BARBARA NORTON had moved some since my last visit. I could tell, because this time the door to her apartment was closed. I knocked and she barked and I opened it to find her sitting where I had left her, wearing the same gray man’s workshirt, with the telephone receiver screwed to her ear and what might have been the same cigarette burning in her face. The pile of butts on the table was half again as big as before and the fluffy dust on the rug scurried in front of the stirred air like pigeons in the park.
I sat in the chair I’d occupied earlier and tipped my hat back on my head and waited while she finished talking about peeling and flaking paint. At length she rang off and flipped down her cheaters and looked at me.
I said, “I’m back.”
“I noticed right away.” She waited.
“It’s an object I’m looking for this trip. A crucifix, more properly referred to as a cross, as this one doesn’t have the figure of Jesus on it. Seven inches by three, silver, with a blue stone where the crosspieces meet and smaller red stones at the points. It belongs to Martha Evancek’s family. She’d like it back.”
She laughed the laugh with the dry cough in it. The cigarette bobbed in the corner of her mouth and dropped ash on the front of her shirt but she didn’t brush it off. “Now it’s a search for the holy grail. What’s she paying?”
“Couple of hundred. Mostly sentimental value. It disappeared at the time of the shooting and it looks like it came out of the house with Michael.”
“Just a couple of hundred?”
“It’s not even worth that, really. Silver drops a little every time gold goes up and the stones are nothing.”
“Hardly worth your coming down here, is it?”
I lit a Winston. “Family stuff.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that. I never had one, exactly, though I tried to do what I could for Michael after that bastard Bob took off and Joseph, that son of a bitch —”
“I heard this. What about the cross?”
“I don’t have it.”
“She’ll go five hundred,” I said. “Tops.”
“If I had it I’d sell it. I didn’t let him take anything out of that house but the clothes on his back. I even made him leave his coin collection. He howled about that, but it was the right decision. He grew up normal.”
Her conversation had all the fresh spontaneity of her telephone spiel. The more I heard her the better I thought of Bob Norton.
“Where would such a thing be if Michael didn’t take it with him?” I wondered out loud.
“How the hell should I know? Still in the house, probably.’
“Not after all this time. It’d get sold or —” I thought. The ash on my cigarette grew. I got rid of it and stood up. “Well, thanks again. I hope you sell a lot of siding. One more thing. Did you have an insurance policy on Michael?”
“Are you kidding? Who could afford the premiums?”
“Who else but an insurance company would send someone down to look into the drowning?”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know.”
It was three o’clock when I got back to the office. Howard Mayk would still be on duty at Shaw College. I looked up security there and got a voice like a smashed windpipe who switched me to a call box across campus.
“Yeah?”
It was Mayk, all right. “This is Walker. Remember me?”
“Who could forget? The wife and I had a honey of a fight that night over me not being home when she got in from work nor leaving a note. The hell with her. Find the kid?”
“More or less. He’s dead. Accident.”
A pause. “Jesus, I’m sorry. How’d the old lady take it?”
“Better than someone who never stacked sandbags during a shelling. I’m looking for something else now, a religious item Joseph Evancek took with him out of Poland. What’s the procedure in Hamtramck when no one comes forward to claim the deceased’s personal effects? Hello?”
“I was just remembering,” he said quickly. “There wasn’t a whole lot, just some cash and clothes and furniture and the usual house clutter. Some Church stuff, not much. Evancek’s wife was Protestant. The Nortons took the cash, and our cable to Poland about the rest of the stuff never got an answer. It would of gone on the block. What kind of religious item?”
“A large silver cross. Too big to wear.”
“I don’t remember it. I think I would if I’d seen it.”
“I didn’t think you had. If the department sent an itemized list to the Evanceks in Poland it would have been on it. The reason I called, I got to thinking about the jam Evancek was in before the blowup — unemployed, drinking up what was in the bank. He might have hocked the cross for whiskey money.”
“Could be.”
“When I thought of that, I remembered the fence you said you and Bill Mischiewicz put in soak, the one that specialized in religious articles. This cross is one of a kind. If Joseph came to him he might remember, or know if it was in circulation at all. Is he still around?”
“He was when I left the department, but we could never get anything on him again. Now, I don’t know. He’d be pretty old. Name’s Woldanski, John Woldanski. He ran a shop on Trowbridge; you could check it out.”
He gave me the address. I wrote it on the telephone pad and tore off the page. “Thanks, Mr. Mayk.”
“Yeah.”
Power shovels reared like glutting beasts against a mildewed sky, their yellow iron jaws drooling dirt and rubble and vomiting their loads into big piles. The air throbbed with engine noise and the grinding creak of mashing gears and peep-peep-peep of heavy machinery backing up. It wasn’t doing much backing up. It was creeping uptown with the unstoppable inevitability of glaciers on the move. New barricades had been erected farther north that had nothing to do with strawberry festivals. The scene played like evolution in reverse; civilization had had its day and the dinosaurs were taking over, leaving only naked earth like droppings in their wake.
I made enough detours to get lost in a town I knew like my tongue knew the inside of my mouth, but came out on Trowbridge eventually and pulled up to a meter with some time left on it in front of a square brick building with a charred front and department-store windows on the ground floor. There was junk in them, porcelain lamps shaped like women’s legs and dirty-faced reproductions of famous dead artists’ masterworks in plaster frames and “antiques” you can buy brand new in any hardware store, here rescued from barns and garages with some of the rust knocked off and showing evidence of half-hearted attempts to clean them up. Young smartly dressed married women with credit cards in their purses would buy them for living rooms with old barn siding on the walls. Yes, this is an original panel from a two-seater outhouse that once belonged to a German pig farmer in Mecosta County. I simply stole it from this grubby little shop in Hamtramck. Don’t you think it makes a lovely coffee table?
The place had a half-finished look inside, as if someone had started to clear it out for some other business and then given up and walked away from it, leaving exposed wires and junk stacked in corners and trestle tables holding up dusty glass insulators and dented silver sets and tin cigar boxes and square brown bottles of Dr. So-and-So’s Horse Linament and Bunion Cure with the contents a thick hard layer of varnish in the bottoms. Someone had put a lot of time and effort into that half-finished look. You can call a ten-year-old enema tube a hookah and charge three times as much for it if the place has ratholes in the corners. One of the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling spat and flickered like a moth caught in a screen door.
The counter was another trestle table running along the right wall with a group of Philco radio shells and a fairly modern cash register standing on it and a forty-year-old black man sitting on a stool behind it, bald to his crown with scimitar-shaped sideburns and a moustache and whiskers that looked like a coal-smear around his mouth. The sleeves of his stained sweatshirt were cut off to show the lumpy muscles in his upper arms. He had a dragon tattoo on his left bicep that looked as if it had been done by a drunk with a rusty razor. Another black, younger, with an impressive natural and a long loose look under a ragged denim jacket over a black T-shirt and jeans, slouched in a sprung overstuffed chair at the end of the counter with one leg hooked over the grimy arm, watching me through the smoke of a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He looked half asleep.
I figured he was the one to watch.
They had been talking about bikes when I came in, breaking off when I walked straight up to the counter without pausing to browse. The one with the tattoo and smear of beard looked at me the way some animals in the zoo look at the people who come to their cage, the ones the keepers are told to keep an eye on when the shift changes. I speared my lips with a weed and let my eyes wander over the place while I got a match out of its folder. The three of us were alone.
“You fellows are a ways north of Grand, aren’t you?” I lit up.
“It’s the land of opportunity,” said Tattoo. He sat with his hands on his thighs and his head sunk between his shoulders like a fighter, looking up at me from under his brows.
I shook out the match, grinning. “Hamtramck?”
“I said it’s the land of opportunity. I didn’t say anybody had to like it. You’re just the second customer we had in all day. Folks up here sure can hate.”
“They’ve had four hundred years to practice. Woldanski in?”
“Woldanski who?”
So that’s how we were going to play it. “I was told he owns the joint.”
“The name ain’t Woldanski today.”
“You’re the owner?”
“Cash on the barrelhead. Nothing down and no easy monthly payments.”
“Cash?”
“Green on one side, gray on the other. Lots of little pictures of presidents.”
“Must be nice. Being an heir.”
He said nothing. I blew a plume of smoke. “Know where I might start looking for Woldanski?”
He kept on watching me from under his brows. I glanced at the lean lad in the overstuffed chair, who moved his bushy head from side to side slowly, watching me. I felt watched. The younger man fanned smoke away from his face with a narrow and oddly beautiful left hand.
Without taking his eyes off me, the other picked up a package of Pall Malls from the counter and shook one loose and got it between his lips and left it there, without lighting it or touching it. Just three boiled birds standing and sitting around with plugs in our beaks.
The seal on top of the pack was unbroken. He’d opened it on the bottom. I reached out and nudged it with a knuckle.
“Milan or Jackson? Or some slammer out of state?”
He smiled then without front teeth. “Hell, why didn’t you say you was with the cops to start?”
“I’m not Nero Wolfe. If you don’t want people knowing you’re from the neighborhood you’d better start smoking from the right end of the pack. They only open them that way in places where if they fall out of your pocket and roll loose they start a brawl. So how about Woldanski?”
“I don’t know no one named Woldanski,” he said. “I’d throw Woldanski at you if I had Woldanski so you’d get out of my face. My name is Roland DePugh. Does that sound like Woldanski?”
“I think I’m getting it. You don’t know Woldanski.”
The man sprawled in the chair chuckled, a low, rippling sound like a panther’s purring. I looked at him.
“No Woldanski,” he said sleepily. “Roland’s had the paper on the place, what, two years?”
“Three come September. Bought it from the boys that own the block. Before that they rented it out, I don’t know to who.”
“Whom,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Forget it. I’ve been hanging around too many writers lately. A thing like that can ruin you. Who owns the block?”
DePugh gave me the up-from-under look. “You ain’t no city cop. They’d know that.”
“You said I was a cop. You never heard it from me.”
He punched the NO SALE button on the cash register, lifted a Colt Detective Special with a two-inch barrel out of the compartment where he kept the twenties, and clunked it down on top of the counter, keeping his hand on it. “You done wore out your honeymoon here.”
“It’s guns,” I said. “After the first ten have been jammed in your kisser the thrill’s all gone.”
He thumbed back the hammer.
I said, “That’s not necessary with a double-action.”
“Easier on the finger, though.” The man in the chair held up his thumb, studying it like an artist. “I’d go, mister. That fall Roland took was for ADW knocked down from assault with intent. Shot off a brother’s left earlobe.”
“Nice shooting.”
“I was aiming between his eyes,” said DePugh. He drummed his fingers on the revolver’s cylinder.
I dropped some ash on the plank floor. It wasn’t its first. “Well, I’m gone. I don’t need any stuffed mooseheads today. Or whatever else you’ve got in the back room that the owners don’t know is for sale.”
“I run a legitimate business here.”
“The place reeks of it.” I nodded to the other man, who gave me a cat’s smile back and the smallest nod that could be nodded. I left.
The investigation business has more dead ends than a magician has pockets, and as many other ways to go. From there I drove back across the line and on downtown to Lee Horst’s office in one of the bank buildings, never mind which. Lee is an information broker. Whenever you need brain fodder that the Detroit Public Library can’t supply — legitimate, shady, borderline, just plain illegal — you go to see Lee Horst. He specializes in information of a personal and sometimes embarrassing nature, but he’s no blackmailer. He won’t do business with known squeezers or reporters or cops. If he doesn’t know you or your references he’s polite, he gives you the glad hand and the warm smile and takes you on the grand tour that always ends with you standing alone in the hallway wondering just where and when you dropped the ball. Most of his information comes from servants and repairmen and delivery boys, the so-called invisible people who pass in and out of people’s homes attracting data like lint, and who meet Lee in parking garages and shopping centers to sell what they have. He buys almost everything about almost anyone, and if you’ve spent any time at all in the Detroit area, chances are he has something on you. His business is by no means a rare quantity in today’s fishbowl society, but he is one of its few scrupulous practitioners. He’s also one of the twenty wealthiest men in the city.
The gold lettering on the frosted panel of the door to his outer office read HORST RESEARCH ASSOCIATES. That was window dressing. So far as I knew he was the entire company. A buzzer went off when I opened the door and went on buzzing until it closed behind me with a pneumatic hiss. A couple of chairs and a sofa upholstered in yellow fabric stood on a yellow carpet with yellow-painted walls all around and fresh magazines arranged in a fan on a yellow library table. Lee likes yellow. I was alone in the waiting room.
A door marked PRIVATE opened and Lee strode out, a huge soft smiling man with a lot of creamy yellow hair arranged in waves and a broad ruddy face with a dust of freckles across his cheeks and bright little eyes like shiny steel buttons with little cracks at the corners. He was sixty-eight years old then and still looked like an overgrown boy. He had on an ivory-colored suit that moved with him and a yellow silk tie on a pale yellow shirt with the collar buttoned down. The whole rig had to be built especially to his scale; he was six-seven anyway and tilted the scales at four hundred pounds. He took my hand in both of his moist warm flippers.
“Amos, Amos,” he said in his high, soft, chiding voice. “I never see you anymore.”
“Lower your rates and you’ll see me more often. How are you, Lee?”
“Just fair. I don’t know where next month’s rent is coming from.” He held open the door to his private office. A diamond stud the size of a horse pill winked on his shirt cuff.
I hung my hat and coat on the hall tree and made myself comfortable in a chair covered with yellow leather. It was a corner office, with windows in two walls opening on the brown skyscrapers and jammed streets of downtown Detroit. The automobile horns blatting six stories down sounded remote, like Canadian honkers flying high overhead. Lee walked around behind his big bare-topped desk and lowered himself into a swivel chair with a tall winged back that was big enough for two men, but it was just big enough for him. The superstructure creaked but it held.
“I need the address of a man named John Woldanski,” I said. “He used to run a shop on Trowbridge in Hamtramck, where he fenced valuable religious objects until a few years ago. Two cops named Mayk and Mischiewicz there busted him a long time ago and he went to Jackson for a hard stretch. He’s not listed in Hamtramck or Detroit or any of the suburbs. I don’t know that he’s still in the area, or even if he’s still alive.”
He confirmed the spelling, then turned in his chair and slipped a vinyl cover off a screen and keyboard on a stand where a typewriter would be ordinarily.
I said, “Not you, too.”
He made a wry face. “It saves time. But I’m still paying rent on a warehouse full of files in case a stray bolt of lightning knocks out this bastard’s memory.”
“That happens?”
“So the guy that installed it told me. Also power failures and nylon undershorts and a good stiff sneeze.”
He turned it on. It didn’t make any more noise than it had when it was off. I got bored watching him click keys and lit a cigarette. I hoped that wouldn’t bother its memory. After a while he sat back and gave me an address on Denton in Hamtramck and an unlisted telephone number.
I wrote them down. “When I was a kid only rich people weren’t listed.”
“It’s the telephone solicitors,” he said. “Why look for other salesmen’s marks on picket fences when you can just stab a finger and dial?”
“People don’t want to have to buy plastic siding. What’s the damage, Lee?”
“For you, seventy-five.”
I jumped a little. “Dollars?”
“No, Cadillacs. Of course dollars.”
“Just for tapping a few keys?”
“I have to pay for the machine. Listen, you’re getting a break on account of we’re old friends.”
“Buy yourself some enemies.” I slid four twenties out of my wallet and pushed them across his desk. He gave me a five from the metal cash box in the top drawer and wrote out a receipt. I put it in the space vacated by the twenties.
“Stay and talk?”
“Not at these prices.” I got up and reached for my hat.
He patted the computer console’s sky-blue hull, not unlovingly. “You know, if I were you I’d worry about one of these things turning me into a buggy whip.”
“Until they start making that shell out of solid bone, no way.”
I said good-bye and drove back to Hamtramck. It was the paddle, I was the ball, and the elastic string between us wasn’t an inch longer than it had to be.