Less subtle was the path of silence I towed through the room as I made my way to the bar. The original murmur of conversation closed back in behind me, but I felt a little like a cattle baron’s gunslinger entering a saloon full of small-time ranchers. Eyes watched me under the corners of lashes from the seats on either side as I rested a hand on the bar top. A tall slender party in a starched white blouse placed a drink on a fresh napkin at the end and drifted my way. “What’s your pleasure?”
“I’m open to suggestions,” I said. “Hemlock, or a strychnine spritzer? Whatever makes me popular.”
“It isn’t that bad. It’s just the name of the place. Thirty-two weeks without a single castration.” She dyed her collar-length hair a bright shade of copper, which went well with her pale coloring and a band of freckles across her cheeks. She was either a mature thirty or a well-maintained forty. Her eyes smiled even though her mouth didn’t. “Whiskey sour? You don’t look like a man with a sweet tooth.”
“Hold the syrup.” I watched her mix the bourbon and lemon juice in a tumbler. She reached for the sugar, thought better of it, left it where it was, and gave the swizzle a couple of turns. When she set the glass in front of me I slid a ten-spot her way.
“Run a tab?”
“Maybe. Anyway, don’t make change just yet.”
A pug-nose blonde two seats down touched her glass. I waited while the bartender replaced it with a full one and caught her eye at the register. She brought the blonde her change and came back, brows raised. “Trouble with your drink?”
“It’s okay. I watched you fix it. This woman been in lately?” I gave her one of the prints I’d had made of Cecelia Wynn’s picture.
She whistled low. “Looker. Police?”
“Private.” I gave her a card. “She’s been missing about a week.”
“Don’t know her, but I’m just part-time. Putting my way through community college.”
“Recent split?” She had a pale spot on her ring finger.
“Recent, and unofficial. It wasn’t legal to begin with, thanks to the good ole boys in Lansing. The rest of the time I model for art classes. Shocked?”
“To the heels. Get many complaints about the freckles?”
She decided to laugh at that. “It pays better than slinging drinks, but the work’s harder. I can always tell when the instructor never modeled. They think we’re made of pipe cleaners, and their watches run slow: A twenty-minute pose can run a half hour.”
“What’s your major?”
“Engineering. What was yours?”
“Sleuthing. Okay if I work the room?”
She sucked in a cheek, chewing.
“I’ll be gentle. Client just wants to know she’s healthy.”
“I’d steer clear of the corner booth.”
I had a view of it in the mirror behind the bottles. A hefty woman in a sweatshirt sat alone there, both hands wrapped around a glass the size of a burial urn, reading the tea leaves in the bottom. “Dumped?”
“For a pair of pants. I’d like that no-castration record to stand a little longer.”
“What’s she drinking?”
“She started on Harvey Wallbangers. Had me hold the orange juice the last three hits.”
“People who drink straight vodka aren’t drinking for laughs. She got a ride home?”
“Takes the bus.”
“Set her up again on me.” I pushed another ten after the first.
“Mister—”
“Walker. Don’t worry. I’ll work my way around, come in downwind. Keep the rest. We need engineers more than we need bartenders.”
“Her name’s Loretta.”
“What’s yours?”
This time she smiled with her mouth. “Single malt.” She rang up the bills and poured herself three inches from a bottle of Glenfiddich.
I wet my lips on my glass—I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was too sour—and salted the room with Cecelia Wynn’s picture. I found out who was bi and who was committed, got away from under one bedroom gaze while her partner was burning slowly, bought a drink for a party of four that couldn’t decide whether they’d seen her around, bypassed a two-top when the woman saw me coming and transferred her Coach handbag from the back of her chair to the seat of the one vacant. By the time I got to Loretta’s booth, she was almost finished with the drink I’d sent over. She had an unlit cigarette in the corner of her mouth and she was swaying in place, but the pair of eyes that moved my way were as steady and solid as gray stones.
“Thanks for the booze,” she said. “I’m not changing sides.”
“I’m not recruiting. Okay if I join you? I’m working.”
“That’s what Dixie said.”
“Dixie?”
“The bar girl. What’s the matter, not detective enough to find out who you’re talking to?”
“I asked. She doesn’t draw out her vowels enough for a Dixie.”
“Maybe her old lady named her after a paper cup.” She tilted her football-size head toward the seat opposite. I slid in, got the redhead’s eye, and twirled my finger.
Loretta waited until after the drinks were brought and we were alone again, then wrapped her hands around her fresh glass. “This like a piece of raw meat wrapped around a tranquilizer pill?”
“Dixie got me a little scared.”
“I don’t bite,” she said, “men. Why blame the guy? You get tired of packing those things around, you have to stick it someplace. Where you do that’s up to the stickee.”
I drank, said nothing. I was getting used to the puckery taste.
The woman in the sweatshirt took a healthy sip without taking the cigarette from her mouth. The sleeves were short. She had a tiny heart tattooed on the underside of her thick upper arm with a ribbon wrapped around it. It was blank. She saw me see it.
“Keeping my options open; or I was. I had it in mind to have her name put on it next week.
“I’ve known what I am since I was twelve,” she went on. “Suzie said she was full-throttle, too. Men don’t have the corner on lying their way into a woman’s pants. I was just an interesting detour along the way. A story to share with her friends in the book club over a dirty martini when hubby’s on the links and the brats are in day care.”
A teardrop the size of a pearl onion rolled out over her lower left lid and followed the crease from the corner of her nose to the corner of her mouth, where it quivered before evaporating.
“Mine left me, too,” I said when she didn’t continue.
“Man? Woman? Never mind. Doesn’t matter. A lot of people think it does, but it’s the same plot with different characters. I bet you thought it was your fault.”
“Thing is, it was.”
“Unfaithful?”
I laid Cecelia Wynn’s picture in front of her. She went on watching me for fifteen seconds, then scraped it up from the table and turned it over to look at it, like a playing card. That gave her a view of the back, which was blank. She turned it over again, studied it, shook her head, put it down, and picked up her drink.
“I don’t know her. We don’t all know each other, you know.”
“Facebook will change all that. She’s new. She might not be ready for the social scene. For all the evidence I’ve got, she might not even have changed teams. I’m just playing an angle.” I laid my card on top of the photo. “I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know if any of your friends recognize her. She might be in trouble.”
“Who isn’t?”
I left money for the liquor and was halfway to the door when I turned around and went back. I tore a sheet from my notepad, wrote a number on it, and held it out.
She looked at it without taking it. “Who answers if I call?”
“An actress named Foster. She does girl-on-girl at a place called Stormy Heat Productions.”
“I know Stormy Heat. Their straight porn’s the same old shit, but whoever does the gay stuff knows his business. Or hers. This a fix up?”
“That’
s up to you. I wouldn’t use my name. We had us a little dustup before we parted. But she’s committed, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
“Keep it. I’m depressed, not desperate.”
I stuck the sheet in a pocket. “Memorized it, didn’t you?”
“Thanks for the drinks.”
The stoplight at Ten Mile Road had a NO TURN ON RED sign. I slid up to the crosswalk, tapped the brake, then punched the accelerator before my brake light could come on and swung into the outside lane. Behind me the driver of a Smart Car crossing with the light screeched his brakes and leaned on his nasal little horn for the benefit of a gray Lincoln Town Car turning behind me against the light.
I turned left at Van Dyke and stayed below the limit the rest of the way into Detroit. I didn’t want to lose my shadow, just find out what it looked like.
TWELVE
I tried a drop-behind, as much to find out how good the tail was as to get a glimpse of the plate. I slowed, after which the Town Car did the same, falling back half a block and letting a dilapidated station wagon pass him on the inside lane and slide back into the outside, separating us. A point in his favor: An inexperienced shadow gets nervous when open road isn’t available. Town Car closed in on the wagon, increasing speed comfortably while leaving enough room to slide around the obstacle when necessary. I swung right onto the broken pavement of a lot belonging to a check-cashing emporium with bars in the windows, goosed the pedal, and skinned between the cinder-block building and a chain-link fence on the other side of a constipated alley, then opened all four barrels circling the building. When I came out on the other side there was no sign of the Lincoln. SOP so far.
Back on the street heading in the same direction I’d been going, I fell back to twenty-five, then lingered at a STOP sign before creeping across the intersection, keeping one eye on the mirror and the other on the street ahead, in case the driver had cruised on past, preferring losing me to the risk of discovery. Even that would be valuable information: Cops in general don’t care if you know they’re following; criminals almost always do.
I increased speed, looking to catch up with him. I caught a break at a light, but stamped on the brake in the next block to avoid rear-ending a panel truck. When I got around it, all I saw was congealing traffic up ahead and deserted street behind.
I passed a curbside strip mall containing a dry cleaner, an auto-parts store, a grubby little place that advertised yoga instruction and probably ran numbers out the back door, and a Christian Science reading room with curtains in the windows. Out of its parking lot came the Town Car. From then until I got back to the office it stuck to my heel like toilet paper.
The driver was good. I knew, because vehicular tails are one of my special talents; but I’m usually hindered by the lack of a good leg man in the passenger’s seat to bail out and continue the surveillance on foot when the mark finds the only parking space on a busy street and takes it on the ankles.
This one wouldn’t be operating under such a handicap. The bump I’d spotted atop the right-side seat could have been a headrest or a head. It would be a head; and so it was two against one.
Not so frightening odds, when I was thirty. But that train had sailed. Waiting for the light to change at Eight Mile Road, I popped open the nifty little hatch under the glove compartment and transferred the Chief’s Special in its clip to the belt next to my right kidney.
I wondered who I’d ticked off this time, and if it had anything to do with the case I was working. That’s the trouble with a long and colorful career. You never know whether you’ve made a new enemy or it’s just old business.
Rosecranz, the gnarled gnome who represented the one note of consistency in a building that changed tenants as regularly as lightbulbs, was rearranging the same gray city grit in the foyer with a push broom that was nearly as bald as he was. He’d given up actually removing the dirt sometime around the first Gulf War. He claimed his mother had saved him from the Bolsheviks by throwing him out an open window, which if true put him just on the shady side of a hundred: But with each passing year he shriveled and shrank a little bit more, never suppurating, just becoming dryer and more wrinkled. He looked like a potato that had fallen back into the pantry and been overlooked for a year.
When he saw me he shouldered his broom at parade rest. “You have a visitor. The Cossack?”
Which was his not-so-pet name for my bane and salvation, a public fixture every bit as permanent as Rosecranz, but with considerably more influence on my life than a petrified potato.
“Let him in?”
He lowered the broom to the floor, leaning the handle against his shoulder, and spread a pair of hands slabbed with decades of callus. “I should say no? January comes, goes, I am too busy always to register.”
I skinned a five-spot from my wallet and held it out. A lot of building superintendents wouldn’t bother to tell a tenant there was a cop waiting for him in his private office. The bill went into a pocket of his overalls so fast I wasn’t sure it had changed hands at all.
At the first landing I leaned against the scaly wainscoting and lit a cigarette, to flatten my nerves and build me up for battle. After half a dozen puffs I dropped it onto the rubber tread and ground it out with my foot, into the gray compost of its ancestors. I don’t know what we’ll do when they finish taking tobacco from us. Heroin’s too cumbersome, with its spoons and matches and rubber hoses, and coke goes against the grain: Most of the human orifices are designed for exits, not entrances. Mountain goats unwind from the office by butting heads. I didn’t see the percentage. I never had; but it was part of my job description.
“I don’t know why you waste the rent. You’re never here.”
John Alderdyce sat behind my desk with my office bottle standing on the blotter and a shot glass hiding out in his fist like a thimble in a catcher’s mitt. He’s an inspector with the Detroit Police Department—Homicide, to put the fine point on it—and as much as he looks like a grizzly bear carved with a chainsaw from a living oak, he likes to drape himself in fine tailoring. Today he had on a plum-colored suit over a grayish-pink shirt. His necktie was aubergine, held in place with a platinum clip bearing his initials in onyx.
“It’s Detroit, John,” I said. “Real estate’s as cheap as life.”
“How long have you been holding on to that one?”
“Just since the last time we met. Anything left?” I pointed at the bottle.
“You know, there’s a law against advertising Scotch as Scotch that didn’t come from Scotland. The label reads like a Japanese instruction manual.”
“You think I keep the good stuff out where any flatfoot can lay hands on it?” I went around him, unlocked the cast-iron safe that had come with the office, and stood a fifth of Glenfiddich on top of the desk. It was two-thirds full: I doled the stuff out to myself like penicillin in an epidemic.
He drew the bottle close to him, studied the label, unscrewed the top, sniffed. Finally he tossed what was in his glass into the ossified plant in the corner and poured two inches into the bottom. He found another glass among the paper clips and Past Due bills, measured out the same amount, and pushed it my way.
“Global warming,” he toasted.
“Can’t come soon enough to suit me.” I laid away what was in the glass. “Who’s dead?”
“Who isn’t? I got two women on an apartment floor on East McNichols who went missing in Flint, a homeless guy with his brains beat out in a tent in Cobb Field, a six-year-old girl on Vernor whose uncle doused her with tiki-torch fuel and touched it off for wetting the bed, and a stiff in a basement on Livernois belonging to the manager of a health-food store, all since I clocked in this a.m.”
As he spoke, he held his glass at eye level, pretending to study its machine-cut facets but actually using it as a magnifying lens to watch my face. I rolled a shoulder and sat in the customer’s chair bolted beyond halitosis range in front of the desk. “I haven’t been to Flint in a year. It isn’t on the way to an
ywhere. You’ve got the uncle, I’m guessing. Do I look like I hang out in health-food stores?”
“Surveillance camera belonging to the dollar store across the alley says you do. It was time-stamped yesterday afternoon.”
“Dollar stores need cameras now?”
“Narcotics raided the place this morning. The corporation that owns it has a medical-marijuana license, entitling it to maintain twelve plants per customer. The officers found seven hundred and ninety-two plants thriving under grow-lights in the basement.”
I almost said the basement couldn’t be that big; I caught myself in time. The camera story could be just a dodge to back up a shaky eyewitness. “How much space does that take up?”
“Eight hundred square feet. It’s a big old dugout, half of it belonging to a farmhouse next door that was torn down around the time of the Armistice. So almost a plant per square foot, and incidentally the manager, thriving not so much.”
“How many pot customers does the place have?”
“Fifteen.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a competitor got jealous.”
“Narcs say no. No such chatter going around. This was the second unit. First’s still tamping out that super-heroin fire from last year before we run clean out of junkies who don’t check the dosage. There’s not enough money in pot to risk a homicide investigation. Anyway they kicked it over to us, and here I am.”
“What’s his name?”
“Radu Czenko.” He spelled the name. “Age thirty, Romanian, naturalized citizen, emigrated with his parents after the Ceausescu assassination. BS degree in Horticulture from Michigan; as if you need a diploma to water and heap shit on marijuana plants. They don’t call ’em weed for nothing. No known living relatives, lived alone in a rented house in Redford. Nobody to report him missing. No priors. Single shot through the bridge of the nose.”
“Professional size caliber?”
“What’s that? Every copycat’s seen Law and Order. We’ll know what size when the M.E. digs out the slug. Right now the padlock on the outside of the basement door makes a compelling case against suicide.”
Don't Look for Me: An Amos Walker Novel (Amos Walker Novels) Page 8
