Never Street (17 page)

“That was last week’s excuse. Tell him it’s about Vesta Mannering.”

“That’s what it was about last week.”

“Then it was about Vesta and Neil Catalin. Now it’s about Vesta and Leo Webb. You know, like
Bewitched
: same Samantha, different Darrin. Are you going to buzz him, or do I walk in and catch him fighting with Endora?”

“I’m going to buzz Security if you aren’t out in the hall in thirty seconds.”

“Security frightens the hell out of me in this town,” I said. “I’ve seen what they’ll take in the police department. What they won’t take I wouldn’t send out for a pizza. Buzz them, by all means. Leo and I will be waiting for them in his office.”

“You can’t—”

I didn’t wait for the rest. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know where she was going. I swept down the interior corridor, found Webb’s door unlocked, and went in. It took me a second to realize he wasn’t there. He could have been hiding behind the bric-a-brac.

“Now
will you go?” said Judy Yin from the doorway.

I turned around faster than she expected, before she had time to close her Asian features. She was as surprised as I was to find the room unoccupied.

T
HE AUDITORIUM AT THE
Detroit Institute of Arts belonged to the new addition behind the original building, whose marble Italian Renaissance façade went with the blank gray granite of the upstart section like a carved cherub on the wall of a penitentiary. I parked on John R a good hour before the feature was scheduled to run, bought a ticket for one of the cheap seats located in the next county, and admired the glassed posters in the lobby, selected from among Austin Alt’s best films and those of his mentors from the old Hollywood in honor of the world premiere of Alt’s new picture next Friday at the Fox Theater. Here among the faux marble walls and hollow plaster columns, George Raft rubbed shoulders with Kevin Costner, Veronica Lake glared through her peek-a-boo bang at Kim Basinger, and John Wayne reached back to hurl a hand grenade across the concession stand at Sony International. The advertising for the newer films looked mechanical and cheerless against the old; but then I’d been brought up on fresh-popped corn served with real butter in motion-picture palaces dripping with gargoyles and red velvet, not greasy bits of Styrofoam scooped from plastic trash bags in the concrete bunker at the end of the mall: a dinosaur at forty-three.

For the first twenty minutes I had the place all to myself except for the ticket-taker, a pair of ushers, male and female, in crimson blazers, and a security guard who looked like a steelworker in a rented tuxedo, eyeing me as if I might walk off with one of the wall sconces. Then customers began to file in, longtime patrons in couples wearing suits and dresses, movie buffs in singles in jeans and suspenders, and film students in gaggles dressed for the Bleeding Eardrums Tour of the Screaming Graceless Zombies; you could tell the orchestra seats from the bleachers at a glance. Nobody who looked like Neil Catalin turned up in the first wave. At ten minutes to showtime, Gay Catalin came in, had her ticket torn in half, and glanced my way long enough to see me shake my head, then went on through the double doors into the auditorium. She had on a yellow cocktail dress, white shoes and purse, and amber beads on a string around her neck.

“I see you took my advice.”

A second went by before I placed the bearded face above the T-shirt and worn sportcoat. It seemed as if a lot more than eighty hours had passed since I’d discussed the psychology of film noir with Asa Portman in the chalky air of a lecture hall at the University of Michigan. He was the one who had first told me about the DIA film festival and upcoming reception to celebrate the Alt premiere at the Fox.

“I always take advice when it means going to the movies.” I shook his hand. “Are you working?”

“I’m strictly here as a fan. Any sign of your missing man?”

“Not yet.”

“If he misses this series he’s no buff. Are you sure he’s still in this area?”

“He may have committed a murder here in town over the weekend.”

He stroked his beard. Men who wore them could never let them alone. “That’s out of character for a noir hero. Unless it was self-defense?”

“Doesn’t look like it.” I bent a little to peer under the floppy brim of a passing hat. The face belonged to an old woman.

“As a rule identity cases become violent when their delusion is threatened. If someone calls them by their true name they’ll just ignore it, but if they’re barraged with questions that challenge their logic, anything can happen.”

“You said reality could shake him out of it.”

“The transition is never smooth. Having to be born all over again into a world he’s already rejected as unsatisfactory is painful as hell. He might strike out just to preserve the status quo.”

“This one struck out five times with a pistol.”

He stopped fooling with his whiskers. “That’s a serious case.”

“I figured that out and I don’t even have a Ph.D.”

“I don’t mean it that way. I mean if he’s that deep into his persona, the movies are no longer his escape; quite the opposite. Whatever’s left of what he was will avoid them just to keep from asking himself why those actors on the screen are imitating him. From there it’s a short hop to asking himself why
he’s
imitating
them.
If he’s willing to commit murder to duck that one, you couldn’t drag him into this building with a rope.”

“So this noir character he’s become didn’t kill anyone. Walter Mitty did, to protect Don Quixote.”

“One of the most dangerous animals in the world is a rabbit in a corner.”

The last straggler had gone in. I looked at my watch. One minute to showtime. “This rabbit made an appointment to meet his wife at the old Michigan Theater the night of the murder. When she gave up waiting and went back to her car, she found a ticket to this screening clipped to her windshield. Why would he do that if he has no intention of showing up?”

“You’re a detective,” Portman said. “You’ve seen your share of these films. When A arranges to meet B at a certain place and time and A doesn’t show, what’s obvious?”

“A knows where B is at that time.”

He spread his hands.

“The last time he stood her up, someone got killed,” I said. “If he suspected she’d hired a detective to look for him, he might have thought I’d go with her to the meet. She said she tried to call me, but I was in Iroquois Heights, interviewing her husband’s mistress. Now all I have to work out is who he’s planning to kill this time while I’m out of the way.”

The lights went off and on three times. It was Portman’s turn to check his watch. “Well, you’ve got two and a half hours to do it. The picture’s only ninety minutes, but they’ve stuck in an intermission followed by a short feature to bring the event closer to one of Austin Alt’s bladder-bursting epics.”

“I’ll stay out here, in case he shows up after all.”

“You can see the whole auditorium from my seat. It’s a cheapie; I’m just a poor educator. There are bound to be plenty of vacancies in the section. You might as well enjoy the show while you’re waiting.”

“I saw it last week on video.”

“Then you didn’t see it at all. Come on.”

The room was already dark, lit only by the countdown taking place on the big screen at the far end. We groped our way to a pair of seats in the rear corner. The room smelled of popcorn and orange soda, just like the theaters of old.

Portman was right: I hadn’t seen
Pitfall.
On a full-size screen, before an audience, the film unfolded like a sinister flower that had been preserved between the pages of a book neglected for nearly fifty years. The crisp black-and-white images shimmered with a silvery sheen, the dialogue crackled, the orchestral score throbbed beneath the suspense scenes like an escalating pulse and soared over the action like exploding rockets, just as it must have when postwar crowds bought out the showings in 1948. Dick Powell, tight-jawed, with jaded eyes and lips incapable of curving into a smile, might have been any one of thousands of disillusioned American GIs trying to accustom themselves to civilian clothes and peaceful ways in the wake of Hiroshima and the Fall of Berlin. Pretty, level-headed Jane Wyatt, a decade before her similar turn as the female half of the nuclear parents on
Father Knows Best,
represented all the faithful, nurturing women of the Home Front. Lizabeth Scott, husky-voiced and slinky, stood for the danger that tempted all those returning veterans away from the predictable and sedate. Hulking, villainous Raymond Burr was the epitome of the Great Evil they thought they had destroyed after four bloody years in Europe and the South Pacific, only to find it waiting for them at home, draped in a thousand guises, each far more subtle and malevolent than anything in jackboots and a Tiger tank. The narrative spoke to the world after Watergate and Vietnam, sunk in the dreary morass of political correctness and trapped in a society divided along lines racial, sexual, philosophical, dogmatic, and religious, exactly as it had spoken to a world suddenly deprived of an obvious, conveniently foreign enemy and forced to look to itself for a substitute; and if the audience with whom I shared the experience snickered at the cornball wisecracks and outmoded fashions, they flinched when Burr sucker-punched Powell in the shadow of Powell’s own suburban garage and gasped when Powell shot a man dead for the first time in his life, crossing the line into Burr’s world, just as that earlier audience had under Truman.

At first glance it was just another sordid love triangle: bored, married insurance agent, seductive model, unscrupulous private eye. At second glance it was about the death of our collective colonial innocence. Although it ended with the bad guy subdued and the good guy still standing, it did not end happily, but uncertainly, and with the nagging conviction that things would never again be as they had been. When the lights came up, so did the applause.

“Great flick,” said Portman as we stood near the exit watching the moviegoers trickle past in search of rest rooms and refreshments. Some used the auxiliary exit at the opposite end of the auditorium, and I craned my neck, wondering if I would recognize Catalin from the back had he managed to slip in unnoticed. “Good noir. Better than
Out of the Past,
which is muddled by too many flashbacks, and much better than
Detour,
whose hero is a moron. The critics love those. They wouldn’t know a good storyline if it rolled over their feet. I’m sure you caught the sexual connotation when Dick Powell took the controls of Lizabeth Scott’s speedboat, the only gift from her boyfriend he let her keep when his company confiscated everything else for the insurance. It was like the first honest-to-Christ climax he’d had in years. Then later, when Raymond Burr forces him to turn it in, the theme of self-castration is hard to miss.”

“I thought it was just a boat.”

“Could be it was. Occupational hazard.” He smiled. “How about when Powell asks his boss what it’s like to be a respectable married man? There’s a moment just as poignant in
Sudden Fear,
when Joan Crawford—”

Gay Catalin emerged into the lobby. I excused myself and followed her.

Portman called after me. “You don’t want to miss the assortment of vintage movie trailers they’re showing next.”

“I know. If I haven’t seen them on the big screen, I haven’t seen them at all.”

“Well, no. They sucked as big then as they do now.”

I caught up with her at the water fountain. She straightened up and dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a lace handkerchief. Her face was flushed, as if she’d been running. “Mr. Walker, what kind of game is Neil playing? Does he blame me for his colorless life? Is that why he’s tormenting me?”

“I’ll ask him as soon as I find him. Have you thought any more about what I told you about Webb?” I’d called her at her home before leaving for the auditorium.

“I can’t think of any answers. He doesn’t pick up his phone. Do you think they’re in on this together? And what is
this?
What does it have to do with what happened to poor Brian?”

“I don’t know. Webb’s being tight enough with Neil to borrow his car when you and everyone else thought Neil was long gone could mean Webb knew about your brother’s murder, and that’s why he panicked and ran. Another way of looking at it would be that Webb killed Brian—he was mad enough about the equipment theft from Gilda’s studio to track him down and extract some old-fashioned vigilante justice—and framed Neil by dropping his video rental card at the scene.”

“I’d believe that before I’d believe Neil was capable of murder,” she said. “There was always something slippery about Leo I didn’t like.”

“Slippery is right. Orvis Robinette assumed your husband was the man who visited Vesta Mannering Tuesday night because he read Neil’s name on the registration in the car parked out front. Say Webb knew she was being watched. He chose a night visit because it was dark enough so anyone who had the place staked out wouldn’t be able to tell it wasn’t Neil going in and coming out. He even wore a hat just to make it more difficult. So now Neil’s connected both with Brian’s murder and—”

I swore.

“And what? What’s wrong?”

“Neil didn’t leave that ticket on your windshield,” I said. “Webb did. And I know why.” I swung toward the street exit, almost knocking down an older couple in evening clothes.

“Where are you going?” Gay Catalin’s voice was fading behind me.

I was too busy running to answer. Webb had already had a ninety-minute head start, and that had been long enough for the director of
Pitfall
to commit two murders.

A
LIGHT RAIN HAD
been falling since early evening, but it had let up by the time I reached the Iroquois Heights city limits. The Cutlass’s tires swished on the wet pavement as I swept all the mirrors for red flashers; the local police had not invented the concept of the speed trap, but they had been practicing it long enough and with sufficient consistency to apply for a patent.

If Webb had killed Brian Elwood and left Neil Catalin’s video rental card at the scene to hook him up with the murder, he had driven Catalin’s car to Vesta Mannering’s apartment for the same general purpose, to establish a connection between the two that hadn’t existed for two years. Her telling me about Webb, and my attempt to confront him, had made it more important than ever that she be gagged permanently. The L.A. dodge his receptionist had handed me had been meant to alibi him for the time I was busy at the DIA, preparing for a nonexistent meeting with Catalin.