Sinister Heights

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Take the Land Rover, why don’t you?” Mrs. Stutch asked, as I swept away the scraps and put the folder in my pleated hip pocket. “If you’re right about the pickup, you might be stopped before you make it to the end of the block.”

  “I’d rather take the chance no one sees the plate. White Rams are as common as carjackers. There’s only one Stutch Land Rover, and I look even less like you than I do the kid who belongs to the card. Anyway, using Glendowning’s ride appeals to my sense of justice.”

  “I didn’t realize you were so poetic.”

  “It’s not an asset in my work. I’ll call you when it’s finished.” I didn’t add that the call wouldn’t be necessary if it finished the way I had planned. Everyone in Iroquois Heights was going to know there were doings up on the hill. I slid off the stool.

  “It’s not dark yet,” she said.

  “I’ve got someone I have to see first.”

  She got up from the chair she’d been sitting in. “You didn’t tell me that part.”

  “I don’t tell anyone everything. It’s a habit.”

  She stood very close in front of me. I smelled scented soap on her skin. It wasn’t the green stuff from the guest bath. It would be engineered to remove all traces of the heavy exercise she liked, with something added that wouldn’t be available to the general run of health maven. “I’ve forgotten your first name.”

  “Amos.”

  “I like it. Old Testament?”

  “It’s not getting any younger. Don’t fall into the habit of calling me by it. When the cops come visiting I’m just a hand you hired for some legal legwork.”

  “Don’t worry. I have the advantage of not having been born with money. A better education might have made me think I’m smarter than them.” She put a hand to her throat. “It’s been a long time, you know.”

  “Since Brooklyn?”

  “No.” She was breathing shallowly. Her nostrils quivered. “Being Mrs. Leland Stutch is like being the most popular girl at school. All alone Saturday night because everyone assumes she’s spoken for.”

  “It’s longer than that. Old Man Stutch died before Viagra.”

  “So you can see my situation.”

  “I bet you were popular, at that.”

  There was a little space during which Mrs. Campbell, back from the store, sounded out the opening bars of a nocturne in the next room, or maybe it was Count Basie on Valium. Then the mistress of the house went up on the balls of her feet and kissed me. Her tongue pried at my lips. I let it. After a while I grasped her upper arms and pushed her back down on her heels.

  A hard red light flickered in the brown of her eyes. “Maybe I’m not Dutch enough for you.”

  “Brunettes are okay. My mother was a brunette. Field hands don’t mesh with boss ladies. No future in it.”

  “Ethics, is it?”

  “To start.”

  “I fired you, remember? We’re just two people.”

  “I’m just one person. You’re the navy and the marines and the New York Philharmonic. Bad arithmetic. Leland’s dressing gown doesn’t fit. I’m getting out before you order one in my size.”

  “That’s reverse snobbery. I’m not in the market for a kept man.”

  “That’s okay, because I don’t keep any better than yogurt. This is just juxtaposition and adrenaline. I need the adrenaline for later.”

  She tugged down the hem of her blouse. “You’re in mourning, is that it?”

  “If you like. There’s no future in it either way.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I wasn’t thinking of anything permanent.”

  “That’s the hell of it,” I said. “I’m in the kind of work where the landscape keeps changing. Permanence is the only thing that might buy me.”

  She’d stopped rearranging herself. She hadn’t gotten that disarranged to begin with. She looked Indian again, as impassive as the head on a can of baking powder. “Someday, some woman—not me—will make you that offer. I hope for both your sakes you won’t be too busy looking back over your shoulder to listen.”

  “The thing is I was.” I picked up my bag and got out of there.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  The Land Rover had tracked a mixture of sand and red clay into the garage. For a moment I thought about moistening a handful of it with water from the sillcock inside the door and smearing it over the Ram’s license plate, but vetoed the idea on the grounds that even an Iroquois Heights cop might be familiar with the gag and move in for a closer look.

  The clouds were turning a deep eggplant color in the west when I backed out. I thought for a second I saw the red light of the sun on the lip of the land, but the overcast was complete. The angry copper glow belonged to a stream of liquefied steel pouring from the ladle into molds behind the east window of the Stutch plant. When the building came down in a year or so and the engineering and design center went in with its computer stations and fluorescent midnights, the inner workings of the automobile industry would be hidden from the unprivileged eye, cosseted behind soundproofed and heat-resistant walls and cricketing keyboards, and cloaked in mystery overall, like a conjuring act in Atlantic City. For now, the plant was the dead last place on earth where one could witness the flexing of the naked muscle that turned the crank that worked the gears that made the Industrial Revolution revolve.

  Twenty years ago, in the midst of white flight from Detroit, the Iroquois Heights citizenry had become alarmed that over-development might deprive the place of its small-town charm. Never mind the fact that it was as charming as Black Rock. They voted to float bonds for the construction of a greensward in the southeast corner to serve as a quarantine line between themselves and the festering metropolis at their feet. Matching federal funds gave the city council authority to condemn twenty-eight privately owned acres, including a number of historic storefronts and a residence under construction. Dozers carved the flat landscape into enchanted hills and mysterious valleys, sod was laid, trees were planted, and nature walks and bridle paths installed withal. There was a bandstand and a duck pond and a scatter of picnic tables and wrought-iron benches chained to concrete footings. Six months after the ribbon-cutting ceremony, the mayor, the city treasurer, and the private contractor who had bid low on the project retired. Another two years went by before someone noticed that the bandstand was tilting a few degrees to the left. When city workers attempted to jack it up and introduce a ton of fresh cement to the foundation, the jack sank out of sight. A private environmental group conducted tests and reported that the park was built on the site of an old landfill, richly contaminated by battery-acid spills and the leakage from oil drums, which had rusted through finally and caused the earth piled on top of them to collapse. By this time, the poured slabs beneath the tables and benches and the comfort station had begun to crack apart and a brackish swamp had opened on the south end of the pond. Of the three individuals responsible, one was dead, one was under indictment in Florida for laundering Colombian drug money, and the third was living in a country with no extradition treaty with the U.S. They called the place Victory Park.

  I drove the Ram between a pair of stone posts where a gate had been before the city gave up charging admission and followed the crumbling composition drive to a parking lot in the northwest corner. There was only one car in the lot, a navy or black four-door Oldsmobile nosed into a low brick retaining wall with a view beyond of the city lights cast out like bits of colored glass on black felt. I pulled in beside the car, leaned over, and rolled down the window on the pickup’s passenger side. The tinted window on the driver’s side of the Olds whirred down at the same time. Ray Montana looked out at me with his hands resting on the wheel. There was a block of shadow in the passenger’s seat.

  “Is that Dave Glendowning’s truck?” Montana asked.

  I said it was.

  “You like to take chances.”

  “Nope. All my pillows still have the DO NOT REMOVE tags. I needed wheels and didn’t have them. Glendo
wning had them and didn’t need them. Around here they arrest you for walking to the mailbox.”

  “I could’ve lent you a car.”

  “Everyone’s offering me transportation. Where were you all at two this morning? Who’s that with you?”

  “Personal security.” As Montana spoke, the shadow moved, leaning forward into the last gasp of light from the shrouded sun. A shaved blue-black head with a gold loop gleaming in one earlobe showed above a matching dark shirt-and-tie set. The face was familiar. I’d seen it on TV, either during one of Montana’s press conferences or in a documentary on Easter Island.

  “Where’s Reznick?”

  “He’s the day man,” Montana said.

  “I thought bodyguards did the driving.”

  “Everyone thinks that. That’s why they shoot at the passenger.”

  “What good’s personal security with a bullet in its head?”

  “What good is he if it’s in mine? Anyway a head’s a hard thing to hit.”

  “Can we continue this conversation in your car? I’ve got a touch of whiplash.”

  At the end of a brief murmured conference the bodyguard got out. He wasn’t as big as he looked sitting. He had short bandy legs and a heavy torso, an authentic Chippendale. At that he was big enough. His suitcoat was a size too large: a .44 magnum long. He was still standing there when I climbed down from the cab and came around to his side. He smelled of gun oil and clean sweat.

  “It’s okay,” Montana called from inside the car. “Get in the back.”

  “He’s armed.” The man’s voice was a light tenor. Elephants are keyed a little high too.

  “Who isn’t? Get in the back.”

  He got in the back. I slid into the bucket seat next to Montana’s. The car had that new-toy odor of fresh rubber and molded plastic. The CB radio in the dash was the first I’d seen in years, but they’d never gone away, really; just ebbed back to their source. Truckers called home on cell phones but kept in touch with one another over the citizens’ band.

  Montana’s profile was sharp against the window on the other side. The reflected glow of the lights beyond the wall gleamed in his cornea. “Looks clean from up here.”

  “Not really,” I said. “You can still see it.”

  “Everybody’s got one Iroquois Heights story. What’s yours?”

  “I’m greedy. I’ve got ten. I left two teeth on Pioneer Street and three full sets of fingerprints at the county jail. The last time that happened they threw me in a pit with a black inmate twice my size and laid bets on which one of us came out. Those are the big-ticket items. I won’t put you to sleep with the small stuff. What about you?”

  “Nothing, personally. Being the son of a famous man has some perks. My father had a story. He wasn’t born famous. You know about this park?”

  “The gift that keeps on giving.”

  “Before that. That was comic relief. I mean back when it was a dump. Steelhaulers were on strike, blocking roads and gas pumps to discourage the scabs. The old city racket squad parked a seven-passenger growler crossways on the street that ran past the fence, and when my father stopped his gas rig like a citizen they pulled him and his partner out of the cab and dragged them behind the fence and gave them the Louisville Massage for about five minutes. Long time.”

  “Baseball bats?”

  “Get your eyebrows off the headliner. Where do you think we got the idea?”

  “I didn’t mean that. I thought the cops preferred saps and truncheons.”

  “Not then. Greenberg and Gehringer were in the lineup and the whole country was horsehide-happy. Anyway my father curled up on the ground, the way he’d learned to do in the scrapyards when a pickup fight went sour. They broke his jaw and his arms in six or seven places. I guess you don’t count ribs. He was in traction for eight weeks while my mother cleaned houses on top of her regular waitressing to pay the rent and the hospital bills. She probably cleaned house for at least one of the cocksuckers who passed down the order for the beating. Dad’s partner didn’t know to curl up; he was raised in a good neighborhood. He didn’t move anything below his chin for nine years. Then his head stopped moving too and they buried him.”

  “Stutch’s order?”

  “Who knows? Those big chiefs used buffers on buffers. He could say he never knew about it, and I suppose he did say it, if he was ever asked. I don’t remember because I wasn’t born yet. That was back when Stutch had his name stamped on every bolt and washer that came out of his plant. He knew what all his bolts and washers were up to all the time.”

  The dim wash of light gleamed on bared teeth. I realized he was grinning. “The joke is, my father and his partner weren’t on strike. They didn’t even belong to the union then. They were scabs, delivering steel for Stutch. It was a random roust.”

  I looked out, thought I saw the pulsing white-orange of hot steel through the window of the plant. I decided it was too far up. I was looking at Betelgeuse. “You know the boy Thorpe’s holding is a Stutch. Leland’s great-grandson.”

  “I know. I’ve been thinking about it ever since this morning.”

  “Where’d you wind up?”

  He turned his head my way. Strangely enough I couldn’t see him as well then. It took his face out of the light. “My father did a lot for the Steelhaulers after he joined. There are men in the local who are too young to remember him. They cross themselves when his name is mentioned. They don’t even know they’re doing it.”

  “I saw it when he was alive. You don’t see that kind of thing anymore. Too many microphones under too many beds.”

  “He was a good man once. Almost as good as he was bad later.”

  The dark oval of his face went silent. I was expected to say something.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Maybe. I only knew him at the end.”

  “I do. And if I didn’t, there are plenty of men still alive who could tell me. You don’t get that unless you were a hell of a man once.”

  “Yeah.” It was something to drop into the next silence.

  “Maybe Stutch was good too, at the beginning. What the hell, he started this whole thing, just as if he stuck the key in the ignition and turned it.”

  “Twisted the crank would be more accurate, but yeah.”

  The impertinence bounced off the dark oval. “Well, I’m trying real hard to be Phil Montana from the time before anyone crossed himself at the name. Which was the time when it would have been appropriate. I don’t know this kid Matthew, but I’m in no place to say he won’t try just as hard to be like that other Leland Stutch.”

  “That’s deep, man.”

  We both turned to look at the tenor in the back seat. Only his gold earring showed.

  I returned my attention to the shadow behind the wheel. “What’s the twenty on your guys?”

  He chuckled softly. It’s hard to tell in the dark if a man has a sense of humor. It can be faked, like a lunatic shamming sanity for the psychiatric review board.

  “Someone’s been watching Smokey and the Bandit,” he said.

  “Someone’s had four hours of sleep in forty, and he wasn’t a morning person to begin with. He wants to know if your people are in place.”

  “There were right around seventy of them last count. More on the way. Don’t know where I’ll put them. I almost had to stack the seventy. The payload alone’s over two million pounds.”

  “How soon can we expect the rest?”

  This time Tenor laughed. Montana didn’t. “How the hell many do you need? You want to level the place?”

  “Why not? You might get a commission from GM. A new car, anyway. You remember how much it cost Detroit to demolish Hudson’s. They had to replace part of the People Mover.”

  “The plant’s built even solider. Then there are gas lines and underground tanks. We could take down half the city.”

  “It’d be a start.”

  We sat there for a while as more lights came on below and the pencil beams of homebound cars on the m
ain cut thinned out, turning down side streets and into driveways. The city grew quiet and we grew quiet with it. Montana stirred, creaking the vinyl upholstery, reached across me, and popped open the glove compartment. The dim yellow light shone on a flat pint of Bushmills. He took it out, slapped shut the compartment, and broke the seal on the cap. He tipped it toward me.

  I took it. The sweet sting of the ferment made my stomach rumble. “What happened to the peach brandy?”

  “That was breakfast.”

  I swallowed a mouthful and handed it back with a face. The heartburn kicked in immediately. Irish is a miserable drunk. They should have left it back home with the blights and leprechauns.

  “I know,” Montana said, and took a drink. “What can I say? Dago red gives me the runs. Have you given any thought to a signal?”

  “The building was engineered to protect the suits and the equipment from the employees. The nerve center’s in the security office in the basement. From there, whoever’s on duty can throw on and off the outside floods in one movement. In the plans it’s an old-fashioned knife switch, like in Frankenstein movies. Now it’s probably a circuit board, but that would be the only change. Thorpe would have seen to that. The floods are always on at night. When they go off, that will be your cue to move in. Make sure your people understand that.” I pointed to the CB. “Can the cops listen in?”

  “They use a different frequency, but if they scan it, it won’t mean anything to them. No bears or good buddies. We move with the times too.”

  In the back seat, Tenor said, “I could use a swig of that. I’m black Irish.”

  “Have some coffee,” Montana said. “There’s a Thermos on the floor. You’re working, remember?”

  “So’s Walker. You let him have a swig.”

  “He’s only got his own ass to worry about. You’re supposed to worry about mine. You can’t get good help,” he told me, as the man in the back unscrewed a big metal cap.

  I said nothing. After a little while I tipped up the door handle and put a foot out onto the pavement. Montana’s face was expressionless under the dome light. “You right-or left-handed?” he asked.