As for myself, I went ethnic. The kielbasa and kraut looked too good to pass up.
I had dinner with Sue that night. I wasn’t quite sure what her mood would be. All too soon these murders would tie her up in knots again. Why not? They had us all tied up. The whole county seemed to be talking about nothing else. I had heard at Benny’s Diner that Hub City had virtually shut down. A pall of fear had settled over the place. Parents refused to let their kids out to play after school. Mothers were probably going nuts keeping their kids in. This was a tough one for a town that had already had its share of hard knocks. I wondered what Sue would have to say over dinner.
I picked her up at her place about seven-thirty. I suspected she hadn’t been home long, not long enough to change clothes, anyway. She managed a wan smile and a greeting, grabbed her purse, and we were off. I’d made a reservation at a steakhouse in St. Clair, so it took a bit of a drive to get us there. She was quiet on the way, though not sullen.
“How’s the investigation going?” I asked.
“Are you still working for the Evans family?”
“Forget I asked.”
So maybe she was a little bit sullen.
But she apologized later and unburdened herself during dinner. Bud Billings still liked Delbert Evans for the homicide, and she respected his intuitions. After all, there was that matter of the time of year the murders had begun and the way the daughter had been buried. It seemed to me we were having the same conversation we’d had at lunch one day before. But since, as they had heard, old man Evans was going around the county trying to peddle a false arrest suit for his son, the two of them had been told to steer clear of Delbert until they might actually get something on him.
“But how are we going to do that,” she asked, “unless we bring him in for questioning and then check out his story?”
“Evans may get a buyer on that false arrest suit,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, “that’s what Bud’s afraid of.” She sighed. “So we’ve just been rechecking details at the crime scenes, trying to get anything that we might have overlooked. We’ve got a tire print now, but it matches Ford, Mercury, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Dodge, and Plymouth. Any idea how many of those there are in the county?”
I was about to mention to her what Mark Conroy had told me when she changed the subject.
“I told my parents to set an extra plate at Thanksgiving,” she said.
“And how did they react?”
“Very positively. They can’t wait to see you.”
I couldn’t say I was that eager. Although I’d said yes to the occasion, I still felt uneasy about it. To me it seemed to imply a commitment that I hadn’t yet fully made.
“How many will be there?” I asked.
“Oh, just family.”
“Out in Southfield?”
“Yes, that’s the house where I grew up.”
“But bigger now, I suppose. Empty nest and all that.”
“I suppose so, but their part of Southfield’s been changing.”
“That’s changing, as in ethnic composition?”
“Yes, the usual.”
“I see.”
“Don’t judge them, Charley. They’re a different generation.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” I said. “How old’s your father?”
She hesitated, then: “He’s sixty-two.”
“Not all that much older than I am.”
“Now, don’t start up, okay? Just let me handle it.”
“With pleasure, my dear.”
There was a break then, during which I polished off the remainder of the lake perch on my plate, and Sue chewed away dutifully at two bites of sirloin from the slab of meat on her plate. She swallowed them, first one and after great effort, the other. Then, with a sense of firm resolution, she pushed it away from her.
“That’s it,” she said. “I can’t finish this.”
“You don’t have to,” I said. “Want them to wrap it up for you?”
“No, I’ll just look at it in the refrigerator in a week and decide it’s not fit for human consumption.”
I signaled for the waiter to bring me the check.
“Sue,” I said, “there’s something I wanted to pass on to you.”
“What’s that?”
I told her what Mark Conroy had told me. Although I didn’t mention him by name, I’m sure she knew who he was when I described him as a client of mine who used to be a cop.
She looked at me skeptically and said, “I’m not sure just how seriously I ought to take that. ‘Check out your own’? Our own look pretty good to me.”
“Yes, but both the county and the Hub City cops operate in their patrol cars without partners.”
“You know the reason for that, Charley. Both the county and Hub City are shorthanded, undermanned. Underwomanned, too.”
“That’s not the point, Sue. The point is, they’re out there completely on their own. And kids of that age are crazy for policemen.”
“The point is, Charley, the guy who gave that to you may have been a pretty good cop, but he’s in so much trouble now that any advice he hands out is subject to question.”
“I’m not going to argue that with you, Sue. Not now.”
“Oh, Charley, I’m sorry.” She shook her head unhappily. “All this has me so confused,’ so frustrated, so miserable that I just don’t want to talk about it. Is that okay?”
She was right. There was no point in continuing the discussion. The waiter came with the bill. I laid down enough to cover it plus a reasonable tip.
On the way home I was wondering just what sort of apology I should offer when I ran out on her later. She seemed so frayed and unhappy that I was afraid she might take it terribly personally if I left her at her door. Still, Pd promised Conroy I’d go with him. I was due in Detroit in a little over an hour.
But as I pulled up to the entrance of her apartment building, she laid a hand on my shoulder. “Charley, if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you here,” she said. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very good company tonight.”
I nodded. “Of course. I understand. See you later, kiddo.” She gave me a quick kiss and waved from the doorway, disappearing inside. As I pulled away, I was making plans to gas up before hitting the Interstate. It wouldn’t be such a great idea to run out of gas on some dark street in Detroit.
Most of the streets are dark in Detroit. There is a sort of primeval quality to great stretches of the city—whole neighborhoods of boarded-up houses, blocks razed during the 1967 riots and never again reconstructed—so that the place has about it the look, the atmosphere, and the smell of an urban jungle. And it was at a corner in this grim terrain, one I hadn’t had any trouble finding in the daylight, that I was to meet my two guides.
Conroy’s instructions were to meet him in front of the building he owned at Parker and Lafayette. This, of course, was the place where he had kept the apartment with Mary Margaret Tucker that I had visited not so very long before. Because I had come down Jefferson on that earlier occasion, I’d had no difficulty at all finding it. This time, however, since I was in a hurry, I stayed on Interstate 94 a little too long, got off at the wrong exit, and wandered around the dark streets until at last I got on Van Dyke heading in the right direction and managed to pull up some minutes late at the designated corner.
I thought perhaps they had left without me until down the line of cars parked on the street a set of big headlights flashed at me—one, two, three times. I managed to find a place nearby and pulled my car right into it. I hurried over to Conroy’s Cadillac Seville. The driver’s-side window slid open automatically.
“You’re late, Sloan,” said Conroy. “Get in the back. We’ve got an appointment to keep.”
“Will my car be safe here?”
“Who’d steal that car of yours? It’s only a Chrysler.” I heard a cackle of laughter at that from Tolliver. “Get in.”
Still a bit reluctant, I complied. The truth was, at that late moment I
was having second thoughts about going with the two of them on this expedition. All the good arguments against seemed twice as good just then. But I’d promised, and here I was, and so there was no backing out now. Or was there?
With just a twist of the steering wheel, Conroy rocketed out of the parking space. I hadn’t even noticed that the motor was running.
We took Lafayette toward downtown Detroit. The high-rise office buildings surrounding Cadillac Square rose up in the middle-distance ahead. I’d had an office on the tenth floor of one of them for more than a decade. That was before my life fell apart. From where we were, I couldn’t tell which had been my building. Somehow they all looked alike to me.
“Sorry I was late,” I muttered to Conroy. “I guess I got lost.”
“You got what? I thought you lived your whole life here.”
“I did, except for the last three and a half years up in Pickeral Point. It’s just that Detroit has changed a lot. It doesn’t look the same to me anymore, especially at night.”
“I know what you mean, man,” said LeMoyne Tolliver. “I get turned around once in a while myself. At night.”
“Sometimes it seems to me I’m not absolutely sure where anything is anymore—except for the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice. I could find my way there in my sleep. In fact,” I added, “I’ve been told that I’ve done just that on a number of occasions.”
That got a chuckle from Tolliver. Conroy ignored us both as he concentrated on his driving and the route he had chosen. Somewhere east of the Chrysler Freeway, he turned right, then left again and onto the freeway.
“Where are we going?” I asked him.
“You’ll know when we get there.”
“Are you sure about this, Conroy? All of a sudden, I’ve got a bad feeling about it. Call it a premonition or something. I don’t know.”
I caught his eyes on me in the rearview mirror. “Look,” he said, “I don’t know about your premonitions. To tell you the truth, it doesn’t feel quite right to me, either. But you heard all the reasons why we have to make this meet, and you agreed to come along. Am I right?”
“Yes, you’re right.”
“You can wait in the car if you want to.”
“No, I’m with you.”
“That’s it, then.”
Not another word passed between the three of us for a few minutes. Conroy left the freeway and found his way smoothly to John R, where he turned north. He slowed the car, and Tolliver leaned forward and began studying the blighted cityscape ahead.
John R (named after an early inhabitant of these parts who ran a fur trading post and general store before there ever really was a Detroit) is one of those boulevards that was hit hard during the riots; perhaps of them all, it was hit hardest. Once lined with museums, brownstone professional societies, and august residences from the turn of the century, John R must have seemed like one of the power centers to the rioters, for they burned a lot of it, broke windows and doors, and threw a lot of furniture out into the street. What’s left today is a wide street lined, for the most part, with burned-out brick shells and deserted stone structures.
“That’s the place,” said Tolliver, pointing ahead, “right there at the end of the block.”
Conroy slowed the car to a crawl. There was nobody behind us to honk a protest. We were virtually alone there on the boulevard. He pulled over to the curb, bumped over a loose brick or two, and came to a halt. If I understood correctly, the building that Tolliver had pointed to was a three-story structure of blackened stone. As nearly as I could tell, it hadn’t suffered much, if any, fire damage, but doors and windows were boarded up and spray-painted with gang graffiti. The place looked completely deserted.
“There’s a driveway,” said Tolliver. “You could leave the car there if you wanted to. It’d be in the shadows.”
“Be pretty obvious where we’d come to call,” Conroy pointed out. “Look, there’s a driveway in front of that building across the street. I’ll leave it there.”
It took less than a minute to reposition the Cadillac. It was half hidden by a wall and the trunk of a big tree.
“You got your tape recorder?”
“Right in my pocket,” said Tolliver.
“And I’ve got mine.” Conroy turned to me in the backseat. “Two taped copies of the interrogation. That gives us backup and confirmation. We’re going to do this by the book. Ready? Then let’s go.”
The two of them left the car in a rush. I bounded out, hoping to keep up with them. But it was no use. Conroy barely paused to point the gadget that locked the car electronically. Then they were out in the street, scurrying for the other side. The best I could manage was a determined jog in pursuit. Even LeMoyne Tolliver, who was probably about ten years my senior, seemed to move faster than me. The idea was to get across before we were caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. But the nearest, a good two blocks away, didn’t seem to me to pose much of a threat. Maybe they were just trying to show me up.
“Around in back?” Conroy asked the question just as I made it to the curb.
“That’s right, Chief. Better let me lead the way.”
Tolliver took over, hustling us up the driveway and out of sight from the street. The passage between buildings narrowed, and as we moved ahead I seemed to be struck night-blind in the deep shadows, unable to make out shapes ahead, or even detect movement. About all I could rely on to guide me was my hearing. And when Conroy suddenly went silent and slowed down, I plowed into him from behind, nearly knocking us both down.
“Hey, watch it, Sloan,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
“Sorry. Hasn’t he got a flashlight?”
“It’s up to him when to use it. Shhhh!”
My sense of smell wasn’t much help. It wasn’t that it had failed me. No, it was working all too well, overwhelming me with odors of an open latrine. Whatever this building once had been, it seemed that it wasn’t much more than a three-story outhouse today.
When at last we came to the rear of the building, there was a bit of open space and some welcome light—dim, but enough to make out Tolliver and Conroy. They were some paces ahead of me by now, just starting down steps that led, I assumed, to a rear, basement entrance.
I was right. They disappeared. I followed. By the time I joined them in front of the battered, spray-painted door, Tolliver was shining his flashlight around. Although this one appeared to be as tightly sealed as the rest, close inspection revealed that an opening had been jigsawed in the plywood around a lock. All that was needed was the right key to open it.
Tolliver got a nod from Conroy and proceeded to give a knock in code (three-two-one) on the door. They waited. Conroy nodded again, and Tolliver repeated the knock. Again, no response.
“What do you think?”
“We’re not that late,” Conroy whispered. He held his wristwatch into the flashlight’s beam. “Just nine, maybe ten minutes is all. Better open it up. You’ve got the key?”
Tolliver nodded, dug into a pocket, and produced it.
“Go ahead, then. Only open it fast and step back.”
As Tolliver inserted the key, Conroy reached back into his jacket, and from somewhere around the small of his back, he pulled a semi-automatic pistol. It was big, and it looked deadly. The last thing in the world I wanted was to see guns waved around. How did I get in this mess, anyway? I was at that moment in a situation no lawyer should ever be. Conroy waved me back behind him. Only too happily I took shelter.
Tolliver waited for a long moment. Maybe they counted to sixty or something, I don’t know. Whatever the drill was, after a certain delay, Tolliver, who now had his flashlight in one hand and his revolver in the other, jumped out from our side of the door frame, and Conroy followed him in. I did the sensible thing and hung back.
Maybe I counted to sixty, or maybe it was a hundred and twenty. Who knows? But I waited until it seemed safe—no gunshots, no cries of a alarm—and only then did I step through the door. There was a bad smell in th
e place.
I found them looking up at something.
I couldn’t quite recognize it as much of anything—a dummy? What? It was elevated a bit from the floor. Tolliver’s flashlight played up and down, flicking this way and that.
“Is there a light?” Conroy asked.
“Yeah, here someplace.”
The beam played around the rest of the room and settled on a single bulb hanging down from the ceiling just behind me.
“Get that, will you, Sloan? Turn it on.”
Tolliver held his light on it until I pulled the chain. The sudden explosion of light from what must have been a hundred-watt bulb dazzled me. I suppose I was blinded for a moment. When I regained fuir vision, I found the two of them staring at the thing that was tied to an insulated pipe up near the low ceiling. I was shocked to see that it was the body of a man, or what was left of one. Naked to the waist, he had had his stomach slit vertically and horizontally, opened, and his intestines pulled out There were small cuts all over his torso. He wasn’t hanging from his neck but from his wrists, which were bound and stretched above him. His head was hung low, and his face was invisible to us.
“They really did a job on him, didn’t they? Cut him down, LeMoyne.”
Tolliver produced a spring knife and popped it open. He sawed away at the ropes that held up the corpse. They went all at once, and the body of the nameless informant collapsed onto the floor, hiding the foul mess of his insides beneath him, and revealing his face for the first time. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was open.
Conroy knelt down and studied the face on the floor. He seemed especially interested in his mouth. He looked up at me then, almost accusingly.
“They cut out his tongue,” he said.
There is no suitable response to such a message.
“That means they were on to us. That means they did it for the mayor. Hell, he probably ordered it.”
12
I woke up early Sunday morning, surprised and gratified that I had been able to sleep at all. I hardly bothered to check the newspapers; their late-Sunday editions were all wrapped up early Saturday night. There was no local news on television until late that same afternoon. So I went to the only possible source for information on the grim escapade of the night before.
The Judgment Page 23