Never Street (21 page)

“When did the cops cut you loose?” I asked without salutation.

“Who’s this?”

“Amos Walker, alias the money fairy. Did they at least give you a ride home?”

“They offered. I called a cab. I prefer the brand of disinfectant the Yellow people use. Hold on a second.”

I held on a little longer. Paper and cellophane and foil crackled. Steel scratched flint. A pair of lungs filled and emptied. In the suburbs another couple of hundred brain cells died without a whimper. Then:

“What did you say about money?”

“Later,” I said. “I wanted your undivided attention. Are you a suspect?”

“Not unless I hired it done, and I guess all those original Rembrandts in my three-hundred-buck-a-month walkup don’t put me in the right tax bracket for that. I was slinging menus in front of a hundred witnesses all the time Leo was getting himself shot in my bedroom. Did you do it?”

“No, and neither did Neil, but that’s how Detroit’s handling it. How much of what you told me did you tell them?”

“If you mean did I tell them about Orvis Robinette slapping me around, the answer’s no. They didn’t ask.” She paused. “Oh, hell. Would they tap my phone?”

“Not for a couple of little victims like Elwood and Webb. Anyway, Detroit hasn’t had the case long enough to get the court order, and in Iroquois Heights it’s last season’s catch. We’re safe to talk. Are you working today?”

“I doubt I’m still employed. Two big Detroit cops in uniform plucked me out from behind the registration desk in the middle of the evening rush hour. That doesn’t add up to four stars in a restaurant review.”

“If you’re rested up enough to see me in half an hour, you may not need to look for another job for a while.”

She paused again. “I’ve gotten exactly two hours’ sleep in the last twenty-four. Even when I’m rested I’m not good at riddles. Spell it out.”

“What would you do if you had nine thousand dollars in your hands right now?”

“Oh, please.”

“Indulge me. You’re up already.”

“I’d get a new wardrobe and have some pictures taken by a good photographer and hire a booking agent and get my acting career out of the toilet. While I was at it I’d pick a religion I liked and find the church most in need of a new roof and drop nine hundred in the collection plate. Miracles don’t come cheap.”

“Are the cops still hanging out at your place?”

“They took down the seal, but I’ve still got Leo’s picture in masking tape on my bedroom carpet. I slept on the couch.”

“Not there, then. The Detroit cops knock usually, but that Iroquois Heights gang thinks every little murder gives them a ninety-nine-year lease on private property, especially when there’s a chance of catching a beautiful woman naked. Where can you meet me?”

“If you’re serious about the money, you pick. I need the laugh.”

I thought. Then I had it. “Got a pencil?”

She went to look for one. When I gave her the address she asked me to make it an hour and a half. “I’ve got bags under my eyes you could pack shirts in.”

“Wear dark glasses.”

She made a noise with her lips. “Give me a hint about this nine thousand.”

“Ninety-two hundred,” I said, “to put the fine point on it. That’s the ten percent finder’s fee the insurance companies will pay you when you return the money your ex-husband stole from the video stores downriver.” I hung up.

I
LEFT WHAT I COULD
of the Monday From Hell in the shower drain and the sink basin, dressed fresh from the skin out, ate breakfast for the first time all year, and rolled out. The air smelled scrubbed and rinsed. This had been the rain we’d been waiting for since July, the one that broke the cycle of pressure and heat and swept the sky as clear of clouds as a china bowl. The temperature was in the low seventies. Tops were down, bare midriffs were in, businessmen walking back from lunch swung their briefcases and whistled. I might have joined them if I could think of any tune but “The Song of the Volga Boatmen.” It had been a long hard row, the boat had landed in the wrong spot, and I was the only one who seemed to care.

I dropped off the VCR and the Debbie Reynolds movies I hadn’t gotten around to watching and wrote a check to ransom my good name. The clerk, a different kid this time with the same skin condition as his predecessor, didn’t send up any flares. There were four identical machines on a shelf behind the counter and, incredibly, no one had been in over the weekend asking for
Tammy and the Bachelor.

For the film aficionado and the student of architecture, the Michigan Theater in downtown Detroit is the place to go to be depressed. Built in 1926 along the soaring Art Deco lines of the Albert Kahn buildings sheltering the police department, the two daily newspapers, and the Fisher Theater, the Michigan had packed its auditorium for Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, and Clark Gable, eked in enough viewers to cover the rental fees for James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, shut down through the entire film careers of Ryan O’Neal and Karen Black, and then in the time of disco and Jimmy Carter was gutted of its velvet seats and rosewood stage and turned into a parking garage. Now Luminas and mini-conversions and Nissans blackened the crumbling ornamental plaster at the tops of the ceiling columns with monoxide and dripped oil and transmission fluid on the mosaic floor tiles. What the ghosts of the Sheik and Cleopatra and the crew of the battleship
Potemkin
made of it all was anybody’s guess.

I parked under the remains of a green-gilt false balcony, its bottom burst from water draining off the roof and trailing clumps of horsehair plaster, got out and wandered around for a while. I was ten minutes early, an old detective habit. By all rights my veteran’s pension should kick in ten minutes before my sixty-fifth birthday and my casket should be lowered into the ground ten minutes ahead of the time advertised in the obituary, not that anyone would be there to notice. When I got to the gates I would smoke a cigarette while waiting for St. Peter to come back from lunch.

It was a big old echoing shell of poured concrete and red iron girders, with enough space overhead to house the phantom population the city bribed the census takers to report to Washington. Pigeons fluttered among the flies like bats in a cathedral. My footsteps slapped back at me from vaults and groins where the treble of a pipe organ long since gone to scrap might still be reverberating, as unaware of the change as a Japanese soldier on a remote island in the Pacific. I thought I smelled hot buttered popcorn under the guano and gasoline, but that was probably race memory. It was just a place to park cars.

I leaned against the Cutlass’ rear fender, smoking and watching the entrance. I wondered if Neil Catalin had been watching the same way when his wife came here to meet him four days ago, when this was just a missing-person case and there were two more people in the world. I wondered if he had arranged to meet her at all. If I was right, and Webb had called Gay, successfully imitating his partner’s voice, to keep us busy while he killed Brian Elwood and pinned it on Neil, then sent us to the DIA while he went to Vesta’s place to kill her, I couldn’t work up much indignation over Orvis Robinette. All he wanted was the money he thought he had coming to him, and all he had done was kill a killer.

I was thinking these thoughts, like God on His cloudy mount, when a red Triumph convertible turned in from the street, paused while the driver took a ticket, and rolled up the aisle between the rows of parked vehicles. I lifted a hand. Vesta saw it and cranked into a handicapped slot two cars over. She swung a mile of smoothly shaved tan leg out of the seat and came my way, hugging herself as if she were chilled, her high-heeled sandals clicking in the great empty space. She wore a white sleeveless blouse knotted above two inches of brown midriff and black shorts. Her hair was gathered inside a white silk scarf tied under her chin and she had on black-rimmed glasses with gray lenses through which I could just make out her eyes.

“I see you took my advice about the glasses,” I said.

“Occupational necessity. I can’t afford to squint in bright sunlight. Every fresh wrinkle knocks fifty bucks off my base salary.” She glanced around. “This is the first time I’ve been in this building. It doesn’t look like your usual parking structure.”

“It’s not. We’re standing in the orchestra pit. The screen was there, with a stage in front of it where Astaire and Rogers danced during personal appearances. It’s kind of hard to envision now.”

“A movie house.” She smiled without enjoyment. “I might have guessed. You’re the right person to go looking for Neil. You share an obsession.”

“Don’t think I’m on the trip I seem to be on. That comes in handy when I run up against someone who expects me to react like a Hollywood sleuth of the old order. It confuses them when I break from the script, and that levels the playing field. Anyway, I’m not looking for Neil anymore. His wife fired me this morning.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised. You’re kind of a blunderer.”

“What I am is a redundancy, with the police of two cities already looking for Catalin for murder. And just what kind of blunderer I am is something you really don’t know much about.”

She took off her glasses. She had made up her eyes, but there were tiny threads of blood showing in the whites. “You’ll have to excuse me if I’ve bruised your feelings. I’ve had just enough sleep to make the amount I haven’t had that much worse. There’s fingerprint powder all over my apartment. I don’t have a career. I probably don’t even have a job. If I kept a biorhythm chart, which I don’t because I’m the only actress east of Catalina who doesn’t believe in that sort of thing, it would read like a Russian tragedy. I’m here for only one reason.” She put her glasses back on and folded her arms, waiting.

“Why didn’t you tell the cops about Robinette? Don’t tell me again it’s because they didn’t ask. That one’s as old as greasepaint.”

“They let me know in a hundred little ways that they had it all figured out and that my input was just for the boys in the computer room. Introducing Robinette into it would just snarl things up. It seemed simpler to let them go on thinking what they thought. Otherwise I might still be there. Did you tell them?”

I shook my head. “Same reason, different motives. If they thought this connected to the shotgun robberies, they’d think you knew where the money was and tank you as an accessory.”

“That was taking a chance. What if I had told them? They’d tank you for withholding evidence.”

“I’ve been tanked before. It’s worse than you expect, but not as bad as you fear. I figured you had enough angst for all of the Barrymores to draw from without a stretch in the county hotel.”

“Zorro in a ninety-dollar suit. What makes me your damsel? I’m trying to sleep my way to the top.”

“You’re not having much luck at it. Anyway it’s a narrow market.”

“Thanks for the compliment.”

“You’re no femme fatale,” I said. “You just look the part. From where I sit you’re the only fly in this web who thought it was just an innocent doorway. An expert I talked to about Catalin’s fix said if anything jolted him out of it, reality would. The world is a lot more complicated than noir fiction. Bad guys turn out to be just determined survivors, like Phil Musuraca. Some of them even get to be heroes; Robinette may have saved your life. Bad girls are just good girls in trouble. It’s something to think about.”

“Sometimes things are just the way they seem. I’m nobody’s idea of a good girl.”

I grinned. “That’s quite a pep talk you give yourself. Stanislavsky or Stengel?”

“You said something about ninety-two thousand dollars.”

Happy hour was over. I snapped my expired butt in the general direction of the VIP seats. It bounced off a van that had rusted through all its fenders and rolled toward the iron grating over the drain. “Trust me, you don’t want the whole shot. The law will never leave you alone, and even if it does, Robinette won’t. That kind of hero he isn’t. Ten percent’s customary from the insurance companies. A crafty lawyer might be able to jack them up for another five plus his fee. If you want someone to run interference and you’re allergic to lawyers, I’m between assignments at the moment.”

“And what might your fee be?”

“I get five hundred a day and expenses. There won’t be any expenses. Hour’s work over the telephone. Fifty ought to cover it.”

Her brows shot up above the dark glasses. “That’s all?”

“You were right about one thing,” I said. “Sometimes the good guy is just as honest as he looks.”

“Of course, this is all theory so far. Where’s the money? How’d you find it?”

“Neil helped.”

“So you did talk to him.”

“Communed would be the word. I watched the same pictures he did.
Pitfall
in particular. Did you see it?”

She shook her head. “I don’t own a VCR, and we couldn’t exactly visit Neil’s basement. He
talked
about old movies a lot. I wasn’t always listening.”

“I’ll sketch it out: Married man, single dish, boyfriend in the slammer, fat sleazy private dick. Sound familiar?”

She said nothing.

“Coincidence maybe,” I went on. “For sure when he found out the rest of it, his interest level went up: Here was his chance to lead the life he’d only been able to experience secondhand. It fascinated me too, but only because the resemblances sharpened the deeper I got into your relationship. There were differences. Raymond Burr went after Lizabeth Scott for purposes of lust, while Musuraca was only interested in the missing money. Your ex-husband gave you a car. Scott’s boyfriend bought her a boat. But those were only questions of props and continuity.”

“Car.” She was starting to get it. She was a lot more intelligent than her past behavior indicated.

I said, “The same guy who told me about the difference between a movie and the real world pointed out the significance of the boat in
Pitfall.
I didn’t need that, because you’d already told me about the one condition Ted Silvera had made in your divorce. I even took pity on Fat Phil, who’d been trailing you for days and didn’t realize he was never more than a block away from what he was after. I recommended he read Poe. A half-smart guy, Phil. He got the drift, but he missed the point. He thought I was talking about your apartment.