Till the Butchers Cut Him Down (v5) (epub)

by Marcia Muller

  “Suits never had a childhood or an adolescence. Rather than start on a high-powered adult career at seventeen, he decided to catch up on what he’d missed.”

  Ahead of us the cliff face curved toward the sea, then disintegrated into a tumble of rocks that extended into the water, forming a natural jetty. I stopped walking, my eyes drawn to the top of the sandstone; a feeling had stolen over me—that of being watched. I scanned the cliffs, but saw no one.

  “This way,” Anna called.

  I shrugged the feeling off and followed her around a jagged mass of barnacle-encrusted stone to an A-shaped opening in the cliff’s wall. “Our smugglers’ cave,” she said.

  Inside, the cave was damp and echoing, noticeably colder than the beach. Deep shelflike hollows gouged its walls, suitable caches for crates of illegal liquor. I went over to one and ran my hand across its mossy surface, then perched on a reasonably dry rock that protruded from the pebbled sand. Anna came over and leaned beside me.

  I said, “Suits and I could only pinpoint a couple of people in his organization who have access to enough information to have planned these attacks on him—Noah Romanchek and Russ Zola. Do you know them?”

  “Not well enough to hold an opinion on what they’re capable of.”

  “We also isolated a couple of turnarounds that may be at the root of the trouble—Keystone Steel and Lost Hope, Nevada.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “I have the files on those,” I went on, “but I’d like your impression of how things were for Suits personally during those periods. You talk on the phone every night, so you probably have insight—”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  She pushed away from the rock and began to walk restlessly around the cave. “Last night when I said the marriage wasn’t without its flaws? Well, I meant it as a joke, but there’s a good deal of truth in it. Suits and I weren’t getting along around the time he went to Pennsylvania, and we agreed to a trial separation. It wasn’t until after he finished Nevada that we worked things out and got back together.”

  “All together how long was that?”

  “Four years, give or take.”

  “And you had no contact the whole time?”

  “Very little.”

  “Didn’t you ever discuss those years with him?”

  She shook her head. “We decided to start over from the day we got back together. That meant no dwelling on past problems, no delving into what went on during the years we were separated. Those years were hard on both of us; I think Keystone would have been more successful if he hadn’t had the breakdown of our marriage on his mind. And I … There were things I would have done differently, too, if I’d been safe in the marriage.”

  Anna interested me; I wanted to ask her about those things, but they really weren’t any of my business. I said, “Suits has made a lot of enemies over the years. Can you think of any who might go to this extreme?”

  She considered the question thoughtfully, drawing a pattern in the pebbles with the toe of her sneaker. “No one comes to mind.”

  “This next question may seem offensive, and I apologize in advance, but I have to ask it. Have you ever known Suits to do drugs?”

  “I’m the ex-druggie in the family. He hardly even drinks; you saw how little wine he had last night. Why do you ask?”

  “A number of people have described him as paranoid, and even though I believe someone really is out to get him, I’ve noticed paranoid behavior, too.”

  “Suits has always been on the paranoid side of the scale, so I know what you mean. Frankly, I’m worried about him. A few weeks ago he admitted that he’s had his phones wired with recording devices. He keeps tapes of his conversations and examines them for sinister connotations. And he’s taken to conducting most of his business meetings in public places or on the helicopter. He says they can’t get to him there.”

  “They?”

  She nodded. “They.”

  “Not good. Do the people he’s talking with on the phone know they’re being taped?”

  Anna shook her head.

  “He’s committing a crime.”

  “I know that. I’m the only one he’s told about it, so don’t you let on to him.”

  “I won’t. There’s another reason I asked about drugs, though: a man he knows in the city described him as having what sounds like a flashback.” I explained what Carmen had told me. “A railroad overpass, two or three people, heat lightning on the water,” I repeated. “Do those images mean anything to you?”

  She became very still. I could see her hug herself beneath the folds of her cape. “Did you ask him about them?”

  “I wouldn’t have gotten a straight answer. Might even have damaged our rapport.”

  Anna’s face was pale now, her gaze turned inward. Finally she said in a flat voice, “Well, I don’t know what they could possibly mean.”

  Maybe she didn’t understand their exact significance, but I was sure she’d recognized something in the images. Before I could ask more, she moved outside the cave and began walking toward the tide line.

  I went after her, but it was obvious that the subject was closed. As soon as I caught up she began to chatter, trying to divert me with tales of bootleggers and shipwrecks, with a skill that her husband would have admired. As we walked, the feeling of being covertly watched came over me again; I scanned the beach and the cliff tops, but saw no one.

  * * *

  When Anna and I got back to Moonshine House, the Jet Ranger was idling near the edge of the cliff on a flat cleared area. Suits met us halfway up the slope, turned me around, and pointed me toward the cottage. “Get your things together,” he said.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Trouble. We’ve got to go back to the Bay Area. I’ll meet you at the copter.”

  “Suits—”

  He was already heading toward the house.

  I glanced at Anna; her lips had pulled tight and her eyes were stormy. She looked at me, shrugged, and started toward the cottage.

  I remained where I was, my brimming annoyance with Suits spilling over onto her. What was wrong with her, anyway? She wasn’t going to protest, wasn’t even going to ask the reason for his abrupt departure! After a moment I followed, gathered my things in silence.

  When I’d zipped my travel bag, I saw that Anna was staring out the window at the sea, arms wrapped around herself under the cape. She turned—mouth dejected, eyes bleak now—and my anger deflated. I touched her shoulder. “Why don’t you let me help you pull the sheets off the bed.”

  She shook her head. “I’ll take care of them after you leave. I’m expecting a young friend from the reservation—Franny Silva, the woman who wove this cape. Getting the cottage fixed up for her will give me something to do.”

  When we got back to the house, Suits met us in the gallery and handed me my briefcase, looking haggard. He whispered his apologies to Anna during a quick embrace. Then he hurried out the door, motioning to me.

  I slipped out of the borrowed parka, pulled my own damp one from the hall tree, and turned to Anna to give my thanks. She hugged me, then enfolded me in her lovely handwoven cape.

  “Anna, I can’t take this—”

  “I want you to have it. It’s special to me; so are you. In a way I feel like we’re sisters. And now you’ll excuse me if I don’t come outside to say good-bye.”

  I hugged her in return, pulled the cape’s hood over my head so she could see how it looked, then ran after Suits. He and Josh were impatient to be off; they helped me aboard the copter quickly. After I put on my headset I looked out the window toward the greenhouse gallery, but saw no sign of Anna.

  As the copter lifted off, I asked Suits, “Now what’s happened?”

  He hesitated a moment before replying. “It’s Carole Lattimer. She was mugged and beaten in the garage across from our building, where she parks her car.”

  “She’s alive?”

  “
Barely. We don’t know the full extent of her injuries yet.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Middle of this afternoon. Noah—he’s at the hospital—Noah says they’re afraid there’s brain damage.” Suits slumped in his seat, chin on his collarbone. “The police … they say it’s the neighborhood. They say she should’ve been more careful. They say … ah, hell! I know there’s more to it than that.”

  “You can’t be sure.”

  “I can. It’s just more of the same.” He put his hand over his eyes. When he spoke again, his voice rasped with emotion. “Sherry-O, I hate this. I just plain hate this. The goddamn butchers can do what they want to me, but why do they have to hurt my people?”

  * * *

  Later that day the Mendocino County authorities would tell us that we must have just cleared the ridge of coastal hills on our inland journey when Moonshine House exploded, fragmenting everything and everyone inside.

  Touchstone

  September 28

  Black smoke belching from a helter-skelter heap of wood and stone. Orange flame licking at its edges. Firefighters scurrying like frightened insects, leaving a spoor of hoses across the charred vegetation.

  Wind sweeping the smoke higher, buffeting the copter; Josh crying so hard he was having trouble setting it down.

  Suits’s hand in mine—limp as the corpse of a small animal. Face a rigid plaster-of-Paris mask, and just as fragile. His eyes … no, I can’t look into his eyes.

  Hot tears now. Whose? Mine. Burning tracks on my face.

  Suits couldn’t believe it when the Oakland P.D. met us on the roof of the building and told us. Insisted we fly straight back. He believes it now.

  Sob catching in my throat. I believe it, too.

  Close to the ground. Closer. Visibility nil. A bump. Door open, smoke billowing in. Filling my lungs, I can’t breathe. And the smell …

  Smell of countless things incinerated, shattered, ripped apart, ruined. And, faintly, the smell of charred human flesh—

  I’m strangling on it. Trying to scream, but the sound won’t come. Straining harder, and now it does—hoarse, raw. And I’m falling—

  Arms catching me, folding me close. A voice, Hy’s voice. Over and over he’s saying, “No, no, McCone, no. …”

  * * *

  After I’d fought free of the nightmare that was more a memory than a dream, I told Hy I needed to get some air. September was a hot month here in the high desert; Hy’s ranch house had been closed up since early July. Perhaps it was the lingering heat and stuffiness that had suggested flame and smoke.

  Who was I trying to fool? The nightmare had recurred on an almost daily basis in the cool, fog-washed air of San Francisco.

  We dressed and went out into the gray dawn. Sheep huddled in their fenced pasture; they moved restively as we went by. Hy led the way across rough sagebrush-dotted ground to a grove of gold-leafed aspen. A dry creek bed meandered through the trees; we bridged it on well-worn stones. On the other side of the grove, the land dropped off sharply in a series of ridges to the volcanic plain where Tufa Lake nestled. As we sat on the cliff’s edge, our feet dangling, I could see the landing light at the nearby Vernon airstrip wink green.

  Hy said, “Can’t just be thirty-ninth birthday nerves.”

  “No.”

  “And it can’t just be your friend Anna getting killed. You hadn’t known her all that long, and besides, you’ve dealt with worse things.”

  “Dealt with them better than I am with this, you mean.”

  “Uh-huh. Your friend Suits—”

  “Is being a total asshole! I hate him!”

  The vehemence of my response surprised both of us. Hy frowned and waited. When I didn’t go on, he said, “McCone, talk to me.”

  My fingers clenched together. I bowed my head. So far I hadn’t been able to relate more than the surface details about the explosion, certainly hadn’t been able to describe my feelings. The feelings only crept forth in the night, in my dreams. Otherwise they lay buried as deep as what few fragments they’d been able to find of Anna. To look at me as I dealt with clients and conducted interviews and instructed Mick, you’d never have known that I was only part there—that the greater portion of me was lost in the smoke and the smells at Bootlegger’s Cove.

  I thought of the many things I hadn’t told Hy: Of the framed photo of Anna and Suits that I’d come upon near the helipad, miraculously thrown free and unharmed by the blast that had destroyed all else. Of Josh’s anguished cry when he saw me holding it. Of Suits talking with a sheriff’s deputy and the fire captain, then growing more and more still, as if he were flipping a series of internal circuit breakers to disable all human connection. And of the suspicion that had grown in my mind during this past month, that was the worst thing of all. …

  Hy couldn’t possibly know what I suspected, but when he tugged at the cape I wore, I started and glanced up at his face to see if somehow he’d guessed. The cape was Anna’s, the one she’d given me immediately before the explosion, the one I’d worn from the house to the JetRanger, its hood raised. When I’d thrown it on to go meet Hy at Oakland Airport the previous evening, I’d done so as a symbolic act—a declaration that I was committing to a risky and possibly ruinous course of action.

  On September 6, Suits had terminated his contract with me. A check signed by Dottie Collier arrived at my office, accompanied by a brief note thanking me for my efforts on her employer’s behalf. A check for the full amount of my fee, plus a fifty percent bonus—buying me off, buying me out of Suits’s life.

  I hadn’t deposited the check; I hadn’t earned it. And I couldn’t be bought, especially not in this instance.

  Hy gave up on me initiating a conversation and asked, “Did you go up to Mendocino County last week, like Gordon’s lawyer wanted?”

  “Yes.” Suits had refused to return to the Bay Area with Josh and me after the explosion. Moonshine Cottage had survived intact, and it was there he took up residence—had remained in residence to this day.

  The week before, Noah Romanchek had called me. “It’s about T.J.,” he said. “He’s in terrible shape, won’t deal with the business. GGL’s hanging on, but just barely. Decisions have to be made about the Hunters Point base. The Port Commission and the Southern Pacific want to get moving on deepening that tunnel. A lot of people are depending on this project. Christ, Carole Lattimer had brain surgery, and she’s pitching in from her hospital bed. If she can do that, T.J. ought to be able to pull himself together.”

  “Have you told him this?” I asked.

  “Of course. I went up to the cove to talk with him last week. He threw me out of the cottage.”

  “Well, I don’t know what I can do. I’m not working for him anymore.”

  “T.J. once told me that he respects your opinion. Please go up there and try to get through to him. We’ll pay whatever your usual rate is.”

  For reasons of my own, I’d agreed and flown north in the JetRanger with a somber Josh Haddon. Had left the pilot walking among the charred ruins on the clifftop and gone to the cottage.

  Now I told Hy, “I found pretty much the kind of deteriorating scene Romanchek described. Suits is wallowing in grief; he seems to enjoy it.”

  “Drinking?”

  “No, no drugs, either. He’s just … shut down, doesn’t give a damn about anybody or anything.”

  “Well, maybe he’ll snap out of it. We all handle our grief in different ways. When Julie died, even though I’d known for years that the disease would eventually take her, I went crazy for a while. Drank, self-destructed all over the map. Went berserk at whatever protests the movement was staging, hoping some cop would blow me away and put me out of my misery.”

  “But that kind of behavior was in character for you. Suits’s isn’t. After the explosion there was a lot of speculation in the press, particularly the tabloids: had he been responsible for the explosion? No one ever went so far as to suggest he actually blew the place up himself or hired someon
e to do it, but there were allusions to Anna’s and his ‘unusual lifestyle.’ And they dredged up about him turning the dope farm, and her addiction, as well as their four-year separation and the story of how he bribed her to marry him.”

  Hy grimaced. “Fuckin’ vultures.”

  I nodded. “The man I knew would have reacted just that way. He’d’ve come out swinging at the tabloids, slapped them with huge lawsuits. But as it was, he didn’t even issue a press release. And here’s what makes me angriest of all with him: he doesn’t care why Anna died, doesn’t want to find out who set that explosion.”

  I paused, thinking back to August. “You know, Suits said something once, to the effect that the butchers were trying to cut him down. At the time I thought he was being overly dramatic, but that’s exactly what they did. They—his enemies and the press—butchered his wife, and they butchered him.”

  I pictured Suits lying listlessly on dirty blue sheets in the room I’d occupied at Moonshine Cottage. Trash had clogged the fireplace; soft-drink cans and plates full of half-eaten food sat everywhere. I’d tried to persuade him to get up, clean up, come out for a meal or at least a walk, but he refused. I’d tried to give him Anna’s cape, so he would have something of hers, but he wouldn’t take it.

  “Keep it, Sherry-O,” he’d said. “I don’t want it. I don’t want anything.”

  It was the ultimate rebuff, of both his dead wife and our dead friendship. I left the cottage a few minutes later. When I got back to the helipad I found Josh standing next to the JetRanger, fingering a piece of blackened stone and crying, as he had on the day of the explosion. His eyes rested on the cape that I held over my arm; he turned and angrily hurled the stone into the sea. We hadn’t spoken since then; I wasn’t even sure if he was still in the Bay Area.

  Hy asked, “Do they have any leads on who set the explosion?”

  “No. It was plastic explosives, but the blasting caps and wiring devices don’t tell them anything. They figure the charges were laid earlier that week when Anna was down in Sausalito helping a couple of her protégés set up a crafts exhibit, and detonated by remote control.” My voice quavered; I breathed deeply, steadied it before I continued. “They’ve got little enough to work with; the only way they got an I.D. on Anna was that the dentist who takes care of the people from her reservation recognized a couple of fillings as his work.”