Never Street

by Loren D. Estleman

  I was without a car, but in the only place in Michigan where it doesn’t count. Ferries to and from the island measure the day into fifteen-minute blocks. From the moment you leave the gangplank until you get back aboard, you are in a different century. Automobiles have been banned from Mackinac Island for as long as there have been automobiles. Once there you get to where you’re going by foot or bicycle or horse. Dogs die of old age on Mackinac Island.

  During the brief trip over I smoked a cigarette in the bow, then took a bench seat to get out of the cold wind. The water was slate blue and shot with whitecaps to the horizon, where it turned brazen. I was the only passenger wearing a suit. I felt like a kid stuck in summer school.

  At the dock a tanned teenager in running shorts and a T-shirt that read COED NAKED BROAD JUMP caught the rope thrown him by an old salt of twenty and tied it to a piling with a tire suspended from it. A rich brown odor reached my nostrils as I waited my turn at the gangplank. The sight of horses and carriages lined up on the other side of the dock told me it wasn’t fudge.

  I asked for directions to Balfour House from another veteran, wearing a retainer and handing out printed leaflets advertising Old Fort Michilimackinac. He said he’d never heard of it.

  I had better luck with a driver waiting on the seat of a rubber-tired flatbed wagon for cargo. This one was absolutely decrepit, thirty if he was a day, in a tight maroon velvet vest with a white ruffle, white silk leggings, a black top hat, and his hair in a ponytail.

  “That’s a private house, mister. Nothing there for tourists.”

  “That’s bad news for tourists.” I waited.

  “There’s a bike rental up the hill. You don’t look like a horseman.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. I’m told I’m the spitting image of my great-grandfather. He was a U.S. marshal in Montana. Can I walk it?”

  For no reason that I could see he leaned forward and patted the rump of one of the shaggy grays in the traces. Then he sat back. I never saw a man so far short of the half-century mark with so much time on his hands. “Work up a sweat. I’ll take you there for two bucks.”

  “What about your load?”

  He had a slow, easy grin. “Hell, mister. I was born here. There ain’t nothing on this patch of grass won’t wait an hour or a month.”

  “Isn’t that the idea?”

  He shrugged. It was like watching sand shift.

  I thought a second, then climbed up beside him. When I sat down he gave me a worried look. “You don’t live at Balfour, do you?”

  I said I didn’t.

  “That’s good. I can stand tourists okay. It’s the professional crazies I can’t hack.” He gave the reins a flip.

  Four

  IT WAS A BRICK manor house, twenty or so rooms built on a stone foundation along lines more modest than either of its neighbors, a Queen Anne horned all over with gables and a Swiss chalet that looked like a cuckoo clock. A double row of narrow arched windows and a triangular lintel set on Doric columns flanking the front door gave the place an institutional air that may have influenced its sale. An embossed plaque set at the end of the concrete walk explained that the house was constructed on the site where Captain Henry Balfour was believed to have established his quarters while taking possession of Fort Michilimackinac in 1763. A professionally printed placard in the window to the left of the door warned visitors that it was a private residence.

  A porter or something in a white coat and gray slacks let me into a blue-carpeted foyer and asked me to wait while he took my card into Dr. Naheen. There were no pictures on the walls, but a hall running straight through to the back of the house opened onto a picture window looking out on the lake, where boats with bright-colored sails skidded around, cutting white arcs in the blue water. Rembrandt couldn’t have competed with that.

  I waited five minutes. Nobody screamed, nobody in a white uniform hustled through carrying a butterfly net, nobody ran down the staircase dressed like Robin Hood. At the end of the wait the porter stepped in front of the view at the end of the hall and beckoned to me.

  Ashraf Naheen rose from behind a big polished desk cluttered with executive toys and walked around it to take my hand. He wore a brown pinstripe three-piece suit tailored to make him look less small and less round. He had thick black hair combed straight back, showing the marks of the comb, round rimless glasses, and a moon face poured into the mold of a pleasant expression. I had a feeling a tidal wave wouldn’t change it. A crooked scar above his lip, the result of an old surgery to correct a cleft palate, marred the smooth polished surface of his milk-chocolate-colored skin.

  “I’m sorry I kept you waiting, Mr. Walker. I was just finishing a conversation with a guest.”

  “Not a patient?”

  “We try not to use language that would make anyone feel he or she has been institutionalized.”

  “Which they are not.”

  “Admission to Balfour House is strictly voluntary. We are a private facility, and somewhat exclusive.”

  “That must explain why most of the locals don’t know it from Brigadoon.”

  He adjusted his glasses and looked pleasant. “We treat cases of nervous disorder, as well as substance abuse. In some circles that is regarded as a badge of celebrity and fair game for the media. Our guests don’t belong to those circles.”

  “I’m not a tabloid reporter, Doctor.”

  “You certainly don’t look like one. Of course, that raises the strong possibility that you are one. I assume you have the usual identification.”

  I showed him the investigator’s license with my picture and my carry permit with my fingerprints. He wrinkled his brow at the latter.

  “I hope you’re not armed at present.”

  I shook my head. “I never met a horse I couldn’t talk out of homicide.”

  The wrinkle vanished. “Understand, no one here is violent. Still—” He smiled pleasantly. “Will you have a seat?” He gestured away from the desk, in the direction of a cozy little conversation area in the opposite corner. This consisted of a brace of slingback chairs covered in coarse nubby green fabric, tough as steel, and a couch that was just a couch, not something to stretch out on while the nice doctor opened his steno pad and grilled you about your mother; that might have led to feelings of institutionalization.

  The office was good-sized, not cavernous, and in an earlier incarnation had probably been a bedroom for the more important visitors, such as George III or Chief Pontiac. Cabbage roses bloomed on the pale green paper on the walls, which wore some good abstracts in rosewood frames and Dr. Naheen’s diploma from the University of Michigan School of Medicine. The carpet was sculptured, a mottled pattern in beige and green, and the lamps on the desk and the glass-topped table in the conversation area were burning. They were necessary. Heavy curtains over the window behind the desk blocked out the sunlight, also the rest of the view of Lake Huron that began at the end of the hallway outside the room. No worldly distractions to upset the guests.

  I sat down, found with surprise and pleasure a glass ashtray the size of a wheel cover on the low chrome-and-glass coffee table, and offered Naheen a Winston from the pack. He declined, slipping the band off a long green cigar he took from his pocket by way of explanation, and offered it to me in return. Having established that we were both satisfied with our own smokes, we fired them up and poisoned the air for a few seconds in silence.

  I broke it. “Neil Catalin was a guest last year?”

  “I’m afraid I cannot answer any questions about Mr. Catalin’s case. I explained that when you called.” He hiked up his trouser cuffs and sat on the couch, reinhaling through his nose the fumes he’d just exhaled. An addictive type, Dr. Naheen. Most cigar smokers didn’t take the stuff into their lungs even once.

  “You wouldn’t be violating anything if you told me when was the last time you saw him.”

  “He left Balfour House February fifteenth of last year,” he said. “I looked it up after you and I spoke. I haven’t
seen or heard from him since.”

  “I know a little about his case. I won’t ask you to interpret his dreams. I need answers to some general questions about his particular psychosis.”

  He frowned pleasantly and cocked the hand holding the cigar; the tolerant judge allowing an irregularity to continue until he decided to throw it out of court.

  “He’s a classic crime film buff,” I said. “His wife says he’s loony on the subject. Day before yesterday he disappeared after bingeing on Bogart and Dick Powell and Fred MacMurray in the movie room in his basement. Mrs. Catalin thinks he’s gone off to live the life of a Hollywood hero. How’s that square with your experience and training?”

  “That would be a classic schizophrenic reaction to a traumatic episode. Wish fulfillment. Freud coined the term. After he had subjected a series of his patients’ recurring fantasies to analysis—”

  “Doctor.” I spoke gently. “I have a flight out in seven hours.”

  The eager gleam faded out behind his glasses. He drew in a chestful of smoke and watched it find its way back out. “Don Quixote complex. It predates the invention of the motion picture by several thousand years. Cervantes put a name to it when he wrote about his demented knight-errant. Whether because of abuse, sudden trauma, or longstanding feelings of inferiority, the victim decides that his own life has become unbearable, and so co-opts the life of someone he admires, preferably a creature of the imagination, since the genuine article is often a disappointment. We’ve all known the urge. James Thurber’s fictional Walter Mitty represents us all, daydreaming while stuck in traffic of winning the big game, saving the great man’s life, impressing the beautiful woman with one’s swordsmanship; the sword, of course, representing—”

  “Wilkinson razors. I’m not out to cure the guy, I just want to find him and bring him back to his wife.”

  “That would be a Sherlock Holmes complex. Another manifestation of the same obsessive compulsion.”

  “Yeah. Fortunately, mine pays the bills.” I was beginning to have had enough of Dr. Naheen; a new record.

  I went fishing.

  “How often does Walter Mitty actually put on armor and duke it out with windmills?”

  “Almost never. In fifteen years of practice I have yet to encounter an authentic case. If Mr. Catalin has begun to exhibit classic schizophrenic behavior, I hope he consults me. I’d like to publish a paper.”

  “So you think it’s possible his wife is right.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  The water was too cold for worms. I threw it away and tried a spooner.

  “You said it could have been triggered by a traumatic episode. Do severe business problems qualify as traumatic?”

  “Only if you use the term very generally. By definition, trauma refers to life-threatening incidents. Freud to the contrary, the will to survive is much stronger than the human sex drive.”

  “That sounds like your pet theory.”

  He waved the cigar. “I’ve written upon the subject for the psychiatric journals.”

  “What about sex?”

  “It has its importance. It isn’t paramount. If you want my opinion, I think dear old Sigmund needed desperately to get laid.”

  I smiled; not for the reason he thought. A professional man who has been bitten by the competitive bug is already sniffing at the lure.

  “A man struggling hard to avoid bankruptcy,” I said, “whose marriage is in trouble because of an affair; could that make him suicidal?”

  “In some cases, yes …”

  I jumped in ahead of the but with waders on. “So his life can be said to be threatened.”

  He shook his head, trying to spit out the hook. “You speak as if the situations were simultaneous, when in fact six months—” His pleasant expression deserted him at last.

  A hit.

  He cleared his throat, leaned forward, and tipped a column of ash into the big glass tray, nodding, as if in approval of the perfect cylinder. “It’s a pity you haven’t a medical degree, Mr. Walker. I could use you on my staff.”

  “I can’t even fix a toaster.” I pretended to consult my notebook while he reassembled the elements of his professional imperturbability. If I rubbed it in now I’d lose him for good. It was enough to know that Catalin had felt sufficiently guilty over his fling with Vesta Mannering to confide it to his analyst half a year after the fact. That took him out of the casual philanderer category. I’d won myself a free game, and to hell with the angling metaphor. I was still seasick from the ferry.

  “I guess the bonus question is does a Walter Mitty have it in him to become a Don Quixote? Can a dreamer be a doer?”

  “Most definitely. That’s the whole point of giving in to a fixation.”

  I looked up from the notebook. “There’s a point?”

  “Of course. It’s always a matter of choice. On that one thing, Freud and I are in total accord. Nothing happens by accident.”

  He parked his cigar and braced his hands on his fat thighs, warming to the subject. He had stamped out his own brief flare of inferiority. In his case it would always be a temporary aberration.

  “If you dislike the suit of clothes you’re wearing strongly enough, eventually you will change suits. If you hate yourself—totally, violently, with the deep self-loathing of the true paranoid schizophrenic—you will become another person. Not just think. Become.”

  I was looking at my own double reflection on the surface of his glasses. It seemed to me one of the images was distorted. “We’re talking Jekyll and Hyde.”

  “Robert Louis Stevenson was a thinker ahead of his time. A psychosis, Mr. Walker, is like a drug. Indulge in it, and your personality changes. Your dress, bearing—even such benchmarks as the set of your features and the timbre of your voice—will be altered nearly beyond recognition. Any estimation you may have formed of Mr. Catalin’s abilities and temperament based on information supplied by his wife and friends is useless. He may be smarter, stronger, and more athletic than the person you were hired to find. He will almost certainly be more dangerous.”

  Five

  I LEFT HIM, a pleasant-looking brown man in a green office, and stood on the front doorstep for a minute, replacing the nicotine in my system with the clear sharp sopping air off the lake and wondering what I was going to do with the next six hours and change. I wasn’t dressed for strolling on the beach and I didn’t care that much about seeing how fudge is made.

  “I guess Doc Ashraf didn’t find you batty enough to keep.”

  I turned my head. The flatbed wagon that had brought me there was drawn up down the block, the ponytailed driver in the Regency get-up lounging sideways on the seat with his stovepipe hat on the back of his head and one silver-buckled shoe propped up on the whipsocket. He was munching on a Clark bar.

  I said, “I guess that cargo’s still gathering barnacles on the dock.”

  “Zebra mussels, actually. They’re getting to be a bitch: choking out all the other marine life, snagging the inlets. We’ll get rid of them someday. Then flocks of giant boat-eating seagulls will fly up from Brazil or someplace like that and screw up the fishing. We go from crisis to crisis here. But at least we ain’t got Democrats. I’m on a sugar break. Want some?” He held up the remaining half of the candy bar.

  I shook my head, but the suggestion had started my stomach juices going. “Anyplace around here a fellow can get lunch without hocking an heirloom?”

  “I could eat too. Hop aboard.” He took his foot off the whipsocket.

  In a little while he trotted the horses up a hill and drew rein in front of a colonnaded porch the length of the Queen Mary. A double row of windows with green shutters and a lookout tower overlooked the straits, where a long hog-nosed ore carrier was grunting its way along the channel from Lake Michigan, bound for the steel-rolling mills in Detroit and Cleveland. Old Glory fluttered from staffs on the porch railing and a hundred or so people in white duck trousers and pastel frocks strolled its red-carpeted length, look
ing like no more than half a dozen, spread out as they were along that great expanse.

  “I said I wanted to hang on to my watch,” I said. “This is the Grand Hotel.”

  “I know. I used to climb on the roof.”

  They charged you just to step onto the porch; it was the longest in the world, the sign said, and your life wasn’t complete until you’d walked it. The fellow who took the money, a distinguished-looking black in his fifties in a red coat and white gloves, glanced at my companion and waved us on through.

  “Stab in the dark,” I said as we whisked past the line waiting inside for a table. “You’re the governor’s bastard son.”

  “Close. Hi, Henry. Snake pit taken?”

  The man behind the reservation desk, also black and edging into old age in the same uniform, smiled, but only with his eyes. “Hello, Tommy. No, today I’m feeling kindly toward my fellow creatures. Does your friend have any objection to crab cakes?”

  I said I didn’t. There must have been a bright answer to that one, but I couldn’t find it.

  Tommy led the way unassisted to a table the size of a corn plaster, jammed between the bandstand and the swinging doors to the kitchen. We were almost behind the backdrop. My view of the entertainment was blocked by an amplifier as big as a refrigerator.

  “Nothing to see anyway.” My companion took off his hat and stuck it under his chair. “They don’t play till dinner, and then you can’t hear your fork hit your plate.”