Sugartown (26 page)

“She let your subscription to the coin magazine run until she moved. That’s how I found her.”

“Son of a bitch.” He pounded the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “I told her to cancel it.”

“You found out from her I was looking for you?”

He nodded, meeting my gaze in the mirror. “That’s why I got Louise to call you in after Rynearson made his move in Ypsilanti. I wanted to find out how much you knew. The strange thing is, I really thought it was Fedor he was after. I barely remember the cross and I never knew it was valuable. You mentioned my grandmother. Are you working for her? Is she in this country now?”

“She wants to see you. Or she did until I told her you were dead.”

“I don’t see that it would accomplish anything.”

Louise said, “I really feel as if I’ve started reading a manuscript in the middle, and one I wouldn’t buy. To begin with I can’t believe anyone would go to such lengths to avoid going back to a life he never wanted in the first place.”

Neither could I.

We made the rest of the trip in silence. Sigourney pulled the Mercury over to the curb in front of the American Airlines terminal and climbed out to get Louise’s bags and briefcase out of the trunk. She and I stood on the sidewalk with skycaps bustling all around. A jet roared hollowly overhead, unrolling a thick layer of noise over the jabbering and traffic sounds on the street.

“I’ve got jet lag already,” she said, raising her voice above the din. “I haven’t known what’s been going on since you showed up at the hotel.”

Her face looked stiff. I remembered then that she and Andrei were not just an editor and a writer. “Maybe he’ll write a book about it someday,” I said.

“I wish I knew what to say when I get back to New York.”

“Tell them the truth. Your boy Alanov’s in the clear.”

“They’re going to ask why I still have the five thousand.”

“Tell them Rynearson had a change of heart. Or don’t tell them anything and keep the money.”

She looked at me. The scent of jasmine seemed stronger here than in the car. “You know I won’t do that. I hope you know.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry to be missing that tour,” she said wistfully. “I have a feeling I’m missing more than I know.”

“Maybe not. According to some informed sources.”

Sigourney finished arranging the luggage on a skycap’s cart and handed her the briefcase. I wandered to the curb with my back to them and lit a fresh cigarette and watched a bus unload a gang of chattering Japanese tourists with cameras strung around their necks. I wondered what they’d found to take pictures of in Detroit. When I turned back Sigourney was standing there alone, watching Louise Starr switch her hips through a glass door held open by a gray-headed man carrying a suithanger over one shoulder. The writer-translator turned back, touching his lips with a folded handkerchief. We got back into the car.

“A man named John Woldanski was murdered in Hamtramck last week,” I said, as we glided around the long looping drive that led back to Edsel Ford East. “He fenced religious articles at the time of the Hamtramck shooting nineteen years ago. Whoever killed him wasn’t looking for the cross, because neither of Woldanski’s two houses had been searched. He was taken out for the sake of silence. You wouldn’t know anything about that.”

“I never heard the name until just now.” Sigourney accelerated into the stream of traffic on the expressway. “Or maybe I did and don’t remember it. There are still gaps in my memory.”

“They come in handy sometimes.”

“Meaning what?” It came out too quickly.

“Meaning that you remember as far back as Dayton, but Detroit stays a blank order.”

“I was pretty young when I left. I’ve been to doctors and they tell me I may never remember all of that part of my life.”

“You saw the shooting. You remember it, because you didn’t ask ‘What shooting?’ when I mentioned it just now.”

“I didn’t see it. I got home after it was over.” His eyes were bolted to the road.

“That’s what you told the cops a couple of days later, after your Aunt Barbara had a chance to tell you what you saw and what you didn’t. A witness saw you come home before the first shotgun blast.”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“It’s over,” I said. “No one who can do anything about it cares who shot who. Michael Evancek is legally dead. I couldn’t prove otherwise if I wanted to, which I don’t. We’re just two guys talking. You’ll park this car at the Westin and we’ll get out and go two separate ways and probably never see each other again. I think you’ll have to tell someone someday or split down the middle. Why not me?”

We drove. A jet, possibly Louise Starr’s, strained against gravity going over the freeway, its silver belly flashing in the sun. “I killed them.”

“What?” I didn’t think I’d heard him right over the whooshing of the engines.

“I killed them!” It was a shout. “I killed my mother and my father and my sister.

“I came home and found my parents screaming at each other for the thousandth time and I went into their bedroom and got my father’s shotgun and shot them both and when my sister came running in I shot her too. Or Michael Evancek did. I’m Andrei Sigourney. Andrei Sigourney, who writes books and translates Russian authors into English and never shot anyone.”

As he spoke he lowered his foot against the accelerator. We were coming up on eighty now, and snaking in and out between slower-moving cars and trucks, the slipstream buffeting the Mercury’s sides like a high gusty wind. I felt my fingers going white on the dashboard. I didn’t remember putting them there.

“You didn’t kill them,” I said.

“The police said my father did.” His hands were locked on the wheel, his profile drawn tight with scenery blurring past on the other side. “That’s what Aunt Barbara wanted them to think. It’s what she wanted everyone to think, including me. But I know. It’s the reason she refused to discuss it with me afterwards.”

“You didn’t kill them,” I repeated. “And neither did your father. There’s only one other way it clicks.”

I wasn’t getting through. We had run out of speedometer and were still winding up. I tried again.

“It was your mother, Jeanine Evancek. Barbara’s sister. She pulled the trigger.”

W
E WERE PASSING
a green van with blue side-curtains. Sigourney dropped the left front wheel off the pavement, grinding gravel and spitting dust behind us. He wrenched it back the other way, overcompensated, and we fishtailed wildly across two lanes to avoid sideswiping the van. I had a brief glimpse of a blur of face through the window on the driver’s side with a mouth working in it, and then it was behind us. Sigourney eased back on the pedal and we drifted back into the slow lane.

“My mother never killed anyone,” he said. “She couldn’t.”

“Anyone can, given the right — or wrong — circumstances.” I pried my fingers loose from the dash and worked them, forcing circulation past the knuckles. “She was found lying next to your sister. That didn’t fit the way the cops wanted to figure it, so they just put it down as one of a million variables that come up in the course of a homicide investigation. Your sister had to have died first. It explains the position of the bodies, why she didn’t run the other way after the first shot was fired. All the months of pressure from your father’s unemployment and drinking erupted suddenly and your mother got the shotgun and cut loose at the first thing that moved. It happened to be her own daughter, but she would be too far gone to know that. What I think happened next is your father wrestled her for the gun and it went off, killing her. That saved your life, because you would probably have been the next victim. Then when the full force of the situation hit him, he went into the kitchen and blew out his own brains”

“You don’t know any of this.”

I said, “It clears up a lot. Like why your aunt kept the cops away from you for so long. She hated your father and loved your mother and couldn’t bear to have the world know her sister had turned into a crazed killer at the last. You were in shock and so your impressions were malleable. She coached you until you were ready to swear you weren’t there at the time of the shooting. Most of the other witnesses’ testimony was on her side in that. In time you probably came to believe it yourself. But part of you knew different, and the guilt of your secret turned into a worse kind of guilt, and you came to suspect yourself of the murders. The pressure of that suspicion may have helped bring on the amnesia after you almost drowned; it was too much guilt for one man to bear, and so you just stopped being that man. Even now you’re still shutting out the whole episode.

“Or not. But that pop-shrink stuff has its uses in my line.”

We drove. The indicator hovered around sixty. He chewed his lower lip.

“What makes you think it wasn’t me?”

“Your father’s body was found in the classic suicide position, with the shotgun between his legs. The blast caught him square in the face, which is unusual but not impossible. It bothered me for a while. But if he hadn’t killed himself, the killer would have had to make it look as if he had. That means premeditation, and this was not that kind of killing. Everyone in that house was a victim that day.”

“I wish I could believe you. I’ve thought otherwise too long.”

“That was your aunt’s fault, for making you see something you didn’t and for not talking about it ever again in your presence. I wouldn’t be too hard on her, though. She was protecting her family and she thought she could protect you by selling you on an idea the way she sells artificial siding over the telephone. That may be the worst crime of all, the murder of memory.”

“I need time to get used to the idea.”

“Take it. There might be a book in it. Who knows?”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say!” he rapped.

I rested my head on the back of the seat. “It’s the drugs talking. Work it out your own way. I’m sick of the Evanceks and the Sigourneys and the Alanovs. Every time I put the case down it springs back up at me. Here’s where I walk away from it.”

“What about the cross and this man Woldanski?”

I said, “I take care of that today at four o’clock.”

He looked at me sideways but said nothing.

The uniformed teenager at the hotel garage accepted Sigourney’s keys with indifference — Louise Starr was long gone — and we shook hands at the entrance to the building. The writer’s grip was warm.

“Your grandmother wants to see you.”

“I don’t know her,” he said. “I don’t know that I want anything tying me with Michael Evancek.”

“Sure you do. You have since before I came in. You knew damn well your grandmother was in this country. I took Louise Starr’s first call less than an hour after leaving Barbara Norton’s place the first time. There wasn’t time for her to tell you I was looking for you and for you to make the decision to hire me and then get Louise to do it. You had to know I was working for your grandmother before I ever talked to your aunt.”

He breathed some air and looked away from me.

“I read my grandfather’s obituary in the
News
some time ago,” he said after a moment. “Evancek isn’t that common a name. I’ve been paying the people on the other side of the duplex ever since to look after my grandmother, without letting her suspect it or why. Her phone is just an extension of theirs. They overheard her when she made her first appointment with you. As soon as they told me I looked you up through the state police. I had to know what you’d found out.”

“See her. It’s easier.”

“I wouldn’t know what to say to her.”

“Try the truth. She’s heard and seen stranger things, believe me.”

We said good-bye. The revolving door sucked his trim frame inside.

Gallagher was relatively quiet. If you closed your eyes to the clouds of granite dust roiling to the south you could pretend that the rumble of heavy equipment rendering wood and brick was distant thunder. Neither the red Bronco nor the blue Pinto was parked in the driveway that the house shared with the place next door. The neighbor’s green Camaro was there. Leaving my Olds at the curb, I climbed the concrete stoop, opened the screen door, glanced up and down the street, and used my hat to protect my fist when I pushed in the glass in the storm door. It made no more noise than a dog shaking itself and I reached in and turned the latch. It was quarter to four.

At ten past, a high-pitched engine wound down nearing the driveway, gears changed, and heavy tires kissed the pavement, coming to a stop. A door slammed, keys jingled on the way to the stoop. Then silence. He had spotted the broken window.

“It’s me, Mayk,” I called in a normal voice. “Walker. Come in and make yourself at home.”

His Colt Python entered first, its nickel plate glittering like cheap costume jewelry in the sunlight coming through the window over the sink. Then he came in, big and square-shouldered in his gray uniform, broken glass crunching under his shiny black Oxfords. His mud-colored hair swept back like a mane from his wide face with the lines etched deep in the ruddy flesh. There were dark circles under his tired cop’s eyes and beads of moisture on his long upper lip. He saw me sitting at the kitchen table facing the door and he saw what was on the table and he closed the door and leaned his back against it. The gun was a growth in his fist.

“When’d you put it together?” he asked quietly.

“A few hours ago. When I finished the rest of it and found parts left over. Four people knew I was looking for John Woldanski, but only one knew it was the cross I was after. One took over the old man’s fencing operation on Trowbridge. One was a Hamtramck cop working undercover. Neither knew Woldanski personally. The third was just an information broker I use from time to time. He’s got his own racket and it pays very well. That left you. You knew Woldanski; busted him, in fact. You investigated the Evancek shoot. And you knew I was looking for the cross, because I told you.”

“Pretty flimsy.”

“You of all people should recognize a judgment call,” I said. “It made me curious enough to invite myself in and frisk the place.”

I had removed the large crucifix that looked as if it had been carved out of a single block of wood from the hallway wall leading into the living room and placed it on the table. With one hand I lifted the top half free. Tarnished silver shone dully in the hollow, its blue and red stones gleaming.