Motor City Blue by Loren D. Estleman Read Free Book Online

there.”
    “We didn’t lose, we strategically withdrew.” I did up my necktie. “What’d you get on the car?”
    “I had Auto Recovery process the license plate number right after you gave it to me. It was reported stolen yesterday afternoon in Ann Arbor. The lab is doing a Sherlock Holmes on the interior right now. The slug entered the back seat at a forty-five-degree angle downward and flattened against the frame. It was a forty-four, and judging by what it did to his head on the way out it was fired from a magnum. The car radio was tuned to a station that plays straight country and western.”
    “That plays with what I saw and heard. Not that it’d stick in court. That stuff goes big across the river. Or maybe the guy who owns the car listens.”
    He shook his head. “A.A.P.D. got him out of bed. He digs opera.”
    “Kramer might have lived in that building he was hurrying from on Woodward. Did you send anybody up there?”
    “They’re checking it out now.”
    “Get Johnny Cash on the horn. Find out where he was yesterday at six P.M. ” He wasn’t laughing. I changed the subject. “What are you doing on this one, anyway? They take you off Freeman Shanks?”
    “No such luck. Maybe you haven’t heard. There are more than enough murders to go around in this town. Sure, the overall crime rate dropped last year, but the percentage of crimes of violence goes up as steady as the cost of living. The renaissance crowd tends to gloss over that last part. That’s like rooting for the Pistons when they’re down one-oh-three to sixty-four with two minutes to go in the fourth and they finally sink one; it’s nice, but what the hell good is it?” He was rolling the pen more rapidly now. “I wouldn’t mind it so much if it didn’t slop over into the department. Now they’ve got us doing PR work for the Chamber of Commerce. It’s worth a cop’s badge to use the words ‘Murder City’ in his own home. Meanwhile it spreads like venereal disease because everyone thinks it’ll go away if we stop talking about it.”
    “The GOP convention next year will change all that,” I fed him.
    “Bullshit. That’s one more headache we don’t need. What if, in spite of all the security, one of the candidates gets blown away? Dallas is still trying to live down November 1963. What do you think it’ll do to Detroit?
    “A popular young black labor leader disappears in the middle of a union rally and shows up fourteen hours later on East Grand River with three bullets in his back fired from a thirty-eight. Who did it? The man he beat out for the presidency of the local? The Mafia bigwigs he promised to purge from the union? Or some bigot who hates to see a nigger get ahead in anything? I used to go with his sister, so they tell me to solve it. Then they peel off half my manpower and put them to work busting whores and closing down porno shops because they’re supposed to be bad for the convention trade, even though they know damn well that’s what brings them here in the first place. And my kids ask me why I don’t tell jokes like the cops on ‘Barney Miller.’ ”
    “Feeling better?” I asked.
    He glared at me. Then, slowly, a grin broke through the stony facade. “A little,” he said. “Walker, we wouldn’t be so far along on this Kramer thing now if you hadn’t made that call last night. I owe you one.”
    “Every citizen’s duty. If you don’t want it hanging over your head, though, there’s one thing you can do for me.” I slipped the graduation photo Ben Morningstar had given me from my pocket and read off the description someone had penciled in a tight hand on the back. Alderdyce jotted it down on a yellow scratch pad with the pen he’d been trying to remold.
    “Placing an order?”
    “Too young for me. Her name’s Maria Bernstein, but if she’s still using it she’s even more naïve than I figure her. Almost a year ago she split with an unidentified male, age and race unknown, from the