“How do you stand it?” I asked.
“I put myself through college proofreading mathematic texts for a small academic house in Boston. After graduation I spent four years as a reader for a senior editor at the house I’m working for now, one of these self-styled Max Perkinses with a red beard who thought his writers should clear every apostrophe and semicolon with him before they submitted a word. He went on to greater glory condensing books for a national magazine, but it was another two years before I got my present desk and half a window looking out on the screw top of the Chrysler Building. In the meantime I corrected other editors’ spelling and once talked a former Great American Writer who was sitting in a furnished apartment with the telephone in one hand and a revolver in the other out of pulling the trigger on himself. Now I go to sleep at night reading typescripts and spend four-hour lunches listening to would-be Norman Mailers mewing about essential punctuation and one bad review written by a freelancer with hemorrhoids for a regional magazine no one ever heard of, when I should be in front of the board going to the that for a first novel by an unknown writer of rare genius. I hold their heads when they’re blocked. I canvass the bars and police stations when they’re on a binge. I listen politely to counter-offers by literary agents who think their clients are working for them, and when I’m not doing that or brushing up on the American League standings in case I should find myself in the elevator with the man who owns the firm I work for, I sometimes squeeze in a few minutes to edit someone’s book. And all the time I’m counting the months since I delivered my last best seller and wondering how much longer the dry spell will last before they show me the door.”
She recrossed her ankles the other way. “I don’t know how I stand any of it, Mr. Walker. But I do, and if I ever had to stop I suppose I’d become the mistress of someone in the publishing business just to stay near it. Will you accept me as your client? Just me, this time. We won’t bother the boys on the top floor.”
I grinned. “That’s some pep talk. I bet it sounds good Monday mornings at the dressing table.”
This time she didn’t flush. “When you read too much you tend to talk in soliloquies to anyone who will let you get away with it. Are you working for me?”
“I’m already working, Mrs. Starr. One client at a time will do. Otherwise the paperwork would kill me.”
“You’re too honest.”
I moved a shoulder.
She stood. I got up with her. “Will you call me when you’ve found him?” she asked. “After your client, of course. I’m staying at the Book Cadillac. Appropriate, don’t you think?”
“Last time it was the Westin.”
“Last time I flew first class. That’s one of the reasons books cost so much. You’ll call?”
“I’ll call.” I got the door for her.
“I’ll be there through the weekend.” On the threshold she looked at me. “You promised me a tour of the city last time.”
“How’s Mr. Starr?”
“In New York.”
I said nothing again. She waited a little, then said goodbye and went out trailing jasmine.
15
ACME COLLISION CLANGED and racketed inside a hangarlike building with a hip roof and lime-washed barn siding and its name painted inexpertly over the doors in red letters spidering down the front in streaks. The sun was warm on the asphalt outside, where a row of hulks with accordioned front ends squatted on blocks. In the corner nearest the street, two boys of about eleven were peering through the windows of a fresh wreck with a head-size hole in the windshield on the driver’s side and brown stains on the upholstery. While I was locking my car, a loose length of redheaded man in greasy coveralls came out of the building with a wrench in one hand and chased the boys back to their bicycles. They kicked loose the stands and when they were rolling they turned in their seats to gesture obscenely back with enviable choreography. The redhead lunged forward, shaking the wrench. They leaned over the handlebars and pumped their legs like pistons and pulled away fast. Their pursuer stopped, spat. “Little bastids.” I recognized the Kentucky accent from my telephone call yesterday.
I intercepted him on his way back inside and asked where I could find Wally Petite. His eyes traveled over my suit. They were a baked-out blue under pale brows as thick and as straight as an accusing finger. Finally he pointed his wrench through the spread doors. “Office.”
I entered ahead of him and paused while my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light inside. Most of it was coming from a dropcord hooked on the edge of an open pickup hood, where a broad back was bent in gray coveralls with ACME COLLISION stenciled across it. On the far side of the big room, another set of coveralls whooshed clouds of acrid-smelling blue paint from a spray gun over a white Lincoln with masking on the windows and trim. A third worker had a door panel clamped in a wooden vise on one of the steel workbenches that lined the room and was banging out the dents with a short-handled sledgehammer in time with the music blasting out of a portable radio at his feet. He was naked to the waist and his arms bulged when he swung back the heavy hammer. Every time it struck home he said, “Huh!” Sweat rolled off his slick torso, overpowering the odors of stale grease and turpentine sunk into the walls.
The office was a glassed-in cubicle to the left of the doors. The door was propped open with a brick and I went in without knocking. It wouldn’t have been heard over the music and pounding anyway.
“Have a seat, Walker. Close the door.”
I kicked the brick out of the way and pushed the door shut. The noise level went down a notch.
The man who had spoken was hunched over an old Adler on a stand behind an oak desk with a cracked veneer, plucking at the keys with one index finger and taking all the time in the world to select his next letter. He had on a salmon-colored shirt with puffed sleeves and the collar spread over a tight black vest with gold fleurs-de-lis on the back. A gold chain glittered among the dark hairs on his swarthy chest. He wore his brown hair long and full on the sides in styled waves to bring out his high cheekbones, and the one eye I could see in profile had lashes long enough to trap a bird. A black jacket with peaked lapels faced in velour draped a wooden hanger on a hook on the door I had just closed.
“Mr. Petite?”
“With you in a minute. Sit down. I usually have someone fill in these applications for title for me, but she’s out sick. Funny how many employees take ill these last few weeks of good weather.”
His voice was absolutely smooth, not so much polished as lathed down, with no hint of geography or origins and only so many tones as he needed to make himself understood. A perfect cylinder. I turned a chair made of steel tubing and red vinyl to face the desk and trusted my weight to it. A picture calendar on the one wall that wasn’t glass behind the desk showed a gang of gray moustaches in scarlet jackets and jodhpurs leaning horses around a copse of trees in pursuit of a red-brown streak with the hounds in full cry between. Whenever I saw a print like that I wondered what happened to the fox. I decided I didn’t want to know.
“There!”
He struck one last key and rolled the sheet out of the typewriter. When he turned my way I saw that his left eyelid drooped a little, as if a nerve or a muscle had been severed. It spoiled his girlish good looks. “I’m sorry about the condition of the place,” he said. “We’re moving to larger quarters end of next month. My office will be on a different floor from the nuts and bolts, air-conditioned and soundproofed.”
I said, “The body game must be booming.”
He didn’t take the bait. “It’s always good. When the economy’s rolling so are the cars, and the more cars on the road the more likely they are to run into each other. Then when money’s tight everyone saves by holding on to the old wreck and they bring it in here to keep it looking good. You should see some of the crates that limp in. By the time we’re done stripping them to the frame and replacing the rusty parts with sheet metal and pounding out the dents and repainting and rechroming them, their owners might as w
ell have bought a new one hot off the line. But we earn it, and there’s real satisfaction in turning a clunker into a classic.”
“Kind of like surgery,” I said. “Only more fulfilling.”
That time his face shut down. He leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers, and Lou Gallardo was wrong; there was no grease under his nails. A gold ingot flashed on the third finger of his left hand. “You wanted to talk about Phil.”
“I think the man I’m looking for was investigating his murder when he disappeared. Maybe you’ve seen him.” I described Barry.
“No one who answers that description has been in here. No one has come around asking about Phil. You’re the first in more than a year.”
“Maybe he spoke to one of your employees.”
“I’d have been told. What makes you think he was interested in what happened to Phil?”
“He had a file folder full of newspaper clippings in his office. The piece about the cops finding Niles’s body was among them.”
“That’s all?”
“Amigo Fuentes told me a blond man with a limp was in asking about Niles last week.”
“Amigo Fuentes.” He made as if to crack his knuckles. “That son-of-a-bitch greaser killed Phil and got clean away. Maybe he killed your friend too.”
Something about the way he said the Cuban’s name. Not the way someone whose ancestors came from a cold climate would have said it. I got out my pack and offered him a cigarette. He hesitated, then took one. I struck a match and lit it and one for me. “In that case he wouldn’t have told me Barry had been there,” I said. “And Fuentes was in Florida at the time of the murder.”
“He had it catered.”
Our smoke curled and mingled in the air. Smoke doesn’t care what kind of company it keeps.
I said, “How hard did the police question you about your partner?”
“Pretty hard. When I was younger I was pretty wild. I have a record for theft. But that’s behind me, and I could account for all my movements. They wanted Fuentes worse. I guess you know about Acme’s reputation.”
“A little.”
He scraped some ash off on the edge of a Styrofoam cup on the desk. “I’m not making any confession today. But small businesses have a steep hike the first year or so. You tend to get involved in things you wouldn’t if your old age didn’t depend on them.”
“You’re no longer heisting cars?”
“I never said we were.”
His voice presented no ethnic or environmental handles whatsoever. Someone had put in his share of hours on this one. I used the cup. “Anyone can cater a kill. Five grand will buy the best talent Hazel Park has to offer, complete with a virgin piece and a new demonstrator model borrowed off a Ford lot for the get-gone. If you’re strapped you can go down Woodward and hire it for the price of a lid, but the quality will suffer. There’s a whole range of working muscle in between.”
“The point being?”
“The point being that if, say, a former mechanic with a police record, in partnership with a businessman who won’t see the profit in certain trade practices, wanted him gone, his partner’s involvement with a loan shark could stir up some useful dust.”
“I think I’ve just been accused of contracting a murder,” he said. “I wouldn’t know, of course.”
“I’m just poking at the haystack. All I’ve got is a newspaper clipping and the word of a shylock.”
“We’re through talking now.” He swiveled his chair and turned a knob with exposed wires running up the wall, like an antique light switch. A loud burring ring like an amplified telephone bell echoed through the building. It was still fading when the door opened and two men came in. One was the lanky redhead who had chased the kids away from the wreck out front. He still had the wrench. His companion was the man I’d seen beating the door panel in the vise. He had a bald head and a matted black tangle of beard that spread into the hair on his chest and the muscles of his torso bunched and squirmed as he worked his hands on the sledge across his thighs. “Make sure this gentleman finds his way out,” Petite told them. To me: “Unless you bend a fender, don’t come back. A man that doesn’t know his way around the equipment in places like this … ” He gestured with the cigarette between his fingers.
“I have to admire me.” I got up. “I’m unstoppable. They bounce jack handles off my stomach and throw me in with the big cats and I keep coming. I don’t even pause to count my teeth. So long, Mr. Petite.”
“Goodbye, Walker. Thanks for the smoke. I’m trying to cut down.”
“That’s what I was counting on.”
After unlocking both offices and throwing away my mail I didn’t know what to do next. I looked at Barry’s typescript, which I’d brought with me from home, but I didn’t feel like reading. I didn’t even know why I’d brought it. It wasn’t doing me any good.
The first lead never leads anywhere. You spot a bright thread and pick at it, hoping the whole dense fabric will come apart in your hands, and then it catches and you tug and it snaps and there you are staring at the frazzled end. But there was still the blond cripple Fuentes had said was also curious about the Niles murder. The shark might have known those things about Barry from his column, but even crooks don’t lie just for practice. I called Jed Dutt at the News.
“Any sign of the boy reporter?” I asked.
“None. Which answers my question. Anything else?”
“You remember who got the Philip Niles case?”
He went to get his notes. I listened to a lone typewriter somewhere clacking out its last days amid creeping technology. They used to argue about sex and politics at parties. Now they talk software. He came back on the line.
“Sergeant Ysabel, with a Y, of the Royal Oak Police Department. He’s with Detroit now. Major Crimes. Or was last I heard.”
I mouthed gratitude and punched off and dialed Detroit Police Headquarters. The switchboard put me through to Major Crimes. “Sergeant Ysabel,” I said.
“You mean Lieutenant Ysabel,” a woman’s voice corrected. “He won’t be in until four. Can I take a message?”
I said I’d call after four. Replacing the receiver, I looked at Barry’s script again.
There is a specialist with the First Air Cavalry, a large fellow with football shoulders and gentle brown eyes who grins easily and wears his helmet tipped forward with the strap buckled under the bulge of his head to keep it from skidding over his eyes. The prostitutes in town, whether or not they are out with other men, are always making excuses to touch him and stand close to him with their eyes sliding sideways to look at his profile. He is popular with the men of his unit, but officers do not like him, as he has a quick mouth and even when he is carrying out an order behaves as if he just thought of it himself. We met some weeks ago by accident during a shelling. I like him and think he is the reason I have stayed in this area so long rather than moving ahead with the main column.
Last week while on patrol he came upon a Vietcong standing over what remained of a specialist with whom he’d gone through basic training. He went on spraying lead into the Cong seconds after his body stopped twitching, until his M-16 clicked empty. None of the other Americans who witnessed the incident dared step forward before then.
Today we went into town together for a drink. He smokes heavily, and through the haze his grin is as quick and his eyes are as gentle. His repartee is as lively and he is no less responsive to the admiring glances of the prostitutes.
It is not in the little ways we show change.
Well, what did you expect, Barry? It’s like when you see a movie or read a book you liked years before, and not only do you not like it, you can’t imagine ever having been the sort of person who would. And basic training or no, I had never been all that close to Spec-4 Michael Valducci, who ate his squid raw and cleaned his rifle with whoever’s jockstrap was handy. He was just a constant face in a shifting sea and then he wasn’t.
They sent us halfway around the world to a place wh
ere our fillings rusted in our mouths and declared open season on jungle creatures with leaves on their heads and bags of rice on thongs around their necks. Russian MIGs shrieked overhead in formations no farther apart than spread fingers and American F-111s sprayed villages with a gelatinous mass that caught fire with a sucking sound when it hit the air. We hunted Charlie and we plowed the girls in Saigon and it was like one of those lost continent pictures with rubber dinosaurs and midget actors made up like ape men, that you hoot at in the theater and then when the lights go up you go outside and breathe cold air and listen to tires swishing down the street and already it’s fading. Six months later you put your hand in the pocket of a jacket you haven’t worn in a while and come out with the stub and then you remember. Jesus, but that was a lousy picture.
Only it wasn’t a ticket stub that brought it back, but a glimpse of the neighbor’s Asian gardener weeding the lawn or a traffic helicopter chattering over the house or the sunlight coming green through leaves in a park at a moment when you’re thinking about anything but Vietnam. Then you think about nothing but, and then you get mad because the whole thing has ruined you for those moments, and maybe forever, the way learning of the death of a close relative while your favorite song is playing on the radio will have you thinking of the death every time you hear the song from then on. It wasn’t at all like a bad movie, or even like a bad dream. It was like nothing for anyone who wasn’t there.
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