FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES, the sampler read.
Enid Kohler had put her handbag in its usual drawer in the file cabinet and sat down behind her desk before she saw the package, wrapped in white paper without any writing on it and tied with cord. The wrapping tore away from a polished wooden frame, obviously antique, and the needlepoint sentiment worked into brown burlap with brittle thread that had once been scarlet. It was probably eighty years old.
“The kid in the head shop didn’t want to part with it,” Rick said. “He had it hanging over the cash register for luck. I had to buy an incense burner and a rock poster with it. Ever hear of a group called the Swinging Blue Jeans?”
She looked at him standing in the doorway to the next room. He had on a polo shirt and chinos, no more Brooks Brothers. “You’re early.”
“Pammie let me in. She’s upstairs. I wanted to make the sampler myself, but I couldn’t get the hang of it over the long weekend.” He paused. “An oral answer is sufficient.”
“What you said made me mad as hell,” she said. “I’m not some giggly schoolgirl with a crush on the history teacher.”
“No argument. The little wire that connects my mouth to my brain breaks sometimes. I’m sorry.”
Her face lost its porcelain cast. In a sleeveless silk blouse and pleated slacks with her black hair loose to her shoulders, she looked no older than twenty. “That would have done all along. You didn’t need the visual aid, but it’s sweet. You must have looked all over town.”
“Let’s just say I’ve seen enough beaded curtains and macramé in the last three days to last me until nineteen eighty.”
“Have you had breakfast?”
“Is there someplace nearby?”
“That’s right, you never got the tour. This way.” She led him past the staircase and down a short hall to a fully furnished kitchen painted in pastel colors and paved with swirly linoleum. Sunlight shot through a window looking out on a jungle of poppies and forsythia. She lifted the lid off a coffee pot on the electric stove, looked inside, and turned on the burner. “Pammie always remembers to change the pot and always forgets to put heat under it. It’ll be a few minutes. Juice?”
“Anything but grapefruit.”
From the two-toned refrigerator she took a pitcher of orange juice, shook it up, and filled two flowered glasses from the cupboard. They clinked glasses. Sipping, she leaned back against the counter. “What did you think of the Farm?”
“It was a jolt.”
She laughed. “Wendell told me what happened. Are you sold on seat belts?”
“I never thought they didn’t work. If I had a family I’d probably insist on them.”
“Bachelors aren’t any more indestructible than family men. You ought to know, you’ve been gathering statistics.”
“Ever read Orwell?”
“You don’t have to give up your freedom in return for protection,” she said. “You men and your dangerous toys. What’s the point in trying to get yourself killed?”
“That’s not the object. The object is to see how close you can come without actually doing it.”
“That’s crazy.”
He considered retreating. But he’d established himself as devil’s advocate, and to change directions now would be suspicious. That was the part he hadn’t missed about undercover, the cakewalk. “Most of us are passengers,” he said. “Life’s like that. Driving a car is one of the few times when you feel like you’re in control.”
“Right up until you go flying through the windshield.”
“I didn’t say you’re in control, just that you feel like it.”
“Is that why you drive a car with a speedometer that goes up to a hundred and fifty when the speed limit on the expressway is seventy?”
“That Mercedes of yours is no tricycle.”
“It was a gift from my father.”
He used his tongue to pry a string of orange pulp from between two teeth. He hated fresh-squeezed. “Did he give you the ten thousand you donated to the Porter Group?”
“In a way. It was what his life insurance paid.”
He drank his juice, hoping for more pulp; when he was picking his teeth he wasn’t talking.
“He ran into a truck making a wide turn at an intersection,” she said. “They pronounced him dead on arrival at the hospital. My mother never regained consciousness and died a week later of a cerebral hemorrhage. The car wasn’t that badly damaged. They might both have survived if they were wearing seat belts.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That was three years ago. I didn’t need the money from the insurance, so I gave it all to PG. That was before the Farm, before Hell On Wheels, when Wendell was unknown outside of speaking engagements at women’s clubs. My mother had been quite taken with him when he appeared at hers. Anyway, when he got the check he invited me in to tour the office. It was in an old building in East Detroit then, not nearly as nice as this, and his bookkeeping system was a wreck. I didn’t work summers in my father’s real estate office without learning something. I offered to help. I’m still helping.”
Rick said, “He has a talent for attracting just the people he needs for each job. Hal Bledsoe was with American Motors, Günter Damm raced cars for a living, you helped organize a business—”
“—and you were a newspaperman,” she finished. “You have a way of getting information out of people without their noticing. You should have been a detective.”
He met it head on. “I hung around them some. It was the job. Things rub off.”
The pot had been percolating for some time. She took two mugs down from the cabinet. “How do you take it?”
“Cream no sugar.” When she was through with it he looked at the mug she’d handed him. It carried an advertisement for the 1964 Corvair.
She smiled and poured herself a slug of black coffee. “It came free through the mail. You’d be surprised how many lists you wind up on once you begin writing for information. GM’s computer hasn’t made the connection yet between Wendell and W. G. Porter, Esquire. All our pens say General Motors. Wendell gets a big kick out of using them to sign his press releases.”
“He gets a big kick out of the whole thing, doesn’t he? I mean he’s not your stereotypical bluenose alarmist.”
“No one ever said you couldn’t be dedicated and enjoy your work at the same time.”
“What about his wife? Does she enjoy it?”
If he’d expected her to spill her coffee at the mention of the name she disappointed him. “Caroline’s a different breed. Blinders on, look-straight-ahead. She goes for the jugular, whether it’s in the courtroom or out in the competitive world in general. It’s a good match. Without her, Wendell might get tangled up in his altruism and never get anywhere. She knows the odds and how to meet them.”
“Don’t get all sloppy-sentimental.”
He got it then, a whitening at the edges of her nostrils just before she looked up from her mug and saw he was grinning. The tightness evaporated. “Maybe auto safety isn’t quite the holy crusade to her that it is to the rest of us. Maybe she’d be just as aggressive if she were representing a millionaire stockbroker accused of insider trading. I suppose it’s foolish not to expect a lawyer to think like a lawyer.” She glanced at a tiny jeweled watch. “Eight o’clock whistle, Mr. Flintstone. Time to go to the quarry.”
Pammie was licking envelopes at the card table. Today she had on a Minnie Mouse keep on truckin’ T-shirt and her hair was tied into its usual corn-shock with a green ribbon instead of a rubber band. Rick assumed the ribbon was for his benefit. He had it on Lee Schenck’s authority that Pammie had a thing for PG’s newest volunteer.
“I saw the needlepoint thing,” she said. “Pretty smooth.”
“Is there anything you don’t see?” He sat down and slid the telephone over.
“If I don’t know about it, it didn’t happen.”
He was still working his way down the list of towing services. His mind wasn’t on the first two calls; he got a female receptionist who was too wary to give him any useful information or let him speak to anyone else, and whoever answered the telephone the second time hung up before he finished his first question. Pammie watched him cradle the receiver.
“Forgot to sound like a hick,” she said.
Actually he felt like one. The old Rick Amery would have zeroed right in on a source like Pammie instead of letting a week slide by while he worked on Lee and Enid. “You like baseball?” he asked.
“My brother said I was the best shortstop in Royal Oak, but I haven’t had a glove on in years.”
“Tigers are playing a double-header Thursday. If we work hard we can be out of here before the second game. Want to go?”
She uncovered a fortune in braces. “I’ll bring my home cap.”
His next several calls were more successful, and he filled ten pages with notes. Lee Schenck, wearing a tie-dyed shirt that looked as if he’d used it to mop up an oil spill, leaned in while Rick was in the middle of an interview, waved, and withdrew, presumably to go upstairs to his cubbyhole. It was a few minutes before ten. With the exception of Enid, the office appeared to operate on an organic clock.
A little while later Enid came to the door and waited until Rick hung up.
“I was going to draft Lee for this, but since you asked about Caroline I thought you might want to meet her,” she said. “Wendell’s being sued again over something he wrote in Hell On Wheels. I did some of the research, so she wants to ask me some questions and see the records, about fifteen pounds’ worth. You don’t wear a truss or anything, do you?”
“Where’s the stuff?” He rose.
“Upstairs. Lee will show you.”
Lee, sprawled behind a library table in a back bedroom under a steeply tilted ceiling—which explained his habit of ducking his head whenever he stood up anywhere—was reading a magazine from one of the stacks that occupied most of the floor space. His job was to pore through everything that came out on the automobile industry, including Big Three stock reports, and cull any information PG might find useful. Since he never seemed to write anything down, and since Porter wasn’t the kind to retain deadwood with or without a salary, Rick assumed Lee had a photographic memory.
When Rick explained his errand, the long-haired young man pointed the hot rod comic book he was reading at three stuffed accordion files on the table. “Going to see the Arctic Princess, huh?”
“That’s the plan.” He stacked the files one on top of another and hoisted them. It was closer to twenty pounds than fifteen.
“Don’t touch her without insulated gloves.”
Enid was waiting at the foot of the stairs. “I’ve got some paperwork to do on the way over. Mind driving?”
“Not if we take my car.”
“Do you have seat belts?”
“I’ll drive carefully.”
“Drive normally. Men with cars like yours are most dangerous when they’re being careful.”
Outside he put the files on the backseat and held the passenger’s door for her. “Where to?”
“Grosse Pointe, where else?” She sat down and swung her legs inside. He found himself wishing she’d worn a skirt.
Heading east on Jefferson he stopped for the light at Cadieux. A sky-blue Cobra was stopped in the left turn lane with its indicator blinking. Rick grinned and gunned his engine twice. The driver of the Cobra returned the salute. The light changed and they parted company.
“What was that?” Enid was looking at him over a pair of glasses with rose frames.
“Camaraderie of the road.”
She resumed reading the sheet in her hand. “Why don’t you just drop your pants and use a ruler?”
Harry DiJesus gunned his engine back at the guy in the silver Camaro and swung onto Cadieux. He wanted to pop the clutch, but a Tactical Mobile Unit carrying two officers was coming the other way. They passed him without a second look and stopped at Jefferson. He pointed his finger at the rearview mirror and said, “Pow.”
He’d never done a cop and wouldn’t unless he had to, but he’d always wondered how it would be. Most of the guys he’d done were stiffs going in, stationary targets who died surprised. He still got a lift from it, but it wasn’t lasting as long these days; the first nigger in the after-hours joint had been like a dry fuck, he should’ve tried to get him to open the door instead of blasting him through it. A cop would be something different. Fellow professional, good reflexes. Like taking on John Wayne in The Sons of Katie Elder. He always identified with the gun punks in westerns, calling out the top hands with the big reputations. The writers ought to let one of them win once in a while.
But he’d stopped looking for trouble. Every time he had in the past he’d wound up in jail. Others were less lucky and wound up in a tray at the Clark County Morgue. Most of them got off on their guns, it was the only fuck they knew except for what they paid for. At thirty-one, bronzed and well-muscled in his body shirts and tight jeans, DiJesus had never had to pay for it. Recently he’d let his blond hair grow long like the kids’, and the effect on women was more than satisfying. With the gold chains he’d begun wearing in Vegas, it made him look like a surfer.
Vegas was looking better and better. Detroit was a hick town, rolled up the sidewalks at 2:00 a.m. except for the after-hours places, and those were for niggers only. He yawned bitterly. He was having trouble adjusting to sleeping at night and staying up during the day. Back home he rose at sunset in his suite at the Flamingo, ordered breakfast from room service while the rest of the world was sitting down to dinner, and cruised the Strip until dawn, meeting friends and sitting in on games he owned a piece of and once in a while doing someone. That was the rent he paid for the good life.
The shotgun raids were a lift, one of the few things that made Detroit bearable. The tall nigger in the barbershop, now; that was a classic. The boy had been an athlete and still had balls, charging him after the first blast with his right side blown away and nothing in his hands but the telephone receiver he’d been holding when they came through the door. DiJesus had waited until he’d almost reached him with those long arms, then squeezed off again. That blast spun him around and folded him up like a big spider.
DiJesus would be glad when this one was over. He was used to dry heat. The sweaty air here made him feel wrung out and greasy and he was developing a rash on his neck from the ski mask, which had been a better idea in the cool desert nights. His incentive for coming east, a piece of the local numbers, wasn’t worth scratching and sweating his way through the long sleepy days. Max and Georgie, his partners in the shotgun raids, could do what they liked with what he was paying them; he himself would be an absentee landlord.
He braked for the light at Mack. It changed and a horn blatted behind him. The dentate grille of a gray 1959 Cadillac—“nigger diesels,” he’d heard them called up here—leered at him in the mirror. Behind the windshield, two smaller sets of teeth gleamed just as brightly in black faces under big hats. DiJesus turned in his seat to give them the one-finger salute—remembering even as he did so that he’d seen the same car a block behind him on Jefferson. Something slid out of the window on the passenger’s side and the Cobra’s rear window disintegrated in a shower of opalescent bits.