Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 02

by Angel Eyes

  When I first came here there were sixteen houses along this road. Now there are six hundred. They raise their brat kids the way they were raised. As a result, we average more incidents of breaking and entering and vandalism than any neighborhood of comparable size in Detroit. And it doesn’t stop there.

  “Not long ago some social worker got the idea that juvenile delinquency withers and dies when surrounded by trees and grass. So they invoked public domain, booted the farmers and homeowners off the property they inherited from their grandfathers, and started building parks. All right, so the few must make sacrifices for the welfare of the majority. That’s democracy. Only there are five thousand acres of parks within a twenty-mile radius of Huron and they’re planning to build more. And they wonder why our grandchildren will be eating earth-worms for nutrition.”

  “I get you.”

  “I’m not finished yet,” she said.

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “The city’s in financial trouble. So is my brother-in-law, and for the same reason—because he can’t handle money. He asked me for a loan, but what did he ever do for me? I said no. Now we aren’t speaking. Fine. I never liked him anyway. But it doesn’t work that way with the city. The mayor goes to his buddy the governor and says, ‘Look, we need sixty million dollars or I won’t be able to keep up the payments on my new limo.’ The governor says, ‘Sure thing; didn’t you contribute to my campaign fund last election?’ and kicks up taxes all over the state. When we complain he reminds us that if Detroit falls, so does Michigan. That bothers me, that does. I can just see them throwing a barricade across the state line with a sign: GONE OUT OF BUSINESS.”

  “Nice speech,” I said. “Except the mayor’s a Democrat and the governor’s GOP. They don’t contribute to each other’s campaigns.”

  “Not so you’d notice. Turn here.”

  A dirt road angled off to the left through steepening hills cloaked in tall trees. As we started the climb: “I bet two other people had this same conversation twenty years ago.”

  “Could be,” she agreed. “Only it’s worse since Watergate. The American people are so inured to scandal that they’ve given up hope on anything better.”

  She was silent for the rest of the trip. There were few houses in this area. Those we saw were perched atop hills and all but invisible behind shrouds of evergreen and budding maples. At length she pointed at a rutted driveway winding up through thick growth, its mouth flanked by gray concrete pillars with vines growing out of the cracks and blocked by a weathered wooden gate secured with a chain and padlock.

  “We’ll leave the car here,” she directed. “Go up on foot.”

  I pulled the Cutlass as far as it would go onto the weeded apron and we got out. There was just space enough between one of the pillars and the tangled brush for one person to squeeze through. I let her go first. From there we hiked for a solid mile along the twisting path, which inclined with each turn. The earth was still moist and slippery from last night’s rain. After a hundred yards I began to sweat. I loosened my tie and peeled off my jacket and threw it over my shoulder. My shirt clung to my back. Maggie, who had left her purse in the car, chugged along as steadily as if she were crossing Huron’s main street. She wasn’t even breathing hard. I decided it was all those years of good clean country air, and found myself hating her.

  The house was an A-frame, rare in its day but now as common in woodsy settings as gum wrappers on a sidewalk. From a high peak, the shingled roof canted all the way to the ground on either side of the glassed-in front. The glass was tinted so that we couldn’t see inside.

  I walked around the building while I waited for my breath to catch up with me. Behind it the hill rose for another forty feet before it rounded off, its crest jagged with pine and cedar. Maggie was standing where I had left her when I completed the circuit.

  “How long has the place been empty?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “The former owner stopped renting it not long before he died. Too much trouble with the tenants. No one’s lived there for several months.”

  “Is there a caretaker?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Then how do you explain these?” I pointed at the ground at my feet. She came over to look. A set of footprints showed clearly in the mud between the stone foundation and the overgrown lawn.

  “A prowler,” she suggested. “Or maybe there is a caretaker.”

  “If it was a caretaker, he’d have a key to the padlock on the gate. He’d drive up rather than suffer that hike. No one’s driven up that road since the rain or there’d be tire tracks. I think we’d better—”

  Inside something crashed.

  19

  BIRDS SANG IN THE stillness that followed the sudden noise. It meant nothing to them. Up high, wind moaned in the pines, an eerie, half-human wail. We listened, but nothing significant developed.

  “On the other hand, it might have been a squirrel,” said Maggie. “They cause a lot of damage in these empty cabins.”

  “We’ll know soon.” From my wallet I drew my photostat license and tested the lamination between thumb and forefinger for stiffness. Then I tried inserting it between the doorlatch and the jamb. It didn’t work. It never does, for me.

  “What are you doing?”

  I hadn’t heard Maggie moving in closer. When I came down from the roof I said, “Nothing, apparently. We’ll have to smash the lock.”

  “What do you mean ‘we,’ paleface?”

  I glanced at her. She looked about as nervous as a pothole in the road. “If you’d rather not be part of this, you can wait for me back at the car.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of being eaten by a bear? That’s the first thing you city folks think of when you’re out in the country all alone.”

  “Lady, I grew up in this country, not fifteen miles from where we’re standing. The nearest bear is on a billboard asking people to prevent forest fires. I won’t start kicking in the door until you’re out of earshot.”

  “Kick it in. I’m sixty-three years old and I’ve never seen the inside of a jail. I might as well experience everything I can while I’m still able to enjoy it.”

  “You’d be disappointed.”

  It was an old lock of the turn-and-snap variety, not a dead bolt. I shattered it in two kicks. The door flew inward and bounced back to hit me in the shoulder, not very hard. Wishing I hadn’t left my Luger in the glove compartment, I motioned Maggie behind me and palmed the door open slowly, keeping to one side. No bullets ricocheted off the jamb. I stepped over the threshold.

  The ground floor was all open space, with no walls to separate the porcelain-tiled kitchen from the green-carpeted living area, where a low couch and a couple of scoop chairs were arranged so that people sitting in them could look out over the wooded slope beyond the glass, at the bottom of which the road we had taken played a twisting game of peekaboo with the scenery. A corner of the private lake Maggie had mentioned was visible to one side, looking like the edge of a blank coin set in green velvet. At the other end of the room were a bar with two swivel stools upholstered in red leather, a small, copper-colored refrigerator, a matching two-burner stove, and a microwave oven of the same hue. The second story was really a loft, divided into two open bedrooms with a railing in front and connected to the main floor by a spiraling metal staircase, down which a man was crawling.

  He made his way slowly and painfully, grasping the edge of a step and dragging his body a few inches forward and downward, then reaching out to grasp another. His face was a smear of wax in which his mouth gaped black and round. His blond hair, dark with perspiration, was plastered to his face like seaweed to a rock. He was gasping hoarsely, mechanically, without hope. He didn’t know he was gasping. He didn’t know we were there watching him. He didn’t see us. All he saw was the next step down.

  The debris of a lamp sprinkled the tiles to the left of the stairs where it had shattered after being dislodged from the second-floor railing. Probably he had stagg
ered against it while making for the stairs, fallen, and found himself too weak to climb back to his feet. Behind him, the steps glistened dark and wet.

  Maggie didn’t scream. She couldn’t have if she had wanted to, paralyzed as she was. The color of her face, or rather the lack of it, matched the man’s. As I approached the stairs on jointless legs I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in a mirror on the side wall. I didn’t look any more robust than they did.

  He had rounded the last curve and was eight steps from the floor when he lost his grip. For a throbbing moment he hung there, one dusty palm outstretched, groping for the next step, and then the other hand, the one he was using to brace himself, let go. His chest struck the metal with a loud woof, and he slid clattering to the bottom, one arm still extended as if he were a runner caught off base and diving to beat the tag. He reached the tiles and skidded to a halt at my feet.

  Maggie screamed then, a hoarse, masculine wail that saved me the trouble.

  I waited until the body stopped hiccoughing before I squatted to feel the throat for a pulse. As often as I’d seen it in Nam, I could never shake the suspicion that they were trying to get up when they did that. This one wasn’t.

  Death, and the nearness of it, has a way of changing a person’s features. I wouldn’t have recognized him at all had it not been for his checked coat. Crazily enough, my first conscious thought was that now I knew why Albert Gold hadn’t answered his telephone earlier. He had been here, dying.

  Telephone. I looked around and spotted one on a stand between the chairs in the living area. I pointed at it. “Find out if that works,” I directed Maggie. My voice didn’t sound like anyone I knew. “Call the police.”

  “We don’t have a police force anymore.” She spoke shallowly. “There’s a sheriff’s substation in the village park.”

  “Whatever. Call them.”

  “What about an ambulance?”

  “We don’t need an ambulance.”

  That took a moment to register. Then she made her way to the telephone as if she had to move each foot by a separate effort of will. I couldn’t blame her. This was my third corpse in a little more than thirty-six hours, and I wasn’t any more in command of the situation than she was. While she was lifting the receiver I clenched my teeth, grasped the body by both shoulders, and turned it over. It was like handling a sack full of loose iron weights.

  His shirt was slick with blood. I unbuttoned it, using my handkerchief, and pulled it away from the wound. It made a nasty sucking sound. The wound, half an inch above his belt, was small and blue and looked pretty insignificant to have killed a full-grown man. It could have been made by a .32. It could have been made by a .25 or by a .38; you can’t tell where something soft like flesh is concerned. Whatever it was, it had been more than enough for the purpose.

  “Dead.”

  I started to agree, but then I saw Maggie with the receiver in her hand and realized she was referring to the instrument. I folded the checked coat over the gore and rose.

  “Can you drive?”

  “I was handling a Hudson Hornet when you were just a gleam in your father’s eye, sonny.”

  I smiled faintly. She was bouncing back. Women like her always did. I held out the keys to the Cutlass. “Take mine to the nearest working telephone and call the substation. I’m going to take a look around.”

  “Do you think the murderer is still nearby?” She came forward and grasped the keys.

  “I doubt it. Where he was shot you bleed a long time before you die. The only reason he got up was he must have heard us outside. Maybe he wanted help, or maybe he thought it was the killer coming back to finish the job. Before that he was probably semi-conscious.”

  Her eyes flicked to the dead man. “Did you know him?”

  “I met him once. I didn’t like him.”

  “Maybe you’d better tell me the whole story.”

  I shook my head. “When the police get here you’re better off ignorant. As a matter of fact, you’re best off not being here at all. When you call them, say you saw someone walking up the road to this house and got suspicious. Don’t identify yourself.”

  “They’d recognize my voice. I only drop into the station twice a week. They’ll ask me how I got out here, with my car in plain sight back in town. What’ll I tell them, I jogged six miles? Besides, they’d take one look at you standing over that body and ventilate you. The substation commander used to be a Detroit police officer.”

  “Which detail?”

  “STRESS.”

  “Swell.”

  She said, “Listen, when they broke up the unit its members had to go somewhere. This one came here. Anyway, you promised me an exclusive.”

  I studied her clinically. “Town gossip, my uncle’s saddle shoes. What papers did you apprentice on before you came out here?”

  “Not one, but it doesn’t take long to pick up the jargon. This isn’t Dogpatch.”

  “If I say you can stay, will you go?”

  She smiled weakly. “Believe it or not, I understood that. Yes.”

  “You got it.”

  When she had gone I went through Gold’s pockets. Change, keys, the same wallet containing the same pictures. The girl looked prettier than last time, the kids cuter and more innocent. They didn’t know they were half orphans. I smeared everything carefully and put it back. Cops are unpleasant enough without the knowledge that someone’s been tampering with their precious evidence.

  I looked down at the body and wanted a cigarette but didn’t light one because I know what store cops set by leftover butts as clues. Scientific detection had reached the sticks about the same time as television.

  Walker Investigations, my Yellow Pages display read. Specializing in missing persons. What I was good at finding was stiffs. It was getting so I couldn’t walk through a door without tripping over one.

  Leaving philosophical conclusions to the people with brains, I circled the body and mounted the stairs, avoiding the sticky patches. The bedrooms had enough room for the beds, night stands supporting lamps with flowered china bases, and identical three-drawer dressers. The beds had the look of having been made for some time. The drawers were empty, lined with newspapers dated last year. I lifted the paper in each and looked underneath. Nothing. There were no personal articles in either room. Ditto the bathroom, a closet-sized cell behind the staircase with a sink, a commode, and a tub just large enough to wash one limb at a time.

  There was dust on the furniture, not a lot of it, but enough for a house that hadn’t been lived in for some time. I tried all the switches. No electricity. In short, there was nothing in the house that I hadn’t expected to find, with one exception. Which left me farther behind than I had been coming in.

  20

  THE COMMAND OFFICER’S NAME was Hardacre, and he looked more like a small-town cop than any other man I had ever met. He had a lot of face the color and texture of raw hamburger and scanty brown hair and Popeye forearms swelling from the rolled sleeves of his desert tan uniform shirt. He had nine years on the Detroit Police Department. The only reason I know that is he kept reminding me.

  He took one look at me after coming in the door, glanced at the corpse, and detoured into the living room, where he took possession of the couch and motioned me over. He was accompanied by a pair of deputies, one tall and outdoorsy with dark hair and a seamed, windburned face; the other young, slim, redheaded. Both were wearing stiff brown felt hats with broad brims and tin sheriff’s stars on the front, and the younger one was carrying a third. He approached his superior with it while his partner went over to examine the body.

  “Your hat, Sergeant,” he said, holding it out. “There might be pictures, and you know how the sheriff feels about deputies being in full uniform at all times.”

  “The sheriff can roll his hat into a tube and shove it in up to his elbow. Nine years I was a Detroit cop and I never wore one. Who’s taking pictures? You see any cameras around Maggie’s neck? Hello, Maggie.”

&nbs
p; The newspaperwoman, who had made it back ten minutes before, returned the greeting. She called him Fred.

  “Somebody move this body?”

  I turned to look at the dark deputy, who was staring at me from a squatting position beside the still form. His hands, encased in disposable surgical gloves, dangled loosely between his knees.

  I said, “I did. I was trying to revive him.” You tell a lot of lies in my business.

  “Coroner’s gonna drop a brick. He favors playing them as they fell.”

  “I got a hat all ready for the coroner to roll, too.”

  Hardacre produced a white handkerchief from his hip pocket and mopped his red raw neck. It wasn’t that hot, but he was sweating. Without looking at me, he put his hand out palm up and wiggled his fingers. “The license.”

  I gave it to him. Lately it had been in and out more often than a family cat. He read it, every word, moving his lips, and returned it. When he wasn’t paying attention I wiped it off on my pants leg and put it away.

  He said, “Detroit, huh? They ever get around to swamping out that king-size toilet?”

  “Some,” I replied. “Mostly they just squirted some deodorizer around the bowl.”

  He didn’t appear to have heard. “I don’t go much for P.I.’s. The ones I used to do business with were mostly cops that got bounced for going on the take.”

  “What they bounce you for?”

  I was trying to gauge his limits, but he wasn’t having any of it. He used the handkerchief behind his left ear and looked at it as if he thought the red might come off. Then he spread it out on his knee to dry. He winched his eyes up to meet mine for the first time since he had come in.

  “For a guy in your position you got a lively mouth.”

  “What exactly is my position, Sergeant?”

  “Right now you’re a suspect. I haven’t heard your story yet. Maybe when I have we’ll reduce that to witness. Providing I like it.”

  I gave him the story, or as much of it as I thought he needed. I couldn’t tell if he liked it. I couldn’t even tell if he was listening. The deputies were, particularly the young one still holding the sergeant’s hat. He watched me wide-eyed, the way young law officers everywhere watch a case developing, as if they’re half astonished to find themselves part of it and half fearful that someone will notice them and ask them to leave the room while the grownups talk. The dark one squatted scowling at his gloved hands still hanging unused. I wondered why he hadn’t just left them bare.