MOTOR CITY BLUE Read online

  The liquid eyes lingered on me for a beat, then flowed to the bodyguard. “Well, take his things, Merle,” he ground out. “You can’t expect a man to listen to a proposition when he’s sweating like a broiled hog.”

  Now that he’d mentioned it I noticed that the room was overheated. The furnace was on blow and I could feel the hot air pouring through the square register in the floor behind me. I shrugged off my coat and handed it and my hat to the ex-hockey player, who had stepped forward to claim them.

  “Jeez, a fedora,” he exclaimed, still Allen Jenkins. He could turn it on and off. “I ain’t seen one of them on nobody under fifty in years.”

  I’d already used up my line for that one, so I kept silent while he crossed the room to a door on the other side, opened it, laid my things on a bed in the darkened chamber beyond, and returned to his post in the center of the room. He moved with a gliding swing, one shoulder thrust forward, as if he were still on the ice. His hands were clenched, hairless knots of corded muscle with two knuckles for every one of mine. Too many sticks had been laid across them in the heat of competition.

  Cooke caught the black man’s eye and nodded. The latter stepped forward and laid my .38 on the polished surface of the narrow end table at the old man’s left elbow.

  “We found that on him,” said the Texan.

  Morningstar hardly glanced at it. “Give it back.”

  No one moved. Cooke started to speak. The old man cut him off with a peevish gesture of his right hand.

  “Damn it to hell, can’t you see it’s unloaded?”

  The other hesitated, then strode up to the table and lifted the revolver to examine it. Light showed through the holes in the chamber. He looked at me.

  “You didn’t ask,” I said.

  He snarled and slapped it stinging into my outstretched hand. I returned it to its holster. I didn’t mention the cartridge under the hammer. Sometimes it’s useful to let them think you’re afraid of guns.

  Wiley, the black man, was beginning to sweat. It broke out in beads along his hairline and started the slow descent down his forehead. No one had asked him to remove his coat. He’d melt into a coffee-colored puddle before he took it off on his own. It was so dry in the room a match could ignite the air. I decided to risk it.

  “Okay if I smoke?” Morningstar nodded. I won’t say he smiled as he did so. What passed for one could have been just a nervous twitch of his dry slit of a mouth. I eased out a cigarette and touched it off, drawing the cool smoke into my lungs along with God knows what else. The man in the chair sat motionless except for quivering nostrils, as if tryingto breathe the overflow.

  “Proposition?” I prompted.

  The mouth twitched again. “You’re all right, Walker. You know enough to give an old man some slack. Not many of these young bastards would.” As he said it his eyes circled the ring of help, lighting on Cooke. “Paul, get the hell out of here. Take Wiley with you. I’ve seen enough shvartzes for one day.” He watched their retreat until the doors rolled shut behind them. “That was one of Paul’s ideas, hiring the colored to keep an eye on things back here. I suppose he’s all right, but that don’t mean I got to like him. His kind’s one of the reasons I left this town in the first place. You think I’m a bigoted son of a bitch, don’t you?” He nailed me again.

  “I don’t think unless I’m paid.”

  “Strutting around in that fag getup.” He didn’t appear to have heard me. “He don’t dress that way in Phoenix.”

  “Wiley?”

  “Cooke. Sit down. I’ve got a larynx from Sears and Roebuck and a guinea pig’s stomach and one lung and half of the rest of me is scattered in jars from here to the West Coast. I don’t need no stiff neck too.”

  The only other chairs in the room were a vinyl number with a low back and no arms and a cushy leather overstuffed the size of the Uniroyal tire display south of I-94. I chose the vinyl. I didn’t want to fall asleep during the conversation.

  “Go to bed, Merle,” he said then.

  The bodyguard hesitated. “You sure?” His eyes told me I’d been weighed on his personal scale and come up short. I didn’t figure I was alone in this.

  “Damn it, Merle, one of these days you’re going to ask me that question and I’m going to fry your ass.”

  Merle muttered something on his way out that I didn’t catch.

  Morningstar sat back and let out his breath in a long, rattling sigh. “Athletes,” he said. “I never met one with brains you couldn’t strain through a towel.” He lowered his eyelids for a couple of seconds, and I was beginning to wonder if he’d drifted off or worse when they creaked open again. “Tell me something about yourself.”

  “Why? You’ve had me checked out or I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Humor me.”

  “I’m thirty-two years old. I was raised in a little town you never heard of about forty miles west of here. I’ve a bachelor’s degree in sociology; don’t ask me why. I tried being a cop but that wasn’t for me so I let myself get drafted. The army taught me how to kill things and sent me out to do it, but along the way someone found out what I’d done before and they made me an MP. I liked almost everything about it except the uniform, so when I got out I looked for a way to do the same thing without wearingone. I’m still looking.”

  “You dropped out of the twelve-week police training course after eleven weeks. Why?”

  “Like I said, it wasn’t for me.”

  “You can do better than that.”

  I shrugged. “Another trainee propositioned me in the shower room. He was very insistent. I broke his jaw.”

  “That doesn’t sound like something they’d bounce you for.”

  “The trainee was the nephew of a U.S. congressman.”

  “I see.”

  “I thought you would.”

  There was a short silence. Then, “You’re supposed to be a man who keeps his mouth shut even at the dentist’s.”

  “Who says?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “I like to keep track of whose mailing list I’m on from week to week.”

  He said he thought that was wise and gave me a name I recognized, never mind what it was. “I’ll be straight with you,” he said then. “Yours isn’t the only name I had and it wasn’t the first I tried. I called two others, but one’s out of town and the other don’t do this kind of work no more. They said. I think they backed off when they found out who was interested. Does working for Ben Morningstar make any difference to you?”

  “It means I can charge more.”

  Twitch. I was beginning to think it really was a smile. Then it was gone. “I’m told you specialize in missing persons as well as insurance fraud.”

  He was having trouble getting into it. I crossed my legs and tapped half an inch of cigarette ash into the near cuff, sat back to finish the butt. I studied his face through the smoke.

  “Who’s missing?” I asked.

  4

  HE SLID A WALLET-SIZE photograph out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. Our hands brushed as I leaned forward to accept it. His had a temperature and consistency to go with its blue-cheese appearance.

  It was a high school graduation portrait of a dark-haired girl with even darker eyes that looked as if they flashed and a complexion like twelve-year-old Scotch going down. She seemed pretty, but you can’t trust school photos. Those touchup artists can make the picture of Dorian Gray look like Robert Redford at the beach.

  “Relative?” I held onto it. Giving it back would be a gesture of rejection and if I put it in my own pocket I was hooked.

  “Ward. Her father shot himself in ’63 when the government indicted him for smuggling Mexican Brown across the border and I raised her. Her name is Marla. Marla Bernstein.”

  “Leo Bernstein’s girl?”

  He nodded. “I see you’re up on your Cosa Nostra history. Yeah, Leo Bernstein. Son of Big Leo Bernstein, king of Robbers’ Roost. But of course you wouldn’t remember that. Your
father might. That’s what the papers called him when he was down in Ecorse during Prohibition, running Old Log Cabin across from Windsor. But he wasn’t really big, just five-five, weighed maybe a hundred and ten pounds. They just called him that because Big Al was what the Chicago papers was calling Al Capone, the fat-ass guinea bastard. He was my partner. Leo, not Al. I guess I can say that now that the statute of limitations has run out. Not that it matters much anymore.

  “I brought Marla up the best I could after my wife died. I must have done all right because she never gave me a reason not to be proud of her. Not until–” He stopped and cleared his stainless steel throat. The sound was like firecrackers exploding inside a drainage pipe. “Last year, when she graduated high school in Phoenix, I sent her back here to a finishing school in Lansing. I haven’t seen her since.”

  “Why Lansing? Why not some place in Arizona?”

  “They don’t have finishing schools in Arizona. They have spas and dude ranches and co-ed colleges, complete with hot and cold running gigolos and vending machines with rubbers in them in the men’s rooms. I had my fill of them health nuts and horsey cowboy types hanging around her when she was living at home. Besides, I sent my kid sister to the same school in 1928 and I liked what they did for her there. Miss Fordham’s School for Young Ladies, they called it then. Now it’s the Miriam H. Fordham Institute for Women. The same woman runs it now that was running it then. Esther Brock. She’s a good ten years older than me, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her. You’d say it’s closer to a hundred. But she hasn’t changed her methods of teaching, so off went Marla to Lansing.

  “She stopped writinghome almost a year ago. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Christmas vacation was coming up and I figured she was saving up news for when she came to visit. When Christmas came and went and she didn’t show up I got Miss Brock on the horn.

  “She said that Marla dropped out two weeks before the Christmas break. She told Miss Brock that she was going to get married and was on her way back to Phoenix with her fiancé to introduce us. She wouldn’t be coming back to school. Later, one of her roommates saw her getting into a car parked in front of the school with a man behind the wheel. They took off before the roommate could catch up. That was the last anyone saw of her.”

  “Any description of the man or the car?”

  He shook his head. “The car was either green or blue, or maybe black. The man was in shadow and had on a dark suit with a dark tie. You know kids. They never look at anything.”

  “Did you go to the police?”

  “I got out of that habit fifty years ago when I found out you could blind most of them with a twenty-dollar bill. First thing they’d do is tip the press and then it’d be all over the country. ‘Police Seek Mob King’s Ward.’ That’s the kind of attention I raised her to avoid.”

  “Publicity could help turn her up.”

  “Not in this case. Just the opposite.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The look on his face alarmed me. If he had a bad heart, and there was no reason to think he hadn’t with everything else that was wrong with him, that grimace was as good an indication as any that an ambulance was in order. But then he resumed speaking and I realized the pain went much deeper.

  “I hired a private dick in Lansing right after she disappeared, but he didn’t have enough to go on and gave up when his last lead came up empty two months ago. He’s thrown over his practice since and moved to California along with all the others who can’t take this climate. I found out he’d gone the other day when I tried to reach him to tell him about this.”

  Slowly, much more slowly than the first time he went for it, he reached into the same pocket from which he’d drawn the graduation picture and came up with another square of white cardboard slightly larger than the first. He held it out for me to take as if the weight of it were too much for him to push. I had to come part way up out of my chair and seize it from his fingers.

  I was holding a black and white snapshot mounted on heavy stock designed to withstand a lot of handling. It wasn’t good photography. The lighting was bad and it was hard to tell at first glance just what was going on in the shabby room with a print of September Morn just visible in one corner on the wall. What was going on was a hell of a lot less subtle than the artist’s rendition of a coy female bather. A pretty, dark-haired girl, nude except for a black garter belt, net stockings, and high heels, was down on one knee performing what the Supreme Court calls an unnatural act upon an amply endowed male. The girl could have been Marla Bernstein. Nobody had touched it up and the mortarboard was missing.

  “Could be any one of a hundred girls,” I said. “What makes you so sure it’s her?”

  “It’s her.” The tuning fork or whatever it was that imitated the vibration of vocal cords was barely buzzing. “I watched her grow up. I know. If I had any doubts, that mole on her right shoulder blade would clear them up.”

  I looked again. I hadn’t seen it before. It wasn’t the sort of picture in which you noticed such details right off.

  “Have they seen this?” I inclined my head toward the sliding doors.

  “They know about it. You’re the only one I’ve shown it to since I first saw it a week ago. I wasn’t figuring on pasting it in no scrapbook.”

  “Are you a collector?”

  “Certainly not.” A spark glowed in the viscous eyes. “An old associate of mine, never mind who, has part interest in a business that wholesales this garbage to porno shops and grindhouses in the area. It’s a sideline. He hardly ever sees the stuff that passes through, but ten days ago he happened to drop in on the man who runs the place and this was layingon his desk. This associate has spent a lot of time in my home and knows Marla almost as good as I do. He recognized her right away and came to me in Phoenix.”

  “He say who took it?”

  “He questioned his man. He wasn’t sure. It could have come from any one of a dozen studios he deals with here in town or he might have bought it in a package from some hophead punk off the street. Hundreds like it cross his desk every day. He can’t be expected to know the source of each one.”

  “Swell. How about mail order?”

  “No way. That’s a federal rap.”

  “I’ll need his name.”

  The lines in his face tightened. “My associate?”

  “The guy who works for him. Also a list of the studios he does business with if you’ve got it. If not I can get it from him.”

  “I guess I can give you that much. His name’s Lee Q. Story. That’s important, the Q. I hear he’s particular about it. Runs a dump called Story’s After Midnight on Erskine. Another shvartze, but I don’t suppose I got to tell you that in this burg. Frankly, I was surprised to hear you was white, name like Amos.”

  “There are a few of us left. I guess I have to get it from him.”

  “Get what? Oh, the list. Yeah. I didn’t have the stomach for it. Bad enough I got to see that garbage from the outside on my way down Woodward without going in. When I was young those were all theaters, you know what I mean? Theaters. Paramount, Roxy, Bijou. Clara Bow. Ramon Novarro. Dick Arlen and Buddy Rogers in Wings. I seen that one three times, each time with a different girl. You know what’s playing at the Roxy right now? Sluts of the Third Reich. What the hell kind of a thing is that to slap up on a sign a yard high for kids to read?”

  Color came to his face like blood on a galled fish. I tried to break in before he had a stroke, but he was just warming up.

  “This morning I had Wiley take me down Twelfth Street where I grew up. Rosa Parks Boulevard they call it now. It made me sick. They burned down the house I was born in. Burned it to the ground during the riots. Same thing with all the places I used to work to help support the family after my pa got killed. Nothing but black holes in the ground with here and there a chimney or a cast-iron sink sticking up out of them. I remember thinking as a kid how ugly it all was, that neighborhood, how it would be a blessing if somebody put
a match to the whole thing. I was wrong. It’s worse.”

  I had been scribbling the essentials of the case into my soiled notebook with a pencil stub I’d dug out from among the lint and paper clips in my pocket. Now he noticed that I had stopped. Something that passed for a wry look slithered over his fallen features.

  “Go ahead and say it,” he said. “I’m one of those old farts who talk too much.”

  I turned that one aside. “A man in your line has enemies. Could it be she was forced into this to get you?” I flipped the photo.

  “The last of my enemies died ten years back. I’m retired. Everything I own now is in the form of investments, and Paul Cooke looks after those for me. Even if I had something they wanted, it wouldn’t do them much good keeping me in the dark. I found out about this by accident.”

  “Through your associate.”

  He smiled thinly, without twitching. “I thought of that. I don’t trust him any more than I do anyone else, but he’s above suspicion in this case. He has no family, and the cancer that’s eating out his stomach is going to kill him before the one in my lung kills me. We had a saying in the business. I guess it’s still used. You can’t take it with you.”

  “Anything else I should know about Marla? Hobbies? Ambitions? Needs, medical and otherwise?”

  “Her health’s good, so there’s nothing there. She’s a real good singer. Nice voice. Plays the piano like a pro. She always wanted to sing for a living, but I hoped the Brock woman would put a stop to that. Show business is full of fags and whores. I know. I used to own a nightclub.”

  I sat quiet for almost a minute, lips pursed, tapping the edges of the two pictures against the palm of my hand. I could feel his eyes on me. Finally I took a deep breath and put them away in my inside breast pocket along with the notebook and pencil. The pictures, not his eyes. They were right behind them without my having to do anything. I got up.

  “My fee’s two hundred a day plus expenses. First day in advance. I report when I have something, not before. Does that suit you?”