Free Sugartown by Loren D. Estleman Page A

raise, little Michael put a caterpillar in his pocket and forgot about it, the new furniture came, Jeanine fell and fractured her wrist on the icy sidewalk in front of the house. Michael joined Little League. Joseph had him batting .297 and fielding flies like Horton; Jeanine had him unable to get out of his own way. In May the boy was into collecting coins. By August he was chasing butterflies and then he got burned by a magazine advertisement offering a bag of rare stamps for a dime that turned around and billed him afterward for eight-fifty. In November he was back to coins. There were hand-drawn holiday cards from Michael and Carla to their grandparents and how-are-you-I-am-fine letters scrawled in blurred pencil on ruled lines half an inch apart, Michael going on about iron Lincoln D pennies and asking the old folks to send him Polish coins.
    The family was planning a vacation trip to Arizona, Jeanine thought she was pregnant again but it was a false alarm, the snow was up to the sills, the sun was shining, it had rained six weekends in a row. By the second spring most of the letters were Jeanine’s. Late in May Joseph was laid off from Dodge Main. They blamed it on the bum economy. In June there was one more letter from Joseph, a short one, blotched and nearly illegible, assuring his parents he would be called back anytime. It was the last letter in the stack.
    Reading the letters from this side of that explosive July, you wondered why no one had smelled the fuse burning. Then you went back over them in the frame of mind in which they must have been received and they were just letters, and damn boring ones at that. Thousands of people had written hundreds of thousands of letters just like them and then gone bumping along like the rest of us without ever killing anyone.
    I put them back in their envelopes and stacked them in their original order and retied the ribbon. I sat back and smoked and looked out the window at the pigeons fiddlefooting along the splattered ledge of the apartment building. Filthy birds. Carried lice and ticks and the noise they made in their throats sounded like mugging victims gurgling through slashed windpipes in stinking alleys. I disinterred the office bottle from the file drawer in the desk and blew dust out of the pony glass and oiled my gullet. As the heat expanded from the base of my stomach I recapped the bottle and put it away and looked out at the pigeons again. It was okay now. They were just birds.
    I made a brief field trip to a drugstore around the corner, a department store really, with shelves of electric razors and wristwatches and garden gadgets and if you looked long enough a prescription counter at the back, and returned with a magazine for coin collectors. There had been three on the rack, all published by the same firm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Long-distance Information gave me the number. I dialed it and a switchboard operator with banjo strings for vocal cords got me someone in Circulation.
    “My name’s Walker,” I told the guy. “I’m a Michigan State Police licensed investigator trying to track down a witness to a murder. I think he may be on your subscription list.”
    “Which title?”
    “Any or all of them. He collects coins.”
    “Sec.”
    I parked the receiver in the hollow of my shoulder and lit a cigarette. I was just stringing popcorn. For all I knew, Michael Evancek hadn’t touched a coin except to feed a meter in nineteen years.
    The voice came back on. “I checked and the lists are in the data bank. I’ll just punch them in here and have them on your screen in ten minutes. What system are you using?”
    “Underwood and Noggin. I don’t have a computer.”
    The pause on his end was just long enough to tell me I blew it.
    “You’re with the Michigan State Police and you don’t have a computer?”
    “I’m not with the state police,” I said. “They just issued my license. I’m private.”
    “So why mention them at all?”
    “Mainly, to avoid