Free Motor City Blue by Loren D. Estleman

standing behind the one being handed into the police van on John R I’ll tear up my press card.”
    I breathed some air. “That’s fast sliding for someone who was the apple of her guardian’s eye in December.”
    “They don’t call it the skids for nothing. That’s not all. It was a slow news day. The Free Press covered the same raid, without pictures. But they did publish the girls’ names. How does ‘Martha Burns’ sound?”
    “Just like something an eighteen-year-old girl named Maria Bernstein might pick if she wanted to remain incognito without giving up her identity. Give me the rest of it.” He did, along with the names of all the others, just in case. I took them down in my notebook. “Thanks, Barry. By the way, how are you guys planning to handle the Kramer killing?”
    “What’s the Kramer killing?”
    “Maybe the cops haven’t released his name. They found him imitating a spare tire in the parking lot at City Airport this morning. He had a hole in his head the size of the Windsor Tunnel.”
    “I was just talking to the city editor. He said that unless the mayor sticks his Size Nine in his mouth again, tonight’s front page is going to be all state and national.”
    I gave that a couple of seconds. Then, “Keep scratching, newshawk.” I pegged the receiver before he could ask any questions. But as I stepped aside for the delinquent who was waiting to smash the telephone I thought up some questions of my own.
    The address he’d given me on John R—a street named, along with Williams, after the city’s first mayor, who left no other legacy—belonged to a large, neat-looking brick house with a fenced yard that even under a pile of snow looked as if it complied with the antiblight ordinance, no matter how many others it might ignore. A big, square man, black, in a green polar coat with a fur-lined hood, was busy shoveling out the front walk when I let myself in through the picket gate. When he saw me he stopped shoveling and straightened to his full height, which turned out to be a lot fuller than I’d expected. If he was less than six foot six I had shrunk.
    He wasn’t ready yet for the River Rouge scrap heap, but his best days were forty years behind him. His skin was the faded gray of old age, and where scar tissue had not formed there was not an inch of it that wasn’t cracked and squeezed into dozens of sharp creases like a crumpled sheet of foil that’s lost its shine. What I suppose he called a nose had been bent and straightened out so many times that now it was just something on his face. His shoulders were broad and square and he had no waist to speak of. He wouldn’t be any harder to stop than a runaway oil tanker.
    “You got business, mister?” Nobody had ever punched him in the throat. He had plenty of volume but there didn’t seem to be any anger behind it, just suspicion.
    “I do if you’re in charge.” The way he peeled back his hood on one side and cocked a cauliflower ear in my direction told me he hadn’t heard. He wouldn’t, at any normal level. Now I understood why he shouted. I repeated it, louder this time. His eyes narrowed as far as they were able.
    “You a cop?”
    I shook my head. “Just a guy.”
    “Miss Beryl, she don’t do no business this time of day.”
    “I’m here on another kind of business.”
    He jerked a gloved thumb back over his shoulder. “See the lady. I just shovels snow and turns back cops.” As if to prove it he resumed his labors, taking forty pounds at a swing. I sidestepped the flashing blade and mounted the stoop.
    A doe-eyed black maid answered the bell. I flashed my license for the third time that day, minus the badge this time, and asked for the lady of the house. She wasn’t impressed. Confronted with a faceful of door, I was about to try again when it opened back up and I was ushered inside. I gave the maid my coat and hat and she blew. If she could speak at all I didn’t hear it.
    I was marooned for a time in the middle