Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  The loudspeaker under my window crackled and spewed some irrelevancy that gave me the best line I could dredge up under the circumstances. “The race is downstairs.”

  She started, as if the additional discovery that I was capable of speech was too much for her to take in. “Next door,” she said; and fell on her face.

  I couldn’t have caught her on a moped. Still, I sprinted through the connecting doorway, knelt and felt her carotid for the strong pulse I found there, and lifted her up onto the upholstered bench where the potential clients were expected to sit, thumbing through copies of U.S. News & World Report from the Carter administration. She’d skinned her nose when she fell, but the rest of the inventory checked out. She’d only fainted. I took my raincoat off the halltree and spread it over her. Then I went out, locking the dead bolt behind me.

  The office next door belonged that month to a graphic artist, a bitter-faced old mutterer still waiting for his one-man show at the Detroit Institute of Arts—or failing that, next month’s rent—who hadn’t said a word to me all the times we’d passed each other on the stairs. I nodded to the workman painting someone’s name on a glass door down the hall, knocked at the artist’s door, and tried the knob. It wasn’t locked. Nothing about the workman’s resigned expression told me he’d seen any good-looking naked women that day.

  The office consisted of one room, slightly larger than my private tank. It had been converted into a studio, with unframed canvases covered with riotous slashes of paint hung on the walls and a sheet tacked over the south window to simulate north light. A foot-high wooden platform occupied one corner; across from it stood an easel holding up a canvas with the outlines of a nude human female form brushed on and a low zinc-topped table smeared all over with paint from half a dozen squashed tubes. A bouquet of brushes stood in a chipped coffee mug on one corner.

  The air smelled of turpentine and something else even stronger, that didn’t belong in a studio or an office or anywhere else except the firing range at Detroit Police Headquarters. I went over and wrenched up the window to let some of it out. The run was still going on below, with accompanying commentary from the loudspeakers. Every corner wore a cop in uniform.

  The room where an artist works is never tidy. There are always things lying around, props and half-empty containers and yards of canvas tarpaulin and piles of paint-stained clothing. The pile of clothing at the foot of the easel contained a man.

  He lay on his side with his legs drawn up and one arm flung across his face. When I moved the arm to get to the artery on the side of his neck, the collar of his old streaked shirt shifted, exposing a blue-black hole the size of my finger in the back of his head, just below the occipital bulge. There was no reason to expect any activity in the artery, but I looked for some anyway. No surprises there. The face was the one I knew from the stairs. It looked a little less bitter. Death will do that, even the violent kind.

  His right fist was wrapped around a long-handled brush. I made a mitten of my handkerchief and grasped the brush and pulled. It slid easily out of his grasp. I slid it back in. I straightened, touched the paint on the canvas with a corner of the handkerchief, and looked at the cloth. No stain. There was a sink, paint-splotched like everything else in the room, with a square plank table covered with charcoal sketches on rough paper, and a wobbly kitchen chair, where presumably the next Van Gogh sat with his back to the door, drinking coffee and brooding over his dark visions. A split, empty Styrofoam cup stood on the table. It smelled of grounds and was still warm.

  One corner of the room was obscured by a sheet hanging down like a drape from tacks in the ceiling. Behind it was another rickety chair, with a woman’s dress folded on the seat. A pair of low-heeled pumps lay underneath and a bra and panties hung from the back. I touched the dress lightly with a palm.

  I found the telephone on the floor under an open Little Caesar’s box with a bit of crust stuck to it and a couple of flies stuck to that. I made a call.

  The painter in the hallway was gathering up his equipment. According to the fresh legend on the door, I was about to be blessed with another lawyer for a neighbor. My building ate them like peppermints.

  “See anyone today?” I asked.

  The painter shook his head. “I hate working Sundays. Dull as a washtub.”

  My visitor was standing in the middle of my waiting room, wearing my raincoat with her hands in the pockets. It nearly wrapped around her twice. A little of the frightened-doe look had gone from her eyes.

  “You locked me in.” She sounded accusing.

  “I didn’t want to lose the raincoat. Put these on instead.”

  I held out her dress and shoes and undies.

  “You went in there?”

  “Uh-huh. You want to talk about it?”

  “Turn around.”

  I admired the view of the inner office while the raincoat rustled to the floor behind me and hooks hooked and elastic bands snapped.

  “I’m a model,” she said. “I work nude.”

  “I know. I’m a detective.”

  “I didn’t see it. I was posing with my back to him. I heard the door open and close, but I didn’t turn around. In my work you learn to stand still no matter what. I heard a sharp crack. Just a crack, like a brush dropping to the floor. I thought guns made more noise than that.”

  “Depends on the gun. Also whether it’s wearing a suppressor.”

  “Suppressor?”

  “Silencer to you. It was probably a twenty-two automatic, which is one of the few guns you can suppress successfully. It’s a pro’s weapon. What happened then?”

  “He made a little noise and fell. I turned around then, just in time to see someone going out the door. It was a man—I think. That’s all I can tell you. All I saw was his back.”

  “What was his name?”

  “I told you, I didn’t see his face. I wouldn’t—”

  “Not the shooter’s, the artist’s. I like it when the dead men I find have names. It helps me sort them out.”

  “Oh. Tontine. Victor Tontine.” She hesitated. “He’s really dead?”

  “Didn’t you check?”

  “No. I just ran out. I didn’t even bother to dress. I was afraid he’d come back and kill me. Don’t they do that to witnesses? I panicked. I knew I couldn’t go outside all undressed. Yours was the first door I came to. Thank God it wasn’t locked.”

  “If what you say is true, you aren’t much of a witness. Do you know why Tontine was killed?”

  “I know nothing about him. He hired me through the agency where I’m listed. Thirty minutes, that’s how long we knew each other. That’s how long I’d been posing.” A zipper shrilled. “Can you take me to the bus stop? There’s a crowd on the sidewalk and my legs are too wobbly to fight my way through. I need to go home.”

  “We need some law first. You can sit down till they’re through with you. It shouldn’t take long, since you didn’t see anything.” I started toward the inner office and the telephone.

  “Turn around.”

  I did. She looked just as good with as without, a rarity. The dress was a simple blue frock with double-reinforced pockets sewn in. Some women just didn’t like to carry purses. This one preferred to hold a gun. It looked familiar.

  “You should have locked the door to your office, Mr. Walker,” she said. “You never know who might walk in and plunder the arsenal.”

  “Poor judgment. You didn’t have any pockets when I left.” I raised my hands.

  “It was going to stay in my pocket until we got away from the crowd; but I never make plans that won’t stand alteration. You’re going to take me to my car, arm in arm, just like we’re going steady. This gun’s going to be in your ribs just in case you can’t stand commitment.”

  “You should’ve wet down the paint.”

  She frowned. “What?”

  “The paint on the canvas Tontine was working on. It was dry. He wasn’t painting when he was shot. He was sitting at the table drinking coffee.
After you shot him you pried the cup out of his fist, splitting the Styrofoam, dumped it out in the sink, dragged him to his easel to make it look like he was working, and stuck a brush in his fist. It was looser than it should have been if his muscles had contracted the way they usually do at the moment of death, but that wasn’t evidence. The dry paint was. Also your clothes. They were still warm from your body. They wouldn’t have been if you’d been posing for a half hour, like you said.”

  “Well, well. You are a detective.”

  “You were working under a deadline, or you wouldn’t have hit him with a charity run going on down in the street and cops hanging from the lightpoles. You like your anonymity, or you wouldn’t worry about being seen by one of them, a woman alone leaving a building where a murder was committed. And then there was the painter in the hall. He didn’t see you slipping in; painters take breaks, just like everyone else. But you couldn’t go back downstairs without passing him. You could have killed him, too, but that’s one too many bodies on the same premises for a true professional. What’s a girl to do?”

  “What, indeed?” She seemed to be enjoying herself. She had the weapon.

  “Easy. You shucked your clothes, ditched the gun somewhere in the clutter—the cops will find it, but it won’t have prints or a serial number or a past history to spoil a job well done—waited till the painter wasn’t looking, and slipped down the hall and through my door. Chances are you saw me through the window from the street on your way here and took a chance that I’d be working on a Sunday with my door unlocked. If you were wrong, you could always go back for your gun and kill him. He wouldn’t be likely to run from a good-looking naked woman.”

  She laughed. She really was having a good time. “Thanks for the compliment. I work out. You have to stay in shape in my line, but I’m a woman too. I like to look good. Good enough anyway to ask a handsome gentleman to see me to my car and keep his mouth shut.”

  “Permanently, of course. If the painter was worth killing, so is a detective. There can’t be so many lady mechanics in this town the cops won’t put two and two together.”

  “Here’s where I say I prefer to be called a ‘hitperson.’” She wasn’t laughing now. Nothing like amusement had ever crossed that face. “On second thought, you may not be worth the commitment. Never let it be said I ever needed a man for any purpose, let alone slipping away in a crowd.” She slid back the hammer on my revolver.

  “Lose the piece now!”

  She hadn’t heard the hall door opening behind her. Now it swung around the rest of the way and Mary Ann Thaler charged in, accompanied by a pair of Detroit Police officers in uniform. They spread out inside the door, crouching, their service pieces clamped in both hands. The Felony Homicide lieutenant had on stone-washed jeans, black high-top Reeboks, a satin jogging jacket, and a baseball cap with a brown suede visor and her hair tucked up inside.

  The game of cops and robbers was starting to require all new equipment: compacts and curlers and an extra pair of pantyhose for those pesky runs during high-speed chases. I was beginning to feel even more like an endangered species than usual.

  The piece was lost. The officers flung Ms. Raskolnikov against the wall and put on the cuffs.

  I lowered my hands and looked at my watch. “Twenty minutes for a murder. That’s some kind of record.”

  “You try finding a place to park with barricades all over the neighborhood.” Lieutenant Thaler returned her nine-millimeter to the shoulder rig under her jacket. “Where’s the cold cuts?”

  “Next door.”

  In the studio, she squatted on her heels to look at the dead man’s face. “That’s Tontine, all right. He’s wanted for questioning by the FBI for an art forgery scam with connections to the Benevolent Brotherhood of Sicilians. We got a flyer. I guess someone was afraid he could talk as well as he could paint.” She looked up at the embryonic painting on the easel. “That’s where she got the idea to impersonate a nude model, huh? She got a nice body?”

  “If you like one with a murderer inside,” I said. “You’ll find my prints on the telephone when you dust the place. I called you from here.”

  She stood up. “What are you doing at work on a Sunday, anyway?”

  “What are you? I thought you had weekends off this month.”

  “The IRS doesn’t recognize weekends.”

  “You shouldn’t put things off till the last minute,” I said. “You can get in all kinds of trouble.”

  Necessary Evil

  Rosecranz, the building super, met me in the foyer. He was the oldest thing in the place after the plumbing, and whether he existed outside it was a mystery no one had yet paid me to solve. At midnight and change he had on the same greasy overalls and tragic expression he wore at noon. At the moment it was directed at the ruins of the front doorframe, shot to splinters by a solid professional kick to the dead-bolt lock that had torn the screws from the pre-Columbian wood.

  “You didn’t hear anything?” I said by way of greeting.

  “I had on M.A.S.H. It must have been during the shelling.”

  “Uh-huh.” I didn’t elaborate. Whatever the corporation that owned the building was paying him, it didn’t cover acts of valor. “How many offices got hit?”

  “Just yours.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I got the rest during the climb to my floor. After the sitcom rerun had finished, he had stepped outside his office/apartment to check the front door before bed and had found it in its present condition. He’d snatched up the monkey wrench he kept around for pipes and crackheads, tried the doors to all the offices, and learned that mine alone had been forced. By then the intruders had left. He’d called me instead of the police on the theory that they hadn’t changed since they put him in the hospital for attending a rally for Sacco and Vanzetti in 1922. I couldn’t see any holes in the theory.

  The lock to my outer office—the one with A. WALKER INVESTIGATIONS on the door—had been slipped with a credit card or a strip of celluloid. The furniture and magazines inside were undisturbed. I’d secured the door to my private brain trust with a dead bolt, but they’re only as sound as the woodwork; the white gash where the frame had shattered was so worm-tracked it looked like Sanskrit.

  “You went inside?” I asked. Rosecranz nodded.

  I believed him, but I unlimbered the Chief’s Special and poked the muzzle into all the holes and corners. A good break-in artist can hide behind a dust bunny.

  Mounds of papers leaned at Dali-esque angles atop the old desk, crumples lay around the kicked-over wastebasket, the blinds hung crooked over the window. Everything just the way I’d left it when I locked up the evening before.

  Everything except the two green file cabinets. Even there they’d made a tidy job, springing the two simple bar latches that secured all the drawers, the same way every file case had locked since Eve hired Cain to get the goods on Adam. All the missing files had been scooped from the top drawer of the second cabinet, between Beeker and Day.

  “Something?” The super’s sad eyes had followed every movement like a dog’s.

  “Something.” I slammed the drawer shut with a boom they heard in Alberta.

  “Police?”

  “Why? I’ve already been robbed.”

  He called Detroit headquarters downtown anyway, for the insurance company. I skinned him a twenty to forget all about my office when he filed his statement, and got to work.

  I couldn’t get to who without going through why, and why wasn’t worth banging my head against until I figured out what. That meant identifying which files were gone.

  With the back of the customer chair tilted under the doorknob for privacy, I sat on the floor surrounded by spiral pads and transposed my notes onto a legal tablet, focusing on the names of clients that fit the hole. As experiences go, it was about as nostalgic as cramming for a tax audit.

  When I finished the room was full of daylight and cigarette smoke. My throat burned and my eyes felt pickled. I wrenched open the w
indow, sucked in my morning’s helping of auto exhaust, and sat down at the desk to place the first of many telephone calls.

  It was wild goose season. Two of the older numbers were invalid. Owen Caster’s machine answered, and I left a message asking him to call me back. April Berryman hung up—divorce case.

  I wound up with six no-answers, four new-parties-at-old-numbers, and three appointments for interviews. That was swell, provided I could think of some questions.

  • • •

  “Amos Walker. I hoped I’d never hear that name again.”

  Evelyn Dankworth met me at the Caucus Club. Her deep auburn hair and mahogany-colored eyes went with the stained glass and paneling, her tall highball with her two-fisted legacy. Her greatgrandfather helped found General Motors and drank himself to death in 1930. Her parents had gone in an alcoholic murder-suicide, and after a long custody battle she had been raised by an uncle who later stood trial for drunk driving and manslaughter. These days she divided her time between Betty Ford and a clinic in Toledo where cosmetic surgeons removed the fresh-burst blood vessels from her cheeks.

  “I get that a lot,” I said. “I’m only bothering you to prevent someone else from bothering you worse.” I told her about the burglary.

  “I hired you to rescue my daughter from a cult. You didn’t deliver. That’s hardly a scenario for blackmail.”

  “You hired me to find her. When I did, you tried to pay me to kidnap her and deliver her to some professional deprogrammers you’d hired to scare the cult out of her. I turned you down because she was eighteen and an adult. I’d have stood trial for abduction.”

  “In any case I haven’t heard from her in two years. She might be dead.”

  “Someone who knew about the situation might want to shake you down. That case file would help.”

  “You know my family history. Do you honestly think I could be hurt if any of this was made public?”

  I sipped my scotch, a single malt that tasted like the smoke from an iodine factory. “I wasn’t talking about blackmail. Someone might make contact with you and offer to deliver her for a consideration. A phony who got all his inside information from the stolen file.”