by Dan Ames
“How can you be so dexterous with a fork and so ape-like with a pen?” I said, after I’d picked up the paper and looked at what he’d written. Or more accurately, tried to decipher what he’d written. “Jeez, I’ve seen better handwriting at the zoo’s gorilla exhibit.”
“Very funny,” he said. “Now goodbye John, I’m on a deadline.”
I looked at the note.
Bluestone Limited.
The name meant nothing to me.
“What the hell is Bluestone Limited?” I asked Nate.
“No idea.”
“That’s a terrible answer for a reporter.”
That finally got him to look at me.
“You know, I’ve been doing pretty well on the new eating program,” he said. He folded his hands across his ample midsection. “The great thing is, I get a free day. Every Friday. Eat whatever I want. How about you treat me to burgers at Paul’s?”
I shuddered at the thought of how many burgers Nate could destroy on his “free” night.
It sure as hell wouldn’t be free for me.
“Fine.”
“Good. I’ll tell you what I know about Bluestone then.”
He lifted his head toward the door.
“Close it on your way out.”
I did as he said, but was disappointed in his office etiquette. Not professional at all.
22
The first thing I thought of on the way back to my office was that I should take a quick look at my checking account. I was going to need a fair mount of cash on hand to fund Nate Becker’s “diet-free night” at Paul’s. Even if Paul’s was just a burger joint, you could chew through some serious cash. ‘Chewing’ being the operative word there.
My office smelled a little better than last time thanks to the efforts I made airing out the place. A little crisp fall air never hurt anyone.
I sat down at the desk and figured my strategy now was to divide and conquer. Let Nate worry about Bluestone Limited and I would throw myself onto Auto Time or whatever it might turn out to be. Auto Time sounded like a really strange name. My guess is it was a television show or a used car dealership. Which made it a really odd choice as Benjamin Collins’s place of employment. I braced myself for a slog getting to the bottom of this one.
The first thing I did was to Google “Auto Time” and I added “Michigan” after a moment. Sure enough, a car dealership on Eight Mile Road was the first hit. After that, there were no businesses listed.
Had Benjamin Collins gotten a job at a used car dealership on Eight Mile? Doubtful. Eight Mile was the road that marked the border of Detroit. It was infamous for a lot of reasons, including a movie about a rapper. But it was just as well known for crime and open prostitution. Most businesses had razor wire and iron bars across the doors. Eight Mile was no place for a young kid from Grosse Pointe to find steady employment.
Still, I had to check.
There was a number for AutoTime so I called. A woman whose voice sounded like a trash compactor answered. I asked if they had ever had an employee about six years ago by the name of Benjamin Collins. She laughed at me. It sounded like an internal combustion engine running out of gas. And then she said they weren’t even in business until about a year ago when she won the place in a card game. It was called 8 Mile Autos up until then.
I thanked her and hung up as I scrolled through more search results for Auto Time. There was a magazine that looked like it was out of print, but it was based in Pennsylvania.
My next attempt was to search Auto Time Grosse Pointe, which resulted in no results at all.
In the storage closet near my printer were stacks of old phone books. I didn’t throw them away because you never knew when they might come in handy. Like now.
Starting with the books from a year before the murder, I searched the Yellow Pages for a company named Auto Time. There were a lot of businesses, as you can imagine, that started with the word Auto. But no Auto Time. Same for the following two years of phone books.
I stopped with the last one, and looked again at the businesses. There was one called Auto Prime. It appeared to be some kind of money lending business. But it was located in Wyandotte, which was nowhere near Grosse Pointe.
Having lived in Grosse Pointe for most of my life, I knew most of the businesses here. I racked my brain but couldn’t come up with any memories of a business called Auto Time. Even all of the car washes on Mack Avenue didn’t go by that name. Had there been any named that six years ago? I didn’t know.
There was also the very real possibility that the name was wrong. Amanda hadn’t been sure of Auto Time. What if it was Out of Time?
Back to Google. There were a couple of movies called Out of Time, and some songs. In the Detroit area there were several housekeeping services called Out of Time. Had Benjamin Collins gone into the cleaning business? Again, not a very plausible scenario.
A few more Internet searches turned up sports stories about the University of Michigan football team running out of time.
This was going nowhere.
I put the phone books back in the closet and shut down the computer. Sat there in silence for a few minutes.
Thought about calling Anna.
Instead, I looked at my watch. It was close enough to five o’clock to merit a cocktail. I grabbed a cold beer from the little fridge. Twisted off the cap and held it up. “First of the day,” I said to my office. It was a phrase one of my uncles always used to say when he cracked a beer.
The beer tasted great, and I mused on the name Auto Time. Other possible variations. All the Time. Otter Time. Maybe there was a business that let people play with otters. Like how you could swim with dolphins.
When my mind wandered it tended to head straight into the realm of lunacy. It really was a gift.
Little did I know that I was about to be handed the biggest break in the case yet.
23
There were about two fingers worth of beer left in the bottle when the door to my office opened.
“Rockne?” a voice called out.
Caught off-guard and cursing myself for not locking the door, I didn’t even think to open the desk drawer that contained my gun. Instead I just stood up and started toward the lobby but Tripp Collins appeared in my doorway before I could take another step.
“What is your problem, asshole?” he barked at me.
“Can you be more specific?” Humor was a great way to defuse a situation. It never worked in my home life, but it was always my first place of refuge. Or maybe it was the beer talking. I’m a lightweight when it comes to alcohol.
“Go to hell,” he said.
I suddenly realized that I didn’t have a very high regard for Tripp Collins, despite our intertwined histories.
“How can I help you, Mr. Collins?”
“Why is my office getting called about a private investigator asking if they’re my clients?”
“There are a lot of private investigators in Detroit,” I answered. Which was the truth.
“Oh, that’s bullshit. Why are you harassing me?”
“I’m not,” I said.
“Yeah? Then why were you in my lobby accosting your ex-girlfriend?”
Accosting? I didn’t recall any accosting. And how had he known about my brief conversation with Elizabeth?
“Again, I’m not harassing you. And I didn’t accost anyone.” Both were completely true statements.
His face turned an even darker shade of red. He was clearly drunk. Drunker than he’d been at his house. His entire demeanor was in disarray. His hair was messy, his tie loose, shirt untucked, even a stain on his pants. Plus, he couldn’t stop looking at my beer.
“Want a beer?” I said.
He pulled a flask out of his pocket.
“No, I don’t want a beer,” he snarled at me. “I want you to get your shit together and get out of my business, literally and figuratively.”
He took a long pull from the flask.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,”
I said. “There’s a lot of new information coming in regarding Benjamin’s murder. A lot of stuff is happening.”
“Like what?” he said, his voice thick with skepticism.
“I’m afraid I can’t share anything right now.”
We stood there, looking at each other. He was holding the flask; I was holding my nearly empty beer bottle.
Finally, he took another long drink from the flask, tilting it all the way up at the end. Empty.
“Listen. You’re a screwup in the grandest sense of the word,” he said. He looked around my lobby like it was a dirty diaper. “I know you’re desperately trying to make yourself feel better, but keep me out of your pathetic little self-esteem improvement campaign, okay?” he sneered. “Get a life. Anger, regret, jealousy, you need to let it all go. It’s not too late to make something of yourself. Well, it probably is. But you should at least try. Stop being a loser, is what I’m saying.”
I nodded. Sage advice. Following his lead, I drank the rest of my beer and was about to show him out when something he’d said caught my attention.
Anger. Regret. Jealousy.
“Jealousy?” I asked him. “Who am I jealous of?”
He laughed out loud and looked at me like I was joking.
“You really don’t know, do you?”
“Enlighten me.”
“You’re going to need a drink after I tell you this,” he said, shaking his head. He clapped his hands together and rubbed them briskly back and forth. “You know your old girlfriend, your ex-fiancée Elizabeth Pierce?”
“Yeah? What about her?” My voice was calm but I had a sick feeling in my stomach.
He lowered his head and looked directly into my eyes. His face was filled with sheer delight.
“Benjamin was fucking her.”
24
Two guys who preferred not to use each other’s real names. The Spook laughed. His whole life had been nothing but smoke and mirrors. He idly wondered how many of the people he’d dealt with throughout his life had gone by their real names. Probably less than twenty percent, he guessed.
Now, he sat in a conference room. The space perfectly matched his mental image of a room in an insane asylum. White walls. Burnished steel table. White leather chairs. The only thing missing was a straitjacket.
The man sitting across from him had a physician-like appearance, as well. A sleek silver suit. Pale blue tie. Perfectly manicured. Expertly coiffed. His white hair and tanned face only brought out the blue in his eyes and made him look much younger than his real age, which the Spook guessed to be at least eighty years.
The Spook knew the man’s real name, but never used it. In fact, they never used names at all. The Spook simply referred to him as the Director. It was a title that fit the man.
“I appreciate you meeting with me personally,” the Director said. “Ordinarily Mr. Ricks would handle this, but…”
He spread his thin, bony hands out in a helpless gesture.
“What happened to Mr. Ricks?” the Spook asked.
The Director smiled and nodded his head. As if the question had been highly amusing.
“Only the murderer who shot him in the head can answer that.”
“That’s the funny thing about bullets,” The Spook said. “They aren’t refundable.”
The Director’s face betrayed a tiny twitch that most people would never have noticed. But The Spook had been trained to notice these things.
“It seems that your previous assignment has resulted in renewed attention to the incident in Grosse Pointe from a few years back,” the Director continued.
“Some things you can bury only so deep,” the Spook said. “A flash flood. A new building project. An earthquake. Anything can happen and usually does. In our business, there are no guarantees. You know that.”
“No guarantees,” the older man agreed. “And no refunds.”
“Exactly.”
The old man sighed. “Well, I don’t like surprises. And I want this thing buried deep, once and for all.”
“I can make that happen,” the Spook said.
The old man swiveled in his chair and looked at the blank wall.
“I’m assuming that my original investment won’t cover your services,” he finally said, before turning back to face him.
“Every major project requires investment and occasional reinvestment,” the Spook answered. “You of all people know that. However, I’m happy to reduce my fee by ten percent. You can use that money to establish some sort of memorial for Mr. Ricks. Call it the No Refund Fund.”
The old man’s eyes narrowed. The Spook supposed it was the kind of look that made subordinates tremble. He wasn’t a subordinate. And he never trembled. Instead, he stood and let himself out.
It was time to go to work.
25
“What’s wrong with you, John?” Anna asked me. I’d been despondent all night, barely listening to what my family was saying. I’d asked my daughters about school, listened to Anna talk about her struggles to decide what book to pick for her book club, but mostly, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Tripp Collins had said.
Benjamin and Elizabeth.
There was no way.
Amanda Collins had told me that Benjamin said he’d met someone. That Grosse Pointe wasn’t suddenly so bad. Could that someone have been Elizabeth? Was it even a possibility?
It was bullshit.
Tripp Collins had been drunk and desperate to come up with something. The man was a loose cannon.
It was fiction, plain and simple.
The girls eventually went to bed. Anna went online to research her book choices and I sat on the couch, staring at the television.
What a ridiculous story. Elizabeth and I had been engaged. We were lovers. And we had spent a lot of time together. Sure, we had our separate schedules. Being a rookie on the police force, I’d had a lot of long shifts I couldn’t avoid. I suppose if she had wanted to sleep around on me, she could have. But I highly doubted it. I would have known, right?
I realized instantly how foolish that thought was. Every person who has ever been cheated on probably thought the same thing. That somehow they would have known.
There was no point in deceiving myself about how smoothly people could lie. In my profession, I saw it every day.
Another problem was that Benjamin would have been much younger than Elizabeth. He was barely out of high school for God’s sake. It just wasn’t possible that she would have started seeing someone that young. Right?
Still, the triumph in Tripp Collins’s eyes had been genuine. Even if it wasn’t true, he certainly seemed to believe it was.
On the television, an auction of classic cars was taking place. A beautifully restored Mustang rolled onto center stage and a bunch of old white guys, balancing glasses of beer on their bulging guts, were bidding.
An announcer was talking about the Golden Age of the automobile. It made me think of Auto Time.
And Benjamin Collins getting a job.
Onscreen, the Mustang sold for a little over forty thousand dollars, to some seventy-year-old guy with a cowboy hat and a twenty-five-year-old trophy bride.
Men. Sex. And cars.
Benjamin. Elizabeth. Murder.
Then again, there was a connection between the Collins family and the Pierce family. I had just seen Elizabeth with the UAM folio tucked underneath her arm. How long had she been working with Tripp Collins? Why hadn’t I thrown that in his face when he confronted me?
On the television, a Cadillac that must have been about forty feet long was pushed onto center stage by two guys wearing gloves. It sat there while the camera flashed on bidders. I wondered who would have a garage big enough to house a car that size. You would practically need an airplane hangar.
Well, I wasn’t done with Tripp Collins. Or Elizabeth Pierce. I would just have to go back at him tomorrow. Confront him with the fact that I knew Elizabeth was a client. And just what did he have to say about that?
I
turned off the television before the final hammer came down on the Cadillac.
It was time to go to bed.
But I doubted I would get any sleep.
26
Morning started with an entire pot of coffee for myself and the realization that I needed to stake out the home of Tripp Collins. Which meant, of course, that an entire pot of coffee was the last thing I needed. Both my bladder and I would come to regret it.
As I pulled out of the driveway in the Taurus and made my way down to Windmill Pointe Drive, I understood the challenge ahead. It’s not easy to do a stakeout in Grosse Pointe. People who live here are naturally suspicious. When you reside so close to a major city plagued with crime, it tends to put people slightly on edge.
Not that all crime came from Detroit. Far from it, in fact. But Grosse Pointe was a community that noticed things. They tended to take note if a car was sitting out on the street for extended periods of time with someone inside. Property taxes were high in Grosse Pointe. Part of the reason was an extremely well-funded police force. Grosse Pointers had no problem calling the cops the minute they saw something out of the ordinary. It was their way of getting some value back on their investment. You could ask my sister Ellen if you didn’t believe me. Her people dealt with those kinds of calls every day.
Eventually, I found a house with a for sale sign in the front yard. I knew for a fact that most houses listed with that company were foreclosures and usually vacant. Not all of the time, but certainly most. Like every other city in America, Grosse Pointe had been hit by the foreclosure crisis of a few years back. Only recently had the market picked back up. Before that, it wasn’t uncommon to see a half-dozen for sale signs on every block.
I parked in front of the house for sale. The best part was that the vantage point gave me an unobstructed view of Tripp Collins’s house. Because the house I was parked in front of was for sale, passersby could take me for a real estate agent. Or a prospective buyer. It would buy me at least a couple of hours.