MOTOR CITY BLUE

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Hello, newshawk.”

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “Both, if you can get two drinks poured before sunrise.”

  “I can sure as hell try.” He turned and took the stairs two at a time back up to the second floor. I took them as they presented themselves.

  Barry Stackpole had trod the Detroit News police beat for five years before becoming a columnist whose exposés of organized crime were beginning to attract the attention of newspapers across the country. The way he carried himself, you’d never have guessed the bottom third of his right leg was fiberglass or that the plastic on his face concealed a titanium plate, two mementos of a TNT surprise left beneath the hood of his car shortly before he was to testify before a Grand Jury on labor racketeering in the auto industry. The bomber needn’t have bothered. After Stackpole recovered from his injuries he spent a total of three months behind bars on contempt of court for refusing to reveal his sources. The word on the street was that his ears were worth a handy twenty-five grand apiece to the soldier who brought them in. The word was wrong, or he’d be sharing quarters with Francis Kramer already.

  Right or wrong, he lived as if he believed the rumors. There were three people in town who knew where he was staying at any given time, and he was one of them. That left his mother and me, and there were times when I wasn’t sure he trusted her. Me? Like his, my livelihood depends upon how close I can come to starvation before I open my mouth.

  He had a bottle and a suitcase and a portable typewriter in his two-room apartment and that was it. Everything else was furnished. The typewriter could be operated while still in its case, which was the way he had it. The suitcase was open on his bed with all his clothes in it except for the polo shirt and flared cotton slacks he was wearing. The bottle had two drinks left in it, and a minute and a half after we entered the room it didn’t have that. His entire life was spent poised with one toe on the starting line. The difference was that he had to be off and running before the opening shot.

  “What phony story you want me to plant this time, op?” He handed me one of two plain water tumblers he had half-filled with McMaster’s, his favorite, and motioned me into my usual seat on the edge of his bed while he sank into the chair at the typewriter, crossinghis right ankle over his left knee. Brown fiberglass peeped above his sock. He shifted uncomfortably, then reached into his right hip pocket and pulled out the nine-millimeter Luger I had never seen him without since the day we had met in a mudhole during a MIG strafing south of Phnom Penh, when he was a correspondent and I was a dogface. It landed with a thud atop the papers on the desk. “Cold steel,” he said, lifting his glass.

  “Hot lead.” We drank. It was a ritual we used every time we got together. “Cold Steel, Hot Lead” was the title I had suggested for the book he’d told me he was writing on his experiences in Vietnam and Cambodia while we were up to our chins in yak urine and motor oil. He never got around to finishing the book, but the title made a hell of a toast.

  “No planting this time,” I said, balancing my glass on my knee while igniting the cigarette I hadn’t smoked in Alderdyce’s presence. I didn’t offer him one; he didn’t indulge. Sometimes I think I’m the only one keeping Tennessee from going bankrupt. “This time I want you to do some digging.” I reached him over Marla Bernstein, before and after.

  He gave them equal time. His eyes didn’t even flicker as he shifted his attention to this year’s model. Sometimes I wondered about him. He handed them back.

  “Hold onto them,” I said. “I can stop by the News later and pick them up.”

  “Don’t need them.”

  I’d forgotten his photographic memory. I deposited the evidence and gave him the Reader’s Digest version of what I’d been told earlier.

  “Bernstein,” he echoed, the computer clicking. “Ben Morningstar’s bogus daughter.”

  Damn him and his encyclopedic knowledge of the underworld. Aloud I said, “I don’t have to tell you not to scribble it on any men’s room walls. If it got out I’d even showed these to a reporter, there’s a certain ex-hockey player who’d turn my head into a puck.”

  He smiled, not the open grin with which he’d greeted me. “Merle Donophan. I’d heard he was under contract to a new team. What do you want, the usual arrest story?”

  “If there is one. It shouldn’t be too difficult, this not beingan election year. Cathouse raids only get popular when the mayor smells re-election. Deeper than that, though. Hookers have been known to advertise. Roommate Available, Model Willing to Work Nude, Lay-a-Day Escorts, You Tap Her, We’ll Wrap Her–you know the lyrics. Check out everything likely since the beginning of the year and when you find something get hold of my answering service. They’ll page me.”

  “There won’t be much. The News is so staid the editors sleep with their nightshirts knotted between their legs. The boys in advertising won’t even accept business from X-rated movie houses.”

  “It’s the girls in classified who take the calls. If you’ve got any bottle buddies on the Free Press, you might put them to work on it over there. It’s worth a C for half a day’s work. My client won’t starve.” I got out my wallet and spread one of the two Franklins Paul Cooke had given me on the bed.

  “Keep it. I’m no menial.” He drained his glass at a jerk. I always admired anyone who could do that.

  “Since when? I never saw the day you wouldn’t snatch at a quarter so fast you shook feathers off the eagle.”

  “You’ve seen it now. I got a call last week from New York. They’ve offered me a slot on Today, shoveling the same crap I shovel here, only out loud and for a dozen times what these cheap bastards are stoking me to sweat behind a typewriter six days a week. I’m leaving tonight to meet the head of network programming, whatever the hell that is.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “Why?” His blue eyes grew crystal sharp.

  “Because I think some of Ben Morningstar’s hired help followed me here this morning.”

  I was looking out the window at my right, above the sill of which, from where I was sitting, I could just make out the top of a yellow roof parked across Collingwood as dawn broke. Stackpole shot to his feet with a curse and limped over to the window. The only time he didn’t walk like you or me was when something happened to remind him of his loss.

  I finished my drink, a swallow at a time, the way I took the stairs. “I’m sorry, Barry. I thought I lost him on Trumbull. Anyway, it’s not you he’s after. I doubt if he even knows who I came to see.”

  “Well, it doesn’t really matter.” He left the window without presenting his back to it. Whether or not he bought that story about the price on his head, the chance that someone did was enough to make him act like Bill Hickok most of the time. “I’m leaving for Metro straight from the office. I won’t be coming back here. If, that is, checking into your girlfriend’s past doesn’t make me miss my plane.”

  “You’re still doing it?”

  “My column’s done through next Tuesday. If you hadn’t come along I’d just be wasting time resting.”

  I offered up the hundred. “To grease the skids over at the Free Press.”

  “Keep it,” he said. “I’ve been wondering how to collect on the favor Freddie Sloane over there owes me before I leave.”

  I put away the C-note and stood up. “That’s one I owe you.”

  “Two.” He smiled. “Don’t forget that redhead from composing I fixed you up with last summer.”

  Wiley had last night’s edition of the News open to sports behind the wheel of the Pinto when I approached him across the street from the side entrance.

  “The Wings dropped it in the last two and a half,” I informed him.

  He’d been watching me out of the corner of his eye. He turned to comics. “Basketball’s my sport.”

  “So I noticed. You’ve been playing guard to my center all morning. How come?”

  “I do what I’m told. You’re pretty chummy with the cops, I see. Drop in on them
any hour of the day and they’re so happy to see you they entertain you for seventy-two minutes. Or maybe it’s the other way around.”

  “You’ve been wasting gas. Your boss isn’t the only client I’ve ever had. His name never came up.”

  “I hope not, for your sake. Who lives in the dump?” He inclined his modest afro toward the building I’d just left.

  “What if I told you it’s a reporter I know?”

  He looked at me for the first time. “I’d say it’s a sad day for a certain peeper,” he replied after a moment.

  “Like I said, I don’t work exclusive. The deal was your boss won’t see his name in the paper. Until that happens I visit who I want. Take that back to Grosse Pointe.”

  I spun rubber on Rosa Parks to get him out of there before Barry left the building. On West Forest I lost him, but picked him up again on Woodward and from that point on he was a bumper sticker. He was good. I grabbed a light breakfast at a lunch counter–don’t laugh, it’s your language too–and at eight sharp was parked on Watson kitty-corner from George Gibson’s apartment when the subject in question stiff-legged it out the door and hobbled down the street with the aid of his canes toward the nearest bus stop. He was a skinny, white-haired little guy with a determined face that looked ten years older than it was. I laid aside the morning Free Press I’d been reading (there was nothing in it about Francis Kramer, but then I hadn’t expected there to be, considering the lead time involved) and swung out into the main gut, where I rolled along discreetly amid the congealing traffic until he reached his destination, then double-parked next to a van in a loading zone and waited for the DSR to pick him up. It was only fifteen minutes late, just enough time for me to check my mirrors and determine that Wiley’s bilious economy job was gone. Which meant that he’d either swallowed the line I’d offered or gone back to confirm the old man’s suspicions.

  When the bus pulled out with Gibson on it I drove past it and was waiting across from the unemployment office when he got off and went in to pick up his check. My Nikon was on the seat beside me with a telephoto lens, but it might as well have been one of those toys you crank to deliver a picture that develops in minutes, too dark and primarily green, for all the chance I got to use it. He stayed between the sticks on his way out of the office and through a brief shopping trip downtown without the slightest indication that he could get along without them. When he returned to his apartment a little before ten I kept going. Maybe this time my cynicism was misplaced. Maybe he was a straight guy with a streak of hard luck. And maybe the mayor voted Republican in the last election.

  7

  MY OFFICE IS A third-floor wheeze-up in one of the older buildings on Grand River, a pistol-shot from Woodward. The last time I scrubbed it, the pebbled-glass door, which always reminds me of the window in a public lavatory, read A. WALKER INVESTIGATIONS in flecked black letters tombstoned tastefully across the top and in need of touching up. The man from whom I inherited the practice, who had himself inherited a bullet meant for me, used to call it APOLLO CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATIONS, after the Hellenic god who brought light to the darkness, but I changed it after I got fed up with taking calls from people who wished to speak with “Mr. Apollo.” It’s a pleasant enough little burrow, and while the place has never seen a featherduster or broom with bristles stiff enough to reach into the corners, let alone the Silver’s touch, it has everything a P.I. requires, including a file cabinet with the worst dents shoved up against the wall, a backless sofa suitable for snoozing one off, and a desk with a bottom drawer deep enough to store a bottle of Hiram Walker’s upright, suitable for tying one on. I admit it’s a hike south from my dump near Hamtramck, but then the internal combustion engine has spoiled us all for those copper towns in the upper peninsula whose residents slept and ate in company-owned homes built in the very shadow of the mines that employed them.

  I’d started the day on Scotch and don’t mix my drinks, and in any case the sun was well up and watching me, so it wasn’t the bottle I was going for when I unlocked the door and crossed through the outer office. Today my own office telephone was the only one available that hadn’t already received the attention of some industrious fellow with a crowbar and a yearning for a pocket full of quarters.

  I made two calls, one to information, the second to the number the impatient-sounding operator gave me for the Miriam H. Fordham Institute for Women in Lansing. Esther Brock turned out to be a mannish-voiced matron who claimed direct descent from General Sir Isaac Brock, the canny old Britisher who shelled Detroit from across the river in 1812 and marched a motley assortment of guerrillas, British regulars, and Indians up Jefferson Avenue to make this the only major American city ever to surrender itself to occupation by a foreign power. She told me all that in the first five minutes, which should give you some idea of how garrulous the beldam was once you broke through her crust. I was touching base. Yes, Miss Bernstein told her two weeks before the Christmas break that she was leaving school to get married. No, she didn’t say who the young man was. Yes, her roommate was certain that it was Miss Bernstein she saw getting into a car with a man later that afternoon. No, the young lady was no longer enrolled at Fordham. Married, don’t you know, and living in Maine or Maryland or some other place that begins with M. So few finish these days. Miss Bernstein herself had entertained hopes of leaving school for a theatrical career, of all things. Have you a sister or a daughter of college age, Mr. Walker? Oh, that’s unfortunate. Yes, you’ll be the first to know if Miss Bernstein is heard from. Good-bye, Mr. Walker, and do remember Fordham when you marry and are blessed with female progeny.

  I could still smell lemon verbena and starched white gloves when I hung up. I glanced at the calendar on the wall with the picture of a pretty girl on it whose clothes went up with the clear plastic flap to make sure I hadn’t slipped back fifty years during the conversation. Then I consigned the mail I’d picked up on my way in to the wastebasket and left for Erskine Street, where they took down the red lights a long time ago for the same reason a church needs no sign to tell you it’s a house of God.

  Story’s After Midnight shared a block of age-blurred building with half a dozen similar establishments on the north side of Erskine, a street where business was conducted behind graffiti-smeared clapboard fences and from the back seats of spanking new Caddies and Lincolns, where cops paired up on sticky August nights to patrol on raw nerveends, thumbs stroking the oily black hammers of the holstered magnums they preferred to the .38 specials issued by the department, ears tuned for the quick scuffing of rubber soles on the sidewalk behind them and the wood-on-metal clacking of a sawed-off pump shotgun being brought to bear just beyond the next corner, a street where a grunt of uncontrollable passion and a stifled scream in the gray, stinking depths of a claustrophobic alley could mean a ten-dollar quickie or a rape in progress. With its stripped, wheelless hulks that had once been cars and aimlessly blowing litter, it was the kind of street you never saw on the posters put out by the Chamber of Commerce. If you got a glimpse of it at all it was on the eleven o’clock news, whose cameras had recorded hundreds of feet of rubber-wrapped corpses being trundled out of narrow doorways into the rears of ambulances backed up to the sidewalk on streets like this, while in the foreground earnest young reporters with microphones in their hands and blow-dried hair stirring in the wind rattled off names and facts in modulated baritones, acting as Greek chorus to a scene that was dyed-in-the-wool American. It was an area that spawned a mindless, disorganized brand of violence, and once every few years, as it had less than a mile south of here not long ago, it spawned a Cass Corridor Strangler, who killed for a time and then faded into terrifying obscurity. But you could still hear good jazz in the right bars.

  I parked next to a hydrant heaped high with rusty snow in front of the store, where I could keep an eye on the car through the window, and went in, easing my way past a knot of sullen-looking black youths in scuffed Piston warmup jackets who were sharing the same twisted cigarette in front of th
e entrance. My nerves tingled as I did so. I’m no more prejudiced than the next guy, but I tighten up whenever they band together like that.

  It was one of those places where you had to tip the guy at the counter fifty cents before he’d let you in. In this case he was a bony young black seated on a high stool behind a display of latex breasts and plastic phalluses. He had an afro you could lose a shoe in and invisible eyes behind mirrored glasses and needle tracks all over his mahogany wrist where it stuck out of his cuff as he reached for my two quarters.

  “Cold out there,” I ventured.

  “So’s the world, man.”

  A philosopher. His accent was Mississippi straight up with a Twelfth Street twist. I left him to ring up the alloy in a big, old-fashioned register and began browsing.

  The place had everything the well-dressed degenerate could want. It was stocked primarily with books and magazines, from near-legitimate classics like A Man With a Maid and The Story of O to the more contemporary Hot Snatch and Anal Delight, with covers featuring various sexes and species engaged in provocative pursuits which, according to the title splashes, only hinted at the literary and pictorial treats to be found inside, shrink-sealed in plastic. But miscellaneous grunts and squeals that seemed to emanate from everywhere and yet nowhere, and a sign made to resemble an interesting anatomical pointer, indicated that a peep-grind “with sound!” was available in the back for the admission price of one dollar, There were the usual revolving wire racks containing the kind of greeting cards you didn’t send Grandma at Christmas time, the standard bin filled with fifteen-minute reels of Super 8 film with titles like A Lesson From Miss Dove and Blowing Wild–not the one starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck–and, beneath the glass counter near the entrance, a fascinating collection of gadgets, among which was a device which, its tag pledged, would Increase the Size of Your Organ in Minutes, an ingenious contraption with a glass tube and a vacuum pump that seemed ideal for rescuing golf balls from mud puddles.