Peeper

by Loren D. Estleman

  “’Morning, Anita,” Ralph said. “I guess you got to be real careful when you use toilet paper. You could bleed to death.”

  She didn’t look up from her copy of Working Woman. “Mrs. Lovechild wants to see you.”

  “What’s she want this time, my body?”

  “Just your testicles. She said to send in that asshole as soon as he decides to show up.”

  “How’d you know she meant me?”

  “A business is like a pair of pants. It can only have one asshole in it at a time.” She turned the page.

  He leaned over the desk and lowered his voice to a gruff whisper. “I hear the Alamo Hotel on East Jefferson is running a lunchtime special: fifty minutes for five bucks.”

  She looked up from her magazine for the first time, smiled, and aimed one of her nails at his good eye. “How’d you like to hustle pencils for the rest of your life?”

  “Broads. Never a straight answer.” He shrugged and went through the door behind the desk.

  In the short pastel hallway that led to Lucille Lovechild’s office, Ralph’s personality underwent a change. He straightened his necktie, took off his hat, and smoothed back his hair, which flopped forward again as soon as he took away his hand. Holding the hat, he tapped softly on the door with the occupant’s name on it engraved in a brass plate. He remembered the matchstick he was chewing and put it in a pocket.

  “Come in, Poteet.”

  The office was twice as large as the reception room and decorated much less gaily, with a gray-and-white carpet, woodgrain paneling, and framed community-service citations on the walls. Windows on the north and east sides looked out on Washington Boulevard and Woodward Avenue. The only thing feminine in sight—and that included Lucille Lovechild herself—was a spray of daisies in a cut-glass vase on the gray steel desk. They looked as if they’d rather be anywhere else. Ralph sympathized.

  “You wanted to see me, Mrs. L.?”

  “You’re late. As usual.”

  “There was a fire in my building.”

  “I thought maybe your sister was sick again. Have you got a sister, Poteet?”

  “She’s in the Ohio Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Her and my old man had an argument with an electric knife. It was a hell of a Thanksgiving.”

  The owner of the agency was standing at the north window gazing down at the street. She was taller than Ralph and lean, in her late thirties, with her hair up and frosted. She wore glasses with neutral frames and a tailored tan suit over a white silk blouse with a jabot at her throat. Her profile was clean and she wore very little makeup. Finally she turned from the window and placed spread fingertips on her desk.

  “Do you want to tell me about this morning?”

  “What, the fire?”

  “Before that.”

  Ralph suddenly had to go to the bathroom. He wondered how many others had been watching him that he hadn’t known about.

  “This morning?” he repeated.

  “This morning, last night, whichever you want to call it. When decent people are in bed. I want to know what you thought you were accomplishing.”

  “Who’d you talk to, the bishop?”

  “What bishop? I’m curious to know why you thought it necessary to jeopardize your job by calling me at ten minutes past midnight and asking me about my sleeping habits.”

  “Huh?”

  She took off her glasses. She had clear gray eyes and a level stare that reminded Ralph of her late husband. “Amnesia? That’s your defense? Okay, I’ll play. I don’t appreciate being awakened in the middle of the night and asked if I sleep with a G.I. Joe doll.”

  “I did that?”

  “You said you had a bet with a guy in the bar.”

  “Did I say which bar?”

  “What difference does it make? What you do on your own time isn’t my concern, thank Christ, but when it involves me I’ll put on the iron boot and kick your lard butt from here to Kalamazoo.”

  “I was drunk.”

  “I wouldn’t recognize you sober. And that’s another thing. From now on there will be no drinking on company time.”

  “I meet a lot of clients in bars. They’ll take it wrong if I don’t drink with them.”

  “I’m talking about the fifth in the wastebasket by your desk and the pint in your glove compartment and the flask in your coat. You’re a walking Seven-Eleven. Any clients you drink lunch with are not clients of this firm. I’ve made that clear.

  “Lovechild is an inquiry agency,” she went on. “That means we run credit checks, investigate employee theft, and look for missing persons. We don’t handle divorce work. We don’t peek through keyholes. Most particularly we don’t sneak around taking photographs of consenting adults submitting to their biological urges, regardless of whom they happen to be married to.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “When my husband died and left me the agency, his will stipulated that you would remain employed here for as long as you wanted. It didn’t say in what capacity. That’s why you work in the file room, shuffling records and drawing your salary. I won’t have you out front where prospective clients can see you or talk with you or know you exist. You seem to think your job is secure no matter what you do. It isn’t. You just haven’t made enough of an ass of yourself yet to cause me to put my lawyer to work breaking the will. Last night’s escapade came damn close. Am I clear now?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You say, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ but you’re really thinking, ‘hard-nosed bitch,’ aren’t you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then you’re even dumber than I thought, because that’s just what I am.” She leaned forward. “I’m your worst nightmare come true, Poteet—a woman in charge, who’s on your case. Every time you come into this office I’ll have a new rule for you. Sooner or later you’ll break one, and then you’re history. I don’t know what Gus ever saw in you, but I’ll see the last of you yet.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Ma’am?”

  “What?”

  Ralph put on his hat. “You didn’t say if I won the bet.”

  “Get out!”

  He got out, fishing for the matchstick.

  Chapter 5

  In the corridor that led to the file room he ran into Chuck Waverly. The young operative was in a hurry and almost dropped the file folder he was carrying.

  “You sign that out?” Ralph asked.

  “Yes—er—no. I’ll do that when I put it back. I think I found a link to the Henderson thefts.”

  “You still working on that Klugman thing?”

  Chuck raised eyebrows eminently designed for raising. He was in his twenties and very slender, with red hair and a face that Ralph always resisted the urge to pinch. “How’d you know I was on it at all?”

  “I read the file. You’re wasting time with the Dombrowski kid. Klugman’s your man.”

  “You’re supposed to file them, not read them. They’re confidential.”

  “I read all the files. How else can I kill time back there, jerk off into the wastebasket? I read yours. You ought to marry that girl.”

  He flushed. “What makes it your business? Wait a minute. Becky’s not in my personnel record.”

  “If all Beckys was, we’d be canned more often than strained peas. Didn’t Lucille teach you nothing about getting more dope than you hand out?” He was grinning.

  Chuck changed the subject. “So what’s this about Klugman? He owns the place, why would he steal his own stock? We caught young Dombrowski ripping off Henderson’s Department Store five years ago, and here he is again working for Klugman.”

  “We didn’t catch him, I did. It was just before Gus kicked off and Our Lady of the Arctic Thighs took over. If you tried reading them files instead of looking for big red clues, you’d figure out Klugman’s got something on the side and his wife suspects. Why would she be calling him every hour except to check up on him? Who hired us, him or his insurance company?”

  “The insurance company. B
ut—”

  “There you go. His new squeeze has got expensive tastes, or else he’s busy salting a secret bank account before Mrs. Klugman serves him on an infidelity rap and freezes his assets. That takes dough, so he boosts his own merchandise and sells it down the road, then pockets the insurance payoff. What you got to do is tail him, take pictures. Dollars to dogshit something soft and pink with a high voice comes out of the soup, and it won’t be Pee-Wee Herman.”

  “You mean, er—”

  “The old Beautyrest Bolero, the snooper’s best friend. Only you better develop them yourself or have a custom place do it, because Fotomat won’t. Show ’em to Klugman. He’ll confess to the San Francisco earthquake to keep them out of his wife’s hands.”

  “Mrs. Lovechild says—”

  “Whose name goes on the report, yours or hers?”

  “Mine, but—”

  Ralph put a hand on Chuck’s shoulder. “Two rules to live by, kid: clients pay for results, and there’s always a broad in it somewhere. Find her, get the goods, get paid. Client’s happy, Goosey Lucy’s happy, you’re happy. Integrity just makes everybody sore.”

  “I guess it can’t hurt to keep an eye on Klugman for a day or so.”

  “That’ll be enough, believe me. If this guy could keep it in his pants that long he wouldn’t be in the fix he’s in.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “Instincts. They’re what put me where I am.”

  “In the file room?”

  “In the numero-uno spot, best private star in town. Well except for this one-man show over on West Grand River, but he’s a Boy Scout.”

  “Gee, thanks, Mr. Poteet. I don’t know why Mrs. Lovechild says you’re a pain in the ass.”

  “She kids a lot. You got change for a twenty?”

  Chuck took out his wallet. “All I got’s a ten and a five.”

  “That’s okay, you can owe me.” Ralph took the bills.

  “Where’s the twenty?”

  “I left my wallet home. Hell, I guess that makes us even.”

  Ralph continued down the corridor to the file room, mildly ashamed of himself. It was like hunting in the Detroit Zoo.

  The room was lead-lined and had no windows. One wall was taken up by built-in file drawers, a third of them empty now that Lucille had hired a crew to transfer everything to computer disks. His desk was a cracked-oak veteran of Eagle Eye, with a matching chair that wailed in mortal agony whenever he turned it and the only black rotary-dial telephone left in southeastern Michigan. First thing, he looked inside the wastebasket and was not surprised to find that his fifth of Four Roses had been confiscated. Shaking his head, he unscrewed his pocket flask and swigged Smirnoff’s. Only a wimp was afraid to mix his drinks.

  Ralph was the second child of an Ohio Baptist minister and a church secretary, who had picked up and left when Ralph was ten, taking with her the collection for a new church roof and an organist named Donald. Ralph’s father never believed Ralph was his son after that and took to beating him with the family Bible (which Ralph always said beat no book-learning at all), once fetching him a blow that detached the retina of his right eye, leaving it sightless and causing it to resemble a sourball that had been sucked and then spat out. When Ralph’s sister Ethel was sixteen she had driven across the county line with an assistant supermarket manager named Zwingler and gotten married, but Ralph’s father had gone after them with a .410 shotgun and had the marriage annulled. Ralph was fifteen the Thanksgiving Day his father and Ethel got into a serious altercation about the proper way to carve a turkey and she started carving the old man instead, killing him and totally ruining a Black & Decker Floating Wonder cordless electric knife. A court-appointed psychiatrist had pronounced her mentally unfit to stand trial, after which she was committed to the state hospital for the criminally insane. Ralph never visited her, but received a Christmas card from her every August.

  His father having had no other relatives, and his mother having last been heard from in 1957 singing in a roadhouse outside Wichita to the intimate accompaniment of Donald’s organ, Ralph had been placed in a group home. Two days before his eighteenth birthday, when he would have been given the choice of staying or leaving, he had flushed his group father’s teeth down the toilet in the upstairs bathroom and walked out. He had been on his own ever since, not counting a total of three weeks served in jail for failure to register for the draft and obstruction of justice reduced from assaulting an officer after he had sat on one of the policemen summoned to investigate a domestic disturbance between Ralph and his wife.

  The judge had released him from custody on the latter complaint in return for Ralph’s promise to seek psychiatric counseling. The counselor, a tan and sandy psychiatrist in his thirties with leather patches on his elbows and a Harvard rowing trophy in a glass case in his office, had listened to Ralph’s account of his early life and declared that Ralph was the way he was because the Bible beatings had caused him to give up on trying to please his father sooner than most. Flushing his group father’s teeth down the toilet was a symbolic castration of his male parent, with a subconscious wish to prevent his own birth. His refusal to register for the draft represented rebellion against authority, born of his inability to defend himself against child abuse, and sitting on the police officer indicated a severe anal fixation; he postulated that Ralph had been constipated for a long time as a result of his father’s grisly death at a family dinner. Ralph stole the electric typewriter from the psychiatrist’s reception room on his way out and didn’t go back for a second session.

  At that point, Ralph might have chosen crime as his vocation had he not acquired a violent distaste for jail. He had thought his intimate knowledge of the workings of the dishonest mind ideal for detective work, but knew that his record would not allow him into the police training program in Detroit, where he went to change his luck without stopping off at home to pack or say goodbye to his wife. Insurance work looked close and easy, so he used his new typewriter to draft letters of reference and forged the signatures of Red Adair, Greta Garbo, and George Plimpton, on the theory that these three would be impossible to reach for confirmation, and sent copies along with a wonderfully creative resume to the three largest insurance companies in Michigan. All three rejected him, so he submitted the material to Great Lakes Universal Life, Casualty, Auto, and Paternity, headquartered above Arnie’s Little Touch of Albania Chop House on Livernois in Detroit. There he was interviewed by Arnie himself, smelling of Brut and fried onions, who clamped a greasy hand around his and welcomed him to the firm as a claims adjuster. He worked in that capacity for three years until a series of unfortunate incidents forced his dismissal. If not for Gus Lovechild, who took him on at Eagle Eye as an employee and finally as an uncredited partner, Ralph would likely be busing tables at the Soup Kitchen or building roads with a work gang in Marquette. He wasn’t so sure that both alternatives weren’t preferable to juggling files for Lucille. Damn Gus for dying anyway.

  When the flask was empty, he stopped reminiscing, took his feet off the desk, and did some filing. The stack of folders atop the desk was not very high and contained nothing in the way of what he considered useful information. He suspected Lucille of culling the choicer bits and locking them in her office so he couldn’t get at them. He stuck the folders in their proper drawers, more or less, and sat until noon, idly blacking out teeth in the photograph of Lucille on the desktop advertising calendar she gave to satisfied clients. Then he went to lunch.

  His favorite bar was the Vinegaroon on Cass, but that was too far to walk in the drizzling rain that had just started, and anyway the place hadn’t been the same since the owner defaulted on a loan payment and wound up hanging by his beer pulls. Florentino’s was closest, but Ralph owed Tino money, and lately there had been too many potted ferns and well-dressed men hanging around the Macedonian Room to suit him. He stood deliberating in the rain for a moment with his Tyrolean tugged down, then said to hell with it and trotted across two streets a
nd around a corner to Richard’s, wedged between a Cambodian restaurant and an auto parts store that gave discounts to customers with spiked gloves. The furnace worked.

  “Hey, Ralph. Same as always?” As usual Richard, the one-armed black bartender who pretended to own the place for a Sicilian named Sal the Hippo, shared the establishment with the Doberman and the guy in the back booth who never ordered anything but Pepto-Bismol and sat making marks in a twelve-year-old TV Guide from morning until closing.

  “Double it.” Ralph climbed onto one of the cleaner stools. The Doberman, whose name was Coleman, raised its chin from its paws on a filthy rug behind the bar, studied Ralph, farted, and went back to sleep.

  Ralph fanned away the stink as Richard set a shot of Four Roses and a glass of Budweiser in front of him. “That as dangerous as that mutt gets?”

  “I got to stop feeding him cabbage.”

  Ralph downed the shot and chased it with a slug of beer. “Hit me again.”

  “I’m surprised you come down from last night. You really tied one on.” He refilled the shot glass.

  “I was in here?”

  “Don’t you remember? You bought a Pepto-Bismol for Andy there.”

  Ralph looked over his shoulder at the guy in the back booth, who was talking to himself now. “He the one I made the bet with?”

  “What bet?”

  He turned back. “Did I make a call from here?”