“She’s crazy,” Mrs. Creighter volunteered, not moving from her chair.
I knelt and pawed through the contents of the purse but saw nothing I wanted. The dog Roscoe got into the spirit, yapping and running in circles.
“Greg, this woman doesn’t share your moral code,” I said, straightening up.
“She’s crazy,” Mrs. Creighter repeated, but she wasn’t talking to Wycoff. “You can see it, can’t you? Yes. Why are you sending me this trial? I know that, but—” Her eyes fixed themselves in the middle distance. “What should I do? I will follow.”
“What?” Wycoff clutched his Mai Tai as if it were the only solid object in the room.
I told him, “She’s not talking to you.”
She went on, “I can’t do anything right this minute, all by myself. You can see that.”
Wycoff sobbed, “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”
“She’s frightening me,” Mrs. Creighter said to him.
“Good,” I said.
“Time for all good bunnies to please, please go home,” said Wycoff helplessly.
22
Silly me. I’d thought perhaps Mrs. Creighter was doing business with the doyenne of—what did Wycoff call it?—forensic art? But as it turned out, she was the doyenne of forensic art.
All right, I thought, she’s a talented weirdo with strange ambitions. Who wants to kill me. She wouldn’t have done it in front of Wycoff, unless she wanted him dead too, which she wouldn’t, as he was useful to her.
I beat it out of Wycoff’s fast, then spent another restless night at home with my plank against the door. I tried to read myself to sleep on some Kay Boyle short stories, but all the wartime details made me queasy, so I switched over to Flannery O’Connor. Good old savage religion. The stories made me laugh, but they didn’t anesthetize me. When dawn broke I brewed coffee and sat and thought.
I wondered anew what happened to Mr. Creighter: How did he die? Was he buried somewhere? Mrs. Creighter said he’d been dead for six years. Should I even be thinking about him? What if he died under mysterious circumstances? But circumstances weren’t what I needed to stop the Creighters; I needed evidence the police could tack to their foreheads.
I went over the events at the Creighter home again. My mind came to roost on the photos and papers I’d seen. What about the papers? Something in the back of my mind was trying to click. Those pages: the distinctive sans-serif typography, the playbill-sized paper; the blocks of fine print.
Suddenly I had it. They were pages from the Triangle, the only gay periodical in the area. Specifically, they were the classified pages, the reams of lonelyhearts ads placed by gay men and women from all over the metro area.
The Triangle was primarily a shopper: It carried display ads for all the bars, schedules of events like drag shows and charity dance-a-thons, as well as a smattering of whatever gay/lesbian news there was.
Without a doubt, the most important part of the Triangle was the personals section. Surely it was the most profitable part of the business. Every now and then I’d read them for cheap thrills. There were always tons of “male seeking male” ads and “saw you on the bus” ads, but usually the “women seeking women” took up the smallest portion of space.
I gave the Triangle excellent marks in the distribution department. It was free, and you could find it not only in the bars, but also in at least half the coffee shops, laundromats, newsstands, and bookstores in the three counties of southeastern Michigan.
I riffled through my magazines and found a recent issue. The theme for the week was “Sluts and Nuts: A Coming-Out Guide for the Rest of Us.” There were essays on the subject by queers of all sorts, in between display ads for bars. I flipped through to the personals.
Male lonelyhearts and female lonelyhearts, straight and gay, want the same thing: love and a chance to give it back. For some, intimacy means companionship for country walks, movies, and firelight kisses; for others, we’re talking spanking, fisting, and bootlicking, which carry their own charms.
Bonnie had probably placed at least one regular classified ad, for the disc jockey opening that Iris wound up filling. And what else? Placed some personals? Answered some? Each ad referred callers to a voicemail extension paid for by the person who placed it. The police could get ahold of phone records, but I couldn’t.
I read the female-seeking-female ads thoroughly.
If the Midnight Five had been gay women, well, that would’ve been an easy thread for the police to try to follow. But what if—what if they weren’t exactly gay? What about the dreaded “bi-curious” classification? It’s a common path of entry to the gay/lesbian world. And somehow it’s sort of a flashpoint for confirmed dykes. I can’t begin to tell you how many lesbians I’ve known who, in the midst of their discussion groups, book groups, journal-writing groups, what have you, find reason to stand up and yell about what a phony thing it is to be bisexual. Criminy.
Me, I can understand it. Why not go to a wine-tasting before buying a case? Iris had all but described herself to me in that fashion.
I drummed my hands on the floor while poring over the ads. Todd watched me closely.
Bi-curious WF seeking friend. I am 28, shy, curvy, honest. Magic words to me are Frisbee, Jacuzzi, Psychology, Astrology. You are sophisticated, sexy, athletic, vegan,
financially solvent, animal-loving. Let’s get together for coffee and hugs, possibly lasting relationship. Sincere inquiries only.
Spicy WF tomato seeks Latina hot pepper. Could we make great salsa together? I love music, dancing, equality, mountain-biking. No head games or racists.
Bi-curious? Join me and my husband for spirited fun. He will watch only. Clean, healthy, and discreet.
Ugh. It was futile without more information.
Was my assumption of multiple Creighter murders correct in the first place? Maybe the photos were from sexual encounters. I’d not seen dead bodies; I’d seen women’s faces. I began to understand how valuable a skeptical mind like Ciesla’s could be.
I found myself talking to Todd, bouncing ideas off him. The air got muggier. The horse chestnut tree outside my window stood perfectly still. My anxiety mounted. I wondered how long it would take Ciesla and Porrocks to crack the case through the narrowed channels I’d left to them.
I put down a meal for Todd and took off to the City-County building, where I requested Carl Creighter’s death certificate. “Cause of death: cardiac arrest and multiple trauma.” Hmm. I read it again. Cardiac arrest and multiple trauma? “Place of death: Highway 68, Taos County, New Mexico,” and it specified a mile marker.
Then I popped over to the main branch of the Detroit Public Library and, now having the exact date, looked up the newspaper death notice on the microfilm.
For a minute, scanning down the columns I thought there’d been a mistake, that the Creighter notice had run twice, but no, there were two Creighter notices that day: Carl Creighter and his daughter Veronica Creighter. Same date of death, same place. Private interment at Woodlawn Cemetery, Detroit.
I scanned through the A sections of the prior days’ papers but found nothing more, no story about the deaths. The DPL didn’t have film for any New Mexico paper.
So Bonnie’s father and sister bought it in a car wreck, possibly triggered by Mr. Creighter’s coronary. Woodlawn was more or less on my way back to Eagle, so I stopped in, asked for the coordinates, and found the graves.
A moist breeze kicked up and rustled the shrubbery while moody purple clouds swept overhead.
Why did I stop in? I just had a feeling. When you’re desperate to figure something out, you don’t just dig for stuff you think’ll be important. You dig for tidbits too, because you never know which tidbit might turn out to be the one.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was amazed by what I found: a marker the size and style of the Vatican. White marble to hell and gone. The main feature was a statue of an angel with a life-size lamb at its feet. On second look it wasn’t
an angel; it was St. Francis, the animal-loving saint. A stone sparrow nestled in the crook of his arm, a stone mouse nibbled his sandal strap, and his expression was one of sad benevolence. Above the names two biblical quotations were inscribed:
FOR SOME ARE ALREADY TURNED ASIDE AFTER SATAN.
WHEREFORE WE LABOUR, THAT, WHETHER PRESENT OR ABSENT WE MAY BE ACCEPTED OF HIM.
I wrote down the inscriptions in my notebook, then slowly walked back to the Caprice and drove home.
My apartment was quiet as usual, but I could tell some noise had occurred in my absence: Todd’s ears were quivering, and there were three hang-ups on the old answering machine. We nibbled carrots and cookies together in the big orange chair, both of us a bit edgy.
At about three o’clock the phone rang, and I let the machine get it. The speaker crackled, “Lillian, Ricky Rosenthal. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Minerva LeBlanc is in town, looking into the midnight disappearances, and I thought—”
I picked up. “I’m here, Ricky. Minerva LeBlanc is in Detroit? Minerva LeBlanc?”
“Yeah. Hi.” Ricky’s voice was high-pitched but unhurried. Under his direction, the Motor City Journal ran like a sewing machine. “One of my city people bumped into her at police headquarters. She said she was doing research on the midnight disappearances. Trying to decide if they’re worth doing a book on. I thought you’d be interested to know that. You might want to compare notes.”
“My God, I can’t believe it. She’s only, like, the most fantastic crime writer in the universe. She’s—oh, my God. I’ve read everything she’s ever written.”
“Really.”
“Wow!” I was practically dancing in place. “I’ve always wanted to meet her! Do you know where I can get ahold of her—do you know where she’s staying?”
“Uh-unh. But somebody here says she always travels first class, which figures. She’s gotta be so filthy rich from all those books—”
“I’ll try the hotels. Ricky, if you hear of another sighting of her, would you please let me know?”
“Sure.”
I hung up all in a dazzle. Minerva LeBlanc: The name tripped off the tongue with elegance and style. She’d made her first enormous splash about ten years earlier, with the book Inside Johnny Florida, a true account of one of the most gruesome slaughters in history. Surely you’ve read it, surely you know the story:
Johnny Florida started out as the mousy little son of law-abiding Hungarian immigrants, an extended clan that lived together in a big house in Queens, New York. As a young man he dropped his real name—his normal wimpy name, whatever the hell it was—and started calling himself Johnny Florida. He felt the name conveyed the kind of man he was, or fantasized being: hip, energetic, in control. But the kid was not very bright.
One day he decided it’d be in his best interest to take over the family business, which was a hot-sausage pushcart in lower Manhattan. His father and uncles declared they weren’t ready to retire. There was a commotion; afterward, the house in Queens was very quiet.
Johnny Florida developed his own recipe for sausage, which he served from his pushcart. It was months before the murders were discovered and the skeins of sausages hanging from the basement beams analyzed.
Minerva LeBlanc, a trainee in a New York brokerage house, had eaten regularly from Johnny Florida’s pushcart, and she’d become fond of the swaggering little dude. After the story broke, she quit her job and wrote a book about Johnny, his crimes and his trial, using information from dozens of exclusive interviews he granted her from the nuthouse they put him in.
Inside Johnny Florida was a smash best-seller, a hit movie, and a springboard for Minerva to scrutinize other sensational crimes. Since then, she’d written half a dozen more books about the bizarre, incomprehensible worlds of psychotic killers. Her research on open cases actually helped the police catch some of them. All her books rode the best-seller charts for months. I’d read and reread all of them, thrilling to her snappy descriptions and trenchant insights. Now here she was in Detroit, treading, perhaps, the very same pavement I was.
The Midnight Five were either the most puzzling string of missing persons the state had ever seen, or nothing at all. As any cop will tell you, people disappear every day; they walk away from their lives for a million different reasons, leaving things hanging in varying degrees.
Five women had disappeared overnight, one every few months, starting about two years ago. The first couple of them no one connected; then as the count rose, the police started to wonder. But there were no signs of criminal activity, no signs of struggle in their homes, no abductions witnessed, no nothing except that they didn’t show up for work the next morning, or their tennis date, or whatever. I couldn’t remember much about the women, except that they’d come from different spots around metro Detroit and seemed to have nothing in common.
Iris could be the sixth. But unlike the others she came up dead.
I got out the phone book and started calling the top hotels. The Townsend in Birmingham, the Westin downtown. My fifth call was to the Ritz-Carlton in Dearborn, and whaddaya know, Minerva was registered. Out right now, evidently; I left a message.
Now my little rush of adrenaline was over. I resumed brooding, pacing, sitting, drumming my fingers. What if she doesn’t call back? What if the Creighters come for me? Or Lou? Or Bucky, for that matter.
I was too paranoid to keep hanging around home. I put on my better blue jeans, an unfrayed madras-plaid blouse, and my penny loafers. I combed a little gel through my hair. I put my notebook and Iris’s photograph (which I’d never given back to Porrocks) in my little leather bag and drove over to the Ritz.
Leaving the Caprice in the self-park lot, I walked up the drive. It was awkward because there was no sidewalk between the parking and the lobby. The architectural message was, You should use the valet, you two-bit hick. The valet looked at me politely.
I called her room from the lobby; she was still out, so I sat down to wait. What a lobby. The floral arrangements alone must’ve stripped about three acres of rain forest.
I waited, doodling in my notebook, looking up every few minutes. Just as the sun broke under the cloud cover and turned golden, clarifying the air outside and in, in walked a slim, simply dressed woman lugging a soft leather briefcase, looking tired, and a little troubled.
She was thinking. Boy, I could see her mind working as she moved. She stopped and spoke briefly to the concierge, then turned toward the corridor to the elevators. I bounced up and approached, my heart in my mouth.
23
“Ms LeBlanc?” She turned. I could see her inner monologue shutting off. She looked me over with a businesslike expression, poised to deliver either a quick brush-off or half a minute’s worth of attention.
“Uh, my name is Lillian Byrd. I’m a local reporter here, and I’ve been a terrific fan of yours for years, ever since Inside Johnny Florida, and—” Her face relaxed into a semi-condescending meeting-a-fan expression. I noticed searching eyes, thin lips, and a shortish jaw that almost gave her an overbite. She reached into her briefcase and drew out a pen. “And—and I don’t want your autograph—I mean, I’d love to have your autograph, of course, but that’s not why I stopped you, I—it’s that I’m investigating the murder that might be the latest Midnight Five disappearance—six!—and I thought we maybe could talk, because I heard you’re working on the Midnight Five, but maybe you aren’t, in which case, uh.” Am I a smoothie or what?
She put the pen away. Her expression now was identical to my seventh-grade gym teacher’s when she had to grade me doing a routine on the balance beam or parallel bars. A determined suppression of laughter mixed with the cringing expectation of seeing me hurt myself badly any second.
I was gratified that she didn’t just walk away. She looked around; there was a bit of pre-dinner traffic in the corridor—and said, “Let’s go into the lounge.”
Wowie. We took a table in a corner. Here we had British hunt-club atmosphere; we sank up t
o our waists in manly-smelling leather chairs. The barman came right over.
“I’ll have a lemonade, please,” said Minerva LeBlanc. I held up two fingers.
“Certainly,” said the barman.
“How did you know I was in town and that I was staying here?”
I told her. “And, you see, I thought it might be worthwhile to compare notes. I know a few things about this recent murder, and I have some pretty good suspicions. In fact, the killers got their hands on me the other night, but I got away—” I started blurting out everything in reverse order, then stopped. “Are you looking into the midnight disappearances?”
“Yes.” She got that gym-teacher look again.
Our drinks came, frosty and pretty, and she chugged half of hers. “Mmm!” The drink perked her up. She sat there across from me, a receptive, composed presence.
“Let me back up,” I said. “First of all, thank you for taking a little time to talk. The reason I came here is, I feel like I’m stirring a pretty deep bean pot here, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d listen to my story and tell me what you think. I mean, do you have a little time?”
She nodded, getting out her notebook. She flipped it open and showed me a short page of notes. “I’ve been poking around for two days, and this is all I’ve got to show for it. The midnight disappearances: I don’t know, maybe they’d make a good nonbook.” She gave a short laugh. “I can’t get a handle on them at all. Nobody knows anything, and the police can’t pull out all the stops because so far there’s no crime to investigate.”
“Exactly. See, I’m not sure this murder I referred to is related to these missing women, but if it is, a whole lot of questions could be answered from it.”
A cluster of pointy-toed guys came in and threw themselves into chairs in the opposite corner of the lounge. They were talking fancy business loudly. One shouted, “The only thing wrong with the deal’s the goddamn Canadian taxes!” The barman glared at them and took his time getting over there.
The Lillian Byrd Crime Series Page 13