The Judgment (30 page)

The beam played around the rest of the room and settled on a single bulb hanging down from the ceiling just behind me.

“Get that, will you, Sloan? Turn it on.”

Tolliver held his light on it until I pulled the chain. The sudden explosion of light from what must have been a hundred-watt bulb dazzled me. I suppose I was blinded for a moment. When I regained fuir vision, I found the two of them staring at the thing that was tied to an insulated pipe up near the low ceiling. I was shocked to see that it was the body of a man, or what was left of one. Naked to the waist, he had had his stomach slit vertically and horizontally, opened, and his intestines pulled out There were small cuts all over his torso. He wasn’t hanging from his neck but from his wrists, which were bound and stretched above him. His head was hung low, and his face was invisible to us.

“They really did a job on him, didn’t they? Cut him down, LeMoyne.”

Tolliver produced a spring knife and popped it open. He sawed away at the ropes that held up the corpse. They went all at once, and the body of the nameless informant collapsed onto the floor, hiding the foul mess of his insides beneath him, and revealing his face for the first time. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was open.

Conroy knelt down and studied the face on the floor. He seemed especially interested in his mouth. He looked up at me then, almost accusingly.

“They cut out his tongue,” he said.

There is no suitable response to such a message.

“That means they were on to us. That means they did it for the mayor. Hell, he probably ordered it.”

I
woke up early Sunday morning, surprised and gratified that I had been able to sleep at all. I hardly bothered to check the newspapers; their late-Sunday editions were all wrapped up early Saturday night. There was no local news on television until late that same afternoon. So I went to the only possible source for information on the grim escapade of the night before.

From Detroit’s All-News Radio, I learned that the victim’s name was Willie Albright, described as “a small-time criminal with connections to Detroit’s drug world.” He was found in the basement of a deserted building on John R, “evidently the victim of a torture murder. In a related development, the body of Policewoman Madge Turnaby was found in Albright’s Highland Park apartment, the victim of an execution-style slaying.” It certainly wasn’t the top story of the hour. Less than sixty seconds in the clichéd vocabulary of broadcast news was all that they were given on the seven o’clock report. Maybe later there would be more details. After all, it wasn’t every day that a policewoman was murdered, was it? No, not even in Detroit.

I recalled there’d been a discussion between Conroy and Tolliver regarding the fate of Madge Turnaby. It had been brief and to the point.

“Well,” Conroy had said, “if she’s alive, then she gave him over.”

“And if she’s dead, she didn’t.”

There was something so cold-blooded about the way they speculated that it occurred to me as I stood listening to them that I was awfully glad I had never met Ms. Madge Turnaby. If I had, I might think that she deserved somewhat more than what she got from them.

All this was just before Conroy and I left the scene. Tolliver had called it in on the police radio in the chief’s Cadillac. It wouldn’t be long until we saw domelights flashing at one end of John R or the other. We had to get out of there. Conroy climbed in behind the wheel of his car, and I followed him inside. Conroy had little, or nothing, to say on the drive back to Parker. He was tight lipped and frowning all the way there.

Although for my part, I certainly regretted the terrible death of the informant and was fearful for the policewoman who had been assigned to watch over him, I was not really sorry that Conroy’s plan had failed. It seemed to me like a piece of pure kamikaze. He had let his hatred of the mayor rule him. His primary objective, his only objective, had to be saving himself. He should know that, but it wasn’t the time for me to lecture him.

It was that night that I decided to visit Mary Margaret Tucker. It was the only possibility I had for pushing things forward, the only thing left to be done. And Sunday morning seemed the best time to catch her.

Coming in down 1-94, I got off at Vernier and followed it around onto 8 Mile Road. Somewhere around Gratiot I turned off and followed the route I’d worked out on the Detroit city map. Mary Margaret Tucker’s address wasn’t hard to locate on the grid. It was an address on Eastburn, one of a row of Midwest bungalows, no different from the rest. It was early, not too much after eight, and that was how I’d planned it. Wake her up, catch her off guard, get her to talk. That was the plan, anyway. The way it worked out was something different.

So I went up and rang her bell and waited. Nothing. I rang it again. I rang it so loud and long that I was sure my auditory assault would have awakened the neighbors. Mary Margaret Tucker just wasn’t home. Discouraged but not despairing, I returned to my car, got in behind the wheel, and waited. I was parked across the street, so I wasn’t likely to be noticed.

I must have waited about twenty minutes when at last she appeared. I spotted her in the rearview mirror. There she was, chugging along on the sidewalk at a steady grind, dressed in a no-frills sweatsuit, eschewing the final sprint with which so many joggers ended their workout. She looked tired, physically exhausted, not many endorphins left working in her bloodstream at that moment. I wondered how far she’d run, and how long. I fought the impulse to confront her right there on the sidewalk in front of her house. No, let her go inside and then hit her with the doorbell. As tired as she looked, the effect might be comparable to rousing her from a sound sleep. But timing was all. Wait too long, and she’d probably be in the shower.

Gulping in great drafts of air, she turned down the walk toward the house. On the porch she fumbled out a small set of keys from an invisible pocket in her sweatpants, fitted one of them into the door, swung the door open, and stepped inside. I jumped out of my car. Seconds later, I was laying on the bell, refusing to be ignored.

It didn’t take long. The door swung wide, and there she was, still panting, sweat running down her pretty face. It took her a moment to recognize me. When she did, she looked about as angry as her condition allowed, her green eyes blazing.

Still sucking wind, she gasped,
“You!”
She panted a couple of times more and said, “You’ve fucked everything up!”

Then she shut the door in my face.

I’d come prepared for that. Dressing for battle that morning, I had put on the thickest, heaviest, toughest
boots I owned, old wafflestompers from the sixties, the kind made to withstand a direct assault by the right front foot of an elephant. Either one could easily repel a door flung by an exhausted woman. The left one did the job. The door bounced back, yawning wide. It revealed Mary Margaret Tucker, stalking away, her back turned to me. Since the door was open, I took that as an invitation to enter.

When I caught up with her in the kitchen, she looked at me, not so much angrily as in sudden confusion.

“You still here?” she said. “I told you to leave.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Well, I shut the door on you.”

“It came open again.”

“Okay then, I’m telling you now—get out!”

I took a deep breath and a step back and put a careful smile upon my face. I decided this would probably be the best time to push the button.

“Mary Margaret,” I said, “I’m here to save you some trouble.”

“Bullshit,” she growled, “you’ve caused me plenty already.”

“No, I mean it,” I said. “Why don’t you just sit down and answer some questions for me like the intelligent human being you are. That way maybe I can save you the trouble of going downtown, missing classes and all that, to talk to me with some prosecutor present. Maybe. I can’t promise that.”

“I don’t have to talk to you.”

“You were on the list of witnesses at the arraignment.”

“I didn’t testify, though.”

“The fact that you were on the list gives me the right to talk to you. In fact, it makes it necessary for me to talk to you. Now, why can’t we do it in a sensible way?”

Her cheeks puffed. She blew out some air and looked at me skeptically.

“If I do, you’ll leave me alone for a while?”

“For a while. I promise.”

She sighed. “All right, but let me drink some orange juice first. I need some sugar after that run.”

She took a tall glass from the cupboard and went to the refrigerator.

“How far did you go?” I asked her.

“Three miles. First time I’ve gone that far. I only started jogging in September after Mark and I …” She trailed off. “Would you like one, too?” she asked brightly, raising her glass.

Although she was in her twenties, she was still a lot like a kid. I could understand her appeal to someone like Conroy, and his to her.

“Sure,” I said, “why not?”

“Get a glass.”

I got one down from the cupboard. She gave me a tentative smile as she poured the orange juice from a nearly full carton. Then she put it back on the shelf and kicked the door shut with her knee.

“All right if we talk in the kitchen?” She seemed pretty sure of herself.

“Of course.”

We settled in chairs across the kitchen table. She slugged down half the glass of juice in three big gulps.

“I’ll be okay now. Go ahead, ask me some questions.”

Was there a dare in that? An implication that, Hey, I got past the cops, I can get around you, Charley Sloan? We’d have to see about that. I took a sip of the orange juice and hit her with the kind of question I hoped might shake her.

“Just a moment ago, you had a little difficulty saying exactly what you and Mark Conroy had done. In fact, you broke up. Tell me about that. Who broke up with who?”

“Is that important?” she asked, unruffled. “The cops didn’t ask me about that. They just wanted to know if Mark had given me money, and how much.”

“I’m aware what the cops asked you. I’m asking you now to tell me about it. Who instigated the breakup?”

She hesitated, perhaps looking for the right word, the
right phrase. “Mutual consent,” she said at last.

“And how’ did this come about, this mutual consent?”

“All right, you want to know what it was about? It was about how Mark wouldn’t accept me as an independent woman. He just wanted me to be his little playmate in his little love nest. He wanted me to be
available
, you know? It wasn’t like I had a life of my own or my own needs. It was just what
he
wanted when
he
wanted it.”

The mistress’s lot is generally not a happy one, but I was betting that Mary Margaret Tucker did not, probably did not ever, think of herself as Mark Conroy’s mistress. Maybe that was part of the trouble. If she had, and had accepted the rules of the game, the two of them might still be together. Then I thought of Althea Conroy and how she’d badgered her husband to cop a plea, and I wondered at his choice of women.

“Could you give me a time frame for this?”

“Oh, it had been building through the summer. By the end of September, it was all over. At the end of the third week in September, we had a big fight, and that ended it.”

“Did you move out of the apartment on Parker right away?”

“No.”

“How long did you stay?”

“Just after classes started, until about the end of October.”

“Did Mark Conroy ask you to move out then?”

“No. He said he owned the building, I could stay as long as I wanted.”

“Then why did you move out?”

She frowned at me, letting me know she wasn’t enjoying this. “I moved out,” she said, speaking slowly, emphasizing her words, “because I wanted to let him know it was really all over. He tried to start up again. Let’s say, he tried to start up again in a very physical way.”

“Are you suggesting rape?”

She started to say yes, but then caught herself.

“Attempted rape?”

“Let’s just say old Mark knew how to push my buttons, he really did. He’s kind of a control freak, you know? It’s, like, he has to have power over everyone and everything. I just knew I had to get away from him, completely away, or I’d never, like, be in charge of my life again.”

“And so you left?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you move in here right away?”

“No, I didn’t. I moved in with a friend.” Then she added, anticipating my question,
“Female
friend. I needed some time to get my feet on the ground and look around for a place of my own.”

“And this is what you found. A house. You share it with anyone?”

“No. It’s just me here, me alone. I like it that way.”

“I remember from having read your police interrogation that you said you’d been given money on a regular basis by Mark Conroy. For how long?”

“Over a year, or just about a year. It wasn’t huge amounts of money. Just a thousand a month, sometimes a little more. It probably didn’t amount to more than ten thousand dollars.”

“Not an inconsiderable sum,” I said. “So tell me, what did you spend it on?”

“On food, mostly. A few clothes, nothing expensive. Mark bought me a few things. Incidental expenses.”

“So in effect, with these regular payments, and the rent-free accommodations he offered you, you were able to save the entire salary you were paid as his secretary at 1300 Beaubien. Is that correct?”

She glowered at me. “Yes.”

“And you told the police that Mark Conroy paid your tuition and expenses for this fall semester at Wayne State. Is that correct?”

She glowered at me even more darkly. “Yes.”

“Tell me, then, what are your feelings toward Mark Conroy today?”

“I don’t want to see him. I hope I never see him again.”

“But why? He seems to have been generous to you, paid for your college this semester, made it possible for you to live in this house. And the furniture?”

“Salvation Army.”

“Okay, but the question remains, why?”

She was fuming now, and holding back a lot, most of it emotional.