Motor City Blue (18 page)

“You told him?”

“The bill’s in the safe. Should I hang onto it for evidence or something?”

“What’d you tell him?”

“The truth. That these two honkies, a man and a broad, are using a trailer here to shoot dirty pictures and then turning around and selling ’em to Story. Hippies, but that don’t make no difference to me. Hell, I was getting a cut. It’s no skin off my ear if some guy out in Grosse Pointe or somewhere gets off on that crap. Anyway, it’s legal now, ain’t it?”

“More or less. What do they call themselves?”

“The brothers? They didn’t—”

“The couple!” I grasped my glass as if it were his neck and inhaled the contents in a slow, steady draft. It wasn’t enough anymore. I still wanted to throttle him.

“Oh, them. Rinker. Ed and Shirley, but if they’re hitched I bet it’s common law. Filthy, both of them, with hair out to here. I thought that crap went out with Watergate. But their money’s clean.” He grinned to show what good friends we were. His left incisor was steel and shone dully in the bad light.

“Are they there now?”

He stopped grinning and shook his head. The glow of the lamp played off the dents in his gleaming brown pate. He was a one-man light show. “The bastards split this morning without paying me my last cut. They left their trailer behind, though. Figure I might make some scratch renting it out.”

“The girl in the picture. Ever see her?”

“I never got to see any of the models, worse luck. They didn’t come through here. Too bad. I could of used some of that stuff. I like my white meat as well as my dark.”

“Did anybody else ever ask about the trailer or Story? Maybe a black man, husky build, around forty?” Leading question, Walker. The drinks were screwing up my judgment.

“Nobody like that ever came here. Them two billies was the first ever asked about Story. Hold on.” A vertical cleft marred the polished expanse of flesh between his skimpy brows. “One night I seen this guy. Some broad with a trailer on the other side of the park came in to complain about her plumbing. I went out with her to take a look. We was passing Rinkers’ when the door opens and this guy steps down and almost walks into me. He was a brother all right, and husky.”

“Did he act like he was in hiding?”

“Come to think of it, yeah. Furtive-like. You know?”

I said I knew. “Straight hair for a black? Light eyes?”

“Yeah, that was him all right.”

“What color was his flying saucer?”

He scowled thoughtfully, as if trying to picture it. Then he glared at me suddenly. “Flying saucer? Say, what the hell you trying to pull?”

“That’s my line.” I got up and ran straight into my drinks. I had to reach up and grab the brass arms of the dead ceiling fixture to keep from reeling backward. “Nobody sees everything,” I snarled. “Why didn’t you quit while you were ahead? You didn’t see any husky black. You thought if you gave me everything I wanted whether you had it or not your chances would be better with the cops. Maybe the whole damn story was just that, a story. Thanks for the use of the glass, and be sure and show your best side to the artist from the
Free Press.
He draws the best courtroom pictures.” I capped the bottle and swept it into my hip pocket. It was a lot lighter than it had been coming in. That was more than could be said for me. I set a tack for the door.

“Hold on!” His chair scraped backward. I kept moving. “It wasn’t a story, not all of it. Just the part about the guy. Not all of that, neither. I seen a guy, but he was white, kind of blond and pudgy. Wore one of them Russian fur hats. Like the Commies, you know. About a week back. And the rednecks was real enough. Hell, you know that; you recognized the description. Hey!”

I had a foot on the stack of cinder blocks that did for a stoop outside the trailer. I turned back, as much to get away from all that cold oxygen as to look at him. My stomach did a slow, ponderous turn, like a whale rolling over in deep water.

“One more chance,” I snapped. He was standing now, more or less, his big knuckly fighter’s hands braced flat on the paper-choked table top. His eyes weren’t eyes at all, just a pair of half-cooked eggs with runny whites. “The trailer. Where is it and do I need a key to get in.”

There was a black metal box under all the litter, which from the looks of it wasn’t any older than Mariners’ Church. He flipped it open, reached in and took out a key with a green plastic tab on it that said “Vistaview Mobile Home Park,” and threw it at me. I couldn’t have been as drunk as I felt, because I caught it in one hand above my head. “It’s on the south side. Anthony Wayne Drive. You can’t miss it. The streets are all named alphabetically, starting with Algonquin, which is the first one you come to. There are some letters missing, I suppose on account of the guy that laid it out couldn’t think of anyone or anything in local history that starts with Q or X or Y or X or a few others. He was kind of a history buff. Number Six.”

“The Dar—the hillbillies. How long were they there?”

“Hell, for all I know they never left.”

“For Christ’s sake!” I started down the steps. Then I went back, tore out the bottle, and thumped it down on his table. The second time I made it.

O
N MY WAY BACK
to the car I scooped a handful of snow out of the fairly clean pile beside the jerry-built stoop and rubbed it over my face. That made me a cold drunk. The engine didn’t like to start in that weather, but I climbed in and ground away until it caught, let it warm up for half a minute or so, and then got rolling. The steering wheel was a frozen eel in my hands. The vinyl on the seat felt clammy too, but not as cold as Lee Q. Story’s skin. Nothing was that cold. The air had the raw dampness it always has in the low twenties. I didn’t want to know what the wind chill was.

Whoever had laid out the park in its fishbone pattern, with parallel “streets” branching out horizontally from the wide main drive, had a cockeyed notion of which names from Detroit history to enshrine on the white-on-green nameplates that caught and threw back my headlights from the posts on the corners. After “Algonquin” came “John Brown,” who may have had his place in the scheme of things since he picked the old William Webb home on Congress Street to lay his plans for the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, but it seemed to me that General Edward Braddock or Henry P. Baldwin would have made a better choice than the murderous lunatic hanged for his attempt to foment a nationwide massacre of slaveowners and their families. Daniel Boone would have been ideal, if only because he spent more time here than Brown, as a hostage of the Shawnee in 1778. By that same token, Simon Girty, that white taker of colonists’ scalps in the pay of the British during the Revolution, scarcely seemed a more prudent choice to represent the seventh letter of the alphabet than Stanley Griswold, Michigan’s first secretary by the appointment of Thomas Jefferson. There were other such clinkers, but it was more than likely that the people who occupied the modern, generally well-kept trailers that lined the streets had no idea of the significance of the queer names they were obliged to include in the return addresses on their correspondence. Detroiters have as much sense of history as a herd of cattle.

Number Six, Anthony Wayne Drive was a twenty-five-footer, fairly new, with two doors on the same side but on opposite ends, a striped aluminum awning over the one near the front and the usual expanse of louvered and curtained glass between them. No light showed from inside.

The little, car-length driveway in front was unoccupied. There were no tire marks in the snow to indicate that a vehicle had been pulled around behind, which meant nothing because they would have parked elsewhere and walked in. I swept past and turned into another vacant space two trailers down. No lights in this one either, but just in case someone was sleeping inside I killed my lamps and engine and coasted to a stop. I waited. No lights blinked on. No dogs started barking. Maybe they weren’t allowed. I sat and waited and yearned for a cigarette but didn’t light one. The engine ticked as it cooled, and then it stopped ticking and everything got quiet. The air inside the car stank sharply of hot wet metal from the heater, turned off now and silent. Damp cold wandered up to the car and sniffed and crept in through the door cracks and settled into my bones with a contented sigh.

Nothing happened in Number Six that could be seen or heard from outside.

Eight hours crawled past, although by the luminous dial of my watch it was just ten minutes. I unclipped the electronic paging device from my inside breast pocket and chucked it into the glove compartment. It would be just my luck for it to start beeping at an inopportune moment. I pocketed my keys, got out, pushed the door shut and leaned against it until it clicked, and slogged through the ankle-deep snow to the street, whose comparatively clear gray surface was more suited to efficient sneakery. Keeping to the right edge in order to avoid being silhouetted against the snow on the other side, which glowed pallidly from its own mysterious source of illumination in the absence of moon or stars, I passed the covered porch of the first door without pausing and went on to its plainer mate on the other end. There I stood and listened. No creaks or footsteps sounded from within. I hadn’t expected any. The trailer was too well built for that, and it would be carpeted like all the others.

The door was raised eighteen inches off the ground with a steel step-plate beneath it. It was like a regular door in a house, with a brass knob and a keyhole, the latter at eye level when you were standing on the ground. The lock wasn’t a dead bolt. Just for the hell of it I tried the knob before going for the key. It twisted and the door came open.

I didn’t like that. Inside it was dark as Tut’s tomb. I stepped back and waited for fireworks, but when none came I hauled out my revolver and mounted the step. Nobody was crouching on either side of the door with a sap in his hand. I stepped inside and waited for my eyes to adjust themselves to the darkness.

It wasn’t as black as it had seemed at first. The white net curtains on the small square window on the end were as good as no curtains at all, and after a while I could make out the low bulk of a double bed with its headboard just beneath the sill and an open sliding-door closet filled with plenty of nothing in the far wall. The room was seven by seven and was separated from the rest of the trailer by a walnutlike partition with a door that when opened would bump the baseboard of the bed. Right now it was closed. I changed that, but not until I had stood with my ear at the crack long enough to hear silence on the other side. I started through with my gun in my hand.

I sensed rather than felt the new weight that had entered the trailer behind me. Before I could turn, something that was not a comb or a stiffened finger dug into the fleshy part of my back just above the waist.

“I’m gonna give you a firsthand look at your own guts the second you even think about turning around,” said a voice dripping with deep South at my right ear.

I
RAISED MY HANDS,
gun and all, to my shoulders. A hard dry hand raspy with calluses reached over and relieved me of the weapon, twisting it out of my grip so violently that I barely got my finger clear of the trigger guard in time to save it from being snapped off.

“Got him, Jer,” he called. His calf’s-bawl set my head to ringing. It still ached, thanks to the U.S. Army.

The trailer filled with light. I blinked. I was standing just inside a shallow passageway that opened onto a tiny bathroom to my left and led into a room that took up the rest of the trailer. But I couldn’t see anything beyond that, because the square arch ahead of me was filled with a dark figure that stood two feet inside the room holding something in his left hand that glittered like gold.

“Well, don’t just stand there, you dumb cocksucker,” he said. “Shoo him in.”

He had the other’s nasal twang, but his was colder, more thoughtful. The hard something prodded my back. I moved forward to spare the kidney.

The room had been a combination kitchen, living, and dining area before someone had converted it into a photographer’s studio and motion picture set. Strobe lights mounted atop metal standards stood at the head and foot of a Queen Anne bed bigger than some states with a rumpled pink spread and tangled black satin bedding. A hand-held videotape camera worth a couple of G’s lay on its side atop a low table with a padded top designed for that purpose, beside a smaller film-type movie camera. Another table held a good still camera and a cheap Polaroid and a number of curled black and white Polaroid shots of naked girls in every conceivable pose and a couple that would be pretty hard to conceive unless you were preoccupied with that sort of thing, and aren’t we all. Test shots. Opaque black curtains, open now, had been added to the kitchen end, and there were chemical containers of glass and unbreakable plastic on the drainboards next to the double sink, turning the area into a darkroom. Negatives clothespinned to a cotton cord dangled above the sink. There were indentations in the slippery black pillows on the bed that might have been made by heads, and there were white spots on the sheet that had been made by something else. It was a nice room.

It was the room in which the picture in my pocket, the later one, had been snapped. What I had mistaken for a list of hotel checkout times was really a shooting schedule printed in neat blue-pencil characters on a child’s wide-ruled composition sheet taped to the door.
September Morn,
torn from a magazine and mounted in a cheap frame, still hung to the left of it.

As with most trailers, cabinets had been built everywhere cabinets could be built. Most were open, their contents spilled out on the floor. These included dozens of flat gray metal canisters and miles of Super 8 and 16-millimeter film, exposed and unexposed to begin with, but now all exposed. They hadn’t gotten around yet to tearing the bed apart and slitting the pillows.

“You shouldn’t ought to call me that, Jerry,” whined the gunman behind me. “You know I don’t like to be called things like that.” He said
thangs,
just as the park manager had claimed.