Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde

by Loren D. Estleman

  That particular stack of wood, he’d said, had been seasoning since last fall. No one connected with the yard had had any reason to look under the tarp and wouldn’t until the construction season started up in March. He’d asked the detectives if the state disclosure laws required him to inform customers that their wood had been contaminated by a corpse. They’d referred him to the Attorney General’s Office.

  “‘Female, five-two, eyes and hair brown, aged twenty to thirty,’” Alderdyce read from the notes he’d made on his blotter pad. “She had on a light cotton dress, ordinary lingerie, flat pumps. The shoes don’t often stay on; but whoever dumped her might have put them back on her feet, either out of respect for the dead or a compulsion for organization. How cold did it get in November?”

  “As I recall it was mild,” I said. “But a lot of people don’t dress for cold weather until they can’t stand it anymore.” I thought of Barry Stackpole.

  “She was wearing a small crucifix on a gold chain. The examiner had to cut it off. Bloating. That could make her a Catholic—the crucifix, not the bloating—but not necessarily. The Guzman woman didn’t give us a positive, although she recognized the clothes as her daughter’s. We’ll ask her again when she’s had some time, but by then we’ll know for sure anyway. You know how they take prints in cases like these?”

  “They cut them off the corpse and make finger puppets out of them.”

  He made a grumpy noise, as if I’d stepped on his punch line. “In Washington they use holographic photography. Here we’re still using ducking stools. Who’s paying your expenses?”

  The abrupt change of subject was supposed to catch me off guard.

  “I’m still trying to reach the client,” I said. “It isn’t a question I get to answer until I do.”

  He didn’t get mad. He’d booted that habit on the advice of a physician. “The mother says Jillian Rubio came to visit November tenth, intending to stay through Thanksgiving. On the twelfth she packed an overnight bag, saying she had an important appointment and would be back on the fourteenth. She wasn’t, but Mrs. Guzman wasn’t too worried. Apparently the daughter was an unstable type, couldn’t be counted on. Went months without telephoning or answering letters; then she’d show up in person, right out of the blue. Diagnosed manic-depressive, or whatever they’re calling it this season.”

  “Bipolar. It’s like a code. They change it whenever too many people understand it.”

  “That’s checkable, although she thought of that, too. The mother doesn’t know the name of the doctor.”

  “Who thought of it, the mother or the daughter?”

  “Detectives weren’t sure. Mrs. Guzman’s a cool character, they say. Must come from living with animals that can eat you alive the first time they figure out they don’t have to sit or stay just because you say so.”

  “If her daughter was taking medication for her condition, it ought to show up in the toxicology report.”

  “Which if so, in her depressive phase she walked across the street, ditching the overnight bag somewhere we haven’t found it, climbed up under the tarp, and committed suicide. That’ll fly.”

  “Dicier cases than that have.” I thought about the former president of Gilia’s country, shooting himself with a machine gun that required two men and a tripod to operate. “But in those cases the system had some incentive to make them fly. Jillian Rubio wasn’t that important.”

  “She was to someone.”

  I saw it was coming again and threw something in front of it. “Did Miranda Guzman see her leave?”

  “She went out to catch a city bus on the corner. We’re checking that. Obviously she missed it. Maybe someone offered her a ride. Whoever it was didn’t take her very far. Who’s paying your expenses?”

  Well, I hadn’t really expected it to stall him for long. I had a cup of coffee sitting on the desk in a blue-and-gold DPD mug I’d forgotten about. I took a sip and said nothing. The coffee wasn’t as bad as you hear. But it was cold.

  Alderdyce leaned back, fished in a pants pocket, and slid two quarters and a dime across the blotter. “Try the client again. There’s a pay phone in the hall.”

  I always obey the police when there’s no reason not to.

  Tapping a public telephone means a world of hurt for the locals who try it, but the Supreme Court is less specific about outside listening devices. In the hall I felt all around the box for a bug, unscrewed the mouthpiece and then the earpiece and looked inside, groped under the shelf. All I found was a petrified wad of gum. That left low-tech. A hangdog type with a fringe of ginger-colored hair was slumped on the wooden bench nearby, with nothing to do but check his necktie to see if the tomato stain was still there. He was probably a detective lieutenant. I turned my back on him and called the Hyatt.

  I argued with someone I may or may not have argued with before, and just as Gilia came on a male operator broke in to tell me I was out of minutes. Gilia asked him to reverse the charges. I waited to make sure he’d gone away, then made my report quick, on the same theory that if you yank off a Band-Aid all in one motion you spare the patient extra pain. It doesn’t work with Band-Aids and it didn’t work with Gilia. She rattled off some gutter Spanish that made a lot more sense to me than anything I’d heard from Don Quixote.

  When she stopped for breath I said, “This goes back to before she missed her first appointment. A good investigator might have made a better start at it then, but homicides take time. The cops just broke a case that took place at the Airport Hilton a dozen years ago; they had to wait for genetic science to catch up. I need to move a hell of a lot faster, which means I need your consent.”

  “Consent on what?” She sounded like someone who’d bought the Brooklyn Bridge and was waiting for the bank to tell her the check had already cleared.

  “I’m going to have to give the cops something. I’ve been in the jug before. It’s every bit as bad as they say, but the food’s decent—thank Amnesty International for that—and they let you alone with your thoughts. Only I wouldn’t be any use to you in a cage.”

  “Tell them everything. What’s the difference? The axe is going to fall either way. She was pretty clear about that.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. Most blackmailers are lazy or they’d find a less risky living. The information could be parked under a rock somewhere. If I can get the cops to cut me some slack I may be able to find the rock. Information’s the only card they accept. The honest ones, anyway.”

  “I guess it’s too much to hope that this inspector isn’t one of the honest ones.”

  “Yeah. There’s never one of the others around when you need one.”

  I heard canned music on her end, conga drums and vibes. She had the radio tuned to an Afro-Cuban station. “If he’s your friend and you tell him, will he keep the confidence?”

  “Police inspectors aren’t anybody’s friend, least of all mine. They have people to answer to, the people they have to answer to have people to answer to, and sooner or later one of them is a politician. It will get out. So our priority is not to give them anything we don’t want to get out.”

  “The blackmail—”

  “Is one of those things. Even if we don’t say what it was about. Especially then. That kind of thing just makes the darlings in the press want to run out and dig up whatever it is you’ve been paying to keep buried. Which they will, eventually. It’s all public record, remember.”

  “But if they haven’t found it out on their own by now …” She saw where that was going before she finished, but I kicked it home.

  “So far no one’s had a reason to match up all the files,” I said. “The minute they find out you’ve been paying extortion, they’ll have a reason. It’s called circulation and ratings. They call it truth.”

  “Give the police my name. I can stall them with lawyers, and bad publicity won’t hurt me as long as no one knows the details of how I came to be mixed up in a murder. I’m a pretty notorious character already. It might even get me a Eu
ropean tour.” She was starting to sound like the public Gilia now; shoot first and flash your breasts on the recoil.

  “No good. They’re bound to find out Jillian Rubio’s real name, and then they’ll guess the rest. Giving them a head start would be a bad idea.”

  “But what can you give the police to satisfy them?”

  I let two seconds trickle into Ma Bell’s purse. I was pretty sure the putative cop had gotten up from the bench and left, and when I looked around I was right. Mostly I wanted to enjoy the moment. “Hector Matador,” I said.

  FOURTEEN

  “Bullshit. Hector Matador? Bullshit.”

  When John Alderdyce employed his favorite compound word, it was usually the last in the argument. But this time there was a light in his eye. He was too much cop to dismiss a fresh opportunity to tie the Colombian drug lord to a murder. His telephone had begun ringing the instant I gave him the name, and he’d reached for it out of habit. Now he withdrew his hand and let it ring itself out.

  “I was as surprised as you,” I said. “He says he’s a reformed character. The parole board seemed to agree with him, and there wasn’t any red bank dye on his money, so I took the job.”

  Gilia’s reaction had been similar, but after I’d explained my reasons—different reasons from the one I’d given the inspector—she’d agreed it made sense, in a P.I. kind of way. The police held no fear for Matador. Once prepared for the encounter by his client, he could stonewall a little thing like a big-city homicide until whales beached themselves on the shore of Lake St. Clair. The fact that once he got clear he’d come after me with his private army was immaterial. He’d been waiting to light candles at my head so long I was already dead on general principle. It was a small enough price to pay for sleuthing time.

  Alderyce said, “I didn’t realize you’d been Born Again. The last time you two were in the same room, he tried to kill you.”

  “No, the last time was when I testified against him in Recorder’s Court. One might say the two things canceled each other out.”

  “If you needed the money that badly, why didn’t you rob a church?”

  “If I only worked for people I liked, I’d be sleeping in a refrigerator box instead of the palace I live in now.”

  “Ah. The solvency defense. Somehow I never expected to hear it from you. But then I blacked a kid’s eye in third grade when he told me the Easter Bunny died.”

  “The Easter Bunny died?”

  He wasn’t listening. He was looking at the pictures of his boys in their duofold frame, thinking I didn’t know what. They were school shots: hair combed, shirts bright and chosen by a maternal hand. One of them had started college. His brother was on a carrier in the Persian Gulf. If I’d known that at the time, I might have played things differently. Probably not, though. The game is tricky enough when the human card doesn’t turn up.

  I opened a palm. “The job looked okay. Matador had a standing appointment with Jillian Rubio the thirteenth of each month. After she missed three of them he got worried.”

  “Appointment for what?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Jillian didn’t either, at least to her mother. If it was the same appointment. Maybe they had a pact.”

  “It got broken this afternoon.”

  “Good luck with that,” I said. “Matador wouldn’t tell a cop his blood type if he blew an artery.”

  The telephone went off again. This time he answered it. He said “yeah” three times, wrote a name and a time on his blotter, and cradled the receiver. I glanced at his scribble. The name meant nothing to me and probably had to do with another case. He always used military time, not that he’d ever served. About the time I was scaling walls at Fort Campbell, he was riding around in the back of a police car, memorizing the names of streets.

  He said, “So that’s your story.”

  “Matador’s staying at the Dearborn Hyatt. You can confirm it with him.”

  “I never thought I’d see the day you used him as a reference.”

  “Times change. We’re chummy with China now.”

  He played with his gold pencil, standing it up on its eraser, sliding his fingers down from the top, reversing ends, sliding his fingers down from the top. Finally he blew out a lungful of coffee-flavored air and threw the pencil hard into a corner. It rattled off two walls and rolled to a stop at the base of a particleboard bookcase stuffed with Michigan Manuals. He’d inherited them from a predecessor who thought they had something to do with the law.

  “Feed it to me plain,” he said. “No understanding by implication, no conclusions based on omission, no bullshit about what the definition of ‘is’ is. You accepted a blind assignment from Hector Matador. No other parties involved.”

  I met his glare. “Yeah.”

  “You’re a goddamn liar.”

  “I’ve got a thousand dollars of his money in my wallet. I put the other fourteen grand in the bank. Want me to empty out my pockets?”

  “I want you to take a lie detector test.”

  “Can you do that? I’m just asking. A lot’s changed since last fall. They used to post the Bill of Rights in the room where you conduct strip searches. It was kind of quaint, like the ‘God Bless Our Home’ sampler in the warden’s office at Jackson.”

  “So you’re refusing.”

  “It’s not the machine, it’s the guy who operates it. He smells like old magazines.”

  “I could book you as a material witness. No habeas corpus need apply.”

  “I wish you would. I can use the free advertising. The Free Press charges too much and all I can get from Channel Two is thirty seconds between nine-hundred numbers. The last time I did that a guy proposed marriage.”

  He smoothed his necktie. It already clung to his shirt like a seal’s skin. “I guess I should’ve seen this coming when we started letting presidents lie under oath. Then we lost the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts! I guess Mickey Mouse is next. He’s been selling secrets to Woody Woodpecker. It’s like a fucking virus. Call me Huck Finn. I never thought it’d worm its way around to you.”

  “Still don’t believe me?”

  “I do. That’s what’s depressing me.” He drew an ordinary pencil out of his leather cup. “You know where the elevator is. The way my day’s going you probably won’t fall down the shaft.”

  “Isn’t this supposed to be the part where you tell me not to leave town?”

  “You can leave the fucking planet. Hubbell can use another snooper.”

  I got up. I was home free, but I just had to stop and ask to be thrown out at the plate.

  “How long do you figure on that toxicology report?”

  When he scowled, he looked like one of those tiki gods carved for the purpose of sacrificing virgins and porterhouse steaks.

  “Lansing’s been backed up since the coed murders in sixtynine,” he said. “Ten days just to eliminate the nonprobables. Minimum.”

  “You might ask them to test for Stelazine. That’s a poison.”

  “I know what it is. I used to work hospital detail. Why might I?”

  “I like the word. Rhymes with ‘nectarine.’”

  “In Branson, maybe. Are you withholding evidence in a homicide?” He laughed, explosively and without enjoying himself. “Look who I’m asking.”

  “A hunch isn’t evidence. Anyway, I didn’t withhold anything. You can write down the exact time I brought it up.” I looked up at his quartz clock. “Oh six hundred.”

  “That’s six A.M. I thought you were a veteran.”

  “Just a dogface. The brass kept the time.”

  The scowl went away. He still looked like a pagan barbecue grill.

  “I hope I get to lock you away for obstruction of justice,” he said. “It might save our relationship.”

  “I wasn’t aware we had one.”

  “That’s what makes it work.”

  I let myself out. It was the nicest thing anyone had said to me in days.
/>   FIFTEEN

  Eastern Standard Nighttime lay on the cophouse steps as stiff as a dead cat, dragging down the thermometer and turning the afternoon thaw into a sheet of glaze. Blue salt crystals scattered by a city employee were eating holes in the ice and eventually the marble underneath, but I hung on to the railing and tested each step before committing my weight to it. I hadn’t dodged a bullet inside just to break my neck out front.

  A ticket was frozen to my windshield where I’d parked in a slot reserved for police vehicles. That angered me; the phony MEDICAL EMERGENCY sign I’d clipped to the visor was plainly visible. I chipped the ticket loose and stuck it in the glove compartment with its near relations. I’d pay them when the lid would no longer close.

  Just for a driving exercise I remembered the telephone number Barry Stackpole had given me, a number without a name that belonged to a professor at Columbia with the power to corroborate or destroy Gilia’s alibi for the night Angelina Suerto danced her last tango. He wouldn’t be there at this hour, and anyway I had another more urgent hole to plug. It was named Miranda Guzman.

  The Matador gambit had an expiration date. His connection with Gilia wasn’t public and he would know how to keep it that way, but I had a few days at most before the cops gave up on him and dug back far enough in Jillian Rubio’s history to find out she shared a name with the hottest Latina entertainer since Charo cooched her last cooch. But I didn’t have even that much time if Jillian’s mother decided to spill what she knew. So I had to persuade a grieving mother to lay off on the woman who by now she may have convinced herself had something to do with her daughter’s murder. I should have brought more raw meat.

  I rang the buzzer, got some barking from the direction of the kennel behind the house, but no Miranda. The boss dog didn’t come to the window and I missed its deep bass among the others. I thumbed the button a second time just for laughs. I stepped down to the sidewalk and put my hands in my pockets.

  I pictured Miranda’s living room, where I’d used her telephone to report the body in the lumberyard. It ran pretty much to type: sofa and love seat, a little worn but a matched set, clean and with those arm-condoms in place to slow down wear and tear, a wicker coffee table with picture magazines on top, not too much of a chore to read for a resident who spoke English but thought in Spanish, a Spanish Bible on a side table with a rattan mat, an elaborate crucifix on one wall, carved in meticulous detail from what looked like ancient ash. That would have come over with her and Jillian. A votive candle guttering on a decorative shelf underneath. A religious person, Mrs. Guzman. I bet she and Mr. Guzman, whoever and wherever he might be, had discussed long into many a night the merits of Jesus’ claim to messiahhood. Maybe I’d lose my bet. There are probably a lot of Roman Catholics named Guzman, just as there are plenty of Jews named O’Reilly, Presbyterians named Washington, and Muslims born in Salt Lake City.