“You’re pretty handy with a car door lock,” I said. “I may have to find another place to keep my registration.”
“Don’t bother. I know all the places. When I looked you up and found out you was a private cop, I decided to adopt you. You almost throwed me off when you switched cars. I thought you was on to me.”
“Not then. You’re pretty handy all around.” I put away the pistol and showed him the picture of Neil Catalin.
“Could be him. It was dark, and he had a hat on. You figure his old lady knows about the ninety-two large? I can’t think of any other reason why she’d want him back.”
“You never know with these quiet ones.” I walked around the desk and picked up the Beretta. “What about the kid in the Grand Cherokee?”
“What about him? I thought he was peddling subscriptions to Rolling Stone.”
“He was Catalin’s brother-in-law. The Detroit cops body-bagged him out of a house on Ferry Park Friday night. Somebody pumped three bullets into him.” I sniffed the barrel. If it had been fired recently, it had been cleaned since.
“So that’s where you went with the cops. I split when I seen ’em. They’re bad luck for me.”
“Care to tell me where you were around ten P.M. Friday?”
“Looking for a way to sit on my front seat that didn’t hurt my hemorrhoids while you was listening to spick music with Vesta in the Castanet Lounge.”
“You could have gone off to do the brother-in-law and been back before we left.”
“Could of. Didn’t. I ain’t in the habit of doing folks I ain’t met. What you think I am, one of them Cheerio killers?”
“You don’t mind if I hang on to your piece, just in case the cops aren’t as reasonable as I am.”
“I don’t guess I’ll have much to say about it in the can.”
“I’m not turning you in. If I started reporting people for criminal stupidity, there wouldn’t be anyone left to pay taxes. That will change if I catch you tailing me again.”
“You won’t catch me.” He stood up.
“I don’t suppose it would do any good to advise you to give up on that money.”
He shook his orange head. His confidence was returning. It would never be absent for long. “Ted’s in the can, I can’t touch him. Your guy’s on the street. I hunt the street. Ask anybody.”
He walked out past me.
I found all the parts of the revolver except one small screw. That meant a trip to a gun shop, and life with the Luger until then. I picked up the telephone and replaced the receiver. Just then the bell rang, and it was John Alderdyce. They’re never around when you need them.
Seventeen
I’D VISITED JOHN ALDERDYCE’S office only once before since he made inspector. It hadn’t changed, not the requisite Academy class picture in a metal frame on the wall or the shots of his wife and two children in their younger years on the desk or the expired flies in the bowl fixture suspended by chains from the ceiling. He had, though; he’d aged visibly. Some of it was good: the gray in his short hair softened the brutal Masai-warrior cast of his face, making it look less like the rock against which a thousand alibis had been smashed. Some of it was less beneficial: the weight he’d gained since he’d stopped going to crime scenes had settled in for the duration, forming jowls, a serious paunch, and a roll around his chest that messed up the lines of his custom shirt. It was getting hard to believe that we were almost the same age. Or I hoped it was.
“What did you call me about?” he said when I came in and pushed the door shut behind me.
“That’s it?” I asked. “No, ‘Hey, Amos, how’s the boy’?”
“Your color’s good and you’ve got that same cocky son-of-a-bitch look you had on your face the time you shot me in the ass with a Daisy rifle. I can guess how the boy is.”
“It was a Red Ryder. And we were playing Sands of Iwo Jima. I was John Wayne.”
“John Wayne waited for the Japs to turn around before he shot them.”
“The Japs didn’t outweigh John Wayne by fifteen pounds.” I spun a chair and straddled it, folding my arms across the back. “Anyway, you called me.”
“I was returning your call.” He closed the folder on the arrest report he’d been reading and rested his hands on top of it, looking as impassive as igneous.
“I heard the Elwood shooting got bumped to Homicide. I wondered why.”
“I traded Lieutenant Thaler two drive-bys and a domestic murder for it. I needed the change of pace.”
“Hey, that’s my schtick. You’re supposed to throw me through that partition when I ask too many questions.”
“You’re bigger than you were at the time of the Red Ryder incident.” After a short silence he opened his desk drawer and skidded a glassine bag across the top. It contained a video rental card with Neil Catalin’s name embossed across it. “Forensics found that at the crime scene. We figure either it fell out of Catalin’s pocket when he was bending over the body or the pocket got torn when Elwood put up a fight and it fell out then. That takes it out of the category of a homicide connected to a lesser felony. Catalin traced the equipment that was stolen from his production company to his brother-in-law and shot him. That makes it a revenge killing.”
“Anybody could make up a card with Catalin’s name on it. It could be a plant.”
“Getting his prints on it is a little harder. They check against a set we had on file from a gun registration Catalin made two years ago. His wife can’t find the gun, by the way. It’s a nine-millimeter S-and-W semi-automatic. Care to guess what caliber slug Dr. Chung dug out of Elwood at the morgue?”
“Nine millimeter’s the Chevy of guns. I’ve got a Beretta in that caliber sitting in my safe I’ll send over later. You might want to check it out.”
“Why might we?”
“I’ll tell you if it matches up. If it doesn’t it won’t much matter, except it’ll be one less gun on the street. Any other prints?”
“Should there be?”
“If Catalin used the card there should be at least one other set, belonging to the clerk in the store where he used it the last time he rented a video. The turnover in that business is worse than McDonald’s; unless the clerk’s been printed for some reason in the past you probably won’t match it. But there should be another set.”
“Not if he obliterated it when he handled it last. He had to put the card away after the clerk returned it.”
“Anyway, that answers my question.”
“Who belongs to the Beretta you’re sitting on?”
I’d already thought about that. Having Orvis Robinette picked up for questioning in the Elwood homicide would get him off my neck for a while, probably for years considering the rules against possession of a handgun while on parole, but it would pull Vesta Mannering into the police investigation, and I had a couple of questions I wanted to put to her myself before the cops started in. I hung on to Brian’s attempted blackmail of Catalin for the same reason. I’d gotten that from Vesta.
“I found it in an empty lot,” I said.
“What empty lot?”
“I can’t remember. You can’t cut through a vacant block in this town without tripping over ordnance.”
“I can tank you as a material witness.”
“Can you? I sure can use the rest.”
He pointed at the door. “If that gun isn’t on my desk by five o’clock I’ll get a warrant and toss your office. I’ll dump your case files on the reading table in the employee lounge downstairs. That ought to do plenty for your reputation as a confidential agent.”
“Well, it beats threatening my license. I was getting tired of that.”
“Just send over the piece. And call if you find Catalin. He’s more than a missing person now. He’s the prime suspect in a murder investigation.”
“Not exactly an exclusive group in this town.”
He pointed. I went.
It was lunchtime. I set the Cutlass west on Michigan and followed it to Livern
ois, checking the mirror from time to time for Orvis Robinette’s Camaro, which didn’t make an appearance. I had a taste for the cuisine at Ziggy’s Chop House.
The Power Lunch was a Ziggy’s specialty. The restaurant’s low ceilings and Mission Oak tables and chairs did little to absorb the clatter of flatware on crockery and buzzle of masculine voices, folding every variety of corporate thimble-rigging inside the din of Cro-Magnons feasting on saber-tooth steaks and medallions of mastodon. The only females in evidence were the help. Women weren’t barred; they just didn’t like the place. The current record belonged to a distaff member of the design team at Chrysler, who had endured five consecutive lunches among the rep ties, white-on-white shirts, and gold cufflinks flashing over bloody T-bones and bowls of black bean soup and remains of butchered competitors, then conducted an orderly retreat to the Olive Garden and a more genteel brand of carnage. Ziggy’s continued to operate as it had since the Irish ran Detroit, not in defiance of the sexual revolution so much as it seemed unaware of it.
“Have you a—”
Vesta broke off when she recognized me. She looked a little less ethereal standing behind the reservation desk than she had among the shadows of the Castanet Lounge, but no more undesirable. She had on a multicolored silk blouse that wrapped around her waist without a button and an ankle-length black skirt with a row of jet snaps along the slit that allowed her to be as daring as she chose. Today she had dared as far as the knee. Her feet were arched in black patent-leather heels with silver clips shaped like Art Deco butterflies. She wore her black hair up, exposing onyx buttons in her ears.
“No reservation,” I said. “I’ll take the table for two by the kitchen where the personnel break.”
Her dark glance darted past my shoulder to the customers waiting behind, then back to me. “Smoking or non?”
“That depends on whether you need a cigarette. You’re joining me.”
“I can’t.” She whispered it.
“Sure you can. I had a visit from Orvis Robinette this morning.”
She surprised me by turning pale. I’d had her pegged for a better poker player than that. She touched the arm of a passing waitress. “Linda, can you hold down the desk for a little while?”
“All I’ve got is a party of undertakers and a guy reading the Wall Street Journal. They won’t even notice I’m gone.”
I followed Vesta all the way through the dining room and out a fire exit leading to a row of parking spaces reserved for employees. The temperature change from the air conditioning inside was a shock, but not as harsh as the waves of heat crawling beyond the building’s shade.
I said, “I guess this means we don’t eat.”
“I’ve waited tables in a lot of places. You can’t have a private conversation in a restaurant.” Producing a set of keys from her skirt pocket, she unlocked the driver’s door of her red Triumph, got in, and leaned across to pop up the button on the passenger’s side. The black leather seat was warm against my back.
“There’s a fresh carton in the glove compartment,” she said. “Break out a pack for me, will you?”
She smoked Kools. I lit one for her and a Winston for myself. “Start with Robinette,” I said. “You told me you didn’t know who your husband’s partner was in the video store robberies.”
“I told the police the same thing. I was telling the truth then. If you went to them with another story, they’d think I lied and that I knew everything, including what Ted did with the money. They’d be all over me.”
“How much do you know?”
She looked at me. There sitting behind the wheel of her own car she was no longer pale. “Ted never told me anything. I didn’t lie about that. I never heard of Robinette before last month, when he broke in on me in my apartment and started slapping me around, asking me where the money was.
“I’ve been hurt before,” she said. “I can stand pain. I can’t afford to have my face messed up permanently. I know I’m not the world’s greatest actress; I need these looks.”
“You told him about Ted’s meeting with Ernie Fishman. Their fence.”
“I heard Ted call him Ernie. I didn’t hear any other name and Ted didn’t tell me who he was. Do you believe me?”
“Robinette believed you. He had a lot more to gain by not believing you.”
“I guess some people still say crime doesn’t pay. I don’t know about that, but I sure know being married to a criminal doesn’t pay. The only thing Ted ever gave me was this car, and he bought that secondhand, on time, with money he earned stacking cartons at Kroger’s. He was afraid to spend the money he got from stealing because it might draw too much attention. So what was the point?”
“He had to have done something with the money. He didn’t burn it.”
She took a deep drag, spat out smoke, and snapped her butt out the window on her side. She got the least amount of good out of a cigarette of anyone I’d seen in a long time. “So that’s what this is about,” she said. “The money. I needed another Fat Phil Musuraca on my case. That’s the only thing I was missing.”
“I like money as much as the next guy, if the next guy isn’t Orvis Robinette. That’s the difference between him and me, apart from our colorists. I’m all practiced up on poverty. It’d be a shame to get rich all of a piece and see that go to waste. I’m looking for Neil Catalin. When I find him I collect my five hundred per diem plus the cost of cigarettes and whiskey and gasoline and get my start on my first million. Where’s Neil?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea since two years ago the first of this month.”
“That isn’t what you told Robinette.”
That bothered her a lot. She reached up, tilted the rearview mirror, and smoothed her lipstick with a fingertip. “I was wondering when you’d get to that.”
“It seems to have slipped your mind Friday night when I asked you for the second time when was the last time you saw Neil. I mean about his coming to see you Tuesday night.”
“That’s because he didn’t.” She flicked something away from her left eyebrow.
“Orvis robs people at gunpoint and beats up women. If you tell me he’s a liar to boot I’m going to give up all my faith in human nature.”
“I wouldn’t want to be responsible for that. When Robinette forced his way in on me a second time I thought I was in for another beating. I had an audition Thursday. Even if I hadn’t I wasn’t looking forward to swallowing teeth. When he seemed to think I’d just had a visit from Neil I saw a way out. If he thought Neil knew where the money was he might leave me alone.”
“So you sicced him on Catalin’s wife.”
“Why not? The bitch cost me a good gig at Gilda.”
“I can’t think why. All you did was steal her husband.”
She turned my way. Her eyes glittered in the depths of the shade. “No woman ever stole a man. He had to meet her at least halfway, and to do that he had to have a reason. She should have looked closer to home before she yanked my living out from under me. The only difference between me and her is she saw Neil first. If once she’d landed him she thought she could relax, I shouldn’t be the only one to pay for that mistake.”
When I said nothing she sat back, directing her gaze to the blank brick wall in front of the windshield. “If I thought she was in any real danger from Robinette I might have come up with something else. When you read in the paper that a woman was raped or beaten in her own home and it turns out that home was a house in West Bloomfield, you’re reading the front page. When it’s an apartment in Iroquois Heights, you’re reading the police column in the third section. That’s because that kind of thing doesn’t happen in West Bloomfield. There, even the thugs mind their manners. The worst she’d get was followed. I know what that’s like, and it beats a broken jaw.”
“Robinette saw Catalin coming out of your place late. Catalin’s car was parked out front with his registration in the glove compartment.”
“I don’t know about the car, but it wasn’t Neil
he saw coming out of my apartment. He saw Leo Webb. Neil’s partner.” She shook a cigarette out of her pack. “It was after two A.M. You’re the detective. You figure it out.”
Eighteen
WHILE WE WERE SITTING there a waitress came out the side door, fishing cigarettes and a lighter out of her apron pocket, spotted us, and moved farther down the line of parked cars to lean against the building and light up. The smokeless society has convened a new counterculture in America’s alleys.
I let Vesta fire hers up from the dashboard lighter. Gallantry was getting old. “You and Webb?”
“My mother made Judy Garland’s mother look like June Cleaver,” she said. “On my third birthday she signed me up for tap dancing lessons at Arthur Murray. At six I played Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop in a children’s theater group production in Garden City. I did a Crest commercial and sang the Oscar Mayer song when I was eleven. Dramatic scholarship at Wayne State. I got my SAG card when other girls my age went shopping for training bras. If there were any other choices I never saw them. I don’t want to schlep menus when I’m forty.”
“So it’s business.”
“What else would it be? Half of Gilda Productions belongs to that cueball, and he doesn’t have a wife to foul the nest. When it comes to recreational sex I like a full head of hair to get a grip on. I like your hair,” she added.
“Don’t flirt. How long have you and Webb been keeping company?”
“What’s this, Monday? Tomorrow will be a week.”
“Tuesday night was the start?”
“He called me that day at Ziggy’s. I told him where I lived. He brought flowers and a script. The shooting’s next week. I play Christina Ford in a docudrama about Henry the Deuce.”
“All this slipped your mind when we spoke Friday.”
“You asked if I’d seen Neil. You didn’t ask about Leo.”
Never Street Page 12