Sweet Women Lie (16 page)

I accepted the sheet. “He kept a close record of his employment during the eight months he was in business for himself. It wasn’t hard. What there was was penny-ante and his expenses kept on top of him most of the time. Then, starting last month, poof! he had money to burn. Only he neglected to record where it came from. He left something else out as well. He left out you.”

“Then I was right. I don’t fit in.”

“You forgot he was following you last night, and probably was the one who’d been tailing you for some time. You weren’t anywhere in his records, though. He doesn’t mention employment of any kind for the past month. When did you first suspect you were being followed?”

“About a month ago,” she said. “I think you ought to talk to Bill.”

“I did, this afternoon. You called the office just after he left. He never heard of Pingree. He says. The world’s full of people who never heard of Pingree. I was one of them until last night.” I peeled the cigarette away from my lip and ground it out in the bottom of the saucer. “How can I get in touch with Frank Usher? You call him Edgar.”

“Why?” She was holding her purse in front of her with both hands, an old gesture I remembered.

“I want to ask him some questions. Starting with where he was this morning around nine o’clock.”

“He’s a gentle old man. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“I’m interested in Pingrees, not flies.” I moved a shoulder. “He doesn’t have to talk to me if he doesn’t want to. I know a detective sergeant in East Detroit who would be happy to pinch hit. I don’t have a client to stand in front of now.”

The star-shaped scar on her right cheek disappeared into her sudden pallor. “That would drag me into it. You, too.”

“I’m in it,” I said. “Lady, I’m in it. Pingree died in my arms.”

“You used to protect people. Women especially.”

“I thought they needed it then.”

“You’ve really gotten to be a bastard.”

“I know. It’s the price I paid for becoming a better housekeeper.”

She rose icily. “I’ll tell Edgar. He’ll get in touch with you. You’re wasting your time.”

“It’s not worth much anyway.”

I got up and went over and took her coat out of the closet and held it for her. She wrapped it around herself, glanced down at her wristwatch. “It’s Friday night. You’ve just got time to catch the People Mover before it shuts down. Maybe Pingree’s mysterious quarry is riding it tonight.”

I felt my face grow blank.

She smiled incredulously. The tiny scar was back now. “You didn’t notice, did you? I thought when you circled those places — hell, mister, you’re some detective.”

I took the typewritten sheet out of my pocket and unfolded it. The Civic Center, 4:00 p.m. Tuesday. Joe Louis Arena, 9:15 a.m. Thursday and 6:00 p.m. Friday. The RenCen, 4:45 p.m. Thursday. Trappers Alley, 11:30 p.m. Saturday. The downtown People Mover, Detroit’s experiment in mass transit, stopped at all those stations. The entire circuit took fifteen minutes, which was the interval between all the arrivals and departures listed in the report. The dissonant frame I had missed the first time I’d looked at the circled names stood stock still and leered at me.

I refolded the sheet and put it away. Catherine was gone by then. Her laughter hung in the open doorway like the bitter aftereffect of her cologne.

I
WAS FLOATING
several stories above the pavement. It was night and I could see the lighted display windows of the shops below on Grand River and Michigan and the pools of pinkish light beneath the street lamps on Woodward and beyond them, wheeling away to the sky, the yellow and orange and blue and green and turquoise lights of a million windows, glittering like insects with hard shiny bodies on fresh tar. I looked away from them, and I wasn’t floating at all. I was riding in a train of some kind, balanced on a single high rail that swayed beneath my feet as I stood hanging on to a steel handle to keep from pitching into one of the benches that lined the car on both sides under the windows.

Near me on one of the benches sat a young woman whose honey-blond hair and slightly protruberant blue eyes reminded me of Edie Hibbard’s. She was drinking from a large disposable Pepsi cup. I realized suddenly that I was thirsty, desperately thirsty; I had ridges on my tongue like wind-tracks in loose sand.

Edie saw me lusting after the cup, smiled, and offered it to me. I reached out for it. My hand stuck out of a green-and-yellow houndstooth sleeve, and that’s how I knew I was Herbert S. Pingree, great-nephew of Hazen (or something), a native of DelRay behind Great Lakes Steel, the president of Trans-Global Investigations:
Lost something? In trouble?
Yes and yes.
Peace of mind is our stock-in-trade.
Rest in peace of mind, dear Herbert. Trade you a stock for one sip from that cup.

Then the cup was in my hand and I was drinking, guzzling, choking, the brown sticky liquid running over my chin. I didn’t notice the scorched, bitter smell until the cup was empty. I looked at Edie over the edge of the cup. The protuberant blue eyes were sad now, tilting away sadly from a bold Grecian nose. Catherine’s nose, Catherine’s eyes. Her sardonic mouth opened to let out a laugh, and as she laughed I smelled her cologne: A scorched, bitter smell. I dropped the cup. It broke like glass when it struck the floor. Then I noticed that Edie-Catherine wasn’t alone on the bench. She was seated between an arid-looking man in a gray suit and amber-tinted glasses, and another man, older, ordinary, with a plump face and smoky eyes and dark thinning hair and a neat little moustache, a face from a photograph. They were laughing too. All three of them were having a good time.

I tried to join them, but I couldn’t get enough air for a really good guffaw. I could hardly get enough air to breathe; my lungs had gone out on strike. The blood came hot to my face and I knew I was turning purple. They thought that was funnier than anything. They howled. Their mouths opened wider and wider until they formed one great pulsing hole with a black center that looked more inviting than any bar I had ever walked into. My vision was blurring, and for a panicky second I was afraid I’d miss the hole. I didn’t. I leaned forward and my toes left the floor of the car and I did a beautiful free fall toward the cool moist black bottom. I knew it would be cool and moist, like dark moss. Their laughter followed me all the way down, colliding and jangling together like so many requiem bells.

The ringing was real. It belonged to the telephone in the living room. My eyelids snapped open like a pair of windowshades, rolling and flapping in an empty skull. I lay there for a moment, hanging on to the mattress with both hands, while the darkness around me separated into familiar shapes in a shaft of skim-milk light zigzagging through the new thermal window in my bedroom, whose double panes turned the three-quarter moon into Siamese twins. When I was sure I was no longer falling, I rolled out from under the covers fully clothed except for shoes and scuffed out toward the source of the ringing. As a nightcap, I decided, an Edinburgh screwdriver is not a glass of warm milk.

The clock read 2:56 when I turned on the light. Whoever wanted me had been ringing a long time. I lifted the receiver and said something in Cro-Magnon into the mouthpiece.

“Mr. Walker?” A deep, heavy voice with a slight trace of cornpone.

“You first,” I said.

The owner of the voice chuckled. Some voices are rigged for chuckling. “I guess a little rudeness is the least I deserve for calling so late. Catherine told me you wanted to speak with me.”

I felt a little clammy then. Far away the furnace cut in with a thump and a clatter, as if it knew. I lowered myself into the easy chair and squirmed deep into the cushions for warmth. “Do I have to call you Papa?”

“At the moment I’d prefer Edgar, or Mr. Pym if you’re the formal kind.”

“Not Frank Usher, huh.”

“A name is just clothing. Where and when would you like to meet? I prefer someplace open. I spent most of my time out-of-doors as a boy, and I guess you could say I’m in my second childhood. This time through I aim to enjoy it.”

I thought. Part of me was still suspended in the black hole. “I’ll meet you in front of Ford Auditorium. Nine in the morning okay?”

“Two in the afternoon would be better. I’m up way past my bedtime now.”

“I’m looking for answers,” I said. “I hope you’re planning on bringing plenty.”

“I’ll bring some. How many I go home with is up to you. The older I get, the more I want to know. Life’s just a backwards mule, ain’t it?”

The accent came down heavily on the last part. I said two o’clock would be satisfactory.

“Good. Nice dreams, son.” The connection went away.

F
OUR HOURS LATER
I showered hard, shaved, and drank a pot of black coffee strong enough to float the deficit. To avoid picking up the nightmare where I’d left off I hadn’t gone to bed right away after Usher’s call, but had smoked a couple of cigarettes and watched the last half-hour of
Night of the Living Dead
on Channel 7. I thought it was a documentary.

Pingree made the front page of the morning
Free Press
under the headline
POISON SUSPECTED IN EAST DETROIT DEATH.
It was a four-inch-square item printed below the fold with no picture or mention of the dead man’s occupation. The body was reported to have been discovered by an associate. Sergeant Eugene Trilby of the East Detroit Police Department’s Criminal Investigation Division was quoted as saying that he didn’t suspect product tampering was involved. The autopsy report was still pending.

I got into a white shirt, gray suit, and black knitted tie and collected my hat and coat on my way out the door. I never put them on; the temperature had pulled one of those Michigan late-autumn dipsy-doodles and shot up into the high fifties. At the office I separated the bills from the junk, ran a skip-trace for an agency in San Francisco on a disabled city bus driver who had ducked out on a charge of flagrant misuse of food stamps, and found him an hour later perched happily on the local welfare roll, all without leaving my desk. Nero Wolfe, Mycroft Holmes, and the Old Man in the Corner had nothing on me. Dale Leopold used to say that you could tell the real pros by their hemorrhoids.

After calling in the information to San Francisco I typed up a bill and sealed it in a neat envelope complete with a window and
A. Walker Investigations
printed in tasteful blue in the upper left-hand corner. It was one of a thousand I had accepted in lieu of my fee from a printer whose runaway senile father I had found working at McDonald’s. While I was returning the old Underwood to its resting place atop the file cabinet, the sixteen-millimeter projector that was my brain stuttered on yet another frame that had no business being on that reel. This time I wound it back and isolated the frame. I grinned. If the day continued as it had started out, I would consider giving up sleep entirely.

At noon I rewarded myself with a full sit-down lunch at a seafood place on East Grand River on the way to Ford Auditorium. I had abalone out of season, baked in a mild horseradish sauce, and poured a glass of Liebfraumilch in after it to let it swim. My system, bulked up on burgers and fast-food chicken, attacked it like feral dogs. The business has its days. It’s the years you want to watch out for.

Appropriately enough in view of its two namesakes, the Henry and Edsel Ford Auditorium in the riverfront Civic Center looks a little like an air filter. At night the mica-flecked blue granite of its curved front wall shimmers like an anaconda’s back in the floodlights, but by daylight it looks like plain steel mesh. I stood on the concrete park in front among a shuffling crowd of Saturday celebrants enjoying the unseasonal sun and looked for a man of about sixty who might have resembled the subject of the photograph in my pocket when it was taken thirty years ago. I wasn’t looking too hard. I was thirty minutes early for our appointment.

“Mr. Walker?”

He was standing in the shadow of the porch that ran across the front of the building, a stoutish man with a late-middle-age belly swelling below his belt, wearing a coat of some kind of inexpensive tweed and green double-knit slacks and a wide white belt with patent-leather shoes to match. For his age, he was dressed as inconspicuously as William Sahara in his unremarkable grays; you know you’re getting on when you wake up one morning with an uncontrollable urge to dress like the Loch Ness Pimp. The fat red eye of a cigar glowed in the dimness of the porch.

“Usher,” I said.

“Pym. Step in out of the sun. It’s bad for you, you know.”

I joined him under the roof. The shade touched the back of my neck, chilling me to the balls of my feet and reminding me that Christmas was only five weeks off, together with the Canada clippers that blast down the river and leave the city dead white in their wake. Up close, his face was less full than in the picture: His cheeks swayed like empty sails when he moved his head and his skin had an orange tint of advancing jaundice. His eyes were still smoky, with the milky beginnings of a cataract in the right, and although his widow’s peak had thinned and receded, his moustache had grown fuller and healthier and white as bone. The thick brown smell of his cigar brought memories of Sundays when my uncle came to visit. An uncle I never had. It was that kind of a smell. He was leaning slightly on a blackthorne stick with a brass ferrule and a curved natural grip like a shillelagh.

“You’re younger than I expected,” he said. “But then everyone’s younger than he ought to be these days. I guess that’s something an old fogy would say.”

I said, “You’re not that old and I’m not that young. I didn’t come here to play Andy Hardy to your Judge.”

“Easy, son.”

“I’m not your son, either.”

He smiled behind the moustache. “Now, who can say that with any certainty? Where would you like to go?”

“Let’s walk. Something tells me this porch is worse for me than the sun.”

He pulled on the cigar, blew a wreath, and walked out of the shadows. I hung back a second, watching the way he moved. I couldn’t tell if he was carrying. You can’t with the professionals. I caught up with him.