You Know Who Killed Me (11 page)

I don't know why I'd asked; or for that matter why I wasn't surprised by the answer.

 

FOURTEEN

She started to get up. I waved her back down with my hand of cards. “I'm an expert on kids, never having had any. Give him a chance to wind down before you stir him up.”

She hesitated, then subsided into her seat. “He's not usually like that. Well, he was, before the school nurse prescribed Ritalin. Even then it was a long time before he settled down. But for a week now he's been more like a normal boy.”

“I'd like to talk to him, but not now. Maybe sometime when the slow-down juice kicks in.”

Her eyes were big. “Michel's the one you meant? What could he tell you? He was sleeping at the babysitter's house the night—”

“Where was he the day before?”

“At home; it was Christmas vacation. But so was I. What's the day before got to do with anything?”

“Could be nothing. Someone saw a driver behaving strangely in front of this house that day. It might be nothing, but of two other witnesses I've spoken with, one's dead and the other went missing, but not before he left behind a lot of blood.”

She put down her cards.

“When were you going to tell me this?”

“I wasn't. Officially I shouldn't have now; the cops get territorial when there's a stiff involved. Between us, knowing it wouldn't have done you any good. Not until either the cops or I find the holes the loose bricks fit into. This game's one for the cat.” I threw in my hand and stood. “Can I have that list?”

She rose, opened a drawer in a maple secretary, and handed me a sheet of bright pink paper with a smiling yellow sun in one corner. She had a round, schoolgirl hand and dotted her eyes with circles. I forgave her for that, seeing as how she was so good at euchre.

*   *   *

I started local. The owner of the third name on the list had an office in Centerline, in a sprawling new redbrick building on a four-lane highway where the commuters played Grand Theft Auto with real cars. I sat in the turning lane two minutes before I caught a break, then had to gun it to avoid the driver of a low-slung yellow pickup who tried to close the gap with a spurt. The marks of my tires are still on the asphalt, probably.

A short hallway leading from the entrance made a T in the center. I eenie-meenied my way left, past three empty-looking smoked-glass offices to one in the corner, with a silver-etched sign on the glass reading:

RICHARD PERLBERG, P.C.

The door closed itself behind me, making as much noise as a cat yawning on a sunny sill, and I found myself in another shallow passage containing four chromium-and-black-leather chairs and a pile of swanky magazines on a glass table, with a receptionist's nook at the cross of another T at the end. It was going unused at the moment.

I had an appointment, but I was five minutes early. I took a seat and opened a copy of
Hour,
a Detroit publication about the size of a plat book, with glossy pages and not much print to clutter up the photos. There was nothing in them I recognized; it publishes in the suburbs, with a well-dressed security man at the door.

“Mr. Walker?” A smiling middle-aged woman stood in front of the receptionist's desk with her hands folded at her waist. She'd come in as quietly as the door closed. I was some detective that day.

I put aside the article I was reading about a sushi restaurant I'd never heard of and got up.

“Mr. Perlberg's ready for you. Just down that hall.”

“Dandy.”

Another left turn brought me to a large square office with the door propped open. A young balding man got up from behind a glass-topped desk supporting a multiline telephone, an electronic calculator, and an electric stapler. Printed forms made orderly stacks on a credenza behind his chair. The outfit specialized in opening tax loopholes for small businesses.

“Quite a spread you have here, Mr. Perlberg.” I sat down in a comfy chair facing the desk.

“Richard, please. We try to put people at ease.” Squidging up his nose, he tilted back in his swivel and propped an argyle-clad foot on the desk. “Thanks for the compliment. I own the whole shebang, and Peggy and I are the only souls in it. I built it just before the wonks in Washington lowered mortgage rates straight into the second Great Depression. We're offering the first three months free to anyone who'll sign a year's lease. You saw how many takers we've had on your way down the hall.”

“How long can you hold out?”

He cleared his throat, straightened his tie—silver, to match the lettering on the glass outside—and sat up, wriggling his foot into an unseen shoe. “I don't mean to be unsociable, but I'm swamped this time of year. No time for small talk. I'd've put you off when you called until after April fifteenth, but since it's about Don, I can give you five minutes.”

“That's okay. I really don't give a damn about the rest. You used to hunt with Gates in Canada. Did he have any enemies his wife doesn't know about?”

“Jesus, no. Kind of hunter he was, even the elk didn't have anything against him. Is that all you wanted to know? You could've asked over the phone.”

“I've got four and a half minutes coming. Anything about him didn't seem to fit the rest of him?”

“I'm not sure I understand the question.”

“A bunch of men shut up together get to know each other, sometimes better than their wives: no guards, no games. Amelie helped her father run the hunting lodge. You were there when they were becoming close. Did he act or say something you wouldn't have expected of him, knowing him as well as you did?”

He smiled.

“Who doesn't, man? Who doesn't, when the love bug bites?”

“How about later, after they were married and before he dropped out of the group?”

“Can't help you there. He only made one trip after the wedding, and I wasn't there. One of my clients was being audited, an important one. It was my rep on the line.”

“I got this from his wife.” I snapped open the pink sheet and laid it on his desk. “Rule out any who weren't present that last trip.”

“Oh, they were all there. Rudy Johnson brought down a buck ran close to eight hundred pounds; could've been a moose if it didn't watch its carbs. Amelie's father took their picture with it. The guys are still ribbing me about not being there. Here.” He swiveled, stretched an arm, scooped a standing frame off the credenza, and poked it at me.

It was a collector's item: a Polaroid, with a greenish cast. Six men in checked flannel shirts, baggy woolen pants, and three-day beards with an eighteen-point monster hanging on an outdoor pole between them, towering evergreens in the background. Donald Gates stood at one end. He was the one who wasn't smiling.

Which meant exactly nothing. Maybe the only time he'd ever grinned for the camera was when he was caught off-guard at Christmas.

“Gates's eyes look red. Did he drink heavily on these trips?”

“Don? Hell, no. Beer now and then, just to fit in. You could get drunk off the dregs he left in the bottle. Rudy was the drinker in that crowd. I bet he polished off two six-packs a day. He must've been aiming at something else when he hit that buck.”

“His name's not on the list.”

“No reason it should be. His liver gave up on him a couple of years ago. His wife and kids gave up on him a long time before that.”

I looked closer. It could have been ordinary flashbulb red-eye. The more I looked the more I was sure of it.

“Any of these guys closer to Gates than the others?”

“Well, Rudy, if you know what I mean. He was a huggy drunk, one of those ‘I love you, guys' guys. I guess his folks never told him they loved him.”

“I mean still putting out carbon dioxide.” For a man with only five minutes to spare, he was hard to reel in.

“That'd be Chuck.” He pointed at a man standing next to Gates, close to his age and dusky, with whiskers blacker than the rest, to match his hair. “Chuck Swingline. He's a half-blood Ojibway, the leader of our gang and the best hunter in three counties. He took Don under his wing the first day he showed up at the lodge; you know, giving him the benefit of Indian ways. Not that he ever gained anything by them, but Chuck never gave up. Between you and me?” Perlberg leaned forward, resting his forearms on the desk. “I think he had a man-crush, Chuck did, not that he ever did anything about it, I'm sure of that. You could chop wood using his chin for a block. But if there was anything ginchy going on with Don that last trip, he's your man.”

Charles Swingline's name was fourth on the list, with an address in Ottawa, Canada.

I had just the fellow for that job. I thanked Perlberg and left him to his empty building.

*   *   *

“Loyal Dominion, Toronto office.”

The woman sounded like a cheerleader her first day on a part-time job. I remembered a plastic hairband and a charm bracelet that made as much racket as a bucket of coins falling down a metal staircase.

“Amos Walker for Llewellyn Hale.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Walker. I remember you. One moment.”

I listened to Anne Murray singing “Snowbird” for thirty seconds. I wondered if they laid on the Canada so thick when someone local called.

“Amos? You in the country?”

The quasi-British accent was still there, callow-sounding coming from a youthful body connected to a brain as old as Solomon's and almost as sharp. He'd helped me crack two homicides spaced a half-century apart, at the expense of adding two more to the score.

“Why? I don't play outdoor hockey. I've got a job for you up at the capital.”

“Shoot.”

I gave him the particulars. Keys rattled on his end.

“It shouldn't take long,” I said. “Your day rate should cover it, plus travel.”

“No travel. I've got a branch up there now. But getting those Ojibway to open up can be like cracking a bowling ball with your toe. My guy there's French-Canadian. That's better than American, and way better than British where they're concerned. Pontiac's Conspiracy might have wrapped up just last week.”

“I don't guess it's kosher to tell him to bring along some beads.”

“I'm not sure whether that remark is anti-Indian or anti-Semitic.”

“Hogwash. I'm part English, German, Jewish, French, Serbian, Croatian, and Italian, and my ex-wife was one-sixteenth Cherokee. I'm bulletproof.”

He said he'd be in touch and we ended the conversation.

I had three names left on the list, one in Grand Rapids, the other in Toledo. The convenient address was on Evergreen just north of Outer Drive.

A wife answered the telephone. When I told her my errand she clucked sympathetically and said her husband was at work, but would be home around six. I looked at my watch. Four o'clock. I said I'd be there and got off the line.

I paid a bill and tore up a couple of second notices, but it didn't take up near enough time as I'd hoped. The place was in Redford Township, where the therapist I was supposed to see kept her office.

I blew out air and called the number I had in my notebook. A foggy-voiced receptionist told me I was in luck: There'd been a cancellation, and could I be there in an hour? I couldn't catch a break.

 

FIFTEEN

The cell rang while I was crossing Eight Mile Road. It was Ray Henty.

“What part of ‘Stay away from the wife' didn't you understand?” he said by way of greeting.

“Who ratted?”

“The wife. She called the substation to ask if we'd turned anything and said you'd just left. It's coming up on four forty-five. I'm going to play Santa Claus and throw in the extra fifteen so you can draw your salary for another full day. Apart from that consider yourself canned as of this moment.”

“Don't play dumb, Lieutenant. The job was over when I gave you what I got from those anonymous callers, but you didn't give me my time, so I figured I was still a junior deputy. Who does anyone go to when a married man is killed?”

“If it gets out I hired a civilian to do my job, I won't even be a junior. You're interfering in an official investigation.”

“I'm just covering ground you already did.” I told him where I was headed, leaving out the side trip to see the shrink.

“We already checked those guys. They're clean, and none of them's had any contact with Gates in years. Their phone records checked with that. Now you're just wasting public money.”

“You said ‘wasting.' That mean I'm still on the payroll?”

“Yes, goddamn it. When I start to fuck things up, it's best to go ahead and finish the job.”

“You should put that on a sampler. Anything new?”

“Deputy Thaler's a good egg when it comes to cooperating with local law. She can't last long. That computer Yako was using lit up every illegal drug Web site in both hemispheres. Looks like he was ordering and dealing; which may mean his death, if he had one, had nothing to do with Gates. Don't you just love it when a case splits in two?”

*   *   *

The therapist's name was Miernik, and right away I hated her for being too easy to like. She asked me to call her Jeannie.

“As in ‘meany,'” she said, “but not ‘weenie,' and I'm just tall enough to resent ‘teenie.'”

She looked just enough like the sturdy blond doctor in Highland Park I suspected nepotism in the recommendation, but she was not so much a walking fist. She was tall enough, and more; our eyes were on a level when she shook my hand at the door from the receptionist's office. She had gray eyes with green flecks in them and chestnut hair cut short and teased into curls around the border of her face; which normally to hell with it, but her face didn't seem to have been made for any other style. No-nonsense flats, a tan skirt, and a tailored hip-length sweater over a black top was her working uniform. I tagged her for a well-put-up forty.