The Wrong Case

  “What about the old woman next door?” I asked.

  “That’s the best part of all,” he said, smiling tiredly. “She’s not only crazy or senile, she’s also an illegal alien from Poland. She doesn’t speak a word of English, she’s been in the country forty or fifty years but she still can’t speak the language. Christ. And we can’t rustle up anybody who speaks Polish.”

  “She lives alone?”

  “No, she has a spinster daughter. The daughter used to speak some Polish, but she and the mother haven’t spoken in thirty or forty years, so she forgot what she knew. Can you believe that?”

  “Family life,” I said.

  “Yeah. And if that wasn’t enough, the daughter was drunk as a sow, and when we went to the door, she went into hysterics. Seems she thought we’d come to take her mother back to the old country.”

  “Where’s the daughter now?”

  “Either swilling apricot brandy or passed out. Who knows? Christ, sometimes I love this town, Milo, goddamned love it.”

  “Everybody’s got to live someplace,” I said.

  “Yeah, but they could die someplace else,” he said, then paused and took my arm, leading me over to the wall. “And there’s this other problem.”

  “What?”

  “You know a prof out at the college named Elton Crider?”

  “I met him last night,” I said.

  “So I hear. At the Riverfront. I understand that you two had a small discussion.”

  “So?”

  “So they fished his car out of the river this afternoon. He was in it. He was drunk but not too drunk, and there weren’t any skid marks. You want to tell me what you two talked about?”

  “Raymond Duffy.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s it. He hadn’t had anything to do with the Duffy kid in months, almost a year, and didn’t know anything. I drove away and he went back into the bar. That’s the last I saw of him.”

  “That’s what Vonda Kay says too, but I don’t like it,” Jamison said.

  “Don’t like what?”

  “Don’t like your version, don’t like the blood-alcohol count, don’t like the missing skid marks. But it’s in the county.” By which he meant that nothing more would come of the investigation. In our state the county sheriff is an elected official, and in our county the sheriff knew a great deal about getting elected but little else. “Anyway, you should stop in the sheriff’s office and give a statement tomorrow. Then stop in to see me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to know what you tell them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t like it.”

  “Neither do I,” I said. Already numb about Simon, I didn’t have any room to think about Elton Crider and his sad life. “But it’s none of my business.”

  “And Simon is?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  We both turned to look at the body again, neither of us mentioning the missing notebook or Simon’s pencil in Jamison’s pocket. I knew how careful Simon had been about stairs since his accident with the pickup; his hip hurt when he climbed stairs, and he was afraid of falling down them, so he clung tightly to banisters and climbed only one step at a time. And he had been sober, I was sure, just as sure as I was that somebody had pushed Simon off the stairs, that I would find out who, and that I would kill him. And it would be easier for me if Jamison thought accident instead of homicide.

  “Hey, Jamison, maybe Simon thought he was helping me. He knew I was going up to Stone River to see Reese, maybe he thought he could find something here, something about the Duffy kid. I don’t know. You know how he was when he was drunk.”

  “Yeah,” Jamison said, but I couldn’t tell if he bought it, so I gave him some more.

  “Look, I know that’s Simon’s pencil in your shirt pocket, and that you are wondering about his notebook,” I said, but Jamison looked blank. “He was just about finished with his notebook, man, and maybe the letter took up the rest of the pages. Don’t make more of it than necessary.”

  “Yeah,” he said, but I’d blown it, talked too much, and he didn’t believe me. “Sure.” But he wanted me to think he did.

  “Goddamned old drunk,” I muttered, covering my eyes as the lab boys closed their cases and the boys from the ambulance carried their stretcher in.

  “Yeah.”

  The attendants had trouble fitting Simon and his splinter on the stretcher.

  “Hey, Jamison,” one said, “can we pull this thing out?”

  Jamison gave them his hard, disgusted glare, which they ignored.

  “Well, can we?”

  “Only if you want it shoved up your ass.”

  “Okay, man, you don’t have to get huffy. Christ, I was just asking.”

  “I’m not huffy,” Jamison said softly.

  “Oh,” the guy said after a long awkward moment looking at Jamison’s unhappy face. “Okay. Whatever you say, Lieutenant.”

  Simon would have loved it. He stunk so badly that even the attendants turned their faces as they lifted him onto the stretcher. They put him too far to one side, and his body fell off. They cursed and put the body back on, strapping it down this time. But then they couldn’t fit him into the ambulance door. They sat the load down in the rain, scratching their heads and discussing the project like two furniture movers stuck with a piano larger than the doorway.

  “Get him outa here!” Jamison shouted.

  They had to unstrap the body, tilt it so the splinter would fit diagonally through the door, then strap it again. There was a loud tearing noise as the wood ripped the headliner when they lifted him in.

  “Watch the headliner, man,” one complained.

  “Go to hell,” the other answered.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jamison muttered.

  Amos followed them, patting my arm and muttering around his cigar that he intended to do one hell of a good job on Simon’s autopsy, then he waddled into the rainy dusk. Somewhere behind the clouds the sun found the horizon, and the long summer afternoon finally ended, night falling gently on the wet, shining streets of Meriwether.

  “When the hell does summer start?” Jamison grumbled.

  “Last month,” I said.

  “Ain’t it the truth,” he commented, then after a long pause he said, “Say, Milo, I got some bad news for you.”

  “So what’s new?”

  “But listen, you gotta promise me you’ll stay outa this, Milo.”

  “I don’t have to promise you anything.”

  “That’s right, smart guy, you don’t have to promise me anything. I just hate to see your kid grow up with a con for a father. How do you think he’ll feel about that?”

  “How does he feel about having a cop for a father?” I asked.

  Jamison shrugged and smiled like a man about to tell the truth.

  “Like every other punk in this country,” he said. “I’m the enemy, Milo, and you’re his hero.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said, thinking that a man shouldn’t be ashamed that his son thought of him as a hero, wondering what I was ashamed of.

  “You haven’t been by in too long. You ought to spend some time with him, let him see what you’re really like.”

  “Is that your bad news?” I asked. It had already been a long day, but the look on Jamison’s face told me it was about to get longer.

  “There’s a warrant for Muffin,” he said.

  “So?”

  “Illegal possession. Two packets of heroin. Do you know where he is?”

  “Goddammit. When it rains, it pours,” I said. “How the hell did that happen?”

  “Anonymous telephone call.”

  “And you got a search warrant with that?”

  “Milo, this town is so crazy with junkies right now that I could get a search warrant on a hunch.”

  “You know Muffin never dealt smack.”

  “I don’t know anything anymore. Do you know wh
ere he is? Have you heard from him?”

  “No,” I said. Now I understood Muffin’s message and knew where he had gone to ground. “Not for a couple of weeks.”

  “If you bullshit me, Milo, you’re gonna take a fall. I promise you that.”

  “Okay. This afternoon he left a message with my service that he had split for Mexico.”

  “Yeah,” he grumbled, “I got that too. What’s it mean?”

  “If it doesn’t mean that he’s gone to Mexico, or wants you to think that, then I don’t know. We don’t have any Captain Midnight secret codes, Jamison. I can’t blame him for running. He wouldn’t deal smack because it’s too hard a fall and he wasn’t hooked. He’s not that kind.”

  “I didn’t tell you to adopt the kid,” Jamison said.

  “You thought it was a good idea at the time.”

  “Maybe I was wrong.”

  “No chance of that,” I said. “Do you think somebody might be trying to lay a bum rap on him?”

  “That only happens in the movies, Milo.”

  “Just like being right all the time, huh?”

  “Yeah. Guess so.”

  “Good thing he wasn’t there when you showed up,” I said. “I hope his luck holds.”

  “Luck, hell. Whoever he owns over in robbery tipped him,” Jamison complained. “I’ll get that son of a bitch one day, and when he gets to Duck Valley, the cons’ll eat him alive.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “How did you ever get to be a cop, Jamison? Your ideals are too high.”

  “It was so long ago that I don’t even remember,” he muttered.

  “Remember what you said the night you found out I was on the take?”

  “I remember cussing a lot,” he said, shaking his head.

  “You gave me a long lecture about corruption, how it was like cancer. First, it took the man, then the police force, then the whole community.”

  “That was a long time ago,” he said.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  “Don’t be so easy,” he answered.

  As we stood there, alone now, the lab boys gone, the crowd fed and dispersed, Simon’s body off to the morgue to be butchered and probed, Jamison and I were nearly friends again, forgiving the distance between our lives. He reached over and squeezed my shoulder.

  “I know how you felt about Simon, I’m really sorry.”

  “Just another old drunk,” I said, sorry too now, trying to cover the tears.

  “Reese give you anything interesting?” he asked, kneading his damp scalp.

  “Lumps and pain.”

  “Yeah, he’s a hard one. He wouldn’t give me anything either, but I got the feeling that he knew more than he was telling.”

  “I thought so, too, at first, but now I don’t know. He really looked like a man who wants to go straight, looked really tired of his life,” I said.

  “Aren’t we all,” Jamison said, patting his thin hair carefully back across his baldness. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Sure,” I said, then walked away, not bothering to look back at him standing, confused among the ruined house. The wreckage didn’t amuse me anymore.

  —

  I could accept Elton Crider’s death as a coincidence. He had been depressed and drinking; coincidences do happen. And from what Reese had told me, the Duffy kid had good reasons for an accidentally-on-purpose way out of his dismaying life. But nobody was going to convince me that Simon’s death had been an accident. He had found out something somebody thought worth killing for, and they had pushed the old man down the stairs and taken his notebook. Not a very bright somebody, either. A smart man would have ripped out the pages with notes and left the rest of the notebook; a smart man would have known that I would take the old man’s death personally. Of course, if I were a smart man, I would know how to go about finding the not-so-bright somebody who had killed Simon and set up Muffin.

  The only thing I knew to do was to find a junkie and sweat him until he gave me his pusher, then sweat the pusher and work my way to the top of the dung heap. Whoever I found there was standing in shit. That was the plan.

  But as I drove to Mahoney’s to pick up a pair of handcuffs from my other office, I discovered that I needed Simon to talk to. Without him I wasn’t sure. I could hear his gruff voice telling me what a silly bastard I was. We both knew that I wasn’t mean enough to follow through. Not that I couldn’t be mean when it seemed necessary at the moment, but that I lacked that abstract edge that makes violence calm and controlled, a tool for justice or vengeance. I would either get sick and quit or kill somebody before they could tell me what I needed to know.

  “Dumb-ass,” the old voice said. “Think.”

  I tried, but found only confusion compounded by grief. I needed a drink. Nearly as badly as I needed the old man.

  —

  When I got to Mahoney’s, Simon’s wake had already taken the bar by storm, filling it with so many local drunks that they stood in line outside to get in the door. I parked in the loading zone, put the automatic and the sap and the derringer into the paper sack, then got out and tried to buck the crooked line at the door. Somebody was buying the drinks. I hoped it wasn’t me.

  The first wino I nudged didn’t know me, so he pushed back, muttering that I should wait my turn. I picked him up by the nape of his neck and his britches, meaning to just set him aside. But I had had too much, speed or death, and I threw the old man into a parked car. He fell into the gutter, mewling curses, but he looked at me and didn’t get up. If he had, I think I might have killed him. He thought so, scuttling away quickly. The others outside the door either knew me or had been convinced that I wanted through. Everybody either left or stood silently aside. The silence spread into the bar as I walked in, and they all stood aside.

  Leo was sitting on the bar, waving his hands over his disciples, swaying gently, an amazed, drunken grin on his face. I knew who had been buying drinks.

  “Fell off the wagon,” he confided happily to me. “God, it feels great. Makes me remember why I drank.” But then he saw my worried face and added, “But by God, I’ll be sober tomorrow, Milo, sober as a judge. Man can’t stay drunk all his life, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Goddamned old Simon,” he muttered, unhappy again. He lifted one clenched fist, nearly falling backwards behind the bar, and handed me the tiny gold star clutched in his sweaty palm. I had to peel it off, didn’t have to lick it when I pasted it in the corner of Simon’s picture, couldn’t look at the smiling face behind the glass. Some decent soul had unplugged the jukebox as I walked over to the wall, and standing on the chair above the quietly drunken crowd, I felt as if I should give a speech, so I turned around and said, “Fuck it.”

  And they cheered.

  When I walked into the cooler, they were still shouting. Somebody had plugged the jukebox back in and turned it up so loud that I could feel the bass notes thumping the floorboards, but I couldn’t hear the music over the roar of the wake.

  Freddy followed me into the other office and watched silently as I slipped into the shoulder holster and checked the automatic, holstered it and put the extra clips in my back pocket.

  “You fixing to kill somebody?” he asked.

  “If I get the chance,” I said, putting the sap into the back pocket with the extra clips.

  “That ain’t hardly the rig,” he said. “It’s too slow. And you ain’t hardly the type.”

  “It’s as fast as I am,” I said, settling my arms back into the damp windbreaker. The blood from my eyebrow had stained the left shoulder with dull brown spots and the rain had smeared them. “And killers don’t come in types.”

  “Who you going after?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said as I rummaged through drawers looking for the cuffs.

  “You best hope he’s slow on the draw, Milo. I tell you that shoulder rig with an automatic ain’t for—”

  But before he could finish
, I had spun, drawn and cocked the pistol, and faced him in the combat stance.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, ducking. “I’ll shut up.”

  “I used to practice some,” I said, finding the cuffs and hooking them over the back of my belt.

  “You ever kill a man with that?” he asked, not shutting up at all. Sometimes I thought that I had to either play father or son to every drunk in town. “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever killed a man?”

  “Not since the war. Haven’t fired a shot in anger in nearly twenty years.”

  “Hick cops,” he muttered, talking around his toothpick.

  “What?”

  “Milo, I killed four men and one woman. I got more time in front of review boards than you got on the crapper,” he said, taking out the toothpick and smiling. “Why don’t you let me do it?”

  I looked at him. He was grinning, mean as hell, his pudgy face no longer a joke.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  He shrugged, then asked, “What about the twist I’ve been tailing? Want me to stay with it?”

  “Oh, hell, I’d forgotten about that. Yeah, stay on it,” I said, not really caring, knowing Freddy liked the work. “What did she do today?”

  “Went shopping. Spent loads of somebody’s money. Made five phone calls from public booths.”

  “Catch any numbers?”

  “Couldn’t get that close. I can try tomorrow, if you want.”

  “No, just tail her.”

  “Whose hooker is she?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Who does she belong to? She’s a hooker, Milo. Didn’t you know?”

  “I should’ve guessed.”

  “Big-city girl too. Maybe she’s on vacation or something, maybe she’s retired, but I know hookers, and she ain’t done it for free in a long time.”

  “Is she pretty?” I asked, wondering about Nickie’s friend, why he had money to keep an eye on her but not enough money to come up with anything but a whore.

  “She used to be. She’d turn your head till you got a good look.”

  “Ain’t it the truth,” I said. “Stay with it.”

  “That’s some eye you’ve got. What happened?”

  “Ran into a wall,” I said, and we grinned. “And say, why don’t you keep an eye on Leo tonight. I’ll pay for the time.”