Lady Yesterday (18 page)

“I don’t have time to play psychiatrist,” I said. “He could be trying to call right now. If I had my service transfer him here he’d get hinky. You’re going to have to do your own pulling together. I hope you make it.”

“Don’t count on me, I told you.”

“I hope you’re there.”

His eyes were closed again when I looked back at him from the door. The sight put ice in my belly. It was as if I’d never been there.

It was a bright cold day, the snow unbearably white under the sun. I wore dark glasses on the way to my building. My eyes felt swollen and heavy behind them and I could feel each of the sixteen stitches in my forehead, like embedded sparks. My neck was scratchy. I felt greasy under my clothes.

No one was using the waiting room. The mail hadn’t come yet. I took off my coat and jacket and shirt in the little water closet and bathed myself from the sink and used the emergency electric razor I kept there to intimidate my whiskers. They didn’t scare. I put on the same shirt and brushed the worst of the grit off the suit and combed my hair. I looked like a patched tire.

My answering service said no one had called. I got off the line quickly to have it open and relayed some room-temperature Scotch from the bottle I kept in the desk to a pony glass to my stomach. What it might do when it met up with the painkiller still in my system was of strangely little concern to me. I was having an out-of-body experience.

The sound of the mail slot clanking shut woke me. My watch read quarter to nine. The front of my head was pulsing independently of the rest of the skull when I got up and went over and bent down to pick up the mail.

It wasn’t the mail. It was a thick brown envelope, hand delivered, slightly longer and wider than legal size, with the name of the consultancy firm I had called the day before printed on it. I took it over to the desk and sat down and slid a thumb under the Hap. The telephone rang. I jumped on it. “Mozo?”

“Tomaso Acardo.” The gentle accent was more pronounced over the wire. “Francisco asked me to call. He says he doesn’t trust himself to talk to you this morning.”

“I’m expecting an important call.”

“So I gathered. You had a disappointing night. And a costly one for my nephew.”

“I don’t remember a lot of talk about guarantees.”

“Cut the fucking tea party, Uncle Goat.” I recognized Frank Acardo’s voice in the background. “Ask him what he’s got that was worth losing two of my best men.”

“Francisco says—”

“I heard. Tell him the wheels are still turning. I’ll call him when they stop.”

Tomaso started to pass it on. His nephew cut him off. “You tell that fucking peeper he don’t show up here by nightfall carrying Sam Mozo’s head by the hair I’ll feed him his balls.”

“Francisco says—”

“I heard that too,” I said. “Tell him me and my balls will be in touch.” He was laughing gently in his deep rumble when I cradled the receiver.

The computer printout from the consultancy firm echoed what Mary Ann Thaler had told me about the motel on Tireman. It, the Park-a-Lot Garage, and half a dozen other parking facilities in the metropolitan area belonged to something called SouthAmCo, principal stockholder Manuel Anuncio Malviento. It went on to list the company’s other holdings, including three auto dealerships and a substantial amount of property in Detroit, zoned residential. The most recent purchase had been made just that week. The telephone caught me digesting the information.

“Hombre, you owe me a Korean.”

“You said yourself that hand-to-hand stuff was out of date,” I said. “If it means anything, your boy Felipe took out an Acardo button.”

“One dead lady friend, that’s what you bought yourself, chamaco.”

The receiver creaked in my hand. I leveled my voice. “I don’t think so. Because if you killed her I’d go to the cops with the tape.”

“Maybe you did already. I got people at Receiving. That’s a pretty lady cop visited you this morning.”

“There’d be a warrant out for you if I did.”

He gave me a Spanish lesson. I listened, but this time I couldn’t hear echoes. Well, he wouldn’t use the garage a second time.

“It cost you,” he said, remembering his English. “You be ready to move.
Now
. Felipe, he’s parked across the street from your building. You ain’ out front alone in fi’ minutes, go back inside and wait for the mail. Her head be in it.”

“How do I know she’s still wearing it?”

“You don’t, man.” Click.

The gray Lincoln was standing at the opposite curb with its motor running when I came out carrying something in a small paper sack. The hood was dented in front and some teeth were missing from the grille, but aside from that Flynn appeared to have sustained all the damage from that collision. I looked for John Alderdyce’s Japanese bug on my way across the street. I didn’t see it.

I opened the front door on the passenger’s side and got in. The upholstery hadn’t been replaced yet and I was sitting on the knife-slash. Sam Mozo was hard on cars.

Felipe was wearing the same powder-blue suit under a black coat with a fur collar and a black tie and Oxfords. Up close his face was pockmarked but hardly less aristocratic for that. The concave hairline lengthened his already funereal features behind black wraparound sunglasses. His shoulder harness was fastened and as he spun the wheel to leave the curb, some extra material pouched under his right arm. If you know what to look for you can always tell when the tailor has left room for a holster. I pointed my chin at it. “That the thirty-eight you used on her windshield?”

He said nothing. It was warm in the car and I unbuttoned my overcoat. I smelled Brut. I didn’t figure it belonged to Felipe.

“Must be interesting working for Little Caesar,” I tried again.

“He is my cousin.”

“You’re all cousins. Everybody must be related to everybody else down there.”

“It is why I left.” He twirled the wheel again. We were entering the southbound John Lodge now.

“You came up first?”

“Yes.”

“Tough spot.”

“Not so bad.” He had decided to talk. “I get the job driving the car. Back home I drive the taxi: ‘You want to see how the coffee is made, mister? I take you to the plantation, you get the free cup of the coffee.’
Chocho
. The money is much better here. In a year I send for Manolo, Sam Mozo you call him. Now for him I drive the car. America is funny.”

“I laugh all the time. Did you drive Jackie Acardo from the beergarden to the motel?”

His face, which had become animated, fell back into its grave mode. He made no reply. That told me a lot. I dipped my line deeper.

“Good clean hit,” I said. “To look at the room now you wouldn’t know anything happened in it. There’s something to be said for owning the roof you do your killing under. Too bad Mozo didn’t pay as much attention to his help. He should have known about Charm’s camera setup.”

“There is no loyalty here.”

I jumped on it. “You picked up Jackie at Joy and Evergreen and drove him to the motel for the hit?”

“Manolo said he wanted to talk to him. I just drive.”

I sat back and let some scenery pass. “I guess it’s a short step from driving a man to his death to running one over.”

“I want to drive around you and the other,” he said.

“Why didn’t you?”

“Manolo he don’t let me. His hand is on the wheel, his foot it is on the pedal on top of mine. The man is dead, I guess.”

“You’re a good guesser. Also a murderer.”

He stopped at the light on East Jefferson. The shadow of the Renaissance Center darkened his features, or maybe it wasn’t that.

“Who killed Charm, Ang or your cousin?”

The light changed. We stayed on Jefferson, following the river. The downtown skyscrapers rolled away behind us. I checked the mirror on my side for John’s car. Nothing. Felipe turned down the heater. “None of us killed Charm,” he said then.

I said, “I know.”

H
E DIDN’T ASK HOW
I knew, or even show interest. I wasn’t in a mood to volunteer anything—not yet, anyway. I settled myself in for a long quiet drive, but on the edge of Gabriel Richard Park he turned again and we headed directly toward the river.

Long before it was renamed for Douglas MacArthur, the Belle Isle bridge had posed a temptation for local barnstorming pilots, beginning in 1913 with William E. Scripps, who later took on more daring journalistic stunts as publisher of the Detroit
News
. The water looks closer than it is and it’s in the nature of fliers to pass under things and panic the flightless down below. Barely two lanes wide, the bridge describes a pistol-straight path out to a narrow stretch of water-locked real estate that was used to raise pigs a safe distance away from marauding wolves in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, until Pontiac’s warriors massacred a family there during the Battle of Bloody Run. The deadly race riot of 1943 started in a nightclub there and spilled over onto shore. Old Hog Island now boasts a park, a card casino, a children’s zoo, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, a fountain, various museums and conservatories, and a prettier name. On this day it was a snowfield with the water slate-colored around it and flashing in the sun.

Watching the mirror as we came off the bridge, I saw a flash higher up at the other end. It could have been a car, or a patch of ice catching the light. I didn’t see it again.

We might have been alone on the island. There are more desirable places to be in February with the temperature in the twenties and winds skidding across from Canada whittling it down another ten degrees. When you’re in the company of Colombian gangsters there is just no contest.

We parked in the lot and Felipe got out, signaling me to stay put. He walked around the car and opened my door. He had his gun out now—it was a short-barreled .38 Colt—and kept it tight against his left hip while he patted me down from my collarbone to my ankles and felt around inside my coat and jacket. He inspected my hat too, but when he reached for the drugstore sack next to me on the seat I caught his wrist.

“When I see Iris,” I said.

The wind lifted the feathery hairs that still clung to his scalp. He paid it no attention. “How I know you don’t have a gun in there?”

“You don’t, man.”

He stood chewing the inside of one cheek. He glanced down at a square gold watch strapped to his wrist. After a moment he stepped back, gesturing with the Colt. I got out carrying the sack. The cold wind slapped my face, stinging my cheeks like an open palm. I tugged down my hat and buttoned up. He gestured again and I started ahead of him along the footpath that divides the island.

The wind was a little less bitter there, cut off by naked trees on either side. The path was swept bare of snow but the earth was iron-hard and the cold was numbing. Before we had gone fifty yards my toes felt like rolled coins inside the thin leather of my shoes. If the warm-blooded Colombian was suffering he didn’t show it, remaining ten paces behind me without comment or any change in his gait. I assumed he was still carrying the gun. If I had turned to look, my eyes would have strayed past him and maybe tipped him that John was following.
If
John was following. I felt all alone on that frozen rock.

Felipe grunted. I had gone past the path that branches off the main walkway toward the side facing Windsor. He had stopped short of it. I took advantage of the turn to shoot a quick glance behind him. Nobody.

The softball diamond was in the middle of a big clearing, snow-covered and bleak with the foreign city strung out gray behind it on the other side of the Fleming Channel. Three people were standing at home plate with their hands in the pockets of their overcoats. I saw Sam Mozo’s big white hat and I recognized Iris’ tan coat.

From the outfield I couldn’t tell who the third party was. But I had an idea.

I had stopped. Felipe grunted again—he was making up for all the talking he had done earlier—and I continued across the clearing. The snow came up over the tops of my shoes and wedged itself in around my feet. I couldn’t feel them at all now. Thoughts of frostbite glimmered through my brain, and of life without toes. But life of any kind looked good.

“Playing shallow, chamaco.”

The wind warped Mozo’s words and flapped our coat-tails. I held up at second base. Felipe was a presence behind me and to my right. Shortstop.

“Iris?”

“I’m all right.” She sounded cold and tired. She was hatless and the wind had blown apart her hairdo. She whipped it out of her face. “That man last night—”

“Dead,” I said. “It was part of his work. How you doing, Lester?”

Lester Hamilton said nothing. He had traded the motel’s red blazer finally for a leather bomber jacket and pulled a cloth cap down over his eyes. The ends of the green-and-white-striped scarf were tucked inside the jacket. His face was lumpy and swollen.

Mozo said, “Lester knows what’s good for him. I like a man knows what’s good for him. Maybe I give him a job when this is finish.”

“Who worked him over, the Korean?”

“I told him be gentle. Dead men know shit when you ask them questions. You ain’ surprised to see him?”

“Here maybe. With you no. He had to have been the one who told you I was in Charm’s office after he was stabbed. Lester was the only one who knew.”

Lester shifted his weight agitatedly. “I kept our deal. I didn’t tell the cops nothing.”

“Of course you didn’t. You had a lot more to gain by keeping it than the fifty I gave you. If the cops came to me and I told them Mozo was involved and they started digging, they might have found out about the tape. Only you couldn’t know then that I’d never heard of Mozo.”

“No more talking, chamaco. You got the tape?”

I patted the bag.

“Felipe.”

Felipe took a step forward, but I put out a hand. He hesitated. I looked at Iris.

“There never was a strange license plate number on that list,” I said. “No prowler broke into your room. Mozo put that drawing in your jewelry box himself. Being the owner of the motel he’d have a passkey.”

It took her a moment to understand. “Then who stole the list? Who killed Charm?”