Sinister Heights

by Loren D. Estleman

  Speaking of which, the Italian cordovan on his right foot glistened like an oil spill. He glanced at it briefly, checking for scuff marks, then turned his blue eyes on me with the same speculative expression. “You look even worse than last time. The night life must be catching up.”

  “Nice shoes,” I said. “Vivaldi?”

  That threw him, but only for a second. He was too experienced a courtroom lawyer to display confusion. “The trouble with you Eagle Scouts is you think poverty is some kind of badge of honor. Some of us care about our appearance, budget a little more for clothes and food, a nice car, a steep mortgage. A nice haircut doesn’t mean a wicked man.”

  “On the other hand it doesn’t turn a rat into a poodle. I hear you’re a paid lobbyist these days. Who pays? Same gang as before?”

  His expression didn’t change, although a muscle jumped in one cheek. There used to be a mole there, but if it was surgery they’d done a good job and left no scar. Maybe it had been just a wart after all. “I represent a number of interests. Everyone’s entitled to a voice in this democracy.”

  “Some are louder than others. Those dead presidents can really yell.” I drank more coffee. Either I was getting used to the taste or it had improved in contrast to the company. I was as wide awake as a hummingbird.

  “I’m using a spare office here, with the mayor’s permission. He’s a good man, but he’s new to government. I explain procedure and provide tips on how to cut through red tape. It’s temporary, and strictly without portfolio.”

  “What’s it pay?”

  “Straight salary, no perks or benefits. The better I do my job, the shorter it lasts. I think even you would concede I’m no slacker.”

  “You never tried to turn an hour’s work into a full day’s pay.”

  He allowed himself to look surprised. “Thank you for that.”

  “You can shove your thanks up your boondoggle. I don’t think you even like money. It’s just something you ride, like the inter-urban, and change trains just before it derails. You’ve got a cockroach’s flair for survival. Now you can thank me.”

  “Damn you, you shabby little saint,” he said mildly. “What are you doing for Connor Thorpe?”

  “I’m looking for a missing person, a small boy. It’s got nothing to do with you.” I watched him to see if it had anything to do with him. Nothing moved in his face, not even the muscle in his cheek.

  “What’s the boy’s name, and why does Thorpe care?”

  “Ask him. A little matter of a confidential investigation is nothing between a couple of close friends like you.”

  It was a gamble. The odds scared the hell out of me, like diving headfirst into a dark swimming pool. If he was in with Thorpe, or if he wasn’t and called my bluff and asked him about the boy, the plant would be waiting for me with torches and pitchforks.

  Fish retreated, with the tiniest shake of his head. The water was deep enough and not too cold. He changed weapons, more smoothly than Muriel. “Earlier this week you were detained by two officers of this police department for having a defective taillight.”

  “License plate light,” I corrected. I’d wondered when he’d get around to it. Fish twirled the police like a pistol. His ability to win their loyalty was his steel core. They reported to him ahead of their watch captains.

  “License plate light. You showed them a check signed by Leland Stutch’s widow. Are you working for her as well as for Thorpe, or are the cases related?”

  “I didn’t say I was working for Thorpe.”

  “You said you were looking for a little boy.”

  “You asked what I was doing for Thorpe. I said I was looking for a little boy. If you assumed I was answering your question, it wasn’t my job to set you straight. I’m not a paid lobbyist.”

  “So Rayellen Stutch has hired you to find this boy.”

  “If you like.” I sipped coffee. I was starting to enjoy the conversation.

  He banged the table suddenly. He’d forgotten the pencil was in his fist and he marred the leather top. He flung away the pencil to shake a finger at me, the way he’d shaken it at a hundred juries to put some animation in their oxlike faces.

  “It’s a mistake to think that because I don’t have my name on a door in this building I’m harmless,” he said. “Muriel never asks questions he doesn’t want to know the answers to. When I shoo him out of the room it’s bare knuckles. I couldn’t use them back when there was some chance I’d be a senator. That’s gone, and as I recall you had some small part in it.”

  “Was that you? I forgot. You had more hair then.”

  “I’ll remind you. We went a couple of rounds over that Broderick killing a few years ago. I had you on the mat once, but I couldn’t bring my heel down on your throat the way I wanted to, because people were watching. Well, the auditorium’s empty. I’ve got free use of two hundred and fifty police officers. I had that before, but now I’ve also got a second team. Cops busted off the job because they did a little improv on the shift and got caught on video. Parole cops who have favors done for them by ex-cons they could bust back to prison at the scratch of a pen. Election toughs who started tearing down opposition posters, then graduated to caving in precinct workers’ ribs in parking lots.

  “There’s a third team, too, that I don’t even like to think about. But I’m an attorney. I won’t lose sleep forever.” His face was bright. He might have been standing on a platform.

  I grinned. “That’s quite a half-time talk. Ever scare yourself?”

  He went all ice then, as only the blue-eyed ones can. But he had the same control over his moods they say Houdini had over his muscles. For sure it had taken some kind of escape artist to turn a recall into an unofficial appointment as mayor.

  “What were you looking for in the Stutch plant blueprints? What’s it got to do with Rayellen Stutch and a missing boy? Is there a boy?”

  “There’s a boy. And I like to look at blueprints. The older the better. Blueprints, not boys. It’s a hobby.”

  “Boys or blueprints?”

  “Blueprints. The boy’s a job. How about you?”

  His mouth hung open for a moment, and I knew why they called him Fishhook down on Boyle Street. Then he found his smirk. “You must like pain and hardship. Your résumé shows that.” The smirk capsized. “What are you doing?”

  “Violating an ordinance.” I touched a match to the Winston I’d stuck between my lips. “You’re all hide and horns, counselor. You can use my ears for ashtrays, all right. Only you won’t, because Connor Thorpe’s tougher. You bought-boys like to leer at the suckers who punch the clock and buy on time. You think they’re afraid to take shortcuts. They’ll never be as afraid as you. On the one hand you’ve got the reform crowd to worry about, the citizens’ groups and the Eyewitness News hacks and the spooks in your own camp who will sell you out for a free dinner, because when you buy a jackal that’s what you get. On the other hand you’ve got the guy who bought you to begin with, who knows you’ll sell him out for the same free dinner. He’ll also throw you to the ’gators when they froth up the water, because he’s a jackal too. Those clowns I scared off with Mrs. Stutch’s check will never have it as bad as you. They’re just maggots, any buck will do as long as it’s dirty. You’re a maggot with ambitions. You want to be Thorpe.”

  “You talk a good half-time yourself,” he said. “Assuming you’re right—which is one hell of an assumption, and slander besides—how does that make me worse off?”

  “There’ll always be a dirty buck to be made, but there’s only one Connor Thorpe to a thousand bought guys like you. He controls the security budgets of the Big Three. By now he’s used them to dig up enough on the men who deal out those budgets to nail himself tenure, followed by a tropical retirement. He’s a corruptor, which is a whole different creation from the simply corrupt. You’ll never graft enough to catch him.”

  “I’m not working for Thorpe.” This came out on an automatic spring.

  “Neither am I.
But I’m the one with his letter in my pocket.”

  He found his smirk again finally. This time he’d had to scrabble for it in a drawer. “You won’t always have a letter.”

  “Yeah, well, mine’s bigger than yours.” I tipped the cigarette, which I hadn’t wanted anyway, into the mug on the desk and got up. I winced a little when I put weight on my ankle. Fish was too experienced a predator to miss it.

  “Hurt yourself?”

  “For once, not in the Heights.”

  Sergeant Vivaldi stopped gabbing with the receptionist and pushed himself off the desk when I came out. I swept on through and punched up the elevator. I should have taken the stairs. Just as the doors opened, Vivaldi came trotting out of reception. He asked me to hold the car.

  I held it. He got in, said, “Ground floor?” and pressed a button. The doors rolled shut and we rode down in silence.

  When the car didn’t stop on the ground floor, I stepped back quickly to give myself swinging room, but my ankle was hurting and I was off balance. Vivaldi’s right fist caught me just above the belt buckle. I doubled over; that was real enough, but before he could give me the two-fisted club from above I grasped hold of his crotch and twisted as if I were working the airlock to freedom. He said, “Jesus!” in about four syllables and grabbed for my arm. I reached up, clutched his face hard, glasses and all, with my other hand, and straightened my arm with a pop, driving the back of his head into the mirrored lining of the elevator. The glass dished in and starred.

  The doors opened on a basement boiler room. I punched the ground-floor button. The doors took a week to close. The car took longer making up its mind to rise, but I didn’t know my way around the basement or if there was an exit. Vivaldi, glasses gone and his hair in his face, remembered he had a gun. He stopped reaching for it when I stuck a finger in his face. He’d recognize that if he’d been fetching for Cecil Fish long.

  “No holes in the merchandise,” I said. “You folks sure do enforce the smoking laws up here.”

  It worked. He held that half-crouch, breathing hard, with pain lines on his face and one hand partly inside his jacket, while the car eased itself to an obese stop. When the doors opened, I stepped aside and held the button for a white-haired man in a rusty leisure suit pushing a wheelchair with a mummy in it wearing a silk dress and a blue wig. Vivaldi shuffled to the other side and hadn’t made a move to come out when I let the doors go.

  Out in the parking lot I glanced up at the second-floor window I figured belonged to Mayor Muriel’s outer office. It was bullet-resistant Plexiglass, tinted, and I couldn’t tell if Fish or anyone else was standing there. It didn’t matter. He’d taken his kick at the sandcastle and wouldn’t risk another. One thing you can depend on is a bought man.

  He got in the last word anyway. A canary-yellow parking ticket stuck out its tongue at me from behind the windshield wiper of the Ram pickup. There on it was the plate number, penciled neatly in a left-hand slope, and no cops hiding in the box to jump out and grab me and hand me over to Toledo. Some coffee-sergeant inside had probably pinned up a notice offering an apartment for rent on top of the hot sheet on the bulletin board.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Stutch motors plant crouched on its hill like a gaunt spider, casting no shadow under a clouded noonday sky, vampiric. Even the smoke from its three stacks didn’t appear to be moving, parallel rivulets dried to black crusts on zinc. The gridded window on this side reflected the buildings of Iroquois Heights. It wasn’t giving up anything.

  This time the angle was slightly different. I was looking out the window of Rayellen Stutch’s art studio, a plain room with walls painted off-white in order not to distract from an artist’s honest evaluation of her paintings, and which would look dirty yellow against the soft whites in the conservatory. Mrs. Campbell, as gray and calm as a bell moth, had installed me there while Mrs. Stutch was changing, then glided on out. I’d as much as called her a busybody to her face, but she was playing the faithful retainer and didn’t curl a lip. Now someone was putting the baby grand through its paces in the room next door: Handel, I thought, although I only knew the old gentleman from long drives when the jazz stations went progressive and one more doowop on an oldies track would send me up onto the median. The housekeeper’s left hand was wasted on the Germans. Someone ought to introduce Fats Waller into her repertoire.

  Unframed canvases and works on paper leaned against the baseboards all around the studio: pastels and watercolors, oils and acrylics, and a train wreck of a charcoal sketch Mrs. Stutch might have done during a hiccup fit. There were still lifes and pastorals that reminded me of the rustic images on Mayor Muriel’s walls, portraits and abstracts, one or two copies of old masters done with a twenty-first-century twist. I recognized the strokes from the framed costume prints on the hallway walls outside. On the drafting board, unfinished, Mrs. Campbell noodled the white piano’s middle scale in three-quarter profile, surrounded by pencil sketches in long view and close-up fixed with pushpins to the board. Her expression, glistening in fresh oils, was serene.

  The art was good, pleasing at least to my monstrously untrained eye, and I’d rather have spent the time looking at it than at the old plant. But since I was fated to while away a good part of the night inside I needed to scope it out. Also the room reeked of turpentine and my eyes were burning just fine without help. I raised the double-hung window eight inches and wedged an aerosol can of fixative under the sash.

  Rayellen Stutch came in dressed in a shimmering copper-colored scoopneck top without sleeves, white pleated slacks with flared cuffs, and soft brown slippers with moccasin stitching. The slippers underscored her resemblance to an Indian princess. Her black hair spilled uninterrupted to her shoulders and her eyes were as dark as tamarack. She stopped when she saw me.

  “You look awful,” she said.

  “Thanks. I feel horrible. Are you part Indian?”

  “Dutch, I’m told. Stutch the Dutch.” She smiled briefly. “All the blonde genes spilled through the hole in the dike before I came along. Please sit down. You look as if you’re about to collapse.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll just lean here. You’d have to pry me back up. The only thing holding me together is a whole lot of whiskey, a little bit of caffeine, and a quarter mile of athletic tape. Nice portrait.” I tilted an eyebrow toward the oil on the drafting table.

  “Just a doodle. If I could catch on canvas what comes out of the piano, well.” She left it. “What in the world happened? Mrs. Campbell said you’d called to cancel lunch.”

  “An oversight. I haven’t eaten in so long I forgot how to chew.”

  She was out of the room before I could put a period on it. The music next door stopped, voices murmured. Mrs. Stutch came back in. “I hope eggs and coffee are all right,” she said. “I didn’t dine here last night, so there are no leftovers. Mrs. Campbell was going to shop this morning, but that was when we were expecting guests for lunch.”

  I said eggs would be fine, ducking the implied question at the end. I asked her how the fundraiser went.

  “I suppose it was a success. I don’t like putting the arm on people. Becoming wealthy and staying that way is hard work, as I said, but I’m expected to make people feel guilty for not giving something back, as if they stole it or swindled it. Anyway, we don’t need a new library, just more space for books. Instead we’re going to have a media center.”

  “Was Thorpe there?”

  “No. He never attends these things. About the most he does is pose for pictures in his office giving someone a check.” She paused with lips parted. “Is there some reason that’s important?”

  “I wanted to see if you were backing his play. If you were, you might alibi him. Or maybe not. It would be easy to find out from someone else if he was there. But I know he wasn’t, so I’m just spilling words.” I took a deep breath and spilled some more. I didn’t stop until I got to Ray Montana. Her skin paled beneath the tan. She drew the chair out from
the drafting table and sat down. It was a tall chair. We were almost eye to eye.

  “This Iris was a friend?”

  “Why does everyone ask that?” I said. “And what’s it matter? She’s as dead as Pharaoh and David Glendowning.”

  “I don’t believe Connor had anything to do with it. Murder and kidnapping. Why?”

  “From the start he didn’t like your looking for your husband’s daughter and granddaughter. You said yourself he dragged his feet when you wanted to put him on it. He told me when he sent me to you he hoped nothing would come of it. I’m pretty sure he set those cops on me when I was leaving this house. He knew they wouldn’t scare me off, being six feet and one inch of real man with assorted attachments, but they might rattle me enough at the outset to take the fun out of the detail work. When that fizzled, he put Proust on me, to follow me around in that brown Chevy and find out what I found out when I found it out.

  “Proust was a little rusty at first; I spotted him. After that he got better, or else he pulled a rotation on me. He’d still have contacts on the local force. They didn’t have to know what it was about. When it came time to do Glendowning and then me, he went solo. Also the kidnap. That schnook Glendowning only got tagged because it had to be done with his truck. That was a shame, maybe. He was talking about getting himself straightened around.” I didn’t not believe it, but I didn’t believe it, either. When someone’s dead you’re supposed to say something nice about him, and I hadn’t liked his haircut.

  “But what does Connor have to gain?”

  “I’ll ask him with this.” I’d snapped the Chief’s Special back onto my belt. Now I unholstered it and slapped it down on the windowsill.