Sugartown

by Loren D. Estleman

  “It almost never is.”

  She had the receiver in her hand and was dialing another number from her list. I left her to that and the bitterness that was like another person in the room.

  The dandelion was still on the lawn when I came out on the stairs but there was no sign of the gardener. He was probably on the telephone to the National Guard. Tough little weeds, dandelions. They ought to be licensed and bonded. They could tell a sick old lady that the grandson she’d never met had been dead as long as she’d been looking for him and never blink a leaf. I got into my crate and pried it out of the little parking lot and drove back to the office at the approximate speed of a funeral procession.

  The telephone was ringing when I let myself in. I took off my hat and pegged it and sat down behind the desk and it was still ringing. I picked up the receiver. “Walker.”

  “This is A. Walker Investigations?”

  It was a woman’s voice, clipped and businesslike, ageless and almost sexless. You hear a lot of voices like it these days. I said it was.

  “I represent a party who might be interested in engaging your services. Would you be free to discuss it at the Westin Hotel this afternoon?”

  I said, “I’m just wrapping something up. Could we make it this evening or tomorrow morning?’

  “Mr. Alanov has a speaking engagement this evening. One moment.” A hand went over the mouthpiece on her end. Presently: “Mr. Walker? He will see you in his suite tomorrow morning at eleven-thirty.”

  She gave me the number of the suite. I wrote it down. “This wouldn’t by any chance be Fedor Alanov, the Russian novelist?”

  “Mr. Alanov is Russian and a novelist. To say that he writes Russian novels could be misleading.”

  It sounded like banter, but the tone of the voice hadn’t changed. I wondered what it would take to change it and if it would ever be worthwhile. Aloud I said, “Could you give me a hint of what I’m seeing Mr. Alanov about?”

  “Not over the telephone. We’ll pay your expenses to and from the hotel, with an added inducement regardless of the outcome of the interview.”

  “An inducement of say how much?”

  “I believe your consultation fee is two hundred fifty dollars.”

  I confirmed the time and suite number and got off the line before her mind changed.

  I thought about it. I hadn’t read Alanov; I could never sort out all the viches in books from that part of the world. But I’d heard about him plenty at the time he left Russia to stay ahead of the gray suits that didn’t care for the liberal tone of his writing. Someone had told him the press was free here. I played with it a little, then put it away for later. For the next hour anyway I was still on salary to Martha Evancek.

  A female switchboard operator answered at the number Long-distance Information gave me for Buckeye Industries and told me to hang on when I asked to speak to Fred Florentine. Florentine was the young man who according to Barbara Norton had been swimming with Michael Evancek the day he drowned. He wouldn’t still be working there.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello,” I echoed. “I’m trying to get hold of Fred Florentine.”

  “You can stop trying.”

  “You’re Florentine?”

  “Years now. Who are you?”

  He sounded young and confident, a lad with his own office. I told him who I was and what I was after and what Barbara Norton had told me. It took longer to tell than it did to know.

  He blew air. “Mike. God, I haven’t thought about him in months. That was a bad day. I hope it’s the worst I’ll ever see. One second I was standing there talking to Mike and enjoying the water and the next I didn’t know which direction the surface was. I thought a shark had me. First thing I did when they plucked me out of the water and pumped out my lungs was check to see if everything was still there. And Mike — God, it was like he was never here, he was gone just that fast.”

  “I guess you two were pretty close.”

  “He was my goombah. I was a long time getting over it. Maybe I’m not over it yet. Maybe you never are. Who’d you say you were working for?”

  “I didn’t. But it’s Mike’s grandmother, Martha Evancek.”

  “Really? I never knew he had one. He never mentioned her.”

  “They didn’t know each other. What did he do at Buckeye?”

  “Worked in the catalogue department, same as me. ‘Lightweight, durable, one-twentieth-inch cardboard, ideal for storage and shipping.’ We wrote that. It was our most successful collaboration.”

  “What kind of a guy was he?”

  “The best. If you got run over by a bus he was there and if you just needed five bucks till payday he was there too, making you think you were doing him a favor to take it. Guys like him are so rare I guess God figured he shouldn’t stick around any one place too long.”

  “Getting dead does a lot for your social standing,” I said.

  “I’m not just saying these things because he’s dead. Mike was the best friend I’ll ever have.”

  “He must have had something wrong with him.”

  “I don’t know what it would be, unless he was too quiet. You know, I never even thought about that till he was gone. I tried to remember things he’d said, the way you do, and couldn’t think of a one. Oh, he talked, but it was almost always in answer to something you said. Maybe that’s why I liked him. He was a good listener. He made you feel as if everything you had to say was gold. I guess it’s not so strange I didn’t know about the grandmother, close as we were. He never talked about himself.”

  “Did he ever mention the shooting?”

  “What shooting?”

  “Something he had no control over,” I said quickly. “Listen, I’d like to give your name and telephone number to the old lady. She might want to talk to you about Michael.”

  “Sure. I’d like that. Just having talked to you about him makes me feel better.”

  I wrote down his home number and we stopped talking to each other. I got Information again, which put me in touch with someone who could give me the number of the authorities in Cabo San Lucas, Baja, Mexico. The telephone rang fifteen times there before a Sergeant Cristobal answered. The line was thick with static and his voice was even thicker with Spanish accent and something else, but I finally got through to him what I was after. His English improved quite a bit after I mentioned fifty dollars American. He asked if I was the man who had come to ask about the drowning before.

  “What man?” I asked. “When?”

  “A man. Months ago. I will send you a copy of the full report in a few days.” Just before hanging up he bellowed at someone named Elena. I could almost smell the tequila on the sergeant’s breath.

  I tried Barbara Norton’s number. Busy. Then I spent some more money and called Fred Florentine again. I asked him if he knew anything about anyone going down to investigate the accident.

  “No. But that’s not unusual, is it? Insurance companies don’t get to be big trusting their clients.”

  “I’ve worked for enough of them to know that. Thanks.”

  I poured myself some Scotch, nodded to the looker on the advertising calendar, and drank it off. Then I poured some more and didn’t toast anyone. I filed the bottle again and got my hat. It was heavy. They had gotten the material from a quarry and lined it with lead.

  The sun was somewhere west of Southfield and shadows were clotting on the lawns of St. Clair Shores when Karen McBride met me at the top of the steps in Martha Evancek’s house. She had her nurse’s uniform on now and looked crisp and white enough to make me feel wilted and sallow. I had a head start on it. Her smile of welcome saw my face and dangled.

  11

  “HOW IRONIC. to survive murder-suicide and grow up to drown in water waist-deep.”

  “If it’s wet you can drown in it. I could tell you stories.”

  But I didn’t. Instead I closed my mouth and knocked almost half of my cigarette into a glass ashtray on the arm of the sofa. I hadn’t want
ed it, my throat already felt like a chimney in need of sweeping, but it was something to do with my hands. For some reason I had told her the whole thing. I had started with what she already knew, the old lady hobbling into the office, and gone straight through what I had scraped up from Howard Mayk and the visit to the old Evancek house and everything else, finishing with Fred Florentine in Dayton. Stash Leposava fascinated her most of all. She had asked me a dozen questions about the old Cossack and sat on the edge of the upholstered straightback chair with her hands between her white linen-covered knees and her face thrust forward to hear the answers. When it got too dark to see each other she got up and snapped on a lamp and sat back down for the rest of it. Soft shadows brushed her cheeks and the hollow under her full lower lip and made her look like a little girl playing dress-up in front of an attic mirror.

  “Do you want a drink?” she asked.

  “I had one. Two. They didn’t help.”

  She looked down at her hands. “I’ll tell Martha. She’s stronger than you’d think. She’ll handle it.”

  I killed my stub, shaking my head. “That’s why I took the money. It isn’t like it hasn’t bought bad news before. I’m an old hand. If my car had a mast I’d keep black sails in the trunk and run them up at times like this like Ulysses.”

  “I thought it was Jason.”

  I looked at her. She shrugged an apology. “I know her better,” she said. “You can give her the details later.”

  I got out the envelope and held it out.

  “What’s that?” She didn’t take it.

  “The second half of her five hundred, less expenses. I tied it up in one day. The time I spent checking out her story last night doesn’t count. It would have if she’d lied. I’ll type up a full report and bring it around in a few days.”

  She took the envelope. “She’ll say you earned it anyway.”

  “Maybe at first. The more she stewed on it the less she’d think so. In the end I’d be out a reference. I’m not nearly as noble as I look. I have to work in this town.”

  She got up and put the envelope in the drawer of a sidepiece with a lace shawl on top and pushed the drawer shut. Her skirt rustled that way you can hear clear down a hospital corridor. She turned around and looked at me.

  “Does that brunch offer hold for dinner?”

  I said, “I thought you worked tonight.”

  “It’s the middle of the week. I can get someone to cover.”

  “Is it my good looks or are you sorry for me?”

  Her face took on a clinical cast, studying mine. “You’d look okay, if you let your hair grow over your ears and didn’t shave your upper lip so close. But I’d have to say in this case it’s pity.”

  “Good enough. Let’s go.” I rose.

  She smiled the monkey smile. “Let me make a call and climb out of these whites.”

  One good thing about the slow retreat of jazz before soul’s groaning, sliding advance in Detroit — the only good thing about it — is you can get into a downtown jazz club in the middle of the week. We had a fifteen-minute wait at the bar of a place on Gratiot, then a hostess in a ruffled blue blouse and a floor-length skirt with peonies on it escorted us to a table across a murky hangar from the stage, where a fat black man in an orange-and-green plaid sportcoat leaned on a saxophone case smoking behind mirrored glasses. We ordered, and when our waitress withdrew with the hem of her skirt slurring the floor we sipped at the drinks we’d brought over with us.

  “You’re not satisfied,” Karen said.

  “I haven’t tasted the prime rib.”

  “No, I mean about Michael. You don’t think he died the way they say?”

  “He probably did. It’s the shooting that bothers me. I believe old Stash.”

  She laced her fingers under her chin. She wore no rings, or jewelry of any kind. She had on a black shift of some sort with no sleeves and a scoop neck that quit where it started to get interesting. Her hair was pinned up in back. Candlelight from the thick orange cut glass on the table winked in the glossy waves. She watched me and said nothing.

  “A gang of witnesses is always suspect,” I said. “They get together and start comparing notes and there’s always one or two that saw something better than all the rest, and then the others get to thinking that what they have isn’t so interesting after all, and by the time the cops show up they’ve all seen the same thing. But the old man didn’t hang around with the rest of the neighbors. He saw what he saw and it didn’t matter to him that none of the others saw it. He just reported it and didn’t try to glitz it up with stuff he thought the cops would like to hear.”

  “But he’s senile.”

  “Now, maybe. Not then. Maybe not now either. You can be young and stubborn and they call it muleheadedness. When you’re old and stubborn they say you’ve got space to rent upstairs and stick you in a home. I think the old man saw Michael get in before the shooting. Remember that none of the other neighbors saw the boy come home at any time. They would have had no special reason to be looking out their windows until the shotgun blasts drew their attention. The cops just wrote down what Michael said days after the fact. Chances are he was still in shock. You can be for a long time and not show it.”

  “Barbara Norton would know that better than anyone,” she said.

  “Probably. But she’s as soft as an abutment and I don’t have the six months it would take to wear her down.”

  A thought came into her face. She raised her chin from her hands. “You don’t think Michael —”

  “No,” I said. “Though it wouldn’t be all that unthinkable. There’s nothing you can dream up that someone hasn’t done, and recently. But the official record’s probably right so far as it goes. Say what you like about them, most cops are reasonably honest and usually right. But thorough they can’t always be, considering their tight budgets and workload. I think Michael saw something that would nail down some of the loosest ends. But he’s fish food in the Pacific and it doesn’t much matter any more.”

  The waitress came with our dinner and we didn’t talk again until she’d emptied her tray and gone. Then Karen said, “I’ve never known a private eye before. I thought they were mostly flat-nosed thugs who spend their evenings bouncing people off the walls of alleys. You’re kind of nice.”

  “I’ve bounced my share. Tonight you’re looking at my St. Clair Shores face.”

  “What’s that?” She picked up her fork.

  “Restrained and polite. It’s like my Grosse Pointe face, only there I put a little weasel in it. You know, that smooth panting look. Here it’s regular John, get-a-load-of-those-gams. I save the flat nose for Cass and Mt. Elliott.”

  “ ‘Gams’?” Her eyes crinkled.

  “Sorry. When I’m tired I talk dirty.”

  “How about Iroquois Heights?”

  “Up in Iroquois Heights I just try to get in and out with any face at all. There they push them in just for something to do, like a mean kid de-winging flies when he ought to be looking up the Congress of Worms.”

  “I was born in the Heights,” she said.

  “A lot of nice people were. It’s the cops and their pet prosecutor you don’t show your back to if you’re fond of your head.”

  The entire band, a five-man combo, had gathered on the stage and climbed into “Ebb Tide” for horns, bass, piano, and drums. She glanced that way, then nibbled at her gin and tonic. “That wasn’t your St. Clair Shores face this morning.”

  Grinning, I pushed aside my empty plate and picked up my drink. I’d demolished a prime rib and all the options and hadn’t tasted a bite. “That was your fault. You went stiff old maid on me, which always brings out my thirteen-hundred face. That’s the one I show the cops at thirteen-hundred Beaubien, police headquarters. It generally gets me a lift out the back door and my hat tumbling along afterwards.”

  “I was on the defensive this morning,” she said. “I didn’t know you. I’m still a long way from knowing you. What makes a halfway intelligent gu
y with a flashy line of gab and a nice face — this one, anyway — peek at people’s underwear for his living?”

  “What makes a girl who should be a model empty bedpans for hers?”

  “I get to see a lot of naked men. But I asked you first.”

  “A friend died and left me the business. I don’t get to see nearly as many naked women as I’d like.”

  “No, really.”

  I sat back and toyed with a cigarette. “I ask myself that eight times a week. Twice on Mondays when I’m still hung over from Saturday’s sapping. A bright young fellow like me should be in high tech, except my distrust of computers borders on the pathological. I could go out West and become a cowboy. But the only time I was ever on a horse I got tossed and had the sense not to remount. You don’t get back on a hot stove. I could run for mayor only I’m not black enough or slippery enough. Law —”

  “What about police work?”

  “Next question.”

  She ran the edge of her fork along the rim of her plate. “You’re a riddle, all right,” she said. “I’m just debating with myself whether it’s worth the trouble to solve.”

  I let that one drift. The waitress came back to ask if everything was all right. I ordered a bottle of something with a cork in it and she went away. The band was playing “Stars Fell on Alabama” — slow, with the trumpet up front, the way Red Nichols used to. It was a better band than the place deserved. A few couples were prowling the floor. We watched and listened.

  “Swaying to music like primitives in a National Geographic special,” murmured Karen. “Kind of dumb when you think about it.”

  “Dumb.” I got up and held out a hand. She took it.

  Our feet made no noise at all on the layers of varnish on the dance floor. She was wiry under a padding of deceptively soft flesh. Her head came to my collarbone. “It dances, too,” she marveled. “My father taught me, back when everyone I knew was shaking his arms and snapping his head like someone trying to swim backwards up a waterfall. Where’d you learn?”

  “The hookers in Saigon only did one other thing.”