Peerless Detective Read online

  Peerless Detective

  Michael Raleigh

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2015 by Michael Raleigh

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition August 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-242-0

  Also by Michael Raleigh

  Paul Whelan Mysteries

  Death in Uptown

  A Body in Belmont Harbor

  The Maxwell Street Blues

  Killer on Argyle Street

  The Riverview Murders

  For Katherine

  PROLOGUE

  The Much-Travelled Billy Fox

  Lansing, Michigan, 1977

  “See, you’ll go home,” the sergeant with the pock-marked face had once told Billy Fox, “and the place’ll still be there, yeah, sure, but the whole thing will have changed. It won’t be what you remembered. It won’t be what you hoped.”

  I’ve lowered my expectations, Sarge.

  In truth, Billy already understood many of the ways in which Lansing had changed for him. He had been gone five years and no longer hoped old fantasies might come true. Once, early on, he had imagined returning to Lansing as a war hero, a decorated veteran. But he’d managed to miss Vietnam. The closest he’d come to combat had been a bar fight in Texas which left him with a scar on the left side of his face and an understanding that in taverns there were limits to freedom of speech.

  For Billy, his old life was captured in a photograph he carried in his bag. It wasn’t much of a photograph—a battered Polaroid drained of its life by the years and hard use. Faded, cracked, patched crudely by tape across a corner, it was Billy’s only picture of himself with Rita. It had been taken that summer, the one he thought of as the summer the old days ended. In the photo, half a dozen bored teenagers posed and mugged on somebody’s front stairs. In the center stood Rita and Billy. There wasn’t much detail to it, you couldn’t even really see Rita’s small features. But she was there for him to see, dark-haired and pretty—a contrast to the boy beside her, a gangly fair-skinned boy with a mop of light brown hair and improbable sideburns.

  And there was something else, as well, something Billy could still make out in Rita’s face—she was tough and streetwise in ways that the boy beside her had not yet fully understood. She came from a hard place and an abusive father, and she took nothing from anyone. An odds maker might have told Billy his chances with this girl were slim. And Billy would not have listened. So it was that she was able to shock him. Just once, but it was all that was needed. Two weeks after the picture was taken, Rita broke up with Billy, saying she would make changes in her life, that she was no longer a child. She said a person could just slip out of her life and into a new one. Billy had no idea what she was talking about, but it was clear that she meant what she said. Just a month later Billy’s mother died, and in a gesture of melodrama that even at the time seemed stupid, Billy made his own change—he enlisted. He would serve, see action in Vietnam, prove himself.

  And now, more than five years after he’d left, he was returning home to Lansing, Michigan, where he expected to find nothing of his past. He peered out the bus window, and the glass clouded from his breath. He rubbed at it to make his home town appear.

  Lansing was dark and wet almost exactly the way it had been the night he’d left home, as though time had stopped and the city had frozen in place. A thick mist hung over it like cobwebbing, and Billy told himself his town was trying to hide from him. The Trailways bus made its last turn coming in, and the nervous man on the seat beside him lurched into him.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  The man’s gaze went to Billy’s scar. Billy smiled at this jittery middle-aged man. He pulled his carry-on bag up onto his lap. Emboldened, the nervous man asked if Billy lived here.

  How to explain his return to his hometown?

  I’m here to settle old scores. I’m trying to find out where my life went. I’m here killing time while I try to think of something else to do.

  There was a girl.

  “No. I used to.”

  Yeah, this nervous man might understand that one, every guy would.

  “So, this is homecoming after the service?”

  “Yeah.”

  Yeah, this is homecoming.

  It felt nothing like a homecoming. But he no longer thought of Lansing as home. In truth, he thought of no place as home. It struck him now that he had not felt a part of anything or any place for much of his life.

  Indeed, for a brief, horrific time in Denver after his discharge, Billy Fox had been without a home in the purest sense, living on the street in downtown Denver, sleeping in one doorway after another until a worker from a rescue mission turned him onto a series of day labor jobs.

  “So you’re from Lansing?”

  Billy looked at the gray-haired man. “I used to be. I grew up here.”

  And, Billy wanted to add, I thought I owned the world.

  To the other man he added, “When I thought I had all the answers.” He smiled.

  The older man nodded. “We’re all like that when we’re young. And you still are. You’ve got your, you know, your prospects, you’ve got all your life ahead of you.”

  Prospects. Billy looked out the window. Right.

  The Army had taught him things, it was true—some basic carpentry skills, car maintenance, a bit of boxing, how to drink, how to decide when to fight and when to walk. And of course, how to fire an M1 rifle. Yeah, that would come in handy. He tried to imagine his resume. Or, better yet, a job interview.

  “What else can you do, young man, that will help our firm?”

  “I can shoot your employees for you, sir, if they act up.”

  Billy looked out the window. The bus was late, Lansing hadn’t waited up for him.

  “Myself, I’m heading on to Chicago,” the man said.

  Billy wanted to laugh.

  Small world. That’s where I’ll be heading next. That’s where they say she went.

  To his seat companion he said, “Nice town from what I hear.”

  “It’s not bad.” The man peered past Billy and squinted. He was a long-faced man with bags under his eyes, a tired-looking man. His hair was combed straight back, and it reminded Billy of the Old Man’s hair, slick with Brylcreem. “I’m gonna be looking for work there,” he added. “Good place to look for work,” he said, but Billy caught the doubtful note in his voice. He didn’t know what to say but it seemed there should be something to say.

  “That’s what somebody told me,” Billy said. “You’ll probably do okay there.”

  The man gave him a shy smile. “Hope so. I’m a little bit long in the tooth to be looking for work in a strange town, but I want to make a fresh start.”

  Billy nodded but had nothing to add to that. He had a sudden disturbing image of this older man walking the streets of a place where he knew no one. But he understood the need for a fresh start.

  Outside, the mist grew thicker and Lansing looked comatose. Somewhere, he knew, the bars were busy, especially the ones frequented by the Oldsmobile plant workers, but it had begun to rain now, coming down in sheets and pelting th
e life from the streets. He recognized it all, but it was no longer home to him. He would not be staying. He was here to tend to personal matters. Then he would be off, on another bus just like this one, for Chicago, where he didn’t know a soul, to find a girl running from her life, a girl who did not want to be found, least of all by Billy Fox.

  The bus made its last awkward turn, entering the terminal. In his favorite imaginings of this moment, he came back to the old town, having seen the world and ready to settle with his girl. The Billy Fox in this version was a smart kid, streetwise and good with his hands and full of—what the older guy had just said, prospects. The girl in this scenario, in every scenario, was Rita. She would be waiting for him, waiting breathlessly for the first glimpse of him as he climbed down from the bus.

  The Greyhound slid into its slot in the terminal, and Billy shook hands with the gray-haired man.

  “Good luck,” he said. “You’ll do good there in Chicago.”

  • • •

  Aunt Jo was waiting, despite the rain and the hour. She was the only person in the waiting area. She seemed to scrunch down, as if trying to make herself smaller, striving to give the world as little offense as possible.

  “Hello, Billy,” she said and flinched as he grabbed her. He planted a kiss on her cheek and she giggled, smelling of cigarette smoke and coffee. A fine rain had begun to fall. Josephine led him out onto the street and opened her umbrella over him, and he saw that the rain came through a large hole in one side.

  “Nice umbrella, Jo,” he said, and she laughed and shrugged.

  At her house she fixed him a ham and Swiss sandwich, and as he ate she watched him the way his mother used to.

  Halfway through the second sandwich she nodded. “You still got a good appetite, Bill.” The hopeful note in her voice invited him to confirm that all was right in his world. She wanted, of course, to hear the reassuring lies.

  “If Army food didn’t kill it, nothing will.”

  Still, she watched him with her owlish eyes, looking for the dark signs.

  “I’m fine, Jo,” he said. “I’m not gonna throw myself in front of a train.”

  Later, over bottles of Stroh’s and a shared pack of Marlboros, they filled the room with smoke and unspoken thought and touched on every subject except the ones that needed to be out in the open. Josephine was about his mother’s age, fifty or fifty-two, and no blood of his, but she’d been his mother’s best friend for years, so that she became, early on, Aunt Jo. For a brief time between his mother’s passing and his enlistment, Billy had lived here in Jo’s spare room. They spoke of the weather and the Tigers and the Army and why Stroh’s was better in bottles than in cans and whether the Oldsmobile plant was hiring—it wasn’t, but that might change soon—and the running back from MSU who was going to sign with the Lions.

  Billy watched Josephine as she blew smoke out into the room. She looked around her cluttered living room, and he could see her trying to picture it as a visitor might. Plaster had come down from a corner near the windows, and he could see where she’d wrapped electrical tape around a frayed cord. On the way in he’d noticed a broken stair and a cracked window.

  Your house is coming down around your ears, my girl.

  She read his thoughts. “I’ve got to fix the place up.”

  Billy nodded. His gaze rested on her television, a tiny black-and-white that she’d had as long as he’d known her. The antenna had a ball of aluminum foil taped to one branch.

  Tin foil and electrical tape hold her life together. Jesus. Poor Josephine.

  “I think I’ll give you a hand, Jo.”

  “Oh, you got plenty on your mind. You don’t have to be worrying about me.”

  He shrugged. A new look came onto Josephine’s face. She was working up her nerve.

  “So you got all my letters, right?”

  “I know I got some because I even answered a couple.”

  “Oh, sure. You’re a good letter writer, Billy. So you know about, you know, everything. You know she’s gone now.”

  “I know the whole story, Jo, I know she lost her mind and married Kenny Coyne of all the people on God’s earth to marry. Kenny Coyne. And I know she’s got a kid and now she’s gone.”

  “She’s gone, yeah. Chicago. She needed a new place, you know?”

  “Whatever you want to call it.”

  She’s on the run. That’s what I want to call it.

  “I won’t be in town long, Jo.” Her face fell, and he finished the thought. “But I was wondering if I could stay here for a week or so?”

  Now she smiled. “Oh, you know you can always stay here, Bill. I’ll get it cleaned up for you.”

  “No need for that. Just let me have your couch or something.”

  “I got the bed in the back room—you can have that room again. It’ll be nice to have somebody here.”

  “Well, thanks, Jo.” He looked around the place again. “I’ll give you a hand while I’m here.”

  “You don’t have to, Billy.”

  “I like using my hands. I learned some things in the Army.”

  “Then what, Billy? You got plans? A young guy needs a plan.”

  He saw the wary look in her eye, but there was no point in lying to her.

  “I’ll get something, I always do. First I want to find Rita. I want to find her.”

  “Oh, you won’t find her there, Billy. In Chicago? You could drop all of Lansing in Chicago and you’d lose it. That’s a place that will swallow you up. I know, Billy, I used to live there. I grew up there.”

  “I know that.”

  “I think she just wanted a new place to start. You know, get away from—”

  “Get away from her old life, from Kenny, I understand that, Jo. I just want to see her, see if she’s all right.”

  He met her eyes briefly and saw that she wasn’t buying it.

  “But it’s been so long, Billy.”

  Five years, yes, five years since he’d even seen her face. But Billy believed he was quite different from the naïve kid in the photograph. He had seen some of the world, acquired some experience in life. He thought he was altogether another Billy Fox, and this one might have a chance with Rita. It was worth a shot.

  “You know, she wrote me when I was in Germany.”

  One letter Rita had written, a letter out of the blue. By then she had been married more than two years, long enough to regret most of her choices. There was no complaint in the letter, simply a feeling that the writer had embarked on a life far different from the one she’d hoped for. She spoke of her child, a daughter named Annie, expressed her gladness that the Vietnam War was coming to an end before Billy had to see any of it.

  But for that letter, for the manifest sadness of it, Billy thought he might have been able to forget about Rita.

  Jo puffed at her cigarette and shook her head. Then she shrugged, resigned.

  “You can’t blame her for getting involved with that one, or for leaving him, Bill.”

  “I don’t. We were finished by the time I went into the service. We were done. I just never figured her for Kenny Coyne.”

  “He was an older guy, he had clothes and a nice car and money—those people, they always have money.”

  Billy smiled. Those people—drug dealers.

  “A girl wants security sometimes. It’s, you know, interesting. Glamorous. It’s really fun when you have money for the first time. For a while you don’t think about any of your other issues.”

  Josephine looked down at her threadbare rug, lost in thought, and Billy wondered if there had been a time in Jo’s life when she’d had money, clothes, nice things. It struck him that he’d never seen a picture of Josephine as a young woman. She gave a shake of her head.

  “And when you have a few bucks, honey, you think it’s gonna last forever.”

  “Anytime you have something good, you think it’ll last forever, Jo.”

  She nodded. “But Rita lived with her mistake.”

  Billy nodded.
He had trouble imagining the child. If things had gone another way, that would have been his child. He couldn’t imagine himself with a kid. But he understood that the existence of this child changed everything for Rita, and for them. It meant that a time in his life was gone, with no chance of returning to that time. An image came to him then of himself and Rita, a couple of teenagers wandering along the old section of the MSU campus, daydreaming aloud about their lives—Rita would go to college, she’d attend Michigan State while Billy put together his own business, auto repairs, he thought. Five years later, she was on the run with a kid, and he was an aimless veteran who had no idea where his next paycheck was coming from.

  Billy forced himself to listen to Jo talk about the old neighborhood, who had died, who had moved away, how things had changed. He listened and understood that just having someone to listen to was something out of the ordinary for Josephine. That much he could give her, at least. He looked around at her place. He could listen to her and he could do a few things around the place.

  He would spend his time in Lansing wisely. He would tend to things. Then he would head to Chicago, for whatever it was worth. He forced himself to acknowledge that this young woman on the run had no interest in Billy, had long ago lost any feeling for him.

  He recalled the Old Man once saying that he’d done a kindness, lent money to an acquaintance he hadn’t seen in ten or fifteen years.

  “For old times’ sake,” his father had said. “For old times.”

  This thing, Billy told himself, this fool’s errand, would be like that. It was for old times’ sake.

  • • •

  In the morning he spent an hour just assessing Josephine’s swayback mule of a house, a place that hadn’t seen plaster or paint since the fifties. Then he went to a hardware store and bought plaster, Spackle, paint, duct tape, screws, nails, caulking, a pane of glass, a tape measure, and a handsaw. At a lumber yard, he bought wood for the staircase. For the next four days, he threw himself into the work—he fixed cracks in the walls, replaced the front window and the broken stair. He painted two rooms, reinforced bannisters, caulked around the edges of the windows, put a new piece of screen in the back door. In the bathroom he put on a new toilet seat, replaced the handles on the faucets and her ancient shower head, put new filters in the taps, put new grout between some of the tiles. He moved relentlessly from room to room, carting with him his smokes and a cup of coffee and Jo’s old clock radio, and he listened to old Motown music as he worked, music he’d danced to with Rita. When he was done with the house, he fixed the legs on broken chairs, repaired a dresser drawer whose bottom had come out, mowed her lawns front and back.