American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Our incarceration system failed you,” I went on. “Another year or so of therapy and you might’ve developed patience. All you did was blow both your chances at a piece of a couple of million. When Deirdre found out he was using her as a fence, she broke off the engagement. They fought, she’s dead, and Bairn’s got worse problems with the law than he had with you.”

  “Bairn tell you I turned him down?”

  “I never got close enough to ask. He was the job, not the client.”

  “Know where he is?”

  I shook my head. “Neither do the cops. That’s what makes him their star.”

  Watson took his first drink. He blinked both eyes and pushed the mug away. “Strong shit. No wonder you dream funny. Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, I found out what I came here to find out. I got new business with Bairn now his meal ticket’s getting sliced up downtown. He offered me ten percent of the two million when it came through. He started out lower, but I had Ernesto negotiate and we reached what they call accord. You’re still working if you want to know who’s still squeezing him. It ain’t me.”

  “You wouldn’t lie.”

  “What’s the point of bluffing when I got Elron in my hand?”

  The big man emptied his mug in a jerk and plocked it down on the table. It looked like a demitasse in his paw. “Jesus. Why’n’t you just chew the grounds?”

  “We got a rally to attend.” Watson slid to the end of his bench, spread his feet, and pushed himself upright. “You should consider joining the rank and file. No one should live like this.” He swiveled his yellow eyes toward Elron.

  The big man curled four fingers around the back edge of the refrigerator, took in a deep breath that swelled his face and turned it red, and pulled. The refrigerator tipped forward in one smooth motion and shook the house when it struck the linoleum.

  Elron seemed to notice then he was still holding the scrap of paper in his other hand with my address on it. He looked around as if for a wastebasket, then took a step and laid it gently on the table. He followed Watson out through the living room while I sat and finished my coffee.

  TWELVE

  Hey, man.”

  Fuller sounded a little less worn. Whatever he’d smoked the night before must have given him some rest in spite of the hard floor against his old bones.

  I said, “I got a busy signal before. Does this mean you’re through making your calls?”

  “They got self-help manuals for everything else. They ought to write one for dealing with funeral directors. How big’s your trunk?”

  “Why, did you kill one?”

  “No, I’m moving today. I don’t need much space to pack what the buzzards left me. How’s my credit with you?”

  “Based on the advance you paid, I could move you to South America. What hotel did you pick?”

  “That’s the thing. Just when you think you know someone you divorced, she turns out human. I called Gloria first thing this morning. We cried a lot, then she offered me the vacation house I gave her in the settlement till I can find a place of my own. She ain’t used it in years. Dee-dee went there sometimes,” he said after a moment.

  “Sure you’re up to that?”

  “I figure I should get it all out right at the start. Then maybe it won’t be so hard later. What do you think?”

  “I think it’ll be hard regardless. Where’s the house?” If it was Detroit Beach I was going to back out.

  “Black Squirrel Lake. Know it?”

  “If it’s got lake on the end I’m shaky. Got directions?”

  “I can drive it in the dark. We practically lived up there from postseason till spring training.”

  “I’ll bring my rod and reel.”

  “Hope you like pike. They ate everything else.”

  I spent a little while getting my refrigerator back on its feet, then opened it to survey the damage. The lightbulb was broken and I’d lost four eggs and a six-pack of Stroh’s, but the compressor was still working. There’s something to be said for living the spare life of the bachelor. I mopped up the mess and climbed into the traces.

  At Alter Street, where Jefferson Avenue stops and Lake Shore Drive begins, a derelict sat on the southeast corner surrounded by his shabby duffels and knotted Wal-Mart sacks, smoking a cigarette and watching a Micronesian gardener edging blue-gray sod on the northwest corner. The derelict belonged to Detroit, the gardener to the first of the private estates that grew progressively larger as the river slowed down and spread to form Lake St. Clair. Which was the dream and which was the reality depended on which way you were driving. When it came to situations, you couldn’t come up with a better name for a street in that particular spot than alter.

  I drove past two miles of scrollwork, topiary, and fleets of stretches and two-seaters, then turned into the white-powder drive between the two gray stone pillars and the rectangles of lawn that looked naked now without furniture, the grass trampled flat and shiny by hundreds of pairs of feet. Arcs of water erupted from underground sprinklers and drifted in apparently aimless patterns, making rainbows in the sunlight hammering down from above. Fuller caught me watching them with my hands in my pockets when he opened the door.

  “Somebody forgot to call the water company,” he greeted. “I’m running up the bill for Washington. Give me a hand with these, okay? I ran out the warranty in my arm thirty years ago.”

  He was holding a silver garment bag, a two-suiter, over one shoulder and had a Detroit Tigers duffel at his feet, Domino’s blue from the early days of the succession of pizza franchises that had owned the team. I leaned across the threshold and hoisted the duffel by its handle. Behind him the morning sun painted shimmering stripes on a polished walnut floor that swept uninterrupted to the walls. “Looks like they even sold the dust bunnies,” I said.

  “They went last. Careful with that bag. I’m heading out with a year’s supply of lightbulbs.”

  The duffel wasn’t heavy. “Anything else?”

  “I thought about faucet handles, but I figured they’d come after me for those.”

  “I meant personal possessions.”

  He grinned, reached inside the slash pocket of the team Windbreaker he wore over his sweats, tossed a baseball up above his head, caught it without looking, and returned it to the pocket.

  “The ball?” I asked.

  “That’s what the Sports Illustrated photographer said when I let Dee-dee play jacks with it. He said I ought to be more careful with a historical artifact.” The grin evaporated.

  “It looks like she didn’t feel anything. For whatever that’s worth.”

  He nodded, but he didn’t appear to be listening. He didn’t look rangy today, but frail, and every bit of sixty. The gray eyes lacked luster in a face as weatherchecked as an old tire. His gaze drifted out over the lawn. “You missed the TV crews. I hid upstairs and called my lawyer, who’s got plants at the stations. Appears I left for California last night.”

  “That’s going to cost.”

  “When you don’t have it to pay you don’t worry about it.”

  I took the envelope out of my breast pocket and stuck it at him. “I’m pretty sure this wasn’t reported. The cops have all the federal company they want these days without inviting more.”

  “It’ll help.” He folded it one-handed without looking inside and put it in the same pocket with the no-hitter ball. “They find the son of a bitch?”

  “If they did they’re not announcing it. I didn’t want to call and show too much interest. They think I’m off the case. Am I?”

  “We’ll talk about it on the way. Is that your ride?” He squinted at the Cutlass in the driveway, its blue paint turning to chalk in the sun.

  “Don’t let the dings fool you. There isn’t a thing about the engine that’s legal.”

  We put his bags in the trunk and I slammed the lid. He started to get in on the passenger’s side in front, then withdrew his foot and walked down the driveway toward the stre
et. About thirty yards from the house he turned around and stood looking at it for a full minute. Then he took the baseball out of his pocket and flipped it back and forth between his hands. A caterpillar climbed my spine in high heels.

  He nodded, a short jerk of his chin, as if approving a signal from the catcher. He clasped the ball in both hands against his chest, then wound up, raising it above his head and lifting his left foot as high as his belt. His right arm swept down and around twice, then back, paused, and snapped out straight as he came down on the foot, lifting the other, putting his whole body into the pitch. The ball vanished from his hand. I heard a whoosh and then a pane jumped out of one of the mullioned windows to the right of the front door with a tinny tinkle.

  I was behind the wheel when he came back up the driveway and slid in beside me. “Sure you wanted to do that?”

  “It was like I was carrying around a anvil in my pocket.”

  “We could go in and get it.”

  He looked at me. “Now, what’d that do besides take all the point out of the stupidest thing I ever done?”

  I didn’t have any argument for that. I’d never seen a more convincing suicide note.

  I hadn’t been through that part of Oakland County in some time. Judging by the housing developments that had sprung up since then, it might have been forty years. We drove past sprawling villages of mammoth houses surrounded by baby shrubs, raw sections of upturned earth dotted with dozers and portable toilets and buildings in every stage of construction, and school after school with temporary classrooms towed in and propped up on blocks to handle the sudden overload. It was one big tribute to Tyvek. I braked twice to avoid colliding with deer looking for a new place to live.

  Fuller broke the long silence. “How they figure to feed all these folks when the last farm’s plowed under?”

  “Plant wheat in the empty cities.” A billboard rolled past calling our attention to the future site of yet another Fox Run.

  Black Squirrel Lake made a figure eight on the eastern edge of Dodge Brothers State Park, girdled in the middle by a tangle of reeds and pussy willows with a channel running through it. We passed a tiny rustic settlement flanked by a bar and diner, turned at a sign obliterated by buckshot, and followed a gravel track ending abruptly in front of a rectangular house sided in redwood with a front porch running its length. Shaggy plants grew out of copper pots suspended from the roof. “Somebody’s going to have to water ’em,” said Fuller.

  We got out. At around 1100 square feet it was one of the larger houses in its immediate neighborhood. Older tile-and-tar-paper shacks flanked it on narrow lots. A cedar lodge the size of the governor’s mansion took up several acres directly across the lake, with a deck overhanging the water and below it a pontoon boat tied to a private dock. Its nearest neighbors were a Cape Cod nearly as large and a Frank Lloyd Wright affair of gaunt girders and glass sheets. That seemed to be the more fashionable side of the lake.

  “Come take a look at this.”

  Fuller had gotten onto the porch to fish the key out of one of the hanging plants. The tone of his voice brought me back up the worn path in the grass I’d wandered down for a closer look at the lives of people who took vacations. He stood with his back to the driveway, the silver garment bag hanging from his hand to the boards. As I stepped up beside him he withdrew his index finger from a neat round hole in the front door, a third of the way down from the top and an inch right of center.

  “Squirrel?” he asked.

  “Squirrel,” I said. “If someone shot it from a gun.”

  “There’s no hunting here. The lake owners’ association has its own security.”

  “Not many people hunt from inside a house. This bullet was traveling our way.” I pointed to a bristle of splinters pointing out.

  “What the hell.” He aimed the key at the lock.

  I grasped his wrist before he could turn it. “Those splinters are fresh.”

  He got it. He let the bag slide the rest of the way to the boards and we backed off the porch.

  On the ground I pointed to a corner of the house out of direct view from the windows and he took up that position while I opened the door on the passenger’s side of the car and released the spring that opened the little hatch under the glove compartment. The Luger came free of the metal clips with a twist. I checked the magazine, heeled it back into the handle, chambered a round, and circled the house on foot with the barrel raised, seeing what I could of the inside through the windows from ground level. It was useless unless the shooter was careless enough not to stay away from them, but it beat charging the place without a plan. When I got to where Fuller was waiting, I got the key from him and told him to stay put a little longer. Then I crept back up the steps to the porch.

  I turned the knob slowly until it stopped. The door was locked. I slid in the key without scraping the sides and turned it just as slowly until the dead bolt slid back with a snap. Then I tightened my grip on the pistol and went in.

  No one shot at me, not in the open floor plan of the kitchen and dining and living room areas or in either of the two bedrooms, one larger than the other, or the bathroom that was just big enough for a sink, shower stall, and toilet. The place was tidy, with a piny smell throughout and personal items here and there I didn’t bother to stop and study. There was no telephone or television, no video games, just a few paperbacks and a stack of board games in ratty cardboard boxes stacked in a closet to distract the occupants from the entertainments offered by the lake. A genuine getaway spot.

  A sliding doorwall let me onto a shallow deck overlooking the water, with an old-fashioned wooden chaise longue, a green resin chair, and a white wicker love seat, where one could sit on the faded cushions, sipping a drink and smacking mosquitoes and watching speedboats razz about and the pontoon boat from the wilderness mansion across the way cruise in circles, leaking dance music and the clink of cocktails being stirred. I poked the Luger under my waistband and leaned on the railing. That gave me a fresh angle on the near shore, and a look at the boxy rear end of an orange Aztek sticking up out of the water.

  THIRTEEN

  When we got down there, I pointed out the twin tracks where the Aztek’s tires had flattened the grass from where it had been pushed or driven off the driveway down to the shore. I’d walked right across them on my patrol around the house, but they weren’t obvious and I hadn’t been looking at the ground. Where the grass ended and the earth sloped to the water’s edge, two furrows led through the mud to the lake. The vehicle had rolled a few yards into the water and hung up with its front two-thirds submerged and the hatch pointed skyward at a thirty-degree angle. I took out my pistol and offered Fuller the butt. “Know how to use one?”

  “I grew up on Erskine. Wasn’t for baseball I’d probably be doing my time in Jackson. What you want me to shoot?” He took it.

  “Whatever moves when I open the hatch.” I’d left my coat in the Cutlass. I sat down on the grass, took off my shoes and socks, and rolled my pants above my knees. It didn’t make me feel a bit like Huckleberry Finn.

  “What’s the odds something will?”

  “Zero.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “My arithmetic’s not that good.”

  “Is it Bairn’s? There’s plenty of these around.”

  “Not with his plate.”

  “So this is where he’s been hiding. He must’ve spent some time out here with Dee-dee.”

  It was another hot day and the water was only a few degrees cooler, but it chilled me like a blast of liquid oxygen when I waded in. The bottom was mucky and oozed between my toes; I might have been walking on a bed of earthworms.

  Despite the precautions I was soaked to the waist when I reached the car. I cupped my hands around my eyes and leaned against the back window, but the glass was tinted and I saw only shadows. Nothing seemed to be moving around inside. I reached down for the handle. If the hatch was locked I’d have to go back and leave it for the cops. I should h
ave left it for them anyway, but my judgment’s not often better than my arithmetic.

  It wasn’t locked. The latch clunked when I lifted the handle. I raised the hatch until the hydraulics took over, then got out of the way of anything that might come at me from inside.

  Nothing did. I hadn’t expected it to, but I’d been shot once for my expectations. There was plenty of cargo space behind the rear seat, which folded down when extra was needed. It wasn’t. The man who lay there with his knees tucked into his chest looked to be only average height and underweight for that. It gave his cheeks that hollow starved look you see in cologne advertisements; his cocoa-brown suit, creased and wrinkled now, would have hung handsomely on his delicate frame. The face was Latin, the disarranged hair thick and black and growing far down on the forehead, the beard blue beneath the skin, lashes long and curling where the eyes stared through them at nothing. He’d bled a little from the hole in his shirt, leaving an oblong patch on the carpeted deck like rusty water stain.

  “Who is it, Bairn?” Fuller had a good view from shore.

  “No.”

  Tucked behind the bent knees like an afterthought was a black enamel toolbox the size of a small tackle. I turned up the hinged latch with a knuckle and tipped back the lid. Inside was a stainless-steel hammer with a black neoprene grip and a box of three-inch spikes.

  I felt a foolish little pang of disappointment. I’d psyched myself up for a different sort of introduction to Ernesto Esmerelda, Wilson Watson’s chief enforcer. It was like cramming all night for an exam, only to find out in the morning it had been canceled.