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CHAPTER ONE
One
It was the summer of darkness.
It was the summer of darkness, and Ula McAdoo was
responsible.
It happened this way. The previous autumn, Detroit Edison
had made a brave effort to trim all the trees in Wayne County
that waved to one another during windstorms, taking down
electric lines and pitching most of southeastern Michigan back
into the Mesozoic. The workers had polished their yellow
hardhats, pressed their blue coveralls, buffed the steel toes of
their work boots, gassed up their chainsaws, and hit the woods.
Then Ula, aged seventy-four and living in Dearborn Heights with
a cat named Buster, came home from the Monday night meeting
of the Committee to Suppress Satanism at Disneyworld, found
the top four feet missing from the cedar in her front yard, and
sued Edison for a million. She settled for ten thousand and a
bundle of striplings.
After that the chainsaws fell silent. Summer came, bringing its
handy sampler of thunder, lightning, tornadoes, and gale-force
winds, batting the trees about and twirling and snapping the
electric lines like the threads in a fifty-dollar suit. By August,
Wayne and Oakland counties had experienced fourteen major
power blackouts; rumor had it some residents had been waiting
for their service to be restored since before Bastille Day. A
couple of the dicier neighborhoods in Detroit had taken to burning
Edison's chief executive officer in effigy for the illumination,
when what they should have done was torch Ula's cat.
The latest outage struck just as I was about to push the button
of my snazzy new microwave oven for dinner. The ceiling light
flickered twice, then died to an amber glow. After five minutes I
unplugged the oven, refrigerator, and television to avoid a surge,
left the dish of frozen lasagna to thaw on its own, snagged a
bottle of Scotch and a bowl of doomed ice from the dark
refrigerator, and went out on my toy front porch to plaster myself
quietly in the dewy evening cool. The days had been cracking
ninety, with the humidity just behind. I figured I had twenty
minutes of peace before the first of my neighbors fired up his
portable generator.
It was a time for taking stock and reflecting. Business was off,
as it always was in vacation season, when George and Marian
loaded the kids and the luggage in the car and left behind their
regular extramarital affairs to make room for the cabana boy and
the anonymous divorcee with the tattoo. All the best
sins--adultery, employee theft, credit-card fraud, Neil Diamond
on the neighbor's stereo--were out of town. All the private
investigators, too; those who hadn't blown the Tahiti fund on a
spaceage oven now pulling single duty as a cupboard, anyway. In
the morning I would make some calls. Cold calling was always
something to look forward to on a gummy August day when all
the air conditioners were down and there was nobody to take it
out on but the stranger on the other end of the telephone, looking
for work. I refilled my glass.
As I did so, a pint-size breeze lifted my hair where I sat on a
demoted kitchen chair and sucked the front door shut behind
me. There was a hint of brimstone in it. Another storm was on
its way.
After a while a two-cycle motor started up down the block
with a noise like marbles bouncing off a bass drum. In another
minute or two, that mating call would be answered, and before
long every generator on the street would be coughing up its lungs.
I was thinking about taking my drinking paraphernalia inside when
a black Jeep Grand Cherokee with green neon running lights
turned the corner and boated my way, slowly, as if the driver was
trying to read addresses in the steepening dark. It rolled along on
jacked-up tires and a cushion of grumbling bass from a pair of
speakers that were using the space where the back seat
belonged. Rap, of course. I wondered, not for the first time, if
anyone listened to those expectorated lyrics in his own living
room with his slippers on.
The Jeep stopped in front of my house, rocking in place on the
thick waves of sound washing out of its open windows, and the
driver poked out his head. It was shaved at the temples, but
long-haired in back, with a trailing moustache and pointed goatee
and two or three gold rings glittering in one ear. In the green light
coming up from below, the face looked like it belonged to Boris
Karloff, Junior.
"Yo, Zeke!" he called to me. "Know where I can find a dude
named Walker?"
I rubbed my chin, which needed scraping nearly as badly as
his--but then it generally did from noon on--and spoke through
my nose like Jed Clampett. "War, I believe if you was to turn left
at the house where Wilbur Klumpp died, and went on past where
the Bodie place used to be before it burned down, and turned
right at Olson's Swamp, you'd find him plowing his pasture as like
as not."
He scratched his nose, squinting at me against the dark of
the house. "You're him, right?"
I said I was him. He might have been seventeen or
twenty-three. The Auschwitz haircut put on as many years as it
took off.
"Don't you answer your phone? My sister's been trying to
get through to you for a half hour."
"The line's probably down. We had a storm earlier. Didn't
you hear it, or were you listening to Snoop Doggy Dog?"
"Blowfish," he said. "She wants to see you." He gave me an
address in West Bloomfield.
"She got a name?"
"Catalin. Gay Catalin. I'm Brian Elwood. I'm her brother."
"I guessed that when you told me she's your sister. This
business, or does she want somebody to hold her hand until the
lights come back on?"
"She had lights when I left. You're like a private eye, right?"
"Just like one. Only taller."
That one buzzed right past him. "A private eye's what she
needs. Her husband split yesterday. She wants him back,
Christ knows why. He's a major feeb."
The pickings there were too lean for me. I lit a cigarette. The
air was still, and it had begun to heat up. Nothing like a breeze
had ever come down that street. We were in for a big banger.
"I'll ride you on over," Brian Elwood said.
I pointed in the direction of the noise coming from the Jeep.
"That a tape?"
"CD. I got Hammer, the Fat Boys, Rectal Itch--"
"Marcus Belgrave?"
"Who?"
"I'll drive my own heap, thanks. Tell her half an hour."
"You tell her. I'm off to Cherie's. Tits and ass."
He flashed me his pearlies and took off with a blat of twin
pipes. Seventeen, definitely.
Lightning flickered in sheets over Windsor when I pulled out of
the driveway. We had had a load of rain that year. The guy
who read the weather on Channel 4 had traded his sportcoat
for a white beard and cassock like Noah's. The mosquitoes
were as big as DC-3s. Doors stuck, freeways flooded, and a
puddle had formed on the floor on the driver's side of my big
Mercury. I was thinking of stocking it with trout.
The streets were dark, with here and there a light showing in
a window like the outthrust tongue of a homeowner with a
generator. The traffic light was out at Caniff. While waiting for
the other drivers to work out who had the right of way, I
punched a Sarah Vaughan tape into the deck. "Ain't No Use."
The theme song of the professional information broker in the
age of the hard drive.
West Bloomfield was nearly inseparable from Bloomfield
Hills and Birmingham--"Bloomingham" was the local
coinage--which had started out as the waiting room for
Grosse Pointe, where auto money aged in big colonials facing
Lake St. Clair with lawns the size of small European countries.
Now it was an end in itself, with its own waiting rooms in
Farmington and Farmington Hills. Paved streets wound among
modern homes with Sevilles parked in the driveways and
security lights burning all night atop twenty-foot poles, shaming
the stars. Well-dressed white children pounded basketballs off
the concrete pads in front of the garages in the daytime, looking
to fight their way out of the upper middle class with nothing but
their trust funds and a dream.
The power failure had missed the Catalin neighborhood. It
happens that way sometimes, democracy to the contrary. All the
windows were ablaze in the cool, sprawling ranch-style of brick
and frame, the only house in a cul-de-sac that ended in a berry
thicket and a chainlink fence. Four huge oaks were arranged on
the lawn in such a way that the house would always be in
shade. The brimstone smell was strong during the short walk
from my car to the front door. It wouldn't be long now.
A thick-waisted woman in a gray dress and white apron,
with her brittle black hair caught up by combs, listened carefully
to my spiel, then shut the door in my face. A minute or so later
she came back, led me into a large sunken living room with a
conquistador's breastplate and weapons mounted above the
stone fireplace, and went away. They aren't called maids
anymore, but they still don't speak much English.
"Thank you for coming on such short notice, Mr. Walker.
I'm Gay Catalin."
She'd come in through an open arch from a brightly lit room
at the rear of the house when I was looking in another direction,
a small compact red-haired woman with a forest of flowering
plants behind her. That put her over forty, assuming she'd
planned her entrance, with the light at her back. She had large
eyes mascaraed all around, a pixie mouth, and a fly waist in a
pale yellow dress tailored to show it off. The scent she wore
was light and euphoria-inducing, like stepping out of a dank
cellar into the sunshine; or it might just have been the flowers in
the other room.
"I like your home." I borrowed a warm, slightly moist hand
with light calluses--the kind you get from gardening--and
returned it. "They don't design them this way since air conditioning."
"Neil has an instinct. He produces home-improvement
videos, among other things."
"Neil's your husband?"
"Yes. Can I get you something to drink? I'm sorry to say
Angelina has narrow ideas about her housekeeping duties."
"No, thanks. I left a pitcher of Scotch back home and it's
the jealous type."
She laughed, a nervous little preoccupied laugh, and put her
hands in the pockets of her skirt. She didn't know what else to
do with them.
"I hope Brian wasn't rude. He's a good boy, essentially; he
just runs with the pack. He's been living here ever since our
mother died, and I suppose he finds us boring. Your office
phone didn't answer, so I looked up your residence. When I
couldn't get through, I didn't know what else to do but send him
over."
"He was okay. He said your husband's missing?"
"It's official now. Twenty-six hours. I trust the police, but
they're outnumbered by their cases. That's why I tried you."
"This puts me neck and neck with mine. Why me?"
"I saw your picture in the paper last year, when you testified
against that man Matador. The killer. I remembered your name.
I liked it; I still do. I don't know very much about hiring a
private detective, Mr. Walker."
"I take it Neil isn't in the vanishing habit."
"No. He's never been gone without an explanation except
for the time he was in the hospital."
"Accident?"
"No."
I was starting to get the idea. "Is that where you think he is
this time?
She shook her head. There was a tight vertical line between
her eyebrows. "May I show you something?"
I said okay. She turned, taking her hands out of her pockets,
and I followed her through another arch. We crossed a stainless
steel kitchen hung with yellow curtains to match her dress and
went down a quiet flight of open steps swathed in silver pile. At
the foot we stood in a dark underground room smelling of
furniture oil and new plastic. The only light came from the fixture
in the stairwell.
She picked up a long black object from a table and pushed a
button. Three black tubes mounted under the ceiling glowed and
shot three colored shafts of light, red, green, and blue, at a
forty-five-degree angle across the room, where they illuminated a
screen six feet square. It was the first front-projection television
set I'd seen outside of photographs in home theater magazines.
"Impressive." I waited.
Gay Catalin's face looked sickly in the reflected glow. "Neil's
in there, Mr. Walker." She pointed at the empty screen. "That's
where he's gone. I'm sure of it, and I want you to go in and bring
him back out."
