Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “A pro bowler in Harper Woods. You’d like him. Muscles on his elbows and if his IQ tests out at half his handicap you can have my pension. Blum started getting cold around midnight and she was at Fred Flintstone’s place from ten o’clock on. She married Blum four years ago, about the time he turned seventy-five and handed over the operation of his construction firm to his partners. We’re still digging.”

  “He told me he used to be in shipping.” Alderdyce shrugged. I said, “I guess you called Perkins.”

  “The number you wrote on the card. Blum didn’t score any more points with him than he did with you. I’m glad we never met. I wouldn’t want to know someone who wasn’t good enough for two P.I.’s with cardboard in their shoes.”

  I lit a Winston, just to make him squirm. “What I most enjoy paying rent on this office for is to provide a forum for overdressed fuzz to run down my profession. Self-snuffings don’t usually make you this pleasant. Or is it the heat?”

  “It’s the heat,” he said. “It’s also this particular self-snuffing. Maybe I’m burning out. They say one good way of telling is when you find yourself wanting to stand the stiff on its feet and ask it a question.”

  “As for instance?”

  “As for instance, ‘Mr. Blum, would you please tell me why before you shot yourself you decided to shoot your dog?’”

  I said nothing. After a little while he broke his cigarette in two and flipped the pieces at my wastebasket and went out.

  Three

  I finished my smoke, then broke out my Polk Administration Underwood and cranked a sheet into it and waited for my report to the husband of the runaway wife to fall into order. When I got tired of that I tore out the blank sheet and crumpled it and bonged it into the basket. My head said it was time to go home.

  “Mr. Walker?”

  I was busy locking the door to my private office. When I turned I was looking at a slender brunette of about thirty standing in the waiting room with the hall door closing on its pneumatic tube behind her. She wore her hair short and combed almost over one eye and had on a tailored black jacket that ran out of material just below her elbows, on top of a ruffled white blouse and a tight skirt to match the jacket. Black purse and shoes. The weather was too hot for black, but she made it look cool.

  I got my hat off the back of my head and said I was Walker. She said, “I’m Andrea Blum. Leonard Blum is—was my husband.”

  I unlocked the door again and held it for her. Inside the brain room she glanced casually at the butterfly wallpaper and framed Casablanca poster and accepted the chair I held for her, the one whose legs were all the same length. I sat down behind the desk and said I was sorry about Mr. Blum.

  She smiled slightly. “I won’t pretend I’m destroyed. It’s no secret our marriage was a joke. But you get used to having someone around, and then when he’s not—” She spread her hands. “Leonard told me he tried to hire you to trace his stolen guns and that you turned him down.”

  “I’d have had to tell the police that a cache of unregistered firearms was loose,” I said. “Three out of five people in this town carry guns. They’d like to keep the other two virgin.”

  “Don’t explain. I was just as happy they were taken. Guns frightened me. Anyway, that’s not why I’m here. The police think Leonard’s death was self-inflicted.”

  “You don’t.”

  She moved her head. The sunlight caught a reddish thread in her black hair. “The burglary infuriated him. After that other detective refused to take the case he was determined to find one that would. He was ready to do it himself if it came to that. Do people shoot themselves when they’re angry, Mr. Walker?”

  “Never having shot myself I can’t say.”

  “And he wouldn’t have killed Hector,” she went on. “He loved that dog. Besides, where could he have gotten the gun? It was one of those missing.”

  “Could be the burglars overlooked it and he just didn’t tell you. And it wouldn’t be the first time a suicide took something he loved with him. Generally it’s the wife. You’re lucky, Mrs. Blum.”

  “That he cared less for me than he did for his dog? I deserve that, I guess. Marrying an old man for his money gets boring. All those other men were just a diversion. I loved Leonard in my way.” She lined up her fingers primly on the purse in her lap. The nails were sharp and buffed to a high gloss, no polish. “He didn’t kill himself. Whoever killed him shot the dog first when it came at him.”

  I offered her a cigarette from the deck. When she shook her head I lit one for myself and said, “I’ve got a question, but I don’t want one of those nails in my eye.”

  “Insurance,” she said. “A hundred thousand dollars, and I’m the sole beneficiary. It’s worth more than twice the estate minus debts outstanding. And yes, if suicide is established as cause of death the policy is void. But that’s only part of why I’m here, though I admit it’s the biggest part. At the very least I owe it to Leonard to find out who murdered him.”

  “Who do you suspect?”

  “I can’t think of anyone. We seldom had visitors. He outlived most of his friends and the only contact he had with his business partners was over the telephone. He was in semiretirement.”

  She gave me the name of the firm and the partners’ names. I wrote them down. “What did your husband do before he went into construction?” I asked.

  “He would never tell me. Whenever I asked he’d say it didn’t matter, those were dead days. I gather it had something to do with the river but he never struck me as the sailor type. May could tell you. His first wife. May Shinstone, her name is now. She lives in Birmingham.”

  I wrote that down too. “I’ll look into it, Mrs. Blum. Until the cops stop thinking suicide, anyway. They frown on competition. Meanwhile I think you should find another place to stay.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if Mr. Blum was murdered odds are it was by the same person who stole his guns, and that person sneezes at locks. If you get killed I won’t have anyone to report to.”

  After a moment she nodded. “I have a place to stay.”

  I believed her.

  Four

  When she had left, poorer by a check in the amount of my standard three-day retainer, I called Ben Perkins. We swapped insults and then I drew on a favor he owed me and got the number of a gun broker downtown, one who wasn’t listed under Guns in the Yellow Pages. Breaking the connection I could almost smell one of the cork-tipped ropes Perkins smokes. When he lit one up in your presence you wouldn’t have to see him pull it out of his boot to know where he keeps them.

  Eleven rings in, a voice with a Mississippi twang came on and recited the number I had just dialed.

  “I’m a P.I. named Walker,” I said. “Ben Perkins gave me your number.”

  He got my number and said he’d call back. We hung up. Three minutes later the telephone rang. It was Mississippi.

  “Okay, Perk says you’re cool. What?”

  “I need a line on some hot guns,” I said.

  “Nix, not over the squawker. What’s the tag?”

  “Fifty, if you’ve got what I want.”

  “Man, I keep a roll of fifties in the crapper. Case I run out of Charmin, you know? A hunnert up front. No refunds.”

  “Sixty-five. Fifty up front. Nothing if I don’t come away happy.”

  “Sevenny-five and no guarantees. Phone’s gettin’ heavy, man.”

  I said okay. We compared meeting places, settling finally on a city parking lot on West Lafayette at six o’clock.

  My next call was to Leonard Blum’s construction firm, where a junior partner referred me to Ed Klagan at a building site on Third. Klagan’s was one of the names Andrea Blum had given me. I asked for the number at the building site.

  “There aren’t any phones on the twenty-first floor, mister,” the junior partner told me.

  An M. Shinstone was listed in Birmingham. I tried the number and cradled the receiver after twenty rings. It was getting slippery. I go
t up, peeling my shirt away from my back, stood in front of the clanking fan for a minute, then hooked up my hat and jacket. The thermometer at the bank where I cashed Mrs. Blum’s check read 87°, which was as cool as it had been all day.

  It was hotter on Third Street. The naked girders straining up from the construction site were losing their vertical hold in the smog and twisting heat waves, and the security guard at the opening in the board fence had sweated through his light blue uniform shirt. I shouted my business over the clattering pneumatic hammers. At length he signaled to a broad party in a hardhat and necktie who was squinting at a blueprint in the hands of a glistening half-naked black man. The broad party came over, getting bigger as he approached until I was looking up at his Adam’s apple and three chins folded over it. The guard left us.

  “Mr. Klagan?”

  “Yeah. You from the city?”

  “The country, originally.” I showed him my ID. “Andrea Blum hired me to look into her husband’s death.”

  “I heard he croaked himself.”

  “That’s what I’m being paid to find out. What was his interest in the construction firm?”

  “Strictly financial. Pumped most of his profits back into the business and arranged an occasional loan when we were on the shorts, which wasn’t often. He put together a good organization. Look, I got to get back up on the steel. The higher these guys go the slower they work. And the foreman’s a drunk.”

  “Why don’t you fire him?”

  He uncovered tobacco-stained teeth in a sour grin. “Local two-two-six. Socialism’s got us by the uppers, brother.”

  “One more question. Blum’s life before he got into construction is starting to look like a mystery. I thought you could clear it up.”

  “Not me. My old man might. They started the firm together.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “Mount Elliott. But you better bring a shovel.”

  “I was afraid it’d be something like that,” I said.

  “All I know is Blum came up to the old man in January of ‘thirty-four with a roll of greenbacks the size of a coconut and told him he looked too smart to die a foreman. He had the bucks, Pop had the know-how.”

  He showed me an acre of palm and moved off. I smoked a cigarette to soothe a throat made raw by yelling over the noise and watched him mount the hydraulic platform that would take him up to the unfinished twenty-first floor. Thinking.

  Six

  The parking lot on West Lafayette was in the shadow of the News building; stepping into it from the heat of the street was like falling headfirst into a pond. I stood in the aisle, mopping the back of my neck with my soaked handkerchief and looking around. My watch read six on the nose.

  A horn beeped. I looked in that direction. The only vehicle occupied was a ten-year-old Dodge club cab pickup parked next to the building with Michigan cancer eating through its rear fenders and a dull green finish worn down to brown primer in leprous patches. I went over there.

  The window on the driver’s side came down, leaking loud music and framing a narrow, heavy-lidded black face in the opening. “You a PI. named Walker?”

  I said I was. He reached across the interior and popped up the lock button on the passenger’s side. The cab was paved with maroon plush inside and had an instrument-studded leather dash and speakers for a sound system that had cost at least as much as the book on the pickup, pouring out drums and electric guitars at brain-throbbing volume. He’d had the air conditioner on recently and it was ten degrees cooler inside.

  My eardrums had been raped enough for one day. I shouted to him to turn down the roar. He twirled a knob and then it was just us and the engine ticking as it cooled.

  My host was a loose tube of bones in a red tank top and blue running shorts. And alligator shoes on his bare feet. He caught me looking at them and said, “I got an allergy to everything but lizard. You carrying?”

  When I hesitated he showed me the muzzle of a nickel-plated .357 magnum he had lying face down on his lap. I didn’t think he was the Ebony type. I took the Smith &Wesson out of its belt holster slowly and handed it to him butt first. His lip curled.

  “Police Special. Who you, Dick Tracy? I got what you want here.” He laid my revolver on his side of the dash and snaked an arm over the back of the seat into the compartment behind. After some rummaging he came up with a chromed Colt Python as long as my forearm. “Man, you plug them with this mother, the lead goes through them, knocks down a light pole across the street.”

  “I’ve got no beef with Detroit Edison.”

  He dropped his baggy grin, put the big magnum back behind the seat and its little brother on the dash next to my .38, and held out his palm. I laid seventy-five dollars in it. He folded the bills and slid them under a clip on the sun visor. “You after hot iron.”

  “Just its history.” I recited Blum’s list so far as I remembered it. “They came up gone from a house on Kendall a little over a week ago,” I added. “Unless someone’s hugging the ground they should be on the market by now. Some of those pieces are pretty rare. You’d know them.”

  “Ain’t come my way. I can let you have a forty-five auto Army, never issued. Two hunnert.”

  “How many notches?”

  “Man, this is a virgin piece. The barrel, anyway.”

  “The guns,” I said. “You’d hear if they were available. It’s a lot of iron to hit the streets all at one time.”

  “When S ‘n’ W talks, people listen. Only I guess it missed me.”

  “Okay, hang your ears out. I’ve got another seventy-five says they’ll show up soon.” I gave him my card.

  “Last week a fourteen-year-old kid give me that much for a Saturday night banger I don’t want to be in the same building with when it goes off. Listen, I can put you behind a Thompson Model Nineteen Twenty-One for a thousand. The Gun That Won Chicago. Throw in a fifty-round drum.”

  I looked back at him with my hand on the door handle. I’d clean forgotten that item on Blum’s list. “You’ve got a Thompson?”

  His eyes hooded over. “Could be I know where one can be got.”

  I peeled three fifties off the roll in my pocket and held them up.

  “I trade you a thousand-dollar piece for a bill and a half? Get out of my face, turkey white meat.” He turned on the sound system. The pickup’s frame buzzed.

  “Ooh, jive,” I said, turning it off. “You keep the gun. All I want is the seller’s name. There’s a murder involved.”

  He hesitated. I skinned off another fifty. He put his fingers on them. I held on. “I call you, man,” he said.

  I tore the bills in two and gave him half. “You know the speech.”

  “Ain’t no way to treat President Grant.” But he clipped the torn bills with the rest and gave me back my gun, tipping out the cartridges first. There’s no more trust in the world.

  Seven

  Shadows were lengthening downtown, cooling the pavement without actually lowering the temperature. I caught a sandwich and a cold beer at a counter and used the pay telephone to try the Birmingham number again. A husky female voice answered.

  “May Shinstone?”

  “Yes?”

  I told her who I was and what I was after. There was a short silence before she said, “Leonard’s dead?”

  I made a face at the snarl of penciled numbers on the wall next to the telephone. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Shinstone. I got so used to it I forgot everyone didn’t know.”

  “Don’t apologize. It was just a surprise. It’s been two years since I’ve seen Leonard, and almost that long since I’ve thought about him. I don’t know how I can help you.”

  “Just now I’m sweeping up whatever’s lying around. I’ll sort it out later. I need some stuff on his life before January nineteen thirty-four.”

  “That isn’t a story for the telephone, Mr. Walker.”

  There was something in her tone. I played around with it for a second, then poked it into a drawer. “If you have a few minute
s this evening I’d like to come talk to you about it,” I said.

  “How big is your car trunk?”

  “Would you say that again, Mrs. Shinstone? We have a bad connection.”

  “I’m giving up the house here and moving to an apartment in Royal Oak. I have one or two things left to move. If your trunk’s big enough I can dismiss the cab I have waiting.” She gave me her address.

  I said, “I’ll put the spare tire in the back seat.”

  I paused with my hand on the receiver, then unhooked it again and used another quarter to call my service. Lieutenant Alderdyce had tried to reach me and wanted me to call him back. I dialed his extension at Headquarters.

  “I spoke to Mrs. Blum a little while ago,” he said. “You’re fired.”

  “Funny, you don’t sound like her.”

  “She’ll tell you the same thing. Blum’s death is starting not to look like suicide and that means you can go back to your bench and leave the field to the first string.”

  “How much not like suicide is it starting to look?”

  “Just for the hell of it we ran Blum’s prints. We got a positive.”

  “He told me he’d never been printed.”

  “He must’ve forgot,” Alderdyce said. “We didn’t mess with the FBI. They destroy their records once a subject turns seventy. We got a match in a box of stuff on its way to the incinerator because it was too old to bother feeding into the computer. There is no Leonard Blum. But Leo Goldblum got to know these halls during Prohibition, whenever the old rackets squad found it prudent to round up the Purple Gang and ask questions.”

  “Blum was a Purple?”

  “Nice kids, those. When they weren’t gunning each other down and commuting to Chicago to pull off the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre for Capone they found time to ship bootleg hooch across the river from Canada. That was Goldblum’s specialty. He was arrested twice for transporting liquor from the Ecorse docks and drew a year’s probation in ‘twenty-nine on a Sullivan rap. Had a revolver in his pocket.”