Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “A man has a right to defend himself in his home if he feels threatened, whether it’s by a Boy Scout or the Hitler Youth.”

  “Damn straight. He says the screen was hooked, and the techies found an open pocket knife when they turned the puke over; small for a weapon, but good for sticking between the door and the frame to slip the hook. But there’s been a rash of accidental firearms deaths lately, and a lot of noise about keeping them out of civilian hands. The county prosecutor wants to be attorney general, the attorney general wants to be governor, and the governor wants to go to Washington.”

  “That’s a lot of weight to put on the back of one little old man.”

  “Well, you saw what happened to the Detroit cops just for beating one rotten little recidivist to death with flashlights. We can’t carry ‘em that size anymore even here. Have to make do with guns and tasers and sap gloves and batons. We’re going out there practically naked. What chance has a private citizen got?”

  “Maybe the puke has a violent record.”

  “How can he not? That’s not a Happy Face on his cheek.”

  The lieutenant cut me loose. Outside, Doto sat in the back of a police cruiser, staring through the grid separating him from the front seat. His head came barely level with the padded rest. He looked nine years old.

  • • •

  Sandusky’s puke didn’t have a violent record. He had almost no record at all, and the one he had told a story nearly as sad as Doto’s.

  His name was Ryan Lister. He was sixteen and, by all appearances, had been living on the street since his father had booted him out for not contributing to the household income. In February the manager of a Starbucks in Highland Park found him sleeping in a corner of the kitchen when he came in to open up, discovered the latch broken on the back door, and had him arrested for breaking and entering. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of illegal entry, spent six weeks in a juvenile detention center, and was released. That was the narrative on Lister’s life of crime.

  Doto’s first lawyer, assigned by the public defender’s office, stood up for him at his arraignment and was gone, replaced by an experienced criminal attorney retained by a Holocaust survivors’ organization that had taken an interest in his case. When the prosecution proposed that Lister had merely sought shelter from the cold in Doto’s house as he had in the Starbucks, the defense established that the temperature that night had not dropped below fifty, far warmer than on many of the nights the boy had slept in alleys.

  Throughout the prosecution’s part of the trial, the sides played badminton with the evidence:

  —Surveillance records of all the area’s known white supremacist groups contained no mention of Lister’s ever having been a member or attended a meeting or rally;

  —A medical examiner confirmed that the swastika had been tattooed on Lister’s cheek quite recently—had not even had a chance to scab over—indicating that he was a new convert and therefore unknown to surveillance officers;

  —Sergeant Futterman, one of the first Hamtramck police officers on the scene, testified that Doto had delayed reporting the shooting for more than two hours, suggesting the defendant had used the time to dress the scene and concoct his alibi;

  —Amos Walker, neighbor, offered the defendant’s explanation that he’d waited patiently for the police to arrive, expecting someone in his neighborhood to have called them to complain about hearing a shot. Yes, Doto hadn’t been sure he’d seen the swastika, but under emotional pressure—(Objection; speculation).

  And like that, back and forth.

  The prosecution scored a hit when it seated a licensed psychotherapist whose sessions with Holocaust survivors had convinced him that the unremitting horror of life in the Nazi concentration camps had inured them to violence and human suffering, effectively turning them into psychopaths, without conscience or compunction about striking out against threateners real or perceived. In his opinion based on his research and interviews with the defendant, Doto had been a time bomb waiting for more than sixty years to explode.

  The therapist’s testimony infuriated groups representing survivors of Hitler’s Final Solution, but the jury stirred and murmured and the judge tapped his gavel.

  When the defense stepped up to bat, reporters speculated that a string of camp survivors would be called to confirm from their own experience that the sight alone of a swastika worn by an intruder was justifiable cause to act in one’s own defense; disclosure records revealed that Doto’s attorney had been interviewing dozens from the Polish community in Hamtramck alone with that purpose in mind. But he called only one witness.

  On the stand Doto answered questions calmly, recounting, with the startling clarity of an old man’s memory of past traumas, his experiences as a Jew imprisoned in Treblinka. The litany of humiliations and abuses climaxed with an account of his separation from his parents and his younger sister, and the certainty later that they’d been killed in gas chambers, their ashes shoveled from ovens and deposited among those of thousands of others spread for miles around the camp. When the Allies liberated him in 1945, the ten-year-old boy had weighed less than forty pounds.

  He broke down only once, weeping softly when he described his last meeting with his family. After a brief recess, he took the stand and repeated what he had told me of the shooting, with one exception: he was now in no doubt that he’d seen the swastika before he fired. His own lawyer defused the prosecution’s best cross-question by asking him why he’d told investigators he wasn’t sure he’d seen it. He replied that he’d been too upset by the attempted break-in and his own action in response to remember the details clearly at the time. When the shock passed, his memory had returned.

  Summations were brief. The prosecutor recapped the therapist’s testimony and reminded the jury that the defendant had changed his story about seeing the tattoo. Counsel for the defense delivered an impassioned plea for a lifelong victim driven at last to a violent act to defend himself and his home.

  The jury deliberated for two nerve-wracking hours. County residents were sympathetic to the homeless in those first weeks following a severe winter, and Ryan Lister’s lack of a serious criminal record was troublesome. But in the end that swastika swept up the last holdout. Doto was acquitted.

  I offered him a ride home. On the way he remembered that bottle of Polish vodka we hadn’t cracked. He kept it in the freezing compartment of his refrigerator; the liquor smoked when he poured it and tasted like an ice-cold cloud.

  When he left the living room to refill our glasses, I opened a large green cloth-bound album lying on the coffee table. Of course there were no pictures from his childhood, and either his first wife had never been photographed or her successor, who was probably the one who’d assembled the album, had left her out from natural jealousy, but there was a rich record of the couple’s American life, with vintage cars and fashions and extinct Detroit area landmarks throughout and vacations on the beach. Snapshots showed Doto in his Dodge coveralls with lunch pail; relaxing with friends around an old-fashioned beergarden table crowded with longnecks; retired at last from the daily scramble, posing proudly in the doorway of the shop where he’d peddled the product of his artistic talent downtown. I smiled in response to a grin I’d never seen on his face in person.

  His remained; mine faded when I read the sign lettered on the plate-glass display window:

  TATTOOS TO YOUR ORDER

  I knew then, as clearly as if there was a picture there of the poleaxed expression on my face, how I’d come to be a part of it all. I’d helped bear witness to his uncertainty about the swastika on Lister’s cheek, corroborating the testimony of the professionals on the scene. I’d done my part to saw a hole in the floor under the therapist’s evidence on psychopathic behavior. Anyone can relate to shock. It’s a human emotion after all, not the machinelike reaction of a coldblooded killer. I’d been as useful a tool as the needle in the kit he’d hidden or destroyed after it had served its purpose. I could see him taking pains
with his masterpiece, his last work, with no pesky resistance from his human canvas because it was incapable of flinching. Nevertheless, it required all his skill. It would have taken him every minute of the time before he called on me.

  • • •

  When I looked up from the album, Doto had returned. His face was flat as paint. He set down our glasses, took it gently from my hands, closed it, and slid it onto a shelf packed with mementos of his life in Hamtramck.

  Cigarette Stop

  One

  My pack ran out two miles north of the village of Peck. I crumpled it into the ashtray and started paying attention to signs.

  I was an hour and a half out of Detroit, following State Highway 19 through Michigan’s Thumb area on my way to Harbor Beach and my first job in more than a week. It was a warm night in late May and the sky was overcast, with here and there a tattered hole through which stars glittered like broken glass at the scene of an accident. My dashboard clock read 10:50.

  Up there, miles inland from the resort towns along the Lake Huron coastline, there are no malls or fast-food strips or modern floodlit truck stops complete with showers and hookers to order; just squat brick post offices and stores with plank floors and the last fullservice gas stations left in the western world. I pulled into a little stop-and-rob on the outskirts of Watertown with two pumps out front and bought a pack of Winstons from a bleach job on the short side of fifty who had taken makeup lessons from the Tasmanian Devil. The kid was standing by my car when I came out.

  He was a lean weed in dungarees, scuffed black oxfords, and a navy peacoat too heavy for the weather that hung on him the way they always do when you draw them from a quartermaster. His short-chopped sandy hair and stiff posture added to the military impression. Also the blue duffel resting on the pavement next to him with ABS C. K. SEATON stenciled on it in white.

  “Lift, mister?”

  I stripped the pack and speared a filter between my lips. He looked safe enough, clear-eyed and pink where he shaved. So had Richard Speck, Albert DeSalvo, and our own John Norman Collins.

  “Where to?” I asked. “I’m headed up to Harbor Beach.”

  “That’ll do. My folks are in Port Austin.”

  “Why aren’t you traveling up Twenty-five? That’s the coast highway.”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  “Seen one Big Boy, seen ‘em all,” I said.

  “Me too.”

  “Hop in.”

  He threw his duffel into the backseat of the Mercury and climbed into the passenger’s seat in front. Under the domelight he didn’t look as fresh as I’d thought. His face was drawn and pale as a clenched knuckle and he was breathing hoarsely, as if he’d been running. Then I closed my door and darkness clamped down over us both.

  Back on the road, with the broken white line flaring and fading in the headlamps, I made a comment or two about the lack of traffic—where I came from, only two cars in three miles meant nuclear war at the least—but he didn’t respond and I shut up. Well, in my own hitching days I’d hoped for the company of drivers who didn’t feel they had to entertain me. Somewhere between Elmer and Snover he slumped down in the seat with his knees up and his chin on his chest. He didn’t miss anything.

  In Argyle I stopped for gas at a place that might have been the twin of the one in Watertown. While the attendant was filling the tank I used the men’s room and bought a Coke from a machine to douse the nicotine burn in my throat. I bought another one, paid for the gas, and stuck the second can through the open window on the passenger’s side. When the kid didn’t reach for it I shook him gently by the shoulder. He fell over the rest of the way, and that’s when I saw the blood shining in the light mounted over the pumps.

  • • •

  The attendant, a tall strip of sandpapery hide in baggy suitpants and a once-white shirt with Norm stitched in red script over the pocket, bobbed his Adam’s apple twice when I showed him the dead body in my car, then went inside to use the telephone. Just for the hell of it I groped again for the big artery on the side of my passenger’s neck. It wasn’t any busier than it had been the first time I’d checked. I located the source of the blood in a ragged gash between two ribs on his right side under his shirt. He’d bled to death quietly while I was remarking on the thin traffic.

  I went through his pockets. Nothing, not even a wallet. Straightening, I looked at the attendant through the window of the little store, gesticulating at the receiver in his left hand. I opened the rear door and inspected the duffel. I found sailor’s blues rolled neatly to avoid wrinkles, cooking utensils and related camping equipment, and thick sheaves of some kind of newsprint, there presumably to keep the stuff from rattling as he carried it. The only identification Able Bodied Seaman C. K. Seaton had had with him was his name stenciled on his one piece of luggage. If it was his name.

  Norm was hanging up the telephone. I carried the duffel behind the car, unlocked the trunk, threw it in, and slammed the lid just as he came out. I had no idea why. I didn’t know why I did a lot of the things I did, like picking up strange hitchhikers in downtown Nowhere.

  “Raise anyone?” I asked Norm.

  “State troopers. We ain’t got no police in Argyle. You reckon somebody croaked him?” He was gaping through the passenger’s window with his chin in his lap.

  “If he shot himself he ditched the gun. And you can lay off the dialect. I was born in a town not much bigger than this one. We wore shoes and everything.”

  “Shit.” He dealt himself a Marlboro out of the bottom of a box he kept in his shirt pocket and lit it with a throwaway lighter. “Thought you was one of them Detroiters come up here to the boonies to cheat us rustics out of our valuable antiques. Last month my boss sold a woman from Grosse Pointe a Coca-Cola sign he bought off a junkyard in Port Huron for ten bucks. She gave him fifty. It was the ‘shucks’ and ‘you-alls’ done it.”

  I consumed my Coke in place of the cigarette I really wanted; one of us lighting up that close to the pumps was plenty. “Where’d you graduate?” I asked him. “Jackson?”

  His face squinched up. “Marquette. What gave me away?”

  “You’ve got to start smoking them from the top of the pack if you don’t want anyone to know you were inside. Out here we don’t scramble for cigarettes when they fall out and scatter. Yet.”

  “You a cop?”

  “Private.” I showed him the ID.

  “Amos Walker,” he read. “I never heard of you.”

  “That doesn’t make you special.”

  We were still going around like that a few minutes later when a blue-and-white pulled in off 19 and a blocky figure in a blue business suit climbed out of the right side. “Christ, it’s Torrance,” Norm said. “Do me a favor, okay? Don’t tell him about Marquette. Nobody knows about that around here.”

  “Nobody has to,” I said. “What did they take you down for, anyway?”

  “I stuck up a gas station.”

  Two

  Luther Torrance commanded the Cass City post of the Michigan State Police. He was square-built and shorter than they like them in that jurisdiction—which said something about what kind of cop he had to be to have made commander—with short brown hair and eyes that looked yellow in the harsh outdoor light, like a wolf’s. The uniformed trooper who had driven him ran six-four and wore amber Polaroids. He stood around with his thumbs hooked inside his gun belt, in case Norm and I threw down a gum wrapper or something.

  “Thirty-eight’d be my guess,” said Torrance, stripping off a pair of rubber surgical gloves as he came away from the body in the Mercury. “Maybe nine-millimeter. It’s still in there, so we won’t be guessing long. You’re the owner of the car?” He looked up at me.

  I said I was and showed him the PI license. When he was through being impressed I told him what had happened, starting at the cigarette stop. He took it all down in a leather-bound notebook with a gold pencil.

  “What’s a private sleuth doing up here?” he asked.

 
“Does it matter?”

  “Not if you’re on vacation, which you aren’t or you’d be a lot closer to the lake. Nobody comes through here unless he’s lost or on his way someplace else. You don’t look lost.”

  “Security job up in Harbor Beach.”

  “Judge Dunham’s poker game.” I must have reacted, because he showed me his bridgework. “Shoot, everybody in these parts knows about the judge’s annual game. You don’t shove a couple of hundred thousand back and forth across a table one weekend every spring and expect not to get talked about around here. That’s why he needs security. Well, I’ll check it out. This guy never introduced himself?”

  I shook my head. “He said he had family in Port Austin.”

  “We’ll send a man up there with a morgue shot. Any luggage?”

  “No.”

  “Most hitchers have something. A backpack or something.”

  “This one didn’t.”

  He tapped the gold pencil against his bridgework. Just then a county wagon pulled in and two attendants in uniform got out. He put away the pencil and notebook. “You heading straight up to Harbor Beach tonight?”

  “Not this late. I thought I’d get a room and make a fresh jump in the morning. Any place you’d recommend?”

  “The roaches all look alike up here. I got your address and number if we need you, or I can call the judge if we need you quick. We won’t. I figure our boy got robbed and put up a fuss. Fact he didn’t tell you he was wounded makes me think a dope deal went bad, something on that order. We get that, even here.”

  I said, “I guess there aren’t any Mayberrys any more.”

  “There never were, except on television.” He thanked me and walked back to take charge of the body. Norm, watching, was on his second pack of Marlboros. I noticed he’d opened this one on top.

  Three

  The motel I fell into a mile up 19 was a concrete bunker built in a square Uwith the office in the base. The manager, fat and hairless except for a gray tuft coiling over the Vin his Hawaiian shirt, took my cash and registration card and handed me a key wired to the anchor from the Edmund Fitzgerald. My room, second from the end in the north leg of the U, stood across from an ice machine illuminated like an icon under a twenty-watt bulb. I had a double bed, a TV, and a shower stall with a dispenser full of pink soap that smelled like Madame Ling’s Secrets of the East Massage Parlor on Gratiot. The TV worked like my plans for the evening.