Sinister Heights (23 page)

Unframed canvases and works on paper leaned against the baseboards all around the studio: pastels and watercolors, oils and acrylics, and a train wreck of a charcoal sketch Mrs. Stutch might have done during a hiccup fit. There were still lifes and pastorals that reminded me of the rustic images on Mayor Muriel's walls, portraits and abstracts, one or two copies of old masters done with a twenty-first-century twist. I recognized the strokes from the framed costume prints on the hallway walls outside. On the drafting board, unfinished, Mrs. Campbell noodled the white piano's middle scale in three-quarter profile, surrounded by pencil sketches in long view and close-up fixed with pushpins to the board. Her expression, glistening in fresh oils, was serene.

The art was good, pleasing at least to my monstrously untrained eye, and I'd rather have spent the time looking at it than at the old plant. But since I was fated to while away a good part of the night inside I needed to scope it out. Also the room reeked of turpentine and my eyes were burning just fine without help. I raised the double-hung window eight inches and wedged an aerosol can of fixative under the sash.

Rayellen Stutch came in dressed in a shimmering copper-colored scoopneck top without sleeves, white pleated slacks with flared cuffs, and soft brown slippers with moccasin stitching. The slippers underscored her resemblance to an Indian princess. Her black hair spilled uninterrupted to her shoulders and her eyes were as dark as tamarack. She stopped when she saw me.

“You look awful,” she said.

“Thanks. I feel horrible. Are you part Indian?”

“Dutch, I'm told. Stutch the Dutch.” She smiled briefly. “All the blonde genes spilled through the hole in the dike before I came along. Please sit down. You look as if you're about to collapse.”

I shook my head. “I'll just lean here. You'd have to pry me back up. The only thing holding me together is a whole lot of whiskey, a little bit of caffeine, and a quarter mile of athletic tape. Nice portrait.” I tilted an eyebrow toward the oil on the drafting table.

“Just a doodle. If I could catch on canvas what comes out of the piano, well.” She left it. “What in the world happened? Mrs. Campbell said you'd called to cancel lunch.”

“An oversight. I haven't eaten in so long I forgot how to chew.”

She was out of the room before I could put a period on it. The music next door stopped, voices murmured. Mrs. Stutch came back in. “I hope eggs and coffee are all right,” she said. “I didn't dine here last night, so there are no leftovers. Mrs. Campbell was going to shop this morning, but that was when we were expecting guests for lunch.”

I said eggs would be fine, ducking the implied question at the end. I asked her how the fundraiser went.

“I suppose it was a success. I don't like putting the arm on people. Becoming wealthy and staying that way is hard work, as I said, but I'm expected to make people feel guilty for not giving something
back
, as if they stole it or swindled it. Anyway, we don't need a new library, just more space for books. Instead we're going to have a media center.”

“Was Thorpe there?”

“No. He never attends these things. About the most he does is pose for pictures in his office giving someone a check.” She paused with lips parted. “Is there some reason that's important?”

“I wanted to see if you were backing his play. If you were, you might alibi him. Or maybe not. It would be easy to find out from someone else if he was there. But I know he wasn't, so I'm just spilling words.” I took a deep breath and spilled some more. I didn't stop until I got to Ray Montana. Her skin paled beneath the tan. She drew the chair out from the drafting table and sat down. It was a tall chair. We were almost eye to eye.

“This Iris was a friend?”

“Why does everyone ask that?” I said. “And what's it matter? She's as dead as Pharaoh and David Glendowning.”

“I don't believe Connor had anything to do with it. Murder and kidnapping. Why?”

“From the start he didn't like your looking for your husband's daughter and granddaughter. You said yourself he dragged his feet when you wanted to put him on it. He told me when he sent me to you he hoped nothing would come of it. I'm pretty sure he set those cops on me when I was leaving this house. He knew they wouldn't scare me off, being six feet and one inch of real man with assorted attachments, but they might rattle me enough at the outset to take the fun out of the detail work. When that fizzled, he put Proust on me, to follow me around in that brown Chevy and find out what I found out when I found it out.

“Proust was a little rusty at first; I spotted him. After that he got better, or else he pulled a rotation on me. He'd still have contacts on the local force. They didn't have to know what it was about. When it came time to do Glendowning and then me, he went solo. Also the kidnap. That schnook Glendowning only got tagged because it had to be done with his truck. That was a shame, maybe. He was talking about getting himself straightened around.” I didn't not believe it, but I didn't believe it, either. When someone's dead you're supposed to say something nice about him, and I hadn't liked his haircut.

“But what does Connor have to gain?”

“I'll ask him with this.” I'd snapped the Chief's Special back onto my belt. Now I unholstered it and slapped it down on the windowsill.

She looked at it without recoiling. Well, she was born in Brooklyn.

“Where? Not in the plant.” She glanced out the window involuntarily.

I folded my arms and said nothing. I was too tired to play it any way but out of an old melodrama.

She nodded then. “That's right. You said something about my backing his play.”

“I got the phrase from someone this morning. Some things stick. Like who stands to gain the most if one of Stutch's heirs doesn't come out of the hospital and another vanishes from the interstate and is never heard from again.”

“I hired you to find them, have you forgotten?”

“That was before you knew Cecilia Willard had a great-grandson. That's four of you splitting thirteen million a year. You might have to take in boarders.”

“I could have let the thing stay dead and kept the whole thing. I would anyway. The bulk of the estate went to Leland's grandson. Most if not all of it will come out of his portion.”

I picked up the revolver. She didn't move or react, just sat on the tall stool with her slim ankles intertwined.

“One thing my marriage taught me is the law belongs to the side with the most lawyers,” she said. “If I had to, I could tie up the courts until young Matthew's reading
Modern Maturity
.”

That rang like coin. I holstered the gun.

“Where else if not the plant?” I asked. “He's always there.”

“You won't get in. It's built like—”

“I know what it's built like. I know the footage and the stresses and the name of the architect. The reason it's built like that is the reason he's holding the boy there, if the boy's alive. It's designed to turn away a mob. Only I'm not a mob. A drop of water can sweat through a dam built to hold back a river.”

“But how will you get out?”

“That's the part I'm still working on.” I hadn't told her yet about my talk with Montana. I realized then I never would, although I trusted her far enough now not to run to Thorpe with the information. It wouldn't take more than an ounce of common sense to talk me out of what I'd rigged up.

She shook her head, sending blue shimmers through that fall of hair. “I didn't hire you for a suicide mission. I'd rather pull the plug than let you go in there alone. I don't go there myself, although ostensibly I own it. It's Connor's lair. What he has with the men under him is something I can't buy.”

“It's a guy thing. You wouldn't understand.”

“I don't have to.” She wasn't smiling. “All I have to do is fire you.”

“Go ahead. I fire easy.”

“Will you walk away if I do?”

“Not so easy. The world's turned. My neck and my ankle will heal, expenses cover that. They don't cover Iris or Glendowning or Constance in the hospital or little Matthew, whose world is shot to hell and he knows even less about why than we do. If he's alive. Then there's the posthumous frame I was supposed to stick my head through in Toledo. I don't worry so much about myself, but I do care what happens to my corpse. Those things have to come out of Thorpe.”

“Those things are what police are for.”

“This town doesn't have police. The real police would have to clear jurisdiction through what wears the uniform here. That would be followed by a call to Thorpe asking what time would be convenient for a raid. I might as well call him on your bill and leave the taxpayers a little more to bribe the trash man with.”

“I'm the town's richest citizen. I know a bit about money and power. I wasn't brought up in Walnut Grove, and I wasn't out diddling the pool boy while Leland was on the telephone, wheeling and dealing in both hemispheres. If it's muscle you need—”

“Knowing the vocabulary doesn't mean you speak the language,” I said. “Hiring leg-breakers takes almost as much practice as breaking legs. You never know where they've been, for one thing. Around here they've probably all broken legs for Thorpe. When push comes to shove they might forget whose legs they're being paid to break this time out.” I was talking too much about breaking legs. My own conversation was beginning to taste as bad as Muriel's coffee. “Anyway, I've got it covered.”

“Covered how?”

I pushed away from the windowsill. “The less you know about that part of the operation, the fewer questions you'll be expected to answer when the authorities come around. And they'll come around, sure as winter. As a matter of fact, it'd be best if you fired me right now. That way everything I do from here on in I do as a free agent.”

“If I fire you now, can I re-hire you later?”

“No comment. That might be one of the questions they'll ask.” I waited.

She unhooked her ankles, hooked them the other way. “You're fired.”

“What, no severance package?”

She smiled for the first time in forever. Then she became as solemn as an Indian; “as a Dutchman” didn't answer. “When are you going in?”

“As soon as I get some sleep. I've been running on fumes since sunup. I'm putting into a motel. I expect the cops at my place anytime. The real cops.”

“Do you have a bag?”

“In the pickup.”

“Bring it in. I'll have Mrs. Campbell make up a guest room while you're eating.”

I'd forgotten about eating. I hoped I didn't nod off with a wad of eggs in my throat.

“I've been here too long already. If someone spots that pickup, I'm finished.”

“Pull it into the garage.”

“You'd be harboring a fugitive. There's a buzzer out on me in two states.”

“Don't fight me on this one,” she said. “You're too tired to win twice in one afternoon.”

I didn't try. Lead was creeping into my extremities and darkening the edges of my brain.

I'd parked the Ram behind the house, where it wouldn't be visible from the street in case some prowlie had read his sheet, but that wouldn't stop a neighbor from coming around to borrow a cup of money and going away to spread the word the Widow Stutch was entertaining a visitor. One of a pair of electric doors opened in the garage with almost no noise at all and I parked next to a bratty European sports job with a maroon finish that went down a block. There was a row of gleaming hoods beyond it, another roadster and a stretch Cadillac for show and a Land Rover Defender standing tall on tires the size of Volkswagens, in case a safari broke out. I wondered who took care of them all. Mrs. Campbell, maybe, when she wasn't playing the piano or moving furniture. You just didn't know what the house contained at a glance; including its owner, who painted portraits and offered to raise an army of muscle. Old Man Stutch had recognized a bargain when he saw it.

The door thrummed shut as I scooped my bag from the narrow space behind the seat. No garage door I'd ever seen moved half as fast with so little fanfare. Mrs. Campbell took the bag away from me at a side door. I followed her through a pantry the size of my living room into an acre of bright kitchen hung with copper utensils like mission bells, and sat down at a painted country table that belonged in Mt. Vernon, set with china and six forks.

The eggs were omelets, golden brown, stuffed with peppers and onions and cheese, smothered in a cream sauce. I yawned my way through two helpings and half a pot of coffee. After that I floated off on someone's arm—I think it was Rayellen Stutch's—to an upstairs bedroom done in mauve and silver, with a tall bureau and a big oak four-poster festooned with some kind of netting, or maybe that was just my vision beginning to cloud. At least the window looked out on a part of Iroquois Heights that didn't include the damn plant.

I'd torn up the road back and forth between two states on three different sets of wheels, been in an accident, had a gun stuck at me, been sassed at by three different kinds of crook and caught one in the breadbasket from a fourth, stumbled over a corpse (first of the year), and managed to lose three people under my protection, at least one permanently, since the last time I'd closed my eyes. Just another day in the life of a self-employed screw-up. I needed twelve hours. I told whoever helped me to the bed to wake me in four.

I was left alone to undress and unwind the tape from my ankle, which I did without worrying what I would substitute in its place. The ankle was striped violet and purple and a gay shade of yellow, but the swelling didn't look any worse for all the time I'd been spending on it. Those ambulance boys were worth more than what they were paid, an epidemic condition in our booming economy. I tossed the coils onto the nightstand next to my revolver in its holster. My neck was stiffer than ever. I would need that brace soon if I didn't want to walk around like Ed Sullivan for the rest of the year, but where I was headed it would just be in the way.