Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 02

by Angel Eyes

  I got a box of paper clips out of my desk and emptied it into an envelope. Then I folded my handkerchief small, inserted it in the box, placed the ring on top of that, and replaced the lid. Somehow it seemed more respectful. I snapped a rubber band around the box, tucked one of my cards beneath that, and slipped it into my overcoat pocket. Troy wasn’t there when I descended. I levered my crate out of the loading zone in front of the building and highballed it to the riverfront.

  The brown-and-silver towers of the Renaissance Center rose from the construction surrounding them like feudal ruins, afternoon sun striping the 740-foot central turret of the Detroit Plaza, the world’s tallest failing hotel. Near that site in the year 1701, Cadillac erected a village of stout logs designed to withstand an Indian siege, and in 1974 history swung full circle when the city he had founded began work on a structure impressive enough to discourage rioters and second-story men. The result is a Xanadu overlooking some of the poorest real estate in the Northwest Territory. The hotel received its baptism of blood shortly before it opened, when a young woman hurled herself from its summit. It was a bad omen. But while the hotel languishes because the city has no tourist trade, the office complex and shopping center prosper, those who can afford the rates flocking to the security of the Center’s glass walls like fugitives from Poe’s Red Death. Like Ann Maringer’s diamond ring, it’s a pretty piece of work, and about as necessary as a Tiffany lamp in a home for the blind.

  The air was stuffy and moist with false summer, but sunlight bounced hot and dry off the asphalt of the parking lot while starlings scampered this way and that in a frustrated search for grass. Sawhorses shunted off to one side near the staircase to the entrance and a couple of broken bottles were all that remained of that morning’s labor disturbance. A black cop whose afro bulged from under both sides of his uniform cap like Mickey Mouse ears eyed me suspiciously as I passed him.

  The tower lobby, indirectly lit and smelling like new lobbies everywhere, of fresh wax and filtered air and plastic shoes on a hot day, was nearly deserted, or it looked that way because it was so big. I took one of the exposed elevators that travel up the outside of the building in glass tubes like mercury in July. Riding in it made me feel like a target. Glancing down toward the parking lot, I noticed a man in a topcoat with a quiet check walking rapidly across the asphalt, scattering starlings before him. Then he disappeared inside the building.

  It could have been coincidence. In a city this size there were thousands of topcoats like that. And blond men to wear them. I directed my attention to the cityscape, going gray under an approaching cloudbank, and thought.

  The entire thirty-eighth floor was leased by United Steelhaulers. They had come a long way from the pitched battles of the Depression, when the steel mills hired cops to break the strikes by breaking heads and union executives were selected for their skill with blunt instruments. They had come exactly thirty-eight floors.

  I stepped off the car into a carpeted octagon with elevators on every side but one, a pair of glass doors behind which a middle-aged black man in light blue uniform, with a face like a squashed cigar, sat at a reception desk. I went on in. Two men occupied black vinyl-upholstered couches reserved for visitors, one on either side of me. They were large and well-dressed and sat with their hands resting on their thighs, watching me. A third stood smoking near the desk: A tall man, very slim, in a tan suit cut with an engraving tool, one hand resting casually in his pocket. He was watching me too.

  “This isn’t a public floor,” the security man informed me. His eyes were pinpoints of light in sharp, weathered creases. “You got an appointment with Mr. Montana?”

  I ignored him, focusing my attention on the tall man. “You must be the personal secretary.”

  He spent some time trying to stare me down. He had tan hair clipped short at the ears and neck and combed in crisp waves. His face was the same shade of tan as his hair and suit, as were his eyes, and between them they showed enough expression to fill an ant’s eye cup. A gray thread worked its way upward from the end of his cigarette to a ventilator hidden in the ceiling, describing a square, twisting pattern that reminded me of the image on the screen of an oscilloscope.

  There was something familiar about him. The something flashed in my memory but was gone before I could grasp it.

  “That settles that,” he said finally, in the cool, self-assured voice I recognized from the telephone. “Now who are you, and like the man said, do you have an appointment with Mr. Montana?”

  “I might have if you had let me speak to him earlier.”

  It took him a moment to place me, but then he had and rage came to his eyes like a face to a window. I looked past him, through the glass beyond the half wall that separated the reception area from the rest of the offices. Outside, the sky was darkening, not with night but with sudden overcast, washing the streets and buildings in middle-register gray, pierced here and there with spots of yellow light like holes in a bedcurtain. On Woodward an opportunistic neon sign squirted now red, now green, while cars crawled past, towed by beams of light the width of toothpicks. Even in the rarefied air of the RenCen I could feel the pressure building. A storm was on its way.

  “We must have had a bad connection,” said the secretary. “I told you the man is too busy to speak to you.” His voice held a cutting edge.

  “That was over the telephone. In person he’ll have both hands free and can go on working while we talk. I won’t mind.”

  “Get him out of here.”

  The two men who had been sitting on the couches rose silently. In their nice suits and James Dean haircuts they might have been college proctors but for their height. One of them wore horn-rimmed glasses. They took up positions on either side of me, with Size Fourteens spread slightly and spade-like hands folded in front of them, looking resigned and patient, like tanks in a motor pool.

  I slid my hand inside my overcoat pocket and the world stopped turning.

  The secretary’s eyes flicked to the pocket and his lips parted, showing a row of caps as alike as cars on an assembly line. I felt rather than saw the Terrible Twins place their hands inside their pockets.

  “I’m going after a box,” I said. “Just a box.”

  There was another long pause. Even the smoke leaking from the forgotten cigarette seemed to stand still, forming a question mark in the motionless air. Beyond the glass the city had sunk into a crouch beneath the lowering sky, awaiting the first flash and bang. Then the secretary nodded. A nearly indiscernible gesture, involving only his chin. But there on the thirty-eighth floor it carried the force of an explosion.

  “Slowly,” he warned.

  I eased the box into the open and held it out to him. The two giants returned to parade rest. The man in uniform behind the desk relaxed visibly. He was just window dressing, like the sharp suits and the fancy office.

  The secretary read my card, rolled off the rubber band, lifted the lid, and spent some time reading its contents carefully. There was nothing written inside, just the ring. I used the time to wonder where I knew him from. He was young, nearly ten years my junior. The others weren’t much older, except for the guard. They wouldn’t remember, any more than I would, the sit-down strikes of the thirties or machine gun implacements atop the Ford River Rouge plant or Walter Reuther getting kicked down the steps of the Miller Road overpass. Such things would mean no more to them than the casualty count of the Trojan War. They were part of the new wave of hybrid union employees who perspired in bed with blond file clerks and not over vats of glowing molten steel, dined from china at martini lunches rather than from black tin boxes, and thought a device was something a two-hundred-dollar hooker showed when she leaned down to pick up her napkin. I had him pegged, but I still couldn’t place him.

  When the tan eyes rose at last to meet mine I bet myself ten dollars what he was going to say next and won.

  “An engagement’s a serious step. Can’t we just go on dating for a while?”

  I gave him t
he deadpan. “I guess you fellows don’t get much humor up here.”

  He didn’t like that only half as much as he didn’t like not getting a laugh out of the others. “I don’t get it,” he snarled. “What’s this got to do with anything?”

  He could have been legitimate. He could have been acting. I didn’t care either way. “Take it in to Mr. Montana. He’ll know.”

  “I’m not sure I like a shamus coming up here and telling me what I should do. As a matter of fact, I’m sure I don’t.”

  “Call it a request.”

  “How do I know you’re who you claim you are? Assassins have tried to crack our security before. Let’s see some identification.”

  “I’m going for my wallet,” I told the men beside me, and reached in to withdraw it with two fingers. The secretary gave the photostat license and sheriff’s shield the same attention he’d given the ring. I put away the wallet.

  “I thought you said you weren’t with the police.”

  “I used to be a process server. The badge is honorary. It’s saved me a beating or two.”

  “Times change.” He stood there tapping the box with his index finger, looking every inch the gangster’s right-hand man from The Big Heat, then remembered his cigarette and took a last drag before flipping it into a steel dingus attached to the wall. “Wait here,” he said, exhaling smoke. A meaningful glance at the duo, and he went through the opening at his back.

  “What else?” I was talking to the wall.

  7

  I MADE A COUPLE of attempts to strike up a conversation with the guards, but they weren’t having any of it. It was getting darker outside. It wouldn’t be long now.

  The secretary returned, looking cool and unprovoked. I looked for the ring. He didn’t have it, a good sign.

  “I’m stunned,” he said. “He’ll see you.”

  I took a step and ran into his palm. His tan eyes snapped beyond my shoulder, and the bodyguard with the glasses flicked up my elbows with thumbs like air jets and frisked me from chest to ankles in less time than it takes to tell it. My hat was lifted from my head, then replaced. He stepped away, shaking his head.

  “You understand the necessity for precautions,” explained the secretary gravely as he stepped aside to let me pass. His manners had improved considerably since our first encounter. I had won an audience with Mr. Montana and was thus entitled to such treatment as was reserved for visiting royalty. But he didn’t have to like it.

  “We’re both working stiffs.” I excavated my pack of Winstons and offered him one.

  He accepted the cigarette and broke it in one hand. His eyes remained on mine as he cast the mangled paper and tobacco into the steel ashtray.

  “If that’s the way you want it.” I motioned to him to lead the way.

  We followed the curve of the building for forty feet, past a dozen or so partitioned offices, each with its own desk and window overlooking the city and the Detroit River with Windsor on the other side. It reminded me vaguely of the set from an executive comedy of the fifties, in which a chain of cute secretaries squeak, “Good morning, Mr. Whoozis,” as the gruff businessman in homburg and carrying the Wall Street Journal marches between them. Only there wasn’t a cute secretary in the place. The desks were occupied by young men in snug Hughes & Hatchers, tripping away at IBM typewriters and video terminals with all the individuality of soldier ants. A tepid rendition of “Summertime” floated out of a speaker mounted near the ceiling of each cubicle. None of the young men looked up as we walked past.

  At length we came to a door next to an uninhabited cell, which I took to belong to the secretary. The door was unmarked. He tapped discreetly, and without waiting for an answer opened it and ushered me inside. The door closed behind me.

  The office wasn’t very impressive. It wasn’t big enough for nine holes of golf and you couldn’t see more than half of Ontario through the picture window. Fluorescent lights concealed behind frosted glass panels in the ceiling shone down evenly over deep black pile carpeting, a bar in one corner, an Exercycle opposite that, a combination stereo and television set built into the wall, an executive desk with a glass top, telephone intercom, standard electronic calculator and a lot of paperwork in baskets, and a dozen chairs upholstered in brown leather lined up against the wall near the door, none of them in the same league as the high-backed swivel behind the desk. The walls, paneled probably in oak, were hung with the kind of prints that people working many stories above the street seem to prefer, of mills and horses and covered bridges and fresh-faced girls in yellow sunbonnets sitting under shade trees with their skirts spread about them. Every detail right out of a cartoon in Business Week, with one exception: On a built-in bookshelf behind the desk, a soiled baseball from the 1968 World Series, signed by all the Tigers and looking as out of place as Huck Finn at the Inaugural Ball.

  A small, compact man in shirt sleeves who had been standing at the window with his back to me turned suddenly and I saw that he was holding the box I had sent in, still open with the ring exposed. Few Detroiters could fail to recognize the broad, square face and iron-gray hair cut into a military brush that so delighted the cartoonists on the News and Free Press, or the diminutive but powerful frame of the ex-Golden Gloves champ who had gained nationwide notoriety that September day in 1936 when, as newly elected head of the Detroit local, he led a gang of steelhaulers armed with wrecking bars and wrenches into a bloody melee with strikebreakers not six blocks from where we were standing. In the years since he had been seen haranguing crowds of gibbering truck drivers in newsreels and on television, invoking the Fifth Amendment during Grand Jury probes into union racketeering, and, more recently, in a widely circulated photograph, swamping out a cell block in gray prison garb after his conviction for assault with a deadly weapon.

  He had lost his temper and knocked down a minor union official caught with his hands in the till. That would have been the end of it, except Montana’s enemies got wind of the incident and someone remembered that the former boxer’s fists were still registered as lethal weapons. He was released after serving eight months of a year’s sentence, but it had taken him two years to claw his way back to the top of the union. Every day of that period was recorded in the fresh lines in his face, the set grimness of his broad mouth, the slackening of his jowls that no cartoonist had yet been able to capture.

  His pale gray eyes watched me curiously for about a minute. Finally he walked over to the desk and set down the box containing the ring, next to my card, which lay face up on the blotter.

  “Amos Walker,” he said, looking at me again. “I thought I knew that name. Weren’t you in on the Freeman Shanks investigation?”

  “Me and everyone else but the Texas Rangers.” I wondered where he got his information. As far as the public was concerned the cops had solved the black labor leader’s killing all by themselves.

  He charged the bar. I was startled by the sudden energy of the maneuver. “Scotch or rye? I don’t stock anything else.” He scooped a pair of barrel glasses out of the rack.

  I asked for Scotch rocks. He nodded as if in approval, clattered two ice cubes into each glass from a bowl of them on the bar, and filled them both from the same bottle. “The bar was Bill’s idea,” he explained as he handed me my drink. “He said it was better for my image than a bottle in the desk. Maybe so, but it’s a hell of a long walk when you’re thirsty.”

  I said something appropriate and sipped. It was twelve-year-old stuff. “Bill?”

  “Bill Clendenan. You met him outside.”

  “Your secretary.”

  He laughed shortly, a pleasant barking sound. His voice was like fine gravel. “Is that what he’s calling himself these days? Well, maybe.”

  I watched him, a hard man in shirt sleeves with striped tie at half-mast and cuffs turned back to expose thick forearms matted with black hair going gray. He and the baseball were two of a kind. Moving quickly, he circled behind the desk and gestured for me to pull up one of the leather-uphol
stered chairs. The cushions gripped me like a pudgy hand. He sat, drank just enough of his Scotch to keep it from brimming over, grimaced when it struck bottom, and set the remainder down on the glass surface of the desk, where it stayed throughout our interview. No sight is more tragic than that of a man who likes to drink having to coddle a sour stomach. The gray eyes sought mine.

  “Where’s Janet?”

  I had been holding my hat in my hand. I leaned down and placed it on the carpet, straightened, crossed my legs, sipped my drink, and returned his gaze.

  “Janet?”

  He made another face. “Don’t any of you leeches play anything a way it hasn’t already been played in the movies? Let’s cut right through the bullshit. What is it, ransom or blackmail? Because if it’s blackmail I’d just as soon toss you through that window. It doesn’t bother me a bit that it doesn’t open.”

  I said, “Let’s go back to the overture. Who’s Janet?”

  He glared at me from under eyebrows that refused to go gray. I glared back. It was like looking at one of those cutaway models at the auto show and seeing the fan turning and the pistons pumping. “Maybe you’d better start with the ring,” he said, flicking a finger at the box on his desk. “ Where’d you get it and how’d you trace it to me?”

  “It was given to me last night as a retainer for a job. I consulted an expert, who recognized the workmanship and said that it was mounted by a jeweler who works exclusively for Phil Montana.”

  “This expert wouldn’t be Mike Pilaster.”

  I said nothing. He waved it aside.

  “What’s the job? Who hired you?”

  “When you ask them two at a time, do I get a choice or what?”

  “Start with who hired you.”

  “Uh-uh.” I sat back and swirled my drink around in the glass, the way Charles Boyer had done in Conquest. The way he had done in damn near all his pictures. “Your turn. Who’s Janet?”