Ralph. The department was still buzzing with just how a man with no knowledge of geometry had managed to cram a fifty-seven-piece set of Dresden china into his locker in the basement of police headquarters.

  “The boot didn’t hurt you none,” Ralph said.

  “No, it just cost me my wife and my kid and seven years’ seniority. I’d be a lieutenant now.”

  “Who needs the ulcers?” Ralph lowered his bulk onto the vinyl-and-aluminum chair in front of English’s desk. “I wouldn’t hang this on you if I could go to the city cops. Someone’s out to kill me.”

  “Only one? Tell him I said good luck.”

  “I ain’t kidding.”

  “Am I smiling?”

  “You know that hooker that got blown up this morning?”

  “The gas explosion? I read about it.”

  “Yeah, well, it wasn’t no accident. I’m betting the arson boys find a circuit breaker in the wall switch. You know what that means.”

  “Sure. Somebody lets himself in and turns on the gas on the stove and puts a breaker in the switch so when the guy comes home the spark blows him to hell. What was the hooker into and what was your angle?”

  “It’s more like who was into the hooker.” Ralph told him the rest.

  “This the same Monsignor Breame was found by a novice, counting angels in his bed at Our Lady of the Agonies rectory this morning?”

  “Thanks to me and this bug Morgan.”

  “So what do you want?”

  “Hell, protection. The blowup was meant for me. Morgan thought I’d be going back to that same apartment and set it up while I was waiting for him to come down with Breame’s clothes.”

  “Bishops don’t kill people over priests that can’t keep their vows in their pants.”

  Ralph screwed up his good eye. Its mate looked like a sourball someone had spat out. “What world you living in, Dale? Shape the Church is in, he’d do just that to keep it quiet.”

  “Go away, Ralph.”

  “Well, pick up Morgan, at least. He can’t be hard to find. He looks like one of those devout creeps you see skulking around paintings of the Crucifixion.”

  “Somebody’s been hanging around the DIA. That where you’re selling dirty pictures to your clients now, the art museum?”

  “Hey, I’m giving you a lead.”

  “Go to the city cops. I don’t have jurisdiction.”

  “That ain’t why you won’t do it. Hey, I told Internal Affairs you didn’t have nothing to do with what went down in Property.”

  “It would’ve carried more weight if you’d submitted to a lie detector test. Mine was inconclusive.”

  He paged through a report on his desk without looking at it.

  “I’ll run the name Morgan and the description you gave me through the computer and see what it coughs up. Either there won’t be anything or too much. A lot of guys look like Christopher Walken on the Atkins Diet, and Morgan’s Number Three on the list of most popular AKAs.”

  “Thanks, buddy.”

  “You sure you didn’t take pictures? It’d be your style to try and put the squeeze on a bishop.”

  “I thought about it, but my camera’s in hock.” Ralph got up. “You can get me at my place. They got the fire out before it reached my floor.”

  “Lucky you. Gin flames are tough to put out.”

  • • •

  He was driving a brand-new red Riviera he’d promised to sell for a lawyer friend who was serving two years for suborning to commit perjury, only he hadn’t gotten around to it yet. He parked in a handicapped zone near his building and climbed stairs smelling of smoke and firemen’s rubber boots. Inside his apartment, which was also his office, he rewound the tape on his answering machine and played back a threatening call from a loan shark named Zwingman, a reminder from a dentist’s receptionist with a NutraSweet voice that last month’s root canal was still unpaid for, and a message from a heavy-breather that he had to play back three times before deciding it was a man. He was staring toward the door, his attention on the tape, when a square of white paper slithered over the threshold.

  That day he was wearing his legal gun, a short-nosed .38 Colt, in a clip on his belt, and an orphan High Standard .22 Magnum derringer in an ankle holster that brought out his prickly heat. Drawing the Colt, he lunged and tore open the door, just in time to hear the street door closing below.

  He swung around and crossed to the street window. Through it he saw a narrow figure in a long black coat and the back of a close-cropped head crossing against traffic. The man rounded the corner and vanished.

  Ralph missed the holster the first time, stooped to pick it up, and retrieved the note with it. It was addressed to him in a round, shaped hand:

  Mr. Poteet:

  If it is not inconvenient, your presence at my home could prove to your advantage and mine.

  Cordially,

  Philip Stoneman,

  Bishop-in-Ordinary

  Clipped to it was a hundred-dollar bill.

  Bishop Stoneman lived in a refurbished brownstone in a neighborhood that the city had reclaimed from slum by evicting the residents and sandblasting graffiti off the buildings. The bell was answered by a youngish bald man in a dark suit and clerical collar, who introduced himself as Brother Edwards and directed Ralph to a curving staircase, then retired to be seen no more. Ralph didn’t hear Morgan climbing behind him until something hard probed his right kidney. A hand patted him down and removed the Colt from its clip. “End of the hall.”

  The bishop was a tall old man, nearly as thin as Morgan, with iron-gray hair and a face that fell away to the white shackle of his collar. He rose from behind a redwood desk to greet his visitor in an old-fashioned black frock coat that made him look like a crow. The room was large and square and smelled of leather from the books on the built-in shelves and pipe tobacco. Morgan entered behind Ralph and closed the door.

  “Thank you for coming, Mr. Poteet. Please sit down.”

  “Thank Ben Franklin.” But he settled into a deep leather chair that gripped his buttocks like a big friendly hand in a soft glove.

  “I’m grateful for the chance to thank you in person,” Stoneman said, sitting in his big swivel. “I’m very disappointed in Monsignor Breame. I’d hoped he would take my place at the head of the diocese.”

  “Well, maybe he got head. You bucking for cardinal?”

  Stoneman smiled.

  “I suppose you’ve shown yourself worthy of confidence. Yes, His Holiness has offered me the red hat. The appointment will be announced next month at the Vatican.”

  “That why you tried to croak me?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Whack me. Take me for a ride. Give me a one-way ticket to Box City.” Ralph frowned, seeking the translation. “Make me a martyr: Ralph, patron saint of shamuses, keyhole-peepers, and knights of the infrared lens. Got a ring to it, don’t it? I guess your heir apparent cashing in in a hooker’s bed wouldn’t look so good in Rome.”

  One corner of the desk supported a silver tray containing two long-stemmed glasses and a cut-cry
stal decanter half full of ruby-colored liquid. Stoneman removed the stopper and filled both glasses.

  “This is an excellent Madeira, put down in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. I confess that the austere life allows me two mild vices. The other is tobacco.”

  “What are we celebrating?” Ralph didn’t pick up his glass.

  “Your new appointment as chief of diocesan security. The position pays well and the hours are flexible. Some days you might even not need to show up.”

  “In return for which I forget about Monsignor Breame. Who’s he again?” He grinned.

  “And entrust all related material to me. You took pictures, of course.” Stoneman sipped from his glass.

  Ralph lifted his. “I’d be pretty stupid not to, considering what happened to Lyla Dane.”

  “I heard about that tragedy. That child’s soul could have been saved.”

  “You should’ve thought about that before your boy Morgan croaked her.” Ralph gulped off half his wine. It tasted bitter. Whatever the Spanish Civil War was, it should have bombed the vineyard.

  The bishop laid a bony hand atop an ancient ornate Bible on the desk. It was as big as a cornerstone.

  “This belonged to St. Thomas. More; not Aquinas. I have a weakness for religious antiques.”

  “I thought you only had two vices.”

  The air in the room stirred slightly. Ralph turned to see who had entered, but his vision was thickening. Morgan was a shimmering shadow. The glass dropped from Ralph’s hand. He bent to retrieve it and came up with the derringer.

  Stoneman’s shout echoed. Ralph fired twice at the shadow and pitched headfirst into its depths.

  He awoke feeling pretty much the way he did most mornings, with his head throbbing and his stomach turning over. He wanted to turn over with it, but he was stretched out on a hard, flat surface with his ankles strapped down and his arms tied above his head. He was looking up at water-stained tile. His joints ached.

  “The sedative was in the glass’s hollow stem,” Stoneman was saying. “You’ve been out for two hours. The unpleasant effect is temporary, rather like a hangover.”