Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  The take on his widow was different. A former professional dancer, Rita had met Donato shortly after the death of his first wife, married him within six months, and buried him before their second anniversary. The terms of his will placed her in sole charge of the store chain until the majority of his son Albert, a role she took far more seriously than those of helpmate and stepmother. She remodeled the stores from top to bottom, threw out all the no-brand merchandise, and replaced it with clothing lines named for TV miniseries actresses whom she hired to do commercial endorsements. In no time at all she had stores on both coasts and became a sought-after speaker at gatherings of women who wore shoulder pads and hyphenated their surnames. When the Democrats finally got into the White House there was even talk of a cabinet post.

  Just about then someone in the IRS found out she hadn’t paid taxes in three years, each of which showed more profit than the chain had seen during Walter’s lifetime. After the usual protracted trial, appeal, and counter-appeals, reparations forced the Donato organization into Chapter 11 and Rita into the federal penitentiary at Milan, Michigan, pronounced Meye-lin, where at the time of the accident that took the life of her stepson Albert she had served eighteen months. In the meantime some things had come out about her general comportment that removed her name from Cosmopolitan’s list of the twenty most admired women.

  Albert Donato’s death and its circumstances led all the local news reports and received heavy national play for the better part of a week. The Oakland County Sheriff’s Department traced the truck driver, one Owen Subject, to his house in the suburbs and arrested him for leaving the scene of the accident with a charge of manslaughter to follow, too much time had elapsed for a blood-alcohol test to be considered conclusive, and so no drunk-driving accusation was made. An independent trucker, Subject told the cops he’d been on his way home from delivering a diesel tractor to a farm implements dealership in Iroquois Heights when he swerved to miss a deer and wound up stalled across Square Lake Road. Albert Donato’s Chrysler LeBaron had slammed into him and burst into flames, panicking him into running. Subject’s basset-hound features and freestanding black hair became a staple on the front pages of both Detroit papers for days. Then another one of the mayor’s relatives got caught dealing dope and the story went inside.

  That was when a party named Sporthaven with caps on his teeth and a brown leather portfolio under one arm looked me up in my little toy office on West Grand River and asked me to drop in on Mrs. Donato in Milan.

  • • •

  “Hell no, I never said it. They made that one up at Channel 2 and all the networks took it and ran with it. That’s what convicted me. Otherwise I could have bought my way out.”

  We were sitting in the visitor’s room—a not really uncomfortable place with orange scoop chairs and laminated tables that looked more like the cafeteria in an auto plant than a room in the House of Doors—Rita Donato, Lawyer Sporthaven, and the detective in the story. She had on a cotton blouse open at the neck, twill slacks, and loafers, no stripes or work denims. Things are a little more relaxed in the federal lockup, and if you can afford them you’d be surprised how much you’d be willing to pay for the simple comforts. They didn’t include hair dye, and hers had gone back to its natural gray, but it was done in a style becoming to her lean angular face, parted to the left of center and curling in at the base of her neck. She was fifty and looked it, but a patrician fifty, and the large round lenses of her glasses masked the bags under her eyes.

  The question, asked by me and answered by her, was whether she had really been overheard to say that only losers pay taxes.

  “Pity,” I said. “Nobody ever says what everybody says they say.” I lit a Winston and waited for the conversation to come to a point, any point. So far all she’d done was sit across the table from me with her legs crossed, bouncing one foot and holding up one end of an interview for “Prime Time Live.” I had the impression she was starved for company.

  “A man named Killinger gave me your name,” she said then, without transition. “I gathered he’s something with the state police.”

  “Commander. He issued me my license the first time.”

  “He was decent enough to come here in person and tell me about Albert before I heard it on the news. He mentioned your name and what you do. He didn’t say why. Maybe he knew the local authorities were going to sweep Albert’s death under the rug.”

  “Are they?”

  “Sporthaven tells me they’re about to drop all charges against Owen Subject.”

  I looked at the lawyer’s young-old face: nipped, tucked, stitched, peeled, creamed, and smoothed by many hands until it had all the character of a rounded stone in a riverbed.

  “I got it from a legal secretary at County,” he said. “Albert should have had his car under control. The trucker took adequate steps to avoid hitting an obstruction in the road.”

  “What about his leaving the scene?”

  “There was nothing anyone could do. The car was instantly engulfed. Even had he stayed and risked his life to pull Albert out of the car, a corpse would have been all he saved.”

  “That part’s true enough,” I said. “I saw the car.”

  “They’re blowing it off.” Mrs. Donato had both feet on the floor now. “If Albert were anyone but my stepson they wouldn’t have dared. Read the polls. I’m the most hated woman in America.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Investigate Subject. Killinger said he thought there was alcohol involved. If he’s got a record I want it brought out into the open. If it leads to something else I want that to come out too. I’m no wicked stepmother, Walker. I was very fond of Albert. I won’t have his life wiped off the books just because the woman his father married made a mistake in arithmetic.”

  Sporthaven reached inside his portfolio. “Under the conditions of her personal bankruptcy, Mrs. Donato cannot own anything for five years. However, my firm has authorized me to issue you a letter of credit for up to five thousand dollars.” He handed me a crisp sheet of expensive bond containing three paragraphs printed in boldface with justified margins. “Should you be successful, whatever is left is yours. Your standard fee is guaranteed, of course.”

  “Of course.” I folded it as carefully as if it were the Declaration of Independence and interred it in my inside pocket. “What if nothing turns up?”

  “Come now.” The woman sat back and recrossed her legs. “In your profession and mine, where would we be if we went around looking for the good in everyone?”

  • • •

  I spent an hour in the periodicals section of the Detroit Public Library downtown reading up on the accident. I knew most of the details, but I needed one in particular. When I had it I went back to the office and rummaged through my desk looking for business cards. I still have every card that was ever handed me. Twenty minutes of that and I had a match. I propped it against the base of the desk lamp, looked up Owen Subject in the metropolitan directory, and dialed the number. His wife answered, a break. She said Owen wasn’t home; another break. I read the name and title off the business card and arranged an interview at the house for seven that evening. She said Owen would be in by then.

  The house was in Redford, one of a tract of brick ranch styles that had been poured in an ice cube tray and dumped out in the pattern in which they were formed. A small woman with red hair and gray roots snatched the door open under my knuckles.

  “Owen? Oh.” She clutched her quilted housecoat together at her throat.

  “Anson Wold, Mrs. Subject. We spoke earlier. I’m with Midwest Casualty. It is Mrs. Subject?” I handed her the card.

  “Yes. I’m afraid Owen isn’t home yet. I expected him before this.” She stood aside.

  The living room was full of glazed furniture and factory art. Stacks of supermarket tabloids occupied most of the chairs. The same alien seemed to have cropped up on the front pages of most of them. I found space on the couch.

  “I just need a
couple of details before I can finish processing Mr. Subject’s claim. I understand the truck is his property.”

  “Yes. Um, I didn’t know he’d filed a claim. He’s been so busy with this court thing. They arrested him, you know.” She perched on the edge of a straight-back chair.

  “Released on his own recognizance, I believe.”

  “Right. Even at the arraignment the judge knew they had no case.”

  “I imagine your finances are pretty tight with his truck in impoundment.”

  “Well, there’s not much coming in. But the mortgage is paid off and so is the truck, and we have enough in savings to take care of incidentals.”

  I made some scratches in my prop notebook. “He must be a hustler. Making a go of a small business in this economy is a twenty-six-hour-a-day job.”

  “That’s what I said when he left the trucking company and made a down payment on the rig. I told him if he lost the house I’d leave him. It was tough at first, but then he got a loan and right after that work started coming in. We’re better off now than when he was punching the clock, and his time’s his own.” That made her think to look at her watch. “I can’t imagine what’s keeping him. He was just going to see the lawyer.”

  “Where did he get the loan?”

  “Loan? Oh. Do you need to know that?”

  “It’s for Records.”

  The magic phrase brought her to her feet. “I forget the name of the company. I think there’s a card.” She went to a desk holding up a telephone shaped like a duck and pawed through drawers. “He got the name from a friend in the union. He almost gave up. He’d tried all the places that advertised in the yellow pages and on television. Here it is! Ever hear of them?”

  I looked at the card she brought over. “Oh yeah,” I said. “I’ve heard of Gryphon Collateral.”

  • • •

  I spotted the blue Chevy two turns after I left Redford. It was a closed tail and he was good, but traffic was light at that hour and the routes I take around the city are my own and make no sense to anybody but me.

  I had three good chances to shake him. I didn’t use them. Thanks to Mrs. Subject I had a fair idea who was sending his kid through medical school, and it was handy to have someone close by I could ask questions of in case I hit a wall.

  When I turned into the driveway in Highland Park the guy kept driving, reading the numbers on both sides of the street as if he were looking for one in particular. I heard him cut his motor down the block while I was waiting for someone to answer the front door.

  “Chevies. What’s the world coming to?” Barry Stackpole trained a pair of graphite binoculars through the window of his home office. “Something important went out with bulletproof Cadillacs.”

  “Ten’ll get you twenty when you run the plate it’ll kick out Gryphon Collateral,” I said.

  The room, converted from a small bedroom on the second floor, was full of books and videotapes that had boiled out of the shelves onto the desk ad chairs and all but a narrow twisted walkway on the carpet. Some of the books bore his byline. All of the tapes belonged to the program he had hosted on local cable until someone decided that reruns of “Three’s Company” would skew better in his time slot. The program, titled “Know Your Neighbor,” had highlighted a different Detroit area crime figure each week. Barry had been a Mob watcher only a little longer than he’d been getting around with an artificial leg, two missing fingers, and a steel plate in his skull, souvenirs of the first time someone had suggested canceling him.

  He put down the nocs and limped over to the desk to pour scotch into two glasses from a bottle of Glen-Something. “I want to thank you for bringing him here, Amos. I still have three limbs I don’t know what to do with.” He handed me a glass. “Cold steel.”

  “Hot lead.” I lifted mine and tossed it back. “I brought him here on purpose. When he reports the address and they look it up, maybe they’ll panic and do something dumb.”

  “Here’s hoping they do it to you.” He drank and leaned a hip against the desk. “Gryphon, you said?”

  “I hear they got two floors of a high-rise in Southfield, no more dealing loans over a card table behind Tino’s Billiards on Livernois.”

  “Michigan,” he corrected. “Livernois was Jake the Shake. Gryphon’s lost a lot of color. They figured out they don’t make anything when they have to break bones. That’s when they added Collateral to the company name. Small business is their specialty. If you can’t pay they grab a piece or take it out in trade.”

  “That explains why Owen Subject isn’t hurting for money.”

  “Milton Thorpe.”

  “Is that a name or another toast?”

  “Milton likes to block roads,” he said. “He used to use cars, but someone got around him once by going up the bank. A truck is better. He used a truck the day he capped Guillermo Zuma.”

  “Zuma I heard of. Someone named Milton Thorpe doesn’t sound like he attends the same cockfights.”

  “Zuma always had a WASP front for him. This one had ambition. Loan sharks generally have plenty of indy truckers in inventory. And Milton Thorpe juices most of the sharks in town.”

  “I don’t remember Zuma getting killed in a crash. I heard it was bullets.”

  “You can’t count on a crash. He got it from the car following behind. He couldn’t go forward on account of the truck blocking the road and he couldn’t back up because the car was on his bumper. They squoze him in between, put it in Park, got out, and shot him and his driver in the barrel. Cops down in Ecorse snagged the trucker out of the river three days later.”

  “Owen didn’t show tonight,” I said. “His wife was worried.”

  “He’ll turn up in three days. That’s how long it takes the gas to bring them to the surface.”

  “Lucky for Albert Donato he was driving so fast. It saved him from getting shot.”

  “It would explain why Subject powdered and left the truck behind. Nobody told him there might be flames. The car with the guns would have done the same once Albert was toast.” Absently he scratched the wrong leg. “That store receivership wouldn’t have lasted long. What was a kid with his bucks doing playing around with someone like Milton Thorpe?”

  “Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe it was a message for his stepmother.”

  “Are you suggesting your client might not have come across with the whole story?”

  “I’m shocked too.” I drained my glass and set it on Barry’s face on the back of one of his books. “Thanks for the whiskey and information. I’ll be taking my tail and leaving.”

  “Don’t forget you owe me a bottle.”

  “I can’t afford your brand.”

  “Hell, neither can I. That’s why I give out information.”

  He stopped smiling. “Stay alive, buddy. Don’t leave me alone with the politically correct.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m fire-retardant.”

  I left the driver of the Chevy looking for a space near my building and went up to place some calls. First I tried Rita Donato at Milan, but after a long wait some prison brass came on and said she’d used up her allotment of calls for that period and would I care to leave a message? I hung up and got Lee Killinger at the Northville state police post.

  “I’m out the door, Walker. Unless you’re calling for an address to send money you borrowed from me, which no keyholer will do ever, I got no time for you.”

  “Sorry to hear it, Lee. So will a lady dispatcher I know at the Brighton post. Wasn’t her kid born just about the time you transferred over on your last promotion?”

  “You can only draw that one so many times before it misfires,” he said after a pause. “What is it this time?”

  “I’m wondering if Rita Donato ever had any dealings with a drug lord by the name of Milton Thorpe.”

  “That’s federal.”

  “I hear the computer in Lansing has coffee all the time with the one in Washington.”

  “Anyway, all that would have come out during her tri
al. When they really want you they dig deep.”

  It was a point, one sharp enough to deflate. I asked him to feed it through anyway. He said he’d get back to me in twenty-four hours and banged off. I was getting to be as unpopular as my client.

  Next I called Owen Subject’s wife to ask if her husband had showed up. I knew what the answer would be when she speared the telephone halfway through the first ring. It was three minutes after ten. He’d been missing eight hours. I said something comforting. It made me unpopular with myself.

  • • •

  The next morning I was shaving with the bathroom door open when the TV morning-show hostess, a blonde on Percodans, reported that the body of a middle-aged male had been found snagged in brush on the American side of the Detroit River south of Flatrock. I wiped off the lather and made a call.

  “Wayne County Morgue. Fitzgerald.”

  “Walker, Fitz. How was Bingo Saturday night?”

  “I’m still answering the phone here, ain’t I? What’s the rumpus so bright and early?”

  “I may have an ID on that floater they gaffed down-river.”

  “Too late. His wife identified him an hour ago.”

  “How’d she take it?”

  “Better than the son. He was leaning on the old lady when they left.”

  “Son?”

  “Clean-cut kid. You wouldn’t think he came from such rotten oins.”

  “Fitz, I have an idea we’re not both talking about Owen Subject.”

  “Never heard of the gentleman. Customer’s name is LoPolo.”

  I groped for the pack in my shirt pocket and realized I was wearing my robe. “LoPolo comma Francisco in parentheses Pancho Polo?”

  “Yeah, all of those. Plenty of places he could’ve landed between Bogota and here, but he, chose the Renaissance City. Two in the melon. Nine millimeter.”

  “Didn’t he used to work for Guillermo Zuma?

  “Uh-huh. Some folks thought he’d step into the old man’s pointy patent leathers. He didn’t and I hear it made him surly.”