“Just don’t carry it to work, okay? I’m running out of character references.”
“Why the boost? You don’t know me.”
“I got a break recently I didn’t deserve. I’m paying down the debt.”
After he left, taking the sheet with him, I put the money back in the safe, locked up, and stopped at a carryout restaurant on the way home; one of those places where you had to decide what kind of meat went into the sandwich, what kind of bread to put it between, whether you wanted it heated up, what to put on it, and what to drink with it. That exhausted every last gig in my dial-up brain.
I ate in the kitchen and tuned in a game show for company, but the host was smarmy and the contestants had all the intelligence of a traffic barrel. It was lonely with the set off, so I put Kay Starr on the turntable. All I heard was clicks and pops with some verses in between, and they sounded like a ripsaw going through knotty pine. I swapped Kay for something more contemporary, built a drink, a silly thing of gin with some mint leaves left over from a recipe that hadn’t been worth the prep. The drink wasn’t either; it tasted like Christmas punch marinated in last year’s fruitcake. I poured the rest into the sink and switched to Scotch.
I wasn’t celebrating; not the fact that I had work or my own damn good samaritanship. If Adams got the job, he’d probably lose his temper sometime, deck a union lobbyist, get himself tanked, and cuss me out for providing the bad break. I drank because I hadn’t had a drink since beer for breakfast.
The ice jingled in the glass. I had a first-class case of the shakes. What I really wanted was a pill.
I got as far as the telephone to call my teenage connection. The card belonging to the private therapist was still there poking out from under the standard. I finished my drink over the Free Press, reading about a city councilman under hack for inappropriate relations with a teenage boy; had another, listened to some more music, and went to bed. They say we dream every time we sleep, but as usual, they lie—a fact for which I was grateful. I’d had my share of nightmares in rehab.
SEVEN
Operator: Sheriff’s tip line. What’s your information?
Caller: I know who killed that Gates guy.
Operator: Yes, sir.
Caller: I don’t need a reward.
Operator: That’s refreshing.
Caller: It’s Fred Gudgast, works quality control at Ford River Rouge.
Operator: Why do you think he killed Mr. Gates?
Caller: He’s murdered at least three people at the plant and got away with it. He’s one of those serial killers, you know?
Operator: Have you any evidence?
Caller: He’s a miserable piece of shit, how’s that for evidence?
Operator: Does Mr. Gudgast even know Mr. Gates?
Caller: Serial killers don’t have to know their victims.
So you’re just guessing?
Fuck you, lady.
Thank you for calling.
I let it go on like that while I washed out my coffee cup, then turned off the tape player.
You had to feel sorry for operators of 911 and tip lines:
“What’s your emergency?”
“I can’t remember where I parked my car in the lot.”
“Try pushing the button on your key fob, ma’am.”
“I can’t; I lost my keys.”
“What’s your emergency?”
“I got my hand stuck in a vending machine.”
“How’d that happen, sir?”
“Fucking thing stole my dollar.”
“What’s your emergency?”
“This car in front of me’s had his blinker on for three miles.”
“Why not pass it?”
“Can’t. What if he decides to pull out finally?”
“What’s your emergency?”
“What’s the capital of Brazil?”
“Young man, get off the line at once.”
“What’s your emergency?”
“I flipped the self-cleaning lever by mistake and now my chicken’s burning.”
“What’s your emergency?”
“My next-door neighbor never closes his curtains. Every night I can see everything he’s got; believe me, it’s no treat.”
“What’s your emergency?”
“I can’t keep the raccoons out of my garbage.”
“What’s your emergency?’
“These directions don’t make any sense.”
“What’s your emergency?”
“I need the number of the Wal-Mart pharmacy.”
“What’s your emergency?”
“How do I program my TiVo?”
“What’s your emergency?”
“I’m lost in a corn maze.”
And people wondered why they ran out of sympathy.
* * *
Stay away from the wife, Ray Henty had said. But that was when my duties were restricted to playing deejay for people with hunches and grudges to unload. I got the number from the file and called it.
Donald Gates answered from beyond the grave: “No one can come to the phone right now. Please leave a message.” At least I assumed it was him. I cradled the receiver and left for Iroquois Heights.
The dead man smiled down at me from the billboard at the first exit. The city limits sign still read:
IROQUOIS HEIGHTS
HOME OF THE WARRIORS
YOU ARE UNDER SURVEILLANCE
I wondered how long it would be before I could cross that border without feeling like I was stepping into the O.K. Corral with a cap pistol in my holster.
The house was painted lime green, which somehow managed to look like the only color that made sense. It was a Wright knockoff, fresh enough for the junipers planted out front to resemble an architect’s drawing, bunches of broccoli easy to maintain. It was an old neighborhood, with some of the prewar saltboxes still standing on small lots among newer, larger houses, all well-kept; the local ordinances and the Homeowners’ Property Association were plenty clear on that subject.
“Mister? Are you looking for Mrs. Gates?”
I’d rung the bell and was about to push the button again when the woman called to me from a driveway across the street. She wore a cloth coat over a housedress, a scarf covering her hair and tied under her chin, and held that day’s rolled edition of the local paper. She looked about fifty, and like her house, kept well.
I threw away the cigarette I’d just lit. “Do you know where she is?”
“Belle Isle.”
“What’s on Belle Isle this time of year?”
“Homeless. Detroit lets them set up their tents there in the winter. Amelie helps out, bringing them food and blankets and whatever else they need.”
“I heard she’s the generous type.”
“I keep telling her she’s not helping them at all. Some of those people are in their twenties, and not handicapped so far as I can tell. Do you know what McDonald’s pays? Better than my Chester ever made driving a bread truck for Wonder. In a couple of months they’d save enough to put down a deposit on an apartment. But they’re not about to go to work until people stop giving them handouts.”
“I guess it helps to stay occupied, after what happened.”
“You know about that?” The frown she’d worn for the twentysomethings on the island turned down farther. “If you’re looking for a reward, you came to the wrong place. It’s her church putting it up.”
“I’ve got other business with Mrs. Gates. Do you know how long she’ll be gone?”
“All day, probably. When you waste time on a bunch like that, you waste a lot of it.”
She went back inside. I groped for another cigarette. I could have been the murderer, for all she knew; but she only had time to think about the people who wouldn’t flip burgers for a utility flat in the city, and she didn’t like wasting it.
* * *
A gust caught the Cutlass broadside as I drove over the MacArthur Bridge from Jefferson. It packed a wallop and I had to clamp
both hands on the wheel to avoid drifting into the opposite lane, where a delivery van was headed back toward the mainland on the double. Apart from that I had the span all to myself.
Lake St. Clair was gray as shale and looked about the same consistency. A frozen haze lay on the other side, behind which someone had built a scale model of Windsor, Ontario, out of lead. No telling what was going on there after sixteen straight days without sunshine; Canadians are coy about their suicides.
I never seem to visit Belle Isle in nice weather, when the picnic ground’s in use and the culture crowd is drifting in and out of the Dossin Marine Museum with its dioramas of bootlegging boats and artifacts from the Edmund Fitzgerald. Admiral Perry’s guns still guard the place, their muzzles spiked with twenty years’ worth of birds’ nests and exhausted condoms. I could have used the guns the time I almost left my brains on the softball diamond, soaked to my knees with snow. A lifetime ago. Someone’s parole would be coming up for review.
There was talk of turning the island over to Lansing and making it a state park; anything to avoid paying for the upkeep. Everything on it needed painting or patching or tearing down and burning up.
Well, the same was true of the city where I work. It was rotting from the top down and from the inside out like Dutch elm. The politicians let the homeless live in tents on public property and boarded up the houses they didn’t tear down.
I turned on a classical station to stop that train of thought. It could only lead to another three weeks in the Amy Winehouse Memorial Spa.
They’d picked the ball field to pitch their tents; a little Hooverville, only with nylon instead of canvas and space heaters powered by borrowed generators making a racket like billiard balls bouncing off the skulls of pro wrestlers. This was where all the folks who sold dead flowers on exit ramps and stood on street corners holding cardboard signs made from the north walls of their houses came to rest. Campfires were burning, against ordinance. I smelled Spam frying, coffee boiling, and cannabis. Joan Baez was driving Old Dixie down one last time on a portable CD player. Hip-hop vomited out of someone’s earbuds, loud enough to cause a brain hemorrhage to the one wearing them. It seemed no one wanted to bother to learn the harmonica anymore.
I parked and approached a group of men and women constructing a bonfire on the pitcher’s mound with chairs and mattresses. There’s nothing like the smell of urine cooking to take your mind off the cold.
“Who’s in charge?”
A man who was all white-stubbled chin and hook nose leaned a maple headboard against his knee and pulled a filthy scarf away from the bottom half of his face. He’d used his teeth to open bottles. “All of us are, brother. The island’s a socialist state.”
“Okay, Woody. That’s a shore-bound breeze wafting from Canada at about a thousand miles an hour. Where you going to sleep after you burn down all the tents?”
“What do you care, brother? What’s anybody care what happens to us no more?”
“You know what McDonald’s is paying by the hour?”
“Fuck you.”
“I don’t either, but everyone else seems to. Happen to know where Amelie Gates is working today?”
“Don’t know nobody by that name.”
“There a volunteer tent?”
He blew his nose on the sleeve of his camo coat. He was a colorful character. “That white one there, up by the fountain.”
“Much obliged, Woody.”
“The name’s Howard. Who’s this Woody you got me confused with?”
“A guy who sang about rock-candy mountains and jails made out of tin. You ought to look him up on your smart phone.”
“Got one, wise guy.” He dug it out of a pocket and shook it in my face.
“Okay, Howard. No offense meant.”
He was poking at his phone in the rearview. If he dug up Woody Woodpecker first, I was going to get my car keyed.
The bust of Dante Alighieri topped a marble pedestal on the main drag, wearing a cabbage on his head. What the author of The Divine Comedy was doing in that location was anybody’s guess. He didn’t look any too pleased to be there.
The tent erected nearby was really a canopy, stretched across the tops of aluminum poles secured with ropes and stakes. A long trestle table ran down the center with clam chowder, dumplings, scalloped potatoes, and shaved ham staying warm in aluminum containers above Sterno. A bevy of women wearing aprons over topcoats and earflapped caps kept the containers filled from an army of gas grills at the back of the tent and ladled the contents onto paper plates for those who couldn’t help themselves. I got in line behind a red-haired kid with wads of Kleenex stuck under a pair of stereo earphones, but I didn’t pick up a plate.
“Is one of you ladies Amelie Gates?”
“That’s me.”
A woman behind the scalloped potatoes swept a sleeve across her brow. Her French accent was as out of place as Dante.
I didn’t know what to expect; a drawn-looking woman, maybe, with pinched nostrils and dark circles under her eyes. Maybe someday I’ll learn not to form conclusions ahead of evidence, and then my detective training will begin.
The Widow Gates was small, but built to proportion, with a small upturned nose, eyes like black olives, and a delicate mouth set in a small square chin. Her figure was indeterminate under the apron and quilted coat. The checked hunter’s cap covered her hair, but it would be as dark as her eyes and probably short; I have fixed ideas about Gallic women. The smile she wore to greet me looked genuine, and entirely without regret. But everyone mourns in his or her own way. They don’t all tear at their faces and scrape their knees throwing themselves on the coffin at graveside.
“You look like you could use a break.”
“We all do. What makes me special? Where’s your plate?” She looked doubtfully at my suit and warm overcoat.
“I’m not hungry,” I lied; the fare smelled like a Nordic feast, and I hadn’t eaten since Subway last night. “I’m here on business, if you’ve got a minute.”
She glanced sideways at her fellow volunteers. “That’s just about what I’ve got, Mr.—?”
“Walker.” I held out my card. “I’m trying to find out who knows who killed Donald Gates.”
EIGHT
The smile faltered a little when she read the card. She turned to the woman standing next to her. “Beverly, can you look after my station for a few minutes?”
The woman nodded, and moved into the middle position between dumplings and potatoes. Amelie Gates ditched her apron and we left the canopy and sat down at an unoccupied picnic table. She was sweating a little from standing over the heated dishes; she unbuttoned her coat and let it hang free. She was slender and moderately busty.
“Those billboards were a good idea,” I said. “People drive by them every day. They stick.”
“I can only take credit for the line. Putting up signs was Michel’s idea.”
“Michel?”
“Our—my son. He’s ten. He remembered when our cat went missing two years ago, and we put up posters all over the neighborhood with its picture. I was crying at the time, over so little news from the sheriff’s department. He’s a sweet boy. Making the arrangements kept us busy and took our minds off our grief. He helped me pick out the photograph. It’s one of my favorites; I didn’t know, when I took it—it would be—” Her chin quivered. She looked down at her hands folded on the table.
“Did you find the cat?”
“No. Does anyone ever?”
“Once, anyway. It was found in perfect health, licking the condensation off the wall of a luggage compartment in an airplane a thousand miles away from home. You never know about these things.”
“The hell with the cat. He barfed all over my best sofa.”
“Tell me about Donald. Lieutenant Henty said you met in Quebec.”
“My father was caretaker of a hunting lodge. He still is. The place Donald used to hunt was bought by a corporation and reserved for executive retreats. I worked the coun
ter, checking in guests and seeing to their comfort. He was cute. He had a start on a beard—it’s kind of a uniform of the sport—but it was coming in sort of sparse and ginger-colored. It made him look younger than he was rather than the other way around. I was—I guess you could say I was—” She groped through her command of the language.
“Smitten.”
She brightened. “Yes. It’s an old-fashioned word, isn’t it? You don’t hear it much anymore.”
“In a few years half the world won’t be able to understand the other half. What did he hunt?”
“Elk.” She shook her head, still smiling. “He wasn’t very good at it, I’m afraid. In eight years he never shot one. Do you know what I think? I think he had lots of chances but never took them. It was just an excuse to get away with friends and commune with nature.”
“What were his friends like?”
“I never really got to know them. He’d had some of them since high school, and they were scattered all over the United States. They only got together during the season, and he stopped going after Michel was born. The trips were too expensive to justify, with a family to look after.”
“I’d like the names of his friends, if you can get them.”
“I suppose I can. He kept an address book. Why?”
“I used to hunt deer with my father upstate. He always said if you really want to know who your friends are, you should spend three days with them in a hunting camp. The veneer wears off quick.”
“Why would someone kill Donald? That’s the question I want to ask when they find who did it.”
I lit a cigarette, mainly to cover the smell of warm food drifting my way. I don’t eat breakfast and I didn’t want to chisel off the chronically hungry. “You seem pretty sure they’ll find him.”
“I have to. It’s all I have, apart from my son. I lost the baby, you know.”
“I heard. I’m sorry. What do you think of the reward your church put up?”
She looked me in the eye. “It’s a damn nuisance. People keep calling the house with what they think they know. I tell them to call the sheriff, or the church. I’ve tried to persuade the Reverend Melville to withdraw it. She says that’s up to the person who offered it, and he’s adamant. Do you know who he is?”
You Know Who Killed Me Page 5
