The Glass Highway (18 page)

C
ALL IT CLAIRVOYANCE
or crackpot reckoning or a dream’s passing shadow, but it happens. At ten past three the next morning I sat straight up in bed, convinced that Paula Royce was still in the area.

I told myself those things you trot out when a batty idea keeps you awake. I was wrong to begin with, and even if I was right there was nothing I could do about it right away, and probably not at all, and even if I could what business was it of mine? That didn’t work. It had never been any business of mine from the start.

Why was the Justice Department burning good daylight tailing a busted cop? Not, as Theodore Grundy had intimated, because they were afraid I’d foul their ponderous machinery single-handed. Even Congress couldn’t do that, although it had tried often enough. If I were that much of a danger, they could have taken me out of the picture in less time than it takes a waiter to spit in your eye after you’ve tipped him a quarter. A search of my car alone would turn up the unregistered Luger, which in Michigan is good for a year of planting trees along state highways if the judge feels like leaning.

The papers had filled plenty of space from the official police line that I was the last person to see Paula after Bud Broderick was murdered. The Justice Department, which had a vested interest in her well-being, had then hung a shadow on me. Why? In the hope I’d lead them to where she was hiding. They’d moved fast to rig her death, but that was just a temporary measure to buy time while they located her and spirited her away from harm. Now that they knew I wasn’t cooperating they were going to dangle my license under my nose, and if the carrot failed the stick was next. I’d told Grundy I didn’t know where she was, but guys in his line lie so much about their identities and occupations you couldn’t expect them to recognize the truth if it came up and wet their pantlegs.

The girl had gotten a good dose of just how badly the system could fail when it failed. This time through she decided to trust no one but herself and a P.I. who had nothing to gain from betraying her, and she hadn’t trusted him enough to hand him the whole story. She’d skipped the country until things hotted down, but she’d be back, if only long enough to make connections for parts unknown. It wasn’t as easy to be a fugitive in Canada as it had been at the height of the war in Vietnam. She’d know that. She was smarter than all of us. Smart enough to outsmart herself and land square in the jaws of a hunting thing like Horn.

Around five o’clock I gave up on sleep, climbed into my robe and slippers, and sat down in front of the set to watch a late-late showing of a movie starring George Sanders as The Falcon. I dropped off before he solved the murder and woke up at seven in time for a kiddie show. Next I’d be following the soaps along with all the other hardcore unemployables. I switched off the set and grumped into the bathroom for repairs.

The telephone rang while I was reading about Moses True’s murder in the
Free Press
after breakfast. Sergeant Somebody of the Michigan State Police post at Northville wanted to know if I’d be in my office later that morning before he sent around a trooper to confiscate my license, CCW permit, and wallet credentials. I said yeah and hung up in his face. But I was glad he’d called. I’d begun to feel like the widow whose life was in suspension until she could get her husband’s remains into the ground and out of the way.

In the light of day, my theory concerning Paula Royce was as full of holes as a catcher’s mask. Even if she had come back, and even if she couldn’t book a flight out during the holidays, she’d have cleared the area fast if she had to do it on foot. It wasn’t until I got to the office and saw again the wreckage of my door that I gave the hunch any weight at all. Horn thought as I did or he wouldn’t have hung around Detroit just to scare the hell out of me. He would at least have gone to Canada to see if he could get a line on her from there. He was a native, after all. His story about avoiding small towns and border crossings was just a story.

I called down to maintenance for a new door. I told Rosecranz, the superintendent, that a professional killer had trashed it by way of showing off. Rosecranz told me to lay off the sauce and I wouldn’t walk into so many doors, and said he’d bill me after the job was done. I don’t know why I bothered. Maybe I could hang astrology charts on the walls and take up telling fortunes. It was bound to pay better than what I’d been doing.

The mail came just before ten. Season’s greetings from two city council members up for re-election, a bill, a magazine sweepstakes, a once-in-a-lifetime offer for an eight-week correspondence course in fingerprinting, and a calendar from my bonding company. I kept the bill and the calendar and tipped everything else into the wastebasket.

My mind was growing weeds. I broke out a deck of cards for some heavy thinking. Sherlock Holmes’s fiddle had nothing on clock solitaire. I was placing a red trey on a black four when I remembered Arthur Stillson.

When I was still recovering from the headache she’d handed me at her place, I’d babbled something to Paula about the lawyer’s side racket involving phony IDs. She was a person who would remember a reference like that when the need arose, and from her experience with the Justice Department she would know just what was required. With a complete new set of papers and a new hairdo she could walk through a double row of hawk-eyed cops and board a plane for anywhere.

I looked up Stillson’s number in the Iroquois Heights book and got a female voice as smooth and hard as polished steel that informed me he was vacationing in the Bahamas and wouldn’t be back until after the first of the year. I thanked her and the conversation was over. I wasn’t disappointed. If I had to wait so did Paula. And if she had to wait, sooner or later she would have to get in touch with Rhett Grissom.

Grissom was the rich kid I’d mussed up about a hundred years ago in Grosse Pointe to find out who was supplying Paula with pills. She would still need them, and with Moses True treading clouds Grissom was the next likely source. If anyone had seen her since Windsor it would be him. I left the cards where they were and snatched my coat and hat off the peg on my way out. On the stairs I passed Rosecranz heading up to my floor with a steel tape measure.

A high small sun shone almost straight down onto the lake, its rays flashing off the choppy cobalt surface. The buildings on the foreign side, glowering on my last visit, looked as scrubbed and bright as children’s faces on Easter morning. Across from them, Detroit was a reflection in a dirty mirror. The garage next to the Grissoms’ Victorian manse was closed and there was no sign of the snowmobile I’d trashed. Rhett probably had two more on order. As I got out of the car, a miserable-looking seagull with wings streaked brown turned a round black eye on me from its roost on a gull-proof roof pike, leaned forward, and twisted its tail to show me what it thought of such precautions.

“Good for you,” I said, stepping up onto the round wooden porch.

The door looked like a giant Hershey bar, deep brown and paneled. It had a screw-you window the size of a jeweler’s eyepiece that was as much Renaissance Detroit as it was nineteenth-century London. I pressed a mother-of-pearl button and waited for an eye to appear. When none did I pressed again, then knocked, and I was still waiting. I tried the knob. It gave. I had a premonition. I was going to make a discovery I would regret.

The front parlor—“living room” didn’t quite do it—was large enough to make a lot of antique furniture look like a little, skylit, and paved to within six inches of the walls with a bland rug that was as old as Christianity and just had to have cost as much as some houses. It reminded me of home, if home were an exhibit at the Detroit Historical Museum. The other rooms on the ground floor were almost as big, every bit as stiff and expensively furnished, and just as empty of Rhett Grissom. The kitchen looked as it had the last time I was in it. There was a room on the second floor that had been a ballroom but now contained spoiled plants flourishing in fat pots, two bedrooms half as large, and a den in a tower room overlooking the lake. A matronly lady with thick arms and legs in a maid’s uniform and fluffy gray hair under a white cap was bent over a glass-topped desk in the den, shoving around a chamois dust cloth for all she was worth. She straightened, turned, saw me, and jumped twelve feet. She had a thick East European nose and blue eyes that were faded and frightened.

“Rhett’s friend?” she inquired hopefully. Living in Hamtramck as long as I had been, I knew a Polish accent when I heard it.

“Kind of,” I said, when I remembered what my tongue was for. Old Hawkshaw here hadn’t expected to run into a maid in a Grosse Pointe mansion. “I rang and knocked. No one answered.”

“What?”

I said it all again. She repeated, “What?” That time I got the message. “Where’s Rhett?” I shouted it.

“People walk in, people walk out, all the time. In, out like a hotel. Parties. Parties day and night. A burglar could walk in, a sex fiend, how’d I know he isn’t Rhett’s friend?”

“Rhett,” I bellowed. “Where is he?”

“Rhett’s friend?”

I was living an ethnic joke. “Where is Rhett?” Long pauses between words as I wrote them in the air.

“Where’s Rhett?”

I nodded. My hat shook loose. I caught it and jammed it back on.

“Where’s Rhett, how’d I know where’s Rhett? Two, t’ree days no Rhett, then party. Who cleans up after Rhett’s parties? Not Rhett.”

“Okay if I look around for him?”

“What?”

I waved good-bye.

The place had four bathrooms. He wasn’t in any of them. I went outside through the kitchen. The garage and the boat house were locked, the latter with a padlock on the outside. Through the garage window I saw a yellow Lamborghini and a black-and-silver Eldorado and some odds and ends of garage stuff, spotless rags and tools that didn’t look as if they’d ever been used. The Eldorado would be for winter driving so the Italian job wouldn’t rust out. The crunched snowmobile was parked between them. He hadn’t repaired it yet. The bath house down by the lake was open and empty. I wandered around the grounds and out to the end of the wharf. The view was pretty even in winter. The water made little slurping sounds on the sandy shore.

I almost walked back up the dock to leave. I can’t say why I didn’t. Call it instinct or gut feeling or just that same atavistic caution that makes a child look under his bed before going to sleep. I got down on my knees on aging boards slimy with fish scales and guano and curled my fingers around the edge and peered underneath. At first I didn’t see anything. Then my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light reflecting up off the water and casting crawling haloes on the dark underside of the dock and the thing trapped there and bobbing on the polite tide.

Our faces were close enough to kiss, but I didn’t indulge. The thing’s blond hair was dark and plastered to some swollen meat that may or may not have been the face of one Rhett Grissom. Splintered bone poked through the torn flesh in places. I’d seen one like that in Vietnam, when my squad entered a hut that had been used by Charlie to interrogate captured prisoners before bugging out. Over there it had been part of the natural order of things. In my own backyard it was different.

And one thing was sure. He hadn’t drowned, not floating on his back like that. But if he had he would have welcomed it.

I stood up and brushed the dirt off my knees and cast my eyes around the lake that was actually only a lull in the Detroit River. The buildings of Windsor still looked clean, but now they were leering. The pretty view had something wrong with it, like an oceanscape rolling giddy and uncaring over stove ships and the grinning faces of men long dead. I turned up my collar against a sudden chill gust off the surface and swung back toward the house.

The maid was letting herself out the back door as I came up the flagstone path. She had on a cloth coat and a bright knit cap with a ball on top that made her look like someone just off the boat, and she was carrying a purse the size of a steamer trunk by a strap like a tow hawser. “I’m going home now,” she said. “You found Rhett?”

“Yeah.”

She didn’t hear me, but it must have been in my face. She looked at me closely, seemed on the edge of asking, then pulled the door shut firmly behind her and stepped off the stoop. “I’m going home now.”

I watched her stumping down the driveway. At the end she turned right toward the bus stop on the corner. She didn’t look back. She’d been working for the family long enough not to ask questions where Rhett was concerned. The dumb Polack bit was strictly protective coloring. What a maid knows would bring a blush to the sallow cheeks of a thirty-year man on the vice squad.

She’d locked the door, but the lock was nothing. I didn’t even bother to go around to the front to see if that one was still open. I’d noticed that it was dead-bolted. Curious how people, even people who are smart enough to have a lot of money, forget about things like back doors. Maybe the burglars who preyed on homes in Grosse Pointe were too classy to come in through the servants’ entrance. This one wasn’t. I slipped the latch almost as quickly as they do in fiction and headed up the back stairs to the smaller of the two bedrooms, which I figured was Rhett’s.

The kid had his own refrigerator full of imported beer and several thousand dollars’ worth of stereo equipment besides the usual bedroom stuff. No wonder he had still been living at home at an age when most people had married and moved out. I frisked the room inside out, starting with the less likely places, the way you do with the clever-clever ones. I found a stack of pornography in exquisite bindings under the bed and a crumpled pair of black bikini panties not Rhett’s size behind the dresser. Too many electronic keyboards and screaming Negroes inside the album covers in the record cabinet. One of each would have been more than enough. Nothing taped behind or under drawers. Then I switched to the obvious places. He had eleven thousand dollars in cash rolled up and stashed in the toe of a bedroom slipper in the closet. Tax-free mad money from a spoiled rich kid’s part-time job pushing junk. I still wasn’t sure what ball I was looking for, but at least I was in the right park. The rest of the room was clean. He would be too tricky to hide his merchandise on the premises. I left the money where I’d found it and moved on to the adjoining bathroom.