“You said yourself bodyguards are just nightlights.”
“They beat total darkness.”
“True. And after I testify they’ll change my name and give me a wheat field in Nebraska to hide in. Feds are just cops with tailors.”
I peered into a glass case full of medieval knives. The blades didn’t look much more drawn than my reflection. “If I keep on looking, will you go home?”
“I’ll go back to Mary M’s and wait to hear something.”
“That isn’t the deal.”
“You can keep it then. People my father’s age die while people my age are trying to book seats on airplanes to the States.”
“You’ll stay put. I mean grow roots.”
She thought about it a second, then nodded.
“I hate bargaining with ex-hookers.”
She laughed. I’d forgotten the sound of it.
“I’ll follow you back.” I touched her elbow and we turned toward the exit. The man in the gray homburg was standing in front of it.
He swept off the hat with a gesture that the novelists call courtly and inclined his head a fraction of an inch. He was my height and bald to the crown, from where his hair hung straight and snow-white down the back of his head to his collar. The moustache was waxed lightly so that the tips turned up and there were deep humor lines around his faded brown eyes. He looked like a Mediterranean Buffalo Bill. “Mr. Walker?” His voice was pleasantly deep with the accent set in it like a precious stone.
I said nothing and waited for the other shoe to drop. Iris’ arm tightened, trapping my hand between it and her ribcage.
“I am Tomaso Acardo,” the man said. “My nephew would like some words with you if you have time.”
15
“WHAT WORDS?”
“That’s entirely up to Francisco. I am not actively involved in the family enterprise. It was my brother’s wish.”
At this point we were sharing the room with the young couple who had argued about the mural and a workman in gray coveralls replacing a lightbulb in one of the display cases. Our voices carried. I lowered mine.
“Last I heard Frankie Acardo was doing a nickel in Jackson on a stolen credit card rap.”
“One to three,” corrected Tomaso. “He was released in December after fourteen months. The entire affair was a miscarriage of justice.”
“It miscarries a lot. Look at the shape it’s in. Where is he now?”
“The Adelaide Hotel. Do you know it?”
“What’s Frankie A doing in a dump like the Adelaide?”
“His father owned it. Owns it. He worked—works out of the eighth floor. Francisco is using it until he returns.”
“It doesn’t sound like you think he’s going to.”
“There comes a point after which you must force yourself to hope. A car is waiting.”
“Mine too. Acardo back seats have a bad habit of coming back empty.”
The moustache bent down slightly, but the eyes remained humorous. They had the look of eyes that had seen most of what they had seen from outside. “The invitation is extended in good faith. The lady is welcome as well.”
“The lady’s on her way home.” I squeezed her elbow for silence; she had started to squirm. “I’ll see her there. Maybe I’ll come around after that. These are working hours.”
“Francisco requested me to tell you that you won’t be out anything for the inconvenience.”
“I laugh at money. How much am I laughing at?”
He laughed himself. It was a deep, quiet rumble that turned all of the heads in the room not engraved in marble. It must have been something to hear when he took the lid off at weddings and wakes. “You’re impertinent,” he said. “I was known for that myself when I was younger.”
“Is that why you’re not actively involved in the family enterprise?”
“As I recall it had a very great deal to do with the decision.” He stopped laughing. “I own quarries, Mr. Walker. Our father, Giovanni’s and mine, gave me my first and now I have twenty. Undoubtedly a number of the sculptures in this room came from my stone. That first quarry was intended as an insult, a symbol of my father’s disappointment, rather in the way that parents of my generation used to leave lumps of coal in the stockings of ill-behaved children. Have you checked the price of coal lately, Mr. Walker?”
“So how come you’re running errands?”
“My name is still Acardo. My nephew is new to authority and a mistake on his part would brand me as thoroughly. There has been at least one federal agent parked outside my house since I was forty.”
“Did he follow me here too?”
“I think I will leave that to Francisco to explain.” He put on his homburg, cocking it an eighth of an inch over his right eye. “Shall I tell him to expect you?”
“I get down to that neighborhood sometimes.”
“Sometime today would be to your advantage.”
He touched his hat and left us then, his custom shoes making no noise at all on the carpeted floor.
“What was that all about?” Iris asked.
“Jackie Acardo’s brother.” I let go of her elbow. “Looks like son Frank agrees with the cops about Sam Mozo dusting his old man. So far I haven’t had anything to do with the Acardos, just with your ex.”
“I wish you’d stop calling him that. It isn’t as if we picked out a silver pattern together. You’re not going.”
“It isn’t every day you get an Acardo invitation without guns.”
“Our deal’s not even dry yet. You’re supposed to be looking for my father.”
“You won’t need a father if you’re dead. Sam Mozo wants you that way if he can’t have you out of town, and the Acardos want Sam Mozo. It’s a question of priorities.”
“You don’t know they want any part of him. His name didn’t even come up.”
“I’ll know after I talk to Frank.”
Her eyes were large on me, coffee brown with the pupils wide. “There’s more to it. You’re up to something.”
I put on an innocent look. It went over like the two-dollar bill. Rivera wouldn’t have painted it and the DIA wouldn’t have hung it. I saw her back home. All that art was making me feel out of my depth.
Automobile money had put up the Adelaide, back when taxes were a democratic joke and red brick came five dollars the hundredweight. The brick was stained now, the canopy out front pigeon-striped and fraying, but the vaulted lobby was big enough to park a fleet of trucks inside and the old leather chairs and sofa had been redone recently in dark green Naugahyde. The ferns had fronds as big as Volkswagens. A wet snow was falling outside; as I paused to wipe my feet six pairs of eyes watched me above newspapers. Among the men seated in the chairs, the FBI agents were easy to distinguish from the local muscle. The local muscle wore hats.
The clerk behind the marble reservation desk was a big shale-eyed man who looked like a bartender. The shale eyes moved behind me when I asked for the number of Frank Acardo’s room and two of the men who had been reading when I came in joined me. They had on narrow-brimmed hats and light topcoats open over three-piece suits and striped neckties, one red and silver, the other gray and white. Gray-and-White was a redhead with freckles on his face and hands and an upswung Irish nose. He was my height. The other was a shade shorter with ears that stuck out from hairless temples and I knew from them that from there on up he was as bald as a bearing. His eyebrows were thin and so fair that at first they looked as if he’d shaved them too. His mouth was a straight lipless line like a coin slot.
They were killers. You’ll hear that it’s in their eyes, but eyes don’t kill people; the redhead’s were merry-looking, in fact. It was in their plumb-steady posture and in the way their neat clean short-nailed hands hung in front of their thighs with the fingers bent slightly, and it was in the way you looked at them and were glad you’d left your gun behind. The odds were better carrying a club into a rockslide.
“Name?”
The clerk’s tone w
asn’t entirely impolite. I told him and he lifted a flesh-colored receiver off a cradle behind the desk without dialing and waited and then repeated my name into the mouthpiece. After a second he replaced the receiver and nodded at the two men. Without actually touching me they steered me to the right and around a corner to the elevators. We stepped into an open car and when the doors were closed I stood for the frisk by the redhead while the shaven-headed one watched and then the redhead stepped back and his companion patted me down again. Finally he took off my hat and ran a finger around inside the sweatband.
“Do I get to do you now?” I asked when he returned it.
Neither of them said anything. A button got pushed and I had the quietest ride ever, watching the numbers light up in orange along the top of the car. It stopped on eight with a tiny sigh and the doors slid open on the biggest hotel room in the world.
They had removed all the partitions from that floor, including those defining the hallway, so that we stepped directly into a city-block of room carpeted in midnight blue with brushed-aluminum panels on the walls—the effect was of a room lined in dull silver—and track lighting in the suspended ceiling and a stately row of green-draped windows like the arches at Versailles. The office and the living area blended into each other in such a way that the tenant could rise in the morning from the rumpled king-size bed in the far left corner and go through the door at the rear for a shower in what was presumably the bathroom and put on one of the couple of dozen suits hanging in the walk-in closet with its doors folded open by the bed and take a leisurely breakfast at the table between two of the windows and then go to work at the big no-nonsense slab oak desk with a tufted leather swivel behind it inside an L of wooden file cabinets in the near right corner. The place had everything but a doghouse.
The dog that would have used it was sixty pounds of short tawny coat stretched over broad muscled chest and a pair of haunches that stood out like fireplace fenders when it got up from its place in the center of the blue carpet to trot over and sniff at my ankles. It had a square head and skimpy ears and round black eyes set close above a cartoon muzzle that bent down. It didn’t growl or bark. Pit bulls generally don’t make much noise even when they’re gnawing happily away on your tibia.
“Take the mutt out for a walk or something.”
The speaker was tying his tie in front of one of the mirrored closet door panels, all tapered back and narrow hips in a tight vest and pinstriped brown pants. The redhead got a leash off the coffee table and snapped it onto the dog’s collar and pulled it away from me, or tried to. It wanted to go on sniffing at me but he quirted it behind the left ear with the leather loop and it lost interest. It had a bobbed tail and when it turned to enter the elevator a ragged white scar rippled on its left shoulder. The hair had grown in around it in conflicting grains.
“Lose it in traffic if you can,” said the man at the mirror. The elevator doors closed.
“Garibaldi’s a good dog.”
This was Tomaso Acardo, seated at the table between the windows in his shirtsleeves with a napkin tucked elegantly inside his collar. He was sawing away at a piece of roast chicken on a china dish. A tall-stemmed glass half filled with yellow wine stood at his right elbow.
“He’s a mange. And a loser to boot.”
“To win you must first care how the fight comes out. Are you a dog man, Mr. Walker?”
“Depends on the dog.”
He sipped wine and removed the droplets from his moustache with a corner of the napkin. “I bought Garibaldi from a man who fought him in Iroquois Heights. The dog was recovering from a bad slashing and the man was making arrangements for his next fight. I paid him five hundred dollars over and above the veterinary bill. I can’t stand to see a dumb brute suffer. Giovanni was keeping him for me.”
“I guess a dog needs room to run,” I said.
“It is large, isn’t it? My brother believed in big.”
“Al Capone shit.” The other man reached a pinstriped brown jacket off a hanger in the closet and turned around. “The building’s up for sale. Whoever buys it can raze it or make a monument out of it or turn it into a planter. I’m moving the operation up to Grosse Pointe where it belongs.”
“Your father won’t like it,” said Tomaso.
“My father’s dead. Fucking spicks hit him in the head and fed him to a crusher.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Right. He makes an appointment to meet somebody in a beergarden at Joy and Evergreen, he don’t say who, and the last anybody sees of him he’s on his way there with a carnation in his lapel. He fell in love with a black barmaid and now they’re raising kids and tulips in Mombasa.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t taken against his will.”
Frank Acardo looked at me for the first time. He had dark brown hair combed over his ears, a long jaw, small eyes that snapped, and a hook nose that on his uncle would be called aquiline but that on him could have been used to open bottles. His face beveled back from it sharply like the hull of an icebreaker. He was my age and a whole lot more ugly.
“You,” he said. “What’s your connection with Sam Mozo?”
“He’s my aunt.”
“Fucking comedian. I’ve had a tail on that little Spanish asshole since September. He stops on West Grand River to jaw with you, one of my men follows you up to this crummy third-floor office afterwards. What’s it say on the door? ‘A. Walker Investigations.’ I get to wondering what a private muzzle’s got to talk about with Sam Mozo. I put Tomaso there on the muzzle’s ass.”
“Nice job,” I told Tomaso. “I didn’t spot you.”
“I helped smuggle Allied fliers over the Alps into Switzerland under Mussolini’s nose. You’re a difficult man to keep in sight. I imagine it’s your habit.”
“Tomaso, he’s got manners,” Acardo continued. “Maybe an invite from him gets better results than Mozo got trying to coax you into that fucking Lincoln of his. Also why risk good talent on a dark horse when that’s what family’s for? What the fuck are you grinning at?”
“Only in Detroit,” I said.
“What.”
“There are terrorists running all over Europe in bed-sheets killing people for looking American and there’s enough fission piled up in each hemisphere to blow the world into marbles several times over. The sun is burning itself out and what the governor spends on hairdressers would feed a Third World country for a year. Only in Detroit would a cheap gangster bother to air his Jimmy Cagney impression for a private detective like it was 1931 and Eliot Ness was banging on his door.”
Tomaso chuckled in that deep rumbling bass. Frank swung his hook on him. “Ain’t you got a gravel pit to inspect or something?”
“You’re overdoing the ain’ts and double negatives. Mr. Walker knows we send our young to college.”
“Zio Capro.” The hook swung back my way. “After talking to Mozo you went straight from your office to police headquarters. Why?”
“I lost my virginity. I thought someone might have turned it in.”
“Hey, I can make a call and find out what you were doing there.”
I took a seat in an upright chair covered in yellow vinyl. It looked to be the most uncomfortable there and it probably was. I didn’t want to be comfortable in the sort of room that would contain Frank Acardo. I broke a fresh cigarette out of the deck. I lit it and dragged over a smoking stand with some tea-colored butts in it and got rid of the match. I’d taken my second pull before he realized I wasn’t going to answer him. He kept the lid on.
“Listen, I don’t want to get ugly.”
“Too late.”
“I could bounce him a little.” This was the guy with the clean head in hat and topcoat standing sentry at the elevator. He had a thin voice for what he was.
“It wouldn’t work.” Frank was studying me now with his hands in his pockets. “It’s got to do with that dark meat Tomaso saw you hanging out with at the museum, don’t it? He overheard some of it. Uncle Goat’s
got good ears; they’re just about the only thing about him that’s good. Okay, I can cut a deal same as my old man. What are your rates?”
“You couldn’t afford them.”
“Mr. Acardo.” Baldy was pleading now.
“Save it, Jonesy. Look, it ain’t like we don’t want the same thing. Mozo killed my old man, he’s out to put the hurt on your girlfriend for some reason. You guys don’t like working for free, shit, who does? So maybe I make it a little more worth your time to help put him underground.”
“What’s wrong with Jonesy?”
“His hands are tied. Mine too.” He leaned back on the arm of a big leather chair, hands still in his pockets to show how tightly they were tied. “See, I got people to answer to same as everyone else. My old man sat on the board of the national organization but me, I’m just one of the fish. I know Sam Mozo offed him, know it here”—he took out a hand and tapped his left lung—“but it’s just like in court, I got to prove it. You put your nose to it, bring me something I can take to the board, the rest is up to Jonesy and Flynn there outside taking the mutt for a pee. Next day you get a brick in the mail, only it ain’t no brick. Get yourself a decent office in a building with an elevator, hey, maybe even some blonde snatch sits out front telling people she’s your secretary, how’s that?”
“I’ve got a client.”
“Okay, you like it black, I can get next to that. Scratch the blonde. You won’t go to hell for taking money from two places for the same job. It gets done, everyone’s happy. What do you say, sport?”
“Why don’t you just call me chamaco?”
“Now, what the hell is that?”
“I have an idea you won’t be able to meet Mr. Walker’s price.” Tomaso slid his knife and fork onto his plate and pushed it away to finish his wine.
“Not money, then,” said Frank. “We’re an old established firm, we got friends all over. Maybe we can do something for you.”
“Maybe you can,” I said.
16
MARY M SAID, “No.”
It was daytime and she was wearing red slacks and pink high-top tennis shoes like the kids wear and a black cableknit sweater with a white collar rolled out over the neck. From the waist up it looked like a Catholic school uniform and she looked like a particularly precocious sixteen-year-old despite the lines in her face. She was looking at Jonesy, who had reached back into some memory and removed his hat from his shaved head on her doorstep.
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