Motor City Blue by Loren D. Estleman

Lieutenant Alderdyce was on another line and put me on hold. Five lonely minutes later I got John.
    “Got another number for you,” I said. “I may be getting paranoid, but I think my office is being watched.”
    “So what’s new?” He sounded harried.
    I gave him the number. Paper rustled, which could have meant that he was either writing it down or mopping up a coffee spill with an old report. That’s why I don’t trust telephones.
    “Anything else?”
    “Yeah. What’s the Kramer burn doing under glass?”
    “Forget it.” It came too fast.
    “Come on, John. You know I’m good for it.”
    “Goddamn it, I said forget it!” He caught himself shouting. He turned down the volume but left the intensity where it was. “Walker, I’m sick to Christ of you sticking your snooper into police business. I’m warning you, stay out of the Kramer case or I’ll see they yank your ticket for good!” He banged off.
    I replaced the receiver as if it were a live bomb, zipped the top off a fresh pack of Winstons, and sat and smoked and wondered. I tried the number for Aphrodite Records, just for fun, and got a recording that told me Mr. Zacharias was out for a while, would I please wait for the beep and leave my name and number? I didn’t wait. I snatched up the morning Free Press and attempted to interest myself in Part One of a windy series on the life of the late Freeman Shanks. A stirring account of his struggle to survive a diabetic childhood. It didn’t stir me. Halfway through the second paragraph the door to my outer office opened and closed. When my visitor’s shadow appeared on the pebbled glass of the inner door I cranked down the drawbridge.
    It was Rosecranz, the building super. He was a little man with a fraying face and scruffy hair from which all the color had run years ago and a posture so stooped he seemed to be lugging two thousand years of misplaced guilt in the bib of his overalls.
    “Hope I ain’t caught you busy, Mr. Walker,” he squeaked. His vocal cords seemed always to be in need of a lube.
    “Nobody’s timing is that good, Mr. Rosecranz.”
    “I just wanted to remind you of the clause in your lease that says you can’t change what’s on the windows.”
    I turned around to look at the single square window behind me, partially hidden behind the dusty, half-drawn Venetian blinds. Then I turned back to give him the same blank expression.
    “That fellow I let in an hour ago,” he said helpfully. “The one come in to measure for curtains. Your lease says you got to stick with them blinds. How’d it look to the folks outside if every office had something different on its windows?”
    “What did this fellow look like?”
    He frowned. “Not tall, not short. Dark hair. Kind of average. Looked like a lot of other fellows.”
    “That’s probably what makes him average. Black or white?”
    “Oh, he was white. I’d of said so if he was otherwise. He had on a blue suit, though, which struck me as kind of queer.”
    “That it was blue?”
    “That it was a suit. Where would he carry his folding rule?”
    I thanked him and told him not to worry about the blinds. After he left I sat and smoked and crushed out the stub in the glass ashtray on my desk. I looked in all the drawers and underneath them. I checked out the file cabinet. I crawled on my hands and knees along the floor and ran my fingers over the baseboards. I stood on the desk and peered inside the glass mantle of the overhead fixture. I found a gum wrapper and six dead flies. Finally I sat back down, lifted the telephone receiver, and unscrewed the mouthpiece. A disc about the size of a dime and twice as thick was taped inside the rim.
    I didn’t touch it. I screwed the whole thing back together and cradled it and lit up and sat and smoked and stared at the wall on the other side of which, three stories down, two men in a green Mercury were staring at the door of this building. Then I grabbed my hat and coat and headed for the