Sugartown (16 page)

A spreading oak as old as the Crusades took up most of the tiny backyard with a weathered redwood fence around its huge trunk. A white picket fence in need of painting separated the yard from the backyard of the house facing the next street over, which had no windows on this side, and a garage stood between me and the place on the opposite side of Woldanski’s from the too-close frame building. I seemed to be the only thing stirring in the neighborhood.

I opened the screen door to the enclosed back porch and walked across a fairly new concrete slab with a rubber mat on it and looked at another dead bolt lock on the back door. Just for fun I tried this knob too. It turned and the door opened.

I didn’t like anything about it.

I left the door standing partly open and went through the porch again and back around to my car and got my spare gun out of the special compartment under the dash. It was a Luger without a history or papers and if I was caught with it, it was worth a stiff fine or a jail sentence or both from a judge who probably had an unlicensed firearm of his own strapped on under his robes. But my legal piece was still at home and you get a thing about empty houses once your head’s been bounced off the floors of enough of them. So I was strolling back around to the porch with nine millimeters of German automatic in my hip pocket when the screen door hit me in the face.

Somebody’s shoulder was behind it. Lights flashed. I pivoted on my left foot to catch my balance and grabbed for the wall of the porch with both hands and missed. I went down on one knee, scuffing my shoulder against the wall. By the time I scrambled up and clawed the gun out, my screen door man had hurdled the back fence. I glimpsed movement between the houses facing the next street, did some hurdling of my own, waltzed with a young maple that leaped in front of me without warning, and cleared a four-foot passage between houses in time to see a taillight flicking around the corner. I heard the engine hesitate, then take off shrilly.

Somewhere a dog started barking. I realized I was standing on a public sidewalk holding an unregistered Luger. Well, officer, there was this screen door. I put the gun away and trespassed my way back to Woldanski’s house. The dog went on barking, but no doors slammed and no one called for me to identify myself.

The screen door’s aluminum frame was bent but I hadn’t left any of my face on the wire mesh. I picked up my hat and put back some of its shape and determined that my nose wasn’t broken or bleeding and went inside when I couldn’t think of anything else to keep me out. I had an idea what I’d find. I hoped I was wrong.

John Woldanski had done well for himself in the religious art business. The kitchen was stainless steel and the living room, two steps down at the end of a paneled hallway, was large and airy and full of crushed brown leather and cherrywood rubbed to a deep red glow like coals in a hearth. There was a circular fireplace with a funnel-shaped chimney in the center of the room and the walls were hung with Spanish oils depicting holy subjects, the faces angry and tormented, the brush-strokes slashes of bold color as in a bullfight poster. They were good originals, not the junk that converted Catholics and born-agains hang all over like a gangster stocks his gallery, buying painted canvas by the yard and marble statues in case lots.

The bedroom off the hall was quiet, the walls pastel blue and the bed made. The top of the bureau was littered with coins and combs and brushes with white hairs caught in the bristles, man-clutter. A brown leather wallet containing a Social Security card, two credit cards, and sixty-three dollars in cash. No driver’s license. A five-by-seven color photograph in a gold frame of a neat little man with white hair combed straight across a pink scalp, a large nose, and a small white moustache, holding hands with a plump pink woman with blue hair and glasses in octagonal frames. Three suits in three shades of gray hung in the closet. Two pairs of black brogues on the closet floor, a brushed felt hat on the top shelf. I didn’t open any drawers. I didn’t think Woldanski was that short.

The bathroom was burnt orange and chocolate. I stuck a foot inside and slid the plastic shower curtain open on its rings. There was a puddle of water on the brown tile floor, nothing else. I went looking for other rooms. There were no other rooms. It was a split-level house built on concrete without a basement or second story.

I stood next to the fireplace scratching my ear. When I got tired of that I went back through the kitchen and let myself out the back door.

The rear of the bigger house next door extended fifteen feet behind the ranch style. The buildings were so close they might have been part of the same lot. It had a back entrance close to the near corner. I smoothed a finger along the brim of my hat and stepped up to the door and rapped on the frame.

No one answered. The door was locked, but it was an ordinary spring lock and the place had been broken into recently or otherwise had the glass pane in the door broken and replaced with a square of plywood tacked on from inside. I pushed at it with the palm of my hand. The tacks gave. I pushed a little harder and reached between the plywood and the window frame and found the turning latch and turned it and set the button with my thumb. I opened the door and went inside.

There was only one window in the kitchen, a small one in the north wall with a checked dishtowel tacked over it, leaving the room in gray gloom. I tried the switch on the wall next to the door but no lights came on. The linoleum was badly scuffed, and when I stepped forward my toe kicked a loose tile and it slid a few inches. There were a bare table and some chairs and an unplugged refrigerator with a sofa cushion propping its door open from inside to keep it from growing mold while it thawed. I put a hand inside and touched the inner wall. It was cool but not cold and dry as the inside of a refrigerator that’s been turned off for a while.

The dining room contained another table and chairs and a china cabinet with bric-a-brac behind dusty glass. There was a telephone stand but no telephone and a square hole in the wall over the baseboard where the box had been removed. After that came a living room with a worn rug and sheets thrown over the furniture. Just for the hell of it I lifted the sheets and looked underneath. I found the sofa that belonged to the cushion in the refrigerator. Another door opened on a steep bare staircase leading up to two empty bedrooms and a bathroom growing chalky mold in the bottom of the tub. I tried a faucet. It sucked air with a wheezing noise like an old man in an oxygen tent. I turned it off and went back downstairs.

The kitchen had another, narrower door in the wall next to the sink, held shut by a small bolt. I slid it back. Household tools on the wall over a landing and warped wooden stairs going down into blackness. I struck a match and started down, testing each step with a toe before trusting my weight to it. Nine steps down the glow of the tiny flame touched the scuffed sole of a man’s slipper.

I blew out the match, which was burning down close to my fingers, struck another, and folding back the cover on the matchbook, set fire to the others. They flared bright white and burned down to yellow. The slipper was attached to a foot in a ribbed brown sock and beyond that was a patch of pale hairless skin and then a dark pantsleg and another leg bent under that and a ring of white shirt and a dark blue sweater with a roll collar and a head of white hair lying on its side on an earthen floor. One eye glistened in the wavering light, bright as a wet marble and seeing just as much.

He was sprawled head down over the bottom five steps with the upper third of his body on the hardpack dirt floor of the basement. Bracing my back against the cut stone of the building’s foundation and holding the burning matchbook out like a torch, I stepped over him to the base of the stairs and bent down to feel the big artery on the side of his neck. He wasn’t using it today. But his flesh was still warm and the scalp showing through the parted strands of his hair was as pink as in his picture on the bureau in the bedroom of the house next door.

I dropped the matchbook and stamped out the flame.

There was a little light in the basement itself, sliding gray as a toad’s belly through the thick dirty glass of a rectangular window high in the stone foundation wall on the far end of the house. It was only a half-cellar, just big enough for an aging oil furnace like a steel octopus whose overhead duct-tentacles wouldn’t let me stand up straight and some stored junk in dusty cartons and more objects under sheets. I nudged my hat to the back of my head and sat down on a carton full of old National Geographies and walked a Winston back and forth across the back of my right hand and tried to catch the dead man’s eye.

“Mr. Woldanski, what are you doing lying with a broken neck in the basement of a house not your own?”

He didn’t answer. He wouldn’t even meet my gaze. His small neat white moustache looked as artificial as wax fruit. I stuck the cigarette in the corner of my mouth, patted my pockets for matches, then remembered and let it droop. I thought. I thought about an old woman whose grandson turns out to be dead just about the time she starts looking for him and I thought about an old man who may or may not know what became of a silver cross the old woman would like returned, and who gets dead just about the time someone makes up his mind to ask him about it. I thought about people who hit screen doors with other people’s faces and don’t stop to apologize. Mostly I just sat there sucking on a cold filter tip, thinking that I saw more stiffs in my work than a mortician who gives green stamps.

I had enough of that finally and got up and walked around the tiny basement. I lifted a corner of one of the dusty sheets, braced myself for rats, and tugged it free. I looked at a gold candelabra with nine curved branches and a Star of David on top and at some painted plaster saints with gilt flaking off the hems of their gowns and a stack of painted icons in frames like those I had seen in Stash Leposava’s house, here standing on a rough shop table with a broken leg. I raised another sheet covering a pile of gold votive candlesticks and tiny silver crucifixes with chains attached. There was more of the same under the other sheets, paintings and carvings and ornaments in a holy motif. There were even a few glittering crescents and related Islamic items, although not many; their local market value wouldn’t be as great. No big silver crosses with blue and red stones and Cyrillic lettering on the back.

It all had the look of money and lots of it. John Woldanski might not have died of old age, but he had died rich. I replaced all the sheets.

After a while I stepped over the body again and went upstairs and out and used the telephone in the house next door to order some law.

T
WO DETECTIVES NAMED
K
OWALSKI
and Stamenoff got the squeal.

Stamenoff wasn’t as big as Toronto. He was six feet three inches of hard fat in a brown suit and wide necktie with a hula girl painted on it, heavy lids and puffy lips in a flat face with blue jowls. He never spoke where I could hear him. Kowalski was as far from him as they come, a slim loose redhead with Grecian curls, blue eyes without brows, and a rubber mouth smiling in a long square jaw like a brake pedal. His suit was just a suit. The little basement got very crowded with them and me and the body on the stairs and the uniforms who had come in answer to my call. I doubted that there had been that many people in it since it was dug.

When Kowalski was through with the uniforms he came over to where I was standing next to the sheet-covered items and took my hand in a small hot paw. “Rental heat, huh? You dress like it.”

I glanced down at my raincoat. “It’s that kind of day.”

Stamenoff got a pad out of his hip pocket and found a pencil and we got started. It didn’t take too long to tell with Martha Evancek left out. I didn’t touch on the search for Michael.

“This cross — valuable, is it?” Kowalski asked.

“Depends on what you call valuable,” I said. “Melted down it wouldn’t bring much, but a museum might pop for it if you caught them on a slow day. My client is offering five hundred dollars for its return.”

“Not exactly worth trashing a guy.”

“These days they knock you over for what’s in your teeth. But they don’t usually get cute for five yards, get an old man out of the house he lives in and shove him down the stairs of the place next door so it looks like an accident.”

“Maybe it was an accident,” Kowalski said. “Maybe you just surprised some of our local talent cleaning out Woldanski’s place. We got looters coming in from the suburbs since they started tacking city paper to front doors in this neighborhood.”

“Too much coincidence. Also his house is as neat as a bicycle clip and there’s cash in his wallet on the bureau. It plays like the killer walked him in here and did the job and then went back to carve away everything that didn’t fit the frame. Could be the job got done over there and the killer dragged the body here to make it look like he took a tumble coming to inspect his loot. But that’s a lot of trouble to go to and there was a bare chance he’d be seen, even in a neighborhood as empty as this.”

“You missed the license number?”

“I missed the car. I’d know its taillight anywhere.” I thought. “It had a standard transmission. I heard the gears change.”

“Swell. You get that, Dan? It was a stick.”

Stamenoff nodded without glancing up from his pad or speaking.

“He didn’t step on my face or you could have taken an impression of his foot off my forehead.”

“It’s a thought. The doors to both houses were open when you got to them?”

“More or less.”

“More or less means what?”

“More or less means more or less,” I said. “You’re shouting down the wrong hole there. Everybody who could sign a B-and-E beef against me is spilled over those steps.”

“We don’t know yet that Woldanski owns this place.”

“I didn’t, until I saw what’s under those sheets.”

Kowalski looked hard at Stamenoff, who stopped writing and lifted the one covering the pile of candlesticks and crucifixes. Kowalski whistled.