Sweet Women Lie (17 page)

We started along the river. The water was pewter-colored and steamed a little in the warmer air. On the Windsor side the skyline had been cut with a scalpel out of gray cardboard, a reflection in a time-delayed mirror of an earlier, cleaner, less belligerent Detroit. Canada was behind us in many ways, but she’d get in step.

Usher walked with his white head down, holding the cigar down at his side between his fingers like a cigarette when he wasn’t pulling at it. When he was, the fiery tip burned back a quarter-inch at a time and trailed smoke like a dirty banner. “I decided to have a talk with you before you got hurt,” he said. “More civilians get mashed up in these things than you can imagine. Certainly more than you hear about.”

“What’s Catherine, a draftee?”

“I’d rather leave her out of this discussion. I hope I can depend on your confidence where she’s concerned.”

“Not if I think she might get mashed up along with all the other unreported statistics.”

He nodded, swinging the stick a little as he walked. “I guess that’s fair enough. She don’t like you much. Guess you know that.”

“It’s mutual. But there’s a difference between not liking someone and standing by with your hands in your pockets while she walks under a falling piano.”

“I like that. Yes I do. Where I grew up we tried to keep our women out of harm. That’s old hat now. I’m glad I ain’t the only one who’s too stiff to change.”

I was beginning to see his pattern. When the talk became personal, out came the grits and rustic grammar. I wondered if it was a pattern he’d gotten up for my benefit. I’d been around older people enough to know better than to trust them; and if what Sahara had told me was true, this one had been outwitting European black marketeers, not the world’s most gullible lot, years before I was born.

“What’s your interest in William Sahara?” I asked.

“What did he say it was?” He waved the cigar. “Oh, I know you met down in the concourse and again at your office. Just because he shook one tail don’t mean I didn’t have others.”

“All drawing federal wages, I suppose. He said he wanted out of the Company. You know that much already or you wouldn’t have been tailing him in the first place. He wanted me to make the arrangements. Maybe you know that too.”

“I guessed. He say anything else?”

“Only that he wanted to go alone. Catherine wasn’t to know anything about it. The town’s full of people walking around on tiptoe trying to keep Catherine from knowing anything about anything. Your turn.”

“People quit the Company every day,” he said. “Agents with a lot more secrets to tell than Sahara. Threat of federal prosecution is usually enough to keep them quiet, but sometimes a book contract or the talk show circuit is too tall a temptation and then we have to swallow the cod-liver oil and make a statement that don’t mean nothing and then we go on same as always, maybe minus some deadwood for the wolves, but that’s the game. If we went around slaughtering every field man who hands in his ticket, we’d be a lot shorter on applicants than we already are. We ain’t kill-drunk zombies, no matter what they write about us in the Washington
Post.”
He struck the wooden decking sharply with his stick. “Sahara stole something from Company files. Washington wants it back.”

“And Sahara’s head in a dispatch case.”

“My discretion. My instructions are not to negotiate.”

“Some discretion.”

He smiled at the decking. “Contrary to what the polls say, the gents in power do learn from their past fumbles. If no one actually gives the order, no one has to stand the blame in front of a Congressional subcommittee on something-or-other. See, they don’t mind being a party to murder, but they’re shy about committing perjury.”

“Sahara calls it counterassassination.”

“Bullshit. He’s a butcher like the rest of us.”

We separated to avoid breaking up a strolling couple. The boy was carrying books and the girl had on a Wayne State University sweatshirt.

“What’d he take?” I asked.

“An extensive list of deep-cover agents stationed across the country, together with their locations and the names they’re operating under. Nobody’s supposed to have access to that file but the director and one or two of his top aides. Sahara got the code somehow. Washington thinks he’s planning on selling the list to the enemy. They ain’t seen fit to tell me just who the enemy is, but I’m sure it’s some subversive element just waiting for its chance to kick Uncle Sam in the nuts and piss on the flag.”

“So that’s what Washington thinks.”

“I think it’s more than likely he plans to sell the list back to the Company. Oh, he’s getting out, all right, but the standard pension ain’t good enough. It ain’t, by the way; which is why I’m still here in the traces while most of the boys I started out with are back home scraping aphid shit off their roses.”

“So how come Sahara’s still walking around? The way I hear it, you’re death in large doses.”

“My job’s to get back the list, don’t forget. Since he ain’t asshole enough to carry it around with him, I need to get a handle on all the places he visits so I can start narrowing down hiding places. I figure he’s got to take it out and look at it from time to time, the way a miser counts his coins. I been through all his effects.”

“I thought only the dead had effects.”

He smiled again. “Well, you caught me with my pants down that time, son. I’m getting ahead of myself.”

“Then Catherine’s an effect.”

“Cat’s a special lady, but I guess you know that. If she wasn’t I’d have stopped seeing her soon as I found out she knows less about her husband than a grasshopper. Like I said, we ain’t zombies. Not all of us.”

“Herbert S. Pingree,” I said.

“Ah.”

“If you’d said, ‘Herbert who?’ I’d have pushed you in the river.”

He blew a chain of smoke rings. They drifted toward Windsor, each one widening until it broke noiselessly, like ancient promises. “Don’t let this here snowy roof lead you into trouble, son. I don’t push as easy as I look.”

“Pingree,” I repeated.

“I knew about him. Hard not to. I thought I knew some
politicians
who were in the wrong racket.”

“Did you hire him to follow Catherine?”

“Now, why would I do that? I was with her most of the time myself.”

“Maybe you were paying him to keep an eye on her the rest of the time.”

“Son, if I had to I could get people who could follow you into the shower and you’d never know they were sharing your soap. Mostly I work alone, and when I don’t, I don’t go into the private sector. Even if I did, that boy wouldn’t make the top one hundred names on my list.”

“Who hired him if not you?”

“If I was to guess, I’d say maybe ol’ Sahara thinks more about the little woman than he lets on. Maybe he paid Pingree to see what other roosters was hanging around the henhouse while he was away. Especially this here rooster.”

“No good. He had better people for that. They were in the Club Canaveral the night I braced Pingree in the toilet.”

“Following you, I expect.”

We were running out of deck. One of the last of the season’s ore carriers was gliding up the river on the Canadian side, its stacks lisping brackish smoke. We stopped to watch it. I took the typewritten sheet out of my inside breast pocket and handed it to him. He squinted at it. Watching him and Catherine trying to read a menu must have been worth the price of the meal. “Cat told me about this,” he said. “You say you got it from Pingree?”

“From his effects.” I tried not to stress the last word.

“Rendezvous.” He folded it and gave it back. “Why else would someone ride the People Mover around its whole circuit, unless he’s a tourist? He gets on at one station, whoever he’s meeting gets on at the next. After they finish talking each man gets off where he got on. I’d say your boy Pingree was using both sides of the ruler. Following Cat
and
Sahara.”

“What makes it Sahara he was following?”

“Auction.” He drew one last time on the cigar and tossed it into the water. It spat once and bobbed on the ore carrier’s corrugated wake. “Sahara’s got other buyers for the list of agents. He meets them in a nice public place like the People Mover to discuss terms. Only he got so greedy about it he didn’t notice Pingree shadowing him. Not the kind of mistake a man like Sahara usually makes, but you’d be surprised how many steps you miss when the stake’s personal.”

I put the sheet away. “Pingree didn’t type this. He didn’t have a typewriter in his office or his apartment. He kept his records in script. I didn’t give it much thought until today while I was putting away my own machine. So I guess there’s something in what you say about missing steps.”

“How you figure he got hold of it if he didn’t make it himself?”

A chain clanked on the carrier’s steel deck, sounding as loud across the half-mile of water as if it had been dropped at our feet.

“I figure you gave it to him,” I said, very low. “Not long before you killed him.”

P
APA
F
RANK
U
SHER
was still watching the iron boat, his balding, moustached profile looking as if it had been struck out of yellow alloy. “Not too pretty, is she?” he said. “A dignified lady, though, call her that. When I was six I wanted to be a riverboat pilot more than anything. By the time I was ten, the last of the old paddlers had gone to firewood and floating restaurants. Sometimes I think if it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. Or maybe I would. I was brought up Calvinist, and I still think all the molds were poured long ago.”

I said, “I wanted to be a cowboy, but the first horse I climbed on thought I was a fly. I fell off and you missed the boat and Pingree’s dead and here we are. Why cyanide?”

“Cyanide.” He was still looking at the carrier. “You’d think they’d have developed something better by now. I took cyanide in Vienna. I was in with this bunch of retired storm troopers and somebody in my own office tipped them. They had me cold in this basement room with no windows. My instructions in a case like that were pretty specific, so I bit down on this capsule I’d been carrying around for six months. The glass cut my lip and I winced and most of it went down my chin. When I went into convulsions a young fellow named Strendle gave me mouth-to-mouth until I started breathing again on my own. I wasn’t in no condition to talk after that, so the others left me alone with Strendle. By then I guess he figured he’d bought some stake in my continued well-being, because he helped me escape that night. Sicker than a dog I was, but I kept on walking till the MPs found me. That boy saved my life twice that night. They killed him later.”

“The Nazis?”

“No, the Allies. Seems Strendle was personally responsible for the massacre of sixty-seven Jews at Birkenau. They found him guilty at Nuremberg and hanged him.” He turned my way. “No, son, I wouldn’t feed nobody cyanide. Next time someone tells you it’s a humane way to die, you tell him to go ahead and hold his breath until he faints. That’ll give him some idea of what it’s like. I’m a killer, not a sadist.”

“I didn’t think you killed him personally. I was just asking for a professional opinion. I think you followed Sahara long enough to put together this itinerary, then switched your attention to Catherine so she’d feel guilty when she found out she was being shadowed by a private detective. You hired Pingree for that, knowing he’d blow it and call attention to himself and cause a confrontation between her and Sahara. She’d be that kind. Only she came to me instead.

“You weren’t finished, though. You fed the itinerary to Pingree and turned him loose on Sahara. I don’t know what you told him, but I’ll bet you flashed your credentials and read him the national security speech. He ate it up, along with a nice retainer, and agreed to keep his mouth shut, even in his business records. Sahara would tumble to him quicker than Catherine. Maybe he’d panic and take off with the list and you’d nail him with it on his person. First, though, he’d flick Pingree away like a mosquito. It was the same as if you’d killed him yourself, Usher. He wasn’t much, just a little guy in the wrong racket. I don’t know the rules of your game, but it seems to me these little pieces you blow down when you twirl the spinner are supposed to be the object.”

He raised his stick and studied the ferrule. I stepped back a pace, but he just flicked at it with his thumb and returned it to the ground. “If someone was to do that, it’d be a bad thing,” he said finally. “But if the names on that list got into the wrong hands, there’d be funerals clear across the country.”

“That song never plays. Not unless you sang it for Pingree first.”

“We do what we do, son. Why we do it ain’t always so clear. Nothing is, without uniforms. Maybe nothing ever was.”

“Is that a confession?”

He turned away from the carrier and started back along the river the way we’d come. I fell in beside him. A bank of soiled clouds had moved in front of the sun and the air coming off the water was dank, like a gust off an old barrel. He said, “If I wanted to flush Sahara out, why didn’t I just make an anonymous call, tell him somebody was on to him?”

“He wouldn’t have fallen for it. He and you have been playing the double-reverse so long you wouldn’t know a direct approach if it rolled over you. Maybe Pingree’s partly responsible. Maybe he tried to sell Sahara that itinerary the way Sahara was peddling the list of agents. I doubt it, though, or the last thing he’d have wanted was a partner to split the take. The only time we met he offered to kick half the job over to me, a complete stranger. Maybe you told him to pose as a blackmailer. Maybe he had just enough smarts to suspect something was wrong with the whole business, and that’s why he made me that offer, to get my opinion. Either way you killed him. You might as well have gone up there and handed him that glass of water yourself.”

“It won’t stick, son, even without the maybes. You need chain of evidence.”

“Lawyers need evidence. I fly by my gut. Anyway, you’ve got some kind of license to kill, so why not humor me and confess?”

“If I did have one, it would only be valid as long as I kept my own mouth shut.”