The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

Loren D. Estleman Redneck from Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine

“Don’t take no pictures. I ain’t looking for evidence for no divorce court. I just want to know is she cheating.”

As he spoke, Billy Fred McCorkingdale polished off another rib and laid the bone across the ends of the other three in the latest layer. He had a respectable log cabin going.

The place was called Dem Bones and occupied a sheet-metal barn on Michigan Avenue in Ypsilanti — or Ypsitucky, as it’s sometimes called, for the legions of skilled and unskilled workers who swarmed up Old 23 from Kentucky and points south after Pearl Harbor. They came to Detroit to build tanks and bombers and stayed on after Hiroshima. Billy Fred was a tinsmith at the General Motors Powertrain plant nearby, and his raw hands and big forearms were just what you’d expect of someone who worked with tin snips all day. He had a gourd-shaped head, narrow at the top, small eyes set close, and a nose like a rivet punched way too far above his wide, expressive mouth. He shaved his hair around his ears, which stuck out enough without help.

“That’s good,” I said, “about the pictures. Because I’m not taking the job. I can recommend a couple of good divorce men.”

“I got your name from a divorce man. He said you were the best shadow in Detroit. I want to know where she goes when I’m at work and if she meets anyone. I don’t need to know who he is. I can’t work things out with her till I know what it is I’m dealing with.”

For a second-generation native, he had a redneck accent as broad as the Ohio River.

“That’s all?” I emptied my coffee cup and signaled for a refill. I’d been about to leave.

“I ain’t been a good husband for a long time, Mr. Walker. I caught overtime fever: sixteen-hour days, holidays and weekends. I told myself the extra money was for her, but that don’t cover the bar time I spent after work. It ain’t her fault if she had to go looking for company. But I got to know.”

The waitress refilled my cup. I sipped, studying Billy Fred’s puppy-dog look. “My fee’s five hundred a day,” I said. “First three days up front.”

He plucked a roll of bills from inside his coat, pulled off the rubber band, and counted fifteen hundred dollars in fifties and hundreds onto the table in front of me. My poker face must have slipped, because he said, “Overtime fever, remember? It ain’t worth nothing without Lynne.”

I put the bills in my wallet, wrote him out a receipt, and opened my notebook. “Tell me about Lynne.”

Lynne McCorkingdale clerked in a Perry Drugs in Romulus, next door to Detroit Metropolitan Airport. All the shelves were equipped with horizontal bars like a boat’s, to keep merchandise from falling off when 737s roared overhead. I bought a bottle of aspirin to get a look at her. She was several years younger than her husband, fine-boned and blond, with a short, breezy haircut and gray eyes — pretty in a fussed-over kind of way. She’d have looked better in less makeup, but I’m old-fashioned about such matters. She rang me up with barely a glance.

She drove a blue Chevy Cavalier, two years old, parked in a municipal lot a block from the store. I found a slot farther down the row and pulled the Cutlass into it. The store closed in twenty minutes. I watched a couple of seagulls fighting over half a Hostess cupcake; then Lynne came around the corner and got into the Cavalier and backed out. I gave her till the end of the row, then followed. The gulls took off.

I didn’t expect anything the first night; nothing is what I got, not counting a necktie I bought from one of the floating stalls at Fair-lane, Dearborn’s largest shopping mall, while waiting for Lynne to come out of the Gap. She bought a blouse in Hudson’s, a Clint Black CD in Recordtown, looked at a bra in Victoria’s Secret without buying it, drank a Coke at Arby’s, and went home, where nobody came or left until Billy Fred’s Jimmy thundered into the garage at half-past ten. Thirty minutes later the lights went out. I hung around another hour just for the hell of it, but Lynne didn’t shinny down the drainpipe. I clocked out.

The next day was Saturday, a half-day at the drugstore. She left at noon, drove to Detroit, and spent the afternoon in the library downtown, where she researched a paper for the night course she attended Tuesdays and Thursdays at Wayne State University. I interested myself in the out-of-town newspapers and tried not to feel guilty about spending Billy Fred’s overtime dollars reading the box scores in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

After the library closed, we had supper in a diner on Woodward. I sat at the end of the counter with the combined Saturday edition of the News and Free Press; she read a Danielle Steel paperback from her purse. So far she fit the profile of an errant wife as well as I qualified for a seat on the next space shuttle.

At eight o’clock she looked at her watch, put the book back into her purse, and paid for her meal at the cash register. I laid a ten-spot on the counter to cover my Reuben and the tip and went out behind her.

She took Woodward down to Jefferson and turned left. I closed in to avoid losing her in the homeward traffic from Belle Isle Park and the marinas on Lake St. Clair — too close to follow her when she swung left into a parking lot without signaling, unless I wanted to draw attention to myself. I continued for another eighth of a mile, then turned around in the driveway of an apartment complex and backtracked.

The parking lot belonged to the Alamo Motel: cable in every room and room service around the clock. Only they’d chopped up and sold the cable for the copper years ago, and the restaurant had closed at the request of the health department.

I thought at first she’d given me the slip — turned around and gone back the way she’d come while I was playing catch-up. Then I spotted her Cavalier in a slot behind the motel, next to the Dumpster. I drove back around to the front, got out, and went into the lobby.

It was clean enough. The linoleum had a fresh coat of wax, and the air smelled of Lysol and Raid. The clerk was a slender black in his early twenties, with thick glasses and his hair shaved down to stubble. He used a finger to mark his place in a textbook on abnormal psychology and asked me if I wanted a room.

I showed him the badge from the Wayne County Sheriffs Department. “Blond woman, about twenty-five. Five four, hundred and ten, short hair, gray eyes, pink sweater. What room’s she in?”

“Can I see some ID?”

“Amos Walker.” I gave him one of my cards. “The badge is a gag. I use it to serve papers.”

“Then I guess I don’t have to tell you anything.”

I pointed at his textbook. “Wayne State?”

“U of D, third year.”

“I hear tuition’s stiff.” I fished a twenty out of my wallet.

“I’m on scholarship.”

“Basketball?”

“Academic. Four point O, all four years at Mumford.”

I pulled back the twenty and laid one of Billy Fred’s fifties on the desk. He chewed the inside of his cheek. Then he took his finger out of the book, replaced it with the bill, found a registration card in the box on the desk, and slapped it down in front of me.

“Mr. and Mrs. Robert Brown,” I read. “Bob showed up yet?”

“I wouldn’t know. Nobody goes in through the lobby.”

Room 112. I skidded the card back his way. “I guess Smith is out of style.”

“I never ask.” He opened his book again.

There were four outside entrances to the motel. Room 112 was at the opposite end of the hall from a door with a large number “1” flaking off the glass. A cigarette machine stood just inside. After a quick reconnoiter I went back to the Cutlass and smoked a cigarette. I smoked another, then turned on the radio and listened to the ball game. In the bottom of the seventh a black Ford Taurus came down the row and backed into a space three cars down from Lynne’s Cavalier. A tall, fair-haired party in a sport shirt and slacks got out and went through Door Number One carrying a gym bag.

I trotted in behind him and busied myself with the cigarette machine while he walked down the hall and knocked at 112. The door opened, and Lynne McCorkingdale drew him into the room with her arms around his neck.

Back in the car I listened to the Tigers lose and then a couple of experts tell us why. I heard a call-in talk show and the same details of the same drive-by shootings, child abductions, and congressional investigations on three different news programs. By then it was after midnight, and neither Lynne nor her fair-haired companion had emerged. I went home.

Billy Fred and the customer’s chair in my office were a snug fit. He sat hunched over, licking his big thumb and turning the pages of my typewritten report without comment, his lips moving. When he finished, he read it again. Then he carefully laid it on my desk, with an expression on his gourd-shaped face I can still see when I close my eyes.

“I wrote down the license number of the Taurus,” I said. “I could have someone run it, if you’re interested.”

“I already told you I don’t want to know his name.”

I opened the safe that came with the office, took out five hundred dollars in cash, and put it on top of the report. “It only took two days. I’m returning the rest of your advance.”

“I don’t want it.”

“You won’t say that after the divorce.”

“Who said I want a divorce?”

“Put it toward a reconciliation then,” I said. “Dinner at the Whitney, flowers, a night in a hotel. Not the Alamo.”

After a long time he got up and put the bills into a pocket of his coat. “You done your job.”

I could have left it there. Nothing that happened from then on was my business. “It’s not the worst thing that can happen in a marriage,” I said.

“You married?”

“I was.”

“She cheat?”

“Not how you think.”

He shook his head. “I love Lynne. Nothing don’t make sense without her.”

Anyway I dissected that sentence didn’t please me. I clapped him on the shoulder, and he left.

Two nights later I got home from a tail job that ended in Toledo, slapped a slice of ham between two slices of bread, poured a glass of milk, and turned on the news. An EMS team appeared, pushing a pair of figures covered in sheets on stretchers into the back of a van. A sign in the background identified the Alamo Motel.

“Twelve-gauge shotgun, double-O buck, two rounds per customer, fired at close range. You don’t get any surer than that.” The ugly words were coming out of an attractive face. Mary Ann Thaler, detective lieutenant, closed the file on the autopsy report on her desk at Felony Homicide and folded her slender hands on top of it. She was wearing her light-brown hair short these days and had a white silk scarf around her throat.

“Recover the weapon?” I asked.

“We think. McCorkingdale had a twelve-gauge Ithaca pump in his bedroom and a box of double-O shells. Of course, you can’t trace shotgun pellets like you can bullets. But the gun had been cleaned very recently. No dust inside the barrel.”

“Everybody in Ypsilanti owns a shotgun. They won’t sell you a house there if you don’t.”

“Excuse me, but wasn’t it you who came in here two minutes ago and dropped this on my desk?” She slid a copy of the report I’d typed for Billy Fred from under the autopsy file.

“Just playing devil’s advocate. It isn’t every day I provide someone with a motive for double murder.”

“I’m not here to dispel your guilt complex. I’ve got a philandering wife and her lover, both shot to pieces. I’ve got the gun. And I’ve got the redneck cuckolded husband in an interrogation room, with nothing to account for his whereabouts at the time of the shoot. If they were all this easy, I’d be an inspector by now.”

“Any ID yet on the guy?”

She consulted her notebook. “Kenneth Brindle, thirty-three, single, apartment in Madison Heights. Pharmacist. Apparently he and Lynne met a couple of months ago when he filled in at the drugstore in Romulus.”

I got out my own notepad and read her the license number I’d gotten off the Taurus. She found the proper page in hers and nodded. “Shame,” she said. “He had only two payments to go.”

“I deliberately waited till the next day to tell Billy Fred. Didn’t they know it was bad luck to go to the same place twice?”

“They probably got a hint at the end.” She tapped her coral nails on the desk. “It wasn’t your fault. He was bound to find out sooner or later and do what he did.”

“I’m supposed to know a thing or two about people. I didn’t figure him for that. I still don’t.”

Her telephone whirred. She picked up, said yes three times, and cradled the receiver. “That’s a big ten four. McCorkingdale just confessed.”

I felt my face sag. I pushed back my chair and stood. “Thanks, Lieutenant. Let me know when you need a statement. I’ll be in the unemployment line.”

“People get killed every day,” she said, “especially in this town. Somebody plugged ‘Joey Bats’ Battaglia this morning in front of the Michigan Central Depot. He’s gasping out what’s left of his life at Detroit Receiving.”

“Wasn’t me. Fingering lonely wives is more my speed.”

Billy Fred got three inches of type in the Free Press city section Tuesday morning, bumped to page three by the front-page spread on Joseph “Joey Bats” Battaglia, who was said to have been cutting a deal with the Justice Department on a labor-racketeering charge when his union brothers hung a price tag on him. He’d hoped to throw them off by taking a train to Miami instead of flying, but he was in the ICU at Detroit Receiving Hospital with his kidneys punctured and his ticket intact. His mistress, a local waitress and part-time professional singer, had been waiting inside the depot when Battaglia stepped out for a smoke. Cigarettes kill.

Joey led off the noon and evening news reports. Billy Fred got the pickup spot after the sports and weather and was forgotten by Thursday.

Not entirely, though.

The employee-break room at the Powertrain plant was painted sunset orange and electric blue, probably as a respite from the grays and beiges in Assembly. I found Merle Ketch sitting at one of the trestle tables, reading a magazine and drinking from a can of Pepsi.

My badge impressed him more than it had the clerk at the Alamo. He laid down the magazine and sat up straight. “I put in my two hundred hours,” he said. “I got the judge’s signature on the papers at home.” His redneck accent was even stronger than my former client’s.

I sat down across from him. “Relax, Mr. Ketch. Personnel told me you work Billy Fred McCorkingdale’s shift. I understand you’re friends.”

“We bowl and go see the Tigers. You can’t get much friendlier than that. This about Lynne?”

“What did he tell you about Lynne?”

“I don’t want to get him in trouble.”

I dug out the good-old-boy grin. “He was arraigned yesterday in Recorder’s Court on a charge of open murder. How much more trouble could he get in?”

Ketch went sullen. “They ought to pay him a bounty. If my Judy was ever to step out on me, I’d wring her neck.”

“Not very nineties.”

“Some things don’t change.”

“Did he tell you his wife was seeing anyone?”

“Like I said, we’re friends. He hired some detective to follow her around. I told him just what I told you. All the boys on the shift are behind him. One or two of our granddaddies done the same thing down home. They none of ’em never saw the inside of a prison.”

“You said all that?”

“Hell, yes. Man can only take so much.”

“Did it occur to you that you might be putting ideas in his head?”

“What if I did? Billy Fred’s a hero. Just like them boys that take just so much crap from their supervisors, then come in blasting with a big old AK-47. That’s how this here country got started.”

“I don’t think there were any assault rifles at Valley Forge.” I drew a doodle of a clown in my notebook. “Mind if I ask where you were Monday night?”

He drained the last of his Pepsi, then crushed the can. “Break’s over.”

“I thought you got fifteen minutes.”

“I do. You just used up your last minute.”

I left but didn’t want to. I liked Merle. I hadn’t liked anyone so much since the Ayatollah.

The young man behind the desk at the Alamo was still reading about abnormal psychology. I asked him if he was cramming for a final.

“Aced it yesterday. You’d be surprised how much of this applies to my job.” His eyes were alert behind the thick spectacles. “I told the police you were asking about Mr. and Mrs. Brown before it happened. My statement’s on the record.”

“You’re safe. I’m not a suspect. Lieutenant Thaler says you told her no one came in asking about them the night of the shooting. Anybody else come in that night?”

“Just Mrs. Brown, to pay for the room. Mondays are slow. I never did see Mr. Brown. Not that Mr. Brown.”

“Get a lot of Browns, do you?”

“Like you said, Smith’s out of style.”

“What I can’t figure out is how McCorkingdale knew what room they were in if he didn’t come in and ask.”

“I’m no detective.”

“You’re a psych student. Pretend it’s a pop quiz.”

He smiled for the first time. He’d inherited the smile from every night clerk who had ever stood in the lobby of a hotel where the guests paid in cash. I laid a fifty-dollar bookmark on the desk. This one went into his shirt pocket.

“She asked for the same room she had Saturday night. It was vacant, so I gave it to her. Maybe her husband guessed she’d do that and went straight there without stopping here to inquire.”

“One night’s pretty much like all the rest in this place. You’re sure you didn’t forget?” I handed him the photograph of Merle Ketch I’d gotten from the personnel manager at Powertrain.

The kid glanced at it, then handed it back. “I saw McCorkingdale on the news. This isn’t him.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

“Well, I didn’t see him either.”

“Or maybe he paid you up through next semester to forget you did.”

He adjusted his glasses. “Education’s expensive. Look, just because I have to do a little grifting doesn’t mean I’d cover up for a killer.”

I put away the photograph. “Okay.”

“Okay?” His forehead wrinkled.

I pointed at the book. “I read the same text in college. They ought to update them every twenty years or so. Anyway, you passed.”

I went out to my car, but I didn’t drive away. I’d parked it at a discreet angle so I could see through the glass doors into the lobby.

I was prepared for a very long wait. The clerk’s kidneys were much younger than mine, and for all I knew he’d taken a break just before I arrived. But I had the whole night to see this through. And an empty coffee can for emergencies.

Luck smiled after twenty minutes. The clerk slid off his high stool, laid down the textbook, stretched, and went through a door behind the desk. I was out of the car in less than five seconds. The file box was on the shelf under the desk where he’d had it Saturday. When he came back from the bathroom, he found me standing there scratching my chin with the corner of a registration card from Monday night.

I caught Mary Ann Thaler in the squad room, dunking a tea bag into a cup of hot water. It was the 8:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. shift, and we had the place all to ourselves. The lieutenant looked as fresh as the morning in a royal-blue silk blouse and a black skirt.

“I got the message you left this afternoon,” she said. “We checked out Merle Ketch. He was drinking beer with some buddies in the Sidecar Tavern when the thing went down at the Alamo. That good a friend he wasn’t. Sorry.”

“I’m not interested in him anymore. I need a pass to see Billy Fred.”

“Now? What’ve you got?”

“I’ll tell you after I talk to him.”

“Withholding evidence, are we?”

“A hunch isn’t evidence. What about it?”

“I don’t guess it would hurt. I’ve got my hands full enough with Joey Bats without worrying about McCorkingdale.”

“Any change?”

“His vitals have stabilized, whatever that means, but the news isn’t good. These pro jobs don’t leave much to go on.”

“Talk to his mistress?”

She nodded. “She didn’t see anything. She was inside the station, reading a paperback.”

“Ask her where she was Saturday night.”

“Not without knowing why, I won’t.”

“I’ll fill you in while you write out that pass.”

The visitors’ room I was shown into at the Wayne County Jail was drywalled and painted a not unpleasant shade of ivory, but it had no decorations or outside windows or features of any kind except the two doors that led into it and a table and two folding chairs. I was seated there thirty seconds when Billy Fred McCorkingdale came in, accompanied by a turnkey in a deputy’s uniform who took a glance around, then departed, locking the door behind him. His slab face remained in the steel-gridded window.

Billy Fred sat down facing me. His eyes were sunken. I saw no recognition in them.

“Amos Walker,” I reminded him. “You hired me last week.”

“I know.” His voice grated, as if he hadn’t used it in days. He hadn’t said a word at his arraignment.

“I talked to Merle Ketch,” I said. “You got lousy taste in friends.”

He shrugged and said, “Merle’s company.”

“You’d do better with a parakeet. I suppose he told you his grand-daddy wrung his wife’s neck for straying, and the jury let him off.”

“Cut her throat, he said.”

“Things have changed since then. People don’t walk on their knuckles. They don’t hang their long Johns in the backyard and they almost never acquit wife murderers. Even when the wives are unfaithful.”

He said nothing.

“Life in Jackson’s ten times as long as life on the outside,” I went on. “Those rednecks you work with will have plenty of time to forget all about what a hero you are, and you’ll be in for another thirty years. Take back the confession.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. Tears came out of the cracks. He raised his hands to his face. “I killed her,” Billy Fred said. “I murdered Lynne.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“It’s my fault she’s dead.”

“Better, but still not accurate. It may be your fault she went looking for attention, but that’s between you and a therapist. I know one, if you don’t mind waiting for him to graduate. Lynne’s dead, and so is that poor slob Kenneth Brindle because some bottom feeder who didn’t know either of them from Rembrandt kicked down the door of their room and blew them into kibble. And he’s out there walking around while you’re in here blubbering and being admired by that dirtbag Merle Ketch.”

His face went blank but only for a moment. He was listening now.

“I sneaked a peek at the Alamo registration cards,” I said. “I did it the same way the killer did Monday night — waited for the clerk to go to the bathroom and went in and rifled the box. Your wife and Brindle weren’t the only couple who registered as Mr. and Mrs. Brown that night. There was one other.”

His fingers made deep indentations in the table’s padded vinyl top, but he kept quiet.

“The clerk at the Alamo scores tuition money for college the same way employees in ratty hotels the world over draw cash. He registered a party he recognized from TV and the newspapers and accepted a bribe to forget he ever saw him. That was the phony Brown the killer was looking for.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know the killer’s name. I only know why he did it. He was hired to kill a man registered as Brown and the woman he had with him, to eliminate her as a witness. He was in a hurry. As soon as he found a card with that signature and a room number, he stopped looking. Once that door flew open, he didn’t have time for a positive ID. He saw a man and a woman in bed, shot them both twice, and took off. I doubt he knew he’d killed the wrong Browns until he saw the news later.”

“Who?” he asked again, but it wasn’t the same question.

“The other Browns? ‘Joey Bats’ Battaglia and his girlfriend. They hauled out of there after the big noise and before the cops arrived. That’s why Joey was in such a hurry to leave town the next day. He wasn’t so lucky that time. That time the shooter made up for his mistake.”

“Like hell he did.” He had his face in his hands again.

“All this is speculation so far,” I said, “although the desk clerk’s ready to talk. The cops figured they had their man — you — so they never bothered to check the registration cards. They’re talking to Battaglia’s mistress now. If she confirms that she and Joey were at the Alamo Monday night, you’ll have a defense. But you have to retract that confession.”

“Sure.” He was staring down at his hands: big hands, callused all over, with decades of dirt and steel shavings ground deep into the knuckles. “Poor Lynne.”

I got up and signaled to the turnkey, who let himself in. Billy Fred rose. At the door to the cells he looked back over his shoulder. “I’m hiring you again. Trust me on the advance?”

“Hiring me for what?”

“You’re the detective.”

The guard followed him out and drew the door shut with a click.

It looked as if I had underestimated Joey Bats’s luck. On Thursday the head of surgery at Detroit Receiving Hospital announced at a press conference that his team had managed to save one of the patient’s kidneys. Arrangements had been made to transfer him to Hutzel Hospital for recovery as early as the weekend.

When the appointed day arrived, a crew consisting of a nurse and a pair of interns, with a uniformed police officer looking on, strapped their charge to a gurney and ferried him for security’s sake through an exit normally reserved for mortuary cases. An intern held open the door to the ambulance while his partner and the nurse prepared to slide the patient inside.

Just as they lifted the stretcher, an ambulance bearing the logo of another company rolled around the corner, squished to a stop, and two men in ski masks piled out of the back. One of them covered the uniformed cop with an automatic pistol. His companion sprinted up to the gurney and swung up a shotgun with the stock and barrel sawed off. Before he could squeeze the trigger, the patient sat up and shot him in the chest with a .38 revolver. This startled the man with the pistol just long enough for the “nurse” to produce a nine-millimeter Beretta from the folds of her uniform. “Police!” Mary Ann Thaler shouted. “Drop the weapon!”

He dropped the weapon. At this point the driver of the second ambulance floored the accelerator. Tires spun, and the vehicle took off. The uniformed officer drew his sidearm, crouched, and fired a single shot through the open door at the back of the ambulance. The vehicle veered sharply, jumped the curb, and slammed into a steel post holding up a sign calling for silence. The horn sounded in a long, irritating blast. It didn’t stop until one of the “interns,” a detective with Felony Homicide, grabbed the driver by his collar and pulled his dead body away from the steering wheel.

By the time I got free of the gurney, the uniform had Ski Mask Number One facedown on the ground with his wrists in cuffs. The second “intern,” another plainclothesman, bent over Ski Mask Number Two with the shotgun in hand. “This one’s still breathing, Lieutenant,” he said.

Thaler knelt and stripped off the man’s mask. He had one of those faces you couldn’t have picked out of a lineup if you were married to him — young and unlined without a single distinguishing feature. I holstered my revolver under the paper gown I had on over my clothes and got down on one knee beside the lieutenant.

I said, “Joke’s on you, fella. Joey died Thursday morning. The whole thing was a gag to bring you back for a third try.”

“I just figured that out,” he said. “Bonehead play. That’s two this week,” he said. “Stupid.” Pink bubbles rippled between his lips.

I was tingling now, but I didn’t have time to savor it. “What was the first?”

“The Alamo.” He coughed and gurgled, or maybe it was an attempt to laugh. “Remember the Alamo — get it?”

“Got it,” I said. And he was gone.

Lieutenant Thaler and I stood. “Deathbed confession,” she said and put away her Beretta. “Looks like your client’s off the hook.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Too bad it’s not the one that counts.”