Lady Yesterday (13 page)

The dog that would have used it was sixty pounds of short tawny coat stretched over broad muscled chest and a pair of haunches that stood out like fireplace fenders when it got up from its place in the center of the blue carpet to trot over and sniff at my ankles. It had a square head and skimpy ears and round black eyes set close above a cartoon muzzle that bent down. It didn’t growl or bark. Pit bulls generally don’t make much noise even when they’re gnawing happily away on your tibia.

“Take the mutt out for a walk or something.”

The speaker was tying his tie in front of one of the mirrored closet door panels, all tapered back and narrow hips in a tight vest and pinstriped brown pants. The redhead got a leash off the coffee table and snapped it onto the dog’s collar and pulled it away from me, or tried to. It wanted to go on sniffing at me but he quirted it behind the left ear with the leather loop and it lost interest. It had a bobbed tail and when it turned to enter the elevator a ragged white scar rippled on its left shoulder. The hair had grown in around it in conflicting grains.

“Lose it in traffic if you can,” said the man at the mirror. The elevator doors closed.

“Garibaldi’s a good dog.”

This was Tomaso Acardo, seated at the table between the windows in his shirtsleeves with a napkin tucked elegantly inside his collar. He was sawing away at a piece of roast chicken on a china dish. A tall-stemmed glass half filled with yellow wine stood at his right elbow.

“He’s a mange. And a loser to boot.”

“To win you must first care how the fight comes out. Are you a dog man, Mr. Walker?”

“Depends on the dog.”

He sipped wine and removed the droplets from his moustache with a corner of the napkin. “I bought Garibaldi from a man who fought him in Iroquois Heights. The dog was recovering from a bad slashing and the man was making arrangements for his next fight. I paid him five hundred dollars over and above the veterinary bill. I can’t stand to see a dumb brute suffer. Giovanni was keeping him for me.”

“I guess a dog needs room to run,” I said.

“It is large, isn’t it? My brother believed in big.”

“Al Capone shit.” The other man reached a pinstriped brown jacket off a hanger in the closet and turned around. “The building’s up for sale. Whoever buys it can raze it or make a monument out of it or turn it into a planter. I’m moving the operation up to Grosse Pointe where it belongs.”

“Your father won’t like it,” said Tomaso.

“My father’s dead. Fucking spicks hit him in the head and fed him to a crusher.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Right. He makes an appointment to meet somebody in a beergarden at Joy and Evergreen, he don’t say who, and the last anybody sees of him he’s on his way there with a carnation in his lapel. He fell in love with a black barmaid and now they’re raising kids and tulips in Mombasa.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t taken against his will.”

Frank Acardo looked at me for the first time. He had dark brown hair combed over his ears, a long jaw, small eyes that snapped, and a hook nose that on his uncle would be called aquiline but that on him could have been used to open bottles. His face beveled back from it sharply like the hull of an icebreaker. He was my age and a whole lot more ugly.

“You,” he said. “What’s your connection with Sam Mozo?”

“He’s my aunt.”

“Fucking comedian. I’ve had a tail on that little Spanish asshole since September. He stops on West Grand River to jaw with you, one of my men follows you up to this crummy third-floor office afterwards. What’s it say on the door? ‘A. Walker Investigations.’ I get to wondering what a private muzzle’s got to talk about with Sam Mozo. I put Tomaso there on the muzzle’s ass.”

“Nice job,” I told Tomaso. “I didn’t spot you.”

“I helped smuggle Allied fliers over the Alps into Switzerland under Mussolini’s nose. You’re a difficult man to keep in sight. I imagine it’s your habit.”

“Tomaso, he’s got manners,” Acardo continued. “Maybe an invite from him gets better results than Mozo got trying to coax you into that fucking Lincoln of his. Also why risk good talent on a dark horse when that’s what family’s for? What the fuck are you grinning at?”

“Only in Detroit,” I said.

“What.”

“There are terrorists running all over Europe in bed-sheets killing people for looking American and there’s enough fission piled up in each hemisphere to blow the world into marbles several times over. The sun is burning itself out and what the governor spends on hairdressers would feed a Third World country for a year. Only in Detroit would a cheap gangster bother to air his Jimmy Cagney impression for a private detective like it was 1931 and Eliot Ness was banging on his door.”

Tomaso chuckled in that deep rumbling bass. Frank swung his hook on him. “Ain’t you got a gravel pit to inspect or something?”

“You’re overdoing the ain’ts and double negatives. Mr. Walker knows we send our young to college.”

“
Zio Capro
.” The hook swung back my way. “After talking to Mozo you went straight from your office to police headquarters. Why?”

“I lost my virginity. I thought someone might have turned it in.”

“Hey, I can make a call and find out what you were doing there.”

I took a seat in an upright chair covered in yellow vinyl. It looked to be the most uncomfortable there and it probably was. I didn’t want to be comfortable in the sort of room that would contain Frank Acardo. I broke a fresh cigarette out of the deck. I lit it and dragged over a smoking stand with some tea-colored butts in it and got rid of the match. I’d taken my second pull before he realized I wasn’t going to answer him. He kept the lid on.

“Listen, I don’t want to get ugly.”

“Too late.”

“I could bounce him a little.” This was the guy with the clean head in hat and topcoat standing sentry at the elevator. He had a thin voice for what he was.

“It wouldn’t work.” Frank was studying me now with his hands in his pockets. “It’s got to do with that dark meat Tomaso saw you hanging out with at the museum, don’t it? He overheard some of it. Uncle Goat’s got good ears; they’re just about the only thing about him that’s good. Okay, I can cut a deal same as my old man. What are your rates?”

“You couldn’t afford them.”

“Mr. Acardo.” Baldy was pleading now.

“Save it, Jonesy. Look, it ain’t like we don’t want the same thing. Mozo killed my old man, he’s out to put the hurt on your girlfriend for some reason. You guys don’t like working for free, shit, who does? So maybe I make it a little more worth your time to help put him underground.”

“What’s wrong with Jonesy?”

“His hands are tied. Mine too.” He leaned back on the arm of a big leather chair, hands still in his pockets to show how tightly they were tied. “See, I got people to answer to same as everyone else. My old man sat on the board of the national organization but me, I’m just one of the fish. I know Sam Mozo offed him, know it here”—he took out a hand and tapped his left lung—“but it’s just like in court, I got to prove it. You put your nose to it, bring me something I can take to the board, the rest is up to Jonesy and Flynn there outside taking the mutt for a pee. Next day you get a brick in the mail, only it ain’t no brick. Get yourself a decent office in a building with an elevator, hey, maybe even some blonde snatch sits out front telling people she’s your secretary, how’s that?”

“I’ve got a client.”

“Okay, you like it black, I can get next to that. Scratch the blonde. You won’t go to hell for taking money from two places for the same job. It gets done, everyone’s happy. What do you say, sport?”

“Why don’t you just call me chamaco?”

“Now, what the hell is that?”

“I have an idea you won’t be able to meet Mr. Walker’s price.” Tomaso slid his knife and fork onto his plate and pushed it away to finish his wine.

“Not money, then,” said Frank. “We’re an old established firm, we got friends all over. Maybe we can do something for you.”

“Maybe you can,” I said.

M
ARY
M
SAID
, “No.”

It was daytime and she was wearing red slacks and pink high-top tennis shoes like the kids wear and a black cableknit sweater with a white collar rolled out over the neck. From the waist up it looked like a Catholic school uniform and she looked like a particularly precocious sixteen-year-old despite the lines in her face. She was looking at Jonesy, who had reached back into some memory and removed his hat from his shaved head on her doorstep.

“His bed and board will be taken care of,” I said. “He’s housebroken, they tell me. You won’t even know he’s here.”

“You got that right. He won’t be here.”

“Inside or parked out front, he’ll be here. I’d prefer inside. I’m sold that the man who’s been threatening Iris has gotten to one of your tenants. The selling job was yours when you showed me how you handle unwanted guests. Inside, Jonesy will get the chance to stop something before it starts. It’s better than no chance at all. Think of him as the house eunuch.”

“Watch that shit,” he said.

He hadn’t spoken at all in my car on the way over, but that hadn’t anything to do with his boss’s instructions to cooperate instead of dribbling me. He’d watched the scenery with alert interested eyes, turning his head all around like a dog on its first automobile trip in a long time. He had to have been tired of the sights in the Adelaide. If you didn’t know he had a gun strapped to his ribs under the topcoat you’d have wanted to scratch him behind the ears, if he had hair and a personality.

I wasn’t getting around Mary M. The pixie impression was all in her bright eyes and small sharp features; behind that she was case steel. I said, “Why don’t we put it to Iris? Let her decide.”

“I know what she’ll say.”

“Let’s hear it anyway.”

She had on loose flowered lounging pajamas and the cork-soled shoes I had seen before. Jonesy appreciated her. His round flap ears moved back and his face smoothed out even further; much more and it would have been gone entirely. Iris gave him a quick glance and thanked Mary M, who had fetched her. It was a polite dismissal.

Mary M hesitated, then decided. “I’ll be close.” She went down the hall.

Jonesy said, “Heavy chick.”

“Who’s Kojak?” asked Iris.

I introduced them. “He doesn’t need much care. A biscuit now and then, maybe some rawhide to chew on. He breaks necks for Frankie Acardo. Guys who break necks for a living are better than the average run at preventing necks from being broken.”

“So that’s why you went to see him.”

“Partly. I was also curious like I said. I make deals. That flaming sword gets heavy.”

“Thanks, I’ll go with what I’ve got.” But she didn’t move.

“Mary M’s got a big handicap when it comes to this kind of thing,” I said. “She’s got a heart. Jonesy, what do you do when somebody gets too close?”

“Kill ’em.”

“See?”

“I had it to here with killers,” she said. “They stink in bed and they’re boring to listen to. What if somebody counts the doors wrong coming back from the bathroom at night, he going to blow a hole through them?”

“You’re not worried about that. You just don’t take to the idea of someone babysitting you. No one does, including babies. I can’t do any kind of job looking for your father if I have to keep calling here every hour or so to ask if your throat’s been cut yet. This isn’t negotiable.”

The corners of her nostrils lifted at that. I braced myself, but after a beat she said: “Well, where’s he sleep?”

“Down, boy,” I told Jonesy.

Driving away from there I felt like singing. Things couldn’t have taken a better turn if an uncle had died and left me Uniroyal. Federal bodyguards miss details while they’re studying their reflections in their custom nickel-plated pearl-handled pocket pistols, and policemen are always worrying about their wives and their hairlines. The worst any of them can pull if their protectees get splashed is a ninety-day suspension, or the boot if there are headlines involved. Shields like Jonesy treated their responsibilities more personally because if they fell down they stood a better than even chance of dying young; their employers didn’t believe in severance pay. Besides, this one liked his work. So he was sitting on a chair outside Iris’ room with his gun in his lap, happy as a mother snake protecting her young, and I was back in the traces.

I got Mr. Charm’s notebook out of my pocket and went over his entries again while waiting for a light on St. Antoine. I’d been carrying it around since leaving his office and so far osmosis wasn’t working. “212, S.M., $5,000” was still intriguing. The only S.M. I’d met in the case had opened a big door for me. I was hoping he would open at least one more. The driver behind me tooted and I turned on the green in the direction of Tireman.

It was half-past noon when I entered the motel lobby. I was counting on the towheaded clerk with the spiky moustache being on a break. I was right. In his place a black girl with glasses and the company red blazer smiled at me. She was barely tall enough to see over the desk.

I smiled back, trying to look tired. It didn’t take much trying. “Single for the night. Two-twelve, if I can get it. I got the best sleep I ever had in a motel last time I stayed there.”

“Four-oh-eight’s quieter,” she said. “It’s an inside room.”

“I’m claustrophobic.”

She checked her card file. The room would be occupied. A vacancy would be too easy. I was flipping through my own brain index of alternate stories when she slid a registration blank in front of me.

“It’s a corner room in back, second level. Just drive around behind the building and take the stairs. I guess you know that if you stayed there before.”

I thanked her anyway and signed “L. P. Wimsey” above a phony address. I gave her thirty-five dollars and she gave me a brass key that lay in my pocket like a hand truck. I saw no sign of Lester Hamilton on my way around the building. No one was reading plate numbers in his place.

It was a room on an open hallway overlooking the parking lot, with a picture window in front so the tenant could sit on the baby sofa and watch his car being stripped. The sofa and chair were gray and so was the rug and the coverlet on the double bed. The dresser and writing table were glass-topped, the bathroom clean and small and unremarkable. The closet was a doorless alcove with a rod and half a dozen theft-proof hangers slotted into steel loops. On the wall over the bed hung a duck-hunting print in a pressed wood frame, bolted in place, its figures reversed in a mirror built into the partition opposite it, facing the bed.