door, a two-foot aluminum Christmas tree shared a small library table with a Mr. Coffee machine, but in place of the usual ornaments, front-and-profile mug shots dangled from the branches. Police humor.
Zorn rapped once and we went into a small office with a gray carpet, the usual desk, file cabinet, and two chairs, no other furniture. The desk was just a desk holding up the usual desk stuff and a nameplate reading assistant chief mark proust. The plasterboard walls were hung with framed citations, one of those academy class pictures with rows of visored adolescents in sepia ovals, and a framed front page from the Iroquois Heights Spectator bearing a photograph of Proust shaking hands with the mayor under the headline mark proust named assistant chief.
I figured I’d remember the name.
“Walker, Chief,” said Zorn.
Proust took his time finishing the police report he was reading at his desk and looked up at me the way you look at a picture that needs straightening. His hair was more white than gray now, very thin at the temples from years spent rubbing against his old fedora, but his long face was the same, pale as paper pulp and sagging into jowls and deep pouches under his eyes. He was dressing better these days, in blue serge with a high shine and a gray-and-red-striped tie. When I knew him it was baggy gray wool and hand-painted nooses from the state fair.
He honored me for a long moment with his dishwater gaze. Then he smiled slowly with just his lowers. “Welcome to the suburbs, shamus. When was it we caught each other’s act last? Wasn’t it that time your old company commander got himself burned?”
“That’s it,” I said. “I bet the rubber hoses are lonely since you left the department.”
“Always the card.” He looked at Zorn. “You frisk him?”
The sergeant looked surprised. “You didn’t say bring him in hard, Chief. He ain’t under arrest.”
“Yeah, right.”
He made it sound like a temporary oversight. I wasn’t packing anyway. My unregistered German meat-chopper was still in the safe in my office, and I’d left the Smith & Wesson locked in the desk. There was a gun or two lying around the house, but when cops issue an invitation it doesn’t include your hardware.
Proust glanced down at my name on the report on his desk. In my work you learn to read upside-down. “You did a job a week ago for a party named Broderick?”
“You know that already,” I said.
“You found his son here in town?”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“We didn’t say you did. Yet. Sit down.”
I was about to decline politely when the only other chair in the room was shoved against the back of my legs and Zorn’s ham hand dropped to my shoulder and pushed me down onto the hard seat. Proust got up and strolled around the desk with his hands in his pants pockets. This was going to be interesting. He’d perfected his interrogation technique working for the old Detroit STRESS (Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets) crackdown unit, the one dissolved by the present administration after the body count made national headlines.
“Christmas is a season for surprises,” he began. “It started with Mrs. Charles Esterhazy of Grosse Pointe, who decided to drop by one Paula Royce’s place here in town about seven to wish her son the compliments of the holiday. She’s booked a flight with her husband to Jamaica at eight-fifteen. The front door’s locked and no one answers her knock, so she goes around back and tries the door there but it’s locked too. So she peeks in through the kitchen window, and guess what she sees.”
“Stockings hung by the mantel with care.”
He went on as if I hadn’t said anything. “She sees her son, one Bud Broderick, sprawled in his own brains on the kitchen floor. Her husband’s waiting in the car and she runs screaming back to him. He gets on the horn to the mayor, who’s a fellow member of his country club, gets him out of bed. The mayor turns around and gets the chief
Zorn rapped once and we went into a small office with a gray carpet, the usual desk, file cabinet, and two chairs, no other furniture. The desk was just a desk holding up the usual desk stuff and a nameplate reading assistant chief mark proust. The plasterboard walls were hung with framed citations, one of those academy class pictures with rows of visored adolescents in sepia ovals, and a framed front page from the Iroquois Heights Spectator bearing a photograph of Proust shaking hands with the mayor under the headline mark proust named assistant chief.
I figured I’d remember the name.
“Walker, Chief,” said Zorn.
Proust took his time finishing the police report he was reading at his desk and looked up at me the way you look at a picture that needs straightening. His hair was more white than gray now, very thin at the temples from years spent rubbing against his old fedora, but his long face was the same, pale as paper pulp and sagging into jowls and deep pouches under his eyes. He was dressing better these days, in blue serge with a high shine and a gray-and-red-striped tie. When I knew him it was baggy gray wool and hand-painted nooses from the state fair.
He honored me for a long moment with his dishwater gaze. Then he smiled slowly with just his lowers. “Welcome to the suburbs, shamus. When was it we caught each other’s act last? Wasn’t it that time your old company commander got himself burned?”
“That’s it,” I said. “I bet the rubber hoses are lonely since you left the department.”
“Always the card.” He looked at Zorn. “You frisk him?”
The sergeant looked surprised. “You didn’t say bring him in hard, Chief. He ain’t under arrest.”
“Yeah, right.”
He made it sound like a temporary oversight. I wasn’t packing anyway. My unregistered German meat-chopper was still in the safe in my office, and I’d left the Smith & Wesson locked in the desk. There was a gun or two lying around the house, but when cops issue an invitation it doesn’t include your hardware.
Proust glanced down at my name on the report on his desk. In my work you learn to read upside-down. “You did a job a week ago for a party named Broderick?”
“You know that already,” I said.
“You found his son here in town?”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“We didn’t say you did. Yet. Sit down.”
I was about to decline politely when the only other chair in the room was shoved against the back of my legs and Zorn’s ham hand dropped to my shoulder and pushed me down onto the hard seat. Proust got up and strolled around the desk with his hands in his pants pockets. This was going to be interesting. He’d perfected his interrogation technique working for the old Detroit STRESS (Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets) crackdown unit, the one dissolved by the present administration after the body count made national headlines.
“Christmas is a season for surprises,” he began. “It started with Mrs. Charles Esterhazy of Grosse Pointe, who decided to drop by one Paula Royce’s place here in town about seven to wish her son the compliments of the holiday. She’s booked a flight with her husband to Jamaica at eight-fifteen. The front door’s locked and no one answers her knock, so she goes around back and tries the door there but it’s locked too. So she peeks in through the kitchen window, and guess what she sees.”
“Stockings hung by the mantel with care.”
He went on as if I hadn’t said anything. “She sees her son, one Bud Broderick, sprawled in his own brains on the kitchen floor. Her husband’s waiting in the car and she runs screaming back to him. He gets on the horn to the mayor, who’s a fellow member of his country club, gets him out of bed. The mayor turns around and gets the chief
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