The Hours of the Virgin (2 page)

I put out my cigarette in a glass ashtray with a picture of General Grant in the base and sipped. “Not bad.” I pushed the drink back across the table. “A little sweet.”

“That's the molasses.” He looked at the cigar in profile. It was an excuse to admire the half-carat diamond on his pinky. You never knew when Merlin was eating catfood or hauling his wallet around on a hand truck; his suits always fit, even if the coat didn't, and the shine on his cordovans would attract low-flying aircraft. I'd inherited him from Dale Leopold, my late partner. A long time ago, when the Irish were in charge, he had run interference between Mayor Cavanagh and the local building trade. These days he hung around the Erin Go Bar in Corktown, peddling dirt in election years, swapping war stories, and living off a succession of women who thought he could do with a little reforming.

I drank some of my screwdriver and put it down. It tasted like a Bubonic Plague. “Whatever it is, Merlin, it better not cost too much. I haven't had a client in a week.”

He stuck a hurt look on his face. It was all skull, bad skin plastered over the cheekstraps and eyesockets. “Dale should of taught you respect. The two of us was like that.” The pair of fingers he held up were exactly the same length.

“His dying words? ‘Don't give Merlin Gilly the time of day if you expect to get it back.'”

“Dying words my ass. He was dead on arrival at the pavement.”

I shrugged out of my belted coat. The sight of him in all that fur overheated me, but he hadn't broken a sweat. If he ever did it would come out pure Gordon's gin. “Paper says snow,” I said. “I've got a throbbing rib says the same thing. A bullet splintered it eighteen years ago last November.”

“Who cares? I got something will cost you an easy fifty.”

“I don't have any easy fifties. What can I get for a sweaty sawbuck?”

He filled his mouth with smoke and let it roll out. A complacent Merlin Gilly is harder to look at than a C-section. I folded two twenties and a ten into a tight rectangle and walked it across the back of my hand. That fascinated and irritated him. Parlor tricks weren't in his repertoire.

“Guy downtown needs a good detective. They're all busy so I thought of you.”

“Jail or Holding?”

“DIA.”

I walked the bills back the other way. “DIA to me stands for the Detroit Institute of Arts. What's it stand for to you?”

“Same thing. You think I ain't got no culture? I gaped at a Van Gogh there once.” He pronounced both
g
's.

“Forget it, Merl. Where would you fence it?”

He thought about getting mad, then let it blow. “This is about missing property. There's a ten percent finder's fee, might run ten grand.”

“Stolen painting?”

“A book, if you can believe it. I mean, with the liberry right across the street, where you can borrow one free gratis and nobody chases you. Crime's gone to hell in this town.”

“When did you ever borrow a book?”

He pushed back his chair. “I come up here to do you a turn, you insult me. I guess I'm leaving.”

“You're still sitting.” But I stood the fifty on its end within his reach. He scooted up his chair and stuck the rectangle in the pocket with the cigars.

“His name's Harold Boyette. He's got him a private line.” He gave me a number from memory. I pulled out my notebook and scribbled. “Some kind of old book expert,” he said. “I guess there's a living in it. I'm a people person myself.”

“Uh-huh. All dead presidents.” I put away the notebook.

“Hey, if I started paying taxes now, Uncle Sam would have a stroke.”

“Who's your source?”

“Cost you another fifty.”

I moved a shoulder and drank orange juice and vodka. “I never knew you to take the short money when there was more than a hundred to be made.”

“Aw, you know my contacts. All they know about books is the point spread in Cincinnati.” He glanced at the clock, pressed out his Grenadier, and picked up his drink. “I'm due at the Erin. Get this?” He cocked an elbow toward the check the barmaid had left.

“Why should today be any different? Got a date?”

He grinned. His teeth were his only good feature and he took care of them. “Auto money. She thinks I look like Johnny Depp.”

I played with my glass.

“I never figured you for screwdrivers,” he said.

“I'm fighting a bug.”

“That ain't the way to do it. You need hot Vernor's and Smirnoff's, half and half.”

“What do you call it?”

He finished his Bubonic Plague and set it down, gently and with pity. “You only get to name one drink. Everybody knows that.”

2

My building had changed hands from a corporation based in Phoenix to a doctors' syndicate with a P.O. box in Toronto. The immediate difference to me was I had to put on an extra stamp when I mailed my rent check. The next involved workers in radiation suits punching holes in the hallway ceiling outside my office and scooping out asbestos insulation by the bushel. I'd been offered the chance to relocate until they'd finished replacing the carcinogens with blown-in fiberglass, but I bought an extra carton of cigarettes instead, on the same theory that snake venom was used to treat snakebite. My clients' thinking was less advanced. I hadn't had a walk-in since before the new year.

One glance at the waiting room told me my record was intact. I shut both doors to muffle the whining of power tools and dialed the number Merlin Gilly had given me. The line purred several times before Harold Boyette came to the telephone. He didn't sound anything at all like George Arliss in an old movie set in a museum. He was surprised to hear from me, wouldn't discuss his situation or admit that he had one over the wire, but asked for references. I gave them to him and we banged out an appointment for that afternoon. I hung up with the prospect of earning half a year's income before Easter. Some mornings are like that. About one in ten thousand.

On my way downstairs later I excused myself to get around one of the asbestos workers, who had shed his hood to light up an unfiltered Camel. I had a convert.

The car radio was all talk, no music. WJR was interviewing an environmental scientist in California about global warming. They broke for a weather bulletin about a winter storm watch and record cold temperatures, then returned to the subject. I punched up an old-time radio drama on WXYT. G-men Charles McGraw and Frank Lovejoy were closing in on a counterfeiting ring when I pulled behind the DIA. I was five minutes early, so I left the motor running with the heater on until they shot the leader and arrested the others. There was no mention of the ozone.

I walked around the dead gray granite walls of the 1966 addition, leaning into the wind, and let myself in the white marble front. In the lobby, the Ford line workers in the Rivera mural went on assembling Model A's and paid me no more attention than they had the artist. Henry had solved the problem of showboating for visitors by scheduling daily public tours for fifty years.

The woman behind the admissions desk, silver-haired and immaculate in a navy blazer and blue silk blouse, took my donation and handed me a map to the galleries. On my way through the American wing a security guard with an African tribal insignia tattooed on the back of one hand looked me over quickly and nodded a greeting. I was wearing a new suit.

“Amos Walker? Pleased to meet you. Sorry about the venue. My office is being renovated.”

Harold Boyette looked even less like George Arliss than he sounded over the telephone. He was just in the shade of thirty, soft-looking but not fat in a medium-gray suit with a light violet stripe, tailored to blend into walls. His sandy hair was thinning, his eyes were too small, and his ears too flat to his head. He had strawberry lips, fascinatingly moist, red, and ready to pick. It was a little boy's mouth, untouched by the cynical years. His grip was firm enough, and dry; all that contact with old parchment would leech the water out of a rice paddy. In his left hand, he was carrying a burgundy leather briefcase with a brass combination lock.

The venue was one of the larger galleries open to visitors. The ceiling was high and the indirectly lit walls were painted an unobtrusive shade of white. We were surrounded by bold slashes of color on old canvas: reclining duchesses, simian-faced royal families, and sundry atrocities involving scythes and sabers and French soldiers in uniform, still vibrant under layers of varnish ancient and modern. The Goya exhibit was in its second week.

“I thought the DIA was in a money crunch,” I said.

“A chronic condition. I'm paying for the renovation out of my own pocket. You see, I'm a collector as well as a consultant. Books and antiquities are one market that never goes down, and I've done well by keeping track of what happens at auction. I spend a great deal of time in that office and I don't share my predecessor's infatuation with sisal and bleached oak.”

“I'm stuck with an avocado-green stove and refrigerator myself.” We were alone in the room with a guard, this one female. “Lonely work.”

Boyette rearranged his ripe lips into a scowl. “There's an auto show going on at Cobo Hall and the Red Wings are in the running for the playoffs. That's stiff cultural competition for a simple Spaniard whose paintings changed the course of empire in Europe. It wasn't always this way, not even in a blue-collar town like Detroit. Society's gone into a tailspin with God knows what waiting at the bottom.”

“Probably a private detective. You want to go somewhere, or do you plan on yodeling later?”

“Sound does travel here. I've converted a storeroom in the south wing into a workspace, if you have no objection to clutter.”

“Clutter is my business.”

We passed down a series of carpeted corridors and through a couple of thousand years of Roman emperors, South American fertility gods, gaunt mummies, and fat prosperous Flemish silk merchants done in slick marble; up a shallow flight of stairs, through a fire door marked
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
, and along a dusty linoleumpaved hallway with splotches of gray spackle on the unpainted walls. Here the hum of an industrial-grade humidifier—or maybe it was a dehumidifier, I never get that straight—clicked on and off like the respirator for a culture on the critical list. Near the end he fished out a black leather key case, unlocked a blank door, and switched light into a room that was a kind of charnel-house of dead civilizations.

“Be it ever so ugly,” he said, stepping aside for me to enter ahead of him, “it's home to me. At least for the time being.”

It was a big space, whitewashed and windowless, with a bare plywood floor and exposed ceiling joists. A large worktable like the kind tailors used to cut out patterns on took up most of the room, piled high with rolled documents, empty plaster frames, and miles of bubble wrap. A network of narrow aisles wound among odd items of statuary, leaning canvases, porcelains in crates, and chunks of classical architecture, some of it sheeted, the rest naked under a skin of chalky dust. It looked like Charles Foster Kane's basement.

I brushed a plaster bust off a pedestal with my elbow and rescued it in a diving catch. The subject was a bald geezer in a toga, with a seriously hooked nose and that skeejawed expression you see on the face of an antiques dealer when you've traded a hundred dollars for a rusty Coleman lantern you could buy new in an Ace Hardware for less than fifteen. I set the bust back up without shaking or wetting myself.

“Reproduction of a Victorian attempt at neoclassicism.” Boyette closed the door. “Thirty-eight bucks plus tax in the gift shop. Did it give you a turn?”

“No, green is my natural color. Is all of this stuff fake?”

“No, much of it's genuine, either awaiting exhibition or in transition to better storage. Trivia, for the most part; students of students and one-time great masters forgotten by history and the fickle antiquities market. We keep the really valuable stuff in a vault.” He stood looking around, like a visitor. “I come here often to order my thoughts. There's so much hope in these objects, so many grand plans untainted by reality. The authentic geniuses burned themselves out young. Rembrandt became prosperous and dull, then just dull. Rodin grew as cold as his stone. In their prime they never approached the kind of wide-eyed, pathetic hope you find in these fellows. Too rich a diet can make you just as miserable as plain bread and water.”

“I thought your specialty was books.”

“Sorry. It's the building. You can't pass someone in the hall without some of his obsession rubbing off on you. I know quite a bit about early American rugs as well, and far too much about Chinese bottles.”

We were standing on opposite sides of the big table. He cleared a corner and laid down his briefcase while I hung my coat on a convenient centaur.

“I checked your references,” he said. “I hope you don't consider those people your friends.”

“I don't work for friends. Did they say anything actionable?”

“That's between you and your counsel. They did say you're honest, in a slippery sort of way. They also said you get results. I was given to understand those results might not be what I requested.”

“They almost never are.”

“You haven't said yet who told you I needed a private investigator.”

“I wouldn't wait.”

After a moment he nodded, as if that were the right answer. “I assume you have a badge, or something else that will prove you're who you say you are.”

I got out the folder and flipped it onto his side of the table. “You won't find that badge number on the active list in Wayne County,” I said. “The sheriff's department called them all in years ago, but they forgot that one. It scares away kids on Devil's Night. The ID's current.”

He looked at it carefully, then slid the folder back toward me. “You take a lousy picture.”