“Can we walk a bit more?”
The anger had blown out of me, but I was still thinking about Clyde Rix’s carpet mill. I looked Jenkins over. He held his hands clasped behind his back, and this made the buttons of his boxed shirt pull over his beefy chest.
“I’m on a schedule,” I said. “Just spill what you got to spill.”
“Something’s in the air,” said Jenkins. “Can you smell it?”
“I’m not a coon dog,” I said.
“Talk and more talk. It’s always there in the background. In fact,” he said, “you might say that talk is my business. Lately in Detroit the whispers in the shadows have turned to words of hate and race war.”
I shrugged and turned my palms up. “But I don’t care about any of that,” I said.
“You do care. Of course you do. You’ve lost your partner. You’ve shown an odd concern for young Jane Hardiman. Clearly you have deep feeling for your nephew Alex. Can you fool yourself into thinking that all of these things aren’t related?”
“Where’s your profit in all of this?” I blurted. “Where do you fit in?”
Jenkins looked disappointed. “We all have so much to lose—and I know that the burden will fall most sorely on the Negro population if we can’t stem this violence. It always does. Now I ask, do you have so much left in the world that you can afford to turn away as it goes up in flames?”
My teeth clamped down. I turned abruptly and stalked off toward my car, cutting crosswise over Beaubien to make it hard for them to follow me.
Jenkins called after me, “Perhaps we can be of assistance to you, Detective!”
I kept walking, my eye now nailed forward into a tunnel of vision, thinking only of Alex, a carpet factory, and a little girl who died before her time.
CHAPTER 14
On the way out to the carpet mill, a cop directing traffic stopped me with a white-gloved hand, then whirled and let the cross traffic go. After a moment, the cop turned toward me again and peered into the glass. His white teeth flashed in a sneer of recognition; he formed a mock gun with one white-gloved hand and popped it off in my direction, and then he turned away. It might have been a good-natured gesture or a veiled threat. But I thought, That’s it. I might as well go home and sit out on the porch with a beer. They’ll come for me if I don’t come to them.
I let out a long, slow breath through pursed lips and let the resignation wash over me, teasing out the kinks from my aching neck. Why not? It was simpler to let all the worry about the future go slack. I considered a quick visit to Eileen to see about the boy. But I reminded myself that the best way to care for Alex was to find the festering sore at the bottom of the trouble.
I leaned over and pulled half a box of slugs from the glove box. I dumped the bullets into the inside pocket of my jacket because I couldn’t stand to have the weight bouncing against my thigh. Twice I stopped and turned around to make sure that no one was following me, but I felt that the effort was wasted. It seemed that every eye behind every curtain in town and in every darkened doorway knew me and would relay news of my whereabouts to all concerned—a great spider’s web of alliances I had not the ability or the desire to understand. Fair enough, I thought. The bigger the better. Let them all gather round. If I could not hope to grasp the entire thing and make it right, I would burn like a poker of white-hot iron into the belly of it.
I trolled by the alley where the runt had cut Bobby and followed the street for two blocks more, turned west—there it was, another block away, closed up and falling to pieces. The old building looked to me like it had been built before the end of the last century. It could not have been closed more than a year or two, but already nature had begun to reclaim it. Greenery sprouted in patches all over the packed dirt drive and the gravel lot, and the surrounding area had not been mowed or tended for some time.
I drove twice around the block, looking the place over from all angles, and then parked the car. After dragging an old flashlight from under the seat and testing the batteries, I left the car and stepped toward the building. I took a slow walk around the perimeter and found no obvious trace of recent entry. Cigarette butts lay strewn about a small sunken truck bay, shielded from direct view from the street. Kids, probably, sneaking smokes. All the windows were closed and whitewashed on the inside, the doors padlocked, no fresh scratches on any of them. I had never possessed the patience for detail work and could not see a reason to start.
Without checking to see if anyone was watching, I leaned into one of the doors to gauge the strength of the locks. The padlock and the hasp were flimsy, meant only to present an obvious discouragement to idle hoods. The deadbolt felt solid, though, sunk into the old wooden beam like an anchor. It was too high up for me to kick through it; but one, two, three heavy shots with the shoulder on the opposite side of the door sent the upper hinge splintering away. Two heavy forearms hitting at that side ripped loose the bottom hinge, too, and the door scraped away over the floor till it hung only by the twisted hasp of the padlock. I went in.
There was no smell. No human smell. The clouds of dust I had stirred up now swirled in the light thrown in from the highest windows. I found no obvious trace of recent habitation or activity, no sour smell of men drinking, smoking, scheming. The place felt so peaceful that I didn’t feel the need to pull out my gun. After waiting a moment for things to settle, I made a circuit of the building, looking down into the dust as I went. Bits of rat shit here and there, thin trails and tiny footprints wavering across the floor, but no footprints, no empty bottles, no cigarette butts. The dried carcass of a bird, gone so long it no longer smelled, lay below a window dotted with tiny holes in the whitewash, where the bird had slammed against it trying to escape.
In a big, open area, where they might have cut the carpets and bound up the edges, I stepped over the wide grate that covered a trough cut in the floor. I wondered what kinds of chemicals were dumped in the process of making carpets, and what place downriver they had fouled during the mill’s years of operation. No matter. I walked across and felt that it might be nice to live in such an open, airy place. You could just take a piss right in your living room, right down into the sewer. Scanning the edges of the grate, I wondered if the rats were coming up from it, if the holes were big enough. I’d once been told that a rat could squeeze through an opening the size of a quarter. With the forefinger and thumb of my bad hand, I made a circle about the size of a quarter and peered through it at the grate. Plainly now, at my feet, I saw that someone had recently removed the grate and gone into the well below the floor.
I had been ready to turn back but felt no real pleasure at having guessed things correctly. Somehow I felt that my steps were not my own, that I was being drawn forward into a game set up just for me. What I needed was a shot of whiskey to settle my thoughts. I considered going to fetch the bottle from the car but decided against it, for fear that the booze would rip into my empty stomach. When I turned to check the window nearest the grate, one of a bank of little panes reaching up ten feet above the sill, I found it unlocked, of course, and just about big enough for a child or a small man to slip through on the run. I pictured it in my mind: The runt hoofed it for a couple blocks, trotted up to the window, pushed it in, rolled over the sill, closed it up, and picked up the grate and made it underground.
I leaned over and tested the weight of the grate. Not so heavy for me, but I would have figured a little guy would have a hard time picking it up—unless someone was there to help him. A quick scan of the surrounding floor told me that wasn’t likely. So he must be strong—stronger than you’d expect, I thought. Make a note of it.
I stooped and laced the fingers of my good hand into the middle of the square of grating and lifted it away from the sunken bay in the floor. Quietly, I leaned it against the wall and then lowered myself into the deep trough until my shoes crunched on the dried chemicals that glittered like jewels at the bottom of a well. I could see that the trough fell away from the building through a flat opening
barely large enough to squeeze through. Thinking that the wad of money hidden at home could buy me a new suit of clothes, I got down flat on my belly and peered into the darkness. The flashlight was weak, but I could see that there was a drop-off just the other side of the opening, maybe another six feet down. It seemed that a wider corridor led away from the well. It looked tight, but I thought I could squeeze through the opening and down to the lower corridor. Feet first, and covered now in dust, rat shit, and crystallized chemical residue, I lowered myself down till my feet landed on a round metal grate. Faintly, I could hear water moving far below.
I regretted the noise I made getting down into the narrow passage. I imagined a nest of vipers or rats springing to life, surrounding and overwhelming me, but when I stopped for a moment to gain my bearings, I heard nothing but my own raspy breath and the blood pounding in my ears. It seemed fitting to imagine a whole network of nigger-killing bastards skulking under the city; but what I saw in the feeble glow of the flashlight looked cramped and plain, like a maintenance passage between sewer lines or an old tunnel left over from Prohibition days, a way to get out during a raid. They were all over the city, I knew, and I expected that the narrow passage would lead only to a manhole in the street or to a shack at the edge of the property.
Before I started out down the passage, I closed my eye and tried to picture which direction I would be heading above the ground. I had twisted myself around so much inside the building that I could not decide. I wondered if I would be able to climb back up into the trough inside the building if the tunnel didn’t lead anywhere. Without anything to step up on or a place to get a good grip, I knew I was in some trouble if there wasn’t any other way out. I thought I might die down underground, and it flashed through my mind that I’d be reduced to screaming for help before that happened. From what I could see from the flashlight, there weren’t any piles of bones stacked up anywhere. If the rats can survive down here, I thought, so can I.
As I stooped forward, I realized that I had forgotten my hat in the car. Bad luck for me today, I thought.
I kept the light at my feet as I crept forward. The passage went on for a dozen yards, a dozen more, and seemed to be sinking slowly, graded down away from the mill. In the dim glow I could make out a turn a few more yards ahead. It seemed like I was moving yards at a time, but I might have been moving only inches. The walls were smooth and damp, slimy with condensation, and I braced myself with my free hand because the floor was slick under my hard soles. As I neared the corner, the flashlight began to go. I turned it to my face and shook it: a brief flare, then darkness. I stood there like a dope for a minute, choking down the panic; I had always been afraid of enclosed spaces. But as my vision adjusted, I realized that the darkness was not complete. A meager light seemed to bounce along the corridor, reflected from beyond another corner some distance ahead.
I stooped to place the flashlight gently on the ground, then drew my gun and inched forward as quietly as I knew how. When I drew near to the light that seemed to swirl like fog at the next corner, I heard it: a low rumbling, not clear enough to sound in the ears but felt in the belly. I stood for a moment before I realized what it was. Snoring, I thought. Bastard’s sleeping like a baby.
I stepped softly toward the light, trying to judge how far I had come from the carpet mill’s perimeter. Maybe it was because of the missing eye, or maybe I had always been bad at such things. I could not even guess where I was. But as I moved forward, I decided what I’d do. Listen good, bust in, shoot ’em up, fall back down the corridor and up into the old building if I couldn’t get them all. I almost laughed. Not much of a plan, but simple.
As I drew near, the snoring abruptly stopped. I heard someone drop his feet to the floor—no shoes—and the deep, heavy breathing of a man still half asleep. There was no other sound, no sign of any other man. From someplace behind me, I heard the faint scratching of a rat scurrying along, maybe checking to see if the flashlight would be good to eat. I crept forward at an achingly slow pace, trying to time my footfalls to the man’s breathing. The corridor opened up into a room, and the dim light that filtered into it came from narrow windows high up on the walls. The man was holed up in someone’s cellar.
When I was as sure as I was going to get that no one else was around, I curled myself around the corner till I could see the cot where the man sat scratching himself. The funk of the place burned sharply in my nostrils: piss and grease, sweat and beer. I took two steps toward the man and realized that the darkness of his skin was not merely shadow but pigment. I raised my gun and drew a bead.
“Pease,” I said, my voice a gargle.
Donny Pease turned toward me with a world of weariness in his expression. “One-eyed fool,” he said.
I extended the gun to arm’s length and began to shuffle angrily toward him. “Go ahead and move, Pease. One good eye means I got real good aim now.”
“I ain’t goin’ nowhere.” There was a dull glimmer in his eyes. “You got me, I see.”
I hurried around the cot to get a clearer view of Pease’s hands. As I stepped forward to put the barrel of my gun to Pease’s neck, the light seemed to spark like lightning for a moment and my head snapped forward. My knees buckled; I wanted to piss. Before the light faded entirely, I crumpled toward the cot and my eye caught a close view of the flaking skin of Pease’s knees. The floor is cool, I thought, dry packed dirt. I remember that the familiar smell of that dirt floor gave me a sweet feeling before I blacked out.
* * *
In the dark, I felt a sharp pain at my knee. Maybe a cramp but—growing sharper and clearer.
I came to with a jerk and tried to lash my leg away from the sharp thing, but I could not move it at all. I snapped my head from side to side, trying to clear the cobwebs. There was a snicker and a lower chuckle, and I sensed a small figure skipping away from me. Still I could not see; my left arm was immobilized, and my right was cuffed to something heavy. Both legs were bound tight. I felt I had to fight to catch my breath. After a moment, I realized that a burlap sack covered my head.
There were figures around me: two, maybe a third, quiet behind me. Skittering before me, nervous and excited, was a man I guessed to be the runt. He came close and stuck me in the leg again—something like the tip of an ice pick welded onto some brass knucks. I strained and lifted myself in the chair I was bound to. But my right wrist was handcuffed to something heavy and metal and my legs could not move, so I sat back down rather than fall on my face.
Snickering laughter from the runt, giggling. A retard, maybe, a head case. My stomach, already churning and empty, heaved up a bit more from the general air of him.
“Fairy,” I croaked.
The heel of the runt’s little shoe cracked into my chest and sent the wind out of my lungs. The force of it tipped the chair back onto two legs for a moment.
“All right, Mr. Frye. We don’t want to make Mr. Caudill uncomfortable.”
I bobbed my head from side to side, trying to form a picture of the room from the spangled light I could see through the holes in the rough fabric. I felt warmth oozing from both legs just above my knees, blood trickling down the inside of my baggy trousers and along my calf and into my shoe. Nothing serious, I thought. The fairy likes to poke his little pin into things.
“You trouble me, Mr. Caudill. You disrupt my timetable. I suppose it’s Detective Caudill, now, is it not?”
A snicker from the runt, and a raspy gut-laugh from a seated man to my right; dark, probably Pease. I heard a low grunt and heavy breathing directly behind me. That made three, plus the man who had spoken. Though the conversational tone was quite different from the speech I had heard in the old barn, I knew it was Sherrill. I could not guess where I was. If I had been unconscious, they might have taken me anywhere; I might have only been taken upstairs from the cellar. If it was some sort of hiding place, there might have been any number of rednecks lounging about in other rooms. I tried to let all the tension out of my arms, tried to save my s
trength.
“I apologize for my associate’s behavior. You see, it’s a grim business we’re in, and he takes his amusement where he can.” Sherrill took a step into the room. “You really should take better care of your weapon, Detective. This revolver is filthy. That makes it, perhaps, untrustworthy, as liable to kill the owner as anyone else. And yet I’ve heard you’re quite a marksman.”
Maybe my mind was filling in what my eye couldn’t see, but I could make out his stooped figure in outline, leaning against a cabinet, waving the gun like it weighed too much for him.
I said, “Sherrill, is it? I heard you were dead.”
“Clearly you are in receipt of bad information.”
I worked my left arm and my legs. I was in a wooden chair. It could be broken, I knew, but my right wrist was handcuffed to something heavy and immovable; so if I broke free, I’d still be stuck.
“I believe the barrel of this thing has been bent! How can you shoot, Mr. Caudill, with a pistol so untrue? Is this the gun you used when you shot that little Negro boy in the neck?”
I said nothing, but I hoped he could feel the heat coming off me.
“Have I heard the story right, Mr. Caudill? You did shoot him in the neck, didn’t you? For my money, that’s the way to do it. I’ve seen a darky or two dispatched to hell with a shot to the neck. A true shot will sever the spinal cord, and the whole animal just flops over like a pile of soiled laundry. With only a fair shot, he’ll at the least be discouraged from sassing you. Isn’t that right, Mr. Pease?”
“I guess,” said Pease.
“Mr. Pease is just waiting for the money he’s been promised. When he gets it, I suppose he’ll be on his way down to Dixie and his kin and all the little pickaninnies he’s fathered. What’s your feeling about the Negro situation, Detective?”
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