Sweet Women Lie

by Loren D. Estleman

  The ringing was real. It belonged to the telephone in the living room. My eyelids snapped open like a pair of windowshades, rolling and flapping in an empty skull. I lay there for a moment, hanging on to the mattress with both hands, while the darkness around me separated into familiar shapes in a shaft of skim-milk light zigzagging through the new thermal window in my bedroom, whose double panes turned the three-quarter moon into Siamese twins. When I was sure I was no longer falling, I rolled out from under the covers fully clothed except for shoes and scuffed out toward the source of the ringing. As a nightcap, I decided, an Edinburgh screwdriver is not a glass of warm milk.

  The clock read 2:56 when I turned on the light. Whoever wanted me had been ringing a long time. I lifted the receiver and said something in Cro-Magnon into the mouthpiece.

  “Mr. Walker?” A deep, heavy voice with a slight trace of cornpone.

  “You first,” I said.

  The owner of the voice chuckled. Some voices are rigged for chuckling. “I guess a little rudeness is the least I deserve for calling so late. Catherine told me you wanted to speak with me.”

  I felt a little clammy then. Far away the furnace cut in with a thump and a clatter, as if it knew. I lowered myself into the easy chair and squirmed deep into the cushions for warmth. “Do I have to call you Papa?”

  “At the moment I’d prefer Edgar, or Mr. Pym if you’re the formal kind.”

  “Not Frank Usher, huh.”

  “A name is just clothing. Where and when would you like to meet? I prefer someplace open. I spent most of my time out-of-doors as a boy, and I guess you could say I’m in my second childhood. This time through I aim to enjoy it.”

  I thought. Part of me was still suspended in the black hole. “I’ll meet you in front of Ford Auditorium. Nine in the morning okay?”

  “Two in the afternoon would be better. I’m up way past my bedtime now.”

  “I’m looking for answers,” I said. “I hope you’re planning on bringing plenty.”

  “I’ll bring some. How many I go home with is up to you. The older I get, the more I want to know. Life’s just a backwards mule, ain’t it?”

  The accent came down heavily on the last part. I said two o’clock would be satisfactory.

  “Good. Nice dreams, son.” The connection went away.

  22

  FOUR HOURS LATER I showered hard, shaved, and drank a pot of black coffee strong enough to float the deficit. To avoid picking up the nightmare where I’d left off I hadn’t gone to bed right away after Usher’s call, but had smoked a couple of cigarettes and watched the last half-hour of Night of the Living Dead on Channel 7. I thought it was a documentary.

  Pingree made the front page of the morning Free Press under the headline POISON SUSPECTED IN EAST DETROIT DEATH. It was a four-inch-square item printed below the fold with no picture or mention of the dead man’s occupation. The body was reported to have been discovered by an associate. Sergeant Eugene Trilby of the East Detroit Police Department’s Criminal Investigation Division was quoted as saying that he didn’t suspect product tampering was involved. The autopsy report was still pending.

  I got into a white shirt, gray suit, and black knitted tie and collected my hat and coat on my way out the door. I never put them on; the temperature had pulled one of those Michigan late-autumn dipsy-doodles and shot up into the high fifties. At the office I separated the bills from the junk, ran a skip-trace for an agency in San Francisco on a disabled city bus driver who had ducked out on a charge of flagrant misuse of food stamps, and found him an hour later perched happily on the local welfare roll, all without leaving my desk. Nero Wolfe, Mycroft Holmes, and the Old Man in the Corner had nothing on me. Dale Leopold used to say that you could tell the real pros by their hemorrhoids.

  After calling in the information to San Francisco I typed up a bill and sealed it in a neat envelope complete with a window and A. Walker Investigations printed in tasteful blue in the upper left-hand corner. It was one of a thousand I had accepted in lieu of my fee from a printer whose runaway senile father I had found working at McDonald’s. While I was returning the old Underwood to its resting place atop the file cabinet, the sixteen-millimeter projector that was my brain stuttered on yet another frame that had no business being on that reel. This time I wound it back and isolated the frame. I grinned. If the day continued as it had started out, I would consider giving up sleep entirely.

  At noon I rewarded myself with a full sit-down lunch at a seafood place on East Grand River on the way to Ford Auditorium. I had abalone out of season, baked in a mild horseradish sauce, and poured a glass of Liebfraumilch in after it to let it swim. My system, bulked up on burgers and fast-food chicken, attacked it like feral dogs. The business has its days. It’s the years you want to watch out for.

  Appropriately enough in view of its two namesakes, the Henry and Edsel Ford Auditorium in the riverfront Civic Center looks a little like an air filter. At night the mica-flecked blue granite of its curved front wall shimmers like an anaconda’s back in the floodlights, but by daylight it looks like plain steel mesh. I stood on the concrete park in front among a shuffling crowd of Saturday celebrants enjoying the unseasonal sun and looked for a man of about sixty who might have resembled the subject of the photograph in my pocket when it was taken thirty years ago. I wasn’t looking too hard. I was thirty minutes early for our appointment.

  “Mr. Walker?”

  He was standing in the shadow of the porch that ran across the front of the building, a stoutish man with a late-middle-age belly swelling below his belt, wearing a coat of some kind of inexpensive tweed and green double-knit slacks and a wide white belt with patent-leather shoes to match. For his age, he was dressed as inconspicuously as William Sahara in his unremarkable grays; you know you’re getting on when you wake up one morning with an uncontrollable urge to dress like the Loch Ness Pimp. The fat red eye of a cigar glowed in the dimness of the porch.

  “Usher,” I said.

  “Pym. Step in out of the sun. It’s bad for you, you know.”

  I joined him under the roof. The shade touched the back of my neck, chilling me to the balls of my feet and reminding me that Christmas was only five weeks off, together with the Canada clippers that blast down the river and leave the city dead white in their wake. Up close, his face was less full than in the picture: His cheeks swayed like empty sails when he moved his head and his skin had an orange tint of advancing jaundice. His eyes were still smoky, with the milky beginnings of a cataract in the right, and although his widow’s peak had thinned and receded, his moustache had grown fuller and healthier and white as bone. The thick brown smell of his cigar brought memories of Sundays when my uncle came to visit. An uncle I never had. It was that kind of a smell. He was leaning slightly on a blackthorne stick with a brass ferrule and a curved natural grip like a shillelagh.

  “You’re younger than I expected,” he said. “But then everyone’s younger than he ought to be these days. I guess that’s something an old fogy would say.”

  I said, “You’re not that old and I’m not that young. I didn’t come here to play Andy Hardy to your Judge.”

  “Easy, son.”

  “I’m not your son, either.”

  He smiled behind the moustache. “Now, who can say that with any certainty? Where would you like to go?”

  “Let’s walk. Something tells me this porch is worse for me than the sun.”

  He pulled on the cigar, blew a wreath, and walked out of the shadows. I hung back a second, watching the way he moved. I couldn’t tell if he was carrying. You can’t with the professionals. I caught up with him.

  We started along the river. The water was pewter-colored and steamed a little in the warmer air. On the Windsor side the skyline had been cut with a scalpel out of gray cardboard, a reflection in a time-delayed mirror of an earlier, cleaner, less belligerent Detroit. Canada was behind us in many ways, but she’d get in step.

  Usher walked with his white head down, holding th
e cigar down at his side between his fingers like a cigarette when he wasn’t pulling at it. When he was, the fiery tip burned back a quarter-inch at a time and trailed smoke like a dirty banner. “I decided to have a talk with you before you got hurt,” he said. “More civilians get mashed up in these things than you can imagine. Certainly more than you hear about.”

  “What’s Catherine, a draftee?”

  “I’d rather leave her out of this discussion. I hope I can depend on your confidence where she’s concerned.”

  “Not if I think she might get mashed up along with all the other unreported statistics.”

  He nodded, swinging the stick a little as he walked. “I guess that’s fair enough. She don’t like you much. Guess you know that.”

  “It’s mutual. But there’s a difference between not liking someone and standing by with your hands in your pockets while she walks under a falling piano.”

  “I like that. Yes I do. Where I grew up we tried to keep our women out of harm. That’s old hat now. I’m glad I ain’t the only one who’s too stiff to change.”

  I was beginning to see his pattern. When the talk became personal, out came the grits and rustic grammar. I wondered if it was a pattern he’d gotten up for my benefit. I’d been around older people enough to know better than to trust them; and if what Sahara had told me was true, this one had been outwitting European black marketeers, not the world’s most gullible lot, years before I was born.

  “What’s your interest in William Sahara?” I asked.

  “What did he say it was?” He waved the cigar. “Oh, I know you met down in the concourse and again at your office. Just because he shook one tail don’t mean I didn’t have others.”

  “All drawing federal wages, I suppose. He said he wanted out of the Company. You know that much already or you wouldn’t have been tailing him in the first place. He wanted me to make the arrangements. Maybe you know that too.”

  “I guessed. He say anything else?”

  “Only that he wanted to go alone. Catherine wasn’t to know anything about it. The town’s full of people walking around on tiptoe trying to keep Catherine from knowing anything about anything. Your turn.”

  “People quit the Company every day,” he said. “Agents with a lot more secrets to tell than Sahara. Threat of federal prosecution is usually enough to keep them quiet, but sometimes a book contract or the talk show circuit is too tall a temptation and then we have to swallow the cod-liver oil and make a statement that don’t mean nothing and then we go on same as always, maybe minus some deadwood for the wolves, but that’s the game. If we went around slaughtering every field man who hands in his ticket, we’d be a lot shorter on applicants than we already are. We ain’t kill-drunk zombies, no matter what they write about us in the Washington Post.” He struck the wooden decking sharply with his stick. “Sahara stole something from Company files. Washington wants it back.”

  “And Sahara’s head in a dispatch case.”

  “My discretion. My instructions are not to negotiate.”

  “Some discretion.”

  He smiled at the decking. “Contrary to what the polls say, the gents in power do learn from their past fumbles. If no one actually gives the order, no one has to stand the blame in front of a Congressional subcommittee on something-or-other. See, they don’t mind being a party to murder, but they’re shy about committing perjury.”

  “Sahara calls it counterassassination.”

  “Bullshit. He’s a butcher like the rest of us.”

  We separated to avoid breaking up a strolling couple. The boy was carrying books and the girl had on a Wayne State University sweatshirt.

  “What’d he take?” I asked.

  “An extensive list of deep-cover agents stationed across the country, together with their locations and the names they’re operating under. Nobody’s supposed to have access to that file but the director and one or two of his top aides. Sahara got the code somehow. Washington thinks he’s planning on selling the list to the enemy. They ain’t seen fit to tell me just who the enemy is, but I’m sure it’s some subversive element just waiting for its chance to kick Uncle Sam in the nuts and piss on the flag.”

  “So that’s what Washington thinks.”

  “I think it’s more than likely he plans to sell the list back to the Company. Oh, he’s getting out, all right, but the standard pension ain’t good enough. It ain’t, by the way; which is why I’m still here in the traces while most of the boys I started out with are back home scraping aphid shit off their roses.”

  “So how come Sahara’s still walking around? The way I hear it, you’re death in large doses.”

  “My job’s to get back the list, don’t forget. Since he ain’t asshole enough to carry it around with him, I need to get a handle on all the places he visits so I can start narrowing down hiding places. I figure he’s got to take it out and look at it from time to time, the way a miser counts his coins. I been through all his effects.”

  “I thought only the dead had effects.”

  He smiled again. “Well, you caught me with my pants down that time, son. I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  “Then Catherine’s an effect.”

  “Cat’s a special lady, but I guess you know that. If she wasn’t I’d have stopped seeing her soon as I found out she knows less about her husband than a grasshopper. Like I said, we ain’t zombies. Not all of us.”

  “Herbert S. Pingree,” I said.

  “Ah.”

  “If you’d said, ‘Herbert who?’ I’d have pushed you in the river.”

  He blew a chain of smoke rings. They drifted toward Windsor, each one widening until it broke noiselessly, like ancient promises. “Don’t let this here snowy roof lead you into trouble, son. I don’t push as easy as I look.”

  “Pingree,” I repeated.

  “I knew about him. Hard not to. I thought I knew some politicians who were in the wrong racket.”

  “Did you hire him to follow Catherine?”

  “Now, why would I do that? I was with her most of the time myself.”

  “Maybe you were paying him to keep an eye on her the rest of the time.”

  “Son, if I had to I could get people who could follow you into the shower and you’d never know they were sharing your soap. Mostly I work alone, and when I don’t, I don’t go into the private sector. Even if I did, that boy wouldn’t make the top one hundred names on my list.”

  “Who hired him if not you?”

  “If I was to guess, I’d say maybe ol’ Sahara thinks more about the little woman than he lets on. Maybe he paid Pingree to see what other roosters was hanging around the henhouse while he was away. Especially this here rooster.”

  “No good. He had better people for that. They were in the Club Canaveral the night I braced Pingree in the toilet.”

  “Following you, I expect.”

  We were running out of deck. One of the last of the season’s ore carriers was gliding up the river on the Canadian side, its stacks lisping brackish smoke. We stopped to watch it. I took the typewritten sheet out of my inside breast pocket and handed it to him. He squinted at it. Watching him and Catherine trying to read a menu must have been worth the price of the meal. “Cat told me about this,” he said. “You say you got it from Pingree?”

  “From his effects.” I tried not to stress the last word.

  “Rendezvous.” He folded it and gave it back. “Why else would someone ride the People Mover around its whole circuit, unless he’s a tourist? He gets on at one station, whoever he’s meeting gets on at the next. After they finish talking each man gets off where he got on. I’d say your boy Pingree was using both sides of the ruler. Following Cat and Sahara.”

  “What makes it Sahara he was following?”

  “Auction.” He drew one last time on the cigar and tossed it into the water. It spat once and bobbed on the ore carrier’s corrugated wake. “Sahara’s got other buyers for the list of agents. He meets them in a nice public place like the Pe
ople Mover to discuss terms. Only he got so greedy about it he didn’t notice Pingree shadowing him. Not the kind of mistake a man like Sahara usually makes, but you’d be surprised how many steps you miss when the stake’s personal.”

  I put the sheet away. “Pingree didn’t type this. He didn’t have a typewriter in his office or his apartment. He kept his records in script. I didn’t give it much thought until today while I was putting away my own machine. So I guess there’s something in what you say about missing steps.”

  “How you figure he got hold of it if he didn’t make it himself?”

  A chain clanked on the carrier’s steel deck, sounding as loud across the half-mile of water as if it had been dropped at our feet.

  “I figure you gave it to him,” I said, very low. “Not long before you killed him.”

  23

  PAPA FRANK USHER was still watching the iron boat, his balding, moustached profile looking as if it had been struck out of yellow alloy. “Not too pretty, is she?” he said. “A dignified lady, though, call her that. When I was six I wanted to be a riverboat pilot more than anything. By the time I was ten, the last of the old paddlers had gone to firewood and floating restaurants. Sometimes I think if it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. Or maybe I would. I was brought up Calvinist, and I still think all the molds were poured long ago.”

  I said, “I wanted to be a cowboy, but the first horse I climbed on thought I was a fly. I fell off and you missed the boat and Pingree’s dead and here we are. Why cyanide?”