Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde

by Loren D. Estleman

  The cops—my cops—wouldn’t need much more than the Stelazine to make up their minds. Gilia was the only human link between two murders committed several thousand miles and two years apart, and that was worth running out, at least until they hit the wall. The same poison showing up in both cases was the kind of evidence that made walls disappear. Getting her off on the first murder wouldn’t convince anyone whose business it was to run down the most obvious trail. He’d just say that’s where she got the idea. When a blackmailer dies violently, the steps you have to follow practically glow in the dark, and lead only one direction.

  I might have followed them myself, and would have, if they hadn’t used Stelazine. Anyone smart enough to point out that birds seldom follow the rules of simple arithmetic is smart enough to come up with something that didn’t spell out her name in lights.

  Then again, maybe the cops were right. The teacher had been right about one from eighteen leaving seventeen. You can get too clever with an idea and fail the test.

  It doesn’t pay to think too much about cops when you’re driving. They don’t set much store by telepathic communication, but they can smell fear. I had exited the Lodge onto Jefferson when a DPD blue-and-white loomed up out of the flying snow in my rearview mirror. When I made the turn onto Woodward, it turned behind me. Its lights struck firefly patterns off the swirling flakes, its siren growled. I drifted over in front of the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center and braked. The blue-and-white swung in behind, bouncing red and blue off the sad streaked face of the statue of the Spirit of Detroit.

  They usually let you sit and stew while they run your plate number through the onboard computer. Not this time. Someone tapped on my window and when I ran it down I looked out at two hundred pounds in a glistening leather jacket and snow piling up on a plastic cap shield. The cop had his semiautomatic half out of its holster. I couldn’t think of any of the fifteen traffic violations for which you can get pulled over while making a turn downtown that would make an officer draw his sidearm. I kept my hands on the wheel.

  “You Amos Walker?” The voice was a tight tenor.

  I said I was Amos Walker.

  “Homicide’s got a BOLO out on your car. You want to follow me or ride in back? You won’t like the third choice.”

  I said I’d follow. It was only a few blocks. You’re never more than a few blocks from a cop anywhere you go in this world.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The things you see sitting in a squad room at 1300 Beaubien, Detroit Police Headquarters:

  —A homeless guy wearing a filthy red Santa Claus coat over a Nine-Inch Nails sweatshirt, possible witness to a driveby, snoring and using a stack of arrest reports on the booking officer’s desk for a pillow.

  —A city worker on a stepladder, replacing a fluorescent tube in the ceiling, with his pants down around his hips and an object I swore was a crack pipe sticking up out of his back pocket.

  —A very attractive detective third-grade with Domestic Disturbances, shucking out of insulated snow pants and smoothing the wrinkles out of a red skirt that caught her at mid-thigh. I figured she was drumming up business.

  —A dinosaur from the old STRESS crackdown squad, last of his kind, evidence gloves on his hands, cleaning a twelve-gauge shotgun with what looked like antiseptic gauze and laying out the pieces on a newspaper spread over his desk, doing everything but powdering the butt with Johnson & Johnson’s.

  —A local Action Newswoman on a color TV no one seemed to be watching, interviewing a manic fan waiting for Gilia to emerge from a trailer on West Vernor, where the city had finally agreed to let her shoot her video, interviewer and interviewee both covered with snow and apparently seriously expecting her to step out into it.

  —Gilia in the flesh, got up like Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago in expensive fake furs, signing an autograph for one of the officers who had brought her in for questioning.

  It’s pretty much like that all the time, give or take a visiting superstar. I’m not there every day, but I’m not important enough for a floor show. For all I know they shoot pigeons off the window ledges Fridays.

  Gilia didn’t see me. There was a roomful of desks and chairs and computer consoles between us, and it’s a big room, about the size of a 1950s high school gynmnasium and even smelling a little like Red Devil varnish and basketballs. After she handed back the pen, someone took her gently by the elbow and conducted her down a hall out of sight. Some of the magic went out with her. It was just a room after all, and detectives are just clerical workers with guns.

  There was no sign of any of her people, not Benny and certainly not Matador, who was probably back at the Hyatt placing a call to Gilia’s attorney in Beverly Hills, or wherever the better California lawyers were hanging their briefs these days. She wouldn’t be under arrest, though, so there would be little the legal team could do, apart from making polite threats in Latin. They wouldn’t know about the two years Inspector Alderdyce spent in prelaw at the University of Michigan before joining the academy in Detroit, and they might not be aware of them even after the conversation, unless they forgot their manners and called him a dumb flatfoot. Maybe not even then. He was the kind who didn’t mind losing a hand or two as long as he cleared the table at the end of the evening.

  I only knew for sure Alderdyce was involved because I was sitting in a plastic scoop chair outside his office, and I’d caught a glimpse of him looking my way briefly from near the windows, where he was in conversation with a detective sergeant I’d met before, but whose name had never stuck. One look, no more. I might have been a tile that needed replacing. After a moment he’d parted company with the sergeant and gone down the same hall the uniforms escorted Gilia down a few minutes later.

  I got it. I was being shunned.

  It’s an old trick and may even predate good cop/bad cop and the Wedding at Cana. The theory was you ignored the victim until the knowledge of his own guilt got the better of him and he confessed. Don’t laugh until you’ve been through it. Cops have squeezed full statements out of thugs with pickled hides just by drumming their fingers on a steel desk in a tiny room, bouncing random circles off a ceiling from a flashlight, chewing tinfoil. The first time the strategy worked had probably been an accident; one of Pilate’s lieutenants on the Plain Toga Detail got stuck for a tactic and was working on the problem when the character sweating it out on the broken-down divan opposite him suddenly cracked. Two thousand years later they would have a Greek name for it and an explanation, along with the suspect’s psychiatric profile in a folder and a table of figures predicting how long it would take. The table in my case being as long as the Bayeux Tapestry. The Long Wait hadn’t a thing on the Lincoln Question. I balanced my checkbook in my head and when that got too depressing I looked at my nails.

  The patrolie who had brought me in and plunked me down in the chair was long gone, back on the beat or down in the locker room changing into dry socks. I’d been sitting there about an hour and a half when the sergeant whose name I’d forgotten came up and kicked a leg of the chair.

  “You’re up, big fella.”

  He looked to be my size until I stood. He was a well-proportioned scale model of a full-grown man, no big head or short arms to give him away until you stood next to him. His burgundy shirt, olive drab safari necktie, and gray pinstripe pants could have been bought in the boys’ department at Jacobson’s. The Glock in his snap-on belt holster looked as big as a Frontier Colt sticking out behind his miniature hipbone. He must have lied about his height to join the department. He had red hair, freckles, and pale lashes. Maybe he was related to a token Irishman on the city council.

  I followed him across the room. On the way past the worker on the stepladder, he reached up and poked the crack pipe down below the edge of the pocket. I figured he was a pet.

  We went down the hall to the same Bermuda Triangle that had claimed the others. I knew the hall, of course, just as I knew every other square inch of 1300 including the basement, where they used to c
onduct interrogations outside of Eleanor Roosevelt’s earshot. The corridor was lined with framed photographs of dead police commissioners, dead retired football greats who had served on the Police Athletic League, dead Hollywood celebrities with tenuous connections to Detroit who’d had their pictures taken with police officials who may or may not be dead by now. Valleys had been worn in the marble floor by eighty years of wing tips, brogues, high heels, sneakers, and hobnails. The building has always been too elegant for the characters who work in it. No serious architect who wants to remain sane ever looks back at what became of his designs after the ribbon-cutting ceremony. There were tobacco stains on the Carrara that had seniority over the chief.

  The sergeant went up on tiptoe to peer through a grated window in a door, then opened it, told me to have a seat, and closed it behind me. I couldn’t tell if it was one of the rooms I’d been in before. Such rooms aren’t planned. They spring up like mushrooms, indistinguishable from one another, from the two-way mirror to the heavy-duty plastic over the ceiling fixture to the furniture, three mismatched chairs and a particleboard table with one fuzzy rounded corner that looked as if it had been gnawed by rats. (Not a fanciful notion; when another Albert Kahn construction, the Packard plant, was imploded, an army of rodents the size of Chihuahuas swarmed across East Grand like British infantry.)

  They’re not interrogation rooms anymore. That term went out with cattle prods. Now they’re interview rooms, a name that went about as deep as the new beige paint on the walls, the turpentine smell covering decades of sweat and cop spittle. As sterile as it looked, the room was as heavy with fear and misery as a hospital and as empty of hope as the walk from a morgue. Transferring me there was just the next chapter of the Wait. I’d skipped five circles of hell, all the way from limbo to the burning plain.

  Only one new feature had appeared since my first acquaintance: an industrial-design camcorder on a tripod, aimed at the table area. It had replaced the old suitcase model reel-to-reel tape recorder, which in its turn had nudged out the stenographer, who for many years had been the only feminine presence in that entire seven-story monument to patriarchy. Even the most mannishlooking of the species had managed to introduce a note of hope into the whole bleak experience, like the first tentative birdsong heard at the end of a long winter. They took down your statement efficiently, with a show of disinterest, but if you wanted to hard enough you could hear sympathy in the scratching of their Eberhard Fabers. They were with the department but not of the department. I missed them the way I missed Checker cabs, cigarette billboards, and Captain Kangaroo.

  Alderdyce came in right on cue in the middle of this maudlin muddle, followed closely by the miniature detective sergeant. Today the inspector wore a sharp blue pinstripe suit and polkadot tie, white on red, on a shirt so white it hurt to look at it. He might have come straight there from a job interview at Fifth Third Bank. He strode straight to the other side of the table and smacked down a gray cardboard folder. The sergeant planted himself in front of the door like a toy bouncer.

  “Angela Suerto,” Alderdyce said.

  I’d expected that. He’d given me too much time to sift through all the reasons I might have been tagged. I didn’t mention before that the delaying tactic misfires as often as it works.

  I said, “And a very Angela Suerto to you, too. Elena Verdugos all around.”

  “Nobody said you could talk.”

  I didn’t look at the sergeant. It’s always a mistake to make eye contact with little yappy dogs.

  Alderdyce said, “Let him talk. Talking’s what he’s best at, didn’t you know? This one can talk his way through rings of flame. It’s a sight to see.” He flipped open the folder. On top was a smudgy eight-by-ten photograph printed on fax paper. A professional like Fritz Fleeman wouldn’t have bothered to reproduce it, but police photographers in the third world work on salary just like their brothers in the U.S. Their best work spends most of its life locked away in metal file cabinets.

  The Suerto woman was a disappointment. From what I’d heard I’d expected a combination of Yvonne DeCarlo and Jennifer Lopez, one of those overripe Latina beauties with exotic lips and cheekbones and high arched brows, a mane of curly black hair and more curves than a bobsled run. The woman in the photograph looked like something you saw pushing a supermarket cart in an unfashionable suburb, a dumpy forty with a bulldog face and lank hair, gray along the part. But then the photographer hadn’t caught her at her best. It was a morgue shot of her pale flaccid body lying naked on a steel table with a drain at the foot. A row of numbers written with chalk or a white grease pencil in one corner contained the date and the order of admittance.

  “Stingy end to a gaudy life,” Alderdyce said. “Amateur model, cantina dancer, pavement princess, mistress to a revolutionary, Cadaver numero setentatres in the mortuary in a city named for a virgin. You supply the irony, I’m fresh out.” He peeled aside the picture. The sheet underneath was typewritten, another blurred fax. “Officer Gonzales is translating all this. I got the gist over the phone from a captain whose name I won’t try to pronounce because I can’t roll my rs the way he did. His English wasn’t much better than my Spanish, but we worked it out.”

  “Cops are on the same page the world over,” I said.

  “See what I mean, Ohanian? You wouldn’t want to have missed that.”

  Ohanian. No way would I have guessed Armenian. Alderdyce went on. “Jillian Rubio came to this country as an infant. We got that from her mother, but nobody thought to ask if that was the name she went by in the old country. We checked with Immigration. They dug in the basement and came up with her birth name. You want to talk now, take a guess at what it was?”

  “You’re having too good a time telling it,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to step on your punch line.”

  Ohanian made a noise in his throat.

  Alderdyce slapped the folder shut. A gust caught the faxed photo and it slid out between the covers, perched on the edge of the table for a second, then floated from there to the floor like the last leaf of autumn. I knew how it felt.

  “Gilia Cristobal,” he said. “Hell of a coincidence. We got a Gilia Cristobal down the hall. Which is one too many, but wait. Her name isn’t Gilia Cristobal. But then the plot thickens, because both Gilias were born in the same country, which begs the question why did they come all the way to Detroit to fight over who gets to keep the name? What’s the matter, lost your taste for conversation? You’re making me out a liar in front of Sergeant Ohanian.”

  “How much of this did she tell you?”

  “This is an interview room, Walker. You’re the interview. I know what.” He gripped the back of a chair, hard enough to bend the plastic. “Tell me a stretcher. It’s your right. As I recall you were pretty specific about that yesterday. You want to give the speech again? Ohanian didn’t hear it.”

  I got out a cigarette, to play with, not to smoke. I didn’t know which one of them was supposed to slap it out of my mouth.

  “If you know about Angela Suerto,” I said, “you know about Mariposa Flores. Does Immigration know?”

  “You heard the inspector. You’re the interview, not us.”

  I was still looking at Alderdyce. “You’re a dynamite team. Why don’t you drink a glass of water while he talks?”

  Ohanian took a step my direction, but his timing was off. He stopped before Alderdyce stuck out a hand.

  “INS is busy sorting terrorists,” Alderdyce said. “Here’s how it plays out. Mariposa and Angela have a boyfriend in common, that hunky rebel type all the girls go for. Mariposa clears out the competition, using Stelazine, then jumps the rap using Gilia’s identity. Gilia Number Two makes good stateside, Gilia Number One doesn’t. So Gilia Number One sets out to level the field with blackmail. When that gets old, Gilia Number Two reverts to type. Stelazine again. But first she needs a finger, say a private badge who specializes in finding missing persons, to locate Number One so Number Two can slip her the needle. To repeat this informa
tion from the beginning, please press Three. No?” He turned his head. “I sure am sorry about this, Sergeant. He talks a blue streak when it’s just us.”

  “Just like that frog in the cartoon.”

  “Go to hell, both of you,” I said. “The Rubio woman’s been dead since last November. If I fingered her then, why’d I wait three months and then call your attention to the corpse?”

  Ohanian spoke up. “The client’s in town, on a tour. She paid you off, probably, but you’ve had since Thanksgiving to go through it and start to think maybe you undersold yourself. So you go to her with a new deal, but she isn’t having any. Presto, you find the stiff, right where you left it.”

  “Fingering myself while I’m at it.”

  “I didn’t say you were smart. Just greedy.”

  “I’m lost. Who killed her, me or Gilia Two?”

  “You tell us.”

  “This guy needs to take a walk,” I told Alderdyce. “Pull his string, will you?”

  “Go to the can, Sergeant.” He spoke without looking at him.

  “Sure, Inspector?”

  “I can tell when a man needs to go to the can.”

  Ohanian opened the door. “I’ll be around, big fella. You won’t have to look for me.”