Motown (19 page)

“No one ever said you couldn’t be dedicated and enjoy your work at the same time.”

“What about his wife? Does she enjoy it?”

If he’d expected her to spill her coffee at the mention of the name she disappointed him. “Caroline’s a different breed. Blinders on, look-straight-ahead. She goes for the jugular, whether it’s in the courtroom or out in the competitive world in general. It’s a good match. Without her, Wendell might get tangled up in his altruism and never get anywhere. She knows the odds and how to meet them.”

“Don’t get all sloppy-sentimental.”

He got it then, a whitening at the edges of her nostrils just before she looked up from her mug and saw he was grinning. The tightness evaporated. “Maybe auto safety isn’t quite the holy crusade to her that it is to the rest of us. Maybe she’d be just as aggressive if she were representing a millionaire stockbroker accused of insider trading. I suppose it’s foolish not to expect a lawyer to think like a lawyer.” She glanced at a tiny jeweled watch. “Eight o’clock whistle, Mr. Flintstone. Time to go to the quarry.”

Pammie was licking envelopes at the card table. Today she had on a Minnie Mouse keep on truckin’ T-shirt and her hair was tied into its usual corn-shock with a green ribbon instead of a rubber band. Rick assumed the ribbon was for his benefit. He had it on Lee Schenck’s authority that Pammie had a thing for PG’s newest volunteer.

“I saw the needlepoint thing,” she said. “Pretty smooth.”

“Is there anything you don’t see?” He sat down and slid the telephone over.

“If I don’t know about it, it didn’t happen.”

He was still working his way down the list of towing services. His mind wasn’t on the first two calls; he got a female receptionist who was too wary to give him any useful information or let him speak to anyone else, and whoever answered the telephone the second time hung up before he finished his first question. Pammie watched him cradle the receiver.

“Forgot to sound like a hick,” she said.

Actually he felt like one. The old Rick Amery would have zeroed right in on a source like Pammie instead of letting a week slide by while he worked on Lee and Enid. “You like baseball?” he asked.

“My brother said I was the best shortstop in Royal Oak, but I haven’t had a glove on in years.”

“Tigers are playing a double-header Thursday. If we work hard we can be out of here before the second game. Want to go?”

She uncovered a fortune in braces. “I’ll bring my home cap.”

His next several calls were more successful, and he filled ten pages with notes. Lee Schenck, wearing a tie-dyed shirt that looked as if he’d used it to mop up an oil spill, leaned in while Rick was in the middle of an interview, waved, and withdrew, presumably to go upstairs to his cubbyhole. It was a few minutes before ten. With the exception of Enid, the office appeared to operate on an organic clock.

A little while later Enid came to the door and waited until Rick hung up.

“I was going to draft Lee for this, but since you asked about Caroline I thought you might want to meet her,” she said. “Wendell’s being sued again over something he wrote in
Hell On Wheels.
I did some of the research, so she wants to ask me some questions and see the records, about fifteen pounds’ worth. You don’t wear a truss or anything, do you?”

“Where’s the stuff?” He rose.

“Upstairs. Lee will show you.”

Lee, sprawled behind a library table in a back bedroom under a steeply tilted ceiling—which explained his habit of ducking his head whenever he stood up anywhere—was reading a magazine from one of the stacks that occupied most of the floor space. His job was to pore through everything that came out on the automobile industry, including Big Three stock reports, and cull any information PG might find useful. Since he never seemed to write anything down, and since Porter wasn’t the kind to retain deadwood with or without a salary, Rick assumed Lee had a photographic memory.

When Rick explained his errand, the long-haired young man pointed the hot rod comic book he was reading at three stuffed accordion files on the table. “Going to see the Arctic Princess, huh?”

“That’s the plan.” He stacked the files one on top of another and hoisted them. It was closer to twenty pounds than fifteen.

“Don’t touch her without insulated gloves.”

Enid was waiting at the foot of the stairs. “I’ve got some paperwork to do on the way over. Mind driving?”

“Not if we take my car.”

“Do you have seat belts?”

“I’ll drive carefully.”

“Drive normally. Men with cars like yours are most dangerous when they’re being careful.”

Outside he put the files on the backseat and held the passenger’s door for her. “Where to?”

“Grosse Pointe, where else?” She sat down and swung her legs inside. He found himself wishing she’d worn a skirt.

Heading east on Jefferson he stopped for the light at Cadieux. A sky-blue Cobra was stopped in the left turn lane with its indicator blinking. Rick grinned and gunned his engine twice. The driver of the Cobra returned the salute. The light changed and they parted company.

“What was that?” Enid was looking at him over a pair of glasses with rose frames.

“Camaraderie of the road.”

She resumed reading the sheet in her hand. “Why don’t you just drop your pants and use a ruler?”

Harry DiJesus gunned his engine back at the guy in the silver Camaro and swung onto Cadieux. He wanted to pop the clutch, but a Tactical Mobile Unit carrying two officers was coming the other way. They passed him without a second look and stopped at Jefferson. He pointed his finger at the rearview mirror and said, “Pow.”

He’d never done a cop and wouldn’t unless he had to, but he’d always wondered how it would be. Most of the guys he’d done were stiffs going in, stationary targets who died surprised. He still got a lift from it, but it wasn’t lasting as long these days; the first nigger in the after-hours joint had been like a dry fuck, he should’ve tried to get him to open the door instead of blasting him through it. A cop would be something different. Fellow professional, good reflexes. Like taking on John Wayne in
The Sons of Katie Elder.
He always identified with the gun punks in westerns, calling out the top hands with the big reputations. The writers ought to let one of them win once in a while.

But he’d stopped looking for trouble. Every time he had in the past he’d wound up in jail. Others were less lucky and wound up in a tray at the Clark County Morgue. Most of them got off on their guns, it was the only fuck they knew except for what they paid for. At thirty-one, bronzed and well-muscled in his body shirts and tight jeans, DiJesus had never had to pay for it. Recently he’d let his blond hair grow long like the kids’, and the effect on women was more than satisfying. With the gold chains he’d begun wearing in Vegas, it made him look like a surfer.

Vegas was looking better and better. Detroit was a hick town, rolled up the sidewalks at 2:00 a.m. except for the after-hours places, and those were for niggers only. He yawned bitterly. He was having trouble adjusting to sleeping at night and staying up during the day. Back home he rose at sunset in his suite at the Flamingo, ordered breakfast from room service while the rest of the world was sitting down to dinner, and cruised the Strip until dawn, meeting friends and sitting in on games he owned a piece of and once in a while doing someone. That was the rent he paid for the good life.

The shotgun raids were a lift, one of the few things that made Detroit bearable. The tall nigger in the barbershop, now; that was a classic. The boy had been an athlete and still had balls, charging him after the first blast with his right side blown away and nothing in his hands but the telephone receiver he’d been holding when they came through the door. DiJesus had waited until he’d almost reached him with those long arms, then squeezed off again. That blast spun him around and folded him up like a big spider.

DiJesus would be glad when this one was over. He was used to dry heat. The sweaty air here made him feel wrung out and greasy and he was developing a rash on his neck from the ski mask, which had been a better idea in the cool desert nights. His incentive for coming east, a piece of the local numbers, wasn’t worth scratching and sweating his way through the long sleepy days. Max and Georgie, his partners in the shotgun raids, could do what they liked with what he was paying them; he himself would be an absentee landlord.

He braked for the light at Mack. It changed and a horn blatted behind him. The dentate grille of a gray 1959 Cadillac—“nigger diesels,” he’d heard them called up here—leered at him in the mirror. Behind the windshield, two smaller sets of teeth gleamed just as brightly in black faces under big hats. DiJesus turned in his seat to give them the one-finger salute—remembering even as he did so that he’d seen the same car a block behind him on Jefferson. Something slid out of the window on the passenger’s side and the Cobra’s rear window disintegrated in a shower of opalescent bits.

T
HE BUILDING WAS LESS
than five years old, a yellow brick construction designed to continue the pleasing horizontal lines of Grosse Pointe’s tiny select business district, and sheltered, along with Caroline Porter Associates, a number of doctors’ offices and accounting corporations whose names were embossed on the directory in the glass-and-chromium lobby. The elevator doors sliced open on the third floor directly across from a glass wall with the legal firm’s name lettered in gold on the door. When Enid opened and held it for Rick and his burden of files, conditioned air touched his face like spring mist.

A receptionist behind a white desk with thin steel legs repeated their names over a Princess telephone and asked them to have a seat. Rick wondered if her beehive hairstyle violated the city’s ordinance against skyscrapers.

He deposited the files on a glass coffee table with copies of the
Saturday Evening Post
fanned across its top and wandered around the reception area while Enid made herself comfortable on the tweed sofa. The walls were paneled in blond wood and decorated with Picasso prints in steel frames; the Blue Period, to match the carpet. In a little while they were joined by a man Rick’s age in blue worsted and glasses with tortoiseshell frames. “How are you, Enid?”

“Busy, as always.” She took his hand and rose. “Rick Amery, Ronald Engler. Ronald is Mrs. Porter’s assistant.”

Rick touched a dry hand without calluses. He wanted to ask Engler if a new carpet meant a change of wardrobe, but chose an inanity instead. The neutral-colored eyes behind the glasses let him go when the hand did and passed to the files. “Is that the stuff? How did Wendell get all that into three hundred and sixty pages?”

“This is only the portion Caroline asked about,” Enid said. “The rest would fill this floor.”

“Where does he get his ideas?”

“From the obituaries.”

Rick grinned.

“Caroline said to show you right in.” Engler had edited out the exchange.

Rick picked up the files and he and Enid followed the assistant down a silent hallway lined with framed certificates of merit from a dozen community organizations, some of whose names were familiar to Rick. At the end Engler tapped lightly on a door made of the same pale wood as the paneling and opened it without waiting for an answer. They walked in past him.

“Thank you, Ronald.”

It was a dismissal. Engler backed out, drawing the door shut. The office, a corner room, was roughly the size of the ground floor plan at PG, furnished with antiques and an Oriental rug on a parquet floor, and looked more like a Victorian parlor than a place of business. Windows in adjacent walls, hung with ivory satin drapes tied like funeral bunting, looked out on the business section and a wedge of Lake St. Clair, flaring like bright metal under the climbing sun. The walls were beige and uncluttered, bearing only a framed diploma from the University of Michigan and an eight-by-ten photograph of Caroline Porter shaking hands with John F. Kennedy.

The woman herself was standing behind a maple table arranged with desk items, smiling the smile she had smiled for JFK, showing only a thin line of white teeth between bright red lips. Her blond hair was up in its customary Princess Grace style and she was wearing a gold bolero jacket with blue embroidery over a pale silk blouse with a frothy jabot at her throat. Her skirt was brown broadcloth, snug but not tight. Rick saw no jewelry, not even a wedding band.

“Enid, thank you for coming. I know what your schedule is like.”

The voice, a contralto, held the same cordial tone she had used to get rid of her assistant. The
Cosmopolitan
article Rick had read had claimed that when addressing the bench she could go from a throaty purr to the crack of a steel whip instantly.

“Anything to keep Wendell out of court,” Enid said. “When he’s there he’s not helping the Porter Group.” She introduced Rick.

A slender hand fluttered in his and was gone. He’d been expecting a firm, manly grip and it caught him off guard; which he supposed was the intention. Gray eyes made contact with a static crackle. “You don’t look like the fetch-and-carry type.” She inclined her head a fraction of an inch toward the stack of accordion files, which he had deposited on a low tea table in a conversation area consisting of a settee and matching straight chair and rocker, upholstered in petit-point.

Enid said, “Rick’s new. He plans to be an expert by the end of the week. Is it all right if he stays?”

The red lips tightened almost imperceptibly. There were deep commas at the corners that could no longer be passed off as dimples. “If he doesn’t mind being bored. It’s not like
Perry Mason.
”

“You’re an improvement over Raymond Burr,” he said. “I hope that’s not out of line.”

“Hardly. In any case I’m used to it. There weren’t many women in my class in law school, and I’ve heard all the jokes about briefs. Would anyone like tea or coffee before we get started?”

Rick and Enid declined and they went over to the conversation area. Rick waited until the women were seated, then took the rocking chair. Enid, on the settee, reached for the top file on the stack.