"A little dessert," I offered as I brought out the tray, "in keeping with the evening. Chocolate was a very important commodity in the New World."
"And the famous Mayan orange groves." She turned from my bookcases where she'd been inspecting titles.
"Yes, the famous floating orange groves of the Mayan empire, where maidens learned the sensuous arts of harvesting and marmalade-making."
We laughed, in spite of the horrors out there in the night. We kept laughing through more dumb talk and chocolate- and orange-nibbling, until we left off nibbling the treats and started in on each other. The smell and taste of Minerva LeBlanc was more nourishing than any food I could imagine. If only food could be as great as sex.
You know how that first time is usually a bit awkward? Not like in books, where they always just jump on each other like champions, nobody fumbles, nobody messes up, everybody gets a medal—"our bodies fused together as one"—that kind of nonsense.
Speaking for myself, I can't help worrying whether she's worried about how I'll react to her body, her looks, her desires. Then: Will I have the stamina, the imagination she requires? Is she anxious about orgasms? All of that and more, you know?
With Minerva, though, there was no awkwardness. No frightened egos, no negotiating. Although she'd been the one in control on the street, I found myself enjoying the lead in the bedroom.
I always try to set myself a challenge when making love: Which part of her body would she least expect me to dwell on? You can't imagine the sexual tension that creates. Well, perhaps you can. She's expecting you to move on, get to the good parts, you know, but you just settle right there and linger and linger, and eventually, if she's got a normal nervous system, she experiences a sort of breakthrough, you can feel it because a spark runs through her and she just sinks down under you, and you know you really have her. Because now she's sensitized, she's really feeling, and when you do get to the good parts—well, hold onto your Stroh's, fans.
Minerva LeBlanc, I'm pleased to report, liked my style.
Chapter 26
In my dream I was swimming in a tropical sea just beyond a crashing surf line, surrounded by colorful non-threatening fish and mollusks. My heart was peaceful. I rolled onto my back and floated beneath a luminous green sky dotted by fluffy pink clouds.
Suddenly a burglar alarm began ringing somewhere onshore, then an outrigger canoe came surging across the waves toward me. Bonnie and her mother were paddling like mad, and Bucky, seated in the stern, was shouting something unintelligible over their heads. He was bare-chested and looked like a boiled pig. Lou, in her overalls and plaid shirt, rose from the prow and took aim at me with a rusty harpoon. I jerked upright with a start, my heart drumming in my throat.
It was dark, and the phone was ringing. I stumbled naked into the dining room to get it.
"Lillian. Aunt Rosalie." Her voice was low and urgent. "Are you getting up? It's four-thirty."
My tongue was thick. "Aunt Rosalie? What—um—why—it's still night."
"Oh, honey, don't you remember? Uncle Guff? Today's his last day."
A sledgehammer of regret rammed into my chest as I came fully awake and remembered what I'd forgotten.
My Uncle Guff and Aunt Rosalie had more or less finished the job of rearing me after my parents died when I was twelve. They got me at the dawning of a difficult adolescence, just as I was blossoming from an average, slightly rebellious kid into an ornery, pissed-off teenager. To this day I wince at some of the things I did and said to those kind people. They had no children of their own. I loved them and knew they loved me, though gallons of sodium pentothal couldn't have gotten any of us to admit it.
As an adult I tried to make it up to them by calling and visiting and being extra nice. About once a month we three would go bowling or shopping or fishing. Every few years I'd accompany them on a vacation in their boxcar-size motor home. They enjoyed having me around: someone to talk to who remembered the old days almost like they did.
Uncle Guff was my father's brother. He'd made a living as a mill worker at Great Lakes Steel for decades, and he was preparing to retire. About two months ago when we were out on the south end of Belle Isle trying to get the perch to bite, Aunt Rosalie had told me when Uncle Guff's last day at the mill would be, while he kept his eyes on his bobber.
The special day was today, and I had promised to go and commemorate it with a photograph of him arriving at the plant for the very last six a.m. shift of his life.
"You have such a good camera," Aunt Rosalie had said.
Now she was saying, "Lillian? Are you there?"
"Ohhh," I said into the phone.
"I'm so glad I called," she whispered. "He's in the bathroom now. If you'd forgotten to be there, he never would have said anything, but I know how terrible he'd feel. I'm fixing him ham and eggs."
"Oh, God, Aunt Rosalie, thank you for reminding me. I'm—I'm—yes, I'll absolutely be there. In fact, I'm on my way. Yes. Absolutely."
I hung up, mumbling, "Oh, God, oh, God."
Of course she knew I'd forgotten; I couldn't fake it with her. Nothing would have cut any ice, not even, "Gee, Auntie, I've been mixed up in a murder investigation where I almost got killed, and normal responsibilities have been slipping my mind." No. I'd shown her, conclusively, that even in a once-in-a-lifetime situation I was not to be counted on. This for me would be yet another shameful thing to wince about once or twice a week for the rest of my life.
But I had a chance for redemption. I'd go and set myself up for the best triumphant-workingman picture any shutterbug ever took.
I grabbed a roll of Plus-X and my Canon and set them next to my keys, then returned to the bedroom.
Minerva had been undisturbed by the phone call. She lay on my thin futon sleeping deeply, her body a perfect sculpture beneath the soft folds of the sheet.
I employed my patented "kiss-awake" method, and she stirred. I briefly explained my mission and urged her to go back to sleep. "It isn't even five o'clock yet. I'll be back by seven, I think. I'll pick up some doughnuts. Do you like crullers?"
"Mm-hmm," she sighed. "This is a great bed." I was amazed; she turned onto her stomach and appeared to try to burrow deeper into the futon, which I regarded as little better than a stale pancake. It rested right on the floor. Mine was a low-tech bedroom.
Her skin felt cool, so I drew my light summer blanket up to her neck and tucked it around her. Todd was sleeping in his bed in the corner.
I threw on some clothes and gave her one more kiss on the back of the head, which stuck out from the blanket like a satiny coconut, then hurried out.
The street was empty. I fired up my besmirched Caprice and headed for the Downriver steel town of Ecorse.
Whenever I asked Uncle Guff to tell me about his work at Great Lakes, he invariably answered with a three-sentence resume: "I started in the flues." Long pause, and a look into the far distance, lower lip between the teeth. Work in the flues, everyone knows, was dirty and dangerous. "Then I pulled ingots for a long time...real long time." The gaze shifted nearer, into the middle distance, the mouth relaxed, and a series of nods would begin. "Now, why, obviously, I'm a crane operator." And the shoulders would square up, and he would meet anyone's eye with the confidence of a man whose place was high above the factory floor, who was entrusted with other men's lives and took pride in it.
When I was little I thought he was involved in the production of soft drinks, as I would hear about "the coke works" and "pouring slag." I thought it would be exciting to mix big batches of Coke and pour off the resulting slag. Slag sounded like something I would force my enemies to drink, while I'd refresh myself with only the purest-quality Coke, iced down, of course, and fizzier than the kind found in restaurants and stores.
I cruised down West Jefferson alongside the Detroit River, silvery ribbon of maritime commerce, and made it to the main gate with ten minutes to spare.
The steel mill's distinctive silhouette loomed like a sawtoothed mountain ran
ge over the riverside neighborhoods. Six miles of shoreline—that's how big the place is. The docks front the water, then the mill buildings back up to them, then there are the rail yards, sort of all over the place. To get to their jobs in the mill, the workers have to climb up to a covered catwalk then cross over a thick braid of railroad tracks.
I hung around the Quonset hut next to the catwalk looking for good angles. Men and women were coming to work, walking past the guard in ones and twos; I knew that as the clock neared six a.m., the influx of workers would become a thick stream. I watched for Uncle Guff's red suspenders and knew he'd be watching for me.
I decided to set up for a few different shots. I peered through my viewfinder, mentally noting light-meter readings and fooling with my shutter speeds and stops. I became absorbed with the problem of exactly matching up the mill's roofline with the rising sun. The light meter didn't like it.
After a minute I heard the scuff of a shoe on pavement just behind me; I turned, and there was Uncle Guff looking the other way, as if he'd merely come over to inspect a weather-beaten fence post.
"Uncle Guff!" I gave him a big hug and a kiss, and he looked down and tried not to smile.
He was a trim man with thin lips and squared-off teeth, and bright blue eyes behind heavy safety glasses. He had on his usual work outfit of clean blue jeans, blue work shirt, and red suspenders. The suspenders were his only overt statement of individuality. The other employees favored heavy leather belts. One lean hand was wrapped around the handle of his dented black lunchbox. He held it up and said, "I'm gonna throw this here in the river after lunch."
I punched his arm. "All right!"
We got down to business. I positioned him and started shooting. He stood calmly, ignoring the curious looks of the other workers, his expression dignified. Working quickly, I took shots in front of the door to the catwalk stairs, through the fence with the old administration building in the background, from a low angle showing the mill in the background, and a few close-ups. I got one glorious smile out of him when I called, "Think about clocking out this afternoon!"
"That's enough," he said.
I promised to get prints to him and Aunt Rosalie in a few days, and he turned and merged with the stream of workers going in. It was three minutes to six.
I smiled all the way back to Eagle, thinking how happy he'd be at the end of the day. In retirement he'd go fishing more often, work in his garage shop, and take Aunt Rosalie on more trips in the motor home. He liked to fish wherever he went. Aunt Rosalie told me how he once dropped a line off the stern of the Staten Island Ferry when they were in New York for some wedding. He snagged a big dead turtle, and the deckhands hollered at him.
I stopped at the Dunkin' Donuts on Woodward and picked up half a dozen crullers plus two large coffees. I love their crullers: The dough is very nice and eggy, and not as sweet as the other varieties.
As I drove on home, I felt my confidence and optimism grow. Sure, I was in a fix, but I had Minerva LeBlanc on my side now. Together we'd get the goods on the Creighters, save my butt, and give her another book to write.
What's more, I was falling in love. I thought Minerva the most intelligent, sexy, creative, fun person I'd ever met. I pictured us together in a variety of exciting situations, some involving armed confrontations with steely-eyed thugs, others featuring gourmet room-service trays and thick terry bathrobes.
I parked the Caprice in my usual spot in front of the house. It felt good to be up and about so early. The birds were twittering; the neighborhood was coming alive. As I carried my camera and the doughnut go-tray up the porch steps and into the vestibule, I noticed Mr. McVittie's front door standing open. That was unusual.
The two flats shared a common front door into a vestibule; the McVitties' front door opened to the left off the vestibule, and my stairs led upward to the right. In the summer the McVitties' window air-conditioning unit was usually on, which called for all doors and windows to be shut. I listened for the hum of the air conditioner.
Then I heard him calling my name from inside. I set my stuff on the stairs and went in.
The flat was furnished in high '70s style, lots of avocado and gold, heavily worn shag carpeting, and plenty of antiquing and swags.
"Lillian? Lillian!" he called. I followed his voice to the dining room.
He was standing there in his pants and undershirt, barefooted, talking to the ceiling, staring at something up there. "Lillian?"
"Mr. McVittie!"
He turned and gave me a bewildered look. "There's something. I can't see so good."
I looked up and saw a stain on the ceiling about the size of a dinner plate. It was wet and very red. And it appeared to be spreading.
The McVitties' dining room was directly beneath my bedroom.
Chapter 27
I tore out of the McVittie flat and rushed upstairs to mine. I couldn't have moved any faster, yet I dreaded the moment I was hastening toward.
I stopped at the doorway to the bedroom, seeing already the inconceivable, impossible, horrible reality.
Minerva LeBlanc lay just as I had left her, facedown in my bed, the back of her head the only exposed part of her. There was so very much blood.
She'd been bludgeoned. A flap of her scalp hung off to one side, the right side of her head; I saw mashed tissue there, bone and brains, oozing blood.
I'm not up to the task of describing how much blood there was. It had soaked through the futon, the carpet, and the flooring, which I knew to be old and cracked. The air in the room was heavy with that warm-sharp smell that women know so well.
She was surely dead, I thought, but in the next second I heard a ragged sound and realized she was still breathing.
I dived to her side, my mind racing. Mr. McVittie had followed me upstairs and was frozen in the doorway as I had been.
"Call an ambulance!" I shouted, "and the police! Nine-one-one, Mr. McVittie! Oh, God, keep breathing."
Direct pressure, I knew, stops bleeding, but if I pressed on the back of her head, I'd be pushing skull fragments into her brain. I didn't dare touch her.
"Breathe, honey, breathe, breathe, breathe." I saw that her head was actually turned slightly to the side, away from the door. I lifted the blanket and bent down to look into her eyes, which were half open. They looked completely blank. I couldn't tell whether her pupils were symmetrical. Her lips were parted; I could see her beautiful teeth. They were undisturbed.
I knelt with her. "Oh, breathe, Minerva, help is coming, help is coming. If you can hear me, honey, you'd better breathe. Breathe, goddamn it."
Someone had fallen upon her so suddenly and with such force that she'd had no chance to struggle.
I heard Mr. McVittie yelping into the phone.
The mind-shattering implications of what had occurred came rushing to me: I had discovered her, she was in my bed, I had been the last to see her, we had been seen together by many people.
Minerva's shoulder bag lay where she had placed it, on the floor near her clothes. Then I saw the weapon, tossed aside and spattered with blood: It was my two-by-four; which I'd handily left next to the front door. The doors. Someone had sneaked in here. My God, I must have left the doors unlocked in my hurry to meet Uncle Guff.
Mr. McVittie returned to the doorway, hugging himself. "They're coming. Oh, Lord!"
"Did you see or hear anything?" My voice was a rasp.
He shook his head and backed away from me, then turned and ran down the stairs. I heard his door slam.
Had someone watched the house all night, waiting for me to leave? Or had they simply shown up at five a.m., assuming I'd be home in bed?
I looked at Minerva again, and a spasm ran through me: It could have been me lying there.
She and I were the same general size and shape, the same hair color. Whoever attacked her might not only have thought they were attacking me; they might have thought they killed me.
Who would have wanted that? Bucky Rinkell, if he'd gone psycho? T
he Creighters wanted me dead, or were they so calculating as to suppose that if they killed someone in my home it could implicate me, perhaps get me arrested and convicted? Did they think I might flee?
Lou might have wanted to kill me or Minerva, or both of us. How many of these people had been watching me?
Holy hell.
Sirens.
.
The paramedics arrived first and sprang into action, pushing me out of the room. I was standing in the living room gripping my head when Tom Ciesla, Erma Porrocks, and four uniformed officers came in. The faces of Tom and Erma were hard.
In one sentence I told them the immediate facts, then watched them move through the flat to the bedroom doorway.
Ciesla stopped there and barked, "Is she dead?"
The paramedics, two of them, were yelling to each other, and one was yelling into a radio, while equipment was flying all over the place.
"I said, is she dead?" Ciesla shouted.
"No!" snapped the one in charge, a compact black woman with a shaved head. Somehow she was threading a tube into Minerva's mouth. "Imbecile," she muttered.
"Is she gonna die?"
"Yes! Shut up and get out of here."
"Then we've got a murder scene," Ciesla said. He started giving orders to the badges, who dispersed. One talked into his radio, requesting a photographer and lab people.
I indicated Minerva's purse, anticipating their request for her I.D. "The last I saw, she had a gun in there," I told them. I was acquainted with a couple of the cops. They stared at my knees. I looked down and saw them bloody.
The paramedics came through the living room with Minerva lying on her side, frighteningly still; then they were gone.
I didn't see Todd anywhere.
More cop cars pulled up, more cops came in, until it looked as if they'd been spread on with a knife.
Porrocks asked me a few questions. I told her who Minerva was and how my morning errand had taken me away from home.
Holy Hell Page 16
