Never Street

by Loren D. Estleman

  I broke out the belted raincoat, drove to the store where I’d rented the vcr, and threw some money at the clerk to keep the video police off my back. On the way home I stopped at Kroger’s for some grocery items and got out forty-five minutes later behind a line of local residents laying in for a long siege. Flashlight batteries and canned goods were the order of the day.

  Back home I wasted no time. I scooped a videotape at random from the sack Gay Catalin had given me and poked it into the machine, trying to see as much as I could before the blackout. I got through Detour and then Double Indemnity, but just as John Garfield was about to bash in Cecil Kellaway’s skull in The Postman Always Rings Twice, a bolt struck nearby with a noise like a forklift truck falling off the kitchen table. The signal snapped and the screen went black.

  I jerked all the plugs and sat in my one comfortable chair smoking cigarettes in the leaden gloom, thinking while the rain slapped the siding and the wind rocked the house. Some of Hollywood’s best and grimmest were still in the sack, waiting their turn to live again in the cramped confines of my nineteen-inch Motorola: Gun Crazy, Kiss Me Deadly, Cape Fear, Dead Reckoning, D.O.A., more I couldn’t remember. The titles alone played like a dirge, with a police siren for a minor key. I knew them all, by reputation if not by experience. Like those I had watched already that day, they all had to do with ordinary, not-too-bright characters who plunged or were shoved in up to their necks in dirty money, poisonous women, demented villains, and their own self-devouring angst. When it came to role models, Neil Catalin had set his sights low enough to score a bullseye first shot out of the box. The whole business lined up like Rubik’s Cube. It was such a perfect pretty thing I hated to twist it apart.

  Hating to do something isn’t the same as not doing it. I picked up the telephone, found it was working, and dialed Barry Stackpole’s number at the cable station in Southfield where he worked. The female voice that answered said he wasn’t in, but she took my name and promised to pass on a message. Fifteen minutes later the bell rang.

  “Amos. I thought you were watching Rocky and Bullwinkle this time of a Saturday.” He sounded as if he were shouting through an electric fan.

  “I might if I could get my set to operate on kerosene,” I said. “Don’t tell me you popped for a car phone. You always said the three places you most didn’t want to be reached were the bathroom, your car, and work.”

  “The station put it in my contract. They didn’t say I had to turn the damn thing on. I mostly use it to order pizza. What’s the skinny? Who’d you kill?”

  “This isn’t for broadcast. I need a favor.”

  “What? You’re breaking up, pal.”

  “Barry, that’s beneath you.”

  “No, I mean I’m really losing you. Fucking hills. Listen, I’m only about twenty minutes from your dump. Got any beer?”

  “It might not be cold by the time you get here.”

  “That’s okay. I’m the bastard son of an English barmaid. See you anon.” The connection crackled away.

  The lights were still out when he knocked on the door. I opened it to find him drenched. His white-blonde hair, thinning now, was plastered to his scalp, exposing the oblong outline of the metal plate underneath. His shirt was transparent. The harness that held his Fiberglas leg in place stood out beneath the soaked flannel of his slacks. Despite these impediments to exercise he was as trim as ever. His grip would crack hickory.

  “You know, owning an umbrella is not an admission of weakness,” I said.

  “This is Detroit. We drive to the mailbox. Who needs umbrellas? There was talk of warm beer.”

  “I thought you were AA.”

  “Oh, I quit that crowd. What good’s listening to people’s hard-luck stories if you can’t publish them?” He glanced around the living room. “Nice. You ought to have power failures more often. It’s cheaper than redecorating.”

  I told him where the towels were and went into the kitchen. When I came back with the beers he was looking at one of the tapes from the sack. His hair stood straight out from his scalp and he had a towel draped across his shoulders. “Cry of the City” he read. “Don’t you get enough of this kind of thing at work without taking it home?”

  “That is work.” I tossed him one of the beers. He caught it one-handed, put down the videotape, and popped the top on the can with his left hand, the one that was missing two fingers. He’d left them on Livernois some years back, along with his leg and a piece of his cranium. In those days he wrote a crime column for the Detroit News, and the people he offended weren’t the kind who wrote letters to the editor. Now he chaired a weekly segment on cable entitled “Meet Your Neighbors,” and his ratings share and the quality of his contacts had promoted him above the victim line. I let him have the easy chair, found the end of the couch with the most springs, and asked him what he was working on.

  “The Russian godfathers are hawking their wares in our hemisphere,” he said. “Clear violation of the Monroe Doctrine. I tapped the phone of a hardware dealer in Highland Park who claims to be a Ukrainian, but for a guy who sells hammers and extension cords he spends a lot of time reminiscing about air-lifting Simonov carbines across the Chinese border during the Korean War. I think he’s negotiating a trade with the old Matador mob downtown: a carload of Kalashnikova AK-47s for a tanker full of Colombian cocaine.”

  “Can you use any of it?”

  “The station’s lawyers say no. But through his brother-in-law the station owner’s got title to three more network affiliates than the FCC allows, and I’ve got affidavits to back it up. I’ve been saving them for just this situation.” He drank off half his can at a gulp.

  “Did you ever think of doing one of those call-in gardening programs?”

  “With my luck I’d get a call from some clown who dug up Jimmy Hoffa with his flowering hibiscus. What’s the favor?”

  “I didn’t want to have to haul you all the way over here, Barry. I just need a name to go with the number on a license plate.”

  He drained the can and squashed it with his incomplete hand. “That’s it? You can get that from the Secretary of State’s office.”

  “It’s closed weekends. I thought if anyone had access outside the regular channels it’d be you. I’d have asked you over the telephone if those damn cellulars worked better than two cans and a string.”

  “Tell me about the case.”

  “It wouldn’t interest you. There isn’t a Sicilian or a Russian in sight.”

  “Someone said the same thing about the hardware dealer. Then a UPS dispatcher whose kid I helped put through college sent a box to his store containing twelve volumes of Tolstoy in the original.”

  I took a sip and put my can down on the coffee table and left it there. Warm domestic beer has the consistency of saliva. “You can’t use it until I give you the green light.”

  “Hell, Amos. You think I’d have told you about Highland Park if I thought it’d end up in the Sunday magazine?”

  I told him then, leaving out Dr. Ashraf Naheen and Balfour House. I wasn’t sure where they fit in myself. When I finished he frowned and ran his fingers through his hair, smoothing it back from the widow’s peak.

  “I sat in on the Silvera trial,” he said. “Two of the video store managers owed money to the same shylock in Taylor, and it looked like the robberies might have been set up to arrange a payback. But there was no connection with the others and everything about Silvera screamed independent. The Ferry Park murder’s nothing. Back on the News we’d have buried it with the horoscopes.”

  “I said there wasn’t anything in it for you.”

  “Now tell it to me again, and this time put back in what you took out.”

  “That’s the kit.”

  He smiled slowly, the way he had when a state liquor control commissioner insisted on the air he’d awarded Sam Lucy a license to sell alcoholic beverages without knowing Frank Costello had given the bride away at Lucy’s wedding. “This is Barry. The guy you fell on in a she
ll hole in Da Nang, remember? The only guy in Southeast Asia who was a better liar than you.”

  I lit a cigarette and pushed the match through the hole in my beer can. It spat when it touched liquid. “Catalin fell off once before, a year and a half ago. He landed in a casa del loco on Mackinac Island. One of the natives there told me he suspects the shrink in charge of taping his sessions with well-heeled patients and selling the tapes back to them later.” I gave him the shrink’s name.

  “Naheen. Don’t know it. That grift’s as old as Freud’s couch. Video or audio?”

  “Video.”

  “Anything to it?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Resort island like that, a laugh-house honcho’s got to be about as popular as sharks offshore. Stories are going to be made up. Even if this one is true, I can’t see how it ties in.”

  “Maybe you haven’t watched enough movies.”

  “There’s a line I never thought I’d hear from anyone,” I said.

  “Seriously, everything about this one has to do with videotape. Gilda Productions, Catalin’s obsession, the shotgun robberies, the shrink. I’m guessing you played with that.”

  “We’re living in the age of the couch potato. Everything has to do with videotape. Even the cops look to make sure there’s a blank tape in the minicam before they check the loads in their revolvers. That’s no handle.”

  “What about the Camaro?”

  “Search me. That’s why I called you. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not. It’s there too often to be coincidence but not often enough to draw a lot of attention. That means he’s done it before. It might not even connect to the Catalin case. Not everything has to.”

  “Be nice if it did, though. Life’s snarled enough as it is. No wonder your boy prefers Hollywood.”

  “That’s what everyone says. Hell, it’s not even a town. Just a street that never really existed.”

  “That’s the draw.” He craned an arm and scooped the telephone from its table into his lap. “What’s the plate number?”

  I gave it to him. He dialed from memory, waited, began talking. He knew whoever was on the other end fairly well. I was pretty sure it was a woman. A man’s tones usually soften when that’s the case, regardless of what he thinks of her. He made no notes. Barry Stackpole’s memory for names, dates, figures, and details had been known to reduce more than one trial lawyer to frustrated splutters in the middle of a cross-examination.

  He thanked her and hung up. His eyes were bright, even for him. I recognized the mood. He was going to let me dangle for a while.

  I had time. It was the weekend, after all. I took a drag and flicked ash into the beer can. “Who’d you talk to?”

  “Secretary of State.”

  “I guessed that much.”

  “No, you didn’t.” His expression was deadpan.

  I looked at him. Realization wore through with a pace like erosion. “How’d you come to know the Michigan Secretary of State?”

  “I didn’t. She came to know me. She’s the one needs the good will of the media.” He moved his shoulders. “Okay. I slap the handball around sometimes with her husband at the Detroit Athletic Club. I got him the exit-poll results in the last election, two hours before they were announced. It gave her a head start on her acceptance speech.”

  “Talk about your backhand.”

  “With what’s been happening to the First Amendment, I need all the help I can steal. Anyway her personal computer is wired into the mainframe in Lansing. Don’t you want to know what it coughed up?”

  “I figured you’d tell me when I’d twisted long enough.”

  “Trouble is you don’t twist. The Camaro’s registered to Orvis Robinette, Sherman Hotel, Detroit.” He spelled the name.

  Not having Barry’s memory I got up and wrote it on the telephone pad. “What’s the gag? The city condemned the Sherman five years ago. They needed another empty lot.”

  “It’s still operating, a very exclusive address. You can’t register without a record as long as Pete’s feet. Every lam-mister, sneak thief, kneecapper, crumb bum, and congressman who’s anyone has hung his brass knuckles at the Sherman at one time or another.”

  “I wonder which one of those things Orvis Robinette is.”

  “You mean you really don’t know? How do you make a living at this?”

  “I don’t. I’m only doing it to keep busy until the presidential nominating committee calls.” I waited.

  “You’d better say yes. I don’t know what he’s been up to lately, but three years ago the cops downriver arrested him for suspicion of complicity in the shotgun robberies. Orvis covered Ted Silvera’s back.”

  Reel Two

  Cross-Fade

  Fifteen

  I WAS RUNNING down a dark narrow alley, darker than you’ll find in the era of twenty-four-hour security lights and narrower than they make them in this country; I couldn’t see my hands but I could touch one to each wall merely by spreading my arms. The bricks felt springy. I could have pushed my fists through them without much effort. They were painted canvas.

  What illumination there was reached me by ricochet, the green-and-pink phosphorescence of a neon advertising sign mounted on some high roof reflecting off the chemical slime with which the false bricks were sprayed. I knew it was green and pink, but I couldn’t see the colors. Everything was black and white and a sinister grade of silver, like nitrate splinters in film manufactured before the invention of safety stock. The celluloid was volatile. It could burst into flames any second if the bulb in the projector got too hot. Meanwhile, the silver continued to oxidize steadily, dissolving the walls and sky and shining pavement with the inevitability of human mortality, curling up and turning brown at the edges, collapsing upon itself like plastic melting. Existence itself was ephemeral, and mine was only a matter of the immediate present. Death was behind me. In front of me there was only darkness, interrupted by scratches and splices and age-cracks through which edged that silver light, serving only to make the blacks seem blacker.

  I ran and ran. My side ached and my breath sawed in my throat. My own footsteps clattered back at me. I couldn’t separate them from those of Death. I ran around a sharp corner, and suddenly I was no longer in an alley. Now I was running down the midway of a deserted amusement park. No one rode the merry-go-round, no lines waited to enter the arcade, the lighted Ferris wheel turned at a mournful pace against a starless vault with its gondolas swinging empty. I heard the echoes of the day’s merriment, hollow and drawn and forlorn, like the cries of the ghost riders in the old song. The warped soundtrack popped and sizzled.

  I ran, stumbled, and ran faster to catch myself before I fell. The scenery whirled, became a smear of painted horses and wicked-looking clown faces and Uncle Sam on stilts and barkers in straw hats and stripes with faces like skulls. Other images, having nothing to do with the sights and sounds of an amusement park, bled in from offscreen: cars slamming into light poles, stacks of poker chips telescoping to the sky, exploding storefronts, chattering submachine guns, bodies rolling into gutters. I was trapped in a montage from an old Warner Brothers gangster film.

  At length I spotted the Tunnel of Love and dived into it. A boat shaped like a dragon was waiting. I handed a coin to the gondolier standing in the bow and climbed onto a seat. He pushed off, singing the theme to Laura in a high, ethereal voice that reminded me of the doomed street singer in The Body Snatcher. I interrupted him to warn him to look out for Boris Karloff. He turned, and I saw that he was Brian Elwood, complete with bullet holes in his torso, a fleck of congealed blood on his lips, and that vacant stare that none living could intercept.

  My eyes sprang open. I was clutching the sides of my mattress with both hands, as if I were trying to push myself out of a boat. The sheets were soaked through with my sweat and the muscles of my jaw ached from clenching.

  I snapped on the lamp and looked at the wind-up alarm clock on the nightstand. It was ten after three Sunday morning. The street in
front of the house was quiet, as it never was any other hour of the week. The storm had long since passed. The power had come back on sometime during the night.

  I got up, threw on my robe, and padded into the kitchen to pour myself a glass of milk. I needed the nutrients. Barry and I had progressed from beer to gin, killing off a bottle with a picture of Queen Victoria on the label I found in the cupboard over the sink and listening to the Tigers lose to Seattle on my portable radio. I’d poured him into a cab sometime around 7:00 p.m. Now my head was whanging and my tongue felt as thick as a sofa cushion.

  I finished the glass sitting at the table in the breakfast nook, smoked half a cigarette, and put it out when it started to taste like stale gin. Then I went back to bed and the nightmares I was more accustomed to: Vietnam and my marriage.

  In the morning I swung out of my way to stop at the video store, waited ten minutes for it to open, and pulled three tapes off the shelves. The kid behind the counter, eighteen and forty pounds overweight in a NO FEAR T-shirt with Clearasil stains on the neckband, was watching a pair of Asians kicking the sushi out of each other on the monitor. Reluctantly I turned away to process my selections.

  “Singin’ in the Rain, The Mating Game, Tammy and the Bachelor.” He demagnetized them and handed them back. “Debbie Reynolds fan?”

  “Not especially. But nobody ever gets killed in her pictures.”

  “Except for How the West Was Won.”

  I pointed at the monitor. “What do you get out of those?”

  He hunched his round shoulders. “I watch ’em and then I don’t go home and stomp the shit out of my old man.”

  “If it’s that bad, why don’t you move out?”

  “Then I wouldn’t have nobody to stomp the shit out of but me.” He let his shoulders fall. “Your life’s so great you got to go out and monkey around with other people’s?”