Never Street (34 page)

His eyes closed. I didn’t know if he’d heard anything I’d said. He was going into deep shock.

All the doors at the back of the auditorium opened simultaneously and twenty uniformed Detroit police officers streamed up the aisles, some of them carrying riot guns. I laid my revolver on a theater seat and clasped my hands on top of my head.

John Alderdyce strolled in while I was being frisked. He said I was okay and the officer let me push myself away from the wall. The officer bending over Robinette straightened.

“This one’s pretty bad, Inspector. I’ll radio EMS.”

“If you like.” The inspector watched Lizabeth Scott, the movie’s only authentic victim, being escorted to her cell by a city matron. Dick Powell, the source of most of her grief, rode away with loyal Jane Wyatt at the wheel, free to live whatever remained of the respectable life he had been leading when the story began. The reel ran out. The screen went white.

“Good picture?” he asked me.

“I thought so the first couple of times I saw it. I’ve seen it so many times now I don’t even see it anymore. Did you get Mrs. Catalin?”

He nodded. “Mary Ann Thaler’s checking her for weapons.”

“The kind she carries won’t turn up in a frisk.” I looked around, spotted the checked butt of the automatic poking out from under a seat, and used my handkerchief to pick it up by the barrel. “The serial number on this ought to check out with the gun Neil Catalin registered. The prints are Robinette’s. Meet Robinette.” I waved the butt at the man on the floor.

“Thanks. We’ve met a time or two.”

“You may not have to meet him again, even if he survives. If the slugs that killed Brian Elwood and Leo Webb didn’t come from this piece, I’ll retire and write my memoirs.”

“I almost hope they don’t.” He took the gun by the handkerchief end.

“Robinette didn’t kill Elwood; Webb did. But then Robinette beat to death a P.I. in Iroquois Heights named Musuraca, and you may not be able to make that one stick.”

“Any murder will do. I hear you found out they sprang Ted Silvera from Jackson. I tried to call.”

“You should have left a message.”

“That’d make one more you owed me. This brings us almost even for the Luger. If you’d told me Saturday what you called and told me today, you’d be a little ahead.”

“I needed you to catch him in possession of the gun. He didn’t have it with him last night or I’d have called you then. I was pretty sure he’d have it today. Nobody resents being taken more than a taker.”

“I’m not sure we can hold the woman. Anything she told you in here is inadmissable.”

“Try this,” I said. “Gay Catalin was too smart to risk taking her husband’s body very far from their house. The gun’s enough to shake loose a warrant to search the house and grounds. Don’t forget the berry thicket at the end of the cul-de-sac. She’d be just cute enough to bury him there on city property.”

“West Bloomfield won’t even need a warrant for that.”

“Thanks, John.”

He looked around, at the marble and velvet and stained glass and gold leaf and painted plaster. “Big place, huh? My old man would say a person could store a mess of cotton in here.”

“Not really. It’s already full.”

A
UTUMN BEGAN BANG
on schedule, with starchy winds and needles of rain and the first chill of death from Alberta. The leaves on the trees planted in boxes along Woodward turned brazen and bloody—in River Rouge they remained black as the coke in the ovens in the foundry—and the Tigers fell out of the run for the pennant at the point where they usually fell out when they had any shot at all. In September, officers from Detroit and West Bloomfield working jointly turned up Neil Catalin’s decomposing remains in the soft soil under the untended brush at the end of the street in front of his house. His widow, Gay Catalin, was arrested, arraigned in Detroit Recorder’s Court on a charge of open murder, and scheduled for trial in October.

The circumstances of the crime were bizarre enough to inspire a theme show on one of the afternoon TV talkfests—“Men Who Obsess and the Women Who Love Them”—and to interest a national cable network, which covered the trial, borrowing personnel and equipment from Gilda Productions, currently in receivership with Judy Yin acting as general manager. A well-known feminist attorney took charge of the defense pro bono, arguing for acquittal on the grounds of temporary insanity brought on by the victim’s infidelity and virtual desertion. The trial lasted two weeks. The jury deliberated for five days, then reported itself deadlocked, seven to five in favor of conviction. A mistrial was declared.

Orvis Robinette was recovering under police guard in a room at Detroit General Hospital. He awaited arraignment for felony homicide in the death of Leo Webb during the commission of a burglary.

The night of the day the jury hung in the Catalin case, Vesta and I had dinner at the Downtown London Chop House, caught a concert at the Ford Auditorium, and afterward walked along the riverfront, which was well lighted and filled with strollers dragging the last good out of the season before the long gray coma of winter. We were comfortable in our light cotton jackets, but there was a coppery smell of change in the air. The weather reader on Channel 4 was predicting snow for Halloween.

“Do you think they’ll try her again?” Vesta asked.

We had stopped to watch an ore carrier steaming under the Ambassador Bridge, its coal-shovel prow gleaming greasily in the lights strung along the cables between the spans.

“Maybe not,” I said. “Prosecutors are always running for something and want that feminist vote. Apparently the right to murder your husband is in jeopardy. If they do go again it won’t make television. The networks already have reruns to spare.”

“I didn’t even watch myself when they repeated my testimony on the late news. It’s the first time I ever played myself on camera. I’m pretty sure I was wrong for the part.”

“The D.A. loved you. If I were you I wouldn’t read any notices from the defense.”

“I walked out during a taping of
Hard Copy
last week. The interviewer kept referring to me as the ‘Delilah from Detroit.’ I signed a release, so they’re threatening to sue.”

“I wouldn’t sweat it. Next week some high school algebra teacher in Delaware will seduce a student into murdering her husband and they’ll forget all about you. Warhol was right.”

“Maybe not.”

We resumed walking. She had on cream-colored pleated slacks with a top and jacket to match. It looked yellow under the lamps. Her long black hair was gathered into a loose ponytail and she wore no jewelry and little makeup. She might have been a mature senior in high school. She was quieter than usual.

I said, “Something happened.”

“Something.” She nodded.

I lit a cigarette without offering her one and tossed the match toward the river. It made a short orange arc and spat when it struck the surface.

“A producer called,” she said then. “He saw me on
Court TV.
He wants me to fly to L.A. and audition for a part on
Days of Our Lives.”

“Did he call you Chickie and talk with a lisp?”

“He wasn’t one of those. I called SAG. He checks out as far back as
Playhouse Ninety.
It’s a genuine offer. He sent me a plane ticket and everything.”

“What’s the part?”

“A homewrecker.”

I said nothing.

She moved a shoulder. “So I’m typecast. Neil used to say that’s what makes a star shine.”

“I hope he was right. You’ve earned it.”

We passed an old man in a light blue suit, narrow-brimmed hat, and black-and-brown wingtips, holding hands with a white-haired woman who walked with an aluminum cane.

Vesta said, “You could go with me.”

“To the audition?”

“To L.A. I mean, if it works out. To live.”

I shook my head. “Southern California’s crawling with P.I.’s. Here I’m a small frog in a small pond. Out there I’d just drown.”

“There’s loads of security work. Every ten-year-old who shoots a cereal commercial thinks he needs a bodyguard.”

“That’s appealing. A babysitter with a Motorola.”

She stopped and hugged herself. There was no wind and the air was mild. “Work with me here. I’m trying to find out if we have anything worth hanging on to.”

“When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I’m relieved. For a minute there I was worried you weren’t giving me much notice.”

“You could come out later.”

“I’d have to work up contacts, memorize a whole new set of streets. My Spanish isn’t that good.”

“I probably won’t get the part anyway.”

“You probably will.”

A breeze came up then, moist from the water and edged with sulphur from the smelters downriver. A radio was playing on the Canadian side. The notes Dopplered over in a warped glissando: a slide trombone with tonsils. Sarah Vaughan. Vesta reached up and pulled a stray lock of hair away from her face. “Tell me where I screwed up so I’ll know what to avoid next time.”

“You didn’t. I’m as bad as Neil in my way. You’d spend most of your nights watching television alone or reading a book, not knowing if I picked up a tail job that took me all the way to Seattle or if I was floating facedown in La Brea. Maybe it’s not worth killing over, but nobody should have to put up with it either.”

“There are other jobs. You’ve got a college education.”

“You could model.”

She made a face. Then she smiled. Then she looked away. The slight bump on her nose gave her the profile of an Indian princess. “If this is right, how come I feel so crummy?”

“That’s how you tell.”

Next day I drove her to the airport. She kissed me at the curb, tipped a skycap to carry her bags inside, and followed him through the automatic doors without looking back. I went to see a movie.

Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.

Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once
The Oklahoma Punk
was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.

Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s
Motor City Blue
, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel,
Sugartown
, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is
Infernal Angels
.

Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980,
The High Rocks
was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s
The Book of Murdock
. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author.
Journey of the Dead
, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.

Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.