Sugartown (7 page)

I
T WAS A CLEAR FRESH MORNING
with the sun rum-colored on the grass and the smell of a lakeshore at dawn in the air. Birds were singing for the pure hell of it and if you listened hard you could hear the sound of convertible tops coming down all over the city. I showered and shaved and shook the butts out of my almost-seersucker and got my gray Olds rolling northward along the scenic route. I cranked the window down on the driver’s side. A convertible it isn’t.

As you hit the rolling country above Eight Mile Road and swing east, you pass through a series of suburbs, none of them as old as this century, with names like Hazel Park and Warren and East Detroit and Harper Woods, and if you miss the
YOU ARE ENTERING
signs you’re lost, because you won’t see anything like a Roseville Dairy Queen or a Centerline Bait & Tackle Shop. That’s too small-townish for the city folk who came up here to get away from the ethnics. You pass low brick schools and churches built like service stations and sudden glass-and-steel blisters that call themselves civic centers and the vast sterile fenced enclosure of the GM Tech Center, where college lads in white coats tinker with everything from genetic engineering to ashtrays with little fans in them that smoke your cigarette for you. You drive through block after block of nice residences, not too large, with all-weather driveways and lawns the size of money clips, skirt brief business sections with two-car parking lots, and never catch a green light all the way. The cops are all eighteen and wear sky-blue uniforms with short sleeves and cruise in pairs in cars painted the chief’s wife’s favorite color with discreet emblems on the doors. If you blow a tire and don’t have a jack they won’t lend you theirs but will call the wrecking service the city has a contract with and if you go two miles over the limit they will nail you. They are nice places to live but you wouldn’t want to visit there.

The pioneers who founded St. Clair Shores didn’t speak French or Spanish. They preferred tight overcoats to doublets and instead of Toledo steel they carried Chicago typewriters whose workmanlike chattering became as much a part of the lakefront as the foghorns’ belching when the soup drifted in from Canada. They set up a winch to unload the boats from Windsor during the dry time and sold the stuff to the Capone organization in Chicago. Jews and Italians and Poles and even a few Greeks from down Monroe Street, they moved in their families and built homes and schools and churches and synagogues and rented themselves a police force and when Prohibition ended they all sent their kids to parochial school to get a good education. Today it looks like any other upper middle-class community of retired schoolteachers, with a noise ordinance and speed bumps in the residential section and no marble stands erected over the places where the founding fathers shed blood over cases of Old Log Cabin. But in the venerable dock pilings are holes that weren’t made by worms, and if the older buildings there could talk they’d speak with the bitter accent of the eastern slums.

The house was a white frame duplex on Englehardt with faded awnings over the upstairs windows. Martha Evancek’s number belonged to a door in the el at the end of the driveway that went on to become the garage. My knock got an invitation from inside and I opened the door and climbed three steps and turned left and climbed another two.

“Mr. Walker? I’m Karen McBride.”

The voice was even cooler and fresher in person, and for once it went with its owner. She was in her late twenties, short, but well-proportioned — very well-proportioned — so that I didn’t realize she was short until I was standing in front of her and could look down on top of her head. It was a nice head, covered with dark brown hair that could be called chestnut if you cared. I was admiring it when she smiled and gave me her hand. Her grip was firm but feminine. I could take her two falls out of three any day in the week.

“Carrying Mrs. Evancek up and down those steps must be what keeps you in such good shape,” I said.

“She manages them quite well. She told me she managed the three flights to your office without help. Let me take your hat.”

“Sorry. I forgot I had it on.” I took it off and gave it to her.

She opened a door to the left of the entrance and got rid of the hat. When she turned I saw that her hair was caught behind her neck and spilled into a loose sort of ponytail down her back almost to her waist. Her front was covered by a white pullover with the straps of her brassiere showing underneath and she had on a dark gray skirt, slightly flared, that hung to the tops of brown leather boots wrinkled around her ankles. She had a high round forehead and a small nose that turned up a little at the end and large brown eyes and her mouth was just a little too wide, so that when she unzipped it to smile, the dimples went clear down her cheeks. The boys would have called her Monkey-face when she was little and bought a black eye for their trouble. I liked her face fine. So far I liked all of her.

“Martha didn’t tell me she was going to see you or I wouldn’t have let her go alone,” she said, closing the closet door. “I think she deliberately waited until I left for the day because she was afraid I wouldn’t have let her go at all. When I came by last night to help her into bed and saw how tired she was, I got the story out of her. They can be such children at that age.”

“She’s a grown woman,” I corrected. “Would you have?”

It threw her for a second. She stopped smiling and wrinkled her smooth brow. “You mean let her go to see you? I couldn’t stop her. She has rights.”

“But you don’t love the idea.”

“Are you always this penetrating this early?” she demanded.

“It’s the detective thing. Sometimes the switch gets stuck on. Do we go in to see the lady or does she come out here?”
Out here
being a narrow entryway with a linked rubber mat on the floor and on one wall one of those framed portraits of Christ screened in Day-Glo on imitation black velvet that K-Mart sells next to posters of Loni Anderson.

Karen McBride’s expression changed. “I’m sorry you came all this way. Mrs. Evancek had a scare early this morning. She was taken by ambulance to the hospital. I just came back from there. I tried to call you but I guess you’d already left.”

“Is she all right?”

“Her doctor thinks so. She was calling for me when I got in this morning. She was shaken and very flushed, disoriented. Her pulse was racing. It may have been a minor stroke. They’re holding her for observation, but it looks like the danger is past and there doesn’t appear to be any major damage. It was brought on by yesterday’s physical and emotional strain, I’m sure.”

Her tone was reproachful. I said, “She didn’t tell me her medical history when she called or I’d have come to see her. The trip downtown was her idea.”

“Of course. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve come to like Martha a lot. You get protective.”

“She’s like the grandmother you never had.”

“You’re impertinent,” she blazed.

“Aw, go on. I had my shots.”

For a moment a smile and a snarl wrestled for her just slightly too-wide mouth. The smile won. You could lose your car keys in one of her dimples. “You might as well come in,” she said, standing aside. “I try never to throw anyone out until I’ve given him coffee.”

We walked into a spotless living room with a carpet like a mutt’s coat and floral print covers thrown over everything that wasn’t a table. Someone had painted the brick fireplace white and stood a potted geranium on the grate. No one was going to start anything as messy as a fire in there, by God. There were the usual shiny copper long-handled implements that had never touched ash next to the hearth and on the mantelpiece some cheap plaster saints.

I was starting to think someone was out to convert me.

She kept walking, through a door bright with sunlight into a well-ventilated kitchen. “The coffee’s on already. Make yourself comfortable.”

“Okay if I smoke?”

“If what you’ve been hearing the past ten years hasn’t convinced you it isn’t,” she said, “why ask me?”

“Does that mean I can light up?” I had one out.

“Go ahead. I haven’t been able to make Martha quit in a year. I don’t expect to have better luck with you in five minutes.”

I rolled it along my lips but didn’t set fire to it. I was standing in the doorway watching her fuss with the makings at a linoleum-covered counter but didn’t go in. I was sick of kitchens. This one was very clean and traditional; the most modern things in it were the coffee maker and Miss McBride. I asked her if she worked for Social Services.

“No, I’m on the night shift at the hospital. St. John’s. I’m a registered nurse. Martha hired me to care for Mr. Evancek when he was dying of cancer.”

“And when he was gone?”

“I stayed on. I help Martha out of bed in the morning and do the heavy cleaning and help her into bed at night. I don’t charge her. Aside from that she’s pretty independent. Does her own shopping and fixes her own meals. She’s a wonderful cook.”

“I guess you have to be when your husband’s a chef. Black.”

She made a face, spooned some powdered creamer into one of two cups, and handed me the other.

While she was putting things away I went back into the living room and set my cup and saucer down on a low glass-topped coffee table. A big brown scrapbook flabby with pictures lay on the corner. I hinged open the cover and turned the pages idly. Faded oval sepia prints of serious-eyed children in baggy white sailor-dresses, boys as well as girls; a wedding picture of a young man in a high starched collar, his dark moustache waxed into sharp points and his hair parted in the middle and plastered down with pomade, his bride beside him in ivory lace, dark eyes in a grave pretty face that I recognized with a start as Martha Evancek’s fifty years ago; washed-out wartime shots, uniforms and rubble; a snap taken on a visit to some Eastern European city with a postwar look to its spires and minarets under repair and a hefty, smiling young man standing in the foreground; the picture I had already seen of an eleven-year-old boy, newly returned to its corners and the reason the book was out; a little towheaded girl, probably Carla, in a wading pool; and, toward the back, page after page of jarring color Polaroid photos of an emaciated old man gasping out his life, naked to the bedcovers. His eyes were huge in a face whose hollow cheeks and temples and outward-curling earlobes had nothing in common with the sternly confident young bridegroom in the wedding shot.

“I took those.”

Karen McBride’s voice almost made me jump. She had come in carrying her cup and saucer, looking not at all like a young maid at tea in a Gibson print.

“Martha insisted,” she went on. “She said it was family tradition to maintain a complete photographic record of each life. I thought it was ghoulish, but Mr. Evancek agreed with her and I used my own camera. Funny people, those Old Worlders. Their threshold of shock is a lot higher than ours.”

“Watching your friends and neighbors get blown to pieces in artillery barrages will do that.” I flipped back through the book. “You’ve seen this?”

“Martha shows it to me often. She has a story to go with each picture. They aren’t all the kind of stories you’d expect a sweet little old lady to tell.”

“They don’t get to be old wearing blinders. She tell you about this one?” I showed her the beefy lad in the fairy-tale city.

“That’s Joseph at eighteen. He looks like a good-natured ox. Not at all like someone who would do what he did.”

“I think they can arrest you for looking like that.”

I closed the book and sat down. She balanced her coffee stuff on her knee in an upholstered chair with a straight back and antimacassars pinned to the arms while I fought to avoid being swallowed whole by the sofa. There’s a company that makes those specifically for private investigators to sit in while visiting the homes of little old ladies.

“Nice place,” I lied.

“It’s horrible. I always feel like a little girl having to keep quiet at her grandmother’s when I sit in this room. She rents it furnished from the people on the other side of the wall.”

“You’re right, it stinks.”

Her mouth tried for a prim look. “I see. It’s a funny detective.”

“I’m glad you think so. There are those who wouldn’t agree. But the heck with them. Are you married?”

The snarl took another fall after a little struggle. The smile had her face now. I’d been rooting for it since its first victory. She sipped some coffee. “What did you want to ask Martha? She’s told me a lot about Joseph’s — tragedy and about little Michael. Who I guess isn’t so little anymore. Maybe I can help.”

I pulled myself out of the morass of horsehair and printed flowers and balanced on the edge of the sofa’s frame. I picked up my cup, remembered the cold cigarette between my lips, and put it away before drinking. “I’m in a delicate position here,” I said.

“So I noticed.”

I forced a grin. “I bet they love you down in Intensive Care. There’s a little matter of client privilege riding on just how much you do know about why Mrs. Evancek hired me and how much more I might be telling by asking you questions.”

“You’re a very careful man,” she said.

“Impertinent too. Don’t forget impertinent.”

She passed that one. Her eyes were almost amber in the sunlight streaming in from the kitchen. “I’m careful too. After Martha told me she’d hired you I checked up on you. I called the police. They referred me to a lieutenant in Homicide. I forget his name.”

“Alderdyce. John Alderdyce.”

“That’s him. From what he said I couldn’t make up my mind whether he likes you or wants to charge you with something. But he said you were honest enough. If I could ignore what you thought passed for a sense of humor, he said, we’d get along fine.”

“John’s a great kidder.”

“Now I guess it’s my turn.” Talking, she tapped a short glossy-pink nail on the handle of her cup. “You’re looking for Michael Evancek, aged about thirty, whom Martha lost track of nineteen years ago when her son Joseph, the boy’s father, went berserk and murdered his own wife and daughter and then committed suicide. She offered you a thousand-dollar retainer and you gave back half. You also promised to report daily.”