Sinister Heights Read online

  “That’s what the meeting’s about. Is Thursday good?” I didn’t know if Thursday was good for Rayellen Stutch. If it wasn’t they could work it out. I wanted to be somewhere else than in that pleasant room with those eyes, down on the docks where all you had to stare down were belly guns and rats the size of chimpanzees.

  “Who else will be there? Her lawyers?”

  “Not if you don’t want them. You may want a lawyer there yourself. A witness anyhow. People sometimes forget things they said without someone to remind them, preferably with a writ. Your daughter’s invited too, of course. Mrs. Stutch wants to take care of all the heirs. I’m looking for her, too, to deliver the same message. Do you have her current address? I couldn’t find a listing.”

  She lifted her right hand to stroke her left upper arm, as if it tingled. I wondered if she had a weak heart. The leg of her slacks where she’d been gripping her thigh was a crush of wrinkles.

  “I’m not sure.” She stopped the stroking, but left the hand on her arm. “We haven’t had contact in more than a year. The last I knew she was living in Toledo. She may still be, if that animal she married hasn’t killed her. My daughter made an unhappy match, Mr. Walker, just like her mother. Perhaps your client’s late husband acted in my mother’s best interest after all, when he refused to make an honest woman of her.”

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  I looked at the dog asleep on its bed, for no other reason than the thought that staring too long into Carla Witowski’s eyes might give me cataracts. The dog’s legs twitched and now and then a little whimper made its whiskers ripple. Somewhere it was chasing rabbits and barking in a deep basso profundo.

  “I liked David Glendowning when Constance introduced him to me,” Mrs. Witowski said. “He was a rough cob, but I’ve been around those most of my life. You don’t have to dig back more than a generation in this town to find a blue collar in every family. He drove a truck for a cartage firm in Toledo, a solid occupation and decent pay. He was running for shop steward then. Wanted to make the union his career, so he had ambition, and he watched his manners around me. They seemed to be in love. I didn’t see any reason to meddle beyond that.

  “The wedding took place in Toledo, a small affair in a Methodist chapel. My ex-husband and I were on our best behavior, which means he didn’t try to feel up the maid of honor and I didn’t throw any crystal at him at the reception. We even posed for pictures. If you knew what our marriage came to be, which you won’t because it isn’t any of your business, you’d know what a minor miracle that was.”

  None of this was any of my business, but I didn’t stop her. You never know what might come out of an open window.

  “You’re still a young man, Mr. Walker, but you look as if you’ve taken your share of dings. I’ll tell you a number of things that happened once the Glendownings began married life, and you can tell me what you think they mean. They spent their honeymoon in a resort on Lake Erie. She called me twice during that week. When they got back home she called me every day, at first, then once every few days. By the end of the first month I was hearing from her once a week. The calls got shorter, then farther apart. By their six-week anniversary I was calling her. These calls usually ended in quarrels about unimportant things. Sometimes she’d complain about David’s behavior—he’d taken to leaving her alone most evenings while he drank with his trucker friends in some bar or at their houses, and it got so he wouldn’t spend even an hour with her after coming back from a week on the road before he went out drinking again—but when I agreed he was treating her atrociously, she’d turn square around and defend him, accuse me of interfering. That was when we spoke. Often the phone would ring and ring and nobody would pick up. One time David answered, said Constance wasn’t home, and hung up before I could ask when he expected her back. I’m sure as I am of anything that she was home. Where would she go? All her friends were here, and I’d hear from them now and then asking how Constance was, because they couldn’t get through to her, they said.

  “The next time I got hold of her I asked her about it. There was a pause before she said David had told her about the call, but she’d been preoccupied and forgot to return it. She said she’d gone out to get a few things. I may not be Mother of anyone’s Year, Mr. Walker, but I know when my child is lying to me. She knew nothing about that call until I told her. Does this pattern suggest anything to you?”

  “There’s always the possibility he forgot to tell her. Husbands do that.”

  “If it were as innocent as that, she wouldn’t have felt the need to lie. I asked you a question.”

  “It sounds like the M.O. of the textbook wife abuser: Isolate her from friends and family, turn her against them, make her dependent on him, and treat her like pocket lint until there’s nothing left of her self-respect. Dear Abby runs a checklist twice a year, like the Cosmo quiz. If you score high, you lose.”

  She colored a little when I mentioned Dear Abby. “I eventually fell back on the hackneyed device of clipping out that very column and sending it to her anonymously. I might as well have included my return address. The last time we spoke, she threw it in my face and said I was trying to drive a wedge between her and her husband. I thought it was interesting that she could charge me with David’s crime, but I didn’t get the chance to say so. She said that until I felt like apologizing to her and David for my hatefulness, she didn’t want to hear from me. As I said, that was more than a year ago. I haven’t felt like apologizing in the meantime.

  “The worst part is I haven’t seen my grandson since he was an infant. They were always too busy to come up and visit, or little Matthew was sick. They used variations on the same excuses when I suggested visiting them. Matthew would be three now. Quite a little man.” She lifted her chin, daring me to find any moisture in those dark eyes. The tear ducts might have dried up and blown away.

  I got out my notebook and added the name Matthew Glendowning to the list of Leland Stutch’s heirs. It was getting to be a cottage industry.

  I said, “If you’ll give me Constance’s most recent address and telephone number, I’ll get out of your hair.”

  She gave them to me without getting up to consult anything. “Thank you,” she added.

  “For?”

  “For not saying you’re sorry. That would be just a little more than I could take.”

  “You were wrong about me before, Mrs. Witowski. I’m not still a young man. I’ve got ten years left to call myself middle-aged and I don’t plan to spend them feeling sorry for relative strangers. For what it’s worth, I hope you and your daughter work things out. I don’t guess it’s worth much.” I put away the Stutch family tree and rose. “Thanks for seeing me. Mrs. Stutch will be calling you.”

  “Please tell Constance her mother’s in good health. If you see Matthew”—she shook her head and returned her hand to her thigh—“I’m not in a position to ask favors.”

  “I’ll let you know how he’s doing.”

  She murmured something I didn’t catch, a first in that conversation. Her speech in general was as clear as a seventh-grade English teacher explaining diphthongs. I told her I’d missed it.

  Her chin went up another click to accommodate my manly height. “It’s worth something,” she said. “I said it’s worth something.”

  I just made it outside without disturbing the dog. It started coughing again when the doorlatch snicked home behind me.

  I’d earned half my fee and it was still morning. I grabbed an early lunch at a cafeteria on the Dix Highway and belched onions at the wall by the telephone waiting for someone to pick up in the house in Iroquois Heights. I got Mrs. Campbell. “Mrs. Stutch is out on her bicycle, Mr. Walker. May I take a message?”

  “Just tell her I’m halfway home and I’ll call her from Toledo if I don’t snag a run in my hose.”

  “You’ve found the daughter? That was fast work.” Her voice was warm. “I should tell you Mrs. Stutch and I have few secrets. Has she agreed to a meeting?�
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  “I have plenty of secrets, and I mean to keep them. Please give her the message.”

  “I will. Thank you for calling.” The receiver plopped on her end. Her tone had gone to an early frost.

  I tried the number Carla Witowski had given me for her daughter in Toledo, got a busy signal, smoked part of a cigarette and tried again. Same thing. Well, it was a nice day to drive.

  They were tearing up I-75 again, looking for pirate gold or maybe just for the hell of it, because it didn’t seem as if anything could have gone wrong with it since the last dig, and so I slalomed among orange barrels and got the fantods from stern signs saying FINES DOUBLED IN WORK ZONES all the way to Ohio. At one point I followed a complicated series of detour signs and actually went back in time. My right cheek felt as if it were drawing up, but when I looked at it in the rearview the burn was just a healthy blush. The Red Badge of Stupidity. It didn’t pay to backtalk an Iroquois Heights cop without knowing what they were serving that week at County.

  When I left the lane shifts behind and entered the wide boulevards on the outer edge of Toledo, I cranked into a Total station and used the telephone. The Glendownings’ line was still busy. I bought a city map and charted a route along the southwest shore of Lake Erie. Following it I glimpsed afternoon sunlight sparking off blue water, a couple of sailboats playing midweek hooky out beyond the dirty foam where the lake had no choice but to make contact with the State of Ohio, and far out on the clean horizon the profile of an ore carrier shaped like an overturned telephone receiver, deadheading back to Superior for a fresh load of iron. My skin prickled for no good reason, as it always does when I’ve crossed the Michigan line going the wrong way into Buckeye territory; one hundred sixty years ago, Andrew Jackson deeded the City of Toledo to Ohio, throwing Michigan the Upper Peninsula as consolation for the loss of a key port. The decision was based on the fact that Ohio had more electoral pull, and even though the booby prize was later found to contain the richest copper and iron deposits in the world, nothing runs deeper than an old animus.

  The house was a brick split-level on a street that had come up several notches from its beginnings in the dead center of the American middle class. Some of the original ranch-styles remained with their simple shotgun lines, but a handful of stately Tudors had sprung up where others had been demolished, and a framing crew was at work on a real monster covering two adjoining lots on the corner.

  The driveway of the split-level canted down steeply from the street to an attached garage. I parked in front of the garage and climbed flagstone steps to an exposed front door in a redwood half-wall, above which the 1960s yellow brick had been painted white. The Glendownings, or whoever had owned the place before them, had caught the upwardly mobile bug, but it hadn’t quite taken; the grass needed cutting and hornets had built a nest inside the plate glass of a carriage lamp mounted above the door. The little man sawing wood on a wind-driven lawn ornament didn’t seem to be half trying.

  I pushed the button and listened, but couldn’t hear a bell. When nothing happened I tried the miniature brass-plated knocker. It made a die-cast clink. I tried again with bare knuckles. At the end of thirty seconds, floorboards shifted on the other side and the door opened just wide enough for a face to plug the gap. It was an ordinary sort of male face with pale blue eyes, glinting blonde stubble, and one of those spiky Briggs & Stratton haircuts that a couple of years ago were an ensign of rebellion, but have since spread throughout a generation that isn’t mine. The blue eyes were swimming in blood. I smelled a familiar combination of stagnant male and beer. There were too many layers of the latter to have come from one six-pack.

  I said, “Mr. Glendowning?”

  “That’s the name on the mailbox.” This reply wasn’t nearly clever enough for the length of the pause that had preceded it.

  I showed him my license in its little window. A sheriff’s star, a loaner from Wayne County, was pinned to the bottom half of the folder and I held it so he could see that too.

  He pretended to read the information. It would have taken him twice as long to read both the images he was seeing. “What’s the deal?”

  “I’m a state-licensed private investigator.” For once I left off the “Michigan”; I didn’t have the time required for him to come up with a Wolverine insult. “I tried calling earlier. Your phone is off the hook.”

  “I must have wanted it that way. What’s the deal?” he said again.

  “No deal. I’m here to see Mrs. Glendowning about her inheritance.”

  “No shit. The old lady kicked off?” He looked interested for the first time.

  “If you mean Mrs. Witowski, she’s in excellent health, not counting a bad back. Is your wife at home?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “We had this conversation. If we’re going to have it again I’d prefer Mrs. Glendowning be present so I won’t have to say it a third time.”

  “She’s out. Give me the message and she’ll get back to you.”

  “Do you know when she’ll be home?”

  “I guess you don’t hear so good. Now, what’s this about an inheritance?” He burped in the middle of “inheritance” and had to start it again.

  “I’ll come back later.” I pocketed the folder and turned away.

  “Just a second.” He reached a hand through the gap and closed it on my shoulder. He had a brute of a grip. I remembered he drove a truck; most of the power in a big rig’s power steering is supplied by the operator. I pulled back, not sharply enough to break the grip. It pulled his center of gravity forward and I spun to face him and took hold of the front of his shirt and pulled him the rest of the way through the opening. He stuck his hands out in front of him to avoid landing on his face and I pivoted and planted a foot between his shoulder blades, pinning him to the concrete stoop: I’d learned the first move from the army. The second was made in Detroit.

  “Son of a bitch.” He was talking to the concrete, but I felt the resonance all the way to my knee.

  “Rewind,” I said. “Where’s your wife?” Let me up.

  I tried to think of a good reason why I should let him up. I don’t like standing on many complete strangers and damn few friends. I couldn’t think of one.

  Then he gave me one. “I got blood pressure issues.”

  I took my foot off his back and stood clear while he pulled himself hand over hand up the doorframe. When he was upright I watched him set his feet with his back to me, watched with clinical interest. I moved my head out of the way when he swung his fist, then stepped in and clipped his chin in a short straight uppercut. His mouth shut with a clop and light evaporated from his eyes. I caught him under the arms when he sagged and we went inside.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  We went down a step into a sunken living room that smelled as if it had gone down with the Armada. It was carpeted in deep pile from which Glendowning’s heels dragged up dust and strips of cellophane from cigarette packages past as I hauled him backward toward the nearest chair. This was a fat gray recliner that went into its act when I dumped him into it, stretching its spine and swinging up its footrest. My host had on a blue twill shirt, faded jeans, and white athletic socks with dirty black soles, no shoes. From the smell he had had them all on for days, or had put on the same ensemble every day for a week. If there was an ashtray under the bent cigarette butts on the end table by the chair, or for that matter an end table under the squat brown beer bottles, I would have needed a shovel to find them. There were more bottles on a glass coffee table, atop a bookcase filled with Time-Life books in sets and on the TV cabinet a Curtis Mathes in dark walnut. When I started to walk across the room, I kicked a bottle that rolled in a half-circle and came to rest with its neck pointed at me. I didn’t feel like kissing anyone. The room was too close for that, or anything else except Greco-Roman wrestling. I found the switch to the ceiling fan and tipped it up. The blades came around in a lazy swoop, stirring the socks and dead tobacco and beer into a kind of
gay collage: Jersey City Locker Room, 1933.

  Glendowning was snoring, the grackles and plooeys drowning put the hum of the fan. The TV was on with the sound turned down. I watched a white golf ball arch against a blue Augusta sky and plop onto a green that looked as if it had been dipped in the dye they used for the Irish flag. The spectators in the gallery applauded in silence. There were brown smears of grime on the corners of the glass screen. Everything in the room was dusty except the beer bottles. My reflection was dusty in the glass of a framed poster from the Toledo Art Museum above a gas fireplace, and a dustbunny the size of a Chihuahua, coaxed from hiding by the fan, scudded across my shoe and caught in the skirt of a sofa upholstered in Sunday sports sections. It left a mark on my toe that made me think of a snail. Instinctively I scrubbed my toe against the carpet. That only made it worse. I was beginning to get the idea. Mrs. Glendowning wasn’t at home.

  The man of the house was out of the inning. I went through an arch into a kitchen with crumbs and crusty spills on every horizontal surface. The dishwasher was jammed with dirty plates and cups and knives with their wicked tips pointing up. The double sink was a graveyard of pots and pans. It didn’t take a geologist to identify the stratum where the utensils had run out and the takeout had come in; a trail of ants as straight as a plumbline led from a baseboard across the linoleum and up the steel leg of the kitchen table to a forest of open cardboard containers. I opened the refrigerator, then closed it quickly against the stench. There ought to have been a Sell By date on the door.

  I opened the door next to the pantry and descended gridded metal steps to the rubber-smelling garage. I switched on the overhead bulbs and looked at a new Dodge Ram parked on the near side, spotless white and nearly seven feet tall on high-rider tires. An oil stain marked the concrete on the other side where there was room for another vehicle. The fact that he was still parking to one side meant nothing. Some habits are hard to break, and hope springs eternal, if you read the poets and believe what they wrote. I put out the light and went back upstairs.