Never Street (6 page)

“I’d like to come in and talk with you about him. Just in case he doesn’t show up tomorrow morning.”

A Rolodex clattered on his end. “I can give you fifteen minutes at nine-forty-five this morning. I was planning to use them to go over my notes for a presentation I’m making tomorrow, but I know it cold. Don’t be late.”

I started to say I didn’t intend to, but I was talking to a dial tone.

My Mercury didn’t want to start. I flooded it, waited five minutes, then shoved the accelerator to the firewall and ground it into life. It had been done quicker by others, but I didn’t have a hunchbacked assistant. It was time to think about new wheels.

Gilda Productions had a suite on the seventeenth floor of the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company Building on Woodward, a furnace-shaped skyscraper with a lobby out of Cecil B. DeMille, complete with sparkling blue lights mounted under the thirty-foot ceiling and a bronze ballerina pirouetting among exterior pools, looking faintly afraid to be caught downtown without a stun gun and a can of Mace under her tutu. A black security guard in gray twill pants and a white short-sleeved shirt with a gold badge over the breast pocket watched me read the directory and walk to the elevators, one hand resting on the flap of his holster. It was time to think about a new suit as well.

I found the reception area behind a brass-bound door with the outline of an attenuated woman in an evening dress etched Deco-style on the glass. An Asian woman in her late twenties, less attenuated, sat behind a glass desk—not kidney-shaped after all—tapping a set of coral nails against the handset of a slimline telephone, obviously on hold. She had on a champagne-colored silk blouse with a matching floppy bow tie, pink buttons in her ears, and at least three coats of lacquer that turned her face into an ivory mask. Her straight black hair was cut in a page boy that threw off blue haloes.

She lifted a pair of razor-thin eyebrows when I stopped in front of the desk; then just as I opened my mouth, jerked her head down and spoke into the telephone. “Yes. Oh, not long, seven and a half minutes or so. No, my right hand needed the exercise anyway. Well, if he’s left for the day, don’t you think you might have found that out and told me when I still had circulation in that hand? Yes, I’d be grateful when he checks in if you’d tell him I called. Thank you so much.”

She clapped the receiver into its cradle. “Idiot. Are you here to see Mr. Webb?”

I nodded. “Did they make you listen to Country or the Best of Broadway?”

“Sondheim. Do you suppose anyone ever listened to ‘Send in the Clowns’ voluntarily?”

“You played ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ for me yesterday.”

A nose got wrinkled. “If I had anything to say about it, you’d get Mozart. Are you Mr. Walker?” She had a finger on a leather-bound appointment book lying open before her.

I said I was. She relayed the information through an intercom and sat back, steepling her fingers. “He’ll be out in a minute. This is about Mr. Catalin’s disappearance?”

“I heard he left pretty abruptly.”

“Right in the middle of a meeting. He swept past this desk and right on out without a word.”

“Was he in a hurry?”

“I wouldn’t say that, exactly. But he was preoccupied. It wasn’t like him not to say a word to me in passing. Do you think you can find him?”

“I didn’t say I was looking for him.”

She was deciding whether to be annoyed by that when Leo Webb came in through a plain glass door behind the desk and shook my hand. He was my height and slender, a year or two older than his partner, although his shaved head and hairless face blurred the distinction. His suit was tailored snugly and there was something about the knot of his silk tie that said he’d given it a jerk and a lift just before his entrance. His eyes were like glass shards, pale and hard.

“How do you do? Sorry about that mix-up over the phone. We had a theft from our studio in Southfield last week. A roomful of equipment walked out an unlocked back door with the alarm turned off. I wanted to strap every employee there to a lie detector but my lawyer says no. I’m shopping for a new lawyer.”

“That Bill of Rights is a bitch,” I agreed.

He steered me through the door and down a short hallway hung with eight-by-ten portraits of nobody I knew into his office, an enchanted grotto crusted over with Renaissance paintings in heavy carved frames and plaster cherubs teetering on Greek columns. There was a mahogany Empire desk with gold inlay, as big as a bed, and behind it a throne upholstered in wine-colored velvet perched on a swivel.

“Props.” Webb palmed the head of a three-foot fountain sculpture in what looked like solid marble of a small curly-haired boy pouring water from an urn and lifted it one-handed. “It’s all right if you don’t like the place. My first two wives pronounced it hideous.”

“It’s different.”

“That’s the diplomatic answer. It’s a sure-fire litmus test for detecting phonies. They get all wet over it. One of them asked me for the name of my decorator.” He laughed; a short, hard sound, like metal striking concrete.

“If they fail the test, do you refuse to do business?”

“Not really. As a matter of fact, in this business the straight shooters are the hardest to handle. Are you a straight shooter, Mr. Walker?”

“I miss four times out of ten.”

“In baseball you’d be batting six hundred. In business—” He shrugged the shrug morticians shrug when the conversation turns to death.

At his invitation, I sat in a wingback chair covered in imitation zebra skin. This put me an inch or two below him when he took his throne. That was okay. I wouldn’t recognize equal footing if I had it.

“What can you tell me about the meeting Catalin walked out on?” I asked.

A gilt Diana stood on one foot on a corner of the big desk, notching an arrow into her bow. Webb stroked the point with a fingertip. “It was just Neil and me. I don’t remember what we were talking about specifically, just the usual Tuesday bull session: future projects, old business, how to avoid paying Michigan’s chickenshit single-business tax and stay out of court. Nothing for either one of us to get our shorts into a wad over.”

“That’s what you were talking about when he walked out?”

“You’ve used that phrase twice, ‘walked out.’ It’s a poor fit for someone like Neil. If he were standing on the edge of a cliff and you pushed him, he’d just go ahead and fall. Grabbing your arm would be rude. As I recall he excused himself to get something from his office. When he didn’t come back I went looking for him. Ms. Yin said he’d left. I called his home, but Gay said she hadn’t seen him since that morning.”

“Ms. Yin is the receptionist?”

“Also our secretary. We downsized the staff when the cable companies pulled in their horns.”

“Did Catalin take his car?”

“He must have. It wasn’t in the lot when I went home later. Last year’s LeBaron—gray, naturally. He could afford to drive better, but cars don’t mean much to Neil. His sense of style matches his color preference.”

“Where does Vesta Mannering fit in that picture?”

The glass shards dulled. It was as if a transparent membrane had slid down over them, like a salamander’s. “Well, well. Gay made a clean breast.”

“Were you the one who told her about her husband’s affair?”

“Christ, no. That would be a violation of the male code.”

“You knew about it, then?”

“You can’t keep that kind of thing secret in an office. We cast Vesta as the seductress in a PSA about AIDS, and I’m here to tell you there was never a better example of casting according to type. She auditioned here and shot in Southfield. Neil spends a lot of time at the studio, which is his real bent. He was making student films at Michigan, you know, when I was getting my MB. That’s where we met.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Oh, yeah. He was Orson Welles to my Bill Gates. I said he was the creative half. Anyway he spent a lot of time on the set, and by the time Vesta came back here to collect her paycheck, those two were striking sparks like a Zippo. Even the kid who delivers sandwiches had to know there was something going on.”

“Gay Catalin says she made Neil fire her.”

“She may have told him to, and maybe he canceled any plans he had to cast her in other projects. It was a ten-day shoot. She finished and went on her way.”

I made a note. “Do you know where Miss Mannering is working? I haven’t been able to get her at home.”

“I’ll ask Judy to look her up in the file.” He glanced at a heavy gold watch strapped to his wrist, to show me he’d meant what he said about fifteen minutes.

“How’s Neil been acting lately?”

“Same as everyone in this goddamn business, jumpy. The Democrats threaten to shut down television violence, the Republicans threaten to cut public broadcasting subsidies, some little old lady in Taylor complains about her cable bill, and everyone scrambles for a parachute. If it’s security you’re after, take a civil service exam.”

“You wouldn’t know that to see this office,” I said. “Not everything in here is fake.”

He smiled at his reflection in a jade bowl containing erasers and paper clips on the desk. “I admit I’m a sucker for plush things. On top of that I’m supporting two ex-wives and a house in Farmington Hills. It helps to be hungry when you’re in charge of financing. God knows Neil isn’t. You’ll probably find him in a little shit theater someplace, watching
The Seventh Seal
for the thousandth time.”

“Can I see his office?”

“I’ll have Ms. Yin show you.” He reached for his intercom.

When he was through, I thanked him for his time. We shook hands. At the door I said, “Mrs. Catalin’s brother is missing, too. His name’s Brian Elwood. Do you know him?”

No cloudy membrane now; his eyes would cut paper. “He came to take Neil home once when his car was in the shop. I caught the little punk going through Neil’s desk while he was in the john. He said he was looking for cigarettes. I told him if I saw him around here again I’d call the police. I will, too. A thief is worse than a murderer in my book.”

I let myself out.

J
UDY
Y
IN WAS WAITING
for me in the hallway. She was tall for an Asian, which made her medium height by American standards, the top of her head just clearing my shoulder in three-inch heels. Her smile was cool, as might be expected. Nothing about her would bring water to a boil; around the office, anyway. I’d had some experience with these professional types.

“Mr. Catalin’s office is this way, Mr. Walker.” She opened an arm and followed it. I followed her. She wore trim-fitting brown stirrup pants with the champagne-colored blouse, and she hadn’t anything in the pockets.

Neil Catalin’s office was a poor working cousin of his partner’s, a third smaller and less demanding on the eye. It had a plain desk and file cabinet and a chipboard table containing a combination
TV
and
VCR
with a ten-inch screen and a stack of videotapes in plastic sleeves. A computer terminal on a stand, too, of course, but the hell with that. It wouldn’t tell me anything the rest of the office and a kid with glasses in South Bend didn’t already know. The only personal items were a smiling picture of Gay Catalin in a silver frame on the desk and a two-by-three-foot movie poster behind glass on one wall:
Gilda,
starring Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford.

The painting of the red-headed bombshell dancing in a low-cut evening gown was nearly identical to the etching on the glass door leading into the reception area. That explained the name of the outfit.

The receptionist hovered inside the door. I said, “Mr. Webb said you’d look up Vesta Mannering’s work number.”

“Yes, I’ll do that before you leave.” She leaned against the door frame and crossed her arms.

I opened the desk drawers and found the usual desk stuff, rubber bands and pencil shavings and unremarkable contraband. The message pad by the telephone was blank. None of the titles hand-lettered on the videotape sleeves on the table meant anything to me. I poked one into the gate and turned on the TV. I watched two minutes of an infomercial for a miraculous new product that turned fresh fruit into compost.

“One of our most successful projects,” said Ms. Yin when I turned it off. “Our client sold sixty thousand units in Metropolitan Detroit alone.”

I tried the drawers of the file cabinet. They were locked. I made a show of giving up and looked at my watch. “Okay if I call my answering service?”

“If it’s local.”

The first button on the telephone lit up when I lifted the receiver. I punched Line 2 and dialed the number for Gilda Productions.

The telephone rang in the reception area. Judy Yin stirred and withdrew to answer it. I laid the receiver on the desk and inspected the file cabinet. It was a standard bar lock, as old as the chastity belt. I had it open with my pocket knife in two seconds. Inside I found files. Not one of them was labeled
WHERE I WENT.

Disappointed, I closed the drawers, jimmied the lock back the other way, and returned to the desk. Ms. Yin was still telling the telephone hello. I punched the button for Line I and hit redial. That was the line Catalin had used last, unless someone else had made a call from his office recently. On the second ring a woman’s voice, metal with a serrated edge, answered.

“Musuraca Investigations.”

I hung up just as Judy Yin came back. “Did you get your messages?”

I said I got one.

“That puts you one up on me,” she said. “There was no one on the other end.”

“Kids.”

She swung a hard glance around the office that stopped at the file cabinet. She went over to it and tugged at one of the drawers. When it didn’t budge she made a noncommittal little noise and turned my way.

“Ziggy’s Chop House on Livernois. Miss Mannering’s a little hostess there, or was when she left that number.” She gave it to me.

I didn’t bother to write it down. I knew Ziggy’s. I looked at Judy Yin. Her black eyes were bright with something close to anger. I didn’t think I was the cause. I said, “I get the impression that when Vesta makes it big, you won’t be going to the premiere.”