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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

September 17, 1996

Tuesday late afternoon

I left after that, driving straight to Top Dog. It was around two o’clock. Maybe two-thirty. I wasn’t sure if the clock on the Thunderbird’s dashboard was correct. It was in the mid-sixties, warm enough to make the jacket I’d purchased uncomfortable. I didn’t take it off, though. It was the only way to carry the gun.

Entering the building, it was just a bit warmer than it was outside. In the lobby they had one of those ugly black directories, the kind with white plastic letters that clip into grooves and make it easy to swap out when the businesses fail. I read through the list of companies, searching for one that sounded like their business was re-insurance. It took a moment, but I settled on National Casualty. They were in suite 108.

Walking down the hall, I tried to think about what I needed to learn. But it was basically anything you could tell me at that point. I found the right door, opened it, and stepped in. The set-up was similar to Top Dog. A truncated reception area with a desk and two offices. No—they had three. Still, small. I wondered how national their casualties could be.

There was a girl at the reception desk who was little more than a teenager.

“Hello. I was told that someone in this office witnessed the shooting yesterday. Do you know anything about that?”

“It wasn’t me.”

An older woman stepped out of one of the offices. A plaque next to the door said LOIS SITWELL. Lois was around fifty, not very tall and a bit round in the middle.

“It was me,” she said. “Who are you?”

“I’m a friend of the woman’s family. They’ve asked me to look into this.”

I was avoiding using my name again. If I had to I would, but it seemed better to breeze right by it.

With a scowl, she said, “Isn’t that what the police are for?”

“Joanne’s family is concerned they won’t do their best.”

Using Joanne’s name was a good idea, since Lois relaxed a tiny bit. She said, “I didn’t see very much and I wish people would stop asking me about it.”

“What did you see?”

“I was leaving. Walking to my car. It was in the front parking lot. I was getting in when I heard the pop. It was loud. I wasn’t sure what was happening at first. My first thought was hunters, actually.”

“In Novi?” the girl said, skeptically.

“I didn’t say it was a rational thought. Anyway, I saw the kid running away, then I walked around the car and saw the woman, Joanne, lying on the ground.”

“You saw the kid? You saw that he was a Black kid?”

“Not exactly.”

“So you didn’t get a good look?”

“I saw the hooded sweatshirt he was wearing. You know, that’s the kind of thing they wear. And… well, he stole her purse.”

“But you never saw his hands or any part of his face?”

“It was the policeman, he said…”

But I could tell from her face that she couldn’t remember him actually saying the kid was Black. Likely he’d implied it enough to get her to agree. She had the decency to be embarrassed by her mistake.

“Tell me anything about the hoodie. What color was it?”

“Green.”

“Spartan green,’ the girl said. “That’s what you said.”

“Yes. It was Spartan green.”

“What kind of green is that?” I asked. The girl giggled.

The woman said, “You’re not from Michigan, are you?”

“No. I’m not.”

“Michigan State. Spartans.”

I remembered something about the real Spartans being gay warriors. I decided this was not the time to bring that up.

Finally, the woman felt pity on me and said, “It’s a very specific dark green.”

“You think the killer is a student?” I asked.

“Oh, God no. Michigan State is up in Lansing.”

“So the killer’s brother or sister goes there?”

“Not likely. People just wear the gear. They’re fans probably. College football.”

“The Wolverines are yellow,” the girl added.

“University of Michigan. There’s a rivalry. U of M is over in Ann Arbor. People down here tend to lean toward the Wolverines. But there’s a healthy dose of Spartan fans. You can buy their gear at K-Mart. Especially at this time of year. The game is next month.”

“So the hoodie doesn’t tell us anything,” I said, disappointed.

“You asked what color it was. It tells you that.”

She was right, but for a moment I’d thought the color might tell me more.

“Did the kid in the hoodie make any attempt to steal the car?”

“Not that I saw, no. But then he might have before.”

“Is there anything else you remember that might be useful?”

“It all happened very quickly. I barely knew what was happening until it was over. “She might have said, ‘Why?’”

“Really? You think she asked ‘why’?”

“I wasn’t looking in that direction so I can’t be sure. I might be imagining that part. I mean, if someone was going to kill me in a parking lot, I think I’d ask why. So maybe that’s why I think I heard it.”

“Or you heard it.”

“Yes, I could have.”

I thanked her and left. As I walked around I wondered about the word ‘why’. Did that mean Joanne knew her killer and wanted to know why he was about to shoot her? Or was it a question she asked a stranger?

I leaned toward the former. She knew her killer. A stranger there to steal your things didn’t need an explanation. But someone you knew, someone you thought cared about you, that did raise the question of ‘why?’

I figured it was around three fifteen. I wandered around the building and then went outside. I had two main suspects: Luca and Mr. Cray. Neither made much sense.

Luca was being followed by the Feds so that made his committing murder seem unlikely. But then I remembered the first time I saw the Feds they were sitting outside Luca’s Lifters and Luca was nowhere to be found. So he might have given them the slip. That was even more plausible if he knew he was being followed by the Feds. Did he know? Was there a way to find out if he knew?

And then there was Mr. Cray. He might have overheard my conversation with Joanne that afternoon. He might have overheard that she was embezzling from him. Hell, she might have gone into his office afterwards and demanded something from him the way she’d demanded something from me. I couldn’t be sure. But what I could be sure of was that if Mr. Cray decided to kill Joanne that afternoon, he didn’t leave himself much time to plan the murder. He’d have to have had a gun right there in the office. The same with the hoodie; it would have to have been in his office. He’d have needed to hide the gun and the hoodie as he walked passed Claudia, go somewhere to put on the hoodie, then proceed out of the building, and shoot Joanne. Then he’d have to reverse the process: Hide something in the ceiling of the men’s room on the second floor and then go out to his car at the back of the building. I wasn’t sure there was time for all of that. In fact, I was pretty sure there wasn’t.

Of course, either of them could have hired someone to kill Joanne. Was that plausible? Could Mr. Cray have done it that afternoon? Could you order a killer the way you could a pizza?

I was outside on the east side of the building, the side without cameras, when I noticed something. The building next door. The storage place. There were cameras on each corner of that building. And they were pointed at the building I was standing next to. They’d have been recording everything that happened on that side of the building.

I began moving with more purpose. I needed to find Rocky, the janitor. He didn’t seem to be anywhere in the building with Top Dog, so I walked over to the storage place, circled the building and then moved on.

The next two buildings were very similar to the one that housed Top Dog. Both were two stories and wide, with lots of parking lot. I found Rocky on the first floor of the first building. He smiled when he saw me, a little too big.

“I have more questions,” I said quickly, not wanting him to get the wrong idea.

“That’s disappointing.”

I took a couple hundred dollars out of my pocket, and said, “Not that disappointing.”

I handed the money over right away. He might not want to help me, but I knew he wouldn’t want to give the money back.

“What do you need?”

“The building with the storage units, it has camera’s pointed at the first building. Did the police take that computer?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Did you remind them it was pointed at the building where there were no cameras?”

“Oh gosh… must have slipped my mind.”

“Have you looked at it already?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you show it to me?”

He shrugged. He probably wasn’t supposed to. “Yeah, sure, why not. You’ll be disappointed though. It doesn’t show much.”

“Okay, well, let’s look at it anyway.”

We walked back to the storage building. At the front, one of the bays had been converted into a security room. They’d lined it with unpainted sheetrock, and cut a door and a window into what had been a roll-up door. There were large metal tubes leading to vents across the ceiling. There was some kind of heater/air conditioner somewhere outside.

At the furthest end of the room was a banquet table with a couple of stand-up computers beneath it and several monitors on the table, along with a keyboard. One monitor was dedicated to the operation of the computer, the other monitors showed what was being recorded. Based on what I was seeing, there were eight cameras installed around the building we were in. More than the building where Top Dog was located.

“Why does this building have more cameras?” I asked.

“Bigger target. People get it in their heads storage units are filled with hidden treasures. They’re not. It’s mainly just people’s junk.”

Scanning the monitors, I picked out the two cameras that were aimed at the building next door. They would be the most useful.

“Can you go back to yesterday around four-forty-five?”

“Sure.” He called up the interface program that allowed him to control the cameras. Clicked in a few numbers and a short time later we were looking at yesterday.

There were two views that mattered. The one of the southwest camera, and the one from the northwest camera. The south camera took in part of the parking lot next door where the shooting took place. The parking lot wasn’t even a third full. I could easily pick out Joanne’s Cadillac.

The video was black-and-white, with a time code running across the top. The Cadillac, which in real life was bronze, read as a pale gray. We began watching at 4:30.

“I can fast forward if you want,” Rocky said.

“Let me get oriented first.”

An older man walked out of the building and got into a Ford Taurus and drove away. As he left the parking lot, a minivan drove in and parked. No one got out. They must be picking someone up, I thought. Nothing happened for a bit.

“You like living here?” I asked Rocky to fill the time. “In Detroit?”

“Not really sure. It’s the only place I’ve ever been. Grew up here.”

“Maybe you should get out and see the world. You’re still a young guy.”

“Yeah, maybe I should,” he said in a way that made me think he wouldn’t. I wondered why. But then I watched a woman come out of the building. She wore a leather jacket that looked like Joanne’s purple one. It was very dark on the video. I was pretty sure it was Joanne even though the quality of the video made faces hard to distinguish. She stopped, looked through her purse, and then pulled out a cigarette. She lit it and inhaled deeply. After studying the cloudy sky for a moment, she walked to the Cadillac.

She didn’t get in, though. She stood there smoking. Which made sense. Joanne was a woman who didn’t smoke in her own house to spare the drapes. Standing outside her car to smoke made sense. It also might have gotten her killed.

The kid in the hoodie came out of the building. On the video, the hoodie was so dark it looked black. When he got close to Joanne, he pulled something out of the hoodie’s pouch. The gun. It only took a second and he shot her.

“Can I see that again?”

Rocky ran the video back. I watched the murder a second time. This time, I picked out Lois Sitwell. She’d come out of the building about forty seconds after Joanne and walked to a Lincoln Continental sedan—though it might have been a Crown Vic, it was hard to tell in the video. She was looking at the door handle as the gun went off. She ducked—well, squatted really. She hadn’t mentioned that. By the time she stood up the shooter was entering the building. She barely got a look at him at all.

“Again?”

Rocky ran the video backward. This time I watched Joanne. Yes, Joanne might have said, ‘Why?’ It looked as if her lips had moved. The cigarette dropped to the ground right before she was shot. She knew what was happening.

“Is there a way to enlarge the picture?”

“Not really. The cameras record at seventy-two dpi.”

“What is dpi?”

“Dots per inch.”

“That doesn’t sound like a lot.”

“It’s not. When you enlarge that kind of image, the computer puts a pixel in between. It kind of guesses. Garbage in garbage out. That’s what they say. Did you want to see it again?”

“Yes. Let’s let it play all the way through this time.”

I kept an eye on the second screen this time. It covered the back parking lot, which was pretty quiet. Looking back to the first screen, the Ford Taurus drove out of the parking lot. The minivan arrived and parked. We waited.

There was a young woman at the edge of the back parking lot. I hadn’t noticed her before. She was looking at something in her hand, probably a flip phone. Then she was holding it up in the air. She was trying to find bars.

I looked back at the front parking lot. Joanne came out of the building at 4:51. She looked into her purse, fished out a pack of her long skinny cigarettes, and lit one. Lois Sitwell came out of the building and squeezed past Joanne, brushing smoke away from her face as she did. It was 4:53.

Joanne walked to her car, stood next to it, and smoked. Lois Sitwell’s Lincoln was closer to the road, facing in the opposite direction of Joanne’s Cadillac. Lois was standing next to the driver’s door. At first it seemed that she was just staring at the door, but then I realized she was trying to enter a code to open the vehicle. Those cars had a five button keypad above the door handle and you put a number in to open them.

The shooter came out of the building at 4:55. He walked directly to Joanne. He doesn’t decide to steal Joanne’s vehicle. He could have gone after Lois’s. She’d just gotten the door open. No, he went directly to Joanne and shot her at 4:56. She hadn’t even opened her car door yet.

Joanne slumped to the ground. The shooter bent down and took her purse, which was still hooked in her elbow. He ran back to the building and entered it at 4:58. The murder and robbery had taken two minutes.

I continued to watch. Lois walked over to Joanne’s body and began screaming. Something caught my eye and I looked at the view of the back of the building. The young woman had gotten bars and was talking. But the screaming made her stop. Then, still talking, she rushed over to a Geo Metro and got in. She drove along the far side of the parking lot, disappearing for ten seconds, and then sped through the front parking lot and out onto the street.

A couple of people had come out of the building. Most people worked until six. One of the perks of dunning poor people for money appeared to be banker’s hours. A younger woman was trying to calm Lois down. Funny, in our interview she hadn’t mentioned being that upset.

In the back parking lot, Mr. Cray came out of the building carrying a briefcase. It was 5:02. He walked directly to his BMW and then drove out of the parking lot. He passed the front parking lot at 5:04. There were a few people standing around, but not many. Thinking about it for just a moment, it didn’t really seem odd that Mr. Cray didn’t notice anything unusual.

Then the minivan began to move and drive out of the parking lot at 5:06.

“Stop for a minute.”

Rocky paused the images.

“Do you think that minivan could be a Plymouth Voyager?”

“Hard to tell.”

“But there on the back bumper. That’s a Clinton/Gore bumper sticker, isn’t it?”

“It could be.”

Suzie. Aunt Suzie. She’d arrived a few minutes before Joanne was shot, sat there in the van and watched her get shot and then drove away. That had to mean she had something to do with it. Didn’t it? Had she hired someone to kill Joanne? Who? Who had she gotten to do it?