“Call the police,” Tuskin told the nurse.
“Uh-uh.” I blocked her path. “What happened?”
Tuskin hesitated. “Stroke. It happened shortly after you left yesterday. What right have you to break in and batter my staff?”
I studied the gaunt face behind transparent plastic. “Is he conscious?”
Before the doctor could respond, Chubb’s eyelids rolled open and the great eyes slued my way. To Tuskin I said, “This will only take a minute. It’ll be on tonight’s news, so you can stay if you like.”
He liked. I spoke for longer than a minute, but by then no one was watching the clock. The dying man lay with his eyes closed most of the time. I had only the peeping of the electronic whozis to tell me I still had an audience.
“I confirmed it in back issues of the News and Free Press at the library,” I went on. “That wasn’t the first load of hooch Specs paid for and never got. His rumrunning boats and cars had a habit of sinking and getting hijacked, more than those of his rivals. Eddie bought the stuff in Canada with the boss’s money, stashed part of it to be picked up later, and saw to it that the empty crates he’d replaced it with got lost. He was making a respectable profit off each load. Kle-instein got wind of it and threatened him. Eddie and Clara never were an item. That was just Barnes’s story.”
Chubb’s lips moved. I didn’t need to hear him.
“Sure you saw them together,” I said. “They were retrieving a load from one of their caches. If Barnes was Eddie’s pipeline into the police department, as he’s confessed, Clara was his spy in Specs’s inner circle, ready to sound the alarm if he ever got suspicious. When he did, Barnes panicked and had Eddie taken out to keep him from talking.”
I read his lips again and shook my head.
“No. I thought Barnes had killed him too until we checked out his alibi. The night Eddie went down, your partner was sitting vigil in a Harper Woods funeral parlor with a cousin’s remains. Two people who were with him that night are still alive, and they’ve confirmed it. There was only one other person who had a stake in Eddie’s death, who he would have trusted to go with him that last night.”
His lips didn’t move this time. I hurried on.
“It was the girl, Mr. Chubb. Clara Baxter. She shot him and spent all night chipping a hole under the car to cover the evidence. Barnes hasn’t changed much in fifty years. When I started poking around he lost his head again and tipped Kleinstein anonymously to get me out of the way while he offed Clara. He knew she wouldn’t confess to Eddie’s murder, but if Specs got suspicious and wrung the truth about the swindle out of her, Barnes was cold meat. In court he stood a chance. The underworld doesn’t offer one.”
I waited, but he didn’t respond. After a brief examination Dr. Tuskin announced that his patient had lapsed into coma. I never found out if he was conscious long enough to appreciate the fact that he’d spent half a century hating a man for the wrong reason. He died early the next morning without telling his son about our arrangement, and I didn’t have enough capital on hand to sue his estate. But I wasn’t the biggest loser by far.
Three days after his arraignment on two counts of murder, while awaiting trial in the Wayne County Jail, Walter Barnes was found strangled to death in his cell with the cord from his hearing aid. The coroner called it suicide.
Fast Burn
The old man wrestled open my inner office door and held it with a shoulder while he worked his way inside, supporting himself on two steel canes, dragging one foot behind him that clanked when he let his weight down on it. He had a corrugated brow and a long loose face of that medium gray that very black skin sometimes turns with age, shot through with concentration and pain. His brown suit bagged at the knees and no two buttons on the jacket matched.
At that moment I was up to my wrists in typewriter ribbon, changing spools on the venerable Underwood portable that came with the office, and unable to get up from behind my desk to assist him— not that he looked like someone who was accustomed to receiving help from anyone. I simply said hello and nodded toward the customer’s chair on his side. While I threaded the ribbon through the various forks, hooks, and prongs I heard him lower himself thankfully onto semisoft vinyl and make the little metallic snicking noises that went with undoing the braces securing the canes to his wrists.
I took my time, giving him breathing space. Going to see a private investigator isn’t like visiting the dentist. I come at the desperate end of the long line of friends, relatives, friends of relatives, friends of friends, and guys around the corner whose friends owe them favors. By the time the potential client gets around to me he’s admitted that his problem has grown beyond him and his circle. So I let this one resign himself to the last stop before the abyss and didn’t realize until I looked up again that I was playing host to a dead man.
You know dead once you’ve seen it a few times, and the old man’s cocked head and black open mouth with spittle hanging at one corner and the glittering crescents of his half-open eyes said it even as I got up and moved around the desk to feel his neck for an artery he didn’t need any longer. His face was four shades darker than it had been coming in, and bunched like a fist. He’d suffered six kinds of hell in that last quiet moment.
I broke a pair of surgical gloves out of a package I keep in the desk, put them on, and went through his pockets. When someone dies in a room you pay rent on it’s only polite to learn who he is. If the driver’s license in his dilapidated wallet was valid, his name was Emmett Gooding and he lived—had lived—on Mt. Elliott near the cemetery. What a crippled old man was doing still driving was strictly between him and the Michigan Secretary of State’s office. There were twelve dollars in the wallet and a ring of keys in his right pants pocket, nothing else on him except a handful of pocket lint and a once-white handkerchief that crackled when unfolded. He was wearing a steel brace on his left leg. I put everything back where I’d found it and dialed 911.
The prowl car cop who showed up ten minutes later looked about 17, with no hair on his face and no promise of it and a glossy black visor screwed down to the eyes. He put on gloves of his own to feel Gooding’s neck and told me after a minute that he was dead.
“That’s why I called,” I said, knocking ash off a Winston into the souvenir ashtray on my desk. “I wanted a second opinion.”
“You kill him?” He laid a hand on his sidearm.
“I’ll answer that question when it counts.”
Creases marred the freckles under his eyes. “When’s that?”
“Now.” I nodded at the first of two plainclothesmen coming in the door. He was a slender black with a Fu Manchu moustache and coils of gray hair like steel wool at his temples, wearing the kind of electric blue suit that looks like hell on anybody but him. I knew him as Sergeant Blake, having seen him around Detroit Police Headquarters but not often enough to talk to. His companion was white, short, fifteen pounds too heavy for department regs, and a good ten years too old for active duty. He had a brush cut, jug ears, and so much upper lip it hung down over the hollow in his chin. I didn’t know him from Sam’s cat. You can live in a city the size of Detroit a long time and never get to know all the cops on the detective force if you’re lucky.
Blake’s flat eyes slid over the stiff quickly and lit on the uniform as he flashed his badge and ID. “Anything?”
“Just what’s here, Sarge,” reported the youngster, and handed me a glance meant to be hard. “Suspect’s uncooperative.”
“Okay, crash.” And the uniform was off the case. When he had gone: “They’re running too small to keep these days.”
The short fat cop grunted.
“Amos Walker, right?” Blake looked at me tor the first time. I nodded. “This is my partner, Officer Fister. Who’s the dead guy?”
I said I didn’t know and gave him the story, leaving out the part about searching the body. Cops consider that their province, which it is. Fister meanwhile wrapped a handkerchief around his fingers and drew the de
ad man’s wallet out of his inside breast pocket. He had probably run out of surgical gloves years ago. He read off what mattered on the driver’s license and inventoried the other contents. Blake watched me carefully while this was going on, and I made my face just as carefully blank. At length be gave a little shrug. That was it until the medical examiner arrived with his black metal case and glanced at Gooding’s discolored face and looked at his fingers and took off the dead man’s right shoe and sock and examined the bottom of his foot and then put all his instruments back in the case, humming to himself. He was a young Oriental. They are almost always Orientals; I think it has something to do with ancestor worship.
Blake looked at him and the M.E. said, “Massive coronary. We’ll root around inside and spend a hunk of taxpayer’s money on tests and it’ll still come out massive coronary. When their faces turn that shade and there’s evidence of an earlier stroke”—he indicated the leg brace, part of which showed under the dead man’s pantsleg—“it can’t be much else.”
The sergeant thanked him and when the expert left had me tell the story again for Fister’s notepad and then again just for fun while the white coats came to bag the body and cart it down to the wagon. “Any ideas about why he came here?” Blake asked. I shook my head. He sighed. “Okay. We might need your statement later if Charlie Chan turns out to be wrong about the heart attack.”
“He didn’t act like someone who’s been wrong recently,” I said.
Fister grunted again. “Tell me. I never met one of them croakers didn’t think his sweat smelled like lilacs.”
On that sparkling note they left me.
Two
I spent the rest of the week tailing a state senator’s aide around Lansing for his wife in Detroit, who was curious about the weekends he was spending at the office. Turned out he had a wife in the state capital, too. I was grinning my way through my typewritten report at the desk when Sergeant Blake came in. He wore a tired look and the same shocking blue suit. There couldn’t be another like it in the city.
“You’re off the hook,” he announced. “Gooding’s heart blew like the M.E. said. We checked him out. He was on the line at the Dearborn plant till he took his mandatory four years ago. Worked parttime flagging cars during road construction for County, had a stroke last year, and quit. No family. Papers in his dump on Mt. Elliott said he was getting set to check into a nursing home on Dequindre. Staff at the home expected him this week. Next to his phone we found Monday’s Free Press folded to an article about employee theft that mentioned you as an investigator and the Yellow Pages open to the page with your number on it.”
“That was a feature piece about a lot of dead cases.” I stapled the report. “What did he want with me?”
“¿Quien sabe? Maybe he thought this was the elephant graveyard for old Ford workers. I’d care if he died any way but natural.”
“Okay if I look into it?”
“Why? There’s no one to stand your fee.”
“He came looking for help with something. I’d like to know what it was.”
“It’s your time.” He opened the door.
“Thanks for coming down, sergeant. You could have called.”
“I’m on my way home. I dropped off a uniform to drive Gooding’s car to the impound. We found it in the lot next door.”
He went out and I got up to file my carbon of the report to the woman with the generous husband. The window behind the desk started chattering, followed an instant later by a massive hollow crump that rang my telephone bell. At first I thought it was the ancient furnace blowing. Then I remembered it was June and got my .38 out of the desk. I almost bumped into Blake standing in the hall with his Police Special drawn. He glanced at me without saying anything and together we clattered down three flights to the street. Something that wasn’t an automobile any longer squatted in a row of vehicles in the parking lot next to my building with its hood and doors sprung and balls of orange flame rolling out of its shattered windows, pouring black smoke into the smog layer overhead. Sirens keened in the distance, years too late to help the officer cooking in the front seat.
Three
Shadows were congealing when I got away from Headquarters, dry-mouthed from talking to a tape recorder and damp under the arms from Sergeant Blake’s enthusiastic interrogation. The bomb squad was still looking at the charred husk of Gooding’s car, but it was a fair bet that a healthy charge had been rigged to the ignition. Gooding was Homicide’s meat now and my permission to investigate his interest in me had died with the uniformed cop. So I called an old acquaintance in Personnel at the City-County Building from a public booth and asked for information on the old man’s brief employment with the Road Commission; if I’d had brains to begin with I would have invested in two chinchillas instead of a license and waited for spring. My acquaintance promised to get back to me next day during business hours. I hung up and drove to Dearborn, where no one working the late shift at the Ford plant had ever heard of Emmett Gooding. The turnover in the auto industry is worse than McDonald’s. I caught the personnel manager just as he was leaving his office, flashed my ID, and told him I was running a credit check on Gooding for a finance company. Reluctantly he agreed to go back in and pull the old man’s file.
The manager was small, with a shaved head and a very black pointed beard that didn’t make him look anything like the high priest of the Church of Satan. He scowled at the papers in the Manila folder.
“He was a steady worker, didn’t take as many sick days as you might expect from someone nearing mandatory retirement. Turned down the foreman’s job twice in eighteen years. No surprise. It’s a thankless position, not worth the raise.”
“Is there anyone still working here who knew him?” I asked.
“Probably not. A robot’s doing his job these days.” He winced. “I had a computer expert in here recently bragging about how the machines free workers from inhuman jobs to explore their true potential. In my day we called it unemployment.”
There was nothing in that for me, so I thanked him and got up. His eyes followed me. “What’s a man Gooding’s age want with a loan?”
“He’s buying a hot tub,” I said, and got out of there.
That was it for one day. I had a bill to make out for the bigamist’s wife, and contrary to what you read, private stars don’t often work at night, when most sources are closed. The bill complete, I caught a senile pork chop and a handful of wilted fries at the diner down the street from my office and went home. There was just a black spot on the parking lot pavement where Gooding’s car had stood.
After breakfast the next morning I drove down to the City-County Building, making a gun out of my index finger and snapping a shot at the statue of the Spirit of Detroit on my way in. The Green Giant, as we call him, was still threatening to crush the family he was holding in one hand with the globe he was gripping in the other. The blunt instrument symbolized Progress.
I owed my contact in Personnel to having sprung his younger brother from a charge of assaulting a police officer upon producing evidence that the cop had a history of trying to pull moving violators out of their cars through the vent windows. It had cost me some good will at Police Headquarters, but the access to confidential records was worth it. My man looked like 14 trying to pass for 40, with freckles, hornrims, and short sandy hair parted with a protractor. Never mind his name.
“What you got?” I slung my frame into the treacherous scoop chair in front of his gray metal desk and lit up. He pushed a spotless white ashtray my way. He was one of those non-smokers who didn’t mind a little more pollution in a sky already the color of sardines. “Not a lot,” he said. “Gooding was with the Road Commission off and on, mostly off, for only about five months before taking a medical.” He told me which months. I took them down in my notebook.
“What sort of worker was he?”
“How good do you have to be to hold up a sign? Nothing remarkable on his work sheet; I guess he was reliable.”
“Where’d he work?”
He started to read off street names, quadrant numbers, and dates from the printout sheet on his desk, then swore and slid it across to me. I wrote them down too, along with the foreman’s name and home telephone number. “Anything else?”
“Nothing the computer noticed,” he said.
“Okay, thanks.” I got up, shook his hand, and went through the door, or almost. Blake and Fister were on their way in. The sergeant’s fist was raised to rap on the door. When he saw me I pulled my head back out of range. He hesitated, then uncurled his fingers and smoothed down one side of his Fu Manchu. He said: “I should have guessed. The guy in Dearborn said someone was around asking about Gooding last night.”
“Good morning, Sergeant,” I said. “Officer.”
“Let’s clink him for interfering in a police investigation,” suggested Fister. His long upper lip was skinned back to his gums, exposing teeth the shade of old plaster.
Blake ignored him. “You’re screwing around with your license, Walker.”
“Not technically, since I’m not working for anyone.”
Fister said. “The law ain’t in books, pal. It’s here standing in front of you.”
“Don’t let us walk on your heels a second time,” the sergeant said evenly. “We’ll bend you till you break.”
He walked around me into the office, followed a half-second later by his trained dog.
Four
The foreman’s name was Lawler. I tried his home number from a booth, got no answer, and called the county dispatcher’s office, where a dead-voiced secretary informed me Lawler was due at a road construction site on Dequindre at two. That gave me three hours. I coaxed my heap up Woodward to the Detroit Public Library and spent the time in the microfilm room reading copies of the News and Free Press for the dates Gooding had worked flagging cars. No major robberies or hits had taken place in those vicinities at the time. So much for the theory that he had seen someone driving through whom he was better off not seeing. Rubbing floating type out of my eyes, I put a hamburger out of its misery at a lunch counter on Warren and took the Chrysler north to Dequindre. On the way I flipped on the radio in the middle of a news report on the bombing outside my office building. The announcer managed to get my name right, but that was about all.
Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection Page 5