Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels

by Loren D. Estleman

  He looked mild enough, despite the ordnance: one of the growing minority of local white hip-hop artists, with long ratty fair hair and a nose as big as a Polish fieldpiece under a porkpie hat, pale eyes with black pupils punched in the centers. A kid with a cap pistol appeared more dangerous.

  It seemed he had enough on his plate without receiving and selling stolen goods; but I’d always heard you needed something to fall back on in case you washed out in show business.

  I wasn’t going on appearances. Back in the car I paid a visit to the gun room and clipped on the .38.

  Away from downtown, the scenery along the main stem looks less like part of a big city and more like a series of small towns deserted by an interstate: check-cashing places, two-for-one tattoo stalls, storefront campaign headquarters, mini-marts built like penitentiaries, and a Great Wall of China of plywood and spray paint, the only retail items that have trouble keeping up with the regional demand. The same dusty heirlooms make the rounds of all the pawn shops, all located conveniently next to corner lube joints and the crap games and dog fights inside. I watched a seagull too old to migrate to a choicer neighborhood picking at cracks in the sidewalk behind a walker.

  Decade upon decade of weather and monoxide had gnawed the letters clean off the side of the four-story building that housed the music shop, but the darker brick where the paint had been still advertised the name of a hardware store and its date of establishment: 1908. Back then, the city had been known more for kitchen stoves than automobiles, and not at all for the businesses that have faded away with the paint. Sleek Stratocasters beckoned to customers from behind heavy plate-glass windows, with some decorative gravel strewn about to cover the chains shackling them to the superstructure. The entrance was set back in a rectangle made of more glass with a gold decal warning burglars that the place was protected by Reliance Alarm Systems, a division of the biggest detective agency in metropolitan Detroit, which broke out in hives at the very thought of the competition I offered.

  The store’s name was Felonious Monk Music. The reference was probably lost on most of the clientele, but considering its owner’s current circumstances was good for a chuckle. A crude cartoon of a monkey brandishing a switchblade hung from a post above the door, probably to prevent ignorant questions. A jazzy downbeat answered for a bell when I let myself inside.

  Nothing much seemed to have been done by way of remodeling since hardware-store days: broad swept planks creaked underfoot and the ceiling was pressed tin. Where kegs of bolts and sacks of washers had stood, more guitars leaned rakishly on stands. Woodwinds and brass suggested a swing band at rest behind the counter and there were the usual racks of picks and reeds and packages of strings and sheet music in pocket racks. A life-size cutout of Bruce Springsteen, made from the same sturdy cardboard used to make the original, drew attention to a display of DVDs that promised to teach guitar virtuosity in ten easy steps. Posters of pop icons all around and a bare spot of floor where something had stood that was heavy enough to make three distinct impressions in the solid pine planks.

  “Eggshell-finish Yamaha baby grand. When it went, I cried more than when my grandma died, and she raised me from age two.”

  This was a good voice, resonant without being self-aware, with the promise of more in reserve. It belonged to a man who’d come in from the back and stood at the end of the showcase counter wiping his hands with a streaked chamois cloth. I caught a strong whiff of 3-in-1 Oil, a not unpleasant tang that took me back to seventh-grade band, third chair; cornet valves will stick if you don’t lubricate them regularly.

  No Glock, no porkpie hat, and he’d tied his ragged locks into a meager ponytail behind his neck, but he looked enough like his album cover not to fool a determined autograph hound or a border guard with basic training. He photographed older, and his eyes in person were not so much pale as the bright artificial blue of pool chalk: tinted contact lenses, possibly, although I figured him more likely these days to avoid attention rather than seek it out.

  “I’m guessing it went toward bail,” I said. “A fine instrument like that’s worth more in draw than a flat-out sale.”

  He went on kneading the cloth. He had on a plain black T-shirt and Levi’s that looked as if they’d worn honestly; torn at the crotch, not at the knees, uneven frays at the cuffs, a broad square lick from a brush loaded with whitewash. The brand of jeans belonged to an earlier generation, the inventor of hip, now solidly mainstream. His bare arms were a blue smear of elaborate needlework, each design screaming for attention in a mob.

  He said, “I’m innocent. That’s the party line, on orders from my lawyer. You’re the third person today came in to look at me instead of the stock. I guess I’m the piano now.”

  “Maybe I came for the stock.”

  “You look like a musician,” he said, “like I look like a cop. What’s your pleasure?”

  “It’s not as bad as that.” I showed him my ID with the deputy’s badge folded out of sight; he’d seen enough of those lately.

  He folded the cloth into a neat square and laid it on the counter. His biceps were lean and moved smoothly under the ink-stained skin. I guessed martial-arts training, and wondered how many moves I remembered. “I guess everyone has a family, even a rat like Winfield. Ask your clients what they’d do if somebody promised you five million dollars, withheld ninety percent pending returns, and cut you off after one album on a three-album deal.”

  “Go on a five-hundred-thousand-dollar drunk. But that’s just me.”

  “What if you spent every cent on a house for your parents, a place in Grosse Pointe for yourself, this dump for the tax write-off, a fat salary for your publicist, and loans to all the friends who promised to pay you back with interest, only you said, no, no, pay me back what I lent you when you can, but they never paid back even that?”

  “Go on a cheaper drunk. Old Milwaukee instead of Grey Goose. I’d still have the piano.” I put away the credentials. “I’m not investigating what went down in Guam. I’m tracking a shipment of stolen HDTV converters. They walked out of a house in Detroit sometime over the weekend.”

  “Oh, Christ. Bait a second hook in case I slip off the first. I didn’t kill anyone and I don’t deal in electronics, stolen or otherwise.”

  “No one in town deals in them. I asked. I’m starting to think it’s all outsourced to China.”

  “Mister, I’m looking at fifty to life in a Philippine shithole for improper disposal of an earring with a piece of shit attached to it. Turning fence wouldn’t cozy me up to the jury.”

  “The scatology’s sound, but the reasoning’s shaky. You’re into a bailbondsman for a hundred grand and you’ve got a lawyer to feed. If I were in your position I’d sell anything I could get my hands on.”

  “Including your good name?”

  “Which one. Gale Kreski or Bud Lite?”

  “One’s easier to spell and download.” He scratched a tattoo and looked at his nails to see if it had come off. He’d lost his faith in every transaction. “My great-grandfather came through Ellis Island with a cardboard suitcase and fifty zlotys sewed inside the lining of his coat. That was about ten dollars American. He came to Detroit and hammered out engine blocks at Dodge. Thirty-six years of that and then an artery blew out in his brain right at the end of his shift. Two hundred people went to his funeral in St. Stanislaus’, counting friends and four dozen relatives he helped bring over from the Old Country. I never knew him, but my grandma told me stories every day, each one more saintly than the last. Nobody’s that good, but I wouldn’t turn thief and piss on his grave.”

  “Where’d he stand on murder?”

  His skin was fair and flushed at the first sign of rain, but that was as far as it went. “I told you twice I’m innocent.”

  “How about Great-Grandpa? I thought all you Polacks had a dead Cossack in the family closet.”

  That worked. I’d begun to think nothing would. He was fast, and I had twenty years on him, hard ones with painkillers cr
awling through my veins, but rock beats scissors. I cleared the .38 just as his right foot left the floor.

  It was a near thing even then. The two yards that separated us spared me a bad case of athlete’s chin. He caught himself in mid-kick and lowered the foot.

  “I wish I had killed the son of a bitch.” He was breathing hard. “If I had, I’d do the time satisfied.”

  “People say that who never did time. But I believe you. If I didn’t before, I do now. You’d have kicked him off his terrace, not shot him. I don’t buy you on that album cover. No wonder it didn’t sell. You forgot to take off the safety.”

  “I let Winfield talk me into posing for it. It was wrong on every level. I told him I’m no gangsta, but he said if I expected people to believe that I should tell them I came from Wichita. He seriously thought ‘Detroit iron’ meant guns.”

  “He should’ve dumped the campaign and run with Ellis Island. I don’t think anyone’s ever shot a video there, but I’ve lost touch. My cable went out.”

  “White Stripes, last year.” His smile was lost in the shade of the strong Balkan nose. “I opened for them in Cleveland.”

  “Who killed him?” I don’t know why I asked. Every case doesn’t have to lead to murder.

  “Record producers make child pornographers look like Bambi, and Winfield made other record producers look like Saint fucking Joan. He hired armed Chamorro to patrol his grounds day and night because of all the death threats he got. My guess? Somebody paid one of his Chamorro to cap him, ten minutes after I left his place. We were yelling loud enough to be heard in American Samoa.”

  “No wonder they call it rap.”

  The smile stuck. “Ever investigate homicide?”

  “Not in Guam.”

  “I couldn’t afford it anyway. Converters, you said?”

  I nodded; realized I was still holding the revolver and returned it to its clip. “Twenty-five of them, still in boxes. They’re all that was taken, so the burglars knew what they were after. They’ll try to unload the shipment in a lump. Piecing it out takes too long and burns gas.”

  “Price at the pump affects everything, even larceny. I’m told. I haven’t seen ’em, but like I said.”

  Not being a fence was the part of his story I didn’t believe, but life’s too short to argue with a black belt. “They might try to move them through a music shop, to throw off the cops. You didn’t ask what converters are, so the businesses must overlap.” I put a card on a padded stand supporting an arrangement of amplifiers on different levels. “My cell’s on the back. I can throw a hundred or so into your defense fund if the sellers show up and you can keep them around.”

  “A hundred’d buy a half-hour with my counselor.”

  “That’s the job. It isn’t a big job as jobs go, but they don’t fall off overpasses like chunks of concrete. The governor says we’re in a one-state recession.”

  “How about something on account?”

  “Sorry. A judge could revoke your bail any time and whisk you off to that shithole in the Philippines.”

  “I can make a lot more off the converters themselves. If I were in the racket.”

  “I’d find out. I wouldn’t make a good character witness at your trial.”

  He flushed again. I let myself out, elaborately in no hurry. Back on the street I resumed breathing. My quick-draw is only good for one charge.

  SIX

  My walk-in trade had stood still since Saw II, but I swung by the office to throw away my mail on the way home. That was two flights of stairs too many for the leg. Back in the house I left the pills alone and fixed myself some old-school relief from the vintage in the kitchen cupboard. It wouldn’t win me any marathons but it would hold me until bedtime and the next round of vehicular nightmares.

  I played with my Scotch and watched the local stations run ten minutes of news on a loop for an hour and a half. There were more fatal drug overdoses around town than usual, I thought, but being a borderline addict myself maybe I was just more sensitive to it. Even so, on the evidence, some souped-up grade of heroin from Asia or the Middle East was blasting its way through a network more accustomed to friendly old Mexican brown. Every twenty years or so these things swept in like an Alberta Clipper, clearing out the shelters and rehab clinics, then moved on to wealthier markets in Hollywood and D.C. Somewhere along the line the city had become a testing laboratory for new product.

  Reuben Crossgrain, my client, got his fifteen seconds between spots for a burger chain and a treatment for hemorrhoids whose side effects included cholera. The only reason his B and E got any air at all was it allowed a consumer affairs reporter to lead into a canned feature about truckloads of analog TVs rolling into landfills: Another great day for planet Earth.

  Crossgrain showed off his sample box and managed to get the name Past Presence into the sound bite. I made a mental note to hit him up for another advance when the three days were up, based on the business it brought in. If he’d mentioned me at all it was lost in editing.

  If my profit margin were wider than a worm’s whisker I’d offer the first day free. It’s almost always squandered on leads that don’t lead and tips that don’t tip. I’d made practice casts over two counties and pulled up a pawnbroker with a heart as well as a change-maker, a tough secretary to a smuggler’s widow, Johnny Toledo, the Donald Trump of the inner-city junk pile, and a kid who should have been hammering out engine blocks like his great-grandfather and playing in a garage band on weekends but was instead about to go to prison on a patch of volcanic ash that was only barely U.S. soil. A cross section of the community, when you thought about it, now that all the auto millions were draining into the eastern hemisphere. In one way or another I’d made all their troubles my own.

  But that’s my working method. Whenever I’m faced with a problem, I identify it, analyze it, and make it bigger.

  *

  There wasn’t much to watch after the news now that my basic cable had been shut off for bills outstanding, just a lot of people yelling at one another without a script and a drama about a fifty-year-old woman and her three forty-year-old daughters. I turned in early.

  The dream was the same, but I’d been through it so often I recognized it for what it was and did some light editing. Knowing the impact was coming front and rear, I slumped down in the driver’s seat and let my muscles go limp. The crunch when it came was just as sickening, with the novelty of having become dreary from repetition. I might as well have stuck with the tube.

  I sat up, groped among the day’s refuse on the nightstand, and lit a cigarette, watching the smoke drift toward the source of light, in broken frames like an image in a silent film. For some reason it always seeks the light.

  My head cleared a little more slowly. I realized the smoke was going in the wrong direction, away from the moon shining through the window and around the edge of the bedroom door standing half open. The lamp was on in the living room.

  As I was trying to remember whether I’d turned it off, something clinked. It sounded like metal on glass.

  I screwed out the cigarette in the ashtray on the nightstand—it seemed to make as much noise as someone dragging an iron safe through gravel—and reached inside the drawer I kept open with the .38 inside.

  With my fingers closed around the cold grip I slid the covers to one side and tried to keep springs from scraping against each other as I swung bare feet to the floor. The nights were getting cooler. The touch of the boards made me feel naked in my shorts.

  The something clinked again as I eased around the edge of the door. Once clear, I paused to let my eyes catch up to the light. The lamp was on its lowest setting, a soft yellow glow in a room crowded with the unfamiliar shadows that gathered in a place I knew well every other hour of the day and night. Someone was sitting in my armchair. I couldn’t tell if the figure was male or female.

  It moved then. Something glittered, accompanied by that metallic sound. Then it settled back into motionless silence.

 
I kept close to the wall far from the light, but I wasn’t fooling anyone. Two sharp clicks broke the stillness into three pieces and I blinked in the glare of the bulb at full power. My finger tightened on the trigger.

  Mary Ann Thaler was looking at me with the same quiet tension she brought to bear on every situation. Her legs were crossed and an inch and a half of medium-dark liquid glistened in the bottom of one of my old-fashioneds. She lowered her other hand from the switch on the lamp, lifted the glass, and sipped, causing the ice cubes floating inside to shift and touch the side with a clink. My blood resumed circulating with a rush like warm water. I relaxed.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your lock,” she said. “Just your door. The wood’s shrunk away from the frame. I used an emery board on the latch.”

  “It’s a wonder there aren’t more woman burglars.” I laid the revolver on the end table by the sofa.

  I didn’t feel any more self-conscious than usual. She’d seen me in my underwear under similarly unromantic circumstances. I watched her, fascinated. I’d never seen her drink anything stronger than white wine.

  She swirled the stuff in the glass. “So this is what the fuss is about. They should stick to golf.”

  “My brand barely qualifies as Scotch. Are you going to finish it?”

  “Be my guest.” She set it down next to the lamp.

  When I stepped forward to pick it up, she uncrossed her legs in transparent hose and crossed them the other way. Her years with the Detroit Police Department and now with Washington probably showed somewhere, but not in that light. She was slender and brown-haired, wearing it long now, and had on something tailored with an above-the-knee skirt that looked like tweed but moved like silk when she moved. Her shoes, narrow pumps with low heels for chasing terrorists, were on the floor beside the chair, one over on its side. I’d always admired her feet. I emptied the glass in one slow smooth motion and crunched the cubes.