Another brief conference with Hornet’s back turned my way. You could have projected Lawrence of Arabia on it.
Thaler moved out of his shadow. “Me, if you get a line on those converters. The lieutenant if you turn a suspect. Copy us both, of course.”
Hornet said, “If you lose our numbers, I’ll book you on obstruction and interfering with the police in the performance of their duties.”
“Same old specialty of the house,” I said.
“Except by then we’ll have everything we need to shake loose a warrant. That’s the part that sold me: If you don’t follow through, the deal never happened. Can’t recommend the diet at County,” he said. “Beanie-wienies and sauerkraut from the can.”
“Two days without fuzz steaming up my collar,” I said. “That’s like two weeks in real time.”
Mary Ann Thaler took me home and I chased sleep for an hour. When it finished outrunning me I got up and made coffee. An unfamiliar car was parked on the street a few doors down. Someone with foresight had driven it through a mud puddle, but it was the latest model for three blocks. I didn’t know if it belonged to Detroit or Washington, but either way it violated the terms of our deal. I drank from my cup and watched it though the window with mixed emotions. I’d traded a counterfeit bill for a blind horse. It was an honorable arrangement that no one intended to honor.
TEN
I sat down in the living room with my coffee and dialed a number I knew by heart. On the other end, the bell was hooked up to an air horn to be heard above the whine of power wrenches.
“Ja.” Ernst Dierdorf picked up just ahead of AT&T.
“A little heavy on the Teutonic this morning.”
“Oh. It’s you.” He racheted back the accent. He had a thousand customers and knew each one by voice. His ears were tuned to tell which belt was loose by its whistle and whether a rattle belonged to a stuck lifter or a broken engine mount.
I said I needed a loaner.
“You bang up that Cutlass again?”
“That was just once, and years ago. It’s fine. Just too easy to spot.”
I told him what I needed. The arrangements were involved, but he listened without interrupting and didn’t ask me to repeat anything. He said to sit tight and broke the connection.
OK Towing & Repair was an outlaw garage, operating in open violation of federal law. Neither he nor any of his employees was a certified mechanic, and no framed proof of certification hung on any of his walls. Overnight, the legislation, which was intended to discourage incompetence and price-gouging, had destroyed the old American custom of a garage on every corner and quadrupled the cost of even the most basic repairs. Ernst, who had left Germany with his father to avoid just that kind of tampering with private enterprise, kept a mean little rat terrier of an attorney on a leash to stay in business.
When I finished the pot and put on another, the unfamiliar car was still in the same place, all alone now that my neighbors had all left for work. I couldn’t tell if anyone was inside. There would be two: one to drive, the other to get out and tail me on foot in case I took the last parking space.
A knuckle banged on the back door. I let Ernst in while the coffee was brewing and shook his hand. “I expected you to send a flunky.”
“I have a vested interest in that car. I raised it from a wing nut. You’re lucky I let you drive it.”
It was the first time I’d seen him without coveralls. He wore a plaid sport coat over a blue denim shirt, narrow necktie, and jeans. Nothing fit him properly; his hunched, shriveled frame would challenge a master tailor. A jack or something had slipped early in his working life, crushing parts of him that had been replaced with titanium and plastic. The thought of him dragging himself over fences to get to my house unobserved made me cringe.
I let him peer around the edge of the curtain at the unfamiliar car outside. He made a disgusted noise with his tongue against his teeth. “Designed in Canada, assembled in Mexico with parts made in China. Like feeding yourself with a fork, a corn tortilla, and chopsticks.”
“Coffee?”
“Strong?”
“Brutal.”
He took plenty of sugar. I was pretty sure he was on his third set of teeth. His head with its thickness of blonde hair—graying now—and aging but clean lines needed a Heidelburg dueling scar on one cheek to complete the effect, but apart from his looks he was thoroughly Americanized. The accent only came out when he didn’t want to disappoint a customer who preferred the stereotype.
“Sixty-five-and-a-half Skylark Gran Sport.” He pushed a plain ring with two keys on it across the table in the breakfast nook. “White with patches of rust-red primer. It was scheduled for painting Friday. Four-oh-one Wildcat engine.”
“I thought the Wildcat was four-forty-five.”
“That’s the number of pounds of torque it delivers at twenty-eight hundred RPM. Four-oh-one refers to cubic inches.”
“I’m used to four-fifty-five in the Cutlass.”
“You won’t notice much difference. Buick called it ‘a Howitzer with windshield wipers’ in its advertising.”
“Suspension?”
“Four control-arm in back, roll bar in front for stability. Boxed frame. Those were standard. I made some improvements.” He looked smug.
I gave him the keys to the Cutlass.
“How fancy do you want it?” he asked. “I can keep ’em busy for twenty minutes, then I’ve got a brake job that can’t wait.”
“Ten should do it. Stick to the limit and don’t let ’em get a good look at who’s behind the wheel.”
He finished his coffee. “I parked two streets over like you said, straight shot from your back door.”
“Thanks, Ernst. What’s the damage?”
“Don’t scare me with such talk. Top off the tank—you’ve got additive?”
“I’ve got a case in the garage.” Classic muscle cars won’t run on modern unleaded gas without help.
“I put some in the trunk just in case. Fill it up when you’re finished and get it back to me in one piece. I’ve got a customer on the hook with homes in Grosse Pointe and London. He wants to ship it back and forth across the Atlantic by air.”
“The economy must not be so bad after all.”
“Oh, he’s hurting. He couldn’t swing the asking on the forty-nine Merc he had his eyes on originally. You take the cure?”
I caught his meaning after a second. “Nope. Still smoking.”
“Not in the car. I reupholstered it in red leather.”
“At least let me pay your hourly rate.”
“That’s work. This cloak-and-dagger business beats the grease pit.” An idea took some of the chill out of blue eyes. “What you can do, as long as you’re not using the Cutlass, is let me bang out the dings and give it a spray job. I’ll do it for cost. It’s a sin to hide that engine inside a brown paper bag.”
“I need the protective coloration. They’ll shoot me if they think they can’t catch me.”
We stood and shook hands again. I reminded him to obey the traffic laws. Although he could dismantle a ’55 Thunderbird convertible and reassemble it as a station wagon, he was an unreliable driver. They say Stradivari couldn’t play a note.
*
As the garage door trundled shut, I watched the unfamiliar vehicle separate itself from the curb and fall in a block and a half behind my car. The distance made it a closed tail; I wasn’t supposed to know it existed. This team must have been using a coloring book for a manual. If it was Washington, I hoped that meant they were saving their best people for actual terrorists. If it was Detroit, it was business as usual.
I was feeling athletic; my morning pills had kicked in. I let myself out the back door, hopped a fence and a drainage ditch, and found the Buick where Ernst had said I would, a two-door hardtop built wide and low to the ground. I’d been afraid it would attract too much attention, but the chalky white paint worn down to dull reddish-brown primer in big swatches on the hood and fenders blended in with most of
the beaters on the street. A connoisseur would spot it for what it was, but I didn’t plan to be driving it long enough to build an entourage.
The instruments in the dash were pleasantly simple, just a speedometer, odometer, and fuel and oil gauges and an AM radio, like in the Cutlass. Whoever had ordered it from the factory hadn’t popped for air-conditioning or a tachometer, but Ernst had installed seat belts, also optional under LBJ. The interior smelled of good leather and the bucket seat embraced my back and hips with warmth from the sun.
It started with a discreet rumble, insulated by glass packs in the twin pipes. The transmission shifted smoothly and there was little play in the wheel. Just in case Hornet or Thaler was double-teaming me, I drove around the block, but no one who was behind me when I pulled out was still there when I finished.
I called Gale Kreski on the cell. He put me on hold to deal with a music-store customer, then came back on. A beat pulsed in the background: the same basic broth every rapper in two continents used for stock. That answered a question I hadn’t intended to ask him, whether anyone in creation listened to hip-hop when he was alone.
I said, “There’s been a development.”
“Yeah, I watch the news. That your client in the morgue?”
“He paid up front. My offer’s still good.” I’d thought his generation got its current events from late-night comedy. “Just a couple of follow-up questions.”
“I heard he was beaten to death. I didn’t do it.”
“That answers one.” I wanted to ask him about MacArthur Industries. I’d been distracted the first time by his tale of personal woe, but I wasn’t about to do it over the telephone. I wanted to see him to find out if he’d react to the name the way Eugenia Pappas had seemed to.
“Listen, I got an appointment with my lawyer in thirty minutes. Try me this afternoon.” Just try, his tone seemed to say. I said I would and hit END.
Ouida, the personal assistant, answered at the Pappas number. She sounded a little more friendly this morning, but in an impersonal professional way. She said her employer was out tending to charitable business.
“That’s okay. It’s you I wanted to talk to.”
“I wouldn’t waste your time, Mr. Walker. I’m still waiting to hear back from the people Mrs. Pappas asked me to make contact with. I’ll call once I have—after I report to her.” She hung up in my face, but not without saying good-bye, in an impersonal professional way.
I punched in another number and got the pawnbroker who’d put me on to Pappas, Bud Lite, and Johnny Toledo. Him I asked point-blank about MacArthur. There was no getting a significant reaction from him, in person or over the air.
He at least didn’t seem to have seen the news. “I admire your faith in the inflation rate,” he said. “That money was for services rendered, not a deposit on the future.”
“I’m headed away from your shop. Give me something worth turning around for at today’s gas prices and I’ll shower you with euros.”
“The name don’t ring a bell, but drop in sometime after I get a chance to poke around. I’m getting a little sick of buying back the same toaster oven from Mr. Willis.”
I put away the cell. I don’t know how I’d ever gotten along without it.
Sometimes the second day of an investigation is just a carbon copy of the first. You go back and plow the same tired ground hoping for a quarter acre of something more promising than dust.
Meanwhile I had some fun for as long as I had the loaner. Pulling away from a stop sign at the beginning of a long deserted block, I laid parallel black stripes on the asphalt and topped sixty before I had to slow for a changing light at the next intersection. The noise was a kind of mating call. As I sat waiting, feeling the idle vibrating in my crotch, a couple of kids with too much metal in their faces to have come from anywhere but the scrubbed-white suburbs slid alongside me in the outside lane.
They were driving a Plymouth Roadrunner rusted through at the wheel wells, as holey as Venetian lace. That meant they’d invested more of their parents’ money in the plant than in the body. Recognizing the Gran Sport for a fellow dark horse, the kid in the passenger’s seat hung a billy-goat beard out his window with a grin in it. I bared my teeth back. His buddy behind the wheel gunned twice and tore off at the green with a fine shriek of rubber he wasn’t paying for, adding black smoke to his pre-existing carbon footprint. I gave him half a block for confidence, then blasted past his little 383.
I shot past a city cruiser tucked nose out inside a cracked half driveway ending in a tangle of weeds belonging to one of the fabled local empty lots. I throttled down, but the lights and siren came on. Just then the Roadrunner, accelerating to catch up, skinned within a sixty-fourth of an inch of the cruiser’s left front fender. The officer in the driver’s seat forgot about me and went after the bird in hand. As the kids turned obediently into the curb I gave them the Red Baron salute and spun around the corner. Okay, I’m a kid too. The piercing’s optional.
Slowing to the limit, I slid the AM needle all the way left and right looking for something appropriate from Jan & Dean. I got a string of conservative yellfests and switched off. The ’60s just aren’t coming back.
Rain splatted the windshield out of a clear blue sky. The drops turned elliptical, then broke left and right in crooked patterns propelled by the slipstream. The sun stayed out. “The devil’s whipping his wife,” my grandmother used to say of that state of affairs; the drops were her tears. They’re a prediction of doom of some kind. Nearly everything is, when you study the science of soothsaying. The tea leaves, sheep’s entrails, and cast bones turn up positive omens about as often as valuable rookie cards.
*
The gaunt HUD house stood resolvedly in its garden of orange barbed wire and purple loosestrife, flora’s attractive answer to the zebra mussel. The galvanized aluminum inner sleeve the city had installed to discourage squatters had been peeled back sardine-can fashion from the windows to let in air and light. Nothing appeared to have changed there since yesterday, or for that matter since the Pet Rock. The city continued its slug’s crawl toward bleak oblivion around all four sides.
The rain, such as it was, had stopped short of wetting the earth. A rat the size of a young coyote was foraging inside a Dunkin’ Donuts box in a burned-out patch in the grass. The rattling went on without pause as I climbed out of the driver’s seat and thunked the door shut. It might have been a coyote at that; at night they gather in the basement of the demolished downtown Hudson’s Department Store to howl at streetlights. Civilization isn’t in nature’s weight class when skunk cabbage grows wild in the neighborhoods.
I stood outside the ramshackle entrance Johnny Toledo had cut in the side of the house and called his name; called it twice. No one answered. He never left home. To do so in a wheelchair invited every bipedal predator from the primordial urban ooze to fall on him and strip him to his colostomy sack. I checked the load in the Chief’s Special that had grafted itself to my skin, settled it gently into its clip for quick release, and heaved aside the jagged piece of siding that covered the hole, stepping back to fist the revolver. His boys’ size .22 rifle carried a small round, but a greasy one that encouraged infection, gangrene, and a slow odoriferous death. I’d read The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
Nothing stirred except the rat grazing on crumbs and wind slithering through weeds.
The voice of experience told me not to go in. Not into a building that should have been torn down during another corrupt administration. The voice of experience should be a basso profundo, like Tennessee Ernie Ford’s. Instead it’s a mealy little whisper, like the teller’s at a window informing you your acount’s overdrawn.
In any case I was too old to wait for an administration that wasn’t corrupt. I went in.
ELEVEN
At a glance, the place hadn’t changed much in a day. There were more catalytic converters; the Free Press had reported a rash of thefts from cars and trucks parked on the northwest side overnight, probably for
the platinum they contained. Like the other scrap they had their own pile. It was an orderly system despite appearances. An overturned wheelchair meant nothing because he had several in various stages of disassembly. You had to be a special kind of paraplegic to traffic in stolen wheelchairs; but Johnny never asked for any more sympathy than he gave. Business is business is business.
Then I saw something that reminded me I had a gun.
I tightened my grip on the butt and reached down with the other hand to lift a golden statuette off the floor where it had fallen when the folding TV tray had collapsed from under it. A fresh dent on the side of its head had turned the cherub into a mongoloid. It seemed a hell of a way to treat the only memento Johnny Toledo had of his father’s adventures in the scrap trade.
As I was lowering it back to the floor, trying not to make any more noise than I already had, a floorboard shifted upstairs.
It wasn’t Johnny. The house’s second story had ceased to exist for him when he’d lost the use of his legs. As far as I could tell he slept in his wheelchair.
Sneaking up those stairs was impossible. If they’d ever had a padded runner, scavengers had made off with it before the Supremes broke up, and decades of unheated winters and humid summers had split and warped the boards into driftwood shapes; I’d have made less noise scampering across a piano keyboard. I took a deep breath and ran up them, feet and heart pounding, the gun heavy in my hand, hoping I wouldn’t put a foot through and shoot myself in the head.
I stopped before my head came level with the landing. That easy I wasn’t going to make it for anyone waiting up there with a gun. I waited, counting my heartbeats. He’d have to go through me to get out.
Wrong again. With a melancholy crash, the last glass pane in the house gave way.
I took the rest of the steps at a dead run and got to the open door of the first room off the stairs just in time to see a head of brown curls vanish through the window.
Three strides took me across the bare floor. At the window I flattened my back against the wall and edged an eye past the frame. No one shot at me. A small figure in a red jersey jacket with his shirttail flapping below the hem made a broken-field dash around the debris in the adjoining lot and grabbed a lightpole for balance as he swung around the corner. His other hand clutched the waistband of his baggy dungarees to keep them from slipping below his knees and tripping him up. It looked comic but he sure could fly.
Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels Page 7