The bartender backhanded his remote at the TV and the screen went black. "They'll sweep that one under the rug toot-sweet. State should make them buy a hunting license."
"I guess you've never been in on a bust."
"I been on the receiving end. Cops think they own the town."
"Anything can happen when the adrenaline kicks in and the guns come out. A little girl got killed the same way last spring. That time they were looking for an armed robber."
"I remember it. Seems to me a cop got an unpaid vacation. He's back on the job and the girl's still dead. You a cop?"
"If I said I was, would you spit in my drink?"
He grinned sourly. "For starters."
The story metastasized over the next few days. A DPD spokesman confirmed the report that no gun was recovered from the house and the bullet, which had shattered when it penetrated the woman's sternum, was a soft-nose.38, a common police weapon. The lab rats in Ballistics were working to reassemble the fragments in order to match them to the gun. So far none of the officers on the scene had admitted to discharging a sidearm. The spokesman refused to say whether their guns were being examined, but that would be SOP.
Another press conference was called by Philip Justice, who announced he'd been retained by the husband to sue the police department for excessive use of deadly force and false arrest. Justice-it was his real name, and maybe the inspiration for his choice of occupations-was a pit viper who specialized in representing ordinary citizens against authority. His strategy never changed. He went in fast and hard, shrill with outrage, blindsiding the opposition before it could get a toehold and wresting pricey settlements with his teeth.
I admired his performance over my morning coffee. He removed his hand from his recently released client's shoulder only to stab a finger at the camera and paraphrase the First Book of Samuel; he'd know the passages on David and Goliath by heart, but he needed the sympathy of atheists too.
It was live coverage. I'd just turned off the set when my telephone rang. It was Justice.
I'd worked for him a couple of times, so I wasn't shocked that he'd tag me to investigate, but the timing was a surprise. I thought he'd be on the line with a judge or the New York Times, or anyway someone higher up on the food chain so quickly after going public. I said I wasn't working hard and agreed to meet him in his office in twenty minutes.
He operated high up in the American Building in Southfield, a glass-and-steel arrangement that towered over the horizontal suburb like a birthday candle on a cupcake. The suite was medium gray and pale yellow, and his desk was a glass wafer on composition legs. He got up from behind it, and as usual his six feet six was a shock to the system; sitting down he looked built to ordinary scale. His hair grew straight back and close to the scalp like an otter's and he blinked a lot-I guess from all those TV lights and flash attachments he lived among. He took my hand in a swift, firm grip and gave it back. "Amos Walker, Claud Vale."
I remembered his client spelled his first name without an e. He rose from a yellow leather chair, shrinking in on himself unlike Justice as he did so, and lowered and raised his chin in greeting while letting his hands hang at his sides. He was fifty but looked older, with once-red hair like rusted iron and muddy eyes wallowing in bags behind bifocals. A blue blazer hung from thin shoulders, showing four white stitches on one cuff where the manufacturer's label had been removed, a nice lawyerly touch that said the man was unaccustomed to dressing up but had made the purchase to appear presentable in court. The black silk armband was unobtrusive but impossible not to notice.
When we were all seated, me in gray leather, Justice in the ergonomic item behind the desk, he said, "Mr. Vale neither said nor hinted that he was armed. When he refused to open the door to police answering a domestic disturbance complaint by neighbors, the officers assumed the worst and the situation escalated from there."
"Ernestine was divorcing me," Vale said, in a voice like a cassette tape dragging over tired spools. "When GM laid me off and I couldn't find nothing, she said she'd be better off getting a job and looking after herself and nobody else. That's what we fought about. I never laid a hand on her, not in seventeen years. I sure didn't want her dead." He dug out a handkerchief, blew his nose, and lifted his glasses to wipe his eyes.
"We know a shot was fired," said Justice. "We know from which gun. An ERT sergeant admitted it after Ballistics examined his weapon. He claims it went off when Mr. Vale grabbed his arm."
"That's a lie!"
"Of course it is, Claud. Try to calm down. The bullet recovered from Mrs. Vale's body was too fragmented to match conclusively to a weapon, but with only one shot fired and one slug found, we don't need it to build our case."
I crossed my legs. "All I know is what I saw on TV. The cops who answered the domestic complaint swore he shouted through the door he'd shoot if they tried to come inside."
"I never did."
"Claud, please. You're among friends. Even if that were so, it would only have given the department probable cause to enter the house. I'm not debating that, although I believe they mistook what they heard. The fact that no gun was found in the house or within throwing range of any of the doors or windows emphatically demonstrates that the authorities failed to exercise due diligence. We're asking for ten million."
"This is all starting to sound familiar," I said.
"The circumstances are almost identical to those involving the death of a little girl six months ago on the East Side: an Early Response Team officer investigating a felony-harboring situation said the grandmother on the scene struggled with him and his gun went off, killing the child. I wasn't the attorney of record in the suit that followed, but the officer was dismissed and the judge awarded the family five million. I believe double that amount is justified by the fact that the department failed to learn from its earlier mistake."
"You've got it all figured out. So what's my end?"
"I want to swat that mosquito about whether Mr. Vale threatened to shoot the first responders. If one of them doesn't recant I can still make the case, but if there's no truth in it, the city will settle and this never goes to court."
I got out a cigarette, to play with, not to smoke; state law says you can buy them but don't light up. "In other words I ask a couple of cops if they're liars."
"You've got the best lawyer in town, if that's what you're worried about."
"It's not. My insurance carrier might consider stupidity a pre-existing condition." But I proved the point and took the job.
I met Officer Bender in a booth in the Thermopolis, a cop bar in Greektown, in the shadow of 1300, the ornate crumbling headquarters of the Detroit Police Department. It was early, and the staff was clearing away the debris of the morning rush and laying tables for the noon crowd. We had the place to ourselves apart from them and a couple of tired-looking plainclothesmen from Major Crimes drinking coffee at the bar over baklava and waiting out the end of their shift.
Bender was the junior half of the two-man team that had responded to the domestic disturbance complaint at Claud Vale's house. He was built like a college basketball player, tall and sinewy in his autumn uniform, and during the brief small talk I learned he'd been offered a full-ride scholarship at the University of Michigan but had gotten tired of the hoops and dropped out to join the twelve-week police training course in Detroit. He was a good-looking light-skinned black who liked plenty of cream and sugar in his strong Greek coffee.
He finished looking at my credentials and handed them back. "'I'll shoot the first man through the door,' that's what I heard. Book says that implies probability of a weapon. What's it say in yours?"
"It says step off and call for backup," I said. "Only I don't have backup, so I'd just step off. How do you and Wallace get along?" Sergeant Wallace was his partner, a fifteen-year man with the Uniform Division; three letters of commendation in his jacket and two months' unpaid suspension over a home-invasion suspect who'd died of asphyxiation in the course of a bust.