Never Street by Loren D. Estleman Page B

no honest investigator could follow without slipping in Phil’s greasy footprints. What his number was doing on Neil Catalin’s redial was one for Ellery Queen.

Eight
    “G OOD MORNING. Z IGGY’S Chop House.”
    A low voice for a woman and even some men, with fine grit in it, like a cat’s lick. Conversations collided in the background with tinkling flatware and clattering crockery. I could almost smell the carcinogens frying in the kitchen.
    “I’m trying to locate Vesta Mannering,” I said. “Does she work there?”
    “Speaking.”
    I leaned against the telephone cover. The Penobscot Building across the street shimmied in the August heat ribboning up from the pavement. Parking attendants and Federal Express couriers, their uniforms just beginning to wilt as the Judas cool of the morning burned off, paced themselves like pros as they made their way toward the shrinking shade.
    “You’re a hard woman to get hold of, Miss Mannering.”
    “I don’t let just anyone get hold of me. Who is this, please?” Her voice had dropped. Not taking personal calls on restaurant time would be among the commandments at Ziggy’s. Another would be keeping kitchen secrets.
    “My name is Amos Walker. I’m an investigator hired by Gay Catalin to find her husband.”
    “That again. I told her I haven’t seen Neil in over a year.”
    “Not seeing him doesn’t cover telephone calls and letters.”
    “You left out singing telegrams, which I didn’t get either. I lost a valuable career contract because of Catalin. Now this job’s all I have, lousy as it is. Do you want me to lose that too?”
    There was no reason to play the card, no reason at all, except that I was losing the hand and the Joker was all I had left.
    “What about Fat Phil?” I asked. “Heard from him?”
    The little silence that followed was like the bank breaking. When she spoke again the background noise was muffled, as if she had inserted her body between it and the telephone. “What do you know about Musuraca?”
    “Meet me and we’ll swap stories.”
    “Not here,” she said quickly. “Do you know the Castanet Lounge in Iroquois Heights? I’m through here at ten.”
    “I’ll find it.”
    The Mercury was ready to start finally. Waiting for a hole in traffic, I read the clock on the dash. Eleven hours till Vesta. It was too early for lunch and there was nothing waiting for me back at the office but some bills and a water stain shaped like Mike Tyson. I drove to a garage I knew on the East Side and that the car knew even better, like a tired horse returning to the barn.
    OK Towing & Auto Repair worked out of a building that belonged on the National Register of Historic Places, whenever the NRHP got around to recognizing the age of the automobile: one of the dozen or so remaining garages built of white glazed brick still being used for their intended purpose. A Standard gasoline pump, no longer functional and missing its original glass globe (stolen, no doubt, by a collector), rusted out front, its price for Regular Leaded frozen at 29.9 cents, and a cardboard sign depicting the proper firing order of pistons in an eight-cylinder engine slouched in the window, gone the color of mummy wrappings and no longer visible to the people who worked there. The proprietor had declined several offers by the city to buy the building so it could be torn down and replaced by a park named for a felon who had managed to get himself beaten to death by overzealous police officers. Rumor had it the proprietor was waiting for someone from Greenfield Village to take it off his hands and transport it brick by brick to the historical theme park in Dearborn. Meanwhile he papered the wall of his office with citations from the city designed to nickel-and-dime him into submission. He had a pit bull for a lawyer and more motions for injunction on the table than a politician has teeth.
    I found Ernst Dierdorf seated on a stool at the bench, swamping out a four-barrel carburetor