The Hours of the Virgin (23 page)

I sniffed the envelope. It smelled like paper and ink. That was as much as I could get from it without going inside. I ran my thumb under the flap and pried it loose.

There wasn't anything inside but a business card. It was cheap white stock, not much thicker than notepaper, printed in smelly black ink with a Dearborn Heights address on the bottom and a pair of thickly lashed eyes, curving lips, and a comma of a nose decorating one corner. It looked like a tattoo on the arm of a sailor who still had his baby teeth.

THAT TOUCH OF VENUS

117652 Woodbine

Massage • Sauna • Body Shampoo

Discreet Service

That's the thing about looking for a Virgin. She always turns up in the last place you'd think.

25

The security man in the veined marble lobby of the
Detroit News
, lean and black and hardy in a medium-gray uniform with dramatic hollows under his cheekbones like an Indian in an old western movie, took my license out of its folder and read the fine print front and back. I didn't think anything was printed on the back, but then I never looked at the thing. He returned it. “Who'd you say you came here to see?”

“I didn't. I came to buy a newspaper.”

“There's a box out front.”

“It's got today's paper. I want yesterday's.”

He didn't like the sound of that at all. “How come?”

“I want to see if the weather forecast was right.”

“Down the hall on the end. Don't leave this floor.”

I started that way. I had to turn back and lean on his desk. “You know, no one's laid siege to a newspaper since Dodge City.”

He thought about that. Then he brightened. “Dodge City papers didn't have security.”

I quit even and waited in line behind a woman looking for Classifieds and an old man leaning on a quad cane who wanted the issue containing the obituary of a man named Bud, but didn't know which issue it was and couldn't remember Bud's legal name. When I finally drew face-to-face with a small, dish-faced blonde behind the counter I forgot what I wanted and had to think. She ducked, smacked a copy of Monday's paper onto the counter, and took my money without saying thanks. On my way out I smiled at the friendly guard.

In the car I turned to the city section, found the mug shot they'd run with the piece about Harold Boyette's body turning up in O'Hair Park, and cut it out with my pocket knife. The
Free Press
hadn't used any art and the
News
had bumped the story to a paragraph on a back page in the latest edition; the First Lady was coming to town and her fan club was all over City. The picture was a standard ID shot, obtained from the DIA, but for once it was a good likeness. You can describe someone the same way to forty people and leave forty different impressions of what he looks like. How detectives got along before Mathew Brady is anybody's guess.

There are a lot of Jeep Rangers around town, so I didn't draw the connection right away. Sport utility vehicles are a Detroiter's answer to all those suppository-shaped go-buggies buzzing out of Kyoto and Tennessee; the four-by-fours are made of steel, not beer cans, and you can roll them all the way over and maybe have to straighten your tie afterward. An eight-foot-tall tank will rumble up to the curb and a woman the size of your thumb will step down from the driver's seat and feed three meters.

This one pulled away from the curb on West Lafayette just as I shut myself into the Cutlass, which was parked behind it. The light at First was just turning yellow when the Jeep got to it, but the driver braked anyway; a careful motorist, credit to a busy downtown. When the light changed again he started out slow and I passed him on the outside. He let a panel truck get between us before switching to my lane. I had two blocks on him when we switched lanes again and turned onto Washington and again when we hooked up with Michigan. There he stayed all the way past the Edsel Ford Freeway, where the traffic picked up and he narrowed the gap. He was pretty good.

I still wasn't sure, so I wobbled the front end as if I were losing a wheel and pulled over and stopped. The driver of the Jeep didn't look right or left as he passed me. He'd changed clothes and that threw me for a minute because I thought he slept in that uniform; but I recognized the profile, the gray sidewalls, the skin starting to sag under the granite chin that had had more fists bounced off it than a wall at Betty Ford.

He was parked on the gravel on the other side of the C&O tracks when I started up again and passed that intersection. A couple of minutes later I saw him in the mirror in the inside lane. I couldn't tell if he were trying to call attention to himself or if he didn't care. They call it an open tail, and it's the toughest to shake.

I fought a little war with myself. For four blocks it was anyone's battle, but then detective's curiosity lost; I didn't want company where I was going.

I slowed up for the yellow at Schaefer, then banged the accelerator to the firewall and swung right from the inside lane. A Mayflower van rushing to make the light from the other direction laid down horn and a red Ford Escort crossing on Schaefer panic-braked and stalled, but I threaded the needle and powered north as far as Colson, jogged over to Neckel, crossed Ford Road, and hung out in the parking lot at Fordson High for a while, smoking a cigarette and watching for Jeeps. Three came by in five minutes, but they were all the wrong color. I ditched the butt out the window and took Alber back to Schaefer and turned north. From there Warren Road led west to Dearborn Heights.

Dearborn is where it all started, where an apprentice machinist tinkering nights and Sundays in the little shop behind his house transformed some scrap metal and a set of rickety buggy wheels into the largest industry in the history of the planet. Overnight, Detroit stopped manufacturing stoves and started making potholes. Dearborn Heights was founded exclusively to shelter the overflow when hunkies and hillbillies came to work at the mammoth River Rouge plant and started raising families on Mr. Ford's generous paychecks. Now Rouge Park and its succession of golf clubs wind green through the city's belly, but it's still a factory town, all two-story storefronts and attached garages, where a Hyundai parked in a driveway means someone's entertaining a visitor from out of town.

That Touch of Venus was hard to miss. The name was scrolled in yellow Day-Glo across a blue plastic canopy running the length of the building, flanked by a Jiffy Lube and a used paperback emporium. There was a light behind the canopy and another in the window, where a placard read
OPEN MONDAY THRU FRIDAY, 10 A.M. TILL 12 P.M
. in black press-on letters. They never get that right.

I parked next to an exhausted-looking station wagon in the little gravel lot behind the building and walked around to the front. The glass door was plastered over with decals: Elks, Lions, Shriners, Kiwanis, Rotarians, some others I couldn't identify. I pressed the button. It took me a second to place the melody that chimed out. “Venus, If You Will.” I grinned at my reflection in the glass. It looked properly predatory. Silence, then a pair of slippers slapping on linoleum. The net curtain behind the glass stirred. A latch clicked, the door opened.

“Hello, honey. You want massage?”

She might have made five feet with heels. There weren't any on her red Chinese slippers with gold dragons on the toes, so it was more like four-nine and ninety pounds. Black hair worn long and straight and glossy, cut in bangs across her eyebrows like Anna May Wong. Yellow kimono covered with pink cherry blossoms, tied at the waist and ending at mid-thigh. She was a light-skinned Korean, stretching for sixteen under the makeup. They beat the law with the highest turnover this side of fast food. The girls were paid off and gone long before the warrant came down.

“How much?” I asked.

She opened the door wider and stepped aside. I entered. She closed the door, flicking the latch, and pulled back a thick maroon velour curtain hanging in a doorway to the left. The opening was cut out of a partition as thin as a cracker. I went through it and waited for my pupils to adjust themselves to the fifteen-watt light. It was a sailor's berth of a room, just wide enough for a padded table with a tiny lamp and bottles of lotion on top and a kitchen chair. Those places always smell of scented oils and boiled cabbage, the main staple of Seoul.

“One hour, sixty. Half hour, forty.”

I took out my wallet, but I couldn't see the bills. I groped at the wall until I found a toggle switch and tipped it on. Fluorescents mounted above the frosted ceiling panels flooded the room to the corners. In the angry light the girl's paint looked like a Greek mask. I gave her two fifties.

“Ah.” Into her pocket they went. Off came the robe. She was all sharp ribs and tiny breasts like brass bells, and shaved her pubic hair. That made her look more like eleven.

“You massage me, yes?”

“No.” I showed her the newspaper shot of Boyette.

The robe went back on. “You are police?”

“I'll ask the questions, China doll,” I growled. “You seen this man?”

She glanced at the picture barely long enough for the face to register, if it did. She turned and fled through the curtain. I didn't follow her.

Time went by, quite a lot of it. I got some tobacco burning and dropped the match in an incense burner shaped like Buddha on the stand among the bottles. A white chip marred the imitation gold leaf over Buddha's right eye, making him look a little like a battered pug. I resisted the urge to give his head a brotherly pat and looked up. I couldn't tell if anyone was watching me through the frosted panels. That would be part of the menu. If you couldn't afford the forty you could pay twenty and watch.

The odor in the room had color and texture. The cabbage smell was brown and greasy, the perfume creamy pink and as thick as motor oil. Faintly, Del Shannon was singing “Hats off to Larry.” It might have been a radio wave that had been bouncing around the cosmos since 1961. It might have been just in my head. I figured I was getting a contact high from the hashish that was burning somewhere on the premises. Either that, or someone was incinerating a rope.

The curtain stirred finally and a silver cloud drifted into the room. This one was eight inches taller than the Korean and thirty pounds heavier, which made her just right. She was Occidental, but her Hollywood Chinese costume jumped the culture gap: silver high-heeled slippers, silver satin pajamas with white embroidered doves on the shoulders, glasses with silver inlays in the tilted frames. Her glittering page boy wig was made entirely of tinsel and looked like one of Cleopatra's headdresses. It would have a label stitched to the lining reading
E. Taylor
—
Property 20th Century Fox
. Her long silvered nails, razor sharp, caught the light like a dragon's tears. It was quite a special effect; but it might have been the second-hand smoke.

For a long time after she entered—it might have been fifteen seconds—neither of us said anything. Eyes like blue planets smiled behind the clear flat placebo lenses of the spectacles. She could have been twenty or forty; the eyewear and wig were just distraction enough to smear the difference.

I held up the newspaper picture in lieu of greeting. “Him deadee. You knowee?”

That surprised a laugh out of her. She had small white even teeth with sharp incisors. Abruptly she stopped laughing. “Are you a policeman?” She had a breathy voice like Marilyn Monroe's, but without the aggressive innocence. It sounded artificial, as if she were hiding a speech impediment.

“Just a man.” I put away the picture. “The name is Walker. Amos to my friends.”

“I know.”

I watched her. After a little silence she showed her teeth again in one of those switched-on smiles they hand out with the naughty underwear. She held out one of her slim razor-nailed hands. When she turned her head the light found a slight swelling along the left side of her jaw, shadowed under makeup expertly applied.

“I'll be your friend, Amos. Around here I'm Madelaine.” She pronounced it with a long second
a
, like Lily Marlene.

I left the hand where it was. “Who are you other places?”

“Depends on the place.”

“The Tomcat Theater, for instance.”

She lowered her hand then. The smile stayed. I plummeted on.

“I never get over modern science. How in the middle of chasing down a cure for AIDS and stopping up the hole in the ozone it's always got time to invent the little things, like cloned sheep and colored contact lenses. These days no one with money has to go around looking at the world through eyes that don't match. Do they, Mrs. Strangeways?”

“Please,” she said. “Call me Laurel.”

26

“What gave me away?” she asked. “Don't just say you're a detective and let it go at that. I need to know, to avoid slipping up next time.”

She'd ditched the husky whisper, also the wig, running her fake nails through her short black hair to give it lift. The accent was back, like windchimes on the verandah of a plantation house. She took off the glasses, which hadn't done that much to change the shape of her face anyway. She was twenty again—nineteen, to be accurate. She had the complexion of a little girl and the whites of her eyes were as pure as clarified milk.

“When you changed your look, you should have changed your perfume too. I've never smelled magnolias, but if they don't smell like that, I'll be disappointed.” I breathed some of it. “What next time?”

“Let's go someplace. These walls wouldn't stop a noisy thought.”

I followed her out of the room and down the linoleum hall to a brightly lit kitchen at the end. The cabbage smell was coming from a covered stainless steel pot simmering on a two-burner electric range. There was a sink and cupboards and a laminated table with three vinyl-upholstered chairs split and repaired with fiberglass tape. It might have been a kitchen in any low-rent apartment in the city. Another Korean woman, twice as old as the first and stout, got up from the table when we entered and left without a word. Her fuzzy pink robe had all the animal allure of a bathmat.