Never Street (7 page)

She moved a shoulder. “She’s an actress, or fancies herself one on the basis of a couple of cat-food commercials. In her book that puts her above us lowly telephone girls. Even if she does sling hash to keep up her car payments between feminine hygiene spots.”

“That’s kind of a big chip to still be carrying around two years later. See or hear anything of her since?”

“Not a thing, and neither has Mr. Catalin. For someone who’s not looking for him, you seem awfully interested in things he had the use of.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t looking for him.”

She tapped her teeth with a coral nail. They were good teeth, blue-white against ivory skin. “I don’t think I’d hire you, Mr. Walker. You have an attitude I wouldn’t care for in someone who was working for me.”

“It’s a handicap. I considered getting help to overcome it.”

“What was the decision?”

I shook my head.

She set the lock on Catalin’s door and pulled it shut behind us. Back in the reception area I watched her take her seat with a flashy kind of economy of movement she probably wouldn’t have used without someone watching. When I made no move to leave she lifted her brows at me.

“That insurance policy between Webb and Catalin,” I said. “Were you a witness, or did you just file it?”

“I don’t know anything about an insurance policy,” she said after a moment. “Is there one?”

“Search me. It was just a gag to get information I didn’t want to ask Webb about and make him mad enough to give me the boot. As arrangements go it’s standard among longtime partners: When one dies, the other benefits, and the business goes on.”

“If you’re suggesting something happened to Mr. Catalin and Mr. Webb was responsible, I can’t help you. He may not be the ideal employer, but that doesn’t make him Klaus von Bülow.”

“That kind of information is easy to get.”

“How nice for you.” She slid her eyes toward the door. I went after them.

My car didn’t want to start again. I smoked a cigarette while it got used to the idea, and thought about Musuraca Investigations. I knew Phil Musuraca; not personally or even by sight, but the way a hardworking gardener knows a destructive species of beetle. Where he had gone, no honest investigator could follow without slipping in Phil’s greasy footprints. What his number was doing on Neil Catalin’s redial was one for Ellery Queen.

“G
OOD MORNING.
Z
IGGY’S
Chop House.”

A low voice for a woman and even some men, with fine grit in it, like a cat’s lick. Conversations collided in the background with tinkling flatware and clattering crockery. I could almost smell the carcinogens frying in the kitchen.

“I’m trying to locate Vesta Mannering,” I said. “Does she work there?”

“Speaking.”

I leaned against the telephone cover. The Penobscot Building across the street shimmied in the August heat ribboning up from the pavement. Parking attendants and Federal Express couriers, their uniforms just beginning to wilt as the Judas cool of the morning burned off, paced themselves like pros as they made their way toward the shrinking shade.

“You’re a hard woman to get hold of, Miss Mannering.”

“I don’t let just anyone get hold of me. Who is this, please?” Her voice had dropped. Not taking personal calls on restaurant time would be among the commandments at Ziggy’s. Another would be keeping kitchen secrets.

“My name is Amos Walker. I’m an investigator hired by Gay Catalin to find her husband.”

“That again. I told her I haven’t seen Neil in over a year.”

“Not seeing him doesn’t cover telephone calls and letters.”

“You left out singing telegrams, which I didn’t get either. I lost a valuable career contract because of Catalin. Now this job’s all I have, lousy as it is. Do you want me to lose that too?”

There was no reason to play the card, no reason at all, except that I was losing the hand and the Joker was all I had left.

“What about Fat Phil?” I asked. “Heard from him?”

The little silence that followed was like the bank breaking. When she spoke again the background noise was muffled, as if she had inserted her body between it and the telephone. “What do you know about Musuraca?”

“Meet me and we’ll swap stories.”

“Not here,” she said quickly. “Do you know the Castanet Lounge in Iroquois Heights? I’m through here at ten.”

“I’ll find it.”

The Mercury was ready to start finally. Waiting for a hole in traffic, I read the clock on the dash. Eleven hours till Vesta. It was too early for lunch and there was nothing waiting for me back at the office but some bills and a water stain shaped like Mike Tyson. I drove to a garage I knew on the East Side and that the car knew even better, like a tired horse returning to the barn.

OK Towing & Auto Repair worked out of a building that belonged on the National Register of Historic Places, whenever the NRHP got around to recognizing the age of the automobile: one of the dozen or so remaining garages built of white glazed brick still being used for their intended purpose. A Standard gasoline pump, no longer functional and missing its original glass globe (stolen, no doubt, by a collector), rusted out front, its price for Regular Leaded frozen at 29.9 cents, and a cardboard sign depicting the proper firing order of pistons in an eight-cylinder engine slouched in the window, gone the color of mummy wrappings and no longer visible to the people who worked there. The proprietor had declined several offers by the city to buy the building so it could be torn down and replaced by a park named for a felon who had managed to get himself beaten to death by overzealous police officers. Rumor had it the proprietor was waiting for someone from Greenfield Village to take it off his hands and transport it brick by brick to the historical theme park in Dearborn. Meanwhile he papered the wall of his office with citations from the city designed to nickel-and-dime him into submission. He had a pit bull for a lawyer and more motions for injunction on the table than a politician has teeth.

I found Ernst Dierdorf seated on a stool at the bench, swamping out a four-barrel carburetor with a toothbrush and a cup of gasoline. The cup was the same one he used for coffee, with his first name lettered on it in gold-leaf Gothic. His Aryan Nation poster-boy features had begun to slip past sixty, the clean chin blurring and the skin growing thick around his chilly blue eyes. The rest of him was the same as always, stunted and misshapen under what had to be the first pair of coveralls he had ever owned, strataed and sub-strataed with layers of black grease.

“I need you to look at my car when you get a minute.” I had to shout to make myself heard above the whimpering of air wrenches and the clanging of tire irons.

“I’ve seen your car.” He blew through the carburetor. It made a sound like a flute. Then he went back to scrubbing. It wasn’t the note he was looking for.

“You need new material, Ernst.”

“You need a new car.”

“You say that every time I come in.”

“I mean it every time.”

“Well, take a look at it.”

“I don’t need to.”

“Why not? Did you find that Nazi gold you buried in forty-five?”

“Go to hell, Amos. I was too young to serve in the Wehrmacht.”

“I heard it was the Hitler Youth.”

“I don’t need to look at your car to know what’s wrong. You’ve got fissures in the block. You had fissures in the block last time. They don’t heal.”

“Use more epoxy.”

“It’s ninety percent epoxy now. That’s not a car you’re driving. It’s a rolling advertisement for miracle adhesives.” He wiped the carburetor with a rag slightly less filthy than his coveralls, blew through it again. “I got a car for you. Let you have it for a grand.”

“You’ve been trying to sell me a car ever since I bought this one.”

“You should’ve come here instead of buying it hot.”

“We’re not married, Ernst. I wasn’t being unfaithful.”

He wiped the carburetor again, with a clean rag this time, and set it on the bench next to the sawed-off Remington shotgun he used to protect himself at night from burglars and the Jewish Defense League. “You want to see it or not? I already got one offer from a collector. Thousand, cash.”

“Why didn’t you take it?”

“I hate collectors worse than bolsheviks. They treat cars like pussies.”

“Show me what you’ve got.”

He climbed down from the stool and hobbled through a back door propped open with the block from a Packard Eight. He moved painfully, using only the balls of his feet. He had not used the rest since the Russians had got hold of him three hundred feet from the Bunker. All it took to turn Ernst Dierdorf violent was to order a glass of vodka anywhere within his hearing.

Behind the garage was a gravel apron where the hopeless cases were parked, with the occasional work-in-progress mixed in to camouflage it from thieves, should they get over the electrified fence with all their internal organs intact; his lawyer had been trying for years to persuade him to stop cranking the current up to lethal levels. One of the vehicles was covered with a canvas tarpaulin. With no ceremony whatsoever he flipped up the end of the cover and rolled it back over the hood, across the roof, and down the sloping rear window to the trunk.

It was an Oldsmobile Cutlass, twenty-five years old, with a white vinyl pebbled top and a dusty blue battered body. The distance from the nose to the base of the windshield was nearly as long as the rest of the car. A conscientious traffic cop would have been tempted to ticket it for speeding while it was standing still.

“I had one just like this,” I said.

“Like hell. You had this one.”

“You told me you sold it to a guy for parts two presidents back.”

“I did.” He stood doubling and redoubling the canvas tarp in his strong hands, as close to bursting as he ever got. He was almost smiling.

I got out a cigarette and speared it between my lips, then decided against lighting it. The ground was soaked as deep as I was tall with gasoline and motor oil.

“It was back in January,” he said. “I was on my way to a tow job clear out in Washtenaw County. I passed this pile of junk, up to its knees in weeds in an unplowed field. The farmer’s wife was home. She said she was sick of looking at it and I could have it for nothing if I cleared it out before her husband got back from Lansing. I never did get to the tow job. I hitched on and brought it straight here. I almost fell on my face when I read the serial number.”

I nodded. Ernst’s memory was where old serial numbers went to die. If he ever forgot one you can bet it never existed. He went on.

“Engine and transmission were junk, of course. I had a brand-new four-fifty-five Cadillac V-8 engine I traded a Willys Jeep for to a guy in Dearborn, never used. I found the trans in a salvage yard on Ford Road. I applied for a title based on the serial number of the Caddy. It came through last week. It’s as legal as abortion and you don’t have to worry about picketers.”

“Why just a thousand?”

His face twitched, another memento he carried around from the last good war. “What?”

“Any collector worth the name would give you twenty-five hundred for it as it sits. You don’t hate them that much. Where’s the string?”

“No string.” He twitched again. “Oh, the farmer’s wife called me the next day trying to get it back; something about her husband threatening to divorce her. I already had the engine in. I hung up. The farmer has the original title, but that goes to the number on the old engine. I junked that. It would be better if the car weren’t here when his lawyer comes around.”

“Ernst, that’s theft.”

His face went stoic. “Thousand’s the price.”

I undid the latch and threw up the hood. The 455 wasn’t anywhere near as clean as an operating table at Johns Hopkins. I slammed the hood shut. “Give me two hundred on the Merc. I’ll give you another hundred down and a hundred a month.”

“I don’t want the Merc. I need half up front. If you’re going to pay the rest on time I’m going to have to make it twelve-fifty.”

“How’s Eric?”

“Eric’s good. He’s going to be a monsignor.” He doubled over the tarp another time, his knuckles whitening. “Give me the Merc and the hundred, cash. I expect the first payment first of next month.”

I’d deposited Gay Catalin’s retainer check the day before and kept out two hundred for walking around. I gave him five twenties. He laid the rolled canvas across the hood of a Monte Carlo with belts and hoses spilling out like entrails and counted the bills. “Don’t you want to take it out for a run first?”

“Anyone else work on it but you?”

“You see anyone walking around here with a broken jaw?”

“Let’s go in and swap titles.”

He led the way, moving fast on the balls of his feet.

We completed the transaction in his little monoxide-smelling office in the garage. “Come around after this thing goes away and I’ll bump out the dings and do you a paint job nobody will know wasn’t factory.” He handed me a set of keys attached to a washer.

“I like it the way it is.”

“You don’t put up much of a front.”

“Someone would just push it in if I did.” I gave him the keys to the Mercury.

Before he went into the Catholic seminary, Ernst’s son Eric had been arrested by the Detroit Police on a charge of Grand Theft Auto. As a favor to my mechanic I’d dug up three witnesses who swore Eric was with them at the Pussycat Theater on Telegraph Road at the time the car was seen barreling out of the dealer’s lot at Seven Mile and Dequindre. The cops didn’t buy their story any more than I did, but the dealer hadn’t wanted to bother with a long trial and withdrew his complaint. And I hadn’t paid a penny for a lube and oil change in five years.

O
UR DAILY STORM
clouds were in place when I came out on the street after lunch, but they provided no insulation from the heat. Instead they sealed in the temperature and humidity like the lid of a pressure cooker. By the time I found a parking space around the corner from the main branch of the Detroit Public Library, my shirt was shrink-wrapped to my back. The air-conditioned atmosphere inside the building went down inside the back of my collar like an icicle.