Herb, the manager at Farmer Dell’s, said he had not seen Melba, she was some shopper, you see her, give her a kiss for me, and the offer still stands for her to get her picture in the Farmer Dell’s employee newspaper, the number-one shopper at location twenty-seven.
Y
ou never told me you killed that nigger in New York.”
It had been nearly a week since I had seen Maury Ahearne, and I had almost succeeded, until the events of that day, in forgetting about him, forgetting that he was the putative reason I was even in Detroit. Melba Mae had been more on my mind. My mistake. I should have known Maury Ahearne was not going to forget me. I was his ticket out. He was in my room on the seventy-third floor of the Renaissance Plaza when I unlocked the door that night. Looking through my notebooks and file folders. I might have been a felon brought back in handcuffs to the scene of his crime for all the concern he showed about getting caught in the act. He took a newspaper clipping from one of the folders and ran a finger over the headline. “Billionaire Broderick Heir in Racially Motivated Murder Investigation.” Maury Ahearne made a clucking noise with his tongue. “You forgot to tell me you were rich, too. You don’t tell me that, then where’s the trust you should have with your collaborator. We’re still collaborators, right?”
I silently cursed the impulse that had made me save those damned clips. And bring them with me. As if I needed another
scrapbook, a memento of still another five minutes of the fame, or infamy, we are all supposed to be allocated.
He glanced at the clipping again. “Shaamel. Boudreau. You really took him out with a load of sheets?” He gave an approving nod. “Got to remember that. Bet it didn’t leave a mark on him.” He replaced the clipping in a folder, picked up a notebook, and waved it at me. “What’s all this guilt shit in here about? You really feel guilty for whacking him, or are you just saying that because you think that’s how you’re supposed to feel?”
He had a gift for getting to the point. No frills, no beating around the bush. Change the subject. “How did you get in here?”
“Showed the badge,” he said. “Told the assistant manager you were suspected of being Mr. Big.”
“Mr. Big in what line of work?” Even as I said it I knew he would have an answer that would make me regret having asked the question.
“Kiddie porn.” Explaining the furtive look I had received from the desk clerk when I asked for my room key. “The video king. Little boys with tight assholes. Sucky-fucky. I told him I’d be discreet. Keep the hotel’s name out of it.” There were three empty miniature Chivas Regal bottles from the minibar on the night table, and an empty can of Planter’s cocktail peanuts. Meaning he’d been there a while. And probably gone through everything in the room as if it were a crime site. “That’s all they’re worried about.” His frigid smile. “I’ll tell them it was a mistake. All you got to do is tell them you’re going to sue their ass and they’ll probably pick up your tab.” An expansive shrug. “Not that Billionaire Broderick’s got to worry about his hotel bill. That ought to make that cheap sheeny out in California happy, though. You getting comped, and all.”
Marty Magnin. I had forgotten about him, too. Marty would not mind the ethnic slur. It was just a cost of doing business. “What are you doing here, Maury?”
If he picked up the chill in my voice, he chose to ignore it. “I
got some ideas. For our project.” The project. For a moment I pulled a blank. It would come back to me. Think. Ah.
Murder One
. The short white homicide cop and the black seven-foot ex-basketball player. High concept. Which translates into shit. A translation I was not prepared to share at that moment with Maury Ahearne. “I ever tell you about Hughie McIntyre?”
I shook my head.
“I thought I did.”
I still did not reply.
“Used to be in homicide, Hughie. Went to Wayne State at night. Law school. He finally graduates, but he’s not the swiftest guy around, it takes him four tries to pass the bar. He’s forty-three years of age, so he takes his pension and sets up shop, Hughie McIntyre, attorney-at-law, he’ll make a buck out of the shit he used to put away, you know what I mean?”
I stared at him without speaking.
“The thing is, he’s good at it. Better than he was a cop, you want the truth, the guys like him, they steer him cases, court-appointed stuff.” He suddenly faltered. It was a rare moment, and had I not been so angry I might have enjoyed it more. He plunged on. “That was Hughie handling Emmett, the guy in court the other day when you come by, you want me to check out that old broad in Hamtramck.”
I was certain that the old broad in Hamtramck was the reason I had found Maury Ahearne going through my room.
“Emmett was the guy that smoked the Cuban selling vacuum cleaners. Hughie walks him.”
Emmett who had smoked the Cuban just to see if his new gun worked. With a courtroom outcome exactly as Maury Ahearne had predicted. I opened the minibar.
“I’ll take a Chivas,” he said.
“You cleaned out the Scotch.”
“A vodka, then.”
I tossed him a miniature vodka and opened a can of beer for myself. He poured the vodka over the dregs of his Scotch. “You know, I could get used to this living on the expense account.”
It did not require a response.
“What were we talking about?”
No help from me. My silence was making him uncomfortable. He lined up my notebook carefully on the night table, next to the book of Weegee photographs Melba Mae had stolen from the Hamtramck library and given me.
“Oh, yeah, Hughie. He gets along with everybody, Hughie. Except the Church. You know, the Catholic Church. You’re a Catholic, right?”
Three times married, twice divorced, and probably thrice if that Fiat Spider had not spun into my Porsche at Sunset and Anita and sent Lizzie through the windshield. A committer of most of the mortal sins, homicide excluded, a major offender in coveting my neighbor’s wife, daughter, granddaughter, sister, au pair, aunt, and next-door neighbor, but yes, I suppose I was still a Catholic.
“He’s married twenty-six years, Hughie, to this Polack, banging her would be like fucking a meatloaf, you ask me, and I guess one day Hughie comes to that opinion too, and he takes off, who can blame him? The thing is, he wants to get married again, and his new one, also a Polack, he’s got this thing for piroshki, I guess, anyhow, she says she can’t marry a divorced man, he’s got to get an annulment. No problem, Hughie says, he’s a lawyer, he’ll work it out. The thing about annulment is, you get one if you’re one of Princess Grace’s fuck-up kids that gets knocked up by some guy with a
schlong
like a fire hydrant, she can get the money on the table and her divorce scrubbed, but if you’re Hughie McIntyre that’s only making a yard and a half for walking shit like Emmett, the cardinal says, Uh-uh, you were banging the meatloaf for twenty-six years, you’re jerking my chain you think Holy Mother the Church is going to grant you an annulment, get out of here, come back when you got the kind of bread Princess Grace and the Kennedys and them give to the foreign missions, then you can drown the meatloaf for all we care, like Teddy there, have him give you some drowning lessons, we’ll give you absolution, an annulment, tickets
to the Super Bowl, that’s what you want. So the second meatloaf, she takes off, and Hughie, he should be saying good riddance, but he blames the cardinal, and … you follow me, so far?”
I had to admire the performance element. He could almost make me believe that telling me about Hughie McIntyre was the real reason he had broken into my room.
“You want to tape it? I see you got a new tape recorder?”
Replacing the one he had thrown out the window of his car. And thrown me out right after it. Had he not done so I would not have ended up in Lily White’s bed. Or in Melba Mae Too-late’s RV. Cause and effect. Circumstances and coincidence. I suspect he had been listening to my tapes, too. On my new tape recorder. I returned his stare.
He shrugged, then continued. “So Hughie, he decides to stick it to the cardinal, he’s so pissed he doesn’t get his annulment. There’s this nun, Sister Felita, she strangles this other nun with her rosary beads, the big kind nuns used to wear, hanging off their belt, it looks like a noose. When I was a kid at St. Cyprian’s, this sister, she used to whack me with it.”
His face darkened, and I had the feeling he was wondering why he had not punched out the nun at St. Cyprian’s. Or perhaps he had. That Maury Ahearne might be a psychopath, one with a badge, had occurred to me more than once.
“When’s the last time a nun’s been charged with homicide in this country? You should look it up. Never, I bet. Because the D.A.s are all harps and wops is the reason why. Then this Sister Felita comes along. She’s pissed because the other nun, her name was Brittany, or something like that, a funny name for a nun, you ask me. Anyway, Sister Brittany—you know, I got a hard time saying that, Sister Brittany—she was wearing lipstick and a short skirt, they don’t have to wear a habit anymore they don’t want to, the sisters, and this is what pissed Sister Felita, like it wasn’t holy, and so she wraps her beads around Sister Brittany’s neck, and did that thing like Clemenza did to Connie’s husband in
The Godfather
…”
“Garroted her.”
“That’s it, that’s what she does. Naturally the cardinal says, No need to go public, she just went kind of crazy, her mind went. Fuck that, Hughie says. He represents Sister Brittany’s family, and he says Sister Felita was sweet on Sister Brittany, was trying to go down on her pretty young snatch, that was going to waste in the convent, when all Sister Brittany wanted to do was make novenas and the Stations of the Cross and shit like that. Well, you can imagine how much the cardinal likes to hear that, the papers and the TV will lap it up, like Hughie says Sister Felita was trying to lap up Sister Brittany’s pussy …”
The litany of human frailty seemed to reinvigorate him, and even piqued my own resistant curiosity. In spite of myself I had been absorbed by his tawdry and meretricious tale. As I was meant to be. Maury Ahearne’s smoke screen.
“Naturally he gets a settlement. Six hundred grand. Hughie got a third. The lawyer gets a third when he takes the case on a …” He snapped his fingers, searching for the right word.
“Contingency.”
“That’s it. So Hughie says to himself, two hundred grand, easy as eating chocolate cream pie, there must be more where this comes from, and he becomes a specialist in banging it to the Church.”
I looked out the window, at the lights of Detroit spreading out in every direction seventy-three stories below, and wondered if any of the lights belonged to the Autumn Breeze recreational vehicle and trailer park in Hamtramck. I took a deep breath. “So what are you really here for, Maury?”
“Another client of Hughie’s is this guy Rodney,” he continued, as if I had not spoken. “A fag with piles.”
I was beginning to lose control. “I don’t give a fuck about Hughie. Or the fag with piles either.”
He screwed the top back onto the empty vodka miniature, then suddenly arched it into a wastebasket. The crash of the bottle into the metal basket made me flinch. “So.” He sized me up for a moment. “Why’s your nose out of joint?”
“If you wanted to tell me about Hughie, you wouldn’t need to break into my room. It’d wait until morning. Hughie was your backup—”
“Is that right—”
“—in case I got back here earlier than you thought, and caught you going through my things. Or maybe you’re such a great storyteller, you don’t need a backup, you just make it up as you go along.”
After a moment he said, “You know, you’re not as dumb as I thought you were.”
My father had said that to me once. He had meant it as a compliment, too. “I suppose it was you that broke into Mrs. Toolate’s RV.”
He did not blink. “Easier than I got in here. Those old farts respect law enforcement.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re old. They’re afraid of the Emmetts of this world, there’s more of them than—”
My voice rose. “I mean, why did you break into her RV?”
“Oh.” The incipient tantrum elicited a tight smile. “You got to look at it from my point of view. I don’t see you for a week, and I got all these stories you don’t seem to give a shit about anymore, the ones I thought would be a nice little nest egg for my old age—you sure you don’t want to hear about Rodney and Father Len with the spandex tights?”
“No.”
“… and old Father Lujack, Father Len’s pastor that gets busted for indecent exposure because of Rodney and Len?”
“Goddammit, Maury—”
“Okay. Okay.” He sucked up the melting ice cubes in his glass, then wiped his lips with the sleeve of his jacket. “So naturally I’m a little curious about this Mrs. Toolate, lives out there in that RV park in Hamtramck. That all of a sudden you’re so interested in you drop me like a bad habit.” The swagger was back in his voice. “You had me look her up, remember? With all the husbands and no state aid and a drug bust in Ypsilanti,
charges dropped, and I begin to wonder what this bag lady’s got that I don’t, so I decide to check things out.”
I was getting very tired of Maury Ahearne. “She split.”
“So.” Maury Ahearne cracked his knuckles, elaborately unconcerned. “She’ll be easy to find. You check the GDWC dispatcher, he gives you the driver, and the driver’ll have a trip ticket that says where he dropped her, she’s not going to get far, even you could find her.”
I tried to keep my temper. In fact, I had already talked to the GD&WC cabdriver. My old police reporter training. A twenty was my way in, with a promise of another twenty depending on what he had to tell. His name was Lorenzo McNally and he said he had brought her to the bus station in downtown Detroit. Trailways or Greyhound? The dog, Lorenzo McNally said. Where she had negotiated with him. She had sold him the two VCRs for a hundred dollars, the thirty-inch Panasonic for seventy-five, the Cuisinart for fifty, the gelato maker, the microwave oven, and the six-slice toaster for another seventy-five, three hundred bucks in all, and he had tossed in the fare, what the hell, it was the least he could do, it was like hitting the jackpot on
Wheel of Fortune
, she wasn’t no Vanna White, this lady, but she wasn’t bad, you like the older stuff. This shit isn’t hot, is it, Lorenzo McNally had suddenly asked, and I had said, no, it wasn’t hot, consider it your lucky day, Lorenzo, and gave him the second twenty. I wondered what he was doing with three hundred in spare cash anyway, what kind of scam he was running, but that was for someone else’s story, not mine, I did not have enough room for Lorenzo McNally, maybe it was just Melba’s lucky day, too. All she had was a suitcase, Lorenzo McNally said, this old beat-up suitcase practically coming apart at the seams, it was so heavy she was dragging it behind her, she had this piece of heavy twine that she had wrapped around the handle.
I don’t need much myself
, she had told me that first day.
I got one suitcase, that’s it. If it gets heavy, I just get rid of stuff. The story of my life
.