Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  I refolded the paper and gave it back. “Your daughter’s taken up with Boyd?”

  “They were high school sweethearts,” Frechette said. “That was before Texas Federal foreclosed on his family’s ranch and his father shot himself. She disappeared from home after the first robbery. I guess that makes her an accomplice to the second.”

  “Legally speaking,” I agreed, “if she’s with him and it’s her idea. A smart DA would knock it down to harboring if she turned herself in. She’d probably get probation.”

  “She wouldn’t do that. She’s got some crazy idea she’s in love with Boyd.”

  “I’m surprised I haven’t heard about her.”

  “No one knows. I didn’t report her missing. If I had, the police would have put two and two together and there’d be a warrant out for her as well.”

  I swallowed some beer. “I don’t know what you think I can do that the cops and the FBI can’t.”

  “I know where she is.”

  I waited. He rotated his mug. “My sister lives in Southgate. We don’t speak. She has a white mother, not like me, and she takes after her in looks. She’s ashamed of being half Osage. First chance she had she married a white man and got out of Oklahoma. That was before I left for Texas, where nobody knows about her. Anyway she got a big settlement in her divorce.”

  “You think Boyd and your daughter will go to her for a getaway stake?”

  “They won’t get it from me, and he didn’t take enough out of Texas Federal to keep a dog alive. Why else would they come here?”

  “So if you know where they’re headed, what do you need me for?”

  “Because I’m being followed and you’re not.”

  The bartender came around to offer Frechette a refill. The big Indian shook his head and he went away. “Cops?” I said.

  “One cop. J. P. Ahearn.”

  He spaced out the name as if spelling a blasphemy. I said I’d never heard of him.

  “He’d be surprised. He’s a commander with the Texas State Police, but he thinks he’s the last of the Texas Rangers. He wants Boyd bad. The man’s a bloodhound. He doesn’t know about my sister, but he did his homework and found out about Suzie and that she’s gone, not that he could get me to admit she isn’t away visiting friends. I didn’t see him on the plane from Houston. I spotted him in the airport here when I was getting my luggage.”

  “Is he alone?”

  “He wouldn’t share credit with Jesus for saving a sinner.” He drained his mug. “When you find Suzie I want you to set up a meeting. Maybe I can talk sense into her.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Tell me about it. My old man fell off a girder in Tulsa when I was sixteen. Then I was fifty. Well, maybe one meeting can’t make up for all the years of not talking after my wife died, but I can’t let her throw her life away for not trying.”

  “I can’t promise Boyd won’t sit in on it.”

  “I like Virgil. Some of us cheered when he took on those bloodsuckers. He’d have gotten away with a lot more from that second job if he’d shot this stubborn cashier they had, but he didn’t. He wouldn’t hurt a horse or a man.”

  “That’s not the way the cops are playing it. If I find him and don’t report it I’ll go down as an accomplice. At the very least I’ll lose my license.”

  “All I ask is that you call me before you call the police.” He gave me a high school graduation picture of a pretty brunette he said was Suzie. She looked more Asian than American Indian. Then he pulled a checkbook out of his hip pocket and made out a check to me for fifteen hundred dollars.

  “Too much,” I said.

  “You haven’t met J. P. Ahearn yet. My sister’s name is Harriett Lord.” He gave me an address on Eureka. “I’m at the Holiday Inn, room 716.”

  He called for another beer then and I left. Again he didn’t offer his hand. I’d driven three blocks from the place when I spotted the tail.

  Two

  The guy knew what he was doing. In a late-model tan Buick he gave me a full block and didn’t try to close up until we hit Woodward, where traffic was heavier. I finally lost him in the grand circle downtown, which confused him just as it does most people from the greater planet earth. The Indians who settled Detroit were being far-sighted when they named it the Crooked Way. From there I took Lafayette to 1-75 and headed downriver.

  Harriett Lord lived in a tall white frame house with blue shutters and a large lawn fenced by cedars that someone had bullied into cone shape. I parked in the driveway, but before leaving the car I got out the unlicensed Luger I kept in a pocket under the dash and stuck it in my pants, buttoning my coat over it. When you’re meeting someone they tell you wouldn’t hurt a horse or a man, arm yourself.

  The bell was answered by a tall woman around forty, dressed in a khaki shirt and corduroy slacks and sandals. She had high cheekbones and slightly olive coloring that looked more like sun than heritage and her short hair was frosted, further reducing the Indian effect. When she confirmed that she was Harriett Lord I gave her a card and said I was working for her brother.

  Her face shut down. “I don’t have a brother. I have a half-brother, Howard Frechette. If that’s who you’re working for, tell him I’m unavailable.” She started to close the door.

  “It’s about your niece Suzie. And Virgil Boyd.”

  “I thought it would be.”

  I looked at the door and got out a cigarette and lit it. I was about to knock again when the door opened six inches and she stuck her face through the gap. “You’re not with the police?”

  “We tolerate each other on the good days, but that’s it.”

  She glanced down. Her blue mascara gave her eyelids a translucent look. Then she opened the door the rest of the way and stepped aside. I entered a living room done all in beige and white and sat in a chair upholstered in eggshell chintz. I was glad I’d had my suit cleaned.

  “How’d you know about Suzie and Boyd?” I used a big glass ashtray on the Lucite coffee table.

  “They were here last night.”

  I said nothing. She sat on the beige sofa with her knees together. “I recognized him before I did her. I haven’t seen her since she was four, but I take a Texas paper and I’ve seen his picture. They wanted money. I thought at first I was being robbed.”

  “Did you give it to them?”

  “Aid a fugitive? Family responsibility doesn’t cover that even if I felt any. I left home because I got sick of hearing about our proud heritage. Howard wore his Indianness like a suit of armor, and all the time he resented me because I could pass for white. He accused me of being ashamed of my ancestry because I didn’t wear my hair in braids and hang turquoise all over me.”

  “He isn’t like that now.”

  “Maybe he’s mellowed. Not toward me, though, I bet. Now his daughter comes here asking for money so she and her desperado boyfriend can go on running. I showed them the door.”

  “I’m surprised Boyd went.”

  “He tried to get tough, but he’s not very big and he wasn’t armed. He took a step toward me and I took two steps toward him and he grabbed Suzie and left. Some Jesse James.”

  “I heard his shotgun was found in the van. I thought he’d have something else.”

  “If he did, he didn’t have it last night. I’d have noticed, just as I noticed you have one.”

  I unbuttoned my coat and resettled the Luger. I was getting a different picture of “Mad Dog” Boyd from the one the press was painting. “The cops would call not reporting an incident like that being an accessory,” I said, squashing out my butt.

  “Just because I don’t want anything to do with Howard doesn’t mean I want to see my niece shot up by a SWAT team.”

  “I don’t suppose they said where they were going.”

  “You’re a good supposer.”

  I got up. “How did Suzie look?”

  “Like an Indian.”

&nbs
p; I thanked her and went out.

  Three

  I had a customer in my waiting room. It was a small angular party crowding sixty in a tight gray three-button suit, steel-rimmed glasses, and a tan snapbrim hat squared over the frames. His crisp gray hair was cut close around large ears that stuck out and he had a long sharp jaw with a sour mouth slashing straight across. He stood up when I entered. “Walker?” It was one of those bitter pioneer voices.

  “Depends on who you are,” I said.

  “I’m the man who ought to arrest you for obstructing justice.”

  “I’ll guess. J. P. Ahearn.”

  “Commander Ahearn.”

  “You’re about four feet short of what I had pictured.”

  “You’ve heard of me.” His chest came out a little.

  “Who hasn’t?” I unlocked the inner office door. He marched in, slung a look around, and took possession of the customer’s chair. I sat down behind the desk without asking permission. He glared at me through his spectacles.

  “What you did downtown today constitutes fleeing and eluding.”

  “In Texas, maybe. In Michigan there has to be a warrant out first. What you did constitutes harassment in this state.”

  “I don’t have official status here. I can follow anybody for any reason or none at all.”

  “Is this what you folks call a Mexican standoff?”

  “I don’t approve of smoking,” he snapped.

  “Neither do I, but some of it always leaks out of my lungs.” I blew some at the ceiling and got rid of the match. “Why don’t let’s stop circling each other and get down to why you’re here?”

  “I want to know what you and the Indian talked about.”

  “I’d show you, but we don’t need the rain.”

  He bared a perfect set of dentures, turning his face into a skull. “I ran your plate with the Detroit Police. I have their complete cooperation in this investigation. The Indian hired you to take money to Boyd to get him and his little Osage slut to Canada. You delivered it after you left the bar and lost me. That’s aiding and abetting and accessory after the fact of armed robbery. Maybe I can’t prove it, but I can make a call and tank you for forty-eight hours on suspicion.”

  “Eleven.”

  He covered up his store-boughts. “What?”

  “That’s eleven times I’ve been threatened with jail,” I said. “Three of those times I wound up there. My license has been swiped at fourteen times, actually taken away once. Bodily harm, you don’t count bodily harm. I’m still here, six-feet-something and one-hundred-eighty-pounds of incorruptible P.I. with a will of iron and a skull to match. You hard guys come and go like phases of the moon.”

  “Don’t twist my tail, son. I don’t always rattle before I bite.”

  “What’s got you so hot on Boyd?”

  You could have cut yourself on his jaw. “My daddy helped run Parker and Barrow to ground in ‘34. His daddy fought Geronimo and chased John Wesley Hardin out of Texas. My son’s a Dallas City patrolman and so far I don’t have a story to hand him that’s a blister on any of those. I’m retiring next year.”

  “Last I heard Austin was offering twenty thousand for Boyd’s arrest and conviction.”

  “Texas Federal has matched it. Alive or dead. Naturally, as a duly sworn officer of the law I can’t collect. But you being a private citizen.”

  “What’s the split?”

  “Fifty-fifty.”

  “No good.”

  “Do you know what the pension is for a retired state police commander in Texas? A man needs a nest egg.”

  “I meant it’s too generous. You know as well as I do those rewards are never paid. You just didn’t know I knew.”

  He sprang out of his chair. There was no special animosity in it; it would be the way he always got up.

  “Boyd won’t get out of this country even if you did give him money,” he snapped. “He’ll never get past the border guards.”

  “So go back home.”

  “Boyd’s mine. “

  The last word ricocheted. I said, “Talk is he felt he had a good reason to stick up those savings and loans. The company was responsible for his father’s suicide.”

  “Bah!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Bah!”

  “That’s what I thought you said. I never heard anyone actually say it before.”

  “If he’s got the brains God gave a mad dog he’ll turn himself in to me before he gets shot down in the street or kills someone and winds up getting the needle in Huntsville. And his squaw right along with him.” He took a shabby wallet out of his coat and gave me a card. “That’s my number at the Houston post. They’ll re-route your call here. If you’re so concerned for Boyd you’ll tell me where he is before the locals gun him down.”

  “Better you than some stranger, that it?”

  “Just keep on twisting, son. I ain’t in the pasture yet.”

  After he left, making as much noise in his two-inch cowboy heels as a cruiserweight, I called Barry Stackpole at the Detroit News.

  “Guy I’m after is wanted for Robbery Armed,” I said, once the small talk was put away. “He ditched his gun and then his stake didn’t come through and now he’ll have to cowboy a job for case dough. Where would he deal a weapon if he didn’t know anybody in town?”

  “Emma Chaney.”

  “Ma? I thought she’d be dead by now.”

  “She can’t die. The Detroit cops are third in line behind ATF and Customs for her scalp and they won’t let her until they’ve had their crack.” He sounded pleased, which he probably was. Barry made his living writing about crime and when it prospered he did too.

  “How can I reach her?”

  “Are you suggesting I’d know where she is and not tell the authorities? Got a pencil?”

  I tried the number as soon as he was off the line. On the ninth ring I got someone with a smoker’s wheeze. “Uh-huh.”

  “The name’s Walker,” I said. “Barry Stackpole gave me this number.”

  The voice told me not to go away and hung up. Five minutes later the telephone rang.

  “Barry says you’re okay. What do you want?”

  “Just talk. It isn’t cheap like they say.”

  After a moment the voice gave me directions. I hung up not knowing if it was male or female.

  Four

  It belonged to Ma Chaney, who greeted me at the door of her house in rural Macomb County wearing a red Japanese kimono with green parrots all over it. The kimono could have covered a Toyota. She was a five-by-five chunk with marcelled orange hair and round black eyes imbedded in her face like nailheads in soft wax. A cigarette teetered on her lower lip. I followed her into a parlor full of flowered chairs and sofas and pregnant lamps with fringed shades. A long strip of pimply blonde youth in overalls and no shirt took his brogans off the coffee table and stood up when she barked at him. He gaped at me, chewing gum with his mouth open.

  “Mr. Walker, Leo,” Ma wheezed. “Leo knew my Wilbur in Ypsi. He’s like another son to me.”

  Ma Chaney had one son in the criminal ward at the Forensic Psychiatry Center in Ypsilanti and another on Florida’s Death Row. The FBI was looking for the youngest in connection with an armored car robbery in Kansas City. The whole brood had come up from Kentucky when Old Man Chaney got a job on the line at River Rouge and stayed on after he was killed in a propane tank explosion. Now Ma, the daughter of a Hawkins County gunsmith, made her living off the domestic weapons market.

  “You said talk ain’t cheap,” she said, when she was sitting in a big overstuffed rocker. “How cheap ain’t it?”

  I perched on the edge of a hard upright with doilies on the arms. Leo remained standing, scratching himself. “Depends on whether we talk about Virgil Boyd,” I said.

  “What if we don’t?”

  “Then I won’t take up any more of your time.”

  “What if we do?”

  “I’ll double what he’s paying.”

&
nbsp; She coughed. The cigarette bobbed. “I got a business to run. I go around scratching at rewards I won’t have no customers.”

  “Does that mean Boyd’s a customer?”

  “Now, why’d that Texas boy want to come to Ma? He can deal hisself a shotgun at any K-Mart.”

  “He can’t show his face in the legal places and being new in town he doesn’t know the illegal ones. But he wouldn’t have to ask around too much to come up with your name. You’re less selective than most.”

  “You don’t have to pussyfoot around old Ma. I don’t get a lot of second-timers on account of I talk for money. My boy Earl in Florida needs a new lawyer. But I only talk after, not before. I start setting up customers I won’t get no first-timers.”

  “I’m not even interested in Boyd. It’s his girlfriend I want to talk to. Suzie Frechette.”

  “Don’t know her.” She rocked back and forth. “What color’s your money?”

  Before leaving Detroit I’d cashed Howard Frechette’s check. I laid fifteen hundred dollars on the coffee table in twenties and fifties. Leo straightened up a little to look at the bills. Ma resumed rocking.

  “It ain’t enough.”

  “How much is enough?”

  “If I was to talk to a fella named Boyd, and if I was to agree to sell him a brand new Ithaca pump shotgun and a P-38 still in the box, I wouldn’t sell them for less than twenny-five hunnert. Double twenny-five hunnert is five thousand.”

  “Fifteen hundred now. Thirty-five hundred when I see the girl.”

  “I don’t guarantee no girl.”

  “Boyd then. If he’s come this far with her he won’t leave her behind.”

  She went on rocking. “They’s a white barn a mile north on this road. If I was to meet a fella named Boyd, there’s where I might do it. I might pick eleven o’clock.”