Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  The Man Who Loved Noir

  One

  The address I’d written down belonged to a house in Lathrup Village three miles north of Detroit, the only one in a cul-de-sac that ended in a berry thicket and a cyclone fence. It was a cool, sprawling ranch-style of brick and frame with four great oaks in the yard arranged in such a way that the house would always be in shade. I felt the sweat drying on my body during the short walk from my car to the front door.

  A woman in a gray dress and white apron with her hair caught up by combs led me into a sunken living room and went away. They’re no longer called maids, but they still can’t speak English.

  “Thank you for coming on such short notice, Mr. Walker. I’m Gay Cully.”

  She’d come in through an open sliding glass door from a patio in back when I was looking in another direction, a small compact red-haired woman with the sun behind her. Assuming she’d planned her entrance, that put her over forty. She had large eyes mascaraed all around, a pixie mouth, and a fly waist in a pale yellow dress tailored to show it off.

  “I like your home.” I borrowed a warm, slightly moist hand with light calluses and returned it. “They don’t design them this way since air conditioning.”

  “Neil has an eye for that kind of thing. He’s a building contractor.”

  “Neil’s your husband?”

  “Yes. Can I get you something? I’m afraid Netta has narrow ideas about her housekeeping duties.”

  “Just water. Anything stronger’s wasted on a day like this.”

  She agreed that it was hot and came back after a few minutes with two glasses and a bowl of crushed ice on a tray. When we were seated on either side of a glass occasional table she said, “Neil’s officially missing. Twenty-six hours. I trust the police but they’re outnumbered by their cases. That’s why I called you.”

  “This puts me even up. I take it he isn’t in the vanishing habit.”

  “No. He’s never been gone without an explanation except for the time he was in the hospital.”

  “Accident?”

  She drank and set down her glass. “He checked himself into a sanitarium. That was eighteen months ago, when the construction business was in a slump. Our lawyer advised him to declare bankruptcy, but Neil insisted on paying back every creditor in full. It was too much for him, the worrying, the long hours. One day he left for work and never showed up. The police traced him to the hospital after three days.”

  “I guess you checked there this time.”

  “I called every hospital in the area, public and private. No one answering his description has been seen in any of them.”

  “How’s he been lately?”

  “A little keyed up. We’re just now getting back on our feet. I didn’t think it was anything serious until his partner called yesterday to ask where he was.”

  I had some water. I wasn’t thirsty any more, I just never liked asking the question. “Any reason to suspect he’s involved with another woman?”

  “Yes, but I called her and she swears she hasn’t seen him in months.”

  “You know her?” I stroked my Adam’s apple. A piece of ice had stalled in my throat during her answer.

  “Vesta is her name. Vesta Mainwaring. She was the bookkeeper at the office until I made Neil fire her.” She leaned over and touched my wrist. The light found hairline creases in her face.

  “I should explain something before we go any further. My husband is an obsessive personality, Mr. Walker. He’s subject to binges.”

  “Alcohol?”

  “No, but just as intoxicating. Come with me to the basement.” She rose.

  We went through a stainless steel kitchen and down a flight of clean sawdust-smelling steps into a cellar that had been turned into a den, mahogany paneling and tweed wall to wall. It contained a wet bar, Naugahyde chairs and a sofa, and a television set whose forty-eight-inch screen dwarfed the videocassette recorder perched on top. A set of built-in shelves that looked at first to hold books was packed with videotapes instead.

  “My husband’s favorite room,” said Mrs. Cully. “He spends most of his time here when he’s not working.”

  I read the labels on the tapes. They were all movies: “The Dark Corner,” “Night and the City,” “Criss Cross,” “Double Indemnity”—not a Technicolor title in the bunch, and none of them made after about 1955. “He likes murder mysteries, I see.”

  “Not just murder mysteries. Dark films with warped gangsters and troubled heroes and fallen women. There’s a name for them; my French isn’t very good—”

  “Cinema noir, “ I said. “Black films. I like old movies myself. So far it hasn’t landed me in psychiatric.”

  “You just like them. Neil sucks on them. In the beginning I watched with him. They were interesting, but not as a steady diet. I don’t think he even noticed when I stopped watching. Lately he’s been spending every spare minute in front of this set, exposing himself to I don’t know how many murders, deceits, and depressing situations. It’s not healthy.”

  An empty cassette sleeve lay on an end table. “Pitfall,” starring Dick Powell, Raymond Burr, and Lizabeth Scott. I went to the VCR and punched Eject. A tape licked out. “Pitfall.” It hadn’t been rewound.

  “He was watching this one when?”

  “Night before last. He disappeared the next day.”

  “When was the last time he got on this kick?”

  “Just before he entered the hospital. About the time I found out he was having an affair with Vesta Mainwaring.”

  “How’d you find out?”

  “The police told me. The little slut caved in pretty quickly when they started asking questions about his disappearance.”

  I slid the tape into its sleeve. “Where can I find Miss Mainwaring?”

  “She’s listed. But as I told you, she doesn’t know where he is.”

  “I’d like to hear her say it. What’s the name of your husband’s firm?”

  She’d anticipated that and gave me a business card from the pocket of her dress. CULLY AND WEBB, it read. “Webb is the partner?”

  “His first name’s Leo. They’ve been together longer than Neil and I.”

  “Can I take this with me?” I held up the videotape.

  “Of course. You’ll need a picture of Neil too.”

  Upstairs she took a five-by-seven out of its frame and handed it to me. Cully was a craggy-looking party in his late forties with sad eyes and dark hair thinning in front. “Any ideas on what he might be up to?” I asked his wife.

  She hesitated. “It might sound crazy.”

  “Try me.”

  “You have to understand that he might be unbalanced,” she said. “I didn’t put it together the first time, but I’ve seen enough of these things now to recognize the plot. I think Neil wants to be one of these noir heroes, Mr. Walker. I think he thinks he’s in a film.”

  Two

  Cully and Webb had a small suite on the seventeenth floor of the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company Building on Woodward, a furnace-shaped skyscraper with a lobby out of Cecil B. DeMille, complete with sparkling blue lights mounted under the thirty-foot ceiling and a bronze ballerina pirouetting among exterior pools. The offices themselves were just offices. A gray-haired woman with reading glasses suspended from a chain around her neck spoke my name into a telephone and Leo Webb came out to shake my hand.

  He was a short wiry sixty with white hair slicked back, a power nose, and eyes like glass shards. His suit was tailored snugly and there was something about the knot of his silk tie that said he’d given it a jerk and a lift just before his entrance.

  When I told him my business he steered me into his office, a square room full of antiques and statuary, trembling on the rim of bad taste. I admired the view of downtown Detroit through his window and managed to sit without upsetting a plaster cupid notching an arrow into its bow on a pedestal next to the chair.

  “Gay’s overreacting,” Webb said, settling himself behind a French Empire d
esk crusted all over with gold inlay. “Cully’s just off on a toot. He’s that age. He’ll be back when he’s had enough.”

  “Vesta Mainwaring told her she hasn’t seen him in months.”

  “This town’s full of squirming women. I know. That’s why I never bothered to get married.”

  “How’s he been acting lately?”

  “Same as anyone in this goddamn business, jumpy. Every time it rains on Wall Street mortgage rates go up and people stop building houses. If you’re looking for security, keep going.”

  “You wouldn’t know that to see this office.”

  He smiled and ran a finger down the side of a Dresden Marie Antoinette on the desk. “I’m a sucker for nice things. We’re into developing in a small way. You get a sixth sense for dying old widows looking to unload their property in order to have something to leave their grandchildren. The bargains would surprise you.”

  Bet they wouldn’t. “Do you know where Miss Mainwaring is working? I can’t get an answer from her home phone.”

  “Her new employer called us for a reference.” He slid the pointer down the side of one of those nifty message caddies and punched up the cover. “Ziggy’s Chop House on Livernois.” He gave me a telephone number.

  I wrote it down in my old-fashioned notebook. “Do you always hang on to the new numbers of former employees?”

  “Everybody has their own records system and they take it with them when they go. Calling them saves a lot of decoding time.”

  “Can I see Cully’s office?”

  “I’ll have Frances show you.” He picked up his telephone.

  “Partners sometimes take out insurance policies on each other,” I said when he was through. “Anything like that here?”

  “The premiums are too dear for the shoestring we operate on most of the time. His half of the business goes to his wife. Are you suggesting I did something nasty?” A pair of shard-like eyes glittered.

  “Just sweeping out all the corners.” Someone knocked and the woman I’d spoken to outside stuck her gray head into the office. I stood. “Thanks, Mr. Webb. I’ll let you know if he turns up.”

  He remained seated. “Just tell him to wash off the powder and perfume before he reports to work.”

  Neil Cully’s office was a poor working cousin of his partner’s, containing a plain desk and file cabinet and an easel holding a pastel sketch of an embryonic building. The only personal items were a picture of Gay Cully on the desk and a framed movie poster on one wall for “This Gun for Hire,” with Alan Ladd looking sinister in four colors under a fedora. Frances stood in the doorway while I went through the file cabinet and desk. I found files and desk stuff. The message pad by the telephone was blank, but there were indentations in the top page.

  “The police called this morning,” Frances said. “They said not to disturb anything in the office.”

  I looked at my watch. “Okay if I call my answering service?”

  When she said yes I lifted the receiver and dialed the number for Cully and Webb. The telephone rang in the reception area. Frances excused herself and withdrew. I laid the receiver on the blotter and tried the trick with the edge of a pencil on the message pad. It made the indentations clearer but not legible. I smoothed out some unedifying crumples in Cully’s wastebasket, found a sheet that had been torn off the pad, and got it into my pocket just as Frances returned. I cradled the receiver.

  “Odd, there was no one on the other end,” she said.

  “Kids.” I thanked her and left before she could work it out.

  In the elevator I looked at the sheet. An unidentified telephone number. I tried it in a booth on the street.

  “Musuraca Investigations,” wheezed a voice in my ear.

  I hung up without saying anything. I knew Phil Musuraca; not personally or even by sight, but the way a hardworking gardener knows a destructive species of beetle. Where he had gone, no honest investigator could follow without risking having a safe drop on him with Musuraca’s name on it. What his number was doing in Neil Cully’s wastebasket was one for Ellery Queen.

  Three

  “Hello?”

  A low voice for a woman, with fine grit in it, like a cat’s lick. Conversations collided in the background with the snarling and cracking of a busy griddle. I could almost smell the carcinogens frying at Ziggy’s Chop House. “Vesta Mainwaring?”

  “Speaking. Listen, I’m busy, so if this is another obscene call, get to the dirty part quick.”

  I introduced myself and stated my business. I was looking across my little office at Miss August, kneeling in yellow shorts, high heels, and nothing else behind some convenient shrubbery on the calendar. I wondered if Miss Mainwaring ever trimmed hedges.

  “Like I told Mrs. Cully and like I told the police, I haven’t seen Neil since last fall,” she said. “I got work to do.”

  “Not seeing him doesn’t cover telephone calls and letters.”

  “You forgot telegrams, which I didn’t get either. I lost one good job over that crumb, you want me to lose a lousy one too?”

  There was no reason to play the card, just the fact I hadn’t any other leads. “What about Fat Phil, heard from him?”

  The little silence that followed was like tumblers dropping into place. When she spoke again the background noise was muffled, as if she had inserted her body between it and the telephone.

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Meet me and we’ll swap stories.”

  “Not here,” she said quickly. “Do you know the Castinet Lounge on Grand River? I get off at ten.”

  “I’ll find it.” I hung up and checked my watch. Quitting time. Five hours to kill. I had dinner at a steak place on Chene and stopped at a video store on the way home to rent a VCR from a kid I wouldn’t have let follow me into an arcade after sunset.

  At the ranch I fixed a drink, hooked up the recorder to my TV set with the help of the instructions and a number of venerable Anglo-Saxon words, and fed the tape of “Pitfall” I had borrowed from Gay Cully into the slot. It was a tight, black-and-white crimer the way they made them in 1948, starring Dick Powell as an insurance agent who has an extramarital affair with sultry Lizabeth Scott, only to run afoul of her embezzler boyfriend and a sex-driven insurance investigator played by Raymond Burr at his pre-Perry Mason heaviest. Powell kills the boyfriend and Scott kills Burr, but not before Powell’s marriage to Jane Wyatt is threatened, leaving their lives considerably darker than they were when first encountered. There were plenty of tricky camera angles and contrasty lighting and one clever scene involving Powell and Burr with guns in a room full of shadows and reflections.

  It was a good movie. It wasn’t worth going off the deep end over, but then neither are most of the reasons men and women choose to walk away from a perfectly good relationship. When it was over I caught a rerun of “Green Acres,” which made more sense.

  Four

  The Castinet Lounge was the latest in a series of attempts to perform shock therapy on Detroit’s catatonic nightlife. A foyer paved with blue-and-white Mexican tiles opened into a big room covered in fake adobe with a bar and tables, a dance floor, and a mariachi band in sombreros and pink ruffled shirts. At a comer table I ordered scotch and soda from a waitress dressed like Carmen Miranda who wouldn’t remember Sonny and Cher.

  Ten o’clock came and went, followed by ten-thirty. A few couples danced, the band finished its set, rested, and started another. They were playing requests, but everything sounded like the little Spanish flea. I nursed the first drink. What I did with the second and third was more like CPR. I was sure I’d been stood up.

  Just before eleven she came in. I knew it was her, although I’d never seen a picture or been given a description, and my opinion of Neil Cully went up a notch. Coming in from the floodlit parking lot she was just a silhouette, square shoulders and a narrow waist and long legs in a blue dress and a bonnet-like hat tied under her chin with a ribbon, but as she stopped under the inside lights to look around
I saw eyes slanted just shy of Oriental, soft, untanned cheeks flushed a little from the last of the day’s heat, red lips, a strong round chin. If you were going to kick over the traces you could wait years for a better reason. When her gaze got to me I rose. She came over.

  Seated, she took off her hat, shook loose a fall of glistening blue-black hair, and traded the hat to Carmen Miranda for a whiskey sour. When we were alone she said, “You don’t look like someone who’d be working with Phil Musuraca.”

  “Never met him.”

  “Did Neil tell you he was following me?”

  “Who hired him?”

  She seemed to realize she’d tipped something. She took a cigarette from her purse and fumbled for a light. I struck a match and leaned over. I didn’t smell onions. Whatever she had on made me think of blossoms under a full moon. She blew a plume at the ceiling. “You haven’t talked to Neil.”

  “Me and the rest of the human race,” I said. “That part I’ve been spending time with, anyway. Tell me about Fat Phil.”

  “First tell me why you’re asking.”

  “I found his number in Cully’s wastebasket. Did Cully hire him?”

  “I suppose you could find out anyway. Musuraca’s working for my ex-husband. His name’s Ted Silvera.”

  “Where did I hear that name?”

  “He pushed over a bunch of video stores downriver two years ago. They called him the shotgun bandit.”

  “I remember the trial,” I said. “The prosecution offered him a deal if he agreed to tell them where he’d stashed the money.”

  “Eighty thousand dollars, can you believe it? I keep telling Ziggy he should sell the griddle and rent out tapes. Anyway Ted spit in their face and he’s doing eight to twelve in Jackson. The police followed me around for a while, but when they got the idea I didn’t know what Ted did with the money they laid off.”