Lucky Stiff

by Elizabeth Sims

  Lonnie stepped on the tempo and I followed. People began to clap along, Duane too. His smile grew broader. Lonnie and I pounded out our ending, Lonnie's last sharp chord ringing in the city night air.

  Duane came over to me, took my arm, and said to Lonnie, "Can I borrow her for a minute?"

  Lonnie ignored him.

  I said, "Sure, Duane."

  We walked together down the sidewalk and stopped in front of the glass window of New Hellas. People inside were eating their dinners. A waiter poured wine. He must have told a joke as he did it, because the people laughed.

  Duane said, "I thought I'd find you here. Lillian, I have something to tell you. I quit my job."

  "You did? How come? Gimme a cigarette."

  "Here." He cupped his hands around a match, and I touched his warm hand as I took the light. He said, "Last night I had a very dark night. A dark night of the soul, Saint John style."

  The both of us had read far too much hagiography growing up. Fortunately, we interspersed it with forbidden texts like Valley of the Dolls and Mad magazine.

  "I was home," he went on, "alone, trying to be honest with myself, for a change."

  I smiled nervously and took a hit from the Marlboro. Its cutting smoke punished my lungs.

  Duane said, "I realized that I've been adrift without knowing it. Lillian, I finally came to terms with it. I said to myself, Yes, Duane, your mother is dead. Lillian told you the truth. She's at rest. Mama is at rest."

  I put my hand on his shoulder. He grasped for my hand and brought it down in both of his. "And Lillian, I know…Something told me that now it's time to move to the next step." He looked up at me suspensefully, from beneath his floppy hair.

  I said, "Yeah? What step is that?"

  "I need to find my dad."

  I let out a chuffing, desperate stream of smoke.

  Duane said, "I want to tell you, my good friend, that I'm on board with your…with your obsession. It's the right thing to do. We'll both find peace, I know, if we can find my dad. And Lillian—are you all right?"

  "Yeah. Fine." I summoned all my strength to look at him with a clear and even expression.

  "Lillian, I want to talk to you about forgiveness. I…last night I forgave my dad. Can you believe it? And now, I want nothing more than to tell him that."

  "Oh, Duane."

  "It must come as a shock to you, I know. Well, you've got your own feelings about it. I wish you could somehow get to the place in your heart where you can forgive him too."

  "Dear Jesus Christ."

  Do I need to tell you? I didn't know whether to shit green or go blind.

  "Lillian, I'm going to devote myself full-time to this quest. I'm going to sell my house, maybe I'll get twenty or thirty thousand profit out of it. That'll hold me for a little while. It'll hold us for a little while. We'll start in Florida just like you said. Minerva LeBlanc's working on it, right? Well, how can we fail?"

  I concentrated on not fainting. Inside the restaurant the waiter approached the table with a sizzling serving of saganaki. Holding the plate aloft, he flashed a butane lighter over the alcohol fumes hovering there. "Opa!" Oily yellow flames leaped up to the blackened ceiling. The waiter quenched them with a fist of lemon, and the diners, having made their wish, fell to eating.

  Duane said, "I rejected all that Catholic stuff when we were growing up. I rejected it all for a long time. We both did."

  I nodded.

  His eyes brimmed with gentle feeling. "Forgiveness was the hardest part for me. But you know how I feel right now? Free, Lillian. I feel incredibly free."

  "I'm glad, Duane."

  "Well, you look kind of shook up. You probably need to let this sink in. You probably were ready to write me off." He laughed joyfully. "But now the new Duane!"

  What the hell am I going to do now? I could not let my friend wear himself to tatters trying to find the unfindable. I'll think of something. I'll make something up. It would have to be convincing. It would have to sound genuine.

  "Tell you what," I said. "I'll call you in a couple of days, OK?"

  Lonnie kicked off "Me and My Shadow" in the deep bass register, and I joined in, plucking a sixteenth-note line over the top.

  The notes flew out and upward from our instruments, in an arc of sound toward the people on the street. We played a string of variations. My hands began to loosen.

  A woman threaded her way through the dozen people who had stopped to listen. An alert, intelligent woman, quietly sexy, whose very slightly uneven footsteps suggested a life lived not in safety. Yes, it was plainly a woman who accepted a measure of risk as a matter of course. Minerva LeBlanc, smiling, dropped a piece of folded money into Blind Lonnie's case and stepped to the edge of the crowd.

  "Thank you, lovely lady," said Lonnie, thumping out his bass notes. Lonnie was right about everything.

  Minerva settled her weight evenly on her feet, folded her arms, and listened. She watched my hands as I played.

  And just then, on that street corner, my improvisation skills took a sudden leap. A barrier was gone. I found myself able to invent, embellish, juggle, and modify as never before. Blind Lonnie smiled, he poured it on, he shouted with happiness. "Go, Lily!" He handed me the melody.

  I dove into it, bending the tune, drawing newness from it, hiding the melody, revealing it, hiding it again. The notes I'd played in the past were not completely gone—my mistakes and my little successes—and I understood then that each note determined the past the instant it was played. The future was nothing but notes waiting to be released. I stood on the nighttime city street and played on and on, better and better, pleased to find it now all so effortless.

  __________

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To my family and friends I offer up, as always, my deepest gratitude for their love and belief. Thousands of thanks go to my thousands of readers, whose pleasure means everything to me as a writer. And to the booksellers great and small: I'm obliged to you.

  For special help given to me in writing this book I'm indebted to Sherry Viola, MD; the Wayne County, Michigan Medical Examiner's Office; and the Detroit Fire Department, especially Wanda Jenkins. Thanks also to Randall and Patricia Lamb for two handy details.

  If Shirley Ososkie were alive, I would thank her for expressing herself so memorably.

  I received, as usual, sensible and intelligent advice from Angela Brown.

  Most of all I thank my beloved Marcia for her support and inspiration.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Elizabeth Sims is a prizewinning author and writing authority. She's the author of the Lambda Award-winning Lillian Byrd Crime Series and the Rita Farmer Mystery Series, and she has written articles, essays, short stories, and poems for numerous publications.

  Elizabeth writes frequently for Writer's Digest magazine, where she is a contributing editor. Are you a writer too—or would you like to be one? If so, you'll find help and inspiration in her book, You've Got a Book in You: A Stress-Free Guide to Writing the Book of Your Dreams, published by Writer's Digest Books.

  Elizabeth earned degrees in English from Michigan State University and Wayne State University, where she won the Tompkins Award for graduate fiction. She's worked as a reporter, photographer, technical writer, bookseller, corporate executive, street busker, ranch hand, and symphonic percussionist. She belongs to several literary societies as well as American Mensa.

  NOTE FROM ELIZABETH

  Thank you for being a part of Lillian Byrd's world by reading Lucky Stiff. You're the reason I write.

  Til n
ext time,

  Elizabeth

  Read on! Here is the beginning of the fourth book in the Lillian Byrd Crime Series, Easy Street.

  1

  I always like a good thick ham sandwich, so I was delighted to find a whole baked ham, flanked by a pot of Polish horseradish and a stack of rye bread, on the buffet table. It was an admirably loaded table: no dainties, just solid cop-fantasy food—you know, the kind of food cops talk about when they're trying to stay awake on an overnight surveillance. Besides the ham, there was a grill-your-own steak station with a guy to ensure you didn't ruin yours, a cauldron of Bolognese sauce with a platter of meatballs the size of fists, a dune of steaming pasta to ladle the stuff over, and a handsome green salad. There were boiled sausages and oven-baked chickens, mashed potatoes with some kind of wonderful-smelling cheesy thing mixed in, and the obligatory steamed vegetable medley, touched only by one or two of the younger cops who didn't know any better.

  Then there was the cake, this iced slab decorated with teensy handcuffs and guns and stacks of paperwork, with Good Riddance, Erma beautifully scripted in pale green frosting.

  My knees got weak as I stood looking and smelling and swallowing my saliva. I took a pull from the bottle of Stroh's I'd picked out of a cold well next to the bar.

  I was about to grab a plate and get going on the ham when something struck me between the shoulderblades so hard my head snapped back. An unfamiliar laugh rang out, and I turned to see Lt. Tom Ciesla enjoying the effect his backslap had on me.

  Ciesla himself was a familiar sight, of course: his thick shoulders straining his jacket, his large careful hands holding a bottle of Stroh's, his direct expression, his five o'clock shadow. But I realized that I'd hardly ever heard him laugh. He was a serious cop, and we'd had many a deep conversation, but I couldn't remember when I'd heard him laugh, and that was a little sad. Cops have to take life more seriously than most people.

  But right now he was off duty, he'd eaten well, and he was happy to see me.

  "Was the cake your idea?" I said.

  "What do you think of it?" His voice was as direct as his expression.

  "It's perfect. If anything could make Erma cry tonight, it'll be that cake."

  "Well, she saw it."

  "Did she cry?"

  He laughed again.

  "What else have you guys got in store for her? Is that guy from narcotics going to do Elvis again? Please tell me he's not going to put on that—"

  "Lillian."

  "Yeah, Tom." I was smiling, but suddenly he wasn't.

  Ciesla said, "You don't look … good." He took my upper arm and pinched his fingers into my flesh down to the bone. He held me away from him and looked me down to my Weejuns. "You're way too skinny. Are you sick?" Here he'd been joking and having a good time, now abruptly he's worried about this nerdy unemployed writer.

  "No, Tom, just hungry."

  "You're eyeballing that ham like you think it's going to jump the fence."

  "Yeah, well, I like ham. Where's Erma? I haven't had a chance to say hi."

  "Those probation officers have got her cornered over there. I think they're trying to get her to sign up for bowling again."

  "Can't the woman get some peace after all these years?"

  "Yeah, but she's a good bowler, and the team's gonna stink without her. She threw a 290 in the finals last month."

  "Wow." I couldn't help keeping an eye on that ham.

  "Well," Ciesla said, "you better eat."

  "Out of my way."

  He watched me pick up a plate and begin piling food on. When I turned from the buffet table, he'd taken off.

  This ballroom, the Crystal Grand in the Marriott, was surely the safest place in the city this Friday night. A hundred cops in every flavor—off duty, most carrying a weapon—plus a few badges who'd stopped in for a few minutes between calls, all of them bullshitting and laughing and eating and drinking. The room hummed with the pleasant chaos of it. It was nine o'clock, and the festivities would go on past midnight.

  I saw this towering black lady detective who'd cracked a major car-theft ring last month by calling the main crook's girlfriend and posing as a telephone psychic. She got the girlfriend to tell her everything, which was a lot more than the boyfriend thought she knew. There was a white homicide cop whose face had gotten carved by a prisoner who'd slipped out of his cuffs and reached a razor blade he'd stuck in the edge of his flip-flop. The cop's face had healed in a half-grin that gave him a crazy look, which reportedly made him a much more effective interrogator. Then there was the Chinese-American vice cop who was addicted to Little Debbie snack cakes; he'd sit down to write a report, and half an hour later you'd have to climb over this barrier of Little Debbie wrappers to talk to him.

  Most of the party guests gave me a good feeling. I'm a resolute believer in the basic goodness of cops. Only a few of them creeped me out: ones who'd tampered with evidence (so I'd heard) and never got nailed, the ones who were always on the make somehow, the ones with a quiet rep for using smack or for shaking down stupid people who couldn't figure out how to stay out of their way. You just hope you never have to deal with cops like them.

  I found a seat at an empty table. I wanted to concentrate on eating, on filling my belly with as many solid calories as I could, and I wanted to thoroughly enjoy the experience of eating food that was not only free but good. The smoky-peppery ham was succulent between the firm slabs of bread. It's easy to find food that's good and expensive, and relatively simple to find food that's awful and more or less free, but good and free—that's the combination for me.

  I chewed and swallowed, and a little sunburst of horseradish rose to clear my sinuses. So good. It felt so good to eat well.

  I finished my sandwich and pickle, and a busboy came by and took my plate. I set my coordinates for the meatballs. I stopped, though, seeing Det. Erma Porrocks disengage herself from the probation officers and head toward me. I met her for a hug.

  "Congratulations, Erma. You made it."

  She smiled widely, showing her even teeth that formed a friendly arcade between her postmenopausally fuzzy pink cheeks. Probably the smallest cop in the department, Porrocks was nevertheless fearlessly herself. She wore her gray hair in a style that made you think of moms on 1960s-era television: a simple smooth style, but styled. She liked cardigan sweaters. There always was a little something soft and retro about Porrocks, which somehow never represented a handicap to her in the testosterone-soaked world of the detective division.

  "Man, Erm, twenty-five years. How does it feel?"

  "Funny. It feels funny." She tugged at the waistband of her skirt. "I started on the force late in life, for a cop. I was thirty-two. Now I can't believe I'm pushing sixty."

  "Just think, you'll be able to do stakeouts only when you really, really want to. Hey, thanks a lot for inviting me. Fabulous spread—you can tell the department thinks highly of you."

  "Yeah, I got the twenty-five-year spread. I'm glad you're enjoying it."

  "Well, what're you going to do?"

  "I'll take some time off, you know. Then I might go into private investigation."

  "Yeah? That sounds good. You'll be a great gumshoe, Erma."

  She started to say something, then bit her lip, and I saw she was feeling emotional. "I—I'm going to miss all these jackasses."

  I touched her arm. "Yeah."

  "Uh, have you had a bite to eat?"

  "Mm-hmm, I was about to go get some more."

  "Lillian, can I talk to you?"

  "Sure, what about?"

  "Why don't you get some more food and come back here?"

  I grabbed two fresh bottles of Stroh's on the way back with my steaming plate of pasta.

  She thanked me and took a sip of beer. "I bought a house a few weeks ago."

  "You're moving?"

  "Just to the waterfront. Wyandotte, actually."

  "Oh, yeah?"

  "I've always wanted a view of the water, and you know there's nothing lik
e that in the city except for high-rises. Now that I'm retiring, well, I got an opportunity to buy this place—rather suddenly, actually, and it was such a good deal I went for it. It's a nice house, good bones, like they say in the magazines. But it needs work—quite a bit of work. I think somebody with a temper lived there."

  "Yeah?" I wondered what her point was going to be. In a prompting way I said, "Is it one of those bootlegger places?"

  During Prohibition, smugglers ran so much illegal Canadian booze into Detroit and all its shoreline communities you couldn't spit into the river without hitting some guy in a fast motorboat. And you couldn't toss a daisy into a police squad room without hitting somebody on the take. It was a high time all around.

  "Oh!" said Porrocks. "Well, I don't know. It does have a boathouse."

  Smugglers coveted the houses on the waterfront with private docks for obvious reasons. The boss smugglers would buy these places for cash from some prosperous haberdasher or car dealer, then do the modifications in the dead of night. You'd hear about places with secret passageways from the waterline into hidden cellars, then tunnels to the alley or to a neighboring house. I'd always hoped to get a look at a place like that.

  Porrocks got a little more intense. "How have you been, Lillian?"

  "Well—fine, Erma. Just fine."

  "Really. What are you living on?" Porrocks had a little dry voice, but it carried authority. I haven't yet mentioned that she was a high-level judo expert, so good at leveraging her modest weight and strength that she taught special classes at the police academy on how to subdue obstreperous suspects without bone-breaking violence. Now and then I'd wondered about her private life.

  "Yeah," I said, "I'm—I'm working on some, uh, some ideas for—for all these magazines that are interested in my work, you know. And, uh, I'm into my music."

  "Yes, I've seen you playing on the streets." She was looking at me so steadily that I got a little nervous. "Lillian, why don't you get a job?"