Never Street

by Loren D. Estleman

  Now I had the weapon. I dropped the can, took the shotgun in both hands, and rammed the stock into the side of his head. He made another little noise and fell at my feet.

  Silence again, although my ears were still ringing from the blast.

  I stooped, felt for his collar, and dragged him the rest of the way inside. I pushed the door shut and propped his feet against it, which seemed appropriate since he’d used one of them to kick apart the latch. I groped for the switch on the wall of the stairwell, but before I found it the foyer flooded with light. Vesta stood on the landing with her hand on the upstairs switch. A number of other tenants huddled behind her in robes and pajamas, awakened by the racket.

  The shotgun was a twelve-gauge Winchester pump, less than twenty-eight inches long. The wood was still white where the stock had been sawed down to the pistol grip and fresh steel shavings clung to the end of the barrel.

  “Is it Robinette?” Vesta asked.

  I grasped the back of his head by the hair and lifted it to expose his face. It was a pale face, too pale by a race to belong to Orvis Robinette. I didn’t know him from the Four Freshmen, but I made a pretty good guess based on his preference in weapons.

  Vesta confirmed it. “It’s Ted,” she said. “My ex-husband, Ted Silvera. I didn’t know he was out.”

  The Shotgun Bandit was wearing a tan jacket that was at least a size too large for him. It might have been the one he had worn on his way to Jackson; prison food is a good diet to lose weight on. In the time it took me to lower his head to the floor I had a plan. I was taller by a couple of inches, and his hair was a shade lighter than mine, but it was nighttime and if I moved fast enough I might survive the plan.

  I laid the shotgun on the stairs. Silvera groaned and stirred, but the stinging in his eyes would keep him busy long after he regained all his senses. I wrestled the jacket off his shoulders and down his arms and put it on. It was almost a perfect fit, just a little short in the sleeves. I found the can of Mace against a baseboard and summoned Vesta down from the landing. When she was a couple of steps from the bottom I handed her the can.

  “He shouldn’t give you any trouble,” I said. “This stuff is designed to stop a tiger in mid-pounce. But if he does, give him another dose.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Play Trojan Horse.” I picked up the shotgun and racked a fresh shell into the chamber.

  I kicked Silvera’s feet out of the way and let myself out the door. On the concrete step I turned up the collar of the jacket, then started toward the street at a brisk trot. There was a bare chance the pair had arranged to meet on the other side of the block, in which case I was out of luck; but I doubted it. If everything went according to plan, Silvera would need the shortest, fastest route of escape, and that would be right out front.

  He must have circled the block and parked at the base of the hill, where he could see the driveway to the apartment house. As soon as I got to the end, carrying the shotgun with my shoulders hunched and my chin tucked inside the collar of the tan jacket, the Camaro’s motor sprang to life with a rippling growl and the green car rolled into the pool of light shed by the streetlamp near where I stood in the shadows.

  I leaped forward, pulled open the door on the passenger’s side, slid in, and thrust the muzzle of the shotgun under the chin of the man at the wheel.

  “Hands on the dash,” I told Robinette, reaching out with my free hand to turn off the ignition. “Let’s talk.”

  Thirty-seven

  “THROUGHOUT OUR HISTORY, the only authentic American art has emerged in times of repression,” the bald man was saying. “We’ve been conditioned to regard the sixties as a period of freedom from pernicious Puritanism, and what came of it? Designer jeans. Warhol’s immortal soup can. Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. Ryan O’Neal. Ryan O’Neal,” he repeated, to a chorus of mock-horrified snickers. “Conversely, that very Puritanism we’ve been conditioned to despise gave us Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, Poe, and Dickinson. When Hitler came to power in Germany, the great Mitteleuropean directors—Lang, Preminger, the Siodmaks, and my beloved Billy Wilder—fled to Hollywood, where they brought their expressionist techniques to bear in complying with Hays Office restrictions. Couldn’t show graphic violence onscreen? Say it with shadows. Couldn’t film biographies of actual criminals? Use allegory. No sex? Steam up the innuendo. Remember, it was the survivors of Vichy France who spotted these strains when Europe was inundated with verboten American movies after Liberation and codified them under the heading film noir. We had to be told by a people who had experienced the worst kind of repression that we’d invented something special.”

  “But isn’t that just the male view?” asked one of the bald man’s listeners, a thin woman in a man’s tuxedo with her hair mowed to within a quarter-inch of her scalp. “All the women in those films were objectified and exploited. How can we justify that as art?”

  Austin Alt measured her out a benign smile. He was a tall, pudgy sixtyish with a milk-chocolate California tan in aviator-style bifocals with gray-tinted lenses. His white fringe of hair waved back into an elaborate ducktail over his starched formal collar. He emptied his champagne glass and handed it to someone. “I never engage in gender politics. However. In nineteen forty-four, Lauren Bacall curled up on Humphrey Bogart’s lap in To Have and Have Not, stroked his cheek, slapped it, told him he needed a shave, and walked out of his room. Compare that single image against the number of times you’ve seen Kim Basinger raped and beaten and explain to me how far we’ve come from the objectification and exploitation of the forties.”

  The woman silenced for the time being, I drifted away from the edge of the large group that had gathered around the director and wandered through the grand lobby of the Fox Theater, sipping flat champagne and sunning myself in the light reflecting off the carved Chinese lions, golden grapes, plaster eagles, jeweled monkeys, fluted sconces, and brass-buttoned ushers that populated the restored building. The organ, a three-manual Moller, was merely a backup for the lordly four-manual Wurlitzer in the auditorium; faux pipes of molded plaster above the inlaid double doors leading into the theater proper represented the genuine articles, two stories high and built into the structure out of hollow pine without knots, because the bass chords were powerful enough to punch them out.

  The Fox was more than a motion-picture palace. Along with the newly refurbished State Theater in the next block of Woodward, it symbolized Detroit’s latest attempt to drag itself out of the ashes, one fueled by big money belonging to the city’s new rich. The hookers displaying their legware along the main thoroughfare and the dealers in their big hats seated in Lincolns parked at the curb were already having a tough time making themselves seen against the flashing lights on the towering marquees and had started the slow migration uptown. Where they stopped, if they stopped, depended on how long the new reform administration managed to remain relatively honest. The wheel had made this same turn before.

  There were at least a hundred people in the lobby, decked out in black tuxes and gold and red and blue and white sequined gowns with the occasional red ribbon to commemorate the plague currently in fashion; but it would take three times that number to make that echoing grotto seem crowded. They formed clusters under the cherubs and Greek masks, shifting position only to admit new arrivals and to select canapes and drinks from trays carried by the catering staff, got up in Highlander costumes complete with kilts in honor of Alt’s new film, a historical set in Scotland. I recognized the deputy mayor, the police chief, several city council members and their spouses, a couple of Pistons in Forty Extra Longs and size fifteen patent leathers, and a local news anchor, three sheets to the wind with a two hundred-dollar call girl on his arm. The conversations were conducted in rapid, high-pitched voices that died short of the great vaulted ceiling, which seemed appropriate.

  I spotted Asa Portman, waist-deep in conversation with a Ford Foundation matron in diamonds and chins, and drifted that way. The University o
f Michigan professor of psychology and I were the only males present not in evening dress; I had on my black double-breasted with a fresh shirt and tie and he wore gray tweed and a bow tie on a plaid shirt. He’d trimmed his beard for the occasion and done something to keep his unruly hair in check. When he saw me he excused himself and came over to shake my hand.

  “Have you met the Great Man?” he asked.

  “Not quite. I didn’t want to interrupt his lecture.”

  “Art and repression, right? He’s been giving it for years. All his interviews sound the same. Are you planning on watching the show?”

  “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “The reaction from the sneak previews isn’t encouraging. Malcolm the Third couldn’t ditch his Dodge City twang and I understand there’s a honey of a jet trail in the sky over the Battle for Northumbria.”

  I sipped from my glass, watching the Detroit Symphony conductor describing the size of his baton for a model from the auto show. “Did you get it?”

  “They were backed up at the film lab. I bribed a technician to move it up on the list. You owe me twenty dollars.”

  “When?” I got out my wallet and handed him a bill.

  “He said seven. It’s almost that now. I left a student behind with instructions to bring it here as soon as it’s ready. I gave him your description. He’ll come to the street door.”

  “He’d better not get caught in traffic. I’ve only got the auditorium from ten to eleven.”

  “I hope you thought this out,” he said. “I had to call in every marker I’ve got in the Detroit area film community to set this up. I’m counting on your having something interesting to say when you come to address my class.”

  “After tonight I should. Thanks, Professor.”

  “Portman will do. I’m not a castaway on Gilligan’s Island.”

  He left to join the group gathered around Austin Alt and I went off in search of a telephone. I waited for a Hollywood type with long hair and ruffles on his shirtfront to finish blowing long-distance kisses to his Yorkie, then dropped a coin and punched out a number I knew by heart.

  “Hello?”

  “This is Walker. We need to talk.”

  “I can’t imagine what about, but go ahead.”

  “Not over the telephone. I need to meet with you. Tonight.”

  “Can’t it wait till tomorrow? I’m planning to turn in early.”

  “This won’t keep. I know what happened to Catalin. I’ve got a witness.”

  Silence crackled. A platinum-haired aircraft tower in a black velvet dress whom I recognized as a hostess of one of the local TV talk shows clattered up, stopped when she saw me on the line, glanced down at a thin gold watch strapped to the underside of her wrist, and sighed.

  The voice came back on the other end. “Can you come here? I really am too tired to go out.”

  “I believe you. You’ve been busy. Come to the Fox Theater at ten. There’s security at the door but it’s been greased. Just tell them you’re here to see me.”

  I worked the lifter and offered the receiver to the lady in black, cradling it formally across the crook of my arm. She snatched it out of my hand, nearly strangling me with the cord, and shoved me aside with a padded shoulder.

  The conditioned air in the lobby had gone stale. I stepped outside to breathe some fresh smoke. There was still plenty of light, and would be until past ten o’clock, most of Michigan being on the extreme western edge of the Eastern time zone. It looked as if the storm front had broken at last. The sky was a painful shade of blue and the meteorologists couldn’t find a cloud between here and Toronto. No more blackouts.

  I was still standing there twenty minutes later when a gray Ford Bronco rolled up to the curb and the driver leaned over and cranked down the window on the passenger’s side. In the right circumstances the vehicle could have been mistaken for Brian Elwood’s Black Jeep Cherokee; for a fleeting moment I thought I was having a flashback to the sodden evening in front of my house where this whole thing had started. But the head was too bushy for Elwood, the body that went with it too chunky in a University of Michigan Wolverines T-shirt.

  “Are you Mr. Walker?”

  I nodded. “Got something for me?”

  He scooped something off the passenger’s seat and held it out. I took it. It was a flat metal can about eighteen inches in diameter, the kind reels of film come in. I tipped him ten dollars. He grinned his thanks and drove away.

  Before I went back in I glanced toward the green Camaro parked in the loading zone across Woodward Avenue. It had been there all the time, but I had avoided looking in that direction. Now I made eye contact with the man sitting behind the wheel, whose expression didn’t change. I nodded then and took the film inside.

  Thirty-eight

  THERE IS ABOUT THE Fox auditorium a heart-sickening enormity, dwarfing its best features and reducing the lone visitor to the status of a beetle plodding across a golden bowl. The trumpeting elephant’s head mounted above the proscenium measures twenty feet from eartip to flaring eartip, but in the cavernous proportions of the room it looks as if a man of ordinary size could span it with arms outstretched. The electrified stained-glass globe hanging from the Arab tent of the ceiling, fashioned after a Fabergé egg, appears no larger than a beachball, yet my entire living room could fit inside it, with space for a big-screen tv as well. It weighs two tons. The false arched balcony-boxes that march around the room’s upper level might have sheltered the fierce-looking oversize saints of a medieval cathedral, and a gathering of one thousand people in the orchestra and balcony would leave four fifths of the seats empty.

  It is a palace in every sense of that overused term, conceived and constructed on the massive, impossibly opulent scale accessible only to mad Russian monarchs and the demented monopolists who flourished during Hollywood’s Golden Age. William Fox was noted for his refusal to wear a watch under any circumstances and for keeping the blinds drawn over his office windows day and night to make time stand still. It didn’t work; the stock market crashed anyway and his creditors hounded him out of the industry before he had a chance to collect a nickel from his showpiece theaters in Detroit, Brooklyn, St. Louis, Atlanta, and San Francisco. He’d missed his best opportunity for greatness by two hundred years and a continent. Catherine the Great would have applauded his lunatic vision and offered him a place in her harem.

  Onstage, the movie screen hides behind curtains bearing a screen-printed Japanese landscape, with swags of wine-colored drapery above and enough space between the painted acacias and the footlights to park a symphony orchestra—a frequent event whenever the Stokowski of the season comes through town. From my vantage point, I could see the cleaning crew bagging up litter from the aisles and between the rows of seats; the Alt premiere had finished ten minutes ago. I’d caught the tail end of the historical epic, standing just far enough back to avoid getting any blood spattered on my tie. My ears were still throbbing from the French horns and bagpipes. Movie sound has come a long way since Jolson, but I doubted it could demolish even a small city.

  In a little while the last of the cleaning crew left, carrying his broom and long-handled dustpan. Someone switched off the overhead lights. Only the sapphire bulbs glimmering in the sconces on the walls remained to define the room’s boundaries. The hum of voices coming from the direction of the grand lobby subsided to a buzz, then broke off into tinkling notes, like a faucet dripping itself dry. Silence fell with the sudden reverberating boom of a great door slamming. The ghost of Valentino walked once again.

  I fought the urge to fidget. The huge room was acoustically perfect, designed years before the advent of electronic amplification by an architect who understood the configuration of the human ear as well as any audiologist; the smallest clearing of a throat could be heard two hundred feet away.

  I waited years.

  I waited as much as ten minutes.

  At the end of that time, one of the inlaid double doors at the end of the center a
isle tipped open and a lone figure stepped in from the lobby. A few yards in, the newcomer stopped, waiting for a pair of wary eyes to accustom themselves to the dimness of the room.

  “Hello?”

  The greeting sounded as close as if it were spoken into my ear.

  A light slammed on in the projection booth above the balcony. A white beam shot through the darkness and exploded onstage.

  Instinctively the new arrival turned to look up at the booth. But human nature is as strong as it is predictable. The head came back down and swiveled around to stare at the screen.

  And the screen was visible now, white as righteous wrath and spreading like daylight as the printed curtains glided noiselessly apart.

  White, that is, except for the figure standing at the bottom wearing a black double-breasted suit, with his hands in his pockets.

  “Mr. Walker?”

  But Mr. Walker said nothing. Numerals and letters appeared behind him, unsteady, three frames to the shot and then whiskaway for the next, the smallest five times the size of the man standing in front of them:

  10

  NINE

  8

  7

  SIX

  5

  4

  3

  2

  And then white no more, but black and white, a man’s handsome troubled middle-aging face filling the screen, big as a barn door. Dick Powell, alone in the half-light of his suburban living room, waiting for the jealous boyfriend of his former mistress to break in; waiting for him with his old service automatic in hand while his wife and young son lie asleep upstairs, oblivious to the drama about to take place one floor below.

  The last reel of Pitfall.

  Two things were different from the last time I’d watched the feature. Then there had been tense background music, composed to work the audience up to an emotional high pitch just before the suddenness, the awful unredemption of the shot. This version, however, was silent; the soundtrack was missing. The other difference, obvious in the tight shot of Powell’s face, was the blemish on the point of his chin. It might have been a fly, attracted by the bright silvery light to the surface of the screen. Instead it was a man, disappointingly life-size, and now nothing more than an annoying irregular surface for the projected image to wrap itself around like wallpaper on top of an overlooked nail. Just a man. Not Humphrey Bogart, eighteen feet high and thirty-six feet wide. Not John Garfield or Robert Mitchum or Richard Widmark or even Elisha Cook, Jr. The guy who had to find his keys when the lights came up and go home.