“Once. If she looked like you I’d have taken it.”
We were looking at each other when the waitress came and set two glasses of water on the table. She had fenders like a GMC truck under a knobbly white uniform, and a watch smaller than Louise’s rode her bare wrist like a rubber band around a leg of lamb. Her eyes were dark and angelic, trapped in balloons of flesh. She wore her hair in a net. I asked her how the moussaka was today.
“You’ll think you died and went to Mount Olympus.”
“I thought that was just for gods.”
“What do I know, I’m from Warren.”
“What’s moussaka?” Louise asked.
“Stuffed eggplant, ground beef, green peppers in tomato sauce,” said the waitress.
“For breakfast?”
“Greeks don’t eat lunch.” I handed up the menus. “Moussaka twice, and two bowls of egg lemon soup.”
“Ouzo?”
“No. Too early in the day to risk losing the rest of it.”
“Iced tea, please.”
The waitress rolled off. We sipped our water and listened to the music. Louise glanced around, at the scoured interior and fishing scenes on the walls. “They won’t go broke on atmosphere.”
“Atmosphere’s to keep your mind off what’s going on in the kitchen. The food’s good here. It always is when a Greek’s in charge, for some reason.”
“Do you know the owner?”
“I did a job for him once.”
She didn’t go after it. “Have you lived in Detroit all your life?”
“I was born here. My father had part ownership of a garage on West McNichols, but most of his money came from the pumps out front. Then two companies that were listed on the exchange got into a war and inside of six months he and fifty other independents were looking for work as curbside attendants, read that gas jockeys. He finally shipped me out to a burg an hour’s drive west of here and I grew up there.”
“What happened to him?”
“Twenty years later he died.”
Her lips parted, showing an even line of fine white teeth. Her tea came. She made a thing of removing the wedge of lemon from the lip of her glass and laying it down just so while the waitress withdrew beyond earshot. Then: “I take back what I said before. It can be a fault. What are you protecting yourself from?”
“I’m a detective, Mrs. Starr. Louise. People pay me two-fifty a day and expenses to find things out. After you’ve been doing it a while you get to thinking of information as a commodity. Ours is not a giveaway society.”
“I don’t think that’s it. I think you like to keep people at arm’s length from what you are. You’re divorced, aren’t you?”
“And you’re married. Between the two of us we reflect the entire adult population in microcosm.”
She laced her fingers together under her chin. “You know, you’ve never asked me about my husband.”
“What about him?”
“We’re very close. We’ve been married for five years and when I’m away from him I miss him. He’s a vice president in a firm that manufactures and sells office copiers, very successful. All his friends are successful vice presidents. Their wives own antique shops in Connecticut and go to aerobics classes out on Long Island.”
“You don’t.”
“Who has time? When I’m not away at a sales conference or helping some tortured young Marxist with a literary bent kill martinis at a club with a fifty-dollar cover, I play a little tennis. Stooping and stretching to Rod Stewart is not my idea of a sound time investment.”
“Your body isn’t your temple?”
“If it were, it would seem sacrilegious to cover it with sweat, don’t you think?”
Our moussaka came. The green peppers and tomato sauce seduced our nostrils. She took a forkful and made sounds of ecstasy. I said, “How come you don’t wear a wedding ring?”
“I’m allergic to gold.”
I grinned.
“No, really. I break out.”
“You’re the perfect woman, Louise.”
“That’s disrespectful of women.”
“The hell with that. It’s getting so you can’t pass along a compliment without looking it over first to see if something’s sticking to it.”
“I’m sorry. I thought you were making a joke.”
“It started out as one.”
We ate. She laid her knife and fork in her empty plate. “You haven’t told me about this threat you received.”
“I get them from time to time, probably not as often as you think. I don’t even know that this one has anything to do with what I’m working on. If I started listening to them I’d never get anything done.”
“You’re not getting much done this morning. On the case.”
I left a third of my moussaka untasted and rinsed my mouth out with water. It was a little early for so much spice after all. “Telephone threats, the ones that mean anything anyway, are usually followed by tails. Just to see if it took. Sometimes they’re made just to get someone mad enough to do the exact opposite. If I do nothing for a while maybe I’ll see which way they want it.”
“In other words, if they are watching you and you both do nothing, the threat is genuine.”
“Put that way it sounds pretty stupid. But yeah.”
“And if it’s something else they want, they’ll do—what?”
“They’ll call me again, or maybe send someone to pay me a visit, and spell it out.”
“With brass knuckles?”
“You’ve been editing too many detective novels. They don’t use knucks much anymore, except for parades. You can buy three months in the school of locks just for having them in your possession. Nowadays they run to jack handles and rolls of quarters, things no cop that stopped you for forgetting to signal a turn would look twice at. But to answer your question, no. The hard lessons come later.”
She watched me for a moment. Then she shook her head. Her hair threw off soft sparks in the light. “You move in a whole different world.”
I said nothing, and she returned to her iced tea. I touched the lip of my water glass. “He went to work in a steel foundry,” I said.
“Who did?”
“My father. After he sent me away to live. He died of a coronary in the heat treatment plant the year he would have retired.”
The hectic violins played. After a stretch she smiled and laid her fingers on my hand resting on the table. They were cool from the glass of tea.
20
THE OLD CLOCK in the living room chimed eleven, grinding and wheezing between the strokes like a fat old man climbing stairs. It made me want to go out and help it. Almost.
Louise undressed with the bedroom window at her back. I had drawn the shade and curtains, softening the light in the room to a medium gray. Pale double shadows fluttered on the wall as she drew off the silk blouse and then stepped out of the long skirt. The teddy she had on underneath was a very light blue, almost eggshell-colored, and shone softly. I went over and helped her out of that. She was golden all over.
“I didn’t know busy editors had time to scout out nude beaches.” My voice sounded scarcely louder than the quiet in the room.
“Far Rockaway,” she said, and hers was even quieter. “I bought one of those suits that don’t block the ultraviolet rays. But I think I’ll go back to a regular bikini. I like to see how my tan is doing.”
“I like it this way.”
We kissed. Our tongues touched and I felt the warmth of her through my clothes. Her naked back was smooth under my palms. The air was sheathed in jasmine. When we finished kissing she undid two buttons on my shirt and traced my collarbone lightly with her fingers. “Do you have music?”
“What do you like?”
“Something appropriate. And not under twenty years old.”
“Lady, you came to the right place.”
In the living room I took Bunny Berigan down from the shelf and started him turning on the cheap stereo. The first notes of
“I Can’t Get Started” crept out of the speakers—the good version, no singing, just his trumpet playing like raw silk sliding over polished stone. I turned the volume down to heartbeat level and walked away from it.
She was under the covers now, the sheet outlining her in a way even the soft light couldn’t match, falling away in a gentle pyramid from one raised knee. Her hair spilled over the pillow in a fall of muted sunlight. I stood in the doorway and stared. After a long time she smiled. “I don’t bite.”
“Like hell you don’t,” I said.
She laughed. In the next room the clock with the tired chimes listened for pointers. I went to her. She cried out softly in the half-light.
I slid out of bed, put on my robe and slippers, and sat on the edge of the mattress to get a package of cigarettes and a book of matches out of the drawer in the nightstand. Louise sighed and stirred as if she’d been asleep. A hard-nailed finger went up my spine, making me shudder.
“That’s a cliché,” she said,
I got rid of the charred match, blew smoke away from the bed, and resettled myself so that I was facing her. “What is?”
She nodded at the cigarette. “First the sex, then the smoke. I strike it when I see it. If the manuscript’s worth saving at all.”
“Clichés don’t get to be clichés by being wrong.”
“Books aren’t like life. They can’t repeat themselves.” She was looking at me. “It can’t mean anything, Amos.”
“I never thought it could.”
“It could if I let it. That’s why it won’t. I’ve finally got all my furniture arranged just the way I want it. I’m not going to start breaking it up and moving it around because of one nice morning in Detroit.”
I went on smoking. She was still looking. “I’ll bet you were thinking I was going to say I love my husband.”
“I wasn’t thinking anything.”
“I don’t know that I love him at all. It’s a final-sounding word, like death. You’d think it would be as definite. Have you ever been in love?”
I grinned. “That’s worse than smoking after sex.”
“You don’t have to answer.”
“Once.”
“Your wife?”
“No. I thought I was but I wasn’t. Someone else. Someone recent.”
“Was she here?”
“Yeah.”
“Should we have gone to the hotel?”
I shook my head. “I thought about not bringing you here. Then I thought it’d be like when someone dies and you get a chill every time you walk past her room and it made me think of the old lady in the rotting wedding dress still waiting for the guy that left her at the altar.”
“Miss Havisham. Great Expectations.” She saw me looking at her and colored. “Sorry, but I am in the business. Did she leave you?”
I stubbed out the cigarette in the china saucer I use for an ashtray. “I’ve got Barry’s manuscript.”
It took her a second to catch up. She drew up her legs with the sheet over her breasts and clasped her hands around her knees and rested her chin on them. Naked, she looked more like an editor in that moment than she had in any of her tailored suits. “How long have you had it?”
“Since day before yesterday.”
“Wasn’t that the day you were hired to look for him?”
“For him. Not his book.”
“May I see it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I stole it. If he wanted me to have it I wouldn’t have had to steal it and if he doesn’t want me to have it he doesn’t want me showing it around.”
“But he called me, wanting to sell it.”
“He wanted to sell a book. It might not be this one. Chances are it isn’t, because this one looks fairly complete and he told me he was taking the time off to finish a book. But none of that means anything because I don’t have his permission to show anything.”
“Well, why’d you tell me you have it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because it’s the damnedest thing and I had to tell somebody.”
“What’s the book about?”
“Vietnam.”
“Vietnam books are big,” she said after a space. “If I told the board I had a line on one by Barry Stackpole I wouldn’t have to worry about my job until the next dry spell.”
“You won’t, though.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because if you promise them a book and then something happens and it doesn’t come through they’ll empty your desk drawers into a suitcase and send it to you.”
“That’s not how they work. But I see what you mean.” She tossed her head so that her hair fell behind her shoulders. “Why did you steal it?”
“I don’t know that either. There’s something about it. I keep thinking that if I read it closely enough I’ll find out what’s been bothering Barry.”
“Isn’t it the story you think he was working on? The hot potato?”
“It goes back further than that. I think. We haven’t been in touch on a regular basis for a long time. Eleven months ago he took up with the sort of person you don’t take up with unless you’ve stopped liking yourself. Then he started drinking hard. Not that he ever drank soft, but this time it was hard enough to land him in AA. Something happened. Whether it was something new or something further back, I don’t know, any more than I know what it was. Maybe it’s in the book.”
“Maybe it is the book. All those memories coming back in the writing. The war.”
“Maybe.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“That flashback thing’s been done and done,” I said. “Every time a guy knocks over a gun shop and it turns out he’s a vet, his lawyer says he thought the counterman was Cong and the street outside was mined. Barry’s too original for that. It’s a cliché like sex and cigarettes.”
She said, “I’ve spent most of my adult life around writers, a lot of them hacks and a couple of authentic geniuses. Even the geniuses couldn’t manage to live lives that were wholly original.”
“It’s not like it is in books.”
“That’s why people read them. What are you going to do?”
“Find Barry.”
“Such a simple goal,” she said. “For such a complex character.”
“I am an anomaly.”
Her eyes were pure lavender in the gray light. “Hard to get close to.”
I took the hint and shifted closer. She ran a finger down my jaw, letting the sheet fall from her breasts. Her hand kept going, following the line of my throat and the lapel of my robe down to where the belt tied.
I saw her to the lobby of her hotel, where a neat black security man in a gold blazer took his attention from the row of closed-circuit television monitors over his desk to glare at me. I glared back until he looked away. “Call me?” Louise asked.
I said I would and pressed the button for the elevator.
“Not just if you find something out,” she said. “Any reason will do.”
The doors opened and she stepped inside, past a man coming out who hesitated for an instant, wondering whether he should get back on. But by then the doors were closing on a dream in blue and gray. The security man hadn’t asked to see her key before letting her go up. With me they unbutton the flaps over their holsters.
I used one of a bank of pay telephones off the front desk.
“Acme Collision.”
This was a new voice, youthful, male, gum snapping. In the background a welding torch hummed and splattered sparks. I asked for Mr. Petite.
“He’s at lunch. Back at three.”
“Where can I get in touch with him? It’s urgent.”
“Hang on.”
The radio was playing loudly under the noise of the torch. I held the receiver away from my ear until he returned.
“Curly’s, on Fenkell in Highland Park. Know it?”
“That’s a bar.”
“I never said he was eating, ace.” I g
ot hung up on.
I drove to the low brick building on Fenkell, which was just five minutes away from Acme. It was a few minutes past one and the parking lot was filled. Not a lot gets done in Highland Park after lunch. I circled the place twice before a yellow Cavalier convertible pried itself loose from a space near the door. A green Charger that had been waiting leaned on its horn when I swung into the opening. The driver saluted me with a finger when I climbed out. I waved back.
The interior was cool and lighted only by the rosy lamps behind the bar. They didn’t reach far enough to show anyone inside who you were leaving with. Guitar music floated out of a hidden speaker. I was still standing in the entrance, getting used to the change in visibility, when a red-faced character in a blue silk bowling shirt with Ed stitched over the pocket swung through the door, banging me with the handle. When I turned, tiny eyes lit on me.
“That was my space you took, fucker.”
“Sorry.”
He rocked back on his heels and came forward on his toes. I had six inches on him, but he was built like a sack of angle irons. “I didn’t hear that, fucker. Let’s hear you say it again like you mean it.”
I turned the rest of the way so that I was looking down on him. I really needed a scene. Like a cover girl needs acne I needed a scene. I took hold of the collar of his bowling shirt and twisted.
“Don’t mix up good manners with no guts,” I said. I didn’t speak any louder than the general whisper of conversation in the room.
His face got redder. His eyes lost focus. At length he nodded quickly. I let go and he turned around and went out, muttering, “All a guy wants is a drink.”
I went to the bar, set at an angle to the door. The bartender, a big black with a moustache and gray in his natural, was looking at me with his hand wrapped in a chamois inside a glass that was already sparkling.
“Trouble?”
“The guy was right,” I said. “I just wasn’t in the mood for him to be right. Wally Petite here?”
He went on looking at me with his hand in the glass. I got out my wallet and laid a five-dollar bill on the bar. He didn’t look at it.
“This is a good bar, mister,” he said. “Maybe not the best bar in the world, but not the kind of place you seem to be used to either. You want to see a customer, you give me your name, I ask him does he want to see you. Otherwise buy a drink or get out.”
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