“I wish I could say I feel sorry for him. I’m not that good a Christian.”
“I’m not either, but I do. I felt the same way for the scabs who tried to go pro during the baseball strike.”
“The police still think Neil killed Leo.”
“Impossible.”
“Why?” she asked. “I mean, I know he didn’t do it, because I know Neil, and he’d never hurt anybody, no matter what a psychiatrist might say about delusionary behavior. I’m an actress and I understand consistency of character. But you’ve never met Neil. What makes you so sure he didn’t kill Leo or Brian Elwood, when the police are so sure he did?”
“Because Neil’s dead. He’s been dead since before I started looking for him, and probably since the day he vanished.”
Reel Four
Smash Cut
Thirty-five
THE WAITRESS CAME OVER to ask if everything was all right. Vesta asked for another drink. I stood pat. The help left. Art Tatum’s chord progressions seemed to have taken a sinister turn.
“Neil’s dead?”
I said, “It’s the only answer that plays. Why would Webb frame him for the Elwood murder if he were alive and in condition to talk when he was arrested? Why would he drive Catalin’s car to your place except to make whoever was watching think he was still alive, while giving him a good reason to walk away from his respectable life; one that this particular watcher would buy? And how did he get the car, if Catalin were alive to refuse it to him?”
“But how could Leo know Robinette was watching me? He couldn’t have known he existed.”
“He didn’t. That was a fluke. Phil Musuraca was the one who was supposed to be watching. He was the one who was supposed to testify he saw Catalin’s car drive up to your place and someone who might have been Catalin going in the night he disappeared. Webb made sure to wear a floppy hat to make him harder to place in the dark. He expected Musuraca to be there, because he faxed him two words he knew would put him back on your case: VESTA KNOWS.
“He and Neil went back all the way to college,” I said. “He’d have heard all about his partner’s former peccadillo from the source. Just to be sure that whoever investigated Catalin’s disappearance couldn’t miss Fat Phil’s story, Webb dialed Musuraca’s number on the telephone in Catalin’s office so it would show up on the redial. All he had to do was hang up when someone answered: The fact that the number was called would be in the electronic memory.”
“But Musuraca wasn’t there. At least I don’t think he was. I didn’t notice him following me until the next day.”
“That’s because he didn’t get the fax until the next day. He was away working a divorce case the day it came. But Webb didn’t know that. As it happened, things worked out his way, but then he had to kill you to keep you from swearing under oath that it was Webb and not his vanished partner who went to see you. That was already in the plan.”
I pushed my plate away. “Webb called Gay Catalin, imitating Neil’s voice, and arranged to meet her at the old Michigan Theater Friday night. By now he was looking for Catalin, and he expected me to accompany her and be out of the way while he killed Elwood. I didn’t, because I didn’t know about the call, but Webb caught another break because I was busy elsewhere. He went to the Michigan just long enough to leave a ticket on Gay’s windshield admitting her to the Monday night opening of the film festival at the DIA. Then he left to take care of Elwood on Ferry Park. Monday night the DIA appointment tied both of us up while he went to see you.
“That was where his string of luck ended. You weren’t in. Orvis Robinette was.”
“Would you folks like dessert?”
Vesta jumped as our waitress set her drink in front of her. She shook her head. I said, “Just the check, please.”
“I’m still not understanding why Leo killed Brian,” Vesta said when we were alone again. “It was Neil he tried to blackmail.”
“It all seemed pretty elaborate just to snuff someone for stealing equipment from Gilda Productions,” I said. “I didn’t put it all together until I saw who was on the tape that was sent to Dr. Naheen. That was when I put a name to the description Blint gave me at Spee-D-A Couriers. The man who arranged to accept the package containing the fifty thousand was too young to be Miles Leander, the man who removed the tapes from Balfour House. Put dark glasses on Brian, cover his New Wave haircut with a baseball cap, and you get something that sounds a lot like Mr. Bell. B. Elwood. Get it?”
“I’m beginning to,” she said. “It was Neil on the videotape, wasn’t it? From when he was there last year.”
“Leander was telling the truth when he said he sent the tapes to the people who should have them. He meant the patients whose sessions the good doctor had recorded so he could shake them down for what was on them. Most of them kept silent when they received the tapes; if they went to the law they risked exposing their deepest secrets to a legal system with more leaks in it than a wicker bucket. Only one tape got a response. That was the one Leander sent to Neil Catalin.
“Only Catalin didn’t get it. Either Leander sent it to him at Gilda and Webb intercepted it, or Elwood did when it came to the house he shared with his sister and brother-in-law. I think Webb saw it first. It didn’t contain the kind of dynamite he could use against his partner even if his partner were well enough off to bother blackmailing, but the very fact that the tape existed gave him leverage against Naheen, a member of a respectable profession and owner of his own psychiatric clinic on Mackinac Island, where there is no such thing as a low-rent district.
“Webb needed a go-between to arrange the ransom drop and to pick it up,” I went on. “He used Brian, who he knew to be a sleaze and not too bright. He probably didn’t even cut him in, just gave him the key to the Southfield studio and told him to help himself to as much equipment as he could fence. Somehow, probably during that last meeting with his partner, Catalin found out what was going on and threatened to blow the whistle. Webb followed him away from the office, killed him, disposed of the corpse, and stashed Catalin’s car so he could use it later to make people think he was still alive and involved once again with you. Neil’s extramarital affair and the nervous breakdown he suffered afterward were the only glitches in his long record of social respectability; it would make sense that you were somehow connected to his disappearance.
“Maybe Brian suspected his brother-in-law had been murdered. Maybe he was even part of it and decided he was entitled to more than he was getting. Remember, he tried to blackmail you and Neil once. Having already committed his first murder, and penciled in yours to follow, Webb wouldn’t waste much sleep wondering what to do about young Elwood. Probably he arranged to pay him off at the house on Ferry Park where Brian was planning to exchange the studio equipment for cash. What better place to kill him and make it look like he fell out with his buyer?
“Only Webb got cute, and instead of leaving it at that he planted Catalin’s video rental card at the scene to pin Elwood’s murder on his brother-in-law. Those cards are always getting left around; he could have found it in Catalin’s desk. With Neil implicated in one homicide, the cops would be more likely to accept him as the killer. Of course Webb would have been sure to get the Spee-D-A claim ticket from Brian so he could pick up the fifty thousand.”
The waitress brought the check. I left the amount together with a fifteen-percent tip and we left. It was a warm night. The stars dangled low in a cloudless sky.
“Fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money,” Vesta said. “It doesn’t seem enough to kill three people for.”
“The blackmail scheme just started things moving. There was more involved. I don’t have enough bricks yet to build a case, but this has all the earmarks of something that was in motion long before anyone ever heard of Miles Leander. A lot of material things change hands when the senior partner in a going business drops out.”
“I just don’t see Leo hatching a murder. Embezzlement, yes. That doesn’t take as much nerve.”
> “I suspected him the day I met him. He admitted he liked nice things, and he was a little too eager to explain away Neil’s absence as some kind of lark.
“So far his investment was low, with a high yield,” I went on. “The stolen equipment would be returned, or if not, the company’s theft insurance policy would reimburse him for the full amount. That’s why he arranged for Elwood to spirit the stuff away instead of just paying him off. Webb couldn’t lose.”
“But he did. He lost everything, including his life.”
“Only by accident. He didn’t know you were working late that night, and he couldn’t know Robinette would pick that night to toss your place looking for the ninety-two thousand Ted Silvera stole during the shotgun robberies.” I unlocked the door on the passenger’s side of the Cutlass and opened it.
She hesitated. Her pupils were huge and glossy in the dim light of the parking lot. “But he did know. Or he should have. I was expecting him that night, but I found out when I got to work that I had to stay for the late shift. I left a message on the answering machine at his house.”
“Maybe he didn’t get it. If not, it would still be on the machine. The cops would consider it evidence Catalin killed Webb out of jealousy. Or maybe he got it and decided to let himself in and wait for you.”
She sat down. “You know what’s wrong with your theory? Too many ‘maybes’ and ‘probablys.’ It wouldn’t hold up in a court of law.”
“It doesn’t have to. The defendant has already been tried and sentenced and executed. You can’t cop a plea with a gun in your face.” I shut the door and walked around to the driver’s side, feeling my brow furrowing. Something stank, and it wasn’t coming from the Dumpster behind the restaurant.
We stopped at a nightspot in Birmingham, an L-shaped place with a converted Wurlitzer standing in for the band that appeared there weekends, had drinks, and used the dance floor. She clung to me firmly, smelling of pale blossoms under a full moon.
“You’re a good dancer,” she said.
“My boxing coach made us take lessons. I notice you don’t trip over your feet.”
“My mother mortgaged the house to get me the best voice and ballet teachers she could find. I danced the Dying Swan at a recital while other girls my age were still learning to use the potty.”
“Did you manage to work in a childhood?”
“Uh-uh. When you’re brought up to think of Let’s Pretend as a business, you don’t play with dolls and little teacups on your own time. I thought the Kansas parts of The Wizard of Oz were romantic.”
We drove to her apartment house. With her hand on the door handle on her side she said, “I’d invite you up for coffee, but I’m out. Can I offer you anything else?”
“Yes.”
Up in her living room she dealt us each a glass of Scotch from a bottle equipped with a pourer. She saw me looking at the broken windshield hanging over the false fireplace. “My baloney period. I took out a loan and hired a decorator to impress all the Hollywood producers I was going to bring back here when they came through town shooting chase scenes. God, he was a bitch.” She drank.
“Did the producers like it?”
“I never met one. Only the second unit ever comes to Detroit: pimple-faced assistant directors and stuntmen in trusses. Meanwhile I’m still paying off the loan.”
“The producers don’t know what they missed.”
“How would you know? You’ve never seen me act.”
“I think I have.”
She watched me for a moment. Then she set her glass on the fireplace mantel and moved in close. “Am I acting now?” She melted into me, closing her eyes.
I kissed her. Her lips were soft and tasted of strawberries and her teeth were sharp. When we came apart I said, “I don’t think so. But you might be better than I think.”
“When will you know?”
“These things take time.”
She smiled. We kissed again.
The first time was hot and frenzied, without finesse; we were both greedy and took more than our share. Her nails were claws, her body lithe and sinuous, blue-white in the moonlight coming through the bedroom window. The second time was slower, more controlled. We gave more, made discoveries, and commented on them in whispers punctuated with kisses. Afterward I lay on my back with her head on my chest, listening to her even breathing and thinking what a difference a wrecking bar made.
Right about then a car turned the corner at the end of the block, slowed to an idle as it passed the building, then accelerated to take the hill, and I stopped thinking. I knew the sound of those twin pipes.
Thirty-six
“AGAIN?” VESTA RAISED her head from my chest and smiled without opening her eyes. “You are a good guy.”
“Later. Do you own a gun?”
They were open now. “Why?”
“I’m probably wrong. There have to be a thousand juiced-up wagons in this area that sound just like Robinette’s Camaro. Just in case I’m right, tell me where you keep the gun so I can find it without turning on any lights.”
“I don’t have one. Where’s yours?”
“I’ve got too high an opinion of my animal magnetism to bring one along on a date. What have you got that works like a weapon?”
“A can of Mace. It’s in the handbag I carry to work. I’ll get it. You’ll never find it. That good a detective you’re not. No man is.” She slid out of bed into a silk robe and opened her closet.
I got dressed and went over to the window, sinking down on one knee to peer around the half-drawn shade. The moon threw a trapezoidal patch of light onto the floor of the bedroom where I’d found Leo Webb’s body and spilled shadows of liquid velvet into the parking lot where my Cutlass nestled beside Vesta’s little Triumph. Both cars looked black. Nothing was moving there.
“Here it is.” She started toward me.
“Stay there.”
She stopped while I drew the shade down the rest of the way. When the room was nearly pitch black I stood and went over to her. The can, short and squat like a container of shaving cream, felt cold when I closed my hand around it.
“Make sure you know which way it’s pointing before you use it,” she said. “This stuff can blind you permanently.”
I found the hole with my finger, pointed it at the floor, and tested the sprayer. It worked.
“Stay here and keep an eye on the parking lot,” I said. “If you see anything moving, let me know. Leave the lights off.”
“Where will you be?”
“Bottom of the stairs.”
She put a hand on my chest. “Don’t get killed, okay? One more murder and I lose my lease.”
I grinned, shook the can, and left her.
There was almost no light at all in the stairwell. I waited on the landing for my eyes to adjust to what there was, then went down, feeling each step with the ball of my right foot before trusting my weight to it. The air was stale and smelled of Victory Cabbage and Meatless Tuesdays and nouvelle cuisine and pensioner cat food, all the cooking fads of seven decades rolled into one depressing meal. Every tweak and groan of a geriatric building settling into the earth sounded as loud as a gunshot. I had spent entirely too much of my life on this staircase thinking of death.
At the bottom I groped for the doorknob, cool to the touch, and determined with the ball of my thumb that it was locked. I unlocked it. Then I locked it again. I didn’t want whoever came to the door to suspect that anything waited for him inside but a sleeping building; also I needed some kind of warning. My reflexes weren’t what they were twenty years ago in another hemisphere, or for that matter twenty minutes ago in another room. I positioned myself to the left of the door on the opposite side from the knob and wanted a cigarette but didn’t light one. More important than not giving myself away with smoke, I needed the heightened nervous system that came with the craving for nicotine. I wondered what the nonsmoking detectives did to sharpen the edge.
I forced my mind blank, which in my case w
as like clearing space in a dusty storeroom. Mostly I tried not to think that of the three men I knew of who had been with Vesta, two were dead and one was in jail.
“Amos!”
Vesta’s whisper from the top of the stairs went up my back like a jet of ice water. I hadn’t heard her open the door of her apartment. It took me a minute to convince myself she hadn’t been reading my thoughts.
“How many?” I spoke in a murmur. Whispers carry too far.
“Just one. I think he’s got a gun. A short rifle or something.”
“Get back inside.”
This time I heard the door draw shut.
And silence settled inside the little foyer like a fall of fresh snow.
A foot fell outside, or maybe not. I tensed up, then willed my body to relax. The can of Mace felt slippery. I parked it under my left arm, rubbed my palm down and up my thigh, wiped the can on the front of my shirt, and returned it to my right hand. I didn’t make any more noise in the still night air than a runaway dump truck.
The doorknob turned, grating ever so slightly in its socket, and stopped.
I took in my breath and held it. Then I changed my mind about the Mace. I transferred the can to my left hand and flexed the fingers of my right.
Something hard struck the door in the area of the knob. The molding around the inside of the frame cracked. A pause, and then the something struck again: the heel of a man’s shoe. Wood splintered, the door came free and flew at my face, and I threw up my left forearm to block it. Something long that gleamed in the moonlight spilling in from outside poked through the opening. I grasped it in my right hand and wrenched it toward the floor, at the same time leaning into the door with all my weight. A molecule-shattering roar filled the little space, a gush of blue-and-orange flame destroyed my night vision. The man on the other side of the door had reflexes as quick as mine and shoved back. I took a step backward to avoid the collision, but kept my grip on the fat barrel of the shotgun and pulled, jerking him across the threshold and off his feet. He cursed and tried to catch himself, but I pivoted on the ball of my right foot and thrust the Mace into his face and sprayed. He made a gaspy whimper and let go of the shotgun to claw at his face with both hands.
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