The Glass Highway (6 page)

And maybe I wouldn’t have done anything in any case, because nothing in this world is like standing in front of a gun in a drunk’s unsteady hand.

He marched me down a brief hallway that broadened without doors into a clean pocket-size living room with too much furniture in it and a portable black-and-white TV tuned in to a soap opera. Behind me, Bud depended on both walls to keep his face off the floor. I looked at a small young woman in a sweatshirt and slacks standing with her back to a doorway opposite. She had dark eyes and straight black hair with bangs to her eyebrows. Her features were dark, even, not made up. She was barefoot.

On the screen, Dr. Alan Drake was breaking the news to his brother’s wife June in her hospital bed that she’d be back doing Sani-Flush commercials by February. The scene was being played better than the one I was living. I wondered who Bud had been expecting when he came to the door heeled.

“If that’s Bud, you have to be Paula,” I told the barefoot girl.

Something hard punched me in the lower back. Why do they always feel compelled to do that? “That leaves you,” said Bud, “unless your name really is Waxhouse.”

“It’s Walker. I talk just as well when I’m not at gunpoint. Some say even better.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Who shent—sent—you and what for?”

Gun talk. They hear it on the teatime movie and think it’s mandatory.

I said, “I’m a P.I. That’s private investigator to you. Emphasis on private. No one sends me anywhere. I’m being paid to look for you by your father.”

He breathed some air through his mouth noisily. “Try again. I haven’t seen my father since I was a kid, outside of the tube.” He poked me again. I was getting my fill of that.

“Maybe he has credentials or something.” The girl spoke with a vague musical accent. You had to be concentrating to hear it. Hispanic, but not Puerto Rican or Cuban, both common locally. The things you trouble yourself with when death comes looking.

I said, “I’d get them out if I thought the son of the dean of Detroit newsmen wouldn’t shoot them out of my hand. By way of my kidneys.”

“I’ll get them.” She stepped forward.

“Stay put!” Sudden panic edged Bud’s tone. “I’ll take care of it.”

“My wallet’s in my left inside pocket,” I informed him. “I should warn you I’m ticklish.”

“Grit your teeth.” The gun rattled, as they will when you switch hands on them. Then his right hand reached around under my raised right arm and inside my jacket. I moved quickly.

I brought my right arm down, pinning his to my body, and pivoted left, throwing my left shoulder hard into his chest with all my weight behind it. A rush of hot, stale liquor breath singed my eyebrows. I came up with the same shoulder under his chin, shutting his jaws for him with a hollow clop, then released his arm to scoop the gun out of his left hand. It was a .32 revolver. He was off balance and falling, but just to help him on his way I delivered a short backhand chop to the big muscle on the side of his neck with the edge of my left hand. He folded like a broken puppet.

The choreography was good, but I’d forgotten one of the dancers. I was turning to take a bow when something swished and I exploded in a shower of hot sparks that swarmed and fell and died in darkness.

M
ARTHA
S
OUTHBY FROM
El Dorado, Arkansas, had the dining room set and the electric range and was going to get a chance at the vacation for two in Jamaica.

I lay for several minutes with my eyes shut tight against the light, wondering who Martha Southby might be at all and why her good fortune had come to my attention in the first place. Slowly, like a rock eroding, I came to the realization that I was listening to an afternoon game show on television. I cranked open my lids, rolled my eyes in the direction the sound was coming from, started to black out again, and rolled them the other way. I recognized the rug and the furniture. I was stretched out on the floor of Paula Royce’s living room with a lump the size of a cocker spaniel over my right ear. I raised my sore arm to touch its sticky surface. White pain arced between my temples and a wave of nausea climbed my throat. I swallowed it. Groaned.

A thousand feet overhead, a face moved between me and the ceiling. I couldn’t make it out for the clouds, but I recognized the sweatshirt and slacks under it. She was holding my gun loosely down at her side.

“Can you talk?”

Again I tried to place the accent. Mexico? Panama? I moved my tongue sluggishly from side to side in my mouth, working off the flab of disuse. “Did Dr. Drake find a cure for June yet?”

“What?”

“I guess you don’t speak delirium. Don’t pay any attention to me.” I didn’t try to get up. Many minutes spent watching ceilings had taught me that the muscles are the last to respond after a blow to the skull. “What’d you hit me with, the Kern block?”

“A brass ashtray.” She giggled nervously, but she wasn’t the giggling type and it went flat. “I don’t even smoke. It belongs to the people I rent from. You’ve been out close to half an hour. I held a mirror to your lips once to make sure you were breathing.”

“I’m glad I didn’t wake up then. A thing like that could scare a fellow into a coma. Where’s Bud?”

She moved her head. I followed the movement to where a pile of something lay snoring under a blanket on the rug across the entryway. I’d thought the noise was going on in my head.

She said, “I tried to move him but I can’t. I guess he’s sleeping it off. He’d been drinking.”

“You couldn’t prove it by me.” I felt for my wallet. The pocket where I keep it was flatter than my ego. She noted the action.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t roll you. I’ll give it back when you leave. I had to look for identification. It says you really are a private detective.”

“Investigator,” I corrected automatically.

“What’s the difference?”

“In this state, your license. The state cops issue them and being cops they get burned when someone who is not a cop starts calling himself a detective. Semantics. I’m talking for therapy.”

“Is it true you’re working for Bud’s father?”

I nodded, wished I hadn’t. I laid palm to floor and pried myself into something that resembled a sitting position. My senses buzzed around like disturbed flies and settled slowly. I fumbled for my cigarettes, found the pack, then didn’t feel like taking it out. Too heavy. “What’s he afraid of?”

“Nothing,” she said. “For himself, anyway. He’s protecting me, he thinks. That’s why he moved in here. That’s what the heroes always do in that junk he reads.”

“You need protecting?”

She smiled that smile girls smile. Enigmatic, they call it. I call it a low ache. I said, “I don’t guess it’s any of my business. I’m just the guy who got his brains spilled because you thought I was someone you needed protecting from too. I’m just the guy Moses True sicked his mutt on because an aggravated assault beef looked sweeter to him than your address in my notebook. The reason he had your address to begin with is someone smeared the man who probably had it before and gave True Grosse Pointe with this charming place as a bonus. Jump right in and stop me when I start making sense.”

She sat on the floor next to me, folding her legs under her. She was still barefoot. Her face looked a little pale under the dark coloring. Her knuckles were white on my gun in her lap, but it wasn’t pointing at me. That was a novelty. Her eyes probed mine. “Moses True couldn’t have had this address. I never gave it to him.”

I had recovered enough strength to winch out a Winston. I paused, watching her, then struck a match. “Yeah, I thought he was forking it to me when he said he delivered out here. He probably followed you some night after you made a score.”

“Why would he do that.”

It wasn’t even a question, just one of those things you say when you think it’s expected but you’re too tired or disgusted to sell anyone on it. I tipped smoke back down my gullet and shook out the match. I looked around, found a heavy brass ashtray I’d met before on the floor nearby, righted it, and dropped the match into the bowl. Nothing like it to eat the time your brain spends warming up.

“I think you know why,” I said. “When you feel like telling someone besides good old Bud, use this.” I found one of my cards and stuck it out.

She took it carefully by the edges as if it were made of brittle glass. She read it, looked down, appeared to notice my gun in her hand for the first time, and gave it to me butt first. There is a certain way a person handles a gun that says she’s handled guns before. I tucked the observation into my creaking mental card file for future reference. She said, “I took out the bullets. I’m sorry I had to hurt you. I didn’t know.”

“It doesn’t hurt that much less when someone hits me who does.” I stuck the Smith behind my hipbone. “Will you hit me again if I call Bud’s father and tell him where he is?”

“I’ll have to move anyway. Too many people know where I live.”

I managed to miss the walls getting up. My skull boomed like a tin hut in a high wind. I filled it with smoke. “Got coffee?”

She nodded, looking up at me. “I don’t have any made, though.”

“Make some. Meanwhile I’ll try getting Tarzan onto the sofa without a wrecker.”

She smiled—a real one this time—and climbed to her feet before I could put out a hand to help her.

Bud wasn’t any heavier than a drugged walrus. When I had everything on the sofa but his legs and one arm, I hurled my shrieking discs into the nearest armchair and dragged over one of those telephones with the dial built into a receiver that’s about as easy to hold in one hand as a flagstone. Sandy Broderick’s soundstage baritone answered after two rings. He listened, said, “Wait for me,” and hung up in my face. Next I called Sharon Esterhazy to say her boy was safe and that Broderick would give her the details later. She wanted to know where Bud was. I repeated what I’d said, said good-bye, and did some hanging up of my own before she could press me further.

After a brief search, I found a bottle in the stereo cabinet with an inch of Bourbon in the bottom. I used it straight from the bottle and was waiting for the heat to crawl up my spine when Paula came in carrying a steaming white china mug. She saw the dead soldier in my hand and shrugged.

“I only keep liquor in the house for Bud,” she said, setting down the mug on the end table next to the sofa. “I never could get used to it.”

“Just as well you didn’t. That stuff doesn’t go with pills.”

She stood rubbing her right hand up and down her left forearm absently. It was hard to tell what kind of shape she had under the bags she wore. “I’ll bet you got that information from Bud’s mother. She caught me on a bad day. I don’t usually zonk out.”

“Save it. I’m just the hired help.” I picked up the mug. “Better bring the pot. It’s for old Iron Liver there.”

She left and came back with a glass pot three-quarters full of black liquid.

“Salt too,” I said.

“You mean table salt?”

“As much as you have.”

She had an unopened box of Morton’s. I opened it, poured a thimbleful into the mug, and stirred it with a pencil from the end table. Together we sat Bud up and I held his nose and dumped the mixture down his throat, fixed another, and sent it after the first. He coughed, spluttered, struggled, pleaded in a gasping voice for me to stop.

“Get a bucket,” I said to Paula. “If you don’t have one handy, any good-size container will do. Don’t trip over anything on the way.”

I gave him time for air while she hurried out, then filled the mug again, doctored it with salt, and forced half the contents down him. Bud was making familiar urgent noises when she returned carrying a large copper-bottomed pan. I seized it and put it in his lap just as he bent forward. He gave back two cups for each one he’d drunk.

I grinned. “ ‘When it rains it pours.’ ”

When he was finished, I set the pan on the floor and mopped his lips with my handkerchief. Oh, the life of a private eye. Then I emptied the mug into the pan and filled it with fresh coffee. I lifted it to his lips.

“No,” he gasped, turning his head away. “No more. Please.”

“One more, without salt. You want it the way you got the others?”

He didn’t. I helped him put his hands on the mug and tilt it. He sipped, lowered it, breathed, raised it, sipped. Again. His face was the color of old cheese.

“I’ve never seen him drunk before,” said Paula. “He’s been under a lot of pressure.”

“The hell with him. My head hurts.” I waited for the mug and set it to one side when it was empty. Bud sat with his elbows on his knees, massaging his face and hair with both hands. After a moment he stopped, looking at me through his fingers.

“Who are you?”

“The Bourbon fairy.”

A car door slammed. Daddy was here.

I opened the door. Broderick, hands in the pockets of a station-issue overcoat with a fur collar, glanced at me, then past me, his face registering impatience when his vision collided with the wall of the entryway. He looked at me again, harder. “What the hell happened to you?”

“It all started when I flunked my high school aptitude test.” I stepped away from the door.

He opened his mouth again, then closed it with a minute shake of his platinum head. He swept past me and around the corner into the living room. I closed the door and followed. Story of my life.

His back was to me, so I missed his expression when he saw Paula entering opposite. By the time he turned back in my direction he had on his Six O’Clock News face. “Where is he?” It wasn’t the smoothly modulated voice of the microphone and the telephone. It never is, in person.

“Dolling himself up in the toilet,” I said. “He had help going in. This is—”

“I’m sure I know who she is.” He flicked loose the buttons on his overcoat. Underneath was a brown blazer with the station’s logo on the breast pocket. He hadn’t been home long after doing the noon report when I’d called. I wondered if he ever did loosen his necktie.

I tried again. “You ought to talk to her, Mr. Broderick. She’s the audience you want to reach with your reports on narcotics.”

“Are you on staff at the station, Walker?”