Silent Thunder

by Loren D. Estleman

  Leslie Dorrance sat on the chalk-colored sofa reading my typewritten report. His horse face looked comforting, like a homely aunt’s when you’ve had enough of city lights and bottled blondes. His legs were crossed in expensive brown pinstriped trousers ending in ribbed socks and the inevitable thick-soled loafers with tassels. Krell stood at the mantel in another of his black suits, this one with orange stripes to match his sunset-colored tie, clasped with the bit of shrapnel. The sharp creases in his face made it look as if it had been assembled from squares of pale metal. He never sat. I decided either his old hip wound made sitting uncomfortable or he liked people to compare him to the figure in the painting.

  Constance Thayer was seated across from me with her legs crossed in a chair that matched the sofa. She had on a lightweight green summer dress and white pumps and her hair appeared rich brown in that light. She looked as if she’d gotten a good night’s sleep. Well, so had I: fourteen hours, after spending all of Monday and a big slice of Monday night with cops. Today was Wednesday.

  Dorrance read the last page, flipped back a couple and reread something, then closed the report. His eyes were bright. “This can all be substantiated?”

  I nodded. “The cops have a deathbed testimony from the young man who died at Receiving, and the man I shot at Ma Chaney’s has agreed to turn state’s evidence to help truss up Proust and the other Iroquois Heights officials involved. With the Colonel dead there’s no one left to be loyal to.”

  “Of course I don’t approve,” Dorrance said. “Many other lawyers would have quit the case when they found out their client had hired an investigator behind their backs a second time. However, for the first time in my life I wish we had a shorter court date. I’d like to try this before a jury while the news reports are still fresh in their minds.”

  “They’ll be fresh enough. The nuke angle scares a lot of people. As indirectly as Doyle Junior was involved in this mess, the fact that he was interested in obtaining plutonium to arm his pet Polaris missile has got to make whoever shot him look great by comparison.” I was looking at Constance as I spoke. She was busy lighting a cigarette.

  Krell cleared his throat. The noise reminded me of an M-16. He rested a hand inside his coat, and that reminded me of an M-16. My ears were still ringing. “I knew Seabrook socially,” he said. “Old soldiers, you know. He always seemed quite rational. I can’t believe he had any faith in his scheme.”

  I moved a shoulder. “People are unhinged on the subject of nuclear arms, like I said. He was like a kid who watches television and thinks you can make anyone do whatever you want just by waving a gun at him. It’s never an either/or proposition when it comes to blackmailing governments. Something would have come along. That’s what the people who worry about the ozone and the population problem and the atomic bomb never understand. Something always comes along.”

  “Like you,” said Dorrance.

  “Something else if not me. There’s a natural balance to these things.”

  The lawyer rolled the report in his hands absently. “Do you think the Chaney woman would testify that Thayer came to her to buy the Polaris? That connection needs shoring up.”

  “If you meet her price.”

  “I’m sure I can swing immunity.”

  “She’s got that now. Macomb County’s case against her fell apart when her people spirited all those weapons and explosives out of the farmhouse right under the sheriff’s nose.”

  “Will you testify?”

  “No.” This time Constance and I were looking at each other. Her face gave up nothing.

  “We need you,” Dorrance said.

  “It’d be just hearsay. I’ll sign an affidavit if you want but I won’t go to court.”

  “Why not?”

  “Let it go, Leslie,” said Constance. “Mr. Walker’s made up his mind.”

  “Well, I wish I knew what was going on.”

  “If you did you wouldn’t,” I said.

  I wanted to leave then, but Mrs. Krell came in with a tray of lemon cookies and set it on the coffee table. For once I wasn’t hungry enough to eat one. They reminded me of M-16s.

  After she went out, Krell said, “I think I’d better absent myself as well. I hope to work with Thayer Industries in the future and I want to avoid any suggestion of conflict.”

  I said, “The old man got to you, didn’t he?”

  He colored. “I have an organization to support. I can’t drift from one client to the next like you.”

  “Don’t explain. I sold out more cheaply than you did.” I stood. “Good luck in court, Mr. Dorrance.”

  He got up and shook my hand. “Will you send me a bill?”

  “It’s been paid.”

  I left. Constance Thayer and I hadn’t exchanged as much as a word.

  The morning was sun-drenched and already sultry. The air was thick with pollen and smelled heavily of blossoms. It did nothing for my dull headache.

  Lieutenant Romero was leaning against the Mercury. Today it was beige poplin, with a red-and-white silk tie on a white shirt and the cocoa straw hat, adjusted at a jaunty angle to allow for the fat bandage on his right ear. I’d heard they’d pulled enough wood-splinters out of it to reconstruct the staircase banister in Proust’s basement.

  “Your service told me you’d be here,” he said. “You look like my ear feels.”

  “I feel like your ear looks. How’s Pollard?”

  “Pulling desk duty until his arm heals and hating it. You can’t break as many heads from behind a stack of arrest reports.”

  Pollard had been one of the officers wounded during the fight. “How’d you talk him into coming along on a raid of Proust’s house?” I asked.

  “At first, of course, we didn’t know that’s what it would turn out to be. When we got there I promised to shoot him if he didn’t go in with us. He believed me. It must have been the hot blood.”

  “He believed you because you meant it.”

  “Maybe. I’m not Colonel Seabrook.”

  “You were at my office early?”

  “We were waiting in the empty one next door when Hubert—that was his name?—let himself into the office across the hall. We could’ve taken him then, but where I was born we wait for the big fish. There was also a question of jurisdiction, not to mention the fact that the only charge we had to hold him on was breaking and entering a vacant office, which we were guilty of ourselves. I put a note on your door for the others when we left to follow. I knew there would be others,” he added with a straight face.

  “Good thing you waited for them before going in.”

  “I had disciplinary problems as I said.” He took a long cigar out of the lacquer case.

  I lit it. “What happens now?”

  “Proust has resigned to devote time to his defense. City Prosecutor Fish has appointed Chief of Detectives Frank Knowles to fill in as acting police chief until a permanent chief can be assigned. Knowles is a good policeman by Iroquois Heights standards. You’d have to know him a long time to realize he’s crooked.”

  “You mean deputy chief.”

  “The chief retired. According to the boys on the third floor, it happened right after he invited Proust to his house and took a typewritten resignation and his service revolver out of his bathrobe and said either Proust’s signature or his brains would be on the sheet in five minutes.”

  I grinned. “It’s a good story.”

  “I wish it were true.”

  “So who’s the new chief of detectives?”

  “Not me. The talk is it will be Lieutenant Reuben Zorn.” He saw my face change. “Know him?”

  “I knew him when he was a sergeant. I’d have bet then he’d wind up on charges, but that was before I knew how bad things were in the Heights. Are you sticking?”

  “Someone has to. If I can stay honest I might be chief myself after another few shake-ups.”

  “I think you will.”

  “Be chief?”

  “Stay honest.”

>   He showed me his white teeth briefly. We shook hands and got back into our cars.

  I drove back to the office. Unlocking my door I said hello to a sign painter lettering DR. W. W. JOHNSTONE ASTROLOGICAL PROJECTIONS on the door across the hall. I picked up my mail from under the slot, carried it into the private office, and dumped it on the desk. I didn’t pass any customers. It was too early for a drink so I filled a glass from the tap in the water closet and swallowed its contents in a lump. Then I sat down and called my answering service. One of the messages was from a Mr. Livingood. I called him.

  “Fair shooting up in the Heights.” He sounded cheerful. “I prefer woodcocks myself. More of a challenge.”

  “I’m glad you showed.”

  “We wanted him kicking, you know. Care to guess where he stashed the stuff he took off the fairgrounds? He never told his grunts.”

  “It’ll turn up.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. Well, hell. Plenty more where that came from, and it beats watching him appeal convictions past the year 2000, although an arrest in this case would’ve made me a bureau director. They don’t care for this Dillinger Squad stuff in D.C.”

  “Did you want to be a bureau director?”

  “Hell, no. I never made any secret of the fact I’m just basically treading water till retirement. I just called to say we’re even. Sounds like a song, don’t it?”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “Cheer up. The world’s out one asshole.”

  “Plenty more where he came from,” I said.

  “Did you expect them all to disappear?”

  “I wasn’t expecting anything.”

  “That’s the spirit.” He hung up.

  I looked at Custer. He was still losing. He would always be losing no matter how many times I studied the picture. He looked good doing it, though. I gave him that.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Amos Walker Mysteries

  1

  THE CLUB CANAVERAL’S rainbow front died short of the alley that ran alongside the building. Not for me the side that faced Griswold, where orange flamingos capered in the windows and a pink neon tube — turned off by daylight — scripted over a parti-colored awning that when cranked up resembled a roll of Life Savers. I stood in the alley among caved-in trash cans and smears of pale disinfectant powder flung over places where patrons had lost supper, pushed a button next to a brown steel fire door without a handle, and listened to the brazen noise inside. It sounded like a tired musician clearing his spit valve.

  She surprised me by opening the door herself. I had been expecting the janitor, or at most one of the abbed and latted specimens in white disco suits who posed with her in newspaper advertisements. If I had been expecting her, it would have been in five-inch heels and piles of yellow hair and a dress that pushed her white breasts up through the hole in the ozone. It wouldn’t have had anything to do with this small slim woman wearing flat heels and a man’s denim workshirt with the tail out over black jeans. She wore her hair in a ponytail, brown, not blond, with silver glittering in the part. Her face was creased lightly around the eyes and at the corners of the wide handsome mouth that the caricaturists had had so much fun with when she dated Frankie Avalon. She looked a well-scrubbed, well-exercised forty, which put her a couple of years past her studio biography. Well, the white-haired moguls decomposing in their big oak cigar-smelling offices back then knew the teen audience, or thought they did. And what they thought was what we got.

  I said, “You looked taller in my bedroom.”

  It didn’t throw her. The wide mouth measured out forty watts of the famous thousand-candlepower smile. “Which poster was it, Beach Blowout or V-8 Vampires?”

  “Vampires. You had on a shiny black leather jumpsuit unzipped to China. It ruined me for all the girls in the eleventh grade.”

  “Don’t tell me. You had a surfboard and a stop sign on the other walls.”

  “Just the poster. I was too straight a kid to steal signs and there’s no surf in Michigan. I’m Amos Walker.” I took off my hat. Grainy November snow slid out of the dent.

  “Gail Hope. But I guess you know that.” She gave me the loan of a small supple palm. “Come inside.”

  We were at the end of a shallow hallway lined with framed publicity stills from Gail Hope’s pictures. These included a honey of a shot of Miss Hope in a white sharkskin swimsuit fainting in the scabrous arms of a creature that appeared to be half reptile and half diseased elm. The rest room doors were divided into sexes by cutouts of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean pasted on them. She led me, trim white ankles scissoring under the barrel cuffs of her jeans, across the nightclub proper, dimly lit by sunlight through partially drawn blinds, to a door marked OFFICE. On the way we passed a lot of tulip-shaped tables and Brando biker posters and a divan made from the rear end of a 1960 Cadillac with tailfins. The walls were sea-green and pale orange, the floor a checkerboard of charcoal and pink. Evenings the colored lights played off paper lanterns, and musicians got up like Bobby Rydell and Connie Francis performed doo-wop on a bandstand the size of Warren Beatty’s wallet. By day it all seemed kind of tired, like a trick-or-treater on November first, but at night you could sit back sipping from a glass with an umbrella in it and pretend that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were still planning the invasion and Caroline and John-John were playing on the White House lawn.

  The office had none of that. The desk was black-painted steel with a Formica top like the ones that migrate to gas stations, with a swivel behind it and a blank-faced computer on a stand. An Impressionist painting of a city street hung on the back wall in lieu of a window and there were only two photographs. One, in a clear Lucite stand on the desk, looked like a nonprofessional shot of Gail Hope taken twenty years ago. The other, on the wall, was definitely a much younger Miss Hope sitting on a sofa and sharing a laugh with a sandy-haired young man in an open-necked shirt and baggy plaid sportcoat. It took a moment to recognize him as Elvis before the black dye job and white Vegas gravity suit. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen.

  She saw me looking at the girl on the desk. “My daughter Evelyn. She’s studying law at UCLA.”

  “I guess you didn’t want her in show business.”

  “Her choice. I’m glad she made it. At least this way if she winds up on drugs it won’t be because a studio doctor made her take them.” She took my hat and coat and hung them on an antique halltree, the oldest thing in the building. She frowned approvingly at what the coat had been covering. We sat. I watched her fish a pack of Bel-Airs and a book of matches out of the top drawer.

  “I own the building, I pay the taxes,” she said, lighting up. “If you’re worried about black lung, you know where the door is.”

  I grinned and borrowed her matches to light a Winston.

  Relaxing a little, she sat back, planted an elbow on the arm of her swivel, and pointed her cigarette at the ceiling. “Just to dispel any pesky illusions: I wasn’t a virgin when they cast me in my first beach picture and the only reason I agreed to do it was the studio promised me the whore in an Edward Albee play and they wanted a two-picture deal. Then they scrapped the Albee and gave me a biker show instead. After that I was typecast. My leading man in Beach Blowout was living with a Beverly Hills men’s-room attendant and every time the director said cut, the old-fart star from Hollywood’s Golden Age they cast as my father stuck his big sweaty hand inside my bikini. Disappointed?”

  “Devastated. I feel like going straight home and smashing my forty-five of ‘Johnny Jump-Up.’ ”

  Her quick little smile sharpened the creases at the corners of her mouth. They could almost be passed off as dimples. “It isn’t even my voice on the record. It wasn’t enough to be the season’s biggest drive-in draw, you had to be a recording star too. My agent’s idea, the old souse. I stopped sleeping with him soon after and he cut his wrists like a hysterical old woman. The studio could have hired Hitchcock for what it cost them to hush it up. See, I’m nobody’s G
idget.”

  “You’re tough as old gravy, all right.”

  “You say that now, but would you have gone back to see me seven times if you knew the truth then?”

  “I never saw any of your pictures even once.”

  That opened her eyes a notch. They looked different without the thick fringed lashes. “You had a V-8 Vampires poster in your room and you didn’t go to see it?”

  “There wasn’t any money in my house for movies. When yours got to TV I was working nights. My father worked in a steel foundry when they weren’t paying much.”

  “You were lucky. Mine cut out when I was seven. When I was making thirty-five hundred a week he came back and took me to court. They made me pay for his support.” She blew a dagger of smoke and crushed out her cigarette in a plain glass ashtray that was probably a collector’s item in some circles. “I got your name from L. C. Candy. He gave you information on some old jazzman you were looking for. You made a good impression.”

  “I remember him. Did he play here?”

  “Who, Candy? I couldn’t use him. There were no trombones in the early sixties. I rented him a room upstairs cheap while he was looking. He got a steady playing backup at the Chord Progression finally. I hear from him now and then. You ever carry money for anyone?”

  “I’m bonded.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “Sometimes. It’s not my specialty. Who’s shaking you down?”

  She made a sound that was supposed to pass for laughter. It didn’t resemble her Malibu giggle. “If you knew as much about my private life as the slugs who used to read Rendezvous, you’d know how funny that one is.”

  “Sam Lucy,” I said.

  “Maybe you did read Rendezvous.”

  “Call it osmosis.” Gail Hope and Samuel Frederick Lucy — pinball, restaurants, cleaning and dyeing, and any other business that dealt largely in cash that could be exchanged for money skimmed off the tables in Vegas before wind of it reached the IRS — had made the columns a dozen years ago when the papparazzi caught them attending the première of Broken Blossoms, a remake of a silent soaper that was hyped as Gail Hope’s comeback to motion pictures. The prospect of short, ugly, potato-nosed Sam, in tuxedo and fedora and mirrored sunglasses, escorting the cool beauty in spotless white velvet and diamonds had raised all kinds of speculation among the people whose business it is to speculate over such things, then evaporated in direct proportion to the movie’s reception among critics and the ticket-buying public. Now the picture appeared occasionally on local TV between “High Flight” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and Sam Lucy showed up even less frequently, usually in court on charges of conspiracy to commit something-or-other. If Miss Hope and Mr. Lucy were still involved, anybody who tried to put the bee on her was either new in town or tired of breathing.