Easy Street

by Elizabeth Sims

  "But carefully, though?"

  "Of course. I'm a very neat worker. But I was sort of hoping, uh."

  She read my face and said, "You know, private investigation these days is largely a matter of searching databases. It's not very exciting, like in the pulp novels."

  "Yeah," I said glumly. "I know." Of course I knew. I'd gotten hold of the latest book in the Calico Jones series, Encounter in Borneo, to feed my bedtime reading habit. I'd actually found this copy abandoned at a bus stop on lower Woodward—abandoned, can you believe it?—and had considered it a good omen. An omen of something—of riches soon to come? I was beginning to get very superstitious, seeing things as omens, and the omen was either riches soon to come, or some hot girlfriend soon to come. So to speak.

  Anyway, Encounter in Borneo starts out with Calico Jones—the beguiling, gorgeous, competent, brilliant private eye, on a train from Mumbai to Singapore, where she's to meet clandestinely with a Swedish biophysicist named Ingrid something, who's supposed to fill her in on her next mission. You just know this Ingrid's going to be a knockout. You just know it.

  Calico Jones's investigations are never ordinary. You don't catch her sitting in some Internet café Googling bad guys and taking notes. No sir, she's out there with her .45 semiautomatic and her sports car and her custom-designed clothes and her unerring powers of deduction and her nerves of pure tensile steel. She is so courageous.

  I came back to Porrocks saying, "Do you have your own crowbar at least?"

  "I do, in fact." One of the few possessions I hadn't yet hocked.

  "Well, how does fifteen dollars an hour sound?"

  "Fifteen an hour? Sounds great, Erma. Excellent. When can I start?"

  She said thoughtfully, "There's at least a few weeks' worth of work. Maybe more, maybe even a month or two."

  "How big is this place?"

  "Fairly large. Four bedrooms—larger than I need, really, but I just fell in love with it. You know how that can happen."

  I did, though it had never happened to me. People I've fallen in love with, animals I've tumbled for, but never a building.

  "My nieces and nephews can come visit, and now there's plenty of space for them. The house has only been vacant a few weeks, but I've had a little trouble, a couple of break-ins."

  "Oh."

  "That dismays me." She cupped her neat chin in her hand. "But I know the neighborhood's really OK—I think it's just kids. There's nothing in it to steal. Maybe they wanted to use it as a hangout. I was going to delay moving in till I got all the refurbishing done, but I think it'd be wiser for me to get in there right away. So the movers are coming on Monday, and I'll put the condo up for sale immediately. Hey, want to clean the condo once my stuff's out of it? Same rate."

  "Absolutely. I'll make it sparkle." Come to think of it, I have fallen in love with inanimate things: cleaning products. A sustaining force in my life will always be original powdered Spic-n-Span. Provided you do your part of using a decent rag and a bucket of really hot water, it'll meet you more than halfway.

  "Lillian, I want you to take better care of yourself."

  "I don't mean this to be funny, Erma, but I never knew you cared."

  "Well, I do. Tom cares about you too. I mean, we haven't seen you in a while, and well—it's not just that you're bonier than ever, and your car looks like it's held together with twist ties. There's something in your face that worries me."

  Porrocks had lived alone in her condo overlooking the Lodge Expressway for years and years, had never married (I once asked Ciesla), went birding on the weekends, read all the police journals, worked late on thankless cases, never complained of sexual harassment on the job. I don't think she encountered much harassment; Porrocks seemed impervious to that shit anyway; I wondered what ever really got to her.

  My antennae are pretty good, and I tuned them in to try to see if she was trying to show—how shall I put it?—special interest in me. I tried several frequencies but came up clear. She was just sincerely wanting to help somebody she thought needed it.

  I said, "My rabbit is sick."

  "Do you need money for the vet?"

  "Uh, no, I'm fairly current on that bill. Look, if I can just do that work for you, that'll help me out quite a bit. You'll have done me quite a favor. Thanks, Erma."

  A drunken vice squad cop came up and put a gentle hammerlock on Porrocks, who remained seated and slipped out of it as if she were shrugging off a sweater.

  "You'll have to do better than that, Duke," she commented.

  "Everybody wants cake!" he hollered.

  "OK, where's the machete?" Porrocks got up and murmured to me, "I'll call you in the morning."

  And that's how quietly this one got going.

  Chapter 3

  The next morning I pulled my shuddering, noble 1985 Chevrolet Caprice into the driveway at Porrocks's new digs. The house, one of those dark-red brick old beauties with three floors and a mansard roof, looked solid.

  The day was shaping up majestically: A glittering autumn sun arced into a crystal sky filled with cold, happy air and the occasional skein of southbound geese. We were in the second half of a fine October.

  On second glance I noticed the ancient copper gutters on Porrocks's house pulling away from the eaves, a few shingles missing, tattered window frames, and overgrown shrubbery around the front porch. The leaves of a fabulously huge maple tree smack in the middle of the front yard had turned van Gogh yellow. They were gently dropping in the breeze, like golden rain.

  A good omen, I thought. Golden rain.

  I saw Porrocks at the front door.

  "Stay down," I said to Drooly Rick, who was lying on the back seat.

  Yeah, I'd sort of sideswiped the job already, but I had to. Or I felt I had to.

  Before leaving Porrocks's party around eleven, I'd filled my pockets and shoulderbag with snacks for the street people I'd gotten to know all too well busking with my mandolin downtown over the last few years. I wrapped a few sandwiches in paper napkins and scored some slices of cake. On the way back to my flat in Eagle, I detoured to Greektown and handed out the stuff.

  I came across Drooly Rick and his longtime girlfriend, Young Brenda, huddled next to a row of garbage cans in the alley behind the restaurant Pegasus. It was a working alley behind that row of restaurants, dirty and dark but not cluttered with a lot of junk; trucks came through regularly. Rick was crouching over Brenda trying to get her to drink from a paper container of orange juice he'd gotten from one of the street missions.

  She looked like hell, her skin pocked and gray like old snow, her eyes sunken far back in her skull. Her hair was matted and sparse, her hands shook and although she spoke coherently, I thought she couldn't be far from a real medical crisis. Her clothes were soaked with vomit and urine. I breathed through my mouth, though that seemed risky. Brenda liked methamphetamine a lot.

  Drooly Rick, by contrast, appeared to be reasonably straight, and I remembered that this was their pattern: When one floundered, the other hung on and stayed in control enough to minimally look after the floundering one. Switching back and forth like this they'd built up some staying power on the dirty, sad streets.

  Rick told me, "I want Brenda to go home before winter comes."

  "Home? What do you mean?"

  "Her sister in Tennessee said she could come and stay for a while." He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his greasy black wool overcoat "I ain't invited, though."

  "Oh."

  "If she could hang out with her sister, I bet she'd feel better after a while."

  I offered Brenda a sandwich, but she muttered, "I can't eat. Got 'ny money?"

  "No."

  "I need some shit," Brenda said.

  "Shit is right," asserted Drooly Rick, who favored fortified wine and malt liquor. He took the sandwich. "If I could just buy her a bus ticket to Clarksville, everything'd be OK."

  "How much would that ticket cost, Rick?"

  "Dunno. Maybe a hunnerd dollars."


  "I bet not that much." I took another look at Brenda, who was only in her late twenties, I guessed. The expression on her face was a vacant sort of longing. "Would you like to see your sister?"

  "I don't care," she said in a dead voice.

  Rick put the juice to her lips again. She pushed it away. "But you gotta get well," he told her. She had on a ski jacket that appeared to have once been mint green with white fake-shearling trim. It was now a mottled moss gray, somewhat like camouflage, and the trim looked like strips of dead coyote.

  Rick stood up and motioned me aside. He muttered, "I don't know what to do. I love her. We've been thinking about havin' kids. I'd like to get us a ranch in Montana someday."

  Dear God. "Look, Rick," I said, "if I could get you a little work for a few days, would you do it? Basic labor. I'll pay you cash—let's say seven-fifty an hour."

  "Seven-fifty?"

  I looked at him in the sparse light from the restaurant's security bulb. His teeth were brown but his chin was dry, and it looked as if he'd managed a shave within the past week.

  "Yeah," I told him. "In ten hours you could have seventy-five dollars and put Brenda right on that bus. Work a little bit more, and you'd have a hundred."

  "Couldn't you just let me have the seventy-five bucks now?"

  "Lord, I don't have it. I've got about twenty dollars, and I need it for gas and stuff until more comes in. I've got work and I'll share it with you, OK? It'll be easy work, ripping up carpet and stuff in this old house."

  "I could do that kind of work. Used to run a salvage yard."

  "Well, you'll have to tell me about it someday."

  "Inneresting work. Very responsible position."

  "The big question is, can you stay sober while you're doing it?"

  "Yeah. Yeah, I can."

  "Because I can't work with a drunk."

  "OK, OK. Yeah."

  "You're pretty straight right now, aren't you?"

  Sorrowfully, he said, "Yeah."

  "Well, stay that way until morning, all right? I'll come find you as soon as I hear when I'm supposed to show up."

  ----

  So now Rick stayed down in the back seat while I went up to talk to Porrocks. I thought she might be OK with Drooly Rick working in her home under my supervision, but I wasn't at all sure of it, and I just couldn't have coped with a problem right then.

  We chatted there on her front porch for a minute, then she invited me in to show me the place. She said all the new-house stuff people say. "So here's the view to the river. I just love it; it's so serene."

  "It is."

  "I hate the paint, but this oak floor is beautiful, isn't it? Look at this built-in buffet! That's the original finish."

  "Very nice," I said. "Terrific place, Erm." She'd been measuring rooms and closets and deciding where to put her stuff. She looked energetic but a little uneasy. You'd expect it, really: someone retiring after such a long time and then changing her environment to boot. I wondered if she'd feel lonely.

  "Then today I'm going to pull out some broken shelves in the big upstairs closet," she said. "Then after that I'll have to go back to my condo and get things organized for the movers." She had a radio tuned to a sports program; the announcers were yammering about the football game between Michigan and Notre Dame that was going to kick off in a couple of hours. Their sharp voices bolstered the getting-things-done feel in the house.

  "Would you like me to get started in the boathouse?" I asked.

  "That'd be good. If I can make that livable I might stay there while I'm getting the work done in the main house."

  We hiked back there and she showed me what she wanted. The boathouse had a newer roof, and the pilings it rested on looked solid. Wavelets sloshed pleasantly through the pilings, and that organic clean river smell came up to our noses. Part of the building was the actual boat well, with a winch lift and a roll-up door to the river. The winch was rusted up pretty badly.

  "You gonna get a boat?" I asked Porrocks.

  "Maybe. I don't know."

  It was dim in the boat well, the only light bouncing in from the space between the water and the start of the walls, about two feet of open space. Blots of reflected light danced on the plank walls and ceiling.

  The other part of the building was a guest cottage, with a kitchenette and a dining area and two rooms for sleeping. The tiny little bathroom needed a hefty dose of Spic-n-Span. The place smelled musty but fortunately not pukey. Porrocks pulled back a filthy curtain, letting in daylight and saying, "In all its glory." Some crummy furniture gave the place a depressed atmosphere: a couch that looked like a raccoon had raised a family in it, a rickety dinette set that someone about twenty years ago had tried to resurface with pink contact paper. The carpet was beyond cleaning, as was the peeling linoleum. I couldn't tell the original color of the carpet.

  "I hired a couple of guys to tear down two of these interior walls," Porrocks said, pointing, "but they quit halfway through the job, and I haven't seen them again."

  "Huh," I remarked. "Well, you've got quite a mess here, Erm."

  "I should have gotten the floor coverings out first. I'm not sure now whether I want that other wall down." We looked at it, covered in dirty wallpaper with a cutesy flower-basket print.

  "Well, it doesn't matter," I assured her. "I'll fix everything up. Don't you worry."

  I decided I didn't need to bring up the subject of Drooly Rick at all, since he and I could hide out and work here, isolated at the end of the long driveway.

  The neighborhood looked quite OK. Even around Detroit waterfront property is costlier than most. The trouble is, since there's no elevation past the riverbank, a house on the opposite side of the street has practically no view, and houses on the next block have views of each other, and that's it.

  Porrocks's new neighbors kept up their places nicely—nicer than hers had been, so I imagined they'd be glad to see her sprucing up 201 Adderly St. I noticed a small apartment building directly across the street from her, so there were rentals in the neighborhood, but again the place was neat. Yep, it looked as if Porrocks had made a good choice.

  Porrocks returned to the house, and I pulled the Caprice down the drive to the boathouse.

  "She said she's gonna work in the house upstairs," I told Rick. "So let's just be cool." We unloaded the few tools I'd brought: a wrecking bar, a claw hammer, a utility knife, a pair of pliers.

  "What happened here?" said Rick, looking at the stubble of a wall.

  I told him about the couple of workers who'd preceded us.

  "She want this other wall down too?" He looked at it hungrily, and I felt what he was feeling—a sort of exhilaration at having license to destroy.

  "No, now she's not sure."

  "It'd make the room a lot bigger. Real nice."

  "No. Listen to me, Rick. We're just gonna rip up these floors, OK? This carpet here and this linoleum. Then we'll pry the tile off these kitchen walls, see? That'll be fun. We're gonna leave the walls in place and just rip the tile and wallpaper off them. We're gonna leave these kitchen cabinets up, too." They were nice oak cabinets with green glass knobs.

  I'd smelled Rick's breath when I picked him up downtown, but I had another thought: I wasn't going to be able to keep my eye on him all day. I already realized that we could use a second wrecking bar, which I could get at the hardware store for a few dollars. I said, "I know you're sober now, but—do you have anything on you?"

  The insulted look on his face told me.

  "No!" he shouted.

  "Mind if I check your pockets, then?"

  "Go right ahead!" He glared at me as I patted his left coat pocket, then the right. I guess he was hoping I wouldn't be thorough, but the pint of Mad Dog in his right pocket was hard to miss. I pulled it out.

  "I'm gonna lock this in the trunk for you, OK?" I handled the bottle as if it were a valuable camera or something. "Wouldn't want anything to happen to it."

  "Thank you," he said humbly.

 
"Remember, Rick, you're doing this for Brenda. You gotta get that bus ticket."

  "Yeah, I really got to."

  "Now, if the lady of the house comes in, let me handle it. You don't have to say anything. You can take your coat off now, by the way."

  Drooly Rick's customary outfit was a black overcoat with about five assorted shirts underneath it, this outrageous pair of bright blue plaid golf pants, and several socks on each foot. The shoes varied—street people tend to be hard on shoes. This day he was wearing a dignified-looking pair of cordovan oxfords with almost no heels left. He preferred to keep his coat on.

  I had on blue jeans and my Wayne State T-shirt, plus my brown nylon windbreaker and my black Chuck Taylor basketball sneakers. Rick and I were a motley team, all right.

  "Will she pay us today?" Rick asked.

  "I sure as hell hope so, but she might wait until next week. I dunno. Today's Saturday. Well, let's get going." We moved the furniture out to the boat well, where there was just room for it on the narrow walkway. Then I decided we should pry the baseboards away from the walls so we could get at the carpet. "We gotta be careful not to mar the wood, OK?" I gave Rick the wrecking bar, which had a tapered end, and took the claw hammer, and we started in opposite corners.

  I realized knee pads would have been a good idea, so as soon as I got a corner of carpet free, I cut two pieces and folded them over to make kneeling pads for us. The carpet was blackish with old mildew beneath. In such a damp environment you're going to have that problem. That funny, half-chemical, half-plant smell of mildew came up, but not bad. The autumn breezes had dried things out.

  It took only about an hour to get all the baseboards off and stacked out of the way on top of the furniture in the boat well. We pulled and grunted at the carpet and got into a rhythm of working. Rick was strong.

  After we'd been at it a while he said, "Lillian?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Do ya s'pose she'd love me more if I was rich?"

  Now, how the hell do you answer a question like that? I thought for a minute. "Well, you guys might be quite a bit more comfortable if you were rich. But when you really think about it, Rick, what's that got to do with love?"