Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I think you would do just that. You remember a time when no one quit the organization, and when Tillet gave notice and you found out young Paul had arranged to buy his silence instead of making dead sure of it, you took Paul out of the way and then slammed the door on Tillet.”

  “You’re fishing, Walker.”

  “Why not? I’ve got Rena Murrow for bait.”

  The room got quiet. Outside the glass, fourteen floors down, traffic glided along Grand River with all the noise of fish swimming in an aquarium.

  “She set up the meet with Tillet for Venito,” I went on. “She can tie Paul to that diner at Eight Mile and Dequindre and with a little work the cops will tie you to that trunk at Metro Airport. She can finger your two button men. Looking down the wrong end of life in Jackson, they’ll talk.”

  “Get him out of here,” DeMarco snarled.

  The blue suits came toward me. I got out of there. I could use the smoke anyway.

  Eight

  I was closing my front door behind me when Rena came out of the bedroom. She had fixed her make-up since the last time I had seen her, but she had on the same navy suit and it was starting to look like a navy suit she had had on for two days.

  I said, “You remembered to relock the door this time.”

  She nodded. “I stayed in a motel last night. The cops haven’t got to them all yet. But I couldn’t hang around. They get suspicious when you don’t have luggage.”

  “You can’t stay here. I just painted a bull’s-eye on my back for Fred DeMarco.” I told her what I’d told him.

  “I can’t identify the men who killed Dave,” she protested.

  “Freddy the Mark doesn’t know that.” I lifted the telephone. “I’m getting you a cab ride to Police Headquarters and then I’m calling the cops. Things are going to get interesting as soon as DeMarco gets over his mad.”

  The doorbell buzzed. This time I didn’t have to tell her. She went into the bedroom and I got my Luger off the table and opened the door on a man who was a little shorter than I, with gray eyes like nickels on a pad. He had traded his Windbreaker for a brown leather jacket but it looked like the same .22 target pistol in his right hand.

  Without the ski mask he looked about my age, with streaks of premature gray in his neat brown hair.

  I waved the Luger and said, “Mine’s bigger.”

  “Old movie line,” he said with a sigh. “Take a gander behind you.”

  That was an old movie line too. I didn’t turn. Then someone gasped and I stepped back and moved my head just enough to get the corner of my eye working. A man a little taller than Gray Eyes, with black hair to his collar and a handlebar moustache, stood behind Rena this side of the bedroom door with a squat .38 planted against her neck. His other hand was out of sight and the way Rena was standing said he had her left arm twisted behind her back. He too had ditched his Windbreaker and was in shirtsleeves. The lighter caliber gun he had used on Tillet and probably on Paul Venito would be scrap by now.

  It seemed I was the only one who needed a key to get into my house.

  “Two beats one, Zorro.” Gray Eyes’ tone remained tired and I figured out that was his normal voice. He stepped over the threshold and leaned the door shut. “Let’s have the Heine.” He held out his free hand.

  “Uh-uh,” I said. “I give it to you and then you shoot us.”

  “You don’t, we shoot the girl first. Then you.”

  “You’ll do that anyway. This way maybe I shoot you too.”

  Moustache shifted his weight. Rena shrieked. My eyes flickered that way. Gray Eyes swept the barrel of the .22 across my face and grasped the end of the Luger. I fired. The report gulped up all the sound in the room. Moustache let go of Rena and swung the .38 my way. She knocked up his arm and red flame streaked ceilingward. Rena dived for her blue bag on the easy chair. Moustache aimed at her back. I swung the Luger, but Gray Eyes was still standing and fired the .22. Something plucked at my left bicep. The front window exploded then, and Moustache was lifted off his feet and flung backwards against the wall, his gun flying. The nasty cracking report followed an instant later.

  I looked at Gray Eyes, but he was down now, his gun still in his hand but forgotten, both hands clasped over his abdomen with the blood dark between his fingers. I relieved him of the weapon and put it with the Luger on tile table. Rena was half-reclining in the easy chair with her skirt hiked up over one long leg and her .32 Remington in both hands pointing at Moustache dead on the floor. She hadn’t fired.

  “Walker?”

  The voice was tinny and artificially loud. But I recognized it.

  “We’re all right, John,” I called. “Put down that bullhorn and come in.” I told Rena to drop the automatic. She obeyed, in a daze.

  Alderdyce came in with his gun drawn and looked at the man still alive at his feet and across at the other man who wasn’t and at Rena. I introduced them. “She didn’t set up Tillet,” I added. “Fred DeMarco bought the hit, not Venito. This one will get around to telling you that if you stop gawking and call an ambulance before he’s done bleeding into his belly.”

  “For you too, maybe.” Alderdyce picked up the telephone.

  He’d seen me grasping my left arm. “Just a crease,” I said. “Like in the cowboy pictures.”

  “You’re lucky. I know you, Walker. It’s your style to set yourself up as the goat to smoke out a guy like DeMarco. I had men watching the place and had you tailed to and from Great Lakes. When the girl broke in we loaded the neighborhood. Then these two showed—” He broke off and started speaking into the mouthpiece.

  I said, “My timing was off. I’m glad yours was better.”

  The bearded black sergeant came in with some uniformed officers, one of whom carried a 30.06 rifle with a mounted scope. “Nice shooting,” Alderdyce told him, hanging up.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Officer Carl Breen, Lieutenant.” He spelled it.

  “Okay.”

  I let go of my arm and wiped the blood off my hand with my handkerchief and got out my wallet, counting out two hundred and fifty dollars, which I held out to Rena. “My day rate’s two-fifty.”

  She was sitting up now, looking at the money. “Why’d you ask for five hundred?”

  “You had your mind made up about me. It saved a speech.”

  “Keep it. You earned it and a lot more than I can pay.”

  I folded the bills and stuck them inside the outer breast pocket of her navy jacket. “I’d just blow it on cigarettes and whisky.”

  “Who’s the broad?” demanded the sergeant.

  I thought of telling him that’s what a Dulcinea was, but the joke was old. We waited for the ambulance.

  The surviving gunman’s name was Richard Bledsoe. He had two priors in the Detroit area for ADW, one conviction, and after he was released from the hospital into custody he turned state’s evidence and convicted Fred Demarco on two counts of conspiracy to commit murder. DeMarco’s appeal is still pending. The dead man went by Austin Grant and had done seven years in San Quentin for second degree homicide knocked down from Murder One. The Detroit Police worked a deal with the Justice Department and got Rena Murrow relocation and a new identity to shield her from DeMarco’s friends. I never saw her again.

  I never ate in Butch’s diner again, either. These days you can’t get in the place without a reservation.

  I’m In the Book

  When I finally got in to see Alec Wynn of Reiner, Switz, Galsworthy, & Wynn, the sun was high over Lake St. Clair outside the window behind his desk and striking sparks off the choppy steel-blue surface with sailboats gliding around on it cutting white foam, their sharkfin sails striped in broad bright bikini colors. Wynn sat with his back to the view and never turned to look at it. He didn’t need to. On the wall across from him hung a big framed color photograph of bright-striped sailboats cutting white foam on the steel-blue surface of Lake St. Clair.

  Wynn was a big neat man with a black widow’s peak trimm
ed tight to his skull and the soft gray hair at his temples worn long over the tops of his ears. He had on aviator’s glasses with clear plastic rims and a suit the color and approximate weight of ground fog, that fit him like no suit will ever fit me if I hit the Michigan Lottery tomorrow. He had deep lines in his Miami-brown face and a mouth that turned down like a shark’s to show a bottom row of caps as white and even as military monuments. It was a predator’s face. I liked it fine. It belonged to a lawyer, and in my business lawyers mean a warm feeling in the pit of the bank account.

  “Walker, Amos,” he said, as if he were reading roll call. “I like the name. It has a certain smoky strength.”

  “I’ve had it a long time.”

  He looked at me with his strong white hands folded on top of his absolutely clean desk. His palms didn’t leave marks on the glossy surface the way mine would have. “I keep seeing your name on reports. The Reliance people employ your services often.”

  “Only when the job involves people,” I said. “Those big investigation agencies are good with computers and diamonds and those teeny little cameras you can hide in your left ear. But when it comes to stroking old ladies who see things and leaning on supermarket stock boys who smuggle sides of beef out the back door, they remember us little shows.”

  “How big is your agency?”

  “You’re looking at it. I have an answering service,” I added quickly.

  “Better and better. It means you can keep a secret. You have a reputation for that, too.”

  “Who told?”

  “The humor I can take or let alone.” He refolded his hands the other way. “I don’t like going behind Reliance’s back like this. We’ve worked together for years and the director’s an old friend. But this is a personal matter, and there are some things you would prefer to have a stranger know than someone you play poker with every Saturday night.”

  “I don’t play poker,” I said. “Whoops, sorry.” I got out a cigarette and smoothed it between my fingers. “Who’s missing, your wife or your daughter?”

  He shot me a look he probably would have kept hooded in court. Then he sat back, nodding slightly. “I guess it’s not all that uncommon.”

  “I do other work but my main specialty is tracing missing persons. You get so you smell it coming.” I waited.

  “It’s my wife. She’s left me again.”

  “Again?”

  “Last time it was with one of the apprentices here, a man named Lloyd Debner. But they came back after three days. I fired him, naturally.”

  “Naturally.”

  A thin smile played around with his shark’s mouth, gave it up and went away. “Seems awfully Old Testament, I know. I tried to be modern about it. There’s really no sense in blaming the other man. But I saw myself hiding out in here to avoid meeting him in the hall, and that would be grotesque. I gave him excellent references. One of our competitors snapped him up right away.”

  “What about this time?”

  “She left the usual note saying she was going away and I was not to look for her. I called Debner but he assured me he hadn’t seen Cecelia since their first fling. I believe him. But it’s been almost a week now and I’m concerned for her safety.”

  “What about the police?”

  “I believe we covered that when we were discussing keeping secrets,” he said acidly.

  “You’ve been married how long?”

  “Six years. And, yes, she’s younger than I, by fourteen years. That was your next question, wasn’t it?”

  “It was in there. Do you think that had anything to do with her leaving?”

  “I think it had everything to do with it. She has appetites that I’ve been increasingly unable to fulfill. But I never thought it was a problem until she left the first time.”

  “You quarreled?”

  “The normal amount. Never about that. Which I suppose is revealing. I rather think she’s found a new boyfriend, but I’m damned if I can say who it is.”

  “May I see the note?”

  He extracted a fold of paper from an inside breast pocket and passed it across the desk. “I’m afraid I got my fingerprints all over it before I thought over all the angles.”

  “That’s okay. I never have worked on anything where prints were any use.”

  It was written on common drugstore stationery, tinted blue with a spray of flowers in the upper right-hand corner. A hasty hand full of sharp points and closed loops. It said what he’d reported it had said and nothing else. Signed with a C.

  “There’s no date.”

  “She knew I’d read it the day she wrote it. It was last Tuesday.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That means what?” he demanded.

  “Just uh-huh. It’s something I say when I can’t think of anything to say.” I gave back the note. “Any ideas where she might go to be alone? Favorite vacation spot, her hometown, a summer house, anything like that? I don’t mean to insult you. Sometimes the hardest place to find your hat is on your head.”

  “We sublet our Florida home in the off-season. She grew up in this area and has universally disliked every place we’ve visited on vacation. Really, I was expecting something more from a professional.”

  “I’m just groping for a handle. Does she have any hobbies?”

  “Spending my money.”

  I watched my cigarette smoke drifting toward the window. “It seems to me you don’t know your wife too well after six years, Mr. Wynn. When I find her, if I find her, I can tell you where she is, but I can’t make her come back, and from the sound of things she may not want to come back. I wouldn’t be representing your best interests if I didn’t advise you to save your money and set the cops loose on it. I can’t give guarantees they won’t give.”

  “Are you saying you don’t want the job?”

  “Not me. I don’t have any practice at that. Just being straight with a client I’d prefer keeping.”

  “Don’t do me any favors, Walker.”

  “Okay. I’ll need a picture. And what’s her maiden name? She may go back to it.”

  “Collier.” He spelled it. “And here.” He got a wallet-size color photograph out of the top drawer of the desk and skidded it across the glossy top like someone dealing a card.

  She was a redhead, and the top of that line. She looked like someone who would wind up married to a full partner in a weighty law firm with gray temples and an office overlooking Lake St. Clair. It would be in her high school yearbook under Predictions.

  I put the picture in my breast pocket. “Where do I find this Debner?”

  “He’s with Paxton and Ring on West Michigan. But I told you he doesn’t know where Cecelia is.”

  “Maybe he should be asked a different way.” I killed my stub in the smoking stand next to the chair and rose. “You’ll be hearing from me.”

  His eyes followed me up. All eight of his fingers were lined up on the near edge of his desk, the nails pink and perfect. “Can you be reached if I want to hear from you sooner?”

  “My service will page me. I’m in the book.”

  Two

  A Japanese accent at Paxton & Ring told me over the telephone that Lloyd Debner would be tied up all afternoon in Detroit Recorder’s Court. Lawyers are always in court the way executives are always in meetings. At the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice a bailiff stopped spitting on his handkerchief and rubbing at a spot on his uniform to point out a bearded man in his early thirties with a mane of black hair, smoking a pipe and talking to a gray-headed man in the corridor outside one of the courtrooms. I went over there and introduced myself.

  “Second,” he said, without taking his eye off the other man. “Tim, we’re talking a lousy twenty bucks over the fifteen hundred. Even if you win, the judge will order probation. The kid’ll get that anyway if we plead Larceny Under, and there’s no percentage in mucking up his record for life just to fatten your win column. And there’s nothing saying you’ll win.”

  I said, “This won’t
take long.”

  “Make an appointment. Listen, Tim—”

  “It’s about Cecelia Wynn,” I said. “We can talk about it out here in the hall if you like. Tim won’t mind.”

  He looked at me then for the first time. “Tim, I’ll catch you later.”

  “After the sentencing.” The gray-headed man went into the courtroom, chuckling.

  “Who’d you say you were?” Debner demanded.

  “Amos Walker. I still am, but a little older. I’m a P.I. Alec Wynn hired me to look for his wife.”

  “You came to the wrong place. That’s all over.”

  “I’m interested in when it wasn’t.”

  He glanced up and down the hall. There were a few people in it, lawyers and fixers and the bailiff with the stain that wouldn’t go away from his crisp blue uniform shirt. “Come on. I can give you a couple of minutes.”

  I followed him into a men’s room two doors down. We stared at a guy combing his hair in front of the long mirror over the sinks until he put away his comb and picked up a brown leather briefcase and left. Debner bent down to see if there were any feet in the stalls, straightened, and knocked out his pipe into the sink. He laid it on a soap canister to cool and moved his necktie a centimeter to the right.

  “I don’t see Cecelia when we pass on the street,” he said, inspecting the results in the mirror. “I had my phone number changed after we got back from Jamaica so she couldn’t call me.”

  “That where you went?”

  “I rented a bungalow outside Kingston. Worst mistake I ever made. I was headed for a junior partnership at Reiner when this happened. Now I’m back to dealing school board presidents’ sons out of jams they wouldn’t be in if five guys ahead of me hadn’t dealt them out of jams just like them starting when they were in junior high.”