Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde

by Loren D. Estleman

  After five minutes someone knocked on the door and came in, a sad-faced balding party in the oldest pair of overalls this side of a textile museum. He looked like a refugee from the Crimean War.

  I said, “This is Rosecranz. He was standing on this lot when they built the place, so they put him in charge.” To him I said, “This is Gilia. She’s an international superstar. She needs a way out of the building that doesn’t involve Grand River, and transportation to the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Dearborn. What’ll it cost?”

  He looked at her without recognition or excitement. Nothing had excited him since the October Revolution, and the nine-inch Admiral that entertained him in his broom closet on the ground floor only got Your Show of Shows. “Fifty dollars, I think. More if I get a ticket for the broken taillight.”

  “It’s a Dodge pickup,” I told Gilia. “Truman rode in it. You’ll have to walk the last couple of blocks. If Rosecranz ever saw his picture in the National Enquirer he’d fall and break his hip.”

  “Can he be trusted?” There is something about the old man that makes you refer to him in third person when he’s in the room, and not at all when he isn’t.

  “He hasn’t said anything about Jimmy Hoffa in twenty-seven years.”

  She rose. I got her coat and helped her into it. She spent some time pinning up her hair. When she’d tied the scarf and put on her dark glasses she looked like the second runner-up in a Gilia look-alike contest. “Gracias, Mr. Walker. You are un caballero.”

  “Yeah. Band leader, wasn’t he?” I took out my wallet and gave Rosecranz two twenties and a ten.

  He studied each bill, then got out his greasy handkerchief, folded them inside, and stuck the works in a hip pocket. “Who is Jimmy Hoffa?”

  TWENTY-THREE

  I’m not as patient as I used to be.

  When I was just old enough to vote, I’d waited out a sniper about the size of my left leg for twelve hours, not moving a muscle, until he scratched his nose and I shot him through his right eye. But back then I’d had all the time in the world; time enough to read Kerouac and Gibran and Rod McKuen and realize they were gasbags top to bottom. The pisher in the Geo wasn’t worth more than five minutes of a life half-lived. That was as much time as I gave Rosecranz and Gilia before I turned out the lights and closed the blinds over the window.

  I spread two slats to watch him. At the end of two minutes his repertorial instincts got the better of him. He got out to reconnoiter.

  They always seem to be runts, for some reason. Maybe it’s the tight spaces they have to squeeze through, or the security radar they have to duck. This one was a little butterball nearly as wide as he was high, waddling across the street as fast as his chubby legs could pump. He had on a Lakers warm-up jacket and straws of greasy-looking hair stuck out from under his Dodgers cap all around. From three floors up I could tell he hadn’t been in the same room with a razor in better than a week. A tan leather camera case hung from a strap around his neck and the way his pockets bulged told me there was more in them than just his hands. All those little aluminum film canisters would make him popular with the people standing behind him at airport security.

  I gave him time to get inside the foyer, then went downstairs. I knew all the squeaky boards to avoid, and so I caught him standing on the slushy rubber mat inside the entrance, peering at the white snap-on letters on the building directory. I could almost hear his lips moving.

  “I wouldn’t go by it,” I said. “Half those businesses turned toes up when the market took a header.”

  He actually jumped, just like a cartoon character, daylight showing under his Keds. But he had good reflexes. His camera came up before his feet touched down and the flashgun hit me full in the face. I was seeing purple-and-green spots while a pair of rubber-soled feet pounded the floor going away.

  I caught the door while it was drifting shut, but there’s no catching a little fat guy in the short stretch. I had to look both ways because I didn’t trust my eyes yet, and by that time he had the door open on the driver’s side. I sprinted the rest of the way and got my hand on the passenger’s-side door just as he started rolling. I might have lost him then, but the street was slick with sodden snow and he spun his wheels at first. I got the door open just as he lunged across to lock it. I almost sat on his head. He lunged back the other way and opened the other door, bailing out of his own moving car. He was a born survivor. But I got hold of his jacket by the back and yanked him my direction. The tires had found traction; we slewed out into the street, hydroplaning on snow and slush with no hand on the wheel. I let go of him to grab it, and damn if he didn’t try again to jump out. I swung up my elbow, barking him a good one on the temple, and as he slumped against me in a daze I spun the wheel into the skid, just the way they teach you in drivers’ education, snaked a leg up over the console, and found the brake with one toe. The antilocking system paid for itself and we rocked to a stop in a diagonal across both lanes.

  I looked up into a pale smear of face behind the windshield of a PT Cruiser stopped in the middle of the eastbound lane. We’d missed colliding by the width of a hand. I waved, found reverse, and got out of the way. A full thirty seconds went past before the Cruiser started forward. By then the little butterball was stirring.

  I reached across him, tugged his door shut, and locked it. I needed whatever advantage I could get over his reflexes. I withdrew my foot from his side of the car and got out the ID folder. The sheriff ’s star gave his eyes something to focus on.

  He blinked at it. “That ain’t real. You’re the snooper from the top floor. I seen your name in the lobby.”

  “A lot of cops moonlight in this state. Steer this crate into the curb. If you try to run again I’ll roll it right over you.”

  He pulled it almost squarely into the clear patch of pavement he’d been parked on top of before. This time we were pointed in the other direction. That made us legal for fifteen minutes. While he was straightening out I popped open the glove compartment and found his rental agreement among the empty McDonald’s cartons jammed inside. His name was Fritz Fleeman—Fritz, not Frederick or Friedrich; it was probably on his birth certificate—and he was licensed to drive in Orange County, California. I put away the folder and shoved the hatch shut against the pressure from inside.

  “Okay, Fritz. What makes me so important and who to?”

  A pudgy hand went inside his jacket. I got hold of that arm high up and squeezed. That took all the grip out of his hand. His face twisted. “It’s just a cell phone! I’m calling nine-one-one.”

  “Speaking.”

  “You ain’t no cop.”

  I reached inside his jacket with my other hand, under the camera strap, found the little telephone in his shirt pocket, and brought it back out. I let go of his arm then. If he had a gun, he’d have gone for it instead. I laid the squawker on the dash. I was breathing through my mouth. He smelled like an elevator full of Frenchmen.

  The whole car was as messy as the glove compartment. I was sitting on a pizza box and the backseat was covered with greasy paper sacks, crushed pop cans, Krispy Kreme cartons, and cameras. These included a Japanese digital job about the size of a cake of soap, vintage last week, and an old-fashioned drop-front Speed Graphic that belonged in a museum, among the scatter of Nikons, Polaroids, Kodak Instamatics, and those little throwaways people put on the tables at wedding receptions. Cans and cans of film. One or two of the better cameras would have retailed for more than the car he was driving.

  “You ain’t no cop,” he said again. He actually stuck out his lower lip. He could pass for thirteen, even with the feathery growth of whiskers. He could have been my age. His face needed washing and dermatology.

  “You ain’t Ansel Adams,” I said. “Start again. Who’s paying for all this jazzy equipment?”

  “I bought it myself, cash money. How much you make last year prowling motel parking lots? I bet I paid out more than that in quarterlies.”

  “Since when does a shakedown art
ist declare his income?”

  He sneered. You need a putty pimpled face and green teeth to pull it off the way he did. “I’m with the Hollywood Press Corps, Jack. They may not want to admit it, but I make the parties they don’t get invited to. Wander into any checkout lane, you see my byline. You catch that spread last week, Michael Jackson’s taking injections to go back to being black?”

  “I saw it. You don’t have to push a button for a living to recognize an underexposed shot.”

  “Underexposed my ass! I caught him outside the hospital in Berne, sneaking out the door they use to wheel the corpses out of the morgue.”

  “What’d you do, stow away with the Swiss cheese?”

  “Concorde, first class, smart guy. I made twenty-five grand on that one frame. That don’t count what I expect to get from the Brits for the shot I took of Bonnie Prince Charlie scratching his ass at Heathrow when I was changing planes on the way back.”

  “What are you doing in my league, Flash? I can’t sing or dance and steak-and-kidney pie gives me the trots.”

  “Brother, I can’t see your league from the circles I spin around in. It’s that bottle blond tamale up in your office brought me here to Skid Row. What’s the squeeze? You catch her with Bill Ford in the backseat of an Explorer?”

  “My office is empty, Fritz. Just me and the fixtures. Come on up. Bring your Brownie.”

  He wet his lips. They were plenty wet to begin with. Just thinking about getting a shot of this year’s diva cooling her maraccas in the office of a private cop had all his glands going. Miranda Guzman’s dogs had less of a drooling problem.

  “Aw,” he said. “She rabbited. I heard an old wheezebox chugging up the next street over. I should of went with my gut and hung a tail.”

  “You follow her around a lot, huh?”

  He had shrewd little eyes the color of canned peas. “Now, who’d that be? Your office is empty.”

  “That was a haze. You get around, you know how it is in these union towns. We’ve got to give the new guy a going-over. Our work’s not so different, yours and mine. I used to tiptoe around with a camera.”

  “It ain’t the same thing.”

  “Of course not. You get paid to plaster your work in every A and P and Sam’s Club from here to Nova Scotia. I got paid to bury mine. I bet you got shots of Gilia no one’s ever seen, just waiting for the right headline to slug on top.”

  He leered, started to lean my direction. Then he sat back. His face shut. “I fill a lot of rolls. A lot of rolls. Most of it’s shit. You got to be prepared to fill a lot of rolls with a lot of shit. Now and then you get something just by accident.”

  “As for instance?”

  “Let’s just say when a lady takes a sunbath on her bedroom balcony, putting screens all around ain’t always enough. A fellow that knows his way around a long lens can get plenty out of the right angle and a full-length mirror on a closet door somebody left open.”

  “Oh, nudes. I thought maybe you had something. Anybody who hasn’t seen her naked doesn’t read enough magazines.”

  This time he got a handle on the leer without moving. “Shows how much you know. That’s all I’m going to say.”

  “You saying she had company?”

  “I ain’t saying anything. But if I was to say something, a certain party that goes by the name of double-oh-seven would have him some explaining to do when he got home.”

  “So that’s how she got the part. I wondered. Usually they have to prove they can get over a line without a grappling hook.”

  He looked smug. His nose needed wiping.

  “Who’s playing James Bond these days?” I asked. “I can’t keep up.”

  “Christ, don’t you know nothing? Go see a show, Grampa. They got sound now.”

  “I’m not interested in sex pictures,” I said. “Not today. Ever take any of Gilia where she doesn’t look like she just stepped off a cloud? You know, like one of us?”

  “You mean like curlers and a ratty sweatshirt? No dice. She’s too careful. These career broads spend too much time in the driver’s seat to make that kind of mistake. Well, I did snatch one where she didn’t exactly look all glammed up, more like a pretty you’d see on the street. Not this street; Jesus, this town looks like it was designed by the guy that did San Quentin. Say Wilshire, east of Santa Monica. The rest of the time, what you might see, that don’t walk down any street you ever get to use.”

  “What, did a pigeon crap on her?”

  “I wish. The Globe would of went ten thousand for a shot like that. I caught her squinting into the sun. You could still tell it was her, but you wouldn’t believe it if somebody didn’t tell you. The Gilia you see up on them big projection screens onstage, she just laughs at a little thing like the sun. I guess the mope she pays to lug around her dark glasses was home sick that day.”

  “Sell it?”

  “Hell, no. Who’d shell out for it? It don’t look like her. I mean it does, but it don’t. How would you head it? ‘Salsa Queen Looks Like Your Sister’?”

  “I might buy it.”

  “You? Bullshit. You want to hang it in your bathroom, get yourself started every morning?”

  “I’d have to see it first.”

  “You couldn’t afford it.”

  “You don’t look enough like Bill Gates to jump to that kind of conclusion,” I said.

  “What kind of crack’s that?” He was more sensitive than he looked.

  “I’m saying a clicker who makes up to twenty-five grand per snapshot doesn’t usually drive a Geo and dress like a strikebreaker. Just like you wouldn’t look at my neighborhood and guess I made fifteen grand this week. But I don’t pull in that kind of coin only to risk it on what’s behind Door Number Three. Let’s have a look.”

  His little pea eyes jigged toward the backseat, then focused on me. “Tell me what she’s paying you for and maybe I’ll let you take a peek.”

  A stack of nine-by-twelve manila envelopes stuck out from under the pile of cameras and takeout containers on the backseat. I reached across the front seat and scooped them into my lap. He made a grab for them. I stiff-armed him, cuffing him on the temple with the heel of my free hand, just about where I’d struck him before with my elbow. He fell back against the door on his side and stayed there. He wasn’t out, just reluctant to invite more attention of that kind.

  There were five envelopes. I went through the contents of the first two quickly. Mostly contact sheets, strips of film printed directly onto glossy black paper, with some finished eight-bytens of the more commercial items. A lot of walking shots, movie and TV stars and singers and dancers and stand-up comics, a senator or two, striding down sidewalks and across hotel lobbies, some unaware of the camera, others reacting, seldom positively; a very nice pose in full color of the child star of a popular family sitcom giving Fritz the finger. It was a revelation how many millionaire entertainers picked their noses in public. They needed an old-time studio system to teach them how to behave and dress like the gods and goddesses they once were, but that ship had sailed along with Cohn and Selznick and the brothers Warner. I saw more dark roots and crooked toupees than a Beverly Hills hairdresser. The guy was an artist of a very particular type.

  I found what I wanted in the third envelope. It was mostly Gilia, taken in some town other than Detroit, probably an earlier stopover on her national tour. Fritz had staked out a spot in front of a hotel with a revolving door and taken a couple of dozen shots in twelve or fifteen seconds of her walking out among her entourage, including Emmett and Felipe and Big Bad Benny, scowling bullets directly into the lens; if he’d printed them all on separate sheets I could have riffled them and gotten a moving picture. No sign of Matador, but then business managers stayed away from public occasions, and former Colombian drug lords were notoriously shy of cameras.

  Fritz had printed only one picture of Gilia separately. It wasn’t especially unflattering, just her screwing up her face against the morning or afternoon glare. She had on street
clothes: an opennecked white blouse and loose pleated canary yellow pants. Her hair was twisted into a ponytail, still too blonde even for a Scandinavian, much less a señorita, but everyday as to style. While you’d probably look at her twice because she was an alarmingly attractive stranger to encounter on a public street, you wouldn’t guess based on your first glimpse that she was who she was. She looked more like Mariposa than Gilia. I hoped.

  I kept it out, put the rest back, then rolled up the eight-by-ten to prevent creasing and slid it into my inside breast pocket. I got out my wallet and laid the stack of envelopes on Fritz’s lap with a hundred-dollar bill on top.

  He looked at it as if it were a dead roach. “I wipe my lenses with hundreds.”

  “I’m just buying the print, not exclusive use. You can run up another and peddle it to the Tattler for a twelve-pack of lens wipers.”

  He reached for his cell phone. “I’m ordering up some law. You ain’t no cop, don’t try and kid me. I didn’t agree to sell.” He pecked out 911.

  “Ask for Lieutenant Franklin. He heads up Vice.”

  “I don’t want Vice. I want Robbery.” But he paused with his thumb hovering over the SEND button.

  “I helped ease Franklin out from under a bogus rape charge last year. A hooker claimed he traded a get-out-of-jail-free card for services. She missed some drug connections while I was tailing her. After forty-eight hours she went in voluntarily and took back her complaint.”

  “So you strung her out and she came clean. So what?”

  “Franklin didn’t say so what. He broke up a child-porn ring in January. I think he still has a couple of dozen pictures in the evidence room he won’t need to make his case. They could’ve been taken by anyone.”

  He found his sneer, but his face got more pasty. I’d tapped into every photographer’s nightmare.