The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

Sometimes a Hyena by Loren D. Estleman

FROM Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

WHY I TOLD THE JOKE AT ALL I can't say. It wasn't that good, but then neither was the bar I told it in nor the bartender I told it to. I was drenched through with the sweat of a long day, with nothing else to show for it but the thought of an unpleasant telephone conversation with the client the next morning. Sometimes you stick with the subject like his own bad taste in aftershave, sometimes he drops you like a weak signal; but the guy paying your freight is never a philosopher.

I'd driven past the place a hundred times without noticing. I hadn't been thirsty the first hundred times. A long way back it had been someone's idea of home, a square frame eight-hundred-square-foot house with a shingle roof and tile siding that reminded you you'd missed three appointments to have your teeth cleaned. It didn't identify itself: the owner had just bought an orange LED sign that said OPEN and stuck it in the front window. But in that neighborhood a bar was all it could be. I still think of it, when I think of it at all, as the Open.

Inside was permanent dusk, two piles of protoplasm dumped on stools at the end of the bar, and a tabletop shuffleboard game whose pine boards had been slapped with a varnish that went tacky in high humidity so that one of the shuttles had stopped halfway down its length one day and decided that was where it would stay. A paint-can opener would be needed to pry it loose.

I don't remember what the bartender looked like. He would be a middle-aged guy running to flab who had seen Cocktail once, pictured himself in some swanky joint juggling shakers and stem glasses, and like the shuttle had come to everlasting rest in that spot. Normally I wouldn't have spoken to him beyond ordering a double scotch, but while he was siphoning it out my gaze lit upon a sepia picture in a frame on the wall above the beer taps. Someone had cut a photo of zebras grazing in the veldt from National Geographic and put it behind glass to make the place seem exotic.

"Guy walks into a bar," I said.

"Guys do, pleased to say." He slapped a paper napkin in front of me and set my drink on it. "This a joke?"

"That's the punch line from another 'Guy walks into a bar' joke; but you tell me. There's a kangaroo mixing the drinks. Kangaroo looks at the guy and says, 'I see you're surprised to find a kangaroo behind the bar.' Guy says, 'I'll say. Did the zebra sell the place?'"

He grunted, which told me all I needed to know about how he'd wound up in a dump like the Open. A really first-class barman laughs when the joke isn't funny and shakes his head when the story isn't that sad. Now that I think of it, his face belonged on the other side of the bar, tie-dyed with red gin blossoms and yellowed lost opportunities. But then that might just have been my face in the peel-and-stick mirrors in back of the bottles with recycled premium labels. An unexpected glimpse of one's reflection on that sort of day is no treat.

I'd thought of leaving him change from my ten, but I put it away. His kid could scrub pots and pans for his tuition, just like all the other self-made millionaires. I was in what the poets call a dark humor. I looked around for someone to kick sand in my face.

"Fucking cops," the bartender said.

He'd flicked on the TV on the corner shelf under the ceiling, in case my opening routine might lead to a set.

I wasn't the least bit curious. That state of mind is the first off-duty casualty in the life of a detective. I couldn't care less about what the cops were up to that put him out of his sunny mood. So of course I looked up at the screen.

A female reporter stood on a street crosshatched with yellow caution tape, pretending to read from a notepad while red and blue strobes pulsed in the background. An Early Response Team-downtown Detroit jargon for SWAT-had charged a house on the northwest side where an armed man was said to be barricaded with his wife. The husband was in custody, but the wife was dead with a slug in her heart. An unidentified source swore that no firearms were found in the house. An investigation was under way to determine whether a stray police round had killed the woman.

The bartender backhanded his remote at the TV and the screen went black. "They'll sweep that one under the rug toot-sweet. State should make them buy a hunting license."

"I guess you've never been in on a bust."

"I been on the receiving end. Cops think they own the town."

"Anything can happen when the adrenaline kicks in and the guns come out. A little girl got killed the same way last spring. That time they were looking for an armed robber."

"I remember it. Seems to me a cop got an unpaid vacation. He's back on the job and the girl's still dead. You a cop?"

"If I said I was, would you spit in my drink?"

He grinned sourly. "For starters."

The story metastasized over the next few days. A DPD spokesman confirmed the report that no gun was recovered from the house and the bullet, which had shattered when it penetrated the woman's sternum, was a soft-nose.38, a common police weapon. The lab rats in Ballistics were working to reassemble the fragments in order to match them to the gun. So far none of the officers on the scene had admitted to discharging a sidearm. The spokesman refused to say whether their guns were being examined, but that would be SOP.

Another press conference was called by Philip Justice, who announced he'd been retained by the husband to sue the police department for excessive use of deadly force and false arrest. Justice-it was his real name, and maybe the inspiration for his choice of occupations-was a pit viper who specialized in representing ordinary citizens against authority. His strategy never changed. He went in fast and hard, shrill with outrage, blindsiding the opposition before it could get a toehold and wresting pricey settlements with his teeth.

I admired his performance over my morning coffee. He removed his hand from his recently released client's shoulder only to stab a finger at the camera and paraphrase the First Book of Samuel; he'd know the passages on David and Goliath by heart, but he needed the sympathy of atheists too.

It was live coverage. I'd just turned off the set when my telephone rang. It was Justice.

I'd worked for him a couple of times, so I wasn't shocked that he'd tag me to investigate, but the timing was a surprise. I thought he'd be on the line with a judge or the New York Times, or anyway someone higher up on the food chain so quickly after going public. I said I wasn't working hard and agreed to meet him in his office in twenty minutes.

He operated high up in the American Building in Southfield, a glass-and-steel arrangement that towered over the horizontal suburb like a birthday candle on a cupcake. The suite was medium gray and pale yellow, and his desk was a glass wafer on composition legs. He got up from behind it, and as usual his six feet six was a shock to the system; sitting down he looked built to ordinary scale. His hair grew straight back and close to the scalp like an otter's and he blinked a lot-I guess from all those TV lights and flash attachments he lived among. He took my hand in a swift, firm grip and gave it back. "Amos Walker, Claud Vale."

I remembered his client spelled his first name without an e. He rose from a yellow leather chair, shrinking in on himself unlike Justice as he did so, and lowered and raised his chin in greeting while letting his hands hang at his sides. He was fifty but looked older, with once-red hair like rusted iron and muddy eyes wallowing in bags behind bifocals. A blue blazer hung from thin shoulders, showing four white stitches on one cuff where the manufacturer's label had been removed, a nice lawyerly touch that said the man was unaccustomed to dressing up but had made the purchase to appear presentable in court. The black silk armband was unobtrusive but impossible not to notice.

When we were all seated, me in gray leather, Justice in the ergonomic item behind the desk, he said, "Mr. Vale neither said nor hinted that he was armed. When he refused to open the door to police answering a domestic disturbance complaint by neighbors, the officers assumed the worst and the situation escalated from there."

"Ernestine was divorcing me," Vale said, in a voice like a cassette tape dragging over tired spools. "When GM laid me off and I couldn't find nothing, she said she'd be better off getting a job and looking after herself and nobody else. That's what we fought about. I never laid a hand on her, not in seventeen years. I sure didn't want her dead." He dug out a handkerchief, blew his nose, and lifted his glasses to wipe his eyes.

"We know a shot was fired," said Justice. "We know from which gun. An ERT sergeant admitted it after Ballistics examined his weapon. He claims it went off when Mr. Vale grabbed his arm."

"That's a lie!"

"Of course it is, Claud. Try to calm down. The bullet recovered from Mrs. Vale's body was too fragmented to match conclusively to a weapon, but with only one shot fired and one slug found, we don't need it to build our case."

I crossed my legs. "All I know is what I saw on TV. The cops who answered the domestic complaint swore he shouted through the door he'd shoot if they tried to come inside."

"I never did."

"Claud, please. You're among friends. Even if that were so, it would only have given the department probable cause to enter the house. I'm not debating that, although I believe they mistook what they heard. The fact that no gun was found in the house or within throwing range of any of the doors or windows emphatically demonstrates that the authorities failed to exercise due diligence. We're asking for ten million."

"This is all starting to sound familiar," I said.

"The circumstances are almost identical to those involving the death of a little girl six months ago on the East Side: an Early Response Team officer investigating a felony-harboring situation said the grandmother on the scene struggled with him and his gun went off, killing the child. I wasn't the attorney of record in the suit that followed, but the officer was dismissed and the judge awarded the family five million. I believe double that amount is justified by the fact that the department failed to learn from its earlier mistake."

"You've got it all figured out. So what's my end?"

"I want to swat that mosquito about whether Mr. Vale threatened to shoot the first responders. If one of them doesn't recant I can still make the case, but if there's no truth in it, the city will settle and this never goes to court."

I got out a cigarette, to play with, not to smoke; state law says you can buy them but don't light up. "In other words I ask a couple of cops if they're liars."

"You've got the best lawyer in town, if that's what you're worried about."

"It's not. My insurance carrier might consider stupidity a pre-existing condition." But I proved the point and took the job.

I met Officer Bender in a booth in the Thermopolis, a cop bar in Greektown, in the shadow of 1300, the ornate crumbling headquarters of the Detroit Police Department. It was early, and the staff was clearing away the debris of the morning rush and laying tables for the noon crowd. We had the place to ourselves apart from them and a couple of tired-looking plainclothesmen from Major Crimes drinking coffee at the bar over baklava and waiting out the end of their shift.

Bender was the junior half of the two-man team that had responded to the domestic disturbance complaint at Claud Vale's house. He was built like a college basketball player, tall and sinewy in his autumn uniform, and during the brief small talk I learned he'd been offered a full-ride scholarship at the University of Michigan but had gotten tired of the hoops and dropped out to join the twelve-week police training course in Detroit. He was a good-looking light-skinned black who liked plenty of cream and sugar in his strong Greek coffee.

He finished looking at my credentials and handed them back. "'I'll shoot the first man through the door,' that's what I heard. Book says that implies probability of a weapon. What's it say in yours?"

"It says step off and call for backup," I said. "Only I don't have backup, so I'd just step off. How do you and Wallace get along?" Sergeant Wallace was his partner, a fifteen-year man with the Uniform Division; three letters of commendation in his jacket and two months' unpaid suspension over a home-invasion suspect who'd died of asphyxiation in the course of a bust.

"He's my partner. I trust him with my life."

"That's what the book says. I'm not taking notes."

"I don't think he'd give me his sister's hand if I asked, but we got plenty of that in the department. He's a good cop. That thing two years ago could've happened to anyone. Guy had a glass throat."

I let that one eddy with the current. "This thing goes the way it went on the East Side last spring, a lot of good cops'll wind up in private security. That goes from the bottom up and never reaches the brass."

He added still more sugar to his cup and stirred it; a weaker man would've had to use two hands. "Call me a liar again, I'll cuff you for whatever I can dream up between here and down the street. Just as soon as I finish my coffee."

That was it for the interview. I thought of paying his tab along with mine, but the bribery charge might be too much temptation.

Cops, even young ones, are rarely so thin-skinned. I'd taken a wild shot and drawn blood.

Sergeant Wallace was temporarily unavailable. He'd taken a personal day and the woman who answered at his home-I assumed it was his wife-said he'd gone bow hunting in Washtenaw County. She didn't expect him back before nightfall.

I couldn't get within a mile of the ERT sergeant who'd fired the round that had reportedly killed Ernestine Vale. He was on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the internal investigation, and not even Philip Justice could get a contact number for him outside of 1300. But I couldn't think of anything to ask him that the shoot team wouldn't, so I didn't waste time pumping my unofficial sources, who are all more or less legitimately employed and keep jacking up their rates according to the risk of selling confidential information: Homeland Security had become involved, and Justice's pockets aren't that deep. No one's are.

Just to kill time while waiting to corner young Officer Bender's partner, I got a pass through Justice to walk through the scene of the shooting. The cop at the door looked at the pass, confirmed it on the Star Trek radio clipped to his shoulder strap, and stood aside to let me open the door and duck under the yellow tape.

It was a building of historical interest, which locally is as good as an order of condemnation; ninety years ago Henry Ford built dozens and dozens of narrow frame houses with steeply pitched roofs to shelter laborers who had streamed in from the Deep South and eastern Europe to earn five dollars a day assembling Model Ts in Dearborn. This was one of the few left, and despite intermittent remodeling preserved the shape and character of the original better than most of the rest.

I climbed the nearly vertical staircase and looked at the bedroom purely out of cultural curiosity. All the action had taken place on the ground floor, where according to her husband Mrs. Vale was down with the flu on the living room sofa when the bullet entered her heart at an oblique angle, the coroner said, which corresponded with Vale's version of the event. She'd moved to the sofa anyway preliminary to cutting herself loose from her husband permanently. The sheets had been removed for evidence, but the cushions were stained dark where she'd bled.

On the way out I nodded to the gatekeeper and tried the house next door, a shotgun-style ranch built on the site of what would have been another Ford construction; he created whole neighborhoods from barren fields and reclaimed swamp. The woman who cracked the door two inches at my knock had thick fingers, a suspicious blue eye, and a Ukrainian accent. The eye studied my credentials from top to bottom, but the door didn't budge. "I tell the police everything," she said.

"I won't walk you all the way back through it. What did you hear?"

"I hear bang when the police are there. I think it must be a shot."

"Any sound of struggling?"

"No, just bang. Without police I would think it is a door slamming. Doors are slamming there all the time, yelling, like that day. The people, they don't get along so good."

"Are you the one who complained to the police about the domestic disturbance?"

"I don't want to get into no trouble."

"You won't."

She said it again. I moved on. I was sure now it was her, not that it mattered who'd called. "What about when just the two policemen were there? Did you hear Mr. Vale shouting?"

"I hear shouting. I don't know who or what. Then the two go away. Later more come. One comes to this door and says don't go out, stay away from the windows. I tell him, today is no different from all the rest. I might have stayed in Kiev."

I thanked her. She pressed the door in my face and was still snapping locks when I stepped off the porch.

"I had a sweet shot, a heart shot," Sergeant Wallace said. "This little-bitty birch you couldn't even see deflected the arrow and the best rack I've seen in years went sailing off over a barbed-wire fence."

Veteran cops are masters at dividing their work and home lives. I was there to ask about his part in an affair that had left a woman dead with a slug in her heart and he was telling me about the deer heart he'd missed that afternoon in rural Michigan; no irony in his voice or expression.

We were sitting in his small kitchen in Redford Township, with a group of mismatched appliances that had been replaced as needed and no two at the same time. The pattern was worn almost completely off the linoleum and the table we sat at was sheet metal over pine. He had a squat brown beer bottle in his squat right fist and I could have connected the broken blood vessels in his broad fleshy face like dots. Mrs. Wallace, a small, wrenlike creature who gave the impression of a nervous type until you noticed the steel wire underneath, was in the laundry washing spray-on doe hormones from her husband's camo suit. He wore loose-fitting old suit pants and his back hair curled like tropical undergrowth over the shoulder straps of his BVD undershirt.

I said, "I won't take up much time. What did Claud Vale say when you showed up at his house?"

"'Go away or I'll shoot right through this door.'"

"Those words exactly?"

"They're in my report."

I looked at my notebook. "Your partner said it was, 'I'll shoot the first man through the door.'"

"What's the difference?"

"The second version threatened your lives. The first threatened his door."

He swigged beer and thunked down the bottle. "You work for a lawyer, all right. You know same as me he meant only one thing either way."

"The lawyer I work for would go to town on the difference in phrasing. He'd make it sound like one of you lied and the other backed him up, as partners do, only he got the words wrong. He'd say it was your idea, being the senior man; but anyway he'll play it so both your testimonies wind up in the ashcan."

His face got so dark I couldn't pick out the burst vessels.

I said, "I'm just the messenger. If that's how it went down, fine: tell it on the stand and let Justice do what he can with it. Just don't lose it there the way you're losing it here in your own kitchen. I wouldn't be talking this way if Bender didn't lash out like a snake when I told him his career might depend on what he said in court. He's got a guilty conscience."

"Finished?" He pointed at the beer he'd given me. I hadn't touched it, but I put away my notebook and got up. At the front door I heard the hollow snap and whoosh of a fresh bottle being opened.

Philip Justice subsided into the cushions of his desk chair, closing his eyes and folding his hands across his spare middle as if he'd just finished a feast. "Damn fine work. I had Wallace figured as the weak link, based on that blot on his record. But Bender's our pigeon. I may not even have to call his partner to the stand."

"Thing is," I said, "I think Wallace is telling the truth. I believe Vale made a threat of some kind. Bender didn't hear it-making out emotional words through a thick door comes with experience. Bender decided to back him up after they compared notes. You need a good reason for calling for reinforcements when you write your report, especially after what went down."

"Made a threat with what? He didn't have a gun."

"Not when a search was made. The next-door neighbor heard doors slamming earlier. A handgun report heard through two walls can be mistaken for a door slamming."

He opened his eyes and came forward. The feast had turned into indigestion. "She heard yelling too."

"I can go back and find out if any of that yelling sounded like Ernestine Vale's voice."

"I didn't hire you to make a case for the police. God, you make him sound like a criminal mastermind. You're saying he shot his wife, then staged a fight to bring the cops to his door and set up the Detroit Police Department for her murder."

"It wouldn't be the first time someone tried to get tricky. If he shot her long enough before the complaint went through, he'd have plenty of opportunity to sneak out of the house, dump the gun in a storm drain a dozen blocks away, and sneak back in and fake a fight."

"There'd be a record of a firearm purchase. He's clean. Don't you think I had that checked out? You're not the only PI in town."

"You're right. Where would anyone go in Detroit to get a gun without leaving a paper trail?"

"He's an unemployed auto worker, not a penny-ante hit man. He wouldn't know where to look."

I played with a cigarette. "All I'm saying is I'd like to run it out. You don't want this blowing up in your face in public."

"What do you want from me?" Now he sounded like a successful man being put upon by a poor relation.

"Two things. First, when did his wife file for divorce?"

He fired up the computer on his desk. "April eleventh."

"This is part of the first thing. When did the cops screw up and kill that little girl on the East Side?"

"You can't think those two things are connected. The circumstances-"

"-are almost identical. Your words. When?"

Keys got tickled. He frowned at the screen, showing the kind of reaction he never showed in court. "April fourteenth."

I wrote both dates in my notebook, not that I'd forget. "Second thing: Which plant did Vale work for before he was laid off?"

I found Dix Sommerfield working the employee parking lot at the GM assembly plant in Warren. He was a third-generation member of a Kentucky family that had come north in a body to build tanks for the automobile-factories-turned-defense plants during World War II. He could usually be found, a potbellied presence in a reverse ball cap, selling unlicensed bottles of whiskey and cartons of cigarettes and certain other contraband from the trunk of his wired-together Chevy Nova during shift changes. Tuesdays and Thursdays found him at Chrysler, Mondays at River Rouge, where he spent a lot of time looking over his shoulder for Ford's private police force. The other days of the week you could depend on his being in Warren, his sentimental favorite; his father and grandfather had been loyal to General Motors ahead of Uncle Sam and the Southern Baptist Church.

"I'm looking for a thirty-eight revolver," I said, after we'd exchanged greetings. I'd bought information from him in the past, cash on the barrelhead, and no backlash from the authorities.

Not that he wasn't cagey; the balance had shifted after 9/11, and you never knew when interference from the amateurs in Washington might louse up a smooth system. "I don't deal in that stuff no more," he said, moving the toothpick that lived in his mouth from one corner to the other. "You want a piece, go to Dick's Sporting Goods."

"I want to know about one you sold. Dix, do I have to pull that spare tire out from under all those boxes of Marlboros and look into the well? It was a soft-nose slug, so it couldn't have come from an automatic."

"Wearing a wire?"

I unbuttoned my shirt and spread it.

"That ain't nothing. Drop your pants."

I kicked him in the shin, and when he bent to cradle it gave him a chop with the side of my hand on his elbow. Forget the groin: if you really want to make a painful point, go for the little knobs of bone that stick out from the joints. When the tears stopped flowing I took out a Free Press clipping with Claud Vale's picture and stuck it under his nose.

He wiped his eyes with his sleeve and squinted. "Jeez. I been praying for days that one wouldn't come back and bite me in the ass."

"God answered. He said stick to cigarettes and booze. You can't go wrong with the basics."

One week after the story broke, Philip Justice announced he was dropping his suit and that he'd resigned as Claud Vale's attorney. The cops, knowing what that meant, rearrested his former client and went to work on him; no physical abuse, no coercion other than the reliable aggressive questioning in Supreme Court-mandated increments with periods of rest in between, tying the suspect up in his own lies until telling the truth was the only path to sanity. He confessed to murdering his wife, threatening the first responders so that backup was required from 1300, and grabbing the arm of the first cop through the door, forcing his gun to go off, as guns will in that situation. A more thorough search of the crime scene turned up the ERT sergeant's slug in a place where two baseboards met unevenly in a corner. That had been a break for Vale, who hadn't considered what would happen if it were recovered anywhere but in Ernestine Vale's heart. He'd had the foresight to score an X in the nose of the slug he'd used before firing it, making it burst apart on entry so that it couldn't be traced to the gun he'd used; the rest was beginner's luck.

The gun itself was never found, but it was no longer required for evidence. I didn't have to go to jail for keeping Dix Sommerfield's name out of the record.

Philip Justice bought me a drink at the Caucus Club downtown. He was still bothered by the loss of what looked like a big settlement and more crusading glory to his name, but he was grateful not to have been made a clown on the evening news. He sipped at his twelve-year-old cognac. "So you got all this on what a couple of cops told you?"

"Some of it." I stirred the ice in my scotch and tossed the swizzle. "The timing cinched it. Vale was brooding about the divorce, losing half of what little he had in the outcome, when that little girl died. He saw a way to get clear and be rich besides."

"That was an armed-robbery investigation, not murder."

"It was enough the same as what he had in mind. When I first heard of Vale I was in a bar."

"Imagine that."

"I'll ignore the implication. I'd told the bartender a joke. I got the idea from a picture of zebras he had on the wall." I told it.

He didn't laugh. "I heard that one. Seems to me a different animal was involved."

"Sometimes it's a hyena sold the place. It's always a kangaroo behind the bar, for some reason. Who knows what makes these things work?"