Never Street

by Loren D. Estleman

  Behind the garage was a gravel apron where the hopeless cases were parked, with the occasional work-in-progress mixed in to camouflage it from thieves, should they get over the electrified fence with all their internal organs intact; his lawyer had been trying for years to persuade him to stop cranking the current up to lethal levels. One of the vehicles was covered with a canvas tarpaulin. With no ceremony whatsoever he flipped up the end of the cover and rolled it back over the hood, across the roof, and down the sloping rear window to the trunk.

  It was an Oldsmobile Cutlass, twenty-five years old, with a white vinyl pebbled top and a dusty blue battered body. The distance from the nose to the base of the windshield was nearly as long as the rest of the car. A conscientious traffic cop would have been tempted to ticket it for speeding while it was standing still.

  “I had one just like this,” I said.

  “Like hell. You had this one.”

  “You told me you sold it to a guy for parts two presidents back.”

  “I did.” He stood doubling and redoubling the canvas tarp in his strong hands, as close to bursting as he ever got. He was almost smiling.

  I got out a cigarette and speared it between my lips, then decided against lighting it. The ground was soaked as deep as I was tall with gasoline and motor oil.

  “It was back in January,” he said. “I was on my way to a tow job clear out in Washtenaw County. I passed this pile of junk, up to its knees in weeds in an unplowed field. The farmer’s wife was home. She said she was sick of looking at it and I could have it for nothing if I cleared it out before her husband got back from Lansing. I never did get to the tow job. I hitched on and brought it straight here. I almost fell on my face when I read the serial number.”

  I nodded. Ernst’s memory was where old serial numbers went to die. If he ever forgot one you can bet it never existed. He went on.

  “Engine and transmission were junk, of course. I had a brand-new four-fifty-five Cadillac V-8 engine I traded a Willys Jeep for to a guy in Dearborn, never used. I found the trans in a salvage yard on Ford Road. I applied for a title based on the serial number of the Caddy. It came through last week. It’s as legal as abortion and you don’t have to worry about picketers.”

  “Why just a thousand?”

  His face twitched, another memento he carried around from the last good war. “What?”

  “Any collector worth the name would give you twenty-five hundred for it as it sits. You don’t hate them that much. Where’s the string?”

  “No string.” He twitched again. “Oh, the farmer’s wife called me the next day trying to get it back; something about her husband threatening to divorce her. I already had the engine in. I hung up. The farmer has the original title, but that goes to the number on the old engine. I junked that. It would be better if the car weren’t here when his lawyer comes around.”

  “Ernst, that’s theft.”

  His face went stoic. “Thousand’s the price.”

  I undid the latch and threw up the hood. The 455 wasn’t anywhere near as clean as an operating table at Johns Hopkins. I slammed the hood shut. “Give me two hundred on the Merc. I’ll give you another hundred down and a hundred a month.”

  “I don’t want the Merc. I need half up front. If you’re going to pay the rest on time I’m going to have to make it twelve-fifty.”

  “How’s Eric?”

  “Eric’s good. He’s going to be a monsignor.” He doubled over the tarp another time, his knuckles whitening. “Give me the Merc and the hundred, cash. I expect the first payment first of next month.”

  I’d deposited Gay Catalin’s retainer check the day before and kept out two hundred for walking around. I gave him five twenties. He laid the rolled canvas across the hood of a Monte Carlo with belts and hoses spilling out like entrails and counted the bills. “Don’t you want to take it out for a run first?”

  “Anyone else work on it but you?”

  “You see anyone walking around here with a broken jaw?”

  “Let’s go in and swap titles.”

  He led the way, moving fast on the balls of his feet.

  We completed the transaction in his little monoxide-smelling office in the garage. “Come around after this thing goes away and I’ll bump out the dings and do you a paint job nobody will know wasn’t factory.” He handed me a set of keys attached to a washer.

  “I like it the way it is.”

  “You don’t put up much of a front.”

  “Someone would just push it in if I did.” I gave him the keys to the Mercury.

  Before he went into the Catholic seminary, Ernst’s son Eric had been arrested by the Detroit Police on a charge of Grand Theft Auto. As a favor to my mechanic I’d dug up three witnesses who swore Eric was with them at the Pussycat Theater on Telegraph Road at the time the car was seen barreling out of the dealer’s lot at Seven Mile and Dequindre. The cops didn’t buy their story any more than I did, but the dealer hadn’t wanted to bother with a long trial and withdrew his complaint. And I hadn’t paid a penny for a lube and oil change in five years.

  Nine

  OUR DAILY STORM clouds were in place when I came out on the street after lunch, but they provided no insulation from the heat. Instead they sealed in the temperature and humidity like the lid of a pressure cooker. By the time I found a parking space around the corner from the main branch of the Detroit Public Library, my shirt was shrink-wrapped to my back. The air-conditioned atmosphere inside the building went down inside the back of my collar like an icicle.

  I walked past the big globe, passing up the line waiting to play with the computer terminal for the card catalogue section, which since my last visit had moved six feet closer to the back door and oblivion. I’d miss it when it was gone. It would mean allowing an extra ten minutes per trip for the electronic convenience.

  The Media section was chock full of information on Neil Catalin’s favorite subject. Most were big glossy picture books. There was a file box stuffed with publications targeted at noir buffs, both expensive slicks and amateur jobs photocopied and stapled, part of a shelf devoted to race and gender bias in the genre, and one scholarly tract, Dark Dreams: Psychosexual Manifestations of Hollywood Crime Movies Circa 1945-1955, by Asa Portman, Ph.D. This was a thick volume wrapped in a dead black dustjacket with its title printed in white capitals like typewriter characters, published that year by the University of Michigan Press.

  I lugged the book over to a reading table and waded in. After ten minutes I went to the Reference section and came back with a dictionary. When that didn’t help I turned to the author’s biography at the back of the film book. Asa Portman, it said, taught courses on psychology and popular culture at Michigan.

  I used a telephone on the main floor to call the university switchboard. A series of voices covered with ivy put me in touch with Portman’s department, where a student intern laid me down to wait. I had just fed the coin slot a second time when Portman came on. I told him what I was about and he agreed to see me in an hour. I wrote down the location in my notebook.

  The German was too modest. In addition to the engine and transmission, he’d replaced the suspension, improving upon the slip-slop system that in 1970 had not progressed beyond the engineering of the family car under Eisenhower. The Cutlass cornered like a Formula I racer and capped the hills as if it were screwed down. On the Edsel Ford expressway west of Romulus, I shot past a state trooper parked on the median, doing eighty, and got nothing from him but a yawn. Those dents and that chalky paint made me invisible.

  Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan and the five-dollar fine for possession of marijuana, has variously been called the Arcadia of America, the cultural capital of the world, and the last great refuge for artists and philosophers in the age of the music video. It has been called all these things by itself. In fact the city’s chief contribution to the twentieth century is the invention of the parking meter.

  It has more trees than people—hence the arbor—and s
ix traffic lights for every tree. It’s a sickly egghead kid with a passion for Tolkien, touchdowns, and tofu; a place where the cop who stops you for running one of its nine million red lights might recommend a book while writing up your ticket; a doddering hippie with a haircut and floral throws over the avocado velour chairs in the den. Every state has one, and each one thinks it’s unique.

  On campus I negotiated one-way streets, jaywalking students, and a throwback in a tie-dyed shirt hawking copies of an underground newspaper and found a space only a mile or so from my destination. This was an imposing brick hall a city block wide, constructed sometime during the Era of Good Feeling. The chimes in the university tower were just striking three when I threaded my way among a scattering of students sunning themselves on the front steps and heaved open one of the big front doors. Inside I found an acre of veined marble cordoned with Neoclassical pilasters and more steps. Only the discovery of an antique Otis elevator on the next level rescued me from a general strike on the part of my feet.

  The room number I’d gotten from Portman belonged to a small auditorium, illuminated solely by the black-and-silver images fluttering on a square screen at the base of the graduated tiers of wooden seats. Fifteen or twenty heads were silhouetted against the screen; in the brief intervals between music and dialogue, fifteen or twenty pens scribbled in notebooks propped on kidney-shaped writing boards attached to the seats. I sat in the vacant top row. The room smelled of varnish and ink and the hot bulb burning in the projector whirring away on a metal desk before and below the screen.

  Beyond and above it, where the shaft of white light ended, Robert Mitchum, in fedora and trenchcoat, careered down a dark country road at the wheel of a big car with bug-eye headlamps. Beside him, her shining hair covered by a silk scarf, rode Jane Greer: midnight-eyed, beautiful, corrupt. They were both achingly young. It was 1947.

  The music built. As a police roadblock hove into view ahead, Greer’s expression turned venomous.

  “Dirty double-crossing rat!” She clawed a revolver from her purse and shot Mitchum. The car went into a spin. She fired through the windshield at the officers, who returned fire. After she was killed and the car came to a stop, one of the cops opened the driver’s door and Mitchum flopped out, dead.

  The lights came up and a small man with a big head and a short beard, half the age I associated with a college professor, turned from the wall switch to address the class.

  “Impressions! David?”

  A student in his early twenties with the right side of his head tattooed and the left side shaggy to his collar lowered his hand. “Robert Mitchum’s—excuse me, Jeff Bailey’s— fatal flaw is his affection for Jane Greer. Kathy Moffat. However, according to Aristotle—”

  “Aristotle never spent Dime One at the Bijou. Save that for your philosophy instructor. And it’s okay to refer to the characters by the names of the actors. What you’re saying is Mitchum let his crotch do his thinking when he should have handed Greer over to Kirk Douglas, as he was hired to do in the first place. You can get that much from Leonard Maltin’s movie guide. What else? Heather?”

  A woman of eighteen or nineteen, in a man’s work shirt, with her hair cut short, rose from her seat. “Jane Greer is not the villain of this piece; she’s the victim. In a society less dominated by aggressive males, she would not have had to resort to crime to realize her full potential as a human being.”

  “Bullshit. She’s a scheming vixen guilty of triple homicide. How does Mitchum’s fate relate to that of the hero in another film we’ve watched this semester? Yes, Darice?”

  Darice was a black woman, older than most of the class, wearing a tailored silk jacket and her hair in rich brown waves. She’d caught Portman’s eye with the end of a gold pencil. “What happened to Mitchum is what might have happened to Humphrey Bogart if he’d refused to send Mary Astor over at the end of The Maltese Falcon.”

  “Exactly! We’re talking movie reality, boys and girls. Not Aristotle’s, and certainly not Betty Friedan’s. Any resemblance to the world outside Hollywood is purely coincidental. If the script calls for a detective as tough as a forty-minute egg, you go to Bogart, or Lloyd Nolan if Bogie’s on loan to Columbia. Mitch is the boy you want for strong-but-squishy. The heavens and the earth were created on the first day of the shooting schedule, and Central Casting is God. Go now into the sunshine, and don’t forget your papers are due Tuesday.”

  The students climbed the steps toward the exit, talking among themselves. David and Heather looked perturbed. Darice, sliding her notebook and gold pencil into a calfskin portfolio slung from her shoulder, looked like someone whose paper was already written.

  Portman reversed the projector, rewinding the reel while he shoveled books from the metal desk into an old briefcase. They were not textbooks, but dilapidated paperbacks with covers in tarnished primaries showing beetle-browed pugs in dirty trench coats watching blondes undress: two-bit potboilers from the heyday of the drugstore press. Teachers under Eisenhower had confiscated them by the case from students who smuggled them into class behind Understanding Trigonometry. Now they were study guides.

  “The real thing!” Portman put down his briefcase to shake my hand. “I wish you’d come earlier. I could have filled the class period comparing your experiences with those of the private eyes of fiction. Tell me, do you pack a rod?” His teeth shone in his beard. Up close he was older than he looked from the back of the room.

  “Every time I go fishing. Are all your classes this intimate?”

  “You mean small. Summer sessions are always tiny, but I never pack the place the way this type of course did in the sixties and seventies, when colleges were turning out Coppolas and Scorseses by the dozen. You know Lawrence Kasdan studied here.”

  I said I didn’t know.

  “That was the film school generation. They worshiped at the shrine of Welles and Godard and Kurosawa and Fellini. This new batch would rather clear a million on a splatter-fest, and don’t even talk to them about black-and-white. They’d colorize Whistler’s Mother.”

  “The man I’m looking for would probably agree with you.” I sketched out the case. He listened, staring at the blank screen in front of the blackboard as if the story were playing up there.

  “So his wife thinks he’s run off to play cops and robbers for real,” he said when I’d finished. “Not unusual, considering the medium. The cinema is the most visceral of all the arts. It passes through the cornea directly into the brain.”

  “A psychiatrist I spoke to said pure cases aren’t common.”

  He made a noise beneath the dignity of an educator. “Psychiatrists are frustrated plastic surgeons. By the time they find out they can’t stomach the sight of blood and bone splinters, they’ve spent too much on their education to back out. That’s when they opt for the couch and the bust of Jung. During the Depression, when most Americans couldn’t afford to buy bread, they laid down their nickels by the millions to see a movie once a week. Nikos Kazantzakis’ Last Temptation of Christ was in libraries and bookstores for years without a peep from the religious Right; Scorsese puts it on film and they pour out to protest it like nothing since the Great Schism. That’s the power of celluloid and safety stock. You can’t get to the heart of it lying on your back bitching about your poor toilet training.”

  I felt for a cigarette. “I must have one of those faces. Everyone’s giving me lectures.”

  “It is a lecture hall.” But he smiled apologetically. “What do you need?”

  “I dipped a toe in Dark Dreams at the library. Most books on noir are for buffs. The man I’m looking for went beyond that somewhere around the fifteenth time he saw Pitfall. Yours is the only book I found that takes on the psychology of the form. I thought you might translate the Latin.”

  He switched off the projector and removed the take-up reel. “It’s a simple enough fantasy, on the surface; which is as far as any film goes, whether the director is an auteur or a studio hack. It’s a two-dimensional medium aft
er all. In many ways that’s its appeal, but we’ll get to that. We’ve always identified with gods and heroes. The allure of the noir protagonist to modern man is he’s more approachable than Beowulf or Sherlock Holmes. It takes a Superman to slash away at Grendl or to match intellects with Professor Moriarty, but this guy is an ordinary slob with tall troubles who usually comes out on top, even if it does kill him sometimes.”

  “Stiff price to pay for victory.”

  “But a price we feel the need to pay. Years ago we died for God and country, but we’ve stopped believing in the one and no longer trust the other. So instead we throw it up for points.”

  “We’re a tangled mess, all right,” I said. “Tangled enough anyway to make me wonder why anyone would throw it over for something as complex as the noir world.”

  “Actually it’s simplistic. I said it was two-dimensional. You’ve got your good guy, your heavy, your good girl, and your tramp. Upon examination the noir landscape makes more sense than ours. I don’t wonder that an obsessive like your client’s husband would prefer it to his own snarled affairs. His wife, whom he perceives as the good girl, represents the crushing responsibilities that landed him in therapy the first time. The girlfriend, whose situation might have come out of any crime movie of the forties—Pitfall is an excellent example—promises adventure and uninhibited sex and a respite from his oppressive routine. The whole thing might have been made to order for a man with his fixation.”

  “Even the danger?”

  “Especially the danger.”

  I watched him place the reel in a flat can labeled out of the past and seal the lid. “What would it take to shake him out of it?”

  “The shock of reality might do it, if he isn’t too far gone.”

  “The third dimension.”

  He nodded. “The world we live in has more twists than any screenplay. Villains turn out to be just guys trying to get along. Bad girls are just good girls in trouble. Angels turn into whores while you’re looking at them. If that doesn’t bring your man around, neither will electrodes.”