Sugartown by Loren D. Estleman Read Free Book Online Page A

said. “In my business when you get gold in every pass it’s time to get a new pan.”
    The moustache moved.
    I smoothed the cigarette some more. It was plenty smooth. I stuck it in my face and left it there without lighting it and was thinking up another question that would make me sound like a detective when Mayk got back for the cross-examination.

6
    T HE FORMER DETECTIVE SERGEANT looked large and martial in his blue shirt and pants and his gun was an obvious growth on his flat stomach under the shirt. “He’s on his way,” he said.
    The old man on the bed had closed his eyes again and showed no reaction. I told Mayk what he had told me.
    “What’s it, a hundred yards between the front of this place and what was the Evanceks’?” said Mayk, loud enough for Leposava to hear.
    “About that,” I said.
    “That’s damn good seeing for someone who thought you were a priest the first time he looked at you.”
    I said, “I think I resent that.”
    “I had twenty-twenty vision the first seventy-five years of my life,” put in the Ukrainian. “Are you as good a man as you were two decades ago?”
    “We’re not talking about me.” Mayk approached the bed. “Why is it you’re the only one saw the boy get in when you say you did?”
    “Perhaps I was the only one looking.”
    “You remember that so good, how come you can’t remember how close the shots came together?”
    “A boy coming home from summer school is a normal occurrence. Shotgun blasts are not, or were not, in this neighborhood in those times. It’s difficult to think of timing with something so unexpected.”
    “Got all the answers, don’t you?”
    “You have all the questions.”
    I set fire to the cigarette finally, trying not to grin.
    Mayk circled back. “Six witnesses swore the boy came home after the shots were fired.”
    “Did they see him come home?”
    “You’re the only one claims you saw that.”
    “Interesting. That they’d swear to a thing they didn’t see.”
    “Yeah, there seems to be a lot of that here.”
    They went back to the subject of the argument and I lost interest. I wandered to the open doorway where my smoke could find its own way out and leaned against the frame. From there I had a good view through the front dining room window of the house across the way, where on a sweltering afternoon in a time of relative innocence three loud crashes had carried across the world to the other side of Europe.
    Father Olszanski came in twenty minutes later. A lean six feet, he brushed his iron-gray hair back from his widow’s peak in twin wings that kept wanting to slide down over his forehead and he trimmed his white beard so close it looked like stubble until you looked again. His eyes were a flat sad blue behind spectacles whose gold rims winked when he jerked his hair out of his eyes. The clerical collar under his light black topcoat was blue-white against the brown of his throat.
    “Have you grown weary of your graven images?” Leposava greeted him, once Mayk and I had introduced ourselves and taken the priest’s clean corded short-nailed hand in ours.
    “You old pagan, what are you doing in bed? You’ve played the crippled ancient so long you’ve begun to believe it yourself.”
    The banter proceeded in this fashion for another minute or so. Olszanski’s accent was as American as french fries.
    Mayk said, “He won’t let us call the police.”
    “Once they got the address they’d just file it under the blotter,” the priest said. “ Now will you move, you old Tartar?”
    “I did all the moving I intend to in the fall and winter of nineteen seventeen.” He lay as calm as a boulder in the sun.
    This was where I’d made my entrance. I pinched out my second butt and parked it in my jacket pocket next to its uncle. “We appreciate your time, Mr. Leposava. Good luck.”
    “I won’t wish you the same. The young man should stay lost.”
    Olszanski escorted Mayk and me into the front room. He slid an aluminum