Sweet Women Lie (11 page)

A curved shard of thick transparent glass winked at me from under the window, between the edge of the beige rug and the baseboard. It belonged to a tumbler. The hand that had held it — or maybe it wasn’t the hand — was clutching the edge of the desk on the far side. The nails looked gnawed. I stepped closer.

He was down on one knee, wedged between the chair and the desk, with his other leg stretched out inside the kneehole. He had on the same green-and-yellow jacket or one like it. There couldn’t be another one like it. Holstering the .38, I went around the desk and eased back the chair. Herbert S. Pingree unfolded himself and sagged onto his back on the floor. As I bent over him, I heard the rattle and wheeze of the elevator down the hall. I straightened quickly, taking the gun out again, and reached the hall in three strides, but the indicator over the cage had already slid down to two. I put away the .38 and went back inside.

Kneeling with my ear to Pingree’s chest, I thought I heard a heartbeat. Then I thought it was mine. I plucked some fibers from the carpet and held them under his nostrils. They seemed to be stirring, but I couldn’t tell if it was because he was still breathing faintly or because of the drafts that lanced through the rickety old building like a magician’s knives. I took off my coat and bunched it under his shoulders, tipped back his head, pinched his nose, gulped air, and breathed into his mouth. I kept that up for five minutes. Then I put my ear to his chest again. There was nothing going on there. I felt the big artery on the side of his neck. I stood up.

The base of the broken glass had come to rest rightside up on the carpet. There was some clear liquid in the bottom. I picked it up with my handkerchief and stuck my nose inside. A scorched, bitter smell. You’d think he’d have noticed it. Maybe he didn’t want to seem impolite. I put the base down where I’d found it.

The desk contained a blotter and pen set with matching brass trim, aside from the bookcase the single largest investment in the room. Probably an office-warming gift. A red plastic frame that went like hell with the set contained a portrait, one shoulder turned mock-seductively toward the camera, of a honey blonde with slightly protruberant blue eyes, a large nose, and an overbite. The hair was her best feature, but I liked the face fine. Nobody had been at it with a mallet and scalpel and a picture of Linda Evans for a model.

Pingree’s appointment book was blank but for a single note on the top page: “Lunch Edie, Black Bull, 12:30.” It didn’t look like any sort of code. I tore off the page and pocketed it.

I went through the drawers. Scissors, rubber bands, envelopes, a copper letter-opener with a lion’s head for a handle. Desk stuff. A collection of paperback detective novels in the deep file drawer, thumb-blurred and bloated. Herbert would sit with his feet crossed on the desk, reading and waiting for an exotic woman with a thick accent to come swaying through the door and offer to fall in love with him if he found her emerald necklace. While he was waiting he would have lunch with Edie of the Incisors. No telephone or address book. Herbert would have no addresses or telephone numbers to put in it except Edie’s, and he would have that memorized. He’d mentioned a girlfriend who taught English in Dearborn. The honey blonde looked like a teacher. I didn’t know what teachers looked like these days. I was just playing detective.

There was a side door that would connect with
Antoinette’s Academy of Massage,
the other office in the suite. I tried it. Locked. A radio was playing easy listening music very low on the other side. I used my handkerchief on the things I’d touched in the office and went outside and rapped on Antoinette’s door. A female voice invited me in.

It was a corner room as I said, twice as big as Pingree’s, painted dark red, with two windows on adjoining walls. A sort of cubicle had been constructed out of partitions to the left of the door with an archway closed off by wine-colored velvet curtains. Matching hangings draped the walls like bunting. A pile carpet the color of intestinal blood tickled my ankles. The music was muted and the place smelled of incense and liniment and more delicate oils in pump containers on shelves in back. She came to me from that direction, a small brown girl with her dark hair in a straight page-boy that may have been a wig and a silver-blue robe knotted around her waist with a green sash. Her bare feet were in platform sandals. I had a hunch I was looking at everything she had on. The hunch was confirmed when she passed through a shaft of weak sunlight and for a brief moment the robe became transparent. Her smile looked natural enough until you saw her eyes.

“Are you Antoinette?” I asked.

“No, I’m Cathay. Like in Cathy, only with an extra
a
.” Her voice said it was the first time the question had ever been asked. Her eyes added another digit to an invisible scoreboard.

“Cathay, you don’t look Chinese.”

“It’s okay. Antoinette isn’t French.” The smile faltered as she stopped in front of me, then came back with a determined kind of energy.

My jaw ached. I realized I was grinning like a skull. I pulled my lips down over my teeth with an effort. Anybody not in Cathay’s racket would have run for cover at the sight of me. “How long have you been here, Cathay?”

“About a year. The massage will be fifty dollars. You can take your clothes off in there.” She indicated the curtained cubicle.

“I don’t want a massage. I didn’t mean how long you’ve been working here. I’m not making conversation. I meant how long have you been here today?”

The smile shut down permanently. An essentially grave young black woman had been standing behind it, showing tiny lines in her face that should not have been there at her age, or what I judged her age to be. I gave her a quick look at the sheriff’s buzzer. She looked tired suddenly. “I’m a licensed massage therapist,” she said. “You can’t bust me for that.”

“Relax. I’m interested in your neighbor, the sleuth.”

“Sleuth?”

“Shamus. Gumshoe. Hawkshaw. Peeper. I’d say dick, but it probably wouldn’t mean the same thing in the massage business.” She was still in the dark. I said, “The private detective. Next door? That’s the thing with the knob on it down the hall. Stop me when it sounds like English.”

“Oh, Herbie. We haven’t had any trouble with him since we made him patch up the hole. Did he drill one on the other side?” A forehead line deepened. “Wait a minute, that’s the comic book place. You better show me that badge again. It didn’t look like no city shield.” Her grammar was slipping.

“Why bother? It’s just a gag. I’m private too. I just want to ask if you saw or heard who visited him today.”

“Why?”

I got out the wallet again and gave her fifty of William Sahara’s dollars. “Tell Antoinette you had a customer. Or don’t tell her and buy yourself some underwear. The person I’m interested in just left.”

She put the bills in a pocket of her robe. “You might as well take your clothes off, mister. You wasted your money otherwise. I didn’t hear nothing. I had the radio on since I got in.”

“I heard it in Herbie’s office. The walls in this dump are made of tissue paper and trust. You must have heard something. Voices, a glass breaking.”

“Why ask me, if you were in there? Ask Herbie. Oh.” It dawned on her then. She looked a little sad, as if her favorite soap opera had been pre-empted. “I heard two guys talking. Herbie was one of them. I didn’t hear any words. It didn’t sound like nobody was mad or nothing. What happened, he get cut?”

“He got poisoned. I think.”

“Jesus. Was it in his water?”

“Looks like it. Did he drink a lot of water?”

She nodded. “He had a fresh bottle delivered every couple of weeks. The customers sure weren’t drinking it. Herbie didn’t have no customers.”

“Sounds like you know a lot about him.”

“Like you said, these walls are a joke. Also we saw each other in the hall. He liked to talk. Did you know he was a direct descendant of the Mayor Pingree that turned the vacant lots in Detroit into potato patches to feed the poor?”

“He never told me. Did he talk about the case he was working on?”

“I didn’t know he was working at all. Today was the first time I heard anyone in there with him in weeks. Well, except the bottled water man. Hey, maybe he’s the one put in the poison.”

“When was the last delivery?”

She thought. “A week ago, about.”

“If it was in the bottle he’d be dead a week.”

“Maybe it, like, built up in his system.”

“Cyanide doesn’t work that way. That’s what I smelled in his glass.”

Her eyes opened a little. They looked like the eyes on the door of Trans-Global Investigations. “Cyanide, that’s heavy. Ain’t it hard to get hold of?”

“Ask me questions when the fifty bucks is used up. What was the other man’s voice like? Deep? High? Gruff? Did he sound like he operated a power shovel or danced the Carioca for his living?”

“It was kind of medium, I think. I didn’t pay much attention. I was listening to the radio.” She glanced at a tiny watch on her wrist. “I got a regular coming in at ten. He don’t like it when somebody else is here.”

“Tell the councilman to wait in the Omar Sharif Room. The building’s going to be crawling with cops in a little while. Where did Herbie live?”

“With his girlfriend. If he told me that once he told me a hundred times. I think she was his first. That boy was pussy-whipped.”

“That’d be Edie? Where’s she live?”

“We didn’t exchange addresses. Her name’s Hubbard. No, Hibbard. Edith Hibbard. Can’t be far. Herbie used to go home for lunch, and maybe a quickie. Something tells me quickies were all anybody ever had with Herbie.”

I wrote the name in my notebook. “I’d better use your telephone to call the cops. They get awful upset when you smear up the one at the murder scene.”

“How come all the shit happens when I’m in charge?” she said.

I took the receiver off a maroon wall unit and punched buttons. “I was going to ask the same question.”

T
HERE IS A PATTERN
to these things, as immutable and unvarying as a bride’s first meal followed by a groom’s first heartburn: The uniforms arrive first, then the plainclothes detectives. It’s one of the Unwritten Laws, a penal code that would run to several hundred volumes if anyone ever chose to set it down. In East Detroit on the day Herbert Selwyn Pingree drank his last glass of water, they came together. You could call it a refreshing example of democracy in practice. You could call it plain dumb coincidence and be right. I didn’t think they were pooling, but you never knew what elected officials would come up with next in an economic crunch that was approaching drinking age.

While the uniforms went about their business of dispersing the street crowds they had gathered in the first place with their pretty lights and sirens, a Sergeant Trilby shook my hand and steered me into a vacant office down the hall for a chat. It was a square empty room with a painted steel radiator and the inescapable mushroom-shaped glass fixture suspended upside-down from the ceiling, suitable for snaring dust and expired flies. The walls and ceiling were painted the original sickly yellow and a window with a slanted shade offered a view of an abandoned Pinto in an empty lot.

“You like November?” Trilby asked me.

“I used to, when I hunted deer.”

“Why’d you stop?”

“It reminded me of some things.”

“Yeah, I saw that movie too.” He dusted his palms, indicating that the small talk was over. Trilby was youngish, with black hair cut short and combed down over a slightly low forehead like Jack Kennedy’s, dark, intelligent eyes — no cops’ rude, weary-of-the-human-race stare there; not yet, anyway — and a pug nose that contributed to his youthful appearance. I wasn’t sure if he really was young or if I was just getting old. I decided he really was young. I needed a break.

He consulted an alligator-hide notebook. “You told the officers you had an appointment with this Pingtree?”

“Pingree,” I corrected. “It wasn’t really an appointment. He asked me to come up when I got a chance.”

“Had you known each other long?”

“About fifteen minutes total, not counting artificial respiration.”

“What was he to you, if not a friend?”

“A guy in the same racket. I ran into him last night in the Club Canaveral. He found out I was in the business and he wanted to talk about partnering. He said the case he was on needed two men.”

“What was the case?”

“He didn’t say.”

Trilby frowned at his notebook. He didn’t like what he was writing. I didn’t care for it much myself. “I’m not clear on how it is you happened to run into each other last night.”

“He was tailing someone. He might have been more obvious about it if they’d put him under the main spot and vamped him, but I doubt it. I braced him and treated him to a little free advice, one P.I. to another.”

“Generous of you.”

“I get that way when I’m drinking.”

“Who was he tailing?”

“A woman. I’d have paid more attention to her if Pingree weren’t more entertaining. He almost followed her into the toilet.”

He changed directions. “It says here you heard the killer escape in the elevator while you were busy with Pingree. What makes you think it was him — or her? Poisoning’s a woman’s game.”

“Not since liberation. Cyanide works quick, within minutes of ingestion. I figure whoever put it in Pingree’s glass waited to see him drink it before he left.
I
would if it were me and I went to that much trouble. I got to Pingree’s door in time to hear the glass drop from his hand when he collapsed. Nobody used the elevator before that except me. There’s no access to the stairs from this floor. I checked.”

“There’s always the fire escape.”

“He’d have to pass too many windows on his way down. Someone would see him. The way I take it, when he heard me coming up in the elevator he ducked into a vacant office, maybe this one, and waited until I went into Pingree’s.”

“You make him sound like a pro.”

“Pro enough anyway to slip a private cop a Mickey when everyone else out there is gun happy. This guy likes his work or he wouldn’t be into the refinements.”