Elmore Leonard - City Primeval

“To go the bathroom,” Hunter said. “Maureen, let’s get out of here and find a motel.”

She said, “Let’s see if we can get a positive I.D. on the other car first.”

Hunter said, “You think you’re gonna impress me with that detective shit, you’re crazy. You’re a girl , Maureen.”

“I know I’m a girl,” Maureen said. She smiled easily and was never shocked, by words or bullet wounds. She had the healthy look of a brown-haired, 110-pound marathon runner and had been a homicide detective five of her fourteen years with the Detroit Police Department. Hunter would remind Maureen she was a girl. Or Hunter would tell her she was just one of the dicks. Hunter liked to play with Maureen and see her perfect teeth when she smiled.

Bryl used his flashlight to poke her arm and said, “What other car, Maureen?”

They waited as Raymond Cruz walked over to them from the Plymouth. He said, “Who wants another one?” Keeping his voice low. “Twenty-five-to-thirty-year-old white female, no I.D. Well dressed, shot, possibly raped, burn marks-what look like burn marks-on the inside of her thighs. Found her in Palmer Park half hour ago.”

“Insect bites,” Hunter said. “They can look like burn marks. Remember the guy-what was his name-the GM exec. Looked like he’d been burned, it turned out to be ant bites.”

“Somebody lying in the weeds a couple of days, maybe,” Raymond said. “This one’s fresh. Car from the 12th spotted a guy out on the golf course, two o’clock in the morning. They put a light on him and he runs. Start chasing him and almost trip over the woman’s body.”

Bryl said, “They get the guy?”

“Not yet, but they think he’s still in the park.”

Hunter said, “Tell ’em they want to I.D. the lady, go across Woodward-what’s the name of that place?-where all the hookers and the fags hang out.”

“I asked Herzog, he said no, she doesn’t look like a hooker. Probably she was dumped there. So-we can have her if we want. Herzog says how’s it look here? I told him I don’t know, we could be around all day and still use some help.”

Maureen said, “We’ve got a second car at the scene. Young guy hanging around-wait’ll you hear the story.”

Raymond took time to give her a warm look that was almost a smile. “I turn my back a few minutes, Maureen, what do you do? Come up with a witness. Is he any good?”

“I think you’re gonna like him,” Maureen said, opening her notebook.

In his statement Gary Sovey, twenty-eight, explained how his car had been stolen the previous week and how a friend of his happened to see it this evening in the parking lot of the Intimate Lounge on John R. Gary said he went over there with a baseball bat to wait for whoever stole it to come out of the lounge and get in the car, a ’78 VW Scirocco. Gary stated that he waited in the vicinity of Local 771 UAW-CIO headquarters, which is between the Intimate Lounge and the American La France Fire Equipment Company. At approximately 1:30 A.M. he saw the Silver Mark VI traveling at a high rate of speed south on John R with a black Buick like nailed to its tail. He heard tires squeal and thought the two cars had turned the corner onto Remington. He was on the north side of Local 771, in other words away from the American La France parking lot, so he didn’t actually see what happened. But he did hear something that sounded like gunshots. Five of them that he could still hear if he concentrated. Pow, pow, pow, pow, pow. About a minute later he thought he heard what sounded like a woman screaming, but he isn’t positive about that part. Was he sure the black car was a Buick? Yes. In fact, Gary said, it was an ’80 Riviera and he would bet it had red pin-striping on it.

“The part about the woman screaming-” Raymond stopped. “First-did he get the guy who stole his car?”

Maureen said it turned out the car had been there two or three days, abandoned, and the Intimate Lounge owner was about to call the police. So Gary was still mad.

She said, “I like the part about the woman screaming too. We can talk to Gary about it some more.”

Raymond said, “If there was a woman with the judge and the guy’s gonna shoot her anyway, why didn’t he do it here?”

Hunter said, “Took her to the park, fool around a little first.”

Bryl said, “I love to listen to you guys. You take the bare possibility a woman was even here and you make her the one found in the park. Two separate shootings with no apparent nexus at all except they were both shot about the same time. The judge here, the woman four, five miles away in Palmer Park.”

“Across the street from Palmer Woods,” Raymond said, “where the judge lived.”

It stopped Bryl for a moment. He said, “Okay, you want to believe it, that’s fine. If there’s a connection we’ll know by this afternoon, but right now I’m not gonna jump up in the air and get all excited. You know why?”

As he spoke they separated, moving aside to let the morgue wagon roll out to the street and Raymond didn’t hear the rest of what Bryl said. He didn’t have to. Norb Bryl wasn’t going to jump up in the air because he was Norb Bryl-who weighed evidence before giving an opinion and kept hunches to himself. He would say, “We don’t even know absolutely for sure from the medical examiner the cause of death and you’re talking about a nexus.” Bryl had established his image.

Raymond Cruz was still working on his.

Thirty-six years old-what do you want to be when you grow up? He wanted to be a police officer. He was a police officer. But what kind? (This is where it became gray, hazy.) Uniformed? Precinct Commander? Administrative? Deputy Chief some day with a big office, drapes-shit, why not work for General Motors?

He could be dry-serious like Norbert Bryl, he could be dry-cool like Wendell Robinson, he could be crude and a little crazy like Jerry Hunter… or he could appear quietly unaffected, stand with hands in the pockets of his dark suit, expression solemn beneath the gunfighter mustache… and the girl from the News would see it as his Dodge City pose: the daguerreotype peace officer, now packing a snub-nosed .38 Smith with rubberbands around the grip instead of a hogleg .44.

How did he explain himself to her? Pictures could jump in his head, as they did right now, clamor for him to tie in the two killings, because he knew beyond any doubt there was a nexus and ballistics and lipstick on cigarette butts would prove it… Or, tests would prove nothing and that’s why there were bored, cynical policemen who seldom ever hoped and were never disappointed… if you wanted to get into poses. Tell her there were all different kinds of policemen just as there were all different kinds of priests and baseball players. Why would she tell him he was posing? Playing a role, she said. You had to know you were doing it before you could be accused of posing. The gunship colonel in that Vietnam movie who wore the old-fashioned cavalry hat-what’s his name, Robert Duvall-strutting across the beach, taking his shirt off to go surfing while the VC were shooting at him- that was posing, for Christ’s sake.

Raymond Cruz said to his sergeants, watching the morgue wagon drive off, “Who wants to go to Palmer Park?… Maureen?”

Alone together in the blue Plymouth neither of them said a word until they were almost to the park. Maureen assumed Raymond was going over the case, sorting out evidence, understandably withdrawn. Which was fine. She never felt obliged to talk, make up things, if there was nothing to say.

Maureen Downey wrote a paper in the ninth grade entitled “Why I Want To Be A Policewoman Someday.” (“Because it really sounds exciting…”) She had to leave Nashville, Michigan, to do it, entered the Detroit Police Academy and was assigned, for nine years, to Sex Crimes. Jerry Hunter would ask her why she supposed she was chosen for it and study her through half-closed eyes. He would ask her about deviates with weird fetishes and Maureen would say, “How about a guy who licks honey off of girls’ feet?” Hunter would say, “What’s wrong with that?… Come on, Maureen, give me a really weird one.” And Maureen would say, “I’m afraid if I give you a raunchy one you’ll try it.”