Sugartown

by Loren D. Estleman

  Andrei Sigourney met me at the door to the suite. Today he was wearing a light blue suit contrasting the slightly olive sheen of his features and dark feminine eyes. His Nantucket beard interfered not at all with the square lines of his face. The scar on his brow looked less vivid now, but I was used to it. We shook hands briefly and he stood aside to let me through the unused room into the main part of the layout. Fedor Alanov was sitting on the same humpbacked sofa as if he had never left it except to change his clothes. He now had on a plain yellow short-sleeved shirt with a square tail hanging outside his slacks. A descendant of the bottle I had seen him kill off last visit was dying the same quick death into the glass in his other hand. His beard was no grayer, his shaggy black hair was no thicker, the bridge of his nose was no more nonexistent. Glaciers had come and gone since I had last stood in that room, but Alanov was still Alanov and Crackerjacks still offered prizes.

  “How’s the book coming?” I asked. “Or do writers get sick of hearing that?”

  “It’s coming. And we do.”

  “Save it for the reporters, Fedor. Mr. Walker’s a detective. He sees right through that irascible pose.”

  I turned toward the new voice. She wore the brown tailored suit and cream blouse I had seen before, but the outfit would have been to the cleaners and back since. Her hair was down and sunlight coming through the doorway behind her haloed her head. Rooms changed when she entered them. They always would. I lifted her proffered hand and said, “No one else shows you the sights next time you’re in town, right?”

  “Right.” She smiled. It was strictly for business associates. “But I doubt I’ll be back. The bean-counters in demographics don’t consider this a high-sales area. It’s too bad.” Her smile changed a little and it didn’t seem to have much to do with book sales. Then I decided that that was more than you can get out of a smile.

  “What happened to your face?” she asked then.

  “I ran into a floor. Luggage?”

  “In the car. I just have to check out at the desk. We can go anytime you’re ready.”

  “I came ready.”

  She hesitated. “Fedor —”

  “You’ll have the book when the book’s done,” he said, topping off his glass. “We did that. The good-byes too. So get out of here and let a man work.”

  “I don’t like leaving you here alone,” she said. Then she looked hopefully at me. “Unless the Rynearson situation has been dealt with.”

  I said, “You ended that sentence with a preposition. And no, it hasn’t. Not in the way you wanted it to be.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a big club.”

  “Club?”

  “B. B. B. B. and B.,” I said. “The Benevolent Brotherhood of the Bothered, Befuddled, and Bedraggled. Also Bludgeoned. I’m hoping to dissolve it after we get through with our ride.”

  Her deep blue eyes glinted like waves catching the sun. “I’m not very good at riddles. But if Fedor’s still in danger someone should stay with him.”

  “He isn’t.”

  “But you said—”

  “He never was.” I offered her my arm.

  After a moment she took it. We left, trailing Sigourney. Behind us Alanov’s bottle of wine gurgled.

  An elderly couple shared the elevator with us and we didn’t speak on the way down or in the lobby, where a crowd of conventioneers was being checked through. In the covered driveway leading from the hotel garage, a teenage attendant in a uniform with a stripe on the pants hastened to open the front door on the passenger’s side of a black Mercury for Mrs. Starr. She was a lady a lot of men three times her age would move fast to open doors for. She shook her head slightly and said, “I’ll ride in back. This gentleman and I have business to discuss.”

  He glanced at me, measuring me, swung that door shut, and opened the one behind it. I walked around the trunk and got in on the other side. Nobody opened my door. Sigourney got into the driver’s seat and started the engine and we got rolling.

  On West Jefferson Louis Starr watched me light a cigarette. The flame jiggled in my fingers. I still didn’t have any feeling in the tips. She said, “You look terrible.”

  “Thanks. I feel horrible.”

  “Did Rynearson — ?” She left the end dangling.

  “Not alone. He had help. He sicced his Man Friday on me and got a needle into me and kept me for two days. I think he wanted to preserve me for his collection. I’ll take my receipt back.” I handed her the five thousand dollars.

  “He didn’t take it?”

  “He couldn’t see it from the pile of cash he was standing on. Tell your bosses the next time they set out to buy someone to find out his price first.”

  She counted the money, put it in her purse, found my receipt, initialed it, and gave it to me. “What’s this about needles?”

  “Your frightened old shopkeeper has a personal gorilla and some drugs the FDA has never seen.” I stuck the receipt in my wallet and put it away. “Also he’s a hypnotist. These are not tools listed in government pamphlets on the operation of small businesses.”

  “Then he is a Russian agent.”

  “Maybe. On the side. Mostly he’s into smuggling national art treasures past Customs. Anyway, he’s the FBI’s meat now. So your boy Alanov is safe to write an exposé the world needs like it needs another Elvis impersonator. Not that he hasn’t been all along.”

  We were heading north along the unlimited access stretch of the John Lodge toward the Edsel Ford, with buildings crowding in close on both sides and the sky only a narrow rectangle between the roofs. Sigourney drove in silence with both hands on the wheel.

  “Right, Michael?” I asked him.

  28

  WE STOPPED for a light. He said nothing. I got some ashes into the tray in the door handle at my elbow without losing any fingers to the spring lid.

  Louise said, “Michael?”

  “Andrei Sigourney’s real name,” I said. “Michael Evancek.”

  The translator’s slightly tilted dark eyes looked at me from the rearview mirror. “How long have you known?”

  “Just since now, when you told me. But I’ve suspected it since this morning, when I read the report of your drowning off Cabo San Lucas. Michael Evancek’s body was never recovered, which wasn’t unusual. Eighteen months later somebody not his family showed up there asking about the accident, which was.

  “It cost me fifty bucks, but it was worth it,” I continued. “My contact down there was thorough and kept records of everything connected with the accident, including the man who came around asking questions about it, introducing himself as a friend of the family. The cop he talked to had a good eye. The man’s description matched Paul, Eric Rynearson’s gofer. There can’t be two who look like him in civilization.

  “He hangs around the police station the better part of a day, then leaves with some answers, but he’s seen here and there in the vicinity throughout the week. Six months go by, and then men in the employ of Eric Rynearson make an attempt on a car carrying Fedor Alanov and his translator Andrei Sigourney near Detroit. No one’s ever heard of Sigourney, so naturally it’s assumed Alanov the famous and controversial Russian writer is the target. Only he’s not. Michael Evancek is, because he came out of the Pacific with a new name and nationality.”

  The car behind us tooted its horn. Sigourney glanced up at the green light and started forward. “That’s a long leap to make on a description,” he said.

  “Not so long. Some things Paul said about beaches when I was questioning him under drugs confirmed it, though they didn’t make much sense to me at the time. Also you looked familiar to me from the start. You have a little of your grandmother in you. I’d put it down to your coming from the same racial stock, but what with Paul and Rynearson’s interest in the cross Martha Evancek gave her son the coincidences got too deep to wade through. I saw your picture too, and some features don’t change from childhood, though the scar and beard threw me off for a while. R
ynearson must have made pretty much the same connection. You look a little like the pictures of your father, except you’re not as wide.”

  “I’ve never met Rynearson.”

  “But he saw you. What about publicity? Ever have your picture in the paper?”

  “When Baltic appeared we set up some speaking engagements for Andrei as translator,” Louise offered. “We blanketed the area fairly heavily.”

  “Rynearson burned his files before ducking the FBI,” I said. “There were a lot of them. The so-called drowning might have been covered in some newspaper up here and the account might have found its way into those files. He would collect everything to do with his interests, and the cross was one of them.”

  Louise said, “I’m lost. What cross?”

  “A family heirloom a woman named Martha Evancek hired me to look for after I told her her grandson was dead. A thing of little value, she told me, other than sentimental. Only I did some digging in the library and found out that anything commissioned by the court of King Sigismund Augustus of Poland not now in the museums is worth a small country to the collector interested in such things. Rynearson would know the cross’s history, and at least suspect that it came here with Joseph Evancek, Michael’s father. Not being an investigator, he would lose track of it at the time of the shooting in Hamtramck. When luck dropped the surviving Evancek into his lap he wouldn’t be able to resist trying to kidnap him to pump the cross’s whereabouts out of him. Failing that he might rifle the suite Michael was sharing with Alanov on the off chance it was hidden there.”

  Sigourney said, “I have an apartment in town. Someone broke into it a few weeks ago. Nothing was stolen. I never put it together with the kidnap attempt. I don’t know anything about the cross beyond what I remember of it from my childhood. I don’t have it.”

  “Why’d you play dead?” I asked.

  “I didn’t start playing until a few months ago. I split my head open on a rock or something off Cabo and was washed ashore a mile north. A Mexican fisherman scraped me off the beach. He took no newspaper and didn’t own a radio or TV set and never heard about the swimming accident. He was a kind old man who had read War and Peace four times, and when he’d brought me around and found out I didn’t remember who I was he named me after Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei because he thought I looked Russian.

  “You wouldn’t think that you could get used to not knowing your own name, but you can. At first it was like that nightmare you have about having to be somewhere far away and not knowing just where or how to get there, and of time rushing past while you’re wandering aimlessly. Then I just stopped thinking about it. When I was well enough to earn my keep I started going out on the boat with old Julio. I got to be a pretty good small-craft boatman. I left after ten weeks and made my way north, taking work with charter boat operations. You need a last name to work above the border, so I took Sigourney. It went with Andrei. Andrei Sigourney swabbed decks in Long Beach and drifted, stopping in YMCAs and cheap hotels. Nights I wrote. I don’t know how I got started on that, except that it seemed natural. Maybe something was trying to tell me I once wrote catalogue copy for a cereal box manufacturer in Dayton. Some months later I had a book. I had it typed and submitted it to a publisher in New York. Two publishers later it wound up on Louise’s desk.”

  “It was a fine first novel,” she said. “With a seafaring background, all about a young man’s learning to cope with a past that was a mystery to him. But I never dreamed it was true.”

  “By then it wasn’t.” He watched the road. “I’d discovered an understanding of Polish and Russian, though I hardly knew it was my father who had taught it to me. When the book was rejected I asked to translate Fedor Alanov. Something— it might have been the very act of writing—had jarred a hole in the blank wall in my skull and I had started remembering things. My friend Fred Florentine. Ohio. My Aunt Barbara, who raised me. She scared me when I walked in on her in Dayton. She took one look at me and screamed. She really thought I was a ghost.”

  I said, “She told me you were dead.”

  “I asked her to, if anyone ever came around asking.”

  I waited. The Michigan Avenue overpass slid overhead.

  “Not many of us get a chance to start over fresh,” he continued after a moment. “Like every other copywriter in the history of advertising I’d wanted to do some serious writing, and like almost all the rest I was afraid to walk away from a steady paycheck. The amnesia wiped away that fear. I was on my way toward becoming an important novelist and I didn’t want to take the chance of slipping back into that old secure, wasted life. I wanted Michael Evancek to stay dead. Even Fred couldn’t know the truth. It wasn’t a hard decision; Michael had never been happy. I’d acquired all the papers you need to get by these days, and it was really easier to go on being Andrei Sigourney than to go back to being that bright young advertising talent.”

  “So of course you came back to Detroit, where Michael Evancek lived the first eleven years of his life,” I said. “Is there something wrong with that logic, or am I still suffering from narcotic poisoning?”

  “I wasn’t running away. I felt the need to revisit old haunts, or get the horrors every time someone mentioned Detroit. No one there would remember Michael, or if someone did, the odds were he wouldn’t recognize him as the boy who left almost twenty years ago. I didn’t count on Eric Rynearson. Who would? Tracing me all the way from Cabo must have cost him a fortune. My aunt moved here to be near me. That was a mistake too, but you’ve met her. You know she’s as easy to persuade as a flash flood.”

  “She let your subscription to the coin magazine run until she moved. That’s how I found her.”

  “Son of a bitch.” He pounded the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “I told her to cancel it.”

  “You found out from her I was looking for you?”

  He nodded, meeting my gaze in the mirror. “That’s why I got Louise to call you in after Rynearson made his move in Ypsilanti. I wanted to find out how much you knew. The strange thing is, I really thought it was Fedor he was after. I barely remember the cross and I never knew it was valuable. You mentioned my grandmother. Are you working for her? Is she in this country now?”

  “She wants to see you. Or she did until I told her you were dead.”

  “I don’t see that it would accomplish anything.”

  Louise said, “I really feel as if I’ve started reading a manuscript in the middle, and one I wouldn’t buy. To begin with I can’t believe anyone would go to such lengths to avoid going back to a life he never wanted in the first place.”

  Neither could I.

  We made the rest of the trip in silence. Sigourney pulled the Mercury over to the curb in front of the American Airlines terminal and climbed out to get Louise’s bags and briefcase out of the trunk. She and I stood on the sidewalk with skycaps bustling all around. A jet roared hollowly overhead, unrolling a thick layer of noise over the jabbering and traffic sounds on the street.

  “I’ve got jet lag already,” she said, raising her voice above the din. “I haven’t known what’s been going on since you showed up at the hotel.”

  Her face looked stiff. I remembered then that she and Andrei were not just an editor and a writer. “Maybe he’ll write a book about it someday,” I said.

  “I wish I knew what to say when I get back to New York.”

  “Tell them the truth. Your boy Alanov’s in the clear.”

  “They’re going to ask why I still have the five thousand.”

  “Tell them Rynearson had a change of heart. Or don’t tell them anything and keep the money.”

  She looked at me. The scent of jasmine seemed stronger here than in the car. “You know I won’t do that. I hope you know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry to be missing that tour,” she said wistfully. “I have a feeling I’m missing more than I know.”

  “Maybe not. According to some informed sources.”

  Sigourney finished
arranging the luggage on a skycap’s cart and handed her the briefcase. I wandered to the curb with my back to them and lit a fresh cigarette and watched a bus unload a gang of chattering Japanese tourists with cameras strung around their necks. I wondered what they’d found to take pictures of in Detroit. When I turned back Sigourney was standing there alone, watching Louise Starr switch her hips through a glass door held open by a gray-headed man carrying a suithanger over one shoulder. The writer-translator turned back, touching his lips with a folded handkerchief. We got back into the car.

  “A man named John Woldanski was murdered in Hamtramck last week,” I said, as we glided around the long looping drive that led back to Edsel Ford East. “He fenced religious articles at the time of the Hamtramck shooting nineteen years ago. Whoever killed him wasn’t looking for the cross, because neither of Woldanski’s two houses had been searched. He was taken out for the sake of silence. You wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  “I never heard the name until just now.” Sigourney accelerated into the stream of traffic on the expressway. “Or maybe I did and don’t remember it. There are still gaps in my memory.”

  “They come in handy sometimes.”

  “Meaning what?” It came out too quickly.

  “Meaning that you remember as far back as Dayton, but Detroit stays a blank order.”

  “I was pretty young when I left. I’ve been to doctors and they tell me I may never remember all of that part of my life.”

  “You saw the shooting. You remember it, because you didn’t ask ‘What shooting?’ when I mentioned it just now.”

  “I didn’t see it. I got home after it was over.” His eyes were bolted to the road.

  “That’s what you told the cops a couple of days later, after your Aunt Barbara had a chance to tell you what you saw and what you didn’t. A witness saw you come home before the first shotgun blast.”