Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro

by Loren D. Estleman

  He held the glasses up to the light. They looked dirtier than before he’d tried to clean them. “If everyone felt that way, we’d still be fighting that crummy war.”

  “Give it up, Delwayne. Even the cops gave it up in the end. There was a bushel of suspects, too many motives, and not enough incentive after the press lost interest.”

  “Because the victim was black.”

  “Partly, probably. Also it wasn’t the only murder in town. Automobile production was up, employment was up, births, too. Somebody had to make room for all those babies.”

  “So it’s not a police case anymore. You’re free to accept it.”

  “I always was.”

  He scratched his chin whiskers with the earpiece of his glasses. “Sounds like we’re still on opposite sides.”

  “I can’t afford to turn down work on that basis. Homicide’s different. It can be contagious, for one thing.”

  “This one’s more than fifty years old. What’s the half life?”

  “Same as the statute of limitations. It can still burn you after a hundred.”

  “I’m not convinced you’re as cowardly as all that.”

  I grinned. “That won’t work either.”

  “Let’s quit chasing rabbits. How much to overcome your fear of death?”

  “Authority, too. Don’t forget authority. I only adjust my rates for inflation, not for risk.” I gave him the usual numbers.

  He goggled. “U.S.?”

  “Cigarette machines in Detroit don’t take Canadian.”

  “What kind of expenses?”

  “Mileage. Long distance calls. Stitches. Bail, since cops are involved. Cold cases are like extinct volcanoes: no such thing. That’s why I need three days up front. It saves running back to you every time I come out of cardiac arrest.”

  “What if the expenses run higher than your fee?”

  “You pay them, same as when they don’t.”

  “What kind of a payment plan do you offer?”

  “The traditional one. If you stiff me, I call a collection agency. They nose around among your neighbors and business associates, ask embarrassing questions, stand in the middle of Yonge Street and call you a deadbeat through a bullhorn. If that doesn’t work, they get a court order and seize your assets.”

  He tried to make a sneer. It looked better on paper. “I’ve got eighty-nine dollars in savings. Don’t spend it all in one place.”

  “In that case, we’re wasting time. You can’t afford me.”

  “Can you recommend anyone?”

  “Not for eighty-nine dollars.”

  “There’s a check coming when I deliver this book in the fall. I can pay you then.”

  “Call me in the fall. What’s three more months on top of fifty years?”

  He scooped a gum eraser off the rail and rubbed out the ear he’d drawn earlier. It seemed to take all his concentration.

  “I’m impetuous,” he said. “I imagine you knew that before. If the mood I’m in passes, I’ll never know the circumstances of my father’s murder and my mother’s suicide.”

  “A lot of people with that background pay plenty to therapists to help them forget the circumstances you want to pay an investigator to find out.”

  “At least they have that option.” He redrew the ear. “Sometimes I think being the child of death unresolved must be like living life as an amnesiac. You can go for long periods behaving normally, without wondering about the blank. Then, suddenly, it’s urgent you know. The feeling passes, it always does, but in the meantime you age at an accelerated rate. Who said swinging a bat and missing consumes more energy than swinging and connecting?”

  “Al Capone. You might prefer the blank.”

  “Do you always spend this much energy talking yourself out of a job?”

  “Truth in advertising. You can’t exchange an unsatisfactory answer.”

  “Does anyone ever change his mind when you give that speech?”

  “One did.”

  “Just one?”

  “He came back later.”

  He leaned forward, blew away the eraser shavings and graphite dust, and sat back to examine the new ear over the top of his glasses. It didn’t look any different to me, but then I once hung a Picasso print upside down.

  “You’re as curious as I am,” he said. “You know too much about something that happened years and years before I left home. You didn’t need it just to find me.”

  “Don’t read too much into that. I’m a forties buff.”

  “What?”

  “You know: Glenn Miller and Casablanca and the Bataan Death March. Nobody worried about cholesterol and you could smoke in a supermarket. We didn’t have civil rights or penicillin, but you could get a T-bone steak for a buck at Berman’s. I like hats and big cars and black-and-white movies. I can get lost in all that. Then the lights come up and I have to fill up the tank on the way home, at twenty-first-century prices. I’ve got twelve hundred and forty-two dollars in savings. Eleven hundred of it came from your Aunt Beryl. Call me in the fall, when you’ve got fifteen hundred to blow.” I foraged, found a card, and stuck it between two of the brushes sticking up out of a glass on the coffee table.

  “How do I know you’re worth it?”

  “You asked me. I didn’t drive four hours to make a pitch.”

  “You’re pretty independent for a man in a J.C. Penney suit.”

  “Sears. And I’m not independent. Just a lousy salesman.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I like the way you talk. When you’re not making speeches, I mean. Those big word balloons get in the way of the action. How’d you like a part in a graphic novel?”

  “Would I have to wear long underwear?”

  “That’s a comic book, damn it! Did you listen to a word I said?”

  “Yeah. I was just clapping your erasers. No, I wouldn’t like a part. I’m afraid of tall buildings.”

  “You’re just a big scaredy-cat.” He flipped over the sheet he’d been working on, picked up his pencil, swooped down on the blank sheet he’d exposed, tore it off, and turned it around to show me. He’d drawn a cartoon cat with a nervous expression and quaking lines all around. It wasn’t a bad likeness, except for the pointed ears. He had a problem with ears.

  TEN

  Istopped at a duty-free shop to buy a box of putative Havana cigars. The transaction took five minutes, just long enough to ensnare me in traffic at the border. I took the tunnel to avoid the trucks backed up at the bridge, which stuck me square in the biurnal stream of international commuters, all of whose horns were in order. When the big moment came and the U.S. Customs agent asked me if I had anything to declare, I showed him the cigars. He took one glance and waved me on through. That settled the argument about whether they were genuine. I wasn’t planning to smoke them anyway.

  Red Burlingame was backing his truck down his driveway when I pulled in behind him. As I got out and approached the cab, he powered down the window. He had on a felt hat with a braided band. I’d never seen him wearing one. I don’t know where old men still find them.

  “I’m meeting my daughter for dinner,” he said. “I’m late.”

  I poked the box of cigars through the window. “Thanks for the lead. I found Garnet, just where you said. He goes by Lance West now.”

  “Sounds like a porno star.” He sniffed at the seam. “Cubans?”

  “I wouldn’t trust it. The label’s bordertown Spanish.”

  “They’re overrated anyway. Like their music. What’d the little prick have to say for himself?” He laid the box on the passenger’s seat.

  “He tried to hire me to find out who killed his father.”

  “Smallwood? He never knew him. Take the case?”

  “Not for what he was paying.”

  I delayed him another five minutes answering his questions. He still had more FBI in him than parent.

  I drove to my building to pick up mail and call the service for messages, but I couldn’t go up. It’s a neo-goth
ic design, fierce faces on the rainspouts, and after business hours, when the cut-rate endocrinologists, Romanian hearing-aid technicians, and teenage website designers go home and the maintenance crew is trailing its cables and scraping gum off the wainscoting, it’s as bleak as a decomissioned cathedral. Even the ghosts have decamped to deserted buildings in more stylish neighborhoods. I was wrung out from eight hours on the road, suffering the post-partum depression that sets in after a job. It was no mood to take into an office where the telephone hadn’t rung and the mail was full of nothing but work-at-home opportunities for the terminally unemployed.

  I smoked a cigarette on the sidewalk, stalling. You never knew when the Monopoly millionaire might come puffing up the street, one hand holding down his silk hat, looking for a detective to trace his stolen sports car. But by the time the stub burned my fingers it was clear he’d decided to hire the guy from Clue. I snapped the charred filter toward the storm drain and got back behind the wheel.

  By bedtime I was feeling better. I had a bellyful of Tuna Helper and whiskey, an hour of Julie London on the stereo, and had identified the murderer fifteen minutes into a two-hour first-run TV movie. I could still figure out everybody else’s mysteries. It was a bullet-point to consider for my next Yellow Pages ad. I went to bed.

  The next morning, business picked up. I had a new client and an old murder.

  ELEVEN

  My old answering service had closed its doors. If it had doors. All the operators whom I liked to picture plugging and unplugging jacks, cracking gum and wise during breaks, and clicking out the door at quitting on five-inch heels with seams up the backs of their stockings, were out on the street. Since my business is too fragile and most of my prospects too timid to spill their problems to a machine, I’d had to cast my lariat over five states to find a replacement. The new outfit was a subsidiary of a telecommunications company with offices in sixty-seven cities and had changed its name three times in eighteen months. Some of the operators were men, and all of them spoke in the disconnected singsong cant of a Calcutta tour guide. They probably wore baggy jeans to work and wouldn’t know a slingback pump from a Flying Wallenda.

  The one I drew the morning after Toronto was named Michael. He stumbled over apostrophes. I stroked him gently, milked out six messages, hung up, and broke a pencil. Five of them were from Lance West, asking me to call him back. He didn’t leave a number. When I remembered who Lance West was, I went down to the car, where I’d left Llewellyn Hale’s report on Delwayne Garnet, and paged through it on my way back upstairs. I found his number on page fourteen and dialed it standing up at my desk.

  “Hello?” He sounded out-of-breath.

  “Delwayne, this is Walker.”

  “Sorry, friend. You’ve got the wrong number.” He hung up.

  I dialed again. I’d have used my gun butt on the buttons if I didn’t have to unlock the safe to get it.

  “Hello?”

  “Lance West, then,” I said. “Someone should have told you it sounds like the lead in a gay porn film.”

  “Walker?”

  “Sorry, friend. I must have dialed the wrong number.” I hung up.

  When the bell rang I was sharpening a fresh pencil. I sighted down the barrel, tested the point with my thumb, blew off the cedar shavings, and slid it eraser-end down into the cup. Then I picked up. “A. Walker Investigations.”

  “Damn it, Walker, this isn’t a game. Just answering to ‘Delwayne’ on an open line could be interpreted as an admission of my identity.”

  “No one’s listening, Lance. You called me first, remember? Also second, third, fourth, and fifth. Sixth, if you count this one. I didn’t think I made that big an impression.”

  “You didn’t. But I don’t know any other investigators in the U.S. I want you to take the job I offered you yesterday. You know the one.”

  “Hollywood call?”

  “What? Oh, money. I borrowed against what I’ve got coming this fall. Turns out my friends at Lost Galleon had a few doubloons lying around I didn’t know about. They like my work. Which translated means I come cheaper than Steranko.”

  “What’s a Steranko?”

  He sawed air in and out. “Do you always work this hard at not working?”

  “It’s still a police case, Lance.”

  “I’ll pay you a bonus at the end.” He breathed again. “Five thousand, if you deliver.”

  The mail slot in my door creaked and three envelopes dribbled to the floor. Real checks don’t come in envelopes with windows. “Put fifteen hundred in the mail. The clock starts when I cash it.”

  “I won’t be using the mails. I’m flying out in an hour.”

  “Flying out where?”

  “Detroit. I’ll be paying you in cash.”

  “What broke you loose? You’re still lukewarm here. The Washington spooks might throw a net over you just to keep in practice.”

  “I’ll take that chance. When I was growing up with my ear to the wall, I learned some personal information about my mother and father that might help with the investigation. I don’t want to tell it over the phone and I don’t want to wait four hours while you make the drive up here. Can you meet me in the dining room of the Airport Hilton at noon?”

  “There hasn’t been an Airport Hilton for years. It’s the Marriott now.”

  “Thanks for that. I may reserve a room. Is the hotel still attached to the terminal?”

  I said it was.

  “Good. I don’t plan to visit the old neighborhood or take in the sights. I’m keeping my return ticket in my pocket. One rotten whiff and I’m on my way to the gate. Will you meet me?”

  I said I would, and the connection broke. I used my freshly sharpened pencil to enter the time and place of the appointment, no name, on the Word-a-Day calendar. The word was mesoblast. I didn’t see me working it into a conversation any time soon.

  I returned the only non-Delwayne-related call I’d had waiting, and used the pencil again to note down the names of elusive witnesses to a tanker crash on the Jeffries Freeway the Monday before. It was an insurance job, easy in, easy out, good for a new set of radials for the car. I did a little sleuthing over the telephone, snared some unlisted numbers, left messages, and made appointments. Just to be prepared I broke a stack of blank affidavits out of the file cabinet and put it in the belly drawer, along with a gold Cross pen for that professional touch. I slit open the mail, wrote out a check for the only third notice in the batch, sealed and stamped it, and stuck it under the hinged lid of the elk’s-foot inkstand I use for an outgoing basket. Then I started some tobacco burning and got to work waiting for it to be time to leave for the airport. Some days are like that, end on end. Then business slows down.

  The Marriott convention center hotel at Wayne County Metropolitan Airport may be unique in our country, although not for long. It’s the only one I’ve ever entered where I had to pass through a security checkpoint in order to drink at the bar, dine in the restaurant, or take a room. This is because it’s directly attached to the Smith Terminal and the gates where planes take on and disgorge passengers. The federal annexation of security has made for polite personnel who can speak in polysyllables without having to come up for air, but the beef medallions are as good as most places, and you don’t have to empty your pockets and take off your shoes in order to get a table.

  Despite these precautions, a stewardess was raped and strangled in one of the rooms a dozen years ago. The long-range result was the recent arrest of a suspect implicated in a similar murder in Lansing, based on DNA fingerprinting. The immediate result was the Hilton chain was forced to sell the hotel to Marriott when people stopped booking rooms. A new name outside a building works miracles of faith.

  I parked in Short Term and hurdled the fresh barriers the airport had installed to discourage people from using the spaces within car-bomb range of the terminal. The traffic inched along the four-lane driveway in lock-step, all the driver’s faces in profile behind the windshields, looking for
an opening to jag into and unload passengers and luggage. A big county deputy with a stainless-steel whistle plugged into the middle of his face kept busy breaking up clinches at the curb. He had an angry man’s tan, red as a scraped shin.

  The dining room staff was holding its breath for the lunch crush. I took a corner booth. It was still early, so I ordered a glass of fizzwater with a twist and browsed the menu while the room filled up. The party of six seated around the center table got loud fast. They were dressed for first class and had started the drinking day on the ground in whatever city they’d started from; I guessed New York from the braying honk of the alpha male, a curly-haired skeleton in sharp lapels and egg-shaped gold-and-enamel cufflinks who kept offering his mussels to his fellow diners and when they declined, shoveled them onto their plates anyway.

  One of the reluctant recipients was a trim redhead seated at his right in a smart pale-pink suit, with her hair cut short and very close to the nape of her neck, smoking a cork-tipped cigarette. She looked cool and tolerant and bored, in a well-bred way. Her quietness made the host seem even louder.

  “Still waiting, sir? Would you like something from the bar?”

  I pulled my gaze away from the redhead and looked at the waiter, who had crept up silently on rubber soles and oiled muscles. He was a fine-featured young black with a bump on his nose that saved him from being pretty. “Chloroform, if you have it,” I said. “Bring it to the center table with my compliments.”

  His smile went no deeper than the dimple in his necktie. “I’ll ask them to hold it down.”

  “Thanks. I can’t hear the jets taking off.” I ordered a Tom Collins.

  He went off on cat’s paws and came back five minutes later with the drink and a message. “Mr. Walker, Mr. West called and asked you to meet him in his room. He’s in three-twenty-two. Nonsmoking floor.”

  I was tapping a cigarette out of the pack. “How’d you know I was Walker?”

  The dimple returned briefly. “He has a gift for description.”

  “He’s an artist.”

  “That would explain it. Would you care to order?”