Sugartown (11 page)

The waitress came with our dinner and we didn’t talk again until she’d emptied her tray and gone. Then Karen said, “I’ve never known a private eye before. I thought they were mostly flat-nosed thugs who spend their evenings bouncing people off the walls of alleys. You’re kind of nice.”

“I’ve bounced my share. Tonight you’re looking at my St. Clair Shores face.”

“What’s that?” She picked up her fork.

“Restrained and polite. It’s like my Grosse Pointe face, only there I put a little weasel in it. You know, that smooth panting look. Here it’s regular John, get-a-load-of-those-gams. I save the flat nose for Cass and Mt. Elliott.”

“ ‘Gams’?” Her eyes crinkled.

“Sorry. When I’m tired I talk dirty.”

“How about Iroquois Heights?”

“Up in Iroquois Heights I just try to get in and out with any face at all. There they push them in just for something to do, like a mean kid de-winging flies when he ought to be looking up the Congress of Worms.”

“I was born in the Heights,” she said.

“A lot of nice people were. It’s the cops and their pet prosecutor you don’t show your back to if you’re fond of your head.”

The entire band, a five-man combo, had gathered on the stage and climbed into “Ebb Tide” for horns, bass, piano, and drums. She glanced that way, then nibbled at her gin and tonic. “That wasn’t your St. Clair Shores face this morning.”

Grinning, I pushed aside my empty plate and picked up my drink. I’d demolished a prime rib and all the options and hadn’t tasted a bite. “That was your fault. You went stiff old maid on me, which always brings out my thirteen-hundred face. That’s the one I show the cops at thirteen-hundred Beaubien, police headquarters. It generally gets me a lift out the back door and my hat tumbling along afterwards.”

“I was on the defensive this morning,” she said. “I didn’t know you. I’m still a long way from knowing you. What makes a halfway intelligent guy with a flashy line of gab and a nice face — this one, anyway — peek at people’s underwear for his living?”

“What makes a girl who should be a model empty bedpans for hers?”

“I get to see a lot of naked men. But I asked you first.”

“A friend died and left me the business. I don’t get to see nearly as many naked women as I’d like.”

“No, really.”

I sat back and toyed with a cigarette. “I ask myself that eight times a week. Twice on Mondays when I’m still hung over from Saturday’s sapping. A bright young fellow like me should be in high tech, except my distrust of computers borders on the pathological. I could go out West and become a cowboy. But the only time I was ever on a horse I got tossed and had the sense not to remount. You don’t get back on a hot stove. I could run for mayor only I’m not black enough or slippery enough. Law —”

“What about police work?”

“Next question.”

She ran the edge of her fork along the rim of her plate. “You’re a riddle, all right,” she said. “I’m just debating with myself whether it’s worth the trouble to solve.”

I let that one drift. The waitress came back to ask if everything was all right. I ordered a bottle of something with a cork in it and she went away. The band was playing “Stars Fell on Alabama” — slow, with the trumpet up front, the way Red Nichols used to. It was a better band than the place deserved. A few couples were prowling the floor. We watched and listened.

“Swaying to music like primitives in a
National Geographic
special,” murmured Karen. “Kind of dumb when you think about it.”

“Dumb.” I got up and held out a hand. She took it.

Our feet made no noise at all on the layers of varnish on the dance floor. She was wiry under a padding of deceptively soft flesh. Her head came to my collarbone. “It dances, too,” she marveled. “My father taught me, back when everyone I knew was shaking his arms and snapping his head like someone trying to swim backwards up a waterfall. Where’d you learn?”

“The hookers in Saigon only did one other thing.”

We danced some more. She felt warm.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Don’t be naive.”

“This.” She patted the Smith & Wesson on the back of my belt under my jacket.

“I thought I might have a use for it earlier. I didn’t. I forgot I was still wearing it.”

“I hate guns.”

“They’re not a thing to love or hate. They’re just so much steel.”

We danced. Her hair smelled sweetly of soap and female musk.

“Listen, I’m worried about this guy you’re sort of involved with.”

“Don’t be. I’m not.”

“Involved?”

“Worried.”

When we were through dancing we drank some wine and then I took her home. She had an apartment on the second floor of a brick house on Lake Shore Drive, one of the big ones that would have been built by someone named Phil the Camel or Charlie Blue Eyes, with a bay window looking out on the smoked-glass surface of Lake St. Clair with the lights of Windsor strung like sequins along the far shore and the broader glittering sheet of Grosse Pointe Woods and Harper Woods farther down on this side, and beyond that Detroit. I was looking at Detroit with the lights off behind me and my tie undone and my jacket draped across a chair when Karen handed me a glass of something and slid her arm around my waist, laying her head against my upper arm. She was tiny with her shoes off.

She said, “I like it at night. I like to stand here and look out and wonder what’s going on behind each lighted window.”

“A murder behind at least two,” I said, “if the stats hold up.”

“We’re cynical tonight.”

“We’re tired. Why is it always ‘we’ with you nurses?”

“What’ve you got against the place?”

“It isn’t what it was. Don’t get me started.”

“We’ve got all night.”

“You’re doing it again.” I drank. It was good bourbon, with a slight char. “When I came to the town it was like a big dumb hunky with a neck like a beer keg and a big wide stupid grin. It worked hard, got dirty, swore, told off-color jokes, and laughed a lot and loud. Then the riots came and after them the murders and then this new gang took over and threw up those silos on the riverfront and called it the Renaissance City. Now it’s like a hooker that got religion, avoiding its old friends, won’t laugh at the old jokes. But at night it still opens its thighs to whatever comes along. I guess it’s the holy attitude I don’t like.”

She said, “You expect too much of a pile of bricks and steel.”

“Maybe. I miss that old hunky.”

She turned her face up then and I kissed her. It started out friendly and wound up self-defense. I had to bend my knees to keep strain off my back. She was pressed against me from breastbone to thigh and her tongue darted and one hand found my shoulder blade and the other went prowling down my spine to the small of my back and found the revolver and recoiled. I let go of her with one hand and reached around behind and unsnapped the holster and fumbled it, gun and all, onto the window seat. All this was very awkward entangled as we were, but we never broke formation. She was at once as pliant and as sinuous as a young ocelot and her lips were like crushed wild berries, untamed and smoky-sweet with her teeth like thorns in the center of the sweetness. I did some biting of my own and plunged deeper into the jungle.

I dressed quietly in the dark. The bedroom had a smaller version of the bay window in the living room, and as she stirred atop the tangled sheets and drew one slick leg up its mate the city glow lay blue-white on her naked skin. She lay with her hair fanned out dark across her pillow and watched me buttoning my shirt.

“Why not hang around for morning?” she asked sleepily. “I fix a mean breakfast. Never go near the hospital cafeteria staff.”

“I don’t eat much in the way of breakfast.”

“There are lots of other good reasons to hang around.”

“Better than good,” I said. “But tomorrow’s for working. I can’t get someone to cover for me like you.”

“Also mornings are yours and you don’t share them.”

I looked at her. All of her. Sighed. “She’s smart too.”

“I live alone. It goes with the territory, like talking to yourself and eating on your feet.”

She got off the bed and slipped on a red kimono that wasn’t any longer than it had to be. In it she saw me to the door of the bedroom and went up on her toes for a kiss. I made it a quick one. I patted her silk-covered backside and grinned. “This is where we got into trouble last time.”

She smiled, but it wasn’t the wide monkey-smile. It was that tight one even the best ones get, that says no matter how far you go in this world or what you do, some part of you belongs to them. “Call me tomorrow?”

I sighed again. “Uh-huh.” I kissed her again.

Later I picked up my jacket and tie in the living room and got the gun and holster from the window seat and strapped them on behind my right hipbone. The weight felt at home, a lot more than I did standing in that living room. For all that it was a nice room to read a morning paper in. I left with my jacket over my arm, tiptoeing like a second-story man.

I
CAUGHT SIX HOURS’ SLEEP
and a shower and a shave and was looking at myself in the mirror over the sink when the front door buzzed. It was the boy from the cleaners with my good blue suit. I paid for the cleaning and tipped him and took the wire hanger off his hands. “Would I look better with my hair longer and a moustache, do you think?”

He looked at me appraisingly. He was a young Arab with smooth brown skin and a striped necktie on a plaid shirt. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. Where I come from they throw you in jail if you don’t have a moustache by thirteen.”

“Where would that be, Iran?”

“Highland Park.” He showed very white teeth under his own neat black Clark Gable.

When he was gone I got out of the robe and unpinned a new pale blue dress shirt and put it on and chose a black necktie with a silver diamond pattern and put on the fresh suit. I tried a display handkerchief, looked at it in the mirror, didn’t like it and took it out. I brushed my teeth and my hair and frowned at the blue shadow on the lower half of my face that no razor designed by man had been able to do anything about. A new gray hair glittered among the thick brown at my temples. Gray temples are for solid men. I figured there had been some mistake. I wiped off each shoe with a towel and used the front door. I hoped I looked good enough for a Russian writer.

The sun wasn’t shining today. There was a thin silver layer of cloud overhead and the raw-iron smell of rain in the air. I threw a raincoat in the back seat for luck.

The Westin Hotel, built only a few years ago as the Detroit Plaza, pierces the sky at 740 feet surrounded by the cylindrical towers of the Renaissance Center. The city needed the hotel accommodations for conventions, so tore down a bunch of older hotels to put up this one, along with a concrete-paved festival square that is sinking into alluvial river soil and a covered sports arena with a ceiling too low for football and a leaky fountain designed by a Japanese architect, that looks like a big steel slobbering tarantula. I parked in the city lot next to the Center and rode the elevator up to Fedor Alanov’s floor. There was no one in the quiet carpeted circular hallway when I alighted. Like every other hallway in every other expensive hotel in the world it felt like the anteroom to the chamber where they lay out the dead.

“Good morning, Mr. Walker. You’re punctual. Please come in.”

Her voice didn’t sound in person the way it had sounded over the telephone. It wouldn’t, any more than an art masterpiece looks the same in the gallery as it does in a magazine. I stepped inside and let her hang my hat in a closet and took a hand that was soft and cool and made for taking and pressing and then letting go. She smelled faintly of something that if it wasn’t jasmine should have been.

“I’m Louise Starr, Mr. Alanov’s editor. We spoke yesterday.”

Here was a blonde. Her hair was brushed back behind her ears to curve out at her shoulders, but left to its own it would fall over her right eyebrow, and even in its present fettered state it threw off soft sparks in the lamplit room. The tan of her face was even enough to be her natural complexion except for the telltale white of her eyelids. Her eyes were blue, like Lake Superior is blue under a violet sky. She wore some make-up but I didn’t pay much attention to it. It would be the right shade for her and she would know where to go to learn how to apply it. She had amber buttons in her ears and a cream blouse and a tailored jacket and skirt of that rich brown that is supposed to say all business and no sex, but the guy who figured that out had never met this lady. She was a few inches shorter than I, in flat-heeled maroon shoes cut low on the sides.

“Come meet the premier artist in our stable,” she said.

I got my tongue unstuck from the roof of my mouth. “I thought the only thing you kept in stables wore iron shoes and blankets.”

“It’s just an expression. As I keep telling Mr. Alanov.”

I was following her through one of those rooms that are just rooms you walk through to get to other rooms. It had a salt-and-pepper carpet and some chairs no one ever sat in along walls with paintings no one ever looked at. Louise Starr’s hips switched a little in the snug tailored skirt.

We went into another room twice as large, with more of the same carpet and paintings plus some green chairs and sofas with high humped backs and long spindly legs of dark wood that gleamed. Windsor lay in muted colors outside a big window in the right wall with the Detroit River slicing steel-blue in front of it. A drink cart full of bottles and polished shakers stood next to one of the sofas, where a bearded man sat topping off a stemmed glass with deep red liquid from one of the bottles. A younger man, also bearded, turned from the window as we entered.

“Mr. Alanov, Mr. Walker,” said Louise Starr.

The older man finished pouring and set the bottle back on the cart before looking up at me. He was thickset but not fat and wore his black hair shaggy and swept back without a part like windblown grass. His brows were thin for a Russian but absolutely level across eyes with lashes as long as a woman’s. His nose had a deep dimple where the bridge should have been, as if someone had laid a stick across it years before, and twin bands of silver swooped down through his beard from the corners of his mouth and up toward his ears as if he’d drooled them. He had very coarse skin with pores you could stick your fingers in.