Dead Wood (18 page)

Forty

“H
ow did you manage to get here before me?” a voice asked. I turned and Ellen walked toward me, her thumbs hooked in her gunbelt.

I was staring out at Lake St. Clair. The water was smooth and green, waiting for a giant freighter to plow through the center of its body.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how another life had been taken and how Molly had tried to get in touch with me. I should have done more. I should have driven to see her immediately after her call was interrupted. Goddamnit, I thought.

“John,” my sister said.

“I should have known,” I said.

“Just start at the beginning,” she said. So I did. I detailed my conversation with Molly, the note with the phone number, waiting for a courier that never showed up and the decision to drive over here on my own.

Ellen didn’t respond when I finished.

“So what’s your best guess?” she said.

“Honestly,” I said. “I have no clue.”

“You don’t know what she was trying to get to you?”

I shook my head. Ellen turned and looked out at the lake.

“Her neck was broken,” she said. “Apparently.”

“Ah, Jesus.”

“They’re saying she fell down the stairs.”

That brought me off the car. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. Fell down the stairs? I don’t think so.”

“No other signs of injury. Two witnesses say they saw it happen.”

“The pork queens? Erma and Freda?”

“They heard a loud crash,” Ellen said. “Rushed in and found the victim at the foot of the steps.” I could tell Ellen wasn’t buying it either, she was just laying out the official story so far.

“Oh my God,” I said. “What total bullshit.”

“It isn’t bullshit until it’s
proven
to be bullshit.” I heard what she was saying.

“If it’s the last goddamned thing I do,” I said.

I kept thinking of Molly. Of her crisp way of speaking, her little daily planner clutched to her chest. So in control. And then the vision of her sprawled out at the base of the stairs.

“We did a quick search on the vic,” Ellen said. “She looks clean as a whistle. No record, not even a speeding ticket.”

I thought about my interaction with Molly. Precise. Efficient. Maybe a tad on the cold side. But that was her job. To protect her boss.

It looked now like she should have been a little more worried about protecting herself. Whatever it was she’d found, she was trying to get to me. But why me? If it had something to do with the murder of Jesse Barre, why not go to the cops? I knew the answer as soon as I asked the question.

She was worried about what might happen to her.

So she was going to let me get the evidence.

In short, she wanted me to take the fall.

I winced at the irony.

•  •  •

Ellen went back into the crime scene where I still wasn’t allowed, so I turned my attention once again to the lake. When you lived in Grosse Pointe, you couldn’t help but associate the lake with events in your life. Lake St. Clair sat there, a silent witness of the community next to it. I had my own personal history with the lake. Culminating in the death of Benjamin Collins. His life ended in the lake. Along with what used to be mine.

And now, here I was back at the lake, working a case that was spiraling out of control. Every one of my instincts told me that my meeting with Shannon later tonight was a setup. Shannon luring me to the park after dark. The death of her assistant only a few hours old. Someone was trying to tie up loose ends.

But I didn’t believe Shannon was in on it. She was kooky. She played the star thing to the hilt. But for some reason, I didn’t think she was a killer. Maybe I’d been taken in a bit by her beauty. No, not her beauty. The warmth of her beauty. Some women are beautiful like crystal. Cold, cool lines. Others have the beauty of a glowing fire. I felt Shannon was the latter.

But I’d been wrong plenty of times before.

Something was nagging at me. Like a hair-trigger on the verge of being pulled. My mind kept going back to Laurence Grasso. He was a trigger, too.

Rufus Coltraine had been the second to die. There was something about his role in this thing, too. Something about him that kept coming back to my mind but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Something about-

Family.

And then something sparked in my mind. Family. Joe Puhy, the prison guard at Jackson had said he thought Coltrane would head South to see his family. So why hadn’t he? And Puhy had said that Coltraine didn’t get any letters – so how did he know he had family in — where was it?

Goddamnit. I pulled out my cell phone. I almost had it, and then it would slip away. If Puhy worked at Jackson, he probably lived in the area. There were only a few small towns nearby. Plymouth. Ann Arbor.

I punched in the number for information and asked for Joe Puhy’s number. There were three of them. I jotted them down and called the first. I got a machine but when the voice of the answering machine clicked on, I knew I didn’t have the right one. The Puhy I’d spoken to was older and gruff.

Exactly the voice I got on the second try.

“I’m very sorry to bother you at home, Mr. Puhy,” I said. “This is John Rockne, the private investigator. We spoke earlier about Rufus Coltrane and Laurence Grasso.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, not happy at all. “I remember. Look, we’re about to sit down to dinner.” I could hear voices in the background.

“I’m terribly sorry, sir. This won’t take more than a minute.”

He sighed. “You’re a friend of the House, right?”

The House was my buddy who worked on Cell Block A who’d initially put me in touch with Puhy. Thank God for the House. I owed him one.

“Yeah,” I said.

“All right, go ahead.”

“I was just looking back through my notes and I saw that you said you thought Rufus Coltrane would go down South to see his family. Or that you thought he had family there.”

“Uh-huh.” More dishes clattering in the background. I had to make this fast.

“But you also said that you didn’t recall him getting any letters or anything from family members,” I said.

There was a pause as Puhy thought about the contradiction.

“Uh…right.”

“So how did you know he had family down there?”

This time the pause was longer. I heard more voices in the background, including a woman calling out, “Joe!” She had that kind of voice that you ignored at your own peril. Kind of like my wife’s.

“Uh…,” he said.

Shit, I didn’t want to lose him.

“You know, this is really a bad time,” Puhy said.

“I know it is, but another person has died, Mr. Puhy.” I was starting to get mad. People were dying and this guy’s Beef fucking Stroganoff was more important.

He must have heard the tone in my voice.

“Hold on!” he shouted to the people in the background.

“All right,” he said. “Let me think.” We both waited. A freighter nosed its way out of the Detroit River, heading north. The clatter of silverware from the Puhy kitchen sounded in my ear.

“Okay, I think I remember,” he said.

“Shoot.”

“It wasn’t a letter or anything,” he said. “I think I overheard him talking about it.”

“Was he talking about it with Laurence Grasso?”

“Yeah. How’d you know that?”

“Just a hunch.”

“Yeah, I think I overheard Coltrane saying something about getting out and going there.”

“Where, Mr. Puhy?”

“Home,” he said.

“Home where?”

“I’m pretty sure it was, um, Tennessee.”

A shiver ran down my spine. The little thing that had been dancing around in my brain finally let itself be known.

“Where in Tennessee?” I asked, even though I already knew.

A giant block had slammed into place.

“Memphis,” he said.

Forty-one

S
omething about a house. Fuck. I was losing my mind – short term, medium term and long-term memory loss. All at the same time. I pounded the steering wheel with my hands. Think, think, think. I pulled onto Vernier from Lakeshore, heading toward I-94.

I needed to start making more connections. That feeling of being close wasn’t good enough.

Where had I been when I felt things starting to come together? At the party. The first time. Talking to Shannon’s entourage for the first time.

A car pulled in front of me and I reefed the wheel to the right, sped up and floored it past him.

Something about a farmhouse?

What the fuck was it? We were all sitting around, talking about escapes or something. And Memphis mentioned something about looking at a house. Was she buying?

Finally, it clicked.

A lighthouse. That’s right, a lighthouse. Because she said she was on Harsen’s. The island at the other end of Lake St. Clair.

I pounded the wheel again and roared onto I-94. Harsen’s Island. A lighthouse. And someone had said something about Memphis milking cows. A joke that I assumed meant she had a little farm or something. Farms on Harsen’s weren’t unheard of.

I glanced at the clock on the dashboard.

It’d been nearly three hours since Molly had been killed. If the same person was headed for Memphis’, he or she had a big jump on me.

I pushed the pedal all the way to the floor.

•  •  •

Harsen’s island is the biggest of a small group of islands at the north end of Lake St. Clair. The lake narrows and eventually turns into the St. Clair River for a brief thirty miles or so before opening back up, this time into Lake Huron.

I exited I-94, sped across Harper and pulled into the parking lot at the ferry harbor. Fifteen minutes later, the ferry dumped us on the island and I hit the road running. Even though Harsen’s has its own yacht club and for years was a miniature summer playground for Grosse Pointers, it still feels like you travel back twenty years or so. Mostly summer cottages and the occasional bait shop/convenience store.

The entire island is only a couple square miles with one main road that runs along the outside border. The road is aptly named Harsen’s boulevard and I steered onto it from the ferry dock. It had been over fifteen years since I’d been on the island, and then I was a high schooler driving out to my buddy’s cottage to get drunk.

I’d never seen a lighthouse on the island, or if I had I certainly didn’t remember, and didn’t know that one even existed out here.

I also figured there weren’t many cops out here, either. So I hammered the pedal down and turned Harsen’s into my own private Indianapolis 500.

After about five minutes, I sped around a steep curve and saw the lighthouse, although, technically, it was more like a lightpost you see in the suburbs. A tiny harbor had a few boats tied off and I looked at the surrounding land.

No sign of a farmhouse.

I did, however, see an older woman walking a Bassett Hound. I pulled the car up next to her.

“Do you know of a farmhouse around here with a view of the lighthouse? It belongs to a songwriter named Memphis Bornais?” I said.

She looked at me with bloodshot blue eyes. They looked just like the dogs’. I thought she was going to tell me that Harsen’s residents were a private people and that if this Memphis woman wanted me to find her she would’ve given me directions.

Instead, she jerked an unusually large thumb in the direction behind her.

“Third mailbox down,” she said. The Bassett Hound gave a soft bark and they went on their way.

I thanked her and sped down to the mailbox – instead of the little flag sticking up from the box it was a metal musical note. I knew I had the right place.

The driveway was dirt and gravel and it immediately climbed. From the road, the tall trees blocked any view of the houses behind. But once I got near the top of the driveway, I realized there was a very small bluff. And perched on top was a little white farmhouse, with a picket fence and a red barn behind it.

It was a cross between Mayberry and Martha’s Vineyard, before Billy Joel moved in.

I skidded to a stop in the roughly hewn semi-circular drive and jogged to the front door. I rang the doorbell and waited, but I heard nothing from inside. I tried the knob. Locked.

I ran to the back of the house and saw a silver, 7-series BMW backed up against the house. I went up the back porch steps and was about to knock on the door when I saw that it was already open.

I went through it, into a small mudroom. There were potted plants and gardening gloves and an umbrella. The door leading from the mudroom into the kitchen was open as well. Inside the kitchen, I saw a few dishes in the sink, a pot on the stove and a small cat bowl with food in it.

From the kitchen, I went through a doorway into a small dining room and off the dining room was a living room. The place was furnished with big, overstuffed chairs and throw rugs. A small fireplace sat off to one side of the living room. I saw on the mantle a collection of photographs.

To my right, I saw a stairwell and heard a bumping noise from above me.

“Hello!” I yelled up. No one answered.

I climbed the stairs two at a time and came to a hallway with three doors. The first door on my right was open and I could see tile as well as the edge of a pedestal sink.

To my left was another door, closed. And straight ahead, the third door was open and I could see shadows moving inside. I walked forward, my heart beating from exertion and fear.

For the first time in my career, I desperately wished for a gun.

I peeked into the room and immediately understood the bumping sound and the moving shadows.

Memphis hung from the ceiling fan, her neck stretched in a way that could mean only one thing. The ceiling fan was on, and was slowly spinning her body, her foot occasionally bumping against the bed’s footboard.

I froze, unable to tear myself away from the image of Memphis’ face, her lips frozen in a look of terror, blood dripping from her nose-

Blood dripping…

Fresh blood…

An electric spike shot down my spine just as I heard the whisper of a shoe on carpet and I ducked but the blow cracked along my vertebrae between my shoulder blades and I hit the floor. I rolled and caught the sight of Erma’s – or was it Freda’s? – face flushed red, her teeth gritted, a tazer in her hand.

She cursed in German and I rolled into the bedroom where Memphis hung.

And I rolled right under Freda.

She’d been standing behind the door. While her sister had been in the bedroom with the door closed. As I watched them descend on me, I realized they knew I was coming. Somehow, they knew. They’d staged the scene to lure me in.

The first one pounced on me and sat on my chest and pinned my arms under her knees. I tried to head butt her in the face but she pulled back easily and all I caught was air. I felt an incredible weight on my legs and realized the other one was kneeling on them.

If I had any doubts about what they were trying to do, those doubts ended when the first one grabbed a handful of my hair and brought her gun up toward my mouth. I gritted my teeth but she let go of my hair, brought her forearm down and pinched my nose shut.

I held my breath, knowing what was going to happen. When I opened my mouth to breathe, she would jam the gun in and blow off the top of my head.

Then they would jot a little note.

Double suicide. Or murder/suicide depending on which story they went with.

I’d killed Memphis for some reason and then they’d bring out my past. An ex-cop ate his gun. Happens all the fucking time. Every day, in fact.

I didn’t think my sister would let it ride, but hey, these two fuckers were pros. They’d make it look very good, very real.

My lungs were on fire and I knew I couldn’t hold my breath very much longer. The first one had a little smile on her face. She looked like a mean little kid who’d pulled the wings off a fly and was now happily watching it die a pathetic little spasmodic death.

It pissed me off.

Every muscle in my body slammed into place and I bucked with everything I had.

The first one barely moved.

But move she did.

Just enough to free my left arm.

I reached up and got her neck and bucked again, this time bringing her head toward me as I rammed my head forward. I heard and felt her nose squash against my forehead. Blood sprayed and now my right arm was loose. I grabbed the gun as the woman on top of me sagged. The gun fired a round and the explosion brought the three of us into a burst of frantic energy.

I hoped that I’d knocked the first one out, but her eyes cleared just as I was bringing the gun around. She had the advantage but I had momentum on my side. I gave one more shove and the gun came around toward her chest.

I pulled the trigger.

Just as she was knocked back, the second one let go of my legs and reached for her gun. I put three rounds into her chest and she staggered back into the hallway and fell on her ass, her feet still in the room. She had a look of utter sadness, looking down at her dead sister. She toppled over then, her big body landing with a thud.

The smell of gunpowder was overwhelming and I felt stars shooting across my forehead.

Everything started to go black and I was suddenly scared I’d been shot.

But then I realized why.

I was still holding my breath.