He glanced toward his watch pocket, scowled. Digging it out to give it back again was too silly. He took a deep drag on his Old Gold. This time no smoke came back out. “They had a fight the day Ann left, her and Mrs. Wynn. I could hear them screaming at each other out here. I don’t know what it was about. I was changing the oil, had the radio on.”
“Hip-hop?”
“Classical. WKAR-FM.”
“Beethoven?”
“Mozart.”
“Beethoven’s better. He could drown out an armored assault.”
“Mister, I didn’t hear the words, and if I could, I’d’ve turned up the sound. In this line—”
“Yeah. The less you know the more you work. Any idea where she went?”
“Who? Mrs. Wynn or Ann?”
“Both.”
“Nope. No reason Mrs. Wynn would tell me even if I asked, and Ann didn’t like me any too much after I tried to get acquainted. It wasn’t as if I went to bend her backwards over the bumper. All I did was smile. You know the smile?”
“I know the smile. I’ve had better luck with the cigarette trick.”
“Just between us and this fine piece of German engineering, I think Ann was cut out to be a gym coach, if you get my drift.”
“So she shook off your pitch. That doesn’t make her a lesbian.”
“I guess not. How much you give the Portagee?” He tilted his monolithic head toward the house.
“Five.”
He smoked, nodding. “Damn place has too many windows. Better give her ten. Man makes enemies of two maids back-to-back, it starts to look like he’s the problem.”
SIX
I drove past the place the first time, turned around in the parking lot of a flat-roofed professional building with the address 97180 posted on a sign next to the driveway, and drove back doing twenty, slow enough to read Ninety-seven thousand one hundred seventy-two written in script above the doorway of a small old frame house with a card in a window identifying it as the Elysian Fields Health & Wellness Centre. Stopping in a pocket-size parking area, I fished the squat plastic bottle out of my coat pocket and looked at the label. Yep, it said “Olympic Gardens.” Between that and the way they posted the address, I figured the owners were in Witness Protection.
The window in the front door, behind which hung a brittle-looking lace curtain, was decorated with rows of faded and chipped decals belonging to Greenpeace, the World Health Organization, Amnesty International, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and two or three symbols I couldn’t put a name to; testimonials that no monkeys or Rwandans had been harmed in the manufacture of the goods available inside. At first glance it looked like the cluster of lodge seals stuck in front of a Korean massage parlor.
The door struck a copper bell mounted above it when I pushed it open. Someone had pulled down all the walls that had cut the ground floor into separate rooms, clearing space for a lot of plants hanging in pots and freestanding shelves with bottles and jars and sealed brown paper sacks crowded onto them. The floor was made of twelve-inch planks joined tongue-in-groove, too broad to have been hewn from second-or third-growth Michigan pine. The house was old, but not that old: Probably the same someone who’d knocked down the walls had reclaimed them from one of the historic buildings the city demolished on a rotating basis. Fluorescent tubes, mounted in troughs between the open stacks, struggled to stay lit with the hopeless buzzing and flickering of a beetle caught in a spiderweb. The air was a confusion of sharp spices, thick-smelling herbs, and cow manure. There were sacks of that, too, and no doubt in the soil the hanging plants were using.
As I shut the door behind me, a tall creature dressed all in white wafted through a curtained doorway behind the antique oak counter without appearing to disturb the curtains. She was just drinking age, with blond hair pulled behind her head and, from the way she carried herself, probably spilling most of the way down her back. The dress she wore might have been made from two bedsheets fastened at the shoulders. It was designed to hang straight down, but parts of it clung to her curves and hollows through a combination of static electricity and pure sex. She had high cheekbones, a straight nose, full unpainted lips, and eyes that changed from smoky green to stormy gray to light brown: living mood rings. I know, because I put them to the test.
She asked if she could help me. Her voice was mezzo and a little scratchy, like a grazing pass from an emery board.
“You can tell me I’m in the right place.” I took the bottle of capsules from my pocket and showed her the label.
The eyes turned stormy. “We had to change the name. A thug lawyer from the Olympics Committee paid us a visit last month with a cease-and-desist order. Apparently the committee has the exclusive right to the name.”
“I’m surprised they let the ancient Greeks get away with it.”
“Anyway, I’ve got a hundred labels printed, and I intend to use them up before I order any under Elysian Fields.”
“You’re the owner?”
“No, it’s a corporation. I just run the place when the manager’s out. He’s out a lot. You know, you look pretty healthy to me. Are you running an errand for Cecelia?”
“Cecelia. You’re friends?”
“I’m friends with all the customers. Especially when their checks stay put when they land.” Her smile was as cool as the hazy green haze that had eclipsed the gray. “I seem to be answering all the questions. Are you Mr. Wynn?”
I showed her my license with the deputy’s star folded back out of sight. I had a feeling it would have ended the conversation. Maybe it was the state-of-the-art computerized cash register that didn’t go with the battered old counter it sat on and the big stainless-steel safe next to the curtained doorway, with an electronic lock. If an operation like that had enough money left after those investments to require a safe, either the population was sicker than I thought or the place had something in the inventory besides green tea and saffron.
The storm clouds returned. “The only thing I like less than men who spy on their wives is men who hire someone to do it for them. No, come to think of it, I like the men they hire even less.”
“We’re not all men. And we don’t all do divorce work. Mrs. Wynn’s gone missing, leaving behind a lot of expensive clothes and a drawer full of pills she bought here. He thinks something may have happened to her. I’m beginning to think so, too. When was the last time you saw her?”
She turned to the computer while her eyes lightened to brown. I could have stood there all day and watched the kaleidoscope, also the way her body moved under the Grecian dress or whatever it was. But I had miles to go before I slept. She crackled the keys, manipulated a mouse built in to the base of the keyboard, and said, “Friday, March twenty-fifth. She bought some fennel seed and clove cigarettes. She’s trying to quit smoking.”
“You’re licensed to sell tobacco?”
“There’s no tobacco in them. No license required. Would you like to try one?”
“No need, thanks. I smoke tobacco.”
“I know. You have nicotine stains on top of your nicotine stains.”
“The twenty-fifth was ten days ago. That was about four days before she dropped off the screen. Did she say anything that might make you think she was planning on changing scenery?”
“Nope. The conversation was dull as normal. How-are-you-I’m-fine-how-are-you-okay. She’s a good customer, but not the sort of person I would consider friending.”
I caught the verb. “Do you Facebook?”
“It’s a good marketing tool.”
“Mrs. Wynn doesn’t. I asked. If it weren’t for holdouts like her I’d be out of a job. Everyone tells everyone everything they’re doing and thinking.”
“Not this one. I don’t even keep a diary. There isn’t a thing on my page I wouldn’t tell anyone who rang my little copper bell. Why do people think they can splash their secrets all over a global billboard and cut somebody cold when they ask a personal question face-to-face?”
“Why does Aunt Ethel prowl the mall all day in curlers and run for the hills when someone aims a camera at her? How’d she seem that day? Cecelia, not Ethel.”
“Actually, I knew someone who had an Aunt Ethel. Not many of those around anymore, and those who are pack their oxygen on their backs. Maybe in fifty years, when the world’s full of Tiffanys and Amber Dawns in their eighties, they’ll be back.” She shook her head, disturbing the straight fall of liquid-gold hair behind her back. I’d been right about that, first time in a long dry spell. “She was edgy, but then she is generally. That’s what the flax seed is for. I wish I could be more helpful. Mrs. Wynn is—”
“A good customer. They’re hard to come by, with Walmarts springing up all over like third parties.”
“Don’t I know it. You’re the first person in here today didn’t have a cell phone hardwired to the side of his head the whole time I was waiting on him. But then, you’re not a customer, are you?”
“Maybe. I’d like to try a pack of those clove cigarettes.”
“They don’t come in packs, but I can tell you’re not interested. You smell like the Marlboro Man, and you don’t strike me as the kind of person who quits anything.”
“I quit the police department, before you were born. I quit Vicodin. I quit on the Lions, along with everyone else. I quit on marriage; or it quit on me. The only thing I can’t seem to quit is this lousy job.” I realized I was still holding the ID folder and packed it back on my hip. The subject needed changing anyway. “That’s quite an olfactory sense you have there. I change my clothes a lot and I kill the tobacco breath with Scotch.”
“I smelled that, too, even in this reek.”
“If you don’t like the air, you can change professions. The auto show’s always looking for spokesmodels.”
A pair of full lips got pursed. “I can’t tell if you’re flirting with me or interrogating me. This the good cop or the bad one?”
“A little of both. Like God and the Devil. How’d she pay for her order, check or credit card?”
“Cash. We don’t accept anything else.”
“I thought that was just for cider mills and antiquarian bookstores.”
“It costs us some business—you might have noticed this stuff isn’t cheap, even if there is assembly required—but, believe me, it’s worth not having to deal with those loansharks in gray worsted.”
“That’s why the safe, I’m thinking.”
“That’s why the safe. It has a time lock, so I can tell the bandits to settle for what’s in the till: for our safety, the manager says. Except you can be shot for twenty and change the same as for twenty grand.”
“That much?”
Her eyes turned golden, a new color in the spectrum. “This is Elysian Fields, not Morgan Chase. I was being poetic.”
“What’s the name of the corporation that owns the place?”
“Haven’t a clue. My salary’s deposited directly into my account. I never see a check. I suppose it’s public record, if you’ve got the patience to sound it out.”
I couldn’t think of anything else important. Not that there wasn’t. The stench of all that bottled health was pickling my brain. I looked around. “Does all this stuff work?”
“It does if you think it does. Holistics is largely a matter of faith. So far the FDA isn’t a convert, but we acknowledge that openly in the literature we hand out to new customers.”
I asked to see the literature. She reached under the counter and handed me a glossy pamphlet printed in four colors. She’d had business cards printed with the new name and I took one from a holder shaped like the Acropolis. Next to the name embossed on the card, Diana the Huntress stood in her tennis skirt drawing her bow. I put away my plunder.
“Thank you, Miss—?”
“Amber Dawn.”
“Seriously?”
“No. Smoke.” She flicked a hand across her face. “On account of the eyes. You noticed. My parents were hippies.”
“I thought babies were born with their eyes closed.”
“Myth, like they’re all born blue-eyed. They didn’t name me until they brought me home and got to know me, like a puppy.”
She showed a set of well-polished teeth, with a crooked one up front. These days you either get the orthodontic tour or a gap Hannibal could drive his elephants through. I liked everything about her except for what she was holding back.
SEVEN
Driving away from there I got the number of Multi-Urban Services from Information and pecked it out. According to the Wynns’ new maid, that was the agency that had employed Ann Foster, the previous girl at bat.
“We’re not at liberty to give out information about our clients.” This was a feminine voice that sounded the way cool mints taste.
I said, “I’m sorry to hear that. I went to a party at the Wynn place in Grosse Pointe about six weeks ago and was very impressed with Miss Foster’s efficiency. I’d heard she was free and I was thinking of engaging her services on a full-time basis.”
Keys rattled on her end.
“I’m sorry, but Miss Foster is no longer with this agency. However, I can recommend another client every bit as efficient. We screen them closely and have never—”
“Can you tell me where Miss Foster is currently working?”
“As I said, we don’t—”
“Give out information about clients; I heard. But she isn’t a client, is she?”
The mints began to melt. “I haven’t the—”
“Just tell the one who has the authority there’s a commission in it for Multi-Urban as well as whatever outfit she’s with now.” I gave her my name and contact numbers and caught the time just before I flipped the phone shut. If I stepped on it I could get in two drinks at the MGM Grand before Barry showed up.
*
Where it fronts on the John Lodge expressway it looks like the grille of a 1938 Studebaker, all Art Deco curve with its name stacked vertically in raised letters totaling nine stories. Four hundred rooms, eight hundred million dollars on the hoof, lit up brightly enough to throw a man’s shadow clear to Ontario, and the Hope Diamond pinned to a pair of grubby coveralls wouldn’t look any more out of place. The address is 1300, same as the old Detroit Police Headquarters on Beaubien, but the plunkety-plunk noise belongs to the slots and not buckets collecting drips from the roof.
A valet got up like Patton on parade, complete with epaulets and ropes of gold, opened my door and slid in behind the wheel without reacting to the dings and rust and handed me off to a doorman in an even more elaborate uniform who grinned at me like a state trooper who’d caught me red-handed trying to use the emergency crossover on the interstate; once past him, the place had me just as surely.
The great sprawl of ground floor was a racket of jangling one-armed bandits, the trickle of an occasional handful of coins into a metal dish, rumbles of conversation and some laughter, but most of those playing were senior citizens dressed in gaudy Lycra, feeding the machines and pushing buttons with butts smoldering in the corners of their mouths. Few of them used the big chrome handles, which are mainly for nostalgic purposes: Why aggravate bursitis and slow down the stream of cash? Colored lights bounced around and whatever the psychologists on the payroll fed into the ventilation system to keep the customers alert and eager to continue smelled like a crisp new twenty.
With a little imagination, you could convince yourself you’re in Las Vegas, but only if you dropped acid and had a recent lobotomy.
It was a weekday, but the place was busy. The only employees sitting on their hands were the poker dealers. All the players of games of skill were busy trying to bluff someone on the other side of the world over the Internet.
The Grand has five restaurants, in case you can’t think of another excuse to leave, but knowing Barry when someone else is paying, I went straight to the steakhouse, where you can drop a yard and a half on a meal for two without ordering a drink. He’d order a drink. There was a wait for a table. I left my name, and whi
le I was enjoying a legal cigarette anticipating the Great Event, a barmaid wearing fishnet stockings and a dress that had popped up from a Kleenex box wobbled up on stilts and offered me a complimentary drink from her tray. I selected the one with the least amount of tropical architecture and tipped her a buck. The glass was rounded over with good Scotch that packed a wallop: Two sips and you bet the rent on twenty-two black. All very cold-blooded, and as subtle as a feeding frenzy, but if it’s the Salvation Army you’re looking for, you’re in the wrong part of town.
I tried a quarter machine, just to kill time. I got two American flags and the Statue of Liberty.
“Wasted two bits. Everybody knows the loose slots are all up front, to rope in the suckers.”
I put out my stub in a tray full of sand and turned to smile at the owner of the voice. “Hello, Barry. Just doing my bit to keep Vinnie No Ears off welfare.”
We shook hands. He stopped wearing a white glove on the one that was short two fingers years ago. It just called attention to itself, like his limp when he forgot himself and the plate in his skull when he didn’t comb his hair right. Aside from the missing parts, he always looked bandbox new. We were close to the same age, but he could pull off a six-hundred-dollar sportcoat over a Metallica T-shirt without drawing a smirk. As an investigative journalist he’d survived the decline of the great newspapers, the brief sad history of cable-access television, and the dot-com bust, leaping from one medium to the next just before the last one collapsed under his feet, and he was still carded every other time he bought alcohol.
“Vinnie’s gone straight, didn’t you hear? They all have. The best mob lawyer in Vegas is mayor there now. Ran out of clients. What are we standing around for, by the way? I thought you were buying me dinner.”
“No place to sit.”
“Horseshit. Bobby? We came to eat, not pose for pictures.” He rapped a knuckle on the registration desk. The young man behind it, dark-skinned and good-looking in a yellow jacket—his name was probably Roberto—uncurled his lip when he recognized Barry. He looked down at his list, glanced at his watch, and crossed out a name. “Party’s five minutes late. Emily? Mr. Stackpole.”
Don't Look for Me: An Amos Walker Novel (Amos Walker Novels) Page 5