Sugartown Read online

  I split the stack and held out the top five bills. “Two days will tell us whether you’re wasting your money.”

  She hesitated, then took back the bills. There was something behind her face that had not come in with her.

  I gave her a receipt and got her address and telephone number in St. Clair Shores and then helped her down three flights to the street. It only took a half hour. She was tougher than she looked. “We’ll make it your place next time,” I told her, when I had a cab coming our way. She’d taken the bus in. “You must have been all afternoon wrestling that contraption upstairs.”

  “When you have helped stack sandbags all around your city with shells shrieking overhead, nothing you try to do later is too much.” She gave the walker to the driver to fold and put in the front seat while I helped her into the rear. She was as light as pie crust. As I was getting set to close the door she looked up at me. “I feel I have made the right choice,” she said.

  I swung the door shut and stood back while the cab pulled out from the curb and burbled away. I hoped she was right. I had never stacked sandbags in my life.

  Back in the office I dialed the number she had given me for Howard Mayk in Hamtramck. A man’s voice, very deep, answered after two rings. Listening to it I saw a big man in a blue uniform with a double row of brass buttons down the front, swinging a stick in one hand and folding deep vertical lines in his cheeks when he smiled.

  “Officer Mayk?”

  A pause, then:

  “That’s Sergeant. My last ten years with the department, anyway. Now it’s Mr. Mayk. Who’s asking?”

  “Amos Walker. I’m a Detroit P.I. working for Mrs. Martha Evancek, looking for her grandson Michael. I’d like to come over and talk for a few minutes if you’re not too busy.”

  “I haven’t been busy in four years. But I can’t tell you anything about what happened to the boy because I don’t know. I told her that enough times.”

  “I realize that. I thought if I knew something about the shoot I might get a better handle on the case.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does that mean I can come over?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll be there in forty minutes, then.”

  He said yeah again and I thanked him and he hung up. This was going to be like pulling nails with my teeth.

  Before leaving I broke out some duplicate driver’s license application forms issued by the Michigan Secretary of State’s office and filled out two of them, one asking for a copy of a driver’s license for Michael Evancek, the other asking for one for Michael Norton, including lost Michael’s date of birth on both. I stuck them in separate envelopes and addressed them to the Lansing headquarters of the SOS and stamped them and dropped them into a mailbox on my way to Hamtramck. If the stars were all in their places, one of the applications might jar loose a photocopy of the missing party’s license containing his present address for a small fee, if he hadn’t left the state or taken another name or if he had a license at all. It’s a service provided for people who drop their wallets into the sewer while leaning down to pick up a quarter. It can save you steps, but only when you’ve got a month to spare for the turnaround. I had two days.

  3

  THERE IS NOTHING SPIRITUAL about Detroit’s Poles. They are the supreme property owners of the Western Hemisphere. Since the railroad shops and stoveworks and, later, Ford Motors slammed a hole though the immigration laws of the last century and emptied villages in Poland and Italy and Austro-Hungary, the bull-shouldered enemies of Czarist Russia had been coming here with their substantial women, lugging their loaves of hard bread and jugs of thick brown wine, to stake out the half-and quarter-acre lots that remain the sole measure of success in their community. Hamtramck to this day boasts the highest percentage of home ownership of any city in the country.

  Driving down Chene through the old village with its tight rows of identical century-old houses painted in peeling colors, you still catch glimpses of the melting pot: old men loitering in front of the old Round Bar where as children they had packed the balcony along with their fathers to watch the struggling glistening naked backs of the wrestlers below; a thick-ankled housewife slitting a duck’s throat in her backyard and holding it flapping upside-down while her little daughter catches the warm blood in a bowl for the soup they call czarnina; native costumes sagging from a pully-operated line waiting for the Polish Constitution celebration on Belle Isle. But you have to look quick, because it’s going, going to eminent domain and General Motors’ golden ring in the nose of City Hall, its churches knocked to rubble and kindling, the bricks that paved its medieval alleys piled in heaps for the scavengers.

  Chene merges with Joseph Campau north of Grand Boulevard. There doomed Dodge Main warmed its pitted brick face in the sun, considering with blind eyes the spot where the gin mills used to stand in front, the Purple Gang’s Lincolns and Caddies barricading the street while the trucks unloaded in the days when the Motor City was Sugartown to every laborer from Montgomery to Budapest. Yellow Caterpillars crawled over hills of naked earth and crumbled pavement in the parking lot. Farther north, the blue street signs that mark Hamtramck proper begin and the housing gets thicker and more modern. It looks like the rest of Detroit and you can have it, except I live there and as bland and monotonous as it gets it still looks like home.

  I went past bakeries and butcher shops with names as long as your belt and the municipal tennis courts that turned out this country’s best pros before the kids and dykes took over that sport, crossed Holbrook and then Florian, closed off with sawhorses at Joseph Campau for the May Strawberry Festival going on in front of the soaring brownstone of St. Florian’s with the lowering sun grazing its stained glass, turned right on Evaline three blocks up and then swung left on Gallagher to a chalk-gray frame house with a high peak and Howard Mayk’s number in black wrought iron on the cornerpost. The place shared a driveway with the brick house next door. Michigan cancer was eating through the fenders of a nine-year-old red Ford Bronco parked on Mayk’s side next to a spanking green Camaro on the other. I parked on the street and glanced through the Bronco’s long rear Plexiglas window on my way up the driveway. A set of rubber waders wallowed on the ribbed metal floor with a long-handled nylon net on top of them. I mounted a concrete stoop and rapped on the screen door’s aluminum frame. It was still plenty light out and the room beyond the screen was as black as Martha Evancek’s dress.

  Heavy feet trod around inside for a little and then the darkness stirred and I was looking at a man in dark trousers and a matching short-sleeved shirt standing on the other side of the screen.

  “Mr. Mayk? Amos Walker. I called earlier.”

  “Yeah. Stand away.”

  I stepped back and he manipulated a drugstore latch and the door opened out, straining a long steel spring. I stepped up over the threshold and past his long arm into a narrow dank-smelling utility room. A dirty mop in one corner and old mud-dauber wasps’ nests under the eaves. There was another door standing open into what looked like a kitchen.

  My host let the screen door bang shut and set the latch. My mental picture of the former detective sergeant hadn’t been far off. He was a big man, my height, with more shoulder, although what I have is not to be sneered at. His hair was thick, smoothed back from his broad face as if by meaty palms like his, and of that neutral color that can’t make up its mind whether to go gray or stay sandy. His heavy jaw was cleanshaven and he had a long upper lip that made his nose look small and a small nose that made his upper lip look long. His eyes were a flat gray under low brows, cop’s eyes. He was a very good-looking fifty, but he was fifty. He was wearing a charcoal-gray security guard’s uniform with shield-shaped patches piped in red on the short sleeves and one of those Velcro belts that don’t need buckles.

  “I thought you were retired,” I said.

  “I am. You think I’d make this a career? My pension’s the only thing that hasn’t gone up since I left the big blue machine. I was just comi
ng in from the eight to four at Shaw College when you called.” He moved a big hand in the direction of the open door and I went that way.

  It was a large kitchen like they don’t build them now, with a scuffed but clean linoleum floor and a long white enamel sink with a window over it and a gas stove and refrigerator and a table with a sheet-metal top and three vinyl-covered chairs that didn’t match drawn up to it. A short wainscoted hallway jogged to the left into an unlighted living room. On the plaster above the wainscoting hung a large crucifix carved from a single block of maple. A Velcro gunbelt lay in a heap on the table with a nickel-plated Colt Python in the holster.

  I tilted my head toward the crucifix. “Mayk doesn’t sound Polish.”

  One side of his mouth went up. “It was Maykowski, but not to some civil servant on Ellis Island when my old man came through. My boy went back to it, but he designs machine parts for a living and doesn’t have to sign his name as often as I did.” He opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk, shaking it to find out how much was inside. “This is all I got if you’re thirsty,” he said. “I been on the wagon since New Year’s.”

  “Milk’s fine. Tied one on, huh?”

  “Man, I missed most of last year.” He got two glasses out of a cupboard next to the sink and put them on the table and filled them, shook the carton again, tilted the remaining contents down his throat, and tossed the empty container into a green plastic wastebasket.

  We sat down across from each other at the table with the gunbelt between us and sipped our milk. “How much you jacking the old lady up for?” he asked, whipping away his moustache with a thick forefinger.

  “Two and a half yards per,” I said. “But I’m not jacking her up. That’s the standard rate.”

  “I figured some cheap shamus would latch on to her sooner or later. I’m just surprised it took this long.”

  “She came to me.”

  “You didn’t waste a lot of time arguing her out of it, though.”

  “Turning down paying work takes practice. Look, Mr. Mayk, I’m just poking around. If the trail’s too cold I’ll give her back what’s left of the retainer and advise her to run something in the personals or forget it. Just don’t ask me to do my job for free.”

  “I tried private work after I left the department,” he said. “I didn’t like the company I was keeping.”

  Silence stretched thin and tight the enormous length of that kitchen table.

  “How was the smelt running?” I tried.

  He raised his brows an eighth of an inch — a feat, considering those brows. “What, that bath I took didn’t get rid of the smell?”

  “I saw your gear in the Bronco. They aren’t wearing waders to chase butterflies this year.”

  “You ever been?”

  I grinned. “Once.”

  He laughed then, a short harsh barking noise, and the air in the kitchen got warmer. “Freeze your ass off all night in Sturgeon River water up to your bellybutton and scoop out little fish till your arms get too heavy to scoop out any more. One man just can’t take that much hilarity all at once.”

  I laughed too. We drank our milk. After a little I said, “The Evancek shoot.”

  “Didn’t she tell you about it?”

  “Just what you told her. Cops don’t talk to grandmothers the way they talk to people.”

  He smoothed back his hair with one of his big hands and left it on the back of his neck. When he did that he looked like a big rough farmer.

  “It was just about this time on what had to be the hottest son-of-a-bitching day of the year,” he said. “Lieutenant Jezewski got the squeal at the station and sent Bill Mischiewicz and me out there. We came to this house where a uniform about twenty-two was heaving his guts out on the sidewalk in front and Bill said, ‘I think this is it.’ Well, you had to laugh. Anyway, we park behind the black-and-white and go in right past the uniform, which if we were the whole Red Army he wouldn’t of noticed us, and, Christ, how can I make you see it? You saw the blood first, on the walls, the floor, Christ, even on the ceiling, orange-red and splattered all over like a pressure cooker full of red cabbage blew up. For a second I thought it was something like that. Blood always looks too bright to be blood till it dries. The bodies looked like bodies, though, not like dress dummies like I bet I heard a million people say. The first two were on the floor in the living room, one a lot smaller than the other, and the only way we could tell the bigger one was a woman was she was wearing a dress. We thought at first the other was a boy because it had on red corduroys and a striped shirt. Their faces — well, they didn’t have any.

  “Another uniform came out of the bedroom and said we’d find the last one in the kitchen and he had the boy, Michael, in the bedroom. Bill sent him back in to keep an eye on the boy and we went into the kitchen. The third stiff was sitting on the floor with his back propped against the back door and his face all over the wall behind him. He had this twelve-gauge automatic shotgun between his legs and Bill said it looked like he was jerking off. Well —”

  “I know,” I said. “You had to laugh.”

  He shook his big head. “Not that time. It almost sent me out front to heave up with the blue suit. I told Bill to shut it. I mean, he was a sergeant and I was just a third-grader then, but the only feelings he ever had were in his holster and in his crotch. No one was all that broke up when some seventeen-year-old punk put a thirty-two slug through Bill’s head running out of Svoboda’s liquor store later.

  “Well, we talked to the boy, but he was in shock and not saying much, and a couple of days later when he’d been collected by his aunt and uncle and we got back to him he said he’d found the bodies when he got home from school. That jibed with what most of the neighbors told us. By then we’d ID’d the stiffs — Jesus, his little sister was just fixing to start school in September — and what we found on the scene and what we knew then about this guy Joseph Evancek and the fight the neighbors overheard just before the shots were fired went with the murder-suicide scenario and we locked it up tight.”

  “Most of the neighbors?”

  “What?”

  “You said that what Michael said about coming home from school and finding the bodies agreed with what most of the neighbors said. What did the others say?”

  He removed the hand from the back of his neck and waved it in front of his face impatiently. “There’s always a nutcase looking to get attention by claiming he saw something nobody else did. An old guy across the street said he looked out his window just as the kid came home before the first shot, and then the housewife from next door piped up and said she saw the same thing. You learn to spot them.”

  “Check out their stories?”

  “Departmental fucking procedure. Housewife said she saw the boy coming up the driveway when she went out back to feed the cat. Only there was a six-foot hedge between the houses and when Bill and I went back there neither of us could see the driveway from where she said she was standing, and she was a foot shorter than either of us. The old guy had a clear view but he was a nutcase like I said. There’s always some confusion in these things as to who heard and saw what first, but there was enough agreement between the other witnesses to discount his story.”

  “Would you remember his name?”

  “It was almost twenty years ago, what do you think? Anyway, the old guy’s dead by now, or if he isn’t he’s moved. Neighborhood’s all tore up.”

  I drank the last of my milk. It left a slick coating on the roof of my mouth, but in my business you drink whatever they offer you. You never turn it down. “Anything else that didn’t fit with the other evidence?”

  “I never worked on a case where there wasn’t.” He frowned, pulling his upper lip still longer. “The blood test, maybe.”

  “What test?”

  “At the autopsy they ran Evancek’s blood and the alcohol level tested lower than you’d expect in a case like that. Oh, he was drunk enough to pull off the road, but he had some size, about five
-ten and a hundred and eighty, and if a guy with his reputation as a boozer didn’t get violent before, it was sort of strange he’d pick then and on so little booze. But it was just one of those things that passes through your head when you’re wrapping one up. He did it, all right. We ran every angle and it was the only one that came close to fitting.”

  I looked at my notebook scrawl. “How much of this did you tell Joseph’s mother?”

  “She got the Disney version, like you said. That about the blood test didn’t bother her any more than it did me when it first went down. She’s had a long time to get used to what her son did.”

  “I guess you don’t have any ideas about where the boy wound up.”

  “If I did she wouldn’t of had to hire you.”

  I passed that one. “I’d like to take a look at the old Evancek place. Could I buy your time as tour guide?”

  “Would you charge it to the old lady?”

  “Probably.”

  “Then it’s on me.” He rose. “I got nothing to do till the wife gets home anyway. Let me get out of this monkey suit and we’ll take the Bronco.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Don’t bother. It’s for Mrs. Evancek. We Poles stick together.”

  He went down the hall into the living room and opened a door somewhere on the other side. I got up and leaned a shoulder against the hallway wall and lit a cigarette. “Why’d you quit the department?” I called out.

  “I had my twenty in.” His voice was muffled, as if through fabric.

  “You look like you could have stuck it out till mandatory.”

  “I could of. I didn’t get along with the new skipper and I figured the hell with it.”

  “Who’s the skipper down there now?”

  “Same guy. Steve Grabowska.”