Motor City Blue (22 page)

Nothing appeared to be missing from the table. The flat whiskey bottle we had shared lay empty on its side atop the formidable paperwork. None of it had spilled, because he’d emptied it before it fell over. There were no new figures on the ledger sheet he’d been working on a couple of hours earlier. The butt of his Army Colt stuck out from beneath its scrawled camouflage at the same angle as before. The black metal box was still open but its contents hadn’t been disturbed. I glanced around the rest of the office, but there was nothing there worth taking. Nothing but a life. I reached across the table, transferred the old-fashioned black metal telephone from the window ledge to the table, and reported two murders to the night captain at Detroit Homicide, who had told me yawningly that Lieutenant Alderdyce had gone home. I said nothing about Freeman Shanks. That would have brought them too soon. I asked him to notify Alderdyce and hung up while he was asking my name.

I left the place as boldly as someone who had a right to be leaving it at 3:30 A.M. and walked all the way to Anthony Wayne Drive. It was farther than it seemed by car, but then almost everything is. The lights in Number Six were still burning, the way Iris and I had left them. I strolled around the trailer before going in, just to make sure my quarry hadn’t doubled back while I was waltzing with the cab driver, but there were no cars or trucks parked anywhere near it and no tread marks were visible in the light of my pencil flash. No one was parked in my original spot two trailers down. I entered the big trailer.

I didn’t know if the Rinkers, Ed and Shirley, had turned out the lights when they vacated the place, but if they hadn’t the manager would have. I did the same, after first dialing down the thermostat. Then I made myself comfortable, but not too comfortable, on the ravaged movie-set bed and got out my gun and balanced it on my thigh and waited.

I spent most of the time keeping my eyes open. I’d had two hours of sleep early in the evening, but that was a hundred years ago, and the kind of enforced nap I’d taken courtesy of Jerry and Hubert Darling is worse than no rest at all. I must have given in, because the next thing I knew there was a thrumming noise on the narrow street as of an engine approaching at a cautious rate and when I looked at my watch I found that fifteen minutes had slipped painlessly out of my life.

The Luger had slid from my leg and was a hard heaviness next to me on the mattress. I picked it up. Outside, the engine noise grew louder. I could hear the tires crunching over gravel. Something that had been nibbling at the edge of my memory took a sudden, ravenous gulp. I leaped to my feet, only to duck when a solid bar of indecent white light raped the darkness, sweeping rearward from the front of the trailer along the line of the window. It felt cold skimming the back of my neck, or maybe that was fear. The thrumming sound swelled and stopped. The light halted too, but stayed on. The silence hurt. Moving swiftly, before anyone could get out of the truck and hear me, I slunk to the front door and set the lock with a brittle snap. Then I crept back beneath the merciless shaft and straightened in the shadows beyond the curtains of the makeshift darkroom with my gun in hand.

A metal door opened flatulently outside and swung shut with a crisp thump. Then silence again, and then the scrape of a leather sole on concrete and the rattle of a doorknob being tried. I was glad I’d thought to lock it finally. Then a key turned in the lock and the door was pulled open.

At first only her profile was visible in the harsh light, all bulbous forehead and upturned nose and plump, well-shaped chin. Then she turned slowly in my direction, all of a piece as if standing on a swivel, screwing up her face in an effort to penetrate the shadows in which I stood holding my breath. She was small, not more than five-three and a hundred pounds, and her face was tiny between the wings of the worn leather collar of her jacket, and round, and might have been attractive with a little make-up. As it was, it looked like scraped bone. Add to that a great stack of frizzy hair that might be red in a kinder light, a denim bag even larger than Iris’ green leather one hanging from a strap over her shoulder, and a pair of hip-hugging jeans unevenly faded and stuffed into the fringed tops of imitation buckskin boots that reached halfway up her calves, and you had what the Vistaview Mobile Home Park’s late manager might consider a hippie. Her little, bare hand groped for the light switch on the wall next to the door. It was an awkward thing to do considering that the hand was curled around a gun. I stepped forward just enough to let the twin headlamps glaring through the window paint a pale stripe along the barrel of the Luger.

“No lights, Maria,” I said, in as calm a tone as I could muster. “Not until you close the door and get rid of the piece.”

S
HE HISSED.

I’d been prepared for her to scream, or freeze up, or try for a shot, but she did none of these things. She opened her mouth and emitted a dry, voiceless sibilant from her throat like a Gila monster gulping cool air. Tiny feet scampered down my spine at the sound of it. I raised the Luger farther into the light. She stopped hissing. Her mouth closed slowly, reminding me again of a venomous lizard.

“The door,” I said again. “Then the gun. Toss it on the bed.”

She closed the door and underhanded the iron. It landed on the near corner of the mattress, bounced once, and came to rest with the butt poking over the edge.

“Now the light.”

She flicked the switch, bathing the trailer in yellow. I blinked, but not enough to do her any good. Outside, the truck started up again, swung around parallel to the trailer, pulled up in front of it, and started backing toward the hitch. I’d expected that. The light was the signal for all clear.

Maria’s eyes did a fast tango between the discarded gun and the source of the noise. She was a good-looking girl in this light, except for the hair, of which there was too much and which was too light-colored for her eyes and complexion. It was too light-colored for almost anything. It was damn near orange.

“Would you mind ditching the wig?” I asked, not impolitely. “You don’t have to, but I’d consider it a personal favor. You’ll have to admit it’s hard on the eyes.”

She hesitated. A door slammed outside and feet crunched through snow. Metal rattled. Then she reached up and peeled off the orange Brillo pad and shook loose her blackblack hair so that it tumbled over her shoulders in disheveled waves. That was the Maria Bernstein I knew, the stunner in the graduation photo, the sword-swallower in the porno snap. The battleworn jacket, jeans, and boots gave her a wickedly exotic look: Ilse, She-Wolf of the SS. She stood glaring at me, holding the shaggy wig down at her side.

I came out of the darkroom and crab-walked in front of her over to the bed where the gun lay. It was a long-barreled .22. I left it where it was and took up a position between it and her. I wanted her fingerprints on it when the cops came.

Someone was scraping snow away from in front of the trailer with a shovel, getting set to insert a jack beneath the steel tongue. She was listening to the miscellaneous noises.

“Don’t worry, he’ll join us in a little while,” I said. “Then we can all have a nice talk. Is his name really Rinker, or is that as phony as ‘Martha Burns’?”

“It’s really Rinker.” Her voice was calmer than expected. She’d had time to compose herself. It wasn’t a bad voice, sultry but shallow, as when she sang. Her hiss had more depth. “I met him at Aphrodite Records. He was back-up guitarist with a group that called itself the Accelerators. For all the hits they had it could just as well have been the Brake Pedals.”

“He must like money as much as you do. Musicians usually have too many dreams to toss them away by throwing in with blackmailers. Unless they do drugs and lack the wherewithal. Is that his problem?”

“He does pills.” Her dark eyes smoldered. “For him it was money to buy reds and angel dust. For me it was revenge.”

“Revenge for your murdered boyfriend,” I said, helping her out. “Freeman Shanks.”

Her lips parted in surprise. They were nice lips that needed no gloss. Her teeth were even and very white. Then they closed again. “How’d you know?”

“I had no idea he was involved until I saw the film.”

“You saw the film!” An animal hunger sprang into her eyes. She started forward but my gun stopped her.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “It’s a novel, but it needs telling. Stop me when I stray too far. You met Shanks when you were both in Lansing. I called Esther Brock last night and she told me he spoke at the school while he was in town conferring with his campaign backers. That’s when he was running for union office. The rest is guesswork, but somehow you and he got together alone and something happened. You fell in love with him. Maybe he reciprocated, or maybe he just liked snatch.”

“He reciprocated. It was at a coffee in the students’ lounge after the speech.” She blushed then. It would have been adorable if I hadn’t seen her other side. “We went back to my room. It didn’t take long; he was a busy man. We were both back at the party before anyone missed us.”

I nodded. “He was a busy man, all right. But not too busy he didn’t like a little diversion now and then during a tough campaign. He was also nearing forty, and flattered to think that he could attract a pretty eighteen-year-old girl. Maybe he knew who your guardian was even then. Probably not, though, or he’d have dropped you like a rattlesnake. It didn’t look good for a man who had promised to rid the union of mob influence to be carrying on with the ward of an infamous racketeer. His campaign people would have told him that eventually, but by then it was too late. He had taken you with him to Detroit.”

“We were going to be married after the election.” There were tears in her eyes. They glistened without falling. But her voice remained steady.

“Maybe. Maybe not. Interracial marriage is a long way from acceptance in this town. At any rate, whether he knew who you were or not, he hid you out in a brothel to keep you out of sight until the balloting was finished. Only something went wrong. Something called the Black Legion. Those good old boys don’t like to see blacks doing anything but shining shoes and swamping out toilets. What a lesson it would be to the rest of the race if its greatest hero of the moment got knocked off. No doubt they tried a couple of times without success. I seem to recall reading about an attempt or two on Shanks’ life that went bust. The cops hung them on the Mafia and played them that way, which explains why no one ever went up for them. They wouldn’t have known about the Legion, or Klan, or whatever they prefer to be called, because the government was working that angle and Feds never talk to anyone about anything. Anyway, it was well known that Shanks had better protection than anyone except the President, and that to get to him you had to mow down twenty bodyguards who were themselves armed, which just about rendered him impervious to anything short of a kamikaze raid. You won’t find many in that strutting bunch who are that ready to die for their ideals. So they had to smoke him out, and that’s where you came back into the picture, Maria. You and the Darlings.”

She watched me between narrowed lids. There were no tears visible now. It didn’t look as if there ever had been. “Who are you?”

It seemed late in the day to be asking that question, if she really didn’t know the answer. I humored her.

“Just a guy. Jerry and Hubert are the kind of dedicated bigots it takes to keep their organization from becoming an occasional rally at the VFW where they get to dress up in sheets and holler a lot about niggers and spies and kikes and Commies and taxes. Maybe they’re the leaders. Anyway, they found out about you somehow. I don’t think they followed Shanks when he came to visit or they could have knocked him down anywhere along the way, because he made them without his security. Most likely they spotted him by chance while they were going and he was coming. They were off-and-on customers. That’s probably what gave them the idea to take him out in the first place. They could have staked out the place and ambushed him, but too many people knew them there. So they dropped in on you at Aunt Beryl’s early one morning and persuaded you to help them get your boyfriend away from his private army. Probably they started by offering you money, and when you refused they got rough. One of the other girls heard it and saw your face later. You weren’t very pretty right then.”

“They threatened to bust me up good,” she said. Her voice betrayed her finally. She covered her face with both hands. “They said they hoped I had a good picture of myself to remind me what I used to look like.”

“That was just the clincher, doll. You were ready to throw in with them the minute they mentioned money. But holding out a little longer was romantic. Maybe it even drove up the price.”

There must have been an edge to my tone. She lowered her hands softly, a millimeter at a time, and looked at me with the hatred dawning in her eyes.

“You wanted to be a singing star,” I went on, before she could say anything. “You wanted it so bad you could taste it. That was the one thing that everyone who knew you agreed on. But no one but you knew how far you’d go to realize that dream. You sang for Barney Zacharias at Beryl’s and he told you he could make you a star if you had the money to finance the climb. Only you didn’t have money. Your tuition, room, and board at the school had been paid by Morningstar directly to Esther Brock and you never even got to smell it. Shanks didn’t give you any because you might get ideas about spending it, and that meant leaving the house. You couldn’t go back to the old man and ask him for it because you knew he wouldn’t agree, and if he found out you’d been checked into a whorehouse under a fictitious name by your lover, a
shvartze—
well, you’d be back in Arizona quicker than you can say ‘Grand Canyon State.’ So you took to hooking, which was nice until you had to start cutting others in on your action. Then the Brothers Darling came along and offered you big money to betray your boyfriend and it was like manna from Heaven.

“I don’t think you knew they were asking you to lure him to his death. They wouldn’t have told you that in any case. Maybe you thought they just wanted to get him alone so they could talk to him and maybe rough him up a little, not much, just enough to persuade him to drop out of union politics. So you agreed to it.