Sweet Women Lie

by Loren D. Estleman

  The Herbert S. Pingrees of this world aren’t supposed to wind up murdered. They’re charted for public-school educations, two years of business college, marriage to a plump girl who in middle age will starve and exercise herself down to gristle, tint her hair the ubiquitous beige, and complain that they never go anywhere. The Herbert S. Pingrees of this world are down for three children, one of them a problem, early hair loss, office football pools, and retirement in a concrete bungalow in Florida where the kids never visit. When they die, it’s supposed to be from too many potato chips and Sunday roasts and beers with the Five O’Clock Club on the way home from work. Nobody is supposed to find them crumpled up with a bellyful of cyanide in a cardboard office in East Detroit between a rub-a-dub emporium and Lawyer Dan, the Ambulance Man. A Teflon drawer in the county deep freeze is no place for the Herbert S. Pingrees of this world.

  Damn him anyway for snarling the statistics. I wasn’t in business to lie to the cops for Pingrees.

  At Conant I turned around and drove back the way I’d come, faster this time. The lights were all going to have to be with me if I were to keep a date for a dead man. He’d screwed me up again, making me forget to check my watch.

  The restaurant wasn’t hard to find for an experienced detective. It was a low sprawling red-brick building in the center of an asphalt parking lot with its name on a free-standing electric sign forty feet high and a black bull on its roof. A kid could have used the ring in its nose for a hula hoop.

  Inside, the motif was country kitchen. The floor was laid in sheets of broad planking with imitation pegs, the tables looked like butcher blocks, and homely samplers lined the printed-paper walls. The waiters were all in their twenties and wore white aprons that covered them from neck to knees. Knives and forks clattered, people talked like dogs barking in a kennel. It was a popular place.

  Edie was seated facing the door in a booth near the back. She wore a pink mock-turtleneck sweater and silver hoops in her ears, and her dark blond hair was pulled back and tied loosely behind her neck. The hair looked even better than in her photograph, waving naturally from a not-too-severe part in the center and gleaming softly and deeply, like cognac. She would wash it nightly in an herbal shampoo and stroke it one hundred times with a brush with natural bristles, applying the same kind of gratitude and awe that a poor man brings to his only valuable possession. As I approached the booth, she checked the time on a silver watch pinned above her left breast, made to look like a miniature grandfather’s clock complete with a pendulum that never moved; and I knew then with as much certainty as I knew anything that she still had the dollhouse her parents had given her for her eighth birthday, adding to it from time to time.

  “Edith Hibbard?”

  She looked up, startled. In person as in her picture, her blue eyes stood out a little, but they had a luminous effect, as in an Elizabethan painting. Her upper lip didn’t quite cover her prominent front teeth. “Yes?”

  “I’m Amos Walker, a friend of Herb’s. He asked me to meet you. He’s going to be a little late.” I held out one of my cards.

  She took it and read it. “He never mentioned you. Are you working together on something?”

  “Sort of. May I sit down?”

  “I guess so.” She laid the card facedown next to her silverware.

  I pegged my coat and hat on a partition between booths and slid in opposite her. The dividers extended eight inches above the red vinyl upholstery, creating the illusion of private rooms.

  She tried a smile that made me think of a pep rally. “Herbert never talks about his work. I think he thinks I don’t approve of it.”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t really understand it. My father offered him a job in the cement plant he manages, a desk position, but he turned it down. Herbert says he wants to make his own way.”

  “There’s something to be said for that.” It sounded like an epitaph.

  “Maybe. If only he weren’t in that awful building.”

  “He hasn’t been spending his allowance next door, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Next door? Oh.” She colored. You can’t fake that. She was younger than she looked in her picture, in her late twenties. For all that she didn’t seem as young as Pingree. Women straddle that line more often than men.

  “That’s a nice desk set you bought Herb,” I said.

  “Oh, did he tell you I gave it to him?”

  “He didn’t get around to it. It looked like a woman’s taste.”

  “Which is?”

  “Better than mine.”

  A waiter came. Edie asked for a glass of water. I ordered coffee. When we were alone again: “You said Herb never discusses his work. Does he keep records?”

  “I don’t know. He has a desk at home he keeps locked. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “He’s pretty busy.”

  It sounded lame as hell, but she didn’t seem to be paying much attention. The waiter returned, set a tall amber glass of water in front of her, and filled the cup at my elbow from a carafe. She waited until he left. “It really doesn’t matter,” she said. “About the massage place, I mean. Didn’t Herbert tell you? He’s moving out soon.”

  “Of his building?”

  “No, out of the apartment. Our apartment. Well, my apartment; Herbert barely makes enough to keep up the rent on the office. I’ve met someone.”

  I don’t know why it rocked me. It wasn’t shaping up to be one of Herbert’s better days. “Did you tell him?”

  She sat back then, her antennae fully extended. “Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you. I’ve only known you five minutes.”

  “You didn’t tell him.”

  “We discussed his moving out. I told him I thought it was a good idea. I said we needed some time apart. If that isn’t telling him, what is?”

  “Telling him,” I said. “Herb’s grasp of the obvious is slippery at best.”

  Her eyes had a hurt-deer look. “Why are you so angry? I was right, I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.” She glanced down at the tiny grandfather’s clock on her bosom. “Did Herbert say how late he was going to be? I have to be back at school in an hour.”

  I stood up. “I just remembered I have to make a telephone call.”

  I walked past the pay telephone and through an arch to the rest rooms. In the men’s room I grasped the sink with both hands and looked at my reflection in the mirror. It was my face, all right. I recognized the sly cast of the features, the feral gleam in the eyes, the predatory mouth. Someone with a face like that would crank up a dead man and make him walk around one more time, just long enough to turn out his pockets and count his valuables. He would rob graves, con widows, and rip the DO NOT REMOVE tags off mattresses. Nothing was beyond him, least of all lying to Snow White about the state of Dopey’s health to find out what he could about Dopey’s last days.

  Sweet women lie, kid, Dale Leopold had said, a long time ago, when he found out his partner was going to be married. Men lie to get something or get out of something. Women lie because they’re good at it. The sweeter the woman, the better the liar. They’re so good at it they hardly ever have to pull a trigger. Somebody always does it for them. As good a liar as Catherine was she had nothing on Edie. Pingree had gone to the morgue thinking she was still his. But lying to her didn’t square anything.

  Dale was dead, too. Over a woman. She hadn’t even been in the same zip code when the trigger was pulled.

  I dashed water in my face and mopped it dry with paper towels. It was just a face after all, no better than most and not as good as some, but the one I had to look at if I didn’t want to go through life tripping over my beard. I ran a comb through my hair, straightened my tie, lifting the knot away from the shirt the way they advised in GQ, and went back and sat down opposite Edie. She was reading the menu now.

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  She looked at me over the top of the menu. “Who is?”

  “Herbert. Last time I saw him
the cops were tracing him with masking tape on the carpet in his office.”

  “How — ?” It didn’t mean anything yet. She was just asking the questions you ask when you don’t understand any of the answers.

  “Murdered. Poisoned, to put the fine point on it. This morning. Someone put cyanide in the water he’s always drinking. Or something that smelled a lot like cyanide and worked just as thoroughly.”

  “My Herbert?”

  “I tried CPR. Potassium cyanide paralyzes the breathing muscles; that’s how it works. If you get to them quick enough and can keep forcing air into their lungs until the paralysis wears off, you can save them. I didn’t get to him quick enough.” I paused. “If it means anything, I don’t think he suffered much. It’s a fast poison.”

  “If it means anything.”

  There was no hysteria, just a lot of quiet tears. The diners seated near us didn’t even look around. I saw our waiter coming and waved him away. I went for my handkerchief, but I wasn’t fast enough. Again. She opened a burlap purse with a daisy embroidered on it and took out some Kleenexes. I sipped coffee while she made repairs. It had grown cold, but not as cold as Herbert.

  She closed the purse with a sharp snap. Her face was flushed, but it might have been from the November air outside if you hadn’t seen her crying. “Who?”

  “That’s the question the police are asking. They’ll get around to asking you after they finish talking to a girl named Cathay. You’re sure Herb never told you what he was working on?”

  “If you were his partner, you’d know. Who are you?”

  “The card I gave you is genuine. Herb and I were in the same business and that’s as much as I knew about him until this morning when I found him.” I told her about the Club Canaveral, as much of it as I’d told Sergeant Trilby. “If I’m going to find out what his death has to do with anything, I’ll need to know who hired him and why. You said he kept a locked desk at home. Can I look inside it?”

  “Why should I let you?”

  “No reason. I don’t know much about the cops in East Detroit, but I know cops, and the smallest police force in the world is better equipped to handle murder than I am. On the other hand, if what I suspect draws any water, I may be holding more threads in this tangle than anyone else, and maybe one man can follow them farther faster than any local bureaucracy. In any case we’ll all have the same chance; a detective sergeant who calls himself Trilby and looks like something on the other end of a Phi Beta Kappa key will be calling on you any time.” I shut up for a beat. What the hell, cue the strings. “Besides, maybe Herbert would prefer I had a hand in.”

  That surprised her. “Why would he? You just said you never met before last night.”

  “Look at it from his side. If he was like the rest of us who ever shared housekeeping with a woman, he spent a good deal of time trying to make you approve of what he did. That desk set was a good move on your part, but he’d need more. If a fellow P.I. were to help clear up his murder, he might feel vindicated in his career choice. Call it one last gift from you and me, in place of what he should have gotten when he was here to appreciate it.”

  A busboy cruised over carrying a pitcher of water, saw that Edie’s hadn’t been touched, and sailed off. She ignored him. “Does that approach work very often?”

  “Almost never.” I sighed, sitting back. “Herb would’ve eaten it up.”

  “That’s the first thing you’ve said I agree with.” She slid to the edge of the booth. “Will you excuse me?”

  “Back to school, huh?”

  “No, I have to make a call. They’ll need to find a substitute for my afternoon classes. The apartment’s in Dearborn. Can you follow me that far, or do all detectives get lost as easily as Herbert?”

  17

  THE APARTMENT WAS in a new brick complex off Schaffer, set back two hundred feet from the highway at the end of a private street with a parking lot in front and a deer park behind, where the residents could stand on their narrow balconies and watch the tough city squirrels mugging each other for acorns. Dearborn was built by Ford for Ford. Its citizens drive Fords. Henry the First put together his prototype buggy there in a brick shed behind his house in 1896. Twelve years later he stamped his name all over the city, just as he did with his beloved Model T, and to this day you can drive there by way of Ford Road past Fordson High School, enter the Edsel Ford Freeway, and pass the Ford River Rouge plant. In 1914, Ford’s production line flooded Detroit with black immigrants looking for work, changing the complexion of the city forever, but not so many years ago a black family couldn’t live in Dearborn without having bricks thrown through their windows on a daily basis.

  We parked a few spaces apart — true to her community, Edie

  drove a two-year-old white Escort — and she unlocked a glass security door and led me up a quiet flight of shag-carpeted steps to the second floor, where the apartment she had shared with Pingree faced the parking lot. The layout was L-shaped, with a combined kitchen and living room taking up the shaft of the L and a small bedroom and bath in the leg. A sliding glass door opened onto a balcony where one person could stand comfortably. A brown mohair sofa and two matching chairs shared the living room with a console color TV, some magazines, a midget rolltop desk, and good Impressionist prints on the walls. There was a double bed in the bedroom between matching nightstands with pottery lamps on them and a Maxfield Parrish poster mounted over the headboard, showing a square-rigger heeling through a storm of whitecaps and orange lightning. I thought I could guess who had picked out the art in which room.

  Edie took my coat and hat and hung them with her coat in a closet. I wandered over to the little rolltop. “This the one?”

  “Yes. I don’t have a key. Can you pick a lock?”

  I grasped the top and pulled. It rolled up without resistance.

  “It’s always been locked before,” she said.

  I examined the lock. If it had been picked it had been a sweet job. “You might want to look around the place and see if anything’s missing,” I said.

  “Oh, God.”

  “Don’t worry. If whoever killed Herbert has been through this desk it isn’t you he’s after.”

  “Maybe Herbert just forgot to lock it this time.”

  “Did he ever forget before?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I went through the letters in the pigeonholes. All bills, addressed to Pingree’s office. They didn’t tell me anything except that he was a month late paying Detroit Edison and had received a dunning notice from a collection agency employed by the corporation that owned his building. “You’d better look around,” I said. “Just this morning someone told me that when something changes in a man’s life just about the time he gets dead, it’s a change worth checking.”

  While she was looking I went through the drawers, also unlocked. Stationery, a rack of alphabetical file folders in the deep drawer with nothing in them, a drawer full of receipts, many of them from the speedy-print place across from Pingree’s building. Edie returned to my side as I was going through the last. “Nothing seems to be missing.”

  I closed the drawer. “Did you ever see Herbert put anything in this desk?”

  “He had this habit of taking slips of paper out of his wallet and throwing them in that drawer.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing. Well, a couple of times I saw him take a big manila envelope out of the top drawer and pull something out and look at it, then put it all back.”

  “You’re sure it was a manila envelope?”

  “Yes, a big one. Stuffed full. It was starting to split.”

  I went through the top drawer again, then all the others. I felt inside the compartment under the pigeonholes on top. Just for the hell of it I worked my fingers into the narrow space between the rolltop and the top of the pigeonholes, where things sometimes disappear in desks of that design. I got a splinter under a fingernail from an unfinished edge, nothing more.

  “That explains
why he didn’t toss the apartment,” I said. “He got what he was after.”

  “Do you think that’s why Herbert was killed?”

  “Either that or he’s mopping up. Poor Herb. He was cagey enough to keep his dynamite out of the office and dumb enough to tell his killer where he kept it. Otherwise the guy would’ve hung around to search the office after Herb died.”

  “He always thought he was ahead of the pack,” she said. “It was cute for a while. God, I can’t believe he’s dead.”

  The drawer containing the receipts was still open. Something had rung my doorbell when I first saw them, then run away. Now it rang again. I pointed at the telephone on the end table by the sofa. “Can I use that?”

  She said of course. Information gave me the number of the East Detroit printer. I pecked it out. A male voice with a cigarette wheeze answered. I asked it if they did photocopying. The owner of the voice said if it weren’t for photocopying they wouldn’t have any business at all. I thanked him and hung up.

  “What was that about?” Edie asked.

  “Maybe Herb wasn’t back with the pack all the time.” I walked the length of the apartment and back, sucking on my sore finger. I imagined I was a little guy in a loud sportcoat. I stopped in front of a built-in bookcase next to the balcony door. It contained a number of volumes and some Mexican pottery that matched the lamps in the bedroom. “Whose books, yours or his?”

  “Most of them are mine. That top row is his. Was his.”

  Some hardcover detective novels, a couple of trashy best sellers, and a book without a jacket whose green cover caught my eye because I had one just like it in my little home library. Detroit Is My Own Home Town, by Malcolm W. Bingay. I slid it out and opened it to the table of contents. I ran my finger down the page, found what I wanted, and turned to that chapter.