Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places

by Loren Estleman

  His name’s Ethan Hollis, and he’s living beyond his means in Grosse Pointe, but if they outlaw that they’ll have to throw a prison wall around that place. I don’t need to park more than two minutes in front of the big Georgian he shares with his wife to know it won’t happen in there, inside a spiked fence with the name of his alarm company on a tin sign on the gate.

  Anyway, since I’m not the only one who’s heard Nola’s threats, we’ve agreed that apparent accidental death is best; I’m just taking stock. The few seconds I get to see him through binoculars, coming out on the porch to tell the gardener he isn’t clipping the hedge with his little finger extended properly—is enough to make me hate him, having worked that very job under cover for a drug lord in Roseville. He’s chubbier than I had pictured, a regular teddy bear with curly dark hair on his head and a Rolex on his fat wrist, with a polo shirt, yet. He deserves to die for no other reason than his lack of fashion sense.

  I know his routine thanks to Nola, but I follow him for a week, just to look. I’ve taken personal time, of which I’ve built up about a year. The guy logs four hours total in the office. The rest of the time he’s lunching with clients, golfing with the senior partner, putting on deck shoes and dorky white shorts and pushing a speedboat up and down the river, that sort of bullshit. Drowning would be nice, except I’d join him, because I can’t swim and am no good on the water.

  These are my days. Nights I’m with Nola, working our way through the Kama Sutra and adding footnotes of our own.

  The only time I can expect Hollis to be alone without a boat involved is when he takes his Jaguar for a spin. It’s his toy, he doesn’t share it. Trouble is not even Nola knows when he’ll get the urge. So every day when he’s home I park around the corner and trot back to his north fence, watching for that green convertible. It’s a blind spot to the neighbors, too, and for the benefit of passersby I’m wearing a jogging suit; just another fatcat following the surgeon general’s advice.

  Four days in, nothing comes through that gate but Hollis’s black Mercedes, either with his wife on the passenger’s side or just him taking a crowded route through heavy traffic to work or the country club.

  I’m losing confidence. I figure I can get away with the jogging gag maybe another half a day before someone gets nervous and calls the cops. I’m racking my brain for some other cover when out comes the Jag, spitting chunks of limestone off the inside curves of the driveway. I hustle back to my car.

  Hollis must need unwinding, because he’s ten miles over the limit and almost out of sight when I turn out of the side street.

  North is the choice today. In a little while we’re up past the lake, with the subdivisions thinning out along a two-lane blacktop. It’s a workday—Nola’s in the office, good alibi—and for miles we’re almost the only two cars, so I’m hanging back, but I can tell he’s not paying attention to his rearview or he’d open it up and leave me in the dust. The arrogant son of a bitch thought he was invulnerable.

  You see how I’m taking every opportunity to work up a good hate? I’ve had time to lose my sense of commitment, start to think when I get him alone I’ll work him over, whisper in his ear what’s in store if he doesn’t lay off diddling the help. He’s such a soft-looking slob I know he’ll cave in if I just knock out a tooth.

  After ninety minutes we’ve left the blacktop and are towing twin streamers of dust down a dirt road with farms on both sides and here and there a copse of trees left for windbreaks. Now it’s time to open the ball.

  I’ve got police lights installed inside the radiator grille, and as I press down the accelerator I flip them on. Now he finds his mirror, gooses the pedal, then thinks better of it and begins to slow down. But we’re short of the next copse of trees, so I close in and encourage him forward, then as we enter the shade I signal him to pull over.

  I’ve been wearing my old uniform under the jogging suit all this time, and have shucked off the outer shell while driving. I put on my cap and get out and approach the Jag with my hand resting on my sidearm. The driver’s window purrs down, he flashes his pearlies nervously. “Was I speeding, Officer?”

  “Step out of the car, please.”

  He’s got his wallet out. “I have my license and registration.”

  I tell him again to step out of the car.

  He looks surprised, but he puts the wallet away and grasps the door handle. His jaw’s set. I can see he thinks it’s a case of mistaken identity and he may have a lucrative harassment suit if he can make himself disagreeable enough. I’ve been around enough lawyers to know how they think; meth cookers are better company.

  Then his face changes again. He’s staring at the uniform.

  “You’re pretty far out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you? This area is patrolled by the county sheriff.”

  “Get out of the fucking car.” I draw my sidearm.

  “Fuck you, fake cop.” He floors it.

  But it’s a gravel road, and the tires spin for a second, spraying pebbles, which strike my legs and sting like hornets, which gives me the mad to make that lunge and grab the window post with my free hand. Just then the tread bites and the Jag spurs ahead and I know I’m going to be dragged if I don’t let go or stop him.

  I don’t let go. I stick the muzzle of my piece through the window, cocking the hammer.

  Who knows but it might have worked, if my fingers didn’t slip off the window post. As I fall away from the car I strike my other wrist against the post and a round punches a hole through the windshield.

  Hollis screams. He thinks he’s hit, takes his hands off the wheel, and that’s the last I see of him until after the Jag plunges into a tree by the side of the road. The bang’s so loud if you even heard my piece go off you’d forget about it because the second report sounds like a cannon, and across a whole field of wheat at that.

  I get up off the ground and spring to the car, still holding the gun. The hood’s folded like a road map, the radiator pouring steam, windshield gone. I look up and down the road and across the field opposite the stand of trees. Not a soul in sight, if you don’t count a cow looking our way.

  Just as I’m starting to appreciate my lucky break, I hear moaning.

  Lawyers are notoriously hard to kill.

  He lifts his head from the wheel. The forehead’s split, the face a sheet of blood. It looks bad enough to finish him even if it wasn’t instantaneous, but I’m no doctor.

  I guess you could say I panicked. I reached through the window and hit him with the butt of the gun, how many times I don’t know, six or seven or maybe a dozen. The bone of his forehead started to make squishing sounds like ice cracking under your feet, squirting water up through the fissures. Only in this case it wasn’t water, and I know I’m going to have to burn the uniform because my gun arm is soaked to the elbow with blood and gray ooze. Finally I stop swinging the gun and feel for a pulse in his carotid.

  He wasn’t using it any more. I holstered the weapon, took his head in both hands, and rested his squishy brow against the steering wheel where it had struck the first time.

  I take a last look around to make sure I didn’t drop anything, get into my car, and leave, making sure first to drag the jogging suit back on over my gory uniform. I wink at the cow on my way past.

  For the next few days I stay clear of Nola. I don’t even call, knowing she’ll hear about it on the news; I can’t afford anyone seeing us together. I guess I was being overcautious. Hollis’s death was investigated as an accident, and at the end of a week the sheriff tells the press the driver lost control on loose gravel. I guess the cow didn’t want to get involved.

  I was feeling good about myself. I didn’t see any need to wrestle with my conscience over the death of a sexual predator, and a high-price lawyer to boot. As is the way of human nature I patted my own back for a set of fortunate circumstances I’d had no control over. I was starting to think God was on my side.

  But Nola isn’t.

  When I finally visited, after th
e cops had paid their routine call and gone away satisfied her beef with her employer was unconnected with an accident upstate, she gave me hell for staying away, accused me of cowardly leaving her to face the police alone. I settled her down finally, but I could see my explanation didn’t satisfy. As I’m taking off my coat to get comfortable she tells me she has an early morning, everyone at the office is working harder in Hollis’s absence and she needs her sleep. This is crap, because Hollis was absent almost as often when he was alive, but I leave.

  She doesn’t answer her phone for two days after that. When I go to the apartment her bell doesn’t answer and her car isn’t in the port. I come back another night, same thing. I lean against the building groping in my pockets, forgetting I don’t smoke anymore, then Nola’s old yellow Camaro swings in off Jefferson and I step back into the shadows, because there are two people in the front seat. I watch as the lights go off and they get out.

  “If you’re that afraid of him, why don’t you call the police?” A young male voice, belonging to a slender figure in a green tank top and torn jeans.

  “Because he is the police. Oh, Chris, I’m terrified. He won’t stop hounding me this side of the grave.” And saying this Nola huddles next to him and hands him her keys to open the front door, which he does one-handed, his other arm being curled around her waist.

  They go inside, and the latch clicking behind them sounds like the coffin lid shutting in my face. She’s got a new shark in her school. I’m the chum she’s feeding him. And I know without having to think about it that I’ve killed this schnook Ethan Hollis for the same reason Chris is going to kill me; I’ve run out of uses. So for Chris, now I’m the sexual predator.

  Until I got a good look at her in the security light, I wasn’t sure it was even her. She hadn’t pulled that helpless-female routine with me. To hear her now, she hadn’t a sardonic bone in her body. See, I’d been wrong to connect her with just one variety of reptile. She’s at least half chameleon, changing her colors to suit the sap of the moment.

  I was out of my league.

  That’s why we’re talking now. It’s Nola or me, and I need to be somewhere else when she has her accident. I’ve got a feeling I’m not in the clear over Hollis. Call it cop’s intuition, but I’ve been part of the community so long I know when I’ve been excluded. Even Phil Carpenter won’t look me in the eye when we’re talking about the Pistons. I’ve been tagged.

  Except you’re not going to kill Nola, sweetie. No, not because you’re a woman; you girls have moved into every other profession, why not this? You’re not going to do it because you’re a cop.

  Forget how I know. Say a shitter knows a shitter and leave it there. What? Sure, I noticed when you reached up under your blouse. I thought at the time you were adjusting your bra, but—well, that was before I said I’d decided to kill Hollis, wasn’t it? I hope your crew buys it, two wires coming loose in the same cop’s presence within a couple of weeks. I’ll leave first so you can go out to the van and tell them the bad news. I live over on Howard. Well, you know the address. You bring the wine—no Jack and Coke, mind—I’ll cook the steaks. I think I can finish convincing you about Nola.

  Like killing a snake.

  The Bog

  I hesitated over this one for reasons similar to those of my unnamed narrator, to sacrifice a good story idea in order to commit the perfect murder. In my case, I had to let go of the perfect murder in order to write a story. (Confess: You’ve fantasized along these lines yourself.) But then I probably wouldn’t kill anyone anyway, and there’s no sense letting a good idea go begging.

  • • •

  Watching Hufnagel take the strychnine, I felt a twinge of remorse.

  Certainly not for Hufnagel, or for the fact that the primo cocaine he thought he was ingesting contained enough mole poison to ensure the pristine character of every lawn in suburban Michigan. He’d bought that fate five years before, when he plagiarized one of my best ideas and pissed it away on a desk-top novel that languished in Barnes & Noble and died on the remaindering table, forever beyond the reach of a writer who knew best how to make use of the subject matter. I’d have taken him out then, but there’d have been scant satisfaction in an act performed in the heat of first wrath. The thing needed time; to plan, to refine, to make friendly overtures, to overcome through patience and grim sincerity the natural suspicions of a thief whose victim has elected not only to forgive him, but to include him in his circle of intimates. The center of the circle.

  The best con men, they say, con themselves first. It was necessary to remind myself of how close we were before the betrayal, in effect to erase all surface memory of the incident and re-create emotions formed in an innocence I no longer possessed. Fortunately, good writers and method actors have that ability in common, and if I may say so I succeeded as thoroughly as an Olivier, a James Dean. There had even been times, dining and drinking with the man I despised above all others, when I felt as close to him as a brother, and when thoughts of the despicable theft occurred unbidden, managed without much effort to convince myself it had all been a mistake, a laughable coincidence, and that since he’d failed so miserably to profit from it, that the thing was of no great consequence.

  But an actor or a writer who is unable to separate himself from his self-delusion when not actually performing is a tiresome creature. A good con man never loses sight of the prize. In my mind, Hufnagel was as dead as the idea he’d appropriated and defiled with his hackery. It was a corpse I sat beside at ballgames. It was a cadaver I invited to my home in the country. All that remained was to put the concept into practice.

  No, it wasn’t Hufnagel who made me contrite, and I’d lived with the plan too long to feel guilty for my deception. I grieved for the loss of another idea. It was as good as or better than one he’d stolen, there was an Edgar Award in it at least if I used it in fiction, and once I’d used it in fact, it would be lost to me forever. While writers make their best work public, murderers bury theirs. It’s a near thing for an artist or an entertainer to seek success through obscurity.

  But a twinge was all it was. Ideas aren’t hard to come by, unless you’re so deficient creatively to have to filch them. I didn’t lament the one he’d made away with so much as the making away. The hard part had been winning his trust, and convincing him that I shared his drug habit. I drink in moderation, smoke not at all, and had been pompous on the point that I’d never taken an illegal substance. So in order to get the strychnine into my enemy, I was forced to present myself as a liar and a hypocrite. It was humiliating, especially considering the audience, to suffer his blubbery, condescending grin when at last he’d accepted my admission. So you’re no better than me after all, it said, complete with his indifference to elementary grammar.

  No matter. It was a corpse’s grin.

  I’m nothing if not a thorough researcher. I had no trouble getting him to believe that the Ziploc bag I showed him contained the purest cocaine from the coastal village of Canavieiras, at a cost commensurate with its quality.

  He actually licked his lips when he saw the flaky white powder. “Your books must be in the black finally.”

  “When did poverty ever stop one of us?” I placed a shaving mirror on the coffee table, picked up a razor blade, and separated the little heap I’d poured on the glass into parallel lines, as neatly as if I’d been practicing for years instead of hours.

  I wasn’t a good host. I helped myself first, to remove any lingering doubt on his part. It was unnecessary. He was so intent on his own approaching pleasure he didn’t notice that what I inhaled through the rolled-up dollar bill was empty air from an unoccupied part of the mirror. Impatient as he was, he didn’t bother to count the remaining lines. I’d expected that. There’s no underestimating the greed of a plagiarist, especially one who is also a drug fiend. He seized the bill, bent to the line nearest him where he sat on the sofa, and made an appropriately porcine noise snorting it up into his nasal cavity, into his empty brain.

>   Would he have time to notice it was only all-purpose flour, or would the sting of the poison convince him it was as advertised? Even cyanide doesn’t work as swiftly as you’d think on the evidence of what some of my mystery-writing colleagues publish. But when you hate a man, truly detest him enough to see him punished, strychnine’s the thing. While it takes ten or twenty minutes for symptoms to appear when ingested internally (much less when taken directly into the exposed capillaries inside the nose), the time spent in violent convulsion is an eternity for the victim. Puzzling visibly over the immediate sensation, given the build-up I’d provided, he reached back a hand to massage his stiff neck. When he moved it around to probe at his face, stiffening as well, I got up from the sofa. I did this as much to remove myself from the range of his flailing arms and legs as to watch the show.

  It was a hit. He crashed to the floor, knocking over the table and scattering its contents, rolled onto his back, and arched his stomach toward the ceiling, keeping his head and feet on the floor. (One of the accepted positions for both Lamaze and death throes.) His entire body quivered like a drawn bow. Spittle formed at the corners of his mouth, which drew farther and farther apart in a rictus that was not at all similar to the superior leer he’d worn only minutes before. His face looked slimy. He sweated through his sports shirt, he made a gurgling noise in his throat that may have been an attempt to cry for help. He released the contents of his bladder.

  Enough detail. I’m not a sadist. Soon enough he was dead, and I got to work.

  The beauty part of the plan wasn’t the murder; that was pedestrian. It was the disposal of the body. That’s where most amateurs foul up, for not thinking things through. Either they chopped up the remains and parted them out, multiplying the chances of discovery, or buried them in a flowerbed or something on their own property or—just as bad—tossed them in the trunk of a car and drove to some secluded spot, risking a police pullover for a cracked taillight or failure to sign a turn or just because the cop was bored and wanted someone to talk to, and even if they succeeded and got back home undetected and removed all traces of the body from the trunk, some crime-lab geek going over the corpse collected traces of the trunk from the body, which was a guaranteed conviction. You couldn’t count on the remains not being found, not completely, and you had to prepare for the possibility that you’d be suspected and questioned.