Motor City Blue (14 page)

“John, knowing you is keeping me honest.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Have you been drinking?”

It was John all right. I struck a match where he could hear it and touched off a weed. “Not too much,” I said, spitting smoke. “I’m not burning.”

“Grow up and listen. My buddy in Atlanta couldn’t raise anything on anyone named Darling. Screwy thing. When he fed the names into the computer it referred him to Grand Theft Auto, but when he tried that he drew a blank.”

“I half expected something like that.”

“In English, please.”

“We’re dealing with Washington here. Most of our tax dollars go for electric wastebaskets and paper shredders. They learned how to erase tapes a couple of administrations ago. Computer tapes can’t be all that different. Thanks twice, John.”

I hung up long enough to haul out the city directory and run my finger down the G’s until I found the name I wanted. Damned if she wasn’t listed. I dialed. It purred twice and then Beryl Garnet’s sweet little old voice came on.

“Hello?”

“Hello yourself.” I did my Bogart impression. That one always worked. Nobody ever guessed who it was. “Let me talk to Iris.”

“She doesn’t usually come to the telephone. May I take a message?” She didn’t sound as if she suspected anything. But then she never did.

“Quit stalling, sister. I got dough to spend and a plane to catch at seven. It’s Iris or nothing.”

“One moment, sir.” No pause, no sharp intake of breath, not even a change in tone. Just, “One moment, sir,” as if I were placing an order for party drinks and she had to grab a pencil. I listened for a while to the miscellaneous bumps and footsteps and unintelligible voices that came to me as if from the other end of a hollow tube and smoked my cigarette. Somewhere a TV set was playing: loud, blaring music, shots, a shriek of tires followed by the smashing of glass. A cop show. I checked my watch. 3:52. That made it either the teatime movie or a rerun of an old program. Aunt Beryl’s girls didn’t get to do much viewing in the evening. Someone lifted the receiver.

“Hello?” A unique voice, timid at the same time as it made promises. A hint of island in the cadence. Iris.

“I’m a customer you had a while back.” I used my natural voice. “Don’t let Auntie know I’m anything else. Say yes if you understand.”

“Oh, yes!” She sounded tickled pink. That put the old lady right there in the room.

“Okay, here’s where it gets sticky. I have to ask you some questions without you tipping off the boss with your answers. Is there another extension in the house? Don’t just say yes or no. Be inventive.”

“I’m afraid not.” She sounded as if she were playing hard to get.

“Good. Two pairs of ears is all we want on this. Get rid of the old lady. Tell her I’m shy and you’ve got selling to do. If she balks tell her I’m loaded and so are my friends. Make it sound long and boring. If that doesn’t work we’ll try something else.”

“Oh,” she laughed, “I’m sure we can work something out.” There was a pause. Then, in a low voice: “It’s okay, she’s gone. Good thing, too, because that story would never have worked in a million years. What is it?”

“The loonier the line the better it works, usually. These Darling brothers you mentioned, that romped once with Martha. Were they regular customers?”

“Not really. I saw them once or twice before, several months apart. That’s how I knew it was them when I heard their voices on the other side of the wall that night. They sounded like the Dodge Sheriff in stereo.”

“Either of them ever go with you?”

She laughed shortly and without mirth. “Lord, no! I don’t think those good ole boys went for dark meat.”

“Don’t be coarse. Seen or heard anything of them lately?”

“Not since that night.”

“What happened that night?”

Her voice rose. A coy note crept into it. “No, I don’t think I’d like that.” Someone had come into the room. There was another pause, then she resumed in hushed tones. “Felix walked through. There was a lot of talking that night, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Some of it sounded kind of angry. There were a lot of bumps and smacks and squeals, as if someone was getting worked over good.”

The butt was burning my fingers. I’d forgotten about it. I smashed it into the glass bottom of my souvenir ashtray from Traverse City. “Didn’t that seem strange?”

“Not here. It takes all kinds to pay the bills in a whorehouse. I’m being coarse again, aren’t I? But she had a black eye when I saw her later that night.”

“Who? Martha?”

“Mm-hm. I didn’t have much chance to talk to her about it, though. That was the night we were raided.”

“What’d the old lady say when she saw the shiner?”

“She didn’t. She was out of town when the cops hit the place, and we were all released together the next morning. Some crummy newshawk snapped us during the bust, but the eye didn’t show up in the shot. It was right afterward that Martha locked herself in her room. Aunt Beryl thinks it’s because she was embarrassed at being hauled in like a common hooker. I know better. She had no excuse for that eye. A few days later she lit out, taking my gold heart with her.”

“What about Jerry and Hubert? They get picked up too?”

“They left an hour before the cops showed. Does this have something to do with finding Martha?”

“It may have everything to do with it. Sit tight, angel. You’ll be hearing from me soon.”

“Wait! Am I going to see you, too?”

She had turned it on again. Not that it was ever really off. “Did someone just come in?” I asked.

“No.”

I grinned. “See you later, angel.”

I stared at the office bottle for a few seconds. Then I seized the half-full shot glass and poured its contents down the neck, screwed the cap back on, put them both away in the drawer, and reached for my hat. Who needed liquor? I was getting my highs off life.

T
HE TEMPERATURE HAD CLIMBED
twelve degrees since noon, according to the radio, and now big fat drops of freezing rain were starring the windshield after the wipers had made peanut brittle out of the wafer-thin ice that had already formed. My tires swished on the slick wet pavement. All around me cars were hydroplaning on the sheen of water atop the glassy surface, and here and there curbs, gutters, and hydrants had begun to blossom with fender-benders and six-hundred-dollar suspension replacement jobs. Some people have to learn how to drive all over again each winter.

The overcast had reduced the complexion of the city from its usual smog blue to a smeary gray, through which swollen headlamps gleamed resignedly like candles beneath a filthy wet undershirt and were reflected even more dimly in the puddles ahead. I reached over and tugged mine on just for appearances. The car smelled of warm, wet wool. Tires swished and wipers thrummed and rain pattered on the vinyl roof and the heater fan pushed warm air at my feet, drying my socks, soaked from slogging through puddles. I felt cozy and relaxed and protected from the cold, wet, noisy world by a palpitating wall of warmth. Then I swung left onto Woodward and an icy stream of water that had been trapped beneath the dash drooled over my right ankle and the feeling was gone.

Just for the hell of it I cruised past George Gibson’s building at Woodward and Watson, but this time my attention was fixed on the place across the street, where Francis Kramer had knocked a match out of my hand while he was hurrying out the door. No soap. A guy with a back like a marine drill instructor’s—straight as a rifle shot—in a necktie and brown, knee-length trenchcoat was standing in that very doorway looking miserable and sticking out, in that neighborhood, like a pair of black formal shoes at a love-in. Only he wasn’t marines, he was army. Which when I thought about it wasn’t such a tough break after all, since if there had been anything worth looking for in the GM foreman’s apartment they’d have found it by now, and there wouldn’t be any need to post a guard. I rolled on past and lit a shuck east to Erskine.

I parked in a lot a couple of blocks down from Story’s After Midnight and walked back in that direction with my hat brim down to my eyes and my collar turned up around my ears, leaning into the driving rain. The drops crackled when they pelted my face, burning the skin on contact like showering sparks. The wind picked up my coattails and flapped them noisily about my legs. Along this block the street rose at a thirty-degree angle, and the run-off made rivers out of the gutters and gurgled greedily past naked branches and gobs of wet newspaper in the sewer grates. The world was very much with me here.

There were no toughs waiting for me this time, but I nearly brained myself anyway when I swung into the deep doorway and grasped the brass handle and pushed and the door didn’t budge. I stepped back and read CLOSED on a dun shade on the other side of the glass. I cupped my hands around my eyes and leaned against it, but the shade was opaque and so was the one over the window. My watch said 4:33. It seemed a strange time to close, but he might have worried about getting home later because of the road conditions. I didn’t think so. Something that wasn’t a drop of cold rain crawled down between my shoulder blades.

There was an alley two doors down. I took it, walking as nonchalantly as the rain and my own gnawing hunch would allow, around to the back and counted the brown steel doors I found there until I came to the one I figured led into Story’s. Two black plastic garbage bags lounged beside it. One of them had a hole chewed in it near the bottom and something was squirming around inside. Rats. When we’ve all been blown to atoms, they’ll still be around. I made sure they had room to scurry out without running up my pants leg and stooped to inspect the lock.

It was a dead bolt, which came as no surprise in a country where mace manufacturers advertise in women’s magazines. The brass strikeplate didn’t wobble when I shook the door by its dull metal handle, and what I could see of the screws wasn’t encouraging. If they were longer than half an inch they might pose a problem. I looked around, took two steps back, raised my foot, and threw everything I had behind the heel, smashing the lock square on the keyhole. It shuddered a little.

I tried the door a second time. It seemed to have given some, about as much as Gibraltar settles into the ocean each day. The old wood had begun to release its hold on the screws that kept the strikeplate in place. I took a deep breath and stood back with my foot poised. It wasn’t just the loss of my license I was flirting with now; it was a year in the slam. Judges don’t take to private sleuths any more than cops do, and they’d been coming down hard lately on cases of breaking and entering. The hell with that. Amos Walker had a hunch.

It didn’t happen on that one either, or on the next, but the fourth blow tore the screws from the casing and sprang the door inward, twisting my ankle at the same time. The molding and a fist-size chunk of worm-eaten oak went with it. I limped inside and pushed the works as shut as it could get behind me.

I was in a storage room of some kind, windowless and as black as Hitler’s heart. I knew it was used for storage because I tripped over a long box of something parked across the entrance and had to twist so that I sat down on it instead of pitching forward into God knows what. The force of my weight moved it about the width of a butterfly’s eyelash. I fished out my pencil flash and snapped it on to examine the box. The flaps were open and it was full of hardcover books shrink-wrapped in plastic and packed for shipping via whatever parcel service Story subscribed to. I got up and, using the flash to prevent a similar accident, made my way over a jumble of other cartons to a door that presumably led into the shop proper. Satisfying myself that it was reasonably airtight and would leak no light where it could be spotted from the street, I grasped a chain I’d noticed earlier dangling from a naked bulb on the ceiling and gave it a jerk.

It was a claustrophobic little cell, hardly eight by ten, and the walls were fuzzy yellow lath with plaster the color of old ivory squeezing out between the slats. Cardboard cartons of various sizes filled the room. If someone had stacked them, someone else had pulled the stacks apart. Every one had been opened, and although from where I stood the boxes of books and rolled posters and packets of stills had been left as they were, those containing films had been dumped out, the canisters pried open and the celluloid strips uncoiled from the metal spools and left in tangled, glistening piles like wet black tapeworms. There was no use examining them. Someone already had.

I tugged off the light and tried the door. It was unlocked. I stepped into the shop, where the soggy gray afternoon light slanting in through the transom over the front door was all I needed to see that it was in even worse shape. Here, even the books had been torn from their racks, their plastic seals slashed open and the books flung to the floor in a riot of pages. The drawers of the desk beneath the plate glass window had been pulled completely out, dumped upside-down, and their contents scattered over the floor in that pawed-through pattern you see only when every item has been closely examined. Even the glass picture frames containing obscene photos suitable for desk-top display had been taken down from their shelves and pulled apart. The sale films were in the same condition as their cousins in back. Someone with a lot of time had been through the place with a thorough hand, and the odds were he didn’t get what he had come for. People usually stop searching when they find what they want.

There was one door left to try, a narrow job with a poster tacked to it of a nude girl with breasts the size of watermelons and the face of a prominent feminist superimposed on top of her neck. This one was locked, but not nearly as securely as the one that led into the building from the rear. I produced my pocket knife, inserted the blade between the edge of the door and the jamb, slid it upward for six or seven inches until it clicked against metal, then gave it a firm upward jerk that flipped a little steel hook out of a little steel eye. There was no latch. The door creaked inward of its own weight like Boris Karloff Night at the movies.

Lee Q. Story sat fully dressed on the toilet seat facing sideways so that he could lean his forehead on the edge of the matching white porcelain sink, just as you and I might do if we got up to get ready for work before the flu was out of our systems and a fresh dizzy spell hit while we were tying our shoelaces. Only the flu wasn’t anything he had to worry about, ever again. He was long past worries of any sort. My fingertips on his throat where the pulse was supposed to be told me that much. The rain outside wasn’t as cold as his skin.