Sugartown: An Amos Walker Mystery (Book Five)
Page 13
There was only one window in the kitchen, a small one in the north wall with a checked dishtowel tacked over it, leaving the room in gray gloom. I tried the switch on the wall next to the door but no lights came on. The linoleum was badly scuffed, and when I stepped forward my toe kicked a loose tile and it slid a few inches. There were a bare table and some chairs and an unplugged refrigerator with a sofa cushion propping its door open from inside to keep it from growing mold while it thawed. I put a hand inside and touched the inner wall. It was cool but not cold and dry as the inside of a refrigerator that’s been turned off for a while.
The dining room contained another table and chairs and a china cabinet with bric-a-brac behind dusty glass. There was a telephone stand but no telephone and a square hole in the wall over the baseboard where the box had been removed. After that came a living room with a worn rug and sheets thrown over the furniture. Just for the hell of it I lifted the sheets and looked underneath. I found the sofa that belonged to the cushion in the refrigerator. Another door opened on a steep bare staircase leading up to two empty bedrooms and a bathroom growing chalky mold in the bottom of the tub. I tried a faucet. It sucked air with a wheezing noise like an old man in an oxygen tent. I turned it off and went back downstairs.
The kitchen had another, narrower door in the wall next to the sink, held shut by a small bolt. I slid it back. Household tools on the wall over a landing and warped wooden stairs going down into blackness. I struck a match and started down, testing each step with a toe before trusting my weight to it. Nine steps down the glow of the tiny flame touched the scuffed sole of a man’s slipper.
I blew out the match, which was burning down close to my fingers, struck another, and folding back the cover on the matchbook, set fire to the others. They flared bright white and burned down to yellow. The slipper was attached to a foot in a ribbed brown sock and beyond that was a patch of pale hairless skin and then a dark pantsleg and another leg bent under that and a ring of white shirt and a dark blue sweater with a roll collar and a head of white hair lying on its side on an earthen floor. One eye glistened in the wavering light, bright as a wet marble and seeing just as much.
He was sprawled head down over the bottom five steps with the upper third of his body on the hardpack dirt floor of the basement. Bracing my back against the cut stone of the building’s foundation and holding the burning matchbook out like a torch, I stepped over him to the base of the stairs and bent down to feel the big artery on the side of his neck. He wasn’t using it today. But his flesh was still warm and the scalp showing through the parted strands of his hair was as pink as in his picture on the bureau in the bedroom of the house next door.
I dropped the matchbook and stamped out the flame.
There was a little light in the basement itself, sliding gray as a toad’s belly through the thick dirty glass of a rectangular window high in the stone foundation wall on the far end of the house. It was only a half-cellar, just big enough for an aging oil furnace like a steel octopus whose overhead duct-tentacles wouldn’t let me stand up straight and some stored junk in dusty cartons and more objects under sheets. I nudged my hat to the back of my head and sat down on a carton full of old National Geographies and walked a Winston back and forth across the back of my right hand and tried to catch the dead man’s eye.
“Mr. Woldanski, what are you doing lying with a broken neck in the basement of a house not your own?”
He didn’t answer. He wouldn’t even meet my gaze. His small neat white moustache looked as artificial as wax fruit. I stuck the cigarette in the corner of my mouth, patted my pockets for matches, then remembered and let it droop. I thought. I thought about an old woman whose grandson turns out to be dead just about the time she starts looking for him and I thought about an old man who may or may not know what became of a silver cross the old woman would like returned, and who gets dead just about the time someone makes up his mind to ask him about it. I thought about people who hit screen doors with other people’s faces and don’t stop to apologize. Mostly I just sat there sucking on a cold filter tip, thinking that I saw more stiffs in my work than a mortician who gives green stamps.
I had enough of that finally and got up and walked around the tiny basement. I lifted a corner of one of the dusty sheets, braced myself for rats, and tugged it free. I looked at a gold candelabra with nine curved branches and a Star of David on top and at some painted plaster saints with gilt flaking off the hems of their gowns and a stack of painted icons in frames like those I had seen in Stash Leposava’s house, here standing on a rough shop table with a broken leg. I raised another sheet covering a pile of gold votive candlesticks and tiny silver crucifixes with chains attached. There was more of the same under the other sheets, paintings and carvings and ornaments in a holy motif. There were even a few glittering crescents and related Islamic items, although not many; their local market value wouldn’t be as great. No big silver crosses with blue and red stones and Cyrillic lettering on the back.
It all had the look of money and lots of it. John Woldanski might not have died of old age, but he had died rich. I replaced all the sheets.
After a while I stepped over the body again and went upstairs and out and used the telephone in the house next door to order some law.
18
TWO DETECTIVES NAMED KOWALSKI and Stamenoff got the squeal.
Stamenoff wasn’t as big as Toronto. He was six feet three inches of hard fat in a brown suit and wide necktie with a hula girl painted on it, heavy lids and puffy lips in a flat face with blue jowls. He never spoke where I could hear him. Kowalski was as far from him as they come, a slim loose redhead with Grecian curls, blue eyes without brows, and a rubber mouth smiling in a long square jaw like a brake pedal. His suit was just a suit. The little basement got very crowded with them and me and the body on the stairs and the uniforms who had come in answer to my call. I doubted that there had been that many people in it since it was dug.
When Kowalski was through with the uniforms he came over to where I was standing next to the sheet-covered items and took my hand in a small hot paw. “Rental heat, huh? You dress like it.”
I glanced down at my raincoat. “It’s that kind of day.”
Stamenoff got a pad out of his hip pocket and found a pencil and we got started. It didn’t take too long to tell with Martha Evancek left out. I didn’t touch on the search for Michael.
“This cross — valuable, is it?” Kowalski asked.
“Depends on what you call valuable,” I said. “Melted down it wouldn’t bring much, but a museum might pop for it if you caught them on a slow day. My client is offering five hundred dollars for its return.”
“Not exactly worth trashing a guy.”
“These days they knock you over for what’s in your teeth. But they don’t usually get cute for five yards, get an old man out of the house he lives in and shove him down the stairs of the place next door so it looks like an accident.”
“Maybe it was an accident,” Kowalski said. “Maybe you just surprised some of our local talent cleaning out Woldanski’s place. We got looters coming in from the suburbs since they started tacking city paper to front doors in this neighborhood.”
“Too much coincidence. Also his house is as neat as a bicycle clip and there’s cash in his wallet on the bureau. It plays like the killer walked him in here and did the job and then went back to carve away everything that didn’t fit the frame. Could be the job got done over there and the killer dragged the body here to make it look like he took a tumble coming to inspect his loot. But that’s a lot of trouble to go to and there was a bare chance he’d be seen, even in a neighborhood as empty as this.”
“You missed the license number?”
“I missed the car. I’d know its taillight anywhere.” I thought. “It had a standard transmission. I heard the gears change.”
“Swell. You get that, Dan? It was a stick.”
Stamenoff nodded without glancing up from his pad or speaking.
“It’s a thought. The doors to both houses were open when you got to them?”
“More or less.”
“More or less means what?”
“More or less means more or less,” I said. “You’re shouting down the wrong hole there. Everybody who could sign a B-and-E beef against me is spilled over those steps.”
“We don’t know yet that Woldanski owns this place.”
“I didn’t, until I saw what’s under those sheets.”
Kowalski looked hard at Stamenoff, who stopped writing and lifted the one covering the pile of candlesticks and crucifixes. Kowalski whistled.
I said, “Woldanski was a fence specializing in religious articles. You’ll have a file on him downtown. It looks like when he retired out of his shop on Trowbridge he moved his inventory here. There isn’t a lot of room for it in the house next door.”
“I don’t like that I don’t know who you’re working for,” said Kowalski. “I don’t like that more than I don’t like anything else about this one.”
“I’m in a confidential line of work. Like you. You don’t give up your snitches without a fight.”
“Yeah, and any night magistrate with a hard-on against cops can clink me for not sending mine over in open court. That works with doctors and lawyers and priests but you’re not any of those.”
I shrugged.
Kowalski scratched his long jaw. “Feed it to me again. What made you think of Woldanski?”
I fed it to him twice more. The second time was to see what holes showed. The third was just to remind me who was cop and who was suspect. In most murders the guy who calls the law is the guy who did it. It would be a statistic a cop like Kowalski would know and being a cop he would run with the statistics. He was back to asking the questions he’d asked the first time when the medical examiner came downstairs, followed by the fingerprint man and the photographer, as if they’d all arrived in the same car. We were jammed up against the walls now and Kowalski decided to adjourn to headquarters. He’d never looked at the body except to avoid tripping over it when he came in. Some of them don’t, and solve those cases that can be solved just as quickly as the boys who peer under the deceased’s fingernails and vacuum his pockets.
“You’re driving what?” Kowalski asked.
“Silver-gray Olds Omega,” I said. “It’s parked out front.”
“Keys.”
I hesitated, then took the ring out of my pocket and dropped it into his palm. He handed it to one of the uniforms and told him to follow us in my car. “You don’t want to leave it on this street after dark,” he said.
I said that sounded all right. I hoped the uniform wouldn’t find the Luger under the dash. Outside, Kowalski and I climbed into the back of a brown Pontiac and Stamenoff wedged himself under the wheel and we took off gently, no sirens or squealing tires. Real cops are dull.
Being a lieutenant, Kowalski had his own office in the detective bureau. It was a tight little room with a desk mounded over with file folders and pipe-smoking paraphernalia, a coffee maker on a yellow oak table, a three-drawer file cabinet, and cork walls tacked all over with curling color Polaroid shots of charred corpses in mangled cars with all the paint burned off and pieces of bodies caught in the limbs of trees. They reminded me a little of the death’s-head pictures of Martha Evancek’s late husband Michael in the back of her photo album. They were two of a kind, were Mrs. Evancek and Lieutenant Kowalski. He left me alone with Stamenoff while he went out to brief his detail. Stamenoff said nothing and stood at the window looking out into the squad room with his hands in his pants pockets jingling his keys and change. I found a pipe lighter on the desk and set fire to a cigarette. I finished that, lit another, and was looking at the pictures on the wall for the fifth or sixth time when the lieutenant returned.
“I took those when I was with County,” he said, picking up a black blob of bulldog pipe from the desk and opening and closing drawers. “These city cops go out on shootings and stabbings and they think they see it all. You haven’t until you’ve sponged a sixteen-year-old kid’s face off the tree he’s wrapped his little bomb around doing ninety-five on an icy curve with twelve beers under his belt.”
“What’s the gallery supposed to do, make men out of ’em?”
“No, that’s strictly for the punks we pull in on Open Intox. Pictures don’t work with police officers. The blood never comes out the right color, for one thing, and it’s just not the same as when you’re standing there in the middle of all that gasoline stink listening to some road patrol rookie tossing his crackers. Grabowska wants a piece of this one,” he told Stamenoff.
The other detective grunted and went on jingling his keys and change.
The juxtaposition threw me until I remembered what Howard Mayk had said about his arrival at the Evancek house nineteen years before. I must have smiled, because Kowalski said, “You know the skipper?”
“Just by reputation. I hear he’s got a glass stomach.”
“I wouldn’t give a nickel for a cop that didn’t lose at least one meal on the job. But there’s a limit. They called him Kid Puke around here until his last promotion.” He gave up looking in the drawers finally and turned the scuffed brown leather pouch on his desk inside-out to fill his pipe. Then he flipped away the empty pouch and tamped down the tobacco with a stained thumb and started the complicated business of getting it burning. I’ve always admired pipe-smokers for their patience, but that’s about all. At length he tossed the lighter back onto the desk and looked at me, puffing up thick gray clouds.
“Your story starts in the middle and quits before the end,” he said. “I still don’t know how you knew to look for Woldanski.”
“I’ve got a place just west of the city. You hear things.”
“I lived here all my life. I never heard of Woldanski.”
“Is that my fault?”
We stared at each other. I didn’t blame him; it sounded funny without Howard Mayk. But Mayk knew I was working for Martha Evancek.
We were still staring when the captain came in without knocking. He was younger than expected, about forty, with hair the color of wet sand, worn just long enough to cover the tops of his ears, and tan eyes with a curious dead kindness in them and a neat soft moustache that drooped a little over the corners of his mouth. He wore a sharp buff-colored suit that went with his eyes and hair and a red tie with a knot the size of a softball. He didn’t look at me until Kowalski introduced us, and then he might have been looking at a door. He didn’t offer to shake hands. “What’ve we got on the house?” he asked Kowalski.
“Fine, thanks,” I said. “And you?”
He looked at me again, differently. His lips were stuck in a perpetual pucker, as if he were always getting set to say something. “You don’t talk until I talk to you,” he said.
“Then do I get a biscuit?”
“I’ve got a man in the clerk’s office going through the plats,” Kowalski put in quickly, slapping me down with his eyes. “Woldanski looks to have had the run of the place if it wasn’t his.”
“So I heard. Get someone from Robbery in here.”
Kowalski glanced at Stamenoff, who left the office.
“When the M.E. gets through putzing around he’ll say Woldanski left us on account of a broken neck,” said the lieutenant. “He could have fallen, but it wasn’t all that far to fall and he almost had to be pushed to hit that hard. Walker might have surprised the guy that did it coming out of the old man’s house after either frisking the place or making everything look kosher. He didn’t get a good look at him. I’ve got uniforms turning the neighborhood for an eyeball, but the pickings are plenty lean.”
“Not lean enough,” Grabowska said. “The old man should have cleared out as soon as the property was condemned. We can’t protect them if they won’t obey the law.”
I said, “He had until the end of the mont
h. You owed him protection till then.”
He turned his mild dead eyes on me again and pursed his lips. “Communist, huh? You stand four-square against progress and finding jobs for people?”
“If it means turning other people out of homes they took jobs to pay for in the first place.”
“My kid sister’s husband’s out of work, Zorro. They’re living with his folks because he can’t afford any kind of house.”
“Why don’t you give him a job here?”
“You don’t just walk into police work. It takes a special breed.”
“Also a strong stomach,” I said.
He spun on Kowalski. “Anyone laugh?”
“Not me, skipper.”
Grabowska turned back, smoothed his moustache. “Who’s your client, Hot Wit?”
I smoked. He rubbed his hands.
“Withholding, is it? Maybe some time in soak will take the starch out.”
“I’ve been in jail, Captain,” I said. “I didn’t like it, but I was there long enough to find out you don’t die of it, and I’ll be out on a writ days before I feel like rattling my head against the bars to hear music.”
“Oh, tough guy. We see a lot of that. They come in that door hard as boiler plate but they don’t go out that way. They slink out like the yellow rats they are.”
I had to grin. “I saw this one,” I said. “Bugs ties a knot in Elmer’s shotgun in the end and he blows his face off.”
Kowalski snorted. Grabowska looked at him quickly. The lieutenant coughed and took his pipe out of his mouth and made a face and waved smoke from in front of it.
Stamenoff returned then, with someone I recognized. It was a tall, slender black man, loose-jointed like Kowalski, in patched and faded denims and a black T-shirt. He had his officer’s ID pinned to the front of his ragged jacket, but I knew the big Afro and the way his cold cigarette dribbled from one corner of his mouth. He was one of the two men I had spoken with in John Woldanski’s old shop on Trowbridge. He looked at me sleepily, without showing surprise.