Sugartown

by Loren D. Estleman

  My heartbeat accelerated a little. There was probably nothing in it. There was no B. Norton in the Detroit directory. I called Local Information. They had it under New Numbers and I worked the plunger and dialed it and got a busy signal. I hung up and smoked a cigarette and tried again. Same thing. Well, when you flush two birds you’re supposed to go for the far one first anyway.

  San Francisco Information put me in touch with Philip Norton. He had a high affected voice that made me hold the receiver a little away from my ear. He said he was 45, owned a coin shop off Golden Gate, and had never been in Michigan in his life. But if I was ever in the Bay Area I should look him up.

  B. Norton’s line was still busy. I wasn’t very nice to it. I wanted to get that one out of the way and start shaking loose some real leads. There were a million Nortons in the world, probably a hundred thousand B. Nortons, and anyway if Michael was still into coins why would the magazine be going to his aunt? Write off the fifty and go find some real detective work to do.

  From the top drawer of the desk I took a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver, the one they call the Police Special, with a checked ball-rubber grip and a four-inch barrel. I looked at the cartridges, then slid it into its stiff leather holster and strapped the works on my belt with the butt snugged into its permanent dent in my right kidney. Then I locked up and drove to B. Norton’s address on Gilbert. It was a good neighborhood. The very best people were found dead there.

  9

  YOU CAN DRIVE BACK AND FORTH to work every day along Michigan Avenue and never know the street. The Michigan Avenue that cuts in at an angle on that undigested lump of real estate alternately called Cadillac and Kennedy Square in the heart of downtown Detroit is not the Michigan Avenue that squeezes rush-hour traffic in and out of Cadillac Main where the old Grand Trunk crosses or the Michigan Avenue that takes you past a solid bank of hookers displaying their legware at Livernois when the lights come on. It starts at the base of the old Grand Circle among weathered brown skyscrapers and slashes straight as a knife westward through where the city becomes horizontal, refusing to crimp until it becomes US-12 just east of Dearborn. The bad areas don’t look that much different from the relatively good ones, and unless you’re familiar with the street’s changing moods you don’t know until you cross the wrong alley and suddenly find yourself walking in a very quiet block with invisible eyes watching you from doorways that you’ve come too far. You can trust John R and the Cass Corridor to be treacherous, but you can never be sure about Michigan. If it were in a bottle it would carry a warning label.

  A city barricade stood across one lane of Gilbert at Michigan with a blue-and-white parked in the other and a uniformed black cop in short sleeves leaning on the car. He signaled for me to stop and came across, swaggering a little the way cops will when they’re wearing the belt with a gun and a walking radio and cuffs swinging from it. He came to a stop just behind the open window on the driver’s side with the post between us.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” he said. “May I see your driver’s license and vehicle registration.”

  I got them out and handed them over. He had smooth cocoa-brown skin and a black Fu Manchu moustache, which was as much of an impression as I got of him behind that post. They’re trained to stand just there because its harder to turn and shoot them that way. Some people manage to do it regardless.

  “What’s up?”

  “Just a routine check, sir. What is your business here today?”

  “I asked you first.”

  A white cop who had been sitting in the prowl car monitoring the radio came over and joined him. My guy gave him my license and registration and he carried them back across the street and leaned in through the window and hooked out the mike and started reading.

  “We’re just following up some citizen complaints in the neighborhood,” said the black cop evenly. “Your business?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Princess patrol. Why didn’t you say so? Your watch captain must have it in for you.”

  His brow bunched under the visor of his cap. “You plainclothes?”

  “Private. How’s the murder rate?”

  “Up twenty percent over this time last year. But the commissioner says snag hookers so it’s hookers we snag. We’re hitting the johns this week.”

  I told him I was chasing down a lead on a missing persons beef.

  “Yeah,” he said. “My old man was a house painter. Took his paint can with him everywhere and nobody asked him what he thought he was doing because he always looked like he was working.”

  “Does this look like a face that has to pay for it?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person. All you folks look alike to me.”

  We grinned at each other like two strange cats in an alley. The white cop returned with my papers. “He’s clean.”

  “You won’t recognize the block next visit.” The black cop gave them to me. “We’ll have all the girls out of their miniskirts and banging typewriters in offices downtown.”

  “Or something.” I started the engine and waited. The uniformed pair stood clear and I cranked the Olds around the end of the barricade and cruised on. In my rearview mirror the cops swaggered back to their parked prowl car and got ready to dig another hole in the Atlantic Ocean.

  The place was a three-story apartment complex with outside stairs leading to iron-railed balconies, the lower of which was a long porch to the people on the ground floor. It would have started out with a trumpeting THIS IS THE FUTURE SITE OF sign and had all its apartments rented out before the foundation was poured, and there would have been a swimming pool in the courtyard and automatic washers in the basement and a window-cleaning service, but somewhere along the way things would have gone sour. The tenants would have gotten together and bought the building and yanked out the laundry to make room for storage and save on water and maintenance and put the window cleaning on a pay-as-you-go basis, and no one would use the pool anymore or skim the top and the water would have seeped down and the green scum have dried on the bottom and cracks would have appeared and the tenants would have had it filled in so that the courtyard resembled nothing so much as a giant air shaft with balconies all around for no better reason now than to look down and see how the concrete was doing.

  Then as the city’s complexion changed, as burglars and rapists turned commuter and building security went the way of the laundry and the window-washers and the pool, those tenants who could afford to leave would have left and either rented their old apartments to whoever had cash or let them stand empty. The aluminum siding would grow pockmarked and the picturesque ivy matting the front wall would run wild and pry shingles loose from the roof and the rosebushes along the base would overgrow and strangle all but a few lean ugly city-bred buds. The iron railings would be scaly like dead skin to the touch and there would be brown curled leaves in the cobwebs in the porch corners. As a rule you find a better class of slum there on the west side, but a sty is a sty.

  I drove around behind the building and parked in a circular lot that would be about as easy to get out of as a bulldog’s mouth and walked back around to the front, where a sign reading OFFICE was screwed to the door of a corner apartment at ground level. On the strip of lawn in front of the place a middle-aged black man in a cap and green workclothes had a hose in his hand from a tank with training wheels, spraying industrial-strength weedkiller over a lone dandelion.

  The woman in the office, also black, wearing white-framed glasses with an oriental tilt and a red wig, directed me to Twelve and put the door in my face before I could ask if B. Norton was a woman and what the B. stood for. She had something in the oven that smelled like a fire in a plastics plant. I thought about using the little brass knocker again, shrugged, and turned toward the outside stairs. The gardener or whatever was still bombarding the dandelion when I reached the second row of apartments. Well, he had all afternoon and a full tank.

  The door to Apartment Twelve was standing open, as were several others in the summery wa
rmth. A woman’s voice floated out.

  “Sir, I was just asking if you were bothered with peeling and flaking paint. I did not mean to imply… No, sir, I did not accuse you of living in a dump. Sir, I’m just asking the questions my employer wants me to … Well, then, you can take your peeling and flaking paint and shove it up your ass.”

  I poked my head through the door just as she banged the receiver into its cradle. She said, “Creep,” and took a pencil out of her hair to draw a line through something written on a yellow legal tablet on the table in front of her. She was in her fifties and running a little to fat, with a shadow under her chin and dewlaps over the corners of her small mouth. Her hair was done up in a kind of hive and tinted a bright brass. She had on a man’s gray cotton workshirt with flaps on the pockets. I couldn’t see what she was wearing under the table but it wouldn’t be chiffon. Her small eyes had a pink, naked, crowded-together look on either side of a nose that was just a nose and when she glanced up and saw me in the doorway she tipped down a pair of glasses with big round lenses and bows with a dip in them like racing handlebars. She peered at me through the lenses and said, “Well?”

  “I’m looking for a Barbara Norton,” I said.

  “I’m Barbara Norton.”

  I narrowed my eyes a little. She looked like she could be related to the ordinary blonde in the family picture with Joseph Evancek and the kids. Then she didn’t. I said, “The Barbara Norton I want took in her nephew Michael after he lost his family in Hamtramck nineteen years ago this July. It’s him I’m really looking for.”

  She didn’t scream or run up any walls. All she did was put the pencil back in her hair. Maybe for her that was the same thing.

  “Michael’s dead,” she said. “He’s been dead almost two years.”

  10

  I STEPPED INSIDE. There seemed to be an invitation in what she’d said about Michael. It was a fairly large apartment with a hallway leading to other rooms farther back and a sliding glass door opening onto a balcony overlooking the courtyard that told me I’d been right about the pool if there had ever been one. The place was halfway clean. It would always be halfway clean while she was living in it. The rug had been vacuumed within memory, but feathers of dust clung like frightened children to the legs of the table. There were stacks of magazines and old newspapers solid enough to sit on in the corners. Shirts and dresses and slips were flung over the arms of the chairs and sofa. Dust made little hammocks in the corners of framed pictures of sailboats and windmills on walls that were scrubbed sometimes but not as often as the rug was vacuumed. The sliding glass door was streaked enough not to need a brightly painted butterfly stuck to it at eye level, but it had one. The butterfly looked as if it would rather be out pollinating flowers the gardener hadn’t poisoned yet. I knew how it felt.

  I had spent a lot of time in private residences in this case. I was starting to feel like an insurance agent. You’ve a lovely home, Mr. and Mrs. Fosslethwaite. What kind of fire protection are you carrying at present?

  Barbara Norton had a cigarette burning in a pile of butts on the table that might or might not have had an ashtray under it. She broke the cigarette free of an inch and a half of ash and stuck it in her face without taking her eyes off me. They looked larger and less naked behind her window-size lenses. “Who are you?”

  I told her, flashing the bona fides. That has an official touch that works with some people, but I could see it meant as much to her as someone else’s baby picture. I put the wallet away. “I’m working for Martha Evancek, Michael’s grandmother. She’s in this country and she wants to know where he went. I’m sorry he’s dead. How’d he get that way?”

  While I was talking she got a fresh cigarette going, using the butt of the last. She did this with the concentration of a watchmaker replacing a jewel the size of an ant’s cufflink, then smashed out the old butt in the pile.

  “Close the door,” she said.

  I closed the door.

  “Have a seat.”

  I had a seat. This time I chose a padded rocker with a brassiere slung over the back. The sofas of the world could swallow air for a while.

  “Excuse the condition of the place,” she said. “When you work at home you don’t get much chance to pick up.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Whatever doesn’t burn gas. Stuff envelopes. Type up student papers, only my machine’s in hock just now. Mostly telephone work, surveys and advertising.” She indicated the Metropolitan Detroit directory lying open on the table and the legal pad with names and numbers scribbled on it, many of them scratched out. “Just now they’ve got me selling vinyl siding.”

  She mined a thin stack of colored plastic strips out of the general clutter and fanned them out expertly. They looked like insoles with a phony wood grain.

  “What are you supposed to do,” I said, “describe them over the telephone?”

  “They came in the same envelope with the list of questions I’m supposed to ask prospective customers. I guess they’re for inspiration. I’d sure hate to have this stuff on my house, though. I’d feel like a foot in a plastic shoe.” She dropped the strips back to the table. “You should see my phone bill. The manager sent the cops up here yesterday; she thinks I’m a call girl.”

  I grinned and lit a Winston. “Michael.”

  “He drowned in the California Gulf a year ago last August. He and a friend were standing in water just over their waists off Cabo San Lucas when the undertow got them. Someone in a boat rescued the friend. Michael’s body was never recovered.”

  There was a deliberate deadness in her tone.

  I said, “What was he doing in the Baja?”

  “He was on vacation. He worked for a package design firm in Ohio.”

  “Is that where you went after you left St. Clair Shores?”

  She nodded, leaking smoke out her nostrils. “Dayton. My bastard husband Bob ran out on both of us six weeks after the move. Couldn’t stand having a kid in the house. What was I supposed to do, stick him in an orphanage after that filthy son of a bitch Evancek —”

  “Mrs. Evancek and her husband wrote you after the shooting. You never answered their letters.”

  “I wanted Michael to forget all about his father’s side of the family. I wouldn’t even let him write his grandparents. It was the right decision. He grew up normal.”

  “The authorities in Cabo San Lucas investigated the drowning?”

  “You can check with them.”

  “Was Michael married?”

  She shook her head. “I used to nag him about it. But his opinion of the blessed state couldn’t have been high, and who could blame him? So you can tell the old lady to forget about great-grandchildren.”

  “Of course, you could be lying about that,” I said.

  “You could find out easy enough.”

  There was an ashtray rounded over with butts on the end table next to the rocker. I tipped some ash on top of the pile. Thinking. “What brought you back here?”

  “The rent’s cheaper than Dayton. I just moved back the first of the year.”

  “You collect coins?”

  She raised her eyebrows at that. They were tweezed very thin and gave her an owlish look behind the glasses. Then she laughed, an abrupt, harsh sound with no enjoyment in it. It ended in a coughing fit. She ground out the butt. “Yeah, I should have guessed that’s how you found me. I started subscribing to that magazine for Michael at least ten years ago, when he was still at home. Because my name was on the check they sent it to me. I never got around to canceling it for sentimental reasons.”

  She seemed as sentimental as a wrecking ball. I said, “How did you and Joseph get along before the shooting?”

  “We didn’t. I never liked the idea of Jeanine marrying that dumb greasy Polack and I don’t guess I hid it too well. I only visited her when he was at work. I didn’t see much of her after he got canned and started hanging around the house all the time getting drunk.”

  “How do you k
now that if you weren’t around?”

  “Jeanine told me. We talked on the phone when he was passed out or busy tanking up at some bar. She was miserable. The kids were the only reason she stuck. My sister was runner-up for homecoming queen her senior year in high school. She could have had her choice of anyone. Ah, shit.” She picked up a disposable butane lighter and got another weed burning. “That night, when the phone rang, and it was the police, I think I knew what they were going to say before they said it. I didn’t feel anything but tired. Even when they called me down to the morgue — I don’t know why, there wasn’t anything to identify—” She let it hang and looked at me. “I guess you think I’m just another burned-out bitch.”

  “What I think won’t change my underwear.”

  She made the noise again, this time without coughing. “All you good-looking guys got tact. Bob had tact. That’s why he ran out on me.”

  “Do you remember the name of the friend Michael was swimming with?”

  “Fred something.” She thought. “Florentine. Fred Florentine. They worked together. The company was Buckeye Industries in Dayton. He might still be there.”

  I finished my cigarette. I had run out of questions. I thanked her and got up. “I’ll let you get back to work now.”

  Her eyes followed me. “What are you going to tell the old lady?”

  “The truth. It’s paid for.”

  “It better be, for your sake. It’s not a thing you’d buy after you heard it.”