Stress (5 page)

The message, something about an offer of a ten-thousand-dollar settlement in a MacNeil case, meant nothing to Battle. Its presence bothered him a lot. It didn’t go with the cheap Romanian-made .32 revolver found on the terrace near Harrison’s body. It bothered him too that aside from Nampula, Potts, and the serving staff, Junius Harrison was the only black person on the premises at the moment Sergeant Paul Kubicek had begun shooting.

Lieutenant Zagreb re-entered his office just as Battle was poking the copious material back inside the file folder. With him were two men in suits; or rather one in charcoal tweed with a showy brown vest and one in a snappy rust-colored Kmart blazer with lapels as wide as Woodward Avenue and twill trousers that didn’t match under the fluorescent lights at police headquarters. Some cops would put up with anything to avoid being fitted.

“Finished?” asked the lieutenant, and without waiting for an answer, “Great. Charlie Battle, this is Sergeant Walter Stilwell and Officer Aaron Bookfinger. They’ll bring you up to speed on the Crownover case.”

Stilwell had carroty-red hair brighter than his blazer, teased forward from the temples into classical curls to makeup for the recession in front. His face was flushed and mealy, and when Battle rose to accept his iron grip his gray-blue eyes twinkled, but it was more the glint of a pair of fresh nailheads than light from within. He smiled with his lower teeth only, which were the precise shade of an amber traffic light. Bookfinger, taller and less beefy—Mutt to Stilwell’s Jeff—wore his black hair in an Elvis pompadour, lacquered to a high hard shine; but for that and his contrasty vest he had nothing whatever to mark him. Shaking his slender and decidedly limp hand, Battle thought the man’s pale and ordinary features resembled ninety-nine out of a hundred sketches drawn by police artists from the vague descriptions of suspects provided by agitated victims.

“Buy you a cuppa?” Stilwell asked.

Battle agreed, handing the file to Zagreb, who riffled abroad thumb through the contents as if to make sure none of them had strayed. Then he shook hands with Battle. “Welcome to the Spec squad. Every now and then I make a choice I know I’ll never, question.”

The lieutenant said nothing more and it was clear Battle had been dismissed. On that ambiguous note, he turned his back on the Uniformed Division and went out for coffee.

“I’m worried about the guns,” Battle said.

True to his offer, Walter Stilwell had tossed thirty cents into the cardboard Chock-Full-o’-Nuts box in the squad room and the three had gone to a vacant interrogation room with their steaming Styrofoam cups. The plastic wood grain-printed veneer was peeling away from the particleboard table they were sitting around and the government green of the Bowles administration had begun to bleed through the beige-painted walls. Stilwell, apparently the department philosopher, had wondered aloud about the irrepressible quality of truly ugly colors: figure a different shade for each mayor and that lead-based dinge had found its way through seven coats of paint. Whoever said a thing of beauty is a joy forever, here marked, had sure never been busted in Detroit.

Which seemed quite an assertion coming from a man in an orange suit.

“What about the guns?” Aaron Bookfinger, who held his cigarette between the third and fourth fingers of his left hand, had a way of covering the entire bottom half of his face when he inhaled that annoyed the newest member of the shooting team. It reminded Battle of a girl he’d dated for a while in school who was self-conscious about her crooked teeth and put her hand over her mouth whenever she spoke. One reason they’d broken up was he couldn’t understand what she was saying half the time.

Battle said, “Couple of things. To start with, Nampula’s shotgun and Potts’s thirty-eight were among the guns reported stolen from a collector on Grosse Ile last summer. Forensics lifted a partial from the burglary scene that matched Potts’s prints.”

“Makes sense,” Bookfinger said. “Potts had a prior for B-and-E.”

“Thing is, Harrison’s piece wasn’t on that list. It traces straight back to Bucharest without a stop, a virgin. What’s that suggest?”

“Gee, you don’t suppose the collector left something out of the burglary report?” The red-headed detective swallowed coffee, pulled a face. It did taste a little like stewed barbedwire. “Sergeant I play dominoes with in General Services recovered two Thompsons last year in the same lot with a Russian rifle and six revolvers. Rifle and handguns showed up in a B-and-E report in Highland Park in ’71, but not the tommies. You need a dealer’s license to own a machine gun, which the guy filing the report didn’t have.”

“A Saturday night special isn’t a Thompson. Anyway the shotgun was an Ithaca and the thirty-eight was a Colt. Name brands. Harrison’s thirty-two was chunked out by some company behind the Iron Curtain that also makes gas ranges and farm implements. What kind of collection is that?”

Stilwell showed his amber lower teeth. “How long you been in again?”

“Eighteen months.”

“You ought to have met a gun nut or two. God knows we got our share. Belanger in Auto Theft’s got a bazooka and a couple of Korean grenade launchers, but when his wife’s birthday come along he bought her this little chrome-plated twenty-five with pearl grips that looks like a cigarette lighter, which is about all it’s good for. If it makes noise on one end when you pull on the other, they want it. Somebody trading with this character in Grosse Ile throws in a junk piece to sweeten the deal, he don’t figure it’s worth listing when it comes up missing. That don’t mean he throws it out with the empty toilet paper rolls. Harrison was new to the hard crap, a rookie. He got the last turn at the grab bag. Piece like that, I might’ve ran myself instead of shooting it out with Kubicek. Better odds.”

“That’s the other gun I’m worried about, Kubicek’s forty-five auto. Department regs prohibit automatic pistols.”

Stilwell reached behind his back and clunked a blue-barreled Smith &Wesson nine-millimeter automatic onto the table. “Regs haven’t been updated since Dillinger,” he said. “What good’s one of them Dick Tracy snubnose thirty-eights when every sixteen-year-old puke in the railroad yard packs a magnum?”

“The forty-five was Kubicek’s personal piece.” Bookfinger covered his nose and mouth, drew deep, and let the smoke trickle out of his nostrils. “What a cop carries when he’s not on call is nobody’s business.”

This was news to Battle. “He wasn’t on duty?”

Stilwell and Bookfinger exchanged glances. Stilwell said, “That don’t leave this floor. The department line is he was working under cover for STRESS.”

“You mean he was there as a guest?”

“Oh, yeah. Kubicek’s old man worked in the block plant at Dodge Main seventeen years. Every Saturday night he climbed out of the coveralls and into a tux and went to the ballet with Abner Crownover. Paul and little Caryn played doctor behind the tennis courts at Fairlane. Shit. What do you think he was doing there? He was working.”

“Private security?”

Bookfinger smiled primly at his partner. “We’ve got a born detective here. And you thought we’d have to take him to the toilet.”

“If he was moonlighting against policy, why’s 1300 standing behind him? This should be between Kubicek and his lawyer.”

“It should, should it?” Stilwell swallowed coffee.

Battle pushed his away, rested his forearms on the table. “It doesn’t take a detective to see what we’ve got here. Three suspects go down during a bad heist. Two have sheets as long as your arm. One has almost no record at all, a good job, and a legitimate reason to be at the party. He’s found with the only weapon that can’t be traced to a previous crime. What do you get from that?”

“Throwaway piece,” Bookfinger said. “We thought about that. Cop gets caught up in the heat of the shoot, finds out he’s put down an unarmed man, plants a clean weapon on the body. None of us knows a veteran who doesn’t carry one around for just that purpose. It’s a theory, no doubt about it.”

“It’s shit.” Stilwell fixed his nailheads on Battle. “This is a nineteen-year officer with a shitload of commendations in his jacket and a certificate of valor. In sixty-eight he walked in on a heist at the Shell station downtown, took two in the chest, and still managed to put down the perp when he was holding a gun to the head of the kid behind the counter. Eight weeks in the hospital, and he’s still carrying around a forty-grain slug an inch from his spinal cord. How much lead you carrying around, rook? How many certificates of valor you got taped inside your locker next to Miss April’s tits?”

Battle looked from one detective to the other. “That’s the line, is it?”

“You’re goddamn right it is. Question is, which side of it are you standing on?”

“Let the kid breathe, Wally.” Bookfinger squashed out his cigarette in a tin Salem tray. “He doesn’t know Kubicek. What say we fix that?”

Battle said, “He’s in the building? I thought he was suspended with pay.”

“Limited duty. He’s keeping the dust off a chair in the Media Room.”

“What’s that?”

Stilwell stood, checked the magazine in the Smith &Wesson, and returned it to its clip. “File room back of STRESS. It’s got a TV. Let’s go ask him what’s going on with
Days of Our Lives
.”

F
OR A MAN WHO LOATHED BOREDOM AND COLD
weather more or less equally, Joe Piper reflected that he spent a good deal of time freezing his ass off on some windswept spot waiting for someone.

On this particular flinty Sunday morning in January, that spot happened to be the old interior parade ground at historic Fort Wayne, where the wind from Canada blasted between the buildings containing the barracks and the powder magazine, flinging bushels of grainy snow and ice splinters from the river against his coat and into his face, where they stung like sparks. Around him, a denser shade of gray than the low sky and the bare earth and the jagged water, stood a number of humpbacked tanks and big guns mounted on swivels: products of the Arsenal of Democracy, borne there on flatbed trailers from the converted weapons plants of Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler and never used, rendered obsolete by the Japanese surrender while still warm from the foundries. They belonged emphatically to a redoubt constructed one hundred twenty-five years ago for the defense of a city that had never been threatened. He wondered what compelled people to visit vestal arms in a spinster fort.

He looked at his watch, tapped it, wound the stem, and held it to his ear on the leeward side. It was ticking. It seemed incredible he’d been there only five minutes. In that time his nose had begun to drip, his feet in their thin leather shoes had turned to flatirons. The only place on his body where he still had feeling was the tender flesh beneath his chin. He had given up shaving that area to avoid breaking open the scab, and the stubble kept the bandage so loose it chafed him whenever he moved.

He couldn’t believe he’d stood there and let Wilson McCoy slice him open like a brisket. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t known the business had changed since he’d come into it. None of the old rules applied since the Sicilians had pulled out of Detroit. New to the rackets, the blacks had learned nothing from the last fifty years and duplicated all the dumb, violent mistakes their predecessors had made during Prohibition. They slaughtered one another in the street, shot it out with cops, and even butchered their own suppliers, obliging themselves to find replacements, often without checking their references. The undercover presence of STRESS made every white face a threat to be eliminated on the slightest suspicion. What for Joe Piper had been a relatively safe area of criminal enterprise had in a field of excitable amateurs become dangerous in the extreme. He’d known all that, and still had managed to place himself in hazard.

What was worse, here he was again.

At last a drumroll of pistons drew his attention to the Jefferson side, where a Jeep Cherokee was rolling through the main gate. It was painted a dull green and as it entered the parade ground he saw that it had been stripped of most of its options, including the wheel covers and radio antenna. The vanity plate on the front read USNO-1. Joe Piper took two steps backward as it squished to a stop on waffle-patterned tires.

Homer Angell uncramped his legs from under the dash and stepped down. At six feet seven he towered over the gun dealer in pleated khaki trousers, an insulated coat splotched with jungle camouflage, size fifteen combat boots, and a tight canvas cap whose bill rested on the bridge of his nose.

His pale hair was cropped a quarter-inch from his scalp and he had blue eyes that were painful to look at, like a bright sky. He had a long slack jaw and ears that stuck out.

Joe Piper, who never knew quite how to speak to the man, opened with the weather. “Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.”

“It’s summer in Nam. On the Mekong Delta the frogs are frying.”

“I didn’t know you were over there.”

“I read up on it. My unit was about to be called up when Kissinger threw in the towel.”

“Well, it was a shit war.”

“It didn’t have to be. When you’ve got guns and you’re fighting pygmies, you don’t go in with spears. I’m just glad my old man didn’t live to see us tucking in our tail. He was on the
Enola Gay
.”

“Mine was with the marines. He sent back a case of captured Schmeissers. My mother and my older brother traded them for meat stamps and made a bundle.”

For reply, Angell fingered a crop of pimples on his jaw. The gun dealer was pretty sure he’d said something wrong. Homer Angell had first come to Detroit with the 82nd Airborne during the riots, apparently found the chaos there to his liking, and when his enlistment ran out moved to Highland Park and joined the Michigan National Guard. Implicated when a cache of automatic weapons came up missing from the downtown armory, he had been allowed to resign his lieutenant’s commission in return for a promise not to prosecute. Since September he had been employed part-time as a caretaker at the Fort Wayne museum. His appetite for illegal gun money notwithstanding, he had an aversion to any calling that took him away from things military. It was his private opinion—not so private among those who knew him and had the patience to listen—that the army had lost another Omar Bradley when it refused to promote him above the rank of quartermaster sergeant.