Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Thirty minutes.” He clicked off.

  It was snowing finally; bitter, streetwise flakes that rolled off the hood of the Cutlass like buckshot. I found a space near the six-story slot machine that used to be Trappers Alley and hung up my coat inside the Atheneum: a counter, six booths, and a scatter of tables on gray linoleum as old as the wine-dark sea. The restaurant was one of the few left in Greektown that hadn’t gone to ferns and stainless steel.

  There were only three customers on-site. A couple with overcoats still on over their party clothes dined in chilly silence in the far booth. Barry was nursing a mug of coffee at the end of the counter. He wore no coat as before and the same clothes he’d had on earlier that day.

  I slid onto the stool next to his. “What happened to guarding your back?”

  He pointed to a convex mirror mounted above the blackboard menu. The Today Only Special on baklava had entered its third consecutive year. “Sir and Lady Laughalot took my first choice.”

  “What’s their story?”

  “What do you think? They lost two bucks on the slots and spent a thousand trying to get it back at blackjack.”

  “Talk to them?”

  He shook his head. “I ask questions for a living. You never ask one you already know the answer to.”

  The counterman, thickset and hatchet-faced, with a long scar on his left forearm where a tattoo had been routed out, poured thick black coffee into a mug and set it in front of me. I hadn’t ordered it. I figured he was a disciple of Barry’s.

  I drank. The barely saturated grounds crawled down my throat and threw open a couple of hundred thousand brain cells. “What couldn’t wait eight hours?”

  “Northwest Flight 166 to Islamabad,” he said. “It leaves at seven, and I need to be there by five to make sure my underwear clears security. An arms dealer I’ve been in close contact with longer than my first marriage is over there peddling a missile guidance system to a fellow whose most recent address was Kabul.”

  “I didn’t know you were married.”

  “If I had a nickel for every fact you didn’t know about me I wouldn’t have to fly to Pakistan.” He took a fold of paper from his shirt pocket and stood it tent fashion on the counter next to my coffee.

  I opened it up. It was one of the sheets of newsprint he used for making notes when he bothered to make notes. It contained a 212 area code and telephone number scribbled in pencil in his left-hand slope, nothing else.

  “New York,” I said.

  “Columbia University. It belongs to a professor of Romance languages.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “You’ll have to get it from him. I spent an hour and a half on the phone just getting permission to give you that number.”

  “He sounds like you.”

  “He’s got a good reason. He only has one eye, and he didn’t start out in life that way.”

  We were speaking in murmurs. I waited until the counterman pushed through a swinging door into the fragrant kitchen. Even then I didn’t raise my voice. “The Lincoln Question?”

  Barry said, “Yeah. I installed a four-barrel carb in the home computer a week ago—the works, including air scoop. It gets into corners the laptop doesn’t know existed. I got a recipe for heating pennies and a list of names. This one kept coming up. He’s the only one not still in prison down there, not counting the ones they buried in the yard and the ones unaccounted for, who are probably buried next to them. Emigrated two years ago. State Department looked down his throat, looked up his birth certificate, and granted him asylum. Notwithstanding all that, he still pisses his pants whenever someone addresses him in Spanish with an island accent. Down there they don’t put erasers on pencils. They hate to make mistakes.”

  “The two years is good. What else?”

  “The name Mariposa rang a very big bell. I guess someone slipped up and called her by it on the way down to the boat.”

  “Thanks, Barry.” I started to refold the sheet. He snapped his fingers and stuck out his palm.

  “Memorize it. I only wrote it down because you’re the visual type.”

  I unfolded the paper again, mouthed the number a couple of times, closed my eyes. I dropped it on his palm. He plucked a matchbook with THE ATHENEUM printed in red on the cover from a glass bowl full of them, set fire to the sheet, and dropped it into his empty mug to burn out. The couple in the booth didn’t look up, but the counterman pushed in from the kitchen sniffing the air, spotted the flame, and said, “Hey, hey!”

  Barry said, “Opaa!” and put his hand over the mug to snuff it out.

  ELEVEN

  New York and Michigan share the same time zone, a fact that seems to be lost on everyone but people who live in Michigan. It was too early to call the number I’d memorized and too late to go back to bed, but I tried bed anyway and gave up after an hour and a half locked in combat with three slugs of Greektown coffee. I had a cup of my own and tomato juice for breakfast and drove to the office unsatisfied. Drinking Juan Valdez after the Atheneum was like chasing single-malt Scotch with Kool-Aid.

  The temperature had risen, turning the snow that was still falling into a gluey mixture of rain and loose ice crystals. But the temperature of the pavement was still below freezing and I had an interesting moment with a patch of black ice and a city salt truck I’d just as soon not remember in my next life. For what it’s worth, I appeared to have lost all tails, open and closed. The salt truck and my Cutlass were the only vehicles abroad at that hour.

  I had my choice of spaces in the little lot near my building. The attendant, usually an inexhaustible source of unsolicited gossip, stayed inside his plywood booth out of the drizzle, nursing a Thermos and watching Mr. Rogers on his portable TV. I surprised Rosecranz, the building superintendent, mopping the foyer and passed a member of the cleaning crew lugging a bag of trash downstairs. The grand panoply of early morning had opened itself up to me in all its variety.

  A visitor was snoozing in my outer office. He was a long loose number in a cable sweater and unpressed Dockers, slouched on the upholstered bench with a seasoned mackinaw bunched up behind his head to protect it from the maple rail and his feet spread in clunky sneakers with waffle soles. He was too tall to stretch out full length. His mouth hung open, but he was breathing quietly; those lanky types aren’t snorers, as a rule. He had a nice head of chestnut curls and he needed a shave. I didn’t know anything about him, except that he was good with locks. I had a dead bolt on the door and I always used it when I went home for the night.

  A black duffel slumped on the floor at the foot of the bench. I unzipped it and poked among the clothes inside, opened the cheap vinyl toilet kit, and found nothing more interesting than an electric razor and an unhealthy obsession with L.L. Bean. I put everything back, moved a stack of National Geographic to one end of the coffee table, and sat on the edge, facing the sleeper. I didn’t want a cigarette, but I lit one and blew the smoke his direction. After a little while his face twitched. He rubbed his nose, shifted positions, and slept some more. I leaned forward and blew a cloud into his face. He snorted, coughed, and opened a pale blue eye.

  “You’re Walker?” He didn’t even sound hoarse. He would be one of those individuals who dropped off when they wanted to, slept the programmed length of time, and woke up with all the circuits intact. My father was one, by vocational necessity, but that was in the days before truck stops and sleeper cabs. Nowdays it seems like showing off.

  “What did you use on the door?” I asked.

  He stirred, reached into a pocket of the Dockers, and brought out a flat worn gray suede case that closed with a snap. “Most people think it’s a nail kit,” he said. “I used to be able to get it through airport security without questions. Now I have to check it. I’m not a B-and-E man, I just needed to crash for a little. Been up twenty-four hours.”

  “No Continental breakfast, sorry. You can’t expect that for the rates.”

  After a second he showed his teeth in what someone
had told him was a grin. The other eye opened. He had heavy lids and he liked to look out from under them. That and the sneer made him a bully of the classic schoolyard type. I studied him the way you stare at a loose shingle—something that would have to be dealt with, and sooner was less expensive than later.

  “That makes you Walker,” he said. “Corky said you were quicker on the draw than what’s good for you.”

  “Corky as in Sid Corcoran of St. Paul?”

  “Minneapolis-St. Paul; but fuck that. They don’t correct you in Minneapolis.” He returned the burglar kit to his pocket, groped in the one on the other side, and showed me a Minnesota private investigator’s license. Alvin Spitzer was the name.

  “They call you Alvin or Spitz?”

  “Neither, if they admire their bridgework. Al’s okay. What about you?”

  “You seem comfortable with Walker. Tell me why we’re introducing ourselves.”

  He put away the ID, sat up, and cracked his neck, my favorite habit after chewing tinfoil. “You gave Jillian Rubio to Corky. He gave her to me and I tracked her through the DMV to a duplex in Coon Rapids. Neighbor on the other side hasn’t seen her lately: months or weeks, he couldn’t say. She keeps to herself. Why are they always the ones that go missing?”

  “Because the ones that don’t turn up quicker. People notice when they’re not around. What did you get out of the duplex?”

  He showed his teeth, thought about running a bluff, then remembered where he was and how he got in and moved a shoulder. “She’s a good Catholic, or wants people to think so. A cross in every room and spares on chains in all her drawers. All her books and magazines are in English. Only things in Spanish were some letters I found in a box on the bureau in her bedroom, all in the same handwriting and from the same address. Most recent was postmarked November third of last year. No mail in her box, so she probably stopped delivery, but you need a court order to find out for sure. I took the letters and gave them to Maria at the office, to translate. They were from Jillian’s mother. Newsy as all hell. The telephone book should be so dull.”

  I hadn’t told Corky about Gilia or blackmail, but if the mother were part of that, it seemed likely she’d make some mention of it in a letter. Or maybe not. She came from a country where mail was opened and read in transit. “Return address Detroit?”

  “You guessed it. West Vernor Avenue?”

  “Mexicantown. You don’t have to be Mexican to live there, but life’s easier if Spanish is your first language. You could have given me this over the telephone. I don’t like charging clients for unnecessary travel. Somehow I don’t think Corky does either.”

  “He’s eating the expenses. There’s a subpoena on its way to the office in St. Paul with my name on it. We thought it best for everyone if I wasn’t there to take delivery.”

  “He said you don’t make friends easily.”

  “The advantage being that when I do, they’re worth keeping around. So you’re getting my considerable services for free. Use them or don’t. If not, give me the name of a good cheap hotel. I can take in a couple casinos and maybe the Ford Museum while I’m here.”

  I let that one swing. I knew he was good with locks, and Corky said he ran a good gag, but I didn’t like him by a mile. I saw discipline problems in my future. “What name is the mother using?”

  “Miranda Guzman. I guess she remarried. I gathered from the letters she owns dogs. Dogs don’t like me any better than people. If I’m going along, don’t count on me to scratch them behind the ears.”

  “We can pick up some biscuits on the way.”

  “That mean I’m going along?”

  “Until you forget who’s boss actor. I’m not as easy to get around as a doorman.”

  He uncased his incisors one more time. No wonder he didn’t get along with dogs; they’re territorial. “Corky told you about that, did he?”

  “He also said you’re into him for twenty thousand in bail. I have to work in this town. If you queer that, I won’t go to Corky. You don’t want to wrestle with me. I don’t have any more friends than you.”

  He rose. He stopped rising at six-two and none of it was suet. His hands formed fists at his sides, as if that was the position they found most natural. I didn’t feel like getting up. I took my cigarette out of my mouth, rested my hands on the edge of the coffee table, and kicked him in the nearest shin. He took in air through his teeth and bent to grasp it.

  I stood up. A member of the cleaning crew was standing in the doorway, holding a broom and dustpan and a square bucket filled with spray cans and bottles. He was a deaf-mute in his fifties with thick pads of scar tissue around his eyes and his nose spread all over his face. He watched us without blinking.

  “You can give me the rest in the brain box,” I told Spitzer, shaking out my keys. “I’ve got a bottle of Old Smuggler in the desk, good for applying internally or externally.”

  “I’d bust it over your head if I didn’t need it.” He finished rubbing his shin and tested it with his weight. “Maybe sometime you’ll get to St. Paul.”

  “Minneapolis-St. Paul.” I opened the door and herded him inside.

  It was my second visit to the neighborhood in as many days, and I was just as happy that none of the people who were beginning to brave the slush appeared to be related to Caterina Munoz. I wasn’t so sure I’d get the friendly end of a bottle of mescal without the presence of Gilia’s wardrobe mistress to curb her nephews’ protective instincts. The awnings were coming down and the steel cages were going up in front of the bakeries, paleta shops, tortilla factories, and corner markets with plucked fowl dangling upside down in the windows. A thin boy of about twelve, with black bangs and the face of an old man framed by the hood of his parka, pedaled a bicycle along the sidewalk carrying wrinkled brown chiles and cans of refried beans in the basket attached to the handlebars. West Vernor in February looked like Mexico City in a science fiction film about a new ice age.

  Spitzer glowered out the window on his side. “You got an ugly winter. I thought you had the lake effect here, too—fluffy drifts, the works. Looks like the inside of a goat’s stomach.”

  “Tourist Council wanted to put that on our license plates. Wouldn’t fit.” I looked for addresses. There ought to be a law requiring they be posted prominently on places of business.

  “You got to wonder what the Mexicans think. What makes a man move his family from Chihuahua all the way to the fucking North Pole?”

  “Automobiles. Minimum wage is higher than their maximum.”

  “Not high enough for me. I’d still be working in Florida if it wasn’t for my ex-wives. It got so I couldn’t follow one restraining order without violating two others.”

  “There are forty-nine other states,” I said. “One’s California.”

  “I thought about it. I could put up with the crowds and the traffic and the goddamn Democrats and the fat overcooked tourists and their fanny packs. I just didn’t want to have to get used to a whole new set of natural disasters. God threw us out of paradise and He gets sore when we try to crawl back in. So He sends hurricanes and earthquakes and fires and floods and droughts and mudslides and paid lobbyists. I’ll take my chances with snow and ice. It beats listening to a movie star sitting on her redwood deck blubbering over the fate of the spotted owl.”

  “I didn’t know there were movie stars in Florida.”

  “There are movie stars in Miami and Phoenix and Santa Fe and wherever the sun shines warm. That’s why I picked Minnesota.”

  I almost missed the address. It belonged to a narrow, butter-colored house with a high peaked roof wedged in between a cinder-block restaurant with a bullfighting mural painted across the front and a discount tire shop. I’d driven down Vernor at least twice a month since I learned to drive, and I’d never noticed it before. I U’d into a space across the street and looked at Spitzer. “How are you with women?”

  He made the thing he thought was a grin. “I never had any complaints.”

  “T
hat’s what I thought you’d say. I’ll do the talking.”

  Three painted wooden steps led to the front door. There was a wicker shade in the window next to the door and in one corner a square of white cardboard neatly lettered in black Magic Marker:

  AUTHORIZED PRESA CANARIO BREEDER

  CHD FREE GUARANTEED

  “Presa canario.” Spitzer mangled the words, however they were supposed to be pronounced. “Sounds like a pasta plate.”

  I pressed the button next to the door. I got a jingling buzz from deep in the house and then a deep, rooping bark I could feel in my testicles.

  Spitzer said, “Shit,” and backed down a step.

  I reached behind under my coat and loosened the Smith & Wesson in its kidney holster. I’d had business with mean dogs before. A normal-size man in good health is more than a match for most if he keeps his head, but there was more than a hundred pounds behind that bark.

  Inside, someone yelled. The barking stopped. A floorboard squeaked and the door came open wide enough for the woman inside to insert her face into the gap. It was a strong Hispanic face, framed between corkscrews of dark hair that had come loose from the pins. Very large, very dark eyes, good skin, and the beginnings of jowls. She’d gone light on the lipstick and eyeliner, a good choice. There had been great beauty there once, and she still had a claim on handsome if she didn’t try too hard to hold on to it. I had her down for fifty.

  “Mrs. Guzman?” I said.

  Her eyes flicked from my face to Spitzer’s and back to mine. “You’re early. I haven’t fed them yet.”