The Midnight Man by Loren D. Estleman Page B

see if they didn’t vary enough. Science really ought to study a policeman’s brain if they can ever get one untangled. I could hear cops yelling outside as I talked. The crowd was growing.
    “Busted neck was enough to kill her, the M.E. says,” put in the sergeant afterward. “From a blow to the face, if that makes any sense. Spun her head around farther than it’s supposed to go. I had to drag that much out of him. He won’t say for sure till the autopsy.”
    Alderdyce grunted. “The medical examiners’ lament. Time we had another conversation with Mr. Bassett.”
    “ ‘Another’?” I echoed.
    Hornet flashed capped teeth in a quick grin. “He stopped in at headquarters when he hit town. Just like the old bounty men used to do at the marshal’s office. Horsey as hell, ain’t he?”
    “You said Warren?” The lieutenant got his note pad from an inside pocket.
    I nodded. “At least, that’s where his trailer was earlier this afternoon. The K-Mart parking lot. I guess he likes to save his money for ammunition.”
    He wrote it down, tore out the page and gave it to the sergeant. “Get on the horn to the Warren Police and have them send a couple of men out there. I want that cowboy in my office today.” To me: “Stick close. I want you there, too, to look at pictures.”
    Hornet was first out the door. There was a lot of shouting going on now, only part of it by cops. The street looked like the overflow from Cobo Hall during an Aretha Franklin concert. Black faces everywhere. On his way through, Alderdyce half-turned and said, “About that cuffing. I was out of bounds. That doesn’t mean you didn’t have it coming.”
    I waited for the kicker. Some of the spectators had begun chanting civil rights slogans from the sixties.
    “You in a mood for advice?” He raised his voice above the din.
    “Everyone’s Judge Hardy today,” I said loudly. “Do I have a choice?”
    “No.”
    “Then I guess I’m in a mood to listen.”
    He scrutinized me, his eyes white slashes in his shiny black face. Then he nodded a nod that if I had blinked I would have missed completely. “I guess that’s as much as I’ll ever be able to expect from you. If I remember right you were raised Catholic.”
    “Episcopalian. Now I’m an agnostic. Atheists don’t ask questions I can’t answer and believers don’t answer questions I don’t ask. They both think there’s hope for me.”
    “Who cares? Just light a candle, if that’s what Episcopalians do, and pray that your playmates from last night chilled that girl. Because if they didn’t, guess who’s got the best motive in their eyes. There’s no appeal from the court of instant reprisal.”
    “Catchy,” I said. “Any line on Smith yet?”
    He said something unworthy of him and plunged into the sea of surging bodies.
    The boys from the Tactical Mobile Unit had drawn a broken line of sawhorses around the area where my car was parked and stationed officers in the spaces between. They were young, and held absolute faith in the varnished brown nightsticks in their hands. No one had told them during training that more officers had been beaten with their own sticks than had beaten others, or that at the first sign of riot the experienced cop’s instinctive reaction was to hurl his stick as far away from him as he could. Alderdyce got out his folder and stuck it in his outer breast pocket with the badge showing. I had a badge too, from the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department, but it was honorary and wouldn’t have gotten me past the ticket window at a Don Knotts film festival. The lieutenant instructed the uniforms to let me through. The clamor of voices was terrific.
    A group of strangers in suits and sport jackets were gathered around the open trunk, badges twinkling in the slanted afternoon sunlight. One, a slim youth straight out of the 1955 high school yearbook—complete with crewcut hair and horn-rimmed glasses—was putting instruments away in a shiny black metal