Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro

by Loren D. Estleman

  He put aside the remote. “Oakland County cops didn’t have much choice but to buy what MGM was selling. The studios were sovereign nations in California. They lost their national clout when Antitrust made them sell their theater chains, but the sale money gave them plenty of juice to tend their own backyard. The old whiskers who invented the system were still in charge. They treated the local law like their own security, and why not? It was a factory town. It’s damn near impossible for out-of-town talent to gain a foothold without cooperation from the natives. They watched Van Johnson mince around a closed set and flew home.”

  “They talk to this producer Wellstone?”

  “If that was his name. I haven’t looked at the file in years.”

  “It’s incomplete. There’s no catalogue of evidence, to begin with.”

  “The case was almost voting age when we inherited Delwayne,” Burlingame said. “Files get moved. Things slip out and fall behind cabinets. Also there wasn’t any love lost between the feds and the locals in those years. Anyway, we weren’t out to solve any old murders that fell outside our jurisdiction. We just wanted a line on our fugitive.”

  “The paper said Wellstone threatened Smallwood with a beating if he didn’t stay away from Fausta West. The studio had invested too much in her to see her throw it all away on an interracial affair.”

  “That was the Times, right? You’re quoting the Hearst Press.”

  “You’re right. Reporters are so much more reliable now.”

  He blew air out his nose. “It’s not impossible. Harry Cohn at Columbia sent thugs after Sammy Davis Jr. when he took up with Kim Novak. They say that’s how he lost his eye.”

  “He lost it in an automobile accident. But I heard the story too. Maybe whoever told it was thinking about Smallwood.”

  “Whoever shot out the fighter’s eye was pretty good. He used a revolver, and there weren’t any powder burns around the socket.”

  “The revolver ever turn up?”

  He shook his head. “That’s a vote for Morningstar’s people. Those connected boys throw away guns like tinfoil.”

  “Everybody does. Guns are cheap.” I got up. “I’m not being paid to solve any murders either. Thanks for the look, Red. I’ll start with Toronto.”

  “Dress warm.”

  “I’ll farm it out first. Delwayne could have moved fifty times in sixteen years. How’s your daughter?”

  His mouth remained a straight line across his square face, but the corners of his eyes creased humorously. “She’s okay. She and my son-in-law are adopting a baby boy.”

  “Junior G-Man.”

  The creases flattened out. “If that’s what he wants. I hope I’m dead by then.”

  SIX

  On the ground floor of the Detroit Public Library on Woodward Avenue stands a world globe, nearly a story high and rendered obsolete by international events of fairly recent origin. No one consults it anymore, but it screens the afternoon sun from the derelicts who stretch out at its base. They’re always sleeping, no matter what time you visit the building. Dumpster-diving must be exhausting work.

  The library serves pretty much the same purpose, except to those of us who draw a distinction between information and raw data cut with spam. I went to the out-of-town telephone directories and spent quality time with the Toronto yellow pages before settling on the Loyal Dominion Enquiry Agency on Queen Street in Toronto. I figured any group of detectives still arrogant about siding with the loser in the American Revolution had the pluck necessary to track down a thirty-year fugitive from U.S. justice. Its display ad featured the Maple Leaf flag and a Mountie. I wrote down the number, along with a couple of others in case we fell out over free trade.

  While I was there, I used a microfilm reader to study up on Curtis Smallwood. I didn’t know why he fascinated me so, except the backdrop was a very different Detroit from the one I knew. Three major department stores took out full-page ads every day in all three daily newspapers, nightlife boiled through clubs both legal and tucked behind steel-reinforced doors with screw-you panels, and the only thing Japanese to be found on Jefferson at rush hour was the occasional gardener commuting to and from Grosse Pointe. George Kell was batting .343 for the Tigers, Henry Ford II dropped broad hints about a whole new division to be built around a luxury car designed to boot the Cadillac out of its market. Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, was asking what was in it for labor.

  Smallwood, the “Black Mamba,” got plenty of press with a stunning series of knockouts, T.K.O.’s, and decisions, one of which took place before ten million viewers during the Friday night fights on NBC. He had a lethal hook, an explosive cross, and the legs of a Triple-Crown champion. America was in love with boxing in 1949: It fit neatly on a bulbous nine-inch screen, and you knew which one to root for by the shade of his trunks. Smallwood’s were black, with a white satin stripe that contrasted nicely with his medium-dark skin. I wondered if the televised fight was available on tape.

  I didn’t learn anything about the shooting that hadn’t been in Burlingame’s file. Reporters kept the story on life-support for weeks, mainly through feature interviews with the dead man’s acquaintances—not counting Fausta West, who was shooting outside the country and unavailable for comment. A picture of her and Smallwood taken near the entrance to the Oriole Ballroom showed her in a striped fur coat, chinchilla or Siberian tiger, him in what might have been the same houndstooth he’d worn the night he was killed, with a fringed white scarf draped around his neck and a borsalino hat tugged down rakishly over one eyebrow. Neither was smiling, and their heads were turned toward the camera as if the photographer had called out their names to get their attention just before he pushed the button. It was the shot said to have drawn the threat from Paul Wellstone, the producer at MGM, and possibly a bullet. White supremacists were mentioned as well. It had been only thirteen years since Detroit police broke up the Black Legion branch of the Ku Klux Klan in connection with another fatal shooting.

  Wellstone was interviewed, in his leather-upholstered office in Hollywood. He came off charming and jovial, good-naturedly denying rumors of hard words between him and the deceased. The Free Press reporter assigned to the story might have been influenced by a VIP tour of the studio, including a visit to the set where Lana Turner was filming, extensively detailed, but I doubted it. That was a tough generation of newshawk, who had covered the gang wars of the 1930s, the 1943 race riot, and a long string of Grand Jury investigations into city corruption, including the murder of a United States senator in 1945. In a photo exclusive to the paper, the producer smiled from behind a couple of hectares of desk, dressed in a terrycloth sportcoat with patch pockets and a silk foulard. He had a moon face, a silly little chevron-shaped moustache, and eyes as hard as asphalt.

  The byline belonged to someone named Edie Van Eyck. I don’t know why I noted it down, except that it was rare for a woman journalist in those days to land an assignment from the city desk. But then the story had passed to the feature section for lack of progress. She was probably as dead as most of the principals.

  Closer to home, Archie McGraw, Smallwood’s manager, ducked the center spot. He forted up behind a pair of former light heavyweights and gave no interviews. There were no pictures of him.

  Ben Morningstar was equally elusive. He was in Havana, scouting a site for a casino to be built and operated by a coalition of Detroit businessmen. Joe Zerilli and Sam Lucy were among the partners. Respectively, they sat on the national governing council of La Cosa Nostra and ran the sports book in southeastern Michigan. A swarthy, more ferretlike version of the Morningstar I’d known scowled at a contraband camera in a morgue shot snapped on the back terrace of Al Capone’s vacation home in Miami Beach. I’d seen it before. It was the only known likeness taken of him between a group shot struck at the time of a Detroit Police Department sweep in 1931 and ghosty Kinescope footage of his appearance before the Kefauver Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce twe
nty years later. He hadn’t given Congress any more than he’d given the cops or the press, citing his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination seventeen times. He’d worn his trademark heavy black-framed glasses only in the Florida picture, removing them when he’d been arrested and before his televised testimony in 1951. His nickname in the bad old days was Specs, and he’d hated it.

  Edie Van Eyck had written the McGraw and Morningstar non-stories. Those old-time sob sisters never let the grass grow under their chunky heels.

  The stuff from City had even less substance. The Black Mamba had threatened the referee in the Rodriguez fight for delaying the count, or maybe it was a ringside judge for shaving points; no one could pin down the details or their source. An unidentified contact in the police department hinted that Smallwood had placed bets against himself in the forthcoming fight with Joe “Rock” Candy, a Philadelphia native who had to go through Smallwood to get to Jake LaMotta, which opened the nationwide gambling racket to smoky speculation and a dead end. Someone reported overhearing the deceased agreeing to meet what sounded like a female caller on the telephone just before he left for the Lucky Tiger and his death in the parking lot. Again, the information went unattributed.

  You could almost hear the first thud of earth striking the lid of the coffin containing the Curtis Smallwood case. Whenever the mysterious-woman card came up, the investigation was as good as buried. Both the cops and the papers were busy kicking dirt into the hole.

  I scrolled forward to 1952, missed the local coverage of Fausta West’s suicide, and had to go back. She got a paragraph on the obituary page, taken off the AP wire, with no photo and no mention of her connection to the Smallwood murder, which by then was strictly of historical interest. In the meantime, President Truman had survived an assassination attempt, King George VI had died, and the Tigers had traded Vic Wertz to the Cardinals. Edie Van Eyck was busy that week interviewing Clare Booth Luce.

  After an hour and a half among the Studebaker advertisements I left the library and staggered blinking out into the twenty-first century. I drove back to the office, collected the mail from under the slot with no interference from the lack of clients in the reception room, and wastebasketed the circulars and second notices while waiting for someone to pick up at the Loyal Dominion Enquiry Agency.

  The quasi-English-accented female voice that finally came on the line listened to me, then put me on Hold. I heard part of the score of The Phantom of the Opera. I reached out and patted Beryl Garnet’s brushed-bronze cap. “Patience, old girl.”

  Just before the chandelier let go I spoke to someone named Llewellyn Hale, who sounded American, and of course he was, although they prefer to call us Americans and to hell with the shared continent. He didn’t spill his tea when I told him I was working a thirty-four-year-old missing-person case. He asked a few questions. I heard computer keys chuckling. We discussed terms—in U.S. dollars, he was no provincial bumpkin—and he said he’d be in touch. Politeness is Canada’s chief export, after Moosehead beer and stand-up comics.

  I didn’t pat the urn again or speak to it when I’d hung up. We hadn’t been that friendly before the incineration.

  Lawyer Meldrum’s check was giving my wallet heartburn. I went out to sock it in the business account, holding back a few hundred for bribery and gasoline, deposited a sandwich and a cup of coffee in my personal account, and let myself back into my hobby room.

  The telephone was ringing. It was Llewellyn Hale at Loyal Dominion. He’d found Delwayne Garnet in just under fifty minutes.

  SEVEN

  The customs agent on the foreign side of the Ambassador Bridge looked like trouble; but then that was the idea. He was six-two, with his cap squared off across his sandy brows and a jaw that ached for a chinstrap. The morning sun was at his back, limning his uniform in purple.

  He glanced at my driver’s license, handed it back, and asked what my purpose was for visiting Canada. When I said, “Business,” his gray gaze went to the urn strapped into the passenger’s seat. “What’s in the container?”

  “Cremains.”

  He waved me over for the full treatment. I climbed out of the car for the patdown and smoked three cigarettes while a pair of uniforms pawed through the upholstery and lifted the hood and felt the trunk lining and poked at the undercarriage, looking for terrorists and undeclared fruit.

  I’d left the munitions behind, which was a wise choice, because they found the catch to the gun compartment I’d tricked out under the dash and sprang it open. They’d seen my investigator’s license and carry permit, so they didn’t ask any questions about it. One of them tugged the cover off the urn, slid out the aluminum canister, twisted loose the top, and stirred the gritty contents with his fingers. He was older and darker than the others and might have been American Indian.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  “Client. I’m delivering her to her son.”

  “I always thought human ashes would be more fluffy.”

  “You wouldn’t if you knew her.”

  He put everything back together and held it out. “Sorry for the inconvenience, sir. These days we have to be careful.”

  I cradled the urn in one arm like a loving cup. “It was ‘cremains,’ wasn’t it? I should’ve said ashes.”

  “Enjoy your stay in Canada.”

  I shook loose of Windsor by way of Queen’s Highway 401 and followed it for two hours through miles of forestry the lumber sharks of Fifth Avenue and Pall Mall hadn’t managed to get their hands on, then took 2 along the shore of Lake Ontario, which on a cloudless day in June offered no horizon, rolling unbroken into blue infinity. Miles out, the occasional turnturtle profile of a laden ore carrier crept among the waves like dragons on an Old World map.

  Toronto’s a clean city, not much crime of the violent kind, and no place for a professional who pays his bills with the interest accrued from human misery. From that perspective, there isn’t a thing wrong with it that twenty years of crooked politics and a casino or two couldn’t cure. The motorists obey the law without much horn action and the swarms of Hollywood second units that shoot there on location have to send back to the states for bags of trash to make the place look like New York City. Even the little man on the pedestrian WALK signal has good posture.

  Loyal Dominion appeared to be doing well, despite the inequity in abductions, blackmail, and street thuggery; but then I supposed even Canadians stepped out on their spouses and ran away from home. A discreet sign bearing just its name stuck out perpendicularly from a four-story brick building that sparkled from recent sand-blasting. Its neighbors included the local office of a large United States travel agency and one of those places that sell coffee in giant cups with whitecaps. I drove two blocks past the building and beat a BMW into a spot freshly vacated by a delivery van. The driver of the BMW tapped his horn and drove on without gestures. I hoped I wouldn’t need an interpreter.

  The air was crisp, on a day when Detroiters were testing their air conditioning and wondering if they could get by without bringing a jacket to work for the drive home. There was a virile breeze blowing off the lake, and in the dead of summer you can still draw a horizontal line from there to the Bering Sea on a map. I pulled my suitcoat out of the back seat and shrugged into it as I walked.

  A hidden gong went off when I opened the door to the detective agency. The reception room was a done-over storefront, with pale green carpeting, antique excursion posters framed on the walls, and a pair of panoramic aerial shots hung side by side above a doughnut-shaped work station of Horseshoe Falls roaring into a ravine full of smoky spray. I thought for a moment I’d entered the travel agency by mistake.

  A freckle-faced towhead sprawled across the work station interrupted his conversation with the receptionist to look my way. He had on a denim shirt over a gray T-shirt and jeans with the cuffs turned up, the way U.S. youngsters used to wear them in the fifties. The scuffed sneakers seemed to be overdoing things, but then I didn’t keep up with fashions on
either side of the border. Maybe I looked like someone who’d bled through a seam in the time-space continuum. He said something to the woman seated inside the doughnut, then undraped himself and strolled out through an open door in back.

  The woman at the work station smiled up at me. A plastic hairband kept her pale brown bangs in place. She wore a white sweater with a gold chain holding it together in front and a blue silk blouse, and when she moved her hand, a charm bracelet on that wrist jangled and clanked like armored cavalry.

  “Amos Walker. I have an appointment with Llewellyn Hale.”

  “Yes, the American detective. Mr. Hale says to go right in. His office is at the end of the hall.”

  This was the owner of the virtual English accent I’d talked to the day before. I said, “When did he say that?”

  “Just now.”

  The hallway led past two rows of open doors, beyond which young, casually dressed people sat in lozenge-shaped offices, cricketing computer keyboards and speaking over headsets. In between the doors were framed letters of official appreciation, signed by ministers and home secretaries. The door at the end was open as well. I raised my fist to rap on the frame.

  “Come in, please, Mr. Walker. We don’t stand on ceremony here.”

  I recognized this voice, too. It belonged to the freckled towhead. He sat behind a small blue-enameled desk, immersed to his elbows in what looked like a tangle of black seaweed on the composition top. The walls were hung with floor plans of Byzantine temples and a small window behind him looked out on a street that was identical to the one that ran past the front of the building.

  He extricated himself from the tangle long enough to shake hands and point at the plastic scoop chair that faced the desk. “I have to say you look like my idea of what an American private detective should look like.”