Till the Butchers Cut Him Down

by Marcia Muller

  “Anyone else on that list who’s a possible suspect?”

  “No.” She shook her head and handed back the notebook. “The rest are still here, and none of them’re devious enough for what you’re talking about.”

  I asked for and wrote down Herb Pace’s address. “Is there anyone else you can think of who could give me some insight into the time of the turnaround?”

  Koll pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Well, there’s Amos Ritter. He’s a writer. Big fat paperback historicals that you buy for long plane trips. Has quite an interest in local history, too, so he might be helpful to you. Lives in a big brick house on top of the hill—Raymond Lewis’s old place, he was one of the founders of Keystone. I can’t give you the exact address, but it’s on Crest Avenue; anybody can point it out.”

  I noted the writer’s name. “One last question, and I won’t take up any more of your time. Is there a motel in town?”

  Koll smiled pityingly at me. “Not anymore. I recommend you try Schmidt’s Guest House in Pearl Alley.” She gave me brief directions. “Jeannie Schmidt keeps a clean place, and it’s cheap. Plus she’s a notorious gossip. Who knows?” She winked. “You might learn something I don’t know.”

  * * *

  The town, I noticed, had a lot of little unpaved lanes that ran between the regular streets, and each had been given a name. I found Schmidt’s Guest House on one of those, set back a ways and screened by two big maple trees. I approached the old-fashioned frame house on a carpet of fallen leaves; a seedpod came spinning down and lit on my shoulder. In college I’d had a friend from Vermont; she called the two-winged seedpods “helicopters.”

  Jeannie Schmidt—a tiny, birdlike woman with a quick, breathy voice and a thick braid of blond hair hanging down her back—told me I was her first customer that week. She showed me to a large front room furnished in what looked to be good antiques. The bathroom was down the hall and had a very rudimentary shower; Jeannie—as she insisted I call her—apologized twice for the inconvenience. She seemed to have an exaggerated idea of what amenities Californians were used to and was astonished when I told her that for the first year I’d lived in my house I’d put up with a toilet located in a cold cubicle on the back porch. We settled on a very reasonable rate for the room, and then I asked to use the phone, promising to put long-distance calls on my credit card.

  First, Mick. My nephew wasn’t at home or at my office. I left the guesthouse number on both machines.

  Next, Noah Romanchek. His secretary at GGL told me he’d flown up to Bootlegger’s Cove that morning and hadn’t yet returned. I also left the number with her.

  Finally, Amos Ritter. The writer had a soft voice with a touch of the South in it; he readily agreed to see me and gave me directions to what he called his “Gothic horror.”

  * * *

  It was a Gothic horror: dark red brick, with turrets and arched windows and stained-glass panels depicting rather violent religious scenes. The slate roof was topped by elaborate ironwork that resembled angry fists raised at the heavens; marble steps led up to a double front door with more stained-glass insets, these depicting the Crucifixion. As I rang the bell I half expected Lurch the butler to answer.

  The man who greeted me was in pleasant contrast to the house: slight, blond, with a receding hairline and a fine-featured sensitive face; clad in jeans and a blue velour pullover and shod in plush-lined moccasins. His easy manner made the enormous, high-ceilinged foyer less forbidding. He led me to a parlor whose walls were covered with built-in bookcases, seated me on a leather sofa, and poured two glasses of sherry from a crystal decanter.

  I complimented him on the room while warming my hands in the heat from the fireplace.

  “In a house like this,” he said, “one has to create oases of comfort. In a sense, I suppose I bought it to prove that anything can be turned into a home.”

  “It was built by a founder of Keystone Steel?”

  He handed me one of the wineglasses, took his to an armchair, and propped his feet up on a hassock. “Raymond Lewis. Old man Lewis was a religious fanatic—hence the gory stained glass—and a compulsive spender—hence everything else. There’re six bedrooms, six bathrooms, all with hand-painted tiles, a ballroom on the top floor, and a bowling alley in the basement.”

  “Amazing. You live alone here?”

  “I am, as they say, between relationships, and finding a new partner poses a bit of a problem. I’m gay, and few men of my orientation hang out in dying steel towns—unless they’re fond of drunken unemployed mill-hunks. But I’m quite happy rattling around here by myself; I have a great many books and hobbies. My firearms collection is considered one of the best in the state, and I’m also into restoring antique furniture.”

  “Local history is also one of your interests, I’m told. Are you from the area?”

  “Biloxi, Mississippi.”

  “Then how and why …?”

  “How and why did I end up here?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, like many a southern boy, I spent my adolescence in the closet. And also like many, I later headed west to your town. S.F. State, to study creative writing. My parents came to visit during my freshman year; it didn’t take them long to catch on to certain nuances of my lifestyle. They stopped sending money, and I started going to school part-time and working odd jobs to get by. Six years later I was still in the creative writing program and living with a man who was offered a teaching position at the state university at California—that’s a little south of here. When he moved, I went along.”

  Ritter paused, eyes contemplative. “The trouble with San Francisco was that I hung out in bars and coffeehouses with other young writers more than I wrote. And when any of us did write, we all sounded the same. I decided that if I got away to a place that was completely foreign to me, I’d eventually start sounding like myself. And I guess I do—I sure as hell don’t sound like anybody else. Some people call my books potboilers, and to a certain extent they are; but writing them pleases me, and they pay to keep this Gothic horror up, so who am I to complain?”

  He raised his glass in a toast, and I responded in kind.

  I said, “I assume because you’re not from this area, you have a certain detachment about what goes on here.”

  “In a way. You said on the phone that you’re interested in the Keystone mess. T. J. Gordon’s your client?”

  “Yes.” I explained Suits’s present circumstances.

  “I heard about the explosion,” Ritter said. “It made the national news and, of course, the tabloids. People here couldn’t stop speculating.”

  “Speculating that someone connected with Keystone might be the responsible party?”

  “Uh-huh. Very few people in Monora really understand what happened with the mill. The Keystone board and management were a bunch of shortsighted fuckups who didn’t realize how far into the ground they’d run the company until it was way too late. Most of them—Herb Pace, the former CEO, is a good example—still don’t get it.”

  “Tell me about Herb Pace.”

  “He was the first to be fired. Your client arrived in town, and before he’d unpacked, Pace was out on his ass. To add to that humiliation, his marriage fell apart as soon as the big salary he’d been paying himself stopped.”

  So Pace had been Suits’s sacrificial lamb. “What about the other Keystone execs?”

  “The ones who’re still in the area are retired and living off their investments. Others found jobs elsewhere. People like them do a lot of damage and still manage to land on their feet.” He paused, thinking. “Labor didn’t play a much loftier part in the Keystone debacle, though. The USWA local made extreme demands, and when they weren’t met, they used dirty tactics. Your client arrived at a crisis point, and for a while it looked as if he might have a strike or even a riot on his hands. Then the head of the local, Ed Bodine, was caught dealing drugs and sent to prison. After that, union leadership more or less collapsed.”

  “When was Bodine
arrested?”

  “Shortly after Gordon took over. He was dealing cocaine. Claimed he was framed, but some very reputable people, including a member of his own union, testified to the contrary.”

  “Can you name names?”

  Ritter thought, shook his head. “I can’t recall any.”

  I made a mental note to ask Chief Koll about the arrest and trial.

  Ritter got up to pour more wine. “The way I see it,” he went on, “Gordon was a man with a tough job—a near impossible job—to do, and he went ahead and did it. Unfortunately, he’s not particularly likable, certainly no diplomat, and neither are the people he surrounds himself with. Their tactics struck everybody as excessively heavy-handed and insensitive. I always thought he should have used his wife in a community-relations capacity; apparently she was charming and might have been able to do him some good. But as it was, she wasn’t here long enough—”

  “Wait a minute—Anna Gordon came to Monora?”

  Ritter looked surprised at the sharpness of my tone. “For a couple of months right at the beginning, but then she went back to California. There were rumors that the marriage was in trouble.”

  I replayed my mental tape of Anna’s and my conversation on the beach at the cove the day she died. What had she said about accompanying Suits to his turnaround sites? That she’d tried but it hadn’t worked well. And I’d had the impression that she was about to tell me something important but decided against it. Later she’d claimed she could give me no insight into either Lost Hope or Keystone, because she and Suits had agreed to a trial separation at the time he went to Pennsylvania and hadn’t worked things out until after he finished in Nevada. But now I found she’d lied about going to both places.

  Anna had also said something that struck me as interesting, but that I didn’t pursue because I felt it was none of my business: there were things she would have done differently if she’d been safe in the marriage. Now I wished I’d asked her what she meant.

  * * *

  Ritter insisted I stay to dinner—an elegant caviar-and-lox omelet and a salad—so it was after ten by the time I got back to the guest house. The writer had handed me no further surprises about Suits’s time in Monora, although the stories he told affected me strongly. He told of grown men and women crying when they received their layoff notices; of workers begging to take a pay cut to five dollars an hour if they could keep their jobs; of union food-and-clothing drives; of families piling their possessions in trucks and of leave-takings reminiscent of those of the Great Depression. Jobs at the new mini-mills in Alabama had been offered to the workers with the most seniority, but few took them; it was hard for older people to pull up roots that went back in some cases for generations. Militant young workers spurned the offers, too, because the wages were below scale; currently none were making what they could have had they relocated.

  As I drove back to the guest house I wondered what I would have done had I been in Suits’s position. Save a company, but destroy its employees’ lives? Return a profit to the shareholders, but let the men and women who had labored for it go hungry? The concept went against my idealistic grain, but my practical side recognized a certain necessity and inevitability in his actions. Possibly after having been in his line of work so long, he hadn’t even considered the human side of the equation.

  Jeannie Schmidt’s big frame house was dark except for a porch light and sconces in the hallways. A small lamp glowed on the bedside table in my room; the covers had been turned down and a note lay on my pillow. Noah Romanchek wanted me to call him.

  I left the room and tiptoed down the hall to the stairway, trying to avoid squeaky floorboards and instead hitting every one. The stairs creaked loudly, and I had to grope around to find the light switch for the alcove off the parlor where the phone was. Romanchek had left his home number, and he answered on the first ring.

  “I went up to Mendocino County this morning. T.J. is missing.”

  “What?”

  “He’s not at Bootlegger’s Cove. The cottage is empty. Josh and I called that cabdriver T.J. sometimes uses; he hasn’t seen him since he drove him to a clinic in Fort Bragg a week ago to have the cast removed from his arm. We had him come get us and take us into Elk; someone from the grocery store there dropped off supplies at the cottage last Wednesday, but nobody’s had any contact with T.J. since. Nobody’s seen him in Albion, Little River, Mendocino, or at the airport.”

  I thought of Moonshine Cottage: its loneliness; its view of the blackened rubble on the cliff top; the nearby precipitous drop to the rocks in the cove. “You don’t suppose he killed himself?”

  “There was no body, no note, no other evidence of that.”

  “You contacted the sheriff’s department?”

  “Filed a report. Sharon, what is it you want to talk with him about?”

  “There’re a few details I need to clear up.”

  “Anything I can help you with?”

  “No. Where do you suppose he went? And how?”

  “God knows. Hitchhiked, maybe. By the way, I couldn’t help but recognize the area code you called from. You’re in Monora?”

  Damn! I should have called back instead of leaving the number. Even though Romanchek had been very cooperative with my investigation, I didn’t trust him, sensed Suits didn’t really trust him, either. “Yes,” I said grudgingly.

  “These details you need to clear up—do they pertain to the Keystone turnaround?”

  “No, they’re personal.”

  “I see. How long have you been in Pennsylvania?”

  “Only the day.”

  “And have you found anything promising there?”

  “No. I’ll be coming back to California soon. Noah, has T.J. indicated to you at any time since the explosion that he was planning to leave the cove?”

  Romanchek was silent.

  I repeated the question.

  “Sorry, I was thinking. There is one thing, and in light of his disappearance I don’t like its implications one bit. The last time I went up there he said there was only one reason he’d leave—if he figured out who had set the explosion. Then, he told me, he’d go after the bastard and kill him.”

  Fifteen

  After talking with Romanchek for a few more minutes and coming to no definite conclusions, I went to bed but couldn’t sleep. The night passed slowly as I repeatedly changed position on the too-soft bed. The old house groaned and creaked; a wind kicked up around four in the morning, causing a tree branch to scratch against the window glass.

  So Suits had finally shaken off his apathy, I thought. Walked away from the rubble of his life. To where and to what purpose? The unanswerable question nagged at me. Without Anna to anchor him, and fueled by rage over her death, my client was a loose cannon, dangerous both to himself and to anyone his paranoid psyche might focus on.

  The thought of the damage he might do made me want to get up, drive straight back to Pittsburgh, and catch the next flight west. But what sense was there in that? Sure, I could go to Mendocino County, repeat Romanchek and Josh’s inquiries, but it sounded as though they’d been thorough. Still, given my distrust of the attorney …

  At five-thirty I got up and pulled on my jeans and sweater. Tiptoed through the silent house to the phone again and, not caring that it was only two-thirty there, called home. Mick answered on the sixth ring, his voice a groggy croak. “Wake up,” I said. “There’s something I need you to do.”

  “… Shar, do you know what time it is?”

  “Get used to this, kid. Rotten hours and calls in the middle of the night are what private investigation’s all about.”

  Grunt.

  “Mick!”

  “Okay, I’m here. I was trying to find a pencil and paper.”

  He was nothing if not willing—I had to give him that. Briefly I explained the circumstances of Suits’s disappearance. “I want you to go up there and verify what Romanchek told me. Ask as many people as you can if they’ve seen or spoken to Suits. K
eep detailed notes and call me here as soon as you’re finished.”

  “Shar, how am I supposed to get there? I don’t have a car, and I doubt Rae’ll lend me hers if I wake her up at three in the morning.”

  “Good Lord, you don’t have to leave yet! The trip’ll only take you three, three and a half hours.”

  “I still don’t think she’ll let me take the Ramblin’ Wreck on a weekend.”

  Now that I thought of Rae’s appropriately named old Rambler American, I didn’t want Mick driving it on the narrow, winding coast highway. “You can use mine. It’s parked at the general aviation terminal at Oakland Airport. Extra keys are hanging on the hook on the fridge.”

  “I can see them from here.” Now Mick sounded fully alert—even excited. “Shar, I waited all day, but there was nothing from NPRC on Sid Blessing.”

  “They’re a bureaucracy. We’ll be lucky if we hear in a week.”

  “Listen, I won’t be able to sleep any more tonight. I could go into the office and tinker—”

  “No! Every time you pull something illegal you’re putting my license in jeopardy.”

  “I won’t get caught.”

  “Oh, yeah? Remember what happened with the board of education?”

  “… Right. Well, maybe I’ll just run up to Mendocino now, get a head start.”

  “Yes, why don’t you do that?”

  It wasn’t until I was back in bed that I realized he would have one hell of a time getting to Oakland Airport at three in the morning.

  * * *

  At some point before dawn I fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep and woke woolly-mouthed and disoriented at a little after nine. I dragged myself along the hall for a cold shower, dressed, and followed the smell of coffee downstairs to a big 1950s-style kitchen that reminded me of the one at All Souls. Jeannie had told me to help myself; I filled the cup she’d set out and took it to the backyard, where I found her raking leaves.