Never Street (11 page)

Against this frayed backdrop, the yellow police tape encircling the lot looked garish, the throbbing red and blue strobes of the parked police cruisers as frivolous as Christmas lights at a vigil for the dead. I parked at the curb behind the Tactical Mobile Unit and got out. The big black sergeant who had shone the flashlight in my face asked me to wait there and ducked under the tape. A small group of local residents in fuzzy bathrobes and knee-length football jerseys had gathered on the sidewalk in front, staring at the house and at the officers quartering the yard with flashlights, not looking as if they expected much in the way of entertainment. Police activity in that neighborhood would be almost a nightly event.

The sergeant’s partner, a lean cob with a withered-looking face, leaned back against the cruiser, arms folded, daring the crowd with his bitter little eyes to make some move that would give him the opportunity to dazzle them with his fast draw. I saw videotape in his future.

The sergeant leaned his big head out the front door and beckoned to me with his arm. I felt a dozen pairs of eyes on me during the trip up the cracked front walk.

“The lieutenant will see you now,” said the sergeant.

“Which lieutenant?”

“Thaler.”

That was good news, aesthetically speaking. I found Mary Ann Thaler in the tiny living room, conversing in a group that included a pair of officers in uniform, one of them female, and a young Asian male in a snappy white turtleneck and a corduroy sportcoat with leather patches on the elbows. The lieutenant was a trim 115 pounds or so wearing a red blazer over a silver blouse, black miniskirt, black hose, and moderate heels. She wore her hair longer these days, tumbling in rich light brown waves to her shoulders, and glasses with large frames in a color that matched her hair. The plastic police ID she had clipped to her handkerchief pocket was a fashion don’t, but she carried it off. The room was just a room with some furniture in it. It needed cleaning, but then so did mine.

“You look like the tattered end of a long day,” she said by way of greeting.

I said, “You look like spring blossoms. Nobody else in Armed Robbery does justice to a miniskirt.”

“It’s Felony Homicide now, and watch your unenlightened mouth. This is Albert Chung from the coroner’s office. Amos Walker.”

The Asian shook my hand. “CID?”

“P.I.,” I said. “Who’s dead?”

He opened his mouth to reply, but Thaler cut him off. She had her notebook out, a nifty slimline pad with imitation alligator covers. “You’re working for a Mrs. Neil Catalin in West Bloomfield?”

My inner stem wound itself a notch tighter. “It’s Catalin?”

“Missing Persons took a report from her this afternoon. I’m starting to like our new computer system; it cross-references complaints. Mrs. Catalin’s maid says she’s out for the evening. Sergeant Binder and Officer Wise burned twenty-four dollars in city money waiting for you at your place. You dating clients now?”

I shook my head. “I’m not putting them on electronic tethers, either. Who am I here to identify?”

“These officers were cruising the block when they heard shots.” She indicated the Adam-and-Eve team. “They couldn’t tell which house the shots came from, so they started pounding on doors. This one was open. It looks like the perp exited out the back. If he had a car it wasn’t parked on this street. Two hits?” She lifted her eyebrows at Chung.

He nodded. “Maybe three, but I’m betting one’s an exit wound. I’ll know more when I get inside.”

“The officers heard six shots,” she said. “We found three holes in the walls and a freshly broken window, broken from the inside. If it was a professional hit, the pro was either in a hurry or blind or trying to make it look homemade. I vote for genuine homemade. A buy went bad.”

“Drugs?”

“Hot merch. Let’s take a look.”

I followed her through an open door into a kitchen the same size as the living room, that hadn’t been done over since Nixon. The cabinets and countertops were avocado to match the refrigerator and four-burner stove. A flycatcher of an imitation Tiffany ceiling fixture shed greasy light onto worn linoleum, stacks of electronic equipment, and Brian Elwood, Gay Catalin’s kid brother.

He lay half on his back on the linoleum with his knees drawn into his stomach and his head resting on a baseboard, staring up through the ceiling, the rafters above that, and beyond them the roof, trying hard for the stars. Three of the four bulbs in the fixture weren’t working; the one remaining cast shadows from the leading between the panes, etching a spiderweb pattern across the gray bloodless face. There was an angry red hole in his tank top where the pectorals met, frozen pink bubbles on his lips.

“Lung shot,” Mary Ann Thaler said. “Drowned in his own blood, probably. You can see he tried to crawl through the side door. Left a track like a snail. His black Jeep’s parked next to the door; that’s where we got his name, from the registration in the glove compartment. He was trying to get to his wheels.”

I bent over him, keeping my lips tight. His shaved head was as gray as a stone. There was blood clotted in his goatee. I tried to make eye contact and gave up. He was seeing something the rest of us would have to wait for.

Straightening, I turned and looked at the equipment piled in the corner. I identified four large video cameras, a laser disc player, a rectangular black box that might have been a seven-channel equalizer, and several thirty-six-inch speakers encased in ebony. There were coils of copper wire and a number of fiberboard cartons with stenciling on them I didn’t bother to read.

Thaler said, “We’re checking the hot sheets now. There must be ten, fifteen thousand bucks’ worth of toys here.”

“Twenty,” I said. “Wholesale.”

“Really. I thought you were still listening to eight-track tapes.”

The room smelled of old meals and something much more acrid that didn’t belong in a kitchen. “When?”

“Squad car team heard the shots a little after ten. They were another fifteen minutes locating the source; time enough for Little Brother to give up the ghost. He was still plenty warm. The hatch is open on the Cherokee. Either he’d just finished unloading the stuff or he was getting set to cart it away. A few shots wouldn’t have drawn much interest in this neighborhood. It was the perp’s bad luck the cops were within earshot.”

“If he was planning to cap him anyway, why didn’t he do it when the stuff was still in the Jeep? He could’ve just driven it away.”

“Maybe the perp wasn’t buying. Maybe he was selling, and decided to keep the cash
and
the merch.”

“Then he should’ve waited until it was loaded.”

“It could have been spur-of-the-moment. He wasn’t used to it or he wouldn’t have missed four times. Then he heard the officers banging on doors and bugged out.”

“Maybe he didn’t care about the merchandise or the money. Maybe he just wanted Brian dead. The whole idea of the buy could have been a set-up.”

She hooked a thumb inside her belt, exposing the butt of the service revolver holstered under her blazer. “This was a crack house last year. Before that it was a house of prostitution. I suppose there was a time when it was just a house, but that was when the Irish were still in control. I’d have to check the zoning regulations, but using it to engineer a hit for the sake of a hit is probably a violation. This guy could be in a lot of trouble with the Planning Commission.”

“Well, now you’re just being facetious.”

“I wish I knew what
you
were being.”

I looked at her. She was all cop. There was a time, back when women began joining the department, when it was thought they would change it, but the system has been around nearly as long as women, and unlike them it hasn’t changed that whole time. It’s rock-scissors-paper, and you can cut paper and break scissors, but when you wrap paper around a rock it’s still a rock. I said nothing.

“I just came on this one,” she said. “You’ve been on it a couple of days. If there’s a connection between Catalin’s disappearance and his brother-in-law’s death, you don’t want to wait till morning to lay it out for us. If this is a plain old kill and not a murder in the commission of a felony, it’s not mine anymore. Then it’s Homicide’s, and you don’t want to drag your feet with them. They lack the woman’s touch.”

I moved my shoulders. “I’ve got a couple of hunches. They don’t make a lot of sense.”

“Try me.”

“You’ll get this off the hot sheets anyway. Neil Catalin’s partner at Gilda Productions is a man named Leo Webb. When I spoke to Webb yesterday he thought I was a police detective investigating a theft at Gilda’s studio in Southfield. He said someone walked out with twenty thousand in video and sound equipment the night before.”

“Anything else?”

“Brian Elwood’s name came up during our conversation. He said he caught him once going through Catalin’s desk.”

“You think Elwood boosted the equipment and Webb shot him for it?”

“Webb’s no Boy Scout. Killing a couple of zeroes in the company ledger is more his speed.”

“Catalin then. It would explain his taking a powder. He is a mental case.”

“Even mental cases have motives for what they do, or convince themselves they have them. Simple theft doesn’t seem strong enough, even for someone with problems of his own.”

“It’s thin,” she agreed.

“I said it didn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Anything else?”

Suddenly I tasted Scotch and soda. Heard a mariachi band playing “Ain’t No Use” in slow reggae. Saw a woman in an indigo dress. Telling me something about Brian Elwood.
The little creep.

I shook my head.

The lieutenant gave it another beat, watching me. Then she unhooked her thumb from her belt and looked down at the corpse. “So do we have a positive ID?”

“It’s Brian all right. I only met him once, but he left an impression.”

“You can’t always tell by appearances. My older sister’s boy wears a ring in his nose. He starts Princeton next month.”

“I hope he stays clear of places like this.”

“If he doesn’t, I’ll shoot the little son of a bitch myself.”

I knew a curtain line when I heard one. I asked if she needed anything else. She said nothing I was willing to give her and that I might think about letting her know if I had any business that took me out of the area. Like I said, nothing’s changed.

I fired up the Cutlass and cut every short I knew between Ferry Park and West Bloomfield, which were a good deal closer than the quality of life suggested. I didn’t bother looking for the green Camaro. I couldn’t afford the time it would take to shake it. I wanted to be standing on Gay Catalin’s doorstep when she came back from wherever she’d been all evening.

I was too late. The maid, looking less accommodating than usual in a quilted housecoat with her eyebrows scrubbed off, asked me to wait, then came back after a minute to say her mistress would see me.

She conducted me to the sun porch, where my client sat in a wicker chair surrounded by flowering shrubs in troughs and potted dahlias, mums, geraniums, and a dozen or so varieties outside my knowledge of botany—looking, with nothing but darkness beyond the glass door walls, like a selection of prom dates for the last-minute shopper. Tonight the dress was cream-colored, the lady’s face ashen. One hand rested atop a yellow telephone on a lattice table.

“The police just called,” she said. “Brian—”

“I know. I just came from there.”

“Oh, God.” She put her fist in her mouth and started to rock to and fro.

I turned to the maid. “Is there any liquor in the house?”

Her expression turned inward, plumbing the depths of her English. I brought my cupped hand up to my lips. She nodded then and scuffed out in pink slippers. When she returned with a glass of something that smelled like bourbon, I took it and handed it to Mrs. Catalin, who sat hugging herself and made no move to lift it.

I said, “It only works if you drink it.”

She drank then, cupping the glass in both hands. She coughed shallowly and tried to put it on the table, but I put my hand around hers and made her lift it again. She was starting to get some color now.

“Now I know why people drink.” She tried to smile.

“Alcohol’s like war. If it didn’t have some good points we’d have figured out a way to get rid of it before this.”

“Thank you, Angelina. Go to bed now.”

The woman in the housecoat hesitated, then withdrew, drawing shut the doorwall that separated the porch from the living room.

“Was it horrible?” Mrs. Catalin’s eyes were on me, as steady as the eyes in a painting.

“It was all over pretty quickly,” I said.

“What was he doing in that neighborhood?”

“Your brother was into some things he shouldn’t have been. You must have suspected it. Most older sisters have sensors for that kind of thing built in.”

“We were born twenty years apart. Our mother was very young when she had me. Brian was a surprise late in life. In many ways, culturally, we were as distant as a parent and her child. I did worry, though. He never stayed with a job more than a few months, but he always seemed to have money to make the payments on his Cherokee, and to buy speakers and things. I wasn’t a very good sister. I didn’t ask the questions I didn’t want to know the answers to.”

“That puts you in good company.”

“They want me to identify the—to identify Brian. Will you take me? I don’t think I can drive.”

“Who’d you talk to?”

“A Sergeant Somebody at police headquarters.”

“That was old business. I took care of it. They might want you to go to the morgue tomorrow, but there’s no reason to visit the murder scene. They’ll be around to ask you questions.”

“Murder scene.” She looked down, rediscovered her drink. She raised it and swallowed.

“One of the questions they’ll ask is where you were tonight,” I said.

She started. “I forgot. Neil called.”

I was stripping the cellophane off a pack of Winstons. I paused, then went on. “When?”

“I didn’t look at the clock. It must have been after nine. He wanted me to meet him. He was out of breath. He sounded as if he’d been running.”