Rayellen sobbed once, softly. I couldn’t tell if it was relief or grief or her ironbound guilt returning. Mrs. Campbell lay half on her side on the concrete with the soles of her sensible shoes showing and her revolver lying a foot away from her outstretched hand. She wasn’t moving.
I came around the open car door, lowering the automatic but not all the way, taking away my left hand so I could bring the gun up fast. I wasn’t shaking now that I couldn’t miss. I stepped over quickly and kicked away the revolver, harder than I’d meant to; it scraped across the concrete and went into the cut grass that bordered the drive. I leaned down and laid the fingers of my free hand on the big artery at the side of the woman’s neck. It throbbed once and then its work was over. The front of the gray dress below her breasts was black under the light spilling out of the garage.
I heard slippers scuffing the floor behind me and rose. I moved too fast.
“Amos?” Rayellen Stutch’s voice echoed like Chinese bells in the blackness. I fell away from them.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
I woke up as they were loading me into the ambulance. I don’t remember, but they told me later I wouldn’t put my head back down until the paramedics promised to take me to Detroit Receiving and not the hospital Leland Stutch had endowed in Iroquois Heights. The chief surgeon was being sued for leaving a putting glove inside a gall bladder patient and the board of directors had voted six to four in favor of letting him practice until the case came to court. I do remember seeing a fat cop in uniform walking past the van with Mrs. Campbell’s shiny revolver in a Ziploc bag, holding it by the top between thumb and forefinger like dog droppings. Then I went back to sleep and stayed that way for fourteen hours.
My surgeon, a blonde stunner with blue eyes and a Malibu tan, incongruously named Rosenberg, pried sixteen pieces of lead shot out of my back and hip. She came in while I was propped up in bed eating breakfast and showed me the pieces in a disposable cardboard drool cup. They were the size of the peas they serve at banquets. She asked if I wanted them for a keepsake. I told her to distribute them in the charity ward.
She pouted. “I don’t know why the men in your line are so flippant about this kind of thing. A few more degrees to the left and we’d have had to remove a kidney.”
“A few more degrees to the right and they’d have missed me completely. Call me an optimist.”
It was my first morning rightside-up. I’d been on my stomach for days with stitches and patches on my back, listening to the news reports on television because it still hurt my neck to look up at the set bolted to the ceiling. At the end of three days the Eyewitness News team had the fracas in Iroquois Heights pegged as a wildcat strike by a number of truckers who were dissatisfied with the last contract the Steelhaulers had ratified with General Motors, in particular having to do with working conditions at the former Stutch plant. Ray Montana appeared on Meet the Press to disavow any foreknowledge of the event and promised an internal investigation. The U.S. Attorney General announced that she would make no decision regarding the appointment of a special prosecutor until she had “read and re-read the reports of investigators engaged by the Department of Justice.”
Connor Thorpe, recovering in a private room at the hospital in Iroquois Heights from injuries sustained in the raid on the Stutch plant, was unavailable for comment. He was one of only five people reported injured that night. Two were truckers.
The death of Myra Campbell, longtime housekeeper to Rayellen Stutch on the night of the assault on the plant, was under investigation by local authorities, who did not believe it was related to the rest of the evening’s events. Mrs. Stutch herself was on vacation in Florida and could not be reached.
Some reports claimed more than a hundred tractor-trailer rigs were involved in the destruction of some eighty million dollars’ worth of public and private property inside the Iroquois Heights city limits. More conservative estimates placed the number of vehicles at sixty. The Stutch plant was declared a total loss and the date for its demolition was moved up one year. In addition, heavy trucks had destroyed a 7-Eleven near the downtown freeway exit, most of a strip mall on the main drag, including a cut-rate drugstore and a Harley-Davidson boutique, and the entire east side of the old main four corners. On that pass, one $150,000 Marmon hauling a double-bottom tanker took out a Real Estate One, two video stores, a Hallmark, and the Shogun Massage Emporium; it was a century-old brick block with common walls that had survived two fires. The driver was being sought for reckless driving, malicious destruction, and leaving the scene of an accident, as well as violating a ten-year-old Michigan law banning double-bottom tankers on the grounds of their abysmal safety records.
Small-change damage included a half-dozen street signs pretzeled by rigs cutting corners and a honey locust that had been planted the previous spring in place of a statue erected to commemorate an old victory over the Iroquois. Local protesters—not an Indian among them—had gotten the statue scrapped and the tree dedicated to Native Americans. It was in the corner of the downtown park and whoever had knocked it down had to have taken aim. A Kenworth with Texas plates was suspected.
A White dump truck got stuck on top of a twisted hunk of bronze commissioned from a Japanese-Swedish sculptor on the lawn in front of the City-County Building. The driver fled on foot but was cornered by prowlies in an alley and placed in custody. The sculpture was named “Unchained Thought” and hadn’t looked all that less twisted before it was run over.
Mayor Arbor Muriel issued a long rambling statement to the press decrying the “wanton vandalism,” promising “virtuous redress,” and proposing that a new community center be build on the site of the shattered downtown block. Of all those solicited for comment, he spoke the longest and had the least to say. Cecil Fish, who had no official capacity in local government, was not heard from.
I’d slept through Iris’s funeral. Ms. Stainback, the Cerberus who guarded the gate at the shelter in Monroe, had made all the arrangements, and the procession had been long enough and sufficiently populated with well-known figures to make the papers. There was no mention in the obituary of the Detroit hookshop where Iris had worked for eighteen months twenty years ago. She was identified as a Jamaican native who had come out of an abusive marriage to found a shelter for battered women and children and died in an automobile accident while transporting a client and her young son to the home of a relative. A Catholic bishop known to the Vatican, the physician in charge of a drug rehabilitation clinic where Iris had put in many hours of volunteer work after her own recovery from heroin addiction, and the president of the local chapter of the National Organization of Women had been among those delivering eulogies. Iris would have been flattered by the first two and kept her comments to herself regarding the third, remembering the husbands of professional feminists she had entertained in the days before she’d reformed. Her ashes were interred in a Monroe cemetery and in lieu of flowers, mourners were requested to make donations to the Iris Chapin fund, proceeds to be used to improve and maintain the shelter. Lying on my stomach reading the account of the funeral, I made a mental note of the P.O. box where donations were to be sent.
I greeted more visitors in three days in the hospital than I normally did in a month at my office.
After Dr. Rosenberg left with her cup of lead, Sergeant Vivaldi of the Iroquois Heights Police Department bulled in, smiling with all his tobacco-tinted teeth, eyes hooded behind his smoked glasses. When he turned his head, a patch of white bandage showed where his wire-brushed black hair had been shaved. I wondered if Maintenance had gotten around to replacing the mirror in the elevator of the City-County Building.
“Heard you got yourself shot,” he said. “Too bad his aim stunk.”
“Mine, too,” I said. “The guy who shot me’s in serious condition on the fifth floor. He still had some blood left.”
“Busy night. I heard you killed a woman.”
“If you talked to Mrs. Stutch, you know that was self-defe
nse. I was defending myself all over town that day, starting with downtown. How’s your head?”
“I can still think with it. I won’t need my Miranda card to haul you down when they spring you from this meat shop.” He went out on this gem.
The next cop in the box was Loggins, the hefty female sergeant from the Juvenile Division of the Michigan State Police. She had on a slate-gray business suit that fit her better than the bolero jacket she’d worn to the scene of the accident on I-75. The shoulder bag was the same: too red, to match her lipstick. She’d brought along a male stenographer with the long sad face of a professional pallbearer. She asked me if I was feeling well enough to make a statement, in a tone that said she didn’t care what the answer was. I told her the missing boy was with his grandmother and gave her Carla Willard Witowski’s telephone number in Melvindale. I gave her some details I hadn’t before. She said shock made people forget. If there was any sympathy in the remark, she’d masked it well; but then a person only has so much, and the store had to be conserved for her younger subjects. She made sure the stenographer had it all and we parted company on terms somewhat more cordial than when she’d entered.
Just to relieve me of the company of all these sergeants, a detective lieutenant from Toledo Homicide dropped by, a well-dressed black named Boncour, tall enough to have played a lot of basketball in college. He wanted me to pay him a visit after my release to tape a video statement in regard to the David Glendowning killing. He said I’d have to answer questions about leaving the scene and that a transcript of the tape would be sent to Lansing, where they review private investigators’ licenses, but his disapproval was strictly professional. Mark Proust was talking from his hospital bed under heavy police guard, and Boncour was on his way to Iroquois Heights with a warrant for Connor Thorpe’s arrest for conspiracy to commit murder. I said he’d have to fight it out with the authorities in Michigan, who were waiting to charge him with abduction and child endangerment, to start.
While I was dressing, waiting for the hospital paperwork, I took a telephone call from an attorney named Swammerdamm, who said he was senior member of the firm that represented Rayellen Stutch. He said he’d been in touch with the police in Iroquois Heights and that no arrest warrant would be issued if I agreed to surrender myself voluntarily for questioning at the station. Swammerdamm would be present at that time. His fee had been taken care of.
I took a cab home, poured myself a tall Scotch, and carried it and my mail into the living room. I was getting along with an Ace bandage on my ankle. The house smelled shut up, as if I’d been away a month. I opened a window and sat down in my easy chair and looked around, like Odysseus back in the palace at Ithaca. My little library of no value to collectors, the rack of LPs, even the permanent ring on the little side table where I placed my glass with the precision of a pilot landing on an aircraft carrier, were objects of wonder. In the hospital I’d tried to picture it all and had failed, like a little boy trying to recall the features of his dead mother.
That made me think of Matthew. I looked up the number of Henry Ford Hospital, called and finally got a nurse familiar with Constance Glendowning’s case, who told me she was awake and expecting a visit from her mother and son. I thanked her and hung up without leaving my name.
The only thing in the mail that held my interest long enough to open the envelope was a check from Mrs. Stutch, without a note. It bore a Miami postmark. It covered my fee, with a bonus twice as big to cover expenses.
I called around until I found the garage in Trenton where my Cutlass had been towed and made arrangements to tow it from there to the garage I did business with in Detroit. Without an estimate I figured the repairs, including a new bumper, hood, windshield, and upholstery to eliminate the bloodstains, would leave me with just enough to pay my monthly bills.
The bills could wait. Next morning, after eight hours in my own bed, I uncharacteristically made breakfast, enjoying the novelty of cooking my own eggs and brewing coffee the way I liked it, letting it steep on the hotpad until it could stand on its own. I took a thirty-minute shower, shaved close, broke a new white shirt out of plastic, and put on the suit I wore to weddings and funerals and client visits in Grosse Pointe. In place of a necktie I Velcroed on the snappy blue cervical collar they’d given me at Receiving for my whiplash. I called a cab and had the driver wait outside my bank while I cashed Mrs. Stutch’s check. I kept out a hundred in cash, put the rest in savings, and rode to the MGM Grand Casino.
What looked like the same seniors in the same pastel sweats were sawing away at the slots with the same look of no hope on their faces. At the cashier’s cage I bought two fifty-dollar chips. I waded through the sea of jangling and bing-bonging from the machines, with the odd clink of silver dollars trickling into the trays, stopped at the roulette table, and put down a chip on the black seven. When the wheel stopped at sixteen red, I put the other chip down in the same place and turned away.
“Seven, black,” said the croupier, a smooth young black woman in a stiff formal shirt and red bow tie. “Fifteen hundred to you, sir.”
The other players applauded politely.
I asked the smiling cashier to make out a check to the Iris Chapin Fund. Outside, I climbed into the first cab in line and gave the driver the address of my office.
“Any luck, mister?” he asked.
“A little.”
His eyes crinkled in the rearview mirror. “Lady smiled, huh?”
“All the time.”
And in a little while, I did too.
A Biography of Loren D. Estleman
Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.
Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once The Oklahoma Punk was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.
Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s Motor City Blue, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel, Sugartown, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is Infernal Angels.
Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980, The High Rocks was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s The Book of Murdock. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author. Journey of the Dead, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.
In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.
Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.
Estleman in his study in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, in the 1980s. The author wrote more than forty books on the manual typewriter he is working on in this image.
Estleman and his family. From left to right: older brother, Charles; mother, Louise; father, Leauvett; and Loren.
Estleman and Deborah Morgan at their wedding in Springdale, Arkansas, on June 19, 1993.
Estleman with actor Barry Corbin at the Western Heritage Awards in Oklahoma City in 1998. The author won Outstanding Western Novel for his book Journey of the Dead.
Loren signing books at Eyecon in St. Louis in 1999. He was the guest of honor.
Estleman and his fellow
panelists at Bouchercon in 2000. From left to right: Harper Barnes, John Lutz, Loren D. Estleman, Max Allan Collins, and Stuart M. Kaminsky.
Estleman and his wife, Deborah, signing together while on a tour through Colorado in 2003.
Estleman with his grandson, Dylan Ray Brown, shown here writing an original story on “Papa’s” typewriter at Christmastime in 2005 in Springfield, Missouri.
Estleman with his granddaughter, Lydia Morgan Hopper, as he reads her a bedtime story on New Year’s Eve 2008. Books are among Lydia’s favorite things—and “Papa” is quick to encourage this.
Estleman and his wife, Deborah, with the late Elmer Kelton and his wife, Anne Kelton, in 2008. Estleman is holding his Elmer Kelton Award from the German Association for the Study of the Western.
Estleman in front of the Gas City water tower, which he passed by on many a road trip. After titling one of his novels after the town, Estleman was invited for a visit by the mayor, and in February 2008 he was presented the key to the city.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 by Loren D. Estleman
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2169-2
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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