seeing all the time when he goes there. I thought he had all kinds of ladies. Mr. Walker say no, it's the same one, good-looking young woman name Melody ... Mel something ... Melanie. That's it, he say Melanie. Young foxy-looking chick; Mr. Walker say she lays by the swimming pool without her top on, these gentlemen come chipping onto number seventeen, that's right by the place, like the front yard. Man, they looking over there at Melanie, waiting for her to turn over, they lucky to five-putt the hole.'
'That's an interesting story,' Louis said. 'What's the rest?'
'She don't work that Mr. Walker knows of,' Ordell said. 'But Lisabeth Cooper say she got four thousand seven hundred and two dollars in the Providence Bank and Trust.'
'Say she's been saving her money,' Louis said. 'Say shit. She spends it in the casino, but she's always got some in the bank.'
'I don't see the problem,' Louis said. 'So the man's got something on the side.'
'I don't say it's a problem,' Ordell said. 'But I like to know all the shit that's going on. I don't like surprises, man. I like to know, what's he doing there? What's she doing? Who is she? You understand what I'm saying?'
'Why don't you call him and ask him?' Louis said. He studied the clean, streamlined O'Keefe label. He liked the old one better. The new one gave him the feeling the beer was weak, watery. He said, 'Why don't we call him? I'm serious. Get it done.'
'Ask him about the foxy chick?' Ordell didn't see it yet.
'No, I mean tell him the deal. Why do you have to wait till he gets back?'
He could see Ordell hadn't thought about it, the possibility. Maybe there were some other things he hadn't thought about.
Ordell said, 'I don't have his number.'
Now he was stalling, giving himself time to think.
'Call information. Or get it from Mr. Walker,' Louis said. 'The man's right there. All he's got to do is go to the bank.'
Ordell was frowning, thinking hard. 'See, he comes home, he finds out she ain't there. He knows something's happened to her.'
'He calls home tonight,' Louis said. 'No, hey-- we let her talk to him on the phone. 'Honey, these men--I've been kidnapped--'' Louis stopped, realizing something. It was the first time he had said the word or had even thought the word and heard it in his mind. Kidnap. Christ, they had kidnapped a woman. It wasn't simple extortion, leaning on the man, prying money out of somebody who was making it illegally and cheating the government, they had kidnapped the man's wife. Ordell hadn't used the word either. Talking it over it was always about the man, how they were going to jive the man into giving them a million dollars. Pay off Richard, pay off a few people in the Bahamas, they'd split, say, $960,000. You believe it? $480,000 apiece and the man couldn't say anything about it, couldn't call the police, couldn't do anything. See, always the man. The man thinking he was so smart. They were gonna skin the man. And to make him jump right now and not get in a long conversation and give him time to lie or confuse them or move the money someplace else, they'd tell the man he'd never see his wife again unless he did what he was told. Nothing about kidnapping.
'Say call him, let his wife tell him,' Ordell said, thinking about it. 'He makes the transfer tomorrow. I call the bank, see the money was deposited--'
'We drop the lady home--' Louis said.
Ordell's gaze came alive and flicked at Louis. 'With the police waiting.'
'Okay, we put her on a bus.'
'The police still waiting, wanting to know who put the man in the closet. Man with about fifteen stitches in his head.'
'What she gonna tell them,' Louis said, 'she was kidnapped?' Christ, he said it again. 'She doesn't know anything, because if she gets her husband involved they start asking him questions-- all that money, huh?--dig into his business, his books. Before she knows it he's in Lewisburg, man, conspiring to defraud the United States government.'
'Hey, it's interesting,' Ordell said. 'You know it? He's down there with the foxy chick his wife don't know nothing about. His wife's up here sitting on Richard's mother's bed, he thinks she's home making cookies. Yeah, it's interesting.'
The Sony TV Frank had won and kept in the bedroom was now in this room. It sat on the vanity that had round corners and was made of lacquered blond wood, the back of the set reflecting in three panels of mirrors. She thought of Frank and his golf trophy. Because the vanity reminded her of the 1930s and the Empire State Building.
Mickey remembered snapshots of her mother taken in the '30s ... her mother and her mother's two younger sisters, her grandmother ... looking at the album every summer in the house at Gratiot Beach, the home on Lake Huron they called 'the cottage' where there had been a vanity like this one in her grandmother's room. She remembered the sachet odor from that time, looking at her grandmother's 'things,' linens and silks (what were they, scarves, tablecloths?) folded in tissue paper and stored in a fat leather trunk, a treasure chest in an upstairs room where a pair of dormer windows looked out past a sweep of lawn to the beach and the lake that was like an ocean.
The dormer windows in this room were covered with a sheet of plywood, nailed tight to the frame with headless nails. In case she might try to rip the board off with her fingernails and jump out the window. Mickey had no idea where she was: within a half hour of Birmingham or Bloomfield Village, but in which direction? In a small, two-story house, blind behind the plywood to what might be a familiar view outside. Though she doubted it.
The little ruffle-shade lamp--the only light in the room except for a fixture in the ceiling--could be her grandmother's, but not the chenille bedspread with the peacock design in blue, purple and red. There was a print on the wall of a blond Christ Child, a scrubbed, well-behaved looking boy. The Sony, she noticed, was plugged in. They were considerate--a white man and a black man and a third one who had body odor, God, who stunk. Someone else recently had had b. O. A lot of people did. Why didn't they smell themselves? She'd have it too if they kept her in here very long. It was warm in the room. She had a nearly flat package of cigarettes, a lighter. Knock if she had to pee and put her mask on. It would be something to do. She wondered if they'd talk to her. Maybe they had the wrong person. Who was being kidnapped these days? People in Italy who had money. And the kidnappers got away with it. What was the last one here, in this country? A girl in a box underground who breathed through a tube. No, a more recent one. A woman tied to a tree in the woods, found after a couple of days. Both of them found alive, she was quite sure, and the kidnappers arrested.
Why would anybody--if you were going to kidnap somebody, why not pick ... she'd never had her picture in the paper. Oh God, yes she did. But they couldn't have seen it and then planned it so fast. They must've seen Frank's name. Frank A. Dawson Homes, Grandview Estates. But even then, what did they cost? Grandview Estates wasn't money. What about the really wealthy people in Detroit? Somebody must've made a mistake.
God, kidnapped--
She couldn't believe it. She'd turn on the 6 o'clock news and there it would be. Friend of family describes wife's ... mother's abduction. Friend of family.
Prominent industrialist trying to fool around with and get in the pants of friend's wife describes daylight abduction. Husband away on business not immediately notified.
When would they get in touch with him?
Local and county police have begun a thorough investigation ...
The one who came to the door had smelled of perspiration. The policeman in the two-tone blue uniform, in the unmarked car. The same one, here.
It was planned. Of course it was planned. They had been watching her, waiting for the right time. And Marshall, the big jerk, had strolled in and gotten whacked on the head.
It was 10 to 5. The earliest news was on Channel 4 at 5:30. She was dying to hear how the friend of the family would explain what he was doing in the house between 12:30 and 1 o'clock in the afternoon.
'I just happened to be driving by and saw something suspicious,' said Marshall Taylor, president of Taylor Industries, five-handicap golfer and country club lover.
Mickey sat down on the bed. A little self-analysis. How did she feel about all this?
Surprisingly, she felt fine. She felt--what else? Excited. More than that. Afraid? Yes, she was afraid. But she wasn't scared to death or petrified. Just the opposite, she felt alive. She was excited but calm. She had time to take
