Motor City Blue (13 page)

The small combo Zacharias had hired to back her up was cut from the same bolt. There were a lot of them out there. One out of every hundred thousand made good money for a while, then dropped out of sight and ended up with a tag on his toe and an inch on page twenty-three of a newspaper small enough to take notice: “Johnny Hercules, one-time guitarist with the Winged Wonders vocal group, was found dead on the bathroom floor of his Dearborn Heights home yesterday afternoon. Death is believed to have resulted from drug overdose.” I wondered if Aphrodite Records offered the musicians the same deal as Martha Burns,
née
Maria Bernstein.

By the time the record ended, Zacharias was sitting on a stool at the control panel with his head in his hands. I asked him if he was feeling better. He didn’t call me anything I hadn’t been called before.

“Let’s start with the money,” I said. “Where’d she get it?”

“Go piss up a rope.” The words were squeezed from his diaphragm. Either I’d kicked him harder than planned or he was faking. I decided to test the second hypothesis.

I took the little widowmaker out of my pocket, made sure the safety was on, gathered it up in my fist, and, moving so that my back was between him and the window, tapped the bald Greek on the tip of his chin between his supporting hands.

As an improvement on nature the compact firearm was fully as effective as my own Smith had been on Erskine. His hands sprang apart, his teeth snapped, and his head went back and rapped the fiberboard on the wall behind him. He gasped and shook his head as if to see if I’d knocked anything loose inside. I was sure as hell trying.

I massaged my knuckles where they’d split open again and stepped in for a second blow. He saw me coming, yelled, and threw his hands up in front of his face. It was like hurling a shotput through morning mist. His nose flattened like so much papier-mâché and blood spurted from his nostrils over his white shirt front.

“I don’t like people who pull guns,” I explained, through my teeth. “Sooner or later someone’s got to show your brand of punk that a peashooter in your hand doesn’t necessarily mean the world in your pocket. I guess I’m elected.”

I was proud of myself. I’d been insulted by cops, swiped at with a shiv, frisked, brained, shot at, and threatened, and I was taking it out on a guy half my size with an artificial aid I didn’t need just because he swindled kids who had nothing but hope and a little money and pulled guns he had no intention of using. I was in a league with the brainless slugs at Olympia who sat swilling beer out of paper cups and screaming for one overpaid athlete to splatter another’s gray matter over the manmade ice. The only difference was that I was the one doing the splattering. I spread my feet for another crack.

“No!” It was a shriek of uncut terror. He had his arms crossed over his swollen and bleeding face and his head was pressed back against the wall so hard it dented the brittle material that covered it. “I don’t know where she got the money! I didn’t ask. She just had it. I swear!”

“That’ll buy you a ticket to yesterday’s ball-game,” I said. But I backed off. Slowly he lowered his arms. His nose was puffed and still trickling and a dirty bluish patch had begun to spread over his chin and jaw. He’d be living on oatmeal and eggnog for the next week.

I got out my handkerchief and wound it around my sore right hand. The blood seeped through the white cotton, something else to be added to the expense account I would submit to Ben Morningstar. “Try guessing,” I told him. “She didn’t make that much hooking.”

“How should I know? Maybe she got it from her boyfriend.”

“You mentioned that before. Who was he?”

“Search me. I never even saw the guy. She used to get calls from him in the studio. I overheard enough to know he was loaded. That’s it.”

“You sure?”

“No. I’m holding out. I like to do that when somebody’s working me over real good. I’m into S/M.”

“When did you see her last?”

“Sometime around the end of July. We had problems getting a good cut and knocked off around seven. She said she’d be in to try again in the morning. She wasn’t. I haven’t seen her since, and don’t think I didn’t try to find her, a sweet deal like that. No soap. I never even knew where she was staying.”

I broke the clip from the automatic, jacked the shell out of the chamber, wiped everything off with the end of my handkerchief, and laid the works on the control panel out of his reach.

“Why’d you air the iron?”

He had his own handkerchief out and was using it to staunch the flow of blood from his nostrils. If we used the same laundry there were going to be rumors circulating come wash day. “Sooner or later everybody gets to pushing me around,” he complained. “I figured it was time I did some pushing of my own.”

I left the booth. He scrambled up off the stool. “Hey, what about paying me for the info?”

“Your turn at the rope,” I said, and left. The minister played on.

S
INCE ANYONE DESPERATE ENOUGH
to steal secondhand furniture and magazines old enough for Medicare deserves a break, I leave the door to my outer office unlocked during the day for the convenience of those customers who don’t mind waiting. There was one on the pew behind a copy of
Life
when I got back.

“Where’d you park the yellow bomb?” I asked as I drew the door shut. “I didn’t spot it out front.”

“Around the corner.” Wiley returned the magazine to the coffee table and got up. The more I saw of him the more he looked like an ad for campus fashions. I kept wondering how he got into the business. He didn’t look the type to go the standard dope route, but you never know.

I got out a cigarette and rolled it around in my fingers. “What can I do you for?”

“You can start with a full report. You promised Mr. Morningstar you’d check in daily.”

“That was only fourteen hours ago. The day’s not up yet.”

“Let’s hear it anyway. I don’t smoke.”

I’d offered him a Winston. I shrugged and lit mine. “Thanks. I’ll make it to Mr. Morningstar in person.” I waved out the match slowly. He was watching me, not the movement. Well, it didn’t always work. That was good to know for future reference.

“Come along, then.”

“Sorry. I’m busy.”

“He’s an old man,” he said calmly. “That’s why he hires people like Paul Cooke and me to look after his interests. Which includes making sure he isn’t taken by down-at-heels private eyes with friends on newspapers and in the police department. He can holler nigger all he wants and I’ll still do it because that’s what he pays me for. Do we understand each other?”

“Not quite. I’m down at heels because I’m honest. Some of us are in this business. We’re the guys the slick ops in the sharp tailormades hire at the professional courtesy rate of fifty or a hundred a day to do the work their clients engage them for at three hundred. Your boss may can me and throw his green into office bars and computers and flashy receptionists with nothing to do all day but answer the telephone and ball the department head, but he’ll still be hiring me or someone like me. He’ll just be shelling out more to the middleman. I may charge whiskey to expenses, but when I do I write it out clear and firm on the accounting sheet. He won’t get that from anyone in a higher tax bracket.”

He watched me in silence a moment longer. It was hard to believe I’d ever compared his looks with Stevie Wonder’s. “Is that what you want me to tell him?”

“That and one more thing. Ask him if he was sending Maria any money while she was in finishing school.”

“I can answer that. He did all his banking here, through me. It was the one link he had with his hometown he wanted to keep. He paid for her board and tuition directly to Esther Brock. Maria never saw a penny. I think it was his way of keeping her mind on her studies and out of trouble.”

“That seems to have been the popular notion.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I’ve got a big mouth. Forget I said it. Tell your boss I’ll call him tonight. Unless, of course, you’ve got orders to take me for a ride or something like that.”

He grinned. That’s what was missing. It transformed his whole face. “Man,” he said, “you’ve really got to stay away from that late-late show.” Then the bottom dropped out of the grin. “Just keep in mind that fiction is always based on something known.”

I met his gaze. “Message received.”

The latch had just snapped home behind him when the telephone in my office started ringing. I unlocked the door and went in and sat down and answered it.

“Walker’s Funland. Hit the private dick and win a cigar.”

“Can the jokes, Walker. This is John Alderdyce.”

“Second, John.” I unscrewed the mouthpiece and tore out the tap. “Go ahead,” I said when I had it back together. I dropped the junior-size mike into the file drawer next to the office bottle and pushed it shut. If it was powerful enough to pick anything up through all that oak it was worth hocking.

“Listen,” Alderdyce was saying. “I traced that license plate number. Know who was on the other end?”

“Yeah, Uncle. Why didn’t you tell me you had orders to sit on Kramer?”

“How in hell—” He sounded awestruck. I affect people that way sometimes.

“Skip it. Someday I’ll write a book. Everyone else does. So why the tantrum this afternoon instead of telling me?”

“It’s not something a cop cares to talk about. Not long after you left headquarters this morning, Proust calls me into his office where these two birds flash their ID’s at me and say they’re taking over the investigation. Proust says he called the Pentagon and confirmed their authority, tells me to turn over everything I’ve gathered. A case I’ve just about got solved, thanks to you. Later on you call and ask me why I’m keeping it under glass. What would you have done?”

“Bent some noses, but then I’m not a public servant. Listen. John. What’ve you got on a couple of billies who call themselves the Darling brothers? Jerry and Hubert.”

“This wouldn’t have anything to do with Kramer, would it?” His tone was baggy with warning.

“What if it does?”

“How does twenty years in the Milan pen sound? Anyway, if we had anything on these two in the mugs you’d have found it this morning. That is, if they’re the pair you saw snatch Kramer.”

“I’ll take my chances with Uncle. Can you get anything on Telex from Atlanta P.D.? If these dudes weren’t a hundred percent Georgia I’ll give up my membership in the Professor Higgins Association of Accents and Linguistics.”

“Forget it. Walker. I’ll be damned if I’ll use police facilities to obtain information on a case I’ve been warned off.”

“Excuse it please, is this the Lieutenant Alderdyce who told me this morning he owed me one?”

“Hold on! You called us square when I agreed to find out if this Marla broad you were looking for had a record with Vice.”

“So you remember,” I purred. “I was beginning to wonder.”

“Christ’s sake, Walker, I can’t do fourteen things at once!” He paused. I could almost hear his digestive juices working. They’d have finished with his lunch by now and would be starting in on his stomach. “Okay,” he sighed, “you win. A guy I went through training with wound up a captain down in Atlanta. I’ll call him and charge it to my home phone. If they suspend me I’ll come looking for you.”

He was about to hang up. Hastily I said, “Anything new on Shanks?” If he rang off mad at me I might lose him. Better to turn his anger in some other direction.

“Please,” he growled. “This case has more angles than the Hope diamond. He made enemies like you and I make toast. He was going to shake the Mafia out of the union brass. He was organizing the military, starting with the transport services. He had his opponent in the last election investigated and dug up a thirty-year-old assault rap that never got to court. He had ties to Core and the Panthers but severed them when he went into union politics. Want to hear my theory? The guy was twins.”

“Feed that to the press. It’ll keep them off your back while they fulminate over it.”

“Great. Now tell me what I can feed Proust. He’s convinced I’m dragging my feet on this one.”

“Try arsenic. Oh, what’d you turn up in Kramer’s apartment?”

“Apartment?” The swift change of subject left him hanging. “Oh yeah, the place on Woodward. That wasn’t his. Turned out to belong to an assembly foreman at GM. A bachelor. He’s up north this week deer hunting; we couldn’t reach him. Looks like your old C.O. was a thief. The place was torn inside out.”

I gripped the receiver until it creaked. “What was he after?” The voice wasn’t mine anymore. It belonged to a loose board beneath the linoleum.

“You tell me. All I know is this foreman has a porno collection you’d have to see to believe. Stills, books, rags, posters—”

“Films?”

“Those too. Real filth.” He yawned. His day had been as long as mine. “We thought for a while that might have had something to do with the shoot. Maybe somebody was blackmailing somebody else. Anyway, that’s the line we were following when Uncle came and took it away. Walker?”

I scraped my voice from the ceiling. “Thanks, John. I’ll be here when you get word from Atlanta.” I depressed the plunger before I could betray myself and just missed my thumb with the receiver.

I sat and drummed fingers on the big flat scribble calendar that took the place of a blotter. Then I opened the file drawer and hoisted out the office bottle and a glass and poured myself a slug and trickled it down my throat. The warmth was just beginning to spread through me as I stepped into the four-by-four bathroom and bathed the back of my head with cold water from the tap. At first it was like ramming in an ice pick, but as I toweled off gently the throbbing dissipated a hundredth of a percent and my stomach stopped doing gymnastics. I returned to the desk then and got down to some serious solitaire.

The telephone went off toward the end of the third game and halfway through the fourth glass. It interrupted a debate between my conscience and Hiram Walker over the morality of diving for the four of spades, which was snickering at me from its hiding place beneath the king of hearts. I scooped up the instrument’s business end.