Never Street

To those who lived:

Curtis K. Stadtfeld

Ray Puechner

—mentors—

To those who live:

Jim O’Keefe

The Gang at Sigma Video

And to those who will live forever:

Humphrey Bogart

Orson Welles

James Cagney

Lizabeth Scott

Ida Lupino

Virginia Mayo

Dick Powell

John Garfield

Dana Andrews

Gloria Grahame

Lana Turner

Joan Crawford

Alan Ladd

Fred MacMurray

George Raft

Veronica Lake

Barbara Stanwyck

Lauren Bacall

Glenn Ford

Burt Lancaster

Richard Widmark

Rita Hayworth

Ava Gardner

Marlene Dietrich

Robert Mitchum

Cornel Wilde

Kirk Douglas

Claire Trevor

Gene Tierney

Jane Greer

...Roll ’em!

Reel One: Mise-en-Scène

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Reel Two: Cross-Fade

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Reel Three: Dissolve

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Reel Four: Smash Cut

Thirty-five

Thirty-six

Thirty-seven

Thirty-eight

Thirty-nine

Forty

A Biography of Loren D. Estleman

I
T WAS THE SUMMER
of darkness.

It was the summer of darkness, and Ula McAdoo was responsible.

It happened this way. The previous autumn, Detroit Edison had made a brave effort to trim all the trees in Wayne County that waved to one another during windstorms, taking down electric lines and pitching most of southeastern Michigan back into the Mesozoic. The workers had polished their yellow hardhats, pressed their blue coveralls, buffed the steel toes of their work boots, gassed up their chainsaws, and hit the woods. Then Ula, aged seventy-four and living in Dearborn Heights with a cat named Buster, came home from the Monday night meeting of the Committee to Suppress Satanism at Disneyworld, found the top four feet missing from the cedar in her front yard, and sued Edison for a million. She settled for ten thousand and a bundle of striplings.

After that the chainsaws fell silent. Summer came, bringing its handy sampler of thunder, lightning, tornadoes, and gale-force winds, batting the trees about and twirling and snapping the electric lines like the threads in a fifty-dollar suit. By August, Wayne and Oakland counties had experienced fourteen major power blackouts; rumor had it some residents had been waiting for their service to be restored since before Bastille Day. A couple of the dicier neighborhoods in Detroit had taken to burning Edison’s chief executive officer in effigy for the illumination, when what they should have done was torch Ula’s cat.

The latest outage struck just as I was about to push the button of my snazzy new microwave oven for dinner. The ceiling light flickered twice, then died to an amber glow. After five minutes I unplugged the oven, refrigerator, and television to avoid a surge, left the dish of frozen lasagna to thaw on its own, snagged a bottle of Scotch and a bowl of doomed ice from the dark refrigerator, and went out on my toy front porch to plaster myself quietly in the dewy evening cool. The days had been cracking ninety, with the humidity just behind. I figured I had twenty minutes of peace before the first of my neighbors fired up his portable generator.

It was a time for taking stock and reflecting. Business was off, as it always was in vacation season, when George and Marian loaded the kids and the luggage in the car and left behind their regular extramarital affairs to make room for the cabana boy and the anonymous divorcee with the tattoo. All the best sins—adultery, employee theft, credit-card fraud, Neil Diamond on the neighbor’s stereo—were out of town. All the private investigators, too; those who hadn’t blown the Tahiti fund on a space-age oven now pulling single duty as a cupboard, anyway. In the morning I would make some calls. Cold calling was always something to look forward to on a gummy August day when all the air conditioners were down and there was nobody to take it out on but the stranger on the other end of the telephone, looking for work. I refilled my glass.

As I did so, a pint-size breeze lifted my hair where I sat on a demoted kitchen chair and sucked the front door shut behind me. There was a hint of brimstone in it. Another storm was on its way.

After a while a two-cycle motor started up down the block with a noise like marbles bouncing off a bass drum. In another minute or two, that mating call would be answered, and before long every generator on the street would be coughing up its lungs. I was thinking about taking my drinking paraphernalia inside when a black Jeep Grand Cherokee with green neon running lights turned the corner and boated my way, slowly, as if the driver was trying to read addresses in the steepening dark. It rolled along on jacked-up tires and a cushion of grumbling bass from a pair of speakers that were using the space where the back seat belonged. Rap, of course. I wondered, not for the first time, if anyone listened to those expectorated lyrics in his own living room with his slippers on.

The Jeep stopped in front of my house, rocking in place on the thick waves of sound washing out of its open windows, and the driver poked out his head. It was shaved at the temples, but long-haired in back, with a trailing moustache and pointed goatee and two or three gold rings glittering in one ear. In the green light coming up from below, the face looked like it belonged to Boris Karloff, Junior.

“Yo, Zeke!” he called to me. “Know where I can find a dude named Walker?”

I rubbed my chin, which needed scraping nearly as badly as his—but then it generally did from noon on—and spoke through my nose like Jed Clampett. “Wal, I believe if you was to turn left at the house where Wilbur Klumpp died, and went on past where the Bodie place used to be before it burned down, and turned right at Olson’s Swamp, you’d find him plowing his pasture as like as not.”

He scratched his nose, squinting at me against the dark of the house. “You’re him, right?”

I said I was him. He might have been seventeen or twenty-three. The Auschwitz haircut put on as many years as it took off.

“Don’t you answer your phone? My sister’s been trying to get through to you for a half hour.”

“The line’s probably down. We had a storm earlier. Didn’t you hear it, or were you listening to Snoop Doggy Dog?”

“Blowfish,” he said. “She wants to see you.” He gave me an address in West Bloomfield.

“She got a name?”

“Catalin. Gay Catalin. I’m Brian Elwood. I’m her brother.”

“I guessed that when you told me she’s your sister. This business, or does she want somebody to hold her hand until the lights come back on?”

“She had lights when I left. You’re like a private eye, right?”

“Just like one. Only taller.”

That one buzzed right past him. “A private eye’s what she needs. Her husband split yesterday. She wants him back, Christ knows why. He’s a major feeb.”

The pickings there were too lean for me. I lit a cigarette. The air was still, and it had begun to heat up. Nothing like a breeze had ever come down that street. We were in for a big banger.

“I’ll ride you on over,” Brian Elwood said.

I pointed in the direction of the noise coming from the Jeep. “That a tape?”

“CD. I got Hammer, the Fat Boys, Rectal Itch—”

“Marcus Belgrave?”

“Who?”

“I’ll drive my own heap, thanks. Tell her half an hour.”

“You tell her. I’m off to Cherie’s. Tits and ass.”

He flashed me his pearlies and took off with a blat of twin pipes. Seventeen, definitely.

Lightning flickered in sheets over Windsor when I pulled out of the driveway. We had had a load of rain that year. The guy who read the weather on Channel 4 had traded his sport-coat for a white beard and cassock like Noah’s. The mosquitoes were as big as DC-3s. Doors stuck, freeways flooded, and a puddle had formed on the floor on the driver’s side of my big Mercury. I was thinking of stocking it with trout.

The streets were dark, with here and there a light showing in a window like the outthrust tongue of a homeowner with a generator. The traffic light was out at Caniff. While waiting for the other drivers to work out who had the right of way, I punched a Sarah Vaughan tape into the deck. “Ain’t No Use.” The theme song of the professional information broker in the age of the hard drive.

West Bloomfield was nearly inseparable from Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham—“Bloomingham” was the local coinage—which had started out as the waiting room for Grosse Pointe, where auto money aged in big colonials facing Lake St. Clair with lawns the size of small European countries. Now it was an end in itself, with its own waiting rooms in Farmington and Farmington Hills. Paved streets wound among modern homes with Sevilles parked in the driveways and security lights burning all night atop twenty-foot poles, shaming the stars. Well-dressed white children pounded basketballs off the concrete pads in front of the garages in the daytime, looking to fight their way out of the upper middle class with nothing but their trust funds and a dream.

The power failure had missed the Catalin neighborhood. It happens that way sometimes, democracy to the contrary.