Lady Yesterday (10 page)

The tinted rear window whispered down. A smooth round brown face like a cocoa moon looked out at me and a hand grasped the collar of the man sitting next to him and yanked him forward so he could look too. This was Raleigh, the parking attendant at the garage on Griswold. “Thees him?” asked Moon Face. Raleigh nodded. “Hokay, get out.” Moon Face shoved him back against the door on the other side.

Raleigh clawed it open and looked at me again over the Lincoln’s roof with one foot on the curb. He straightened his gold-rimmed glasses. “Nothing personal.”

I shrugged and he slammed the door and began walking. I never saw him again.

“Get een,” said Moon Face.

I laughed at him.

“Ang.”

The Oriental’s monkey mask twisted, the long lip pulling away from teeth that made his complexion look less rotten. Air hissed in through his nose and he went into a crouch with his left foot planted before his right and his left fist thrust out in front of him at shoulder height and his right cocked at his waist, knuckles foremost.

I rolled back the hammer on the gun in my pocket. It made a crisp statement in the cold air. The Oriental held his position.

A young couple in dress overcoats came down the sidewalk and slowed as they neared us. The woman put a gloved hand on the man’s arm and they picked up their pace. We let them pass between us.

“Why you dicking aroun’? Heet him!”

Moon Face hadn’t heard the noise of the hammer. I said, “Maybe he knows if he moves I’ll turn him into a Chinese checkerboard.”

“Hey, chamaco, no guns. Just talk.”

“Call off your Pekingese.”

“Ang.”

Ang lowered his hands and relaxed his stance. His face went slack and dumb. I let down the hammer gently. The black eyes glittered.

“Hokay, chamaco, get een.”

“I can hear you from here.”

Moon Face spat a string of breakneck Spanish and got out of the car. He was a five-foot butterball in a white felt hat with a red silk band and a brim that swept down on one side Capone fashion. He had on a pearl-gray alpaca coat with a thick fur collar over a maroon three-piece suit and a white cashmere scarf, and when one of his yellow pumps sank to its top in slush he used some more Spanish. On the sidewalk he stooped and wiped off the shoe carefully with a rose-colored silk handkerchief. Then he tossed the handkerchief in the gutter.

“You see that, chamaco?” he said. “Twenny dollars an’ tax, I t’row it away ’cause it’s dirty. How much you worth, five-six t’ousan’, less?”

“I’m not dirty.” I kept my hand in my pocket.

“Man says he’s not dirty, you hear that, Felipe?”

“I heard, Manolo.” This was the driver, leaning over a little now and showing me his long grave brown Latin face and high bald dome. He looked Castilian, a contrast to his boss, who looked digger Mexican, round and greasy, a wallet-size Fatty Arbuckle with protruding eyes and a small mouth with a pouty lower lip that made his face look broader than it already was.

“Hombre, they find you in a sewer pipe, you be dirty. Ang there he done a man in Seoul with just his head. That’s why he’s here.”

“Remind me not to rub it for luck.”

“ ’Course, that man he didn’ have a gun like you. Karate, judo, tae kwan do, they been doing that what, couple t’ousan’ years? Man blow them off with a piece he bought for fi’teen dollars in a crapper. ’S’why I rounded out Ang some. Show the man.”

The Korean reached in the side pocket of his tan coat and I tightened my grip on the gun. He saw that but didn’t react. He came out with a jackknife and flipped it open by the blade, then somersaulted it and closed his fingers on the handle. The blade had been ground needle-thin.

“You can empty that piece into him, he still cut off your head. He would, too. These yellow boys they’re loyal. I’d hire more only a man’s got a responsibility to his own people.” He blew into his hands and rubbed them together. They were puffy and soft-looking, like brown dough. “Well, chamaco, what we going to do with you?”

“For starters you can stop calling me chamaco.”

“You know what it means?”

“It’s a bastardized word for boy. The kind of boy that black men get called sometimes.”

He buttoned his overcoat and tucked the ends of the scarf inside the lapels. The cold was getting to him.

“Tell your girlfriend go home, hombre. Tell her Sam said Detroit is no place to be in the winter. Or the spring or the summer or the fall. Tell her the island’s better for her health.”

“I thought your name was Manolo.”

He held out a hand and the Korean laid the knife in it. Then he leaned in through the open door on the passenger’s side and tore the blade across the leather front seat in a long arc. Foam rubber bulged obscenely out. Felipe watched the operation with a sad expression. Moon Face turned back to face me and folded the knife.

“You see that, chamaco? An’ I
like
thees car.”

He returned the knife to Ang and got back into the rear seat, stepping over the slush. He reached for the door handle. “Tell her, hombre. Then maybe you take a little vacation yourself. You look tired.” He pulled the door shut and hummed up the window.

Ang remained for a beat, his black eyes on me, then pocketed the knife and backed away a step and spun on the ball of his foot, bending himself into the ruined front seat. The car was already in motion when he got the door closed. I had no trouble getting the license plate. It read
grande
.

I pried my fingers loose of the gun and went inside.

T
HE MORNING
F
REE
P
RESS
was waiting for me inside the mail slot among the daily junk. I scooped it all up automatically. Automatically I unlocked the inner office door and I automatically gave the mail a burial at sea in the wastebasket. I poured myself two fingers automatically from the bottle in the file drawer of the desk and drank both of them and after that I started thinking again. No thoughts worth an award. I considered that foam rubber spilling out of slashed upholstery has the same effect as bloody entrails.

I called police headquarters and asked for Lieutenant Thaler’s extension. It was busy. I cradled the receiver and went through the newspaper. Mr. Charm’s murder had made the lower right-hand corner of the front page, with a picture of the bagged corpse being wheeled out the side door and no mention of the motel’s name anywhere in the article. Charm, first name Eldon, had been discovered by an employee who also wasn’t named. I didn’t appear and neither did the fact of the missing list. It was a very short article. Acting Lieutenant Leonard Hornet, in charge of the investigation, said that robbery had not been ruled out as a motive.

The man who finally answered Mary Ann Thaler’s line said she wasn’t at her desk. I thanked him and hung up and drove down. Before going inside I transferred the revolver from my coat pocket to the glove compartment. It was legal but I didn’t care to have the fine print on my permit read while the metal detectors were clanging.

There were more detectives on hand at that time of day, but the more of them there are the quieter things get, somehow. I found Thaler in conversation with a plainclothesman in the squad room, half sitting on the edge of a cluttered desk with her ankles crossed and her arms folded. They were trim ankles above cut-down brown loafers and she was wearing a red skirt and a blue metallic blouse and a gray jacket. The blouse brought out the blue in her eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses. The plainclothesman was two hundred eighty pounds of hard fat in black polyester pants whose cuffs dragged at his heels and a burgundy blazer with brass buttons and anchors. His short red necktie brought out the congestion in his face. I knew him as Sergeant Hornet, John Alderdyce’s second whip in Homicide.

“Who the hell let you in here?” His features were spread all over his raw slab of a face.

“Good morning, Sergeant. Have you had your breakfasts today?”

“Acting Lieutenant, damn you.”

“I bet you can pull it off. You’ve been acting like a detective for years.”

He glared at Thaler. “You got business with this horse’s ass?

“He’s part of the public we serve,” she said. “Is there anything else I can help you with, Leonard?”

He mumbled a negative and gave me the hard look before rolling back toward Alderdyce’s office.

“He hates the name Leonard.” She looked at me. “I’m still waiting on that ballistics report, if that’s what you’re here for.”

“Just partly. Got a minute?”

She glanced down at a man’s gold watch on her wrist. It was the only thing mannish about her. “Just about that.”

We went into her office, where she offered me a cup of coffee and I accepted it. The flowers had been changed; other than that the place looked the same as it had the day before, no less tidy.

“Is that the motel murder you’re working on with Hornet?” I asked.

She poured a cup for herself. She had real china cups, not Styrofoam, with matching saucers. “Peripherally. It looks more like some kind of mob thing now than robbery. Hornet liked the employee, Hamilton, at first—liked him a lot—but it won’t hang without a motive.”

“What made anyone think robbery?”

“The safe in the office had been jimmied. But we found six thousand in receipts still inside. Whatever the killer was after, it wasn’t money.”

“Just six thousand?”

“It’s an overnight stop, not the Westin. What did you want to talk about?”

I sat down, balancing my cup and saucer. “With John on leave you’re my only friendly face in the department. I was wondering if you had anything on file on a fat little Hispanic who dresses like Al Capone and glides around in a gray Lincoln with a plate that reads
grande
.” I spelled it. “He calls himself Sam, but his driver calls him Manolo. Has a Korean torpedo named Ang, a real Bruce Lee type.”

“Manuel Malviento.”

“That came out fast.”

She remained standing beside the desk and sipped coffee and placed the cup in its saucer, holding them in front of her. She didn’t look anything at all like an old maid in a parlor. “He’s managed to rub up against every detail in the department except Rape and I’ve got money in the pool says he’ll do that by next Monday. He came up from Colombia in the crowd five years ago and started with dope and now he’s got a thumb on every dirty dollar in town. He calls himself Sam Mozo.
Mozo
, that’s young man in Spanish. He’s twenty-four. How’d you come to step in that?”

“He’s threatening a client.”

“The lady with the bullet?”

I said it was.

“Hide her good. That little creep’s a stone killer.”

“So far he’s just talking.”

“Two years ago he was just another mule running kilos for the big boys. He’s got one prior for possession for sale, one-year probation. Six months ago Jackie Acardo disappeared, and here comes Sam Mozo out from behind a bush to pick up the pieces. Acardo was the last goombah hanging fire against the Colombians in the dope trade here. He didn’t just go on vacation. The Acardos would be moving on Mozo only he’s just one of a couple of dozen vest-pocket godfathers who have benefited from Jackie’s powder and this generation of mobsters likes to look before it breaks out the blowtorches.”

I drank coffee and listened.

“We had Mozo down here once for threatening an undercover officer. He took off his own thousand-dollar pink cashmere coat and cut it to ribbons with a jackknife in front of the cop, by way of showing how little anything means to him. He likes to destroy nice things.”

“That’s him. Someone ought to take him down while he still has some possessions left. What’s his connection to the Park-a-Lot Garage on Griswold?”

“He probably owns it. Parking garages and auto dealerships are how he launders his money. Also they pay almost as well as cocaine and heroin. You ever store a car in this town for any length of time?” She arranged a blank arrest form on the desk for a coaster and set down her cup and saucer. “The feds would like to take him down, or at least deport him, but he finagled citizenship somehow, and Immigration is a mess. Don’t laugh at him too hard. You’ll still be laughing when he slides a knife between your ribs.”

I busied myself lighting a cigarette so as not to meet her gaze. I knew what was in it. She straightened with her fingers splayed on the desk.

“You were pretty interested in that motel killing just now,” she said. “Do you figure Sam Mozo for it?”

“An hour ago I never heard of Sam Mozo.”

“Yes.” She went on looking at me. Her eyes were as hard as baby blue ever gets. “I just got a glimpse at how come you’re so short on friendly faces down here.”

I got up and put my cup and saucer next to hers. “I’ll be available whenever those test results come in. Thanks again for running them.”

She took her hands off the desk. “If it were my case I’d be turning you on the spit now.”

“I bet you can turn it, too. But it’s Hornet’s barbecue and you don’t like him any more than I do.”

“Don’t trade on that. Just because I’m female doesn’t mean I’m not in the brotherhood.”

“I’ll remember.”

“And watch out for Sam Mozo. He only
looks
ridiculous.”

I took myself out. I had a column of ash growing and hers was the only floor in the place I didn’t feel comfortable using for a tray.

“U
MP,” SAID A TIRED
male voice on the other end of the line.

“Sorry?”

“UMMP. What do you need?”

There was no background noise in the Detroit office of United Musicians and Musical Performers. I pictured a clothes closet with a view of the air shaft and a bald man in rolled-up shirtsleeves sitting at a desk that had come over in steerage with Cortez. Aloud I said, “I’m booking a wedding reception. I need to find a trombonist named George Favor.”

“Sounds like a real hip wedding. How about an accordion?”

“No, I want Favor.”

“What’s his card number?”

“If I knew that I’d probably know his address.”

He put down the receiver and I listened for a few minutes to a chair squawking and someone’s thumb flicking through cards in a file. I snapped a shred of pencil eraser off my blotter.