DOC HAD RETURNED SPENCE’S cab and ridden a bus into town. He and Ance took a taxi to Inkster. On Michigan Avenue they got out in front of a block of two-story yellow brick buildings sheltering a Kid Koin Laundry, a used furniture store, and a health spa with a rear entrance under a blue awning and a sign reading WE EMPLOY ONLY AMERICAN MASSEUSES.
“Need a back rub?” Doc asked.
“That’s about the only thing they don’t rub here. We’re home.” Ance led the way around the side of the building.
That side bore a ten-foot cartoon of a coin wearing a cowboy hat and drawing a pair of six-guns. One of its booted feet decorated a steel fire door. Stopping there, Ance glanced around the unpaved parking lot and sorted through a dozen keys on a ring the size of a softball. “No sign of the crate. Taber’s sleeping one off again.”
He unlocked the door, and they entered a narrow hallway paved with broken linoleum that ran the length of the building. It smelled like a bus station.
Near the end was another steel door painted to look like wood with a gridded-glass window lettered in black:
M. W. Ance
KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING
“What’s your advertising budget?”
Ance used another key and opened the door. “Strictly Yellow Pages and the county grapevine. You don’t get much off-the-street trade in this business.”
The office was square, well-furnished, and surprisingly neat. It contained a large pearwood desk with a leather top, a telephone and fax machine, a copier, and a complicated-looking coffee maker with a checkerboard of flashing colored lights atop a nine-drawer file cabinet. The rug looked expensive and too ornate for the room, and the desk was bunted up against the wall under a window overlooking the parking lot. Outside, a pickup truck bearing the name of a well-known construction firm on the door of the cab pulled up and a driver in dusty coveralls got out and went into the massage parlor.
“Dumb putz.” Ance was watching, too. “He owns the company. The feds have had that skin shop under surveillance for a couple of months. They think it’s one of the places where city contracts go to get fixed. Rumor is the company that owns the place is a subsidiary of our right and honorable mayor’s holding corporation. You’d think a construction boss would know better than to drive up in one of his own trucks.” He hung up his coat “Terrible what’s happened to corruption in this town. Under Cavanagh it had style.”
“How come you know so much about it?”
“Secrets are only secret from the people who want to know them. When you don’t give a shit, you hear things. That’s your first lesson.” He sat down at the desk and lifted the receiver off the telephone.
His was the only chair in the office. “Where do the customers sit?”
“At home. I work here. I don’t entertain visitors.” He dialed, took out a cigarette while he was waiting, then crumpled it and tossed it into the metal wastebasket next to the desk. “Maynard Ance. Any messages? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.” He hung up and wrote something on his calendar pad. “We got an appointment in Redford at two. You know the Kingswood Manor Apartments on Livernois? They’re down the street from Baker’s Keyboard Lounge.”
“I know Baker’s. Is that where the appointment is?”
“That’s where the transportation is. Apartment 612. If Taber doesn’t answer, tack a note to his door and bring back the bus. Here’s the extra set.” He opened a drawer and handed Doc a pair of keys attached to a miniature license plate.
“What do I do, compare numbers?”
“You’ll know it when you see it. Believe me.”
Doc opened the door. “A guy doesn’t get to do much sitting around this place.”
“One thing you won’t get working for me is hemorrhoids.” Ance put on his glasses.
Kingswood Manor was a quiet complex set back from the road with potted trees on the balconies and patios and a taxi stand in front. Doc paid the driver and went in through the main entrance. Finding the inner door locked, he studied the rows of mailboxes built into the wall and pushed the button next to R. TABER. When there was no answering buzz after his second attempt, he pressed another button at random. A buzzer sounded and he went through the door.
Sunlight slanted through a tall window at the end of the corridor on the sixth floor. When he knocked on 612, the door moved. He knocked again, then pushed it open.
The living room was large and took up most of the apartment, with a kitchenette to the left and a door at the back that he assumed led into a bedroom. Parts of a newspaper, or of several newspapers, lay in tents on a blonde pile carpet and a smell of stale tobacco hung in the air like shabby laundry. On a green vinyl Strato-lounger a man lay as if in state, with his stockinged feet on the swing-out footrest and his head on the cushioned back. He was a blocky, fortyish six feet and two hundred pounds in a white shirt and dark trousers with gray in his short rumpled brown hair and looked like a truck driver, or what a truck driver used to look like before power steering. Between the first two fingers of his right hand resting on the chair arm a cigarette had burned down to the flesh and gone out
For a second Doc thought he’d found his second dead body in twelve hours. Then something broke loose and a fierce racking snore made him jump. After that the noise became rhythmic. It remained loud.
A pony glass and a fifth of Ten High two-thirds empty stood on an end table next to the chair. Doc thought he knew something about Taber then, if this was Taber. It was a special kind of drunk that didn’t wake up when a cigarette scorched the tender flesh between his fingers.
Doc didn’t try to wake him. In a desk with a pullout leaf he found paper and pencils, wrote a note explaining that he was from Maynard Ance and that he was taking the car, signed it, and left it on the leaf, weighting it down with a dirty ashtray. Taber was still snoring when he went out.
A small paved parking lot for the tenants elled behind the building. Four cars were parked there early on a working afternoon and none of the plates matched the number on the key ring Ance had given him. Walking around the outside of the complex to see if there was more to the lot, he spotted a Coachmen motor home as long as a city block, parked next to the building with two wheels up on the berm that flanked the driveway. The numbers checked out. He hadn’t paid much attention when Ance had referred to it as a bus.
The inside was a higher climb than Neal’s pickup. Both front seats were mounted on swivels. Behind them was a dining nook, a stove and refrigerator, a couple of fold-down beds, plenty of drawers and cabinets, a closet of a bathroom with a stainless steel basin and a chemical toilet, and something next to it that had a drain in the floor and so might have been a tiny shower before someone had installed bars around it that opened on one side, turning it into a cell.
The tallest of the cabinets was locked. He unlocked it with a small brass key that didn’t match the others on the ring. Two shotguns, one with a cut-down barrel, a .30–30 Winchester carbine, assorted handguns, and a Thompson submachine gun glistened under a sheen of oil inside foam-lined compartments. Doc had never seen a Thompson outside of old-time gangster movies. The guards on the catwalks at Jackson had carried rifles. He removed the full-length shotgun, a twin of the Ithaca his father had given him on his fourteenth birthday to hunt rabbits, and inspected the breech. It was loaded. He wondered if that was legal in a motor vehicle in Michigan. He wondered if that mattered with the bail bondsman. Feeling suddenly that someone was watching him, Doc put back the weapon and closed and locked the cabinet. Just holding the gun was a violation of parole.
The motor home’s controls were the same as a car’s. He started the motor and, proceeding slowly—he had never tried to maneuver anything so large—pulled forward into the parking lot and backed and turned the wheel and went forward again and backed again, angling the vehicle’s nose out toward the road. He was straightening it for the last time, using both big side mirrors to avoid hitting parked cars, when a face came to the window on the driver’s side eight feet above the ground. Startled, he stamped on the brake.
The face’s mouth was moving, distorting it, but he recognized the man he had left snoring in apartment 612. He rolled down the window.
“—going, you son of a bitch?” The cab filled with the stench of half-digested whiskey.
Doc said, “Maynard Ance’s office. I left you a note. Want to come along?”
“Give me them keys.” An arm in a white sleeve flashed past Doc’s face. Instinctively he slapped it up with his left hand. Taber almost fell off the step but caught hold of the mirror post and hauled himself back up. “Fucking prick cocksucking car thief bastard.” Doc rolled up the window quickly.
An open palm struck the glass, flattening out like a ham and shooting hairline cracks in four directions. Doc’s foot slipped off the brake pedal, and the Coachmen lurched forward. Taber, still off-balance from his own blow, lost his grip on the mirror post and dropped below the window.
Doc braked again a few feet ahead and opened the door to look back. Taber was sitting on the pavement. He hadn’t put on shoes before leaving the apartment and the soles of his socks were filthy. After a few seconds he pushed himself to his knees, rested, and started to get up, cursing loudly the whole time. For a moment Doc was indecisive. Then he yanked the door shut and accelerated. His last view of Taber as he pulled out into Livernois was a flash in the right side mirror of a man running after him, mouth working silently.
Driving along, one hour into his new job, Doc wondered if five hundred a week was going to be enough.