Sugartown

by Loren D. Estleman

  The place had a half-finished look inside, as if someone had started to clear it out for some other business and then given up and walked away from it, leaving exposed wires and junk stacked in corners and trestle tables holding up dusty glass insulators and dented silver sets and tin cigar boxes and square brown bottles of Dr. So-and-So’s Horse Linament and Bunion Cure with the contents a thick hard layer of varnish in the bottoms. Someone had put a lot of time and effort into that half-finished look. You can call a ten-year-old enema tube a hookah and charge three times as much for it if the place has ratholes in the corners. One of the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling spat and flickered like a moth caught in a screen door.

  The counter was another trestle table running along the right wall with a group of Philco radio shells and a fairly modern cash register standing on it and a forty-year-old black man sitting on a stool behind it, bald to his crown with scimitar-shaped sideburns and a moustache and whiskers that looked like a coal-smear around his mouth. The sleeves of his stained sweatshirt were cut off to show the lumpy muscles in his upper arms. He had a dragon tattoo on his left bicep that looked as if it had been done by a drunk with a rusty razor. Another black, younger, with an impressive natural and a long loose look under a ragged denim jacket over a black T-shirt and jeans, slouched in a sprung overstuffed chair at the end of the counter with one leg hooked over the grimy arm, watching me through the smoke of a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He looked half asleep.

  I figured he was the one to watch.

  They had been talking about bikes when I came in, breaking off when I walked straight up to the counter without pausing to browse. The one with the tattoo and smear of beard looked at me the way some animals in the zoo look at the people who come to their cage, the ones the keepers are told to keep an eye on when the shift changes. I speared my lips with a weed and let my eyes wander over the place while I got a match out of its folder. The three of us were alone.

  “You fellows are a ways north of Grand, aren’t you?” I lit up.

  “It’s the land of opportunity,” said Tattoo. He sat with his hands on his thighs and his head sunk between his shoulders like a fighter, looking up at me from under his brows.

  I shook out the match, grinning. “Hamtramck?”

  “I said it’s the land of opportunity. I didn’t say anybody had to like it. You’re just the second customer we had in all day. Folks up here sure can hate.”

  “They’ve had four hundred years to practice. Woldanski in?”

  “Woldanski who?”

  So that’s how we were going to play it. “I was told he owns the joint.”

  “The name ain’t Woldanski today.”

  “You’re the owner?”

  “Cash on the barrelhead. Nothing down and no easy monthly payments.”

  “Cash?”

  “Green on one side, gray on the other. Lots of little pictures of presidents.”

  “Must be nice. Being an heir.”

  He said nothing. I blew a plume of smoke. “Know where I might start looking for Woldanski?”

  He kept on watching me from under his brows. I glanced at the lean lad in the overstuffed chair, who moved his bushy head from side to side slowly, watching me. I felt watched. The younger man fanned smoke away from his face with a narrow and oddly beautiful left hand.

  Without taking his eyes off me, the other picked up a package of Pall Malls from the counter and shook one loose and got it between his lips and left it there, without lighting it or touching it. Just three boiled birds standing and sitting around with plugs in our beaks.

  The seal on top of the pack was unbroken. He’d opened it on the bottom. I reached out and nudged it with a knuckle.

  “Milan or Jackson? Or some slammer out of state?”

  He smiled then without front teeth. “Hell, why didn’t you say you was with the cops to start?”

  “I’m not Nero Wolfe. If you don’t want people knowing you’re from the neighborhood you’d better start smoking from the right end of the pack. They only open them that way in places where if they fall out of your pocket and roll loose they start a brawl. So how about Woldanski?”

  “I don’t know no one named Woldanski,” he said. “I’d throw Woldanski at you if I had Woldanski so you’d get out of my face. My name is Roland DePugh. Does that sound like Woldanski?”

  “I think I’m getting it. You don’t know Woldanski.”

  The man sprawled in the chair chuckled, a low, rippling sound like a panther’s purring. I looked at him.

  “No Woldanski,” he said sleepily. “Roland’s had the paper on the place, what, two years?”

  “Three come September. Bought it from the boys that own the block. Before that they rented it out, I don’t know to who.”

  “Whom,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Forget it. I’ve been hanging around too many writers lately. A thing like that can ruin you. Who owns the block?”

  DePugh gave me the up-from-under look. “You ain’t no city cop. They’d know that.”

  “You said I was a cop. You never heard it from me.”

  He punched the NO SALE button on the cash register, lifted a Colt Detective Special with a two-inch barrel out of the compartment where he kept the twenties, and clunked it down on top of the counter, keeping his hand on it. “You done wore out your honeymoon here.”

  “It’s guns,” I said. “After the first ten have been jammed in your kisser the thrill’s all gone.”

  He thumbed back the hammer.

  I said, “That’s not necessary with a double-action.”

  “Easier on the finger, though.” The man in the chair held up his thumb, studying it like an artist. “I’d go, mister. That fall Roland took was for ADW knocked down from assault with intent. Shot off a brother’s left earlobe.”

  “Nice shooting.”

  “I was aiming between his eyes,” said DePugh. He drummed his fingers on the revolver’s cylinder.

  I dropped some ash on the plank floor. It wasn’t its first. “Well, I’m gone. I don’t need any stuffed mooseheads today. Or whatever else you’ve got in the back room that the owners don’t know is for sale.”

  “I run a legitimate business here.”

  “The place reeks of it.” I nodded to the other man, who gave me a cat’s smile back and the smallest nod that could be nodded. I left.

  The investigation business has more dead ends than a magician has pockets, and as many other ways to go. From there I drove back across the line and on downtown to Lee Horst’s office in one of the bank buildings, never mind which. Lee is an information broker. Whenever you need brain fodder that the Detroit Public Library can’t supply — legitimate, shady, borderline, just plain illegal — you go to see Lee Horst. He specializes in information of a personal and sometimes embarrassing nature, but he’s no blackmailer. He won’t do business with known squeezers or reporters or cops. If he doesn’t know you or your references he’s polite, he gives you the glad hand and the warm smile and takes you on the grand tour that always ends with you standing alone in the hallway wondering just where and when you dropped the ball. Most of his information comes from servants and repairmen and delivery boys, the so-called invisible people who pass in and out of people’s homes attracting data like lint, and who meet Lee in parking garages and shopping centers to sell what they have. He buys almost everything about almost anyone, and if you’ve spent any time at all in the Detroit area, chances are he has something on you. His business is by no means a rare quantity in today’s fishbowl society, but he is one of its few scrupulous practitioners. He’s also one of the twenty wealthiest men in the city.

  The gold lettering on the frosted panel of the door to his outer office read HORST RESEARCH ASSOCIATES. That was window dressing. So far as I knew he was the entire company. A buzzer went off when I opened the door and went on buzzing until it closed behind me with a pneumatic hiss. A couple of chairs and a sofa upholstered in yellow fabric stood on a yellow
carpet with yellow-painted walls all around and fresh magazines arranged in a fan on a yellow library table. Lee likes yellow. I was alone in the waiting room.

  A door marked PRIVATE opened and Lee strode out, a huge soft smiling man with a lot of creamy yellow hair arranged in waves and a broad ruddy face with a dust of freckles across his cheeks and bright little eyes like shiny steel buttons with little cracks at the corners. He was sixty-eight years old then and still looked like an overgrown boy. He had on an ivory-colored suit that moved with him and a yellow silk tie on a pale yellow shirt with the collar buttoned down. The whole rig had to be built especially to his scale; he was six-seven anyway and tilted the scales at four hundred pounds. He took my hand in both of his moist warm flippers.

  “Amos, Amos,” he said in his high, soft, chiding voice. “I never see you anymore.”

  “Lower your rates and you’ll see me more often. How are you, Lee?”

  “Just fair. I don’t know where next month’s rent is coming from.” He held open the door to his private office. A diamond stud the size of a horse pill winked on his shirt cuff.

  I hung my hat and coat on the hall tree and made myself comfortable in a chair covered with yellow leather. It was a corner office, with windows in two walls opening on the brown skyscrapers and jammed streets of downtown Detroit. The automobile horns blatting six stories down sounded remote, like Canadian honkers flying high overhead. Lee walked around behind his big bare-topped desk and lowered himself into a swivel chair with a tall winged back that was big enough for two men, but it was just big enough for him. The superstructure creaked but it held.

  “I need the address of a man named John Woldanski,” I said. “He used to run a shop on Trowbridge in Hamtramck, where he fenced valuable religious objects until a few years ago. Two cops named Mayk and Mischiewicz there busted him a long time ago and he went to Jackson for a hard stretch. He’s not listed in Hamtramck or Detroit or any of the suburbs. I don’t know that he’s still in the area, or even if he’s still alive.”

  He confirmed the spelling, then turned in his chair and slipped a vinyl cover off a screen and keyboard on a stand where a typewriter would be ordinarily.

  I said, “Not you, too.”

  He made a wry face. “It saves time. But I’m still paying rent on a warehouse full of files in case a stray bolt of lightning knocks out this bastard’s memory.”

  “That happens?”

  “So the guy that installed it told me. Also power failures and nylon undershorts and a good stiff sneeze.”

  He turned it on. It didn’t make any more noise than it had when it was off. I got bored watching him click keys and lit a cigarette. I hoped that wouldn’t bother its memory. After a while he sat back and gave me an address on Denton in Hamtramck and an unlisted telephone number.

  I wrote them down. “When I was a kid only rich people weren’t listed.”

  “It’s the telephone solicitors,” he said. “Why look for other salesmen’s marks on picket fences when you can just stab a finger and dial?”

  “People don’t want to have to buy plastic siding. What’s the damage, Lee?”

  “For you, seventy-five.”

  I jumped a little. “Dollars?”

  “No, Cadillacs. Of course dollars.”

  “Just for tapping a few keys?”

  “I have to pay for the machine. Listen, you’re getting a break on account of we’re old friends.”

  “Buy yourself some enemies.” I slid four twenties out of my wallet and pushed them across his desk. He gave me a five from the metal cash box in the top drawer and wrote out a receipt. I put it in the space vacated by the twenties.

  “Stay and talk?”

  “Not at these prices.” I got up and reached for my hat.

  He patted the computer console’s sky-blue hull, not unlovingly. “You know, if I were you I’d worry about one of these things turning me into a buggy whip.”

  “Until they start making that shell out of solid bone, no way.”

  I said good-bye and drove back to Hamtramck. It was the paddle, I was the ball, and the elastic string between us wasn’t an inch longer than it had to be.

  17

  THE HOUSE WASN’T TEN YEARS OLD, a low brick ranch job with a green slate roof and one of those big picture windows in front that you have to buy eight hundred-dollar drapes for unless you want the neighbors to know what you look like in your Jockey shorts. It had been built so close to the bigger older frame house next door that you could skin your nose trying to squeeze between them. Both lawns needed mowing. They would continue to need it until the dozers trundled in and tore them up.

  It would be a quiet street normally, but the quiet now was of desertion. There were no other cars in sight when I parked on the street. No curtains moved in any of the windows as I went up the walk to John Woldanski’s front door. I felt like the gunslinger in the story who rides into the ghost town only to be shot down by the shades of the men he’s killed. Even the doorbell made that unmistakable hollow sound of chimes ringing in an empty house.

  When no one answered five minutes after my second ring I tried the door, shielding the movement with my body. It was locked. The door was tight to the frame and anyway it was a dead bolt lock. I walked around to the back.

  A spreading oak as old as the Crusades took up most of the tiny backyard with a weathered redwood fence around its huge trunk. A white picket fence in need of painting separated the yard from the backyard of the house facing the next street over, which had no windows on this side, and a garage stood between me and the place on the opposite side of Woldanski’s from the too-close frame building. I seemed to be the only thing stirring in the neighborhood.

  I opened the screen door to the enclosed back porch and walked across a fairly new concrete slab with a rubber mat on it and looked at another dead bolt lock on the back door. Just for fun I tried this knob too. It turned and the door opened.

  I didn’t like anything about it.

  I left the door standing partly open and went through the porch again and back around to my car and got my spare gun out of the special compartment under the dash. It was a Luger without a history or papers and if I was caught with it, it was worth a stiff fine or a jail sentence or both from a judge who probably had an unlicensed firearm of his own strapped on under his robes. But my legal piece was still at home and you get a thing about empty houses once your head’s been bounced off the floors of enough of them. So I was strolling back around to the porch with nine millimeters of German automatic in my hip pocket when the screen door hit me in the face.

  Somebody’s shoulder was behind it. Lights flashed. I pivoted on my left foot to catch my balance and grabbed for the wall of the porch with both hands and missed. I went down on one knee, scuffing my shoulder against the wall. By the time I scrambled up and clawed the gun out, my screen door man had hurdled the back fence. I glimpsed movement between the houses facing the next street, did some hurdling of my own, waltzed with a young maple that leaped in front of me without warning, and cleared a four-foot passage between houses in time to see a taillight flicking around the corner. I heard the engine hesitate, then take off shrilly.

  Somewhere a dog started barking. I realized I was standing on a public sidewalk holding an unregistered Luger. Well, officer, there was this screen door. I put the gun away and trespassed my way back to Woldanski’s house. The dog went on barking, but no doors slammed and no one called for me to identify myself.

  The screen door’s aluminum frame was bent but I hadn’t left any of my face on the wire mesh. I picked up my hat and put back some of its shape and determined that my nose wasn’t broken or bleeding and went inside when I couldn’t think of anything else to keep me out. I had an idea what I’d find. I hoped I was wrong.

  John Woldanski had done well for himself in the religious art business. The kitchen was stainless steel and the living room, two steps down at the end of a paneled hallway, was large and airy and full of crushed brown leather a
nd cherrywood rubbed to a deep red glow like coals in a hearth. There was a circular fireplace with a funnel-shaped chimney in the center of the room and the walls were hung with Spanish oils depicting holy subjects, the faces angry and tormented, the brush-strokes slashes of bold color as in a bullfight poster. They were good originals, not the junk that converted Catholics and born-agains hang all over like a gangster stocks his gallery, buying painted canvas by the yard and marble statues in case lots.

  The bedroom off the hall was quiet, the walls pastel blue and the bed made. The top of the bureau was littered with coins and combs and brushes with white hairs caught in the bristles, man-clutter. A brown leather wallet containing a Social Security card, two credit cards, and sixty-three dollars in cash. No driver’s license. A five-by-seven color photograph in a gold frame of a neat little man with white hair combed straight across a pink scalp, a large nose, and a small white moustache, holding hands with a plump pink woman with blue hair and glasses in octagonal frames. Three suits in three shades of gray hung in the closet. Two pairs of black brogues on the closet floor, a brushed felt hat on the top shelf. I didn’t open any drawers. I didn’t think Woldanski was that short.

  The bathroom was burnt orange and chocolate. I stuck a foot inside and slid the plastic shower curtain open on its rings. There was a puddle of water on the brown tile floor, nothing else. I went looking for other rooms. There were no other rooms. It was a split-level house built on concrete without a basement or second story.