The Glass Highway (11 page)

“I thought you had it tailored for the girl.”

He gave me his Lon Chaney Jr. smile, all bottom teeth. “I’m a civil servant. Humor me.”

“Rosecranz, the super in my building, can tell you I was in my office from about seven till nine. After that I was with Fern Esterhazy—that’s Bud’s stepsister—in The Chord Progression. The bartender there may remember me, though he won’t want to. We went from there to her place in Grosse Pointe. I left there at two-thirty.”

Zorn leered. Proust pulled at his lower lip. “We’ll talk to all of them. Then where’d you go?”

“Where does anyone go at two-thirty on a Christmas morning in Detroit?” I asked. “Skinny-dipping in Lake St. Clair.”

“With or without the Esterhazy cunt?” put in the sergeant.

“Shut up, shithead,” Proust snapped. “We can do this smooth or we can do this rough, Walker. The book says we got to let you call a lawyer, but it don’t say we can’t show you the system first.”

“On what charge? I came up here voluntarily.”

“We forgot. Cops are human too.”

“Says you.”

His expression didn’t change. He’d heard lots worse plenty of times. “Where were you from two-thirty until my men came to get you at eight?”

“In bed, like I told your boy Zorn.”

We watched each other. Finally he said: “That’s it?”

“I’m smart enough to come up with something better if it weren’t true.”

“I know you, Walker. You’re dumb-smart. You’re hoping that’s just what we’ll think.”

I burned tobacco. Here was where I was going to bail out with my story about getting euchred into giving a suspected murderess a lift. If it had been anyone else but Proust asking the question I might have. I burned tobacco and said nothing. The assistant chief made brief eye contact with Zorn, who came away from the wall with his head down. His coat was open and he had his fur hat shoved back past a black widow’s peak as sharp as a fish knife.

“We know what you was doing,” he said. “You picked up the Royce cunt, or she picked you up, and you delivered her out of town, probably across the line in Ohio. Maybe Canada, but that’s a sucker play and we don’t figure you for that much of a sucker. That’s why we found your card in front of the door where someone who’s in a hurry might drop it on their way out. But like the chief said, us cops are human. We all got sour memories. Chances are we’ll forget your name and what you look like once we got a line on the girl.”

“You’re missing Christmas morning, Sergeant,” I said.

“Quit fucking around and read him his rights!” spat Proust,

“Charge?” Bloodworth had stopped fooling with the loose thread.

“We’ll fill in that part later.”

Zorn said, “Then can I check out, Chief? I’m working for free now an hour.”

Proust wasn’t listening. He was looking at the black detective. “You stay here, Officer. We’ll talk about your loose gums and why you look at me like you just stepped in something every time I give a simple order. Just because the mayor says I got to take you don’t mean I got to take your crap.”

“Okay.” Bloodworth’s jaw muscles twitched.

“Okay what, damn you?”

“Okay, Chief.”

“Okay.” He swung both barrels on me. “I’m not half as stupid as you think, Walker. No one could be. I know you’re looking for headlines. ‘Private Eye Refuses to Betray Client.’ Pick up a little free advertising at the city’s expense. Only it won’t dry with me. I got an in with the local press and I can make you stink so high no client will come near you without a gas mask. That’s if I get soft and don’t bust your license in the meantime. Just try me if you don’t—Yeah!” Someone had tapped at the door.

A skinny plainclothes man in shirtsleeves and a shoulder holster opened the door and leaned inside. “Silver Bells” trickled in from a radio in the squad room. “Prosecutor’s here, Chief.”

“You mean someone from his office?”

“No, it’s the cheese himself.”

“Christ, he must have radar.” Proust stuck the end of his tie inside his jacket and did up the knot. “Okay, shoo the camera-happy bastard in.”

The unidentified dick backed out. I remembered my cigarette and knocked half an inch of ash off onto the rug. Making myself at home. Because if “prosecutor” meant who I suspected, the fun was just getting started.

C
ITY PROSECUTOR
C
ECIL
F
ISH
strode in and stopped to look around as if wondering what the hell had happened to the trumpets he’d ordered. He was a smallish man in a neat brown three-piece suit under a trenchcoat and sporting a fresh carnation that on him looked like a sunflower. His graying blond hair was cut in youthful bangs, but the black-rimmed glasses he wore to mask the bags under his eyes put back every year the hairstyle took away. His expression said he was aware of that and he didn’t like it one damn bit. He had pale blue eyes and a wart on one cheek painted black to resemble a mole. He looked ten years older and three inches shorter than he did on television.

I said before that you could buy Iroquois Heights for less than you’d stoop to pick up from the sidewalk, but you wouldn’t get the prosecutor, not for that, not with a state senator’s chair coming up empty next November. He couldn’t see a thousand-dollar bill. A ten-grand campaign donation, however, would get you the key to the city and the promise of an appointment in Lansing after the swearing-in ceremony. He was famous both for raids on gambling hells and drug dens that made the front pages and for acquittals for lack of evidence that got buried among the obituaries. His kind is as American as Legionnaires’ disease and twice as common. They can smell publicity from the downwind side of a stockyard.

Today he couldn’t smell much of anything, because he had a cold. He reached into his jacket right past a crisp white handkerchief showing above the inside breast pocket and took out a Kleenex, into which he blew his slightly red nose with a delicate little honk. “This the suspect in the Broderick case?” His words were muffled by the tissue. He was looking straight at me.

Proust said, “He didn’t do it, but we think he knows where the one who did is and helped her get there.”

“What’ve you got on him?”

The assistant chief filled him in on the events of a week ago, mentioned my card and where it was found, and finished with my refusal to make a statement. I was beginning to feel like the guy who had wandered into his own funeral.

Fish tossed his wadded tissue into the wastebasket by the desk and came over and stood in front of me. “Your part in this is pretty transparent, mister,” he said. “What’ve you got to say in your defense?”

I blew smoke in his face.

Bloodworth grinned suddenly, his bright teeth lighting up the room. Proust shot him a hard look, but met only grave respect.

“He’s a hardcase, Cecil,” snarled the assistant chief. “He knows we don’t have anything he couldn’t slide out of with a little spit.”

“Then we’ll just have to make sure he doesn’t spit.” He turned to Proust. “I just got off the phone with Esterhazy. Maybe you never heard of him before today, but he draws a lot of water with the mayor and half the city council. Then there’s the fact that this boy who was killed is the son of a popular Detroit television personality. I’m going to be shaking reporters off my lapels in a couple of hours. I sure hope you have something for me to tell them other than the usual dreck about all the leads you’re following.”

“I thought talking to the press about ongoing police investigations was my job.” Something like color had come into the assistant chief’s face.

“Not on something this big. Don’t forget you only got this job because you kept the chief’s nephew’s name out of that drug raid you made on the Detroit school system. As a spokesman for this department you have all the media presence of a poisonous land snail.”

Proust said something about which of them was more suited to fit inside a snail’s shell and they were off. Bloodworth caught my eye and winked. I leaned over in my chair and whispered, “How long they been like this?”

“What time is it?”

Zorn, who had been consulting his wrist watch every ten seconds, took his partner literally. “Quarter after ten, for chrissake.”

I twisted out what was left of my cigarette against a shoe sole and got up, flipping the butt at the wastebasket. “I’ll just be on my way,” I announced. “I won’t even ask anyone to drive me back. I’ll call a cab. That’s my Christmas present to the taxpayers of Iroquois Heights.”

“You aren’t going anywhere!”

Some of Fish’s authority was lost in that he was shouting at my Adam’s apple. I said, “Charge me or release me. You know the lyrics better than I do, or you should. I can hook a lawyer up here, but it’s long distance and he’d just say the same thing anyway.”

It got quiet enough in the office to hear “Winter Wonderland” playing on the other side of the door. I grasped the knob. Got that close.

The telephone on Proust’s desk whirred. He picked up the receiver and barked his name into the mouthpiece. Then he listened, and as he listened his face subsided to its normal pasty color. He said, “Yeah,” and hung up.

The prosecutor was looking at him, but as Proust turned away from the instrument his eyes went straight to Sergeant Zorn, standing next to the door. “He stays.”

Zorn made a slight movement we both understood, I let go of the knob and moved away.

“That was Detroit,” Proust told Fish. “I got out an APB on young Broderick’s Jeep Cherokee when we couldn’t turn it at Paula Royce’s place. They just found it.” He told him where.

Fish sucked his cheek, watching me. “Find him accommodations at County. Book him as a material witness for now, but show him the process. Whether we tack on accomplice after the fact and aiding and abetting is all up to you, Walker.”

“Feed him his Miranda,” Assistant Chief Mark Proust directed the sergeant.

The county lockup was a four-story brick box squatting on a block of prime downtown real estate with a twelve-foot wall around the exercise yard and a narrow alley separating it from the Lawyers Building next door. It had been built back when criminals were punished instead of recycled, and although some reform-minded chief turnkey had had the plaster walls repainted a soothing turquoise, the tough old government green had begun to show through, bringing with it memories of leg irons and rubber truncheons and homosexual rapes in the shower room. Very little sunlight penetrated the iron mesh outside the windows to the corridors, lit day and night by fluorescent tubes and reeking of Lysol. The cells were medium gray all the time and had a dank stony smell, and a quieter place you will never see.

Zorn and Bloodworth ran me over after pictures and prints at the station and delivered me through a back door that led directly into the basement. A gray-haired guard signed for me there and took me to a brightly lit little room where a younger colleague sat reading a Michener novel at a yellow oak table with initials carved all over the top. For the next fifteen minutes they discussed last night’s hockey game, taking time out from the play-by-play every few seconds to address me in the flat tones of men saying the same things they’d said a thousand times already. Empty the pockets. Leave them hanging inside out. Take off the tie. Take off the belt. Take out the shoelaces. Leave them on the table. Strip. Open your mouth wide. Spread your arms. Spread your legs. Turn around and face the wall. Bend your knees. Stoop. Get dressed. Hold on to that receipt for when you leave us. No receipt, no valuables.

“What, no stripes?”

Grayhead gave me the deadpan. “Funny, pal. Denims come after the prelim. That goalie couldn’t catch a punch in the mouth if the coach caught him screwing his wife, Eddie. Later. Okay, comedian.”

Out the door and a clanking elevator ride up to the second floor. The felony tank. Clackety-clack, clackety-clack down a waxed corridor to a cell two thirds of the way down. A couple of wolf-whistles from inmates along the way, but mostly no reaction at all. White-enameled bars worn down to dull steel where many hands had gripped them. Clang of the door, the guard’s footsteps clacking away. Then silence.

My world measured eight feet by ten by my calculation, with a narrow creaking bunk bed and a lidless toilet that worked about as well as they do in most institutions, meaning unpredictably. By climbing up onto the top bunk and kneeling with the side of my face pressed against the barred window, I could just see through the thick glass and wire mesh to the handkerchief-size lot where the lawyers and judges parked their cars next door. It’s not often you see that many Mercedes in one place. Directly under the window a pair of trustees were busy unloading a bread truck backed up to a dock opening off what was presumably the kitchen storeroom. No matter what time it is on what day, someone is always working somewhere.

I climbed back down and sat on the bottom bunk. I could feel the metal slats through the mattress, which was about as thick as a deck of cards and stuffed with cotton batting that was mostly bunched up toward the head end. At least I had the cell to myself. Cecil Fish’s orders, most likely. Let the bastard stew for a while alone, make him desperate for someone to talk to, even if it’s a cop. Everyone’s a psychologist these days. Everyone didn’t know me.

I wondered where Paula Royce was. I wondered who she was and what she was running from besides the law. I wondered who had handed Bud Broderick his ticket and why. I wondered what I was doing sitting all alone on a thin mattress in a quiet cell with a semifunctional toilet if I didn’t know any of those other things. I wondered when they served supper. I hadn’t eaten in close to twenty-four hours.

It was served at dusk, Monte Cristo style on a metal tray through a port in the bottom of the door, and consisted of some gray meat sliced paper-thin, powder and water pretending to be mashed potatoes under canned gravy, loose kernels of corn, a slice of bread, and a half-pint of milk in a cardboard carton. Plastic utensils. I consumed everything edible, using the bread to scoop the last of the gravy into my mouth. The food had an institutional flavor, but it filled all the empty spaces. Afterward I pushed the foul matter back out through the port for pickup as instructed by the trustee who had brought it, a harelip who walked with his right foot turned inward forty-five degrees. His shambling limp was distinguishable a hundred feet down the corridor. I would come to identify it with food and start salivating like Pavlov’s dogs at the sound of it.