Sinister Heights (2 page)

“She pass a hundred yet?” I asked.

“If you're interested in the job, you can ask her.”

“What's the job?”

“You can ask her that too. I may be violating a confidence just by bringing it up.”

“If it's that dicey, tell her to let it lie. You never know what's on the bottom side of a rock.”

“Just the bottom side of the rock. I hope.”

“Now I'm curious.”

“I'll set it up.”

“I said I was curious. I didn't say I was interested.”

“Just drop me off on the corner. I'll walk the rest of the way.”

I pulled into a slot in front of the Fisher Building. Across the street, atop the sprawling General Motors office complex, a crew was at work with cutting torches on the two-story-high neon letters, with a Tinker Toy arrangement of pulleys and winches waiting to lay them flat on the roof. Thorpe sat glowering at the operation.

“I don't know how they figure to gain by moving their headquarters to the RenCen from the biggest office building in the world,” he said.

“I think the Pentagon's bigger.”

“It lacks charm.”

“Times change.”

“People don't. I wish just once it was the other way.”

“Not me. It's the business I'm in.”

“Get me something on Tindle I can use. Find out what he did with the money.” He got out.

I climbed out my side. “Mr. Thorpe.”

He'd started down the sidewalk. He swung around like an old gunfighter, nothing on his face but the stubble he'd missed that morning. I flipped the Viper's keys across the roof. He caught them one-handed.

I said, “Title and registration's in the glove compartment. He put them in his mother's name.”

He looked up from the keys. “You stole it from his driveway?”

“Garage on Howard. I broke in. The trouble with most thieves is they think they cornered the market.”

His smile made him look even sadder.

CHAPTER
TWO

The new century was full of changes. In addition to GM moving into the Renaissance Center, evicting the handful of tenants who had managed to keep their shops afloat in the longest-sinking enterprise since the
Andrea Doria
, the City of Detroit was preparing to shift its own base of operations into the old GM headquarters from the City-County Building; which had just been rechristened the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center after the mayor who had stolen everything but its doorknobs. The Tigers had vacated their historic stadium for a splashy new park downtown with the biggest scoreboard in baseball, suitable for recording the most zeroes in both leagues. Casinos had begun fleecing customers in the old IRS building (big change) and the Wonder factory, the birthplace of sliced bread, and had already racked up their first casualty in the person of an Oak Park police officer who followed up a ten-thousand-dollar loss at blackjack with a bullet to his brain. Twenty-one more shots and a color guard saw him into the ground. J.L. Hudson's, the largest department store in the world, was gone, and with it a chunk of the People Mover commuter train, dynamite being notoriously nonspecific about what it blows to electrons. Even the Grand Prix was moving again, from Belle Isle to the Michigan State Fairgrounds. It seemed like everybody and everything was going somewhere but me.

I was still conducting business, although not the busy kind, from my little grass hut on the top floor of a three-story building that had occupied the same spot on Grand River Avenue since shortly after the bottom dropped out of the beaver market. The winds of change had found their way there as well, through spaces where the mortar had eaten away, but they'd whistled right past me. After the travel agent next door went bust, the office had stood empty six months, then was leased twice in four weeks, first to a stationer who'd been removed quietly by Treasury agents for running off reasonable facsimiles of old-style tens and twenties on his laser printer, then to a website designer who was always there in the mornings when I came to work and in the evenings when I left, bent monk-fashion over his mouse with his door open and oversize posters of busty female superheroes all over his walls. We'd spoken only once, in his doorway when he offered to set me up with my own web page if I agreed to introduce him to the redhead he'd seen leaving my reception room the day before.

“Why would I want my own web page?”

“Well, to advertise your services.”

“I do that in the telephone book.”

“A lot of people with computers never open the telephone book. What is it you do?”

“I look for missing persons.”

“Anyone with a computer can do that.”

“Then why would I want to advertise on a computer?”

“Have it your way. I could upgrade your system. What do you use?”

“Cigarettes and whiskey.”

“I mean what kind of computer.”

“No kind of computer. I don't own one.”

He banged the door shut.

Just as well. The redhead, a local TV reporter, had hurled my stapler at my framed autographed picture of Joel McCrea when I declined her retainer to follow around a
Free Press
journalist for the purpose of identifying all his sources. I hadn't stapled anything in a month, but I liked the picture. I should have fixed her up with the web guy.

I was thinking of changing my specialty. The spread of the One-Eyed Wonder had made it possible for every adopted child, deserted wife, divided twin, and class reunion secretary to tap into every records bureau in the world and find that long-lost individual during a coffee break. The odd credit check, an old reliable fallback, had gone down the same fiberoptic follicle, and corporate theft had grown so high-tech it required a plugged-in type like my neighbor to scope it out. I'd had to put the arm on my friend Barry Stackpole and his supercharged PC to track down Jerry Tindle's shady Viper. The rest of the job had involved a pinchbar short enough to get me arrested for possession of a burglar tool and a stroll around three levels of the garage on Howard Street, pushing the button on the keychain I took from the attendant's booth until the car's horn blatted in response. That was a larcenous gap even Bill Gates hadn't gotten around to bridging.

The modem hasn't been designed that can slip a latch, boost a hard file, intimidate a suspect, or contuse and lacerate an uncooperative witness into changing his mind. It can't seduce a receptionist or blackmail an accomplice, and it lacks the character needed to process a quart of gin and keep its circuits intact while the other fellow is overloading his. If it somehow managed to do all that, it couldn't erase its hard drive fast enough to avoid a stretch in the Stone Motel. If I work it right I might be able to squeeze in a career before Windows 2050 makes me completely redundant.

FedEx knocked and the telephone rang at the same time. In both cases Connor Thorpe was responsible. I shouldered the receiver and signed the electronic clipboard.

“You must be one of those guys who overtips and hangs around for the reaction.” I slid his check out of the gaudy cardboard envelope. He'd added a bonus.

“I never overdid a thing in my life, if you don't count marriage.” There was an echo on his end, as if he were speaking from the bottom of a steel-pouring vat; which wasn't far off the mark. He was in his basement office in the Stutch plant. “Rayellen Stutch is expecting you at four this afternoon. That's an appointment, not a social invitation. Don't arrive fashionably late. Your first impression may be your last.”

I wrote down the address in Iroquois Heights, suppressing a sigh like a bad cough. It had to be
there
. “That was fast work.” We'd parted company less than two hours earlier. I'd cabbed it back to Howard to pick up my Cutlass and stopped for lunch on the way to the office.

“The New Center meeting was a moron marathon. I made my calls from the conference table and the fucker at the head never stopped talking about his pie chart. One thing: Mrs. Stutch is old-fashioned. You'd better bring a gift.”

The telephone went dead before I could ask what kind of gift. There was nothing wrong with the line; greetings and farewells were alien concepts to Thorpe.

I thought about it for a while, but my detective skills were unequal to the problem. I locked up and went across the street, where a doodad store had opened in the glazed-brick building that had housed a Shell station until the Arab oil crisis, then a colony of raccoons and Scientologists. A strip mall had built off one end, selling hearing aids, bladder-control pills, and devices to improve TV reception. Planet Hollywood is not going to move into the neighborhood anytime soon.

A bell tittered when I opened and closed the door of the gift shop. A fortyish blonde in a white sailor suit appeared behind a counter display of Hummel figurines and we went into a huddle. Five minutes later I walked out carrying a package wrapped in silver paper. I drove for twenty minutes with the window open before I stopped smelling potpourri.

I went out past the zoo and along four lanes of resurfaced highway, passing miles of greensward tended by convicts in striped suits like the Beagle Boys, to where a sign greeted me:

W
ELCOME TO
I
ROQUOIS
H
EIGHTS

P
ROUD
H
OME OF THE
W
ARRIORS

1995 D
ISTRICT
C
HAMPIONS

Y
OU
A
RE
U
NDER
S
URVEILLANCE

To underscore the point, a city prowler sat on the gravel apron with only the lower half of the driver's face visible beneath the tilted-down visor, chewing gum.

Beyond this was a string of placards belonging to the city's seven Christian churches and one synagogue, a M
URIEL FOR
M
AYOR
sign left over from the election, and a simple wooden cross marking the spot where the local police had run a carjacker into the side of a hatchback being driven by a mother of three. I passed the usual hell of drive-throughs and cheapjack superstores and hung a right before the half-empty buildings of the old business district, heading for the original neighborhoods laid out by auto money to escape the thud and jangle of the factories. Auto money went a lot farther in the Heights than it did in Detroit.

The house was a battleship-gray box built at the end of a street named
NO OUTLET
, with another sign in the driveway reading
NO TURNAROUND
and a
NO SOLICITORS
card stuck in a corner of the leaded-glass window in the front door. It was the one time of year, before the trees and hedges leafed out on the east side, when you could see that the place was three times as big as it appeared from the front. It went back and back to claim two large lots, each addition constructed of a slightly different grade of material according to what was available at the time, like an old English manor house with a new wing for every beheading in London. A yellow cat built like a medicine ball snored in a wallow of dead fur in a rocker on the porch.

A woman of indeterminate age, wearing a gray dress like a jail matron's uniform, asked me to wait in the foyer and took my card down a hallway that led past the stairs. I was alone with a bronze Ali Baba vase and a portrait of Leland Stutch, painted sometime around the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. He'd been middle-aged even then, with a scant widow's peak and skin beginning to wattle over the top of his detachable collar. The eyes were light-eating black holes, the mouth bent down at the corners like Somerset Maugham's. One hand rested on a world globe, with the long fingers encompassing the northern hemisphere from Prince Edward Island to the Gulf of Mexico. At an age when most men had been retired twenty years, he'd sold his interest in General Motors and invested in research to improve the efficiency of fossil fuels, where he'd made his fortune all over again. Today Stutch Petrochemicals had facilities on six continents and was rumored to hold the title on a country in Southeast Asia; ten years after his death, Antitrust was still following the paper trail.

“Mrs. Stutch will receive you now. She's having her physical therapy session.” The woman had come up behind me noiselessly on rubber soles.

I said, “She sounds pretty lively.”

Her face got a puzzled look. “Yes.” She turned and went back down the hall. I followed.

“I had some business with Mr. Stutch about a dozen years ago. I didn't realize he'd remarried.”

“Mrs. Stutch came later. The grandson was quite upset. He gave the Commodore his youth.”

You never hear anyone called Commodore anymore. They'd buried the title with the old man. It had been honorary, earned during two years when he lent his engineers to the U.S. Navy. A minesweeper of their design occupied a panoramic photo on the hallway wall. It went like hell with the other decorations: costume sketches in metal frames of attenuated models in ruffles, pleats, and suits of armor, all bearing the same illegible signature in the lower right-hand corner. We passed open doors belonging to side rooms, including a sort of conservatory with a white baby grand piano on a polished wooden floor, and a studio setup complete with a drafting board and brushes growing like cactus out of tin cans and clay pots. Music, art, and the theater seemed to be what was filling the lonely days of widowhood.

The woman tapped on a quilted door at the end and opened it. I trailed her into a large room throbbing with Pink Floyd's “The Wall.” A tilted skylight poured sun into a white interior with exercise equipment scattered about, treadmills and rowers and progressive-resistance machines in gleaming chrome. A square platform stood in the center with turnbuckles at the corners and ropes stretched all around, and in the center of that, two women in lace-up boots and headgear and not much else were bouncing about poking at each other with boxing gloves.