MOTOR CITY BLUE

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I’ve got a hell of a lot of choice with no transportation,” she said. “This is getting wild. Who killed Story?” She had slipped the bag from her shoulder to get her arm into the jacket sleeve. Now she hoisted it back into place. The syringe rattled inside.

  I guess I was staring. A frightened look came over her features and she said, “Amos, what’s wrong? I knew you got up too soon.” She hurried over to me and put a hand on my shoulder to guide me back to bed. I left it there, but I didn’t move. I was too busy looking at the bag.

  “Come on,” I barked, snapping out of it and grabbing her wrist. “We make a great team. I’m Nick, you’re Nora.” I tore open the door and towed her out into the cold and darkness. We were within ten feet of my car when we heard the shots, both of them.

  23

  TWO FLAT REPORTS, SPACED a second apart and brittle in the cold damp air, like a cat sneezing. They might have come from the manager’s office and they might have come from Chicago. Iris and I froze in our tracks and stared at each other without seeing anything in the gloom, listening to ourselves not breathing. Then I let go of her wrist and ran to the rear of the Cutlass and fumbled out my keys and cursed as I felt for the one that opened the trunk and used it. There was no light inside. I groped along the lining on the right side until I felt a bulge and pulled the Luger out of its special pocket. It was as cold as Death’s handshake. I broke out the clip, saw that it was indeed loaded, rammed it back in, and put the gun in my coat pocket.

  “Stay here!” I shouted, slamming the lid. I could have saved my breath. She was already in the passenger’s seat. The dome light flickered on briefly, outlining her head and shoulders in yellow, then went black again as she pulled the door shut. It was time I got that lock fixed.

  There was no time to argue even if it would have worked. I climbed under the wheel, ground the engine into reluctant life, yanked on the lights, and splattered slush over the side of the trailer I’d been parked in front of as I tore off across a rectangular patch of lawn and hit Anthony Wayne Drive with a thud that did little for my front-end alignment and less for my sore jaw. Out of nervous habit I glanced up at the rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of the upper half of a determined face bathed in the eerie green glow of the dash lights. It didn’t look like anybody I knew.

  I was doing sixty by the time I got to the main stem and almost lost it on the turn, gouging a hunk out of a pile of plowed snow as hard as a banker’s heart and raking my lights over the paralyzed figure of a dowdy matron in curlers and a housecoat who had opened the door of her trailer to see who the damned fool was who was turning her peaceful court into the last lap at Indy. She wouldn’t have paid any attention to the shots. There would be deer hunting in the woods nearby, and tougher game laws had never daunted determined poachers and shiners in the past. For all I knew that might have been all there was to it, but I wouldn’t have made book on the odds. Nevertheless I cooled it on the straightaway, which probably saved my life and Iris’.

  A pair of blinding headlamps moving nearly as fast as mine came directly at me. I made for the right shoulder and my rear end came slueing around to block the road. The oncoming lights swept the inside of the Cutlass from right to left, blazing over Iris, who was flattened against the door on the passenger’s side with her nails digging holes in the padded dash, then throwing a lone, naked tree on the left side of the road into ghastly white relief as the other vehicle, a heavy pickup, skidded to avoid striking us and slammed into the heaped snow on the shoulder. It was still rocking when the driver punched it into reverse, spraying gravel and clay from all four tires, twisted the wheel to the right, and tore off in the direction from which he’d come. A stone flying from the rear wheels struck my window with a resounding crack and sent hairline fissures forking out from the point of impact.

  “Hang on!” I shouted, backed into the road, and took off in pursuit, bouncing over the ruts.

  The taillights ahead blinked out as I was roaring past the manager’s office, too late for me to miss that the truck was turning left onto the road that led back to Grand River. I lost a quarter-mile taking the turn, picked it up again on the first straight stretch of gravel, and could almost read the license plate number when it swung right suddenly, bounced up over the snowy bank, and cut a hundred yards off the corner on its way onto the avenue. My speedometer read eighty by this time but I was running out of road. I took my foot off the accelerator and used it to tap the brakes, on, off, on, off, rapidly, the scenery awash in my headlights and shifting wildly to right and left each time pressure was applied.

  It wasn’t enough. I shot past the stop sign on the corner and straight across Grand River, fighting the wheel all the way. My front wheels locked, turning the car into a two-ton iceboat. There was no traffic in the westbound lane. A taxi was crawling east, its light forming elliptical yellow pools on the glazed pavement. Iris screamed. The cab’s front wheels turned to avoid us but failed to change the vehicle’s course. At the last instant it looked as if I might get across its path in time. I didn’t. Its right front fender struck my right rear with a bang and bounded off. The Cutlass kept rolling and fetched up against a solid bank of snow on the north shoulder with a jolt that rammed my chest into the steering column. The engine stalled. There was no sign of the four-by-four I’d been chasing.

  Silence rushed in like air filling a vacuum. I wheezed to catch my breath, remembered Iris suddenly, and darted my gaze in her direction. She was massaging a spot near her hairline with a hand that could have been steadier.

  “You okay?” I snapped on the dome light.

  “Bumped my head on the windshield.” Her voice quavered slightly. “Didn’t break the skin.”

  “Sure you’re all right?”

  She gave me a level glare. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Any other time you couldn’t find a cab on a night like this,” I grumbled.

  The windshield wasn’t damaged. I cut the lights and clambered out. The cab driver was stalking across Grand River in my direction with a tire iron in his hand. There didn’t appear to be anything wrong with his tires or mine. His hack had come to a stop off the south shoulder with its headlamps shining into the road, in which position its wrinkled fender showed in the lights of a car that was crawling past beneath an overload of curiosity. It didn’t stop. They seldom do. There wasn’t anyone seated in the rear of the cab.

  The cabbie was an old black man whose stiff white eyebrows–the only individual feature I could make out against the glare of his lamps–bristled out beneath the shiny, broken visor of his cap, which bore a Teamsters Local 299 button on one side. His face was broad and square and dusky gray in the darkness, and the body beneath his stained Navy peacoat, with its various lumps and bulges, was anything but old. Guys like that are as easy to knock down as fire hydrants. He was barely across the turning lane when he opened his mouth.

  “Where the hell’d you learn to drive, man?” he exploded in a tough, city-wise voice from which all the Alabama had been beaten out long ago. “Demolition derby?”

  The wronged driver’s litany. It didn’t change from year to year. I flashed the sheriff’s shield I’d had hidden inside a flap of my wallet. It slowed him down.

  “Sergeant Duffy, County,” I said, in my policeman’s voice. “I was chasing a wife-beater. Lost him, thanks to you.” I put up the buzzer before he could get a good look at it, walked briskly around to the other side of the Cutlass, and helped Iris out onto the shoulder. She shivered in her thin jacket. She was the first hooker I’d ever met who didn’t appear to own a fur coat. I escorted her over to where the driver was standing with the tire iron dangling loosely in his grip.

  “Don’t waste time apologizing,” I snapped. “This is the scroat’s wife. Take her home while I get out an APB.” I turned her over to him.

  Iris’ mouth fell open. “What? Amos–!”

  I grinned at the cabman. “I went to school with her older sister. She calls me Amos and I call her Madeline. This should
take care of the fare and that fender.” I gave him one of the C-notes I’d gotten from Morningstar and supplied him with the address on John R. He stared at the money in his hand, then at me, and smiled. The night wasn’t so dark when he did that.

  “Man,” he said, “I don’t know who you are or what rules you play by, but I’ve knowed Iris here for a year at least, and she ain’t got no husband and her name ain’t never been Madeline. Sent her some of her best customers. But you can buy the right not to tell me if you give me enough to do the job proper. You can’t get no fender fixed for less than two hundred these days.”

  “The hell with that. You can pick one up in any junkyard for twenty-five and replace it yourself. Unless of course you’ve been cutting your dispatcher in on your pimping action?”

  The grin faded. “Man, you hoojies don’t never stop screwing us poor niggers, do you?” He was gripping the iron with his old determination.

  “ ‘Hoojies,’ ” I echoed, jacking my own grin back up onto my face. “Prison slang. Bet you’re on parole. Whose name’s on your chauffeur’s ticket?”

  He suggested something vile and turned back toward his rig with a hand on Iris’ arm. She shook it off.

  “I’m a human being, damn it!” She was glaring at me. Had been, since the exchange began. “You can’t haul me around like a kid’s pull-toy. I’m going with you.”

  “No, you’re not, angel. If I find what I think I’m going to find in that office it won’t be any place for a working girl. Not after I call the cops.” I turned to the driver. “If you don’t see her to her door I’ll have you in a holding cell by first light.”

  He’d handled rough customers before. He pinioned her arms, kept his shins out of the way of her two-inch heels, and walked her across the avenue to the cab. She had resigned herself by the time he got her inside, which was a good thing since they don’t design hacks like police cars, with no door handles in the back. The engine was still running. He got in, whined his wheels off the snow and across to the eastbound lane, and left, his right headlamp cocked a little out of line with its mate. Iris watched me through the rear window as far as I could see her, which on that night wasn’t far. She looked like a little girl on her first day off the island.

  Finding the Cutlass little the worse for its intimacy with the snowbank, I climbed in and started it and hit the lights. A line of four cars and a tanker with an impatient horn passed me heading into town at fifteen or twenty. I waited until they were clear, ground my way back onto the road, and swung across into the cow path that led to the trailer court.

  This time I pulled around behind the office and parked. I got out quietly, fingering the Luger in my pocket. No one yelled at me. I climbed the cinderblock steps, stopped, listened for a few seconds, then manipulated the thumb latch and opened the door. My gun went in first. No one knocked it out of my hand. I followed it.

  The floor lamp was still burning. Whether the manager was or not was something between him and his God. His chair had tipped over backward and was lying on its back behind the table, the X-shaped standard with its casters exposed, so that I had to walk up to the table and lean forward to see beyond the edge. He was still sitting in the chair. There were two holes in him, either one of which would have done the trick.

  I figured the first bullet had struck him in the chest while he was rising to greet his visitor, something he hadn’t done for me. He had sat back down then, hard enough to start the chair tipping backward. At that point the killer had fired a second time, aiming at approximately the same level, so that another wound was opened up between his eyes and an inch and a half above them. He hadn’t bled much from either wound. He wouldn’t have. His half-open eyes looked soft and moist and kind of sad. A thread of pink foam was drying between his lips.

  The holes were far too small to have been made by a magnum of any kind, let alone a .44. It would have surprised me if they had been. I knew now who had killed this one and Story, and it wasn’t the Darlings.

  Nothing appeared to be missing from the table. The flat whiskey bottle we had shared lay empty on its side atop the formidable paperwork. None of it had spilled, because he’d emptied it before it fell over. There were no new figures on the ledger sheet he’d been working on a couple of hours earlier. The butt of his Army Colt stuck out from beneath its scrawled camouflage at the same angle as before. The black metal box was still open but its contents hadn’t been disturbed. I glanced around the rest of the office, but there was nothing there worth taking. Nothing but a life. I reached across the table, transferred the old-fashioned black metal telephone from the window ledge to the table, and reported two murders to the night captain at Detroit Homicide, who had told me yawningly that Lieutenant Alderdyce had gone home. I said nothing about Freeman Shanks. That would have brought them too soon. I asked him to notify Alderdyce and hung up while he was asking my name.

  I left the place as boldly as someone who had a right to be leaving it at 3:30 A.M. and walked all the way to Anthony Wayne Drive. It was farther than it seemed by car, but then almost everything is. The lights in Number Six were still burning, the way Iris and I had left them. I strolled around the trailer before going in, just to make sure my quarry hadn’t doubled back while I was waltzing with the cab driver, but there were no cars or trucks parked anywhere near it and no tread marks were visible in the light of my pencil flash. No one was parked in my original spot two trailers down. I entered the big trailer.

  I didn’t know if the Rinkers, Ed and Shirley, had turned out the lights when they vacated the place, but if they hadn’t the manager would have. I did the same, after first dialing down the thermostat. Then I made myself comfortable, but not too comfortable, on the ravaged movie-set bed and got out my gun and balanced it on my thigh and waited.

  I spent most of the time keeping my eyes open. I’d had two hours of sleep early in the evening, but that was a hundred years ago, and the kind of enforced nap I’d taken courtesy of Jerry and Hubert Darling is worse than no rest at all. I must have given in, because the next thing I knew there was a thrumming noise on the narrow street as of an engine approaching at a cautious rate and when I looked at my watch I found that fifteen minutes had slipped painlessly out of my life.

  The Luger had slid from my leg and was a hard heaviness next to me on the mattress. I picked it up. Outside, the engine noise grew louder. I could hear the tires crunching over gravel. Something that had been nibbling at the edge of my memory took a sudden, ravenous gulp. I leaped to my feet, only to duck when a solid bar of indecent white light raped the darkness, sweeping rearward from the front of the trailer along the line of the window. It felt cold skimming the back of my neck, or maybe that was fear. The thrumming sound swelled and stopped. The light halted too, but stayed on. The silence hurt. Moving swiftly, before anyone could get out of the truck and hear me, I slunk to the front door and set the lock with a brittle snap. Then I crept back beneath the merciless shaft and straightened in the shadows beyond the curtains of the makeshift darkroom with my gun in hand.

  A metal door opened flatulently outside and swung shut with a crisp thump. Then silence again, and then the scrape of a leather sole on concrete and the rattle of a doorknob being tried. I was glad I’d thought to lock it finally. Then a key turned in the lock and the door was pulled open.

  At first only her profile was visible in the harsh light, all bulbous forehead and upturned nose and plump, well-shaped chin. Then she turned slowly in my direction, all of a piece as if standing on a swivel, screwing up her face in an effort to penetrate the shadows in which I stood holding my breath. She was small, not more than five-three and a hundred pounds, and her face was tiny between the wings of the worn leather collar of her jacket, and round, and might have been attractive with a little make-up. As it was, it looked like scraped bone. Add to that a great stack of frizzy hair that might be red in a kinder light, a denim bag even larger than Iris’ green leather one hanging from a strap over her shoulder, and a pair of hip-hugging jeans uneve
nly faded and stuffed into the fringed tops of imitation buckskin boots that reached halfway upher calves, and you had what the Vistaview Mobile Home Park’s late manager might consider a hippie. Her little, bare hand groped for the light switch on the wall next to the door. It was an awkward thing to do considering that the hand was curled around a gun. I stepped forward just enough to let the twin headlamps glaring through the window paint a pale stripe along the barrel of the Luger.

  “No lights, Marla,” I said, in as calm a tone as I could muster. “Not until you close the door and get rid of the piece.”

  24

  SHE HISSED. I’d been prepared for her to scream, or freeze up, or try for a shot, but she did none of these things. She opened her mouth and emitted a dry, voiceless sibilant from her throat like a Gila monster gulping cool air. Tiny feet scampered down my spine at the sound of it. I raised the Luger farther into the light. She stopped hissing. Her mouth closed slowly, reminding me again of a venomous lizard.

  “The door,” I said again. “Then the gun. Toss it on the bed.”

  She closed the door and underhanded the iron. It landed on the near corner of the mattress, bounced once, and came to rest with the butt poking over the edge.

  “Now the light.”

  She flicked the switch, bathing the trailer in yellow. I blinked, but not enough to do her any good. Outside, the truck started up again, swung around parallel to the trailer, pulled up in front of it, and started backing toward the hitch. I’d expected that. The light was the signal for all clear.

  Marla’s eyes did a fast tango between the discarded gun and the source of the noise. She was a good-looking girl in this light, except for the hair, of which there was too much and which was too light-colored for her eyes and complexion. It was too light-colored for almost anything. It was damn near orange.