Holy Hell

by Elizabeth Sims

  This is a very lousy way to defend yourself.

  I didn't hit Mrs. Creighter, and she still had more ammunition. She fired once more into the couch; the bullet tore through, caromed off the wall, and stung me in the butt. The spent bullet just bounced off my jeans. Tendrils of sharp gunsmoke curled into my nostrils.

  As I cowered in my hiding place I heard her rise and advance in my direction. I pulled my trigger again. Click. Empty. Oh, yes.

  My back was against the Bible-plastered death-chamber wall, and the angel of chaos bore down on me. I turned to the wall seeking grace. "Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein," read the passage before my eyes. Right.

  Suddenly there was a terrific crash upstairs, followed by pounding footfalls, a hesitation, then somebody big and determined rushing down the stairs.

  I poked my head up to see the door blast open and Lou barrel into the room, carrying some long strange weapon. I don't know about Mrs. Creighter, but I was expecting a cop.

  Mrs. Creighter instantly turned on her, snarling, but her voice strangled in her throat as Lou rammed her dogcatcher noose over her head and jerked it tight. The heavy wire noose disappeared into the folds of her neck.

  Lou accomplished this in a second. "Stay there!" she yelled to me. Mrs. Creighter's gun went off, then dropped from her hand. It was her last round; the slide was stuck open. She pawed the air, then grasped the noose's metal pole as if she were impaled on it, went down to her knees, then collapsed onto her side, her eyes bulging.

  Lou loosened the noose slightly, planted her foot on Mrs. Creighter's waist, and announced in a tough voice, "You're goin' nowhere, lady."

  As I was trying to grasp what had just happened, a bolt of white light shot into the room from behind me: a police flashlight. Moments later I was under arrest for possession of an unregistered handgun.

  Chapter 36

  During the turbulent ten minutes that followed, I lay on the floor waiting for the paramedics, attempting to synopsize the night for the police. Lou stood to the side, listening and chiming in.

  Owing to her obsession, she had set up her own surveillance on me, at first to satisfy her own compulsion, then later to keep track of my dangerous blundering as well. Being an electronics buff (I remembered mention of it in her letter), she got hold of a homing collar used on wild animals and secretly attached it to the Caprice's undercarriage.

  She had to work during the days, but at night she tracked my whereabouts from her home, using some kind of radio receiver. She decided to rendezvous with me at Meijer's to see what I was up to so late in the evening. She'd had me totally fooled.

  Later, when she realized my car was near the Snapdragon, she followed, sensing catastrophe. She brought along the weapon she knew best, her animal noose. So intent was she on getting to the Snap that she ran a red light a few miles away and clipped a newspaper delivery van. No one got hurt, but her front axle was bent, so she abandoned the car and hustled the rest of the way on foot, equipped with her noose and a nearly delusional sense of invulnerability.

  "Thank you, Lou," I said, grasping her hand.

  "You're welcome. Lillian?"

  "Yes."

  "Don't worry anymore. About me. You know what I mean?" We talked around the stolid presence of the cops.

  "Double thank you."

  She appeared exhausted yet clear-eyed, as if she'd been through a catharsis. She wasn't fidgeting.

  The ambulance guys insisted on strapping me to a stretcher and carrying me upstairs. To tell the truth, I felt pretty used up. Bonnie wasn't dead, though she looked it. She lay in a lump on the dance floor, her eyes glassy while another pair of ambulance guys worked on her. Her mother's aim had been better on her, and she'd got one in the gut. I asked why they didn't just throw her into the ambulance and get her over to the hospital, and they said they needed to stabilize her first. I was stable enough.

  They took Mrs. Creighter away in a police car, but I suspected she'd get into a hospital at some point.

  Emerald was standing outside, along with the wino I'd given the two dollars. They formed the crowd for this event. I told the ambulance guys to hold it. Emerald said it was sure lucky his house had gotten broken into that night. If he hadn't had occasion to go out looking for his stuff... "And you know, I did find—I actually did find my wife's purse in that dumpster!" he said. "No money in it, to be sure."

  The police were obliged to confiscate his gun and inform me that although I was going to the hospital, I was under arrest for having the gun, for which neither Emerald nor I could produce documentation. "It is my gun," Emerald shouted at the officers. "It is a five-shot Smith & Wesson Chief's Special, and I have the serial number memorized. You ever try to get a handgun permit in this city?"

  "But she had ahold of it," a cop said.

  "It's OK, Emerald," I said.

  They took me to Receiving Hospital, the best place to go in the city if you've got a bullet in you. They must handle a thousand cases a year. Ciesla and Porrocks showed up. The doctors let them into my cubicle after they'd gotten an IV going.

  A Detroit cop had shackled my ankle to the gurney. Ciesla persuaded him to come in and take it off. The doctors and nurses left me to wait for the X-ray guy. A non-life-threatening gunshot wound at Receiving is low priority, given the cornucopia of drastic medical emergencies generated by the city twenty-four hours a day.

  Ciesla took my hand, bless him. I didn't have anything to say. "Decency makes me thank you," he said. "I know you were trying to do the right thing. But you should have been killed."

  "I know."

  "You're so stupid."

  "I know!"

  He asked for the details and made notes while I talked. Porrocks hovered, patting my arm. A nurse came in and gave me a shot for the pain, which was getting worse now that I was finally relaxing. I felt the effects of the injection immediately.

  "Tell me," I asked the nurse in my throatiest voice, "will I make it?"

  "Oh, certainly." She was apple-cheeked and efficient and talked with a Scots accent. "You'll need a bit of surgery, no doubt."

  "Will I be able to do pirouettes after this?"

  "I should think so, of course."

  I tapped an imaginary cigar and wiggled my eyebrows. "That's funny, I never could do pirouettes before!"

  She clearly wanted to throttle me with the IV line, but I got a good pair of laughs out of Ciesla and Porrocks. It was a relief to hear them laugh. Then an orderly came and pushed me down to X-ray and back.

  Ciesla said the handgun charge would probably be dropped. A surgeon walked in, examined my leg, making it hurt horribly, and said they would indeed have to operate to get the slug out. Porrocks promised to call Billie for me, then the cops bid me adieu.

  They only kept me two days in the hospital. I learned from Ciesla that Bonnie had made it and was supposed to recover fully. He also told me that it wasn't Bonnie who'd come after me that morning and attacked Minerva; it'd been Mrs. Creighter, who presumably was losing patience with the cat-and-mouse routine.

  Billie collected me and drove me to Aunt Rosalie and Uncle Guff's house; they were gracious enough to take me in. She brought Todd over the next day. I imagined he looked glad to see me. I certainly was glad to see him. I started working on my story for the Motor City Journal right away.

  Minerva, I learned, had made it through two surgeries, during which the doctors had found more of her brain left than they'd expected. They put a plate in her head to replace the segment of pulverized skull, then she promptly lapsed into a coma. Her parents ordered her shipped back to some medical center on Long Island, where they lived. I didn't get to see her before she was taken away.

  While Bonnie recovered from her wounds she and her mother were charged with the murder of Iris Macklin and the attempted murder of Minerva LeBlanc.

  Judy called me once after she heard about my exploits. "You are not a person I can cope with in any way anymore," she said stiffly, after making sure I was all right.

&nbs
p; Ciesla and Porrocks let me know pretty much the same thing, although Ciesla couldn't help bringing over some frozen spaghetti sauce and homemade chocolate chip cookies. Aunt Rosalie thanked him nicely but eyed the food suspiciously behind his back. I knew what she was thinking: A man who cooks? Bad medicine.

  "Erma thinks we would have cracked this anyway," Tom said. "But I'm not so sure. If the two of them kept denying everything, they might have gotten away with it. In Iris Macklin's case we thought it was the husband. He wouldn't take a polygraph. I don't know why. I think Bonnie Creighter's going to tell us where the other bodies are. She's not too mentally tough anymore."

  I never did learn exactly what went on in that basement, exactly how Colossians was inflicted on Subject E, for instance, and I suppose in retrospect that's for the best.

  Evidently Mrs. Creighter's morbid business in forensic art was merely a sideline, the supply of teeth from the fresh corpses a happy coincidence. She'd held down a part-time job as a dental hygienist, where, coincidentally, they'd had a rash of thefts of equipment and supplies.

  I wrote Minerva's parents a low-key letter, trying to help them understand their daughter's last hours before the attack (minus certain details), trying to express my sympathy and my grief, so small in proportion to theirs. No one knew whether Minerva would ever wake up. I suggested that I'd come to visit her soon.

  As far as I could learn, she didn't leave behind a lover in New York. The parents wrote back telling me to keep away.

  .

  Within a few weeks my leg was practically back to normal and my story was finished. It ran as the cover piece in the Journal, titled "How Not to Catch the Crooks: My Adventures With Murder and Chaos in Detroit's Underbelly." Ricky Rosenthal loved it, the response was terrific, and he gave me an assignment to write a feature on life on the Detroit P.D.'s vice squad. My freelance career was underway.

  When the story came out, Judy found it necessary to call again. She tracked me down in the new apartment I'd rented a few blocks away from the McVitties' duplex. I had a phone, a card table with two folding chairs, and a box of groceries. That was it. Todd and I rolled around the empty apartment like marbles in a coffee can. I'd spent a wad getting the Caprice repainted the same nice shade of evergreen. I'd saved a hundred dollars out of my check from the Journal to go on a shopping spree at John King, the great used bookshop near Wayne State. I was working on a list of essential titles when Judy called.

  "Our community," she told me huffily, "doesn't need this kind of crazy crap going on." As if I'd killed somebody.

  "What community?"

  "You know," her voice was scratchy with irritation, "the gay and lesbian community. This kind of publicity doesn't do us much good. You went and poked around in dangerous places. You got yourself shot, Lillian! That is not the kind of message women need to be hearing! Plus, everybody thinks queers are killers anyway, and this kind of stereotyping, well, it's just irresponsible."

  "But Judy, I—you've missed the point. These women, the Creighters, I don't think you could call them gay, or even festive. They were maniacs."

  "Oh." Sarcastic-like.

  "And do you suppose true Christians go around killing people? Anyway, wouldn't you want to know about something like this? I can't help it if it was sensational." Moreover, I thought, this is the stuff rent checks are made of.

  I didn't ask about Sharon Wurtz, and she didn't offer any information. I figured I'd see them around.

  Lou called after reading my article. I suggested we meet for coffee, which we did, nice and normal, at Yokey-Dokey. I wanted to make sure she understood how grateful I was that she'd showed up when she did.

  "Anybody woulda done it," she mumbled into her hazelnut latte.

  "I don't think so."

  "Well. So. Maybe we can just be friends? You know, friends?"

  We shook on it.

  I heard nothing from Ed or Bucky Rinkell. I guessed the Buckeroo thought he'd taught me the lesson I deserved.

  Except he hadn't.

  That loose end gnawed at me; something, like a little angel on my shoulder, told me I should tie it up. Whatever I did to him had to focus on his car, as he had focused on mine. He knew I doted on my car, and I knew he cherished his. Yes, he cherished his car as a surfer cherishes his board, as a porn star cherishes his penis, as a corporate vice president cherishes his corner office. It bolstered his identity. As long as he took care of it, it would take care of him. To other guys, their cars are babe magnets; to Bucky, his Camaro was a babe substitute.

  No way could I simply trash his car, as he had mine, and get away with it. No, he'd know it was me, and I'd get it again some way. He'd never, ever let me have the last word. Fine.

  Everybody knows the most beautiful paybacks are the self-inflicted ones. I thought and thought, and finally came up with a plan. All it would take was one more tiny bit of skullduggery. That, and the willingness to relinquish the moral high ground I'd been so firmly standing on from the beginning.

  One fine day I cruised around to a couple of stores and obtained a pair of bolt cutters, a sheet of coarse sandpaper, a pair of coveralls, and a yellow hard hat for good measure. I swung through downtown Eagle close enough to the Eye offices to glimpse Bucky's sparkling blue Camaro at the curb. It was resplendent. Really, it was. Then I drove to his apartment building.

  Most of the tenants worked during the day so the place was quiet. I parked around back, donned the coveralls and hard hat, and strode up to the main entrance. A minute after I pressed all the doorbells with my palms, the speaker crackled and a querulous voice said, "Yes?"

  "Maintenance." I was ready to talk my way in, but whoever it was hit the buzzer instantly. Listening up the stairwell, I heard an apartment door open, then shut after a questioning pause.

  I found Bucky's storage closet in the basement, having vaguely remembered the setup from the tour he'd given during his ill-fated cookout. I recognized the hibachi and the ice chest with its WLLZ bumper sticker.

  The closets were wire-fenced cages with combination padlocks. After slicing off the lock with my bolt cutters I found Bucky's car-wash pail. It contained a sponge and bottles of Ivory Liquid, Windex, Armor-All, and a generic bug dissolver. Nestled in the bottom was the object of my quest: a can of top-of-the-line Turtle Wax. I pried it open with my knife. It was about half full.

  I got out the sheet of coarse sandpaper and scraped a fair amount of grit into the wax. I pressed and stirred it into the top layer with my finger, then carefully smoothed it over with a wadded Kleenex and replaced the lid.

  I put everything relating to car washing back the way it was, then messed up the rest of his stuff, as if a burglar had been looking for valuables. Then I beat it.

  Have you ever looked at sandpaper under a microscope? It's fearsome. That's the way it looks to paint, too.

  .

  A few weeks later I learned that Gerald Macklin got his promotion at Hastings Benevolex after all; his face popped out at me from the business section of the Free Press one morning. "Congratulations, buddy," I said to the head shot, then tore up the paper.

  The day was the last cloudless, hot one of the year. I fired up the Caprice and drove around the metro area aimlessly, letting the gritty expressway wind blow through the windows, across my face.

  For the hell of it, I cruised past the Eye offices. I had to look twice, but there it was: Bucky's Camaro, with a brand new paint job. Orange metallic sparkle this time.

  Even that didn't cheer me up, though, and I hit the expressways again. Eventually I pulled into a sprawling suburban cemetery, all flatness and tacky chapels. The sun was beating down, straight overhead.

  The caretaker helped me find the rectangle of sod that covered Iris Macklin six feet down. There was no stone yet.

  I stood there remembering my fleeting impression of her beauty and the senselessness of her loss. A shadow swept across the grass. Looking up I saw a hawk on the wing, cruising the updrafts, hunting for mice among the tombstones. I would
remember Iris forever. It was all right that I knew next to nothing about her.

  I thought about the Midnight Five and the rest of the dead women, their desperate last hours. It was time to let them go. I thought about Minerva LeBlanc, lying insensible in some clinic where no one could know how wonderful she had been.

  I thought about people who can't handle what God gives them and decide to take it out on the rest of us.

  Hunkering down, I plucked a stem of clover and chewed it. The hawk, a red-tail, dropped like a stone from the sky. In a minute it was up again, climbing, talons empty, starting all over.

  __________

  Did you know that eight out of ten people who recommend books enjoy healthy, happy lives? (The other two experience increased personal wealth and general well-being.)

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Since a novel is more or less a manifestation of the innards of the author, and since no author is self-invented but is formed by, if not made up of, her experiences, I'd like to thank everyone I've ever met.

  A handful in that group stands out:

  My mother, Carolyn Sims Davis, whose reverence for books and authors set me to thinking, way too young, hell, you know, how hard could it be? My father, Frank Sims, who gave of himself everything I ever asked. My loving brother David Sims, my beautiful sister Kathleen Cristman, and my steadfast uncle and aunt, Leonard and Tracy Romey.

  Pauline Adams for humoring my grandiose ambitions. My special friends Maureen M. McClellan, Arlene Marie, Brad Grube, Lucinda Reinas, Gesa Kirsch, Thom Powers, Jan Kimmel, Terry McKenzie, Cindi Forslund, Anne Kubek, Molly Sapp, Andrea Smith, and Philip Lenkowsky. Sue Brooks and Kay Solsbury, through whose door I found the community, and so much more. Tim Gable, Elaine Morse, and Don Powers, as holy a trinity of booksellers as ever lived. The uncommonly sensible Angela Brown.