Silent Thunder (9 page)

“Do you suppose he and Ernest Krell know each other?”

“Qué?”

I turned around. “We’re awfully Old Country suddenly. I didn’t hear any of that in the car.”

“Sorry. Places like this bring out the
peón
in me.”

“You were never a
peón.”

He shrugged again. “My father rolled cigars in a window in Havana.”

“If I ever meet a Cuban whose father didn’t roll cigars in a window, I’ll buy him one.”

He smiled briefly. He had very white teeth that transformed his face.

I had time to smoke a cigarette before Proust strode in from the back, pulling off his riding gloves. He smelled of sweat and leather.

“Our other guest is late,” he told Romero. “Have you eaten today? Pollard?” The pair nodded.

I said, “I could go for a sandwich.”

Proust turned his watery eyes on me. “Still the fucking smartass, aren’t you?”

“I guess that means no sandwich.”

“What’s your business with the Thayer woman?”

“Never heard of her.”

“Romero and Pollard followed her to your office.”

“I lied.”

He opened a cabinet with antlers for handles, sprayed seltzer into a glass, and filled it with bourbon. He was still holding his gloves in one hand.

“When they called in to report I told them to bring you here.” He drank deeply. “Somebody wants to meet you.”

“Why didn’t Thayer send for me himself?”

He slammed down the glass, splashing whiskey, and swung on Romero. “Which one of you told him?”

“We didn’t.”

The simple dignity of the statement made Proust back up. “How’d you guess?” he asked me.

“Detective lessons cost money.”

He fingered the gloves. He wanted to slap me with them. He swallowed the urge, along with the rest of the bourbon.

“Doyle Thayer isn’t in the habit of leaving his office during working hours to talk to cheap private detectives. What made you think it’s him?”

“You get these little beads on your upper lip when the subject is money,” I said. “Thayer’s got all of it in the Heights that the politicians haven’t sniffed out. Speaking of working hours, how come
you’re
not at the office?”

“I’m on vacation.”

“Under suspension, you mean. When’s your preliminary?”

“September first. The whole thing’s a joke.”

“Eleven counts is hilarious, all right,” I said. “Long date. Figures. Constance Thayer’s comes up in three weeks. But she’s only up for murder.”

“So you
are
working for her.” You could smell the canary on his breath. Also bourbon.

“I’m working for her, yeah. That’s what you wanted to find out. Can I go?”

“What are you doing for her?”

I looked at Romero. “You were wrong. He didn’t want to talk to me.”

“I’m wrong a lot,” he said.

I jerked a thumb at Pollard. “What about him? I know he speaks because I heard him yesterday.”

Pollard creaked his uniform. “You may hear me once too often, creep.”

“Leave us alone, will you?” Proust said. Romero hesitated. “I’m not going to shoot him, for chrissake.”

The pair left.

Proust stood slapping the gloves against his leg for a moment. Then he flipped them on top of the cabinet. “Have a seat.”

I sat in a wingback chair with cowhide upholstery. It was as stiff as a trampoline.

“Drink?”

“I never drink before six.”

“Bullshit.” He refilled his glass. The seltzer bottle stayed put. “Let’s not beat around the bush. We hate each other’s guts and always have.”

“Who’s beating around the bush?”

“What we got here is a tramp who tanked up on booze and drugs and filled her husband full of lead. Not unusual these days, except the husband’s father happens to be Doyle Thayer Senior, who employs half the population of the city I work for and pays taxes for the other half. Makes the police look bad; couldn’t even protect one of its wealthiest citizens.”

“The police
are
bad.”

He let it pass. “On top of that, we got federal men poking around the house where the murder took place and they won’t even tell us why. Doesn’t matter that we know. And that’s another thing: Where are the local authorities when a private individual is busy amassing the largest arsenal west of Fort Dix in his basement?”

“Riding horses?”

“Taking a piss, busting drunks for throwing up on a cop’s shoes, it don’t matter.” His grammar was failing, a stormy sign. “There’s an election in November and the spirit of reform is in the air. The sanctimonious little twerps smell blood. As if things would be any different six months after they took office.”

“Another set of dirty underwear is still a change,” I said.

That got to him. “You need our goodwill, you cheap son of a bitch. Who wants to hire a private eye who keeps getting doors slammed in his face?”

“I think I will have that drink.”

He didn’t move. I got up and went over and poured myself one, using the fizz. “My face is on every door between here and Port Huron,” I said. “I’d rather be thrown down the back steps at Detroit Police Headquarters than invited into the Iroquois Heights city hall. This is good whiskey.”

“I’d like to throw you down a few steps myself.”

“Nice shack. Is it paid for?”

“It was a gift. From the grateful citizens of Iroquois Heights.”

“In other words, Doyle Thayer.”

“He’s a citizen.”

“Congratulations. Cecil Fish only got a boat, I heard. What about your boss the chief, or does he rate? He’s been sick a long time.”

“We’re all friends here,” he said. “Sure, I’m bought. Show me someone in public office who isn’t, if not for money then for the promise of power. A lot of important work gets done anyway. Just because I’m not your idea of a servant of the people don’t mean I don’t do my job. Nobody’s paying
me
to spring a murderer.”

“Somebody’s paying you plenty to see it doesn’t happen.”

“Where’s the harm, if justice is served?”

“You political cops are always talking about justice when you mean the law,” I said. “Every election you run ads promising equal justice, as if there were any other kind. You can’t serve justice, and you sure as hell can’t sell it. Whenever you try it turns into something else. Either it’s there or it isn’t. Iroquois Heights is where it isn’t.”

He straightened to his full height. It pushed out his paunch a little. He needed the horse. “You ought to be more grateful. I had you in jail once. Inmates have been known to hang themselves in their cells.”

“I’m supposed to thank you because I didn’t?”

“It could still happen.”

“Romero told me I wasn’t under arrest. Okay, what’s the beef so I can order the rope?”

“I didn’t mean now. Right now you’re under safe conduct because it’s in my best interest to keep you that way. I meant later. These charges they got against me are so much chickenshit.”

“If I were you I’d worry about hanging my
self.
Some of the people who’ve been paying you for all this good police work you’ve been doing might not want you to turn state’s evidence against them.”

That hadn’t occurred to him. He scowled down at his glass, but he didn’t like the fortune he read there. He emptied it and set it down.

“What were you doing at Thayer Junior’s place yesterday?” he said.

“Trying to keep from being blown clear to Lansing, mostly. You ought to get in on the auction. The department could use another fifty-caliber machine gun, I bet. For interrogations.”

“Jesus Christ. Don’t you ever quit?”

“Not unless the job quits me first.”

“I’ll see they put that on your headstone.” The doorbell rang. “That’s Thayer Senior. Ever met him?”

“Never.”

“He’s a corker.”

The maid came in and announced the corker.

H
E CAME IN SLOWLY,
but without hesitating; he hadn’t entered anyplace uncertain of his welcome in more than fifty years. Although he was not especially tall, his trim build and a way he had of carrying his back created an impression of considerable height. He appeared at first to be totally bald, but at closer range his hair was pale and cropped very short on a skull like a Roman emperor’s, the brow high and round. His nose was hooked, his eyes dark and set deep. His suit wasn’t important; it would be a color and fabric that was right for him and he would know where to go to have it cut and fitted. As he walked he dragged his right foot very slightly. I’d read somewhere that he had suffered a stroke a year or so back. He made it seem like a temporary annoyance.

“Right on time, Mr. Thayer,” said Proust, shaking the old man’s hand.

“I’m late. Two of your men are outside. I understood this would be a private meeting.” His voice was shallow. It often is with men who seldom have to raise it.

“It will be. I asked Lieutenant Romero and Officer Pollard to escort Walker here. I can send them back anytime.”

“Are you asking me if you may?”

“I’ll send them back.” It sounded lame to him too. Quickly he introduced us.

Thayer let me come to him; the less he walked the less he broadcast the limp. His grip was as frail as a dowager’s. Up close, his head shook as from palsy, although the muscles on the sides of his jaw stuck out from the effort to control it.

“Is there someplace less open?” he asked Proust.

“The den is this way.”

A short sunlit corridor lined with framed photographs of thoroughbreds led to a walnut door, which Proust unlocked and opened, standing aside to let us enter. It was a small woodstained room with an olive-colored rug, a big square desk with a mirror finish and nothing on top, and brass-plated trophies on the bookshelves. No books. A single window looked out on the corrals. Proust stepped past us and drew the curtains.

“I’d like this private,” Thayer said. “Just Mr. Walker and me.”

Proust’s hesitation made his eyebrows rise.

“He’s afraid I’ll hit you with the desk, leap out the window onto a horse, and gallop away,” I said.

The old man’s face was without humor. “Were you brought here under force?”

“It was polite enough.”

Proust said, “You don’t know Walker like I do, Mr. Thayer. Sometimes—”

“Please wait for us.”

Proust took himself out. He almost bowed.

Thayer wandered behind the desk, a natural migration for him. He was outlined against the curtained window now. His complexion was paler than his hair, almost translucent blue, but it wouldn’t be because of his blood. The son of an upholsterer, he had worked his way up from the machine room to the front office of a tool company that no longer made tools, then bought it to serve as the flagship for an industry whose main product was numbers on the New York Stock Exchange. Since then he had been acquiring local ball clubs, a fast food chain in California, and a Spanish castle, which he had ordered dismantled and shipped across the Atlantic to a Brooklyn dock where it sat in numbered crates awaiting removal to Mackinac Island and his twelve-acre estate. He had done all this almost with nobody’s notice, and it would probably still be that way had not his son’s violent death catapulted him into the public eye like a very rich cinder.

In another year, possibly two, he would begin the long slide, sinking in on himself like a grand old building grown too heavy for its foundation, but that summer he stood astride the loose collection of feudal fiefdoms that is the Detroit area business community, and looked it.

“I’ve employed the services of Reliance on a number of occasions,” he said. “I assume that’s why Krell went outside the agency in this case.”

I said nothing. It was one reason I hadn’t thought of.

“My son and I had nothing in common except our name,” he went on. “My fault. You can’t build a successful business and tend to family at the same time. One or the other must suffer, and no one who chose family ever had his picture on the cover of
Forbes.
After my wife’s third attempt at suicide I placed her in a private hospital and sent Doyle Junior away to school. When he was expelled from that one I sent him to another. When he was arrested for car theft I arranged for his release and had the incident erased from the record. I suppose now I should have let him face the consequences of his actions, but you can always afford to be objective when it doesn’t matter anymore.

“Doyle never showed an interest in anything his first twenty-one years, except embarrassing his father. When at last he developed an affection for firearms, I offered him a position in an arms factory in which I own a part interest in Colorado; but he didn’t want that, or anything else from me except money. Which I gave him. Guilt perhaps. The fact is that aside from the job offer, the only time I ever actively took steps to change the course he chose for himself was when I tried to stop him from marrying the woman who eventually killed him.”

His head shook. Clamping his fingers on the edge of the desk, he stopped it. He breathed in and out deeply. “I offered her money, of course. She turned it down. Of course. There was so much more to be made later.”

“Did you threaten to disinherit your son?” My voice sounded funny in the room.

“I don’t make threats I don’t intend to carry out, although it was certainly implied. She saw right through that. Women of her sort are impossible to bluff. I will not have what I’ve built broken up to feed an already bloated government, and there is no love lost between myself and the people I employ now to help me run it. She sensed that. Whatever hash Doyle might make of it, I was determined that Thayer Industries would remain in the Thayer family. I still am,” he added.

“Your grandson.”

“My grandson. I haven’t many years left, but I mean to make my stamp on the boy, as I never could with his father. As I said, I’ve always found time for business. It’s taken me this long, and the tragedy of my son, to realize that in this case family
is
business. His mother won’t have him. Not while there is blood in these veins.”

“Even if it means framing her for murder?”

His chin came up another centimeter. “Where is the frame? She admits she killed him.”

“She confessed to it,” I said. “Whether or not it was murder is why the case is going to court.”