Silent Thunder (18 page)

It could have been something. It could have been just a name in a book. That’s the trouble with real life. You never know what pieces belong to which puzzle.

I started with the obvious. Leaving the room key in the ashtray for the maid, I cranked up the gray bomb and burned some gasoline visiting the furniture and antique dealers whose names I’d recognized. It was a balmy Sunday and they were all open for business. Of the four I spoke to, one had heard of Sturdy, but would never, never do business with him. Two more, the Lithuanian included, had no time for me as soon as they found out I wasn’t shopping for furniture. The fourth, a tall woman leaning hard on fifty with eyeglasses hanging from a chain around her neck and hair dyed brittle black and combed into crisp waves, said she didn’t know anyone named Stoudenmire and invited me into the back room to convince me. I declined.

Some of them were lying, of course. The antique trade in non-tourist towns is a paying hobby at best and if it’s going to be even that you have to do some business with your eyes closed, just like every other shoestring industry forced to operate in a state with a crazy single-business tax. But none of them knew anything about what Sturdy was into when he was killed, and I was pretty sure none of them had killed him. If I was wrong I’d be back. After you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth—unless you were a little too hasty the first time. For now I was back to revving my engines on the runway with no place to fly.

The last shop I’d been to, the woman’s, was a Queen Anne house in Hazel Park, around the corner from a pancake joint smelling of hot grease and flour in the waitresses’ hair. It was full, and while I was waiting for it to thin out I bought the late edition of the Sunday
News
from a stand on the sidewalk out front. When a booth opened up I ordered coffee and a short stack and read the article about the body in the bathtub in Iroquois Heights. It was a sketchy three inches and neither Lieutenant Romero nor I was mentioned. Two lines at the end said that no services were planned, according to the deceased’s sister, Hilda Stoudenmire Myrtle.

M
OTIONS.

Going through them is what the work amounts to most of the time. You scratch up a lead and tug at it until it breaks loose and dumps you over backwards, then you get up and start scratching again. Each lead might be the magic one that takes you all the way to the prize, and the minute you forget that and expect it to be another dud it comes to life and sinks its fangs in the back of your hand. It’s just as true that if you behave all the time as if you’re on to something hot you burn out early. Either way you burn out. There is no winning in the work, only surviving.

Nor was there anything for a detective in a man writing down an appointment with his sister in his notebook. That he would refer to her by her married surname instead of her first was worth a closer look. Maybe.

The article identified Hilda Stoudenmire Myrtle as a resident of Birmingham. When I finished my pancakes I called Information from a pay telephone outside, got her number, and used it. The woman who answered listened to my short spiel and agreed to see me.

Birmingham started expanding after the last big war as the waiting room for Grosse Pointe, a place where new money was left to mellow and season in brick splitlevels before moving into the great Prohibition-era mausoleums on Lake Shore Drive. Then when inflation, taxes, and the servant problem began converting the mansions into museums and homes for the elderly, the new money, growing slightly used now, decided to stay in Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills, its richer bastard child. The streets are resurfaced regularly and the homes, while considerably less imposing than the glandular cases in Grosse Pointe, are beginning to look suspiciously like mansions, although their tax-shy residents are quick to deny any such assertion. Nobody wants to be called rich in a democracy.

The Myrtle home was an older ranchstyle in one of the less pretentious neighborhoods, with brick facing up to the windowsills, white aluminum siding above that, and a tricycle on the lawn, one of the new plastic jobs that no one will ever find affectionately preserved in a middle-aged citizen’s garage. An impressive display of irises and poppies with big orange petals like crepe paper grew under the windows. There was a for sale sign by the curb with the name of a local real estate firm printed on it. I pushed a button on the front porch and got Dvorak.

Mrs. Myrtle was small and neat like her brother, with silvering brown hair brushed straight back in an abrupt manner that said she did it mostly to keep the hair away from her face, which was oval and pointed at the bottom. The frames of her tinted glasses matched her hair and made no statement beyond that. She had on a plain gray dress with a black patent-leather belt buckled around her waist and gray shoes with low heels. Her eyes were a crisper shade of gray.

She was late thirties and could pass for early fifties. The extra years looked recent.

After we established that I wasn’t there to see the house she invited me into a tidy living room done in a taste that Ma Chaney would never even suspect, let alone have: all beige and gray and vacuumed and dusted to within an inch of its life. A small cluster of family photographs on the mantel saved the place from the cool impersonality of a hotel room. Sturdy appeared in none of them.

“Are you moving out?” I asked.

“When someone meets our price.” She closed and locked the front door. “The house has been on the market for six weeks.”

“You can see Eight Mile Road from here. People who can afford to live in Birmingham can afford to move farther from Detroit.”

“Who can afford to live in Birmingham?” Her tone wasn’t bantering.

“I’m sorry about Sturdy.”

“Sturdy? Oh, you mean Waldo. Yes. He was a disappointment. Did you say you were investigating his death?”

“If I’m not interrupting something more important.”

“It’s not your place to judge me in my house,” she said quietly.

“I’m sorry about that too.” I showed her the id. “I was hired to look into the activities of a man who had business dealings with your brother. His name was Thayer.”

“I never heard the name.”

“Did he ever mention a man called the Colonel? Colonel Seabrook?”

“I don’t recall that either, but we didn’t speak very often. We weren’t close. Waldo was eleven years older than I. He left home just as I was starting school. I told this to that nice Mexican detective from Iroquois Heights.”

“Cuban.”

“Whichever. He was very polite. I wish I could say the same for the officer he had with him.”

“Did he have a crew cut and a pair of dark glasses bolted to his face?”

She looked annoyed. “If you know them, why are you here? Don’t you people compare notes?”

“I’m not with the police.”

“You don’t look it. But then neither did the Mexican.”

“You knew what your brother did for a living?”

Something more than annoyance wrinkled the smooth neatness of her face. “Don’t call it that. He could have made a real living honestly. My husband offered to put in a word for him where he worked. Waldo turned him down.”

He and young Thayer had that in common. “Where does your husband work?”

“Worked.” She said it quickly. “He was assistant director of plant safety at Fermi Two.”

“The nuclear plant? Did he retire?”

“He quit to die. The place gave him cancer. He left there two months ago.”

“I’m sorry.” It was the third time I’d apologized since we met.

“No, you’re not, and neither are they. But they will be. I’m suing them and I don’t care if it takes ten years.” She looked down at the floor, then back up at me. “You’ll have to forgive me. Sometimes I lose control.”

“I guess it’s just as well your brother didn’t take the job.”

“At least he died faster.”

The words had no emotion at all. She was a neat woman as I said. I got away from it.

“Waldo wrote something in his notebook about an appointment with someone named Myrtle. Did he ever call you that?”

“We were on a first-name basis. Brothers and sisters usually are, no matter how seldom they see each other.”

“That’s what I was thinking. Might he have meant your husband?”

“I can’t think why. Except for that job offer they never had anything to talk about.”

“When did they discuss the job?”

“Oh, years ago.” She studied me. “Do you know who killed Waldo?”

“He bought and sold stolen merchandise. You rub up against some rough hides in that line.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I’m pretty sure who. I’m trying to find out why. Did your husband leave any papers?”

“What kind of papers?”

“Notes. Memos. An appointment calendar. Lists of Things To Do Today. Knowing what the meeting was about would be one place to start. When a man is murdered in his bathtub, anything he did out of the ordinary toward the last goes under a bright light.”

“My husband wasn’t much for writing things down,” she said. “Why don’t you ask him in person?”

I hesitated. “I thought he was dead.”

“Not dead. Dying. This way.”

She led me through an arch and down a short hall to a room with shades drawn over the windows. There was a bed in the middle with someone in it and a cloying sweet smell in the overheated air, an unmistakable sickroom odor.

“This was the dining room.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper. “I had the table taken out and the bed put in when he couldn’t climb stairs any longer.”

“Can he talk?”

“If you listen hard.”

I stood in the doorway while she went in and put a hand on his shoulder. The difference in atmosphere in that room was acute, like stepping from bright sunshine into the flowered muffled silence of a funeral home.

“Tom? There’s a Mr. Walker who wants to talk to you.” On her way out she touched my sleeve. “Not too long.”

I went in and sat down on the hard chair next to the bed.

Mrs. Myrtle was standing in the middle of the living room when I came back. She looked as if she’d been waiting there all along. Her face wore a question. It was not so much prematurely aged as cracked inside, like an old vase with fresh enamel.

“Maybe something,” I said. “I have to check it out.”

She nodded. “I’m used to not being told anything. The doctors are good at that.”

“They’re also expensive.”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you’re selling the house?”

“Certainly not. We—”

“I just spent ten minutes with your husband. He’s past lying.”

She ran her right hand up her left arm. Nodded again. “The insurance only pays part of it. I’m not suing the plant. We can’t afford a lawyer. But the plant should pay for everything. It killed him.”

“Where’s your son?” Most of the pictures on the mantel included a redheaded boy of about six.

“We—I sent him to camp. I want him to remember his father the way he was. As it is I can hardly remember him that way myself. And yet he’s only been like this a little over a month. So fast.”

“After a while you’ll remember him the way you want to.”

“It’s like he’s dead already. You know the worst part? The worst part is knowing I’ll have to go through it all over again when he does die.”

I wanted a cigarette, but there wasn’t an ashtray in the room. “You both knew he was dying long before he quit.”

“Yes. He went to the security director, the plant doctor, the union. Nobody would help. Everyone said they were very sorry, but the illness was unrelated to his work and so he wasn’t entitled to compensation. Wasn’t entitled. After twelve years without a single sick day, and breathing that poison the whole time. Lying there like—.” She broke. It didn’t last long. When it was over she said, “I have arrangements to make for Waldo, so if you’re finished.”

I thanked her and left. It was warm out and the air was clean. I sucked it in in long drafts, clearing my lungs of the sweetish smell of decay, my brain of images of living skeletons as white as the sheets they lay between, speaking in short breathy bleats to strangers in darkened rooms with no son there to tell good-bye.

I sawed the Mercury’s engine into life and took off with all four windows down and the fresh air rushing in.

I
KNEW NOW
what Sturdy had been up to and why he was so important to the Colonel. It was crazy as a frog’s hat, but then nothing about the case had made sense from the beginning. I might have been living in a Picasso painting for all the way things added up.

I called the Macomb County Sheriff’s Department from a drugstore booth and asked for Calvin. While I was waiting I broke open a fresh pack of Winstons.

“Galvin don’t come on till four,” said a gravel voice. “This is Sergeant Czolgosz.”

I blew smoke at the glass. “Art Winfield, Eyewitness News. How’s that man doing who was shot at Emma Chaney’s place last night?”

“They upgraded him to serious this morning. Hey, is this on the air?”

“Tape. Has he been identified?”

“Not yet. The docs won’t let us talk to him yet.”

“Is Ma Chaney still in custody?”

“You kidding? She didn’t even take off her coat.”

“Thanks, Sergeant.”

“Will this be on at six?”

I said that was up to the news director. You never know when you might need someone later.

I hung up and cracked the door to let the smoke out. A big woman in a flowered dress who had been standing near the booth earlier replaced a jar of cologne on a display and started in my direction. I pulled the door shut, got out my notebook, and called Constance Thayer at her sister’s place in Redford. The big woman stumped back to the cosmetics display.

“Something?” asked Mrs. Thayer.

“Everything except Doyle Junior,” I said. “Where can we meet?”

“Are you going to try to talk me into firing you again?”

“Never twice.”

“Here’s no good,” she said. “Do you know the Blue Heron in West Bloomfield? It’s a restaurant.”

“Only when I’m running an expense account.” I looked at my watch. “Can you make it by three?”

“I’ll have to call ahead. It’s a popular place.”