“You called him before you went over?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Not important. I wondered why his line was busy at that hour. Keep telling it.”
“Your call came. That’s when Thorpe told me to go back and wait for you here, and that thing about a second front. That’s the shebang. Jesus, it’s cold for April.” He was hugging himself, shivering. He was going into deep shock.
I didn’t need the .38 anymore. I put it away, took out the Glock, removed the clip and ejected the shell from the chamber and put them in my pocket, and laid the automatic on the step. I retrieved Glendowning’s Beretta and went upstairs.
Another of the many reasons Mark Proust had been a lousy cop was he had no imagination. I knew what Thorpe meant by avoiding a second front even if he didn’t. Learning he had the boy at the Stutch plant gave me that.
I found what I wanted in the belly drawer of the midget rolltop in the den. David Glendowning’s address book was a cheap one bound in brown vinyl, but it was rich with names and numbers. The first name I recognized was all the reinforcements I needed. I put down the Beretta to transfer the data to my pocket pad, then returned the book to the drawer and picked up the gun. In the living room I smeared it between my palms and dropped it on the rug next to the recliner. If the Toledo police were on point, they’d run a carbon test on Proust’s hands to find out if he’d done any shooting recently. My prints on the gun that killed Glendowning would just confuse them.
Proust’s teeth were chattering when I returned to the garage. He was too far gone in shock to protest when I put my hands under his arms and hauled him out of the way of the pickup. I selected an eight-inch-wide oak plank from the scrap lumber in the storage area—it was only six feet long, short but serviceable—and tossed it into the box. I found the switch that operated the garage door, started the Dodge and backed out, closed the door using the remote clipped to the sun visor on the driver’s side, and drove up the steep incline to the street. I parked in front of the house, got out, flipped down the tailgate, and slid the plank back until it tilted to the ground, creating a ramp. I tested it for spring, then started the Indian, rode it to the corner, turned around, and gunned it, getting a running start. The front tire jounced up over the end of the plank, then the rear. I throttled back as I climbed and coasted onto the bed. There I cut the power and got off and laid the bike on the two fat snow tires resting in the front and rear left corners.
So far as I could tell I did all this without witnesses. If anyone had heard the picture window breaking, he must have thought he’d dreamt it and gone back to sleep to wait for the alarm. The shots had taken place in an insulated garage, built into the hill that supported the rest of the split-level. The architect had been considerate, a good man to have next door. The neighborhood was just coming awake, lights going on in windows not facing the rising sun.
The pickup was fully loaded—more fully than when it had left the factory—and I knew what it could do. I needed the transportation, Glendowning didn’t, and I’d promised Dollier I’d have his bike back in time for work. The cops wouldn’t have a tag out on the Dodge until after they’d talked to the owner. I would put all the miles on the odometer I needed by the time they found out he wasn’t talking.
I was going to leave then, let the cops deal with Proust when they came to see Glendowning about his missing son, but that might take hours, while shock turned a crippling wound fatal. I didn’t give a damn about that, except it was something Proust would have done. I went into the house and called 911, then hung up. The operator would trace the call, and send a car when no one answered.
Before I left, I circled the block, purely out of curiosity. Proust had to have driven some kind of vehicle down from the Heights on his way to kill Glendowning and borrow his pickup. I spotted it parked around the corner, a late-model caramel-colored Chevy I’d seen before. That explained a number of things.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
I-75 was in the horror of rush hour, and I didn’t get back to my house until nearly seven-thirty. Dollier, sitting on my front step, looked up as the pickup swung into the driveway, then got to his feet when he saw who was behind the wheel and trotted over, carrying his helmet. He’d discarded the black T-shirt for a white one reading PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS. The face above the goatee was a stack of worried inverted V’s; he’d spotted his motorcycle lying in the bed.
“Laid it down, didn’t you?” he said. “I told you it wasn’t a mountain bike.”
“It still isn’t.” I got out and gave him the key. “Thanks for the loan. There isn’t a scratch on it.”
He hopped up into the box to confirm that. I put the ramp into place and between us we got the bike up on its wheels and guided it down to the pavement. He looked it over closely on both sides, pulled out his handkerchief to eliminate a smudge not visible to the naked eye of a non-owner, and strapped on the helmet. “How’d everything go in Toledo?”
“Bang-up job.” I leaned against the pickup and lifted my bad foot. “Do you wear some kind of badge into the Tech Center?”
“No badge. Just show my ID at the gate.”
I asked if I could see it. He hesitated, then produced a tooled-leather wallet with western stitching from his hip pocket and took out a laminated card. I took it from him and studied it. It had “General Motors” on it and his name and DOB and description, with his picture in the upper right-hand corner.
“I need another favor,” I said. “I need to borrow this today.”
“What for?”
“Did you ask Connor Thorpe what for when he told you to bring the Indian here?”
He scratched his chin-whiskers. “They won’t let me on the grounds without the card.”
“Take a sick day.”
“I’m not sick.”
I lit a cigarette. It spared me from setting fire to him. “Nice morning. Weatherman says it’s going to be like this all day. There must be a place you can ride a great bike like yours on a day like this.” I hadn’t heard a weather report. If the rain held off two more minutes I had a shot.
“They’ll can me.”
“They won’t know where I got it. Nobody’s going to get that long a look.”
He frowned at the bike. “There’s a swap meet in Flint this weekend. They’re setting up today. I wasn’t going till Saturday.”
“First day’s always the best.” I got out my wallet and removed two twenties and a ten. I put his ID card in the wallet and pocketed it. “Put that toward a pair of saddlebags.”
“Never use ’em.” But he took the bills. “Nobody’d buy that’s you in the picture.”
“I’ll grow a beard.”
He was holding the money in one hand and his wallet in the other. I grabbed his hands and helped him stuff the bills into the wallet. “You get fifty more when I give back the card. That’s for not telling anyone we had this conversation. Including Thorpe.”
“I really don’t like that part. Why don’t you get the clearance from him?”
“Takes too long.” I looked at my watch. “If you’re going to say no, you’d better do it now. There’s a back-up on 75 north to Warren.” I hadn’t heard a traffic report either; but here I was on safer ground. The odds that there wasn’t a back-up were about the same as winning the lottery.
That made his decision. Nothing makes a Detroiter turn pale faster than a freeway snarl on the way to work. He put away the wallet. “My old man never missed a day on the line in forty years. He’d be pissed at me if he wasn’t dead.”
“Don’t sweat it. Come tomorrow, no one at GM is going to remember you weren’t at work today.”
After he roared off I went inside and sat down and propped my foot up on the ottoman, but I didn’t take off the Windbreaker. I didn’t want to get too comfortable. When the Toledo cops found Glendowning and Proust and compared notes with the state troopers from Michigan who were looking for Glendowning’s son, I was going to have visitors, and I wasn’t up to entertainin
g. First I called Henry Ford Hospital to ask about Constance Glendowning’s condition. The nurse or receptionist I was eventually handed off to told me her condition was stable but that she hadn’t regained consciousness. There were no broken bones or internal damage. She might have been talking about a car up on the hoist. I thought about having Carla Witowski paged, then decided that would take too much time. I rang off and called the number I’d copied from David Glendowning’s address book. The name that went with it was Ray Montana.
A thousand years ago I’d had dealings with Phil Montana, Ray’s father, who a thousand years before that had battered out the American Steelhaulers Union with his bare fists and a couple of hundred thick-skulled fellow truckers. Some of them had had those skulls bashed in by rented muscle, including whole police departments employed by the steel mills, but the gaps closed quickly, and after consolidating its gains the ASU had gone on to organize the entire transport industry. Phil was dead, but a succession of mob puppets in the president’s chair had forced the Justice Department to take it away and offer it to Ray in hopes the magic of the family name might prevent the rot from spreading. He’d finished out that appointed term, then carried the next election in a landslide. Justice was pleased at first, then alarmed; the creature had assumed a life independent of its creator. Under Ray, ASU had expanded its operations to represent taxi drivers, airport luggage handlers, food concessionaires, computer technicians, school bus mechanics, messengers, and golf caddies. If the job involved wheels, Montana was on it. Although a campaign to organize prison work gangs backfired when police officers threatened to bail out of the union, the message was clear: The Steelhaulers were standing still for no one. When Ray’s aggressive management of the union pension fund proved more successful than the government’s handling of Social Security, congressional hearings were suggested to determine whether any RICO laws had been violated. It was the kind of meddling talk that only increased Ray’s standing among the rank-and-file. There were truckers, some of them former draft dodgers, who would take a bullet for Ray Montana.
The functionary who answered the telephone—a medium, velvety voice, sex unknown—got my name and Glendowning’s and asked me to wait. I spent the time hoping things went better with Ray than they had with Phil. We hadn’t parted company with anything like a firm handshake and a slap on the back.
“Ray Montana.” A light voice, lacking his father’s raspy baritone. He’d never stood on a loading dock bellowing above the grumble and peep of forklifts. These days a cell phone call or an e-mail from the Detroit headquarters carried farther than a speech backed up with blackjacks.
“Amos Walker, Mr. Montana. I’m a private detective, working a case involving one of your union representatives. David Glendowning.”
“Shop steward in Toledo. Go on.”
I paused. “That’s impressive, if you don’t mind my saying so. Like Patton recognizing the name of a corporal at Fort Bragg.”
“Glendowning’s on the short list for president of the local. I make it a point to keep track of the good men coming up.”
Not to say the competition. But I’d learned a thing or two since Phil and held my tongue. “He’s dead. Shot in the head to look like suicide, but it wasn’t.”
“I hadn’t heard.” No change in tone.
“It isn’t public knowledge. You can confirm it with the police in Toledo. They ought to be filing their reports about now. They have a man in custody, a former Iroquois Heights cop named Proust.”
“Iroquois Heights.”
A man in public office, any sort of office, can say plenty with two words or nothing with two hundred. There was a whole book, very battered and read many times, in the way he pronounced the name.
I said, “Yeah,” and one-upped him by a word.
“I’ll call Toledo. What is your connection with this murder, Mr. Walker?”
That was impressive, too. I usually had to say my name twice before anyone got it, common as it was to the point of invisibility. I wondered if his father had ever mentioned it to him. “It tells pretty long, especially over the telephone. I’d like to tell it in person, if you’re free.”
“I will be when you get here. Mr. Reznick will give you directions to my house.”
The velvety voice came back on and gave me an address in Beverly Hills; not the one in California, and not ever to be confused with it. I said I’d be there in a half hour. That gave me ten minutes to shower, which I did with my bandaged foot stuck outside the stall, put on fresh clothes and the same handy boots, and pack a bag. Hot water is a poor substitute for sleep, but it beats nodding off in the presence of a man who said he would “call Toledo” as if he could speak to the entire city on one dime.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
They call them bedroom communities, the endless string of schools and housing developments unwinding along the Mile Roads north of Detroit, and in their particular case the nomenclature has never been more accurate. They have no business districts, no industrial parks or museums or libraries, no strip malls offering everything for sale from maternity clothes to mortuary needs; just two-car garages and low-maintenance lawns and places to sleep and take on nutrition between eight-hour blocks at work and the twice-daily battle to get to it and away from it. Beverly Hills, identified only by a “Welcome to” sign dozing behind an unpruned limb, has few swimming pools and no movie stars; it doesn’t even have hills. With the trees fully leafed out bordering Evergreen between Twelve-and Thirteen-Mile, it’s possible to forget its homes even exist, tucked back as they are on streets with names like Plantation, Embassy, and Buttonwood Court. Some of them aren’t even paved.
Ray Montana’s man Reznick had directed me to an address on a curving two-lane blacktop belonging to a low red-brick house no larger than its neighbors, with a recently asphalted driveway flanked by lights stuck into the grass like garden markers. There was no gate, no wall or fence surrounding the property; no indication, in fact, that the man who lived there with his family was a public figure who bumped knees on a daily basis with industrialists, senators, and guys named Murray the Midget. Nothing, that is, except floodlights perched high in the mature maples planted on the four corners of the lot and a complete absence of hedges or any other foliage near the house, so that anyone approaching was exposed long enough for someone inside to empty a clip in his direction. Death threats came to Montana’s door as regularly as the newspaper, hurled with greater accuracy, and the local police—Steelhaulers, presumably—had his children on a twenty-four-hour kidnap watch.
The man who answered the bell was small and dark, with buzz-cut black hair, sharp, intelligent features, and ears that came to a point. He looked like Kafka and dressed like Nureyev, in a black turtleneck and slacks, loose-fitting clothes that would allow him to move quickly and smoothly on his narrow feet, encased in black suede slippers like ballet pumps. He would rhyme karate with latte.
He didn’t bow, although his soft expression left the impression that he had. “Good morning, Mr. Walker. I am Reznick. Are you armed?”
“I am.”
“Thank you for your honesty. It won’t be necessary to search you. Will you hand me the weapon, please?” He held out a small palm, shiny with callus along the inside edge.
“Not out here. I don’t want to attract any more police attention than I have already.”
“Are you wanted?” He might have been inquiring if I had a cold.
“Not yet, I hope. I expect to be popular later.”
He stepped aside, far enough to get a running start at me if I decided to trip over the threshold. Inside a brief foyer with a ceramic-tile floor and a bronze bust of Phil Montana’s bulldog head on a pedestal, I unsnapped the Smith & Wesson from my belt, holster and all, and laid it on the calloused palm. This time he did bow—his head, anyway—and led me around a corner and down a short flight of carpeted steps, carrying the revolver in front of him as if it were a tray of cocktails.
We turned before a bathroom with its
door open and entered a small rumpus room, paneled in composition wood, with a low bar and a sitting area and behind the bar a mirror made up of peel-and-stick tiles. There was a little gym area with free weights and a punching bag, a pressboard bookcase full of children’s books and recent bestsellers, and the sofa and chairs were covered with loose throws, the kind you use to conceal stains and worn spots on the upholstery. Feathered darts stuck out of a cork target on a wall covered with nicks from near misses. A tidy room, cheerily lit with table lamps and torchieres, and furnished for well under a thousand bucks. If any money was being made under the table, as Congress charged, not much of it seemed to be going to Montana.
“Mr. Walker,” Reznick announced.
“Thanks. You can go now, and give him back his gun.”
The little dark man turned and held it out on his palm. His face was unquestioning. I snapped the holster into place under my sportcoat. He went out, drawing the door shut behind him. It looked like an ordinary hollow-core door, but it was almost four inches thick. It would be soundproof. That made the domestic arrangement a blind for some high-level meetings far outside the fishbowl in Detroit where the union kept its headquarters; either that, or Montana was a noisy drunk.
He might have been reading my thoughts at that moment, because he said, “Make yourself a drink, Walker. Are you a morning man?”
Ray Montana was a couple of inches taller than his father, who had been called Little Phil in the days before he began cutting the steel barons down to size, but he wasn’t tall. He had a compact build, running to middle-age fat now under a white dress shirt tucked into gray pleated slacks. At the moment, he was bent over an upholstered weight bench in the gym area, helping steady a pair of red barbells for a boy stretched out on the bench in a T-shirt and sweats. The boy was about fourteen, skinny but with definition in the arms, and in about fifteen years he would look like Ray. This would be his son, Philip. Philip’s sister, Regina, was attending college somewhere in the East, unless that was just another blind to confound kidnappers. Dominick Montana, Ray’s uncle and the first Phil’s brother, had spent ten days bound and blindfolded in a barn in Livingston County forty-odd years ago during negotiations to end a strike at McClouth Steel. Who had bankrolled the snatch, and what it hoped to achieve, never came to light outside the smoky world of labor politics. Sheriff’s deputies acting on an anonymous tip pulled Dominick’s body out of the barn after he died from insulin shock.
Sinister Heights Page 14