Till the Butchers Cut Him Down (22 page)

The jet engines thrummed as the plane sped across the continent toward the dawn that now streaked the sky. I watched the shifting
light and shadow and felt a curious sense of inevitability. My client was a man out of my past; we’d reconnected, and it had
almost proved fatal. Whatever set those events in motion had begun in Monora; now I was going there to uncover it. The sensation
both discomfited and excited me. I’d always resisted the notion of fate, but never failed to respond to its pull.

Again, I decided, I would just let events unfold.

Monora, Pennsylvania

Early October

The road paralleled the railway tracks that ran along the edge of the Monongahela. On the river a barge heaped with coal moved
slowly north. To my right were steep hills covered with sagging wood-frame and brick houses, their walls blackened by soot.
The late-afternoon light did nothing to relieve their dinginess; the only cheerful spots were big orange garbage bags with
jack-o’-lantern faces crayoned on them, put out early for Halloween.

After a while the pavement jogged away from the river and climbed some. A small sign that said Monora appeared; the population
figure had been painted out and not replaced. The road dipped down into a commercial section, its buildings soot-blackened
like the houses on the hill above: Mellon Bank, Dutch Boy Paints, Rexall Drugs; defunct movie theater, McGlennon’s Pub, U.S.
Post Office; Steel City Pizza, state liquor store, defunct dress shop. Every third business, including the Monora Hotel and
Frank’s Department Store, was dead; the town had a curiously empty feel, in spite of it being only four-thirty on a Friday
afternoon. Cars lined the curbs, but I saw no pedestrians except for a couple of cops crossing a side street from the police
station to a doughnut shop.

I kept following the road past more boarded-up and abandoned buildings until it curved again and ran downhill toward the river.
And there on a flat plain that bowed out into the Monongahela lay what I’d traveled thousands of miles to see.

The enormous shut-down steel mill stretched for nearly a mile. Huge corrugated metal buildings, corroded and stained red-orange.
High catwalks and covered walkways spanning weed-choked railroad tracks. Rows of tall smokestacks that emitted nothing; finger
piers where no barges were moored; paralyzed cranes, tumbledown sheds, and cracked pavement; heaps of coal that would never
fuel the now-cold blast furnaces. All of it rusting away.

I made a U-turn, got out of my rental car. Crossed a debris-filled drainage ditch to the high chain-link fence and stood peering
through it. The wind blew strongly here at the river’s edge, cold and crisp with autumn. Above me metal clanked monotonously;
I glanced up at a nearby walkway, saw a lattice work of corroded iron dangling and banging against a support. Otherwise there
was no sound and nothing moved.

I felt the same sense of desolation and futility that I’d experienced when Suits took me to Hunters Point. Wondered if his
plans to revitalize the old naval base had roots in guilt over what he’d done here. If so, it would be small atonement; the
closing of Keystone’s Monora mill had not only taken away livelihoods but also ended an era.

In the 1950s the mill had been one of the largest in America, rolling over five million tons of steel a year. Its products—building
beam and plate and rail and rod and wire—could be found from coast to coast: in the skyscrapers of Manhattan, in the cars
rolling off Detroit’s assembly lines, in the train yards of the Midwest, in the freeways of California. But after 1957 production
dropped off in an alarming series of cyclical swings. Management blamed the federal government for failing to protect the
industry from foreign competition; they blamed the steelworkers’ union for demanding high wages and imposing inefficient work
regulations. They blamed everyone but themselves.

When management could have invested in new technologies, they clung to outmoded open-hearth furnaces. When they could have
investigated new product lines, they devoted little money to research-and-development. When they could have worked productively
with labor, they adopted an adversarial stance. In 1959 the entire industry was crippled by a major strike that ended only
when President Eisenhower invoked the Taft-Hartley Act, forcing workers back to the mills.

Keystone’s worst misstep came in the late seventies, when a new two-hundred-million-dollar blast furnace—installed only after
baffling technical problems, interminable delays, and cost overruns that sent their accountants reeling—proved, as many would
have predicted, to be a white elephant. The company plunged further into the red. Management’s response was to raise prices
and send senior executives, board members, and their wives on an all-expense-paid “fact-finding” junket to such hubs of heavy
industry as Tahiti, Hong Kong, and Australia. In 1982 the layoffs began in earnest. In the late eighties the frightened board
finally threw nearly seventy years of deeply entrenched tradition to the winds and sent for Suits.

No one, I thought as I gripped the cold links of the fence around the corpse of what had once been a mighty, vital mill, could
blame Suits for what had happened here. By the time he was summoned, there had been little left to work with.

I recalled his description of what he’d found upon his arrival in Monora: “Fifty-five hundred of the most depressed steel-workers
on the face of the earth; they’d taken pay cut after pay cut, and relations had deteriorated so badly that management was
afraid to walk down the same side of the street with labor. Railroad tracks that a locomotive didn’t pass over but twice a
week. Whole buildings shut down, others only half used. The open-hearth sheds were just shells, but Keystone couldn’t afford
to demolish them. Most of the blast furnaces had been dynamited and were just lying in pieces, waiting to be hauled away.
There were virtual graveyards of abandoned coke ovens and equipment. And
this
they expected me to turn around?”

But he
had
turned Keystone. He sent the board on an extended vacation and fired management. He negotiated as best he could with labor.
Then he pulled the plug on the mill and sold off every asset that could possibly be liquidated. With the proceeds he built
three mini-mills—small and efficient, each offering a single product at below-market cost—in Alabama, where land and labor
were cheap and steel was in short supply. Keystone now returned a small but respectable profit to its shareholders.

Suits had saved another company. But to do so he’d destroyed a mill, a town, a way of life. Now that I’d seen this place I
was sure that what he’d done here was sufficient grounds for harassment—and ultimately murder.

* * *

It took me less than a minute to realize that the Monora Police Station was a former tavern. Its brick and glass-block facade
and double doors with small diamond-shaped windows gave away its previous incarnation; even the framework for a neon sign
remained. Amused, I pushed through the doors and found a familiar precinct-house setup. The desk sergeant told me that Chief
Nancy Koll was at the doughnut shop across Cop Station Alley, and motioned toward the side street where I’d earlier seen the
two uniforms crossing.

Koll was a strong-featured woman in her fifties, a little under six feet tall, with a cordial if somewhat abrupt manner. When
I introduced myself, she recognized my name, dismissed the subordinate she’d been conferring with, and asked me to join her.

“Coffee here’s okay, but I don’t recommend their doughnuts,” she told me. “We use the shop as our conference room; it’s better
heated than the station.”

I ordered coffee and asked her if Deputy Westerkamp had explained why I was coming to Monora.

“He did. Smart man to use you. Saves his department money.” Then she launched into a tirade about budget cuts for law enforcement,
and I started to like her—as most of us do when we meet someone whose opinions are a near match for our own.

I asked, “Have you turned up anything on who Westerkamp’s dead man might be?”

She shook her head. “I’ve got a man going through our missing-person files right now, but it’s a slow process. A lot of people
up and went around the time we’re talking about. Husbands went out for a pack of cigarettes; wives took up with traveling
men; kids ran off to escape another drunken beating. Happens that way when your livelihood’s taken from you.”

“The town’s in bad shape since the mill closed.”

“The town’s dead. It just doesn’t know it yet.”

I took my notebook from my bag. “My client … Did Westerkamp mention I’m working for T. J. Gordon?”

The web of lines around Koll’s eyes deepened. “He did. Can’t say as I have much sympathy for Gordon, considering what he did
to us, but it’s still a tough thing to lose a wife that way. And unlike a lot of people around here, I understand that he
just did what he had to.”

“There’s active resentment of him, then. Can you think of anyone who would go so far as to follow him west to get revenge?”

“No one in particular. Is that what you think the dead man was after?”

“If so, he wasn’t the only one. He died over a year ago, but somebody else began harassing Gordon this past August, a few
weeks before his house blew up.” I flipped through the pages of my notebook, then handed it to her. “This is a list of people
who Gordon thinks could have been responsible.”

She read it, nodding a couple of times. “The first name you can scratch—he’s dead. Suicide. The second was one of the husbands
who went out for smokes. I suppose he might’ve headed west, but he never had enough ambition or brains to stick to any one
course of action. This one”—she pointed—“Herb Pace. He’s a sorry case.”

“How so?”

“Pace was CEO at Keystone before Gordon fired him. Lived high, had one of those trophy wives. She divorced him, took what
was left of his money. Now he lives on River Road across from the railroad tracks and spends most of his time at McGlennon’s
Pub. Pace really hates your client, but I know for certain that he hasn’t left town in the past few years. You might want
to talk with him, though, to get background on the years when Gordon was here. And he might know of somebody who
has
left town with revenge on his mind. Just be sure to catch him before noon while he’s still lucid.”

“Anyone else on that list who’s a possible suspect?”

“No.” She shook her head and handed back the notebook. “The rest are still here, and none of them’re devious enough for what
you’re talking about.”

I asked for and wrote down Herb Pace’s address. “Is there anyone else you can think of who could give me some insight into
the time of the turnaround?”

Koll pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Well, there’s Amos Ritter. He’s a writer. Big fat paperback historicals that you buy for
long plane trips. Has quite an interest in local history, too, so he might be helpful to you. Lives in a big brick house on
top of the hill—Raymond Lewis’s old place, he was one of the founders of Keystone. I can’t give you the exact address, but
it’s on Crest Avenue; anybody can point it out.”

I noted the writer’s name. “One last question, and I won’t take up any more of your time. Is there a motel in town?”

Koll smiled pityingly at me. “Not anymore. I recommend you try Schmidt’s Guest House in Pearl Alley.” She gave me brief directions.
“Jeannie Schmidt keeps a clean place, and it’s cheap. Plus she’s a notorious gossip. Who knows?” She winked. “You might learn
something I don’t know.”

* * *

The town, I noticed, had a lot of little unpaved lanes that ran between the regular streets, and each had been given a name.
I found Schmidt’s Guest House on one of those, set back a ways and screened by two big maple trees. I approached the old-fashioned
frame house on a carpet of fallen leaves; a seedpod came spinning down and lit on my shoulder. In college I’d had a friend
from Vermont; she called the two-winged seedpods “helicopters.”

Jeannie Schmidt—a tiny, birdlike woman with a quick, breathy voice and a thick braid of blond hair hanging down her back—told
me I was her first customer that week. She showed me to a large front room furnished in what looked to be good antiques. The
bathroom was down the hall and had a very rudimentary shower; Jeannie—as she insisted I call her—apologized twice for the
inconvenience. She seemed to have an exaggerated idea of what amenities Californians were used to and was astonished when
I told her that for the first year I’d lived in my house I’d put up with a toilet located in a cold cubicle on the back porch.
We settled on a very reasonable rate for the room, and then I asked to use the phone, promising to put long-distance calls
on my credit card.

First, Mick. My nephew wasn’t at home or at my office. I left the guesthouse number on both machines.

Next, Noah Romanchek. His secretary at GGL told me he’d flown up to Bootlegger’s Cove that morning and hadn’t yet returned.
I also left the number with her.

Finally, Amos Ritter. The writer had a soft voice with a touch of the South in it; he readily agreed to see me and gave me
directions to what he called his “Gothic horror.”

* * *

It
was
a Gothic horror: dark red brick, with turrets and arched windows and stained-glass panels depicting rather violent religious
scenes. The slate roof was topped by elaborate ironwork that resembled angry fists raised at the heavens; marble steps led
up to a double front door with more stained-glass insets, these depicting the Crucifixion. As I rang the bell I half expected
Lurch the butler to answer.

The man who greeted me was in pleasant contrast to the house: slight, blond, with a receding hairline and a fine-featured
sensitive face; clad in jeans and a blue velour pullover and shod in plush-lined moccasins. His easy manner made the enormous,
high-ceilinged foyer less forbidding. He led me to a parlor whose walls were covered with built-in bookcases, seated me on
a leather sofa, and poured two glasses of sherry from a crystal decanter.