Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Here’s two thousand back.” I handed him a thick envelope. “They believed me when I told them Motown is dead and the local record business is depressed. All part of the service.”

  “I’d have shot the motherfuckers.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I’m paid to end trouble, not start it. And they demanded an outsider. What do we owe you, Walker?”

  “Simple buy-back, no complications. A C-note ought to do it.”

  “Hell.” He drew two bills from the envelope and held them out. “Buy a new suit with the extra hundred. You’ll never get the stink out of the one you’re wearing.” I took one of the bills. “We go back a long way, Ansel. Put it in your retirement fund.”

  “Who’s retiring?”

  I started to go. He called me back. His Masai features were unreadable. “If you won’t accept tips, maybe you’ll take work. A girl I know could use a break.”

  “What kind?”

  “If I knew that I’d help her myself. Redline’s got her on contract. Lately she’s been missing sessions. Management was getting set to tout her as the new Diana Ross, but now they’re talking about dropping her. She’s got trouble but she won’t say what.”

  I lit a Winston. “What’s she to you?”

  He drew himself up; all the way up, which was hard on my neck. “What’s that mean?”

  “Don’t sweat it, Ansel. If she’s your kid, swell. If she’s your something on the side, that’s swell, too, but it makes a difference in the way I approach her. You know that.”

  “Shit.” He relaxed. “I’ve been around these corporate twerps so long I’m starting to act like a pimp. Sheilah’s just a sweet kid, used to stop by security on her way to the studio and pass the time of day. When I brought up the rumors and asked her if I could help, she walked out. Now she won’t even look at me on her way past. Maybe a young stud like you could get something out of her. Color doesn’t matter any more, not in this business.”

  “Sheilah’s her name?”

  “With an H on the end. Sheilah Sorrell, that’s the name on the label. You’ll find her in Farmington Hills.” He scribbled an address in his pocket pad and gave me the sheet. “She lives with Ronnie Madrid.”

  “The druglord?”

  “Please. The entertainment mogul. He owns two comedy clubs in town and tried to buy this company.”

  “He can afford to. When his boys wiped out the Little Colombia mob he inherited the whole East Side.”

  “You got something against free enterprise? A girl can’t help who she falls in love with.”

  “Who pays?”

  “Redline Records, who else?”

  “You mean you.”

  He leaned back against the brick wall. His jacket fell open, exposing the big shiny magnum.

  “They pay me too much to keep out the pirates, and I’m too old to spend it on anything worthwhile.”

  “Like hell you are.” I left.

  Two

  The neighborhood was made up of large homes with clean lines tucked between hills, not one of them more than twenty years old or worth less than three hundred thousand. The Madrid house was glass and brick with a red tile roof and a swimming pool that would have held my place in Hamtramck. Nice work for a kid who not so long ago was begging in the streets of Managua.

  Ronnie Madrid, born Rafael Maldronado y Sanchez etcetera, had found a shortcut Horatio Alger had overlooked. The only survivor of a family of Nicaraguan rebels massacred by Sandanistas, he’d been brought to Detroit by a distant relative while still in short pants, gone to work running dope for the Colombians, and become a bodyguard at age nineteen for Luis “El Tigre” Rodriguez; but he wasn’t too good at that, because six weeks later The Tiger turned up bound and gagged and shot full of holes in the trunk of his Excalibur at City Airport. A gutter war raged for months. When it ended, Ronnie was the Man to See east of Cadillac Square for everything from Mescaline to Mexican Brown. Twenty now, old enough to vote if he were a citizen but still too young to buy beer, he was using his good looks, streetwise charm, and drug connections in South America to gain a foothold in the local entertainment industry, assuring himself both a legitimate front and a place to launder his money to Uncle Sam’s taste. Like the man said, only in America.

  The doorbell chimed “Spanish Harlem,” no kidding. A maid whose ironclad features suggested she would know “Der Horst Wessel Lied” better carried my card back into the house and returned five minutes later to tell me Miss Sorrell would see me.

  I waited in the entryway. The floor tiles were Mexican. Spanish needles grew in ceramic pots on either side of a curving staircase. A framed poster advertised a bullfight in Spanish on one wall. Inside the curve of the staircase stood a suit of Japanese armor, looking abashed.

  “Awful, isn’t it? Ronnie insisted on buying it. I told him it wouldn’t go with the rest of the house, but you don’t tell Ronnie anything.”

  She had come up on me while I was staring at the armor. She was small, with fine Jamaican features and skin as light as mine, which may have been why she wore her hair in cornrows and dressed in a stiff white cotton robe with African symbols painted on it in primary colors. Unbelted, it left her collarbone bare and covered her feet.

  “Maybe he thinks he needs a tin suit,” I said. “They’d be a sellout in high school parking lots.”

  “I’m Sheilah Sorrell. Did Ansel send you, Mr. Walker?” I’d written his name on the back of my card.

  “He’s fresh out of kittens caught in trees. He thinks you’re in some kind of jam.”

  “I’m not. He’s kind of like an uncle, always looking out for me. Can I offer you a drink, or are you on duty?”

  “I’m not that kind of detective.”

  “I’ve got gin, scotch—”

  “Stop there.”

  She laughed in a way only singers can, turned, and lifting her robe the way they do in Victorian movies, led the way into something they probably don’t call a living room in houses like that. It was done in blue and white with French doors looking out on the sparkling pool. There was a small bar and a wall full of audio equipment that looked like the computer in 2001. Sheilah Sorrell stepped behind the bar.

  “This is something I never let Greta do for Ronnie. I like mixing drinks. Water or ice?”

  “A glass is fine.”

  She poured it from a cut-glass decanter, fixed herself something amber, and brought them over to a blue satin sofa. We sat down. She crossed a country block of smooth bare leg over the other and showed me a white leather sandal and coral polish on her toenails. “I’m sorry you wasted your time,” she said. “Ansel’s a mother hen.”

  “That mother hen was thrown out of the toughest police department in the country for misuse of deadly force.” I drank. “Where’s Ronnie?”

  “Away on business. What did Ansel tell you?”

  “He said you’ve been missing work.”

  “I’m a musician. I play a delicate instrument. My voice strains easily and I have to rest it. I don’t expect a security man to understand that but Redline should.”

  “He says there’s talk of letting you go.”

  “They can’t do that. I’ve got a contract.”

  “I heard someone say once that in show business a signed contract is considered the beginning of the negotiating process.”

  She smiled then. The colors in the room faded in the light. Then her gaze shifted. “Yes, Greta.”

  “Telephone, missus.” The maid was standing in the doorway.

  “Who is it?”

  “He would not say. It is important he said.”

  “I’ll take it upstairs.” She set her drink down untasted on the white coffee table and rose, “Excuse me, Mr. Walker. Play some music if you like.” She went out, followed by Greta.

  A cabinet contained several of Sheilah Sorrell’s CDs. After a few minutes I figured out how to work the player—I haven’t forgiven the music business for changing technologies just when I had amassed a col
lection of all my favorites on eight-track—and put on one, “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.” She ran Cole Porter through Motown and it came out like raw silk. I stood listening and looking at the pool for thirty seconds before the detective in me kicked in. The bar was stocked with wines and liquors I had only heard about. The carpet and drapes had been bought in New York. And Sheilah Sor-rell had a pistol in the drawer of a blue lamp table.

  It was a .22 magnum derringer, a two-shot and too delicate-looking for an hombre de guerra like Madrid: it was nickel-plated and the sidegrips were mother-of-pearl. The engraving on the backstrap read: “Your Ace in the Hole. Ronnie.” “Ace in the Hole” was another Cole Porter song in Sheilah’s CD cabinet. The muzzle gave off a vanilla-flavored whiff of powder solvent. I tipped light into the barrels and looked inside. No dust. A thorough job of cleaning for a woman, and very recent.

  Three

  I heard footsteps and returned the pistol to its drawer. The disc player was still making plaintive sounds in Sheilah’s lost voice.

  “Missus said she is sorry,” the maid said. “She was called away.”

  “I didn’t hear her leave.”

  “She is dressing. Call later,” she said.

  I drove around the corner and parked on the blind side of a bank of lilacs. Through the leaves I could see the front of the house. It was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and the driveway was the only exit. For the neighbors’ sake I pretended to be studying a road map. The map was of Arizona and I had no idea what it was doing in my glove compartment.

  Somewhere between Flagstaff and Tucson a bottle green Jaguar chortled down the driveway with Sheilah Sorrell at the wheel. She turned left, directly in front of me. I slumped down until she passed, then threw aside the map, hit the ignition, and swung out behind. There were no other cars on the shady street and I gave the Jag two blocks.

  We took Maple Road to Telegraph and points south, past West Bloomfield and neighborhoods that made Farmington Hills look like a welfare project—Ronnie Madrid’s next stop on his way to Grosse Pointe, where the Spanish accents cut the grass and the residents thought a contra was a foreign convertible. Below Ten Mile Road the scenery broke down and became plain old Detroit. There the traffic was brisk and I closed up. On Seven Mile the Jaguar drifted into the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant and Sheilah got out and went inside. She had on a yellow cotton shift and dark glasses.

  I found a space on the street and adjusted my rearview mirror to include the restaurant door. In a little while a burly black party in an electric blue suit walked past my car carrying a leather briefcase and entered the restaurant.

  Things were getting interesting. I’d been visiting police headquarters the day they brought in Virgil Sweet for questioning in connection with a drive-by shooting at a crack house on Watson. Since then he’d gained about twenty pounds and several yards of expensive Italian tailoring. Two minutes after he went inside he came out and walked back the way he had come, without the briefcase.

  Sheilah Sorrell had it. She came clicking back across the parking lot, threw the item onto the front seat of the Jaguar, and got in with it. She took off with a chirp of rubber. Of course I followed.

  We went downtown. Afternoon rush hour was thirty minutes away and we could have driven on the sidewalks for all the pedestrians we would hit. Finally she parked behind a produce truck on Monroe and got out carrying the briefcase. I wedged my car into a loading zone and shadowed her on foot. We crossed into Greektown, where restaurateurs with thick arms and white aprons to their ankles were sweeping out their establishments in preparation for the dinner trade. But Sheilah had had her fill of restaurants, and turned into Trapper’s Alley instead.

  I almost lost her in the crowd that was a fixture in the vertical shopping mall. When I spotted her she was on the escalator halfway to the second level. She never looked around. I might have been tailing her in an army halftrack.

  On the top level she stopped at a newsstand, bought a ticket for the People Mover, and went out on the tiled platform to wait. I bought one too and loitered among the magazines until the train came. We boarded with a small crowd. I hurried past her while she was settling herself on the molded bench under the windows and found a place to stand at the rear of the car.

  The train slid out of the station, its motion as smooth as the graft that had built it. We stopped at Cadillac Center, Joe Louis Arena, Grand Circus. Some passengers got on, others left. Approaching Bricktown, the last stop before the station where we had boarded, Sheilah slid the briefcase under the bench and stood. When the doors opened, she stepped off. The briefcase remained behind. So did I.

  I rode the circuit twice and started around again. Several stories below, the streets were thickening with traffic. Nobody touched the briefcase, hidden in the shadows. I had thought I knew what it contained, but when no one claimed it the trip started to look like a try-out, to see if Sheilah followed instructions. At Cadillac Center I got in with a knot of Japanese tourists waiting to alight and scooped up the case on my way through the doors. It felt heavy.

  In the nearest men’s room I tried to open the briefcase, but it was locked. There would be time enough to break into it later and remove the newspapers or whatever other useless items it held. I dropped a quarter into one of the telephones in the hallway outside and dialed John Alderdyce’s number at police headquarters. A rum-pled-looking business type in two-toned cordovans was using the other instrument. I turned my back on him.

  “Walker, what’s happenin’?” Alderdyce said. “I heard you died.”

  “That was three days ago. I’m back.”

  “What can I do for you, you blasphemous son of a bitch?” he asked brightly.

  “What do you hear lately about Virgil Sweet?”

  “Nothing good, and I read the obituaries every day. Word is he’s partnered up with the Hispanics. Shooting kids on street corners is for the help. What about him?”

  “Would one of those Hispanics be Ronnie Madrid?”

  “That’s the name I heard. We’re looking for Ronnie, by the way. He missed an appointment.”

  “A hearing?”

  “Prelim. Nobody’s seen him in a duck’s age. What’s Sweet up to?”

  I couldn’t answer the question. I probably wouldn’t have anyway. I saw movement reflected in the shiny black surface of the telephone. Then a purple light exploded in my skull and I didn’t see anything for a while.

  Four

  I woke up to a white glare. Someone was moving a penlight back and forth between my pupils. I said, “Turn that off or I’ll use it to take your temperature.” That was the planned speech. It came out in some dead language.

  “Dilation normal,” muttered a voice I didn’t know. “How many fingers am I holding up, son?”

  “December 7th, 1941.” That at least sounded like English, winched up from the bottom of a dusty shaft.

  Someone else chuckled. I knew John Alderdyce’s sinister mirth. I was lying on my back on the hard floor in the short passage outside the men’s room at Cadillac Center. The man with the penlight and the fingers was supporting my head with one hand. He was a balding person with thick-rimmed glasses and a long tragic face that looked medical. Beyond this was John’s brutal black features, gentling slightly as he spread into middle age. “I had your call traced,” he said. “I almost arrested the doc here when I found him bending over you. I thought that ‘Stand back, I’m a doctor’ line went out with Louis B. Mayer.”

  I said, “The briefcase.”

  “What briefcase?”

  “That answers one question. Got a light?” I sat up and patted my pockets. My head expanded like an airbag.

  The doctor sat back on his heels. “You should check yourself into Emergency. You could be concussed.”

  “Walker bounces backhoes off his skull Saturdays.” John speared a mentholated cigarette between my lips from the pack he was always quitting from and lit it off a disposable lighter. It tasted like Old Spice.

  “In that
case sign this.” The doctor snapped open a folded sheet from a pocket and held it and a pen under my nose. It was a form releasing him from liability. I scribbled my name at the bottom and he was gone like Clayton Moore.

  “What’s new?” John asked.

  I grabbed his arm and jacked myself vertical. My head kept expanding. It was going to hurt like hell when it finally burst. The small crowd we’d collected began to fade. “I make it Ronnie Madrid was kidnapped,” I said, leaning against the wall. “Sheilah Sorrell, his squeeze, told me he was away on a buy, but someone called the house and she was in a lather to leave after that. She met Virgil Sweet in a Chinese place on Seven Mile and he gave her a briefcase. She left it on the People Mover. When nobody claimed it I figured it was a trial run, snatched the case myself, and called you. That’s when the sky fell on me.”

  “Ronnie Madrid’s dead.”

  I waited.

  “Metro called just as I was leaving the office,” he said. “Somebody put two in him and dumped him behind a video arcade on Michigan Avenue. Customers heard a car tearing away about five this afternoon.”

  “That was just about the time his girlfriend caught the train.”

  “They must’ve been pretty sure she’d deliver.”

  “Who do you like for it?” I asked.

  “The guy was a dealer. Tomorrow morning I’ll sit down with the city directory and check off the names of the ones I don’t like for it.”He watched me crush out the cigarette. “You okay? Maybe the doc was right about having yourself looked at.”

  “It was just my head.”

  “Get a hinge at the sapper?”

  “Just for a second. A legend died today; I didn’t spot the tail when I left the train. He was waiting for me when I came out of the toilet, pretending to be making a call. He looked like a bad salesman.” I described what I remembered, including the flashy cordovans.