Detroit: Summer Blue---second excerpt

FOURTEEN



Going north on US 23 through a fairly heavy rain, (The Weather Channel had said it was coming again), Brit and I discussed my conclusions and agreed that there was a large piece of the puzzle that wasn’t in the puzzle-box. Even if French’d had the benefit of complete reports from everybody we’d talked to, it should make sense for him to think he’d be most ahead to have a meeting with us and, in essence, defy us.

The degree of his avoidance was excessive; particularly considering the cost to him of the loss of his video facility. The attempted hit from the red car had the flavor of a ‘crew’ under orders or eager to make up for something---perhaps having been remiss at the video facility. Somebody who’d achieved what French was credited with would have a greater degree of faith in himself; he would be unlikely to panic as he seemed now to have done.

I have a GPS set-up that’ll direct me to any address I put in, so we knew where to find the location Gabe’d given us. North and east of where we’d burned the building, it was an area of simple lower-middle-to upper-lower-class houses. Most of the neighborhood seemed to be frame construction, often with aluminum siding. Most of the yards were rather poorly kept---some were nothing but bare dirt and weeds.

The red-brick place with the right address on the front was the most imposing on the block and it wasn’t really all that much. It was most likely a hiding-place instead of his usual abode.

We drove a criss-cross of the surrounding area to see what might be awaiting us. Finding nothing, we parked down the block and sat and watched. Even considering the degree of obscurity caused by the rain, the house showed no lights or other signs of life. We talked desultorily until my watch said it was past eleven PM. Absolutely nothing had happened.

We’d been talking entirely of other subjects as is common to a waiting game such as we were playing. Now we spoke simultaneously. I said, “Let’s go look.” Brit overlaid it with, “We should go in.” Knowing the likelihood of this, or some such variation, Brit was still dressed in his black warm-up suit but had changed both socks and tee-shirt to match his outerwear; all black.

My idea of sartorial perfection is somewhat looser than Brit’s. What he saw when he glanced at me was a husky sort of bloke wearing black lightweight sweats, including a black turtleneck under a blue-black knee-length raincoat. I had equipped myself with an Ithaca Model 37 pump shotgun with a pistol-grip instead of a full-length stock and a ‘riot-configuration’ barrel (18 ½ inch long and cylinder-bore---but with a ventilated Poly-Choke) and magazine tube. With an around-the-shoulder sling it hangs vertically, conveniently to hand, just in front of my left shoulder, and doesn’t stick out past the bottom hem of my coat. I don’t button the coat. Since it’s the riot-design gun it holds seven in the tube and one in the chamber.

It makes no sense to use a pistol if you know ahead of time that you’re likely to have need of a firearm. You use a long gun of some sort, because of its greater efficiency. A pistol is so you’ll have a firearm with you even when you don’t think you’ll need one, so I also had my little Kimber carry-gun as back-up.

Brit was toting, along with his little bag of tools/tricks, another of the MAC-10s. This time he had it hanging on a sling around his neck. The bottom of the thirty-cartridge magazine was about even with his belt-buckle. Spare magazines went one in each side pocket of his trousers. Carrying the gun in this way, the sound suppressor won’t fit inside your jacket, so he stuck it, too, in his pocket.

I started the engine and drove over two blocks. We put on the little gloves and locked up and went around the block; by counting, we came through the downpour between houses from the next street---headed for the red-brick house’s back yard. The streetlights weren’t functioning so we were working in gloom as well as wet. We had to vault a sagging back fence, and slop across the yard.

         There was a somewhat rickety back deck with a door leading out onto it. Taking care not to step where the structure might make any untoward noise, we approached the door and found that it didn’t even need the lock-picking tools I had ready in a little zipper case. As an alternative, I used a strip of semi-flexible hardened stainless steel, with one end rolled-over double-thickness to make something to hold on to, to press back the tongue of the snap-lock while Brit held his red-lensed light.

    A flexible putty-knife also works well, but because of the handle, it’s considerably more bulky to carry. The oft-suggested use of a credit card or other such piece of plastic to slip a lock is a poor idea for several reasons. The card is actually a little too thick for best function and the plastic is not quite tough enough to do the job without a significant chance of damaging its edge. The stainless is thinner and tougher, and even stiffer.

And the procedure’s very quick---the locksmith who taught me could open doors using this method almost without breaking stride. I’m not quite that fast but it took less than five seconds to have the door standing open. Brit took a pair of ‘dikes’ (diagonal cutting pliers) from his little bag and cut the seal on the electric meter on the wall next to the door. He raised the outer housing and pulled loose the meter itself, setting it on the deck. Now no lights could possibly be turned on. We went inside, using the approved techniques.

We found ourselves in what had probably been intended as a bedroom. It contained a miscellany of cast-off furniture in a helter-skelter grouping. The rich odors of the wet outdoors were replaced with that curious dry smell of a little-used house, overlaid with some very recent cigarette smoke and coffee motifs.

With our red-lensed Surefire lights we moved on through the doorway. I noted a ‘forties touch in the little telephone niche built into the wall at the back of the hall; there was no instrument there. Directly across the hall was another doorway and beyond it another room, this one equipped as a bedroom. It exhibited signs of recent use in the tumbled bedclothes. A suitcase sat on a chair with socks and undershirts hanging out. Half-a-dozen garish-patterned silk shirts in transparent cleaner’s bags were hung from the upper edge of the open closet door.

The shelf in the bathroom displayed shaving gear and a toothbrush laying with its bristle end hanging over the edge. The kitchen held a kettle on the stove, part of a loaf of ‘Wonder Bread,’ a jar of instant coffee and a mostly used-up jar of peanut butter, and a yellow box of sugar on the counter ---a counter made up of one-inch tiles of alternating black-and-white.  Very ‘forties. A modern refrigerator contained coffee-cream and what looked like the remains of a case of Bud, part of a package of bologna, a jar of grape jelly, and a plastic ‘squeezer’ of mustard. The freezer compartment boasted a dozen TV dinners and two ‘everything’ pizzas.

The living-room had what seemed to be a blue-and-light-blue-stripe velvet settee-couch and two tired-looking light green easy chairs on dirty rose-colored carpet; grouping was arranged so that all faced a flat-screen telly in the corner next to the front window. The colors were a little hard to make out because of the red filters on the flashlight lenses. An overflowing ashtray sat on one cushion of the settee within easy reach of someone sitting next to it; that seating cushion permanently indented by much use.

The house was built on a foundation with only a partial basement---it was somewhat musty and almost empty when I opened the door; trash in one corner and no one home. After the first once-through we went back and checked the unlikely and faintly silly-seeming places---closets and other storage areas---for someone hiding. It’s better to seem a little silly than to have a rude surprise. Then we went back to the front room and settled down to wait in the dark. Our flashlight beams showed the twin to the repeater box attached to a recorder on a table next to the TV in the corner.

During the hour and a half we sat there, there were half-a-dozen times when a car went down the street, the headlights casting a moving flicker of illumination through the vertical blinds on the front window. The last one broke the pattern by pulling into the driveway and stopping alongside the house. 

The engine stopped and the lights went off. Then a shadow went across the front window and a key scratched in the lock. Brit had moved to stand just past the swing of the front door. (If you stand behind it, a door thrown fully open can, at the very least, be disconcerting and awkward; if the door hits you with enough force you can be in serious trouble.)

I’d thrown my coat over one of the un-used chairs and was sitting with the shotgun across my lap. I raised it to firing position just before the door opened. Any movement on my part was unnecessary because Brit ‘coshed’ him with a spring-handled black-jack as he stepped into the room. He took a wandering half-step further and crumpled to his knees before landing on his face. Brit pushed the door shut and checked to see that the lock had caught. Then he put the cosh back in his hip pocket.

I handed him a ‘Ty-wrap’---often called ‘plastic handcuffs;’ it’s an incredibly tough strip of moulded nylon with a tiny loop at one end. Slip the free end through the loop and a little metal tongue catches it so that the end cannot be withdrawn. This creates a larger loop of the whole thing. It can be tightened, but not loosened. A Ty-wrap loop around the wrists must be cut in order to free the prisoner so created. His pinioned hands went behind his back. The Ty-wrap was originally intended for industrial and automotive uses.

I picked up a coffee mug from a nearby TV tray, doing duty as an end table, and took it to the kitchen. A face dashed full of the water thus transported quickly had him coughing back to the land of the sentient. My flashlight told me that he fit the description of Lou French, so I nudged him with my toe.

“Hi, Lou. At last we meet in person.” He elected to try bluster. “I don’t know who you are, but you’re in way over your head. You’d better let me be and get out of here in a hurry.”

    “We’re friends of Jenny Robinson. She got such a bad time from you and whoever else,  that she tried to commit suicide. We think it’s your fault and we’re here to find out everything you know about what happened. You can make this hard or you can make it easy---relatively ---but by the time we leave you will have told us everything we want to know. One way or the other.”

Brit came back into the room to report that, “The power’s back on. I also noticed that the bedroom windows are blanked out. We can take him in there.” French had struggled to turn onto his side. I pushed him back onto his face and we each took an ankle and hauled him through the gloom, face dragging, into the usable bedroom; next we took him by the elbows and dumped him on the bed. I stepped back to push the door shut and flipped the light switch. The house was old enough to have ceiling lights and a cheap double-bulb fixture lit the room with a harsh yellowish glare.

The windows, one toward the back of the house and the other to the side, were covered with plywood just like at the video-shipping establishment. Dull black paint around the edges of the boards suggested that the outsides were thus made almost unnoticeable. My eyes went back to the figure on the bed. The end of his nose was raw from the contact with the floor.

    I told him, “I think you’re rat shit and what’s happened to Jenny and the result has entirely removed all the kindness from my system. I’m here to find out what you did to her and I’ll do whatever it takes to get the answers I want. Just so you understand, we killed your acne-faced gofer the other day; then we torched your inventory. Those nitwits in the Camaro didn’t get very far when they tried for us on the way home. We have as much time as we need to get the answers we want. You can either start to talk right now or I’ll pull the cover off that pillow and jam it in your mouth to keep the noise down and then see what I can break. Sooner or later you’ll tell us; it might just as well be sooner.”

    He’d started shaking his head before I got half done with my little speech. “Look guys, I’m willin’ to tell you all I know ‘bout this, but it really isn’t very much. I got a tip from a business ‘sociate who’d seen her working in a massage parlor in Highland Park. She seemed t’ have the right ‘look’ and I talked her into doing a session for me. You guys know I do videos.

    “I have a studio where we make the stuff---the place on Saginaw was just the distribution center. She was kinda leery about doing a video but I talked her into doin’ a strip with one of those little masks on---like that ‘Cat-Woman’ in ‘Batman’---no guys involved. And she sorta played with herself. Then she tells me she’s a virgin! I mean, Come On! She’s givin’ head in a massage parlor an’ she’s still got ‘er cherry? When I looked at a close-up, I could see she wuz tellina trut’! I know about a guy who’d go crazy over somethin’ like ‘at; he loves any kinda fresh stuff, so I gave the tape to him. And ‘at’s all I know!”

As he had talked, he’d got more and more eager to tell the story. His words accelerated out of him until they were coming in a fine spray. I noticed an odor and realized he’d wet himself. His mental picture of the situation in which he was enmeshed was actually doing a better job of motivating him than my words had done.

I replied, “No, that isn’t all you know. What made you think that this guy would appreciate the video? How did you find out about him? What did you think he’d do with the disk when he got it? Did you arrange for him to meet Jenny? What happened next? What’s this guy’s name and when’d you meet him? You surely know the answers to all those questions and you’re going to give them all to us before we’re done here. We’ve got as long as it takes.”

“C’m on guys, this is one bad dude! I tell you about him and before long I’m lookin’ up at dirt! Anybody that talks about him is gonna have a real short life.”

I riposted, “Does it strike you that you’re going to say ‘no’ and whine a little bit and we’ll just throw up our hands and go away? Let me point out to you that if this guy is really bad he might track you down at some future time and you probably wouldn’t like the result. On the other hand, we’re right here in the room with you and you’re trussed-up on this bed. Which would you rather have, the possibility that he might find you or the certainty that you’re going to bleed right now? Hold him, Brit!”

When I go ‘on the muscle,’ I commonly carry, among others, a small ‘boot’ knife. Designed by Bob Loveless, the knife has a three-and-one-half-inch double-edged blade. The handle is cast aluminum; coated with some sort of sprayed-on plastic with a somewhat rough surface. It won’t take usable fingerprints and I’m careful not to leave any evidence on the smooth blackened stainless-steel of the blade, because I might have to leave it behind. The sheath has a metal clip instead of a belt loop.

We’d played this game before. Brit, who’d been lounging against the wall with no readable expression, took two steps and grabbed French by the ears to hold his head steady. I took the little knife and slowly brought its bodkin-point to his right eye. He bleated and started to struggle. I touched his cheek below the eye socket just enough to draw blood and then with a feeling of repugnance I drew it back. A fecal stench had filled the room.

I ignored the odor and said, “Let me tell you a little story, Mister French. The pirate, Jean Lafitte, worked the ocean not too far from New Orleans. One day he had the good fortune to capture an enemy Spanish ship. He castrated the ship’s captain, removing the entirety of his genitals, cut his tongue out, and severed the tendons in his heels; making it almost impossible for him to walk. Then he had him treated by a medical doctor to make sure his life was saved and that he healed.

He kept this crippled specimen in his headquarters at Barataria, for the purpose of kicking him around and generally making his life unbearable. Of course, the reason for his ire was that the Spaniard had earlier been responsible for the death of Lafitte’s wife.

“All you’re responsible for is the attempted suicide of a teen-age girl; she was treated so badly that she didn’t want to live. I won’t keep you around to kick---I’ll just leave you lying on this bed in the blood and stink with your eyes scooped out. And I’ve always thought that it would be worse to be blind than crippled. I’ll call a doctor so you probably won’t die. It’s up to you; but maybe this business with Jenny wasn’t all your fault.” (Bad cop turns good cop.)

I had to wait for his incoherence to moderate. Brit let go of his ears and stepped back to the wall. To the uneducated eye, Brit would have seemed completely impassive. I could see the faint, but to me completely readable signs that he was laughing at my feigned ferocity. It’s one of the differences between us; he’d actually do what I’d just threatened. Under the right set of circumstances, I’d have killed French. But not because I was trying to pry information out of him. And I’m incapable of actually doing what I’d just suggested ---I think. Sometimes anger turns to cold rage in me. This was a naïve teen-age kid he’d helped hurt. Luckily, French didn’t know meretriciousness when it stared him in the face.

He managed to regain some slight degree of control; his words began to make a semblance of sense, although his diction suffered. “OK, OK guys, I’ll tell yuh all I know. The fella you’re lookin’ for is called Aaron Blake. He’s the real owner of the video business, a sorta silent partner. I got a call one day when I was just gettin’ started. A voice said to go for a ride an’ meet this dude---the car would pick me up on the corner. He knew I needed money an’ when I met with him he offered to front all the money I’d need but he’d own ninety percent. He has guys keepin’ tracka’ the money an’ I get my cut. I, personally, got better’n three million free an’ clear last year. There’s money in the basement---I’ll give it to yuh if yuh let me go!”

“Maybe, but you have more questions to answer. What did this cove do with the video you made? I’m sure he didn’t just want a dirty movie for Saturday night.”

“Nah, he wannit to meet ‘er. I made arrangements wit’ Del (Ah Ha!) fer them ta meet an’ I know he had a car pick her up. I don’ know what happened after that!”

“Tell me about this Aaron Blake!”

“He’s some kinda big shot. He’s got political connections an’ so on. I think he just makes money by investin’ like he did wit’ me.”

“Where does he live?”

“I guess he has houses all over. I heard he’s got a house in the Pointes somewheres an’ I heard he has a place in one uh them fancy areas Up Nort’. An’ he’s got a place in Florida. Down inna Keys is what I heard.”

“Where is he now?”

“Man, I don’ know! I been tryin’ to call ‘im fer three days to tell ‘im ‘bout what’s been happenin’. I just get one uh ‘is go-fers. They say he’ll call back but he hasn’ yet. An’ he’s gonna shit! All the masters fer three years of work burned up wit’ the stock at my place on Saginaw! We c’n make tapes fer ‘bout a dollar-an’-a-half, includin’ the label an’-a box---the disks are even cheaper---an’ we c’n sell ‘em for as much as fifty bucks each, wholesale, but not unless we gotta master to make’em from.”

“How did he find out about you in the first place?”

“I kinda wondered ‘bout that myself! I just figured that one uh the people I ‘proached tol’ ‘im I wuz lookin’ fer money. Look, I reely don’ know anythin’ more! Yuh c’n see I ‘bin tryin’ to help yuh. Pleeze le’me go. Leave me wit’ ‘nuff money an’ I’ll jus’ disappear!”

“How much money do you have in the basement?”

“I don’ know fer shur! Ev’ry time I getta envelope I bin shovin’ it inna safe.”

“Where’s the safe and how do you open it?”

“Inna basement under th’ pile o’ junk inna corner. It goes down inta th’ floor. Take off the cover an’ reach down for th’ dial. Th’ combination is left to 3---right twice to 14---left twice back to 6. Then yuh lift up the handle an’ turn the whole top a quarter-turn lef’ an’ lif’ up. Yuh can have th’ whole thing. I gotta bug-out package wit’ my lawyer. I c’n pick it up inna mornin’ an’ be long gone if yuh lea’me go.”

I glanced at Brit, who pushed himself off the wall and went out without a word. French subsided on the bed almost as if someone had let part of the air out of him---like a Mylar balloon going soft---and lay there silently. The smell reminded me of a badly over-used outhouse. French seemed beyond caring but I would gladly be shut of the premises.

Brit came back into the room dangling a big, black, heavy-duty plastic trash-bag in one hand. The MAC was back on the sling around his neck. The bag bulged as though filled almost to the top. He said, “It’s all bundles of hundreds; still in the bank bands. I didn’t even try to count it but it must weigh sixty pounds.”

I turned back to the specimen on the bed. “Turn over so I can get at your hands.” He hitched up awkwardly onto one shoulder and I used my saw-edged hawk-bill folding pocket-knife to cut the Ty-wrap. The little Gerber boot-knife would have slashed his wrist due to the double edge. His hands fell apart and he didn’t even seem to have the strength to move to a less awkward position.

“One last question---How did you find out so fast that we’d hit your distribution center?”

“Oh, I had two guys stayin’ there in case you showed up. The one that got away from you called me as soon as he stopped runnin’. By ‘at time it was too late to do anythin’.”

“But you sent that red Camaro-load of gunners after us! It couldn’t have been much more than fifteen or twenty minutes from the time your guy went out the door until they were right behind us!”

“No, I di’n’t. I don’ know anythin’ about any red---anythin’!”

“You sure?”

“Honest. I wouldn’t lie to yuh!”

He was probably telling the truth. “OK, we’re going. Stay right where you are for ten minutes. When you get up, go and clean yourself; you’re disgusting. What you do after you’re clean is up to you but if I find out that you’ve done anything at all to warn this Aaron Blake, or anybody else connected with this deal, about anything that’s happened, I’ll come and get you. And when I’m done, the Spaniard I told you about will have had it good in comparison to the way you’ll end up! Leave town! Go to another country! I don’t want to hear anything about you ever again! Your money here is going to assist in taking care of the girl whose life you helped wreck!”

We walked out the front door, leaving it standing wide open; French remained in a near-foetal position on the bed. At the corner we turned right in order to get back to the location where ‘Orca’ was setting.