I was starting to think someone was out to convert me.
She kept walking, through a door bright with sunlight into a well-ventilated kitchen. “The coffee’s on already. Make yourself comfortable.”
“Okay if I smoke?”
“If what you’ve been hearing the past ten years hasn’t convinced you it isn’t,” she said, “why ask me?”
“Does that mean I can light up?” I had one out.
“Go ahead. I haven’t been able to make Martha quit in a year. I don’t expect to have better luck with you in five minutes.”
I rolled it along my lips but didn’t set fire to it. I was standing in the doorway watching her fuss with the makings at a linoleum-covered counter but didn’t go in. I was sick of kitchens. This one was very clean and traditional; the most modern things in it were the coffee maker and Miss McBride. I asked her if she worked for Social Services.
“No, I’m on the night shift at the hospital. St. John’s. I’m a registered nurse. Martha hired me to care for Mr. Evancek when he was dying of cancer.”
“And when he was gone?”
“I stayed on. I help Martha out of bed in the morning and do the heavy cleaning and help her into bed at night. I don’t charge her. Aside from that she’s pretty independent. Does her own shopping and fixes her own meals. She’s a wonderful cook.”
“I guess you have to be when your husband’s a chef. Black.”
She made a face, spooned some powdered creamer into one of two cups, and handed me the other.
While she was putting things away I went back into the living room and set my cup and saucer down on a low glass-topped coffee table. A big brown scrapbook flabby with pictures lay on the corner. I hinged open the cover and turned the pages idly. Faded oval sepia prints of serious-eyed children in baggy white sailor-dresses, boys as well as girls; a wedding picture of a young man in a high starched collar, his dark moustache waxed into sharp points and his hair parted in the middle and plastered down with pomade, his bride beside him in ivory lace, dark eyes in a grave pretty face that I recognized with a start as Martha Evancek’s fifty years ago; washed-out wartime shots, uniforms and rubble; a snap taken on a visit to some Eastern European city with a postwar look to its spires and minarets under repair and a hefty, smiling young man standing in the foreground; the picture I had already seen of an eleven-year-old boy, newly returned to its corners and the reason the book was out; a little towheaded girl, probably Carla, in a wading pool; and, toward the back, page after page of jarring color Polaroid photos of an emaciated old man gasping out his life, naked to the bedcovers. His eyes were huge in a face whose hollow cheeks and temples and outward-curling earlobes had nothing in common with the sternly confident young bridegroom in the wedding shot.
“I took those.”
Karen McBride’s voice almost made me jump. She had come in carrying her cup and saucer, looking not at all like a young maid at tea in a Gibson print.
“Martha insisted,” she went on. “She said it was family tradition to maintain a complete photographic record of each life. I thought it was ghoulish, but Mr. Evancek agreed with her and I used my own camera. Funny people, those Old Worlders. Their threshold of shock is a lot higher than ours.”
“Watching your friends and neighbors get blown to pieces in artillery barrages will do that.” I flipped back through the book. “You’ve seen this?”
“Martha shows it to me often. She has a story to go with each picture. They aren’t all the kind of stories you’d expect a sweet little old lady to tell.”
“They don’t get to be old wearing blinders. She tell you about this one?” I showed her the beefy lad in the fairy-tale city.
“That’s Joseph at eighteen. He looks like a good-natured ox. Not at all like someone who would do what he did.”
“I think they can arrest you for looking like that.”
I closed the book and sat down. She balanced her coffee stuff on her knee in an upholstered chair with a straight back and antimacassars pinned to the arms while I fought to avoid being swallowed whole by the sofa. There’s a company that makes those specifically for private investigators to sit in while visiting the homes of little old ladies.
“Nice place,” I lied.
“It’s horrible. I always feel like a little girl having to keep quiet at her grandmother’s when I sit in this room. She rents it furnished from the people on the other side of the wall.”
“You’re right, it stinks.”
Her mouth tried for a prim look. “I see. It’s a funny detective.”
“I’m glad you think so. There are those who wouldn’t agree. But the heck with them. Are you married?”
The snarl took another fall after a little struggle. The smile had her face now. I’d been rooting for it since its first victory. She sipped some coffee. “What did you want to ask Martha? She’s told me a lot about Joseph’s — tragedy and about little Michael. Who I guess isn’t so little anymore. Maybe I can help.”
I pulled myself out of the morass of horsehair and printed flowers and balanced on the edge of the sofa’s frame. I picked up my cup, remembered the cold cigarette between my lips, and put it away before drinking. “I’m in a delicate position here,” I said.
“So I noticed.”
I forced a grin. “I bet they love you down in Intensive Care. There’s a little matter of client privilege riding on just how much you do know about why Mrs. Evancek hired me and how much more I might be telling by asking you questions.”
“You’re a very careful man,” she said.
“Impertinent too. Don’t forget impertinent.”
She passed that one. Her eyes were almost amber in the sunlight streaming in from the kitchen. “I’m careful too. After Martha told me she’d hired you I checked up on you. I called the police. They referred me to a lieutenant in Homicide. I forget his name.”
“Alderdyce. John Alderdyce.”
“That’s him. From what he said I couldn’t make up my mind whether he likes you or wants to charge you with something. But he said you were honest enough. If I could ignore what you thought passed for a sense of humor, he said, we’d get along fine.”
“John’s a great kidder.”
“Now I guess it’s my turn.” Talking, she tapped a short glossy-pink nail on the handle of her cup. “You’re looking for Michael Evancek, aged about thirty, whom Martha lost track of nineteen years ago when her son Joseph, the boy’s father, went berserk and murdered his own wife and daughter and then committed suicide. She offered you a thousand-dollar retainer and you gave back half. You also promised to report daily.”
“Nothing to report, except that what she told me checks out so far. You always waste a little time in these things jumping up and down on the information your clients give you to see if it stands up. The lies come thick and fast in my corner. Okay.” I sat back carefully, sinking a little. “What I want to ask, does Mrs. Evancek have any letters her son or grandson sent her in the last year or so before the blowup?”
“I don’t know. I could look. Why?”
“If I knew that I wouldn’t have to ask. So far I’ve got two pictures of the Evanceks, American branch, an old lady’s and the cops’. They’re a mile apart. The letters might bridge the gap. Also I’m stuck, which is nothing to get hopped up about. I get stuck a lot.”
“Not for long, I bet.”
“You smooth-talker,” I said. “Let’s elope.”
She parked the cup and saucer and rose. “I think I know where she might be keeping those letters. I’ll just be a minute.”
She went through another doorway. I took advantage of her absence to get something burning in my face.
8
IT TOOK LONGER THAN A MINUTE. It always does. While I was waiting I got up and looked at some pictures in gold frames on a corner of the mantelpiece not occupied by brittle martyrs. Mr. Evancek — grayer than in his wedding pieture but healthy — standing, thumbs in his vest pockets, before a commercial building with Cyr
illic characters on the sign. I figured it was the restaurant where he had worked in Cracaw. A family shot of an older Joseph in a sport shirt with one hand on an ordinarily pretty blonde’s arm and the other resting on a nine-or ten-year-old Michael’s shoulder, the boy in a red sweater with his white shirt collar spilling over the neck and his dark hair tousled, next to his sister, beaming in a pink dress, all golden curls and shiny red cheeks. Another picture, very old, of a young Martha Evancek with a couple in the styles of another century, their faces faded to blank ovals. Her parents, probably. Four generations pictured and only one member known to be still living. You start out playing solitaire with a crisp new deck full of promise. Sometimes you win. Oftener you get all the aces out and still run dry. You mount pictures lovingly in the family album and someday someone will turn the pages and wonder who the people are.
Karen McBride came in carrying a thick sheaf of yellow curling envelopes with a faded brown ribbon tied around it. “I just looked at the return address,” she said, holding it out. “They all came from the same place in Hamtramck. She had them in one of Mr. Evancek’s old cigar boxes in the bottom drawer of the bedroom bureau.”
I accepted them. Her fingertips grazed mine accidentally. This close she smelled of soap that would be pink, but she wouldn’t choose it for the color. I couldn’t decide if she used perfume. The sheaf felt like a stack of dried leaves.
“I’m hoping these will tell me something of Michael’s interests,” I said. “Sometimes you can track a person down through them.”
“Young boys have a lot of interests. But they change them like socks.”
“Maybe one or two stuck.” I looked at my watch. “I missed breakfast this morning. Can we go somewhere and eat? I guess you’d call it brunch up here.”
Something glinted in her eyes. “Is this business or a pickup?”
“I guess that depends on how far your cooperation goes.”
“Its tongue is silk,” she said. “I promised Martha I’d keep an eye on the place until I leave for work. Also I’m sort of involved with someone at the moment.”
“ ‘Sort of.’ ” I tapped the bundle of letters against my open palm. “That falls somewhere between ‘I’m pinned’ and ‘What color should we paint the bedroom?’ Which is it?”
She smiled the smile. “Your switch is stuck again.”
I didn’t have a topper. I collected my hat and got away from her while I still owned a watch.
I caught a ham sandwich at the counter down the street from my office and let myself into the thinking room. No one stopped me on the way through the little room where the customers cooled leather. There was no one to stop me. My mail on the floor inside the slot all had little windows in it. I picked it up and carried it reverently to the desk and filed it in the top drawer next to the whoopee calendar from the police supply house where I’d bought my first set of handcuffs five years ago. Loyalty, you take it where it comes in my business. I sat down and got the bundle out of my inside breast pocket and undid the ribbon.
Some of the letters were in a thick, jerky hand with Joseph’s signature at the bottom. They were in English. The first one was dated two and a half years before the shooting; it would be the language he was most comfortable with by that time. The last had been written a full month short of it. The letters got fewer and the dates got farther apart as months went by, as they will the longer a son stays away from home. Others had been written by his wife Jeanine with easy open loops and cheery circles over the i’s. Joseph got a raise, little Michael put a caterpillar in his pocket and forgot about it, the new furniture came, Jeanine fell and fractured her wrist on the icy sidewalk in front of the house. Michael joined Little League. Joseph had him batting .297 and fielding flies like Horton; Jeanine had him unable to get out of his own way. In May the boy was into collecting coins. By August he was chasing butterflies and then he got burned by a magazine advertisement offering a bag of rare stamps for a dime that turned around and billed him afterward for eight-fifty. In November he was back to coins. There were hand-drawn holiday cards from Michael and Carla to their grandparents and how-are-you-I-am-fine letters scrawled in blurred pencil on ruled lines half an inch apart, Michael going on about iron Lincoln D pennies and asking the old folks to send him Polish coins.
The family was planning a vacation trip to Arizona, Jeanine thought she was pregnant again but it was a false alarm, the snow was up to the sills, the sun was shining, it had rained six weekends in a row. By the second spring most of the letters were Jeanine’s. Late in May Joseph was laid off from Dodge Main. They blamed it on the bum economy. In June there was one more letter from Joseph, a short one, blotched and nearly illegible, assuring his parents he would be called back anytime. It was the last letter in the stack.
Reading the letters from this side of that explosive July, you wondered why no one had smelled the fuse burning. Then you went back over them in the frame of mind in which they must have been received and they were just letters, and damn boring ones at that. Thousands of people had written hundreds of thousands of letters just like them and then gone bumping along like the rest of us without ever killing anyone.
I put them back in their envelopes and stacked them in their original order and retied the ribbon. I sat back and smoked and looked out the window at the pigeons fiddlefooting along the splattered ledge of the apartment building. Filthy birds. Carried lice and ticks and the noise they made in their throats sounded like mugging victims gurgling through slashed windpipes in stinking alleys. I disinterred the office bottle from the file drawer in the desk and blew dust out of the pony glass and oiled my gullet. As the heat expanded from the base of my stomach I recapped the bottle and put it away and looked out at the pigeons again. It was okay now. They were just birds.
I made a brief field trip to a drugstore around the corner, a department store really, with shelves of electric razors and wristwatches and garden gadgets and if you looked long enough a prescription counter at the back, and returned with a magazine for coin collectors. There had been three on the rack, all published by the same firm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Long-distance Information gave me the number. I dialed it and a switchboard operator with banjo strings for vocal cords got me someone in Circulation.
“My name’s Walker,” I told the guy. “I’m a Michigan State Police licensed investigator trying to track down a witness to a murder. I think he may be on your subscription list.”
“Which title?”
“Any or all of them. He collects coins.”
“Sec.”
I parked the receiver in the hollow of my shoulder and lit a cigarette. I was just stringing popcorn. For all I knew, Michael Evancek hadn’t touched a coin except to feed a meter in nineteen years.
The voice came back on. “I checked and the lists are in the data bank. I’ll just punch them in here and have them on your screen in ten minutes. What system are you using?”
“Underwood and Noggin. I don’t have a computer.”
The pause on his end was just long enough to tell me I blew it.
“You’re with the Michigan State Police and you don’t have a computer?”
“I’m not with the state police,” I said. “They just issued my license. I’m private.”
“So why mention them at all?”
“Mainly, to avoid conversations like this.”
“That changes things some. Our subscription information is confidential.”
“Bull. You sell it to every mail-order advertiser that comes along.”
“That’s business.” He paused again. “But a subscription to one or all of our magazines entitles you to some things.”
“I’m not a collector.”
“Suit yourself, Jack.”
“I could be, though,” I said, before he could hang up. “Which one would you recommend to a beginner?”
“Numismatics Monthly. It runs fifty dollars per year.”
“How much for six months?”
“We don’t offer six-mo
nth subscriptions.”
“What do the others run?”
“Fifty dollars.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Listen, you want the list or not?”
“I’m just interested in two names,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me if they’re on any of the lists and if they are I’ll get a check off to you.”
He laughed. It wasn’t a very nice laugh. “You must think I’m a philatelist.”
I said, “Okay, one way or the other you get it.”
“How do I know you’ll come through?”
“How do I know you’ll tell me straight?”
“I guess we just have to trust each other,” he said. He didn’t like saying it. It lay like alum on his tongue. “Okay, shoot.”
“His name’s Michael Evancek.” I spelled it. “He might be going by Michael Norton.”
I heard keys rattling. After a minute he said, “No Evanceks. We got two Nortons, Philip in San Francisco and a B. Norton in Dayton, Ohio.”
“Barbara?” I jumped on it. Barbara Norton was Jeanine Evancek’s sister.
“Just the initial. Sec.” More keys rattled. “We got a kill on it. Subscriber moved a few months back without filing a change-of-address.”
I asked him for the old number and wrote it down, along with Philip’s San Francisco address. They might not have liked the name Michael any more than they did Evancek.
“I don’t see how you function without a computer,” Circulation mused.
“It’s tough. I’m like a musician without a saddle. Who do I make the check out to?”
“Albert C. Moss.”
The publishing firm’s name was entirely different. I wrote down Albert C. Moss and said I’d get the check off by the end of the week.
“Where should we send the magazine?” Albert asked innocently.
I laughed nastily and pegged the receiver. They grow them funny in Cedar Rapids.
I looked at my watch. Then I looked at the bathing beauty on the calendar on the wall. Then I looked at my watch again to see what time it was. I was going to have some fun explaining fifty dollars for a magazine subscription on the expense sheet. Especially when neither of the two names and addresses it bought, one of them obsolete, probably had anything to do with Michael. I wondered if Karen McBride was really sort of involved with someone or if I was using the wrong aftershave. My mind was starting to wander. I called Long-distance Information again and asked for the main branch of the U.S. Post Office in Dayton, Ohio. A clerk there looked up B. Norton in the change-of-addresses and gave me a number on Gilbert in Detroit.
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