Sugartown by Loren D. Estleman Read Free Book Online

call the priest. He was a detective in Hamtramck then. According to him your account of the shooting didn’t go with the other witnesses’.”
    When he heard the name Evancek, his face set like cement.
    “Was it that long ago? Yes, it must have been. It would take that long for things to get this bad. Who’s paying you to look for him?”
    I told him that too. He moved his bald yellow head from side to side slowly. “Foolish old woman. I hope for her sake you don’t find him. It would be grotesque.”
    “Does that mean you won’t help me?”
    “How much can it matter? I can’t tell you where the boy is.”
    “Where a person goes often depends on why he left,” I said sagely.
    He was still looking at me. I don’t know how much he was seeing. Probably more than he let on. “Do many people believe that?”
    I grinned punchily.
    “Some. I’m just fishing, Mr. Leposava. Looking for a place to start.”
    He stared across the years, and I knew then that those old artists had used Ukrainians for their models.
    “It was hot,” he said. “The air was very thick, the way it never was on the steppe and the way I could never get used to. I had every window in the house open. I worked then, translating news from the Detroit press into Russian for the local Ukrainian paper. I couldn’t concentrate in the dining room because of the shouting across the street.”
    Here his moustache twitched. “It wasn’t the noise; I could work in a boiler factory. If it really bothered me I could have closed the windows on that side or moved to another part of the house. But it is difficult not to listen when two people you don’t know are shrieking out each other’s faults. I’m telling you things I never told the police. For some reason it was important to me then not to be thought a — what’s the word?”
    “Busybody.”
    “Busybody.” He tasted it. “A good word. The American idiom is very close to Russian. We are much the same people after all.”
    He seemed to have lost the thread. “They were shouting at each other across the street,” I said helpfully.
    “I said that. I was just organizing my recollections. Why is it that what you ignore in people your own age you automatically consider proof of senility in anyone over sixty? Yes, young Mr. and Mrs. Evancek were shouting at each other and what they were saying wasn’t nice. Don’t ask me what that was. Her poor housekeeping, perhaps.”
    “I understood it was over his refusal to look for work.”
    “I don’t remember that. That could have been behind it, but people rarely argue about what’s really bothering them. It’s the inconsequential things that set them off. I translated a story once about a brother and a sister who shot their father because he wouldn’t let them smoke marijuana. In any case, the fight stopped when the boy came home.”
    “This was before the shooting?” I fought the tug to lean forward.
    “Definitely before. I know what the others said, but they were wrong.”
    “You’re sure it was Michael?”
    “I saw him go in the front door. I knew the boy well enough by sight. We waved when we saw each other, his parents too. I was and am not the visiting type.”
    “How long between when he came home and you heard the first shot?”
    “About five minutes.”
    “Your memory for time is very good,” I said. “After almost twenty years, a lot of people wouldn’t be able to say if something took five minutes or a half hour. Generally they shorten it.”
    “You forget I worked for a newspaper. I wrote up the incident later and you tend to remember something you’ve written down.”
    “How many shots were there?”
    “Three. Very loud.”
    “How close together?”
    He thought about it. “I can’t tell you. I’d just be guessing. I’m not sure I could have remembered the sequence at the time. It seems to me the police asked me about it and I said the same thing.”
    “You had me worried there for a minute, Mr. Leposava,” I