Don't Look for Me: An Amos Walker Novel (Amos Walker Novels)

by Loren D. Estleman

  At the mention of the Pirandello shooting, she touched the bandage on her head with her free hand. “I underestimated your marksmanship in the dark. But the wound was slight enough to pass off as a minor accident, sparing the trouble of finding a doctor who wouldn’t report it.

  “By the time the situation changed, the Garland plan was too late to call off. I couldn’t get in touch with her. She was an employee of mine, by the way: a computer filer with a credit bureau I use for money recycling, what you would call laundering. Not that she knew it; it’s a subsidiary of a subsidiary, and difficult to trace back to MacArthur Industries; or Pacific Rim, as it’s now called. The photo in her personnel file was a close match with the one you—”

  She stopped herself. She wouldn’t have talked herself into a trap only a year ago. Life on the lam had sharpened certain reflexes, dulled others.

  I pretended I hadn’t heard. Everything depended on keeping her off the defensive. If time slowed any further, the clock would be running backwards. That cop was taking the scenic route. “It was pretty fancy stitching just to keep me from drawing attention to the place,” I said. “Why not just do me like you did the manager?”

  “Unlike him, you might have been missed. Your friend in the police department might have pursued the matter. Remember, when I made the plan there was still hope of reversing my blunder.”

  “Which was when you put Yummy on my tail, to make sure I took the bait.”

  “Yummy? Oh, yes, Mr. Mondadori. You once accused me of living in a pulp magazine, but the colorful nicknames you choose for your petty criminals tells me I’m not alone. He was useful, until he wasn’t. You gave Miss Garland quite a fright in that restaurant, made her silence doubtful. After Mr. Mondadori disposed of that problem, he thought committing a second murder so soon after the first entitled him to a bonus.”

  “He tried to blackmail you?”

  “In his defense, he thought I was one of those white-collar women driven by desperation to break the law. I let him go on thinking that while I called in a favor from one of his associates, a more reliable man altogether.”

  “It would’ve been a lot less complicated if you’d gone to him first.”

  “In hindsight, yes. He was the man I had in mind for the disposal problem at Elysian Fields. That’s his specialty, which is why I didn’t think of him. Killing is Mondadori’s. He’d killed the manager and been paid well for it, so I assumed he’d be as efficient in the case of Miss Garland. I could have paid him, of course, and never missed the amount: He had no idea of the size of my resources. I don’t mind being taken advantage of—it goes with great wealth—but when is the bill paid in full?”

  “That’s easy,” I said. “When you go to your body guy and have him dump Yummy’s handiwork in the house he’s living in. Then you tipped off the cops. What if he talked?”

  “People in his line of work have a built-in resistance to police interrogations. It’s that charming underworld notion of honor among thieves.”

  “Not one of the delusions you suffer from.”

  “If I learned nothing else from my apprenticeship, it’s that life has no value. I considered the situation worth the risk, if all it bought me was time to close up my operation and leave. I—” She turned her head a fraction of an inch, listening.

  I’d heard it, too: A powerful engine rumbling into the block, tires crunching on broken asphalt as it braked. Cops don’t use sirens on babysitting assignments. I spoke quickly to take her mind off it, shifting my weight onto the balls of my feet. I was out of reach of my .38, but there was another weapon within range.

  “You lied when you said you never do anything the same way twice,” I said. “You learned not to trust anyone with your killings but yourself, which is why you shot Pirandello in the car warehouse, just in case Yummy had told him who hired him for two murders. Then you did the same with the two Israeli agents who could place Yummy at the scene of the murder in Elysian Fields. He might talk his way out of the Garland rap, but connecting him with two homicides might turn him into a snitch before you could finish closing out those operations of yours. How’d you find out about them, by the way?”

  “I have someone in Tel Aviv. He wasn’t as punctual with the information as I would have liked. I won’t use him again soon. Struggling to live within his means will make him more dependable next time.”

  “He must be someone high up.”

  “Not at all. Minor functionaries are privy to far more information than their high-profile superiors, and they’re poorly paid. They’re a bargain, really. And so eager to please.”

  Smoke put in an oar. She was standing by a window with the shade pulled down, methodically rubbing an arm with her other hand. “Why are you here?”

  Sing looked at her as if she’d forgotten she was there. She hadn’t, though. I jumped in before she could answer. I felt the vibration of the heavy-duty elevator rumbling up the shaft; I was standing on bare floor and Madam Sing was seated with a rug at her feet, so she might not have been aware of it, but I remembered how much noise it made as it slowed, and especially when it came to a stop. I spoke loudly to cover it. “She’s here to do exactly the same thing for the fourth time. You’re the only one still running around loose who can definitely tie Sing to the Cecelia Wynn case, and through that to five murders connected to it.”

  “Me? How can I—?”

  “Because you showed her Cecelia’s picture.”

  The elevator stopped on that floor with a clang. It sounded as loud as someone using a pair of manhole covers for cymbals. The P-38 came up. I lunged, snatched the wine bottle from the sack on the end table, and swung, aiming for the hand holding the pistol.

  Not fast enough, though. Not nearly fast enough to beat a .30-caliber slug.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The P-38 barked, a short savage yelp, just as the barrel of the bottle made contact with the hand holding the pistol. She’d aimed it at me, but the blow deflected the trajectory. I had the satisfaction of feeling bones snap, and hearing the same intake of breath I’d heard when I grazed her in the car warehouse, but even as the gun struck the floor and I kicked it away, dropping the bottle in favor of the Smith & Wesson behind my back, I turned Smoke’s way just in time to see her knees give out. One hand was splayed on her blouse just above the waist. Blood leaked between the fingers.

  Charlotte Sing was on her own knees, reaching for the Walther with her uninjured left hand. I hooked a foot under her midriff and heaved, flipping her over onto her side. She cried out when her broken hand struck the chair she’d been sitting in, shoving it crooked. I started toward where Smoke had fallen.

  Then the door flew open, bringing the shattered jamb in with it, and also a man wearing the midnight-blue uniform of the Detroit Police Department with a Sig-Sauer semiautomatic clasped in both hands.

  “Drop the weapon!” he roared. “Now!”

  I dropped the weapon. Now. Exposition could wait.

  *

  “What a cocked-up mess.”

  Alderdyce was behind his desk, reading the report from the first officer on the scene.

  I was standing on the other side, waiting for the telephone to ring. The cops he’d sent to Detroit Receiving had orders to call the moment there was news from the room where surgeons were operating on Smoke Wygonik. “If you’re looking for an argument, I can’t help you.”

  “You got two foreign nationals killed. If we’d known they were involved, we might’ve nabbed Sing outside their hotel room.”

  “They made a good case for keeping my mouth shut. They knew the risks. I sort of liked Dorn, but she said herself GOLEM agents have the life expectancy of the common housefly. And we can add Israel to the list of countries waiting in line to extradite.”

  I’d seen something you don’t see every day, Charlotte Sing cuffed to a DPD officer. He hadn’t been able to shackle both wrists with shards of bone sticking out of her right hand, but she’d been pale with pain and in no mood to resist.

&nbs
p; Smack behind the patrol car that took her away had come the EMS unit for Smoke. The girl had lost a lot of blood, despite my best efforts and those of Officer Winthrop of the Tactical Mobile Unit. As the attendants rolled her out she smiled wanly at me through the oxygen mask and was barely able to squeeze my hand.

  Alderdyce said, “I never realized Sing was so small.”

  “So is a brown recluse,” I said.

  “What I mean is she must have climbed onto a stool to fire through that peephole.”

  “Not really. She could have stood on tiptoe and stretched her arm. If her timing was right she didn’t have to see just when Dorn put her eye to it after she knocked. She must’ve been watching the hotel ever since she got herself patched up from the thing at Fort Wayne. She knew sooner or later one of them had to go out on some errand. When Leibowitz went for cigarettes, she got the one inside the room, then staked out the elevators.”

  “Five murders on top of a drug conspiracy. Yummy’ll trade state’s evidence for a twenty-year pop and call it Christmas.”

  “You’d better double his guard. She still has people on the outside.”

  “Is it okay if I already did that?”

  The phone rang on his desk. He looked at caller ID. “Receiving.” He picked up. “Alderdyce. Yes. When? Okay, thanks. I know.” He hung up, his face bleak.

  “Yeah.” I let myself out.

  *

  The police located Smoke’s parents in Madrid, New Mexico. They came in to bring the body back. Alderdyce, who’d supervised the details, stopped by my office on his way back to Homicide. He’d put on a sober black suit and knitted black tie for the occasion.

  “Everything go all right?” I filled two glasses from the working bottle.

  “Oh, we’ve got it down to a science now.” He drank, swallowed, made the appropriate face. “I thought I should tell you in person what we found in a backpack in Smoke’s loft.”

  “How much?”

  “Just under ten thousand. I guess she spent some of it on incidentals.”

  “A rotisserie chicken and a bottle of wine.”

  “You’re not surprised.”

  “I almost got it straight from Sing, but she caught herself. I’d figured it out by then; I just didn’t know how deep Smoke was in. That morning she pressed me a little too hard to take her along when I went to the hotel—although she didn’t know it was the hotel I was going to and I doubt she knew anything about it. It hadn’t happened yet. I’d left a picture with her after I asked about Cecelia Wynn, the first time we met. Someone had to have told Sing what my interest was, and given her a photo so she could match it with a ringer. Ten thousand seems pretty steep, but there was more to the job.

  “Yummy got the assignment to tail me around town and report to Sing, but after he blew his cover in the foyer of my building, and especially after he tried to jack her up for more money, Smoke inherited it. I didn’t tell her much, but it was enough for Sing to track my progress. She knew I was spending quality time with Homicide, so she or one of her people staked out the precinct with a high-tech scanner. That’s speculation, but it still makes as much sense as the first time I suggested it. She probably trusted that job to herself, just like when she followed up on it at Fort Wayne. Her organization’s running low on employees she can rely on. Now that I think of it, that’s why she stopped herself before outing Smoke. She never intended to kill her. She’d proven herself in my case.”

  “Moot point, if Sing killed you.”

  “She wasn’t there for that, just to find out how much I knew. She isn’t one to abandon a plan if it can be salvaged.”

  “We found a shopping list of herbs in the Dumpster behind the Wolverine Hotel, in a hand like Alison Garland used when she was impersonating Cecelia Wynn. Cecelia must have left it at the store. Sing gave it to Garland for practice. Do you think Smoke knew she was an accomplice to drug-dealing and murder?”

  “I like to think not.”

  “She really got to you, didn’t she?”

  “Well, you know what they say.” I drained my glass.

  “Yeah. The bitch is dead.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Charlotte Sing never stood trial in the United States. Israel filed for extradition, followed closely by China, both Koreas, Sweden, Denmark, and several emerging nations in Africa. There would be others as the news worked its way around the world, but the State Department gave China the first crack, as a gesture of good faith against Washington’s monetary debt to Beijing. Detroit hollered loudest of all. No one was listening, as usual.

  No footage appeared on TV and no pictures appeared in the papers of Sing, with a cast on her hand and her arm in a sling, boarding a Delta jet at Detroit Metropolitan Airport between two burly U.S. Marshals. That’s because it was done by way of the underground sometime in the puny hours of the morning, to avoid any attempt to rescue her or on her life. An Islamic cleric in Syria had issued a fatwa against her for misappropriation of funds intended for the destruction of Israel; and as for Israel itself, what had happened to Eichmann in 1962 is considered current history there, and sound political policy.

  So Madam Sing vanished behind the Bamboo Curtain, to face execution or life in some hole like the one Major Lazara Dorn had described to me. Not knowing which has aged me a little.

  Meanwhile I had a case to put to rest.

  *

  The window-studded façade of the big house on Lake Shore Drive reflected itself in a fresh puddle of water in the courtyard. As often as William the chauffeur washed Alec Wynn’s vehicles when he wasn’t driving them, I still wasn’t sure how he spent most of his day. I can operate a motor vehicle; anyone born within forty miles of Detroit can drive himself home from the maternity ward. It looked like a good job for catching up on my reading when I’ve had my fill of missing persons, international spies, dragon ladies, and lesbian bars. I don’t mention corpses because I got my fill of them long ago.

  Trina, the Brazilian maid, was expecting me. Her hair looked whiter and her eyes more dull, but that could have been projection on my part: I felt old enough and dull enough for both of us. She directed me to the morning room and returned to whatever her duties were. I was a fixture in the house now, requiring no escort.

  Nothing had changed in the quiet room where Cecelia Wynn had sat writing invitations and notes of thanks at her desk; nothing, that is, except the stench of chlorine from the swimming pool outside. It seemed stronger, and this time the door was closed. The surface should have been littered with the carcasses of birds that had flown too close to the fumes. Maybe the pool man had taken care of that, working his miniature butterfly net at the end of a long staff. When Trina left I slid open the glass door and stepped onto the tiles, breathing through my mouth. It didn’t keep my eyes from watering. I lit a cigarette, fighting poison with poison.

  Wynn came out five minutes later. Today’s gray suit was tailored as well as all the others, but he seemed to have shriveled inside it. The time that had passed still wasn’t that long, but anyone can give a physical impression based on a mental state.

  “I walked out of a meeting after you called,” he said. “I wasn’t really there anyway. I hope this means you’ve found Cecelia.”

  “I’ve found her. I think.”

  “You think?”

  “I haven’t found her in all the places I’ve looked, but negative evidence doesn’t count. That’s why I came back here.”

  “You’re babbling.”

  “Her note,” I said. “‘Don’t look for me.’ Of course she knew you would. You had to prove you could fulfill at least one of the duties of a husband.”

  “I told you of my shortcomings in confidence. Who else have you told?”

  “Stop talking like an idiot. Don’t you watch television? These days you’re not a man until your little man lets you down.” I lit another cigarette, to fill my nostrils with something besides chlorine, and flipped the match toward the pool. It floated motionless for a moment, then drifted toward the
filter outlet, which sucked it in with a slurp. “If it means anything, Debner couldn’t keep her happy either. No man could.”

  “Are you saying my wife’s a nymphomaniac?”

  “No. She’s a homosexual.”

  “That’s a damn lie.” But it lacked conviction.

  “Not a practicing one. It’s possible she didn’t even realize what her problem was until five weeks ago, when she accidentally saw your former maid naked. The maid’s a lesbian and recognized the reaction. They develop a sense for it after a while, like a blind man’s hearing. Cecelia was proud, wasn’t she?”

  “Intensely. She didn’t see it as a sin. Neither do I. Pride’s responsible—”

  “I know all about the pyramids and the Declaration of Independence. This isn’t a PowerPoint presentation. When are you going to do something about this pool?”

  The change of subject threw him for a moment, but he seemed to welcome it. “The man I consulted has a crew coming next week. He thinks it’s methane gas causing the odor, from an old sewer line running under the yard. The city capped it off when the new one went in, before I bought this house, but he thinks it’s developed a crack. It’s a choice of digging up the yard or adding more and more chlorine to cover the smell. Have we talked enough about the damn pool?”

  “Sure. I was just gathering my thoughts. I’m going to be a cockeyed psychologist, like everyone else who watches daytime TV.” I waited for him to shoot that down or wave me on, but I couldn’t tell if he was even listening. He stood staring at the fence that separated his house from his neighbor’s, fists balled in his pants pockets. Maybe there was a long-standing feud over property lines. You never know what the rich are thinking.