Never Street (2 page)

All the windows were ablaze in the cool, sprawling ranch-style of brick and frame, the only house in a cul-de-sac that ended in a berry thicket and a chainlink fence. Four huge oaks were arranged on the lawn in such a way that the house would always be in shade. The brimstone smell was strong during the short walk from my car to the front door. It wouldn’t be long now.

A thick-waisted woman in a gray dress and white apron, with her brittle black hair caught up by combs, listened carefully to my spiel, then shut the door in my face. A minute or so later she came back, led me into a large sunken living room with a conquistador’s breastplate and weapons mounted above the stone fireplace, and went away. They aren’t called maids anymore, but they still don’t speak much English.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice, Mr. Walker. I’m Gay Catalin.”

She’d come in through an open arch from a brightly lit room at the rear of the house when I was looking in another direction, a small compact red-haired woman with a forest of flowering plants behind her. That put her over forty, assuming she’d planned her entrance, with the light at her back. She had large eyes mascaraed all around, a pixie mouth, and a fly waist in a pale yellow dress tailored to show it off. The scent she wore was light and euphoria-inducing, like stepping out of a dank cellar into the sunshine; or it might just have been the flowers in the other room.

“I like your home.” I borrowed a warm, slightly moist hand with light calluses—the kind you get from gardening—and returned it. “They don’t design them this way since air conditioning.”

“Neil has an instinct. He produces home-improvement videos, among other things.”

“Neil’s your husband?”

“Yes. Can I get you something to drink? I’m sorry to say Angelina has narrow ideas about her housekeeping duties.”

“No, thanks. I left a pitcher of Scotch back home and it’s the jealous type.”

She laughed, a nervous little preoccupied laugh, and put her hands in the pockets of her skirt. She didn’t know what else to do with them.

“I hope Brian wasn’t rude. He’s a good boy, essentially; he just runs with the pack. He’s been living here ever since our mother died, and I suppose he finds us boring. Your office phone didn’t answer, so I looked up your residence. When I couldn’t get through, I didn’t know what else to do but send him over.”

“He was okay. He said your husband’s missing?”

“It’s official now. Twenty-six hours. I trust the police, but they’re outnumbered by their cases. That’s why I tried you.”

“This puts me neck and neck with mine. Why me?”

“I saw your picture in the paper last year, when you testified against that man Matador. The killer. I remembered your name. I liked it; I still do. I don’t know very much about hiring a private detective, Mr. Walker.”

“I take it Neil isn’t in the vanishing habit.”

“No. He’s never been gone without an explanation except for the time he was in the hospital.”

“Accident?”

“No.”

I was starting to get the idea. “Is that where you think he is this time?”

She shook her head. There was a tight vertical line between her eyebrows. “May I show you something?”

I said okay. She turned, taking her hands out of her pockets, and I followed her through another arch. We crossed a stainless steel kitchen hung with yellow curtains to match her dress and went down a quiet flight of open steps swathed in silver pile. At the foot we stood in a dark underground room smelling of furniture oil and new plastic. The only light came from the fixture in the stairwell.

She picked up a long black object from a table and pushed a button. Three black tubes mounted under the ceiling glowed and shot three colored shafts of light, red, green, and blue, at a forty-five-degree angle across the room, where they illuminated a screen six feet square. It was the first front-projection television set I’d seen outside of photographs in home theater magazines.

“Impressive.” I waited.

Gay Catalin’s face looked sickly in the reflected glow. “Neil’s in there, Mr. Walker.” She pointed at the empty screen. “That’s where he’s gone. I’m sure of it, and I want you to go in and bring him back out.”

S
OMETHING SHOOK THE HOUSE
to its foundation. There was a concussion like a sonic boom, followed by a rattle of caked mud or plaster falling between joists. The moment wasn’t that dramatic; it was just the first sharp peal of thunder crossing the river from Canada. I groped at the wall near the stairs and tripped a switch. A row of indirect lights mounted behind a soffit came on, reflecting off a pale gray ceiling.

The room measured about eighteen feet by twelve, with a medium gray tweed carpet laid wall to wall and dark gray paneling on the walls. The panels were covered with some kind of spongy fabric that absorbed sound. There was a wet bar, two big recliners and a Chesterfield upholstered in charcoal Naugahyde, and a built-in cabinet containing stacks of video and sound equipment twinkling their digital readouts behind smoked-glass doors. The blue-green numerals provided the only color beyond the labels on the bottles behind the bar and a frieze of movie posters in gray steel frames continuing unbroken along all four walls. They looked like originals, and I was younger than the newest of them. Below them, a set of built-in shelves that I thought at first held books was packed instead with videotapes in gray plastic containers. There must have been a thousand of them, and twenty or more laser discs in the bottom of the smoked-glass cabinet.

“My husband’s favorite room,” said Gay Catalin. “He spends most of his time here when he’s home.”

I read the labels on the tapes. They were all hand-lettered in the same neat block capitals. Movie titles:
The Dark Corner, Edge of the City, Double Indemnity, Detour, The Asphalt Jungle
—not a Technicolor title in the pack, and none of them made after about 1955.

“I see he likes murder mysteries.”

“Not just murder mysteries. Dark films with warped gangsters and neurotic heroes and dangerous women. Shiny wet streets and big black cars with their headlights on. There’s a name for them.” She hesitated. “My French isn’t very good.”

“
Cinéma noir
.”

“That’s it. It means ‘black films,’ from the lighting and the mood. I don’t think collecting them and watching them is a very healthy hobby.”

“I like old movies myself. So far it hasn’t landed me in psychiatric.”

“You don’t know Neil.”

“Tell me about Neil.”

“He’s senior partner in Gilda Productions, a company that provides video features to cable television stations. He started it just after he graduated from Michigan, filming local commercials and documentaries, and now the firm has clients in New York, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong. Neil’s forty-two; he’s done all this in twenty years, the last eight of them married to me. I suppose he was past due for his little slip last year.”

“That would be the hospital?”

She nodded. Her hands were back in her pockets. “He committed himself to a sanitorium. That was eighteen months ago, when the government was talking about regulating cable rates. His business was in a slump. The firm’s attorney advised him to declare bankruptcy, but Neil insisted on paying back every creditor in full. It was too much for him, the worrying, the long hours. One day he left for the office and never showed up. The police traced him to the hospital after three days.”

“Which hospital?”

“Balfour House, on Mackinac Island. You won’t find it listed; it’s private. I have the number, if you want to check it.”

“Didn’t you?”

“I called every hospital I could think of, public and private. No one’s seen a man answering his description.”

“How’s he been lately?”

“Wired. We’re just now getting back on our feet. I didn’t think it was serious until his partner called yesterday asking where he was. He walked out in the middle of a meeting.”

“Does he get along with your brother?”

“They get along. They don’t joke and slap each other on the back. Did Brian say something?”

I passed that pitch. I was curious about what she’d said before, about Neil having gone into the TV screen, but I had another question to ask before I put up the detective’s handbook.

“Any reason to suspect he might be romantically involved?”

“Yes, but I called her and she swears she hasn’t seen him in months.”

“I think I will have that drink. Can I make you one?”

She raised a smile then. She had to go deep for it—deep as the
Edmund Fitzgerald
—and what she brought up hardly seemed worth the dive. “I must look like I need it. Bourbon and ginger ale, please. There’s a refrigerator under the bar.”

I made two. I found a bottle of tonic water in the dwarf refrigerator and substituted it for ginger ale in mine. When we were both provisioned I took a long cool sip. I wasn’t thirsty. The handbook didn’t cover her casual answer to my last question. As a rule they either threw a cleaver at me or cried all over my lapels. I took a seat on the Chesterfield. Mrs. Catalin perched on the edge of one of the recliners with her ankles crossed. From that angle the white screen dominated the room.

“Vesta’s the name she uses,” she said. “Vesta Mannering. She claims to be an actress. In any case, Gilda Productions employed her to appear in some of its features. Never mind how I found out about her and Neil. It’s been over for two years.”

“Does she still work there?”

“I made him fire her. Oh, it’s a cliché, I know. Gilda would certainly never have anything to do with it. The market for that kind of thing dried up a long time ago. I’m in love with my husband, Mr. Walker. I’ll do anything to keep him. I guess in a way that makes us just alike.”

I had some more bourbon. The quinine in the tonic water transported me to a folding campstool outside a tent in the Punjab, holding the frontier for Victoria. In another minute a couple of thousand Bashi-Bazouks, mounted on camels and swinging scimitars, would come pouring out of that naked screen.

Gay Catalin leaned over and touched my wrist, and I was back in West Bloomfield. The light found hairline creases in her face. “I should explain something. The doctors at Balfour House diagnosed Neil as an obsessive personality. He’s subject to binges.”

“Alcohol or women?”

“Neither.” She swept a hand around the room. “You said you like these old movies. Neil sucks on them.”

I said nothing. The place was full of hidden speakers, crackling faintly for want of a soundtrack to sink their teeth into.

“I used to watch with him, when we were first married and the collection was less than half this size. They’re interesting, and many of them are as good as or better than anything they make today. But not as a steady diet. I don’t think he even noticed when I stopped watching. Lately he’s been spending every spare minute in front of that screen, exposing himself to I don’t know how many murders, deceptions, and acts of sadism. It can’t be healthy for someone with his history.”

An empty cassette sleeve lay on the end table by the Chesterfield.
Pitfall,
starring Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, and Raymond Burr. I got up, opened the cabinet, and punched the EJECT button on the VCR. A tape licked out.
Pitfall.
It hadn’t been rewound. “He was watching this one when?”

She looked at it. “Night before last. He disappeared the next day.”

“When was the last time he got on this kick?”

“Just before he checked himself into the hospital on the island. That was six months after I found out about Vesta.”

“Do you think there’s a connection?”

“I called his doctor at the time and asked him the same thing. He said that was confidential. His name’s Naheen, if you think you can do any better. Ashraf Naheen.”

I made a note in my pocket pad and slid the videocassette into its sleeve. “All right if I take this tape with me?”

“Of course. You’ll need a picture of Neil, too. And I suppose you’ll want to look through his things.” She stood, smoothed her skirt, and used the remote. The room seemed much bigger when the screen was dark.

“Where can I find Miss Mannering?” I asked on our way upstairs.

“She’s listed in Iroquois Heights. But as I told you, she hasn’t seen him. I believe her.”

“I’d like to believe her in person. Who’s your husband’s partner?”

“Leo Webb. He’s been with Neil much longer than I have. Almost from the beginning. Gilda Productions is in Detroit, the Consolidated Gas Building on Woodward. I’ll give you a card.”

Back in the living room she took a five-by-seven portrait out of its frame and handed it to me. Catalin was a representative specimen of middle-aging manhood, still youthful looking in an outworn way, like a necktie that’s still in use after it’s gone out of style; he had sad eyes, a jaw that lacked resolution, and dark hair thinning in front. Women that age tended to look hard, although Gay Catalin had dodged that bullet. Men just looked beaten.

There were some empty hangers on his side of the bedroom closet, but his wife couldn’t say which of his clothes were missing. She summoned Angelina, who merely shrugged. Washington was recruiting its diplomatic couriers from the wrong class. Neil’s home office, just off the bedroom, was small and windowless, with a desktop computer and printer on one of those homely assemble-it-yourself work stations. The computer didn’t have anything to say to me, but then neither did a French waiter once he got a look at my suit. Catalin had the standard settings on his speed-dial: office, partner’s home, 911, Little Caesar’s Pizza. I punched his redial and got the time of day. That was more than anything I’d gotten so far.

He kept his checkbook and savings account passbook in an unlocked drawer. The last check he’d drawn had been made out to a video store in Birmingham for two hundred and change. Hard times weren’t so hard he’d abandoned his obsession. He had twenty-seven thousand dollars in the joint savings account he shared with his wife. He hadn’t made any substantial deductions in weeks.

That was it for the office. The room contained no personal items, nothing in the way of decoration. Setting it up wouldn’t have taken him a tenth of the time he’d put into the movie room in the basement. I was starting to get a handle on Neil Catalin.