Never Street (19 page)

“Back at Vesta’s. I’ll hoof it.”

Thaler said, “I’ll give you a lift. I’ve got my personal car. We came separately.”

“Sorry to hear it. I’m still broken up over Sonny and Cher.”

“Just let’s go.”

I stood. “How married are you to that theory?” I asked Alderdyce.

“Enough to go to bed with it. The ring comes later. It fits the facts.”

“Not all of them. Did the locals turn Webb’s car?”

“Blue Taurus, this year’s model. Registration’s his. They found it around the corner. Did you expect him to try that gag with Catalin’s car?”

“He was dumb. Dumb enough anyway to try to jazz up a simple murder. He wasn’t nuts. The car wasn’t on every Detroit cop’s pullover sheet the first time. If he was there just to see Vesta, why didn’t he park in the apartment house lot like any other honest lecher? Why take pains to park it out of sight unless he didn’t want whoever might be watching to identify the car as his?”

“Don’t tangle this up with one of Catalin’s old movies, no matter how much it may look like one. Not everything ties up at the end with a granny knot. Maybe there are pigeons on the roof and he didn’t want to have to stop at a car wash after midnight.”

“Maybe,” I said. “And maybe Catalin grew six inches since he went underground. That’s how much taller the guy I swapped lead with was than the description Gay Catalin gave me of her husband.”

“Too bad you aren’t a better shot. If he’d bled some DNA we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“That’s the kind of thinking that’s going to make you chief.”

The skin of his face, already the deep blue-black of a Masai warrior, darkened further with congested blood. “Get him the fuck out of here before I smear him all over the walls,” he told the lieutenant.

Thaler and I left.

On the ground floor I asked about my Luger. The desk sergeant, forty pounds overweight with broken vessels in his cheeks, consulted his property sheet and told me they were holding it for a registration check. That meant I’d seen the last of it until it turned up as evidence in my trial for possession of an unregistered handgun.

Thaler drove a three-quarter-ton black Bronco, a surprise. I’d expected something small and fuel-injected. She drove with both hands on the wheel, but she wasn’t afraid of it. She worked the clutch as if her stroller had been equipped with four on the floor.

“That wasn’t the best thing you could have said, about making chief,” she said. “John had a shot at commander when the city administration changed. He was in line five years ago, but he and the old chief hated each other’s guts. Now the new chief thinks he was the old chief’s pet, along with all the others who were up for promotion. There’s talk of bumping him over to Auto Recovery. Climbing any higher than sergeant in this department is a forty-hour pain in the butt.”

“Maybe the change isn’t such a bad idea. It’s hard to make a carjacking look like bike theft.”

“I thought you two were friends.”

“I was friendly with a detective lieutenant. I don’t know the inspector from Richard Nixon.”

“What makes your theory any better than his?”

“They’re both full of holes. The difference is I’m concerned about plugging up mine.”

The Bronco wanted to hydroplane on a puddle between two flooded storm drains. Thaler turned into the skid and had it straight in a second. “Last time I looked there were sixteen open homicides on the platter downtown. How many are you working on, Columbo?”

“Homicide’s your job. I’m just looking for Neil Catalin.”

“So are we.”

She let me off at the apartment house, where a uniform guarding the yellow police tape demanded to see identification, checked it against his notebook, and let me get into my car and drive away. Like a lot of the cops there he was ten years too old for his officer’s rank: The IHPD was where you went when the department you worked for busted you out for splitting one skull too many in interrogation, with your pension five years off.

Dull gray steel had begun to wear through the black velour over metropolitan Detroit. The 4:00 a.m. shift at the auto plants was starting to pull in traffic from the suburbs; I had to wait for a break before turning into the street. While I was waiting I noticed a rectangular patch of dry pavement next to the curb, where a car had parked before the rain and pulled out after it stopped. If it had been there earlier I hadn’t noticed it, coming in hard in darkness, looking for Leo Webb. It wasn’t the car I’d heard roaring away after the shooting. That had been parked on the other side of the block.

I thought about it, and when I swung out of the driveway I knew I wasn’t going to bed, not yet.

A
CCORDING TO THE DIRECTORY
I kept in the car, Phil Musuraca operated out of an address on Furlough Street, a healthy hike from Iroquois Heights’ major tax base. There was no home listing, so I expected a long wait before he reported to work. I figured I could toss his files for entertainment.

The number belonged to a twenty-four-hour Chinese restaurant with a plaster pagoda over the entrance. A hand-lettered sign taped to the glass door read RING AFTER 12 P.M. The time mistake was common enough to Occidentals, so I forgave them. The button I pushed, with exposed wires disappearing through the crack between the door and the frame, gave back a phlegmy buzz. Well before the end of the Year of the Pig an ancient Chinese crept up to the door, peered, threw a dead bolt, and backed away, leaving me to open the door for myself.

The old man did not belong to the same world as Albert Chung, the doctor from the Wayne County Coroner’s office who had examined Brian Elwood’s corpse, or Judy Yin, the receptionist at Gilda Productions. Less than five feet tall, he had white hair like streaks of chalk on a scalp the color and texture of an old scroll and a wisp of transparent beard that stirred in the slight current of air. He wore a black pullover shirt outside loose white slacks and linen slippers with crepe soles; he wouldn’t have looked out of place in a pigtail and mandarin’s cap.

He waited for me to speak. He would have gone on waiting, without moving or changing expressions, while dust layered his stooped shoulders and the candles on the tables behind him guttered and died and grew as cold as jade.

“Musuraca.” I traced a broad circle in front of me with my index fingers.

“In back, taking a snooze.”

His accent was pure Great Lakes. I crossed the room and pushed through a swinging door into a small kitchen smelling of hot grease and soy sauce, where a Buddha in a stained white apron and a paper chef’s hat sat on a stool reading a Chinese newspaper. He looked up and jerked his chins in the direction of a door in back. I went through that and found myself in a room not much larger than the kitchen, with a metal-shaded bulb hanging straight down from the naked rafters and a gray steel desk shoved up against the only wall that wasn’t covered by steel utility shelves to the ceiling. A fax machine shared the desk with overflow from the shelves, cardboard cartons and food cans the size of wastebaskets. While I was standing there, something snapped in a dark corner, followed by a frenzied squealing and then silence. I hoped that wasn’t tomorrow’s special.

The place looked uninhabited, but the old Chinese was too picturesque to be a liar. A partition consisting of four black-painted metal file cabinets, not quite old enough to qualify as antiques, isolated the corner nearest the desk. I walked around it into the middle of a rank humid odor, as in a kennel at the pound, if the animals used Old Spice. The source of it sprawled in all his two hundred sixty pounds across a rollaway bed that had come over with Leif the Lucky. Leif had inherited it from Eric the Red, who had won it in a crap game from Pepin the Short. He was fully clothed; even his tie was knotted as tight as packing cord. His porkpie hat rested on his nose.

There was a long moment during which I thought I’d found another corpse. Then his mouth dumped open and a ratcheting snore made the big cans vibrate on their shelves. I hadn’t improved things when I’d flattened his nose. This went on for a while. When he paused again, the quiet hurt my ears.

It was a cozy enough corner for a fat bachelor. He had commandeered a set of shelves for his toiletries: a squashed tube of Ultrabrite, toothbrush in a moldy glass, disposable razor, can of Barbasol, an assortment of suppositories still in the foil like nasty little Hershey’s Kisses. Hemorrhoids would be a fact of life for a fixture like Phil. No deodorant or mouthwash, but the six cases of his favorite aftershave covered that. It took a tough breed of odor-causing bacteria to swim upstream through the fumes.

One of the file cabinets would hold his shorts and socks and underwear. He would wash and relieve himself in the restaurant men’s room, and he could live on what came back from the tables. The pay telephone near the entrance was as good as any for conducting business, as long as his quarters held out. All the comforts of a mansion in Grosse Pointe and an office in Birmingham, and none of the overhead, except whatever he slipped the owner for the space and maybe the local zoning inspector to look the other way.

No wonder he preferred to spend most of his time in his car.

The black composition butt of his shiny automatic stuck out from under the pillow where his head lay. I slid it out slowly, removed the clip from the handle, worked the slide to empty the chamber, and sprang the cartridges from the clip. Then I put it back together and returned it. He let out a fetid gust then, and took in a draft with a noise like a kid dragging a stick along the iron spikes in a cemetery fence. I waited until the next pause, then reached into an open case for one of the squat white bottles with a schooner printed on it. I pulled the stopper, sniffed, and recoiled from the citrus-and-alcohol stench.

Perfect.

Just then he exhaled. I leaned across the bed and held the bottle to his nose as he breathed in.

He snorted, choked, sputtered, and jackknifed into a sitting position, nearly knocking the bottle from my grip. His hat slid off his face and he swiveled his head, eyes bulging, mouth working. When he realized he wasn’t alone he snatched up his hat and plopped it on top of his bald head, then went for the automatic under his pillow. His reflexes were more than respectable, but I questioned the order.

“Don’t shoot,” I said. “I may have saved your life.”

“What?” His gaze flicked down to the bottle in my hand, clouded slightly. He’d expected something else. He squinted back up at my face through a network of swollen veins. That checked with the stink of sour mash that clung to his clothes. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Amos Walker. We met before. You probably just didn’t recognize me without your hat on.”

“Oh, yeah.” The gun stayed on me. “What’s this horseshit about saving my life?”

“That sleep apnea can kill you. One of these times you’ll stop breathing and forget to start back up.”

“Oh, that. Horseshit. My wife used to hook me up to this electronic gizmo that set off a bell every time I quit breathing.”

“What happened?”

“I gave it to her in the settlement. What time is it?”

“Why, you don’t want to miss your favorite show on the TV you don’t have? Let’s talk about what happened last night at Vesta’s.”

“Go to hell.”

“How come you were staked out in front of her place when she was at work?”

“Fuck you.”

“Who’d you see come barreling out her apartment window after the shooting stopped?”

His face bunched up like bubble wrap. He wasn’t pretending he didn’t know what I was talking about; he had simply run out of sophisticated rejoinders. After a moment he came up with a dandy.

“Go to hell.”

I raised my brows. “You mean this isn’t it?”

“I can shoot you right now for busting into my place.”

“You’ll need these.” I opened my left hand. The cartridges fell to the floor and scattered like peanuts in the shell.

He scowled, pointed the Sig-Sauer at a can of water chestnuts big enough to feed Beijing, and snapped the hammer on the empty chamber. “Aw, shit.” He flipped it onto the tangled bedcovers.

I put down the bottle of aftershave and looked around. “Nice hole. Southwest exposure and all the moo goo gai pan you can eat. Where’s the secretary I talked to when I dialed your number on the telephone in Neil Catalin’s office?”

“I pay—
paid
a high school girl to answer the phone during business hours. She quit yesterday. Some horseshit about minimum wage.”

“Enough small talk. How come you were staked out in front of Vesta’s place when she was at work?”

“Jesus Christ.” He patted his pockets.

I let out some air. “Phil, don’t make me take away that twenty-two again. This time it’ll be the jaw. You’ll be sucking your Crab Rangoon through a glass straw.”

“I ain’t got it on me. I’m looking for Pepto tablets. I told you before I got a sour gut.”

“Things are tough all over. I haven’t been to bed since Sunday. Let’s skip the next part. You know: I ask you again why you were watching Vesta’s apartment instead of Vesta, you say you weren’t within a mile of the place, I kick out your teeth and start all over. I saw your car,” I lied. “I know it was yours.
American Graffiti
isn’t in town.”

“I went to the library yesterday. I borrowed a book.”

“How come hell froze over and nobody told me?”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. What book?”

“A bunch of stories and poims by that Poe guy you told me about.”

“Did you read it?”

“Part of it. Weird shit. What was this guy on, anyway?”

“Just about everything, from what I heard. Did you get to ‘The Purloined Letter’?”

“Yeah. That’s just about the only one I liked, except for the one where that guy bricked up this major pain in the ass in his basement. The letter story’s the one you were talking about, right? All those guys running around looking for this thing that was right there in front of them the whole time.”

“That’s the one.” I waited. I was a patient teacher waiting for the student at the bottom of the curve to see the dawn. I realized I liked Phil Musuraca in a distant-relative kind of way, like Dr. Leakey and Zinjanthropus.