The Hours of the Virgin Read Online Free PDF Page B

Dale’s thick scrawl and locked in a box in his desk, were specific. He was cremated, and the ashes were placed in the care of his surprised sister, who he’d once said was fond of complaining that he never gave her anything.
    The new county prosecutor didn’t like the case against Earl North. The gun used in the murder never surfaced, no eyewitnesses came forward, and thanks to Dale’s lone-saddle methods and refusal to maintain a formal log, there was nothing to place the accused at the scene. But he took it to the grand jury, possibly because he regretted canning his best investigator to make way for a Wayne State University graduate with a law degree and no practical experience, but more likely because Dale had left a partner to make sure he didn’t forget to regret it. The jury heard the case, deliberated for forty minutes, nol-prossed, and went to look for their umbrellas. North was headed home on the John Lodge before the judge left the Old County Building.
    Dale would have appreciated especially the role played by North’s wife, the woman who had hired Dale to tail him. Called to testify, she told the jury her husband was home with her in Redford Township at the time of the shooting, asleep in bed.
    People suck, kid. Thank Christ for it, or we’d both be calling folks at home trying to sell them storm windows .
    It could have been somebody else, of course. Had he bothered to keep one, the Leopold Enemies List would have run as long as Cats , and several of them were out on parole. But his eyes and reflexes were better than those of most detectives half his age, and his memory was a mug file of all the faces he’d seen since age ten; none of his anti-fans would have gotten that close. All three of the bullet wounds were in front and delivered at close range. If it was robbery, the thief had overlooked his Chronograph watch and his wallet with the five hundred dollars he carried for emergencies folded in the change compartment.
    The North case was the only thing Dale had had on at the time, and Mullett Street at 3:00 A . M . Tuesday, a street where it’s always Tuesday at 3:00 A . M ., even at seven on a Saturday evening, wasn’t the kind of place he’d go jogging even if he lived within three miles of the place and didn’t think joggers had Ben-Gay for brains to begin with. There was nothing in the neighborhood to draw a middle-aged detective that far from his house to walk off a case of insomnia.
    What was there was a joint named the American Eagle Motor Lodge, frequented by a hooker who called herself Star LaJoie. It was a tinselly kind of name with a little bit of originality, rare among the breed, and you tended to remember it. Particularly when it appeared several times in Dale’s barely legible notes on the case. Particularly when the woman who went by it never returned from her annual convention migration to Miami Beach. That was as much as the night clerk at the Eagle, a needle hound with his own drawer at Detroit Narcotics, knew about his regular guest. He couldn’t even describe her, and if she had a record with Vice it was under some other name.
    The other coin on North’s side of the scale wasn’t evidence, even if I weren’t the only one who seemed to have witnessed it. It was the way his wife looked at him when the prosecutor was asking the big question, and the way North’s hands gripped the edge of the defense table during the long pause before she answered. And it was the way the smile bagged on his face immediately afterward.
    Three weeks later, husband and wife were back in court, agreeing on a divorce settlement whose terms were sealed. But I didn’t need the details. I’d seen the negotiation.
    The first street sign I was aware of since I’d pulled away from the DIA belonged to my street a block west of Hamtramck, and I had to jam on the brakes to make the turn. I might have driven through an artillery barrage for