Sweet Women Lie

by Loren D. Estleman

  In my office again I broke a blank application form out of the file cabinet, filled it out, and stuck it and one of the copies in an envelope, which I stamped and addressed to the Social Security Administration in Washington. I filed the other copy and went down and slotted the envelope into the mailbox on the corner. In ten days to two weeks I’d have a Social Security card in Ben Boyer’s name, which would get Sahara work anywhere. I didn’t think Ben would mind.

  I’d earned a drink, but I had a sudden thought. I went back upstairs, took the other copy of the birth certificate out of the files, looked around the office tapping the edge of the folded paper against my teeth, and stood on my chair to poke it into the glass bowl of the ceiling fixture. The rectangular outline showed through the milky glass when I turned on the light, but not obviously; the building cleaning service never dusted above eye level. I locked up and went out.

  Later I congratulated myself, but at the time it was just routine paranoia.

  10

  I WAS BUSY FOR the next few days. First I paid a visit to a camera shop I knew on Chalmers, where for fifty dollars the owner went into his back room and drew up a temporary driver’s license and stamped out a Visa card, both in the name of Benjamin Boyer. With them I opened charge accounts in three department stores with branches across the country, then burned them in my wastebasket; phony IDs are time bombs, and Sahara would have the genuine articles soon enough. Then I drove out to Ann Arbor, asked some questions around the University of Michigan campus, and made certain arrangements with an attendant in the medical school there. That cost two hundred dollars. Finally I paid a call on Albert Schindler in his East Side garage.

  I found him relaxing for once, drinking a Coke in his neat little office with the gray steel desk and the boxes of new spark plugs and headlamps and seat covers arranged alphabetically on shelves. He had the head of a poster boy for the SS — clean fair profile and curly blond hair — and the body of a Morlock.

  I had never seen him in anything but coveralls and suspected he had given up trying to find clothes to fit his apelike arms and torso and stunted legs. His left foot, resting on an outdrawn desk leaf, turned inward forty-five degrees, a congenital defect that didn’t slow him down any more than an ingrown toenail. He was almost sixty and looked barely thirty. An old-fashioned Zenith radio with a gaudy dial was playing chamber music on the desk.

  “Walker.” He kept his seat. “Did that rolli1ng boiler blow up on you finally?”

  “You’re just sore because I didn’t buy it from you.” I sat down in a clean plastic scoop chair and swung a leg over my knee. Everything was clean in the garage. You could eat off the floor under the hoists if you didn’t mind getting yelled at for not using a placemat. “As a matter of fact, I need a car, but it isn’t for me.”

  “I’m a mechanic, not a dealer. You passed six of them on your way here.”

  “They want paperwork. All I want is a clear title.”

  “Oh. That kind of car.”

  “Something old, but in good shape. It doesn’t have to look like much, but I don’t want it getting pulled off the road as a rolling disaster area. It should perform without calling attention to itself.”

  “Plate?”

  “Dealer’s temp will do. It’s just to get someone out of the area.”

  “Price range?”

  I gave him five bills. The Sahara money was getting low. “That’s to get you started. I’ll settle up when you hand me the keys.”

  “What’s the name on the title?”

  “Benjamin Boyer.” I spelled it.

  “I’ll call you.”

  I left him, a real treasure. He knew more about automobiles than Henry Ford and had a son who was always in trouble.

  I used the pay telephone in the garage to check my answering service. The post office had called to say that an express package was waiting for me at the Fort Street branch.

  I parked in a slot for postal vehicles only and went in after it. It had no return address. Back in my car I opened the red, white, and blue container and drew out a manila envelope with something inside it the size and shape of a photo album. I peeled up the flap and slid a gray cardboard file folder into my lap. The tab read WALKER, AMOS in neatly printed block capitals.

  I didn’t open it there. I drove back to the office and locked myself in and poured Scotch into a pony glass from my private desk stock and stretched out on the old backless sofa with the reading lamp on.

  Some of it had been typed on cheap drugstore stock. Other information had been printed out on green-and-white computer paper in foggy dot-matrix. There were old newspaper clippings in which someone had highlighted my name with a yellow felt-tipped marker. There were medical reports. There were canceled checks with my endorsement on the backs. There weren’t many of those. There was a copy of my first application for an investigator’s license, which belonged in the Smithsonian. There were photographs and negatives. These included a couple of headshots from old licenses, a candid in a crowd of cops I recognized from the Free Press at the time of the Alonzo Smith shooting, several I had never seen that looked as if they had been taken with a long lens from a distance, a couple I had obviously posed for but didn’t remember. Here I am at my wedding. Here I am in my specialist’s uniform. Here I am in front and profile at the jail in Iroquois Heights, looking like Jimmie Jones after the lemonade.

  I looked at all of them. I read everything. Date of birth, check.

  Height 6’1”, generous by half an inch. Weight 185. Hair and eyes brown. One-centimeter scar on lower lip — fell out of a treehouse, Doc, age nine and a half — old surgery scar on right side of abdomen, to pin together a rib splintered by a bullet. Slight protrusion at bridge of nose, an old break — dropped my guard in the second round, Coach, they hit hard in college. Military service: Two years Vietnam and Cambodia, First Air Cavalry, three years stateside, Military Police. Education: B.A. Sociology, eleven weeks in the Detroit Police Department’s cadet training program, the Tet Offensive. Associations, Personal: None. Associations, Professional: John Alderdyce, Inspector, Detroit Police Department; Barry Stackpole, journalist; Lee Horst, information broker; Lou Gallardo, repo man. The list seemed short. At that they were the closest thing I had to friends in Detroit, and I didn’t know anyone outside Detroit. Habits: Cigarettes (Winstons exclusively), Scotch (in a bottle), following one slightly bent snoot into deep sewage. Turn-ons: Old movies, dead female vocalists, people in trouble. Kisses on the first date, but doesn’t go all the way. Likes dogs, tolerates cats if they’re sufficiently doglike. Good cook, indifferent dresser. Never met a pickpocket he didn’t like or a union rep he did. Turn-offs: Barbershop quartets, colorization, reading files with his name on them.

  I finished it in an hour and a half, getting up twice to refill my glass. The telephone rang on one of these trips but the caller hung up when I answered, another wrong number. When I turned over the last leaf I put it all back into order, carried the folder into the little water closet, and shook its contents into the toilet. I threw the folder in last. I squirted half a can of lighter fluid over the pile, struck a match, held it a moment until it burned down past the sulfur, and dropped it into the bowl. The fluid went up with a polite little thump. I watched the pages shrivel and crawl, the couple in the wedding picture writhe together and melt into a flaming black hole. When I was sure the stuff wouldn’t clog the pipes I dropped the lid and pushed down the pedal. As the water gushed and growled I lifted my glass and drank what was in it. It was one of the better and wetter wakes I’d been to.

  I went back to the desk and sat down. I didn’t feel born again, or even cleansed. I felt as empty as the tank, or as empty as the gesture, which was emptier. It brings no great lift to see one’s life boiled down to a half-inch sheaf of papers in a cardboard folder, filed along with all the other half-inch lives in a drawer like the ones they have at the morgue. A life that is all murmurs and images can always be changed. Write it down, collate and cross-reference it, and it is th
ere forever, the letters like uniform headstones in a bureaucratic Arlington, their sounds and meanings embalmed and entombed in concrete vaults, enshrined, immobile. If the first cave-dweller who had stopped boasting about his day’s hunt over the fire to set it down in charcoal on the granite wall of his boudoir had been pinioned and trussed and fed to a tiger by his outraged companions, we would all be better off, our sins and mistakes as erasable as those marks on a child’s magic tablet that vanish when the cellophane is lifted. Shakespeare had it wrong: First kill all the clerks.

  No matter how well you live your life, the thought that all the smudges and half-measures are part of the permanent record is shameful, like waking up from a private erotic dream to find that others have been watching and listening as you thrashed and muttered. You try to forget and sometimes you succeed, but now and then on the edge of your hearing you’ll detect the furtive scribbling, like rats’ claws on plaster.

  The telephone rang again while I was examining the bottle and wondering whether the rest of the afternoon was worth not sacrificing to the great twin gods J&B. I left the decision to whoever was on the other end.

  At first there was no one on the other end, just as before. I started to hang up.

  “Amos?”

  It was just another woman’s voice, heard on an instrument that had brought me plenty of women’s voices in every key since the day I’d had my name painted on the office door; the team that had assembled the dossier that had blistered the underside of my toilet lid might have been able to estimate their number. If I hadn’t just been reading the file and wasn’t still stuck in reverse gear, I might not have recognized it at all. Then again maybe I would have even if I’d been up to my neck in the present.

  “Hello, Catherine,” I said, screwing the cap back on the bottle.

  11

  “YOU ALWAYS DID have a memory like an elephant,” she said after a pause.

  “Elephants have the hide for it,” I said. “They’re born with it. I had to make mine from scratch.” I waited.

  “So how are you? How’s Dale?”

  “Compared to Dale I’m swell. He’s been dead for years.”

  “Oh.” At least she didn’t say she was sorry. She had only one face, however much time she spent on it in the course of a day. “Did you get a new partner, or are you all alone?”

  “Sometimes there’s hardly enough business for one.”

  “You’re alone?”

  “What’s on your mind, Catherine?”

  She feigned irritation to cover the real thing; same old Catherine. “Aren’t you going to ask me how I am?”

  “How was Aruba?”

  “Too many beaches. I’m lucky I don’t have skin like barn siding. I’ve been back a long time. Years. I’m in Detroit now.” This time she waited, but I didn’t jump in. She gave up. “I wasn’t doing anything and I got to wondering about you, what you were up to and if you were still in town doing the same thing. First I looked up Apollo Investigations. It wasn’t listed.”

  “I changed the name after Dale was killed.”

  “Dale was killed?”

  “So you looked me up under my name and here we are talking.”

  Long pause. She would be looking at her nails the way she did — her perfect nails — as if the next line were written on them. It’s funny the things you remember. “I know Bill went to see you,” she said.

  “Who’s Bill?”

  “My husband, William Sahara. Don’t pretend you never heard of him. You never could lie to me.”

  “I never tried.” I hadn’t this time, either. It was hard to think of Sahara as anybody’s Bill.

  “Are you saying you haven’t seen him?”

  “If you think he’s sneaking around you might consider hiring a private investigator. I can give you some names.”

  “Did he hire you to follow me?”

  My chair squeaked. “Hold on a second.”

  “What?”

  I laid the receiver gently on the blotter and got out my handkerchief to wipe my palms. Both palms were dry. I looked at the bottle again and shook a cigarette out of the pack instead. I lit it and picked up the receiver. “What was the question?”

  “You heard me,” she said.

  “Would he have a reason to have you tailed?”

  Another pause, shorter this time. “Amos, can you get away for a drink?”

  “A drink I can do right here in the office.”

  “Please, Amos.”

  The cigarette tasted like an overheated radiator. I put it in the ashtray and let it smoke itself. “Where do you want to meet?”

  “I’ve been out of circulation a long time. Most of the places we used to go to are probably closed by now. You pick. Someplace we can talk.”

  “I know the place,” I said.

  I missed the first half of the floor show. The hostess, a tall blonde dressed like Marilyn Monroe in a spaghetti-strap dress she had put on with a roller — to distinguish her from the waitresses dressed like carhops — seated me near the busboys’ stand, shouted in my ear that I’d be served after the show, and sashayed out of my life. I watched Gail Hope and the Malibu Mafia make a few taps and turns look like a production number out of Guys ’n’ Dolls and listened to the applause washing over like breakers in the second of pitch-blackness that came on the end of the last drumbeat. When the lights came up, Catherine was standing by the table.

  “You’re getting gray,” she said.

  I stood up. She had on a suit made out of a used dropcloth that would have run three figures, all bright daubs and spatters on some stiff material like canvas with shoulder pads and a skirt that caught her at mid-calf, over a red silk blouse and a goldstone necklace with beads the size of cueballs. Her pumps were gold, too, and it brought out the highlights in her hair, which was auburn now and almost shoulder-length; but then the tomboy cut I remembered was as dead as Nehru. She seemed to have on no make-up at all, which meant she had put on the right kind for the lighting in the Club Canaveral. Leave it to Catherine to show up dressed and painted correctly for a place she said she had never been to before.

  “I’ve got a painting of me that never gets gray at all,” I said. “The artist screwed up my instructions.”

  “I see you still have your sense of humor.”

  “You always did hate it.” I pulled out her chair.

  She remained standing. “Is this the best table you could get?”

  “If it were, you still wouldn’t like it. We’re not here for the show.” I got her into the chair finally and took my seat. A carhop wobbled over. I looked at Catherine. “Is it still a gimlet?”

  “Only in the summer. Seven-and-Seven, please. The gentleman will have red-eye.”

  “In a clean glass,” I said. “I’m civilized now.”

  “Excuse me?” The hop looked panicky. She was a little redhead with a bar of freckles like a wicker fence across both cheeks. She wore a navy jacket with gold buttons and epaulets, a red pleated cupcake shirt that ended with her pelvis, red high heels, and a cookie-tin hat set at a dangerous angle.

  “Scotch and soda.”

  She clattered off and returned a few minutes later with the drinks. Catherine lifted hers. “We have an anniversary coming up.”

  “I don’t celebrate until January,” I said. “That’s when I got the letter from your lawyer.”

  “Amos, let’s not fight.”

  I looked at her like a detective. She had lost weight, quite a lot of weight. She had never been fat or even plump, but when the fashion went from Boticelli’s Venus to Gertie the Amazon she would have gone right along with it: Nautilus machines, designer leotards, the works. Her face had lost its girlish roundness, which was one of the things that had attracted a young would-be sociologist with his draft notice in his wallet. Her eyes were gray and tilted away sadly from a Grecian nose, bold and straight. Her forehead was quite high, giving her face the illusion of length, and she had a tiny pale star-shaped scar on her right cheekbone, from a fal
l off a high school balance bar onto an exposed bolt. The fall had changed her plans to become an Olympic gymnast. If it hadn’t, something else would have.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t get rid of the scar,” I said.

  She touched it with a coral nail. “You used to like it.”

  “I still do. That’s why I’m surprised you didn’t get rid of it.”

  “I’ve learned to live with my imperfections. Have you?”

  “Are we talking about yours or mine?”

  “I was just getting used to the ones you had when you went over there,” she said. “You came back with an entirely new set.”

  “The old ones didn’t work anymore. That happens after you’ve shot away a thirteen-year-old Asian’s face with an M-fifteen.”

  She flinched. “That’s one of the things I was talking about,” she said bitterly. “Does it make you feel better to horrify me?”

  “Talking about it was the only cure I had. I wound up talking to the refrigerator while you went to the movies.”

  “You talked to Dale Leopold. He talked you into signing up for another hitch as an MP. You threw away your education to become a cop. I’ll never forgive him for that.”

  “It was either Dale or my service piece.”

  “Don’t overdramatize yourself. You were going to join a welfare agency and help people. Instead you run around after husbands and wives and take pictures through keyholes. Oh, hell, would someone please ring the bell before we kill each other?” She glanced around at a busboy rattling crockery on the stand.