Never Street (25 page)

And they would never have their man as long as they thought he was Catalin.

While I was working all this out, a moth the size of a kite sailed in through the broken window, splatted against the lamp shade, and plopped to the carpet, dead as the USSR. I had some home maintenance to do.

I found some scraps of plywood in the garage, but nothing that would fit the empty window frame. I picked up a hammer and a sack of nails, punched the bottom out of the silverware drawer in the kitchen, and nailed the piece over the hole. After picking up and throwing out the broken glass I took the hammer and nails into the bedroom and pounded a nail into the bed’s wooden frame halfway between the head and foot, leaving an inch and a half of shaft sticking out.

The telephone rang. I carried the revolver with me into the living room.

“Walker’s All-Night Construction.”

“Are you okay?”

It was Vesta.

“It depends on what scale you’re using. Did you try to call earlier?”

“You didn’t answer. I was worried.”

“Why?”

“I had a visitor right after I got off the phone with you. After he left I went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I got to thinking he might be on his way over to your place. I was right, wasn’t I?”

“I’ll guess. It was Orvis Robinette.”

“I kept the door on the chain all the time we were talking. He could have broken it, but he was on his good behavior. I told him I didn’t have the ninety-two thousand, that my lawyer had it and he’d put it in a safe deposit box and that we were giving it back.”

“Was he still on his good behavior?”

“For him, I suppose. He didn’t call me anything I hadn’t heard before, but he didn’t try to break in. That means he believed me. He wanted to know whose idea it was to give the money back. I wouldn’t tell him, but I think he figured it out for himself. He left then. When you didn’t answer your phone I thought—”

“He was here. I didn’t see him, but I know the sound of that souped-up Camaro he drives. I heard it at your place the night he killed Leo Webb. He wasn’t as lucky with me. He missed.”

“Did you call the police?”

“What for? I’ve already been violated.”

“But you’re okay.”

“Okay enough to do a little midnight carpentry. He won’t be back tonight. I’m pretty sure he won’t be back at all.”

“What makes you sure?”

“He’s hotheaded, but he’s no psycho. He went into crime for the money, not the buzz. The cash is gone. There’s no percentage in carrying on a vendetta. That doesn’t mean he won’t try again if I happen to cross his path, but he won’t go out of his way to cross mine after the risk he just took. By now he’s planning his next heist.”

“I hope you’re right. All my relationships lately seem to wind up in jail or wanted by the cops or dead. I’m starting to wonder if I’m the opposite of a rabbit’s foot.”

“Let’s just say your biorhythms are due for an upswing. Go back to bed; that’s what I’m planning to do. I’ll see you tonight”

“Just don’t walk under any ladders between now and then, deal?”

I grinned and told her good night.

When the receiver was in the cradle my grin faded. With the gun in my hand I checked the locks on every door and window in the house. In the bedroom I draped my robe over the footboard, hung the revolver by its trigger guard on the nail I’d hammered into the bedframe, and stretched out on the mattress, checking a couple of times with my hand to make sure the weapon was within reach. A gun under a pillow is too hard to get to. A gun on the nightstand is too easy for the wrong people to get to. And as confident as I’d sounded when I spoke to Vesta, too many of my assumptions had gone wrong lately to trust any of them as much as I trusted that nail.

I
N THE MORNING
I showered, cleaned my gun, shaved, loaded the cylinder, dressed, checked the load, drank coffee and juice, snapped the holster to my belt, and went to work. Nobody shot at me when I fished the Free Press out of the junipers, so I counted it the start of a good day.

A high-speed early-morning chase involving a stolen car, three Detroit police cruisers, and an innocent thirty-three-year-old mother of two killed crossing with the light at an intersection had bumped the Elwood-Webb murders to an inside page. The story led off with the discovery of Catalin’s car at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, went from there to an all-purpose quote from the FBI special agent who had inherited the case, then went on to rehash the familiar details. The same trio of pictures of Elwood, Webb, and Catalin ran as filler.

The respite of the last few days had ended. The ventilating breezes from Canada had shifted to the North, bringing up the stale air from Ohio and Kentucky and below that sopping Dixie: It smelled of kelp. A bank of sullen, dirty-faced clouds was working its way upriver from Lake Erie, preparing to screw down the lid once again. Humidity, storms, and blackouts were predicted. The officers of the Tactical Mobile Unit busied themselves polishing their face shields and checking the expiration dates on their cans of Mace. Every summer and every winter, the Pleasant Peninsula pays a price for avoiding the earthquakes out West and the flooding in the East.

I stopped at the office long enough to check my service for messages and call Spee-D-A Couriers. Mr. Blint, the manager, was at his desk and expected to be there throughout the day. After just ten minutes parked in the sun, I could have broiled a steak on the hood of the Cutlass. When I turned on the radio, Nat King Cole sang “Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer.” I punched a button to change stations and got Sarah Vaughan on WEMU: “Ain’t No Use.”

I wondered if it was going to be such a good day after all.

The messenger service was set up in a glass-brick building on Vernor that had housed an Italian restaurant, a throw-away newspaper discarded after eighteen months, a Mexican restaurant, a police mini-station, a Thai restaurant, an accounting service, a Japanese restaurant, a Republican campaign headquarters, and some kind of restaurant. It was a palimpsest of a structure that bore some evidence of every business that had passed through its portals. The windows were made of bulletproof Plexiglas from the mini-station period, an electronic megaphone belonging to the political incarnation still poked out above the door, and the button to push for service reposed between the jaws of a brass-plated Japanese dragon.

The building was less than twenty years old. It had replaced a hotel that had been in operation constantly since the Cleveland Administration.

A sign mounted perpendicular to the front of the building read SPEE-D-A COURIERS, the s fashioned after a lightning bolt. A row of bicycles was chained to a rack next to the entrance. I stood back out of the way as a lanky teenage girl in Spandex shorts, a halter top, a cork helmet, and shin guards punched open the door, dumped an armload of packages into the basket of the first bike in line, unlocked the chain, and took off, swinging a leg over the seat after the vehicle was already in motion.

The shallow customer area was painted blue and orange to match the colors of the sign out front and ended abruptly before a counter with a swing gate. The room beyond was a chaos of stacked packages in Fiberglas crates, cases of pigeonholes, canyons of boxes, and a granite-topped table like a printer’s stone where a dozen or so young people dressed like the girl who had just left stood wrapping and stamping bundles with that combination of wasted movement and superior efficiency that belongs exclusively to the under-twenty set. Just watching them made my corns ache.

A copper bell with a handle stood on the counter. I picked it up and gave it a jingle. In a little while one of the workers, a boy with cropped blonde hair and a gold stud in his right nostril, came over.

“Mr. Blint?” I asked.

He shook his head and jerked it toward the back. “Is it a complaint? Sorry, mister. Some of these kids are a little slow. They don’t stay here long enough for us to sort out the lazy ones from the Spee-D-A material.”

“How long have you worked here?”

“Almost four weeks.”

“I guess that makes you the assistant manager.” I gave him a card. “Please take this in to Mr. Blint. It’s important I talk to him.”

He went back without glancing at the card or asking questions. He was Spee-D-A material. Thirty seconds later he came back and opened the gate.

“Mr. Blint’s at his desk.”

After the bicycles and printer’s stone I suppose I expected an old crotch in a green eyeshade surrounded by carrier pigeons in cages. I got a graying longhair in granny glasses and a fringed leather vest, seated at a keyboard in front of an electronic screen. He shared the back third of the building with fourteen monitors, six fax machines, eight printers, and a board containing a row of digital clocks representing the world’s time zones, including the daylight savings holdouts. A bulletin board shingled with notes and memos featured a color reproduction clipped from a magazine of the melting clocks of Dali’s
The Persistence of Memory.
The screen saver marching across the blue glowing faces of all the spare monitors put it more directly:
TEMPUS FUGIT.

“I think I’m getting it,” I said by way of greeting. “Gepetto Plugged.”

“Actually, my home page handle is Huygens. He was the Dutchman who designed the first clock pendulum.” Blint’s attention remained on the screen in front of him. “What you’re looking at is a three-dimensional oxymoron. Fax, Internet, E-Mail, World-Wide Web, and the good old underappreciated Don Ameche.” He patted the console telephone at his elbow. “Who the hell needs a messenger service? I wonder if the frontier ferrymen who contracted with the Union Pacific to carry their rails and men and equipment across the rivers of this great land ever paused to consider that they were putting themselves out of business.”

“I think they did. You don’t turn down paying work. Speaking as one oxymoron to another,” I added.

“That crossed my mind when I saw your card. Why employ a shamus when you can get all the information you need at the touch of a key?”

“Not all. You can’t swap confidences in cyberspace. You can’t buy a drunk a drink or wave a fin under the nose of an underpaid clerk or fix up a city councilman with the barmaid or muss someone’s shirt. At forty cents a minute you can’t practice diuturnity.”

“Diuturnity.” He sat back then and looked up at me. His eyes were oyster-colored above the wire rims of his Ben Franklins. “Such an impressive vocabulary in such an unremarkable suit.”

“I gave myself a word-a-day calendar last Christmas. And I never discuss tailoring with anyone who dresses like Jimi Hendrix.”

“Hendrix. There was someone who made full use of the time he had. Yes, child?” He looked at the girl in Spandex who had materialized from the other side of the pigeonholes.

“Devon just quit. He said Burger King pays more and the hours are better.”

“He’s probably right. Give Rebecca his route.”

She left.

“Big turnover?” I asked.

“Tip of the iceberg. The wages I can afford to pay restrict me to the MTV generation. They have the attention span of a housefly.”

The girl returned. “Rebecca says there are too many hills on Devon’s route.”

“Tell her she’s fired. Corinne,” he called, after a moment.

She’d started to turn. She turned back. “I’m Janet. Corinne quit last week.”

“Noted. How are you on hills?”

“They’re easy. I’m a gymnast.”

“Congratulations, Janet. You just inherited Devon’s route and a raise.”

“Who gets my old route?”

“Rebecca. I decided she’s not fired.”

When we were alone again, Blint sighed. “Have you always been a detective?”

“Probably not. If I were born wearing a shoulder holster I’d have heard about it.”

“I was a mail carrier in Royal Oak for twenty years. Then a clerk I barely knew well enough to talk to came in and sprayed the place with lead just as I was tying out. Now I’m self-employed.” He pushed himself away from the computer console and I saw the wheels on his chair. “But you’re not here to waste
Tempus.”

“My client had some property stolen. Someone’s offered to sell it back to him, payment to be delivered to this address. Is it usual for a messenger service to accept deliveries as well as make them?”

“Not if I suspect hot merchandise is involved, or drugs. The authorities are here on a regular basis because of the minors I employ. I always test clean.”

“But you do accept deliveries sometimes. I’m investigating a customer, not you.”

“On occasion, yes. We charge more for the convenience than the postal service does, but you need identification to rent a post office box. Anyone can walk into any post office and find out who belongs to a particular box number. That never fails to upset the people who advertise for partners in alternative-sex publications; they almost always find out from their employers or spouses. We don’t ask for ID unless the customer pays by check. That almost never happens. It doesn’t do to have your monthly dividend from the Marital-Aid-of-the-Month Club arrive at your front door in full view of the neighbors.”

“The customer I’m interested in goes by Mr. Bell.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he slid his cheaters back up his nose. “How do I know you’re not just working some divorce case? I figure I’ve got two more years before the whole world’s on line; just enough time to make a difference between a comfortable retirement and Little Friskies every Friday. That goes west when my customers find out I can’t keep a secret in a cage.”

“This isn’t evidence. It would just be a hell of a lot of trouble to go to when there are easier ways to get what I’m after.”

I took out the sheet of notepaper Naheen had given me containing the fifty-thousand-dollar ransom demand, folded back the top to conceal the doctor’s name, and held it in front of his face.

Blint read it, then took off the glasses and rubbed his eyes. He had a cast in one and a white scar along that temple that a bullet might have made. It reminded me of the mark on the underside of the curio shelf in my living room.

“Works for me.” He put his glasses back on. “I remember Bell. None of these kids would; most of them weren’t working here then. It was a couple of weeks ago. I could look it up.”