Motor City Blue by Loren D. Estleman Page B

slept and ate in company-owned homes built in the very shadow of the mines that employed them.
    I’d started the day on Scotch and don’t mix my drinks, and in any case the sun was well up and watching me, so it wasn’t the bottle I was going for when I unlocked the door and crossed through the outer office. Today my own office telephone was the only one available that hadn’t already received the attention of some industrious fellow with a crowbar and a yearning for a pocket full of quarters.
    I made two calls, one to information, the second to the number the impatient-sounding operator gave me for the Miriam H. Fordham Institute for Women in Lansing. Esther Brock turned out to be a mannish-voiced matron who claimed direct descent from General Sir Isaac Brock, the canny old Britisher who shelled Detroit from across the river in 1812 and marched a motley assortment of guerrillas, British regulars, and Indians up Jefferson Avenue to make this the only major American city ever to surrender itself to occupation by a foreign power. She told me all that in the first five minutes, which should give you some idea of how garrulous the beldam was once you broke through her crust. I was touching base. Yes, Miss Bernstein told her two weeks before the Christmas break that she was leaving school to get married. No, she didn’t say who the young man was. Yes, her roommate was certain that it was Miss Bernstein she saw getting into a car with a man later that afternoon. No, the young lady was no longer enrolled at Fordham. Married, don’t you know, and living in Maine or Maryland or some other place that begins with M. So few finish these days. Miss Bernstein herself had entertained hopes of leaving school for a theatrical career, of all things. Have you a sister or a daughter of college age, Mr. Walker? Oh, that’s unfortunate. Yes, you’ll be the first to know if Miss Bernstein is heard from. Good-bye, Mr. Walker, and do remember Fordham when you marry and are blessed with female progeny.
    I could still smell lemon verbena and starched white gloves when I hung up. I glanced at the calendar on the wall with the picture of a pretty girl on it whose clothes went up with the clear plastic flap to make sure I hadn’t slipped back fifty years during the conversation. Then I consigned the mail I’d picked up on my way in to the wastebasket and left for Erskine Street, where they took down the red lights a long time ago for the same reason a church needs no sign to tell you it’s a house of God.
    Story’s After Midnight shared a block of age-blurred building with half a dozen similar establishments on the north side of Erskine, a street where business was conducted behind graffiti-smeared clapboard fences and from the back seats of spanking new Caddies and Lincolns, where cops paired up on sticky August nights to patrol on raw nerve-ends, thumbs stroking the oily black hammers of the holstered magnums they preferred to the .38 specials issued by the department, ears tuned for the quick scuffing of rubber soles on the sidewalk behind them and the wood-on-metal clacking of a sawed-off pump shotgun being brought to bear just beyond the next corner, a street where a grunt of uncontrollable passion and a stifled scream in the gray, stinking depths of a claustrophobic alley could mean a ten-dollar quickie or a rape in progress. With its stripped, wheelless hulks that had once been cars and aimlessly blowing litter, it was the kind of street you never saw on the posters put out by the Chamber of Commerce. If you got a glimpse of it at all it was on the eleven o’clock news, whose cameras had recorded hundreds of feet of rubber-wrapped corpses being trundled out of narrow doorways into the rears of ambulances backed up to the sidewalk on streets like this, while in the foreground earnest young reporters with microphones in their hands and blow-dried hair stirring in the wind rattled off names and facts in modulated baritones, acting as Greek