“If I had, would you have come clean?”
She gestured with her cigarette. “If I didn’t think it was your business I’d have refused to answer. I only act when I’m paid.”
“Why was Webb driving Catalin’s car?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t know he was until you told me just now. Robinette didn’t say why he thought Leo was Neil. Maybe he borrowed it.”
“If Catalin loaned it to him, it means they saw each other after Catalin went missing. I asked Webb about his partner’s car specifically. He said it wasn’t in the company lot. He didn’t say he’s the one who drove it away from there.”
“I hope he’s got a good explanation when you ask him about it. I need the work.” When I said nothing, she looked at me. “What are you staring at? In your line you must meet a lot of determined survivors.”
“So that’s what you call it.”
“I don’t have to justify myself to anyone,” she snarled. “Talent’s the smallest part of the equation in my business. The rest is luck. I can’t make luck, but if it’s out there groping around in the dark I can damn well turn on a light.”
I snapped my filter end at the handicapped symbol stenciled on the wall of the building, scoring a bull’s-eye in the center of the wheel of the wheelchair. “I wonder if you’re as hardboiled as you like to make out. And if you are, I wonder why Catalin didn’t run to you first thing after he hopped the fence this time. You’re made to order for the scenario he’s looking for: the femme fatale, cold as a polar cap and tougher than old deviled eggs.”
“What can I say? If he did I wouldn’t need to keep time with Leo. At least Neil has a heart. Whatever his partner’s using for one is due back at the prop department at Gilda.”
“You’re sure it’s you he wants?”
“Thanks for the compliment.”
“Beautiful women need compliments like Scrooge McDuck needs a bank loan. Two years after you left Gilda, Webb comes to you with a script in one hand and his hormones in the other. Why now, just after his partner disappeared? He didn’t by any chance, say, in a moment of passion, ask you about the ninety-two thousand?”
She opened her door. “Break’s over. I’m sick of hearing about that damn money. If I knew where it was I’d turn it over to the cops just to get everyone off my back.”
I stayed where I was. “Don’t go back and take it out on the customers. The question had to be asked.”
“Well, he didn’t say anything about the money, or anything else I didn’t already tell you. Not counting what I won’t tell you. I may bed anything that moves for a leg up, but I don’t discuss the details.”
“You’ll never get anywhere with that attitude. What will you tell your ghost writer at memoir time?”
After a pause she decided to smile. I grinned back. She let go of the door handle and slid closer.
“So you think I’m beautiful?”
“It was a statement. Not a pickup line.”
“I’ve got a bump on my nose.” She touched it. “I hit a curb and took a flyer over the handlebars when I was ten. My mother was furious. She thought I’d ruined any chance I ever had at a career. I made an appointment once to have it fixed, but I chickened out.”
“Anyone can order a nose from the catalogue. Garbo had big feet.”
She touched the more obvious bump on my nose. “What happened to yours?”
“I asked a detective a personal question.”
She drew back in a hurry. “Excuse, please. I didn’t realize I was trying to seduce an apostle.”
“Is that what you were trying to do?”
She stabbed out her cigarette in the dashboard tray. “Well, I didn’t put my weight behind it.”
“I don’t have a script to offer.”
“I don’t work on the career all the time.” She got out. “Lock it up when you leave, okay? This car’s third on the thieves’ list this year.”
“You ought to get the Club.”
“What I ought to do is trade it in on something more quiet. But I agreed to hang on to it so Ted wouldn’t contest the divorce. He wants to buy it from me when he gets out.”
I said, “I ran into a left jab.”
She had turned to slam the door. Now she turned back and leaned down to look in at me. “What?”
“It was my fifteenth fight in college. He feinted with a right cross, then nailed me with his left. When I came out of the anesthetic I decided not to go into boxing.”
She smiled again and pushed the door shut.
I smoked another Winston. Then I got out and walked down the line of cars to where Phil Musuraca was sitting behind the wheel of his big Buick Invicta. The motor was running. The loose compressor belt on the air conditioner squealed like rats in an Osterizer. When he looked at me over his USA Today I made a rotating motion with my right hand. He folded the paper and cranked down the window on his side. The cloud of Old Spice that puffed out on the rush of cold air nearly knocked me over.
“What.” His big face all but filled the opening. His nose was all over the place, but there hadn’t been much swelling.
“I’m curious,” I said. “What do you do when your bladder’s full?”
“I got me a wide-mouth jar. What do you?”
“Coffee can. How much do you know about a fence in Flatrock named Ernie Fishman?”
“I know he’s dead.”
“I could get that from the obits. What else?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Right. Like you’re any closer to that ninety-two grand than you were three days ago.”
His eyes slid right and left under the shelf of his single brow like the bubble in a carpenter’s level. “You talking partners?”
“This case is breaking. If it breaks off in two directions I’m going to need a leg man. I’m guessing you’ve seen enough of parking lots and brick walls for a while.”
“Fifty-fifty?”
“Sure.”
His eyes fixed in the center. “You agreed to that mighty quick.”
I leaned against his doorpost. I could feel the heat of the metal through my suitcoat. “You don’t trust anyone, do you, Phil?”
“The last person I trusted was my mother. She left me with an IRS debt. It took me ten years to pay it off.”
“Meanwhile, not trusting anybody has got you your own detective agency, a company car, and state-of-the-art sanitary facilities.”
“What’ve you got, Rockefeller?”
“Oh, but I’m honest. That’s a whole different set of delusions. What have you got to lose? If I get to the money first you can always swipe it.”
I could hear his brain running as easily as the big engine under the hood. After a moment he turned off the key. “I sold Fishman some stuff from time to time,” he said. “Clients got a way of being broke when you hand them your bill. Sometimes you have to take it out in merchandise.”
“What did he deal in?”
“What didn’t he? Radios, coins, toaster ovens, luggage, rocks—”
“Diamonds?”
“Sure, diamonds. What other kind of rocks is there?”
I got out a cigarette, then thought better of it and put it back. The smoke from the last was still scraping the walls of my empty stomach. “Phil, do you ever read anything besides that cheesy newspaper?”
“You mean like Sports Illustrated?”
“No. Books.”
He shook his head. “They ain’t big enough to duck behind when your tail turns around.”
“You might give one a hard look sometime when you’re not working. Edgar Allan Poe has a lot to say to guys in our profession.”
“How many people is that?”
“Just one.” I straightened up and slapped the roof of the car. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Bring that guy Poe. He sounds like he’s smarter than you.”
Judy Yin clittered her coral nails on the glazed top of her reception desk, which was as much agitation as she would ever show wit
hin the confines of Gilda Productions. Today she wore a cranberry silk blazer over a green jumpsuit, but the ivory mask was the same as on my first visit. Her page boy gleamed like polished anthracite.
“As I told you over the telephone, Mr. Webb left for Los Angeles this morning,” she said. “I don’t expect him back before Thursday.”
“That was last week’s excuse. Tell him it’s about Vesta Mannering.”
“That’s what it was about last week.”
“Then it was about Vesta and Neil Catalin. Now it’s about Vesta and Leo Webb. You know, like Bewitched: same Samantha, different Darrin. Are you going to buzz him, or do I walk in and catch him fighting with Endora?”
“I’m going to buzz Security if you aren’t out in the hall in thirty seconds.”
“Security frightens the hell out of me in this town,” I said. “I’ve seen what they’ll take in the police department. What they won’t take I wouldn’t send out for a pizza. Buzz them, by all means. Leo and I will be waiting for them in his office.”
“You can’t—”
I didn’t wait for the rest. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know where she was going. I swept down the interior corridor, found Webb’s door unlocked, and went in. It took me a second to realize he wasn’t there. He could have been hiding behind the bric-a-brac.
“Now will you go?” said Judy Yin from the doorway.
I turned around faster than she expected, before she had time to close her Asian features. She was as surprised as I was to find the room unoccupied.
Nineteen
THE AUDITORIUM AT THE Detroit Institute of Arts belonged to the new addition behind the original building, whose marble Italian Renaissance façade went with the blank gray granite of the upstart section like a carved cherub on the wall of a penitentiary. I parked on John R a good hour before the feature was scheduled to run, bought a ticket for one of the cheap seats located in the next county, and admired the glassed posters in the lobby, selected from among Austin Alt’s best films and those of his mentors from the old Hollywood in honor of the world premiere of Alt’s new picture next Friday at the Fox Theater. Here among the faux marble walls and hollow plaster columns, George Raft rubbed shoulders with Kevin Costner, Veronica Lake glared through her peek-a-boo bang at Kim Basinger, and John Wayne reached back to hurl a hand grenade across the concession stand at Sony International. The advertising for the newer films looked mechanical and cheerless against the old; but then I’d been brought up on fresh-popped corn served with real butter in motion-picture palaces dripping with gargoyles and red velvet, not greasy bits of Styrofoam scooped from plastic trash bags in the concrete bunker at the end of the mall: a dinosaur at forty-three.
For the first twenty minutes I had the place all to myself except for the ticket-taker, a pair of ushers, male and female, in crimson blazers, and a security guard who looked like a steelworker in a rented tuxedo, eyeing me as if I might walk off with one of the wall sconces. Then customers began to file in, longtime patrons in couples wearing suits and dresses, movie buffs in singles in jeans and suspenders, and film students in gaggles dressed for the Bleeding Eardrums Tour of the Screaming Graceless Zombies; you could tell the orchestra seats from the bleachers at a glance. Nobody who looked like Neil Catalin turned up in the first wave. At ten minutes to showtime, Gay Catalin came in, had her ticket torn in half, and glanced my way long enough to see me shake my head, then went on through the double doors into the auditorium. She had on a yellow cocktail dress, white shoes and purse, and amber beads on a string around her neck.
“I see you took my advice.”
A second went by before I placed the bearded face above the T-shirt and worn sportcoat. It seemed as if a lot more than eighty hours had passed since I’d discussed the psychology of film noir with Asa Portman in the chalky air of a lecture hall at the University of Michigan. He was the one who had first told me about the DIA film festival and upcoming reception to celebrate the Alt premiere at the Fox.
“I always take advice when it means going to the movies.” I shook his hand. “Are you working?”
“I’m strictly here as a fan. Any sign of your missing man?”
“Not yet.”
“If he misses this series he’s no buff. Are you sure he’s still in this area?”
“He may have committed a murder here in town over the weekend.”
He stroked his beard. Men who wore them could never let them alone. “That’s out of character for a noir hero. Unless it was self-defense?”
“Doesn’t look like it.” I bent a little to peer under the floppy brim of a passing hat. The face belonged to an old woman.
“As a rule identity cases become violent when their delusion is threatened. If someone calls them by their true name they’ll just ignore it, but if they’re barraged with questions that challenge their logic, anything can happen.”
“You said reality could shake him out of it.”
“The transition is never smooth. Having to be born all over again into a world he’s already rejected as unsatisfactory is painful as hell. He might strike out just to preserve the status quo.”
“This one struck out five times with a pistol.”
He stopped fooling with his whiskers. “That’s a serious case.”
“I figured that out and I don’t even have a Ph.D.”
“I don’t mean it that way. I mean if he’s that deep into his persona, the movies are no longer his escape; quite the opposite. Whatever’s left of what he was will avoid them just to keep from asking himself why those actors on the screen are imitating him. From there it’s a short hop to asking himself why he’s imitating them. If he’s willing to commit murder to duck that one, you couldn’t drag him into this building with a rope.”
“So this noir character he’s become didn’t kill anyone. Walter Mitty did, to protect Don Quixote.”
“One of the most dangerous animals in the world is a rabbit in a corner.”
The last straggler had gone in. I looked at my watch. One minute to showtime. “This rabbit made an appointment to meet his wife at the old Michigan Theater the night of the murder. When she gave up waiting and went back to her car, she found a ticket to this screening clipped to her windshield. Why would he do that if he has no intention of showing up?”
“You’re a detective,” Portman said. “You’ve seen your share of these films. When A arranges to meet B at a certain place and time and A doesn’t show, what’s obvious?”
“A knows where B is at that time.”
He spread his hands.
“The last time he stood her up, someone got killed,” I said. “If he suspected she’d hired a detective to look for him, he might have thought I’d go with her to the meet. She said she tried to call me, but I was in Iroquois Heights, interviewing her husband’s mistress. Now all I have to work out is who he’s planning to kill this time while I’m out of the way.”
The lights went off and on three times. It was Portman’s turn to check his watch. “Well, you’ve got two and a half hours to do it. The picture’s only ninety minutes, but they’ve stuck in an intermission followed by a short feature to bring the event closer to one of Austin Alt’s bladder-bursting epics.”
“I’ll stay out here, in case he shows up after all.”
“You can see the whole auditorium from my seat. It’s a cheapie; I’m just a poor educator. There are bound to be plenty of vacancies in the section. You might as well enjoy the show while you’re waiting.”
“I saw it last week on video.”
“Then you didn’t see it at all. Come on.”
The room was already dark, lit only by the countdown taking place on the big screen at the far end. We groped our way to a pair of seats in the rear corner. The room smelled of popcorn and orange soda, just like the theaters of old.
Portman was right: I hadn’t seen Pitfall. On a full-size screen, before an audience, the film unfolded like a sinister flower that had been preserved between the pages of a book neglected
for nearly fifty years. The crisp black-and-white images shimmered with a silvery sheen, the dialogue crackled, the orchestral score throbbed beneath the suspense scenes like an escalating pulse and soared over the action like exploding rockets, just as it must have when postwar crowds bought out the showings in 1948. Dick Powell, tight-jawed, with jaded eyes and lips incapable of curving into a smile, might have been any one of thousands of disillusioned American GIs trying to accustom themselves to civilian clothes and peaceful ways in the wake of Hiroshima and the Fall of Berlin. Pretty, level-headed Jane Wyatt, a decade before her similar turn as the female half of the nuclear parents on Father Knows Best, represented all the faithful, nurturing women of the Home Front. Lizabeth Scott, husky-voiced and slinky, stood for the danger that tempted all those returning veterans away from the predictable and sedate. Hulking, villainous Raymond Burr was the epitome of the Great Evil they thought they had destroyed after four bloody years in Europe and the South Pacific, only to find it waiting for them at home, draped in a thousand guises, each far more subtle and malevolent than anything in jackboots and a Tiger tank. The narrative spoke to the world after Watergate and Vietnam, sunk in the dreary morass of political correctness and trapped in a society divided along lines racial, sexual, philosophical, dogmatic, and religious, exactly as it had spoken to a world suddenly deprived of an obvious, conveniently foreign enemy and forced to look to itself for a substitute; and if the audience with whom I shared the experience snickered at the cornball wisecracks and outmoded fashions, they flinched when Burr sucker-punched Powell in the shadow of Powell’s own suburban garage and gasped when Powell shot a man dead for the first time in his life, crossing the line into Burr’s world, just as that earlier audience had under Truman.
At first glance it was just another sordid love triangle: bored, married insurance agent, seductive model, unscrupulous private eye. At second glance it was about the death of our collective colonial innocence. Although it ended with the bad guy subdued and the good guy still standing, it did not end happily, but uncertainly, and with the nagging conviction that things would never again be as they had been. When the lights came up, so did the applause.
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