The Hours of the Virgin (6 page)

“I wish I'd shaved,” I said. “I didn't think no tussle at the Tomcat rated no visit from no inspector.” I'd only seen him a few times since the department promoted him out of my league.

“I was on the Southfield Freeway when the radio call came through. Any car in the vicinity. My luck.” He swept his coattail aside and returned the nickel-plated snubnose he'd come in with to his kidney holster. He was the only cop in the city who hadn't gone to elephant calibers after the riots. “Where's the body?”

“Under this suit.”

“What the hell happened to the suit?”

“All-night grindhouses and gas station toilets affect me the same way. I can't resist rolling around on the floors.”

“You're slipping, Walker. Where you are there's usually a couple of hundred pounds of USDA Choice waiting for the wagon.”

“I'm coming down with something. Well enough to be shot at, but too sick to shoot.” I coughed.

“Do what I do, pump aspirins. Thinner blood kills germs.” He held out his hand.

I squeaked out the .38 and gave it to him. He sniffed at the barrel, inspected the cylinder, and returned it. His nose kept working. “Somebody shot something.”

I pointed toward the damaged sconce. “You'll find the slug behind there. The reason it doesn't have my brains on it is the reason my suit looks like this. How'd the cops get it?”

“Nine-one-one. A fight, she said.”

“She?” I saw eyes that didn't match, a pair of triangle earrings.

“She said she sells tickets. Dispatch believed her. She couldn't put together a coherent sentence without a building permit.”

“Oh. The girl in the booth. I'm surprised she took the time. She rabbited along with everyone else, including the projectionist.”

“Who can blame them? The place has more priors than seats. The concession stand is a guy named Atticus in the parking lot. What's the story?” He leaned back against the block wall with his hands in his coat pockets. He looked as casual as the Kremlin.

I found an uncrushed Winston in the pack, lit up, and darkened my lungs another shade while I gave it to him from Chapter One. I edited out Earl North. That wasn't city property.

“You stepped on that old rake?” he said when I got to the girl with the cigarette.

“If I were smart I'd be two-thirds of the way to a pension.”

“No wonder that bullet missed your brains.” He looked at the empty screen, as if the story were playing there. “What's your take on this bird Boyette? You've only got his word for it that money's his. It wouldn't be the first time a courier took off with the pony.”

“I thought about it. I don't like it. I initiated contact. He didn't search me out.”

“Good con guys almost never do. Merlin Gilly would shill for the Prince of Lies.”

“Pick him up.”

“Are you filing a missing-persons report on Boyette?”

“My specialty's missing persons. I'd never live it down. Anyway, for all I know he's sitting in his living room right now, unrolling a Dead Sea Scroll.”

“How about attempted murder on you? That's got to be a misdemeanor.”

I shook my head.

“Then it's your scooter,” he said. “All I've got is a shot fired inside city limits and maybe a property damage complaint, if anyone bothers to come down and swear one out. No one will. In a minute or so I won't even have the shot fired. My specialty's homicide.”

He should have played the lottery. Exactly sixty seconds later a uniform came in, young, with the marks of the academy mold still on his shiny leather jacket and in the crease of his trousers. Alderdyce flashed his shield, then walked away with him a few yards, speaking low. The uniform nodded and went back out. The inspector stayed where he was with his hands in his pockets.

“Something?” I asked.

“Not likely. I just remembered I'm in no hurry. My daughter's using our living room for her divorced women's meeting.”

In a little while the uniform returned and read something out of his notebook. “That's next door, isn't it?” Alderdyce asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Stay here and wait for the manager.” The polished-ebony head turned my way. “Temperature's about twelve. Good for the lungs.”

I crushed out my cigarette on the linoleum and buttoned my coat.

“Ticket clerk has an apartment next door,” Alderdyce said as we headed across the parking lot. “She left the address when we called downtown. I had the kid get it from Dispatch. Maybe she knows your brunette.”

I didn't say anything. The wind was full of razor blades.

It was another block building, this one the original gray, with a Laundromat on the ground floor, locked up and dark. The door to the stairs came open when he tugged on the handle. “No wonder I never run out of work,” he said.

“Maybe she's from Iowa,” I said.

“Nobody leaves Iowa.”

We climbed a steep flight of gridded iron steps between walls three feet apart. The number he wanted belonged to a door just off the landing. He knocked, and when the lid slid away from the peephole inside, introduced himself, holding up the gold shield in its folder. The lid squeaked back into place. A series of clicks followed.

“Told you,” Alderdyce said.

The door opened wide enough to show a black-shaded eye, a gold hoop in a pale nostril, and half of a pair of lips painted green. The chain wouldn't let it open any wider.

“You ought to lock the door downstairs too,” said the inspector. “By the time they get up here they might be mad enough to break this one down.”

“Lock's busted downstairs.” She waited.

“You called the police about a disturbance at the Tomcat earlier. You work there, don't you?”

“There was a fight.”

“Didn't you hear the shot?” I asked.

The eye flicked my way, then back to the inspector. “There was a fight.”

I described the brunette, short hair, odd-lot eyes, fox coat, earrings, and all. I asked her who she came in with.

“Nobody came in looking like that.”

“Think hard. You'd remember her, even without the eyes.”

“Nobody came in looking like that.” She started to close the door.

Alderdyce and I leaned against it at the same time. It was a wonder the chain held. I said, “What about a guy carrying a package? A big mailer under his arm.”

“I saw him.”

“The girl came in about forty-five minutes later. She was one of the last ones in.”

“Last two people I sold tickets to was a couple of little old ladies.” She spoke through her teeth.

“Do you remember me?”

“You gave me a funny coin.”

“Thanks for your help.” Alderdyce took his shoulder off the door. She pushed it shut then, in spite of my resistance. She was a strong girl.

“She wears green lipstick,” I told the inspector.

“So does my son.”

“She's a poster girl for rehab.”

“Pupils look okay. At a guess I'd say she wouldn't be ordering police on anything stronger than grass. I can pull her downtown if you want to change your mind about that attempted murder complaint.”

I shook my head. We started downstairs, but two steps down I went back and poked a business card under the door.

“What was that about?” Alderdyce asked when I rejoined him.

“Casting bread on the waters.”

Back in the parking lot the uniform's scout car was bouncing blue light off the front of the theater. Alderdyce opened the door on the driver's side of his unmarked Chrysler and got in. “Jesus, I hope those women are gone. If there's a strange car in my driveway I'm going right on past.”

“Thanks for the time, John.”

“Thank my daughter.” He started the engine. “So how was the picture?”

“The heroine gets it in the end.”

I got my foot out of the way of his tire in time and walked to my car, digging in my pocket for the keys. I came up with the small open triangle I'd found stuck to my hand when I raised it from the floor of the theater. It looked like silver, but I was betting on platinum. As often as they lose them you wonder why women bother to wear them at all.

7

Rosecranz, the superintendent who held down the basement of my office building and occasionally fixed a pipe, had come in with Coolidge, seen the city burn down twice, and watched the rest of the country go to hell through the nine-inch window of the 1946 Admiral in his dank little office next to the water heater. Before that he had been passed through a hole in the wall of a house in Yaroslavl, a nine-pound bundle, to protect him from Cossacks, smuggled across an angry black ocean in the hold of a rusty steamer, and folded, stapled, and spindled by U.S. Immigration into a gray little man in bib overalls with tools in his pockets and a piece of silver duct tape holding his glasses together at the bridge of his nose. All of which should have made him colorful, but you could pass him a dozen times on the stairs and never realize you weren't alone. He was as much a part of the place as the cigarette burns on the runner outside the door of my office, only less inspiring. Topping the third-floor landing with my keys in my hand the morning after my visit to the Tomcat Theater, I didn't notice him until he spoke.

“You are still here?” he said. “I was afraid you'd gone like the others.”

I looked at a blob of pink insulation bulging through the ceiling grid where a panel had been removed. The workers hadn't reported in yet.

“I can't afford the rent anywhere else,” I said. “What about you?”

“I have nowhere else.”

“What's your stand on asbestos?”

“For a hundred years it's okay. Then it isn't. I think I will live to see it's okay again. Or you will if I do not.”

“Only if I hold my breath.” I slid my key into the lock. It was already unlocked.

“I should not have, maybe.” Between his spotted hands he was carrying what looked like the same stained rag he'd had in his pocket the day I came to work with Dale Leopold. They were oddly graceful hands despite the splotching, with slender spatulated fingers and fine knuckles. He was never without the filthy and tattered gloves he carried in his bib. “You said always to open the door for anyone who asks to go in and wait when you're gone.”

“That hasn't changed,” I said. “Who's the customer?”

“A young woman.”

I spun the key ring around my finger. “Brunette, short hair, one blue eye, one hazel?”

He shook his head. “I stayed out here in case she steals furniture.”

“I don't think we're talking about the same young woman.” I gave him a couple of singles, which he folded into his old rag like part of a magic act. “If she bothers to carry it down the stairs she's earned more than I can get for it,” I said. “She give a name?”

“Mrs. Dracula, maybe.”

He shoved the rag into his hip pocket along with the responsibility and went for the stairs, dragging his left leg a little. He claimed the Pinkertons had broken it with truncheons during a protest rally for Sacco and Vanzetti.

I lingered a moment to center my headache before going in. On the way home from the theater the night before I'd stopped to buy a bottle of Scotch, then spent the rest of the evening with a glass in one hand and the telephone receiver in the other, trying to track down Harold Boyette. His number didn't answer and my source at Ameritech for unlisted patrons couldn't find him in the directory. My plant in the secretary of state's office in Lansing plugged into the company computer and reported that the license number of Boyette's Toyota was registered to a leasing company headquartered in Jackson. Of course there was no answer there at 10:30
P
.
M
.

I should have asked my client for his home number when I still had him. I should have asked for his birth certificate and two references, but it was a one-night job, his agreement to pay ten thousand dollars upon recovering the Hours of the Virgin had arrived at my office on schedule, and his check for five hundred had cleared at his own bank without a belch. I drank the bottle down to the plumb line and went to bed.

Now the Battle of Bannockburn was going on inside my skull. I'd outgrown hangovers; the petri dish that was my bloodstream had launched a frontal attack on my nervous system with catapults and a battering ram. I was too sick to work and not sick enough to stay home. So I came to work.

The little waiting room smelled like leaf-burning season in Bogota. She was seated on the upholstered bench with her knees spread, getting all the good out of half an inch of roach on a toothpick clutched between fingers with black lacquered nails and dirty knuckles. I thought the nails and the seven-inch heels on her scuffed vinyl boots made her a she, but I hadn't tuned into MTV that morning for the latest. The rest of her was all ribs and Mother Death tattoos in a purple imitation leather jacket and a brief statement of a skirt, with a thatch of brown hair growing on top of her shaved head like moss on a rock. She was pushing twenty but not hard enough to dent it. The tattoo on her left shoulder was the spread wingfeathers of a bird of prey. The rest of the bird was under the jacket. It was quality needlework. There are some real artists waiting out their probations in the parlors along East Jefferson.

Today a gold chain linked the stud in her nose to a scimitar dangling from her right earlobe. She hadn't replaced the black shadow on the eye I'd last seen looking at me from behind the door of her apartment near the Tomcat; merely freshened it with a second coat.

“Good morning,” I said. “If I'd known it was formal I'd have worn my snake.”

She pinched out the end of the joint—flesh sizzled—poked it into a slash pocket, and zipped the pocket shut. Her eyes, mud-colored with shrunken pupils, drifted from me to the framed
Casablanca
poster on the wall. “Who's the old dude in the hat?”