Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 04

by The Glass Highway

  “Underneath what?”

  That dulled her amusement a little. She said, “I like you too, even though you’re not as funny as you seem to think you are. I don’t know if I wanted him to move in. I didn’t not want him to. Or is that the same thing?”

  “Not by a mile. I don’t want to lug around a gun, but there are times when I don’t not want to, like every time I come to this town.”

  “What’s wrong with Iroquois Heights?”

  “Let’s see. The city prosecutor runs the town and he’s a crook. The police department has several hundred thousand federal revenue-sharing dollars tied up in enough electronic flash to remake Star Wars, but what the cops get the most use out of is their twelve-volt cattle prods. Any Saturday night you can ring three longs and two shorts on some rich resident’s doorbell and be shown into the basement where a dogfight is going on. There’s a former city attorney named Stillson on the main drag who specializes in probate work, but if you’re a friend of a friend and have twenty thousand to spare he’ll make you the proud parent of a brand new black-market baby. If you’re hot he’ll sell you a complete new set of identification for a grand. What’s wrong with Iroquois Heights? I’ll tell you what’s right with it. There isn’t as much of it as there is of Detroit.”

  Someone raised his voice in the living room. The wall shook. Glass crashed. I pushed through the swinging door a step ahead of the girl.

  Papa Broderick was half-sitting on a pedestal table canted back against the wall on the other side of the television set. A black porcelain vase lay in six pieces on the floor at the foot of the table. Bud stood glaring at his father with his fists clenched. The newscaster straightened with exaggerated dignity, tugged at his jacket, and touched a handkerchief to his mouth. It came away stained.

  “Damn it,” he said, “I’m going on camera again in four hours. If my lip’s swollen—”

  “Say that again and I’ll make sure of it!” Bud was seething.

  “You’re not doing a whole hell of a lot of good here, Mr. Broderick,” I said. “Why don’t you tell Miss Royce you’re sorry for what you said about her and let’s you and me take the air?”

  His colorless eyes flicked from face to face and lighted on my forehead. “I don’t owe her any apologies.”

  Bud glared at me. “How come you know so much about what he said?”

  “You’re a very fast young man with your fists and a gun when it comes to the girl. What’s to know?” I was looking at Broderick. “Let’s you and me take the air.”

  The newscaster handed Bud his editorial face, the one he reserved for crime and urban blight. He was against them. “You two deserve each other. Just don’t ever call me and expect me to put up bail.”

  Having delivered this devastating blow he left us. Poor Sandy Broderick. His whole livelihood was balanced on a dial the size of a beer coaster.

  I glanced at the TV. Lucy was trying to get Ricky to agree to move to a larger apartment and not having much luck. The laugh track was in hysterics. I found my hat and coat and turned to Bud.

  “This won’t take, but the windmill hasn’t been built that I can pass up.

  The girl can take care of herself in spite of you, and maybe even in spite of me too, sterling defender of the weak and oppressed that I am. She’s got your gun in her pocket if it came to that.”

  His eyes went to Paula, then to the bulge in the left leg of her slacks.

  She said, “The gun’s mine. It’s registered to me.”

  “Who are you?” Bud demanded of me for the second time. I paused, considering. I had a joke for it this time too, but Broderick’s exit had ruined me for snazzy curtain-closers. I said nothing and vanished into broad daylight on a puff of smoke and a sneeze.

  Thinking that that was the end of it.

  9

  IT RAINED ON Christmas Eve as predicted.

  I turned out the lights in my little tin office on West Grand River and watched it come down, streaking the thin frost on the window and making the lights of the city run. A close friend had presented me with a bottle of twenty-four-year-old Scotch for the holiday and I was quietly knocking the head off it with a glass I kept in the desk for emergencies. That close friend and I having the same name in common. I had bought it with that part of Sandy Broderick’s thousand left after satisfying my landlord, Detroit Edison, Michigan Bell, and the ready-to-wear emporium I commissioned all my clothing from in Greektown, minus a bone to the savings account just to keep the service charges from eating it up. Not counting a routine credit check at courtesy rate for a medium-size agency I sometimes do business with on the East Coast, I hadn’t worked in a week, not since leaving Paula Royce’s place in Iroquois Heights. Nobody has any use for private heat at yuletide. Husbands ditch their mistresses to spend the holidays with their families, store employees stop chiseling the management under the watchful eye of goosed security, kids stay home to avoid missing out on the loot come Christmas morning. Business would pick up after the first of the year when everyone was fed up to the hairline with peace and good will, but for now I was the forgotten man. I sipped unblended whiskey and watched the rain.

  The world hit me over the head with my own telephone. I tipped down what was in the glass and hung the receiver on my ear. “Hudson Bay lighthouse. Gus speaking.”

  There was dead air on the other end, then: “You don’t sound like any Gus I ever knew, and I knew a couple.”

  A woman’s voice, middle-register but trying hard for husky. A shade alcoholic, but I didn’t hold it against her, because I was a shade alcoholic myself. I said, “You sound like a Fern. Or do Ferns make sounds?”

  “This one does. I tried to get you at your place. Don’t you ever go home?”

  “Every Leap Year Day, just to feed my four-year locust.”

  “What are you doing this festive eve?”

  “Nothing I wouldn’t rather be doing with Candace Bergen on the beach at St. Tropez.”

  She blew air. I could almost smell the smoke. “I’ll call the airport. You know The Chord Progression on Livernois?”

  I said I knew it. “Wear heels,” she said, and broke the connection.

  I hung up and drained my glass, staring into a dark corner of the office. The rain was just water leaking out of the sky now that I knew I had to go out in it. I broke out the foul-weather gear and dangled.

  Entering a jazz club in full stride from a rainy street is a little like walking around a corner into a fire fight. I stood in the dimly lit entrance a moment, stopped by a wall of amplified noise while a frat kid in plaid dinner jacket and black bow tie frowned over his reservation book at the puddle I was making on the paisley carpet. Someone was banging hell out of a piano in the cave beyond the lighted area, but I didn’t hear any wood splintering yet so I figured the show was just getting started.

  “We’re full up, mister. Try us after New Year’s.” The frat kid had priced my suit and raincoat at a glance. His tone said he’d made that tonight in tips.

  I told him I was meeting Fern Esterhazy. His expression thawed a little. “Uh, yes, she said she was meeting a gentleman. You’ll find her at the bar.” We were both men of the world now, his attitude implied, brothers of the eager thigh. I had a necktie older than he was.

  I left my stuff at the window with an aging hatcheck girl and pried a path through the darkness and smoke hanging beyond the arch. The Chord Progression had started out topless under another name, but a previous administration had nickel-and-dimed it to death with citations for overcrowding and serving drinks to minors. The new owners had redecorated and advertised it as a place to hear topflight musicians of international renown. Instead, the slow, rolling death of the auto industry had made it a showcase for what passed as local talent. On the bandstand a black pianist with a weightlifter’s torso was tearing chords out of the keyboard in long, ragged strips while his partners on horn and bass stood by nodding and grunting behind dark glasses. It sounded to me like someone kicking a box of Lincoln Logs downstairs,
but then I’m a Fats Waller man. Customers at tables visible in the glow of the baby spot seemed to be enjoying it. At six bucks for a glass of alcohol and fizz they’d better.

  The Fern, in a shimmering green evening gown with a ninety-day neckline, was seated on a red stool at the bar arguing with a teenage bartender in a yellow jacket. Her voice was more nasal now.

  “What are you, some kind of sex-changed Emily Post? Your job’s to keep this glass full. When I want your opinion on how a lady should act I’ll call you. Don’t break any dates to wait by the phone.”

  The teenager touched his bow tie. “It’s not my rule, ma’am. Management says no unescorted ladies at the bar. I stuck my neck out serving you two here already. I’ve only had this job a week and a half. I’d sort of like to hang on to it till I see my first paycheck.”

  “I know your boss, sonny.”

  “Yes, ma’am. So do I. What he says is no unescorted ladies at the bar and no unescorted ladies at the bar is what he says.”

  “She’s escorted,” I said, slipping onto the stool next to hers. “One more for the lady, and a glass of Scotch I can stand up in.”

  The bartender’s face wore a thin sheet of suspicion. He had a coppery sprouting on his long upper lip that looked as if it had taken a month to show. He said, “You know her from somewhere, or this a pickup?”

  Meaning was she wildcatting without kicking in to the house. I turned to her. “You left the cap off the toothpaste tube this morning.”

  She beckoned the bartender closer with her index finger. When he leaned his ear down: “Call a cop. I don’t know this guy from Billy Graham’s chauffeur.”

  Still hunched, he slid hostile eyes in my direction. Then they slid back to her face and he straightened. “Sure, green the help. I’m just trying to eat like everyone else.” He moved off to fix the drinks.

  “Class bars, phooey. Give me a dive down on Mt. Elliott anytime.” She got out a cigarette and tapped it noisily atop the bar while she hunted in her purse for an Aqua-filter. Then she gave up and speared the weed between her lips cold.

  I lit it and one for myself. “You’ve never been any closer to a Mt. Elliott dive than the Renaissance Club. I’m on to your act, remember?”

  “You and everyone else. They all think I’m too good for me.” She squirted smoke at the ceiling and looked at me. She had glitter-dust on her long eyelashes. Her thick red hair hung down her bare back to the stool. “Sorry I left you hanging before. I’m sensitive about my height.”

  The bartender brought our glasses and picked up the money I’d left him on the bar, made change from the cash register. I accepted it and stared at him until he moved down to the other end.

  “Heard from Bud lately?” I asked Fern.

  “He came by last night to drop off Christmas presents for the family .Sharon asked him to stay but he said he had to get back. He’s still living with Paula. How’d you find out where she lives?”

  “I beat up a guy.”

  She almost choked on her drink. She set it down and dabbed at the front of her dress with her droll cocktail napkin and killed the cigarette I’d just lit for her in a black ashtray mounded over with them on the bar. They all wore traces of her red lipstick. “We’re a good match,” she said, squashing out the butt. “We like to pretend we’re hard. We’re as hard as a couple of toasted marshmallows.”

  “Philosophy yet,” I said. “Ain’t we hell.”

  She turned right around and took another one out of her pack. I let her fire this one up herself with a slim gold lighter from her purse. I had a hard enough time keeping up with my own bad habits. “I hate this season,” she said.

  “So do I. Drink up and let’s go caroling.”

  “They start hyping it around Halloween and don’t let up until it’s time to start getting ready for the George Washington’s Birthday sales. The air conditioners are still running in the stores while they’re piping in ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nose Reindeer.’”

  “Cute tune.”

  “I bet all the bars in all the cities in the whole Christian world are jammed tonight.” She ran a scarlet-nailed finger around the inside of her glass and tasted it. “Chock full of toasted marshmallows like us busting their asses to make themselves merry. The hell with all of us. You can take all the mistletoe and all the trees and bright ribbons and shiny paper and cut rate Santas and canned sleighbells and Perry Comos and sink them in the Detroit River with a rock. The last thing we need is a whole season just to remind us how alone we are.”

  “You’re right. Let’s get married and be alone together.”

  She smiled archly at our reflections in the mirror behind the bar. “You better watch it, brown eyes. I got rice in my bloodstream.”

  “We’d last about a week.” I put down what was in my glass and whistled through my teeth at the bartender. It irritated the hell out of him, which pleased Fern. “But it would be an interesting week.”

  “It couldn’t be any worse than the two tries I made. But I shouldn’t fault them. I’m still collecting reparations from one husband.”

  “What about the other?”

  “He’s in Jackson. We were together six weeks when he got himself busted for stealing a car. It wasn’t his first beef and he’s doing three to five.”

  The bartender wet my glass. I paid him and he turned his back on us and went over to listen in on a conversation between two basketball fans three stools down. The good news from the bandstand was the pianist had finished his solo. The bad news was the horn player had started his. Fern watched me out the corner of her eye.

  “I’ve moved out of the house,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve got an apartment off East Jeff, a little place. Four rooms, one and a half baths, and something called a kitchenette, but you wouldn’t want to try to cook two eggs in it at the same time.”

  “Little place,” I echoed. “What’s Ford Auditorium, an efficiency apartment?”

  “The husband I’m getting alimony from is on the board at GM. When he gets a raise, I get a raise.”

  “You said something about starving if you left home.”

  “I lied. Fact is I was too lazy to make the move. But there’s no living with Sharon since she started blaming me for bringing Bud and Paula together.”

  I drained my glass. “Let’s ditch the small talk and go straight to the seduction. My place or yours?”

  She hesitated, then: “For shame. ERA and all. A woman’s supposed to be able to call a man these days without him thinking she’s on the make. Don’t you ever watch TV?”

  “Only when Sandy Broderick’s on.”

  “That eunuch.” She drank.

  I wrinkled my brow. “Him too? You must have finished with the A’s already.”

  “Says you. I was being the proper little hostess that day Sharon told him about Bud. He acted like I had rabies. I think he’s afraid of sex.”

  “Who isn’t?” I reached across her to grind out my stub. Something stroked the inside of my thigh lightly. When I glanced down, her hand was back in her own lap. She was toasting herself in the mirror.

  The trio was jamming now, sleepwalking through something that sounded like “Lullaby of Birdland” if you closed your eyes, but only if you closed your ears too. Fern said, “I’m sick of this dump. Did you bring your car?”

  “I think I left it in the parking lot.”

  She topped off the pile in the ashtray and picked up her purse. “Let’s go riding somewhere.”

  “Somewhere like East Jeff?”

  She grinned and got up, swaying a little, not too much.

  10

  I HELPED HER into a fur coat that would have kept me in gas and oil for a year and we left. Leaning on my arm, she slouched a bit to appear shorter than I in her two-inch heels. She was leaning a little too heavily for anyone within a yard of sober. There wasn’t room for her between my lap and the steering wheel, so she just huddled close and rested her head on my shoulder. Female musk filled the car. I t
ooled north on Livernois and swung east onto Vernor, hydroplaning a little on the water standing on the pavement. Without a buzz on I’d probably have lost it right there. The rain had paused for breath, and in the glow of my headlamps the street shone as smooth and treacherous as a glass highway.

  “Nice muscles.” She was stroking my right arm. “How is it someone who pumps as much smoke and anesthetic into his system as you do feels like the Mighty Thor?”

  “I get out and throw the hammer around every Ragnarok.”

  “You’re full of surprises. Maybe we really should get married.”

  “Once did it for me. It’s not at all like peanuts.” I got my arm loose and turned on the heater. The fan pushed refrigerator air at my feet. New cars.

  “Who killed Johnny Ralph Dorchet?” I asked, after we had gone a couple of blocks in silence.

  “I thought it was Cock Robin.” She stirred a little at my side. Her tone was sleepy.

  “I figured maybe you’d heard something. It couldn’t have been the local crowd. They’d have replaced him with someone who could handle Dorchet’s racket without having to be told when to go to the bathroom and what to do when he got there. Anyone but Moses True.”

  She sat up, looking at me. Her face was taut in the light of a passing bar sign. “You are full of surprises.”

  “I thought you’d know True.”

  “Only by reputation. All bad. Why should I pay for pills when I get them free at parties?”

  “Sometimes you might need a little something to get you from one to the next. I don’t guess it’s a disgrace anymore in your neighborhood. Maybe it never was. The air up there’s too rare for a lug like me.”

  “You’re a reverse snob, you know it?”

  “I’m a dark-eyed Adonis who snaps women’s hearts like breadsticks. Who killed Johnny Ralph?”

  “I’d have to know he lived in the first place. I seem to have gotten along for twenty-six years not knowing.” She slid low in the seat, resting the back of her head on top of it. It didn’t make her look the least bit petite. “Was he a friend of yours?”