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

waltz-and-pinky school her old man had her enrolled in up in Lansing. There’s some evidence she’s got herself mixed up in the porno trade here. Hooking too, most likely. They go hand in hand. You used to work Vice. Got any friends there?”
    “My brother-in-law. He’s a plainclothesman.”
    “If anybody who answers that description has been hauled in since last December, I’d appreciate hearing about it.”
    “Who’s your client?”
    It was my turn to smile. “Go to hell, Alderdyce.”
    The city was getting in its last winks when I fired up my crate and left the morgue behind me. There was some traffic, but it was still dark and the early rush hour was more than an hour off. A couple of times I looked up in my rearview mirror and spotted what I thought was the same light-colored mid-size trailing me two or three blocks back, but when I turned west on Milwaukee it rolled past without stopping and I relaxed. As I approached the General Motors Building, however, it or one like it swung in behind me off John R.
    I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt a little longer. The city was full of yellow Pintos.

6
    I F FOR ANY REASON you should ever find yourself looking through the microfilmed copies of the News , Free Press , or the old Times for the year 1931 at the Detroit Public Library, you may come across a photograph of a nondescript building with a Maltese cross superimposed over one of its windows. If you read the accompanying piece, you’ll learn that the window marks an apartment where three men were gunned down by the Purple Gang one night in what was immediately tagged the Collingwood Massacre. The building still stands at the corner of Collingwood and Twelfth—excuse me, Rosa Parks Boulevard—and while it’s no more remarkable in appearance than it was during those days of Prohibition, it does hold the dubious distinction of being one of the few structures left intact there by the rioters a dozen years ago. There were lights on in a few of the apartments when I parked on Rosa P. and entered the sooty foyer, but I was interested in only one. The Pinto was nowhere in sight as I left the street, which meant exactly nothing.
    I selected a grubby black button under an even grubbier rectangle of paper bearing the name I was looking for and pressed it. It wasn’t the name my quarry was born with, nor as far as I knew was it one he used anywhere else. As a matter of fact, for someone as cautious as he was, his choice of buildings, considering its forty-eight-year-old reputation, was nothing less than perverse. More of that later.
    I had just about made up my mind that the buzzer wasn’t working when a lean figure I knew well appeared atop the landing of the staircase on the other side of the locked glass-and-grill door. He spotted me and came bouncing down the stairs with a friendly grin on his face that did proud the plastic surgeons who had labored so many hours to put it back together. Straight up he crowded something over six feet of athletic build with sandy hair and the kind of jaw they used to go nuts over in Hollywood, square but not too square, and set off by a pair of level eyes whose color you couldn’t appreciate if you’ve never seen Lake Superior on a clear day. He opened the door and offered me his left hand. He had a white cotton glove on the right to mask the missing fingers, and if it moved at all it wasn’t without the other’s help.
    “Hello, shamus.” His grip never crushed any bones or tendons he didn’t want it to. For me it was the same strong, self-assured grasp he reserved for friends and his tennis racquet.
    “Hello, newshawk.”
    “Business or pleasure?”
    “Both, if you can get two drinks poured before sunrise.”
    “I can sure as hell try.” He turned and took the stairs two at a time back up to the second floor. I took them as they presented themselves.
    Barry Stackpole had trod the Detroit News police beat for five years before becoming a columnist whose exposés