Never Street (30 page)

After a short silence Vesta said, “So does this kind of thing happen to you often?”

“I’m pretty sure not. I’d remember if I ever had another fight on top of a skyscraper.”

“You know what I mean.”

“It’s a little easier for a private investigator in this state to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon than it is for an orthodontist.”

“But you must like that part of it. Orthodontists charge ten times more for their services.”

“It evens out. I don’t have to wear a paper coat.”

She was looking at me now. “I didn’t notice it before. You and Neil are a lot alike. The only difference is you’re actually leading the life he can only dream about. You get a buzz out of all this derring-do.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Neil,” I said.

“Don’t change the subject.”

I slid into the outside lane to pass a truck. “I was an M.P. stateside after my tour in Cambodia. When I was discharged I joined the police department here, but that didn’t take. This did.”

“So it doesn’t scare you.”

“Only when I might get killed.”

“How often is that?”

“Not as often as in the movies. A little more often than people think who are always saying it’s not like the movies. What about acting?”

“Does it scare me? Only when I might forget my lines.”

“How often is that?”

She looked out her window. “Now you’re making fun of me. Flopping on your face on a soundstage isn’t the same as being thrown off a building.”

“I didn’t say it was. No two jobs have less in common than actor and detective.”

We were quiet for a couple of miles. Then she said, “I do, though.”

“Do what?”

“Get a buzz out of it. Being afraid I might forget my lines.”

I slowed down for a traffic snarl. A state trooper had pulled over a van and the flashers had brought out the innocence in all the other drivers. “We’re pretty much screwed up,” I said.

“Pretty much.”

The ice was broken. We could relax for the rest of the trip.

For a small town, Brighton was lively of a Thursday night. All the spaces were taken along the main drag, so we pulled around behind the restaurant and parked in a municipal lot badly in need of resurfacing. Inside the entrance we found a packed bar area and a grinning blonde hostess in white puff sleeves and a green vest, incipient panic showing in the whites of her eyes. We followed her between tables filled with chattering customers to a booth in another room and sat down. Paintings and photographs of movie stars and unknowns, all wearing hats, covered the walls. The music playing over the speakers was fifties jazz. Bird and Coltrane and Gillespie and Brubeck.

“I didn’t expect it to be this crowded.” Vesta had to lean across the table to avoid shouting.

“Anything that doesn’t resemble a roof in a rainstorm is swell with me.”

“Did you notice the hostess? She’s that close to a nervous breakdown.”

“You wouldn’t be.”

“I’ve been pinched by too many male customers in too many places to lose it over a little thing like traffic control. She’s probably the owner’s daughter.”

Our waitress came. Vesta ordered orange roughy. I asked for the Australian steak and we had drinks while we were waiting. By the time the food arrived, some of the early diners had left and the decibel level in the room went down. The music came through clearly: Art Tatum playing “Ain’t No Use” on the piano, but it was an upbeat rendition.

“Food service is rotten work,” Vesta said between forkfuls. “Acting’s worse. The rejections are devastating and you have to work around a lot of pumped-up egos. The producer always seems to have a son-in-law who thinks he’s Brando. It’s draining emotionally, but it’s also hard physical labor, as bad as digging a ditch. I lose five pounds in a day’s shooting. The hours are long, but the pay stinks.”

“Hardly seems worth the buzz.” I washed the steak down with plenty of water. Apparently they liked it spicy there in the Outback.

She shrugged. “It has its rewards. I was asked once for my autograph.”

“Did you give it?”

“No. The piece of paper came with the key to his hotel room.” She put down her fork. The candle on the table heightened the color on her cheekbones and painted shadows in the undercurves. “I’m sorry for that crack I made the other day about you being a blunderer. I guess if you were you wouldn’t have lasted this long.”

“I blunder my way out of as many tight places as I blunder my way into. Sometimes stupidity is an asset. Outsmarting yourself can get you killed. Look at Phil Musuraca.”

“I read about that. Is that what happened?”

“He thought he’d caught the brass ring, but it was attached to the wrong bull’s nose. The bull being Orvis Robinette.”

“Oh.”

“Robinette killed Leo Webb. Fat Phil saw him bail out the window of your apartment house after Robinette and I traded shots. He thought that entitled him to a silent partnership in Robinette’s criminal career. He as much as told me so himself, not long before his body turned up beaten to a pulp in the trunk of his own car.”

“I wish I could say I feel sorry for him. I’m not that good a Christian.”

“I’m not either, but I do. I felt the same way for the scabs who tried to go pro during the baseball strike.”

“The police still think Neil killed Leo.”

“Impossible.”

“Why?” she asked. “I mean, I know he didn’t do it, because I know Neil, and he’d never hurt anybody, no matter what a psychiatrist might say about delusionary behavior. I’m an actress and I understand consistency of character. But you’ve never met Neil. What makes you so sure he didn’t kill Leo or Brian Elwood, when the police are so sure he did?”

“Because Neil’s dead. He’s been dead since before I started looking for him, and probably since the day he vanished.”

T
HE WAITRESS CAME OVER
to ask if everything was all right. Vesta asked for another drink. I stood pat. The help left. Art Tatum’s chord progressions seemed to have taken a sinister turn.

“Neil’s dead?”

I said, “It’s the only answer that plays. Why would Webb frame him for the Elwood murder if he were alive and in condition to talk when he was arrested? Why would he drive Catalin’s car to your place except to make whoever was watching think he was still alive, while giving him a good reason to walk away from his respectable life; one that this particular watcher would buy? And how did he get the car, if Catalin were alive to refuse it to him?”

“But how could Leo know Robinette was watching me? He couldn’t have known he existed.”

“He didn’t. That was a fluke. Phil Musuraca was the one who was supposed to be watching. He was the one who was supposed to testify he saw Catalin’s car drive up to your place and someone who might have been Catalin going in the night he disappeared. Webb made sure to wear a floppy hat to make him harder to place in the dark. He expected Musuraca to be there, because he faxed him two words he knew would put him back on your case: VESTA KNOWS.

“He and Neil went back all the way to college,” I said. “He’d have heard all about his partner’s former peccadillo from the source. Just to be sure that whoever investigated Catalin’s disappearance couldn’t miss Fat Phil’s story, Webb dialed Musuraca’s number on the telephone in Catalin’s office so it would show up on the redial. All he had to do was hang up when someone answered: The fact that the number was called would be in the electronic memory.”

“But Musuraca wasn’t there. At least I don’t think he was. I didn’t notice him following me until the next day.”

“That’s because he didn’t get the fax until the next day. He was away working a divorce case the day it came. But Webb didn’t know that. As it happened, things worked out his way, but then he had to kill you to keep you from swearing under oath that it was Webb and not his vanished partner who went to see you. That was already in the plan.”

I pushed my plate away. “Webb called Gay Catalin, imitating Neil’s voice, and arranged to meet her at the old Michigan Theater Friday night. By now he was looking for Catalin, and he expected me to accompany her and be out of the way while he killed Elwood. I didn’t, because I didn’t know about the call, but Webb caught another break because I was busy elsewhere. He went to the Michigan just long enough to leave a ticket on Gay’s windshield admitting her to the Monday night opening of the film festival at the DIA. Then he left to take care of Elwood on Ferry Park. Monday night the DIA appointment tied both of us up while he went to see you.

“That was where his string of luck ended. You weren’t in. Orvis Robinette was.”

“Would you folks like dessert?”

Vesta jumped as our waitress set her drink in front of her. She shook her head. I said, “Just the check, please.”

“I’m still not understanding why Leo killed Brian,” Vesta said when we were alone again. “It was Neil he tried to blackmail.”

“It all seemed pretty elaborate just to snuff someone for stealing equipment from Gilda Productions,” I said. “I didn’t put it all together until I saw who was on the tape that was sent to Dr. Naheen. That was when I put a name to the description Blint gave me at Spee-D-A Couriers. The man who arranged to accept the package containing the fifty thousand was too young to be Miles Leander, the man who removed the tapes from Balfour House. Put dark glasses on Brian, cover his New Wave haircut with a baseball cap, and you get something that sounds a lot like Mr. Bell. B. Elwood. Get it?”

“I’m beginning to,” she said. “It was Neil on the videotape, wasn’t it? From when he was there last year.”

“Leander was telling the truth when he said he sent the tapes to the people who should have them. He meant the patients whose sessions the good doctor had recorded so he could shake them down for what was on them. Most of them kept silent when they received the tapes; if they went to the law they risked exposing their deepest secrets to a legal system with more leaks in it than a wicker bucket. Only one tape got a response. That was the one Leander sent to Neil Catalin.

“Only Catalin didn’t get it. Either Leander sent it to him at Gilda and Webb intercepted it, or Elwood did when it came to the house he shared with his sister and brother-in-law. I think Webb saw it first. It didn’t contain the kind of dynamite he could use against his partner even if his partner were well enough off to bother blackmailing, but the very fact that the tape existed gave him leverage against Naheen, a member of a respectable profession and owner of his own psychiatric clinic on Mackinac Island, where there is no such thing as a low-rent district.

“Webb needed a go-between to arrange the ransom drop and to pick it up,” I went on. “He used Brian, who he knew to be a sleaze and not too bright. He probably didn’t even cut him in, just gave him the key to the Southfield studio and told him to help himself to as much equipment as he could fence. Somehow, probably during that last meeting with his partner, Catalin found out what was going on and threatened to blow the whistle. Webb followed him away from the office, killed him, disposed of the corpse, and stashed Catalin’s car so he could use it later to make people think he was still alive and involved once again with you. Neil’s extramarital affair and the nervous breakdown he suffered afterward were the only glitches in his long record of social respectability; it would make sense that you were somehow connected to his disappearance.

“Maybe Brian suspected his brother-in-law had been murdered. Maybe he was even part of it and decided he was entitled to more than he was getting. Remember, he tried to blackmail you and Neil once. Having already committed his first murder, and penciled in yours to follow, Webb wouldn’t waste much sleep wondering what to do about young Elwood. Probably he arranged to pay him off at the house on Ferry Park where Brian was planning to exchange the studio equipment for cash. What better place to kill him and make it look like he fell out with his buyer?

“Only Webb got cute, and instead of leaving it at that he planted Catalin’s video rental card at the scene to pin Elwood’s murder on his brother-in-law. Those cards are always getting left around; he could have found it in Catalin’s desk. With Neil implicated in one homicide, the cops would be more likely to accept him as the killer. Of course Webb would have been sure to get the Spee-D-A claim ticket from Brian so he could pick up the fifty thousand.”

The waitress brought the check. I left the amount together with a fifteen-percent tip and we left. It was a warm night. The stars dangled low in a cloudless sky.

“Fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money,” Vesta said. “It doesn’t seem enough to kill three people for.”

“The blackmail scheme just started things moving. There was more involved. I don’t have enough bricks yet to build a case, but this has all the earmarks of something that was in motion long before anyone ever heard of Miles Leander. A lot of material things change hands when the senior partner in a going business drops out.”

“I just don’t see Leo hatching a murder. Embezzlement, yes. That doesn’t take as much nerve.”

“I suspected him the day I met him. He admitted he liked nice things, and he was a little too eager to explain away Neil’s absence as some kind of lark.

“So far his investment was low, with a high yield,” I went on. “The stolen equipment would be returned, or if not, the company’s theft insurance policy would reimburse him for the full amount. That’s why he arranged for Elwood to spirit the stuff away instead of just paying him off. Webb couldn’t lose.”

“But he did. He lost everything, including his life.”

“Only by accident. He didn’t know you were working late that night, and he couldn’t know Robinette would pick that night to toss your place looking for the ninety-two thousand Ted Silvera stole during the shotgun robberies.” I unlocked the door on the passenger’s side of the Cutlass and opened it.

She hesitated. Her pupils were huge and glossy in the dim light of the parking lot. “But he did know. Or he should have. I was expecting him that night, but I found out when I got to work that I had to stay for the late shift. I left a message on the answering machine at his house.”