Sugartown (17 page)

I said, “Woldanski was a fence specializing in religious articles. You’ll have a file on him downtown. It looks like when he retired out of his shop on Trowbridge he moved his inventory here. There isn’t a lot of room for it in the house next door.”

“I don’t like that I don’t know who you’re working for,” said Kowalski. “I don’t like that more than I don’t like anything else about this one.”

“I’m in a confidential line of work. Like you. You don’t give up your snitches without a fight.”

“Yeah, and any night magistrate with a hard-on against cops can clink me for not sending mine over in open court. That works with doctors and lawyers and priests but you’re not any of those.”

I shrugged.

Kowalski scratched his long jaw. “Feed it to me again. What made you think of Woldanski?”

I fed it to him twice more. The second time was to see what holes showed. The third was just to remind me who was cop and who was suspect. In most murders the guy who calls the law is the guy who did it. It would be a statistic a cop like Kowalski would know and being a cop he would run with the statistics. He was back to asking the questions he’d asked the first time when the medical examiner came downstairs, followed by the fingerprint man and the photographer, as if they’d all arrived in the same car. We were jammed up against the walls now and Kowalski decided to adjourn to headquarters. He’d never looked at the body except to avoid tripping over it when he came in. Some of them don’t, and solve those cases that can be solved just as quickly as the boys who peer under the deceased’s fingernails and vacuum his pockets.

“You’re driving what?” Kowalski asked.

“Silver-gray Olds Omega,” I said. “It’s parked out front.”

“Keys.”

I hesitated, then took the ring out of my pocket and dropped it into his palm. He handed it to one of the uniforms and told him to follow us in my car. “You don’t want to leave it on this street after dark,” he said.

I said that sounded all right. I hoped the uniform wouldn’t find the Luger under the dash. Outside, Kowalski and I climbed into the back of a brown Pontiac and Stamenoff wedged himself under the wheel and we took off gently, no sirens or squealing tires. Real cops are dull.

Being a lieutenant, Kowalski had his own office in the detective bureau. It was a tight little room with a desk mounded over with file folders and pipe-smoking paraphernalia, a coffee maker on a yellow oak table, a three-drawer file cabinet, and cork walls tacked all over with curling color Polaroid shots of charred corpses in mangled cars with all the paint burned off and pieces of bodies caught in the limbs of trees. They reminded me a little of the death’s-head pictures of Martha Evancek’s late husband Michael in the back of her photo album. They were two of a kind, were Mrs. Evancek and Lieutenant Kowalski. He left me alone with Stamenoff while he went out to brief his detail. Stamenoff said nothing and stood at the window looking out into the squad room with his hands in his pants pockets jingling his keys and change. I found a pipe lighter on the desk and set fire to a cigarette. I finished that, lit another, and was looking at the pictures on the wall for the fifth or sixth time when the lieutenant returned.

“I took those when I was with County,” he said, picking up a black blob of bulldog pipe from the desk and opening and closing drawers. “These city cops go out on shootings and stabbings and they think they see it all. You haven’t until you’ve sponged a sixteen-year-old kid’s face off the tree he’s wrapped his little bomb around doing ninety-five on an icy curve with twelve beers under his belt.”

“What’s the gallery supposed to do, make men out of ’em?”

“No, that’s strictly for the punks we pull in on Open Intox. Pictures don’t work with police officers. The blood never comes out the right color, for one thing, and it’s just not the same as when you’re standing there in the middle of all that gasoline stink listening to some road patrol rookie tossing his crackers. Grabowska wants a piece of this one,” he told Stamenoff.

The other detective grunted and went on jingling his keys and change.

The juxtaposition threw me until I remembered what Howard Mayk had said about his arrival at the Evancek house nineteen years before. I must have smiled, because Kowalski said, “You know the skipper?”

“Just by reputation. I hear he’s got a glass stomach.”

“I wouldn’t give a nickel for a cop that didn’t lose at least one meal on the job. But there’s a limit. They called him Kid Puke around here until his last promotion.” He gave up looking in the drawers finally and turned the scuffed brown leather pouch on his desk inside-out to fill his pipe. Then he flipped away the empty pouch and tamped down the tobacco with a stained thumb and started the complicated business of getting it burning. I’ve always admired pipe-smokers for their patience, but that’s about all. At length he tossed the lighter back onto the desk and looked at me, puffing up thick gray clouds.

“Your story starts in the middle and quits before the end,” he said. “I still don’t know how you knew to look for Woldanski.”

“I’ve got a place just west of the city. You hear things.”

“I lived here all my life. I never heard of Woldanski.”

“Is that my fault?”

We stared at each other. I didn’t blame him; it sounded funny without Howard Mayk. But Mayk knew I was working for Martha Evancek.

We were still staring when the captain came in without knocking. He was younger than expected, about forty, with hair the color of wet sand, worn just long enough to cover the tops of his ears, and tan eyes with a curious dead kindness in them and a neat soft moustache that drooped a little over the corners of his mouth. He wore a sharp buff-colored suit that went with his eyes and hair and a red tie with a knot the size of a softball. He didn’t look at me until Kowalski introduced us, and then he might have been looking at a door. He didn’t offer to shake hands. “What’ve we got on the house?” he asked Kowalski.

“Fine, thanks,” I said. “And you?”

He looked at me again, differently. His lips were stuck in a perpetual pucker, as if he were always getting set to say something. “You don’t talk until I talk to you,” he said.

“Then do I get a biscuit?”

“I’ve got a man in the clerk’s office going through the plats,” Kowalski put in quickly, slapping me down with his eyes. “Woldanski looks to have had the run of the place if it wasn’t his.”

“So I heard. Get someone from Robbery in here.”

Kowalski glanced at Stamenoff, who left the office.

“When the M.E. gets through putzing around he’ll say Woldanski left us on account of a broken neck,” said the lieutenant. “He could have fallen, but it wasn’t all that far to fall and he almost had to be pushed to hit that hard. Walker might have surprised the guy that did it coming out of the old man’s house after either frisking the place or making everything look kosher. He didn’t get a good look at him. I’ve got uniforms turning the neighborhood for an eyeball, but the pickings are plenty lean.”

“Not lean enough,” Grabowska said. “The old man should have cleared out as soon as the property was condemned. We can’t protect them if they won’t obey the law.”

I said, “He had until the end of the month. You owed him protection till then.”

He turned his mild dead eyes on me again and pursed his lips. “Communist, huh? You stand four-square against progress and finding jobs for people?”

“If it means turning other people out of homes they took jobs to pay for in the first place.”

“My kid sister’s husband’s out of work, Zorro. They’re living with his folks because he can’t afford any kind of house.”

“Why don’t you give him a job here?”

“You don’t just walk into police work. It takes a special breed.”

“Also a strong stomach,” I said.

He spun on Kowalski. “Anyone laugh?”

“Not me, skipper.”

Grabowska turned back, smoothed his moustache. “Who’s your client, Hot Wit?”

I smoked. He rubbed his hands.

“Withholding, is it? Maybe some time in soak will take the starch out.”

“I’ve been in jail, Captain,” I said. “I didn’t like it, but I was there long enough to find out you don’t die of it, and I’ll be out on a writ days before I feel like rattling my head against the bars to hear music.”

“Oh, tough guy. We see a lot of that. They come in that door hard as boiler plate but they don’t go out that way. They slink out like the yellow rats they are.”

I had to grin. “I saw this one,” I said. “Bugs ties a knot in Elmer’s shotgun in the end and he blows his face off.”

Kowalski snorted. Grabowska looked at him quickly. The lieutenant coughed and took his pipe out of his mouth and made a face and waved smoke from in front of it.

Stamenoff returned then, with someone I recognized. It was a tall, slender black man, loose-jointed like Kowalski, in patched and faded denims and a black T-shirt. He had his officer’s ID pinned to the front of his ragged jacket, but I knew the big Afro and the way his cold cigarette dribbled from one corner of his mouth. He was one of the two men I had spoken with in John Woldanski’s old shop on Trowbridge. He looked at me sleepily, without showing surprise.

I said, “What’s the matter, they don’t pay you enough here?”

The corner without a cigarette in it turned up slightly.

Grabowska looked from one of us to the other. “You met?”

“He was in DePugh’s place asking about Woldanski,” the black cop said. “I’ve been moled in there three weeks.”

“Oh yeah, fence detail. How’s it look?” Grabowska squinted at the ID. “Foster, is it?”

“Forster, sir. It looks sweet. I rang up a thousand in hot tape decks once when DePugh was busy out front hassling a meter maid.”

Kowalski said, “Brother, are we in the wrong business.”

Forster lifted the free corner again. The captain asked him if he knew Woldanski.

“Not to talk to. But when I was getting ready to go under I saw his name a lot on old reports. I never heard of him when DePugh was looking,” he told me.

“Never mind that,” Grabowska snapped. “You know he got spliffed today.”

“The sergeant said.” He tilted his bushy head toward Stamenoff.

“DePugh say anything about Woldanski after Walker left?”

“No, sir.”

I said, “His flesh was still warm when I found him. He couldn’t have been dead more than half an hour. What was DePugh doing around four-thirty?”

“Counting his money, maybe. It was a slow day. He closed up at four and I came here.”

“Maybe you’d better talk to DePugh,” I told Kowalski.

“What a sleuth. I never would’ve thought of it.” He ground his teeth on the pipe-stem.

Grabowska puckered. “These monkeys don’t retire. Could be they were laying some things off through each other that were smoking too much for one man’s mitts. DePugh got rattled when a guy came around asking about Woldanski like a detective and powdered him to keep him from squawking.”

“Except he’s not the get-rattled type,” Forster said.

“Everyone is, if you shake hard enough.” The captain looked at me. “Who else knew you were looking for the old man?”

“Lee Horst. You know him, maybe.”

“Horst?”

“Answer man,” said Kowalski. “We kept stubbing our toes on him at County. You want it, he knows it, for a fee. Unless you’re on the square. Then he’s dumb as a baseball bat.”

I shook my head, killing my stub in a copper ashtray full of glistening black plugs from his bulldog. “He’s square. Maybe not all his customers are, but he’s in a legitimate business or Detroit Metro would have turned the key on him ten years ago.”

“For a guy who wouldn’t tip over his client, you sure gave
him
up without a struggle,” Grabowska said.

Kowalski said, “Horst is a wall. Throwing cops at him is like whacking tennis balls off a board fence. Lend me the riot detail and half of nightside, give us two days, and maybe he’ll tell us his telephone number, that being listed. He’s bigger than Stamenoff. No one’s bigger than Stamenoff.”

The mountainous cop grunted.

A telephone rang. Kowalski swept a dozen file folders off the instrument and barked his name into the mouthpiece. He listened for several moments, then said “Okay” and hung up. He turned to Grabowska.

“That was Wasylyk from the clerk’s office. The empty house was Woldanski’s. He built the new one eight years ago and moved into it after his wife died. Wasylyk called the morgue at the
Free Press
for that part.”

The captain rubbed his hands in that way he had. “Okay, run with it. Crank DePugh in here and run a check on that stuff in Woldanski’s basement, see is any of it on the hot sheet. Foster here will help with that—”

“Forster, sir,” the black cop corrected. “And, sir, I don’t think we should lean on DePugh just yet. It’d blow three weeks under cover.”

“Homicide takes front seat,” Kowalski reminded him. “Sorry.”

“Yes, sir.”

The captain looked at me, and I was a door again. “You get this scroat’s statement?” he asked Kowalski.

“Not yet.”

“Get it and get him out of my building. Don’t think we’re cutting you loose, keyholer. You’re still our Number One if we crap out on DePugh. And whichever way it winds up hanging, I’ll remember you.”

“I’m flattered. Who’d you say you were again?”

“Keep it up. I don’t want to take the slightest chance of ever liking you.” He left.

Kowalski made another face and knocked out his pipe into the ashtray. “Damn generous of Captain Cookies to show us how to conduct a homicide investigation. You married, Walker?”

“Not lately.”

“Kids?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t have any,” he advised. “Sooner or later every married man with kids gets the Grabowska he deserves. Okay, Forster, thanks for coming in. Sorry about the stakeout.”

“I’m used to it, Lieutenant.” He opened the door.

I said, “Funny, you don’t look Polish.”

He smiled the tired crooked smile without disturbing the cigarette in his mouth. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s the first time I heard that one today.” He went out.

Stamenoff jingled his keys and change and grunted.

I
T WAS DARK
when I got my car out of the police parking lot. The Luger was still there. I drove straight home without thinking about Eric Rynearson’s shop on Jefferson. His telephone recording had said he closed at seven, and anyway I didn’t feel like leaning on anything harder than a mattress, not even for someone like Louise Starr. I bought myself a drink in the kitchen while my supper was heating up, and I bought myself another afterwards while listening to one of the hourly news reports on the radio for a mention of the murder in Hamtramck. There was none. There probably wouldn’t be, unless the cops tipped the press about the merchandise in the basement. You have to dress up murder these days if you want air time. I bought a few more and then went to bed, expecting to lie awake a while. I didn’t. I didn’t even dream. I slept as deeply as I ever do, but it wasn’t the sleep of the dead. No sleep ever is.