The Glass Highway (7 page)

“Excuse it, please.” I somersaulted a cigarette back and forth across the back of my hand. “Just for a minute there I forgot I’m just the guy that shovels out the stalls.”

His face softened, falling in on itself under the crisp snow cliff of his hair. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

“Yeah, I know. Don’t pay me any attention. My head hurts.”

“You’ve done an excellent job, finding my son in less than twenty-four hours. You’ve earned a bonus.” He reached inside his blazer.

“
I owe you
, Mr. Broderick. Three days’ fee, less the cost of a new suit and overcoat and some gasoline. I’ll explain it all in my report. You’ll get the balance back as soon as I see my wallet.”

The girl started a little, then crossed to a low chest that was holding up a lamp and opened a drawer and came over carrying my wallet, brushing past Broderick without a word. Her hand was cold to the touch. I bummed a pen off her and opened the check compartment and started to write one out for six hundred dollars.

Broderick said, “You’re just wasting a check. The money’s yours from a grateful client. Give it to the policemen’s fund if you like.”

I tore the check sidewise and lengthwise and voided the counterfoil and put the pieces away in the wallet and the wallet away in my jacket. That dedicated I’m not.

We stood around looking at each other for a little. Then Bud came in from the bathroom. He’d washed up and combed his hair, but the flush was still on his cheeks. He leaned on the jamb and tried to look like he was not leaning. His eyes locked on his father’s shirt collar. Their focus was still vague.

The newscaster moved his shoulders that way he had. “I’m sure you’ll excuse my son and me while we talk.” He was addressing a wall.

“I’m not so—” Paula fell silent. Father and son looked at her. She turned toward me, but I was busy trying to touch my nose with the end of my unlit cigarette. She went into the kitchen. I took a step in that direction.

“There’s no reason for you to stay, Walker,” said Broderick, not impolitely. “Your job here is finished. You must have other business that needs tending.”

“Thanks. I’m on my lunch hour.” I kept moving.

T
HE KITCHEN WAS BRIGHT
and ventilated and big enough to move around in without having to file a flight plan to get from the stove to the refrigerator, as at the Grissoms’ in Grosse Pointe, and it looked and smelled like a place where meals were cooked and occasionally burned, not like an eighty-year-old wall sampler or an exhibit at Tomorrowland. A blob of dried egg clung brazenly to the top of the oven door. I burned some tobacco with my back to a slightly discolored wall and watched Paula walloping pots and pans around and wiping the counter with short, savage strokes like a fighter jabbing the heavy bag. Blowing off steam the way only unliberated women still know how. I said, “How come you don’t catch cold?”

She stopped strangling water out of her damp cloth into the sink and looked back at me. “What?”

“Hopping around barefoot on cold linoleum. That’s begging for it this time of year, especially for someone from a warm climate.”

She finished wringing, draped the cloth over a plastic towel bar, and tilted her hips back against the sink, wiping her hands off on her plain white apron. She had large dark eyes and hollows in her cheeks, as if she’d had her back teeth dragged out in pursuit of that lean hungry look. I didn’t think girls did that anymore. “Who are you working for, Mr. Walker?”

It doesn’t pay to show surprise too often in my work, but now and then I slide, especially when I don’t know I’m working. She saw it and rearranged her features quickly.

“What I mean is,” she said, “you must be a secret agent or something. Most people think I’m a native.”

I did a little rearranging of my own. “It’s not obvious. You pronounce some words a little too carefully for someone who grew up with the language. South America, right?”

She nodded quickly. “Bolivia. My parents brought me here when I was eight. My father was American, but he was raised in Chile. I spoke English in school and Spanish at home. I still tend to slip into it when I get mad, though not as much as I used to.”

“Do your parents live around here?”

“They were killed five years ago in an auto accident. Don’t say you’re sorry. It was five years ago.”

“I wasn’t going to.” I flipped my butt into the sink. It spat and died. “Iroquois Heights is a steep climb for an orphan from a poor country.”

“I have an outside income. Are you being a detective or just a busybody?”

“How would you have me?”

Her smile was fleeting. “I think I would have you quiet.”

“That’s too tall an order. I like to talk.” I found some dust on my knees and brushed it off. It was getting so I couldn’t keep a suit clean anymore. “I guess he’s got it pretty bad. Bud. Twenty-year-old boys who have lived at home all their lives don’t turn their back on Mom’s tuna casserole for just anything with long hair and a high voice.”

“Bud’s in love with the idea of independence, that’s all. He just hasn’t figured out yet that it won’t last any longer than his savings. Also he has a hero complex like any other twenty-year-old boy who reads too much. He should go to school and prepare for a career. That’s what I’d do if I had rich parents. And I doubt that his mother’s cooked a meal since she married his stepfather.”

“That’s exactly what his mother said. About school, I mean. I can see why you and she don’t get along. Did you want Bud to move in?”

“That’s a very personal question,” she said. “What makes you think I’d answer it?”

“Fern Esterhazy says it’s my pretty brown eyes.”

She laughed. The transformation was like emerging from a tunnel into bright sunlight. “I like Fern. She wants everyone to think she’s a tramp, but she’s a nice girl underneath.”

“Underneath what?”

That dulled her amusement a little. She said, “I like you too, even though you’re not as funny as you seem to think you are. I don’t know if I wanted him to move in. I didn’t not want him to. Or is that the same thing?”

“Not by a mile. I don’t want to lug around a gun, but there are times when I don’t not want to, like every time I come to this town.”

“What’s wrong with Iroquois Heights?”

“Let’s see. The city prosecutor runs the town and he’s a crook. The police department has several hundred thousand federal revenue-sharing dollars tied up in enough electronic flash to remake
Star Wars,
but what the cops get the most use out of is their twelve-volt cattle prods. Any Saturday night you can ring three longs and two shorts on some rich resident’s doorbell and be shown into the basement where a dogfight is going on. There’s a former city attorney named Stillson on the main drag who specializes in probate work, but if you’re a friend of a friend and have twenty thousand to spare he’ll make you the proud parent of a brand new black-market baby. If you’re hot he’ll sell you a complete new set of identification for a grand. What’s wrong with Iroquois Heights? I’ll tell you what’s right with it. There isn’t as much of it as there is of Detroit.”

Someone raised his voice in the living room. The wall shook. Glass crashed. I pushed through the swinging door a step ahead of the girl.

Papa Broderick was half-sitting on a pedestal table canted back against the wall on the other side of the television set. A black porcelain vase lay in six pieces on the floor at the foot of the table. Bud stood glaring at his father with his fists clenched. The newscaster straightened with exaggerated dignity, tugged at his jacket, and touched a handkerchief to his mouth. It came away stained.

“Damn it,” he said, “I’m going on camera again in four hours. If my lip’s swollen—”

“Say that again and I’ll make sure of it!” Bud was seething.

“You’re not doing a whole hell of a lot of good here, Mr. Broderick,” I said. “Why don’t you tell Miss Royce you’re sorry for what you said about her and let’s you and me take the air?”

His colorless eyes flicked from face to face and lighted on my forehead. “I don’t owe her any apologies.”

Bud glared at me. “How come you know so much about what he said?”

“You’re a very fast young man with your fists and a gun when it comes to the girl. What’s to know?” I was looking at Broderick. “Let’s you and me take the air.”

The newscaster handed Bud his editorial face, the one he reserved for crime and urban blight. He was against them. “You two deserve each other. Just don’t ever call me and expect me to put up bail.”

Having delivered this devastating blow he left us. Poor Sandy Broderick. His whole livelihood was balanced on a dial the size of a beer coaster.

I glanced at the TV. Lucy was trying to get Ricky to agree to move to a larger apartment and not having much luck. The laugh track was in hysterics. I found my hat and coat and turned to Bud.

“This won’t take, but the windmill hasn’t been built that I can pass up.

The girl can take care of herself in spite of you, and maybe even in spite of me too, sterling defender of the weak and oppressed that I am. She’s got your gun in her pocket if it came to that.”

His eyes went to Paula, then to the bulge in the left leg of her slacks.

She said, “The gun’s mine. It’s registered to me.”

“Who are you?” Bud demanded of me for the second time. I paused, considering. I had a joke for it this time too, but Broderick’s exit had ruined me for snazzy curtain-closers. I said nothing and vanished into broad daylight on a puff of smoke and a sneeze.

Thinking that that was the end of it.

I
T RAINED ON
Christmas Eve as predicted.

I turned out the lights in my little tin office on West Grand River and watched it come down, streaking the thin frost on the window and making the lights of the city run. A close friend had presented me with a bottle of twenty-four-year-old Scotch for the holiday and I was quietly knocking the head off it with a glass I kept in the desk for emergencies. That close friend and I having the same name in common. I had bought it with that part of Sandy Broderick’s thousand left after satisfying my landlord, Detroit Edison, Michigan Bell, and the ready-to-wear emporium I commissioned all my clothing from in Greektown, minus a bone to the savings account just to keep the service charges from eating it up. Not counting a routine credit check at courtesy rate for a medium-size agency I sometimes do business with on the East Coast, I hadn’t worked in a week, not since leaving Paula Royce’s place in Iroquois Heights. Nobody has any use for private heat at yuletide. Husbands ditch their mistresses to spend the holidays with their families, store employees stop chiseling the management under the watchful eye of goosed security, kids stay home to avoid missing out on the loot come Christmas morning. Business would pick up after the first of the year when everyone was fed up to the hairline with peace and good will, but for now I was the forgotten man. I sipped unblended whiskey and watched the rain.

The world hit me over the head with my own telephone. I tipped down what was in the glass and hung the receiver on my ear. “Hudson Bay lighthouse. Gus speaking.”

There was dead air on the other end, then: “You don’t sound like any Gus I ever knew, and I knew a couple.”

A woman’s voice, middle-register but trying hard for husky. A shade alcoholic, but I didn’t hold it against her, because I was a shade alcoholic myself. I said, “You sound like a Fern. Or do Ferns make sounds?”

“This one does. I tried to get you at your place. Don’t you ever go home?”

“Every Leap Year Day, just to feed my four-year locust.”

“What are you doing this festive eve?”

“Nothing I wouldn’t rather be doing with Candace Bergen on the beach at St. Tropez.”

She blew air. I could almost smell the smoke. “I’ll call the airport. You know The Chord Progression on Livernois?”

I said I knew it. “Wear heels,” she said, and broke the connection.

I hung up and drained my glass, staring into a dark corner of the office. The rain was just water leaking out of the sky now that I knew I had to go out in it. I broke out the foul-weather gear and dangled.

Entering a jazz club in full stride from a rainy street is a little like walking around a corner into a fire fight. I stood in the dimly lit entrance a moment, stopped by a wall of amplified noise while a frat kid in plaid dinner jacket and black bow tie frowned over his reservation book at the puddle I was making on the paisley carpet. Someone was banging hell out of a piano in the cave beyond the lighted area, but I didn’t hear any wood splintering yet so I figured the show was just getting started.

“We’re full up, mister. Try us after New Year’s.” The frat kid had priced my suit and raincoat at a glance. His tone said he’d made that tonight in tips.

I told him I was meeting Fern Esterhazy. His expression thawed a little. “Uh, yes, she said she was meeting a gentleman. You’ll find her at the bar.” We were both men of the world now, his attitude implied, brothers of the eager thigh. I had a necktie older than he was.

I left my stuff at the window with an aging hatcheck girl and pried a path through the darkness and smoke hanging beyond the arch. The Chord Progression had started out topless under another name, but a previous administration had nickel-and-dimed it to death with citations for overcrowding and serving drinks to minors. The new owners had redecorated and advertised it as a place to hear topflight musicians of international renown. Instead, the slow, rolling death of the auto industry had made it a showcase for what passed as local talent. On the bandstand a black pianist with a weightlifter’s torso was tearing chords out of the keyboard in long, ragged strips while his partners on horn and bass stood by nodding and grunting behind dark glasses. It sounded to me like someone kicking a box of Lincoln Logs downstairs, but then I’m a Fats Waller man. Customers at tables visible in the glow of the baby spot seemed to be enjoying it. At six bucks for a glass of alcohol and fizz they’d better.

The Fern, in a shimmering green evening gown with a ninety-day neckline, was seated on a red stool at the bar arguing with a teenage bartender in a yellow jacket. Her voice was more nasal now.