Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde

by Loren D. Estleman

  “All except the last three.”

  His fast draw was one for Pecos Bill. If he’d been armed, I’d have had a hole in my chest before I gave any thought to the revolver I wore under my coat. He whisked the envelope from his inside breast pocket and tossed it at my feet. It made an expensive thump when it hit the carpet. I found my reflexes and stooped to pick it up. There was nothing greater than a fifty inside, but the packet was too thick for the flap to close properly.

  “That is fifteen thousand. You may count it if you wish. I offered each time to return the unclaimed five thousand to Miss Cristobal, but she told me to hold on to it and add it to the next payment. Consider it your retainer, to be repaid after you have deducted your fee and expenses in the event you are unable to determine the Rubio woman’s fate.”

  I flipped the envelope onto the bed. It landed with a smack. U. S. Grant’s eyes glared at me above the notch.

  “I’d be tempted, if I thought you weren’t blowing Spanish smoke up my chimney about separating yourself from the action.”

  “I was not. Of course, I would prefer it be on my own two feet instead of the alternative we discussed. You will report directly to Miss Cristobal. If you call her first, using the private cellular number she will provide, you will not so much as smell my cigar.” He seemed to remember he was holding it then. He snapped a flame out of a gold-and-enamel lighter and started it burning. It smelled like the inside of an exclusive club, the front door of which would always be closed to me.

  “You hesitate still.” He frowned at the ring he’d blown; as circles went it was a bubble off perfect. “I will raise the bonus. One hundred thousand dollars. The difference to come from my own pocket.”

  “That must be quite a work-release program they have there in Jackson,” I said. “Most ex-cons have to settle for minimum wage.”

  “Let’s just say I settled for smoking Dominicans and saved my pennies.”

  “What’s your end? Gilia is gilt-edged now, but the market in futures isn’t looking too good. A man with your connections can always clean up a replacement. They dump the raw material at the L.A. bus station every morning and afternoon.”

  “You are mistaken. There is but one Gilia to a century, and the century is no older than this cigar. More important, there is but one Gilia in my life.”

  I laughed in his face. He looked at the ceiling and forgot to squirt smoke. It found its way out of his nostrils in twin blue threads.

  I picked up the envelope and thumbed through the bills. There was fifteen thousand there all right. I tapped a corner against my lower lip. “She could be guilty, you know.”

  “Of revolutionary activity? But of course. She has said as much.”

  “No, the other.”

  He appeared to consider it for the first time. “It is as good. Better, maybe. A woman who would kill for love is a precious thing.”

  “It spices up the Friday night fights.” I put the envelope in my inside breast pocket. “Keep your hundred grand. Gangster dollars never stay with me long. I can’t walk past a church poor box with them in my wallet, and I have to burn the wallet after. It’s a new wallet.”

  He lifted his eyebrows again. Then he placed his cigar in a glass ashtray as big around as a bicycle wheel and let it smoke. “I will tell you what you need to know to start. Then we will return to Miss Cristobal’s suite and she will tell you what you need to know to finish.” He lowered his eyebrows, and with them the lids of his eyes. “I sold you very hard to her, gringo. I hope you will not make me out a liar.”

  I shrugged him a North American shrug. It wasn’t as fluid as his, but my ancestors came from a colder climate. Maybe he was in love with her after all. Weasels fell for chinchilla wraps every day.

  SIX

  He was standing alone on hell’s hilltop, swinging a saber at a half-naked warrior while another warrior took aim at him with a captured revolver. All of his companions were dead or in the process of being butchered, and what this all had to do with selling beer was somebody else’s mystery. I’d had the Anheuser-Busch advertisement framed and hung on the wall of my office so long I couldn’t remember what sort of stain it was hiding. In all that time, Custer hadn’t made any headway toward subjugating the Sioux and Cheyenne, and I was no closer to retirement than I had been the day I bought him in a junk shop in Redford.

  I was waiting for a callback on a message I’d left with a number in Milwaukee, and the cheap print was the only thing worth looking at in the meantime. The two olive green file cabinets—retro chic now, no longer just a pair of stove-in saurians inherited from the back room of a mortuary—were full of dust and dead cases, the rug had given up its pattern to the sun, and the desk was just a desk and the man behind it just taking up space in obedience to the first law of nature.

  Hector Matador had made the October blackmail payment to Jillian Rubio in a restaurant in Milwaukee, a dark wood erzatz German place with decorative steins on shelves all around the main dining room. The personnel who answered the telephone there didn’t remember either customer, but then four months had elapsed and at the time they were up to their Lederhosen in Oktoberfest. That meant a hotel search, and I remembered a detective there I’d tagged for help in the past. A recording had kicked in on his end, referring me to an 800 number, never a good sign. There I’d gotten a recorded directory, pressed the nearest option to what I needed, and left my name and number.

  The telephone rang, taking me away from the Little Big Horn. A deep masculine voice with some evidence of radio training asked me if I was with A. Walker Investigations.

  “I am A. Walker Investigations. Is this a party calling itself Millennium Confidential Services in Milwaukee?”

  “This is the Milwaukee office. We also have offices in Madison and Green Bay. I’m Lester Ziegler, special agent in charge. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m looking for Dan DiNapolitano. I didn’t think I’d need to do detective work to find a detective.”

  “Don’t know the name, sorry. He might be one of the independents who sold their practices to us last year. We offer a very comfortable buyout package whenever we open a new office.”

  “I wouldn’t think there was enough work in Wisconsin to support three branches of an investigation firm. Dan barely made his rent shooing home lost cows.”

  The deep voice grew an edge. “We’re a little busy around here to discuss mutual friends you and I don’t have. If this is a business call, tell me what you need and I’ll tell you if we can deliver.”

  I said I needed someone to run through registrations, airline manifests, and railroad passenger lists for a certain week in October. I said I had a name and a description but no picture; that was bad. We discussed the difficulty of flying under an alias during the current situation; that was good. He quoted me a rate that made me feel like a discount dentist at a convention of microsurgeons. I asked him about his professional rate. He said that was his professional rate. I gave him the name and description and then he asked me about my credit history and I told him the name of my bonding company. All this took as long as Dan DiNapolitano would have needed to do the first two hotels.

  When we were through with each other, I thought a bit about Dan. I didn’t know him that well, just a monotone over the wire and the noise of an electric typewriter munching in the background. But he’d found more to say to me than Lester Ziegler of Millennium Confidential Services. I wondered how comfortable their buyout package was. Maybe Dan had had his fill of clerks, jerks, and boulevard Turks, not to mention the twicebreathed air in the county hall basement and the monoxide haze in the break rooms where taxi drivers drank their brimstone coffee and griped about their lousy marriages and their bratty kids and their rotten fares. Maybe one more fifteen-minute tail job that lasted a week had been one too many. Maybe he was out shooting badgers.

  I had another call to make, but that line was busy. The buzzbuzz woke up my stomach and it began to grumble. I remembered I was supposed to feed it every twelve hou
rs. When I told the girl at the answering service I was going out for a while, she tried to keep me on the line with some original remarks about Michigan in February. For all I knew I was her only customer. As I hung up it occurred to me that one of these years I’d dial the service and a tinny voice would direct me to another number that would be answered by Millennium Voice Mail.

  My bank was on the way to the soup-and-sandwich place where I was eating my lunch this century. The teller—a stranger; they changed them with the ballpoint pens—looked at me with mild interest when I laid fourteen thousand in cash on the ledge in front of him, but in the absence of an eye patch or a parrot on my shoulder he returned to his computer and handed me a slip indicating I would have whiskey and Velveeta for a few more weeks. The remaining thousand was snug in my wallet, waiting to bribe the surly border guard, buy the last vacant compartment on the Shanghai Express, snag the seedy little hotel room overlooking the Bay of Dirty Deeds, or procure a can of beanie-wienies at the 7-Eleven around the corner from home. Preparation is everything in grizzly-tracking and detection.

  The restaurant wasn’t much, even by downtown standards. It averaged five critical violations per inspection and the counter help smelled of reefers. But it was handy to the office and I liked the old-fashioned flatware with its perforated pink plastic handles that looked like Band-Aids. I had a bowl of tomato soup, which couldn’t have too much happen to it between the can and the pot, and watched the cook grill my cheese sandwich. The place was Arab-owned and had a new American flag tacked inside the window that faced the street. I smoked a cigarette for dessert and read the review of Gilia’s concert in the Free Press. The reviewer wasn’t impressed by the butterfly finale but allowed as how the star seemed to perform as if she was aware there was an audience present. He was a Sinatra man and only referred to the Chairman’s final appearance in Detroit five times in four columns. A sidebar feature mentioned the video Gilia was shooting all week in Mexicantown and what was left of the warehouse district.

  Barry Stackpole swung his counterfeit leg into the opposite side of the booth and followed it in. As usual he wasn’t wearing a coat, just a pink cashmere sweater over an Oxford shirt, prewashed jeans, and Keds high-tops. As not so usual, he had a deep tan and his normally sandy hair looked bleached. He was carving it close to the skull these days, which made him look even more like he’d cut algebra to sneak a smoke in the boys’ room. We were both looking at fifty from the same slim distance, but middle-age morbidity had hit him like a haulaway. He was fighting it with everything but fission.

  “Man,” he said, “you’ve got to start eating in better places. You’re starting to look like a cop.”

  I folded the newspaper. “I tried to call you a little while ago. Richard Simmons wants his sweater back.”

  “This is the hot color in Miami this season. Once a girl thinks you’re a man who is comfortable with his masculinity, you’re as good as in the stirrups.”

  “Maybe she just wants you to offer her a good price on a rinse and set.”

  He had on that toothpaste smirk that made women wonder why they were angry at him and made men want to push it through the back of his head. The week his father had died and left him his motorcycle collection, he’d joined a Harley club, discovered Viagra, and given up tennis for sex. He was going out with women who weren’t born yet the day a car bomb took off his leg, two fingers, and part of his cranium. The scars from his steel implant showed through the extreme haircut. The incident hadn’t prevented him from making celebrities out of a couple of hundred public enemies who would rather they’d stayed below the radar. Call him an underappreciated press agent.

  “Sam Lucy’s kid, Peter, bought a place called the Lagoon,” he said, apropos nothing. “‘The Nugget of the Gold Coast,’ he calls it. Or he did. The Miami Hotel Owners Association is looking into the purchase.”

  “Were they looking into it before you went down there?”

  “I wrote a guest column for the Sun-Sentinel. Could be coincidence. I sent you a postcard. Drew an arrow pointing to my room.”

  “Didn’t get it. Maybe Lucy has friends in the post office. I’m guessing when you drew that arrow it wasn’t your room anymore.”

  “My new hard-on didn’t drain all the blood from my brain.” He helped himself to a pickle chip off my plate. “I was on my way to your dump when I saw you through the window. Thought I’d show off the tan.”

  “It’s like the first robin of spring.” I asked him how his contacts were in Gilia Cristobal’s country. I didn’t mention Gilia.

  “Mostly dead. Revolution’s dead, too, but the government keeps on executing rebels. A rebel being anyone who slaughters one of his own chickens because he can’t afford the tax on meat.”

  “I’m checking a client’s story. It has to do with a love triangle and murder.”

  “I need specifics. That’s how all the love triangles end down there. The national flag is a broken heart on a field of daggers.”

  “This one has a political twist. A rebel leader slept with two women and one of them wound up with a skinful of poison.”

  “Rings a bell. What kind of poison?”

  “Something called Stelazine.”

  “Yeah, I know it. I went undercover in a booby hatch once. It can look like a heart attack or a stroke if no autopsy is performed. That’s the advantage. The disadvantage is it’s a hard drug to get hold of down there, unlike heroin or coke. The authorities keep a tight cap on all the legal narcotics. You’d have to have access to a locked hospital cabinet. The hospitals are all owned by the government, so that means there’s an armed soldado standing in front of it.”

  “I only need what was in the newspapers. Also anything you can get me on any political prisoners who might have vanished about the same time as the murder. Vanished as in escaped.”

  He nodded. He never made notes on anything of a criminal nature. All the photographs in his memory were front-and-profile. “Anything in it for me?”

  “Not now. Probably not ever. It’s a personal favor. Quid pro quo to be named later.”

  “Shit. Sex, murder, and politics. Put them all together, they spell Pulitzer. But it seems to me I already have one of those in the attic. How about lunch?”

  “I just ate.”

  “I mean me. All you can get in Miami is fish and clams. They couldn’t do a steak if you sent them to school in Omaha for a year. I skipped the delectable turkey loaf aboard the plane; saved my empty gut for the beef medallions at the Blue Heron.”

  “They don’t serve lunch there.”

  “They’ll serve me. INS was all set to deport the head chef until I made a couple of calls to DC. Been on their VIP list ever since.”

  “B.F.D. That stands for big freaking deal. What am I supposed to do, drink fizzy water and watch?”

  “My friend the chef will have to hot up the grill and prepare the meat. By the time it gets to the table you’ll be hungry again. We’ll stop and pick up my laptop and I’ll have what you need before the appetizer. You’ll have to pay for yours, though. All you ever did for the Heron was bleed in their parking lot.”

  “If you don’t have to pay for your meal, what do you need me for?”

  He slapped his smirk back on. “Company. I don’t like to eat alone.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since Pauly Cicero stuck a knife through the back of my booth in Allen Park last Easter. I wouldn’t be here, except he hit a stud. Not this stud. A stud inside the seat. Think you can keep an eye out for Paulies?”

  “Only all my adult life.” I slid out of the booth.

  SEVEN

  Her name was Mariposa.

  On formal occasions, when filling out documents or when her parents lost patience with her and addressed her by her complete designation, it was Mariposa Niceta Ignacia y Villanueva Flores, and there was evidence the family had owned El Salvador and a fair chunk of Guatemala through the generosity of Philip II of Spain, but their personal fortune had gone the way of the
Armada. A great-to-the-fourth-power grandfather, the Conde de Villanueva, had fled the homeland to avoid his creditors and run out of ocean on the island where Mariposa would be born four hundred years later.

  Many generations of hardscrabble existence followed, but by the 1950s the Flores family had done very well in coffee and invested some of its profits in the presidential palace to maintain its piece of the monopoly on foreign exports. Mariposa’s great-aunt nailed the deal by betrothing herself to the minister of the treasury. Then the military laid siege to the capital and the president committed suicide by shooting himself with eighteen rounds from a two-hundred-pound Krupp fifty-caliber machine gun. That threw a damp sheet over the wedding ceremony, and the reception was called off when the generalissimo who had taken charge nationalized the coffee industry and the Floreses found themselves once again without property or cash. (The great-aunt changed out of her white gown into a black sheath after her groom was herded along with the rest of the former cabinet into a soccer stadium and shot in front of a Dr Pepper sign.) When Mariposa was born, thirty years later, you couldn’t tell the descendants of the Conde de Villanueva from the rest of the islanders who supported their families by picking the bugs off leaves on the government-owned plantations.

  There was a brief dusty ray of hope in the overcast: A representative of the government-controlled radio station heard sixteen-year-old Mariposa singing in the choir at Our Lady of Perpetual Pain and booked her on the air to interpret the sentimental country ballads that were decreed suitable to keep the peasantry contented with the cards as dealt. At first she sang with two other black-haired girls, introduced as Las Palomas Negritas, the Little Black Doves, but within a few weeks her rich contralto moved her out from between them into solo spots. Then in a little harbor town where nothing ever happened her brother Fernando jerked the pin out of a grenade in a cafe frequented by soldiers, and the revolution was on.

  Actually, it had been going on for a year in villages and provinces throughout the country, but when prison laborers shoveled up what was left of Fernando and the half dozen men in uniform he’d taken with him, it threw its tentacles around Mariposa. Her father had died some years before between rows of coffee plants, so the arrest order named the remaining Floreses for conspiracy to overthrow the government. Her mother was removed to an undisclosed detention area and was not seen again. Mariposa eluded the soldiers who came for her at the radio station. For a time after, she was reported to be traveling with ragtag squads of revolutionaries, including a charismatic and well-educated young commander who was believed to have been the man who brought her the news of Fernando’s death and her mother’s arrest and bundled her out a back door while the government troops were coming in the front.