MOTOR CITY BLUE Page 6

  The only other customer in this part of the store was a heavy-set businessman-type, black, with a brown cashmere overcoat buttoned over his spreading middle and a sprinkling of gray in his kinky, receding hair. He seemed oblivious to everything but the fag corner in the back, where a study of the photographs on the covers of the magazines, in the proper order, provided a crash course on how to get along with your fellow man. A sales executive, I figured, killing his coffee break in a way his fellow employees never suspected.

  It wasn’t the dank hole the folks in the suburbs had in mind when they formed their Sunday morning decency leagues to keep pornography out of their neighborhoods. Fluorescent tubes in the ceiling shed plenty of light over the merchandise, and the tile floor shone beneath a seal of fresh wax. The plate glass window was spotless. You’ll find stores like it in any shopping center. The only difference is the stock.

  The snowbird behind the counter was dividing his attention between a convex shoplifters’ mirror in the corner and a paperback in his hands. I caught a glimpse of the title when he shifted it to turn the page. Catch-22. That was like finding an “Out to Lunch” sign on the door to a McDonald’s. I approached him.

  “Lee Story?”

  “Lee Q. Story.” He didn’t look up.

  “Sorry. I’m told you wholesale.”

  My reflection came up to meet me in the mirrored cheaters. “Who’s asking?” He turned down a corner of the page he’d been reading and laid the book aside.

  “Andy Jackson.” I waved a shopworn twenty under his nose.

  I couldn’t tell if he was looking at the bill. Lamont Cranston would have trouble reading a man’s thoughts behind those Foster Grants. “You a pig or something?”

  The guy over in fairyland overheard him and strode swiftly past me out the door, fat legs working despite the hobbles of his calf-length coat.

  “Or something.” I put the double sawbuck on the counter and hauled out my wallet, flipping it open to the license and sheriff’s buzzer. When he’d had an eyeful I returned it to my pocket and planted the more interesting of the two pictures Morningstar had given me atop the twenty.

  “Maybe you could see it better minus the shades,” I suggested.

  He had wide-set eyes with pupils that reacted slowly when they were exposed to the light. He was a user, all right. He barely glanced at the photo.

  “I seen it before, man. That what you wanted?” He reached for the bill. I speared his wrist.

  “What I want is the name of the person who saw it before you did,” I said.

  “I done told somebody else I don’t know.” That gave him an idea. “Say, we working for the same boss?”

  “Not hardly. I want a list of your picture sources.”

  “Is that all?” Acidly. “Look, man, I got people to answer to. Leggo my hand.”

  I held on. “How long can it take to jot down some names? Five minutes? That’s two hundred and forty an hour. Henry Ford, Jr. doesn’t pay that. Senators don’t make that much in graft.” He still looked doubtful. “The people you answer to have people to answer to,” I added. “I answer to them.”

  Whatever the hell that meant, it hooked him. I raised my hand and he withdrew his, leaving behind the green.

  “Second.” He swiveled to face a small desk beneath the display window strewn with grainy snaps like the one I’d shown him, snatched a pen from a glass of them, and spent some minutes scribbling on the back of a page from a large receipt book. Then he tore it off and spun around on his stool. He passed it over with his right, grabbing the bill with his left at the same time.

  There were thirteen names on the sheet, a few of which I recognized. I pocketed it, along with a blister card from a display of stick batteries on the counter “For the Junior Miss Vibrator,” and gave him a dollar, telling him to keep the change. He rang it up without asking questions.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “You been a pig somewhere down the string, man.” He looked exasperated. “You wring a buck till Washington sweats.”

  “MP,” I said. “Three years, after Nam and Cambodia.”

  “You was in Nam?”

  “Were you?”

  “Damn near. I done a year in Leavenworth for lighting a joint with my draft card.”

  I tapped the picture. “There’s a piece of paper tacked to the door in this shot. Could be a list of rules and checkout times. Which of your sources works in a hotel or a motel?”

  “Which of them don’t? This ain’t L.A.”

  “How about the girl? Know her?”

  “Man, they all look alike with their threads off.”

  “Give me back my twenty. I don’t buy crap.”

  His bony face twisted into a mask. “Get out of my place, honky.”

  When I didn’t move he reached beneath the counter and clanked a battered .22 with a seven-inch barrel down on top of it. I moved.

  The youths were still gathered around the door when I stepped out. I moved to pass them. They moved with me. I shifted in the other direction. They went the same way. There were four of them. One, who acted a half-beat ahead of his companions, was a tall, rangy cager-type with a small head and too much untended afro atop a long, skinny neck and wrists that protruded several inches out of the sleeves of his warm-up jacket. He said something about my mother in an Erskine Street drawl and started to push me.

  That’s how it always starts, with a push. Most of us learn that in grammar school and some of us never get over it. When he thrust his big palms against my chest, I took advantage of the opening and gave him as much knee in the groin as I could afford without sacrificing my balance. It was enough. He exhaled a double lungful of stale marijuana into my face and jackknifed.

  Among the others there was a moment of shocked indecision. Then a short, chunky black with a firmly rounded belly, Jeff to the other’s Mutt, rushed me, arms outstretched to take me in the bear-hug that appeared to be his specialty. I sidestepped him and gave him a judo kick in the well-upholstered seat of his pants that sent his woolly head crashing into the building’s block corner. The plate glass window shivered but didn’t fall apart. Neither did Fatty, but not for lack of effort on the part of heels suddenly gone round as he staggered aimlessly across the littered sidewalk.

  That left two I hadn’t tried, but they had to wait their turn. The beanpole I’d kneed had recovered himself, and now he went for the pocket of his jacket.

  The switchblade darted from the steel and plastic handle like a serpent’s tongue and jiggled up and down lightly in his hand with the confidence of a sixth finger. A grin that didn’t remind me much of Cab Calloway spread across his face as he watched my reaction. Then he lunged.

  The blade scraped some fiber off my coat as I threw myself hard against the other side of the entrance niche. I moved to kick him as I had Fatty, but he anticipated that and twisted as he went past. My foot scuffed his pocket, nothing more. He came up against the door with a shuddering bang.

  The years between me and my last workout on the mats were offset to a degree by the mild narcotic in his system, but he had youth and reach on me. It was time to stop playing. As he came away from the door, I fisted my Smith & Wesson and sent three pounds of steel, bone, and flesh smashing into his grin. It gave way with an audible crunch; he slammed into the door once again, and dribbled down it like Pepto-Bismol.

  My fist was beginning to ache when I turned the revolver around and Wyatt-Earped my way through the ominously growling knot of toughs to my car. As I pulled away from the hydrant I got a hinge of Lee Q. Story watching me through the display window. His expression put me in mind of a fight manager who had laid everything he had on the wrong guy.

  On St. Antoine I took advantage of a stoplight to study the list Story had given me. Then I crumpled it and tossed it to the floorboards. The one name I wanted would be the one he hadn’t written down. For that I’d have to wait.

  8

  I WAS HITTING ALL the red lights today, which was okay since I didn�
�t know where to go and was in no hurry to get there. At the next stop I broke out the batteries I’d bought at Story’s and replaced the old ones in the pencillike paging device I wear clipped to my inside breast pocket. It was a struggle; the knuckles of my right hand were burst and bleeding and the fingers were beginning to stiffen. I barely got everything screwed back together when the damn thing started beeping.

  I made it to a public telephone between the repairman and the neighborhood vandal and got the girl at my service, who bawled me out for not answering the page half an hour sooner and gave me Barry Stackpole’s private number at the News. He stabbed it halfway through the first ring.

  “We lucked out, shamus,” he said, after I had identified myself. “Thursday, January twenty-fifth, a couple of days after the GOP picked Detroit for next year’s convention. The city council put the cops to work scouring the red light districts. We had a photographer on it. If that isn’t your girl standing behind the one being handed into the police van on John R I’ll tear up my press card.”

  I breathed some air. “That’s fast sliding for someone who was the apple of her guardian’s eye in December.”

  “They don’t call it the skids for nothing. That’s not all. It was a slow news day. The Free Press covered the same raid, without pictures. But they did publish the girls’ names. How does ‘Martha Burns’ sound?”

  “Just like something an eighteen-year-old girl named Marla Bernstein might pick if she wanted to remain incognito without giving up her identity. Give me the rest of it.” He did, along with the names of all the others, just in case. I took them down in my notebook. “Thanks, Barry. By the way, how are you guys planning to handle the Kramer killing?”

  “What’s the Kramer killing?”

  “Maybe the cops haven’t released his name. They found him imitating a spare tire in the parking lot at City Airport this morning. He had a hole in his head the size of the Windsor Tunnel.”

  “I was just talking to the city editor. He said that unless the mayor sticks his Size Nine in his mouth again, tonight’s front page is going to be all state and national.”

  I gave that a couple of seconds. Then, “Keep scratching, newshawk.” I pegged the receiver before he could ask any questions. But as I stepped aside for the delinquent who was waiting to smash the telephone I thought up some questions of my own.

  The address he’d given me on John R–a street named, along with Williams, after the city’s first mayor, who left no other legacy–belonged to a large, neat-looking brick house with a fenced yard that even under a pile of snow looked as if it complied with the antiblight ordinance, no matter how many others it might ignore. A big, square man, black, in a green polar coat with a fur-lined hood, was busy shoveling out the front walk when I let myself in through the picket gate. When he saw me he stopped shoveling and straightened to his full height, which turned out to be a lot fuller than I’d expected. If he was less than six foot six I had shrunk.

  He wasn’t ready yet for the River Rouge scrap heap, but his best days were forty years behind him. His skin was the faded gray of old age, and where scar tissue had not formed there was not an inch of it that wasn’t cracked and squeezed into dozens of sharp creases like a crumpled sheet of foil that’s lost its shine. What I suppose he called a nose had been bent and straightened out so many times that now it was just something on his face. His shoulders were broad and square and he had no waist to speak of. He wouldn’t be any harder to stop than a runaway oil tanker.

  “You got business, mister?” Nobody had ever punched him in the throat. He had plenty of volume but there didn’t seem to be any anger behind it, just suspicion.

  “I do if you’re in charge.” The way he peeled back his hood on one side and cocked a cauliflower ear in my direction told me he hadn’t heard. He wouldn’t, at any normal level. Now I understood why he shouted. I repeated it, louder this time. His eyes narrowed as far as they were able.

  “You a cop?”

  I shook my head. “Just a guy.”

  “Miss Beryl, she don’t do no business this time of day.”

  “I’m here on another kind of business.”

  He jerked a gloved thumb back over his shoulder. “See the lady. I just shovels snow and turns back cops.” As if to prove it he resumed his labors, taking forty pounds at a swing. I sidestepped the flashing blade and mounted the stoop.

  A doe-eyed black maid answered the bell. I flashed my license for the third time that day, minus the badge this time, and asked for the lady of the house. She wasn’t impressed. Confronted with a faceful of door, I was about to try again when it opened back up and I was ushered inside. I gave the maid my coat and hat and she blew. If she could speak at all I didn’t hear it.

  I was marooned for a time in the middle of a bourgeois little salon or family room or whatever the architects and real estate agents are calling the living room this season, complete with a baby grand piano in one corner and rows of leather-bound books arranged in unread elegance behind glass. Three arched doorways led into adjacent rooms and a thickly carpeted staircase wound toward the second story a short hike from the entrance. A Presto log burned blue in the fireplace. In another minute I expected Perry Como to stroll in singing “Home for the Holidays.” I wasn’t so far off.

  “Mr. Walker?”

  The beige carpet beneath my feet was so deep I hadn’t realized I was no longer alone until I heard the voice behind me. I turned to face the same arch of the same doorway I’d seen when I’d looked in that direction before. Her head didn’t start until two feet below that point. She was pink and fluffy and squeezed into a pink and fluffy dress that fit her like the casing of one of those tiny, expensive sausages they sell in the chain stores in packages of six that nobody ever buys. She had bluish hair carefully brushed and sprayed into soft-looking waves that framed a round, pink little face with a round, pert little nose and round, bright little eyes that sparkled from the depths of her plump flesh like glass buttons machine-punched into a throw pillow. Her Cupid’s-bow mouth was fixed in a rouge-tinted smile of greeting as she approached with dainty steps, making a journey out of the few yards that separated us.

  I admitted to the Walker part but said I wasn’t so sure about the mister. Up close I caught a scent, or rather the impression of a scent, of delicate toilet water, or maybe it was just her.

  “I’m Beryl Garnet.” A plump, moist little hand slid into mine, fluttered there for an instant, and was gone.

  I leered charmingly. “Parents play some awful tricks on defenseless babies, don’t they?”

  Her laughter tinkled as if the tin and crystal pendants of a Chinese mobile dangled in her throat.

  “You’re perfectly awful, Mr. Walker. And perfectly correct. But then I haven’t met anyone named Amos in over forty years.”

  “My father named me after half a radio show.”

  The pendants stirred again. “Shall we sit down?”

  We should and did. Beryl Garnet assumed a ladylike little pose on the edge of a Louis XIV or some such number chair with her tiny hands folded in her lap while I foundered in a maroon overstuffed sofa. By the time my keel had righted itself the maid was standing over me. The vow of silence was broken. Did the gentleman wish a cup of coffee? I looked at the two white cups painted with tiny flowers steaming on the silver tray in her hands, decided I couldn’t get enough grip on one of them to lift it without shattering it, and said no thanks. It should have been tea in the first place. My hostess fluttered a hand and the maid glided off.

  “May I smoke?” I kept away from my pockets. I’d been caught once too many times with a Winston in one hand, a flaming match in the other, and a big fat No staring me in the face.

  “Try one of these.” She opened a hand-worked wooden box on the glass coffee table between us and held it out. “They’re Turkish.”

  I selected one of the oval cylinders arranged inside and lit up. The tobacco had been mixed with shredded fiber from some sultan’s flying carpet. By the time my mat
ch was ready for it, a glass ashtray had appeared on the arm of the sofa. The maid seemed to operate by remote control.

  It looked as if it was up to me to open. I was gearing up for it when the floor shook and a Great Dane the size of last month’s utility bill came bouncing into the room through the arch to my right and planted its huge paws on my shoulders with the light touch of a pair of battering rams. My teeth ground halfway through the cigarette. Through the smoke a great square head with hornlike ears and ivory teeth bared in a blue-black muzzle breathed hot air into my face with a taint of stale meat. Its growl was a dynamo rumbling deep in its powerful chest.

  “Ulysses! Down!”

  The weight lifted suddenly from my shoulders, leaving only its ghost behind as the blood rushed in to fill the dents. The great beast turned a bobbed tail on me and went over to its mistress, its head lowered for petting. It planted its feet carefully this time, like an elephant testing the ground before trusting its weight to it.

  “You bad dog,” she said, but it didn’t sound as if she meant it. She scratched behind its ears. It closed its eyes and gave vent to a long, groaning sigh, like a record winding down. I hadn’t seen anything like it since the last time I fell off the wagon. From snout to truncated tail it stretched four feet and stood a yard high at the shoulder, with almost two feet of that gobbled up by its chest. From there its underside swept back up in a graceful scoop to taut flanks and narrow hips and muscular haunches, between which its nub of tail moved from side to side with a measured beat as its mistress’ pudgy fingers stroked the sensitive hollows behind its skull. Even when it wasn’t moving, its muscles seemed to throb and ripple with restless power beneath a thin coat of flesh and short hair the color of gun bluing.

  “You mustn’t let Uli frighten you, Mr. Walker,” she said, staring into the dog’s nut-brown eyes as with both hands she smoothed back the seams that ran down both sides of its neck. “He’s really very gentle. He wouldn’t hurt anything larger than a rabbit. Would you, dear?” Ulysses craned forward to lick her ear with a tongue like a wet facecloth.