Sinister Heights

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Thanks.” It’s a simple word, but there are ten thousand ways to say it. This sounded like one of the right ways, but I’d been there too long.

  “I don’t expect it to do a damn bit of good,” I said. “I think you’re a cracked block. A lost cause. But you can return the empty gesture by telling me what kind of car your wife drives.”

  “Gray ninety-six Chrysler LeBaron, Ohio license GBX-121. It’s leaking fluid. Damned if I been able to find out from where. I don’t suppose them shelters let them stand out in the street.”

  “You never know. They’re like any other place with too many secrets and not enough closet space.” I put away my notebook with Constance’s LeBaron in it. “Anyway I know most of the shelters between Battle Creek and Cincinnati. They can use the practice throwing me down the front steps all over again.”

  He lifted his bottle. Then he returned it to his knee. “I don’t guess I could hire you to report back when you find her.”

  “It’d be my license if I did, and if it wouldn’t I still wouldn’t do it. Your wife’s a pretty woman, Glendowning. I’ve seen her picture. In the morgue she’d be just another puffy face with broken bones under it. The next time you might raise more than a welt.”

  “I’ll call your guy,” he said after a moment. “You think I won’t, but I will.” He started to raise the bottle again. He looked at it and his face turned the color it had turned when he’d been choking on an unexpected slug of water. He leaned forward, kicking the footrest back under the chair, and set the bottle down on the carpet with a thump.

  I said, “You can drop-kick it through the window if you like. It won’t stop you from buying another six-pack.”

  “I’ll call your guy.” He sounded petulant.

  I knew a curtain line when I heard one, but I was too soft a slab of ham to let him have it. “When I see her I’ll tell her what went on here,” I said at the door. “What she does with it is her business.”

  He screwed up his face to bawl again. I stepped outside and shut the door fast.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  On my way out of town I stopped at the same Total station for a fill and a telephone call. This time Rayellen Stutch took it. She sounded out of breath.

  “I didn’t think people who employed housekeepers had to run to catch the phone,” I said.

  “I just got through pedaling around the city limits. Or don’t rich people get to sweat in the world you live in?”

  “In the world I live in they don’t stay long enough to work one up. I thought that bit about you being on your bicycle was just a clever euphemism.”

  “Nope. I figure if Leland could make a hundred and six on straight whiskey and T-bone steaks, I ought to have a shot at two hundred. Are you in Toledo?”

  “Wholly. But not for long. I just had a talk with your granddaughter’s husband.”

  “She’s Leland’s granddaughter, not mine. I’m not two hundred yet. You didn’t see Constance?”

  I backed up and brought her up to the post, beginning with Carla Witowski and finishing with Glendowning, editing for length; especially the brief round on his doorstep. The fights you lose make better listening.

  “He sounds horrendous. The little one is named Matthew? Well, he’ll go to college. Oxford, maybe, if he minds his grades. Are you checking out the shelters next?”

  “Not personally. Not here. I was stretching the blanket when I told Glendowning I knew them all. I used to know a couple around Detroit, but I’ve been off the wandering-wife beat for years now.” I rapped on the laminated wood of a Slim Jim display; I didn’t want to go back. “I’ll have to farm it out. It might take a few days.”

  “Sounds more like a month.” She was stating a belief, not haggling over my day rate.

  “I doubt it. She’s from Michigan, and I have it on her mother’s authority and Glendowning’s she didn’t have any ties down here. She’d run to cover somewhere north. I know someone here who specializes in this kind of case. We’ll split my fee. It won’t cost you anything more than his expenses.”

  “I’ll cut you another check. How’s two thousand to start?”

  “I don’t need anything right now. The last I knew my credit was still good with the party I have in mind.”

  “Would I know the party’s name?”

  “Not unless you lied on that résumé you gave me yesterday. It’s not a nice party. But it works hard and it’s as good as its word.”

  “All that was true of Ted Bundy.”

  “Not quite. Bundy didn’t blow his nose in his napkin.”

  The pause on her end was just long enough for a woman who had lived in Grosse Pointe, but not too long for a girl from Broadway. But she didn’t change subjects any more smoothly than I did. “What’s Carla like?”

  “Like every schoolteacher I ever had who cared if I knew ‘all right’ was one word or two. She’s bitter, though. It won’t be cheap.”

  “In my bracket nothing is.” She said good luck and we were through talking.

  I found Jerry Zangara where almost no one else would, behind a battleship gray desk of booming steel in the airless little security office at the end of an outlet mall off I-75, square on the state line. He couldn’t walk the thirty yards to the pay office to pick up his check without paying income tax in two states. I tugged open a steel fire door with a NO ADMITTANCE sign on it in white and red enamel and had to walk around it to use the metal chair on the customer’s side. There were two metal file cabinets, gray like the desk and chair, and a set of gray bolted utility shelves holding printed regulations or typewritten reports or something held together with brads, or maybe they were old student dissertations rescued from a dumpster on the Ohio State campus and placed there for effect. The walls were gray too, and they had been painted recently; the sheen was still on them and the smell of turpentine was the first thing you noticed when the door drifted shut.

  The only decoration in the place was a large poster on one wall itemizing the legal rights of suspected shoplifters, with check marks in blue ballpoint beside all but a few. I couldn’t tell if someone had started to keep track and lost interest or had checked off the ones he’d decided he could do without. It was that kind of office.

  Jerry was a little fat guy with a nice head of wavy black hair, white teeth in a small shy smile bracketed by his apple cheeks, and shiny black eyes with no more expression in them than nailheads in Sheetrock. He had on a black-and-white cowboy shirt with pearl snaps and a bolo tie with the turquoise slide drawn up just under his double chin. When he recognized me he lifted himself an inch off his seat and stuck out his hand. It was like shaking hands with a boneless chicken breast.

  “Amos. How’s my favorite Michigander?” He knew I hated the term.

  “I’m okay, Jerry. I see your grammar is coming along. The wind must be blowing from the north.”

  “That’ll be enough of that. I strip-searched a three-hundred-pounder not fifteen minutes ago. I had to keep chalking my place. A thing like that can put you off your game. What’s on your plate you can’t finish?”

  “I’m looking for a batter job. She took her kid and slipped the knot about three weeks ago in Toledo. I’m banking on her going to a shelter.”

  When he wrinkled his nose he looked like a big fat baby. “You’re too late, old son. I don’t moonlight no more. I ain’t had my nuts kicked in over a year. You ought to give it a whirl.”

  “I don’t think so. I’m out of chalk. What’d you do, give up on the sports book?”

  “Naw. I got married. She’s a senior clerk in a credit union. Double-Income household, No Kids. You know what them initials spell?” He tried to leer, but his cheeks wouldn’t budge.

  “Everyone knows what they spell, Jerry. There’s cash in it. Client’s strictly blue chip.” I smoothed out the bill on the desk. It was one of the new hundreds. Franklin’s face looked more bloated than usual.

  Jerry Zangara’s little black eyes glittered, but he kept his hands on his side of
the desk. “You don’t keep up. Blue chip went out with the Macarena. These days it’s e-trade or nothing.”

  “You get another one when you turn a lead. More if you have to cover ground and you can prove mileage. Printed gas receipts, Jerry, from chain stations. I know all about those blank receipt books in your bottom drawer.”

  “That’s cold. I’m a reformed character since I wandered into the snare.” He lifted an old-fashioned postage meter off the corner nearest him and set it down on top of the bill. “Details, please.”

  I gave him as much as he needed to start looking, including the license number of Constance Glendowning’s gray Chrysler. He didn’t have to know the name of the client or that an inheritance was involved. I trusted him up to three figures, that was all. But it was farther than I trusted most presidents.

  He took it all down in his big moronic hand on the back of an invoice, putting in the last period with a bang that made the desk reverberate. “Got it. You want me to make contact?”

  “No, and don’t let her see you. Just give me a ring when she surfaces. That’s her on the right.” I skidded the engagement picture Mrs. Stutch had clipped from the newspaper across the top of the desk, minus the article identifying Constance’s parents. I’d torn that off and put it in my pocket. Jerry was just the kind of elephant that might remember the name Willard.

  “Pretty,” he said, committing the face to memory. “Not special. This the husband?”

  “That’s him.”

  “A puke. You see mugs like this whenever the Nazis march or the cops bust a gang of Goths using skulls for skillets. She should of consulted me first. Okay.” He gave back the picture. He’d know her in a short wig or a Zorro mask now. “I thought you got out of divorce work.”

  “Gas is going to two bucks a gallon. You snapped up the last senior clerk.” I put the newspaper shot in my wallet. “This one’s a snowbird. Draw a circle around everything within thirty minutes of Toledo and concentrate on that for now. I’ll cover Detroit. You know where to reach me day or night.” I stood.

  “It won’t be night. Nights I lay my head in the lap of domesticity. You still divorced?”

  “The statute of limitations ran out on that after twenty years. Now I’m just single.”

  “Ring-a-ding-ding.” This time he managed a leer. He looked like a woodchuck with a porno collection.

  I shook my head. “Sinatra checked out. You ought to get out of this changing booth once in a while.”

  “Naw. I just got it fixed up the way I like it.”

  I shook his hand again and didn’t wipe mine on my coat until I left the office. I made room for a uniformed security guard duck-walking a teenager down the short hall by the back of his neck. The teenager had on black baggy clothes and lips to match and smelled emphatically of nightshade. At least he didn’t weigh three hundred pounds.

  A No. 10 envelope with General Motors in the return address was waiting for me under the slot when I swung into the office the next morning. The letter was brief, signed in Connor Thorpe’s no-bullshit hand, and advised all these present to know that Amos Walker was engaged upon corporation business and that cooperation would be appreciated and noted. An assistant had run it off on a computer from his dictation and had probably put it through a couple of times more to restore Thorpe’s pet phrases. He went through secretaries like tailgunners. I refolded the letter and stuck it in my breast pocket next to the county star where they could have a power party while I unlocked a drawer in one of my file cabinets, never mind which drawer or which cabinet.

  In a manila folder that is otherwise empty I keep a little fat blue notebook that I have had long enough for the cardboard corners to have poked through the vinyl like the bones of a compound fracture. Some of the names and telephone numbers and addresses are now obsolete by reason of relocation or death, or in the case of some cement company executives and certain members of the old mayor’s staff, in jail. None of the rest is listed anywhere the public has access. The book would buy me a comfortable retirement if word of the book’s existence got out among the muckraking press and I gave out the key to the code. It would be a short retirement followed by services, if my carcass turned up. Just having it out in the open air makes me nervous, and so I scribbled down the half-dozen numbers I needed on my telephone pad without identifying them and locked it back up. The safe is just a dodge to draw lightning. No one rifles the files of a PI in my unfashionable district.

  The shelters that take in battered women and children, when they are listed in the public directory, don’t include their addresses. The telephones are answered by experienced personnel, some of them former battered women themselves, who know what questions to ask and hang up when the answers don’t fit. The information in my book contained addresses and the numbers of private lines belonging to the offices of the directors. Those who didn’t know me knew my references. All others could go climb up their own legs. Husbands and their representatives, and those who are suspected of being one or the other, are about as welcome as a roast pig at a bar mitzvah.

  I got my swivel chair squeaking and began dialing. Two of the numbers bought me an irritating three-note squeal and a recording informing me they were out of service. I drew lines through them on the pad and continued through the list. One of the numbers had been reassigned to a twenty-four-hour doughnut shop. I wrote “doughnuts” next to it, not knowing when I might crave a cruller at 4:00 A.M. Next I spoke to a director who knew me, who assured me that no one of Constance Glendowning’s name or description had been checked in since April 1, or going back sometime before that date. At another number I reached someone who was new since my original contact, who wrote down my references and called me back after ten minutes to tell me I had a clean bill of health and sorry but nothing there either. A tough female voice dripping with Twelfth Street answered at the last number, listened to what I had to say, provided me with a thorough and not entirely inaccurate account of my lineage, and gave me an earache on the disconnect.

  I cradled the receiver, entered a question mark next to that line on the pad, and checked my wristwatch to see how long I would have to wait before the air had cleared enough to try again. For that I needed a calendar.

  At home and in the trunk of my car I had a set of ingenious disguises for dealing with similar situations, including an assortment of utility-company coveralls with barely adequate credentials clipped to the breast pockets. I’d selected them with relaxed-fit crotches to accommodate an athletic cup in case I got found out, which was fairly often. I didn’t want to put them on, but I didn’t want to count too heavily on Jerry Zangara either; he was on his third cup last I knew. So I didn’t think about it at all. I typed up a report on the case thus far, ran a credit check I’d been putting off for a client who ought to have had a credit check run on him, answered a few messages waiting for me at my telephone service, went out for a long lunch and a short beer, and took the rest of the day off to scout some junkyards downriver for a hubcap to replace one I’d lost off the Cutlass. I got home at dark with a dashboard compass instead, opened a can of supper, and went to sleep in front of a three-dollar rental movie I’d managed to avoid in the theaters for seven-fifty.

  Sometime later I turned off the fuzz on the TV screen and stumbled to bed. I wasn’t in it five minutes when Jerry Zangara called, direct from the lap of domesticity. He’d found Constance Glendowning, he thought.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  “You think?” I could just make out the time on the living room clock in the light from the bedroom. It was too late for hunches.

  “What’s that margin the pollsters use, six percent?” Jerry asked. “I’m inside that. I got a woman at the door, a real diesel job: straight hair, glasses, no makeup, gray sweats. I’m betting you could lose a shoe in the hair under her armpits. She wouldn’t even take my card.”

  “They never do. A husband’s lawyer could use it to prove they know where the wife is. If that’s all you’ve got, to hell with you and
good night.”

  “You know me better than that, and to hell with you too.” He said it as if he were wishing me good health. “I poked around outside with a penlight. It’s a big old house with a garage in back. Driveway needs asphalting. There’s a patch where a car sat for a while leaking fluid; trans, I think. Anyway it smelled like it when I got down on all fours and took a sniff. You said Constances Chrysler has a leak.”

  “Get into the garage?”

  “Naw, I don’t do that no more. Also there was a bright son of a bitch of a security light right in front. Did I tell you this was in Monroe? I got to be careful about bending the law in Michigan. Matter of an outstanding warrant.”

  “I didn’t know there were any shelters in Monroe.”

  “I did. That’s what makes me worth the two hundred. Anyway this patch might be two—three weeks old, but I ain’t Kit Carson. I networked the neighborhood until I found an old crotch that lives next to his window, there’s always one. I had a friend in Shipping at the mall print me out a picture from his computer of a ninety-six LeBaron. I showed it to the old bastard along with a couple of other models. He picked it out quick.”

  I grunted and found a cigarette. Jerry was a storyteller; his reports read like pulp fiction. There was no use asking him to skip to the last page. He’d just go back to the first and start over.

  He said, “I thought the same as you, probably: Nobody’s memory is that good, I’m just a time-killer between his Malt-O-Meal and Ted Koppel. Then he springs the license number on me.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Straight money. I says what are you, some kind of fucking. Rain Man, you want to hop the redeye with me to Vegas, bust the blackjack bank at the Sahara? He says no and shows me the spot on the windowsill where he scratched the number with a safety pin. He seen the car swing into the driveway and a woman pile out with a little kid that looks like his. The old man’s lost some sawdust out of his head since the Kaiser surrendered; if he’s got a kid he’s older than I am or dead. Either way he probably don’t visit. The old man’s smart enough to take down the number so he can put the cops on the case, but he’s fuzzy enough to forget all about it until I come along and remind him. He don’t even know what day he scratched it in the sill.”