Sinister Heights (5 page)

This gave Jay something to get his claws into. “Who the hell's side you on?”

The black cop took in some air and let it out. This was no new discussion. “The president's. How's he going to look come November if you and I fuck up full employment?”

Jay called him something they don't teach in sensitivity training, banged my license and registration down on the hood hard enough to dent it, and crunched back over the gravel apron to the prowler, where he sat down behind the wheel and cranked up the scanner loud enough to make the speakers buzz.

“I won't apologize for Jay,” Russell said. “We're married and that's that.”

“Don't invite me to the anniversary.” I put the papers back in my wallet.

“How's Mrs. Stutch to work for?”

“Forget it. She's already got security.”

He exchanged some more air. “That's cold, mister.” He crunched away. He walked with a slight hitch in his right leg. There was an old injury there, and probably a story to go with it.

To hell with him. When you start feeling sorry for a cop it's time to move to the beach.

I drove home through three jurisdictions without obstructing any of them and let myself in through the side door from the garage. The telephone was ringing in the living room. I let it ring while I fetched a carton of milk and half a can of tuna from the refrigerator, but it wouldn't wear down. I folded a slice of bread to make a sandwich, picked up the receiver, and spoke my name through a mouthful. I remembered I wasn't at the office and tacked a “Hello” on the end of it.

“How'd it go with Mrs. Stutch?”

It was Connor Thorpe. I swallowed. “What, you got someone watching my place?”

“I've been calling all night. You take her out to the show or what?”

“I could've got her in for half price. Why'd you tell me she's old-fashioned?”

“You had your mind made up she loaded Washington's musket at Valley Forge. You'd have been disappointed otherwise.”

“Are you sure you didn't just want her to fire me before I was hired?”

“What, did she say something?” The question came quickly.

I juggled the sandwich into the hand holding the receiver and swigged milk from the carton. There was no reason not to tell him I knew she'd been after him for five years to find the daughter and granddaughter, except it was none of his business. “You did. You told me you hoped all I found was the bottom side of the rock.”

“I meant it. Dead dogs ought to stay dead.” But he sounded relieved. I wondered why.

“I'm turning over the rock. It's okay if you're not okay with that. I just need to know before I have another run-in with what's pinned to a badge in Iroquois Heights.”

“Why, what happened?”

I gave him the short form. He said “Sons of bitches” twice, then asked me for their names.

“I'm a big boy, Mr. Thorpe. I fight my own fights. Just so I don't have to keep fighting the same one, though, I'll take a letter from you on GM stationery saying I'm working on a confidential matter for the board of directors. If I go on showing Mrs. Stutch's check, her signature will get rubbed off and they won't cash it at my bank.”

“I'll have it on your desk tomorrow.”

“The day after will be soon enough. I try not to visit the Heights two days in a row. It voids my insurance.” We talked around in a circle for another minute and rang off. I finished my supper in front of a giant parade of TV commercials without ever finding out what show was playing, then read for a while and went to bed. I had a big day tomorrow, starting when the bank opened.

CHAPTER
FIVE

My bank, a 150-year-old Detroit concern, had recently taken down its sign and replaced it with one bearing a name more suited to its new conglomonational status; whether it had merged with, been bought by, or had bought a chain of similar institutions stretching from Key West to Point Barrow was a Chinese puzzler for its shareholders to figure out; its immediate concern to me was that all of its services had dried up like the ink in its ballpoint pens. A snazzy pamphlet had come my way by mail, announcing the name change and informing me that three withdrawals of my own money in a single month would be considered excessive activity and cost me a buck and a half. I'd made up my mind to cash out my balance as soon as I had one and look for another mattress to stick it in, but that would have to wait until I had a handle on the heirs of Leland Stutch and Cecilia Willard.

The blonde in the tellers cage took Mrs. Stutch's check, gave me a flimsy printout that told me how much I'd just deposited, no extraneous information such as how much I now had in the account, and gave me back the two hundred I was holding out for cigarettes and bribery. The remitter's signature didn't get so much as a flicker from her. She'd been born since fuel injection; she would pronounce
Renault
without the
t
.

Back at the office I spent a little on Information in Grass Lake and called the number the operator gave me for Fred Witowski, husband or ex-husband of Cecilia's daughter Carla and father of Constance. I got a gruff outgoing announcement on a warped tape and hung up without leaving a message. I only wanted him for Carla's address in Melvindale, and waiting by the telephone was not a good use of Rayellen Stutch's money. I dipped into my bag of special detective tools and opened the telephone book.

Witowski is not an uncommon name in a metropolitan area built on the strong backs of Poles who had fled the Czar to grade and lay track for the Michigan Central Railroad, and later to forge engine blocks at old Dodge Main. There were several Witowskis listed in Melvindale, but only three C. Witowskis, and no Freds; not that many divorced or separated women were still listing themselves under the names of their exes. Fewer yet in this age of stalkers and demographers cared to advertise their single sisterhood by using their Christian names, so there weren't any Carlas either. I called the first one on the list and got a recording giving just the number. I hit the plunger before it finished and tried the next.

“Hello?” A female voice, age indeterminate.

“Is this Carla Witowski?” I asked.

“That depends on who wants her.”

“I'm with UPS. I've got a package for a Carla Witowski in Melvindale, but I can't make out the number or street.”

“What's in the package?”

“I wouldn't know, ma'am. I left my fluoroscope in my other pants.”

“And what have you got in this pair?” She was purring now.

“Nothing for you, Cornelia.” I reached for the plunger.

“It's Cynthia, smartass. Now, who—”

I cut her off and tried the third number. No one answered. Sometimes you have to let your feet do the walking. I was starting to do just that when the telephone rang.

“A. Walker Investigations.”

“Gotcha, smartass. You ever hear of star sixty-nine?” She'd lost the purr. Its place had been taken by a rusty alcoholic edge. “Who says you can insult a woman in her own home?”

“Thomas Jefferson. Bye-bye, Clothilde.”

The bell had started ringing again when I went out the door.

On the way downriver I pulled into an oil shop and dropped a little more client money on an overdue lube and a change. When the junior mechanic lifted the hood to replace the air filter he said, “Holy shit.”

“So size does matter.” I blew smoke and pushed myself away from the pillar I was leaning against.

“Outside it's a heap. What do you do, run dope?”

“I'm a dance instructor.”

He slitted his eyes at me. He was a clean-cut black kid who had knocked the top off every knuckle he had. “That don't make no sense.”

“That's what the cops in Iroquois Heights said.”

“That place.” He spat and rubbed the spittle into the concrete floor with the toe of his shoe. “They ought to take it down brick by brick and throw salt on the dirt.”

“You and Cato.”

“Cato, my ass. I'd do it myself if I could afford the salt. They got a funny curfew there. It only works if you forget to be white.”

When he handed me my keys I said, “I'm on my way to Melvindale. I'll bring you back some salt.”

“Do what?”

“You know. From the mine.”

He shook his head. He was too young, a condition that was becoming epidemic. I tipped him two bucks and pulled out of the bay, gunning the big 455 as a gift. He probably didn't know who Cato was either.

Underneath Detroit is another city, inconceivably old and made entirely of salt. It's a thousand feet underground and extends more than two miles between the cities of River Rouge and Melvindale, in a vein that stretches from Wyandotte to Port Huron, an area roughly the size of Costa Rica. For a hundred years the International Salt Company excavated thousands of tons of chalk-white deposits from an ancient ocean, first to cure meat for pilgrims traveling west, then to mix with cinders and spread on roads and highways throughout the northeastern states during the winter, to melt snow and ice and incidentally christen the entire region America's Rust Belt. Operations on the American side have been shut down twenty years for unexplained reasons, obliging the various road commissions to purchase their salt from Canada. Meanwhile the original equipment, more than a century old and preserved by the dryest air outside the Presbyterian Church, sits undisturbed among caverns blasted from pure salt, with salt roofs supported by salt pillars anchored to salt floors. Melvindale, which holds title to the only remaining unsealed entrance, scratches up some money from time to time conducting guided tours; otherwise there's no reason to go there unless Melvindale is where you live. Detroit has three times as many satellites as Jupiter, and most of them are just as difficult to tell apart without a glass.

The address listed for C. Witowski in the telephone book belonged to one of the newer houses in a snarl of serpentine streets and cul-de-sacs off Oakwood, which did not mean that it was at all new; the housing sprawl that had begun nine months after V-E Day and ended with the Edsel had left its droppings all over Wayne and Oakland counties. The inspirational touch here was that the contractor had reversed the blueprints from time to time so that the
faux
stone facing to the right of the front door on one house was to the left on the next; or maybe the straw boss had dropped the plans and spread them out any old way when he picked them up. Some of the roofs had been replaced over the years by the individual homeowners, eroding further the uniform scheme, and here and there a hawthorn hedge or a low redwood fence had boldly supplanted the architects junipers, but except for that and the occasional Toyota truck in a neighborhood of Fords, Chevies, and Chryslers, the homes were as alike as barracks on a military base. If one of them sold for sixty thousand, the property values would spike up fifteen percent.

I parked on the street and walked up a composition driveway past a nine-year-old Cavalier hatchback with an S.O.S. sticker on the rear bumper and a fat asterisk next to the legend
SAVE OUR SCHOOLS
. On the other corner was an older one, scuffed and peeling, on which faded letters spelled out
TEACHER OF THE YEAR
1991.

The doorbell imitated a set of chimes. Someone had a coughing fit inside and a set of off-white curtains in the window next to the door parted, revealing a black nose on the end of a shaggy tan muzzle. That was the source of the coughing noise. It was like a bark with a silencer.

“Yes?”

The woman who opened the door was about fifty, with blondined hair waved back from a handsome sort of face that wore a little more makeup than Rayellen Stutch, but little enough still to annoy Revlon. She was tall and stood unnaturally stiff, as if she had a bad back. She had on a dark brown scoop-necked top with sleeves that came to her elbows, beige pleated slacks, and brown leather loafers, scuffed just enough to have character. She wore no rings or jewelry of any kind except for pearl buttons in her ears to keep the holes from closing. She had steady eyes and a strong jaw, but I'd been fooled by those before.

“Mrs. Witowski?” I asked.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Carla Witowski?”

“Yes.” Now her brows were separated by a vertical line. She hadn't many.

I pressed my luck. “Carla Willard Witowski?”

The line smoothed out. Her eyes were dark and deep-set, like those in the portrait of Leland Stutch in the foyer of the house in Iroquois Heights. I didn't see the fiercely glowing centers I'd observed in person, but she had another fifty years in which to acquire those; if they were his eyes, and if she'd inherited them.

“What is it you want?” she asked.

“To confirm you're Carla Willard Witowski, for a start. Would you mind telling me your mother's Christian name?”

“If I did that, I'd have given you four names. You haven't given me even one.”

“You teach math, don't you?” I grinned, but she didn't do anything with it. I gave her a card.

“Amos Walker,” she read. “Is that your real name?”

“It's the one I use most of the time.”

She read the rest of the card. “It says here you're a private detective.”

“It does not. It says ‘Investigations.'”

“What's the difference?”

“There isn't any. The state police don't like anyone who is not a policeman printing up cards calling himself a detective. I humor them, in return for which they let me keep my license.”

“My mother's name was Cecilia. I taught English, not math. I retired last year.”

“Not many teachers can afford to retire before fifty-five.”

“I'm not one of them. I'm shopping around. I'd rather try to live on my savings than draw a paycheck from a school system with a dropout rate of seventy percent.”

“That's what convinced you to quit?”

“Persuaded,” she corrected. “You convince someone of an idea; you persuade him to an act. Did you attend school in Detroit?”