Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 07

by Lady Yesterday

  “His bed and board will be taken care of,” I said. “He’s housebroken, they tell me. You won’t even know he’s here.”

  “You got that right. He won’t be here.”

  “Inside or parked out front, he’ll be here. I’d prefer inside. I’m sold that the man who’s been threatening Iris has gotten to one of your tenants. The selling job was yours when you showed me how you handle unwanted guests. Inside, Jonesy will get the chance to stop something before it starts. It’s better than no chance at all. Think of him as the house eunuch.”

  “Watch that shit,” he said.

  He hadn’t spoken at all in my car on the way over, but that hadn’t anything to do with his boss’s instructions to cooperate instead of dribbling me. He’d watched the scenery with alert interested eyes, turning his head all around like a dog on its first automobile trip in a long time. He had to have been tired of the sights in the Adelaide. If you didn’t know he had a gun strapped to his ribs under the topcoat you’d have wanted to scratch him behind the ears, if he had hair and a personality.

  I wasn’t getting around Mary M. The pixie impression was all in her bright eyes and small sharp features; behind that she was case steel. I said, “Why don’t we put it to Iris? Let her decide.”

  “I know what she’ll say.”

  “Let’s hear it anyway.”

  She had on loose flowered lounging pajamas and the cork-soled shoes I had seen before. Jonesy appreciated her. His round flap ears moved back and his face smoothed out even further; much more and it would have been gone entirely. Iris gave him a quick glance and thanked Mary M, who had fetched her. It was a polite dismissal.

  Mary M hesitated, then decided. “I’ll be close.” She went down the hall.

  Jonesy said, “Heavy chick.”

  “Who’s Kojak?” asked Iris.

  I introduced them. “He doesn’t need much care. A biscuit now and then, maybe some rawhide to chew on. He breaks necks for Frankie Acardo. Guys who break necks for a living are better than the average run at preventing necks from being broken.”

  “So that’s why you went to see him.”

  “Partly. I was also curious like I said. I make deals. That flaming sword gets heavy.”

  “Thanks, I’ll go with what I’ve got.” But she didn’t move.

  “Mary M’s got a big handicap when it comes to this kind of thing,” I said. “She’s got a heart. Jonesy, what do you do when somebody gets too close?”

  “Kill ’em.”

  “See?”

  “I had it to here with killers,” she said. “They stink in bed and they’re boring to listen to. What if somebody counts the doors wrong coming back from the bathroom at night, he going to blow a hole through them?”

  “You’re not worried about that. You just don’t take to the idea of someone babysitting you. No one does, including babies. I can’t do any kind of job looking for your father if I have to keep calling here every hour or so to ask if your throat’s been cut yet. This isn’t negotiable.”

  The corners of her nostrils lifted at that. I braced myself, but after a beat she said: “Well, where’s he sleep?”

  “Down, boy,” I told Jonesy.

  Driving away from there I felt like singing. Things couldn’t have taken a better turn if an uncle had died and left me Uniroyal. Federal bodyguards miss details while they’re studying their reflections in their custom nickel-plated pearl-handled pocket pistols, and policemen are always worrying about their wives and their hairlines. The worst any of them can pull if their protectees get splashed is a ninety-day suspension, or the boot if there are headlines involved. Shields like Jonesy treated their responsibilities more personally because if they fell down they stood a better than even chance of dying young; their employers didn’t believe in severance pay. Besides, this one liked his work. So he was sitting on a chair outside Iris’ room with his gun in his lap, happy as a mother snake protecting her young, and I was back in the traces.

  I got Mr. Charm’s notebook out of my pocket and went over his entries again while waiting for a light on St. Antoine. I’d been carrying it around since leaving his office and so far osmosis wasn’t working. “212, S.M., $5,000” was still intriguing. The only S.M. I’d met in the case had opened a big door for me. I was hoping he would open at least one more. The driver behind me tooted and I turned on the green in the direction of Tireman.

  It was half-past noon when I entered the motel lobby. I was counting on the towheaded clerk with the spiky moustache being on a break. I was right. In his place a black girl with glasses and the company red blazer smiled at me. She was barely tall enough to see over the desk.

  I smiled back, trying to look tired. It didn’t take much trying. “Single for the night. Two-twelve, if I can get it. I got the best sleep I ever had in a motel last time I stayed there.”

  “Four-oh-eight’s quieter,” she said. “It’s an inside room.”

  “I’m claustrophobic.”

  She checked her card file. The room would be occupied. A vacancy would be too easy. I was flipping through my own brain index of alternate stories when she slid a registration blank in front of me.

  “It’s a corner room in back, second level. Just drive around behind the building and take the stairs. I guess you know that if you stayed there before.”

  I thanked her anyway and signed “L. P. Wimsey” above a phony address. I gave her thirty-five dollars and she gave me a brass key that lay in my pocket like a hand truck. I saw no sign of Lester Hamilton on my way around the building. No one was reading plate numbers in his place.

  It was a room on an open hallway overlooking the parking lot, with a picture window in front so the tenant could sit on the baby sofa and watch his car being stripped. The sofa and chair were gray and so was the rug and the coverlet on the double bed. The dresser and writing table were glass-topped, the bathroom clean and small and unremarkable. The closet was a doorless alcove with a rod and half a dozen theft-proof hangers slotted into steel loops. On the wall over the bed hung a duck-hunting print in a pressed wood frame, bolted in place, its figures reversed in a mirror built into the partition opposite it, facing the bed.

  I wondered about the mirror. I threw my hat on the bed, walked up to the glass, and leaned my forehead against it, blocking out light with my cupped hands. A pair of sad brown eyes stared back. The mirror was opaque, from this side anyway. I walked around the room a second time. I pulled the dresser away from the wall and looked behind it and felt along the baseboard. If necessary I’d have gotten down and groped around under the bed, a job I always saved for last because that was where ghosts bred and multiplied. I didn’t have to. I found it socketed in the knob that screwed onto the bedside lamp and held the shade in place, a metal plug the size of a thumbnail, with a waffled top and wires running down inside the harp into the base of the lamp itself.

  I had an idea where they would lead from there. I checked it out. I let myself out into the hall and around the corner to the linen closet I knew I’d find there. The door was locked, but linen doesn’t rate a dead bolt. I slipped it in less than a minute using the edge of my ID.

  The closet was four feet square, all bare drywall with an exposed bulb screwed into the ceiling and a chain switch hanging down. It was part of a crawlspace between the inner and outer rooms. The shelves had been removed—the holes where the brackets had been looked like puckered wounds—and someone had sawed a square out of one wall and installed a window. I saw the room I had just been in, turned backward as if I were looking in a mirror, which in fact I was, or rather through one. Two-way mirrors were hot stuff when I was a kid, but now everyone has one in his front door and nobody much thinks about them, least of all the guests in well-maintained motels. On a stand in front of the glass someone had erected a video camera with its lens looking into the room. With a toe I nudged its trailing wires where they disappeared through a hole in the floor. I knew where they came out. I found the catch on the camera and slid out the tray that held t
he tape. It wasn’t holding anything but air.

  There was nothing else to see. I wiped off everything I’d touched and smeared both doorknobs on my way out of Eldon Charm’s private motion picture studio. I didn’t reset the lock. No police seal meant I’d beat the cops there. I owed them a break.

  Back in 212 I stretched out on the coverlet, smoking a cigarette and watching myself in the mirror. It gave me a crawling sensation, like looking at the smooth black surface of the water filling a mineshaft three hundred feet deep, and I knew then that I would never pass another mirror without feeling the clammy chill of blind white things swimming in and out through empty eye-sockets at the bottom.

  There was no reason for that. Charm had supplemented his night-manager’s income videotaping married executives and their secretaries nooning on the premises—probably in every room in the motel that bordered on a linen closet, if the other entries in his notebook meant anything—and selling them back to his subjects at four-digit rates. Chances were he had compromised Sam Mozo similarly, making himself enough of a nuisance to be removed, but in the heat following Jackie Acardo’s disappearance only when it became convenient to remove him. Getting the list containing the license plate number of whatever flunky had planted the skull-and-crossbones in Iris’ jewelry box would have been convenience enough. There was no reason to think the missing tape contained anything but the Latin butterball taking exercise with the wife of a city councilman, or maybe the city councilman himself, given the times. Or the mayor’s cat.

  No reason, except what was that to a loud little toad who dressed out of the Warner Brothers wardrobe department and cut up expensive coats and custom leather seats and bragged about employing a Korean killer? Except for the fact that five thousand was at least twice as much as Charm was soaking any of the other initials in his notebook. Except for the fact that the beergarden where Jackie Acardo had agreed to meet someone just before he vanished was less than five minutes from where I was soiling the coverlet with my shoes and watching the gray spread through my hair in the mirror that was not a mirror. Except for the crawling sensation.

  I didn’t buy it for a second. The thing was too thorny with coincidence. It needed more work and the work wasn’t going to get done while I was staring into that flooded mineshaft. I left the key for the maid to find and got out. If I was going to have nightmares about mirrors I’d have them in my home or my office where I could tell them to leave.

  17

  THERE IS A new breed of detective abroad these days. It wears its suits tailored and never leaves the office except for two-hour lunches and to go home, doing all its gumshoeing on the telephone and at the computer console. It doesn’t own a gun and it stokes up on chef’s salads and Perrier and wouldn’t be caught dead slipping a bellhop five dollars, although a year’s lease on a late-model Jaguar for a congressional aide would not be beneath consideration. It doesn’t even call itself a detective, preferring the term consultant along with whatever adjective is on the charts this season. But you can still find it in the Yellow Pages under “Private Investigators.” Ma Bell knows.

  In the office I called a firm I’d done business with before, that specializes in tracing the ownership of businesses and public corporations. That’s all open record and theoretically you can get it from any county office for a minimal copying fee, but the labyrinth of subsidiaries and holding companies can delay the answers for weeks. (If you ever get the urge to scramble a computer, feed it the Catholic Church.) I reached a senior consultant finally and read off everything I could think of, including the motel on Tireman and the Park-a-Lot Garage and Sam Mozo and Manuel Malviento, his real name. It was make-work and out-of-pocket, but I had dead-ended in room 212 and the thing wasn’t tidy enough to hand to the police just yet. They would expect me to tidy it for them in twelve hours of interrogation. Even a doll like Mary Ann Thaler is still a cop, and anyway the Charm murder was Acting Lieutenant Leonard Hornet’s. He’d book me as a material witness just to see bars on my face.

  The senior consultant took it all down and offered to put the answers on my screen when he had them. I thanked him and said a private messenger would do. A grateful Japanese-American client had once suggested high-teching my office at cost, but I’d opted for cash. The building’s circuits wouldn’t handle the load and besides, the equipment wouldn’t go with the wallpaper.

  Next I called Mary M’s. Mary answered and I asked how Jonesy was getting on.

  “Better than my refrigerator. Eight ham and cheese sandwiches so far, the last two without ham because we ran out. He’s sublimating. Three of the girls propositioned him but he wasn’t having any. What’s he, gay? I know he’s not a rabbi.”

  “He’s a good bodyguard is what he is. Give him what he wants. Frankie A’s good for it.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m itemizing.”

  “How’s Iris taking it?”

  “He stands by the bathroom door while she’s inside. How do you think?”

  “Listen, this is no reflection on you.”

  “How isn’t it? Just him sitting there says I can’t look after my own guests. And you tell me one of them is some kind of a plant. Maybe this place wasn’t paradise before you landed in it, but compared to where some of these girls came from it was next best. Do you have any idea what a man on the floor does to a house full of prostitutes trying to get straight? I’m fighting an epidemic of zipper fever here.”

  “I’m working on making him unnecessary.”

  “Work faster. You want to talk to Iris?”

  “No, put Jonesy on.”

  “If he takes a bite out of the phone it goes on the bill.”

  I listened to house sounds for a minute. Then the receiver was lifted and I heard breathing. I asked Jonesy if Mary was still in the room.

  “No. I got a door to stand in front of, pal.”

  “This’ll just take a second. I want you to run a tab on these women who are hitting on you, especially the ones that don’t give up. One of them’s Mozo’s. She’ll be the most persistent.”

  “Gee, I never thought of that.”

  “I don’t know you long enough to know how you think. When you find her, hold her. Don’t kill her. She’s the cops’ link to that motel killing last night. If she ties it to Mozo we’ll both have done our jobs. Maybe there’s a bonus in it for you from Frankie.”

  “Yeah, like I get to keep my head.”

  There were any number of responses I could make to that, given his haircut, but I just told him good-bye. We were working together, sort of. There are courtesies.

  The telephone rang as soon as I took my hand off it. It was Mary Ann Thaler, calling to say that ballistics had come up empty on the bullet I had dug out of Iris’ front seat.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I think I know who put it there. Thanks again for running it. Turn anything yet on Charm?”

  “Out of my hands.” Her voice was cool and clean, like her office. “The robbery angle dried up. Safe could have been sprung anytime and he just didn’t report it. I’m back to taxi holdups and liquor store heists.”

  “Before you got frozen out, did you find out if Charm had any kind of record?”

  “As for instance blackmail?”

  She got me with that one. I covered the pause with a cough. “I guess that’s nothing new in hotel work.”

  “It’s about as common as dentists who molest female patients. He had a fat bank account for a man who spent most of his time prowling hallways, but maybe he had a paper route. I wasn’t with the case long enough to find out if we had a sheet on him. I could ask Hornet.”

  “Not that important.”

  “Somehow I didn’t think it would be,” she said. “You’ve got something that says blackmail?”

  “Just a stab, so to speak. Murder’s interesting.”

  “For you, maybe.”

  After lunch I had some traffic. A trim well-dressed woman in her forties with a bandage over one eye needed to find a witness to an accident. I ran the p
artial plate number she had through a contact in the Secretary of State’s office, got three possibles, and charged her twenty dollars for ten minutes’ work. I’d promised my contact lunch. Midwest Confidential called with some insurance work that could wait until next week and a woman in Cincinnati needed to find her ex-husband to sign some papers. I made some calls and tracked him down in East Detroit. That took me the rest of the afternoon. By the time I had the paperwork done it was dark out. I was starting to think about dinner when the telephone rang again.

  “Mr. Walker?”

  “Always has been.”

  “This is L. C. Candy, the trombone player?”

  “Sure.” I heard music on his end. I wondered if he was calling from the Kitchen.

  “I wasn’t sure I’d catch you before you went home.”

  “I never go home.”

  He said something else. Someone dropped a tray of glasses near him and I asked him to repeat it.

  “I’m at a place called Captain Ted’s Party in Ferndale.” He was shouting now. “It’s on Woodward.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “That puts you in the majority. Listen, you might want to come up here.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “What?” The music was thumping louder. I told him I was on my way. I had to say it twice.

  The pavement was wet and slick with fresh snow bordering it in ruled lines and pale headlamp beams and red and green and amber traffic lights reflected on the surface in a pastel wash. I drove past Captain Ted’s Party the first time and had to turn around and come back. It was a brick building in a line of them with a small yellow electric sign turned perpendicular to the avenue. It looked dark inside. I parked in a tiny lot in back that was nowhere near full and went in through the front door, set back in a tunnel.