The Glass Highway (3 page)

“There’s no profit in hooking a private eye.” Smoke trailed out her nostrils. “The honest ones boil their shoes for lunch and the crooked ones are all greasy to the touch. When I marry again it’s going to be to someone with his name in the Social Register and one foot in the intensive care ward at Detroit Receiving.”

“For shame,” I chided. “ERA and all.”

“I never asked to be liberated. Besides, any constitutional amendment that can’t pass without bribery and coercion—or with it, for that matter—can’t be that good.”

“Now that we’re such good friends, what can you tell me about Paula Royce?”

Her eyes glittered. “I must be losing it. There was a time when I could make a man forget what business he was in for hours at a stretch.”

“I bet you still could—if you tried. What about Paula Royce?”

“I put on the PJ’s and everything. When Sharon told me a pair of pants was on its way—“

“You’re not half the slut you like to think you are. There’s a time and place for the sex stuff, and these ain’t them. Paula Royce.”

“You’re an icy son of a bitch,” she said. “I bet if I cut you you’d bleed Freon gas. I’d like to try and thaw you out one of these nights.” Her eyes smoked over.

“Paula—” I started to say. She held up a hand.

“Okay, okay. You don’t have to smack me in the kisser with a salami. I can tell you all I know about Paula while waiting for a traffic light to change. We only knew each other to say hello at parties. A sweet-tempered girl, I think. Quiet. Petite, if you like those cute French words. A brunette. All things I’m not.”

“Where’d you meet her?”

“At a party, where else? Don’t ask me whose. One’s pretty much like another. I guess it was about a year ago.”

“Who brought her?”

“I think she brought herself. I never saw her come in with anyone, there or the other places. If she ever left with someone I didn’t see that either, probably because I’d left by that time with someone myself.”

“Was Bud there?”

“Mmm-mm.” She was sucking on the filter. “They didn’t get together until three or four months ago. It was a do at Rhett Grissom’s. My date couldn’t make it at the last minute, so Bud offered to take me. He knew I try never to miss one of Rhett’s parties. The poor dear was so gallant.”

“How long have you been talking about your stepbrother in the past tense?”

She raised a pair of rather thick eyebrows. “Did I do that? Maybe it’s because he was so easy to forget. Damn it, there I go again. It’s hard to imagine him existing at all when you’re not in the room with him. Maybe that’s what attracted Paula. She was the same way.”

“I hear your stepmother thinks she’s a doper.”

“She should talk.” It came out in a bitter rush of smoke.

I imitated her raised-eyebrow expression.

She said, “Sharon pops so many pills it’s a wonder she has a chance to eat. Pills to wake up, pills to fall asleep, pills to lose weight, pills to gain it back. When she farts the room smells like a hospital ward. Paula’s nowhere near the doper she is. Probably not as much.”

“You’re saying Paula does pills.”

“Who doesn’t these days, outside Christian Science?” She stabbed out her butt in an onyx ashtray on the coffee table. The butt wasn’t half smoked. “Sharon thinks because she gets hers on a prescription and we get ours from a bowl at a party she’s holy and we’re bound for hell. Her doctor’s just a high-priced pusher with a diploma.”

“Were there pills at Rhett Grissom’s party?”

She started to answer. Then she smiled and placed the tip of a crimson-nailed forefinger against her upper lip. “For a minute there I forgot you’re a detective,” she said. “It’s the brown eyes. You ought to have them registered.”

I dredged up my pad and pencil. “That’s Rhett as in Butler, G-R-I-S-S-O-M?”

“Self-incrimination, darling.” She patted my knee and stood. “I have a date coining by at four. Excuse me while I slip into something a little less comfortable.”

“Who for, you or your date?”

She smiled again with her red-red lips and brushed her fingers along my jawline as she sashayed past. I twisted around in my chair to watch her leave. She passed another woman coming through the doorway from another room. They said nothing to each other.

“Mr. Walker? I’m Sharon Esterhazy.”

I got up and shook hands with a woman six inches shorter than her stepdaughter. She wore a cream-colored blouse with puffed sleeves, tucked into a brown flaring skirt cut to mask a slight middle-age weight shift, and her hair, arranged in a kind of pageboy, was that shade of blond that dark-haired women adopt to hide the gray as they grow older. She had on too much eye make-up, and from her nose to her mouth there were deep lines that powder couldn’t conceal. Her smile was as tight as a fist. Her hand felt cold.

I moved my inner dial to Tranquil Charm and said, “Thanks for agreeing to see me, Mrs. Esterhazy. I didn’t give you much notice.”

“Nonsense. Do I look like a busy woman? I’m just another one of those useless society butterflies you read about.”

She made me a drink offer, which I declined, then waved me back into my seat and perched on the edge of the sofa with her rather thick ankles crossed and her hands folded in her lap, consciously avoiding the still-warm spot where Fern had been sitting. She looked about as much like a society butterfly as I look like Boris Karloff. I kept hearing nervous Chihuahuas in her speech.

“I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Walker,” she said. “I wasn’t in favor of hiring you. It was Sandy’s idea. I think it’s a police matter and I may still call them. My husband pays taxes for just that privilege.”

I put out my cigarette next to Fern’s. “How does Mr. Esterhazy feel about that?”

“He’s left the decision to Sandy and me. He says that Bud’s our son and that he shouldn’t interfere.”

“What does your husband do for a living?”

“He’s an investment counselor. He built his own firm from the ground up, and now he employs twenty-three people. He’s a self-made man, unlike most of our neighbors.”

Her tone was defensive. When a wife talks that way about her husband you get to wondering how many squashed toes he’s left behind. “Did he and Bud get along?”

“Why do you ask?” The little dogs were yapping now. Her back was as straight as a pistol shot.

“I’m just establishing a background,” I explained. “Bud was over fourteen when you remarried, old enough to have a sense of father that wouldn’t transfer easily to a relative stranger. I understand he wouldn’t let Mr. Esterhazy adopt him. Whenever a young person drops out of sight I have to wonder if family friction was a contributing factor.”

“Well, you can stop wondering. As you say, Bud was too old to accept Charles as his father, but they got along very well. Bud called him by his first name.”

And Fern called her stepmother by hers. But I took a passed ball. “It was just a test shot. Bud wasn’t living at home when he disappeared, so it seemed unlikely. But the police would have asked the same question. What sort of man is your son? Your stepdaughter says he’s quiet.”

“A mortar burst would be quiet compared to her,” she said dryly. “Bud’s a normal twenty-year-old boy. He was on his high school debating team, played baseball, and dated, not always girls I approved of. I don’t imagine that’s unusual. He has good manners, which I suppose Fern might mistake for shyness, never having had any of her own. I wanted him to attend college, but he wanted to take some time out to think about it. He lived here for a year while he went to job interviews and filled out applications. Then he was hired for the line at the Ford Rawsonville plant. As soon as he had some money in the bank, he moved out to be near his work. I didn’t want him to. What mother would? I was hoping he’d save the money for tuition. He’s got too much upstairs to spend the rest of his life tightening nuts.”

“What about his interests outside of his job? Does he have hobbies?”

“Sports and reading. He belonged to a local softball club, but he gave that up when he went to work. I think he liked books better anyway. Action stories, mostly. Spy fiction. I tried to get him interested in Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but he always came back to that Ludlum person.”

I pretended to make a note of that. “Paula Royce.”

Her jaw clenched. “If anything’s happened to Bud and she’s responsible I’ll kill her.”

The air in the room had changed. I moved my shoulders around under my jacket. Now I knew where Sandy Broderick had picked up the mannerism. “Tell me about the time you saw her at your son’s apartment.”

“She wasn’t living there. Understand that.” Her hands twisted in her lap. “The day he makes that kind of arrangement, if he ever does, it won’t be with someone like her. I had nothing to do and it was a nice day to get out—it was October, the color was peaking—so I drove over there for a visit. They were having an early dinner, something Bud had cooked. That surprised me, because he’d never cooked anything before, not while he was living here, in any case. She was very rude. She said I should have called first. Maybe that’s true, but it seems to me that was for Bud to say. And I’m sure she was on drugs. Her speech was slurred, kind of drunken, except she wasn’t drunk. I could tell the difference.”

“What did you do?”

“What could I do? I left. Bud was polite, but I could see that the situation was making him nervous. I expected him to call later and explain, or apologize the next time we saw each other. But he never mentioned it. A month later he stopped coming to visit. I suppose Sandy’s told you the rest.”

I leaned on routine. Did Bud behave oddly during his last couple of visits? He seemed preoccupied, but not upset. A mother notices such things. Had she talked with her son’s friends? None of them had seen him since he took up with the Royce girl; can’t imagine why they’d lie. I asked for some names and wrote them down. I mentioned a picture. She went into another room for a minute and returned with a five-by-seven black-and-white portrait in a silver frame of a hefty youth with hair like wet sand smiling frozenly at the camera. Sandy Broderick’s eyes looked out at me from Sharon Esterhazy’s face.

“He had it taken last summer,” she explained. “I’d told him I hadn’t had a picture of him since his high school graduation.”

I took it apart and gave her back the frame. Then I played my wild card.

“Do you know a Rhett Grissom?”

Her brow creased. “The boy who gave the party where Bud met the girl? He lives here in Grosse Pointe with his parents, though I think they’re in Hawaii. He didn’t go with them. But he’s not a friend of Bud’s. Do you think he knows where Bud is?”

“He might know someone who does. What’s his address?”

She gave it to me. While I was writing, an automobile horn blasted in the street out front. It sounded like money.

“That’s Fern’s date. When I was her age, young men rang the bell.” She got up, smoothing her skirt.

I did the same, minus the skirt part. “Maybe this one knows Fern will come running no matter how she’s called.”

“She’ll be glad to hear you said that. She’s been playing the part of the scarlet woman so long she’s beginning to believe it herself.”

At the front door, Sharon Esterhazy got my hat and coat out of the closet and I climbed into them. I put on the rubbers. “Thanks for your help. I’ll call if anything else occurs to me.”

Her face looked pinched and old in the gray light sifting in through the transom. “May I ask what my ex-husband is paying you to look for our son?”

“A thousand dollars. That’s a four-day retainer.” I opened the door. Someone sitting behind the wheel of a black Corvette parked across the end of the driveway perked up, then saw me, and settled back into his slump.

“I might have guessed,” she said. “If Sandy were trapped in an alley and a truck were bearing down on him, he’d throw money at it.”

I got out of there.

T
HE PARTY IN THE
’vette observed my approach down the walk through a pair of pink-tinted sunglasses. No one in those parts had seen the sun since November. His face was suety and he was wearing a toupee that had cost him some change ten years ago, but it hadn’t gone gray like his sideburns. It looked like an angry black cat crouching on his head. He had on a blue leisure suit over a white turtleneck, young man’s clothes. He was upwards of forty.

I didn’t realize the engine was running until I was standing next to it. He could have heard the dashboard clock humming if he had one that worked, and I bet he had. “Here for Fern?” I fed my face a butt.

He had slid over as far as the console allowed and rolled down the passenger’s window to catch my philosophy. He looked at the question from both sides, then said, “Yeah,” cautiously.

“Hope you brought training wheels.”

He was still turning that one over when the lady came out of the house. Purple dress showed under the hem of a long gray coat with a high waist, and under that black leather boots with needle heels. She was still too short for professional basketball. “I see you two have met.”

“We had word,” I said.

She didn’t let it puzzle her long. “Ernie’s taking me to a party.”

“Where at, the intensive care ward?”

“Who is this guy?” demanded Ernie. He hadn’t budged except to flip up the lock button on the passenger’s side. Galahads like him are as rare as zippers these days.

“His name’s Walker.” She was looking at me with that canary-feather smile. “He says he’s a detective.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, no money changed hands.” Ernie was a card.

“What would someone like you be doing when he’s not sleuthing?” she asked.

“I collect bruises.”

“Hey, you hitting on this guy on my time?”

She ignored him. “I guess your number’s in the book. I may use it some time.”

“I may answer.” I opened the door for her.

She got in and looked up at me. “I’m serious. Maybe we can have a drink. Or something.”

“Give my neck a break and leave the heels at home.”

Her smile got too heavy for her. She let go of it and swung the door shut. I barely got my fingers out of the way. Ernie tried to splash me with mud from his rear wheel, but I stepped back and saved everything above the knees. I stood on the frozen wet grass, watching them roar away and getting rained on the smoking and sounding the depths of my ability to say the wrong thing.