Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

• • •

  The Paul Bunyan Bowl-A-Rama, an aluminum hangar with a two-story neon lumberjack bowling on its roof, looked abashed at mid-afternoon, like a nude dancer caught under a conventional electric bulb. A young thick-shouldered bouncer who hadn’t bothered to change out of his overalls on his way in from the back forty conferred with the office and came back to escort me past the lanes.

  Little Phil Costa crowded four-foot ten in his two-inch elevators, a sour-faced baldy in his middle years with pointed features like a Chihuahua’s. Small men are usually neat, but his tie was loose, his sleeves rolled up unevenly, and an archaeologist could have reconstructed his last five meals from the stains on his unbuttoned vest. He didn’t look up from the adding-machine tapes he was sorting through on a folding card table when I entered. “Tell Lorraine the support check’s in the mail. I ain’t about to bust my parole over the brat.”

  “I’m not from your ex. I’m working for the Cuttles.”

  “What the hell’s a Cuttle?”

  I told him. He scowled, but it was at a wrong sum on one of the tapes. He corrected it with a pencil stub. “I heard about it. I hope you got your bread up front.”

  “Talk is Judy and Jeremy were going to add a pool room to the Stage Stop.”

  “How about that. What’s six times twelve?”

  “Think of it in terms of years in stir.” I laid a hand on top of the tape. “A few years back, two guys who were operating their handbook in one of your neighborhoods were shotgunned behind the New Hellas Cafe in Hamtramck. The cops never did pin it to you, but nobody’s tried to cut in on you since. Until the Cuttles.”

  The farm boy-bouncer took a step forward, but Costa stopped him with a hand. “Get the bottle.”

  It was a pinch bottle filled with amber liquid. Costa took it without looking away from me and broke the seal. “You a drinking man, Walker?”

  “In the right company. This isn’t it.”

  “I wasn’t offering. This stuff’s twenty-four years old, flown in special for me from Aberdeen. Seventy-five bucks a fifth.” He upended it over his metal wastebasket. When it gurgled empty he tossed in the bottle. “On their best night, that’s what the Cuttles’ room might cost me. Still think I iced them?”

  “I’m way past that,” I said. “Now I’m wondering who takes out your trash.”

  “You trade in information, I’ll treat you. Check out a guy named Chuckie Noyes. He’s a Child of Solomon, squats in the cemetery behind the Stage Stop property, the old caretaker’s hut. I knew him in Jackson before he got religion. He did eleven years for killing a druggie in Detroit. Used a shotgun.”

  “Why so generous?”

  He tipped a hand toward the adding-machine tapes. “I got a good thing here, closest I ever been to legit in my life. Last thing I need’s some sticky snoop coming back and back, drawing attention. Time was I’d just have Horace here adjust your spine, but if there’s one thing I learned on the block it’s diplomacy. Dangle, now. I open at dusk.”

  “Seventy-two,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Six times twelve.”

  “Hey, thanks.” He wrote it down. “Come back some night when you’re not working and bowl a couple of lines. On the house.”

  • • •

  For the second time that day, police strobes had beaten me to my destination. They lanced the shadows gathering among the leaning headstones in what might have been a churchyard before the central building had burned down sometime around Appomattox. Near its charred foundation stood a galvanized steel shed with a slanted roof and a door cut in one side. As I was getting out of the car, two uniformed attendants wheeled a body bag on a stretcher out through the door and into the back of an ambulance that was almost as big as the shed. Sergeant Springer came out behind them, deep in conversation with a man six inches taller in a snap brim hat and a coat with a fur collar. The two were enveloped in the vapor of their own spent breath.

  “I’ll want it on my desk in the morning,” said the big man, pausing to shake Springer’s hand before pulling on his gloves.

  “Will do, Lieutenant.”

  The lieutenant touched his shoulder. “Bad day all around, Ollie. Get some rest before you talk to the shooting team.” He boarded an unmarked Dodge with a magnetic flasher on the roof. The motor turned over sluggishly and caught.

  “Chuckie Noyes?” I asked Springer.

  He looked up at me, then down at his fur cap. “Yeah.” He put it on.

  “Who shot him, you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He do the Cuttles?”

  “Looks like.”

  “You’re not the only one having a bad day, Sergeant.”

  “Guess you’re right.” He fastened the snaps on his jacket. “I came here to ask Noyes some questions, thought he might have seen or heard something living so close. He had an antique pin on this chest of drawers by his bed. Judy wore that pin to church every Sunday. Don’t know how I missed not seeing it in the trailer. Noyes saw it same time I did. He tried for my gun.”

  “Were you alone?”

  “What?” He lamped me hard.

  “Nothing. You folks in the country do things differently.”

  “I don’t expect to lose sleep over squashing a germ like that, but it doesn’t mean I wanted to. Now we’ll never know if he was working for Comfort or if he slipped the rest of the way over the edge and acted solo. He had a record for violence.”

  “So Little Phil said.”

  “That germ. Guess you’ll talk to just about anybody.”

  “It’s a job.”

  “A stinking job.”

  “Everything about this one stinks,” I agreed. “Sleep tight, Sergeant.”

  Six

  I’d always heard God-fearing people went to bed with the chickens. Another myth gone.

  At 11:45 P.M. I was still parked down the road from Bertram Comfort’s gray stone house, where I’d been for over an hour, warming my calcifying marrow with judicious transfusions of hot coffee from a Thermos and waiting for the lights to go out downstairs. A couple of minutes later they did. I was tempted to go in then but sat tight. Just after midnight the single lighted window on the second story went black. Then I moved.

  I’d brought my pocket burglar kit, but just for the hell of it I tried the knob on the front door. Comfort had the old churchman’s prejudice against locks. I let myself in.

  I also had my pencil flash, but I didn’t use that either. There was a moon and the glow reflecting off the snow shone bright as my best hopes through the windows. I found my way to the study without tripping over anything.

  I didn’t waste time going through the desk or looking behind the religious paintings for a wall safe. During my interview with Comfort his eyes had strayed to the big Bible on the desk one too many times for even the devoutest of reasons.

  The book was genuine enough. There were no hollowed-out pages and an elaborate red-and-gold bookplate pasted to the flyleaf read TO MR. BERTRAM EZEKIEL COMFORT, FATHER OF THE FAITH, FROM THE CHILDREN OF SOLOMON, flanked by Adam and Eve in fig leaves. A dozen strips of microfilm spilled out of a pocket in the spine when I tilted the book.

  I carried the strips over to the window and held them up to the moonlight. They were photographed documents bearing the identification of the records departments of various police organizations. The farthest came from Los Angeles. The closest belonged to Detroit. I read that one. Then I put it in my inside breast pocket, returned the others to the Bible and the Bible to its place on the desk, and left, my sabbatical completed on the bones of another Commandment.

  Seven

  The next day was clear and twenty degrees. The sky had no ceiling and the sun on the snow was a sea of cold white fire. Breathing was like inhaling needles.

  The air was colder inside the empty Stage Stop building with the raw damp of enclosed winter. The old floorboards rang like iron when I stepped on them and my breath steamed around the gaunt timbers that held up the roof. Owls nested in the
rafters. The new yellow two-by-fours stacked along the walls were bright with the anticipation of a dead couple’s exploded vision.

  “Jesus, it’s cold in here,” said Ollie Springer, pushing aside the front door, which hung on a single scabbed hinge, “Is the cold locker closed at Pete’s Meats?”

  “It’s a hall. The Cuttles might have appreciated the choice. Thanks for coming, Sergeant.”

  “You made it sound important over the phone. It better be. The lieutenant’s waiting for my report on Chuckie Noyes.”

  “I’ve got something you might want to add.” I handed him the microfilm slip I’d taken from Comfort’s Bible.

  “What is it?”

  “Noyes’s arrest report on a homicide squeal he went down for in Detroit a dozen years ago. Since you mentioned his record yesterday I thought you’d like to see the name of the arresting officer.”

  He was holding it up to a shaft of sunlight coming in through an empty window, but he wasn’t reading.

  “The city cops are jealous of their reputations,” I said. “When they take a killer into custody they sometimes forget to release the name of the rural cop who actually busted him during his flight to freedom; but a report’s a report. Just a deputy then, weren’t you?”

  “This doesn’t mean anything.” He crumpled the strip into a ball and threw it behind the stack of lumber.

  “Detroit has the original. Bertram Comfort maintains the loyalty of the more recalcitrant members of his flock by keeping tabs on their past indiscretions; that’s where I got the copy. I figure when you found out Noyes was back in circulation and hanging around your jurisdiction, you either hired him to kill Judy and Jeremy or more likely threatened to bust him on some parole beef if he didn’t cooperate. Then you offed him to keep him from talking and planted Judy’s pin in the caretaker’s hut where he was living. The simple plans are always the best. As a Child of Solomon he’d be blamed for trying to help secure the Stage Stop property for Comfort’s new camp.

  “I guess I’m responsible for accelerating their deaths,” I went on. “Someone—you, probably—made a last ditch attempt to scare them off the other day by taking a potshot at Jeremy. When he and Judy hired me instead to investigate, you switched to Plan B before I could get a foothold. You’re one impulsive cop, Sergeant.”

  “Why would I want to kill the Cuttles? They’re like my second parents.” He rested his hand on his sidearm, a nickel-plated .38 with a black knurled grip.

  “It bothered me too, especially when I found out you spoke up for them at the hearing before the State Liquor Control Commission. But that didn’t jibe with what you told me about thinking this place had a hoodoo. I should have guessed the truth when Ed Snilly said they decided later to expand the Stage Stop. At first I thought it was their plans for a pool room and the competition it would create for Phil Costa, but that was chump change to him, not worth killing over. It was the wine cellar.”

  “What wine cellar?”

  “There isn’t one now, but there was going to be. You were right in there cheering them on, in spite of your own bad luck with the place and the wife you said left you, until you found out they were going to dig a hole.” I paced as I spoke, circling a soft spot in the floor where the old boards had rotted and sunk into a depression eight feet across. He was watching me, trying to keep from staring at my feet. His fingers curled around the grip of the revolver. I said, “I made some calls this morning from my motel room in town, got the name of that rock singer everyone says your wife ran off with. I called eight booking agents before I found one who used to work with him. He didn’t skip with anyone’s wife. He died of a drug overdose in Cincinnati a couple of months after he played here. Nobody was with him or had been for some time.”

  “If you stayed at the motel you know she spent a night with him there,” Springer said. “It was all over the county next day. They were both gone by then.”

  “Your wife didn’t go as far as he did. No more than six feet from where we’re standing, and all of it straight down. Those rotten boards lift right out. I checked before you got here.”

  “Plenty of room under there for two.” He drew his gun.

  “Drop it, Ollie!”

  He pivoted, snapping off a shot. The bullet knocked a splinter off the big timber the sheriff’s lieutenant had been hiding behind. The big man returned fire. Springer shouted, fell down, and grasped his thigh.

  “Drop it, I said.”

  The sergeant looked down at the gun he was still holding as if he’d forgotten about it. He opened his hand and let it fall.

  “Thanks, Lieutenant.” I took the Smith & Wesson out of my coat pocket and lowered the hammer gently. “Sorry about the cold wait.”

  He holstered his own gun under his fur-lined coat. “Ollie was right about this place.” He shook loose a pair of handcuffs.

  I left while he was reading Springer his Miranda and went out into the cold sunshine of the country.

  Major Crimes

  One

  Deborah Stonesmith was a tall black woman with auburn-tinted hair sprayed into hard waves and heavy hips tastefully disguised under a tailored gray herringbone suit. The steel desk in her office just came to her knees when she rose like a man to grasp my hand. The gesture didn’t seem out of place at all; but for a spray of daisies in a cut-glass vase on the desk, the room might have belonged to any of the male detectives in the squad. When we were seated, she put on a pair of gold-rimmed glasses hanging from a chain around her neck to read my ID, then took them off and returned the folder and leaned back in her yellow leather swivel, steepling a pair of surprisingly slender hands without a ring or long nails.

  “What brings you down to Major Crimes, Mr. Walker?”

  Her voice fell around the middle register, a little hoarse at the edges like a saloon singer’s. I said:

  “I’m working for Midwest Life, Automobile & Casualty this month. Stan Draper there hired me to look into this Gendron kill that went down Tuesday. Gendron’s wife stands to collect a quarter million on the double indemnity clause and its Midwest’s policy, excuse the expression, to investigate all claims above fifty thousand. I understand it’s your case.”

  She smiled tightly. “How is Stan?”

  “Three sheets to the wind, same as always. You know him?”

  “We pulled stakeout together once when I was in uniform. That was before they broke him for keeping a pint of Ten High in the glove compartment.” She turned the chair to the left and back again. “We made a collar in the Gendron case this morning. This kid tried to buy a tape deck at a Radio Shack downtown with bills on the hot serial number list. He’s rolling over on his partners right now.”

  “I heard. When can I talk to him?”

  “Not until after he’s arraigned, and maybe not even then. The P.D. on this one’s a real nutcracker and I’m not going to stray from the book and take a chance on blowing it all over some technicality. We got a textbook arrest on a drugstore heist and the murder of an innocent bystander and that’s how it’s going to stay.”

  I tapped a Winston out of my pack and spiked it between my lips. “I’d like to see the autopsy report on Gendron.”

  “So would I. We’re still waiting on it. All I’ve got so far is the bullet that killed him, a .38. The kid didn’t have a gun on him when we picked him up and his apartment is clean, if you call a drawerful of controlled substances and a stack of naughty pictures clean. He says it was one of the others pulled the trigger. I would too.”

  “Yeah. Did you ever find out what a PR consultant was doing in a drugstore in the middle of the morning on a weekday?”

  “Getting cigarettes, his secretary said. Look, you think his wife sent him there to get squiffed? One of the scroats popped him in front of four witnesses on their way out the door.”

  “The questions have to get asked.” I lit up and flipped the match into the glass ashtray on the desk. “This kid got a sheet?”

  She fingered her eyeglasses, smiling the tight smi
le. “Three disorderlies and a shoplifting. Copped a pair of nylon panties from the downtown Hudson’s, when there was a downtown Hudson’s. His size. Did I say those pictures we found in his apartment were all of men?”

  “Not exactly Machine Gun Kelly.”

  “These days you don’t have to be. All it takes is an expensive hobby, like doing pills and cruising the fag bars on Woodward.”

  “Any provocation for the shoot?”

  “Witnesses say no. Just another good-bye kill. We get them.”

  “Was Gendron killed instantly?”

  “Twelve paces, straight through the heart.”

  “They’re getting better.”

  “I’ve got a ballistics expert wants his autograph.”

  I burned some more tobacco. Then I squashed out my butt half-smoked and rose. “Thanks, Inspector. I hope you get the others.”

  “We will. We don’t see many mysteries in Major Crimes. You see Stan, tell him Deb said hi.”

  She put on her glasses and I let myself out. She looked as much like a Deb as I look like an Irving.

  Two

  The Gendron house stood in St. Clair Shores a block off the lake, really just a broad spot in the Detroit River where rich people from Grosse Pointe with nothing better to do sail catamarans and worry about their putting. It was a brick colonial with a midget windmill on the front lawn and a yellow Citroen parked behind a black Ca-maro in the circular driveway. I parked behind the Citroen and got out and when I rang the doorbell a tall party with receding gray hair answered. He had on a camel-hair sportcoat over a white turtleneck and black wool peg-topped pants. His face was tanned.

  “I’m Amos Walker,” I said, before he could say, “Yes-s?”, and handed him a card. “I’m an investigator with the late Mr. Gendron’s insurance underwriters. I wonder if I might ask Mrs. Gendron a few questions.”

  “I doubt it.” His gaze fell somewhere behind me. It was a powder-blue gaze. What color it was behind the contacts was anybody’s guess.

  I said, “It has to do with whether or not Midwest pays off her claim.”