Sugartown

by Loren D. Estleman

  “This was a nice place nineteen years ago,” Mayk said.

  “Everything was nicer nineteen years ago.” I pushed the button. It made a grating sound in its scabbed socket but there was no answering ring or buzz from inside. I put my knuckles to work.

  A brief pause, and then a loud flat bang and a silvery tinkle from the back of the house.

  Mayk was already off the porch, tugging his Python out of his belt. “You take the front,” he barked.

  I tried the knob. It wasn’t interested in turning today. But the lock was strictly Calvin Coolidge and I shattered it in two kicks. The door sprang inward and I hit the floor.

  No one shot at me. I was crouched in starting position on a thin rug from which most of the leaf pattern and all of the color had been trodden years ago, with feathery balls of dust darting about in the current of air stirred by the open door. In front of me were the claw foot and heavy turned leg of a massive oak table, and in the electric light leaking from another room a ring of dark paintings in swollen gilt frames of bearded faces so hostile-looking they had to belong to saints glared down at me from the walls. It was a brown room with tired umber paper on the walls and ceiling and bronze-colored curtains without luster over the windows and dirty beige baseboards with mouseholes in the corners, and Mayk would have said it felt like a room with a stiff in it.

  It wasn’t. I got up dusting my palms and looked around the room and at a long sideboard with a row of religious pictures painted on flat wooden rectangles the size of paperback books propped up on top. Several of the pictures had fallen or been knocked over and lay on their backs or faces. My toe nudged one on the floor and I picked it up. It was an exquisitely detailed rendition of a blond beach boy wearing a sheet and holding a flaming sword high over his head. The colors had the rich patina of age. For a century anyway its artist would have known the Archangel Michael by sight.

  I stood it up on the sideboard and walked through a door into the room with light in it. If they wanted me they could have me. I was through with floors.

  This one was a front bedroom, with an eight-drawer chiffonier scraping the comparatively low ceiling, more brown wallpaper and disapproving saints in frames with gilt cupids carved into the wood, a painted nightstand holding up a tarnished brass lamp with a yellow paper shade, and a high bed with a painted iron frame. By the window a candle the size of a big toe burned with a pale orange fixity of purpose in front of another pocket-size painting like those in the other room on a varnished stand. The room smelled of hot wax.

  Some of the parched furniture and all of the artwork were antique. The rest was just old, like the man on the bed.

  In the light shed by the lamp his head was large, yellow, onion-shaped, and as bald as a thumb. There were blue veins in his closed eyelids and his eagle’s profile had been cut with an engraving tool out of tough old ivory without a line or a crack in it except for those that seemed to have been drawn by the weight of his moustache. It was the size and shape of an inverted horseshoe and as white as virtue, as white as bones in the desert, as white as an old man’s moustache under electric light in a house in Poletown after dark. It made the pillow his head was resting on look dirty. He lay on his back in an old-fashioned cotton nightshirt with a thick brown sweater over it and his fine long yellow hands with the blue veins in them resting on a pink quilt drawn over his stomach.

  His eyes snapped open. It was as if a pair of shutters had been flung wide on the dawn. They were gray with a bright sheen and I could see my reflection in their pupils.

  “All Christian czardoms have come to an end,” he said, “and have been gathered together into one czardom of our sovereign, according to the book of the prophets, that is to say the Russian czardom; for two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and a fourth there will not be.”

  “Okay,” I said, drawing it out.

  “The seeds for Constantinople’s destruction were sown by the Latin heresy, the belief in immaculate conception and the trinity, over the true faith of just the Father and the Holy Ghost. In the patriarch there is continuity and power.”

  He stopped talking suddenly and his eyes became slits. I felt them rake my face. “You’re not Father Olszanski,” he accused.

  “I never have been.” I said it a little too loud. His voice was little more than a cracked whisper, but there was in it the memory of strength and I was trying to match it. He rolled his consonants ponderously in an accent that was familiar but not precisely Polish.

  “No need to shout,” he said. “I’m close to blind, but my hearing works perfectly around the middle register. I thought you were the priest come to continue the argument. He smiles at everything I say until I get to the Pope. That’s when he leaves. Otherwise he’s harder to get rid of than a cataract.”

  “I thought most Poles were devout Roman Catholics.”

  “He’s Ukrainian,” said Howard Mayk, coming in. “Some of them are Russian Orthodox.”

  The former detective sergeant was carrying one of the small religious paintings in one hand and his Colt Python in the other, although it wasn’t pointing at anyone. Even then he didn’t handle it the way Stanislaus had his, like a closed umbrella. You find firearms in the hands of two kinds, gun people and people with guns. Mayk was a gun person.

  The old man squinted at the newcomer, then at his weapon. His big head sank deeper into the pillow. “You won’t need that to rob me. You’re welcome to everything in the house. I’d rather see it in a thief’s hands than under rubble.”

  “We’re not here to rob you, Mr. Leposava. That’s already happened once tonight.” He looked at me. “The guy broke the window in the back door and let himself in. He went out that way when we knocked on the front door. What we heard was the rest of the glass going when it slammed behind him. He dropped this in the yard.” He held up the painted item.

  This time it was a woman in the sheet, no sword, but the same many layers of existence on the dark reds and glazed blues.

  Mayk put away the gun. “It’s an icon. Magdalene, I think. Their version of a plaster saint. He’s got them all over the house; no telling how many our friend got clear with, or what else.”

  “The converted whore,” acknowledged Stash Leposava, narrowing his eyes to bring the painting into focus. “That’s appropriate, for this town. I must have slept through it. One thing I do well now is sleep.”

  “Are they worth a lot?” I asked Mayk.

  “Some stay in families a couple of hundred years. Collectors go pretty high on the better ones. Bill and me traced a hundred grand’s worth once through a fence that used to specialize in religious articles in Hamtramck. He pulled eight to twelve in Jackson.”

  “What we need is some law.”

  “No police,” put in the old man. “They won’t come anyway, and if they do they’ll just have me committed. It will save serving me with sheriff’s papers.”

  “You’ve been hit before,” I suggested.

  His translucent lids slid down and up, reptile fashion. “I never was until the city condemned my property. I kept picking bricks up off my floor until I got tired of replacing broken glass. In a few weeks it will all be dust anyway. Me too.”

  I said, “Someone should stay with you till the lock on the front door gets fixed and the hole in the back door gets plugged. Do you have any family?”

  “Not since the October Revolution.”

  “What about the priest, Father Olszanski? Would he stay?”

  “Until the conversation swung around to His Eminence,” he said, shifting the ponderous weight of his moustache. “If you must, his number is in the book on the table in the dining room. But they turned off the telephone last month.”

  “I’ll use the Stanislauses’.” Mayk laid the icon down on the nightstand and went out.

  Leposava closed his eyes again and left them that way. I listened to the house sounds: timbers settling with fat men’s sighs, a gust of wind chattering a loose pane, the furnace cutting in. Outside of the felony
tank in any jail in this country there is no place quieter than an old man’s bedroom. This one had a medicine smell, sweetish under the burning-wax stench, and a skin of dust on the furniture. I stepped around the bed to where the candle was still glowing determinedly on the wooden stand in front of the window and peered at the icon it was illuminating. A Madonna and Child, with the gloss of youth shining out of their big wet hound-eyes across a gulf of time that encompassed powdered wigs and Valley Girl Tshirts, muskets and ICBMs, Napoleon and the Ayotollah, Abbott and Costello. I was punchy. I straightened up and got out a cigarette and smoothed it between my fingers. I glanced at Leposava. His eyes were open and on me, icon-bright with the candle flame squirming in their centers.

  “Who are you?”

  I told him. “I’m looking for Michael Evancek, the boy whose parents and little sister were killed across the street nineteen years ago. That’s Howard Mayk who just left to call the priest. He was a detective in Hamtramck then. According to him your account of the shooting didn’t go with the other witnesses’.”

  When he heard the name Evancek, his face set like cement.

  “Was it that long ago? Yes, it must have been. It would take that long for things to get this bad. Who’s paying you to look for him?”

  I told him that too. He moved his bald yellow head from side to side slowly. “Foolish old woman. I hope for her sake you don’t find him. It would be grotesque.”

  “Does that mean you won’t help me?”

  “How much can it matter? I can’t tell you where the boy is.”

  “Where a person goes often depends on why he left,” I said sagely.

  He was still looking at me. I don’t know how much he was seeing. Probably more than he let on. “Do many people believe that?”

  I grinned punchily.

  “Some. I’m just fishing, Mr. Leposava. Looking for a place to start.”

  He stared across the years, and I knew then that those old artists had used Ukrainians for their models.

  “It was hot,” he said. “The air was very thick, the way it never was on the steppe and the way I could never get used to. I had every window in the house open. I worked then, translating news from the Detroit press into Russian for the local Ukrainian paper. I couldn’t concentrate in the dining room because of the shouting across the street.”

  Here his moustache twitched. “It wasn’t the noise; I could work in a boiler factory. If it really bothered me I could have closed the windows on that side or moved to another part of the house. But it is difficult not to listen when two people you don’t know are shrieking out each other’s faults. I’m telling you things I never told the police. For some reason it was important to me then not to be thought a — what’s the word?”

  “Busybody.”

  “Busybody.” He tasted it. “A good word. The American idiom is very close to Russian. We are much the same people after all.”

  He seemed to have lost the thread. “They were shouting at each other across the street,” I said helpfully.

  “I said that. I was just organizing my recollections. Why is it that what you ignore in people your own age you automatically consider proof of senility in anyone over sixty? Yes, young Mr. and Mrs. Evancek were shouting at each other and what they were saying wasn’t nice. Don’t ask me what that was. Her poor housekeeping, perhaps.”

  “I understood it was over his refusal to look for work.”

  “I don’t remember that. That could have been behind it, but people rarely argue about what’s really bothering them. It’s the inconsequential things that set them off. I translated a story once about a brother and a sister who shot their father because he wouldn’t let them smoke marijuana. In any case, the fight stopped when the boy came home.”

  “This was before the shooting?” I fought the tug to lean forward.

  “Definitely before. I know what the others said, but they were wrong.”

  “You’re sure it was Michael?”

  “I saw him go in the front door. I knew the boy well enough by sight. We waved when we saw each other, his parents too. I was and am not the visiting type.”

  “How long between when he came home and you heard the first shot?”

  “About five minutes.”

  “Your memory for time is very good,” I said. “After almost twenty years, a lot of people wouldn’t be able to say if something took five minutes or a half hour. Generally they shorten it.”

  “You forget I worked for a newspaper. I wrote up the incident later and you tend to remember something you’ve written down.”

  “How many shots were there?”

  “Three. Very loud.”

  “How close together?”

  He thought about it. “I can’t tell you. I’d just be guessing. I’m not sure I could have remembered the sequence at the time. It seems to me the police asked me about it and I said the same thing.”

  “You had me worried there for a minute, Mr. Leposava,” I said. “In my business when you get gold in every pass it’s time to get a new pan.”

  The moustache moved.

  I smoothed the cigarette some more. It was plenty smooth. I stuck it in my face and left it there without lighting it and was thinking up another question that would make me sound like a detective when Mayk got back for the cross-examination.

  6

  THE FORMER DETECTIVE SERGEANT looked large and martial in his blue shirt and pants and his gun was an obvious growth on his flat stomach under the shirt. “He’s on his way,” he said.

  The old man on the bed had closed his eyes again and showed no reaction. I told Mayk what he had told me.

  “What’s it, a hundred yards between the front of this place and what was the Evanceks’?” said Mayk, loud enough for Leposava to hear.

  “About that,” I said.

  “That’s damn good seeing for someone who thought you were a priest the first time he looked at you.”

  I said, “I think I resent that.”

  “I had twenty-twenty vision the first seventy-five years of my life,” put in the Ukrainian. “Are you as good a man as you were two decades ago?”

  “We’re not talking about me.” Mayk approached the bed. “Why is it you’re the only one saw the boy get in when you say you did?”

  “Perhaps I was the only one looking.”

  “You remember that so good, how come you can’t remember how close the shots came together?”

  “A boy coming home from summer school is a normal occurrence. Shotgun blasts are not, or were not, in this neighborhood in those times. It’s difficult to think of timing with something so unexpected.”

  “Got all the answers, don’t you?”

  “You have all the questions.”

  I set fire to the cigarette finally, trying not to grin.

  Mayk circled back. “Six witnesses swore the boy came home after the shots were fired.”

  “Did they see him come home?”

  “You’re the only one claims you saw that.”

  “Interesting. That they’d swear to a thing they didn’t see.”

  “Yeah, there seems to be a lot of that here.”

  They went back to the subject of the argument and I lost interest. I wandered to the open doorway where my smoke could find its own way out and leaned against the frame. From there I had a good view through the front dining room window of the house across the way, where on a sweltering afternoon in a time of relative innocence three loud crashes had carried across the world to the other side of Europe.

  Father Olszanski came in twenty minutes later. A lean six feet, he brushed his iron-gray hair back from his widow’s peak in twin wings that kept wanting to slide down over his forehead and he trimmed his white beard so close it looked like stubble until you looked again. His eyes were a flat sad blue behind spectacles whose gold rims winked when he jerked his hair out of his eyes. The clerical collar under his light black topcoat was blue-white against the brown of his throat.

  “Have you grown weary o
f your graven images?” Leposava greeted him, once Mayk and I had introduced ourselves and taken the priest’s clean corded short-nailed hand in ours.

  “You old pagan, what are you doing in bed? You’ve played the crippled ancient so long you’ve begun to believe it yourself.”

  The banter proceeded in this fashion for another minute or so. Olszanski’s accent was as American as french fries.

  Mayk said, “He won’t let us call the police.”

  “Once they got the address they’d just file it under the blotter,” the priest said. “Now will you move, you old Tartar?”

  “I did all the moving I intend to in the fall and winter of nineteen seventeen.” He lay as calm as a boulder in the sun.

  This was where I’d made my entrance. I pinched out my second butt and parked it in my jacket pocket next to its uncle. “We appreciate your time, Mr. Leposava. Good luck.”

  “I won’t wish you the same. The young man should stay lost.”

  Olszanski escorted Mayk and me into the front room. He slid an aluminum tube out of an inside pocket and broke out a greenish cigar without a band, went through the ritual of passing it under his nose and licking the seam and never did light the thing.

  “Stash is a remarkable man,” he said in a low voice. “He fought the Bolsheviks, you know. There’s Cossack in him and the Lord God knows what else. He speaks six languages and could have been a fine writer in any of them if he didn’t insist on translating the work of men of lesser talent. He worked until he was past eighty. Lately, though, his mind—” He waved the cigar. “He has no family. When he says he’ll be here to greet the wreckers he means it. There are some good nursing homes up north; as the one closest to him I can go to court and sign the papers. He’ll have clean quarters and round-the-clock care and even a counterfeit of love, plastic smiles and girls one-fourth his age who will call him by his first name in tones the rest of us reserve for dogs and children.” He smiled in his beard with his sad eyes on the expensive unlit cigar. “I’ll miss our talks.”

  “Where do you preach?” Mayk asked.

  “Immaculate Conception.”