The Glass Highway (8 page)

“What are you, some kind of sex-changed Emily Post? Your job’s to keep this glass full. When I want your opinion on how a lady should act I’ll call you. Don’t break any dates to wait by the phone.”

The teenager touched his bow tie. “It’s not my rule, ma’am. Management says no unescorted ladies at the bar. I stuck my neck out serving you two here already. I’ve only had this job a week and a half. I’d sort of like to hang on to it till I see my first paycheck.”

“I know your boss, sonny.”

“Yes, ma’am. So do I. What he says is no unescorted ladies at the bar and no unescorted ladies at the bar is what he says.”

“She’s escorted,” I said, slipping onto the stool next to hers. “One more for the lady, and a glass of Scotch I can stand up in.”

The bartender’s face wore a thin sheet of suspicion. He had a coppery sprouting on his long upper lip that looked as if it had taken a month to show. He said, “You know her from somewhere, or this a pickup?”

Meaning was she wildcatting without kicking in to the house. I turned to her. “You left the cap off the toothpaste tube this morning.”

She beckoned the bartender closer with her index finger. When he leaned his ear down: “Call a cop. I don’t know this guy from Billy Graham’s chauffeur.”

Still hunched, he slid hostile eyes in my direction. Then they slid back to her face and he straightened. “Sure, green the help. I’m just trying to eat like everyone else.” He moved off to fix the drinks.

“Class bars, phooey. Give me a dive down on Mt. Elliott anytime.” She got out a cigarette and tapped it noisily atop the bar while she hunted in her purse for an Aqua-filter. Then she gave up and speared the weed between her lips cold.

I lit it and one for myself. “You’ve never been any closer to a Mt. Elliott dive than the Renaissance Club. I’m on to your act, remember?”

“You and everyone else. They all think I’m too good for me.” She squirted smoke at the ceiling and looked at me. She had glitter-dust on her long eyelashes. Her thick red hair hung down her bare back to the stool. “Sorry I left you hanging before. I’m sensitive about my height.”

The bartender brought our glasses and picked up the money I’d left him on the bar, made change from the cash register. I accepted it and stared at him until he moved down to the other end.

“Heard from Bud lately?” I asked Fern.

“He came by last night to drop off Christmas presents for the family .Sharon asked him to stay but he said he had to get back. He’s still living with Paula. How’d you find out where she lives?”

“I beat up a guy.”

She almost choked on her drink. She set it down and dabbed at the front of her dress with her droll cocktail napkin and killed the cigarette I’d just lit for her in a black ashtray mounded over with them on the bar. They all wore traces of her red lipstick. “We’re a good match,” she said, squashing out the butt. “We like to pretend we’re hard. We’re as hard as a couple of toasted marshmallows.”

“Philosophy yet,” I said. “Ain’t we hell.”

She turned right around and took another one out of her pack. I let her fire this one up herself with a slim gold lighter from her purse. I had a hard enough time keeping up with my own bad habits. “I hate this season,” she said.

“So do I. Drink up and let’s go caroling.”

“They start hyping it around Halloween and don’t let up until it’s time to start getting ready for the George Washington’s Birthday sales. The air conditioners are still running in the stores while they’re piping in ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nose Reindeer.’”

“Cute tune.”

“I bet all the bars in all the cities in the whole Christian world are jammed tonight.” She ran a scarlet-nailed finger around the inside of her glass and tasted it. “Chock full of toasted marshmallows like us busting their asses to make themselves merry. The hell with all of us. You can take all the mistletoe and all the trees and bright ribbons and shiny paper and cut rate Santas and canned sleighbells and Perry Comos and sink them in the Detroit River with a rock. The last thing we need is a whole season just to remind us how alone we are.”

“You’re right. Let’s get married and be alone together.”

She smiled archly at our reflections in the mirror behind the bar. “You better watch it, brown eyes. I got rice in my bloodstream.”

“We’d last about a week.” I put down what was in my glass and whistled through my teeth at the bartender. It irritated the hell out of him, which pleased Fern. “But it would be an interesting week.”

“It couldn’t be any worse than the two tries I made. But I shouldn’t fault them. I’m still collecting reparations from one husband.”

“What about the other?”

“He’s in Jackson. We were together six weeks when he got himself busted for stealing a car. It wasn’t his first beef and he’s doing three to five.”

The bartender wet my glass. I paid him and he turned his back on us and went over to listen in on a conversation between two basketball fans three stools down. The good news from the bandstand was the pianist had finished his solo. The bad news was the horn player had started his. Fern watched me out the corner of her eye.

“I’ve moved out of the house,” she said.

“Oh?”

“I’ve got an apartment off East Jeff, a little place. Four rooms, one and a half baths, and something called a kitchenette, but you wouldn’t want to try to cook two eggs in it at the same time.”

“Little place,” I echoed. “What’s Ford Auditorium, an efficiency apartment?”

“The husband I’m getting alimony from is on the board at GM. When he gets a raise, I get a raise.”

“You said something about starving if you left home.”

“I lied. Fact is I was too lazy to make the move. But there’s no living with Sharon since she started blaming me for bringing Bud and Paula together.”

I drained my glass. “Let’s ditch the small talk and go straight to the seduction. My place or yours?”

She hesitated, then: “For shame. ERA and all. A woman’s supposed to be able to call a man these days without him thinking she’s on the make. Don’t you ever watch TV?”

“Only when Sandy Broderick’s on.”

“That eunuch.” She drank.

I wrinkled my brow. “Him too? You must have finished with the A’s already.”

“Says you. I was being the proper little hostess that day Sharon told him about Bud. He acted like I had rabies. I think he’s afraid of sex.”

“Who isn’t?” I reached across her to grind out my stub. Something stroked the inside of my thigh lightly. When I glanced down, her hand was back in her own lap. She was toasting herself in the mirror.

The trio was jamming now, sleepwalking through something that sounded like “Lullaby of Birdland” if you closed your eyes, but only if you closed your ears too. Fern said, “I’m sick of this dump. Did you bring your car?”

“I think I left it in the parking lot.”

She topped off the pile in the ashtray and picked up her purse. “Let’s go riding somewhere.”

“Somewhere like East Jeff?”

She grinned and got up, swaying a little, not too much.

I
 HELPED HER
into a fur coat that would have kept me in gas and oil for a year and we left. Leaning on my arm, she slouched a bit to appear shorter than I in her two-inch heels. She was leaning a little too heavily for anyone within a yard of sober. There wasn’t room for her between my lap and the steering wheel, so she just huddled close and rested her head on my shoulder. Female musk filled the car. I tooled north on Livernois and swung east onto Vernor, hydroplaning a little on the water standing on the pavement. Without a buzz on I’d probably have lost it right there. The rain had paused for breath, and in the glow of my headlamps the street shone as smooth and treacherous as a glass highway.

“Nice muscles.” She was stroking my right arm. “How is it someone who pumps as much smoke and anesthetic into his system as you do feels like the Mighty Thor?”

“I get out and throw the hammer around every Ragnarok.”

“You’re full of surprises. Maybe we really should get married.”

“Once did it for me. It’s not at all like peanuts.” I got my arm loose and turned on the heater. The fan pushed refrigerator air at my feet. New cars.

“Who killed Johnny Ralph Dorchet?” I asked, after we had gone a couple of blocks in silence.

“I thought it was Cock Robin.” She stirred a little at my side. Her tone was sleepy.

“I figured maybe you’d heard something. It couldn’t have been the local crowd. They’d have replaced him with someone who could handle Dorchet’s racket without having to be told when to go to the bathroom and what to do when he got there. Anyone but Moses True.”

She sat up, looking at me. Her face was taut in the light of a passing bar sign. “You are full of surprises.”

“I thought you’d know True.”

“Only by reputation. All bad. Why should I pay for pills when I get them free at parties?”

“Sometimes you might need a little something to get you from one to the next. I don’t guess it’s a disgrace anymore in your neighborhood. Maybe it never was. The air up there’s too rare for a lug like me.”

“You’re a reverse snob, you know it?”

“I’m a dark-eyed Adonis who snaps women’s hearts like breadsticks. Who killed Johnny Ralph?”

“I’d have to know he lived in the first place. I seem to have gotten along for twenty-six years not knowing.” She slid low in the seat, resting the back of her head on top of it. It didn’t make her look the least bit petite. “Was he a friend of yours?”

“I only know him by reputation,” I said. “All bad.”

“Then what’s it to you who showed him the door?”

“I think Paula Royce knows. She isn’t saying.”

“Same question. Her account’s paid, I heard. As far as you’re concerned, anyway.”

“Yeah.” I whumped through an axle-deep puddle, spraying wings of muddy water up past the windows. The wipers came up once, shrugged some stray drops off the windshield, and went back to bed.

“I’ll be damned,” she said. “She did it again.”

Her voice sounded strained. I looked at her, but I couldn’t see her face for shadows. “I didn’t know she did it before. Did what?”

“Did you just like she did Bud. How’s she do it without apples?”

“You’re snockered.”

“And right. And sick. Stop the car.”

I glanced at her again, then leaned into the curb, braked, and snapped on the dome light. Her face was gray-white and she was shivering. The rouge on her cheeks stood out like red wax.

“What were you drinking?” I asked.

“Gin and tonic.” She smiled weakly. “Must’ve been the tonic.”

“Can you hold out till your place?”

“I don’t think so.” The words came out in a string. She clawed open the door on the passenger’s side.

I watched my reflection in the windshield, tinted green from the reflected dash light, and drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. I was spending a good deal of time lately listening to people throw up. The pay was lousy, but you couldn’t beat the glamour.

She sagged back against the seat, breathing heavily. I gave her my handkerchief. She pressed it against her mouth and closed her eyes. The door on her side drifted almost shut. I reached across her lap and jerked it the rest of the way. “Going to live?”

She nodded with her eyes closed. “With my luck.” It came from just in back of her tongue.

We resumed rolling. “Three drinks don’t usually come down so heavy on you hardboiled types,” I said. “That pill-and-alcohol combination’s dynamite. It’ll land you in a box one of these nights.”

“I told you I only drop them at parties. I drank too fast, that’s all.” Her breath was coming more easily now. She tried to give me back my handkerchief. I told her to keep it.

The rain started up again, drumming the roof and stitching up the puddles standing in the street. Then it was over. I took the Edsel Ford to East Jefferson and turned down a private road lined with large brick houses, finally screwing the Olds into a space behind the one Fern pointed out. The lights of Windsor showed across the oily black surface of St. Clair. I unlocked the front door with her key and helped her, still wobbling on her stilts, up a broad staircase to the second floor. I used another key, found the wall switch, and stepped inside with her hanging on to my arm.

The living room was fifteen feet by ten with a brown-and-beige Oriental rug under a couple of modular sofas, a dark walnut table with curved legs and gold inlays all around the top, and a stereo console with a color TV screen hidden behind doors like a chamber pot. A casement window at the far end opened onto a wrought-iron balcony. A door to the left led into a room that was probably a study when it wasn’t full of stacked cardboard cartons, and a hallway to the right gave access to two bedrooms and the aforementioned one and a half baths. Something that might have been called a kitchenette, containing the usual round of built-in cupboards and appliances and a square of red linoleum large enough for one person to stand on, jogged left just ahead of the balcony window. Light found its way in somehow through frosted panels in the ceilings. The apartment took up the whole floor.

When I finished the grand tour, I found Fern curled up at the end of one of the sofas. She had flung both her shoes in the general direction of the window. One of the straps that held up her gown had fallen down over a white shoulder from something less than neglect.

“Sorry I can’t offer you coffee or anything corny like that,” she said dreamily. “I’m still unpacking. There’s a bottle of something in the kitchen cupboard, though, and glasses.”

“We’ve both gone the distance with stuff that comes in bottles tonight.” I dragged smoke down into my lungs. “You look a little green to me yet.”

“I’m all right. Why don’t you sit down over here?”

“Thanks, I’ve been sitting all night.”

The raw silver in her eyes took on a hard glitter. “I guess my losing my lunch killed the mood. I do lots worse things. What do you want, Evening in Paris and candles?”

I took the Winston out of my mouth and looked at the end. “It doesn’t happen very often,” I said, “but every now and then in my work, someone gives me a horse I just have to peek at its teeth. Odd considering my virile good looks and gorgeous build, but I still haven’t come around to thinking of myself as the type a rich and attractive single lady would call up on Christmas Eve because she can’t find a man to stack up against me. I ask myself, am I worth six hundred bucks in dress and two hours at the grooming station, and I have to answer no. Then I have to ask why me.”