Tin City (Twin Cities P.I. Mac McKenzie Novels)

by David Housewright

  Ruth was speaking to me, but I didn’t notice until she nudged me in the ribs.

  “I said I need to be going,” she repeated. “I have my tai chi exercises.”

  “Yes, yes. Thank you for everything.”

  “If you have any more questions, don’t hesitate to call.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  Ruth’s eyes went from me to Pen and back to me again. She shook her head and smiled.

  “I told you,” she said. “Audrey Hepburn.”

  Nonsense, I told myself.

  After she left, I made my way across the pool deck to Pen’s table. I wasn’t in love with Pen despite what Ruth had to say. How could I be? But I desperately wanted to become friends with her, to get her on my side and keep her there. Question was, how? Years ago, a guy named Eric Weber wrote a tutorial filled with surefire lines designed to impress women called How to Pick Up Girls! I never read it. I was a college sophomore when I came across the book, and I already knew everything. Only now I wish I had memorized it cover-to-cover, because my mind was a complete blank. When I reached Pen’s table I blurted the first thing that came into my head.

  “Do you believe in destiny?”

  Pen looked up at me, shielding her eyes with her hand, unafraid in such a public place. She smiled when she recognized me.

  “I do,” she said. “I do believe in destiny.”

  “I’ve been seeing you all day,” I told her. “Outside your trailer, on the street, and now you’re here. It’s fate.”

  “I think it’s wishful thinking on your part. But please, sit down.” She gestured at a chair across from her and closed her notebook. Her smile stayed on her face, as if she had forgotten it was there.

  “If I’m not interrupting,” I said.

  “Not at all. I could use a break. The more I work on this melody, the more it sounds like ‘Skylark.’”

  “Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer.”

  “Very good. You know music.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Let’s see. Try this one. ‘Here’s That Rainy Day.’” She sang the title.

  “Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen.”

  “Nice. How about ‘Autumn Leaves’?”

  “Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics. I don’t know who did the melody.”

  “I’d be impressed if you did. Actually, the melody was written by the great French film composer Joseph Kosma. He wrote it for a film called Les Portes de la Nuit”—her French accent was a lot better than mine—“back in 1946. In ‘47, Jacques Prévert, who was a poet, wrote lyrics and the song became ’Les Feuilles Mortes,’ which Yves Montand sang in 1947. So even though it’s one of Mercer’s best-known lyrics, he was actually late to the party, writing the English version in the early 50s. I’m boring you.”

  “Not even a little bit,” I told her. “Okay, now I have a song for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “‘I’m a Believer.’”

  She looked at me like I had insulted her.

  “Neil Diamond,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Pretty lame, Jake.”

  “How ‘bout ’West Coast Blues?’”

  She repeated the title several times. “I think you got me.”

  “Wes Montgomery.”

  “You go from a pop star like Neil Diamond to a jazz guy like Wes Montgomery? What do you listen to?”

  “Everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Jazz mostly, but also blues, rock, some classical, even a little opera.”

  “Country-western?”

  “Some.”

  “Who?”

  “Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Mary Chapin Carpenter.”

  Pen nodded her head in approval.

  “Ever listen to Suzy Bogguss and Chely Wright?”

  “They sound familiar, but I don’t think I know them. Why?”

  “No reason. Okay, I have one more for you. Something tough. Are you ready?”

  “I am.”

  She sang, “‘Till You Come Back to Me.’”

  I gave it some thought, realized I had never heard the song before, and took a chance.

  “Penelope Glass and Tommy Heyward?”

  Pen laughed boisterously enough to cause several heads to turn toward her.

  “You guessed,” she said.

  “I did not.”

  “You did.”

  “It’s one of my favorite songs.”

  “Oh yeah? Hum a few bars.”

  I hummed “As Time Goes By.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “I so admire what you do,” I told her.

  “Anyone can write music.”

  “You think?”

  “It’s writing good music that’s hard. I didn’t realize just how difficult it was until I started trying to make money at it.”

  “Who’s your favorite composer?”

  “I don’t know if I have one, I’ve been influenced by so many people. Sometimes I think Cole Porter is God. Then I change my mind and think it’s Antonio Carlos Jobim. Next day I wake up and pray to Joni Mitchell.”

  “If you had to pick one.”

  “If I had to pick one.”

  “Only one.”

  “Edward Kennedy Ellington.”

  “The Duke.”

  “You could argue that he invented American music.”

  I decided I was in love with Penelope Glass after all. Only I held back. I said, “I like you,” instead.

  “I like you, too.”

  “Have lunch with me,” I blurted.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Are you afraid your husband will disapprove?”

  “The man does carry a gun. But the truth is, Jake, I have to work. I promised Tommy I’d e-mail him something by the end of the week, and it’s the end of the week.”

  “Some other time?” I was trying to get Pen to commit. It seemed like the most important thing in the world at the time.

  She touched my hand. It was an unexpected gesture and made me flinch with a shock of electricity.

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  Pen rose, retrieved her notebook, and slipped it into her bag. I didn’t want her to leave. I said, “Pen, the man who attacked you yesterday—I don’t think that was a case of mistaken identity.”

  “Neither do I.”

  She looked at me with eyes that were quite bottomless.

  “Honestly, Jake, I enjoy the attention. But I’m not a damsel in distress, and you don’t look much like a Knight of the Round Table.” She patted my hand again, this time without the electrical charge. “I thank you for the offer. Maybe next time.”

  I watched her leave. At the entrance to the pool area she turned and looked back at me. She smiled some more and shook her head.

  “Smooth,” I said quietly to no one in particular. “You are sooooo smooth.”

  I moved the Neon about two hundred feet and parked at the end of 47½ Avenue. I wanted to take a look at the mobile home owned by the “gay guys” Ruth had mentioned, for the simple reason that I didn’t believe they were gay or that it was a coincidence that they had moved in so soon after Pen and Sykora. I was betting that they were the people who were at the other end of the bugs Marshall Lantry had found in Pen’s trailer.

  I hadn’t expected to see much, and I didn’t the first time I walked past the mobile home, except for the Toyota Camry parked in front. But on the return trip, I saw the trailer door open and a man wearing a blue sports jacket step out. He was about five-seven, with black hair, and despite the many extra pounds he carried, he walked to the Toyota as if he were trying to outrace a tornado. His progress was slowed by a second man wearing a white dress shirt and gray slacks. He seemed slightly crazed, like someone who had been struck by lightning and couldn’t quite believe he had survived.

  The second man said something to the first. Blue Jacket spun around and said something back. I was too far away to hear what was spoken, but the gestures and body langua
ge were undeniably angry. They glared at each other as if they couldn’t bear to be in each other’s company for another moment, and I thought maybe they were gay. Certainly I knew several straight couples married for years that behaved in exactly the same manner.

  Either that or government employees stuck together for too long in a confined space.

  Blue Jacket sat inside the Toyota and slammed the door behind him. Gray Slacks stood with his hands on his hips and watched him drive away.

  I thought of Pen and Sykora.

  Mostly I thought of Pen.

  At the same time, I caressed the back of my hand where she had touched me.

  Nuts, I told myself. Ruth was right.

  I went for a sub sandwich. Unrequited love drove with me, leapt out of the car at the light, ran in circles, then hopped back in again. It was goofy and childish and distracted me from the task at hand—nnding Mr. Mosley’s killer—but there it was. I found myself hurrying back to the motel so I could listen to Pen on my monitor.

  A voice called, “Agent Greene, Agent Greene,” after I parked my car in the Hilltop lot. I turned toward the sound. Victor was standing just outside the office and waving at me. I glanced around—there was no one else in the lot—and walked immediately to him, still carrying my sandwich.

  “What did you call me?” I made the question sound like an accusation.

  Victor took a step backward. He cleared his throat and said, “Agent Greene?”

  “Who told you I was an agent?”

  “The maid.”

  “The maid?”

  “What happened was”—Victor was stammering—“the maid was making your bed and, and …”

  “And what?”

  “She heard voices.”

  “Voices?”

  “That’s what she said. She said she heard voices. And, and …”

  “Get on with it, Victor.”

  “She opened your desk drawer and found your tape recorder thingy.”

  “She did, huh?”

  “She didn’t mean no harm. She heard voices and … There was a tape recorder and written on the tape recorder, it read …”

  “I know what it read.”

  “And she told me.”

  “Who else did she tell?”

  “Who else? Ahh, no one. Just me.”

  “And who did you tell?”

  “No one. I figured you were undercover so I, I …”

  “So you yelled my name across the parking lot.”

  “Oh, dear. I did, didn’t I? I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, Victor.”

  “But I am.”

  “Victor.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “My name isn’t Jacob Greene. I’m not with the U.S. Treasury Department. I am not working undercover. Do we understand each other?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You and the maid will not tell a soul that I am here, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I patted Victor on the back. “Good man.”

  Victor smiled like I had just made him a co-conspirator. I turned to leave.

  “Agent … Excuse me. Mr. Greene?”

  “Yes, Victor?”

  “Who are you after? Someone in Hilltop?”

  “We’re not allowed to tell.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “It could be you.”

  Victor went from pleased to terrified just that fast.

  “Mr. Greene,” he said, drawing out the words. “Anything you need, you let me know.”

  I heard odd noises over the receiver that didn’t amount to much as I settled in with my sandwich, noises I could only guess at.

  The sandwich wasn’t bad, even though the store advertised that it was healthy for me. Healthy or not, it made me long for the submarine sandwiches that Clark’s used to make. The first time I drove my dad’s car alone after getting my license, I drove to Clark’s Submarine on University and Dale, next to Steichen’s Sporting Goods, where I bought all my hockey equipment.

  “Why don’t you pick up a couple of Atomics,” my dad had said to me.

  Ahh, an Atomic, with absolutely everything on it. Now, that was a submarine sandwich. Unfortunately, Clark’s had disappeared years ago—along with my youth.

  I had just finished eating when I heard the notes of a piano. I remembered the invoice I had stolen along with the rest of Pen’s recyclables, the one that said she had leased an electronic piano.

  Pen began playing, stopped, and started again, repeating the same few bars over and over, the notes changing slightly each time she played them.

  “No, no, no,” she said. Followed by, “Think about it.”

  She sounded out a melody a single note at a time. I could picture her pounding the piano keys with one finger. She paused, hummed, played the notes again, paused, hummed some more. She played a half dozen notes in quick succession, added another half dozen, then scrapped them all and began anew. After a while, she began experimenting with chords and a variety of rhythm patterns. This went on for nearly an hour, and if Pen was making progress, I didn’t hear it.

  I became bored listening. Then angry with her constant starting and stopping, repetitions, experiments, and incessant humming. Music is like sausages, I decided—it’s better not to see how it’s made.

  Pen managed to put about twenty seconds of music together before pronouncing herself satisfied. Satisfied with what, I couldn’t say. I had taken a year of music appreciation in college, yet today I’d heard none of the musical elements I was taught to listen for. I began to ask myself, Does she really make money doing this?

  “All right,” Pen told herself. “Let’s see what we have.”

  She started playing, only not the notes she had been writing the past sixty minutes. She began instead with an unhurried introduction that lasted about ten seconds, lingering over a single note at the end of it that hung in the air like the call of a songbird summoning its mate.

  Deftly, she slid into an upbeat tempo, and the song began to soar—a quarter note executed with the speed of an eighth, a sixteenth flashing by like a thirty-second. After the introduction, she played two verses and launched into a chorus with a catchy, hummable hook that repeated and expanded the note structure of her introduction. I found myself diagramming the song in my head. I A A B. I was expecting another verse, but she fooled me by gliding across a bridge—a middle eight—eight bars played in the same key but with a vastly different chord progression, taking the song in a different direction, adding texture. It was the same twenty seconds of music she had worked so hard on, and suddenly it made perfect sense.

  The bridge brought me back to the chorus, led into another verse, then went back to the chorus again, which Pen repeated twice. C B A B B. Only she had built an extro into the final chorus so the song would end dramatically and not merely repeat itself monotonously until the studio technician faded it out.

  I was actually applauding when Pen finished. Then I leapt for my tape recorder and switched it on.

  “Play it again,” I said to the recorder.

  Pen began with the introduction, but when she hit that wondrous note before launching into the body of the song, the telephone rang.

  “It’s me,” Sykora said.

  “I was expecting your call,” Pen told him.

  “You were?”

  Pen didn’t answer.

  Sykora said, “Yeah.”

  “Coming home at a decent hour two nights in a row—what are the odds?” Pen asked.

  “I have a job to do.”

  “I understand. Gallivanting about the countryside like the Lone Ranger battling the forces of evil. Meanwhile, I’m stuck in Hilltop in a crummy mobile home.”

  “It’s all about you, isn’t it, Pen? What’s good for you.”

  “No. It’s about what’s good for us.”

  “We were together last night.”

  “One night a week we pretend we’re married. What fun.”

  “Stop it.”

&
nbsp; “We didn’t live like this in New York.”

  “Yes, we did. Only you were too busy to notice.”

  “That’s nonsense.”

  “You were never there for me, Lucky. You were always too busy hanging with your gay partner. Or you were busy hitting the clubs uptown because you needed to ‘feel the pulse of the music scene’”—I heard the quotes in his voice—“or you were busy ‘taking a meeting’ with some record producer no one has ever heard of.”

  “That’s part of my job—”

  “What job? It’s not a job? It’s a hobby.”

  “It’s not a hobby,” I shouted at the receiver.

  “It’s not a hobby,” Pen shouted a beat behind me. “I’ve sold eight songs.”

  “Eight songs in four years. And made just enough money to buy a car.”

  “Which you drive.”

  “Pen, this isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  “No. It isn’t.”

  “Pen … It’ll get better. Once I get Granata, it’ll get better.”

  “Granata? From New York? I thought you were done with organized crime. I thought it was all about terrorism now.”

  “Granata is a terrorist.”

  “He’s a gangster. The last of the godfathers. You said so yourself.”

  “I’m going to tie him to terrorism and bring down his entire family. Wait and see.”

  “You’re obsessed with him, obsessed just like you were in New York.”

  “I am not obsessed. I’m a cop and he’s a crook. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Steven, I thought we transferred here because … Does the FBI know you’re still working on Granata?”

  Sykora didn’t say.

  “You’re doing it on your own time, aren’t you? That’s why you’re always working late. That’s why you take my car instead of using a company car.”

  “Pen—”

  “This is why our marriage is suffering? Because of Granata?”

  “It’s my job.”

  “Granata isn’t your job,” Pen shouted. “He’s your hobby.”

  “There’s no talking to you.”

  “Steven—”

  “I’ll be home late.”