Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “How’d you and Cecelia get on?”

  “Oh, swell. So good we crammed a two-week reservation into three days and came back home.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Different drummers.” He picked up his pipe and blew through it.

  “Not good enough,” I said.

  He grinned boyishly. “I didn’t think so. To begin with, she’s a health nut. I run and take a little wheat germ myself sometimes— you don’t even have to point a gun at me—but I draw the line at dropping vitamins and herb pills at every meal. She must’ve taken sixteen capsules every time we sat down to eat. It can drive you blinkers. People in restaurants must’ve figured her for a drug-addict.”

  “Sure she wasn’t?”

  “She was pretty open about taking them if she was. She filled the capsules herself from plastic bags. Her purse rattled like a used car.”

  A fat party in a gray suit and pink shirt came in and smiled and nodded at both of us and used the urinal and washed his hands. Deb-ner used the time to recharge his pipe.

  “Still not good enough,” I said, when the fat party had gone. “You don’t cut a vacation short just because your bed partner does wild garlic.”

  “It just didn’t work out. Look, I’m due back in court.”

  “Not at half-past noon.” I waited.

  He finished lighting his pipe, dropped the match into the sink where he’d knocked his ashes, grinned around the stem. I bet that melted the women jurors. “If this gets around I’m washed up with every pretty legal secretary in the building.”

  “Nothing has to get around. I’m just looking for Cecelia Wynn.”

  “Yeah. You said.” He puffed on the pipe, took it out, smoothed his beard, and looked at it in the mirror. “Yeah. Well, she said she wasn’t satisfied.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No one’s ever told me that before. I’m not used to complaints.”

  “Uh-huh”

  He turned back toward me. His eyes flicked up and down. “We never had this conversation, okay?”

  “What conversation?”

  “Yeah.” He put the pipe back between his teeth, puffed.

  “Yeah.”

  We shook hands. He squeezed a little harder than I figured he did normally.

  Three

  I dropped two dimes into a pay telephone in the downstairs lobby and fought my way through two secretaries before Alec Wynn came on the line. His voice was a full octave deeper than it had been in person. I figured it was that way in court too.

  “Just checking back, Mr. Wynn. How come when I asked you about hobbies you didn’t tell me your wife was into herbs?”

  “Into what?”

  I told him what Debner had said about the capsules. He said, “I haven’t dined with my wife in months. Most legal business is conducted in restaurants.”

  “I guess you wouldn’t know who her herbalist is, then.”

  “Herbalist?”

  “Sort of an oregano guru. They tell their customers which herbs to take in the never-ending American quest for a healthy body. Not a few of the runaways I’ve traced take their restlessness to them first.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that. Trina might. Our maid. She’s at the house now.”

  “Would you call her and tell her I’m coming?”

  He said he would and broke the connection.

  Four

  It was a nice place if you like windows. There must have been fifty on the street side alone, with ivy or something just as green crawling up the brick wall around them and a courtyard with a marble fountain in the center and a black chauffeur with no shirt on washing a blue Mercedes in front. They are always washing cars. A white-haired Puerto Rican woman with muddy eyes and a faint moustache answered my ring.

  “Trina?”

  “Yes. You are Mr. Walker? Mr. Wynn told me to expect you.”

  I followed her through a room twice the size of my living room, but that was designed just for following maids through, and down a hall with dark paintings on the walls to a glassed-in porch at the back of the house containing ferns in pots and lawn chairs upholstered in floral print. The sliding glass door leading outside was ajar and a strong chlorine stench floated in from an outdoor crescent-shaped swimming pool. She slid the door shut.

  “The pool man says alkali is leaking into the water from an underground spring,” she said. “The chlorine controls the smell.”

  “The rich suffer too.” I told her what I wanted.

  “Capsules? Yes. Mrs. Wynn has many bottles of capsules in her room. There is a name on the bottles. I will get one.”

  “No hurry. What sort of woman is Mrs. Wynn to work for?”

  “I don’t know that that is a good question to answer.”

  “You’re a good maid, Trina.” I wound a five-dollar bill around my right index finger.

  She slid the tube off the finger and flattened it and folded it over and tucked it inside her apron pocket. “She is a good employer. She says please and does not run her fingers over the furniture after I have dusted, like the last woman I worked for.”

  “Is that all you can tell me?”

  “I have not worked here long, sir. Only five weeks.”

  “Who was maid before that?”

  “A girl named Ann Foster, at my agency. Multi-Urban Services. She was fired.” Her voice sank to a whisper on the last part. We were alone.

  “Fired why?”

  “William the chauffeur told me she was fired. I didn’t ask why. I have been a maid long enough to learn that the less you know the more you work. I will get one of the bottles.”

  She left me, returning a few minutes later carrying a glass container the size of an aspirin bottle, with a cork in the top.

  It was half full of gelatin capsules filled with fine brown powder. I pulled the cork and sniffed. A sharp, spicy scent. The name of a health foods store on Livernois was typewritten on the label.

  “How many of these does Mrs. Wynn have in her bedroom?” I asked.

  “Many. Ten or twelve bottles.”

  “As full as this?”

  “More, some of them.”

  “That’s a lot of capsules to fill and then leave behind. Did she take her clothes with her?”

  “No, sir. Her closets and drawers are full.”

  I thanked her and gave her back the bottle. It was getting to be the damnedest disappearing act I had covered in a long, long time.

  The black chauffeur was hosing off the Mercedes when I came out. He was tall, almost my height, and the bluish skin of his torso was stretched taut over lumpy muscle. I asked him if he was William.

  He twisted shut the nozzle of the hose, watching me from under his brows with his head down, like a boxer. Scar tissue shone around his eyes. “Depends on who you might be.”

  I sighed. When you can’t even get their name out of them, the rest is like pulling nails with your toes. I stood a folded ten-spot on the Mercedes’ hood. He watched the bottom edge darken as it soaked up water. “Ann Foster,” I said.

  “What about her?”

  “How close was she to Cecelia Wynn?”

  “’I wouldn’t know. I work outside.”

  “’Who fired her, Mr. or Mrs. Wynn?”

  He thought about it. Watched the bill getting wetter. Then he snatched it up and waved it dry. “She did, Mrs. Wynn.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. I reached up and plucked the bill out of his fingers. He grabbed for it but I drew it back out of his reach. He shrugged again, wringing the hose in his hands to make his muscles bulge. “They had a fight of some kind the day Ann left. I could hear them screaming at each other out here. I don’t know what it was about.”

  “Where’d she go after she left here?”

  He started to shrug a third time, stopped. “Back to the agency, maybe. I don’t ask questions. In this line—”

  “Yeah. The less you know the more you work.” I gave him the ten and split.

  Fiv
e

  The health foods place was standard, plank floor and hanging plants and stuff you can buy in any supermarket for a fraction of what they were asking. The herbalist was a small, pretty woman of about 30, in a gypsy blouse and floor-length denim skirt with bare feet poking out underneath and a bandana tied around her head. She also owned the place. She hadn’t seen Mrs. Wynn since before she’d turned up missing. I bought a package of unsalted nuts for her trouble and ate them on the way to the office. They needed salt.

  I found Multi-Urban Services in the Detroit metropolitan directory and dialed the number. A woman whose voice reminded me of the way cool green mints taste answered.

  “We’re not at liberty to give out information about our clients.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “I went to a party at the Wynn place in Grosse Pointe about six weeks ago and was very impressed with Miss Foster’s efficiency. I’d heard she was free and was thinking of engaging her services on a fulltime basis.”

  The mints melted. “I’m sorry, Miss Foster is no longer with this agency. But I can recommend another girl just as efficient. Multi-Urban prides itself—”

  “I’m sure it does. Can you tell me where Miss Foster is currently working?”

  “Stormy Heat Productions. But not as a maid.”

  I thanked her and hung up, thinking about how little it takes to turn mint to acid. Stormy Heat was listed on Mt. Elliott. Its line was busy. Before leaving the office, I broke the Smith & Wesson out of the desk drawer and snapped the holster onto my belt under my jacket. It was that kind of neighborhood.

  Six

  The outfit worked out of an old gymnasium across from Mt. Elliott Cemetery, a scorched brick building as old as the eight-hour day with a hand-lettered sign over the door and a concrete stoop deep in the process of going back to the land. The door was locked. I pushed a sunken button that grated in its socket. No sound issued from within. I was about to knock when a square panel opened in the door at head level and a mean black face with a beard that grew to a point looked into mine.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

  “What do you want?” demanded the face.

  “Ann Foster.”

  “What for?”

  “Talk.”

  “Sorry.” The panel slid shut.

  I was smoking a cigarette. I dropped it to the stoop and crushed it out and used the button again. When the panel shot back I reached up and grasped the beard in my fist and yanked. His chest banged the door.

  “You white—!”

  I twisted the beard in my fist. He gasped and tears sprang to his eyes. “Joe sent me,” I said. “The goose flies high. May the Force be with you. Pick the password you like, but open the door.”

  “Who—?”

  “Jerk Root, the Painless Barber. Open.”

  “Okay, okay.” Metal snapped on his side. Still hanging on to his whiskers, I reached down with my free hand and tried the knob. It turned. I let go and opened the door. He was standing just inside the threshold, a big man in threadbare jeans and a white shirt open to the navel Byron-fashion, smoothing his beard with thick fingers. He had a Colt magnum in his other hand pointed at my belt buckle.

  “Nice,” I said. “The nickel plating goes with your eyes. You got a permit for that?”

  He smiled crookedly. His eyes were still watering. “Why didn’t you say you was cop?” He reached back and jammed the revolver into a hip pocket. “You got paper?”

  “Not today. I’m not raiding the place, I just want to talk to Ann Foster.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I don’t need no beef with the law. You don’t see nothing on the way, deal?”

  I spread my hands. “I’m blind. This isn’t an election year.”

  There was a lot not to see. Films produced by Stormy Heat were not interested in the Academy Award or even feature billing at the all-night grindhouses on Woodward Avenue. Its actors were thin and ferretlike and its actresses used powder to fill the cavities in their faces and cover their stretch marks. The lights and cameras were strictly surplus, their cables frayed and patched all over like old garden hoses. We walked past carnal scenes, unnoticed by the grunting performers or the sweat-stained crews, to a scuffed steel door at the rear that had originally led into a locker room. My escort went through it without pausing. I followed.

  “Don’t they teach you to knock in the jungle?”

  I’d had a flash of a naked youthful brown body, and then it was covered by a red silk kimono that left a pair of long legs bare to the tops of the thighs. She had her hair cut very short and her face, with its upturned nose and lower lip thrust out in a belligerent pout, was boyish. I had seen enough to know she wasn’t a boy.

  “What’s to see that I ain’t already seen out on the floor?” asked the Beard. “Man to see you. From the Machine.”

  Ann Foster looked at me quickly. The whites of her eyes had a bluish tinge against her dark skin. “Since when they picking matinee idols for cops?”

  “Thanks,” I said. “But I’ve got job.”

  We stared at the guy with the beard until he left us, letting the door drift shut behind him. The room had been converted into a community dressing room, but without much conviction. A library table littered with combs and brushes and pots of industrial strength make-up stood before a long mirror, but the bench on this side had come with the place and the air smelled of mildew and old sweat. She said, “Show me you’re a cop.”

  I flashed my photostat and honorary sheriff’s star. “I’m private. I let Lothar out there think different. It saved time.”

  “Well, you wasted it all here. I don’t like rental heat any more than the other kind. I don’t even like men.”

  “You picked a swell business not to like them in.”

  She smiled, not unpleasantly. “I work with an all-girl cast.”

  “Does it pay better than being a maid?”

  “About as much. But when I get on my knees it’s not to scrub floors.”

  “Cecelia Wynn,” I said.

  Her faced moved as if I’d slapped her. “What about her?” she barked.

  “She’s missing. Her husband wants her back. You had a fight with her just before you got fired. What started it?”

  “What happens if I don’t answer?”

  “Nothing. Now. But if it turns out she doesn’t want to be missing, the cops get it. I could save you a trip downtown.”

  She said, “Hell, she’s probably off someplace with her lawyer boyfriend like last time.”

  “No, he’s accounted for. Also she left almost all her clothes behind, along with the herbs she spent a small country buying and a lot of time stuffing into capsules. It’s starting to look like leaving wasn’t her idea, or that where she was going she wouldn’t need those things. What was the fight about?”

  “I wouldn’t do windows.”

  I slapped her for real. It made a loud flat noise off the echoing walls and she yelled. The door swung open. Beard stuck his face inside. Farther down the magnum glittered.

  “What?”

  I looked at him, looked at the woman. She stroked her burning cheek. My revolver was behind my right hipbone, a thousand miles away. Finally she said, “Nothing.”

  “Sure?”

  She nodded. The man with the beard left his eyes on me a moment longer, then withdrew. The door closed.

  “It was weird,” she told me. “Serving dinner this one night I spilled salad oil down the front of my uniform. I went to my room to change. Mrs. Wynn stepped inside to ask for something, just like you walked in on me just now. She caught me naked.”

  “So?”

  “So she excused herself and got out. Half an hour later I was canned. For spilling the salad oil. I yelled about it, as who wouldn’t? But it wasn’t the reason.”

  “What was?”

  She smoothed the kimono across her pelvis. “You think I don’t know that look on another woman’s face when I see it?”

  We talked some more, b
ut none of it was for me. On my way out I laid a twenty on the dressing table and stood a pot of mascara on top of it. I hesitated, then added one of my cards to the stack. “In case something happens to change your mind about rental heat,” I said. “If you lose the card, I’m in the book.”

  Back in civilization I gassed up and used the telephone in the service station to call Alec Wynn at his office. I asked him to meet me at his home in Grosse Pointe in twenty minutes.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I’m meeting a client at four.”

  “He’ll keep. If you don’t show you may be one yourself.” We stopped talking to each other.

  Seven

  Both William the chauffeur and the Mercedes were gone from the courtyard, leaving only a puddle on the asphalt to reflect the window-studded facade of the big house. Trina let me in and listened to me and escorted me back to the enclosed porch. When she left I slid open the glass door and stepped outside to the pool area. I was there when Wynn came out five minutes later. His gray suit looked right even in those surroundings. It always would.

  “You’ve caused me to place an important case in the hands of an apprentice,” he announced. “I hope this means you’ve found Cecelia.”

  “I’ve found her. I think.”

  “What’s that supposed to signify? Or is this the famous Walker sense of humor at work?”

  “Save it for your next jury, Mr. Wynn. We’re just two guys talking. How long have you been hanging on to your wife’s good-bye note? Since the first time she walked out?”

  “You’re babbling.”

  “It worried me that it wasn’t dated,” I said. “A thing like that comes in handy too often. Being in corporate law, you might not know that the cops have ways now to treat writing in ink with chemicals that can prove within a number of weeks when it was written.”

  His face was starting to match his suit. I went on.

  “Someone else knew you hadn’t been able to satisfy Cecelia sexually, or you wouldn’t have been so quick to tell me. Masculine pride is a strong motive for murder, and in case something had happened to her, you wanted to be sure you were covered. That’s why you hired me, and that’s why you dusted off the old note. She didn’t leave one this time, did she?”