Don't Look for Me: An Amos Walker Novel (Amos Walker Novels)

by Loren D. Estleman

  I noticed a few wrought-iron fences this trip. An earlier generation of residents had donated theirs to the Second World War and are still too proud of the sacrifice to replace them. Until recently, it was the last four square miles in the United States with penny parking meters downtown, another common touch that had fallen before the transfusion of New Money.

  They’ll tell you the real wealth now is in Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills; but those places smell of crisp greenbacks and not the soft old bills of the aristocrats whose great-grandfathers put the world on the gasoline standard. Their men wear French cuffs on weekends and their women clank their bracelets and talk too loud over trick martinis built of colored liqueurs and bobbing bits of fruit. In Grosse Pointe they go out in open-neck sports shirts, plug the holes in their earlobes with tasteful star-cut diamonds, and hoist boilermakers in honor of their ancestors lying with their bagged livers in marble vaults. They haven’t a thing to prove until you ask them just where their money is invested at present.

  The Wynn house, located on the less-desirable side of Lake Shore Drive across from the cul-de-sacs on the lake, was a nice place if you like washing windows; which wasn’t a problem even on that side, because the servant pool is always deep when unemployment tops 10 percent, a chronic situation in southeastern Michigan. There must have been fifty on the street side alone, with ivy—rusty-brown now, but showing optimistic dots of green among the shriveled leaves—crawling up the fieldstone walls. That was a lot of fieldstone; it had to have been trucked in from someplace like Washtenaw County, where they grow rocks like Kansas grows wheat. But the owners of some of the older houses across the street had gone as far as Florence and Greece. There was a courtyard with a chalky Cupid urinating into a round trough in the center and a black chauffeur in his shirtsleeves polishing the chrome on last year’s Mercedes in the brick-paved drive that encircled it. The car would be Alec Wynn’s beater when slush and road salt threatened the Porsche. The chauffeur was young and angular, and so tall he had to stoop to buff the hood: There but for an ounce of athletic skill went the next captain of the Pistons.

  Maybe that was racist. Maybe it had been his life’s dream to drive a rich white couple wherever they wanted to go. A job is what you make it.

  So why hadn’t he driven Cecelia Wynn where she wanted to go, when she went? Or had he? Another thing I would’ve asked Alec, if it had occurred to me they had a driver. Or if he’d thought to mention it. If he was so rich, why wasn’t he smart?

  A white-haired woman with dull eyes and a faint moustache answered my ring. The serving-class demographic was growing old. If Silicon Valley didn’t ramp up its robotics soon, people were going to have to start dusting their own knickknacks.

  “Trina?”

  “Yes. You are Mr. Walker? Mr. Wynn told me to expect you.”

  She wore a starched white apron over a charcoal pantsuit, walking shoes on her feet, strong hands folded at her waist. Wynn had said she was Brazilian. A little space before she responded to my question. She spoke in careful English but did her thinking in Portuguese.

  She took me through a room big enough for badminton, but that was designed just for following maids through, and down a hall lined with dark paintings to a morning room of some kind. There was a small neat white-painted writing desk with a shallow chair drawn up in front of it that would accommodate an average-size woman comfortably. Among men, a jockey might stand it as long as five minutes. There were sprays of fresh flowers in painted porcelain vases and a Mary Cassatt print on a wall. A feminine sort of room, but no pink flourishes or unicorns. A glass doorwall was ajar and a strong chlorine stench floated in from a crescent-shaped swimming pool. She slid the door shut.

  “The pool man says alkali is leaking into the water from an underground spring,” she said. “The chlorine controls the smell.”

  “Being rich is a bitch. Excuse my French.”

  “French?” Her smooth brown brow broke into horizontal lines.

  “An expression. Your English is swell, but you can live here a long time before you get a handle on American.”

  The lines smoothed out. “Swell. I know this word. It means good, yes?”

  “Yes; but don’t bother working it into your vocabulary. It’s out of date, like me. Did Mr. Wynn tell you what I wanted?”

  “Capsules.” She nodded gravely, her hands still folded in front of her apron. “Many, many capsules. In my country, it is only the sick who swallow so many things from little bottles. Mrs. Wynn, she seems healthy. I have been in this country ten years and I don’t understand it.”

  “Congratulations. You’ve assimilated. I was born here, and I know less about it than I knew ten years ago. Can you tell me where she got them?”

  “She has many bottles of capsules in her room. There is a name on the bottles, I think. Understand, I do not pry. Pry, this is correct?”

  I nodded. I wondered if she was the Innocent Abroad she made herself out as. You know you’ve been on the job too long when you question the motives of everyone you meet.

  On the other hand, that’s the job description.

  “Can I see one?”

  “You mean, may you see one?”

  “Yeah.” Right back in Mrs. Stevens’ fifth-grade English class, and the old bat twenty years in the ground.

  “I will get one.” She unfolded her hands.

  “No hurry. What sort of woman is Mrs. Wynn to work for?”

  A pair of pleated lips pursed. “I don’t know that this is a good question to answer.”

  “Not your place. We don’t have places here, Trina. You can call me Amos if you like.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “You’re a good maid, Trina.” I wound a five-dollar bill around my right index finger. She made no move to take it. I shook my head. “Not a bribe. You know bribe?”

  “I know this word. I am born in Rio de Janeiro.” The pleated lips sealed tight.

  I didn’t know what that meant, but my history is spotty. “I’d be honored if you’d consider it a gift in return for your patience in speaking with an American.” I slid it from my finger, still in a tube, took one of her hands gently, and laid it in the calloused palm.

  She flattened the tube and tucked it inside her apron pocket. I got the impression she was doing me a favor.

  Just what I was after. It made me want to scrub myself all over and join the seminary.

  FIVE

  Trina refolded her hands. She was as placid as an eel skin drying in the sun. “I do not say anything against Mrs. Wynn.”

  “I’m not asking you to,” I said. “That isn’t what the money was for. This isn’t a divorce case. Mr. Wynn just wants to know where she went and if she’s all right.”

  “She is a good employer. She says please and thank you and does not run her fingers over the furniture after I dust, like the last woman I worked for. She does not offer me her old clothes as if they are—” She stumbled over the word.

  “A bonus. I get you. To hell with employers like that. Is that all you can tell me about her, she’s polite?”

  “I have not worked here long. Only five weeks.”

  “Who was the maid before that?”

  “A girl named Ann Foster, at my agency. Multi-Urban Services. She was fired.” Her voice dropped to a whisper on the last part. We were alone, no one within earshot; but it’s a scary word to say out loud.

  “Fired why?”

  “William the chauffeur told me she was—let go. I did not ask for what. In my country we have a saying.”

  “English, please. My Portuguese is worse than my Mandarin.”

  “I was going to say it in English. ‘The less you know, the more you work.’”

  “Ah. We have a saying like that here, too. Where can I find Ann Foster?”

  “Through the agency, maybe. But I think she does not work there now.”

  “Tough place. One fumble and you’re off the team.”

  “Fumble?”

  “Mistake.”

&nbs
p; “I think maybe it was not her first. The bottles are in her bedroom. I will get them.”

  “One will do, thanks.”

  When she’d left I caught my reflection in the glass over the Cassatt print. “Pushed it,” I said.

  While she was away I went through the little writing desk. A shallow belly drawer contained a sheet of first-class stamps with three gone, a pad of the same drugstore stationery she’d used to write her brush-off note to her husband, some nice ballpoint pens, and a block of yellow Post-its. Neither the top sheet on the pad nor the one on the block showed any legible depressions when I turned them toward the light, but then they hardly ever do outside the portals of the Doubleday Mystery Book Club. The pigeonholes on top of the desk were empty.

  I was back on my mark when Trina returned. She handed me a brown glass container the size of a small pickle jar with a broad cork in the top. I pulled the cork and looked inside. It was half full of clear gelatin capsules. I took one out and held it up to the light coming in from the direction of the pool. A fine brown powder shifted around inside when I tipped it. I held it to my nose and sniffed. A sharp, spicy scent, vaguely familiar. Cinnamon: but not the kind generally available at the supermarket. I remembered it then, from a long time ago. It was an Asian variety, the genuine article, made from the bark of a tree found only in and around Saigon. Well, Ho Chi Minh City, but that one wasn’t my fault. It was after my time.

  The label had been printed out by computer:

  OLYMPIC GARDENS

  97172 Livernois

  Detroit, MI 48220

  There was an 800 number and an e-mail address, but I didn’t pay them any attention. I don’t have a computer and I wanted to talk to Mr. or Mrs. Olympic in person.

  I restopped the container and slipped it into the side pocket of my coat. “How many of these does Mrs. Wynn have in her bedroom?”

  “Many, as I said.”

  “I meant how many bottles.”

  “Ten or twelve, I think. More, maybe.” Her brow cracked across again for a second. Then she nodded. “More.”

  “As full as this?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t look inside. When one is empty she throws it away. An easy woman to clean up after, Mrs. Wynn. Everything is always back in its place.”

  “I understand she fills some of the capsules herself?”

  “Yes. She says it is less expensive if she buys them empty and fills them. Also she knows she is not being cheated on the amounts.”

  “That’s a lot of capsules to go to all the trouble to fill and then leave behind. Did she take her clothes with her? A suitcase?”

  “No, sir. Her closets and drawers are full.”

  “May I take a look?” When she started to furrow a third time I took out my cell. “You can ask Mr. Wynn if it’s okay.”

  “No. I would like to help.” Still she hesitated. “Mr. Wynn said not to disturb anything in her room. I do not leave a place in that condition naturally.”

  “Normally.”

  “Normally. Thank you.”

  I showed her my palms. “No white gloves.”

  She conducted me into a biggish room decorated in silver-gray with rose accents, not very busy. The rose bedding on the queen mattress was rumpled, the pillow showing the clear depression of a head. A drawer of the silver-gray bureau hung open and some items of feminine apparel were strewn about the rose carpet. More plastic bottles rattled around the inside of the next drawer down when I tugged it out. A pair of double-louvered doors opened onto a closet containing dresses and suits cut to a woman’s waist and a lot of shoes on a mahogany rack on the floor. It looked like a complete set of paints, powder, and brushes on the dressing table, but after a hundred years on the job I’m still no judge of that kind of thing. I asked the maid if anything appeared to be missing.

  “No, sir. Mr. Wynn asked me the same thing.”

  The room was untidy, but not so bad it looked as if it had been ransacked or the person who slept there had left in a hurry. A smoky scent of violets lingered; a woodsy variant, unique to the individual who wore it, a chemical anomaly: a clue, if I had any talents in that direction.

  It was shaping up to be the damnedest disappearing act I’d covered in a long, long time.

  *

  The tall black chauffeur was leaning backward against the roof of the glistening Mercedes, smoking a cigarette, when I came out of the house. The rain and sleet had stopped, and the disgusted expression on his strong-boned face read out as three more hours of nothing to do till quitting time. The expression changed as I kept walking his way without stopping by my Cutlass. Blank now: The shields were up. Following that shift of his facial muscles, nothing moved, not even his crossed ankles in high-topped shoes with the laces crossed over metal hooks. The toes would be steel. You can tell a lot about a man by what he puts on his feet.

  “Are you William?”

  “You ought to take better care of your automobile. It’s a damn shame to abuse a fine instrument like the 1970 four-fifty-five.” His voice was deep and resonant. The words plunked one by one into an empty steel drum.

  “If I bumped it out and got a paint job, a trooper might want to take a look under the hood. I dummied up the emissions system to improve performance. Sorry about the dumb question. Of course you’re William. Complete strangers don’t just walk in off the street with a can of Turtle Wax under one arm. Not in this neighborhood.”

  “Yourself?”

  I showed him my ID folder.

  He pointed a finger as long as a fondue fork at the honorary sheriff’s star. “That a gag?”

  “It’s pure milk chocolate under the foil.” I put it away and handed him a card.

  He read it, then bent it into a cantilever between the thumb and forefinger of the hand not involved with his cigarette and held it like that, as if he was thinking of letting it go to see how far it sprang. “Same information, bigger print. I don’t need two forms of identification. I’m not a bank.”

  “I believe you. Who’d lie about that? Can I piggyback a light?” I shook one out of the pack and poked it between my lips.

  He took the half-smoked stub out of his mouth and gave it to me. I lit mine off the end; didn’t need it, I always carry a second book of matches in case I drop the first in a puddle of blood or something. I gave him back his stub. The inhaling end was dry.

  “Now we got us a bond,” he said.

  I blew a jet of smoke down the driveway. “Hasn’t worked yet. But a man can hope.”

  Nothing. Not even a grunt to indicate my audio was working. This was going to be like pulling nails with my toes.

  I stood a folded ten-spot on the Mercedes’ trunk, just inside his long reach. He looked at it, then at the low fieldstone wall that separated the lot from the one next door. The wall looked back. Whatever passed between them wasn’t my business. My card remained bent between his fingers, a little tighter now. It was like watching the ash grow on the end of a cigar and wondering when it would fall.

  “Your boss hired me,” I said.

  “Did he.”

  “He did. You knew that. He’d have asked you if you drove Mrs. Wynn away the other day, or if she left on her own. Whether or not he told you about me, you had to know why I’m here with my cards and Roy Rogers badge. So let’s waive the pissing contest. My day’s a long way from finished.”

  “Who’s this Rogers?”

  “You wouldn’t like him. He rode a horse.” I waited.

  I don’t know how much longer we’d have gone on, because just then a little breeze came up and the folded bill lifted away from the hood. My business card sproinged loose from between his fingers and he swept up the bill in a looping left. Whatever his shortcomings on the court, reflexes weren’t among them. He stretched it between his hands and held it up to count the threads. Then he folded it square and poked it into the watch pocket of his chinos.

  “I didn’t drive her. It was my day off. She always called a cab when Mr. Wynn and I were both gone. She doesn
’t drive. I think she was from New York City or somewhere where they don’t.”

  “I figured she made other arrangements, or you’d have told Wynn where she had you drop her off. It’s Ann Foster I’m interested in.”

  He grinned for the first time, big white well-kept teeth in a face blasted from volcanic rock. “Lots of folks were interested in Ann. I took a run at her myself, but she was born out of bounds.”

  “That good, huh?”

  “No one around here’s seen anything like her since the governor cut out the tax breaks for Hollywood. Skinny little thing, but long on looks.”

  “And aloof.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Bullshit. Wayne State?”

  “Oakland. Two years, till I blew out my knee and lost my scholarship.”

  “Tough break.”

  “I wasn’t that good. Just tall.”

  “Who was Ann closer to, Alec or Cecelia?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I work outside.”

  “Which one fired her?”

  The cigarette was short enough to scorch his lips. He spat it out, plucked another out of a pack of Old Golds in his shirt pocket, and fired it off a disposable butane lighter. By the time he drew in an egg of smoke and spewed it out his nostrils I got the hint. I always do when they’re as subtle as an earthquake in Japan. This time I put the ten in his hand. It rested flat on his palm for a moment, like a butterfly. Then he stuck it back at me. “I wasn’t fishing. Not worth the risk. These jobs don’t float in on the tide. Even rich people learn to do for themselves when the dividends slow down.”

  “So drive a bus.” But I took back the bill. You could have knocked me over with a dump truck. “Wynn knows I’m here, and if this house means anything he’s figured out what sort of questions I’m asking. But you can check with him yourself.” I unshipped the cell again.

  Again it was refused. But I was still holding the bill in my other hand and he helped himself to it. Into his pocket it went.

  “It was her fired Ann,” he said. “Mrs. Wynn.”

  “Why?”

  “She didn’t run it past me, can’t think why.”

  “For ten bucks you can guess.”