Motor City Blue (17 page)

“Leggo, honey,” said Iris, trying to sound as if she couldn’t wait to get back to him. “I’m on long distance. It’s my father. Gimme a minute.”

“First it was a second, now issa minute. Go on, no whore’s got no daddy, leastwise not the blood kind. ’Specially not no nigger whore. Come on, whore.” Feet shuffled rapidly on the other end. He was grabbing for her and doing plenty of missing.

“Put him on,” I snapped.

There were a couple of seconds of dead air, then a muffled “Huh?” and then two big clumsy hands fumbled with the receiver and hot wet heavy breath wheezed into the mouthpiece. I drew back instinctively. I could almost smell the liquor.

“Yeah?” No word conveys a sneer so well.

“Captain Johnson, Chicago Vice.” I put tough urban black into my voice. He’d be too drunk to wonder why there wasn’t any island in it. “I want to know what a man’s doing in my daughter’s sorority house. What’s your name?”

He said, “Urgalagurg,” or maybe it was “Schlapadafrap.” In any case it didn’t sound like something I’d find in the city directory. There was more fumbling, followed by heavy footsteps moving away from the telephone, but this time they sounded hurried, driven in fact. There was a loud crash, as of a man’s hip slamming into a door jamb or the edge of a table, and then a louder curse. I might have heard it even without the telephone.

“What did you say to him?” It was Iris. She had the hiccups, or maybe she was holding back laughter. “He turned three shades of green and took off running for the bathroom.”

“Pretext and subterfuge.” I felt for a cigarette, remembered where I was and vetoed it. “Some Michigan P.I.’s went to court last year over our right to employ it under certain circumstances. That was one of them. Got that name I gave you?”

“Alderdyce. I got it. Amos, what’s going on?”

“Funny. I never did like the name Amos, but coming from you it sounds like ‘Stardust.’ Is it me you care about, or the gold heart?”

“Sh—” she started, and stopped. “Hang the gold heart. I don’t want it if it means you coming out in a zipper bag. You’re a nice guy. Maybe the only one I’ve met this side of the water.”

“Don’t spread it around. ‘Nice’ isn’t one of the words I use in my Yellow Pages ad.”

“Damn it, will you stop screwing around and be serious for a minute? Can’t you see I’m worried as hell about you?”

It could have been a tender moment, but Beryl Garnet spoiled it by calling Iris’ name. The second syllable was louder than the first. She was entering from another room.

“Don’t be,” I said hurriedly. “At least not until one-twenty. And don’t leave that pad lying around. Nothing stays secret in Washington or a John R bordello.” I hung up. Then I wiped everything off all over again and got the hell out of there.

It was on what had to be the last unpaved road within ten miles of the city limits, a narrow gravel job that ran north off West Grand River long after you’d forgotten what skyscrapers were like and begun to wonder if gas stations and roller-skating rinks and Big Boys were all the civilization there was left, and then this diagonal ribbon of dark slush sprang into your headlights out of nowhere with no sign to warn you it was coming up and you had to stand on the brakes and twist the wheel and skid and scratch mud and gravel to avoid having to turn around up ahead and go back. It wasn’t on the map I kept in my glove compartment. I wouldn’t have known where to begin looking for it if they hadn’t found the nude body of a female rape-murder victim jammed into a culvert near the corner a year or so ago and splattered it all over the airwaves. Even then it probably wouldn’t have stuck with me, but the girl was a secretary who had worked in an office on the floor below mine and we used to run into each other in the lobby and talk about the weather on our way up the stairs. I couldn’t remember her name but I never forgot the road.

Phooey on the country. The Wayne County Road Commission spends all its time and appropriations keeping up the main highways leading into Detroit and lets these little half-forgotten paths wither into rutted things, along which trees with branches like the groping fingers of men long dead crowd the shoulder and thrust out solitary limbs you don’t see until you’re right on top of them, when it’s too late to swerve and they crack up against your windshield and drag wrenchingly along the side of your vehicle, taking paint and metal with them. Then the salt they scoop up from the mines beneath the city and slather over the road to make up for the grading they don’t do in summer splashes up and eats greedily of the exposed metal, and six months later you’re sucking dust where your rocker panels used to be.

I drove past the place once, turned around in the driveway of an old farmhouse, went back and pulled into an even narrower private lane that led into the Vistaview Mobile Home Park. I pulled up in front of a six-by-six trailer mounted on a block foundation with a phony sign made to look as if it had been burned crudely into a hunk of bark riveted over the door, reading
OFFICE
. There was a light on behind the louvered front window.

I didn’t like it. It was too remote and there were too many places to sink a body without someone getting suspicious about what you were doing outside after dark with a shovel. I killed the engine and got out and walked up the scraped flagstone path to the door and went in without bothering to knock.

“Y
OU FORGOT YOUR TRAILER.”

The comic was a chunky black in a faded blue and gold University of Michigan sweatshirt, seated behind a folding card table mounded with paperwork beneath the front window. He was looking through it at my Cutlass and chuckling. His profile in the light of the standing lamp behind his right shoulder was flat, as if someone who didn’t care for his witticisms had squashed it with the heel of a callused palm. What I could see of his eyes beneath the puffy lids was rheumy and toadlike, the look of a confirmed alcoholic. It was something to keep in mind.

“I’m not after a spot,” I said. “Just information.”

“Try the phone company.” He swiveled halfway around with a squeal of dry bearings to face me and leaned back, clasping his lumpy hands behind his neck and looking at me from under the heavy lids.

“Hilarious,” I told him. “Like a whoopie cushion on a wheelchair.” I fished out the later picture of Maria Bernstein and scaled it onto his makeshift desk. It skidded to a stop across a ledger sheet full of penciled figures slopping over the ruled lines. He watched me a moment longer, then allowed his eyes to slide down his nose to the photo. He came forward slowly, unclasping his hands and bringing them forward to handle it. A greedy light sprang into his eyes. Guys like him were the reason guys who took pictures like that were in business.

The interior of the trailer was no better than it deserved to be. The walls were paneled with that cheap blond veneer they used to slap on furniture during World War II, the kind that fell apart months ahead of the Axis, and the ceiling just above my hat was a water-stained pegboard from which sprouted a light fixture with four blackened bulbs, none of them burning or ever likely to. There were a studio couch, badly worn, a safe behind the card table you could crack with a nail file and ten seconds to spare, a toilet behind a folding screen, an old-fashioned gray steel radiator beside it, and closets and cabinets built into everything. A couple of kitchen chairs made of tubing and cracked vinyl were arranged in front of the table, ostensibly for the convenience of customers. There were no other rooms.

After a minute or so he returned his attention reluctantly to me and held the item out for me to take back. “So what about it?” His tones were spare and northern. He was a native.

I made no move to accept it. “Know where it was taken?”

“Copper?”

“Private.”

He studied it again. This time he was looking at the room and not the two people in it. Finally he shrugged and returned the picture. “I might. For a price.”

I played my hole card. “Let’s discuss it over a drink.”

“You got?” Suddenly he looked thirsty. His eyes frisked me, looking for telltale bulges.

“Wait here.”

I went out to the Cutlass, got the fresh bottle I’d been meaning to take out of the glove compartment before the weather got too cold, and came back in holding the flat pint so that he couldn’t miss the unbroken tax stamp on the cap.

“Haig & Haig,” he said, approvingly. “You drink good.” He was almost panting.

There were two half-ounce glasses waiting on the table. Sitting in one of the customer chairs, I broke the seal and twisted off the cap and poured amber liquid into both of them. He had his hands around one while the bottle was still airborne toward the second. They didn’t shake any more than a go-go girl in an icebox.

“Sex and violence,” he said, and tossed his down the pipe. I didn’t try to compete. I emptied mine in two swallows and was still waiting for my breath to catch up when I poured him another. His hands now were as steady as the murder rate. That one died as painlessly as the first.

“God awmighty, that’s good booze. Keep ’em coming, Mr.—I didn’t catch the name.”

“I didn’t throw it.” I poured. “What about the picture?”

“Picture?” He was slowing down some. His first sip had only cut the contents in half. “Oh, that. I ain’t sure.” He swallowed the rest and held out his glass.

I replaced the cap. He stared. I sat back holding the pint and drumming my fingers on the table. The plastic top was sticky from drinks long ago spilled and forgotten.

“You’re playing blindman’s buff. Gropin’ in the dark.” His snarl was bottled in bond. He raised a hand to clear away the cobwebs and missed. “What makes you think I know anything about this blue picture racket? What do I look like, a pervert?”

“This court was listed in Lee Q. Story’s little brown book.”

Surprise flickered briefly behind his eyes, which had begun to look even rheumier. Then he looked angry. Then he made his face blank. The changes came sluggishly, like a fluorescent lamp blossoming on in a cold room. “So who the hell is this Story? He tell you he knows me?”

“He didn’t tell me anything. He couldn’t, the second time I saw him. He was dead. Somebody treated him to a double dose of his own joy juice. Maybe you know something about that, too.”

“I don’t know nothin’ from nothin’!” He tried to stand up, but his feet skidded out from under him and he crashed back down. He wasn’t that drunk. He was scared clean down to his toes. I wondered why. I opened the bottle and reached out to pour him a slug. He cupped a hand over his glass. It was shaking again.

“I still ain’t seen nothing that says you’re not sloppin’ at the public trough,” he said.

I got out my wallet and tossed it atop the table. He opened it, spent some time focusing on the ID and the photostat license enclosed in celluloid, and flipped it back at me with a grunt.

“The cops don’t know about the murder yet,” I explained. “I stumbled on it. There was one piece of written evidence that linked Story to this address, and I’ve got a copy. Trouble is someone else got there ahead of me and swiped the original. I figure whoever it was came straight here. You’ve seen him?”

He uncovered his glass. I poured. He drank. His wide nostrils flared. I blamed his flattened nose on a youth spent in the ring, feather- or bubbleweight division, before high living caught up with him. The town turned out almost as many fighters as it did cars and hit men.

“Not him. Them.” He was staring past me now at nothing. His hands were curled around the glass so tightly I winced, waiting for it to burst. “Hillbillies, both of them. Big guys, like you. One was bigger than the other and a year or two older, maybe forty. Blond. Big noses. Maybe they got that way by being talked through all the time, you know, twangy. Said ‘hort’ instead of ‘heart,’ ‘thang’ instead of ‘thing.’ Stuff like that. Figured they was brothers. They was here about an hour ago. That the straight dope you give me about them icing Lee Q.?”

“He was iced. I don’t know if it was them did it. Probably not. A forty-four in the head is more their style. What’d they want?” I think I presented a calm exterior. I wanted to get my hands around his throat and force the words out.

“ ’Cause, man, I don’t want no conspiracy rap on my head. I done time once already. Them prisons is full of fags.” He shuddered at some private memory. Then he looked sharply at me. “Them TV private guys always got an in with the cops. That so?”

I told him it was. I hated to lie like that. I waited. He drained his glass and held it out. I bought one for each of us just to be sociable.

“Maybe you can put a word in for me if things get hot? I co-operated with the authorities, stuff like that?” I nodded.

He sighed bitterly and ran a hot damp hand back over his balding head. “Oh man, I can get in trouble just sitting here. The big redneck done most of the talking. Asked me if I knew Story. I said what if I did? He hauls a roll of bills out of his hip pocket big enough to stuff a bowling ball with some left over, peels off a C-note and swats it down on the table on top of my cash sheet and says, ‘This is what.’ I make a grab for it, but my hand’s just touching it when he slams his big ham-hook down on it so hard I can still feel it. Well, I keep a gun handy when I’m figuring receipts. I don’t know if you noticed it.”

“I noticed it.” I had, the butt of what looked to be an Army Colt automatic being hard to miss sticking out from under a stack of scribbled-over sheets at his left elbow.

“Yeah, I figured you might.” His eyes narrowed for an instant. Then they returned to limbo. “Turned out, so did the smaller one. He saw me looking at it and reached across his belly under his coat—he was wearing a suit, both of them was—and stuck a hogleg under my nose like I ain’t seen since ‘Gunsmoke’ went off the air. ‘Don’t,’ he says. Just that, ‘Don’t.’ Calmlike, you know?”

“Was it a forty-four?” I managed to keep my voice off the light fixture, but just barely. His grip on his glass was nothing compared to mine.

He nodded. “Could of been, yeah. One of them magnums. You know, the kind that can turn a guy’s brains into spaghetti. Everybody’s carrying ’em these days. You’d think they didn’t make nothing else. Anyway, I forgot all about my little Colt when I seen that. So the big guy says the century’s mine if I tell him what my connection is—was—with Lee Q.” He drank.