Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Tommy’s fine,” I said, when his mother wound down. “Meet me here.” I gave her the address. “Put Millie on and I’ll give her directions.”

  “Millie’s out shopping. I don’t have a car.”

  “Take a cab.”

  “Cab?”

  “Forget it. You’ve got too much of that stuff in your pipes to come out alone. I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.”

  It was all of that. The road crews were at work and everyone who had a car and no job was out enjoying the season. I left the engine running in front of the brick complex and bounced up the wrought-iron steps to where Millie’s door stood open. I rapped and went inside. Charlotte Corcoran was sitting on the sofa in the robe and nightgown.

  “That’s out of style for the street this year,” I said. “Get into something motherly.”

  “Plenty of time for that.”

  I felt my face get tired at the sound of the voice behind me. I turned around slowly. Millie Arnold was standing on the blind side of the door in a white summer dress with a red belt around her trim waist and a brown .32 Colt automatic in her right hand pointing at me.

  “You don’t look surprised.” She nudged the door shut with the toe of a red pump.

  “It was there,” I said, raising my hands. “It just needed a kick. I had to wonder how Boyd and Riddle got on to me so fast. They couldn’t have been following Mrs. Corcoran without Stendahl and LeJohn knowing. Someone had to tell them.”

  “It goes back farther than that. I made two calls to Texas after spotting Frank at the mall. The first was to his old partners. I can’t tell you how much they appreciated it. If I did I’d be in trouble with the IRS. Then I called Charlotte. Throw the gun down on the rug, Mr. Walker. It made an ugly dent in my sofa when you were here yesterday.”

  I unholstered the .38 slowly. It hit the shag halfway between us with a thump. “Then, when Mrs. Corcoran arrived, you talked her into hiring the biggest investigative firm you knew. You figured to let them do the work of finding Corcoran. It probably meant a discount on Boyd and Riddle’s fee.”

  “It also guaranteed me a bonus when Frank got dead,” she said. “Krell giving the case to you threw me, but it worked out just fine. When I got back from shopping and Charlotte gave me the good news I just couldn’t wait to call our mutual friends and share it.”

  “My cousin,” said Mrs. Corcoran.

  Millie showed her teeth. Very white and a little sharp. “You married a hundred-thou-a-year executive. I’d have settled for that. But if it wasn’t enough for him, why should what I make be enough for me? I met his little playmates that time I visited you in Austin. I remembered them when it counted.”

  “What happens to us?” I asked.

  “You’ll both stay here with me until that phone rings. It’ll be Boyd giving me thumbs up. I’ll have to lock you in the bathroom when I leave; but you’ll find a way out soon enough. You can have the condo, Charlotte. It isn’t paid for.”

  “The boy had nothing to do with Corcoran’s scam,” I said. “You’re putting him in front of the guns too.”

  “Rich kid. What do I owe him?”

  “They won’t hurt Tommy.” Mrs. Corcoran got up.

  “Sit down.” The gun jerked.

  But she was moving. I threw my arm in front of her. She knocked it aside and charged. Millie squeezed the trigger. It clicked. Her cousin was all over her then, kicking and shrieking and clawing at her eyes. It was interesting to see. Millie was healthier, but she was standing between a mother and her child. When the gun came up to clap the side of Mrs. Corcoran’s head I tipped the odds, reversing ends on the Smith & Wesson I’d scooped up from the rug and tapping Millie behind the ear. Her knees gave then and she trickled through her cousin’s grasp and puddled on the floor.

  I reached down and pulled back her eyelids. “She’s good for an hour,” I said. “Call nine-one-one. Give them the address on Pembroke.”

  While she was doing that, breathing heavily, I picked up the automatic and ran back the action. Millie had forgotten to rack a cartridge into the chamber.

  Twelve

  Approaching Pembroke we heard shots.

  I jammed my heel down on the accelerator and we rounded the corner doing fifty. Charlotte Corcoran, still in her robe, gripped the door handle to stay out of my lap. Her profile was sharp against the window, thrust forward like a mother hawk’s.

  There was no sign of the police. As we entered Corcoran/Muldoon’s block, something flashed in an open upstairs window, followed closely by a hard flat bang. A much louder shot answered it from the front yard. There, a huge black figure in an overcoat too short for him crouched behind a lilac bush beside the driveway. His .44 magnum was as long as my thigh but looked like a kid’s water pistol in his great fist.

  “Hang on!” I spun the wheel hard and floored the pedal.

  The Olds’s engine roared and we bumped over the curb, diago-naling across the lawn. Del Riddle straightened at the noise and turned, bringing the magnum around with him. I saw his mouth open wide and then his body filled the windshield and I felt the impact. We bucked up over the porch stoop and suddenly the world was a deafening place of tearing wood and exploding glass. The car stopped then, although my foot was still pasted to the floor with the accelerator pedal underneath and the engine whining. The rear wheels spun shrilly. I cut the ignition. A piece of glass fell somewhere with a clank.

  I looked at my passenger. She was slumped down in the seat with her knees against the dash. “All right?”

  “I think so.” She lowered her knees.

  “Stay here.”

  The door didn’t want to open. I shoved hard and it squawked against the buckled fender. I climbed out behind the Smith & Wesson in my right hand. I was in a living room with broken glass on the carpet and pieces of shredded siding slung over the chairs and sofa. Riddle lay spread-eagled on his face across the car’s hood and windshield, groaning. His legs dangled like broken straws in front of the smashed grille.

  “Lose the piece, trooper.”

  My eyes were still adjusting to the dim light indoors. I focused on Monroe Boyd baring his teeth in front of a hallway running to the back of the house. He had one arm around Tommy Corcoran’s chest under the arms, holding him kicking above the floor. His other hand bad a switchblade in it with the point pressing the boy’s jugular.

  “Tommy!” Charlotte Corcoran had gotten out on the passenger’s side. She took a step and stopped. Boyd bettered his grip.

  “Mommy,” said the boy.

  “What about it, trooper? Seven or seventy, they all bleed the same.”

  I relaxed my hold on the gun.

  A shot slammed the walls and a blue hole appeared under Boyd’s left eye. He let go of Tommy and lay down. Twitched once.

  I looked up at Frank Corcoran crouched at the top of the staircase to the second story. His arm was stretched out full length with a gun at the end of it, leaking smoke. He glanced at Tommy. “I told you to stay upstairs with me.”

  “I left my ball here.” The boy pouted, then spotted Boyd’s body. “Funny man.”

  Mrs. Corcoran flew forward and knelt to throw her arms around her son. Corcoran saw her for the first time, said “Charlotte?” and looked at me. The gun came around.

  “Stop waving that thing,” his ex-wife said, hugging Tommy. “He’s with me.”

  Corcoran hesitated, then lowered the weapon. He surveyed the damage. “What do I tell the rental agent?”

  I heard the sirens then.

  Bloody July

  The house was a half-timbered Tudor job on Kendall, standing on four acres fenced in by a five-foot ornamental stone wall. It wasn’t the only one in the area and looked as much like metropolitan Detroit as it tried to look like Elizabethan England. A bank of lilacs had been allowed to grow over the wall inside, obstructing the view of the house from the street, but from there inward the lawn was bare of foliage, after the fashion of feudal estates to deny cover to intruders.

  I was
n’t one. As instructed previously, I stopped in front of the iron gate and got out to open it and was on my way back to the car when something black hurtled at me snarling out of the shrubbery. I clambered inside and shut the door and rolled up the window just as the thing leaped, scrabbling its claws on the roof and clouding the glass with its moist breath.

  “Hector!”

  At the sound of the harsh voice, the beast dropped to all fours and went on clearing its throat and glaring yellow at me through the window while a small man with a white goatee walked out through the gate and snapped a leash onto its collar. He wore a gray sportcoat and no tie.

  “It’s all right, Walker,” he said. “Hector behaves himself while I’m around. You are Amos Walker.”

  I cranked the window down far enough to tell him I was, keeping my hand on the handle and my eye on the dog.

  “You’re Mr. Blum?”

  “Yeah. Drive on up to the house. I’ll meet you there.”

  The driveway looped past an attached garage and a small front porch with carriage lamps mounted next to the door. I parked in front of the porch and leaned on the fender smoking a cigarette while Leonard Blum led the dog around back and then came through the house and opened the door for me. The wave of conditioned air hit me like a spray of cold water. It was the last day of June and the second of the first big heat wave of summer.

  “You like dogs, Walker?”

  “The little moppy noisy kind and the big gentle ones that lick your face.”

  “I like Dobermans. You can count on them to turn on you someday. With friends you never know.” He ushered me into a dim living room crowded with heavy furniture and hung with paintings of square-riggers under full sail and bearded mariners in slick sou’west-ers shouting into the bow-wash. A varnished oak ship’s wheel as big around as a hula hoop was mounted over the fireplace.

  “Nautical, I know,” said Blum. “I was in shipping a long time back. Never got my feet wet, but I liked to pretend I was John Paul Jones. That wheel belonged to the Henry Morgan, fastest craft ever to sail the river. In my day, anyway.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the name of an ore carrier.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  I waited, but he didn’t embroider. He was crowding eighty if it wasn’t stuck to his heels already, with heavy black-rimmed glasses and a few white hairs combed diagonally across his scalp and white teeth that flashed too much in his beard to be his. There was a space there when we both seemed to realize we were being measured, and then he said:

  “My lawyer gave me your name. Simon Weintraub. You flushed out an eyewitness to an accident last year that saved his client a bundle.”

  “I’m pretty good.” I waited some more.

  “How are you at tracing stolen property?”

  “Depends on the property.”

  He produced a key from a steel case on his belt, hobbled over to a bare corner of the room, and inserted the key in a slot I hadn’t noticed. The wood paneling opened in two seconds, exposing a recessed rectangle lined in burgundy plush and tall enough for a man to stand in.

  “Notice anything?” he asked.

  “Looks like a hairdresser’s casket.”

  “It’s a gun cabinet. An empty gun cabinet. Three days ago there wasn’t enough room to store another piece in it.”

  “Were you at home when it got empty?”

  “My wife and I spent the weekend on Mackinac Island. I’ve got a place there. Whoever did it, it wasn’t his first job. He cut the alarm wires and picked the locks to the front door and the cabinet slick as spit.”

  “What about Hector?”

  “I put him in a kennel for the weekend.”

  “Are you sure someone didn’t just have a key?”

  “The only key to this cabinet is on my belt. It’s never out of my sight.”

  “Who else lives here besides your wife?”

  “No one. We don’t have servants. Elizabeth’s at her CPR class now. I’ve got a heart I wouldn’t wish on an Arab,” he added.

  “What’d the police say?”

  “I didn’t call them.”

  I was starting to get the idea. “Have you got a list of the stolen guns?”

  He drew two sheets folded lengthwise out of his inside breast pocket, holding it back when I reached for it. “When does client privilege start?”

  “When I pick up the telephone and say hello.”

  He gave me the list. It was neatly typewritten, the firearms identified by make, caliber, patent date, and serial number.

  Some handguns, four high-powered rifles, a few antiques, two shotguns. And a Thompson submachine gun. I asked him if he was a dealer.

  “No, I’m in construction.”

  “Non-dealers are prohibited from owning full automatic weapons,” I said. “I guess you know that.”

  “I wanted a lecture I’d have gone to the cops to start.”

  “Also a warrant for your arrest. Are any of these guns registered, Mr. Blum?”

  “That’s not a question you get to ask,” he said.

  I handed back the list. “So long, Mr. Blum. I’ve got some business up in Iroquois Heights, so I won’t charge you for the visit.”

  “Wait, Walker.”

  I had my back to him when he said it. It was the way he said it that made me turn around. It didn’t sound like the Leonard Blum I’d been talking to.

  “Nothing in the collection is registered,” he said. “The rifles and shotguns don’t have to be, of course, and I just never got around to doing the paper on the handguns and the Thompson. I’ve never been fingerprinted.”

  “It’s an experience no one should miss,” I said.

  “I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, that’s why I didn’t holler cop. For a long time now I’ve lived for that collection. My wife lays down for anything with a zipper; she’s almost fifty years younger than me and it’s no more than I have any right to expect. But pleasant memories are tied up with some of those pieces. I’ve seen what happens to old friends when they lose all interest, Walker. They wind up in wheelchairs stinking of urine and calling their daughters Charlie. I’d splatter my brains before I’d let that happen to me. Only now I don’t have anything to do it with.”

  I got out one of my cards, scribbled a number on the back, and gave it to him. “Call this guy in Belleville. His name’s Ben Perkins. He’s a PI. who doubles in apartment maintenance, which as lines of work go aren’t so very different from each other. He’s a cowboy, but a good one, which is what this job screams for. But I can’t guarantee he’ll touch it.”

  “I don’t know.” He was looking at the number. “Weintraub recommended you as the original clam.”

  “This guy makes me look like a set of those wind-up dime store dentures.” I said so long again and let myself out, feeling cleansed. And as broke as a motel room chair.

  Two

  The Iroquois Heights business had to do with a wandering wife I never found. What I did find was a deputy city prosecutor living off the town madam and a broken head courtesy of a local beat officer’s monkey stick. The assistant chief is an old acquaintance. A week after the Kendall visit I was nursing my headache and the office fan with pliers and a paperclip when Lieutenant John Alderdyce of Detroit Homicide walked in. His black face glistened and he was breathing like a rhinoceros from the three-story climb. But his shirt and Chinese silk sportcoat looked fresh. He saw what I was doing and said, “Why don’t you pop for air conditioning?”

  “Every time I get a fund started I get hungry.” I laid down my tools and plugged in the fan. The blades turned, wrinkling the thick air. I lifted my eyebrows at John.

  He drew a small white rectangle out of an inside pocket and laid it on my desk, lining up the edges with those of the blotter. It was one of my business cards. “These things turn up in the damnedest places,” he said. “So do you.”

  “I’m paid to. The cards I raise as best as I can and then send them out into the world. I can’t answer for where they wind up.�
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  He flipped it over with a finger. A telephone number was written on the back in a scrawl I recognized. I sighed and sat back.

  “What’d he do,” I asked, “hang himself or stick his tongue in a light socket?”

  He jumped on it with both feet. “What makes it suicide?”

  “Blum’s wife was cheating on him, he said, and he lost his only other interest to a B-and-E. He as much as told me he’d take the back way out if that gun collection didn’t find its way home.”

  “Maybe you better throw me the rest of it,” he said.

  I did, starting with my introduction to Blum’s dog Hector and finishing with my exit from the house on Kendall. Alderdyce listened with his head down, stroking an unlit cigarette. We were coming up on the fifth anniversary of his first attempt to quit them.

  “So you walked away from it,” he said when I was through. “I never knew you to turn your back on a job just because it got too illegal.”

  I said, “We’ll pass over that on account of we’re so close. I didn’t like Blum. When he couldn’t bully me he tried wheedling, and he caught me in the wrong mood. Was it suicide?”

  “It plays that way. Wife came home from an overnight stay with one of her little bridge partners and found him shot through the heart with a thirty-eight automatic. The gun was in his right hand and the paraffin test came up positive. Powder burns, the works. No note, but you can’t have music too.”

  “Thirty-eight auto. You mean one of those Navy Supers?”

  “Colt Sporting Pistol, Model Nineteen-Oh-Two. It was discontinued in nineteen twenty-eight. A real museum piece. The same gun was on a list we found in a desk drawer.”

  “I know the list. He said everything on it had been stolen.”

  “He lied. We turned your card in a wastebasket this morning. We tried to reach you.”

  “I was up in the Heights getting a lesson in police work, Warner Brothers style. Check out the wife’s alibi?”

  He nodded, rolling the cold cigarette along his lower lip.