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

of organized crime were beginning to attract the attention of newspapers across the country. The way he carried himself, you’d never have guessed the bottom third of his right leg was fiberglass or that the plastic on his face concealed a titanium plate, two mementos of a TNT surprise left beneath the hood of his car shortly before he was to testify before a Grand Jury on labor racketeering in the auto industry. The bomber needn’t have bothered. After Stackpole recovered from his injuries he spent a total of three months behind bars on contempt of court for refusing to reveal his sources. The word on the street was that his ears were worth a handy twenty-five grand apiece to the soldier who brought them in. The word was wrong, or he’d be sharing quarters with Francis Kramer already.
    Right or wrong, he lived as if he believed the rumors. There were three people in town who knew where he was staying at any given time, and he was one of them. That left his mother and me, and there were times when I wasn’t sure he trusted her. Me? Like his, my livelihood depends upon how close I can come to starvation before I open my mouth.
    He had a bottle and a suitcase and a portable typewriter in his two-room apartment and that was it. Everything else was furnished. The typewriter could be operated while still in its case, which was the way he had it. The suitcase was open on his bed with all his clothes in it except for the polo shirt and flared cotton slacks he was wearing. The bottle had two drinks left in it, and a minute and a half after we entered the room it didn’t have that. His entire life was spent poised with one toe on the starting line. The difference was that he had to be off and running before the opening shot.
    “What phony story you want me to plant this time, op?” He handed me one of two plain water tumblers he had half-filled with McMaster’s, his favorite, and motioned me into my usual seat on the edge of his bed while he sank into the chair at the typewriter, crossing his right ankle over his left knee. Brown fiberglass peeped above his sock. He shifted uncomfortably, then reached into his right hip pocket and pulled out the nine-millimeter Luger I had never seen him without since the day we had met in a mudhole during a MIG strafing south of Phnom Penh, when he was a correspondent and I was a dogface. It landed with a thud atop the papers on the desk. “Cold steel,” he said, lifting his glass.
    “Hot lead.” We drank. It was a ritual we used every time we got together. “Cold Steel, Hot Lead” was the title I had suggested for the book he’d told me he was writing on his experiences in Vietnam and Cambodia while we were up to our chins in yak urine and motor oil. He never got around to finishing the book, but the title made a hell of a toast.
    “No planting this time,” I said, balancing my glass on my knee while igniting the cigarette I hadn’t smoked in Alderdyce’s presence. I didn’t offer him one; he didn’t indulge. Sometimes I think I’m the only one keeping Tennessee from going bankrupt. “This time I want you to do some digging.” I reached him over Maria Bernstein, before and after.
    He gave them equal time. His eyes didn’t even flicker as he shifted his attention to this year’s model. Sometimes I wondered about him. He handed them back.
    “Hold onto them,” I said. “I can stop by the News later and pick them up.”
    “Don’t need them.”
    I’d forgotten his photographic memory. I deposited the evidence and gave him the Reader’s Digest version of what I’d been told earlier.
    “Bernstein,” he echoed, the computer clicking. “Ben Morningstar’s bogus daughter.”
    Damn him and his encyclopedic knowledge of the underworld. Aloud I said, “I don’t have to tell you not to scribble it on any men’s room walls. If it got out I’d even showed these to a reporter, there’s a certain ex-hockey player who’d turn my head into a puck.”
    He smiled, not the open