by P J Parrish
“All right, Phil. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
It took Louis three hours to make it back to Plymouth. The freeway was plowed, but all other roads were iced over, and twice he had almost lost the car into a ditch. He pulled up in the driveway tense and tired, flexing his hands, cramped from gripping the wheel.
The front door was locked. He dug back in his jacket pocket for his keys. The wind was bitter and his fingers were so cold he was struggling to separate the keys when the door swung open. Phillip stood there, dressed in a blue sweater and old slacks. He stepped back to let Louis inside.
As Louis wiggled out of his jacket, he thought about asking if Frances had come back, but he knew she probably hadn’t. It was a little after 10:00 A.M. and the house was empty of any of her usual scents.
“How was the drive?” Phillip asked, taking his coat.
“Dangerous,” Louis said.
Phillip said nothing and Louis headed to the kitchen to look for something to eat. It hit him how sharp his comment about the drive probably sounded, and he knew he was just tired. He hadn’t slept well at Dalum’s last night. Thinking about Delp and having to ask him for help. Thinking about what Dr. Seraphin had said. But none of that was any reason to snap at Phillip.
Louis turned to apologize, but Phillip interrupted him. “So, what’s going on out there?”
Louis opened a cupboard and pulled down a box of Cheerios and some sugar. “We had another murder. A security guard.”
“Yes, I saw something in the Free Press. That’s terrible.”
Louis grabbed the milk and was pouring it on the Cheerios when Phillip spoke again.
“Have you found any connection to Claudia?”
“Not to the killer, no,” Louis said.
“To what then?”
“What do you mean, to what? I don’t have any more information on Claudia than I had two days ago,” Louis said. “And it’s kind of hard to deal with her with everything else that’s going on there.”
“Hard to deal with her?”
Louis was pushing the Cheerios around with a spoon and he stopped. There was a tinge of annoyance in Phillip’s question, and Louis bit back his first response, letting his irritation fade before he spoke.
“There aren’t many leads for her, Phillip,” Louis said evenly. “Right now, we have to catch this guy and maybe when we do, he’ll tell us more. I don’t know.”
“But isn’t there someone else you can talk to?” Phillip asked. “Aren’t there more people out there like that Millie woman? More patients who knew her?”
Louis faced him. “Yeah. I can do that. I can go get all kinds of stories about Claudia. How she looked. What drugs she was given. All the horrible things she went through.”
Phillip stared at him and Louis could see the anguish in his face, and he knew he shouldn’t say one more word because he could hear the edge to his voice and one more word might be one too many. But they poured out anyway.
“Is that what you want, Phillip?” Louis asked. “More guilt?”
“No,” Phillip said. “I have plenty of that.”
Louis turned back to his cereal, but he just stared at it, working his way toward an apology he didn’t want to give. Maybe Phillip needed to hear that remark. Maybe he needed to know just how pathetic he had become, hanging on to some kind of romantic dream that he could never get back, throwing his life away for a ghost.
“But that is why I asked you to come here,” Phillip said. “I didn’t expect you to get involved in another case.”
Louis closed his eyes, his chest so tight he couldn’t breathe. He didn’t want to fight with Phillip. He didn’t want to fight with anyone.
“If you want to quit all this, I understand,” Phillip said.
“I don’t want to quit.”
“You sound like it.”
Louis started stirring the cereal in slow circles.
“If you want to talk, Louis,” Phillip said, “we can go down to the basement. Grab a beer, eat some nuts. You know. We can talk, like we used to do.”
And the words were on his lips before he thought about them, and he heard them come out, but he couldn’t believe they were his.
“We never talked, Phillip,” Louis said.
“That’s not true,” he said. “I remember . . .”
Louis faced him. “I got lots of fatherly advice. I got nice clothes. And a damn good education. But we never talked.”
Phillip’s shoulders drew stiff, hurt coloring his face. It was a look Louis had never seen before. But it didn’t stop the rush of emotion, and before he could stop himself, he was talking again.
“Did it ever occur to you why that coach in high school wanted me on the basketball team?” Louis asked.
“Well, I—”
“Or why I didn’t go to the prom?”
Phillip was just staring.
“Or why I ran away so many times? Or what I might have wanted to eat at Christmas?”
“Louis—”
“Did it ever occur to you that I might want something like greens or hot skillet corn bread or smoked turkey legs or anything that might be southern?” Louis stopped for a moment, trying to even his voice. “Or black?”
Now Phillip knew what he was talking about and his expression changed from confusion to indignation. Louis saw something else there—pity.
“I thought it was best for you to forget what happened to you before you came here,” Phillip said.
“Forget?” Louis asked.
“Yes.”
“Forget what happened to me, Phil, or forget what I was?”
“You talk like I tried to make you white,” Phillip said.
“Maybe you did.”
Phillip took a step back, and Louis thought he was going to leave the kitchen, but he didn’t.
“When they brought you here, Louis, you were eight years old,” Phillip said. “You had marks and bruises. And I didn’t care what color of skin those marks were on. I only wanted to make them go away.”
Louis could feel the pounding of his heart. But he had no words now. His throat was too tight and the emotions suddenly too strong. He knew none of this was meant for Phillip. It was something else. And it was about someone else. A different white man in a straw hat, and a face that no matter how hard Louis tried to bring into focus, remained a blur.
Suddenly Phillip was gone and Louis was alone in the kitchen. And for almost a full minute, he didn’t move. Then he sank into a chair at the table and put his head in his hands. He needed to apologize and he would. In a minute. But right now he didn’t want to move. Right now, it was all he could do to control the waterfall of images and memories. Keep them inside and steady. And God, he needed to be steady right now.
Phillip came back into the kitchen and Louis forced himself to look up. Phillip was holding something out to him. Photographs.
“These were taken the night before you arrived here. Do you want to see them?” Phillip asked. “Do you want to see what I saw?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Phillip set them on the table. They were Polaroids. Three of them. Probably taken by Children’s Service.
The first. His scrawny light brown back, splotched with the kind of bruises that came from being smacked.
The second. His butt. The skin colored a deep, bronzy red, some of the welts so big they looked like giant, bloody blisters. And on his upper thighs, ragged lacerations from where the buckle of the belt had sliced into his skin.
He sifted to the third picture. His face. Small, dirty, the lip split, his black hair uncombed and speckled with dirt.
But it was the eyes that pulled at his heart. A strange shade of smoky gray, wide with a beseeching stare. Desperate eyes in a tiny face, like something, someone, trapped behind a mask fighting to get out.
Louis stared at the writing on the wide white border. Louis W. Kincaid. Age 8. December 1967. Detroit, Michigan.
He remembered that Decem
ber. And that house he had been in before coming here. He remembered Moe. And the man before Moe. But what he couldn’t remember anymore was his first seven years in Mississippi. He used to be able to grab a few images. His mother in a blue dress. His older sister and her bright red lipstick. His brother . . . doing something near a river. And they were the good images.
But even those were fading.
His eyes drifted back to the photographs. God, he didn’t want these to be the only things left.
“I’m losing it,” he whispered. He looked up at Phillip.
“The good part of my past. I’m losing it and I don’t know how to stop it.”
Phillip lowered himself into a chair. He reached over and put a hand around the back of Louis’s neck and pulled him closer.
CHAPTER 35
Delp called late the next day. He had tracked down the four men from Dr. Seraphin’s patient files. He was able to confirm that Earl Moos was living with his brother and hadn’t left California for the last ten years. Stanley Veemer was doing time in an Ohio prison for man-slaughter. And Michael Boyd had died of a drug overdose five years ago.
Louis picked up a file. That left only Buddy Ives.
Delp hadn’t been able to find out much about the guy, just that he had been in and out of jail and worked a series of menial jobs since being discharged from Hidden Lake seventeen years ago. Delp was able to offer up one lead: Ives’s last known address in Detroit, compliments of a parole officer.
Louis opened Ives’s file to refresh his memory. Ives had sexually assaulted, then killed his grandmother, with whom he had been living at the time. Dr. Seraphin had explained to Louis that under Michigan law at the time, the prosecution had to prove Ives wasn’t insane. They failed, and instead of rotting in prison, Ives was sent to Hidden Lake.
Ives had been eighteen when he went in. He was thirty-two when he was released in 1973. That made him forty-eight now. Still young enough to have raped and murdered Rebecca Gruber and Sharon Stottlemyer.
Louis pulled a small picture out of the file. It showed a twenty-something man with messy sparse hair over a high forehead, eyes the color of dirty winter ice, and a cold sliver-moon mouth hiding in a bank of whiskers.
Louis closed the file. It was time to go find Buddy Ives.
The address turned out to be in northwest Detroit on Mansfield, a street hard by the CXS tracks. As Louis got out of the Impala, he could hear the tire-hum of the Jeffries Freeway nearby.
In its day it had been a nice house, with a big wraparound porch, the kind where people sat in swings, swatting mosquitoes and nodding to neighbors. Now there were trash cans on the porch, towers of yellowed newspapers, and a mud-caked blue recycling bin filled with beer bottles. There were five rusting mailboxes nailed near the door.
The doorbell looked broken, so Louis opened the sagging screen door and pounded on the door. Nothing. He pounded again, then stepped to the window, trying to see something between the iron security bars and the dirt smears. There was a faded red sign in the lower corner: ROOM FOR RENT. SEE MAURY APT. 1.
Then the door opened with a loud scrape and a man poked his head out. Louis immediately saw the look—that mix of fear and false bravado that surfaced on the faces of older white guys when they saw a strange black man.
Louis had the Ardmore badge out before he took a step toward the man. “I’m with the police. I need to talk to you.”
The guy’s eyed flicked to the badge and up to Louis’s eyes. “How I know that’s real?” He had retreated behind the sagging screen like it could offer some protection.
Louis took a breath. “It’s real.”
The man was in his early sixties, his scrawny, scabbed arms hanging from the sleeveless white T-shirt, his face mottled with whiskers and spots.
“I’m looking for a man named Buddy Ives,” Louis said.
“Don’t know him.”
“Are you Maury?”
“Yeah. I’m the owner here.”
“Ives was living here as of 1986. Think hard.”
The man shook his head. “I said I don’t know him.”
Louis pulled Ives’s picture from his coat pocket and held it out. “Think harder.”
The man stared at Louis for a moment, then let his eyes flick to the photo before they came back to Louis’s face. “Ives . . . okay, yeah, he was here. But he ain’t now.”
“When did he leave?”
“Well, it was hot, I remember that, ’cause he was bitching at me to fix his AC and I told him I wasn’t gonna do shit until he paid his rent. He wouldn’t leave, so I let just let him sweat his balls off up there until he couldn’t take it anymore and just left one night.”
“You have any idea where he went?”
“He didn’t say and I didn’t care.”
Louis stuck the photo back in his coat. “What can you tell me about him?”
“He was a dirtbag.”
“How about being a little more specific.”
“He drank and did drugs. That’s dirtbag enough in my book.”
“How long did he live here?”
The man had to think about that one. “’Bout two years?”
“Did he have a job?”
“Yeah, at first. That’s the only reason I rented to him. He showed me a pay stub from Uniroyal. But it didn’t last long. He was in jail once or twice, too, I remember.”
“What else do you remember?” Louis asked.
“He was real sick once.” The old man folded his scarred arms over his chest against the cold. “Don’t know what was wrong with him but it was bad, real bad. I called the amblance but he wouldn’t go. Just laid there and screamed that nobody was gonna stick him in a hospital. He almost died up there. It was nuts. . . .”
Louis had to ask. “Was he?”
“Was he what?”
“Nuts. Was Ives nuts?”
The man’s skinny shoulders hunched up. “How the hell should I know? Lots of guys come through here that are a little off in the head, but if they keep quiet and pay their rent I don’t ask.” He shrugged again. “Ives didn’t seem any more nuts than anybody else.”
“What about visitors?”
“What? Women? Nah, never saw him with one.” The man’s eyes shot up to Louis’s face. “Wait, there was one time. I remember one time he did bring some woman back here.”
“You remember anything about it?”
“Hell yes,” the old man said. “I was down here watching Carson and heard them go up the stairs, her laughing and all liquored up. Then I heard some yelling and figured they was just having a good time. Next thing I know, she comes flying down the stairs.”
“What happened?” Louis asked.
“I went out to the hall and she was screaming and holding on to her dress that was all ripped up. Her face was bleeding. But she was mad and cussing up the stairs to wheres he was standing.”
He stopped, shaking his head. Louis waited.
“I didn’t want to get in the middle of that one, so I was glad when she just ran out the door. Never heard a woman use language like that, yelling that he . . .”
The old man paused, looking suddenly at Louis.
“Yelling what?”
“She was yelling that he couldn’t . . . not . . . you know, couldn’t get a woodie.”
Louis stared at him.
The man stared back. “You know, a hard-on, a stiffy, a—”
“I know,” Louis said. “Could I see his room?”
“Huh? What for? I had to throw everything out and repaint the whole place when the guy left. I got somebody new in there now.”
“Did Ives leave anything?”
“Yeah, a mess. Garbage, needles on the damn floor, and shit on the walls.”
Louis was about to ask another question but he paused. “He put shit on the walls?”
“Not just shit . . . shit. Like real shit. And he didn’t just put it there, he wrote with it.”
“Wrote what?”
“He wrote ‘fuck you
, Maury’ with his damn handprint next to it.”
The man’s face colored and Louis knew it was from anger, not embarrassment.
“He must have been nuts. Anyone that would do that is nuts, right?”
“Probably,” Louis said. “Thanks. You’ve been helpful.”
Louis started back to the Impala.
“Hey, you catch the crazy bastard, tell him he owes me money!” Maury yelled from the porch.
Louis’s mind was locked on Buddy Ives as he drove. Now that he was sure Ives had been the one to leave the bloody handprint in E Building, he knew there was no choice. He had to turn Ives’s name over to Bloom.
He stopped for a traffic light and looked up. Where the hell was he? His brain had been so locked on Ives, he had driven fifteen minutes in the opposite direction from the freeway back to Plymouth.
He looked for a sign on the desolate street of liquor stores and vacant shops. Something familiar loomed in the corner of his vision. Through the swipe of the wipers, the image became clearer—a red brick building. It was boarded up and covered with graffiti, but a trace of its old elegance lingered in the slate mansard roof and the twin clock towers.
Suddenly, he knew exactly where he was. He was at the intersection of Grand River and Greenfield, staring at the old Montgomery Ward department store. Across the street was another decaying hulk—the old Federal store.
He stared at the sad buildings as a memory came clicking into high relief. There used to be a Kresges next to “Monkey Wards” and he had shoplifted candy there once.
A horn blared behind, startling him. He drove on across Grand River. Two blocks down, he made a sharp right turn.
It was a residential area of brick colonials and bungalows with bare old maples arching high overhead. He drove slowly down the deserted street, staring at the homes. So many were boarded up, a few burned out or with foreclosure windows on them. Everything looked alien to him, yet oddly familiar.
He passed a hulking red brick school enclosed in a high chain-link fence.
Jesus. He could remember. John Burns Elementary. He could remember sitting mute in a classroom and a fight on the playground.
He drove on. Then, there it was on the bent street sign: STRATHMOOR. He turned left and inched the Impala forward. He stopped. Leaning forward on the steering wheel, he stared out the windshield.