Never Street

by Loren D. Estleman

  Never Street

  Loren D. Estleman

  To those who lived:

  Curtis K. Stadtfeld

  Ray Puechner

  —mentors—

  To those who live:

  Jim O’Keefe

  The Gang at Sigma Video

  And to those who will live forever:

  Humphrey Bogart

  Orson Welles

  James Cagney

  Lizabeth Scott

  Ida Lupino

  Virginia Mayo

  Dick Powell

  John Garfield

  Dana Andrews

  Gloria Grahame

  Lana Turner

  Joan Crawford

  Alan Ladd

  Fred MacMurray

  George Raft

  Veronica Lake

  Barbara Stanwyck

  Lauren Bacall

  Glenn Ford

  Burt Lancaster

  Richard Widmark

  Rita Hayworth

  Ava Gardner

  Marlene Dietrich

  Robert Mitchum

  Cornel Wilde

  Kirk Douglas

  Claire Trevor

  Gene Tierney

  Jane Greer

  …Roll ’em!

  Contents

  Reel One: Mise-en-Scène

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Reel Two: Cross-Fade

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Reel Three: Dissolve

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Reel Four: Smash Cut

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  A Biography of Loren D. Estleman

  Reel One

  Mise-En-Scène

  One

  IT WAS THE SUMMER of darkness.

  It was the summer of darkness, and Ula McAdoo was responsible.

  It happened this way. The previous autumn, Detroit Edison had made a brave effort to trim all the trees in Wayne County that waved to one another during windstorms, taking down electric lines and pitching most of southeastern Michigan back into the Mesozoic. The workers had polished their yellow hardhats, pressed their blue coveralls, buffed the steel toes of their work boots, gassed up their chainsaws, and hit the woods. Then Ula, aged seventy-four and living in Dearborn Heights with a cat named Buster, came home from the Monday night meeting of the Committee to Suppress Satanism at Disneyworld, found the top four feet missing from the cedar in her front yard, and sued Edison for a million. She settled for ten thousand and a bundle of striplings.

  After that the chainsaws fell silent. Summer came, bringing its handy sampler of thunder, lightning, tornadoes, and gale-force winds, batting the trees about and twirling and snapping the electric lines like the threads in a fifty-dollar suit. By August, Wayne and Oakland counties had experienced fourteen major power blackouts; rumor had it some residents had been waiting for their service to be restored since before Bastille Day. A couple of the dicier neighborhoods in Detroit had taken to burning Edison’s chief executive officer in effigy for the illumination, when what they should have done was torch Ula’s cat.

  The latest outage struck just as I was about to push the button of my snazzy new microwave oven for dinner. The ceiling light flickered twice, then died to an amber glow. After five minutes I unplugged the oven, refrigerator, and television to avoid a surge, left the dish of frozen lasagna to thaw on its own, snagged a bottle of Scotch and a bowl of doomed ice from the dark refrigerator, and went out on my toy front porch to plaster myself quietly in the dewy evening cool. The days had been cracking ninety, with the humidity just behind. I figured I had twenty minutes of peace before the first of my neighbors fired up his portable generator.

  It was a time for taking stock and reflecting. Business was off, as it always was in vacation season, when George and Marian loaded the kids and the luggage in the car and left behind their regular extramarital affairs to make room for the cabana boy and the anonymous divorcee with the tattoo. All the best sins—adultery, employee theft, credit-card fraud, Neil Diamond on the neighbor’s stereo—were out of town. All the private investigators, too; those who hadn’t blown the Tahiti fund on a space-age oven now pulling single duty as a cupboard, anyway. In the morning I would make some calls. Cold calling was always something to look forward to on a gummy August day when all the air conditioners were down and there was nobody to take it out on but the stranger on the other end of the telephone, looking for work. I refilled my glass.

  As I did so, a pint-size breeze lifted my hair where I sat on a demoted kitchen chair and sucked the front door shut behind me. There was a hint of brimstone in it. Another storm was on its way.

  After a while a two-cycle motor started up down the block with a noise like marbles bouncing off a bass drum. In another minute or two, that mating call would be answered, and before long every generator on the street would be coughing up its lungs. I was thinking about taking my drinking paraphernalia inside when a black Jeep Grand Cherokee with green neon running lights turned the corner and boated my way, slowly, as if the driver was trying to read addresses in the steepening dark. It rolled along on jacked-up tires and a cushion of grumbling bass from a pair of speakers that were using the space where the back seat belonged. Rap, of course. I wondered, not for the first time, if anyone listened to those expectorated lyrics in his own living room with his slippers on.

  The Jeep stopped in front of my house, rocking in place on the thick waves of sound washing out of its open windows, and the driver poked out his head. It was shaved at the temples, but longhaired in back, with a trailing moustache and pointed goatee and two or three gold rings glittering in one ear. In the green light coming up from below, the face looked like it belonged to Boris Karloff, Junior.

  “Yo, Zeke!” he called to me. “Know where I can find a dude named Walker?”

  I rubbed my chin, which needed scraping nearly as badly as his—but then it generally did from noon on—and spoke through my nose like Jed Clampett. “Wal, I believe if you was to turn left at the house where Wilbur Klumpp died, and went on past where the Bodie place used to be before it burned down, and turned right at Olson’s Swamp, you’d find him plowing his pasture as like as not.”

  He scratched his nose, squinting at me against the dark of the house. “You’re him, right?”

  I said I was him. He might have been seventeen or twenty-three. The Auschwitz haircut put on as many years as it took off.

  “Don’t you answer your phone? My sister’s been trying to get through to you for a half hour.”

  “The line’s probably down. We had a storm earlier. Didn’t you hear it, or were you listening to Snoop Doggy Dog?”

  “Blowfish,” he said. “She wants to see you.” He gave me an address in West Bloomfield.

  “She got a name?”

  “Catalin. Gay Catalin. I’m Brian Elwood. I’m her brother.”

  “I guessed that when you told me she’s your sister. This business, or
does she want somebody to hold her hand until the lights come back on?”

  “She had lights when I left. You’re like a private eye, right?”

  “Just like one. Only taller.”

  That one buzzed right past him. “A private eye’s what she needs. Her husband split yesterday. She wants him back, Christ knows why. He’s a major feeb.”

  The pickings there were too lean for me. I lit a cigarette. The air was still, and it had begun to heat up. Nothing like a breeze had ever come down that street. We were in for a big banger.

  “I’ll ride you on over,” Brian Elwood said.

  I pointed in the direction of the noise coming from the Jeep. “That a tape?”

  “CD. I got Hammer, the Fat Boys, Rectal Itch—”

  “Marcus Belgrave?”

  “Who?”

  “I’ll drive my own heap, thanks. Tell her half an hour.”

  “You tell her. I’m off to Cherie’s. Tits and ass.”

  He flashed me his pearlies and took off with a blat of twin pipes. Seventeen, definitely.

  Lightning flickered in sheets over Windsor when I pulled out of the driveway. We had had a load of rain that year. The guy who read the weather on Channel 4 had traded his sportcoat for a white beard and cassock like Noah’s. The mosquitoes were as big as DC-3s. Doors stuck, freeways flooded, and a puddle had formed on the floor on the driver’s side of my big Mercury. I was thinking of stocking it with trout.

  The streets were dark, with here and there a light showing in a window like the outthrust tongue of a homeowner with a generator. The traffic light was out at Caniff. While waiting for the other drivers to work out who had the right of way, I punched a Sarah Vaughan tape into the deck. “Ain’t No Use.” The theme song of the professional information broker in the age of the hard drive.

  West Bloomfield was nearly inseparable from Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham—“Bloomingham” was the local coinage—which had started out as the waiting room for Grosse Pointe, where auto money aged in big colonials facing Lake St. Clair with lawns the size of small European countries. Now it was an end in itself, with its own waiting rooms in Farmington and Farmington Hills. Paved streets wound among modern homes with Sevilles parked in the driveways and security lights burning all night atop twenty-foot poles, shaming the stars. Well-dressed white children pounded basketballs off the concrete pads in front of the garages in the daytime, looking to fight their way out of the upper middle class with nothing but their trust funds and a dream.

  The power failure had missed the Catalin neighborhood. It happens that way sometimes, democracy to the contrary.

  All the windows were ablaze in the cool, sprawling ranch-style of brick and frame, the only house in a cul-de-sac that ended in a berry thicket and a chainlink fence. Four huge oaks were arranged on the lawn in such a way that the house would always be in shade. The brimstone smell was strong during the short walk from my car to the front door. It wouldn’t be long now.

  A thick-waisted woman in a gray dress and white apron, with her brittle black hair caught up by combs, listened carefully to my spiel, then shut the door in my face. A minute or so later she came back, led me into a large sunken living room with a conquistador’s breastplate and weapons mounted above the stone fireplace, and went away. They aren’t called maids anymore, but they still don’t speak much English.

  “Thank you for coming on such short notice, Mr. Walker. I’m Gay Catalin.”

  She’d come in through an open arch from a brightly lit room at the rear of the house when I was looking in another direction, a small compact red-haired woman with a forest of flowering plants behind her. That put her over forty, assuming she’d planned her entrance, with the light at her back. She had large eyes mascaraed all around, a pixie mouth, and a fly waist in a pale yellow dress tailored to show it off. The scent she wore was light and euphoria-inducing, like stepping out of a dank cellar into the sunshine; or it might just have been the flowers in the other room.

  “I like your home.” I borrowed a warm, slightly moist hand with light calluses—the kind you get from gardening—and returned it. “They don’t design them this way since air conditioning.”

  “Neil has an instinct. He produces home-improvement videos, among other things.”

  “Neil’s your husband?”

  “Yes. Can I get you something to drink? I’m sorry to say Angelina has narrow ideas about her housekeeping duties.”

  “No, thanks. I left a pitcher of Scotch back home and it’s the jealous type.”

  She laughed, a nervous little preoccupied laugh, and put her hands in the pockets of her skirt. She didn’t know what else to do with them.

  “I hope Brian wasn’t rude. He’s a good boy, essentially; he just runs with the pack. He’s been living here ever since our mother died, and I suppose he finds us boring. Your office phone didn’t answer, so I looked up your residence. When I couldn’t get through, I didn’t know what else to do but send him over.”

  “He was okay. He said your husband’s missing?”

  “It’s official now. Twenty-six hours. I trust the police, but they’re outnumbered by their cases. That’s why I tried you.”

  “This puts me neck and neck with mine. Why me?”

  “I saw your picture in the paper last year, when you testified against that man Matador. The killer. I remembered your name. I liked it; I still do. I don’t know very much about hiring a private detective, Mr. Walker.”

  “I take it Neil isn’t in the vanishing habit.”

  “No. He’s never been gone without an explanation except for the time he was in the hospital.”

  “Accident?”

  “No.”

  I was starting to get the idea. “Is that where you think he is this time?”

  She shook her head. There was a tight vertical line between her eyebrows. “May I show you something?”

  I said okay. She turned, taking her hands out of her pockets, and I followed her through another arch. We crossed a stainless steel kitchen hung with yellow curtains to match her dress and went down a quiet flight of open steps swathed in silver pile. At the foot we stood in a dark underground room smelling of furniture oil and new plastic. The only light came from the fixture in the stairwell.

  She picked up a long black object from a table and pushed a button. Three black tubes mounted under the ceiling glowed and shot three colored shafts of light, red, green, and blue, at a forty-five-degree angle across the room, where they illuminated a screen six feet square. It was the first front-projection television set I’d seen outside of photographs in home theater magazines.

  “Impressive.” I waited.

  Gay Catalin’s face looked sickly in the reflected glow. “Neil’s in there, Mr. Walker.” She pointed at the empty screen. “That’s where he’s gone. I’m sure of it, and I want you to go in and bring him back out.”

  Two

  SOMETHING SHOOK THE HOUSE to its foundation. There was a concussion like a sonic boom, followed by a rattle of caked mud or plaster falling between joists. The moment wasn’t that dramatic; it was just the first sharp peal of thunder crossing the river from Canada. I groped at the wall near the stairs and tripped a switch. A row of indirect lights mounted behind a soffit came on, reflecting off a pale gray ceiling.

  The room measured about eighteen feet by twelve, with a medium gray tweed carpet laid wall to wall and dark gray paneling on the walls. The panels were covered with some kind of spongy fabric that absorbed sound. There was a wet bar, two big recliners and a Chesterfield upholstered in charcoal Naugahyde, and a built-in cabinet containing stacks of video and sound equipment twinkling their digital readouts behind smoked-glass doors. The blue-green numerals provided the only color beyond the labels on the bottles behind the bar and a frieze of movie posters in gray steel frames continuing unbroken along all four walls. They looked like originals, and I was younger than the newest of them. Below them, a set of built-in shelves that I thought at first held books was packed instead with
videotapes in gray plastic containers. There must have been a thousand of them, and twenty or more laser discs in the bottom of the smoked-glass cabinet.

  “My husband’s favorite room,” said Gay Catalin. “He spends most of his time here when he’s home.”

  I read the labels on the tapes. They were all hand-lettered in the same neat block capitals. Movie titles: The Dark Corner, Edge of the City, Double Indemnity, Detour, The Asphalt Jungle—not a Technicolor title in the pack, and none of them made after about 1955.

  “I see he likes murder mysteries.”

  “Not just murder mysteries. Dark films with warped gangsters and neurotic heroes and dangerous women. Shiny wet streets and big black cars with their headlights on. There’s a name for them.” She hesitated. “My French isn’t very good.”

  “Cinéma noir.”

  “That’s it. It means ‘black films,’ from the lighting and the mood. I don’t think collecting them and watching them is a very healthy hobby.”

  “I like old movies myself. So far it hasn’t landed me in psychiatric.”

  “You don’t know Neil.”

  “Tell me about Neil.”

  “He’s senior partner in Gilda Productions, a company that provides video features to cable television stations. He started it just after he graduated from Michigan, filming local commercials and documentaries, and now the firm has clients in New York, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong. Neil’s forty-two; he’s done all this in twenty years, the last eight of them married to me. I suppose he was past due for his little slip last year.”

  “That would be the hospital?”

  She nodded. Her hands were back in her pockets. “He committed himself to a sanitorium. That was eighteen months ago, when the government was talking about regulating cable rates. His business was in a slump. The firm’s attorney advised him to declare bankruptcy, but Neil insisted on paying back every creditor in full. It was too much for him, the worrying, the long hours. One day he left for the office and never showed up. The police traced him to the hospital after three days.”

  “Which hospital?”

  “Balfour House, on Mackinac Island. You won’t find it listed; it’s private. I have the number, if you want to check it.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “I called every hospital I could think of, public and private. No one’s seen a man answering his description.”