The Hours of the Virgin (7 page)

“Rutherford B. Hayes. He played center field for the Giants. Who's watching the booth?”

“I don't come on till four. You remember me, huh.”

“I never forget a tattoo. Care to come inside? You clash with everything out here.”

“What's inside?”

“Privacy.”

She scratched her crotch. “What's that?”

“Let's find out.” I unlocked the inner door and held it for her. She'd be used to that.

“This place is the bomb,” she said, looking at the butterfly wallpaper, the desk and mismatched chairs and kicked-in file cabinets, Custer on the wall violating the civil rights of Native Americans at the Little Big Horn. “Like a picture we run once.”

“
The Dark Corner
?”

“
My Gun Is Thick
. Tony Gonads and Cherry Yesterday. A classic.” She plopped herself onto the chair on the customer's side and slid down until she was sitting on her spine, rucking her skirt up to her pelvis. She hadn't listened to her mother's advice about what you should do in case you get in an accident. “I'm Vyper. That's with a
y.
”

“Why?”

“Huh?”

I shook my head and sat behind the desk. I milked the last four aspirins out of the office bottle, filled the pony glass from the pint I kept in the belly drawer, and washed them down all in a lump.

She watched me. “You sick?”

“You don't want to kiss me.” I picked up the telephone and tried Boyette's number again. Still no answer. I worked the plunger and called the automobile leasing company in Jackson. When a woman came on I said I was Sergeant Albert Winder with the General Service division of the Detroit Police Department, checking for wants and warrants on the license number of a yellow Toyota, current year model, and needed the lessee's address and home telephone. While she was running it down I pointed my chin at Vyper-with-a-
y
. “Did you see the piece about Colombian papers in the new
High Times
?”

“I use toilet paper.” She sat up and folded her arms on the desk. “You're like a private pig, right?”

“Right. I only wallow when I'm paid.”

“How much they pay you?”

“If you're looking for a job, the hiring here is restricted to my own species.”

A green lip curled. “Just 'cause I don't look like Betty and Veronica don't mean I'm crud.”

“It does in this world.” The receiver clicked in my ear. “Hello?”

“Sergeant?” A different woman this time. “We're not at liberty to give out the names and addresses of clients without written authorization. Could you fax us your request on department stationery?”

“What gave me away?”

Her tone grew thorns. “If I told you that, next time you might get away with it.” The connection broke.

I cradled the receiver. The queen of chains and leather was starting to look good. “What are you selling?”

“A woman.”

“No thanks. I just had one and it didn't agree with me.”

“A woman in a fur coat.”

“Blue eyes?”

“One was. I don't know what color you call the other one but it wasn't blue.”

That was a step in the right direction, but I'd mentioned the mismatched eyes the night before. “Brooklyn accent?”

“More like Mississippi, only not quite. I used to live with a dude from Mississippi and he talked like that, only different. Someplace south, Atlanta maybe. Is Atlanta a state?”

The aspirins were beginning to kick in. I found the triangle earring in my pocket and dangled it over the desk. She squinted, cracking her eye shadow.

“Yeah. She was wearing them.”

I put it away. There was still some liquor in the glass. I sipped at it, but it wasn't what I wanted and I dumped it out in the wastebasket. “I thought she didn't exist.”

“That's what I said in front of that pig. I don't like pigs.”

“I'm a pig.”

“You don't bust people.”

“Drugs?”

She showed her teeth. I guessed she thought she was smiling. “No thanks. I just had some.”

Her arms were still folded on her side of the desk. I grasped a wrist at random and pulled the arm straight. The same Michelangelo who was responsible for the bird of prey had rendered the Yellow Brick Road in intricate detail inside her forearm. The Emerald City glimmered in the crease of her elbow. I couldn't see any marks that weren't artistic. I gave it back to her.

“I'm clean since I'm sixteen.” She rubbed the wrist. “They didn't bust me for that. They said I put my baby in the snow.”

“Did you?”

“I wrapped it in a towel first. You want the woman or not?”

“Depends on the price.”

“Thousand. Cash.”

I laughed in her face.

“Take it or leave it.”

I reached for the telephone. She thought I was going back to work.

“You called it, pig.” She got up and went to the door.

I lifted the receiver and dialed. “Thirteen hundred? C.I.D., please. Inspector Alderdyce.”

She spun around. Her chain jingled. “Asshole!”

“Oink.”

“Big bluff. I ain't done nothing to get busted for.”

“There's an extortion attempt involved and a person missing, possibly kidnap or murder. The cops have a name for it. They call it withholding evidence.”

She came back and sat down. “Hundred.”

“Fifty.”

She started to get up again.

“John?” I said. “Amos Walker. Guess who's in my office.”

She reached out and slapped down the plunger. “Asshole,” she said again.

I cradled the receiver.
Titanic
was playing downtown at 4:30, 8:00, and 11:40, if it matters.

She counted the tens and singles I placed in front of her, unzipped a pocket over her left breast, and made the deposit. “Strangeways is her name,” she said. “Lauren Strangeways.”

“Any relation to Gordon Strangeways?”

“Just by marriage.”

“How do you know her?”

“Strangeways owns the Tomcat. They say he likes to make surprise visits to places he owns, peek at the books to make sure he ain't cheated. He come around last month in a limousine and the manager come out to talk to him. She was in the back. I heard Strangeways introduce her.”

I waited until she was at the door again. “What happened to your baby?”

“Somebody adopted it, I guess.”

“Was it a boy or a girl?”

“I don't know. I didn't check.”

“Slither, Vyper.”

She banged the door shut behind her. She was the only person I'd met in days who didn't have a cure for the flu.

I wrote the name Laurel Strangeways on the telephone pad. I don't know why. I wasn't likely to forget it. Her husband had a million dollars for every letter, with enough left over to buy the pad and the desk and the building that held them. I was still saving up for another pad.

8

A freezing mist was falling on Woodward when I parked down the block from the library, glass needles shattering when they struck the asphalt and the vinyl roof of the Cutlass. I noticed a new crack in the marble when I climbed the steps to the library entrance, and about a pound and a half less pressure in the pneumatic closer when I pulled open my favorite door. The tube needed replacing. Money for such things had gone into the old mayor's private investment firm, and the new administration was waiting for the casinos to make up the difference.

A security guard and one of the older librarians smiled and said hello on my way to the reference section. The vagrant who was sleeping his way through Shakespeare at the first reader's table had gotten as far as act two, scene three of
Troilus and Cressida
, then passed out again. I don't know what I'd do without free public access to information. Buy a book, I suppose.

I walked right past the customer computer terminal to the shelf containing the
Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature
. Ten minutes' congress with the big red-bound books sent me off in five directions, and when I had everything stacked on one of the partitioned tables near the windows, I set out my notebook and pen and killed the rest of the morning enlarging upon my education.

The subject of Gordon Strangeways presented a litmus test for the differing styles of the magazines and other sources.
People
was sly and slangy,
Time
dowdy and ponderous,
Newsweek
just dowdy.
U.S. News & World Report
had a serious case of hemorrhoids,
The Christian Science Monitor
needed a doctor.
Who's Who
asked, “Who?” Only
Forbes
and
Fortune
seemed to approve; you could hear the raspy dry-washing of miserly hands over the columns of figures on the black side. At a conservative estimate he was worth two and a half billion, and making two million a day.

There was some conflict. His age varied along with the place of his birth, and nobody seemed to be clear on whether he had served with the army or the coast guard or waited out the fall of Saigon in Quebec. The business of checking facts has tended to lag behind technology in the Age of Information.

The
Playboy
interview was the most informative and plausible, an in-depth personality profile based on many hours spent in conversation with its subject, and as many more divided between libraries like this one and dusty reading rooms in records bureaus strung out between Detroit and the Dark Continent, poring over old newspapers on microfilm and translating bureaucratic hieroglyphics in boxes of defunct files. It made up for the missing centerfold.

Born into a family of professional Linotypists in either Mossel Bay or Port St. Johns, South Africa, in either March or December of 1943 or maybe February 1945, Strangeways had through a series of intelligent suggestions on his part been removed from the print shop to the editorial staff of a Cape Town quarterly at age twenty (or eighteen), then emigrated to England and later to America just behind the Beatles as overseas correspondent for the London
Times
. Never a great hand at carrying out assignments dreamed up by other people, he had quit that post in favor of a partnership in a failing men's fashion magazine based in Birmingham, Michigan. There was plenty of room for photographs once he'd deep-sixed all the articles containing grooming tips and spirited discussions of plaids vs. pinstripes, so he hired a staff of lensmen out from under the even shakier girlie magazines in his market. When he was through tinkering,
After Six
resembled a four-color manual of gynecology. The first featured pictorial under Strangeways' editorship was headed “Snatch of the Day.”

Despite an improved circulation, the revamped magazine might have passed unnoticed among the common lot of masturbation monthlies had not the Birmingham City Council and the United States Postal Service pressed separate and simultaneous actions to close it down for distributing obscene material. The federals gave up after a mistrial, as they always do when they're especially determined, but a ruling in the city's favor was appealed by Strangeways' attorneys, overturned at the district level, then sought again by the city in Lansing. Eventually the case wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear it and let stand an earlier dismissal on Constitutional grounds.
After Six
had won; but that was only half the story.

The publicity, stoked by the continuing debate over how far the founding fathers had intended for the First Amendment to stretch, netted the magazine a national readership. The ACLU, NOW, and the Catholic Church weighed in on both sides of the issue. There were death threats and offers to help with legal expenses. Gordon Strangeways became a celebrity. All the major TV and radio talk shows had had him on, and the president, campaigning for reelection in Missouri, had referred to him as “a purveyor of public prurience.” The purveyor had in the meantime become naturalized, acquired a wife and been divorced by her for desertion, and invested his balloon profits in a chain of “health spas” (quotation marks courtesy of
Newsweek)
and adult theaters throughout the Great Lakes region, concentrated most densely in metropolitan Detroit. He was the first distributor of X-rated material to open video outlets across the Midwest, then the United States. Wall Street lifted its head out of tickertape when he turned down an offer of two hundred million from a Japanese corporation to acquire his video stores.

After Six
was still publishing, but the sexual revolution and its plague-ridden aftermath had fostered even raunchier fare that cut into its bottom line at the newsstands. A series of police raids on Strangeways' That Touch of Venus health spas had forced its prostitution activities underground, if they hadn't eliminated them entirely. But the video business was going strong. Young couples, randy singles, and lonely seniors who wouldn't risk being seen going into or coming out of a porno theater rented copies of
Texas Ta-Tas
and
E.T. The Extra Testicle
in handbaskets. Of late, the Strangeways empire had been selling off its theaters and investing heavily in the computer online video market. The Tomcat on Telegraph was one of the few old-time grindhouses still operating under the company banner.

It was one of those Streets of Gold stories told with a strong Detroit accent, but it carried a coda: Three years ago, while riding in a rented limousine to his hotel from the airport in Little Rock, where he had bought ten acres to construct a kind of sexual shopping mall (videos, sex toys, edible underwear, calendar photography studio, Starbuck's), the Horatio Alger of hormones was stopped by a mob of angry Pentecostals, pulled from the back seat, stomped, and beaten with picket signs and baseball bats. Although the police intervened before he was battered to death, he hadn't taken a step or stood on his own since. The few public appearances he had made in recent months were in a wheelchair, and these days he spent most of his time behind the walls of his estate on Grosse Ile. Not so the ringleaders of the mob that had crippled him; they'd made the round of all the afternoon talk shows after three Arkansas juries failed to convict them for assault and battery and attempted murder. Some audiences cheered when they came onstage.