The Glass Highway (12 page)

Dusk became evening, measured by a barely perceptible thickening of the shadows in the corners farthest from the light in the hall. Then interminable night. Writhing and stretching to burrow an acceptable configuration in the lumpy batting, finding it, then writhing and stretching again five seconds later. Staring at the slats in the bunk overhead. Doubts chasing thoughts through the dark abyss of the idle mind. No screams up there in felony, at least; those were all below in the drunk tank, where the inmates were wrestling with the furry purple things that came out when the buzz wore off, and on the top floor, which was a way-station before the upholstered rooms at Ypsilanti. Where I was was quiet. Backaches and doubts and quiet and the nagging nighttime fear of spending one’s life in their company. The bland eternity of a night that didn’t end until the morning shift came on to say it had. All for a promise no one much cared if I kept.

Happy holidays, Walker. Many more.

S
OMEWHERE BETWEEN BREAKFAST
and lunch on the second day, I was taken back down to the basement, steered into a tiled room off the showers with a row of sinks under a long streaked mirror, and handed a safety razor and a can of shaving cream. I hadn’t seen my reflection in a while and it startled me. I looked like every mug shot I’d ever seen. Under a guard’s supervision I scraped off two days’ stubble, washed my face, combed my hair with my fingers—there was more gray in it today—and I still looked like every mug shot I’d ever seen.

“Why the spruce job?” I asked the turnkey, a young deputy in the county uniform.

“I just take ’em where they tell me,” he said. “I don’t ask how come.”

I put on my shirt, gave back the razor and can, and was escorted out; but instead of turning left toward the elevator we bore right and followed the corridor into the receiving area, where Zorn and Bloodworth were waiting.

“How’s Mrs. Zorn?” I asked the sergeant. “Or did she run off with that parole cop?”

He wasn’t smiling. “Back to the station, criminal. We got questions.”

“New ones, I hope.”

“You wish.” He reached behind him under his coat and brought forth handcuffs. Bloodworth signed me out.

Police interrogation rooms are neither designed nor decorated. They just happen, like Dutch elm disease. Four blank walls set too close together around a table with a dozen cigarette burns in the top, a couple of hard chairs, butts in the dusty corners, that same stench of sweat and stale fear soaked deep into the walls. Nothing you couldn’t pick out of a picture in the October 1948 issue of
Police Times.
The only thing missing was the heat lamp. In its place, an ordinary hundred-watt bulb protected by a steel cage in the ceiling shed even, medium-bright light into every corner. In a way that was worse, like the frank lighting in a morgue.

Zorn was the heavy. For an hour he pelted me with questions, now circling behind my chair so that I couldn’t see what he was doing, now inserting his large nose before my face, spattering me with saliva, and giving me the full benefit of his nicotine breath. He kept coming back to Paula Royce; where was she? I grinned at him. He seized my collar in both fists and lifted me off the chair. Bloodworth pulled him away, said maybe he’d better go out for a cup of java. Zorn went out for a cup of java, slamming the door behind him hard enough to rattle the bulb in the ceiling.

The same tired routine.

Silence swelled the room on the sergeant’s heels. I watched Bloodworth watching me, one foot planted on the seat of the other chair, arms folded on his raised knee, smoke dribbling out the end of a filtered Pall Mall between his brown fingers. Shirt cuffs turned back, spotted tie at half-mast. I said, “You the one that offers me a cigarette and calls me by my first name?”

He grunted, got his pack out of his shirt pocket, and tossed it to me. I slid one out and flipped back the rest.

“That wasn’t really an act.” He lit mine with a Zippo. “Rube is one cop who’s as tough as he seems.”

“I just came from a place where they pick their teeth with tough guys like him. They don’t have to strut and make with the tight talk; they’re the real thing.”

“You caught him on a bad year. We all make allowances for Rube. He’s got an eighteen-year-old wife that’s making him crazy.”

“I thought that was just a gag about the parole cop.”

“The parole cop and just about everyone else on the department who is not named Dick Bloodworth.” His grin came and went quickly. “Also it’s this case. It’s screwy.”

“Screwy how?”

“Oh, the Royce girl’s guilty, all right. One thing about this detective business is surface facts usually turn out to be everything they seem. Four years in plainclothes and I’ve never had a murder you could call a mystery. They’re mostly open and shut. It’s the girl’s background giving us hell. She doesn’t have one.”

I sucked hard on the filter for taste and waited. After almost twenty-four hours without, it tasted enough like a Winston not to complain.

He said, “She was issued a Michigan driver’s license sixteen months ago, which is about the time she registered the Buick Skylark we found in the garage. Her gun registration is dated a week later. According to her landlord she moved into the house that same week. No lease, but she got up first and last month’s rent and a security deposit. Fifteen hundred. Cash. So he didn’t bother to ask for references. Before that, nothing. She didn’t exist.”

“Probably an alias. What’d you get on her prints?”

“We’re still waiting on Washington. Holidays. A set we lifted at the house matches what’s on file with the gun permit in Lansing. It’s obvious she was hiding from something. Could be when we find out from what we’ll clear up somebody else’s headache too.” He lowered his eyelids, then raised them. “Proust would fry my ass if he knew I was telling you all this. But what the hell, he fries it whenever he gets the chance anyway.”

“He was the same way down in D. Why do you think he stayed an inspector eight years?” I added some ash to the fine mulch on the floor. “So what’s good old Rube squawking about?”

He found a scuff mark on the toe of the shoe he had propped up on the chair and rubbed it out with his fingers. “I’m not one to dump on his partner the minute his back’s turned, but you know the River Rouge down by the Ford plant? Where the water’s so warm from the chemicals you can boil an egg in it—only you wouldn’t want to eat it afterwards? Sergeant Reuben Zorn’s idea of a productive day involves sitting on the bank fishing that river.”

“But you wouldn’t want to dump on him the minute his back’s turned,” I said.

The quick bright grin again, like a light bulb blazing out.

I smoked up the room a little. “What kind of press is this drawing?”

“Turn to any channel any time of day and see if you can avoid Cecil Fish. So far you’re an unidentified lead. About tomorrow, though, he’ll have to release your name if he wants to stay on the front page. Unless, of course, we got it all wrapped up by then.”

“Lots of luck, with that anchor they hung on you for a partner.”

“Can that!” he said sharply. “You haven’t spent two years with him, which is what buys me the right to talk about him like I do.”

I canned it. I’d forgotten for a second he was a cop. Dangerous mistake.

The door opened and Zorn came in. He looked subdued, like a grass fire under control but still subject to sudden changes of wind. He glanced at Bloodworth, who shook his head almost imperceptibly.

“That’s it for us for now, shamus,” grumped the sergeant. “Fish wants his turn.”

They handcuffed me again for the elevator trip up two floors to the prosecutor’s office, where a three-man camera crew was busy rolling cable and packing equipment. Fish got up from behind a desk the size of a bed as we came in through the open door, but he hadn’t seen us yet. He was talking to a slick number in a shiny gray suit, with one of those heads of curly brown hair that is almost always a wig.

“When did they say they need this tape?” The prosecutor peeled off his jacket.

“Next Tuesday. It’s going into a sort of collage with that footage we shot of you speaking downtown and that pork-barrel session you had with those striking DPW workers last month. Servant of the people. It’s corny as hell, but the voters expect some of that.” The gray suit was flipping through papers attached to a clipboard in his hand.

“What’s the rush? I won’t be stumping till spring.”

“Trust your old campaign manager. You want to go to bed with your public at night and wake up with them every morning right through to the first Tuesday in November.”

Fish gave him that plastic grin you see a lot of around election time. “And all the while I’ll be telling them it’s the opposition that’s screwing them.”

Gray Suit spotted me, pulling a double take when he saw the cuffs. “Hold up,” he said, laying a hand on the arm of the guy carrying the camera. “Cecil, a couple of minutes of you interrogating a prisoner would put some zip in that day-in-the-life gag. We can go dumb with it, use a voice-over.”

“Keep that monkey organ out of my face or you’ll be wearing it,” I told the suit brightly.

Whether it was the cuffs or the wrinkled clothes or my Most Wanted look or a combination of all three, the blood slid out of his face.

“Forget it, Ed,” said Fish, looking at me levelly. “That law-and-order stuff went out with George Wallace.”

He steered his campaign manager to the door and gave him a friendly but firm push with his hand on the other’s back. The crew followed Ed out, glancing at me curiously as they passed. Fish’s politician’s smile lasted until the door was shut. Then he turned on Zorn.

“What’s with the bracelets? Why not hang a neon sign on his ear, for chrissake? Don’t the words ‘secret witness’ mean anything down on your floor?” His voice got high when he spoke rapidly.

Zorn unlocked the cuffs. “Department regs.”

“More of Proust’s bullshit, you mean. Wait outside.”

The sergeant and Bloodworth went out. I rubbed my wrists. There’s nothing quite like the bone-pinchers to remind you you’re in confinement. Fish regarded me for a moment with his pale blue eyes, then strode past me, unbuttoning his shirtcuffs and turning them back as he went. He stepped through a side door and left it open. A moment later I heard water running.

The office was four times the size of my cell. The carpet was as green and spongy as the felt on a pool table, and bore the clear outlines of shoes and the marks made by the camera’s casters. Squares of something that looked like real oak paneled the walls, set corner-to-corner checkerboard fashion with the grain going two ways. Sober brown law volumes stood in a tall bookcase against one wall, suitable for standing in front of when the cameras were turning. Opposite that a big square window with net curtains and Venetian blinds framed downtown Iroquois Heights, and under the window were an ivory-colored sofa and a cocktail table for those in-depth interviews with women journalists with serious eyes and hurricane-proof coiffures. There wasn’t a thing on the desk but a tape recorder and a telephone in a box like an infant’s coffin.

So far I was just some more furniture where my host was concerned.

Fish came out of the bathroom buttoning his cuffs. His tie was done up and his face looked scrubbed and pink and a shade lighter than it had going in. The people we most hate and admire these days are all wearing make-up.

I said, “You’ll never make state senator.”

He started a little. His eyes narrowed behind the glasses. “Why do you say that?”

“Voters today like candidates who talk. That icy silence is strictly Calvin Coolidge.”

He grunted and hooked his tailored jacket off the back of his desk chair. Putting it on: “I did some checking up on you.”

“I get checked up on a lot. What did they say this time?”

“The exact wording doesn’t matter. You’re a smart operator. Not smart enough to stay on the sunny side of the authorities, but smart enough to make it good when you don’t. Too smart anyhow to help a murderer escape justice.”

“Then what am I doing counting cockroaches in the felony tank?”

“Because you’re guilty as hell of being a smartass and smuggling out a suspect you think is innocent of the crime as charged. Your penchant for the white horse is public record; you’ve ridden it into more jams than you can count. But never as tight a one as this.”

“On what evidence?” I said. “A business card found at the scene of the shoot and a stolen Jeep parked around the corner from my office. You’d boot a rookie cop out of here if he came to you with a case like that.”

He smiled tightly, without showing teeth. “Not if he had an eyewitness.”

My scalp started tingling.

“Even longtime private cops who know better can be taken in by appearances,” he said, stroking the tape recorder on his desk. “They think because the Customs officials on our side of the international border are ruder and ask sharper questions than the Canadians, they’re the ones to look out for. But some of those geezers over there have good memories.”

I didn’t say anything. Suddenly it was very cold in the office.

“We blew up Paula Royce’s driver’s license picture and yours from your investigator’s photostat and circulated them among all the shifts on both ends of the tunnel and the bridge yesterday. A Simon LaFarge remembers checking you through the Ambassador in a late-model gray two-door around five Christmas morning. He’s prepared to swear that a girl who looked like Paula Royce was riding with you.”

I smiled. I’ve done harder things, but not recently. “Nice try, Fish. I bet you get a lot of confessions that way. From the guilty ones.”

“You did a dumb thing, Walker. Don’t make it dumber. Twenty years dumber. That’s the max for accomplice after the fact in this state.”

“That’s if you arrest your chief suspect,
if
you can prove she pulled the trigger, and if this LaFarge character, if he exists, identifies her as the girl in the car. No statements for you today, counselor. I’ll take my chances with the system.”

“Last chance,” he said calmly. “Talk into this machine and you walk out of here. No cuffs, no cops, nothing. Free as air. Otherwise we nail your ass to the flagpole.”