Never Street (12 page)

“Where’d you meet him?”

“I didn’t. He asked me to come to the old Michigan Theater.”

“The one in Ann Arbor?”

“No. The one in downtown Detroit. It isn’t a theater anymore. They gutted it twenty years ago and turned it into a parking garage. He said he used to see movies there when he was in college.”

“Why didn’t you meet him?”

“He never showed up. I stood in front for two hours. I didn’t feel safe waiting any longer; the streets were empty. My car was parked inside. When I went back I found this under my windshield wiper.”

She fished a rectangle of pale pink cardboard out of a pocket of her skirt and handed it to me. It was a ticket to Monday night’s motion picture screening in the auditorium of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The feature to be shown was
Pitfall.

I
’D LIT THE CIGARETTE,
but after the day I’d had I needed both hands to hold the ticket steady, so I tilted my head back to keep the smoke out of my eyes. It didn’t do much good. If the etching of the statue of the Spirit of Detroit in the corner tipped me a wink, I’d missed it.

“How sure are you Neil put it on your windshield?” I asked his wife.

“Who else would? He’s always been a great supporter of the film series at the DIA. He once rescheduled an important meeting to attend a showing of
Citizen Kane
, a film he already had on tape. I looked at the cars parked nearby, just in case the ticket was part of a promotion of some kind, but mine was the only one that had it. What do you think it means?”

“Could be he thought someone was watching you and decided to change venues. Did you mention hiring me when he called?”

“He didn’t give me time. He said, ‘Remember my telling you about the Michigan? I’ll see you there.’ That was it. He hung up before I could ask him any questions.”

“You’re sure it was him?”

“Yes. It was Neil’s voice.”

“No ‘Hi, honey’? Or darling or poopsy or slugger?”

“No. If there’d been anything like that I’d have known for sure it wasn’t Neil. He’s not much for endearments.”

“Who picked up the telephone. Angelina?”

“She was upstairs, ironing. I answered.” She started to set her glass on the lattice table, missed it, and had to look to make contact. Then she twisted her hands in her lap and looked at me. “Do you think he’s in trouble? Real trouble, not the kind he’d make up to fit the plot of some movie?”

“I don’t know. I don’t like that he didn’t show. At least not between a quarter to ten and ten-thirty.”

Her lips formed a
W,
but the question didn’t come out. A curtain slid down behind her face. “That was when Brian was—there. In that place. When he was killed. Wasn’t it? You can’t suspect Neil.”

“The night you hired me and told me about your husband’s affair, you wouldn’t say how you found out. It was Brian, right? He told you.”

“You don’t know my husband if you think he’d kill him for that.”

“I met Vesta Mannering tonight. She said your brother offered to keep their affair secret from you if Neil came across with a thousand bucks.”

“What makes you think you can believe anything that harlot says?” Her cheeks were hot. The pallor had fled.

“If Brian’s the one who told you, it means at least half her story is true.”

“My brother wasn’t a blackmailer.”

“Five minutes ago you as good as told me you suspected he was a crook.”

“There’s a difference between petty thievery and extortion.”

“For Brian, that difference was about twenty thousand.”

“What’s that mean?”

I pinched out my butt and dropped it into a terra-cotta pot containing a purple blossom as big as my hand. “When I talked to Leo Webb, he was complaining that someone had just spirited away that much in electronic equipment from Gilda’s studio in Southfield without breaking so much as a window. Tonight the cops found your brother’s body in a kitchen that looked like the back room at Radio Shack. When the cops trace the stuff back to Southfield, they’re going to ask the same question I’m asking now: Who gave Brian a key?”

“It could have been anyone. Someone might have left a door open accidentally.”

“Someone might have. It might even have happened on the same night your brother decided to see what he could boost there. Vesta might have made up the story about the touch. All of this might even have taken place within twenty-four hours of Neil’s disappearance. Coincidences happen all the time. Try and sell that to the cops when they put out a warrant for your husband for first-degree murder.”

She looked up quickly. “How much did you tell them?”

“Webb told me he caught Brian going through Neil’s desk once. I gave them that. They like it when you give them something. I didn’t tell them about Vesta Mannering.”

“Neither did I, when I reported Neil and Brian missing. I didn’t think it was important. I have an idea you didn’t tell them because you thought it was.”

“At this point I don’t know what’s important, only what makes me curious. I didn’t want to trip over any more cops than I had to satisfying my curiosity. I hope it doesn’t come back and bite me on the neck. But it’s my neck.”

“What do you think happened, Mr. Walker?”

I looked at my reflection in the dark glass enclosing the porch. I saw a tired face on an exhausted body in a suit that needed pressing. “I think your brother had something on your husband; something more serious than an extramarital affair. He approached him with the same deal he did two years ago, only this time the price for his silence was higher. Twenty times higher. All Catalin had to do was throw back a bolt and look the other way. Brian would know where to fence the equipment, and Neil knew from before that he wasn’t bluffing when he threatened to tell what he’d dug up.”

“What could it have been?”

“I’ve got a guess or two, but they need running out. One has to do with ninety-two thousand in stolen cash hidden somewhere by Vesta’s ex-husband, and a fellow named Musuraca who’s looking for it. You told me Neil had money trouble.” I rubbed my eyes. They burned as if I’d been watching movies all night. “Whatever it was, it was bad enough to make Neil decide to drop out of the picture for a while.”

“Then you don’t think it had anything to do with his obsession?”

“It might have had everything to do with it. Those films are the only reality he knows, or accepts. We do what we do from instinct and learning. If your teachers were Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell and Alan Ladd and Orson Welles, you handle things the way they did. It doesn’t matter that it was some hack screenwriter’s idea of how to satisfy the requirements of entertainment, studio policy, and the Hays Office, or that the people you’re dealing with may not have read the script. He wouldn’t think of the fact that in real life there are no retakes. That when the bodies are through falling they don’t get back up when the director yells cut.”

“What do you propose to do?”

“To begin with, I need to borrow a few more movies from your husband’s collection. It would help if you can pick out the ones he watched most often. Not every case gives you a peek at the missing party’s shooting script.”

“I’m afraid I can’t give you many titles. I hadn’t been watching with him for quite some time, so I can only describe what I happened to see on the screen whenever I looked in on him.”

I grinned. “This is where my wasted youth comes in handy. I overslept through most of high school after staying up with the Late Show.”

“What about the DIA?”

I gave her the ticket. She took it without looking at it. “You want me to go in alone?”

“He’ll be looking for it. I’ll be there early. If Catalin shows, I’ll talk to him.”

She stood and smoothed her cream-colored skirt. I stepped back to give her room, but she took a step toward me. Even through the competing perfume of the flowers that surrounded us I could smell the euphoric scent she wore. “Is there anything else I can do?” Her eyes were planets of mystery and promise.

“Not unless you know someone who drives a green Camaro.”

Disappointment caved in her face. “I—I don’t notice people’s cars. One is pretty much like all the others. Does it bear on the—case?”

“Maybe not. Most things don’t. That’s another difference between our world and Neil’s.”

“Do you really think he killed Brian?”

“I’ll let you know what I think when I’m no longer just thinking,” I said. “It’s not impossible. Up on Mackinac Island, Dr. Naheen told me the Neil Catalin I’m looking for may not be the Neil Catalin you knew.”

“Naheen.” She hugged herself. “I don’t like that man. Even over the telephone I felt something unclean about him.”

“You’re not alone. He’s one of those guesses I want to run out.”

She turned then, and we went to the basement to pick out some movies. She moved carefully on the stairs, like a guest in an unfamiliar house.

I
AWOKE WITH THE SUN
in my face and some optimism for a bright summer Saturday. By the time I was shaved and dressed the hole in the clouds had closed up along with my hopes. Some hysteric at the radio station I listened to over toast and coffee actually dusted off the emergency signal to warn all of southeastern Michigan it was under a severe thunderstorm watch. God forbid we should all get wet.

I broke out the belted raincoat, drove to the store where I’d rented the vcr, and threw some money at the clerk to keep the video police off my back. On the way home I stopped at Kroger’s for some grocery items and got out forty-five minutes later behind a line of local residents laying in for a long siege. Flashlight batteries and canned goods were the order of the day.

Back home I wasted no time. I scooped a videotape at random from the sack Gay Catalin had given me and poked it into the machine, trying to see as much as I could before the blackout. I got through
Detour
and then
Double Indemnity,
but just as John Garfield was about to bash in Cecil Kellaway’s skull in
The Postman Always Rings Twice,
a bolt struck nearby with a noise like a forklift truck falling off the kitchen table. The signal snapped and the screen went black.

I jerked all the plugs and sat in my one comfortable chair smoking cigarettes in the leaden gloom, thinking while the rain slapped the siding and the wind rocked the house. Some of Hollywood’s best and grimmest were still in the sack, waiting their turn to live again in the cramped confines of my nineteen-inch Motorola:
Gun Crazy, Kiss Me Deadly, Cape Fear, Dead Reckoning, D.O.A.,
more I couldn’t remember. The titles alone played like a dirge, with a police siren for a minor key. I knew them all, by reputation if not by experience. Like those I had watched already that day, they all had to do with ordinary, not-too-bright characters who plunged or were shoved in up to their necks in dirty money, poisonous women, demented villains, and their own self-devouring angst. When it came to role models, Neil Catalin had set his sights low enough to score a bullseye first shot out of the box. The whole business lined up like Rubik’s Cube. It was such a perfect pretty thing I hated to twist it apart.

Hating to do something isn’t the same as not doing it. I picked up the telephone, found it was working, and dialed Barry Stackpole’s number at the cable station in Southfield where he worked. The female voice that answered said he wasn’t in, but she took my name and promised to pass on a message. Fifteen minutes later the bell rang.

“Amos. I thought you were watching Rocky and Bullwinkle this time of a Saturday.” He sounded as if he were shouting through an electric fan.

“I might if I could get my set to operate on kerosene,” I said. “Don’t tell me you popped for a car phone. You always said the three places you most didn’t want to be reached were the bathroom, your car, and work.”

“The station put it in my contract. They didn’t say I had to turn the damn thing on. I mostly use it to order pizza. What’s the skinny? Who’d you kill?”

“This isn’t for broadcast. I need a favor.”

“What? You’re breaking up, pal.”

“Barry, that’s beneath you.”

“No, I mean I’m really losing you. Fucking hills. Listen, I’m only about twenty minutes from your dump. Got any beer?”

“It might not be cold by the time you get here.”

“That’s okay. I’m the bastard son of an English barmaid. See you anon.” The connection crackled away.

The lights were still out when he knocked on the door. I opened it to find him drenched. His white-blonde hair, thinning now, was plastered to his scalp, exposing the oblong outline of the metal plate underneath. His shirt was transparent. The harness that held his Fiberglas leg in place stood out beneath the soaked flannel of his slacks. Despite these impediments to exercise he was as trim as ever. His grip would crack hickory.

“You know, owning an umbrella is not an admission of weakness,” I said.

“This is Detroit. We drive to the mailbox. Who needs umbrellas? There was talk of warm beer.”

“I thought you were AA.”

“Oh, I quit that crowd. What good’s listening to people’s hard-luck stories if you can’t publish them?” He glanced around the living room. “Nice. You ought to have power failures more often. It’s cheaper than redecorating.”

I told him where the towels were and went into the kitchen. When I came back with the beers he was looking at one of the tapes from the sack. His hair stood straight out from his scalp and he had a towel draped across his shoulders. “
Cry of the City”
he read. “Don’t you get enough of this kind of thing at work without taking it home?”

“That
is
work.” I tossed him one of the beers. He caught it one-handed, put down the videotape, and popped the top on the can with his left hand, the one that was missing two fingers. He’d left them on Livernois some years back, along with his leg and a piece of his cranium. In those days he wrote a crime column for the Detroit
News,
and the people he offended weren’t the kind who wrote letters to the editor. Now he chaired a weekly segment on cable entitled “Meet Your Neighbors,” and his ratings share and the quality of his contacts had promoted him above the victim line. I let him have the easy chair, found the end of the couch with the most springs, and asked him what he was working on.