Motor City Blue (16 page)

The other three snatched off their hoods and ran up to the fallen man. One of them knelt beside him for a moment while his companions stood around with their hands on their knees. Then he got up. The man with the gun put it away and pulled off his own hood. Then one of the men standing around the body happened to turn in this direction and his hand came up as if to point, and at that moment the camera panned away crazily. The last shot on the roll was of bouncing sky. The rest of the film was blank.

The match with which I had been about to light a cigarette when the action started burned down to my fingers. I cursed and shook it out. Then I spat bitter tobacco off my tongue. That was the second time Francis Kramer had made me bite through a Winston.

I reacted finally to the flapping that told me the feed spool had run out of film and switched off the projector. That left me in the dark. But the little projector behind my eyes was casting its own images on the wall where the bright yellow square had just faded out and I was watching those.

Francis Kramer was dead because he’d been seen filming a Black Legion execution straight out of the Depression. Lee Q. Story was dead because he’d had the film and somebody had lost his head before Story could tell them what he’d done with it. Any amateur shutterbug with a good darkroom could blow up those final frames big enough to stand up as identification in court. As for the victim, I didn’t need a blowup to identify him. Footage on him had been taking up quite a bit of air time on the local news programs over the past three months. I knew him chiefly from that running gait, made awkward by a well-publicized football injury suffered during his freshman year at the University of Detroit.

I needed no blowups to know that I had just witnessed, secondhand, the murder last August of Freeman Shanks, the ghetto-bred darling of the union rank and file.

F
OR A LONG TIME
after the film ran out I sat there in the dark and smoked and thought, but mostly I just smoked. My throat was beginning to feel like the inside of a stack at the Ford plant when I mashed my umpteenth butt into an ashtray rounded over with them and got up and put on the light and bought myself a drink. As I stood there pouring it into a tumbler I thought some more. My head began to hurt.

The Kramer burn was related to the Shanks killing, which was related somehow to Maria Bernstein’s/Martha Burns’ disappearance. If Beryl Garnet was telling the truth, her description of the man who bankrolled Maria’s room and board in the cathouse on John R fit Freeman Shanks as well as it fit a thousand other guys. That explained the attempt to disguise himself during his visits, which was unnecessary if the old lady never watched television or read a newspaper as she claimed, but he wouldn’t have known that. Interracial affairs weren’t good politics, any more than one between a racketeer’s ward and a labor leader who had pledged to purge the union of Mafia influence. He would have been running for office last December when he stashed her.

What stank was my stumbling into the same case, if it was the same case, from both ends on the same day. It reeked of coincidence, like the unbelievably complicated plot of a Victorian novel. But then, if coincidences didn’t happen from time to time there wouldn’t be a word for them. That was why two sisters born in Russia who hadn’t seen or heard from each other since the Nazi invasion could meet by accident at the local shopping center in Oil Trough, Arkansas, and discover they’d been living within a couple of miles of each other for the past twenty years. So the jury was still out on that one.

I thought too hard on it and filled the tumbler to the rim and ended up having to pour most of it back into the bottle. I went into the kitchen and passed what was left in the glass under a damp faucet—only hopeless alcoholics drink their whiskey straight—and came back in and sat down and drank it off and thought. Then I got up again, got out my notebook, went over to the telephone, removed Spain and Vespers’ tap, and dialed the number of the Miriam H. Fordham Institute for Women.

It rang eight times before I got a woman with a Mary Astor accent who informed me that Miss Brock had gone home for the day, would I care to call in the morning? It took me two minutes—a lot of time when you’re on the horn—to wheedle La Brock’s home number out of her. Esther Brock remembered me very well indeed. I asked her one question, she gave me one answer back. I thanked her and put the receiver back where it belonged.

Which left me holding both ends of the rescue line but still half a mile from shore and treading water like a rat. Even though the answer I’d gotten was the one I needed to tie the thing up with a dainty satin bow, I had no idea who had killed Lee Q. Story, which wasn’t important, and knew as much about Maria Bernstein’s whereabouts as I had twenty-four hours earlier when Merle Donophan’s telephone call came to upset my peaceful poverty, which was.

Then I remembered something I’d forgotten to do, and immediately wished that it had stayed forgotten, because it meant going back to interview a dead man.

T
HERE WERE NO
tactical mobile units parked in front of the shop on Erskine, no bubble-gum machines splashing pulsating blue light over everything, no crowds on the sidewalk, no barricades, no frightened-looking young men in midnight blue uniforms as snug and new as the wrapper on a stick of spearmint, no weary-looking middle-aged men running to fat in rumpled overcoats speaking in played-out monotones over hand mikes attached to unmarked units, no police radios turned up to maximum volume to be heard over the controlled mayhem of a routine murder investigation. In short, no one who was still in the habit of reporting to authorities had discovered the corpse in the bathroom. Too bad. It would have given me an excuse to keep rolling.

There was just enough snow on the street to provide traction. I tooled into the lot I’d used earlier, left my car in shadow—of which there was plenty, the nearby streetlight having been broken out—and struck off on foot, taking a route I thought would bring me out behind Story’s. I had my revolver in my pocket this trip. I would have in any case, in that neighborhood after sundown. Wet snow soaked my feet through my shoes.

I got lost for a time in the medieval maze of streets and alleys that wound Caligari-like through the area, but dead reckoning finally placed me under a working light that stood kitty-corner from the blank expanse of building I was after.

The two garbage bags were still there, but the rats were gone, probably inside where it was warm. The door was as I had left it. Inside I clicked on my pocket flash just in time to avoid tripping over the same carton of books all over again. No one had straightened up the storeroom in my absence.

I found the shop in the same condition. No mysterious footprints or garments left behind or lingering smell of exotic perfume. Nobody waiting to knock me over the head. Death was never this quiet. Just for the hell of it I gave the door to the bathroom a push. It opened to my touch.

That trickle of cold water that wasn’t started down my spine again. Hooks can fall into place without help, but they don’t come undone by themselves. As the door crept inward without any further encouragement from me I put away the flash, got my gun out, placed my free hand on the inside of the door with my thumb on this side of the jamb, and forced it the rest of the way with my fingers until it bumped the wall. It met no obstruction, which left only the other side open to speculation. I charged in, smashed shoulder-first into the opposite wall, spun and drew down on the suspicious corner with the revolver clasped in both hands at arms’ length, police style. Nothing moved in the shadows. I fumbled for the chain that swung from the bulb overhead and bathed the tiny room in light. A crack in the plaster yawned at me.

Story was still sitting on the john with his head on the sink and one eye peeping up at nothing. My rude entrance didn’t appear to have disturbed him. Neither had any of the others that had taken place since my last visit. He was just another fixture in the room. I popped open the medicine cabinet. Its contents didn’t look to have been tampered with. Whoever had slipped the hook seemed to have come to the same conclusion I had.

It wasn’t the police. They would still be nosing around, drawing chalk lines and popping flashbulbs and quartering the floor in search of buttons and butts and using the freshly dusted telephone to roust out their favorite reporters and see about snatching some space in the morning edition or half a minute on what was left of the eleven o’clock news. They’d have come in with sirens and defiled the air with their cheap stogies and everything would be lit up like a disco on Saturday night. I didn’t think it was the killer, unless he’d had the same idea I had about the morning mail. In which case there was no reason for him to look in the bathroom, unless like me he was just plain curious.

Stepping out, I shut the door without bothering to reset the hook this time, traded the gun for my flash, and made my way over to Story’s desk. There I squatted among the debris on the floor and used one of his pencils to poke through the items that had been dumped out of the drawers. I came across one of those little brown plastic-bound notebooks you see on the impulse-buying racks near the checkout line in any supermarket, lying open face-down on the floor. I picked it up and shone my light on the pages.

It was an address book. The names and numbers were in Story’s awkward hand and I recognized them as the ones he had written down for me that morning in exchange for twenty dollars. One page was missing. I fingered the bits of paper adhering to the metal rings and got crafty.

By now anyone who watches television knows that something written on top of a stack of pages makes legible impressions two or three pages down, and that even when the sheet on which the information was scribbled is missing, the edge of a sharpened pencil rubbed across the next sheet down will bring it out in negative. Story’s pencil and a lot of squinting and turning the light this way and that—the page beneath had writing of its own on it—gave me more addresses I recognized and one I didn’t. I wrote it out fresh on the other side of the page, tore it loose, and thrust it into my pocket. Then I gave the notebook’s slippery covers a thorough wiping with my handkerchief, no doubt destroying valuable evidence in the process, and put it back more or less the way I’d found it. Then I had a premonition.

The telephone is a wonderful invention, whether you trust it or not; it conserves time, energy, and sole leather and has even been known to save a life once in a while, if you dial the city’s emergency 911 and can get someone to answer before you choke your last. Considering that A. G. Bell lived in Nova Scotia, the instrument is one of a couple of things Canada has given us to justify its existence. So I tried to reach Barry Stackpole with the telephone on Story’s desk and no one answered.

I’d forgotten about his trip. I hung up and thought. Then I called Beryl Garnet’s house of ill fame.

“Yes?” A slow, honeyed voice, not Aunt Beryl’s and not Iris’. The maid.

I fell back on Bogart. “Let me talk to Iris.”

“Miss Iris is occupied. May I take a message?”

A friendly place. Everyone I spoke to there seemed to want to preserve my golden words for posterity. “I’ll bet she is,” I growled. “Drag her out from under whoever it is and tell her Lieutenant Fowler wants to talk to her.”

“Lieutenant Fowler.” She’d been around too long to show it in her speech, but if she hadn’t gone stiff as Chester’s leg on that one I’d turn in my license tomorrow.

“Yeah,” I said. “One of her customers stuck up a gas station tonight. Killed an attendant. I want to tell her to hang out her eyeballs in case he shows up.”

“Please hold the line.” She put down the receiver. Off to change her drawers, I suspected. There was conversation going on in another room, but I couldn’t make it out. It sounded like a mouthful of bees. Once I heard a man’s loud, drunken laughter. Business hours were in full swing.

“Me, angel,” I said, when a familiar voice greeted me. “I’m calling you because right now you’re the only one there is to call. Are you alone in the room?”

There was a pause, then: “Yes. Corinne said something about a gas station stickup. What—”

“That’s my cover. Hang onto it if anyone asks what this was about. Listen, things have gone smoothly so far and I don’t like it. I don’t mean to say I like collecting lumps, but when there’s too much time between them I get itchy, like when I used to box with my uncle as a teenager and he let me win three straight matches. Fourth time out I dropped my guard and he knocked me clean past my next birthday. After that I learned to look out for that sneaky left hook.”

“What are you talking about? Are you drunk?”

That was the second time I’d been asked that. I was beginning to wonder. “The point is,” I said patiently, “if I’m walking into a buzz saw I want someone somewhere who knows where the pieces go. What kind of terms are you on with the law?”

“I’m on a short fast slide to Dehoco with a banana peel under my butt. What’s happening?”

Dehoco is the Detroit House of Corrections, and outside of playing host to bandit queen Belle Starr something over a hundred years ago, it doesn’t have much going for it. I made a disapproving noise with my tongue against my teeth.

“You’re being coarse again. Never mind. You don’t have to give them your name, although they’ll ask for it. It’s now”—I inspected the luminous dial of my watch—”eleven-twenty. If you don’t hear my dulcet tones by one-twenty, call the cops and send them to this number.” I gave her the address I’d copied from Story’s book. “Ask for Lieutenant Alderdyce.” I spelled it.

“Just a second, honey. I’m busy.”

She wasn’t talking to me. I’d heard the footsteps approaching while waiting for her to finish writing. A man’s tread, heavy and shambling, audible even on the fluffy carpeting that seemed to cover every floor in Aunt Beryl’s house. Drunken footsteps. I’d also heard the rustle of paper as Iris hurriedly ditched the pad on which she’d been writing Alderdyce’s name.

She wasn’t fast enough. “Whassamatter, babe? I innerupt you or somethin’? You writing a love note to your fav’rite john? Mebbe thassim on the phone.” The voice was as heavy as his walk and twice as drunk. He needed a winch to haul his tongue around each word. I tried the inebriated laughter I’d heard earlier on him to see how it fit. It fit fine.