MOTOR CITY BLUE

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You’d better tell me everything. My head hurts.”

  “I can’t think why. You weren’t lying in any more than a cup of your own blood when I found you.”

  “You found me where?”

  “You wanted the whole story.” Her dark eyes flashed. “Who are you to tell me to wait two hours to find out if you’re dead or alive and then hang up? When I finally got a hack I came here and spent half an hour getting that soak in the office to tell me where you’d gone. He was two-thirds of the way through a pint of Haig & Haig and three sheets to the wind. I don’t suppose you had anything to do with that.”

  “Tsk tsk,” I said. “A member of your own race.”

  “Race doesn’t enter into it! Anyway, he’s African and I’m islander. There’s a world of difference. And a soak is a soak. Stop interrupting. By the time I got here you were sprawled in a mess on the carpet. It cost me an extra ten to get the driver to help me carry you in here, and then he wouldn’t stick around. Someone had been at the other bed with a knife and it made him nervous. Where do you store all that tonnage, anyway? There isn’t any fat on you. Except for your head.”

  I took a strike on that one. “Where were the Hager twins?”

  “Who? Are you delirious?”

  “No more so than usual. I mean the Darlings. You know, Jerry and Hubert. The Apache dancers in the room next to yours.”

  “I didn’t see anyone. You mean, they’re the ones who did this to you?” She gripped my hand hard enough to cut off the circulation.

  “Them and a hunk of brass good for a year in Jackson if the cops find it in their possession,” I said. “They probably lit out the other door when you and the hackie came in the front. Two on two isn’t their style, and who can tell the sex of anyone in a getup like that on a dark night?” I flitted my aching eyes over her mannish attire. “Whatever happened to skirts, or aren’t I allowed to ask that anymore? A guy can’t call a broad a broad these days without getting picketed.”

  “My, aren’t we macho. And you with teeth in another room.”

  “Not quite.” I disengaged my hand from hers with a gentle squeeze of my own and peeled back the bedspread. It was heavier than it looked. It was woven steel stuffed with cannonballs.

  “What are you doing?” Her tone dripped disapproval.

  “Getting up.” I braced my elbows on the mattress.

  “No, you’re not!”

  I sat up. The black and white checkerboard came back. Only it wasn’t a checkerboard now, it was a net that someone had drawn over my eyeballs and was twisting behind my head. Blood boomed inside my skull. I lay back down. It was a long way to the mattress. “No, I’m not,” I agreed.

  Her face drifted around a bit before dropping anchor. It had I-told-you-so scribbled all over it. “You took more of a beating than you think,” she said. “If I showed you the stain on the rug you’d know how much. You aren’t twenty anymore; you can’t expect to bounce back just like that. What are you, thirty-five, thirty-six?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “No kidding? You look a lot older. I was just being kind. There’s gray in your hair.”

  “If I were half as old as I feel, I’d be ten years buried.”

  “What you need is a week’s rest.”

  “What I’ll take is ten minutes.”

  “How about an hour?”

  I started to shake my head, thought better of it, and said, “I’ve got an appointment with the guy who runs this court. He doesn’t know I’ve got it, but I don’t want to be late.”

  She just stared at me. I was beginning to realize just how angry and scared she was. “You’ll stay in that bed if I have to climb in there with you.”

  I grinned. The split in my lower lip opened some more and I tasted blood. I ignored it. “Not with those pants on,” I said. “I’d feel like a fag.”

  She looked at me for a moment without saying anything. Then she got up. There was a metallic pop, the whine of a zipper, and then she pushed the slacks down her long slim legs and stepped out of them and her shoes in almost the same movement. If she was wearing any underwear at all there wasn’t enough of it to blindfold a canary. She swept the cumbersome garment aside with a foot the way a baby bird might free itself of the egg with one last kick and slid in beside me. “Slid” was the word. She had the grace of a trained dancer. She felt warm against me, or maybe that was just me. Her expression was still mad as hell. I said something tactless. Remember, I was sick.

  I said, “This isn’t going to cost me anything, is it? They lifted my wallet.”

  “Shut up,” she said, and kissed me. It hurt, but not so much I wanted her to stop.

  22

  IT WAS 2:45 BY my watch, which had a battery only six weeks old and no reason to lie. Some pursuits seem to go faster than others. I excavated my crushed pack of cigarettes from my sodden shirt pocket and offered her one. She accepted it.

  “That certainly was restful, wasn’t it?” I said.

  She held the cigarette between her fingers and looked at the imitation walnut paneling of the ceiling. She had a clean profile and a neck like a pharaoh’s erotic dream. She said, “If that’s a sample of what you can do when you’ve been beat up, I’ll have to catch you when you’re well.”

  I came back with something equally flattering, but which wasn’t a lie, and let the Winston in the corner of my sore mouth droop while I patted my pockets for matches.

  “Hand me my purse,” she said. “There’s a lighter in it.”

  It was more bag than purse, an over-the-shoulder number in green leather with a strap you could use for a fan belt on an earth mover. Times were rough for purse-snatchers. Something rattled inside when I lifted it. I sat up and hoisted it into my lap and opened the catch. Iris took in her breath sharply and made a grab for it, but my strength was returning; I held on and rooted among the keys and cocktail napkins and wads of Kleenex and came up with a hypodermic syringe that glittered in the soft light. She snatched it out of my hand.

  Silence stank while I mined out a slim plastic throwaway lighter–green, to match her suit and purse–and lit our cigarettes, starting with hers. She puffed at it angrily.

  “How long?” I asked, when mine was a quarter-inch down.

  “About two years.” She dragged at hers more slowly. “Twenty-six months and three days.”

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “That’s right.”

  We smoked. Not too far away an engine started after a lot of grinding and idled, warming up. An assembly-line worker, maybe, on his way in for the early shift. Or a blind pig customer. Or both, which explained the quality of today’s cars.

  She took the bag from my lap, dropped in the syringe, and snapped it shut. She left the cigarette burning in her mouth and sat there with her hands clutching the bag, looking at nothing. “I wasn’t forced into it, if that’s what you want to know,” she said. “I never did have will power. Not an ounce.”

  “I saw a man today who had been killed by a good stiff fix. I suppose it’s as peaceful a way to go as any.”

  She wasn’t listening. “I’ve thought about quitting. The turkey, not that methadone stuff. I wonder if it’s the hairy trip they say.”

  “It’s worse.”

  Her head jerked back as if she’d been slapped. She turned huge eyes on me. Huge and scared. “What I heard–”

  “What you heard was PR put out by the drug clinics. If they told the truth they wouldn’t get half the patients they get. A week to stop screaming. Ten days to two weeks before you feel like going on and can keep anything down heavier than chicken broth. Two years before you stop missing it. That’s the dangerous time. Some think they can handle it and start in all over again. I can count the people I know who kicked it twice on one finger. He died.” I stopped to take a drag. She didn’t say anything. Outside the idling engine took on a businesslike growl and throbbed away. “If you’re serious about quitting, I can give you the name of a guy I know in Hazel Park. He runs a
clinic in a private house on Woodruff. I have his card, if Jerry and Hubert didn’t run off with my wallet.”

  “Is he a doctor?”

  “Was. Even the AMA can’t close ranks fast enough when the narcs move in.”

  “He’s a doper?”

  “Was again. For six years. Which is why he knows better than anyone else how to run a clinic. He has a doctor on staff, to administer glucose injections and sign death certificates for those that don’t make it. I’m not trying to scare you, just telling you what to expect. People with strong hearts have nothing to worry about.”

  “What made you decide to become a snooper?”

  I wasn’t surprised by the swift change of subject. Almost anything’s more fun to talk about than your own health. “It was good enough for a guy I liked,” I said.

  “Tell me about him.”

  I crushed out my cigarette in my left palm, a habit I’d picked up in the jungle when there wasn’t an ashtray handy. “When I met him, I was a police trainee and he was a sergeant with twenty-six years on the force. He liked me. Some people did, back then. He put his pension on the line to try and help me out of some trouble I got into and damn near lost it when it didn’t work. By the time I got out of the army he’d retired and gone private. I didn’t have a job so he hired me. I didn’t have a place to live so he put me up in his three-room apartment. When I decided to get married he stood up for me at the ceremony even though he’d tried to tell me she was no good. He was right. He was usually right, but he never said I told you so, not even at the divorce hearing.”

  I shook my head. “He wasn’t much. He was fat and old and ugly and he drank too much and he wasn’t much of a P.I. But there was one thing he hated, and that was a set of crooked gears that worked too smoothly. He said it was the duty of every honest man to throw sand in the works whenever the opportunity presented itself.”

  Iris said, “I think I’d like him too. What happened to him?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Oh.” She changed the subject again. “Why did the Darlings try to kill you?”

  “They weren’t trying to kill me. There are quicker ways of doing that and I imagine they know most of them. At first they thought I had something they wanted. Then they didn’t think that anymore, but they wanted to know what I was doing and who I was working for. I told them, but they didn’t believe me.”

  “Do you have what they want?”

  I nodded. “Last night–the night before last, now–they put a bullet through the head of a guy I used to know because he filmed them and two of their friends executing a guy last August. The guy in the film was black and they’re Klansmen and the rest you know, or ought to. This other guy they killed was working for Army Intelligence, but I figure he’d been sitting on the film all this time, bleeding the Darlings and company. He was that kind of guy, and from what the park manager here told me they’re loaded. Most likely Kramer–that’s the guy with the candid camera–told them after they snatched him what he’d done with the evidence or they wouldn’t have handed him his ticket. Hubert, the younger one, carries a forty-four magnum and Kramer was shot with a forty-four. And I saw the snatch.

  “Only Kramer didn’t have the film. He was no genius, but he wasn’t so dumb he’d tell them where to find it knowing they’d kill him once he did. They knew he didn’t have it because they’d been following him all over town watching him look for it. I’ll come back to that. They confronted him with this knowledge and he blurted out what little he knew. Exit Kramer.

  “Last night they visited a porno shop on Erskine run by a guy named Story, looking for the film, but someone had beaten them to it and tossed the place without finding it. I’d been there second and found it, never mind how. Story was dead, brained with something or other and OD’d on his own dope. Maybe he put up a fight and got slugged hard enough not to expect to come out of it and the murderer got scared and tried to make it look like an accident. It’s not rational, but killers who don’t do it for a living seldom are.”

  I paused to give her time to comment or ask questions. She didn’t use it. She reached over and mashed out her butt against the closet’s sliding door. It left a mark on the blond wood.

  “Lee Q. Story bought and sold all or most of his merchandise locally,” I continued. “Some of it came from this trailer, and some of it went to collectors and other shops in town. Kramer had just finished tearing apart the apartment of a collector who probably bought some of his stuff from Story when Jerry and Hubert picked him up. It was a last-ditch effort to find the film that could keep him alive after he’d pushed the blackmail angle too far. He’d already been to every place Story dealt with in quantity, or he wouldn’t have been on his way to an appointment he’d made with another Intelligence agent for protection.

  “He’d been here first, because this was where he hid the film when things started to get hot. He was seen leaving the trailer a week ago. That’s why Lee Q. left this court off the list he gave me of his sources; he suspected someone here knew something and he didn’t want me stumbling on it. It was the perfect cache. Who’d ever think of looking for footage of a murder in a trailer full of stag movies in identical cans? Kramer’s trouble was he didn’t take anyone into his confidence, and the film went out in a box or crate with maybe a dozen others to the shop on Erskine. That would have been his next stop. He wouldn’t have looked as closely there as he’d have liked to, though, because Story was a mean mother with friends on the street who probably told him he’d get cut if he kept snooping around. Being something less than a hero, Kramer split with a fair idea of the places Story did business with and confined his search to them. What was wrong with that was he didn’t know that Lee Q. had looked inside the box, probably screened the film, realized he had a gold mine and socked it away for future use. Blackmail, of course. Items like that carry the germs of greed like Mary Mallon carried typhoid. If he didn’t know who the men in the film were, he planned to find out. Only he got burned before he could turn a profit.”

  She had turned onto her side and was watching me. Her body was snug against mine. She wore no perfume. Some women don’t have to. Her finger traced idle circles on my unshaven cheek.

  I went on. “Kramer must have told the Darlings about Story but not about this trailer, or they wouldn’t have had to go to the place on Erskine to find out about it, just as I did. That’s natural. He thought he was talking himself out of a jam and would want to keep his story simple and believable. Besides, he may have suspected that it was someone here who was holding out on him and not Story and planned on coming back. As for why it took the Darlings twenty-four hours to pay a call on the shop, the only thing I can think is that they wanted to check out some of the other places first. Like most bigots they’d fear blacks on their own ground, and might put off visiting the blackest part of the city until they absolutely had to. Then they would have wanted to go in after dark, because that’s how they work.”

  “What does all this have to do with Martha?” asked Iris, still watching me. She had large eyes even when they weren’t registering fright. “Aside from her entertaining the Darlings in her room that night, I mean. That could have been coincidence.”

  “There’s only one coincidence in this case, and that’s that I happened to step into the same muckhole from two directions. There is no Martha Burns, to begin with. Her name is Marla Bernstein, and that picture I showed you was taken in this trailer. You might even call that coincidence, except for a telephone call I made to Lansing that blows that theory all to hell. She wasn’t entertaining the Darlings, not in the way you think. But the hell with that right now.” I peeled aside the spread and swung my stockinged feet to the floor. A wave of nausea swept over me, but it was quickly past. I put on my shoes, bit my lip, and dipped down to scoop my jacket and tie from the floor. I nearly passed out on that one, but then I was upright again and dragging on the jacket. I balled up the necktie and thrust it into a pocket, then put on my shoes.

  “Amos!�
� she said angrily. “I said an hour!”

  But I was already up and heading for the other end of the trailer. It was like walking in a dream, with clouds shifting and crossing beneath my feet. It wasn’t a dream. My jaw was starting to hurt. “No time, angel. Jerry and Hubert were thinking of rabbiting or they wouldn’t have run at first sight of a car. I’ve got to get to a telephone.”

  An ugly brown stain had spoiled the nap of the carpet where my head had been lying. I tried not to think of it as my blood and rescued my overcoat from the floor where Iris and the cab driver had flung it after stripping it off me to lighten the load. My hat was where it had fallen with the first blow of Jerry Darling’s brass knuckles. I got that too, and put them both on. They’d done a thorough job on the Queen Anne mattress. The cover was slashed in a ragged cross and stuffing hung out of it like entrails.

  Iris came in, trying to walk and step into her slacks at the same time. She wasn’t having much success. She had her bag over one shoulder and was carrying her sea-green jacket, thrown off in the heat of lovemaking, under her arm. Her white nylon blouse was milkily transparent. She wasn’t wearing underwear, by the way.

  “Who are you going to call?” She had stopped finally and was making progress with the slacks.

  “Alderdyce. It’s his case.” My wallet and everything else Jerry Darling had taken from my pockets were still on the snapshot-littered table. My gun had left with them. I put the items in their respective pockets. “I guess I forgot to tell you. The guy Kramer filmed them snuffing was Freeman Shanks.”

  She stopped what she was doing and stared, mouthing the name without making a sound. Then, slowly and carefully, she did up her slacks, tucked in her blouse, and donned and fastened her jacket. Things were moving too fast for her. I knew how she felt.

  I said, “They can post cops at both airports and alert Customs at the Ambassador Bridge and put out an APB statewide and in enemy territory. Meaning Ohio. They might pick them up in six months if the Feds stay out of it, which of course they won’t. Are you coming or not?”