Lady Yesterday (7 page)

“I didn’t know jazz was back.”

“Maybe it isn’t. Maybe I’m just hoping. Too many limeys screwed up rock, took it away from us and took the roll out of it and after that we had to get high to enjoy it. Jazz is.”

I hooked a beer from a waitress and asked if he wanted a refill. He shook his head. “Know anything about a girl singer named Glen Dexter?” I asked.

He perked. “Hell, yes. She could’ve been as big as Dinah Washington or Sarah. She retired early.”

“She recorded with Favor once.”

“Once, hell. She never cut with anyone else. They almost married.”

“What happened?”

He shrugged. “It was a bad time for a white woman to hook up with a black man. Maybe that was it. They broke up is all I know. She sang at the Paradise Lounge afterward. Died sometime late in the sixties. I met her niece last year at the Montreux festival.”

“Know where I can find her?”

“Ypsilanti, I think. She introduced herself because she said I sounded like Georgie. You can bet I pumped her about him. Edwina Dexter, that’s her name.” He pronounced it with a long
i
.

I wrote it down. “Either of your boys here when he used to sit in?”

“I was here first. Hey, you find him, call me, okay? I got a ton of questions to ask.” He gave me a card.

It was printed on tangerine stock with his name and address and telephone number in raised characters and a musical clef in one corner. I ran a thumb over the embossing. “What do the initials stand for?”

“Laverne Carroll.”

“Thanks, L. C.” I shook his hand. It was thickly calloused where the slide rested against his thumb and forefinger.

He returned to the platform for the next set and I ate something that sounded Italian and washed it down with beer and drove down to 1300 Beaubien, Detroit Police Headquarters. The snow was cuff-deep now and gave off its own light under the street lamps.

The squad room was quiet after the shift change, papered over with FBI circulars and typewritten memos and giving off an institutional smell of disinfectant and instant coffee and galoshes and the cat litter they threw on the floor where suspects lost their lunches. I asked for Lieutenant Thaler and a sad-faced plainclothesman in an underarm holster with egg salad on his tie jerked his thumb at an office door standing open. I went to it and rapped on the frame.

It was a square cubicle like all the rest, sequestered inside amber pebbled glass that fell a foot short of the squad room ceiling, but tidier than most. The paperwork was arranged in neat piles on the gray steel desk and bound copies of the Michigan Penal Code stood in order of year in a metal bookcase with a coffee machine on top, its little red light glowing. A spray of bright flowers grew out of a cut-glass vase on the corner of the desk opposite the telephone. Peonies, if it matters.

A trim woman in her mid-thirties sitting behind the desk looked up from her writing when I knocked. She had light brown hair that could have been honey blonde with no trouble, curling under at her shoulders and pushed back to form bangs on her forehead by a red plastic hairband like little girls wear. It didn’t look out of place on her. She wore tortoiseshell glasses with large round frames and a tailored khaki suit with a white jabot frothing at her throat. The nameplate on the desk read
LT. MARY ANNE TAYLOR
.

She said, “Yes?” She had a dimple at the corner of her mouth and her forehead wrinkled a little when she raised her eyebrows.

“John Alderdyce said I’d want to get along with Thaler,” I said after a moment.

She sat back and unscrewed her ballpoint pen. Her eyes flickered over me from behind the glasses. They were baby blue and nowhere near the size of hen’s eggs. “You’re not going to challenge me to an arm-wrestling match, are you?”

“Uh-uh. You might win. I’ve got a delicate ego.”

“It looks like the only thing about you that is. You’re with who?”

I opened my folder, turning the badge around back. It wasn’t likely to impress her. “John’s a friend. He said you had a leg up with ballistics.”

“How is he?”

“Drinking Millers like Prohibition’s coming back tomorrow. He’ll be okay.”

She screwed the pen back together, measuring me still. After a second she glanced at the chair in front of the desk. I sat down. She lifted the receiver off the telephone, dialed, waited a long time, spoke for a minute, and hung up. “John says you’re okay.”

“That’s more than he ever said to me.”

“He sounded drunk.”

“That would explain it.”

“What’ve you got for me?”

I unwrapped the bullet and laid it atop one of the piles of paper. She looked at it without picking it up.

“Thirty-eight. Where’d you get it?”

“Lady I’m working for found it in her driver’s seat. Someone put it through the windshield. She wasn’t in the car at the time and she’d like to know who’s responsible.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

She looked amused. “You want me to spell it?”

“I was expecting a lecture. Taxpayers’ money and like that.”

“I was one of four sergeants up for this promotion,” she said. “The other three were black and one of them was a woman, and what do you think my chances were in the town that invented Affirmative Action? John took my jacket and my score on the looey’s exam upstairs and didn’t come back down until I had this spot. So when he says you’re okay I figure you’re up for Pope at least.”

I scratched my ear.

“Something?”

“Just reconsidering my stand on women’s rights.”

“I was against them from the start. All those women running around fulfilling themselves while some poor schnook couldn’t get a job to feed his family. Or hers.” She unscrewed the pen. “Leave your card, Mr. Walker. I’ll call if we raise anything.”

T
HE PLOW HAD JUST
been down my street, followed by a salt truck to break up the ice the plow had uncovered and start dissolving my fenders and rocker panels. The cold air had frozen the ridges of snow hard as mortar and it was easier to pass a needle through the eye of a camel than to get into my driveway. I backed up and floored it and made it on the third try, tearing hell out of my new mudguards and throwing brine as high as the windows. Fortunately, much of the car is plastic.

The house was chilly. There is something about trapping winter air that brings out the worst in it. I dialed up the thermostat and the oil furnace kicked in with the sound of a distant cash register. I plugged in the coffee maker and bought myself a drink from the cupboard bottle to start my blood moving. After a few minutes I took off my hat and coat to let the heat inside. The chill crept out of the place on slow club feet.

In my not-so-easy chair, sipping coffee laced with whiskey and listening to the click-clunk of the antique clock in the living room, I went over what I had. It wasn’t much. It was less than that. So far I hadn’t been able to establish an existence for Little Georgie Favor this side of three years ago. Where he went after the Kitchen was a question as wide as Detroit, or as narrow as an old man’s options. I took out the picture Iris had given me of the two smiling people standing in front of the Piano Stool in Kingston. A happy young couple enjoying themselves for eternity, not knowing or caring what was coming, the moment lifted cleanly from time and set aside, like an item of token value rescued from an apartment before flames took it. Chief Crazy Horse was right. Cameras trapped the soul.

There were people I couldn’t find. I had a drawerful of unfinished cases, most of them unpaid for too. Some of them just walked out on their lives and never went back. It’s easier than you might think, and the more paper we have to carry around to prove we exist the easier it gets. In the last century you could run out to the territories, but communities were small and strangers stuck out a mile. Now it’s just a question of getting hold of a birth certificate, which unlocks all the other paperwork, and getting swallowed up in a population center somewhere. Strangers are more common than acquaintances; no one thinks about them. They aren’t even invisible. They’re part of the scenery.

For all that, people who disappear according to plan are the most easily traceable. They trade in opposites. If they live in Los Angeles they move to New York City. If they’re blond they dye their hair black. If they work in the accounting department they get a job hoisting crates of machine parts onto a loading dock. They take common names in place of unusual ones and nine out of ten of them wear their new lives like thorn underwear. You can pick them out of a crowd upside-down in a dirty mirror. The tough ones to find are the ones who left suddenly without thought, the thirty-year clerks who just missed being run over by stricken cab drivers on their way to work and the wives who walked into their husbands’ offices and found them on the sofas with their secretaries—people who just turned away from their various crossroads and started walking with no idea of where they were heading. They took up lives similar to those they had left, sometimes in the next block and sometimes without even changing their names, and unless someone who knew them in their other lives ran into them in a supermarket you’re out of luck. People don’t pay private investigators to sit around waiting for coincidences. The success ratio isn’t sparkling and even the most dedicated fishermen lose interest when their lines are slack as often as they’re taut.

I didn’t know which pigeonhole fitted George Favor. A man without friends glides around on the edge of others’ vision. People never looked at him directly or noticed when he wasn’t around until something happened to remind them. The job needed less work. Sometimes when you just let them lie, a root found its way into the soil and they blossomed on their own. The other job, the death’s-head drawing in Iris’ jewelry box and the bullet in her car, needed more work. The garage where she’d picked up the car was one handle. So far the attendant she’d claimed it from was the only person who knew she was in town. That was my all day tomorrow. When it comes to giving up information, garage attendants are as easy as doormen and confidential secretaries at the Pentagon. Clams were named for them.

I was still holding the picture. Having failed to draw any vibrations from it, I returned it to my breast pocket, brushing the paging device with my hand. I remembered Lester Hamilton then at the motel on Tireman, and as if that completed some sort of telepathic connection the beeper sounded. I turned it off and called my service. The girl said someone had left the name Lester and a number. I dialed it. He answered on the first ring.

“Mr. Walker?”

He sounded out of breath. I felt a tingling. He hadn’t called to tell me he’d turned up a license plate that didn’t belong in the motel parking lot. I asked him anyway.

“Forget that,” he said. “It’s Mr. Charm. I’m in his office.”

“Is he listening?”

“No.”

The tingling was stronger now. “Can he be?”

He might have swallowed. You can’t tell over the telephone. “No.”

I told him to sit tight and got my hat and coat and started reeling in line.

T
HE MOTEL LOOKED
much the same at night. The parking lot was well lit and the sign splashed green neon on the snow at its feet. Lester was standing under the canopy when I swung into a slot near the entrance. He had on the same red blazer and green-and-white-striped scarf. He opened my door.

“ ’S’go in the side,” he said. His flattop was a little mussed but other than that he looked as calm as moonlight.

We went through a steel fire door around the corner from the main entrance, at the end of a corridor carpeted in orange sherbet that started at the unfriendly lobby. I didn’t get close enough to tell if the blazer behind the desk contained the towheaded clerk with the spiky moustache who had sneered at me that afternoon. Long before we got to it we turned down a shorter corridor ending in a ridged glass door with
PRIVATE
stenciled in black on one of the horizontal ridges. Lester pushed it open and stood aside holding it against the pressure of the closer. I accepted the invitation.

It was a narrow room where work got done, unlike Drago Zelinka’s office at the Kitchen. A paneled desk two steps inside the door held up a scribbled-over appointment calendar and a metal rack jammed with letters in envelopes and a telephone with one of those caddies that let you rest the receiver on your shoulder while you’re going through the mail. There were a locked file cabinet and a gray steel safe and a clipboard attached to the wall by the desk with papers curling away from it. There was a window looking across the space between the two buildings at the windows of the rooms on that side. I turned up the Venetian blinds to determine that and closed them again. The walls were painted beige.

The carpet was shallow for easy cleaning and made of tough short black-and-brown fibers that wouldn’t wear out quickly. Mr. Charm was lying on it in a fetal curl with his congested face to the door and one hand curved loosely around an imitation stag handle protruding two inches above the watch pocket of his gray vest on the left side. The vest was stained dark around it but aside from that he was as well turned out as ever, with the gray knot of his silk necktie snugged up under his Adam’s apple and a soft shine on his black tasseled loafers and not too much cuff showing at his wrists. The round gray moustache was perfect. He’d approve.

“He didn’t go off at three like usual.” Lester had stepped inside, letting the door close. “His light was still on and the door was locked when I checked again at ten. No one had saw him. I slipped the lock.”

His skin was as cold as it gets, which is colder than just about anything. Still squatting, I examined the knife handle without touching it. It looked like a standard Boy Scout jackknife, only larger. They sell them in army surplus stores from Fairbanks to Miami. I got up, looked at him, looked at the door. If the body hadn’t been moved he could have got it while he was standing there holding the door open for his visitor. One thrust in and up by somebody who knew what he was doing. There were no heel marks on the carpet. The door had a button lock. It was just a matter of setting it on your way out.