Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde

by Loren D. Estleman

  That derailed her for a beat. “What did he say?”

  “He said you have a capacity to atone for past wrongs. He said it’s a common characteristic where you both come from. Was he off base?”

  “Off base?”

  “Full of crap.”

  “No. I never thought about it, but I wouldn’t argue. It’s a Catholic country, after all. What has that to do with what we were talking about?”

  “Everything and nothing. Good luck tonight. I’m supposed to say break a leg. The guy that started that tradition probably never broke one.”

  “I’m shooting in Mexicantown tomorrow. Will you come?”

  “It so happens I’ll be in the neighborhood.”

  “Just give your name at the barricade. I’ll tell them to expect you.”

  The conversation was over, but I didn’t want to let her go. “Can you tell me why you ever decided to film a music video in Detroit in February?”

  She laughed. Except when she sang it was the only time she seemed to forget she had ever fought in a revolution. “I don’t like my people to become too soft. How can you expect to feel the music when you do not know what it is like to be tired and hungry and cold?”

  “If you can’t lie any better than that, you should turn down the acting job.”

  “Once again you see through the butterfly’s wings. The hotel rates are cheaper in winter. I have a very large company, and I prefer to finish a tour in the black. Did you know you can fill stadiums from New York to San Francisco and still lose money?”

  “Sell Tshirts.”

  “I do. Tshirts, coffee mugs, my head bobbing on top of a twenty-dollar doll. That pays for the gasoline for the property truck. Sometimes it’s all show and no business.”

  I had no frame of reference for comment. The Munoz jabbered uninterrupted for thirty seconds. No other sounds, not even the band tuning up in the auditorium. Cobo’s an old barn but the walls are as thick as bunkers.

  “I have to get into character,” she said finally; and as she said it the accent broadened. “Take care, Amos. You’re least safe at the moment you feel safest. Nico taught me that.”

  “In that case I’m safe.”

  I probably should have told her good luck again. Maybe you should always tell a performer good luck at the beginning and end of a conversation. Then again maybe they just cancel each other out. What I said was good-bye.

  The next time the telephone rang I was in bed. I wasn’t asleep, and when I padded out into the living room I took along the revolver and didn’t turn on any lights. When I said hello, the word wobbled into a hollow silence. I didn’t even hear breathing.

  I breathed for both of us. “Just for my own curiosity,” I said, “where’d you get the bat?”

  No one answered. No one hung up, either, and we were like that for a minute, two characters on opposite ends of the greatest invention in the history of communications, saying nothing. Then I remembered Matador’s men had been in the house and knew where the telephone was, and consequently where I was at that moment. I cradled the receiver and got away from the spot.

  It could have been a wrong number, or someone who’d called to sell storm doors and lost his nerve. I needed caller ID.

  After a few minutes I walked through the house carrying the .38, checking windows and all three doors by the little bit of moonlight that kept me from bumping into furniture. Then I went back to bed. I got up three more times, twice to investigate noises I’d never noticed before in the quiet of the house, a third time to investigate why there were no noises at all. That time I poured a slug of Old Smuggler into a tumbler of water and put it all down in one easy deposit, like Bromo.

  I may have dozed off once or twice, never deeply enough to lose awareness. Just before I went to sleep for real I could make out the features of the bedroom in the leaden light of predawn. I dreamt I was in the old Detroit General Hospital, sitting on a chair listening to my mother’s respirator pumping and sighing. When I woke up with a jump, full daylight pounded me in the face.

  I’d survived the night. Now I had to make it through the day, which is the most dangerous time of all, because that’s when you feel safe.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Church bells were ringing, reverberating with the heavy solid self-assured thrum of old-time coinmetal, a sound that can’t be duplicated on a mixing board. They were swinging all over town, Detroit having nearly as many places to worship as it has bars and Pizza Huts. Religion runs deep into the pavement of industrial cities, built as they were on the strong backs of survivors of pogroms, purges, holocausts, and ethnic cleansings. Mosques, temples, cathedrals, kingdom halls, reading rooms, and cult coffeehouses sprout within blocks of one another like a theme park for the devout.

  I couldn’t pick out Most Holy Redeemer from Most Blessed Sacrament from Most Holy Trinity in the chorus, or for that matter make up my mind about how all three can claim to be the most; but then I’d sinned too much, blasphemed not a little, and seen too many saved and too many sacrificed to be sure of anything beyond question. Everybody is reaching out for something: God, a glass, a dog-eared dollar, a grope in a sweaty doorway—I’d given up the moral authority to pass judgment. Every hourly rate motel room has a Bible, and every set of pews its share of cheats and pedophiles. Today I was hoping one of the pews had Miranda Guzman.

  I’d had to detour around Vernor ten blocks and circle back to park near the house. The police had barricaded off four blocks for Gilia’s video and an additional six to make room for gawkers. I could hear electric guitars blanging up and down the scales from half a mile away, and the TV trucks whose crews were covering the event for the local news were parked nearly as far down as I was. I hadn’t seen so many EMS vans and blue-and-whites gathered in one place since the riots. They couldn’t all have been assigned to security. Cops are no more immune to rubbernecking than the rest of us. Ten stories up, a helicopter with the FOX-2 logo painted on its fuselage pummeled the air, which was heavy with rain or snow or ice, or something anyway that smelled like copper. One good lick on a bass and the low clouds would split open like a pinata.

  The narrow yellow house was still sandwiched between the tire shop and the Mexican restaurant. La Casa del Rubio. I was almost surprised to see it. So much had happened since the last time, I’d half expected to find it razed and a forty-story casino sprung up in its place. Behind it, the yellow police tape would still be fluttering in a square around the section of the lumberyard where Isabella, the canario bitch, had sniffed out what was left of Jillian Rubio. It had only been four days.

  I climbed the three painted wooden steps. The sign was still in the window advertising that the resident was an authorized presa canario breeder, CHD Free Guaranteed. I couldn’t believe that a little over half a week before I’d never heard of the breed. I pressed the buzzer, keeping an eye on the wicker shade behind the sign. If a squat black snout pushed it aside I was out of there.

  The buzz echoed emptily, followed by barking. The barking wasn’t coming from inside the house, but from the kennel in back. The bull wasn’t home. That meant Miranda Guzman wasn’t either.

  The lock was a dead bolt. I’m clumsy with a sliplatch and can’t pick my nose with a jimmy. I looked around. God and Gilia had cleared the street of witnesses. I punched in the window with the butt of the .38, reholstered it, reached through and around and found the latch and twisted it. The bolt shot back. I retrieved my arm and let myself in.

  No alarm sounded. More to the point, nothing jumped me to tear out my throat. I was standing in the living room with the worn sofa-and-love-seat set, the magazines on the wicker coffee table, the carved crucifix on the wall, and the Spanish Bible on the side table with the rattan mat. A new votive candle stood on the little shelf under the crucifix, not burning. Mrs. Guzman was too practical not to extinguish it before she went out. Apart from that the room was as unchanged as a closed movie set.

  I wasn’t sure where to start. I didn’t know what I was looking for. All I ha
d was the knowledge that this was the house in which Jillian Rubio had spent her last hours. If I had any psychic powers I might have been vibrating like a tuning fork, but as it was the only sensation I got from things unseen was the smell of lemon wax, and underneath it dog. All I had to work with were my hands and my eyes and a small gnawed hunk of brain.

  I went to the back of the house and worked my way to the front. A small kitchen looked out on the kennel, where a couple of the dogs were sleeping on the bare earth and a couple more were conducting personal self-inspections, including Isabella. A spare bedroom that had been a den had probably been Jillian’s during her visit, but it had been cleaned since and the bed made, and if there’d been any clothes in the closet or personal items in the little dresser and nightstand, the cops had taken them along with her luggage. The rest of the ground floor told me little about Miranda that I hadn’t already known or suspected and nothing about her daughter.

  The house was a one-and-a-half-story construction, with a narrow steep staircase grandfathered in before code and sloping walls upstairs. Miranda had to stoop to approach her bed in order to avoid cracking her head on a joist. A paperback Spanish translation of a novel by an American author with a half-naked Saxon on the cover lay open facedown on the nightstand. Nothing in there.

  The only other room upstairs besides the bathroom wasn’t much bigger than a walk-in closet and was used for storage. Boxes that had contained cans of dog food were filled with the picture magazines Miranda liked, odd scraps of material, junk too broken to use but not worth lugging downstairs and out to the curb. Spavined umbrellas, out-of-style clothing, spare lightbulbs, a big old scuffed suitcase of foreign manufacture, shoved clear to the back and wearing a two-inch coat of dust. It would have been the first thing she put in storage after moving in, had probably contained whatever she had brought with her from the old country, and had been taking up the same space for as many years as she’d lived in the house; when you keep dogs, you don’t do much traveling unless you’re prepared to go to the trouble to find someone you trust to take care of the feeding and related chores. I wondered if the tapestry overnight bag she’d lent Jillian for the emergency trip had come from that same closet. I wondered what use Miranda had had for an overnight bag at all.

  A thought sprouted in that close space. It didn’t promise to end up big or even good. Hunches are like dates, and you have to kiss a lot of frogs if you’re serious about pursuing the game. No judge would waste tax money on the one I had. Lack of evidence isn’t evidence. She might have bought the bag for a trip to inspect breeding stock. But it got me to thinking about suitcases and what they might contain.

  I had to move a heavy box out of the way and turn sideways to wriggle to the back of the closet, and then I had to lean across a stack of department-store catalogues and move a pile of heavy moth-eaten coats and dog manuals from on top of the suitcase to get to it. I got a lungful of house dust and when I sprang the green brass latches the inside of an empty suitcase.

  When I turned away I bumped into the pile of junk I’d moved. Something slid out and landed on one end on the only clear patch of floor with a clank. It had a black tip with a flanged base. I dropped the pile back onto the suitcase, took hold of that end, and extricated the other from the tangle. It gave me some trouble because it was hooked at that end. It was an aluminum cane with a black composition handle.

  The police were looking for that, without much hope of finding it. The killer who had picked Jillian Rubio up in his car while she was headed for the bus stop would surely have discovered it after he’d disposed of the body and gotten rid of it as well. It hadn’t been found with her corpse. A woman whose legs had been weakened by a crippling disease early in life would have needed it to walk several blocks to catch a bus. She’d have needed it to leave her mother’s house.

  I left the suitcase as it was and started downstairs, carrying the cane by the middle, where I was least likely to smear fingerprints. Halfway down I stopped. Miranda Guzman was standing at the base of the stairs. She had the big male presa canario with her, and judging by the sounds that were rippling from its throat it didn’t like what it was looking at any more than she did.

  THIRTY-THREE

  “You broke into my house.”

  She wore the cloth coat with the cheap fur collar she’d worn to church the other day. The black lace scarf was loose around her neck, no longer necessary to conceal her vanity from God. The dark hot eyes in that maturely beautiful face, flushed but not from the cold, were fixed on mine. She’d seen the cane in my hand. If she didn’t look at it, perhaps it didn’t exist. The big muscular bull only had eyes for the vein pulsing in my throat.

  I nodded carefully. Dogs don’t like jerky movements. “I rang the bell. No one answered, so I broke in. You should call the police.”

  If I’d expected that to rattle her, I was disappointed. She was as calm as a dormant volcano. There’s no such thing as an extinct one.

  “Lupo.”

  She spoke the name quietly, with absolute assurance that the meaning was understood; the same way Matador had said, “Felipe,” just before the red-hot penny made its appearance. The dog’s short stubby ears swiveled forward, like twin cocked hammers. The muscles across its chest bunched. The leash was off its collar, coiled up in its mistress’ hand. I wondered if Lupo could clear the stairs in one spring. I decided he could, with fuel to spare.

  “Young women confide in their mothers,” I said. “Even an estranged daughter needs someone she can talk to, particularly when she’s having a crisis of conscience. How much did she tell you about her arrangement?”

  “Lupo?”

  Slightly different inflection. The dog licked its chops, waggled its hips. No congenital hip displacement there. It was digging its rear paws into the floor for the pushoff.

  “I’m guessing everything. There never was any cache of papers. You knew her story better than anyone. You would have the original of her birth certificate, if it was necessary. You were her ace in the hole, all set to step in just in case Gilia realized the only way to stop blackmail is to stop the blackmailer. You were the partner.”

  “Put down the cane and leave this house.”

  Lupo made a little whimpering noise of impatience, without going off point. My reaction was different. I figured there was only one way left to pronounce the dog’s name.

  I shook my head slowly. With my gun undrawn the cane was the only weapon handy. I wasn’t turning my back on either of them.

  Silence crackled. It made me think of Lupo crunching a hambone.

  “Lupo, sit.”

  The hairs stood out on the backs of my hands when she said “Lupo”; but the dog grunted and sank onto its haunches. I took advantage of the reprieve to change hands on the cane and free my right. The distance between it and the .38 was still seven times farther than a canine bound up nine steps.

  “We spoke of this before,” Miranda said. “I am not a blackmailer.”

  “Just a murderer.”

  Lupo’s ears twitched. Maybe the dog understood the word.

  She said, “The cane means nothing. Two years ago I twisted my ankle, breaking up a fight between Isabella and one of her whelps. The cane is from then.”

  “In that case, you won’t mind if they take a look at it in a police lab.” Bluff. She might have wiped it off, and if any of Jillian’s DNA was left it would be too close to her mother’s to prosecute.

  “You spoke of a crisis of conscience.” She had a little trouble with the unfamiliar phrase. “I thought then perhaps you understood. My daughter was a good woman. Her life was difficult. She lost her way, but she found it again. We are none of us perfect under God.”

  My palms were damp. They’d been damp when Professor Zubaran had said the people of his country were capable of making up for past wrongs.

  I said, “She never had any intention of keeping that appointment in Milwaukee. That’s why she came here, to tell you what she’d been doing and that she’d decide
d to quit. Maybe she was going to return the money she’d extorted from Gilia. You fell out over it.”

  She said nothing. I opened and closed my free hand a couple of times, drying it in the air. A fast draw is useless when your palm is slippery.

  I went on. “The cops thought—me, too—that the killer snatched Jillian off the street, probably in a car, and dumped the body a street over after injecting her with Stelazine. It had to be injected to work that fast. The only thing wrong with that theory was it was based on your statement that she broke off her visit to keep an appointment. Since that jibed with the date she’d had with Hector Matador, we bought it. It didn’t have to make sense that she would come all this way to spend Thanksgiving with you, then reverse directions to make a pickup she’d been making once a month for a year. Everything doesn’t have to match up in a homicide investigation as long as most of the facts fit. But if you run it so it does, she had no reason to be on the street the day she was killed. That means you made it up. She made this trip so she wouldn’t be tempted to keep that appointment at all. So there was no car, and if there was no car there didn’t have to be a needle. You could have emptied her prescription bottle into her cornflakes and let her take her own time about dying. Then you waited until after dark and lugged the corpse next door. That wouldn’t have been too much physical effort for a woman who’s used to dragging a hundred-and-fifty-pound dog around on a leash.”

  “That is what you say.”

  “That’s what the cane says. You should’ve dumped it with the body.”

  “I could not go back.”

  She wasn’t talking to me. Her voice was so low that the dog, expecting a scratch behind the ears to go with what it thought was a murmured endearment, turned its huge square head to look up at her. No affection there. It returned its attention to me and smacked its loose lips, making a sound like a shovel scooping up wet cement.