I STEPPED INSIDE. There seemed to be an invitation in what she’d said about Michael. It was a fairly large apartment with a hallway leading to other rooms farther back and a sliding glass door opening onto a balcony overlooking the courtyard that told me I’d been right about the pool if there had ever been one. The place was halfway clean. It would always be halfway clean while she was living in it. The rug had been vacuumed within memory, but feathers of dust clung like frightened children to the legs of the table. There were stacks of magazines and old newspapers solid enough to sit on in the corners. Shirts and dresses and slips were flung over the arms of the chairs and sofa. Dust made little hammocks in the corners of framed pictures of sailboats and windmills on walls that were scrubbed sometimes but not as often as the rug was vacuumed. The sliding glass door was streaked enough not to need a brightly painted butterfly stuck to it at eye level, but it had one. The butterfly looked as if it would rather be out pollinating flowers the gardener hadn’t poisoned yet. I knew how it felt.
I had spent a lot of time in private residences in this case. I was starting to feel like an insurance agent. You’ve a lovely home, Mr. and Mrs. Fosslethwaite. What kind of fire protection are you carrying at present?
Barbara Norton had a cigarette burning in a pile of butts on the table that might or might not have had an ashtray under it. She broke the cigarette free of an inch and a half of ash and stuck it in her face without taking her eyes off me. They looked larger and less naked behind her window-size lenses. “Who are you?”
I told her, flashing the bona fides. That has an official touch that works with some people, but I could see it meant as much to her as someone else’s baby picture. I put the wallet away. “I’m working for Martha Evancek, Michael’s grandmother. She’s in this country and she wants to know where he went. I’m sorry he’s dead. How’d he get that way?”
While I was talking she got a fresh cigarette going, using the butt of the last. She did this with the concentration of a watchmaker replacing a jewel the size of an ant’s cufflink, then smashed out the old butt in the pile.
“Close the door,” she said.
I closed the door.
“Have a seat.”
I had a seat. This time I chose a padded rocker with a brassiere slung over the back. The sofas of the world could swallow air for a while.
“Excuse the condition of the place,” she said. “When you work at home you don’t get much chance to pick up.”
“What do you do?”
“Whatever doesn’t burn gas. Stuff envelopes. Type up student papers, only my machine’s in hock just now. Mostly telephone work, surveys and advertising.” She indicated the Metropolitan Detroit directory lying open on the table and the legal pad with names and numbers scribbled on it, many of them scratched out. “Just now they’ve got me selling vinyl siding.”
She mined a thin stack of colored plastic strips out of the general clutter and fanned them out expertly. They looked like insoles with a phony wood grain.
“What are you supposed to do,” I said, “describe them over the telephone?”
“They came in the same envelope with the list of questions I’m supposed to ask prospective customers. I guess they’re for inspiration. I’d sure hate to have this stuff on my house, though. I’d feel like a foot in a plastic shoe.” She dropped the strips back to the table. “You should see my phone bill. The manager sent the cops up here yesterday; she thinks I’m a call girl.”
I grinned and lit a Winston. “Michael.”
“He drowned in the California Gulf a year ago last August. He and a friend were standing in water just over their waists off Cabo San Lucas when the undertow got them. Someone in a boat rescued the friend. Michael’s body was never recovered.”
There was a deliberate deadness in her tone.
I said, “What was he doing in the Baja?”
“He was on vacation. He worked for a package design firm in Ohio.”
“Is that where you went after you left St. Clair Shores?”
She nodded, leaking smoke out her nostrils. “Dayton. My bastard husband Bob ran out on both of us six weeks after the move. Couldn’t stand having a kid in the house. What was I supposed to do, stick him in an orphanage after that filthy son of a bitch Evancek —”
“Mrs. Evancek and her husband wrote you after the shooting. You never answered their letters.”
“I wanted Michael to forget all about his father’s side of the family. I wouldn’t even let him write his grandparents. It was the right decision. He grew up normal.”
“The authorities in Cabo San Lucas investigated the drowning?”
“You can check with them.”
“Was Michael married?”
She shook her head. “I used to nag him about it. But his opinion of the blessed state couldn’t have been high, and who could blame him? So you can tell the old lady to forget about great-grandchildren.”
“Of course, you could be lying about that,” I said.
“You could find out easy enough.”
There was an ashtray rounded over with butts on the end table next to the rocker. I tipped some ash on top of the pile. Thinking. “What brought you back here?”
“The rent’s cheaper than Dayton. I just moved back the first of the year.”
“You collect coins?”
She raised her eyebrows at that. They were tweezed very thin and gave her an owlish look behind the glasses. Then she laughed, an abrupt, harsh sound with no enjoyment in it. It ended in a coughing fit. She ground out the butt. “Yeah, I should have guessed that’s how you found me. I started subscribing to that magazine for Michael at least ten years ago, when he was still at home. Because my name was on the check they sent it to me. I never got around to canceling it for sentimental reasons.”
She seemed as sentimental as a wrecking ball. I said, “How did you and Joseph get along before the shooting?”
“We didn’t. I never liked the idea of Jeanine marrying that dumb greasy Polack and I don’t guess I hid it too well. I only visited her when he was at work. I didn’t see much of her after he got canned and started hanging around the house all the time getting drunk.”
“How do you know that if you weren’t around?”
“Jeanine told me. We talked on the phone when he was passed out or busy tanking up at some bar. She was miserable. The kids were the only reason she stuck. My sister was runner-up for homecoming queen her senior year in high school. She could have had her choice of anyone. Ah, shit.” She picked up a disposable butane lighter and got another weed burning. “That night, when the phone rang, and it was the police, I think I knew what they were going to say before they said it. I didn’t feel anything but tired. Even when they called me down to the morgue — I don’t know why, there wasn’t anything to identify—” She let it hang and looked at me. “I guess you think I’m just another burned-out bitch.”
“What I think won’t change my underwear.”
She made the noise again, this time without coughing. “All you good-looking guys got tact. Bob had tact. That’s why he ran out on me.”
“Do you remember the name of the friend Michael was swimming with?”
“Fred something.” She thought. “Florentine. Fred Florentine. They worked together. The company was Buckeye Industries in Dayton. He might still be there.”
I finished my cigarette. I had run out of questions. I thanked her and got up. “I’ll let you get back to work now.”
Her eyes followed me. “What are you going to tell the old lady?”
“The truth. It’s paid for.”
“It better be, for your sake. It’s not a thing you’d buy after you heard it.”
“It almost never is.”
She had the receiver in her hand and was dialing another number from her list. I left her to that and the bitterness that was like another person in the room.
The dandelion was still on the lawn when I came out on the stairs but there was no sign of the gardener. He was probably on the telephone to the National Guard. Tough little weeds, dandelions. They ought to be licensed and bonded. They could tell a sick old lady that the grandson she’d never met had been dead as long as she’d been looking for him and never blink a leaf. I got into my crate and pried it out of the little parking lot and drove back to the office at the approximate speed of a funeral procession.
The telephone was ringing when I let myself in. I took off my hat and pegged it and sat down behind the desk and it was still ringing. I picked up the receiver. “Walker.”
“This is A. Walker Investigations?”
It was a woman’s voice, clipped and businesslike, ageless and almost sexless. You hear a lot of voices like it these days. I said it was.
“I represent a party who might be interested in engaging your services. Would you be free to discuss it at the Westin Hotel this afternoon?”
I said, “I’m just wrapping something up. Could we make it this evening or tomorrow morning?’
“Mr. Alanov has a speaking engagement this evening. One moment.” A hand went over the mouthpiece on her end. Presently: “Mr. Walker? He will see you in his suite tomorrow morning at eleven-thirty.”
She gave me the number of the suite. I wrote it down. “This wouldn’t by any chance be Fedor Alanov, the Russian novelist?”
“Mr. Alanov is Russian and a novelist. To say that he writes Russian novels could be misleading.”
It sounded like banter, but the tone of the voice hadn’t changed. I wondered what it would take to change it and if it would ever be worthwhile. Aloud I said, “Could you give me a hint of what I’m seeing Mr. Alanov about?”
“Not over the telephone. We’ll pay your expenses to and from the hotel, with an added inducement regardless of the outcome of the interview.”
“An inducement of say how much?”
“I believe your consultation fee is two hundred fifty dollars.”
I confirmed the time and suite number and got off the line before her mind changed.
I thought about it. I hadn’t read Alanov; I could never sort out all the viches in books from that part of the world. But I’d heard about him plenty at the time he left Russia to stay ahead of the gray suits that didn’t care for the liberal tone of his writing. Someone had told him the press was free here. I played with it a little, then put it away for later. For the next hour anyway I was still on salary to Martha Evancek.
A female switchboard operator answered at the number Long-distance Information gave me for Buckeye Industries and told me to hang on when I asked to speak to Fred Florentine. Florentine was the young man who according to Barbara Norton had been swimming with Michael Evancek the day he drowned. He wouldn’t still be working there.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” I echoed. “I’m trying to get hold of Fred Florentine.”
“You can stop trying.”
“You’re Florentine?”
“Years now. Who are you?”
He sounded young and confident, a lad with his own office. I told him who I was and what I was after and what Barbara Norton had told me. It took longer to tell than it did to know.
He blew air. “Mike. God, I haven’t thought about him in months. That was a bad day. I hope it’s the worst I’ll ever see. One second I was standing there talking to Mike and enjoying the water and the next I didn’t know which direction the surface was. I thought a shark had me. First thing I did when they plucked me out of the water and pumped out my lungs was check to see if everything was still there. And Mike — God, it was like he was never here, he was gone just that fast.”
“I guess you two were pretty close.”
“He was my goombah. I was a long time getting over it. Maybe I’m not over it yet. Maybe you never are. Who’d you say you were working for?”
“I didn’t. But it’s Mike’s grandmother, Martha Evancek.”
“Really? I never knew he had one. He never mentioned her.”
“They didn’t know each other. What did he do at Buckeye?”
“Worked in the catalogue department, same as me. ‘Lightweight, durable, one-twentieth-inch cardboard, ideal for storage and shipping.’ We wrote that. It was our most successful collaboration.”
“What kind of a guy was he?”
“The best. If you got run over by a bus he was there and if you just needed five bucks till payday he was there too, making you think you were doing him a favor to take it. Guys like him are so rare I guess God figured he shouldn’t stick around any one place too long.”
“Getting dead does a lot for your social standing,” I said.
“I’m not just saying these things because he’s dead. Mike was the best friend I’ll ever have.”
“He must have had something wrong with him.”
“I don’t know what it would be, unless he was too quiet. You know, I never even thought about that till he was gone. I tried to remember things he’d said, the way you do, and couldn’t think of a one. Oh, he talked, but it was almost always in answer to something you said. Maybe that’s why I liked him. He was a good listener. He made you feel as if everything you had to say was gold. I guess it’s not so strange I didn’t know about the grandmother, close as we were. He never talked about himself.”
“Did he ever mention the shooting?”
“What shooting?”
“Something he had no control over,” I said quickly. “Listen, I’d like to give your name and telephone number to the old lady. She might want to talk to you about Michael.”
“Sure. I’d like that. Just having talked to you about him makes me feel better.”
I wrote down his home number and we stopped talking to each other. I got Information again, which put me in touch with someone who could give me the number of the authorities in Cabo San Lucas, Baja, Mexico. The telephone rang fifteen times there before a Sergeant Cristobal answered. The line was thick with static and his voice was even thicker with Spanish accent and something else, but I finally got through to him what I was after. His English improved quite a bit after I mentioned fifty dollars American. He asked if I was the man who had come to ask about the drowning before.
“What man?” I asked. “When?”
“A man. Months ago. I will send you a copy of the full report in a few days.” Just before hanging up he bellowed at someone named Elena. I could almost smell the tequila on the sergeant’s breath.
I tried Barbara Norton’s number. Busy. Then I spent some more money and called Fred Florentine again. I asked him if he knew anything about anyone going down to investigate the accident.
“No. But that’s not unusual, is it? Insurance companies don’t get to be big trusting their clients.”
“I’ve worked for enough of them to know that. Thanks.”
I poured myself some Scotch, nodded to the looker on the advertising calendar, and drank it off. Then I poured some more and didn’t toast anyone. I filed the bottle again and got my hat. It was heavy. They had gotten the material from a quarry and lined it with lead.
The sun was somewhere west of Southfield and shadows were clotting on the lawns of St. Clair Shores when Karen McBride met me at the top of the steps in Martha Evancek’s house. She had her nurse’s uniform on now and looked crisp and white enough to make me feel wilted and sallow. I had a head start on it. Her smile of welcome saw my face and dangled.