Angel Eyes (17 page)

“I’ve lived here only fifteen years, and I couldn’t find anyone who had been around at that time who remembered the Whitings. Apparently they kept to themselves, because there was nothing about them in any of the other papers I read. As a last resort I drove out to the Methodist Home and spoke to Agnes Gooding. She held down this desk for seventeen years, until she suffered a stroke eight years ago that left her deaf in one ear and confined to a wheelchair. She remembered Janet Whiting very well indeed.”

She paused. I smoked and waited. When it became evident that I wasn’t going to press her, she continued.

“Until her husband died and she moved into the village, Agnes lived next door to the Whitings. Janet was a shy girl, rather awkward because she was growing up too fast physically. She loved movies and romantic stories. In those days the old theater was still operating and she went down there every Saturday night. Every week the garbage can in front of her parents’ house was jammed full with trashy magazines—love stories and like that. She probably wasn’t a good student, because with all that dreaming she wouldn’t have had much time for homework. I can’t verify that; fourteen years ago the old school building was gutted by fire and all the records were destroyed. Fortunately, this was stored in a corner where the flames didn’t reach.”

She extracted a thin volume from the deep drawer of the desk and opened it atop the bound newspapers. For some time she flipped through slick pages covered with pictures of boys in football uniforms and girls in cheerleaders’ sweaters until she came to a two-page spread of inch-square portraits and swiveled the book toward me, placing a finger on a picture in the third row. A plain-looking girl with straight dark hair cut in bangs across her forehead looked back at me with eyes as big as half dollars. She wasn’t smiling.

You see them in every high school yearbook, the one member of the class who has nothing to smile about. It was just a picture, one millisecond out of a lifetime, but it said more to me than anything else had thus far in the investigation. I said, “She doesn’t look happy.”

“There’s no reason she should,” said Maggie. “That was taken during her freshman year, the year she left town. Agnes said she tried out once for the cheerleading squad but didn’t make it, probably because she was too gangling to perform the routines. Not long afterward her parents enrolled her in a dancing academy in Ann Arbor, ostensibly to teach her grace. Agnes doesn’t know what the results were.”

“I do,” I said. “She could dance rings around Travolta.”

“You couldn’t prove it by me. I’m still coming to the juicy part. You know that she left town with her parents at the age of fourteen. What you don’t know is why.”

“My information is that the firm her father worked for moved to Detroit.”

“That much is true. But that wouldn’t have made them move. George Whiting retired the year before.”

I dragged all the good out of my cigarette and killed the butt in the ashtray. “That I didn’t know.”

“I said so. Janet wasn’t a particularly pretty girl. She was too tall and hadn’t learned yet how to handle herself. But she had beautiful eyes, according to Agnes. Big, blue, and innocent. Details like that are very attractive to some men.”

“I’m beginning to get what you mean.”

“There’s a house out on Pinedale Road,” she went on, ignoring the comment. “It belonged to one of our leading citizens—meaning richest—who died about three months ago. It’s a secluded place surrounded by woods and overlooking a private lake. The owner used to rent it out during the summer to folks from the city.

“Twenty-four years ago, a man who gave his name as Peter Martin was living there. Fortyish, Agnes said, dark and rather handsome in a brutish sort of way. He was seen in town only once, when he stepped into the hardware store to buy fishing tackle. Janet Whiting happened to be in the store at the same time, running an errand. They were seen talking, and after Martin had made his purchase they left together. The clerk gathered that he had asked her for directions to someplace, and assumed that they had gone outside so that she could gesture.

“An hour later, George Whiting called the store looking for his daughter. When the clerk told him what had happened, he called the police. They went out to the house on Pinedale, and sure enough, there was Janet. Martin told the officers he had merely invited her over to sample some of the trout he had caught that morning, in return for the help she had given him in finding the place he was looking for. She backed him up, and since she didn’t seem to be harmed they took no further action, just brought her home. A week later Martin went back to Detroit. That might have been the end of it, except that the Whitings left town after another few months. Agnes said that Janet had begun to gain weight by that time.”

“Does she think she was pregnant?”

Maggie smiled wickedly. “The odds are in favor of it. But I’m still coming to the good part.

“The clerk wasn’t the only witness to what happened in the hardware store. There was a customer, a retired truck driver, who had seen Martin a couple of times in Detroit, though they had never actually been introduced. Only he knew him by a different name.”

I waited. Her smile was diabolic, her eyes sharp as glass shards.

“Phil Montana,” she finished.

The telephone bell made me jump. She speared the receiver and barked the name of the newspaper into the mouthpiece. Someone wanted to place a classified ad. She put on her glasses, jotted down the information in shorthand on a yellow scratch pad, got the caller’s name and address, read it back, said, “Thank you,” and hung up. Her eyes returned to me.

“Caught you off guard, didn’t I?”

“It wasn’t the name I expected,” I admitted. “Is this truck driver still around?”

She nodded. “In the cemetery west of town. He’s been dead ten years at least.”

“The house on Pinedale. Who owns it now?”

“Some firm in Detroit; I don’t remember the name. It’s been closed for some time. Would you like me to look it up?”

I shook my head. “Do you think they’d mind if I drove out and took a look at the place?”

“They don’t have to know about it. The less anyone in that city hears from us, the better. But you’ll never find it by yourself. I’d better go with you.”

“What’ll it cost me?”

“Not a damn cent.” She stood. “School’s letting out right now. There are a couple of little girls that run over here every afternoon and beg me to take their picture for the paper. I’m too soft to refuse and film’s too expensive to waste. I’d rather just be out when they get here.” She went over to collect her purse.

“You’re soft,” I said, getting up and putting on my hat. “Like a destroyer escort.”

She grinned.

We drove under the viaduct and along a scenic blacktop that wound past rows of subdivisions, stop-and-go party stores with gasoline pumps in front, an occasional lake, and a lot of real estate offices in what had been private homes. The sun was warm on the pavement, and here and there pretty girls of about seventeen were walking home from school in shorts with their books in one hand and their shoes in the other. Seeing them made me ache, not from sexual frustration, but from nostalgia. My passenger rode with her eyes trained straight ahead.

“What have you got against Detroit?” I asked her.

“Nothing, as long as it stays put and leaves us alone. At the present moment, more than half of Huron’s population works in the city and commutes back and forth. Nothing wrong with that either, except that the population of the village itself hasn’t changed in twenty years. They come swarming out here and buy up all the farmland and cut it up into acre and half-acre lots and put up
GO TRESPASSING
signs like they’re land barons.

When I first came here there were sixteen houses along this road. Now there are six hundred. They raise their brat kids the way they were raised. As a result, we average more incidents of breaking and entering and vandalism than any neighborhood of comparable size in Detroit. And it doesn’t stop there.

“Not long ago some social worker got the idea that juvenile delinquency withers and dies when surrounded by trees and grass. So they invoked public domain, booted the farmers and homeowners off the property they inherited from their grandfathers, and started building parks. All right, so the few must make sacrifices for the welfare of the majority. That’s democracy. Only there are five thousand acres of parks within a twenty-mile radius of Huron and they’re planning to build more. And they wonder why our grandchildren will be eating earth-worms for nutrition.”

“I get you.”

“I’m not finished yet,” she said.

“I was afraid of that.”

“The city’s in financial trouble. So is my brother-in-law, and for the same reason—because he can’t handle money. He asked me for a loan, but what did he ever do for me? I said no. Now we aren’t speaking. Fine. I never liked him anyway. But it doesn’t work that way with the city. The mayor goes to his buddy the governor and says, ‘Look, we need sixty million dollars or I won’t be able to keep up the payments on my new limo.’ The governor says, ‘Sure thing; didn’t you contribute to my campaign fund last election?’ and kicks up taxes all over the state. When we complain he reminds us that if Detroit falls, so does Michigan. That bothers me, that does. I can just see them throwing a barricade across the state line with a sign:
GONE OUT OF BUSINESS
.”

“Nice speech,” I said. “Except the mayor’s a Democrat and the governor’s GOP. They don’t contribute to each other’s campaigns.”

“Not so you’d notice. Turn here.”

A dirt road angled off to the left through steepening hills cloaked in tall trees. As we started the climb: “I bet two other people had this same conversation twenty years ago.”

“Could be,” she agreed. “Only it’s worse since Watergate. The American people are so inured to scandal that they’ve given up hope on anything better.”

She was silent for the rest of the trip. There were few houses in this area. Those we saw were perched atop hills and all but invisible behind shrouds of evergreen and budding maples. At length she pointed at a rutted driveway winding up through thick growth, its mouth flanked by gray concrete pillars with vines growing out of the cracks and blocked by a weathered wooden gate secured with a chain and padlock.

“We’ll leave the car here,” she directed. “Go up on foot.”

I pulled the Cutlass as far as it would go onto the weeded apron and we got out. There was just space enough between one of the pillars and the tangled brush for one person to squeeze through. I let her go first. From there we hiked for a solid mile along the twisting path, which inclined with each turn. The earth was still moist and slippery from last night’s rain. After a hundred yards I began to sweat. I loosened my tie and peeled off my jacket and threw it over my shoulder. My shirt clung to my back. Maggie, who had left her purse in the car, chugged along as steadily as if she were crossing Huron’s main street. She wasn’t even breathing hard. I decided it was all those years of good clean country air, and found myself hating her.

The house was an A-frame, rare in its day but now as common in woodsy settings as gum wrappers on a sidewalk. From a high peak, the shingled roof canted all the way to the ground on either side of the glassed-in front. The glass was tinted so that we couldn’t see inside.

I walked around the building while I waited for my breath to catch up with me. Behind it the hill rose for another forty feet before it rounded off, its crest jagged with pine and cedar. Maggie was standing where I had left her when I completed the circuit.

“How long has the place been empty?” I asked.

She shrugged. “The former owner stopped renting it not long before he died. Too much trouble with the tenants. No one’s lived there for several months.”

“Is there a caretaker?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then how do you explain these?” I pointed at the ground at my feet. She came over to look. A set of footprints showed clearly in the mud between the stone foundation and the overgrown lawn.

“A prowler,” she suggested. “Or maybe there is a caretaker.”

“If it was a caretaker, he’d have a key to the padlock on the gate. He’d drive up rather than suffer that hike. No one’s driven up that road since the rain or there’d be tire tracks. I think we’d better—”

Inside something crashed.

B
IRDS SANG IN THE
stillness that followed the sudden noise. It meant nothing to them. Up high, wind moaned in the pines, an eerie, half-human wail. We listened, but nothing significant developed.

“On the other hand, it might have been a squirrel,” said Maggie. “They cause a lot of damage in these empty cabins.”

“We’ll know soon.” From my wallet I drew my photostat license and tested the lamination between thumb and forefinger for stiffness. Then I tried inserting it between the doorlatch and the jamb. It didn’t work. It never does, for me.

“What are you doing?”

I hadn’t heard Maggie moving in closer. When I came down from the roof I said, “Nothing, apparently. We’ll have to smash the lock.”

“What do you mean ‘we,’ paleface?”

I glanced at her. She looked about as nervous as a pothole in the road. “If you’d rather not be part of this, you can wait for me back at the car.”

“Aren’t you afraid of being eaten by a bear? That’s the first thing you city folks think of when you’re out in the country all alone.”

“Lady, I grew up in this country, not fifteen miles from where we’re standing. The nearest bear is on a billboard asking people to prevent forest fires. I won’t start kicking in the door until you’re out of earshot.”

“Kick it in. I’m sixty-three years old and I’ve never seen the inside of a jail. I might as well experience everything I can while I’m still able to enjoy it.”

“You’d be disappointed.”

It was an old lock of the turn-and-snap variety, not a dead bolt. I shattered it in two kicks. The door flew inward and bounced back to hit me in the shoulder, not very hard. Wishing I hadn’t left my Luger in the glove compartment, I motioned Maggie behind me and palmed the door open slowly, keeping to one side. No bullets ricocheted off the jamb. I stepped over the threshold.