You Know Who Killed Me (13 page)

 

SEVENTEEN

Royal Oak was closer, but I didn't know anyone with that department, and anyway most metropolitan area homicide squads conferred with Detroit.

John Alderdyce was in the break room at the Third Precinct, which was filling in for headquarters while Animal Control smoked the critters out of the spongy walls at 1300 Beaubien and the mayor found the money to fix the floor. The inspector was the biggest thing in the room apart from the full-size refrigerator; a slab of black granite in more casual attire than I'd ever seen him in at work, a navy sweatshirt with the police officers' union coat-of-arms on the front, faded jeans, and high-topped Nikes.

“Is it Friday?” I shook his calloused mitt.

“It was either this or my Scooby-Doo pajamas. I pulled three shifts back-to-back, one on furlough. I just hit the sheets when the phone rang. It was your friend Henty, who heard about it when everyone else did. I'm still not clear on why h-and-r gets someone in my pay scale out of bed.”

I didn't ask where Henty was. I stalled on the picture of Alderdyce in Scooby-Doo pajamas.

The toaster on the counter shot a strawberry Pop-Tart into his hand; he had the reflexes of a bonus baby. “Haven't had lunch since breakfast,” he said with his mouth full, “and come to think of it I didn't have breakfast. We're letting our boy steep a bit in Interview Room A, come up with a flimsy enough excuse for the gray matter on his busted grille to break him.”

“Is it an Alero or a Honda?”

“Kia. In my nightmares I'm run over by a foreign job in the middle of Woodward and it shows up in my obituary. What do you know about it?”

“It's connected to the Gates murder in Iroquois Heights. You heard about that.”

“Since before his church decided to make him a celebrity. We shook loose some of our own for the early legwork. What's your end?”

“Legwork. The sitting-down kind.” I told about the anonymous calls, skipping the rest. I had to leave something for the lieutenant.

“So now you're a bounty hunter.”

“I gave up on all that about the time I found out about Santa Claus. It's in the way of a paid favor for Ray. Isn't he here?”

“On his way. He had to brief the Lord High Sheriff first.” He had a prejudice against elected cops, for some reason.

The door swung and Henty came in. He had on his working clothes: sportcoat, slacks, and loafers, but he'd ditched the necktie. He looked ten years older than when I'd seen him last, but I decided to be kind and blamed the fluorescents. He shook Alderdyce's hand and looked at me. He had cops' eyes, bleak as November and flat as steel slugs.

“I might've known. Why don't I just resign and put you in charge?”

“The money would spoil me.”

“Har; and while I'm at it, har. It's a little early for badinage, don't you think?”

“Never, when I can get a cop to lay out three syllables back-to-back.” I looked at Alderdyce. “How do we know this is the Thompson hit-and-run? It's always Shark Week in this town.”

“First one in a week, according to Motor Vehicle. That has to be some kind of record. Forensics says the tissue's fresh.”

Henty ran a hand over his brush cut. “Name?”

The inspector took a folded sheet of department stationery out of a hip pocket and snapped it open. His Palmer penmanship held up even during the wee hours. “Boris Ataman. What's that, Russian?”

Henty and I answered together. “Ukrainian.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“It's that kind of case,” I said.

“Homework, on my part,” Henty said. “After Yako went missing I Googled the country, got a shitload of Cossack history. Some of it stuck. ‘Ataman' is a ranking officer. Five bucks says if we go back far enough I bet we find at least one captain in a fuzzy hat hanging from his family tree. With what Thaler found on Yako's computer, I'll lay another fin we're dealing with the Ukrainian mob.”

Alderdyce brightened. “Thaler as in Mary Ann? You know, I've seen her more often since she went to Washington than when she worked at Thirteen Hundred. How's it I'm just hearing about all this now? Walker's chin's been nailed shut as long as I've known him, but I thought we'd get a little more cooperation from the Heights since it shook out the bozos.”

“She just came into it, and the mob theory was just a hunch based on Yako's background. Two Cossacks on the same case may be a coincidence in Kiev. In Detroit it's evidence.”

Alderdyce yawned bitterly.

“Seeing as how you're up on your borscht, I'm going to make you primary in interrogation. Call your sheriff if you need an okay.”

“Actually,” Henty said, “I need to ask
her.
”

He was facing the door, where Mary Ann Thaler was standing, wearing the same cute hat and fun fur she'd had on the last time I saw her.

 

EIGHTEEN

“You're dressed for the part,” Alderdyce said. “How's the turbulence over the Volga this time of year?”

“Same as here, also the climate. But I'm just back from Royal Oak. Couple of kids found Yako in a condemned house three blocks from the Shrine of the Little Flower, of local legend. They said they were exploring, but one of them has a juvie record for scavenging scrap metal, so you can be sure they were looking for copper pipe.” She smiled. “Hello, John. I'm glad to see you stopped wearing neckties. They're bad for the circulation.”

“Everybody's got something to say about my sartorial choices. Next time I'll rent a tuxedo.”

“What was C.O.D.?” Henty asked Thaler.

“Desanguination: such a pretty word for bleeding to death. Shakespeare could have written a sonnet around it. Four quarts, if I remember my forensics training. The case is still too green to decide whether they used a shotgun or a machete. He's missing his midsection.”

“I'd guess a saber,” I said. “But I'm a romantic.”

“My first question is why they didn't just leave him where they sliced him up.”

Henty said, “Maybe we'll know when we have time of death. Maybe he wasn't quite dead when they smuggled him out of his apartment. Nothing there; there's a back stairs for carrying up furniture and carrying down evidence in a felony. They took him someplace, maybe the condemned house, to get what they could out of him before he finished bleeding out.”

“He must have had double the usual,” she said.

Alderdyce said, “We get more variety in plain Homicide than you did in Felony Murder. I worked a couple of devil-worshipping cases, some dandy dismemberments in bathtubs, a daughter decapitated by her father in Dearborn; she was involved with a gentile, and the old man was an Islamic traditionalist. It looked like someone opened a fire hydrant full of cherry Kool-Aid. Blood always looks like more than it is.”

“Like spilled milk,” I said. “Somebody didn't want his absence known too soon; that's why they went to all the trouble of flipping the mattress and making the bed.”

Thaler took off her floppy hat and rearranged her hair with her fingers.

“Let's ask Boris.”

*   *   *

I thought I recognized the furniture on the other side of the two-way glass: Back at 1300 I'd sat in orange scoop chairs at cheap chipboard tables often enough to qualify for a perfect attendance certificate, and the city was too broke to let them go to waste in that rotting building. The man occupying one of the chairs sat tracing someone's initials in the veneer with a blunt forefinger. He was blunt all over, with fair hair mowed close to a broad scalp, a bony promontory overhanging pale eyes, and no more neck than a jar of pickles. He wore a green work suit and a pair of square-toed boots on his big square feet. I'd seen more curves in a Rock 'em Sock 'em Robot.

From the crown of his head, his skull fell straight down the back to his collar. That flattened cerebellum is a common characteristic among some eastern Europeans. All he needed was gold frogs on a scarlet tunic and a bearskin hat to star in a road show version of
Doctor Zhivago.

So when he finally opened his mouth to spell his name for the record, I was surprised to hear a light baritone with a Midwestern drone and not the deep burring speech of the western steppes.

“What's your address, Mr. Ataman?” Thaler asked.

“Sixteen-forty-two Mound.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“Tinsmith at GM in Warren.”

“Your hands aren't very calloused for someone who works with tin snips.”

“Join the twenty-first, lady. It's all electronic now.”

“If you call me anything, call me Deputy. I'm with the U.S. Marshals' office.”

Only his lower teeth showed when he smiled. “Your name wouldn't be Dillon, by any chance?”

“The cowboy or the actor? Don't answer. The name's Thaler. Your car was pulled over because it didn't have any plates. Where'd you ditch the V-A-L?”

“I don't know what you mean. That's what this is about, no plates? I thought you feds set your sights higher.”

Thaler touched the nosepiece of a pair of glasses she hadn't worn in years.

“You ran down a man named Thompson the other night; the officers who pulled you over saw the damage to your grille, and Detroit Forensics found blood and brains on the car. Those plates, which were reported stolen, belonged to a car seen in front of a house where a murder took place New Year's Eve or early New Year's Day. That's two killings we can tie you to. You can plead Man Two for Thompson, but the first victim was shot to death at point-blank range. In this state that's a life sentence—without parole, and believe me, they make you behave yourself in places where the death penalty's out of the equation—but you don't have to worry about that, because I'm looking to shackle you to a federal homicide. That's lethal injection.

“It's just like a visit to the doctor,” she said. “They even dab your arm with alcohol, in case you might catch infection in the forty seconds before the cyanide shuts down the muscles you need to breathe. You choke to death, just as if they put a rope around your throat and let you strangle; they don't even break your neck like in the old days.
Snap!
” She snapped her fingers, sharp as a sonic boom; Ataman flinched. “There's the thing, clean and quick, only it's too hard on the spectators, so we did away with it. Not PG-thirteen.”

“Lady—Marshal—I haven't been in Iroquois Heights in two years.”

“Who said Iroquois Heights?'

She was good. As poker faces go she could fade a department psychiatrist, but when she wanted to she could put a light in her eyes that might as well have been shaped like skulls. I'd seen her turn that on me. It still wakes me up nights. Her fingers were clamping the edge of the table hard enough to dent the veneer.

Ataman's face was as blank as a dead TV screen.

“I follow the news. I know someone reported a car at that guy Gates's place the day before he was killed. If you can do better than that, I'll call a lawyer. If not, put me away on the hit-and-run. If you can.”

She took a turn around the room, arms crossed. Her heels drew the tendons in her calves as tight as bowstrings. At length she leaned down and planted her palms flat on the table. Her nostrils spread, like a lioness on the scent.

“Boris—”

“If you call me anything, call me Mr. Ataman.”

“Boris, there's a team of experts trained at Quantico at great expense to the taxpayers who are busy digging into your background; digging, digging, sweeping aside the dust, and digging again, like archaeologists in Egypt. When they hook you up with the Ukrainian mob, RICO kicks in. You know what that stands for? ‘Roy, I'm Cutting you Open.'”

For the first time he looked confused. “I don't know what that means.”

“Not officially. It's the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for the ACLU, though they don't like it any better. Unofficially, it means we can make an end run around the Bill of Rights, hold you indefinitely without bringing charges, and put you on a fast track to the little room with a gurney in it: no lawyer, no Miranda, no habeas corpus; just Boris Ataman, time of death calculated to the second. You're special. Ninety-nine percent of the human population has no idea the exact moment when they'll check out. You'll get the chance to balance your checkbook, make out your will, and memorize your last words. My favorite is Oscar Wilde's: ‘Either this wallpaper goes or I do.' I bet you can do better.”

His finger stopped tracing the carved initials. He folded his hands.

Thaler pulled another of her thousand faces. She sat back, took a deep breath, let it out; smiled. Washington has a good dental plan. She could be a movie star if she didn't like pinning bugs to a board as much as she did. Now she looked like an older sister.

“Give us some names we can do something with, and we'll let you plead to involuntary manslaughter. You'll be out in five years; less than three, if you get along with the corrections officers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds way better than the needle.

“I'll answer your next question,” she went on. “Witness Protection. I'm sure you've seen
Law and Order
—who can avoid it? It's like
The Golden Girls
on cable, twenty-four-seven, thirty days a month, three hundred and sixty-five days a year—so I don't have to spell it out. We'll give you an attractive white-bread name, your choice, if it's not taken, set you up in some place with a nice climate, get you a job that pays at least as much as you make now, with all the benefits.

“Oh, and we'll keep the Siberian tigers at bay. Honestly, Mr. Ataman, you'll be safer than ninety-nine-point-six percent of the population; more, considering that these days even kindergartners can't count on not being mowed down by a yellow prick with an AK-forty-seven. Hell, I'd snap at it myself if I didn't just sign a two-year lease on a condo on the river. You may even wind up happy you didn't step on the brake when that poor schmuck wandered into the street drunk on his ass.