Sugartown

by Loren D. Estleman

  “That was nice last night,” she said, after the young man had passed us, walking swiftly.

  “We aim to please.”

  She smiled monkey-fashion. We walked. Banks of tall windows broke up the pastel walls at intervals, looking out on a sweep of green lawn two floors down.

  She said, “Martha’s out of danger, but she tires easily. You’ll have to be gentle.”

  “I left my gun home and everything.”

  “What’s that, your thirteen-hundred face?”

  “Sometimes it slips into gear without warning. This it?” We were slowing down near a corner room. The hall took a sharp turn ten feet up and we were alone in our stretch.

  “This is her room. I won’t be going in. She wants to talk to you alone. I might not see you before you leave.”

  “Then we’ll say good-bye right here.” I gathered her up.

  She struggled a little. “Someone might come around that corner any second.”

  “We’ll say you were trying to resuscitate me.”

  “Standing up?”

  “We could lie down.”

  “Never mind.”

  We kissed. When we came up I said, “I met a blonde today who makes you look like a boy.”

  “So go to her. Who’s stopping you?”

  “She’d swallow me whole. It was that kind of blonde.”

  “Not you.”

  “Thanks — I think. This guy you’re sort of involved with; is he a doctor?”

  “He’s studying to be. He’s two years younger than I am.”

  “Horrors. What do you do with your cane when you’re necking?”

  She nodded. “I guess I deserved that. I was daring you to object.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  We were still entangled. She put a hand against my chest and tilted her head back to get a better look at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just uh-huh. It’s something I say when I can’t think of anything to say.”

  “His name’s Tim.”

  “Nice name. I don’t like him.”

  “Nobody asked you to.” She got loose and straightened her uniform. Just then a white-haired male patient in a robe and pajamas turned the corner and passed us trailing an odor of pipe smoke. We kept silent until he was out of range.

  I said, “Funny how you have to hide this sort of thing.”

  “It’s called being civilized.”

  She had cooled about two degrees below professional. But the flush was still there, in different light this time.

  “Busy tonight?” I asked.

  “Double shift, remember?”

  “You get off when, four A.M.? We could have a cup of coffee.”

  “I need my sleep. Tim doesn’t have classes tomorrow. He’s taking me sailing on St. Clair.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  We said good-bye. I watched her walk back down the hall and press the button for the elevator and wait. When the doors opened she went through them without looking back. I scratched my right ear. Then I changed faces and stepped through the open door into Martha Evancek’s hospital room.

  15

  THE ROOM WAS SEMIPRIVATE, dim gray, and as noisy as fingers in a felt glove. Mrs. Evancek had the bed nearest the door, with a folding screen standing between it and its mate. I peeped around the edge of the screen. Vertical blinds were drawn over the room’s only window and what light there was fell on a mop of dirty-gray frizz showing over a humped blanket.

  “She’s quite deaf, Mr. Walker. Fireworks in the room wouldn’t awaken her.”

  I turned. Mrs. Evancek was half sitting up with two pillows bunched behind her back and a thin green cotton blanket drawn over her lap. She looked less aristocratic, more peasant-like without the veil, and some strands of her white hair were loose, but the bold nose and heavy lids were still arresting, and dramatic shadows lay in the many hollows of her face. She wore a gray flannel nightdress that tied at the neck and had long sleeves and a ruffled bodice that probably embarrassed her. Her strong rough hands were folded on the blanket.

  “They tell me you had a scare.” I hung my coat and hat on the edge of the open door to the bathroom.

  “Very little is left that can frighten me. Please sit down.”

  The only chair on her side of the screen was a tricky tan vinyl number with an attached footstool that slid out when you leaned back. I didn’t.

  “You are good at what you do,” she said. “You learned in twenty-four hours what I could not in nineteen years.”

  “I got lucky. My fist went through the wall in a spot where I usually just bruise some knuckles.” I paused. “I wish the news could be better.”

  She shifted her position on the bed and reached across to open the drawer in the nightstand. Her hand rummaged around inside for a moment and then she sat back again, breathing heavily. “They’ve hidden my cigarettes again.”

  I gave her one of mine and lit it without taking one for myself. She inhaled smoke in that odd way she had, holding it in her mouth and then seeming to swallow it, letting what was left find its way out her nostrils. She looked at me. “What is the Norton woman like?”

  “A hard egg, we used to call her type. She thinks everything she does is right once she’s done it and no one can change her mind. Not a bad woman. Just tough.”

  “Tough.” She ate some more cigarette, her hand covering the lower half of her face. “It’s an important word over here. I’m not sure I understand its meaning.”

  “You’re not alone. Some cops think it has to do with getting someone in an interrogation room with badge muscle all around, and in the corner poolrooms downtown it seems to mean who has the loudest gun. You can be born tough — the kind of tough that lets you watch German bombers roaring roof-high over your backyard and not blink — or you can acquire toughness like callus from what life bounces off you, like Barbara Norton. We set a lot of store by it here ever since a small group of misfits in Boston stuck their tongues out at King George and made him like it. That’s what tough is really all about, bucking the odds and coming out with all the important things you had going in. It’s one of the reasons so many Americans support what another small group of misfits are up to in your country.”

  “That’s all very democratic and inspiring, but the people who make speeches here wouldn’t invite the people who are fighting there into their houses to use the bathrooms. And in most cases they’d be right not to.”

  “Nice people don’t make revolutions,” I said. “Being tough doesn’t have a lot to do with knowing which fork to use at a dinner party.”

  “I think you would know, or make those who do know appear superficial. And yet I think you are tough.”

  I said nothing. The ruby on her right hand glistened like a drop of fresh blood in the room’s dimness.

  “Tell me about Michael,” she said.

  “He had a friend, Fred Florentine, in the place where he worked. He was the one who was with Michael at the time of the accident. I spoke to him on the telephone. He said Michael was the best kind of friend to have, the kind that’s there when he’s needed and good to have around even when he isn’t. The kind of friend I’ve been looking for all my life. He collected coins,” I added. It seemed important. None of it was enough, for a life.

  “That’s comforting. But of course you only hear good about the dead. I would like to talk with this Fred.”

  “I have his number. It’ll be in the report.”

  The woman on the other side of the screen stirred. There was a rustling of bedclothes and a thin old voice like a parrot’s said something to someone named Caroline.

  “Her daughter,” Mrs. Evancek explained. “The nurse said she died in childbirth thirty years ago.”

  I nodded sagely.

  “There is something else,” she said.

  Her eyes moved to the door of the room, which remained open. I got up and closed it and sat down again. She moved her head approvingly.

  “It is a
religious artifact, a silver crucifix trimmed with semiprecious stones. It has been in my family as long as this ring and was cast by the jeweler to the court of Sigismund Augustus in the sixteenth century. Its intrinsic value is not great. Its historical value is greater, though not enough to make the difference between a poor man and a wealthy one. I gave it to Joseph when he left Poland. He was to keep it as a family trust and not to part with it unless his life were threatened. I don’t know what happened to it after his death. I would like to know now.”

  That spilled me as much as anything about the old lady had spilled me from the first. Her case had seemed complete without a holy relic. I took a deep breath and leaned back and the footstool licked out. I used it.

  “Why didn’t you mention this before?”

  She tipped some ash into a saucer that was trying hard not to look like an ashtray on the nightstand. “It was not as important as finding Michael. There was the possibility it would be found when he was, but if not I would have been content to have my grandson returned to me. It is different now, you see. Also, the crucifix would be considered a national treasure and illegal to remove from Poland. I did not know you well enough before to trust you with the story, which might mean deportation if it reached the immigration authorities here. I feel that I know you well enough now. Also the possibility of being made to leave this country has lost its terrors.”

  “You want it back.”

  “It belongs to my family, not to the Russian puppet government in Warsaw.”

  “I can ask Barbara Norton. If she has it she’ll want something for it.”

  “It isn’t hers to sell,” she said sharply. Then she closed her eyes and rested the back of her head on the pillows. Lying that way she reminded me of Stash Leposava.

  “Do you have proof it’s yours?”

  “Of course not.” She opened her eyes, smoked. “You may offer her five hundred dollars. In the nature of a reward.”

  I nodded. “She might bite, if I offer cash.”

  “You will do it?”

  “I’ll do that much. If she doesn’t have it I wouldn’t know where to begin looking.”

  “Karen has deposited the rest of the money I gave you. I have that and the five hundred dollars you returned Tuesday and a little more.”

  “It’ll keep till you get out of here. What’s the cross look like?”

  “It’s silver, as I said, about seven inches by three. The largest stone is a lapis lazuli, deep blue, perhaps a third of an inch across and set in the center. There are smaller red garnets set in each of the four points. The inscription on the back is in Cyrillic characters and means ‘Glory and Eternity.’ ”

  I wrote it all down and kicked the footstool back under the chair. “I’ll get back to you with her answer.”

  “Karen is not to know anything about this,” she said. “If she asks what we talked about, tell her it was about Michael.”

  “Sure.” I got up. Her eyes followed me.

  “She has it in her mind that I am an old immigrant woman with nothing to live for but her memories. I’m afraid she’ll think me grasping if she hears of the crucifix. Do you?”

  “You aren’t paying me to think, Mrs. Evancek. But if it’s grasping to want what’s yours we’re all just as bad as one another. She won’t hear it from me.”

  “They say that material things mean less the nearer we get to death. I think that those who say that are very young.”

  She ground out her cigarette in the ashtray and lay back. She was having trouble keeping her eyes open. I told her again I’d get back to her. She might have nodded. I got my hat and coat and left. The hallway seemed bright after the gray colorlessness of that room.

  There was no sign of Karen on my way out of the building.

  16

  BARBARA NORTON had moved some since my last visit. I could tell, because this time the door to her apartment was closed. I knocked and she barked and I opened it to find her sitting where I had left her, wearing the same gray man’s workshirt, with the telephone receiver screwed to her ear and what might have been the same cigarette burning in her face. The pile of butts on the table was half again as big as before and the fluffy dust on the rug scurried in front of the stirred air like pigeons in the park.

  I sat in the chair I’d occupied earlier and tipped my hat back on my head and waited while she finished talking about peeling and flaking paint. At length she rang off and flipped down her cheaters and looked at me.

  I said, “I’m back.”

  “I noticed right away.” She waited.

  “It’s an object I’m looking for this trip. A crucifix, more properly referred to as a cross, as this one doesn’t have the figure of Jesus on it. Seven inches by three, silver, with a blue stone where the crosspieces meet and smaller red stones at the points. It belongs to Martha Evancek’s family. She’d like it back.”

  She laughed the laugh with the dry cough in it. The cigarette bobbed in the corner of her mouth and dropped ash on the front of her shirt but she didn’t brush it off. “Now it’s a search for the holy grail. What’s she paying?”

  “Couple of hundred. Mostly sentimental value. It disappeared at the time of the shooting and it looks like it came out of the house with Michael.”

  “Just a couple of hundred?”

  “It’s not even worth that, really. Silver drops a little every time gold goes up and the stones are nothing.”

  “Hardly worth your coming down here, is it?”

  I lit a Winston. “Family stuff.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that. I never had one, exactly, though I tried to do what I could for Michael after that bastard Bob took off and Joseph, that son of a bitch —”

  “I heard this. What about the cross?”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “She’ll go five hundred,” I said. “Tops.”

  “If I had it I’d sell it. I didn’t let him take anything out of that house but the clothes on his back. I even made him leave his coin collection. He howled about that, but it was the right decision. He grew up normal.”

  Her conversation had all the fresh spontaneity of her telephone spiel. The more I heard her the better I thought of Bob Norton.

  “Where would such a thing be if Michael didn’t take it with him?” I wondered out loud.

  “How the hell should I know? Still in the house, probably.’

  “Not after all this time. It’d get sold or —” I thought. The ash on my cigarette grew. I got rid of it and stood up. “Well, thanks again. I hope you sell a lot of siding. One more thing. Did you have an insurance policy on Michael?”

  “Are you kidding? Who could afford the premiums?”

  “Who else but an insurance company would send someone down to look into the drowning?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know.”

  It was three o’clock when I got back to the office. Howard Mayk would still be on duty at Shaw College. I looked up security there and got a voice like a smashed windpipe who switched me to a call box across campus.

  “Yeah?”

  It was Mayk, all right. “This is Walker. Remember me?”

  “Who could forget? The wife and I had a honey of a fight that night over me not being home when she got in from work nor leaving a note. The hell with her. Find the kid?”

  “More or less. He’s dead. Accident.”

  A pause. “Jesus, I’m sorry. How’d the old lady take it?”

  “Better than someone who never stacked sandbags during a shelling. I’m looking for something else now, a religious item Joseph Evancek took with him out of Poland. What’s the procedure in Hamtramck when no one comes forward to claim the deceased’s personal effects? Hello?”

  “I was just remembering,” he said quickly. “There wasn’t a whole lot, just some cash and clothes and furniture and the usual house clutter. Some Church stuff, not much. Evancek’s wife was Protestant. The Nortons took the cash, and our cable to Poland about the rest of the stuff never got an answ
er. It would of gone on the block. What kind of religious item?”

  “A large silver cross. Too big to wear.”

  “I don’t remember it. I think I would if I’d seen it.”

  “I didn’t think you had. If the department sent an itemized list to the Evanceks in Poland it would have been on it. The reason I called, I got to thinking about the jam Evancek was in before the blowup — unemployed, drinking up what was in the bank. He might have hocked the cross for whiskey money.”

  “Could be.”

  “When I thought of that, I remembered the fence you said you and Bill Mischiewicz put in soak, the one that specialized in religious articles. This cross is one of a kind. If Joseph came to him he might remember, or know if it was in circulation at all. Is he still around?”

  “He was when I left the department, but we could never get anything on him again. Now, I don’t know. He’d be pretty old. Name’s Woldanski, John Woldanski. He ran a shop on Trowbridge; you could check it out.”

  He gave me the address. I wrote it on the telephone pad and tore off the page. “Thanks, Mr. Mayk.”

  “Yeah.”

  Power shovels reared like glutting beasts against a mildewed sky, their yellow iron jaws drooling dirt and rubble and vomiting their loads into big piles. The air throbbed with engine noise and the grinding creak of mashing gears and peep-peep-peep of heavy machinery backing up. It wasn’t doing much backing up. It was creeping uptown with the unstoppable inevitability of glaciers on the move. New barricades had been erected farther north that had nothing to do with strawberry festivals. The scene played like evolution in reverse; civilization had had its day and the dinosaurs were taking over, leaving only naked earth like droppings in their wake.

  I made enough detours to get lost in a town I knew like my tongue knew the inside of my mouth, but came out on Trowbridge eventually and pulled up to a meter with some time left on it in front of a square brick building with a charred front and department-store windows on the ground floor. There was junk in them, porcelain lamps shaped like women’s legs and dirty-faced reproductions of famous dead artists’ masterworks in plaster frames and “antiques” you can buy brand new in any hardware store, here rescued from barns and garages with some of the rust knocked off and showing evidence of half-hearted attempts to clean them up. Young smartly dressed married women with credit cards in their purses would buy them for living rooms with old barn siding on the walls. Yes, this is an original panel from a two-seater outhouse that once belonged to a German pig farmer in Mecosta County. I simply stole it from this grubby little shop in Hamtramck. Don’t you think it makes a lovely coffee table?