Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  “It’s a theory, anyway,” I said. “The cops will buy it; they don’t care as long as the case closes. If there’s another reason and I have to go out and find it, I might take the long way back, past Immigration.”

  The fight went our of him then. In a sport coat and silk shirt, he looked smaller than he did in pads, and now he was almost human scale. “We go somewhere?”

  The cop shop is just off Greektown, which is always open, thanks to the casino. The street was speckled with zombified strollers whose air-conditioning had broken down at home. There was a scorched-metal smell in the air, peculiar to that city of wall-to-wall automobiles on a heated summer night. We ordered coffee in a corner booth in a place that reeked of hot grease and burnt cheese. Ivanov hunkered over his cup, looking like a nervous goalie.

  “She is—was—underage.”

  “What’s her name, and how far did it go?”

  His story started in the old country. Trinka Svetlana, a Ukrainian figure skater with Olympic hopes, had met Ivanov when he was skating for a team in Kiev. He was twenty-three; she was sixteen. When Detroit bought his contract and started unwinding red tape to import him, the pair had been living together secretly for six months. He promised to send for her the moment he had the cash. That was three years ago. In the meantime, she’d made her way over with an aunt’s help and was living with her in Rochester Hills. Trinka surprised Ivanov one night, waiting for him outside the arena. She’d expected a joyful reunion, but the look on his face when he recognized her ended that. He’d been married to the daughter of the owner of the Lifters for a year.

  She fled when he broke the news. Two weeks later, the first of the letters came, threatening to throw acid In Ivanov’s face if he didn’t agree to leave his wife and return to her.

  “What about the Massassauga Relief Fund?” I asked.

  “I read about some such thing in the newspaper. Everyone in America supports a cause, no? I thought it would, how you say, throw off the suspicion.” His eyebrows disappeared again. “This thing, it is like that movie. Fatal Extraction?”

  I didn’t correct him. His dumb hunkie act had worn through. “She hasn’t assimilated,” I said. “The thing to do in America is to bring charges against you for statutory rape and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, not to mention encouraging the hopes of innocent rattlesnakes under false pretenses. That means deportation. No wonder you wanted private protection instead of going to the cops.”

  “Well, she is scared off now. What is your interest?”

  “There’s a kid in Holding because he thought he was throwing a pie in your face, and it turned out to have a rock in it. I’m curious to meet the person who put it there.”

  “What pie? What rock?”

  I got up and put down money for the coffee. He seized my wrist in an athlete’s grip.

  “You won’t tell Immigration?”

  I broke the grip with a maneuver I hadn’t used since Cambodia. “Too busy. I need to get an estimate on putting the Berlin Wall back up.” I went out into the scorched-metal air.

  There was a V Svetlana listed in Rochester Hills. I tried the number from a booth, and a husky female voice confirmed the number and told me to leave a message. I disobeyed.

  I opened the window in the car, mostly to let out the stale air. My congestion was clearing, and I had just begun to feel the heat. Coming up on one A.M., and the stoops of apartment buildings and single-family houses were occupied by men in damp undershirts and women in shorts and tank tops, smoking and drinking from cans beaded with moisture. Some of them looked as if they’d been hit over the head with something, but most were smiling and laughing. Winter had been long and cold and not so far back.

  It was one of the homes in the older section of Rochester Hills, which means it didn’t look as if it came with a heliport. The roof was in good shape, it had been painted recently, and the lawn would pass inspection, free of miniature windmills and lighthouses.

  “Mrs. Svetlana?” I asked the creature who answered the doorbell.

  She looked at me with slightly sloping Tartar eyes in a face that had given up its first wrinkle—a vertical crease above the bridge of the nose—and probably got something well worth having in the trade. Her hair was an unassisted auburn, cut short at the neck but teased into bangs to lighten the severity. The nose was slightly aquiline, the cheekbones high. Stradivari had made a pass at her lips and taken the rest of the week off. She had on a blue satin dressing gown and flat-heeled sandals and looked me square in the eye at six feet and change.

  “Miss,” she corrected. “It’s late for visitors.”

  “Not many women would open the door this late.” I showed her my ID. “Are you Trinka Svetlana’s aunt?”

  “You woke me up to ask me that?”

  I liked her accent: Garbo out of Ninotchka by way of Nadia Ko-manich. “Trinka’s boyfriend is in jail. I want to ask her a couple of questions about how he got there.”

  A light glimmered n the Oriental eyes. “Grigori?”

  “Michael.”

  Her face shut down. It had never been fully open. “She’s a beautiful girl. I can’t keep track of her young men.” She started to push the door shut. I leaned against it.

  “I’m betting she can. Girls are organized about that kind of thing.”

  “She isn’t here.” She pushed harder. She had plenty of push, but I had thirty pounds on her, and it was too hot to move. She gave up then. “She’s at the rink downtown, practicing her routine.” She rolled the r.

  “Routine?”

  “Her figure skating act. Everything today is a show. To skate expertly is no longer enough. She wants to go to the Olympics.”

  “She wanted that in the Ukraine. She wanted Grigori, too. Does she still want Grigori?”

  “Grigori is a pig.” Spittle flecked my cheek.

  “No argument from the U.S. Which rink?”

  “There is only one.”

  I straightened, and she pushed the door shut. By that time it was redundant. With women like V. Svetlana around, it was a wonder there weren’t still missiles in Cuba.

  The Iceland Skating Rink’s quarter-page ad in the Yellow Pages said it closed at midnight. There was a light on in the city block of yellow brick building when I parked in a lot containing only a two-year-old Geo and a Dodge Ram pickup with a toolbox built onto the bed. When no one came to the front door, I walked around to the side and kicked at a steel fire door until it opened wide enough to show me a large, black, angry-looking face and a police .38.

  “What part of CLOSED you need me to explain to you?”

  It was a deep, well-shaped voice. Motown had a lot to answer for when it moved to L.A.

  “You left a light on. I’m with Detroit Edison.”

  He looked at my ID. “That ain’t what it says.”

  “One of us is lying. I need a minute with Trinka.”

  “Don’t know no Trinka.”

  “Yeah. I’m just the scrub team. The first string won’t like that answer any more than I do. It’s a long drive from Thirteen Hundred and a hot night. They’ll be sore.”

  Thirteen Hundred is the address of Detroit Police Headquarters. He opened the door the rest of the way and put away the .38. His uniform was soaked through. The air-conditioning budget at Iceland went into keeping the rink from turning into a swimming pool.

  I followed him down an unfinished corridor to a glass door. “See if you can get her to go home,” he said. “I like her, but I need this job.” He left me.

  Inside, a trim figure in a royal blue leotard glided around on the ice. It was just her and me and Sarah Vaughan singing “Dancing in the Dark” on a portable CD player propped up on the railing that surrounded the rink. I leaned next to it and violated another rule by lighting a Winston.

  Trinka Svetlana was as tall as her aunt and could have been her daughter. Her hair was longer and a lighter shade of red, but disregard fifteen years and the laws of physics, and I might have been looking at the sa
me woman. She had an athletic build and muscular legs, more shapely than the broken Popsicle sticks they use to sell hose on television.

  Her white skates cut wide, nearly silent loops on the ice. I found the volume on the CD player and turned it down. I didn’t want to startle her by switching it off. She noticed the change and slowed down, looking at me. She didn’t stop.

  “Nice form,” I said. “I give it a ten, but my favorite’s the luge.”

  “Who are you?” Her accent was heavier than her aunt’s, but she didn’t sound any more rattled.

  “Not important. Michael’s in jail.”

  Even that didn’t stop her. She drew a wide circle around the edge of the rink. “Michael?”

  “Nash. N as in nice-to-a-fault. A as in adolescent, S as in stupid. H as in hell. Or holding. Same definition. He threw a bottle of acid at Grigori. Grigori Ivanov? I as in infidelity—”

  “I know who he is.” It was the first emotion she’d shown. “Michael’s a nice boy. Why would he want to do that?”

  “He believed your letters. Don’t say, ‘Letters?’ No more spelling bees.” My face was stiffening all over again, That night in summer was the coldest winter I’d ever spent.

  “He thought it was colored water in the vial. Any thoughts on where he got that idea?”

  She skated in silence. Sarah had stopped singing. I switched off the player.

  “He said he filled it himself from the tap,” I said, “but I figure he lied about that, too. Whoever filled it used hydrochloric and sulphuric acid in concentrate. Very hard on the complexion.”

  She stumbled and almost fell. She caught her balance and skated up to the rail. Her eyes were larger than her aunt’s, but they hadn’t been so large a moment before

  “Who sent you?”

  I told her.

  “Aunt Vadya?” She was breathing heavy, and her face glowed with moisture. It had collected in beads along the top of her collarbone. On TV you never saw how much they were sweating.

  “She didn’t rat you out. In the Ukraine she grew up in she learned how much truth to tell when. What I want to know is, why didn’t you do the job yourself? Your aim probably would’ve been more accurate.”

  “It was water. I filled it and put in the coloring. Are you the police? Why did you arrest Michael? He’s just a boy.”

  This sounded like truth. It didn’t have the ring of conviction that went with a lie. But then she was a performer. I put cop in my voice. “We arrest them whether it’s nitro or Kool-Aid. If it’s Kool-Aid, we don’t hold them. When it’s something else, we try them as adults.”

  She believed me then. I wouldn’t have bet money on it a minute earlier. “Grigori. Did—”

  “Did his face melt? Six inches this way or that, and it would’ve. It sure made a mess out of a painted concrete wall. Not that he’d have had to look at himself in a mirror. He’d have had to skate for a team for the blind.”

  “That’s impossible! I never—it—”

  She stopped, not because I’d interrupted her. Something had clicked for both of us.

  “Was that vial ever out of your sight after you filled it?” I asked.

  She started shivering.

  • • •

  I told her she could pick up her car later. I drove her to 1300, got Sergeant Testaverde out of his office, and introduced him to her. He locked himself up with her for twenty minutes. At the end of it, he sent a car to Rochester Hills.

  The four of us waited in the office. Michael Nash and Trinka sat on the vinyl-upholstered sofa—close, but not touching, and without speaking. She’d put on a sweatsuit over her leotard and changed from her skates into a pair of pink running shoes. Dressed like that and with her hair twisted into a ponytail, she looked younger than nineteen, closer to Michael’s age. She stared at the linoleum, he looked at a CPR chart on the wall and chewed his lower lip. The sergeant, seated behind his desk, mopped at his face and neck with a hand towel and glowered at me sipping hot coffee from a Styrofoam cup in the scoop chair.

  “Do you have to guzzle that in front of me?” he snarled. “It just makes me hotter.”

  “That’s your problem. I think I’m coming down with a cold.”

  “You can stay home and nurse it after Lansing jerks your license. Impersonating an officer.”

  “I did an impression of one. There’s a difference.”

  “I’d sure as hell like to know what it is.”

  “It wouldn’t do you any good. You have to shut off half your brain, and half’s all you got.”

  “That a Mexican joke?”

  “I don’t know any Mexican jokes. They haven’t been up here long enough. It’s a cop joke. Force of habit. You’d have got around to Trinka after you finished sweating Beaver Cleaver.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” He reached back and twisted the knob on the window fan, looking for a speed faster than High. Maintenance turned off the air conditioner at midnight.

  A uniform poked his head in and said the suspect was in Interview Room 3. Testaverde stood and pulled his shirt away from his back. “Keep these two company.” He stabbed a finger at me. “Let’s find out what half your brain turned up.”

  Detective Clary was still at his post, but he wasn’t asking many questions. Vadya Svetlana, having changed into a simple but by no means unfashionable green dress, but otherwise looking much as she had standing on her own doorstep, sat at the table Michael Nash had occupied, speaking directly to the video camera.

  “You Americans talk of family until it means nothing,” she said. “You couple it with other words—family values, family workplace, extended family—as if it needed the help. I will tell you about family. When the Nazis shelled Leningrad, my grandmother was visiting friends outside the city. She tried to sneak back in, carrying her baby—my uncle—and holding her firstborn’s hand—my mother’s hand—and almost stumbled into an SS patrol. She took cover in a doorway. When the baby began to cry, she smothered it with her hand so the soldiers wouldn’t hear and slaughter them all. She killed her son to save her family.”

  After a moment, Clary cleared his throat. “Let’s move closer to the present. Why did you replace the colored water in the vial with acid?”

  “Because my niece is a fool.”

  The camera whirred, wanting more.

  “Most kids are,” prompted the detective. “Most guardians don’t turn it into a reason for mayhem.”

  “Most guardians don’t have Cossack blood. When someone dishonors you, the name of your family, you don’t just scare him. You say, ‘Boo!’, what is that? No, you say it with a knife in the belly.”

  “If you feel that way, why didn’t you do it yourself?”

  “The boy wanted to do it. He said it was too dangerous for a girl. When a boy wishes to play at soldiers, it is not a woman’s place to interfere.”

  “Except in the business of the vial.”

  “You frighten a pig, it runs away squealing. The fright goes away, the pig comes back. What you expect, he will stop being a pig? If you want a pig to stop being a pig, for the honor of your family, you must kill him.”

  “But you didn’t try to kill him.”

  She shrugged. It was an entirely Slavic gesture, not to be imitated. “It is America. You make the adjustment.”

  Officer Clary was silent. We were silent. She lifted her eyebrows and looked directly at us. The glass was a blank mirror on her side.

  “What did I say?” she asked. “It is my English?”

  Testaverde switched off the intercom. I thought he shuddered a little. It could have been the cold.

  Snow Angels

  One

  They were the unlikeliest visitors I’d had in my office since the time a priest came in looking for the antiquarian bookshop on the next floor.

  She was a comfortably overstuffed sixty in a plain wool dress and a cloth coat with a monkey collar, gray hair pinned up under a hat with artificial flowers planted around the crown. He was a long skinny length of
fence wire two or three years older with a horse face and sixteen hairs stretched across his scalp like violin strings, wearing a forty-dollar suit over a white shirt buttoned to the neck, no tie, and holding his hat. They sat facing my desk in the chairs I’d brought out for them as if posing for a picture back when a photograph was serious business. Their name was Cuttle.

  I grinned. “Ma and Pa?”

  “Jeremy and Judy,” the woman said seriously. “Ed Snilly gave us your name. The lawyer?”

  I excused myself and got up to consult the file cabinet. Snilly had hired me over the telephone three years ago to check the credit rating on a client, a half-hour job. He’d paid promptly.

  “Good man,” I said, resuming my seat. “What’s he recommending me for?”

  Judy said, “He’s a neighbor. He sat in when we closed on the old Stage Stop. He said you might be able to help us.”

  “Stage Stop?”

  “It’s a tavern out on Old US-23, a roadhouse. Jeremy and me used to go there Saturday night when all our friends were alive. It’s been closed a long time. When the developers gave us a hundred thousand for our farm—we bought it for ten back in ‘53—I said to Jeremy, ‘We’re always talking about buying the old Stage Stop and fixing it up and running it the way they used to, here’s our chance.’ And we did; buy it, that is, only—”

  “Dream turned into a nightmare, right?”

  “Good Lord, yes! You must know something about it. Building codes, sanitation, insurance, the liquor commission—I swear, if farming wasn’t the most heartbreaking life a couple could choose, we’d never have had the sand for this. When the inspector told us we’d be better off tearing down and rebuilding—”

  “Tell him about Simon,” Jeremy snapped. I’d begun to wonder if he had vocal cords.

  “Solomon,” she corrected. “The Children of Solomon. Have you heard of it, Mr. Walker?”

  “Some kind of Bible camp. I thought the state closed them down. Something about the discipline getting out of hand.”

  “A boy died in their camp up north, a runaway. But they claimed he came to them in that condition and nobody could prove different, so the charges were dropped. But they lost their lease on the land. They were negotiating a contract on the Stage Stop property when we paid cash for it. Solomon sued the previous owner, but nothing was signed between them and the judge threw it out. They tried to buy us off at a profit, but we said no.”