MOTOR CITY BLUE

by Loren D. Estleman

  The door was raised eighteen inches off the ground with a steel step-plate beneath it. It was like a regular door in a house, with a brass knob and a keyhole, the latter at eye level when you were standing on the ground. The lock wasn’t a dead bolt. Just for the hell of it I tried the knob before going for the key. It twisted and the door came open.

  I didn’t like that. Inside it was dark as Tut’s tomb. I stepped back and waited for fireworks, but when none came I hauled out my revolver and mounted the step. Nobody was crouching on either side of the door with a sap in his hand. I stepped inside and waited for my eyes to adjust themselves to the darkness.

  It wasn’t as black as it had seemed at first. The white net curtains on the small square window on the end were as good as no curtains at all, and after a while I could make out the low bulk of a double bed with its headboard just beneath the sill and an open sliding-door closet filled with plenty of nothing in the far wall. The room was seven by seven and was separated from the rest of the trailer by a walnutlike partition with a door that when opened would bump the baseboard of the bed. Right now it was closed. I changed that, but not until I had stood with my ear at the crack long enough to hear silence on the other side. I started through with my gun in my hand.

  I sensed rather than felt the new weight that had entered the trailer behind me. Before I could turn, something that was not a comb or a stiffened finger dug into the fleshy part of my back just above the waist.

  “I’m gonna give you a firsthand look at your own guts the second you even think about turning around,” said a voice dripping with deep South at my right ear.

  20

  I RAISED MY HANDS, gun and all, to my shoulders. A hard dry hand raspy with calluses reached over and relieved me of the weapon, twisting it out of my grip so violently that I barely got my finger clear of the trigger guard in time to save it from being snapped off.

  “Got him, Jer,” he called. His calf’s-bawl set my head to ringing. It still ached, thanks to the U.S. Army.

  The trailer filled with light. I blinked. I was standing just inside a shallow passageway that opened onto a tiny bathroom to my left and led into a room that took up the rest of the trailer. But I couldn’t see anything beyond that, because the square arch ahead of me was filled with a dark figure that stood two feet inside the room holding something in his left hand that glittered like gold.

  “Well, don’t just stand there, you dumb cock-sucker,” he said. “Shoo him in.”

  He had the other’s nasal twang, but his was colder, more thoughtful. The hard something prodded my back. I moved forward to spare the kidney.

  The room had been a combination kitchen, living, and dining area before someone had converted it into a photographer’s studio and motion picture set. Strobe lights mounted atop metal standards stood at the head and foot of a Queen Anne bed bigger than some states with a rumpled pink spread and tangled black satin bedding. A hand-held videotape camera worth a couple of G’s lay on its side atop a low table with a padded top designed for that purpose, beside a smaller film-type movie camera. Another table held a good still camera and a cheap Polaroid and a number of curled black and white Polaroid shots of naked girls in every conceivable pose and a couple that would be pretty hard to conceive unless you were preoccupied with that sort of thing, and aren’t we all. Test shots. Opaque black curtains, open now, had been added to the kitchen end, and there were chemical containers of glass and unbreakable plastic on the drainboards next to the double sink, turning the area into a darkroom. Negatives clothespinned to a cotton cord dangled above the sink. There were indentations in the slippery black pillows on the bed that might have been made by heads, and there were white spots on the sheet that had been made by something else. It was a nice room.

  It was the room in which the picture in my pocket, the later one, had been snapped. What I had mistaken for a list of hotel checkout times was really a shooting schedule printed in neat blue-pencil characters on a child’s wide-ruled composition sheet taped to the door. September Morn, torn from a magazine and mounted in a cheap frame, still hung to the left of it.

  As with most trailers, cabinets had been built everywhere cabinets could be built. Most were open, their contents spilled out on the floor. These included dozens of flat gray metal canisters and miles of Super 8 and 16-millimeter film, exposed and unexposed to begin with, but now all exposed. They hadn’t gotten around yet to tearing the bed apart and slitting the pillows.

  “You shouldn’t ought to call me that, Jerry,” whined the gunman behind me. “You know I don’t like to be called things like that.” He said thangs, just as the park manager had claimed.

  “You’ll get called a damn sight worse if you don’t learn to stop using names, shithead.”

  Jerry was a bruiser, a college gridiron type with good shoulders growing out of his solid neck like roots from a stump, but he was carrying too much belly these days to make even semipro. His dark suit coat of no particular color wasn’t buttoned at the waist and hadn’t been in years. His gray topcoat needed cleaning. It was the same outfit he had been wearing when he and his brother snatched Francis Kramer on Woodward a couple of decades ago–or was it yesterday afternoon? He had a thick face with not enough chin, too much nose that threatened to pull him over onto his face, and incongruously innocent blue eyes that went as deep as the gold plate on a pair of dollar cuff links. His dishwater hair was collar-length and greased back and wasn’t any cleaner than it had to be. The glittering something was behind his back.

  He was working at a wad of gum and giving me a good view of his progress because he chewed with his mouth open. He studied me in silence for some moments, his gum clicking.

  “You walk awful quiet for a man your size,” he said at length. “We never would of knowed you was coming at all if we didn’t see your car rolling slow down the main drag, like you was looking for a particular street and wasn’t sure where to find it. Hubert–damn it, now I’m doing it!” He spat out his gum viciously. It made a nasty noise hitting the rug. “Well, the hell with it. I sent Hubert out behind the trailer to wait. He seen you sneaking up. Now, what’s your blister?”

  I said nothing.

  “You ain’t no Jew. Too damn good-looking. You sure as hell ain’t no nigger. Kikes snoop around a lot and niggers is always looking for an easy shove-over. Only other reason I can figure you’d be on the prowl is you’re a cop.”

  I repeated myself. In the passageway the tin furnace kicked in and began purring.

  “I got to do everything for myself. Keep them hands up, you.” He put whatever it was that glittered into a pocket, patted me down, and came up with my wallet and the pictures and the scrap of paper in the right side of my jacket. He left my keys and change in my pants. He didn’t get my notebook with all the information I’d jotted down on this case. That was at home where I’d had the good sense to leave it.

  First he opened the wallet and gave my papers a good going over in the light of the ceiling fixture. “Snooper, huh?” he said, looking up. He didn’t expect an answer. The pictures interested him, particularly the bigger one, which had been taken in this room. He studied it a minute, glanced at the door that led outside, which had figured in the shooting, looked back at the picture again, and turned his attention without comment to the crumple of paper I had torn from Story’s notebook. I saw his scalp move when he realized what it was. Still he didn’t say anything. He gave everything one last look and then put it on the table with the Polaroids. Then he turned back to me with his blank stare.

  “Shut that door and put away the piece,” he told the other. “This guy ain’t going nowhere.”

  The gun was removed from my back. I let my hands down. A second later there was a shallow rumbling noise behind me as the sliding door that separated this room from the rest of the trailer was pushed shut. Then the other man came around me, walking sideways and giving me as wide a berth as he could, considering the cramping presence of the oversized bed. Hubert was a poor carbon of h
is brother, not as big and even less tidy in an identically nondescript suit and shabbier topcoat. His face was badly pockmarked, and the flesh-colored nub of a hearing aid showed inside his right ear–another legacy, I supposed, of that same childhood illness. The butt and cylinder of a Colt magnum stuck upabove his big square belt buckle. My Smith & Wesson made his left coat pocket sag.

  He had beady little eyes unlike his brother’s that glistened unhealthily in the soft light as he directed them from me to the stuff on the table. He started to pick it up.

  “Who told you to move?” snapped Jerry. “Put that down and get the hell back where you was before!”

  Hubert looked at him with a hurt expression, opened his rather weak mouth, then clamped it shut and left the stuff where it was and retraced his steps around to my back, one hand gripping the magnum protectively.

  “Hold him, Hube.”

  The older Darling gave the command as casually as a doctor calling for suction during an operation. My arms were seized and jerked behind me somewhat less casually and a variation of the nolo contendere hold that had led Francis Kramer to his death was applied. Any attempt on my part to escape would have cost me more than one bone.

  Meanwhile, Jerry reached into his right pocket and then cupped that hand around his left, and when they came apart I saw that the glittering something I’d noted earlier was a full set of brass knuckles. I held my water with difficulty.

  “You kill the coon in the pecker shop?” he asked calmly.

  “No.”

  While I was looking at the fist with the brass knuckles he drove the other into my abdomen. I wheezed and bent, but only so far as Hubert let me. My arms creaked in their sockets.

  “Let’s try it again. You kill him?”

  I said no again, through my teeth this time. He hit me with the same fist just below the solar plexus. I didn’t have any wind left to wheeze with. That didn’t stop my lungs from turning themselves inside out trying.

  Jerry waited for me to recover somewhat, then repeated his question. I repeated my answer and braced myself.

  He grinned, not sadistic, not friendly. It was just something he did with his mouth. “ ’Course you didn’t. You was there after us, not before. Otherwise you’d have the original page from the shine’s book and we’d have the penciled-over one instead of the other way around. I had to know if you’d lie to save yourself a beating. Now we can get down to some serious business. Where’s the film?”

  “What film?”

  The fist with the brass knuckles flashed around and caught me on the side of the jaw. I tried to roll with the punch. It bought me little. A hot white light burst inside my head and my jaw tore at its fastenings. I shook my head sluggishly, without any snap to it, and worked the jaw. It crunched as if there were sand in the sockets.

  “Where’s the film?”

  “I don’t–”

  The right fist slammed into the other side. It was a pillow compared to the other, but I hadn’t seen it coming in time to turn my head with it and caught the full force on the tender region. My vision broke into black and white checks. There was salt on my tongue and something else.

  “Man, it’s your face,” said Jerry. “If I was wearing knucks on that one you’d leave here in a bag. Where’d you hide it?”

  He knew what the answer was going to be. He dropped his left shoulder and cocked the shining fist.

  “Lay off that one, Jerry,” said his brother. “What’d he be doing snooping around here if he had the film?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.” But he relaxed his stance. “The picture,” he said to me. “The blow job. It was took here. Who’s the bimbo and what’s your interest in her?”

  “She’s a missing person,” I replied, through a mouthful of rocks. “Her guardian hired me to find her. She disappeared from a school in Lansing last year. The picture’s all I’ve got to go on.

  “Makes sense, Jer.”

  “Shut up.” The big man looked thoughtful. He was about my height, but he had twenty pounds on me. The knuckles gave him another hundred. “I don’t like it,” he snarled. “It stinks. This guardian, he got a name?”

  “Ben Morningstar.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence. Then they both laughed out loud. They had nasty laughs.

  “That’s sweet, that is,” said Jerry, “considering Morningstar’s the money man behind this whole thing.” He waved an expansive arm around the trailer.

  “What whole thing?”

  “Story’s and about a dozen other jerk-off stands and grindhouses in town. Wasn’t for him, there wouldn’t be no porn traffic, for Christ’s sake. At least not like we got it.”

  “Says who?”

  “Hell, it’s street dope. Right, Hube?”

  “Shit, yes,” said Hube.

  The older Darling’s doll-eyes narrowed. His face was a tight white mask. “Which is why you’re lying in your teeth, Mr. Peeper. Teeth you ain’t gonna have much longer to lie in no more. Hold him good, Hubert.”

  Hubert held me good. Jerry set himself and stepped forward to put some weight behind his swing and I kicked him between the legs with everything I had.

  Which wasn’t enough, considering I’d hoped to kill him. The pain and shock had been known to do that, according to my judo instructor in the MPs. But when Jerry said, “Ga!” and went down to the floor rolling and moaning with his hands between his legs I knew I’d fallen short of the mark.

  “Jer! You all right, Jer?” Hubert sounded scared. He relaxed his grip and I started to twist free, but before I could gather enough balance to wheel around he got hold again and bent my arms back and up with a violent surge that nearly forced me to my knees. I was still grunting from the pain and exertion when Jerry, pale and shaken, got up on his knees and climbed unsteadily to his feet. His top coat and right cheek were smeared with brown dust.

  “You son of a bitch!” He sprayed saliva. His face wasn’t a face anymore. It was a grinning skull with glazed dead eyes in the sockets. His voice was nothing more than air forced through his teeth. “Hold him, Hube,” he hissed. “Hold him real good.”

  He positioned himself in front of me and to the left, with his right hip turned toward me as protection against another kick. “Such a good-looking boy, too,” he said regretfully, and hurled a brassbound fist straight at my mouth.

  21

  “BRASS KNUCKLES ARE THE lowest, most vicious device ever concocted by man,” a voice was saying. “They’re almost always the property of the aggressor, and the guy too weak or scared to rely on his own fists has no right taking the offensive at all.”

  “But this guy was no Caspar Milquetoast,” someone protested. “He was a good six-one and two hundred pounds.”

  “All the more reason to despise his falling back on artificial aid. Since he didn’t need it, his decision to use it tells you something important about him. The man’s a sadist.”

  I opened my eyes to yell at the two guys who were disturbing my coma. There was no one there. I was lying on a bed in a dimly lit room all alone. The voices were both mine and they were both in my head. My face didn’t feel like my face. It was a numb mask. Which was merciful, because when I raised a hand from under the covers to touch it, it didn’t feel as if it was all there. I ran an exploratory tongue around my teeth, some of which wobbled. There I halted my inspection. I didn’t want to know any more just yet.

  The light was coming from a lamp with a corrugated paper shade and a fat china base on a low square table with a single drawer in it beside the bed. On the other side was a closet with a sliding door open just far enough to show that it was empty. Aside from that the room had two doors, one on the right that looked as if it might lead outside and another just beyond the foot of the bed that opened on a shallow passage I recognized. It took me a minute to put it together. I was in the bedroom of the trailer, the one no one ever seemed to use, even for sleeping.

  I was fully dressed under the top sheet and spread except for my jacket
, tie, and shoes, which when I looked in that direction turned out to have been left in a heap on the floor between the bed and the right wall. That angered me for a moment, someone treating another man’s clothes like that when there was a perfectly good closet standing unused nearby. I wasn’t thinking straight. I hadn’t been for some time.

  I disregarded the ache in my arms and my own fears to feel my face again. It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. My jaw was swollen and my lower lip was puffed up and oozing fresh blood through a split near the center, but the jawbone appeared to be intact and most of my teeth were firmly in place. My nose hadn’t been touched. There had been more blood but someone had sponged it off.

  My watch read 2:08. Morning or afternoon? The square window on the end of the trailer above my head was black. Morning, then. Of what day?

  I was turning that one over when a toilet flushed somewhere and the light in the bathroom off the passage, which I just realized had been burning all this time, blinked off under the door and the door slid open and someone came out and into the bedroom. Someone with a trim figure beneath a pale green pantsuit and who swayed as gracefully on stilt-high platform shoes as she did in clogs and nothing. Someone named Iris.

  She smiled when she saw I was awake and came over and sat on the edge of the bed and put her purse on the floor. She picked up my hand and held it between her smooth palms, so pale in contrast to the deep brown, nearly purple, of the rest of her. Her eyes were bright and shiny, the pupils shrunken to pinpoints. She’d just had a fix and the world was a beautiful place again.

  “This has to be Heaven,” I mumbled through my cracked lips. “I’ve been through Purgatory.”

  “Close. You look like Hell.” She gave my hand a squeeze.

  “The gendarmes with you?”

  She shook her head quickly. “I never took the time to call them. Right after you got off the line I called for a cab and headed straight here. I told Aunt Beryl a friend of mine had been in an accident and was in the hospital. The dispatcher had a hell of a time getting a cabbie that would go down John R after dark.”