Sweet Women Lie (8 page)

I looked at all of them. I read everything. Date of birth, check.

Height 6’1”, generous by half an inch. Weight 185. Hair and eyes brown. One-centimeter scar on lower lip — fell out of a treehouse, Doc, age nine and a half — old surgery scar on right side of abdomen, to pin together a rib splintered by a bullet. Slight protrusion at bridge of nose, an old break — dropped my guard in the second round, Coach, they hit hard in college.
Military service:
Two years Vietnam and Cambodia, First Air Cavalry, three years stateside, Military Police.
Education:
B.A. Sociology, eleven weeks in the Detroit Police Department’s cadet training program, the Tet Offensive.
Associations, Personal:
None.
Associations, Professional:
John Alderdyce, Inspector, Detroit Police Department; Barry Stackpole, journalist; Lee Horst, information broker; Lou Gallardo, repo man. The list seemed short. At that they were the closest thing I had to friends in Detroit, and I didn’t know anyone outside Detroit.
Habits:
Cigarettes (Winstons exclusively), Scotch (in a bottle), following one slightly bent snoot into deep sewage.
Turn-ons:
Old movies, dead female vocalists, people in trouble. Kisses on the first date, but doesn’t go all the way. Likes dogs, tolerates cats if they’re sufficiently doglike. Good cook, indifferent dresser. Never met a pickpocket he didn’t like or a union rep he did.
Turn-offs:
Barbershop quartets, colorization, reading files with his name on them.

I finished it in an hour and a half, getting up twice to refill my glass. The telephone rang on one of these trips but the caller hung up when I answered, another wrong number. When I turned over the last leaf I put it all back into order, carried the folder into the little water closet, and shook its contents into the toilet. I threw the folder in last. I squirted half a can of lighter fluid over the pile, struck a match, held it a moment until it burned down past the sulfur, and dropped it into the bowl. The fluid went up with a polite little thump. I watched the pages shrivel and crawl, the couple in the wedding picture writhe together and melt into a flaming black hole. When I was sure the stuff wouldn’t clog the pipes I dropped the lid and pushed down the pedal. As the water gushed and growled I lifted my glass and drank what was in it. It was one of the better and wetter wakes I’d been to.

I went back to the desk and sat down. I didn’t feel born again, or even cleansed. I felt as empty as the tank, or as empty as the gesture, which was emptier. It brings no great lift to see one’s life boiled down to a half-inch sheaf of papers in a cardboard folder, filed along with all the other half-inch lives in a drawer like the ones they have at the morgue. A life that is all murmurs and images can always be changed. Write it down, collate and cross-reference it, and it is there forever, the letters like uniform headstones in a bureaucratic Arlington, their sounds and meanings embalmed and entombed in concrete vaults, enshrined, immobile. If the first cave-dweller who had stopped boasting about his day’s hunt over the fire to set it down in charcoal on the granite wall of his boudoir had been pinioned and trussed and fed to a tiger by his outraged companions, we would all be better off, our sins and mistakes as erasable as those marks on a child’s magic tablet that vanish when the cellophane is lifted. Shakespeare had it wrong: First kill all the clerks.

No matter how well you live your life, the thought that all the smudges and half-measures are part of the permanent record is shameful, like waking up from a private erotic dream to find that others have been watching and listening as you thrashed and muttered. You try to forget and sometimes you succeed, but now and then on the edge of your hearing you’ll detect the furtive scribbling, like rats’ claws on plaster.

The telephone rang again while I was examining the bottle and wondering whether the rest of the afternoon was worth not sacrificing to the great twin gods J&B. I left the decision to whoever was on the other end.

At first there was no one on the other end, just as before. I started to hang up.

“Amos?”

It was just another woman’s voice, heard on an instrument that had brought me plenty of women’s voices in every key since the day I’d had my name painted on the office door; the team that had assembled the dossier that had blistered the underside of my toilet lid might have been able to estimate their number. If I hadn’t just been reading the file and wasn’t still stuck in reverse gear, I might not have recognized it at all. Then again maybe I would have even if I’d been up to my neck in the present.

“Hello, Catherine,” I said, screwing the cap back on the bottle.

“Y
OU ALWAYS DID
have a memory like an elephant,” she said after a pause.

“Elephants have the hide for it,” I said. “They’re born with it. I had to make mine from scratch.” I waited.

“So how are you? How’s Dale?”

“Compared to Dale I’m swell. He’s been dead for years.”

“Oh.” At least she didn’t say she was sorry. She had only one face, however much time she spent on it in the course of a day. “Did you get a new partner, or are you all alone?”

“Sometimes there’s hardly enough business for one.”

“You’re alone?”

“What’s on your mind, Catherine?”

She feigned irritation to cover the real thing; same old Catherine. “Aren’t you going to ask me how I am?”

“How was Aruba?”

“Too many beaches. I’m lucky I don’t have skin like barn siding. I’ve been back a long time. Years. I’m in Detroit now.” This time
she
waited, but I didn’t jump in. She gave up. “I wasn’t doing anything and I got to wondering about you, what you were up to and if you were still in town doing the same thing. First I looked up Apollo Investigations. It wasn’t listed.”

“I changed the name after Dale was killed.”

“Dale was killed?”

“So you looked me up under my name and here we are talking.”

Long pause. She would be looking at her nails the way she did — her perfect nails — as if the next line were written on them. It’s funny the things you remember. “I know Bill went to see you,” she said.

“Who’s Bill?”

“My husband, William Sahara. Don’t pretend you never heard of him. You never could lie to me.”

“I never tried.” I hadn’t this time, either. It was hard to think of Sahara as anybody’s Bill.

“Are you saying you haven’t seen him?”

“If you think he’s sneaking around you might consider hiring a private investigator. I can give you some names.”

“Did he hire you to follow me?”

My chair squeaked. “Hold on a second.”

“What?”

I laid the receiver gently on the blotter and got out my handkerchief to wipe my palms. Both palms were dry. I looked at the bottle again and shook a cigarette out of the pack instead. I lit it and picked up the receiver. “What was the question?”

“You heard me,” she said.

“Would he have a reason to have you tailed?”

Another pause, shorter this time. “Amos, can you get away for a drink?”

“A drink I can do right here in the office.”

“Please, Amos.”

The cigarette tasted like an overheated radiator. I put it in the ashtray and let it smoke itself. “Where do you want to meet?”

“I’ve been out of circulation a long time. Most of the places we used to go to are probably closed by now. You pick. Someplace we can talk.”

“I know the place,” I said.

I missed the first half of the floor show. The hostess, a tall blonde dressed like Marilyn Monroe in a spaghetti-strap dress she had put on with a roller — to distinguish her from the waitresses dressed like carhops — seated me near the busboys’ stand, shouted in my ear that I’d be served after the show, and sashayed out of my life. I watched Gail Hope and the Malibu Mafia make a few taps and turns look like a production number out of
Guys ’n’ Dolls
and listened to the applause washing over like breakers in the second of pitch-blackness that came on the end of the last drumbeat. When the lights came up, Catherine was standing by the table.

“You’re getting gray,” she said.

I stood up. She had on a suit made out of a used dropcloth that would have run three figures, all bright daubs and spatters on some stiff material like canvas with shoulder pads and a skirt that caught her at mid-calf, over a red silk blouse and a goldstone necklace with beads the size of cueballs. Her pumps were gold, too, and it brought out the highlights in her hair, which was auburn now and almost shoulder-length; but then the tomboy cut I remembered was as dead as Nehru. She seemed to have on no make-up at all, which meant she had put on the right kind for the lighting in the Club Canaveral. Leave it to Catherine to show up dressed and painted correctly for a place she said she had never been to before.

“I’ve got a painting of me that never gets gray at all,” I said. “The artist screwed up my instructions.”

“I see you still have your sense of humor.”

“You always did hate it.” I pulled out her chair.

She remained standing. “Is this the best table you could get?”

“If it were, you still wouldn’t like it. We’re not here for the show.” I got her into the chair finally and took my seat. A carhop wobbled over. I looked at Catherine. “Is it still a gimlet?”

“Only in the summer. Seven-and-Seven, please. The gentleman will have red-eye.”

“In a clean glass,” I said. “I’m civilized now.”

“Excuse me?” The hop looked panicky. She was a little redhead with a bar of freckles like a wicker fence across both cheeks. She wore a navy jacket with gold buttons and epaulets, a red pleated cupcake shirt that ended with her pelvis, red high heels, and a cookie-tin hat set at a dangerous angle.

“Scotch and soda.”

She clattered off and returned a few minutes later with the drinks. Catherine lifted hers. “We have an anniversary coming up.”

“I don’t celebrate until January,” I said. “That’s when I got the letter from your lawyer.”

“Amos, let’s not fight.”

I looked at her like a detective. She had lost weight, quite a lot of weight. She had never been fat or even plump, but when the fashion went from Boticelli’s Venus to Gertie the Amazon she would have gone right along with it: Nautilus machines, designer leotards, the works. Her face had lost its girlish roundness, which was one of the things that had attracted a young would-be sociologist with his draft notice in his wallet. Her eyes were gray and tilted away sadly from a Grecian nose, bold and straight. Her forehead was quite high, giving her face the illusion of length, and she had a tiny pale star-shaped scar on her right cheekbone, from a fall off a high school balance bar onto an exposed bolt. The fall had changed her plans to become an Olympic gymnast. If it hadn’t, something else would have.

“I’m surprised you didn’t get rid of the scar,” I said.

She touched it with a coral nail. “You used to like it.”

“I still do. That’s why I’m surprised you didn’t get rid of it.”

“I’ve learned to live with my imperfections. Have you?”

“Are we talking about yours or mine?”

“I was just getting used to the ones you had when you went over there,” she said. “You came back with an entirely new set.”

“The old ones didn’t work anymore. That happens after you’ve shot away a thirteen-year-old Asian’s face with an M-fifteen.”

She flinched. “That’s one of the things I was talking about,” she said bitterly. “Does it make you feel better to horrify me?”

“Talking about it was the only cure I had. I wound up talking to the refrigerator while you went to the movies.”

“You talked to Dale Leopold.
He
talked you into signing up for another hitch as an MP. You threw away your education to become a cop. I’ll never forgive him for that.”

“It was either Dale or my service piece.”

“Don’t overdramatize yourself. You were going to join a welfare agency and help people. Instead you run around after husbands and wives and take pictures through keyholes. Oh, hell, would someone please ring the bell before we kill each other?” She glanced around at a busboy rattling crockery on the stand.

“We’re both out of training,” I said. “We used to draw a bucket of blood before anyone yelled uncle.”

She lifted her drink. “To — what, reunions? Or rematches?”

“Imperfections.” I took the top off my Scotch.

She sipped and set her glass down. “I guess you’re not married.”

“Guessing suits you.”

“Any particular reason, apart from the mess we made?”

“The honeymoon would wipe out my bail fund.”

She wasn’t listening. “I wasn’t going to lash myself down again either. But you get tired of dating. There ought to be a leash law for losers.”

“It’s a bad time for gadflies,” I said. “Even if you don’t catch anything you stand to lose your escort to the federal penitentiary system.”

A pair of sad eyes got hard. “You wouldn’t have heard that from anyone but Bill.”

“We’ve met. That’s what you’ve been trying to get me to admit, isn’t it?”

“Then you
have
been following me. Or your partner has.”

“I don’t have a partner. Well, Detroit Edison. Is there a reason you should be followed?”

“That’s what I most didn’t like about the things I didn’t like most about you,” she said. “You never answered a question with anything but another question. Okay, I lied when I said I just happened to look you up, but then you knew that. I —” She sat back suddenly and busied herself with her drink.

Gail Hope, in her tight gown and Gidget make-up, leaned her profile next to mine. I hadn’t heard her coming. “Listen, I’m sorry,” she said.

“That’s okay. I like to watch the busboys earn their tips.”

“I don’t mean the rotten table. Although I could do a lot better for you if you’d just call before coming. I mean about the wild goose chase with Sam Lucy. I didn’t have any choice.”

“Forget it. You paid for the goose.”

“Well, the evening’s on me. That’d be a start.” She looked across at Catherine.

“My manners stink as usual,” I said. “Gail Hope, Catherine Sahara.”

“Sahara?” Gail straightened. The room temperature dropped ten degrees.