Never Street (31 page)

“Maybe he didn’t get it. If not, it would still be on the machine. The cops would consider it evidence Catalin killed Webb out of jealousy. Or maybe he got it and decided to let himself in and wait for you.”

She sat down. “You know what’s wrong with your theory? Too many ‘maybes’ and ‘probablys.’ It wouldn’t hold up in a court of law.”

“It doesn’t have to. The defendant has already been tried and sentenced and executed. You can’t cop a plea with a gun in your face.” I shut the door and walked around to the driver’s side, feeling my brow furrowing. Something stank, and it wasn’t coming from the Dumpster behind the restaurant.

We stopped at a nightspot in Birmingham, an L-shaped place with a converted Wurlitzer standing in for the band that appeared there weekends, had drinks, and used the dance floor. She clung to me firmly, smelling of pale blossoms under a full moon.

“You’re a good dancer,” she said.

“My boxing coach made us take lessons. I notice you don’t trip over your feet.”

“My mother mortgaged the house to get me the best voice and ballet teachers she could find. I danced the Dying Swan at a recital while other girls my age were still learning to use the potty.”

“Did you manage to work in a childhood?”

“Uh-uh. When you’re brought up to think of Let’s Pretend as a business, you don’t play with dolls and little teacups on your own time. I thought the Kansas parts of
The Wizard of Oz
were romantic.”

We drove to her apartment house. With her hand on the door handle on her side she said, “I’d invite you up for coffee, but I’m out. Can I offer you anything else?”

“Yes.”

Up in her living room she dealt us each a glass of Scotch from a bottle equipped with a pourer. She saw me looking at the broken windshield hanging over the false fireplace. “My baloney period. I took out a loan and hired a decorator to impress all the Hollywood producers I was going to bring back here when they came through town shooting chase scenes. God, he was a bitch.” She drank.

“Did the producers like it?”

“I never met one. Only the second unit ever comes to Detroit: pimple-faced assistant directors and stuntmen in trusses. Meanwhile I’m still paying off the loan.”

“The producers don’t know what they missed.”

“How would you know? You’ve never seen me act.”

“I think I have.”

She watched me for a moment. Then she set her glass on the fireplace mantel and moved in close. “Am I acting now?” She melted into me, closing her eyes.

I kissed her. Her lips were soft and tasted of strawberries and her teeth were sharp. When we came apart I said, “I don’t think so. But you might be better than I think.”

“When will you know?”

“These things take time.”

She smiled. We kissed again.

The first time was hot and frenzied, without finesse; we were both greedy and took more than our share. Her nails were claws, her body lithe and sinuous, blue-white in the moonlight coming through the bedroom window. The second time was slower, more controlled. We gave more, made discoveries, and commented on them in whispers punctuated with kisses. Afterward I lay on my back with her head on my chest, listening to her even breathing and thinking what a difference a wrecking bar made.

Right about then a car turned the corner at the end of the block, slowed to an idle as it passed the building, then accelerated to take the hill, and I stopped thinking. I knew the sound of those twin pipes.

“A
GAIN?”
V
ESTA RAISED
her head from my chest and smiled without opening her eyes. “You
are
a good guy.”

“Later. Do you own a gun?”

They were open now. “Why?”

“I’m probably wrong. There have to be a thousand juiced-up wagons in this area that sound just like Robinette’s Camaro. Just in case I’m right, tell me where you keep the gun so I can find it without turning on any lights.”

“I don’t have one. Where’s yours?”

“I’ve got too high an opinion of my animal magnetism to bring one along on a date. What have you got that works like a weapon?”

“A can of Mace. It’s in the handbag I carry to work. I’ll get it. You’ll never find it. That good a detective you’re not. No man is.” She slid out of bed into a silk robe and opened her closet.

I got dressed and went over to the window, sinking down on one knee to peer around the half-drawn shade. The moon threw a trapezoidal patch of light onto the floor of the bedroom where I’d found Leo Webb’s body and spilled shadows of liquid velvet into the parking lot where my Cutlass nestled beside Vesta’s little Triumph. Both cars looked black. Nothing was moving there.

“Here it is.” She started toward me.

“Stay there.”

She stopped while I drew the shade down the rest of the way. When the room was nearly pitch black I stood and went over to her. The can, short and squat like a container of shaving cream, felt cold when I closed my hand around it.

“Make sure you know which way it’s pointing before you use it,” she said. “This stuff can blind you permanently.”

I found the hole with my finger, pointed it at the floor, and tested the sprayer. It worked.

“Stay here and keep an eye on the parking lot,” I said. “If you see anything moving, let me know. Leave the lights off.”

“Where will you be?”

“Bottom of the stairs.”

She put a hand on my chest. “Don’t get killed, okay? One more murder and I lose my lease.”

I grinned, shook the can, and left her.

There was almost no light at all in the stairwell. I waited on the landing for my eyes to adjust to what there was, then went down, feeling each step with the ball of my right foot before trusting my weight to it. The air was stale and smelled of Victory Cabbage and Meatless Tuesdays and nouvelle cuisine and pensioner cat food, all the cooking fads of seven decades rolled into one depressing meal. Every tweak and groan of a geriatric building settling into the earth sounded as loud as a gunshot. I had spent entirely too much of my life on this staircase thinking of death.

At the bottom I groped for the doorknob, cool to the touch, and determined with the ball of my thumb that it was locked. I unlocked it. Then I locked it again. I didn’t want whoever came to the door to suspect that anything waited for him inside but a sleeping building; also I needed some kind of warning. My reflexes weren’t what they were twenty years ago in another hemisphere, or for that matter twenty minutes ago in another room. I positioned myself to the left of the door on the opposite side from the knob and wanted a cigarette but didn’t light one. More important than not giving myself away with smoke, I needed the heightened nervous system that came with the craving for nicotine. I wondered what the nonsmoking detectives did to sharpen the edge.

I forced my mind blank, which in my case was like clearing space in a dusty storeroom. Mostly I tried not to think that of the three men I knew of who had been with Vesta, two were dead and one was in jail.

“Amos!”

Vesta’s whisper from the top of the stairs went up my back like a jet of ice water. I hadn’t heard her open the door of her apartment. It took me a minute to convince myself she hadn’t been reading my thoughts.

“How many?” I spoke in a murmur. Whispers carry too far.

“Just one. I think he’s got a gun. A short rifle or something.”

“Get back inside.”

This time I heard the door draw shut.

And silence settled inside the little foyer like a fall of fresh snow.

A foot fell outside, or maybe not. I tensed up, then willed my body to relax. The can of Mace felt slippery. I parked it under my left arm, rubbed my palm down and up my thigh, wiped the can on the front of my shirt, and returned it to my right hand. I didn’t make any more noise in the still night air than a runaway dump truck.

The doorknob turned, grating ever so slightly in its socket, and stopped.

I took in my breath and held it. Then I changed my mind about the Mace. I transferred the can to my left hand and flexed the fingers of my right.

Something hard struck the door in the area of the knob. The molding around the inside of the frame cracked. A pause, and then the something struck again: the heel of a man’s shoe. Wood splintered, the door came free and flew at my face, and I threw up my left forearm to block it. Something long that gleamed in the moonlight spilling in from outside poked through the opening. I grasped it in my right hand and wrenched it toward the floor, at the same time leaning into the door with all my weight. A molecule-shattering roar filled the little space, a gush of blue-and-orange flame destroyed my night vision. The man on the other side of the door had reflexes as quick as mine and shoved back. I took a step backward to avoid the collision, but kept my grip on the fat barrel of the shotgun and pulled, jerking him across the threshold and off his feet. He cursed and tried to catch himself, but I pivoted on the ball of my right foot and thrust the Mace into his face and sprayed. He made a gaspy whimper and let go of the shotgun to claw at his face with both hands.

Now I had the weapon. I dropped the can, took the shotgun in both hands, and rammed the stock into the side of his head. He made another little noise and fell at my feet.

Silence again, although my ears were still ringing from the blast.

I stooped, felt for his collar, and dragged him the rest of the way inside. I pushed the door shut and propped his feet against it, which seemed appropriate since he’d used one of them to kick apart the latch. I groped for the switch on the wall of the stairwell, but before I found it the foyer flooded with light. Vesta stood on the landing with her hand on the upstairs switch. A number of other tenants huddled behind her in robes and pajamas, awakened by the racket.

The shotgun was a twelve-gauge Winchester pump, less than twenty-eight inches long. The wood was still white where the stock had been sawed down to the pistol grip and fresh steel shavings clung to the end of the barrel.

“Is it Robinette?” Vesta asked.

I grasped the back of his head by the hair and lifted it to expose his face. It was a pale face, too pale by a race to belong to Orvis Robinette. I didn’t know him from the Four Freshmen, but I made a pretty good guess based on his preference in weapons.

Vesta confirmed it. “It’s Ted,” she said. “My ex-husband, Ted Silvera. I didn’t know he was out.”

The Shotgun Bandit was wearing a tan jacket that was at least a size too large for him. It might have been the one he had worn on his way to Jackson; prison food is a good diet to lose weight on. In the time it took me to lower his head to the floor I had a plan. I was taller by a couple of inches, and his hair was a shade lighter than mine, but it was nighttime and if I moved fast enough I might survive the plan.

I laid the shotgun on the stairs. Silvera groaned and stirred, but the stinging in his eyes would keep him busy long after he regained all his senses. I wrestled the jacket off his shoulders and down his arms and put it on. It was almost a perfect fit, just a little short in the sleeves. I found the can of Mace against a baseboard and summoned Vesta down from the landing. When she was a couple of steps from the bottom I handed her the can.

“He shouldn’t give you any trouble,” I said. “This stuff is designed to stop a tiger in mid-pounce. But if he does, give him another dose.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Play Trojan Horse.” I picked up the shotgun and racked a fresh shell into the chamber.

I kicked Silvera’s feet out of the way and let myself out the door. On the concrete step I turned up the collar of the jacket, then started toward the street at a brisk trot. There was a bare chance the pair had arranged to meet on the other side of the block, in which case I was out of luck; but I doubted it. If everything went according to plan, Silvera would need the shortest, fastest route of escape, and that would be right out front.

He must have circled the block and parked at the base of the hill, where he could see the driveway to the apartment house. As soon as I got to the end, carrying the shotgun with my shoulders hunched and my chin tucked inside the collar of the tan jacket, the Camaro’s motor sprang to life with a rippling growl and the green car rolled into the pool of light shed by the streetlamp near where I stood in the shadows.

I leaped forward, pulled open the door on the passenger’s side, slid in, and thrust the muzzle of the shotgun under the chin of the man at the wheel.

“Hands on the dash,” I told Robinette, reaching out with my free hand to turn off the ignition. “Let’s talk.”

“T
HROUGHOUT OUR HISTORY
, the only authentic American art has emerged in times of repression,” the bald man was saying. “We’ve been conditioned to regard the sixties as a period of freedom from pernicious Puritanism, and what came of it? Designer jeans. Warhol’s immortal soup can. Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. Ryan O’Neal. Ryan O’Neal,” he repeated, to a chorus of mock-horrified snickers. “Conversely, that very Puritanism we’ve been conditioned to despise gave us Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, Poe, and Dickinson. When Hitler came to power in Germany, the great Mitteleuropean directors—Lang, Preminger, the Siodmaks, and my beloved Billy Wilder—fled to Hollywood, where they brought their expressionist techniques to bear in complying with Hays Office restrictions. Couldn’t show graphic violence onscreen? Say it with shadows. Couldn’t film biographies of actual criminals? Use allegory. No sex? Steam up the innuendo. Remember, it was the survivors of Vichy France who spotted these strains when Europe was inundated with verboten American movies after Liberation and codified them under the heading film noir. We had to be told by a people who had experienced the worst kind of repression that we’d invented something special.”

“But isn’t that just the male view?” asked one of the bald man’s listeners, a thin woman in a man’s tuxedo with her hair mowed to within a quarter-inch of her scalp. “All the women in those films were objectified and exploited. How can we justify that as art?”

Austin Alt measured her out a benign smile. He was a tall, pudgy sixtyish with a milk-chocolate California tan in aviator-style bifocals with gray-tinted lenses. His white fringe of hair waved back into an elaborate ducktail over his starched formal collar. He emptied his champagne glass and handed it to someone. “I never engage in gender politics. However. In nineteen forty-four, Lauren Bacall curled up on Humphrey Bogart’s lap in
To Have and Have Not,
stroked his cheek, slapped it, told him he needed a shave, and walked out of his room. Compare that single image against the number of times you’ve seen Kim Basinger raped and beaten and explain to me how far we’ve come from the objectification and exploitation of the forties.”