Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 02

by Angel Eyes

  I released the clip. Loaded full up. The barrel smelled of fresh oil and disuse. The poor dumb bastard hadn’t even thought to take it with him into the house. I wiped it off and put it back. Then I wiped off everything else handy and climbed out.

  Ignoring Maggie’s questioning glance, I stood in the middle of the road and made a 360-degree turn to get a hinge at the scenery. From here you could just see the peak of the A-frame among the trees not four hundred yards away. To avoid footprints I returned to the grown-over apron and walked along the edge, looking down at the sandy surface. Gold had parked behind the other vehicle, which had preceded him, I didn’t know by how much. Some attempt had been made to obliterate the impressions made by the tread, but a clear piece showed just behind where the car had crossed the tracks Gold’s had made leaving the road. The diamond pattern was distinctive.

  It wouldn’t have held up in court, unless some irregularity in the tread could be matched to the tires. There were probably a thousand similar sets of tires in the Detroit area alone. I had no legal reason to be standing there thinking that the design was very like that of the tires I had seen on Jack Billings’s Trans Am back at the DeLancey estate.

  22

  I DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING to Maggie about my suspicions. I hardly trusted them myself. On our way back down I ragged a broken branch behind us to cover the footprints we had made both ways. It wouldn’t discourage a blind Apache, but it felt good to do it.

  “I suppose we should tell Hardacre about what we found,” she ventured when we were back in the car and rolling toward town.

  “They’ll come across it soon enough. Cops aren’t dumb, except for their sense of humor.” I drove for a while in silence. Then: “What do you know about the last person who rented the house?”

  She turned a puzzled expression on me. Then she settled back in the seat and frowned at the windshield. “It’s been so long. Months.”

  “Work on it. You haven’t failed me yet.”

  “I don’t think he ever came into the office and I never heard his name,” she said. “Mr. Kitchner, the owner of the house, pointed him out to me once, on the street. Medium height, I guess, around forty. No older. He wasn’t the kind whose age you could guess easily. Slim, dark hair. That’s as much as I can dredge up short of hypnosis.”

  “Clothes? Complexion? What about his voice? Speech? Any accent?”

  “I never heard him speak. He dressed casually, like just about everyone else around here. I don’t remember any suit or tie. Complexion?” Her brow furrowed. “Now that you mention it, he had a very deep tan and his face was very smooth. It shone, in fact. It was his only distinctive feature, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t wintertime.”

  “It sounds like he was very good at being inconspicuous.”

  “Do you think he’s mixed up in this somehow?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, exasperated. “It’s just one of those things you ask, like who was the last person to see the deceased alive. Most of the time it doesn’t amount to a damn. How long did he stay?”

  “Not long. A week, maybe. He never came into town except to buy groceries and pick up a Detroit paper. He’d been gone a while when Kitchner died.”

  “Where can I find Kitchner’s widow?”

  “In town. She lives with her daughter and son-in-law. The house is right on our way; I’ll show it to you. I’d go in with you, but I’ve got an afternoon baseball game to cover. Worse luck.”

  She pointed out a narrow, two-story house on a side street off the main drag and just inside the viaduct. It looked a hundred years old and probably was all of that and then some. I kept going and pulled up alongside a fire hydrant in front of the Herald office. Maggie gathered up her purse.

  “Don’t forget your promise.”

  I nodded. “Noon Wednesday.”

  “That’s tomorrow.” She got out and swung the door shut. The last I saw of her she was standing in the alcove in front of the office door looking for her keys.

  A pinched-looking woman with watery blue eyes and hair bleached too light for her complexion answered my knock. I gave her my card and asked to speak with Mrs. Kitchner.

  “What about?” she asked, after reading the card. Her tone reeked of suspicion.

  “The last man who rented Mr. Kitchner’s house in the woods. He may be involved with an investigation I’m conducting.”

  “Would this have anything to do with the call we got a little while ago from the sheriff’s department?”

  I said it would.

  “Are you connected with the sheriff?”

  I said I wasn’t.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t let you speak to her. My mother had a coronary six weeks ago. Talking takes too much out of her. Besides, she wouldn’t be much help. Old age as affected her mind as well as her body. She just lays there.”

  “I’d just like to ask her a couple of questions. It wouldn’t take five minutes.”

  “I’m sorry. We don’t let her have any visitors.”

  “None?”

  “None.” She started to close the door.

  “Does she have a doctor?”

  The question made her pause. The door remained open just wide enough for me to see her pinched face. “Yes,” she said, as if she wasn’t sure.

  “Bet his bills are hard on the family budget.”

  She pressed her lips together. In small towns they still value privacy. I drew out my wallet.

  “Would twenty dollars ease the blow?”

  She looked at the twenty, then at me. The lines around her narrow mouth were as hard as graphite. “Your card says you’re from Detroit,” she snapped. “I’m not surprised. Maybe you can handle most folks there with money, but not here. Good-bye.” The door banged in its casing.

  I stood there a moment longer, still holding the double sawbuck. Then I returned it to the wallet and slipped the wallet back inside my jacket and stepped off the porch. I paused with my hand on the Cutlass door handle, looking at the second story of the house. Heavy curtains were drawn over one of the windows. I felt empty, but not as empty as the old woman lying up there, staring at the ceiling and waiting. I got in and drove back to the city.

  No one touches my engine but a sixty-two-year-old German who runs a garage on Mack. He had installed it himself at cost, after the Coup de Ville from which it had come was totaled in a four-car pile-up on Eight Mile Road. He gave me hell for not coming to him sooner with that loose rod and told me to bring it in tomorrow afternoon, once he had finished making a serviceable Lincoln out of two Continentals that had gotten smashed up in separate accidents on the same day. I rated discounts for having helped spring his nephew from a Grand Theft Auto rap two years ago. The nephew was guilty as Cain, but I needed a good mechanic. From there I headed back downtown.

  There were no visitors in my office. I collapsed into the chair behind the desk and massacred the office bottle. I felt like a handful of pocket lint. When the glass came up empty a second time I put the bottle back in the drawer and called the DeLancey house. The maid informed me that Mr. Billings was still on his way to Hawaii. I asked her if he had taken his car to the airport. She said he had. I thanked her and hung up. I sat there for a moment, pushing my lower lip in and out like Nero Wolfe. It didn’t help.

  The report on Janet Whiting was still in the desk. It didn’t look to have been disturbed, so maybe Fitzroy and Cranmer hadn’t tried to get a warrant after all. I paged through it absent-mindedly, without focusing on what was written there. I was thinking about what I had learned in Huron and what I hadn’t, adding them up in two separate columns and arriving with two separate zeros. A fisherman like the late Judge might have called it trolling without bait.

  Suddenly I stopped paging. The bound report flipped shut of its own weight. Outside the window and three stories down, someone stood on his brakes in the middle of the street, his tires shrieking like a dog caught in a meat grinder. I barely heard it. After a long moment I lifted the receiver with
a quaking hand and called Phil Montana’s office. Bill Clendenan answered.

  “Is he in?”

  He recognized my voice. There was a pause during which I heard “The Shadow of Your Smile” being drawn from syrupy strings in the background.

  “Listen, Walker—” he began.

  “I heard it. The bass fiddle needs tuning. Just tell him I’ll be around in a little while. Tell him I think I know who killed Bingo Jefferson and why. Tell him I’ve got an idea who did in Krim and that I’m pretty sure about the identity of the one responsible for a third murder he doesn’t know anything about. Tell him that.”

  He didn’t answer for five or six bars. Then:

  “Is that all?” His tone was icily ironic.

  “Not quite,” I said. “You can also tell him I think Judge Arthur DeLancey’s still alive.”

  I rung off before he could react.

  23

  A CROWD OF ABOUT twenty workers in caps and Windbreakers was boiling around the parking lot entrance to the RenCen, homemade picket signs thrashing above their heads, STRIKE NOW! screamed one in red Magic Marker letters. Another bellowed OPEN YOUR EYES, PHIL! and still another STEELERS VS. STEALERS. A handfull of sweating police officers in uniform stood on the fringes, trying to get the pickets moving in an orderly circle. The air was brittle with tension.

  “Hey!”

  A squat man whose jacket sleeves were rolled past muscular bronze forearms, the left a couple of shades darker than the right, inserted his hard round belly in front of the steps as I approached, blocking my path. I backed up a couple of paces and bumped into two more standing behind me.

  “You going up to see Phil Montana?” demanded the first.

  I took my time answering. His broad face, originally white, was burned dark and cracked at the corners of his eyes and lips. He had cigar breath. He was at least four inches shorter than I, but he had forty pounds on me easy, none of them soft. The guys behind me were my height and no less solid.

  “If I told you I was, would you take to your bed and sulk?”

  “One of us might end up in bed,” he grunted. “But it wouldn’t be me and the bed would be in a hospital.”

  He had a United Steelhaulers patch on his Windbreaker. “I thought you union boys were all for Montana.”

  “We are. Which is why we’re doing this, to get his attention. He’s been listening to the men around him too long. He don’t talk to the rank and file no more. We figure we can set him straight on how they’re selling us down the river to the big mills.”

  “I get it. When no one comes up to see him he’ll come down to find out why.”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “It won’t work. He’ll just send one of his stooges down here in his place. Or have the cops break it up.”

  “Then there’ll be some heads busted. Right, boys?”

  Assent rumbled through the crowd. One of the workers, a big black, slung his picket sign over one shoulder and hooked a thumb inside the watch pocket of his jeans, spreading his jacket to reveal the soldered end of a lead pipe sticking above the waistband.

  “So I’m asking you again,” said the spokesman. “Is your business with Montana or ain’t it?”

  “Hell, don’t look at me. I’m just an insurance agent. You want to buy a policy?” I produced a card from my collection, identifying me as Sherman Brady of the Midwest Confidential Life, Automobile, & Casualty Company. He made a face and stepped aside to let me pass. Like I said, you never know when they may come in handy.

  This time the secretary himself was waiting for me when I stepped off the elevator. He was wearing a different tan suit, this one a shade lighter. He wasn’t smoking. The two plainclothes bodyguards loomed bigger than ever behind him.

  “I told him,” Clendenan said. “He’s waiting.”

  I was frisked again and showed empty. The uniformed guard didn’t look up from his desk as we passed him. “Camelot” was tootling out of the speakers above the male clerical staff, hard at work as usual. An image flashed through my mind of a world in ruins, a mushroom cloud spreading over the rubble, and one lone speaker at the top of a twisted pole, playing one empty tune after another until the electricity ran out.

  Montana’s door stood open. The boss sat at his desk, fingering his World Series baseball and pretending to read the signatures on the horsehide. The desk was clear of paperwork. Blocky and solid-looking as before, he also looked tired. He had a jacket on this time and was wearing eyeglasses with half-lenses. I stood before him while Clendenan closed the door from outside.

  After a while he leaned back in his swivel chair and returned the ball to its place on the shelf. Then he folded his hands across his spare middle and looked at me over the top of his glasses. He inclined his head abruptly toward the chair I had occupied during my last visit. I accepted it.

  “You can start with why you think Arthur’s still alive,” he said.

  I was in the act of lighting a cigarette. I drew the smoke as far down as it would go, shook out the match, and leaned over to drop it into a square black onyx ashtray on the edge of the desk. I squirted smoke.

  “I don’t have any evidence that he is,” I began. “Just a hunch. But it’s a hell of a hunch.

  “He had tax problems, big tax problems. The kind that can land a man in a cell for a long time no matter how important he is. There was only one way out of it: to disappear. But disappearing isn’t as easy as it was once. First you need money, a lot of it if you want to continue living the way the Judge did. So he set up a dummy company, Griffin Carbide. He got his friends to invest in it on the rumor that it was going to merge with a bigger company. It didn’t and it folded. His friends took the loss. Only it didn’t fold, on account of I found out today that it owns property thirty miles west of here. I figure DeLancey’s been drawing on Griffin’s funds since his vanishing act, just as if it were his personal bank account. The ready cash he needed to start came from selling his firearms collection outright to his stepson, Jack Billings.

  “His scenario was just flashy enough to be believed. Everyone knew how keen he was on fishing and the outdoors, so he arranged an excursion to Canada over Lake Superior. To make it look like a working vacation he invited his aide. Then at the last minute he bowed out. Probably he claimed pressing business and told the pilot and aide to go ahead and he’d meet them later, traveling by automobile around the lake. Only they never made it across Superior. Maybe he tampered with the engine, maybe he planted some kind of bomb. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the plane went down over the most treacherous body of water on earth. As far as the public and anyone else were concerned, the Judge went down with it.”

  I paused to draw on my cigarette and give Montana a chance to comment. He didn’t. He was staring at his strong square hands resting on his stomach. I continued.

  “It was a peach of a setup. He didn’t confide in anyone, not even his family or mistress. It was almost perfect except that he didn’t count on his late pilot having a brother.

  “The pilot went by the name of Collins, but according to DeLancey’s chauffeur his real handle was Krim, the same as the Arab who owned The Crescent. I’ve seen Collins’ picture and the family resemblance is unmistakable. Krim—the Krim of The Crescent—had a substantial bank balance and was in the habit of making regular deposits in large amounts. Somehow he found out that the Judge wasn’t on that plane when his brother went swimming, and his revenge took a lucrative turn. It’s my guess he used the blood money he squeezed out of DeLancey to buy the joint on Cass, which made a good front should the IRS start wondering where he derived his income. I bet if you look it up you’ll find that Griffin Carbide is a major investor. But what Krim was getting was scrapings compared to what DeLancey had to draw on, so everyone was happy. Then Janet Whiting showed up.

  “She was bitter about the disappearance of the Judge’s last will and determined to find it. Somewhere along the way she tumbled to Krim’s relationship to DeLancey and became an employee at Th
e Crescent under an assumed name to learn more. You found out she was working there and because you felt responsible for her—later we’ll go over just why—you sent Bingo Jefferson down to look after her.”

  “I told you that,” put in Montana.

  I nodded. “But you didn’t tell me that you fathered her illegitimate child back in Huron—which, the laws governing paternity suits being what they are, was a good enough motive to send Jefferson not to protect her, but to kill her.”

  He stopped staring at his hands and leveled his gaze at me. For an instant I was transported back to a jungle in Southeast Asia, face to face with a guerrilla I’d stumbled across with his hands buried in the bloody face of a writhing G.I. I’d had my M-16 with me, and it had all been over in a second. But I never forgot his eyes. I made a gesture of dismissal.

  “Relax, I wasn’t accusing you. If you’d wanted her on ice you would have put her there long ago. Fatherhood is just as strong a motive for feeling protective toward the woman involved. Unfortunately, she didn’t see it that way, and when she spotted Jefferson—a menacing enough figure at the best of times—she got nervous and called me. Remember, she couldn’t be sure that you weren’t in on the plot.”

  “What makes you think I’m not?”

  “An investigator survives on hunches. If you’d been that kind of a guy you would never have stood trial on that chintzy assault rap, let alone been convicted. You’d have fixed it. I’m rambling.

  “Jefferson eavesdropped on my conversation with Janet Whiting—or Ann Maringer, as I knew her. He saw the ring change hands, figured out what it represented, and tried to get it back from me because he knew it would make trouble if it was traced back to you. You know what came of that. After I left and Janet got off work he followed her to her apartment. He had to find out where the ring went. He backed her into the bedroom, where she snatched a gun from somewhere and shot him. Or maybe not.

  “Maybe someone else followed her home. Someone like Krim, who had grown suspicious and was afraid she was going to spoil his good thing. Maybe he shot Jefferson and grabbed the woman to use as an extra bargaining point with DeLancey. Somewhere there’s a thirty-two derringer floating around that may have been what did the job on your bodyguard. It’s the ideal murder weapon—unregistered, untraceable, and easy to hide. Don’t ask me how he got it; I’m hypothesizing. Why Krim died and who did it is still up in the air, but I’m betting the Judge was in no mood for further squeezing.”