Sugartown (2 page)

“Joseph killed his wife?”

“He didn’t stop with her. The police said he used the shotgun on little Carla when she ran in after the first explosion. Then he turned it on himself.”

The words came neatly, one on top of another like bills counted out by a banker who no longer thought of them as money. The whole story had the sound of something she’d told plenty of times.

“Michael?”

“He was attending summer school to make up for a failure in arithmetic. If he hadn’t come home late he might have been killed too, the police said.”

“He discovered the bodies?”

She closed her eyes and nodded. “It was not five minutes after the shooting. The neighbors were afraid to investigate after all the noise. When the police came they found him standing in the middle of all the blood and bodies. He was eleven years old.”

“When were you notified?”

“Ten days later. The telephone service in Poland in those days was what you might expect it to be and the cable the authorities sent was delayed somewhere. In the meantime the police had pieced together the entire incident, and Joseph, Jeanine, and Carla were buried and the boy had gone to live with Jeanine’s sister and her husband in St. Clair Shores. Jeanine’s parents were dead. There was never any question afterwards about our living anywhere else when we came to this country. But at the time there seemed little that we could do. Michael and I argued about it bitterly. He wouldn’t let me part with Grandmother’s jewels. He said they were the things that kept us from being common peasants. You would have to know the class system in my country to understand such pride.”

“We have the same system,” I said. “We just call it by different names.”

“It wasn’t until the troubles came and there was not enough food available to keep the restaurant open that he gave in.” She talked right through me. “By that time Jeanine’s sister and her husband had moved away and taken little Michael with them. The police had given us their original address but they never answered our letters.”

“No forwarding?”

“It was too long ago. The post office stops forwarding mail after a year and destroys its records after two. We talked to the people who were living in their old house but they knew nothing of them. The house had had at least two owners since and we couldn’t find the people who sold it to those who are there now.”

“If a real estate firm handled the sale you could have traced them through the firm.”

“It was sold privately.” Her head started to shake. “I don’t think these people want to be found.”

“Could be. Time has a way of drifting in over your tracks whether you ask it to or not.” I tapped the pencil on the edge of the book. “What name did Jeanine’s sister and her husband go by?”

“Norton. The Robert Nortons. Her name was Barbara.”

I wrote it down. “Occupations?”

She shook her head, deliberately this time.

“Who investigated the shooting?”

“Sergeant William Mischiewicz and Detective Howard Mayk of the Hamtramck police. Mischiewicz was shot to death in a holdup a few months later. Mayk retired four years ago. He still lives in Hamtramck.” She gave me the address and telephone number. “We talked to him. He remembered almost everything about the shooting but had no idea where the Nortons moved to.”

“Were you satisfied with the official account of the shooting?”

She looked down at her hands in her lap, then nailed me again. Her whole head was trembling now. “I lived through the Nazi invasion. I know that people are capable of anything under certain circumstances. I did not see Joseph the last thirteen years of his life. I can’t tell you what kind of man he was in those years.”

Outside, the horns were getting nasty. I got up, closed the window, and sat back down. “Do you have a picture of your grandson?”

She had a black crushed-leather purse about the size of an after-dinner mint in her lap. From it she drew a two-by-three snapshot and held it out fluttering in her hand. I accepted it the way I had accepted hundreds of others: too-dark Polaroids with green skies and red spots in the eyes, studio shots with fake landscapes in the background and more touchup than photo, black-and-white poses against cars with big headlights and round fenders long since gone to the crushers, beach pictures with big grins and funny hats and rolls of pale flesh around the middle, school shots with starched white blouses against blue canvas, grainy exposures taken through keyholes of naked white bodies, service photos with neck-high uniforms and visors square over the eyes, vacation shots with tanned faces squinting into the sun and fluted canyons behind, theatrical poses dramatically lit, motel room pictures burned out from the flash, telephotos snapped from across the street, blurred freeze-frames in sixteen millimeter, lightning-clear blowups in bureau-top size, First Communion pictures, bar mitzvah pictures, wedding pictures, clowning-around pictures, candid pictures — you don’t really have film in that camera, do you? — pictures you dress up for and pictures you take your clothes off for. Pictures handed over eagerly, reluctantly, in hope and in terror, the act symbolic of breaking open the family circle to admit a stranger. I had handled enough pictures to fill a gallery of the lost. This one, dog-eared and finger-marked, showed a boy with his dark hair wet down and parted on one side, the way no boy anywhere combs it without adult help, with shiny dark eyes tilted slightly toward a large nose and that smile kids have before they learn to show their teeth. Clean plaid cotton shirt buttoned at the throat. The name of a school photo agency was stamped on the back. I memorized those features that counted and gave the picture back to her.

“He’ll have changed too much,” I explained. “If I showed that around, it would just throw people off. You’d have to be a pro and know what to look for. He’d be about thirty now?”

She looked at the picture for a moment before putting it away. “His birthday’s in June. He turns thirty on the fifteenth.” She sucked at her teeth a little. “Can you find him, Mr. Walker?”

“I have some tricks,” I said, by way of evasion. “If I do, my job stops after I’ve told you where he is. If he doesn’t want to see you I can’t make him.”

“Why would he not want to see me?”

“I’m just mentioning it as a possibility. Half the time in these things they don’t.”

She thought about that. Then:

“I want to see him. But if I cannot I will be satisfied to know where he is and that he is all right.”

“I charge two hundred fifty dollars per day, expenses extra. First three days in advance. I report daily and put it all in writing at the end.” I considered. “One day in advance will be fine.”

She was back inside her purse already. She hoisted out a flat packet and laid it on the desk between us. The bill on top was a crisp new hundred. “Here is a thousand dollars. That is four days.”

I left it where it was. When you do see money in my business you usually see it in cash, but there had never been that much of it on that desk all at once. She must have read me, because she said, “I sold my husband’s things. Also your public benefit programs here are very generous. I do not require much to live. If you have learned little in four days I can sell the ring.”

I split the stack and held out the top five bills. “Two days will tell us whether you’re wasting your money.”

She hesitated, then took back the bills. There was something behind her face that had not come in with her.

I gave her a receipt and got her address and telephone number in St. Clair Shores and then helped her down three flights to the street. It only took a half hour. She was tougher than she looked. “We’ll make it your place next time,” I told her, when I had a cab coming our way. She’d taken the bus in. “You must have been all afternoon wrestling that contraption upstairs.”

“When you have helped stack sandbags all around your city with shells shrieking overhead, nothing you try to do later is too much.” She gave the walker to the driver to fold and put in the front seat while I helped her into the rear. She was as light as pie crust. As I was getting set to close the door she looked up at me. “I feel I have made the right choice,” she said.

I swung the door shut and stood back while the cab pulled out from the curb and burbled away. I hoped she was right. I had never stacked sandbags in my life.

Back in the office I dialed the number she had given me for Howard Mayk in Hamtramck. A man’s voice, very deep, answered after two rings. Listening to it I saw a big man in a blue uniform with a double row of brass buttons down the front, swinging a stick in one hand and folding deep vertical lines in his cheeks when he smiled.

“Officer Mayk?”

A pause, then:

“That’s Sergeant. My last ten years with the department, anyway. Now it’s Mr. Mayk. Who’s asking?”

“Amos Walker. I’m a Detroit P.I. working for Mrs. Martha Evancek, looking for her grandson Michael. I’d like to come over and talk for a few minutes if you’re not too busy.”

“I haven’t been busy in four years. But I can’t tell you anything about what happened to the boy because I don’t know. I told her that enough times.”

“I realize that. I thought if I knew something about the shoot I might get a better handle on the case.”

“Yeah.”

“Does that mean I can come over?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be there in forty minutes, then.”

He said yeah again and I thanked him and he hung up. This was going to be like pulling nails with my teeth.

Before leaving I broke out some duplicate driver’s license application forms issued by the Michigan Secretary of State’s office and filled out two of them, one asking for a copy of a driver’s license for Michael Evancek, the other asking for one for Michael Norton, including lost Michael’s date of birth on both. I stuck them in separate envelopes and addressed them to the Lansing headquarters of the SOS and stamped them and dropped them into a mailbox on my way to Hamtramck. If the stars were all in their places, one of the applications might jar loose a photocopy of the missing party’s license containing his present address for a small fee, if he hadn’t left the state or taken another name or if he had a license at all. It’s a service provided for people who drop their wallets into the sewer while leaning down to pick up a quarter. It can save you steps, but only when you’ve got a month to spare for the turnaround. I had two days.

T
HERE IS NOTHING SPIRITUAL
about Detroit’s Poles. They are the supreme property owners of the Western Hemisphere. Since the railroad shops and stoveworks and, later, Ford Motors slammed a hole though the immigration laws of the last century and emptied villages in Poland and Italy and Austro-Hungary, the bull-shouldered enemies of Czarist Russia had been coming here with their substantial women, lugging their loaves of hard bread and jugs of thick brown wine, to stake out the half-and quarter-acre lots that remain the sole measure of success in their community. Hamtramck to this day boasts the highest percentage of home ownership of any city in the country.

Driving down Chene through the old village with its tight rows of identical century-old houses painted in peeling colors, you still catch glimpses of the melting pot: old men loitering in front of the old Round Bar where as children they had packed the balcony along with their fathers to watch the struggling glistening naked backs of the wrestlers below; a thick-ankled housewife slitting a duck’s throat in her backyard and holding it flapping upside-down while her little daughter catches the warm blood in a bowl for the soup they call
czarnina
; native costumes sagging from a pully-operated line waiting for the Polish Constitution celebration on Belle Isle. But you have to look quick, because it’s going, going to eminent domain and General Motors’ golden ring in the nose of City Hall, its churches knocked to rubble and kindling, the bricks that paved its medieval alleys piled in heaps for the scavengers.

Chene merges with Joseph Campau north of Grand Boulevard. There doomed Dodge Main warmed its pitted brick face in the sun, considering with blind eyes the spot where the gin mills used to stand in front, the Purple Gang’s Lincolns and Caddies barricading the street while the trucks unloaded in the days when the Motor City was Sugartown to every laborer from Montgomery to Budapest. Yellow Caterpillars crawled over hills of naked earth and crumbled pavement in the parking lot. Farther north, the blue street signs that mark Hamtramck proper begin and the housing gets thicker and more modern. It looks like the rest of Detroit and you can have it, except I live there and as bland and monotonous as it gets it still looks like home.

I went past bakeries and butcher shops with names as long as your belt and the municipal tennis courts that turned out this country’s best pros before the kids and dykes took over that sport, crossed Holbrook and then Florian, closed off with sawhorses at Joseph Campau for the May Strawberry Festival going on in front of the soaring brownstone of St. Florian’s with the lowering sun grazing its stained glass, turned right on Evaline three blocks up and then swung left on Gallagher to a chalk-gray frame house with a high peak and Howard Mayk’s number in black wrought iron on the cornerpost. The place shared a driveway with the brick house next door. Michigan cancer was eating through the fenders of a nine-year-old red Ford Bronco parked on Mayk’s side next to a spanking green Camaro on the other. I parked on the street and glanced through the Bronco’s long rear Plexiglas window on my way up the driveway. A set of rubber waders wallowed on the ribbed metal floor with a long-handled nylon net on top of them. I mounted a concrete stoop and rapped on the screen door’s aluminum frame. It was still plenty light out and the room beyond the screen was as black as Martha Evancek’s dress.

Heavy feet trod around inside for a little and then the darkness stirred and I was looking at a man in dark trousers and a matching short-sleeved shirt standing on the other side of the screen.

“Mr. Mayk? Amos Walker. I called earlier.”

“Yeah. Stand away.”

I stepped back and he manipulated a drugstore latch and the door opened out, straining a long steel spring. I stepped up over the threshold and past his long arm into a narrow dank-smelling utility room. A dirty mop in one corner and old mud-dauber wasps’ nests under the eaves. There was another door standing open into what looked like a kitchen.