Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 04
Page 16
“Sorry.”
Pause. “What’s that mean? I thought that’s what you wanted.”
“It is. But it has to be on my terms, not yours. Otherwise having a license doesn’t mean anything. It’s a little thing called holding up my end of a bargain. I wouldn’t expect you to understand that, working for the government.”
“That’s twice you’ve said that. I resent it twice as much this time. My integrity—”
“Is so lightweight it moves with the tide. Good-bye, Grundy. So glad you called.”
“Listen, Walk—” The rest of it got trapped in the wires.
The telephone rang again after a few seconds. I let it. It stopped at eight.
The code was nothing. I broke it in less than an hour. The numbers ran backward up the alphabet from Z starting with 3, skipping every fifth digit. I recognized some of the names of customers on Grissom’s list and was surprised by one or two, although there was no reason I should have been, given the times. My interest was in the hurried last entry, but it was a disappointment. The name was F. Esterhazy, the number Fern’s new address in Grosse Pointe.
She’d lied to me about not using pills between parties, but I get lied to a lot, and it slides off me like tobacco juice off polished brass. If she was a regular customer—and a quick look through the rest of the book would establish that—it was only natural that a new entry would be made for her after her move from home. I pushed the book away in disgust and fumbled for a cigarette.
I didn’t light it. Two memories shoved me, then scampered away, whispering to each other and giggling. Something Fern had said in The Chord Progression that strange Christmas Eve. Something else Gable Reinhardt, Barry Stackpole’s research assistant, had said in the Sextant Bar. Just two things told me by two not very different people on either side of a murder. I unlocked my little book of dynamite from the file cabinet and called the number listed there of a guy in records at the City-County Building who owed me.
When I finished talking to him, I got my .38 out of the drawer and snapped the holster onto my belt. What I could get for wearing it on the street without a permit was a lot better than what I’d get if I didn’t.
A cloud bank was backing in from the north like a fat headwaiter leaving a big tipper’s table but there was still no snow. Winter without snow is always holding its breath. The air smells of iron and the streets have a bleak empty look. Everybody watches the sky. It’s like the interval between the time they come for your cellmate and when you hear the ragged shots of the firing squad outside, and the silence screws down tighter and tighter until the volley when it comes is like an orgasm.
The tenants’ lot behind Fern’s building was filled, so I parked on the street and climbed the stairs to her apartment. She answered the buzzer almost before I could take my finger off the button. She was wearing a clinging green skirt, platforms, and an ivory-colored blouse unbuttoned just one button past far enough. She started a little when she recognized me, but she covered up nicely.
“Well, well,” she said. “Door-to-door shamus.”
“I bet you worked a week on that one. Am I welcome inside or are you curling your eyelashes?”
“Inside what?” Her tone was husky. But she made room for me, just enough so that I brushed her breasts coming in.
I pointed at them. “I hope those are registered.”
“You should know.” She closed the door and leaned back against it, vamp style.
I walked around the acre of living room, opened the door to the study and looked in, glanced down the hallway opposite. I’d have had to pack a lunch before searching the whole apartment.
“Looking for a way out so soon?”
She didn’t sound nervous. But then she’d had two husbands and a lot of walk-ons to test her acting. I turned around and almost bumped into her. She snaked her arms inside my coat and pressed a hand against the small of my back. I curled an arm behind her out of reflex. She leaned back against it. Her long thick red hair tickled my wrist. The musk was strong today.
“I missed this,” she murmured. “Most of the men I go out with are a foot short or else they tower over me and we have to find a cab with a sun roof for them to stick their heads through like giraffes. Kiss me.”
I obliged. When our lips were almost touching I said, “Rhett Grissom’s dead.”
Her eyes opened. The raw silver in them shone. We were so close I could focus on only one at a time. “What?” She whispered it.
“Your first husband beat him to death,” I said.
25
I DON’T KNOW how long we stayed like that. Probably only a few seconds before she disentangled herself. “Have you been drinking? My first husband is—”
“He’s out. They let him out Christmas Day. Just in time for him to strangle Moses True. He’s been one busy ex-con.”
She glared at me but said nothing. She moved a little toward the inlaid table near one modular sofa. I kept on.
“You talked too much Christmas Eve, but then you’d been sucking up pills and gin all night and were wearing a cloud for a hat. You told me he was pulling three to five in Jackson for stealing a car. Horn said yesterday he just got off three years of a nickel stretch in Jackson. Someone else said he was inside for Grand Theft Auto. But a lot has happened lately, and I wouldn’t have put them together if I hadn’t seen your name on Rhett Grissom’s list of customers. I checked with records and learned that Fern Esterhazy and Fletcher Horn were married in Detroit three years ago, and divorced a couple of months later. That would have been after he was arrested and sentenced.” I paused for breath. “Where’s Paula Royce?”
“In a Canadian morgue.” She kept drifting toward the table, her eyes on me. It had a small drawer in the side. “Okay, I married a crook and a killer. I fixed that mistake. How do you get from that to Paula Royce?”
“It’s not that much of a jump. She needs her drugs more than you. She’s smart, but that kind of need goes past brains. She got in touch with Grissom and gave him this address for delivery. You don’t come out of this end looking so bad, really. If Horn knew you were hiding her he wouldn’t have had to beat it out of Grissom.”
“He knows?” For a moment she stopped drifting. The skin of her face was drawn tight.
“He knew as much about Paula’s habit as I did. He knew that if she was still in the area she’d make contact with Grissom sometime. Horn was just guessing she was back from Canada. So was I, but I knew she’d be hiding somewhere waiting for Arthur Stillson to get back from the Bahamas and provide her with the phony identification she needed to get shed of Paula Royce. But I have to wonder why she was hiding here specifically. For that I have to go back to Christmas Eve again, the night someone killed Bud Broderick in Iroquois Heights. Stay away from that drawer.”
She dived for it. I grabbed her wrist and twisted it and jerked open the drawer with my other hand. A .32 Browning automatic lay inside. She clawed for it with her free hand. I twisted harder and she squealed. I snatched up the gun.
Maintaining my grip, I backwalked her to the sofa and pushed her roughly. The backs of her knees hit the edge of the seat and she collapsed into it. Then she broke. Sobs shook her body. She hugged herself and leaned forward, her hair tumbling in front of her face and completely hiding it.
“Paula knew you’d provide her with a safe house while she was waiting,” I said. I was still holding the automatic. “She wasn’t aware of your connection with the man who was out to kill her, or she wouldn’t have taken that risk. But she was counting on you. You said yourself you weren’t close friends. Why, then? Because she had something on you.
“Last time I was here I asked you why you picked me to spend Christmas Eve with when you had a wide field of eligible men to choose from. God knows my manly good looks are hard to pass up, but those aren’t what you look for. I wasn’t as old or anywhere near as rich as the kind you prefer. But I was something none of the others were. I was a detective, and therefore the best possible alibi.”
I said, “Unless they get a corpse when it’s still warm, medical examiners can’t tell within a couple of hours when death occurred. Having been the wife of a killer you might know that. What better way to account for your whereabouts on the night Bud died than to be able to point to a sort of detective? It was just extra insurance, because there was only one other person who could place you at Paula Royce’s house that night, and you thought she was too zonked out to remember. Hell, she might even think she did it herself. Only she didn’t. When the pills wore off she remembered just enough to use that knowledge against you for refuge. Why’d you kill him, Fern?”
“You don’t know that I did it. You’re just trying to talk yourself back into a job.” She scooped her hair back behind her shoulders with both hands, like an explorer parting brush. Her face was bone-white except for her eyes and the end of her nose. They were almost, but not quite, as red as spilled blood. Nothing is that red. “My father can fix that for you. It’ll save him the trouble of having to sue you for slander later on. Shall I call him?”
I grinned,. “Everybody’s trying to give me back my license. What was it with Bud, a sibling thing? That happens in families where a youngster’s used to being an only child. It gets ugly when an inheritance is involved,”
“It was an accident.”
This was a new voice. Shoving aside my coattails to get at the Smith & Wesson, I swung toward the hallway to the right. I hesitated, then dropped my hand from the butt. She’d gotten rid of the bangs and dyed her hair dark blond, but you can’t do much about eyes and complexion. She had on a yellow-and-white-striped blouse and a brown flaring skirt and she was barefoot, as she’d been when I first saw her, somewhere on the other side of the last ice age. Ten days ago.
I drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. Somehow I’d hoped I was wrong about the whole thing. She was looking at me.
“I don’t remember much from that evening,” she said, “but I do remember that. I woke up hearing voices and came into the kitchen as they were struggling for the gun, It was in Bud’s hand. Then it went off. Twice. Like that.” She clapped her hands twice fast. “It sounded almost like one shot.”
“You’re the prime suspect, and a junkie to boot,” Fern spat. “Who’s going to believe you in a town my father owns down to the fire hydrants?”
“I will.” I was looking at Paula. “Keep going.”
“There was a lot of blood.” She spoke slowly and distinctly, like someone remembering a past life under hypnosis. “Bud just seemed to hang there a long time, but I suppose it was only a second or two. Then he sagged against Fern. She screamed and jumped back and he fell.” She paused, appeared to lose the thread. “Poor Bud. I had too many pills one night and told him too much about myself. Protecting me made him feel like a man. His mother never gave him that chance.
“I guess I fainted then, because I don’t remember anything until I woke up on the floor. Bud was lying where he’d fallen. Fern was gone. I just knew I had to get out of there. I’d been involved in one murder case already, and there were people who would kill me if it got out who I was. That’s why I came to you.”
“Thanks.”
She smiled then, faintly. “I heard about what happened. I never asked you to go to jail for me. If I’d thought for one minute that you would—”
“You’d have done just what you did,” I finished. “Everyone uses me; that’s what I’m here for. Everyone has the right to save his own skin his own way. The press made out like I was protecting a client. I let them. That kind of publicity is good for business, if I ever get my business back. Truth is I don’t like Cecil Fish or his pet cops and I let them get to me. I like to call it principles. Some might call it plain muleheadedness. They’re entitled to their opinion. How come me and not the Justice Department?”
“You know about that?” Her eyes widened a little, then went back to normal. “Stupid. Of course you do, or you wouldn’t be here. I tried the number they gave me for emergencies. No one answered. Then I saw your card next to the phone. There was no one else.”
“What was so special about Canada? I could have driven you to Metro and seen you off for anywhere.”
“The people who want me dead spend a lot of time around airports. I couldn’t risk being recognized. For some time I’ve kept an apartment in Toronto for just this sort of emergency. It was the key to that apartment I showed you, and said it belonged to a fishing cabin owned by Bud’s stepfather to cover my tracks. But the story was as big in Canada as it was here. I kept trying that number until I reached someone from the Justice Department. I told him I was across the border, but I didn’t say where; I’d already trusted one person more than I like. He said he’d see what kind of deal could be struck with the Canadian authorities and told me to stay in touch. Now that everyone thought I was dead I was safe from the police here, and I remembered what you’d said about the lawyer in Iroquois Heights who could fix me up with new identification. But he wasn’t in. I had to have someplace to stay while I was waiting. A motel or hotel was too risky; too many people moving in and out. I called Fern’s parents’ house, disguising my voice, and they gave me this address.”
“Sorry I missed that meeting,” I said, and looked at Fern. “What happened Christmas Eve?”
She’d had time to collect herself. Casually she fitted a cigarette into an Aqua-filter and lit it with a gold lighter no thicker than a quarter, tipped back her head and squirted smoke at the ceiling. The theatrics of dancing with lung cancer. She crossed her long legs and said nothing.
I nodded. “If I have to carry it I will. The Colombians stumbled on Paula by accident. Maybe one of them accompanied Moses True on his rounds and happened to spot her arriving for one of these dope parties that are so hard to stay away from. They wanted very badly to finish their business with her for what she had done to their organization in Miami, but they were getting conservative and they didn’t want to attract any more headlines than they already had getting settled in Detroit. So they did some digging and found out that a reliable lifetaker was about to be sprung from stir, one who knew the area and who had never been legally linked to a homicide. Then they did some more digging and found you, his ex-wife, traveling in the same circles as Paula. What were you, the spotter?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. She puffed on the cigarette and took it out of her mouth, clicking her long red nails like castanets and staring directly into my collarbone. I might not have been right on track, but I hadn’t lost sight of the rails yet. I chugged on.
“My guess is they threatened you with your first husband. It can be done. He scares me, and I’ve met my share of killers. Faced with that threat, you agreed to keep tabs on her during Horn’s final weeks of imprisonment and make sure she stayed put until he was available. What went wrong was you made the mistake of taking Stepbrother Bud along on one of these partygoing reconnaissance missions, where he fell hard for the mark. Sticky, but still not disastrous. Until he decided to move in with her.”
I stopped talking. Fern was looking at me now. The skin of her face was so tight I could trace the outlines of her skull.
“I loved him,” she said.
26
THE AIR WAS as brittle as old bone. We kept position like three dowagers posing for an antique camera. Even the smoke from Fern’s cigarette hung motionless.
“You were trying to get Bud out of there that night,” I prompted.
“Yes.” She breathed some of the dry air. “He never loved Paula. He knew she was in some kind of danger and protecting her made him feel grown up. Like with you. That’s the secret of her appeal, that phony helpless act she puts on.
“Horn was getting out Christmas Day. Bud was no match for him. I haven’t met anyone yet who is. He woul
d’ve squashed Bud like an ant just to avoid having to step around him. Bud wouldn’t believe me when I told him. He’d only met Horn at my wedding, and he had no idea what he was like. Bud was only seventeen years old then. So I told him the whole story, how I was fingering Paula for the Colombians because my first husband would kill me otherwise. He called me a murderous bitch and told me to get out. When I wouldn’t, he got Paula’s gun and said he’d shoot me if I didn’t leave. I was half-crazy. I couldn’t talk to him with that gun in his hand, so I tried to take it away from him.” Her mouth worked some more, but no words came out. She took a drag, but the smoke went down the wrong way and she started hacking bitterly. The hacking turned to sobbing. If it was an act it was a good one.
“Paula told me you were really a nice girl,” I said. “That used to mean a woman who could love a man in spite of what he didn’t have. I guess you fit that definition. You worked overtime hiding it. Maybe you have to in your set.”
“Amos, I can’t stay here,” said Paula. Her face was pale under the South American coloring. “If Horn knows where I am he’s on his way here now.”
“He’d be here already if he knew. Grissom probably told him you were at Fern Esterhazy’s place.”
Fern stood. Her eyes were swollen now. “Horn would think that meant Father’s house. I moved here to stay away from that killer.”
“He’ll find out. If not from your father and stepmother, from someone else. With any luck we’ll have some law here by that time.” I took the automatic out of my pocket and laid it on the telephone table to dial.
“No! Call this number.” Paula drew a dog-eared card with a telephone number scribbled on the back from her brassiere and held it out.
“Not the Justice Department,” I said. “They have to have your bust measurement down in triplicate before they send out an agent. Give me a cop who can’t spell cat anytime.”
I told Fern to sit down and kept my eyes on her while I spoke to two officers to get where I was going. Finally the familiar busted-windpipe voice came on the wire.