Sugartown (18 page)

I woke up with something heavy and hairy sitting on my face clanging a bell next to my ear. The noise continued while I got the thing’s sharp feet off my eyelids, but the thing crawled to the top of my head, balancing there with its claws sunk in my scalp. One of its hot smelly paws had been inside my mouth and all over my tongue. It went on clanging the bell. It was trying to pretend it was the telephone ringing in the living room, but I knew better. Its weight was dragging the skin tight over the bones of my face and making my eyes start.

I stuck my feet inside slippers and fumbled into my robe on the way out of the bedroom. The bell rang and rang. I leaned my forehead against my great-grandmother’s clock. 4:01. I got the telephone receiver in both hands finally and the silence when I lifted it was so sudden and sharp it hurt as much as the noise. My hairy thing snickered in my left ear.

“Amos? Hello?”

My demon reacted to the voice as if someone had waved a crucifix in its flat ugly face. A silver cross. It leaped off my head and scampered into whatever dark corner its kind lives in, leaving only dull pain and a faint stench of brimstone behind. I hoped it hadn’t laid any eggs.

“Second.” I rested the receiver on the little table next to my only easy chair and went back into the bedroom. When I came out and sat down and picked it up again the voice said:

“You just lit a cigarette, didn’t you?”

“No.” I blew smoke.

“Uh-huh.”

“Am I awake at this hour for a message from the American Lung Association?”

“I earned that,” Karen said, after a beat. “Sometimes my work gets in the way of the rest of me. You know what that’s like.”

“I’ve heard stories.”

“You sound hung over.”

“It’s the connection. A lot of people think that when they call me at four a.m.”

“Amos, are you all right?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good.” She sounded unconvinced. “I wouldn’t want you not to be.”

I let smoke trickle noiselessly out my nostrils and said nothing.

She said, “I’m sorry about this afternoon. Yesterday afternoon, that is. I guess you got to me with that crack about the gorgeous blonde more than I wanted to admit. I’m sure it’s true, but no woman likes to be reminded there are prettier women.”

“I thought maybe it was because you didn’t want to talk about Young Dr. Kildare. Tim.”

“That wasn’t it. Why do you keep bringing him up?” She paused. It was very quiet on her end. “Listen, my shift just finished. I’m sort of on overdrive and I know I won’t be able to sleep. Is it too late to come over and unwind?”

“I thought you were going sailing tomorrow. Today.”

“Tim cancelled. He’s studying for an exam.”

“It’s quite a hike over here. Why don’t we meet at your place?”

“No, I’m too keyed up for home. Besides, I’m the one who got you out of bed. According to Emily Post that carries certain responsibilities.”

“I’ll dig out the tea cozy.” I gave her directions and we spent a couple of minutes saying good-bye.

After hanging up I sat there and finished my cigarette. Then I went into the bathroom and stripped and stood for five minutes under a shower of icicles. I shaved, admiring the pinkish cast in the whites of my eyes. I made the bed and broke a fresh shirt out of the bureau and put it on with the pants to the blue suit. I finished dressing, went into the kitchen, plugged in the coffee maker, and washed the supper dishes I’d left in the sink, then got the carpet sweeper and went over the rug in the living room. I dumped ashtrays and dusted. By that time the coffee was ready. I had time for two cups and another cigarette and then the door buzzer sounded.

“You are hung over,” she said.

She was still wearing her white nurse’s uniform under a brown leather car coat that glistened wetly in the light from the lamp behind me, but she had undone her hair, which glowed softly reddish, like a good painting in the right illumination. Her face was roses and milk. Looking at her, I took in some air and let it out.

She put her arms around my neck and we kissed. I drew her inside and kicked the door shut, setting the lock with my elbow. When we came unstuck she said, “You’ve done this before.”

I made the diplomatic response and helped her out of her coat.

I hung it in the closet and we walked into the living room with an arm around each other’s waist like school kids in the hall by the lockers. She looked around. “You’re a pretty good housekeeper. I thought bachelors always had empty beer cans lying around and socks that needed darning.”

“That’s one stereotype. The other is a gourmet cook with a different kind of hanger for everything he wears and one of those dimmer switches on the wall.”

“Which one are you?”

“When my socks get holes in them I throw them out and buy new ones. But only if the holes show outside my shoes. And when my lights get dim I know I forgot to send Detroit Edison a check that month.” I sat her down in the sofa. “Coffee? No powdered creamer, sorry. You’ll have to take milk.”

“In that case I’ll have a drink.”

“Scotch okay?”

“With water.”

I went into the kitchen and splashed water into a pair of small barrel glasses and colored it with Hiram Walker’s. When I carried them into the living room she was standing by my cheap stereo, leafing idly through the record albums in the open cabinet.

“You have an interesting collection. I’ve never heard of some of these singers.”

“Some of them have been dead longer than you’ve been alive.”

“Could I hear one?”

“Take your pick.”

She did some more leafing, slid one out and studied the picture on the cover. “She’s pretty. Such a delicate profile. I think someone must have hurt her.”

It was Helen Morgan. I said, “What makes it she was hurt?”

“She just has that crushed-petal look. This one, I think.” She tapped the cover.

“Go ahead. That spike goes through the hole there in the middle.”

“Thanks,” she said dryly. She slid the record out of the inner sleeve and spindled it and found the
ON
switch. The Morgan started warbling.

“Plaintive.” She accepted the glass I held out.

I lifted mine. “Voices from the grave.”

“Voices.”

We drank. She moved toward the sofa again, swaying a little to the music, hugging herself with the glass in one hand. I watched her with frankly carnal interest. She sat down and crossed her smooth legs. Louise Starr got the same effect by just crossing her ankles. But there are times when you want rich chocolate and there are times when nothing but sharp peppermint will do.

She looked at me for a while, and then she said, “What did you and Martha talk about today? Yesterday, damn it.”

“Michael.”

“That’s all?”

“Mostly. Some other stuff, about who’s tough and who’s not and what makes them one or the other. Why?”

“I don’t know. She seemed — furtive when I visited her later. She was quite willing to talk about anything but your visit. Whenever the subject came up she changed it. I thought maybe —” She shrugged and nibbled at her drink.

“Maybe what?”

Her gaze got direct. “Amos, did you talk her into hiring you again to investigate Michael’s death?”

“I don’t try to talk people into things. I’m generally too busy trying to talk my way out of this or that. Trying to persuade Mrs. Evancek to do something she didn’t want to is not my idea of time spent constructively.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. I should know better. It’s just—”

“That they can be such children at that age.”

“Well, yes” — she put starch in her glare — “they can. You don’t spend as much time with them as I do, you don’t know the games they play, their simple and touching deviousness.”

“I’ve worked with them and for them. A lot of my business comes from people who are getting ready to die and want to see the sons and daughters they let go of years ago before they do. I’ve spent more time in nursing homes than a Spanish-American War veteran. Old people aren’t cute. They’re mean and kind and petty and impressive and pathetic and sometimes nice, just like the rest of us. The only difference is they’ve outgrown the rules you and I have to live by. Everything they do is serious because death is sitting on their shoulders and blowing in their ears.”

She lowered the level in her glass some more. Then she set it down on my scratched coffee table and sat up straight with her hands on her crossed knee, looking at me. “You have a preoccupation with death this morning. What’s wrong? No snappy lines, please.”

“Mornings I think about death,” I said. “I’m a little closer to it each time I roll out of bed, as who isn’t? Also I stumbled over another stiff yesterday.”

I watched her face work, and then she asked the question.

“ ‘Another’?”

“It’s my hobby. Whenever I find one I throw up my hands and call it out like an out-of-state license plate. So far I’m way ahead of the pack.”

“And who did this one belong to?”

“An old fence named Woldanski, in Hamtramck. He found a broken neck at the bottom of the stairs in an empty house on his lot. You’ll read about it in the H section of today’s paper unless war breaks out or the mayor buys a new suit.”

“Was he murdered?”

“Probably. In my hobby they don’t count if they weren’t.”

“Do you have to joke about it?”

I drank some Scotch. Listened to Helen Morgan.

“Dumb question,” Karen said. She rubbed the back of her neck. “I’m strung like a guitar. Not thinking straight.”

That seemed to be my cue. I set down my glass next to hers and moved behind the sofa and worked my thumbs in the hollows of her shoulders. Her hair smelled like fresh air. She made little purring noises.

“That’s nice. Where did you learn to do that?”

“I used to strangle chickens for the Kiwanis Broil.”

Her knotted muscles loosened grudgingly under my thumbs. She was all taut sinew under smooth flesh like a silken sheath.

“Did this Woldanski know something about Michael?”

I got my hands away from her neck. She turned her head a little, bringing one eyelash into profile. I said, “Listen closely, there will be a quiz later. I’m not looking into Michael’s death today. I wasn’t looking into Michael’s death yesterday. I won’t be looking into Michael’s death tomorrow. Michael is as dead as Caruso, as dead as last summer’s grass, as dead as this conversation. I just got through saying I don’t have to look for dead things. They throw themselves at me like ale-wives fighting to reach shore.”

The record played. Helen was asking someone to give her something to remember him by, but it didn’t sound as if she expected anything to come of it.

Karen said, “It’s just that there seems to be an awful lot of Polish names cropping up in your vocabulary lately. What am I supposed to think?”

“That this is an ethnic city. And that when I say I’m not doing a thing, the chances are I’m not.”

She turned that over for a moment. “What are you going to do about the murder?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I have aches and pains when I get up in the morning that a man my age shouldn’t have because I thought that murder was somebody’s business but the cops’. It took a lot of lessons but I finally got all the notes down pat. Woldanski may have been killed for the thing I went to see him about. The odds say it had to do with one of a thousand other things I never heard of. I don’t have the time and the person I’m working for doesn’t have the money to spend sorting them out. The trail ended at the base of those stairs.”

“Your client won’t be happy.”

“Happy is a dwarf in a kids’ movie.”

“Cynical.”

“No,” I said, “just tired. Tired as hell.”

“I can tell. I’ve been here twenty minutes and you’ve only kissed me once.”

I bent down and took her chin and turned her head and fixed that. The needle came to the end of the record meanwhile and the arm swept back and the machine turned itself off with a discreet click, like a bellhop letting himself out of the honeymoon suite.

T
HE SUN WAS UP
when she left, driving a big rattletrap Plymouth the color of dusty gold and towing a shadow as long as the block. The house smelled of her afterwards, and when I reheated the coffee and drank some it tasted of her. There are women that can be had and there are women that can only be borrowed. It was hard to picture anyone ever having Karen McBride. I took another shower and put on another clean shirt and the blue suit and drove through spreading sunlight to the office. It was going to be a nice day. The sidewalk was dry and warm and the shade of the building entrance touched the back of my neck like cool water.

Louise Starr was standing in the hall outside my little reception room. The theme today was gray, gray pinched jacket and matching high-waisted slacks and a light blue satin blouse. Her blonde hair was up, young-woman-executive fashion, but the light liked it anyway. She was clutching a black patent leather purse with a silver clasp. When I showed up she glanced down at a watch pinned to her lapel and smiled approvingly, with a trace of mockery around the edges.

“You keep early hours,” she said. “I have a nine o’clock appointment with the Information Services director at Wayne State and I thought I’d stop in on the off chance of seeing you. I was about to leave.”

I said, “Yours are early enough. It’s only seven-thirty.” I unlocked the door and pushed it open and stepped aside, holding it. I hoped she wouldn’t hit me with her purse for that.

She didn’t. She entered ahead of me. “Well, perhaps I was counting on that off chance more than I let on.”

I liked her style. She didn’t wrinkle her nose at the Devil’s Island bench in the waiting room or the low chipped table holding up some magazines too old even for a dentist’s office. I let her into my private sleuthing parlor, where a bar of dusty sunlight lay on the desk and carpet and file cabinet, all gone the same color with age. The wallpaper was fairly new, brown stylized butterflies trapped on a field of amber.

“I’d sue your cleaning service,” she said.

I hung up my hat. “Go sue the little guy who turns off your car radio when you drive under a bridge. I don’t think the service exists.”