The Detroit Electric Scheme (36 page)

I considered taking a drive but realized I couldn't risk using any more of the batteries' charge than necessary. Nor did I want to leave the
truck parked in front of my building. I drove to the end of a dark street, parked, and began steeling myself for the gruesome task ahead.

It was after midnight when I drove to the cornfield.

 

Snow crunched under the tires as I eased my foot onto the brake in front of the field. The truck rolled to a stop with a shudder and a squeak of the springs. I sat still, listening. In the distance, a gasoline engine revved. Other than that, it was unnaturally quiet. Snow fell on snow in a silent ballet.

I looked out at the field, and my heart sank. Streetlights lit the area just enough to illuminate a smooth white sea, only occasional stalks rising far enough to break the surface and give any indication of rows. Having only a vague memory of the body's location before the snow, I thought this might well be an impossible task.

But I had to move the body. I stepped down from the cab and crept around to the back of the truck. Taking care to be quiet, I opened the doors, climbed inside, and lit the lantern with my lighter before closing the cowl far enough to allow only a sliver of light to escape. I opened the door and climbed back out onto the snow.

The huge oak tree stood to my left. I tried to triangulate the position of the grave, using the tree and the road, but without the rows to guide me it was impossible. When I walked onto the field, my boots sank through the snow, and I could feel the U-shaped depressions between the rows. Still, everything looked the same.

I took my best guess and pushed the shovel down through the snow. Given that the judge was covered by only a bit of dirt, it was a tentative attempt, but even so, the shovel stopped after a few inches. I was certain the ground around the grave would be softer, so I moved ahead a few feet and tried again. That spot was just as hard. I stepped over to the next row and pushed the blade of the shovel into the earth again with the same result.

Half an hour later, I was frantic, slashing the shovel into the hard ground. The falling snow had hidden my earlier footprints, and I couldn't
remember where I'd dug and where I hadn't. I started over, working methodically down one row and then another, until finally the shovel chunked into a softer piece of ground. Digging carefully now, I found the handle of the bag containing Judge Hume's clothing and the rope used to kill him. I shut off my brain and dug out the body.

When I'd removed most of the dirt, I could see Judge Hume's form inside the sheet—body rigid, knees slightly bent, hips twisted a little to the right. I pushed my hands into the dirt underneath his shoulders, took hold of him under the arms, and tugged him out. His body didn't change position, either frozen or in rigor mortis. After I stripped off the sheet and tucked it inside the bag, I hesitated. Seeing the corpse in the sliver of light from the lantern filled me with pity. Now simply a pale blue figure with bulging eyes, open mouth, and swollen tongue, the judge had been just a man, a father, not some loathsome devil bent on ruining my life. Everyone deserved to die with dignity, not be violated like this.

I dropped to my knees next to him. “Judge Hume?” I whispered. “Your Honor? I know you only wanted the best for Elizabeth. I'm sorry I wasn't the man you thought I should be. You were right. I wasn't good enough for her. And I'm sorry beyond measure for this.” I wrapped him in the blanket and secured it with the clothesline.

Even though the temperature was in the twenties, sweat dripped from my face. I threw the strap of the bag over my shoulder, dragged the body to the truck, and hoisted it into the back along with the bag. Then I returned to the field, filled in the hole, and stomped down the earth. By the time I finished, snow was beginning to erase my footprints. I took one last look around, climbed behind the wheel, and eased the truck back onto the road.

Heading southwest, I cut through neighborhoods as I worked my way down to Jefferson, keeping my speed at a safe eight miles per hour. Had I been driving a gasoline motorcar, I don't think I'd have been able to regulate my speed at all, but I was fortunate electrics stayed consistent.

I had a plan. When I reached the island, I would hide Judge Hume's body and bury the sheet, the rope, and the clothing in different places. Then I'd return and bury the body. It was risky carrying everything
together, but the longer I had the body or any of the bag's contents in my possession, the more likely it was I'd be caught.

When I turned off Jefferson onto West End, I stopped and watched the buildings to the sides and in front of me. A deep dark sound, like the mumbling of a lunatic, carried on the air from Zug's gigantic blast furnace.

An open door in the warehouse brightened. A night watchman carrying a lantern hurried out, took a quick look around, and hurried back inside. I waited another five minutes. Seeing no movement, I put the truck into first and rolled forward, leaving the headlights off. The floodlights on the buildings and the faint white glow from the foundry provided all the light I needed.

I pulled the truck into the shadows at the side of the road and stood next to it for a moment, looking around and listening, before I opened the back doors, grabbed the bag, and pulled the body partway out. It didn't seem likely I'd be able to balance both the judge and the shovel, so I decided to get the judge to the island first.

I threw the bag over my shoulder, squatted down, and slid the blanket-wrapped corpse out over the other shoulder, thinking I'd carry him like a wood plank. When the balance felt about right, I tightened my grip over his waist and stood. The body tipped over my back and hit the ground with a
thud
. I fell backward over the top of it, making just as much noise.

Cursing inwardly, I squatted in the shadows for a moment. It didn't seem anyone had heard. I struggled to lift the body onto my shoulder, but it was impossible. When I carried Judge Hume the night he'd been murdered, his body had formed to the contours of my neck and shoulders.

Now he was a two-hundred-pound rock lying on the ground.

I started dragging him toward the tracks. Pain sprung anew from a dozen spots on my body. I was wringing with sweat before I'd even reached the back of the warehouse. There, I stopped, leaned against the wall, and slid down to a seated position next to the body. My breath shot out in great plumes of steam. I wouldn't be able to stop again until I reached the bridge, four times as far as I'd already come. And I couldn't sit here any longer, either.

I stripped off my greatcoat and left it next to the building before I again slung the bag over my shoulder and dragged Judge Hume's body to the tracks and then alongside them. The body dug up and pushed aside odd bits of trash and the few chunks of coal not already scavenged by the poor, and left a rut in the snow as if I'd run a toboggan over it. Though I could still smell the island, the falling snow tamped down the stench to a tolerable level. The foundry's roar was loud, insistent, and its white light flared and ebbed like a gigantic welder's torch, casting an unearthly glow on the riverfront.

My fingers were cramping, and I ached everywhere, but I kept pulling. The light from the foundry was brighter here, but I was cloaked in the elongated shadows reaching out from the island.

I finally reached the bridge and collapsed on the ground next to the judge's body. This was going to be a trickier business. The bridge was perhaps a hundred feet long and no wider than a train. Even though the canal was only forty feet across, the ground fell away quickly underneath the bridge, which was elevated thirty feet above the water. All but ten feet on either end had the potential for a dangerous fall. A four-inch gap lay between the slats under the tracks, and there were no side rails to keep a person from pitching over into the canal.

Apparently the bridge hadn't been designed for dragging bodies to the island.

I looked both ways down the track and felt the rails, checking for trains. Though it seemed likely the security guard was right and no trains were running, I couldn't take chances. Satisfied, I pulled the judge's corpse up over the metal rails and began dragging it across the bridge. The snow made the wooden slats slippery, and I stepped carefully from one to the next, keeping my eyes on my feet. This was taking much longer than I had expected. My pace was of step, tug, step, tug, and the judge's feet bumped over every slat with a pattern of rhythmic thumps I felt more than heard, what with the low thunder of the foundry behind me.

When I was about halfway across, the bridge began to vibrate. I glanced up in front of me and saw nothing, then dropped the body and turned around.

A headlight, only a few hundred feet away, raced toward me, getting larger by the second.

I froze. There was no time to run back across. The train was nearly on the bridge now. I stepped to the side of the body and rolled it over the edge. The train's horn blared a deafening blast. I leaped from the bridge a split second before the train would have hit me, and the wind from its passing spun me in the air. The pitch of the horn changed from high to low as the train rocketed by and I plummeted toward the canal.

When I hit the frigid water, the shock ripped the air from my lungs. Reflexively, I tried to take a breath and began choking, coughing, and sucking in even more water. I flailed my arms and legs, reaching for the surface. The bag's handle slipped off my shoulder. I grabbed for it and found only water. The strong current swirled away from River Rouge, pulling me toward the Detroit River. I fought it and thrashed with numbing limbs, barely able to breathe through racking coughs. Somehow I made it far enough that my hands hit bottom, and I pulled myself up to the shore. I vomited onto the snow, the spasms continuing long after the water had been purged from my lungs.

The feeling wasn't returning to my body. Still coughing like a consumptive, I sat up and rubbed my legs, shivering uncontrollably, trying to get enough friction to regain some feeling, some warmth, before hypothermia claimed me.

The bag was gone. I looked through the falling snow to the water, expecting to see Judge Hume's blanket-clad corpse bobbing out from the mouth of the canal into the river. Nothing was visible other than the tops of the swells, sparking with the flares of the foundry's blast furnace.

I stumbled back toward the warehouse, hugging myself in a vain attempt to stave off the cold. When I was almost there, light from a lantern bobbed around the front corner of the building. I dropped to the ground, trying to stifle my coughs, shivering so hard my teeth felt like they were being jarred loose. The lantern didn't move for a moment, then disappeared around the corner again. As quickly as caution would allow, I hurried to the building, stripped off my clothing, and wrapped
my greatcoat around me. When I dropped my pants, the pistol fell with them. I'd forgotten I had it. I scooped it up and tottered on numb legs to the truck. After a quick look around, I climbed in and drove to my apartment. I soaked in a hot bath for a long while, then drove back to the Detroit Electric garage, still wheezing.

I had compounded my problem. Judge Hume's body would surface, ensuring he would be found. But worse, I had lost the bag containing his clothing, the murder weapon, and my sheet—in one neat little package. If someone found that bag and turned it over to the police, Riordan would have all the evidence he needed to put me away forever.

 

I spent most of the next day on the couch with a cup of hot tea. My head was stuffy, I had a low fever, and I was still coughing, though with less force and frequency. To distract myself, I went out to the corner and bought a stack of newspapers.

Every one had a feature story about Judge Hume's disappearance on the eve of his meeting with the state police. Now joining the speculation that he was on the run was the theory he himself had been murdered by someone he was going to implicate—conjecture I had no interest in confirming. Because of the Hume/Cooper connection from the bribery scandal, I was mentioned in every article, but not as Judge Hume's murderer. Any speculation in that direction went to Frank Van Dam, who they all agreed was involved, either as Judge Hume's coconspirator or his enemy.

I started to call Elizabeth but hung up before the operator answered. What would I say? I couldn't very well tell her not to worry, he's fine, he'll be home soon. I went back to the couch.

The next morning, feeling much better, I took a streetcar to the library and searched for information on the buoyancy of bodies. I found an article in the
British Medical Journal
that said in cold water a corpse would stay submerged for at least a week, and sometimes as long as a month, before bodily gases accumulated to the extent that it would
float. I probably had a little time before the body surfaced. The bag I was less certain about.

With barely a month until the auto show opened, I threw myself into the work, stopping only long enough to pore through newspapers looking for any mention of the judge's body or my bag. So far, my luck had held.

I created layout after layout of the floor space, worked with sales to get commitments from our dealers to provide salesmen for the show, and collaborated with our advertising department on signage. Mr. Edison was paying us to promote his battery, so I devoted a large space to extolling the virtues of a battery that would allow for long touring trips through the country. Advertising had already put together a display recounting the trouble-free thousand-mile trip Joe and I had made through the countryside in September. Edison batteries powered us all the way. The trip was well publicized and highly successful, although we'd had to abort the ascent of Mount Washington in New Hampshire due to inclement weather.

The rest of the signage emphasized our reputation and service, bragged a little (
Behind the car stands the largest electric vehicle factory in the world
), and finished with the standard hyperbole (
A Detroit Electric is a health-giving, invigorating, care-forgetting necessity
).