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

by Loren D. Estleman

  When the magic hour came I gave it another five minutes, then went back in. There was nobody behind the desk now. I clanged the little bell and a door opened from the side of the little alcove and a sullen-looking man crowding middle age came out chewing on something. He had crumbs on his green vest.

  This time I didn’t bother with the flasher or a story to go with it. I showed him my ID, told him who I wanted to see, and stood a crisp folded fifty on the desk. Two minutes later I was on the way up to Alison Garland’s room.

  TWENTY-ONE

  A DO NOT DISTURB sign hung on the brass doorknob, which meant no one had been in to clean. That was another break. I figured I’d spent all I had coming on this job and was into the next.

  The Wolverine people hadn’t gotten around to replacing the old-fashioned locks with an electronic system. I’d found a way around that, too, but I like to keep my hand in with traditional methods of burglary. A housekeeper had parked her cart outside a room down the hall and the door was open with a vacuum cleaner whining inside. I kept an eye turned that direction as I twisted the knob belonging to Alison Garland’s room toward the door hinges and slid a Costco card between the latch and the jamb. I’m not a member; I’d found it in a parking lot and had added several coats of laminate to make it extra sturdy. After a little struggle the sloping latch retracted with a snap and I was inside with the door shut behind me before the vacuum switched off.

  The room was narrow, made more cramped by a pair of twin beds, one of which was still made. A Starving Artist painting of the Pictured Rocks was bolted to the wall above the beds in a black aluminum frame and a bulbous cathode-ray TV occupied a long three-drawer console with a glossy plastic finish. A sculptured carpet kept the guests downstairs from tracking every movement above their heads and the usual spearmint-flavored disinfectant had been sprayed around with a firehose.

  Women are tidier than men as a rule, but not when it comes to hotel life. Dresses and tailored business suits were laid out on the unused bed, four pairs of shoes were flung about as if they’d exploded off four pairs of feet, damp towels littered the floor. The top console drawer was open, spilling unmentionables out over the front, and a semitransparent ivory blouse hung over the metal shades of the twin lamps mounted between the beds.

  I wondered about that blouse; I even reached out and stroked it between my thumb and forefinger, fishing for metaphysical vibrations, and found out all over again I’m not psychic. But I know women, in so far as a man can know them, which is damn little. Some of them like a light on in romantic moments, but hotel lamps can be harsh on skin imperfections, and sheer material makes a handy filter. A man would never think of it. I pulled back the covers on the rumpled bed, but there were no visible signs of an untidy act. The sheets and pillowcases passed the smell test for excessive perspiration. Anyway, I’d forgotten to pack my DNA kit, along with my ten thousand shares of Microsoft.

  Detecting is funny work. In what other job would it matter whether Alison Garland got laid?

  The bathroom’s the best place to look for feminine secrets. It was narrow, with a combination shower-bath and not much counter space. What there had been was cluttered with a half-used tube of travel toothpaste, a tiny bottle of Scope, half-empty also, and smears of flesh-colored powder and nasty-looking traces of eyeliner and mascara. Nothing hidden in the few places you can hide something in a hotel bathroom: toilet tank, the underside of the sink, between the towels folded on a glass shelf. The wastebasket held only crumpled tissues. Nothing under the plastic-bag lining. I didn’t neglect to turn over the basket and look for something taped to the bottom. I found a Band-Aid that might have been there since they came in tin boxes.

  Back in the bedroom I zipped open a pull-along suitcase and found the inspection tag tucked in the bottom of an inside compartment, nothing else. She’d hung up the clothes she hadn’t laid out in a folding-door closet. The pockets contained nothing but lint, and not much of that. Same with the clothes on the bed. Apart from what looked like a hasty departure—possibly to make her appointment with me in Wyandotte—the Garland seemed to have been neat in her habits. It would be something for her eulogy if nothing else about her surfaced.

  An empty Diet Coke can shared the bedroom wastebasket with crumbs of chocolate chip cookies in a small cellophane package like the kind that came in vending machines. She had a sweet tooth. That ought to break the case wide open.

  The Gideon Bible in the nightstand drawer gave me nothing my early religious education hadn’t; nothing came out when I turned it upside down, fanned the pages, and gave them a good shake. The Detroit Metropolitan phone book left me just as ignorant. Nothing taped to the back of the drawer or underneath it. I got down on my belly and looked under the bed. It was a platform job, no room for a chest full of pieces-of-eight or a murderer to hide. Just to be thorough I tore apart the bed and flipped up the mattress. Not so much as a bedbug. The Wolverine should have put that in its advertising.

  I saved the skimpy writing pad next to the telephone for last. The top sheet had been torn off, leaving a triangular scrap attached to the gum binding. It bore a piece of spiky script that read “ois.”

  Old movies are only good for entertainment. I tried the trick with the midget Ikea pencil I carry with my notebook, rubbing the edge of the lead on the next sheet. In Hollywood, people bear down harder when they write down revealing information.

  Ois.

  It didn’t have to be anything I could use, in a town originally settled by the French. It could have belonged to Dubois, which is a street downtown, or the name of a descendant of one of the first families. There weren’t many of them left, though, and I didn’t think it was Dubois Street either. The only other local place I knew that ended in those letters was Livernois, which happened to be the street where Elysian Fields stood. It was Cecelia Wynn’s source of herbal vitamins and also a clearinghouse for controlled substances, but all the police had been able to clear so far was a corpse from its basement. I broke out my notebook and looked up the home address I had for Smoke Wygonik.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I’d almost forgotten my companions in the Lincoln Town Car. I kept looking for them, but all I got was the usual midtown traffic: a couple of slow-moving vans, their only speed, a bicyclist got up in the standard gladiator regalia of teardrop helmet and Spandex, and a low-rider with more grillwork behind the wheel than outside.

  I felt bereft; it’s a word, last I knew. As someone once said—that someone possibly being me—you can get used to getting hit in the head with a hammer if that’s how you wake up every morning, and what friends I had weren’t always so loyal as my enemies. Maybe my recent unfortunate association with cops had put them off. More likely they’d switched to less familiar transportation and a closed tail. If that was the case, I’d become more important than I cared to be. There’s comfort in being nonessential. Ask any Roman emperor after Christ.

  In any case, hunger trumped paranoia.

  “Peckish” is another good Victorian word for what I felt suddenly. It probably isn’t in the dictionary anymore: The Internet is always enriching the vocabulary with terms just as doomed for the scrap heap, and space is always short. But “hungry” didn’t nearly serve, and “famished” is for Jane Austen. My stomach was pasted to my spine and I had a skull full of helium. It happens every sixteen hours or so when I forget to eat.

  The lunch crowd was clearing out of the Westin at the Renaissance Center. A couple of GM execs were finishing a pot of coffee and divvying up the Western Hemisphere in a corner booth while I ate a cheese sandwich and chased it with a glass of milk. I left them still there fighting over the check and drove the short distance to the warehouse district, where buildings the size of department stores stand empty among others making the transition toward loft apartments. So far the developers were offering spectacular views of the river and the Windsor skyline and space to train troupes of mounted lancers for less than their colleagues were charging for utility flats in Bloomfield H
ills. Smoke had said she’d been tough enough to hold out for rent control when she signed her lease. In fifty years, when Detroit is back on its feet, she’d still be paying just eight hundred a month and using a bicycle to travel from the bedroom to the kitchen.

  The building, on Orleans off East Jefferson, had been used to store everything from Studebaker wagons to stoves to Upper Peninsula pine to cases of Old Log Cabin. It was a microcosm of the city’s history, encompassing pioneer days, the logging boom, the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and Prohibition. Its brick and concrete block had been sandblasted, repainted a soothing mint-green, and panels had been erected in place of the old multiple-paned windows to diffuse the sunlight and protect the privacy of the residents. One of the original bay doors had been left intact, probably for moving furniture, but another had been bricked in with a door and fanlight installed and a row of buttons next to labels printed out on plastic strips. I pressed the one for S. WYGONIK and waited. When that didn’t work I selected another at random. That one released the lock. Somewhere there is always someone expecting a pizza.

  *

  The freight elevator had been installed personally by Otis. The car was large enough to carry coils of industrial steel, and probably had. The present owners had renovated it in compliance with code, but it hadn’t been soundproofed: The big gears designed to lift a ton clanked and clattered and the cables squealed around their pulleys. It was designed for durability, not speed; I could have smoked a carton by the time I got to Smoke’s floor. It stopped with a clang and the doors let me out into a hallway that wasn’t original to the building, paneled with unpainted Sheetrock and pierced with hollow-core doors numbered in brass from the Sears hardware department. I found hers and pressed the bell button. I pressed it a few more times before the door opened and came to a stop at the end of a chain. When she saw it was me she closed it again. The chain rattled and she opened it wide.

  She was barefoot and in sweats with her hair twisted into a ponytail. She took a piece of lath off her shoulder with a nail driven through the end and poked it into a wicker basket on the floor that looked as if the cobra had moved out recently.

  “Nice weapon,” I said by way of greeting. “Was the nail your idea?”

  “I found it in the hallway when I moved in. They were still working on the place then. It came with a bunch of nails. I left one in on an inspiration. I don’t like guns.” She ran fingers through her ponytail. “Did you buzz me from downstairs? I was pounding my ear. I didn’t get much sleep last night. Or this morning, either.” She grinned sleepily—there was a bedsheet crease on her right cheek—and kissed me. “I’m not sure I thanked you for helping me out with the police.”

  “I had the impression you did.” I stepped around her into a great open room with a ten-foot ceiling, suspended from fourteen. There was a stove and a sink and a refrigerator, bedroom furniture, a couple of mismatched armchairs, and a sofa that looked better than the one in the apartment where Yummy Mondadori had been hiding out with his cousin. It might fetch a piece of change from Craigslist. “I’d’ve pegged you for a minimalist. How do you heat the place, by burning lath?”

  “Utilities are included, as long as I don’t abuse the privilege. I’m furnishing the place a piece at a time. Funny, but I didn’t think to budget that in when I signed the lease. Can I offer you a drink? Beer’s all I’ve got, sorry.”

  “No, thanks. I never drink on a full stomach. How did you know Alison Garland?”

  “I didn’t know I did. Who is she?”

  “Last night, for a little while, I thought she was Cecelia Wynn.” I told her about Wyandotte.

  “Why would someone want to pass herself off as her? And why do you think I know her?”

  She didn’t slip up on her tenses. I hoped that meant something nice. She smelled a little like soap. I have a soft spot for women who shower before bed.

  “She left a note in her hotel room. It wasn’t much, but I got the idea it was connected to Elysian Fields.”

  “You think maybe she posed as Mrs. Wynn at the store? If she looked as much like her as you say, she might have. I only saw the customers a few minutes at a time. We weren’t doing land-office business, but there were enough I wouldn’t necessarily remember the physical details of any one of them.” She started to yawn, cut it off in the middle; looked alert and wary. “But if you thought I knew her as this Alison person, you weren’t suggesting I mistook her for Mrs. Wynn, were you? What’s going on, Amos? Do you think I seduced you to throw you off the track? If you think she’s hiding out here, go check the bathroom. I just wish I’d known you were coming to search the place. I’d’ve changed the towels.”

  “No need. I know where she is. Or where she was an hour ago. By now she may be taking up a tray in the county cold room. Someone shot her to death, probably not long after she left me in the restaurant.”

  Her hand went to her mouth, but not to cover another yawn. “God. And you think I shot her?”

  “It occurred to me, but I didn’t know yet how you felt about guns.”

  “I hate them. I hate that you carry one. If I were ever to kill a person, it’d be some other way. Jesus, you think I crawled into your bed fresh from a murder? You think that?”

  I let out my breath. I was having trouble lately remembering the process of respiration. “I’m not a theater critic, but I’m guessing you’re not that good an actress. No, I don’t think you shot her. If you did, you had help, because it looks like she was taken from wherever she was killed and carried into the bedroom where she was found, and I think you’d be smart enough not to share the secret.”

  “Thanks a bunch. I’m too smart to be guilty. That’s not the same as innocent.”

  “Take it in a hitch, Amber Dawn. Anyone can kill; I only quibble about the why. You’re my only link to the health store. Livernois doesn’t have many sights to attract visitors from out of state. Just the Chord Progression Lounge, and she didn’t strike me as the jazz-loving type. I could be wrong about that. They don’t all wear Miles Davis Tshirts and snap their fingers as they walk.”

  “That’s all you had to go on? Livernois?”

  “Not even that. Just the last three letters. When there isn’t a straw around, you grasp at seeds. Also I grew a tail I didn’t have before I went to the store the first time, and part of that tail led to Alison Garland dead in a dump she probably never laid eyes on. Everything about this case has to do with your late place of employment. I’ll take that beer now if the offer’s still good.”

  “I made it before you accused me of murder. But I’m not a welsher.” She opened the refrigerator and twisted the caps off two bottles of Stroh’s. Handing me one: “I don’t guess it’s as good since they blew up the plant, but it was my parents’ brand. I don’t know a lot about beer, only that it beats water when you’re really thirsty.”

  “You’re too young to remember the Stroh’s plant.” We clinked bottles and I sat on the sofa.

  “Not quite that young. But I was too little to know anything about it.” She sat on the other end, swung up her legs, and laid them across my lap. “Mind?”

  I shook my head and rested a hand on a bare ankle. “So no bells? Maybe Cecelia mentioned a long-lost identical cousin?”

  She swigged and stifled a burp. “Like I said, I didn’t get to know any of the customers. Some small talk, questions about which capsule does what. You think it has something to do with Mrs. Wynn’s disappearance?”

  “I’m not sure Mrs. Wynn’s disappearance has anything to do with Mrs. Wynn. I mean that it was her idea. I know they both had something to do with Elysian Fields, and I don’t even know that. All I’ve got is three letters on a scrap of paper.”

  “What do the police say?”

  “I don’t know. But I know what they’ll say when they find out I’ve got that scrap. First, though, they’ll have to find out about the hotel room. I sort of swiped the evidence that led me to it.” I took a long pull and let the liquid pool on the floor of my
mouth before committing it to my stomach. She was right about beer. Wherever they were brewing the stuff now it was a big improvement over water.

  “Is this how you always run your business?”

  “I like to make things interesting. The murders in this town need a little seasoning. It’s like dropping a quarter and throwing a ten-dollar bill after it to make bending over worth the effort.”

  “So am I your ten-dollar bill?”

  I looked at her. She was wearing a greedy little smile. “No,” I said. “Not when you adjust for inflation.” I leaned over to set my bottle on the floor and gathered the rest of her into my lap.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Where to now?”

  She was watching me dress. One bare leg lay on top of the twisted sheets. Her eyes were neutral-colored now behind a sleepy veil.

  “The office, where I do my best thinking.” I knotted my tie, brushed at a crease it had picked up lying on the floor, gave up, and buttoned my coat over it.

  “Thinking or drinking?”

  “Don’t believe I’m the ambidextrous drinker I’m made out to be. It’s PR. Customers like their mechanics German, their decorators gay, and their detectives baggy in the liver. I’m starting all over from scratch and that’s where I go when it itches.”

  “Which case are you working, Alison Garland or Cecelia Wynn?”

  “Does it matter? Did you ever read the story about the blind men and the elephant?”

  “You know my generation only reads blogs.”

  “Check it out sometime.” I turned away from the mirror and looked at her. “What’s your day look like?”

  “You mean my evening? The Internet café and the online employment postings. It’s going to be harder than usual. The only reference I can give for the last six months isn’t available, and if he were, it isn’t a reference that’s likely to get me hired. How about you?”

  “A reference from me is only a little better than one from your dead manager.”

  “I meant I could come to work for you.” She turned over, exposing all of a very long back with a mole on the left shoulder blade, and supported her chin on her fist. “So you’re not a lush. Some of the standards need supporting. How about hiring a sexy blond secretary? That ought to go over big with the customers.”