Motor City Blue (15 page)

He wasn’t wearing his mirrored glasses, but I was still unable to determine what color eyes he had because they were rolled back beyond the half-closed lids. His mouth hung open and his head rested on the edge of the sink a quarter-turn sideways. He might have drooled out the bottom corner. The saliva would have dried long since. Below the sink his long, bony arms dangled as if limp, but they’d be stiff as icicles. I didn’t feel them to make sure. His right sleeve was rolled up past the biceps, where tiny, gray-white circles of scar tissue peppered the mahogany flesh. He had a clotted patch on the back of his head that spoiled his afro, but that wasn’t what had killed him.

A spoon with a bent handle and a blackened bowl lay on the top ledge of the sink beside a hypodermic syringe and a pair of burned-out matches. Something had dried into a brownish pink crust in the bottom of the bowl, sealing a wad of starchy white cotton the size of a thumbnail to the stainless steel. Nearby lay a razor blade with a corner broken off. A tiny crumple that had been a cellophane packet floated in a quart of gray water that refused to go down the sink drain, next to yet another charred match. Something was missing. I took a step forward and kicked a plastic vial that had fallen to the floor, spilling more fine white powder out onto the worn linoleum. Milk sugar, probably, or something else that melted easily.

The spoon was a holder, the bend in its handle designed to keep heat from reaching the fingers that grasped it while one of the matches was held burning beneath the bowl. Another would have been used to sterilize the needle. The presence of a third was a puzzle, but it might have taken more than one to melt the stuff or maybe he was more careful about the needle than most. The milk sugar, or whatever it was, was the pony on which the brownish pink stuff had ridden to its destination. The cotton was a filter to prevent impurities from being sucked up into the syringe along with the brownish pink stuff and the sugar. The razor blade was for scraping callus off an old needle hole so that the brownish pink stuff could be pumped directly into the vein. The brownish pink stuff was heroin. Mexican Brown they call it in Detroit, after its color and the country of its origin. It isn’t as refined as the white stuff you see circulating on the cop shows on television, but too much of it at one time is every bit as lethal. After a thousand dollars or so of taxpayers’ money had been spent on an autopsy, I’d bet the unregistered Luger I kept in a special pocket in the trunk of my Cutlass that that’s what they’d find Lee Q. Story had died of.

The door to the medicine cabinet was a sheet of tin with a mirrored front badly in need of resilvering. I tugged it open with the back of a knuckle. Inside was a can of Afro-sheen, half full—I took it out and shook it with a hand wrapped in my handerchief—an abandoned cobweb and winter air. I snicked it shut. I didn’t bother to search Story’s body. Someone would already have done that. Even the top of the toilet tank was sitting at a slight angle, as if it had been lifted off and replaced by someone whose time was running short.

As a homicide it had something for everyone, including a locked-room mystery. There was nothing to that. There are a dozen ways to close a door so that the hook slips into place with no one on the other side to guide it. It can even be done by accident. I know, because it did it again the third time I tried it on my way out. I smeared the knob carefully behind me.

The air in the shop breathed easier, and not just because I’d been in a cramped bathroom with no ventilation. Story’s .22 wasn’t under the counter, but that wasn’t what I was after. The hunch I was following had all the foundation of a houseboat. I navigated my way around the disturbed inventory to the front door to prove to myself how shaky it was.

The mailman had been by since the killer. Either that or whoever it was had gone through the mail and then put it back into the comparatively neat, fanned-out pile it had assumed on the floor after passing through the brass hatch in the door’s bottom panel, which was ludicrous considering the condition of the rest of the place. And he wouldn’t have ignored it, not someone who would peep inside a toilet tank or pull apart a picture frame. Or hit a man over the head and feed him an overdose of his own dope. I nudged the pile gently with my toe. That gave me exactly nothing. I stooped and shuffled through the envelopes.

Most of it was bills and circulars, the stuff you and I glance at every morning except Sunday and then file either in a drawer or the nearest waste-basket. There were a couple of businesslike items in typewritten legal envelopes and one three-by-seven with the address scribbled in a cramped, nearly illegible hand.

I’d seen the hand before. Seated in my car at a stoplight, looking at the back of a sheet from a receipt book with a list of names written on it in ink. Story’s hand. He was writing letters to himself these days. I broke a federal law opening it. I didn’t hear any sirens, so I looked inside.

It contained nothing but a short thick key wired to a worn paper tag with a number on it and the name of a public food storage locker on Gratiot, which made as much sense as anything else had in this case so far.

I
LEFT THROUGH
the back door as stealthily as I had entered, obliterating as many traces of my presence there as I could think of on the way. There was nothing I could do about the damaged door, which might send the cops off on all sorts of wild theories, but in that neighborhood maybe they’d disregard it as an unconnected break-in. Which it was, kind of.

The street shone like a hippo’s back. The rain had slowed to a freezing drizzle, as relentless as a collection agency and nearly as dangerous. The homeward-bound traffic was inching along at fifteen miles per hour. On the way I was witness to two low-velocity collisions and a couple of dozen near misses, one of which involved my car and an empty haulaway en route to one of the auto plants. It was six o’clock and past dark when I got to the address I wanted on Gratiot, spun into the little customer parking lot in front of the building, swallowed my heart back down where it belonged, and climbed out. The Indians had the right idea: Who needs wheels?

The place was a butcher shop and cold storage plant combined, with a partition in between and a narrow doorway barred by a counter flap through which, the sign warned, only employees could pass. Beyond this stood a hard-faced woman in her late forties and a white smock whose dyed black hair and scarlet lipstick made her look sixty. At her elbow was an old-fashioned cash register and, on the wall above that, a pegboard with rows of hooks from which hung dozens of keys with paper tags similar to the one in my pocket. I figured I could get past the counter flap but not her.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to. I held up the key and she pointed a skinny finger with a crimson nail at a heavy wooden door at the end of an aisle that led past her station and between a pair of long, refrigerated glass cases full of steaks and chops and pale chickens and packages of sliced bologna the color of scrubbed dead flesh. Feeling foolish, I swung the great door open by its huge steel handle and stepped into Siberia.

I was inside a cavernous chamber, cold as death from the refrigeration unit that hissed hollowly in the space between the top of the left wall and the ceiling, and furnished with rows of heavy racks like library shelves containing square metal drawers that reminded me uncomfortably of the bigger ones in the morgue. The walls were hoary with frost. I made sure that the push handle that was supposed to operate the latch from inside was in working order and let the door close itself against the pressure of the pneumatic whozis mounted on top. I felt very, very alone.

The number I wanted was located at the far end of the fourth rack. I inserted the key in the slot near the top of the drawer and twisted. The tumblers shifted reluctantly, as if the extreme cold had driven them into hibernation. I took hold of the handle and tugged. The drawer opened on noiseless casters.

It was nearly full of foil-wrapped packages. I ignored the ones that seemed unlikely, the smaller, bulgy ones that could have been hamburger or bulk sausage and the flat, solid ones that were probably steaks bought on sale and put away for later consumption, and settled on a disc near the bottom, about an inch thick and a bit wider than my hand. It felt like a canister of eight-millimeter film. I unwrapped it nervously and stared for a moment at a wheel of Pinconning cheese.

I sealed it back up as carefully as if I planned to eat it myself later, put it back, and scowled at the rest of the drawer’s contents. I couldn’t have been wrong. Food prices were climbing, but mailing a key to a locker full of nothing but meat and cheese to yourself for fear of its being lost or stolen seemed a bit drastic. I placed a hand on either side of a rounded something twice the size of my head and lifted it out. It wasn’t any heavier than an anvil. I took a deep breath and shook it. Something inside may have wobbled. Balancing it on the edge of the drawer, I peeled aside the foil. Inside was a plastic bag. Inside that was a fourteen-pound turkey. Inside that, jammed sideways into the cavity, was another foil-wrapped disc that I didn’t think was cheese.

I got it out and let the turkey fall back into the drawer with a thud that shook the rack. Then I tore the foil from the smaller package. Brown butcher paper was next, secured with matching tape. I unsecured it and did the same with the plastic wrap beneath that and found myself holding a flat, gun-metal-gray canister without a label. I had a hunch it didn’t need one. I admired it for a few seconds, then slid it into the saddle pocket of my overcoat and pushed the drawer shut. I took out the key and pocketed that too. Then I returned to a world that was a little less cold and a hell of a lot less remote.

Outside, the temperature was dropping again and there were flakes of soggy snow the size of quarters mixed in with the drizzle. They slithered down my face and melted beneath my collar, but compared to the atmosphere in the place I’d just left they were warm as spit. Cars crept down Gratiot, their headlamps hardened by the soft black backdrop of night into bright diamonds whose facets sent out shoots that wheeled around their hot white centers and trapped flakes glittering in midair, stopping time like pent-up breath. Behind the wheel of my own crate I waited forever for an opening, then swung out to join the plodding march. It was another hour before I reached home.

The house looked lonely and dark until I flipped on the overhead light and then it was just lonely. It didn’t look as if anyone had been in it since I’d left that morning. It wouldn’t, except in the tiniest details. I threw my keys onto the stand that held up the telephone and went straight to the closet just inside the door without bothering to take off my hat and coat.

A client for whom I’d done a service, never mind who or what, had paid me off a couple of years ago with a movie projector in lieu of the cash she said she didn’t have after taking care of the pool man and the beautician. It had cost me fifty bucks to get it into hockable condition, and then I’d lost interest and shoved it away, I thought, in this closet. I wasn’t mistaken. I found it, battered black case and all, on the bottom of a pile containing such items as a hairless horsehair blanket inherited from my grandfather and a leaky feather mattress acquired from my ex-wife. I hauled out the projector, set it up, and plugged it in. When it didn’t explode, I got rid of my outerwear and opened the canister and leaned the contents, a metal spool of glossy celluloid some four inches in diameter, against the baseboard near the hot-air register. It would be too brittle to run in its frozen state. Then I went into the kitchen to heat up the supper I’d had defrosting since the night before.

After two hours I woke up in my easy chair and went to check the film. It was still there—I’d locked the door, not that that had stopped anybody before—and it looked and felt like film. I threaded it into the machine, picked out a fairly clean section of wall, pointed it in that direction, took a deep breath, and turned it on. The image flickering on the wall looked pale. I called myself a name Barney Zacharias hadn’t thought of and went over and snapped off the overhead light.

I was looking at a long shot, in black and white, of a grassy vale, framed, as any photographer who had had three lessons would know enough to do, between a pair of maple trees in the foreground. Their branches were fully leafed, which made it summer or late spring, and they cast impossibly long shadows that stretched along the ground to the left and ended somewhere outside the shot, which made it late afternoon or early morning. A slope fell away from where the photographer was standing, at the base of which five men were gathered. I assumed they were men. Four of them were wearing pale robes that swept the ground and matching hoods with high, pointed peaks. Their eyes were black holes in the part that came down to cover their faces. The fifth man, a black with a medium-heavy build, wore an ordinary suit with the necktie undone. There seemed to be something familiar about him, although at this distance his features were impossible to pick out. He appeared to be struggling against something. I had been watching for ten or fifteen seconds before I realized that his arms were pinned behind him, and that he was being held—barely—by two of the robed and hooded men. He stamped the ground with his short, powerful legs and twisted his barrel torso until a third stepped forward to help the others subdue him. He was still coming when the prisoner broke free.

The third man made an ineffectual lunge to take him in a bear-hug, but the black swept him out of the way with a mighty backhand sweep of his arm and took off running up the shallow grade to the right. He ran swiftly but awkwardly, pumping his arms and legs more than he had to and bent forward a little too much at the waist, not so much because he wasn’t used to running or that he had been held in confinement too long, but as if an old ailment of some kind, possibly a back injury, hindered his movement. Nevertheless he had a head start on his pursuers and was halfway up the slope when the fourth man brought a dark object up from under his robes and it bucked three times in his hand and the running man jerked three times and spilled forward onto his knees and then his face. His back hunched once as though he was trying to get up, but then he stopped trying and rolled over onto his side and didn’t try again.