Джордж Хиггинс - The New Black Mask (No 4)

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?”