She looked at it without recoiling. Well, she was born in Brooklyn.
“Where? Not in the plant.” She glanced out the window involuntarily.
I folded my arms and said nothing. I was too tired to play it any way but out of an old melodrama.
She nodded then. “That’s right. You said something about my backing his play.”
“I got the phrase from someone this morning. Some things stick. Like who stands to gain the most if one of Stutch’s heirs doesn’t come out of the hospital and another vanishes from the interstate and is never heard from again.”
“I hired you to find them, have you forgotten?”
“That was before you knew Cecilia Willard had a great-grandson. That’s four of you splitting thirteen million a year. You might have to take in boarders.”
“I could have let the thing stay dead and kept the whole thing. I would anyway. The bulk of the estate went to Leland’s grandson. Most if not all of it will come out of his portion.”
I picked up the revolver. She didn’t move or react, just sat on the tall stool with her slim ankles intertwined.
“One thing my marriage taught me is the law belongs to the side with the most lawyers,” she said. “If I had to, I could tie up the courts until young Matthew’s reading Modern Maturity.”
That rang like coin. I holstered the gun.
“Where else if not the plant?” I asked. “He’s always there.”
“You won’t get in. It’s built like—”
“I know what it’s built like. I know the footage and the stresses and the name of the architect. The reason it’s built like that is the reason he’s holding the boy there, if the boy’s alive. It’s designed to turn away a mob. Only I’m not a mob. A drop of water can sweat through a dam built to hold back a river.”
“But how will you get out?”
“That’s the part I’m still working on.” I hadn’t told her yet about my talk with Montana. I realized then I never would, although I trusted her far enough now not to run to Thorpe with the information. It wouldn’t take more than an ounce of common sense to talk me out of what I’d rigged up.
She shook her head, sending blue shimmers through that fall of hair. “I didn’t hire you for a suicide mission. I’d rather pull the plug than let you go in there alone. I don’t go there myself, although ostensibly I own it. It’s Connor’s lair. What he has with the men under him is something I can’t buy.”
“It’s a guy thing. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I don’t have to.” She wasn’t smiling. “All I have to do is fire you.”
“Go ahead. I fire easy.”
“Will you walk away if I do?”
“Not so easy. The world’s turned. My neck and my ankle will heal, expenses cover that. They don’t cover Iris or Glendowning or Constance in the hospital or little Matthew, whose world is shot to hell and he knows even less about why than we do. If he’s alive. Then there’s the posthumous frame I was supposed to stick my head through in Toledo. I don’t worry so much about myself, but I do care what happens to my corpse. Those things have to come out of Thorpe.”
“Those things are what police are for.”
“This town doesn’t have police. The real police would have to clear jurisdiction through what wears the uniform here. That would be followed by a call to Thorpe asking what time would be convenient for a raid. I might as well call him on your bill and leave the taxpayers a little more to bribe the trash man with.”
“I’m the town’s richest citizen. I know a bit about money and power. I wasn’t brought up in Walnut Grove, and I wasn’t out diddling the pool boy while Leland was on the telephone, wheeling and dealing in both hemispheres. If it’s muscle you need—”
“Knowing the vocabulary doesn’t mean you speak the language,” I said. “Hiring leg-breakers takes almost as much practice as breaking legs. You never know where they’ve been, for one thing. Around here they’ve probably all broken legs for Thorpe. When push comes to shove they might forget whose legs they’re being paid to break this time out.” I was talking too much about breaking legs. My own conversation was beginning to taste as bad as Muriel’s coffee. “Anyway, I’ve got it covered.”
“Covered how?”
I pushed away from the windowsill. “The less you know about that part of the operation, the fewer questions you’ll be expected to answer when the authorities come around. And they’ll come around, sure as winter. As a matter of fact, it’d be best if you fired me right now. That way everything I do from here on in I do as a free agent.”
“If I fire you now, can I re-hire you later?”
“No comment. That might be one of the questions they’ll ask.” I waited.
She unhooked her ankles, hooked them the other way. “You’re fired.”
“What, no severance package?”
She smiled for the first time in forever. Then she became as solemn as an Indian; “as a Dutchman” didn’t answer. “When are you going in?”
“As soon as I get some sleep. I’ve been running on fumes since sunup. I’m putting into a motel. I expect the cops at my place anytime. The real cops.”
“Do you have a bag?”
“In the pickup.”
“Bring it in. I’ll have Mrs. Campbell make up a guest room while you’re eating.”
I’d forgotten about eating. I hoped I didn’t nod off with a wad of eggs in my throat.
“I’ve been here too long already. If someone spots that pickup, I’m finished.”
“Pull it into the garage.”
“You’d be harboring a fugitive. There’s a buzzer out on me in two states.”
“Don’t fight me on this one,” she said. “You’re too tired to win twice in one afternoon.”
I didn’t try. Lead was creeping into my extremities and darkening the edges of my brain.
I’d parked the Ram behind the house, where it wouldn’t be visible from the street in case some prowlie had read his sheet, but that wouldn’t stop a neighbor from coming around to borrow a cup of money and going away to spread the word the Widow Stutch was entertaining a visitor. One of a pair of electric doors opened in the garage with almost no noise at all and I parked next to a bratty European sports job with a maroon finish that went down a block. There was a row of gleaming hoods beyond it, another roadster and a stretch Cadillac for show and a Land Rover Defender standing tall on tires the size of Volkswagens, in case a safari broke out. I wondered who took care of them all. Mrs. Campbell, maybe, when she wasn’t playing the piano or moving furniture. You just didn’t know what the house contained at a glance; including its owner, who painted portraits and offered to raise an army of muscle. Old Man Stutch had recognized a bargain when he saw it.
The door thrummed shut as I scooped my bag from the narrow space behind the seat. No garage door I’d ever seen moved half as fast with so little fanfare. Mrs. Campbell took the bag away from me at a side door. I followed her through a pantry the size of my living room into an acre of bright kitchen hung with copper utensils like mission bells, and sat down at a painted country table that belonged in Mt. Vernon, set with china and six forks.
The eggs were omelets, golden brown, stuffed with peppers and onions and cheese, smothered in a cream sauce. I yawned my way through two helpings and half a pot of coffee. After that I floated off on someone’s arm—I think it was Rayellen Stutch’s—to an upstairs bedroom done in mauve and silver, with a tall bureau and a big oak four-poster festooned with some kind of netting, or maybe that was just my vision beginning to cloud. At least the window looked out on a part of Iroquois Heights that didn’t include the damn plant.
I’d torn up the road back and forth between two states on three different sets of wheels, been in an accident, had a gun stuck at me, been sassed at by three different kinds of crook and caught one in the breadbasket from a fourth, stumbled over a corpse (first of the year), and managed to lose three people under my protection, at least one permanently, since the last time I’d closed my e
yes. Just another day in the life of a self-employed screwup. I needed twelve hours. I told whoever helped me to the bed to wake me in four.
I was left alone to undress and unwind the tape from my ankle, which I did without worrying what I would substitute in its place. The ankle was striped violet and purple and a gay shade of yellow, but the swelling didn’t look any worse for all the time I’d been spending on it. Those ambulance boys were worth more than what they were paid, an epidemic condition in our booming economy. I tossed the coils onto the nightstand next to my revolver in its holster. My neck was stiffer than ever. I would need that brace soon if I didn’t want to walk around like Ed Sullivan for the rest of the year, but where I was headed it would just be in the way.
Naked, I slid between sheets as crisp and cool as dry snow. Just before I coasted off into dreamless black, I thought I heard the grumble and cough of diesel engines barking to life, from as far west as Green Bay and as far south as Louisville. I caught a glimpse behind my eyelids of tall silver stacks farting balls of black smoke in Grand Rapids and Columbus, down logging trails north of Buffalo and along the banks of the St. Lawrence; a dense fleet of eighteen-wheeled heavy cruisers thundering onto freeways on every side of the big mitten, smashing gears and blasting the same harsh note out of their air horns that Ray Montana used when he pronounced the name Iroquois Heights.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
These things I know:
When it comes to sleep, four hours is not as good as eight.
Sometimes, four hours is worse than none at all.
I might have kept myself alert unloading and cleaning my gun and reloading it, practicing my fast draw, or rotating the Ram’s tires and changing the oil. Instead I was still coasting downhill through the Black Forest and nowhere near the bottom when my engine started knocking. It was someone’s knuckles, Rayellen Stutch’s or Mrs. Campbell’s, rapping on the guest room door. Before I could answer it I had to brake, turn around, and begin the long climb up toward the light. The trip took more out of me than the one down, and by the time I cleared the bricks of the Stutch plant off my eyelids and blinked up at the gray mesh between me and the ceiling, I was sweating and a heavy fog filled my head, thick enough to roll sluggishly when I turned my head against the needles in my neck, like one of those tilting-wave toys that take up more room on an executive’s desk than a day’s work.
Someone had lashed a Chevy short block to each of my feet, but I managed to swing them out from under the top sheet and down to the floor. The pain from my injured ankle took the Overland route to my brain, down arroyos and over mountains and around Apache country, but it arrived fresh and full of fire just the same. When I bent down to rub the swelling, the glutinous mass shifted toward the front of my skull and I began to black out. I jerked my head back up, lighting up all the pain-points in my abused tendons but cutting through the fog.
Whoever was out there was still knocking. She’d been knocking for a month. I looked up at a robe hanging from one of the bedposts, a dressing gown with martini olives floating on a burgundy sea and a lining of dark red silk. I stood carefully, dragged it on, and tied the sash. It was old—not worn-old, but of a quality that had gone out with mahogany dashboards and steamer trunks. The sleeves came short of my wrists, the hem just to my knees. The garment would have fit Leland Stutch. It seemed gaudy for a man who had bought his pinstripes and Homburgs in the same store where Herbert Hoover shopped. It had probably been a gift, which explained its bandbox condition. A vintage clothing store would have traded a bundle for it, but for me it was just something to wrap around my nudity.
There were no slipper’s. Stutch’s size fives wouldn’t have supported a sparrow hawk. I waded barefoot through silver pile to the door and cracked it. Mrs. Stutch smiled through the gap.
“I brought coffee. Are you hungry? I sent Mrs. Campbell to the store.”
“Thanks. I’ll stay hungry. I’d rather have the circulation going to my brain. Is there a shower in this zip code?”
“The house isn’t that big. I bought it to avoid just that kind of joke. Bathroom’s across the hall. May I at least set down the tray?”
I swung the door all the way open. She sidled around me, carrying a heavy silver tray with a tall matching coffee pot shaped like a hookah and a pair of white china cups on saucers. She smiled at the sight of me in the dressing gown. “Sorry I didn’t have anything in your size. Leland told me he used to have a bodyguard at the time of the strikes, a big good-looker who stood in for Johnny Weissmuller. People were always trying to shake his hand. They thought the little man with him was one of Leland’s clerks.”
“It’s the little yappy dogs that bite. What time is it?”
“Twenty to six. You’ve got a couple of hours before dark. Are you sure you don’t want to sleep a little longer?”
“I’m sure I do, but I’ve got arrangements to make. Do you have any kind of athletic tape in the house?” I was gripping a bedpost to keep weight off my ankle.
“Miles. I’m a fitness junkie, remember? Would you like me to wind it on?” She set the tray on an upholstered bench at the foot of the bed.
I said I’d manage. She went to get the tape while I showered.
The bathroom was Nile green, with French-milled cakes of emerald soap in the shower and in a little jadeite tray shaped like a coiled asp next to the sink. The towels were striped green and white, and Cleopatra trolled her fingers over the side of her barge inside a green baize frame above the toilet, to put the fine point on it. It was a nice house, what I’d seen of it when I was awake, except someone had let a decorator run riot in it.
I’d brought in my bag, and from it I took my electric travel razor and buzzed off the top growth. I pulled out a dark gray jersey top and a pair of crushable khakis, well-crushed, and put them on. Back in the bedroom, I sat on the bed and let Rayellen Stutch watch me tape my ankle from the roll she’d brought, drinking coffee in a mauve satin wing chair. She was wearing the outfit she’d worn previously and looked as fresh as if she’d just put it on; fresher anyway than me. I rolled on thick black wool socks and stuck my feet inside the elastic-sided boots. They felt clammy inside.
“Shouldn’t the whole outfit be black?” she asked.
“In a Hitchcock film. These urban nights never get dark enough. I’d stick out.” I took the .38 from its holster and spun the cylinder. Then I stood and put the works on my belt. I stuffed my sportcoat into the overnight bag. I’d left the leather Windbreaker in the pickup. It wasn’t any more practical but it went with the look. When they found my carcass I didn’t want Mr. Blackwell clucking over it.
I grasped the bedpost to pull myself up and fetch my coffee from the bench. She made a noise of protest and started to rise, but I propelled myself onto my feet, ignoring the jag of pain, and beat her to it. I poured a cup and drank, trying to lean against the bedpost in such a way that it didn’t look as if it were standing in for my starch. Otherwise she might do me the favor of calling for back-up after I left. For all I knew, Thorpe had a tap on her line.
She read my mind; the last part, anyway. “I’ve been thinking about Connor. I know what he’s up to.”
“Me too. You first.”
“He worked for Leland a long time. What if Leland promised him a legacy, back before I came along? Then along I came, and Leland forgot. Connor sucked it up then, but this business of additional heirs set him off. He’s holding the boy for ransom.”
“Did Leland ever discuss his will with you?”
“We never talked about money.”
“Interesting marriage.” The coffee in my cup hadn’t grown on the same slope as the stuff downtown.
“People who never get sick don’t talk about their health,” she said. “What do you think of my theory?”
“It makes sense. It made sense when I came up with it. If there’s anything in it, you should get a call.”
“It hasn’t been that long. Should we wait?”
“That would be p
rudent.”
She smiled without warmth. “If you were in favor of waiting, ‘smart’ would be the word you’d use. ‘Prudent’ is for spinsters and presidents.”
“There’s a time factor. Unless Proust has used his one telephone call on Thorpe, he doesn’t know that I’m not dead in Glendowning’s garage in Toledo. I don’t think Proust was in any shape to call. Giving birth might be a bigger deal than having a slug taken out of your knee, but I’ve never heard of anyone carrying on any sort of conversation during either procedure. The longer Thorpe goes without getting word, the more suspicious he gets. I need to get in before he decides to shore up the security or worse, fly the coop. If it’s cut-and-run, he’ll get rid of the boy. He’d just slow him down.”
“Then what are we waiting for?”
“What do people usually wait for under these circumstances? Dark.”
She sat back, fingering her cup. “You’re a funny sort of detective. Do you go off on crusades often?”
“The crusaders didn’t go off on crusades. They’re not cost effective. It so happens I’ve knocked a hole in the criminal code, and if I don’t dig up someone to stuff into it, the people who keep the code will use whatever’s handy. Whatever’s handy being me.”
“It wouldn’t have anything to do with your lady friend getting killed.”
“She was beheaded,” I said. “It was a damn good-looking head, too.”
We talked a little more, Mrs. Stutch trying to find out what my plans were for leaving the plant, me changing the subject to the décor in the house. It turned out Mrs. Campbell had done that, too. She was a frustrated aunt. After that we went back down to the studio, where I borrowed an X-acto knife Mrs. Stutch used to trim paper, cleared the drafting table, and sliced young Dollier’s photo out of the corner of the General Motors security ID I’d borrowed from him. I cut my picture out of my investigator’s license, rubber-cemented it to the GM card, and secured the works behind the window of my pocket folder. It looked cheesy in the room’s electric light, and no one was going to believe I was twenty-four years old. I was counting plenty on its being dark enough at the plant to bluff my way past the gate.
Sinister Heights Page 18
