Sweet Women Lie

by Loren D. Estleman

Edie was reading past my shoulder. “ ‘Shall Not Perish From the Earth’?”

  “So they borrowed the heading from Lincoln,” I said. “The chapter’s about a man named Hazen S. Pingree.”

  “Herb’s great-uncle. Or something.”

  When I turned the page, a small rectangular brown envelope slid out from between the leaves. I caught it, put the book back on the shelf, and tipped the envelope’s contents out into my hand. A small steel key with a short shank and a round tab with a number on it. It belonged to a safety deposit box. I had had three just like it, for as long as it had taken me to possess and get rid of $750,000 in cash. A long time ago. Last week.

  “Or something,” I agreed.

  18

  “YOU THINK HERBERT copied everything that was in the big envelope?” Edie asked.

  I said, “Those printers’ receipts total up to a hefty bill for someone who couldn’t pay his utilities. He wasn’t just making copies of his hand.”

  She looked at the watch pinned to her sweater. “I can’t go with you to the bank. The assistant principal’s teaching my two o’clock, but I have to be back at school for a conference at three.”

  “Do you have a dollar bill?”

  She hesitated, then retrieved her purse from a table near the door and fished a single out of a nest of small bills. I don’t know how they do it. Men line theirs up according to denomination, with all the presidents’ faces turned the same way, and can’t separate one as quickly as a woman can from the wad she carries around. Edie gave me the bill. I pocketed it, scribbled a receipt in my notebook, tore out the sheet, and handed it to her.

  “That says you’ve retained my services to recover property that was stolen from your apartment for a consideration of one dollar. Don’t tell anyone about it and put it away in a safe place until I ask you for it. Chances are I never will. Cops get ugly when a citizen messes around in an open homicide case. That paper suggests I’m investigating something else entirely. Call it anti-incarceration insurance.”

  “Shouldn’t you have a copy?”

  I grinned. “If you can’t trust a lady schoolteacher. Besides, you don’t get your dollar back until you return the receipt.”

  “Why are you? Messing around in it, I mean.”

  I stopped grinning. “If I knew that I’d know why I’m in this business, and that would only depress me. Let’s just say I’m the patron saint of little men in funny clothes who take jobs outside their aptitudes and get killed for it.”

  The security buzzer razzed. “Who knows you’re home?” I asked.

  “Nobody. I didn’t tell them at school where I was going.” She slid open the balcony door and stepped out, then came back. “A young man in a beige coat. There’s a police officer with him.”

  “The young one’s the Sergeant Trilby I told you about. He’s a fast worker is Sergeant Trilby. Is there a back stairs?”

  “It leads down to the laundry. The only way out besides the front door is the fire exit. That sets off an alarm.”

  “The laundry will do. Give me two minutes and buzz them in.” I opened the door to the hallway. “It’s up to you whether they find out we’ve been talking, or about the safety deposit box. My job will be smoother if they don’t know for a while.”

  “I can always tell them I found the key later.”

  My grinning muscles had had enough workout for one day. “Two minutes,” I reminded her.

  The buzzer sounded again as I took the hall down the other way to the back stairs. On my way into the basement laundry I passed a bucket-shaped woman in a red-and-yellow muumuu that made Herbert S. Pingree’s sportcoat look like an evening with Alistair Cooke. Her hair was a blaze of bobby pins and she was carrying an empty plastic mesh laundry basket. It didn’t seem to bother her that I didn’t have any washing with me. With neighbors like that, it was no wonder a complete stranger could walk into a security building and search one of the apartments without someone hollering cop.

  It was a windowless room with block walls, a bare concrete floor, and a fairly new washing machine and dryer. The washing machine was going. I smoked a cigarette and watched what looked like a rainbow collection of slips and negligees hurtling through the spin cycle with several pairs of white boxer shorts. They looked to be having a lot more fun than I was. After about five minutes I squashed the butt into the floor and left. Nobody yelled freeze as I stepped out the front door.

  My office was on the way to the bank. I stopped off to check for mail and government agents. I had some bills, a letter inviting me as a preferred customer to a preview showing of the winter line at a haberdasher’s where I’d bought a scarf for two dollars when I tailed someone there last summer, and William Sahara. This time he was waiting on the upholstered bench in the reception room, reading the National Geographic article about dinosaurs. He had on the tan coat over what looked like the same unremarkable gray suit. He probably had a lot of them.

  I said, “You didn’t like the chair in the office?”

  He tossed the magazine onto the coffee table and stood up. “I decided to make this a polite visit. Last night I was ready to kill you.”

  That clinched it. People who haven’t killed say “tear you to pieces” or something equally graphic; plain killing doesn’t seem like enough. I hadn’t been able to make up my mind whether that counterassassination bit was a stall or not, but now I was sure it wasn’t. He knew killing was enough.

  “Let’s talk,” I said, pointing to the office door. “Should I use my key, or do you need the practice?”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  I unlocked the door and held it for him. He kept on the coat and sat down in the customer’s chair. He seemed to have overcome his Wild Bill Hickok complex about doors. I hung up my outerwear and took my mail over to the desk and settled into the swivel. He didn’t start talking right away, so I took my pen knife out of the drawer, slit open the bills, and read each one before filing it under the blotter. I tossed the haberdasher’s letter into the wastebasket and folded my hands on top of the desk and looked at him. The same calm brown eyes behind the amber aviator’s glasses, the same brown hair, shorter than regulation but a long way from a military skinhead, the same vague face with the almost-lantern jaw. He was sitting with his legs crossed and his hands resting on his raised thigh.

  “You saw Catherine last night,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We agreed you’d stay away.”

  “You agreed. I said I didn’t want to see her. Doing what we don’t want to do is part of being a grownup.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “You don’t know?”

  “Damn it, why do you think I wanted to keep you apart? Now a connection has been established between you and me. I told you she was being watched.”

  “That’s an understatement. More people have been watching her lately than saw Gone With the Wind.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “How long have you known about Catherine’s affair?”

  He didn’t flick an eyelash. “What affair?”

  “I’d be disappointed if you turned out to be just another husband hiring a dick to shadow his wife from motel to motel,” I said. “Somehow I don’t think I’m going to be disappointed.”

  “That isn’t why I hired you. We’ve been all through that.”

  “I wasn’t talking about me. I meant Herbert S. Pingree. Trans-Global Investigations. I caught him eavesdropping at the door of a ladies’ room with your wife on the other side. Is he the one who told you I was with her?”

  “Moss and Wessell told me. They followed you. They’re both in the hospital, incidentally. Did you have to use a wrench?”

  “They’re lucky I wasn’t chopping wood. You can’t have it both ways, Sahara. Either you paid Pingree to tail Catherine or Moss and Wessell told you about him. He was about as hard to spot as a weather balloon.”

  He waved it off. “They told me someone else was following her. I knew she
was being followed. I’m more concerned that you made contact with her against my instructions.”

  “Uncle Sam didn’t hire Pingree. He isn’t that hard up.” I unfolded my hands. “I don’t know the rules of your game, Sahara. To know that, I’d have to know what the game is. Okay, say you found out Catherine is having an affair with the man you call Frank Usher. Any P.I. who specializes in divorce work would be happy to take your money to get the goods on them. You didn’t have to come here with a story about wanting to quit the Company.”

  “Walker, Walker.” He touched his glasses. “I told you she was being watched and I told you I thought they’d sicced Papa Usher on me. Do you think he wouldn’t charm her into bed to get information?”

  “I thought about it. It doesn’t explain Pingree.”

  “I didn’t know about Pingree until last night when Moss and Wessell called me from your neighborhood. I didn’t know his name until you told me just now; last night it seemed more important to talk to you. It’s conceivable that Usher sublet his assignment to this Pingree to keep an eye on Catherine when he himself couldn’t be with her. That’s just a hypothesis. He might have been in a hurry. He might have been misled on the subject of Pingree’s qualifications. I’ll ask Pingree when I see him. What concerns me — ”

  “He’s dead. Pingree is.”

  If I was looking for a reaction I wasted some eyesight. He said, “Did you kill him?”

  I smiled and shook my head and stripped the cellophane off a fresh pack. “Everybody’s copping my lines today. I was going to ask you if you killed him.”

  “That’s a fair question. So is mine. After all, he was bothering your ex-wife.”

  “Women can take care of themselves today. They always could.” I unclipped the Smith & Wesson, holster and all, from my belt and laid it on the blotter. “You can check it if you like. There’s dust in the barrel.”

  Sahara didn’t move. “Was he shot?”

  “Yeah, I really didn’t think you’d make a slip that bad. I think it was cyanide poisoning. You ever use it in your work?”

  “I don’t like it,” he said. “It’s unpredictable. They pumped enough of it into Rasputin to kill a herd of elk and he was still moving when they threw him in the river. Papa’s used it I’m sure. He’s been around long enough to have tried everything.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I’m not in the habit of discussing the nuts and bolts of my profession. What do you think was Pingree’s part in this?”

  “I think he was a stalking horse. Or a stumbling one.” I plucked a cigarette out of the pack and played with it, not lighting it. “Somebody hired him to trip over Catherine’s footsteps and call a lot of attention to himself to cover whoever was really following her. Somebody maybe like you. You said yourself Moss and Wessell were on our heels last night.”

  “Yours, not hers. So why kill Pingree?”

  “He wasn’t exactly a clam. He made an appointment to see me at his office this morning. He said he wanted to take me in on whatever he was working. You sub rosa types set a lot of store by silence.” I didn’t mention the theft at Pingree’s apartment, or the safety deposit key lying like a tractor weight in my pocket.

  “When was he killed?”

  I looked at my wristwatch, tapped it, and held it next to my ear to hear the ticking. “Five hours ago, about. I was there just after he fell.”

  “I was with some people then.”

  “Did they have names?”

  “They will if necessary.” He rose. “You know where to reach me if you have any more questions.”

  “Don’t you want a progress report?”

  “What for? Now that you’ve been seen with Catherine your cover is blown. All your actions since we first made contact are known or soon will be. Whatever you’ve done on my behalf is tainted. Now I have to find someone else and start all over again. Did I tell you you’re fired?”

  “I kind of had that impression.”

  He grasped the doorknob. “Too bad, Walker. You could’ve used a friend like me.”

  “I don’t use friends,” I said. “Just so you know. I’m investigating Pingree’s murder. I have a client.”

  “You didn’t waste any time.”

  “I hope you’ll remember that when someone asks you for a reference.”

  He shut the door between us. I was still playing with the Winston a minute later, trying to decide whether it was worth setting on fire, when the telephone rang.

  “Trans-Desktop Investigations,” I said. “Another day, another dollar. Literally.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “Just a second.” I put down the receiver, got up, and poked my head out into the waiting room. Sahara was gone. I went back to the desk and sat down.

  “Hello, Catherine. Sounds like old times.”

  “You know what it’s like to have a freckle-faced waitress come into the ladies’ room and tell you your gentleman friend’s gone home?”

  “Not even vaguely. But I’m sorry. Yesterday was a long day.” Not as long as today, I thought.

  Her tone lost some of its heat. “Well, well. It’s learned how to apologize.”

  “It’s had plenty of practice. Was there another reason you called? I have to get to the bank.”

  “They can wait a little longer for their million,” she said. “What happened with the man who’s following me?”

  “He isn’t following you anymore.”

  “Did he tell you he was working for Bill?”

  “It takes a while to tell. Can I call you later?”

  “No, Bill might come home any time. Will you be at the house tonight?”

  “My house?”

  “Well, since the settlement. Can I come over tonight? I don’t plan to go to bed with you,” she added.

  “I wasn’t planning to invite you. Make it seven.”

  She said seven would be fine. The connection broke. I cradled the receiver gently, looked at the cigarette, scratched my ear with the filter tip. Then I rolled it into a ball and lobbed it into the wastebasket. Pingree’s key and I went to the bank.

  19

  I DREW THE SAME machine-punched blonde who had rented me the three boxes when I’d put Gail Hope’s three quarters of a million in storage. She keyed me into the vault and left me alone to examine the box’s contents in an anonymous little room with a bare table. I sat down and drew out a thick sheaf of coarse copy paper bound with a wide rubber band. The paper smelled of ink and developing chemicals.

  Most of the stuff was junk, an eight-month record of failure. Using what looked like college composition books, Pingree had kept scrupulous count of every meager assignment he had managed to scratch up since leaving the River Rouge Police Department; every expense, every setback, every bill he had decided to put off paying in order to satisfy his more impatient creditors. I pictured him sitting in his toy office, filling page after lined page with initials and dates and skimpy dollar amounts in his neat round schoolboy hand while he waited for the telephone to ring or the door to open.

  In April he did nothing.

  In May he placed an advertisement in the Free Press classifieds, painstakingly composing it in one of the books, with many scratchouts and transpositions: “Lost something? Scared? In trouble? Call trans-global investigations today for a free consultation. Peace of mind is our stock-in-trade.” His office telephone number followed.

  In June he recorded two attempts on the part of the Free Press to collect on the ad. Later that month he landed a security job with a men’s store at the Northland Mall. It lasted two weeks, long enough to pay off most of his bills.

  In July he didn’t work at all.

  In August he looked for a woman’s lost dog. He didn’t find it.

  In September he borrowed $250 from Edie to pay his office rent. Two weeks later he borrowed another hundred to keep his telephone from being shut off. At the end of the month he ran a credit check for a St. Louis savings and loan and used the mone
y to repay part of his debt.

  The first two weeks of October he twiddled his thumbs and re-read the paperback novels in his desk drawer. Then on the seventeenth he paid Detroit Edison, Michigan Bell, AAA, and his landlord. He repaid the rest of Edie’s loan the same day. On the twentieth he wrote a check for $89.50 to Quality Auto Service on Military for repairs to his car heater. The next day he put down a fifty-dollar deposit on a suit at Hudson’s pending alterations, and from that point through the first half of November he recorded all bills paid in full. Expenditures for that four-week period came to a little over a thousand dollars.

  I looked through the rest of the stuff. Copies of bills and canceled checks, a letter to the woman who owned the lost dog reminding her that she had agreed to pay Pingree his fee regardless of whether he found the dog. No mention anywhere of the source of his sudden income. It seemed a serious lapse for so meticulous a keeper of records.

  One item in particular stuck out because it was the only typewritten page in the sheaf, double-spaced on a single sheet with wide margins, a fuzzy copy but legible. It appeared to be made up of times of day and geographical locations. I had just started reading it when the blonde clerk knocked and opened the door to tell me the bank was closing.

  I folded the typewritten sheet, put it in my inside breast pocket, snapped the rubber band around the rest, and returned it to the box. She helped me put the box back in the vault. I thanked her and left.

  I used a pay telephone downtown to call Edie. “How’d it go with the cops?” I asked her.

  “They weren’t here long,” she said. “I had to tell them you met me at the restaurant. They wanted to know why they couldn’t reach me at school and why I wasn’t surprised when they told me Herbert was dead. I didn’t say anything about your coming back here with me, though.”

  “You were right not to try and bluff them out.” I watched a mounted patrolman threading his big chestnut through the stalled rush-hour traffic on Michigan. The sun had slipped below the clouds, gleaming off his black leather and glowing satiny red on the horse’s curried coat; an arrogant, mythic pair, making as much sense against the gray granite backdrop of downtown as a stained-glass window in a cannery. “You didn’t mention the key?”