Sweet Women Lie

by Loren D. Estleman

  “No. Or the locked desk either. The sergeant asked if Herbert had any enemies or if I knew what he was working on. I said I couldn’t help him. I hope I did the right thing.”

  “So do I.”

  She didn’t pick up on it. “What was in the box?”

  “Bills mostly, and all of them paid up. Did he tell you he came into some money recently?”

  “No. But then we haven’t talked, really talked, for some time. Not since I suggested he move out. It’s been a crowded semester for me, and I’ve been seeing Tim besides.”

  “Tim?”

  “The man I’m — the man I met. Herbert seemed a little preoccupied too. I thought maybe he’d found another security job, or was busy looking for a new place.”

  “Were you at all curious when he paid off the rest of your loan all in a lump?”

  The line was silent briefly. “He recorded the loan?”

  “He recorded everything. Up to a point. He had plenty of time. Did you ask him where he got the money?”

  “It wasn’t important. You have to understand that Herbert wasn’t my area of interest anymore. I was happy when he paid me back — not because of the money, but for him. I know how much it hurt him to ask for it in the first place. He might not have looked like it, but Herbert was a proud man. As I said, I assumed he’d found a client and I didn’t press him about it.”

  “I think it was more than a client,” I said. “I think he thought he’d stumbled over the end of the rainbow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I knew what I meant I’d give you back your dollar. I’ll call you when I know.” I took the receiver away from my ear.

  “Wait! Hello?”

  I put it back. “I’m here.”

  “This working for a dollar; is that normal in the investigating business?”

  “It’s not a normal business.”

  “It makes me more confused than ever about Herbert’s reasons for giving up a perfectly good job with the River Rouge Police Department. I grew up in Dearborn. We never quit anything unless something comes along that pays better.”

  I leaned against what Michigan Bell calls a booth today. I felt my face showing its age. “Don’t look for answers from me,” I said. “I’d have to learn a whole new language to explain it, and I don’t think the language would have the words I need. Herb would know. He made all the mistakes you can’t make when you think along those lines and get out alive, but he’d understand it without my having to go into it. He wasn’t born in Dearborn, was he?”

  “DelRay, right behind Great Lakes Steel. He said he was ten years old before he discovered sunrises aren’t green everywhere.”

  “I’ll call,” I said again, and hung up quickly. Suddenly I couldn’t stand talking to her any longer, or anything else female for that matter. As murky as things looked, it was becoming clearer all the time that all Herb had ever wanted was a little attention. He had given up on respect, and when he went for the next best thing he got it from the wrong quarter.

  I bought the News from a box and read it at a counter down the street over a corned beef sandwich and a cup of coffee while I waited for the traffic to clear. Herb hadn’t made the early-evening edition. When I went back out the cars were moving smoothly and there was no sign of the mounted cop or his horse. Well, there was one, and it looked right at home.

  The last of the light was glimmering somewhere behind Inkster when I walked into the house and turned on the lights. I turned on all the lights, including the one over the front stoop. I put a lively Dixieland record on the department-store turntable and fixed myself an Edinburgh screwdriver, one part orange juice and three parts Scotch, the sunniest drink I knew. Whistling in the graveyard is getting to be more expensive all the time.

  The antique clock in the living room, my only heirloom, had run down. I found the key on the floor behind the book cabinet, wound the mainspring and striker, and twirled the minute hand through five cycles, letting the chimes ring, then set it to the correct time. When the record finished its side I turned it over.

  As luck would have it, the first cut on the second side was “St. James Infirmary.” I thought of Herbert S. Pingree. I would have thought of him anyway.

  I got the folded sheet out of the inside breast pocket of my jacket where I’d hung it in the hall closet and spread the sheet out on the table in the kitchen and sat down. Neatly tabulated, the typewritten times of day covered five days, and the corresponding locations all belonged to the city of Detroit and its suburbs. It looked like a record of somebody’s movements, and except for the lack of explanatory detail, resembled the notes I kept when I tailed someone. At first it appeared random, as if the subject were a tourist following no itinerary but that dictated by his own curiosity, but a ragged pattern ran through it, like a trickle of water down a pane of glass.

  At 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday — no date — the subject, whoever he or she was, paid a visit to the Detroit Civic Center. On Thursday at 9:15 a.m., after several other stops at various locations, he was at Joe Louis Arena. At 4:45 p.m. that same day he went to the Renaissance Center. He was back at the Joe on Friday at 6:00 p.m., and at 11:30 p.m. Saturday — the latest he had stayed out — he paid a call on Trappers Alley in Greektown. He had arrived at each place on either the hour or the quarter or the half and had departed after fifteen minutes. The clipped regularity of the visits and their duration suggested a military precision, as of times previously agreed upon between two or more parties. Meetings. Aside from the fact that all of the meetings took place within the downtown area, while his various other ramblings carried him from points as far away as Southfield and Belleville to Grosse Pointe and Flatrock, there appeared to be no connection between the locations chosen.

  I circled each of the places with a pencil and sat back to look at them. Something flashed in my tired brain and was gone, like a single dissonant frame inserted in a sixteen-millimeter film. I tried to rewind it for a better look. The wheezy chimes of the old clock in the living room marked seven, wrinkling my concentration. On the end of the last gong the doorbell rang, tearing it to shreds. I put the sheet in a drawer, went into the living room, and peeped between the curtains on the window next to the front door. Catherine had come back to the Walker house after more than ten years.

  20

  HER EYES WITH their melancholy tilt took in the room behind me, filled with light and loud music, and the glass of orange liquid in my hand. “Somebody must’ve scared you pretty bad,” she said. “I haven’t seen an Edinburgh screwdriver since I walked out on you.”

  I said, “The taste hasn’t improved.”

  She came in past me, trailing something costly with a faintly bitter edge. She was wearing a full-length silver fox coat that covered up whatever she had on underneath, and blue leather boots with killer heels. Her hair looked almost red in the bright light. I closed the door against the beginning of an Arctic winter.

  She looked around. “I don’t believe it. Nothing’s changed.”

  “I gave away your china pugs,” I said. “They reminded me of the carved lions in front of a whorehouse in Saigon.”

  “Still the genteel conversationalist. Is the hall closet still for coats, or are you hiding brunettes in there now?” She walked out of the fox in one smooth motion, opened the closet door, and flicked through the hangers until she found a wooden one. She wore a schoolmarmish gingham blouse with a ruffle at the throat, tucked into a teal skirt that came down over the tops of her boots. The outfit added a little to her height and accentuated her new athletic trimness.

  “That’s what’s different. You used to be a brunette.”

  “No wonder you’re a detective.”

  “We look at ears, the way a person walks. Things you can’t change. Women get a new hair color as often as I clean my gun.”

  “I see you’re not wearing it.”

  “The night’s young.”

  She leaned in through the open bedroom door, then went into the kitchen. She cam
e back after thirty seconds. “You didn’t used to be a good housekeeper. If I were a nosy ex-wife I’d guess there hasn’t been a woman in your life for some time.”

  “There have been too damn many women in my life,” I said. “Especially lately. Can I get you a drink, or should I open a vein?”

  “I’m not thirsty. Okay if I turn off the music? We never did have the same taste.”

  “Go ahead.” As she turned the knob I excused myself and went into the kitchen. I had every intention of pouring the rest of my drink into the sink, but it didn’t get that far. I rinsed out the empty glass and turned it bottomside-up on the drainboard. When I returned to the living room she had switched off all but two lamps and was sitting on the sofa with her legs crossed and her hands folded in her lap, oozing poise out of every pore. I took the easy chair, just oozing. The furnace was now running too well.

  “I remember the day we picked out this furniture,” she said. “I never thought it would last this long. I was right.”

  “You picked it out. I threw money at it. Quite a lot of money for what I was making.”

  “Money never meant anything to you anyway. You were the least ambitious man I’d ever known. From the looks of things you still are.”

  “How’d you wind up married to a spy?”

  “I’m sure Bill’s told you all about that.”

  “That was his side.”

  “All this liberation talk is for kids. A woman my age can’t just go back to college — well, go to college, I never exactly got that far the first time — and come out four years older with a degree in botany and expect to compete with all these young bitches born to the Gospel according to Gloria Steinem. My only hope is to attach myself to something promising. I guess I never had the eye for it. I drew a sleuth, a bum, a crook, and a spy, in that order. Bill told me he held a high-level government post. It looked pretty good after what I’d just had.”

  “He told me about the gun smuggler.”

  The corners of her mouth pulled out. “Loose, isn’t he? His trade is supposed to be secrecy.”

  “A trade is a trade,” I said. “What makes you think you’ll do any better with Edgar?”

  “Who’s asking, you or Bill?”

  “Just curious. Your husband fired me today, by the way. For talking to you.”

  “No kidding?” She looked pleased for a moment. “I haven’t said I’m attaching myself to Edgar. I get attention from him, which is more than I get at home. But if it were to turn into something more serious I could do a lot worse. Let’s face it, I’m not going to land a General Motors board member at my age. They’re all running around with twenty-year-old blondes.”

  “Killers don’t offer much in the way of security.”

  “Edgar’s no more a killer than you are.”

  I lit a cigarette and dropped the match into the ashtray on the end table. She watched me. I realized then I was using one of the Dresden saucers she had bought at the old downtown Hudson’s. I’d been using it for years without thinking about it. “There’s one somewhere in this woodpile,” I said. “The name of the little man who was following you was Herbert S. Pingree. I found him this morning in his office, dead. Poisoned.”

  She unfolded her hands and refolded them the other way. “Did it have anything to do with me?”

  “You be the judge.” I excused myself again, went back into the kitchen, and came out with the typewritten sheet. I laid it in her lap and sat back down. “Pingree had that under lock and key. It’s the kind of record a P.I. keeps when he’s tracking someone’s movements. Does any of it look familiar?”

  She stared at it for several seconds. Then without meeting my gaze she opened her purse, blue leather to match her boots, slid a pair of glasses with rose-colored frames out of a Louis Vuitton case, and put them on. They made her eyes look less sad. She read. “Why are some of these places circled?”

  “Just doodling. Anything?”

  “This isn’t me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I haven’t been to Grosse Pointe in months and I wouldn’t be caught dead in Belleville. I’ve never been to Joe Louis Arena in my life.” She folded her glasses, returned them to the case, and the case to her purse. She held out the sheet. “If this is connected with this man Pingree’s murder, I don’t see where I fit in.”

  I accepted the sheet. “He kept a close record of his employment during the eight months he was in business for himself. It wasn’t hard. What there was was penny-ante and his expenses kept on top of him most of the time. Then, starting last month, poof! he had money to burn. Only he neglected to record where it came from. He left something else out as well. He left out you.”

  “Then I was right. I don’t fit in.”

  “You forgot he was following you last night, and probably was the one who’d been tailing you for some time. You weren’t anywhere in his records, though. He doesn’t mention employment of any kind for the past month. When did you first suspect you were being followed?”

  “About a month ago,” she said. “I think you ought to talk to Bill.”

  “I did, this afternoon. You called the office just after he left. He never heard of Pingree. He says. The world’s full of people who never heard of Pingree. I was one of them until last night.” I peeled the cigarette away from my lip and ground it out in the bottom of the saucer. “How can I get in touch with Frank Usher? You call him Edgar.”

  “Why?” She was holding her purse in front of her with both hands, an old gesture I remembered.

  “I want to ask him some questions. Starting with where he was this morning around nine o’clock.”

  “He’s a gentle old man. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “I’m interested in Pingrees, not flies.” I moved a shoulder. “He doesn’t have to talk to me if he doesn’t want to. I know a detective sergeant in East Detroit who would be happy to pinch hit. I don’t have a client to stand in front of now.”

  The star-shaped scar on her right cheek disappeared into her sudden pallor. “That would drag me into it. You, too.”

  “I’m in it,” I said. “Lady, I’m in it. Pingree died in my arms.”

  “You used to protect people. Women especially.”

  “I thought they needed it then.”

  “You’ve really gotten to be a bastard.”

  “I know. It’s the price I paid for becoming a better housekeeper.”

  She rose icily. “I’ll tell Edgar. He’ll get in touch with you. You’re wasting your time.”

  “It’s not worth much anyway.”

  I got up and went over and took her coat out of the closet and held it for her. She wrapped it around herself, glanced down at her wristwatch. “It’s Friday night. You’ve just got time to catch the People Mover before it shuts down. Maybe Pingree’s mysterious quarry is riding it tonight.”

  I felt my face grow blank.

  She smiled incredulously. The tiny scar was back now. “You didn’t notice, did you? I thought when you circled those places — hell, mister, you’re some detective.”

  I took the typewritten sheet out of my pocket and unfolded it. The Civic Center, 4:00 p.m. Tuesday. Joe Louis Arena, 9:15 a.m. Thursday and 6:00 p.m. Friday. The RenCen, 4:45 p.m. Thursday. Trappers Alley, 11:30 p.m. Saturday. The downtown People Mover, Detroit’s experiment in mass transit, stopped at all those stations. The entire circuit took fifteen minutes, which was the interval between all the arrivals and departures listed in the report. The dissonant frame I had missed the first time I’d looked at the circled names stood stock still and leered at me.

  I refolded the sheet and put it away. Catherine was gone by then. Her laughter hung in the open doorway like the bitter aftereffect of her cologne.

  21

  I WAS FLOATING several stories above the pavement. It was night and I could see the lighted display windows of the shops below on Grand River and Michigan and the pools of pinkish light beneath the street lamps on Woodward and beyond them, wheeling away to the sky, the yel
low and orange and blue and green and turquoise lights of a million windows, glittering like insects with hard shiny bodies on fresh tar. I looked away from them, and I wasn’t floating at all. I was riding in a train of some kind, balanced on a single high rail that swayed beneath my feet as I stood hanging on to a steel handle to keep from pitching into one of the benches that lined the car on both sides under the windows.

  Near me on one of the benches sat a young woman whose honey-blond hair and slightly protruberant blue eyes reminded me of Edie Hibbard’s. She was drinking from a large disposable Pepsi cup. I realized suddenly that I was thirsty, desperately thirsty; I had ridges on my tongue like wind-tracks in loose sand.

  Edie saw me lusting after the cup, smiled, and offered it to me. I reached out for it. My hand stuck out of a green-and-yellow houndstooth sleeve, and that’s how I knew I was Herbert S. Pingree, great-nephew of Hazen (or something), a native of DelRay behind Great Lakes Steel, the president of Trans-Global Investigations: Lost something? In trouble? Yes and yes. Peace of mind is our stock-in-trade. Rest in peace of mind, dear Herbert. Trade you a stock for one sip from that cup.

  Then the cup was in my hand and I was drinking, guzzling, choking, the brown sticky liquid running over my chin. I didn’t notice the scorched, bitter smell until the cup was empty. I looked at Edie over the edge of the cup. The protuberant blue eyes were sad now, tilting away sadly from a bold Grecian nose. Catherine’s nose, Catherine’s eyes. Her sardonic mouth opened to let out a laugh, and as she laughed I smelled her cologne: A scorched, bitter smell. I dropped the cup. It broke like glass when it struck the floor. Then I noticed that Edie-Catherine wasn’t alone on the bench. She was seated between an arid-looking man in a gray suit and amber-tinted glasses, and another man, older, ordinary, with a plump face and smoky eyes and dark thinning hair and a neat little moustache, a face from a photograph. They were laughing too. All three of them were having a good time.

  I tried to join them, but I couldn’t get enough air for a really good guffaw. I could hardly get enough air to breathe; my lungs had gone out on strike. The blood came hot to my face and I knew I was turning purple. They thought that was funnier than anything. They howled. Their mouths opened wider and wider until they formed one great pulsing hole with a black center that looked more inviting than any bar I had ever walked into. My vision was blurring, and for a panicky second I was afraid I’d miss the hole. I didn’t. I leaned forward and my toes left the floor of the car and I did a beautiful free fall toward the cool moist black bottom. I knew it would be cool and moist, like dark moss. Their laughter followed me all the way down, colliding and jangling together like so many requiem bells.