The Glass Highway (4 page)

Windsor’s sullen skyline glowered across a gunmetal-colored Lake St. Clair, its surface sliced by wind and sleet into timid breakers that touched the Grissoms’ backyard and withdrew to tell the others. The house, a Victorian jumble of gables, turrets, and rusty pikes meant to discourage seagulls from roosting on the roof, overlooked a private wharf at the end of a paved cul-de-sac off East Jefferson. Outbuildings included a garage, boat house, and a little hut where the guests could change out of their wet swimsuits into dry martinis. The place didn’t even have a heliport.

The guy tinkering in front of the garage didn’t hear me pull up and get out. He wouldn’t have heard a Soviet first strike on the garage. He had the hood up on a bright red snowmobile and was listening to the chainsaw motor whine.

“Expecting snow?” I shouted at his bent back.

He snapped up like a Vietcong snare and whirled to face me. You’d go some miles before you found someone who looked less like Clark Gable. Long, dirty-blond hair thinning at the crown and hanging limply behind his ears, long acne-scarred face and drooping moustache, long body and legs in fleece-lined denim jacket and dirty jeans, brown cowboy boots scuffed at the toes and splitting at the soles. Sharp eyes under heavy lids. About thirty. He saw me standing with my coat hanging open and my hands in my pants pockets, and he relaxed. He had a heavy wrench in one hand.

“It’s got to come sometime,” he said. “When it does I’ll be ready. Is it me you want?”

“It is if you’re Rhett Grissom.”

“That depends on whether you’re a cop or not.”

“Do I look like one?”

“You don’t look like someone who isn’t one. You got ID?”

“If I showed it to you it wouldn’t mean anything. I’m private. You’ve heard Bud Broderick is missing.”

“I didn’t even know he was here to begin with.” He picked up a white cotton rag and wiped his hands. His hands were clean.

“He was, as a matter of fact. Right here. He came to one of your famous parties with his stepsister a few months back. Fern Esterhazy. She introduced him to another guest, Paula Royce. They hit it off.”

“Man, I don’t even remember who came to my party last Saturday night.”

“It’s the pills. You should lay off them awhile.”

His lids flickered. “What pills?”

Somehow I had known those would be the next words out of his mouth.

“The Royce girl was a regular at your bashes,” I said. “We both know she didn’t come for the good food and stimulating conversation. I won’t send you over. The cops don’t listen to me anyway. What I want to know is if you were supplying her the rest of the time, and if you weren’t, who was.” I stopped to swallow. “Cut the motor, will you? I’m starting to feel my tonsils.”

He mouthed two words that were drowned out by the racket and bent over the motor, gripping his wrench. I reached past his shoulder and gave the throttle on the handlebar a flirt. The machine squirted forward. Grissom lost his balance and pitched face first onto the wet asphalt driveway, but not before the vehicle tried to climb the closed garage door, stalled, and fell over. They heard the noise in Lansing.

“Son of a bitch!” howled Grissom, swiping the wrench at my shin. I hopped over it, kicked his supporting arm out from under him, and planted a foot on his wrist. I found a place for the other foot on the back of his head. Teeth ground on asphalt.

“Paula Royce,” I said. “Were you supplying her?”

He braced his free hand on the driveway again and tried to throw me off. I kicked it again with the foot I had on his head and took up the earlier position as his chest struck ground, emptying his lungs with an animal grunt.

“Her supplier.” I leaned on his head.

He made an unintelligible sound of acquiescence. When it soared to a pleading whine, I got off and pulled him up by his collar. When he was on his knees he swung at me with the wrench. I caught his arm and twisted it behind his back as I lifted him to his feet. The tool tinkled to earth.

I said, “Let’s go inside.”

He steered quite easily when I heaved up on the arm and pushed. At the back door of the house I asked, “You want to open it, or should I do it with your head?”

He wanted to open it. I let go and we stepped into a large kitchen furnished with an antique table and chairs, wood-burning stove, maple chopping block not much bigger than the GM Building, and crowing roosters on the curtains. A modern refrigerator and a microwave oven looked like things that had dropped through a time warp. The stove was working; the temperature inside was thirty degrees warmer and the smell of burning wood made me nostalgic for a childhood I had never had. I deposited him in one of the chairs at the table, checked out the pantry, and poked my head into the next room, a big dining room with a chandelier and one of those long tables you see in Bugs Bunny cartoons. They were deserted.

“Where’s the butler, out walking the parakeet?”

“We haven’t had a butler since I was six.” He spat out grit and blood from his chewed lip. “The maid’s gone shopping or something.”

I twirled a chair and mounted it like Randolph Scott, folding my arms across the back. “Well?”

He worked his sore arm and grimaced. “I wasn’t supplying her. I don’t know who was. Or is. I haven’t seen her in weeks. She didn’t show up Saturday night. If this Bud guy did I don’t know it.”

I showed him the picture. He glanced at it and shook his head. I put it away. “Where’d you know the Royce girl from?”

“Nowhere. She just started showing up at parties. Not just mine. Wherever there were pills, come to think of it. Just another crasher. Man, you almost broke my fucking arm, you know that?”

“If I wanted to I would’ve. Who supplies you?”

He looked at me, and he didn’t have heavy lids anymore. He didn’t have any kind of lids at all. “Forget it. Break an arm if you want. Break both of them. I got lockjaw.”

“Stop being dramatic. They won’t kill you, not for dropping a name to a peeper. Ever been busted?”

“What for? You’re the one broke my snow toy. You going to pay for that, by the way?”

“Ask Mommy and Daddy to buy you a new one. I’m talking about pushing prescription drugs.”

“Once. My freshman year at college. Hell, that’s twelve years ago. Passed water.”

“It’ll float you straight into Jackson if you fall again.”

He showed me his teeth. He had gravel in his moustache. “My father eats lunch with the commissioner.”

“It’s an election year,” I reminded him. “You can’t spend lunch at the polls. If the cops in Grosse Pointe are like the cops in Detroit—and they all drink the same brand of beer and root for the same football teams—they’re watching you now. Your folks are in Hawaii. You’ve probably already started stocking up for this Saturday night. Suppose some solid citizen drops a word in some officer’s ear that a search of the Grissom place just might make his whole week. Today’s Wednesday. They’re serving turkey roll down at the Wayne County Jail. You’ll like it. I don’t think.”

He showed me more teeth. He slid into a slouch and crossed his long legs, bouncing the one on top. He rat-a-tat-tatted long slender fingers with ragged nails on the table. He whistled “Judy in Disguise” through his teeth. Then he uncrossed his legs and sat up and stared at the bridge of my nose. He said: “Moses True.”

“Try again. True’s strictly Twelfth Street. They wouldn’t let him walk his dogs here.”

“Come on, man. How’d I know his name otherwise?”

I beat a tattoo of my own on the tabletop. “He was still working downtown last Christmas. Who’d he replace?”

“That name you don’t have to pry out of me. Johnny Ralph Dorchet.”

Some names trigger instant responses. That one put me in front of my television set around New Year’s Day, watching news footage of three bagged corpses being wheeled into a county fast-wagon from an apartment on Erskine. One of the corpses had belonged to Johnny Ralph Dorchet. The world was suddenly more interesting. I swung off the chair and leaned my face down close to Grissom’s.

“True still on Twelfth?”

“How the hell should I know? He doesn’t deal at his place. He calls me and we meet different places.” He pulled in his chin to avoid collision. I pushed in closer. Some things you never forget from basic training.

“If he’s expecting me I’ll come back and watch you eat your telephone circuit by circuit.”

“You won’t tell him where you got the name, will you? You say he won’t kill me, but that leaves a lot of room for what he will do.”

“Frankly, Rhett, I don’t give a damn.”

He wrinkled his nose. “Oh, funny. I heard that one before.”

I went out to my bucket. The snowmobile was lying on its side, its headlight smashed and one ski broken. The garage door might have been scuffed.

Dusk was gathering in corners. Beyond Lake St. Clair, which was as black as a new galosh, early lights spangled the Canadian side. The orange running lights of a squat ore carrier crawled south toward River Rouge and the iron foundry at the Ford plant. Nocturnal things like Moses True would be getting up about now, staring into the closet and wondering whether to put on the coat with the ermine trim or the purple vest. I decided to postpone going to see him until morning. You don’t hunt vampires at night.

H
OME IS A THREE-ROOM
orange crate on Hamtramck’s west side, not far from where the iron ball was making sawdust out of the historic homes, shops, and church of Poletown in the name of General Motors and the city administration’s mantra, Total Employment. First, GM had dangled the carrot of a new Cadillac plant under the mayor’s nose, then the black knight of Eminent Domain had charged in with token payments for the dreams of lifetimes, and finally those stubborn residents who had refused to leave were burned and trashed out by vandals, none of whom the city police seemed able to apprehend. The case against Eminent Domain had gone to court twice and lost. Both courts were located in Detroit. So the wreckers came and the mayor was re-elected by his customary landslide and everyone was waiting for GM’s next move. And waiting.

I broiled a steak for supper and ate it off a tray in front of the television set watching Sandy Broderick and the Six O’Clock News. He and the Barbie doll and a pansy in a blazer doing a live minicam report from Joe Louis Arena were kicking around preparations for a rock concert, scheduled for January in the crumbling white elephant taxpayers hadn’t finished paying for. All the newscasters agreed that the event would be good for Detroit. The Chamber of Commerce spent a lot of advertising dollars on local TV.

When the news ended I had a choice of three animated Christmas specials and a Pistons’ basketball game. I turned off the set and put a record on my economy stereo—just two speakers, no tape deck or filters or laser can openers—bought myself a double Scotch from the bottle I reserved for guests and sat down and listened to Lee Wiley singing about the street of dreams. The Scotch tasted like moor. When the glass was full a second time I held it up, admiring the pure copper color of the liquid. It looked smug. It didn’t know about pills and people like Rhett Grissom and Moses True and that it was obsolete. I drank it and turned in when the record was through.

The weather wasn’t doing anything at all when I got up next morning. The temperature had risen enough during the night to thaw the street in front of my house, but the wind had come up and swept away the puddles, giving everything outside the window a scoured, uninhabited drabness like a faded black-and-white photograph of an evacuated city. It matched my mood.

I had orange juice and coffee for breakfast. Chewing hurts my head after a quadruple-Scotch night. It didn’t used to, but then neither did a lot of things. I exercised some of the stiffness out of my joints, showered, and left the house at seven wearing my dancing pumps. At half-past I was where I wanted to be on Twelfth Street.

The signs said Rosa Parks Boulevard now, after the black woman who had started it all by refusing to sit in the back of the bus, but aside from that it hadn’t changed since that sweaty Sunday morning in July 1967 when a bottle shattered the rear window of a police car parked in front of the Economy Printing Company and triggered the week-long rioting that had killed forty-three people and won Detroit its “Murder City” tag. Scorched and gutted shells stood gaunt testimony to a revolution gone sour, decaying quietly under the glitzy veneer of Henry Ford Jr.’s Renaissance.

The last time I had had occasion to visit him, Moses True lived over a coin laundry in a two-story brickfront that had been three stories before some disgruntled minority type bought a Molotov cocktail for a window on the top floor. The building had that squat, startled look that such impromptu remodelings always leave. I walked past the closed laundry and mounted a steep rubber-runnered staircase leading up from the street door, which had a broken lock.

The second-story hallway, done over around the time of Hoover’s inauguration, smelled of butts and old plaster. I didn’t try to be quiet on my way down it, because the senile boards under the linoleum would have betrayed me anyway. True liked them that way; after the bars closed at 2:00 A.M. Sundays, he turned his place into a blind pig for the drinkers who didn’t want to go home, and he preferred to hear the patter of big cop feet in plenty of time to hide the evidence.

The dogs started in the second I hit the landing. Dogs were something else Moses True liked to have around. Big dogs, small dogs, dogs in between, young dogs in permanent heat, old dogs with one eye and no teeth. Noisy dogs mostly. He had been cited many times for keeping a kennel in the city, but so far there was no record of a True dollar ever having found its way into the treasury. The racket had my nerves doing headstands by the time I reached his door. I knocked before I had time to realize how unnecessary that was. The barking took on a frenzied pitch inside.

I gave my host a few minutes to step into his shorts, then knocked again. Claws scrabbled at the door. Some more minutes, and then I got my laminated investigator’s photostat out of my wallet, twisted the doorknob away from the jamb, and worked the card between the latch and the strikeplate. It took me only twice as long to hear the snap as it does on television. I reached back under my coat and gripped my Smith & Wesson in its belt holster and opened the door a crack. A black muzzle and yellow fangs tried to force their way through to my leg. I fetched the snout a smart kick and its owner drew back, whining. I stepped inside quickly and leaned the door shut. A great slab of solid stink struck me full in the face.