Sugartown

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  “It’s over,” I said. “No one who can do anything about it cares who shot who. Michael Evancek is legally dead. I couldn’t prove otherwise if I wanted to, which I don’t. We’re just two guys talking. You’ll park this car at the Westin and we’ll get out and go two separate ways and probably never see each other again. I think you’ll have to tell someone someday or split down the middle. Why not me?”

  We drove. A jet, possibly Louise Starr’s, strained against gravity going over the freeway, its silver belly flashing in the sun. “I killed them.”

  “What?” I didn’t think I’d heard him right over the whooshing of the engines.

  “I killed them!” It was a shout. “I killed my mother and my father and my sister.

  “I came home and found my parents screaming at each other for the thousandth time and I went into their bedroom and got my father’s shotgun and shot them both and when my sister came running in I shot her too. Or Michael Evancek did. I’m Andrei Sigourney. Andrei Sigourney, who writes books and translates Russian authors into English and never shot anyone.”

  As he spoke he lowered his foot against the accelerator. We were coming up on eighty now, and snaking in and out between slower-moving cars and trucks, the slipstream buffeting the Mercury’s sides like a high gusty wind. I felt my fingers going white on the dashboard. I didn’t remember putting them there.

  “You didn’t kill them,” I said.

  “The police said my father did.” His hands were locked on the wheel, his profile drawn tight with scenery blurring past on the other side. “That’s what Aunt Barbara wanted them to think. It’s what she wanted everyone to think, including me. But I know. It’s the reason she refused to discuss it with me afterwards.”

  “You didn’t kill them,” I repeated. “And neither did your father. There’s only one other way it clicks.”

  I wasn’t getting through. We had run out of speedometer and were still winding up. I tried again.

  “It was your mother, Jeanine Evancek. Barbara’s sister. She pulled the trigger.”

  29

  WE WERE PASSING a green van with blue side-curtains. Sigourney dropped the left front wheel off the pavement, grinding gravel and spitting dust behind us. He wrenched it back the other way, overcompensated, and we fishtailed wildly across two lanes to avoid sideswiping the van. I had a brief glimpse of a blur of face through the window on the driver’s side with a mouth working in it, and then it was behind us. Sigourney eased back on the pedal and we drifted back into the slow lane.

  “My mother never killed anyone,” he said. “She couldn’t.”

  “Anyone can, given the right — or wrong — circumstances.” I pried my fingers loose from the dash and worked them, forcing circulation past the knuckles. “She was found lying next to your sister. That didn’t fit the way the cops wanted to figure it, so they just put it down as one of a million variables that come up in the course of a homicide investigation. Your sister had to have died first. It explains the position of the bodies, why she didn’t run the other way after the first shot was fired. All the months of pressure from your father’s unemployment and drinking erupted suddenly and your mother got the shotgun and cut loose at the first thing that moved. It happened to be her own daughter, but she would be too far gone to know that. What I think happened next is your father wrestled her for the gun and it went off, killing her. That saved your life, because you would probably have been the next victim. Then when the full force of the situation hit him, he went into the kitchen and blew out his own brains”

  “You don’t know any of this.”

  I said, “It clears up a lot. Like why your aunt kept the cops away from you for so long. She hated your father and loved your mother and couldn’t bear to have the world know her sister had turned into a crazed killer at the last. You were in shock and so your impressions were malleable. She coached you until you were ready to swear you weren’t there at the time of the shooting. Most of the other witnesses’ testimony was on her side in that. In time you probably came to believe it yourself. But part of you knew different, and the guilt of your secret turned into a worse kind of guilt, and you came to suspect yourself of the murders. The pressure of that suspicion may have helped bring on the amnesia after you almost drowned; it was too much guilt for one man to bear, and so you just stopped being that man. Even now you’re still shutting out the whole episode.

  “Or not. But that pop-shrink stuff has its uses in my line.”

  We drove. The indicator hovered around sixty. He chewed his lower lip.

  “What makes you think it wasn’t me?”

  “Your father’s body was found in the classic suicide position, with the shotgun between his legs. The blast caught him square in the face, which is unusual but not impossible. It bothered me for a while. But if he hadn’t killed himself, the killer would have had to make it look as if he had. That means premeditation, and this was not that kind of killing. Everyone in that house was a victim that day.”

  “I wish I could believe you. I’ve thought otherwise too long.”

  “That was your aunt’s fault, for making you see something you didn’t and for not talking about it ever again in your presence. I wouldn’t be too hard on her, though. She was protecting her family and she thought she could protect you by selling you on an idea the way she sells artificial siding over the telephone. That may be the worst crime of all, the murder of memory.”

  “I need time to get used to the idea.”

  “Take it. There might be a book in it. Who knows?”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to say!” he rapped.

  I rested my head on the back of the seat. “It’s the drugs talking. Work it out your own way. I’m sick of the Evanceks and the Sigourneys and the Alanovs. Every time I put the case down it springs back up at me. Here’s where I walk away from it.”

  “What about the cross and this man Woldanski?”

  I said, “I take care of that today at four o’clock.”

  He looked at me sideways but said nothing.

  The uniformed teenager at the hotel garage accepted Sigourney’s keys with indifference — Louise Starr was long gone — and we shook hands at the entrance to the building. The writer’s grip was warm.

  “Your grandmother wants to see you.”

  “I don’t know her,” he said. “I don’t know that I want anything tying me with Michael Evancek.”

  “Sure you do. You have since before I came in. You knew damn well your grandmother was in this country. I took Louise Starr’s first call less than an hour after leaving Barbara Norton’s place the first time. There wasn’t time for her to tell you I was looking for you and for you to make the decision to hire me and then get Louise to do it. You had to know I was working for your grandmother before I ever talked to your aunt.”

  He breathed some air and looked away from me.

  “I read my grandfather’s obituary in the News some time ago,” he said after a moment. “Evancek isn’t that common a name. I’ve been paying the people on the other side of the duplex ever since to look after my grandmother, without letting her suspect it or why. Her phone is just an extension of theirs. They overheard her when she made her first appointment with you. As soon as they told me I looked you up through the state police. I had to know what you’d found out.”

  “See her. It’s easier.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to say to her.”

  “Try the truth. She’s heard and seen stranger things, believe me.”

  We said good-bye. The revolving door sucked his trim frame inside.

  Gallagher was relatively quiet. If you closed your eyes to the clouds of granite dust roiling to the south you could pretend that the rumble of heavy equipment rendering wood and brick was distant thunder. Neither the red Bronco nor the blue Pinto was parked in the driveway that the house shared with the place next door. The neighbor’s green Camaro was there. Leaving my Olds at the curb, I climbed th
e concrete stoop, opened the screen door, glanced up and down the street, and used my hat to protect my fist when I pushed in the glass in the storm door. It made no more noise than a dog shaking itself and I reached in and turned the latch. It was quarter to four.

  At ten past, a high-pitched engine wound down nearing the driveway, gears changed, and heavy tires kissed the pavement, coming to a stop. A door slammed, keys jingled on the way to the stoop. Then silence. He had spotted the broken window.

  “It’s me, Mayk,” I called in a normal voice. “Walker. Come in and make yourself at home.”

  His Colt Python entered first, its nickel plate glittering like cheap costume jewelry in the sunlight coming through the window over the sink. Then he came in, big and square-shouldered in his gray uniform, broken glass crunching under his shiny black Oxfords. His mud-colored hair swept back like a mane from his wide face with the lines etched deep in the ruddy flesh. There were dark circles under his tired cop’s eyes and beads of moisture on his long upper lip. He saw me sitting at the kitchen table facing the door and he saw what was on the table and he closed the door and leaned his back against it. The gun was a growth in his fist.

  “When’d you put it together?” he asked quietly.

  “A few hours ago. When I finished the rest of it and found parts left over. Four people knew I was looking for John Woldanski, but only one knew it was the cross I was after. One took over the old man’s fencing operation on Trowbridge. One was a Hamtramck cop working undercover. Neither knew Woldanski personally. The third was just an information broker I use from time to time. He’s got his own racket and it pays very well. That left you. You knew Woldanski; busted him, in fact. You investigated the Evancek shoot. And you knew I was looking for the cross, because I told you.”

  “Pretty flimsy.”

  “You of all people should recognize a judgment call,” I said. “It made me curious enough to invite myself in and frisk the place.”

  I had removed the large crucifix that looked as if it had been carved out of a single block of wood from the hallway wall leading into the living room and placed it on the table. With one hand I lifted the top half free. Tarnished silver shone dully in the hollow, its blue and red stones gleaming.

  I said, “It disappointed me. Edgar Allan Poe didn’t know anything about the way the police work or he’d never have considered hiding the purloined letter in plain sight. As a cop you should have known better.”

  “It wasn’t a matter of hiding it, exactly. Just putting it somewhere where I wouldn’t have to look at it.” He sounded as tired as he appeared.

  “It needs polishing. It didn’t nineteen years ago or it wouldn’t have tempted you.”

  “It was that bastard Bill Mischiewicz,” he said harshly. “He was on the pad since the academy. He bragged about it. You couldn’t stay straight and spend much time with him without feeling like a chump. It was wrapped in a blue cloth in the top drawer of Evancek’s bureau when we tossed the place after the shoot. I didn’t even think. I smuggled it out under my jacket and never told Bill or anyone else about it. If the Nortons or someone else asked about it I’d of given it back, said I was just holding it for safekeeping. But no one ever mentioned it. I didn’t even know for sure it was worth anything, but it looked like it was. Hell, I didn’t need money. I mean, I wasn’t hurting. But it was like finding a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk.”

  “You tried to sell it to John Woldanski?”

  “I felt him out about it. I backed out of the deal. We busted him soon after and I was scared he’d talk, but he didn’t and I patted myself on the back for being so clever about the way I approached him. But by then I was sorry I’d ever seen the cross. My record was clean, I mean clean. What was I going to do, give it back? I stuck it away and forgot about it. I thought.”

  “A cop who’s basically honest never forgets his one moment of weakness,” I said. “When you found out I was looking for Woldanski to talk to him about the cross, you panicked. You knew damn well where he was, but you sent me the long way around the block to keep me busy while you dusted him to keep him quiet.”

  “I just meant to scare him, rough him up a little so he’d stay forgetful. It was an accident. He fell downstairs and broke his neck.”

  “Save that for a jury of your peers, Mayk. You were still a cop when Woldanski’s wife died and you would’ve been keeping tabs on him in the line of duty and known when he closed up his old house and went to live in the new one next door. You knew it would look more plausible if he was found dead in the place where he kept his stolen merchandise. Fence dies gloating over booty. So you marched him over there from the house he was living in and gave him a shove. He was old, his bones were brittle. If they didn’t cooperate you could always bash his head in afterwards.”

  “You don’t know any of that.”

  “I know that after icing Woldanski you went back to the other house to make sure everything jibed with your scenario, turn off running faucets and put out smoldering cigars or whatever. I showed up sooner than expected and you knocked me out of the way escaping. But I heard that Bronco of yours changing gears during the getaway. That and the cross are material for conviction. Men have been hanged on less.”

  “You’re forgetting this.” He waved the shiny Colt.

  “You won’t use it.”

  He smiled, a tight, tired smile.

  I said, “You broke a long-standing rule nineteen years ago and swiped something that didn’t belong to you. You’ve been living with it all this time, and when it looked as if the rest of the world was going to find out about it, you overreacted and killed an old man. But you’re not the kind to keep on climbing from crime to crime. I think you’d rather have it over.”

  “The cross belonged to a dead man. And Woldanski was a crook. The world smells sweeter without him.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “You think you know everything there is to know about me, huh?”

  “I used your telephone to call Lieutenant Kowalski after I found the cross. He’s on his way.”

  Mayk said nothing. The house got very quiet. Just to relax the tension I lifted my right hand from my lap and rested it on the table. The Smith & Wesson clanked on the sheet-metal top.

  He said, “I guess you don’t leave much to chance.”

  “Neither do you. It’s our police training.”

  “Twenty years a cop,” he said. “One mistake.”

  “Two.”

  “No, one. It’s still happening. But it stops here.”

  And before I could move he put his gun in his mouth.

  30

  WE WERE SITTING in the almost-dark, Martha Evancek and I in her lacy mausoleum of a living room, with no lights on and dusk thickening outside the windows. I could make out the highlights of her patrician face in the depths of her overstuffed chair and the orange tip of her cigarette that glowed fiercely whenever she brought it to her lips, her hand covering the lower half of her face. The ruby ring glistened.

  “Do you think Michael will come to visit?” she asked, wrinkling the long silence.

  “I don’t know. He has a lot to get used to first.” I knocked some ash into the tray on the arm of the sofa. None had grown on my Winston since the last time.

  “I want very much to see him.”

  I concealed a yawn. The smoke in the room burned my eyes and I always felt wrung out and slung over a line after a long session with the police.

  “I should not, but I feel sorry for this man Mayk,” she said. “That theft must have been eating at him all these years.”

  “He killed an old man guilty of nothing more than laying off some stolen property. That takes him out of the class of people I feel sorry for. Anyway, his troubles ended when he put that bullet through his brain.”

  “According to my faith they are just beginning.”

  I let her have that one.

  “I still don’t understand how you came to doubt the police version of the shooting,” s
he said.

  “The bodies didn’t fall right, for one thing. If Jeanine had died first the way the cops had it figured, little Carla wouldn’t have died in the same room. No normal child would have hung around after that first deafening blast unless she was the recipient. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred in these cases, the mother will kill the children first, while the father will start with the mother. It’s a maternal thing, a twisted belief that by removing the children she’s protecting them. That Michael didn’t die next indicated that Joseph stopped her. Joseph was powerfully built and if he’d had the gun, she wouldn’t have been able to prevent him from killing the boy too. The cops didn’t give that any thought because they believed the confused witnesses who said Michael didn’t get home until after the excitement. Also Joseph’s blood test didn’t show enough alcohol in his system to put him over the edge. Because of his history of unemployment and drunkenness the cops took the path of least resistance. That’s understandable, if not forgivable. Two minutes after the first detective was invented, he was given a dozen cases to solve and only enough budget to solve three.

  “Plus, Barbara Norton, Jeanine’s sister, was too anxious to wipe out all memory of the incident from Michael’s mind. That lady’s sense of family takes less dents than armor plate. At all costs Jeanine had to be made to look like the victim rather than the killer.”

  “What about Eric Rynearson?”

  “Just another mugger, but with a hypodermic needle instead of a switchblade, and more expensive tastes. Someone will recognize him from his picture in a post office someday and the feds will snatch him from behind a cash register in some junk store. Or they’ll scrape him off the floor of an alley after someone in a delicate position gets to worrying about what’s in his head that couldn’t be burned in his fireplace. His fuse is pulled.”

  “You’ve suffered so much for so little,” said Mrs. Evancek. “The drugging. Trouble with the authorities.”

  “It’s the way I work. You paid me to take risks. I could have laid it off on the cops when it started bending their way, but I wouldn’t have been earning my fee. The bad will it bought me is a thing I live with. I’ll bill you.”