Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places

by Loren Estleman

  Which in this case is not unpleasant.

  Nola Rockover’s a fox. Not, I hasten to add, one of those pneumatically enhanced bimbos you see on TV, just another flavor-of-the-month, but the dark, smoldering kind you hardly ever see except in black-and-white movies and old reruns. She’s a brunette, slender—not thin, I’ve had it with those anorexic bonepiles that make you want to abduct them and tie them down and force-feed them mashed potatoes until they at least cast a decent shadow—I’m talking lithe and sinuous, like a dancer, with big dark eyes and prominent cheekbones. She had a pantherish quality I’d come to know better, and how.

  She wore this dark sleeveless top and some kind of skirt, no cleavage or jewelry except for a thin gold necklace that called attention to the long smooth line of her throat, and she had a way of holding her chin high, almost aloof but not quite, more like she hadn’t forgotten what her mother had told her about the importance of good posture. She’s not talking, except maybe to respond to something the other woman is saying, encourage her to go on, except I’m thinking she’s not really that interested, just being polite. In any case it’s her friend who’s flapping her chin and waving her hands around like she’s swatting hornets. Probably describing her love life.

  Yes, miss, another Chivas, and how’s yours? Sure? Now you’re making me look like a lush.

  Nola’s friend? Okay, so I’m a chauvinist pig. Maybe she’s talking about the Red Wings. She’s got on this ugly business suit with a floppy bow tie, like she hasn’t been to see a movie since Working Girl. I’m thinking Nola tolerates her company to avoid drinking alone in public. Maybe she already suspects she’s said too much in that condition in the past. You can see I’m kindly disposed to her before I even make contact. There’s no rule says you can’t like ’em and cuff ’em.

  I watch twenty minutes, my drink’s all melted ice, and I’m starting to think this other woman’s got a bladder the size of Toledo when she finally gets up and goes to wee-wee. I give it a minute so as not to look like a shark swimming in, then I wander on over. Nola’s getting out another cigarette and I’m wishing, not for the first time, I hadn’t given up the weed, or I could offer to light her up from the Zippo I no longer carried. Sure, it’s corny, but it works. That’s how some things stay around long enough to get corny. But it’s out, so I do the next best thing and say, “I hear the surgeon general frowns on those.”

  She looks up slowly like she knows I’ve been standing there the whole time, and you’ll like what she says.

  “I don’t follow generals’ orders any more. I got my discharge.”

  And she smiles, this cool impersonal number that make the soles of my feet tingle. She’s got nice teeth—not perfect, one incisor’s slightly crooked, but she keeps them white, which is not easy when you smoke. Her eyes don’t smile, though. Even if I didn’t know her recent history I’d guess this was someone for whom life has not come with greased wheels.

  I’m scraping my skull for what to say next when she throws me a life preserver. “You like the Dead?”

  Now, that’s a conversation starter. It takes me a second to remember what’s on my T-shirt.

  Not, “You’re a Deadhead?” Which is a term they know in Bowling Green by now, it’s hip no more, but most people are afraid not to use it for fear of appearing unhip. The way she doesn’t say it, though, tells me she’s so hip she doesn’t even bother to think about it. I admit that’s a lot to get out of four words, but that was Nola, a living tip-of-the-iceberg. Thanks, honey; I like my Scotch good and orange.

  I lost the thread. Oh, right, the Dead. I take a chance. Remember, everything hangs on how I broach the subject, and the conventional wisdom is never, ever jump the gun. If opening it up standing in front of her table with her friend about to come back from the can any second is not jumping it, I don’t know what is.

  “Yeah, I like the dead.”

  Lowercase, no cap. Which you may argue makes no difference when you’re talking, but if you do, good day to you, because you’re not the person for what I have in mind. No comment? There’s hope for you. Then you’ll appreciate her reaction.

  Her face went blank. No expression, it might have been enameled metal with the eyes painted on. She’d heard that small d, caught on right away, and quick as a switch she’d shut down the system. She wasn’t giving me anything. Wherever this went, it was up to me to take it from there.

  “I know about your problem,” I said. “I can help.”

  She didn’t say, “What problem?” That would have disappointed me. Her eyes flick past my shoulder, and I know without looking her friend’s coming. “Have you got a card?”

  This time I smile. “You mean like ‘Have gun, will travel’?”

  She doesn’t smile back. “I’m known here. I’ll be at the Hangar in an hour.” And then she turns her head and I’m not there.

  I join the boys in the van, who take off their earphones long enough to agree the Hangar is Smilin’ Jack’s Hangar, a roadhouse up in Oakland County that’s been around since there was a comic-strip character of that name, a trendy spot once that now survives as a place where the laws of marriage don’t apply. Every community needs a place to mess around.

  So forty minutes later wearing fresh batteries I’m groping through the whiskey-sodden dark of a building that was once an actual hangar for a small air service, my feet not touching the floor because the bass is so deep from the juke it suspends everything on vibration alone. When I find a booth not currently being used for foreplay and order the house Scotch, I’m hoping Nola is part bat, because the teeny electric lamp on the table is no beacon.

  At the end of ten minutes, right on time, I catch a whiff of scent and then she rustles into the facing seat. She’s freshened her make-up, and with that long dark hair in an underflip and the light coming up from below leaving all the shadows where they belong, she looks like someone I wish I had a wife to cheat on with. The perfume is some kind of moon-flowering blossom, dusky. Don’t look for it, it wouldn’t smell the same on anyone else.

  “Who are you?” She doesn’t even wait for drinks.

  “Call me Ted.”

  “No good. If you know my situation you know both my names.”

  I grin. “Ted Hazlett.” Which is a name I use sometimes. It’s close to “hazard,” but not so close they won’t buy it.

  “And what do you do, Ted Hazlett?”

  “This and that.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Here and there. We can do this all night if you like.”

  My Scotch comes by slow freight. She orders vodka tonic, and when the waiter’s gone she settles back and lights up one of those long cigarettes.

  “We’re just two people talking,” she says. “No law against that.”

  “Not according to the ACLU.”

  “‘This and that.’ Which one is you kill people?”

  I think this over carefully. “‘That.’”

  She nods, like it’s the right answer.

  She tells her story then, and there’s nothing incriminating in the way she tells it, at least not against her. She’s a paralegal with a downtown firm whose name I know, having been cross-examined by some of its personnel in the past. Attends law school nights, plans someday to practice family law, except this walking set of genitalia she’s assigned to, partner in the firm, is planning even harder to get into her pants.

  You know the drill: whispered obscenities in her ear when they’re alone in the office, anonymous gifts of crotchless panties and front-loading bras mailed to her apartment, midnight phone calls when she’s too groggy to cut him off in the middle of the first heavy breath. At first she’s too scared to file a complaint, knowing there’s no evidence that can be traced to him. Then comes the day he tells her she better go down on him if she wants a job evaluation that won’t get her fired.

  The firm’s as old as habeas; no employee recommendation means no employment with any other firm. To top it off, this scrotum, this partner, sits on the
board of the school she attends and is in a position to expel her and wipe out three years of credits. Any way you look at it he’s got her by the smalls.

  Well, what’s a girl to do? She’s no Shirley Temple; lived with a guy for two years, object matrimony, until she caught him in the shower with a neighbor and threw his clothes out a window—I mean every stitch, he had to go out in a towel to fetch them. The senior partners are conservative about cohabitation outside marriage and domestic disturbance.

  So she does the deed on the partner, thinking to hand in her two weeks’ notice the next day and take her good references to a firm where oral examinations are not required.

  Except she’s so good at it the slob threatens to withhold references if she refuses to assign herself to him permanently, so to speak.

  After stewing it over, she decides to take it up with the head of the outfit, file a complaint. But the senior to the seniors won’t sully himself, and fobs her off on an assistant, who by the time she finishes her story has pegged her as an immoral bitch who’s gone to blackmail when she found out she couldn’t advance herself on her knees; she can see it in his face when he tells her the incident will be taken into advisement.

  Next day she’s reassigned to computer filing; the dead end of dead ends and leverage to hound her into resigning.

  It doesn’t stop there. She tries to finance a new car but her credit’s bad. Pulls out her card to buy a blouse at Hudson’s, the clerk makes a call, then cuts up the card in front of her. Some more shit like that happens, then late one night she gets another phone call. It’s the walking genitalia, telling her he’s got friends all over and if she isn’t nice to him he’ll phony up her employment record, get her fired, evict her, frame her for soliciting, whatever; it’s him or a cell at County, followed by accommodations in a refrigerator carton on Woodward Avenue; choice is yours, baby. He’s psycho, no question, but he’s a psycho with connections.

  What the partner hasn’t figured on is a basic law of nature: Corner an animal, and it’s got only one way out.

  There’s no way I can tell you all this the way Nola told it. She lays it out flat, just the facts, without a choke or a sob. The only hint she’s stinging at all is when she breaks a sentence in half to sip her drink, like a runner taking a hint of oxygen before he can go on. But I know every word’s true. I can see this puffed-up bastard in his Armani, ripping up some poor schmoe in court for stepping out on his wife, then rushing back to the office for his daily hummer from the good-looking paralegal. And while I’m seeing this—I can’t say even now if I knew I was aware of it—I sneak a hand up under my shirt and disconnect the wire.

  Nola won’t talk business in a bar. She suggests we meet at her place the next night and gives me an address on East Jefferson. I stand up when she does, pay for the drinks—there’s no discussion on that, it’s an assumption we both make—and I go to the can, mainly to give her a chance to make some distance before I meet with the crew in the van. Only when I leave the roadhouse, I know she’s somewhere out there in the dark, watching me.

  I walk right past the van and get into my car and pull out. I don’t even give the earlobe-tug that tells them I’m being watched, because I know Nola would recognize it for what it was. And I spent an extra fifteen minutes crazying up the way home, just in case she’s following me. You know, they say some prey has a way of turning things around on the hunter; that’s Nola Rockover in a nutshell.

  My telephone’s ringing when I get in, and I’m not surprised it’s Carpenter, from the van.

  “What’s the deal, something go wrong with the transmitter, you forgot we’re out there freezing our nuts off? You get drunk or what?”

  “Sorry, I’m wiped out. Wire must’ve come loose. Not to worry, Phil. She’s no killer, just a broad looking for a sympathetic ear. She couldn’t kill her drink, much less her piece-of-shit boss.”

  “So why give us the brush off?”

  But I was ready for that, too. “Bartender was giving me the fisheye. He saw me climbing in and out of a van I might blow his Tuesday night poker game in the back room. We need places like that, if just for seed.”

  I don’t know if he believed me about Nola, but the part about the bartender was true enough based on what we knew about the dive, so he let it go. Carpenter’s not what you call Supercop, would just as soon duck the graveyard shift for whatever reason. It wasn’t for fear of his disapproval I stayed awake most of that night wishing I still smoked. I could still smell her cigarettes and that dusky scent on my clothes.

  Most of the next day was paperwork pertaining to the nonexistent Rockover case. I logged out in time to go home and freshen up and put on a sport shirt and slacks, no sense working on the image now that the hook’s in.

  Understand, I had no intention of whacking the son of a bitch who was bringing her grief. In twelve years with the department I’d never even fired my piece except to qualify. I’m sympathetic to her case, maybe I can help her figure a way out—brace the creep and apply a little strong-arm if necessary, see will he pick on someone his own size and gender.

  Okay, and maybe wrangle myself some pussy while I’m at it. Hey, we’re both single, and it’s been a stretch for me, what with everyone so scared of AIDS and GHB; I’m telling you, the alphabet’s played hell with the mating game. I figure I’m still leagues above the prick in the thousand-dollar suit.

  She’s on the second floor of one of those converted warehouses in what is now called Rivertown, with a view of the water through a plate-glass window the size of a garage door in her living room. Décor’s sleek, all chrome and glass and black leather and a spatter of paint in a steel frame on one wall, an Impressionist piece that when you stand back turns out to be of a nude woman reclining, who looks just enough like Nola I’m afraid to ask if she posed for it. I can tell it’s good, but the colors are all wrong: bilious green and violent purple and a kind of rusty brown that I can only describe as dried blood, not a natural flesh tone in the batch. It puts me in mind less of a beautiful naked woman than a jungle snake coiled around a tree limb. Artists, they see things most of the rest of us miss.

  It takes me a while to take all this in, because it’s Nola who opens the door for me. She’s wearing a dark turtleneck top over skin-tight stirrup pants with the straps under her bare feet, which are long and narrow, with high arches and clear polish on the toenails. Those perfect feet are just about the only skin she’s showing, but I’m telling you, I was glad I brought a bottle of wine to hold in front of myself. It’s like high school, with the hormones kicking in.

  She takes the bottle with thanks, her eyes flicker down for a split second, and the corners of her lips turn up the barest bit, but she says nothing. I step inside and she closes the door, locking it with a crisp little snick.

  Charlie Parker’s playing low on a sound system I never did get to see. She has me open the wine using a wicked-looking corkscrew in the tiny kitchen, and we go to the living room and drink from stemware and munch on crackers she’s set out on a tray on the glass coffee table, crumbly things that dissolve into butter on the tongue. I’m sitting on the black sofa, legs crossed, her beside me with her legs curled under her, as supple as the snake-woman in the picture, giving off that scent.

  Small talk, music, wine. Then she lifts her glass to her lips and asks me if I approve of the police department’s retirement package.

  I managed not to choke on my wine. I uncross my legs, lean forward, set my glass on the table, sit back. I could try to bluff it out, but just from my exposure to her I know it’d be a waste of breath. I asked her how she doped it out.

  “You forget I’m a file clerk now. I ran that name you gave me through the computer. You shouldn’t have used one you’d used before. Are you getting all this on tape?”

  “I’m not wearing a wire.”

  “Am I supposed to believe that?”

  “Oh, I was wearing one before, but I yanked it. I want to help.”

  She watches me, unblinking as a snake.<
br />
  “Lady,” I said, “if it’s a lie, you’d be in custody right now.”

  She watches me a beat more, then sets down her glass, and before I know it she’s unbuttoning my shirt.

  Long after it’s obvious there’s nothing under it but me, she goes on groping; and in a little while I know there’s nothing but Nola under the sweater and pants. It’s like wrestling that snake, only a warm-blooded one with a quicker tongue that tastes like wine when it’s in my mouth and burns like fire when it’s working its way down my chest, and down and down while I’m digging holes in the leather upholstery with my fingers, trying to hang on.

  I don’t want to give you the impression I’m one of those jerks that tries to puff himself up by giving the play-by-play; I just want you to see how a fairly good cop brain melted down before Nola’s heat. I’ve been married, and I’ve had my hot-and-heavies, but I’ve never even read about some of the things we did that night. We’re on the sofa, we’re off the sofa, the table tips over and we’re heaving away in spilled wine and bits of broken crystal; I can show you a hundred healed-over cuts on my back even now and you’d think I got tangled in barbed wire. In a little while we’re both slick with wine and sweat and various other bodily fluids, panting like a pair of wolves, and we’re still going at it. I’m not sure they’d chance showing it on the Playboy Channel.

  Miss? Oh, miss? Ice water, please. I’m burning up.

  That’s better. Whew! When I think about that night—hell, whenever I think about Nola—this song keeps running through my head. It isn’t what Bird Parker was playing on the CD, he died years before it came out. It wasn’t a hit, although it should have been, it was haunting. I don’t even know who recorded it. “Evil Grows,” I think it was called, and it was all about this poor schnook realizing his girl’s evil and how every time he looks at her, evil grows in him. Whoever wrote it might have known Nola. Because by the time I crawled out of that apartment just before dawn, feeling like I’d been through a grain combine, I’d made up my mind to kill her boss for her.