Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde

by Loren D. Estleman

  “It’s been done. Right now I’m hungry, and all I’ve got in the house is a box of Morton’s salt.”

  “Where’s a good restaurant?”

  “Toledo.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Ohio.”

  “There must be something closer.”

  “There’s Greektown, but I don’t feel like it. The waiters set fire to things and yell. In the old days they called that pillaging.”

  “Well, I don’t want to go back to the Hyatt. We might run into Hector.”

  “You two fall out?”

  “Not exactly. Hector’s like—Greektown. Sometimes I don’t feel like him. Where are we going?”

  I’d pulled out into the street. “I live in a Polish neighborhood. There’s a takeout place not far from me, if you don’t mind garlic.”

  “You really don’t want to go to bed, do you? What happened to not inviting myself to the castle keep?”

  “I’m inviting you.”

  “You’re an exasperating man.”

  “That’s what you get when you’ve been kidnapped, tortured, threatened by cops, and had dogs set on you. Incidentally, you didn’t kill Angela Suerto. Zubaran backed up your story. That bird thing brought him around.”

  She rode for a block in silence. “Does it matter?”

  “It matters a hell of a lot to me. Whether it matters to Washington is between them and your attorney. Alderdyce is sitting on it for now, but too many know. Did you get in touch with your lawyer like I said?”

  “He’s aware of the situation. Do the police think I killed Jillian Rubio?”

  “They’re on the fence. They’re not like the cops you’re familiar with. They don’t make up their minds until most of the precincts are heard from.”

  “What about you?”

  “I think if you wanted her dead you’d use just about anything but what was used.” I stopped for a light, pumping the brakes to avoid locking the wheels. “Zubaran said a friendly guard smuggled your name in to him before he was sprung. Who do you think arranged that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “Nico’s whore, possibly, to get me into trouble.”

  “Uh-uh. She’d have sent it to the warden or the police. The professor thought it was meant to encourage him. He was wrong too.”

  We watched a night-crawling diesel rig cut the corner off a left turn onto our street, missing the Cutlass’ left front fender by inches. The light was green by the time it cleared. I started forward.

  “Who, then?” asked Gilia.

  “Nico. He sent it so Zubaran would be able to identify you later, to give you an alibi for the night of Suerto’s murder. He’d planned it that far ahead. I guess he loved you in his fashion.”

  She thought about that for half a mile. “I underestimated him. Poor Nico.”

  “There are two ways to lose a war: trusting too much and not trusting at all. He was coming to the halfway point the night he sent you to rescue the professor. I don’t know where he was when they caught him. Too far the other way, maybe. But he did what he could to protect you.”

  “I thought he was showing faith in me.”

  “He was. If an alibi was all he was offering, he could have sent you into town for cigarettes.”

  “You told the police all this?”

  “If I hadn’t, one of us would still be in custody. Don’t undersell Washington the way you undersold Nico. They have entirely different protocols for foreign revolutionaries and murderers. The wheels turn more slowly. A smart lawyer ought to be able to jam a stick between the spokes.”

  “But not if I’m accused of killing Jillian Rubio.”

  “That’s next on the list. But only after supper.” I wheeled into the little cleared parking lot of the takeout place on Joseph Campau.

  Gilia had the appetites of a proletariat. Peering through the thick glass in the ancient display case she chose kielbasa sandwiches with heavy slices of pumpernickel and cabbage soup from a massive crock. I threw in a container of turtle soup and a quart of milk, paid the counterman, an incongruous black in a white apron and hairnet, and carried the greasy sack out to the car. A few minutes later we pulled into my garage.

  I helped her out of her coat and put it and her hat in a closet while she shook out her mane. She took the tour of the living room as I poured out the milk and transferred the food from paper and Styrofoam to crockery.

  “Such a masculine house,” she said when she returned. Silhouetted against the lamplight in the doorway, the knitted dress didn’t give my imagination much to work with.

  “I sweep out the hormones every day, but they keep coming back.” I laid out napkins on the kitchen table.

  “Was there ever a Mrs. Walker?”

  “That was over before you were born.”

  “You’re not so old.”

  “You’re not so young. Sit.”

  She slid into the nook. “Are you Polish?”

  “I’m not anything.” I took a long drink of milk. I was thirstier than I was hungry. No one had offered me so much as a glass of water at 1300.

  “I thought all Americans came from somewhere else, except of course the Indians.”

  “Them too. They came across the Bering Strait from Siberia. The only real natives were mammoths and midget horses, which they managed to wipe out long before Columbus. I never dug into the family history. I do enough of that kind of thing during working hours.”

  “And just what are your working hours?”

  “Nineteen seventy-five to the present.”

  “There must be an easier way to make a living.”

  “Spoken like a true American. There must be an easier way than singing and dancing.” I picked up my sandwich.

  “You’re one of the few outsiders who realize that. I am always up before dawn and seldom in bed before midnight. I have no social life.”

  “That’s not what I hear.”

  “What you hear is carefully choreographed. When you see a picture of me on the arm of a bankable movie star, it is the climax of a complicated business negotiation. I might add they are the only climaxes I experience.” She stirred her soup. Then she let the spoon drift. “Before you take a bite of that sandwich.”

  The nook was a tighter fit for me than it was for her. I was still sitting when she slid out and draped herself awkwardly across my lap and kissed me. Whatever she was wearing won out against the garlic and cabbage.

  When we separated I put down the sandwich. “This how you worked the balcony scene?”

  Her dark eyes were puzzled. Then she nodded. “I thought I saw something moving in the bushes that day. Did you see the picture?”

  “I couldn’t afford it.”

  “That, too, was a business deal.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Recreation.” She kissed me again.

  “This won’t work here,” I said when we came up.

  She undraped herself, but only long enough for me to stand up. This time I had leverage on my side. Her teeth scraped at my tongue. Then the kitchen went white.

  “Amos!” It was a gasp.

  I was already moving. The flash was fading from the window. I went out the back door and ran around the corner. His Geo was parked in the street and he might have made it except he turned and aimed his flashgun at me and I deflected my vision to the ground without slowing up. The bulb flared and I lunged and snatched the camera out of his hands. It was strapped around his neck. I twisted the camera and threw my weight against him, pinning him against the car and choking him. His Dodgers cap slid off. His greasy hair stuck down all around like Beetle Bailey’s, only a lot less tidy, and he was bald at the crown like a monk. He still needed a bath. In the light from the corner streetlamp his face was dark with congestion, the whites of his eyes glittering. I untwisted the strap, snaked it up and over his head in one movement, groped until I found the catch on the back of the camera, and yanked out the film like glistening entrails.

  “I got Jeff Dan
iels on that roll!” He sounded more squeaky than usual. He was still filling his lungs.

  I hit him hard in the chest with the camera. He expelled what he had and hugged it as if I might take it away again. I leaned my face close to his. “Get back in this roller skate and go. If I see it or you again I’ll have you up on a morals charge before you can say Woody Allen.”

  “There ain’t no Lieutentant Franklin with the Detroit cops! I checked.”

  “I mean for window peeping. Some of my neighbors have visiting grandchildren. There’s no telling what you had on that roll. It won’t convict you, but the complaint will follow you from here to the Riviera. Go back to Hollywood. All you have to worry about there is private security and Sean Penn with a snootful.”

  I gave him some space. He looked around, found his cap, and slapped it onto his head along with a fistful of slush. It was still running down his face when he scrambled into the driver’s seat and spun his wheels. This time I stepped back far enough to avoid getting splashed.

  Fritz Fleeman. The next time I heard the name, the L.A. cops had him in custody for trespassing on Alec Baldwin’s estate.

  Gilia was standing at the back door when I waded back through the snow on the lawn. Her face was tight. “Did you get the film?”

  “I trashed it. Let’s eat.”

  She didn’t argue. The mood was as dead as Jillian Rubio.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I slid into the curb around the corner from the Hyatt. With most of the windows lit up it looked like cut crystal against a sky swiped clean of stars. There was more snow coming, or one of those spitty February rains if the temperature went up.

  She opened her door. “I’m sorry. A boy should be able to see his girl home.”

  “I’m not a boy, and you’re not my girl. Apart from that you’re right. I still say I can use the publicity.”

  “It isn’t that. We might run into Hector. He is a dangerous man.”

  “I told you that. You didn’t believe me.”

  “I did not know then he was in love with me.”

  She let go of the door and leaned over and kissed me. Then she slid her glove down my cheek. “I cannot help thinking we have missed an opportunity, hombre.”

  “We’ll always have Hamtramck.”

  She laughed the way she sang, with all of her life behind it. The joke wasn’t that good. She got out then and swung the door shut. I watched her under the streetlamps, small and elegant in her furs, until she vanished around the corner. Then I let out the clutch and coasted away. The street shone like oil, with clumps of plowed snow piled like runes in the gutters.

  I didn’t want to go home. I bought a copy of the News from a sidewalk stand and found a Denny’s and read the paper front to back, sipping coffee someone had drained from a radiator with the night help vacuuming up crumbs around my feet. There was nothing new on the Rubio investigation, and dead Nico had dropped right out of the columns, replaced by suicide bombers in the Middle East. Even a shaky self-hanging was no competition for a nineteen-year-old fanatic with a vest made of C-4. But they found ten inches on the front page for the video Gilia was shooting in Mexicantown. Half of metropolitan Detroit had blown off a day’s wage hoping for a shot as an extra. After that I couldn’t find a thing to laugh at in the comics.

  When I’d had my fill of black coffee and yellow press I paid my bill and drove around the suburbs, listening to an all-night truckers’ station selling broken hearts and Thermo King refrigeration units. There wasn’t much traffic, most of the houses were dark, and the store windows spilled the ghostly blue glow of security lights.

  I wasn’t pining for lost love. I had boxes of .38 cartridges older than she was, and people who took up with stars who weren’t themselves stars always wound up looking like empties along the freeway. I had a skinful of caffeine and garlic and a bellyful of cops and crooks and university professors and a murder no one much cared about except the ones whose job it was to care about it and a middle-aged woman who bred large dogs, muy fiero. Except if it wasn’t solved before the feds mixed in, a lot of people would care on the double.

  A small car almost clipped me as I turned into my street. It was going twice the limit and I wouldn’t have paid it any more attention than the close call with the truck earlier except it’s a quiet neighborhood. Not that many people drive through it that late, and when they do they aren’t hurrying. It was moving too fast and the block was too dark for me to make it out in detail. It might have been a Chevy Corsica. It might have been brown.

  I parked half a block from the house, popped open the booby hatch, checked the load in the Luger, and stuck it under my belt on the left side where I could get to it fast using a cross draw. I flicked off the domelight and got out and eased the door into the frame without latching it. I made very little noise, but it sounded like explosions in the stillness.

  Most of the houses on the street were dark. Silver-blue light throbbed in the ground-floor window of the saltbox two doors down from mine where the old woman who took the Polish-language newspaper sat up watching infomercials on her black-and-white set. It went out suddenly as I was walking. That made it a little after 1:00 A.M. She was as reliable as the nuclear clock in the U.S. Naval Observatory for keeping time.

  It took me ten minutes to get from my car to my front door. I kept as much as I could to the shadows and tried not to hurry through the lighter patches from one to the next. There was something on the door that might have been a leaf from last autumn, carried by a gust and stuck there with frost. There is always one house that attracts debris from the street and on that block it’s mine. I ignored the object and tried the knob. It was locked, just the way I’d left it. I hadn’t expected anyone waiting inside to give himself away by leaving it open, but whatever I had that passed for instinct and experience told me the house was empty.

  I looked closer at the thing on the door. I found my pencil flash in my pocket and snapped it on. The thing was black, with fragile-looking membranous wings, which stretched out as they were didn’t extend any farther than a man’s spread hand. A tiny, bunched, ugly face, almost eyeless, but whose ears were nearly as large as a cat’s. Someone had nailed it to the center panel with a three-inch galvanized spike through the thorax. I didn’t know if it had been dead at the time, but if it hadn’t, that would have done it.

  A bat. That was something new.

  THIRTY

  “Vampyrum spectrum,” Barry Stackpole said. “More commonly known as the vampire bat; the false vampire, actually, with a big range throughout South America. The true vampire is Central American, and kind of disappointing, growing no larger than our little friend here. This one’s a baby. Easier to smuggle through Customs, I imagine.”

  We were looking at a screen-size closeup on his seventeeninch monitor. The squashed face, big ears, and exposed nasal cavity were identical to the face of the dead specimen spread out on a sheet of Xerox paper on the computer desk. I’d put on gloves to remove it from my front door and dump it into a Ziploc bag, which he’d opened and taken by the corners to slide the carcass out onto the sheet. We’d both heard too much about rabies in bats to handle it. Not to mention how many Bela Lugosi movies we’d watched.

  It was Saturday morning. I’d left my little visitor in the garage overnight, slept James Bond–style with one hand on the Smith & Wesson under a second pillow, and made an appointment with Barry over the telephone after coffee. He was living in Highland Park that year, in a rented ranch style with a spare bedroom that looked like the control room of the Starship Enterprise; back when he was still working for other people, he’d had the reputation of never leaving a job without taking some of the equipment with him. Apart from the technology, it was a modest little place in a suburb that was struggling against the gravitational pull of Detroit. That black hole was hungry for population and would annex hell to have it. When it comes to maintaining a low profile, Barry makes Salman Rushdie look like Madonna.

  “How come you know so much about bats
?” I said.

  “Degrees of separation.”

  Having thus enlightened me, he boogied his keyboard and brought up a file slugged SLEEPING WITH FISH. Without pausing, he scrolled through a glossary of underworld terms and plinked up rapid-fire explosions of color-coded sidebars, most of which lingered barely long enough for me to form an impression of what they contained. Some came with graphics. I spotted the comic valentine in Machine Gun Jack McGurn’s dead hand, several Mafia coups de grace (loose translation: bullet holes in heads), severed Yakuza fingers, a black hand traced on a scrap of paper, orchards of flaming crosses, a nightmare shot of a dead stool pigeon with his own genitals crammed into his mouth; other images that meant nothing to me, but had obviously meant a great deal to someone else. Whoever said crooks lacked imagination had never stopped to contemplate the many colorful ways the criminal class in every society has thought up to sign its work and warn nonbelievers of the wages of sin. Sin being whatever the local gang lord, warrior chief, shogun, Grand Wizard, or head accountant defined it to be.

  “Black Panthers used to mail a crow to suspected FBI informers,” Barry muttered, possibly to himself. “They called it ‘slipping ’em the Jim.’ Clever.”

  I made no comment. My back was sore from bending over his shoulder and the MTV activity on-screen made my eyes smart. For a lot of people, the Internet is a doorway to the universe. For me, it’s a boon to the aspirin industry.

  “Voilà! Or, I should say, olé!” He’d made one final tap and sat back with a flourish.

  I looked at a newspaper page with a blurred black-and-white photo of a thickset, bearded Hispanic in a storm trooper cap and Sam Browne belt, stretching a small bat between his hands. The text was in Spanish.

  “Holy what?” I said. “I left my Berlitz at home.”

  “Oh, sorry.” He tapped five keys in the time it would take me to strike one on my old Underwood. The page disappeared and a translation took its place, in bold yellow letters against royal blue.

  “But why wear out your eyes?” he said. “This story hit the fan several years ago. Seven or eight stiffs turned up in Medellin one week—hardly front-page material there, that’s a slow Monday—but they were all employed in the transportation business: taxi drivers, streetcar conductors, tour boat captains, commuter pilots, of which the city has more than Alaska. Mules, naturally; still not Section A. Except according to friends and relatives of the deceased, in every case the victim had received a dead bat by way of private messenger services. There was some confusion for a while about whether the bats were true vampires of the variety found in Nicaragua and Panama or the false type I mentioned at the start of my lecture. Not important. Finally someone thought to bring in a sociologist from the university in Bogota, who traced the practice back to the Chibchan Indians near Cartagena in the sixteenth century, who believed that stray bats only visited the dwellings of those who were about to die. Could be coincidence. Modern drug lords are not known to test high in anthropology. But after those corpses showed, the government started having difficulty finding paid informants at any price.”