Never Street

by Loren D. Estleman

  The respite of the last few days had ended. The ventilating breezes from Canada had shifted to the North, bringing up the stale air from Ohio and Kentucky and below that sopping Dixie: It smelled of kelp. A bank of sullen, dirty-faced clouds was working its way upriver from Lake Erie, preparing to screw down the lid once again. Humidity, storms, and blackouts were predicted. The officers of the Tactical Mobile Unit busied themselves polishing their face shields and checking the expiration dates on their cans of Mace. Every summer and every winter, the Pleasant Peninsula pays a price for avoiding the earthquakes out West and the flooding in the East.

  I stopped at the office long enough to check my service for messages and call Spee-D-A Couriers. Mr. Blint, the manager, was at his desk and expected to be there throughout the day. After just ten minutes parked in the sun, I could have broiled a steak on the hood of the Cutlass. When I turned on the radio, Nat King Cole sang “Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer.” I punched a button to change stations and got Sarah Vaughan on WEMU: “Ain’t No Use.”

  I wondered if it was going to be such a good day after all.

  The messenger service was set up in a glass-brick building on Vernor that had housed an Italian restaurant, a throw-away newspaper discarded after eighteen months, a Mexican restaurant, a police ministation, a Thai restaurant, an accounting service, a Japanese restaurant, a Republican campaign headquarters, and some kind of restaurant. It was a palimpsest of a structure that bore some evidence of every business that had passed through its portals. The windows were made of bulletproof Plexiglas from the ministation period, an electronic megaphone belonging to the political incarnation still poked out above the door, and the button to push for service reposed between the jaws of a brass-plated Japanese dragon.

  The building was less than twenty years old. It had replaced a hotel that had been in operation constantly since the Cleveland Administration.

  A sign mounted perpendicular to the front of the building read SPEE-D-A COURIERS, the s fashioned after a lightning bolt. A row of bicycles was chained to a rack next to the entrance. I stood back out of the way as a lanky teenage girl in Spandex shorts, a halter top, a cork helmet, and shin guards punched open the door, dumped an armload of packages into the basket of the first bike in line, unlocked the chain, and took off, swinging a leg over the seat after the vehicle was already in motion.

  The shallow customer area was painted blue and orange to match the colors of the sign out front and ended abruptly before a counter with a swing gate. The room beyond was a chaos of stacked packages in Fiberglas crates, cases of pigeonholes, canyons of boxes, and a granite-topped table like a printer’s stone where a dozen or so young people dressed like the girl who had just left stood wrapping and stamping bundles with that combination of wasted movement and superior efficiency that belongs exclusively to the under-twenty set. Just watching them made my corns ache.

  A copper bell with a handle stood on the counter. I picked it up and gave it a jingle. In a little while one of the workers, a boy with cropped blonde hair and a gold stud in his right nostril, came over.

  “Mr. Blint?” I asked.

  He shook his head and jerked it toward the back. “Is it a complaint? Sorry, mister. Some of these kids are a little slow. They don’t stay here long enough for us to sort out the lazy ones from the Spee-D-A material.”

  “How long have you worked here?”

  “Almost four weeks.”

  “I guess that makes you the assistant manager.” I gave him a card. “Please take this in to Mr. Blint. It’s important I talk to him.”

  He went back without glancing at the card or asking questions. He was Spee-D-A material. Thirty seconds later he came back and opened the gate.

  “Mr. Blint’s at his desk.”

  After the bicycles and printer’s stone I suppose I expected an old crotch in a green eyeshade surrounded by carrier pigeons in cages. I got a graying longhair in granny glasses and a fringed leather vest, seated at a keyboard in front of an electronic screen. He shared the back third of the building with fourteen monitors, six fax machines, eight printers, and a board containing a row of digital clocks representing the world’s time zones, including the daylight savings holdouts. A bulletin board shingled with notes and memos featured a color reproduction clipped from a magazine of the melting clocks of Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. The screen saver marching across the blue glowing faces of all the spare monitors put it more directly: TEMPUS FUGIT.

  “I think I’m getting it,” I said by way of greeting. “Gepetto Plugged.”

  “Actually, my home page handle is Huygens. He was the Dutchman who designed the first clock pendulum.” Blint’s attention remained on the screen in front of him. “What you’re looking at is a three-dimensional oxymoron. Fax, Internet, E-Mail, World-Wide Web, and the good old underappreciated Don Ameche.” He patted the console telephone at his elbow. “Who the hell needs a messenger service? I wonder if the frontier ferrymen who contracted with the Union Pacific to carry their rails and men and equipment across the rivers of this great land ever paused to consider that they were putting themselves out of business.”

  “I think they did. You don’t turn down paying work. Speaking as one oxymoron to another,” I added.

  “That crossed my mind when I saw your card. Why employ a shamus when you can get all the information you need at the touch of a key?”

  “Not all. You can’t swap confidences in cyberspace. You can’t buy a drunk a drink or wave a fin under the nose of an underpaid clerk or fix up a city councilman with the barmaid or muss someone’s shirt. At forty cents a minute you can’t practice diuturnity.”

  “Diuturnity.” He sat back then and looked up at me. His eyes were oyster-colored above the wire rims of his Ben Franklins. “Such an impressive vocabulary in such an unremarkable suit.”

  “I gave myself a word-a-day calendar last Christmas. And I never discuss tailoring with anyone who dresses like Jimi Hendrix.”

  “Hendrix. There was someone who made full use of the time he had. Yes, child?” He looked at the girl in Spandex who had materialized from the other side of the pigeonholes.

  “Devon just quit. He said Burger King pays more and the hours are better.”

  “He’s probably right. Give Rebecca his route.”

  She left.

  “Big turnover?” I asked.

  “Tip of the iceberg. The wages I can afford to pay restrict me to the MTV generation. They have the attention span of a housefly.”

  The girl returned. “Rebecca says there are too many hills on Devon’s route.”

  “Tell her she’s fired. Corinne,” he called, after a moment.

  She’d started to turn. She turned back. “I’m Janet. Corinne quit last week.”

  “Noted. How are you on hills?”

  “They’re easy. I’m a gymnast.”

  “Congratulations, Janet. You just inherited Devon’s route and a raise.”

  “Who gets my old route?”

  “Rebecca. I decided she’s not fired.”

  When we were alone again, Blint sighed. “Have you always been a detective?”

  “Probably not. If I were born wearing a shoulder holster I’d have heard about it.”

  “I was a mail carrier in Royal Oak for twenty years. Then a clerk I barely knew well enough to talk to came in and sprayed the place with lead just as I was tying out. Now I’m self-employed.” He pushed himself away from the computer console and I saw the wheels on his chair. “But you’re not here to waste Tempus.”

  “My client had some property stolen. Someone’s offered to sell it back to him, payment to be delivered to this address. Is it usual for a messenger service to accept deliveries as well as make them?”

  “Not if I suspect hot merchandise is involved, or drugs. The authorities are here on a regular basis because of the minors I employ. I always test clean.”

  “But you do accept deliveries sometimes. I’m investigating a customer, not you.”

&n
bsp; “On occasion, yes. We charge more for the convenience than the postal service does, but you need identification to rent a post office box. Anyone can walk into any post office and find out who belongs to a particular box number. That never fails to upset the people who advertise for partners in alternative-sex publications; they almost always find out from their employers or spouses. We don’t ask for ID unless the customer pays by check. That almost never happens. It doesn’t do to have your monthly dividend from the Marital-Aid-of-the-Month Club arrive at your front door in full view of the neighbors.”

  “The customer I’m interested in goes by Mr. Bell.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he slid his cheaters back up his nose. “How do I know you’re not just working some divorce case? I figure I’ve got two more years before the whole world’s on line; just enough time to make a difference between a comfortable retirement and Little Friskies every Friday. That goes west when my customers find out I can’t keep a secret in a cage.”

  “This isn’t evidence. It would just be a hell of a lot of trouble to go to when there are easier ways to get what I’m after.”

  I took out the sheet of notepaper Naheen had given me containing the fifty-thousand-dollar ransom demand, folded back the top to conceal the doctor’s name, and held it in front of his face.

  Blint read it, then took off the glasses and rubbed his eyes. He had a cast in one and a white scar along that temple that a bullet might have made. It reminded me of the mark on the underside of the curio shelf in my living room.

  “Works for me.” He put his glasses back on. “I remember Bell. None of these kids would; most of them weren’t working here then. It was a couple of weeks ago. I could look it up.”

  “Not necessary.”

  “He paid cash. I told him I couldn’t hold anything longer than thirty days. He said if it hadn’t come by September first, it never would.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “It was a busy day. I was shorthanded, as usual, and working the counter always gives me a stiff neck. He had on a baseball cap, bill to the front, and I think a Windbreaker. I don’t remember the colors, so don’t ask. Pair of shades, the neon kind the kids like. He was young. A kid. When he came in I thought he was looking for a job.”

  “Race, height, weight, facial hair?”

  “White. A smudge of beard, maybe. I’m not sure. I don’t notice people’s height as a rule. They all look like basketball players from down here. Medium to tall, I guess. Skinny. This sucks, doesn’t it? I was a much better witness the time I was shot.”

  “You had more reason to notice details then. I wouldn’t sweat it. Witnesses who remember too much are worse than witnesses who don’t remember at all.” I frowned at my notebook. “He sounds young for the guy I’m thinking of. Could he have been disguising his age? A cap and snazzy glasses can go a long way in that direction if there’s some doubt.”

  “I’m around kids all the time. This one wasn’t much past twenty, if he was that.”

  “He didn’t give you any information beyond calling himself Bell?”

  “No, and I didn’t ask. He didn’t behave like a druggie, and he didn’t dress the way kids that age deck themselves out when they’re making more money than they should; not enough flash. So I figured he was ordering back issues of Anal Delight and didn’t want his parents to know. If I’d thought he was using my business for a blackmail drop, I’d have thrown him out on his ear.”

  “How was he going to claim delivery without some kind of ID?”

  He twisted in the chair, tore the top sheet off a square pad on the corner of the desk, and held it out.

  I took it. It was a receipt blank bearing Spee-D-A’s logo in blue and orange.

  “I wrote ‘Mr. Bell’ on it, initialed it, and gave it to him,” Blint said. “All he had to do was show it at the counter. It didn’t even have to be him. The receipt is all that’s needed.”

  I couldn’t think of any more questions. I didn’t like the answers I’d gotten to the ones I’d asked. I gave him back the blank and put away my notebook. “If you hear from him again, I’d appreciate a call.”

  “What I’d like to do is call the cops and jail his young ass.”

  “They won’t thank you for it. My client will, and he’s in a better position to help out with your retirement.”

  Turning, I almost bumped into Janet.

  “Rebecca quit,” she told Blint.

  “Why?”

  “She’s mad because I got a raise and she didn’t.”

  Driving back to the office, I felt like a white rat in a maze designed by a sadistic scientist. None of the directions I took led to a pellet. Mr. Bell wasn’t Miles Leander. Miles Leander didn’t want money. I had a blackmail case without a blackmailer. I wonder what Blint’s computers would have made of it, or if they would just shut down their circuits in protest.

  On Vernor west of Grand, I picked up a Detroit police cruiser in my rearview mirror. I glanced down at the speedometer, but I wasn’t violating the limit by much; certainly not enough to attract official attention in a town where they let you drive. The car lagged twenty feet behind me for two blocks. Then it closed the distance and kicked on its flashers.

  Thirty

  “WHAT’S THE TROUBLE, Officer?”

  “Step out of the car, please.”

  That old cop please, lined with steel and backed up by DPD blue filling both side windows and their thumbs on the checked butts of their revolvers.

  I stepped out of the car.

  “Hands on the roof, please. Lean forward.”

  I put my hands on the roof. The metal scorched my palms.

  “Spread your feet.”

  I spread my feet, knowing they would be kicked farther apart. Now I couldn’t abandon the position without falling.

  “I’m carrying a revolver. The permit’s in my wallet.”

  Hands thumped me from armpits to waist and jerked the .38 from its holster. After that there was no more please. My feet were kicked out from under me. I fell forward, splitting my lip against the doorpost. A hand snatched my collar, another hand twisted my right arm back and up, and I was hustled forward and flung across the blistering hood. In another second my wrists were cuffed behind me. Only then did one of the officers yank my wallet from my hip pocket and rummage through the contents until he came to the concealed weapons permit.

  “Looks legit.”

  “Put him in the car.”

  They were both black, and efficient with the nerveless efficiency of the veteran who knows his job well enough to have lost his passion for it. One of them forced my head down to clear the roof of the cruiser and pivoted me into the back seat while his partner leaned against the door and radioed the precinct house. I sat and sweated and bled onto my shirt and ignored the curious gaping of passing motorists. The unit was new, but the showroom smell had already begun to retreat before the onslaught of tobacco smoke, take-out barbecue sauce, and the bodily effluvients of the chronically busted.

  After a long time the pair climbed into the front seat and we began rolling.

  “What’s the beef?” I asked after a block.

  The driver, who was the older and bulkier of the two, with white temples and a thick roll of hard fat at the base of his skull, glanced up at the rearview mirror, then returned his attention to the windshield. He said nothing.

  I tried again. “When did the Supreme Court strike down Miranda?”

  The younger officer—who wasn’t young—rode with his window down and his elbow resting on the sill. “Just kind of shut up, okay?”

  I kind of shut up. We were heading down Woodward now at a cop clip, eeling through spaces in the traffic and pinking all the lights. The broad main stem’s infinity of rathole bars, overgrown lots, and empty storefronts gaping toothlessly whipped past like a Third World documentary on fast forward. Pedestrians stumped along carrying laundry in duffels and decaying baskets, indistinguishable from the homeless who punched in at twilight. We
passed the public library and across from it the Detroit Institute of Arts, where I had watched Pitfall and spoken with Gay Catalin, three days and a hundred years ago. A banner stretched across the front advertised the motion picture festival leading up to the premier of Austin Alt’s new movie tomorrow night at the Fox.

  A voice crackled over the two-way radio, too low for me to make out the words from behind the grid separating the front and back seats. The officer who had spoken to me unhooked the microphone and said something into it. The voice crackled in response. He returned the microphone to the dash and spoke to his partner, who nodded and swung the car into a tight right turn from the inside lane. The car behind us in the right lane stopped with a chirp.

  The officer on the passenger’s side propped his elbow on the back of the seat and looked back at me. “Your lucky day, perp. No lockup for you just yet. We got a little detour to make first.”

  “Where to?”

  “Detroit General.”

  “The hospital?”

  “If there’s another one I sure don’t know about it, and I was born on Adelaide right where the Grand Trunk crosses.”

  “How’d you wind up on that side of the badge?”

  “I guess I ain’t as lucky as you.”

  “Cut the gab,” his partner told him.

  Adelaide took his elbow off the seat and faced front.

  We parked outside the emergency room in a slot reserved for ambulances. Adelaide helped me out and took me by the arm. Inside his partner spoke to a black nurse who hadn’t seen anything new that day. She said something back and we caught the elevator to the second floor.

  The recessed-lit, linoleum-paved hallway was congested outside the door to Intensive Care: uniformed Detroit officers, hospital personnel in white, and Inspector John Alderdyce, a black hole in an unstructured silk jacket and foulard tie. I felt a tingle.

  “Officers Thompson and Olready, Inspector,” said the younger half of my escort.