While we were waiting for a response to our 911 call, Fuller gave me a towel from the linen closet in the house to sponge off the muck and a pair of sweats from his duffel to wear while my trousers hung to dry over the railing of the deck. They were too long for me and I bunched them up around my ankles while my feet appreciated the dry warmth of a pair of white gym socks. We sat on the deck, which bore no visible evidence of Deirdre’s occupancy. He’d been sitting less than two minutes when he sprang up, muttering something, and went back inside. I watched a fisherman in an aluminum boat trying his luck among the reeds. My mood brightened when Fuller came back with a bottle of Polish vodka and two barrel glasses pinched between the fingers of one hand.
“Private stash,” he said, pouring. “It’s been aging all this time under a couple of loose floorboards. I had a leetle problem when I had my slump.”
We touched glasses and I drank. The pure grain alcohol scorched my throat going down and vibrated the molecules in the floor of my stomach, producing heat on the microwave principle. “First drink’s best, East or West.” I’d heard it in an old western.
“First and last,” he said. “Everything in between’s just something you got to get through.”
“Like a slump.”
“Hell on earth. Them big bonuses is just an ulcer waiting to bleed. You don’t live up to ’em, it’s back to the minors. Only they ain’t so bad as the worrying about it. Wilson Watson. Seems to me I heard of him.”
“He’s a gambler,” I said. “Also a gangster and a labor leader, which aren’t always the same thing. He made a killing on your no-hitter.” I’d brought him up to date on the way back from the lake: Charlotte Sing, Hilary Bairn’s plunge at Detroit Beach that had put him under Watson’s thumb, the stolen watch, Esmerelda’s reputation, Watson’s visit to my house that morning. I thought laying out the facts might put everything into perspective, but it left me more confused than ever. I took another drink. It was as disappointing as he’d said.
He shuddered. “Gambling, no word’s scarier. You can dope or carouse, commit rape, manslaughter, and still get your shot at Cooperstown if you won enough games, but make one call to a bookie and you wind up greeting at Wal-Mart. Look at Pete Rose.”
“Showboat.”
“Well, then, Denny McLain. First thirty-game winner since Dizzy Dean and the last we’ll ever see, but he broke some legs for a gambler and did time, and that’s all she wrote. If it’d been for a politician it’d been different.”
I let him go on. Sports are always safe. We were up to the World Series That Never Was, a running sore with Fuller, when the fuzz came.
Semifuzz, as it turned out. His name was Fred Loudermilk, and he introduced himself as a captain with security in the service of the Black Squirrel Lake Owners’ Association. His Jeep Cherokee was painted sky blue with a lightning-bolt insignia on a white circle on the doors and orange lights clamped to the roof. He wore the lightning-bolt in patches on his sleeves, sky blue also, and a ball cap with the bill bent into a horseshoe curl framing a lean tan face, mirror-finish sunglasses, and a sandy moustache trimmed and trained to follow the curve of the bill. He stood four inches shorter than I on the front porch. “Which one of you placed the call?”
“I did,” I said. “I thought I was talking to the sheriff’s department.”
“We monitor all nine-one-one calls placed from the lake. I’m also an officer in the sheriff’s reserve. That means I’m qualified to investigate criminal complaints.” He thumbed open a notebook with a spiral on top. “You’re Amos Walker, a private investigator? Did you know the victim?”
“Not personally. His name’s Esmerelda. He ran errands for Wilson Watson, a semiracketeer in Detroit.”
“What’s a semiracketeer?”
“A punk who hasn’t been caught yet.”
He didn’t look up from the notebook. “Says here he was killed on the premises. What makes you think so?”
“You’re standing on the spot.”
He stepped back, lifting his glasses for the first time to stare down at the porch. Neither Fuller nor I had noticed the rusty smear until we’d come back for a second look.
“Bullet came from inside,” I said. “There’s the hole. He didn’t even give him a chance to knock.”
“You’re Darius Fuller, a retired ballplayer? What’s your connection?”
“I built the place. I’m using it on my ex-wife’s invitation.”
“Call sheet at the office says a Deirdre Fuller is the primary resident. That your ex-wife?”
“Daughter. She’s dead.”
Captain Loudermilk knew that. “I’m sorry for your loss. May I see the victim?”
We took him around back. He went as far as the water’s edge, getting mud on his glossy black elastic-sided boots and satisfying himself with the view through the Aztek’s open hatch. He asked about the vehicle’s owner and we gave him that part of the story too, but he already seemed familiar with most of it. He was a recording cop.
“It’s easy enough to work out,” he said. “Shooter got him from ambush, stowed him in back of the SUV, drove it up to the drop, put it in neutral, and got out and pushed it over the edge, counting on it rolling all the way into the lake. Either he didn’t hang around to see it get stuck or fled when it did. No telling how long it would’ve gone undiscovered if it hadn’t. These are private lots.”
He was still speculating when a sheriff ‘s cruiser came our way across the grass, following the tracks left by the Aztek. It stopped short of the drop. The door came open on the passenger’s side and Inspector John Alderdyce got out.
FOURTEEN
What’d you use, a helicopter?” I asked.
Alderdyce shook his bucket-loader head. He wore gray gabardine with a dusty pink stripe and a pink shirt. He looked as effeminate as a Chevrolet short block. “I can straighten out the surface roads when I get a call that interests me. But I can’t hold a match to these county boys, so I left the city car this side of the line and hitched a ride.”
That was all the conversation we had for a while. He went over to join the conference with Loudermilk and the sheriff ‘s lieutenant who’d driven the cruiser, a redhead on a heavy frame with a face like a bruised apple, patched all over with heat rash. The lieutenant spent most of his time listening, which was uncommon when dealing with private security. A few minutes later the morgue wagon came, discreetly camouflaged as an overlong station wagon painted slate gray, then the forensics team, and deputies who put on rubber waders and helped the morgue crew haul the body to shore on a stretcher, holding it clear of the water. A tow-truck team parked out of the way while the detail squad took pictures of treadmarks and looked for footprints and broken pen points, then backed the truck around and one of them waded out and found a place for the hook on the Aztek’s frame. The winch clanked. In a few minutes Hilary Bairn’s ride sat on shore, galled with primordial muck to its rear axle and streaming green slime from the top of its windshield. The sheet metal appeared undamaged.
By this time spectators had gathered, made up of Darius Fuller’s neighbors in shorts and T-shirts, drawn by the unusual activity. No one came out of the small shack on the closest lot, with a galvanized roof and swatches of tar paper showing where tile had been stripped off for replacement; a scaffold stood in front and stacks of composition siding lay on wooden pallets next to the driveway, and I noticed for the first time a FOR RENT sign and the name of a realty firm stuck in the lawn. It was the beginning of the gentrification of that side of the lake, only a generation removed from tacky wigwams and bide-a-wee lodges with outhouses in back. Under normal circumstances, protecting the building materials from theft would be Loudermilk’s biggest responsibility.
We reconvened—Alderdyce, the security man, the sheriff’s lieutenant, and I—in the living room area of the lake house, a cheerful arrangement of rattan chairs and a sofa upholstered with a palm-leaf print, that felt like the waiting room in a funeral home: Fuller’s mood, dampened by the recent pre
sence in the house of Deirdre, was contagious. Streaks left by the spray powder the fingerprinters had used contributed to the cloud of gloom. The lieutenant, whose name was Phillips, had made arrangements with Alderdyce to match them with Bairn’s prints on file from his apartment.
“Wilson Watson,” Alderdyce said, seated on the sofa in a crouch, scraping his palms between his knees. “His name didn’t come up last night.”
I said, “It didn’t seem to matter then. You already figured Bairn was in trouble with the sharks and casinos around. Who didn’t really matter, if he was desperate enough to blow his shot at two million just to keep the dogs from snapping at his heels.”
“You don’t get to choose what matters. If you had that privilege, you lost it when Bairn put a bullet in Watson’s boy Esmerelda. I could’ve put a tail on him and we’d have Bairn in custody instead of sending another local thug on his way to cold storage.”
“If it was Bairn,” I said.
“Not much of a jump. He knows by now we’re looking for his car, and he had to get rid of the body anyway. It was just his sore luck it didn’t sink. His streak’s been holding for a long time now.” Alderdyce looked at Fuller. “Did you keep a gun here?”
“This is the first time I’ve been here in twenty years. I gave Dee-dee a pistol when she got a place of her own, a nine-millimeter. It’s registered in my name.”
“It’d take a nine-millimeter minimum to punch through that door and still be lethal.” Loudermilk untucked his necktie from his uniform shirt and used the end to polish his sunglasses. His eyes were blue and protruberant, like pop rivets. “Unlucky or not, he did okay for an amateur. One bullet straight through the pump, with a door between. You’d think he planned it.”
Alderdyce looked at me. “You still carrying around that Luger?”
I’d gotten it back from Fuller and put it back in the car. I went out and brought it back. The inspector checked the load and sniffed the barrel. “Everytime I take this from you I think I shouldn’t give it back. You ever get around to registering it?” He stuck the butt my way.
“I left the legal piece back in town.” I slid it under the elastic of my borrowed sweats.
“Who says it wasn’t planned?” Phillips dabbed a folded handkerchief to the scabby red patches on his face and examined the results on the fabric. “This Esmerelda had his toolbox with him. He must’ve thought he had an appointment.”
“Someone else might have tipped him Bairn was here,” I said. “Everything Bairn’s done up to this point is reaction to something someone else did. You can’t lay a trap for a pro like Esmerelda without experience, beginner’s luck or no.”
“Where’d Watson say Bairn got cash from one of his ATMs?” Alderdyce asked me.
“He didn’t.”
“Guess.”
“Not in front of the law. That half-assed I’m not.”
He watched me, putting two fingers to his lips in a gesture made meaningless by the fact there wasn’t a cigarette between them. It isn’t nicotine that brings people back to their bad habits so much as all the silly leftover movements without a prop.
Phillips said, “Question is, if it’s Watson that Bairn was hiding from, who killed Mr. Fuller’s daughter?”
Fuller said, “He killed her all right. When she told him to walk, took away the jackpot he was counting on, he struck out like the scared skunk he is and ran.” He’d moved on to the anger stage.
“Brings us back to him laying a trap,” Loudermilk said. “How’d Watson find out otherwise?”
“Maybe Walker told him.” The lieutenant resumed treating his rash. Up close it didn’t look transient enough to have been caused by heat and chafe. It was some kind of eczema or psoriasis.
“It wouldn’t much matter if I did,” I said. “When Deirdre wound up dead all over the news, he knew he wasn’t going to get a penny out of Bairn, so he sent his chief crucifixionist to make an example.”
Loudermilk wiped the legs of his glasses. “I don’t think that’s a word.”
I looked at him. I wondered what his story was. Most rented heat would have been sent on its way by this time.
Alderdyce went back to scraping his palms. They sounded like two sanding blocks. “Time of death will tell us whether Esmerelda had time to come looking for him after the story broke. You’ve got a good coroner’s office in this county,” he told Phillips.
“We ought to. We got the biggest tax base in the state and half as many murders as Detroit. Bairn can’t get far on foot,” he added. “His picture’s faxed to every unit a hundred miles around.”
Loudermilk looked at his watch, put on his sunglasses, said he had rounds to make, and shook hands all around. After he left I told the lieutenant, “You were pretty patient with him.”
“He had my job before the administration changed. It doesn’t do to get too close to the sheriff when the next election might turn him out of office.”
“You don’t look worried.”
He smiled. “I’m thinking of running myself next time. I’ve been married to the same woman for twenty-seven years and I don’t sleep with the help.”
We went outside, where the forensics team was packing up. The morgue wagon had gone and the crowd of onlookers was smaller. They’d begun to return to their cabins to resume their vacations. The smell of grilling meat reminded me I hadn’t eaten all day.
“You going to be in your office later?” Alderdyce asked.
“After I catch a bite.”
“Make it hearty. This time you’re going to tell me everything you did and everyone you talked to since you took this job and everything they said.”
“Most of it won’t do you any more good than it did me. It’s full of dead ends and feathers.”
“And you’re full of shit.”
I went to the edge of the lake and smoked a cigarette while he and the lieutenant were talking to the lab crew. Phillips was going to have a hard time getting into office with that face.
My fisherman was nowhere in sight. Something, a pike or a snapping turtle, poked its head above the surface near the middle of the open water and disappeared. I watched the ripples it made until they, too, vanished in the reeds. I wished I hadn’t been kidding about bringing a rod and reel. It would have been nice to stand there making casts while I waited for my pants to finish drying on the deck. The point of the practice wasn’t to catch anything, necessarily. It would have been a nice change.
Darius Fuller came down to join me.
“You don’t have to wait,” he said. “The inspector offered me a ride to a hotel. I can’t stay here.”
“He wants to question you some more.”
“He would anyway. Maybe this way I get let alone quicker.”
“We’re finished, then.”
He took out the envelope, counted out some bills, and stuck them at me. “I’ll come around to your office for the ring.”
I took a thousand. “Keep the other five hundred. I only worked two days.”
He put away the extra bills and offered his hand. I took it. “I’m sorry again.”
“Not as sorry as the sorry son of a bitch that killed my girl. I hope the cops here don’t catch him. I hope he runs to Texas or Oklahoma and kills somebody there, not somebody’s daughter, just some no-account, and they slip him the needle. I’ll pay forty-nine thousand for a seat in the dugout.”
When he left I snapped my cigarette stub out over the water. It had barely touched the surface when something—my pike or my snapping turtle—struck at it. The ripples it made were just enough to set bobbing a little motorboat tied to a dilapidated pier behind the empty shack next door, its outboard tilted forward and covered with brown canvas. I turned toward the road, and as I did I saw the checked curtains in a near window, tucked around the edges of the frame and sill the way people do when they aren’t coming back for a while and don’t want anyone snooping inside. One of the panels moved just a little.
A strip of shingle-sided buildings stood a couple o
f hundred yards up the road, just far enough back for customers to park and buy tackle from the hardware store and fresh fish from the market to take home when they bombed out on the lake. For the rest there was the Wooden Duck Bar, a windowless dive, and the Chain O’ Lakes Diner bookending the little commercial center on the other side. I went in and sat at the counter and ate a ham sandwich and clam chowder from a can. The coffee at least was fresh and I drank three cups. I wasn’t in any hurry to get back to the shack. The sheriff’s lieutenant had left two deputies and a cruiser in front and they had a clear view of the lake until the sun went down. No one was coming out before then.
I hadn’t lied to John Alderdyce when I’d told him I’d be in my office later that day. I hadn’t known then the shack next door wasn’t empty.
The proprietress, a colorful old party with a cataract patch under her bifocals, took suspicious notice of my pants, wrinkled and still damp. I paid and went out and drove around the lake. About a third of the way around, the road surface improved and the lots got bigger, no stretching your arm out the window to straighten the kinks and punching your neighbor in the ear. The bigger places had carports, decks as big as any of the houses near Fuller’s, and fresh asphalt on the boat landings. I spotted three more signs offering places for rent or lease by Peninsular Realty, the same firm that owned the shack I was interested in. It advertised an 800 number and a Web site, www.pleasantpeninsula.com. Just in case anyone was looking I got out in front of a couple of the available properties and knocked on the doors. If anyone answered, I was an interested buyer. No one did, and the doors were locked. No open houses at Peninsular. I figured the company had three or four million tied up in Black Squirrel Lake alone.
When the sun bled over the water I cruised past Fuller’s place and the shack, found a space between a brace of battered pickup trucks parked next to the Wooden Duck Bar, and strolled back down the road. My pants chafed my thighs and had shrunk a little. The Luger pressed against my belt like a tumor.
The two deputies were outside the prowl car. One of them sat on the front bumper smoking while his partner emptied his bladder behind a jack pine contorted into a sideshow shape at the end of the driveway near the road. His urine steamed a little. The nights can be chill in that lake country even in summer.
American Detective: An Amos Walker Novel Page 10