RICK LIKED THE NEW apartment on Watson, but he missed the personal touch he had enjoyed at his last place of residence.
At $130 per month, the new place—three rooms with bath on the fifth floor of a turn-of-the-century brick building overlooking Woodward—fell easily within reach of his new salary, and the additional room had reunited him with some items he had placed in storage when he broke up with Charlotte; but the anonymity of apartment living took some getting used to after eleven months in the little bedroom over Mrs. Hertler’s kitchen.
Not that he spent much time on the fifth floor. After sleeping in late this Sunday, he had thrown on a T-shirt and jeans, eaten two quick scrambled eggs over Dick Tracy, and come down to the sun-plastered square of asphalt next to the building to inspect the lifter he had heard under the hood of the Z-28 earlier in the week. He had identified and corrected the problem in five minutes with a toothbrush and a capful of gasoline, then as long as he was there he went ahead and changed the points and drained the crankcase. Now, four hours later, he was stretched out under the car replacing the rusty bolts that held the crossover in place with a stainless steel set purchased from the hardware store on the corner. The radio was tuned to CKLW, where the disk jockey was playing the Beatles’ Revolver album in its entirety. Rick would have switched stations if his hands weren’t full. “We had a pretty good thing going in rock ’n’ roll until the Brits came in and screwed it up,” he’d once told Charlotte. She was a fan, and that had been the beginning of the end.
“If I didn’t recognize the car, I’d still know it’s you by those kids’ shoes you wear.”
He looked at a pair of white plastic wingtips standing in front of the car. “Hello, Dan. Get WJR on, will you? Lolich is pitching.”
Dan Sugar walked around to the driver’s side. The radio went off. “Later. I was thinking maybe you lost my telephone number.”
“I’ve been going to call. Goddamnit!” The wrench slipped and he knocked the top off a knuckle. A trickle of blood tunneled through the dirt and grease on the back of his hand.
“What do you think of Porter? I know you met, on account of one of my boys saw you leave the office together yesterday.”
Rick sucked the knuckle. “Who was he watching, me or Porter?”
“Hey, I plug the holes. That’s why I got sixteen people under me, seventeen counting you. So is he a flake or what?”
“He’s not any part of a flake. I haven’t got a handle on him yet, but I know that much. And you can forget that stuff about him not knowing anything about cars. He’s either the best driver I ever saw or the luckiest.”
“Where’d he take you?”
“To a farm.”
“You mean like with cows and turnips? What’s the matter, the fresh produce at the A & P ain’t good enough for the Boy Wonder? It ain’t safe enough for him, maybe.”
Rick tightened the last bolt and wriggled out from under the car. Sugar had on white flared slacks to go with the shoes, a yellow bowling shirt with Dan stitched over the pocket in green script—the tail out to cover his gun—and a pair of wraparound sunglasses that made him look like Gort the robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still. His big raw face was cherry red in the sunlight.
“He’s got his own proving ground up in Macomb County.” Rick wiped his hands off on a streaked yellow chamois. The knuckle was still seeping. “His security’s a joke, but the tests he runs there are your real threat. Everything else is just numbers.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s for the boys in Legal. What about Porter, his slip showing yet?”
“I’m pretty sure he’s not running a white slavery racket on Whittier, but I’ve only been working there two days. Jesus Christ, Dan.”
“How long’s it take to get the scent? You’re a little rusty, maybe.”
“Undercover isn’t like Nescafé. You have to bring people along. That doesn’t happen overnight.”
“We ain’t got much longer than overnight. Washington wants a goat before November and we’re it unless we can discredit Porter first. This I Led Three Lives shit don’t cut it.”
Rick wiped a spot of grease off the Camaro’s fender and slammed down the hood. “I already blew off one source for pushing too hard. I can get it for you fast or I can get it for you good. Take your pick.”
“Just get it. You let me worry about making it good.” Sugar produced a spiral notebook from his hip pocket and leafed through it. “What about this broad works for him, this Kohler dame? I hear she’s a looker, anything in that?”
“That’s the source I blew off. I’m working on it.”
“He spends more time at the office than he does with his wife, the high-class lawyer. I bet them desks see more action than the beds at Howard Johnson’s.”
“It’s promising, but don’t count on it. He’s pretty caught up in his work.”
“Maybe he’s queer.”
“You’re wasting my day off, Dan.”
“Yeah, we shouldn’t be seen together out in the open anyway.” He ran a finger along the Camaro’s silver finish. “Nice. I kind of liked the yellow.”
“I can tell by your shirt.”
“Spiffy, ain’t it? I had it custom done in this little place in Hamtramck. I’m thinking of starting up a team at GM, call ourselves the Security Sleuths. You can join after you finish this job.”
“What’s your average?”
“I don’t get you.”
“Do you bowl?”
“Never tried. Can’t be too hard, with so many Polacks doing it.”
Rick gathered up his tools. “I’ll call when I have something.”
“Call anyway,” Sugar said. “You give me a toothpick, I’ll build a cabin.”
After he’d gone, Rick went upstairs, took a shower, and put a Band-Aid on his injured knuckle, which had begun to throb. He changed into a clean shirt and sweatpants, punched holes in a can of Schlitz, and watched two innings of the baseball game on TV. When Kaline grounded into a double play to retire the Tigers in the seventh his mind wandered.
Everything in this world that walks or flies or swims has got to shit somewhere; it’s only a matter of time before they pick the wrong place. Everybody fucks up.
Where do the Wendell Porters of this world go to fuck up?
Maybe they don’t have to go anywhere. Maybe somebody fucks up for them.
He had a sudden thirst for knowledge.
It was the way of these infrequent attacks that they occurred invariably on Sundays and holidays, when the library was closed.
He watched the game a few minutes longer, then turned off the set and went into the bedroom, where he pulled a faded Stroh’s beer case from the back of the closet.
It contained most of the magazines he had held on to over the past several years—mostly Motor Trend and Popular Mechanics—along with the inevitable dross that got swept up in any unorganized collection: a Newsweek with Khrushchev on the cover, several Photoplays, the special Life JFK issue following the assassination, and some Cosmopolitans. Those and the movie magazines had belonged to Charlotte.
He sat cross-legged on the floor among the torn and creased covers and sorted through the Cosmopolitans.
It was funny how things stuck in your head, particularly when you kept coming across the same magazine when you were looking for something else. Each time he had planned to throw out the women’s publications, and each time after he’d found what he’d wanted he had returned the stack to the box.
He found it now, a single line on the cover among that month’s features—the month being March 1964—checked the table of contents, and turned to the article. The page opposite the title was a full-length black-and-white photograph of a woman in a tailored dress carrying a thick briefcase down the ramp from a commercial jetliner. Her face was turned slightly away from the camera, presenting a clean-edged profile, long of neck with blond hair up, that recalled Princess Grace. The title was “The Queen of Torts.”
The article that followed, written in a breathless style by a female journalist clearly in awe of her subject, recounted a day in the life of Caroline Porter, with a brief introduction tracing her rapid rise from storefront lawyer to canny counsel to the Porter Group. Her landmark case, in which she had successfully defended her husband from a charge of industrial espionage brought by General Motors’ battery of male attorneys, received only a line. The writer was far more concerned with Mrs. Porter’s mannish fashions and trademark pearl earrings, the only jewelry she ever wore aside from her wedding band.
Although it was useless for Rick’s purposes, he read the piece twice before reinterring the magazine with the others in the beer case and shoving the case back inside the closet. Tomorrow when the library opened he would read more.
Caroline Porter.
Enid Kohler.
Say what one liked about Wendell Porter, he had a knack for surrounding himself with beautiful capable women.