Motor City Blue (23 page)

“Then you changed your mind. You took whatever they’d advanced you and what you’d made tricking and split. Why? It couldn’t have been enough to satisfy a leech like Zacharias for long and live on besides.”

She watched me a long moment before answering. Outside, the jack rattled and thumped into place under the tongue. There was a brief pause and then it began clicking. After a couple of beats it caught and I felt a slight lifting sensation beneath my feet. Soon we’d be hitched up and ready to go.

“The raid,” she said finally. It wasn’t a singer’s voice anymore. It was just a voice, and not a very pleasant one at that. “It’s impossible to sleep in jail, did you know that? Too much screaming. They have people locked up in there that belong in hospitals. I got to do a lot of thinking. About the offer the Darlings had made me. About how maybe they were paying me too much money just to get Freeman alone so they could talk to him. I was brought up in a sheltered environment, but Papa Ben couldn’t keep the whole world out. Nobody can, not these days. I wasn’t as naïve as they thought I was. Naïve enough to be taken by someone like Zacharias, but not by them. So after they let us out I stayed at Aunt Beryl’s for a few days more, just in case Jerry and Hubert had someone watching the house. Then when I was sure it was safe I left.”

“Along with Iris’ money and a little gold heart she kept in a jewelry box. What happened to that, anyway?”

“Heart?” Her forehead puckered. “Oh, that. I pawned it. A place called Gershom’s, over on Warren. I got twenty dollars for it, enough for the first few days’ rent in the crummy little boardinghouse I fell into after I left Beryl’s.”

“I’ll ramble some more. You loved Shanks enough to break it off with him because you thought you were poison. So you didn’t tell him when you left. He nearly shouted the place down when he found out. Maybe it was love. More likely he was afraid you’d blurt out the story of your relationship to some scandal sheet or other and ruin his chances of getting into office. There’s a lot of that going around these days. Anyway, he tracked you down at Aphrodite Records, probably the same way I did, but instead of pushing his luck by showing—his disguise wasn’t impenetrable to anyone who followed the news—he telephoned you there. You weakened and the affair was on again.

“There’s a missing piece here. Maybe you’ll supply it. One night you left Zacharias’ studio and didn’t come back. It’s my guess you ran into the Darlings.” I left that hanging. She seized it, shuddering.

“They cornered me in the alley next to the studio as I was leaving,” she said. “If you were a woman and that creepy Hubert stuck a pistol between your eyes and his hand up your dress and asked you which end you wanted done first, what would you do? Jerry was standing behind me. He told me I had a third choice. I took it.”

“And a few nights later, during a rally to celebrate Freeman Shanks’ landslide victory, you got next to him and talked him into ducking his bodyguards and meeting you somewhere. Only you weren’t where you said you’d be. Jerry and Hubert were. With friends.”

She nodded. The tears were back now, and rolling down her fine white cheeks.

“And the next morning he was found with three holes in him,” I pressed. “And for Maria Bernstein it was time for a little vengeance.”

This time she didn’t move or speak. She didn’t have to.

I plunged ahead. “Vengeance comes in strange packages sometimes. In this case it was in a round flat metal canister, burned into a few hundred feet of film shot by an Intelligence agent who happened to be on the scene when the execution took place. A crooked Intelligence agent, who used the evidence to blackmail the lifetakers, and who, when the situation got close and he realized he was in over his head, hid the film in a place where it would go unnoticed among a lot of similar round flat metal canisters. A place like this, which turns out two or three skin flicks a day for sale to a place like Story’s After Midnight, or did until yesterday, when Story got burned and you closed up shop. Who owns the business, you or Rinker?”

“It’s half and half.” She didn’t seem surprised to learn that I knew of Story’s death. She’d have figured that out by now. “That idiot Ed thought I planned on making a career out of this filthy picture business. It was just a sideline for him to keep him in pills and see him through between gigs when I bought into it. He didn’t know I was just doing it to have something to live on while I was looking for the Darlings. It’s a cheap operation. Sometimes I have to pose myself when we can’t afford more than one model at a time. Is that where I made my mistake?”

I got out the snapshot and tossed it to her. She glanced at it, made a face, and laid it face-down among the other pictures on the table. “That was an early shot, before I hit on the idea of the getup.” She gestured with the wig she was still holding.

“Your guardian saw it and hired me to find you.”

“Christ. I should have known.” She didn’t act ashamed. I wondered how Morningstar could have lived with her for so long without seeing this side of her. But that was easier than it seemed when you were a parent, even an unnatural one.

Ed had ceased jacking. The truck creaked through the snow, backing toward the hitch. That’s hard to do when there’s no one standing there to guide you. He’d be wondering what was keeping Maria. I spoke fast.

“Something I’m fuzzy about. I know Francis Kramer struck up a partnership with you on the blackmail angle when things got too hot for one man. How’d he know you even existed?”

“He used to follow Freeman when he visited me at Beryl’s.”

“Follow Freeman!”

“I spotted him in the shadows across the street two different times when Freeman was there, through my window. The second time Freeman got scared, thinking he was a reporter or a spy hired by the other side, and went out to find out what he was doing there. By the time he got there Kramer was gone. I never knew he was with Intelligence until you said so just now. He never said after we got to know each other.”

I parked that one around the corner for the time being. “The film,” I said. “How’d it get out of your hands?”

“That idiot Ed. Nobody told him about it. He shipped it off to Story’s in a box with five other films. Kramer almost killed him when he found out.”

“What about Story, as long as you brought him up? Of course you killed him. Shanks was a diabetic. He needed regular insulin injections to keep from going into shock. He would have shown you how to operate a hypodermic syringe in case he went into it when you were together alone. So you used that knowledge to give Story an extra dose of the heroin he’d already set up for himself when you came in to find out what he’d done with the film. Was it you that slugged him first or Rinker?”

She didn’t say anything. Confessing to murder comes hard even when there’s a gun on you.

“Rinker,” I answered for her. “While Story was giving you a hard time, probably with that twenty-two of his there on the bed, your partner came up behind him and clobbered him. Only he did too good a job and sent him halfway to Hell. You helped him the rest of the way. Then you searched the place.

“Which leaves the trailer court manager tonight, the only one left who could tie the whole thing together for the cops. You didn’t waste any time with him. Him you just up and shot with Story’s gun and then went to collect your trailer and go. Only you couldn’t, because I was here waiting. Twice.”

She tried to keep her eyes on me, tried hard, but they wandered beyond my right shoulder. Then I heard quiet breathing, and knew that for the second time that night there was a man standing behind me with a gun.

I
HADN’T HEARD HIM
moving toward the door at the other end of the trailer because his engine was still running outside. I’d thought he was just being extra careful about maneuvering around for the hitchup. Forgetting to lock the doors had finally caught up with me. I didn’t waste time kicking myself. Without turning I hurled myself sideways toward the mutilated mattress at my left, the idea being to land on my shoulder, twist and fire, maybe hitting something worthwhile, maybe not. I hadn’t a hell of a lot to lose by trying.

It didn’t work, of course. Tricks like that never do, unless you wear spangled buckskins and own a horse named Trigger. While I was airborne Maria hissed again and flung her frazzled dustmop of a wig into my face. The hair seemed to envelop me. I forgot all about the gun in my hand and just fell, flailing my arms in a useless effort to regain my balance. A hand twisted the Luger out of my grasp while I was flailing. I hit the bed and bounced, but before I could turn that to my advantage Maria charged in hissing and seized the .22 from the corner of the mattress where it was about to fall and pointed it at me with both hands clasped around the butt. The muzzle looked tiny, but a bullet from it had killed one man already. I checked my momentum, allowing the tortured springs beneath me to rock me to rest.

Ed Rinker—I assumed it was him, there wasn’t room for any more characters in this Russian novel—was a skinny kid with third-degree acne bunched over his forehead and on his long chin, and hair the color of winterkilled grass sticking out in a crackling white-man’s afro all over his head. His complexion was pale and his eyes were pale blue behind aviator’s glasses with spidery rims and gray-tinted lenses and his hands were pale things growing out of brittle-looking wrists too long for the sleeves of a quilted combat jacket in soiled olive drab. He was too young to have served a hitch in any branch of the service. He was too young for almost anything. The Luger in his right hand aged him. His hand bent downward from the wrist under its weight, so that the muzzle was pointed at my groin instead of my chest. He didn’t have any other guns. He’d never had, except in my imagination. He was shaking like a sparrow in a fist.

His partner had retreated to her original position near the door. Inflation wasn’t as steady as the revolver she was holding. Her dark Jewish eyes glistened, but not with tears.

“You’ve asked a lot of questions,” she said sharply. “Let’s see if you’re as good at answering them. Who are you?”

I told her. She seemed satisfied. A man doesn’t lie when death is staring him in the face.

“Never heard of you. I should have, a clever detective like you. How’d you figure out Story was murdered?”

I said, “First you call me clever and then you insult my intelligence. There was a little matter of a fractured skull and a shop turned inside-out that was shipshape when I visited him yesterday morning. And three matches.”

“Three matches? What are you talking about?”

I sat up on the end of the bed. The revolver jerked. I spread my hands in a gesture of peace, then began counting on my fingers. A silly thing, but it got her used to me moving. “One to sterilize the needle. Another to melt the sugar so the stuff would mix with it and be ready to shoot up. That’s all anyone ever needs. There were three burned-out matches in the bathroom. Story didn’t smoke; there weren’t any butts or ashtrays in the joint. The explanation was that he’d just finished fixing himself when you interrupted him, and after Ed split open his head, probably with one of the joy-toys he had on display, and helped you get him into the toilet, you used a third match to melt a fresh supply. You wouldn’t have bothered with heating up the needle, so there wasn’t a fourth. You knew how to operate a syringe, and even if you didn’t, Ed had been around the dope-rock scene long enough to show you, just as he showed you how to prepare the overdose. I didn’t know that when I figured it out, but it fits. Most of it clicked home tonight when I saw another girl with a syringe.”

“Maybe Ed killed him.” She smirked. Her face wasn’t made for smirking.

“Maybe, but I doubt it. He’s not the type to commit that kind of cold, deliberate murder. Just holding that gun is giving him the screaming willies. In any case you’d be an accomplice, which in the eyes of the law is supposed to amount to the same thing.”

“Only you and I know it doesn’t,” she said, still smirking. “But very good. You’re a regular Lord Peter Wimsey.”

“It works one time out of six.”

“I think you’re underestimating yourself. I’ll bet you can even tell us what happened to Kramer after he left here, and how you ended up working with him.”

“I’m not working with him.”

“Prove it.”

“It’s difficult to strike up a working relationship with someone who refuses to climb out of the porcelain tray he’s lying on in a refrigerated room. I’ve never had the patience for it.”

“You talk funny, Mr. Private Investigator. Maybe I ought to have Ed do to your head with that gun what he did to Story’s with one of his dirty souvenirs.”

“I was trying not to offend your finishing school sensibilities. Kramer’s dead.”

She stiffened. I bored in.

“Croaked,” I said. “Iced. Offed. Stiffed. Slabbed. Gone west. Knocked down. Blown away. Or, if you’re poetically minded, had done what was done when ’twas best ’twere done quickly. In other words, murdered.”

“Shut up! Who did it? You?”

I shook my head. “I had my chance near Hue. That was a little number of the Darlings’. They swatted him down night before last. He turned up the next morning in the parking lot at City Airport.”

“Now I know you’re lying!” Triumph glittered in her eye. “I haven’t missed a paper or a radio broadcast since he went out to track down the film and didn’t come back. Nothing’s been said about any bodies turning up at City.”

“Get it through your head, doll. He was a government agent. As far as the media’s concerned, they don’t die until the Feds say they stopped breathing. He was found jammed into the trunk of a stolen Chevy with a hole in his head and the thing that had made the hole buried in the back seat. It was a bullet from a forty-four magnum. That’s Hubert’s. Jerry’s would be the thirty-eight used to kill Shanks. Not that Kramer would have come back in any case. He was selling you out, doll, and to the highest bidder. They don’t come any higher than Uncle Sam.”

“That means what?”

“I’m guessing again.” I was keeping her occupied. The padded table with the videotape and movie cameras on it was just within my reach, a hundred miles away as long as she was watching me and not engrossed with what I was saying. Rinker I wasn’t too worried about. The Luger’s safety lever had gotten flicked down while he was wresting it out of my hand and he hadn’t adjusted it. It wouldn’t fire if he hit it with a hammer. “You were pushing too hard. Kramer was an opportunist—if he weren’t he would never have snitched his way into the command of our outfit in Vietnam—but he wasn’t aggressive. He would have been content to use the film to tap the Darlings and split. But you wanted revenge. You wanted to smoke them out and do to them what they did to your boyfriend. Kramer was the one who had approached them first, so he became the intermediary, which means exactly what it says. He was in the middle. Probably he was already thinking of cutting himself loose when the film came up missing. But he was afraid of you, doll. A guy like him would be. So he made a halfhearted search, and when it didn’t look as if it would turn up the first time around he made an appointment to meet another agent and spill what he knew in return for protection. Frankly, doll, I’d have suspected you for his killing if I hadn’t seen Jerry and Hubert pluck him off a public street in broad daylight.”