The Sundown Speech Read online

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  In memory of Lois Randall, the queen of copy editors and the best friend I never met

  Detroit is working class and sometimes speaks with a foreign accent. It sends its sons and daughters to Ann Arbor to get educated, to get the class that it doesn’t have. Ann Arbor is petite and learned, but it happens.

  —Detroit: A Young Guide to the City

  Ann Arbor was at the extreme west end of the habitable world, beyond which the sun went down into a boundless, bottomless morass, where the frightful sound of yelling Indians, howling wolves, croaking frogs, rattling massaugers [sic], and buzzing mosquitoes added to the awful horror of the dismal place.

  —Henry Hill, a pioneer of the 1830s

  PART ONE

  SMASH CUT

  ONE

  Roll the clock back a dozen years, maybe more; Michael Jackson was still alive, Iris, too. I could walk all day without limping. Tweet was bird talk, the chain bookstore was the greatest threat to civilization since ragtime music, and the only time you saw a black president was in a sci-fi film. Going back is always a crapshoot.

  * * *

  Downtown Ann Arbor was draining into Zingerman’s Deli at 11:00 A.M. A chirpy Bohemian girl with her cranberry-colored hair wrapped in a bandanna snood fashion worked her way down the hungry line, taking orders and offering cubes of cheese and curls of lunchmeat impaled on toothpicks, and feet ground away at the black-and-white tiles in dirty sneakers, glossy Florsheims, cork sandals, and nothing at all. In the town that invented the five-dollar fine for possession of marijuana, “no shirt, no shoes, no service” was just a quaint suggestion. In those days you could even smoke tobacco if you didn’t mind being glared at.

  I’m used to it. I paid for my order and took my receipt outside, to a picnic table to light a cigarette and wait. It was a bright warm day and there were plenty of halter tops and navel piercings to admire.

  In a little while an employee carrying a tray with a side of pork pressed between thick slabs of sourdough asked me politely to put out the butt. I did that. My clients had arrived, anyway. I got up to meet them.

  They fit the description I’d gotten over the telephone, the woman straight-haired and graying, no makeup, wearing a dress of some unbleached material that hung from straps on her shoulders like a sandwich board, the man trailing a couple of steps behind in corduroys and a soft shirt with the collar spread, gray at the temples, with the pinched expression of an actor in an aspirin commercial. They wore identical glasses with no rims.

  The indigenous local species: Homo Arboritis.

  “Amos Walker? My goodness, you look like a detective. I’m Heloise Gunnar. This is Dante.”

  No other identification, i.e. Dante, my husband. It was no business of mine.

  Her grip was firm, the hand corded with muscle. His hand fluttered in mine and was gone. I let the detective crack go and we sat facing each other on opposite benches.

  “What do you think of Zingerman’s?” Heloise Gunnar said. “We thought as long as you were coming out from the city, you might as well sample a native institution. It’s always being written up in travel magazines.”

  “I thought maybe you picked it because it’s on Detroit Street. Make me feel at home.” The place looked as far away from the Motor City as Morocco. You only saw open-air crowds like that in the Farmers Market, where there’s strength in numbers.

  “Is it? We’re hardly aware of street names anymore. Dante was born right here in town, and I came out after I graduated Berkeley.”

  “That would be in the sixties?”

  The skin whitened a shade around her nostrils. She had some vanity after all under the patchouli. “Seventy-four. I majored in English Lit. I don’t get to use as much of it as you’d think managing a bookstore.”

  After football and stoplights, Ann Arbor majors in bookstores. Managing one is no more a topic of dinner conversation there than pouring steel in Gary.

  “What do you do, Mr.—?” I asked. So far he hadn’t said a word.

  “Gunnar.” He lifted his brows. “Didn’t you hear my wife?”

  So they were married; or as good as. I said something about not every wife taking her husband’s surname.

  “I work for the U of M.” He made it sound as if there was no alternative other than shelving books. “Information Services.”

  That meant exactly nothing to me. I’d only asked out of politeness. It was that stage of the relationship.

  Our meals came, borne by a left tackle with a block M tattooed on one forearm. I had rare roast beef and cheddar on an onion roll, Heloise Gunnar portabello mushrooms on whole wheat, Dante something that looked like sphagnum moss between coarse slices of unleavened bread. His eyes followed my red meat like a dog’s. There’s no reason for all this detail other than I’ve made a habit of it. You can tell a lot about a client from what he eats, and even more from what he doesn’t.

  We made dents in the bill of fare and washed everything down with our drinks of choice. I had black coffee, the Gunnars mineral water with no fizz. I wondered if they flew this close to type when they weren’t in public.

  “You were recommended to us by Dr. Albierti.” Heloise dabbed at the corners of her wide unpainted mouth with a brown paper napkin. “He’s a professor emeritus with thirty years in Romance Languages. You freed his daughter from a cult.”

  “She joined the Young Republicans,” I said. “I found her living in Saline with a professional lobbyist. I told her to call home; that was the job. Did she?”

  “Yes. He sent her money. She’s married to a yoga instructor here in town. So we know you get results. Missing persons, that’s your specialty, right?”

  The roast beef was fidgeting uneasily in my stomach. I’d begun to suspect a practical joke. It had Barry Stackpole all over it. If she said she was Wiccan I was going to pull the plug on the interview.

  “Who’s missing?”

  “Jerry Marcus.” A bit of moss clung to Dante’s lower lip. He flinched when Heloise reached out and swept it away with her napkin.

  “Jerry Marcus,” she said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “He’s an auteur. Do you know the term?”

  “It’s a film director who reads subtitles. Does anyone in your circle operate a forklift?”

  “I don’t know what that is. Jerry’s an independent. One of the new breed: digital. He does most of it on a computer. We met him at a party in the Michigan Union, where he was raising money for his first commercial project. Do you know much about science fiction, Mr. Walker?”

  “I get a lot of it from clients. But you tell it, Mrs. Gunnar. You’re covering the meal.”

  “Dante and I prefer Ms. I almost didn’t tak
e his name, you were right about that. It was never a legal requirement. But when you’re born Gilhooley, you make certain concessions. Jerry’s script, which he wrote himself, is about aliens from a planet run by a totalitarian regime come to earth to clone both front-runners for the office of President of the United States. He’s filming every last foot here in town and in the suburbs. He brought along a disc of what he’d shot and showed it to us on his laptop. He’s made a very effective use of the smash cut. Do you know what that is?”

  I said I didn’t; I had to throw her one. She got animated then; up to that point she’d been Wednesday Addams.

  “A smash cut is a quick camera transition to a new scene, punctuated by a sudden loud noise, designed to shock the audience. You know, like when a quiet scene is pierced by a phone ringing shrilly. The sound effect belongs to the next scene, but you hear it while the first is still on screen. It wakes people up.”

  “Maybe if the quiet scene was cut, they wouldn’t fall asleep. How much did you invest?”

  “How did you—? Oh, yes, I suppose it’s obvious. Fifteen thousand; fifty percent of the budget, with millions to be made if the film opens. Opens, that’s what they say when it’s a success right off the bat. These days, if it isn’t, it’s as if it was never released in the first place. The Blair Witch Project, that opened and how. It was shot on a shoestring and outstripped everything the studios pumped millions into that year, including Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt. We made the check out on the spot and signed a contract that required him to provide an accounting in six months. That was nine months ago.”

  “He took a powder.”

  She glanced down at the front of her dress, looking for powder. “Disappeared,” I said. “You should watch a movie sometime without a little green man in it. Did you try to get in touch with him?”

  She glared at me through her glasses. The lenses were thick; it was like looking at two angry planets through an electron telescope. She hadn’t liked that last crack.

  “If we hadn’t, would we be meeting with you?”

  “I can probably find him, if he isn’t in a landfill. I can almost guarantee that when I do it won’t include the fifteen grand. Not all of it anyway.”

  “Any portion would be welcome. At the very least, if he’s absconded with our money, we’ll have the satisfaction of seeing him prosecuted. Do you carry a firearm, Mr. Walker?”

  “The governor says I can. Do you think it’s that kind of a job?”

  “Definitely not. Dante and I are major contributors to the gun control lobby in Washington. You must promise us that your gun will remain locked up at home, or wherever you keep it, throughout the investigation. We can’t have someone’s death on our conscience.”

  “No dice. Call Greenpeace.”

  “In that case, this interview is over. What do we owe you for the consultation?” She jerked open a handbag made of burlap fastened with a drawstring.

  “Damn it, Hel!”

  She jumped. I almost did. I’d had Dante down for some throat operation that prevented him from raising his voice above a murmur. He’d taken another nervous bite of his sandwich, and the spot of green against the color of his face looked like Christmas.

  “Do you know how many press releases I have to write in order to make fifteen thousand dollars? It isn’t as if you make commissions on those books you sell. You could do better in tips working in this restaurant.”

  If his wife’s eyes were suns instead of planets they’d set him on fire through those heavy-duty lenses. But she said nothing.

  That clinched it for me. “I get five hundred a day,” I said. “Three days in advance, to cover the cost of ammo.”

  I’d tossed that in to see if she’d balk. She didn’t, although when her gaze shifted to mine I almost ducked back into the anthill. I finished my sandwich while she made out the check. They really know how to make beef sing at Zingerman’s.

  TWO

  The check was on dirty-looking recycled paper with an engraved sketch of something that suggested a cross between a manatee and Meatloaf, undoubtedly an endangered species. Heloise Gunnar gave it to me along with some start-up information and a clipping from the Ann Arbor News about Jerry Marcus’ moviemaking project. In the photo, a thirtyish elfin face beamed out from under a mop of curly dark hair, with a chin suitable for driving flathead screws. He looked like a chiseler, but then the really successful ones never do.

  “The paper might have another contact number,” I said. “Did you ask?”

  She shook her head. “They endorsed the conservative ticket in the last election. We canceled our subscription the next day.”

  “I’ll start there. The last time I voted, the candidates’ wives all wore girdles.”

  “That would be LBJ?” Her smile was shrink-sealed to her face. Here was a woman who could carry a grudge to the grave.

  “Wilson. I marched with the Bonus Army. I don’t guess you tried the police.”

  “Those fascists?”

  I said I’d call, and saw them out to their car. It was a faded-rose Volvo—the closest thing to a Birkenstock on wheels—plastered all over the rear panel with peace signs and slogans. It probably ran on soybeans.

  My Cutlass was parked at a one-hour meter around the corner. I put the overtime ticket in the glove compartment with the others and checked the load in the Chief’s Special I keep in a spring hatch under the dash. I went weeks without doing that or even thinking about it, but Heloise’s convictions had made me superstitious on top of my indigestion. I figured they poured the hot sauce with welders’ gloves and a pair of tongs.

  I hadn’t caved in yet to carrying a cell; you could still find a public telephone then without a historic plaque in front of it. I found one and tried the number Marcus had given the Gunnars, confirmed it was out of service, and called the number I got for the News from the directory chained to the box.

  “What is it you want, Mr. Walker?” asked a cool female voice belonging to the features editor.

  “Information. Isn’t that your business?”

  “A newspaper’s business is to make money. We provide the material that attracts readers to our advertisers, based on circulation figures. At least, that’s what the people who draw up our ads say,” she said with a sigh. “Give me something they can get their teeth into, and we’ll talk.”

  “A local moviemaker’s gone missing,” I said. “It could be a flimflam, or foul play. Things may have changed, but when I grew up, those things sold papers.”

  “Is this about Jerry Marcus?” If you can feel a thermometer jump a couple of degrees, I felt it at that moment.

  I said it was, and told her his cell was out of service.

  “We might have another number. Are you free this afternoon?”

  The News building was a cream-colored Deco pile on Huron Street, a couple of blocks off Main. I rode a rheumatic elevator up to the press room, sandwiched between a stuttering fluorescent ceiling and a linoleum floor that had sunk so far into the boards beneath it made me seasick just walking down the aisle. The chunky typewriters of legend had given way to pre-Columbian computer consoles mounted on desks made of pressed cardboard. The first time I’d visited a newspaper office, on East Lafayette, the clatter of Underwood manuals and rumble of cylinder presses in the basement underfoot was like a shot of adrenaline; in this digital age, the keyboards sounded like an old lady coughing discreetly into a handkerchief.

  The place smelled of rubber cement and toner, which was the formula for the coffee I drank with the editor, a pleasant-faced woman with the eyes of a peregrine falcon. We sat facing each other across a desk of no particular design in an office separated from the rest of the floor by pebbled-glass partitions that didn’t reach to the ceiling. Plaques and framed certificates added to the general clutter of paper and personal memorabilia; a cube on the desk kept changing family pictures, a distraction I tried hard to ignore.

  “I know,” she said, when I reacted to the coffee. “We make it with bottled
water: all the good minerals filtered out, at three times the cost of the spring water they started with. They strain it and distill it and refine it until nothing’s left. Just like the newspaper business.”

  “What’s wrong with it? The newspaper business.”

  “Oh, it’s okay. Where I spent my internship, the rewrite man was a character out of MacArthur and Hecht. He had a telephone line installed in the corner booth of the bar across the street from the paper, and he worked there from opening to last call. Never went to the office. A reporter on the scene of a fire would call him, spew out the details, and he’d rap out something in five minutes that sounded like Hemingway. He was a drunk and a bigot, but what he wrote had balls. You don’t get quite the same thing on mocha latte.”

  “Finished?” I said.

  She flushed. She was in a landing pattern around middle age, with dyed-beige hair and a stroke of blush on each cheek. I’d have taken her for a benevolent aunt but for those eyes. They were like steel shavings.

  “Finished. If I didn’t do this once a month, I’d wind up on the Washington Press Corps, taking dictation from the president. I’ve had offers.”

  “I’m sure you have. Do you know about Jerry Marcus?”

  The eyes glazed over. “What was your name again?”

  I told her again. Journalists, like lawyers, are hell for repetition. This time she scribbled in the reporters’ pad at her elbow; the first time seemed to have been practice. She’d missed it the same way Rosa Parks missed the bus.

  “My clients gave this fellow Marcus money to shoot his picture,” I said, “then fell out of touch. There might be nothing in it.”

  She looked at my ID, screwed up her forehead at the deputy’s star pinned to the bottom of the folder.

  I shrugged. “Bureaucratic oversight. The county forgot to ask for it back after I gave up serving papers.”

  “Isn’t it illegal to carry it?”