“You’re a liar,” he said in a friendly tone.
I moved a shoulder. “I didn’t care for it myself.”
“I won’t say it’s none of my business. I’ve made a business out of things that are none of my business.”
“Maybe I think a man should be able to quit his job when he wants to without getting killed for how well he did it. Or maybe it’s because of Gail Hope.”
“She has nothing to do with this. She was just handy.”
“Maybe she’s tired of being handy.”
He smiled after a second. It transformed his face not at all. “Better. I suppose I am her last link to the Company. Whoever they send to replace me won’t remember the Lucy case. She’s one washed-up movie queen who might not mind being forgotten.”
I waited while he went back into the private office and came out carrying his topcoat. He saw I was waiting. “Say it.”
“I can be suckered,” I said. “I bat five hundred in that park. That doesn’t mean I like it. The next time you turn your dogs loose on me I’ll hurt one of them or both of them. You I won’t fool around with. You I’ll kill.”
“It’s been tried.”
“It only has to work once.” I opened the hallway door. “Be packed when I call. We may have to move fast.”
He went out, letting me have the last word again. It made me feel cheap, but only for as long as it would take him to reach the second flight of stairs. Then I went out after him.
O
NE OF THE ADVANTAGES
of following someone in your own building is knowing which boards squeak and which steps wobble because the super hasn’t held a hammer since Eisenhower. I avoided all of them and reached the foyer just as the front door was closing against the pressure of the pneumatic tube.
He had the tan coat on now and was walking east on Grand River, not hurrying but not wasting time either. His walk was as indistinctive as the rest of him. He was better than invisible, he was wholly unnoticeable. If his clothes had been any neater he’d have stood out; if his appearance had been any more drab he’d have called attention to himself. I wondered if he spent an hour in front of the mirror every morning, searching his person for anything that looked as if it hadn’t been milled in a factory before he went out, or if the camouflage came so naturally now he never even thought about it. Wondering that, I almost lost him. He blended into the unremarkable scenery of the neighborhood like a paper clip.
I spotted him again as he stepped off the sidewalk. He looked both ways while I made myself insignificant — although not as much so as he — in a doorway, then crossed the street, unlocked the driver’s door of a dust-blue Chrysler parked on the other side and got in. I stayed in the doorway and took down the license number as he levered the car out into traffic. It didn’t spell anything.
Back in the office I parked a hip on the desk and called Floyd Latimore at the local branch of the Secretary of State’s office. A catatonic civil servant of uncertain gender put me on hold and Floyd’s late-adolescent voice came on a minute later. He’d celebrated his fifty-second birthday in July. “Amos, you find an honest line of work yet?”
“I had my eye on a TV pastorship,” I said, “but that went sour. I need a name to go with a number on a license plate.”
“Call the cops.”
“It isn’t police business yet.”
“Lansing gets awful sore when we give that information out to the private sector.”
“I didn’t call Lansing, Floyd, I called you. Do I have to go into why?”
“Don’t be shrill. Let’s have the number.”
I read it to him. Floyd had come to me some time back with a note from a first wife he had not quite managed to divorce before he married his second, demanding money to prevent her from charging him with desertion and bigamy. I’d done a little digging and turned up a husband the first wife had misplaced, still waiting for her to return from her hairdresser’s since before she’d met Floyd. I sent a photocopy of the marriage certificate to the return address on the blackmail letter and Floyd never heard back from her. It was a break for us both: now that John Alderdyce was an inspector he didn’t hardly associate with no rental heat, and I needed a pipeline to the computers that matched names to license plate numbers.
“Twenty minutes,” Floyd said, after he’d read it back to me.
“Why so long?”
“Machines go to lunch too. I’ll call you.”
I thanked him and went down the street for a BLT and advice from my waitress, a former nurse, on the care and feeding of the human heart. The telephone was ringing when I let myself back into the brain box.
“Magoo, you need glasses,” said Floyd without greeting. “You wrote down the number wrong.”
“Who’s it belong to, the governor?”
“It belongs to Yehudi. No such plate has ever been issued to any car registered in this state. You sure it was Michigan?”
“Yeah.” A cheek got sucked on. “What would it take for someone to get hold of a nonexistent registration number?”
“Outside of stamping the plate himself, I couldn’t say. For that he’d need the equipment and reflecting paint, and the paint’s just a little easier to lay hands on than the ink they use to print currency in Denver. Oh, but then any cop who happened to run the number would pull him over once he drew a blank. The guy’s better off standing in line with the rest of us suckers and paying the two dollars.”
“Do the cops use your computer?”
“Not directly. The city and county computers are plugged into the state police and
their
computer’s wired to the Secretary of State’s office in Lansing.”
“What if there’s a hold order in the state police computer when certain registration numbers are fed to it? The cop runs the plate, the dispatcher gets the word and tells him to pass this one by?”
“Who are we talking about, the Swiss ambassador?”
“Just spitballing, Floyd. I probably got the number wrong.” I lit a cigarette. “How are things at home?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m living at the Holiday Inn in East Detroit.”
“What happened?”
“Arlene found out about Robin.”
“I thought your first wife’s name was Lois.”
“Far as I know it still is. Robin is the woman I’m engaged to.”
I blew smoke over the Little Big Horn. “Floyd, there’s an order to these things. Unless Arlene has another husband stashed somewhere like Lois did, you’re headed down a long dark hole.”
“Oh, I’m divorcing Arlene. She just didn’t know it until recently.” The line clicked twice; he had another call on his end. “Don’t screw up next time, okay? I’d hate to lose this job over a wrong number.”
We hung up. I finished my cigarette in thoughtful silence, or in silence anyway. Floyd’s private life was worse than Omaha Beach, but he didn’t make mistakes on the job. And I hadn’t gotten a license number wrong since George Burns was in short pants. Bill Sahara, whoever he was, drove around with a plate that was as untraceable as his name and description. That at least was a grain on his side of the scales. The first part of any investigation is spent separating the slugs from the genuine coin, and so far this one rang true enough to proceed to the second part.
Private eye evolution ought to include a leather behind and document-dust filters in the nostrils. Not possessing those improvements, I squirmed and sneezed away an hour in my second home, the third seat from the door of the microfilm room at the library, scrolling through the obituaries from the
News, Times,
and
Free Press
from 1948. The choice of years was a little better than a crapshoot. Sahara had mentioned being in college twenty years ago, and the average age of a graduating senior then as now would be twenty-two. In any case I wasn’t estimating aircraft measurements for Boeing.
The
Times
had what I was after, in its Tuesday, July 6 edition:
Benjamin Boyer,
aged 2 mos., 11 days: Born April 24, 1948, to Julius Glynn Boyer and Marian Bernadette (Shepherd) Boyer of 1523 Woodrow Wilson Court; died Monday morning at home of respiratory failure. Survivors, in addition to his parents . . .
I took a moment to think about Julius and Marian: placing the notice, picking out the little coffin, painting over the clowns on the nursery walls in silence. Maybe there weren’t any clowns. Maybe there wasn’t a nursery. Maybe Julius and Marian had never wanted a child in the first place and took off for Europe to celebrate. Maybe I ought to lay off the private emotions of others, at least until I finished robbing the grave. I wrote down what I needed and went from there to the City-County Building, where I asked a clerk in Records with a Knights Templar pin on his lapel to look up the 1948 birth certificate of one Benjamin Boyer. He made a nasty face and told me to come back tomorrow. I offered him the Masonic handshake. He took it after a second and asked me to wait. The handshake was all I’d gotten in payment from a Manufacturers Bank vice president for pulling his sixteen-year-old daughter out from under a bass guitarist in Grand Ledge; this was the first time it had bought me anything, but then the daughter had run away again anyway after two weeks and I’d told the vice president to find another sleuth. I read a poster warning me to stay away from Laetrile and when the clerk came back with the certificate I paid him a fee to make two copies on official stock. I got out of there at the price of another handshake.
In my office again I broke a blank application form out of the file cabinet, filled it out, and stuck it and one of the copies in an envelope, which I stamped and addressed to the Social Security Administration in Washington. I filed the other copy and went down and slotted the envelope into the mailbox on the corner. In ten days to two weeks I’d have a Social Security card in Ben Boyer’s name, which would get Sahara work anywhere. I didn’t think Ben would mind.
I’d earned a drink, but I had a sudden thought. I went back upstairs, took the other copy of the birth certificate out of the files, looked around the office tapping the edge of the folded paper against my teeth, and stood on my chair to poke it into the glass bowl of the ceiling fixture. The rectangular outline showed through the milky glass when I turned on the light, but not obviously; the building cleaning service never dusted above eye level. I locked up and went out.
Later I congratulated myself, but at the time it was just routine paranoia.
I
WAS BUSY FOR
the next few days. First I paid a visit to a camera shop I knew on Chalmers, where for fifty dollars the owner went into his back room and drew up a temporary driver’s license and stamped out a Visa card, both in the name of Benjamin Boyer. With them I opened charge accounts in three department stores with branches across the country, then burned them in my waste-basket; phony IDs are time bombs, and Sahara would have the genuine articles soon enough. Then I drove out to Ann Arbor, asked some questions around the University of Michigan campus, and made certain arrangements with an attendant in the medical school there. That cost two hundred dollars. Finally I paid a call on Albert Schindler in his East Side garage.
I found him relaxing for once, drinking a Coke in his neat little office with the gray steel desk and the boxes of new spark plugs and headlamps and seat covers arranged alphabetically on shelves. He had the head of a poster boy for the SS — clean fair profile and curly blond hair — and the body of a Morlock.
I had never seen him in anything but coveralls and suspected he had given up trying to find clothes to fit his apelike arms and torso and stunted legs. His left foot, resting on an outdrawn desk leaf, turned inward forty-five degrees, a congenital defect that didn’t slow him down any more than an ingrown toenail. He was almost sixty and looked barely thirty. An old-fashioned Zenith radio with a gaudy dial was playing chamber music on the desk.
“Walker.” He kept his seat. “Did that rolli1ng boiler blow up on you finally?”
“You’re just sore because I didn’t buy it from you.” I sat down in a clean plastic scoop chair and swung a leg over my knee. Everything was clean in the garage. You could eat off the floor under the hoists if you didn’t mind getting yelled at for not using a placemat. “As a matter of fact, I need a car, but it isn’t for me.”
“I’m a mechanic, not a dealer. You passed six of them on your way here.”
“They want paperwork. All I want is a clear title.”
“Oh. That kind of car.”
“Something old, but in good shape. It doesn’t have to look like much, but I don’t want it getting pulled off the road as a rolling disaster area. It should perform without calling attention to itself.”
“Plate?”
“Dealer’s temp will do. It’s just to get someone out of the area.”
“Price range?”
I gave him five bills. The Sahara money was getting low. “That’s to get you started. I’ll settle up when you hand me the keys.”
“What’s the name on the title?”
“Benjamin Boyer.” I spelled it.
“I’ll call you.”
I left him, a real treasure. He knew more about automobiles than Henry Ford and had a son who was always in trouble.
I used the pay telephone in the garage to check my answering service. The post office had called to say that an express package was waiting for me at the Fort Street branch.
I parked in a slot for postal vehicles only and went in after it. It had no return address. Back in my car I opened the red, white, and blue container and drew out a manila envelope with something inside it the size and shape of a photo album. I peeled up the flap and slid a gray cardboard file folder into my lap. The tab read WALKER, AMOS in neatly printed block capitals.
I didn’t open it there. I drove back to the office and locked myself in and poured Scotch into a pony glass from my private desk stock and stretched out on the old backless sofa with the reading lamp on.
Some of it had been typed on cheap drugstore stock. Other information had been printed out on green-and-white computer paper in foggy dot-matrix. There were old newspaper clippings in which someone had highlighted my name with a yellow felt-tipped marker. There were medical reports. There were canceled checks with my endorsement on the backs. There weren’t many of those. There was a copy of my first application for an investigator’s license, which belonged in the Smithsonian. There were photographs and negatives. These included a couple of headshots from old licenses, a candid in a crowd of cops I recognized from the
Free Press
at the time of the Alonzo Smith shooting, several I had never seen that looked as if they had been taken with a long lens from a distance, a couple I had obviously posed for but didn’t remember. Here I am at my wedding. Here I am in my specialist’s uniform. Here I am in front and profile at the jail in Iroquois Heights, looking like Jimmie Jones after the lemonade.