Sweet Women Lie

by Loren D. Estleman

  “She returned here when that blew up. It was before we met, but I know most of the details. I investigated her past. That’s when I first came across your name.”

  “Being a spy sure comes in handy in the romance department.”

  “We have to be careful about our associations. Actually, I ran the check before I developed a personal attachment. I first saw her four years ago at a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn. For world hunger, if you can believe it. Her escort later used the money raised there to buy guns to sell to the rebels in El Salvador. He’s doing eight to twenty now in the federal corrections facility in Marion, Illinois.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “It wasn’t my bust. I just kept track of his movements while he was here and passed the information on to Washington, including what I’d learned about his lady friend. The job isn’t all killing. Anyway, something about Catherine interested me apart from the bare facts of her life — maybe I don’t have to tell you what it was — and I looked her up six months later. Six months after that, we were married.”

  “Sweet of her not to hold it against you for throwing her boyfriend in the slam.”

  “He wasn’t her boyfriend, just someone she’d met and a chance to dress up for the evening. When she was questioned she claimed ignorance of his activities, and our information confirmed that. Women get caught up in these things. It’s one reason most field agents are male. There are definite advantages.”

  “Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘service of your country.’ ” I looked at Custer. “Catherine always had lousy taste in men.”

  “I wasn’t aware from your file you’d given up on yourself.”

  “I meant the men she ran around with. She’s an adventuress, or she was when I knew her. Not too many of those left. They went out with silk bodices and schooners.”

  “I sensed that in her. Maybe it gave me a head start: James Bond and all that. You haven’t once asked how she is.”

  “Fine, I suppose. She always took care of herself first. Is she disappearing with you?”

  “No. The first rule of going underground is you have to cut yourself off from your past life entirely.” He raised and resettled his glasses. “You may as well know that things haven’t been good between us for a long time. That’s not why I’m dropping out, but it’s made the decision easier. Naturally she’ll be provided for.”

  “Naturally.” I picked up the envelope from the blotter, thumbed through the frayed $100 and $500 bills, took out a thousand, and gave him back the rest. “This buys four days: expenses. If it takes longer than that I’ll come back for more. This — and one other thing.”

  His amber gaze hardened. “You can’t see her. She’s being watched too closely. I can’t use you if the Company finds out we’re in contact.”

  “I don’t want to see her. I want my file.”

  “Your file, why?”

  “I’m fascinated by me. Can’t get enough of myself. I want every copy of every document, every picture and negative. The memory banks wiped clean. Six weeks from now when somebody feeds my name to a government computer, I want it to kick out a big fat question mark.” I caught a glimpse of Custer’s uniform. “On second thought, you can leave my service record; that’s public property. Everything else goes. Can you do it?”

  “The people who compile those things will just get back to work and in two years the record on you will be nearly as complete.”

  “I’ll take the two years. I didn’t hang those blinds because I was afraid someone would break in and steal the dead moths out of the light fixture. Can you do it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve falsified reports and destroyed papers, but that was when they were still in my hands, before they went into the mill. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have the ten thousand?”

  “It would just put me in a tax bracket. Can you do it?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Yes, damn it. I’ll have to call in some favors.”

  “The telephone’s in front of you.”

  “Now?”

  “Later you’ll be vanished. If I work it right I won’t be able to find you. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  He laid a hand on the receiver. “Give me twenty minutes.”

  I got my coat, went to the delicatessen down the street, and drank a cup of coffee. A pair of young women in rabbit coats seated at the next table were discussing trying out for parts in something by Ibsen at the Attic Theater. One of them stopped emoting long enough to ask me to put out my cigarette. We were in the smoking section, but I obliged. The neighborhood was changing. The next thing you knew they would plant trees along the sidewalks and drive away the working girls on the corner, and what street trade I had would dry up and blow away. I considered consulting the lady astrologer about a change in careers. Maybe Ibsen had something for me.

  Sahara was still talking on the telephone when I got back. I sat down in the waiting room and started an article about dinosaurs in the National Geographic, but that was too depressing, so I returned it to the coffee table and blew smoke at my framed Casablanca poster. Just then Sahara poked his head out of the office. “Well, there’s no going back to Washington now.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “I had to promise some things I won’t be able to deliver on from hiding. I’ll have the file by the end of the week.”

  “Thanks. Let’s talk details.” I patted the settee adjacent to my chair. A fine puff of dust coughed up. He chose the chair facing mine, which gave him a view of the door to the hallway. “Who’s following you and on whose orders?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure who’s doing the following. That suggests someone in particular, because if it were anyone else I’d have gotten a look at him by now. I haven’t lasted twenty years in this work by being inept. This one’s less so. His name’s Usher.”

  “Roderick?”

  “Frank. Short for Franklin. He prefers to be called Papa. He’s pushing sixty — not unheard of in the field, but rare enough to underline in his jacket. That should tell you something.”

  “Is he a killer?”

  “We’re all killers. This one made his bones infiltrating the black market in Vienna for the OSS after World War Two. I pulled his picture from the file.” He took it out of his handkerchief pocket and gave it to me.

  It was an old-fashioned portrait with a soft focus. I looked at an ordinary face, somewhat plump, with smoky eyes and dark thinning hair in a widow’s peak and a neat little moustache. The face could have belonged to a clerk who had been passed over for promotion so many times you could see footprints on his forehead. “How long ago was this taken?”

  “Nineteen sixty. He hasn’t posed for one since, and if there were ever any candids he’s burned all of them. He doesn’t have a standard ID because he refuses to sit for the picture.”

  “What’s he look like now?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve never met and there was no description in his file. He has cheap taste in clothes, that much I can tell you, and he sometimes carries a stick, but it’s just show. Papa’s a special case. Our little group was built around him, the way you build a road around a shaggy old oak because it’s too much trouble to cut down and blast out the stump. Also he’s good. That’s why he’s as old as he is. Some of the younger agents think he’s just a legend, one of those bogey stories rookies get told as part of their initiation. He’s real enough, all right. Thirty or forty witnesses would swear to it, if they weren’t all dead.”

  I put the picture in my shirt pocket. “Can he cross running water, and will ordinary bullets work on him or should I have some made out of silver?”

  “I just don’t want you complaining to me later I didn’t tell you how bad it can get,” he said. “I’m not even sure he’s the one tailing me. I hope I’m wrong. Shadow men come cheap. Papa doesn’t get on you unless he smells blood in the water.”


  “You didn’t answer the second part of my question. Who sicced him on you?”

  “Some desk pilot in Washington. Take your pick, they punch them out of a big sheet.”

  I asked a few more questions. When I had enough to fly on, I stood. “Let me set some stuff up. Where can I reach you?”

  “Leave a message if I’m not in. There’s a machine.” Rising, he handed me a stiff white card with a whorled surface bearing the legend JEROME BOSCH, COUNSELOR AT LAW and a city telephone number in shiny black characters.

  “Who’s Bosch?”

  “Nobody. You don’t think I put my own name on business cards.”

  “Hieronymous Bosch. The Garden of Earthly Delights. Cute. Would Usher know you’re an art connoisseur?” I put the card away with some others in my wallet.

  “I’m not. I took an art survey course twenty years ago in college and that’s all that stuck. I cover my tracks better than that.” He studied me. His scrutiny had all the disturbing power of screws in a strikeplate. “Was it Catherine that decided you to take the job?”

  “I think about Catherine as often as you think about Bosch. It so happens I’m not up to my hips in clients just now; it so happens that happens pretty often. I don’t like to do crossword puzzles and I’ve got a winter property tax payment due next month. And you and the Twins from the Tunnel will probably go on bracing me in embarrassing places until I agree to help you, so why not cut my losses?”

  “You’re a liar,” he said in a friendly tone.

  I moved a shoulder. “I didn’t care for it myself.”

  “I won’t say it’s none of my business. I’ve made a business out of things that are none of my business.”

  “Maybe I think a man should be able to quit his job when he wants to without getting killed for how well he did it. Or maybe it’s because of Gail Hope.”

  “She has nothing to do with this. She was just handy.”

  “Maybe she’s tired of being handy.”

  He smiled after a second. It transformed his face not at all. “Better. I suppose I am her last link to the Company. Whoever they send to replace me won’t remember the Lucy case. She’s one washed-up movie queen who might not mind being forgotten.”

  I waited while he went back into the private office and came out carrying his topcoat. He saw I was waiting. “Say it.”

  “I can be suckered,” I said. “I bat five hundred in that park. That doesn’t mean I like it. The next time you turn your dogs loose on me I’ll hurt one of them or both of them. You I won’t fool around with. You I’ll kill.”

  “It’s been tried.”

  “It only has to work once.” I opened the hallway door. “Be packed when I call. We may have to move fast.”

  He went out, letting me have the last word again. It made me feel cheap, but only for as long as it would take him to reach the second flight of stairs. Then I went out after him.

  9

  ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES of following someone in your own building is knowing which boards squeak and which steps wobble because the super hasn’t held a hammer since Eisenhower. I avoided all of them and reached the foyer just as the front door was closing against the pressure of the pneumatic tube.

  He had the tan coat on now and was walking east on Grand River, not hurrying but not wasting time either. His walk was as indistinctive as the rest of him. He was better than invisible, he was wholly unnoticeable. If his clothes had been any neater he’d have stood out; if his appearance had been any more drab he’d have called attention to himself. I wondered if he spent an hour in front of the mirror every morning, searching his person for anything that looked as if it hadn’t been milled in a factory before he went out, or if the camouflage came so naturally now he never even thought about it. Wondering that, I almost lost him. He blended into the unremarkable scenery of the neighborhood like a paper clip.

  I spotted him again as he stepped off the sidewalk. He looked both ways while I made myself insignificant — although not as much so as he — in a doorway, then crossed the street, unlocked the driver’s door of a dust-blue Chrysler parked on the other side and got in. I stayed in the doorway and took down the license number as he levered the car out into traffic. It didn’t spell anything.

  Back in the office I parked a hip on the desk and called Floyd Latimore at the local branch of the Secretary of State’s office. A catatonic civil servant of uncertain gender put me on hold and Floyd’s late-adolescent voice came on a minute later. He’d celebrated his fifty-second birthday in July. “Amos, you find an honest line of work yet?”

  “I had my eye on a TV pastorship,” I said, “but that went sour. I need a name to go with a number on a license plate.”

  “Call the cops.”

  “It isn’t police business yet.”

  “Lansing gets awful sore when we give that information out to the private sector.”

  “I didn’t call Lansing, Floyd, I called you. Do I have to go into why?”

  “Don’t be shrill. Let’s have the number.”

  I read it to him. Floyd had come to me some time back with a note from a first wife he had not quite managed to divorce before he married his second, demanding money to prevent her from charging him with desertion and bigamy. I’d done a little digging and turned up a husband the first wife had misplaced, still waiting for her to return from her hairdresser’s since before she’d met Floyd. I sent a photocopy of the marriage certificate to the return address on the blackmail letter and Floyd never heard back from her. It was a break for us both: now that John Alderdyce was an inspector he didn’t hardly associate with no rental heat, and I needed a pipeline to the computers that matched names to license plate numbers.

  “Twenty minutes,” Floyd said, after he’d read it back to me.

  “Why so long?”

  “Machines go to lunch too. I’ll call you.”

  I thanked him and went down the street for a BLT and advice from my waitress, a former nurse, on the care and feeding of the human heart. The telephone was ringing when I let myself back into the brain box.

  “Magoo, you need glasses,” said Floyd without greeting. “You wrote down the number wrong.”

  “Who’s it belong to, the governor?”

  “It belongs to Yehudi. No such plate has ever been issued to any car registered in this state. You sure it was Michigan?”

  “Yeah.” A cheek got sucked on. “What would it take for someone to get hold of a nonexistent registration number?”

  “Outside of stamping the plate himself, I couldn’t say. For that he’d need the equipment and reflecting paint, and the paint’s just a little easier to lay hands on than the ink they use to print currency in Denver. Oh, but then any cop who happened to run the number would pull him over once he drew a blank. The guy’s better off standing in line with the rest of us suckers and paying the two dollars.”

  “Do the cops use your computer?”

  “Not directly. The city and county computers are plugged into the state police and their computer’s wired to the Secretary of State’s office in Lansing.”

  “What if there’s a hold order in the state police computer when certain registration numbers are fed to it? The cop runs the plate, the dispatcher gets the word and tells him to pass this one by?”

  “Who are we talking about, the Swiss ambassador?”

  “Just spitballing, Floyd. I probably got the number wrong.” I lit a cigarette. “How are things at home?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m living at the Holiday Inn in East Detroit.”

  “What happened?”

  “Arlene found out about Robin.”

  “I thought your first wife’s name was Lois.”

  “Far as I know it still is. Robin is the woman I’m engaged to.”

  I blew smoke over the Little Big Horn. “Floyd, there’s an order to these things. Unless Arlene has another husband stashed somewhere like Lois did, you’re headed down a long dark hole.”

  “Oh, I’m divorcing Arlene.
She just didn’t know it until recently.” The line clicked twice; he had another call on his end. “Don’t screw up next time, okay? I’d hate to lose this job over a wrong number.”

  We hung up. I finished my cigarette in thoughtful silence, or in silence anyway. Floyd’s private life was worse than Omaha Beach, but he didn’t make mistakes on the job. And I hadn’t gotten a license number wrong since George Burns was in short pants. Bill Sahara, whoever he was, drove around with a plate that was as untraceable as his name and description. That at least was a grain on his side of the scales. The first part of any investigation is spent separating the slugs from the genuine coin, and so far this one rang true enough to proceed to the second part.

  Private eye evolution ought to include a leather behind and document-dust filters in the nostrils. Not possessing those improvements, I squirmed and sneezed away an hour in my second home, the third seat from the door of the microfilm room at the library, scrolling through the obituaries from the News, Times, and Free Press from 1948. The choice of years was a little better than a crapshoot. Sahara had mentioned being in college twenty years ago, and the average age of a graduating senior then as now would be twenty-two. In any case I wasn’t estimating aircraft measurements for Boeing.

  The Times had what I was after, in its Tuesday, July 6 edition:

  Benjamin Boyer, aged 2 mos., 11 days: Born April 24, 1948, to Julius Glynn Boyer and Marian Bernadette (Shepherd) Boyer of 1523 Woodrow Wilson Court; died Monday morning at home of respiratory failure. Survivors, in addition to his parents …

  I took a moment to think about Julius and Marian: placing the notice, picking out the little coffin, painting over the clowns on the nursery walls in silence. Maybe there weren’t any clowns. Maybe there wasn’t a nursery. Maybe Julius and Marian had never wanted a child in the first place and took off for Europe to celebrate. Maybe I ought to lay off the private emotions of others, at least until I finished robbing the grave. I wrote down what I needed and went from there to the City-County Building, where I asked a clerk in Records with a Knights Templar pin on his lapel to look up the 1948 birth certificate of one Benjamin Boyer. He made a nasty face and told me to come back tomorrow. I offered him the Masonic handshake. He took it after a second and asked me to wait. The handshake was all I’d gotten in payment from a Manufacturers Bank vice president for pulling his sixteen-year-old daughter out from under a bass guitarist in Grand Ledge; this was the first time it had bought me anything, but then the daughter had run away again anyway after two weeks and I’d told the vice president to find another sleuth. I read a poster warning me to stay away from Laetrile and when the clerk came back with the certificate I paid him a fee to make two copies on official stock. I got out of there at the price of another handshake.