Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 06

by Every Brilliant Eye

  “Just one message, Mr. Walker,” said the girl at the service. “From a Lieutenant Fitzroy at police headquarters.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Something about an old lady and a marijuana plant. It’s rather involved.”

  I grinned. “Thanks. I can figure it out.”

  After hanging up I puzzled over the clippings a little longer, arranging the white copy sheets side by side on the desk. Then I tried shuffling them, but that didn’t light any bulbs either. Finally I restacked them and slipped a paper clip over one corner and put the sheaf in the drawer with the brass knuckles and my diploma from the Willie Sutton School of Dance. I lit a cigarette and pulled over Barry’s typescript. Paged through it, stopping here and there to read.

  I am sitting in a hollow bunker with an ARVN who has spent two tours here. We are not talking, conserving ourselves in the heat, when one of the new Cobras clatters overhead at treetop level, thorny with machine guns and rocket launchers, raising dust and dead leaves. Particles fly into our eyes and tears join the sweat on our chins.

  “I always did hate choppers,” says the ARVN, thumbing off the safety on his M-16.

  The M-16’s muzzle velocity is not great. In the echo of the sloppy action’s rattle we hear distinctly the clanking of the bullets striking the Cobra’s armor plate.

  The helicopter hovers, seeming to shudder, more from surprise than from pain. The blades change pitch, the tail rotates, and the machine’s squat nose, splotched brown and green, swings around, its cannon and Gatlings trained on our little bunker.

  For a time the earth ceases to turn. The great steel dragonfly floats on air as thick as bath water, swaying a little, not enough to hinder its aim. We remain unmoving.

  After a minute—it seems much longer—the Cobra turns and resumes its flight. The beating of the blades recedes into a steady thrum, and long seconds pass before we know we are hearing it no longer.

  We breathe.

  My fingers were making the sheet crackle. I laid it down gently and moved my cigarette over to the tray on the desk and broke off a column of ash reaching clear back to the filter tip. Then I got up and cracked the window. September air trailed cool fingers into the office. I burned some fresh tobacco and watched the traffic flashing past down West River through the little gap between the comer of my building and the gravel-strewn roof of the lower one next door. I watched the cars until they looked like cars and not like armed helicopters. Then I sat down again and drew out the copied newspaper clippings and dialed Barry’s number at the News. The telephone rang seven times before Dutt speared it.

  “Still think the place is going to blow up without music?” I asked.

  “No, I just can’t work around a mess I didn’t make personally. Anyway, the Detroit bomb squad swung through and chased the goblins out from under the bed and Spengler took away the stack.”

  “I hope you wished him luck with it.”

  “He should rupture himself lugging the stuff over to the City-County Building. What’s keeping me from another column about yet another black playwright whose titles won’t fit on any marquee in the city?”

  “Your byline is on one of those pieces about body drops at Metro and on that feature thing about the labor leader, whatsizname, Kindnagel,” I said. “Any of the others yours?”

  “No, those were strictly blotter. Kids come in fresh from journalism school and a viewing of All the President’s Men and the editor hands them a rape in a student parking lot at Wayne State. I’ve got my notes on those two I wrote right here. What do you need?”

  I paused. “That cop thing again?”

  “Reporter’s instinct. They pass it out at the graduation ceremony in the obituary department, or they used to. I figured you’d call after you had a chance to look at the stuff.”

  “What’s the tariff?”

  “Same as before. An exclusive if anything comes of it, or I collect another time.”

  “Eminently fair. They ever identify that John Doe at the airport?”

  “About a week later. It was a hot news day, my follow-up got bumped. Woman named Pearl Cochran from Lathrup Village positived him at the county cold room.” Paper rustled on his end. “Philip Anthony Niles. Her brother. Ran a body shop in Royal Oak, along with a tab with one of the friendly finance boys downtown, a Cuban named—I like this—Amigo Fuentes. Police took him down and cut him loose after forty-eight hours. He was out of town that week.”

  “He still in business?”

  “You’re asking me, Entertainment? All I know is he was managing a junkyard at Fourteenth and Myrtle that year.”

  I wrote it all down. “What about Kindnagel?”

  More rustling. “No connection I can see. He was in on the ground floor of the Labor Zionist Movement locally, helped organize most of the Jewish laborers in the city while everyone was watching Bennett’s bullies kicking Reuther and Frankensteen down the steps of the Miller Road Overpass. Maybe the most nonviolent union takeover in this town’s history.”

  “I forget what he died of.”

  “Just plain living, as I hope to. Went in his sleep about the time the article ran. One time when those jerks on the Sunday side were right to sit on a piece for six weeks. Sold every copy but the ones on file. He was ninety-two. Everything else is in the story.”

  I thanked him and broke the connection with my thumb. Holding down the button, I thought for a beat, then let it pop back up and tried John Alderdyce’s extension at Detroit Police Headquarters. I got him on the first ring.

  “Hornet?” he barked.

  “Housefly, I think,” I said. “But it’s not bothering anybody up there on the ceiling. How’s the homicide rate?”

  “It’s doing fine, same as my flu. We’re the ones losing ground. What is it, Walker? I’m expecting Sergeant Hornet with a bullet from a picket fence on St. Antoine.”

  “What’s a picket fence doing on that street, collecting limericks?”

  “That bang you hear is me ending this conversation.”

  “Second, John. I need a line on a side of beef you boys pried out of a trunk at Metro two years ago. His name was Philip Niles.”

  He sneezed, blew his nose loudly, and said, “That it? Sure you don’t want the ballistics on the Abe Lincoln burn? Call Records, goddamnit.”

  “Second, John.”

  “That’s just what you’ve got, friend.”

  “Does it happen you know an Inspector Ray Blankenship, who took his papers early from Homicide eight months ago?”

  A little time passed. Voices droned a mile away. He never closed the door to his office when he was alone in it. “What about him?”

  When it came, it came hard and fast. I said, “I don’t know what about him yet. That’s why I’m asking. I never heard of the guy, and I thought I knew all the inspectors in the department.”

  “They kicked him up on retirement, to goose the pension. They do that when they like you upstairs. I hear. He was lieutenant in charge of the detective squad at the Fourteenth Precinct. As of three this morning, though, he’s nothing. He ate his service revolver. They’re still scrubbing up.”

  10

  “I HAVE TO ASK the question,” Alderdyce said.

  But he didn’t ask it. I parked the receiver in the hollow of my shoulder and set fire to a Winston. Waving out the match: “I’m on the bottom step of a missing person. He had a newspaper squib about Blankenship’s retirement in his possession. Right now I’m just scratching at pebbles.”

  “Would I know this missing person?”

  “Yeah.”

  He waited. Then he blew his nose again. “It’s not my hot handle, so who cares. It’s not even Fitzroy’s anymore; they’re closing it out as suicide. What’d you do, pull the son of a bitch out with your teeth?”

  This last was directed away from the telephone. I heard Sergeant Hornet’s wheezy fat man’s voice and the word “bullet.” To me, Alderdyce said: “If it’s okay on your end I’m going to hang up in your face now. My ho
bby calls.”

  “Blankenship was Fitzroy’s?” I asked quickly.

  “Yeah, but you don’t want to talk to Fitz today. He’s awful mad at you for some reason I’d rather not know anything about. Sergeant Grice was the dick on the scene. He’s poking at a kill on Montcalm today. A bag lady. They’re going after the derelicts this season.” Click.

  I cradled the receiver gently, the way a mortician lowers the lid on a coffin when mourners are watching. Montcalm, the part of it where a murdered derelict was likely to turn up anyway, was a two-minute drive from 14th and Myrtle, where Jed Dutt had said Amigo Fuentes’ junkyard was located. I cleared my desk into two drawers—the one on top was too shallow to hold Barry’s memories of Vietnam and Cambodia—and rolled on out of there. My wino was curled up in a fetal position on the floor next to the stairwell, snoring and hugging his green bottle.

  Montcalm. The name conjures up images of crisp blue snow on a craggy peak with pines carpeting the slopes. The reality is a stretch of broken pavement with the lines rubbed off and the signs on the corners, where there still are signs, rusting around bullet holes. Three out of five Detroiters own guns, and one of them is going off somewhere every night. The curbs are lined with long low cars with tailfins and syphilitic decay around the wheel wells, a clot of gaunt young blacks in bomber jackets and Levi’s gone the same greasy shade of gray leaning on the fenders of every third one. They are there every hour of the day and night, cuffing one another’s shoulders and laughing through their noses with their eyes hooded. They live in a world where time is measured in empties and scar tissue.

  I cruised with my foot off the pedal, letting the slant of the street pull the Olds along and flicking my eyes right and left, looking for official cars. The scenery was mostly the backs of buildings with rough yellow concrete stoops and green and black plastic garbage bags leaning in doorways. Nothing ever fronts on streets like Montcalm. It’s as if sixty years ago the architects knew there would be nothing to look at.

  After six blocks I spotted a county wagon backed into an alley with its big red dome rotating lazily. A cruiser from the Tactical Mobile Unit was parked across the street, and on that side a black unmarked car with twin whip antennas blocked a hydrant. There were plenty of other places to park, but if they can they will leave them where no one else is allowed to leave his. Give some guys a cap and a whistle.

  I pulled up behind the blue-and-white and crossed the street on foot just as a lot of suit and coat with a man inside came out of the mouth of the alley. His face was a weak lime tint and everything about him said cop except the color. “Got a cigarette?” he demanded.

  I shook one out of the pack and lit it for him. He took a deep drag and started hacking. Then he puffed again, coughed some more. Spat phlegm.

  “Bet you’d quit if you didn’t enjoy them so much,” I suggested.

  His eyes moved over me for the first time. They were watering in a narrow young-old face under a snapbrim hat with a wide silk band. He wore a thin matinee moustache that looked inked-on against his pallor. He said, “I don’t smoke.”

  I played with it a moment, then put it away. “Sergeant Grice?”

  “Down there.” He jerked the crown of his hat toward the alley. “You with the department?”

  “I’m private.”

  “Okay. I had to ask. One more set of footprints won’t make any difference on this one.”

  I put that away next to the other and walked past him. The alley fell off at a thirty-degree angle from the street, running out of pavement at the bottom, where it curved into a welted parking area behind a drugstore with a padlock on its back door and plywood where its windows belonged. Deep ditches lined the drive, making it too narrow to admit anything but foot traffic. A group of men stood at the bottom. Halfway down I lit a cigarette for myself, and I didn’t want it any more than the guy I had just finished talking to had.

  I had smelled that stink a couple of times before. That meant nothing; when it comes to that particular odor you are always a virgin. Every man in the group had a cigarette in his mouth and was puffing up thick clouds. I was still coming when one of them, an officer in uniform, broke and strode past me double-quick time. He lost his smoke as he came but didn’t stop to crush it out, letting it roll. As he passed I could hear him breathing through his mouth in little sobs.

  The trio remaining included another uniform, flat-nosed with flinty threads glittering in a thick horseshoe moustache, a round-faced Oriental I recognized from the coroner’s office in jeans and an orange zip-front jacket, and a black plainclothesman in the regulation three-piece suit that went like hell with his brilliantined hair and ducktail. The light shone blue off his high pompadour. They were watching a pair of white-coated morgue attendants in gas masks carefully separating a bundle of rags from a settling of wet newspapers and bloated cardboard cartons against the drugstore’s block foundation. A hand stuck out of the rags, its fingers fanned out stiff like spokes from a wheel. A cloud of flies boiled over the debris.

  “Don’t expect lightning to strike on this one,” the Oriental was saying. “We’re going to have to go in with masks and decontam suits, and when we’re finished cause of death will be as good as a guess.”

  “I already know cause of death.” The black detective leaked smoke out the side of his mouth. “Lateral laceration of the carotid, left to right, probably from behind, victim bled out in minutes. Just like the others. What do you figure, three weeks?”

  “About that. You could’ve passed within two feet every day for the first couple of weeks and not noticed it in all that junk. After that you could hardly avoid it.”

  “Neighborhood dogs led us to this one,” put in the uniform.

  “Sergeant Grice?”

  The detective turned my way and my stomach scaled my ribs. His right cheek was a map of sharp broken creases like crumpled cellophane. The last time I had seen that burn scar, the face that wore it had been in the path of my flying fist. He was the undercover cop I’d knocked out in the blind pig on Clairmount a month before.

  He said, “Who’s asking?”

  He hadn’t recognized me. I did some business with the ash on my cigarette. Covering up. “My name’s Walker,” I said. “I’m a private investigator on a missing person case. They told me at headquarters you caught the squeal on the Blankenship suicide this morning.”

  “He the missing person?”

  “It takes some telling. Can we go someplace where we can’t see the air we’re breathing?”

  “That’s the first sensible suggestion I’ve heard since I got on this detail.”

  The white coats had managed to scoop the body into a zipper bag and were transferring it onto a collapsed stretcher. We headed uphill, trailing the uniform and the medical examiner. The atmosphere got sweeter by degrees. As we walked I told Grice about the clippings in Barry’s file folder. He listened with his eyes on the ground.

  “Blankenship snuffed himself, all right,” he said. “Just because I’m fresh off a year and a half on Vice don’t mean I can’t see the pattern. He had a busted marriage and at forty-eight he was washed out as a cop. Maybe your man just likes to collect newsprint.”

  “I have to wonder why Blankenship walked two years shy of a full pension.”

  “Burnout. The Fourteenth is a war zone.”

  “He could’ve put in for transfer.”

  Grice took a last drag and snapped away his butt. We were at street level. The detective with the hat and moustache was standing by the unmarked car with the uniform who had left just as I reached the parking area, comparing complexions. Grice said, “Maybe getting in your twenty is like climbing a mountain. The last two feet are the hardest. His record is so clean it hurts your eyes. Prints on the gun were his and the lab says he’d fired a gun recently. His wife’s staying with her sister in Grand Rapids and has been for the past week. And I’m pulling a double shift like it’s loaded with rocks. I don’t feel like crawling into anyone else’s head. Especially when he
don’t have one no more.”

  “Where’s it go from here, I.A.D.?”

  “It don’t go. Internal Affairs don’t bother itself with civilians, which is what he was since January. The gun he used was his own, although it was the one he carried all the time he was in plainclothes. He’d turned in his departmental piece.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “To look at. Not to talk to.” He was studying my face. The whites of his eyes were just as blue by daylight. They reminded me of skim milk. “We met? You look familiar.”

  “I’d remember,” I said. “Is the widow coming in?”

  “I guess. To dot all the i’s.”

  “When she does, would you have her call me? I’d owe you one.” I gave him a card.

  He poked it into his handkerchief pocket without looking at it. “If I remember, and if I happen to be wearing the same suit.” He grinned suddenly. “Look at that, will you?”

  His gaze was grazing my right shoulder. I turned around. I was looking at the opposite side of the street, anonymous but for a glass door in the building on the corner with DETROIT POLICE DEPARTMENT lettered on it in light blue. The interior was dark behind the glass. “You mean the ministation?”

  “Yeah. One of Hizzoner’s bright ideas when he took office. A cop on every corner. If the old lady screamed, which she wouldn’t of because her vocal cords would of been slashed first thing, they would of heard it there, which they didn’t because it’s been empty for a year. Someone has to pay for that silk wallpaper downtown.”

  Barry’s column was more widely read than I’d thought. I said, “You told the M.E. this bag lady wasn’t the first. I haven’t read anything about any others.”

  “That’s because no one wrote about any of them. No one looks at the street trade when they’re alive, why should they bother when they’re dead? This one’s number six. It’s really number five, on account of she was drawing flies when last week’s turned up in a doorway on Sherman, but we number them by the reports. I do, anyhow. Right now it’s just some dead bums and bag ladies, my speed. It gets out we got another mass murderer loose, the case gets taken away from me and handed to those flashy killers in Major Crimes. I’m just the dirty-stick boy on this detail. Suicide? Dead wino? Call Grice.”