The Sundown Speech Page 9

  “You’ve got Marcus wrong. Psychopath, yeah. Monomaniac too. He wants to control this case from start to finish. It isn’t about money anymore. Maybe it never was. People to him are like the ones he makes from scratch on his computer; they don’t whine about motivation or argue about interpretation or push for percentages of the gross. He’s the kind of movie director who has to call all the shots.”

  “He won’t call the last. You got Dante Gunnar off the hook. Take that home.”

  “You forget I was hired first to find Jerry Marcus.”

  Our checks came, shattering the chilly silence with a crack, like ice breaking up. The lieutenant grabbed them both. “Let the city buy your lunch,” he said. “You might as well get used to it.”

  I’d thought of asking him if he knew anything about Alec Moselle. Then I remembered he was a cop, and that he’d have traced the same number from “Jerry Marcus’” phone I had, and it would remind him I was still working an ongoing police investigation. Not that he’d forget; but there was no percentage in making him any angrier at me than always.

  I walked back to the parking garage and climbed the stairs to the level where I’d left my car. Another pair of feet made echoes in the well a flight below, ascending also. I stopped to light a cigarette. The other footsteps stopped. I flipped away the match and climbed the rest of the way, moving at a faster clip. So did the other pair of feet.

  The man who belonged to them hovered inside the open door to my level, just inside the shadows. He fumbled at his pockets, looking for those darn keys.

  He’d lost them; as I drove past on my way to the street, the screen of a cell phone glowed inside the doorway. I made it to Liberty before I picked up a plain blue Ford in my rearview. There is nothing so well marked as an unmarked police car.

  FIFTEEN

  I didn’t try to shake loose my shadow. Cops are hard to lose, and after you’ve gone to all the trouble they just come back angrier. Even when they weren’t mad at me I had as much leash as they cared to give me, and not an inch more. I couldn’t make a buck without their benediction. They’d find out what I was up to soon enough, tail or no. As it was, the jump I had on them was a rare break.

  Anyway, Ann Arbor’s not big enough to lose them for long, and they knew the place better than I did.

  Driving, I flipped open my notebook and read the address Barry had given me for Alec Moselle, the owner of the last number the dead man in Jerry Marcus’ apartment had called. The place was on Washtenaw Avenue. In the downtown Borders I’d picked up a visitor’s guide to the city. Jackson Avenue wound eastward past fraternity houses, then metamorphosed into Washtenaw at the foot of a water tower shaped like a bicycle horn with the bulb up top, where the scenery changed from residential to commercial as if someone had flipped a switch. I passed a huge gourmet market and a Barnes & Noble bookstore sharing a jammed parking lot, another Borders, and the usual snarl of sit-down restaurants, coffee shops, takeout joints, coffee shops, auto parts stores, coffee shops, PetSmarts, and two stories of glass with a French name and several yards of neon bent into the shape of a coffee mug leaking scripted steam out the top; I figured none of the natives had slept eight hours straight in years.

  The street was multiple lanes of mirror-to-mirror traffic, with just three cars making it through for every green light. I crept along the slow lane, studying the signs in a string of strip malls, spotted the number I was looking for just in time to turn but not in time to signal, and rode the sonic blast from a string of horns into the asphalt lot of a commercial center containing eight businesses separated by common walls on the ground floor and as many on the second. The address I wanted belonged to an outdoor walk-up above a hearing-aid emporium.

  I found a diagonal space in front and pretended to be studying my visitor’s guide while the anonymous blue Ford drifted past and pulled into a slot between a smoke shop and a place with block M jerseys hanging in its display window. The driver, a clean profile with a flattop haircut, stayed inside while I got out and climbed the metal steps to the second floor. He didn’t seem to be taking any precautions to preserve his secret. So far as I could tell he was alone.

  An airlock with nothing in it but a linked rubber mat on the linoleum led into a large reception area papered with super-size black-and-white blowup photographs of naked people. Some were artistic studies of lithe young women pouting at something outside the camera’s field of vision, others of fat men and white-haired grandmothers, all naked as eggs. The majority were panoramic shots of crowds of men and women of all shapes, ages, and sizes standing on flat roofs and on sidewalks and in parking lots, many of them covering their private parts but just as many putting everything on display, with only the occasional pair of running shoes and caps and scarves with the U of M logo to break up the expanses of skin; these last had all the erotic appeal of a Laundromat. They looked like odes to cellulite.

  “Bring along plenty of sunblock,” Barry had said. I grinned.

  The door behind a doughnut-shaped counter appeared to open by twisting a woman’s left nipple. The woman seated inside the doughnut had not posed for the picture. She wore a muumuu printed all over with Route 66 road signs and her hair had been combed into a Woody Woodpecker pompadour only redder, with directional arrows shaved into the temples. She would dress out around three hundred pounds.

  “Moze doesn’t audition models for the mob shots,” she said. “If you’ll give me an e-mail address, I’ll include you in the next cattle call. All you have to do is show up, and bring along a gym bag or something to put your clothes in when you take them off.”

  I started to say I wasn’t there to audition. Then something beeped and she jerked her head back to look up at me. I saw the headset then, a black band threaded through her topknot with earbuds and a serpent-shaped Madonna transmitter in front of her mouth. She hadn’t been talking to me. Like many overweight women she had a pretty, pleasant face, but the expression was stern.

  “Moze isn’t here, if you’re with the police.”

  “Where is he if I’m not?”

  “Are you a reporter? He doesn’t give interviews.”

  I got down to business. The longer I stood there, the further I went down the evolutionary chart; one more bit of idle persiflage and I’d be a U.S. congressman.

  “I’m not a reporter. I’m not a cop. I’m not serving papers or unloading The Watchtower or collecting signatures for a petition to ban marriages between men and beasts. I’m looking for a missing person. I have reason to believe Mr. Moselle knows him.” I gave her a card.

  She fished a pair of glasses on a silver chain from the no-man’s-land between her breasts and read. “Amos Walker. Ten letters. That’s solid. Moze is shooting downtown today.”

  “A little chilly, isn’t it?”

  “He works fast. He has to, to avoid arrest. No permit, you know. He always says it’s easier to ask forgiveness afterwards than permission before.”

  “Who does he work for, the American Nudists’ Association?”

  “He’s strictly freelance. Moze celebrates the human body in urban situations.” She looked me up and down. “Have you ever considered posing nude?”

  “I wear a necktie in the shower.”

  “You’re not wearing a necktie now.”

  I still had on the black T-shirt and jeans I’d worn to the Necto Nightclub. They were beginning to feel like a moldy shroud. “I’m in disguise.”

  “Downtown.” She returned my card. “Be prepared to talk on the run. The local authorities differ with him on the definition of art.”

  “Where downtown?”

  “You’ll know when you’re getting close.”

  * * *

  I reversed directions, towing my tail. Nearing the central stretch of Main Street the traffic came to a dead halt. Rush hour was still a couple of hours away, but the lights kept changing and nothing moved but hands on horns. I cranked down the window on the passenger’s side and hailed a party seated on a bus stop bench under a canopy.
He was large and black, wearing a mahogany-colored zoot suit and a sail-brimmed yellow fedora with an orange feather in the band, brown-and-white spectators on his big feet. He had one arm around a guitar case and everything about him glittered, from the heavy gold watch on his wrist to the pearlies in the grin he wore nailed to his face. He was too clean for homeless and dressed too eccentrically for Ann Arbor, where a show handkerchief is looked on as evidence of a narc. I figured I was addressing the town character. When he turned his high beams on me I waved a five-dollar bill.

  “They tell me Alec Moselle is shooting someplace around here,” I said. “Am I warm?”

  “Not if you’re posing for Moze.” He waved a great dusty-pink palm at the bill. “Keep your money, friend. Might need it if they catch you firing up a doobie. Why you think the place looks like the employee lot at the Ford plant?”

  “I’ve seen more jaywalkers here in the last two days than in thirty years in Detroit. I thought there was a convention in town.”

  “Follow the crowd, friend.”

  “How do you suggest I do that?”

  He got up for a closer look. The grin glimmered away while he studied my face. After a second he jerked his chin in a nod. “I likes you. Hang on.”

  Leaving the guitar case on the bench, he stepped into the street, held up one of those flippers, waved his other arm from his hip to his head in a broad arc, and stuck the first one out straight in front of him. Cars started to part, inches at a time, fenders passing close enough to tickle the dust on the ones that needed washing. A horn honked, subtly different from the usual frustrated squawk. Little by little the drivers jockeyed their way between lanes, nosing into the spaces opening up, effectively prying them wider. They flashed their teeth in smiles when they recognized the man directing traffic.

  Five minutes after he’d started directing, my lane was open clear to the corner. “What’s your name, friend?” I asked as I cruised past the man with the guitar case.

  The thousand-candlepower grin came on. “They calls me Shaky Jake, friend. On account of I’m just a bit loose.” He pointed a ringed finger at one temple and roared a booming laugh I still hear when things get too quiet.

  * * *

  After I turned onto Main Street, I found the crowds on the sidewalks bunched as tightly as the cars on the street. There was no place to park, so I doubled beside a delivery van; it wasn’t going anywhere soon. I don’t know where the cop tailing me wound up; I’d lost the unmarked car somewhere in the press of metal. The uniformed variety was fanning out to partition off the mob. I guessed they had enough on their hands without dealing tickets. I still had plenty to learn about the city of Ann Arbor.

  I bobbed along with the flow toward a Chinese-Japanese restaurant, the kind that features a samurai in a chef’s hat juggling razor-sharp knives behind a spitting griddle; that’s where the throng had stopped. It was orderly, but the cops forming a human barricade were sweating in fifty-degree temperatures. A red-nosed sergeant and an obvious plainclothesman stood inside the doorway of a furniture shop, looking as if they didn’t know the others. Plainclothes’ jaws worked energetically on a wad of gum or a plug of chaw, his fists balled in the pockets of his topcoat.

  In front of the restaurant stood an emaciate in army fatigues with a Chicago Bulls cap twisted backward on his head, gesticulating behind a camera on a tripod on a cleared patch of sidewalk while a blonde who looked like Charlize Theron paced back and forth wearing a glistening black all-weather coat. She had that insolent look that’s hard to fake when you’re wearing something under the coat. And here was one female under thirty who knew how to walk in heels.

  So far, Moze—if that was the man in the cap—hadn’t overtly broken any laws worth the hassle of embittering a crowd that showed no signs of hostility yet. The humming in the air was electric; the steadily building vibration of waiting. With all the sexual revolutions we’ve had, the naked operas, NC-17 movies, and grope shows disguised as reality programming, there’s nothing like the promise of a naked woman to bring out the herd instinct. The two cops in the doorway watched the woman from under heavy lids, vigilant and patient.

  Nothing much happened for sometime. The photographer clacked his shutter, the motor whirred, lining up the next shot of nothing in particular. In sunlight, his fashionable black stubble had bits of red, like pills on a sweater. The crowd began to grumble, the police presence to stiffen further. It looked as if nothing was going to happen; which is the worst thing to happen when enough humanity has gathered in one place expecting Something. It was just the kind of scenario that leads to barn-burning when a lynching falls through. An invisible wire was stretching taut, like one of the strings on Shaky Jake’s guitar; if that was what he had in the case. Personally I think it was stuffed with cash.

  Then the wire broke.

  Moze lifted his cap and resettled it on his head. It might have been a prearranged signal, or maybe his scalp just needed air. His black-red hair ended precisely where the cap began; the rest was pale skin and a splatter of freckles the size of pigeon’s eggs.

  Signal or not it was enough for the blonde, who twitched loose the belt of her coat, flung off the garment, and struck a Statue of Liberty pose with one arm raised. She was as bare as Venus, without the shell and modest handwork. The camera clacked and whirred against a whoop from the audience.

  Things happened fast then. The pair in the doorway boiled out, the red-nosed sergeant swept the coat up from the sidewalk, draping it around her, while the plainclothesman slung up an arm, unconsciously imitating the blonde’s gesture. His jaws chomped away at whatever he had between his upper and lower molars.

  A prowl car slid growling into the curb. In a flash, the woman was in the backseat and the photographer stood in the middle of the crowd holding a citation. It was as slick a police sweep as I’d ever seen.

  The spectators booed and threw plastic cups at the car bearing away their goddess of the afternoon. I went the opposite direction, approaching the man in the Bulls cap.

  “Alec Moselle?”

  He wasn’t paying attention. “I’ll be right down with the bail!” he shouted after the car. He looked down at the paper in his hand with a tight smile. It was gone when he looked up at me. “What’ve you got, four nails and a cross?”

  “It isn’t exactly the Sermon on the Mount, now is it?” I leaned close. There wasn’t any need to whisper in that din, but the drama got to me. “Jerry Marcus.”

  He jerked upright. He was freakishly thin; the bones of his skull were obvious and the fatigues hung on him like something deflated. “Who are you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  He crumpled the citation into a tight ball and cast it aside. “My trailer.” He strode away.

  SIXTEEN

  Alec Moselle’s trailer was a ten-foot Airstream gleaming like a drop of mercury behind a hulking black Ford F-150 pickup parked at a row of meters. He’d fed them all; he’d risk jail, but not a ticket. Stationary Traffic had the city treed. I hoped they wouldn’t tow my car.

  It was a truck with character, probably three hundred thousand miles’ worth. The front bumper had been replaced with a gray oak four-by-six plank, either because the original had rusted away or he didn’t want locked gates getting in the way of a last-minute escape. A female silhouette reclined nude on each back mudflap. The license plate read BARE-S.

  “Secretary of State’s office wouldn’t let me spell it out,” he said, shaking loose his keys.

  Before I stepped up behind him I swept a glance up and down the street. There was no sign of my piggy-back rider from downtown. Chances are, if he’d lost me in the traffic, he’d cruise around until he spotted the Cutlass and stake it out.

  Moselle had gutted the interior and transformed it into a rolling darkroom with an infrared light and damp prints hanging from clothespins like diapers above a stainless-steel sink. Jars of chemicals and boxes of photo paper were stacked on shelves with lips to keep them from spilling over when the trailer turne
d a sharp corner. Other shelves, canted backward for the same purpose, held coffee table–size photo books with torn jackets: works by Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Man Ray, and someone named Bunny Yeager. I asked who she was.

  “Fifties pinup queen turned damn good glamour photographer.” Moselle leaned his tripod, camera and all, in a corner and deposited a bulky leather-and-canvas camera bag on the table in the dinette. A dwarf refrigerator contained more chemicals and plastic water bottles. He took out two bottles, closed the door with his hip, and offered me one. I took it; I was feeling parched. “I stumbled into my dad’s stash of girlie magazines when I was eleven,” he said. “Bunny was my first inspiration—as well as the source of a thousand adolescent hard-ons.”

  On close inspection a print of what I thought were rows of pink baby bottles turned out to be a shot taken from elevation of a crowd of a couple of hundred people in a park setting, all of them naked. The obesity epidemic seemed to have reached crisis proportions.

  “That one was a bear.” He threw himself into a tattered plaid love seat and pointed his bottle toward a platform rocker listing drunkenly to the left. “The sky was overcast. I had to slow down the shutter and shot six rolls before I got one where nobody moved and blurred the take.”

  “They were probably shivering. What were you in, a helicopter?”

  “A bucket. I borrowed it from a buddy with an Edison crew.”

  “Any trouble with the law?” I sat in the rocker.

  “Not that time. It was a nudist camp on Lake Michigan. Controlled environment. No challenge except from Mother Nature. You can’t buy advertising like I got just now.”

  “Kind of tough on the model.”

  “I told her what to expect. She was game. She’s putting together a portfolio. But you’re right. She does all the hard work and gets thrown in the tank. I push a button and get a ticket.”