Sweet Women Lie

by Loren D. Estleman

  The doors tried to close, encountered Sahara’s gun arm lying across the threshold, and reversed directions, sending a silent signal to the central computer to shut down the entire system. As a symbol it was pretty poetry.

  26

  THERE WERE PLENTY of cops around after that. A gang of uniforms from the Detroit Tactical Mobile Unit arrived minutes after the first officers on the scene and set up sawhorses to keep the Saturday night crowds at bay, followed closely by a pair of plainclothes detectives I knew slightly from 1300 Beaubien, Detroit Police Headquarters, who split us up for questioning. Officer Burack showed his East Detroit badge and credentials, but Usher stole his thunder with the impressive-looking CIA card in its neat leather folder and declined to provide any answers on the scene. He was as calm as a fence rail. The rest of us were still in the preliminaries when the detectives elected to take us down to 1300 and drop us in the inspector’s lap.

  One more thing before we leave the Grand Circus station.

  While the transit cop was busy holding back citizens before reinforcements arrived, I directed Burack’s attention away from Usher while he went through Sahara’s pockets. Later, amid the orderly confusion of cops at work, I got Usher into a corner.

  “Did he have it on him?”

  He nodded. “Also a pair of airline tickets one way to Panama, today’s date. I left those. Not the best place to hide from the Company, but from there he could have caught a boat or a plane to anywhere. Both tickets were in the name of Henry Deimling. Recognize it?”

  “No, but I bet if you go back far enough you’ll find Henry’s obituary. Died in infancy. You know that dodge.”

  “First week of training.” He got out a cigar and slid it along his lower lip, moistening the end. “Thanks for the diversion.”

  “You didn’t have to hit him twice.”

  “Sure I did. Just like I had to ride in the next car. He might have recognized me. Anyone ever tell you you’re not an easy man to follow?”

  “I figured you’d keep up.”

  He looked at his cigar. “Find out what you needed to know?”

  “Only what I suspected going in. Sahara didn’t kill Pingree. He barely knew Pingree existed.”

  “He’d have killed you, though. You and Burack and the woman and the rent-a-cop would’ve been dead thirty seconds after you dropped your guns. I’ve seen it before. When a field man of Sahara’s classification slips the harness he turns into a natural disaster.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “What would you have done if I hadn’t come along?”

  “Shot him.”

  “He’d still have killed the woman. He had trained reflexes.”

  “That’s why I’m glad you came along.”

  “It’s my job, son.”

  “Just for the record, I think your job stinks.”

  “It don’t smell any prettier from my side.” He produced an orange plastic throwaway lighter, looked around, spotted the no smoking sign, and put it away, smiling faintly behind his moustache; the rules you keep, the rules you break. “I know you don’t like what I stand for, son. I didn’t like what that little storm trooper Strendle stood for either. When you’re going down for the third time and a hand reaches out over the side of the boat you don’t look at it too close.” He put his out, tentatively.

  This time I took it.

  I was drinking a cup of paint thinner at a table in one of the interrogation rooms downtown when John Alderdyce came in. We hadn’t seen each other in months, and the change threw me. He had lost some more hair, throwing the bones of his coarse African face into even greater relief. Naturally bulky, he had in the months of physical inactivity behind an inspector’s desk put on at least thirty pounds. Soon he would be fat. He walked like a fat man and his camel’s-hair jacket, fashioned as always from the best material, was cut like a tent. He made his way around the table and dropped heavily into the only other chair, sitting with his knees spread to make room for a belly he didn’t have yet.

  “How’s your arm?” he asked.

  I rubbed it. “I banged the elbow when I fell. My fingertips are still numb, but I don’t have any piano recitals coming up for a while.”

  “I read your statement. It doesn’t say why you brought along an East Detroit officer without notifying Detroit.”

  “It was their case. Pingree was killed in East Detroit. Anyway I didn’t bring him along. I called up there and they sent down Burack. I was told he’d be wearing the homeless look.”

  “He was out of his jurisdiction. I don’t have to tell you what you’re out of.”

  “Take that up with his chief. Maybe they were afraid you’d fill the place with uniforms and scare Sahara off. It isn’t as if no Detroit cop ever made a bust up there without telling the locals what he was about.”

  “Cops can get away with it, sometimes. Don’t forget it’s always open season on private heat.” He fished a half-empty pack of Chesterfields out of his shirt pocket and played with it, propping his elbows on the table. He’d been quitting smoking almost as long as he’d been smoking. “Why’d Sahara poison Pingree? Your statement wasn’t clear on that.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Then maybe you can tell me why Sahara’s taking up morgue space here.”

  “What did Usher tell you?”

  “Usher?”

  “Here he’s Pym, sorry. Spies.” I shrugged.

  “He didn’t tell me anything. We’re all just kind of sitting around waiting for Washington to open shop so he can get orders. I thought maybe you’d help kill some time.”

  “It’s goofy,” I said. “I wouldn’t buy a ticket if someone described it to me. I think Sahara agreed to meet me so he could clean house before he left the country. I think he had that in his mind from the start, once I’d established a new identity for him and made all the arrangements. I would have been the only thing to link him to his new life and he couldn’t afford to leave me in a talking condition. That business with Gail Hope and the quarter million proved I was honest, but he’d seen honest men broken when it was in someone’s interest to break them. He’d probably broken his share.

  “Some of it was pride; an unaffordable luxury when your greatest goal in life is to be inconspicuous. He was a man who was supposed to know all the angles, he was being taken for a ride on a little death like Pingree’s, and I knew about it and was rubbing his nose in it. I admit I was shoving him pretty hard. He went over quicker than I expected. Usher happening along when he did made things a little less messy.”

  “Usher — Pym, whatever — he had the contract on Sahara, that it?”

  “So I gathered. The Company gets sore when you quit without two weeks’ notice.” I had left all mention of the list of agents out of my statement. It had seemed like enough without the list.

  “So who killed Pingree?”

  “Why ask, John? That’s East Detroit’s wagon.”

  Someone knocked. He let whoever it was knock again, looking at me. Finally he got up and went to the door. There was a whispered conversation and Alderdyce left the room. A few minutes later he came back and stood by the table. “You must have voted right in the last election, Walker. You know the way out.”

  I didn’t move. “Washington get back to you?”

  “They called the commissioner, got him out of bed. He called me. I never knew what I was missing when I was just a lieutenant. You get your ass chewed out by a whole different class of people up here.”

  “Sorry, John. If there was any other way to play it.”

  “My ass can stand a little chewing. God knows it’s big enough these days. I’m still a peace officer, even if I do spend most of my time stapling crime statistics together. I like to think I’m making a difference. Only just about the time I think I’m doing that, along comes a piecework sleuth and a government spook to start dropping bodies in my lap, as if the four hundred others that got there ahead of it since January weren’t enough. Then as soon as I finish with my l
ittle broom and dustpan, someone whose window looks out on the Capitol Building instead of an airshaft snatches it away. Do me a favor and take it down the street. I’ve got a press statement to write and only two hours to make it sound like I didn’t just get back from Oz.”

  I rose. “I wasn’t going to mention the weight gain. You ought to take up handball.”

  He went out, leaving the door open.

  Outside 1300 the sky behind Windsor was getting rosy. The freezing rain had left a knobby crust on the sidewalks and pavement. A salt truck grumbled around the corner on Jefferson. As the light in the east intensified, it prismed through the hoarfrost on the street lamps and on the concrete supports of the People Mover, as quiet now as bones in a museum; needling the downtown area in rainbow colors. The colors reminded me of where I wanted to go from there.

  The cops had picked me up in a blue-and-white and turned me out without a ride, same as always. On Brush, a Checker cab let off a fare who smelled too freshly of liquor as I stepped past him to have come from anywhere but an after-hours joint. I sank into a black leather seat permeated with tobacco to its springs and closed my eyes. The driver’s “Where to?” woke me up.

  “The Club Canaveral.”

  27

  I PAID THE DRIVER, a dark-skinned Arab who held my bill between his teeth while he made change from a White Owl cigar box in his lap. “You sure I can’t take you someplace else, mister?” he said. “The place looks closed.”

  “Thanks. I’m sure.”

  As he rolled off, tires spinning a little on the slick asphalt, I went down the alley next to the building and stopped in front of the brown fire door. Dead-bolt locks are only effective if your intruder doesn’t know how to pick the oldest, simplest Yale in existence. I made some scratches and barked a knuckle hard enough to start it bleeding and was inside in three minutes.

  In the orange light of an exit sign I navigated my way past the rest rooms and across the dance floor, echoing like an aircraft hanger, to the office. Some of the dawn was coming in under the shades on the windows.

  This lock was an ordinary spring latch and I slipped it in two seconds with one of the celluloid compartments from my wallet. There being no window in the office, I snapped on the ceiling light. The room was anonymous but for the Impressionist street scene hanging behind the desk, a no-nonsense place of business in contrast to the splashed pastels and camp posters in the nightclub itself. The air smelled faintly of something I recognized as Gail Hope’s perfume. Daughter Evelyn watched me wandering the room from her Lucite stand on the black steel desk.

  I found it in the only place it could have been hidden, a wooden two-drawer file cabinet supporting a yellow fern in a hand-thrown clay pot. The typewriter was a Royal, one of the old gray manuals with rounded edges like a tank’s. I lifted it and carried it over to the desk, where it went like hell with the computer terminal on the nearby stand. I sat down and opened and closed desk drawers until I found some stationery and cranked a sheet into the machine. When I was through typing I tore out the sheet and compared it with a paper I took from my pocket. I’d typed the names of as many of the People Mover’s downtown stations as I could remember. The Royal’s lower-case w had a piece broken off and the a was slightly out of line. The sheet from Herbert S. Pingree’s effects showed the same flaws. The ribbon needed changing.

  I folded both sheets and put them in my pocket. Then I made two telephone calls. When that was done I fingered out my cigarette pack, but it was empty. I crumpled it and threw it into the wastebasket. My mouth tasted like cotton filters anyway.

  I must have dozed. I came forward in the chair when the fire door boomed shut. Footsteps clicked across the dance floor. The doorknob turned and she came in.

  No denim shirt and blue jeans this time. No slinky gown and stilts either. She’d put on a plaid caped overcoat with Madame Butterfly sleeves and a pair of black patent-leather pumps with two-inch heels. With her light brown hair pinned up and makeup on she looked taller, but she would always give the impression of a little girl playing dress-up. She wasn’t carrying a purse.

  “I could have you arrested for breaking and entering,” she said.

  “They’d just throw me back out in the street. I wore out my welcome there an hour ago.”

  “All right, you called and I’m here. I said I was sorry about the other thing. Sahara didn’t give me any choice.”

  “Sahara’s dead.”

  She wasn’t quick enough to cover it. She was a better actress than anyone had given her credit for, but the hour was early and I’d sprung it on her. For an instant there it was Christmas. Then she sobered. “What happened?”

  “I happened. Usher happened. You happened. Not in that order.” I told her about it. When I mentioned the People Mover I was watching her closely, but this time she’d had a chance to prepare. I didn’t get anything out of it.

  “I’m not sorry,” she said. “He used me. I might as well have been working for the studios. I’m only surprised that he wanted to quit. I always thought he loved his job, the rotten bastard.”

  “When you burn out you burn out. He had two tickets to Central America in his pocket. One of them was for you, wasn’t it?”

  She overplayed it that time. Well, it had been years since the cameras had rolled. “Uh-huh, yeah. I’d sooner go off with Hitler.”

  “I believe you. But that’s not what you told Sahara. How long had you been sleeping with him? Don’t answer, it doesn’t matter. Long enough anyway to convince a man whose business is to trust no one to take you into his confidence. Long before I entered the picture. No wonder he was amused when I said my helping him out of his job would get you out of his vest pocket. Did you laugh about it late that night in bed?”

  “You’re as sick as he was if you think that.”

  “Only a lover could have gotten him to confide as much as he did. He told you he was quitting, about the list of undercover agents he’d swiped, either to insure his safety or to extort some case dough out of Uncle Sam. About the people who would enter their own bids. Only a lover — or an actress who could pose as one.” I patted the machine on the desk. “You haven’t asked me why the typewriter isn’t in the file cabinet where it belongs.”

  “It’s a little early in the morning to worry about typewriters, especially with a crazy man in the room.”

  “Now you’re chewing the scenery, Gail. Or do you prefer Vadya?”

  She lost a little color when I mentioned the part she played in V-8 Vampires. Sarah Bernhardt couldn’t control that. No reaction otherwise. I let it slide for now and put the two typewritten sheets on the desk.

  “They match, of course,” I said. “You couldn’t forge Pingree’s hand, but you should have gotten rid of the typewriter. Maybe you didn’t think anyone would get this far. The People Mover stations were what you wanted them to notice. Since Sahara wouldn’t just ride around aimlessly day after day, it suggested he was meeting someone. Why? To collect bids on that hot list of agents.”

  I heard a noise in the nightclub. She had left the door open a crack when she came in. I went on. “I can only guess at the amount of homework it took to find an investigator like Pingree. Maybe not so much; every business has its misfits. In any case he was the ultimate pigeon. Did you come to him as Gail Hope, fading movie queen, or as a distraught housewife?”

  “It’s your story,” she said.

  “I like distraught housewife. He was young enough not to have seen any of your pictures. He was also a trusting soul, and business was just bad enough to keep him from checking your scenario, if he even knew how. You knew all about Catherine. She even looks like the Other Woman. You came to Pingree, or more likely you met him somewhere to avoid his nosy neighbors, cried a little into a handkerchief like you did in Beach Blowout, told him you suspected Catherine of having an affair with your husband, and gave him a lot of money to follow her around. You asked him to keep the job off the books. He agreed, and made good on his agreement. I have to like him for
that, harebrained as it was. Men who come through on their promises are rare and getting rarer. You counted on that. There must be no evidence to suggest you ever made contact.”

  I heard nothing more from the direction of the nightclub. I hadn’t expected to hear anything to begin with. I’d been in the land of the professionals on this one from the start.

  “Naturally, Catherine spotted the tail,” I said. “Pingree was as conspicuous as Sahara was invisible. She wouldn’t go to her husband, because she’d suspect her husband of hiring him in the first place. She’d come to me, being a detective and being in town, but mostly being her ex-husband. That made me a valuable witness. I knew about Pingree, had even spoken with him. Sahara would have told you that. By now he was telling you everything. No wonder he kicked me when I called him a sap. It was easier than kicking himself.

  “Maybe my talking to Pingree forced your hand. Even he was starting to smell a Hollywood rat and considered taking me into his confidence. No matter. It was a good time to move.” I tapped the typewritten itinerary. “You’d already given him this, because he’d had time to run off a copy and put it in the safe deposit box where he kept copies of all his records. He was definitely suspicious or he wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to hide the originals in the toilet on his floor. I’m not clear yet on what story you told him when you gave him the paper. Planting it on him after he was dead might not have worked. Maybe you knew about the bank box and thought someone would be suspicious if there weren’t a copy of the itinerary in it. It had to convince some people for whom suspicion is a way of life.”

  “You’re doing a lot of talking for someone who isn’t saying anything.” As she spoke she moved away from the door. The action might have been unconscious.

  “Indulge me. I’m a lonely man. Pingree was crucial, maybe for the only time in his life. If the people who were watching Sahara — the people being Frank Usher, Edgar Pym, Papa, whatever Death is calling itself this season — if they were to buy the premise that Sahara was getting set to peddle that list and sign the death warrant for dozens of deep-cover agents placed at no small expense in key areas across the country, you needed a corpse to put the point across. This is where Gail Hope, former celluloid beach bunny and present Detroit bistro owner, trades petty intrigue for evil genius.