You Know Who Killed Me (3 page)

Caller:
Okay, forget it. I'll call the church.

Operator:
If you're certain of your information, withholding it from the authorities is a crime.

Caller:
You'll get it after I talk to the church.

He'd hung up then. He had a deep voice with a hint of a twang. I looked up his name on the sheet taken from the reverse directory: Alvinus C. Adams, 1207 Daniel Boone Drive, Iroquois Heights; a lot of streets got their names from people who fought the Indians the town was named for. It put him a couple of blocks over from the Gateses, a hopeful sign. I finished my morning coffee and dialed the number.

“Hello?” The same voice.

“Mr. Adams? My name is Amos Walker. I'm a private detective.”

“No shit? I thought they went out with black-and-white TV.”

“Not just yet. You called the sheriff's tip line two weeks ago, claiming to know who killed Donald Gates.”

“Where the hell'd you get that?” he said after a silence. “It's supposed to be anonymous.”

I'd lain awake much of the night working on an explanation. I'd decided just to duck it.

“How far did you get with Christ Church?”

“What's it to you?”

“I'm guessing from your attitude you didn't get far.”

“I didn't get dick, same as from the law. Why do they set up tip lines and offer
re
wards if they don't want the help?”

“If your information's good, I might be able to help you get half that reward.”

“Who gets the other half, as if I don't know the answer already?”

I grinned at the empty seat opposite me in the breakfast nook.

“Mr. Adams, that's the most pointless question I've ever been asked. Did you mean what you said about Gates's murderer?”

“I'll axe you the same question I axed the bitch at the sheriff's. What's to keep you from taking what I give you and keeping the whole thing for yourself?”

“Have you got a pencil?”

“Sure I got a pencil. I just ain't got a job. That's why I'm going against ten generations of Adamses and turning stool pigeon. What am I writing?”

I gave him the names and numbers of three references, one of them a congressman who'd served his Michigan district more than thirty years. “Ask them the same thing you asked me. You can believe them or not, but there will be a record you asked, which would make it difficult for me to snipe you out of what you've got coming.”

“What's your name again?”

I repeated it.

“Then again, you could be somebody else saying you're Walker, and nobody'll ever know who took that money.”

“You just screw yourself into bed every night, don't you?”

“I wasn't born this way, pal.”

“They'd know at Christ Church who took the money. But after you make those calls—and the numbers are easy enough to check, in case you think they belong to accomplices—we'll meet, and I'll show you my bona fides. What've you got to lose?”

“Not my job, that's for sure.” He took my numbers, home, office, cell, and the call was over.

*   *   *

I tried three more numbers from the record, got a recording, no answer, and a harried-sounding woman with children slaughtering each other in the background who told me her husband wouldn't be home till six. I thanked her and said I'd call then. I didn't leave my name or any message.

I opened the folder again. Christ Episcopal Church, the Gateses' place of worship, had stood near downtown Detroit since 1863. Its current pastor was Florence Melville.

My ear was sore from holding the receiver against it. A little face-to-face spirituality is never a bad idea.

When I put the cordless phone back in its cradle in the living room, the card the tough little blond doctor had given me poked out from under the standard. It belonged to a private therapist in Redford Township; but it wasn't the time to make good on the deal.

The Cutlass's cold engine turned over twice and caught. On the way to the river I saw another
“YOU KNOW WHO KILLED ME!”
billboard, Donald Gates smiling in his festive sweater. I might have seen it before, but only through a cloud that still hadn't quite passed.

The sign didn't mention the reward, but it was the widow behind the advertising, not the church.

I peeled the cigarette I'd just lit from my lip, wound the window down two inches, and poked it into the slipstream. It had all the flavor of a toothpick. My belly ached and the “Jingle Bells” dogs were barking in my head. You know you're going to survive when you least feel like it.

I paralleled the chalk-gray water until I got to Rivard and swung into the parking lot next to the old pile.

The churches are almost all that's left from the days before Henry Ford, and there isn't much left from those days either. The city is North America's leading manufacturer of vacant lots. Christ Episcopal has loads of spiked railings for pigeons to curl their toes around and a belfry screaming for bats and plenty of them. It's probably haunted. All the self-respecting spirits have moved out of city hall.

There was no service in progress. In the echoing nave, a novice or whatever he was stopped pushing his carpet sweeper to direct me to the rectory. I went that way, smelling candle wax, furniture oil, and dust. I'd been raised Episcopalian, but had drifted. It was the first time in many years I felt the urge to genuflect. I resisted; the saints in the alcoves were watching, and they didn't get there by being gullible. The non-martyrs, anyway.

I needed a battering ram to make sure my knock would be heard on the other side of the rectory door, but after a second a voice called out for me to enter. The door swung open easily on a system of counterweights or something and I eased it shut behind me. The ceiling was high enough to vanish beyond reach of the sunlight coming through the leaded-glass window. Gray as it was, the light was still bright enough to blur the figure sitting at a desk in front of it.

The desk itself resembled a beached Spanish galleon, all beveled panels and carved laurels, with a red leather top. There was plenty of red in that room, in the deep rug framed all around by eight inches of polished floor, in a dim gilt-bordered painting of some bloody biblical battle leaning out from the wall on guy wires, and in a bronze pen stand studded with garnets on the near edge of the desk. Red's the boss color in the spectrum of the faith. It took me back to the red front door on St. Erasmus, a long time ago.

Erasmus: put to death, they said, by having his intestines unwound from his body by a windlass. I'd let go of just about everything else I'd learned there, but I wasn't about to forget that.

“Yes?” The woman behind the desk looked up from her writing.

“Reverend Melville?”

“Yes,” she said. “
That
Melville, in answer to your next question. Unfortunately the copyright on
Moby Dick
ran out a hundred years before I was born.”

Close up, she was a sturdy brunette with a heart-shaped face and gray eyes behind gold-framed glasses. She wore a white silk blouse with a ruffle and a touch of gloss on her lips; it was a progressive parish, for all its antiquity. A streak of silver started at her hairline to the right of the center part, spreading whisk broom–like for three inches. She wasn't decrepit; I figured her for early thirties. An old church superstition said that when the Call was genuine, it left just such a mark.

Florence Melville smiled. She'd caught the path of my gaze.

“Yes,” she said again. “Started, no doubt, by a clergyman with the same streak. It's a birthmark. It goes as far as the scalp, as I found out when I hit my head on a swing when I was nine and they shaved it to patch me up. Back then I was going to be a country singer.”

“I wanted to be Robert Mitchum.”

“You came close.”

“Don't go by these eyelids. I haven't been sleeping a lot.”

“Is that what you came to talk about?”

You can spend all day making up your mind or letting it make up itself. I spilled the beans.

“My name's Walker, ma'am. I'm a private detective, working with the sheriff's lieutenant in Iroquois Heights on the Gates murder.” I showed her my ID. “I'd appreciate it if that didn't leave this room. Some of the people I might have to ask questions open up easier when they think they're talking to a free agent.”

Her smile went away and a crease of pain split the skin between her eyebrows. “Sit down, please, Mr. Walker.”

I hauled a walnut chair formerly used as a throne by Charlemagne up to the desk and sat. It felt more comfortable than it looked.

The Reverend Melville folded her hands on the yellow pad she'd been scribbling on. “I've met Lieutenant Henty. My guess is he's in favor of keeping your secret.”

“He's a good cop. Unfortunately, he works for a public servant, whose opponents in the next election would say he couldn't do his job without outside help. It's hogwash, but the voters love to watch politicians mud wrestle. Anyway you don't strike me as someone I can string along with a fish story, and I seem to remember something about priests being good at keeping secrets.”

“Most priests, yes. I can't name exceptions without becoming one myself. The Gateses were beloved of this congregation. Whenever volunteers were needed, they were in front of the line. Amelie made items for the bake sale and Don donated a thousand dollars toward the new roof three years ago. Both sold candy bars in front of Wal-Mart to support Youth Camp. To go on would be redundant. Can you tell me anything you've learned about this vile crime?”

“Sorry, no. I just started, and in theory I'm not working the case except to run down some anonymous phone tips. That way those involved with the actual investigation can concentrate on that instead of—”

“Trivia.” She sat back, deflated.

“I was going to say ‘the minutiae.' There wouldn't be a tip line if concerned citizens didn't shed light sometimes.”

“It helps if there's profit in it. I'm sure you know about the reward. It was offered by a loyal parishioner who doesn't want publicity.”

“Then he should button up his pocketbook. Mixing money into a police investigation is like throwing honey on an anthill.”

“May I ask why you're here, if you're not really investigating? I'm not one of your anonymous callers.”

I almost said, “I know”; but you can load someone with only so many secrets before she collapses. “Professional hazard. You can't just nibble at a potato chip.”

“How can I help?”

“For starters, I'd like to talk to whoever put up that reward.”

“Impossible, for the reason I already gave you. Why? Are you that desperate for suspects?”

“The problem with not having any is it makes everyone suspicious. If this party is as loyal to the church as you say, it might be a way of assuaging his or her guilt. On the other hand, it could be a heavy-handed way of diverting suspicion from himself. Herself?”

She didn't rise to that bait. “I can believe the first, although not of this particular person. The second; well, that only works in movies, doesn't it? And not even then.”

“Yeah. The police don't divert so easy. I'd hate to be a close-up magician at a cop convention. All our guilty benefactor would do is call attention away from everyone else. I'd like to talk to him—her—whoever—anyway. If he cares that much, it means he knew the Gateses well. Maybe better than anyone. Disregarding a random killing—and the execution style says this one was personal—the closer I can get to the victim, the closer I can get to the perpetrator.”

“Lieutenant Henty made that same argument. My answer was the same. He didn't like it. He said there's a gray area when it comes to privileged communication—did this offer come out during confession, is it part of confession, or can it be interpreted as a conversation involving two people rather than a priest and a penitent? I wouldn't give him even that much. I like it here. How long do you think I'd remain in this assignment once it was learned I betrayed one of the flock?”

I met her gray eyes, hard as polar caps and as cold. “Cops keep secrets too.”

“From their wives, maybe. They're rarely forced to submit written reports at home, and that's one place reporters can't make a stink out of being denied access to what's supposed to be public record. Then, too, Henty works for a politician, as you said. That kind leaks from every orifice.”

“Yuck. Okay, that's dropped. How well did you know Gates?”

She glanced down at the sermon she was writing, or maybe it was a shopping list. Whatever she was looking for there, she found it. She looked at me.

“Nearly as well as Amelie. Don and I dated.”

 

FOUR

“When?”

She lifted a pair of strong eyebrows. “You're not shocked?”

“I've probably heard as many confessions as you, Reverend.”

“At the risk of disappointing you, there was nothing scandalous about it. It was ten years ago, before I was ordained, and before he met Amelie. We grew up in the same neighborhood, in Monroe; not that we knew each other very well then. We met again here when I was attending divinity school and he was installing the traffic computer in Iroquois Heights.

“We didn't have sex,” she said. “I'm not saying we wouldn't have; priesthood in my faith doesn't come with a chastity clause, although premarital relations while I was studying Scripture might have been a stumbling block. I wasn't a virgin. But we figured out fairly early we were meant to be friends, not lovers.”

I hadn't asked. People who respected other people's confidences seldom needed encouragement to talk about themselves.

“What was he like?”

“You mean, without the hazy gloss of death? A nice fellow, but a bit dull. He talked a lot about computers. Sharing his last name with Bill Gates may have had something to do with his career choice. Offhand I'd say the only color in his life was his annual fishing trip to Quebec. That's where he met his wife, after we stopped pretending we had anything in common. She's French-Canadian.”