“A lot of smoke gets blown about the male fear of loss of masculinity,” I said. “No one talks about women’s fears for their femininity, especially strong women who are often compared to men because they don’t pull their aprons up over their faces when a problem needs a solution. For most women it’s a lark, a little harmless experimentation in college or in the cloakroom at the nineteenth hole. You and I will never get it, because we’re men, and ostensibly heterosexual. But Cecelia wouldn’t either. She had a specific idea of the kind of woman she was and the kind she wanted to be. The herbal pills were all part of that: an ongoing campaign to improve herself according to the conventions. But the conventions threw her a curve.
“She’d fight it, of course,” I went on. “She fired a servant out of hand, to get temptation out of the house, but that would just increase the pressure to look for it outside. I spent an hour in a bar established just for that purpose. When a woman like her faces the truth, she can go one of three ways: ignore the situation, embrace it, or run away from it. The first one’s a ticking time bomb. The second’s thrilling to think about, but it means giving up on the plan you spent so much time building, just walking away from it, and that’s frightening as hell, because you can’t know what you’re trading it in for. That leaves running away. But she’d already tried that with Lloyd Debner, back when she had no idea why she was so dissatisfied with her life. Now that she knew, there was only one other escape route.
“She would be too proud to spell it all out in her note.”
Wynn’s face matched his suit. He groped with one hand, grasped air, stretched his arm, felt the filigreed metal of a pool chair, shuffled over, and lowered himself into it. I’d never seen a man age so quickly outside of science fiction. He put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.
I almost threw my cigarette butt into the water, thought better of it, and crushed it underfoot on the tiles. Even that seemed like a blasphemy: Everything was hallowed ground. “I’m sorry I doubted you, Mr. Wynn, just because her note was undated. When you reach that point in your thinking, who cares what day it is?”
“Where is she, Walker? Where’s Cecelia?”
I stepped over to the pool and looked at my reflection. A light steam rose from the heated water into the frosty spring air. I could see through to the bottom, but there was a recessed area under a shelf along the north edge, some contractor’s idea of a helpful step to boost swimmers out of the pool. In practice it was a design flaw, creating a pocket that would trap leaves and twigs and other debris that would normally be sucked into the filter outlet or float to the surface. Shadows swirled in the pocket, thick and dark and full of secrets.
Books by Loren D. Estleman
AMOS WALKER MYSTERIES
Motor City Blue
Angel Eyes
The Midnight Man
The Glass Highway
Sugartown
Every Brilliant Eye
Lady Yesterday
Downriver
Silent Thunder
Sweet Women Lie
Never Street
The Witchfinder
The Hours of the Virgin
A Smile on the Face of the Tiger
Sinister Heights
Poison Blonde*
Retro*
Nicotine Kiss*
American Detective*
The Left-Handed Dollar*
Infernal Angels*
Burning Midnight*
Don’t Look for Me*
VALENTINO, FILM DETECTIVE
Frames*
Alone*
Alive!*
DETROIT CRIME
Whiskey River
Motown
King of the Corner
Edsel
Stress
Jitterbug*
Thunder City*
PETER MACKLIN
Kill Zone
Roses Are Dead
Any Man’s Death
Something Borrowed, Something Black*
Little Black Dress*
OTHER FICTION
The Oklahoma Punk
Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes
Peeper
Gas City*
Journey of the Dead*
The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association*
Roy & Lillie: A Love Story*
The Confessions of Al Capone*
PAGE MURDOCK SERIES
The High Rocks*
Stamping Ground*
Murdock’s Law*
The Stranglers
City of Widows*
White Desert*
Port Hazard*
The Book of Murdock*
WESTERNS
The Hider
Aces & Eights*
The Wolfer
Mister St. John
This Old Bill
Gun Man
Bloody Season
Sudden Country
Billy Gashade*
The Master Executioner*
Black Powder, White Smoke*
The Undertaker’s Wife*
The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion*
The Branch and the Scaffold*
NONFICTION
The Wister Trace
Writing the Popular Novel
*Published by Tom Doherty Associates
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Loren D. Estleman has written more than seventy novels and has won four Shamus Awards for detective fiction, five Spur Awards for Western fiction, and three Western Heritage Awards. The Western Writers of America also has awarded Estleman the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Contribution to Western Literature. In 2013, the Private Eye Writers of America presented him with its lifetime achievement award, the Eye. Don’t Look for Me is the twenty-third Amos Walker mystery, and it marks the final book of Walker’s Charlotte Sing trilogy that began with American Detective and Infernal Angels. His recent novels include the third Valentino mystery, Alive!, and an epic historical fiction novel of an iconic American gangster, The Confessions of Al Capone. He lives with his wife, author Deborah Morgan, in Michigan.
Learn more at www.lorenestleman.com.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
DON’T LOOK FOR ME
Copyright © 2014 by Loren D. Estleman
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Drive Communications, New York
Cover imagery © 2013 Shutterstock
Edited by James Frenkel
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Estleman, Loren D.
Don’t look for me: an Amos Walker novel / Loren D. Estleman.— First Edition.
p. cm.
A Tom Doherty Associates Book.
ISBN 978-0-7653-3121-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-42994657-5 (e-book)
1. Walker, Amos (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Michigan—Detroit—Fiction. 3. Detroit (Mich.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3555.S84D66 2014
813’.54—dc23
2013025071
e-ISBN 9781429946575
First Edition: March 2014
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