Джордж Хиггинс: The New Black Mask (No 4)

“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.