Never Street (20 page)

“I figured what you meant was I been wasting my time following the Mannering broad all around, like she’s going to lead me to that ninety-two large when she knows I’m right behind her. I mean, you got something valuable, where do you hide it? You can’t trust your friends, and if you bury it someplace public, sooner or later somebody’s going to dig it up putting in a sewer or a duck pond or something. So you hide it at home, right?”

“Makes sense.”

“Sure it does. So I hightail it over to her joint figuring to frisk it while she’s at work. I mean, I didn’t expect to find the cash laying around in a great big sack with a dollar sign on it, like the cartoons. I’m thinking maybe there’s a map or a key to a bus locker or something like that. Even if I come up empty it beats sitting around growing cobwebs on my dick.”

“You were the one who tossed the place?”

“Hell, no. I’m parked out front getting the lay when someone goes in ahead of me. I’m thinking it’s another tenant or maybe the janitor, but then a light goes on in the broad’s apartment. So I wait. I mean, if he comes out carrying a TV set it’s cool, just another B-and-E; they happen. If not I brace him.”

“Who was it?”

“It was dark. I didn’t get a good look, except I’m thinking he’s black. From the way he moved.”

“What’d he do, tap-dance across the parking lot?”

“Shit, what do you think I am, some redneck racist? You know what I mean, that street swagger.” He demonstrated, swaying his shoulders while sitting on the bed. He looked like Oliver Hardy doing the Lambada. “Plus he’s tall enough to shoot hoops for a living. Anyway I’m sitting there going over my options when another guest arrives at the party.”

“Leo Webb.”

He blinked. “Leo Webb. How come I know that name?”

“He was Neil Catalin’s business partner.”

“Okay. Well, I never saw him when I was working the Silvera case so I wouldn’t know him this time.”

“You saw him when you were working this case. He drove Catalin’s car to her place last Tuesday night and stayed a couple of hours. You weren’t the only one staking her out that night. Somebody else saw him too.”

He blinked again. Crusts of dried matter clung to his eyelashes like stalactites. “I was in Toledo Tuesday, working a divorce case. I didn’t get that VESTA KNOWS fax till Wednesday.”

I filed that. “Go on. Another guest arrived.”

“This one had on a hat and a raincoat. It was drizzling then, but I got a better look at him on account of he walked down from the corner under the lamp, right past my car. He was white, but I didn’t know him. The other one came in from the other side.”

“Neither one looked like Neil Catalin?”

“Shit, no. Even if I’m wrong about the first one being black, he was way too tall, and the second one just wasn’t him. Anyway this one lets himself in the same door. I’m outnumbered now, so I decide to stay put and see what shakes down. Play it by ear. Then I hear a shot.”

“Hold on. How long between the time the light went on in the apartment and the second man went in?”

“Two-three minutes.”

“When did the shooting start?”

“Just one shot. Say, thirty seconds after the second guy went in. I got my piece out now. I’m figuring to brace whoever comes out that door. My hand’s on my door handle when that Cutlass of yours comes slamming around the corner. You almost clipped me turning into the driveway.”

“Sorry. Did you get a better look at the first man when he dived out the apartment window?”

“I don’t know nothing about nobody jumping through no windows. I left after you came. That was one too many for me.”

The door opened and the man in the apron and chef’s hat waddled in. Without glancing our way he went up on his toes, embraced a cardboard carton shelved at eye level, and backed out lugging it, pushing through the door with his hip pockets. When we were alone I said, “Phil, you need to learn meat cutting at home. You’re not a good enough liar for this line of work.”

“Hey, I didn’t have to tell you squat.”

“Sure you did. No one likes the taste of his own teeth. I saw the bedroom. It takes more than two or three minutes to turn a room inside out; I know, because I’ve done it, and so have you.”

“Maybe the shooter frisked the place afterwards.”

“That’s what the cops think, because it checks with their theory that Catalin killed Webb and tore the room apart to make it look like a burglary. Either way it takes too much time. You said you heard the shot thirty seconds after Webb got there, then I showed up before you could get out of your car.”

“My watch don’t light up. Maybe it was longer.” A whining note had crept into his voice. It hadn’t been musical to begin with.

“Which time? Don’t bother, I’ll choose. At least fifteen minutes went by between the time the first man went in and Webb came along. That’s how long it would take for you to hotfoot it over to the next block where the first man walked in from, get the number off his license plate or read the name on his registration, and be back in your car in time to see Webb. You were still there when I went up and traded shots with the first man and he left through the window. Maybe you got a good look at him then, maybe not. It wouldn’t matter, because you already had a line on who he was. It was Orvis Robinette.”

“I don’t know that name.”

“You aren’t getting any better at this. If you knew about the ninety-two grand Silvera got from the video store robberies, you knew Robinette was his accomplice. Robinette went to Vesta’s place for the same reason you did, to search for some clue to where the money was hidden. Webb walked in on the middle of it and wound up getting shot with the gun he was going to use on Vesta.” I ran a hand down the rumpled front of his coat, then smelled the whiskey on my fingers. “What’s the celebration, Phil? Is Robinette going to show his gratitude for keeping your mouth zipped about Webb’s murder by cutting you in on his future heists?”

The left side of his face slid up in a lopsided leer. I discovered I didn’t like him after all.

“What’s the matter, you sore on account of you didn’t think of it first?”

“H
AVE YOU MET
Robinette?” I asked Musuraca.

“He’s living in a hotel. I called him. We’re meeting later.”

“Planning to hand him that old dodge about leaving the information with someone who’ll take it to the cops if anything happens to you?”

“I ain’t stupid.”

I wasn’t sure if that meant yes or no. I opted for the Brotherhood of Man. “Neither is Robinette. Even a bad lawyer can get a written statement thrown out of court without a witness or his body to back it up. They won’t find your body.”

“I guess I got this far alive.”

“That’s because you weren’t worth killing. Congratulations. Your stock just went up.”

He took that as a compliment. “Guess you underestimated Fat Phil, huh? Guess everybody did. Well, that time’s past. If you find that ninety grand, you can keep it. I’m investing in futures. No more peephole jobs. No more sitting on my piles in my car outside crummy motels. No more cold squid. Next time you want to see me you can call my secretary and make an appointment. I’ll be heading up my own agency on Main Street, hiring grunts to stake out joints while I practice my putting.”

“Bye-bye, Phil,” I said. “You think I hope it doesn’t work out, but you’re wrong. I’d like to see a little grifter make a big score for a change. The big chains are taking too much of the market.”

He straightened his tie and slung a finger along the brim of his hat. “Pick yourself up some cashew chicken on your way out. It’s the most expensive item on the menu. Tell ’em Phil’s buying.”

I left him there amid the rat droppings and MSG, a little fat man with dreams too big for his belt, and drove home through the rusty rays of dawn over Windsor, smuggling themselves in under the black shelf of yet another storm-front. I was swimming against glue. I could feel my own foulness under my arms and in the bends of my elbows, and my chin rasped against my collar when I turned my head at intersections. When I pulled into the garage and jerked the key from the ignition, the weight of the ring was like dumbbells.

I crossed through the kitchen and living room with flatirons strapped to my feet and threw myself across the bed without undressing. Nothing separated me from Phil Musuraca now except seventy pounds and hope for the future.

FADE IN: EXTERIOR CITYSCAPE—NIGHT

BOGART: So many guns around town, and so few brains.

INTERIOR BAR

CAGNEY: Top o’ the world, Ma.

INTERIOR CAR—IN MOTION

LADD: So long, baby.

EXTERIOR WHARF—NIGHT

POWELL: Let’s call it a retainer.

INTERIOR HOTEL ROOM

LANCASTER: Once I did something wrong.

INTERIOR NIGHTCLUB

STANWYCK: You and me, Walter—straight down the line.

EXTERIOR POLICE HEADQUARTERS—NIGHT

MITCHUM: Someone’s trying to put me in a frame. I’m

going up to get a look at the picture.

EXTERIOR ALLEY—NIGHT

GARFIELD: So long, baby.

INTERIOR STAIRCASE

BACALL: If you want me, just whistle.

EXTERIOR CARNIVAL—NIGHT

WELLES: When I set out to make a fool of myself, there’s

very little that can stop me.

INTERIOR OFFICE

HOLDEN: Poor dope. He always wanted a pool.

EXTERIOR BEACH—NIGHT

GRAHAME: We’re sisters under the mink.

INTERIOR GARAGE

RAFT: So long, baby.

SCOTT: So long, baby.

CRAWFORD: So long, baby.

FADE OUT

It wasn’t a dream, exactly. Dreams come with a plotline, whether or not it hangs together in the compassionless glare of the sun. It was more like a scattering of fragments of brain pictures that had slipped their sprockets, stuttering at demented angles in front of the bulb: Grubby walk-up offices lit by slats of moonglow through Venetian blinds, city skylines dusted with glitter, carnival midways tilted forty-five degrees, their merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels turning perpendicularly like huge gears, fans attached to nightclub ceilings casting swooping shadows like bats’ wings, Krazy Kat staircases that turned themselves inside out halfway up like optical illusions on the puzzle page of the Sunday magazine, forcing me to hang on to the railings to avoid pitching into an abyss. The soundtracks had torn loose from the filmstrips, putting the lines in the mouths of all the wrong actors: John Garfield spoke in Gloria Grahame’s falsetto and Barbara Stanwyck snarled with Humphrey Bogart’s trademark lisp. Train whistles brayed from typewriter keyboards. Steam calliopes tootled through tender love scenes. Telephones sounded like ricocheting bullets.

The images were even more disorienting. Automobile grilles spiked with chrome bulged into fish-eye close-ups. Driving rain turned windshields into opaque jewels. Wet asphalt reflected skyscrapers like mirrors, so that it was impossible to tell which were the skyscrapers and which the reflections. Demonic grinning faces appeared upside down in the bowls of spoons. Whoever was in charge of the dispatching department had sent me Orson Welles’s D.T.’s by mistake. I wondered where mine had wound up, and if Welles, straining a canvas chair in Directors’ Valhalla, was having Dwight D. Eisenhower’s.

I gripped the sides of the mattress in a desperate spread eagle through a delirious flying carpet ride, singeing myself in the torch held by Columbia’s overdressed Lady Liberty, dodging Monogram’s charging locomotive, slaloming between the broadcast rings rippling out from RKO’s radio tower, recoiling from the matzoh breath of the MGM lion.

Lay off the movies, Walker. One of these times your face is going to freeze that way.

The telephone rang at least twenty times before I pried loose of the bed and hurtled out into the living room. I half expected to hear Peter Lorre in the earpiece.

“Mr. Walker, this is Gay Catalin.”

Her crisp voice sounded like something from the other side of civilization: starched table linens and sparkling crystal as seen through a smeared window by the Dumpster. Dust motes kicked and tumbled in the sunlight pouring into the room. I had slept straight through another storm. My watch had migrated to the wrong side of my wrist. 10:05.

“I was going to come see you later today,” I said. “There have been developments.”

“I know. The police just left. I’m sending you a check for twenty-five hundred dollars. Please tell me if that isn’t enough to cover your fee and expenses.”

I peeled off my coat, changing hands on the receiver. My shirt stuck to my skin like a wet Kleenex. “I take it I’m fired.”

“No, that would mean I’m unsatisfied with your services. Now that the police regard Neil as a wanted fugitive, I no longer consider employing a private detective to find him a positive use of my husband’s money. I’m calling our lawyer instead.”

“Your husband’s no murderer.”

“That’s for the lawyer to prove. Thank you for all your hard work, Mr. Walker. Please feel free to use me as a reference.” The connection broke.

I cradled the receiver and rummaged in my sodden shirt pocket for the pack that wasn’t there. I broke a fresh one out of the drawer of the telephone table, found a book of matches, and killed a couple of hundred brain cells, but that wasn’t enough to make me stop thinking. Then I spotted the TV set.

I don’t own a remote, so I surfed barefoot, with my hand on the old-fashioned knob. Three or four talk shows, all featuring men in miniskirts. A couple of reruns of sitcoms I hadn’t bothered to laugh at when they were fresh. An infomercial hosted by the former star of one of the sitcoms.
I Love Lucy,
which killed five minutes until the feminine hygiene spot. A soap opera. A war. A political round table discussion that incorporated the best of those two art forms. Pepe LePew and the cat.

The VCR was long overdue at the store, but it didn’t know that. I punched it on, turned the channel to 3, and hit PLAY. The tape in the deck happened to be
Pitfall.
I sat down and watched it from the beginning until the scene where Dick Powell took over the controls of Lizabeth Scott’s boat. Then I got up, turned off both machines, and dialed the number of Vesta Mannering’s apartment. The hello I got on the sixth ring came from the same sub-basement I had crawled out of when Gay Catalin called.