Sinister Heights

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Just juice, if you have it,” I said. “I forget when I ate last.”

  He told me there was V-8 in the refrigerator and to pour him one too. He held on to the weight bar for another second, then let go and stepped back. The boy drew the bar down to his chest, sucking in air, then blew out, straightening his arms slowly, until he was holding up the barbells at arms’ length. Montana counted, “One, two,” under his breath, then patted his son’s shoulder and helped guide the bar into the brackets attached to the bench. Grinning, he squeezed the boy’s shoulder, then pointed at the punching bag. Philip nodded, swung his feet down to the floor, and stood up. He mopped the sweat off his face and neck with a towel, then traded it for a pair of tomato-red speed gloves. He began hitting the bag tentatively, then settled into the drumroll rhythm of the professional pugilist. He had a better left jab than I’d seen on some experienced men.

  “His school dropped boxing from the phys ed curriculum, would you believe it?” Montana came over to the bar and accepted his V-8, which I’d poured into a narrow glass from a collection on a shelf. “Somebody’s parents took the district to court over little Timmy’s shiner. We’re breeding a generation of sitting hens.”

  “He needs to work on his right cross.” I drank. The thick smooth stuff coated my empty stomach pleasantly.

  “We’re working on it. You box?”

  “College stuff. I spent my first eight weeks in the army unlearning everything I’d been taught. Getting him ready for the union?”

  “If he goes near headquarters I’ll teach him how I throw a right cross. He can be a bum if he wants, hustle pool. Better that than he should grab his ankles for anyone’s vote.”

  Ray had finer features than his father’s, not as square. His eyes were the same shade of gray and set as wide, and the two men shared a pug nose and a long dimpled upper lip, courtesy of some Celt in the family woodpile. He looked as if he could handle himself—the elder Montana had probably seen to that, just as Ray was doing for his own son—but in Phil’s case the training had been in the professional ring. It had come in handy in the urban battlegrounds of the Great Depression, but since all of Ray’s fights took place in boardrooms and on platforms draped with bunting, the advantage was mainly psychological. It was a stretch to imagine him grabbing his ankles ever.

  He sipped V-8, made a subtle face, and filled the gap with golden liquid from a square bottle that turned out to contain peach brandy. It wouldn’t have been my choice for breakfast. “What’s the name of the cop who killed Glendowning?”

  I glanced toward Philip, going budda-budda-budda at the punching bag. Montana shook his head. In anyone else I’d have called it a twitch.

  “He’s deaf. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t noise that about. So to speak.” He frowned at the pun he’d made. “It’s the current fashion to parade one’s disablements like a flag, but it’s one luxury a man in my place can’t afford. You don’t know how much time my opponents spend looking for holes in my masonry.”

  Probably about half as much time as he spent plugging them up. Aloud I said, “If they get it, don’t come looking for me. I can’t work this town from the bottom of the river. The cop’s name is Mark Proust. He was assistant chief in the Heights until they busted him a number of years back for staging fights in the county jail and cutting a slice of the action. Before that he was a detective inspector in Detroit. Before that I don’t know. Losing his tail in some swamp probably.”

  “I remember the stink. The cops up there were nosing around the Steelhaulers, looking for new representation. We were dragging our feet. They were Stutch property, went around ticketing Japanese cars and tapping the phones of Ford and Chrysler execs who had the shitty judgment to live inside the city limits. Repping them would have been like handing Leland Stutch the combination to the safe at union headquarters. The jail scandal gave us an excuse to table the issue till it dried up and blew away. I was just one of the Indians then.”

  “That town’s been for sale since Cadillac beached his canoe there to take a leak. It’s off the block now, though. Connor Thorpe bought it.”

  “I know Thorpe.” He pronounced the name the same way he’d said Iroquois Heights on the telephone. “Tell me how you know him.”

  That was as good a place to start as most. I gave him the whole thing while we leaned our elbows on the bar like a couple of movie cowboys, young Philip flapping away at the bag in the corner: Rayellen Stutch, the inheritance, Carla Willard Witowski, my talk with David Glendowning, the shelter in Monroe, Carla’s daughter Constance, the run-in with Glendowning’s pickup on the interstate, Iris’s death, little Matthew’s disappearance, Proust’s play over Glendowning’s corpse in the garage in Toledo, and what I got out of Proust before and after I kneecapped him. Montana listened, sipping from his glass and showing no more emotion than a man listening to a ballgame with no money riding on how it came out. When I finished, he pushed away from the bar, went over and clapped a hand on his son’s shoulder, squeezing it. Man and boy grinned. The boy mopped sweat off with the towel and let himself out the door. In a little while I heard water rushing through pipes behind the paneling. He was showering after his workout.

  “I looked into organizing the private investigation business several years ago.” Montana drank a little more, then filled the glass to the rim from the bottle of peach brandy. “Waste of time. The crooks couldn’t be counted on to keep up the dues and the honest ones couldn’t afford to. Anyway we couldn’t regulate the overtime. A draft horse like you would price himself out of the market.”

  “Glendowning tried recruiting me,” I said. “I hope his casket has a union label.”

  “I talked to the police in Toledo after you called. Your name didn’t come up.”

  “They don’t know about me yet. I dialed 911 and bugged out.”

  “Not smart. Cops talk to each other. Even if Proust clams, they’ll tie you into Glendowning’s pickup on I-75 and come knocking.”

  “I’ll answer. After I talk to Thorpe.”

  “Asking why.”

  “I might get around to it.”

  “This Iris was a friend?”

  “A good one,” I said. “I don’t have so many I can waste even the bad ones.”

  “Anything more?”

  “Not more. Apart from. If it’s any of your goddamn business.”

  He nodded. Said nothing.

  I said, “I’ll settle with Thorpe for Iris. That’s my end, after I find out if the boy’s all right.”

  “What’s my end?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out. Your name’s in Glendowning’s book.”

  “My name’s in every shop steward’s book between here and the Gulf of Mexico.”

  “I’m betting your home number isn’t.”

  “He had potential. I won’t live forever. One way to guarantee I won’t would be to agree to back a stranger’s play.”

  I finished my drink and got off my elbow. “I’ll be pushing off then. Thanks for the juice.”

  He didn’t move. “When I called you a stranger I thought maybe you’d mention knowing my father.”

  “It wouldn’t be good politics. We didn’t get along.”

  “He told me that, years ago. I got the impression it was his fault. He also told me you’re a man of trust. He said I should remember your name.”

  I put my elbow back on the bar and took my turn at saying nothing.

  “Glendowning had personal problems,” Montana said. “Show me a trucker who’s happy at home and I’ll show you a man I’d rather not have making decisions for the union. I’m sorry about his wife, but that was between them and the agencies whose business it is to deal with that sort of thing. His people liked him. They respected him, which is more important. He was a man of trust. They won’t like it when they find out what happened to him. If they find out Connor Thorpe is involved and I knew it and didn’t do anything about it, they’ll gas up their rigs and run them right through this house.”

 
; “That would be a waste of fuel,” I said. “With Iroquois Heights so close.”

  “What do you want from me, Walker?”

  “How about a splash of that brandy? I like to start a long day with fresh fruit.”

  He filled my glass and waited. The gray eyes held no expression.

  I drank, and set down the glass. The stuff tasted like a cobbler gone bad.

  I said, “I want a second front.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  This time out, no police pulled me over. That made sense, according to the standards in Iroquois Heights: The truck I was driving was on the BOL (Be On the Lookout) list in two states. At one point. I sat at a stoplight next to a shiny new cruiser for three minutes, watching the two uniforms in the front seat watch an inline skater in shorts and a halter top negotiate her way through the pedestrian press on the sidewalk.

  The county records office shared a newish brick building in the civic center with city offices and the criminal court, behind which armored vans conducted a shuttle service between the back door and the county jail. I parked in the little visitors’ lot—metered for one hour, against an average wait of two to three hours inside—stowed my Chief’s Special in the Ram’s glove compartment, and entered the building through a metal detector with a three-hundred-pound cop waiting out his pension on a stool next to it. His flushed and battered face looked as if it had witnessed its share of rubber-hose therapy sessions in the basement of the old city hall.

  The clerk behind the counter in records was the grandmotherly type, if your grandmother moonlighted as a prison matron. The steel rims of her bifocals matched her hair, blown out as big as a racing helmet and sprayed just about as hard, and she tucked the end of her man’s necktie inside her blouse like a top sergeant. When I told her what I needed she said I’d have to wait ten days for my request to be processed. I took out Connor Thorpe’s letter of authorization and spread it out on the counter.

  She read it, lips pressed tight as if to keep them from moving, then turned without comment and went through a door in back. I spent ten minutes reading a brochure on pet-licensing procedures, then watched her come back, wrestling a threadbare book the size of a drafting board around the edge of the door. Dust and weightless bits of paper wheezed out of the page-ends when she thudded it down on the counter. She pointed me to the reading room, a partitioned-off area just big enough for four job applicants to fill out their forms at student desks. I drew two of them together, spread the book open across the kidney-shaped writing surfaces, and leaned on my hands to study the pages I wanted.

  The book was a bound collection of construction blueprints filed with the building permits office for the three-month period between April 1 and June 30, 1936. Such things weren’t requested often, and no one had thought them worth the cost of transferring to microfilm. The carefully ruled lines in blue pencil had faded into the slate-colored pages, and I hadn’t slept in twenty-seven hours. I had to scrub my eyes with the heels of my hands and play slide trombone with my neck in order to avoid seeing two of everything.

  I spent an hour and a half studying the plans, breaking once to go out to the parking lot and feed the meter. I didn’t care about a ticket, but I didn’t want a cop writing down the plate and recognizing it from the roll-call list. I’m ordinarily good at reading blueprints and can grasp the general layout fairly quickly, but the angle of reading while standing up aggravated my whiplash and I had to take frequent breaks, rubbing my neck, rotating my head, and hobbling around on my taped-up ankle. I felt like a car someone was trying to nurse through one more winter.

  The Stutch Motors plant, later Stutch Petrochemicals and later still a division of General Motors, had gone up during the labor uprisings of the 1930s, and was consequently built to withstand a long siege. The main building contained the executive offices, with a glass wall overlooking the foundry on the ground floor where Leland Stutch could glance up from his desk and watch the steel being poured, like money into his mattress. There was only one door in and out—the local fire marshal must have rated at least a new car every model year to overlook that code violation—the walls were built of bricks pressed and fired on the site to a thickness of nearly two feet, the windows were triple-paned and sectioned off with titanium grids. The security offices were in the basement, with emergency living quarters in case it took the city police more than a couple of days to crack open enough of the strikers’ skulls to turn the tide. A chainlink fence had been erected around the compound to repel saboteurs during the Second World War, with hoops of barbed wire on top for that cozy concentration-camp effect. When negotiations broke down, the suits had only to padlock the front gate, bolt the door, and wait things out, roughing it with domestic wine and tinned salmon. Strikers who managed to scale the fence without eviscerating themselves had to make their way through a maze of satellite buildings—glass plant, coke ovens, fueling stations, stamping and assembly facilities—and avoid tripping over three miles of railroad latticework just to get to the main structure. Along the way they would encounter guards with truncheons and Thompsons and a couple of dozen half-starved German shepherds. Casual Friday would be canceled until further notice.

  In its heyday, the plant had had its own telephone system, independent of the city’s and more sophisticated than those in most communities, its own generators, backup generators, and backups to the backups, each the size of a juggernaut, humming away in a building constructed just for them. An urban myth persisted that Stutch had commissioned a flag emblazoned with the company logo, to be run up a staff in the event of an armed labor takeover of the United States, declaring the place a sovereign nation. There were autoworkers still living, and Steelhaulers still active in the union, who would never be convinced it was a myth; they’d seen the tommy guns and watched the dogs savage one another over a hunk of bloody round.

  None of these precautions had ever been put to the test, or perhaps the very fact that they were never challenged meant that they had passed it. Now, the grim lines and terse descriptions written on the sixty-four-year-old blueprints read like an archaeologist’s report on a feudal ruin, something from a barbaric time familiar only to medieval scholars and buffs who walked around in clanking armor on festive weekends. The union execs who sat on the boards, of all three major U.S. automobile manufacturers would scratch their heads over them between courses in the Grill Room at the Detroit Athletic Club. Most of the buildings were gone now or used for storage. When Antitrust ordered Ford to break up its sprawling River Rouge plant to promote competition, Stutch had turned the page. He sold the glass-making equipment, scrapped the dynamos, and farmed out the stamping and assembly operations, at a profit; always at a profit. He’d donated several hundred acres to the city—again to his advantage, but not one that would turn up in any ledgers—leased most of his rolling-stock to the Penn Central and B & O railroads, and consolidated his remaining operations in the main building, the gaunt, Gothic relic still brooding on its hill like Frankenstein’s castle.

  In his high nineties, the old man had cut back his management to two supercharged hours in the dead of night, during which a banker in Switzerland, a loyalist general in Chile, or a loading-dock foreman in Atlanta might expect to be rousted out of bed by a telephone call, and observed that schedule until his death at age 106, or 108, or 112, depending upon which biography one read. With him had passed an era dominated by wildcat semiliterates who had parlayed piles of old wagon springs, steam engine parts, and bizarre-looking new implements hand-forged in backyard shops into an industry that no one but themselves could have predicted. Only a few, like him, had lived long enough to see it pass into the white soft hands of business school graduates who had never busted a knuckle trying to remove a rusted bolt in their lives. His plant, ghost that it was of what it had been, was one of the handful in existence into which a time-traveling contemporary could wander and not feel lost among robot welders, computer consoles, foremen in white lab coats, and day care nurseries. It was
as doomed as Tiger Stadium.

  But ghost was misleading. This phantom had concrete feet planted twenty feet deep in solid bedrock. The materials were no longer available to contractors. Even if they were, government inspectors would never clear them, because buildings weren’t supposed to last two hundred years with so many bricklayers and carpenters out of work. There was enough asbestos between the firewalls to wipe out the population of South America. When the time came to demolish it, the city would have to be evacuated for fourteen blocks around and the dynamite required would be sufficient to level the Mountains of the Moon. The preparation alone would employ more men working with crowbars and sledgehammers than the Berlin Wall, and it would take more trucks to clear away the rubble afterward than even Ray Montana could muster. It would be as hard to get rid of as a Christmas fruitcake.

  There was nothing pretty about it, even in the architect’s elevations that accompanied the floorplans. Albert Kahn, whose graceful Greco/Roman/Deco/Nouveau/Moderne setpieces had transformed the Detroit skyline throughout the first forty years of the previous century, had had no hand in the design. It was as utilitarian as a pipefitter’s glove, as homely as a rich man’s marriageable daughter, and no one who had attended the groundbreaking in 1936 could have imbibed enough champagne to think six decades of smelter-soot and pigeon filth would contribute to its charm. Its square blunt face and rows of windows intended only to save on electric light during the day shifts were things only a former backyard mechanic could love. It was plain from the layout that Stutch had loved it, as much as a working-class child of the nineteenth century could love anything. He could have established himself in one of the offices on the top floor, with a view of the city and soundproof insulation to spare him the ballpeen din, but he’d chosen instead a bleacher seat behind the dugout.