Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde

by Loren D. Estleman

  “The cane was in the corner where she’d leaned it,” Miranda said in that same almost inaudible tone. “I didn’t see it until I came in from the lumberyard. I couldn’t go back. Nothing could make me go back. I put it where I would not have to look at it.”

  Something had broken through in that stairwell. Zubaran had been dead right about the character of his countrymen. I said, “It had to be the money. She gave you a glimpse of how much could be made from the situation, then took it away in the same breath. So you got rid of her. How long were you planning to wait before you made your own arrangement with Gilia?”

  “¡Hijo del perro!”

  Her voice rang out the way it had in church when she’d called me a pig. Lupo leapt up on all fours, the ruff around his shoulders standing. I didn’t know if it was because of her tone or the fact she’d called me a son of a dog.

  Miranda’s face was a primitive mask, something carved out by her ancestors before Christ to frighten away demons.

  “¡Culebra! ¡Mofeta! I did not sin to follow it with sin. La Casa del Rubio was founded by conquistadores. Nobles and conquerors. There is not a parasite in the line. I told her this. She would not listen. She wanted to confess to a priest. I said all the priests in this city are of common stock, that she would disgrace the family by degrading herself before jıbaros. She laughed. She asked what honor I brought to the family when I cleaned dog filth. I had heard this before. It was why I banished her from my house the first time. But this time I held my temper. I waited until dinner, and then I did the thing I knew I must do to preserve the House of Rubio. It is as it is with dogs: The bloodline must be kept pure at all costs.”

  “You never forgave her for getting sick, did you?”

  She took that in with an insane kind of self-discovery. “No. In dogs, several generations are required, and you must destroy those that are tainted. Had I known then what I now know, I would have taken this action then.”

  I waited until her voice stopped ringing off the stairway walls.

  “Lady,” I said, “you’re loco.”

  Her face smoothed out. I knew what was coming. I drew the .38 and pointed it at the dog. Its name died in her throat. Lupo, whining frustration, looked up at his mistress, then back to me.

  “Sit,” she said.

  Lupo sat. When all was said and done the dog meant more than the daughter; but then she’d put more work into it. I owed Noah Guzman an apology for what I’d been thinking about him all week.

  I tightened my grip on the cane and walked downstairs. Neither dog nor woman moved, although as I backed around it the dog followed me with its head, growling on a rising note as if pleading. Miranda paid it no attention. Her head didn’t turn. She was staring at something in the middle ground between her and the sixteenth century.

  I wanted to use a telephone, but not the one in that house. I opened the door and backed through it and didn’t turn around until I’d pulled it shut behind me.

  A blue Bonneville was parked against the curb in front of the house. As I stepped onto the sidewalk the door opened on the driver’s side and Hector Matador bounded out, raising a chromed semiautomatic too big for his slender hand.

  I was still holding the revolver. We fired at the same time. He spun halfway around as if he’d been sideswiped. I’d aimed for his middle, but just as I’d squeezed the trigger something piled into me from behind, a runaway piano or a big log rolling off the back of a truck, making a noise halfway between a roar and a scream, and I stumbled and fell beneath its weight. I half rolled to keep from landing on my face and my elbow struck the sidewalk, but before the pain made its way up my arm I pushed the weight off me. It slid to the grass without bouncing, all dead heft like a sack of meat. My hand was soaked with blood, not mine. Lupo, the great canario bull, sprawled beside me with his tongue on the ground and his eyes already beginning to glaze. The bullet had pierced his heart in midpounce. A hell of a snap shot on the part of someone who hadn’t fired a pistol since before he went to prison for firing it the last time.

  I heard howling. I thought the dogs in the kennel had sensed what had happened and gone into mourning. Then I saw Miranda Guzman standing on the top step in front of her house, both hands balled into fists at her sides with the leash still coiled in one. Her mouth was wide open and the sound that came out was more canine than human.

  Matador lay on his side with one foot hanging over the curb. He had on a three-button beige suit that went well with his brown skin. One side of the coat was stained almost black. He was breathing heavily.

  I pushed myself up with one hand. The other arm was dead from the elbow down, but when it moved someone stuck an ice pick into the bone, and a wave of nausea washed over me. I was pretty sure I’d cracked something when I hit the sidewalk. I clamped the arm tight to my side and picked up my gun with the other hand but didn’t put it in the holster. Matador was still Matador and I couldn’t see what had become of his.

  Someone, probably a returning churchgoer, had called 911. I heard the first gulp of a siren coming up out of the ground a hundred blocks away. The police units and emergency vans parked near the video set would be just catching the same squal. In another minute we were going to be up to our necks in authority. I went over, saw the shiny pistol lying next to Matador’s hip, and used my toe to nudge it out of his reach. I felt a little faint then, and to keep from falling I sat on the grass next to him. His one visible eye was open and it moved my direction.

  “Help’s on its way, amigo,” I said. “You picked the best time and the best place in town to get shot.”

  “I am a fortunate man, Anglo.” He sounded hoarse.

  “Where’d I get you?”

  “The ribs, I think. You are one bad shot.”

  “I was distracted.”

  “I wish the woman would be quiet. Such display is not sympathetic.”

  “She’ll quiet down when her P.D. tells her to.” The arm had begun to ache like a tooth. “You surprised me there. I thought you were shooting at me.”

  “That was the intention when you came out.”

  “What happened?”

  “I do not like dogs. A dog chewed up the first good pair of shoes I bought when I came to this country.”

  “I thought it was something else.”

  He laughed hoarsely. A siren whooped startlingly close by and I had to lean over to hear him.

  “Everything here is something else, Anglo. That is the draw.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Big Bad Benny had his marching orders. He had on a red leather suit today and looked like a monster tomato bowling a path through the printhawks and Eyewitness News wonks stacked twelve deep outside Gilia’s suite with me trailing behind. They dressed and smelled better than Fritz Fleeman. They were probably different in other ways as well, but when they herded up like that, squawking and flapping their feathers, you wanted to drop a safe on them just the same.

  When we were inside, he put a shoulder to the door and leaned it shut, nearly breaking a microphone and the set of fingers holding it, and told me to wait there while he tapped his knuckles on the door to the bedroom.

  “¿Quién es?”

  Déjà vu flashed through me and settled in my chipped elbow. I hadn’t liked the exchange the first time I’d heard it outside Gilia’s dressing room at Cobo Hall.

  This time I got in without a “hokay.” Benny stayed outside. She looked up from an oyster-colored writing desk in the corner opposite the king-size bed. She had on a sky-blue traveling suit with natural shoulders, no blouse, and those little rectangular reading glasses that look like twin microscope slides. Her hair was loose. She took off the glasses, put down her pen, and stood, all in one movement.

  “I know now why you didn’t show up yesterday. Is it as bad as it looks?”

  “Nothing’s ever as bad as it looks.” My arm was in a blue nylon sling padded with foam rubber, with an elastic strap that went around my chest to keep the arm immobile. “It would get me a seat on the subwa
y, if we had a subway. I can play tennis in four to six weeks. If I played tennis.” We said the last part together. She laughed. Then she stopped.

  “Hector?” she said.

  “He’ll be strapped up tighter for a little longer. They took out a rib and pinned two others back together. That’s not the worst of it. Having that pistol sends him back to Jackson.”

  “Life?”

  “Alderdyce thinks a nickel bit. That’s American for five years. Out in two if he minds his manners inside. If there are any animal rightists on the jury he may get the chair.” I started to shrug, thought better of it. “This is all contingent on what the judge thinks of my testimony. The cops gave it a three-pointfive, with most of the loss on the dismount.” I’d sketched in the broad strokes by telephone from the emergency room at Detroit Receiving. By then I’d been over the finer points several times with the officers in the waiting room.

  “He saved your life.”

  “Yeah. He let me down there at the end. Matador being Matador was the one thing I thought I could count on in this town. He called me un postizo when they were loading him into the ambulance. What’s that?”

  “It is not flattering.”

  “I didn’t think it was. He was probably in pain. He won’t be sending anyone any bats for a while.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned bats. I don’t know what it means.”

  “Private joke between enemies. Miranda Guzman put the punch line on it.”

  “What about her?”

  “Man One, if she’s competent to stand trial. They tend to take it easy on you when it’s your own flesh and blood, no one seems to know why. Say, ten to fifteen. That’s seventy to a hundred and five in dog years. She ought to spend them in an upholstered room.”

  “She confessed.”

  “She confessed. It came natural. It was Sunday.” I was tired of discussing Miranda Guzman. She’d been the sole topic of conversation for twenty-four hours. “Shouldn’t you be packing?”

  “Packed. Caterina sees to that. My flight leaves in three hours, just time enough to get through security and the jackals out in the hall. And write a song.” She laughed, gesturing at the desktop.

  “I didn’t know you composed your own stuff.”

  “Today I’m inspired. It’s called ‘Penance.’”

  “A national characteristic, I’m told. How are you with Immigration?”

  “As we speak, a firm of overpriced attorneys is working on that very thing. With luck, the government at home may change hands between delays and extensions. I may return a hero. In which case I will endow an infantile disease research center there in Jillian Rubio’s name.”

  “Penance?”

  “Redemption, I hope. What is this?”

  I’d slid an envelope out of my inside breast pocket and placed it on the desk. “There’s a check inside. The medical expenses ran high on this one, but most of it’s there, not counting my per diem.”

  “You earned the entire fifteen thousand.”

  “Maybe. Endow me a drinking fountain at the Rubio Center.”

  The equatorial sun came out when she smiled.

  A blatty little horn sounded when I stepped out under the canopy. A red Geo was parked in the turnaround in front of the lobby. I went over to it. Fritz Fleeman’s war with hygiene rolled out when he cranked down his window. His reporter’s instincts kicked in when he read my expression.

  “Cool your jets,” he said. “I’m headed out. When Gilia goes, so go I.”

  “Grammar. I thought it was some intern’s job to put that in back at the paper.”

  “I ain’t just a shutterbug, pal. I’m a photojournalist.” He stuck something outside the window.

  I took it. It was a grainy shot printed on cheap paper of a couple kissing.

  I said, “That’s my bad side. How’d you switch the film?”

  “You learn to load on the run. I can make you famous.”

  “How much you charge not to?”

  “I don’t work that street. Anyway, if I did, you’d just shove it up my ass, am I right?” He twisted his head to look up at me from under the bill of his cap.

  “Down your throat. But you’re right in principle.”

  “Then I’d get sore and sell the shot, and then I’d have to come back to this shithole and take your picture again some other time, because you’d be a fucking celebrity. This town’s best feature is it’s got nothing and nobody worth a frame of Fuji standard stock.”

  “That’s what it says in Michelin. So why show me the picture?”

  “Call it a souvenir. Just at a guess I’d say you don’t kiss many superstars.”

  “Kiss, no. I shot one once. That count?”

  “Only if I peddled to the Police Gazette.” He started the tickity engine. “Get your business straightened out?”

  “What business?”

  He showed his bad teeth and cranked up the window. This time he took off easily. The pavement was sheeted with ice.

  The Gilia Cristobal/Jillian Rubio story hit big. Alderdyce got his fifteen seconds of fame on Nightline and an offer from NBC to air his life story over two nights. He declined without disappointing anyone beyond consolation; by then another household name was in custody for forgetting to leave his gun behind when he went through security at LAX and the story got stale. It flared up again when Gilia’s new video came out, and again when someone in the U.S. State Department issued a statement that the government had decided not to deport her in return for some patriotic TV public-service spots she’d agreed to appear in. After that she moved back to the entertainment section.

  I didn’t get a photo op, not even a line. Professor Miguel Zubaran took my spot among People’s 100 Most Intriguing People. It had to be the eye patch.

  Miranda Guzman was declared mentally unfit to stand trial and admitted to the criminal ward at whatever institution had replaced the old State Forensics Hospital in Ypsilanti. Hector Matador pleaded guilty to parole violation and served twenty-six months in the Southern Michigan State Penitentiary in Jackson. I spoke briefly at the sentencing.

  Several months after the story broke I received a FedEx package with the return address of a talent agency in Los Angeles. I took out the videotape and popped it into my VCR. The Detroit footage was brief and showed Gilia in a long white communionstyle dress with her hair tied back, kneeling in the middle of West Vernor before a digitally inserted life-size sculpture of the Virgin and Child. It had a nice stark cold Ingmar Bergman look. Whatever she’d shot on the riverfront didn’t make the final cut. The rest was the usual frantic montage of her in various costumes against various backdrops, exotic and tawdry, lip-synching a song of her own composition. No letter had accompanied the cassette and I didn’t write back. The song shot up the Top Forty list and lingered at No. 1 for four weeks until it was replaced by Eminem. I think it won some kind of award.

  From time to time I get out the photograph Fritz Fleeman took and look at it. More and more it looks like a picture of two people I recognize vaguely, without remembering their names or the circumstances of our meeting. Anyway it’s fading now, and in a year or so it will be nothing but a white rectangle of cheap photo paper, as blank as a wiped slate. It’s called Redemption, and it never comes without a stiff tag.

  BOOKS BY LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

  Kill Zone

  Roses Are Dead

  Any Man’s Death

  Motor City Blue

  Angel Eyes

  The Midnight Man

  The Glass Highway

  Sugartown

  Every Brilliant Eye

  Lady Yesterday

  Downriver

  Silent Thunder

  Sweet Women Lie

  Never Street

  The Witchfinder

  The Hours of the Virgin

  A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

  City of Widows*

  The High Rocks*

  Billy Gashade*

  Stamping Ground*

  Ace
s & Eights*

  Journey of the Dead*

  Jitterbug*

  The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association*

  The Master Executioner*

  White Desert*

  Sinister Heights

  Something Borrowed, Something Black*

  *A Forge Book

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Loren D. Estleman, author of the acclaimed Amos Walker private detective novels and the Detroit series, has won three Shamus Awards from the Private Eye Writers of America, four Golden Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America, and three Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. He has been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. His other novels include the western historical classics Billy Gashade, Journey of the Dead, and The Master Executioner. Detroit hit man Peter Macklin made his return in Something Borrowed, Something Black (2002), having previously appeared in three novels: Kill Zone, Roses Are Dead, and Any Man’s Death. Poison Blonde is the sixteenth Amos Walker novel, his first for Forge Books. Estleman lives in Michigan with his wife, author Deborah Morgan.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  POISON BLONDE

  Copyright © 2003 by Loren D. Estleman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  eISBN 9781429911801

  First eBook Edition : April 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Estleman, Loren D.

  Poison blonde: an Amos Walker novel / Loren D. Estleman.—1st Forge ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-765-30447-3 (acid-free paper)

  1. Walker, Amos (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Michigan—Detroit—Fiction. 3. Detroit (Mich.)—Fiction. 4. Illegal aliens—Fiction. 5. Women singers—Fiction. I. Title.