Y
ou can tell more about an entertainer’s career by whether you’ve ever heard of him than by who he’s opening for. If the name is unfamiliar, he’s on his way up, sharing a bill with a big star. If you remember him vaguely, he’s on his way down with an armload of anvils, warming the stage for a Johnny- or Janie-come-lately who was in diapers when he was headlining in New York and Vegas. Gilia’s opener was a country crossover whose first hit had been his last, and whose most recent exposure had been an
Entertainment Tonight
feature on his release from detox and a riches-to-rags spot on
Behind the Music
. The underwear being flung at him by the women at Cobo had plenty of Lycra.
From where I stood, his hip-swivel seemed to have developed a hitch, and he couldn’t hit middle C with a shovel; but from backstage even the best acts always look like Open Mike Night at the Pig ’n’ Whistle. In any case I wasn’t being paid to follow the program. I only had eyes for the wardrobe mistress.
Her name was Caterina Muñ
oz, and like many women trained to match a three-hundred-dollar scarf to a pair of crocodile pumps, she dressed like a fire in the big top. She was a dumpy sixty with her hair chopped short and dyed bright copper, and she had cut a hole in a painter’s drop cloth and stuck her head through it on her way out the door. I watched her using a portable
steamer to take the creases out of a dozen of Gilia’s costumes hanging from a rack on wheels and wondered what she was spending the money on, since it didn’t appear to be clothes.
According to Gilia, the Muñ
oz had sold a pirate photograph of her employer trying on the gown she’d planned to wear to the Golden Globe Awards in January to a supermarket tabloid, which had run it on the front page. This had forced Gilia to spend another seventy-five grand on a replacement gown. She’d shown me pictures of herself wearing both outfits. I used more material cleaning my revolver, but that wasn’t the point. Without quite resorting to a pie chart, she’d convinced me the surprise factor on the red carpet outside the arena was worth a couple of million in good press. No surprise, no sizzle.
“What makes it Caterina?” I’d asked. “Anyone can sneak a picture.”
“She was the only one present at the fittings, apart from the designer.
Signor
Garbo makes tons more money keeping his designs secret than he ever would selling the details.”
Everything about that made sense, not counting the name
Signor
Garbo. Now the Grammies were in the chute and she wanted me to nail the wardrobe mistress and her contact before history repeated itself. With a tour of Canada on tap after Detroit, she was reasonably certain the next exchange would have to take place locally. That meant a tail job, and with my five-hundred-dollar-a-day rate guaranteed and a payoff of seventy-five hundred if I delivered, I could spend the rest of the winter sopping up the sun on a beach in Cleveland.
Muñ
oz was busy throughout the concert. The hardest part about keeping an eye on her was staying out of the way of an army of grips and talent wheeling pianos, a harp, banks of lights, and set pieces throughout the wings at Grand Prix speed. The place smelled of perspiration, ozone, animal-friendly cosmetics, marijuana, and all the other indispensable effluvia of show business. I saw a relationship consummated in a stairwell, overheard someone giving someone else complicated directions to the local cocaine connection, and almost tripped over a female backup singer having a full-blown anxiety attack during a cellular telephone
conversation with her analyst in Pasadena. There was enough material there to keep an enterprising private detective in business through Thanksgiving. Meanwhile the woman under surveillance recycled the costumes as needed, catching discarded articles of clothing on the fly, handing out changes, and sewing split seams with an arsenal of needles and spools of thread from an emergency basket she carried slung over one shoulder.
I saw Gilia naked many times. She peeled out of her Wonderbras and sweat-soaked bikini panties and rigged up for the next number without bothering to seek cover, while the hundred or so supernumeraries, most of them male, boiled about her showing all the interest of vegetarians at a steak fry. I got tired of looking at it myself, but then the whomping guitars, amplified drums, and laser effects had my head hammering like Sunday morning, and anyway there wasn’t a major magazine in the country that hadn’t featured every pore of her body at one time or another. It was an athletic body, but without a G-string or a halter top to call attention to the racy parts, it was just a slipcase for her talent.
The scalpers were getting five hundred bucks per ticket, and she gave the victims their money’s worth. Her brand of juicedup Latino music had been burning down the competition from rap and third-generation rock for months, and she showed no signs of coasting. At the climax she climbed into a harness attached to a boom and soared around the auditorium fifty feet above the audience’s heads, belting out her chart-topper of the month over a radio headset and flapping a pair of electrified butterfly wings that would have blown every fuse at Tiger Stadium during the 1984 World Series. She had a voice, too; what could be heard of it above the roar from the seats. It chilled spines and tightened every scrotum this side of Windsor.
When the concert finished, a flying wedge of Cobo security guards formed around her with Benito, the born-again Chicano, at the point, and swept her down to the basement and the private exit the Detroit Police had cleared for her escape. The announcer, a squirt in a pompadour with an exposed heart and lungs printed on his T-shirt, gave her fifteen minutes, then announced over the
P.A. system that the butterfly had flown. More security appeared to usher out the fans and prevent the seats from being torn loose of their bolts.
I hung around while Muñ
oz packed Gilia’s costumes into a wheeled trunk, taking note in a memorandum pad as she did so of missing buttons, broken zippers, and ripped linings. Off in an untrafficked corner, yesterday’s country-pop powerhouse stood smoking a conventional cigarette with this month’s rent written all over his face.
The wardrobe mistress accompanied a pair of grips in the elevator to basement parking and watched while the trunk was locked away in an unmarked van. I went along, attracting less notice than the elevator carpet. I stood between a couple of cars pretending to fish in my pocket for my keys while she chirped open the lock on a rental Toyota and got in. She had a nine-by-twelve manila envelope in one hand.
Gilia had arranged a slot for me near the van. I climbed under the wheel of the venerable Cutlass and tickled the big plant into bubbling life. I’d replaced the carburetor recently, steam-cleaned the engine, and yanked the antipollution equipment I’d had installed to clear my last inspection. The body was battered, the blue finish broken down to powder, and thirty blistering Michigan summers and marrow-freezing lake effect winters had cracked the vinyl top, but I could hose Japan off the road in a head wind.
I gave her until the exit ramp, then pulled out and followed. I wanted a look at what was in the envelope.
Muñ
oz’s megastar employer was staying at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn, for the very good reason that after three decades of recovery from the riots, Detroit had yet to harbor a hotel where the silverfish didn’t have a key to the executive floor. When the Toyota turned west on Fort, I thought that was where she was headed. When she swung north on Grand and made a left on the Dix Highway I was sure of it. Then she made another left onto Vernor and we entered a foreign country.
DelRay—the old Hungarian section southwest of downtown—had been going steadily Mexican since the 1990s.
Carnicerías
and Mexican restaurants had opened in former pastry shops and Gypsy storefronts, and on Cinco de Mayo the streets teemed with pretty
señorítas
, well-kept children in native dress, and mariachis. It was February, and only the Spanish signs and one old woman in a head scarf carrying home a sackful of freshslaughtered
pollo
identified the area apart from the many other neighborhoods trying to make the long slow climb from hookshops and crack houses toward lower-middle-class respectability. The current mayor’s face smiled out from a ragged poster carrying the legend
Vota ¡Si! por
Detroit.
The Toyota turned down a side street and parked in a lot next to a building with a sign on it warning drivers in Spanish and English that it was for residents only. It was the sort of building that had been new when sharing the same roof with a few dozen other families was considered novel and suspiciously European; its sandstone corners were worn round as loaves of bread and the arched windows near the roof appeared to be holding up their skirts to avoid contact with the three rows of prosaic rectangles beneath their feet. But a decade ago the whole thing had been headed toward demolition, and most of the glass panes had only recently taken the place of weathered plywood.