I went to bed before the end of the movie. I wanted to be fresh when I asked Ma Chaney how much she knew about Doyle Thayer Jr.
7
WE GOT SOME RAIN DURING the night, a ten-minute downpour that started and ended as suddenly as if a nozzle had been twisted. The pavement was still dark with moisture when I hit it after breakfast and the sky was overcast, making one of those days muffled in damp dirty cotton that make you sweat while standing motionless in the shade. It was as good a day as any to visit the country.
Emma Chaney lived in rural Macomb County, in a tired white clapboard house that probably wasn’t much different from the one she had been born in on the Kentucky-Tennessee border sometime around the First World War. The daughter of a country gunsmith who fathered no sons, she was said to have learned to field-strip and reassemble a Browning automatic rifle blindfolded by the age of ten. If that was an exaggeration, she had certainly picked up everything there was to know about percussion weapons since that time. At thirteen she had married a big-knuckled farmer whose livelihood blew away with the Dust Bowl in 1933, after which he took a job on the Ford line at River Rouge and moved North with his wife and the first of four sons. When a defective propane tank blew up twenty years later, smearing Galvin Chaney over the morning’s run of 1953 Fairlanes, Ma buried what they could scrape up of him, used the out-of-court settlement to pay off the house, and went into the gun trade to keep supper on the table.
Her sons, grown by this time, had opted for the more active end of the same business. Jesse, the oldest, had had his head blown off his shoulders by a riot gun while fleeing a botched bank robbery in Houston. Floyd was in Florida awaiting execution on three counts of felony murder. Wilbur had a room to himself in the criminal ward of the Forensic Psychiatry Center in Ypsilanti, and Mason, the baby, was in his third year on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for a series of armored car robberies in Kansas City; although it was common knowledge to everyone but the Feds that he visited his mother at home on a regular basis.
One thing the Feds did know, along with everyone else to whom such things mattered, was that if the job called for anything from popguns to primacord, Ma Chaney was the woman to see. She had eleven arrests and only one conviction, for failure to notify her insurance company that she was storing six cases of smokeless powder in an upstairs closet. She had been fined and released. Since then no search warrant had managed to turn up anything more volatile than a can of Campbell’s pork and beans.
There were clumps of gravel on the burned-out lawn and tufts of dead grass in the driveway, or maybe it was the other way around. When I climbed out of the car, a tethered goat with its hipbones showing studied me with brown tilted eyes, then resumed gnawing the paint off a corner porch post. On the porch I pulled my shirt away from my back, put on my plaid summerweight sportcoat, and rapped on the screen door. A strong smell of frying onions drifted out.
“I know you. Ma never forgets a face.”
The woman unhooked the screen door and pushed it open against the spring. She didn’t stand a half-inch above five feet, but she was just as broad, wrapped in a canary yellow nylon kimono with neon orange pomegranates on it in bunches. Her hair had been hennaed to match the pomegranates and gone over with an antique curling iron, leaving girlish ringlets around the gross face, powdered an eighth of an inch deep and painted with rouge and eyeliner, as if a Mary Kay lady had gone berserk and she had been standing in her path. The eyes themselves were round and black, without shine, and a cigarette smoldered on her lower lip.
“Well, come ahead in,” she barked. “You’re invited, but the flies ain’t.”
I stepped inside then. As many times as I had laid eyes on Ma, the sight was always rough on the motor functions.
“Didn’t expect you before lunch. Place is a mess.” She let the screen door bang and shuffled past me in bunny slippers to lift last night’s News off a sofa with doilies on the arms and birds of paradise needlepointed on the cushions. Something else, much smaller, went into the pocket of her kimono before I could get a look at it. The living room had been decorated straight out of the furniture commercials on the afternoon Charlie Chan movie, beginning with one of those revolving-shade forest fire table lamps and ending with glow-in-the-dark bullfighters on black velvet in phony gilt frames on the printed wallpaper. Knickknacks were everywhere, but except for the newspaper there wasn’t a scrap of unplanned clutter or a streak of dust in sight. The place was a mess, all right.
Ma crammed the newspaper into a lacquer wastebasket with a peacock on it and took a seat in a big overstuffed rocker that left her feet dangling. “Sit yourself down, son. Only not so hard you can’t get your wallet loose.” She laughed and started coughing. The cigarette teetered.
“It’ll be quick.” I chose a maple upright, the only seat in the room that didn’t look as if it would swallow me whole. “I need to know if you ever had business with a man named Thayer, or if anyone you know had business with him. I’m not looking to put anyone in Dutch. It’s worth something to my client.”
She stopped coughing. “How much?”
“That depends on what you can tell me.”
“I won’t tell you till you pay me and you won’t pay me till I tell you. I sure hope you brought lunch.”
That was it for a while. I sat, she rocked, an antique oscillating fan perched on a windowsill swooped back and forth. I began to look forward to the breeze on the back of my neck.
“Five hundred,” I said. “If you can tell me something about Thayer I don’t know, or point me in the direction of someone who can.”
She rocked a little more. “What’s to stop you from saying you knew it already after I tell it? If I got it to tell.”
“If I didn’t pay my freight you wouldn’t be talking to me now.”
“Folks change.”
“Like hell they do.”
She rocked. Then: “Well, I never dicker. Either it’s the right price or it ain’t, and Ma’s too old to sit here in the heat trading horses.”
I lit a cigarette and waited.
“Hubert!” she bellowed.
I said, “Who’s Hubert?”
“One of the darlings.”
I was turning that one over when the screen door banged and a big man with greasy blond hair came in chewing gum with his mouth open. He was wearing a brown polyester suit that bagged in the knees. He had a pale, pockmarked face, flat blue eyes, and a hearing aid in his right ear. I knew him, of course. I thought I even knew the suit.
“Yeah, Ma.” He hesitated when he saw me, but showed no recognition, only an impersonal sort of suspicion that went with his Georgia drawl.
“Hubert Darling, this here’s Amos Walker. Hubert’s been useful around here with the boys away. He’s going to see if you’re wearing a wire. You won’t mind.”
I said, “How’s he going to do that?”
She hopped off the rocker; for a woman of her age and figure she had plenty of spring. “It’s time Ma went up and got dressed. This here northern living’s making her lazy. You be thorough, now, Hubert. There’s plenty other places to tape them on besides the chest.” She shuffled out.
Hubert’s blue eyes looked like painted tin. “Stand up and get ’em off,” he said.
I stood. Face to face, I had an inch on him. The bigness was attitude, nothing more. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Am I supposed to?”
“You held me once while your brother Jerry went over me with a set of brass knuckles. It was in a trailer park not far from here.”
“Jerry’s in Jackson. He don’t get out till December.”
“When did they let you out?”
“Get ’em off,” he snarled. “The shoes and socks too.”
“You still don’t know me.”
“Mister, if I had a nickel for every trailer park I been in and every time I held somebody for Jerry.” His breath smelled of Juicyfruit. “You want me to take ’em off you?”
“Maybe this’ll help.�
�� I hit him with one hundred and eighty-five pounds.
He was solid. He rocked back on his heels without going over. But he was too dazed to react right away, and I hit him again just as hard. He backpedaled and lost his balance. I reached past him and plucked the forest fire lamp off its table just before it tipped over. He was out then, but his body didn’t know it. He rolled onto his stomach and tried to push himself up. I hit him on the head with the lamp. Bright yellow-and-orange bits of painted forest fire sprayed all over. He groaned and fell on his face.
“Hubert?” Ma’s wheezy voice barely reached the ground floor.
I dropped what was left of the lamp, stepped over Hubert, and pulled the newspaper out of the lacquer wastebasket. I wondered what a day-old copy of the Detroit News was doing lying around an otherwise tidy living room.
The answer was on the front page, or rather missing from it. Someone with scissors had snipped an L-shaped piece out of the lower right-hand corner. I thought I knew where it had wound up.
“Hubert?” Footsteps shuffled on the stairs.
I put the paper back the way I’d found it. I didn’t need it as much as I needed Ma’s goodwill. Around Detroit, old newspapers are as easy to get hold of as hired muscle.
8
SHE CAME IN wearing boys’ Size Husky overalls over a man’s plaid flannel shirt and sneakers on her big square feet. With her orange hair and the paint and powder on her face the outfit made her look like one of those inflatable clowns that pop back up when you punch them. She looked down at Hubert Darling, then nudged the wreckage of the lamp with a toe. “My Calvin gave me that.”
“Sorry. His head was harder than it looked.”
“He dead?”
“Only from the neck up,” I said. “You won’t notice the difference.”
“Well, if they had any brains Ma couldn’t afford them.” She booted him in the ribs, hard enough to bruise one. “Wake up, peckerhead.”
“Let him snooze. He’s going to come to with a headache a yard wide.”
“One thing’s sure. Nobody that ever wore no wire ever hit anybody that hard.”
“You’d be surprised.” I’d stopped at my bank on the way there. I took five fifty-dollar bills out of my wallet, righted the table that had been knocked over, and laid them on top. Their edges stirred a little in the wind from the fan. “You’ll have to trust me for the other half. I’ve got a car payment due.”
“What about your client?”
“That’s a little complicated.”
“Complicated how?”
“What about Thayer?” I asked.
She booted Hubert again. “Sure he ain’t dead?”
“I could go out and get my gun and come back and put a bullet in him if you like. It’d be quicker than kicking him to death.”
“It ain’t that. I just don’t need no bodies rolling around like out at the barn that time. I live here. Well.” She set fire to a cigarette, striking a wooden kitchen match off a thick thumbnail the way I never could, and coughed, hacking a little and swallowing.
“January it was,” she said. “Maybe February. One of them cold months when I get to thinking about visiting my boy Floyd in Florida. They bum-rapped him down there. He told me himself he was in Arkansas when them boys shot that feller in Fort Lauderdale. My boys steal, but they don’t lie.”
“January or February,” I prompted.
“He had a letter with him. I got it here.” She took a fold of coarse paper out of the slash pocket of her overalls and handed it to me.
The sheet had yellowed in a drawer, been doodled on, and used to add sums of figures in Ma’s crabbed hand. The message had been badly typed on a machine whose o’s and a’s looked like fat periods.
Ma
Well how the hell are you i guess you remember your old freind Sturdy. This heres junior hes OK
The moronic signature at the bottom might have read “Sturdy.” It might have read John Hancock or Pontius Pilate. I said, “That’d be Waldo Stoudenmire, the Iroquois Heights fence?”
“Maybe.”
I returned the letter. “I didn’t know Sturdy dealt guns.”
“Sturdy’d peddle his grandmother’s teeth if there was cash in it.” She refolded the letter and pocketed it. “But he knows what’s good for him and he don’t give nobody the green light here that didn’t earn it.”
“Describe Thayer.”
She squinted up at me through the smoke of her cigarette. “Thirty. Your build, but soft around the middle. Be fat in a couple. Glasses, I think.”
“Sounds like his pictures. What was he after?”
“You come back with that other two-fifty and Ma will tell. Plus thirty for the lamp. I forgot about the lamp.”
“I could just ask Sturdy.”
“Sturdy’s dead, I heard.”
“I didn’t.”
“You will.”
I scratched my chin. “It’s like that, is it?”
“Not Ma. Ma don’t kill nobody. She just hears things. You young blades forget us old folks are around.”
“Did you make a sale?”
“I ain’t in business not to.”
“For how much?”
“Ten.”
“Thousand?”
She coughed. “No, Cadillacs. Of course ten thousand.”
“Cash?”
“Check.”
“Check?” For some reason that rocked me harder than the part about Sturdy being dead. “Since when do you put anything on the books?”
“The books say I sold him the truck I made the delivery with,” she said. “Or would of.”
“You didn’t deliver?”
“Bank wouldn’t cash the check.”
“He stopped payment?”
“Not him. His old man. The bank told me.”
“How could Doyle Thayer Senior stop payment on a check his son wrote?”
“He can when it’s drawn on his account.” She tidied the bills, folded them, and put them inside her bib pocket. “That there’s worth about two-fifty, I’d say. Come back with the rest and I’ll tell you the rest.”
I sighed, took out my wallet, and gave her the other half of the five hundred. “I still owe you for the lamp.”
She chortled; that’s all you could call it. She counted the money and put it with the rest. “Don’t never play poker with a lady from Logan County.”
“What was Junior buying?”
“Well, if I was the kind to deal in guns and such, and if Junior was the kind to buy from me, I might offer him a Polaris missile.”
“For ten thousand?”
“Just the shell. Ma don’t mess around with that nuke juice.”
“Where’d you get a Polaris missile?”
“I didn’t. I just told you, I ain’t the kind, and if I was, I wouldn’t say so for no five hunnert.”
I looked down at Hubert Darling, who had begun groaning again but showed no signs of moving. Sorting through my terminology. “Where would someone go around here to lay hold of a Polaris missile, shell or otherwise?”
“Talk to the Colonel.”
“Colonel who?”
Her face was a mask; but then it was anyway. “If you don’t know who the Colonel is, he don’t want you to know. Ma’s got to get lunch on the table.” She pushed past me, in the direction of the smell of frying onions.
“If it’s for Hubert, you better make soup out of it,” I said. “He won’t be chewing anything for a while.”
“I forgot to ask why you hit him.” She was in the kitchen now, banging pots and pans.
“Old times’ sake.” On my way out I crunched through pieces of broken lamp.
The onions had made me ravenous. I had lunch at a sausage palace a mile from the Chaney house. It was a block building made over to look like a barn, with a hip roof, red aluminum siding, and fat waitresses bound in tight pink uniforms. There was enough grease on my plate to lube a fleet of Chevies. I shoveled it in with both hands.
Afterwards I smoked and
thought. I wondered who the Colonel might be and what army he belonged to. I wondered what a spoiled kid with too much money wanted with a nuclear weapon that didn’t work. I wondered what the article was that Ma had clipped out of last night’s newspaper and stuck in the pocket of her nutty kimono. I wondered, while digesting lunch, who was going to pay for supper.
My waitress, three hundred pounds with yellow hair in a bun and Dora stitched across her apron pocket, brought my bill. “Can I get you anything else?”
“Not unless there’s a copy of yesterday’s News in the kitchen,” I said.
“I think it was in your soup.” She laid the bill on the table, but she didn’t go away. “You look like a man with problems.”
“I’m out of work.”
“Put your wife to work. That’s what my husband did.”
“I don’t have a wife.”
“I wish I didn’t have a husband.”
I covered the bill, emptying my wallet for the second time in two days. “What would you call a man who gets fired, then goes on doing the same job without pay?”
“He working for a woman?”
“Yeah.”
She counted her tip and put it in her apron. “I’d call him a romantic. But only if he tips twenty percent.”
Back in the city I got some more cash and stopped at a corner bar for a cold beer and a slice of conditioned air. While the bartender was drawing the beer I used the pay telephone by the rest rooms to call my answering service. Waiting for the girl to come on the line I belched sausage.
“Yes, Mr. Walker, a Mr. Scooter called at ten o’clock. He wants you to call him back. You know the number, he said.”
“Shooter,” I corrected. “Anything else?”
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