Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I guess that rules out a mistress.”

  Something stirred behind her face. She opened the purse again and handed me a matchbook. “I found that in the pocket of one of his jackets. He didn’t take any of his clothes with him.”

  It had an advertising cover, THE DELPHI in blue on marble gray, with a telephone number and an address on Watson. I gave it back. “The Delphi’s a gay bar,” I said. “Is your husband a homosexual?”

  “I can’t believe he practices. He lacks passion as I said. But it wouldn’t shock me to learn he leaned that way. We haven’t had relations since our honeymoon, and that was a disaster.”

  Our waitress was back. Her flush said she’d heard more than she’d cared to. We read our menus and ordered appetizers. I waited until we were alone again. “Personal question.”

  “I married Emmett because my father’s will stipulated I had to have a husband in order to collect my inheritance. A wedding was cheaper and less involved than an attempt to break the will. I don’t think I have to tell you why he married me.”

  “Are you sure you want him back?”

  “I’m used to him.”

  I asked her a few more questions and then the food came. “Another drink?” Natalie Glasscock asked.

  “Not if I’m going to a bar later.”

  The waitress left. “Is that an acceptance?”

  “Seven-fifty will do for a retainer.”

  Three

  When you visit a gay hangout, and you’re not trolling for truckers, it pays to bring reading material; it turns away all but the most rabid pick-up artists while you check the place out. I drank a beer at the bar and read a veiled piece in the News about my testimony in the Matador case. There was a sidebar listing Hector’s various money-laundering operations under the umbrella of his dummy company, Corrida Ltd. I guess I was out of town the day the hoods moved from the police blotter to the financial pages.

  Except for the lack of women, the Delphi didn’t look all that different from a straight bar. These days they all have ferns and the Best of Broadway in the juke. The bartender was a cruelly handsome brute of twenty-two with short-cropped blonde hair and a curl on his lip. I ordered another beer and laid a twenty on the bar. When he picked it up I told him I didn’t want change.

  He gave me change. “There’s a rule against dating customers,” he said, “and if there weren’t a rule against it I’d have one of my own, and if I didn’t have one of my own I still wouldn’t do it because I’m not gay.”

  “I like brunettes with big lungs myself. What I want is information.” I dealt him a picture Natalie Glasscock had given me of her and Emmett Firman taken in a studio. He had one of those faces that made you think the photograph was fading in front of your eyes. “He been in lately?”

  He handed it back, shaking his head.

  “I’m not a cop, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

  “I knew that when you gave me the twenty. This guy could be sitting where you are and I’d forget what he looked like by the time I looked up from the picture.”

  “Got any regulars?”

  “They’re all regulars.” He stroked the bills on the bar. I nodded. He folded them into the pocket of his green vest. “Try Rodney there in the booth. They built the place around him.”

  When I slid in I thought the man sitting opposite holding a stemmed glass was another youthful towhead, but as my eyes adjusted to the candlelight his face took on a burnished sheen and I saw the creases by his ears where the surgeon had folded back the skin. His hair was snow white under a blue rinse and curled over the collar of his tailored jacket. When he lifted his black, plucked eyebrows I held up another twenty. “Five minutes.”

  He smiled carefully, lest his face split. “I used to make twice that for five minutes.”

  I didn’t withdraw the bill. “Everybody’s into youth now.”

  He sighed and took it. I showed him the picture. “His wife wants him back.”

  “One wonders why.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Just to do business with.” A wry look pushed at the taut skin.

  “When?”

  “The first time, about six months ago. It’s been almost two weeks since the last time.”

  “Most people would have to think a little before being that specific,” I said.

  “Specificity’s a tough habit to break. I was with the mayor’s press corps for four years.”

  “What happened?”

  He sipped wine. “Let’s just say I prefer the people I’m working with now.”

  “Do you have a place near here?”

  “Ernest did. That’s where we always went.”

  “Ernest?”

  “I never did believe it was his name.”

  “I take it he didn’t confide.”

  “It was business as I said.”

  “Where was his place?”

  “The Czarina, Room 201. Around the corner on John R.”

  “Thanks.” I slid out of the booth. His eyes followed me up.

  “Aren’t you going to ask who did it to whom?”

  “I’m a detective. Not Geraldo.” I hung back. “I guess I wouldn’t be the first to tell you to be careful.”

  He smiled a tragic smile and saluted me with his glass. “I’m an invert,” he said. “Not an imbecile.”

  Gay, they’re called.

  • • •

  The Czarina had been an elegant hotel when Detroit was the stove-making capital of the world, before Henry Ford and the carburetor. Since then some aesthete had dropped a Styrofoam ceiling under the vault in the lobby, plastered over the marble, and laid linoleum on the parquet. You had to look twice to see where the dusty counter left off and the faded black clerk who was leaning on it began. “Two-oh-one,” I told him.

  Instead of ringing the room, he reached behind the counter without taking his other hand off it and gave me a key. I was still dizzy over the security of the place when the little coffin of an elevator deposited me on the second floor.

  I knocked first, for delicacy, then used the key. Like the lobby, the room had been plastered and paneled into the twentieth century and truncated by a cheesy partition into something less spacious. The bed was unmade, the tub in the bathroom needed scrubbing, and there was a litter of change and pocket fallout on the glass-topped dresser. The drawers were empty, vacant hangers sagged in the closet. The scraps of paper on the dresser included a few odd cash-register receipts and a credit card statement in an open envelope. There was a charge from American Airlines for a one-way flight to Muskegon on the 10th. According to his wife, Emmett Firman had disappeared on the ninth.

  I’d seen everything there was to see. There was no telephone in the room, so I added twenty cents to the expense account to call Natalie Glasscock from the lobby.

  “Muskegon,” she repeated, after we were through greeting each other. “Dear God, I forgot about the cottage.”

  “Now’s a good time to start remembering.” I didn’t try to strangle the telephone cord. The desk clerk was watching.

  “My father had a house in Muskegon. He called it his fishing cottage, but he never went there to fish. It was just a hideaway. I haven’t seen it since he died. Do you think Emmett’s there?”

  I looked at my watch. “I’ll know tomorrow. The airport will be closed by now. Have you got a key to the place?”

  “I’ll have it dug out by the time you get here.”

  I said tomorrow morning would be fine and told her good night. Hanging up, I waited for the rush that comes when the thing you’ve been hunting wanders into your sights.

  It didn’t come. This one hadn’t wandered in at all; it had done a big fat brodie and landed on its face wearing a neon suit.

  Four

  That night I slept in my own bed for the first time in more than a week. I dreamed of hunting cabins and fishing cottages: Safe houses. When the alarm rang I called Fallon’s office in the City-County Building. He was there early, shuffling papers in
the Matador case. When I told him what I wanted he got one of his aides on the intercom and sent him after it. While we were waiting I asked Fallon how the hearing was going.

  “We got an indictment last night.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Save that for when we get a conviction. You still have to—just a second.” The aide had returned. Fallon gave me what he’d brought. “That what you needed?”

  “More or less.”

  “I won’t ask why.” He left a pause, which I didn’t fill, and cleared his throat. “We need to go over your testimony before the trial. Where are you going to be?”

  “Fishing.”

  Five

  I swung through Grosse Pointe, where the maid who answered Natalie Glasscock’s doorbell said her mistress was out and gave me the keys and the address of the house in Muskegon. I drove to city airport from there.

  What the Glasscocks called a cottage would have housed Detroit’s homeless with room left over for all the crooks on the mayor’s staff. Sprawling over two acres of prime Lake Michigan shorefront, it was all glass and timber and stank architect. I parked my rental down the street and approached from the side.

  I looked in on three empty rooms, then risked a peek through the big window from the deck overlooking the lake. If he hadn’t worn a bright red sport shirt I might have missed him. Seated in a scoop chair reading a magazine, Emmett Firman looked even more faded than he did in his picture; and he wasn’t alone. A burgundy loafer on a foot attached to a crossed leg in tan slacks showed in a corner of the window. Whoever was attached to the leg was sitting behind the wall.

  I rang the bell on the street side. When Emmett opened the door I showed him my ID. “Natalie’s worried,” I said.

  His face faded another tint. “Come inside.”

  I followed him through two of the rooms I had looked in on into the big sunny room on the lake. Out on the water a number of sailboats were flitting around like bright moths. Hector Matador, having risen from his chair to stand at the window, was watching them. He had on a fawn-double-breasted with the collar of his open shirt rolled over the lapels. His hands were in his pockets.

  “Are you a sailing man, Senor Walker?” He didn’t turn from the window.

  “If God had meant us to sail he wouldn’t have given us gasoline.”

  “Is too bad.” His head slid my way. “By now I guess you have figured out that Senor Firman was never missing.”

  I said, “Thanks. Up until you said that I wasn’t sure his wife was in on it.”

  “He came here to lead you away from your official friends in Detroit. We could not stop you from talking to the grand jury, but there is no reason you should be made to repeat yourself at the trial.”

  “You must have driven all night to get here ahead of me. How’d you make bail so fast?”

  “I have official friends as well.”

  “Where’s the Aztec backfield?”

  “If you mean Luis and Francisco, they are making my house look lived-in for the police who think they are watching me.” He shrugged. “I am among friends, no? So who needs bodyguards?”

  Emmett said, “May I go now?”

  “What I can’t figure is why you ran me through the Delphi,” I said. “Natalie Glasscock could have told me about the cottage.”

  “Then you would have asked why she didn’t check on it herself. It was more convincing to say she forgot. We knew you’d find the room at the Czarina and the airfare bill to Muskegon sooner or later. Almost too soon, as it turned out.” He grinned.

  I took the Smith & Wesson out of my coat pocket. “Get your hands out where I can see them.”

  Still grinning, he turned from the window and drew them out of his pockets, empty. “Señora Matador’s eldest son is too smart to drive two hundred miles carrying a firearm while he is out on bail,” he said.

  But Sergeant Coyne wasn’t. He came out of a side door behind his department-issue automatic, pale and thick-bellied as ever in the same rumpled suit he’d worn for eight days at the safe house in Oakland County. “Ditch the piece, private flash.”

  I hung on to it. “When’d you go over?”

  “Always was. Couldn’t cap you while you was in custody, now, could I? Not with Straight-Ass Marcus Blevins giving me the fish-eye the whole time. Ditch it, I said.”

  Emmett said, “I’m going.”

  Matador said, “You stay.”

  “I don’t want to be part of this.”

  “You already are. You stay through or you go sailing tonight with Señor Walker. Either way you don’t talk, comprende?”

  Emmett opened his mouth, closed it, fumbled in a pocket, and took a pill from a vial like the one his wife had given me.

  “I won’t tell you again.” Coyne gestured toward my Smith & Wesson with the automatic.

  I said, “You still made it too easy, Matador. That’s why I called Fallon this morning and had him give me a rundown of all the companies your Corrida, Limited uses to launder money. When GlasCo came up I knew Natalie Glasscock had called you last night to tell you I was coming today. She and Emmett owe you too much to refuse when you tell them to set somebody up. Did you think that after all that I’d come here without the cops to back me? There are fifteen of them surrounding this place right now.”

  Nobody said anything.

  I don’t know how I was doing with Matador. I was watching Coyne. Uncertainty flickered on the sergeant’s face and I shot him in the stomach before he could activate his gun hand. By the time he thought of it he was firing at the floor.

  He was still falling when Matador lunged for the automatic. I took two quick steps, kicked the Colombian’s legs out from under him, and booted the automatic out of Coyne’s weak grip. I needn’t have bothered; Emmett Firman was busy chewing his own hand in a corner.

  I used the telephone in the room to call the law and an ambulance. I would have hollered cop earlier, but GlasCo hadn’t been on Fallon’s list and I thought I’d guessed wrong. But Coyne didn’t know that. As I said, he was easy to bluff.

  Kill the Cat

  Rivertown

  It was right at dark, one of those evenings when you saw it as a black diagonal against the light, like the title sequence of the old soap opera The Edge of Night. The river smelled like iron, and the People Mover—Coleman Young’s electric train set—chugged along several stories above the street, empty as usual, shuttling around and around in its endless circle as in one of those post-apocalyptic science-fiction stories about a depopulated world, still going about its automated business decades after doomsday, jungle vines crawling up the sides of vacant glass buildings. Detroit had a start on the last, in weedy empty lots where pheasants roosted among the rats and cartridge casings. I was thirty seconds from downtown and might have been driving through Aztec ruins.

  The address I’d scribbled in my notebook belonged to a barely renovated pile in the shrinking warehouse district, one of the last places where the city still shows its muscle: miles of railroad track and a handful of gaunt brick buildings where steering gears and coils of steel once paused for breath on their way to becoming automobiles. In a year or two it’ll be gone. City Hall and the Chamber of Commerce are busy gentrifying it into riverfront condominiums. This address was poised square in the middle, the edge of the edge of night.

  I was working on a teenage runaway. Mark Childs had slid through a crack in the über-upper class of Grosse Pointe, getting the boot from the University of Michigan three weeks into his first semester and then falling in with low company, in this case three boys studying at Wayne State University. I’d gotten the last from a kid who hung doors at Chrysler in order to attend classes in library science at WSU. Childs had taken his place when he’d opted out of sharing rent so he could sleep in his parents’ house and save money for cigarettes and tuition.

  Where the new roomie found cash to keep up his end, I didn’t know and never did, although the family suspected an indulgent aunt. Childs was seventeen, a young high sc
hool graduate coming into a trust fund when he turned eighteen in two months. The family didn’t like that, thought if they got him back under the parental roof they could teach him some responsibility in sixty days so he wouldn’t blow it all on Internet poker or the Democrats. I hadn’t said anything to that. When work comes your way you don’t get into a debate situation with the client.

  A simple job: Confirm the kid’s location and notify the parents so they could call the cops and tell them to take a mixed-up boy off the streets and deliver him to their door.

  I parked on gravel off Riopelle and walked down to the river to finish a cigarette, stepping carefully over chunks of brick and Jell-O pudding tops. The lights of Windsor, Ontario made waffle-patterned reflections on the surface where the Detroit River squeezes between-countries. The spot where I stood hadn’t changed since Prohibition, when rum boats docked there and men who weren’t dressed for the work offloaded the cargo into seven-passenger touring cars with a man standing sentry holding a tommy gun. It was late August and already the air felt like October. We were in for one of those winters that shut up the global-warming people for a while.

  The place I wanted stood fifty yards away, with all the character sandblasted off the brick and yellow solar panels replacing the mul-tiple-paned windows. The concrete loading dock was intact, but above it someone had substituted a faux-wrought iron carriage lamp for the original bare bulb. It was an amateur facelift, done on the cheap by a landlord who’d seen too many local renaissances fizzle out to put any faith in the current one.

  The big bay doors were chained and padlocked, but decks had been built around the comer with steps zigzagging up four stories and doors cut into each level for the tenants, with small windows added to let in light and accommodate the occasional window-unit air conditioner. The only lights burned on the ground floor. The kid at Chrysler had said none of the other apartments was ready for occupancy.