Silent Thunder
Page 20
The furniture was white maple and green plush on a brown-and-ocher carpet that looked Middle Eastern. There were good oil paintings in baroque frames on the walls and a small brick fireplace with logs burning flatly on the grate — half the people who own them don’t know how to build a decent fire — and not a television set in sight. Rows of palm-worn books lounged behind glass in a cabinet with a clock ticking on top braced by crouched bronze lions. The clock struck the quarter-hour as Trout was hanging up my coat and hat in a closet off the door, the gears scratching and straining like an old convict trying to cough up a wad of jute.
“Your clock needs a good cleaning,” I said.
“It wouldn’t keep time any better if I cleaned it. Odd, isn’t it, how we continue to wind and maintain them long after we’ve ceased to trust them? Perhaps it’s for the same reason we still read newspapers.”
“That sounds like something you’d say to a media convention.”
“Media.” The moustache crawled. “I reject the term. There is the press and there is entertainment. It’s only when we allow them to bleed into each other that we get into difficulty. In any case I’m not invited to speak at conventions. I sold out, don’t you know. The Times — London, not Ochs’s upstart Knickerbocker sheet — Reuters, the BBC — Rendezvous? In the eyes of certain of my peers I’d have done better to keep two underage Ethiopian girls locked up naked in a flat in Soho. Sit down, please. I don’t have many visitors. Would you object to a martini at this ungodly hour?”
“Shaken, not stirred?”
“Stirred, of course. That blighter Fleming. I knew him when he was with MI-5. Oh, well, the man found his calling in the end, even if he didn’t know his drinks.” He was in the kitchen now, on the other side of an arch by the stairs. Ice crunched from a machine into a steel mixer, liquid splashed, a swizzle went to work with a frenzy. “How is Barry?”
“Freelancing.”
“Sorry to hear it. I offered him a job as a stringer when he came back from Vietnam. That was before he lost the leg. Then Rendezvous was shut down before he could answer. I like to think he would have said no. Blast, I’m out of olives. Are you one of those purists who won’t have an onion?”
I said an onion would be okay. A minute later he brought out two funnel-shaped glasses containing clear liquid and a pearl onion the size of a cufflink in each. We touched glasses, sipped, and sat down on a pair of green plush love seats set at right angles. He knew how to mix them, which made up for the embarrassment of a fire. Mine tasted like a cold cloud.
“Sam Lucy,” I said.
“Dear old Sam. What about him?”
“That’s my question.”
He frowned over his glass. He had sturdy features: a frank nose with a high curve, a thick lower lip built for frowning, a brow that furrowed in four deep lines without a break. His eyes were true hazel, a color not as common as a lot of driver’s licenses would have us believe. “Born Samuel Luschke in Hamtramck, 1922. Sigismund, his father, came over from Cracow in 1918 and drove a beer truck for Yonnie Licavoli. Sigismund died of throat cancer in 1930. After Repeal young Sam ran policy slips for Yonnie, and in 1940 at the age of eighteen he was given the pinball concession in Redford Township. After Pearl Harbor he tried to enlist in the army but was rejected because of a gambling conviction. A year later he was drafted. He was wounded at Monte Cassino, for which he received a Purple Heart. In 1951 he recited the Fifth Amendment at the Kefauver Committee hearings, where he was identified as the juice man for the Detroit mob, the man to see when the machine needed oiling. For a while after Joe Zerilli died, it looked as if Sam might fill the vacancy on the national board of directors, but they went with someone else. He retired a few years later, ostensibly. The term doesn’t mean anything more in the underworld than it does in show business. He keeps his hand in, or did until last year. Those are the bare bones.”
“Last year?”
He sat back, swirling his drink. People who do that make my teeth ache. “Feed an old journalist’s curiosity.”
“It can’t get out,” I said. “Not until the hide’s on the wall.”
His features weren’t engineered for smiling, but he hung one in front of the frown. “Mr. Walker, if the President fell dead of tertiary syphilis on my threshold and I telephoned it in, they wouldn’t print it. The so-called legitimate press threw me out into the storm the day I signed with the enemy.”
“I don’t think you’d tell them anyway. Gail Hope wants out. You know who Gail Hope is.”
“I broke the story on their affair. What do you mean ‘wants out’?”
“Out. O as in over the wall. U as in unfettered. T as in truffle, which rhymes with duffel, which is what a grunt carries when he musters out. That brings us back to out. She doesn’t want any more Lucy. I’m to deliver that message to him along with some cash to clear the books.”
“I don’t see why she’d bother,” he said after a moment.
“She has her reasons. They all have reasons.” It sounded a little shrill; the early drink on top of having $750,000 in safety deposit boxes under my name was getting to me. I shut up.
Mitchell Trout wasn’t paying any attention to that. “I mean I don’t see why she feels she has to do anything. Sam Lucy had a stroke last year, an aneurism. He’s been on life support for fourteen months. It’s not public knowledge, but he’s what you Yanks call a carrot. A vegetable.”
Buy Sweet Women Lie Now!
A Biography of Loren D. Estleman
Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.
Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once The Oklahoma Punk was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.
Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s Motor City Blue, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel, Sugartown, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is Infernal Angels.
Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980, The High Rocks was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s The Book of Murdock. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author. Journey of the Dead, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.
In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.
Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.
Estleman in his study in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, in the 1980s. The author wrote more than forty books on the manual typewriter he is working on in this image.
Estleman and his family. From left to right: older brother, Charles; mother, Louise; father, Leauvett; and Loren.
Estleman and Deborah Morgan at their wedding in Springdale, Arkansas, on June 19, 1993.
Estleman with actor Barry Corbin at the Western Heritage Awards in Oklahoma City in 1998. The author won Outstanding Western Novel for his book Journey of the Dead.
Loren signing books at Eyecon in St. Louis in 1999. He was the guest of honor.
Estleman and his fellow panelists at Bouchercon in 2000. From left to right: Harper Barnes, John Lutz, Loren D. Estleman, M
ax Allan Collins, and Stuart M. Kaminsky.
Estleman and his wife, Deborah, signing together while on a tour through Colorado in 2003.
Estleman with his grandson, Dylan Ray Brown, shown here writing an original story on “Papa’s” typewriter at Christmastime in 2005 in Springfield, Missouri.
Estleman with his granddaughter, Lydia Morgan Hopper, as he reads her a bedtime story on New Year’s Eve 2008. Books are among Lydia’s favorite things—and “Papa” is quick to encourage this.
Estleman and his wife, Deborah, with the late Elmer Kelton and his wife, Anne Kelton, in 2008. Estleman is holding his Elmer Kelton Award from the German Association for the Study of the Western.
Estleman in front of the Gas City water tower, which he passed by on many a road trip. After titling one of his novels after the town, Estleman was invited for a visit by the mayor, and in February 2008 he was presented the key to the city.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1989 by Loren D. Estleman
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
978-1-4532-2056-6
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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