“I don’t like poison,” Trilby said. “I don’t like it because I don’t come across it. I’m used to punks plugging each other over a noseful of crack, a wife slipping her old man the butcher knife when he’s hitting her with the rest of the kitchen. Most of the time the perp’s still standing there holding the weapon when the uniforms come. Poison’s for dowagers who go to garden parties to gossip about the vicar.” He looked at his notebook one more time, shook his short-cropped head, and flipped down the cover. “No, I don’t like poison.”
Nothing there had my name on it, so I let it go. He put away the notebook and glanced at my suit, in a way that made his interest look no more than curious. No conflict there: Together we wouldn’t dress out to three hundred dollars. His was a three-button Ivy Leaguer that had seen better days and would probably see a lot worse before he got rid of it, under a cream-colored car coat with a pile collar. He looked like a diffident fraternity brat, carefully mussed. “What were you doing in the Club Canaveral?”
“Meeting a woman.”
“Named?”
“You wouldn’t know her.”
“It’s going to be like that, is it?”
“It doesn’t have to be,” I said. “She’s got nothing to do with this. It was just an accident Pingree and I met.”
“I don’t like accidents much more than I like poison. Whenever something new comes into a man’s life — you, in this case — and the man winds up not having that life soon after, I have to jump on the something new. There’s nothing personal in it; I’ve got a friend on the department who moonlights as a private investigator and I let him in my front door and everything. It’s just a question of averages.” He changed tack again. “That was a good call on the cyanide. It’ll be even better if the coroner says that’s what did it. How come you know so much about it?”
“I went to detective class.”
He was silent for a moment. “I don’t need a citizen soldier from Detroit coming up here telling me I’m stupid, but I can live with it. What I can’t live with is one coming up here
thinking
I’m stupid.”
“You’re right. Sorry, Sergeant.” I shook a quarter-inch of Winston out of a new pack and offered it to him. He turned it down. I pulled it the rest of the way out with my lips and lit it. I stepped on the match. “Kissing a corpse isn’t the way I like to start most days. Besides, I kind of liked the little guy. He was like a clumsy puppy you want to pick up and take home before he gets gassed.”
“What I’m having trouble buying is that a P.I.,
any
P.I., would just up and offer to go partners on fifteen minutes’ acquaintance.”
“Pingree wasn’t any P.I. He was as new as a baby tooth and didn’t know the business from the leading brand. You saw the books in his desk drawer. He thought it was all blondes and midnight meetings on the riverfront and when he found out it wasn’t, he got confused. When I came along he snatched at me like a piece of driftwood. I imagine he was looking for pointers.”
“And you just ate it up.”
“I don’t get asked for advice that often. Besides —”
“You liked the little guy. Okay, Walker.” He opened the door and held it. “Stick around the area in case we need a statement.” When I started to go through, he touched my arm, not threateningly. “This isn’t Detroit. We haven’t gotten around to considering murder a natural cause. If we don’t turn something in seventy-two hours we go back to the starting line. You’ll be doing yourself a favor if we don’t have to come looking for you then. I’m not nearly as nice as I seem the first time you meet me. Ask my brother-in-law.”
“That’s clear enough,” I said.
“I’m glad. Everyone likes to be understood.”
There was a bar around the corner, a little black cavity of a place with four stools at the bar and a row of booths in back. The bartender was young and fair, with a sprouting of reddish moustache. Everybody I met lately was young. I wondered if there had been a coup while I was busy rocking and thinking about my shuffleboard game. I ordered bourbon straight up.
He set it and a paper napkin in front of me. “Nothing like that first shot to jump-start your heart in the morning,” he said. “You look like your battery’s low.”
“When I want a shrink I’ll go the yard an hour. I came in here for sunshine in a glass.”
“Excuse me, Pete. I’m just the help. The observations are free. Sunshine’s a buck seventy-five.”
I grunted, put down two singles, took my change, and went over to the pay telephone at the end of the bar. I dialed my answering service.
“A woman called twice, Mr. Walker. She said her name was Catherine. She sounded upset.”
“You’d be too if somebody left you in a toilet.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Just saying something cryptic under my breath so I’ll sound wise and weary. Anybody else?”
She said no. Well, Sahara preferred to make his visits in person. I hung up, forgetting to thank her, and returned to my stool. The whiskey tasted better than expected, better than I wanted it to at that hour. I looked at my watch to see what hour it was. Eleven thirty-eight. Pingree had a lunch date at 12:30. “Ever hear of a restaurant called the Black Bull?” I asked the bartender.
“Now I’m the auto club.”
“Direct hit.” I nodded. “So far the day’s a stinkeroo and I don’t have a wife or a clog. Maybe you’ve had days like that.”
He slapped his rag at the beer pulls. “Maybe I have.”
“I’ll start fresh if you will.”
He put away the rag, touched his moustache. “It’s a steak place down on Eight Mile, the Detroit side I think. I hear they serve a mean prime rib.”
“You don’t know?”
“I’m a vegetarian.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Would I kid about a thing like that?”
“Hitler probably wouldn’t either. He was a vegetarian too.”
“Yeah? I wonder if it gave him gas like it does me. That could explain Poland.”
“What’s a youngster like you know about Hitler and Poland?”
“Plenty. My folks are from Warsaw.”
I appreciated that for a moment. “What do you know about a guy named Hazen S. Pingree?”
“He doesn’t sound Polish.”
“He wasn’t. A long time ago he planted potatoes to feed the poor. He ran for governor.”
“I bet he lost.”
“It was a gentler time,” I said. “People were more compassionate. He lost by a landslide.”
“Was he a vegetarian?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“Probably not.” He unbuttoned his cuffs and turned them back. The room was a little overheated, as bars are everywhere when it’s cold out. “I can’t help wondering how many of those spuds made it to the poor.”
I tipped him a buck and slid off the stool. “Buy yourself a rutabaga.”
“Anything wrong with the drink?” I hadn’t touched it after the first sip.
“Nothing. I wanted there to be, but there isn’t. That’s what’s wrong.”
“The Bull doesn’t open till noon,” he said. “Where you planning to wait?”
I pushed the door open two inches and stopped. A tall narrow wedge of clammy air touched me from hat to heels. “There’s got to be a Christian Science reading room somewhere in this town.”
“Lots of luck, pal.” He dumped my bourbon into the sink behind the bar and washed the glass.
W
HAT I DID WAS DRIVE.
When they were stumped in ancient Greece, they went to the oracle at Delphi. At Lourdes they take the waters, and I suppose in Akron they go down and watch the tires being made. In Detroit, where we put the world on wheels, or did anyway until the Japanese and the Yugoslavs and the Brits rolled in, when our brains slip into neutral we lay rubber on the road and hit the gas.
I had been driving my antebellum Mercury for several months, ever since my Chevy Cavalier had been shot to pieces, a hard thing to collect insurance on, especially when you leave it unlocked and unattended in the warehouse district after dark. The Merc was one of the old square four-barrel dinosaurs, slab-sided and bigger than Lake Superior, with an unslakable thirst for high-test leaded and 10-W-40. Driving the Chevy I hadn’t realized how much I missed carburetors, the dub-dub-dub of a big engine at idle or the feeling, when you press the pedal to the firewall, that you’ve left the chains of gravity behind and are shrieking into deep space. I took Gratiot clear down to McNichols and McNichols to Outer Drive, the old Detroit city limits before the developers acquired their bottomless hunger for parks and farmland and began a fifteen-mile-wide crawl northward, devouring trees and grass as they went and dropping concrete and asphalt behind them like manure. I passed subdivisions and 7-Elevens, HUD houses that had never been lived in and doorways that were, schools and factories and family practice clinics and the great expanse of Mt. Olivet Cemetery, yawning on both sides of the road and studded with granite angels and gunsight crosses and American Legion flags and family plots occupied by the aged dead and their seventeen-year-old grandchildren, shot down in the hallways and on the steps of local high schools by other seventeen-year-olds because somebody had refused to lend somebody else his notes from Social Sciences. I passed great olive UPS trucks and low slinky Firebirds, city blue-and-whites and rusty puckered heaps with their radios cranked up all the way, as if the cars ran purely on the brain-thudding banality of Rap. I nicked red lights and powered through amber. I was engaged in an eight-cylinder voyage in search of the golden fleece of logic.
The Herbert S. Pingrees of this world aren’t supposed to wind up murdered. They’re charted for public-school educations, two years of business college, marriage to a plump girl who in middle age will starve and exercise herself down to gristle, tint her hair the ubiquitous beige, and complain that they never go anywhere. The Herbert S. Pingrees of this world are down for three children, one of them a problem, early hair loss, office football pools, and retirement in a concrete bungalow in Florida where the kids never visit. When they die, it’s supposed to be from too many potato chips and Sunday roasts and beers with the Five O’Clock Club on the way home from work. Nobody is supposed to find them crumpled up with a bellyful of cyanide in a cardboard office in East Detroit between a rub-a-dub emporium and Lawyer Dan, the Ambulance Man. A Teflon drawer in the county deep freeze is no place for the Herbert S. Pingrees of this world.
Damn him anyway for snarling the statistics. I wasn’t in business to lie to the cops for Pingrees.
At Conant I turned around and drove back the way I’d come, faster this time. The lights were all going to have to be with me if I were to keep a date for a dead man. He’d screwed me up again, making me forget to check my watch.
The restaurant wasn’t hard to find for an experienced detective. It was a low sprawling red-brick building in the center of an asphalt parking lot with its name on a free-standing electric sign forty feet high and a black bull on its roof. A kid could have used the ring in its nose for a hula hoop.
Inside, the motif was country kitchen. The floor was laid in sheets of broad planking with imitation pegs, the tables looked like butcher blocks, and homely samplers lined the printed-paper walls. The waiters were all in their twenties and wore white aprons that covered them from neck to knees. Knives and forks clattered, people talked like dogs barking in a kennel. It was a popular place.
Edie was seated facing the door in a booth near the back. She wore a pink mock-turtleneck sweater and silver hoops in her ears, and her dark blond hair was pulled back and tied loosely behind her neck. The hair looked even better than in her photograph, waving naturally from a not-too-severe part in the center and gleaming softly and deeply, like cognac. She would wash it nightly in an herbal shampoo and stroke it one hundred times with a brush with natural bristles, applying the same kind of gratitude and awe that a poor man brings to his only valuable possession. As I approached the booth, she checked the time on a silver watch pinned above her left breast, made to look like a miniature grandfather’s clock complete with a pendulum that never moved; and I knew then with as much certainty as I knew anything that she still had the dollhouse her parents had given her for her eighth birthday, adding to it from time to time.
“Edith Hibbard?”
She looked up, startled. In person as in her picture, her blue eyes stood out a little, but they had a luminous effect, as in an Elizabethan painting. Her upper lip didn’t quite cover her prominent front teeth. “Yes?”
“I’m Amos Walker, a friend of Herb’s. He asked me to meet you. He’s going to be a little late.” I held out one of my cards.
She took it and read it. “He never mentioned you. Are you working together on something?”
“Sort of. May I sit down?”
“I guess so.” She laid the card facedown next to her silverware.
I pegged my coat and hat on a partition between booths and slid in opposite her. The dividers extended eight inches above the red vinyl upholstery, creating the illusion of private rooms.
She tried a smile that made me think of a pep rally. “Herbert never talks about his work. I think he thinks I don’t approve of it.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t really understand it. My father offered him a job in the cement plant he manages, a desk position, but he turned it down. Herbert says he wants to make his own way.”
“There’s something to be said for that.” It sounded like an epitaph.
“Maybe. If only he weren’t in that awful building.”
“He hasn’t been spending his allowance next door, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Next door? Oh.” She colored. You can’t fake that. She was younger than she looked in her picture, in her late twenties. For all that she didn’t seem as young as Pingree. Women straddle that line more often than men.
“That’s a nice desk set you bought Herb,” I said.
“Oh, did he tell you I gave it to him?”
“He didn’t get around to it. It looked like a woman’s taste.”
“Which is?”
“Better than mine.”
A waiter came. Edie asked for a glass of water. I ordered coffee. When we were alone again: “You said Herb never discusses his work. Does he keep records?”
“I don’t know. He has a desk at home he keeps locked. Why don’t you ask him?”