Sugartown

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I was told it wasn’t worth a lot. Not enough to do what Rynearson did to me to try to find out where it is. It isn’t even why I was there. That was a different case. I thought.” I sipped coffee and reached unconsciously for a cigarette before I remembered I wasn’t wearing a shirt.

  “Here.” She tossed my wrinkled pack onto the tray.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Just habit. Who helped you drag me in here?”

  “Not you, that’s for sure. You were looking for the cross when you found that man dead in Hamtramck, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s it mean that it has something to do with this other case too?”

  “Beats me. I’ll have to throw everything I know about both of them into a bucket and shake it and see what comes out. What’d you use, a block and tackle?”

  “For what? Oh, that. You keep changing the subject. I’ve helped bigger men than you into hospital bathrooms. I thought you were drunk until I got your shirt off —”

  “Sex fiend.”

  “—and saw those marks on your wrist. I still think I should make an appointment for you with our toxicologist.”

  “Thanks, I’ve seen enough white coats for this lifetime. Speaking of which, when does the old lady get sprung?”

  “Tomorrow, why?”

  “I don’t want to waste a trip when I go to visit her.”

  “I didn’t know you’d hit it off that well.”

  “Little old ladies love me. It’s my honest face.”

  She studied me. A question fluttered around the corners of her mouth. She shooed it away. She reached out and stroked my cheek. “It can use a shave.”

  “I’d cut off an ear trying to scrape my chin.”

  “Just stay put.” She got up and went out. I finished my coffee. She came back carrying a razor and a shaving cup and brush. I said, “I hope you borrowed that from a neighbor.”

  She pasted my mouth shut with lather.

  Later she brought in my clothes on a hanger and hung it on the back of the chair she’d been sitting in. “I pressed the suit and rinsed your shirt. Don’t expect that kind of service on a regular basis. Your gun’s in the living room. What are you doing?”

  I had peeled back the blanket and swung my feet to the floor. “It’s called getting out of bed. I’m starting to be pretty good at it. Next week I plan to try walking.”

  She stood between me and the clothes. “You’ve had only six hours’ rest. You’ll run out of gas before you get outside.”

  “Lady, I’ve been running on fumes since I got away from Rynearson’s.” I tickled her. When she squealed and jumped I got my pants off the hanger.

  “Don’t call me lady, you lunk. It makes you sound like a taxi driver.”

  “I’ve driven taxis.” I put on the pants. “You don’t see many ladies through that little window. It’s not a word I throw around.”

  “Are you paying me a compliment? I can’t ever tell with you.”

  I scooped her up. We kissed. She said, “I guess you are.”

  I brushed her cheek with my fingertips. “I’d stay, but the meter’s running.”

  “I’d ask you,” she said. “But Tim’s coming by in a little while.”

  “Is there a Tim?”

  “There’s a Tim.” She paused. “Last night he asked me to marry him.”

  I could see my reflection in her brown eyes. “What’d you say?”

  “I wasn’t very original. I said I had to think.”

  “Are you thinking?”

  She looked at the floor to the right of me and nodded jerkily. It was a way she had. I took her chin and turned her face toward mine. We brushed lips and she said, “I’ve been asked before.”

  “I don’t believe it. An ugly thing like you.”

  She didn’t smile. “I couldn’t picture myself married those times. I can now. Maybe not married, exactly, but part of some kind of commitment.”

  “With Tim?”

  “With someone, not him necessarily. I’m sick of Saturday night movies and restaurant dinners you don’t taste because you’re busy wondering if you’re going to ask him in afterwards. I’d like to try a different rut. Sometimes I think I’ll scream if I don’t.”

  “Don’t tell me about ruts. I wrote my dissertation on them.”

  “Is everything funny to you?”

  “No.”

  “I think you’re wonderful,” she said. “I also think you’re a man of many secrets, mostly other people’s. I don’t mind that I don’t really know you. But people who make a habit of keeping confidences have a hard way about them. Their eyes look bleak and when they smile or frown it’s just their faces moving. It’s like they’ve drawn a black confessional curtain between themselves and the world. When they talk you can see them turning over every phrase first to make sure something important isn’t stuck to it.”

  “I’m like that.”

  “You try not to be, or not to show it. You try to park your secrets on sidings, but the ends stick out and you have to step carefully around them. Talking to you is like tiptoeing through a minefield.”

  “Three different metaphors in a row,” I said. “Or are they similes? I can never get that straight.”

  She passed it. “At first I liked that. It made you mysterious. But it’s a side of you I could grow not to like a lot. I don’t want there to be anything about you I couldn’t like.”

  “Are we saying good-bye?”

  “You could change.”

  “No one has since Lot’s wife.”

  “It doesn’t have to be good-bye good-bye,” she said. “Secrets don’t harm a friendship the way they do, well, love.”

  “It doesn’t work like that. It’s not something you can go back from.”

  She said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  “It’s not the way I feel.”

  I finished dressing and she walked me through the living room to the door, holding hands. The way you hold on to something you’ve borrowed for a while and it’s time to give back. As if it might break before you return it. I stopped to snap on the gun in its holster. On the threshold we faced each other again.

  “Thanks for taking care of me,” I said.

  “I was about to tell you the same thing.”

  “You don’t need taking care of.”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s a bitch.”

  Her eyes glistened on the edge of something. An edge of something I will never be in a position to push someone over. We kissed again, and it tasted the same as always. Everything was the same except one thing.

  She said, “We’re always kissing in doorways.”

  “I’m always going through them. Mostly out.”

  I let go of her hand very slowly and went through one more.

  The weather looked warm, but I couldn’t tell. I felt anesthetized. I could stub my toe and not feel it till Christmas. I caught a cab to the office. The driver, who had looked at me without speaking as I got into the back, adjusted the mirror to keep me in it. I glimpsed my reflection as he did so. I couldn’t blame him. I climbed stairs again, resting on the landings, and let myself in through the waiting room. No one was waiting in it, but that was okay, it was Sunday. I didn’t have any mail. I counted the money again and locked it in the safe. Crumpling the pack with two stale cigarettes in it, I bonged it into the wastebasket, got a fresh one out of the carton in the top drawer of the desk and sat down and propping my feet up on one corner I laid the hot-radiator smell of tobacco smoke over the mustiness in the air. After five puffs I put out the weed and hauled the telephone over by its cord, hand over hand like a swabby weighing anchor. There was no answer in either Louise Starr’s room or Fedor Alanov’s suite. Out hustling Great Literature.

  I looked at the blonde in the mini-misdemeanor bikini on the advertising calendar. She was standing in the classic S-curve, bending forward a little to rub suntan oil on one slick brown thigh so that a soft V of petal-white showed just above the brass ring that
held her top together in front. I had stood in every corner of the office and had not been able to see down any farther under the bright material. Her smile was glistening white against the deep, deep tan of her skin.

  The walls were bellying in. They had been doing that in every room I had been in since coming awake in Rynearson’s bed. I stood up slowly with my head sloshing around like a water balloon balanced on my neck. I walked carefully up to the calendar and just as carefully tore off the page and doubled it over and balled it up and chucked it across the room into the basket. There was a redhead in an even skimpier outfit underneath, and six more girls under that

  26

  THE MAIN BRANCH of the Detroit Public Library on Woodward is set back from that incredibly long boulevard that begins in the posh communities north of the city and stabs straight as an icepick down through the tattoo parlors and street-gang hangouts and all-night jiggle shows and bars and bars and bars of downtown, ending at the docks where the painted wheezing triple-decked anachronisms of the Boblo boats load passengers bound for the only United States island amusement park in Canadian territorial waters. The colonnaded marble-faced library building stands alone in its own square of grass and asphalt like a handsome senile emperor anointing himself with cologne against the animal smell of his subjects. All the knowledge that can be stored between covers is sheltered under its flat roof, but the lads dealing peanuts and white powder on the front steps could add something.

  My business today wasn’t with them. I paid off my cabbie, who looked from my battered pan to the elegant columns behind me and said, “Library’s closed today. It’s Sunday.”

  “I have an indulgence,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  I smiled in my saintly way and blessed him with two fingers. He blessed me back with one and took off with a yip of tires. An agnostic.

  I walked through the parking lot around to the back door and rapped. It was opened almost instantly by a black ex-boxer of middle height with thick sloping shoulders under his uniform shirt and a neck like a leg. Balloons of scar tissue crowded his brows and his modest Afro was blazed white on one side as if he’d been struck by lightning — which, if you believed in stories, was the only thing that hadn’t been thrown at him in eleven years in the ring. He recognized me and grinned with just his lowers.

  “ ’Afternoon, Mr. Walker. It’s been months. You look every day of it, too.”

  “Count on you to say just the right thing when I’m low, Rupp,” I said, stepping in past him. “I’ve been using the front door lately, when the library’s open. But this won’t wait.”

  “Microfilm room?” He drummed broken-knuckled fingers on the keytainer next to the revolver on his belt.

  “Humanities section. Art history.”

  He clucked his tongue. “To think I knowed you when it was Archie comic books.”

  “Like hell. I was translating the Arabian Nights back into the original Sanskrit when I was six.” I handed him ten dollars.

  He tucked the bill into his shirt pocket, buttoned the flap, raked a glance any detective would trade his gold shield for over the closed-circuit television monitors above his desk, and led the way through the maze of corridors and varying levels that I hoped one day to know from the palace at Mycenae. He walked noiselessly on the balls of his feet with one shoulder turned forward like a fighter coming out of his corner at six-forty-five with dinner reservations downtown at seven. He had this job because I’d erased a smudge from his sheet at police headquarters. The department computer had had him mixed with another Damon Rupp pulling twenty to life in Jackson for Robbery Armed, and it was just a matter of sending a case of Seagram’s Seven to an overworked punch clerk in Records and Information, but Rupp had me down as the Al Kaline of fixers and so far I hadn’t gotten around to setting him straight. I probably never would as long as the library closed Sundays and holidays.

  When he left me alone in the stacks I took notes from the card file and selected nine likely titles having to do with the religious art of eastern Europe. They proved to be big volumes and it took two trips between the shelves and the nearest reading table before I had them all in one place. I sat down and peeled my hat off and hung it on the divider and started with the indexes. I was the only thing stirring in the glossed vastness of that room lit by sunlight coming gray through the narrow, grilled shatterproof windows. The sound of pages turning was like small avalanches.

  After an hour I had read enough to mark the useful sections with leaves torn from my notebook. Then I settled down to study. I learned everything anyone would ever want to know about the art of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches and the lost-wax process of casting holy impedimenta in gold and silver and bronze. I could deliver a lecture on the subject anytime I felt like clearing a room. A hand the size of a switch engine shook me by the shoulder.

  “You can’t stay here past dark, Mr. Walker. It’s the job if my relief catches you.”

  I blinked at Rupp’s heavy features. They were indistinct in the gathering gloom.

  “You should’ve let me sleep another five minutes. I was about to be crowned Pope.”

  “Must of been something you read,” he said dryly.

  It was dark when I got back home. I walked through the place, turning on lights as I went and seeing everything through new eyes, the way you do when you get back from jail or the hospital. I had been to both at the same time. There was enough Scotch left in the bottle in the kitchen cupboard for two drinks and I used that without bothering to hunt up a glass. As the heat scaled my belly I realized two things: that I was hungry enough to eat a typewriter and that I was too whacked-out to turn on the oven. I found half a loaf of bread and a jar of stale peanut butter. It beat liquid protein clear to Grand Rapids and back.

  The telephone rang in the living room just as I was starting on my second sandwich. I unstuck the roof of my mouth with water from the tap and threw a leg over the arm of the easy chair and picked up the instrument on the fourth ring. The caller was Louise Starr.

  “I tried to reach you earlier at your office. Why did the FBI call me?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “It’s a novel. A Russian novel.”

  “I thought we had a date this weekend. You stood me up.”

  “You wouldn’t believe for who.”

  “You sound like a record winding down. I can barely hear you on this end.”

  I said, “When’s your plane tomorrow?”

  “Two o’clock. But I’ll be tied up all morning. I’ve been putting off reading the rest of those manuscripts too long.”

  “Need a lift to the airport?”

  “Andrei’s driving me. But that could change.” She sounded a little less cool.

  “No, I want to talk to him too. I’ll ride along if I don’t have to share the back seat with trunks or anything.”

  “I travel light. Two suitcases and a briefcase. Has something happened? Is this to do with Eric Rynearson? Did you deliver the five — the package?”

  “We’ll talk. One o’clock at the hotel?”

  “Better make it twelve-thirty,” she said. “I don’t want to get hung up in traffic.”

  “Traffic’s pretty low on the list of things to worry about in this town.”

  There was a pause on her end. “Well, that’s properly enigmatic.”

  “It’s in character, Mrs. Starr. I’m a man of many secrets.” I said good-bye and broke the connection.

  27

  I SLEPT A DRUGGED SLEEP crawling with soft sinister men in white coats with big needles and gamey apelike assistants and corpses in cellars and rumpled professional men moving in and out like worker ants with the same tired look on their faces and behind them tempered steel. I got up several times during the night to grope my way into the bathroom and draw cold water into a glass and watch my reflection in the mirror over the sink while waiting for it to fill. I was getting the look.

  “She smiled like a monkey,” I told the face. “Who needs that?”
/>   In the morning I stepped out of a cold shower into the imitation seersucker and ate breakfast and took a cab to the impound to bail out my car. The tow chain had scraped chrome off the front bumper, but that was the extent of the damage. I drove to the office. Obese white clouds lay beached on a sky the color of blue chalk. Once upstairs, I opened the window to let the flies out and got the Underwood down from atop the file cabinet and spent an hour typing up the main facts of the Evancek and Alanov cases from my notes. With the articles and adverbs left out they still filled three pages, and they didn’t make any more sense in black and white than they had in my head. It was like trying to match two torn pieces of paper with a third strip missing from the middle. Finally I filed the works in the drawer where I kept my change of shirts and put my heels in the hollow worn into the desk top for that purpose and ignited a Winston, working on my rings. This was one for Baker Street.

  The mail came at ten. Two bills, one of my own statements returned for lack of a forwarding address, a circular advertising a martial arts course for hotel dicks and private investigators, and a coarse Manila envelope carrying a La Paz postmark. I tore it open and stared stupidly at the top handwritten page of the sheaf for a moment before I realized it was in Spanish. Several pages in, a translation into bastard English began and continued for ten garbled pages. The last was signed “Luis Esteban Cristobal, Sargento, Policia de Cabo San Lucas.”

  I read the report twice, consuming three cigarettes in the process. By then it was time to meet Louise Starr. I lined up the edges and tipped the papers back into the envelope and filed it with my typewritten scenario. Before leaving I broke a fifty-dollar bill out of the safe, folded a piece of blank paper over it, sealed it in an envelope, wrote Sergeant Cristobal’s name and the address of his station on the outside, stamped it, and put it in my breast pocket for mailing later. Then I locked myself out of the office a wiser man than I had been going in.

  The clerk in the lobby of the Westin, an Arab with a moustache like a mascara line, rang Mrs. Starr’s room, got no answer, tried Alanov’s suite, spoke briefly to whoever answered, cradled the receiver, and told me to go on up. It was probably as much work as he had done on his shift.