The Lillian Byrd Crime Series

by Elizabeth Sims

  I pointed to her mother. “She’s the crazy one! My God, have you ever met that Wycoff, her necrophiliac boyfriend? You’ve been protecting her, catering to her, dancing to her tune this whole time because of guilt?”

  “A little guilt’s a good thing,” said Mrs. Creighter. “Pay attention to me.”

  “Shut the fuck up! Shut up!” I said, “Don’t listen to her, Bonnie, listen to me. I’m probably God anyway.” Bonnie stared at me, listening, trying to piece it together; she was trying. “Bonnie, lay down this stupid burden you’ve been carrying. Lay it down. You can’t change anything about your father and sister. You’re not crazy. You’d like to be, though—it’d let you off the hook. Well, hell. Be a woman. Be a real woman now and end this.”

  Bonnie opened her mouth and hoarsely said, “Yes.”

  Mrs. Creighter lunged for the gun. Bonnie wasn’t ready for her, and the old girl came up with it.

  “I know the devil now!” Mrs. Creighter cried as she pointed the gun at me. I closed my eyes and rolled off the couch. Nothing happened.

  When I opened my eyes, she had the gun aimed at her daughter. She paused. Then she turned it to her own temple.

  Bonnie leaped at her mother, but Mrs. Creighter moved incredibly fast. She circled the couch holding the gun out of Bonnie’s reach. Then she reached down, pointed the gun in my direction, and fired.

  There was a flash, and my head slammed against the floor. The next thing, I was hearing their voices, high and panicky, above my head. I must have fainted.

  Unbelievably, the bullet didn’t hit me. I think it singed my hair. Bonnie and Mrs. Creighter were upstairs, screaming.

  I struggled to my feet, my leg flashing with pain. I limped over to the window, remembering when I got there that it was barred. The voices upstairs rose to a crescendo. Two shots and a ricochet: Cak! Ca-ring! An instant of silence, then a shriek from Bonnie and an ugly torrent of gibberish from her mother.

  I dragged the gurney over to the wall, since the window was above my head. I climbed up and wrapped my blood-soaked towel around my fist. I pounded, and the glass shattered. I bashed at the bars, but they were solid.

  “Hey!” I hollered, reaching out through the bars, shoving my hand through alley scum, dead leaves, oily muck. “Hey!” I prayed for some prostitute or junkie, anybody, to be passing through. I listened. “Help!” Nothing. I turned back toward the room. Silence. “Hey! Help!” I hollered again. The hollering made my head pound.

  “What? Who’s there? Who’s that?” a husky voice came to my ear through the jagged hole. “What the—who’s there? Bonnie, is that you?” Footsteps tromped to the window, and I saw work shoes, then denim-clad knees, then a pair of brown elbows. Carefully the person put his face to the ground and turned it sideways. It was Emerald, the parking attendant. He looked into my eyes with his own kind, anxious ones.

  “No, it’s not Bonnie. It’s Lillian Byrd, remember me? I can’t get out. Please help me.” I felt dizzy and had to cling tighter to the bars to keep from swaying.

  “Lillian Byrd, what are you doing down there? What’s going on?”

  “Insanity! Terrible! You’ve got to call the police. They shot me.”

  “The police shot you?”

  “No! Bonnie and her mother have me cornered down here. The mother’s got a gun. They killed that DJ. They killed the Midnight Five and then some.”

  “I always knew she wasn’t sound,” Emerald said. “Sweet Jesus! My house just got robbed, and I was looking to see if they dropped any of our stuff back here. I live across the fence, three blocks down. I almost caught ’em.”

  Another shot. “Emerald, go! Tell them they’re shooting right now. She’s gonna come down here again.”

  “Dear Jesus! Here, take this.” He reached under his shirt and pulled out a snub-nosed revolver, and handed it butt-first through the window. “Shoot the bitch if she comes at you. Just aim it and shoot. OK, OK.” He took off down the alley.

  I hopped down from the gurney. It was quiet now upstairs. I turned the gun over in my hands. It sure settled my gut to have it. Someone descended the steps. Mrs. Creighter pushed through the door.

  Her hair was wild, and blood dripped from her mouth. Her gun dangled from her hand. Her eyes swept the room, then she saw me.

  She smiled. “Well now, dear—” she began, then stopped when I waved Emerald’s gun.

  “Stay where you are,” I commanded. “The police are on their way. Don’t do anything.”

  “Hah!” she said. “You found that! Bonnie must’ve had it hidden somewhere. It’s not loaded.”

  “The police are coming.”

  She sank to her knees, then arranged herself cross-legged on the floor, as Bonnie had done. She seemed to forget about me. Gazing off into some distant reality, she looked like a circus freak: proud of herself in a weird way, yet sad at the same time. All of her up front. She sat like that for a while, and I waited, tight with fear.

  My ears strained to hear police sirens. Come on, Emerald. I tried to lock eyes with Mrs. Creighter to get a look inside her, but it was impossible.

  “A tooth for a tooth,” she mumbled.

  “And if he knocks out the tooth of his slave, he shall let him go free for his tooth’s sake.” I’d done a little Bible study in my day.

  Without warning she lifted her gun and fired in my direction: Ca-ring! I threw myself behind the couch, which jerked as the bullet hit it. I smelled singed cloth. I feared the next shot would go through. As the movies had taught me, I popped my head around the side, fast, and shot back, once, twice.

  The noise from all this was indescribable. Emerald must have put a pretty hot charge in his gun because my whole arm bucked skyward when I pulled the trigger. Mrs. Creighter didn’t move. Neither of us had hit the other.

  As I peeped over the couch she again lifted her gun, this time in both hands, took serious aim, and fired. The bullet whizzed through the couch, just missing my ribs, and ricocheted off the wall. I heard the tinkle of her ejected cartridge as it skittered to the floor.

  I was too terrified to stick my whole head out again to aim, so I just blindly poked the gun barrel over the top of the couch and fired three more times.

  This is a very lousy way to defend yourself.

  I didn’t hit Mrs. Creighter, and she still had more ammunition. She fired once more into the couch; the bullet tore through, caromed off the wall, and stung me in the butt. The spent bullet just bounced off my jeans. Tendrils of sharp gunsmoke curled into my nostrils.

  As I cowered in my hiding place I heard her rise and advance in my direction. I pulled my trigger again. Click. Empty. Oh, yes.

  My back was against the Bible-plastered death-chamber wall, and the angel of chaos bore down on me. I turned to the wall seeking grace. “Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein,” read the passage before my eyes. Right.

  Suddenly there was a terrific crash upstairs, followed by pounding footfalls, a hesitation, then somebody big and determined rushing down the stairs.

  I poked my head up to see the door blast open and Lou barrel into the room, carrying some long strange weapon. I don’t know about Mrs. Creighter, but I was expecting a cop.

  Mrs. Creighter instantly turned on her, snarling, but her voice strangled in her throat as Lou rammed her dogcatcher noose over her head and jerked it tight. The heavy wire noose disappeared into the folds of her neck.

  Lou accomplished this in a second. “Stay there!” she yelled to me. Mrs. Creighter’s gun went off, then dropped from her hand. It was her last round; the slide was stuck open. She pawed the air, then grasped the noose’s metal pole as if she were impaled on it, went down to her knees, then collapsed onto her side, her eyes bulging.

  Lou loosened the noose slightly, planted her foot on Mrs. Creighter’s waist, and announced in a tough voice, “You’re goin’ nowhere, lady.”

  As I was trying to grasp what had just happened, a bolt of white light shot into the room from behind me: a police flashlight. Moments later
I was under arrest for possession of an unregistered handgun.

  36

  During the turbulent ten minutes that followed, I lay on the floor waiting for the paramedics, attempting to synopsize the night for the police. Lou stood to the side, listening and chiming in.

  Owing to her obsession, she had set up her own surveillance on me, at first to satisfy her own compulsion, then later to keep track of my dangerous blundering as well. Being an electronics buff (I remembered mention of it in her letter), she got hold of a homing collar used on wild animals and secretly attached it to the Caprice’s undercarriage.

  She had to work during the days, but at night she tracked my whereabouts from her home, using some kind of radio receiver. She decided to rendezvous with me at Meijer’s to see what I was up to so late in the evening. She’d had me totally fooled.

  Later, when she realized my car was near the Snapdragon, she followed, sensing catastrophe. She brought along the weapon she knew best, her animal noose. So intent was she on getting to the Snap that she ran a red light a few miles away and clipped a newspaper delivery van. No one got hurt, but her front axle was bent, so she abandoned the car and hustled the rest of the way on foot, equipped with her noose and a nearly delusional sense of invulnerability.

  “Thank you, Lou,” I said, grasping her hand.

  “You’re welcome. Lillian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t worry anymore. About me. You know what I mean?” We talked around the stolid presence of the cops.

  “Double thank you.”

  She appeared exhausted yet clear-eyed, as if she’d been through a catharsis. She wasn’t fidgeting.

  The ambulance guys insisted on strapping me to a stretcher and carrying me upstairs. To tell the truth, I felt pretty used up. Bonnie wasn’t dead, though she looked it. She lay in a lump on the dance floor, her eyes glassy while another pair of ambulance guys worked on her. Her mother’s aim had been better on her, and she’d got one in the gut. I asked why they didn’t just throw her into the ambulance and get her over to the hospital, and they said they needed to stabilize her first. I was stable enough.

  They took Mrs. Creighter away in a police car, but I suspected she’d get into a hospital at some point.

  Emerald was standing outside, along with the wino I’d given the two dollars. They formed the crowd for this event. I told the ambulance guys to hold it. Emerald said it was sure lucky his house had gotten broken into that night. If he hadn’t had occasion to go out looking for his stuff... “And you know, I did find—I actually did find my wife’s purse in that dumpster!” he said. “No money in it, to be sure.”

  The police were obliged to confiscate his gun and inform me that although I was going to the hospital, I was under arrest for having the gun, for which neither Emerald nor I could produce documentation. “It is my gun,” Emerald shouted at the officers. “It is a five-shot Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special, and I have the serial number memorized. You ever try to get a handgun permit in this city?”

  “But she had ahold of it,” a cop said.

  “It’s OK, Emerald,” I said.

  They took me to Receiving Hospital, the best place to go in the city if you’ve got a bullet in you. They must handle a thousand cases a year. Ciesla and Porrocks showed up. The doctors let them into my cubicle after they’d gotten an IV going.

  A Detroit cop had shackled my ankle to the gurney. Ciesla persuaded him to come in and take it off. The doctors and nurses left me to wait for the X-ray guy. A non-life-threatening gunshot wound at Receiving is low priority, given the cornucopia of drastic medical emergencies generated by the city twenty-four hours a day.

  Ciesla took my hand, bless him. I didn’t have anything to say. “Decency makes me thank you,” he said. “I know you were trying to do the right thing. But you should have been killed.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re so stupid.”

  “I know!”

  He asked for the details and made notes while I talked. Porrocks hovered, patting my arm. A nurse came in and gave me a shot for the pain, which was getting worse now that I was finally relaxing. I felt the effects of the injection immediately.

  “Tell me,” I asked the nurse in my throatiest voice, “will I make it?”

  “Oh, certainly.” She was apple-cheeked and efficient and talked with a Scots accent. “You’ll need a bit of surgery, no doubt.”

  “Will I be able to do pirouettes after this?”

  “I should think so, of course.”

  I tapped an imaginary cigar and wiggled my eyebrows. “That’s funny, I never could do pirouettes before!”

  She clearly wanted to throttle me with the IV line, but I got a good pair of laughs out of Ciesla and Porrocks. It was a relief to hear them laugh. Then an orderly came and pushed me down to X-ray and back.

  Ciesla said the handgun charge would probably be dropped. A surgeon walked in, examined my leg, making it hurt horribly, and said they would indeed have to operate to get the slug out. Porrocks promised to call Billie for me, then the cops bid me adieu.

  They only kept me two days in the hospital. I learned from Ciesla that Bonnie had made it and was supposed to recover fully. He also told me that it wasn’t Bonnie who’d come after me that morning and attacked Minerva; it’d been Mrs. Creighter, who presumably was losing patience with the cat-and-mouse routine.

  Billie collected me and drove me to Aunt Rosalie and Uncle Guff’s house; they were gracious enough to take me in. She brought Todd over the next day. I imagined he looked glad to see me. I certainly was glad to see him. I started working on my story for the Motor City Journal right away.

  Minerva, I learned, had made it through two surgeries, during which the doctors had found more of her brain left than they’d expected. They put a plate in her head to replace the segment of pulverized skull, then she promptly lapsed into a coma. Her parents ordered her shipped back to some medical center on Long Island, where they lived. I didn’t get to see her before she was taken away.

  While Bonnie recovered from her wounds she and her mother were charged with the murder of Iris Macklin and the attempted murder of Minerva LeBlanc.

  Judy called me once after she heard about my exploits. “You are not a person I can cope with in any way anymore,” she said stiffly, after making sure I was all right.

  Ciesla and Porrocks let me know pretty much the same thing, although Ciesla couldn’t help bringing over some frozen spaghetti sauce and homemade chocolate chip cookies. Aunt Rosalie thanked him nicely but eyed the food suspiciously behind his back. I knew what she was thinking: A man who cooks? Bad medicine.

  “Erma thinks we would have cracked this anyway,” Tom said. “But I’m not so sure. If the two of them kept denying everything, they might have gotten away with it. In Iris Macklin’s case we thought it was the husband. He wouldn’t take a polygraph. I don’t know why. I think Bonnie Creighter’s going to tell us where the other bodies are. She’s not too mentally tough anymore.”

  I never did learn exactly what went on in that basement, exactly how Colossians was inflicted on Subject E, for instance, and I suppose in retrospect that’s for the best.

  Evidently Mrs. Creighter’s morbid business in forensic art was merely a sideline, the supply of teeth from the fresh corpses a happy coincidence. She’d held down a part-time job as a dental hygienist, where, coincidentally, they’d had a rash of thefts of equipment and supplies.

  I wrote Minerva’s parents a low-key letter, trying to help them understand their daughter’s last hours before the attack (minus certain details), trying to express my sympathy and my grief, so small in proportion to theirs. No one knew whether Minerva would ever wake up. I suggested that I’d come to visit her soon.

  As far as I could learn, she didn’t leave behind a lover in New York. The parents wrote back telling me to keep away.

  _____

  Within a few weeks my leg was practically back to normal and my story was finished. It ran as the cover piec
e in the Journal, titled “How Not to Catch the Crooks: My Adventures With Murder and Chaos in Detroit’s Underbelly.” Ricky Rosenthal loved it, the response was terrific, and he gave me an assignment to write a feature on life on the Detroit P.D.’s vice squad. My freelance career was underway.

  When the story came out, Judy found it necessary to call again. She tracked me down in the new apartment I’d rented a few blocks away from the McVitties’ duplex. I had a phone, a card table with two folding chairs, and a box of groceries. That was it. Todd and I rolled around the empty apartment like marbles in a coffee can. I’d spent a wad getting the Caprice repainted the same nice shade of evergreen. I’d saved a hundred dollars out of my check from the Journal to go on a shopping spree at John King, the great used bookshop near Wayne State. I was working on a list of essential titles when Judy called.

  “Our community,” she told me huffily, “doesn’t need this kind of crazy crap going on.” As if I’d killed somebody.

  “What community?”

  “You know,” her voice was scratchy with irritation, “the gay and lesbian community. This kind of publicity doesn’t do us much good. You went and poked around in dangerous places. You got yourself shot, Lillian! That is not the kind of message women need to be hearing! Plus, everybody thinks queers are killers anyway, and this kind of stereotyping, well, it’s just irresponsible.”

  “But Judy, I—you’ve missed the point. These women, the Creighters, I don’t think you could call them gay, or even festive. They were maniacs.”

  “Oh.” Sarcastic-like.

  “And do you suppose true Christians go around killing people? Anyway, wouldn’t you want to know about something like this? I can’t help it if it was sensational.” Moreover, I thought, this is the stuff rent checks are made of.

  I didn’t ask about Sharon Wurtz, and she didn’t offer any information. I figured I’d see them around.

  Lou called after reading my article. I suggested we meet for coffee, which we did, nice and normal, at Yokey-Dokey. I wanted to make sure she understood how grateful I was that she’d showed up when she did.