Motor City Blue (3 page)

“And you’d be Paul Cooke.” I pried my hand loose and kneaded the bones back into place.

The twinkle in his eyes deadened. “We met?”

“You’re famous. Ever since ‘Sixty Minutes’ aired that expose last year about your hotel in Tucson. What did they call it? ‘Little Caesar’s Palace.’ “

The grin was gone. He said something that was as much Detroit as it was wide open spaces, then, “You’ll hear more of it before I’m through. Do you know I had to close down after that ran? No more convention business. Guests were scared they’d be machine-gunned in their beds. Nothing bad ever happened in that place, not in the six years I owned it. Okay, one rape, eighteen months ago, and they threw that suit out of court. Turned out she was a hooker. Those New York bastards are going to learn something about the penalties for libel.”

“Slander.”

“Huh?”

I said it again. “In print it’s libel, spoken it’s slander. Common mistake. TV newscasters make it all the time.”

His face now was a desert. Nothing like a smile had ever grown there or ever would. He glanced at the black man, who took a step in my direction. I read his intent behind the glasses.

“I’m heeled,” I said. “On my belt, a thirty-eight, left side.” I unbuttoned my coat one-handed and spread my arms.

Without taking his eyes off mine, the younger man reached under my jacket, groped around, and drew the blue steel Smith & Wesson from the snap-on holster inside the waistband of my pants. He handed it to Cooke, who accepted it by the butt between thumb and forefinger and watched as the other lifted my wallet and went on to pat all my pockets and run an expert hand around the inside of my thighs down to my ankles. Then he rose and, almost as an afterthought, removed my hat and subjected it to the same thorough analysis. By the time he was finished he knew how much change I was carrying without having seen it. Finally he stepped back with a nod and turned the wallet over to the Texan. Cooke opened it, glanced at the photostat license and the buzzer I had obtained from the Wayne County Sheriff s Department during my process-serving days and never given back, and returned it to the other, who handed it back to me. My faith in the conventions was restored.

“Not smart,” said Cooke, still holding the revolver as if it were a dead rat. There were a few in his occupation who had no taste for iron. They paid others to carry it for them.

“I don’t usually play in this yard,” I replied.

There was nothing for him in that, so he let it float. “You’ll get it back later,” he snarled, thrusting the gun toward the black, who grasped it less gingerly and dropped it into his topcoat pocket. Then Stevie Wonder and the Midnight Cowboy ushered me without further preamble across a quietly carpeted foyer and into the Presence.

T
HEY GOT THE BODYGUARD
from central casting. On the short side, with bowed arms and a chest you couldn’t measure with an umpire’s chain, he was doing a fair imitation of Gibraltar in the space between the two sliding library doors as we approached. His black suit was painted on and he wore his striped necktie in a knot you couldn’t undo with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. He had no neck, or maybe he did have and someone had accidentally chopped off his head and pasted a brown, gray-streaked wig on the stump and penciled on features to make it do for a substitute. Certainly they could have been penciled on, flat and lifeless as they looked, with bladderlike scar tissue over the eyes and a crescent of dead white skin on each cheek. Either he had Roderick Usher’s ears or he had been watching through the crack between the doors, because we were still coming when he slid them open noiselessly on rollers and struck an
Arabian Nights
pose with one refinement, his thumb hooked in his lapel near where something spoiled the line of his suit beneath his left arm. I’d have laughed at him in the theater. Not here.

“It’s all right, Merle,” Cooke told him. “This is the guy.”

Merle looked doubtful. “He carrying?”

Bingo. Smooth and moderately pitched, his voice was in such contrast to his bouncer build that I’d ruled him out as the man on the telephone before he’d opened his mouth. I was wrong. What’s more, seeing him and hearing him at the same time, I suddenly knew who he was.

“Not now. Wiley frisked him.”

“Check his socks?”

Cooke nodded, and favored me with a wry look. “He always asks that,” he explained. “Ever since someone slipped past him two years ago with a baby Remington in his argyles.”

I remembered the incident. Two bullets from a .32, one in the ribcage, the second describing a path beneath the scalp from a point just above the right temple around the skull to the nape of the neck. Morningstar was released from the hospital two weeks later, straight into a nest of popping flashbulbs. His assailant was scooped up from the floor of the victim’s living room by a couple of morgue attendants the afternoon of the shooting. There was the usual political circus afterward, the usual Grand Jury investigation, the usual congressional re-elections the following year to show for it. The unwanted publicity forced Morningstar into retirement, so they said, leaving a vacuum for all of two minutes until someone with a lyrical Mediterranean name stepped in to fill it.

“Aren’t you Merle Donophan?” I asked the bodyguard.

He lamped me with ceramic eyes. “What if I am?”

“You were a Detroit Red Wing three years ago. I caught your act a couple of times at Olympia.”

“Yeah?” Out the side of his mouth now. He was stepping into character. “The last one, too?”

“I didn’t see it. I heard about it. A fight. You let some guy on the Maple Leafs have it with your stick.”

“He hit me first. Only difference was I used two hands and he only used one. So how come they gave me the boot and not him?”

“You aren’t still sitting in a sanitarium watching the wallpaper.”

“Christ’s sake, Merle, let them in and close that fucking door. Draft’s worse than a bullet.”

If you’ve never heard a man speaking with the aid of a mechanical voice box, I can’t describe it for you. A Dempsey dumpster or an automatic garbage disposal unit that’s suddenly found itself capable of human speech doesn’t cut it. Alvino Rey came close when he used to make his electronic guitar talk on the old “King Family Show.” That was what came to my mind when the monotonic complaint broke in from across the room.

The place had all the warmth and security of a dentist’s waiting room. The only light came from one of those copper Christmas tree floor lamps with funnel-shaped metal shades drooping from it like leaves on a rubber plant. Like those in most rental homes, mansions notwithstanding, the room had no personality at all. That had to be provided by the figure slouched in the green Lazy Boy next to the lamp.

Whether Benjamin Morningstar, no middle name, was pushing eighty or dragging it behind him was something nobody knew, not even Ben himself. The record of his first arrest in 1917 had 1900 marked in the box labeled “Date of Birth,” but that was likely the educated guess of an overworked cop. A couple of years this way or that hardly mattered now in any case.

He was wearing a mustard-colored baggy sweater with a shawl collar over what was probably an expensive white shirt, limp for lack of starch and too big for his wasted frame. Equally as loose, his trousers were charcoal gray with a pearl stripe and cuffs two-thirds the length of his perforated brown shoes. A stout cane with a rubber tip was hooked around the chair’s right arm. One hand lay twitching within its reach in his lap, a pale, spotted thing that reminded me of old blue cheese encountered unexpectedly in a wad of foil in the refrigerator. The other was raised to his face, where it clutched a flesh-colored cup of perforated plastic around his nose and mouth.

His eyes were huge wet plums that shimmered behind thick corrective lenses as they watched us come in. Farther up, hair as black and gleaming as a new galosh grew straight back from his forehead with a single, startlingly white gash of a part following the path of a bullet long forgotten by everyone outside this room. Not a gray hair in sight. It made the rest of him look that much more worn out, like a shabby old chair with a crisp new doily pinned to its crown.

When we were all inside and the doors were closed he lowered the filter, and then I saw his eagle’s beak with the skin stretched taut and shiny across its bridge and the strings of loose flesh suspended beneath his chin over the scars from his throat operation and the downward turn of his wide, arid mouth. For a moment a bloom of life showed in a thin red line around his muzzle where the cup had been pressed, but it quickly fled.

The liquid eyes lingered on me for a beat, then flowed to the bodyguard. “Well, take his things, Merle,” he ground out. “You can’t expect a man to listen to a proposition when he’s sweating like a broiled hog.”

Now that he’d mentioned it I noticed that the room was overheated. The furnace was on blow and I could feel the hot air pouring through the square register in the floor behind me. I shrugged off my coat and handed it and my hat to the ex-hockey player, who had stepped forward to claim them.

“Jeez, a fedora,” he exclaimed, still Allen Jenkins. He could turn it on and off. “I ain’t seen one of them on nobody under fifty in years.”

I’d already used up my line for that one, so I kept silent while he crossed the room to a door on the other side, opened it, laid my things on a bed in the darkened chamber beyond, and returned to his post in the center of the room. He moved with a gliding swing, one shoulder thrust forward, as if he were still on the ice. His hands were clenched, hairless knots of corded muscle with two knuckles for every one of mine. Too many sticks had been laid across them in the heat of competition.

Cooke caught the black man’s eye and nodded. The latter stepped forward and laid my .38 on the polished surface of the narrow end table at the old man’s left elbow.

“We found that on him,” said the Texan.

Morningstar hardly glanced at it. “Give it back.”

No one moved. Cooke started to speak. The old man cut him off with a peevish gesture of his right hand.

“Damn it to hell, can’t you see it’s unloaded?”

The other hesitated, then strode up to the table and lifted the revolver to examine it. Light showed through the holes in the chamber. He looked at me.

“You didn’t ask,” I said.

He snarled and slapped it stinging into my outstretched hand. I returned it to its holster. I didn’t mention the cartridge under the hammer. Sometimes it’s useful to let them think you’re afraid of guns.

Wiley, the black man, was beginning to sweat. It broke out in beads along his hairline and started the slow descent down his forehead. No one had asked him to remove his coat. He’d melt into a coffee-colored puddle before he took it off on his own. It was so dry in the room a match could ignite the air. I decided to risk it.

“Okay if I smoke?” Morningstar nodded. I won’t say he smiled as he did so. What passed for one could have been just a nervous twitch of his dry slit of a mouth. I eased out a cigarette and touched it off, drawing the cool smoke into my lungs along with God knows what else. The man in the chair sat motionless except for quivering nostrils, as if trying to breathe the overflow.

“Proposition?” I prompted.

The mouth twitched again. “You’re all right, Walker. You know enough to give an old man some slack. Not many of these young bastards would.” As he said it his eyes circled the ring of help, lighting on Cooke. “Paul, get the hell out of here. Take Wiley with you. I’ve seen enough
shvartzes
for one day.” He watched their retreat until the doors rolled shut behind them. “That was one of Paul’s ideas, hiring the colored to keep an eye on things back here. I suppose he’s all right, but that don’t mean I got to like him. His kind’s one of the reasons I left this town in the first place. You think I’m a bigoted son of a bitch, don’t you?” He nailed me again.

“I don’t think unless I’m paid.”

“Strutting around in that fag getup.” He didn’t appear to have heard me. “He don’t dress that way in Phoenix.”

“Wiley?”

“Cooke. Sit down. I’ve got a larynx from Sears and Roebuck and a guinea pig’s stomach and one lung and half of the rest of me is scattered in jars from here to the West Coast. I don’t need no stiff neck too.”

The only other chairs in the room were a vinyl number with a low back and no arms and a cushy leather overstuffed the size of the Uniroyal tire display north of 1-94. I chose the vinyl. I didn’t want to fall asleep during the conversation.

“Go to bed, Merle,” he said then.

The bodyguard hesitated. “You sure?” His eyes told me I’d been weighed on his personal scale and come up short. I didn’t figure I was alone in this.

“Damn it, Merle, one of these days you’re going to ask me that question and I’m going to fry your ass.”

Merle muttered something on his way out that I didn’t catch.

Morningstar sat back and let out his breath in a long, rattling sigh. “Athletes,” he said. “I never met one with brains you couldn’t strain through a towel.” He lowered his eyelids for a couple of seconds, and I was beginning to wonder if he’d drifted off or worse when they creaked open again. “Tell me something about yourself.”

“Why? You’ve had me checked out or I wouldn’t be here.”

“Humor me.”

“I’m thirty-two years old. I was raised in a little town you never heard of about forty miles west of here. I’ve a bachelor’s degree in sociology; don’t ask me why. I tried being a cop but that wasn’t for me so I let myself get drafted. The army taught me how to kill things and sent me out to do it, but along the way someone found out what I’d done before and they made me an MP. I liked almost everything about it except the uniform, so when I got out I looked for a way to do the same thing without wearing one. I’m still looking.”

“You dropped out of the twelve-week police training course after eleven weeks. Why?”

“Like I said, it wasn’t for me.”

“You can do better than that.”

I shrugged. “Another trainee propositioned me in the shower room. He was very insistent. I broke his jaw.”

“That doesn’t sound like something they’d bounce you for.”