Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 02

by Angel Eyes

  When I had finished, Hardacre killed some time contemplating his drying handkerchief. Then: “That the way you saw it, Maggie?”

  She moved her shoulders. “More or less. I can’t say about all the details. I’m not as observant as Mr. Walker. As for everything he says went on before he came here, I’m no witness.”

  He nodded meaninglessly, his head bobbing like a car with bad shocks at a stop light. Then a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, or maybe it was an attack of gas. He was still eyeing the handkerchief. “Attributing, as usual. You’re one hell of a journalist, Maggie. And anyone who’s more observant than you could see through six inches of lead. Any idea what this Gold was doing here?”

  It took me a second to realize he was speaking to me. “I’m guessing,” I said. “He may have seen his agency’s file on Janet Whiting—the original not the bowdlerized version Jack Billings gave me—and decided to check it out, as I did. I don’t know why. Maybe he smelled money in it. He tried to blackmail me when he thought I was mixed up in Krim’s killing.”

  “You said you broke the lock. How’d he get in?”

  “Maybe he found the door open when he got here. Maybe the killer had a key and was ready for him. Or maybe one or the other was a better burglar than I’ll ever be.”

  He nodded again, as absently as before. “Well, we’ll sort that out later. In the meantime it looks like you got some court time coming. For breaking and entering and trespassing.”

  “I doubt it. About the B-and-E, I mean. I heard a noise and thought someone might be hurt and that I could help. I was right about the being hurt. And trespassing stopped being a felony when they closed the frontier.”

  “No kidding? They closed it? When?” He tried to sneer, but that involved too many facial muscles and he gave up. “The point is, Walker, we got a modern department out here. Telephones and everything. I can check out your story and have you in the county lockup by nightfall. You have to admit it’s pretty suspicious, you being first on the scene of three murders.”

  “Suspicious, but not suspect. I’m clear with Detroit P.D. on the other two, reasonably so. As for this one, we’ll let the coroner decide when he took the bullet that killed him. I’ve been busy today. Bet you I can prove I was thirty miles away when it was fired.”

  He was watching me steadily now. His eyes were dishwater-colored. “You’re smart, city fellow. Too smart and not smart enough.”

  “You must sleep with a notepad taped to your stomach so you can jot down gems like that when you think of them,” I suggested.

  The dark man chuckled. I didn’t look at him. Finally Hardacre rapped, “Dennis, Radio Station One and have them call old man Kitchner’s widow and find out who he sold this place to. Then have them get in touch with whoever it is and find out if they want to press charges against Walker for B-and-E and trespassing.”

  The redheaded deputy started to leave, retraced his steps, and laid the sergeant’s hat on the glass coffee table between the scoop chairs, then went out to fulfill his orders. I heard him opening a door on one of the two scout cars parked out front and wondered for the first time how they had gotten past the locked gate. Bolt cutters, probably.

  “Nine years I was a Detroit cop,” the command officer informed me. “In that time I met every kind of peeper there is: divorce peepers, missing persons peepers, security peepers, business peepers, railroad peepers, lawyers’ peepers, plain old peeper peepers. I never invited one of them to dinner. You want to know why?”

  “Because we pick our teeth with our thumbnails?”

  “Because I don’t like them. They all have that cheesy feel, like a paper towel in a men’s toilet. Pluck one and another one just like it comes down to take its place. And not one of them worth using to wipe—”

  “At the risk of destroying a delicate point,” Maggie broke in acidly, “I’ve got a paper to put out and tomorrow’s deadline day. Who’s going to drive me back to town?”

  Hardacre scrubbed his face again with the already sodden handkerchief. I was beginning to realize why his complexion was so rough and red. “You shouldn’t mind sticking a little longer,” he told her. “You’re sitting on the biggest story your paper’s seen in months. One murder’s news out here. In Detroit they list them in columns like shipping reports.”

  That last was for my benefit. People who live in the country always think people who live in the city stay there by choice and ought to be ashamed. I let it flutter.

  “I wonder what Gold did with his car?”

  “What?” The sergeant threw me a hard glance.

  “His car. You know, that thing that goes vroom when you push the slanty pedal and rolls away. It isn’t parked at the bottom of the hill and he didn’t drive it up here.”

  “What makes you think he had a car?” The dark deputy looked stern. “Unless you went through his pockets and found a set of keys.”

  “I didn’t,” I lied. “But I know he owned a car, or at least had access to one, and he didn’t walk all this way.” I described the vehicle I had seen parked in my driveway the night I met Albert Gold. Was it only last night? The deputy shook his head.

  “Don’t sound familiar. But Huron’s a fairly busy place, full of folks driving through on their way somewhere else. An ordinary heap like that would be missable.”

  I turned to the newspaperwoman. “Is there another way up here?”

  “None,” she said. “There used to be an old logging trail somewhere near here, but that’s all grown over by now.”

  Dennis returned, looking younger than he had going out. Hardacre questioned him with his eyebrows.

  “Some company owns the place now,” explained the deputy. “No one’s answering the phone, though.”

  “What’s the name?” the sergeant asked.

  He got out a pocket pad with a hinged cover and flipped through a dozen or so scribbled pages. “Here it is. Griffith Carbide.”

  The pop and flare of my match made the young deputy jump. Everyone watched me as I set fire to the cigarette in the corner of my mouth. I hoped the tremor in my fingers wasn’t noticeable. Slowly, reflectively, I blew out the flame and crushed the match into the tiles at my feet. A car was pulling into the driveway.

  A gray-haired man with a white beard and circles under his eyes like glass marks on a bar came in carrying a black bag and made his way over to the corpse without acknowledging the presence of any of the room’s other occupants. As he lowered himself stiffly to one pinstriped knee, the dark deputy got up and gave him room. Not once had the latter made use of his surgical gloves.

  “When’d he get shot, Doc?” asked the sergeant.

  “How the hell should I know? And don’t call me Doc. This isn’t a Looney Tune.” His sharp, thin voice lashed out like a serpent’s tongue. He felt Gold’s neck for a pulse, then opened his shirt and examined the wound. His fingers were lean and wrinkled and nearly too fast to follow.

  “Two hours,” he said. “An hour this way or that. That’s all you’ll get out of me until after the autopsy. Of course the body’s been moved.”

  “I know.”

  The doctor glared up at the dark deputy. “Oh, you do, do you? How many lectures have you attended on post-mortem lividity? What do you know of splotching of the body’s dependent parts not in contact with the surface upon which the corpse rests after death due to the settling of blood?”

  The deputy looked embarrassed. “I just know that dead people don’t usually land on their backs.”

  This time the old man’s eyes snaked over to where Hardacre was sitting. “I’ll bet you told him that,” he said, and returned his attention to the corpse. “Dead people land wherever they want to land, young man. Fifteen years ago I examined a house painter who had fallen from a roof and skewered himself head first on a steel fence post. We had to unscrew him like a cap from a bottle. I’ll make you a deal: I won’t investigate any crimes if you promise not to engage in forensic pathology. And take off those silly-ass gloves! Harmful bacilli
don’t show up for at least twelve hours after death unless the body’s been exposed to extreme heat.”

  All the time he was speaking, the doctor’s hands were darting this way and that, lifting a limp arm and releasing it, bending dead elbows, poking and prodding, buttoning and unbuttoning. The younger deputy was beginning to look a little pale watching him.

  “Two hours,” Hardacre reflected. “Where were you at noon, Walker?”

  “In my office, talking to Fitzroy and Cranmer of Detroit Homicide.”

  “We’ll check it out. Meanwhile we’ve got you on the other two charges.”

  “Don’t forget me, Fred,” Maggie reminded him. “If you take him in, you’ve got to take me as an accomplice.”

  “That won’t be necessary, and you know it. You were just doing your job.”

  “So was Mr. Walker.”

  “That ain’t the same thing.” His grammar was faltering. He was getting irritable.

  “It is, and you know it,” she pressed. “You just want to make a quick arrest and you want me out on the street so I can write it up in the Herald. You’re transparent, Fred. It’s no wonder they canned you in Detroit.”

  He glowered at her. The hand holding the handkerchief lay forgotten in his lap. “We got a good relationship, Maggie. Don’t blow it.”

  “What will you do, refuse to show me your fender-bender reports? You know how the sheriff feels about good publicity. You’re too close to retirement. What are you going to do if the story I write costs you those stripes and you have to live on a deputy’s pension? You and the sheriff never did get along. This could be just the excuse he’s been looking for to shake you out of his hair.”

  The room was silent but for the sounds the doctor made fussing over the body. The dark deputy was watching him like an intern. Dennis wasn’t sure where to look. Maggie, smiling tightly, stared at the sergeant, who had gone back to staring at his handkerchief.

  “Don’t leave town,” he told me finally.

  I produced one of my cards and placed it on his knee. “You can’t make me stay here without a warrant and you know it,” I said. “But just to show you my heart’s in the right place, call me there. My answering service will take a message if I’m not in.” I waited, but he didn’t say anything. I caught Maggie’s eye. “How about a lift back to town?”

  “Okay, but take it easy. Your engine’s about to throw a rod.”

  “Town gossip, my cousin’s hula hoop.” I held the door for her She went through it beaming.

  21

  “HOW COME A nice-looking young fellow like you isn’t married?”

  We were making our way down the private road toward the car, stepping carefully to avoid slipping. It had rained even harder here than in Detroit; water plopped from the trees and last year’s maple leaves plastered the muddy surface, shining like freshly spilled oil. Early mosquitoes squealed about but didn’t bite. I hesitated before answering. She took my silence for reticence.

  “Excuse my large mouth,” she said. “I’m in my dotage.”

  “The hell you are. I was just wondering what made you think I’m not married.”

  “Ask me a hard one. You don’t wear a wedding ring, and we’ve been together now—what?—two hours and you haven’t even mentioned wanting to call your wife. You’re not, are you?”

  “Not recently.”

  “I guess you’d rather not talk about it.”

  “There aren’t any rathers either way. I knew a cop once, a hard guy. The punks on his beat used to take their drugs and prostitutes and floating crap games to other neighborhoods when he came on duty. He got shot once while chasing a stickup artist down a blind alley, but he kept on running until he caught up with him. His partner found him ten minutes later, pale from loss of blood but still holding the guy pinned by the throat to a brick wall, waiting. Like I said, he was a hard guy. But then he got married and had a couple of kids, and he wasn’t so hard anymore. The punks started noising around what they’d do to his family if he didn’t turn his back to this or that. Eventually his wife died from something or other and the kids grew up and moved out, but by then it was too late. Things got so bad on his beat he was forced into early retirement.”

  “What’d he do finally?”

  “He took on a partner and went private. One day, he and the partner were shadowing this philandering husband as he was leaving his mistress’s apartment. Nothing scary, just a routine tail job. He was on the street and the partner was parked in a car across the way, half a block behind the husband’s car. The husband must have recognized the car from before, because he tugged a gun out of his coat pocket suddenly and pointed it at the partner behind the wheel. The ex-cop hollered, and the guy swung around and plugged him. Dead. He didn’t even have his own gun with him; didn’t think he’d need it. He’d forgotten how to be a hard guy.”

  “What happened to the husband?”

  “The partner winged him through the car window and got out and took his gun away and called the police and an ambulance, in that order. It didn’t seem right not to call for the ambulance, even though it wasn’t needed.”

  “Don’t tell me,” she said. “You were the partner.”

  I didn’t answer. “The husband pleaded diminished capacity and got off. He and his wife reconciled and are living in a condo in Florida. He grows roses. Every year on the anniversary of the shooting they get a picture postcard of Detroit in the mail. No message, just the picture.”

  The gate stood open, the chain broken and dangling. We reached the Cutlass and climbed in. I had to readjust the bucket seat to keep my knees out of my nostrils. Something rattled when I started the engine. She was right about the loose rod.

  “Where’s this logging trail you told me about?” I asked.

  “The other side of that hill, I think. But it hasn’t been passable for some time. The lumber company’s strung chains across both entrances.”

  It was a steep hill like all the rest of them in that country, guttered along the aprons and blistered with white gravel stones that had washed down from the crest. I had the car up to forty at the base, but by the time we reached the top the engine was straining and the tires were grabbing only every third revolution. The loose rod clattered angrily. When we had surmounted the rise at last and were coasting down the other side, Maggie observed, “I think that’s an excuse.”

  “What’s an excuse?” I tapped the brakes gently on, off, on, off. This place must have been hell in January.

  “That story about your partner. I’ll bet it keeps most people from pressing you on why you don’t get married.”

  “Most of them.” We hit a hole that snapped my teeth together.

  “My guess is you got burned once and you’re afraid to go near the stove again.”

  The Cutlass shuddered over the washboard surface. I fought the wheel to keep us from plunging into one of the steep ditches that flanked the descent. “Just what I ordered,” I said, as we approached the level. “Freud’s Handy Guide to Home Analysis. Do you throw in free Gestalt?”

  She made no reply. We had stopped before a sandy road that vanished into thick brush, its surface pulverized by the passage of many heavy trucks. A galvanized chain hammocked across the mouth between two steel posts, a rust-bubbled KEEP OUT sign suspended from it. I got out to examine the setup. The chain had been looped through an eye in the left post and padlocked to another in the right. The surface of the lock, dull from exposure, bore glistening pocks left by several sharp blows from a heavy instrument. The marks had been made since last night’s rain or they would have rusted over. The shackle had been sprung; the whole thing was just hanging together. There were fresh tread marks in the soft sand beyond, at least two sets of them. I strode back, leaned in through the driver’s side door, and killed the engine. Then I looked at Maggie in the passenger’s seat.

  “Are you up to another hike?”

  “It’s unlocked, isn’t it?” she said.

  “More like smashed.”

  S
he sighed. “Well, I’ve already made a liar out of my BE RIGHT BACK sign.” She started to get out.

  “There’s a gun in the glove compartment. Take it out and give it to me.”

  “No there isn’t.” She opened her purse and lifted out the Luger in its holster. I stared at her. “You didn’t expect me to go out looking for a phone without it, did you? For all I knew the first door I knocked on might be the murderer’s.”

  “Good God, what would you have done if we’d been arrested and searched?” I accepted the piece and checked the clip. It was still loaded. I snapped the holster in place on my belt.

  “Giggled, mainly. No one’s pawed me in years.”

  I ducked under the chain and held it up for her. She noticed the tread marks right way. The road climbed gently between tunneling trees, and though it had once been wide enough for broad-base trucks hauling mammoth logs, nature had since crowded in so that there was barely room for one passenger vehicle to pass. One set of tire tracks had all but obliterated the other.

  A hard white glint of sunlight bouncing off metal showed through the trees as we rounded the last bend. At length we came upon Albert Gold’s brown two-door buried in the bushes at the side of the road. The tread marks said it had been pushed off the throughway. There were other marks in the sand that looked as if they had been made with a piece of bush or a broken branch, an old Indian trick to disguise footprints. Aside from a few fresh scratches the car appeared undamaged.

  The door on the driver’s side was unlocked. There was nothing kicking around loose inside. The ashtray held loose change and was too clean ever to have been used for its original purpose. I opened the glove compartment. A Michigan road map, Gold’s registration and certificate of insurance, a first aid kit, a paperback spy thriller, the pages curled from reading, a plastic ice scraper with a piece broken off. And a Colt Woodsman automatic in a stiff leather holster.