Sugartown

by Loren D. Estleman

“What’s he like?”

  “What’s Captain Grabowska like?” He came out tugging an old blue sweatshirt down over the belt of a pair of faded jeans. They nearly matched and he might as well have stuck with the uniform. He would have that look no matter what he wore. “You know the prowl-car cop I told you about, that was throwing up in front of the Evancek place?”

  “Yeah.”

  He went on looking at me. I said, “You’re kidding.”

  “His stomach was a lot stronger when it came to kissing asses.” Mayk pulled the Colt Python out of the holster on the table and inspected the cylinder. Then he scooped a couple of rubber bands off the refrigerator door handle where a dozen of them hung like tired brass rings, snapped them around the smooth wooden butt to keep it from sliding, and stuck the gun inside his belt in front, pulling the sweatshirt down over it. “You carrying?”

  I shook my head. “I hardly ever need it to talk to an ex-cop.”

  “Stick close, then.” He opened the front door.

  “How come?”

  “Maybe you’ll see when we get there. I’m hoping not.”

  I followed him out through the utility room and stood on the stoop while he drew the front door shut and locked up. I hate it when they talk like that.

  4

  “FUCKING COSSACKS.”

  We were driving through the blasted neighborhoods of old Poletown. The sun was gone and the black squares and angles of houses with rubble all around resembled the ruins of a bombed-out village, with hardly a lighted window to a block. The skeletal boom of a crane with a wrecking ball lolling from the end hung against the maroon sky like the head and neck of a brontosaurus with its tongue out. Mayk had been forced to shout to make himself heard over the wound-up whine of the Bronco’s little six-cylinder engine.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “General Motors and the City of Detroit, to name just two. I grew up here, but I’d need a metal detector to find my way around now. We need another Cadillac plant like the world needs another moon.”

  “It’ll create jobs, the mayor says.”

  “The mayor doesn’t care who’s working. He’s got a job. And the paper’s full of them. But the scroats around here won’t step out of the unemployment line for less than fifteen an hour. That’s the fairy story of our time, finding jobs for people. What you do is you find people for jobs.”

  He had it timed so that he banged the shifting cane into a new gear every time he said jobs. We bumped over curbs and corners, cut down alleys going the wrong way, jounced and chattered through cleared lots paved with stones and broken bricks. The four-by-four’s frame shrieked and rattled.

  Don’t ever get into a private car driven by a cop if you can help it.

  At length we swung around the end of an amber-lighted city barricade and ground to a halt on Newton with gasoline whumping back and forth in the tank. I took my feet out of the floorboards. The street marked the south end of Hamtramck with Detroit pressing in all around like a swollen river parting grudgingly for a rock; on the Hamtramck side a row of houses stood intact, facing a moonscape on the Detroit side with boards and shaggy timbers bristling out of bare stone foundations and big flat sections of shingled roof sprawled on top. It looked like tornado footage on the Six O’Clock News. Three houses stood alone on the corner, two of them dark. Mayk pointed to the one with a light on in a ground-floor window.

  “That’s where the old guy lived, the one said he saw the kid get in before the fracas. Surprised the electricity’s still on. That whole block should have been evacuated by now.”

  I grunted and we walked up a path of flagstones with dewy grass grown up all around them to the front door of a house on the Hamtramck side, kitty-cornered from the one he had pointed out. This one was a square frame affair with white tile siding that looked blue in the light of a porch fixture fashioned after a carriage lamp. A recent addition on the left did nothing to relieve the boxy look of the turn-of-the-century construction. Mayk pushed the bell. The ratchety ringing sheared a hole through the stitching noises crickets made in the yard, but after a pause they started in again.

  A face came to the diamond-shaped window in the door, then vanished before I could fix on the features. The door came open and a small man in a sleeveless undershirt and workpants with knobby muscles in his skinny arms pointed a small automatic pistol at our feet.

  “Yes?”

  The word hung in the air between us like an angry bee. Mayk said, “Mr. Stanislaus?”

  “Yes?”

  No change in inflection. Mayk said, “I’m Howard Mayk, a former detective sergeant with the Hamtramck police, and this is Amos Walker, a Detroit investigator. We’d like to talk to you about the shooting that took place here nineteen years ago.”

  “I don’t know nothing about that.”

  “I believe you. Mr. Walker —”

  “You wouldn’t believe the burnouts I boot out of here a couple times a year, wanting to get their pictures taken in front of a murder house, tromp all over the wife’s roses and spoil my new grass.”

  “We don’t want to do anything like that. Mr. Walker just wants a look inside if it’s all right. Just to see where it happened. It has to do with a case he’s working on.”

  Stanislaus thought that over. He was in his late thirties, with dark wiry hair arcing over his forehead but cropped very close at the temples so that his ears seemed to stick out, small bright eyes like new nailheads on either side of a substantial nose, and a heavy dark moustache that turned up at the ends. The gun in his hand was a .25. Its bore was no bigger around than a pencil, but like the man said, no one really wants to get shot with anything. “You got ID?”

  “Thought you’d ask.” Mayk produced a worn leather folder from his hip pocket with his picture on a card behind a window and RETIRED stamped diagonally across the card in purple ink. There was a place on the other half of the folder where a badge should be. I flashed my photostat and the honorary sheriff’s star. Stanislaus’ little eyes spent a lot of time on each item. Then he stepped back and lowered the automatic until the barrel was in line with the seam of his trousers.

  “Sorry,” he said, as we stepped inside. “There’s been a lot of vandalism around here lately.”

  “So I heard.” Mayk closed the door behind and pointed at the pistol. “I hope that’s registered.”

  “It’s one of about three in this city that are.” He set the weapon down on a table near the door. “At least we got some police protection on this side of the line. Punks set fire to a place across the street last week and the cops and fire department was a half hour getting there. They rode the family over to the Perpetual Mission on account of they didn’t have a house no more. Sometimes they don’t show up at all. You hear the police commissioner on TV the other day when the reporters pumped him about that?” He looked at me.

  “He said it was the homeowners’ fault for not vacating when they were told.”

  “Bullshit. Their time ain’t up yet.”

  “How long you got?” Mayk asked.

  “Till the end of the month. We’re moving in with my wife’s folks till I find a place near work. Know what the city’s paying me for this place? Fifteen thousand. It’s worth forty. I paid twenty-two for it twelve years ago. It’s worse in Detroit. Those people won’t be able to buy a trailer for what they’re getting.”

  Mayk said, “Government’s required to offer full market value.”

  “The assessors work for the city. Just like the judge we took the complaint to in the first place. My grandfather would of been better off keeping the family in Poland.”

  “I thought it was a federal judge the property owners went to,” I said.

  “What’s the difference? His office is in Detroit.”

  “Funny, all those vandals popping out of nowhere,” Mayk said.

  Stanislaus said, “You don’t hear me laughing.”

  “Who was it, Thad? Oh.”

  We were standing in a small square living room with flocke
d wallpaper and a rug that was starting to show some wear and pink slipcovers on the chairs and sofa. A young brown-haired woman with tight birdlike features, wearing a pullover and stretch slacks that showed off her slight paunch, had come in from another room and backed up a step when she saw Mayk and me. I took off my hat.

  “Just some men who want a look at the place,” Stanislaus explained.

  “From the city?”

  “No, it’s about the Evanceks.”

  “I hope you told them that was long before we came.”

  “They know that.”

  “We wouldn’t have bought the place if we knew there was a murder in it. They didn’t tell us that when we bought it.”

  “They wanted to sell it,” said Mayk.

  She looked at him. “Isn’t there a law or something that says they have to tell you about that kind of thing before you buy?”

  “They’re supposed to mention bad pipes and a leaky furnace. I don’t think they have to tell you someone got whacked there unless you ask.”

  “Who would think to ask?”

  Mayk shrugged. Stanislaus said, “It’s been a good place to live. You talk like there’s flies in the sewing room or something.”

  “I’ll just be glad to be out of here.” She went back into the other room, rubbing a hand up and down one arm as if she were chilled. A television set was playing in there. A cop show, from the sirens and gunplay.

  “I got a thousand knocked off the asking price on account of the murder,” Stanislaus told us in a low voice. “Don’t tell her.”

  Mayk asked him if we could look around.

  He jerked a thumb in the direction his wife had gone. “You ain’t going to have to go in there, are you? We built that on ourselves. Call it a rumpus room. We don’t hardly use this one anymore. My boys are in there.”

  “It’s just the old part we’re interested in.” Mayk waited. When Stanislaus made no move to go, he said: “We’ll try not to steal anything valuable.”

  The homeowner showed white teeth behind his moustache. “You find anything like that here, be sure and tell me and we’ll split it.” He picked up his gun and went into the addition.

  “You know how many Polacks it takes to fire an automatic?” Mayk asked me.

  I stared at him.

  He made that dismissing gesture with one of his big hands. “Skip it. I know lots more funnier ones. I went through the academy course in Detroit and you get to be a connoisseur.”

  “This where you found Jeanine Evancek and little Carla?’ I asked.

  “This is it. Looks different.”

  “New wallpaper, I guess.”

  “New everything. But a room with a stiff in it looks and feels different. It’s bad enough in a funeral home when they’re all scrubbed and dressed and made up like a whore on Cass. When they’re spread all over the walls like —”

  “Red cabbage,” I said. “I know.”

  He paced off a quick twelve feet from the front door. “They were about here, the little girl laying next to her mother, like she was standing over her when she bought her own load square in the face. They both got it in the face, the M.E. said. Bill thought it—”

  He stopped talking. With his back to the room’s only lamp, his own face was a blank slab of shadow. “Funny what you remember when you come back to a place,” he said then.

  “That being?”

  “Well, like I said, I wouldn’t trust a setup where everything clicked. The parents’ bedroom was down there, next to one the girl and boy shared with a partition between them.” He tipped his head in the direction of a short hallway running parallel with the front of the house, with doors on both sides. “That’s where the shotgun came from, the parents’ bedroom. We found a coloring book open on the floor of the girl’s place and some loose crayons, like she might of dropped everything and run in here after the first shot, the one that killed her mother. Only a shotgun makes a hell of a loud wham indoors and if I was a little girl I’d run the other way.”

  “She could have come out during the shouting match and been here when Evancek fetched in the gun.”

  “Yeah. Also there’s no predicting a person’s reaction under stress, especially a kid’s. It’s just one more of those things that can go six ways when you try putting a thing together backwards. Killers don’t write scripts neat like you see on TV. The kitchen used to be this way.” He went down the hall and turned left.

  It still was, a fairly modern room about half the size of Mayk’s kitchen, with the usual kitchen stuff plus a microwave oven and blue stylized flowers on the floor tiles and that symbol of our times, a woodburning stove, all black iron and white enamel with a warming oven overhead. There was a door at the back with a square window looking out on a shallow back porch. Firewood was stacked to the overhang with syrupy blackness beyond.

  “The porch is new,” Mayk said. “Different appliances and paint job. Jesus, you wonder who’d have the stomach to scrub the place down after a thing like that. That’s the door Evancek was sitting with his back against when we found him.”

  “Was he sitting when he pulled the trigger on himself?”

  “We figured he stood with his feet braced and his back against the door and slid down afterwards. There was a good five feet between where the top of his head would of been if he still had a head and where the blood started.”

  “What’d he trigger it with, a stick?”

  “We didn’t find one. You can do it with a toe, but he had his shoes on. The gun was a Marlin and short, just barely legal. He could of held it out in front of him with the muzzle to the bridge of his nose and triggered it at arm’s length.”

  “Awkward.”

  “There’s no textbook way to blow your face off,” he said.

  “You ran the gun for prints?”

  He nodded. “We got a clear thumb off one of the shells in the magazine. It was Evancek’s. The rest of the prints were smeared the way they always are coming off a gun.”

  “That just proves he loaded his own shotgun.”

  “Don’t look to go unraveling no mysteries from the past, Sherlock. They buried the killer with his victims years before you got your first lay.”

  “Who buried him?”

  “How the hell should I know? The Nortons, I guess. Jeanine Evancek’s sister and brother-in-law.”

  “Damn generous of them.”

  “Maybe the space was paid for already and they didn’t want it going to waste.” He grinned suddenly. “Why did the undertaker fire his Polack gravedigger?”

  “He dug the hole too deep and didn’t have enough dirt to fill it back in. Thanks for the tour.”

  “Old times,” he said, moving a shoulder. “Not that they were that good. In the department we used to call Bill Mischiewicz the original six-foot Pole you wouldn’t touch anything with. You get anything out of this?”

  “Not really. If there are vibes here I’ve got a tin ear.”

  We went back into the living room. I leaned through the doorway into the addition and rapped on the frame. “Thanks, Mr. Stanislaus.”

  He folded his copy of the News and got up from a worn green La-Z-Boy to see us out. His wife was sitting on a sway-backed sofa watching television, and two boys of about seven and nine with dark tousled hair and bright black eyes were pretending to do their homework on the rug over the slab concrete floor in front of the set. The same cop show or one just like it was howling and banging away onscreen.

  “Find anything valuable?” Our host chuckled.

  “Just a typical American home, Mr. Stanislaus,” I said. “I guess it doesn’t get any more valuable than that.”

  “Oh, please.” He looked pained.

  I said, “You wouldn’t know anything about where the old man went that used to live in the house across the street. He was there at the time of the shooting.”

  Mayk said, “He’s dead or in a home. Got to be.”

  “Old Stash?” Stanislaus was looking at me. “Hell, he’s still there. They�
��ll have to peel him off the big iron ball.”

  “Christ, he must be ninety.” Mayk’s tone was hushed.

  “Nearer a hundred. But you better watch him if you’re going over there. That old man’s crazy.”

  5

  IT WAS A COOL NIGHT. A low ceiling had rolled in and the lights of the city rinsed the clouds’ bellies in cold pale light. A horn sounded out Woodward way like a lone goose on the water. The rushing sound underneath might have been wind through pines, but it was Goodyear rubber on damp asphalt. Our shoes slithered through the overgrown grass in Stanislaus’s yard. The crickets had gone back to bed. My winter suit was at the cleaner’s being scraped and damp air found its way through my imitation seersucker without any detours. Mayk seemed comfortable enough in just his sweatshirt and jeans. He was big enough to provide his own heat.

  “Think your wife will mind my borrowing you a little longer?” I asked him when we reached the street. With barricades at both ends we stood in the middle like idiot dogs.

  “She can wait. She’s the one wanted the part-time job.”

  We went on across the street and up a narrow walk that was going back to jungle. Senile weeds hung in clumps like old men’s chins over the edges, obliterating the bread-colored concrete in places and slobbering on our pantslegs as we walked through them. The house had been painted white once with red trim, but the red was curling away from the door and window casings in long slashes and the white was rubbed down to leaden-hued board beneath. The gutters had begun to secede from the cornices and the city light reflecting down off the clouds showed through the rust-perforated iron. Up close some of the window panes were fresh naked plywood. Blunt advice of a scatological nature decorated the front of the house in spray-painted loops. The paint still smelled.

  We mounted the porch. A rake and a garden spade caked with orange rust and dusty Coke bottles left over from the days of the two-cent deposit lay on the seat of a long wicker bench there. No young lovers or anyone else had sat on it in a long time. The name S. LEPOSAVA was embossed in white letters on a strip of cracked blue tape on the mailbox.