“THANKS DON’T CUT IT, Mr. Connie. I already seen Ginny and me in the canned-meat line at the government warehouse. Little Charlie don’t finish school and winds up carrying a hod for fifty cents a hour, just like me and my old man. You done saved the Battles, Mr. Connie. Saying thanks just ain’t near good enough.”
“When you’re out of the woods you can send me a couple of tickets to your next championship bout. Leadbeater hasn’t forgotten about you yet.”
“He sounded like it when he called. He couldn’t wait to get off the phone with me so’s he could stick it in some other sorry son of a bitch.”
Neither could I, but not for the same reason. I can accept gratitude as well as the next man, and better than most, but I hadn’t earned it from the wrestler until I could place evidence in Stuart Leadbeater’s lap to prove that all of southeastern Michigan was in cahoots to put an over-the-hill expatriate mobster back in business. I thanked Battle for calling and cradled the receiver.
Agnes turned over in bed and slid an imperfectly shaved thigh across my groin. The tiny bristles awakened a semblance of life in my aging member, so recently exhausted. She smelled faintly of Chanel, more strongly of me. “That didn’t sound like auto business,” she said sleepily.
“It was, though. Kind of. I keep backing up for a longer head start. I’m so far away now I can’t see what I’m running at.”
“What’s Leadbeater got to do with it?”
“Nothing. Everything. A couple of years ago I read a science fiction story about a group of time travelers who were warned not to step off the path while they were hunting dinosaurs, because if they altered something no one could tell how it might affect history. Someone stepped off anyway and killed a butterfly. When they got back, everything had changed. This would just be another selling job if someone in the Navy Department had assigned Leadbeater to the Philippines instead of Point Barrow.”
“He doesn’t stand a chance of being elected. If that means anything.”
I grinned at the religious picture on the wall opposite the bed, once the property of an acquaintance, long dead. He’d have enjoyed my situation. Not thinking things through had gotten him killed, but it had kept him out of the sort of trouble I spent my life in. “That’s the hell of it,” I said. “Getting him off my back may just clinch the election for him.”
She propped her head up on her elbow. She looked younger with her hair loose around her bare shoulders, and she never looked her age. “You know what your problem is? You spend too much time figuring the angles. I bet if you just went ahead and did your job the way it was described to you when you were hired, you’d come out just as well as if you chased down all the loose cannons. And you’d have a lot fewer gray hairs.”
“It’s a theory.”
“But you won’t try it.”
“Maybe I will. After I’ve chased down one more cannon. I need your brain one more time.”
“Shit.” She turned over, giving me a view of her back all the way down to her right hip, fished a pack of Chesterfields and a Ronson lighter out of her purse on the nightstand on her side of the bed, and sat up to light it. “I’d hoped you wanted me for my body. Okay, shoot.”
“Who knows where all the bodies are buried in Detroit?”
“Narrow it down.”
“I mean in the labor racket. Don’t say Walter Reuther. I can’t go there.”
“Albert Brock.”
“Next suggestion.”
“Sorry. Brock’s your man. His hands aren’t as clean as Reuther’s, but his people are better off because Brock knows enough to put his cufflinks in his pocket before he shakes hands with the mob. He speaks their language.”
“I interviewed him for the Banner when he was just a grunt. My editor twisted the story all around to make him look like an anarchist. He’d as soon run me over with a Kenworth as talk to me.”
“My brother-in-law’s a twenty-year man with the Steelhaulers. He’s crazy about me. I should have married him instead of his brother. He can get you an interview.”
“Am I lying on his side of the mattress?”
She blew smoke at me. “I don’t ask you about your little friend at Ford. She smashes your views on good-looking secretaries all to pieces.”
“If one more person starts following me I’m going to have to put in for a parade permit. What do the kids say? I didn’t know we were going steady.”
“It’s a small town. Someone I know saw you with her at a ball game. Israel Zed’s secretary has a withered arm. You don’t have to be Rocky Lane to put it together.”
“Does it bother you?”
“Does my brother-in-law bother you?”
“I asked first.”
“Jesus Christ. Any woman who doesn’t have to wear a bra to keep her tits out of her soup bothers the hell out of me. Does it bother me that you’re dating one? I’m not sure. My opinion of men is already tarnished, so I don’t expect much. Not that it’s any of your business—unless you say it is—but my brother-in-law is a dispatcher at McLouth and he has pictures of his wife and four daughters all over his desk. He’d sell secrets to Khrushchev before he’d betray them.”
“Not that it’s any of your business,” I said, “unless you say it is. Janet Sherman’s a nice girl I’ve gone out with a couple of times and talked shop talk. She left the definite impression last time she wouldn’t mind if it went further. I left the definite impression I would.”
“Is it her arm?”
“No, goddamn it. It’s the twenty-five years I spent finding out the world smells like bad meat before she was born. I can barely keep up with you. She’d kill me.”
“That again. Everybody gets old, Connie. You’re no pioneer.”
“Let’s just say I’ve got enough on my plate right now without going back to the young love table for seconds.”
“I’ll say. Politicians and union thugs. For someone who thinks he’s Bernard Baruch, you sure act like Dick Danger. Speaking of Dick.” She squashed out her cigarette in the saucer on the nightstand and reached under the covers. Her aim was remarkable.
When she left I was ravenous. I found a frozen steak in the ice compartment of the Kelvinator, left it to thaw under the hot water faucet in the sink while I pulled on a pair of pajama pants under my robe, and had a skillet heating on the stove—I changed my plans for the evening when he told me he cooked with gas; one of my most successful print campaigns at Slauson—when the telephone rang for the second time that night. The kitchen extension, a luxury I was just beginning to take for granted after a lifetime of apartments decorated around the single unit in the living room, had a long enough cord to allow me to introduce meat to hot metal while I spoke.
“This must be serious. You’re the first woman who ever called to tell me she got home all right.”
“Mr. Connie?”
“Oh, hello, Anthony. Get another championship shot so soon?”
“No, that don’t come up for another six months. I got so buzzed over what you done for me I forgot I owed you. I took down some license numbers like you said.”
“License numbers?”
“You know, from folks’ cars that come to the Rest just to see Mr. Carlo.”
“Hell, I forgot. Second.” I found a fat ballpoint with the name and number of a garage printed on it and scribbled on the clean side of the butcher wrap the steak had come in until the ink started. “Okay, spill ’em.”
He had seven. Two belonged to Cadillac Sedan deVilles. There was a Buick Roadmaster, two Lincolns, an Olds Starfire convertible, and a Henry J. For a man who drove a six-year-old Chevy he knew his cars.
“What’s a Kaiser doing in that crowd?” I asked.
“Oh, I knows that one. He run numbers down on Hastings. He don’t spend money on nothing. I hear he gots pretty near a million stuffed in his mattress.”
“There’s always someone people say that about. When some rock ’n’ roll punk finally gets around to slitting his throat he’ll come up with a double handful of cotton batting and the dock bill on a hundred-foot yacht in Lauderdale. What about the others?”
“They mostly comes and goes in the dark. The Starfire’s a lady. I think she’s a McGuire sister.”
“Thanks, Anthony. I may not need this stuff after all, but I’m happy you remembered.”
“Anything you wants, you call. I mean that, Mr. Connie.” He hung up.
I tore off the section with the numbers on it and stuck it in a drawer under the knives and forks. I’d been distracted by my cooking and hadn’t paid much attention to what I was writing. A week went by before I looked at them again; by which time it was almost too late.