Motor City Blue (11 page)

I knew it, but was powerless to stop it, when two pairs of hands working from opposite sides of the car turned me over and emptied my pockets and went through the linings of my coat and jacket. When I was lowered to the floor and folded into the corner under the dashboard to make room in the driver’s seat I knew that too, but only by the change of scenery since I was as numb as a victory party in the losing candidate’s campaign headquarters. My head began to throb dully as it rocked from side to side over the squishy spot with the lurching of the Cutlass being freed from its snowy prison.

For a while I fluttered in and out, and then reality slammed into me as suddenly as it had been taken away. I turned my head and retched again. That brought me up a rung or two from the bottom of the barrel, but it was a deep barrel and there was a lid on top. I attempted to spit out the farmer’s brogan in my mouth, but the taste was there to stay. Then I said something that wasn’t a sentence in any language I’d ever heard of and started the long crawl up to the seat.

“He’s coming around, General.”

The voice, which belonged to the driver, was the same one I had heard reporting my condition just after my lights were shot out. It was ordinary like the rest of him, innocent of regional accent, and about as distinctive as a paper clip. I sneaked a look at him as I was scaling the seat. He had a good profile, with a straight nose and clean line of jaw and dark, wavy hair, not short, not long, the way even politicians are wearing it these days. He could have been thirty or forty-five.

The guy in the back seat, whom I glimpsed while shifting around to sit the way I was designed, was older, about fifty, with crisp gray hair cut severely without sideburns. His face, naturally lean but beginning to go slack in the standard places, was all planes and sharp angles, like something blocked out by a sculptor before placing the finishing touches on a statue. He was bareheaded and wore a tawny car coat with a black fur collar. He didn’t pay any attention to me at all, but kept his flinty eyes on the scenery rolling past the window. His wide, lipless mouth was tugged downward into a wooden-Indian scowl that looked as if it might be terminal.

We were doing twenty-five down a street I recognized, one of the better residential sections along the river. All the houses looked alike and their snow-clad lawns sloped at the same angle down to the sidewalk. Only the colors of the Cordobas and Sevilles parked in the asphalt driveways changed.

“Stop here,” I said, through a throat thick with phlegm.

“Going somewhere?” The driver’s tone was casual enough. The threat was there without his having to be obvious.

“Not as long as you’ve got my car.”

“General?” He shot a glance back over his shoulder. The General didn’t say anything, but he must have nodded because the car swung in toward the curb and glided to a stop.

I got out, breathed some cold fresh air, stooped, and rolled up the square plastic mat containing the remains of my lunch. I hiked back to where someone had left his garbage out for pickup and thrust the roll inside a plastic trash can.

I had an egg on the back of my head you could have served to a Boy Scout troop. But you wouldn’t have wanted to, because it was sticky with blood. A white-hot bolt of pure pain shot clear down to my toes when I touched it. The ache that came back afterward was blinding. As the car slid into motion I closed my eyes and slouched down to rest my neck on the back of the seat.

“Cigarette?” The man behind the wheel nudged me. I opened my eyes and stared for a moment at the package of Lucky Strikes beneath my nose as if it were a picture of his kids. I patted my shirt pocket, found that my Winstons were still there, got one out, and shook my head. Something rattled inside. He withdrew the pack.

“The trouble with Luckies is they never came back from the war.” I couldn’t find my matches. He finished lighting one of his own and tossed his lighter toward me. I caught it and looked at it. It was a silver and pigskin job with the initials J.V. engraved on one side. I lit up and tossed it back.

“Jim Vespers,” he introduced himself. “Colonel Vespers, if you want to be formal about it. The gentleman sitting behind you is General Spain.” He scooped something out of a pocket and flipped it open in front of my eyes. It was a leather folder with gold corners and something behind a celluloid window.

“Which one am I supposed to read?”

He laughed, a short, ordinary laugh, and put it away. “I forgot. You’re probably seeing double about now. The General and I represent Army Intelligence.”

“That’s depressing.”

He laughed again. He enjoyed a good joke as much as the next guy. They were regular fellows, these quiet men with guns who went around tapping people’s telephones and following them from place to place. He caught me eyeing the glove compartment.

“Is this what you’re looking for?” Without taking his eyes from the road he held out my Smith & Wesson in its snap holster. “Go ahead, take it. It’s not loaded anymore.”

I accepted it, took a minute to establish that fact, and snapped it onto my belt.

“You’ve a permit to carry that, I hope,” he said.

“You ought to know. You went through my wallet.”

He let that one slide. “That was a stupid trick you pulled back there. How come?”

“Force of habit. I can’t seem to stop myself from going for iron whenever somebody comes running up on me waving a pistol.”

We drove for a while in silence. We weren’t going anywhere in particular, just swinging in a wide circle back to where we’d started. Vespers pulled into the filling station at Fort and First and told the kid attendant to top off the tank.

“This one’s on the taxpayers, Walker,” he explained as the pump clanged.

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s worth a fractured skull anytime.”

“Where’s the film?”

I looked at him through the smoke of the cigarette I wasn’t supposed to have going now that the pump was working. Nobody enforces the rules anymore. I reached over and crushed it out in the ashtray. Vespers made no effort to ditch his.

“What film?” I said. Someone had to.

He changed the subject. They teach them to do that in Washington. “We ran down your record after Alderdyce told us you were the one clued him in on Francis Kramer. Pretty impressive. Six years’ military service, a tour in Vietnam and Cambodia, a DSC for saving your platoon at Hue, three years in the MPs stateside. How’d you end up in this greasy line of work?”

“Where’d you learn to tap a telephone?”

He smiled. That amused him. He took a last drag on his butt and killed it beside mine. “So you found it. I told the General you would. We also tossed your office and your house, but you wouldn’t know that.”

“I knew about the office. I haven’t been home.”

“You did? How?” He seemed genuinely interested. I’d stumbled on a chink in his defenses and he was waiting with mortar and a trowel.

“You left it neater than you found it. What’s on the film?”

“We waited quite a while for you to show up. What’ve you been doing?”

“Working.”

“Working on what?”

I stared out the window. “Did you know this is a historic site? This was the first drive-in gas station in the world. It’s been operating since 1901. The roots of the automobile era go down deep in this town.”

“What the hell has that got to do with anything?” He was miffed. That was the word for it. His type never gets howling mad. It would draw too much attention.

“Exactly,” I said.

That bought me a few seconds of confused silence. Then the fellow in the back seat spoke up. “Tell him. Colonel.” His voice was General Patton filtered through George C. Scott.

The kid in greasy coveralls and a two-tone high school jacket appeared at the driver’s window and quoted an astronomical figure, which Vespers paid without glancing at the pump. People like him put kids like that through college. Back on the road: “Have you ever heard of something called the Black Legion?”

“A Warner Brothers flick. Bogart made it in ’37.”

He nodded, as if that was what he’d been getting at. “I’ve seen it. That’s basically what I’m talking about.”

“Where does Ann Sheridan come in?”

“Cut the comedy, Walker. The Legion was a northern branch of the Ku Klux Klan that kept its headquarters in Detroit during the thirties. It boasted a membership of two hundred thousand, but it was a few hundred bully boys at the center that caused most of the trouble. Mainly they were a bunch of frustrated WASPs who blamed blacks and foreigners for their inability to get anywhere in the world. What they should have done was blame their mothers for giving birth to a herd of narrow-minded malcontents who had neither the brains nor the stamina to rise above their station without resorting to violence. Midnight rides in white robes and peaked hoods, lynchings, cold-blooded executions in lonely fields in the wee hours—that was their style. It’s estimated that between 1931 and 1936 they were responsible for at least fifty killings in the area. There’s no telling how many more might have died if the police and the public hadn’t banded together in ’36 to put most of the leaders behind bars. After that, publicity and unmasking laws sent them scrambling for the tall timber.”

“Does this history lesson take long?”

“Jesus, but you’re impatient for a cop, even a private one. The Black Legion’s been staging a comeback over the past two years. Someone down south is financing a Klan franchise up here. We know who it is, but we can’t prove it, and even if we did what could we do about it? It’s perfectly legal.”

“So why worry?”

“Don’t be naïve. It’s our job to see it stays that way. Detroit was chosen for tradition’s sake, but since the GOP’s announcement that it would hold its next convention here the whole movement’s gained real impetus. Word has it that one of the candidates for the Republican nomination is marked for assassination and that the Legion’s behind the plan. The system can stand it, but all hell’s bound to bust loose for a while, and chaos is what these quasi-revolutionary groups thrive on. There’s no telling what they’ll do for an encore. We’ve all learned something from the troubles in Ireland and the Middle East.”

“Sounds nutty.”

“Read the papers, Walker. Watch television. The world’s gone nutty.”

“How does Army Intelligence figure in? Why not the FBI or the Secret Service?”

“The army’s got as much stake in seeing this thing put to rest as anybody. The Legion’s infiltrated our ranks. I’m not just talking about the guys you see on furlough at the local whorehouse, privates or sergeants or even second lieutenants. I’m talking pentagon. Care to see your country defended by rank after rank of ridgerunners in sheets and pillowcases, carrying flaming crosses? Stick around.”

I started to hum “Marching through Georgia.” It hurt my head. I stopped.

“Okay,” he said, “so maybe I’m being melodramatic. That doesn’t throw any sand over a sticky situation. We had a man among the local nightriders. He’s dead.”

“Francis Kramer made Army Intelligence? You really ought to change your name. Too many jokes come to mind.”

“He wasn’t one of our regulars. He knew some people in the group and he was familiar with most kinds of photographic apparatus. We got him out of the reserves, where he was a major, taught him how to avoid tripping over his own feet, armed him with a movie camera, wound him up, and turned him loose. For six months he furnished us with reports and some interesting footage, then missed an appointment with a field agent and cropped up nine hours later with a hole in his head an army physician couldn’t miss. No film. No camera. We threw wraps over the case and tossed his apartment. We found the camera, but the only film kicking around was unexposed. He had something or he wouldn’t have made the appointment. Question is, what was it and who has it?”

“Which is why I’m sitting here holding my brains in while you run up miles on my automobile.”

“We’d attract too much attention sitting where we were. As for the state of your health, I’m sorry about that but you begged for it. You were the only lead left. As far as we know you were the last one to see Major Kramer alive—except for his murderers—and by your own testimony at police head, quarters he was your company commander in Southeast Asia. Furthermore, you’re a private dick, a profession that has not been known for an astonishing lack of blackmailers and ripoff artists. Look at it from this side and see how it plays. You run into an old war buddy who may already be in fear of his life because of some incriminating evidence in his possession. He gives you some song and dance and places the evidence in your care. He gets dealt out; you realize what you’ve got is dynamite and sock it away for future use. What could be more natural?”

“Except that you didn’t find anything.”

“Yet.”

I laughed dryly. That hurt too. Not much didn’t. “You didn’t even turn a key to a safety deposit box. If you looked up my background you know I don’t own a summer house in Grosse Pointe. Where else could I have ditched it?”

“You tell us, Walker. Look, I didn’t say you were the only possible suspect, just the only one we had. That play you pulled back there makes me wonder if we’ve even got you. That isn’t the kind of thing someone with something to hide would do. Someone who isn’t wrapped too tight, yes, but not someone with something to hide. So we’re back to square one. Less than that. We’re out a deep cover agent we couldn’t afford to lose. What’s the case you’re working?”

“Missing person. Nothing to do with Kramer.”

“Who’s the person?”

“It’s either Judge Crater or Jimmy Hoffa. I keep forgetting.”

“All right, smart guy.”

We were back on Harrison. The green Merc was parked in front of a ranch-style home on a low hill as if it belonged there. Vespers coasted up beside it, took the Cutlass out of gear and got out, tipping the driver’s bucket forward for General Spain to climb out of the back. I’d almost forgotten he was there. Colonel Average Guy stooped to peer in at me through the open door.

“You roll out first,” he said. “I don’t want this hot rod in heap’s clothing behind me again. Oh, and a word of warning. Just in case I’m wrong, and you
have
got something to hide, stand clear of a pair of blond hicks who call themselves the Darling brothers. They dusted Kramer because they found out he’d been spying on them. You they’d do just for practice.”