Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 02

by Angel Eyes

  Montana said, “You mentioned another murder.”

  I blew a jet of smoke at a corner of the ceiling. Beyond the window the Detroit skyline was limned in a haze of blue smog under a layer of dying sunshine. “You may read about it in tonight’s paper,” I said. “The local media people like to play up violent crimes that happen in other places. About noon a young Reliance Investigations operative named Albert Gold was gutshot and left for dead in the house you used to rent outside Huron. He left a terrible mess on his way downstairs. Later his car was found shoved off an abandoned logging road not far away. Tread marks found at the scene indicate that another car had been parked on the road when Gold arrived. I think they were left by a car belonging to Jack Billings.

  “Billings supplied me with a report on Janet Whiting that his mother had commissioned Reliance to prepare. He had substituted a page in the background section in order to throw me off the track, and went to Huron. I don’t know why. Maybe he thought Janet Whiting was stashed there. Maybe he suspected his stepfather was still alive and, like Krim, saw a profit in it. Or maybe that sappy story he tried to sell me about being infatuated with Janet was true after all. Anyway he went there, and not long afterward so did Gold.

  “His motives are easier to figure. You’ll remember I asked if you knew who was tailing me earlier. It was Gold, one of the operatives who had been keeping you under surveillance for the steel mills.”

  “I had the office checked out after you tipped me,” Montana said. “The telephones had been tapped and the office wired. We’re suing Reliance for invasion of privacy.”

  “Good for you. Gold tried to shake me down after he saw me coming out of The Crescent, where Krim was killed. By bugging our last conversation he learned who Ann Maringer is. It’s my guess he got hold of his agency’s file on Janet Whiting and that greed brought him out to Huron. There he tangled with Billings and fell down hard.”

  “Interesting,” he commented, after a short silence, during which I finished my cigarette and rubbed it out in the onyx tray. “And quite plausible, granting the original supposition that Arthur isn’t dead. But why come to me with it?”

  “I thought you might be able to fill in some of the gaps. Such as what really happened out there twenty-four years ago, and what it has to do with anything.”

  There was another pause, and then his lips smiled thinly, wholly independent of the rest of his face. “Detectives. Everything always has to have something to do with something else. Don’t you recognize coincidence?”

  “You’re stalling.”

  “Damn right I’m stalling. I don’t think as fast on my feet as I used to. It might interest you to know that Janet Whiting never bore my child, and that we never had sex before my wife died and Arthur DeLancey disappeared.”

  I made myself more comfortable in my chair. “It might.”

  He leaned back again and rescued the beat-up baseball from the shelf. This time he didn’t finger it. He placed it in the center of the desk and proceeded to ignore it.

  “I was living there at that time, in that rented house in the woods,” he admitted. “Under an assumed name, for the sake of privacy. It was my first vacation in years. I met Janet in the local hardware store. She saw that I was buying fishing tackle, recognized a trout lure in my purchase, and mentioned a pond where the trout were biting. Apparently she was something of a tomboy, and not at all shy of strangers, though she could barely bring herself to give her order to the clerk, who she must have known for years. I was never much of a fisherman, but I was interested for the sake of my house guest, who was. She offered to show me the way. I took her up on it.

  “After we had driven out there I invited her up to the house for lunch. Don’t look at me that way, Walker; it was a hot day and I was happily married. What I forgot—”

  “—was that DeLancey wasn’t,” I finished. “He was your guest, wasn’t he?”

  He glared. “If you knew that, why’d you insist I was mixed up with her back then?”

  “I wanted to hear you say it. I wasn’t sure you would if I didn’t jolt it out of you. The Judge had to have been there. It came to me when I got back to town this afternoon. He was the fisherman in this case, not you.”

  “You know what’s wrong with you, Walker? You’re too damned circumspect for your own good. One of these days you’re going to zigzag yourself into a real jam.” His eyes dropped to the baseball on his desk and his expression softened. I wondered what it was about that ball. He continued in a quieter voice.

  “Arthur took one look at Janet that day and something came into his eyes I didn’t like. But he was too smart to try anything while I was around. Nothing happened that day.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not a thing. She had eaten and was about to leave when the police came. Her father was with them, red-faced and mad as hell. I’ve battered men who called me worse than he did, but he was a man with a half-grown daughter and I was in the wrong.”

  “Didn’t the cops ask for identification?”

  “I had a phony driver’s license made out in the name of Peter Martin, an alias. You have to appreciate the occasional need for privacy in my work. Anyway, it satisfied them. Arthur was out fishing at that time; no one saw him. They took the girl away and that was the end of it. I thought.

  “Arthur was good-looking in those days. Women were always ready to fall in love with him, and he was a spoiled little kid when it came to self-discipline. He couldn’t control his urges. I figured Janet was too young to have those kinds of thoughts, but kids were getting to be a lot older than I was at the same age. It was a week before I found out that instead of going fishing, Arthur had been meeting the girl in the woods. He said she came to him the first time he visited the pond, and that it had got to be a regular thing. He said it was her eyes that attracted him, which I could believe. She had—has—beautiful eyes, bluer than any I ever saw.

  “I blew my top. I told him to pack up and get the hell out of my house. He did, and I cleared out right afterward. I wasn’t going to be around when her old man found out what had been going on.”

  “Is that why you and the Judge split up?”

  “I suppose it played a part, but not right away. Later, much later, I found out that the girl’s family had come to Detroit when they found out she was pregnant. I tried to get in touch with her, but he—I’m assuming it was her father’s decision—wanted nothing to do with me. I never saw Janet again until she took up with DeLancey years later. By that time she was a woman and old enough to make her own decisions. Her father was dead. I was no longer involved.”

  He looked at me hard. “That’s it, except that I felt responsible again after Arthur disappeared and left her without a cent. The son she had raised alone was old enough to work. I gave him a job here. I think my affair with Janet grew out of that. So you can see why I care what happens to her. She bought a piece of me twenty-four years ago and I’m still paying interest on the mortgage.”

  “Noble.”

  “Far from it. I won’t say I didn’t get something out of the relationship. Janet had changed a great deal in the years since Huron. There she was awkward, unsure of herself. As a woman she was poised and graceful, if not exactly beautiful. Her maturity had caught up with her early dancing lessons. I was proud to have won her, if only for a little while.”

  “So it was Griffin Carbide that ended your friendship with DeLancey.”

  “That again,” he said impatiently. “Yes. I was never able to prove it, but I suspected from the beginning that he manipulated that stock for his own benefit. It wasn’t the money, even though it took a big bite out of funds belonging to the men I was elected to represent. It was the fact that he’d cheat the organization that made him. That I can’t forgive. If you’re right, and he’s living off what he stole from this union, I’ll use whatever influence I have left to make sure he spends what’s left of his life inside walls.”

  I frowned at the ruled notepad upon which I had been recording his
statement. Then I met his gaze. “I’d like to meet Janet Whiting’s son.”

  “You already have.” He turned to the intercom on his desk, and I noticed for the first time that the orange light was shining on the panel, which meant that every word we’d said had been heard in the outer office. “Bill, come in here.”

  24

  BILL CLENDENAN CAME IN like a man walking through a neighborhood he used to know well but didn’t trust anymore—high on the balls of his feet, sidling as if to present a narrower target. He had his right hand inside the flap pocket of his jacket.

  Montana said, “Bill, relax. You checked out Walker yourself. You know he’s into no one but himself.”

  “That doesn’t mean I have to like him,” snapped the other. “He’s got a lot of smart mouth.”

  I had stood to face him. We were about the same height. “You’re Janet Whiting’s son?”

  “And Arthur DeLancey’s. Not that he ever acknowledged it, even in private.” He fingered the object in his pocket idly. It didn’t make much of a bulge. I figured it for a small-caliber weapon, possibly a .25. Not that the size of the bore mattered much at this distance.

  “I knew there was something familiar about you. She raised you?”

  “As best she could, under the circumstances. You grow up fast when you have to spend three nights a week on the streets while your mother’s home entertaining.”

  He spat the last word. I said, “DeLancey wouldn’t help?”

  “She never asked him for anything. He never even knew she was living in Detroit until they happened to meet at a taxi stand. That’s when she picked up where they had left off. She had to. I was in jail on a breaking and entering rap and she needed the money to raise bail. Even then, he was the one who made the offer. He thought he was buying her a new wardrobe. A man like Judge Arthur DeLancey couldn’t be seen with a part-time whore in bargain basement clothes.”

  “Don’t talk about her like that!” Montana snarled.

  “Who’s the gun for?” I asked.

  The union chief started. He seemed to notice his secretary’s hidden hand for the first time. “Take that damn thing out of your pocket! All I need is you getting pinched for carrying a concealed weapon. I’m trying to change this union’s image, not propagate it.”

  “Call it an heirloom. Handed down to me by my beloved father.” He took out the hand, revealing a one-shot derringer in his palm.

  It was the Forehand & Wadsworth that Billings had told me about, a cheap belly gun cranked out by the hundreds between 1870 and the turn of the century. The nickel plating had worn down to dull steel in spots, and the ivory grip was as yellow as horses’ teeth. It was scarcely longer than a man’s index finger. But it could kill. So could a man’s index finger, for that matter.

  I put out my hand and he gave it to me, just like that. I sniffed the barrel. It smelled of freshoil, like vanilla extract. I found the release, pivoted the barrel, and tapped out the cartridge. It was a modern centerfire, which this model was equipped to handle. I pointed the pistol toward the window and peered inside the barrel. No dust. It had been cleaned and oiled recently. I replaced the cartridge and rolled the barrel back into place.

  “I’ll hold onto this for now, if you don’t mind,” I told Clendenan, putting it in my pocket. “You don’t look like the sort of man who’s used to carrying a gun around. Where’s your father?”

  “This is news to me.” Montana was standing behind his desk with his hands flat on the top, staring at his secretary. “Why didn’t you tell me he was still alive and that you knew where he was?”

  Clendenan stared back. “I didn’t trust you. I didn’t trust anyone. Especially not him.” His eyes flicked in my direction, then back to his employer.

  “Maybe you trust the police.” I took a step toward the desk, reaching for the telephone.

  “Try calling them with two broken arms.”

  The secretary’s voice was hoarse with warning. It made me hesitate. Hard knots showed at the corners of his jaw.

  “Who are you going to get to do it?” demanded Montana. “Not my bodyguards. They take their orders from me.”

  “Is that what you think?” Clendenan crossed in front of me, leaned over the desk and flipped on the intercom, which Montana had turned off. “Okay.”

  The bodyguards entered, the one wearing glasses in front. They closed the door and took up positions on either side of it, their hands folded before them. Except for the Ivy League look they might have stepped off a B-movie set. Every once in a while Hollywood nails it square on the nose.

  The union chief tore off his own glasses with a savage gesture. “What the hell is this? I didn’t call you in here. Get back outside where you belong!”

  Neither of them moved.

  The secretary smirked. “I spend more time with them than you do. One of the disadvantages of being dedicated and locking yourself in the office twelve hours at a stretch. The eight months you spent in stir helped. They take your pay, but they take mine too, and more of it. You’re always asking me why I need such a large expense account. Now you know.”

  Montana ignored him. He stalked from behind his desk and confronted the bespectacled guard, glaring up at the man, who towered nearly a foot above him. “I told you to get out.”

  A brief look passed between the guard and Clendenan. Suddenly a huge hand lashed out and Montana went reeling. The guard hadn’t moved another muscle, just his forearm. But his employer had to clutch at the edge of the desk with both hands to keep from falling. The right side of his face was red, and he was wheezing like an asthmatic. I suddenly realized that he wasn’t healthy.

  “You’re always saying that the public is afraid of violence.” His secretary’s voice was taunting. “That it’s the brutal few and not the meek that will inherit the earth. You’ll be happy to know I haven’t forgotten a thing you taught me.”

  “I treated you like a son,” gasped the other. He was staring at the battered and discolored object on his desk, scribbled over with names like Kaline and Freehan and Northrup and

  Lolich, names that rang no longer from loudspeakers on sunny days where men gathered to play ball before cheering crowds.

  Clendenan laughed harshly. “Why? Because I once gave you a moth-eaten souvenir of a dead baseball team for Father’s Day? Or to salve your conscience because of what happened in Huron? The only father I’m interested in is my real one. He’s got millions. He’s no washed-up jailbird. Show him, Tim.”

  The other guard, slimmer than his partner, towheaded and freckling at the tops of his cheeks, tugged a big automatic from inside his coat and covered the room. In his hand the Army Colt looked like a lady’s purse gun. Clendenan held out his hand.

  “The derringer, Walker. Carrying guns is like eating peanuts, hard to give up.”

  I fished it out carefully and watched him return it to his own pocket. “Shall I wrap us up, or will you kill us here?” I asked.

  “Always the card. No one’s going to be killed if I can help it. You’re getting your wish, to meet the late Judge DeLancey. And my mother.”

  “They’re together?” Montana had managed to pull himself upright, though he continued to use the desk as support. His color was returning in patches, under a sheen of perspiration. “Where?”

  “At my house. The one you bought for me in Grosse Ile. I assume you want to accompany us out there. I’m no kidnaper.”

  I indicated the towhead’s .45. “What’s that, a corsage?”

  The secretary smiled wearily. “Like the farmer said, ‘First you got to get his attention.’ Okay, Tim.”

  The automatic returned to its hiding place beneath the bodyguard’s left arm.

  “Just don’t forget he has it,” warned Clendenan. “Let’s go.”

  The staff hardly glanced at us as we passed through the outer office. Montana in the middle of a flying wedge made up of his secretary, the guards, and me. If anyone noticed that the boss looked a little under the weather, none reacted. The un
iformed guard got up to hold the door open for us. No one said anything in the elevator on the way down.

  The situation in the parking lot was still simmering as we emerged from the building. The gang of steelhaulers spotted us and crowded in tightly, shouting to attract Montana’s attention. They made “Phil” sound like a royal title. The harried cops moved in to clear a path.

  My eyes met those of the blocky leader just before Tim shouldered him into the waiting arms of a husky young officer with a walrus moustache. To my back he snarled, “Sell him a policy yet?”

  “What’s that about?” Clendenan wanted to know. We kept moving, striding swiftly through the momentary opening in the wall of humanity.

  “Mistaken identity,” I replied.

  We waited in the aisle while Tim brought around our wheels, a midnight blue Cadillac limousine with blacked-out windows and a finish like patent leather. With both guards up front there was room enough for the three of us and a bowling alley in the deep back seat. There was a telephone in the car and a portable bar.

  “Where do you keep the stewardess?” I asked. “In the glove compartment?”

  “You’ve got wit, shamus. What you lack is timing.” The secretary watched the scenery slide by the window as Tim wheeled us expertly through the lot and out onto Jefferson.

  We turned west, where the street lights were just coming on. The sun was below the Detroit skyline. Tim turned on the heater against the gathering chill. It hissed softly, like snakes in a barrel.

  “Why the tour?” I reached for a Winston and came up with an empty pack. Clendenan offered me one of his. Kools. I accepted it resignedly and lit up.