Stress (20 page)

“Certainly not. My clients call me at the house all the time. Our conversations are confidential.”

“I shouldn’t have to assure you of the Bureau’s discretion.”

“A U.S. Census taker used those exact same words. I happened to mention that I subscribe to
The American Rifleman
so my sportsmen clients will have something to read in my waiting room. Inside six months my mailbox was jammed with applications to join the NRA, the John Birch Society, and the Ku Klux Klan.”

“With respect, sir, your child’s life—”

“Oh, let him have what he wants, Ted. They’ve been listening in ever since Papa told H. R. Kaltenborn the Zero was a better fighter than the Corsair.”

Riordan’s mouth opened, but it was Casimir Dobrinski who filled the silence. The hospital administrator had on the same white sport coat and striped shirt he’d worn the previous afternoon, without the necktie; obviously he’d simply shaved and thrown on whatever was handy as soon as he got the call. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves with all this talk of ransom,” he said. “We don’t know for sure this is a kidnapping.”

“I’m sure you’d rather treat this as some sort of clerical error.” Ted had gone pale, always a danger sign. “You can’t keep this in house. Somebody waltzed in here and took my daughter. If you think we’re not going to hold the hospital responsible—”

During the ensuing squabble, Caryn got up and walked down the hall to Opal’s room. There the oxygen and i.v. tubes and monitor wire from which the little girl had been torn like a melon from its vines still dangled beside the empty bed whose sheets bore the child’s imprint. Her big stuffed Snoopy sat in one of the visitors’ chairs gazing expectantly toward the door as if awaiting her momentary return. Something inside Caryn that was only barely holding on slipped another sickening inch, but when she put her hands to her cheeks they were dry. That was abnormal. A mother who couldn’t cry for her lost child fell outside the definition of the term. And the urge to partake was upon her stronger than ever, burning in every nerve and capillary like a million tiny white-hot buzz saws. She left the room abruptly, in search of a water fountain. Perhaps simple rehydration was all that was needed to put her tear ducts into working order.

In the hallway she almost ran into Riordan. The agent in charge was absorbed in a sheet of stiff paper held by a some-what less successful carbon of himself in a gray suit and glasses with heavy black frames.

“The nurse has confirmed her description of the man she saw loitering outside your daughter’s room earlier from the Identi-Kit,” said Riordan, when he became aware of Caryn’s presence. “Do you recognize him?”

The sketch reminded her of the art lessons of her childhood, only half attended to as she eavesdropped on her brother’s executive exercises in the room next door: She could almost see the intersecting dotted lines through the center of the face oval, indicating that the nose and ears were to be found halfway between the top of the head and the point of the chin and that the eyebrows were level with the tops of the ears. But this face was fleshier than that anonymous model, strong-jowled, with a scowl tugging down the corners of the wide mouth and a squint in the eyes that brought to mind alone figure in feathers and buckskin scanning a horizon for covered wagons. She had a hunch the baseball cap that had been added to the Identi-Kit prototype concealed a wealth of long black hair. Something fluttered in her memory and was gone. A face behind glass. She tried to bring it back, couldn’t.

“It looks like some kind of Indian.”

“That’s what the nurse thought. Is the face familiar?”

A face behind glass. Not enough. “No.” She handed back the sheet.

Riordan made a noise of smothered exasperation. Caryn had already pegged him as one of those civil servants who tried to make you feel guilty for forcing them to earn their government salaries. He returned the sketch to the agent in glasses. “Wire it to Quantico, then circulate it. Black on black, thirty to thirty-five, American Indian, five-five and a hundred and sixty. Go heavy on the reservations up North. Don’t forget the island.”

“Mackinac?”

“Did it sound like I meant New Zealand? Use a local informant. Those people have trouble opening up to anyone who looks like he’s from the G.”

“Can’t think why.”

Alone with Caryn, Riordan said, “You sure you didn’t see the man? The nurse spotted him two or three times. Smelled him, too. She said his cologne would stop a runaway horse.”

“I only left the room once. There was no one in the hall.”

“He must’ve ducked into a vacant room at the end of visiting hours. Great security you have here,” he said as Dobrinski joined them from the waiting room.

“This hospital covers nearly a million square feet. We haven’t the personnel to watch every corner. It isn’t a prison. People come and go: residents, consultants, visitors, fulltime staff, temporary help, maintenance, outside delivery people. Every day I see a hundred faces I never saw before. In any case—”

“Windshield.”

Dobrinski and Riordan looked at Caryn. An arm snaked around her shoulders and squeezed; Ted. “A face behind glass,” she said. “It was a windshield. In a car, watching.”

“Where?” demanded the agent. “What kind of car?”

“Thass him. Like Tonto, only short and squatty-like.” Dwight Littlejohn handed the sheet back to Battle.

The officer was seated with the middle-aged couple among the plastic schooners in Lieutenant Zagreb’s office at 1300. Zagreb had left early on a personal errand, his night-watch replacement didn’t come on for another hour, and Battle didn’t trust any of the interrogation rooms, whose walls literally had ears. He’d wanted Russell’s parents alone in the first lucid moment after identifying their son at the Wayne County

Morgue around the corner. Bookfinger and Stilwell were out, ostensibly interviewing yet another witness who had been present at the Crownover-Ogden mansion at the time of the shootings New Year’s Eve. More likely they were stretching a ten-minute routiner into two hours of saganaki and brews at the Grecian Gardens.

Littlejohn
pére
bore no resemblance to his male offspring. Shorter and thick through the shoulders, running to fat and beginning to stoop, he cropped his graying hair almost to a stubble as if in some kind of reverse rebellion against Russell’s afro. His face was big, soft, and sad—its perennial expression, Battle suspected—and his hands, relatively small for the maintenance work he did for a living, were broken-nailed and shone with calluses. Wife Elizabeth was four years younger but looked ten years older than her actual age of forty-four, with her hair up and pinned and white-framed eyeglasses attached to a gold chain around her neck, which she’d used to study the drawing of the man her husband had described, the man he had seen climbing the outside stairs to his son’s room over the garage recently, he didn’t know just when.

“Could it have been New Year’s Day?” Battle asked.

Littlejohn looked at his wife, who said, “You saw him. I didn’t.”

“Coulda been,” he said. “Coulda been a Sunday after. Anyway I was home. I only just seen him through the window. Russell’s friends they come—came and went.” His adam’s apple worked. “I only remember this one on accounta he some kinda injun. You see
Two Rode Together
?”

Battle hesitated. “Uh, no.”

“Woody Strode, he played a injun in that. Only he black. Well, this one didn’t look like him. This one he all injun. Woop-woop, you know?” He patted one cupped hand to his mouth, holding two fingers of the other behind the crown of his head like feathers.

“Dwight,” Mrs. Littlejohn said.

He looked at her, eyes bright as a child’s leaving a movie theater. A dark shade slid down behind his face when their eyes made contact. The big soft sadness came rushing back in. “Oh.” He lowered his hands to his lap.

Battle gave the charcoal sketch back to the artist, a blonde officer in the regulation cheap white shirt and pleated pants with a .38 in a holster strapped to his belt. Reedy and pale, he would have looked more natural in a paint-streaked sweatshirt and sandals. Battle had to wonder at the chain of circumstances that would lead a man from the north light and nude models of an art-school studio to the fluorescents and dumpy uniformed matrons of Detroit Police Headquarters.

“You say you didn’t see if he came by car?”

Littlejohn shook his head. “You thinking he the one kilt Russell?”

“Do you think someone killed him?”

“You do, or you wouldn’t of took us back here to talk. Nobody done that when my brother got kilt.”

Battle’s chair squeaked. “Your brother was killed?”

“During the riot it was.”

He sat back. “Sixty-seven?”

“Hell, no! That wasn’t no riot. I’m talking about nineteen forty-three. At Paradise Valley it was. The dance hall, you know?”

Battle didn’t know, but he nodded anyway. It seemed the quickest way to get back to business.

“It started on Belle Isle. They was some kind of fight. Blacks said a black woman and her baby got throwed off the bridge. Whites said a white woman was raped. Wasn’t none of it true, but it got around. They mixed it up in front of Paradise Valley downtown. My brother Earl got his head stomped in the middle of the street. Cops that come told my mother what happened said it was more like a hurricane than a murder, and that’s the last we seen of them till the funeral.”

“They came to the funeral?”

“Oh, they come to all the funerals. Twenny-five of them there was.
Black
funerals, that is. I think maybe nine or ten whites got kilt. Cops figured we’d get out of hand if they didn’t come to pay they respects. ’Course, they took along guns and sticks.”

“Things were different then,” Battle said.

“Yeah, they got on different uniforms now.”

He returned to the subject. “Were you aware your son used heroin?”

“No,” said the woman. “Yes,” said the man. The responses were simultaneous. Littlejohn said, “I figured he was using something. I didn’t know heroin.”

“You didn’t figure anything of the kind,” his wife said. She was holding a handkerchief twisted in one fist, but had yet to use it. Shock, Battle thought; or maybe she’d run out of tears a long time before. “If you did, you’d of said something.”

Littlejohn was looking at Battle. “You know everything the little woman and I said to each other in the past year?”

Battle waited.

“She say”—screwing his voice up high—“ ‘Dwight, get out of that toilet,
Mannix
is on.’ And I say, ‘Well, he just have to wait, my bowels don’t just up and move with that big old minute hand.’ Thassit.”

Battle could see this wasn’t going any further. He stood. “Thanks for coming down, Mr. and Mrs. Littlejohn. I’m very sorry about your son. Just so you know, we’re not treating this one as a hurricane.”

The old man—he was old now legitimately, too many notches past middle age to claim it—moved one of his thick rounded shoulders. “It don’t matter. Earl and Russell, they never knowed each other, but they might just as well be one and the same. It don’t matter when you lived. Once you dead, you dead all the time.”

Battle said nothing. Dwight Littlejohn sat working his hands in his lap for a moment, like a warrior steeling himself for some dramatic act. Then he got up and scraped his heels going out, without looking back to see if his wife was following.

K
UBICEK LIT ABOUT HIS HUNDREDTH
P
ALL
M
ALL OFF
the butt of the last, shook out the match, and flipped it in the vicinity of the heaped ashtray, a homemade clay job left over from some proud papa’s stint at 1300. By now that kid had probably turned in his summer-camp trunks for a bandanna and Old Glory on his butt. Kids today were pukes.

The interrogation room, steeped as were its lath-and-plaster walls in the sharp sweat-and-vomit stench of fifty years’ worth of accusations, identifications, commiserations, refutations, genuflections, and the occasional confession, held no terrors for him. He knew where the mikes were hidden, the location of the dents in the floor where heads had struck in simpler days when the Supreme Court was just a building on the D.C. tour, where was the best place to stand on the other side of the two-way glass so the perp at the table couldn’t see you watching him. He was pretty sure this was the room where he and Silverman cracked the Krikor Messerlian murder in ’67 when they obtained a confession from the young looter who had bashed in the Armenian shopkeeper’s skull with a baseball bat. Messerlian had been the first person killed during the riots. That was the week the city went to shit and it hadn’t been back since. The sergeant felt no loyalty to the city, its residents, or his superiors. The first was just a collection of buildings, most of which needed work they wouldn’t get from the people who lived in them, and the people themselves were animals who fucked and shit and stole to pump shit into their veins. If they were anything more than that they’d move out. His superiors spent their time at the office shuffling all the Kubiceks from one duty sheet to another, striking Kubiceks from the sheets when they got killed, sending their dress uniforms to the cleaners between funerals, then going to their real homes in the suburbs, stopping off on the way to pick up their mail at the addresses they maintained in the city to fulfill the department residency requirement. Kubicek felt protective toward his house and wife and daughter, but STRESS was home. The squad and he understood each other. Punch in on time, punch out at quitting, let it know where you were when you went out on a call, pick up your three hundred minus with-holding on Friday, and you were both square. Run down the wrong alley too fast, turn too slow, and your wife got a pension and Old Glory from the captain of the Color Guard, folded into a neat blue triangle. What could be more tidy?

He’d been thinking these thoughts when Charlie Battle walked past the interrogation room door, purposely left ajar lest Kubicek get the impression he was being detained. With him was an older black couple the sergeant didn’t know from a thousand he’d seen on sidewalks and in numbers parlors and in shabby living rooms where they laced their stained fingers together in their laps and swore on the Bible that little Tyrone was home with them eating the Colonel when poor Mr. Aboud was getting his brains blown out for the $63.50 in his till. The man, rounded all over like a stone from a stream and beaten-looking, paused and looked in at Kubicek for along moment, then moved on with the others, shaking his head. Kubicek felt the corners of his mouth tightening in a wolfish smile.
Rookie
, he thought, and he went ahead and said it out loud. If you were going to pull off the old hidden-ball play, it helped to coach your players first. Back on Riopelle he’d been a little worried when the black officer pulled out his Miranda card, but he saw now things were going to be all right.