Sinister Heights by Loren D. Estleman Page B

an annual homicide rate approaching four figures and a man in the mayor’s office that had cost the city a million dollars to redecorate to his taste. There’d been plenty of work in those days, with cops moonlighting as contract killers and jealous wives looking for their husbands with magnums in their handbags. When I’d had enough nostalgia I called to reserve a table for two in nonsmoking and did a little investigative work not related to the Stutch case until noon. Then I went out looking for a place that served underdone Brussels sprouts for lunch. I had a hankering.
    When I came out picking my teeth a caramel-colored Chevy was parked behind my Cutlass on the street with someone smoking a cigarette on the passenger’s side. The visor was down and I couldn’t see his face. It was only worth noticing because I sometimes do that when I’m watching for someone and I want the idly curious passersby to think I’m waiting for the driver to come back from an errand.
    A few blocks later I spotted a caramel-colored Chevy in my rearview mirror, three lengths behind and a lane over. There was no passenger and the driver’s face was just a blank oval in front of the headrest.
    It didn’t mean anything. It’s a popular color and there are more American-made cars in the city than anything else except one-way streets and liquor stores. Just because I was brought up on Steve McQueen movies I took several shortcuts and a couple of long ones, nicked a yellow light on Michigan, and looked for the car. It wasn’t there.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN
    As it happened I didn’t get the chance to bet on the black seven or any other number. A squirt in a ballcap was waiting in my reception room to deliver a summons on behalf of a deadbeat dad I’d flushed out of a woodpile six months before, and I was on the telephone with a lawyer all afternoon getting out of it. His fee ate up what I’d earned on the job. No one sues you over the cases you can’t close. It’s hell on incentive.
    I got to the restaurant ten minutes late, but still ahead of Iris. That much about her hadn’t changed. An aristocratic hostess seated me out of the main traffic path and a chirpy young waitress wearing a necktie with Yosemite Sam on it brought me a double Scotch. I was stirring the ice when Iris drifted in.
    The clientele was mostly the MTV generation, black-dyed hair and clothes from the Morticia Addams line, so she didn’t turn as many heads as she would have among the general population, but she didn’t slip in under the radar either. She wore a cherry-red blazer with suede pumps to match, an ivory silk skirt, and a turban that might have been made from the same bolt of cloth, at one time available only to members of the Egyptian royal family. She didn’t wear a blouse. The dusting of freckles slightly lighter than her medium-brown skin spilled like gold dust into the shadow where the blazers lapels met. I knew where it ended, but that had been a long time ago, when there were still canals on Mars. She looked like Cleopatra after a makeover.
    I rose and she made a little purring growl deep in her throat and hugged me tight. She wore no scent, which didn’t mean she had none. She smelled as clean as Kilimanjaro.
    Keeping her hands on my upper arms, she pushed back for an objective view. “You haven’t aged a minute. What’s your secret?”
    â€œChoosing liars for friends. You look like a new car.”
    â€œToday I feel like an ’83 Pacer. My past came up in the deposition. It was like drowning and seeing my life flash in front of my eyes. It got an X rating.”
    â€œI think it’s NC-17 now.”
    â€œWho gives a shit? I spent most of it in sweaty little rooms filled with smoke. I ought to look like a Virginia ham.”
    â€œI just came off four hours with a lawyer. That makes me an all-day sucker. What are you drinking?”
    â€œWhatever’s open. In a