Sugartown (8 page)

“Nothing to report, except that what she told me checks out so far. You always waste a little time in these things jumping up and down on the information your clients give you to see if it stands up. The lies come thick and fast in my corner. Okay.” I sat back carefully, sinking a little. “What I want to ask, does Mrs. Evancek have any letters her son or grandson sent her in the last year or so before the blowup?”

“I don’t know. I could look. Why?”

“If I knew that I wouldn’t have to ask. So far I’ve got two pictures of the Evanceks, American branch, an old lady’s and the cops’. They’re a mile apart. The letters might bridge the gap. Also I’m stuck, which is nothing to get hopped up about. I get stuck a lot.”

“Not for long, I bet.”

“You smooth-talker,” I said. “Let’s elope.”

She parked the cup and saucer and rose. “I think I know where she might be keeping those letters. I’ll just be a minute.”

She went through another doorway. I took advantage of her absence to get something burning in my face.

I
T TOOK LONGER THAN A MINUTE
. It always does. While I was waiting I got up and looked at some pictures in gold frames on a corner of the mantelpiece not occupied by brittle martyrs. Mr. Evancek — grayer than in his wedding pieture but healthy — standing, thumbs in his vest pockets, before a commercial building with Cyrillic characters on the sign. I figured it was the restaurant where he had worked in Cracaw. A family shot of an older Joseph in a sport shirt with one hand on an ordinarily pretty blonde’s arm and the other resting on a nine- or ten-year-old Michael’s shoulder, the boy in a red sweater with his white shirt collar spilling over the neck and his dark hair tousled, next to his sister, beaming in a pink dress, all golden curls and shiny red cheeks. Another picture, very old, of a young Martha Evancek with a couple in the styles of another century, their faces faded to blank ovals. Her parents, probably. Four generations pictured and only one member known to be still living. You start out playing solitaire with a crisp new deck full of promise. Sometimes you win. Oftener you get all the aces out and still run dry. You mount pictures lovingly in the family album and someday someone will turn the pages and wonder who the people are.

Karen McBride came in carrying a thick sheaf of yellow curling envelopes with a faded brown ribbon tied around it. “I just looked at the return address,” she said, holding it out. “They all came from the same place in Hamtramck. She had them in one of Mr. Evancek’s old cigar boxes in the bottom drawer of the bedroom bureau.”

I accepted them. Her fingertips grazed mine accidentally. This close she smelled of soap that would be pink, but she wouldn’t choose it for the color. I couldn’t decide if she used perfume. The sheaf felt like a stack of dried leaves.

“I’m hoping these will tell me something of Michael’s interests,” I said. “Sometimes you can track a person down through them.”

“Young boys have a lot of interests. But they change them like socks.”

“Maybe one or two stuck.” I looked at my watch. “I missed breakfast this morning. Can we go somewhere and eat? I guess you’d call it brunch up here.”

Something glinted in her eyes. “Is this business or a pickup?”

“I guess that depends on how far your cooperation goes.”

“Its tongue is silk,” she said. “I promised Martha I’d keep an eye on the place until I leave for work. Also I’m sort of involved with someone at the moment.”

“ ‘Sort of.’ ” I tapped the bundle of letters against my open palm. “That falls somewhere between ‘I’m pinned’ and ‘What color should we paint the bedroom?’ Which is it?”

She smiled the smile. “Your switch is stuck again.”

I didn’t have a topper. I collected my hat and got away from her while I still owned a watch.

I caught a ham sandwich at the counter down the street from my office and let myself into the thinking room. No one stopped me on the way through the little room where the customers cooled leather. There was no one to stop me. My mail on the floor inside the slot all had little windows in it. I picked it up and carried it reverently to the desk and filed it in the top drawer next to the whoopee calendar from the police supply house where I’d bought my first set of handcuffs five years ago. Loyalty, you take it where it comes in my business. I sat down and got the bundle out of my inside breast pocket and undid the ribbon.

Some of the letters were in a thick, jerky hand with Joseph’s signature at the bottom. They were in English. The first one was dated two and a half years before the shooting; it would be the language he was most comfortable with by that time. The last had been written a full month short of it. The letters got fewer and the dates got farther apart as months went by, as they will the longer a son stays away from home. Others had been written by his wife Jeanine with easy open loops and cheery circles over the i’s. Joseph got a raise, little Michael put a caterpillar in his pocket and forgot about it, the new furniture came, Jeanine fell and fractured her wrist on the icy sidewalk in front of the house. Michael joined Little League. Joseph had him batting .297 and fielding flies like Horton; Jeanine had him unable to get out of his own way. In May the boy was into collecting coins. By August he was chasing butterflies and then he got burned by a magazine advertisement offering a bag of rare stamps for a dime that turned around and billed him afterward for eight-fifty. In November he was back to coins. There were hand-drawn holiday cards from Michael and Carla to their grandparents and how-are-you-I-am-fine letters scrawled in blurred pencil on ruled lines half an inch apart, Michael going on about iron Lincoln D pennies and asking the old folks to send him Polish coins.

The family was planning a vacation trip to Arizona, Jeanine thought she was pregnant again but it was a false alarm, the snow was up to the sills, the sun was shining, it had rained six weekends in a row. By the second spring most of the letters were Jeanine’s. Late in May Joseph was laid off from Dodge Main. They blamed it on the bum economy. In June there was one more letter from Joseph, a short one, blotched and nearly illegible, assuring his parents he would be called back anytime. It was the last letter in the stack.

Reading the letters from this side of that explosive July, you wondered why no one had smelled the fuse burning. Then you went back over them in the frame of mind in which they must have been received and they were just letters, and damn boring ones at that. Thousands of people had written hundreds of thousands of letters just like them and then gone bumping along like the rest of us without ever killing anyone.

I put them back in their envelopes and stacked them in their original order and retied the ribbon. I sat back and smoked and looked out the window at the pigeons fiddlefooting along the splattered ledge of the apartment building. Filthy birds. Carried lice and ticks and the noise they made in their throats sounded like mugging victims gurgling through slashed windpipes in stinking alleys. I disinterred the office bottle from the file drawer in the desk and blew dust out of the pony glass and oiled my gullet. As the heat expanded from the base of my stomach I recapped the bottle and put it away and looked out at the pigeons again. It was okay now. They were just birds.

I made a brief field trip to a drugstore around the corner, a department store really, with shelves of electric razors and wristwatches and garden gadgets and if you looked long enough a prescription counter at the back, and returned with a magazine for coin collectors. There had been three on the rack, all published by the same firm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Long-distance Information gave me the number. I dialed it and a switchboard operator with banjo strings for vocal cords got me someone in Circulation.

“My name’s Walker,” I told the guy. “I’m a Michigan State Police licensed investigator trying to track down a witness to a murder. I think he may be on your subscription list.”

“Which title?”

“Any or all of them. He collects coins.”

“Sec.”

I parked the receiver in the hollow of my shoulder and lit a cigarette. I was just stringing popcorn. For all I knew, Michael Evancek hadn’t touched a coin except to feed a meter in nineteen years.

The voice came back on. “I checked and the lists are in the data bank. I’ll just punch them in here and have them on your screen in ten minutes. What system are you using?”

“Underwood and Noggin. I don’t have a computer.”

The pause on his end was just long enough to tell me I blew it.

“You’re with the Michigan State Police and you don’t have a computer?”

“I’m not with the state police,” I said. “They just issued my license. I’m private.”

“So why mention them at all?”

“Mainly, to avoid conversations like this.”

“That changes things some. Our subscription information is confidential.”

“Bull. You sell it to every mail-order advertiser that comes along.”

“That’s business.” He paused again. “But a subscription to one or all of our magazines entitles you to some things.”

“I’m not a collector.”

“Suit yourself, Jack.”

“I could be, though,” I said, before he could hang up. “Which one would you recommend to a beginner?”

“
Numismatics Monthly
. It runs fifty dollars per year.”

“How much for six months?”

“We don’t offer six-month subscriptions.”

“What do the others run?”

“Fifty dollars.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Listen, you want the list or not?”

“I’m just interested in two names,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me if they’re on any of the lists and if they are I’ll get a check off to you.”

He laughed. It wasn’t a very nice laugh. “You must think I’m a philatelist.”

I said, “Okay, one way or the other you get it.”

“How do I know you’ll come through?”

“How do I know you’ll tell me straight?”

“I guess we just have to trust each other,” he said. He didn’t like saying it. It lay like alum on his tongue. “Okay, shoot.”

“His name’s Michael Evancek.” I spelled it. “He might be going by Michael Norton.”

I heard keys rattling. After a minute he said, “No Evanceks. We got two Nortons, Philip in San Francisco and a B. Norton in Dayton, Ohio.”

“Barbara?” I jumped on it. Barbara Norton was Jeanine Evancek’s sister.

“Just the initial. Sec.” More keys rattled. “We got a kill on it. Subscriber moved a few months back without filing a change-of-address.”

I asked him for the old number and wrote it down, along with Philip’s San Francisco address. They might not have liked the name Michael any more than they did Evancek.

“I don’t see how you function without a computer,” Circulation mused.

“It’s tough. I’m like a musician without a saddle. Who do I make the check out to?”

“Albert C. Moss.”

The publishing firm’s name was entirely different. I wrote down Albert C. Moss and said I’d get the check off by the end of the week.

“Where should we send the magazine?” Albert asked innocently.

I laughed nastily and pegged the receiver. They grow them funny in Cedar Rapids.

I looked at my watch. Then I looked at the bathing beauty on the calendar on the wall. Then I looked at my watch again to see what time it was. I was going to have some fun explaining fifty dollars for a magazine subscription on the expense sheet. Especially when neither of the two names and addresses it bought, one of them obsolete, probably had anything to do with Michael. I wondered if Karen McBride was really sort of involved with someone or if I was using the wrong aftershave. My mind was starting to wander. I called Long-distance Information again and asked for the main branch of the U.S. Post Office in Dayton, Ohio. A clerk there looked up B. Norton in the change-of-addresses and gave me a number on Gilbert in Detroit.

My heartbeat accelerated a little. There was probably nothing in it. There was no B. Norton in the Detroit directory. I called Local Information. They had it under New Numbers and I worked the plunger and dialed it and got a busy signal. I hung up and smoked a cigarette and tried again. Same thing. Well, when you flush two birds you’re supposed to go for the far one first anyway.

San Francisco Information put me in touch with Philip Norton. He had a high affected voice that made me hold the receiver a little away from my ear. He said he was 45, owned a coin shop off Golden Gate, and had never been in Michigan in his life. But if I was ever in the Bay Area I should look him up.

B. Norton’s line was still busy. I wasn’t very nice to it. I wanted to get that one out of the way and start shaking loose some real leads. There were a million Nortons in the world, probably a hundred thousand B. Nortons, and anyway if Michael was still into coins why would the magazine be going to his aunt? Write off the fifty and go find some real detective work to do.

From the top drawer of the desk I took a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver, the one they call the Police Special, with a checked ball-rubber grip and a four-inch barrel. I looked at the cartridges, then slid it into its stiff leather holster and strapped the works on my belt with the butt snugged into its permanent dent in my right kidney. Then I locked up and drove to B. Norton’s address on Gilbert. It was a good neighborhood. The very best people were found dead there.

Y
OU CAN DRIVE BACK AND FORTH
to work every day along Michigan Avenue and never know the street. The Michigan Avenue that cuts in at an angle on that undigested lump of real estate alternately called Cadillac and Kennedy Square in the heart of downtown Detroit is not the Michigan Avenue that squeezes rush-hour traffic in and out of Cadillac Main where the old Grand Trunk crosses or the Michigan Avenue that takes you past a solid bank of hookers displaying their legware at Livernois when the lights come on. It starts at the base of the old Grand Circle among weathered brown skyscrapers and slashes straight as a knife westward through where the city becomes horizontal, refusing to crimp until it becomes US-12 just east of Dearborn. The bad areas don’t look that much different from the relatively good ones, and unless you’re familiar with the street’s changing moods you don’t know until you cross the wrong alley and suddenly find yourself walking in a very quiet block with invisible eyes watching you from doorways that you’ve come too far. You can trust John R and the Cass Corridor to be treacherous, but you can never be sure about Michigan. If it were in a bottle it would carry a warning label.