Till the Butchers Cut Him Down

by Marcia Muller

  Silence.

  “Mick?”

  “Okay, I borrowed Rae’s car again this morning and drove out there. The wife wouldn’t talk to me, but I got some information from the cops who’re assigned to the case.”

  “You’re not licensed to—”

  “I didn’t represent myself as a licensed P.I. But the cops were impressed that I’m working under your license; the one in charge had read that newspaper story about you opening the agency.”

  “How did you convince them you were working for me?”

  “… Well, last week, you know? I, um, took the liberty of having some business cards printed up.”

  “McCone Investigations cards with your name on them?”

  “Uh, right.”

  “Who paid for them?”

  “… McCone Investigations. But listen to this, Shar!”

  “I’m all ears,” I said sarcastically.

  He ignored my tone. “I gave the cops a story about working a missing-heir case and needing to get in touch with Blessing’s wife. And while the one was looking up the phone number in the file, I sneaked a glance at it and got Sid’s Social Security number.”

  “Mick, do not use that number to request anything we can’t legally access!”

  Silence again.

  “And just forget what it says in The Hacker’s Handbook.”

  When he spoke, his voice was pained. “Do you want to hear the rest of this or not?”

  Curiosity got the better of me. “All right, what’s the rest?”

  “Through various means, I found out that Sid was once in the service. Army.”

  “Various means?”

  “Mostly legal.”

  “Mostly?”

  “Mostly.”

  I sighed. “Okay, what’s done is done. Send a Form One-eighty to the National Personnel Records Center—”

  “I already faxed it.”

  “Good work.”

  “Does this mean you’re not too pissed at me?”

  I hesitated, not wanting to send the wrong message. But he had done good work, mostly legal means or not. “I’m not too pissed at you. But, Mick, don’t make any more unauthorized expenditures like the business cards, or I’ll have to dock your pay.”

  “My pay? All I’m getting is room and board!”

  “As of today you’re on salary. Until I can hire a real assistant.”

  I hung up on his surprised exclamation, checked the directory listings for airlines, and called to find out about flights east from Las Vegas. Then I dialed Noah Romanchek’s number. The attorney told me that as far as he knew, Suits was still at Moonshine Cottage.

  “We’re about to pack it in at GGL and turn the operation back to Kirk Cameron,” he added. “No point in going on without T.J. Carole Lattimer was released from the hospital and went back to Chicago last night.”

  “How is she?”

  “Fair. The surgery was a success, and psychologically she feels somewhat better now that the man who mugged her is behind bars.”

  “When did they pick him up? Who is he?”

  “Oakland P.D. picked him up on an unrelated charge yesterday. He’s a maintenance worker at one of the buildings near the Convention Center. Confessed to a series of muggings in the area, and insists he’s never heard of T.J. Gordon or Golden Gate Lines. As far as anyone can tell, it’s the truth.”

  “Random violence, then. Does T.J. know about this?”

  “Not yet.”

  “He should.”

  “I’m not sure he’d care. And frankly I’ve given up on trying to get through to him.”

  “Noah, would you try one more time? I would, but I’m out of town right now. I’ll need to talk with him when I get back, though, and some other people want to contact him as well. Will you go up to Bootlegger’s Cove and ask him to come back to San Francisco?”

  “It sounds important.”

  “It is.”

  Romanchek waited for me to elaborate. When he realized I wasn’t going to, he said, “All right, I’ll get hold of Josh and fly up tomorrow.”

  “Thanks. By the way, how’s Josh doing?” I recalled the pilot’s tears and anger at the ruins of Moonshine House when he’d ferried me to the cove, and his withdrawn silence on the trip back.

  “Not very well. He was fond of Anna, of course, and her death hit him hard. He’s camped out in T.J.’s condo at Bay Vista—the company okayed it, since his lease was up at the beginning of September on the place where he was living, and given the uncertainty of the situation, he didn’t want to renegotiate it. But without Suits, Josh has got nothing to do, just rattles around there and makes an occasional run over to North Field to check on the aircraft.”

  “Then maybe it’ll do him good to take you up to the cove.”

  “Maybe.” Romanchek didn’t sound too sanguine.

  I said good-bye to the attorney, packed, checked out of the hotel, and headed for the sheriff’s substation.

  * * *

  No identification had been found with the August man’s remains, and Westerkamp was prematurely discouraged. He would, he told me, query Monora, Pennsylvania, as well as surrounding jurisdictions for reports of missing persons; if any seemed probable matches, they’d try to get an I.D. through dental charts. But that was a long shot, and the deputy knew it. His investigation was stalled until he could send someone to question Suits and his associates.

  I made my statement and gave him the information on Suits’s whereabouts, hoping Romanchek would be able to bring our mutual client back to the city, where he could monitor the official questioning. Then I said, “You know, if I were to go to Monora, I might be able to help you.”

  Westerkamp smiled cynically. “More historical research?”

  “Well, look what I turned up here.”

  “Yeah, a case that’s probably going to plague me in my declining years.”

  “Not necessarily. And you’ve got to admit, it’d be a lot more cost-effective for you if I went there on my client’s money than if you had to send somebody or go yourself.”

  He shrugged. “You want to make the trip, I’m not gonna stop you.” Then he scribbled on a scratch pad and passed the sheet across his desk to me. “That’s the name of Monora’s chief of police. I’ll let them know you’re coming.”

  I glanced at the paper. The chief was a woman, Nancy Koll. “Thanks.”

  “No, I thank you. Heading out now?”

  “If I hurry, I can catch a red-eye east from Vegas.”

  “Well, Godspeed.”

  For a long time as I drove south across the dark desert I could see the lights of Lost Hope in my rearview mirror.

  * * *

  I just made the last red-eye to Chicago. It would put me into O’Hare with forty minutes to spare before my connection to Pittsburgh. The flight was nearly empty; after we reached cruising altitude, I pulled a blanket and pillow from the overhead bin, raised the armrests of the adjacent seats, and curled up to sleep.

  For about an hour I dozed, but then I came wide awake. After shifting around for a while, trying to get comfortable, I sat up again, propped the pillow between my head and the window, and willed the plane’s vibrations to lull me. Finally I accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to sleep any more and sat up straight. Stared fixedly at the black window and thought of Hy. By now he’d finished with his business in San Diego, might even be flying east himself. Briefly I fantasized about running into him at O’Hare, then pushed the thought from my mind. I’d never had that much luck.

  At a little after eight in the morning I’d arrive in Chicago. Another time change, and I’d land in Pittsburgh before noon. Grab a rental car and a map, get some breakfast, and plan my route. Sleep for a few hours in a motel near the airport. And then I’d be off to Monora, down on the Monongahela River, halfway to the West Virginia line.

  With every air mile, I was closer to learning the identity of Anna’s killer. My would-be killer. He wasn’t in Pennsylvania, though; I’d have to return to Cali
fornia to bring him down. But even as the distance between us lengthened, I was beginning to sense the outlines of his persona.

  The jet engines thrummed as the plane sped across the continent toward the dawn that now streaked the sky. I watched the shifting light and shadow and felt a curious sense of inevitability. My client was a man out of my past; we’d reconnected, and it had almost proved fatal. Whatever set those events in motion had begun in Monora; now I was going there to uncover it. The sensation both discomfited and excited me. I’d always resisted the notion of fate, but never failed to respond to its pull.

  Again, I decided, I would just let events unfold.

  Part Three

  Monora, Pennsylvania

  Early October

  Fourteen

  The road paralleled the railway tracks that ran along the edge of the Monongahela. On the river a barge heaped with coal moved slowly north. To my right were steep hills covered with sagging wood-frame and brick houses, their walls blackened by soot. The late-afternoon light did nothing to relieve their dinginess; the only cheerful spots were big orange garbage bags with jack-o’-lantern faces crayoned on them, put out early for Halloween.

  After a while the pavement jogged away from the river and climbed some. A small sign that said Monora appeared; the population figure had been painted out and not replaced. The road dipped down into a commercial section, its buildings soot-blackened like the houses on the hill above: Mellon Bank, Dutch Boy Paints, Rexall Drugs; defunct movie theater, McGlennon’s Pub, U.S. Post Office; Steel City Pizza, state liquor store, defunct dress shop. Every third business, including the Monora Hotel and Frank’s Department Store, was dead; the town had a curiously empty feel, in spite of it being only four-thirty on a Friday afternoon. Cars lined the curbs, but I saw no pedestrians except for a couple of cops crossing a side street from the police station to a doughnut shop.

  I kept following the road past more boarded-up and abandoned buildings until it curved again and ran downhill toward the river. And there on a flat plain that bowed out into the Monongahela lay what I’d traveled thousands of miles to see.

  The enormous shut-down steel mill stretched for nearly a mile. Huge corrugated metal buildings, corroded and stained red-orange. High catwalks and covered walkways spanning weed-choked railroad tracks. Rows of tall smokestacks that emitted nothing; finger piers where no barges were moored; paralyzed cranes, tumbledown sheds, and cracked pavement; heaps of coal that would never fuel the now-cold blast furnaces. All of it rusting away.

  I made a U-turn, got out of my rental car. Crossed a debris-filled drainage ditch to the high chain-link fence and stood peering through it. The wind blew strongly here at the river’s edge, cold and crisp with autumn. Above me metal clanked monotonously; I glanced up at a nearby walkway, saw a lattice work of corroded iron dangling and banging against a support. Otherwise there was no sound and nothing moved.

  I felt the same sense of desolation and futility that I’d experienced when Suits took me to Hunters Point. Wondered if his plans to revitalize the old naval base had roots in guilt over what he’d done here. If so, it would be small atonement; the closing of Keystone’s Monora mill had not only taken away livelihoods but also ended an era.

  In the 1950s the mill had been one of the largest in America, rolling over five million tons of steel a year. Its products—building beam and plate and rail and rod and wire—could be found from coast to coast: in the skyscrapers of Manhattan, in the cars rolling off Detroit’s assembly lines, in the train yards of the Midwest, in the freeways of California. But after 1957 production dropped off in an alarming series of cyclical swings. Management blamed the federal government for failing to protect the industry from foreign competition; they blamed the steelworkers’ union for demanding high wages and imposing inefficient work regulations. They blamed everyone but themselves.

  When management could have invested in new technologies, they clung to outmoded open-hearth furnaces. When they could have investigated new product lines, they devoted little money to research-and-development. When they could have worked productively with labor, they adopted an adversarial stance. In 1959 the entire industry was crippled by a major strike that ended only when President Eisenhower invoked the Taft-Hartley Act, forcing workers back to the mills.

  Keystone’s worst misstep came in the late seventies, when a new two-hundred-million-dollar blast furnace—installed only after baffling technical problems, interminable delays, and cost overruns that sent their accountants reeling—proved, as many would have predicted, to be a white elephant. The company plunged further into the red. Management’s response was to raise prices and send senior executives, board members, and their wives on an all-expense-paid “fact-finding” junket to such hubs of heavy industry as Tahiti, Hong Kong, and Australia. In 1982 the layoffs began in earnest. In the late eighties the frightened board finally threw nearly seventy years of deeply entrenched tradition to the winds and sent for Suits.

  No one, I thought as I gripped the cold links of the fence around the corpse of what had once been a mighty, vital mill, could blame Suits for what had happened here. By the time he was summoned, there had been little left to work with.

  I recalled his description of what he’d found upon his arrival in Monora: “Fifty-five hundred of the most depressed steel-workers on the face of the earth; they’d taken pay cut after pay cut, and relations had deteriorated so badly that management was afraid to walk down the same side of the street with labor. Railroad tracks that a locomotive didn’t pass over but twice a week. Whole buildings shut down, others only half used. The open-hearth sheds were just shells, but Keystone couldn’t afford to demolish them. Most of the blast furnaces had been dynamited and were just lying in pieces, waiting to be hauled away. There were virtual graveyards of abandoned coke ovens and equipment. And this they expected me to turn around?”

  But he had turned Keystone. He sent the board on an extended vacation and fired management. He negotiated as best he could with labor. Then he pulled the plug on the mill and sold off every asset that could possibly be liquidated. With the proceeds he built three mini-mills—small and efficient, each offering a single product at below-market cost—in Alabama, where land and labor were cheap and steel was in short supply. Keystone now returned a small but respectable profit to its shareholders.

  Suits had saved another company. But to do so he’d destroyed a mill, a town, a way of life. Now that I’d seen this place I was sure that what he’d done here was sufficient grounds for harassment—and ultimately murder.

  * * *

  It took me less than a minute to realize that the Monora Police Station was a former tavern. Its brick and glass-block facade and double doors with small diamond-shaped windows gave away its previous incarnation; even the framework for a neon sign remained. Amused, I pushed through the doors and found a familiar precinct-house setup. The desk sergeant told me that Chief Nancy Koll was at the doughnut shop across Cop Station Alley, and motioned toward the side street where I’d earlier seen the two uniforms crossing.

  Koll was a strong-featured woman in her fifties, a little under six feet tall, with a cordial if somewhat abrupt manner. When I introduced myself, she recognized my name, dismissed the subordinate she’d been conferring with, and asked me to join her.

  “Coffee here’s okay, but I don’t recommend their doughnuts,” she told me. “We use the shop as our conference room; it’s better heated than the station.”

  I ordered coffee and asked her if Deputy Westerkamp had explained why I was coming to Monora.

  “He did. Smart man to use you. Saves his department money.” Then she launched into a tirade about budget cuts for law enforcement, and I started to like her—as most of us do when we meet someone whose opinions are a near match for our own.

  I asked, “Have you turned up anything on who Westerkamp’s dead man might be?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got a man going through our missing-person files right now, but it’s a slow pro
cess. A lot of people up and went around the time we’re talking about. Husbands went out for a pack of cigarettes; wives took up with traveling men; kids ran off to escape another drunken beating. Happens that way when your livelihood’s taken from you.”

  “The town’s in bad shape since the mill closed.”

  “The town’s dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.”

  I took my notebook from my bag. “My client … Did Westerkamp mention I’m working for T. J. Gordon?”

  The web of lines around Koll’s eyes deepened. “He did. Can’t say as I have much sympathy for Gordon, considering what he did to us, but it’s still a tough thing to lose a wife that way. And unlike a lot of people around here, I understand that he just did what he had to.”

  “There’s active resentment of him, then. Can you think of anyone who would go so far as to follow him west to get revenge?”

  “No one in particular. Is that what you think the dead man was after?”

  “If so, he wasn’t the only one. He died over a year ago, but somebody else began harassing Gordon this past August, a few weeks before his house blew up.” I flipped through the pages of my notebook, then handed it to her. “This is a list of people who Gordon thinks could have been responsible.”

  She read it, nodding a couple of times. “The first name you can scratch—he’s dead. Suicide. The second was one of the husbands who went out for smokes. I suppose he might’ve headed west, but he never had enough ambition or brains to stick to any one course of action. This one”—she pointed—“Herb Pace. He’s a sorry case.”

  “How so?”

  “Pace was CEO at Keystone before Gordon fired him. Lived high, had one of those trophy wives. She divorced him, took what was left of his money. Now he lives on River Road across from the railroad tracks and spends most of his time at McGlennon’s Pub. Pace really hates your client, but I know for certain that he hasn’t left town in the past few years. You might want to talk with him, though, to get background on the years when Gordon was here. And he might know of somebody who has left town with revenge on his mind. Just be sure to catch him before noon while he’s still lucid.”