Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels

by Loren D. Estleman

  What-ho, and all that pother. I let the striker fall, and gave it two more for good measure. I had an appointment.

  A woman in a herringbone business suit found out who I was and let me in. Nick had left his first wife for a kitten from a fresh litter, but this one was too young even for that; I figured her for Eugenia’s personal assistant. She had cranberry hair, bobbed with bangs, and a little too much going on about the waist and calves, but that could have been protective plumage to get her through the beauty wars alive. She left me in the entryway with some porcelain blobs on glass shelves and came back a minute later to say Mrs. Pappas would receive me in the morning room.

  This was a lopsided den on the east side of the house with heavy mesh curtains drawn against the strong sunlight and a lot of functional furniture, including a Prairie style desk made of blanched plywood. Here the mistress of the house sat on a stool shuffling through a stack of mail with a pair of glasses straddling her nose in graphite rims.

  It was the same nose they chiseled out of marble two thousand years ago, straight and bold, with a tall planed forehead resting on the bridge and just enough flesh on the rest to prevent bone from poking through. She wore her hair—blonde with a silver wash—pulled straight back into a knot at the base of her skull. The swiftly moving hands were long and thin and blue-veined. She sat in an upright starter’s position, hipshot, with the muscles in her long thighs tense under a thin wool dress, toes braced in open shoes with low platforms. A handsome woman, to use the gentleman’s term, built along engineering lines; a utility piece, like the furniture.

  “Beggars all.” She drummed the unopened envelopes together and laid them on the desk off-center, in keeping with the house. “I’m on the board of several charitable foundations. That means the hoboes’ sign is on my gate. Sit, Mr. Walker. The seats are more comfortable than they look.”

  I gave my one eighty-five to a square black leather chair with a chromium frame. “I came to ask about the supply side.” I told her what I was after. I’d run out of small talk for her type and her type’s type.

  “I’m hopelessly twentieth century. I had a cell phone, but lost it, and I gave away the Palm Pilot someone gave me. There’s one computer in the house, in Ouida’s office. You met Ouida just now. I’m afraid I wouldn’t know a converter box if I saw one.”

  “Your late husband built this house oh bootleg electronics. I’m not working for the authorities, Mrs. Pappas. If I were I wouldn’t waste a visit calling you a footpad. Those boxes have to be moved through someone and your shop’s the biggest around.”

  “I sold all Nick’s interests to his competitors after he died. You should speak to them.”

  “I heard you kept a toe in.”

  “I never had one in to begin with.” She folded her glasses and tapped them against her teeth, small teeth and bright. “I can circulate the word, of course. Nick was highly respected in his field and some of his old friends stay in touch. What kind of incentive are you offering?”

  “Freedom from incarceration.”

  “Life isn’t Monopoly. I doubt whoever stole the merchandise gave much thought to the possibility of arrest.”

  I stood. “I’ll find the stuff. The longer it takes and the harder I have to work for it, the smaller the offer.”

  “For a man with nothing to sell, you’re not trying very hard.”

  “I’ve got other stops. If you had the plunder piled up in shipping boxes out front I’d stay to make the pitch.”

  She put the glasses back on and found a steel pencil. “One of the boards I serve on provides counseling to small businesses. I’ll do what I can for your client. Who knows? I could be a victim myself one day. Who’s the manufacturer?” She turned over an envelope to write on the back. A proper pad would be redundant in her world.

  I told her. It still didn’t trigger anything for me, but her pencil seemed to hesitate before she wrote the name. The lead might have been brittle.

  FOUR

  The woman with the cranberry hair was standing in the entryway with her hands folded at her waist. “I just got off the house phone with Mrs. Pappas. If you’ll give me all your contact information I’ll get back to you with results.”

  I gave her a card, pointing out the cell number written on the back. “What does being a personal assistant pay these days?”

  Her professional smile was unaltered, but now her eyebrows came into play. “Can we start with religion and sex first, and work our way up to my net worth?”

  “I’m trying to find out if you can be bribed.”

  She nodded, considering. “The salary’s high by local standards, but I have to be available day and night, and calling in sick isn’t an option. I can’t expect her to put her life on hold waiting for the antibiotics to kick in.”

  “So the answer’s…?”

  “No. Unless you can come up with three months’ severance.”

  “I was thinking dinner.”

  “What is it you wanted?”

  “She says she spends most of her time doing good works. What’s she do with the rest of it?”

  “You mean, does she meet people in parking lots with a trunkload of MP3s? I hate to crush your hopes, but the answer to that one is also no.”

  “What would it be if I came up with the three months?”

  “The same. She’s clean, Mr. Walker. I had some reservations when I applied for the position. Google took me straight to her husband’s police file. I came from a small town—”

  “Where folks never locked their doors.”

  She shook her head. “If such places ever existed, they were gone before my time. That doesn’t mean I didn’t want to make my people proud of me. But I’ve been here almost two years and she hasn’t asked me to do anything so sinister as pay an old parking ticket.”

  “That should’ve made you suspicious right off the bat.” I looked for a change in her expression, but she’d put it on with the herringbone. “Ouida, where’d that come from?”

  “Louisa de la Ramee. She wrote under that name. My mother was on a French novel jag. What about Amos? The Bible?”

  “A coin. Andy was on the other side. Mrs. Pappas said she’d ask around. That means you. Do you have to go to her first with what you dig up?”

  “Well, it’s not in the job description, but it’s sort of implied.”

  “There’s some room there I could work a dinner into.”

  “Listen, mister, I may be fat, but that doesn’t mean I’m always hungry. When I am I can feed myself.”

  I’d gotten the polite smile off her face finally, but I’d had to put my foot in my mouth to do it.

  “Working so close to a set of bones like Mrs. Pappas doesn’t make you fat,” I said. “Does the set of bones ever do business with MacArthur Industries?”

  “What did she say?” The question had thrown her off her snit.

  “I didn’t ask. There’s a P.O. box in Southfield, but that’s just a drop. It could be in Maine or Manila. I got the impression Mrs. Pappas was familiar with it.”

  “The impression; I see. It doesn’t ring a bell, and I’m in charge of her correspondence.”

  “She was charging through her own just now.”

  “She likes to fondle the incoming, after I weed out the junk and items too small to bother her with. Shouldn’t you be asking her all these questions?”

  “I only asked three, not counting Ouida. That one was for me.”

  She held up my card like a stop sign. “Wait for my call.”

  I cleared out. The pawnbroker had warned me I’d be picking asphalt from my teeth if I forgot my manners with Eugenia Pappas, but he hadn’t said the bouncer would be named after a French novelist.

  *

  The next drip in the pan lived in northwest Detroit, in a house built with federal funds by a late former governor of Michigan who’d been booted one notch above his competency level. There had been dozens of the simple saltboxes, but too much red tape to put tenants in them, so most had been tor
n down at the city’s expense to displace crack dealers. When the demolition money drained away the rest were left to peel and pucker on shaggy lots with barbed wire on either side. In our city of just under a million, the ratio of empty houses to homeless people is about even, with padlocks separating the one from the other.

  Johnny Toledo had left the padlock intact and cut himself a private entrance in the side with a chain saw, leaning the cut-out piece against the hole for privacy. He’d been more mobile then. When I called out his name I heard a trundling noise inside and saw a brown eye peeking around the edge of the hunk of siding. A grunt of invitation followed, then the trundling noise again, receding a couple of yards. A visit from me usually meant cash.

  I shoved the obstacle aside and slid it back into place behind me Ali Baba style. Johnny poked his boys’ model .22 rifle into its scabbard on the side of his wheelchair. “Yo.”

  “Yo ho ho.” I glanced around. “Home sweet scrapyard.”

  Someone—Johnny, probably, before the accident—had knocked out all the partitions, making the entire ground floor into one room with the bathroom stool exposed and holes in the wall where the kitchen sink and gas appliances had been ripped out by a scavenger who’d gotten there ahead of him and a freestanding staircase leading to the second story he never used. There was no furniture, just a clearing in the piles of coiled copper wire, weeping transmissions, snarls of plumbing elbowed into right angles, stacks of twelve-volt batteries, and manhole covers arranged in neat columns like poker chips, with a couple of strays leaned up against them the way some primitive islanders kept their wealth of giant stone coins.

  “I ain’t just entertaining lately,” he said.

  He was a fair-skinned black of thirty or so, with an Errol Flynn moustache and a shaved head he covered with a navy knit watch cap in all seasons. His clothes were army surplus: shapeless camo pants, combat boots, and fatigue shirts with someone else’s name stitched above the pocket and sleeves long enough to use for oven mitts.

  The wheelchair was stolen, like everything else on the site, including the electricity he used to warm his hot plate, courtesy of a hundred-foot drop cord plugged into an outlet in a crawl space belonging to a clueless neighbor; in winter the plate provided his only heat, and all year around it filled the house with the suety smell of cooking hot dogs, his main staple. In his day Johnny had enjoyed a reputation as a daredevil among salvage thieves, scaling trellises, leaping from roof to roof like Cary Grant, and crawling through storm drains to recover metal to sell to incurious junk dealers. That had ended the night he shinnied up an Edison pole to retrieve a silver conductor and fifty thousand volts flung him fifteen feet to the ground, shattering his spine and paralyzing him below the waist. Now he operated a clearinghouse for his former competitors, receiving scrap at a rate just below the market and reaping the profit from retailers. Located as he was conveniently close to the source of most of the merchandise, he spared his clients the time and risk of transporting truckloads of contraband outside the city limits. His carriers were illegal aliens who thought minimum wage was a democratic myth.

  I asked him how business was.

  “Sterling.” He smiled, showing a gold tooth he’d fashioned by hand from a cable connection. It was the only joke he remembered and it never failed to break the ice.

  “I hear you’re expanding.”

  “Yeah, I’m starting a chain. You want a franchise?”

  “Electronics is what I heard.”

  “Too far over the line. Did you know there’s no law in this town against swiping fixtures from vacant buildings? Cop catches you in the act, worst he can do’s slap you with criminal trespass. I could practically apply for a small bidness loan.”

  “Moving the fixtures is something else again.”

  “Priority zero: too many felonies, not enough cops to go around. Swap it for stereos and GPS, all that hot-ticket shit, bar goes way up. Figure in lawyers, bail, loss of work; pound for pound I make ten times more ripping wires and jacks out of busted VCRs in people’s trash than I’d get boosting laptops from Best Buy.” He had the brain of an accountant. Thieves often do.

  “What about converter boxes?”

  “What the fuck are them?”

  I told him. He touched his wisp of a moustache to make sure it hadn’t fluttered away. His smile was tight-lipped. “And here I thought I was missing my MTV. Shit.” Gold glinted. “This time next year the country’ll be up to its dick in obsolete sets dumped out at the curb. Thousands and thousands of miles of copper and silver wire, aluminum chassis, brass and steel screws. Gonna have to put some more men on the job.”

  “Glad I could be the bearer of good tidings.” Casting about for a fresh tactic I spotted something shiny standing on a folding metal tray from the Eisenhower era, a naked cherub about a foot tall with a twist of wire sticking out of its upraised fist, a sconce intended to perch on a wall shelf. It looked like solid gold or heavy plate, off by itself away from the rest of the inventory. I hadn’t noticed it before, but this was the first time I’d dropped in on him since the accident.

  He saw my interest. “That come from the old Dodge mansion just before they knocked it down.”

  “You were in diapers then.”

  “My old man snuck in through a basement window, right under the nose of a private security patrol: three times. That’s how many trips it took to get that and some other ornamental shit and about a hundred feet of brass stair rods. I seen it in a pile in a junkyard where I had bidness, dirty as hell, looked like cheap brass. Only piece of salvage I ever paid full price for.” Translation: acquired legally. “That was before my spill.”

  “Your father was a scraphound?”

  “Still would be, if he didn’t get stuck in a duct in a shut-up factory in Flatrock and die of pneumonia. I used to pretend that thing was my twin brother till the old man sold it. I thought it was melted down twenty years ago.”

  “If you paid brass prices, it could’ve helped settle your hospital bill.”

  “I wouldn’t swap it for a new spinal cord. It’s all I got to remember the man taught me all I know.”

  That’s why Detroit is never coming back. All the crooks are second-and third-generation.

  “Those converter boxes will move fast,” I said. “There’s a hundred in it if one shows up here and you call me.”

  “What’s one worth?”

  “A hundred in the store, but you won’t pay twenty.”

  “That’s all you want, the box?”

  I lit a cigarette, blew smoke away from him. His lungs wouldn’t be in much better shape than his old man’s for as much exercise as he got rolling back and forth across that little space of bare floor. “One box won’t do my client any good. He lost twenty-five when someone broke in on him. To get the rest I need to find the man. Or the woman.”

  “Women’s got too much sense for that kind of lay. You’re never sure if someone’s home, or what he’s carrying. He shoots first, you’re dead. You shoot first, you get to shower with skinheads till your pecker dries up and falls off.” He shook his head. “I shit in a bag. That’s whack. It gets out I gave up a customer’s name, somebody comes here and feeds me the bag. That’s worse.”

  “Moot point. You don’t deal in electronics.”

  His forehead creased. He’d stumbled over his own lie. “Let’s see the hundred.”

  I folded the bill around a card and gave it to him. Johnny was a fence, not a welsher. And he couldn’t run. “Got a phone?”

  He produced a clamshell from a flap pocket. “It’s a camera too. I gave one to the kid I send for hot dogs so he can send back pictures. I can’t make him understand what’s wrong with turkey franks.” He put it away with the currency and my card.

  I went out and put the piece of siding back in place. I didn’t know where he kept his cash, but once or twice a year Detroit General Hospital admitted a patient from the neighborhood with a .22 slug in his leg and no satisfactory explanation for how he got it. Johnny was
a light sleeper and never left the house.

  I’d asked him once if Toledo was his legal name or if he had some connection with the Ohio city on the lake; all he’d said was he’d spent his entire life in Detroit. Half answers were as much as you could expect from him for free.

  FIVE

  I thought I’d make a commando call on Bud Lite in his storefront uptown without letting him know I was coming, but the job needed doping out and I needed to eat first. Inside Johnny Toledo’s, the lingering effect of all those scorched wieners was nausea; outside, I was ravenous. I made arrangements at a window for a fish sandwich and a fountain drink, then reported to my private pew in the periodicals section of the library. On the way up the steps I threw some melted ice on top of a couple of Vicodin and dumped the cup in the trash.

  Photos of Saddam Hussein before and after his execution filled the front pages and inside sections of both the News and Free Press, but I found some nutshucks buried inside about the rap musician’s arrest in Guam for the fatal shooting of a man named Winfield, who owned a recording label and the house where the shots were fired. Bud Lite’s real name was Gale Kreski. He was a native of Hamtramck who ran a music store on the north end of Woodward Avenue, up near where the birds flew in the spring. The story got more play when he was indicted, and posted a hundred thousand dollars’ surety on a million dollars’ bail, receiving permission to return home while awaiting trial.

  The territorial authorities believed the incident had started with a dispute over sales and promotion and finished with three slugs in Winfield’s chest as he sat on his terrace overlooking the Pacific. A cropped photo of the dead man with six hands on his shoulders featured the usual bald-headed butterball in an earring and trick spectacles.

  People with recording contracts seemed to spend as much time posing for mugs as shooting videos, and I never heard where the bounty had been lifted on executives in the music industry, but the amount some bond company had ponied up to keep Kreski/Lite out of the tank was worth a splash in the media. Counting back the dates I figured out I’d been defending my life in a house in Iroquois Heights at the time, a legitimate distraction. But because most Americans couldn’t find the United States Territory of Guam on a map, the story fell like a busted satellite and burned up during descent. Even an album cover shot of the accused pointing a Glock at potential fans couldn’t slow it down.