Motor City Blue (7 page)

I could still smell lemon verbena and starched white gloves when I hung up. I glanced at the calendar on the wall with the picture of a pretty girl on it whose clothes went up with the clear plastic flap to make sure I hadn’t slipped back fifty years during the conversation. Then I consigned the mail I’d picked up on my way in to the wastebasket and left for Erskine Street, where they took down the red lights a long time ago for the same reason a church needs no sign to tell you it’s a house of God.

Story’s After Midnight shared a block of age-blurred building with half a dozen similar establishments on the north side of Erskine, a street where business was conducted behind graffiti-smeared clapboard fences and from the back seats of spanking new Caddies and Lincolns, where cops paired up on sticky August nights to patrol on raw nerve-ends, thumbs stroking the oily black hammers of the holstered magnums they preferred to the .38 specials issued by the department, ears tuned for the quick scuffing of rubber soles on the sidewalk behind them and the wood-on-metal clacking of a sawed-off pump shotgun being brought to bear just beyond the next corner, a street where a grunt of uncontrollable passion and a stifled scream in the gray, stinking depths of a claustrophobic alley could mean a ten-dollar quickie or a rape in progress. With its stripped, wheelless hulks that had once been cars and aimlessly blowing litter, it was the kind of street you never saw on the posters put out by the Chamber of Commerce. If you got a glimpse of it at all it was on the eleven o’clock news, whose cameras had recorded hundreds of feet of rubber-wrapped corpses being trundled out of narrow doorways into the rears of ambulances backed up to the sidewalk on streets like this, while in the foreground earnest young reporters with microphones in their hands and blow-dried hair stirring in the wind rattled off names and facts in modulated baritones, acting as Greek chorus to a scene that was dyed-in-the-wool American. It was an area that spawned a mindless, disorganized brand of violence, and once every few years, as it had less than a mile south of here not long ago, it spawned a Cass Corridor Strangler, who killed for a time and then faded into terrifying obscurity. But you could still hear good jazz in the right bars.

I parked next to a hydrant heaped high with rusty snow in front of the store, where I could keep an eye on the car through the window, and went in, easing my way past a knot of sullen-looking black youths in scuffed Piston warm-up jackets who were sharing the same twisted cigarette in front of the entrance. My nerves tingled as I did so. I’m no more prejudiced than the next guy, but I tighten up whenever they band together like that.

It was one of those places where you had to tip the guy at the counter fifty cents before he’d let you in. In this case he was a bony young black seated on a high stool behind a display of latex breasts and plastic phalluses. He had an afro you could lose a shoe in and invisible eyes behind mirrored glasses and needle tracks all over his mahogany wrist where it stuck out of his cuff as he reached for my two quarters.

“Cold out there,” I ventured.

“So’s the world, man.”

A philosopher. His accent was Mississippi straight up with a Twelfth Street twist. I left him to ring up the alloy in a big, old-fashioned register and began browsing.

The place had everything the well-dressed degenerate could want. It was stocked primarily with books and magazines, from near-legitimate classics like
A Man With a Maid
and
The Story of O
to the more contemporary
Hot Snatch
and
Anal Delight
, with covers featuring various sexes and species engaged in provocative pursuits which, according to the title splashes, only hinted at the literary and pictorial treats to be found inside, shrink-sealed in plastic. But miscellaneous grunts and squeals that seemed to emanate from everywhere and yet nowhere, and a sign made to resemble an interesting anatomical pointer, indicated that a peep-grind “with sound!” was available in the back for the admission price of one dollar. There were the usual revolving wire racks containing the kind of greeting cards you didn’t send Grandma at Christmas time, the standard bin filled with fifteen-minute reels of Super 8 film with titles like
A Lesson From Miss Dove
and
Blowing Wild
—
not
the one starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck—and, beneath the glass counter near the entrance, a fascinating collection of gadgets, among which was a device which, its tag pledged, would Increase the Size of Your Organ in Minutes, an ingenious contraption with a glass tube and a vacuum pump that seemed ideal for rescuing golf balls from mud puddles.

The only other customer in this part of the store was a heavy-set businessman-type, black, with a brown cashmere overcoat buttoned over his spreading middle and a sprinkling of gray in his kinky, receding hair. He seemed oblivious to everything but the fag corner in the back, where a study of the photographs on the covers of the magazines, in the proper order, provided a crash course on how to get along with your fellow man. A sales executive, I figured, killing his coffee break in a way his fellow employees never suspected.

It wasn’t the dank hole the folks in the suburbs had in mind when they formed their Sunday morning decency leagues to keep pornography out of their neighborhoods. Fluorescent tubes in the ceiling shed plenty of light over the merchandise, and the tile floor shone beneath a seal of fresh wax. The plate glass window was spotless. You’ll find stores like it in any shopping center. The only difference is the stock.

The snowbird behind the counter was dividing his attention between a convex shoplifters’ mirror in the corner and a paperback in his hands. I caught a glimpse of the title when he shifted it to turn the page.
Catch-22
. That was like finding an “Out to Lunch” sign on the door to a McDonald’s. I approached him.

“Lee Story?”

“Lee Q. Story.” He didn’t look up.

“Sorry. I’m told you wholesale.”

My reflection came up to meet me in the mirrored cheaters. “Who’s asking?” He turned down a corner of the page he’d been reading and laid the book aside.

“Andy Jackson.” I waved a shopworn twenty under his nose.

I couldn’t tell if he was looking at the bill. Lamont Cranston would have trouble reading a man’s thoughts behind those Foster Grants. “You a pig or something?”

The guy over in fairyland overheard him and strode swiftly past me out the door, fat legs working despite the hobbles of his calf-length coat.

“Or something.” I put the double sawbuck on the counter and hauled out my wallet, flipping it open to the license and sheriff’s buzzer. When he’d had an eyeful I returned it to my pocket and planted the more interesting of the two pictures Morningstar had given me atop the twenty.

“Maybe you could see it better minus the shades,” I suggested.

He had wide-set eyes with pupils that reacted slowly when they were exposed to the light. He was a user, all right. He barely glanced at the photo.

“I seen it before, man. That what you wanted?” He reached for the bill. I speared his wrist.

“What I want is the name of the person who saw it before you did,” I said.

“I done told somebody else I don’t know.” That gave him an idea. “Say, we working for the same boss?”

“Not hardly. I want a list of your picture sources.”

“Is that all?” Acidly. “Look, man, I got people to answer to. Leggo my hand.”

I held on. “How long can it take to jot down some names? Five minutes? That’s two hundred and forty an hour. Henry Ford, Jr. doesn’t pay that. Senators don’t make that much in graft.” He still looked doubtful. “The people you answer to have people to answer to,” I added. “I answer to them.”

Whatever the hell that meant, it hooked him. I raised my hand and he withdrew his, leaving behind the green.

“Second.” He swiveled to face a small desk beneath the display window strewn with grainy snaps like the one I’d shown him, snatched a pen from a glass of them, and spent some minutes scribbling on the back of a page from a large receipt book. Then he tore it off and spun around on his stool. He passed it over with his right, grabbing the bill with his left at the same time.

There were thirteen names on the sheet, a few of which I recognized. I pocketed it, along with a blister card from a display of stick batteries on the counter “For the Junior Miss Vibrator,” and gave him a dollar, telling him to keep the change. He rang it up without asking questions.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“You been a pig somewhere down the string, man.” He looked exasperated. “You wring a buck till Washington sweats.”

“MP,” I said. “Three years, after Nam and Cambodia.”

“You was in Nam?”

“Were you?”

“Damn near. I done a year in Leavenworth for lighting a joint with my draft card.”

I tapped the picture. “There’s a piece of paper tacked to the door in this shot. Could be a list of rules and checkout times. Which of your sources works in a hotel or a motel?”

“Which of them don’t? This ain’t L.A.”

“How about the girl? Know her?”

“Man, they all look alike with their threads off.”

“Give me back my twenty. I don’t buy crap.”

His bony face twisted into a mask. “Get out of my place, honky.”

When I didn’t move he reached beneath the counter and clanked a battered .22 with a seven-inch barrel down on top of it. I moved.

The youths were still gathered around the door when I stepped out. I moved to pass them. They moved with me. I shifted in the other direction. They went the same way. There were four of them. One, who acted a half-beat ahead of his companions, was a tall, rangy eager-type with a small head and too much untended afro atop a long, skinny neck and wrists that protruded several inches out of the sleeves of his warm-up jacket. He said something about my mother in an Erskine Street drawl and started to push me.

That’s how it always starts, with a push. Most of us learn that in grammar school and some of us never get over it. When he thrust his big palms against my chest, I took advantage of the opening and gave him as much knee in the groin as I could afford without sacrificing my balance. It was enough. He exhaled a double lungful of stale marijuana into my face and jackknifed.

Among the others there was a moment of shocked indecision. Then a short, chunky black with a firmly rounded belly, Jeff to the other’s Mutt, rushed me, arms outstretched to take me in the bear-hug that appeared to be his specialty. I sidestepped him and gave him a judo kick in the well-upholstered seat of his pants that sent his woolly head crashing into the building’s block corner. The plate glass window shivered but didn’t fall apart. Neither did Fatty, but not for lack of effort on the part of heels suddenly gone round as he staggered aimlessly across the littered sidewalk.

That left two I hadn’t tried, but they had to wait their turn. The beanpole I’d kneed had recovered himself, and now he went for the pocket of his jacket.

The switchblade darted from the steel and plastic handle like a serpent’s tongue and jiggled up and down lightly in his hand with the confidence of a sixth finger. A grin that didn’t remind me much of Cab Calloway spread across his face as he watched my reaction. Then he lunged.

The blade scraped some fiber off my coat as I threw myself hard against the other side of the entrance niche. I moved to kick him as I had Fatty, but he anticipated that and twisted as he went past. My foot scuffed his pocket, nothing more. He came up against the door with a shuddering bang.

The years between me and my last workout on the mats were offset to a degree by the mild narcotic in his system, but he had youth and reach on me. It was time to stop playing. As he came away from the door, I fisted my Smith & Wesson and sent three pounds of steel, bone, and flesh smashing into his grin. It gave way with an audible crunch; he slammed into the door once again, and dribbled down it like Pepto-Bismol.

My fist was beginning to ache when I turned the revolver around and Wyatt-Earped my way through the ominously growling knot of toughs to my car. As I pulled away from the hydrant I got a hinge of Lee Q. Story watching me through the display window. His expression put me in mind of a fight manager who had laid everything he had on the wrong guy.

On St. Antoine I took advantage of a stoplight to study the list Story had given me. Then I crumpled it and tossed it to the floorboards. The one name I wanted would be the one he hadn’t written down. For that I’d have to wait.

I
WAS HITTING ALL
the red lights today, which was okay since I didn’t know where to go and was in no hurry to get there. At the next stop I broke out the batteries I’d bought at Story’s and replaced the old ones in the pencil-like paging device I wear clipped to my inside breast pocket. It was a struggle; the knuckles of my right hand were burst and bleeding and the fingers were beginning to stiffen. I barely got everything screwed back together when the damn thing started beeping.

I made it to a public telephone between the repairman and the neighborhood vandal and got the girl at my service, who bawled me out for not answering the page half an hour sooner and gave me Barry Stackpole’s private number at the
News.
He stabbed it halfway through the first ring.

“We lucked out, shamus,” he said, after I had identified myself. “Thursday, January twenty-fifth, a couple of days after the GOP picked Detroit for next year’s convention. The city council put the cops to work scouring the red light districts. We had a photographer on it. If that isn’t your girl standing behind the one being handed into the police van on John R I’ll tear up my press card.”

I breathed some air. “That’s fast sliding for someone who was the apple of her guardian’s eye in December.”

“They don’t call it the skids for nothing. That’s not all. It was a slow news day. The
Free Press
covered the same raid, without pictures. But they did publish the girls’ names. How does ‘Martha Burns’ sound?”

“Just like something an eighteen-year-old girl named Maria Bernstein might pick if she wanted to remain incognito without giving up her identity. Give me the rest of it.” He did, along with the names of all the others, just in case. I took them down in my notebook. “Thanks, Barry. By the way, how are you guys planning to handle the Kramer killing?”