Lady Yesterday by Loren D. Estleman Read Free Book Online Page B

the record off the turntable and held it out.
    “ ‘Vocal by Glen Dexter,’ “ I read. “What happened to her, I wonder?”
    “Went to dope and died happily ever after, probably.” He put it back in its sleeve and laid it atop the console. “What’s Joe Wooding like?”
    “Old and scared and alone. His wife left him and he shut up her ghost in the house and moved into a trailer out back. He’s dying.”
    “I thought he was dead already. It makes you feel cheated.”
    “You’re starting to remind me of him.”
    That shook him to his toes. He changed hands on the bottle.
    “What happened?” I said.
    “She says I never talk. What am I supposed to do, come home and say, ‘You’ll never guess who I found carved into four manageable pieces and individually wrapped in Hefty bags today’? Wives, they watch some bitch with a Ph.D. on television and think talking fixes everything. Last summer we body-bagged two husbands, a wife, and a family of three because they started talking. Must be nice to have a place like Flint to run to.”
    I said nothing. He drank.
    “I knew this prowl-car officer, Krebbs. Fat slob, his uniforms never fit him. Chief suspended him under consideration for dismissal after he weighed in at fifteen pounds over the limit, but he took his thirty years to the DPOA and got himself reinstated. He went through two wives in six years and there was talk he was shaking down some merchants on his patrol for protection. Everybody hated the bastard.
    “Last month he was making an undercover arrest with some suits in a safe house on Fort Street when a rookie from the First Precinct battered his way in and opened fire, thought it was a heist. Fucking little hot dog firing birdshot out of a forty-four mag. Krebbs blew his head off, but not before the little fucker put two good detectives on permanent disability. Department held a hearing and dropped Krebbs from roll call like a hot rivet. They wanted to bring charges against him for manslaughter, only somebody in IAD had placed him under felony advisement and you can’t do both under the Constitution.”
    “I read about it.”
    “Week or so later Krebbs got drunk and ran his car into an abutment on the Jeffries. State cops said there was no sign he’d made any attempt to stop. A brother or somebody buried him in Wyandotte. No uniforms, no mayor or chief or inspectors at the funeral. He wasn’t a cop anymore, see. The little hot dog with the magnum got the works.
    “We used to stand tight,” he said after a moment. “We used to stand tight.”
    He took one last swig and stood holding the bottle, bouncing it a little in his hand as if getting ready to throw it. Finally he stood it on the coffee table next to the other empty. “Kind of get the hell out of here, okay? Today even a private badge is more than I can take.”
    I got up. “Go skiing,” I said. “Build a snowman. Cut a hole in the ice on Lake Erie and drop a line in and sit down and wait. The inside of one of those bottles looks pretty much like all the rest.”
    “I’ll go out in a little while.”
    “Put the telephone back on the hook first.”
    After a space he smiled. It tightened the flesh over his big facial bones. “It’ll drive the shrink crazy,” he said. “He’ll think I ate my revolver.”
    I grinned back. “When’s this Lieutenant Thaler come on?”
    “Six.”
    “Will we get along?”
    He was still smiling. “You’ll want to.”
    I stopped in the office to polish off my report on Clara Rainey and made out an invoice and dropped them into a manila envelope for mailing. When that was done I unhooked the paging device that looked like an oversize fountain pen from my breast pocket and tested it. It squawked healthily. I called my service to ask if anyone had left a message. No one had. I decided to give Lester Hamilton some more time to go through those license plates and went to the Kitchen for supper. It was nearly dark out at five o’clock and loose grains of