Lady Yesterday (9 page)

“I bet you didn’t.”

“I don’t eavesdrop on my guests’ conversations.”

“But you do know what goes on in your house.”

“Only what the creaks and bangs tell me.”

“That’s what I’d like to talk to you about,” I said.

We went into the room Iris and I had just come out of. Mary M sniffed at the air and wrinkled her nose at the pair of squashed butts on top of the
TV Guide
. Then she turned to face me with her hands in the pockets of her red robe. She had tiny cracks here and there on her face and the kind of roughened complexion that comes from wearing too much harsh make-up too long for too many years. Her eyes were like new pennies in a clear fountain.

“Well, how do you like our little home away from the whorehouse?”

“It’s a nice waiting room.”

“Nice is what we go for. A lot of our tenants have never known nice. You met Sara?”

“Pretty girl. Is her hair that color?”

“This isn’t jail. They can bring whatever chemical beautifiers they want to. Some of them show up at the door with little red wagons. Little red wagons and big black-and-blue shiners. Knife scars sometimes. Sara has one from her collarbone to her left hip. Her business manager caught her moonlighting.”

“I guess you get a lot of those.”

“We get a lot of those. Some of the others would be in institutions if not here. We’ve had advanced cases of syphilis with their minds half gone and we get a lot of addicts and not a few reformed addicts who need help staying that way. When we can we get them on programs, but the waiting list is ridiculous. Most of the time I hold their heads.”

“Who bankrolls you?”

“Not the United Fund,” she said brightly. “Painted whores make rotten poster children. Those who can pay, do. I carry the rest, with help. You’d be surprised how generous some pimps turn out to be when an old retired hooker tells them more about their operations than they know themselves.”

“Dangerous.”

She tipped back her head and showed all her teeth. “Mister, you diet down to ninety-six pounds and put on a halter and a handkerchief for a skirt and hit Michigan Avenue at two every morning for six years and tell me what’s dangerous then.” She stopped laughing as suddenly as if a string had broken. “Iris says you’re the only white man she’d trust wearing a sheet in a snowstorm. If she’s in trouble I want to help.”

“You can do that by telling me who’s been here since last night that didn’t belong.”

“Nobody.”

“Think,” I said. “Especially this afternoon while Iris was out.”

“I don’t have to think. Nobody was here. If anybody was he’d have seen this.” She took her left hand out of its pocket and showed me a square chromed .25 Browning automatic pistol. The light came off it in flat sheets.

I said, “That wouldn’t stop a man who thought himself anything of a man.”

“Take it away from me.”

I reached for it. It wasn’t there. An elbow in a scarlet sleeve clipped me on the point of the chin and my teeth snapped together. I moved with the blow and tripped over a bare ankle and upset the lamp on the end table. She spun with a little grunt and feinted at my head with the other elbow. But I saw it for a feint and got a hand around her ankle as her knee came up and pushed her up and over. She turned her shoulder into the fall and rolled on the floor and I stepped in and looked at the pencil-size bore staring up at me from between her palms.

We were like that for a moment, breathing heavily, me standing, she sprawled on her back with her shoulders against the wall and both arms stretched out in front of her ending in the weapon. She had lost a slipper and her robe had come undone. In the cockeyed light of the fallen lamp her tiny nipples stood out against the blue silk of her nightgown.

“Good point,” I said.

She showed me her teeth again and lowered the gun. The safety snicked on. “We average two large angry black men a week in wide hats and purple shirts,” she said, panting. “I didn’t just jump into this venture.”

I grinned then and held out a hand. She took it in her steam-wrench grip and sprang up like coiled steel. Pocketing the pistol she went looking for her slipper. Her bare foot was small and narrow and she had a high arch.

“So much for threats from outside.” I righted the lamp. “Who’s new among your tenants since Iris?”

“She’s the latest.”

“The reason I’m asking is something was stolen from her room.”

She found the slipper and stepped into it. “There is a theft problem here. They don’t go out of here angels so I guess it’s too much to expect them to come in that way.”

“The item turned up. In a place where it shouldn’t.”

She looked at me, then remembered her robe and closed and tied it, flushing slightly. I liked her for that. An ex-prostitute who can still do you a blush is undefeatable. “I don’t suppose you’d tell me where,” she said.

“I just met you. First impressions aren’t reliable.”

“I always went by them.” Her bright eyes were steady on me.

I grinned again. “Next time I’ll leave my purple shirt at home.”

“Come anytime. I promise not to beat you up.”

“Mary, that’s as romantic a proposition as I ever got.”

“Retired cabbies don’t give up driving.” She saw me out.

T
HAT NIGHT
I
DREAMED
I was back in Mr. Charm’s office. The view was different: the short-fibered carpet was very close to my face and when I glanced away from it I was looking at the ceiling very far above. It took me a little while to realize I was dead with a knife in my heart. After that I went away from there, and that was when I found out they play trombones in heaven. I awoke into the cold of my bedroom and smoked a cigarette and put it out and turned over and went back to sleep.

In the morning I put on a robe and drank coffee and read Mr. Charm’s notebook. It contained a lot of hotel jargon lettered in his neat hand, some of which I understood, and a long section filled with three-digit numbers followed by initials and dollar sums in the low thousands. It excited me a little, if only because house dicks never see that kind of money. Give me a code and I’ll break it, but for all I knew, “212, S.M., $5,000” meant that was the going rate for a night with a girl and a whip in room 212. It was the largest amount listed. The rest ran between one and two thousand. I had two cups of coffee over it and gave up for the morning. I thought for a second about giving it to the cops, which fulfilled my citizen’s duty that day.

Showered and shaved and dressed in my good gray wool suit, I drove over to the Wayne County Road Commission for a map and to ask directions to a place I had been to a thousand times. The clerk was a helpful young man named Kevin O’Keefe. I thanked him and asked for a card. He gave me one from a little plastic rack on the counter.

The garage where Iris had claimed her fiancé’s friend’s car was called Park-a-Lot and took up a block of Griswold. It was dank inside and gasoline-smelling and so was the attendant, a beefy white man with dark grease in his fading red hair and a dirty quilted olive-drab coat pulled on over about six shirts. I walked straight up to the glass booth from the entrance and slid O’Keefe’s card under the window.

“We got complaints you’re letting unauthorized parties park in leased spaces.” I ran the words together through the speaking grid as if I’d been saying them all day. “In one case that’s happened three times and some of us at County were wondering maybe somebody here’s skinning something off on the side.”

He read the card, moving his lips, and turned it over with a black thumbnail. Then he looked at me with small colorless eyes crowded close to a blob of a nose like the holes in a bowling ball.

“This here’s a private garage. What’s County got to do with nothing?”

“Listen, Darrow, anything that’s got to do with tires on concrete has got to do with us.” I stabbed a finger at him. “This dump is one lonely knob on an iceberg big enough to sink this whole town come next election. I can go back to the office today with some answers or I can send a deputy around with a subpoena and get them Monday in front of the grand jury. You tell me which it is.”

He exchanged his tone for one with a whine in it. “Hey, I just work here.”

“That’s what the stormtrooper told the judges at Nuremberg.”

“Nurm what?”

A green Ford came down the ramp and stopped next to the booth on the other side. The driver gave the attendant a bill and he made change. While this was going on I glanced at my watch with an irritated gesture. It had worked once. The car pulled away and he turned back to me.

“What do you need?”

“I got a list of makes and license plate numbers I want you to run and tell me if their owners lease spaces.” I hauled out my notebook.

He belched, rumpled his grease-stained hair, belched again, and hoisted a three-ring folder with a stained cloth cover from the shelf under his workspace and opened it. I turned pages in the notebook and fed him some cars and license plate numbers out of the air. He flipped through a fistful of three-by-five cards staggered throughout the folder and grunted negatively while I made marks on the pages. When I mentioned Iris’ Malibu and gave him the number he snorted.

“That one we got. Meridian Tours, eighteen hundred Fisher Building. Registered to Dennis Roberts.”

“It here?”

He ran a finger along a row of hooks on a board mounted over the opposite window with keys hung on them until he came to an empty one. “It’s out.”

“Who claimed it?”

“Hell. Ask me what I ate for breakfast last Tuesday. Raleigh might remember. He parks and fetches the permanents. He’s out back on his break.”

I took it all down and made up two more cars and numbers for show. He shook his head. I put away the notebook.

“ ’Kay, I’ll note your cooperation. Hang on to those records. We might want to subpoena them.”

“I got a bad pothole on my block in Redford,” he said. “Tore hell out of a brand-new tire. I been waiting six weeks for you guys to come fill it in.”

“That’s maintenance. Not my department.”

“That’s what they told the judges at Nurm-whatever,” he snarled.

I cut through the building and out the rear entrance on Shelby, where a small slender black party with graying hair and gold-rimmed glasses leaned against the outside wall smoking a cigarette. His clean blue coveralls couldn’t have fit him more closely if they were tailored and he had on high-tops freshly blacked and laced as tight as a Victorian lady’s corset. He looked to be in his late forties.

Looking at him I abandoned the road commission ploy—the attendant inside had my only card anyway—and handed it to him straight on. “Raleigh?”

He came away from the building with a kind of easy grace you don’t normally associate with small men and took the cigarette from his mouth, flicking ash onto the sidewalk. “Me.” He had confident eyes behind the glasses.

I showed him my ID. “Client of mine claimed a car here a few days ago, yellow Chevy Malibu.” I gave him the license plate number.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah means what?”

“Means a client of yours claimed a car here. Fine young ginger-colored thing. Big eyes.”

“That’s her. You’ve got a good memory.”

“Only for the important things.”

I stretched a five-dollar bill between my hands. “You were the first to find out she was in town. Who’d you tell?”

“Save your money, mister.”

“You won’t say?”

“It worth five bucks to you to hear me say I didn’t tell no one?”

“It might be, if you meant it.”

He held out his palm then and I laid the bill in it. He unzipped a coverall pocket and folded the bill inside and zipped it closed. Then he took another drag.

“I didn’t tell no one. I see pretty ladies every day.”

I left it at that. I wanted to believe him. It’s worth five dollars to meet an honest car hop.

The Fisher
is a junior Empire State Building soaring in fluted Art Deco splendor from a parapeted base, Albert Kahn’s bold reply to the glass boxes that would eventually smother his art. Three stories of marbled arcade run the length of its base, with room down the center to display everything from antique cars standing on spotless rubber inside velvet ropes to the history of fashion from goatskins to chinchilla wraps. I rode the elevator up the tower to the eighteenth floor and stepped out into a blue-carpeted reception area where an East Indian girl seated behind the desk told me that Mr. Roberts was vacationing in the South of France for six weeks, would I care to speak with someone else?

I rode back down and chipped the frost off my windshield and drove to the office, where a gray Lincoln Town Car was parked in front of the entrance with its motor purring.

You couldn’t miss it. In a city full of brown slush and rusted tailpipes it looked fresh out of the crate, polished to a high soft gloss with a full set of those tinted windows that are almost always bad news for someone in my profession. I parked down the street and got my gun out of the glove compartment and checked the load and put it inside the right-hand pocket of my overcoat before getting out. I’m not a Communist. People with nice clothes and spotless cars aren’t automatically my enemies. I just don’t like them parking in front of running-down buildings in the middle-rent district on cold February days without going inside; especially not a building where I happen to have my office. I crossed the street to that side and started walking.

I had the timing figured right. I was abreast of the right rear fender when the front door on the passenger’s side opened and a medium-size Oriental climbed out. He was a gawky case in a tan double-breasted suit that fit him like aluminum siding and eight inches of neck sticking out of his collar. He had an egg-shaped head cropped closely and badly, as if with hedge trimmers, and black hooded eyes in a face the color of rotten teeth. His upper lip was as long as a monkey’s.

I had picked my spot with my back to the building and my hand on the gun in my pocket. The Oriental stopped coming. He stood in the slush in shiny brown hand-lasted shoes small enough for a woman to wear, with his bony wrists hanging four inches out of his cuffs and nothing in his hands. The car door was open behind him. I could see the driver’s leg and an arm supported on the cushioned rest between the seats, both sheathed in powder-blue serge.