Sinister Heights (20 page)

“I'm betting your home number isn't.”

“He had potential. I won't live forever. One way to guarantee I won't would be to agree to back a stranger's play.”

I finished my drink and got off my elbow. “I'll be pushing off then. Thanks for the juice.”

He didn't move. “When I called you a stranger I thought maybe you'd mention knowing my father.”

“It wouldn't be good politics. We didn't get along.”

“He told me that, years ago. I got the impression it was his fault. He also told me you're a man of trust. He said I should remember your name.”

I put my elbow back on the bar and took my turn at saying nothing.

“Glendowning had personal problems,” Montana said. “Show me a trucker who's happy at home and I'll show you a man I'd rather not have making decisions for the union. I'm sorry about his wife, but that was between them and the agencies whose business it is to deal with that sort of thing. His people liked him. They respected him, which is more important. He was a man of trust. They won't like it when they find out what happened to him. If they find out Connor Thorpe is involved and I knew it and didn't do anything about it, they'll gas up their rigs and run them right through this house.”

“That would be a waste of fuel,” I said. “With Iroquois Heights so close.”

“What do you want from me, Walker?”

“How about a splash of that brandy? I like to start a long day with fresh fruit.”

He filled my glass and waited. The gray eyes held no expression.

I drank, and set down the glass. The stuff tasted like a cobbler gone bad.

I said, “I want a second front.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE

This time out, no police pulled me over. That made sense, according to the standards in Iroquois Heights: The truck I was driving was on the BOL (Be On the Lookout) list in two states. At one point. I sat at a stoplight next to a shiny new cruiser for three minutes, watching the two uniforms in the front seat watch an inline skater in shorts and a halter top negotiate her way through the pedestrian press on the sidewalk.

The county records office shared a newish brick building in the civic center with city offices and the criminal court, behind which armored vans conducted a shuttle service between the back door and the county jail. I parked in the little visitors' lot—metered for one hour, against an average wait of two to three hours inside—stowed my Chief's Special in the Ram's glove compartment, and entered the building through a metal detector with a three-hundred-pound cop waiting out his pension on a stool next to it. His flushed and battered face looked as if it had witnessed its share of rubber-hose therapy sessions in the basement of the old city hall.

The clerk behind the counter in records was the grandmotherly type, if your grandmother moonlighted as a prison matron. The steel rims of her bifocals matched her hair, blown out as big as a racing helmet and sprayed just about as hard, and she tucked the end of her man's necktie inside her blouse like a top sergeant. When I told her what I needed she said I'd have to wait ten days for my request to be processed. I took out Connor Thorpe's letter of authorization and spread it out on the counter.

She read it, lips pressed tight as if to keep them from moving, then turned without comment and went through a door in back. I spent ten minutes reading a brochure on pet-licensing procedures, then watched her come back, wrestling a threadbare book the size of a drafting board around the edge of the door. Dust and weightless bits of paper wheezed out of the page-ends when she thudded it down on the counter. She pointed me to the reading room, a partitioned-off area just big enough for four job applicants to fill out their forms at student desks. I drew two of them together, spread the book open across the kidney-shaped writing surfaces, and leaned on my hands to study the pages I wanted.

The book was a bound collection of construction blueprints filed with the building permits office for the three-month period between April 1 and June 30, 1936. Such things weren't requested often, and no one had thought them worth the cost of transferring to microfilm. The carefully ruled lines in blue pencil had faded into the slate-colored pages, and I hadn't slept in twenty-seven hours. I had to scrub my eyes with the heels of my hands and play slide trombone with my neck in order to avoid seeing two of everything.

I spent an hour and a half studying the plans, breaking once to go out to the parking lot and feed the meter. I didn't care about a ticket, but I didn't want a cop writing down the plate and recognizing it from the roll-call list. I'm ordinarily good at reading blueprints and can grasp the general layout fairly quickly, but the angle of reading while standing up aggravated my whiplash and I had to take frequent breaks, rubbing my neck, rotating my head, and hobbling around on my taped-up ankle. I felt like a car someone was trying to nurse through one more winter.

The Stutch Motors plant, later Stutch Petrochemicals and later still a division of General Motors, had gone up during the labor uprisings of the 1930s, and was consequently built to withstand a long siege. The main building contained the executive offices, with a glass wall overlooking the foundry on the ground floor where Leland Stutch could glance up from his desk and watch the steel being poured, like money into his mattress. There was only one door in and out—the local fire marshal must have rated at least a new car every model year to overlook that code violation—the walls were built of bricks pressed and fired on the site to a thickness of nearly two feet, the windows were triple-paned and sectioned off with titanium grids. The security offices were in the basement, with emergency living quarters in case it took the city police more than a couple of days to crack open enough of the strikers' skulls to turn the tide. A chainlink fence had been erected around the compound to repel saboteurs during the Second World War, with hoops of barbed wire on top for that cozy concentration-camp effect. When negotiations broke down, the suits had only to padlock the front gate, bolt the door, and wait things out, roughing it with domestic wine and tinned salmon. Strikers who managed to scale the fence without eviscerating themselves had to make their way through a maze of satellite buildings—glass plant, coke ovens, fueling stations, stamping and assembly facilities—and avoid tripping over three miles of railroad latticework just to get to the main structure. Along the way they would encounter guards with truncheons and Thompsons and a couple of dozen half-starved German shepherds. Casual Friday would be canceled until further notice.

In its heyday, the plant had had its own telephone system, independent of the city's and more sophisticated than those in most communities, its own generators, backup generators, and backups to the backups, each the size of a juggernaut, humming away in a building constructed just for them. An urban myth persisted that Stutch had commissioned a flag emblazoned with the company logo, to be run up a staff in the event of an armed labor takeover of the United States, declaring the place a sovereign nation. There were autoworkers still living, and Steelhaulers still active in the union, who would never be convinced it was a myth; they'd seen the tommy guns and watched the dogs savage one another over a hunk of bloody round.

None of these precautions had ever been put to the test, or perhaps the very fact that they were never challenged meant that they had passed it. Now, the grim lines and terse descriptions written on the sixty-four-year-old blueprints read like an archaeologist's report on a feudal ruin, something from a barbaric time familiar only to medieval scholars and buffs who walked around in clanking armor on festive weekends. The union execs who sat on the boards, of all three major U.S. automobile manufacturers would scratch their heads over them between courses in the Grill Room at the Detroit Athletic Club. Most of the buildings were gone now or used for storage. When Antitrust ordered Ford to break up its sprawling River Rouge plant to promote competition, Stutch had turned the page. He sold the glass-making equipment, scrapped the dynamos, and farmed out the stamping and assembly operations, at a profit; always at a profit. He'd donated several hundred acres to the city—again to his advantage, but not one that would turn up in any ledgers—leased most of his rolling-stock to the Penn Central and B & O railroads, and consolidated his remaining operations in the main building, the gaunt, Gothic relic still brooding on its hill like Frankenstein's castle.

In his high nineties, the old man had cut back his management to two supercharged hours in the dead of night, during which a banker in Switzerland, a loyalist general in Chile, or a loading-dock foreman in Atlanta might expect to be rousted out of bed by a telephone call, and observed that schedule until his death at age 106, or 108, or 112, depending upon which biography one read. With him had passed an era dominated by wildcat semiliterates who had parlayed piles of old wagon springs, steam engine parts, and bizarre-looking new implements hand-forged in backyard shops into an industry that no one but themselves could have predicted. Only a few, like him, had lived long enough to see it pass into the white soft hands of business school graduates who had never busted a knuckle trying to remove a rusted bolt in their lives. His plant, ghost that it was of what it had been, was one of the handful in existence into which a time-traveling contemporary could wander and not feel lost among robot welders, computer consoles, foremen in white lab coats, and day care nurseries. It was as doomed as Tiger Stadium.

But
ghost
was misleading. This phantom had concrete feet planted twenty feet deep in solid bedrock. The materials were no longer available to contractors. Even if they were, government inspectors would never clear them, because buildings weren't supposed to last two hundred years with so many bricklayers and carpenters out of work. There was enough asbestos between the firewalls to wipe out the population of South America. When the time came to demolish it, the city would have to be evacuated for fourteen blocks around and the dynamite required would be sufficient to level the Mountains of the Moon. The preparation alone would employ more men working with crowbars and sledgehammers than the Berlin Wall, and it would take more trucks to clear away the rubble afterward than even Ray Montana could muster. It would be as hard to get rid of as a Christmas fruitcake.

There was nothing pretty about it, even in the architect's elevations that accompanied the floorplans. Albert Kahn, whose graceful Greco/Roman/Deco/Nouveau/Moderne setpieces had transformed the Detroit skyline throughout the first forty years of the previous century, had had no hand in the design. It was as utilitarian as a pipefitter's glove, as homely as a rich man's marriageable daughter, and no one who had attended the groundbreaking in 1936 could have imbibed enough champagne to think six decades of smelter-soot and pigeon filth would contribute to its charm. Its square blunt face and rows of windows intended only to save on electric light during the day shifts were things only a former backyard mechanic could love. It was plain from the layout that Stutch had loved it, as much as a working-class child of the nineteenth century could love anything. He could have established himself in one of the offices on the top floor, with a view of the city and soundproof insulation to spare him the ballpeen din, but he'd chosen instead a bleacher seat behind the dugout.

There was no telling what changes might have been made inside the building since the old man had grown too feeble to climb the stairs to his fishbowl above the pouring vat; but I was betting on the below-ground bunker where Connor Thorpe kept his tabs on his empire of cops, private and public, being the hardest nut to crack. That was what he had meant when he'd told Proust he needed to avoid a second front, the first being the authorities who would rattle the gate with warrants in hand when it got out he was holding a little boy inside. The interior walls were nearly as thick as the ones that held up the building, with the doors to all the offices—steel, or I was no judge—opening onto a single corridor. It was that paradox of bricks-and-masonry security, the impregnable fortress that was also an escape-proof trap. My trail ended there either way.

I was yawning fit to crack the hinges of my jaws when I closed the book. A cloud of dust and paper shavings curled out and lodged in my throat. I coughed. My eyes watered and I mopped them with my handkerchief. I was just beginning to realize how tired I was, and how many years had passed since I'd waited out a V.C. sniper through twelve hours of the Cambodian night. I was no match for the walls of the Stutch plant wide awake, with a sound neck and two good ankles. In my present condition I couldn't open a cardboard container of mooshu pork. That made me think of Moo-goo, Carla Witowski's surgically silenced dog, which in turn made me think of Constance Glendowning, sleeping out a merciful coma in Henry Ford Hospital, unaware that her child was trapped somewhere in the concrete bowels of Iroquois Heights. I needed to follow her example or I wasn't going to be of use to any of them. Not even the dog.

I carried the big book back out into the reception area and slid it up onto the counter. Before I could thank the clerk in the helmet of steel-gray hair, she told me someone wanted to see me.

I turned around and there he was: just under six feet of muscle and hard fat in a blue suit, wire-brushed black hair, and aviator glasses with smoked lenses, smiling impersonally with small even teeth stained a uniform tobacco-beige. I didn't need to look at the shield he was holding. In a strong light it would show behind his features like a watermark. He said his name was Vivaldi, detective sergeant assigned to the City-County Building, and that Mayor Muriel would consider it a personal favor if I'd accompany the sergeant to his office.

I went with him without a squawk. That's how tired I was.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

“Any relation to the composer?” I asked Sergeant Vivaldi.