Sugartown (19 page)

“Those Venetian blinds scream for dusting.”

“I did that Tuesday.”

“You might try standing a little closer next time.”

“So clever, so early.” I waved at the customer’s chair. She sat, bending one knee over the other in her gray slacks, and wedged the purse between her hip and the arm. I opened the window and took charge of the swivel behind the desk. We looked at each other. She made the wallpaper look cheap.

She said, “You ought to get a new sofa and some easy chairs and a coffee maker and do business there in the corner. Sometimes desks get in the way.”

“I could greet the clients in a caftan. Play bongo music and read their palms and sock them ten bucks a finger.”

“Don’t laugh. Our last book on psychic phenomena sold six million copies.”

“Which as an editor and watchdog for culture you don’t appreciate.”

“What I appreciate has very little to do with it. People are reading less and less. They’re all out running and getting themselves fulfilled and they wouldn’t know good writing if you tied them down and read it to them aloud. Or care. A book has to weigh five pounds new or it’s not worth the cover price.”

“Like Mexican Brown,” I said.

She raised delicately penciled eyebrows. “Is that a book?”

“It’s crude quality heroin. The good stuff is pure white when refined. But the local addicts have been mainlining Brown so long they’re suspicious of the other, and when the distributors do lay hold of the white stuff they have to step on it and tint it brown or it won’t sell.”

She nodded. “I think that’s a fair analogy. You seem to know a great deal about drugs.”

“If I worked in Akron I’d know a great deal about tires. I’m a drunk, not a head.”

She laughed. Music played. When things got quiet again I opened a fresh pack and offered her one. She shook her head, smiling, and I lit one for myself. I launched the exhaust away from her. “What brings Publishers’ Row clanking down my street this
A.M.
?”

“I was wondering if you’d talked to Eric Rynearson yet.”

“I meant to last night. I got distracted.”

“Are you still distracted?”

“A little. Not diverted. But Rynearson’s store is only open three hours a day, and these aren’t them.”

“You have principles against” — she hesitated — “
warning
people in their homes? Like the Mafia?”

“I’m entitled to a few, like editors. But that isn’t one of them. I don’t know where Rynearson lives. He isn’t listed. I could find out, but it would cost you seventy-five bucks. Probably a hundred now that I’ve sicced the cops on that source. I figure it’s cheaper all around to see him at work.”

“Oh, but he lives above the store. Didn’t I say that?”

“No,” I said, “you didn’t.”

“He lives above the store.”

“Thanks.”

She smiled again and smoothed the crease on her slacks between thumb and forefinger. Her nails were pointed and perfect and glossy-clear.

“It’s straight,” I said.

“What?” She looked startled.

“The crease. And if it weren’t straight there’s not a lot you could do about it now. Why else are you here bad-mouthing my fixtures?”

“Fedor Alanov’s suite was broken into last night,” she said.

“Is he all right?”

“He’s fine. It happened while he and Andrei were addressing a library gathering in Warren. I was in my room reading manuscripts. Crimes in themselves,” she added archly. “Fedor discovered it when he returned.”

“Anything taken?”

“He says no. Whatever they were after, they were very neat about it. But Fedor is a meticulous man and noticed some things out of place. Shirts returned to bureau drawers in the wrong order, pages of notes not lined up properly, little things like that. But too many to overlook. Whoever did it had to have a key.”

“The maid?”

“Hotel maids don’t clean rooms at night unless specifically requested. Also they have no business going through drawers.”

“They don’t,” I agreed. “But they do. You talked to security?”

“A tall young man with a floorwalker’s manner. He walked around the suite and touched his moustache and insinuated that Mr. Alanov must be mistaken. Absentmindedness is often the culprit, or words to that effect. Fedor thanked him — you know that way of his — and said he’d never been called crazy or a liar in such refined terms. The security man offered to notify the police. I needn’t tell you how Fedor replied.”

“House dicks. They’ve come a long way from the old tobacco-spitters that wore their hats indoors. I don’t think. You suspect Rynearson?”

“More likely it was one of the people working for him. Who else could it be?”

“Hotel thieves. Larcenous maids. A bellboy with a habit. A gossip columnist looking for a scoop. Someone who had the suite before and kept the key. Those things float all over the place, no one knows how many copies there are, and anyone with a buck can get an extra one made at any hardware store. But let’s just for now say it was Eric Rynearson or his help. What would he be after in Alanov’s suite?”

“Why, the
Asylum
manuscript, of course. Fedor had it with him in his briefcase or it would be lost.”

I killed my stub. “Excuse it, please, but I’m having trouble following the plot. I thought it was Alanov this KGB stooge was after, not his book.”

“Ideally, he would want the brain behind the words, but failing that he would seize the existing script as a stopgap.”

“There’s only one copy?”

“Fedor won’t allow copying until it’s finished. He won’t even let anyone read it in its present form. I’ve only seen an outline. That’s not unusual among writers. Their prejudice against showing unfinished work sometimes carries all the mystical ritualism of a pagan superstition.” She smiled primly, like a missionary. She was as much like a missionary as I was like Billy Graham. I drew a pencil from the water glass on the desk and tickled my ear with the eraser. Scratching my brain.

“How come no one who looks like a cop believes Alanov when he reports this kind of thing?”

She lowered her lashes. They didn’t come anywhere near her chin. “All publishing houses aren’t as scrupulous as ours. There have been publicity stunts in the past to promote book sales. The Hughes autobiography didn’t help matters.”

“That’s all?”

“No.” She looked at me again and settled back in the chair with her hands on the arms. “There was an incident shortly after Fedor came to this country from the U.S.S.R. He reported that a Russian agent had been following him everywhere he went since he landed. Federal agents put him under surveillance and eventually apprehended a man who turned out to be an admiring reader from Baltimore who wanted Fedor to autograph his copy of
The Window on the Baltic
. The press caught wind of it and branded Fedor a paranoid. I guess in the eyes of the law that makes him like the hypochondriac who won’t let his doctor tend to those patients who are really sick. But hypochondriacs get sick too. And sometimes paranoids really are in danger.”

“And wolves eat little boys with big mouths. I remember the flap now. It bothered me without my actually remembering it. What makes him not just a nut this time?”

“Andrei was with Fedor that night they tried to grab him. A nut he isn’t.”

I looked at her with new interest. She colored a little. “As I said,” she explained, “Detroit is a long way from New York.”

“Longer than I thought.” I played with the pencil. “What’s this do to my end of the patch? Do I still sweat Rynearson or what?”

“No, you buy him off.”

“Buy him off how?”

She looked puzzled. “With money, of course. How did you think?”

“It isn’t thinking work. I was supposed to do it with brass knuckles —”

“Oh, no, I hope you weren’t planning on using anything like that.”

“Figure of speech,” I said. “Hard guys like me don’t need them. That was the way I was supposed to do it, and now I’m to do it with sugar on top.”

“That’s about it. Yes, that’s exactly it. I’ve been in touch with the brass in New York. To put it mildly, they weren’t satisfied with the way I planned to handle the situation. We’re an old firm, and so respectable we can hardly stand ourselves. The mossbacks in the front office can’t forget we published Thomas Paine. They’re anxious to avoid publicity that would reflect unfavorably on what they term to be the company’s integrity. They aren’t interested in hearing that any integrity we might have had went down the air shaft when we started publishing diet books and hacked-out biographies of minor television talents.”

“You got burned.”

“To a crisp. I’d be on the street now if I weren’t almost the only editor they could trust with a lot of cash.”

“How much is a lot?”

She opened her purse and flipped a packet of crisp new bills onto the desk. It landed with a thud. There was a C-note on top and the band said there were forty-nine more underneath. There couldn’t have been room for anything else in her purse, not even a paper clip. I poked my pencil at the packet. It moved reluctantly.

“Everyone’s throwing these things on my desk lately,” I said. “It don’t hardly speak to the file cabinet no more. What would your mossbacks say if they found out you kicked their five long ones over to the arm-buster that got you in Dutch to begin with?”

“They’d say I had until tomorrow morning to come in and clean out my desk. But I’m no courier. There’s more to being a good editor than rearranging paragraphs and putting in and taking out commas; the job requires a knowledge of people. I think that you are a man who can be trusted. Also I called your bonding firm and they gave you a clean bill of health.”

“So for trying to snatch the stud of your stable and breaking into his suite, Rynearson gets five grand and you get — what?”

“His assurance that both Fedor Alanov and his book are let alone while he’s in Detroit. It stinks, doesn’t it?”

“It depends on whether Rynearson snaps up the bait, and if he does, whether his word means anything. If so you’ve got your blockbuster cheap.”

Something dented the smooth expanse of her forehead. “I — can’t offer you any more for the job than I already have. The company drew its purse-strings after wiring that money.”

I twitched a shoulder. “It’s the same job. Maybe a little easier because I don’t have to make faces at anyone. If it goes sour it’s meat for the cops. I know a detective in Homicide who could not quite be called a friend, but who if I say please with the right whine in my tone might whisper into the ear of someone who can help.”

“Let’s hope it won’t come to that,” she said. She seemed to want to add something, then sat back again.

I said, “I’m not on staff at your firm. If Rynearson swallows this candy I mean to make him see I’d consider it a personal favor if no one’s back gets stabbed.”

“A personal favor. I see.” She smiled. After that she relaxed visibly.

I locked the five thousand in my joke of a safe, wrote out a receipt and tore it off. Our fingers touched as she accepted it. She didn’t withdraw hers right away.

“This is a fascinating city,” she said. “Not at all like New York. I’m flying back Monday without having seen anything of it but what’s on the way from the airport to the hotel and from the hotel to here. Are you free this weekend?”

Her blue eyes had a smoky look. Her soft collar was open to the second button and there was a thin creamy line along the top of her collarbone where the sun hadn’t reached. The air in the office smelled faintly of jasmine, the way the atmosphere inside a crowded bus freshens when a messenger boards carrying a bouquet with dew still on the leaves.

I said, “I’ll call you.”

“Do that.” She took away her hand finally with the receipt in it and put the paper in her purse. Nodding a little, she rose. “Yes, do.”

I got up and let her out.

T
HE RIVER FLASHED
like leaping trout between buildings along East Jefferson, where shirtsleeves and bare midriffs had begun to blossom on the sidewalks in the morning warmth. A stiff breeze was blowing from Windsor. When I climbed out of my crate I could smell the river, a fresh green smell like rain on new grass.

Rynearson’s Eastern Imports wasn’t in a commercial building at all, but a private two-story frame house painted white with red shutters and trim, with a square of lawn in front that had been clipped by someone with a nail shears in one hand and a micrometer in the other. The bugs in that lawn would line up for inspection twice a day. The building, narrow and high-peaked, looked like one of those Henry Ford had had thrown up for his employees, but any others that might have been on the block had come down for brick apartment houses and office complexes, giving the house that last-leaf-of-autumn look that always precedes an empty lot. A sign pegged in the lawn identified the business in fussy script.

“The shop is closed, young man. Come back this afternoon.”

I stepped back off the porch and looked up in the direction from which the voice had come. A silver head and a smear of face looked down at me from an open upstairs window. It was in the shadow of the cornice and the features might have belonged to a man or woman. The voice was barely masculine.

“I’m not a customer,” I called back. “I’m here to see Eric Rynearson.”

“Who is here to see Eric Rynearson?”

It sounded polite enough, almost elaborately so. I gave him my name.

“I don’t believe I know you, Mr. Walker. What’s your business?”

“It has to do with Fedor Alanov.”

The silver head turned away from the window. Low voices murmured inside. It turned back. “Wait one moment, Mr. Walker.” The window got empty.

Not knowing how long one moment was, I lit a pill. I had a third of it smoked when there was some bumping inside and then someone worked a series of bolts and latches on the other side of the door with a noise like a convention of click beetles. I dropped my cigarette and crushed it out on the concrete stoop just as Alley Oop opened the door.

The back of his head came to perfect point, from which dull brown hair like a beast’s coat grew straight down the shallow slope of his forehead and made a stiff shelf over his eyes, glistening wet plums without whites set well back under his bony brow. Dark beard matted his face from just under his eyes to his jaw, with an underdeveloped embarrassment of a nose so pink it might have been false poking out of the forest of hair and looking vaguely obscene. His shoulders extended beyond the doorframe and his chest was broad and deep under a square-tailed blue shirt that buttoned up one side like a tunic and hung outside his white cotton slacks. He was a few inches over five feet tall, but he looked much shorter, almost dwarfish, because he was so wide. And he smelled. The stink came rolling out when the door opened and slapped me in the face like a moldy towel, a thick, sour mustiness as in a kennel or the gorilla cage at the Detroit Zoo. It almost drove me off the stoop.