Sinister Heights

by Loren D. Estleman

  “The New Center meeting was a moron marathon. I made my calls from the conference table and the fucker at the head never stopped talking about his pie chart. One thing: Mrs. Stutch is old-fashioned. You’d better bring a gift.”

  The telephone went dead before I could ask what kind of gift. There was nothing wrong with the line; greetings and farewells were alien concepts to Thorpe.

  I thought about it for a while, but my detective skills were unequal to the problem. I locked up and went across the street, where a doodad store had opened in the glazed-brick building that had housed a Shell station until the Arab oil crisis, then a colony of raccoons and Scientologists. A strip mall had built off one end, selling hearing aids, bladder-control pills, and devices to improve TV reception. Planet Hollywood is not going to move into the neighborhood anytime soon.

  A bell tittered when I opened and closed the door of the gift shop. A fortyish blonde in a white sailor suit appeared behind a counter display of Hummel figurines and we went into a huddle. Five minutes later I walked out carrying a package wrapped in silver paper. I drove for twenty minutes with the window open before I stopped smelling potpourri.

  I went out past the zoo and along four lanes of resurfaced highway, passing miles of greensward tended by convicts in striped suits like the Beagle Boys, to where a sign greeted me:

  WELCOME TO IROQUOIS HEIGHTS

  PROUD HOME OF THE WARRIORS

  1995 DISTRICT CHAMPIONS

  YOU ARE UNDER SURVEILLANCE

  To underscore the point, a city prowler sat on the gravel apron with only the lower half of the driver’s face visible beneath the tilted-down visor, chewing gum.

  Beyond this was a string of placards belonging to the city’s seven Christian churches and one synagogue, a MURIEL FOR MAYOR sign left over from the election, and a simple wooden cross marking the spot where the local police had run a carjacker into the side of a hatchback being driven by a mother of three. I passed the usual hell of drive-throughs and cheapjack superstores and hung a right before the half-empty buildings of the old business district, heading for the original neighborhoods laid out by auto money to escape the thud and jangle of the factories. Auto money went a lot farther in the Heights than it did in Detroit.

  The house was a battleship-gray box built at the end of a street named NO OUTLET, with another sign in the driveway reading NO TURNAROUND and a NO SOLICITORS card stuck in a corner of the leaded-glass window in the front door. It was the one time of year, before the trees and hedges leafed out on the east side, when you could see that the place was three times as big as it appeared from the front. It went back and back to claim two large lots, each addition constructed of a slightly different grade of material according to what was available at the time, like an old English manor house with a new wing for every beheading in London. A yellow cat built like a medicine ball snored in a wallow of dead fur in a rocker on the porch.

  A woman of indeterminate age, wearing a gray dress like a jail matron’s uniform, asked me to wait in the foyer and took my card down a hallway that led past the stairs. I was alone with a bronze Ali Baba vase and a portrait of Leland Stutch, painted sometime around the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. He’d been middle-aged even then, with a scant widow’s peak and skin beginning to wattle over the top of his detachable collar. The eyes were light-eating black holes, the mouth bent down at the corners like Somerset Maugham’s. One hand rested on a world globe, with the long fingers encompassing the northern hemisphere from Prince Edward Island to the Gulf of Mexico. At an age when most men had been retired twenty years, he’d sold his interest in General Motors and invested in research to improve the efficiency of fossil fuels, where he’d made his fortune all over again. Today Stutch Petrochemicals had facilities on six continents and was rumored to hold the title on a country in Southeast Asia; ten years after his death, Antitrust was still following the paper trail.

  “Mrs. Stutch will receive you now. She’s having her physical therapy session.” The woman had come up behind me noiselessly on rubber soles.

  I said, “She sounds pretty lively.”

  Her face got a puzzled look. “Yes.” She turned and went back down the hall. I followed.

  “I had some business with Mr. Stutch about a dozen years ago. I didn’t realize he’d remarried.”

  “Mrs. Stutch came later. The grandson was quite upset. He gave the Commodore his youth.”

  You never hear anyone called Commodore anymore. They’d buried the title with the old man. It had been honorary, earned during two years when he lent his engineers to the U.S. Navy. A minesweeper of their design occupied a panoramic photo on the hallway wall. It went like hell with the other decorations: costume sketches in metal frames of attenuated models in ruffles, pleats, and suits of armor, all bearing the same illegible signature in the lower right-hand corner. We passed open doors belonging to side rooms, including a sort of conservatory with a white baby grand piano on a polished wooden floor, and a studio setup complete with a drafting board and brushes growing like cactus out of tin cans and clay pots. Music, art, and the theater seemed to be what was filling the lonely days of widowhood.

  The woman tapped on a quilted door at the end and opened it. I trailed her into a large room throbbing with Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” A tilted skylight poured sun into a white interior with exercise equipment scattered about, treadmills and rowers and progressive-resistance machines in gleaming chrome. A square platform stood in the center with turnbuckles at the corners and ropes stretched all around, and in the center of that, two women in lace-up boots and headgear and not much else were bouncing about poking at each other with boxing gloves.

  “Which one’s Mrs. Stutch?” I shouted above the electric guitars.

  “The one in the red trunks. I think she’s ahead on points.” The woman in gray touched a keypad on the wall. Silence slammed down.

  Red Trunks got in one last shot, just above the earpiece, and caught her opponent under the arms just as her knees started to fold. She helped her over to a stool in the near corner and snatched off her own headgear, letting loose a fall of black hair to her shoulders. In that bright light, without makeup, she wasn’t even close to forty.

  “Are you all right? I’m sorry, Cassie. That was a sucker punch.” She wedged a glove under her armpit, pulled out her hand, took off the other, and helped the seated woman out of her headgear. Cassie was a short-haired redhead with freckles and a mannish chin.

  “I’m okay.” Her voice was thick.

  “Mrs. Stutch?”

  The brunette looked at me and came over to my side, leaning on the top rope. “Mr. Walker. You look like you know your way around a ring. Would you care to spar?”

  “Can I go home and get my brass knuckles?”

  She had a girlish laugh. “I’m not as bad as all that. This is just my version of ‘Sweatin’ to the Oldies.’”

  “What’s Cassie think?”

  “Cassie’s my niece. I’m putting her through school.”

  “Hell, too. What’s she studying, cranial surgery?”

  “Now you think I’m a sadistic rich bitch.”

  “I know you’re rich.”

  She leaned over the ropes. I could feel the heat off her skin. “What can I do to change your mind?”

  “Not a thing. It’s my job to make the first impression.” I gave her the gift-wrapped box.

  She straightened, examining it from all sides. Finally she tore off the silver paper, opened the flap, and laughed again as she lifted out a fat-cheeked shepherdess done in pink and yellow porcelain.

  “I thought you were a hundred,” I said. “Thorpe didn’t tell me you were training to fight Muhammad Ali’s daughter.”

  “Oh!” Redheaded Cassie got up from the stool and came over. “It’s just the most beautiful thing. My landlady collects Hummel.”

  Rayellen Stutch smiled a question at me. I moved a shoulder. She held out the figurine to Cassie.

  “Tell her you had to fight someone for it
.” She raised her chin toward the woman in gray. “Mrs. Campbell, please show Mr. Walker to the music room while I slip into something a little less comfortable.” As she spoke she crossed her arms in front of herself and peeled off her damp tank top, exposing an industrial-strength sports bra. Her navel was a deep dimple in a set of abs like a pineapple.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  “The house in Grosse Pointe went to Hector, Leland’s grandson,” said Rayellen Stutch. “So did most of the estate. That’s why you didn’t read about me in the papers; there was no dispute. I got the portrait in the foyer and that minesweeper shot in the hall. Oh, and a tenth share in the petrochemicals company. That pays me thirteen million a year.”

  We were in the room with the white piano, sitting on a couple of leather slingback chairs with aluminum frames. The piano was the only thing you couldn’t carry out under one arm; everything else, including the clear Lucite rack containing sheet music, had been selected not to interfere with the resonance of the keys. There were more costume sketches on the walls and three narrow floor-to-ceiling windows with the view of horizontal housing developments and the hill where the original Stutch Motors factory still stood, looking like a brick prison. Black smoke from its triple stacks clawed the sky. I asked her if she missed Grosse Pointe.

  “Not for a minute. The house required a huge staff. I was never alone. I’m not completely comfortable with just Mrs. Campbell knowing most of my secrets, and I’d trust her ahead of anyone, even Connor. She’d worked for Leland for years before I came along. Have you ever noticed how only the rich talk about being private people? That’s because they aren’t.”

  “Life’s a bitch.”

  She started to smile, but jerked it back. “Anyway I’ve felt more at home here than I have anywhere.”

  “You could feel the same way in West Bloomfield.”

  “Mrs. Campbell recommended Iroquois Heights. Her mother worked for Leland when he ran Chevrolet. She counted out the payroll up on the hill for forty years. I know what people say about this town, but you get a different picture when you live in it.”

  “Not if you’re in jail.” I drank water from a glass on a tall stem. It was city water, treated and passed through filters belonging to a private contractor who had bought the system from the council when the cash was needed to avoid default. In the past five years the local residents had paid more than three times the selling price to lease the service. Meanwhile the city attorney who brokered the deal had retired to Texas. It was good water, pure as a bishop.

  Mrs. Stutch had showered and changed into a loose silk shirt and black stirrup pants. Her unpainted toes showed in a pair of woven leather sandals. She had nice feet, tanned and pumiced.

  She laughed, as if the jail comment were a joke. Her black hair was still damp at the ends and her high cheekbones wore no powder. Her eyes were a very dark brown, almost black. I wondered if she was part American Indian. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, “and you’re right. I was twenty-six when Leland proposed. Why would I marry a centenarian, except for money? He knew it. He also knew I’d see he got better care than Hector would have. If I hadn’t, and he cut me out, there was no way under heaven I’d break the will. We lived without illusions, which is more than you can say about most married couples. And I liked him. I miss him.”

  “He was pretty hard to miss when he was alive. They built a whole century around him. Do you play the piano?”

  “Mrs. Campbell does. She used to be with the Detroit Symphony. I pay better. Shall I invite you the next time I have people over? She knows all of Ellington by heart.”

  “I like Chopin.”

  “Ouch.” She sipped from her glass and set it down on a table with a clef-shaped base. “I went slumming there, didn’t I? After I spoke with Connor I searched you out on the Net. You’ve made the papers a few times, not the Lively Arts sections. I figured you drank straight gin and listened to gutbucket. People have been jumping to conclusions about me for ten years. You’d think I’d know better. I’m truly sorry.”

  “Me too. I wouldn’t know Chopin on a cracker.” I tilted my glass toward the wall. “Those her doodles?”

  “No, I did those. Before I was married I designed costumes for the stage. I met Leland at a party at the Fisher Theater. Someone talked him into backing the road company.”

  “Congratulations. Broadway angels usually wind up with actresses.”

  “The understudies alone were stacked six deep, with the boys from the chorus chirping around him like buffalo birds. I had to hack my way through.” She crossed her legs. “I’m a hard-fired little chippie, Mr. Walker, you might as well know that up front. Do I sound like Brooklyn?”

  “The one in Michigan, or the one on The Honeymooners?”

  “The one that berls eggs and feeds boids. I try not to talk like that even in jest. It took me six years in speech training to shuck it and I’m still afraid I’ll forget and slip back. That was in the daytime; at night I studied art, and in between I waited on tables. Was I a girl with a dream?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Smart man. Art was just a vehicle. If I were seven feet tall and black, I’d have learned to dribble a basketball. You go with what God gives you. My father was in and out of the money all the time I was growing up. I preferred in. I never managed to sell Broadway, but even a third-rate road show needs costumes. If Leland hadn’t come along, I suppose I’d have landed on the faculty in an art school somewhere. The pay wasn’t any worse and I wouldn’t have to prop a chair against my door to keep out the night manager. But I wasn’t looking forward to it.”

  “You keep your hand in. I saw your studio.”

  “That’s just a time-waster. It keeps me from becoming one of those rich widows pickled in alcohol. What about you?”

  “I can’t draw a straight line. I can sometimes walk one.”

  “I meant detective work. Is it your consuming passion or just a vehicle?”

  “You go with what God gives you. Or in this case Rayellen Stutch.” I set my glass on the floor and got out my notebook and pen.

  She didn’t need any more nudging. “Connor says you’re a Detroit native. Do you remember hearing about Leland’s paternity suit?”

  “Only that there was one. It’s mighty hard to be male and have money and not attract at least one. Also those old auto barons played as hard as they worked. How’d it come out?”

  “First, can I offer you a real drink? Leland always said water’s only good for making ice.”

  I looked outside. The sun was behind the old plant now, shining straight through the windows from the opposite side as through a paper shell. Most of the machinery had been scrapped or stripped for parts; only the steel-pouring paraphernalia remained, and the evolution of the all-plastic body had killed the midnight shift. GM was talking about knocking down the old hulk and building an engineering complex on the site. Briefcases instead of lunchboxes.

  Mrs. Stutch caught me measuring daylight. “I’ll tell Mrs. Campbell to take her time.”

  “She doesn’t have to gather dust.”

  She got up. “Not gin?”

  I asked for Scotch. She went to the door and called out into the hall. I’d tagged her for something and tonic, but it was vodka neat and a water chaser. In a little while the woman in gray brought in a pitcher and glasses and two bottles on a tray, set the works on the table next to her mistress, and left with our empty water tumblers. At the door she touched a switch and a couple of lamps came on. The sun had slipped a few more inches, and now the plant had grown more solid, its shadow swinging around like a scythe to darken the tract houses. Molten steel glowed white-orange in the windows: They were making monsters again up there on the hill.

  I balanced my notebook on my knee and drank between scribbles. It was single malt, smoky with old heather.

  “It’s been fifty years,” Mrs. Stutch said. “Weird to think about it. I mean, picture having a stepdaughter who’s almost twenty years older
than you are.”

  “It’s definite?”

  “I’ll come to it. Leland was about sixty-five, still married to his first wife, with a grandson. The woman’s name was Cecilia Willard, a telephone switchboard operator at the plant. In court he claimed they never met, but sometime or other they had to have spoken, even if she was just putting through a call. She said she was nineteen when they had their fling.

  “She delivered in the old Woman’s Hospital in Detroit. I’ll give you a copy of the birth certificate. It was a daughter. She named her Carla, with a C. No father’s name given. The child was three years old when Cecilia filed for paternity. That worked against her in court; the judge couldn’t understand why she’d waited so long. She said she was proud and wanted to make it on her own, but when a recession set in and she lost her job the going got too hard. Also she resented Leland for chucking her out with the rest of the batch. They hadn’t had any contact after their affair ended, when she was transferred to the switchboard at GM headquarters, probably because the first Mrs. Stutch got suspicious. That’s an educated guess. By all accounts the old witch died of pure spite. Anyway, Cecilia’s explanation didn’t play, and the blood test was inconclusive. The case never went to the jury.”

  “Did she appeal?”

  “No; and that’s important.” She knocked the top off her vodka, then followed it with a drink of water. It was that old shot-and-a-beer action on which Detroit holds the patent. Stutch had had his influence. “There are two newspaper clippings in the envelope with the birth certificate. One of them is Cecilia’s obituary. She had an aneurysm seven years ago at the age of sixty-two. You didn’t see the item? I’m not surprised. There were only a couple of lines about the paternity suit. It’s a jaded old world when even sex scandals get stale. She kept the name Willard. Apparently she never married. The article listed two survivors: her daughter and a grandchild.”