Dying Embers (3 page)

“If the Glide has to go,” said Ken, leaning back in his chair, “the bitch can go to jail.”

“Then there's the white Jag convertible that you drive to work,” I said. “You only financed half the book value.”

Tracy deposited a cobra stare on Ken. “All Billy got for a down payment was a blowjob,” she said.

Ken swiveled his chair toward Tracy, put his elbow on the desk, and rested his chin in his hand. “You don't think, maybe you could suck one out of him for me, do you, dear?” said Ken. “The black Targa GT on the front line kind of caught my eye.” His face turned malevolent as he sat back in the chair. He folded his hands in his lap and squared his shoulders. “And I'm going to need a ride if I have to give up my scooter.”

“Clements?” asked Harold Butler, scratching a note into his pocket secretary with a gold fountain pen.

“Yeah,” said Tracy, still staring at Ken, “fat, bald, wrinkled-ass Billy Clements—the sales manager.” She turned her face to Butler. “You can take that and stick it because that's all I'm giving you. I want to see an attorney.”

“That's your right,” I said, and Tracy looked at me. “But if this problem leaves this room, right now, here, and today, it gets turned over to the bonding company. They'll pay the entire claim and come after you like the cavalry. They always insist on prosecution because they want the court to order restitution plus interest. You get to pay an attorney four or five grand for a deal that makes you pay back what you stole and includes jail time.”

“That's blackmail!”

“Call it what you like,” I said. “The judge is going to call it three to five on each count.”

“B
ITCH, BITCH, BITCH
,”
said Kim Goldberg. “I tell you what,”—he waved his tape measure at me—”Jews are God's chosen people. The Irish?” He shrugged and backhanded the air. “Never more than a hobby. We got Egypt and Babylon. We got the Roman Empire and the Third Reich. What'd you get? Lousy potato famine! Still, you come stand around my shop in you unnapants and bitch about lucka-da-Irish.”

He draped the tape around his neck and inspected the seat of my trousers at arm's length. “Boy, you got some gas, eh?” he said and laughed. Kim glanced at me and winked. “A little Jewish-Korean tailor joke.”

He'd parked his wire rimmed-glasses atop his bald head with the legs anchored in the short gray fuzz that his fifty-plus years had spared him. Maybe five feet tall on his tiptoes, he had a chest that was more like a divot between his shoulders. He wore a white shirt and used suspenders to level his tan wool slacks around a belly weaned on too much pot roast.

“What'd you do, buy this for Dutch Schultz's funeral?”

“It's the belt loops,” I said. “All the new suits, you know, the loops are too narrow for my gun belt.”

“That's because you shopping off da rack,” he said in a low voice, with downcast eyes—as if buying ready-to-wear was something furtive that people did in dark places. “Tell you what, you go get a cheap suit, bring back, and I'll open up the jacket to hide a shoulder rig. I got good at dat in Chicago. Buy something double breasted; maybe I be homesick.”

“I've been carrying on my hip for twenty-five years,” I said. “If I go to a shoulder rig I'm gonna die grabbing my ass.”

“Art, I know exactly how to help you,” he said. He ripped the trousers in half and handed them back to me. “Next time you want something done, have it laundered before you bring here.”

“Jesus, Kim,” I said, “I gotta meet a client in twenty minutes and I'm standing here in my boxer shorts.”

“And cowboy boots. Most fetching, if you put da gunbelt back on. The little happy faces very chic.”

“Maybe you got something to match the jacket?”

Kim stuck his hand out and waggled his fingers. I dropped the trousers and shrugged out of the jacket.

“I did dis lining for you,” he said.

“Yeah. Pistol tears up the lining.”

“Lining very handsome, but brown plaid make ugly suit.”

“It's very muted.”

Kim took the glasses off the top of his head and settled them on the end of his nose. “Dis muted—I'm Air Jordan,” he said. He took a seam ripper out of his shirt pocket, made one quick fleck at the collar, and tore the jacket in half. “There, now matches pants.”

“Are you nuts? My God! My suit!” My brain churned up the image of me standing in front of a judge who says, “Let's see if I have this right, Mr. Hardin. You strangled this man because he tore your suit,” and me saying, “Well, Your Honor, it seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

“Not to worry,” said Kim. He dropped the halves of my jacket on top of my divided trousers, tilted a tall gray waste can out from under the table, and swept my suit away like fish guts into a bucket. “Hold arms a little higher, please,” he said and whipped the tape measure off his neck and around my waist so quick and precise there should have been an audible crack. “Thirty-six,” he said.

“Thirty-four,” I said.

“You wish.”

“The only thing I'm wishing for is pants.”

“Maybe I got just the thing, match you shoes anyway. I think your belt fits da loops.” He turned and walked back toward the line of garments hung from a rod along the back wall of the shop. “You remember da country singer, da one with the big hair—was down at da Van Andle Arena?”

I hadn't the foggiest notion. “Sure,” I said.

“His security guy come down here—slim hips and a lot of beef, just like you.”

“Don't know him.”

“Conroy—he brought in some jeans to be hem and ordered a jacket.” He pulled a hanger of garments covered in dry cleaning plastic out of the line. “Said I cut da jeans too short, so he left it all.”

Kim hauled up the plastic and showed me a single-breasted, Westerncut, gray herringbone jacket as he walked back to the table. From underneath the jacket he dragged out a pair of black stonewashed denim trousers. I stepped out of my boots.

The jeans were starched and pressed. The pants legs had been hemmed on the bias. The waist was loose enough for a big pasta dinner and the legs wrinkled a little on the tops of my boots when I stepped back into them. “Just right,” I said.

“I guess he taller than you, dey hung straight on him.”

“That was the problem.”

“So, how you mean?”

“That's right, you said ‘Chicago'; you're not from Texas.” I laughed. The jacket fit a little snug under the arms but I generally wear them open anyway. I started my belt around the trousers. The magazine pouches and holster had to be threaded onto the belt between the loops.

“What so funny—I like to know?”

“The jeans are supposed to wrinkle up when you're afoot so that they'll hang straight when you sit on a horse.”

“He came in a limousine—no horse trailer.”

“Doesn't matter. Trust me.”

Kim shrugged.

“How much?” I said.

“Don't worry, you regular customer, I'll send you bill.”

“How much, Kim?”

“Special for you—just because we're friends—five hundred dollars.”

“I'll give you a yard and a half—the rest I'm going to need for bandages and ice packs because I gotta walk around looking like Roy Rogers.”

“Two and a half—you write me check.”

I started the belt back out of the loops.

“What are you gonna do? You can't walk out of here in your shorts.”

“Bet me.”

“Two hundred—and I'm taking a beating here.”

I stopped hauling on the belt. “You don't sell these to me—they hang on the rod back there until Halloween.”

Kim rolled his eyes. “You're killing me. I gotta have cash.”

“What tax bracket are you in, Kim? Twenty-eight percent? I'll split it with you. A hundred and seventy-two dollars. Cash.”

“Deal, and I hope you step in horse poop—
Roy!”

• • •

Lorna sat at the wheel of her yellow Olds Cutlass, her eyes closed and her head nodding to something on the radio. When I opened the passenger door and climbed in, she gave me a glance, then snapped her head around for a double take.

“Howdy, Tex.”

“Don't start,” I said. “We're late.”

“What's the matter—Kim out of matador outfits?”

“Gimme a break,” I said. Lorna pulled out of the lot and turned west toward Division Avenue. “Closer to take Breton up to Lake Drive.”

“Traffic is a zoo,” she said.

“How are you fixed for dough?”

“I got parking money.”

“Better hit a teller machine,” I said. “Kim skinned me for this outfit.” Lorna tightened her jaw but her eyes made merry slits under arched eyebrows.

“I like this jacket,” I said.

“Really?”

“Paid a hundred and seventy-two bucks for the jacket and jeans. Anything I pay that much for, I like.”

“Sorry,” she said, “I just got used to you looking like one of those guys in the old Raymond Chandler flicks.”

“This is more casual. You know. They even dress casual in the insurance offices now.”

She laughed. “In Texas.”

“No, really,” I said. “This is an All-American outfit. Go to Europe—business suits. Go to Tokyo—business suits. Only in America do you get an outfit like this.”

“In Germany they wear leather shorts, and in Scotland the men wear skirts.”

“Yeah, and Dutchmen wear wooden shoes, but not to business meetings.”

• • •

There's nothing like a Detroit Coney Island Hot Dog, especially in western Michigan. All you can get out here is a chili dog—which is not even close to the same thing. North and east of the city, in Rockford, the Corner Bar sells a lot of chili dogs—the blue-collar version with mustard, cheese, and onions—and holds pig-out contests. The winners take home a T-shirt and a box of Bromo Seltzer.

In Grand Rapids there's the Yesterdog Restaurant, located along the red brick pavers portion of Wealthy Street and nestled among yuppie-puppie used book shops and picture frame emporiums. Yesterdog features a wider variety of toppings for the stately frankfurter, including broccoli, pineapple, and yogurt. It even has a vegetarian chili dog, which strikes me as an oxymoron on the order of “committed political moderate.”

The warm late May day had filled the half-dozen wrought iron tables on the sidewalk in front of Yesterdog's with office types leaning over paper trays, trying not to return to work wearing their lunch. Scott Lambert, my wife's client, was not among them, thank God—too much sun ruins my barroom pallor.

“Get us some chow,” I told Lorna, handing her a double sawbuck, “I'll find our client.”

I headed past the serving counter toward the back room but stopped and turned around after a couple of steps. Lorna had a mischievous face. I shook a finger at her. “Nothing clever for me.”

“No jalapeños?”

“No.”

The darkly paneled back room had a half-dozen mix-and-match tables attended by an assortment of garage-sale kitchen chairs. An old-style wooden telephone booth graced the near corner. Since it lacked a telephone, I suppose that its purpose was to accent the antique Coca-Cola signs on the walls or to accommodate Clark Kent if he happened to stop by.

All the tables were occupied. No one wore a red cape and blue tights, but a Fidel Castro-looking dude sat alone sipping coffee and reading a newspaper. In the far corner a man in a blue knit shirt, with his hair neatly combed to conceal a tonsure, sat with his back to me. On the table lay several large stacks of fanfold computer paper pushed aside to make room for the laptop computer he bent over. I walked around to the back of the table.

“Scott Lambert?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said and looked up. “You're Wendy's husband?” Mr. Lambert was clean shaven and wore dark horn-rimmed glasses. A diet of work for lunch had netted him a thin body, gaunt face, and pronounced Adam's apple. He looked at his watch.

“Art Hardin,” I said, and offered my hand.

He looked to be in his mid-thirties but he took his glasses off and set them aside before he reached across the table to take my hand. Maybe he was older than I thought.

“Please call me Scott,” he said. “We've got about twenty minutes and my driver will be out front.”

I pulled out my chair and sat down. “How may I be of service?”

“I want you to find someone for me,” he said, turning his attention back to his laptop.

“Why?”

He quit fingering the computer, sat bolt upright in his chair, and looked at me with an astonished face. “That's what you do, isn't it? Wendy said that you could find anybody.”

“Of course I can find people. I need to know why.”

“Is that the law?”

“My rules.”

“This is a private matter.”

Lorna strolled up carrying a cardboard tray loaded with drinks in paper cups and a couple of bags of chips piled on top of chili dogs in paper boats. Scott eyed the load suspiciously, folded his computer, and slid it off the table.

“This is my associate, Lorna Kemp. Lorna, this is Scott Lambert.”

“Saw you on the news, Mr. Lambert,” said Lorna. “It's a pleasure to meet you.” She set the tray on the table. Scott pushed his chair back and started to rise. Lorna patted him on the shoulder.

“Sit,” she said, “but thank you for being a gentleman.” Scott settled back into his chair. Lorna passed me a comic sneer and sat down.

“Wait,” I said, “I'll get your chair.”

“Why? You made …
moi
… go get the food.”

“And a good job you did, too.”

“I don't know if this is going to work out,” said Scott.

“Scott, I respect privacy. I respect yours, and I'm not going to intrude on someone else's without a good reason.”