Great Noir Fiction

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  “You’re crazy!” Fear broke her voice and she raised her hands palms out before her. “Crazy!”

  “It’s been said,” I told her as calmly as I could.

  I made love to her then, while the moon-struck ocean roared its approval.

  Afterward she lay beside me, completely meek.

  “We were going to be together anyway, darling, always,” she whispered, lightly trailing her long fingernails over me. Her fingernails were lacquered pale pink, and I saw that two of them were broken. “It doesn’t matter about the revolver. I don’t blame you. Not for anything.”

  She’d do anything to recover the gun, to recover her freedom. “I’m glad,” I said, holding her tight against me, feeling the blood-rush pounding in her heart.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she repeated softly, “doesn’t matter.” That’s when I knew the really deadly game was just beginning.

  The Croooked Way

  Loren D. Estleman

  Loren D. Estleman is probably tired of being compared to Raymond Chandler. For one thing, he’s tougher than Chandler, with a less forgiving social eye and a much more vivid sense of the real world. He has lately taken to writing historical detective novels, Whiskey River among them, which is only natural since Loren is also one of our best western novelists and has had plenty of practice using historical incidents as a backdrop.

  First published in 1988.

  You couldn’t miss the Indian if you’d wanted to. He was sitting all alone in a comer booth, which was probably his idea, but he hadn’t much choice because there was barely enough room in it for him. He had shoulders going into the next country and a head the size of a basketball, and he was holding a beer mug that looked like a shot glass between his callused palms. As I approached the booth he looked up at me—not very far up—through slits in a face made up of bunched ovals with a nose like the corner of a building. His skin was the color of old brick.

  “Mr. Frechette?” I asked.

  “Amos Walker?”

  I said I was. Coming from him my name sounded like two stones dropping into deep water. He made no move to shake hands, but he inclined his head a fraction of an inch and I borrowed a chair from a nearby table and joined him. He had on a blue shirt buttoned to the neck, and his hair, parted on one side and plastered down, was blue-black without a trace of gray. Nevertheless he was about fifty.

  “Charlie Stoat says you track like an Osage,” he said. “I hope you’re better than that. I couldn’t track a train.”

  “How is Charlie? I haven’t seen him since that insurance thing.”

  “Going under. The construction boom went bust in Houston just when he was expanding his operation.”

  “What’s that do to yours?” He’d told me over the telephone he was in construction.

  “Nothing worth mentioning. I’ve been running on a shoestring for years. You can’t break a poor man.”

  I signaled the bartender for a beer and he brought one over. It was a workingman’s hangout across the street from the Ford plant in Highland Park. The shift wasn’t due to change for an hour and we had the place to ourselves. “You said your daughter ran away,” I said, when the bartender had left. “What makes you think she’s in Detroit?”

  He drank off half his beer and belched dramatically. “When does client privilege start?”

  “It never stops.”

  I watched him make up his mind. Indians aren’t nearly as hard to read as they appear in books. He picked up a folded newspaper from the seat beside him and spread it out on the table facing me. It was yesterday’s Houston Chronicle, with a banner:

  BOYD MANHUNT MOVES NORTHEAST

  Bandit’s Van Found Abandoned in Detroit

  I had read a related wire story in that morning’s Detroit Free Press. Following the unassisted shotgun robberies of two savings- and-loan offices near Houston, concerned citizens had reported seeing twenty-two-year-old Virgil Boyd in Mexico and Oklahoma, but his green van with Texas plates had turned up in a city lot five minutes from where we were sitting. As of that morning, Detroit Police Headquarters was paved with Feds and sun- crinkled out-of-state cops chewing toothpicks.

  I refolded the paper and gave it back. “Your daughter’s taken up with Boyd?”

  “They were high school sweethearts,” Frechette said. “That was before Texas Federal foreclosed on his family’s ranch and his father shot himself. She disappeared from home after the first robbery. I guess that makes her an accomplice to the second.”

  “Legally speaking,” I agreed, “if she’s with him and it’s her idea. A smart DA would knock it down to harboring if she turned herself in. She’d probably get probation.”

  “She wouldn’t do that. She’s got some crazy idea she’s in love with Boyd.”

  “I’m surprised I haven’t heard about her.”

  “No one knows. I didn’t report her missing. If I had, the police would have put two and two together and there’d be a warrant out for her as well.”

  I swallowed some beer. “I don’t know what you think I can do that the cops and the FBI can’t.”

  “I know where she is.”

  I waited. He rotated his mug. “My sister lives in Southgate. We don’t speak. She has a white mother, not like me, and she takes after her in looks. She’s ashamed of being half Osage. First chance she had, she married a white man and got out of Oklahoma. That was before I left for Texas, where nobody knows about her. Anyway she got a big settlement in her divorce.”

  “You think Boyd and your daughter will go to her for a getaway stake?”

  “They won’t get it from me, and he didn’t take enough out of Texas Federal to keep a dog alive. Why else would they come here?”

  “So if you know where they’re headed, what do you need me for?”

  “Because I’m being followed and you’re not.”

  The bartender came around to offer Frechette a refill. The big Indian shook his head and he went away.

  “Cops?” I said.

  “One cop. J. P. Aheam.”

  He spaced out the name as if spelling a blasphemy. I said I’d never heard of him.

  “He’d be surprised. He’s a commander with the Texas State Police, but he thinks he’s the last of the Texas Rangers. He wants Boyd bad. The man’s a bloodhound. He doesn’t know about my sister, but he did his homework and found out about Suzie and that she’s gone, not that he could get me to admit she isn’t away visiting friends. I didn’t see him on the plane from Houston. I spotted him in the airport here when I was getting my luggage.”

  “Is he alone?”

  “He wouldn’t share credit with Jesus for saving a sinner.” He drained his mug. “When you find Suzie I want you to set up a meeting. Maybe I can talk sense into her.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Tell me about it. My old man fell off a girder in Tulsa when I was sixteen. Then I was fifty. Well, maybe one meeting can’t make up for all the years of not talking after my wife died, but I can’t let her throw her life away for not trying.”

  “I can’t promise Boyd won’t sit in on it.”

  “I like Virgil. Some of us cheered when he took on those bloodsuckers. He’d have gotten away with a lot more from that second job if he’d shot this stubborn cashier they had, but he didn’t. He wouldn’t hurt a horse or a man.”

  “That’s not the way the cops are playing it. If I find him and don’t report it I’ll go down as an accomplice. At the very least I’ll lose my license.”

  “All I ask is that you call me before you call the police.” He gave me a high-school graduation picture of a pretty brunette he said was Suzie. She looked more Asian than American Indian. Then he pulled a checkbook out of his hip pocket and made out a check to me for fifteen hundred dollars.

  “Too much,” I said.

  “You haven’t met J. P. Ahearn yet. My sister’s name is Harriett Lord.” He gave me an address on Eureka. “I’m at the Holi
day Inn down the street, room 716.”

  He called for another beer then and I left. Again he didn’t offer his hand. I’d driven three blocks from the place when I spotted the tail.

  The guy knew what he was doing. In a late-model tan Buick he gave me a full block and didn’t try to close up until we hit Woodward, where traffic was heavier. I finally lost him in the grand circle downtown, which confused him just as it does most people from the greater planet Earth. The Indians who settled Detroit were being farsighted when they named it the Crooked Way. From there I took Lafayette to I-75 and headed downriver.

  Harriett Lord lived in a tall white frame house with blue shutters and a large lawn fenced by cedars that someone had bullied into cone shape. I parked in the driveway, but before leaving the car I got out the unlicensed Luger I keep in a pocket under the dash and stuck it in my pants, buttoning my coat over it. When you’re meeting someone they tell you wouldn’t hurt a horse or a man, arm yourself.

  The bell was answered by a tall woman around forty, dressed in a khaki shirt and corduroy slacks and sandals. She had high cheekbones and slightly olive coloring that looked more like sun than heritage and her short hair was frosted, further reducing the Indian effect. When she confirmed that she was Harriet Lord I gave her a card and said I was working for her brother.

  Her face shut down. “I don’t have a brother. I have a halfbrother, Howard Frechette. If that’s who you’re working for, tell him I’m unavailable.” She started to close the door.

  “It’s about your niece Suzie. And Virgil Boyd.”

  “I thought it would be.”

  I looked at the door and got out a cigarette and lit it. I was about to knock again when the door opened six inches and she stuck her face through the gap. “You’re not with the police?”

  “We tolerate each other on the good days, but that’s it.”

  She glanced down. Her blue mascara gave her eyelids a translucent look. Then she opened the door the rest of the way and stepped aside. I entered a living room done all in beige and white and sat in a chair upholstered in eggshell chintz. I was glad I’d had my suit cleaned.

  “How’d you know about Suzie and Boyd?” I used a big glass ashtray on the Lucite coffee table.

  “They were here last night.” I said nothing. She sat on the beige sofa with her knees together. “I recognized him before I did her. I haven’t seen her since she was four, but I take a Texas paper and I’ve seen his picture. They wanted money. I thought at first I was being robbed.”

  “Did you give it to them?”

  “Aid a fugitive? Family responsibility doesn’t cover that even if I felt any. I left home because I got sick of hearing about our proud heritage. Howard wore his Indianness like a suit of armor, and all the time he resented me because I could pass for white. He accused me of being ashamed of my ancestry because I didn’t wear my hair in braids and hang turquoise all over me.”

  “He isn’t like that now.”

  “Maybe he’s mellowed. Not toward me, though, I bet. Now his daughter comes here asking for money so she and her desperado boyfriend can go on running. I showed them the door.”

  “I’m surprised Boyd went.”

  “He tried to get tough, but he’s not very big and he wasn’t armed. He took a step toward me and I took two steps toward him and he grabbed Suzie and left. Some Jesse James.”

  “I heard his shotgun was found in the van. I thought he’d have something else.”

  “If he did, he didn’t have it last night. I’d have noticed, just as I notice you have one.”

  I unbuttoned my coat and resettled the Luger. I was getting a different picture of “Mad Dog” Boyd from the one the press was painting. “The cops would call not reporting an incident like that being an accessory,” I said, squashing out my butt.

  “Just because I don’t want anything to do with Howard doesn’t mean I want to see my niece shot up by a SWAT team.”

  “I don’t suppose they said where they were going.”

  “You’re a good supposer.”

  I got up. “How did Suzie look?”

  “Like an Indian.”

  I thanked her and went out.

  I had a customer in my waiting room. A small angular party crowding sixty wearing a tight gray three-button suit, steel- rimmed glasses and a tan snap-brim hat squared over the frames. His crisp gray hair was cut close around large ears that stuck out, and he had a long sharp jaw with a sour mouth slashing straight across. He stood up when I entered. “Walker?” It was one of those bitter pioneer voices.

  “Depends on who you are,” I said.

  “I’m the man who ought to arrest you for obstructing justice.”

  “I’ll guess. J. P. Ahearn.”

  “Commander Ahearn.”

  “You’re about four feet short of what I had pictured.”

  “You’ve heard of me.” His chest came out a little.

  “Who hasn’t?” I unlocked the inner office door. He marched in, slung a look around and took possession of the customer’s chair. I sat down behind the desk and reached for a cigarette without asking permission. He glared at me through his spectacles.

  “What you did downtown today constitutes fleeing and eluding.”

  “In Texas, maybe. In Michigan there has to be a warrant out first. What you did constitutes harassment in this state.”

  “I don’t have official status here. I can follow anybody for any reason or none at all.”

  “Is this what you folks call a Mexican standoff?”

  “I don’t approve of smoking,” he snapped.

  “Neither do I, but some of it always leaks out of my lungs.” I blew at the ceiling and got rid of the match. “Why don’t let’s stop circling each other and get down to why you’re here?”

  “I want to know what you and the Indian talked about.”

  “I’d show you, but we don’t need the rain.”

  He bared a perfect set of dentures, turning his face into a skull. “I ran your plate with the Detroit Police. I have their complete cooperation in this investigation. The Indian hired you to take money to Boyd to get him and his little Osage slut to Canada. You delivered it after you left the bar and lost me. That’s aiding and abetting and accessory after the fact of armed robbery. Maybe I can’t prove it, but I can make a call and tank you for forty-eight hours on suspicion.”

  “Eleven.”

  He covered up his store-boughts. “What?”

  “That’s eleven times I’ve been threatened with jail,” I said. “Three of those times I wound up there. My license has been swiped at fourteen times, actually taken away once. Bodily harm—you don’t count bodily harm. I’m still here, six feet something and one hundred eighty pounds of incorruptible PI with a will of iron and a skull to match. You hard guys come and go like phases of the moon.”

  “Don’t twist my tail, son. I don’t always rattle before I bite.”

  “What’s got you so hot on Boyd?”

  You could have cut yourself on his jaw. “My daddy helped run Parker and Barrow to ground in ’34. His daddy fought Geronimo and chased John Wesley Hardin out of Texas. My son’s a Dallas city patrolman, and so far I don’t have a story to hand him that’s a blister on any of those. I’m retiring next year.”

  “Last I heard Austin was offering twenty thousand for Boyd’s arrest and conviction.”

  “Texas Federal has matched it. Alive or dead. Naturally, as a duly sworn officer of the law I can’t collect. But you being a private citizen—”

  “What’s the split?”

  “Fifty-fifty.”

  “No good.”

  “Do you know what the pension is for a retired state police commander in Texas? A man needs a nest egg.”

  “I meant it’s too generous. You know as well as I do those rewards are never paid. You just didn’t know I knew.”

  He sprang out of his chair. There was no special animosity in his move; that would be the way he always got up.

  “Boyd won’t get
out of this country even if you did give him money,” he snapped. “He’ll never get past the border guards.”

  “So go back home.”

  “Boyd’s mine.”

  The last word ricocheted. I said, “Talk is he felt he had a good reason to stick up those savings-and-loans. The company was responsible for his father’s suicide.”

  “If he’s got the brains God gave a mad dog he’ll turn himself in to me before he gets shot down in the street or kills someone and winds up getting the needle in Huntsville. And his squaw right along with him.” He took a shabby wallet out of his coat and gave me a card. “That’s my number at the Houston post. They’ll route your call here. If you’re so concerned for Boyd you’ll tell me where he is before the locals gun him down.”

  “Better you than some stranger, that it?”

  “Just keep on twisting, son. I ain’t in the pasture yet.”

  After he left, making as much noise in his two-inch cowboy heels as a cruiserweight, I called Barry Stackpole at the Detroit News.

  “Guy I’m after is wanted for Robbery, Armed,” I said, once the small talk was put away. “He ditched his gun and then his stake didn’t come through and now he’ll have to cowboy a job for case dough. Where would he deal a weapon if he didn’t know anybody in town?”

  “Emma Chaney.”

  “Ma? I thought she’d be dead by now.”

  “She can’t die. The Detroit cops are third in line behind Interpol and Customs for her scalp and they won’t let her until they’ve had their crack.” He sounded pleased, which he probably was. Barry made his living writing about crime, and when it prospered he did, too.

  “How can I reach her?”

  “Are you suggesting I’d know where she is and not tell the authorities? Got a pencil?”

  I tried the number as soon as he was off the line. On the ninth ring, I got someone with a smoker’s wheeze. “Uh-huh.”

  “The name’s Walker,” I said. “Barry Stackpole gave me this number.”