Sweet Women Lie

by Loren D. Estleman

  “The horses don’t run in November. If he had a client, why wasn’t it in his records?”

  “Maybe for the same reason he went to so much trouble to hide them. Ask your sister. Astrology isn’t my racket.”

  “I’m wondering what is.”

  “Look around, Sergeant,” I said. “This is it, this and a secondhand car and a little place outside Hamtramck you could blow over with garlic on your breath. It’s a successful business as far as it goes, but I’d trade it for a corner bar in Sterling Heights in a hot minute. You listen to the same problems in that line of work, but you don’t have to offer solutions. If I’m working all the angles, I’m worse at it than Pingree was.”

  “Not quite. You’re still alive.” After a moment he stood, returned the package to the briefcase, and zipped it shut.

  “Did I pass?”

  He looked at me. I nodded toward the case. “That face-reading dodge is as old as bullets.”

  “It isn’t a pass-fail proposition. B-plus.”

  “Not A?”

  “No one rates an A.” He glanced at his watch. “Forty hours and eleven minutes.”

  “You’re fast. I’ve got five-forty-four.”

  “That’s a switch. We’re usually a little behind in the suburbs. We like it that way.”

  I sat there for a while after he left. My brains were in the same condition as the ground-out butt in the ashtray. Pingree hadn’t been killed for his papers, or if he had, the killer hadn’t found them. But if that were the case, the killer would have torn his apartment inside-out when they didn’t turn up in the locked desk, the hiding place Pingree had betrayed somehow in his trusting way. If he had betrayed it. If not, the killer would have tossed the office as the most likely place instead of ducking out while Pingree was still reeling from the effects of the poison.

  None of that worked. What worked was that no one had jimmied the lock on the rolltop desk; it hadn’t been locked in the first place, because Pingree’s papers were safely hidden in the wall of the toilet down the hall from his office. An empty gesture; the killer had never bothered to search for the papers. So why was Pingree dead? When my head started to throb I closed up and went to dinner. I don’t know where I went or what I ate when I got there. I was chewing on an entirely different plane.

  I gave up finally and bought the evening News from a stand and went through it on the sidewalk under a street lamp, with my breath curling in front of the print. An item on Page Two confirmed that cyanide had figured in yesterday’s death of an East Detroit man and went on to rehash everything I’d read in the Free Press that morning. I wasn’t interested in the news anyway. I checked the movie listings, but I’d seen all the movies playing around town that didn’t have Roman numerals in their titles. The television lineup had the usual Democratic Party rallies with laugh tracks and a documentary program about murderers on the loose.

  Around the corner from my house I went into a video place and rented a vcr and two movies. One was High Sierra, which had some lines I hadn’t memorized yet. The other, a serendipitous discovery in the Action and Adventure section, was V-8 Vampires, starring Gail Hope.

  At home I spent twenty minutes with the instructions for installation and five minutes doing the installing after throwing away the instructions. I fixed myself a drink — without orange juice this time — poked V-8 Vampires into the slot, and switched off the lamp to watch the movie in darkness.

  It was a period piece all the way, shot in Southern California on a joke budget with an electric-guitar score, lots of yellow sand and creaming surf, and endless scenes of dotted lines darting under the wheels of black Mustangs and red Chevy 409s with flames painted on their fenders. The plot was a mishmash about a gang of teenage hot-rodders who divided their nights between drag races downtown and sucking the blood of exclusively blonde bikini beauties on the same desolate stretch of moonlit beach, led by a 500-year-old sexpot with an addiction for plasma and leaded gasoline. Gail Hope played the vampire honcho, and she was almost the only member of the cast who delivered her lines as if they had just occurred to her and weren’t pasted on someone’s forehead. The climax, in which the Malibu dawn caught her miles from the safety of her coffin in the cellar of an abandoned disco, was genuinely bone-freezing, especially when she began to show her true age and looked like hell served for dessert in her halter top and leather hip-huggers. It was one of her most popular pictures, and one of her last. Her light began to fade soon after, partly because of the bad publicity connected with her affair with gangster Sam Lucy and partly because, by the early 1970s, nothing seemed so quaint or so far removed from reality as the decade of Andy Warhol, beach orgies, and the Age of Aquarius. It was a tough break for someone blessed with the talent to rise above a turkey like V-8 Vampires.

  I finished my drink in a happy glow. The combination of old movies and alcohol instills a calm in me that other people find in pharmaceuticals. I didn’t play High Sierra. While the first tape was still rewinding, I put on the lights, got a card out of my wallet on the dresser in the bedroom, and dialed the number I found there. I felt like a projectionist threading the last reel through the gate.

  25

  AN ALLEY OF LIGHT in a darkened city, Greektown approaching midnight Saturday was crowded with a kind of desperate festivity, like the last corner on earth still untouched by a drifting cloud of radiation. The restaurants were all brightly lit and wild string music stumbled out of doorways where during the day old men in soft caps and loose clothing sucked on bottles of ouzo before going home to Madison Heights and Harper Woods. Trappers Alley, where you went when you were authentically Greeked out, bustled with weekenders riding the arcade escalators and browsing in the knickknack shops and eating Chinese. It was all very foreign to someone who remembered a community the size of a small city where half-naked men wrestled behind the Lafayette Bar and dumpy women who spoke little English wrung the necks of geese in their tiny backyards. A long memory is not a comfort in the City of Detroit.

  In Trappers Alley I took two escalators to the top level and bought a People Mover token at a newsstand from a cashier who looked as Greek as Muhammad Ali. I had on wool pants, sneakers, and a zippered jacket with a down lining over a flannel shirt. The outfit wasn’t warm enough for the weather — a shardlike mixture of snow and freezing rain was crackling outside on the sidewalk — but I needed to be able to move around and to get to the Smith & Wesson riding in the hollow of my back without having to use a metal detector.

  A bored transit cop wearing a leather Windbreaker and a shiny Colt King Cobra in a webbed holster watched me drop the token into the slot and clack through the turnstile; watched me with a faint glimmer of undefined hope for a diversion from sore arches and atrophied reflexes. He and his fellows were highly visible at all the stations where the monorail stopped, a built-in deterrent to the class of passenger who travels with spray paint and a Buck knife. It’s worked so far, but the People Mover is new and the flow of victims in the malls and arcades is still steady.

  Thanks in part to the heavy security, the Greektown station and its counterparts are pretty things, all bright shining tile sporting artwork commissioned locally. The cars themselves, sleek and narrow and operated by computer, shuttle into and out of the stations at clockwork intervals, starting and stopping and working their sliding doors automatically. One was just heading out when I got there. I checked my watch: 11:25. I was a little early. While I was waiting, a chattering group of four men and three women, all in their twenties, came through the turnstile carrying shopping bags, and the cop lost interest in me temporarily. The next set of cars stopped and they climbed on board, still chattering. When the cars pulled out without me, I felt the cop’s attention descend on me like a yoke of anvils.

  A couple in their sixties joined me on the platform, the man leaning on an aluminum cane with three rubber feet. We waited in silence. After the next set of cars had stopped to let out three black youths in Mumford High School jackets and took off carrying the e
lderly couple, the cop approached me.

  “Sir, the People Mover closes in fifteen minutes. Are you waiting for someone?”

  He combed his graying hair sideways across his scalp and he had pale blue eyes in a pasty face with a livid strawberry mark on one side, going down inside his collar. One thumb rested on the black rubber butt of his King Cobra.

  “I was,” I said. “I guess he’s not coming.”

  “Well, the next train’s the last one tonight.”

  “Thanks.”

  He went back to his post without turning around.

  We were the only people in the station when the last set of cars pulled in and the doors shunted open. I stepped aboard. Behind me the turnstile clacked, but by the time I turned around and sat on the bench facing that way, only the transit cop was in view of the windows. Whoever it was had boarded another car.

  The doors slid shut and the cars started forward with a minimum of inertia, swaying a little from side to side. I was sharing the two benches with a black couple in their late teens, holding hands and gazing out the windows with that expression you can only afford to show before you turn twenty, and a carroty-haired, middle-aged man in tattered army fatigues holding a duffel in his lap with both hands. He was looking at the air between us and enjoying his last quarter-hour of climate control before leaning into the elements on his way to one of the all-night grind-houses uptown.

  I stood up to admire the view, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Gripping a steel handle, I seemed to be floating several stories above the pavement. 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 yellow and orange and blue and green and turquoise lights of a million windows, glittering like insects with hard shiny bodies on fresh tar. I was living in something I had tried hard to avoid dreaming in the first place.

  A pre-recorded voice announced that Cadillac Center was coming up. The cars rolled to a gentle stop between glittering tiles arranged in a mosaic; the doors sighed open. The couple got off, still holding hands, and three people got on. The two women were together, wearing nurses’ flare-bottomed white slacks and white orthopedic shoes showing under the hems of their dark coats. The third, a man, had on a gray suit and a light tan belted topcoat. He glanced at me without interest as he boarded, touched the nosepiece of his amber-tinted glasses, and grasped a handle farther down the car facing me.

  We rode in silence past two stops. No one got on at either of them. The nurses sat together. One of them, ten or fifteen years younger than her companion, spent the time trying to talk her into trading shifts on Monday, but the other wasn’t having any. The man in the tan coat gazed into the middle distance and swayed with the car, his right hand resting in his side pocket. The derelict in fatigues had his eyes closed and his mouth open.

  The nurses got off at the Civic Center. Nobody boarded. As we swung along the river, flat black with the lights of Windsor scattered on the surface, I made my way over to the newcomer, cowboy style to avoid pitching onto one of the benches. His empty gaze didn’t change as I approached. I stopped a few feet from him and took hold of one of the vertical poles that supported the roof with my left hand. I reached my right hand behind my back as if to scratch an itch and rested it on the grip of the .38.

  We had the length of the car between us and the derelict, who was snoring now fit to start the screws that held the car together out of their holes. I kept my voice normal. “I said the Greektown station.”

  “Cadillac Center was closer,” Sahara said. “I thought I made it clear yesterday you were fired. What’s so important we have to meet aboard the mayor’s electric train set at midnight?”

  “It seemed an appropriate place.” I leaned closer. “I know who killed Pingree. I know how it was done and why. Boy, you’re a sap.”

  “Am I.” No intonation. He could have gotten a job calling out the stations.

  “I met Usher. Edgar Pym he calls himself here. I guess it’s no worse than your Jerome Bosch. I can relate to all these literary and artistic allusions you fellows use to break up the monotony. Everyone has his little tricks: I crack wise, cops mess around with the Bill of Rights, politicians mess around, period. It gets us all in trouble sometimes, but without it living is just surviving. Usher told me about the list of field agents you stole. He says he’s under orders not to negotiate.”

  “If he weren’t, it wouldn’t have been him they sent. Naturally I don’t know anything about a list.”

  “Naturally. Just like you didn’t know that those downtown locations on Pingree’s sheet were stops for the People Mover, and had no idea why anyone would ride around in a complete circle and get off where he got on. Or where she got on,” I corrected.

  The cars stopped at the Renaissance Center. The doors beside us opened. No one entered. They closed. We resumed moving.

  Sahara said, “She.”

  “She as in her. Her as in the woman in the case. You said yourself they got caught up in these things.”

  “You mean Catherine?”

  “Now you’re playing stupid. I thought invisibility was your trick.”

  His amber gaze didn’t change. “You couldn’t take your hooks off it, could you? Even when I gave you an out. That was for your benefit, Walker. I could have let you fall through the same hole as Pingree.”

  “Stop rewriting your part. You’re a sap, not a hero. You cut me loose because I was too close to finding out what you’d just discovered for yourself.”

  “National security is a factor in everything I — ”

  “Park that. You can’t be a rogue agent and walk the party line at the same time. You just didn’t want the whole world to find out that Bill Sahara, the gray ghost, double-oh-wonderful, got himself set up by a woman, and a nonprofessional at that. That’s the problem with being a pro and working with and against other pros: You can’t predict what an amateur’s going to do. That wild card throws off every hand.”

  “It works both ways,” he said, and kicked me in the chest with both feet.

  I wasn’t prepared for it. I’d been watching the pocket with his hand in it, waiting for the shape to change. Instead he put all his weight on the hand gripping the steel handle over his head and reared back with both feet and kicked out like a mule. That made me a sap, too. Despite what I knew about him, his bland businessman’s disguise had made me forget for a moment that he would be in top condition and that a gun was only one of the many ways he could kill. I had reacted quickly to the sudden movement, leaning back as I slid the revolver from my belt holster, and that saved me from having my chest caved in, but my lungs emptied with a woof and I fell over on my back, landing hard on my gun arm and driving all the feeling out of my fingers. I didn’t even know if I was still holding the weapon.

  “Freeze!”

  Well, some of them still say it, in spite of the bad rap it’s gotten from television, and just then it sounded as sweet as anything I’d ever heard, because Sahara’s hand was out of his pocket now and I was looking up the inside of the suppressor screwed to the barrel of his Walther GSP, a twin of the automatic I’d taken away from his man Wessell. The shout, coming from the far end of the car, rattled him, but he didn’t take his eyes or the gun off me: SOP in a situation like that is to shoot your primary target and deal with the third party afterward. But the split second the shout brought me was enough to let me bring around the .38, which was still in my hand after all. The fact that I’d need a bulldozer to pull the trigger in my present condition was immaterial. It was one too many guns for him and he froze.

  I was sitting up on the floor now with my shoulder against the vertical pole I’d been holding before. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the tramp in fatigues standing with his legs spread in the aisle, a revolver thrust out in front of him in both hands. “Drop it!” he shouted, adding another sterling phrase to the lexicon. “Now!”

  I put an oar in
. “Bill Sahara, meet Officer Mark Ashley of the East Detroit Police Department, Criminal Investigation Division. I think the wardrobe’s his.”

  “Burack,” he corrected. “Ashley couldn’t make it. Drop the piece or I’ll blow you into the next car!”

  He was getting better, but I didn’t have time to congratulate him. In the excitement, I’d missed the announcement that we were heading into the Grand Circus station. The car slowed and stopped. The doors opened at Sahara’s elbow and a woman in a fur coat stepped off the platform. Sahara hurled an arm across her throat, drew her against him, and rammed the suppressor under her chin. She had another chin to spare, and they both began to quiver. “Your turn, the pair of you,” he said. “I don’t have to tell you what happens if you don’t.”

  A transit cop built along the lines of his counterpart in Trappers Alley, but with more hair and less birthmark, drew his Colt. Sahara changed his angle a notch to bring him into his field of vision. “You, too, brother. Let me hear them drop.”

  It seemed longer than it was; the doors don’t stay open beyond thirty seconds. We were like that for a while, painted there like the artwork on the tiles, and then there was a flash of movement outside the windows and a noise that for an instant I thought was the report of the suppressed automatic, only it was too dull for that. Sahara arched his back, loosening his grip, and the woman ducked out from under with admirable reflexes and ran off kiyoodling toward the station exit, which was her earned right. Meanwhile Sahara’s legs did a slow fold and he slid down the pole at his back for a foot or so before sagging forward to his knees and then, ostrichlike, onto his face. The left bow of his eyeglasses came away from his ear. It all took probably less than ten seconds. Enough time anyway for Papa Frank Usher, wearing the same cut-rate sport coat and golf greens he’d had on when I met him, to take another step and swing his stick a second time, a short brutal expert arc. This time the noise was more emphatic. A black stream of the fluid the brain floats in joined the puddle of red on the floor from the first blow.