Night cover, p.1
Night Cover, page 1
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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF MICHAEL Z. LEWIN
“Lewin is precisely what the mystery writer ought to be—alert to the real world, imaginative, observant and witty.” —Nick Kimberley, City Limits
“Michael Lewin has just about the best private detective who has been around in many a day.… Lewin has brains and style.” —Los Angeles Times
“Lewin is a witty and concerned writer, singing his song of social significant low-key.” —John Coleman, The Sunday Times
“As witty as Robert Parker, as ingratiating as Sue Grafton and as crafty a plotter as either.” —The Washington Post
“Ross Macdonald followers who want to switch loyalties will find Lewin devises more intricate plots and peoples them with more interesting characters.” —The Washington Post Book World
Ask the Right Question
“It is always pleasant to come across a promising talent, and Michael Z. Lewin is one. His first book, Ask the Right Question, is a smoothly written private-eye story.… Characters are finely drawn, plotting is logical, details are well worked out. You can be sure that we’ll be seeing more of Mr. Samson.” —The New York Times
Called by a Panther
“Imagine a private eye caper scripted by Tom Stoppard, with cameo appearances by the Marx Brothers. As the late Ross Macdonald once said, ‘Lewin is fast, funny, and brilliant.’” —Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal
“The entertainment level is a perfect ten.” —Mystery Scene
“Irreverent … Amusing … Ironic.” —The New York Times
“Laconic but wildly funny Lewin [writes] up a storm.” —Booklist
The Enemies Within
“A neat puzzle deftly worked out.” —Publishers Weekly
“Samson is a very human hero whose distaste for blood, as well as his sharp intelligence, make him easy to like.… A superior species.” —The Plain Dealer
“Watergate wasn’t much better than The Enemies Within.” —National Review
“Michael Z. Lewin writes a realistic mystery.” —The Washington Post
The Silent Salesman
“Packed with suspense, literate and funny. A swell book to sink back into the pillows with.” —The Boston Globe
“Tough and clever.” —The New Republic
“Samson has to deal with medical doctors, a secret laboratory, the FBI, the cops, heroin, radioactivity, fatherhood, and other crimes. He does so with a little bit of heroism and a great deal of common sense and wit.” —The New York Times
Out of Season
“[Readers are] going to enjoy Lewin’s way of giving even the most minor of characters vivid and unstereotyped personalities.” —Tony Hillerman for the Washington Post
The Way We Die Now
“Mr. Lewin writes with style and sensibility and wit.… He has a fine poetic sense of detail which lights up every page.” —Ross Macdonald
“Excellent.” —The New Republic
“Lewin is a skillful writer.… He creates a feeling of loneliness and even desolation.” —The New York Times Book Review
Missing Woman
“Lewin’s best book … the dialogue is authentic, the settings attractive, and the mystery real.” —Robin Winks, The New Republic
“A pip of a mystery.” —United Press International
“Lewin writes with style and sensitivity. His lean and sinewy prose propels the reader all too swiftly through a highly satisfying book.” —The Houston Post
“The prose is full of pleasant surprises and felicitous phrases, the characterization is choice.” —Chicago Tribune
Eye Opener
“Savor this one. It’s an emotional roller coaster—bemused chuckles follow closely on the heels of horrified gasps—but it’s not to be missed.” —Booklist
Night Cover
“In the several days during which Mr. Lewin allows us to share his long waking hours, Leroy Powder becomes exhilaratingly alive.” —The New Yorker
“Powder is an irritable, tough, honest cop, a real man. Lewin knows his routine, has a good ear for dialogue, and writes good, clear prose.” —The New York Times Book Review
Hard Line
“Unique and well told; Powder and his relationships with his son and with Fleetwood are well characterized. Good reading: Powder’s one of a kind.” —Library Journal
“Lieutenant Leroy Powder is cranky, opinionated, abrasive and demanding. He is also very good at his job, which is head of the Indianapolis Police Department’s Missing Person’s Bureau.… Like all of Lewin’s work, Hard Line is an ingenious and ingratiating story.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune
“[This] latest Powder story is another first-rate, fast-moving police procedural.… Michael Z. Lewin has done another very satisfying job.” —Publishers Weekly
“Lt. Leroy Powder of the Indianapolis P.D. revs up again in this meticulously crafted police procedural. Several interesting cases tangle up in the Missing Person’s Bureau, which Powder runs by working his jaw.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“This is a crackling good procedural with all the plots wired into each other and giving off electric jolts and ringing bells. But it has real staying power as a character study of the hard-liner, a man who suffers fools badly and makes enemies, does not distinguish between work and play (‘The only way I know how to live … is to combine the two’), but unlike most workaholics is less interested in keeping the job going than getting the job done.” —Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Late Payments
“With a complexity worthy of Ross Macdonald and the same concern for family and secret relationships, Lewin (The Way We Die Now) has crafted a first-rate book combining grit, humor and tough-minded caring. One hopes for more mysteries featuring sarcastic, abrasive, all too human and ultimately endearing Leroy Powder.” —Publishers Weekly
And Baby Will Fall
“Adele Buffington stands tall in the crowd of female sleuths.” —The New York Times
“Adele Buffington is a complex, engaging woman, tough, bright and yet vulnerable.” —The Washington Post
Family Business
“I can think of no other series, anywhere, which features a family which owns and works from a private investigation firm.” —Deadly Pleasures
“How these [plot elements] are connected and what the brilliantly characterised Lunghis, from the Old Man down to the school kids, separately get up to is very much the extremely funny Lewin’s business. Totally beguiling, with the lightest of dry touches.” —The Times (London)
Underdog
“An ironic commentator on the current state of Midwestern bizarre.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A hilarious tale … A story that will keep readers in stitches.” —Publishers Weekly
“Literate and funny.” —The Boston Globe
“Bright, witty writing … Moro is a charming and poignant narrator.… Lewin is a clever stylist.” —The Plain Dealer
“Entertainment and humor, a sympathetic and touching hero, and fine supporting characters.” —South Bend Tribune
“Michael Z. Lewin’s offbeat thriller is amiable and amusing.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune
“The surprisingly noble Moro … can be counted on to see everything with an astute eye.” —San Jose Mercury News
“It’s a pleasure, with Moro figuring things out slowly enough to keep us baffled yet quickly enough to keep us hooked.” —The Charlotte Observer
“A very good book.” —New Mystery Reader
Also by Michael Z. Lewin
The Albert Samson Mysteries
Ask the Right Question
The Way We Die Now
The Enemies Within
The Silent Salesman
Missing Woman
Out of Season
Called By a Panther
Eye Opener
The Lt. Leroy Powder Mysteries
Night Cover
Hard Line
Late Payments
Indianapolis Novels
Outside In
And Baby Will Fall
Underdog
Oh Joe
The Lunghi Family Mysteries
Family Business
Family Planning
Family Way
Other Novels
Cutting Loose
Confessions of a Discontented Deity
Story Collections
Telling Tails
Rover’s Tales
The Reluctant Detective and other stories
Family Trio
Nonfiction
How to Beat College Tests: A Guide to Ease the Burden of Useless Courses
Novelization
The Next Man
Night Cover
A Lt. Leroy Powder Novel
Michael Z. Lewin
To Uncle Don and Aunt Louie
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Because there are a number of superficial exactnesses in this novel, I feel bound—for the readers’ sake as well as the sake of those who live and work in places, apparently described—to emphasize that it is a work of fiction
1
“Look, I’m forty-eight years old and I only got seven toes. I don’t have the time or the wear left to spend all night teaching a kid how to write a duty roster.” Though six-two and looking down a good five inches, the young officer felt his shaking knees put his whole body’s balance in question. “Gosh, Lieutenant Powder, I looked at the last two rosters and saw you been on Cover Shift eight straight weeks. I thought you was about due to come on days.”
Powder rubbed his face with both hands, as if he had been asleep within the hour. The young officer read it as a gesture of disgust aimed his way because of his stupidity. Powder had been asleep an hour ago; and he did think the young officer stupid.
“Sonny, you go upstairs to the Assembly Room, take your new roster off the board and rewrite it. And when you start, remember I’m the easiest guy you do because you just write my name at the top of Cover Shift and then you start worrying about guys’ days and nights.”
Powder turned around and left the kid struggling to find something to say that wasn’t stupid. But he was too slow and Powder walked away.
On the two flights of stairs up to the detective Day Room, Powder rubbed his face twice more. Didn’t help much, but it didn’t hurt. He always rubbed his face twice on the stairs.
The kid must have been told about me, he thought. They always tell the new roster men.
There were only two detective sergeants using a room full of desks. 6:46 P.M. Powder walked past the desks to a row of lieutenants’ cubbyholes. He looked in each open doorway. Only the last compartment was occupied and the lieutenant there looked up as Powder passed.
“Roy,” he said by way of greeting.
“Morning,” said Powder, and he walked past to the desk at the end which, in a strange way, he thought of as home. His home-hold on the past—the desk maintained for him in the Day Room as if sometime he would work days regularly again. A choice desk, with the wall behind the swivel chair so he could lean back and scratch his dandruff off on the crags of the plaster. It wasn’t the cubbyhole he would rate if he were really on days, but it was a choice desk.
Powder checked for messages, special assignments, projects, phone memos. There weren’t any. Sometimes there were.
He turned around and walked slowly back the way he had come in.
“You’re working late, Miller,” he said to the lieutenant he’d greeted on the way in.
“Yeah,” said Miller. He rustled a handful of papers with his left hand.
“Tell me,” said Powder, “what’s the story on the body we brought in for you last night?”
“Homicide,” said Miller without looking up.
“I knew she was killed.”
“That was obvious.”
“What were the details?”
With a sigh, Miller leaned back and pursed his lips. “What do you want to know, Powder? Chest size? She was kind of flattened out because rigor set in after she was put on her back.”
“Information, copper,” said Powder. Half pulling rank, though their ranks were equal. He’d been a lieutenant nineteen years and Miller only a year and a half. Half he was pulling race because Miller was black, though in the Indianapolis Police Department all races are equal. “Cause of death. Time of death,” said Powder. “Individualizing details,” measuring all the syllables, showing he was equally comfortable with long words or short.
Miller sighed and thought he should know better by now than to work late. “Strangulation, but it didn’t take place where she was found. Long time since she last ate. It’s hard to pin a time,” said Miller.
Powder frowned. If he’d been talking to a doctor, he would have asked aggressive questions, but if Miller said it was hard to pin a time, it was hard to pin a time. Reputations abound in a closed society like a police department.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Miller. “No, she wasn’t raped. We have no apparent motive, and no ID yet. But … someone went to some trouble to step on her fingerprints.”
Eyebrows up. “With what?” asked Powder, remembering she’d looked messy.
“Blunt, heavy, hard object something like a sledgehammer. Put a few on her face for good luck, but all after she was dead.”
“Which means the killer thought fingerprints would help us.”
“So it would seem,” said Miller, not without interest. He didn’t dislike Powder, but there was a presumptuousness about him which didn’t fit smoothly into a working team.
“I wonder,” said Powder. “Is there any relation between toe whorls and finger whorls? You’d think there would be. They might not be exact, but you’d think out of a thousand sets of fingerprints you could eliminate most of them from the toe prints.”
Miller smiled wryly. “Down the corridor, turn right for ID. E411.”
“Yeah,” said Powder. He pushed off the door frame. And walked downstairs to the Night Cover Room of the detective division.
The first call requiring a detective presence didn’t come until 7:40. Plenty of time before it for Powder to impress on three detective sergeants just how much confusion the new roster man was going to cause. His fourth sergeant was late.
The call was an armed robbery in Edwards-4, a near-northside neighborhood. No shots fired, but the owner—it was a liquor store—had suffered a suspected heart attack after calling the police, so Powder sent a man to take over from the uniformed patrolman first on the scene.
He sent Alexander Smith, his aged probationer. Alexander Smith, as opposed to Sid Smith, the kid with the beard. Worlds of difference.
“Let him make something out of this one,” Powder said to no one in particular after Alexander Smith was out the door.
Stretch. Yawn.
An hour later things were in hand. The fourth cover detective, Salimbean, had arrived at last and was duly put on report. A couple more calls, but no one hijacking the mayor. Powder caught up with the paperwork in his In-Tray. He’d left a few reports over day because the woman’s body had come near the end of the shift the previous night, at 2:15 A.M.
The Cover Lieutenant goes out to take care of bodies himself. And that slows down his read-through of the night’s reports prepared by the sergeants, because it gives him a report of his own to write. Not a long one; just enough to give the day man a solid platform to start his work from. Get a medico in, the lab; take some pictures. Follow up any hot leads.
No hot leads last night. Unidentified female body on a vacant lot. Strictly cold last night. And took too long, too.
There’s no way you can get through a 2:15 body and all the night’s reports before the end of a 3:00 A.M.shift.
At 9:15 Powder had just decided to go downstairs to the coffee machine in the Vending Canteen. But he looked up to see a high-cheeked man in a green shirt and brown jacket come to a halt in front of his desk.
“Lieutenant Powder?” the man asked nervously.
“Who the hell sent you up here?” grumbled Powder. He looked past the man over the half-walls which separated his niche from the desks of his sergeants. Schleutter and Sid Smith were in, working hard with heads low. Jokers.
“I asked downstairs … I don’t know who it was … and here, at the door, a man said you were in charge.”
Powder leaned back and nodded. At that moment Alexander Smith, the probationer, walked into the Night Room leading a handcuffed man.
Now, what had he been sent out to? Armed robbery? Armed robbery. What the hell was he doing bringing him in here?
“Smith! What the hell are you doing bringing a prisoner in here for?” Powder stood up and said to his visitor, “Just a minute.”
“I’ve brought him in for interrogation,” said Smith obliviously. “Just wanted to explain why I’ve been so long. You see, I went out to the liquor store, and the owner there had died, and—”
“Get this man out of here. Don’t you know enough to deal with a prisoner before you come in here to tell me how smart you’ve been?”
Alexander Smith looked chagrined.
“Doesn’t anybody know anything?”
