Sugartown

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Oh.”

  “Yes.” The sad smile was unchanged. “Some of the parishioners feel we will save it yet. I admire their faith. At election time the politicians all have their pictures taken going to church. I haven’t seen them since the condemnation papers came. I regard this as a sign.”

  “I was asking Mr. Leposava about the Evancek shooting across the street,” I said.

  He nodded, licked the cigar. “Yes, there was some gossip about it when I came here from Our Lady in Boston. It was before my assignment.”

  I asked him about the Nortons. He didn’t know anyone by that name. We thanked him for coming.

  “Thank you for calling me. Though I would rather it were anyone else.”

  Mayk and I got out of there. On the porch, the ex-dick filled his lungs with a long draught. “Next time you be bad cop.”

  “What do you think of Leposava’s story?” I asked.

  “I think he’s an old guy that once he gets his choppers into something won’t let go if you hit him in the head with a trombone.”

  “What was the sequence of those shots?”

  He shook his head. “We never got two people to agree on that.”

  “You nearly had me,” I said. “It was a sweet act.”

  “I just sort of slipped into it.”

  We started down the walk.

  “Witnesses can be wrong,” I said. “Even six of them.”

  “Don’t I know it. My last year with the department we trashed a guy on an attempted six-two-seven. Eight people who were in the bar when this steelworker bought a thirty-eight slug in the neck ID’d our man from the book and nailed him in the lineup. Then the steelworker came out of his coma and took one look at the mug and said, hell no, that ain’t him. Detroit snagged the right fish for CCW a week later and he spilled his guts under questioning. But that was different.”

  “Yeah, the victim was still breathing.”

  He stopped walking and turned toward me. The Stanislauses’ porch light was off now and we were beyond reach of the glow through Leposava’s window. But I felt Mayk’s cop’s-eyes on me in the shadows.

  “It isn’t like that,” he said. “We don’t tie up a case the soft way just because there’s nobody left to raise a squawk. Once you get enough dots strung together to see the trunk you don’t need to connect the rest to know it’s a picture of an elephant. The only mystery in these domestic beefs is who gets stuck with the report.”

  We didn’t say anything in the Bronco during the demolition drive back to his place. There was a light on in the house when we swung into the driveway and stopped behind a battered blue Pinto with panic stripes on the rear panel.

  “My wife.” He killed his headlamps. “Uses a fork to fish a piece of toast out of a live toaster and she’s scared a truck will rear-end her and flame her out on the E-way.”

  “You’ve got to laugh in its teeth somewhere.” I put a foot outside and stuck one of my cards on top of the visor. “If you ever have a keyhole that needs looking through.”

  He was watching me with his hands still on the wheel. “We went together kind of smooth in there. Where were you ten years ago?”

  “Protecting my best side in a Cambodian jungle.”

  “Yeah? Korea here.”

  “Same war,” I said. “Different people. Good night, Sergeant.”

  “That’s Mister. But good night anyway.”

  In ten minutes I was home. Just three rooms, a garage, and a dandelion patch with some grass in it, but the surrounding houses were still standing with lights on and when you woke up in the morning it was to the sound of the neighbor’s power mower or the Doberman down the block yapping its head off at a lost hubcap on the front lawn and not a two-ton ball punching holes in the brick house across the street. So far General Motors hadn’t whistled at the mayor and pointed my way.

  There was nothing in the mailbox but a religious pamphlet. I had had enough of religion that evening. I left it for seed and let myself in. The place needed dusting, but not as badly as Stash Leposava’s. I determined to do something about it before it did. I hung up my hat and climbed out of my jacket and necktie, wound the clock my grandfather bought for his mother, went into the kitchen and got a tray out of the freezing compartment of the refrigerator and ran some water on it in the sink. Scrod, with a side of corn and little round potatoes the size of marbles in compartments like you see in a cash box. I hate scrod, but it had been on sale and I had four more trays of it. There was a time when I cooked, really cooked, but it seemed like a lot of trouble to go to for just me.

  I took down a bottle of Scotch three-quarters full, or one-quarter empty, from the cabinet over the sink and wet a glass from it and cut it with water. While waiting for the hoarfrost to melt off the TV dinner I looked at my reflection in the night-backed window and wondered how I would look with a white moustache.

  When the scrod was in the oven I took my glass and went back into the living room and sat down and looked at the dust on the blank television screen.

  People move all the time. They can’t find work at home and go where the jobs are, they get transferred, they grow tired of shoveling snow in April and go west or south, they get sick of waking up every morning to the same face on the next pillow, they go to find themselves, they go to lose themselves, wives run to Bermuda with exterminators, husbands head for Vegas with little blonde numbers from the secretarial pool, kids light out for anywhere not home with just their thumbs and a nylon backpack with something by Kerouac in it. Mommy’s gone away, son. No, Daddy doesn’t know when she’ll be back. Eat your cauliflower. What was he wearing when he left, lady? I can’t understand it, Dad. He’s never been away this long without calling. She was an A student until she met this boy, Officer. Jim, Brian’s an hour late getting home from school and I’m worried sick.

  Sometimes they get snatched and then you wait for the call from someone talking through a handkerchief, telling you where to bring the cash or from a cop asking you to come downtown and take a look at what they found jammed into a culvert in Redford Township. Sometimes they go into hiding and then you have to work backwards to find out why. Sometimes they just move and forget to leave a forwarding address. Those are the hardest, because people forget a lot more thoroughly than they cover up.

  You get a cramp filling out duplicate driver’s license application forms and wear your tongue out licking stamps, you bribe postal clerks to go into the basement and rummage through the obsolete change-of-addresses for information that’s supposed to be free to the public, you ruin your eyes reading old personals on microfilm at the library, you say sir and ma’am to people you wouldn’t wipe your feet on otherwise, because they might remember the name of a moving van parked across from the house they were casing on a certain afternoon. Sometimes people don’t like your questions or the tie you’re wearing and bounce things off your skull, and that might not be so bad except they call you names while they’re doing it. Then the cops call you names because you didn’t run to them with information you didn’t know you had about felonies you weren’t aware took place and shine lights in your eyes and shove tape microphones up your nose and tank you for forty-eight hours on suspicion without a telephone call or a lawyer. They can do that and to hell with what you saw on Adam 12, all bets are off when you get sucked up into the big blue machine. All to keep the bloodsuckers off your back and your belly from scraping your spine, or so you answer on those not infrequent occasions when you find yourself asking why you do what you do.

  Every morning is your last. You’ll put in one more day and then hang up the shoulder holster, ditch the forms, let your dues lapse in the Snoopers and Sleuths Union and get a real job with a place that has a bowling league and a company picnic and every other Friday a check you can almost raise two-point-five kids on with a wife who thinks she really ought to have a facelift, you make that decision and then the telephone rings or the door opens and the devil enters disguised as an old lady in widow’s weeds with a thousand dollars a
nd a picture of a new missing face and you bite the apple. You’re hooked, you’re an addict. You’ve got the call.

  The oven timer made a rude noise and I drank off what was in my glass and went in and ate my dinner standing up at the drainboard. It saved washing dishes and wiping up afterwards. I don’t know why I bothered. It was too late to reserve a table at the Rooster Tail.

  When that was done I mixed some more Scotch and water and sat back down in front of the set and dialed Martha Evancek’s number in St. Clair Shores.

  “Hello?”

  It was the voice of a young woman without a foreign accent. After a pause I asked if I had the right number.

  “Yes, that’s correct. Is this Mr. Walker?”

  I said it was and asked if she was related to Mrs. Evancek.

  “I’m her companion. She’s gone to bed. May I take a message?”

  “It can wait till tomorrow,” I said.

  “Wait, Mr. Walker. Hello?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I’m in Mrs. Evancek’s confidence. I know she’s hired you to locate her grandson and I’m familiar with the circumstances surrounding his disappearance. You can talk freely.” The voice was fresh and cool, like an ice-green mint.

  “I’m sorry, Miss —?”

  “McBride.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss McBride, but you’re not in my confidence. No one ever is. I have one or two more questions I’d like to ask Mrs. Evancek. I’ll swing by in the morning if that’s all right.”

  The voice got a little cooler. “Any time after nine o’clock would be acceptable.”

  I thanked her and cradled the receiver.

  There was nothing on television and I sat up for a while smoking and trying to read a paperback mystery I’d picked up in a drugstore once while tailing someone. It was about a private eye back East who wore expensive running shoes with everything and squawked so much about the things he wouldn’t do that you had to wonder what people hired him for in the first place. His partner was a professional killer and if there was a mystery to it at all I couldn’t find it and gave up. To hell with P.I.’s with codes they have to keep hauling out and looking at like pocket watches and to hell with cool fresh voices in women’s mouths. They never match the faces. I put down the book and looked around the room in the light of the one lamp I had burning. It needed dusting, all right. She probably had pinched nostrils and fuzz on her chin.

  I went to bed and dreamed I was a Cossack who got his head lopped off bending down to tie his expensive running shoes in the middle of a battle.

  7

  IT WAS A CLEAR FRESH MORNING with the sun rum-colored on the grass and the smell of a lakeshore at dawn in the air. Birds were singing for the pure hell of it and if you listened hard you could hear the sound of convertible tops coming down all over the city. I showered and shaved and shook the butts out of my almost-seersucker and got my gray Olds rolling northward along the scenic route. I cranked the window down on the driver’s side. A convertible it isn’t.

  As you hit the rolling country above Eight Mile Road and swing east, you pass through a series of suburbs, none of them as old as this century, with names like Hazel Park and Warren and East Detroit and Harper Woods, and if you miss the YOU ARE ENTERING signs you’re lost, because you won’t see anything like a Roseville Dairy Queen or a Centerline Bait & Tackle Shop. That’s too small-townish for the city folk who came up here to get away from the ethnics. You pass low brick schools and churches built like service stations and sudden glass-and-steel blisters that call themselves civic centers and the vast sterile fenced enclosure of the GM Tech Center, where college lads in white coats tinker with everything from genetic engineering to ashtrays with little fans in them that smoke your cigarette for you. You drive through block after block of nice residences, not too large, with all-weather driveways and lawns the size of money clips, skirt brief business sections with two-car parking lots, and never catch a green light all the way. The cops are all eighteen and wear sky-blue uniforms with short sleeves and cruise in pairs in cars painted the chief’s wife’s favorite color with discreet emblems on the doors. If you blow a tire and don’t have a jack they won’t lend you theirs but will call the wrecking service the city has a contract with and if you go two miles over the limit they will nail you. They are nice places to live but you wouldn’t want to visit there.

  The pioneers who founded St. Clair Shores didn’t speak French or Spanish. They preferred tight overcoats to doublets and instead of Toledo steel they carried Chicago typewriters whose workmanlike chattering became as much a part of the lakefront as the foghorns’ belching when the soup drifted in from Canada. They set up a winch to unload the boats from Windsor during the dry time and sold the stuff to the Capone organization in Chicago. Jews and Italians and Poles and even a few Greeks from down Monroe Street, they moved in their families and built homes and schools and churches and synagogues and rented themselves a police force and when Prohibition ended they all sent their kids to parochial school to get a good education. Today it looks like any other upper middle-class community of retired schoolteachers, with a noise ordinance and speed bumps in the residential section and no marble stands erected over the places where the founding fathers shed blood over cases of Old Log Cabin. But in the venerable dock pilings are holes that weren’t made by worms, and if the older buildings there could talk they’d speak with the bitter accent of the eastern slums.

  The house was a white frame duplex on Englehardt with faded awnings over the upstairs windows. Martha Evancek’s number belonged to a door in the el at the end of the driveway that went on to become the garage. My knock got an invitation from inside and I opened the door and climbed three steps and turned left and climbed another two.

  “Mr. Walker? I’m Karen McBride.”

  The voice was even cooler and fresher in person, and for once it went with its owner. She was in her late twenties, short, but well-proportioned — very well-proportioned — so that I didn’t realize she was short until I was standing in front of her and could look down on top of her head. It was a nice head, covered with dark brown hair that could be called chestnut if you cared. I was admiring it when she smiled and gave me her hand. Her grip was firm but feminine. I could take her two falls out of three any day in the week.

  “Carrying Mrs. Evancek up and down those steps must be what keeps you in such good shape,” I said.

  “She manages them quite well. She told me she managed the three flights to your office without help. Let me take your hat.”

  “Sorry. I forgot I had it on.” I took it off and gave it to her.

  She opened a door to the left of the entrance and got rid of the hat. When she turned I saw that her hair was caught behind her neck and spilled into a loose sort of ponytail down her back almost to her waist. Her front was covered by a white pullover with the straps of her brassiere showing underneath and she had on a dark gray skirt, slightly flared, that hung to the tops of brown leather boots wrinkled around her ankles. She had a high round forehead and a small nose that turned up a little at the end and large brown eyes and her mouth was just a little too wide, so that when she unzipped it to smile, the dimples went clear down her cheeks. The boys would have called her Monkey-face when she was little and bought a black eye for their trouble. I liked her face fine. So far I liked all of her.

  “Martha didn’t tell me she was going to see you or I wouldn’t have let her go alone,” she said, closing the closet door. “I think she deliberately waited until I left for the day because she was afraid I wouldn’t have let her go at all. When I came by last night to help her into bed and saw how tired she was, I got the story out of her. They can be such children at that age.”

  “She’s a grown woman,” I corrected. “Would you have?”

  It threw her for a second. She stopped smiling and wrinkled her smooth brow. “You mean let her go to see you? I couldn’t stop her. She has rights.”

  “But you don’t love the idea.”

  “A
re you always this penetrating this early?” she demanded.

  “It’s the detective thing. Sometimes the switch gets stuck on. Do we go in to see the lady or does she come out here?” Out here being a narrow entryway with a linked rubber mat on the floor and on one wall one of those framed portraits of Christ screened in Day-Glo on imitation black velvet that K-Mart sells next to posters of Loni Anderson.

  Karen McBride’s expression changed. “I’m sorry you came all this way. Mrs. Evancek had a scare early this morning. She was taken by ambulance to the hospital. I just came back from there. I tried to call you but I guess you’d already left.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “Her doctor thinks so. She was calling for me when I got in this morning. She was shaken and very flushed, disoriented. Her pulse was racing. It may have been a minor stroke. They’re holding her for observation, but it looks like the danger is past and there doesn’t appear to be any major damage. It was brought on by yesterday’s physical and emotional strain, I’m sure.”

  Her tone was reproachful. I said, “She didn’t tell me her medical history when she called or I’d have come to see her. The trip downtown was her idea.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve come to like Martha a lot. You get protective.”

  “She’s like the grandmother you never had.”

  “You’re impertinent,” she blazed.

  “Aw, go on. I had my shots.”

  For a moment a smile and a snarl wrestled for her just slightly too-wide mouth. The smile won. You could lose your car keys in one of her dimples. “You might as well come in,” she said, standing aside. “I try never to throw anyone out until I’ve given him coffee.”

  We walked into a spotless living room with a carpet like a mutt’s coat and floral print covers thrown over everything that wasn’t a table. Someone had painted the brick fireplace white and stood a potted geranium on the grate. No one was going to start anything as messy as a fire in there, by God. There were the usual shiny copper long-handled implements that had never touched ash next to the hearth and on the mantelpiece some cheap plaster saints.