Lady Yesterday (5 page)

The motel took up a block of Tireman, two square redbrick buildings connected by a walkway sealed in clear plastic with its name out front in green neon. In the parking lot a slim black youth in a red blazer walked from car to car recording license plate numbers on a sheet attached to a metal clipboard. I passed under a canopy into a generous lobby for an overnight place, paved in gray tile and containing a plastic reservation desk molded to resemble carved maple. There were no chairs or benches. Exotic-looking plants grew out of squat concrete planters, but they had thought of those too and set big spikes around the edges to discourage anyone from sitting on them. You can tell a lot about hotels and motels by their lobbies.

The towheaded clerk was speaking into a red telephone to match his blazer. He wore a black clip-on bow tie and an arsenal of ballpoint pens in a plastic holder in his handkerchief pocket. One of them was gone from the holder and he was using it to write something on a buff pad with the motel’s name printed across the top. Up close he had a pale moustache whose hairs reminded me of the spikes in the planters. I propped an elbow on the desk and waited for him to finish his conversation. After five minutes he said good-bye and glanced at me and worked the plunger and pecked out a number and spoke to someone else. Ten minutes later he said good-bye again and punched some more buttons. I waited until he started talking, then stretched out an arm and pressed down the plunger.

He glared and got his mouth into gear. It was a feminine mouth, pink-lipped and mobile under the spiky growth. “What do you—” He closed it again when he saw the buzzer.

“Two calls when a customer’s standing in front of you, okay. Three is abusing the privilege.” I snapped shut the folder. “I want to see the house man.”

He went through an open door at the back without saying anything. While he was gone I stood around scowling at my watch every couple of seconds and looking like I had an ulcer and troubles at home, just in case he was watching me through a crack. Real cops don’t act like that, but he didn’t look as if he’d been on the job long enough to know a real cop from his clip-on.

He came back in finally and picked up the telephone and slotted himself between me and it while he used the buttons. That wasn’t necessary, because I’d lost interest in him. A very tall, bald, gray-eyed man in a well-cut gray suit had entered behind him, and this was a different number altogether. He had a gray silk tie on a gray shirt and a gray moustache that looked to be the grandfather of the bristle on the towhead’s lip and when he spoke his voice was gray.

“I’m the night manager, Mr. Charm,” he said. “And you are?”

“The name’s a gag, right?”

The moustache twitched. “I assure you, no. Has there been a complaint? One of our guests?”

I returned his serve. “Lady claims her room was broken into night before last. She couldn’t get any satisfaction from the help so she came to us.”

He drew a slim notebook bound in gray leather from an inside pocket and started leafing through it. “Name?”

“Alice Irving.”

“Oh yes.” He shut it and returned it to his pocket. “Someone’s idea of a joke.”

“Breaking and entering is funny?”

“There was no sign of forced entry. She reported nothing missing. Guests are often mistaken about such things. They neglect to pack something and immediately assume it’s been stolen.”

“How many report something was added?”

The moustache twitched again. It was round and thick and groomed sleek as a greyhound. “May I see your badge, Mr….?”

“Walker.” I flashed it, not quick enough. I saw it in the gray eyes.

“I have one of those too,” he said. “The sheriff’s department used to auction them off whenever they changed designs until too many private licenses started showing them around. Are you aware of the penalty for impersonating a police officer, Mr. Walker?”

“They vary according to the judge. And I never said I was an officer.”

“Just having the badge could get your license suspended. At the very least. I could have you escorted from the premises, but you saw the door on your way in.”

“I saw your security too. Forget it.” I pocketed the folder. “We’re in the same racket, Mr. Charm. I’m just trying to find out who ran up the Jolly Roger in Miss Irving’s room. The motel doesn’t have to come into it.”

He ran a thumb down his necktie, lining it up with the placket of his shirt. “If you’d come to me straight on instead of trying to intimidate me with authority I might have cooperated, inasmuch as I can cooperate in a matter that has nothing to do with this establishment. Now you can just take your tin shield out the door.”

“Don’t get your feathers up,” I said. “Hotel dicks are old scenery to me. A lot of them run with the roosters. If you don’t, that’s okay. But don’t get all fogged up because I didn’t expect you not to.”

It smoothed him a little. He did the thing with the tie again.

“We’re not unreasonable,” he said. “The comfort and safety of our guests come first. It’s just that I’m not convinced that Miss Irving wasn’t mistaken. That card could have been placed among her things by a friend before she came here, as a joke.”

“She’s not laughing.”

“I didn’t say it was a good joke. The nature of her personal relationships is not our concern.”

“That’s how it is.”

“I’m afraid so.”

The clerk was sneering at me with the red telephone screwed to his ear. I took my elbow off the desk.

“One more question. What’s the night manager doing on duty in the daytime?”

Charm smiled thinly without disturbing the moustache. “The title is a euphemism. Like ‘private investigator’ for cut-rate gumshoe.”

“I was right,” I said. “The name’s a gag.”

I took myself out of the lobby. The black youth with the clipboard had worked his way down to the far end of the parking lot and was starting back my way. I intercepted him. He had his hair moussed up into a tall flattop the way they wear it now and a crescent of dark beard on the end of his long chin. His only concession to the cold was a thin green-and-white-striped scarf flung around his neck. The company blazer looked as thick as a handkerchief. He looked me over with great brown eyes and waited. Our breath made jets in the air.

“How much they pay you to take down license plates?” I asked.

“Who’s interested?”

“The Lincoln twins.” I held up two five-dollar bills.

“That’s two and a half hours,” he said. “Not that it ever takes me ten minutes. I write them all down and then I come around again a hour later, see how many’s parking here ain’t registered. They still here in another hour they gets towed.”

“Were you on duty night before last?”

He glanced at the bills and I gave them to him. He hiked the clipboard under his arm and folded them over, smoothing the crease between long brown fingers. “Six to ten. They rotates me.”

“I need a list of the numbers that didn’t belong that were parked here that night. They don’t have to have showed up more than once. The one I want probably didn’t. He’d have parked out back, then again maybe not.”

“Mr. Charm gots all the lists in his office.”

“I bet he doesn’t lock the door every time he leaves it.”

“How much you bet?”

I pointed at the bills. “Two more brothers. If there’s a list.”

“There’s one.” He bent his head around to read my watch. “He goes off at three to rest up for night duty.”

I gave him the card the acting manager at the Kitchen had returned to me. “Leave a message with my service if I’m not there.” I watched him tuck the card inside the fold of the bills and put them in the side pocket of his blazer. “I’d as soon throw those down a storm drain as not get a call.”

“You get it. Lester Hamilton ain’t Mr. Charm.” He carried the clipboard inside.

I
FILLED UP
at a station on Tireman and tried John Alderdyce’s home number again from the pay telephone. The line was still tied up. I got in and drove.

His house was one of a dozen in a cul-de-sac off Fenkell, beige tile over concrete block with the standard garage extension on the end with the usual basketball hoop mounted over the open door and the obligatory bicycles and garden tools and pop bottles wedged in on both sides of a Japanese car. I could hear the television pulsing inside when I used the bell. After a long time the door opened and the man stood there in an unbuttoned brown cardigan and jeans and stocking feet with a bottle of Miller in one hand. He was thick through the chest and shoulders and big in the head with a shelf of bone over his eyes and a jaw you could build a small house on. His skin was black with a purplish tint, and looking at him you knew he would always be the bad cop in the interrogation room. Behind him the television was still droning.

“Walker.”

He had always called me that, going back to when we were kids; never Amos. I said, “They told me at thirteen hundred you were on personal time. Who’s on the telephone?”

“I took the fucking thing off the hook. The department shrink can’t stop playing with that dial and every time he plays with it he uses my number. Take it in out of the cold.”

The house was warm. He hung my hat and coat on the hall tree and offered me a beer. I said no thanks and he tipped his up, emptying it, and set it down at the end of a row of empties on the kitchen counter and opened the refrigerator and twisted the top off a fresh one. I followed him into the carpeted living room, where on the 21-inch screen a pile of gray hair in a suit with wide lapels was working his way with a microphone through an audience of women, asking them what they thought of lesbian postal clerks.

“Fucking faggot.” John turned off the set and flung himself into a scoop chair upholstered in green vinyl. I sat on the edge of a green plaid sofa in the only spot that wasn’t piled with magazines and record albums. The floor was a litter of crumpled socks and sports sections and stray lint. The butt of another empty stuck out from under John’s chair.

“So what’s doing in rental heat these days?” he asked.

“Same old same old. A keyhole here, a kidnapped heiress there. The rest of the time I’m shaking blondes and hand grenades out of my bed. Where’s Marian?”

“Visiting her parents in Flint. She took the kids with her.”

“I guess you couldn’t get away.”

“Her old man’s in construction. City employees are people he pays to tie their shoelaces while his people dump sand into the cement. We get on like salt and iron. Her mother plays bingo.”

“You’ve been alone here how long?”

“Let’s see, I had ten cases when I started. A week.”

I didn’t see his department piece anywhere. The only weapon visible, not counting the alcohol, was a deer rifle with mounted scope leaning in one corner. “You under hack downtown?”

“No.” He tilted the bottle and set it down. Foam climbed to the neck, then collapsed. “I’m sick to puking of paperwork up the wazoo and cops who are starting to look and sound like the mayor and TV pricks asking why did you chase that boy who raped and strangled the little old lady and stole her car, put all those other motorists in jeopardy? I’m sick of civil liability and toy coffee in the office pot. I want caffeine. We’ve got more contract killers in uniform than we’ve got in the mugs and I’m sick of that. I’m on vacation.”

“For how long?”

He lifted the bottle again and studied the contents, three quarters gone. “I’ve got six cases left on the back porch. When I’ve killed them I’ll decide.”

“That’ll be Friday at the rate you’re going.”

He looked at me, eye-whites glittering in his dark brutal face. “Run your errand or give me a pamphlet and go. I want a lecture I’ll put the phone back on the hook.”

I thought of leaving. My welcome with friends wasn’t going too far lately. I stayed where I was. I took out my handkerchief and unwrapped the bullet and held it out.

He made no move to take it. “Dig it out of anyone I know?”

“Out of a seat in a lady’s car. You wouldn’t remember her. She was stuck on the edge of the Freeman Shanks case a few years back. I want to put it to a gun. Who do I see while you’re on vacation?”

“Talk to Hornet.”

“Next suggestion.”

He belched. “Try Lieutenant Thaler in Robbery. Use my name. Thaler’s got priority in ballistics in cases not related to homicide. City hall wants to bring down those statistics before the Grand Prix in June.”

I rewrapped and pocketed the bullet. While I was doing that he finished his beer and went into the kitchen and came back with another. He’d left the empty on the coffee table and now he rearranged some newspapers to make room for it, uncovering the black rubber butt of his revolver in its burgundy leather holster. Just for fun I asked him if he’d ever heard of a jazz trombonist named George Favor.

“Little Georgie.”

I’d been looking at the scribbles in my notebook. Now I raised my eyes. His face was a little less grim, like Rushmore in misty light.

“Dad took me to one of his concerts in the old Walled Lake Pavilion. I was nine or ten. I guess there were better on the trombone, but I didn’t know it. Neither did he. Give me a second.”

He got up, found his balance, and came over to the sofa. He spent a couple of minutes shuffling through the records piled there, then muttered something and left the room. I helped myself to a slug of his beer while he was gone. I had never seen him swaying before. The house smelled stale. I lit a cigarette.

He came back carrying a thick record in a stiff green paper sleeve and lifted the lid on the console stereo. “Could have bought a new one for what it cost me to have this thing fixed,” he said, adjusting the controls. “You can’t get 78 rpm anymore.”

The needle swished and crackled for half a minute, like surf breaking. There was a short guitar lick followed by a piano and then a sweet low sound sliding up and down and all around “Old Rocking Chair” without ever actually touching the melody. It was there, yet not, like the vermouth in a skillfully made martini; a cool cloud drifting. Favor hadn’t the warmth of a Tommy Dorsey or the casual genius of a Jack Teagarden. He wouldn’t have held the public ear long and his talent wouldn’t have earned him underground legend as a musician’s musician. But he was too good to wind up washing dishes in a flapjack joint. I listened to it all the way through, John standing next to the console out of the way of the speakers, and laid a column of ash into an empty tray on the coffee table that hadn’t been used in a while. It meant something that John hadn’t taken up smoking again after quitting eleven times.