Lady Yesterday (14 page)

I wondered about the mirror. I threw my hat on the bed, walked up to the glass, and leaned my forehead against it, blocking out light with my cupped hands. A pair of sad brown eyes stared back. The mirror was opaque, from this side anyway. I walked around the room a second time. I pulled the dresser away from the wall and looked behind it and felt along the baseboard. If necessary I’d have gotten down and groped around under the bed, a job I always saved for last because that was where ghosts bred and multiplied. I didn’t have to. I found it socketed in the knob that screwed onto the bedside lamp and held the shade in place, a metal plug the size of a thumbnail, with a waffled top and wires running down inside the harp into the base of the lamp itself.

I had an idea where they would lead from there. I checked it out. I let myself out into the hall and around the corner to the linen closet I knew I’d find there. The door was locked, but linen doesn’t rate a dead bolt. I slipped it in less than a minute using the edge of my ID.

The closet was four feet square, all bare drywall with an exposed bulb screwed into the ceiling and a chain switch hanging down. It was part of a crawlspace between the inner and outer rooms. The shelves had been removed—the holes where the brackets had been looked like puckered wounds—and someone had sawed a square out of one wall and installed a window. I saw the room I had just been in, turned backward as if I were looking in a mirror, which in fact I was, or rather through one. Two-way mirrors were hot stuff when I was a kid, but now everyone has one in his front door and nobody much thinks about them, least of all the guests in well-maintained motels. On a stand in front of the glass someone had erected a video camera with its lens looking into the room. With a toe I nudged its trailing wires where they disappeared through a hole in the floor. I knew where they came out. I found the catch on the camera and slid out the tray that held the tape. It wasn’t holding anything but air.

There was nothing else to see. I wiped off everything I’d touched and smeared both doorknobs on my way out of Eldon Charm’s private motion picture studio. I didn’t reset the lock. No police seal meant I’d beat the cops there. I owed them a break.

Back in 212 I stretched out on the coverlet, smoking a cigarette and watching myself in the mirror. It gave me a crawling sensation, like looking at the smooth black surface of the water filling a mineshaft three hundred feet deep, and I knew then that I would never pass another mirror without feeling the clammy chill of blind white things swimming in and out through empty eye-sockets at the bottom.

There was no reason for that. Charm had supplemented his night-manager’s income videotaping married executives and their secretaries nooning on the premises—probably in every room in the motel that bordered on a linen closet, if the other entries in his notebook meant anything—and selling them back to his subjects at four-digit rates. Chances were he had compromised Sam Mozo similarly, making himself enough of a nuisance to be removed, but in the heat following Jackie Acardo’s disappearance only when it became convenient to remove him. Getting the list containing the license plate number of whatever flunky had planted the skull-and-crossbones in Iris’ jewelry box would have been convenience enough. There was no reason to think the missing tape contained anything but the Latin butterball taking exercise with the wife of a city councilman, or maybe the city councilman himself, given the times. Or the mayor’s cat.

No reason, except what was that to a loud little toad who dressed out of the Warner Brothers wardrobe department and cut up expensive coats and custom leather seats and bragged about employing a Korean killer? Except for the fact that five thousand was at least twice as much as Charm was soaking any of the other initials in his notebook. Except for the fact that the beergarden where Jackie Acardo had agreed to meet someone just before he vanished was less than five minutes from where I was soiling the coverlet with my shoes and watching the gray spread through my hair in the mirror that was not a mirror. Except for the crawling sensation.

I didn’t buy it for a second. The thing was too thorny with coincidence. It needed more work and the work wasn’t going to get done while I was staring into that flooded mineshaft. I left the key for the maid to find and got out. If I was going to have nightmares about mirrors I’d have them in my home or my office where I could tell them to leave.

T
HERE IS A
new breed of detective abroad these days. It wears its suits tailored and never leaves the office except for two-hour lunches and to go home, doing all its gumshoeing on the telephone and at the computer console. It doesn’t own a gun and it stokes up on chef’s salads and Perrier and wouldn’t be caught dead slipping a bellhop five dollars, although a year’s lease on a late-model Jaguar for a congressional aide would not be beneath consideration. It doesn’t even call itself a detective, preferring the term
consultant
along with whatever adjective is on the charts this season. But you can still find it in the Yellow Pages under “Private Investigators.” Ma Bell knows.

In the office I called a firm I’d done business with before, that specializes in tracing the ownership of businesses and public corporations. That’s all open record and theoretically you can get it from any county office for a minimal copying fee, but the labyrinth of subsidiaries and holding companies can delay the answers for weeks. (If you ever get the urge to scramble a computer, feed it the Catholic Church.) I reached a senior consultant finally and read off everything I could think of, including the motel on Tireman and the Park-a-Lot Garage and Sam Mozo and Manuel Malviento, his real name. It was make-work and out-of-pocket, but I had dead-ended in room 212 and the thing wasn’t tidy enough to hand to the police just yet. They would expect me to tidy it for them in twelve hours of interrogation. Even a doll like Mary Ann Thaler is still a cop, and anyway the Charm murder was Acting Lieutenant Leonard Hornet’s. He’d book me as a material witness just to see bars on my face.

The senior consultant took it all down and offered to put the answers on my screen when he had them. I thanked him and said a private messenger would do. A grateful Japanese-American client had once suggested high-teching my office at cost, but I’d opted for cash. The building’s circuits wouldn’t handle the load and besides, the equipment wouldn’t go with the wallpaper.

Next I called Mary M’s. Mary answered and I asked how Jonesy was getting on.

“Better than my refrigerator. Eight ham and cheese sandwiches so far, the last two without ham because we ran out. He’s sublimating. Three of the girls propositioned him but he wasn’t having any. What’s he, gay? I
know
he’s not a rabbi.”

“He’s a good bodyguard is what he is. Give him what he wants. Frankie A’s good for it.”

“Don’t worry, I’m itemizing.”

“How’s Iris taking it?”

“He stands by the bathroom door while she’s inside. How do you think?”

“Listen, this is no reflection on you.”

“How isn’t it? Just him sitting there says I can’t look after my own guests. And you tell me one of them is some kind of a plant. Maybe this place wasn’t paradise before you landed in it, but compared to where some of these girls came from it was next best. Do you have any idea what a man on the floor does to a house full of prostitutes trying to get straight? I’m fighting an epidemic of zipper fever here.”

“I’m working on making him unnecessary.”

“Work faster. You want to talk to Iris?”

“No, put Jonesy on.”

“If he takes a bite out of the phone it goes on the bill.”

I listened to house sounds for a minute. Then the receiver was lifted and I heard breathing. I asked Jonesy if Mary was still in the room.

“No. I got a door to stand in front of, pal.”

“This’ll just take a second. I want you to run a tab on these women who are hitting on you, especially the ones that don’t give up. One of them’s Mozo’s. She’ll be the most persistent.”

“Gee, I never thought of that.”

“I don’t know you long enough to know how you think. When you find her, hold her. Don’t kill her. She’s the cops’ link to that motel killing last night. If she ties it to Mozo we’ll both have done our jobs. Maybe there’s a bonus in it for you from Frankie.”

“Yeah, like I get to keep my head.”

There were any number of responses I could make to that, given his haircut, but I just told him good-bye. We were working together, sort of. There are courtesies.

The telephone rang as soon as I took my hand off it. It was Mary Ann Thaler, calling to say that ballistics had come up empty on the bullet I had dug out of Iris’ front seat.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I think I know who put it there. Thanks again for running it. Turn anything yet on Charm?”

“Out of my hands.” Her voice was cool and clean, like her office. “The robbery angle dried up. Safe could have been sprung anytime and he just didn’t report it. I’m back to taxi holdups and liquor store heists.”

“Before you got frozen out, did you find out if Charm had any kind of record?”

“As for instance blackmail?”

She got me with that one. I covered the pause with a cough. “I guess that’s nothing new in hotel work.”

“It’s about as common as dentists who molest female patients. He had a fat bank account for a man who spent most of his time prowling hallways, but maybe he had a paper route. I wasn’t with the case long enough to find out if we had a sheet on him. I could ask Hornet.”

“Not that important.”

“Somehow I didn’t think it would be,” she said. “You’ve got something that says blackmail?”

“Just a stab, so to speak. Murder’s interesting.”

“For you, maybe.”

After lunch I had some traffic. A trim well-dressed woman in her forties with a bandage over one eye needed to find a witness to an accident. I ran the partial plate number she had through a contact in the Secretary of State’s office, got three possibles, and charged her twenty dollars for ten minutes’ work. I’d promised my contact lunch. Midwest Confidential called with some insurance work that could wait until next week and a woman in Cincinnati needed to find her ex-husband to sign some papers. I made some calls and tracked him down in East Detroit. That took me the rest of the afternoon. By the time I had the paperwork done it was dark out. I was starting to think about dinner when the telephone rang again.

“Mr. Walker?”

“Always has been.”

“This is L. C. Candy, the trombone player?”

“Sure.” I heard music on his end. I wondered if he was calling from the Kitchen.

“I wasn’t sure I’d catch you before you went home.”

“I never go home.”

He said something else. Someone dropped a tray of glasses near him and I asked him to repeat it.

“I’m at a place called Captain Ted’s Party in Ferndale.” He was shouting now. “It’s on Woodward.”

“Never heard of it.”

“That puts you in the majority. Listen, you might want to come up here.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“What?” The music was thumping louder. I told him I was on my way. I had to say it twice.

The pavement was wet and slick with fresh snow bordering it in ruled lines and pale headlamp beams and red and green and amber traffic lights reflected on the surface in a pastel wash. I drove past Captain Ted’s Party the first time and had to turn around and come back. It was a brick building in a line of them with a small yellow electric sign turned perpendicular to the avenue. It looked dark inside. I parked in a tiny lot in back that was nowhere near full and went in through the front door, set back in a tunnel.

There was no music now and the only light came from a hollow square of rosy bulbs over the bar. I paused in the entrance waiting for my pupils to dilate and one of the pink-drenched figures seated at the bar straightened and waved. I went over.

Candy took my hand in a firm grip and swept an olive-drab jacket off the stool next to his, folding it in his lap. I slid onto the stool. In that light he looked younger than ever despite the untrimmed beard and out-of-fashion long hair. His face was boyish, his turtleneck sweater too big for him and turned back at the wrists.

The bartender, not much older, in a bowling shirt with the collar open, was in front of me. I ordered a double Scotch and started to ask Candy what was going on. At that moment the light came on over the junior-size platform at the other end of the narrow room and he put his finger to his lips. An old bald black man mounted the platform carrying a trombone.

I
T STARTED TENTATIVELY
, with as much empty air coming out of the battered brass bell as music, but as he played on and his arm caught the rhythm of the slide it grew in confidence. What he’d lost in lung power he’d gained in maturity of phrasing, and if he would never have the driving originality of a leader he could still hold his own in a solo. The tune, what he gave us of it, was “Body and Soul.” His playing lacked body. It had soul in bushels. At his age it had better, or else he had lived in vain.

It was wasted on most of the drinkers at the bar and in the thin line of booths across the narrow aisle. The name of the establishment was purely cosmetic. It wasn’t a place to party, but to drink and not feel as if you were drinking alone. In time the bandstand would be replaced by another booth or a video game and the big old-fashioned neon juke standing next to it would be the only source of music. At that it would be more than the clientele deserved. The old man might have been plugged into the wall himself for all the attention he was drawing.

He had on an old black suitcoat that screamed Salvation Army on top of a green workshirt and distressed brown brogans poking out from under a rumpled pair of cuffs.

The bottom half of his face had fallen away and he had a white fringe hooked over his ears, the top of his head shedding haloes under the stingy spot. He didn’t look anything like the brilliantined dandy with the thousand-candlepower smile in the picture Iris had given me. He looked like every old black man on Woodward. The trombone made the difference.