Silent Thunder (16 page)

I found the intersection, left the Mercury at the curb, and descended the slight bank on foot holding my pencil flashlight. The grass was shoetop-high and wet, soaking through my socks and plastering my pantscuffs to my ankles.

After ten minutes of searching I was about to give up when the beam of the flash found something that gave back light. I turned over a soggy square of corrugated cardboard that had been a discarded carton, jumped back when something scurried out from underneath, then stooped and picked up Shooter’s nine-millimeter Beretta from the spot where it had landed when I had tossed it out of the pickup. I wiped off the grass and dirt with my handkerchief and kicked out the clip. It was loaded for bear.

W
ALDO
S
TOUDENMIRE LIVED,
or had lived when last I’d had reason to look him up, in a hotel for permanents and transients in a neighborhood in Iroquois Heights that had started out as carriage trade, deteriorated, come back, and had begun to decline again. There were some elegant old homes in the area that had been kept up through the determination of older residents who remembered better days, next to houses with plywood in the windows, cars up on blocks on the front lawn, and nightly screaming matches inside conducted in murky Middle Eastern tongues. The place could go either way from there.

The lobby would have been larger and more ornate in other times. Now it was a narrow passage flanked by mustard-colored wallboard with a desk at the end and a sallow middle-aged party in a green plaid jacket snoozing behind it. That kind only wakes up when it hears a suitcase dropping out a window. I helped myself to a pack of matches with the hotel’s name printed on it from a dusty bowl on the desk and took the stairs. The yellow leaf carpet runner was worn a quarter-inch down and a foot across.

Sturdy’s room was on the third floor next to the elevator, which didn’t have a car anymore and had been used as a garbage chute for years. When nobody answered my knock I slipped the latch with the edge of my investigator’s license.

The room was small and neat, like its resident. A stack of racing magazines occupied the lamp table next to the single bed, which had been made and turned down with a maid’s meticulous routine, even though the hotel didn’t have one. The rug was a patch of bright color on the noisy floorboards, cheap but clean. Three inexpensive suits hung on wooden hangers in the closet, over a pair of black shoes and a pair of brown shoes with hard rubber heel-and toe-plates on their soles and wooden trees inside. Each of the suits’ inside breast pockets contained a small comb. The dresser yielded nothing of interest. Sturdy lived as if he expected a cop with a search warrant three times a week. Where he kept the goods he fenced depended on which township wasn’t holding an election that year.

The window was nailed shut, with paint on the nailheads. The panes were nearly opaque with soot and squinted out on a fire escape coated with orange rust.

The only item in the room that had cost anything was a new portable color television set on the dresser. It was still warm. I hit the power switch, then hit it again quickly when a re-run of
The Untouchables
sprang on, rat-a-tat-tatting at top volume. Whoever had been watching last liked noise.

There was a bath and a door that connected with another room. I opened it, but the facing door was locked on the other side. I stepped into the bathroom. It had been done in black and white deco the first time it was in style, with a few broken tiles now and a wave in the mirror over the sink that made my face look like something in an aquarium. The toilet was white with a black lid. The white enamel tub was a nice long one you could stretch out in if Sturdy weren’t there already.

He was fully dressed in a neat tan poplin suit and a pair of two-tone saddle shoes floating on their heels on top of the water. His paisley necktie was floating too, but his face was under the surface with his thin brown hair drifting out around it and his eyes and cheeks puffed out as if he were still holding his breath. His skin was the gray shade of cooked liverwurst; at least that hadn’t changed. There were puddles on the floor next to the tub and his fingers were cramped around the rim on both sides. I tried prying them loose and gave up.

I leaned back against the sink, poked a cigarette between my lips, and lit it from the fresh pack of matches. I smoked it down to the filter, flicking the ashes into the toilet, then dropped the butt in after them and flushed it. I watched until it went down. Then I rolled up my sleeves and got down on my knees and went through Sturdy’s pockets.

He didn’t have much, just the usual comb, forty-eight dollars in soggy bills in a small brass clip, two flat tablets in foil, and a slim pocket pad with a blue plastic cover and a gold pen clipped to it. No wallet or keys; Sturdy didn’t drive. Many of the earlier notations in the pad had bled through and were illegible, but the water hadn’t soaked through to the pages in the middle. I shook it off, wrapped it inside my handkerchief, and pocketed it.

The tablets looked familiar. They were plain white and the foil was unmarked. I got up and checked the medicine cabinet. There were more of them in a brown plastic bottle with a white snap-on cap and a label with a doctor’s name and “nitroglycerine” typed on it.

It could have been a break, although not for Sturdy. If he had a bad heart and it gave out before whoever was holding him under could obtain the information he was after, I might still be in the game, whatever the game was. If so, the killer was either too disgusted to remember to search him, or too stupid to consider it. All things being equal, in the latter event I had a fair idea who he might be.

Someone banged on the hall door, loudly. “Police! Open up!”

I left the bathroom and checked the window. Someone was standing in the alley under the fire escape. Through the soot and darkness, stray light from the lamp on the corner lay on an oval of metal on his chest.

“Open up!” The door bucked in its frame.

I snatched a penknife and a collar pin from atop the dresser and inserted them in the keyhole of the locked connecting door. The tumblers were worn smooth and hard to grip.

“Give me that passkey.”

The passkey was rattling in the hall door lock when my lock gave. I stepped through the connecting door and drew the other one shut behind me, pushing the lock button, just as several pairs of heavy feet thudded into Sturdy’s room.

I was in a bedroom like the one I had left, except this one was a lot less neat. My feet tangled with clothes on the floor and the air smelled of ashtrays in need of emptying. The room was dark, but an oblong of dirty light coming in through the window fell across a figure sprawled on its back on top of the bedcovers, a figure vaguely female in an old-fashioned white slip with a pair of pantyhose bunched up on one leg. A lot of hair ruthlessly peroxided and punished into waves like bent brass lay on the pillow. The woman was snoring ecstatically. Under the ashtray smell I detected a bellyful of gin and the kind of perfume that ought to come in big jugs with diagonal red stripes on the labels.

I had taken the Beretta out of my belt just in case. Now I returned it and mounted a search for the source of the gin smell. From the timbre of the snores, I wasn’t going to be interrupted.

The bottle had fallen off the bed, probably out of the woman’s hand, and rolled to a stop against one of the legs, where the carpet was damp around it. When I picked it up, its contents settled into a cozy half-inch on the bottom. I carried it into the bathroom, shut the door, and switched on the light over the sink. The layout was black and white like the one in Sturdy’s bathroom, but that was where the resemblance ended. The floor was shaggy with strands of blond hair with gray roots and the sink was green with mold. Tentacles of wet pantyhose dripped from the overhead rail into the tub, where several varieties of mushrooms thrived. The toilet tank was a jungle of bottles, atomizers, and jars of industrial wrinkle cream. A pyramid-shaped bottle half full of the perfume I had smelled in the bedroom wore a tag around its neck with a handwritten message: “For Corinne from her favorite sniffer. Love, Andy.”

The bathroom was separated from Sturdy’s by a common wall. Excited voices murmured on the other side over the body in the bathtub. I took a swig from the gin bottle, and as the heat climbed my spine I shook the remaining drops into my palm and smeared them over my neck. For good measure I sprinkled some of Andy’s perfume onto my shirt. I checked the goods in the mirror, decided I looked too upstanding, rumpled my hair, and unfastened two shirt buttons. Now I looked like the tattered end of a gaudy night and smelled like a Sunday sermon.

Corinne was still rattling the plaster when I left the bathroom. Just as I turned my back on her she stopped in mid-snort and started whimpering. I went back and got the empty gin bottle and pressed it into her hands. Without opening her eyes—they looked painted shut, like the windows—she turned over on her side, raised the bottle to her lips, and started sucking on the neck. Very soon she was snoring again.

I left her. The idea was to get to the door before they started banging on it and woke her up. I took a deep breath, then opened it and leaned against the jamb, shaking loose my last Winston.

A uniformed officer with a twisted nose and the general look of having been broken down from sergeant at least once turned around at the noise and stared at me, fingers resting on the butt of his revolver. I hoped he hadn’t been among the group at the fairgrounds last night.

“What’s the argument?” I said sleepily. “Can’t a guy hang over in peace in this burg?”

“Who’re you?” His voice sounded like a circle saw turning on reduced current.

“Andy Winters.” Wintersong was the name on the perfume label. “If you cops busted these hookers on the street where you’re supposed to, you wouldn’t have to wake up honest citizens.”

“What makes you think we’re arresting a hooker?”

“Isn’t the mayor running again in November?”

“You got identification says you’re Andy Winters?”

I shook my head. I got the cigarette lit finally. That hadn’t entirely been an act.

“Nothing? No driver’s license?”

“They took it away in April.”

“You live here?”

“Corinne does. I’m a friend.”

His mud-colored eyes flicked past me. “That Corinne?”

“It better be. I don’t sleep with strangers these days.”

“What’s Corinne’s last name?”

I grinned moronically and shrugged.

“No strangers, huh.” His fingers stroked the revolver’s butt like a cat kneading its claws. “Where you from, Winters?”

“Why the grill?”

“Answer the question. They passed an ordinance in this town against cohabitation in nineteen-oh-three. I could run you in on it if I had a mind.”

I didn’t touch that one. “I live in Harper Woods.”

“You walk all the way from Harper Woods?”

“Corinne drove. We went out.”

“Smells like you had a good time. Where’d you go?”

“I don’t want to get anybody in trouble.”

“Blind pig, huh? When’d you get in?”

I scratched my jaw. “Eleven, eleven-thirty.”

“Which is it?”

“Eleven-thirty, I guess.”

“You hear anything the last hour or so?”

“You mean besides that?” I tilted my head in the direction of the racket on the bed. “What happened, somebody get rolled?”

“You know who lives in three-ten?”

“Corinne might. If you can wake her up. I gave up nudging her finally and got dressed. I don’t suppose you cops could call me a cab.”

The desk clerk from downstairs joined us. He looked awake now. He had small suspicious eyes and a V-shaped mouth with no lips, like the flap of an envelope. Awake or asleep, his skin was the color of bad buttermilk. I had him down for alcoholic hepatitis.

“You know this guy?” the cop asked him.

He stared at me hard and shook his head. Then his nose twitched. “We might as well just take the door off its hinges. I’d of gave her the boot a long time ago, but she’s paid up till January. Two-bit whore.”

“That’s my girl you’re talking about,” I said.

“This guy says he came in with the lady around eleven-thirty. You see it?”

He was still staring at me. “Nobody came in at eleven-thirty. I been on duty since eight.”

“And asleep since nine, I bet,” said the cop.

“What is it, Flask?”

The newcomer was a uniform at least fifteen years younger than the other, with a ginger-colored puppy moustache and sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves. His eyes were on me.

“He says his name’s Winters, Sarge. He was sleeping next door, he says.”

“Has the lieutenant seen him?”

“No.”

“Get him.”

Moving like someone with strong opinions about taking orders from cops two-thirds his age, Officer Flask left us and went into Sturdy’s room. He returned a minute later with Lieutenant Romero.

H
E HAD TRADED
his cocoa straw hat for a narrow-brimmed Panama, cream-colored with a black silk band and beautifully blocked. The rest of him, except for his brown face and hands and polished black shoes, was blue: a midnight blue suit and a navy blue knitted tie on a powder-blue shirt with the collar buttoned down. His narrow Latin face was solemn as always. The black eyes betrayed nothing, not even recognition. He looked at the officer.

“You found him where?”

“Right here, Lieutenant. It was sort of he found me.”

Romero looked at me again. “Do you make it a habit to always attack the thickest part of the fence?”

“It was a judgment call.” I knocked off some of my ashes. “Naturally I didn’t expect you to be working this shift.”

He nodded. When he spoke again, his intonation hadn’t changed.

“Cover him, Sergeant. Officer, brace him and search him for weapons.”

Flask hesitated only briefly. He had his sidearm out before the young sergeant could react. “You heard him, Andy. Against the wall. Pretend you’re doing pushups, only standing. Spread the legs.”

As I turned, the sergeant drew his revolver finally. Flask kicked my feet apart. I had to grab the wall to keep from falling. My cigarette dropped to the floor. He patted me down swiftly, found the Beretta stuck inside my belt under my shirt, and stepped back.