Never Street

by Loren D. Estleman

  “If my life were that great I wouldn’t need Debbie Reynolds.”

  I pushed on the door. As it drifted shut behind me the kid’s voice floated out: “Attaboy, Bruce. Kick his nuts up between his ears.”

  I often leave the door to my waiting room unlocked, for those customers who don’t mind waiting and reading about pet rocks and disco in the magazines on the coffee table. I’d had a visitor that morning. There were ashes in the tin tray and the air was sticky with a scorched smell that made me wonder at first if I were having a flashback. Marijuana smoking’s less common in public places now that no one cares. I didn’t poke through the ashes to determine the grade, or inspect the pile carpet for footprints. Sherlock Holmes had more time on his hands and no living to make.

  I unlocked the door to the Fortress of Solitude, scooped up the mail under the slot, and carried it to the desk. I checked my service, but there were no messages. I dialed Gay Catalin’s number to ask if she’d heard anything more from Neil. Angelina told me her mistress was at Detroit Police Headquarters, making arrangements for the release of her brother’s body. Next I called headquarters and asked for Mary Ann Thaler. The sergeant I spoke to said she was away from her desk. I left my name and number and asked him to have Lieutenant Thaler call me when she showed up.

  “This police business?”

  “It’s about the Brian Elwood murder.”

  “That isn’t Thaler’s now. It’s been booted over to Homicide.”

  My chair creaked when I sat up. “What happened?”

  “You’ll have to talk to the inspector about that.”

  “Inspector who?”

  “Alderdyce.”

  “So there is a God.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing. Put me through to the inspector, can you?”

  “This isn’t your lucky day, mister. He’s out too.”

  “If it was, it’d be my first. Please have him call me when he gets in.”

  I opened my mail, filed the bills under the blotter and a check for a credit job in my inside pocket, then unholstered the Luger and swapped it for the .38 Smith & Wesson revolver I kept in the top drawer of the desk. I’d never liked the Luger and only carried it when the Smith wasn’t handy. My father had traded a ’48 Hudson for the German automatic, which a friend had swiped off a headless corpse at Bastogne and never got around to registering. It was as comfortable to hold as a printing press and once you’d squeezed the trigger the action had to take a slow boat to Stuttgart and back to complete the firing chain. It worked on the same principle as a pocket lighter and was about as reliable.

  The revolver needed cleaning. I took it apart and broke the kit out of the file cabinet. I wasn’t at loose ends. I needed the mindless repetitive task to keep my hands busy while my brain gnawed at the latest bone to be thrown my way.

  If the Elwood killing had been taken out of Thaler’s hands and given to Alderdyce, it was no longer considered a homicide committed during the course of a lesser felony. It was a case of someone being made dead merely for the sake of having him dead. That meant that between Friday night and Monday morning something had happened to redirect the progress of a criminal investigation system that normally conducted itself as if Truman were still in the White House. It promoted Gay Catalin’s kid brother from spear carrier, if not to a spot on the bill, to at least a part with a bigger spear. I wondered how much it all had to do with Neil Catalin’s vanishing act; or, if it hadn’t, how much longer this straight pass of coincidences would go on until it came up snake eyes.

  I was rearranging all this heavy philosophical furniture when a visitor who made no noise at all on the balls of his feet came in from the waiting room. He was holding a gun, and unlike mine his was all in one piece.

  Sixteen

  HE WAS TOO SHORT for a basketball center, but that was the only thing he’d ever be too short for. At six-five he ducked his head from long habit to clear the top of the door frame. He had a swimmer’s build, slender and smoothly muscled under a green silk sport shirt and mottled jeans secured with a braided leather belt just under his solar plexus. His feet were small for his size, cased in spotless Nikes whose heels lit up when he placed his weight on them. He had a diamond in one earlobe and his short coiled hair was dyed a bright tangerine orange. His skin was the deep rich brown of a walnut gunstock.

  The pistol, a nine-millimeter Beretta, blue-black with an orange front sight to match his hair, rode in his right hand like an extension of his palm.

  He shut the door behind him and stepped aside from it, increasing his field of fire to include the doorway and the desk where I sat. It was a professional move, smoothly choreographed from much repetition. At this point I was pretty sure who he was, but I let him start the discussion.

  “I guess I’ll have you keep your hands there where I can see them.” His voice was as deep and rich as his coloring. When he’d found out there was already one Lou Rawls, the disappointment had driven him to a life of crime. “You’re Walker. You ought to spruce up that Cutlass. It’s a cherry machine.”

  “I told someone else the same thing last week, about his Buick,” I said. “You keep up that Camaro pretty good.”

  “It ain’t nothing. I drove a black Jag for a while, a real cherry, but I had to get rid of it. It’s a cop magnet.”

  “So’s the hair. It’s part of the profile of a dope dealer. They know you can’t be Dennis Rodman since he left the Pistons.”

  “Rodman stole it from me. Tell him to change. You know who I am, huh.”

  “I didn’t for sure, until the Camaro gag. You’re Orvis Robinette. You helped Ted Silvera push in a row of video stores downriver three years ago.”

  “That’s what the cops said. The eyewitnesses didn’t agree. You know how them suspects in police sketches are always wearing knitted caps? They all look alike.”

  “I guess the dye job throws them off at lineup.”

  “Got the idea all by myself. See, everybody up there tries not to be noticed. They scrunch theirselves down, keep their eyes on the floor. Me, I raise my chin and look straight out like I can see ’em right through that one-way glass. Guy like that, orange hair, they just know he can’t be the one. It’s like being fucking invisible. Where’s Catalin?”

  The sudden shift from patter to business caught me without words. He thought I was stalling. He extended the arm with the gun, sighting down it to a point between my eyes.

  I fought the urge to spread my hands. Berettas have hair triggers. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be here now. I’d be down at the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice hunting up another job.”

  “Where was you this morning? I waited here for you twenty minutes after I lost you on Telegraph.”

  I hadn’t spotted him this time. That made me mad enough to tell him the truth. “I went to a video store and rented three Debbie Reynolds movies.”

  His smile was broad and bright and died a mile short of his eyes. “Man, you are so dead.”

  “I want Catalin because his wife wants him and she’s paying me to bring him back. Why do you want him?”

  “Why should I answer anything a dead man asks me?”

  “Cut the crap, Robinette. If I weren’t worth more to you alive, you’d have plugged me on principle the second you came through the door. You’ve been following me all over greater Detroit, hoping to find out what I find out as soon as I find it out. I figure I picked you up at Catalin’s place in West Bloomfield. What’s your interest in Catalin? Why’d you stake out his house? Tell me something and maybe I’ll tell you something back. You can put all the holes in my head you want to, but it’s not going to spill out.”

  He held the bead. I had an itch between my eyes worse than any I’d known.

  “Shit.” He relaxed his aim. Without taking his eyes off me he hooked an ankle around a leg of the customer’s chair and tried to pull it around to the corner of the desk. When it wouldn’t budge he glanced down at the floor. I thought about the Luger in the top drawer. That was a
s far as I got, the thought, when he looked back at me. “It’s bolted down. How come?”

  “I like to breathe oxygen, not onions. Don’t worry, it’s not wired.”

  He gave the door a quick look, considered, then sat down and laid the pistol on the corner of the desk nearest him and farthest from me. From his shirt pocket he brought out a slim plastic case like the ones the cigarette companies used to give away and pulled it apart. The bottom half contained three twists of brown paper. He stuck one between his lips, set fire to it with a disposable butane lighter, and returned the case and the lighter to his pocket. “I’d offer you one, but these days a nickel bag costs a quarter. Gummint’s got to do something about this here inflation, you know what I’m saying?” His vocal cords were strained. That sticky scorched smell began to fill the office.

  “I’ll write my congressman. Okay if I smoke tobacco?” I used my knee to nudge open the drawer a crack.

  “Rather you didn’t. Bad for your ticker.” He sat back and crossed his legs, resting a hand on the ankle nearest the Beretta. He wasn’t wearing socks. “I had some poor luck after Ted went in. I went to Chicago to shop. Illinois state cops stopped me on the way back with a couple of Macintoshes and a laser printer in my trunk, still in the box. I done twenny-six months on a one-to-five in Joliet. Man, it was hot there. When I got out last month I thought I’d catch a breeze up here. Shit, it’s as hot as Biloxi. What the fuck you folks go and do to the weather whilst I was gone?”

  “It’s all caught up with the Fall of Russia; we’re still trying to figure it out. You muck around a lot with stolen electronic equipment?” My tone was as casual as lunch at the drive-through.

  “Diversification, that’s the key to success in bidness.” He grinned. “See, I only ducks and shuffles when I wants to. Well, it was a bad call. When I get bored I do stuff I shouldn’t. I’m bored now.”

  “Damn straight it was a bad call. Especially with ninety-two grand of your own hard-stolen money out there just waiting for you to dig it up.”

  He uncrossed his legs and scooped up the gun. “If you know about that, you talked to Catalin. Where the hell is he?”

  “Don’t be modest. Your little string of heists made the papers. Silvera pulled down a heavy sentence for refusing to tell what he did with the money or who helped him get it.”

  “Ted’s stand-up. That’s why I threw in with him to start. My last partner had a big mouth, so I went with one that had no mouth at all. He didn’t even tell me.”

  “Wasn’t it a little careless to leave the whole bundle to him?”

  “Would’ve been more careless not to. I had a record as long as Woodward when we hooked up. Whenever anything goes down in this town, the cops throw out a loop and I’m always in it. I couldn’t risk getting snagged with even half that money on me. The cops didn’t know about Ted. He could carry the cash down the street in a basket and they’d just think he was on his way to the Laundromat. I figured, what the hell, I can always pry it away from him if he decides to get cute. I didn’t expect him to get picked up before he had the chance.”

  I was getting a handle on Orvis Robinette. I was just there to keep him from justifying himself to himself. He was gesturing with the hand holding the gun as if he’d forgotten it was there. I nudged the drawer open another couple of inches.

  “They had Ted in the can so quick I was sure they got the money too,” he said. “That’s when I made my little trip west, to tide me over till another sweet thing come along like the video stores. By the time I found out the cops in Detroit didn’t know any more about where the cash was than I did, I had troubles of my own. Not no more, though.” He stood, pointing the Beretta.

  I hoisted my eyebrows. “You think I know where it is?”

  “If you did you wouldn’t be sitting around no grubby office in no hot city. You be out on some cool cruise, sniffing that salt air and dipping into them single women out fishing for rich guys. Catalin’s the one knows where the money is. It’s right there in his hip pocket, and you got a line on where he and his hip pocket are keeping theirselves.”

  “What makes you think Catalin knows?”

  He had an infectious smile, if you didn’t look at the top half of his face while he was wearing it. “You ain’t too good at this. The guy with the wand’s the one gets to axe the questions. Stand up. You’re taking me to Catalin.”

  I rose, bracing my hands on the edge of the desk. I slipped one inside the drawer and pointed the Luger at his midsection, what there was of it.

  The smile set like concrete. “Now, what’s this?” he said. “One guy with a piece, that’s cool. Two guys without pieces is okay. But two guys both with pieces is just stupid.” He fired the Beretta.

  I was clinically dead. As a pro he knew it, and that was where he threw it away. He thought he had all the time in the world. While he was using it, watching the scene like a disinterested third party, I pulled up on the edge of the desk, getting my left hip under it. The top of the desk collided with his pistol just as he squeezed the trigger. Later I found a hole in the heating return pipe running up from the furnace that had come down the river with Father Marquette.

  He had good reflexes. He backpedaled to keep from falling over backward, where the desk would have crushed him, but neglected to consider the bolted-down chair. His face showed its first sign of panic when the backs of his knees came into contact with the edge of the seat. By then my right hand was in motion. The barrel of the Luger struck the left side of his head along the cheekstrap with a noise like a Lou Whitaker double and he dropped below my line of vision. When he opened his eyes he was sitting in the chair with the desk tilted across the tops of his thighs, pinching off his circulation, with me leaning against it on one hand with the Luger in the other, tickling the strip of flesh between his nostrils with the muzzle. His own gun lay on the rug near the connecting door to the outer office, mixed up with the scattered parts of my dismantled revolver.

  I was beginning to develop a grudging respect for the German automatic.

  He struggled, realized his forearms were trapped between his thighs and the desk, and gave up with a general subsidence of his long tubular frame that might have broken my heart if he hadn’t tried to kill me fifteen seconds before.

  “Well, hell,” he said. “Things just ain’t been working out for me outside.”

  “You’re rusty.” I tickled his nostrils with the Luger. “Wand. What makes you think Neil Catalin knows what happened to the ninety-two thousand?”

  “You could let up a little. I got no feeling in my toes.”

  “That’s how gangrene starts.” I leaned harder, repeating the question.

  He grimaced. “I figured if Ted told anybody he told his wife, so I axed her.”

  “You talked to Vesta?”

  His skin had lost its sheen. I let up a notch. He exhaled. “I walked in on her in her dump the day after I got out,” he said. “I’d of done it the day before but it took me twelve hours to find out where she moved after she divorced Ted. I batted her around some, not too hard. I like Vesta. She said the night before he got busted Ted sent her to bed while he talked in the kitchen with someone named Ernie, she didn’t know what about. That’d be Ernie Fishman. We used to fence stuff through his junk shop in Flatrock, equipment we boosted from places where there wasn’t much cash in the till. Ernie dealt everything: coins, tape decks, hot rocks. I figured Ted invested the cash with him.”

  “Invested how?”

  “Well, you got to know Ted. He was always going on about how the smart guys were the guys who made money off the dumb guys who took all the risks stealing it. Said if me and him had any brains we’d quit the heist jobs when we had a nice round figure and let it ride with Ernie. I says, ‘Yeah, but what if Ernie don’t pay it back?’ He says, ‘Then we just steal it back from Ernie.’ That was the beauty of it, see, we had the experience.”

  “So you went to see Ernie.”

  “You need a spiritualist to see Ernie. Ernie died last
year. His landlord sold off the inventory to pay off the lease. City bought the building and knocked it down for a parking lot.”

  “Then the money’s gone.”

  “That’s what I thought, but I don’t give up that easy. I went back to see Vesta just to see if she was funning me about Ernie coming to visit. That’s when I seen this guy Catalin coming out of her dump.”

  “You saw Catalin when?”

  Bullets of sweat popped out of a crease in his forehead. I realized I was leaning all my weight on the desk. I straightened, tipping it back onto four legs. The edge had left a furrow across Robinette’s forearms. He started to pull himself out of his slouch, couldn’t get a grip on the sides of the chair, and sat working his fingers. As circulation returned he glanced up at me, but the calculation fled his face when he saw the Luger still trained on him. He rubbed his thighs.

  “Last week sometime,” he said. “Tuesday, I think. It was late.”

  That was the day Catalin had walked out in the middle of a business meeting. His wife hired me the next day. “How’d you know it was Catalin?”

  “I didn’t. I got curious and followed him. He drove clear to Detroit and parked in back of the Alamo Hotel down there on Jefferson and went into one of the rooms. When he didn’t come right back out I checked the registration in his glove compartment.”

  “Where’d he go from there?”

  “I didn’t hang around to see. I had his name and address so I figured I could find him if I needed to. See, I didn’t know him from Sam’s cat. I went back to Vesta’s and axed her about him. I didn’t need to bat her around this time; she remembered how it was before. She told me she and Catalin wrinkled the sheets a couple of times after Ted went into the can but this was the first time she seen him in a couple of years. She said he told her he thought he knew where the money was. He wouldn’t say where, but if he was right he’d be back to split it with her.”

  “You believed her?”

  “I believed her enough to go back and axe Catalin. Only he wasn’t there. Clerk at the Alamo told me he checked out around one A.M. I drove out to his place in West Bloomfield, but his car wasn’t in the garage. I staked the place out. Nobody came or went in the next fifteen hours except this kid in a Grand Cherokee, and he sure wasn’t Catalin. Then you showed.”