The Lillian Byrd Crime Series Page 3

“Plus she has good taste in music.”

  “Hmm.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “I should probably inform you that Bonnie’s got her eye on her too.”

  “Well, doesn’t she put the moves on every DJ who comes in here? I mean, remember Lauren?”

  “Oh, God, Lauren,” he groaned. “Do you know the whole story of that? What happened when Lauren quit?”

  “No, you know I’m not on the inside track of anything. Do tell.” At that instant, we heard Bonnie’s voice cut through the low din: “Kevin!”

  “Can she hear us?” I said.

  “She probably read my lips. I think she’s got demonic powers.”

  “She must be a bitch at times, but aren’t all bosses?” I finished my sentence hastily because Bonnie had uncoiled herself from her barstool and was making her way toward us. She had a thick body and frizzy orange-toned hair.

  “I called you,” she said, pushing her face into Kevin’s.

  He drew back a little. “I was coming.”

  “I want your ass covering this floor. I don’t pay you to chit-chat.” In the dimness her face looked pasty, yet I thought she was attractive in a full-lipped, overblown sort of way. “Gwen needs a hand with the Bloody Mary mix.” Kevin hustled off, and Bonnie cast me a fishy look. I refrained from saying, “How come you’ve got such a nice joint here, yet you yourself are so disagreeable?”

  Right then Bonnie’s look shifted, as if some invisible person had whispered something in her ear. Some nasty gossip about me, perhaps. Her eyes widened, and she looked at me hard and deep. I held her gaze out of self-defense, wondering what she was thinking. Then her eyes softened and dropped. I felt relieved without knowing why.

  “You’re a prize, aren’t you?” she said, looking at my loafers.

  “I’ve been called worse.”

  Abruptly, she turned and waded through the crowd back to her place at the bar. What the fuck that little comment meant, I didn’t know.

  Saturday night was now in full bloom, and the Snap was getting more crowded. The air-conditioning was going full blast, but there were so many people smoking that the air was blue. I hung at the outskirts of the bar for a while, talking with acquaintances, then danced a few steps with a chipper schoolteacher I knew. I do love to dance. I kept glancing over at the DJ booth.

  There was a pause in the music, and Jean put on a tape and slipped out of the booth. She moved smoothly through the crowd to the restroom. I sidled over to intercept her as she came out. What the hell, I thought.

  After clearing the door, she almost bumped my chest with her nose. As she looked up, I saw her eyes deciding whether to be irritated or interested.

  “Get you a drink?” I asked quickly.

  She smiled a cool little smile and tipped her head back to see me better. I tried to look wonderful.

  To my utter delight, she took my arm.

  3

  We carved our way through the haze to the tiny table next to her booth. A red candle pot flickered on it.

  “I’m Lillian Byrd,” I said as we sat down.

  “I’m Jean.”

  I waited.

  A smile. “Just Jean.”

  You know the old saying that you’re really getting to know a gay woman when you’re on a last-name basis with her? I smiled back.

  Kevin, ever alert, appeared, and she ordered an orange juice. I made it two.

  “I don’t drink liquor while I’m working,” she explained. “I drink coffee in the booth.”

  Up close she appeared less confident than she had in the DJ booth. The tape was playing some thumpy song, and the background noise was probably as loud as it ever got, but I thought I detected a quaver in her voice.

  “I was admiring you from over there,” I said, “and I thought it’d be nice to talk for a few minutes.”

  “You’re very nice.”

  “Well. It’s nice to be nice.”

  The crook of my arm was still vibrating where her hand had nestled in it. Her skin was flawless, and I saw large, even teeth when she smiled. I noticed a sideways jog at the bridge of her nose. A perfect imperfection, I thought. Her eyes sort of swerved around my face without coming in, though.

  “Were you a DJ someplace else before here?”

  “Not really, but I told Bonnie I was experienced, that I spun tunes back in my hometown.”

  “Which was?”

  She looked at me. Our orange juices came.

  “To your health,” I toasted. We sipped. “Well,” I said, “I might as well ask you this very extremely important question that’s been on my mind for minutes now.”

  Her eyebrows dived.

  “Do you like terrific food?”

  She laughed, relaxing a fraction. “Of course.”

  “Well, there’s a great all-night deli up on John R where we could grab a sandwich later. They bake their own rye bread—it’s out of this world.”

  She considered that. I watched a muscle in her smooth cheek twitch. She held her body gracefully; you could tell it was resilient and strong. I yearned to get her out on the dance floor.

  She picked up the candle pot and cradled it in her hands, making the hot wax run up the sides. The wick flared. Her nail beds glowed pink, like tiny rosebuds.

  “I’m in a relationship now,” she finally said.

  “Oh.”

  “But I’d like to get out of it.”

  “Oh!”

  She set the candle pot down. “This—this person is not a bad person, but there’s not the—involvement.” Then she looked me right in the eye. “There’s not the passion.”

  “I see.”

  “I used to be a good little girl. Now I want to break loose.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “You’re intelligent.”

  I couldn’t tell whether this was sarcastic. My reporter instincts were churning. I wanted to ask her a hundred questions—learn where she lived, what she did during the daytime, how her nose got crooked, what she liked besides good food, what she hated.

  I love learning what people hate.

  But I held back: Her manner informed me that she’d bolt if I tried to learn too much too fast.

  Her back was to the bar. I saw Bonnie watching us. Jean saw my glance, followed it over her shoulder, and gazed at Bonnie for a long moment. When she turned back she wore a soft smile.

  “Are you and Bonnie—?”

  “Oh! No!” Jean said. “But she’s nice.”

  “I don’t think so.” I ironed my cocktail napkin with my palm.

  “You have to get to know her, that’s all. She’s nice to talk to.”

  “Hmm.”

  She curled her hands around her glass. “What do you do, Lillian Byrd?”

  She seemed to want to warm up to me, yet there was this moat of nervous reserve around her. I sought a drawbridge.

  “You mean for a living? I’m a reporter for—”

  “A reporter!”

  The moat widened into a chasm, just like that.

  “Well, yeah, for the Eagle Eye. You know Eagle? The Eye’s just a weekly town paper. What’s wrong? Are you, like, some kind of undercover—”

  “I have to get back to work. I’m sorry. There’s nothing the matter with you being a reporter. I guess I must seem jittery.”

  “Yeah!”

  “It’s just that—” she stopped. Her eyes appeared to glaze over, then she said something under her breath. I didn’t hear her clearly, but it sounded like, “I don’t know what I’m doing here.” She might have said, “I don’t know what I’m mourning here.” Her gaze fell to the tabletop. “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  I gave it one last shot. “Sandwich later?”

  “No.”

  “All right.”

  She covered my hand with hers for an instant. “Thanks for talking.”

  “Sure. See you.”

  Hoo boy, I thought as I wended my way back to the bar. That’s one conflicted chick. One gorgeous, fascinating, conflicted
chick. Comfortable enough behind the glass, but not quite ready to come out and play.

  I left soon after, bringing a Coke out to Emerald in the parking lot. My car was where I’d left it near the mouth of the alley. Some stuff on the ground caught my eye. You know how you can tell one kind of trash from another, even if it’s smashed or dirty—McDonald’s box, six-pack ring, vodka bottle? The little objects near my car didn’t fit any normal category, so I bent down and looked closer: a couple of plastic syringes, one with a needle, one without.

  “Hey, Emerald, you gotta watch out for these homeless doctors around here,” I called.

  He looked over and laughed. “I try to run a clean parking lot!”

  I swung my foot back to kick the syringes aside, when he said, “Wait, I’d best pick those up. Kids ride their bikes through here sometimes.”

  Then I noticed something else. In the dirty light filtering down from the one tall pole overlooking the parking lot, something gleamed softly. I thought maybe someone had lost an earring; it looked like a pearl or an opal. I squatted and picked it up. Slowly straightening up, I rolled it over in my hand. It was small and beautiful, a God-made thing of simplicity and valuable function, but when I realized what it was, I flung it away from me.

  It was a tooth. An incisor, I judged, from either a dog or a really big rat. Some dried blood clung to the root. I heard it pink on the concrete somewhere in a shadow.

  I peered down the alley, cluttered with dumpsters, boxes, piles of aging refuse. Urban alleys, like deserts, teem with life not always visible, life sustained by strange means. Emerald bent down and carefully picked up the syringes. A few drops of blood were coagulating inside one. In his wrinkled palm the needle looked terrifyingly sharp. He shook his head. Traffic flashed by on Livernois.

  4

  So. I’d seen, spoken with, and touched this woman, this murdered woman. It’d been a little more than a week since Kevin had pointed her out to me, and now she was a corpse in a Polaroid. Still holding the picture, looking out the window from the upper floor of the police department, I felt queasy. God. Dead. A woman with a husband and a fake name working at the Snapdragon. Was she or wasn’t she? It’d be damn unusual for a straight woman to apply for a DJ job at a women’s bar. On the other hand, many a married woman discovers the lesbian in herself and explores it before letting go of the man. I know I felt something stirring in Jean—well, now Iris—that night.

  I studied the picture more closely. A thin stream of dried blood ran from one ear, the lips were closed, the mouth looked bruised and swollen. Had she been beaten up first? I’d learn more when Ciesla and Porrocks got back from the morgue. I shook my shoulders to bring the blood back up to my face, then sat down at Ciesla’s desk to copy the information from the white sheet into my notebook. When I was done I should’ve left the photo on the desk next to the file, but I looked over at Porrocks’s desk and saw a few more shots that looked identical. I slipped the photograph into my notebook. The other cops were busy, and no one noticed.

  Why did I take it? I didn’t rightly know. I sat for a minute, thinking. My old taboo of not talking about my private life on the job was rearing a new, surprisingly ugly head. For of course, if I told Ciesla about seeing Iris Macklin at the Snapdragon, I’d essentially be coming out to the whole police department. A daunting thought at the moment, because believe me, there’s something to the generalization that cops tend to be homophobic. The ones in Eagle, anyway. I’d heard the edge of anxiety in their voices as they swapped fag jokes in the squad room.

  But that wasn’t all of it, couldn’t be, because in a case of murder, so what? “Oh, I had to lie to stay in the closet!” No. There was something else, a feeling I had about this woman and her death. It had to do with privacy, her privacy, a strange and dangerous privacy. That was my vague thought at the moment.

  As I crossed back to the office through the oppressive street air, I figured if those cops are cops, they’ll find out about Iris’s job at the Snapdragon soon enough, and that was about all I’d be able to tell them anyway. They already knew more about her than I had after talking with her for ten minutes. Who knew whether her connection at the Snap had anything to do with her death in the first place? It occurred to me that perhaps the Detroit dailies would get a photo of Iris from her husband and run that along with a story on her murder. Then maybe somebody else from the bar would recognize her and say something, if the husband didn’t know or wouldn’t tell.

  To my relief, Bucky’s sparkle-blue Camaro was gone from the curb in front of the Eye. Inside, everyone had been feasting on the day’s big event. As I passed through the outer office, Archie turned from his carrier lists. “Lillian, admit it, you were trying to emasculate him, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “My aim was lousy, that’s all.” I left the door to my office open as usual, and went to work editing a pile of filler copy. It was Monday and we published on Wednesdays, so the Detroit dailies would break the news of the murder first, on Tuesday. I’d wait to begin writing my story on it until Tuesday, when doubtless more facts would be available. Not that the daily papers made too terribly much of murders, plain old murders: People got murdered every week—every day, it seemed—in Detroit.

  Ed Rinkell stuck his head, topped with its dead-hamster hairpiece, into my doorway. “Got a minute?”

  “Sure, Ed.” He came in and lowered himself into my side chair. He was an indoor mountain of a man, thick-necked and full-bellied. He liked his shirts tight and his ties wild and woolly.

  “Bucky’s at the hospital,” he said. His face was grave beneath its thatch of Dynel.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “He needed stitches.”

  “You have absolutely got to be kidding.” If I were Bucky, the last thing I’d have done would be to go to the hospital and get stitches in my butt. I’d have let it bleed.

  “They, uh, they said he’d have a big scar if he didn’t get stitches.”

  I laughed. “I’m sorry for laughing, Ed, but jeez. How big could it be? How many stitches?” I imagined Bucky explaining a jumbo old scar to some brainless girlfriend someday.

  “Four.”

  Unbrightly, I laughed again. “I hope he lives.”

  “Bucky would love to see me fire you.”

  “I’m sure he would. Ed, man, look. I don’t hate Bucky. We’ve all gotten along pretty well here, except for one thing. I just wanted him to keep his hands off me.”

  He blew out his breath impatiently. “Lillian, read between the lines here. You’re one of the best things that’s ever happened to this paper. You’re a great worker, and everybody likes you.” Inwardly I cringed. Somebody everybody likes is usually a mealy-mouthed loser. “Even Bucky liked you.” Past tense, hooray.

  “Maybe he did. I don’t think Bucky actually likes many women, but that’s another topic.”

  “I know Bucky. Hell.” Rinkell paused. “He’s a young dog.”

  “He’s twenty-three years old, and somebody ought to teach him how to behave. This is an office, Ed, not a fucking stag party.”

  He knew Bucky got what was coming to him, but he couldn’t admit it. “Maybe if you apologized—”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Lillian, you stabbed the kid! What’s wrong with you? You’re usually so reasonable. What the hell’s your problem?”

  “I just got sick of the bullshit. Ed, this doesn’t have to be a big deal. You didn’t handle things, so I did. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I don’t want to fire you.”

  “Good, I think Bucky’s the one you should consider firing.”

  Rinkell popped out of the chair and gave off a sound like a blast furnace.

  I backpedaled. “Forget it, forget it. This is not the hill I want to die on. Hey, have you talked to any cops today? Somebody dumped a body last night on old man Patchell’s property. Woman from Southfield.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Iris Macklin.”

  �
�Don’t know the name.”

  “I’ll call and see if Ciesla’s back from the coroner’s yet.”

  Rinkell turned to go, then turned back. “Do you think your job’s secure? It’s not.”

  I shrugged. “Guess it’s out of my hands.”

  “Goddamn it.” He went out without saying anything else.

  Ciesla and Porrocks hadn’t gotten back, so I kept at my work until six o’clock. They were either still at the morgue or gone on to somewhere else, so I went home.

  5

  My usual through-the-door routine consisted of greeting Todd and doing a cursory check for Todd-damage, then getting my bra off as fast as possible and putting on a T-shirt.

  Todd was my truest friend, ever since I lifted him out of his cage at the state fair the year before and he bit my left index finger almost in half.

  I’d gone into the rabbit building for the hell of it, having split off from a group of friends. I fell in love with every bunny in the place, except the longhaired ones, which scared me, like stuffed toys come to life. I knew my ardor would fade as soon as I left the building. But toward the end of a row, so close to the doors that I could smell the horses in the next building, a compelling scene was unfolding.

  An old man stood next to a rabbit cage, looking furiously over the shoulder of a judge who had just set a rabbit back in the cage. I looked over the judge’s other shoulder and watched as he wrote on a card attached to the cage, “You have not even sexed this rabbit correctly. It is a male. DISQUALIFIED.”

  The judge moved on dispassionately to the next row. The old man’s eyes met mine. “Shit,” he said, making it into two syllables: “Shee-it.” He looked and sounded like Walter Brennan in the old TV show The Real McCoys. If you can remember drinking Tang, thinking it tasted good, and watching The Real McCoys, simultaneously, you’re about my age.

  “I ain’t made that mistake in a long time,” he said in a voice that suggested a rusty privy hinge moving back and forth. He scratched the pit of his chest. “I don’t need no more males this year.”

  I regarded the rabbit. It was a young standard-style one with short brown fur, looking unusually dignified, I thought, for having just had its private parts pushed around. “Want a rabbit, lady?” the old man said. “We’ll likely eat him otherwise.”