Silent Thunder (13 page)

“I’m fine, you’re fine. Everybody’s fine. Your car’s sitting by the river with more holes in it than a fleet of Buicks. You want to tell me how it got there?”

“Gasoline.”

“Say that again, you son of a bitch.”

“John, I never knew you to get so worked up over a car.”

“Witnesses heard automatic fire and the pattern of the bullet holes bears that out. I’m investigating a series of crimes involving men armed with automatic weapons. You’ll excuse me for getting worked up when I find out you’ve been standing this close to the mouth without tipping me.”

“Quite a jump.”

“I’m in shape for it. How about you? Any holes to match the ones in your chassis?”

“None.”

“Good, good. You going to come down here and make a statement or do I have to send out the Huns?”

“What if my car was stolen?”

“Come down and file a complaint.”

“What if I do?”

“I’ll stuff it down your throat.”

“I didn’t think inspectors did that kind of thing.”

“That kind of thing is what got me made inspector. What about it?”

“I’ll be there in an hour.”

“Make it a half hour.”

“I might be thirty minutes late.”

“Then your story better be thirty minutes better.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Thought you might be. Oh. About your friend Sturdy.”

“Yeah.” I felt my fingers cramping on the receiver.

“We picked him up for questioning this morning. He’s in Holding with a bad case of the sniffles, but that’s as close to dead as he’s been lately. You better check your sources.”

“Maybe I’d better.” We stopped talking to each other.

T
HE DOORBELL RANG
while I was sitting there thinking. I wasn’t expecting anyone. I had turned on the lamp beside the chair when it had grown dark. Now I switched it off and went to the door in my towel with the Smith & Wesson in hand.

Constance Thayer said, “Is that how you dress on weekends?”

“The artillery is optional.” I put it down on the table by the door. “Come in and sit down while I go put on a hat.”

“You don’t have to on my account.”

I let that one slide and closed the door behind her. She was dressed a lot more casually herself, although casual for her was another woman’s idea of dressing up: long-sleeved black-and-white checked blouse tucked into tailored charcoal gray denims with a crease you could cut your finger on and white sandals with two-inch heels over stockings. Her reddish hair was teased into bangs on her forehead and tied into a loose ponytail behind her head. She looked seventeen.

“You’re a tidy bachelor,” she observed.

“I’m never here long enough to mess it up.”

A long crackling peal of thunder uncoiled directly overhead, rattling all the crockery in the house. She jumped straight into my arms.

Immediately she put a hand against my chest to push away. It stayed there. She was wearing sandalwood.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m a coward after all.”

“Just two clouds bumping together.” We separated. “I’ll be back in two minutes.”

It was nearer five. I went at my beard with the scraper, combed my hair, and put on a sport shirt, slacks, and loafers. This time I left the Brut in the medicine cabinet. I found her sitting on the sofa with her legs crossed, smoking. She had switched on the lamp. Rain was clouting the west side of the house. I closed a window on that side and asked her what she was drinking.

“Nothing today. I’m in danger of becoming a lush.”

“Who isn’t?”

She was staring at me. “Are you all right? You look like you’ve been in a fight.”

“I thought I left all that in the shower.”

“It’s just a look you have.”

“Technically it wasn’t a fight,” I said. “He had my body but he didn’t have my soul. I guess you’re here for a progress report.”

“I hope you don’t mind. My sister is a wonderful woman, but I can only spend so much time with her before I have to strangle her or get out. All this sitting around waiting is hell. When there was no answer again at your office I looked you up in the directory.”

I sat down in the easy chair. “Your husband did business with some heavyweight bad guys. A woman with three sons doing time or about to be and a Mongoloid top hand with a hearing aid is the best of them.”

“So you have made progress?”

“It depends on what you call progress.”

“Now you sound like Leslie.”

“You’re right,” I said. “No, I haven’t. I got off on a tangent. It’s a common hazard. Cecil Fish will challenge Dorrance to prove in court that Doyle did anything more incriminating than buy an occasional gun from the crowd I’m talking about, and he won’t be able to. That’s all Doyle did.”

“It might be enough, if the crowd is as bad as you say.”

“Maybe. More probably I’m wasting your money.”

“It isn’t worth anything to me if I go to prison.”

Lightning lit up the dark window, turning the street outside into something etched on tin. I waited for the answering clap, then: “Did you tell Dorrance about the money and me?”

She nodded. “He threatened to withdraw when I told him I’d re-hired you.”

“Threatened?”

She smiled.

“Okay, you’ve still got Dorrance. I’ll give him what I’ve got. He can do what he wants with it.”

“You’re not quitting.”

“Not because I got knocked around, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s part of the life, like getting busted when you pick the wrong pocket. Whichever way I go from here will just take me farther away from what you hired me to do.”

“But you can’t know that until you follow it to the end.”

“Call it a feeling.”

The rain was coming harder now, yammering on the roof and smearing the windows. The air smelled of iron oxide. She had to raise her voice.

“Please don’t give it up. I’ve got so few people on my side.”

I didn’t feel like shouting. I left the chair and walked up to the sofa and bent over her.

“Buy a calendar, lady. The Middle Ages closed out of town. The moat’s a duck pond and they sell souvenirs in the tower. Prince Albert’s in a can, the convent’s a Wendy’s, and horses run in the money or they feed the dog. This year’s big hero is a cartoon rabbit. I’m on your side because you paid me to be.”

Our faces were closer than when I’d had my arms around her. She lifted hers and closed her eyes and I kissed her.

When it was over I went back to my chair and sat down. She opened her eyes and gave me the look. “What happens now?”

“The sun will come out. It always does. Then it will get hotter.”

“It always does,” she said. “I mean, what about us?”

“That noise you heard was thunder.”

“I didn’t hear it. What are you grinning at?”

I stopped. “Summer re-runs.”

“What?”

“I knew a P.I. once, young guy and pretty good-looking, thought he was the best thing to happen to women since pantyhose; broke hearts like the rest of us break shoelaces. He disappeared one whole winter, and some of us thought he’d eeled his way inside some rich widow’s garter belt and gone to Texas. Everyone was going to Texas that year. Then spring came and the Ferndale cops found what was left of him stuffed into a culvert with his handsome face battered in and eleven dollars in his wallet. They arrested the woman a month later in San Francisco. Seems he’d been working for her husband and took pictures of her in a motel with the husband’s business partner. She found out and offered to fall in love with him if he tore up the pictures. Which he did, knowing women couldn’t keep their hands off him and that any double-cross she might be planning would go out the window once she had a taste of him in bed.

“Turns out she and the partner had been emptying the till for months and had bought two tickets to California and a leather briefcase to carry the cash. While she was keeping the P.I. occupied, the partner shot the husband as he was working late in the office, cleaned out the safe, and rigged the place to look as if somebody had broken in. When she got the all-clear call, the woman hung up and hit the P.I. a couple of dozen times with the telephone. The partner showed up in the company station wagon, they ditched the body, and took off for a more agreeable climate.”

Mrs. Thayer said, “I bet there’s a moral.”

“No matter how good you think you look, there’s always someone or something that looks better. And I’m not nearly as good-looking as he was. A couple of times a year someone tries to convince me otherwise, usually when I have something they want or am doing something they don’t want me to do or am not doing something they wish I would. Sex is the closest thing we’ve got to a nickel on a string; you can spend it all over town and still have it to spend. I’d rather have a drink. It’s already paid for when you get it.”

“If you feel that way, why did you kiss me?”

“I said I didn’t trust it. I didn’t say I gave it up.”

She took her cigarette out of its tray and broke off the ash. “I guess I deserved some of that. But I’m not a whore. When Doyle was charged up on booze and pills, the only way I felt safe with him was during sex. It got to be a weapon of self-defense. Once it becomes a tool, well.” She took a last drag and put out the cigarette. “The rain’s letting up. Thanks for the shelter.”

I watched her get to her feet. “I’ll stay with it a little, see where it takes me. I’m not making any promises.”

“Do you ever?”

“Not often. They’re not a renewable resource. When you let one go it should count.”

She nodded. At the door she paused. It had grown lighter out and the runoff from the roof was the loudest sound, gurgling through the gutters. “Was that a true story?”

“Most of it. They didn’t kill the husband. The money wasn’t that big.”

“What about the private eye?”

“He was practicing in Flint last I heard, bedding the occasional city councilman’s wife in return for favors. The business partner broke into his office and stole his file on the case with all the pictures and negatives while the P.I. was sleeping with the woman. He woke up with a hangover was all. I thought the part about having his face bashed in was a nice touch. The object lesson is the same.”

“I like it better the way you told it.”

“Most people do. There has to be a murder in it.”

“What does that say about people?”

I moved a shoulder. “We’re still evolving.”

She went out, leaving behind a faint trace of sandalwood.

After a while I called for a taxi and went out too. I gave the driver an address in Macomb County.

T
HE RAIN HAD
cooled things a little after all. A damp breeze stirred the leaves on the trees along Cheyne and the sun shone in a scrubbed blue sky. We detoured around a couple of fallen limbs and cruised slowly through a puddle that stretched from curb to curb and covered the cab’s hubcaps. Somewhere a chainsaw spluttered and soared into a high-pitched snarl.

The house in the country didn’t look any more lively than it had the day before. It hadn’t rained there; the grass was the same burned-out amber and dust lay thick on the burdocks near the road. I told the driver to wait and went up and rapped on the screen door. No one answered.

The door was hooked from inside. Placing my body between it and the cab, I took out my pocket knife and ran the blade up the jamb. The hook sprang out of the eye with a little tinkle.

The living room hadn’t changed, except now a glunky lamp with a fringed shade occupied the table where the forest fire had stood. Ma or someone else had swept up the broken glass and thrown it away. There was a tiny half-bath under the stairs that had been a broom closet, and another door led into a fair-size kitchen with an old-fashioned white gas stove and a refrigerator, newer and avocado colored. No bodies tumbled out when I opened the door. The last person to leave had locked the back door behind him.

Upstairs I found two bedrooms and a full bath. One of the bedrooms contained a single bed with a painted iron frame and a cracked nightstand with a drawer full of thumb-smeared magazines with girls in black panties on the covers. This would be where Hubert Darling had slept. The closet was empty. The other bedroom had to be Ma’s. The double bed had a flowered coverlet. A lamp with a lace shade stood on a nightstand with claw feet and a brass ram’s head you had to grab by its nostrils to slide out the drawer, which contained a carton of Marlboros and a Bible as old as Gideon. The wallpaper was blue with pink cherubs. The closet was jammed with frilly polyester nightgowns in every color and shade, kimonos like the one she had greeted me in yesterday and worse, and six pairs of bib overalls. A cheap dresser with family pictures on its top—Emma and Calvin and four towheaded boys posed in front of vintage automobiles—held king-size lacy underdrawers and men’s flannel shirts in Ma’s size and a gray metal strongbox under a stack of pillowcases.

The box was locked. I set it atop the dresser, found two hairpins, and sprang the lid after fifteen seconds. Inside were the title to a brand-new Ford Blazer, four brown and curling birth certificates, letters from various penal institutions bound together with a green ribbon, and two deeds. One belonged to that house and lot. The other contained a description of a sixteen-acre parcel in the northeast corner of the county. The street address was included. I took it down in my notebook, returned the deed to the bottom of the box, locked it, and put it back where I’d found it.

That was the inventory. The letters from Ma’s sons, laboriously written in soft pencil on lined sheets, read like postcards from summer camp and had been mailed as much as a year apart. Nothing about the house said that she had ever traded in anything more lethal than peach cobblers. Livingood had said she was a good deal smarter than her boys.

When I climbed back into the cab, the driver set aside his crossword puzzle and rested a thick freckled arm with a kewpie doll tattooed on it across the back of his seat. “Where to now, bub, the big square dance?”

I said, “Let’s avoid the rural humor and find a town and a place that rents cars.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t rent you a car without a credit card.”