Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Any grand jury investigations in progress?” I asked.

  “They’re hard on the bookkeeping population.”

  He shook his head. “We got a call in to the feds, but even if they get back to us we’ll still have to go up to the mountain to get any information out of those tight-mouthed clones. We’re pinning our hopes on the street trade and this woman Rena. Especially her.”

  “What’d you turn on her?”

  “She works at the Peacock’s Roost like you said, goes by Rena Murrow. She didn’t show up for the four PM. shift today. She’s got an apartment on Michigan and we have men waiting for her there, but she’s empty tracks by now. Tillet’s landlady says he’s been away someplace on vacation. Lying low. Whoever wanted him out in the open got to Rena. By all accounts she is a woman plenty of scared accountants would break cover to meet.

  “Maybe someone used her?”

  He grinned that tight grin that was always bad news for someone. “Your license to hunt Dulcineas still valid?”

  “Everyone needs a hobby,” I said. “Stamps are sissy.”

  “Safer, though. According to the computer, this damsel has two priors for soliciting, but that was before she started bumming around with one Peter Venito. ’Known former associate,’ it says in the printout. Computers have no romance in their circuits.”

  I smoked and thought. Peter Venito, born Pietro, had come up through the Licavoli mob during Prohibition and during the old Kefauver Committee hearings had been identified as one of the five dons on the board of governors of that fraternal organization the Italian Anti-Defamation League would have us believe no longer exists.

  “Venito’s been dead four or five years,” I said.

  “Six. But his son Paul’s still around and a slice off the old pizza. His secretary at Great Lakes Importers says he’s in Las Vegas. Importing.”

  “Anything on the street soldiers?”

  “Computer got a hernia sorting through gray eyes and the heights and builds you gave us. I’d go to the mugs but you say you didn’t get a long enough hinge at them without their masks, so why go into golden time? Just sign the statement and give my eyes a rest from your ugly pan.”

  The stenographer had just returned with three neatly typewritten sheets. I read my words and wrote my name at the bottom. “I have it on good authority I’m a heartbreaker,” I told Alderdyce, handing him the sheets.

  “What’s a Dulcinea, anyway?” asked the sergeant.

  Five

  The shooting at Eight Mile and Dequindre was on the radio. They got my name and occupation right, anyway. I switched to a music station and drove through coagulating dusk to my little three-room house west of Hamtramck, where I put my key in a door that was already unlocked. I’d locked it when I left that morning.

  I went back for the Luger I keep in a special compartment under the dash, and when I had a round in the chamber I sneaked up on the door with my back to the wall and twisted the knob and pushed the door open at arm’s length. When no bullets tore through the opening I eased the gun and my face past the door frame. Rena was sitting in my one easy chair in the living room with a .32 Remington automatic in her right hand and a bottle of scotch and a half-full glass standing on the end table on the other side.

  “I thought it might be you,” she said. “That’s why I didn’t shoot.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “You ought to get yourself a dead-bolt lock. I’ve known how to slip latches since high school.”

  “All they taught me was algebra.” I waved the Luger.

  “Can we put up the artillery? It’s starting to get silly.”

  She laid the pistol in her lap. I snicked the safety into place on mine and put it on the table near the door and closed the door behind me. She picked up her glass and sipped from it.

  “You buy good whisky. Keyhole-peeping must pay pretty good.”

  “That’s my Christmas bottle.”

  “Your friends must like you.”

  “I bought it for myself.” I went into the kitchen and got a glass and filled it from the bottle.

  She said, “The cops were waiting for me at my place. One of them was smoking a pipe. I smelled it the minute I hit my floor.”

  “The world’s full of morons. Cops come in for their share.” I drank.

  “What’s it going to cost me to get clear of this?”

  “How much you got?”

  She glanced down at the blue bag wedged between her left hip and the arm of the chair. It was a nice hip, long and slim with the pleated navy skirt stretched taut over it. “Five hundred.”

  I shrugged.

  “All of it?”

  “It’d run you that and more to put breathing space between you and Detroit,” I said. “It wouldn’t buy you a day in any of the safe houses in town.”

  “What will I eat on?”

  “On the rest of it. You knew damn well I’d set my price at whatever you said you had, so I figure you knocked it down by at least half.”

  She twisted her lips in that way she had and opened the bag and peeled three C-notes and four fifties off a roll that would choke a tuba. I accepted the bills and riffled through them and stuck the wad in my inside breast pocket.

  “How’s Paul?” I asked.

  “He’s in Vegas,” she answered automatically. Then she looked up at me quickly and pursed her lips. I cut her off.

  “The cops know about you and old Peter Venito, may he rest in peace. The word on the street is young Paul inherited everything.”

  “Not everything.”

  I was lighting a cigarette and so didn’t bother to shrug. I flipped the match into an ashtray. “Dave Tillet.”

  “I liked Dave. He wasn’t like the others that worked for Paul. He wanted to get out. He was all set to take the CPA exam in May.”

  “He didn’t just like you,” I said. “He was planning to marry you.”

  She raised her eyebrows. They were darker than her hair, two inverted commas over eyes that I saw now were ringed with red under her make-up. “I didn’t know,” she said quietly.

  “Who dropped the dime on him?”

  Now her face took on the hard sheen of polished metal. “All right, so you tricked me into admitting I knew Paul Venito. That doesn’t mean I know the heavyweights he hires.”

  “You’ve answered my question. When a bookkeeper for the Mob starts making leaving noises, his employers start wondering where he’s going with what he knows. What’d Venito do to get you to set up Dave?”

  “I didn’t set him up!”

  I smoked and waited. In the silence she looked at the wall behind me and then at the floor and then at her hands on the purse in her lap and then she drained her glass and refilled it. The neck of the bottle jingled against the rim. She drank.

  “Dave went into hiding a week ago because of some threats he said he got over his decision to quit,” she said. “None of them came from Paul, but from his own fellow workers. He gave me a number where he could be reached and told me to memorize it and not write it down or give it to anyone else. I’d gone with Paul for a while after old Peter died and Paul knew I was seeing Dave and he came to my apartment yesterday and asked me where he could reach Dave. I wouldn’t give him the number. He said he just wanted to talk to him and would I arrange a meeting without saying it would be with Paul. He was afraid Dave’s fellow workers had poisoned him against the whole operation. He wanted to make Dave a cash offer to keep quiet about his, Paul’s, activities and that if I cared for him and his future I’d agree to help. I said okay. It sounded like the Paul Venito I used to know,” she added quickly. “He would spend thousands to avoid hurting someone; he said that was bad business and cost more in the long run.”

  “Who picked the spot?”

  “Paul did. He called it neutral territory, halfway between Dave’s place in Southfield and Paul’s office downtown.”

  “It’s also handy to expressways out of the city,” I said. “So you set up
the parley. Then what?”

  “I called Paul’s office today to ask him if I could sit in on the meeting. His secretary told me he left for Las Vegas last night. That’s when I knew he had no intention of keeping his appointment, or of being anywhere near the place when whoever was keeping it for him went in to see Dave. I broke every law driving here, but—”

  The metal sheen cracked apart then. She said “Damn” and dug in her purse for a handkerchief. I watched her pawing blindly through the contents for a moment, then handed her mine. If it was an act it was sweet.

  “Did anyone follow you here?” I asked.

  She wiped her eyes, blew her nose as discreetly as a thing like that can be done, and looked up. Her cheeks were smeared blue-black. That was when I decided to believe her. You don’t look like her and know how to turn the waterworks on and off without knowing how to keep your mascara from running too.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I kept an eye out for cops and parked around the corner. Why?”

  “Because if what you told me is straight, you’re next on Venito’s list of Things To Do Today. You’re the only one who can connect him to that diner. Have you got a place to stay?”

  “I guess one of the girls from the Roost could put me up...”

  “No, the cops will check them out. They’ll hit all the hotels and motels too. You’d better stay here.”

  “Oh.” She gave me her crooked smile. “That plus the five hundred, is that how it goes?”

  “I’ll toss you for the bed. Loser gets the couch.”

  “You don’t like blondes?”

  “I’m not sure I ever met one. But it has something to do with not going to the bathroom where you eat. Give me your keys and I’ll stash your car in the garage. Cops’ll have a BOL out on it by now.”

  She was reaching inside her purse when the door buzzer blew us a raspberry. Her hand went to the baby Remington. I touched a finger to my lips and pointed at the bedroom door. She got up clutching her purse and the gun and went into the bedroom and pushed the door shut, or almost. She left a crack. I retrieved my handkerchief stained with her make-up from the chair and put it in a pocket and picked up the Luger and said, “Who is it?”

  “Alderdyce.”

  I opened the door. He glanced down at the gun as if it were a loose button on my jacket and walked around me into the living room. “Expecting trouble?”

  “It’s a way of life in this town.” I safetied the Luger and returned it to the table.

  “You alone?” He looked around.

  “Who’s asking, you or the department?”

  He said nothing, circling the living room with his hands in his pockets. He stopped near the bedroom door and sniffed the air. “Nice cologne. A little feminine.”

  “Even detectives have a social life,” I said.

  “You couldn’t prove it by me.”

  I killed my cigarette butt and fought the tug to reach for a replacement. “You didn’t come all this way to do Who’s On First with me.”

  “We tracked down Paul Venito. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “In Vegas?”

  He moved his large close-cropped head from side to side slowly. “At Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Stiff as a stick in the trunk of a stolen Oldsmobile.”

  Six

  The antique clock my grandfather bought for his mother knocked out the better part of a minute with no competition. I shook out my last Winston and smoothed it between my fingers. “Shot?”

  “Three times with a twenty-two. Twice in the chest, once in the ear. Sound familiar?”

  “Yeah.” I speared my lips with the cigarette and lit up. “How long’s he been dead?”

  “That’s up to the M.E. Twelve hours anyway. He was a cold cut long before Tillet bought it.”

  “Which means what?”

  He shook his head again. His coarse face was drawn in the light of the one lamp I bad burning.

  “My day rate’s two-fifty,” I said. “If you’re talking about consulting.”

  “I’m talking about withholding evidence and obstruction of justice. The Murrow woman is getting to be important, and I think you know where she is.”

  I smoked and said nothing.

  “It’s this tingly feeling I get,” he said. “Happens every time a case involves a woman and Amos Walker too.”

  “Christ, John, all I did was order the chicken on a roll.”

  “I hope that’s all you did. I sure hope.”

  We watched each other. Suddenly he seized the knob and pushed open the bedroom door, scooping his Police Special out of his belt holster. I lunged forward, then held back. The room was empty.

  He went inside and looked out the open window and checked the closet and got down in push-up position to peer under the bed. Rising, he holstered the .38 and dusted his palms off against each other. “Perfume’s stronger in here,” he observed.

  “I told you I was a heartbreaker.”

  “Make sure that’s all you’re breaking.”

  “Is this where you threaten to trash my license?”

  “That’s up to the state police,” he said. “What I can do is tank you and link your name to that diner shoot for the reporters until little old ladies in Grosse Pointe won’t trust you to walk their poodles.”

  On that chord he left me. John and I had been friendly a long time. But no matter how long you are something, you are not that something a lot longer.

  Seven

  So far I had two corpses and no Rena Murrow. It was time to punt. I dialed Great Lakes Importers, Paul Venito’s legitimate front, but there was no answer. Well, it was way past closing time; in an orderly society even the crooks keep regular hours. I thawed something out for supper and watched an old Kirk Douglas film on television and turned in.

  The next morning was misty gray with the bitter-metal smell of rain in the air. I broke out the foul-weather gear and drove to the Great Lakes building on East Grand River.

  The reception area, kept behind glass like expensive cigars in a tobacco shop, was oval-shaped with passages spiking out from it, decorated in orange sherbet with a porcelain doll seated behind a curved desk. She wore a tight pink cashmere sweater and a black skirt slit to her ears.

  “Amos Walker to see Mr. Venito,” I said.

  “I’m sorry. Mr. Venito’s suffered a tragic accident.” Her voice was honey over velvet. It would be.

  “Who took his place?”

  “That would be Mr. DeMarco. But he’s very busy.”

  “I’ll wait.” I pulled a Thermos bottle full of hot coffee out of the slash pocket of my trenchcoat and sat down on an orange couch across from her desk.

  The porcelain doll lifted her telephone receiver and spoke into it. A few minutes later, two men in tailored blue suits came out of one of the passages and stood over me, and that was when the front crumbled.

  “Position.”

  I wasn’t sure which of them had spoken. They looked alike down to the scar tissue over their eyes. I screwed the top back on the Thermos and stood and placed my palms against the wall. One of them ricked my feet apart and patted me down from tie to socks, removing my hat last and peering inside for atomic devices. I wasn’t carrying. He replaced the hat.

  “Okay, this way.”

  I accompanied them down the passage with a man on either side. We went through a door marked P. VENITO into an office the size of Hart Plaza with green wall-to-wall carpeting and one wall that was all glass, before which stood a tall man with a fringe of gray hair and a neat Van Dyke beard. His suit was tan and clung like sunlight to his trim frame.

  “Mr. Walker?” he said pleasantly. “I’m Fred DeMarco. I was Mr. Venito’s associate. This is a terrible thing that’s happened.”

  “More terrible for him than you,” I said.

  He cocked his head and frowned. “This office, you mean. It’s just a room. Paul’s father had it before him and someone will have it after me. I recognized your name from the news. Weren’t you involved in
the shooting of this Tillet person yesterday?”

  I nodded. “If you call being a witness involved. But you don’t have to call him ’this Tillet person.’ He worked for you.”

  “He worked for Great Lakes Importers, like me: I never knew him. The firm employs many people, most of whom I haven’t had the chance to meet.”

  “My information is he was killed because he was leaving Great Lakes and someone was afraid he’d peddle what he knew.”

  “We’re a legitimate enterprise, Mr. Walker. We have nothing to hide. Tillet was let go. Our accounting department is handled mostly by computers now and he elected not to undergo retraining. Whatever he was involved with outside the firm that led to his death bas nothing to do with Great Lakes.”

  “For someone who never met him you know a lot about Tillet,” I said.

  “I had his file pulled for the police.”

  “Isn’t it kind of a big coincidence that your president and one of your bookkeepers should both be shot to death within a few hours of each other, and with the same caliber pistol?”

  “The police were here again last night to ask that same question,” DeMarco said. “My answer is the same. If, like Tillet, Paul had dangerous outside interests, they are hardly of concern here.”

  I got out a Winston and tapped it on the back of my hand. “You’ve been on the laundering end too long, Mr. DeMarco. You think you’ve gotten away from playing hardball. Just because you can afford a tailor and a better barber doesn’t mean you aren’t still Freddy the Mark, who came up busting heads for Peter Venita in the bad old days.”

  One of the blue suits backhanded the cigarette out of my mouth as I was getting set to light it. “Mr. DeMarco doesn’t allow smoking.”

  “That’s enough, Andy.” DeMarco’s tone was even. “I was just a boy when Prohibition ended, Walker. Peter took me in and almost adopted me. I learned the business and when I got back from the war and college I showed him how to modernize, cut expenses, and increase profits. For thirty years I practically ran the organization. Then Peter died and his son took over and I was back to running errands. But for the good of the firm I drew my pay and kept my mouth shut. We’re legitimate now and I mean for it to stay that way. I wouldn’t jeopardize it for the likes of Dave Tillet.”