The Sundown Speech (2 page)

“Damn it, Hel!”

She jumped. I almost did. I'd had Dante down for some throat operation that prevented him from raising his voice above a murmur. He'd taken another nervous bite of his sandwich, and the spot of green against the color of his face looked like Christmas.

“Do you know how many press releases I have to write in order to make fifteen thousand dollars? It isn't as if you make commissions on those books you sell. You could do better in tips working in this restaurant.”

If his wife's eyes were suns instead of planets they'd set him on fire through those heavy-duty lenses. But she said nothing.

That clinched it for me. “I get five hundred a day,” I said. “Three days in advance, to cover the cost of ammo.”

I'd tossed that in to see if she'd balk. She didn't, although when her gaze shifted to mine I almost ducked back into the anthill. I finished my sandwich while she made out the check. They really know how to make beef sing at Zingerman's.

 

TWO

The check was on dirty-looking recycled paper with an engraved sketch of something that suggested a cross between a manatee and Meatloaf, undoubtedly an endangered species. Heloise Gunnar gave it to me along with some start-up information and a clipping from the
Ann Arbor News
about Jerry Marcus' moviemaking project. In the photo, a thirtyish elfin face beamed out from under a mop of curly dark hair, with a chin suitable for driving flathead screws. He looked like a chiseler, but then the really successful ones never do.

“The paper might have another contact number,” I said. “Did you ask?”

She shook her head. “They endorsed the conservative ticket in the last election. We canceled our subscription the next day.”

“I'll start there. The last time I voted, the candidates' wives all wore girdles.”

“That would be LBJ?” Her smile was shrink-sealed to her face. Here was a woman who could carry a grudge to the grave.

“Wilson. I marched with the Bonus Army. I don't guess you tried the police.”

“Those fascists?”

I said I'd call, and saw them out to their car. It was a faded-rose Volvo—the closest thing to a Birkenstock on wheels—plastered all over the rear panel with peace signs and slogans. It probably ran on soybeans.

My Cutlass was parked at a one-hour meter around the corner. I put the overtime ticket in the glove compartment with the others and checked the load in the Chief's Special I keep in a spring hatch under the dash. I went weeks without doing that or even thinking about it, but Heloise's convictions had made me superstitious on top of my indigestion. I figured they poured the hot sauce with welders' gloves and a pair of tongs.

I hadn't caved in yet to carrying a cell; you could still find a public telephone then without a historic plaque in front of it. I found one and tried the number Marcus had given the Gunnars, confirmed it was out of service, and called the number I got for the
News
from the directory chained to the box.

“What is it you want, Mr. Walker?” asked a cool female voice belonging to the features editor.

“Information. Isn't that your business?”

“A newspaper's business is to make money. We provide the material that attracts readers to our advertisers, based on circulation figures. At least, that's what the people who draw up our ads say,” she said with a sigh. “Give me something they can get their teeth into, and we'll talk.”

“A local moviemaker's gone missing,” I said. “It could be a flimflam, or foul play. Things may have changed, but when I grew up, those things sold papers.”

“Is this about Jerry Marcus?” If you can feel a thermometer jump a couple of degrees, I felt it at that moment.

I said it was, and told her his cell was out of service.

“We might have another number. Are you free this afternoon?”

The
News
building was a cream-colored Deco pile on Huron Street, a couple of blocks off Main. I rode a rheumatic elevator up to the press room, sandwiched between a stuttering fluorescent ceiling and a linoleum floor that had sunk so far into the boards beneath it made me seasick just walking down the aisle. The chunky typewriters of legend had given way to pre-Columbian computer consoles mounted on desks made of pressed cardboard. The first time I'd visited a newspaper office, on East Lafayette, the clatter of Underwood manuals and rumble of cylinder presses in the basement underfoot was like a shot of adrenaline; in this digital age, the keyboards sounded like an old lady coughing discreetly into a handkerchief.

The place smelled of rubber cement and toner, which was the formula for the coffee I drank with the editor, a pleasant-faced woman with the eyes of a peregrine falcon. We sat facing each other across a desk of no particular design in an office separated from the rest of the floor by pebbled-glass partitions that didn't reach to the ceiling. Plaques and framed certificates added to the general clutter of paper and personal memorabilia; a cube on the desk kept changing family pictures, a distraction I tried hard to ignore.

“I know,” she said, when I reacted to the coffee. “We make it with bottled water: all the good minerals filtered out, at three times the cost of the spring water they started with. They strain it and distill it and refine it until nothing's left. Just like the newspaper business.”

“What's wrong with it? The newspaper business.”

“Oh, it's okay. Where I spent my internship, the rewrite man was a character out of MacArthur and Hecht. He had a telephone line installed in the corner booth of the bar across the street from the paper, and he worked there from opening to last call. Never went to the office. A reporter on the scene of a fire would call him, spew out the details, and he'd rap out something in five minutes that sounded like Hemingway. He was a drunk and a bigot, but what he wrote had balls. You don't get quite the same thing on mocha latte.”

“Finished?” I said.

She flushed. She was in a landing pattern around middle age, with dyed-beige hair and a stroke of blush on each cheek. I'd have taken her for a benevolent aunt but for those eyes. They were like steel shavings.

“Finished. If I didn't do this once a month, I'd wind up on the Washington Press Corps, taking dictation from the president. I've had offers.”

“I'm sure you have. Do you know about Jerry Marcus?”

The eyes glazed over. “What was your name again?”

I told her again. Journalists, like lawyers, are hell for repetition. This time she scribbled in the reporters' pad at her elbow; the first time seemed to have been practice. She'd missed it the same way Rosa Parks missed the bus.

“My clients gave this fellow Marcus money to shoot his picture,” I said, “then fell out of touch. There might be nothing in it.”

She looked at my ID, screwed up her forehead at the deputy's star pinned to the bottom of the folder.

I shrugged. “Bureaucratic oversight. The county forgot to ask for it back after I gave up serving papers.”

“Isn't it illegal to carry it?”

“It is.”

“Are you always this honest?”

“No. But I could be lying.”

“Any personal references?”

I gave her some names and numbers and rolled the Styrofoam cup between my palms while she made the calls. A faux-knitted sampler in a folksy barkwood frame hung at an angle behind her head, reading:
DON'T PAINT THE DEVIL AS BLACK AS HE IS
. Everything means something to somebody.

She spent three minutes apiece on each call. She made some squiggles in a notepad, then hung up. A nerve twitched in her right cheek. “You're not a popular person, are you?”

“I kind of languished when teams were picked,” I said. “I played dirty.”

“Not when it counted, I was most reluctantly told.”

“The people who like me wouldn't impress you.”

“I wrote that article myself,” she said. “It's a pretty big deal when someone makes a movie here. The climate, you know; those smogtown crews are terrified of going over schedule and seeing what their breath looks like in late November. Even when the picture's set in Ann Arbor, they shoot it in L.A., with about three days' worth of second-unit footage here for the exteriors. What's one definition of a Michigan native?”

“Someone who's never met a celebrity.”

“So when snow falls in Death Valley and a legitimate outfit shoots locally, we put it on the front page. We get a bump in circulation and maybe sell an ad or two when the movie premieres.” She frowned. “A lot of folks are going to be disappointed if Marcus turns out to be just another swindler. That's a daily item around here.”

“It's what I'm being paid to find out.”

“Do we get the story?”

“If it's fraud, you'll get it before the cops. If it's something more serious, I've got a license to stand in front of.”

“In that event, I'll have to give it to the city desk. The newspaper business is run on a feudal system, and God help the reporter who turns in the murder of a football player to anyone but the sports editor.”

Her Rolodex rattled like a bingo basket. When it stopped, she scribbled something on the back of a business card she took from her desk and gave it to me. The telephone number was local.

“It's a landline,” she said. “Campus area, I think. Marcus gave it to me when I interviewed him.”

I stuck it in my wallet. “I appreciate the time. I know how busy you get this time of day.”

Her face softened. She was an attractive woman when she let herself be. “First time in town?”

“I come through now and then, never long enough to soak up the atmosphere. Mostly I work Detroit, the northern suburbs, and Downriver. Any dragons I need to know about?”

“East side's dicey, and you want to watch yourself in the nightclubs; but where you're going, burglary's as bad as it usually gets. Couch fires were a problem until the city banned upholstered furniture on porches. Some were arson, others caused by kids learning how to smoke. It's a nice town, once you get past the attitude.”

“What attitude's that?”

“Oh, it's an old saw.”

“I'm old enough to appreciate it.”

She had one of those tri-cornered rules on her desk; the kind old-time schoolteachers used to rap the alphabet across errant knuckles. She picked it up and slid it between the thumb and forefinger of one hand; dragging something up from some depth.

“A long time ago,” she said, “someone told them Ann Arbor's the cultural center of the world, and they haven't gotten the joke yet.”

“
They
being who?”

She gave me an edited smile. “If your clients are who I think they are, you've met two of them.”

“I didn't know the place was that small.”

“Not as small as some of the residents like to pretend. The population runs around a hundred thousand when university's in session. But this is the only daily, not counting the student rag, and it isn't my first. Here you can get hold of a copy of
Beowulf
translated into Frangi, which is a language that only existed for three weeks in the eleventh century, but you can't buy a decent cup of coffee anywhere in town.” She sipped from her mug, blue with a yellow block M printed on it, and grimaced.

“I must have passed half a dozen coffee shops on the way here from the deli.”

“A new one opens every month or so and lasts about as long as Frangi. When I came here, you could still buy nails by the pound in hardware stores downtown. Now you have to go out to the big-box joints by the malls. In twenty years the place will be wall-to-wall cafes and brew pubs. And the university, of course, gobbling up millions in donations and tax-free real estate.”

“You make it sound like you were here when they poured the first sidewalk.”

“Not so long, really. The place keeps making itself over. The only thing that never changes is the attitude.”

I grinned. “Frangi, seriously? Does everyone in town have a Ph.D.?”

She colored a little. “The place drips with erudition. Don't get me wrong; I love it here. The people are friendly, by and large, the bookstores are great, and you can walk through downtown after midnight any day of the week, safe in a crowd. But sometimes you want to go to a place where people double their negatives and think Fellini's something you can order at Olive Garden.”

I emptied my cup, just to prove what a tough character I am, and got up.

“Thanks for the number. Also the lowdown.”

She smiled. “Got your first parking ticket yet?”

“They nailed me outside Zingerman's.”

“You get used to it.”

 

THREE

I found another public phone; that's how good a detective I am. Even the homeless party camped on the sidewalk among his overstuffed trash bags had his broker on his cell.

No answer at the new number. When the cheerful recorded voice of Ma Bell cut in telling me to try again later, I waggled the plunger and dialed a number I knew by heart.

“Where are you?” Barry Stackpole asked, when I identified myself. “You sound like you're calling from the hull of an oil tanker.”

“Pay phone in Ann Arbor.”

“No shit. Museum of Natural History?”

“There are a couple of dodos left.”

“Going back for your master's?”

“I've got a number that won't answer. I need an address to go with it.”

“Anything for me?”

“You're the second reporter who's asked me that today. Don't you people ever take a break?”

“Waiting for an answer.”

“I already promised dibs. You're next, unless there's bleeding involved.”

“You're in luck. I'm online right now, exploring the mysteries of the Vatican.”

“The pope's mobbed up?”