She picked up on it quicker than expected. “Barry Stackpole’s?”
“Yeah. He’s started a new book.”
“Did you bring it out with you?”
“I didn’t see it. Just a couple of rough opening pages I found in the wastebasket in his study. It has the same title as the Vietnam book, only this one’s not about Vietnam. I don’t think.”
“What’s it about?”
“It doesn’t matter. It won’t tell me where he is. I found something else that might, a record of a payment to a travel agency. I’ll check into it tomorrow.”
“Is there something wrong with your leg?”
I had shifted positions a couple of times. The cab wasn’t a Checker and there wasn’t room to straighten the knee. “I hit it with Fenkell Street this afternoon.”
“This has something to do with what happened to your car, hasn’t it? Were you in an accident?”
“I wrecked it. I wasn’t in an accident.”
She crossed her legs and propped her chin up on her elbow, looking at me. The shawl slipped three inches. “Are you being a confidential character again?”
I met her lavender gaze. “I bet the young Shakespeares clap their hands and bark like seals when you do that. Show them a creamy shoulder like alabaster under a Cairo moon.”
“Damn thing’s always down around my ankles.” She adjusted the shawl.
“Better,” I said. “Someone monkeyed with my steering and brakes. I aimed for the softest and cheapest thing I could find and took the air.”
“My God.”
I made a shrug. “I should get a new car out of it. The News will be happy to pick up the tab when they find out I trashed a USA Today box with the old one.”
“Did you talk to the police?”
“No.”
“May one ask why not?”
“One may.”
“I see,” she said after a moment. “We’re in the hero business this week.”
I said, “I’ve wrecked cars before. I’ve been hit over the head and pumped full of drugs and jailed and shot and worked over with brass knuckles and lied to a lot. Maybe I will be again, though I really hope not because my head’s not as hard as it used to be. Certainly I’ll be lied to again. But if I start running to the cops, getting my name in the papers with theirs, I’m on the street. My livelihood depends on a profile no higher than curb level.”
“You talk as if private investigators don’t have rights like everyone else.”
“We surrender them when we sign the license application form. It’s part of the ceremony.”
“This has something to do with the warning you got last night?”
“I hope so. Any other answer would be too complicated.”
“You scare me.”
“Not you.”
“Yes, me. I’m not half as tough as I like to make out. There’s a whole universe between facing down a fat publisher who hasn’t read a book since Black Beauty and dealing with people who kill people, actually kill people. I couldn’t exist in your world.”
“Nobody asked you to.”
We had passed the RenCen by this time and were heading northeast, where the river broadened and the foreign skyline disappeared behind the long dark bulk of Belle Isle in the middle. The street lamps were spaced out farther now. The intervals of darkness between them were longer. She rested a hand on my sore knee. “Coming back to the hotel? I’ll put some ice on this.”
“Run that gauntlet of clerks, hops, and dicks?”
“They’re grown up.”
“All the way up to blackmail.”
“We could go back to your place.”
I laid my hand atop hers. She smiled. I patted it.
“A funny thing happens to a man when he passes thirty,” I said. “He finds out he can live without a warm body next to him in bed. It changes his whole outlook.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean Freud was only a little bit right. It can be the driving force in your life, but only after lunch. Preferably on an expense account from the publisher.”
Her hand jerked, but I hung on. “What’s your point?” she demanded, and the warmth in the air was gone. Only the scent of jasmine remained, like incense in an empty room.
“The book’s not mine to sell, princess,” I said. “Not for money, and especially not for sex. Tomorrow you’d be flying back home with a best seller in your briefcase and I’d just have sheets to change.”
“That’s disgusting!” Her nails were claws.
“No argument.” I let go.
She said, “You wouldn’t know an honest emotion if it bit you.”
“Most of them do.”
“You’re a suspicious, vile man. You think everyone else has an angle and you’re the only character with any sort of integrity. But someone had to pay you to look for your own friend.”
I closed a hand on her bare arm, high up where it can hurt. “It’s a business, lady,” I said quietly. “Just like yours. A title without any clout, a card that only opens doors when I slide it between the tongue and the jamb. When I have a legitimate client the cops don’t stand on my foot so hard. And the missing persons business takes money, lady, money to get lost and money to get found. Clients have money. It isn’t at all like opening your thighs to keep a job.”
She said, “You’re hurting my arm.”
I released it. “Don’t pay any attention to me. My knee’s throbbing.”
“Please take me back to my hotel.”
I pushed back the safety shield and told the driver. We watched the scenery on the way back. A jet angled in low overhead on its way to Metro Airport, its blinking lights describing a neon cross. It reminded me of a case I’d had once and I thought of an old lady in black living in St. Clair Shores. The old ladies in black were dying out, giving way to sinewy hags with hair bottled in blonde and leathery brown skin burned dry by the sun and that hungry look behind their dark glasses when the beach boys glide past in their tight G-strings. Age didn’t matter anymore. Everyone was stuck in gear. The sexual revolution had ended but the refugees hung on.
Louise got out while the cab was still in motion and started across the sidewalk. I told the driver to wait and caught up with her at the door and touched her arm, gently this time. “I wasn’t calling you what you think.”
The lavender was gone from her eyes They were splinters of blue ice. Very low she said something to me that didn’t come from her part of New York, not during the day anyhow.
A character in a burgundy uniform with gold braid on one shoulder and scrambled eggs on his cap pried himself loose from the door and said, “The lady doesn’t look like she wants your company, sir.”
“You ought to put some nail polish on all that trim,” I told him. “The glare’s blocking your vision.”
“What’s that?”
“The gentleman just insulted me,” Louise explained.
When she spoke, he looked at her with just the right measure of sappiness to go with a guy who would let his boss dress him like a wedding cake, and when he looked back at me the sides of his jaw stuck out in lumps.
I started to laugh then, and got back into the cab. As we pulled away, the doorman was holding the door for Louise.
A block farther on we passed a little girl hugging herself in a short skirt and knee-length boots in a doorway on the corner. By this hour she would have been in and out of the outfit five times. At night the smog over the city turned to clouds of stale perfume. If the place had a welcome sign it would read “Over Forty Billion Serviced.” What they charged, fifty bucks or a book on the Times list, had nothing to do with the basic nature of the transaction. We’ve established what you are, lady. Now we’re haggling over price.
On my way home it occurred to me that I hadn’t told Louise the real reason I hadn’t called the police yet. I didn’t half buy it myself.
26
I WAS TOO WIRED to sleep. I stayed up past three reading Barry’s typescript, some parts of i
t for the third or fourth time, and staring at the single-spaced paragraph I had found in his wastebasket, waiting for the axe to fall. It didn’t, and when the type started running together I put everything away and went to bed. I may have slept. An hour ahead of the clock I got up, wide awake, and went to the office. The bus was almost empty at that hour.
A note on my desk informed me the building cleaning service had been in. It was the only thing on the desk that didn’t have dust on it. I turned the Venetian blinds up and down. I decided they looked less grimy. Then I decided they didn’t. My finger left tracks on the tops of the file cabinet and safe. Finally I opened the deep drawer of the desk and lifted out the office bottle. They had cleaned two inches off the top.
The mail wasn’t in yet. I put away the bottle and sat down and squirmed around until I’d fitted myself into the groove I’d worn in the seat. That killed a few seconds. I chain-smoked two cigarettes, which killed ten minutes more. By then it was time to call my answering service.
They didn’t have anything for me. I hung up and smoked another cigarette. Then I called for the time. My watch was a minute and a half slow. I reset it, and there went two more minutes. This was going to be a snap.
When it was coming up on eight o’clock I opened the Yellow Pages to Travel Agencies and paged to the Z’s. The pickings were lean in Greater Detroit. A display for Zodiac Vacations, Inc., took up a quarter of the page, complete with map, special holiday hours, and a row of smiling faces with the agents’ names printed underneath. It listed two locations. Next to it Zephyr Travel ran a more modest notice the size of a calling card, just its name in elegant script and a number in Grosse Pointe.
I didn’t see the third one until I moved my thumb. It was a one-line entry: “R. Zeitgeist, trvl agnt.” A telephone number and a Fort Street address followed.
That was it for the Z’s. Zodiac, with its main office on Forest, was the closest. I wet my cab whistle and left.
It was one of those mellow gold fall mornings. The wind had a nip in it and the air was sharp with burning leaves and fermenting cider. Where a tree grew out of a box on the sidewalk and its leaves hadn’t gone the way of industrial toxication, those leaves were turning brown and russet and umber and red. It was a morning to ditch the office and go looking for a football game, any football game. I hoped someone was doing just that for me.
Zodiac occupied a storefront on the north side of West Forest near the John Lodge, a large communal office with a suspended ceiling and two rows of walnut veneer desks with a broad green-carpeted aisle running between. A standing rack near the door held colorful brochures and the walls were papered with posters of matadors and hula girls and Times Square lit up like V-J Day and couples walking along deserted stretches of immaculate beach. All the desks were manned. I chose a vacant seat in front of a man in his late twenties balancing a telephone receiver in the hollow of his shoulder while pattering away on the keyboard of a computer terminal on a revolving base next to the wall. The nameplate on the desk read DAVE, no last name.
“I don’t recommend that hotel,” the young man was saying into the telephone. “Sure, the rates are the best in New York, but we got complaints of rooms getting ripped off and the customers think it’s personnel. Yeah. Okay, can I get back to you? Thanks.”
“I worked in a couple of hotels,” I said, when he’d hung up. “I wouldn’t recommend any of them.”
The corners of an impressive handlebar moustache turned up jauntily and he relaxed in his chair. He was wearing a plaid shirt and skinny tie under a corduroy jacket with ornamental patches on the elbows. “Hotel people are mostly scum, the upper levels anyway. They know there’s an eighty percent chance they’ll never see you again and so they gouge you. I rate them down around morticians and sidewalk solicitors. Where can I send you today?”
“My wife says she wants to see some color. Do you arrange tours of the north country?”
“Sure, but you can hop in the car and take off up 23. You don’t need me.”
“You must own the place,” I said.
“No, I just don’t believe in picking pockets. I figure my days in the travel business are numbered.”
“You’re the man I want to talk to, then. Barry said to be sure and look up Dave.”
“Barry?”
“Barry Stackpole. He’s on a trip he said you set up.”
He turned his chair and thumbed through a stack of scribbled sheets on a spindle, hesitated, then finished the job and turned back, smoothing his moustache with a knuckle. “No Stackpole. You’re sure he said Zodiac?”
“I’m not even sure he said Dave. But it sounded like that and the place he used had a name that started with a Z.”
“There must be several in this area.”
“There are three.”
He ran a thumb along the veneer of the desk. “What is it you want? You’re not interested in any fall color tours. I don’t even think you have a wife.”
“I’m an investigator.” I gave him one of my cards. “Stackpole’s come into an inheritance and he has till the end of the month to come forward, otherwise it goes to the government. We found a reference to ‘Z Travel’ in his records and we thought maybe you were the agency that got him out of town. We need a location or a number where he can be reached.”
“What was that story about the tour?”
“A blind. In cases like this where money is involved, our informants tend to want to cut themselves in.”
He grinned. A lad with a cookie-duster like his can really build you a grin. “I guess you’re not going to tell me what it really is. That inheritance story is older than that poster of Hawaii.”
“Force of habit.” I grinned back. “Stackpole’s got an appointment with a grand jury. If he doesn’t show up it’s going to start costing his employers. The money thing works the other way too. The smell of green ink loosens a lot of tongues.”
“Is there money?”
“If the information’s good.”
“Makes me wish I knew something. If your boy used Zodiac he didn’t go through me.”
“He might have used an alias.” I described him. Dave shook his head. I said, “What about the other agents?”
“I’m managing the office while the regular guy’s in Aruba. I have to okay all checks and I didn’t see any signed Barry Stackpole. Unless he has an account under another name?”
“Who said he paid by check?”
“Everyone does. If someone came in here with cash, one of the girls would ask to see two pieces of identification before she’d accept it.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s not hiding under any of the desks,” he said. “There’s hardly room for our knees there.”
“How about your other office?”
“It’s just a telephone and a place to drop mail. No agent there.”
I got up and tapped the card on the desk with a finger. “You can reach me here if things change. Maybe you can send me on a trip I don’t go on and give you back the ticket to cash.”
“Hell being an honest man,” he said. “Have to go clear around the Horn to make a little change.”
“Choice you make.”
“Nobody makes the choice to be honest, pal.”
“Just testing.”
He smiled under the thatch.
Next I tried R. Zeitgeist on Fort Street near the post office. The first cabbie I got wouldn’t even take me to that neighborhood. The second kept his eyes moving and his hand between the front seat cushions while I counted out the fare. He took off with a cheep of rubber as soon as I slammed the door. A couple of cabs had been shot at in the vicinity earlier in the year.
The ground floor of the building sold auto parts. The counter was just six feet in from the door, with a painted partition behind it with another door cut into it. The real stuff would be stored in back. You went up to the counter and asked for a water pump for a ‘78 Mustang and if they didn’t have one in stock they would back-order it from a parking garage
six blocks over, preferably after dark,
There was no building directory inside the stairway entrance from the street. From the looks of the entrance I was lucky there were stairs. On the second floor I found the elephants’ graveyard for the ninety percent of small businesses that fail within the first two years: credit dentists, disbarred attorneys, auto insurance agencies for the accident prone, easy loan companies, palmists, and karate schools. The rubber-paved hallway smelled of stale hope.
I found the same legend I had read in the telephone book lettered in flaking black on a frosted glass panel with brown grime hammocked in the corners. When I opened the door it bumped against the desk on the other side. The whole place was no bigger than a linen closet and had no windows, but the walls were covered with overlapping posters, orange island sunsets and blue oceanscapes with yellow moons hanging over them. One of the yellow moons was wearing a face with six chins.
The face had a body and the body was jammed into a pink shirt and a green sport coat that gave up where a pair of huge furry wrists began. Two points of a yellow bow tie with red squares on it poked out from under the chins.
While I was staring at this arrangement, the telephone on the desk rang and the moon face stirred and a broad pink palm came up in a holding gesture to me while its mate lifted the receiver to a surprisingly small and well-shaped ear. The other hand came down and picked up a freshly sharpened pencil from a row of them on the blotter and began scribbling on the pad.
“Yeah. Got it. No, I can’t repeat it now. Yeah.” The receiver went back to its cradle. A pair of tiny black eyes looked at me without blinking.
“R. Zeitgeist?” I asked.
“What it says on the door.”
His voice was high and shallow, like a boy’s. I got out of the way of the door enough to shut it. He didn’t ask me to sit down. There wasn’t anything to sit down on. I was giving him the line about setting up a fall color tour when the telephone rang again and the palm came up. He used the next pencil in line.
“Okay, got it.” He cradled the receiver, put down the pencil next to the one he’d used first, saw me turning my head to read what he’d written, and moved his hand over it.
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