Three Catholic churches serve the growing Hispanic community, and all three are a hike from the heart of Mexicantown; but a bus ride to Mass is nothing compared to an old-time pilgrimage, even when it’s in a city bus. I logged up a bunch of blocks on the Cutlass’ odometer, committed more parking violations outside Most Holy Redeemer and Most Blessed Sacrament, got no Guzman in either place, took my leave. Nearing Most Holy Trinity, I hit the brakes and almost lost control in the slush. Someone had tied up a dog the size of a library lion in front of the stark Norman facade.
I found a space on Porter with a sign saying it was reserved for expectant mothers. I didn’t know if that was enforceable, and I toyed with the VISITING PRIEST sign I keep for variety, but with a steeple so close I figured God already had the range, so I put it away.
Most Holy Trinity was the second Catholic parish founded in Detroit, a palm for the Irish when they came by the boatload from the potato famine of the 1830s. The present building has been standing nearly 150 years. The presa canario bull, unimpressed, lifted a leg against the bottom step as I passed. The dog looked miserable and was probably thinking of the hambone it had left at home. It seemed a pretty valuable property to leave out on the street, but the rippling growl that had come from its throat as I’d approached the church reminded me it came with its own security.
Inside the entrance, a bronze plaque depicting an angel and a departing soul in a gondola in relief contains the names of the twelve altar boys and five adults who died when their excursion boat collided with a steamer on the Detroit River in 1880. The pastor, a survivor, called it the Massacre of the Innocents. I took off my hat.
No service was taking place. Miranda Guzman and I had the cavernous interior to ourselves. She was in the third pew from the back, kneeling on the padded rail with her head down and her hands clasped in front of her. She had on a cloth coat with a monkey collar and a lacy black scarf covered her hair. I slid into the pew behind her and waited.
I’m not a Catholic. I’m not anything, although I spent two years of Sundays reading Bible stories at St. Paul’s Episcopal on Woodward and waiting for something to take. Still, it’s tough to remain an agnostic in the presence of so much ancient iconography. There are no atheists in foxholes, and very few in Most Holy Trinity. I thought holy thoughts and wondered if Miranda intended to break for supper.
After a little while she crossed herself, rose from her knees, and sat back. She never turned her head, and gave no indication she knew I was there until she spoke.
“Why are you here? Can a woman not pray for her child’s soul in peace?”
She was looking straight ahead, toward the life-size crucifix behind the altar. Her voice was barely more than a whisper.
I said, “I’ll go if you ask me to, Mrs. Guzman. I need to speak to you tonight. You choose where.”
She was silent for a long time. I didn’t know if she was thinking or praying.
“You can do your speaking before the Lord,” she said finally. “If you have the courage.”
“Did your daughter tell you about her arrangement with Gilia?”
“No one of that name exists. Not now.”
Her tone had a steel rod through it.
“Fair enough. We’ll call her something else. How does Mariposa sound?”
Not being able to see her face I was at a disadvantage. The back of her neck seemed to redden a little, but the red might have been there a while and I’d just noticed it. A church that size has drafts no matter how hard you try to heat it in winter.
“My daughter told me very little about her life in Minnesota. That was her stepfather’s fault. Noah Guzman was a cruel man. I suppose I am to blame also. I did not interfere with his cruelty. It drove her away from us when she was seventeen.”
“Are you divorced?”
“It is not permitted. He died. Strong drink was the cause.”
“Did Jillian’s father die? You and she came to this country without him.”
“He had our marriage annulled so he could wed another. Such things are possible in the country of my birth, if you are willing to meet the bishop’s price. He made me una puta and his daughter una bastarda. It is why we had to leave, and why I changed her name.”
“If she was staying with you near the end, you and she must have reconciled.”
She seemed to shrug. She might have been adjusting her coat.
“I think she told you what she was up to,” I said. “Or you guessed. You knew there was an entertainer running around using your daughter’s birth name. It would be a topic of conversation between a mother and her estranged offspring; safer than something closer to home. Even if she didn’t tell you everything, you would’ve been able to supply the rest. You’re nobody’s idea of a dumb wetback.”
“I’m not a wetback!” It made an echo. An altar boy or something who had come in through a door near the front looked our way briefly, then genuflected before the altar and set to work with a scraper removing bits of wax from the rail. Tiny orange lights flickered in the soles of the running shoes under the hem of his robe. Miranda lowered her voice to its former level. “I’m not a wetback. My great-great-grandfather was a marquise. Your ancestors would have been flogged for failing to lower their heads when a member of La Casa del Rubio rode past.”
“Yeah. Scratch a rolled r and doubloons spill out like gumballs. Your land grant’s shrunk to a kennel in Mexicantown and you swapped your sceptre for a pooper-scooper. Let’s confine the conversation to something since Galileo. Are you planning to put the bite on Gilia, or are you going to the cops?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know this bite.”
“The tariff. The tithe. The bee. You know: El Grande Suckarino. It’s all in the breeding. Blue blood, blackmail.”
“¡Puerco!” It rang clear up in the clerestory. The altar boy dropped his scraper. He looked at us again, crossed himself, picked it up, and resumed scraping. It sounded like a jazzman brushing a snare drum.
Miranda had swung around, resting an elbow on the back of her pew. Bright patches glowed on her cheeks. She had a firestoked beauty that would be with her on her deathbed. Beside it, Gilia’s was all youth and cosmetics. Senor Cristobal had been a donkey to throw it away. “I would kill you if we were not in the house of the Lord.” It came out in a hissing whisper.
I nodded. “Okay. I apologize, Mrs. Guzman. I was just playing picador. What we call needling. I was tired of looking at the back of your neck.”
“Speak of me as you will. You did not know my daughter, what she went through just to cross a room or climb a flight of stairs. When she was six months old they said she would never celebrate her first birthday. When she was a year old they said she would never walk. Until she was two, she did not know a day without hot and cold compresses on her poor withered legs.”
“You nursed her?”
“She had nurses. We had money. The Rubio women were raised to marry well, nothing else. When she was twenty, she still used a cane. She was using it when she came to visit me in November. This woman who calls herself Gilia was born with the gift of health, and what does she do with it? She dances half-naked on the stages of the world. It is right that she paid.”
The boy hummed in time with his scraping, clearly and with unpracticed accuracy. His vibrato resonated in the nave. In New York or L.A. or Branson or Nashville, some producer with a confession to make—there were plenty of those—might have heard him and talked to his parents and signed him up for lessons and a recording contract. But it was Detroit, and the boy would sing in the choir and scrape wax until his testicles dropped.
“So you knew,” I said.
She closed her eyes, then opened them. It was a kind of nod. “I knew. I did not judge, and I did not take any of the money when she offered it, even though all I have is my house and the dogs Mr. Guzman left. I do not blackmail. I go to the—cops—instead.” She tasted the colloquialism, didn’t like it. It was as alien to her as the thought of nursing her own daughter.
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br /> “What would that do?”
“Avenge Jillian. Gilia. My Gilia. Who would kill her if not that whore of an imposter? She has killed before.”
“The whore of an imposter is in town this week. Your daughter died three months ago.”
“Then so was she. Or an assassin in her employ.”
There was no reason, when she said “assassin,” that Hector Matador came into my mind, except that his picture should appear in Webster’s next to the definition. “Your daughter made arrangements to expose the secret in the event of her death. Killing her wasn’t an option.”
Her eyes flickered slightly. Then she raised her chin. It hadn’t been low to begin with. “I ask again: Who if not her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ha!”
“It will take some time to find out,” I said. “You’re the only one who can give me that time. It runs out when you tell what you know.”
“Who are you that I can trust you?”
“Not the police.”
It was just something I’d said to plug a silence that scared me more than her dogs, but it worked on a level I hadn’t thought out. “Police” didn’t mean the same thing to her that it meant to me. To me it was an annoyance at worst. Cops; a joke term for an occupational liability. But twenty years away from home hadn’t been enough to wipe out pictures of dignity squads in Gestapo caps and jackboots wading through peaceful assemblies with clubs and hauling motorists out of their cars and slamming the doors on paddy wagons that only carried their cargo one way and never came back except to take on a fresh load. And if she did manage to forget, we had more than enough of that kind of thing on video here in the U.S. of A. to remind her.
“You will find the monster who did this thing to my Jillian?” It was hardly louder than a prayer.
“I don’t know. I can try to prove that Gilia—the other Gilia—didn’t. The one might flush out the other, but I can’t swear to it either way. If the police decide to pin it to her, that’s as far as they’ll look. If she’s innocent, he’ll still be out there.”
She crossed herself and turned back around. I was staring at the back of her neck again. “Unless I am asked if the woman who calls herself Gilia is responsible for my daughter’s death, I will say nothing. For now.”
“How long is for now?”
I was pretty sure this time it was a shrug.
“La Casa del Rubio was never celebrated for its patience.”
I knew a curtain line when I heard it. The big church door drifted shut on the boy’s humming, sealing it off from the world I lived in. Out there all I got was the dog’s growling as I passed within two yards of where it was tethered.
SIXTEEN
A famous calendar shot of the Detroit skyline shows the daytime scape reflected on the surface of the river at night, gray granite and blue sky above, black onyx and lighted windows below. As I drove away from Most Holy Trinity, the picture rotated on its axis, nightside up. Half of the city was going home from work and the other half was going to work from home, signing out squad cars with engines still warm from the eight-to-four and grasping the handles of drill presses still slick from the sweaty palms that had operated them by daylight. Every day the two half worlds pass each other on the Walter P. Chrysler and the John Lodge and the Edsel Ford freeways with only a narrow median separating them. I was the only one who belonged to both.
I didn’t feel like going home. I didn’t feel like going anywhere especially, and when I feel that way I go to the office.
It’s an old building even by local standards. John Brown might have ridden past it in a four-in-hand on the northern spur of the Underground Railroad. In any other city it would be an archaelogical treasure, and a slot for it on the National Register would be someone’s cause of the month, but in our town it’s just another empty lot in waiting. The corporation that owns it budgets just enough to prevent that, paying an old Russian Jew to bang on the radiators and a crew to sweep out the butts and unclog the waterspouts shaped like griffins. I like it because they let you smoke in the offices. You can probably sacrifice a goat if you want to badly enough.
Old buildings, like old musicians, are never silent. The chords they strike after dark belong to a nocturne. I wasn’t the only one still working, but the typewriter chatter and booming file drawers had shifted to a minor key and the whir of a vacuum cleaner and bass note of a floor buffer came out front. When a telephone rang, it was no longer part of a chorus: more of a soprano solo. Probably it was just a telephone. Your head fills with fuzzy poetry when you work at night. It’s like drinking alone.
I got organized. I moved the dignified old Underwood from its lonely aerie to the desk and typed up a report on the Jillian Rubio case. The dignified old Underwood’s keys had begun to drift loose and it typed a wacky line that looked like sheet music from the score of a Looney Tune. It lent some pizzazz to the bald facts. I didn’t write that I had committed to solve a murder. That would have looked even wackier. It played silly enough inside my head.
I tore out the last sheet, drummed the pages even, read them through, snapped on a paper clip, and filed the report under D for delirium tremens. That was getting to be a thick file.
Just to keep the pink snakes at bay I broke the downtown bottle out of the desk and poured an inch into a glass. Good Old Smuggler. You can’t get it in Michigan, despite the fact it’s imported by my cousin-six-hundred-times-removed Hiram and bottled in Southfield, thirty minutes from where I sat warming my hands around its inner light. You have to follow a bigamist all the way to St. Louis and buy a couple of jugs from the liquor store across the street from the apartment where his second family sits around waiting for Dad to come home from his business trip to Detroit. It has a pirate on the label and you know it’s cheap because of the way your lips go numb when you sip it. In Edinburgh they use it to prep patients for root canals.
I decided to hold off sipping until I tried the telephone number I’d been carrying around in my head since I’d talked to Barry Stackpole in Greektown. I didn’t expect to get anything but an empty ring or a recording telling me the offices at Columbia University were closed and please call back during normal business hours, in free verse if possible. It rang three times and someone picked up.
“Hello?” A mellow rounded voice, perhaps male, perhaps with an accent. You can’t get much more than that from hello.
“My name is Walker,” I said. “I got this number from Barry Stackpole. I didn’t know if anyone would answer this late.”
“Yes, Mr. Walker. I remember the name. I’m leaving on a business trip soon. The dinner hour is the best for clearing one’s desk.” He didn’t introduce himself.
“I’m calling about Mariposa Flores.”
I didn’t know if the name would mean anything; Gilia had said no names were used in the resistance. There must have been a leak, though, because I could almost hear the coin dropping into the pan. Some of the mellow went out of his voice.
“I cannot discuss this over the telephone, Mr. Walker. I would prefer not to discuss it at all, but Mr. Stackpole was very persuasive. Perhaps you could tell me why it’s important.”
“She’s under hack for murder. You may be the only person who can get her out from under.”
“I do not know this hack.”
I blew air. My next client and all his contacts were going to be one hundred percent American. Nothing less than the name of an ancestor on the Mayflower manifest would persuade me to take the case.
“Professor—” I said, and paused when someone gulped oxygen on his end. “It is Professor, isn’t it? Mr. Stackpole didn’t seem to think that was a secret.”
“It is possible I was not specific upon the point. Yes, I am a professor. Of Romance languages. A pretty term. Consolation, I suppose, for the loss of the Americas. Please go on.”
“There’s murder in the business, and a little matter of a visa obtained under a false identity. The State Department is more concerned with the visa. If th
ey pull it, she goes back to stand trial for murder. You may be able to prevent that, if you’ll agree to answer one simple question.”
“I have been asked questions before, Mr. Walker. They are seldom confined to just one and they are almost never simple.”
I asked him to hold on one second. I hung the receiver on my shoulder, picked up my glass, and threw the Old Smuggler off the end of the plank. It pickled my throat tissue and brought a flush all the way to my ears. Conversation with the learned gentleman was enough to wean Henry Ford off weak tea. I plunked down the glass and got back on the line.
“Sorry, Professor. I had to answer another call. The question I’m proposing has nothing to do with Abraham Lincoln.”
He was silent so long I thought he’d hung up while I was fortifying my defenses.
“Just who are you, Mr. Walker?”
I got a psychic flash from six hundred miles away; a picture of a man touching a dead eye socket.
“I’m a private investigator, engaged at the moment in trying to prevent my client from being deported. There’s a hell of a lot more than a red-hot penny waiting for her at home.”
The silence this time was filled with someone’s memories of home. They didn’t come with harmonica music and the old swimming hole. I heard paper slithering.
Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde Page 10