Never Street

by Loren D. Estleman

  Thaler said, “We’re checking the hot sheets now. There must be ten, fifteen thousand bucks’ worth of toys here.”

  “Twenty,” I said. “Wholesale.”

  “Really. I thought you were still listening to eight-track tapes.”

  The room smelled of old meals and something much more acrid that didn’t belong in a kitchen. “When?”

  “Squad car team heard the shots a little after ten. They were another fifteen minutes locating the source; time enough for Little Brother to give up the ghost. He was still plenty warm. The hatch is open on the Cherokee. Either he’d just finished unloading the stuff or he was getting set to cart it away. A few shots wouldn’t have drawn much interest in this neighborhood. It was the perp’s bad luck the cops were within earshot.”

  “If he was planning to cap him anyway, why didn’t he do it when the stuff was still in the Jeep? He could’ve just driven it away.”

  “Maybe the perp wasn’t buying. Maybe he was selling, and decided to keep the cash and the merch.”

  “Then he should’ve waited until it was loaded.”

  “It could have been spur-of-the-moment. He wasn’t used to it or he wouldn’t have missed four times. Then he heard the officers banging on doors and bugged out.”

  “Maybe he didn’t care about the merchandise or the money. Maybe he just wanted Brian dead. The whole idea of the buy could have been a set-up.”

  She hooked a thumb inside her belt, exposing the butt of the service revolver holstered under her blazer. “This was a crack house last year. Before that it was a house of prostitution. I suppose there was a time when it was just a house, but that was when the Irish were still in control. I’d have to check the zoning regulations, but using it to engineer a hit for the sake of a hit is probably a violation. This guy could be in a lot of trouble with the Planning Commission.”

  “Well, now you’re just being facetious.”

  “I wish I knew what you were being.”

  I looked at her. She was all cop. There was a time, back when women began joining the department, when it was thought they would change it, but the system has been around nearly as long as women, and unlike them it hasn’t changed that whole time. It’s rock-scissors-paper, and you can cut paper and break scissors, but when you wrap paper around a rock it’s still a rock. I said nothing.

  “I just came on this one,” she said. “You’ve been on it a couple of days. If there’s a connection between Catalin’s disappearance and his brother-in-law’s death, you don’t want to wait till morning to lay it out for us. If this is a plain old kill and not a murder in the commission of a felony, it’s not mine anymore. Then it’s Homicide’s, and you don’t want to drag your feet with them. They lack the woman’s touch.”

  I moved my shoulders. “I’ve got a couple of hunches. They don’t make a lot of sense.”

  “Try me.”

  “You’ll get this off the hot sheets anyway. Neil Catalin’s partner at Gilda Productions is a man named Leo Webb. When I spoke to Webb yesterday he thought I was a police detective investigating a theft at Gilda’s studio in Southfield. He said someone walked out with twenty thousand in video and sound equipment the night before.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Brian Elwood’s name came up during our conversation. He said he caught him once going through Catalin’s desk.”

  “You think Elwood boosted the equipment and Webb shot him for it?”

  “Webb’s no Boy Scout. Killing a couple of zeroes in the company ledger is more his speed.”

  “Catalin then. It would explain his taking a powder. He is a mental case.”

  “Even mental cases have motives for what they do, or convince themselves they have them. Simple theft doesn’t seem strong enough, even for someone with problems of his own.”

  “It’s thin,” she agreed.

  “I said it didn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “Anything else?”

  Suddenly I tasted Scotch and soda. Heard a mariachi band playing “Ain’t No Use” in slow reggae. Saw a woman in an indigo dress. Telling me something about Brian Elwood. The little creep.

  I shook my head.

  The lieutenant gave it another beat, watching me. Then she unhooked her thumb from her belt and looked down at the corpse. “So do we have a positive ID?”

  “It’s Brian all right. I only met him once, but he left an impression.”

  “You can’t always tell by appearances. My older sister’s boy wears a ring in his nose. He starts Princeton next month.”

  “I hope he stays clear of places like this.”

  “If he doesn’t, I’ll shoot the little son of a bitch myself.”

  I knew a curtain line when I heard one. I asked if she needed anything else. She said nothing I was willing to give her and that I might think about letting her know if I had any business that took me out of the area. Like I said, nothing’s changed.

  I fired up the Cutlass and cut every short I knew between Ferry Park and West Bloomfield, which were a good deal closer than the quality of life suggested. I didn’t bother looking for the green Camaro. I couldn’t afford the time it would take to shake it. I wanted to be standing on Gay Catalin’s doorstep when she came back from wherever she’d been all evening.

  I was too late. The maid, looking less accommodating than usual in a quilted housecoat with her eyebrows scrubbed off, asked me to wait, then came back after a minute to say her mistress would see me.

  She conducted me to the sun porch, where my client sat in a wicker chair surrounded by flowering shrubs in troughs and potted dahlias, mums, geraniums, and a dozen or so varieties outside my knowledge of botany—looking, with nothing but darkness beyond the glass door walls, like a selection of prom dates for the last-minute shopper. Tonight the dress was cream-colored, the lady’s face ashen. One hand rested atop a yellow telephone on a lattice table.

  “The police just called,” she said. “Brian—”

  “I know. I just came from there.”

  “Oh, God.” She put her fist in her mouth and started to rock to and fro.

  I turned to the maid. “Is there any liquor in the house?”

  Her expression turned inward, plumbing the depths of her English. I brought my cupped hand up to my lips. She nodded then and scuffed out in pink slippers. When she returned with a glass of something that smelled like bourbon, I took it and handed it to Mrs. Catalin, who sat hugging herself and made no move to lift it.

  I said, “It only works if you drink it.”

  She drank then, cupping the glass in both hands. She coughed shallowly and tried to put it on the table, but I put my hand around hers and made her lift it again. She was starting to get some color now.

  “Now I know why people drink.” She tried to smile.

  “Alcohol’s like war. If it didn’t have some good points we’d have figured out a way to get rid of it before this.”

  “Thank you, Angelina. Go to bed now.”

  The woman in the housecoat hesitated, then withdrew, drawing shut the doorwall that separated the porch from the living room.

  “Was it horrible?” Mrs. Catalin’s eyes were on me, as steady as the eyes in a painting.

  “It was all over pretty quickly,” I said.

  “What was he doing in that neighborhood?”

  “Your brother was into some things he shouldn’t have been. You must have suspected it. Most older sisters have sensors for that kind of thing built in.”

  “We were born twenty years apart. Our mother was very young when she had me. Brian was a surprise late in life. In many ways, culturally, we were as distant as a parent and her child. I did worry, though. He never stayed with a job more than a few months, but he always seemed to have money to make the payments on his Cherokee, and to buy speakers and things. I wasn’t a very good sister. I didn’t ask the questions I didn’t want to know the answers to.”

  “That puts you in good company.”

  “They want me to identify the—to i
dentify Brian. Will you take me? I don’t think I can drive.”

  “Who’d you talk to?”

  “A Sergeant Somebody at police headquarters.”

  “That was old business. I took care of it. They might want you to go to the morgue tomorrow, but there’s no reason to visit the murder scene. They’ll be around to ask you questions.”

  “Murder scene.” She looked down, rediscovered her drink. She raised it and swallowed.

  “One of the questions they’ll ask is where you were tonight,” I said.

  She started. “I forgot. Neil called.”

  I was stripping the cellophane off a pack of Winstons. I paused, then went on. “When?”

  “I didn’t look at the clock. It must have been after nine. He wanted me to meet him. He was out of breath. He sounded as if he’d been running.”

  “Where’d you meet him?”

  “I didn’t. He asked me to come to the old Michigan Theater.”

  “The one in Ann Arbor?”

  “No. The one in downtown Detroit. It isn’t a theater anymore. They gutted it twenty years ago and turned it into a parking garage. He said he used to see movies there when he was in college.”

  “Why didn’t you meet him?”

  “He never showed up. I stood in front for two hours. I didn’t feel safe waiting any longer; the streets were empty. My car was parked inside. When I went back I found this under my windshield wiper.”

  She fished a rectangle of pale pink cardboard out of a pocket of her skirt and handed it to me. It was a ticket to Monday night’s motion picture screening in the auditorium of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The feature to be shown was Pitfall.

  Thirteen

  I’D LIT THE CIGARETTE, but after the day I’d had I needed both hands to hold the ticket steady, so I tilted my head back to keep the smoke out of my eyes. It didn’t do much good. If the etching of the statue of the Spirit of Detroit in the corner tipped me a wink, I’d missed it.

  “How sure are you Neil put it on your windshield?” I asked his wife.

  “Who else would? He’s always been a great supporter of the film series at the DIA. He once rescheduled an important meeting to attend a showing of Citizen Kane, a film he already had on tape. I looked at the cars parked nearby, just in case the ticket was part of a promotion of some kind, but mine was the only one that had it. What do you think it means?”

  “Could be he thought someone was watching you and decided to change venues. Did you mention hiring me when he called?”

  “He didn’t give me time. He said, ‘Remember my telling you about the Michigan? I’ll see you there.’ That was it. He hung up before I could ask him any questions.”

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  “Yes. It was Neil’s voice.”

  “No ‘Hi, honey’? Or darling or poopsy or slugger?”

  “No. If there’d been anything like that I’d have known for sure it wasn’t Neil. He’s not much for endearments.”

  “Who picked up the telephone. Angelina?”

  “She was upstairs, ironing. I answered.” She started to set her glass on the lattice table, missed it, and had to look to make contact. Then she twisted her hands in her lap and looked at me. “Do you think he’s in trouble? Real trouble, not the kind he’d make up to fit the plot of some movie?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t like that he didn’t show. At least not between a quarter to ten and ten-thirty.”

  Her lips formed a W, but the question didn’t come out. A curtain slid down behind her face. “That was when Brian was—there. In that place. When he was killed. Wasn’t it? You can’t suspect Neil.”

  “The night you hired me and told me about your husband’s affair, you wouldn’t say how you found out. It was Brian, right? He told you.”

  “You don’t know my husband if you think he’d kill him for that.”

  “I met Vesta Mannering tonight. She said your brother offered to keep their affair secret from you if Neil came across with a thousand bucks.”

  “What makes you think you can believe anything that harlot says?” Her cheeks were hot. The pallor had fled.

  “If Brian’s the one who told you, it means at least half her story is true.”

  “My brother wasn’t a blackmailer.”

  “Five minutes ago you as good as told me you suspected he was a crook.”

  “There’s a difference between petty thievery and extortion.”

  “For Brian, that difference was about twenty thousand.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  I pinched out my butt and dropped it into a terra-cotta pot containing a purple blossom as big as my hand. “When I talked to Leo Webb, he was complaining that someone had just spirited away that much in electronic equipment from Gilda’s studio in Southfield without breaking so much as a window. Tonight the cops found your brother’s body in a kitchen that looked like the back room at Radio Shack. When the cops trace the stuff back to Southfield, they’re going to ask the same question I’m asking now: Who gave Brian a key?”

  “It could have been anyone. Someone might have left a door open accidentally.”

  “Someone might have. It might even have happened on the same night your brother decided to see what he could boost there. Vesta might have made up the story about the touch. All of this might even have taken place within twenty-four hours of Neil’s disappearance. Coincidences happen all the time. Try and sell that to the cops when they put out a warrant for your husband for first-degree murder.”

  She looked up quickly. “How much did you tell them?”

  “Webb told me he caught Brian going through Neil’s desk once. I gave them that. They like it when you give them something. I didn’t tell them about Vesta Mannering.”

  “Neither did I, when I reported Neil and Brian missing. I didn’t think it was important. I have an idea you didn’t tell them because you thought it was.”

  “At this point I don’t know what’s important, only what makes me curious. I didn’t want to trip over any more cops than I had to satisfying my curiosity. I hope it doesn’t come back and bite me on the neck. But it’s my neck.”

  “What do you think happened, Mr. Walker?”

  I looked at my reflection in the dark glass enclosing the porch. I saw a tired face on an exhausted body in a suit that needed pressing. “I think your brother had something on your husband; something more serious than an extramarital affair. He approached him with the same deal he did two years ago, only this time the price for his silence was higher. Twenty times higher. All Catalin had to do was throw back a bolt and look the other way. Brian would know where to fence the equipment, and Neil knew from before that he wasn’t bluffing when he threatened to tell what he’d dug up.”

  “What could it have been?”

  “I’ve got a guess or two, but they need running out. One has to do with ninety-two thousand in stolen cash hidden somewhere by Vesta’s ex-husband, and a fellow named Musuraca who’s looking for it. You told me Neil had money trouble.” I rubbed my eyes. They burned as if I’d been watching movies all night. “Whatever it was, it was bad enough to make Neil decide to drop out of the picture for a while.”

  “Then you don’t think it had anything to do with his obsession?”

  “It might have had everything to do with it. Those films are the only reality he knows, or accepts. We do what we do from instinct and learning. If your teachers were Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell and Alan Ladd and Orson Welles, you handle things the way they did. It doesn’t matter that it was some hack screenwriter’s idea of how to satisfy the requirements of entertainment, studio policy, and the Hays Office, or that the people you’re dealing with may not have read the script. He wouldn’t think of the fact that in real life there are no retakes. That when the bodies are through falling they don’t get back up when the director yells cut.”

  “What do you propose to do?”

  “To begin with, I need to borrow a few more movies from your husband’s collect
ion. It would help if you can pick out the ones he watched most often. Not every case gives you a peek at the missing party’s shooting script.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t give you many titles. I hadn’t been watching with him for quite some time, so I can only describe what I happened to see on the screen whenever I looked in on him.”

  I grinned. “This is where my wasted youth comes in handy. I overslept through most of high school after staying up with the Late Show.”

  “What about the DIA?”

  I gave her the ticket. She took it without looking at it. “You want me to go in alone?”

  “He’ll be looking for it. I’ll be there early. If Catalin shows, I’ll talk to him.”

  She stood and smoothed her cream-colored skirt. I stepped back to give her room, but she took a step toward me. Even through the competing perfume of the flowers that surrounded us I could smell the euphoric scent she wore. “Is there anything else I can do?” Her eyes were planets of mystery and promise.

  “Not unless you know someone who drives a green Camaro.”

  Disappointment caved in her face. “I—I don’t notice people’s cars. One is pretty much like all the others. Does it bear on the—case?”

  “Maybe not. Most things don’t. That’s another difference between our world and Neil’s.”

  “Do you really think he killed Brian?”

  “I’ll let you know what I think when I’m no longer just thinking,” I said. “It’s not impossible. Up on Mackinac Island, Dr. Naheen told me the Neil Catalin I’m looking for may not be the Neil Catalin you knew.”

  “Naheen.” She hugged herself. “I don’t like that man. Even over the telephone I felt something unclean about him.”

  “You’re not alone. He’s one of those guesses I want to run out.”

  She turned then, and we went to the basement to pick out some movies. She moved carefully on the stairs, like a guest in an unfamiliar house.

  Fourteen

  I AWOKE WITH THE SUN in my face and some optimism for a bright summer Saturday. By the time I was shaved and dressed the hole in the clouds had closed up along with my hopes. Some hysteric at the radio station I listened to over toast and coffee actually dusted off the emergency signal to warn all of southeastern Michigan it was under a severe thunderstorm watch. God forbid we should all get wet.