Sweet Women Lie

by Loren D. Estleman

  The smile shut down permanently. An essentially grave young black woman had been standing behind it, showing tiny lines in her face that should not have been there at her age, or what I judged her age to be. I gave her a quick look at the sheriff’s buzzer. She looked tired suddenly. “I’m a licensed massage therapist,” she said. “You can’t bust me for that.”

  “Relax. I’m interested in your neighbor, the sleuth.”

  “Sleuth?”

  “Shamus. Gumshoe. Hawkshaw. Peeper. I’d say dick, but it probably wouldn’t mean the same thing in the massage business.” She was still in the dark. I said, “The private detective. Next door? That’s the thing with the knob on it down the hall. Stop me when it sounds like English.”

  “Oh, Herbie. We haven’t had any trouble with him since we made him patch up the hole. Did he drill one on the other side?” A forehead line deepened. “Wait a minute, that’s the comic book place. You better show me that badge again. It didn’t look like no city shield.” Her grammar was slipping.

  “Why bother? It’s just a gag. I’m private too. I just want to ask if you saw or heard who visited him today.”

  “Why?”

  I got out the wallet again and gave her fifty of William Sahara’s dollars. “Tell Antoinette you had a customer. Or don’t tell her and buy yourself some underwear. The person I’m interested in just left.”

  She put the bills in a pocket of her robe. “You might as well take your clothes off, mister. You wasted your money otherwise. I didn’t hear nothing. I had the radio on since I got in.”

  “I heard it in Herbie’s office. The walls in this dump are made of tissue paper and trust. You must have heard something. Voices, a glass breaking.”

  “Why ask me, if you were in there? Ask Herbie. Oh.” It dawned on her then. She looked a little sad, as if her favorite soap opera had been pre-empted. “I heard two guys talking. Herbie was one of them. I didn’t hear any words. It didn’t sound like nobody was mad or nothing. What happened, he get cut?”

  “He got poisoned. I think.”

  “Jesus. Was it in his water?”

  “Looks like it. Did he drink a lot of water?”

  She nodded. “He had a fresh bottle delivered every couple of weeks. The customers sure weren’t drinking it. Herbie didn’t have no customers.”

  “Sounds like you know a lot about him.”

  “Like you said, these walls are a joke. Also we saw each other in the hall. He liked to talk. Did you know he was a direct descendant of the Mayor Pingree that turned the vacant lots in Detroit into potato patches to feed the poor?”

  “He never told me. Did he talk about the case he was working on?”

  “I didn’t know he was working at all. Today was the first time I heard anyone in there with him in weeks. Well, except the bottled water man. Hey, maybe he’s the one put in the poison.”

  “When was the last delivery?”

  She thought. “A week ago, about.”

  “If it was in the bottle he’d be dead a week.”

  “Maybe it, like, built up in his system.”

  “Cyanide doesn’t work that way. That’s what I smelled in his glass.”

  Her eyes opened a little. They looked like the eyes on the door of Trans-Global Investigations. “Cyanide, that’s heavy. Ain’t it hard to get hold of?”

  “Ask me questions when the fifty bucks is used up. What was the other man’s voice like? Deep? High? Gruff? Did he sound like he operated a power shovel or danced the Carioca for his living?”

  “It was kind of medium, I think. I didn’t pay much attention. I was listening to the radio.” She glanced at a tiny watch on her wrist. “I got a regular coming in at ten. He don’t like it when somebody else is here.”

  “Tell the councilman to wait in the Omar Sharif Room. The building’s going to be crawling with cops in a little while. Where did Herbie live?”

  “With his girlfriend. If he told me that once he told me a hundred times. I think she was his first. That boy was pussy-whipped.”

  “That’d be Edie? Where’s she live?”

  “We didn’t exchange addresses. Her name’s Hubbard. No, Hibbard. Edith Hibbard. Can’t be far. Herbie used to go home for lunch, and maybe a quickie. Something tells me quickies were all anybody ever had with Herbie.”

  I wrote the name in my notebook. “I’d better use your telephone to call the cops. They get awful upset when you smear up the one at the murder scene.”

  “How come all the shit happens when I’m in charge?” she said.

  I took the receiver off a maroon wall unit and punched buttons. “I was going to ask the same question.”

  15

  THERE IS A PATTERN to these things, as immutable and unvarying as a bride’s first meal followed by a groom’s first heartburn: The uniforms arrive first, then the plainclothes detectives. It’s one of the Unwritten Laws, a penal code that would run to several hundred volumes if anyone ever chose to set it down. In East Detroit on the day Herbert Selwyn Pingree drank his last glass of water, they came together. You could call it a refreshing example of democracy in practice. You could call it plain dumb coincidence and be right. I didn’t think they were pooling, but you never knew what elected officials would come up with next in an economic crunch that was approaching drinking age.

  While the uniforms went about their business of dispersing the street crowds they had gathered in the first place with their pretty lights and sirens, a Sergeant Trilby shook my hand and steered me into a vacant office down the hall for a chat. It was a square empty room with a painted steel radiator and the inescapable mushroom-shaped glass fixture suspended upside-down from the ceiling, suitable for snaring dust and expired flies. The walls and ceiling were painted the original sickly yellow and a window with a slanted shade offered a view of an abandoned Pinto in an empty lot.

  “You like November?” Trilby asked me.

  “I used to, when I hunted deer.”

  “Why’d you stop?”

  “It reminded me of some things.”

  “Yeah, I saw that movie too.” He dusted his palms, indicating that the small talk was over. Trilby was youngish, with black hair cut short and combed down over a slightly low forehead like Jack Kennedy’s, dark, intelligent eyes — no cops’ rude, weary-of-the-human-race stare there; not yet, anyway — and a pug nose that contributed to his youthful appearance. I wasn’t sure if he really was young or if I was just getting old. I decided he really was young. I needed a break.

  He consulted an alligator-hide notebook. “You told the officers you had an appointment with this Pingtree?”

  “Pingree,” I corrected. “It wasn’t really an appointment. He asked me to come up when I got a chance.”

  “Had you known each other long?”

  “About fifteen minutes total, not counting artificial respiration.”

  “What was he to you, if not a friend?”

  “A guy in the same racket. I ran into him last night in the Club Canaveral. He found out I was in the business and he wanted to talk about partnering. He said the case he was on needed two men.”

  “What was the case?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  Trilby frowned at his notebook. He didn’t like what he was writing. I didn’t care for it much myself. “I’m not clear on how it is you happened to run into each other last night.”

  “He was tailing someone. He might have been more obvious about it if they’d put him under the main spot and vamped him, but I doubt it. I braced him and treated him to a little free advice, one P.I. to another.”

  “Generous of you.”

  “I get that way when I’m drinking.”

  “Who was he tailing?”

  “A woman. I’d have paid more attention to her if Pingree weren’t more entertaining. He almost followed her into the toilet.”

  He changed directions. “It says here you heard the killer escape in the elevator while you were busy with Pingree. What makes you think it was him — or her?
Poisoning’s a woman’s game.”

  “Not since liberation. Cyanide works quick, within minutes of ingestion. I figure whoever put it in Pingree’s glass waited to see him drink it before he left. I would if it were me and I went to that much trouble. I got to Pingree’s door in time to hear the glass drop from his hand when he collapsed. Nobody used the elevator before that except me. There’s no access to the stairs from this floor. I checked.”

  “There’s always the fire escape.”

  “He’d have to pass too many windows on his way down. Someone would see him. The way I take it, when he heard me coming up in the elevator he ducked into a vacant office, maybe this one, and waited until I went into Pingree’s.”

  “You make him sound like a pro.”

  “Pro enough anyway to slip a private cop a Mickey when everyone else out there is gun happy. This guy likes his work or he wouldn’t be into the refinements.”

  “I don’t like poison,” Trilby said. “I don’t like it because I don’t come across it. I’m used to punks plugging each other over a noseful of crack, a wife slipping her old man the butcher knife when he’s hitting her with the rest of the kitchen. Most of the time the perp’s still standing there holding the weapon when the uniforms come. Poison’s for dowagers who go to garden parties to gossip about the vicar.” He looked at his notebook one more time, shook his short-cropped head, and flipped down the cover. “No, I don’t like poison.”

  Nothing there had my name on it, so I let it go. He put away the notebook and glanced at my suit, in a way that made his interest look no more than curious. No conflict there: Together we wouldn’t dress out to three hundred dollars. His was a three-button Ivy Leaguer that had seen better days and would probably see a lot worse before he got rid of it, under a cream-colored car coat with a pile collar. He looked like a diffident fraternity brat, carefully mussed. “What were you doing in the Club Canaveral?”

  “Meeting a woman.”

  “Named?”

  “You wouldn’t know her.”

  “It’s going to be like that, is it?”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” I said. “She’s got nothing to do with this. It was just an accident Pingree and I met.”

  “I don’t like accidents much more than I like poison. Whenever something new comes into a man’s life — you, in this case — and the man winds up not having that life soon after, I have to jump on the something new. There’s nothing personal in it; I’ve got a friend on the department who moonlights as a private investigator and I let him in my front door and everything. It’s just a question of averages.” He changed tack again. “That was a good call on the cyanide. It’ll be even better if the coroner says that’s what did it. How come you know so much about it?”

  “I went to detective class.”

  He was silent for a moment. “I don’t need a citizen soldier from Detroit coming up here telling me I’m stupid, but I can live with it. What I can’t live with is one coming up here thinking I’m stupid.”

  “You’re right. Sorry, Sergeant.” I shook a quarter-inch of Winston out of a new pack and offered it to him. He turned it down. I pulled it the rest of the way out with my lips and lit it. I stepped on the match. “Kissing a corpse isn’t the way I like to start most days. Besides, I kind of liked the little guy. He was like a clumsy puppy you want to pick up and take home before he gets gassed.”

  “What I’m having trouble buying is that a P.I., any P.I., would just up and offer to go partners on fifteen minutes’ acquaintance.”

  “Pingree wasn’t any P.I. He was as new as a baby tooth and didn’t know the business from the leading brand. You saw the books in his desk drawer. He thought it was all blondes and midnight meetings on the riverfront and when he found out it wasn’t, he got confused. When I came along he snatched at me like a piece of driftwood. I imagine he was looking for pointers.”

  “And you just ate it up.”

  “I don’t get asked for advice that often. Besides —”

  “You liked the little guy. Okay, Walker.” He opened the door and held it. “Stick around the area in case we need a statement.” When I started to go through, he touched my arm, not threateningly. “This isn’t Detroit. We haven’t gotten around to considering murder a natural cause. If we don’t turn something in seventy-two hours we go back to the starting line. You’ll be doing yourself a favor if we don’t have to come looking for you then. I’m not nearly as nice as I seem the first time you meet me. Ask my brother-in-law.”

  “That’s clear enough,” I said.

  “I’m glad. Everyone likes to be understood.”

  There was a bar around the corner, a little black cavity of a place with four stools at the bar and a row of booths in back. The bartender was young and fair, with a sprouting of reddish moustache. Everybody I met lately was young. I wondered if there had been a coup while I was busy rocking and thinking about my shuffleboard game. I ordered bourbon straight up.

  He set it and a paper napkin in front of me. “Nothing like that first shot to jump-start your heart in the morning,” he said. “You look like your battery’s low.”

  “When I want a shrink I’ll go the yard an hour. I came in here for sunshine in a glass.”

  “Excuse me, Pete. I’m just the help. The observations are free. Sunshine’s a buck seventy-five.”

  I grunted, put down two singles, took my change, and went over to the pay telephone at the end of the bar. I dialed my answering service.

  “A woman called twice, Mr. Walker. She said her name was Catherine. She sounded upset.”

  “You’d be too if somebody left you in a toilet.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Just saying something cryptic under my breath so I’ll sound wise and weary. Anybody else?”

  She said no. Well, Sahara preferred to make his visits in person. I hung up, forgetting to thank her, and returned to my stool. The whiskey tasted better than expected, better than I wanted it to at that hour. I looked at my watch to see what hour it was. Eleven thirty-eight. Pingree had a lunch date at 12:30. “Ever hear of a restaurant called the Black Bull?” I asked the bartender.

  “Now I’m the auto club.”

  “Direct hit.” I nodded. “So far the day’s a stinkeroo and I don’t have a wife or a clog. Maybe you’ve had days like that.”

  He slapped his rag at the beer pulls. “Maybe I have.”

  “I’ll start fresh if you will.”

  He put away the rag, touched his moustache. “It’s a steak place down on Eight Mile, the Detroit side I think. I hear they serve a mean prime rib.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’m a vegetarian.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Would I kid about a thing like that?”

  “Hitler probably wouldn’t either. He was a vegetarian too.”

  “Yeah? I wonder if it gave him gas like it does me. That could explain Poland.”

  “What’s a youngster like you know about Hitler and Poland?”

  “Plenty. My folks are from Warsaw.”

  I appreciated that for a moment. “What do you know about a guy named Hazen S. Pingree?”

  “He doesn’t sound Polish.”

  “He wasn’t. A long time ago he planted potatoes to feed the poor. He ran for governor.”

  “I bet he lost.”

  “It was a gentler time,” I said. “People were more compassionate. He lost by a landslide.”

  “Was he a vegetarian?”

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  “Probably not.” He unbuttoned his cuffs and turned them back. The room was a little overheated, as bars are everywhere when it’s cold out. “I can’t help wondering how many of those spuds made it to the poor.”

  I tipped him a buck and slid off the stool. “Buy yourself a rutabaga.”

  “Anything wrong with the drink?” I hadn’t touched it after the first sip.

  “Nothing. I wanted there to be, but there isn’t. That’s what’s
wrong.”

  “The Bull doesn’t open till noon,” he said. “Where you planning to wait?”

  I pushed the door open two inches and stopped. A tall narrow wedge of clammy air touched me from hat to heels. “There’s got to be a Christian Science reading room somewhere in this town.”

  “Lots of luck, pal.” He dumped my bourbon into the sink behind the bar and washed the glass.

  16

  WHAT I DID WAS DRIVE.

  When they were stumped in ancient Greece, they went to the oracle at Delphi. At Lourdes they take the waters, and I suppose in Akron they go down and watch the tires being made. In Detroit, where we put the world on wheels, or did anyway until the Japanese and the Yugoslavs and the Brits rolled in, when our brains slip into neutral we lay rubber on the road and hit the gas.

  I had been driving my antebellum Mercury for several months, ever since my Chevy Cavalier had been shot to pieces, a hard thing to collect insurance on, especially when you leave it unlocked and unattended in the warehouse district after dark. The Merc was one of the old square four-barrel dinosaurs, slab-sided and bigger than Lake Superior, with an unslakable thirst for high-test leaded and 10-W-40. Driving the Chevy I hadn’t realized how much I missed carburetors, the dub-dub-dub of a big engine at idle or the feeling, when you press the pedal to the firewall, that you’ve left the chains of gravity behind and are shrieking into deep space. I took Gratiot clear down to McNichols and McNichols to Outer Drive, the old Detroit city limits before the developers acquired their bottomless hunger for parks and farmland and began a fifteen-mile-wide crawl northward, devouring trees and grass as they went and dropping concrete and asphalt behind them like manure. I passed subdivisions and 7-Elevens, HUD houses that had never been lived in and doorways that were, schools and factories and family practice clinics and the great expanse of Mt. Olivet Cemetery, yawning on both sides of the road and studded with granite angels and gunsight crosses and American Legion flags and family plots occupied by the aged dead and their seventeen-year-old grandchildren, shot down in the hallways and on the steps of local high schools by other seventeen-year-olds because somebody had refused to lend somebody else his notes from Social Sciences. I passed great olive UPS trucks and low slinky Firebirds, city blue-and-whites and rusty puckered heaps with their radios cranked up all the way, as if the cars ran purely on the brain-thudding banality of Rap. I nicked red lights and powered through amber. I was engaged in an eight-cylinder voyage in search of the golden fleece of logic.