Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

by Loren D. Estleman

  He swigged beer. “I cannot even reimburse you.”

  “We’re square. I’ve got Prince Cortez, don’t forget. I don’t think you’re stupid enough to fight him with Uncle Sam watching, and he’ll be past his prime by the time you jump through the hoop in Washington.”

  “Will you fight him?” He looked at me. It was the first time I’d seen his eyebrows move more than a bubble off level.

  I scratched my hand. The cut was starting to heal. “I spend most of my day in a sweaty little room. I don’t want to spend my nights in one. My building super has family out in farm country. His Highness can perch on a fence and annoy the neighbors at sunrise.”

  “You are an animal lover?”

  “Only the ones with fur and cold noses. I thought about eating him, but he’s too stringy.”

  “I do not see the profit to you.”

  “I told your daughter at the start my books are in good shape. I got some sun and found good takeout across the street. I don’t think I want to eat in your cousin’s place. He told me he grinds the meat for his burritos. Authentic Mexican cooks shred theirs.”

  “He is Bolivian on his father’s side.” Zorboron chipped at the label on his bottle with a manicured thumb. “I, too, am disenchanted with the spectacle of birds mauling one another for the entertainment of imbeciles. It does not suit a man of standing in his community. I will be disappointed if after all you have said you take advantage of my withdrawal to mount an enterprise of your own.”

  “You’ll have to trust me on that.”

  “This thing I will do.” He offered me the hand with the tattoo. We shook.

  The Woodward Plan

  Emory Freemantle had been with the Detroit Public Library almost as long as the 1950 Wayne County Manual and had spent even less time outside its doors. His job was to wear a uniform and wake up the odd bum when he started drooling on Shakespeare’s sonnets. I’d been bribing him for ten years to unlock the back door for me midnights and Sundays when I needed to check a fact in one of the newspapers on microfilm.

  I parked next to the white marble Main Branch on Woodward and rapped on the fire door. He’d been waiting for me; a key rattled immediately in the lock on the other side and he swung the door open just wide enough for me to slide in around the edge.

  “Thanks for coming, Mr. Walker. I know I haven’t any hold on you. Our account’s square.” He gripped my hand gently; he was as big as a city bus and didn’t need to prove anything by crushing bone. He had skin the color of oiled walnut, faded a little with age, and pale eyes like Christ on the cross.

  “You never know when I might want to take out a reference book,” I said.

  “The librarians hate that. Meanwhile they let a hundred thousand in rare books crawl out through the ductwork. I pulled a guy out of a ventilator just last month.” He spoke carefully as he led me through a mile of metal stacks to the little room where he took his breaks. He read a lot when he wasn’t rousting drug dealers and book thieves and liked to make himself crazy diagramming the sentences of politicians.

  The break room had a Mr. Coffee, a microwave, a camp-sized refrigerator, and a round table covered with magazines, as if there weren’t enough to read on three floors. It smelled of strong Colombian and uncensored literature; Emory’s little borrowed stack on the counter included Ulysses and Harry Potter.

  He poured me a cup from the carafe, tossed a handful of coins into a Town Club box on the counter, and sat down at the table opposite me, folding his big hands on the top. “My nephew’s in Receiving Hospital, hooked up to a pinball machine. He may come out, or not. He hurt his head.”

  “Hurt his head on who?”

  His grin lacked heat. “I oughtn’t forget you’re a detective. He wrapped a Porsche around a lightpole four blocks up on Woodward. You might’ve heard about it.”

  I nodded. “It had to be a Porsche. A Chevy wouldn’t have made Section A.”

  “Cops called it a carjack. Lester stuck a gun in a guy’s face in the parking lot at the Whitney, they said, and took off for Eight Mile Road. City cruiser got in behind him up past Kirby; he had it up to a hundred when he spun out. They don’t know if he’ll walk again.”

  “Should’ve picked a Chevy.”

  He worked his hands together. Powerful hands, with balloons of scar tissue on the knuckles; they must have given him hell in damp weather. He never got to the Golden Gloves, but he’d sparred with many who had, and one winner.

  “My sister did as good a job raising him as she could, but she done it alone. There’s some juvie stuff on his record, but that was years ago, and he never raised so much as his fists on no one. Jacking that car wasn’t his idea.”

  “Cops didn’t pull anyone else out of that wreck. How long since you talked to Lester?”

  “They ain’t let me in to see him. I seen him a week before the thing. He had him a job installing car stereos, was saving to buy speakers for his Jeep. You can’t put speakers the size he wanted in no Porsche.”

  “A Porsche buys a lot of speakers. I’m not trying to be tough, Emory. Nobody knows anybody.”

  “You want to see the gun?”

  “Cops said he threw it out of the car. They didn’t find it, so it went down the sewer.”

  “Them sewers swallow up a lot of ordnance. You wonder how the shit gets out to the river.” He leaned back to snake a hand inside his pants pocket and clattered something onto the table.

  I caught it before it bounced over the edge. It was black plastic, about the size of a cigarette case, with a red muzzle. A spring snapped inside when I pulled the trigger. It was made for shooting plastic darts with rubber suction cups on the ends. I chuckled and slid it back his way. He made no move to pick it up.

  “You get points for originality, but that’s all,” I said. “It won’t buy you thirty seconds downtown.”

  “I gave him that toy gun in a box with a set of darts and a target board for his tenth birthday. I never seen it again till Old Willie brought it to me yesterday. You seen Old Willie. Begs his dinner off folks coming out of the Whitney with doggie bags and eats it in Periodicals.”

  “He the one with the football helmet?”

  “No, that’s Cap’n Kirk—he gets messages from Jupiter. Old Willie wears a sock cap with a deer on it. He picked up the gun in the parking lot where Lester threw it when he took off in the Porsche.”

  I retrieved the toy and turned it over. “It wouldn’t make a difference to the charge. It’s still armed robbery. They put teeth in the law after too many toy-gun users walked on the weapons beef.”

  “That’s ‘cause some toys look real to the victims. You think anybody would be fooled by this one? They don’t put red tips on real guns.”

  “It could happen,” I said. “If it was dark enough, and the victim was Mr. Magoo.”

  “They light the lot at the Whitney brighter’n the MGM Grand. But let’s go out on a limb and say somebody might mistake this hunk of plastic for the real thing. You think anybody’d mistake Buzz Bernadotte for Mr. Magoo?”

  Bernadotte was the owner of the Porsche. A Chevy might have made Section A at that, if it had been carjacked from him; only if it had been a Chevy, it wouldn’t have been Buzz Bernadotte.

  “Richie Rich, maybe,” I said. “Not Magoo. You think the carjacking was phony?”

  “You’re the detective.”

  I twirled the gun Tom Mix fashion on my finger. “Old Willie sell you the gun or what?”

  “It was a gift. I let him curl up in the stacks sometimes when I’m supposed to be sweeping him out the door. He don’t cause trouble, and he’s afraid of shelters. He got his teeth kicked in once for grinding ‘em in his sleep.”

  “He see anything?”

  “I asked, but he went dummy. Half these boys talk to theirselves all the time. The other half wouldn’t open their mouths to tell you you’re parked on their foot. Guess which half is Willie’s.”

  “You say he hangs out in the Periodicals section?”

 
; “All day every day, except dinnertime, when he’s at the Whitney. And today,” he added. “Today he didn’t show up.”

  “He ever miss before?”

  Freemantle shook his close-shorn head. “Not since I know him. That says something, don’t it? I mean if he saw something.”

  “Not to the law.” I put down the toy gun. “It wouldn’t be the first time a policyholder mistook his insurance company for an ATM. If that’s the case, Lester might do a jolt for fraud, but not armed robbery. He’ll take his physical therapy in minimum security, be out in ten months. The gun’s cheesy enough to make the cops ask Buzz some hard questions, but it’s no good if they can’t place it at the scene.”

  “That’s why I didn’t go to the cops.” The guard got a worn wallet out of his hip pocket and laid five one-hundred dollar bills side by side on the table between us, dealing solitaire. “That’s all I got. I know you get three days up front. I’ll write you a check for the rest, if you don’t mind hanging on to it till Friday. That’s when I get paid.”

  I picked up one of the bills. “Case dough. I’ll be back for the rest when I have something to sell. Give me a description of Old Willie. Maybe he’s found a new hat.”

  • • •

  Buzz Bernadotte’s line stretched back to Detroit’s French Colonial period. The family had built its fortune on the trade in beaver pelts, invested it in railroads, then automobiles, and more recently in fast food and sports franchises. Since the 1967 race riot, the Bernadottes had been living in Grosse Pointe Farms, where they grow nothing but billionaires, but Buzz’s father Alec had been pouring money into a number of restoration projects along Woodward Avenue, Detroit’s main street: Theaters, restaurants, and art galleries had begun to appear on sites formerly occupied by crack houses and ladies named Chenille. Alec, Jr.—Buzz to the people who trailed him picking up fifty-dollar bills—made most of his investments in low-slung cars, high-breasted women, and dinners at restaurants like the Whitney, where his tips alone would keep a Democrat in dates for a year. It was one of the few places on Woodward not owned by his father.

  I went to the Whitney, but not to see Buzz. It was dinner-time, and rumor had it the best of the local color could be found at that hour in the parking lot.

  How this many-spired monument to the bad taste of a lumber baron managed to survive the years of civil unrest, soaring homicides, and mayoral plundering is one for Ellery Queen. It was serving sliced salmon hips smothered in champagne sauce while the rest of the city’s nightlife was roasting rats in the vacant lot down the street.

  The parking attendant was a good-looking black kid in a burgundy blazer. When he opened my door, I folded a twenty into a slim rectangle and held it between two fingers. If I’d started with a ten, then changed my mind when I caught a whiff of clarified butter from inside. “I’m looking for Willie.”

  He measured out a centimeter of careful smile. One look at my suit and the car it came out of had told him I wasn’t dining there. “That’s the first time I’ve heard anyone call it that.”

  “This one’s homeless. Short, black, about sixty, wears a knitted cap like a hunter’s with a deer embroidered on it. Begs doggie bags off customers.”

  “Him, yeah. I shoo him off every night.”

  “What about tonight?”

  “Not yet. He usually shows up about ten.”

  “Was he here the night of the carjacking?”

  “Probably. I had my hands full with the police that night. I’m the one who called them. I saw the whole thing.”

  “What’d you see?”

  His face showed animation for the first time. “After I brought up Buzz’s car, he took it to the end of the drive and waited to turn. This guy stepped from behind a pillar waving a piece. Buzz got out with his hands up, and the guy got in and took off.”

  “You saw the gun?”

  “He had something in his fist. I didn’t think it was a pocket calculator and neither did Buzz.”

  “Did you see him ditch it?”

  He shook his head. “Cops said he must have thrown it out during the chase.”

  “The cops know everything,” I said. “That’s why there’s no crime in the city. Willie show up last night?”

  “I wasn’t in last night.”

  “Who was?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t here, remember?”

  “I forgot. People forget things and think they never knew them.” I gave him the twenty.

  “I’ll get my supervisor. He’s here every night.”

  His supervisor had sixty pounds on him and gray hair.

  He’d witnessed the carjacking too, but he hadn’t seen anything the kid hadn’t. He thought Old Willie had been hanging around about that time. It cost me another twenty to find out he hadn’t seen him since.

  I hung around the lot until ten-thirty, smoking cigarettes and watching foreign cars and the odd Cadillac come and go, taking on and unloading well-fed men in Frank Lloyd Wright ties and glittering women. They left carrying filets of Tibetan yak wrapped in swan-shaped foil, and no one came forward to relieve them of the burden. That nailed it for me. Men who hadn’t eaten all day didn’t miss such opportunities. I cranked my battered old American make out of the corner where the employees parked and paid a call on the Wayne County Morgue.

  • • •

  My contact there was a neat little guy with bright eyes behind win-dowglass spectacles he thought made him look older. He looked like Mr. Peabody’s boy Sherman. He said, “You’re going to have to be more specific. This place is a clearinghouse for the homeless, and the living population’s eighty percent black.”

  I told him about the knitted cap. “It might not be natural causes. No wood-alcohol poisoning or OD or passing out on the Penn Central tracks?”

  His eyes brightened further. “We got a g.s. early this morning. That’s gunshot.”

  “N.s.,” I said. “That’s no shit. Show me the body.”

  “Anywhere else, that’d be a euphemism.” He put down his carton of chocolate milk and led the way to a drawer. The naked body was bluish gray, the face shrunken to the skull. He might have spent the last ten thousand years in a crevasse, except for the blue hole just above his left nipple. Bright Eyes scooped the rolled-up paper sack from the foot of the drawer and pulled out a knitted stocking cap, blaze orange the way they wear them in the woods, grimy from constant wear and no laundering. The deer wasn’t talking.

  “Him, I guess,” I said. “Where’d they find him?”

  He returned everything to the drawer, shut it, and went back to his desk to consult his clipboard. “State fairgrounds. Ditch along Woodward. M.E. says he was moved. He dug out a twenty-two long. Pro job, or a good amateur who wanted it to look that way.”

  “Straight shot. No pun intended. They were waiting for him on his way to the Whitney, or more likely on his way back to the library, after ten p.m. when it was quiet. Probably offered him a handout; that’s how they got him in front. Then they rode him up to the first deserted stretch and dumped him.”

  “Doesn’t say that here. Who’s your snitch?”

  “Andy Jackson.” I poked a twenty into the pocket of his white coat.

  Alec Bernadotte was easier to find than his son; it’s often that way with philanthropists. They like to be seen and have their pictures taken, shaking hands with crippled children and giving out big dummy checks loaded with zeroes. It was a morning reception in the baroque lobby of the Fox Theater on Woodward; not his project, which was why he didn’t hesitate to rest the plastic glass containing his mimosa on the head of one of the plaster lions flanking the staircase.

  I got in line to shake his hand. He was a small-boned man in his fifties with black, Gallic eyes and a tanned bald head, a hundred and fifty pounds of nervous energy in a pinstripe suit measured and cut under the direct supervision of God. When he stuck out his hand I showed him my ID.

  “Amos Walker, Mr. Bernadotte. I need to ask a couple of questions about the incident at the Whitney.
”

  The practiced twinkle in the black eyes became a stony glint. Two large men in blue suits stepped forward to flank him. They looked just like the lions. He said, “If you’re working for the insurance company, you’ll have to talk to Buzz. He and I don’t communicate these days.”

  “Not at all?”

  The thrum of voices was loud in the cavernous room, but he lowered his a notch. “I’m a venture capitalist, Mr. Walker. Once an investment has revealed itself to be a losing proposition, I stop putting money into it. My son is a junk bond. He’s been on his own for months.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “You might try the DAC. He likes to keep fit. It’s the one thing he does that makes sense. He needs to stay in front of his creditors.”

  I thanked him and started to leave. Turning back, I pulled the toy gun out of my side pocket.

  Bernadotte shrank back. The bodyguards went for their shoulder rigs. They were trained for speed and would probably have gotten off a couple of shots after I’d pumped half a clip into the man they were paid to protect. I think one of the lions gasped. Then the bodyguards saw what I was holding and relaxed. Bernadotte’s nervous laugh joined theirs, a beat behind. Echoes of it rippled through the crowd in the room.

  “Is life that boring?” Bernadotte asked.

  “Calculated risk,” I said. “I knew you could afford the best and that their reflexes would work just as well both ways. You knew it was a gag, huh?”

  “I’m not an idiot. It might as well have a flag sticking out with ‘bang’ printed on it in big letters.”

  “Is your son an idiot?”

  “Only when it comes to money. He thinks I have my own printing press. Or thought it, until I cut him off. But he knows a toy gun from the real thing.”

  I thanked him again and put away the toy. It was worth almost getting shot.

  Woodward Avenue was named for Augustus B. Woodward, who in 1807 proposed his “Woodward Plan” for rebuilding Detroit after the great fire burned it to the ground two years earlier. The plan called for a series of great circles after the fashion of Washington, D.C., beginning downtown and radiating out to where Outer Drive now encloses the central city. The building I walked into, on Madison a quarter turn along the great circle off Woodward, stands just about where the Plan petered out and the gridded blocks begin. That’s where we lose most of our visitors; they circle the octagonal lots for hours, fingers clamped to the steering wheel and only the ghosts of hope on their faces.