The Glass Highway (2 page)

I snatched one last drag, ditched the butt, and excavated my little notepad. My memory for details had deteriorated since my thirty-third birthday.

“B
UD’S TWENTY,”
he began. “My wife got custody when we divorced six years ago, then she remarried and moved here with him and her new husband. I haven’t seen him since. He’s one reason I took this job; the money’s not that much better here and the climate stinks.” He inclined his head toward the waterworks outside.

“California, right?” I prompted.

“Sacramento. Does it show?”

“Like a pink flamingo in a parking lot.”

“I’ll adapt. Anyway, when I got out here and dropped in on my ex-wife—”

“I wish I had that reunion on film.”

He looked at me with new interest. “You too?”

“Yeah.”

“Bitch, isn’t it?”

I agreed that it was a bitch. That made us war buddies. He relaxed a notch.

“Her name’s Sharon. When I visited her in Grosse Pointe, she said she was just considering calling me in California. She hadn’t seen or heard from our son in almost a month. He took an apartment in Rawsonville last year when he landed a job at the Ford plant there. He came home to visit every couple of weeks or so and sometimes stayed over on weekends. When he failed to show up or call two weekends in a row, Sharon tried to call him. She got a recording saying his phone had been disconnected. She drove out there and spoke to his landlord. He told her Bud had moved out about ten days before, just after he got laid off from the plant. She hadn’t even known he’d
been
laid off. I dropped in while she was vacillating between notifying the police and calling me. That was yesterday. I called you as soon as I got your name from Barry.”

“Did you check with Unemployment?”

“They haven’t heard from him either.”

“The cops are good at this sort of thing,” I said. “They have the manpower and the facilities. When you hire me, me is all you get.”

“Barry says that’s plenty.” He rubbed a nicely manicured thumb over what might have been an irregularity in the desk’s plastic surface if it had had irregularities. “There’s something else.”

“There usually is.”

“The man Sharon married is named Esterhazy, Charles Esterhazy. He has a grown daughter, Fern, who lives with them. She’s been married and divorced twice, She’s what we used to call fast before the sexual revolution rescued us from Victorian bondage.” He made one of those faces newscasters call wry. “She introduced Bud into her circle of acquaintances, specifically a girl named Paula Royce, who is four years older than Bud. They were seeing quite a bit of each other before he disappeared, Sharon says.”

I wrote down the name. If I had a nickel for every young man who vanished that year without some girl being tied up in it somewhere I’d have a nickel. “Let me guess. The girl’s disappeared too.”

Someone tapped lightly on the door. Broderick said something pithy under his breath, then raised his voice. “Come in.”

The short-haired blonde in yellow entered carrying a manila envelope and tipped its contents out under his nose. They were six eight-by-ten photographs of Broderick interviewing someone on the steps of the City-County Building. They looked stagey as hell. “Ray wants your okay on these before we send them out,” she said apologetically.

“Tell him they’re fine.” He returned them to the envelope without a glance and gave it back.

She hesitated with her hands on the item. “Are you coming by tonight?”

“I’m busy, Marlene.”

She flushed slightly and left.

“The girl’s the dead end,” he told me, when the door was closed. “No one knows where she lives, not even Fern. They only saw each other at parties, she says. Sharon didn’t approve. She met her once at Bud’s apartment. She thinks the girl’s on drugs.”

“What kind?” I asked. “Coke? Heroin? Pills?”

“She doesn’t even know for sure it’s dope. It’s just the way the girl acted, like she was a quarter-beat behind. And Fern isn’t talking, at least not to her stepmother. They get along great, those two. Like bitch dogs.”

“You think Paula Royce may acquaint your son with the wonderful world of oblivion?”

“The possibility exists,” he said. “My ex-wife has never suffered from what you would call an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. She has little enough of her own to have passed any on to Bud, and if Fern is any example I think the same can be said of Sharon’s current husband.”

I frowned at my notes. “You’re afraid if you tell the cops and they find your son they’ll bust him for possession, is that it?”

The newscaster shifted his position twice, ending up where he had started. Then he drew a folded sheet from an inside breast pocket and handed it to me. “There’s a copy of that on every editor’s desk in southeastern Michigan.”

I unfolded the sheet. It was a news release typed under the station’s letterhead, announcing that Sandy Broderick, the dean of Detroit newsmen, would present a weekly segment on narcotics abuse on the 6:00 and 11:00
P.M
. news reports beginning next Monday.

“There’s a chance of syndication and maybe even a network spot if it clicks,” he explained. “Police officers love to hear themselves talk. If it gets out my own son is humping a junkie—if that’s what she is—and possibly dropping the stuff himself, they’ll hear the laughter back in Sacramento. If he ODs and pops up at the morgue I’ll be lucky to land a spot on an afternoon bowling show.”

“Ungrateful little bastard.”

His fingers hesitated in the midst of refolding the release, then resumed. He put it away. “My son was fourteen last time I saw him. He was into bugs and baseball. I have no idea what sort of man he’s become. Naturally I’m concerned about him”—his voice dropped three octaves—“but you can’t expect that concern to be as great as if I had raised him all these years. Instead, I’ve been building a career. I won’t let Sharon take that away from me like she did Bud.”

“Is Bud his real first name?”

He nodded. “And he hung on to Broderick, in spite of Esterhazy’s attempts to adopt him. He’s named after my late father.”

“That explains why he named you Sandy.” I tapped my pencil on my knee. “If I find him, what do you want me to do? He’s an adult. If I bring him to you kicking I’m a kidnaper, and to be square there’s a substantial list of things I’d rather do than try wrestling a healthy twenty-year-old back to Daddy. That job’s for the fellows in uniform and they have nothing to fear from me.”

“I’m not asking for that. I don’t want that. I wouldn’t know what to do with him if you did. I just want to know where he is so I can get in touch with him.” He uncapped a fat green fountain pen, scribbled a telephone number on the top sheet of a pad on the desk, tore it off, and gave it to me. “That’s my home number. It’s unlisted. When you find him, call. Maybe his father can talk some sense into him. It’s clear his mother can’t.”

“It’s your money,” I said, tucking the scrap inside my pad. “Speaking of which.”

He produced a flat wallet and counted out ten hundreds. “Is a thousand dollars an adequate retainer?”

I allowed as it was and scooped the crisp new bills into my own tired wallet like a shoplifter cleaning out a jewelry display. “I need more on Bud. Skills, hobbies, personality, friends. And a recent picture if you’ve got one.”

“You’ll have to get all that from Sharon. He’s a stranger to me, as I said.” He gave me her telephone number and address in Grosse Pointe. I took it down. He rose. “Report when you have something. Not here, if you can avoid it. I wouldn’t have met you here if this weren’t urgent and I could have been home last night. The studio brass threw a party to welcome me to the station.”

“I thought your eyes looked bloodshot.” I stood and grasped his proffered hand.

He smiled for the first time since I met him. “As the Indian said to the cowboy, ‘You should see them from this side.’ Bring me good news.”

Blonde Marlene was brushing correction fluid onto a sheet in her IBM machine when I hit the reception room outside. I got out a cigarette and tapped it against the back of my hand. “He’s all yours.”

“Not yet, but he will be,” she said, and flashed white teeth between glossed lips. We wished each other merry Christmas. She had a nice smile. It was a shame about the haircut and the gunk on her eyelids.

In the parking lot the rain had turned to sleet. Tiny icicles shattered against my face and crackled like frying bacon when they struck asphalt. A fat bald guy in a trenchcoat with vice president stamped all over his rosy features was giving my car the evil eye in the space with someone’s name on it. He had the lot guard with him. I walked past them trailing smoke and unlocked the door on the driver’s side. Fatso waddled forward.

“I just wanted to meet the reason I had to park half a mile down the pike.” His voice squeaked when he raised it. “I was about to have you towed away. Can’t you read? This is my space.”

“Not anymore it isn’t,” I said, starting the motor. “Watch those long lunches next job.”

His face looked a little gray in the rearview mirror as I was leaving. Not the guard’s, though. I hadn’t seen a grin that broad since the last time I paid my bar tab.

I ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of water in a diner on Evergreen and had them half consumed before I remembered that I could afford better. So I gave the guy behind the counter a five-spot and told him to keep the change. He made me stay while he counted the whiskers in Lincoln’s beard. When he was finished I asked for change and decided not to eat there again soon.

Sleet rattled against the diner’s front window like skeletal fingers. I dropped two dimes into a pay telephone near the door and pecked out Sharon Esterhazy’s number. She answered after one ring. Her speech had a thin, wound-up quality, like an excited Chihuahua or a Ronstadt album played at 75 RPM. At first she thought I was Bud calling to tell her where he was. I disappointed her as gently as possible and arranged a 3:00 p.m. meeting at her house. When I asked if her stepdaughter would be there too, she said, “Who knows?” laughed a little too gaily, and clicked off.

Pronging the receiver, I had a flash of that black feeling you get when you’ve just started reading a book and you realize you’re going to hate it. But the feeling passed quickly and I blamed it on the rotten weather. Premonitions are like horoscopes. If you take them too seriously you wind up doing nothing. I headed for my bank.

T
HE HOUSE WAS
a brick colonial around the corner from Grosse Pointe’s brisk downtown section, two stories high with white-shuttered windows, scrolls on the columns, and a widow’s walk from where you might see water if you stood on tiptoe and used your imagination. The lawn was big enough for softball, but right now there was a puddle in the middle wide enough to turn a cabin cruiser around in, proving that even the rich suffer during the winter; it was just a question of degrees. I parked in front of a garage that had been a carriage house in gentler times, checked my rubbers for cow flop, and went up and rang the doorbell. It made a noise like coins spilling. It would.

“Something I can do for you, brown eyes?”

If she was less than six feet tall, I had shrunk. Our eyes were almost level—hers were gray, like raw silver—and when I managed to glance down I saw that she was wearing loafers, not high heels. She was also wearing slacks and a matching top of some clinging, glittery green material that the tailor had run out of at mid-calf and forearm. They call them lounging pajamas. I call them trouble, especially with her inside of them at this time of day. Her hair was full, waist-length, and very red. It looked natural, but I’m no Sassoon. Her lips were painted crimson to match the long nails she had curled around the edge of the door. She had pale skin. She wouldn’t see much sun dressed like that. She was halfway through her twenties.

“Christmas shopping?” Her tone knew me.

“Why did I know you’d say that?” I asked. “You’d be Fern. You look like an exotic plant.”

“We both feed on decay. You’re the sleuth who called Sharon about Bud.”

I grinned. “It’s the gum soles, right?”

“It’s the gum soles, wrong. I’ve hired enough P.I.’s to be able to identify the animal. You don’t enter a room till you’ve appraised all the furniture and found the laundry mark on the drapes. Sharon’s busy making herself presentable. You may as well come in; you’re in for a long wait.”

“Meow.”

We went into a living room with beige silk on the walls, some chairs and a sofa upholstered in brown leather, and a baby grand piano that was there just to hold up an African violet in a steel pot. Other potted plants stood along the base of the rear wall, which was all window looking out on a young maple with a wire fence around it, and beyond it the other houses in the neighborhood. The furniture was good for ten grand, by the way, and the drapes were cleaned at a place called Frawley’s on Kercheval.

“You’d get catty too, after you lived with the queen as long as I have,” said Fern, hanging my coat and hat in a closet the size of my kitchen.

I left my rubbers in a puddle on the hall floor. “Why not move out?”

“What’ll I pay the rent with, my good looks?”

“It’s been done. I was thinking more along the lines of a job. You look healthy.”

“And blow my amateur standing? No thanks. I’ll take my chances with Nefertiti, there, at least until I find my next husband. Are you interested?”

“What’s in it for me?” I sank into one of the leather armchairs.

She looked at me, sizing up the goods, then folded herself across one padded arm and planted a lingering one on my mouth. She smelled of the usual cosmetics and that scent the female of the species exudes when she’s in season. When it was over she straightened, hoisted a bucketful of hair back over one shoulder, and waited.

“Yeah,” I said. “But I bet you can’t bake.”

She made a hoarse noise that might have been laughter and offered me a cigarette from a carved box on the glass-topped coffee table. I held up one of my own. She selected one for herself, removed an Aqua-filter from a package on the table, and coupled them. Everybody’s trying to quit but me. She used a silver table lighter to start both of ours and went over and sat down on the sofa. She moved her legs around a good deal getting comfortable. They gleamed like stretched satin below the pajama cuffs.