Never Street (22 page)

“The night before he was busted for the shotgun robberies, Silvera met with Ernie Fishman, the fence from Flatrock. That much you know. What you didn’t know, but that Robinette knew, was that Ernie dealt in stolen jewelry as well as everything else that can be carried away in one trip and turned into quick cash. Ninety-two thousand dollars in the small well-circulated bills found in video store cash registers is bulky and hard to conceal. Silvera traded it to Fishman for something a lot more portable. He must have known the law was close, so he hid the merchandise somewhere they wouldn’t be likely to look when they came around with a warrant. They were looking for cash, remember. They’d ignore the places that are too tight or wet. You said the only thing Silvera asked for in the decree was the option to buy back the car he gave you.”

She turned around, looking toward the Triumph. “I’ve cleaned that car a hundred times, inside and out. I had it in twice for detailing. If he—”

“He wouldn’t put them anyplace where they’d be found during normal cleaning and maintenance.” I walked past her and around to the front of the little convertible. It was a miniature version of a 1930s roadster, complete with running boards, a doughnut cover over the spare tire on the trunk, and a hinged straddle type hood.

I’d thought about the gas tank, but stickup men are a lazy lot, and anything like a string that would make a package easy to retrieve would be obvious every time the tank was filled. Magnetic boxes under the fenders and chassis fall off too easily and call attention to themselves up on the hoist. Just for fun I unscrewed the radiator cap and peered down inside, but that had all the same drawbacks as the gas tank, so the disappointment didn’t disappoint me.

The windshield solvent reservoir was a blue plastic box mounted under the wipers with a cap the size of a jar cover. I removed it and stuck my hand down inside, groping along the smooth sides and saturating my shirt cuff with the blue-tinted liquid. When my fingers found a lump the size of a baby’s fist I felt for the edges of the tape. It tore loose with a noise like Velcro and I withdrew the package and shook off the excess moisture.

It was a common pint-size Ziploc refrigerator bag, doubled over twice and secured with wide waterproof transparent tape. I peeled away the tape, unfolded the bag, zipped it open, and told Vesta to hold out her hands. When she complied I tipped ten lumps of what looked like quartz crystal into her cupped palms. The diamonds ranged in size from raisins to lemon drops, cut in pear shape and sparkling in the light they hadn’t seen in three years.

I was wrong about one thing, and I learned that the next morning when I opened the
Free Press.
The police in Iroquois Heights found a body identified as that of Philip Francis Musuraca, curled into a fetal position in the roomy trunk of his 1960 Buick Invicta, parked behind a Chinese restaurant. He’d been beaten to death.

“A
.
W
ALKER
I
NVESTIGATIONS.”

“Mr. Walker, please.”

I changed ears on the receiver. “This is Amos Walker.”

The short silence on the other end told me I hadn’t fooled anyone. If I’d really been trying I’d have answered the telephone with Judy Collins’ soprano. “Mr. Walker, this is Ashraf Naheen. We met last week at Balfour House. On Mackinac Island?”

I recognized the British accent now, too precise to have been acquired in the country of origin. I put down my Smith & Wesson and the midget screwdriver. I’d located a screw to replace the one I’d lost when I threw the office at Orvis Robinette. It was Wednesday morning. Eighteen hours had passed since I’d left Vesta Mannering admiring her sparklers in the ruins of the old Michigan Theater. “I remember you, Dr. Naheen.”

“I have a little matter I’d be pleased to discuss with you this afternoon, if you plan to be in your office. It isn’t related to what we spoke about last week. I wish to consult your services.”

“I’ll be in. Do you know the address?”

“I still have your card. I’m catching the ten-thirty flight to Detroit City Airport. Look for me about two o’clock.”

When we were through talking I sat back and thought about the Pakistani psychiatrist, brown and pleasant-looking, sitting in his green office and not discussing the nervous breakdown that had placed Neil Catalin in his care eighteen months ago. I thought about Tom Balfour, the island brat and all-around dogsbody, and his suspicions that Naheen videotaped his sessions with his patients for purposes of shaking them down. That didn’t get me anywhere, so I stopped thinking. I finished putting together the revolver, loaded the cylinder from the box of cartridges I kept in the safe with my change of shirts, and returned to the morning edition of the
Free Press
and the article about Phil Musuraca.

It wasn’t much, just two and a half inches in the Local section without a picture. Brian Elwood and Leo Webb had received more play, and no connection was made between them and Fat Phil. I supposed I was indirectly responsible for his beating death. If I’d fingered Orvis Robinette for the Webb killing, he wouldn’t have been available to pay off Musuraca’s blackmail try with his fists. On the other hand, if the Iroquois Heights detective hadn’t tried to cash in on Webb’s homicide, I wouldn’t have had any reason to feel guilty. So that was one more thing to stuff into my little internal box of angst and sit on the lid until it locked.

The second murder had moved the Elwood story from the police column to a spot below the fold on Page One. The Freep had dug up photos of the three principals: a flattering three-quarter portrait of Webb in suit and tie that I had seen in a frame hanging in the hallway leading to his office, a high school yearbook shot of Gay’s baby brother Brian, retouched to mask facial blemishes, and Catalin’s driver’s license picture, face front and sweating guilt through every pore. The article bore as much resemblance to the facts as the Hollywood version of an eighteenth-century novel did to its source. Journalists. Even when they got it right it didn’t sound like anything you’d had something to do with. I turned to
Tank MacNamara
for my minimum daily requirement of truth and committed the works to the circular file.

My own reporter’s instinct awakened, I cranked my Paleozoic Underwood down from its perch atop a file cabinet and typed up a report on the Catalin missing-person case for Gay Catalin to throw away without reading. It read like a screen treatment for Jack L. Warner to drop his cigar ashes on and then hand over to Ben Hecht and W. R. Burnett for rewrite. I stuck it in a manila envelope, stamped and addressed it, and sailed it at the floor in front of the mail slot. Then I wrote out checks for the rent, utilities, and membership dues in the Blunt Instrument of the Month Club against a checking account balance that didn’t exist yet and dispatched them after the report. That carved twenty minutes out of my hectic workday.

Break time. I started a pot of coffee on the little four-cupper in the water closet, washed my hands and face and smoothed back my hair, tracking the progress of the gray in the peel-and-stick mirror tile above the sink, filled a Chrysler Corporation commemorative mug from the pot, and carried it to the desk. The coffee tasted weak. I hoisted the working bottle out of the file drawer of the desk and put a nail in it. My watch told me another eleven minutes had swept past. If this kept up I was going to have to hire an assistant.

Ashraf Naheen was sitting in my reception room when I got back from lunch. Small, round, and brown in his rimless glasses and a cocoa three-piece gabardine, he looked up pleasantly from a two-year-old copy of
Police Times
and stood, offering his hand. He saw me glance at my watch before I took it.

“We’re ahead of schedule,” he said apologetically. “We arrived at the airport in time to take an earlier flight. This is Gordon, my head orderly. I never travel without him.”

I had already noticed Gordon, for professional reasons. He took up all the space in the oversize club chair I’d promoted from a curb on St. Antoine, and when he laid aside the
Entertainment Weekly
with Emmanuel Lewis on the cover and stood, he filled the gap between the crown of his head and the ceiling. He had the spotty tan of the infrequent island goer-outer, black hair sheared close to the skull, probably by himself, and slabs of muscle on his shoulders that threw off the lines of his Big and Tall sport-coat. His face was a plank with features penciled on. We didn’t shake hands.

“Does Gordon ride with the passengers, or do you check him through?”

Naheen was pleasant. “Some of my less successful cases harbor resentments. Even a doctor of psychiatry must sometimes resort to prehistoric methods for his protection. And Gordon is an agreeable companion. He seldom speaks, but when he does, what he has to say is invariably significant. May we go into your office?”

I unlocked the door and the doctor and I went through. Significant Gordon stayed behind to sort through the selection of
New York Times
crossword puzzle books on the coffee table, starting with the back pages where the answers were. I scooped up the mail—two or three circulars and a thick mailer—and carried it to the desk. The mailer was as heavy as a brick.

Naheen wandered the office like a visitor to a gallery, stopping in front of the Anheuser-Busch print of Custer’s Last Stand.

“Interesting choice,” he said, “and possibly a revealing one. Are you a defender of lost causes, Mr. Walker?”

“Only when it pays.”

He smiled his pleasant, noncommittal analyst’s smile. “I ask your pardon. When I see an office so aggressively generic, containing only one item of personal expression, I’m tempted to read much into the item. It’s a professional gaucherie that has cost me a number of valued friendships.”

“We’re not friends, Doctor. I’m just the help. I inherited the office and the furniture in it. All I changed was the magazines and the wall art. A target silhouette used to hang there. The print was just the right size to cover the spot where the wall didn’t fade.”

“Any number of less provocative prints would have done the job just as well. I suspect you’re obfuscating. But I am tilling another’s soil. Cigar?” He produced a leather case shaped like three torpedoes and opened it. When I shook my head he selected one, returned the case to his breast pocket, and went through the ritual. When he had it burning he dropped the match and the band in the ashtray I slid across the desk and sat down in the customer’s chair.

I took my seat and didn’t smoke. The fumes from the doctor’s cigar were thick enough to have texture.

“The news from Detroit makes its way into our little island paper on a regular basis,” he said. “It always saddens me to learn the fate of a guest I was unable to help. Is Mr. Catalin still at large?”

“He was as of yesterday, when the case stopped being mine. As I remember, you thought it was unlikely that his personality would split this wide.”

“I make no apology. The brain is not a mechanical device. You can’t just identify the defective component and replace it. Which in a roundabout sort of way brings me to the reason I’m here.”

“One of your guests skip out on his bill?”

“They are all accounted for,” he said pleasantly. “My problem is with a former employee. His name is Miles Leander.”

He spelled it. I wrote it on my telephone pad. “Canned or quit?”

“I had to let him go. He was an orderly on my staff. He developed a hostile attitude and it was communicating itself to the guests. That was two weeks ago. Now he is attempting to extort money from me.”

“Extort how?”

He leaned forward, propping his cigar on the edge of the ashtray. The afternoon sun canting in through the window behind the desk made opaque circles of his spectacles. “I must assure myself of your confidence. Some of the people I help at Balfour House are public figures. I will not remain in practice for long if they misjudge my motives.”

“I wouldn’t be in business a minute longer if I went around repeating what’s said in this office.”

He was still for a moment. Then he nodded. “I record some of my sessions with guests on videotape. It’s purely for my own use, for reviewing later. Gestures, expressions, body language often reveal much about a person’s emotions and thought processes that words do not. I find it useful to examine them for these things in private, without distractions.”

“Do the patients—excuse me, the guests—know you’re filming them?”

“Absolutely not. People behave differently when they’re aware their words and actions are being recorded. By the time I subtracted suspicion and self-consciousness, I wouldn’t have much left to work with.”

I doodled on the pad.

“No one views the tapes but me,” he went on. “When I am not watching them I keep them locked in a fireproof vault I had built into the closet in my office. I possess the only key. I put them away, I take them out. No one handles them but me.”

“How many are missing?”

He hesitated. Then he nodded again. “I suppose I had no business coming to you if I did not expect you to behave like a detective. Forty-eight tapes are gone, Mr. Walker. They represent ninety-six one-hour sessions spent with a total of thirty guests. Some were prominent, many were not. The one thing they have in common is they are no longer guests at Balfour. The tapes were removed from the rear of the file, where the old case records are stored prior to destruction, and replaced with blanks.”

“That’s a lot of tapes to smuggle out all at once. What kind of security do you have?”

“The doors and windows are wired to alarms, for which the orderlies have codes. Gordon oversees a staff of four to discourage promiscuous comings and goings. These precautions are merely to keep the guests from coming to harm outside; I do not treat dangerous cases, only nervous disorders. It’s my opinion that Leander spread out his theft over a long period to avoid attracting notice. He stole from the defunct file because I would not be likely to review those tapes. What I cannot figure out is how he got into the vault. That key is never out of my possession.”