Motor City Blue (4 page)

“The trainee was the nephew of a U.S. congressman.”

“I see.”

“I thought you would.”

There was a short silence. Then, “You’re supposed to be a man who keeps his mouth shut even at the dentist’s.”

“Who says?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I like to keep track of whose mailing list I’m on from week to week.”

He said he thought that was wise and gave me a name I recognized, never mind what it was. “I’ll be straight with you,” he said then. “Yours isn’t the only name I had and it wasn’t the first I tried. I called two others, but one’s out of town and the other don’t do this kind of work no more. They said. I think they backed off when they found out who was interested. Does working for Ben Morningstar make any difference to you?”

“It means I can charge more.”

Twitch. I was beginning to think it really was a smile. Then it was gone. “I’m told you specialize in missing persons as well as insurance fraud.”

He was having trouble getting into it. I crossed my legs and tapped half an inch of cigarette ash into the near cuff, sat back to finish the butt. I studied his face through the smoke.

“Who’s missing?” I asked.

H
E SLID A WALLET-SIZED
photograph out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. Our hands brushed as I leaned forward to accept it. His had a temperature and consistency to go with its blue-cheese appearance.

It was a high school graduation portrait of a dark-haired girl with even darker eyes that looked as if they flashed and a complexion like twelve-year-old Scotch going down. She seemed pretty, but you can’t trust school photos. Those touchup artists can make the picture of Dorian Gray look like Robert Redford at the beach.

“Relative?” I held onto it. Giving it back would be a gesture of rejection and if I put it in my own pocket I was hooked.

“Ward. Her father shot himself in ’63 when the government indicted him for smuggling Mexican Brown across the border and I raised her. Her name is Maria. Maria Bernstein.”

“Leo Bernstein’s girl?”

He nodded. “I see you’re up on your Cosa Nostra history. Yeah, Leo Bernstein. Son of Big Leo Bernstein, king of Robbers’ Roost. But of course you wouldn’t remember that. Your father might. That’s what the papers called him when he was down in Ecorse during Prohibition, running Old Log Cabin across from Windsor. But he wasn’t really big, just five-five, weighed maybe a hundred and ten pounds. They just called him that because Big Al was what the Chicago papers was calling Al Capone, the fat-ass guinea bastard. He was my partner. Leo, not Al. I guess I can say that now that the statute of limitations has run out. Not that it matters much anymore.

“I brought Maria up the best I could after my wife died. I must have done all right because she never gave me a reason not to be proud of her. Not until—” He stopped and cleared his stainless steel throat. The sound was like firecrackers exploding inside a drainage pipe. “Last year, when she graduated high school in Phoenix, I sent her back here to a finishing school in Lansing. I haven’t seen her since.”

“Why Lansing? Why not some place in Arizona?”

“They don’t have finishing schools in Arizona. They have spas and dude ranches and co-ed colleges, complete with hot and cold running gigolos and vending machines with rubbers in them in the men’s rooms. I had my fill of them health nuts and horsey cowboy types hanging around her when she was living at home. Besides, I sent my kid sister to the same school in 1928 and I liked what they did for her there. Miss Fordham’s School for Young Ladies, they called it then. Now it’s the Miriam H. Fordham Institute for Women. The same woman runs it now that was running it then. Esther Brock. She’s a good ten years older than me, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her. You’d say it’s closer to a hundred. But she hasn’t changed her methods of teaching, so off went Maria to Lansing.

“She stopped writing home almost a year ago. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Christmas vacation was coming up and I figured she was saving up news for when she came to visit. When Christmas came and went and she didn’t show up I got Miss Brock on the horn.

“She said that Maria dropped out two weeks before the Christmas break. She told Miss Brock that she was going to get married and was on her way back to Phoenix with her fiancé to introduce us. She wouldn’t be coming back to school. Later, one of her roommates saw her getting into a car parked in front of the school with a man behind the wheel. They took off before the roommate could catch up. That was the last anyone saw of her.”

“Any description of the man or the car?”

He shook his head. “The car was either green or blue, or maybe black. The man was in shadow and had on a dark suit with a dark tie. You know kids. They never look at anything.”

“Did you go to the police?”

“I got out of that habit fifty years ago when I found out you could blind most of them with a twenty-dollar bill. First thing they’d do is tip the press and then it’d be all over the country. ‘Police Seek Mob King’s Ward.’ That’s the kind of attention I raised her to avoid.”

“Publicity could help turn her up.”

“Not in this case. Just the opposite.”

“What does that mean?”

The look on his face alarmed me. If he had a bad heart, and there was no reason to think he hadn’t with everything else that was wrong with him, that grimace was as good an indication as any that an ambulance was in order. But then he resumed speaking and I realized the pain went much deeper.

“I hired a private dick in Lansing right after she disappeared, but he didn’t have enough to go on and gave up when his last lead came up empty two months ago. He’s thrown over his practice since and moved to California along with all the others who can’t take this climate. I found out he’d gone the other day when I tried to reach him to tell him about this.”

Slowly, much more slowly than the first time he went for it, he reached into the same pocket from which he’d drawn the graduation picture and came up with another square of white cardboard slightly larger than the first. He held it out for me to take as if the weight of it were too much for him to push. I had to come part way up out of my chair and seize it from his fingers.

I was holding a black and white snapshot mounted on heavy stock designed to withstand a lot of handling. It wasn’t good photography. The lighting was bad and it was hard to tell at first glance just what was going on in the shabby room with a print of
September Morn
just visible in one corner on the wall. What was going on was a hell of a lot less subtle than the artist’s rendition of a coy female bather. A pretty, dark-haired girl, nude except for a black garter belt, net stockings, and high heels, was down on one knee performing what the Supreme Court calls an unnatural act upon an amply endowed male. The girl could have been Maria Bernstein. Nobody had touched it up and the mortarboard was missing.

“Could be any one of a hundred girls,” I said. “What makes you so sure it’s her?”

“It’s her.” The tuning fork or whatever it was that imitated the vibration of vocal cords was barely buzzing. “I watched her grow up. I know. If I had any doubts, that mole on her right shoulder blade would clear them up.”

I looked again. I hadn’t seen it before. It wasn’t the sort of picture in which you noticed such details right off.

“Have they seen this?” I inclined my head toward the sliding doors.

“They know about it. You’re the only one I’ve shown it to since I first saw it a week ago. I wasn’t figuring on pasting it in no scrapbook.”

“Are you a collector?”

“Certainly not.” A spark glowed in the viscous eyes. “An old associate of mine, never mind who, has part interest in a business that wholesales this garbage to porno shops and grindhouses in the area. It’s a sideline. He hardly ever sees the stuff that passes through, but ten days ago he happened to drop in on the man who runs the place and this was laying on his desk. This associate has spent a lot of time in my home and knows Maria almost as good as I do. He recognized her right away and came to me in Phoenix.”

“He say who took it?”

“He questioned his man. He wasn’t sure. It could have come from any one of a dozen studios he deals with here in town or he might have bought it in a package from some hophead punk off the street. Hundreds like it cross his desk every day. He can’t be expected to know the source of each one.”

“Swell. How about mail order?”

“No way. That’s a federal rap.”

“I’ll need his name.”

The lines in his face tightened. “My associate?”

“The guy who works for him. Also a list of the studios he does business with if you’ve got it. If not I can get it from him.”

“I guess I can give you that much. His name’s Lee Q. Story. That’s important, the Q. I hear he’s particular about it. Runs a dump called Story’s After Midnight on Erskine. Another
shvartze
, but I don’t suppose I got to tell you that in this burg. Frankly, I was surprised to hear you was white, name like Amos.”

“There are a few of us left. I guess I have to get it from him.”

“Get what? Oh, the list. Yeah. I didn’t have the stomach for it. Bad enough I got to see that garbage from the outside on my way down Woodward without going in. When I was young those were all theaters, you know what I mean? Theaters. Paramount, Roxy, Bijou. Clara Bow. Ramon Novarro. Dick Arlen and Buddy Rogers in
Wings
. I seen that one three times, each time with a different girl. You know what’s playing at the Roxy right now?
Sluts of the Third Reich
. What the hell kind of a thing is that to slap up on a sign a yard high for kids to read?”

Color came to his face like blood on a galled fish. I tried to break in before he had a stroke, but he was just warming up.

“This morning I had Wiley take me down Twelfth Street where I grew up. Rosa Parks Boulevard they call it now. It made me sick. They burned down the house I was born in. Burned it to the ground during the riots. Same thing with all the places I used to work to help support the family after my pa got killed. Nothing but black holes in the ground with here and there a chimney or a cast-iron sink sticking up out of them. I remember thinking as a kid how ugly it all was, that neighborhood, how it would be a blessing if somebody put a match to the whole thing. I was wrong. It’s worse.”

I had been scribbling the essentials of the case into my soiled notebook with a pencil stub I’d dug out from among the lint and paper clips in my pocket. Now he noticed that I had stopped. Something that passed for a wry look slithered over his fallen features.

“Go ahead and say it,” he said. “I’m one of those old farts who talk too much.”

I turned that one aside. “A man in your line has enemies. Could it be she was forced into this to get you?” I flipped the photo.

“The last of my enemies died ten years back. I’m retired. Everything I own now is in the form of investments, and Paul Cooke looks after those for me. Even if I had something they wanted, it wouldn’t do them much good keeping me in the dark. I found out about this by accident.”

“Through your associate.”

He smiled thinly, without twitching. “I thought of that. I don’t trust him any more than I do anyone else, but he’s above suspicion in this case. He has no family, and the cancer that’s eating out his stomach is going to kill him before the one in my lung kills me. We had a saying in the business. I guess it’s still used. You can’t take it with you.”

“Anything else I should know about Maria? Hobbies? Ambitions? Needs, medical and otherwise?”

“Her health’s good, so there’s nothing there. She’s a real good singer. Nice voice. Plays the piano like a pro. She always wanted to sing for a living, but I hoped the Brock woman would put a stop to that. Show business is full of fags and whores. I know. I used to own a nightclub.”

I sat quiet for almost a minute, lips pursed, tapping the edges of the two pictures against the palm of my hand. I could feel his eyes on me. Finally I took a deep breath and put them away in my inside breast pocket along with the notebook and pencil. The pictures, not his eyes. They were right behind them without my having to do anything. I got up.

“My fee’s two hundred a day plus expenses. First day in advance. I report when I have something, not before. Does that suit you?”

“The money’s all right. I don’t know about the report. I’d like to hear something daily if that’s possible.”

I was going to say no, but something had happened to his eyes. The plums had dried. The shine was gone, I sighed. Walker, you weak-kneed son of a bitch.

“I’ll give you what I can.”

He nodded. The mere effort of moving his head down and up seemed to have taken his last reserves. “See Paul on your way out. He’ll give you your first day’s fee and a copy of the other dick’s report, if it’s any help.”

I stepped into the bedroom and got my hat and coat. “One thing,” I said, stopping before his chair. “I’m working on an insurance case at the moment. I’ll be spending some of my time on that. But you’ll get a full day’s work every day. I don’t sleep. Got out of the habit.”

“So did I.”

I said a farewell of some sort and set out for the door.

“Walker.” Barely audible. I turned back. His lids were closed behind the thick spectacles and his head was leaning back against the chair’s cushy support. His weight wasn’t enough to make it recline.

“If I see my name in tomorrow’s paper, yours will be in the next edition. Bordered in black.”

I let myself out.

It was after two when Wiley dropped me off back at my place. I was too keyed up to sleep and all the good movie stations were off the air, so I snapped on the lamp next to my chair and settled down with a glass of Hiram Walker’s, no relation, and the sheaf of papers Paul Cooke had given me to read. The Lansing P.I., some guy named Stillman, couldn’t spell FBI and his grammar was strictly Remedial English 302, but he had a definite flair for narrative. The record of his nine-month search for Maria Bernstein engrossed me for a full five minutes before I passed out.

The strident jangling pierced whatever I was dreaming without deflating it and I slept on, waiting for the alarm to wind down. It didn’t, and after a moment I realized it was the telephone. I untangled myself from the chair and the litter of typewritten pages scattered over my lap, stumbled over to the irritating instrument, tried to pick it up with my left hand, the one that was still asleep, gave that up and used my right.