Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 06

by Every Brilliant Eye

  The temperatures broke during the night. The morning air was brisk and damp and light fall jackets were starting to appear downtown. I parked my car—it was humming like a Swiss waiter now, thanks to Midwest Confidential and a new carburetor and crossover—and walked two blocks to the National Bank Building in Cadillac Square, carrying my brown topcoat, which needed a press. A pneumatic hammer was stuttering somewhere in the direction of Gratiot. Everyone was working today.

  I almost put on the topcoat when I hit the lobby. The air conditioning was on, as it would be until the calendar told them to turn it off; federally funded institutions are all the same. I straightened my tie and smoothed back my hair with the help of my reflection in the slick marble facing on the wall, checked the directory just for luck, and rode the elevator to the sixteenth floor in the company of two young security guards and a white-haired woman in a tailored blue suit. When the doors opened the woman and I got out together.

  The reception area was hidden behind a smoked-glass partition with WALGREN & ROONEY stenciled on the door in silver letters. I held the door for the woman, who nodded at me quickly with a tight red-lipsticked smile and a flicker of curiosity in her gray eyes. She paused before going in. “Are you here for one of the junior partners?”

  I said I had a nine o’clock with Rooney. She covered up well, went through the door and set her purse down on the curved reception desk and scissored long red nails through a pad with an alligator cover. She wasn’t as old as her white hair suggested, maybe forty. Silver high-heeled sandals climbed trim ankles and as she bent forward the back of her snug skirt pulled taut across a handsome backside. She turned her head and caught me looking. She smiled again.

  “You’re Amos Walker?”

  I said I was. She went on smiling and looking at me and lifted the receiver off a yellow telephone intercom. “Good morning, Mr. Rooney. Mr. Walker is here. Yes, sir.” She hung up. “Mr. Rooney will be right out.”

  I thanked her and wandered over to read some framed civic improvement citations on the pastel wall opposite her station. In the glass of one I saw her watching me from behind the desk. I was the meat of the menopause set now.

  A couple of parties in dark suits carrying brown leather briefcases came in from the elevators while I was standing there, asked if the mail was in yet, and walked down the short hall on the other side of the desk without once glancing in my direction. If I was waiting I wasn’t worth it and if I was worth it I wouldn’t be standing around no reception rooms.

  After five minutes or so a tall man with very broad shoulders under a gray pinstriped suit came around the corner of the desk with his right hand out. “Mr. Walker? I’m Arthur Rooney. Good of you to come.”

  I grasped the hand. It was warm and dry and his grip was very firm. In corporate law it better be. Whatever shanty Irish there might have been in Arthur Rooney’s genes had been carefully scraped off and carted away in the dead of night. His face was square, evenly tanned, and his brown hair, tinged with silver, came forward in a crisp shelf over his brows. His eyes were a level amber, wolf’s eyes. They were the only thing remotely predatory about him, to look at. He had a blue silk pocket square to match a necktie with a knot the size of a grapefruit and a deep dimple underneath. Why do they wear them if they don’t know how to tie them?

  He asked the receptionist to hold his calls and we walked down the hall and around the corner into a large office with oak on the walls and a window looking down on the square. Far down, dwarfed by the glass towers surrounding it, the cupola of the old county building stood lifting her ruffled skirts clear of the asphalt and concrete.

  “The old lady of Randolph Street,” Rooney said, thrusting his hands deep in his trouser pockets. “When I was with the circuit court I kept my office there after everyone else had moved into the City-County Building. They didn’t care about cost when she was built. You can bet some public servant squeezed himself a tidy little retirement out of the overrun. It was worth it. This less-is-more crap has got out of hand. Stand an ice cube tray on end and call it architecture.”

  “Why’d you leave the bench?”

  “I gag easy. No one calls me Judge after he’s known me five minutes. It’s on the letterhead, but who reads letterheads? Sit down, Mr. Walker. Coffee?”

  I said I was fine and inserted my hips into a chrome scoop chair with padding that was too coarse and grainy to be anything but leather and crossed my legs. Rooney cocked a hip onto the near corner of his desk and folded his hands around the bent knee. He was one of those.

  “I’ll get right to it,” he said. “I called you because you came recommended by a couple of lawyers whose opinions I respect and because you’re a friend of Barry Stackpole’s.”

  “This is about Barry?”

  “As you may know, Walgren and Rooney is of counsel to the Detroit News in matters relating to copyright and libel. This office has advised Stackpole on the several occasions he has been summoned to testify in civil and criminal cases linked to his reporting. That he has seen fit to ignore that advice and spend a number of weeks behind bars and an unestimated amount of his personal income on fines and costs in consequence is entirely his business.”

  “It is about Barry.”

  “I understand you’ve been in contact with him within the past week.”

  “Just about a week,” I said.

  “Did he seem in any way troubled? Persecuted?”

  I got out my pack and raised my eyebrows. He nodded. I dealt myself a smoke and we did the business of me looking for a place to put the match and him scooping a small glass tray out of a drawer. I balanced it on my knee and said, “You told me over the telephone you wanted to hire my services. Why don’t let’s talk about which ones you want and then we’ll discuss what Barry was wearing last time I saw him and how often he changed the sock on his artificial foot. Or not, if we decide I’m not what you’re looking for in an investigator.”

  He pursed his lips, looked at his hands on his knee, unfolded them and slid off the desk and walked around behind it and sat down. He looked older there and a lot harder, the way he must have looked presiding in court. We weren’t lodge brothers anymore.

  “You’d have made a better prosecutor than a defense lawyer,” he said. “It’s that passion for specifics that wins convictions. All right. Stackpole is missing. He took leave from the News a week ago and now his editors are unable to locate him. I thought that as his friend you might know where he is or, failing that, that you might know where to start looking. In either case our client will recompense you for your time.”

  “I guess you tried his house.”

  “It’s locked up tight. His phone has been disconnected by his request and the post office is holding his mail. The bars he frequents have been notified to hang an eye out for him and to call this office when he appears. So far they haven’t called.”

  It was okay until he got to the part about hanging an eye out. Speech is like clothes and you don’t wear tennis togs to the office. I guess he thought it made him regular folks, like a candidate for president has his picture taken in his shirtsleeves spitballing with workers at a construction site, hardhat and patent leather pumps. To which, nuts. I said, “What makes him more popular now than he was five days ago?”

  He ran a polished nail along the edge of his big desk. “Let’s just say some people want to talk to him.”

  “Uh-huh.” I took one last drag, squashed out my butt, set the ashtray on the desk, and stood, refolding my topcoat. “Thanks for the dope on the old county building, Mr. Rooney. I’ll be clanking along now.”

  “Oh, sit down, Walker. Our work isn’t so different after all. You get into the business of client privilege and pretty soon you’re demanding a writ before you’ll tell someone the time by his own clock.”

  I sat. He unsheathed a slim pen from the onyx holder on the desk and tapped it.

  “The governor has ordered a grand jury investigation into the personal finances of certain city officials. The prob
e will touch on some specifics Stackpole covered in his recent series. Tuesday—the day after you were seen drinking with him in the bar of the Detroit Press Club—the jury issued a subpoena for his records involving the series. When he failed to produce them by the end of the week the jury called for their seizure and summoned him to appear. He has until Monday to do so or be found in contempt.

  “In the past, the media have found it in their best interest to encourage a reporter to lie low until the end of the grand jury session. In this case, however, the News will be fined a thousand dollars for each day Stackpole fails to appear. The editors have therefore directed me on my advice to put you on his scent.”

  Put you on his scent. There it was again, like a Dead End Kid in a three-piece suit. I said, “It stinks, Mr. Rooney, if you don’t mind my saying so. Barry had to have been served, which is a little tougher than getting the leopard down off Kilimanjaro. Even if he weren’t, he’s too good a reporter not to know all this is going on. If he hasn’t shown before now he has reasons.”

  “He was served, depend on it. His flair for theatrics is well known to this firm, and it’s just possible he’s waiting for the last moment to come forward like Houdini from his watery grave. The other possibility, that he has no such intentions and is somehow unaware of the seriousness of the situation, is why I asked you here. A thousand dollars a day won’t shut down the presses at the News; they spend that much on paper clips. But these are parlous times for print journalism, which in the public trust ranks somewhere between politicians and used car salesmen. Even television journalism places higher, and that’s a contradiction in terms. The editors would like to project the image of cooperation with the authorities, particularly in such matters as incendiary as municipal corruption.

  “Put bluntly, Mr. Walker, the First Amendment has its tits in a wringer on this one and your hand is on the handle.”

  “Me, Becky Sue Mattressback, from Rattlesnake Bend, Utah, in the driver’s seat of democracy.” I lit another pill. “Walgren and Rooney has been in practice for a couple of years. The first thing a legal firm does after airing its shingle and ordering stationery is put an investigation agency on retainer, preferably one of the big stainless steel jobs with all the options. The only thing I’ve got going for me is I’m a friend of Barry’s. You don’t strike me as a hunch player, Mr. Rooney.”

  “I’m not. When I was told Stackpole hangs around with a private detective I put that agency we retain on you. I have your war record and your work history going back to your apprenticeship with Dale Leopold at Apollo Investigations.”

  The smoke from my cigarette was bothering him. He leaned back in his chair and tilted his head a little to keep it out of his eyes. I didn’t do anything to help him.

  “It’s been a long time,” he said. “I was in criminal law then and I’ve handled plenty of cases since. Walker is a common name. I didn’t make the connection until I read your name on that old police report, identifying you as sole witness to Leopold’s killing.

  “I was Earl North’s attorney, Walker. I defended the man who killed your partner.”

  I said, “I know.”

  8

  THE SMOKE GOT TO BE too much for him finally. He rose and walked over to the window and looked down on the old lady of Randolph Street. It was one of those dramatic moments they teach you to milk in law school—forget the statutes and precedents and bastard Latin, it’s housewives and credit plumbers you’ll be trying to impress. He said, “I wasn’t going to bring it up. When you didn’t say anything or show you recognized me I thought it was best things stayed buried.”

  “The only thing that got buried was Dale Leopold.”

  “North was at the end of his tether. He had a bad marriage, a job he hated, and an affair he couldn’t end because he didn’t have the character and because he didn’t have the character he was convinced he was less than a man. When he found out his wife had put a detective on him he started carrying a gun. The Freudians could tell you all about that, draw diagrams. One day he stopped and turned.”

  “Bullet pierced the right ventricle, death was instantaneous, the report said.” I tipped half an inch of ash into the tray. “Only it wasn’t, really. It always takes a few seconds. Dale had time enough to realize what had happened. He wasn’t carrying. You hardly ever need a gun on the wandering spouse detail.”

  “You were, though,” said Rooney. He had turned from the window. “I think that was the factor that swung the jury’s sympathy to our diminished capacity plea, your wounding him after Leopold went down.”

  “The black shoulder sling was a sweet touch. Yours, I bet.”

  “It’s just a job, Walker, sometimes not so nice to look at. Cases like that are why I went into corporate law after I took off the robes. I thought it might be cleaner. It’s not. You deal with a higher class of criminal, but a crook in pinstripes and a rep tie is still a crook. I suppose you hate my guts.”

  “I don’t hate anyone’s guts, Mr. Rooney. It’s a waste of good emotion.”

  “Next you’ll claim you weren’t the anonymous character who kept sending North postcards on the anniversary of the shooting. He wanted me to get a court order to stop you, but by then I wasn’t his lawyer anymore.”

  “If he’s still getting them, they’re not from me.” I killed my stub. “You’re not throwing me work because you feel bad about having helped spring a murderer. Guilt doesn’t work in this office. It clashes with the thousand-dollar rug.”

  “Definitely not. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not apologizing for giving an accused party the representation to which the Constitution entitles him. If the case came across my desk tomorrow I’d handle it the same way.” He took his place behind the desk again and resumed tapping the pen. “I remember being impressed with your testimony on the stand. It took me two days and three expert witnesses to defuse its effect on the jury. Nothing I’ve read over the past couple of days has changed my conviction that you’re a fairly solid individual and an honest man with some sort of personal integrity. Granted, you have a frightening capacity for liquor and for smart-mouthing your way into deep shit, but there are worse faults and I like a man who wears the ones he has up front. Plus you know Stackpole. Plus you make a religion of keeping confidences, and this is just the sort of thing that wild-eyed harridan the Free Press would admire to slather over its front page: ‘News Columnist Evades Grand Jury.’”

  “Someone ought to analyze this team thing,” I mused. “Throw two newspapers into a pit with the smell of blood all around and even the briefcases start waving pennants and chanting slogans. Say I grab this bone and I find Barry, which you’ve never tried to do or you wouldn’t be talking about it like it’s already done, and he doesn’t want to come back, which he won’t or he would have already. What then?”

  He stopped tapping. “Are we speaking hypothetically, or do you know where he is?”

  “You’ve been breathing that legal air too long, Mr. Rooney. Real people don’t talk around a corkscrew.”

  “So you say.” He smiled grimly at his little joke. “Well, either way you would have to bring him forward or report his whereabouts. Otherwise a contempt case could be made against you for harboring, if the jury wanted to get ugly.”

  I said, “That’s law. You and I both know there’s not much law in it. Anyway, I’ve done jail. I could do it again.”

  “It’s been my experience that people who say they’re willing to go to jail have never been to jail. But I think you mean it. If you would arrange a meeting with Stackpole I would consider your responsibility discharged.”

  “I set up a meet, you show up with court-appointed officers and park him in protective custody, read that hoosegow.”

  He fondled his pen a few seconds longer. The Freudians would have had fun with that, too; they spoil everything. Then he socked it back into its holder.

  “I won’t insult you by insisting my word is good,” he said. “Sitting on that elevated seat gives you a perspective on the
legal profession you don’t get in Ethics 101. Have Stackpole contact me. After that whatever decision he makes will be his alone. I might add that I haven’t made this many concessions since I last set foot in a courtroom.”

  “Welcome to the real world, Mr. Rooney.”

  “The one I’ve been living in is no seminary. You’ll do it?”

  “I’ll shake it and see what falls out. Good reporters know how to fill in their tracks, and Barry’s the best I know in a town full of Joe Pulitzers.”

  He laid his hand on the telephone intercom. “I’ll have my secretary draw you a check. You require three days’ fee in advance, I believe. Maybe you’ll want to give some of it to Dale Leopold’s widow.”

  “She married her dermatologist and they moved the kids to Houston. I need it more than they do. It’s just a job, like you said.”

  “Helen, make out a check to Mr. Walker for seven-fifty? Thanks.” He pegged the receiver. “I’m glad to hear it. I was afraid you’d be one of these tiresome knights-errant.”

  “Knights can always eat their horses,” I said.

  *

  Dale Leopold. Not a big man, but he looked it until you got close, which no one did because he was a little hard of hearing from the police firing range and yelled everything. Formerly Sergeant Leopold of Missing Persons detail, General Service division, Detroit Police Department, retired on a medical because of his hearing. A head-buster from war days when the 4-Fs used to swarm into the beer gardens on East Jefferson and whistle at the servicemen in town on passes in their crisp uniforms and brush haircuts and the squad had to come in and sit on their faces until the MPs arrived. Dale Leopold of the flinty cops’ eyes and brittle gray fringe that ended exactly where his creased brown fedora began. All chest and gut and no hips. Not a nice man but a good one. Two years out of uniform he could stroll into any squad room in the state and help himself to coffee without a break in the conversation around him, or could until Vietnam ended and the rooms filled with ice-eyed young men with longish hair and hard flat stomachs. He’d fit in again now that they were older and softer outside, but inside hard as tile. But he was bones.