“HI, THIS IS NATE MILLENDER. If it’s paying work, leave a message. If it’s going to cost me, keep trying, you never can tell. Well, you know this shit.’’
I waited for the beep, introduced myself, and said, “Randy Quarrels says you’re the best man in town for the job I’ve got in mind.” I added that I was on an expense account and left my number at the office.
A kid in clown pants and a ball cap back to front, with an electronic beeper clipped to his belt, saw me break the connection and loped toward the telephone. I held up an index finger and dialed the number of the other name I’d gotten from Quarrels. He held up another finger, but hung back. We were standing inside the entrance of a Perry Drugs in downtown Allen Park.
“Well, spit it out.”
Here was a voice squeezed from the lungs of someone who went around all hunched over by the chains he had forged in life. Either that or he smoked too much. I put away the Winston I’d been about to light and asked the voice if it belonged to Ulysses Worth.
“Eulisy.”
“I’m sorry?”
He gave me the letters. “My mother couldn’t spell. That’s the closest she got when it came time to fill out the birth certificate. You the guy with the twins?”
“Not so far as I know.”
“I’m expecting a guy with twins. He wants their picture taken in matching Red Wings jerseys.”
“I’m not the guy. Randy Quarrels says you’re the best in the business for what I want.”
“What do you want?”
“If I could discuss it over the telephone, we aren’t talking about the same business.”
“Hey, man, if this is a sting I ain’t worth the cost of the wire. You don’t get any lower in the food chain than Eulisy Worth.”
“I’m strictly private sector. Not a cop. Not a Fed. I’m not with the Klan or Citizens for a Porn-Free America or Sprint. All I want is your time and I’ll pay for that.”
“This cash? I mean cash. Nobody signs nothing.”
I still had my half-empty cigarette pack in my hand. I dumped out the butts and crackled it in front of the mouthpiece. “Nothing else quite sounds like C-notes,” I said. “When can I come out?”
“Anytime you want, if you don’t mind me working while we talk.”
“I’m on my way.”
The kid with the pager looked up from a display of condoms, but I worked the riser and called my service. “Anything yet from a Nate Millender?”
“No, no messages, Mr. Walker.” The girl sounded genuinely apologetic. She was my favorite that week. I thanked her and hung up.
The kid watched me slide the cigarettes back into the pack, then swooped in. He was punching buttons as the door wheezed shut behind me. I figured I’d slowed down the city’s drug traffic ten minutes.
Eulisy Worth lived and worked in one of those small white frame houses with a shared driveway and a screened-in front porch, the kind you see on the news whenever a drive-by shooting takes place or an unemployed auto worker barricades himself in with his family and a gun. They are part of the landscape in a city that at one time boasted the highest percentage of private homeowners of any urban center in the United States, and so common they’re invisible. This one was on Benson, in case it matters. All the lawns were the color of burned rice. A Dodge minivan with a square of cellophane taped over one window was parked in the driveway.
The screen door was latched. I rapped and waited. After thirty seconds or so I rapped again and pressed my folded handkerchief against the back of my neck. There was evidence the neighborhood had had trees and shade before the city widened the street to drop in a new sewer. Some of the saplings it had planted as an afterthought were still standing. One or two had leaves. Harsh summers and raging winters had beaten the sidings and pavement the same shade of gray.
I rapped a third time. A series of locks and bolts snapped and squeaked on the other side of the door. I hoped the closed windows meant air conditioning inside.
The man who came out to unhook the screen door was small and black and wiry, with a modest flat-top and round wire-rimmed glasses. The prescription was so weak the lenses sent back the light in flat white disks like window glass. He wore a tank top made of cargo netting, Desert Storm camouflage pants with lots of bulging pockets, and square-toed cowboy boots. I liked the look fine except for the moist sheen on his skin. That meant no air conditioning.
“Where are the twins?” He looked past my shoulder. He had gray eyes that darted like silverfish.
“I’m not the guy with the twins. We settled that over the telephone. Walker’s the name.”
“The guy with the C-notes.”
I took out my wallet and showed him the corners of the bills. Not a cigarette pack this time. I’d stopped at the bank on the way.
“Those the new ones? Let me see.”
I slid one out and stretched it between my hands.
He squinted. “Ben’s off-center.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Sure they ain’t queer?”
“I just spend them. I don’t ask them about their private life.”
“Well, bring ’em in.”
He held the screen door while I stepped inside, then searched the street one more time before he hooked it.
“I sure hope that guy shows up with the twins. The Asian market is nuts for twins, the blonder the better.”
“You said you were shooting a couple of kids in Red Wings jerseys.”
“That was on the phone. For all I knew you was using a cellular. Don’t tip nothing over, okay? The equipment’s rented.”
Someone had punched out a couple of walls and converted the ground floor into a studio. There were reflectors everywhere, a bank of lights on a stand, and a full-size video camera on a professional aluminum frame. There were stacks of three-quarter-inch videotape on the floors and on all the furniture except the bed. It wasn’t a bed, really; just a king-size mattress on the floor. A red plush spread had been flung over it, the better to show off the naked female flesh displayed there.
Nudity is deceptive. What looked at first glance to be a pile of writhing bodies turned out to be just two girls in their late teens, one black, the other a pale redhead, lying half entangled on the spread. I could tell my presence was embarrassing them. The black girl yawned and scratched herself under one breast while the redhead applied fresh lipstick from a neon-colored tube.
“Places, ladies,” Worth said.
The lipstick went out of sight and the girls swung into a passionate embrace.
“We can talk while I’m shooting.” Worth poked a CD into a tabletop player. “The music’s just for mood. Someone else’ll dub in the oohs and aahs later.”
The music was Gilbert and Sullivan.
“I didn’t know there was a lesbian pornography market,” I said.
“There isn’t. And the people I work with prefer to call them ‘adult features.’” He had strapped on the camera and was doing a slow schottische around the bed. “Dykes don’t rent videos. Straight couples prefer soft-core. The rest of the market is lonely guys—lots of lonely guys—and they ain’t interested in looking at some other guy’s pimply butt. With two women they think they’re getting double their money’s worth.”
“This your day job?”
“Day and night. That’s how I keep up the payments on this here mansion. Smile, ladies. You’re supposed to be having a good time.”
The black girl said, “I got a button sticking me in the ass.”
“Use it. You’re an actress.”
“Randy says you’re a wizard in the darkroom,” I said.
“Best in the Midwest.” A mobile made up of metal cutouts of spaceships and sportscars hung from a wire above the mattress. With one hand he set it spinning, then panned up with the camera to catch the motion. Onscreen it would look like a window-shattering climax.
“So why do skinflicks? Excuse me, ‘adult features.’”
“Two words,” he said. “Cyberspace.”
“I think that’s one word.”
“Who gives a shit? The point is, any fourteen-year-old with a PC can click his mouse and outperform an expert with a house full of copy cameras, air brushes, and developing fluid. You see a movie lately, all them explosions and car crashes? Computer generated. Special-effects guys that were pulling down a million a year five years ago are putting in for food stamps. Still photography got the worst of it. I got downsized right out of my career.”
“Bummer.”
He stopped to kick out the tape and see how much was left. “You said you had work for me.”
“I want a picture of two people together.”
“Hire a studio. Or buy a Kodak and do it yourself. It’s cheaper.”
“The two people I’m talking about aren’t that easy to get in the same place at the same time.”
“Raise your right leg.”
“What?”
“Not you. Linda, is it?”
“Lisa,” said the redhead.
“Raise your right leg, Lisa. No, not like that. Like you’re pulling on a stocking. That’s it. Oh, very nice. Do you dance professionally, Lisa?” He was standing on the mattress now, zooming in on the foot she had pointed at the ceiling.
“Just on the runway. I don’t do laps.”
“Exactly what kind of picture are we talking about?”
She looked at him. “What?”
“Not you.”
“Kind of like what you’re shooting now,” I said, “only without motion and it doesn’t matter if the subjects ever knew each other.”
He stepped down to the floor and turned off the camera. His eyeglasses caught the light in blank circles. “How do you know Randy Quarrels?”
“Mutual friend.”
“Get dressed, both of you.”
“It’s only been an hour,” the black girl said. “You promised three hours’ work.”
“I’m out of inspiration. Don’t worry, you’ll get the full pony.”
She stood and stretched. She was my height and it was obvious she worked out. Except for her coloring she reminded me of Quarrels’ snow leopard.
“Get a move on. I’ve seen it before.” Worth stooped and jerked a plug out of the wall. Gilbert and Sullivan fell silent, the bank of lights went out with a hiss. Instantly the room seemed less hot.
“Well, shit. This the first time any boy hurried me into my clothes.” Swishing her hips, the black girl followed the redhead around a curtain slung from a clothesline. Lisa’s pale buttocks had less definition than her partner’s.
“You too,” Worth told me.
“I’m already dressed.”
“I mean get out. Randy and I didn’t get along, but I never thought he’d tag me for a blackmailer.”
“What’s the difference to a pornographer?”
“Who’re you, Jerry Falwell? I run a legitimate business.”
“A legitimate business you won’t discuss over the telephone.”
“That’s just to keep the right-wing nuts off my front porch. The neighborhood’s zoned commercial and I don’t use the mails or internet. My stuff sells to the same video stores that carry The Wizard of Oz. Okay, it ain’t Norman Rockwell. It ain’t even Norman Bates. But it’s honest work. Last month every tenth tape Aunt Matilda took home was Hot Cross Nuns. That was one of mine. It ain’t just old men in raincoats anymore.”
I tipped my head toward the curtain. “Who did those girls vote for in the last election, Barney the Dinosaur?”
“They’re pros. I got releases signed by their mothers. One of them appeared in three of my productions before she retired. What do you do for a living, bind Bibles?” Lights flashed off his glasses like bolts from God.
“Throttle down, Fellini. So you’re a grindhouse Griffith with ethics. There was only one way to find that out. For the record, I’m trying to trace a frame, not frame one of my own. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the place. You’d have to be as good an actor as you are a He let out air. “What work you in?”
I told him. “I’ve got ID if you need it.”
“Why would anyone lie about a thing like that?” He undid the harness and laid the video camera on a spavined sofa loaded with tapes and lingerie.
“Randy and I worked together at the News a couple of times,” he said. “I was freelancing, doing some stuff for the Sunday magazine. You know, color shots of Denny McLain washing the Caddy and remembering the good old days when he threw strikes for the Tigers and broke legs for Big Vinnie the Camel.”
“Not the best use of your talents.”
“Talent’s what amateurs have. Pros need cash. Sometimes, when a prominent citizen kicks off and his widow has only a picture of him wearing a hat, it’s somebody’s job to take the hat off in the photo lab. I showed Randy how to do it so even an expert couldn’t tell what’d been done. Parlor stuff. He thought I was a genius.”
director.”
“Are you?”
“I’ve got a good eye and a steady hand. That’s all the genius you need in photography, and now you don’t even need that. I ain’t doing what I’m doing for fun. One set of tits looks pretty much like all the rest.”
“Do you know who took the hat off this one?” I handed him the Talbot-Arsenault picture.
He glanced at it and gave it back. “Not offhand. The girl’s head came from another shot.”
“Quarrels needed a glass to tell him that.”
“That’s why he referred you to me. But it’s not my racket.”
“Whose racket is it?”
“Nate Millender.”
“Quarrels mentioned him. He didn’t say it was his racket, just that he was capable of this kind of work.” I pocketed the picture.
“It’s his racket. Or it was. Damn computers are putting everyone out of work, even criminals.”
“Not all of them. Who’s backing him?”
He took off his glasses and wiped them on his pants. “You’re asking plenty for just a peek at Ben Franklin.”
“How much?”
The actresses came back from behind the curtain. The black girl had on white shorts, cork sandals, a red handkerchief blouse tied under her breasts, and a white vinyl bag slung over one shoulder. The outfit did more for my libido than her nudity had. The redhead wore an army tunic over a T-shirt and artfully torn Wrangler’s. That did nothing for me.
“You said three hours,” the black girl said. “That’s seventy-five apiece.”
“Pay them,” said Worth.
I produced my wallet and thumbed out two hundreds. The black girl opened her bag, fished among a pile of wadded-up bills inside, and traded me a fifty. The hundreds went into the bag and she snapped it shut.
Lisa, the redhead, said, “Hey!”
“C’mon. We’ll break ’em at the mall.”
“Don’t look so sad,” Worth said when they’d left. “One of them’s got a scholarship to Michigan.”
“Which one?”
He shrugged and adjusted his glasses. “They all look alike to me. One set of tits.”
I watched him tidying up, stacking tapes and coiling cables. He was a one-man production crew. “What else do I get for a hundred and a half?”
“A warning, for one thing. You want to watch yourself with Millender. He does a lot of political work. Those boondogglers play tackle.”
“That’s worth about a dollar.”
He plunked himself down next to the camera, exhausted suddenly. Sweat was fogging his freshly mopped glasses.
“There was a construction bid scandal up in Iroquois Heights a few years back. You know the Heights?”
“Well enough to burn my clothes every time I come back.”
“There are crookeder places. There have to be.” But he didn’t sound convinced. “Anyway, kickback schemes are old stuff here in town, and up there if someone didn’t grease all the wheels all the time, the whole damn place would squeak to a stop. But this one wouldn’t go away. Did I mention it was an election year?”
“It usually is.”
“Bogardus was the name of the city councilman who took the heat. One morning his driver came to his house to pick him up and found his front door open. He went in and there’s Councilman Bogardus stretched out on the living room rug with two bullets in his chest. Cops never found the gun. There was a coroner’s inquest. You want to hear the verdict?”
I remembered the case. For two weeks it had seemed the reporters would never stop squawking about it. Then they did. A plane crashed, a local beauty queen was crowned, a child’s body turned up in a culvert, and Bogardus went to the library files with the pet rock. But I let Eulisy Worth tell it.
“Suicide. Apparently he shot himself twice in the upper thorax, which if you ever tried it you wouldn’t call it the easy way out, then hid the gun someplace where two thorough police searches couldn’t turn it. All in the sixteen seconds it took his heart to stop pumping. That was raw even for the Heights. You know Royce Grayling?”
“Some kind of dogsbody at city hall. He ran errands for the old mayor.”
“Not just the old mayor. He’s got free range between Lansing and Toledo. Cops clock him doing ninety in a hospital zone, run his ID, and send him on his way with a polite touch to their visors.”
“Your point?”
“Up north they call Grayling Suicide Sam.”
“I get it. What’s he got to do with Millender?”
“They’re tight as hatches. Sailing on Lake St. Clair every weekend, poker at Millender’s place Wednesday night. You couldn’t blast them apart.” He patted the video camera as if it were a big friendly dog. “Worth the hundred and a half?”
“Maybe the best deal I’ve had all year,” I said.