The Detroit Electric Scheme (23 page)

She rolled over just far enough to look into my eyes. “I don't owe you anything,” she spat. “I wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for you.”

“My God, Elizabeth!” I shouted, slamming my fist into the wall. “I know that! But unless you let me help you . . .” I took a deep breath and gathered myself. “Unless you let me help you, unless you tell Adamo, he's going to kill you, Lizzie.” I dropped to the floor next to her. “I can't let that happen. Please, Lizzie . . . What will it do to your mother and father if you never come home? They love you. You won't just be letting Adamo help you commit suicide. You'll be killing your parents at the same time.”

She hesitated, then in a voice so quiet I barely heard her, she said, “He takes bribes.”

 

I knelt on the dirty floor next to Elizabeth. “Who does your father take bribes from?”

“The DUR and—well, companies, mostly. But I know that every Friday a DUR man delivers lunch to my father at his office. Inside the lunch is a hundred-dollar bill.”

It made sense. Since Mayor Pingree in the 1890s, the city had battled the streetcar companies for lower fares. When Detroit United Railway bought up all the lines to create a streetcar trust, the situation got worse. Many people couldn't afford the nickel fare, and the population explosion in Detroit made it virtually impossible to get a seat on any car. For the past ten years, the city had been trying to break up the DUR, take over the lines, or force them to lower fares. The DUR had recently sued to keep the case from leaving circuit court. So far, even though the public continued to suffer, that court had ruled on the side of Detroit United Railway.

Judge Hume presided over the circuit court.

“I think it's Friday today,” I said. “Will you tell Adamo?”

She sniffled and wiped her nose on my handkerchief. “I don't know.”

A dog started barking in the apartment behind us. I reached out for Elizabeth's shoulder. “Just do what I said. Tell your father about it. He
can stop taking the money. Adamo won't be able to get any evidence, and I'll be able to get you the hell out of here.”

After a moment she nodded her head.

The barking got louder. A man in the next apartment shouted in Italian. I heard a sharp
crack
. The dog yelped and began whimpering.

We waited for Vito Adamo. A woman shouted something at the man in the apartment behind us. He shouted back. They argued for a few minutes, a door slammed, and the man stomped down the hallway, his footsteps like rifle shots on the warped wooden floor. The apartment was quiet again. Elizabeth lay on the mattress, coughing and shivering, her legs shaking, kicking out.

Around ten, Vito Adamo's driver walked into the bedroom. Adamo followed him, twirling a black derby on his finger. “Do you have something to tell me?”

Elizabeth pushed herself upright and shoved the greasy hair out of her face. “If I do, you'll let us go?” Somehow, even under these circumstances, she sounded imperious.

“Of course. I am a man of my word.”

She explained her father's secret to him. When she finished, Adamo consulted his pocket watch. “
Perfetto.
We will observe the judge today at lunch. If it is as you say, I will release you.”

The Adamo brothers left, and the driver took Salvatore's spot at the table. I asked Elizabeth if she was sure this happened every Friday. She said she was, though she didn't look very certain to me. While we waited for them to return, Elizabeth lay down again. Her stomach began cramping, and she retched, over and over, nothing more than stomach acid coming up. She was becoming dehydrated.

“We need to get you to a hospital,” I said.

“No.” She wiped her mouth. “No hospitals.”

“But you have to get off heroin. You have to get clean.”

“I know.” I thought I saw some resolve in her eyes. “I will.”

“Then let me take you to a hospital. You need medical care.”

“I won't do that to my family. I won't cause them any more misery.”

I squatted down next to her. “What are you going to do?”

She rolled over and grasped my arm. “Stay here with me.”

“You need a doctor. I don't know what to do.”

“Just stay with me. Help me.”

I tried again, and yet again, to talk her into going to a hospital, but she wouldn't be persuaded. I had to give her credit. Even now, Elizabeth was more concerned about her family than herself.

The Adamos finally came back around two o'clock. Vito folded his arms over his chest and looked at us with a thoughtful expression, as if he were trying to decide something. “I am satisfied. The young man who delivered the money was more interested in keeping his fingers than remaining quiet.” He bent down in front of us with his hands on his knees. “I am going to trust you. You know things about me that could cause me harm. I do not normally allow that.” An amused expression settled on his face. “For some reason, I like you. But please understand. If I even suspect you have gone to the police with this information, I will kill you. Both of you.”

I nodded. “We'll be quiet.”

“
Grazie.
We understand each other.”

“What about my friend?” I said.

Adamo paused for a moment, considering. “I will have someone bring him here. You will need to persuade him that attempting revenge will only get him killed. And you. And Miss Hume.” He straightened and turned to leave.

“Do you swear you and your men had nothing to do with John Cooper's death?” I said.

He turned back to me and shook his head. “I had nothing to do with it. I enjoyed doing business with Mr. Cooper. I had no problems with him.”

I wasn't sure I heard him right. “You did business—What kind of business did you do with John?”

“His employers occasionally need men for work they don't want to do themselves. I help them.” Again, he pantomimed one hand washing the other.

I nodded. The thugs who had beaten the IWW men at the factory
now made sense to me. “How about Frank Van Dam? Did you do business with him, too?”

“To me they were one and the same.”

“Do you know where Frank went?”

Adamo shrugged. “I do not.”

“All right.” Dr. Miller had said it would take a week to purge the drug from Elizabeth's system. If I was going to keep her away from her parents that long, we'd need to stay somewhere unexpected. Her father would have the police looking for her. “I'd like to ask a favor.”

His smile grew larger, and he glanced at his brother, holding his hands in front of him like he was weighing a pair of melons. “The boy has
grande coglione,
eh?” Turning back to me, he said, “What would you like?”

“Can we keep this room until next Thursday?”

He agreed to rent us the room for fifty dollars, only five times the going rate for a decent hotel room. Since I didn't have the money with me, he told me to bring it to Big Boy at the Bucket before the end of the day. I thanked him and shook his hand, wondering as I did at the incongruity of thanking the man who had kidnapped and threatened to kill us. Salvatore handed me a key to the apartment, and they left.

I locked the door and sat with Elizabeth in the bedroom while I waited for Wesley to arrive. An hour or so later, I heard the apartment door slam. The bedroom door opened, and Wesley was shoved into the room, his hands still bound in front of him.

“Thank God,” I said. “Wes, are you okay?”

He shot me a grim smile. The expression clashed with the crusty blood covering one side of his face and the bruises around his eyes. “It would take someone more capable than that lot to hurt me.” He glanced at Elizabeth lying on the floor and took in a sharp breath. “Is that Elizabeth?”

I nodded.

“My Lord.” His eyes didn't leave her, but he held his hands out in front of me.

I began working the knots loose, trying to keep from touching his broken fingers. “Can you stay with her while I get some supplies?”

“Supplies? We need to get her out of here.”

“No. She wants to get off the drugs, but she won't go to a hospital.”

“Let's just take her.”

I untied the final knot and unwrapped the rope from around his wrists. “Wes, I don't know a hell of a lot about drugs, but one thing I do know is that nobody quits unless they want to. She's saying now she wants to quit. If we force her to go to a hospital, she might change her mind. And if the newspapers got wind of it, it would kill her.”

Wesley shook his head vehemently. “There are private hospitals for this sort of thing, Will. This is stupid.”

“I promised her.”

He blew out a breath in frustration. “You are one stubborn SOB.”

I smiled at him. “Thanks. So can you stay?”

“Yes, of course.”

I knelt down next to Elizabeth. “Lizzie?”

Her eyes opened halfway.

“I've got to leave for a little while. Wesley will be here if you need anything.”

Her eyes, pupils dilated, darted toward me and then away. She rolled over on her side, groaning.

 

After a trip to the nearby general store, I returned to the filthy apartment with a fifty-pound bag of coal, another bag filled with supplies, and a pail of water. My head was finally clear, and I felt like I had at least a modicum of energy. Before I went into the bedroom, I set the bags and water on the floor, and hung my duster on the back of the chair in the main room, careful to keep the bottles in its pockets from clanking together.

Wesley opened the bedroom door. When he saw me, he stepped out and pushed the door shut. “She's sleeping.” He had cleaned his face. A one-inch gash had scabbed up on his forehead, surrounded by a bruise that blended into the others around his eyes.

I stopped and stared. “I'm so sorry, Wes. I should never have gotten you involved in this.”

He stared back at me. “How many times do I have to say this? We're friends. Friends help each other.”

“Not like this . . . Thanks, really.” I carried the bag of coal to the little stove in the corner. It was a cast-iron box stove from early in the last century, now more rust than iron. The wall around it was pitch-black from soot. “Before you go, you and I need to talk.”

Wesley cocked his head.

“I know I said we needed to forget about revenge until we found Elizabeth. But as far as Adamo is concerned, I need you to forget about it—period.” While I talked, I emptied the ash box into the pan underneath and started feeding pieces of coal into the stove.

“What? That son of a bitch almost cut your throat, and you want to let him off? You can't be serious.”

I turned to look at him head on. “Wes, Adamo said he'd kill all three of us if we gave him any trouble or went to the police. No matter what we do, he'll kill Elizabeth. We need to file this one away and forget about it.”

He glared at me with his hands on his hips for a moment before looking away. “Yeah, all right. None of those guys was the killer, anyway.”

I walked back to the table and began emptying the bag of supplies—food, clothing, blankets, candles, soap, washcloths, a pair of drinking glasses, tobacco and cigarette papers, and a chamber pot. “How did you figure out so quickly it wasn't Big Boy?”

“The killer didn't move anything like him.” Wesley lumbered around the room in a parody of the muscle-bound Big Boy.

I slid over into the chair, careful not to shake my coat, and began rolling a cigarette.

“The killer was probably as big,” he said, “but he was smooth, graceful.”

“None of those other guys could be the killer?”

Wesley shook his head. “But if Adamo was behind the murders, he's smart enough to hide the killer away somewhere. He's probably on his way to Palermo, or wherever he came from.”

I bit my lip and thought. “I don't think it was Adamo. Maybe he's a better actor than I'd give him credit for, but he seemed genuinely surprised when I accused him.”

“Keep an open mind. Hey, did Edsel ever get back to you?”

“Oh, God.” I dropped the cigarette. I'd forgotten Edsel was on a mission that would send him into a world of hardened criminals and murderers—no place for any sane person, much less a seventeen-year-old boy. “Wes, I need you to call him, warn him off. Tell him to stop everything and stay out of this.”

“He said he wasn't going to do the digging himself. He's a smart kid, Will. He'll be fine.”

“No. Tell him to stop.”

Wesley shrugged. “All right. But keep in mind that with no information from him, Adamo's still our only suspect.”

“You're right. But I'm not risking Edsel's life on this.” I finished rolling the cigarette and held it up to Wesley. He shook his head.

“Oh, speaking of phoning,” I said, “I've got a doctor coming over here. He was going into surgery but said he'd come tonight. I don't suppose you could escort him, could you? He sounded awfully nervous about coming to this neighborhood after dark.”

“Of course I can.”

After I told him where Dr. Miller lived, I stood and walked around the table to Wesley. “If you ever need help with anything—anything—let me know. Until the day I die, I'll do anything I can for you.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “You're the best friend I've ever had.”

He scuffed a shoe on the floorboards in mock embarrassment. “Aw, shoot. I likes you, too.” His smile changed to a puzzled look, and he sniffed the air in front of me. “Did you have a drink?”

I took another step back and lit the cigarette. “Oh, yeah, just one. Clear the mind and all, you know?”

He nodded and smiled, but his eyes were wary.

“I think we're all—Oh, wait,” I said.

“What?”

“Have you got fifty bucks?”

“Not on me, but yeah, 'course.”