Sweet Women Lie

by Loren D. Estleman

  “AIDS inspection.” I flashed the honorary sheriff’s star pinned to my wallet. “This one looks clean.”

  The redhead in the carhop’s uniform was emptying the ashtray at our table into a handheld scuttle with a lid. Catherine wasn’t there. I’d forgotten about her. I put down money for the drinks, gave the redhead a ten, and asked her to tell the lady in the bathroom the coast was clear. The band was playing “Just Like Romeo and Juliet” when I left.

  13

  WARMTH WRAPPED ITSELF around me like a heated towel when I opened the side door from the garage. My furnace was still working, even if the rest of my life wasn’t. The oil stench got into the sandwich I made from the last edibles in the refrigerator, making it taste like something smoked over crude. I chased it with milk and poured myself a drink for dessert, but I felt lower than liquor could reach that night. I gave all but one sip a sea burial in the kitchen sink. It didn’t go down. That night was the drain’s turn.

  When the plunger didn’t do anything I stripped to the waist and took the trap apart with the big Johnny wrench that had come over from Brobdingnag with Gulliver. The plug of hair and black sludge that plopped out when I turned over the trap broke in two halves like an oyster shell, exposing my class ring, which I hadn’t seen since June. I hoped it was a good omen.

  It wasn’t.

  While I was wiping it with the rag I had under the sink, a pair of soft tasseled loafers walked up to the cabinet and stopped. I recognized the loafers. They were the next best thing to bare feet and therefore ideal for a trained kick-boxer like Bill Sahara’s man Dan Wessell. I didn’t see Earl Moss’s box-toed Oxfords, but it was a fair bet they weren’t far away. I needed a better lock on my front door.

  I picked up the big wrench and brought the heavy end down as hard as I could on Wessell’s right big toe. He howled and started dancing on the other foot. I swept the wrench sideways. It cracked against the raised bone of his left ankle and he made an animal noise and came down like a sack of doorknobs.

  I scrambled out from under the sink. Earl Moss, standing by the door to the garage, was clawing a slim automatic out of a belt clip under his topcoat. I took two steps, almost tripping over his partner, and swung the wrench. The pistol went through the window over the little breakfast nook. I followed through, bending my elbow, and brought it up hard under his chin. His head snapped back, thumping the door. I backhanded and rammed the wrench handle into his groin. His eyes turned inward comically. He clutched himself with both hands and slid into a sitting position on the floor.

  Wessell was rolling from side to side on the floor, clutching his smashed foot. I held the wrench ready while I groped inside his coat. He didn’t object. A spring clip released his pistol into my hand, an L-frame Walther GSP .22 with a fourteen-shot magazine that fed through a rectangular extension of the trigger guard. The nub of exposed barrel was threaded for a suppressor.

  A handsome gun, chalk-colored steel with a mutant grip shaped to snuggle into the fist. A light weapon, with almost no recoil and a report no louder than you’d make opening a pop bottle. A genteel killer, as common to the professional predators who prowl the airports and missile bases of the world as the tommy gun was to their grandfathers and the single-action Colt was to their grandfathers, who played faro with their off hands to keep their shooting hands free and called one another out into the street when they couldn’t circle behind. It seemed a waste of modern technology on their class.

  The telephone rang in the living room. I got rid of the wrench and went in and picked up the whole instrument and brought it to the kitchen door, which was as far as the cord would reach. I parked the pistol under my left arm to lift the receiver, then tucked the receiver under my chin and took the gun back in my right hand, supporting the telephone standard with my left.

  “About time,” I told the caller. “The boys were afraid you’d forgotten about them.”

  “Walker?” That arid voice, as empty of personality as a dial tone. “Put Moss on, I want to talk to him.”

  I looked at the big man, still holding himself and taking deep breaths and blowing them out. “He’s indisposed. So’s Wessell. Everyone’s indisposed except me. May I take a message, Mr. Sahara?”

  “What did you do to them?”

  “Don’t worry. Your place-kicker’s on the disabled list for the season and you may have to change any plans you’ve made to put your fullback out to stud, but they’re alive. Message, please.”

  “I told them to bring you to see me. I told them not to start anything.”

  “They started something when they walked into my house uninvited. I have a strong reaction to things like that. Especially after the same pair knocked me around in the concourse last week. Check the Michigan statutes on self-defense. Or is the law just something you smack when it lands on your cheek?”

  “I want to see you.”

  “Make an appointment. You know my number at the office, also my shorts size.” I cradled the receiver. The telephone began ringing again as I set it back down in the living room. I let it. Back in the kitchen, I nudged Moss with a toe. “Up, Rosencrantz. Take Guildenstern and dangle.”

  “What about our guns?” He worked the words up through his larynx like toothpaste through an exhausted tube.

  “You’ll get them back at the end of the semester. Let’s move.”

  He put a palm on the floor and pried himself up, supporting his crotch with the other hand like a truss. “Jesus, I think I got a hernia.”

  “Next time wear a cup.”

  It was even money which man groaned loudest as Moss helped Wessell to his feet, or rather foot; the thinner man held up the crippled one like a lame stallion and leaned on his partner. The other leg wobbled. The ankle had begun to swell where I had struck it with the wrench, but it wasn’t broken. I went ahead of them through the living room and held open the front door. On the stoop Moss paused. “I bet you think you’re safe here.”

  “Safe’s for the cemetery.”

  I watched from the doorway as they weaved down to the street. A light was on in the home of the Chrysler block assembly inspector who lived across from my house. Two more damaged guests leaving the Walker place, Ruth. He must throw one hell of a party.

  After a while a car started up down the street and mumbled away. I got a flashlight then and went out and poked through the junipers under my kitchen window until I found Moss’s pistol, another Walther GSP threaded for a suppressor. I put it along with Wessell’s gun in my car so I wouldn’t forget to take them to the office and found some cardboard to tack over the broken pane. Before I went to bed I added the window to the list of expenses in my notebook.

  The telephone rang once again, but this time the caller gave up after six.

  14

  EAST DETROIT IS an angry child, connected to the mother city by a steel umbilical cord and despising every inch of it. Bordered on the south by the Detroit leviathan, on the west by the sprawling General Motors playground of Warren, on the north by the essentially featureless Roseville, and on the east by the turquoise swimming pools, exclusive storefronts, and overcrowded berths of St. Clair Shores, it’s a landlocked community that yearns to be an island and lacks only the business, industry, self-awareness, and courage to secede. Every generation or so it signs a petition to dump the Detroit from its name and votes against doing so. Of all of the city’s dozens of boroughs, East Detroit alone refuses to accept its dependence as inevitable; but always in rhetoric, never at the polls.

  That morning it was a November town, gray as rock mold and bleaker than Sunday in Toledo. A dusty snow had been falling since dawn, but the sidewalks and pavement were too warm to sustain it and the flakes sailed and spun like paper cinders on the ground currents and dissolved when they touched down.

  Pedestrians, what there were of them, hurried along with their hands in their coat pockets and their chins inside their collars, on the theory that wherever they were going had to be better than where they’d been. They weren’t g
oing where I was.

  The address Herbert S. Pingree had given me belonged to a row of empty HUD houses off Gratiot with blank autistic windows and what remained of an office block constructed at the turn of the century, with faded brick fronts and iron fire escapes and on the east end squares of shredded wallpaper in different patterns and colors where the rest of the block had been torn away from a common wall; a crazy quilt of separate lives forgotten, like the silhouettes of vaporized victims burned into a wall in Hiroshima. I parked in a spot where I could watch the locals vandalizing my car from the windows and went inside.

  The linoleum in the foyer, marbled with filth, peeled away from my heels when I lifted them. Most of the white plastic letters were missing from the wall directory. The elevator was vintage Otis with a cage and four dimples in the matted carpet made by the stool where the operator used to sit and work the handle before buttons were installed. That was a loss. I could have used a garrulous old man that morning with a weather eye for a hungover detective and a sure-fire cure. The car bellowsed and shuddered up the five stories to Pingree’s floor, missing it by eight inches. I stepped out into a dim hall smelling of stale cigars and secondhand ideas. A building with character, the landlord would call it.

  A hardwood floor in need of sanding and varnishing, plaster walls that had been patched and then touched up with paint a shade off the original. Anonymous offices dark behind their beveled glass panels. Spotty legends on doors flanked by vacant rooms: APEX DENTAL SUPPLY; BARLOW GREGG, ATTORNEY AT LAW; PEERLESS VIDEOS; KARL’S KARAVAN OF KOMIX; UNIQUE NAILS AND ELECTROLYSIS. The sad monotonous gauntlet of Zeniths, A-1s, and Acmes that collect at the nadir of capitalism like flotsam in a storm drain. If they advertised at all it was after the Japanese movie between the midnight party line and Wazoo Waterbeds. Someone had a TV set tuned to a manic local talk show, entertaining himself between customers. Someone else, similarly unencumbered, yawned bitterly, squeaked his desk chair, and yawned again. Behind Barlow Gregg’s door a hunt-and-pecker plucked without enthusiasm at a manual keyboard, polishing a tort or writing a letter to the landlord in lieu of that month’s rent while his secretary was out filing a claim against her employer for back wages. A story in back of every lettered window, a little tragedy with all the raw dramatic power of a notice under Situations Wanted. An office whose shadow haunted the nightmares of slipping account executives and middle-aging vice presidents with young sharks working just below them. A roof and four walls between the occupant and the line where they gave out surplus food. Chapter Eleven and a Half.

  The number I wanted was part of a two-room suite, intended originally as an office and a reception room, one to let the public in, the other to let the busy executive out in case he didn’t like the looks of the public. Now they belonged to two separate businesses. The door on the private office, a corner room, read ANTOINETTE’S ACADEMY OF MASSAGE. The other announced itself as the portal to TRANS-GLOBAL INVESTIGATIONS, painted in an impressive arch with “Herbert S. Pingree, President” closing it off in smaller letters at the bottom. Inside the arch, straddling a gridded globe, was a pair of stylized eyes, twice as many as Pinkerton’s. They seemed to be looking down the hall for bill collectors.

  I raised my fist to knock, stopped. On the other side of the door something shattered that was made of glass. It was followed by a noise I was more familiar with than I wanted to be, a kind of crumpling thud coupled with a grunt.

  I was heeled that morning. I drew the Smith & Wesson and held it barrel high as I twisted the doorknob, leaning my weight on it so it wouldn’t rattle. It rotated without resistance and I went in with the door, bringing the revolver down and my other hand up off the knob to support my wrist, just like on the range. That gave me the drop on an uninhabited office.

  It was half again deeper than a closet, but not much wider: If you stretched your arms out sideways you could almost touch both side walls. They had been painted recently, a deep forest green to cover the inevitable mustard yellow. The dark color made the room seem even smaller. A crisp new investigator’s license hung next to the door in a drugstore frame. Behind an imitation woodgrain desk, a window with its shade drawn halfway down looked out on a laundromat and a speedy printer’s. An old-fashioned water cooler burped in a corner and I almost shot it. There was a good walnut four-shelf bookcase stuffed with yellow law books and a set of blue numbered volumes on forensic science that I recognized. I received a flyer a couple of times a year asking me to subscribe to the series; they threw in the one on fingerprinting free when you placed your order. It looked like Herbert had a complete set.

  A curved shard of thick transparent glass winked at me from under the window, between the edge of the beige rug and the baseboard. It belonged to a tumbler. The hand that had held it — or maybe it wasn’t the hand — was clutching the edge of the desk on the far side. The nails looked gnawed. I stepped closer.

  He was down on one knee, wedged between the chair and the desk, with his other leg stretched out inside the kneehole. He had on the same green-and-yellow jacket or one like it. There couldn’t be another one like it. Holstering the .38, I went around the desk and eased back the chair. Herbert S. Pingree unfolded himself and sagged onto his back on the floor. As I bent over him, I heard the rattle and wheeze of the elevator down the hall. I straightened quickly, taking the gun out again, and reached the hall in three strides, but the indicator over the cage had already slid down to two. I put away the .38 and went back inside.

  Kneeling with my ear to Pingree’s chest, I thought I heard a heartbeat. Then I thought it was mine. I plucked some fibers from the carpet and held them under his nostrils. They seemed to be stirring, but I couldn’t tell if it was because he was still breathing faintly or because of the drafts that lanced through the rickety old building like a magician’s knives. I took off my coat and bunched it under his shoulders, tipped back his head, pinched his nose, gulped air, and breathed into his mouth. I kept that up for five minutes. Then I put my ear to his chest again. There was nothing going on there. I felt the big artery on the side of his neck. I stood up.

  The base of the broken glass had come to rest rightside up on the carpet. There was some clear liquid in the bottom. I picked it up with my handkerchief and stuck my nose inside. A scorched, bitter smell. You’d think he’d have noticed it. Maybe he didn’t want to seem impolite. I put the base down where I’d found it.

  The desk contained a blotter and pen set with matching brass trim, aside from the bookcase the single largest investment in the room. Probably an office-warming gift. A red plastic frame that went like hell with the set contained a portrait, one shoulder turned mock-seductively toward the camera, of a honey blonde with slightly protruberant blue eyes, a large nose, and an overbite. The hair was her best feature, but I liked the face fine. Nobody had been at it with a mallet and scalpel and a picture of Linda Evans for a model.

  Pingree’s appointment book was blank but for a single note on the top page: “Lunch Edie, Black Bull, 12:30.” It didn’t look like any sort of code. I tore off the page and pocketed it.

  I went through the drawers. Scissors, rubber bands, envelopes, a copper letter-opener with a lion’s head for a handle. Desk stuff. A collection of paperback detective novels in the deep file drawer, thumb-blurred and bloated. Herbert would sit with his feet crossed on the desk, reading and waiting for an exotic woman with a thick accent to come swaying through the door and offer to fall in love with him if he found her emerald necklace. While he was waiting he would have lunch with Edie of the Incisors. No telephone or address book. Herbert would have no addresses or telephone numbers to put in it except Edie’s, and he would have that memorized. He’d mentioned a girlfriend who taught English in Dearborn. The honey blonde looked like a teacher. I didn’t know what teachers looked like these days. I was just playing detective.

  There was a side door that would connect with Antoinette’s Academy of Massage, the other office in the suite. I tried it. Locked. A radio was playing easy listeni
ng music very low on the other side. I used my handkerchief on the things I’d touched in the office and went outside and rapped on Antoinette’s door. A female voice invited me in.

  It was a corner room as I said, twice as big as Pingree’s, painted dark red, with two windows on adjoining walls. A sort of cubicle had been constructed out of partitions to the left of the door with an archway closed off by wine-colored velvet curtains. Matching hangings draped the walls like bunting. A pile carpet the color of intestinal blood tickled my ankles. The music was muted and the place smelled of incense and liniment and more delicate oils in pump containers on shelves in back. She came to me from that direction, a small brown girl with her dark hair in a straight page-boy that may have been a wig and a silver-blue robe knotted around her waist with a green sash. Her bare feet were in platform sandals. I had a hunch I was looking at everything she had on. The hunch was confirmed when she passed through a shaft of weak sunlight and for a brief moment the robe became transparent. Her smile looked natural enough until you saw her eyes.

  “Are you Antoinette?” I asked.

  “No, I’m Cathay. Like in Cathy, only with an extra a.” Her voice said it was the first time the question had ever been asked. Her eyes added another digit to an invisible scoreboard.

  “Cathay, you don’t look Chinese.”

  “It’s okay. Antoinette isn’t French.” The smile faltered as she stopped in front of me, then came back with a determined kind of energy.

  My jaw ached. I realized I was grinning like a skull. I pulled my lips down over my teeth with an effort. Anybody not in Cathay’s racket would have run for cover at the sight of me. “How long have you been here, Cathay?”

  “About a year. The massage will be fifty dollars. You can take your clothes off in there.” She indicated the curtained cubicle.

  “I don’t want a massage. I didn’t mean how long you’ve been working here. I’m not making conversation. I meant how long have you been here today?”