“A hundred tap-jockeys in this town and I had to draw an honor graduate of the Dearborn School of Bartending Arts. Pour me a Stroh’s and deal me change.”
He did that, pocketing the chamois, and that was when I knew there had been something in it besides his hand. I sat on the end stool, sipping and watching the smoked-glass mirror that ran the length of the wall near the ceiling, tilted forward to take in the entire room. I spotted him finally near the windows. He was sitting at a table with the red-haired hillbilly and the bald man with the great beard and another man I didn’t recognize, a graying number in gold-rimmed glasses and a tan suit with a windowpane pattern that was so faint it almost wasn’t there. I saw the light glinting off the gold chain around Petite’s neck before I saw anything else. He was wearing a burgundy jacket today, over a pale blue silk shirt open to his ribs. It would be like a former mechanic with sudden money to dress out of California Today.
He and the gray-haired man were talking and laughing in a relaxed sort of way that suggested the business part was over. The two other men from the body shop drank beer and said nothing. They had on clean shirts and jackets that didn’t match their trousers. They were amateurs. Professional bodyguards were more successful at not looking like bodyguards.
I was still sipping and watching the mirror and thinking when a white man twenty years younger than my bartender but dressed the same, in white shirt and black clip-on tie, came in through a door at the end of the bar buttoning his shirtcuffs. My bartender said something to him and he nodded and then my bartender took off his apron and stashed it under the bar and went out through the same door.
I finished my beer, signaled his replacement for another, left a buck for it, and got down to find a pay telephone. There were three in the hallway to the men’s room. I took note of the number on the dial of the one in the center and went to the one farthest from the bar and dropped two dimes and dialed the number.
Leaning against the wall with the receiver to my ear I watched the young bartender set down my beer and a fresh napkin where I had been sitting and come over, mopping his hands on his apron. I turned my back. When he answered I said, “Mr. Petite, please. Wally Petite.”
“See if he’s here.”
The bartender laid the receiver on the ledge under the instrument and went back to page Petite. I hung up, stepped to the telephone nearest the bar, picked up the handset, and waited with my back to the hallway entrance.
21
I SMELLED HIS COLOGNE first, one of those sticky brands with jungle names that smell like burnt leather. As he walked past me with his hand out to pick up the vacant receiver I looped the cord of the one I was holding over his head and pulled. The cord drew tight around his throat before he could get his hands on it. He tried anyway. They always do. He said, “Gkkk!”
“Amos Walker,” I said, next to his ear. “We spoke yesterday. Now let’s say something.”
“Gkkk!”
“Three years ago, Lieutenant Ray Blankenship of the Fourteenth Precinct arrested you for stripping a parked car. You pulled some light time, then lucked into a partnership with a guy that got killed by someone who knew how to do it. Two days ago, Blankenship pulled his own plug. You’re bad luck, pal. I want to know how come.”
He said it again. I glanced back over my shoulder. The bartender was leaning on his forearms on the other end of the bar, talking to a brunette in a dark red shift and pearls. From where he stood we were two guys using the telephones. I turned back to Petite and loosened the cord a little. He sucked in air loudly.
“You son—”
I pulled the cord tight. He grunted and tried to elbow me in the ribs, but he didn’t have the room to do it right. This time I hung on until he started to go slack. When I relaxed, his lungs creaked.
“I got friends here,” he gasped. “They’ll bust you good.”
“Wally, your grammar’s slipping. You won’t be here to see them bust me, get it? You’ll be too busy holding your breath.”
He made no reply. I started to tighten the cord again. He said, “Don’t! We’ll talk.”
“Start with you and Blankenship.”
“I was boosting a couple of things. It was while I was working at the dealership. The sons of bitches weren’t paying me anything. A guy’s got to live. I didn’t see Blankenship. He was off-duty, picking up something for his wife on the way home, something like that, I don’t remember. He came up behind me and asked if I had car trouble. I tried to bluff it out, said it was my car and it wouldn’t start. He wanted to see my license and registration. I got three months and a day.”
“Records gave me that much. Skip to Phil Niles. Why’d you have him killed and what did Blankenship have to do with it?”
“I didn’t have him k—”
I leaned back hard. He struggled, relaxed. I held on. He struggled again, and then he relaxed for real. His face went black and the only thing holding him up was the cord.
When I let go his knees gave. I got an arm around his chest under his arms and let the receiver dangle while I slapped his cheek. He was pale now, paler than his shirt. His color returned in patches. I looked back toward the bartender, who was topping off the brunette’s glass from a bottle of Chianti.
“We go on,” I said. “Alfred Kindnagel. Where’s he come in?”
“I don’t know anybody by that name.” His voice came through six layers of gauze.
“Wally … ”
“I don’t! I swear! Who’s Alan Kindnagel?”
“No good, Wally. Either you remember the name or you forget it entirely. If you got it wrong it wouldn’t be the Alfred part. What about Morris Rosenberg? He ate some bullets on Eight Mile Road eight years back. Kindnagel was his union boss.”
“Christ, eight years ago I’d never seen this town.”
“Okay, let’s just for now say it was before your time. Who killed Niles for you?”
“Niles?”
“Niles. N is for the nasty names you call me. I is for the illness you’ll go through. L is for the lies you try to tell me. E is for—”
Cold air from something that had plenty of it to give prickled the down on my neck behind my right ear. I stopped singing.
“Mister, I’m going to blow your face clean off you don’t let go the man.”
The voice belonged to the black bartender. I opened my arms. Petite fell to one knee. I turned around slowly with my hands in plain sight and looked at the shiny nickel plating on a square .25 automatic at the end of the bartender’s outstretched arm. His big hand was wrapped almost twice around the butt with less than half an inch of pistol showing. His expression was flat. Behind him loomed the figures of Petite’s men, Redhead and Blackbeard. The gray-haired man in the windowpane suit stood behind them, and behind him, crowded out into the bar proper, was the young white bartender. The hallway was very full.
“You okay, Mr. Petite?” Blackbeard wanted to know. He was staring at me the way he had when I’d last seen him in the body shop holding a sledgehammer.
“Yeah.” Standing now, Petite dusted off his knee and straightened, adjusting the rumpled collar of his burgundy jacket. “I was just directing Mr. Walker to the exit.”
“I think we’ll order some law,” said the black bartender.
“No, it’s okay. Isn’t it okay, Walker?”
I didn’t say anything. I was watching the black bartender. He hadn’t moved, just stood there turned sideways to me with his arm stretched out level with his shoulder and the gun in the end like an extension of his hand. He looked like a Charley Russell sketch of an old-time gun-fighter.
“I take him outside, show him where he went wrong,” drawled Redhead.
“No, it’s okay.” And Petite backhanded me across the cheek.
It made a noise like a pistol shot in the confined space. I backed up a step as if staggered. Then I kicked him in the crotch hard enough to lift him off his feet. He made a sound like a sick cat and wheeled out of my way, hands clasped between his knees.
The black bartender swung the gun their way. They stopped.
Over Petite’s mewing, the bartender said: “We don’t escalate, okay? Man had it coming. Everybody out. Pay the man at the rear.” His hooded eyes moved my way. “You first. Don’t come back.”
I didn’t move. “Cop, right?”
“Bodyguard. Teamsters. Out.”
He gestured with the gun and the gang in the hallway parted heavily to let me through. I passed Blackbeard closely enough to smell the clam chowder on his breath. Behind me, Petite was sucking wind in long therapeutic drafts.
In the parking lot I walked around a man on his way inside. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up and carried a plaid sport coat under one arm. His hands were filthy. After he got a look at what was on the way to the men’s room he’d find a better place to have a flat.
I got into the Olds and put my key in the switch but I didn’t turn it. Instead I adjusted the rearview mirror to take in the door of the bar. A grim face with a hot red patch on its right cheek looked back at me from the corner of the glass. At one-thirty it had already been a long day, and sunlight coming warm through the windshield made me drowsy. I cracked the window for fresh air and waited.
After five minutes, Petite and the gray-haired man came out followed by the two body shop employees. Petite had straightened his clothes and restored the layered waves in his hair. He walked with the gray-haired man to a Chrysler Cordoba parked a few slots down from my car and the two shook hands. Then the gray-haired man opened the door on the driver’s side and got in. Petite stood back while he pulled out, lifted his hand in a short wave, then jerked his head at the bodyguards and the three started my way.
I slid down below the back of the front seat, my hand going to the butt of the Luger I kept under the dash. A moment went by, and then a car door opened a few yards away. I raised myself a little to peer through the passenger’s window and the windows of the car parked next to mine as Petite climbed into a blue Mercury two vehicles over. Redhead got in beside him on the driver’s side and Blackbeard let himself into the back seat.
I waited until the car had swung out into the aisle before starting the Olds. As the Mercury hit Fenkell I backed out and followed. I let a couple of cars get between us. It was a sunny day and the terrain was flat. The Merc was large by today’s standards. It was a textbook tail job.
Petite had been frightened under my grilling, and not all of it had been because of me. I had to wonder why he’d risk being strangled over giving up the name of Philip Niles’s killer. Finding out meant getting him away from his hired help and the odd nosy bartender.
At Schaefer the blue car waited for the light to change, then turned right. When I got to the corner I rotated the wheel that way. The Olds kept going straight and the wheel came all the way around in my hands.
22
I ROLLED ACROSS SCHAEFER with my hands locked on the wheel for no good reason. It was like clinging to a noodle in a high sea. I put my foot on the brake, but they had thought of that too. The pedal went all the way to the floor with a sigh and stayed there. The emergency brake pulled back without effort in my hand and the car kept moving. I thought about the man I had seen going into Curly’s on my way out.
Louise would probably have called it a cliché.
I had slowed down for the turn, but the street sloped a little and the speedometer needle was climbing. I cut the motor and shifted into Neutral. If I could bring the speed down far enough to shift into Park without doing a double jackknife through the windshield, if.
That wasn’t going to happen. I was up to forty now and still picking up speed. Also, Fenkell was taking a lazy curve to the north and the Olds was heading east with all the blind machine faith in its pilot of an Aztec holy man walking into a volcano.
Forty-five. I opened the door on the driver’s side.
Forty-eight. A small shopping mall came up on my right. The curve sharpened and I could read the USA TODAY logo on a newspaper box chained to one of the posts that held up the roof of the mall. It was in front of me now.
Fifty. I leaned out. The slipstream sucked at my jacket and sent my necktie flapping around my left ear.
Fifty-two. I jumped.
There was no traffic coming up on my left. I was the only motorist exceeding the limit in this block today. For a long, hanging moment I had a sensation of flight, and then the pavement shot up and white light raked me from the top of my skull to the soles of my feet. My lungs made a noise collapsing and I rolled and banged my knee and rolled and scraped my hand and rolled and barked my shin and rolled and hit my head and rolled and then I stopped with another jolt of light.
Sky and earth did one last slow turn and wobbled to a halt like a coin coming to rest on a bartop. Beyond all that, beyond me, a great painful silence came down, as after the ringing of a church bell, and in that silence I heard the echo of the crash. Then pain welled up in my knee. It was a pain I could see, all white and glowing, and it was the kind of pain I’d have traded ten years of my life to be over. I rocked back and forth with my hands clasped around the knee until the pain changed color and spread out and settled into a reassuring throb.
I had landed across the street from the shopping mall with the curb cutting me in half across my lower back. I rolled over onto my left hand to push myself up, winced, and looked at the palm. My slide had ground a dozen tiny pebbles into the heel. I plucked out the worst of them and tried again. That time I made it to my feet. I did a quick bone check and decided I’d heal okay alone. A triangular flap of torn material hung from the knee of my right trouser leg, exposing my worst injury. The knee was bleeding in ten tiny places, as if I’d shaved it with a rusty razor. I tried bending it. It went the right way.
A crowd was gathering across the street, where my Olds crouched on the sidewalk with its back humped like a bull getting set to charge, only its charging days were over. It had squashed the newspaper box and wrapped its grille around the steel post the box was chained to, springing the frame and releasing clouds of steam from the smashed radiator. The headlamps were staring at each other.
“You all right, mister?”
I looked at a tall old man standing on the sidewalk on my side of the street, in jeans and a checked shirt buttoned at the neck. He wore a black string tie with an Indian totem snugged up under his large adam’s apple. He had a leash in his hand and a Schnauzer at the other end of it, relieving itself against an overflowing city trash can. Everyone else on the block was looking at the wrecked car. “I’m swell,” I said. “Wait for the cops, will you? Tell ’em I’ll be back.”
“Wait, mister! You shouldn’t ought to be leaving the scene of an accident.”
But I was already moving, hobbling back the way I’d come.
It was only a two-block run, but I hadn’t got back all the wind I’d had belted out of me and the knee made me clench my teeth every time I put weight on that leg. I hadn’t banged my head hard enough to raise a lump but it hurt, throbbing fit to burst in time with my accelerated heart rate. I was puffing like a leaky valve when I made Curly’s Bar.
“Thought I said don’t come back.”
The black bartender stood with his hands spread on the bar and the shiny little automatic under one of them. He wasn’t bothering to wrap a cloth around it now.
“Guy came in here a few minutes ago,” I said between gasps. “Probably used the men’s room. Had his shirtsleeves rolled up and his hands were greasy. Where’d he go?”
“Why, you want to strangle him with a phone cord too?”
“Son of a bitch rigged my steering and brakes. That’s why the grease.”
He looked me over again, took in the dirt on my face and clothes and the tear in my pants. “Man, you lead a hard life.”
“Skip the eulogy and tell me where he went.”
“Didn’t see the man.”
“The hell you didn’t, Hawkeye.”
“There was some conf
usion here, you remember. Couple of guys come in, use the bathroom. I was too busy to get their prints. Your man in here now?”
I took a slow turn. Not a few of the faces at the tables were turned my way. He wasn’t in the barroom. I went down the hall and into the men’s room. I wasn’t wearing a gun. In the mood I was in I didn’t need one. There was no one standing at the sink or urinals. I squatted, favoring my injured knee, and looked under the stalls. One of them was wearing a pair of brown loafers. I straightened and rapped on the painted plywood door.
“I’ll be through in a minute.”
I took a step back and threw a heel at the lock. The door flew open and banged the inside of the stall. I looked at a bald man in his sixties sitting on the toilet with his pants down around his ankles and that day’s Detroit News in his lap. He stared back over the tops of his bifocals.
I flashed a grin. I guess it was sheepish. “Sorry. That damn Mexican food.”
By the time I came out the bartender had put away his gun. I spread ten dollars on the bar. “You need better locks on the stalls.”
“Man wants to see you.” He inclined his head.
I followed the angle and nodded at a young uniformed cop standing just inside the bar entrance. He had a thumb hooked in his belt near his holster.
I got away from Highland Park with a citation for careless driving and a reprimand for leaving the scene of an accident. I hadn’t told the police my car had been tampered with. It sounded screwy even to me. A tow truck with a city contract hauled what was left of the Olds down to the garage where I have all my service done in Detroit. I rode along. There I paid the driver and stood by while the owner, a German named Schinder, gave my transportation its last rites. He said he’d see what he could do for me in the matter of wheels.
“What’ll you allow me on the Olds?” I asked.
“Depends on what you left in the glove compartment.”
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