Never Street

by Loren D. Estleman

  “How’s he been lately?”

  “Wired. We’re just now getting back on our feet. I didn’t think it was serious until his partner called yesterday asking where he was. He walked out in the middle of a meeting.”

  “Does he get along with your brother?”

  “They get along. They don’t joke and slap each other on the back. Did Brian say something?”

  I passed that pitch. I was curious about what she’d said before, about Neil having gone into the TV screen, but I had another question to ask before I put up the detective’s handbook.

  “Any reason to suspect he might be romantically involved?”

  “Yes, but I called her and she swears she hasn’t seen him in months.”

  “I think I will have that drink. Can I make you one?”

  She raised a smile then. She had to go deep for it—deep as the Edmund Fitzgerald—and what she brought up hardly seemed worth the dive. “I must look like I need it. Bourbon and ginger ale, please. There’s a refrigerator under the bar.”

  I made two. I found a bottle of tonic water in the dwarf refrigerator and substituted it for ginger ale in mine. When we were both provisioned I took a long cool sip. I wasn’t thirsty. The handbook didn’t cover her casual answer to my last question. As a rule they either threw a cleaver at me or cried all over my lapels. I took a seat on the Chesterfield. Mrs. Catalin perched on the edge of one of the recliners with her ankles crossed. From that angle the white screen dominated the room.

  “Vesta’s the name she uses,” she said. “Vesta Mannering. She claims to be an actress. In any case, Gilda Productions employed her to appear in some of its features. Never mind how I found out about her and Neil. It’s been over for two years.”

  “Does she still work there?”

  “I made him fire her. Oh, it’s a cliché, I know. Gilda would certainly never have anything to do with it. The market for that kind of thing dried up a long time ago. I’m in love with my husband, Mr. Walker. I’ll do anything to keep him. I guess in a way that makes us just alike.”

  I had some more bourbon. The quinine in the tonic water transported me to a folding campstool outside a tent in the Punjab, holding the frontier for Victoria. In another minute a couple of thousand Bashi-Bazouks, mounted on camels and swinging scimitars, would come pouring out of that naked screen.

  Gay Catalin leaned over and touched my wrist, and I was back in West Bloomfield. The light found hairline creases in her face. “I should explain something. The doctors at Balfour House diagnosed Neil as an obsessive personality. He’s subject to binges.”

  “Alcohol or women?”

  “Neither.” She swept a hand around the room. “You said you like these old movies. Neil sucks on them.”

  I said nothing. The place was full of hidden speakers, crackling faintly for want of a soundtrack to sink their teeth into.

  “I used to watch with him, when we were first married and the collection was less than half this size. They’re interesting, and many of them are as good as or better than anything they make today. But not as a steady diet. I don’t think he even noticed when I stopped watching. Lately he’s been spending every spare minute in front of that screen, exposing himself to I don’t know how many murders, deceptions, and acts of sadism. It can’t be healthy for someone with his history.”

  An empty cassette sleeve lay on the end table by the Chesterfield. Pitfall, starring Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, and Raymond Burr. I got up, opened the cabinet, and punched the EJECT button on the VCR. A tape licked out. Pitfall. It hadn’t been rewound. “He was watching this one when?”

  She looked at it. “Night before last. He disappeared the next day.”

  “When was the last time he got on this kick?”

  “Just before he checked himself into the hospital on the island. That was six months after I found out about Vesta.”

  “Do you think there’s a connection?”

  “I called his doctor at the time and asked him the same thing. He said that was confidential. His name’s Naheen, if you think you can do any better. Ashraf Naheen.”

  I made a note in my pocket pad and slid the videocassette into its sleeve. “All right if I take this tape with me?”

  “Of course. You’ll need a picture of Neil, too. And I suppose you’ll want to look through his things.” She stood, smoothed her skirt, and used the remote. The room seemed much bigger when the screen was dark.

  “Where can I find Miss Mannering?” I asked on our way upstairs.

  “She’s listed in Iroquois Heights. But as I told you, she hasn’t seen him. I believe her.”

  “I’d like to believe her in person. Who’s your husband’s partner?”

  “Leo Webb. He’s been with Neil much longer than I have. Almost from the beginning. Gilda Productions is in Detroit, the Consolidated Gas Building on Woodward. I’ll give you a card.”

  Back in the living room she took a five-by-seven portrait out of its frame and handed it to me. Catalin was a representative specimen of middle-aging manhood, still youthful looking in an outworn way, like a necktie that’s still in use after it’s gone out of style; he had sad eyes, a jaw that lacked resolution, and dark hair thinning in front. Women that age tended to look hard, although Gay Catalin had dodged that bullet. Men just looked beaten.

  There were some empty hangers on his side of the bedroom closet, but his wife couldn’t say which of his clothes were missing. She summoned Angelina, who merely shrugged. Washington was recruiting its diplomatic couriers from the wrong class. Neil’s home office, just off the bedroom, was small and windowless, with a desktop computer and printer on one of those homely assemble-it-yourself work stations. The computer didn’t have anything to say to me, but then neither did a French waiter once he got a look at my suit. Catalin had the standard settings on his speed-dial: office, partner’s home, 911, Little Caesar’s Pizza. I punched his redial and got the time of day. That was more than anything I’d gotten so far.

  He kept his checkbook and savings account passbook in an unlocked drawer. The last check he’d drawn had been made out to a video store in Birmingham for two hundred and change. Hard times weren’t so hard he’d abandoned his obsession. He had twenty-seven thousand dollars in the joint savings account he shared with his wife. He hadn’t made any substantial deductions in weeks.

  That was it for the office. The room contained no personal items, nothing in the way of decoration. Setting it up wouldn’t have taken him a tenth of the time he’d put into the movie room in the basement. I was starting to get a handle on Neil Catalin.

  Gay was waiting for me in the upstairs hallway with her husband’s business card. I glanced at it and put it in my wallet. While I had it out I said, “I get five hundred a day and incidentals. A day might be four hours. It might be twenty-three. It depends on what I pry up.”

  “Why just twenty-three?”

  “I need more sleep than I used to.”

  She smiled then, and this one was worth getting wet for. Her face had a little color now. Score one for John Barleycorn. She went into the bedroom and came back out with a checkbook with a canary-yellow cover. Neil’s was gray, like the cellar room. “Will a thousand do to start?” She began writing.

  “If there’s anything left over you’ll get it back. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve delivered same-day service.”

  She tore off the check and gave it to me. “Where do you plan to begin?”

  “First I’ll touch bases with Webb. Then I’ll give Doctor Naheen a whirl. I haven’t been up to Mackinac Island this decade.”

  “He won’t tell you anything.”

  “Who, Webb or Naheen?”

  “Leo will talk your ear off if you let him. Naheen’s a cold show. Most of those foreign-born physicians take that oath pretty seriously.”

  “There never was a horse that couldn’t be rode.”

  She watched me put away the check. “What I said before, about Neil having gone into the screen downstairs.”


  “You were upset.”

  “I still am. I meant what I said.”

  I left space for her to fill. Lightning stuttered outside the window at the end of the hall, throwing one of the oaks in the yard into stark negative, white on black, with witch’s fingers. The thunder was a while coming and might have been left over from another flash.

  “You have to understand he might be unbalanced,” she said. “The first time caught me off guard, but Lord knows I’ve watched enough of these things to recognize the plot. I think Neil wants to be one of those noir heroes, Mr. Walker. I think he thinks he’s in a film.”

  I said I’d be in touch and went down to the ground floor and out. I wouldn’t have taken that other flight of stairs that night for another thousand.

  Three

  THE RAIN HIT THREE blocks from the Catalins’. First came the wind, snarling through the leaf-heavy trees planted along the street with a noise like breaking surf. Then a great barbed fork of lightning turned the sky blue-white, thunder smashed, and the first drops struck the windshield, thumping like fingers on taut canvas and flattening out as big as rubber bathtub stoppers. Finally the clouds zipped open. Sheets of water slammed into the asphalt and wrapped themselves around the car like flypaper. I cranked the wipers up to Turbo, but it was like piloting the Nautilus. On Telegraph I drifted over to the right turn lane behind a dozen or so sensible drivers and set the brake. I smoked a cigarette while the car rocked in the gusts and other motorists—equipped, apparently, with periscopes—swept past down the remaining three lanes at normal highway speeds. If I had a cellular telephone I’d call my broker and invest in a body shop, if I had a broker and money to invest.

  There was a chain video store in a strip mall up ahead on the right. I had an inspiration. I released the brake, crept around the cars standing in front of me with smoke creaming out of their exhaust pipes, and pulled into a handicap slot in front of the door. Ten minutes and twelve dollars later I ran back through the downpour with a rented VCR bundled inside my coat. On the off chance my power had come back on, I planned to put myself to sleep with the movie Neil Catalin had been watching just before he dropped out of sight. Maybe I could dream up his present location. Such things had been known to happen, although never to me.

  The outlook was as dark as the streets. The rain had let up and Edison trucks were out, but the workers were all either sitting in the cabs waiting for the storm to pass or standing around in their shining ponchos trying to keep their cigarettes burning. Then I turned down Joseph Campau and the weather broke. It was still coming down on the Detroit side, but on the Hamtramck side where I lived, the stars were out and the puddles stood undisturbed on the pavement.

  Two linemen in rain gear shared the bucket of a cherry-picker parked on my block, fiddling with the transformer atop the corner pole. As I cruised past I gave the thumbs-up sign to a third worker sitting at the levers. The bleak look I got back was familiar. I’d seen it often enough in mirrors to know the expression of a man who had no idea when he’d see his home again.

  I carried Neil Catalin’s video and the VCR in its satchel from the garage into the kitchen and flipped up the wall switch before I remembered, an automatic movement. Just at that moment the lights came on. I plugged everything back in and started the lasagna warming in the microwave. I hadn’t eaten since late morning. The liquor I’d drunk was clawing at the lining of my stomach like feral cats tied in a gunnysack.

  After supper I washed dishes, started a pot of coffee, and hooked the VCR up to the television set in my little cupboard of a living room. The job required written instructions and a number of venerable Anglo-Saxon words, but the coffee was ready by the time I finished. I set the tape rewinding and poured my first cup, yawning bitterly. It was just past 11:30 and felt much later. So far the forties were playing hell with my nocturnal inclinations. In another couple of years I’d be one of those people who ate breakfast.

  The caffeine kicked in about the time the Pitfall title card pounced on screen with a burst of strings, and for the next ninety minutes I was nailed to the spot. It was a tense, tightly plotted crimer, made the way Hollywood made them in 1948 and then forgot how: Dick Powell, as a tired insurance agent slogging his way through midlife crisis, stumbles into an extramarital affair with smoldering Lizabeth Scott, running afoul of her boyfriend, a jailed embezzler, and a hulking, hormone-driven private eye played by Raymond Burr nine years before Perry Mason made him a star on television. Powell kills the boyfriend in self-defense, Scott shoots Burr, and Powell’s marriage to Jane Wyatt is compromised, possibly forever. Scott, despite her sultry looks and husky voice the only true innocent in the triangle, gets the muddy end of the stick, arrested for defending herself from what today’s criminal justice system would label a textbook stalker. There were plenty of tricky camera angles and lots of contrasty lighting, Burr in particular looming like an implacable ape in up-from-under shots with no fill.

  It was a good movie. It wasn’t worth stepping off the edge over, but then neither are most of the reasons men and women choose to turn their backs on a comfortable life and walk away into an uncertain night. When it was over I caught a rerun of Green Acres on Channel 20. After Perry Mason in a padded suit, even Mr. Haney looked good.

  Morning was rain-scrubbed and cool. The cupola on top of the Fisher Building glistened like a copper bowl in the distance. The weather reader on the radio said that would all be over when a pressure center trundled in around noon—high or low never mattered in Michigan—dragging steep temperatures, thick humidity, and a fresh chain of thunderstorms. Up in Oakland County, fifteen hundred more households were without power since last night’s blow.

  I picked up the telephone to call Gay Catalin and ask if Neil had shown up, but the line was as dead as bell bottoms. That meant a trip to the office. On the way I stopped at the shrine of the clown for a cup of boiling coffee and sausage tartare on a biscuit with a frozen center. That didn’t count as breakfast, so my record held. I parked in the defunct service station across from my building on West Grand River, gave the derelict who claimed he owned the spot a dollar to keep him from slashing my tires, and climbed the three stuffy flights to the Emerald City of Oz.

  There were no bills or threatening letters on the floor inside the outer office, no Sicilians in sharkskins tossing the file cabinets, no flaming arrows stuck in the wall next to the print of Custer’s Last Stand. On the other hand, there were no foreign princesses waiting to pay me a retainer in rubies or a harem, either: an atypical morning in the dangerous, glamor-soaked life of the globe-hopping P.I. I brushed the crumbs of yesterday’s brunch off the swivel and put the telephone to work. Neil was still missing. Gay’s voice did not belong to a woman who had ever smiled at me over a glass of Jack Black and Vernor’s. Next I tried Leo Webb, Neil’s partner at Gilda Productions, but a receptionist informed me Mr. Webb was away on business and wouldn’t be available until tomorrow. Her voice dripped with air conditioning. She would have one of those plastic water bottles like runners drink from on the corner of her kidney-shaped desk.

  I looked up Vesta Mannering in the outcounty directory and got a recording saying her telephone was out of order.

  Those were the duty calls. I had a hunch about Dr. Ashraf Naheen and the Balfour House. My hunches almost never worked out but they were nearly always fun to play. I called Detroit City Airport and got a ticket clerk named Alvin with a Memphis accent. I asked him for the best rate to Mackinac City.

  “American Eagle’s offering eighty-nine dollars round trip, but there’s a catch.”

  “I have to ride outside?”

  “Not quite that bad. You have to fly after ten p.m. and stay over two nights.”

  “Okay, book me.”

  “Sorry, sir. Everything after ten’s full up. I could put you on standby.”

  “No, I’m all caught up in my reading. What else you got?”

  “TWA has a commuter. One forty-three, with a penalty fee of fifty dollars for late changes.”
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  “Any flights this morning?”

  “Nothing today until four p.m.”

  “Four’s swell. Book me.”

  “Sorry, sir. That one’s been canceled.”

  “Hang on, Alvin.” I parked the receiver, rolled back, opened the top drawer of the desk, picked up the .38 Detective’s Special that lived there, and shook out all the shells. I put the revolver back in the drawer and the shells in the shaving mug where I keep my pencils and shut the drawer. I retrieved the receiver.

  “Listen close, Alvin. I want a real seat on a real airplane, today if possible. Don’t tell me about the ghost flights. If you do that to me one more time I’ll feed you to a propeller.”

  Five minutes later I was ticketed for the 10:42 a.m. to Mackinac City, returning to Detroit at 8:15 p.m. I just had time to make one more call before leaving for the airport.

  Dr. Naheen answered his own telephone, a surprise. He had a colonial British accent and time to see me, if I didn’t mind wasting my client’s money since anything that had passed between Mr. Catalin and himself was cloaked by Hippocrates. I replied that no time spent on the island was ever wasted. That pleased him. Mackinites are proud of their little patch in Lake Huron.

  It’s a five-hour drive to the straits under the best circumstances. In late summer, with construction zones blooming like goldenrod all along U.S. 23, you mark your progress on a calendar. In the interests of time and Gay Catalin’s money, I put up with an eighteen-seater with duct tape on the upholstery, a pilot whose voice was still changing, and no stewardess with a copy of Forbes and a glass of anything to take my mind off the engine shuddering on the left wing. We bumped around in the air for forty minutes, then drifted down through a tatter of clouds, and there was the tip of the mitten that is the Lower Peninsula, a dozen shades of green with blue water all around and the souvenir shops, confectionaries, and marinas of the resort city clinging to the mainland like kernels of colored glass.

  That far north the air was noticeably cooler, with a stiff wind planing off the lake that bellied and popped the awnings over the store windows like sails. Even so, there wasn’t a pair of long pants to be seen. Young women in cutoffs and blouses tied into big floppy bows under their breasts flashed their brown legs and flat bellies, old men in cocoa straw hats, madras shorts, and black socks complained to their wives that their feet hurt, and local youths with their shirttails out and their caps on back to front leaned against the light poles, belching and crumpling aluminum beer cans against their foreheads to impress the girls from downstate. The air was sticky with the sick-sweet smell of fresh fudge, a Mackinac trademark, and dirty white gulls swooped at crumbs on the sidewalk, crying like rusted hinges. Stalled cars, trucks, and RVS honked and overheated in every block. Autumn was on its way, and everyone in the Wolverine State was determined to get the last best out of the warm season if it killed him.