Lady Yesterday (4 page)

They call it burnout. They have a name for everything and it never sounds like what it is. Burning and rotting aren’t at all similar.

I got out the typewriter and updated my report for Axel Rainey. That started me thinking about Clara, and thinking about Clara reminded me of Astaire’s steakhouse that used to be Harold’s Hotcake Hacienda and I called there. A bright feminine voice thanked me for calling and asked me to call back after noon. It told me it was a recording. Even that made it happy.

Hanging up, I checked my watch. Ten minutes to twelve. I locked the door to the inner office and left the waiting room open and had lunch in the diner down the street, where the soup du jour tasted like yesterjour and the grilled cheese sandwich tasted like never again. When I got back Iris was in the waiting room.

She had on a leaf-yellow blouse tied at the waist over a burlap-colored tube top and a long green skirt that when she rose from the upholstered bench turned out not to be a skirt at all, but loose flared slacks. Culottes, they’re called. Toeless shoes with cork soles. She wasn’t wearing the turban. Her hair was longer now, waving at the collar and pushed over on one side. She used to wear it cropped very close. The new style softened the Egyptian effect.

I said, “You must be freezing.”

“I came downtown to buy something warmer,” she said. “I’ve never been to your office before. It’s kind of like you.”

“Old and cheap?”

“You’re not old.”

I dredged up a grin. “Wait till you see the rest.”

I unlocked the inner door and held it for her without getting my arm in the way. I never could identify the scent she wore. Maybe it was just her. She looked around while I was climbing out of the outdoor gear. She’d left hers, a tan woolen coat and a yellow beret, on the bench outside. “Looks honest.”

“I didn’t think it was that bad.” I pulled out the customer chair for her. I had unbolted it from the floor finally. Salesmen’s breath didn’t bother me nearly as much as it used to. Neither did salesmen. They didn’t have any problems to unload, just merchandise. We sat down.

“I feel like I’m being interviewed for a job,” she said.

“I’d use the sofa but you might suspect my intentions.”

“Have you found out anything?”

“Nothing to report. I’m pretty much where you were last night.”

“Do you have to?”

I had opened a fresh pack of cigarettes. I put it down without taking one. “I didn’t know you quit.”

“I gave them up on the island. Couldn’t get my brand, and anything’s easy after you kick dope.”

“I never thought you would. Not for good.”

“Well, we won’t know I have until I don’t.”

“Small talk.” I pointed at her purse, green satin with a bronze clasp, trapped between her hip and the arm of her chair. “Is that as well armed as the last one?”

“Yes.”

“It’s got something to do with why you’re here and I’m not smoking?”

“I’m here to buy a pair of boots. And to find out how you were coming along.”

I sat back. If they won’t bite you can’t make them. “You were right about Wooding,” I said. “He’s sick and scared. But he gave me some line and I’ll run it out as soon as you leave.”

“Oh.” She made no move to get up.

“Who’s after you?”

“One of my old customers.”

“Which one and for what?”

“I don’t know.”

I said uh-huh. I wanted a smoke.

“I checked into a motel my first two days in town. I didn’t want to show up at Mary M’s unannounced with two suitcases. Third morning, the day I moved out, I found this in my jewelry box.”

She handed me a three-by-five index card. Someone had drawn a crude skull-and-crossbones on the blank side in red ink, a keyhole shape with two circles for eyes and an X underneath. The ruled side was blank. It was dog-eared and a little dirty. I laid it on the blotter next to my cigarettes. “What makes it a customer?”

“The box has a false bottom. It’s where I used to put the johns’ money. Some of them probably saw me do it, in fact I’m sure some of them did. You don’t think like a normal human being with that juice in your veins. That’s where the card was, right in the middle under the false bottom.”

“Jewelry boxes without false bottoms are rare. Anyone could figure it out. Or it could have worked its way out of a crack or something after a long time and you just never spotted it before. It doesn’t look new.”

“I looked in the box the night before. It wasn’t in there then.”

“Leave the room?”

She nodded. “That was my first night at Astaire’s.”

“Talk to the motel dick?”

“The night manager, whatever they call them now. He thought it was a joke and I couldn’t prove anyone had been in the room after I left. I had a cheesy lock on the ground floor at the back. Place had entrances on every corner.”

“Could just be someone playing pirate.”

“What I thought, until somebody put a bullet through
my
windshield.”

“I’m going to light up now,” I said.

She nodded again and I did it and blew smoke away from her.

“I wasn’t in the car,” she said. “I parked on the street in front of Mary M’s and when I came out for the suitcases I saw the hole, about head-high on the driver’s side. Bullet’s somewhere in the seat, I guess. I couldn’t have been inside five minutes.”

“No one saw or heard anything?”

“Nobody inside. I didn’t canvass the neighborhood.”

“Care to guess who put it there?”

She shook her head. “I tended to satisfy my customers.”

“Who knows you’re in town?”

“Just Mary M, and she didn’t know until I called her after I found the card. I always use phony names in motels; old habit. Alice Irving, if it means anything.”

“Whoever loaned you the car knows.”

“Not really. It belongs to my fiancé’s old partner in the fishing business. He’s in overseas tours now and he keeps the car in a garage downtown for emergencies and for his friends to use. Charles gave me the claim slip. That’s my fiancé. I never saw anyone, just the attendant at the garage.”

“What’s the friend’s name?”

She thought. “I forget. Is it important?”

“I won’t know that until he tells me. Can you call Charles and ask him?”

“I’d rather not. I haven’t told him anything about this. He didn’t want me to come here to begin with.”

I got the location of the garage from her. While I was at it I got the name of the motel she’d stayed in and wrote it all down. “Make a list,” I said. “Even Gandhi had enemies. And get out of Mary M’s.”

“You don’t know her. I’m as safe there as anywhere.”

“Just like your car.”

“I mean inside.”

“Why didn’t I hear about this last night?”

She put her purse in her lap. “Looking for my father for free is enough. Anything more would have to be interpreted as taking advantage. Somewhere there has to be a trade.”

“Engaged goods are outside my reach.”

She started to get up.

“Sit,” I said. “It shouldn’t come as any surprise to you how big a jackass I can be.”

“Remembering it and seeing it are different.” She remained standing. “I only came to ask if you’d dug up anything. The other thing just came out. Stick with Georgie Favor, please. It took a long time but I’m all grown up now.”

“The bigger you get the more you need. No charge for the cracker-barrel philosophy.”

“I’m glad.”

“Did you drive the car here?”

“It’s in the lot down the street.”

I stood. “Let’s go down and look at the bullet.”

I
T WAS A BUTTERSCOTCH-COLORED
Malibu, two years old, with a few parking dings in the doors but otherwise unmarked except for a clean hole in the windshield about where the eyes focused driving. The tip of my little finger just fitted it. A rip in the back of the driver’s seat where foam rubber was poking out through the tan vinyl said the gun had been fired at about a thirty-degree angle downward. The glass around the hole looked scorched. I leaned over and sniffed at it, jerking my head back involuntarily the way you do when sulfur puckers your nostrils.

I looked around. Iris and I were alone at that end of the lot. The black attendant at the entrance was busy adjusting dials on the radio in his booth. Unclipping the Smith & Wesson from my belt inside my coat, I placed the muzzle against the hole. I had to do it with my left hand in order to duplicate the angle. That tied it to someone who was either right-or left-handed, or maybe he was ambidextrous; anyone can fire a shot with his off hand if accuracy doesn’t count. I holstered the gun and opened the door and got out my pocket knife. After ten minutes and as many curses my fingers closed around a hard lump inside the seat and I pulled out a conical piece of lead the size of a fat eraser. The tip was flattened slightly.

“What will that tell anyone?” Iris asked.

“Nothing, if our boy didn’t shoot someone with the same gun fairly recently.” I straightened, brushing pills of yellow foam rubber off my coat, wrapped the bullet in my handkerchief, and put it in my coat pocket. “If he did, ballistics will have it on file at thirteen hundred.”

“Police.” She said it the way you might expect her to, given her background.

“As a rule I don’t get any better treatment from them than you did when you were working,” I said. “Worse, probably. But I’ve got a pipeline of a sort. He doesn’t have to know where the bullet came from.”

“I like that part.”

I slammed the door. The attendant in the booth swung his head in our direction, then turned up the volume on his radio. The Temptations rattled the glass in the windows. I said, “Your admirer is still on a warning binge. He doesn’t want to hurt you yet or he wouldn’t be leaving notes and shooting into empty cars. He’s got to come out of the wings sometime to tell you what he wants, or doesn’t want. If we do this right we’ll know who he is before he gets around to it.”

“We?”

“Me looking, you staying put. Don’t go out unless you can’t avoid it, and then take somebody you trust with you. And make that list.”

“You mean like nuts with guns? I had some of those.”

“I’m not surprised. This town’s full of them. Some of them are judges. I mean like anybody dark or hostile or who acted like his brains boiled too long, or not long enough. You know the formula.”

“That doesn’t leave many,” she said. “It wouldn’t help. Nobody ever gives his right name.”

“See what you can come up with anyway.”

“Do I rate a bodyguard?”

“Do you want one?”

She shook her head. The yellow beret was bright against the gray granite around us. “I’m sleeping solo these days.”

“Bodyguards are just nightlights, like fingerprinting your kids at school. It means their corpses can be identified.”

“Also gives Big Brother a line on them early.”

“That’s ACLU’s headache. I’ll drive you home. We can pick up your car later.”

She patted my cheek and opened the door and slid in under the wheel. “Find my old man.” The engine ground over twice and caught.

I leaned an arm on the open door. “Any chance somebody doesn’t want him found?”

“They had to have followed me all the way from Kingston. I was just starting to ask questions here when that card turned up in my jewelry box. Why would somebody not want him found?”

“I don’t know. Probably the two things have nothing to do with each other. Life doesn’t hang together that neat. I’m just spitballing.”

She put the car in gear but left her foot on the brake. I stepped back. Grasping the door handle she looked up at me with thought on her face. “Are you getting enough sleep? You look beat.”

“The kind of beat I am sleep can’t cure,” I said. “Call me if it rains.”

She said she would and pulled the door shut and backed out of the space. After she hit Grand River I stood on the corner and smoked a cigarette. None of the cars parked against the curb pulled out behind her. A rattletrap Pinto hatchback with a busted tailpipe left the lot a couple of minutes later but turned in the other direction with an old lady at the wheel. I went back to the office.

I called police headquarters and while it was ringing I took the bullet out of my pocket and looked at it. A property clerk answered, went away, and came back to tell me Lieutenant John Alderdyce was on indefinite leave.

“Since when?”

“Since last week,” the clerk said. “Is it an emergency?”

I hung up and tried John’s home number. The line was busy. It was still busy a minute later and I called Astaire’s.

The bright voice answered again, but this time it was live. I asked if Darryl Astaire was back from his trip. She put me on hold.

He came on a moment later, a deep quiet voice like wrapped thunder. He was cautious at first when I told him who was calling, but when he found out it wasn’t about Clara Rainey he loosened up a notch. He didn’t know anyone named George Favor. When he bought Harold’s he’d let the kitchen staff go and replaced the dishwasher with a machine. If he kept up with the lives of all the people he’d had to fire, he said, he wouldn’t have time to look after his present employees.

“Would Harold know?”

“I doubt it. He moved to Texas, where I heard he died.”

I drew an empty circle on my telephone pad, a face without features. I had run out of questions. “Okay. Thanks, Mr. Astaire.”

“Thank
you.
For holding off telling Clara’s husband.”

“How is she?”

“She took the day off. She should be with him now.”

“Good luck.”

“It’s been nothing but good since she came here.” He thanked me again and hung up.

John’s line was still busy. The name of the motel Iris had stayed in her first three days in town stared up at me from the pad, next to the blank face. I looked it up in the telephone directory, then decided to go there in person.

I still had my hat and coat on and it would be a shame to waste them. I took along the bullet.

It was steel cold in the car. The wheel was icy and when I hit the ignition cold air stiffened my face and went down my collar before I got the heater fan switched off. It was getting dark out at just past one in the afternoon. I drove the entire twenty-odd blocks without seeing a scrap of color. When it’s February in Detroit it’s been winter forever.