The Hours of the Virgin (11 page)

Like hell you're not. You're being a husband. New wives got a thing about their men checking in once or twice a week for some reason. They grow out of it, and it's just too bad. Enjoy it while it's here. Go home. Make a kid. Where are all the new dicks going to come from otherwise
?

—If you're sure.

Who said anything about sure? Your mother didn't send in the guarantee when she took you home. The only sure is dead sure
.

—Okay, see you tomorrow.

Sure, kid
.

Not a dream—I was wide awake, and my watch said less than two minutes had passed since I finished talking to Mrs. Jillian Raider—but as vivid as one, and I left it with a jolt and a chill in my back and shoulders as if I were suffering a relapse.

Sure, kid
.

Last words aren't what they used to be; no far far better things or liberty-or-deaths or even Oscar Wilde's “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.” Just an adjective and a noun, a noun he knew I hated. Kids always do. Not much spiritual fuel in it, but then Dale wasn't high on metaphysics, although he knew the word and what it meant. He bought only John O'Hara, but he read everything. After his death I returned fourteen overdue books I'd found lying around the office to the library, each with a page-corner turned down in a different place: some Robbinses and Ludlums, Freud's
Interpretation of Dreams
, a supernatural tract by Edgar Cayce, two volumes of Casanova's
Memoirs
, and a Viennese cookbook. He didn't cook and he lived on burgers and tacos and Pepsi-Cola by the case, but he said reading recipes was the only thing that wound him down after a heavy day or an overnight stakeout. “Winding down” being the closest thing to sleep he knew. He was a lifelong insomniac. But the reading and thousands of hours of solitary thinking couldn't soften his practical shell.

The next time I saw him, on a closed-circuit screen in the Wayne County Morgue, I was relieved at first, because that slack, pulp-colored face wasn't Dale's. Positive IDs often come second, the attendant said. The package looks different without its contents.

Echoes of words, a cigar-burn shaped like a caterpillar on the edge of the desk, an old felt hat worn shiny on the brim in the shape of two fingers that grasped it in the same spot every time he tugged it on or took it off. With the O'Haras and the savings account for the daughter and the Army .45, the sum total of the estate after the debts were cleared.

So why the dream/memory in the middle of a quiet Detroit morning?

It wasn't the big breakfast or the cigarettes I'd smoked. I didn't think it was the asbestos in the hallway; the surgeon general wouldn't have overlooked that. I had a clean bill of health from my head and a second opinion from my stomach, so hallucinations were out. A ghost message, maybe. They're always in code for some reason. Being stuck in limbo, ghosts got nothing better to do than sit around making them up.

Not a ghost. Dale always said there wasn't any point in dying if all you did was come back. If he did come back he would refuse to believe in himself.

Something forgotten. Important, probably. We only remember with absolute clarity the things that don't count. Vague but insistent, coming through as static, like an interfering signal from a pirate transmitter. The transmitter being A. Walker at twenty and change.

Okay, a ghost.

Just another Dagwood Bumstead with a snake in his pants
.

Just another Dagwood Bumstead with a snake

Just another Dagwood Bumstead

Just another

Just

Nuts.

12

Grosse Ile is one of the two largest of some fifteen islands strung out along the Detroit River, the other being Belle Isle, which is a park where the Detroit Police Bomb Squad goes to detonate suspicious packages. Unlike Belle Isle, Grosse Ile supports a city-size community of its own, on the site of what was mostly farmland for three hundred years until the postwar housing boom wiped it out in less than twenty. Ten miles long and a mile wide, it noses into Lake Erie, with a canal called the Thoroughfare splitting it in two diagonally. Apart from its privately owned gardens and distinguished homes, it's best known as the place where Cadillac set ashore and said, “Here I shall build a city,” then thought better of the decision and sailed upriver to say the same thing on the site of Detroit a day or two later. That's okay with most of the people who live on the island; if they could weigh anchor and drift out into the middle of the lake and away from the Motor City, they'd cast off tomorrow.

I drove out West Jefferson, crunching through slush that had thawed from yesterday's ice storm, then refrozen, and took the free bridge to the island. It had been repaired recently after a boat had smashed into it, diverting traffic onto the toll bridge farther down. The company that operated the toll bridge had helped out during the emergency by pocketing the increased fare-load. By night, Macomb Street was lit by spindly lamps with long stretches of darkness in between, with here and there a lighted window suspended from the black like a Christmas ornament. Some of the houses the windows belonged to dated back to silk breeches and tricorne hats.

My directions took me across the shining black waters of the Thoroughfare twice, flowing steady as a fat dog between bunches of elder and sumac overhanging its banks. At last I swerved to avoid hitting a possum that froze in the middle of the lane, eyes glowing turquoise in the glare of my headlamps, and there was the driveway on the right. It wandered down from an artificial elevation under a glistening coat of fresh asphalt, ending at an iron gate stretched between stone pillars. There a trailerload of gravel had been dumped onto the apron to discourage low-slung sports cars from turning around on it. As per instructions, I stopped before the gate and blinked my lamps off and on twice.

A pair of security lights slammed on, whiting out the entire block from twenty-foot towers hidden back in the trees. In a couple of minutes a Jeep Ranger came barreling down the winding incline and crunched to a stop on the other side of the gate. The springs were still rocking when two men in matching leather jackets and fur caps got out. One of them carried a shotgun. This one stood back behind the glare of the high beams, cradling his weapon, while his companion unlocked and opened one side of the gate and approached the car. I cranked down the window. Cold touched my face like an icy palm.

“Get out, please. Keep your hands in sight.”

I did that. I had six inches on him and thirty-five pounds, but his were packed tight and squared off into a compact package around fifty, gray at the temples and battered about the face like a solid old piece of furniture. His voice was slightly wheezy. There's always work in the private security field for retired welterweights with damaged windpipes.

He asked me, not impolitely, to assume the position. I leaned on my hands on the roof of the Cutlass while he went over me from neck to heels, paying special attention to the hem of my topcoat and the insides of my thighs. It didn't hurt, it didn't tickle. Whoever had taught him had done his job and it had taken. Before leaving Detroit I'd unsnapped the Smith & Wesson from my belt and put it in the glove compartment.

He stepped back. When I turned around he was reading my ID in the beam of a Malice Green flashlight. I hadn't felt him sliding the folder out of my inside pocket. Facing him in the ring must have been like fighting a swarm of invisible hornets. A .44 magnum as big as a wrecking hammer rode in a half-holster at his waist with four inches of nickel-plated barrel poking out the bottom.

He handed me the folder. “Leave the car. Vernon'll drive it up.”

Vernon, taller and more narrow, came forward then, lowering the shotgun. He was all shadow between cap and collar. It was one of those matte-finish black faces that don't reflect light. His partner answered for him when I mentioned the gun in the glove compartment.

“It'll still be there.”

I followed the welterweight through the opening in the gate and we got into the front seat of the Ranger, where he adjusted his holster so the magnum wasn't poking him in the thigh. He swung the Jeep around in a tight
Y
and drove one-handed up the twisting private road. Pines and hardwoods flashed by in the wash of the lamps. A lot of arboreal work had been done to convince the odd visitor that he was a long way out in the country. As we rounded one sharp curve, an owl perched on a fresh kill swung its head 180 degrees, staring into the glare with eerily human eyes, then took off with a slow-motion flutter of broad dark wings, clutching its trophy in its talons. A strong acid whiff of skunk came through the air vents a moment later.

“How's the hunting around here?” I asked the welterweight.

“Don't ask me. I get mine at the counter.”

We came around a bootjack and the house sprang out at us, ten thousand square feet anyway and all of it on one level, a sampler's plate of architectural styles ranging from early Georgian to
Star Trek
's third season, with every window lit. The place had more roofs than
Vertigo
. Either it had been added on to many times by many different owners or the contractor had had the attention span of a fruit fly. I asked how long it had been there.

“The original part was built during the Civil War. Mr. and Mrs. Strangeways did the rest. There's still construction going on in the west wing.”

“Don't you mean Reconstruction?”

He said nothing. Wrong audience.

We stopped in a rectangle of light from one of the windows. I didn't try counting them. You don't itemize stars. “Am I the first guest?”

“First and last. Go up and knock.”

I barely got my hand off the door handle when the Jeep pulled away. It followed the driveway around the end of the house and disappeared. I mounted a Palladian front porch equipped with a non-period ramp for Strangeways' wheelchair, grasped the ring of a massive silver lion's-head knocker that had done most of its best knocking on some other door long before there was a New World, and used it. It drew a satisfying boom from the chased oak paneling. The date 1861 was chiseled into the stone lintel above the door.

It's a democracy, after all. There was no reason to expect anyone but Gordon Strangeways to answer his own door, except the act didn't go with the house or the physical condition of its owner. The inside handle was placed low enough for him to grip without reaching, and when I thought to look, I saw that a hydraulic contrivance mounted high on the frame did most of the pulling. At the moment, however, I was more interested in the contrivance that did the rest of it.

“Come in, then. I'll be damned if I'll pay to heat the whole island.”

He was seated on one of those nifty motorized scooters, this one with racing lines and a patent-leather saddlebag on either side of the upholstered seat for carrying books and things. Deeply tanned and clad in rosecolored sweats and two-hundred-dollar track shoes, he looked healthier than he had in recent photographs. His dark eyes were bright behind the pink-tinted lenses of his aviator's glasses and his pewter-colored hair coiled back like crisp wire from a lush widow's peak to his collar. It was difficult to tell where the natural growth left off and the implants began. His face was lean and clean-shaven, not jowly. I stepped inside. He let the hydraulics suck the door into its frame and backed up the scooter for a better look.

“Gordon Strangeways.” He didn't offer his hand. “I was expecting something in alpaca.”

“They were out of stock, sorry. You get me in worsted.”

“An observation, not a critique. Popular fiction to the contrary, blackmailers in general are men of taste. That's what motivates them.”

His accent was British with a strong South African overlay, or so I guessed. I'd never been any closer than
Tarzan and the Lost City of Gold
.

“Met many of them, have you?” I asked.

“Price of wealth. You admit, then, that your business with me is extortion.”

“I never admit anything in a doorway. And my business isn't with you.” I looked around. “Where's the legal talent?”

“At the airport meeting Mrs. Strangeways. In addition to representing me at the bar, Mrs. Raider is my general factotum. My wife's flight was delayed an hour.” He regarded me on a level; not an easy trick when the eyes you're looking into are two feet higher than yours. “What are you if not a highbinder?”

“Your guest. Do I put my coat here?” I climbed out of it and laid it across a filagreed bench that had been built back when sitting down was something you planned first. There wasn't a staircase in sight; if the original structure had included a second story, it had been eliminated during the improvements. The foyer, tiled in green-and-white checkerboard marble and hung with green silk, opened out in two directions through wide arches. A religious tapestry ten by twenty feet covered one wall—a Renaissance piece, I thought, until I looked again at St. Sebastian's pierced body and recognized Gordon Strangeways' head on top of it. Editors will editorialize.

“We'll wait in the library.”

He backed the scooter around and led the way through the arch to the left. We passed a number of paintings in a hall, one or two of which might have been Picassos, and a couple of sculptures with holes in them. None of these bore the least resemblance to Strangeways. The place didn't have any more doors than it had stairs, just broad open entrances easily negotiated by a man without the use of his legs. I had to stride to keep up. Either he liked to make shakedown artists sweat for their take or he went through a battery a week.

“The house is a bit of a crazy quilt,” he said, warming up a little. “The wish-fulfillment of a cripple with too much money. The old section, which we just left, is said to have been built by a spy for the Confederacy. When we took down a wall we discovered a secret passage that may have led to a hidden dock on the Thoroughfare, but that could just as easily have been added by the bootlegger who occupied the place during Prohibition. I'd admire to have installed a few such features myself, but today's construction codes call for too many inspections. I'd have had to have let half of Wayne County in on the secret.”