“Would you mind ditching the wig?” I asked, not impolitely. “You don’t have to, but I’d consider it a personal favor. You’ll have to admit it’s hard on the eyes.”
She hesitated. A door slammed outside and feet crunched through snow. Metal rattled. Then she reached up and peeled off the orange Brillo pad and shook loose her black-black hair so that it tumbled over her shoulders in disheveled waves. That was the Marla Bernstein I knew, the stunner in the graduation photo, the sword-swallower in the porno snap. The battleworn jacket, jeans, and boots gave her a wickedly exotic look: Ilse, She-Wolf of the SS. She stood glaring at me, holding the shaggy wig down at her side.
I came out of the darkroom and crab-walked in front of her over to the bed where the gun lay. It was a long-barreled .22. I left it where it was and took upa position between it and her. I wanted her fingerprints on it when the cops came.
Someone was scraping snow away from in front of the trailer with a shovel, getting set to insert a jack beneath the steel tongue. She was listening to the miscellaneous noises.
“Don’t worry, he’ll join us in a little while,” I said. “Then we can all have a nice talk. Is his name really Rinker, or is that as phony as ‘Martha Burns’?”
“It’s really Rinker.” Her voice was calmer than expected. She’d had time to compose herself. It wasn’t a bad voice, sultry but shallow, as when she sang. Her hiss had more depth. “I met him at Aphrodite Records. He was back-up guitarist with a group that called itself the Accelerators. For all the hits they had it could just as well have been the Brake Pedals.”
“He must like money as much as you do. Musicians usually have too many dreams to toss them away by throwing in with blackmailers. Unless they do drugs and lack the wherewithal. Is that his problem?”
“He does pills.” Her dark eyes smoldered. “For him it was money to buy reds and angel dust. For me it was revenge.
“Revenge for your murdered boyfriend,” I said, helping her out. “Freeman Shanks.”
Her lips parted in surprise. They were nice lips that needed no gloss. Her teeth were even and very white. Then they closed again. “How’d you know?”
“I had no idea he was involved until I saw the film.”
“You saw the film!” An animal hunger sprang into her eyes. She started forward but my gun stopped her.
“It’s a long story,” I said. “It’s a novel, but it needs telling. Stop me when I stray too far. You met Shanks when you were both in Lansing. I called Esther Brock last night and she told me he spoke at the school while he was in town conferring with his campaign backers. That’s when he was running for union office. The rest is guesswork, but somehow you and he got together alone and something happened. You fell in love with him. Maybe he reciprocated, or maybe he just liked snatch.”
“He reciprocated. It was at a coffee in the students’ lounge after the speech.” She blushed then. It would have been adorable if I hadn’t seen her other side. “We went back to my room. It didn’t take long; he was a busy man. We were both back at the party before anyone missed us.”
I nodded. “He was a busy man, all right. But not too busy he didn’t like a little diversion now and then during a tough campaign. He was also nearing forty, and flattered to think that he could attract a pretty eighteen-year-old girl. Maybe he knew who your guardian was even then. Probably not, though, or he’d have dropped you like a rattlesnake. It didn’t look good for a man who had promised to rid the union of mob influence to be carrying on with the ward of an infamous racketeer. His campaign people would have told him that eventually, but by then it was too late. He had taken you with him to Detroit.”
“We were going to be married after the election.” There were tears in her eyes. They glistened without falling. But her voice remained steady.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Interracial marriage is a long way from acceptance in this town. At any rate, whether he knew who you were or not, he hid you out in a brothel to keep you out of sight until the balloting was finished. Only something went wrong. Something called the Black Legion. Those good old boys don’t like to see blacks doing anything but shining shoes and swamping out toilets. What a lesson it would be to the rest of the race if its greatest hero of the moment got knocked off. No doubt they tried a couple of times without success. I seem to recall reading about an attempt or two on Shanks’ life that went bust. The cops hung them on the Mafia and played them that way, which explains why no one ever went up for them. They wouldn’t have known about the Legion, or Klan, or whatever they prefer to be called, because the government was working that angle and Feds never talk to anyone about anything. Anyway, it was well known that Shanks had better protection than anyone except the president, and that to get to him you had to mow down twenty bodyguards who were themselves armed, which just about rendered him impervious to anything short of a kamikaze raid. You won’t find many in that strutting bunch who are that ready to die for their ideals. So they had to smoke him out, and that’s where you came back into the picture, Marla. You and the Darlings.”
She watched me between narrowed lids. There were no tears visible now. It didn’t look as if there ever had been. “Who are you?”
It seemed late in the day to be asking that question, if she really didn’t know the answer. I humored her.
“Just a guy. Jerry and Hubert are the kind of dedicated bigots it takes to keeptheir organization from becoming an occasional rally at the VFW where they get to dress up in sheets and holler a lot about niggers and spics and kikes and Commies and taxes. Maybe they’re the leaders. Anyway, they found out about you somehow. I don’t think they followed Shanks when he came to visit or they could have knocked him down anywhere along the way, because he made them without his security. Most likely they spotted him by chance while they were going and he was coming. They were off-and-on customers. That’s probably what gave them the idea to take him out in the first place. They could have staked out the place and ambushed him, but too many people knew them there. So they dropped in on you at Aunt Beryl’s early one morning and persuaded you to help them get your boyfriend away from his private army. Probably they started by offering you money, and when you refused they got rough. One of the other girls heard it and saw your face later. You weren’t very pretty right then.”
“They threatened to bust me up good,” she said. Her voice betrayed her finally. She covered her face with both hands. “They said they hoped I had a good picture of myself to remind me what I used to look like.”
“That was just the clincher, doll. You were ready to throw in with them the minute they mentioned money. But holding out a little longer was romantic. Maybe it even drove up the price.”
There must have been an edge to my tone. She lowered her hands softly, a millimeter at a time, and looked at me with the hatred dawning in her eyes.
“You wanted to be a singing star,” I went on, before she could say anything. “You wanted it so bad you could taste it. That was the one thing that everyone who knew you agreed on. But no one but you knew how far you’d go to realize that dream. You sang for Barney Zacharias at Beryl’s and he told you he could make you a star if you had the money to finance the climb. Only you didn’t have money. Your tuition, room, and board at the school had been paid by Morningstar directly to Esther Brock and you never even got to smell it. Shanks didn’t give you any because you might get ideas about spending it, and that meant leaving the house. You couldn’t go back to the old man and ask him for it because you knew he wouldn’t agree, and if he found out you’d been checked into a whorehouse under a fictitious name by your lover, a shvartze–well, you’d be back in Arizona quicker than you can say ‘Grand Canyon State.’ So you took to hooking, which was nice until you had to start cutting others in on your action. Then the Brothers Darling came along and offered you big money to betray your boyfriend and it was like manna from Heaven.
“I don’t think you knew they were asking you to lure him to his death. They wouldn’t have told you that in any c
ase. Maybe you thought they just wanted to get him alone so they could talk to him and maybe rough him up a little, not much, just enough to persuade him to drop out of union politics. So you agreed to it.
“Then you changed your mind. You took whatever they’d advanced you and what you’d made tricking and split. Why? It couldn’t have been enough to satisfy a leech like Zacharias for long and live on besides.”
She watched me a long moment before answering. Outside, the jack rattled and thumped into place under the tongue. There was a brief pause and then it began clicking. After a couple of beats it caught and I felt a slight lifting sensation beneath my feet. Soon we’d be hitched up and ready to go.
“The raid,” she said finally. It wasn’t a singer’s voice anymore. It was just a voice, and not a very pleasant one at that. “It’s impossible to sleep in jail, did you know that? Too much screaming. They have people locked up in there that belong in hospitals. I got to do a lot of thinking. About the offer the Darlings had made me. About how maybe they were paying me too much money just to get Freeman alone so they could talk to him. I was brought up in a sheltered environment, but Papa Ben couldn’t keep the whole world out. Nobody can, not these days. I wasn’t as naïve as they thought I was. Naïve enough to be taken by someone like Zacharias, but not by them. So after they let us out I stayed at Aunt Beryl’s for a few days more, just in case Jerry and Hubert had someone watching the house. Then when I was sure it was safe I left.”
“Along with Iris’ money and a little gold heart she kept in a jewelry box. What happened to that, anyway?”
“Heart?” Her forehead puckered. “Oh, that. I pawned it. A place called Gershom’s, over on Warren. I got twenty dollars for it, enough for the first few days’ rent in the crummy little boardinghouse I fell into after I left Beryl’s.”
“I’ll ramble some more. You loved Shanks enough to break it off with him because you thought you were poison. So you didn’t tell him when you left. He nearly shouted the place down when he found out. Maybe it was love. More likely he was afraid you’d blurt out the story of your relationship to some scandal sheet or other and ruin his chances of getting into office. There’s a lot of that going around these days. Anyway, he tracked you down at Aphrodite Records, probably the same way I did, but instead of pushing his luck by showing–his disguise wasn’t impenetrable to anyone who followed the news–he telephoned you there. You weakened and the affair was on again.
“There’s a missing piece here. Maybe you’ll supply it. One night you left Zacharias’ studio and didn’t come back. It’s my guess you ran into the Darlings.” I left that hanging. She seized it, shuddering.
“They cornered me in the alley next to the studio as I was leaving,” she said. “If you were a woman and that creepy Hubert stuck a pistol between your eyes and his hand up your dress and asked you which end you wanted done first, what would you do? Jerry was standing behind me. He told me I had a third choice. I took it.”
“And a few nights later, during a rally to celebrate Freeman Shanks’ landslide victory, you got next to him and talked him into ducking his bodyguards and meeting you somewhere. Only you weren’t where you said you’d be. Jerry and Hubert were. With friends.”
She nodded. The tears were back now, and rolling down her fine white cheeks.
“And the next morning he was found with three holes in him,” I pressed. “And for Marla Bernstein it was time for a little vengeance.”
This time she didn’t move or speak. She didn’t have to.
I plunged ahead. “Vengeance comes in strange packages sometimes. In this case it was in a round flat metal canister, burned into a few hundred feet of film shot by an Intelligence agent who happened to be on the scene when the execution took place. A crooked Intelligence agent, who used the evidence to blackmail the lifetakers, and who, when the situation got close and he realized he was in over his head, hid the film in a place where it would go unnoticed among a lot of similar round flat metal canisters. A place like this, which turns out two or three skin flicks a day for sale to a place like Story’s After Midnight, or did until yesterday, when Story got burned and you closed up shop. Who owns the business, you or Rinker?”
“It’s half and half.” She didn’t seem surprised to learn that I knew of Story’s death. She’d have figured that out by now. “That idiot Ed thought I planned on making a career out of this filthy picture business. It was just a sideline for him to keep him in pills and see him through between gigs when I bought into it. He didn’t know I was just doing it to have something to live on while I was looking for the Darlings. It’s a cheap operation. Sometimes I have to pose myself when we can’t afford more than one model at a time. Is that where I made my mistake?”
I got out the snapshot and tossed it to her. She glanced at it, made a face, and laid it face-down among the other pictures on the table. “That was an early shot, before I hit on the idea of the getup.” She gestured with the wig she was still holding.
“Your guardian saw it and hired me to find you.”
“Christ. I should have known.” She didn’t act ashamed. I wondered how Morningstar could have lived with her for so long without seeing this side of her. But that was easier than it seemed when you were a parent, even an unnatural one.
Ed had ceased jacking. The truck creaked through the snow, backing toward the hitch. That’s hard to do when there’s no one standing there to guide you. He’d be wondering what was keeping Marla. I spoke fast.
“Something I’m fuzzy about. I know Francis Kramer struck up a partnership with you on the blackmail angle when things got too hot for one man. How’d he know you even existed?”
“He used to follow Freeman when he visited me at Beryl’s.”
“Follow Freeman?”
“I spotted him in the shadows across the street two different times when Freeman was there, through my window. The second time Freeman got scared, thinking he was a reporter or a spy hired by the other side, and went out to find out what he was doing there. By the time he got there Kramer was gone. I never knew he was with Intelligence until you said so just now. He never said after we got to know each other.”
I parked that one around the corner for the time being. “The film,” I said. “How’d it get out of your hands?”
“That idiot Ed. Nobody told him about it. He shipped it off to Story’s in a box with five other films. Kramer almost killed him when he found out.”
“What about Story, as long as you brought him up? Of course you killed him. Shanks was a diabetic. He needed regular insulin injections to keep from going into shock. He would have shown you how to operate a hypodermic syringe in case he went into it when you were together alone. So you used that knowledge to give Story an extra dose of the heroin he’d already set up for himself when you came in to find out what he’d done with the film. Was it you that slugged him first or Rinker?”
She didn’t say anything. Confessing to murder comes hard even when there’s a gun on you.
“Rinker,” I answered for her. “While Story was giving you a hard time, probably with that twenty-two of his there on the bed, your partner came up behind him and clobbered him. Only he did too good a job and sent him halfway to Hell. You helped him the rest of the way. Then you searched the place.
“Which leaves the trailer court manager tonight, the only one left who could tie the whole thing together for the cops. You didn’t waste any time with him. Him you just up and shot with Story’s gun and then went to collect your trailer and go. Only you couldn’t, because I was here waiting. Twice.”
She tried to keep her eyes on me, tried hard, but they wandered beyond my right shoulder. Then I heard quiet breathing, and knew that for the second time that night there was a man standing behind me with a gun.
25
I HADN’T HEARD HIM moving toward the door at the other end of the trailer because his engine was still running outside. I’d thought he was just being extra careful about maneuvering around for the hitchup. Fo
rgetting to lock the doors had finally caught up with me. I didn’t waste time kicking myself. Without turning I hurled myself sideways toward the mutilated mattress at my left, the idea being to land on my shoulder, twist and fire, maybe hitting something worthwhile, maybe not. I hadn’t a hell of a lot to lose by trying.
It didn’t work, of course. Tricks like that never do, unless you wear spangled buckskins and own a horse named Trigger. While I was airborne Marla hissed again and flung her frazzled dustmop of a wig into my face. The hair seemed to envelop me. I forgot all about the gun in my hand and just fell, flailing my arms in a useless effort to regain my balance. A hand twisted the Luger out of my grasp while I was flailing. I hit the bed and bounced, but before I could turn that to my advantage Marla charged in hissing and seized the .22 from the corner of the mattress where it was about to fall and pointed it at me with both hands clasped around the butt. The muzzle looked tiny, but a bullet from it had killed one man already. I checked my momentum, allowing the tortured springs beneath me to rock me to rest.
Ed Rinker–I assumed it was him, there wasn’t room for any more characters in this Russian novel–was a skinny kid with third-degree acne bunched over his forehead and on his long chin, and hair the color of winterkilled grass sticking out in a crackling white-man’s afro all over his head. His complexion was pale and his eyes were pale blue behind aviator’s glasses with spidery rims and gray-tinted lenses and his hands were pale things growing out of brittle-looking wrists too long for the sleeves of a quilted combat jacket in soiled olive drab. He was too young to have served a hitch in any branch of the service. He was too young for almost anything. The Luger in his right hand aged him. His hand bent downward from the wrist under its weight, so that the muzzle was pointed at my groin instead of my chest. He didn’t have any other guns. He’d never had, except in my imagination. He was shaking like a sparrow in a fist.
MOTOR CITY BLUE Page 18
