“We’re friends now,” I said, rubbing the ear.
She wasn’t listening. “It was weird. Serving dinner this one night I spilled salad oil down the front of my uniform. I went to my room to change. Mrs. Wynn stepped inside to ask for something. She caught me naked.”
“Not hard to do. So?”
“So she excused herself and got out. Half an hour later I was out of a job. For spilling the salad oil. Sure, we fought. After she fired me, not before.”
“Sure it was the salad oil?”
“It wasn’t.”
“Damn right it wasn’t. Think she’s gay?”
“Takes one to know one, that it?”
“I’ve been in the bars. I never saw anyone clocked yet for making a mistake.”
“Well, it isn’t like with men. Some women are just curious. But if you’re looking for a reason she left, I’d say she went cruising.”
“Why ship out when she had you at home?”
“It’s not a decision you make all at once. Uptight woman like her, she’d fight it first, remove temptation. Then, after she’s thought it over—” She rolled a shoulder, smoothed the kimono across her pelvis.
“Where does one go cruising around here?”
“Try the Pink Diesel in Centerline. It’s a saloon. The place is kind of advanced, though. It could scare a newbie off three feet inside the door.”
“Sounds scary. Should I wear body armor?”
“Maybe a cup.”
NINE
I bought coffee at a drive-through and pulled into a slot to scald my tongue and call Information. A recording at the number I got for the Pink Diesel told me the place didn’t open till four. The gender of the voice was indeterminate and it came with its own musical score: a rock riff on a combination electric guitar and circular saw that was still zinging in my ear when I finished the coffee and drove away.
The trail was cold at least until late afternoon. I checked into the office, letting myself in the miniature waiting room I leave unlocked during the day for anyone who has nothing better to do than catch up on the Clinton Administration in a magazine. I almost dropped the key to the private office when someone stood up from the upholstered bench to greet me.
It was Smoke, the clerk at Elysian Fields. She’d traded the Grecian gown for a loose sweatshirt with a boatneck wide enough to bare one polished shoulder and a classically curved collarbone and black tights. Flip-flops with garnet-colored crystals on the straps set off a pair of slender feet without paint. Her pale yellow hair was pulled back as before and swung near her waist when she turned my way. Her kaleidoscope eyes—frosty green today—were large and startled-looking, as if I’d come on her unexpectedly grazing in a forest glade.
“I looked you up,” she said. “Do you remember me?”
“Sure. Amber Dawn.”
A straight nose wrinkled. “The joke seemed funnier yesterday. A lot of things have changed since yesterday. Can we go inside?”
I unlocked the door and held it open for her. She went straight in without looking around at what passed for the décor and sat down in the chair on the suckers’ side of the desk. She managed to make the rest of the room look even shabbier than always.
“Who’s minding the store?”
“There is no store. That’s why I’m here.”
I adjusted my protuberances into the declensions in the swivel chair behind the desk and broke out a fresh carton of Winstons. When I raised my eyebrows to ask if she didn’t mind, she stuck out a hand. “Bum one?”
I wasn’t sure whether I was more surprised by the fact she smoked than by the turn of phrase. It had gone out with cigarette commercials. I zipped the top off a pack, thumped the bottom with my thumb, and offered her the one that separated itself from the rest. I took one for myself, lit hers off a match, and used what was left of it getting mine burning. “Isn’t that grounds for dismissal from a health store?” I asked.
“Oh, please. If you slam that crap we sell all day every day for the rest of your life, you’ll live exactly an hour and a half longer than if you didn’t. Or not. I think I told you the FDA hasn’t signed on yet.” She cocked her head to blow a jet of smoke away from her hair. She was a puffer, not an inhaler. I couldn’t see the point. “Do you hire yourself out for all sorts of jobs, or just missing-person cases?”
“I guarded a necklace around the neck of a GM board member’s wife once. It got me a night of Wagner in the opera house and a rib eye in the Diamondback. These days you can’t be particular. What did you mean when you said there is no store?”
“When I got to work this morning, the parking lot was jammed with squad cars and an armored vehicle of some kind. Cops in vests and helmets standing around talking into mikes. I just kept on driving; borrowed a look at a phone book in a party store and came straight here. Shouldn’t you have a receptionist or something?”
“I should have a helicopter to beat rush hour, but I can’t afford the fuel either. What kind of cops?”
“Cops cops. How many kinds are there?”
“In Detroit? The FBI maintains a standing army just to keep an eye on all the others.”
“Oh. City cops. Blue-and-whites, black-and-golds. The armored job had ERT on it in letters you could read in Windsor.”
“Early Response Team. They don’t leave home without AK-47s and a couple of dozen shock grenades. Why would Detroit cops raid the place?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. They knocked over a medical-marijuana dispensary two blocks from my apartment last year: Owner had a permit and everything. They like to push in places just for fun.”
“Does Elysian Fields sell pot?”
“If it does, I never handled any sales. There’s a padlock on the door to the basement. My boss said it’s to protect employees from falling down the rickety stairs and suing him for personal injury. If he’s growing the plants down there, I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen it.”
“So what makes this your problem?”
“If they had a warrant to search the place, I’ve got to assume they had one to arrest everyone who works there. Everyone being me. I’d like to know my rights before they show up at my place.”
“You don’t need me. I can give you the names of some lawyers. A couple of them have never faced disbarment.”
She took one last drag, leaned forward in her chair, ditched it in my souvenir tray from Traverse City, and folded her arms on her side of the desk. “I had a lawyer once. He forgot to tell me the date of a hearing was changed, and when I didn’t show up and he had to go there and represent me, he charged me for two hours. Ask me again why I didn’t call a lawyer.”
“Hearing for what?”
She smiled crookedly. “Possession of marijuana: one gram over the limit for personal use. I pulled two hundred hours of community service for possession for sale.”
“Guilty?”
“That’s what the judge said.”
I cupped a hand over the tray until the butt smoldered out. I’ve never met a woman who finished the job. “I don’t sweat over doobies, and I’ve got nothing against free enterprise. If I’m going to help you, though, I need to know if I’m representing a garden-variety pothead or the Colombian cartel. I can pull up your rap sheet, but I’ve only got so many chips I can cash in downtown.”
She rolled the naked shoulder. “I lived with a small-time dealer for eight months. When DEA decided he was worth squeezing for information on his superiors, I got hauled in alongside. They kicked me after six hours in a crummy hotel room they used for interrogations in Redford. When he didn’t cave, they tagged him for statutory rape. I was a child of sixteen. That’s the load, swear on a stack of Bibles.”
“A stack’s no improvement over just one. Are you even a Christian?”
“I was baptized Catholic. For a little while I was a Wiccan, but it’s not a real religion, even if it is registered. Say what you like about Christians and Muslims, they buy into the shebang. Nobody who calls herself a witch really thinks
she can cast spells. They’re just Shriners without the funny hats. If you want to stick me with a label, I guess you could say I’m a recovering believer.”
“A very large congregation, bigger than Hindu. What do you want me to do?”
“Find out what’s going on, and tell me I don’t have anything to worry about.”
“I can deliver on the first part. I can’t guarantee the second. If the cops decide to put the screws on you to build a case against your employer, they’ve got a prior on the possession deal and a person-of-interest card to play on the six hours you spent in Holding. It all depends on how badly they want your boss. Who is he, by the way? You said before it was a he.”
She licked her unpainted lips and slid her gaze toward the pack of cigarettes on the desk. I shoved it her way and struck another match. When she had one going, she said, “I’d rather not answer that one until I have to. Is that all right?”
I finished mine and screwed it out in the tray. “It’s not all right, but if you’re going to be mule headed, I can look into the official investigation and let you know where you stand. If the cops don’t care whether you exist, my job’s done. If they do, we’re going to have this conversation all over again, and if the answer’s the same, I’ll give you that list of attorneys and wish you good luck.”
“That’s fair. Now let’s talk money.”
“Five hundred a day. Three days up front.”
That time she inhaled. Very little smoke came back out. “I knew it would be stiff. I didn’t know how stiff. I don’t guess you haggle.”
“I never alter my fees except when I omit them entirely.”
“That sounds familiar. Did I read it somewhere?”
“Sherlock Holmes. My role model, except when it comes to deduction.”
“Isn’t that all he did?”
“Well, he dressed funny; but I can’t pull it off.”
She got rid of the butt, this time with finality. I had the strange suspicion she was picturing my face in the bottom of the tray. I took pity on her then, I didn’t know why. Probably it was her exposed collarbone. I’m a connoisseur. Breast and leg men have nothing in common with me.
“I’ll look into it for a hundred. It shouldn’t take all day to find out what the cops have in mind. If I’m wrong, we’ll have to renegotiate.”
“Done.” She slid a hand inside the neckband of her sweatshirt and came up with a fold of bills. The crooked smile came out with it when she saw my reaction. “Case dough; that’s what they call it on TCM, right? I’m an old-movie geek. Ever since that first bust I never go out without a getaway stake.” She peeled off a hundred in twenties and two well-traveled tens and smoothed them out in a stack on the desk. I broke out a receipt pad, wrote out the amount.
“Last name?”
“Wygonik.” She spelled it.
“Polish?”
“Fourth generation. My great-grandfather shook the dust of Crakow off his heels a week after he found out Mr. Ford was paying five dollars a day at the River Rouge plant.”
“Doesn’t go with Smoke.”
“I went back to it in a fit of ethnic pride. My parents had it legally changed to Free.”
“Smoke Free?”
“Maybe the pride wasn’t entirely ethnic.”
I entered the name, handed her the original, and kept the carbon. “I live by Hamtramck. Not many of the old guard left.”
“I know. I looked up your home address. Why I’m here.”
“Not Polish; sorry.”
“There’s something to be said for osmosis.”
“Science degree?”
“Two years, U of D. My Catholic period. It’s how I got into botany. You have to grow herbs.”
“Good grounding for pot production. Sure you never got a peek at that basement?”
She crossed herself, held up her right hand. Her eyes clouded over brown. “I said I was a recovering believer. It’s an ongoing process.”
I got her address, wrote it on my pad, gave her a card with my office and cell number on it, and got up to see her out. Afterwards I smoked too many cigarettes and reached behind my neck to smooth down the hairs that had stood out on it. No good: They sprang back. A simple missing-persons case had turned into something else, like most things in a bad dream.
TEN
The nightspots were opening, beginning the bottom half of my double shift. I had a date with a lesbian bar. You can be in this business fifty years and still find something new to add to your memoirs.
A stranger was reading the building directory when I came down the third flight, moving his lips over the white plastic snap-letters arranged according to the imagination of Rosecranz, the super. He was on the tattered outer edge of middle age, wearing a gray corduroy sportcoat over a yellow polo shirt that barely covered his belly fat, tan Dockers bagged at the knees, and sneakers fastened with hook-and-loop straps, the designers’ gift to the terminally out-of-shape. He needed a haircut, especially near the collar, where the black and gray coiled over the top, and his face was burned a deep and unhealthy shade of cherry. A surgeon had gouged a deep gully in his left cheek, foraging for a melanoma.
I asked him who he was looking for. He jumped, as if he hadn’t seen me coming down a stairwell directly in his line of vision, then pointed a ragged nail at the third line.
“C.E. Challis, but there’s no office number.”
“Dr. Challis has retired from practice, with the enthusiastic approval of the American Chiropractic Association. I heard he opened a yoga studio in Farmington. You don’t need a license for that.”
“He didn’t say nothing about it when I made the appointment.” A hand stole to the small of his back: lumbago, or a belt clip. I’d left my arsenal in the Cutlass.
“When’d you call?”
“Last week, if it’s any business of yours.”
“Your calendar’s running slow. He cleared out in January. The building service here makes Washington look good. I think there’s still a phrenologist listed on the board.”
“What’s that?”
“Something that shouldn’t still be listed anywhere. I was making sort of a joke.”
He slid the finger down the ragged furrow in his cheek. “I guess I got the wrong Challis.”
“It’s a common name—in France.”
“Thanks, brother. You saved me a trip upstairs.” He touched his back again.
“You ought to try acupuncture.”
“Like the Chinese need the business.”
That was the end of the scintillating exchange.
I followed him to the street. He crossed into the unofficial parking lot and got into a green Chevy Malibu with a tailpipe held together by rust. The motor started like a bad orchestra rehearsing the Anvil Chorus. It tried to stall as he cranked it out of its space, then caught with a report like a firecracker and spread a screen of greasy black smoke all the way down the block. I had time to unscrew the license plate and put it in my hip pocket. Instead I just memorized the number. It was a Michigan plate, which did nothing to explain the sunburn and skin cancer. The state’s far more prone to sunshine deficiency and frostbite.
Not that the number would do me any good: The car had probably been stolen after he ditched whatever he’d driven from Arizona, where dermatologists go to make their fortunes. Arizona: Home to the Apache Nation, the Diamondbacks, and Mafiosi enjoying their pensions. That was just a guess, but I can smell garlic the way Jim Bridger claimed he could identify Indian tribes by their scent.
I’d spotted the open tail, as I was supposed to by the very definition of the phrase. It’s the one you don’t see that counts.
ELEVEN
You can enter Macomb County without striking any bells or knowing you’ve gone anywhere other than where you’ve been. Detroit lies spread-eagle north of downtown, and the City of Warren’s more of the same, as flat as the General Motors proving grounds, which is the first and only landmark you come to after you cross Eight Mile Road. In the sprawl of bui
ldings nearby, employees with mechanical pencils approach the daily problem of making cars lighter and safer at the same time. Can’t be done, so they’re on the payroll for life.
Centerline hasn’t appeared in the headlines on a regular basis since the Hudson Motor Company stopped manufacturing navy guns there in 1945, which may be a point in its favor. It has no casinos to foster marital unrest and a fair portion of its populace wouldn’t travel the few blocks to Detroit even for free beer. It’s one of those suburbs-within-a-suburb, surrounded by Warren on all four sides. Again, there are no border posts or changes in architecture to let you know you’ve arrived.
The Pink Diesel called as little attention to itself as Elysian Fields. It occupied a flat-roofed yellow brick building that looked as if it had been part of a strip mall before the big-box stores had moved in and turned most of them into pawn shops and cash-for-gold emporia, with tinting over the plate glass to cut down on light from outside and no sign to identify it, just a pink neon tube bent like a balloon sculpture into the silhouette of a tractor-trailer rig in the window next to the door. An impressive display of Jeeps, Hummers, and classic pickups with bulbous fenders occupied the parking lot among more conventional vehicles.
Before leaving the car I reached for the cubby under the glove compartment where I keep the artillery: When someone tells you to wear a cup, it never hurts to adjust upward. In the end I went in armed only with the will of the righteous. I was overdue for a mistake and might as well get it out of the way.
Inside was bar twilight, something with a steady beat thrumming low over the sound system, parties seated around tables and at the bar. Except for the prevailing gender, you wouldn’t have known it wasn’t the usual sort of saloon. There were tattoos and cutoff sleeves, some crew cuts and piercing, but these days you can find those even in a business hangout. Just as many of the clientele had on skirts and blouses and tailored suits. A variety of scents, drugstore and fashion counter, mingled with the hops and fermented grain. Amelia Earhart, Babe Didrikson, Hillary Clinton, Sally Ride in her flight suit, Billie Jean King, Gloria Steinem, and women I didn’t recognize hung in frames on the walls. Whoever had done the place had erred on the side of subtlety.
Don't Look for Me: An Amos Walker Novel (Amos Walker Novels) Page 7
