The Glass Highway (5 page)

Housebreaking animals was not one of True’s specialties. The apartment, which was all one room taking up the entire floor with a row of sooty windows at the back, was an obstacle course of piled droppings and urine standing in puddles on a thin rug whose original color was debatable. Loose hair covered several unmatched chairs with burst cushions. Muddy paw prints bled down the refrigerator door and patterned the kitchen table’s sheet-metal top. Shreds of linen that had once been white and flesh-colored foam rubber clung to the filth on the floor, evidence of a recent tug-of-war with a pillow. Everything was worse than I remembered it. His drinking customers had to be three-quarters gone before they came up there.

I shook off a white terrier that was trying to make love to my leg and slid along the wall to where a tattered curtain masked the bed and bath area, watching an eighty-pound brown Labrador retriever whose yellow eyes followed me from its crouch in the middle of the floor, accompanied by a long, bubbling growl. I had to step around something that looked like a cross between a rat and a Mexican hairless squatting to water the rug. A medium-sized mongrel with a square head and neutral coloring sat nearby watching me with a bored expression. I steadied the revolver and tore aside the curtain.

A naked girl with a mop of tight blond curls was sitting up in bed with her back pressed as close to the headboard as it could go without leaving a dent, staring at me with eyes like the fried eggs I hadn’t had for breakfast. She was holding a sheet over her breasts, but I could see her ribs. She couldn’t have weighed as much as the Lab, which was still revving its engine close by. Her chest fluttered. Next to her, sprawled on his stomach, almost as skinny and just as naked, lay a small man whose skin was a deep, even brown from his ragged natural to his heels, where the dusty pink soles of his feet started. The mattress quivered under his juicy, broken snoring. Moses True, the Terror of Twelfth Street.

A faded flannel shirt and soiled jeans that could have belonged to either sex were heaped on the floor next to the bed. Since they were on the girl’s side I scooped them and tossed them onto her lap. She started, letting go a whimper.

I realized then that I was still holding the gun and lowered it. “I’m not here to chill anybody.” I spoke loudly to make myself heard over the barking. It had fallen off a little. The dogs were getting used to me, all except the brown Lab. I kept an eye on it. “I got business with Valentino here. Why don’t you cruise down to the Renaissance Center and wait for the lunch trade.”

“I ain’t no whore,” she said after a moment. Her Tennessee twang could cut glass.

“I was giving you the benefit of the doubt. Doll up. I’d turn my back, only I’d look silly with a knife in it.”

She got dressed, wriggling into the still-buttoned shirt as if it were a pullover, put on one rundown track shoe, found its mate under the bed and put it on, and left without a coat. They build them tough down there. The dogs sniffed at her heels and let her pass. I listened to her footsteps in the hall and on the stairs and heard the street door slam. Then I got a good grip on the thin mattress True was smeared on and yanked. He rolled over completely and landed on his back on the floor. The room shook a little, not much. He didn’t weigh but a hundred pounds dressed and carrying his wallet.

He awoke with a
woof,
looked around confusedly—and scrambled under the bed. I didn’t think he was going for his teddy bear. When he came back up waving a nickel-plated .357 magnum I leaned across the bed and placed the muzzle of my .38 against his smooth forehead. I drew back the hammer just for effect.

“They’ll love you at the morgue,” I told him. “They won’t have to undress you for the autopsy.”

He was dirty but he wasn’t dumb. He laid his revolver on the bed and raised his hands. He was kneeling on the floor. I straightened, still covering him but at more practical range. The muzzle left a pale circle on his forehead that filled in rapidly with brown pigment. His face was spade-shaped, falling away drastically to a point below high cheekbones and wide-set eyes under a broad brow. Recognition seeped into his eyes.

“Yeah,” he drawled. “I know you.”

“Amos Walker. We met when you were peddling goofdust on Putnam. Right across from Murray High. For shame. Girls too. One of them was the runaway I was looking for.”

“Man, someone got to do something about them kids’ complexions. She run away again?”

“Probably. They usually do. I’m looking for someone else. A man named Bud Broderick.”

The big dog was still growling. I’d ceased paying attention. It was like its master, a lot of lip and no teeth.

“Don’t know the dude,” said True.

“No? I’m surprised Paula Royce never mentioned him.”

He knew that name. His eyes jerked to the magnum lying on the mattress, then back up to my face slyly. I pretended not to notice.

“I’m not on your case,” I said. “I’m not a cop. Makes no difference to me who’s pushing on Twelfth and in Grosse Pointe, because there’ll always be someone pushing on Twelfth and in Grosse Pointe. I’m looking for a guy that knows a woman. She’s on prescription drugs and you’re supplying her. All I want’s her address.”

He went for the gun then and I flicked mine across his face. Just a short snap, but the sight carried away some flesh from the bridge of his nose. Blood came to the torn notch and rolled out the bottom. He squealed just like a woman, clapping both hands to his face.

“You’re an easy read, Mose.” I picked up the magnum. “Paula Royce. Where’s she live?”

“Jump, Grog!”

I spun toward the snarling Lab, which was a mistake. Before I could check myself, the bored mongrel with a square head sprang a full six feet from a sitting position and fastened itself on my gun arm.

The beast was mostly jaws. It hung straight down from my arm, crushing it with all the enthusiasm of a Mexican wife grinding corn. My wrist went numb under the pressure. The dog made no noise at all except to suck air in through its wide moist nostrils. I felt the Smith & Wesson slipping from my fingers. True got up to catch it.

I juggled the magnum in my left hand until I was holding it by the barrel and started clubbing the dog’s skull. It whimpered a little far back in its throat. I kept thumping. It panted some and its jaws began to relax. It dropped, taking half my coat sleeve with it. While it was falling, I twirled the magnum frontier style and cocked it clumsily with my left thumb. The pusher held up, a small naked brown man frozen in mid-rise, knees bent, hands reaching for the gun in my other hand. Blood smeared his features.

In the middle of the room, the Labrador had sat down to lick a paw.

Gasping like a sprinter, I pulled one foot out from under the unconscious mongrel. It was leaking blood down the back of its neck and its tongue showed between brown fangs, but its chest was pumping. My right sleeve hung in ribbons. The skin wasn’t broken so far as I could tell. I had held on to the .38, not that it was of any use with the arm dead. “What the hell is that?” I nudged the dog with a toe.

“Pit bull and something else. He was all pit bull, you still be wearing him.” True licked his lips, glanced down at the animal and back up at me. The movement was strangely doglike. He’d been living with them too long. “If he’s wasted—”

“Forget him. He’s got a skull like a Prussian helmet. Where’s Paula Royce?”

He used up some of the rotten air in the room without saying anything. I made one of those motions you make with a gun.

“You won’t shoot me, man. You have half the neighborhood up your ass ’fore the echo.”

I grinned. “You’ve been hanging around Grosse Pointe too much, Mose. Down here if they don’t hear shots every hour or so they haul you downtown for disturbing the noise. Where is she?”

Still he hesitated. I frowned, feeling the circulation returning in pins and needles to my right arm. It was taking entirely too long to worm the address of one customer out of him. I tilted the magnum’s blunt barrel toward his left kneecap and started squeezing. He saw my finger whiten on the trigger. He blurted out a number and the name of a street in Iroquois Heights.

I relaxed my finger without moving the gun. “That’s across the county line. Since when do you deliver out that far?”

“Man, I got a lot of new customers out that way. That’s how you build trade.”

Beads of moisture glittered like diamond dust on his forehead. I elevated the barrel and let down the hammer gently. “Man,” I mocked him, “I hope you’re not jerking me around.”

“They don’t call me True for kicks.” His hands went to his crotch. A modest man was Moses True, tra la. I watched him closely.

“Why so tight with the information, True? More customers you can always get.”

He scratched himself absently. “Maybe you got me up on the wrong side of bed.”

“Maybe. But you’re not that hard of a guy. Who burned Johnny Ralph Dorchet?”

“Old news, Walker. Even the fuzz shook theirselves loose of that one finally.”

The question didn’t seem to have surprised him.

“Dorchet was working the Pointe,” I said. “A minute and a half after the paramedics finished sponging him and his business partners off the walls of his place on Erskine, you were up there playing out his hand. You must’ve been picking law out of your back teeth for months.”

“Not like you think. I was inside for unpaid traffic fines the night Johnny and his bloods caught that cold.”

“Who blew the whistle, you?”

He skinned his lips back past black gums. “Just sour luck. I got stopped busting a light and they run me in on a bench warrant.”

“Sour like cherry ice cream. You didn’t just step into Dorchet’s platform heels without someone was holding the shoehorn. Who was it?”

“Just fillin’ a vacuum, boss. Just fillin’ a vacuum.”

I gave up. He was too playful for someone standing on the wrong end of a Colt with blood on his face. Muscle playful. I holstered the Smith and inspected my forearm. It was bruised black to the elbow, but I could work the fingers and no important bones appeared to be broken. Grog was coming to at my feet, twitching his legs and smacking his lips like an old man remembering a childhood meal in his sleep. I backed my way between animals toward the door. The Lab got up and growled. I nodded at it as I pulled the door open behind me. “He and Jaws ought to take their act out of town.”

“Hey! What about my piece?”

“Look for it at the next police auction.” The door closing set the dogs off again.

On the sidewalk in front of the building I paused to suck in lungfuls of clear cold air, but I knew I’d have to take another shower and live a little before the stink went away. I drove with my left hand on the wheel, stopped at the first mailbox I came to, wiped off the shiny magnum, and dropped it down the chute. Short of delivering it in person that was the surest route to police headquarters, if the mailman was honest.

I
STOOD UNDER
scalding water for the best part of an hour scrubbing off kennel smell until my skin started to peel, then climbed into a fresh suit and overcoat and took off. My right arm mostly got in the way. Since I couldn’t write with it just yet, I made a mental note on my way down the driveway to charge a new wardrobe to expenses.

Iroquois Heights was the kind of place you wanted to live in if you were in the forty percent bracket and you didn’t care which pies your local public servants had their fingers in so long as they kept their campaign volunteers off your doorstep and the neighbor’s junkie kid away from your stereo. It was one of those jut-jawed little communities that advertised on television warning lawbreakers to steer clear of the city, and at election time they put teeth in it by raiding some giggle parlor or other that was casting too big a shadow. There was a newspaper, but it was part of a chain belonging to a sometime political hopeful and its editors had stiff necks from looking the other way. The streets were clean, the homes were kept up, and every block had a young oak growing out of a box on the sidewalk. From the mayor to the cop on the corner you could buy the whole place for pocket change.

I cruised past the house, parked around the corner, and walked back. It was a one-story white frame with garage attached, nonfunctional shutters on the windows, and a fat cedar trimmed into a perfect cone on the front lawn. A six-year-old Jeep Cherokee was parked in the asphalt driveway. The front door wore an antique brass knocker older than the house. I used it. Lurching footsteps approached and Bud Broderick swung open the door.

“Yeah?”

I blinked. His face was flushed and a little puffy, but I recognized Sandy Broderick’s eyes. Bud was my height but outweighed me by twenty pounds. At least fifteen pounds of it was baby fat. He was wearing an open-necked white shirt and brown polyester pants and black socks thrust into brown loafers. His tawny hair was rumpled and his breath would intoxicate a prowl-car cop’s balloon. He swayed a little, trying to focus on my face.

I remembered myself finally and extended a card. “Frank Waxhouse, Michigan Consolidated Gas. Can I get a look at your meter?”

He spent some time deciding which card to read first. I was holding just the one. The entryway made an L behind his left shoulder so that I couldn’t see what was inside. A television set murmured not far away.

“Who is it?” The voice calling from beyond the L was female and young.

“Gas man.” He slung the answer over his shoulder without turning his head. He’d given up trying to make out what was on the card. I could just as well have shown him the one from the encyclopedia firm and used the same cover.

“That can’t be,” said the voice. “They read the meter last week.”

Bud stiffened.

I backed away a step. “Wrong neighborhood. I guess somebody screwed up.”

“I guess somebody did. Get in here.” He moved his right hand clumsily and showed me the round blue empty eye of death. He’d been holding it behind the door and I’d been too busy wondering what champagne to buy out of his father’s thousand dollars to notice. The gun shook a little. I hate it when they do that. He swiveled aside as if he were on hinges and I stepped in past him, hands raised. If a professional had done that I’d have elbowed him in the stomach and taken my chances on disarming him. But a pro wouldn’t have done that, and amateurs are a blank order. He just might have let daylight through me because he didn’t know I was kidding.