“I only know him by reputation,” I said. “All bad.”
“Then what’s it to you who showed him the door?”
“I think Paula Royce knows. She isn’t saying.”
“Same question. Her account’s paid, I heard. As far as you’re concerned, anyway.”
“Yeah.” I whumped through an axle-deep puddle, spraying wings of muddy water up past the windows. The wipers came up once, shrugged some stray drops off the windshield, and went back to bed.
“I’ll be damned,” she said. “She did it again.”
Her voice sounded strained. I looked at her, but I couldn’t see her face for shadows. “I didn’t know she did it before. Did what?”
“Did you just like she did Bud. How’s she do it without apples?”
“You’re snockered.”
“And right. And sick. Stop the car.”
I glanced at her again, then leaned into the curb, braked, and snapped on the dome light. Her face was gray-white and she was shivering. The rouge on her cheeks stood out like red wax.
“What were you drinking?” I asked.
“Gin and tonic.” She smiled weakly. “Must’ve been the tonic.”
“Can you hold out till your place?”
“I don’t think so.” The words came out in a string. She clawed open the door on the passenger’s side.
I watched my reflection in the windshield, tinted green from the reflected dash light, and drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. I was spending a good deal of time lately listening to people throw up. The pay was lousy, but you couldn’t beat the glamour.
She sagged back against the seat, breathing heavily. I gave her my handkerchief. She pressed it against her mouth and closed her eyes. The door on her side drifted almost shut. I reached across her lap and jerked it the rest of the way. “Going to live?”
She nodded with her eyes closed. “With my luck.” It came from just in back of her tongue.
We resumed rolling. “Three drinks don’t usually come down so heavy on you hardboiled types,” I said. “That pill-and-alcohol combination’s dynamite. It’ll land you in a box one of these nights.”
“I told you I only drop them at parties. I drank too fast, that’s all.” Her breath was coming more easily now. She tried to give me back my handkerchief. I told her to keep it.
The rain started up again, drumming the roof and stitching up the puddles standing in the street. Then it was over. I took the Edsel Ford to East Jefferson and turned down a private road lined with large brick houses, finally screwing the Olds into a space behind the one Fern pointed out. The lights of Windsor showed across the oily black surface of St. Clair. I unlocked the front door with her key and helped her, still wobbling on her stilts, up a broad staircase to the second floor. I used another key, found the wall switch, and stepped inside with her hanging on to my arm.
The living room was fifteen feet by ten with a brown-and-beige Oriental rug under a couple of modular sofas, a dark walnut table with curved legs and gold inlays all around the top, and a stereo console with a color TV screen hidden behind doors like a chamber pot. A casement window at the far end opened onto a wrought-iron balcony. A door to the left led into a room that was probably a study when it wasn’t full of stacked cardboard cartons, and a hallway to the right gave access to two bedrooms and the aforementioned one and a half baths. Something that might have been called a kitchenette, containing the usual round of built-in cupboards and appliances and a square of red linoleum large enough for one person to stand on, jogged left just ahead of the balcony window. Light found its way in somehow through frosted panels in the ceilings. The apartment took up the whole floor.
When I finished the grand tour, I found Fern curled up at the end of one of the sofas. She had flung both her shoes in the general direction of the window. One of the straps that held up her gown had fallen down over a white shoulder from something less than neglect.
“Sorry I can’t offer you coffee or anything corny like that,” she said dreamily. “I’m still unpacking. There’s a bottle of something in the kitchen cupboard, though, and glasses.”
“We’ve both gone the distance with stuff that comes in bottles tonight.” I dragged smoke down into my lungs. “You look a little green to me yet.”
“I’m all right. Why don’t you sit down over here?”
“Thanks, I’ve been sitting all night.”
The raw silver in her eyes took on a hard glitter. “I guess my losing my lunch killed the mood. I do lots worse things. What do you want, Evening in Paris and candles?”
I took the Winston out of my mouth and looked at the end. “It doesn’t happen very often,” I said, “but every now and then in my work, someone gives me a horse I just have to peek at its teeth. Odd considering my virile good looks and gorgeous build, but I still haven’t come around to thinking of myself as the type a rich and attractive single lady would call up on Christmas Eve because she can’t find a man to stack up against me. I ask myself, am I worth six hundred bucks in dress and two hours at the grooming station, and I have to answer no. Then I have to ask why me.”
“Could be I’m slumming.”
“Could be you are. I still have to ask why me.”
Her expression softened. She reclined slightly, and stretched a leg. The gown had a slit there that fell open to expose a rod and a half of silken thigh. “You’re different, that’s why you. You have wit—sort of. You don’t mess with empty chatter, which is rare in my circle. And you don’t believe it, but you are very good-looking, in the same way that a puma I saw once in the Detroit Zoo looked very good. Dangerous. I had a sudden craving for the exotic.”
I wrinkled my nose. “What do you mean, I have wit—sort of?”
She laughed and patted the sofa next to her hip. “Take a load off your brains.”
I finished my cigarette and went over and took a load off my brains. As I did I snatched a glimpse of myself in the casement window. You good-looking puma, you.
I got back on the road at 2:30 a.m. I didn’t meet another car for miles. Colored lights hung in windows and on trees outside, casting elongated red and green reflections on the glossy street surface. The radio was playing “Silent Night.” I started to sing along but forgot the words after “virgin mother and child.” My mouth was dry. I thought of the bottle of good Scotch I’d left standing on my desk. The office was only a couple of miles out of my way. I shot past Hamtramck and home, got off the Ford onto Grand River, and double-parked in front of my building.
It’s a three-story climb to where I do business at the end of an echoing hall decorated in early Warner Brothers. During the day I leave the door to the outer office unlocked so that any customers I might attract can sit down and read a period magazine while they wait. At night I lock it. I also turn out the light that was now spilling through the glass and across the hall. I had a visitor.
It was a hell of a time to be without a gun. I hadn’t thought I’d need one to get a bottle out of my own office. I went back down to my car and returned carrying the Luger I kept in a special compartment under the dash. Avoiding loose boards under the runner, I crept along the edge of the hallway to the door with A. WALKER INVESTIGATIONS lettered in black on the pebbled glass and opened it noiselessly, inching the Luger and part of my face around the jamb.
Paula Royce was sitting on the upholstered bench looking straight at me. She was wearing a light blue belted vinyl raincoat and a soft felt hat like a man’s with the brim pulled down all around her head. Her nostrils fluttered.
She had a gun I recognized in one hand.
11
SHE WAS CROWDED into the far corner of the bench, her free hand braced on the curved wooden arm, the fingers spread and pressing so tight the bones showed through the flesh. The .32 in her other hand—the same gun I’d taken away from Bud a week earlier—was braced on her knee and pointing where most of the muzzles in this case had been pointing. It was too steady for a frightened young woman from Bolivia. Her eyes were very large under
the pulled-down hat brim. The pupils covered the irises. She was as high as a broadcast tower and she didn’t know me from Jack the Ripper.
I stood there holding my Luger and wondering how long a man could live without breathing.
Time sneaked past, a great deal more of it than my watch indicated later. Then her chin trembled and the gun lay down on her leg, pulling her hand over with it. My lungs started working again. I unclamped my fingers from the jamb and came the rest of the way inside. It was wonderful how I could do that without my feet touching the floor. Lowering the automatic, I reached down carefully with my other hand and slid the revolver out from under hers. It was that easy.
I sniffed the barrel. Spent cordite always smells the same. I rotated the cylinder, thumbing out shells and replacing them. Two empties. I dropped it into my coat pocket, there to pick up all kinds of interesting microscopic matter for the lab boys to scratch their heads over, and stuck the Luger inside my waistband.
“Let’s you and me get cozy in the inner sanctum.” I put out a hand.
She looked at it, as a pup will when you use it to try to direct her attention elsewhere, then reached up and grasped it. Her hand was cold as expected. I exerted very little pressure and she rose. I had to steer her toward the door marked PRIVATE, and while I was fumbling for the key she sagged against me with all her weight and I had to clamp my other arm around her to keep her face off my rug.
Not much to inventory in my brain studio. The same oak desk, too old to be smart and not old enough to be back in style, the same odd chairs and backless sofa, the same tired file cabinet with two drawers full of files, one full of cobwebs and mouse droppings, and a change of shirts in the fourth, the same green metal safe, the same framed original Casablanca poster mounted on the wall opposite my investigator’s license in another frame and a peekaboo calendar to preserve the image. Dust and dead flies on the window sill. It was easier to catch leprechauns dancing on a sprig of heather than the building’s fabled cleaning service at work. I deposited Paula in the customer’s chair and walked around the desk and dropped into my swivel-shrieker still wearing my hat and coat.
This was yeoman labor, not fit for the expensive Scotch in the bottle on the desk. I swapped it for the pint of Hiram Walker’s in the bottom drawer and poured myself a slug. That was my thinking brand. It went down in one easy installment.
“I’d offer you some,” I said, “but I already did one lecture tonight about drugs and alcohol.”
She made no response, but she’d heard me right enough. She was sitting on the edge of the chair with her knees pressed together and her hands in her lap like visitor’s day at Miss Fremont’s School for Genteel Young Ladies. Her back was unnaturally straight. I figured Benzedrine from the dilated pupils. Bennies and revolvers. Dr. Nitro, meet Mr. Glycerine.
I burned one cigarette, chain-lit another, and burned most of that. Not saying anything. Letting her get used to the place. There’s something comfortingly clinical about two people sitting on either side of a desk that chases the dragons away. But not after three on a wet Christmas morning with two guns in the room, one of them fired very recently. Those two empty cartridges kept staring at me like hollow nightmare eyes. The tobacco had no taste. I made a face and mashed out the butt in my glass souvenir ashtray.
I started slow. “How’d you get in?”
She stirred, said, “I—I slipped the lock, like they do in the police shows, with my driver’s license. It’s not as easy as they make it look.” Her voice was tight and very small, like a grown woman playing a little girl. The words tumbled out almost without pauses.
“Why here?”
“There was no place else. I didn’t know where you lived. I was going to stay here tonight and wait for you to come in tomorrow morning.”
“It’s tomorrow now. Merry Christmas.”
“Oh. I forgot.”
I used the eraser end of a pencil to poke out a live ash in the tray. “I’m going to have to step pretty carefully here,” I said. “There’s a little matter of my license to practice and what I should and should not know to keep the cops happy and me in business. I want you just to answer the questions I ask and not volunteer anything. Am I coming through?” She nodded. “Tell me.”
“I understand.”
“Here we go, then. Where’s Bud?”
“In the house in Iroquois Heights. In the kitchen. He—he’s—”
“I asked where he is, not what he is. Don’t volunteer. When did you leave?”
“I don’t know. Eleven or twelve. I don’t know. I didn’t look at the clock. I just left.”
“Where were you before you went into the kitchen and saw Bud?”
“In bed. I took some pills to sleep.”
“That was when?”
“Around nine.”
“Bud was in the house when you went to bed?”
“Yes. He was always in the house. He was afraid to leave me alone for more than an hour.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
I phrased the next one slowly, playing Russian roulette with words. “When you went to bed, before you woke up and went into the kitchen and saw Bud—how was he feeling?” Was he breathing, for instance.
She understood the question. “Very healthy.”
So much for her role in the ballet. My throat opened up a little. “When you were in the bedroom, did you hear anything?”
“Maybe. I didn’t think so when I—saw Bud. But I think now I heard a door slam. I thought that’s what it was. I may have dreamed it. I can’t tell you when I heard it; I’d been in bed for a while.”
“Nothing else.”
She shook her head quickly. Her eyes glistened. She was coming down from the uppers. Coming down hard enough to overshoot normal by a country mile. I had to work fast before I lost her.
“Let me bridge here. After you got up and saw Bud, you took something to open your eyes—a lot of somethings—and came straight to me. In what?”
“Bud’s Jeep. My car was in the garage and his was blocking the driveway. I didn’t want to waste time switching them around.”
“You parked it where?”
“Around the corner on Stanley.”
Right on my back porch. I knocked another inch off the bottle. The stuff burned a furrow like molten steel down my tobacco-roughened throat. “Back some. You found the gun in the kitchen?”
“In the living room, on the floor. I picked it up on my way through from the bedroom. That was before I found—”
“—time to get dressed. Brush your teeth. Gargle. Put on your false eyelashes and split.”
“Yes.” She spoke quietly, almost inaudibly. Her Spanish accent was thicker than normal. “Before I found time to do all that.”
“I’m going to get hypothetical now. If something were to happen to good old Bud, if say he were to get his tongue caught in the car door and dragged to his reward, who would the cops figure did the driving?”
That threw her for a moment. She was dropping even faster than I’d feared. When you throw amphetamines up against barbiturates you just can’t be sure who’s going to win. “Me,” she said finally. “They’d think it was me.”
Well, I had to hear it. That was as far as I could take it without knocking over any of the pylons I’d set up for myself. “Are you ready to tell me what it was Bud thought he was protecting you from?”
“I can’t.” Large dark eyes, the pupils contracting even as I looked at them. She was having trouble closing her mouth now. It hung open between sentences. Blue-white teeth against dark skin. “It’s not fair to get you involved.”
“I’m involved. Lady, I’m involved. What do you want me to do?”
“I have to go someplace. Anyplace not here. I need time to think. I—I’m not sure I could face any kind of questioning just now. The people who would ask them have too many tricks.” She got a hand inside a coat pocket on the second try, prowled around for a second, and came up with a key, which she dropped on
the desk. “Bud’s father—his stepfather, Esterhazy—has a cottage in Canada. He calls it his fishing cabin, although he doesn’t fish. That’s the only key. Bud said his stepfather gave it to him because he’s too busy most of the time to get away and he thought a young man might like to be by himself from time to time. I imagine someone checked it out when Bud was missing. If I could just have a week alone I know I could face whatever’s in store.”
“A week’s forever in a homicide investigation. Hypothetically speaking.” I studied the key without picking it up or touching it. That was the point of no return. “You want a chauffeur. The squeal would be out on your car and Bud’s Jeep two minutes after someone wandered into your kitchen. Making me an accessory after the fact and probably half a dozen other nasty things the prosecutor’s office will no doubt be able to dream up. Why am I doing this, again? I forgot.”
By now her eyes were incapable of any kind of expression. “Maybe because you said a week ago you wanted to help.”
“That wasn’t meant to be a blank check.”
“I’m just asking you to take me into Windsor. I’ll catch a bus from there.”
“Just down the block would hang me just as high.” I got up and turned my back on her, looking out the window. Most of the colored lights were out now. The cityscape was this dark only once a year, when no early-morning cleaning crews were at work and parents were snatching dreams between stuffing stockings and that hour when the staircases rumbled under bare feet and greedy little hands tore the paper and ribbons off toys that grew steadily more expensive in relation to the dwindling time between reception and destruction. Somewhere on the east side a lone siren growled briefly and was silent. A routine traffic beef, or some bored uniform welcoming the holiday with a quick flip of the switch. No matter what time it is on what day, someone is always working somewhere.
I turned around and picked up the key. Why should I be any different?
12
THE HALLWAY ON my floor had a brand new lowered ceiling of pebbled glass panels. I took the customer’s chair from the office and climbed up and raised one of the panels and ditched the .32 in the space between it and the old ceiling. It wouldn’t still be there thirty minutes into a professional search, but it was the best I could do early on a Christmas morning.
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