The New Black Mask (No 4)

Loren D. Estleman Blond and Blue

“The following story is based on an actual incident, which at last word was still unresolved,” Loren Estleman writes about “Blond and Blue.”

Since the appearance of his story “Bloody July” in NBM 1, Mr. Estleman has been a busy writer. In October 1985, Mysterious Press published his second novel about professional hit man Peter Macklin, Roses Are Dead; in November, Doubleday published Gun Man, “a serious study of an authentic Western gunfighter”; and in March, Houghton Mifflin will publish a new Amos Walker novel, Every Brilliant Eye.

Ernest Krell’s aversion to windows was a legend in the investigation business. It was a trademark, like his tie clasp made from a piece of shrapnel the army surgeons had pried out of his hip in Seoul and his passion for black suits with discreet patterns to break up their severity. During his seventeen years with the Secret Service he had spent so many public hours warning presidential candidates’ wives away from windows that when it came time to open his own detective agency he dug into his wife’s inheritance to throw up a building that didn’t have any. Narrow vertical slits set eight feet apart let light into a black marble edifice that looked like a blank domino from anywhere along the Detroit River.

A receptionist with blue stones in her ears and that silver complexion that comes free with fluorescent lights took my hat and left me alone in Krell’s office, a bowling alley of a room carpeted in black and brown and containing oak-and-leather chairs and an antique desk in front of a huge Miró landscape, lots of blues and reds, to make up for the lack of a window. The walls were painted two shades of cinnamon, darker on the desk side of the office to keep the customers where they belonged. A lot of framed citations, Krell’s license, and a square black-on-white sign reading “RELIANCE — Courtesy, Efficiency, Confidentiality” took care of the bare spots.

There were no ashtrays, so I took a seat near a potted fern and lit a cigarette, tipping my ashes into the pot. After five puffs the man himself came in through a side door and scowled at the curling smoke and then at me and said, “There’s no smoking in this building.”

“I didn’t see any signs,” I said.

“You don’t see any ashtrays either.” He ran a hand under the edge of the desk. A second later, the silver-skinned receptionist came in carrying an ashtray used just for putting out smokes, and I did that. I couldn’t decide if it was the way he had pushed the button or if I just had the look of a guy that would light up in the boss’s office. When she left carrying my squashed butt, the man extended his hand and I rose to take it. His grip was cool and firm and as personal as a haberdasher’s smile.

“Good to meet you, Walker. I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure.”

“This is the first time I’ve gotten any higher than the fourth floor,” I said.

Krell chuckled meaninglessly. He was six three and two hundred pounds, a large pale man with black hair that looked dyed and wrinkles around his eyes and mouth from years of squinting into the sun looking for riflemen on rooftops. It was orange today, orange stripes on his black suit and jaunty orange sunbursts on his silk tie to pick it up. It softened the overall effect of his person like a bright bow tied to a buffalo’s tail made you forget he was standing on your foot. The famous tie clasp was in place.

He waved me into one of the chairs but remained upright at parade rest with his hands folded behind him. “I spent last night reading the files on the cases you assisted us with,” he said. “Despite the fact that you’re anything but the Reliance type” — his gaze lit on my polyester suit — “you show a certain efficiency I admire. Also you spend more time and effort on each client than a Reliance operative could afford.”

“You can do that when they only come into your office one at a time,” I volunteered.

“Yes.” He let the word melt on his tongue, then pressed on. “The reason I asked you to come down today, we have a client who might best benefit from your rather unorthodox method. A delicate case and a highly emotional one. Frankly, I’d have referred her to another agency had she not come recommended by one of our most valued clients.”

“She?”

“You’ll meet her in a moment. It’s a missing persons situation, which I believe is your specialty. Her son’s been kidnapped.”

“That’s the FBI’s specialty.”

“Only in cases where ransom is demanded. On the statutes it’s abduction, which would make it a police matter except that her ex-husband is the suspected culprit. The authorities consider that a domestic problem and approach it accordingly.”

“Meaning it gets spiked along with the butcher’s wife who threw a side of pork at her husband,” I said. “How old is the boy?”

“Seven.” He quarter-turned toward the desk and drew a typewritten sheet from a folder lying open on top. “Blond and blue, about four feet tall leaning to pudgy, last seen April third wearing a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt, red corduroy shorts, and dirty white sneakers. Answers to Tommy. One minute he was playing with a toy truck in the front yard of his mother’s home in Austin, Texas, and the next there was just the truck. Neighbor thought he saw him on the passenger’s side of a low red sports car going around the corner. The ex-husband owns a red Corvette.”

“That’s April third this year?” I asked. It was now early May.

“I know it’s a long time. She’s been to all the authorities here and in Texas.”

“Why here?”

“A relative of the mother is sure she saw the father at the Tel-Twelve Mall in Southfield three weeks ago. She flew in right after. Staying at the relative’s place.”

“What makes it too hot to touch?”

He stroked the edge of the sheet with a meaty thumb, making a noise like a cricket. “The ex-husband is an executive with a finance corporation I sometimes do business with. If it gets out I’m investigating one of its employees—”

“Last stop for the money train,” I finished. “What’s to investigate? She should’ve gone back to court to start, put the sheriffs on his neck.”

“His neck is gone and so is he. He took a leave of absence from his company, closed out his apartment in Austin and vanished, boy and all. He probably had all his bags packed in the Corvette’s trunk when he picked up Tommy and just kept driving. It’s all here.” He put the sheet back inside the folder and handed the works to me.

It ran just five pages, triple-spaced and written in Reliance’s terse, patented preliminary-report language, but on plain paper without the distinctive letterhead. Very little of it was for me. The ex-husband’s name was Frank Corcoran. He was a house investments counselor for Great Western Loans and Credit, with branch offices in seventeen cities west of the Mississippi. There were two numbers to call for information there. The name and number of the witness who had seen his car at the time of the boy’s disappearance were there too, along with the ‘Vette’s serial number and license plate. It was long gone by now or the cops in Austin or Detroit would have had it in on a BOL weeks ago. I folded the report into quarters anyway and put it in a pocket and gave back the empty folder. “Can I talk to the mother?”

“Of course. She’s in the other office.”

I followed him through the side door into a room separate from the one where the receptionist sat, a chamber half the size of Krell’s, decorated in muted warm colors and containing a row of chairs with circular backs, like the room in a funeral home where the family receives visitors. “Charlotte Corcoran, Amos Walker,” said Krell.

The woman seated on the end chair raised a sunken face to look at me. Her jaw was too long to be pretty, but it had been an attractive face before she started losing weight, the bones sculpted, not sharp like now, the forehead high and broad instead of jutting and hollow at the sides. The little bit of lipstick she wore might have been painted on the corpse in that same funeral home. Her hair was blond and tied back loosely with wisps of gray springing loose around her ears. Her dress was just a dress, and her bare angular legs ended in bony feet thrust into low-heeled shoes a size too large for her. She was smoking a cigarette with a white filter tip. I peered through the haze at Krell, who moved a shoulder and then flipped a wall switch that started a fan humming somewhere in the woodwork. The smoke stirred and began twisting toward a remote corner of the ceiling. I got out a Winston and sent some of my own after it.

“My boy Tommy turned seven last week,” Charlotte Corcoran told the wall across from her. “It’s the first birthday I missed.”

Her speech had an east Texas twang. I twirled another chair to face hers and sat down. The connecting door clicked shut discreetly behind Krell. It was the only noise he made exiting. “Tell me about your husband,” I said.

She snicked some ash into a tray on the chair next to her and looked at me. Seeing me now. “I could call him a monster. I’d be lying. Before this the worst thing he did was to call a half hour before supper to say he was working late. He did that a lot; it’s part of why I divorced him. That’s old news. I want my son back.”

“What’d the police in Austin say?”

“They acted concerned until I told them he’d been kidnapped by his father. Then they lost interest. They said they’d put Tommy’s picture on the bulletin board in every precinct, and maybe they did. They didn’t give it to the newspapers or TV the way they do when a child’s just plain missing. I got the same swirl of no action from the police here. Kidnapping’s okay between relatives, I guess.” She spat smoke.

“Skipping state lines should’ve landed it in the feds’ lap,” I said.

“I called the Houston office of the FBI. They were polite. They test high on polite. They said they’d get it on the wire. I never saw any of them.”

“So far as you know.”

It was lost on her. She mashed out her butt, leaving some lipstick smeared on the end. “I spent plenty of time at Police Headquarters here and back home,” she said. “They showed me the door nice as you please, but they showed me the door. They wouldn’t tell me what they’d found out.”

“That should have told you right there.”

Her expression changed. “Can you find them, Mr. — I’ve forgotten.”

“Walker,” I said. “A lot rests on whether they’re still here. And if they were ever here to begin with.”

“Frank was. My cousin Millie doesn’t make mistakes.”

“That’s Millicent Arnold, the relative you’re staying with?” She nodded. “I’ll need a picture of Tommy and one of Mr. Corcoran.”

“This should do it.” From her purse she drew a five-by-seven bureau shot and gave it to me. “I took it last summer on a trip to Corpus Christi. Tommy’s grown several inches since. But his face hasn’t changed.”

I looked at a man with dark curly hair and a tow-headed boy standing in swim trunks on a yellow beach with blue ocean behind them. “His father didn’t get that build lifting telephone receivers.”

“He worked out at a gym near his office. He was a member.”

I pocketed the photograph next to the Reliance report and stood up. “I’ll be in touch.”

“I’ll be in.”

Krell was on the intercom to his receptionist when I reentered his office. I waited until he finished making his lunch reservation, then:

“How much of a boost can I expect from Reliance on this one?”

“You already have it,” he said. “The situation is—”

“Delicate, yeah. I’ll take my full fee, then. Three days to start.”

“What happened to professional courtesy?”

“It went out of style, same as the amateur kind. What about it? You’re soaking her five bills per day now.”

“Four fifty.” He adjusted his tie clasp. “I’ll have Mrs. Marble draw you a check.”

“Your receptionist has access to company funds?”

“She’s proven herself worthy of my trust.”

I didn’t say it. My bank balance was stuck to the sidewalk as it was.

The report had Mrs. Corcoran in contact with a Sergeant Grandy in General Service, missing persons detail. I deposited half of the Reliance check at my bank, hanging on to the rest for expenses, and drove down to Police Headquarters, where a uniform escorted me to a pasteboard desk with a bald head behind it. Grandy had an egg-salad sandwich in one hand and a styrofoam cup of coffee in the other and was using a blank arrest form for a place mat. He wore a checked sport coat and a moustache healthy enough to have sucked all the hair from his scalp.

“Corcoran, yeah,” he said, after reading my card and hearing my business. “It’s in the works. You got to realize it don’t get the same priority as a little boy lost. I mean, somebody’s feeding him.”

“Turn anything yet?”

“We got the boy’s picture and the father’s description out.”

“That’s what you’ve done. What’ve you got?”

He flicked a piece of egg salad off his lapel. “What I got is two Grosse Pointe runaways to chase down and a four-year-old girl missing from an apartment on Watson I’ll be handing to Homicide soon as she turns up jammed in a culvert somewhere. I don’t need part-time heat too.”

We were getting started early. I set fire to some tobacco. “Who’s your lieutenant?”

“Winkle. Only he’s out sick.”

“Sergeant Grandy, if I spent an hour here, would I walk out any smarter than I was when I came in?”

“Probably not.”

“Okay. I just wondered if you were an exception.”

I was out of there before he got it.

On the ground floor I used a pay telephone to call the Federal Building and explained my problem to the woman who answered at the FBI.

“That would be Special Agent Roseman, Interstate Flight,” she said. “But he’s on another line.”

I said I’d wait. She put me on hold. I watched a couple of prowl-car cops sweating in their winter uniforms by the Coke machine. After five minutes the woman came back on. “Mr. Roseman will be tied up for a while. Would you like to call back?”

I said yeah and hung up. Out on Beaubien the sidewalks were throwing back the first real warmth of spring. I rolled down the window on the driver’s side and breathed auto exhaust all the way to my office building. You have to celebrate it somehow.

The window in my thinking parlor was stuck shut. I strained a disk heaving it open a crack to smell the sweet sun-spread pavement three stories down. Then I sat down behind the desk — real wood, no longer in style but not yet antique — and tried the FBI again. Roseman was out to lunch. I left my number and got out the Reliance report and dialed one of two numbers for the firm where Frank Corcoran worked in Austin.

“Great Western.” Another woman. They own the telephone wires.

I gave her my name and calling. “I’m trying to reach Frank Corcoran. It’s about an inheritance.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Corcoran is on indefinite leave.”

“Where can I reach him?”

“I’m sorry.”

I thanked her anyway and worked the plunger. I wasn’t disappointed. It’s basic to try the knob before you break out the lockpicks. I used the other number, and this time I got a man.

“Arnold Wilson, president of Thornbraugh Electronics in Chicago,” I said. Thornbraugh Transmissions on Livernois put out the advertising calendar tacked to the wall across from my desk. “We’re building a new plant in Springfield and Frank Corcoran advised me to call Great Western for financing. Is he in?”

“What did you say your name was?” I repeated it. “One moment.”

I had enough time to pluck out a cigarette before he came back on the line. “Are you the private investigator who spoke to my partner’s secretary about Mr. Corcoran a few moments ago?” His tone had lost at least three layers of silk.

“What’s the matter,” I said, “you don’t have any walls in that place?”

I was talking to myself. As I lowered the dead receiver I could hear the computers gossiping among themselves, trashing my credit rating. The laugh was on them; I didn’t have one.

My next trip was through the yellow pages. There were at least fifty public gymnasiums listed within a half hour of downtown Detroit, including Southfield, any one of which would suit Corcoran’s obsession with a healthy body. We all have our white whales. I made a list of the bigger, cleaner places. It was still long. Just thinking about it made my feet throb.

I tried the number of the place where Charlotte Corcoran was staying in Southfield. A breathy female voice answered, not hers.

“Millicent Arnold?”

“Yes. Mr. Walker? Charlotte told me she spoke with you earlier. She’s napping now. Shall I wake her?”

“That’s okay. It’s you I want to talk to. About the man you saw who looked like Frank Corcoran.”

“It was Frank. I spent a week in their home in Austin last year, and I know what he looks like.”

“Where did you see him at the mall? In what store?”

“He was coming out of the sporting goods place. I was across the corridor. I almost called to him over the crowd, but then I remembered. I thought about following him, see where he went, but by the time I made up my mind he was lost in the crush. I went into the store and found the clerk who had waited on him. He’d paid cash for what he bought, didn’t leave a name or address.”

“What’d he buy, barbell weights?” Maybe he was working out at home and I could forget the gyms.

“No. Something else. Sweats, I think. Yes, a new sweat suit. Does that help?”

“My feet will give you a different answer. But yeah. Thanks, Miss Arnold.”

“Call me Millie. Everyone does.”

I believed her. It was the voice.

After saying good-bye I scowled at the list, then raised my little electronic paging device from among the flotsam in the top drawer of the desk and called my answering service to test the batteries. They were deader than the Anthony dollar. I said I’d call in for messages and locked up.

The office directly below mine was being used that month by a studio photographer, five foot one and three hundred pounds with a Marlboro butt screwed into the middle of a face full of stubble. I went through the open door just as he finished brushing down the cowlick of a gap-toothed ten-year-old in a white shirt buttoned to the neck and blue jeans as stiff as aluminum siding and waddled around behind the camera, jowls swinging. “Smile, you little—” he said, squeezing the bulb on the last part. White light bleached the boy’s face and the sky blue backdrop behind.

When the kid had gone, following the spots in front of his eyes, I handed the photographer the picture Charlotte Corcoran had given me of her ex-husband and their son. “How much to make a negative from this and run off twenty-five prints?” I asked.

He held the shot close enough to his face to set it afire if his stub had been burning. “Eighty-seven fifty.”

“How much for just fifteen?”

“Eighty-seven fifty.”

“Must be the overhead.” I was looking at a rope of cobwebs as thick as my wrist hammocking from the ceiling.

“No, you just look like someone that wants it tomorrow.”

“Early.” I gave him two fifties and he changed them from a cigar box on a table cluttered with lenses and film tubes and wrote me out a receipt.

I used his telephone to call my service. There were no messages. I tried the Federal Building again. Special Agent Roseman had come in and gone out and wasn’t expected back that day. He had the right idea. I went home and cooked a foil-wrapped tray for supper and watched the news and a TV movie and went to bed.

I was pulling a tail.

Leaving the diner I let fix my breakfast those mornings I can’t face a frying pan, I watched a brown Chrysler pull out of the little parking area behind me in the rearview mirror. Three turns later it was still with me. I made a few more turns to make sure and then nicked the red light crossing John R. The Chrysler tried to do the same but had to brake when a Roadway van trundled through the intersection laying down horn.

I was still thinking about it when I squeezed into the visitors’ lot outside Police Headquarters. My next alimony payment wasn’t due for a month, and I hadn’t anything to do with the Sicilian boys’ betterment league all year.

Sergeant Grandy had a worried-looking black woman in a ratty squirrel coat in the customer’s chair and was clunking out a missing persons report with two fingers on a typewriter that came over with Father Marquette. I asked him if Lieutenant Winkle was in today.

“What for?” He mouthed each letter as he typed.

“Corcoran, same as yesterday.”

“Go ahead and talk to him. I had a full head of hair before people started climbing over it.”

I followed his thumb to where a slim black man in striped shirt-sleeves and a plain brown tie was filling a china mug at the coffee maker. He wore a modest Afro and gray-tinted glasses. I gave him a card.

“I’ve been hired by Charlotte Corcoran to look for her ex-husband and their boy Tommy,” I said. “The sergeant wasn’t much help.”

“Told you to walk off a dock, right?” His eyes might have twinkled over the top of the mug, but you can never be sure about cops’ eyes.

“Words to that effect.”

“Grandy’s gone as high as he’s going in my detail,” he said. “No diplomacy. You have some identification besides a card?”

I showed him the chintzy pastel-colored ID the state hands out. He reached into a pocket and flipped forty cents into a tray full of coins next to the coffee maker. “Let’s go into the cave.”

We entered an office made of linoleum and amber pebbled glass, closing the door. He set down his mug, tugged at his trousers to protect the crease, and sat on the only clear corner of his desk. Then he pulled over his telephone and dialed a number.

“Hello, Miss Arnold? This is Lieutenant Winkle in General Sendee... Millie, right. Is Mrs. Corcoran in? Thank you.” Pause. “Mrs. Corcoran? No, I’m sorry, there’s nothing new. Reason I called, I’ve got a private investigator here named Walker says he’s working for you... Okay, thanks. Just wanted to confirm it.”

He hung up and looked at me. “Sorry. Department policy.”

“I’m unoffendable,” I said. “How many telephone numbers you keep in your head at any given time?”

“Last month I forgot my mother’s birthday.” He drowned his quiet smile in coffee. “We have nothing in the Corcoran case.”

“Nothing as in nothing, or nothing you can do anything with?”

“Nothing as in zip. We run on coffee and nicotine here. When we get a box full of scraps we can hand over to the feds, we don’t waste time trying to assemble them ourselves. The FBI computer drew a blank on Corcoran.”

“Not unusual if he doesn’t have priors.”

“It gets better. Because of the exodus from Michigan to Texas over the past couple of years, a lot of local firms have been dealing with finance companies out there. So when it landed back in our lap, we fed Great Western Loans and Credit into the department machine. Still nothing on Corcoran, because only the officers are on file. But the printout said the corporation invests heavily in government projects. As investments counselor, Frank Corcoran should have shown up on that FBI report. He’d have had to have been screened one time or another.”

“Some kind of cover-up?”

“You tell me. The word’s lost a lot of its impact in recent years.”

I opened a fresh pack of Winstons. “So why keep Mrs. Corcoran in the dark?”

“Don’t worry. It’s not rubbing off on us,” he said. “We’re just holding her at arm’s length till we get some answers back from channels. These things take time. Computer time, which is measured in Christmases.”

“So why tell me?”

He smiled the quiet smile. “When Sergeant Grandy gave me your card I did some asking around the building. If you were a bulldog you’d have what the novelists call ‘acquisitive teeth.’ Quickest way to get rid of you guys is to throw you some truth.”

“I appreciate it, Lieutenant.” I rose and offered him my hand. He didn’t give it back as hastily as some cops have. “Oh, what would you know about a brown Chrysler that was shadowing me a little while ago?”

“It wasn’t one of mine,” he said. “I’m lucky to get a blue-and-white when I want to go in with the band.”

I grasped the doorknob. “Thanks again. I guess you’re feeling better.”

“Than what? Oh, yesterday. I called in sick to watch my kid pitch. He walked six batters in a row.”

I grinned and left. That’s the thing I hate most about cops. Find one that stands for everything you don’t like about them and then you draw one that’s human.

The job stank, all right. It stank indoors and it stank on the street and it stank in the car all the way to my building. I had the window closed this trip: the air was damp and the sky was throwing fingers whether to rain or snow. Michigan. But it wouldn’t have smelled any better with the window down.

The pictures came out good, anyway. It must be nice to be in a business where if they don’t you can trace the problem to a bad filter or dirt in the chemicals, something definite and impersonal that you can ditch and replace with something better. I left the fat photographer developing nude shots for a customer on Adult Row on Woodward and went upstairs.

I lock the waiting room overnight. I was about to use the key when the door swung inward and a young black party in faded overalls and a Pistons warm-up jacket grinned at me. He had a mouth built for grinning, wide as a Buick with door-to-door teeth and a thin moustache squared off like a bracket to make it seem even wider. “You’re late, trooper,” he said. “Let’s you come in and we’ll get started.”

“Thanks, I’ll come back,” I said, and backpedaled into something hard. The wall was closer this morning. A hand curled inside the back of my collar and jerked my suit coat down to my elbows, straining the button and pinning my arms behind me.

Teeth drew a finger smelling of marijuana down my cheek. Then he balled his fist and rapped the side of my chin hard enough to make my own teeth snap together.

“Let’s you come in, trooper. Unless you’d rather wake up smiling at yourself from your bedside table every morning.”

I kicked him in the crotch.

He said, “Hee!” and hugged himself. Meanwhile I threw myself forward, popping the button and stripping out of my coat. My left arm was still tangled in the sleeve lining when I pivoted on my left foot and swung my right fist into a face eight inches higher than mine. I felt the jar to my shoulder. I was still gripping the keys in that hand.

The guy I hit let go of the coat to drag the back of a huge hand under his nose and looked at the blood. Then he took hold of my shirt collar from the front to steady me and cocked his other fist, taking aim.

“Easy, Del. We ain’t supposed to bust him.” Teeth’s voice was a croak.

Del lowered his fist but kept his grip on my collar. He was almost seven feet tall, very black, and had artificially straightened hair combed into a high pompadour and sprayed hard as a brick. In place of a jacket he wore a full-length overcoat that barely reached his hips, over a sweatshirt that left his navel and flat hairy belly exposed.

Behind me Teeth said, “Del don’t like to talk. He’s got him a cleft palate. It don’t get in his way at all. Now you want to come in, talk?”

I used what air Del had left me to agree. He let go and we went inside. In front of the door to my private office Teeth relieved me of my keys, unlocked it, and stood aside while his partner shoved me on through. Teeth glanced at the lock on his way in.

“Dead bolt, yeah. Looks new. You need one on the other door too.”

He circled the room as he spoke and stopped in front of me. I was ready and got my hip out just as he kicked. I staggered sideways. Del caught me.

“That’s no way to treat a client, trooper,” Teeth said. “It gets around, pretty soon you ain’t got no business.”

“Client?” I shook off the giant’s steadying hand. My leg tingled.

Teeth reached into the slash pocket of his Pistons jacket and brought out a roll of crisp bills, riffling them under my nose. “Hundreds, trooper. Fifty of them in this little bunch. Go on, heft it. Ain’t no heavier’n a roll of quarters, but, my oh my, how many more smiles she draws.”

He held it out while I got my coat right side in. Finally his arm got tired and he let it drop. I said, “You came in hard for paying customers. What do I have to forget?”

“We want someone to forget something, we go to a politician,” he said. “Twenty-five hundred of this pays to look for somebody. The other twenty-five comes when the somebody gets found.”

“Somebody being?” Knowing the answer.

“Same guy you’re after now. Frank Corcoran.”

“That standard for someone who’s already looking for him for a lot less?”

“There’s a little more to it,” he said.

“Thought there might be.”

“You find him, you tell us first. Ahead of his wife.”

“Then?”

“Then you don’t tell her.”

“I guess I don’t ask why.”

His grin creaked. “You’re smart, trooper. Too smart for poor.”

“I’ll need a number,” I said.

“We call you.” He held up the bills. “We talking?”

“Let’s drink over it.” I pushed past him around the desk and tugged at the handle on the deep drawer. Teeth’s other hand moved and five inches of pointed steel flicked out of his fist. “Just a Scotch bottle,” I said.

He leaned over the corner to see down into the drawer. I grabbed a handful of his hair and bounced his forehead off the desk. The switchblade went flying. Del, standing in front of the desk, made a growling sound in his chest and lurched forward. I yanked open the top drawer and fired my Smith & Wesson .38 without taking it out. The bullet smashed through the front panel and buried itself in the wall next to the door. It didn’t come within a foot of hitting the big man. But he stopped. I raised the gun and backed to the window.

“A name,” I said. “Whose money?”

Teeth rubbed his forehead, where a purple bruise was spreading under the brown. He stooped to pick up the currency from the floor and stood riffling it against his palm. His smile was a shadow of a ghost of what it had been. “No names today, trooper. I’m fresh out of names.”

I said, “It works this way. You tell me the name, I don’t shoot you.”

“You don’t shoot. Desks and walls, maybe. Not people. It’s why you’re broke, and it’s why I get to walk around with somebody else’s five long ones on account of it’s what I drop on gas for my three Cadillacs.”

“What about a Chrysler?”

“I pay my dentist in Chryslers,” he said. “So long, trooper. Maybe I see you. Maybe you don’t see me first. Oh.” He got my keys out of his slash pocket and flipped them onto the desk. “We’re splitting, Del.”

Del looked around, spotted my framed original Casablanca poster hanging on the wall over the bullet hole, and swung his fist. Glass sprayed. Then he turned around and crunched out behind his partner, speckling my carpet with blood from his lacerated fingers.

The telephone rang while I was cleaning the revolver. When I got my claws unhooked from the ceiling I lifted the receiver. It was Lieutenant Winkle. He wanted to see me at Headquarters.

“Something?” I asked.

“Everything,” he said. “Don’t stop for cigarettes on the way.”

I reloaded, hunted up my holster, and clipped the works to my belt. No one came to investigate the shot. The neighborhood had fallen that far.

On Beaubien I left the gun in the car to clear the metal detectors inside. Heading there I walked past a brown Chrysler parked in the visitors’ lot. There was no one inside and the doors were locked.

The lieutenant let me into his office, where two men in dark suits were seated in mismatched chairs. One had a head full of crisp gray hair and black-rimmed glasses astride a nose that had been broken sometime in the distant past. The other was younger and looked like Jack Kennedy with a close-trimmed black beard. They stank federal.

“Eric Stendahl and Robert LeJohn.” Winkle introduced them in the same order. “They’re with the Justice Department.”

“We met,” I said. “Sort of.”

Stendahl nodded. He might have smiled. “I thought you’d made us. I should have let Bob drive; he’s harder to shake behind a wheel. But even an old eagle likes to test his wings now and then.” The smile died. “We’re here to ask you to stop looking for Frank Corcoran.”

I lit a Winston. “If I say no?”

“Then we’ll tell you. We have influence with the state police, who issued your license.”

“I’ll get a hearing. They’ll have to tell me why.”

“That won’t be necessary,” he said. “Corcoran was the inside man in an elaborate scheme to bilk Great Western Loans and Credit out of six hundred thousand dollars in loans to a nonexistent oil venture in Mexico. He was apprehended and agreed to turn state’s evidence against his accomplices in return for a new identity and relocation for his protection. You’re familiar with the alias program, I believe.”

“I ran into it once.” I looked at Winkle. “You knew?”

“Not until they came in here this morning after you left,” he said. “They’ve had Mrs. Corcoran under surveillance. That’s how they got on to you. It also explains why Washington turned its back on this one.”

I added some ash to the fine mulch on the linoleum floor. “Not too bright, relocating him in an area where his wife’s cousin lives.”

Stendahl said, “We didn’t know about that, but it certainly would have clinched our other objections. He spent his childhood here and had a fixation about the place. The people behind the swindle travel in wide circles; we couldn’t chance his being spotted. Bob here was escorting Corcoran to the East Coast. He disappeared during the plane change at Metro Airport. We’re still looking for him.”

“It’s a big club,” I said. “We ought to have a secret handshake. What about Corcoran’s son?”

LeJohn spoke up. “That’s how he lost me. The boy was along. He had to go to the bathroom, and he didn’t want anyone but his father in with him. I went into the bookstore for a magazine. When I got back to the men’s room, it was empty.”

“The old bathroom trick. Tell me, did Corcoran ever happen to mention that the boy was in his mother’s custody and that you were acting as accomplices in his abduction?”

“He seemed happy enough,” said LeJohn, glaring. “Excited about the trip.”

His partner laid manicured nails on his arm, calming him. To me: “It was a condition of Corcoran’s testimony that the boy go with him to his new life. Legally, our compliance is indefensible. Morally — well, his evidence is expected to put some important felons behind bars.”

“Yeah.” I tipped some smoke out my nostrils. “I guess you got too busy to clue in Mrs. Corcoran.”

“That was an oversight. We’ll correct it while we’re here.”

“What did you mean when you said it was a big club?” LeJohn pressed me. “Who else is looking for Corcoran?”

I replayed the scene in my office. Lieutenant Winkle grunted. “Monroe Boyd and Little Delbert Riddle,” he said. “I had one or both of them in here half a dozen times when I was with Criminal Intelligence. Extortion, suspicion of murder. Nothing stuck. So they’re jobbing themselves out now. I’ll put out a pickup on them if you want to press charges.”

“They’d be out the door before you finished the paperwork. I’ll just tack the price of a new old desk and a picture frame on to the expense sheet. The bullet hole’s good for business.”

“How’d they know you were working for Mrs. Corcoran?” Stendahl asked.

“The same way you did, maybe. Only they were better at it.”

He rose. “We’ll need whatever you’ve got on them in your files, Lieutenant. Walker, you’re out of it.”

“Can I report to Mrs. Corcoran?”

“Yes. Yes, please do. It will save us some time. You’ve been very cooperative.”

He extended his hand. I went on crushing out my cigarette in the ashtray on Winkle’s desk until he got tired and lowered it. Then I left.

Millicent Arnold owned a condominium off Twelve Mile Road, within sight of the glass-and-steel skyscrapers of the Southfield Civic Center sticking up above the predominantly horizontal suburb like new teeth in an old mouth. A slim brunette with a pageboy haircut answered the bell wearing a pink angora sweater over black harem pants and gold sandals with high heels on her bare feet. Charlotte Corcoran might have looked like her before she had lost too much weight.

“Amos Walker? Yes, you are. My God, you look like a private eye. Come in.”

I kept my mouth zipped at that one and walked past her into a living room paved with orange shag and furnished in green plush and glass. It should have looked like hell. I decided it was Millie Arnold standing in it that made it work. She hung my hat on an ornamental peg near the door.

“Charlotte’s putting herself together. She was asleep when you called.”

“She seems to sleep a lot.”

“Her doctor in Austin prescribed a mild sedative. It’s almost the only thing that’s gotten her through this past month. You said you had some news.” She indicated the sofa.

I took it. It was like sitting on a sponge. “The story hangs some lefts and rights,” I said.

She sat next to me, trapping her hands between her knees. She wasn’t wearing a ring. “My cousin and I are close,” she said. “More like sisters. You can speak freely.”

“I didn’t mean that, although it was coming. I just don’t want to have to tell it twice. I didn’t like it when I heard it.”

“That bad, huh?”

I said nothing. She tucked her feet under her and propped an elbow on the back of the sofa and her cheek in her hand. “I’m curious about something. I recommended Reliance to Charlotte. She came back with you.”

“The case came down my street. Krell said she was referred to him by one of his cash customers.”

She nodded. “Kester Clothiers on Lahser. I’m a buyer. I typed Charlotte’s letter of reference on their stationery. The chain retains Reliance for security, employee theft and like that.”

“I guess the hours are good.”

“I’m off this week. We’re between seasons.” She paused. “You know, you’re sort of attractive.”

I was looking at her again when Charlotte Corcoran came in. She had on a maroon robe over a blue nightgown, rich material that bagged on her and made her wrists and ankles look even bonier than they were. Backless slippers. When she saw me her step quickened. “You found them? Is Tommy all right?”

I took a deep breath and sat her down in a green plush chair with tassels on the arms and told it.

“Wow,” said Millie after a long silence.

I was watching her cousin. She remained motionless for a moment, then fumbled cigarettes and a book of matches out of her robe pocket. She tried to strike a match, said “Damn!” and threw the book on the floor. I picked it up and struck one and held the flame for her. She drew in a lungful and blew a plume at the ceiling. “The bastard,” she said. “No wonder he never had time for me. He was too busy making himself rich.”

“You didn’t know about his testifying?” I asked.

“He came through with his child support on time. That’s all I heard from him. It explains why he never came by for his weekends with Tommy.” She looked at me. “Is my son in danger?”

“He is if he’s with his father. Boyd and Riddle didn’t look like lovers of children. But the feds are on it.”

“Is this the same federal government that endowed a study to find out why convicts want to escape prison?”

“Someone caught it on a bad day,” I said.

“How much to go on with the investigation, Mr. Walker?”

“Nothing, Mrs. Corcoran. I just wanted to hear you say it.”

She smiled then, a little.

“What progress have you made?” asked Millie.

“I’m chasing a lead now. If it gets any slimmer it won’t be a lead at all. But it beats reading bumps.” I got the package of prints out of my coat pocket, separated the original of Corcoran and Tommy from the others, and gave it back to Mrs. Corcoran. “I’ve got twenty-five more now, and at least that many places to show them. When I run out I’ll try something else.”

She looked at the picture. Seeing only one person in it. Then she put it in her robe pocket. “I think you’re a good man, Mr. Walker.”

Millie Arnold saw me to the door. “She’s right, you know,” she said, when I had it open. “You are good.”

Attractive, too.

There was a gymnasium right around the corner on Greenfield. No one I talked to there recognized either of the faces in the picture, but I left it with the manager anyway along with my card and tried the next place on my list. I had them grouped by area with Southfield at the top. I hit two places in Birmingham, one in Clawson, then swung west and worked my way home in a loop through Farmington and Livonia. A jock in Redford Township with muscles on his T-shirt thought Corcoran looked familiar but couldn’t finger him.

“There’s fifty dollars in it for you when you do,” I said. He flexed his trapezius and said he’d work on it.

I’d missed lunch, so I stopped in Detroit for an early supper, hit a few more places downtown, and went back to the office to read my mail and call my service for messages. I had none, and the mail was all bills and junk. I locked up and went home. That night I dreamed I was Johnny Appleseed, but instead of trees every seed I threw sprang up grinning Monroe Boyds and hulking Delbert Riddles.

My fat photographer neighbor greeted me in the foyer of my building the next morning. He was chewing on what looked like the same Marlboro butt, and he hadn’t been standing any closer to his razor than usual. “Some noise yesterday,” he said. “Starting a range up there or what?”

“No, I shot a shutterbug for asking too many questions.” I passed him on the stairs, no small feat.

I entered my office with my gun drawn, felt stupid when I found it empty, then saw the shattered glass from the poster frame and felt a little better. I swept it up and called my service. I had a message.

“Walker?” asked a male voice at the number left for me. “Tunk Herman, remember?”

“The guy in Redford,” I said.

“Yeah. That fifty still good?”

“What’ve you got?”

“I couldn’t stop thinking about that dude in the picture, so I went through the records of members. Thought maybe his name would jump out at me if I heard it, you know? Well, it did. James Muldoon. He’s a weekender. I don’t see him usually because I don’t work weekends, except that one time. I got an address for him.”

I drew a pencil out of the cup on my desk. It shook a little.

It was spring now and no argument. The air had a fresh damp smell and the sun felt warm on my back as I leaned on the open-air telephone booth, or maybe it was my disposition coming through from inside. Charlotte Corcoran answered on the eighth ring. Her voice sounded foggy.

“Walker, Mrs. Corcoran,” I said. “Come get your son.”

“What did you say? I took a pill a little while ago. It sounded—”

“It wasn’t the pill. I’m looking at him now. Blond and blue, about four feet—”

The questions came fast, tumbling all over one another, too tangled to pull apart. I held the receiver away from my ear and waited. Down the block, on the other side of Pembroke, a little boy in blue overalls with a bright yellow mop was bouncing a ball off the wall of a two-story white frame house that went back forever. While I was watching, the front door came open and a dark-haired man beckoned him inside. Corcoran’s physique was less impressive in street clothes.

“Tommy’s fine,” I said, when his mother wound down. “Meet me here.” I gave her the address. “Put Millie on and I’ll give her directions.”

“Millie’s out shopping. I don’t have a car.”

“Take a cab.”

“Cab?”

“Forget it. You’ve got too much of that stuff in your pipes to come out alone. I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.”

It was all of that. The road crews were at work, and everyone who had a car and no job was out enjoying the season. I left the engine running in front of the brick complex and bounced up the wrought-iron steps to where Millie’s door stood open. I rapped and went inside. Charlotte Corcoran was sitting on the sofa in her robe and nightgown.

“That’s out of style for the street this year,” I said. “Get into something motherly.”

“Plenty of time for that.”

I felt my face get tired at the sound of the voice behind me. I turned around slowly. Millie Arnold was standing on the blind side of the door in a white summer dress with a red belt around her trim waist and a brown .32 Colt automatic in her right hand pointing at me.

“You don’t look surprised.” She nudged the door shut with the toe of a red pump.

“It was there,” I said, raising my hands. “It just needed a kick. I had to wonder how Boyd and Riddle got on to me so fast. They couldn’t have been following Mrs. Corcoran without Stendahl and LeJohn knowing. Someone had to tell them.”

“It goes back farther than that. I made two calls to Texas after spotting Frank at the mall. The first was to his old partners. I can’t tell you how much they appreciated it. If I did, I’d be in trouble with the IRS. Then I called Charlotte. Throw the gun down on the rug, Mr. Walker. It made an ugly dent in my sofa when you were here yesterday.”

I unholstered the .38 slowly. It hit the shag half-way between us with a thump. “Then, when Mrs. Corcoran arrived, you talked her into hiring the biggest investigative firm you knew. You figured to let them do the work of finding Corcoran. It probably meant a discount on Boyd and Riddle’s fee.”

“It also guaranteed me a bonus when Frank got dead,” she said. “Krell giving the case to you threw me, but it worked out just fine. When I got back from shopping and Charlotte gave me the good news, I just couldn’t wait to call our mutual friends and share it.”

“My cousin,” said Mrs. Corcoran.

Millie showed her teeth. Very white and a little sharp. “You married a hundred-thou-a-year executive. I’d have settled for that. But if it wasn’t enough for him, why should what I make be enough for me? I met his little playmates that time I visited you in Austin. I had a hunch there was money to be made. When I called, they told me just how and why.”

“What happens to us?” I asked.

“You’ll both stay here with me until that phone rings. It’ll be Boyd giving me thumbs up. I’ll have to lock you in the bathroom when I leave, but you’ll find a way out soon enough. You can have the condo, Charlotte. It isn’t paid for.”

“The boy had nothing to do with Corcoran’s scam,” I said. “You’re putting him in front of the guns too.”

“Rich kid. What do I owe him?”

“They won’t hurt Tommy.” Mrs. Corcoran got up.

“Sit down.” The gun jerked.

But she was moving. I threw my arm in front of her. She knocked it aside and charged. Millie squeezed the trigger. It clicked. Her cousin was all over her then, kicking and shrieking and clawing at her eyes. It was interesting to see. Millie was healthier, but she was standing between a mother and her child. When the gun came up to slap the side of Mrs. Corcoran’s head, I tipped the odds, reversing ends on the Smith & Wesson I’d scooped up from the rug and tapping Millie behind the ear. Her knees gave then and she trickled through her cousin’s grasp and puddled on the floor.

I reached down and pulled her eyelids. “She’s good for an hour,” I said. “Call nine one one. Give them the address on Pembroke.”

While she was doing that, breathing heavily, I picked up the automatic and ran back the action. Millie had forgotten to rack a cartridge into the chamber.

Approaching Pembroke, we heard shots.

I jammed my heel down on the accelerator and we rounded the corner doing fifty. Charlotte Corcoran, still in her robe, gripped the door handle to stay out of my lap. Her profile was sharp against the window, thrust forward like a mother hawk’s.

There was no sign of the police. As we entered Corcoran/Muldoon’s block, something flashed in an open upstairs window, followed closely by a hard flat bang. A much louder shot answered it from the front yard. There a huge black figure in an overcoat too short for him crouched behind a lilac bush beside the driveway. His .44 magnum was as long as my thigh but looked like a kid’s water pistol in his great fist.

“Hang on!” I spun the wheel hard and floored the pedal.

The Olds’s engine roared and we bumped over the curb, diagonaling across the lawn. Del Riddle straightened at the noise and turned, bringing the magnum around with him. I saw his mouth open wide and then his body filled the windshield and I felt the impact. We bucked up over the porch stoop and suddenly the world was a deafening place of tearing wood and exploding glass. The car stopped then, although my foot was still pasted to the floor with the accelerator pedal underneath and the engine continued to whine. The rear wheels spun shrilly. I cut the ignition. A piece of glass fell somewhere with a clank.

I looked at my passenger. She was slumped down in the seat with her knees against the dash. “All right?”

“I think so.” She lowered her knees.

“Stay here.”

The door didn’t want to open. I shoved hard and it squawked against the buckled fender. I climbed out behind the Smith & Wesson in my right hand. I was in a living room with broken glass on the carpet and pieces of shredded siding slung over the chairs and sofa. Riddle lay spreadeagled on his face across the car’s hood and windshield, groaning. His legs dangled like broken straws in front of the smashed grille.

“Ditch the piece, trooper.”

My eyes were still adjusting to the dim light indoors. I focused on Monroe Boyd baring his teeth in front of a hallway running to the back of the house. He had one arm around Tommy Corcoran’s chest under the arms, holding him kicking above the floor. His other hand had a switchblade in it with the point pressing the boy’s jugular.

“Tommy!” Charlotte Corcoran had gotten out on the passenger’s side. She took a step and stopped. Boyd bettered his grip.

“Mommy,” said the boy.

“What about it, trooper? Seven or seventy, they all bleed the same.”

I relaxed my hold on the gun.

A shot slammed the walls and a blue hole appeared under Boyd’s left eye. He let go of Tommy and lay down. Twitched once.

I looked up at Frank Corcoran crouched at the top of the staircase to the second story. His arm was stretched out full length with his gun in it, leaking smoke. He glanced at Tommy. “I told you to stay upstairs with me.”

“I left my ball here.” The boy pouted, then spotted Boyd’s body. “Funny man.”

Mrs. Corcoran flew forward and knelt to throw her arms around her son. Corcoran saw her for the first time, said “Charlotte?” and looked at me. The gun came around.

“Stop waving that thing,” his ex-wife said, hugging Tommy. “He’s with me.”

Corcoran hesitated, then lowered the weapon. He surveyed the damage. “What do I tell the rental agent?”

I heard the sirens then.