Sinister Heights (31 page)

The garage shuddered delicately. Overhead, the pull-up door began sliding forward, its rubber rollers making almost no noise at all in the tracks. Rayellen had pushed the button next to the side doorframe.

Mrs. Campbell was standing directly underneath. She stepped back reflexively and pulled the trigger, but the bottom edge of the door struck the end of the revolver; the bullet plucked at my jacket and whacked the back of the Land Rover. I jerked out the automatic and fired five shots practically in one piece, like a movie cowboy fanning his hogleg. The door was halfway down, only Mrs. Campbell's lower half showing underneath. All five slugs tore through the bottom panel in a group no bigger than my fist. Her feet did a foxtrot, but I couldn't tell if she'd been hit or if she was just backpedaling. The door touched down without a sound.

I backed around the end of the Land Rover, jerked open the door on the driver's side, and rested my forearms on top of it with the pistol steadied in both hands, using the door as a shield. I shouted to Rayellen to open the garage door. Then my hands began to shake for real. I forced myself to breathe and they settled down. I'd fired six, counting Andy at the plant. I didn't know how many the gun carried. The next one would have to count.

There was a pause, then the building shuddered again and the door lifted. My skin twitched. I ground my teeth to choke off the tremor before it got to my hands. Nothing would ever raise itself more slowly than the door of that garage; not the
Titanic
nor the lost city of Atlantis nor the Tigers' pitching staff. It rose like the curtain on the last act of
King Lear
, operated by a crew that didn't care for Shakespeare. But it rose, and it wasn't two feet off the floor when I relaxed my shoulders and straightened.

Rayellen sobbed once, softly. I couldn't tell if it was relief or grief or her ironbound guilt returning. Mrs. Campbell lay half on her side on the concrete with the soles of her sensible shoes showing and her revolver lying a foot away from her outstretched hand. She wasn't moving.

I came around the open car door, lowering the automatic but not all the way, taking away my left hand so I could bring the gun up fast. I wasn't shaking now that I couldn't miss. I stepped over quickly and kicked away the revolver, harder than I'd meant to; it scraped across the concrete and went into the cut grass that bordered the drive. I leaned down and laid the fingers of my free hand on the big artery at the side of the woman's neck. It throbbed once and then its work was over. The front of the gray dress below her breasts was black under the light spilling out of the garage.

I heard slippers scuffing the floor behind me and rose. I moved too fast.

“Amos?” Rayellen Stutch's voice echoed like Chinese bells in the blackness. I fell away from them.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE

I woke up as they were loading me into the ambulance. I don't remember, but they told me later I wouldn't put my head back down until the paramedics promised to take me to Detroit Receiving and not the hospital Leland Stutch had endowed in Iroquois Heights. The chief surgeon was being sued for leaving a putting glove inside a gall bladder patient and the board of directors had voted six to four in favor of letting him practice until the case came to court. I do remember seeing a fat cop in uniform walking past the van with Mrs. Campbell's shiny revolver in a Ziploc bag, holding it by the top between thumb and forefinger like dog droppings. Then I went back to sleep and stayed that way for fourteen hours.

My surgeon, a blonde stunner with blue eyes and a Malibu tan, incongruously named Rosenberg, pried sixteen pieces of lead shot out of my back and hip. She came in while I was propped up in bed eating breakfast and showed me the pieces in a disposable cardboard drool cup. They were the size of the peas they serve at banquets. She asked if I wanted them for a keepsake. I told her to distribute them in the charity ward.

She pouted. “I don't know why the men in your line are so flippant about this kind of thing. A few more degrees to the left and we'd have had to remove a kidney.”

“A few more degrees to the right and they'd have missed me completely. Call me an optimist.”

It was my first morning rightside-up. I'd been on my stomach for days with stitches and patches on my back, listening to the news reports on television because it still hurt my neck to look up at the set bolted to the ceiling. At the end of three days the Eyewitness News team had the fracas in Iroquois Heights pegged as a wildcat strike by a number of truckers who were dissatisfied with the last contract the Steelhaulers had ratified with General Motors, in particular having to do with working conditions at the former Stutch plant. Ray Montana appeared on
Meet the Press
to disavow any foreknowledge of the event and promised an internal investigation. The U.S. Attorney General announced that she would make no decision regarding the appointment of a special prosecutor until she had “read and re-read the reports of investigators engaged by the Department of Justice.”

Connor Thorpe, recovering in a private room at the hospital in Iroquois Heights from injuries sustained in the raid on the Stutch plant, was unavailable for comment. He was one of only five people reported injured that night. Two were truckers.

The death of Myra Campbell, longtime housekeeper to Rayellen Stutch on the night of the assault on the plant, was under investigation by local authorities, who did not believe it was related to the rest of the evening's events. Mrs. Stutch herself was on vacation in Florida and could not be reached.

Some reports claimed more than a hundred tractor-trailer rigs were involved in the destruction of some eighty million dollars' worth of public and private property inside the Iroquois Heights city limits. More conservative estimates placed the number of vehicles at sixty. The Stutch plant was declared a total loss and the date for its demolition was moved up one year. In addition, heavy trucks had destroyed a 7-Eleven near the downtown freeway exit, most of a strip mall on the main drag, including a cut-rate drugstore and a Harley-Davidson boutique, and the entire east side of the old main four corners. On that pass, one $150,000 Marmon hauling a double-bottom tanker took out a Real Estate One, two video stores, a Hallmark, and the Shogun Massage Emporium; it was a century-old brick block with common walls that had survived two fires. The driver was being sought for reckless driving, malicious destruction, and leaving the scene of an accident, as well as violating a ten-year-old Michigan law banning double-bottom tankers on the grounds of their abysmal safety records.

Small-change damage included a half-dozen street signs pretzeled by rigs cutting corners and a honey locust that had been planted the previous spring in place of a statue erected to commemorate an old victory over the Iroquois. Local protesters—not an Indian among them—had gotten the statue scrapped and the tree dedicated to Native Americans. It was in the corner of the downtown park and whoever had knocked it down had to have taken aim. A Kenworth with Texas plates was suspected.

A White dump truck got stuck on top of a twisted hunk of bronze commissioned from a Japanese-Swedish sculptor on the lawn in front of the City-County Building. The driver fled on foot but was cornered by prowlies in an alley and placed in custody. The sculpture was named “Unchained Thought” and hadn't looked all that less twisted before it was run over.

Mayor Arbor Muriel issued a long rambling statement to the press decrying the “wanton vandalism,” promising “virtuous redress,” and proposing that a new community center be build on the site of the shattered downtown block. Of all those solicited for comment, he spoke the longest and had the least to say. Cecil Fish, who had no official capacity in local government, was not heard from.

I'd slept through Iris's funeral. Ms. Stainback, the Cerberus who guarded the gate at the shelter in Monroe, had made all the arrangements, and the procession had been long enough and sufficiently populated with well-known figures to make the papers. There was no mention in the obituary of the Detroit hookshop where Iris had worked for eighteen months twenty years ago. She was identified as a Jamaican native who had come out of an abusive marriage to found a shelter for battered women and children and died in an automobile accident while transporting a client and her young son to the home of a relative. A Catholic bishop known to the Vatican, the physician in charge of a drug rehabilitation clinic where Iris had put in many hours of volunteer work after her own recovery from heroin addiction, and the president of the local chapter of the National Organization of Women had been among those delivering eulogies. Iris would have been flattered by the first two and kept her comments to herself regarding the third, remembering the husbands of professional feminists she had entertained in the days before she'd reformed. Her ashes were interred in a Monroe cemetery and in lieu of flowers, mourners were requested to make donations to the Iris Chapin fund, proceeds to be used to improve and maintain the shelter. Lying on my stomach reading the account of the funeral, I made a mental note of the P.O. box where donations were to be sent.

I greeted more visitors in three days in the hospital than I normally did in a month at my office.

After Dr. Rosenberg left with her cup of lead, Sergeant Vivaldi of the Iroquois Heights Police Department bulled in, smiling with all his tobacco-tinted teeth, eyes hooded behind his smoked glasses. When he turned his head, a patch of white bandage showed where his wire-brushed black hair had been shaved. I wondered if Maintenance had gotten around to replacing the mirror in the elevator of the City-County Building.

“Heard you got yourself shot,” he said. “Too bad his aim stunk.”

“Mine, too,” I said. “The guy who shot me's in serious condition on the fifth floor. He still had some blood left.”

“Busy night. I heard you killed a woman.”

“If you talked to Mrs. Stutch, you know that was self-defense. I was defending myself all over town that day, starting with downtown. How's your head?”

“I can still think with it. I won't need my Miranda card to haul you down when they spring you from this meat shop.” He went out on this gem.

The next cop in the box was Loggins, the hefty female sergeant from the Juvenile Division of the Michigan State Police. She had on a slate-gray business suit that fit her better than the bolero jacket she'd worn to the scene of the accident on I-75. The shoulder bag was the same: too red, to match her lipstick. She'd brought along a male stenographer with the long sad face of a professional pallbearer. She asked me if I was feeling well enough to make a statement, in a tone that said she didn't care what the answer was. I told her the missing boy was with his grandmother and gave her Carla Willard Witowski's telephone number in Melvindale. I gave her some details I hadn't before. She said shock made people forget. If there was any sympathy in the remark, she'd masked it well; but then a person only has so much, and the store had to be conserved for her younger subjects. She made sure the stenographer had it all and we parted company on terms somewhat more cordial than when she'd entered.

Just to relieve me of the company of all these sergeants, a detective lieutenant from Toledo Homicide dropped by, a well-dressed black named Boncour, tall enough to have played a lot of basketball in college. He wanted me to pay him a visit after my release to tape a video statement in regard to the David Glendowning killing. He said I'd have to answer questions about leaving the scene and that a transcript of the tape would be sent to Lansing, where they review private investigators' licenses, but his disapproval was strictly professional. Mark Proust was talking from his hospital bed under heavy police guard, and Boncour was on his way to Iroquois Heights with a warrant for Connor Thorpe's arrest for conspiracy to commit murder. I said he'd have to fight it out with the authorities in Michigan, who were waiting to charge him with abduction and child endangerment, to start.

While I was dressing, waiting for the hospital paperwork, I took a telephone call from an attorney named Swammerdamm, who said he was senior member of the firm that represented Rayellen Stutch. He said he'd been in touch with the police in Iroquois Heights and that no arrest warrant would be issued if I agreed to surrender myself voluntarily for questioning at the station. Swammerdamm would be present at that time. His fee had been taken care of.

I took a cab home, poured myself a tall Scotch, and carried it and my mail into the living room. I was getting along with an Ace bandage on my ankle. The house smelled shut up, as if I'd been away a month. I opened a window and sat down in my easy chair and looked around, like Odysseus back in the palace at Ithaca. My little library of no value to collectors, the rack of LPs, even the permanent ring on the little side table where I placed my glass with the precision of a pilot landing on an aircraft carrier, were objects of wonder. In the hospital I'd tried to picture it all and had failed, like a little boy trying to recall the features of his dead mother.

That made me think of Matthew. I looked up the number of Henry Ford Hospital, called and finally got a nurse familiar with Constance Glendowning's case, who told me she was awake and expecting a visit from her mother and son. I thanked her and hung up without leaving my name.

The only thing in the mail that held my interest long enough to open the envelope was a check from Mrs. Stutch, without a note. It bore a Miami postmark. It covered my fee, with a bonus twice as big to cover expenses.

I called around until I found the garage in Trenton where my Cutlass had been towed and made arrangements to tow it from there to the garage I did business with in Detroit. Without an estimate I figured the repairs, including a new bumper, hood, windshield, and upholstery to eliminate the bloodstains, would leave me with just enough to pay my monthly bills.

The bills could wait. Next morning, after eight hours in my own bed, I uncharacteristically made breakfast, enjoying the novelty of cooking my own eggs and brewing coffee the way I liked it, letting it steep on the hotpad until it could stand on its own. I took a thirty-minute shower, shaved close, broke a new white shirt out of plastic, and put on the suit I wore to weddings and funerals and client visits in Grosse Pointe. In place of a necktie I Velcroed on the snappy blue cervical collar they'd given me at Receiving for my whiplash. I called a cab and had the driver wait outside my bank while I cashed Mrs. Stutch's check. I kept out a hundred in cash, put the rest in savings, and rode to the MGM Grand Casino.