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Authors: Loren D. Estleman
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what?”
“Lily Talbot.”
“I don’t know the name.”
“I have a photograph of you together.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“There’s a bare chance you don’t,” I said. “The woman you
were photographed with was wearing a different head at the time.”
He surprised me by jumping on it. I’d had him pegged for another stall. “I can give you five minutes at eleven o’clock. No more. My calendar’s jammed.”
I said five minutes would be sufficient and we were through talking to each other.
Allen Park is to Detroit what the interior of Africa was to the British Empire under Victoria: Unexplored Territory, a place everyone has heard of but few know exactly where it is or what goes on there. It’s downriver, for one thing, and the peculiar centrifugal force that has been destroying the Motor City since the collapse of the Edsel tends to fling departing residents west, not south. Beyond the spines of the factory stacks its skyline is flat, its surface gridded with broad, empty streets and sutured together with grass-grown railroad tracks leading to and from the calcified Ford River Rouge plant, and when you sit at a stoplight with your windows down you hear the slow, measured heartbeat of life in a nursing home. There are even farms. It seemed a curious location for the headquarters of an expanding architectural firm like Imminent Visions.
But as the man said when the woman’s husband asked him what he was doing naked in his wife’s bedroom closet, everybody’s got to be someplace.
The building was four stories of red brick laid in one-ton sections like giant Legos and sandblasted for that look of genteel old age. It showed just enough of Jay Bell Furlong’s prejudice for the horizontal to support the claim of either Vernon Whiting, Visions’ late founder, or Furlong that the other was a thief. With its flat roof and boxed elms it made me think of Beaver Cleaver’s elementary school, but then I don’t know a groined arch from a ruptured disc.
There was a row of ten diagonally striped parking spaces next to the ramp leading down to an underground garage with a swing-arm gate across the entrance labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY . As I pulled into the only available visitor’s slot, the gate opened for an emerald-green Porsche that whipped around the corner and into the street without a sign of a brake light. It’s a well-known fact that when you pay $75,000 for an automobile it comes equipped with its own invisible force field.
A construction crew in lightweight blue coveralls and canary-colored hardhats was busy with spades and a pneumatic drill in a barricaded area next to the building, widening an excavation that had been made in the pavement by a yellow backhoe parked nearby. I stopped to ask the foreman, a heavy-shouldered redneck in his fifties, what the project was. His coveralls were black with sweat.
He took a toothpick out of the corner of his mouth as if it were impeding his view and onced me over. I must have looked enough like an employee of the building to talk to. “Problem with the underground cable. Something gnawed through the insulation, probably. Up on the poles it’s birds, down here it’s ground moles.”
“Power?”
“Phone.”
“Thank God for cellulars.”
“If you don’t mind every punk kid with a scanner listening in. You’d be surprised what some turkeys talk about over the fucking public airwaves.”
“At least you’re working in the shade.”
“Just till noon. If we don’t finish up by then I’m pulling the crew for a job on the east side of something.”
The lobby was done in glazed green-and-white Mexican tile with shiny Bakelite walls and a three-story shaft ending in a skylight. In the center of the room stood a seven-foot granite statue with holes in it on a pedestal three feet high. The sculptor’s name was engraved in a brass plate on the pedestal. I didn’t recognize it, big surprise. The guard stationed
“Lily Talbot.”
“I don’t know the name.”
“I have a photograph of you together.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“There’s a bare chance you don’t,” I said. “The woman you
were photographed with was wearing a different head at the time.”
He surprised me by jumping on it. I’d had him pegged for another stall. “I can give you five minutes at eleven o’clock. No more. My calendar’s jammed.”
I said five minutes would be sufficient and we were through talking to each other.
Allen Park is to Detroit what the interior of Africa was to the British Empire under Victoria: Unexplored Territory, a place everyone has heard of but few know exactly where it is or what goes on there. It’s downriver, for one thing, and the peculiar centrifugal force that has been destroying the Motor City since the collapse of the Edsel tends to fling departing residents west, not south. Beyond the spines of the factory stacks its skyline is flat, its surface gridded with broad, empty streets and sutured together with grass-grown railroad tracks leading to and from the calcified Ford River Rouge plant, and when you sit at a stoplight with your windows down you hear the slow, measured heartbeat of life in a nursing home. There are even farms. It seemed a curious location for the headquarters of an expanding architectural firm like Imminent Visions.
But as the man said when the woman’s husband asked him what he was doing naked in his wife’s bedroom closet, everybody’s got to be someplace.
The building was four stories of red brick laid in one-ton sections like giant Legos and sandblasted for that look of genteel old age. It showed just enough of Jay Bell Furlong’s prejudice for the horizontal to support the claim of either Vernon Whiting, Visions’ late founder, or Furlong that the other was a thief. With its flat roof and boxed elms it made me think of Beaver Cleaver’s elementary school, but then I don’t know a groined arch from a ruptured disc.
There was a row of ten diagonally striped parking spaces next to the ramp leading down to an underground garage with a swing-arm gate across the entrance labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY . As I pulled into the only available visitor’s slot, the gate opened for an emerald-green Porsche that whipped around the corner and into the street without a sign of a brake light. It’s a well-known fact that when you pay $75,000 for an automobile it comes equipped with its own invisible force field.
A construction crew in lightweight blue coveralls and canary-colored hardhats was busy with spades and a pneumatic drill in a barricaded area next to the building, widening an excavation that had been made in the pavement by a yellow backhoe parked nearby. I stopped to ask the foreman, a heavy-shouldered redneck in his fifties, what the project was. His coveralls were black with sweat.
He took a toothpick out of the corner of his mouth as if it were impeding his view and onced me over. I must have looked enough like an employee of the building to talk to. “Problem with the underground cable. Something gnawed through the insulation, probably. Up on the poles it’s birds, down here it’s ground moles.”
“Power?”
“Phone.”
“Thank God for cellulars.”
“If you don’t mind every punk kid with a scanner listening in. You’d be surprised what some turkeys talk about over the fucking public airwaves.”
“At least you’re working in the shade.”
“Just till noon. If we don’t finish up by then I’m pulling the crew for a job on the east side of something.”
The lobby was done in glazed green-and-white Mexican tile with shiny Bakelite walls and a three-story shaft ending in a skylight. In the center of the room stood a seven-foot granite statue with holes in it on a pedestal three feet high. The sculptor’s name was engraved in a brass plate on the pedestal. I didn’t recognize it, big surprise. The guard stationed
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