Sinister Heights (19 page)

“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.

“Just juice, if you have it,” I said. “I forget when I ate last.”

He told me there was V-8 in the refrigerator and to pour him one too. He held on to the weight bar for another second, then let go and stepped back. The boy drew the bar down to his chest, sucking in air, then blew out, straightening his arms slowly, until he was holding up the barbells at arms' length. Montana counted, “One, two,” under his breath, then patted his son's shoulder and helped guide the bar into the brackets attached to the bench. Grinning, he squeezed the boy's shoulder, then pointed at the punching bag. Philip nodded, swung his feet down to the floor, and stood up. He mopped the sweat off his face and neck with a towel, then traded it for a pair of tomato-red speed gloves. He began hitting the bag tentatively, then settled into the drumroll rhythm of the professional pugilist. He had a better left jab than I'd seen on some experienced men.

“His school dropped boxing from the phys ed curriculum, would you believe it?” Montana came over to the bar and accepted his V-8, which I'd poured into a narrow glass from a collection on a shelf. “Somebody's parents took the district to court over little Timmy's shiner. We're breeding a generation of sitting hens.”

“He needs to work on his right cross.” I drank. The thick smooth stuff coated my empty stomach pleasantly.

“We're working on it. You box?”

“College stuff. I spent my first eight weeks in the army unlearning everything I'd been taught. Getting him ready for the union?”

“If he goes near headquarters I'll teach him how
I
throw a right cross. He can be a bum if he wants, hustle pool. Better that than he should grab his ankles for anyone's vote.”

Ray had finer features than his father's, not as square. His eyes were the same shade of gray and set as wide, and the two men shared a pug nose and a long dimpled upper lip, courtesy of some Celt in the family woodpile. He looked as if he could handle himself—the elder Montana had probably seen to that, just as Ray was doing for his own son—but in Phil's case the training had been in the professional ring. It had come in handy in the urban battlegrounds of the Great Depression, but since all of Ray's fights took place in boardrooms and on platforms draped with bunting, the advantage was mainly psychological. It was a stretch to imagine him grabbing his ankles ever.

He sipped V-8, made a subtle face, and filled the gap with golden liquid from a square bottle that turned out to contain peach brandy. It wouldn't have been my choice for breakfast. “What's the name of the cop who killed Glendowning?”

I glanced toward Philip, going budda-budda-budda at the punching bag. Montana shook his head. In anyone else I'd have called it a twitch.

“He's deaf. I'd appreciate it if you didn't noise that about. So to speak.” He frowned at the pun he'd made. “It's the current fashion to parade one's disablements like a flag, but it's one luxury a man in my place can't afford. You don't know how much time my opponents spend looking for holes in my masonry.”

Probably about half as much time as he spent plugging them up. Aloud I said, “If they get it, don't come looking for me. I can't work this town from the bottom of the river. The cop's name is Mark Proust. He was assistant chief in the Heights until they busted him a number of years back for staging fights in the county jail and cutting a slice of the action. Before that he was a detective inspector in Detroit. Before that I don't know. Losing his tail in some swamp probably.”

“I remember the stink. The cops up there were nosing around the Steelhaulers, looking for new representation. We were dragging our feet. They were Stutch property, went around ticketing Japanese cars and tapping the phones of Ford and Chrysler execs who had the shitty judgment to live inside the city limits. Repping them would have been like handing Leland Stutch the combination to the safe at union headquarters. The jail scandal gave us an excuse to table the issue till it dried up and blew away. I was just one of the Indians then.”

“That town's been for sale since Cadillac beached his canoe there to take a leak. It's off the block now, though. Connor Thorpe bought it.”

“I know Thorpe.” He pronounced the name the same way he'd said
Iroquois Heights
on the telephone. “Tell me how you know him.”

That was as good a place to start as most. I gave him the whole thing while we leaned our elbows on the bar like a couple of movie cowboys, young Philip flapping away at the bag in the corner: Rayellen Stutch, the inheritance, Carla Willard Witowski, my talk with David Glendowning, the shelter in Monroe, Carla's daughter Constance, the run-in with Glendowning's pickup on the interstate, Iris's death, little Matthew's disappearance, Proust's play over Glendowning's corpse in the garage in Toledo, and what I got out of Proust before and after I kneecapped him. Montana listened, sipping from his glass and showing no more emotion than a man listening to a ballgame with no money riding on how it came out. When I finished, he pushed away from the bar, went over and clapped a hand on his son's shoulder, squeezing it. Man and boy grinned. The boy mopped sweat off with the towel and let himself out the door. In a little while I heard water rushing through pipes behind the paneling. He was showering after his workout.

“I looked into organizing the private investigation business several years ago.” Montana drank a little more, then filled the glass to the rim from the bottle of peach brandy. “Waste of time. The crooks couldn't be counted on to keep up the dues and the honest ones couldn't afford to. Anyway we couldn't regulate the overtime. A draft horse like you would price himself out of the market.”

“Glendowning tried recruiting me,” I said. “I hope his casket has a union label.”

“I talked to the police in Toledo after you called. Your name didn't come up.”

“They don't know about me yet. I dialed 911 and bugged out.”

“Not smart. Cops talk to each other. Even if Proust clams, they'll tie you into Glendowning's pickup on I-75 and come knocking.”

“I'll answer. After I talk to Thorpe.”

“Asking why.”

“I might get around to it.”

“This Iris was a friend?”

“A good one,” I said. “I don't have so many I can waste even the bad ones.”

“Anything more?”

“Not more. Apart from. If it's any of your goddamn business.”

He nodded. Said nothing.

I said, “I'll settle with Thorpe for Iris. That's my end, after I find out if the boy's all right.”

“What's my end?”

“That's what I'm here to find out. Your name's in Glendowning's book.”

“My name's in every shop steward's book between here and the Gulf of Mexico.”