Never Street by Loren D. Estleman

Author:Loren D. Estleman [Estleman, Loren D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9781453220580
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1998-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-one

THEY HAD REPAINTED the squad rooms since the last city administration, covering the tough old government green with a not entirely unpleasant shade of eggshell, but they had overdone it. The walls, baseboards, ceiling, and even the switchplates in the interrogation room were all the same color. After two hours I wondered when I was expected to hatch.

I was sitting on a steel folding chair drawn up to a yellow oak table freckled with old cigarette burns, initials, and one brave attempt to carve PROUST SUCKS, aborted just after the u, probably by some civil servant with a fist the size of a hog. Not that the perps in Iroquois Heights were especially literary; Mark Proust had been the local chief of police until his involvement in a scheme to pit incarcerated suspects against one another in wrestling matches (gambling encouraged) removed him from office. I had had something to do with his exposure, but no one there had gone out of his way to express gratitude to me this night.

First I had been questioned by a pair of detectives I remembered vaguely from the Proust years, one of whom wanted to adopt me. The other indicated that his appetite wouldn’t have suffered if I hemorrhaged farm machinery.

That was the drill in every police department since Byzantium, but in Iroquois Heights they did it with feeling, especially the hemorrhaging part. Then a watch captain named Malloy, small and neat with brushed hair, French cuffs, and a gold collar pin under the knot of his club tie, had come in and sat down on the other side of the table and stared at me for ten minutes. I admit it, I blinked. I had spent most of the last seventeen hours on my feet and my eyes grated like rusty doorknobs when I moved them. Satisfied, he got up and left without having said a word. For the next half hour I was left alone while the squad observed me through the two-way glass in the door for subversive behavior. I felt like the new puppy in the house.

Then the cavalry came.

John Alderdyce walked through the door and used up all the space in the room, leaving only the doorway for Mary Ann Thaler to stand in. The inspector wore a lightweight blue summer suit, single-breasted to accommodate his underarm rig. The lieutenant from Felony Homicide had on a turquoise silk jacket, gabardine slacks, and open-toed shoes with heels low enough for running through alleys after fleeing suspects. In her hairband and glasses she could have passed for a coed. She carried her small clasp purse in her left hand, with the latch open. I wouldn’t have bet which one of them would win in a fast-draw contest.

It struck me then that I had never seen both of them in the same room at the same time.

“This shoots my theory to pieces,” I said. “I’d have sworn you were one and the same person.”

Alderdyce crossed his arms and leaned his broad back against the wall.

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