“Great flick,” said Portman as we stood near the exit watching the moviegoers trickle past in search of rest rooms and refreshments. Some used the auxiliary exit at the opposite end of the auditorium, and I craned my neck, wondering if I would recognize Catalin from the back had he managed to slip in unnoticed. “Good noir. Better than Out of the Past, which is muddled by too many flashbacks, and much better than Detour, whose hero is a moron. The critics love those. They wouldn’t know a good storyline if it rolled over their feet. I’m sure you caught the sexual connotation when Dick Powell took the controls of Lizabeth Scott’s speedboat, the only gift from her boyfriend he let her keep when his company confiscated everything else for the insurance. It was like the first honest-to-Christ climax he’d had in years. Then later, when Raymond Burr forces him to turn it in, the theme of self-castration is hard to miss.”
“I thought it was just a boat.”
“Could be it was. Occupational hazard.” He smiled. “How about when Powell asks his boss what it’s like to be a respectable married man? There’s a moment just as poignant in Sudden Fear, when Joan Crawford—”
Gay Catalin emerged into the lobby. I excused myself and followed her.
Portman called after me. “You don’t want to miss the assortment of vintage movie trailers they’re showing next.”
“I know. If I haven’t seen them on the big screen, I haven’t seen them at all.”
“Well, no. They sucked as big then as they do now.”
I caught up with her at the water fountain. She straightened up and dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a lace handkerchief. Her face was flushed, as if she’d been running. “Mr. Walker, what kind of game is Neil playing? Does he blame me for his colorless life? Is that why he’s tormenting me?”
“I’ll ask him as soon as I find him. Have you thought any more about what I told you about Webb?” I’d called her at her home before leaving for the auditorium.
“I can’t think of any answers. He doesn’t pick up his phone. Do you think they’re in on this together? And what is this? What does it have to do with what happened to poor Brian?”
“I don’t know. Webb’s being tight enough with Neil to borrow his car when you and everyone else thought Neil was long gone could mean Webb knew about your brother’s murder, and that’s why he panicked and ran. Another way of looking at it would be that Webb killed Brian—he was mad enough about the equipment theft from Gilda’s studio to track him down and extract some old-fashioned vigilante justice—and framed Neil by dropping his video rental card at the scene.”
“I’d believe that before I’d believe Neil was capable of murder,” she said. “There was always something slippery about Leo I didn’t like.”
“Slippery is right. Orvis Robinette assumed your husband was the man who visited Vesta Mannering Tuesday night because he read Neil’s name on the registration in the car parked out front. Say Webb knew she was being watched. He chose a night visit because it was dark enough so anyone who had the place staked out wouldn’t be able to tell it wasn’t Neil going in and coming out. He even wore a hat just to make it more difficult. So now Neil’s connected both with Brian’s murder and—”
I swore.
“And what? What’s wrong?”
“Neil didn’t leave that ticket on your windshield,” I said. “Webb did. And I know why.” I swung toward the street exit, almost knocking down an older couple in evening clothes.
“Where are you going?” Gay Catalin’s voice was fading behind me.
I was too busy running to answer. Webb had already had a ninety-minute head start, and that had been long enough for the director of Pitfall to commit two murders.
Twenty
A LIGHT RAIN HAD been falling since early evening, but it had let up by the time I reached the Iroquois Heights city limits. The Cutlass’s tires swished on the wet pavement as I swept all the mirrors for red flashers; the local police had not invented the concept of the speed trap, but they had been practicing it long enough and with sufficient consistency to apply for a patent.
If Webb had killed Brian Elwood and left Neil Catalin’s video rental card at the scene to hook him up with the murder, he had driven Catalin’s car to Vesta Mannering’s apartment for the same general purpose, to establish a connection between the two that hadn’t existed for two years. Her telling me about Webb, and my attempt to confront him, had made it more important than ever that she be gagged permanently. The L.A. dodge his receptionist had handed me had been meant to alibi him for the time I was busy at the DIA, preparing for a nonexistent meeting with Catalin.
That sign familiar to all who entered the Heights, speed limit 35: 36 mph means $36 fine, swept by so fast I couldn’t have read it if I didn’t already have it memorized.
I shot up the incline to the house where Vesta lived and was out the door, Luger in hand, while the car was still rocking on its springs. The red Triumph wasn’t in the little parking area. That relieved me, but not for long. It could have broken down and she’d caught a ride home. I racked a shell into the Luger’s chamber.
The door to the ground floor was unlocked. The cramped foyer contained a rubber mat, a cheap metal coat rack, and a painting in an oval frame of a sour-faced harridan with a cameo at her throat and grapes on her hat. A twenty-five-watt bulb at the top of the narrow stairwell cast more shadows than light. I started climbing the edge of the steps with my back to the wall. I still made too much noise. The house smelled of lemon wax and old wood.
A new shadow joined the pattern, slowly enough that I wouldn’t have noticed it except I’d committed the others to memory. I ducked just as something rammed the wall where my head had been, showering me with plaster. The echo of the report filled the well. I fired back. I couldn’t see what I was shooting at. I was just clearing the way.
Footsteps slapped the second floor. I took the rest of the stairs two at a lunge, then paused again at the top, flattening against the other wall this time. I counted to two, then pivoted, landing on both feet in the upstairs hallway with the pistol in front of me in two hands. At the far end by an open door, a tall silhouette spun on its heel and leveled an arm straight at me.
I fired. I couldn’t tell if I hit anything. The figure pitched shoulder-first through the open door. Something inside fell over with a crash. There was a pause, then a bigger crash. I sprinted down the hallway, stopped this side of the door to assume the position, and pivoted on through, letting the weight of the Luger do the work.
An empty living room yawned in my face.
A lamp burned in a corner, shedding light over a lot of blonde furniture, white carpet, and the twisted frame of an automobile windshield pretending to be art over the false fireplace. The remains of another lamp lay in pieces on the carpet near an overturned table. Opposite the door, a pair of filmy curtains stirred on both sides of a broken window. I circled the room in that direction and edged my face past the wooden frame. There was a twelve-foot drop to the tiny parking lot. As I was doing the arithmetic, a big engine started nearby with a blat of twin pipes. Tires yelped, gears crunched, the engine wowed and went away.
The house was coming to life beneath my feet. A door banged, voices started up. I didn’t have much time alone. I went back to the door, kicked it shut, and snapped the lock. Then I started on the apartment.
The kitchen was four feet of linoleum with the standard fixtures and some cupboards. I covered it in a glance. Likewise the bathroom, just big enough to do what was required there. The bedroom took a little longer. It was the second largest room in the apartment and held a double bed with a headboard upholstered in pink satin, a walnut bookcase, a dressing table and mirror, and a slipper chair drawn up to the table and upholstered to match the bed. The drawer of the table had been pulled out and flung to the floor amidst a litter of jars and bottles that had been swept from the top. The bedding lay in heaps at the foot of the bed, torn from the mattress in a single motion. Half the books that had stood in the walnut case had been ta
ken from their shelves and scattered across the carpet; even their dustjackets had been removed.
It was an uncomfortable clutter to have to stretch out on, and the position of the man who lay atop it—fingers clenched, knees drawn into his chest—showed it. He wore a light waterproof topcoat over his suit, still damp from the rain, and one of those floppy canvas hats like Woody Allen wore to conceal his features and make sure everybody knew it was him. It had slid forward over his face when he fell. I lifted it. It wasn’t Woody.
I felt for the thick artery below his left ear. His flesh was warm, but that was just a question of time. I took hold of his lapels and dragged him over onto his back to see where the bullet had gone in. There was a bright stain the size of a dinner plate on his blue shirtfront.
I looked for his weapon, but it could have been anywhere in that mess and I decided to let the cops have some of the fun. I looked to Leo Webb for answers, but his eyes were squeezed shut, as if the light hurt them. His bald dome glistened softly under the lamp.
Something else glistened and I bent down and picked up an extracted shell. The embossing on the brass base told me it belonged to a nine-millimeter. That was the caliber of the slug the coroner in Detroit had dug out of Brian Elwood. I rolled it between my palm and the leg of my trousers and let it fall. There would be at least one more at the top of the stairs.
The air stank of sulfur and saltpeter and the coppery odor of blood. I went out of the room to breathe.
The house was all the way awake now. Slippered feet scuffed the floor outside the room, voices murmured. I heard the word “police”—hushed, like “doctor.” No one wanted to knock. That wouldn’t last.
I went back into the kitchen and searched the cupboards until I found a bottle of Cutty Sark two-thirds full. I filled a thick-bottomed glass and sat on the sofa in the living room to drink and wait for the first polite knock of Iroquois Heights’ finest.
Twenty-one
THEY HAD REPAINTED the squad rooms since the last city administration, covering the tough old government green with a not entirely unpleasant shade of eggshell, but they had overdone it. The walls, baseboards, ceiling, and even the switchplates in the interrogation room were all the same color. After two hours I wondered when I was expected to hatch.
I was sitting on a steel folding chair drawn up to a yellow oak table freckled with old cigarette burns, initials, and one brave attempt to carve PROUST SUCKS, aborted just after the u, probably by some civil servant with a fist the size of a hog. Not that the perps in Iroquois Heights were especially literary; Mark Proust had been the local chief of police until his involvement in a scheme to pit incarcerated suspects against one another in wrestling matches (gambling encouraged) removed him from office. I had had something to do with his exposure, but no one there had gone out of his way to express gratitude to me this night.
First I had been questioned by a pair of detectives I remembered vaguely from the Proust years, one of whom wanted to adopt me. The other indicated that his appetite wouldn’t have suffered if I hemorrhaged farm machinery.
That was the drill in every police department since Byzantium, but in Iroquois Heights they did it with feeling, especially the hemorrhaging part. Then a watch captain named Malloy, small and neat with brushed hair, French cuffs, and a gold collar pin under the knot of his club tie, had come in and sat down on the other side of the table and stared at me for ten minutes. I admit it, I blinked. I had spent most of the last seventeen hours on my feet and my eyes grated like rusty doorknobs when I moved them. Satisfied, he got up and left without having said a word. For the next half hour I was left alone while the squad observed me through the two-way glass in the door for subversive behavior. I felt like the new puppy in the house.
Then the cavalry came.
John Alderdyce walked through the door and used up all the space in the room, leaving only the doorway for Mary Ann Thaler to stand in. The inspector wore a lightweight blue summer suit, single-breasted to accommodate his underarm rig. The lieutenant from Felony Homicide had on a turquoise silk jacket, gabardine slacks, and open-toed shoes with heels low enough for running through alleys after fleeing suspects. In her hairband and glasses she could have passed for a coed. She carried her small clasp purse in her left hand, with the latch open. I wouldn’t have bet which one of them would win in a fast-draw contest.
It struck me then that I had never seen both of them in the same room at the same time.
“This shoots my theory to pieces,” I said. “I’d have sworn you were one and the same person.”
Alderdyce crossed his arms and leaned his broad back against the wall. He looked as casual as a halftrack. “Generous folks here in the Heights. Always ready to boot a homicide over to Detroit when it hooks up to something outside the city limits.”
“That’s a small town for you. They don’t cotton to us urban sophisticates coming in here and hiking up the crime statistics.”
Thaler said, “Where’d they cast this town, Black Rock? Ever since John and I walked in they’ve been looking at us like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”
“White flight to the suburbs,” said the inspector. “Like rats fly.” He went on looking at me. ‘Tell it.”
So I told it all again, from Brian Elwood to Leo Webb. They listened without interrupting, a relief. I’d had to loop back every time one of the local cops asked a question, repeating myself so often that it had come out sounding as flat as a wooden hubcap.
“So you figure Webb killed Elwood for ripping off the studio and left his partner’s video card behind to pin it on him,” Alderdyce said. “Why’d he drive Catalin’s car to the Mannering woman’s apartment? What did he have to gain by making anyone who happened to be watching think she and Catalin were still together?”
“He needed a strong motive to finger Catalin for the Elwood killing. When Catalin refused to pay up the first time, Elwood ran straight to his sister and told her about the affair with Vesta. Making it look like they were still seeing each other would explain how Elwood got a key—Catalin gave it to him, to keep his mouth shut—and why Catalin tracked him to the house on Ferry Park and shut it for good. Webb couldn’t care less about the brother-in-law or the stolen equipment. It would be insured. He just wanted a body so he could frame his partner for murder and take control of a business on its way back from bankruptcy. Webb liked nice things.” I fished an empty pack out of my shirt pocket and crumpled it.
Alderdyce produced a box of Marlboros. I lifted my eyebrows; he’d quit smoking last I’d heard. He shrugged. I took one, found a match, and lit it. “When Webb found out I knew it wasn’t Catalin who went to see Vesta, he took a powder. She was the only person who could definitely identify her visitor the night his partner disappeared. He’d already arranged to send me on a wild goose chase that night, just as he had the night he killed Brian Elwood. He ducked me to avoid having to answer my embarrassing questions until the thing was done.”
“The locals combed the building,” Thaler said. “They didn’t find a weapon.”
“That’s because whoever killed Webb and shot at me took it with him when he went out the window. Webb walked in while he was tossing the place. That was a surprise, and before Webb could get over it he had his gun taken away. Maybe he was shot during the struggle. I’m betting that slug in the staircase wall and the one in Webb matches up with the one your man dug out of Baby Brother Brian.”
Alderdyce played with a Marlboro. “So who’s the shooter?”
“B-and-E’s happen all the time.” As I said it I felt my argument going away. When you hold back a key brick you can’t expect anyone to move into the house you built.
“Try this,” he said. “Catalin’s the shooter. The Mannering woman lied when she told you Webb came to see her in Catalin’s car. Whether she knew what he had in mind or just wanted to protect her lover man is something we’ll get out of her when the car I sent for her brings her back from Ziggy’s. She’s working late tonight, or didn’t you know?”
“I didn’t know. Webb could’ve been shooting her full of holes while I was calling to find out.”
He wasn’t listening. “It was Catalin all the time. He fell off his rails once over this Vesta cunt—Sorry, Lieutenant.”
Thaler flipped him a forgiving finger.
“Here’s the option. Either seeing her again triggers another breakdown, or he takes up with her just to draw out his brother-in-law. He pretends to cave to the blackmail, then offs him in that rotten neighborhood so it looks like he tripped over one of his perp friends. Okay, so it sounds like something from a crummy old crime picture. He’s a nut on them, you said.”
“Even the crummy ones tend to make sense,” I put in. “What about Webb?”
“She was seeing them both, and Webb walked in while Catalin was there waiting for her. Then Catalin tossed the place to make it look like a homicide in the commission of a burglary. You said yourself you didn’t get a good look at the shooter.”
“You said Vesta lied about seeing Webb.”
“So she didn’t. I’m as flexible as the next guy. Webb had a key to the apartment in his pocket. She’ll tell us who gave it to him. Meanwhile, if those slugs match up, it means Catalin’s carrying the same gun, and we’ve got a swell chance of catching him with it still in his possession. A pro would’ve thrown it away after the first killing, but it’s a little harder for a private citizen to score a replacement without leaving tracks. That Beretta you sent over tested negative, by the way: no match. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me now who you got it from.”
I shook my head. “For a private citizen, I attract guns like lint.”
“Who told you you’re a citizen? Citizens don’t pull a pair of star detectives out of a nice warm squad room in Detroit in the middle of the night and plunk them down in a stink-hole like Iroquois Heights at the peak of the riot season.”
“A little louder, Inspector,” Thaler said. “I don’t think they heard you downstairs.”
“The hell with them. And while I’m at it, the hell with you, too. You’re only here out of professional courtesy. This hasn’t been your case since that card turned up.”
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