“I’m not after a spot,” I said. “Just information.”
“Try the phone company.” He swiveled halfway around with a squeal of dry bearings to face me and leaned back, clasping his lumpy hands behind his neck and looking at me from under the heavy lids.
“Hilarious,” I told him. “Like a whoopie cushion on a wheelchair.” I fished out the later picture of Marla Bernstein and scaled it onto his makeshift desk. It skidded to a stop across a ledger sheet full of penciled figures slopping over the ruled lines. He watched me a moment longer, then allowed his eyes to slide down his nose to the photo. He came forward slowly, unclasping his hands and bringing them forward to handle it. A greedy light sprang into his eyes. Guys like him were the reason guys who took pictures like that were in business.
The interior of the trailer was no better than it deserved to be. The walls were paneled with that cheap blond veneer they used to slap on furniture during World War II, the kind that fell apart months ahead of the Axis, and the ceiling just above my hat was a water-stained pegboard from which sprouted a light fixture with four blackened bulbs, none of them burning or ever likely to. There were a studio couch, badly worn, a safe behind the card table you could crack with a nail file and ten seconds to spare, a toilet behind a folding screen, an old-fashioned gray steel radiator beside it, and closets and cabinets built into everything. A couple of kitchen chairs made of tubing and cracked vinyl were arranged in front of the table, ostensibly for the convenience of customers. There were no other rooms.
After a minute or so he returned his attention reluctantly to me and held the item out for me to take back. “So what about it?” His tones were spare and northern. He was a native.
I made no move to accept it. “Know where it was taken?”
“Copper?”
“Private.”
He studied it again. This time he was looking at the room and not the two people in it. Finally he shrugged and returned the picture. “I might. For a price.”
I played my hole card. “Let’s discuss it over a drink.”
“You got?” Suddenly he looked thirsty. His eyes frisked me, looking for telltale bulges.
“Wait here.”
I went out to the Cutlass, got the fresh bottle I’d been meaning to take out of the glove compartment before the weather got too cold, and came back in holding the flat pint so that he couldn’t miss the unbroken tax stamp on the cap.
“Haig and Haig,” he said, approvingly. “You drink good.” He was almost panting.
There were two one-ounce glasses waiting on the table. Sitting in one of the customer chairs, I broke the seal and twisted off the cap and poured amber liquid into both of them. He had his hands around one while the bottle was still airborne toward the second. They didn’t shake any more than a go-go girl in an icebox.
“Sex and violence,” he said, and tossed his down the pipe. I didn’t try to compete. I emptied mine in two swallows and was still waiting for my breath to catch up when I poured him another. His hands now were as steady as the murder rate. That one died as painlessly as the first.
“God awmighty, that’s good booze. Keep ’em coming, Mr.–I didn’t catch the name.”
“I didn’t throw it.” I poured. “What about the picture?”
“Picture?” He was slowing down some. His first sip had only cut the contents in half. “Oh, that. I ain’t sure.” He swallowed the rest and held out his glass.
I replaced the cap. He stared. I sat back holding the pint and drumming my fingers on the table. The plastic top was sticky from drinks long ago spilled and forgotten.
“You’re playing blindman’s buff. Gropin’ in the dark.” His snarl was bottled in bond. He raised a hand to clear away the cobwebs and missed. “What makes you think I know anything about this blue picture racket? What do I look like, a pervert?”
“This court was listed in Lee Q. Story’s little brown book.”
Surprise flickered briefly behind his eyes, which had begun to look even rheumier. Then he looked angry. Then he made his face blank. The changes came sluggishly, like a fluorescent lamp blossoming on in a cold room. “So who the hell is this Story? He tell you he knows me?”
“He didn’t tell me anything. He couldn’t, the second time I saw him. He was dead. Somebody treated him to a double dose of his own joy juice. Maybe you know something about that, too.”
“I don’t know nothin’ from nothin’!” He tried to stand up, but his feet skidded out from under him and he crashed back down. He wasn’t that drunk. He was scared clean down to his toes. I wondered why. I opened the bottle and reached out to pour him a slug. He cupped a hand over his glass. It was shaking again.
“I still ain’t seen nothing that says you’re not sloppin’ at the public trough,” he said.
I got out my wallet and tossed it atop the table. He opened it, spent some time focusing on the ID and the photostat license enclosed in celluloid, and flipped it back at me with a grunt.
“The cops don’t know about the murder yet,” I explained. “I stumbled on it. There was one piece of written evidence that linked Story to this address, and I’ve got a copy. Trouble is someone else got there ahead of me and swiped the original. I figure whoever it was came straight here. You’ve seen him?”
He uncovered his glass. I poured. He drank. His wide nostrils flared. I blamed his flattened nose on a youth spent in the ring, feather-or bubbleweight division, before high living caught up with him. The town turned out almost as many fighters as it did cars and hit men.
“Not him. Them.” He was staring past me now at nothing. His hands were curled around the glass so tightly I winced, waiting for it to burst. “Hillbillies, both of them. Big guys, like you. One was bigger than the other and a year or two older, maybe forty. Blond. Big noses. Maybe they got that way by being talked through all the time, you know, twangy. Said ‘hort’ instead of ‘heart,’ ‘thang’ instead of ‘thing.’ Stuff like that. Figured they was brothers. They was here about an hour ago. That the straight dope you give me about them icing Lee Q.?”
“He was iced. I don’t know if it was them did it. Probably not. A forty-four in the head is more their style. What’d they want?” I think I presented a calm exterior. I wanted to get my hands around his throat and force the words out.
“ ’Cause, man, I don’t want no conspiracy rap on my head. I done time once already. Them prisons is full of fags.” He shuddered at some private memory. Then he looked sharply at me. “Them TV private guys always got an in with the cops. That so?”
I told him it was. I hated to lie like that. I waited. He drained his glass and held it out. I bought one for each of us just to be sociable.
“Maybe you can put a word in for me if things get hot? I cooperated with the authorities, stuff like that?” I nodded.
He sighed bitterly and ran a hot damp hand back over his balding head. “Oh man, I can get in trouble just sitting here. The big redneck done most of the talking. Asked me if I knew Story. I said what if I did? He hauls a roll of bills out of his hip pocket big enough to stuff a bowling ball with some left over, peels off a C-note and swats it down on the table on top of my cash sheet and says, ‘This is what.’ I make a grab for it, but my hand’s just touching it when he slams his big ham-hook down on it so hard I can still feel it. Well, I keep a gun handy when I’m figuring receipts. I don’t know if you noticed it.”
“I noticed it.” I had, the butt of what looked to be an Army Colt automatic being hard to miss sticking out from under a stack of scribbled-over sheets at his left elbow.
“Yeah, I figured you might.” His eyes narrowed for an instant. Then they returned to limbo. “Turned out, so did the smaller one. He saw me looking at it and reached across his belly under his coat–he was wearing a suit, both of them was–and stuck a hogleg under my nose like I ain’t seen since ‘Gunsmoke’ went off the air. ‘Don’t,’ he says. Just that, ‘Don’t.’ Calmlike, you know?”
“Was it a forty-four?” I managed to ke
ep my voice off the light fixture, but just barely. His grip on his glass was nothing compared to mine.
He nodded. “Could of been, yeah. One of them magnums. You know, the kind that can turn a guy’s brains into spaghetti. Everybody’s carrying ’em these days. You’d think they didn’t make nothing else. Anyway, I forgot all about my little Colt when I seen that. So the big guy says the century’s mine if I tell him what my connection is–was–with Lee Q.” He drank.
“You told him?”
“The bill’s in the safe. Should I hang onto it for evidence or something?”
“What’d you tell him?”
“The truth. That these two honkies, a man and a broad, are using a trailer here to shoot dirty pictures and then turning around and selling ’em to Story. Hippies, but that don’t make no difference to me. Hell, I was getting a cut. It’s no skin off my ear if some guy out in Grosse Pointe or somewhere gets off on that crap. Anyway, it’s legal now, ain’t it?”
“More or less. What do they call themselves?”
“The brothers? They didn’t–”
“The couple!” I grasped my glass as if it were his neck and inhaled the contents in a slow, steady draft. It wasn’t enough anymore. I still wanted to throttle him.
“Oh, them. Rinker. Ed and Shirley, but if they’re hitched I bet it’s common law. Filthy, both of them, with hair out to here. I thought that crap went out with Watergate. But their money’s clean.” He grinned to show what good friends we were. His left incisor was steel and shone dully in the bad light.
“Are they there now?”
He stopped grinning and shook his head. The glow of the lamp played off the dents in his gleaming brown pate. He was a one-man light show. “The bastards split this morning without paying me my last cut. They left their trailer behind, though. Figure I might make some scratch renting it out.”
“The girl in the picture. Ever see her?”
“I never got to see any of the models, worse luck. They didn’t come through here. Too bad. I could of used some of that stuff. I like my white meat as well as my dark.”
“Did anybody else ever ask about the trailer or Story? Maybe a black man, husky build, around forty?” Leading question, Walker. The drinks were screwing up my judgment.
“Nobody like that ever came here. Them two billies was the first ever asked about Story. Hold on.” A vertical cleft marred the polished expanse of flesh between his skimpy brows. “One night I seen this guy. Some broad with a trailer on the other side of the park came in to complain about her plumbing. I went out with her to take a look. We was passing Rinkers’ when the door opens and this guy steps down and almost walks into me. He was a brother all right, and husky.”
“Did he act like he was in hiding?”
“Come to think of it, yeah. Furtive-like. You know?”
I said I knew. “Straight hair? Light eyes?”
“Yeah, that was him all right.”
“What color was his flying saucer?”
He scowled thoughtfully, as if trying to picture it. Then he glared at me suddenly. “Flying saucer? Say, what the hell you trying to pull?”
“That’s my line.” I got up and ran straight into my drinks. I had to reach up and grab the brass arms of the dead ceiling fixture to keep from reeling backward. “Nobody sees everything,” I snarled. “Why didn’t you quit while you were ahead? You didn’t see any husky black. You thought if you gave me everything I wanted whether you had it or not your chances would be better with the cops. Maybe the whole damn story was just that, a story. Thanks for the use of the glass, and be sure and show your best side to the artist from the Free Press. He draws the best courtroom pictures.” I capped the bottle and swept it into my hip pocket. It was a lot lighter than it had been coming in. That was more than could be said for me. I set a tack for the door.
“Hold on!” His chair scraped backward. I kept moving. “It wasn’t a story, not all of it. Just the part about the guy. Not all of that, neither. I seen a guy, but he was white, kind of blond and pudgy. Wore one of them Russian fur hats. Like the Commies, you know. About a week back. And the rednecks was real enough. Hell, you know that; you recognized the description. Hey!”
I had a foot on the stack of cinder blocks that did for a stoop outside the trailer. I turned back, as much to get away from all that cold oxygen as to look at him. My stomach did a slow, ponderous turn, like a whale rolling over in deep water.
“One more chance,” I snapped. He was standing now, more or less, his big knuckly fighter’s hands braced flat on the paper-choked table top. His eyes weren’t eyes at all, just a pair of half-cooked eggs with runny whites. “The trailer. Where is it and do I need a key to get in.”
There was a black metal box under all the litter, which from the looks of it wasn’t any older than Mariners’ Church. He flipped it open, reached in and took out a key with a green plastic tab on it that said “Vistaview Mobile Home Park,” and threw it at me. I couldn’t have been as drunk as I felt, because I caught it in one hand above my head. “It’s on the south side. Anthony Wayne Drive. You can’t miss it. The streets are all named alphabetically, starting with Algonquin, which is the first one you come to. There are some letters missing, I suppose on account of the guy that laid it out couldn’t think of anyone or anything in local history that starts with Q or X or Y or X or a few others. He was kind of a history buff. Number Six.”
“The Dar–the hillbillies. How long were they there?”
“Hell, for all I know they never left.”
“For Christ’s sake!” I started down the steps. Then I went back, tore out the bottle, and thumped it down on his table. The second time I made it.
19
ON MY WAY BACK to the car I scooped a handful of snow out of the fairly clean pile beside the jerry-built stoop and rubbed it over my face. That made me a cold drunk. The engine didn’t like to start in that weather, but I climbed in and ground away until it caught, let it warm up for half a minute or so, and then got rolling. The steering wheel was a frozen eel in my hands. The vinyl on the seat felt clammy too, but not as cold as Lee Q. Story’s skin. Nothing was that cold. The air had the raw dampness it always has in the low twenties. I didn’t want to know what the wind chill was.
Whoever had laid out the park in its fishbone pattern, with parallel “streets” branching out horizontally from the wide main drive, had a cockeyed notion of which names from Detroit history to enshrine on the white-on-green nameplates that caught and threw back my headlights from the posts on the corners. After “Algonquin” came “John Brown,” who may have had his place in the scheme of things since he picked the old William Webb home on Congress Street to lay his plans for the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, but it seemed to me that General Edward Braddock or Henry P. Baldwin would have made a better choice than the murderous lunatic hanged for his attempt to foment a nationwide massacre of slaveowners and their families. Daniel Boone would have been ideal, if only because he spent more time here than Brown, as a hostage of the Shawnee in 1778. By that same token, Simon Girty, that white taker of colonists’ scalps in the pay of the British during the Revolution, scarcely seemed a more prudent choice to represent the seventh letter of the alphabet than Stanley Griswold, Michigan’s first secretary by the appointment of Thomas Jefferson. There were other such clinkers, but it was more than likely that the people who occupied the modern, generally well-kept trailers that lined the streets had no idea of the significance of the queer names they were obliged to include in the return addresses on their correspondence. Detroiters have as much sense of history as a herd of cattle.
Number Six, Anthony Wayne Drive was a twenty-five-footer, fairly new, with two doors on the same side but on opposite ends, a striped aluminum awning over the one near the front and the usual expanse of louvered and curtained glass between them. No light showed from inside.
The little, car-length driveway in front was unoccupied. There were no tire marks in the snow to indicate that a vehicle had been pul
led around behind, which meant nothing because they would have parked elsewhere and walked in. I swept past and turned into another vacant space two trailers down. No lights in this one either, but just in case someone was sleeping inside I killed my lamps and engine and coasted to a stop. I waited. No lights blinked on. No dogs started barking. Maybe they weren’t allowed. I sat and waited and yearned for a cigarette but didn’t light one. The engine ticked as it cooled, and then it stopped ticking and everything got quiet. The air inside the car stank sharply of hot wet metal from the heater, turned off now and silent. Damp cold wandered upto the car and sniffed and crept in through the door cracks and settled into my bones with a contented sigh.
Nothing happened in Number Six that could be seen or heard from outside.
Eight hours crawled past, although by the luminous dial of my watch it was just ten minutes. I unclipped the electronic paging device from my inside breast pocket and chucked it into the glove compartment. It would be just my luck for it to start beeping at an in opportune moment. I pocketed my keys, got out, pushed the door shut and leaned against it until it clicked, and slogged through the ankle-deep snow to the street, whose comparatively clear gray surface was more suited to efficient sneakery. Keeping to the right edge in order to avoid being silhouetted against the snow on the other side, which glowed pallidly from its own mysterious source of illumination in the absence of moon or stars, I passed the covered porch of the first door without pausing and went on to its plainer mate on the other end. There I stood and listened. No creaks or footsteps sounded from within. I hadn’t expected any. The trailer was too well built for that, and it would be carpeted like all the others.
MOTOR CITY BLUE Page 14
