Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places

by Loren Estleman

  And he’d saved himself a hundred grand.

  Something stirred in the connecting doorway.

  “Counselor? Thought you went home.”

  “She did. I waited to make sure she didn’t come back for something she forgot.”

  Malavaggio didn’t recognize the man coming in carrying a revolver. They’d never met face to face.

  The Tree on Execution Hill

  This is my first published short story. It appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 1977, not long after my first novel was published. At the time I’d just started my last newspaper job, in my hometown of Dexter, Michigan, so the setting was fresh daily.

  • • •

  It seemed as if everybody in Good Advice had turned out for the meeting that night in the town hall. Every seat was taken, and the dark oaken rafters resounded with a steady hum of conversation while the broad pine planks that made up the floor creaked beneath the tread of many feet.

  Up in front, his plaid jacket thrown back to expose a generous paunch, Carl Lathrop, the town’s leading storekeeper and senior member of the council, stood talking with Birdie Flatt from the switchboard. His glasses flashed a Morse code in the bright overhead lights as he settled and resettled them on his fleshy nose. I recognized the gesture from the numerous interviews I had conducted with him as a sign that he was feeling very satisfied with himself, and so I knew what was coming long before most of my neighbors expected it.

  I was something of a freak in the eyes of the citizenry of Good Advice, New Mexico. This was partly because I had been the first person to settle in the area since before 1951, when the aircraft plant had moved on to greener pastures, and partly because, at forty-two, I was at least ten years younger than anyone else in town. Most people supposed I stayed on out of despair after my wife Sylvia left me to return to civilization, but that wasn’t strictly true. We’d originally planned to lay over for a week or two while I collected information for my book and then move on. But then the owner of the town newspaper had died and the paper was put up for sale, and I bought it with the money we’d saved up for the trip. It had been an act of impulse, perhaps a foolish one—so far away from her beloved beauty parlors—but my chief fear in life had always been that I’d miss the big opportunity when it came along. So now I had a newspaper but no Sylvia, which, all things considered, seemed a pretty fair trade.

  The buzz of voices died out as Lathrop took his place behind the lectern. I flipped open my notebook and sat with pencil poised to capture any pearls of wisdom he might have been about to drop.

  “We all know why we’re here, so we’ll dispense with the long-winded introductions.” A murmur of approval rippled through the audience. “You’ve all heard the rumor that the state may build a superhighway near Good Advice,” he went on. “Well, it’s my pleasant duty to announce that it’s no longer a rumor.”

  Cheers and applause greeted this statement, and it was some minutes before the room grew quiet enough for Lathrop to continue.

  “Getting information out of these government fellows is like pulling teeth,” he said. “But after about a dozen phone calls to the capital, I finally got hold of the head of the contracting firm that’s going to do the job. He told me they plan to start building sometime next fall.” He waited until the fresh applause faded, then went on. “Now, this doesn’t mean that Good Advice is going to become another Santa Fe overnight. When those tourists come streaming in here, we’re going to have to be ready for them. That means rezoning for tourist facilities, fixing up our historic landmarks, and so on. The reason we called this meeting is to decide on ways to make this town appealing to visitors. The floor is open to suggestions.”

  I spent the next twenty minutes jotting down some of the ideas that came from the enthusiastic citizens. Birdie Flatt was first, with a suggestion that the telephone service be updated, but others disagreed, maintaining that the old upright phones and wall installations found in many of the downtown shops added to the charm of the town. “Uncle Ned” Scoffield, at ninety-seven Good Advice’s oldest resident, offered to clean out and fix up the old trading post at the end of Main Street in return for permission to sell his wood carvings and his collection of handwoven Navajo rugs. Carl Lathrop pledged to turn the old jail, which he had been using as a storeroom, into a tourist attraction. The fact that outlaw Ford Harper had spent his last days there before his hanging, he said, could only add to its popularity.

  Then, amidst a chorus of groans from scattered parts of the room, Avery Sharecross stood up.

  Sharecross was a spindly scarecrow of a man, with an unkempt mane of lusterless black hair spilling over the collar of his frayed sweater and a permanent stoop that made him appear much older than he was. Nobody in town could say how he made his living. Certainly not from the bookstore he had been operating on the corner of Main and Maple for thirty years; there were never any more than two customers in the store at a time, and the prices he charged were so ridiculously low that it was difficult to believe he managed to break even, let alone show a profit. Everyone was aware of the monthly pension he received from an address in Santa Fe, but no one knew how much it was or why he got it. His bowed shoulders and shuffling gait, the myopia that forced him to squint through the thick tinted lenses of his eyeglasses, the hollows in his pale cheeks were as much a part of the permanent scenery in Good Advice as the burned-out shell of the old flour mill north of town. I closed my notebook and put away my pencil, knowing what he was going to talk about before he opened his mouth. It was all he ever talked about.

  Lathrop sighed. “What is it, Avery? As if I didn’t know.” He rested his chin on one pudgy hand, bracing himself for the ordeal.

  “Mr. Chairman, I have a petition.” The old bookseller rustled the well-thumbed sheaf of papers he held in one talonlike hand. “I have twenty-six signatures demanding that the citizens of Good Advice vote on whether the tree on Execution Hill be removed.”

  There was an excited buzz among the spectators. I sat bolt upright in my chair, flipping my notebook back open. How had the old geezer got twenty-five people to agree with him?

  For 125 years the tree in question had dominated the high-domed hill two miles outside town, its skeletal limbs stretching naked against the sky. Of the eighteen trials that had been held in the town hall during the nineteenth century, eleven of those tried had ended up swinging from the tree’s stoutest limb. It was a favorite spot of mine, an excellent place to sit and meditate. Avery Sharecross, for reasons known only to himself, had been trying to get the council to destroy it for five years. This was the first time he had not stood alone.

  Lathrop cleared his throat loudly, probably to cover up his own astonishment. “Now, Avery, you know as well as I do that it takes fifty-five signatures on a petition to raise a vote. You’ve read the charter.”

  Sharecross was unperturbed.

  “When that charter was drafted, Mr. Chairman, this town boasted a population of over fourteen hundred. In the light of our present count, I believe that provision can be waived.” He struck the pages with his fingertips. “These signatures represent nearly one-tenth of the local electorate. They have a right to be heard.”

  “How come you’re so fired up to see that tree reduced to kindling, anyway? What’s the difference to you?”

  “That tree”—Sharecross flung a scrawny arm in the direction of the nearest window—“represents a time in this town’s history when lynch law reigned and pompous hypocrites sentenced their peers to death regardless of their innocence or guilt.” His cheeks were flushed now, his eyes ablaze behind the bottle-glass spectacles. “That snarl of dead limbs has been a blemish on the smooth face of this community for over a hundred years, and it’s time we got rid of it.”

  It was an impressive performance, and he sounded sincere, but I wasn’t buying it. Good Advice, after all, had not been my first exposure to journalism. After you’ve been in this business a while, you get a feeling for when someone is telling the truth. Sharecr
oss wasn’t.

  Whatever reasons he had for wishing to destroy the town’s oldest landmark, they had nothing to do with any sense of injustice. Of that I was certain.

  Lathrop sighed. “All right, Avery, let’s see your petition. If the signatures check out, we’ll vote.”

  Once the papers were in his hand, Lathrop called the other members of the town council around him to look them over. Finally he motioned them back to their seats and turned back toward the lectern. For the next half-hour he read off the names on the petition—many of which surprised me, for they included some of the town’s leading citizens—to make sure the signatures were genuine. Every one of those mentioned spoke up to assure him they were. At length the storekeeper laid the pages down.

  “Before we vote,” he said, “the floor is open to dissenting opinions. Mr. Manning?”

  My hand had gone up before he finished speaking. I got to my feet, conscious of all the eyes upon me.

  “No one is arguing what Mr. Sharecross said about the injustices done in the past,” I began haltingly. “But tearing down something that’s a large part of our history won’t change anything.”

  I paused, searching for words. I was a lot more eloquent in front of a typewriter. “Mr. Sharecross says the tree reminds us of the sordid past. I think that’s as it should be. A nagging reminder of a time when we weren’t so noble is a healthy thing to have in our midst. I wouldn’t want to live in a society that kicked its mistakes under the rug.”

  The words were coming easier now. “There’s been a lot of talk here tonight about promoting tourist trade. Well, destroying a spot where eleven infamous badmen met their rewards is one sure way of aborting any claims we might have had upon shutter-happy visitors.” I shook my head emphatically, a gesture left over from my college debate club days. “History is too precious for us to turn our backs on it, for whatever reason. Sharecross and his sympathizers would do well to realize that our true course calls for us to turn our gaze forward and forget about rewriting the past.”

  There was some applause as I sat down, but it died out when Sharecross seized the floor again.

  “I’m not a Philistine, Mr. Chairman,” he said calmly. “Subject to the will of the council, I hereby pledge the sum of five thousand dollars for the erection of a statue of Enoch Howard, Good Advice’s founder, atop Execution Hill once the tree has been removed. I, too, have some feeling for history.” His eyes slid my direction.

  That was dirty pool, I thought as he took his seat amid thunderous cheering. In one way or another, Enoch Howard’s blood flowed in the veins of over a third of the population of Good Advice. Now I knew how he’d obtained those signatures.

  But why? What did he hope to gain?

  “Who’s going to pay to take down the tree?” someone asked.

  Sharecross rose again. “Floyd Kramer there has offered to dig it out by the roots with his backhoe free of charge. All he wants is permission to sell it for firewood.”

  “That true, Floyd?” Lathrop asked.

  A heavy-jowled man in a blue work shirt buttoned to the neck gave him the high sign from his standing position near the door.

  I shot out of my chair again, but this time my eyes were directed on my skeletal opponent and not the crowd. “I’ve fought you in print and on the floor of the town hall over this issue,” I said, “and if necessary I’ll keep on fighting you all the way to the top of Execution Hill. I don’t care how many statues you pull out of your hat; you won’t get your way.”

  The old bookseller made no reply. His eyes were blank behind his spectacles. I sat back down.

  I could see that Lathrop’s attitude had changed, for he had again taken to raising and lowering his eyeglasses confidently on the bridge of his nose. Enoch Howard was his great-grandfather on his mother’s side. “Now we’ll vote,” he said. “All those in favor of removing the tree on Execution Hill to make room for a statue of our city’s founder signify by saying aye.”

  Rain was hissing on the grass when I parked my battered pickup truck at the bottom of the hill and got out to fetch the shovel out of the back. It was a long climb to the top and I was out of shape, but I didn’t want to risk leaving telltale ruts behind by driving up the slope. Halfway up, my feet began to feel like lead and the blood was pounding in my ears like a pneumatic hammer; by the time I reached the base of the tree I had barely enough energy left to find the spot I wanted and begin digging. It was dark, and the soil was soaked just enough so that each time I took out a shovelful the hole filled up with mud. It was ten minutes before I made any progress at all. After half an hour I stopped to rest. That’s when all the lights came on and turned night into day.

  The headlights of half a dozen automobiles were trained full upon me. For a fraction of a second I stood frozen with shock. Then I hurled the shovel like a javelin at the nearest light and started to run.

  The first step I took landed in the hole. I fell headlong to the ground, emptying my lungs and twisting my ankle. When I looked up I was surrounded by people.

  “I’ve waited five years for this.” The voice belonged to Avery Sharecross.

  I found my breath then. “How did you know?”

  “I never did. Not for sure.” He was standing over me now, an avenging angel wearing a threadbare coat and scarf. “I once heard that you spent every cent you had on the newspaper. If that was true, I wondered what your wife used for bus fare back to Santa Fe when she left you. Everyone knew you argued with her bitterly over your decision to stay. That you lost control and murdered her seemed obvious to me.

  “I decided you buried her by the hanging tree. That explained why you spent so much more time here than anyone else. Probably you needed the reassurance that she was still where you’d left her.

  “Well, I wasn’t going to dig up the whole hill all by myself, so it became necessary to catch you in the act. That’s when I got the idea to push for removing the tree and force you to move the body.”

  He turned to a tall man whose Stetson glistened wetly in the unnatural illumination of the headlights at his back. “Sheriff, if your men will resume digging where Mr. Manning left off, it’s my guess you’ll find the corpse of Sylvia Manning before midnight. I retired from the Santa Fe Police Department long before they were required to read suspects their rights, so perhaps you’ll oblige.”

  Sincerely, Mr. Hyde

  Thanks to Robert Louis Stevenson for inspiring this one. One definition of a classic is there’s always something new you can bring to it.

  • • •

  This is my suicide note.

  It’s all Jekyll’s doing, feeble prig that he is; his infernal decency has begun to engulf me, just when I thought my logic was bringing him round. Sometime as I slept coiled inside him, he smuggled in a conscience.

  Monstrous vandalism, that, like throwing paint on a Greek statue. (Inspired mischief: Is the British Museum open at this hour?) I was unique among my fellow Homo sapiens, a man thoroughly without scruple, a pure thing.

  Jekyll’s greatest creation, surpassing God.

  The poison—tincture of arsenic and strychnine, with a dash of potassium cyanide, a most lethal postprandial libation—awaits me in a measured beaker, looking quite benign in comparison with the elixir of my release, glowing and foaming bilious green as it does when the powder is introduced, like sulfur dissolved in essence of mad dog.

  Soon the world will know the truth: that Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde are one and the same, saint and sinner, philanthropist and murderer, saver and taker of lives.

  But I’m Hyde yet. If the pang becomes unendurable, I’ll anesthetize it with gin.

  How well I remember my birth, unlike those born of woman: my creator writhing in agony while I tore myself from his insides in impatient rage; my face in the cheval-glass, all ridges and bone and swollen eyeballs, dripping with amniotic fluid like a child just delivered. All babies are ugly at the start, red and wrinkled, their faces distended with wrath. No one had consulted them on the matter
of their birth, or warned them what to expect when they still had the chance to strangle themselves with their umbilical cords. All mankind is born angry.

  Just how Jekyll came to christen me Edward Hyde is a mystery. “Edward” is easy: An uncle of that name died in an asylum for the criminally insane, after chopping up his wife and four children with a hatchet. I am his direct descendant. “Hyde” is enigmatic: Am I the sordid thing that crawls beneath the hide of all humanity, or the dreaded thing from which all humanity must hide?

  Or he may simply have come upon the inspiration sitting on a bench in Hyde Park. The damn absent-minded scientist is easily distracted by the course of his thoughts. Just because we share the same knowledge and memories does not mean we can follow the circumlocution of a highly educated mind.

  It’s my mind, too, don’t forget. I benefit from Jekyll’s many years of study and practise, without having had to fidget in the lecture-hall, the laboratory, and the dissection room, redolent of ammonia, formaldehyde, and raw human flesh; although I revel in that last sense-memory. The extinction of life is the essence of art. I slew a man in Hampstead for dipping snuff. Filthy habit; but he died well. I ate his heart.

  Henry—for I am certainly close enough to him to address him by his Christian name—has never appreciated his good fortune: In this third decade of the reign of good Queen Victoria, to sample the exquisite pleasures of the London demimonde—more extensive in their delicious variety than in all of Sodom—while maintaining one’s respectable reputation, must surely be the dream of any man with blood in his veins.

  I gave him that gift; but to what end? Loathed, hunted, held in deepest contempt by the man who bore me, and now consigned to execution by that same revered practitioner. I would throttle him with my bare hands if it wouldn’t serve his purpose as well as the poison.

  O, but to experience just once more the abandon of Limehouse, Spitalfields, the music-halls where ribald comedies play out onstage while even greater entertainment takes place in the boxes above, swaddled in curtains; opium dens, brothels, cockfights in Soho, bear-baiting in the Isle of Dogs. I lost a good deal of Henry’s fortune on a grizzly named Lord Bartholomew, but made it back on a mastiff they called Geronimo; then blew it on a virgin in a Greenwich bordello who turned out not to be as advertised. I strangled the madam to death with one of her own elbow-length gloves. I despise misrepresentation.