Sugartown (27 page)

I said, “It disappointed me. Edgar Allan Poe didn’t know anything about the way the police work or he’d never have considered hiding the purloined letter in plain sight. As a cop you should have known better.”

“It wasn’t a matter of hiding it, exactly. Just putting it somewhere where I wouldn’t have to look at it.” He sounded as tired as he appeared.

“It needs polishing. It didn’t nineteen years ago or it wouldn’t have tempted you.”

“It was that bastard Bill Mischiewicz,” he said harshly. “He was on the pad since the academy. He bragged about it. You couldn’t stay straight and spend much time with him without feeling like a chump. It was wrapped in a blue cloth in the top drawer of Evancek’s bureau when we tossed the place after the shoot. I didn’t even think. I smuggled it out under my jacket and never told Bill or anyone else about it. If the Nortons or someone else asked about it I’d of given it back, said I was just holding it for safekeeping. But no one ever mentioned it. I didn’t even know for sure it was worth anything, but it looked like it was. Hell, I didn’t need money. I mean, I wasn’t hurting. But it was like finding a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk.”

“You tried to sell it to John Woldanski?”

“I felt him out about it. I backed out of the deal. We busted him soon after and I was scared he’d talk, but he didn’t and I patted myself on the back for being so clever about the way I approached him. But by then I was sorry I’d ever seen the cross. My record was clean, I mean
clean
. What was I going to do, give it back? I stuck it away and forgot about it. I thought.”

“A cop who’s basically honest never forgets his one moment of weakness,” I said. “When you found out I was looking for Woldanski to talk to him about the cross, you panicked. You knew damn well where he was, but you sent me the long way around the block to keep me busy while you dusted him to keep him quiet.”

“I just meant to scare him, rough him up a little so he’d stay forgetful. It was an accident. He fell downstairs and broke his neck.”

“Save that for a jury of your peers, Mayk. You were still a cop when Woldanski’s wife died and you would’ve been keeping tabs on him in the line of duty and known when he closed up his old house and went to live in the new one next door. You knew it would look more plausible if he was found dead in the place where he kept his stolen merchandise. Fence dies gloating over booty. So you marched him over there from the house he was living in and gave him a shove. He was old, his bones were brittle. If they didn’t cooperate you could always bash his head in afterwards.”

“You don’t know any of that.”

“I know that after icing Woldanski you went back to the other house to make sure everything jibed with your scenario, turn off running faucets and put out smoldering cigars or whatever. I showed up sooner than expected and you knocked me out of the way escaping. But I heard that Bronco of yours changing gears during the getaway. That and the cross are material for conviction. Men have been hanged on less.”

“You’re forgetting this.” He waved the shiny Colt.

“You won’t use it.”

He smiled, a tight, tired smile.

I said, “You broke a long-standing rule nineteen years ago and swiped something that didn’t belong to you. You’ve been living with it all this time, and when it looked as if the rest of the world was going to find out about it, you overreacted and killed an old man. But you’re not the kind to keep on climbing from crime to crime. I think you’d rather have it over.”

“The cross belonged to a dead man. And Woldanski was a crook. The world smells sweeter without him.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“You think you know everything there is to know about me, huh?”

“I used your telephone to call Lieutenant Kowalski after I found the cross. He’s on his way.”

Mayk said nothing. The house got very quiet. Just to relax the tension I lifted my right hand from my lap and rested it on the table. The Smith & Wesson clanked on the sheet-metal top.

He said, “I guess you don’t leave much to chance.”

“Neither do you. It’s our police training.”

“Twenty years a cop,” he said. “One mistake.”

“Two.”

“No, one. It’s still happening. But it stops here.”

And before I could move he put his gun in his mouth.

W
E WERE SITTING
in the almost-dark, Martha Evancek and I in her lacy mausoleum of a living room, with no lights on and dusk thickening outside the windows. I could make out the highlights of her patrician face in the depths of her overstuffed chair and the orange tip of her cigarette that glowed fiercely whenever she brought it to her lips, her hand covering the lower half of her face. The ruby ring glistened.

“Do you think Michael will come to visit?” she asked, wrinkling the long silence.

“I don’t know. He has a lot to get used to first.” I knocked some ash into the tray on the arm of the sofa. None had grown on my Winston since the last time.

“I want very much to see him.”

I concealed a yawn. The smoke in the room burned my eyes and I always felt wrung out and slung over a line after a long session with the police.

“I should not, but I feel sorry for this man Mayk,” she said. “That theft must have been eating at him all these years.”

“He killed an old man guilty of nothing more than laying off some stolen property. That takes him out of the class of people I feel sorry for. Anyway, his troubles ended when he put that bullet through his brain.”

“According to my faith they are just beginning.”

I let her have that one.

“I still don’t understand how you came to doubt the police version of the shooting,” she said.

“The bodies didn’t fall right, for one thing. If Jeanine had died first the way the cops had it figured, little Carla wouldn’t have died in the same room. No normal child would have hung around after that first deafening blast unless she was the recipient. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred in these cases, the mother will kill the children first, while the father will start with the mother. It’s a maternal thing, a twisted belief that by removing the children she’s protecting them. That Michael didn’t die next indicated that Joseph stopped her. Joseph was powerfully built and if he’d had the gun, she wouldn’t have been able to prevent him from killing the boy too. The cops didn’t give that any thought because they believed the confused witnesses who said Michael didn’t get home until after the excitement. Also Joseph’s blood test didn’t show enough alcohol in his system to put him over the edge. Because of his history of unemployment and drunkenness the cops took the path of least resistance. That’s understandable, if not forgivable. Two minutes after the first detective was invented, he was given a dozen cases to solve and only enough budget to solve three.

“Plus, Barbara Norton, Jeanine’s sister, was too anxious to wipe out all memory of the incident from Michael’s mind. That lady’s sense of family takes less dents than armor plate. At all costs Jeanine had to be made to look like the victim rather than the killer.”

“What about Eric Rynearson?”

“Just another mugger, but with a hypodermic needle instead of a switchblade, and more expensive tastes. Someone will recognize him from his picture in a post office someday and the feds will snatch him from behind a cash register in some junk store. Or they’ll scrape him off the floor of an alley after someone in a delicate position gets to worrying about what’s in his head that couldn’t be burned in his fireplace. His fuse is pulled.”

“You’ve suffered so much for so little,” said Mrs. Evancek. “The drugging. Trouble with the authorities.”

“It’s the way I work. You paid me to take risks. I could have laid it off on the cops when it started bending their way, but I wouldn’t have been earning my fee. The bad will it bought me is a thing I live with. I’ll bill you.”

We smoked in the dark. After a while she said, “Karen confides in me. I know what happened between you.”

I said nothing.

“She’s a foolish girl,” she went on. “I told her that. You are like my late husband Michael. I had thought he was the last of the kind.”

“Karen will always do what’s right for her. She’ll marry her med student and have three kids and they’ll all grow up solid. None of them will wind up a bushed P.I. running a one-man show in a depressed area.”

“She would not know a solid man if one fell on her.”

I felt a grin forming. “You’ve been spending too much time with me. Next you’ll be spouting dirty limericks and picking your teeth with a stiletto.”

She made a hoarse sound in her throat. Her cigarette-tip came up and flared, casting orange light over her high cheekbones and thick curved nose.

I read the luminous dial on my watch and got up. “It must be coming on your bedtime. I’ll be missing when Karen comes in to help you.” I put on my hat. “The cops are hanging on to the cross. You should get it back after the inquests on Woldanski and Mayk.”

“I care nothing for it now,” she said. “Michael is alive.”

She asked me to turn on the light on my way out — Karen scolded her for sitting in the dark — and we said good-bye. I stepped out into the early-evening cool. My clothes felt clammy on my frame. I felt the cold dried sweat on my back and under my arms and in the bends of my elbows. The lights of St. Clair Shores glittered like stars fallen from the brushed black sky. There were no blanks as there would be in Poletown, where the lights that had drawn so many pilgrims from the tired Old World had been extinguished by bulldozers and iron balls and men with wrecking bars and sledges.

My crate was parked on the street. I climbed under the wheel and pulled the door shut, but I didn’t start the engine right away. I lit a cigarette and sat there and smoked it and put it out and lit another. After a while a dusty-gold Plymouth rolled past and swung into Martha Evancek’s driveway. The taillights went off and Karen McBride stepped out, wearing her white nurse’s uniform under a light topcoat, and walked up to the door leading into the back half of the duplex and rapped and waited and then went inside without once looking in my direction. Something tiny and bright glinted on the back of her left hand.

In a little while I ground the starter and it caught and I drove home the long way around Hamtramck.

Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.

Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once
The Oklahoma Punk
was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.

Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s
Motor City Blue
, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel,
Sugartown
, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is
Infernal Angels
.

Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980,
The High Rocks
was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s
The Book of Murdock
. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author.
Journey of the Dead
, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.