Till the Butchers Cut Him Down (23 page)

I complimented him on the room while warming my hands in the heat from the fireplace.

“In a house like this,” he said, “one has to create oases of comfort. In a sense, I suppose I bought it to prove that anything
can be turned into a home.”

“It was built by a founder of Keystone Steel?”

He handed me one of the wineglasses, took his to an armchair, and propped his feet up on a hassock. “Raymond Lewis. Old man
Lewis was a religious fanatic—hence the gory stained glass—and a compulsive spender—hence everything else. There’re six bedrooms,
six bathrooms, all with hand-painted tiles, a ballroom on the top floor, and a bowling alley in the basement.”

“Amazing. You live alone here?”

“I am, as they say, between relationships, and finding a new partner poses a bit of a problem. I’m gay, and few men of my
orientation hang out in dying steel towns—unless they’re fond of drunken unemployed mill-hunks. But I’m quite happy rattling
around here by myself; I have a great many books and hobbies. My firearms collection is considered one of the best in the
state, and I’m also into restoring antique furniture.”

“Local history is also one of your interests, I’m told. Are you from the area?”

“Biloxi, Mississippi.”

“Then how and why …?”

“How and why did I end up here?”

I nodded.

“Well, like many a southern boy, I spent my adolescence in the closet. And also like many, I later headed west to your town.
S.F. State, to study creative writing. My parents came to visit during my freshman year; it didn’t take them long to catch
on to certain nuances of my lifestyle. They stopped sending money, and I started going to school part-time and working odd
jobs to get by. Six years later I was still in the creative writing program and living with a man who was offered a teaching
position at the state university at California—that’s a little south of here. When he moved, I went along.”

Ritter paused, eyes contemplative. “The trouble with San Francisco was that I hung out in bars and coffeehouses with other
young writers more than I wrote. And when any of us did write, we all sounded the same. I decided that if I got away to a
place that was completely foreign to me, I’d eventually start sounding like myself. And I guess I do—I sure as hell don’t
sound like anybody else. Some people call my books potboilers, and to a certain extent they are; but writing them pleases
me, and they pay to keep this Gothic horror up, so who am I to complain?”

He raised his glass in a toast, and I responded in kind.

I said, “I assume because you’re not from this area, you have a certain detachment about what goes on here.”

“In a way. You said on the phone that you’re interested in the Keystone mess. T. J. Gordon’s your client?”

“Yes.” I explained Suits’s present circumstances.

“I heard about the explosion,” Ritter said. “It made the national news and, of course, the tabloids. People here couldn’t
stop speculating.”

“Speculating that someone connected with Keystone might be the responsible party?”

“Uh-huh. Very few people in Monora really understand what happened with the mill. The Keystone board and management were a
bunch of shortsighted fuckups who didn’t realize how far into the ground they’d run the company until it was way too late.
Most of them—Herb Pace, the former CEO, is a good example—still don’t get it.”

“Tell me about Herb Pace.”

“He was the first to be fired. Your client arrived in town, and before he’d unpacked, Pace was out on his ass. To add to that
humiliation, his marriage fell apart as soon as the big salary he’d been paying himself stopped.”

So Pace had been Suits’s sacrificial lamb. “What about the other Keystone execs?”

“The ones who’re still in the area are retired and living off their investments. Others found jobs elsewhere. People like
them do a lot of damage and still manage to land on their feet.” He paused, thinking. “Labor didn’t play a much loftier part
in the Keystone debacle, though. The USWA local made extreme demands, and when they weren’t met, they used dirty tactics.
Your client arrived at a crisis point, and for a while it looked as if he might have a strike or even a riot on his hands.
Then the head of the local, Ed Bodine, was caught dealing drugs and sent to prison. After that, union leadership more or less
collapsed.”

“When was Bodine arrested?”

“Shortly after Gordon took over. He was dealing cocaine. Claimed he was framed, but some very reputable people, including
a member of his own union, testified to the contrary.”

“Can you name names?”

Ritter thought, shook his head. “I can’t recall any.”

I made a mental note to ask Chief Koll about the arrest and trial.

Ritter got up to pour more wine. “The way I see it,” he went on, “Gordon was a man with a tough job—a near impossible job—to
do, and he went ahead and did it. Unfortunately, he’s not particularly likable, certainly no diplomat, and neither are the
people he surrounds himself with. Their tactics struck everybody as excessively heavy-handed and insensitive. I always thought
he should have used his wife in a community-relations capacity; apparently she was charming and might have been able to do
him some good. But as it was, she wasn’t here long enough—”

“Wait a minute—Anna Gordon came to Monora?”

Ritter looked surprised at the sharpness of my tone. “For a couple of months right at the beginning, but then she went back
to California. There were rumors that the marriage was in trouble.”

I replayed my mental tape of Anna’s and my conversation on the beach at the cove the day she died. What had she said about
accompanying Suits to his turnaround sites? That she’d tried but it hadn’t worked well. And I’d had the impression that she
was about to tell me something important but decided against it. Later she’d claimed she could give me no insight into either
Lost Hope or Keystone, because she and Suits had agreed to a trial separation at the time he went to Pennsylvania and hadn’t
worked things out until after he finished in Nevada. But now I found she’d lied about going to both places.

Anna had also said something that struck me as interesting, but that I didn’t pursue because I felt it was none of my business:
there were things she would have done differently if she’d been safe in the marriage. Now I wished I’d asked her what she
meant.

* * *

Ritter insisted I stay to dinner—an elegant caviar-and-lox omelet and a salad—so it was after ten by the time I got back to
the guest house. The writer had handed me no further surprises about Suits’s time in Monora, although the stories he told
affected me strongly. He told of grown men and women crying when they received their layoff notices; of workers begging to
take a pay cut to five dollars an hour if they could keep their jobs; of union food-and-clothing drives; of families piling
their possessions in trucks and of leave-takings reminiscent of those of the Great Depression. Jobs at the new mini-mills
in Alabama had been offered to the workers with the most seniority, but few took them; it was hard for older people to pull
up roots that went back in some cases for generations. Militant young workers spurned the offers, too, because the wages were
below scale; currently none were making what they could have had they relocated.

As I drove back to the guest house I wondered what I would have done had I been in Suits’s position. Save a company, but destroy
its employees’ lives? Return a profit to the shareholders, but let the men and women who had labored for it go hungry? The
concept went against my idealistic grain, but my practical side recognized a certain necessity and inevitability in his actions.
Possibly after having been in his line of work so long, he hadn’t even considered the human side of the equation.

Jeannie Schmidt’s big frame house was dark except for a porch light and sconces in the hallways. A small lamp glowed on the
bedside table in my room; the covers had been turned down and a note lay on my pillow. Noah Romanchek wanted me to call him.

I left the room and tiptoed down the hall to the stairway, trying to avoid squeaky floorboards and instead hitting every one.
The stairs creaked loudly, and I had to grope around to find the light switch for the alcove off the parlor where the phone
was. Romanchek had left his home number, and he answered on the first ring.

“I went up to Mendocino County this morning. T.J. is missing.”

“What?”

“He’s not at Bootlegger’s Cove. The cottage is empty. Josh and I called that cabdriver T.J. sometimes uses; he hasn’t seen
him since he drove him to a clinic in Fort Bragg a week ago to have the cast removed from his arm. We had him come get us
and take us into Elk; someone from the grocery store there dropped off supplies at the cottage last Wednesday, but nobody’s
had any contact with T.J. since. Nobody’s seen him in Albion, Little River, Mendocino, or at the airport.”

I thought of Moonshine Cottage: its loneliness; its view of the blackened rubble on the cliff top; the nearby precipitous
drop to the rocks in the cove. “You don’t suppose he killed himself?”

“There was no body, no note, no other evidence of that.”

“You contacted the sheriff’s department?”

“Filed a report. Sharon, what is it you want to talk with him about?”

“There’re a few details I need to clear up.”

“Anything I can help you with?”

“No. Where do you suppose he went? And how?”

“God knows. Hitchhiked, maybe. By the way, I couldn’t help but recognize the area code you called from. You’re in Monora?”

Damn! I should have called back instead of leaving the number. Even though Romanchek had been very cooperative with my investigation,
I didn’t trust him, sensed Suits didn’t really trust him, either. “Yes,” I said grudgingly.

“These details you need to clear up—do they pertain to the Keystone turnaround?”

“No, they’re personal.”

“I see. How long have you been in Pennsylvania?”

“Only the day.”

“And have you found anything promising there?”

“No. I’ll be coming back to California soon. Noah, has T.J. indicated to you at any time since the explosion that he was planning
to leave the cove?”

Romanchek was silent.

I repeated the question.

“Sorry, I was thinking. There
is
one thing, and in light of his disappearance I don’t like its implications one bit. The last time I went up there he said
there was only one reason he’d leave—if he figured out who had set the explosion. Then, he told me, he’d go after the bastard
and kill him.”

After talking with Romanchek for a few more minutes and coming to no definite conclusions, I went to bed but couldn’t sleep.
The night passed slowly as I repeatedly changed position on the too-soft bed. The old house groaned and creaked; a wind kicked
up around four in the morning, causing a tree branch to scratch against the window glass.

So Suits had finally shaken off his apathy, I thought. Walked away from the rubble of his life. To where and to what purpose?
The unanswerable question nagged at me. Without Anna to anchor him, and fueled by rage over her death, my client was a loose
cannon, dangerous both to himself and to anyone his paranoid psyche might focus on.

The thought of the damage he might do made me want to get up, drive straight back to Pittsburgh, and catch the next flight
west. But what sense was there in that? Sure, I could go to Mendocino County, repeat Romanchek and Josh’s inquiries, but it
sounded as though they’d been thorough. Still, given my distrust of the attorney …

At five-thirty I got up and pulled on my jeans and sweater. Tiptoed through the silent house to the phone again and, not caring
that it was only two-thirty there, called home. Mick answered on the sixth ring, his voice a groggy croak. “Wake up,” I said.
“There’s something I need you to do.”

“… Shar, do you know what time it is?”

“Get used to this, kid. Rotten hours and calls in the middle of the night are what private investigation’s all about.”

Grunt.

“Mick!”

“Okay, I’m here. I was trying to find a pencil and paper.”

He was nothing if not willing—I had to give him that. Briefly I explained the circumstances of Suits’s disappearance. “I want
you to go up there and verify what Romanchek told me. Ask as many people as you can if they’ve seen or spoken to Suits. Keep
detailed notes and call me here as soon as you’re finished.”

“Shar, how am I supposed to get there? I don’t have a car, and I doubt Rae’ll lend me hers if I wake her up at three in the
morning.”

“Good Lord, you don’t have to leave yet! The trip’ll only take you three, three and a half hours.”

“I still don’t think she’ll let me take the Ramblin’ Wreck on a weekend.”

Now that I thought of Rae’s appropriately named old Rambler American, I didn’t want Mick driving it on the narrow, winding
coast highway. “You can use mine. It’s parked at the general aviation terminal at Oakland Airport. Extra keys are hanging
on the hook on the fridge.”

“I can see them from here.” Now Mick sounded fully alert—even excited. “Shar, I waited all day, but there was nothing from
NPRC on Sid Blessing.”

“They’re a bureaucracy. We’ll be lucky if we hear in a week.”

“Listen, I won’t be able to sleep any more tonight. I could go into the office and tinker—”

“No! Every time you pull something illegal you’re putting my license in jeopardy.”

“I won’t get caught.”

“Oh, yeah? Remember what happened with the board of education?”

“… Right. Well, maybe I’ll just run up to Mendocino now, get a head start.”

“Yes, why don’t you do that?”

It wasn’t until I was back in bed that I realized he would have one hell of a time getting to Oakland Airport at three in
the morning.

* * *

At some point before dawn I fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep and woke woolly-mouthed and disoriented at a little after nine.
I dragged myself along the hall for a cold shower, dressed, and followed the smell of coffee downstairs to a big 1950s-style
kitchen that reminded me of the one at All Souls. Jeannie had told me to help myself; I filled the cup she’d set out and took
it to the backyard, where I found her raking leaves.