Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  He nodded feebly. His eyes were swollen in the shriveled face and his head quaked. “I want him in jail.”

  “You, the Detroit Police, and the FBI.” I stuck a cigarette in my mouth, then remembered where I was, and started to put it away. He told me to go ahead and smoke. I said. “Sure?”

  “Don’t worry about killing me. I’m hardier than I look.”

  “You’d almost have to be.”

  He smiled, or tried to. The corners of his lipless mouth tugged out a tenth of an inch. “You remind me of Eddie.”

  “Eddie?” I lit up.

  “He’s the reason I want Specs behind bars. The reason you’re here. You know about Robbers’ Roost?”

  I blew smoke away from the bed. “If I answer this one right, do I get the range or the trip to Hawaii?”

  “Indulge my senility. You won’t find the Roost on any map, but if you ask any old-time Detroiter about it he’ll grin and give you directions a blind man could follow. It covers ten blocks along the river in Ecorse where rumrunners from Canada used to dock during Prohibition. Eddie and I grew up there.”

  “Eddie was your brother?”

  “Yes and no. His last name was Stoner. My folks adopted him in nineteen twelve after his folks were killed in a streetcar accident on Woodward. You ever see an old Warner Brothers picture called Angels with Dirty Faces?”

  “A time or twelve.”

  “Well, it was Eddie and me right on the button. We were the same age, but he grew up faster on account of a four alarm temper and a pair of fists like pistons. When college time came and my parents could afford to send only one of us, it was Eddie who stepped aside. After graduation I joined the Ecorse Police Department. Eddie got a job delivering bootleg hooch for Specs Kleinstein.

  “I asked him how far he thought I’d get in the force when it got out that I had Mob connections. He said, ’Probably chief,’ and I knocked him down for the first and only time in my life. He moved out soon after.”

  Chubb closed his eyes. Whatever breathing he was doing wasn’t enough to stir the quilt over his chest. But his nostrils were quivering and I relaxed.

  “One day I pulled over a big gray Cadillac for running a stop sign on Jefferson,” he went on. “Eddie was behind the wheel with a girl in the passenger’s seat and ten cases of Old Log Cabin stacked in back. The girl was Clara Baxter, Kleinstein’s mistress. Eddie laughed when I told him to watch his butt. Well, I took them in, car and all. They were back on the street an hour later with everything returned, including the liquor. That was how things worked back then.”

  “Back then.” I flicked some ash into a pantscuff.

  Chubb ignored the comment. “I never saw him again. That winter the river froze over, and the boats went into drydock while old cars were used to ferry the stuff across. I still have the clipping.”

  A yellow knuckle twitched at the bedstand. In the drawer was a square of brown newsprint fifty years old. BOOTLEGGER DIES AS ICE COLLAPSES, bellowed the headline. I read swiftly.

  “It says it was an accident,” I said. “The ice gave way under Stoner’s car and he went to the bottom.”

  “Yeah. It was just a coincidence that Specs found out about Eddie stealing his woman the day before the accident and threatened to kill him. I have that on good authority.”

  “You tried to nail him for it?”

  “For thirty-two years, until retirement. No evidence.”

  “What made you decide to try again now?” He opened his huge eyes and turned them on me. “In confidence?”

  I nodded.

  “This morning I had a little stroke. I still can’t grip anything with my right hand. Nobody here even knows about it. But I won’t survive another.”

  I smoked and thought. “I wouldn’t know where to start after all this time.”

  “You do if your recommendation is any good. Try Walter Barnes in Ecorse. He was my partner for fourteen years and he knows as much about the case as I do. Then you might see what you can do about recovering Eddie’s remains.”

  “He’s still down there?”

  “I never could get the city to pay out to raise a gangster’s body. The car isn’t a hazard to navigation.”

  I folded away the clipping inside my jacket and stood. “My fee’s two-fifty a day plus expenses.”

  “See my son. His number’s on the back of the clipping.”

  “Be seeing you.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  Two

  I found Walter Barnes watering the lawn of his brick split-level on Sunnyside, a tall man in his early seventies with pinkish hair thinning in front and a paunch that strained the buttons on his fuzzy green sweater. He wore a hearing aid, so naturally I started the interview at the top of my lungs.

  “Stop shouting or I’ll spray you,” he snapped. “Who’d you say you were?”

  I handed him my card. He moved his lips as he read.

  “Amos Walker, huh? Never heard of you.”

  “You’re in the majority. What can you tell me about Eddie Stoner?”

  “Who’d you say you’re working for?” His eyes were narrow openings in thickets of wrinkles.

  “Oscar Chubb. You used to be partners.”

  His face softened. “Oscar. How is he?”

  “Dying.”

  “I been hearing that for ten years. Who was it you asked me about?”

  “Eddie Stoner.” I made strangling motions with my hands in my pockets.

  His lips drew back over his dentures. “Eddie was bad. He was the reason Oscar took so long getting his stripes. The brass didn’t like having a hoodlum’s brother on the force, blood kin or no.”

  “Tell me about Eddie’s death.”

  His story was loaded with repetitions and back-telling, but I gathered that it was one of Barnes’s snitches who had carried the tale of Kleinstein’s death threat. Clara Baxter had blurted out the details of her fling during an argument. A scuffle with Eddie followed; Klein-stein’s eyeglasses got broken along with his nose, and he sputtered through the blood that Stoner wouldn’t see Thursday.

  “Way I see it,” the ex-cop wrapped up, “Specs wormed his way back into Eddie’s confidence somehow, then let him have it in the car that night on the ice. Then he got out a spud and chopped a circle around the car so it broke through, and headed back on foot. But he never could prove they were together that night.”

  “What happened to Clara Baxter?”

  “She left town right after the fight. Last I heard she was back and living in Detroit. Married some guy named Fix or Wicks, something like that. I heard he died. Hell, her too, probably, by now.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Barnes. Who do I see about fishing Eddie’s remains out of the river?”

  He turned off the nozzle and started rolling up the hose with slow, deliberate movements of his spotted hands. “In this town, no one. Money’s too tight to waste solving a murder no one cares about anymore.”

  “I hope you’re wrong, Mr. Barnes,” I said. “About no one caring, I mean.”

  He made no reply. For all I knew, his hearing aid needed fresh batteries.

  Three

  A Clara Wicks and two C. Fixes were listed in the Detroit directory. I tried them from my office. The first was a thirty-year-old divorcee who tried to rape me over the telephone and the others were men. Then I got tricky and dialed the number for C. Hicks. No answer. Next I rang Lieutenant John Alderdyce on Detroit Homicide, who owed me a favor. He collected on a poker debt from a cop on the Ecorse Police, whose wife’s brother knew a member of the city council, who had something on the mayor. Half an hour later Alderdyce called back to say that dragging for the submerged car would start first thing in the morning. Democracy is a system of checks and balances.

  There was still no answer at the Hicks number. The house was on Livernois. I thought I’d check it out, and had my hand on the door handle of my war-torn Cutlass when two guys crowded in on either side of me. Together they’d have filled Tiger Stadium.

  �
��You got a previous engagement, chum,” said the one on my left, a black with scar tissue over both eyes and a sagging lower lip that left his bottom teeth exposed. His partner wasn’t as pretty.

  I was hustled into the rear of a dark blue Lincoln in the next slot down, where Gorgeous sat next to me while the other drove. After that the conversation lagged.

  Kleinstein was leaning on a cane in the living room of his Troy townhouse when we entered. His white hair was fine over shiny scalp and his neck and hands were spotted, but aside from that he was the Specs whose picture I’d seen in books about Prohibition, down to the thick eyeglasses that had earned him his nickname. He had on a pastel blue sport shirt and gray trousers with pleats.

  “You’re working for Oscar Chubb.” His Yiddish accent was faint but there. “Why?”

  “I’m supporting a habit. I have to eat every now and then.”

  His cane slashed upward. A black light burst inside my temple. I reeled, then lurched forward, but the gargoyles who had brought me stepped between us. Unarmed that day, I relaxed.

  “Next time don’t be flip,” warned the old man. “What’ve you found out?”

  “If you hit me with that cane again I’ll make you eat it.”

  Gorgeous lumbered toward me, dropping one shoulder. I pivoted and kicked. The side of my sole met his kneecap with an audible snap. Howling, he grasped it and staggered backward until he fell into an overstuffed chair. He started to blubber. His partner roared and lunged, but Kleinstein smacked the cane across his chest, halting him.

  “All right, you’re a hardcase. The cemetery’s full of them. Some guys are just too dumb to scare. You’re here because I want you to know I didn’t kill Stoner.”

  “Who told you I cared?”

  He smiled dryly. The spectacles magnified his eyes to three times their normal size. “Let’s stick to the subject. Five witnesses swore I was nowhere near the river that night.”

  “My client says different.”

  “Your client is senile.”

  “Maybe. We’ll know for sure tomorrow. The City of Ecorse is raising the car Stoner died in.”

  He didn’t turn pale or try to walk on the ceiling. I hadn’t really expected him to. “How much evidence do you think they’ll find after fifty years?” He flushed. “Look at this house, Walker. I’ve lived like this a long time. Do you think I’d risk it on a cheap broad?”

  “Maybe you wouldn’t. The old Specs might have.”

  He spat on the carpet. The thug in him would always come through in moments like this. Turning to the uninjured flunky: “Take this punk back to his building and get a doctor for Richard on your way back.” To me: “Step soft, Walker. Things have a way of blowing up around people I don’t like.”

  I took him literally. When the gorilla dropped me off I checked under the hood before starting my car.

  Four

  The Hicks home stood in a seedy neighborhood where old jalopies went to die, a once-white frame house with an attached garage and a swaybacked roof, surrounded by weeds. When no one answered my third knock I tried the door. It was unlocked.

  The living room was cozy. Magazines and cheap paperbacks flung everywhere, assorted items of clothing slung over the shabby furniture and piled on the colorless rug. In the bedroom I found a single bed, unmade, and a woman’s purse containing the usual junk and a driver’s license in the name of Clara Hicks, aged 68. I was in the right place. A small, functional kitchen boasted an old refrigerator, a two-burner stove, and a sink and counter where a sack of groceries waited to be put away. The sack was wet. Two packages of hamburger were half-thawed inside.

  There was a throbbing noise behind a side door. My stomach dropped through a hole. I tore open the door and dashed into a wall of noxious smoke. She was lying in the back seat of a six-year-old Duster with her hands folded demurely on her stomach. Her mousy gray hair was rumpled, but aside from that she was rigged for the street, in an inexpensive gray suit and floral print blouse. I recognized her sagging features from the picture on her driver’s license. Coughing through my handkerchief, I reached over the seat to turn off the ignition and felt her throat for a pulse. After thirty seconds I gave up.

  I climbed out and pulled up the garage door, gulped some air, then went back and steeled myself to run my fingers over her scalp. There was a sticky lump the size of a Ping-Pong ball above her left ear.

  Five

  Two hours after I called him, I was still sitting in a chair in the kitchen talking to John Alderdyce. John’s black, my age, and a spiffy dresser for a cop. In the garage they were still popping flashbulbs and picking up stray buttons.

  “It could be suicide,” I acknowledged. “She bought groceries today and left that hamburger thawing out in case you boys in Homicide got hungry.”

  The lieutenant made a disgusting noise. “That’s what I can always count on from you, sincerity,” he snarled. “The M.E. says she probably suffered cardiac arrest when the blow was struck, an hour or so before you found her. Who would you fit for it? Specs?”

  “Maybe. I can’t help wondering why, if he was going to do it, he didn’t have her iced fifty years ago. The fact that I was with him about the time she took the blow means nothing. He could have had it catered. You’d better talk to Barnes.”

  “Not that I wasn’t planning to anyway, but why?”

  “Aside from Specs and Chubb, he was the only one who knew I was on the case. Someone had to tell Kleinstein.”

  “That opens up all sorts of unpleasant possibilities.”

  “Buying cops was invented in the twenties,” I said. “Look up his record. Maybe he knows who dropped the contract on Eddie Stoner.”

  “That one’s yours. I’ve got enough new murders on my hands. I don’t have to tinker with old ones too.”

  I fumbled out a cigarette and stuck it between my lips without lighting it. My throat was raw from them as it was.

  “Someone doesn’t agree with you. This particular old murder bothered him enough to make committing a new one seem worthwhile.”

  “Barnes is the one told you about the Baxter woman in the first place.”

  “He knew I’d suspect him if he didn’t. He very conveniently forgot her married name, remember. Of course, I’m assuming she hasn’t made enemies in the interim. That one’s yours.”

  “Thanks. I wouldn’t have known if you hadn’t told me.”

  He put away his notepad. “That’ll do for now, Walker. Your help is appreciated.”

  I’d heard sweeter thanks from muggers. “Don’t mention it. Finding little old ladies sapped and gassed is a favorite hobby of mine.”

  That night I dreamed I was out swimming on a warm evening when I came upon a vintage car sunk in the mud, moonlight shining on it through the water. Peering inside, I was snatched by flabby hands and found myself grappling with an old woman whose face was blotched gray with death. We rolled over and over, but her grip was like iron and I couldn’t shake her. I awoke as drenched as if I had actually been in the water.

  The telephone was ringing. It was John Alderdyce.

  “Good news and bad news, shamus. Sheriff’s men got Barnes at Metro Airport a few minutes ago, boarding a plane for L.A.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “We looked up his record. There’s nothing to indicate he was anything but square. I wish to hell mine were as good.”

  That tore it as far as getting a good night’s sleep was concerned. I sat up smoking cigarettes until dawn.

  Six

  The day was well along when Alderdyce and I shared the Ecorse dock with a crowd of local cops and the curious, watching a rusty sedan rise from the river at the end of a cable attached to a derrick on the pier. Streaming water, the glistening hulk swung in a wide, slow arc and descended to a cleared section of dock. The crane’s motor died. Water hissed down the archaic vehicle’s boiler-shaped cowl and puddled around the rotted tires.

  Uniforms held back the crowd while John and I inspected the interior. Decaye
d wooden crates had tumbled over everything. Something lay on the floor in front, swaddled in rags, and what remained of the upholstery. White, turtle-gnawed bone showed through the tattered and blackened fabric.

  “Not much hope of proving he was sapped or shot,” said the lieutenant. “The denizens of the deep have seen to that.”

  “Even so,” I said, “having a corpus delicti makes for a warm, cozy feeling. Is Barnes still in custody?”

  “For the time being. We won’t be able to hold him much longer without evidence. What is it?”

  A longshoreman who had been pressed into service to unload the cargo had exclaimed as he lifted out the first of the crates. “Awful light for a box full of booze,” he said, setting it down on the dock.

  A crowbar was produced and the rotted boards gave way easily to reveal nothing inside. Alderdyce directed another crate to be opened, and another. They were equally unrewarding.

  “I wonder why Eddie would risk his life for a carload of empty boxes,” I mused, breaking the silence.

  Seven

  In the end, it was the boxes and not the body that broke him. After an hour of questioning, Alderdyce dropped the bombshell about the strange cargo, whereupon Barnes’s face lost all color and he got so tongue-tied he couldn’t keep his lies straight. When he started confessing, the stenographer had to ask him twice to slow down so she could keep up.

  Outside Oscar Chubb’s room that evening an orderly with shoulders you couldn’t hike across grasped my upper arms as I started to push past and I asked him to let go. He squeezed harder, twisting the muscle and leering. I jabbed four stiffened fingers into the arch of his ribcage. When he doubled over I snatched hold of his collar and opened the door with his head. Inside, a gentle boot in the rump laid him out on his face.

  Dr. Tuskin and the hatchet-faced nurse were standing on the other side of the bed. An oxygen tent covered Chubb’s head and torso and he was wired to an oscilloscope whose feeble beep disconcertingly resembled a countdown. The noise echoed the beating of my client’s heart.