Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 06

by Every Brilliant Eye

  “You feel that way, how come you left Vice?”

  He showed his teeth again. “Prestige. You sure we don’t know each other?”

  “No way we could. I haven’t killed anyone lately and I don’t have any vices. I appreciate the time, Sergeant. I owe you, like I said.” I turned away quickly.

  To my back he said: “You wouldn’t if you’d tell me where it was we met. Wherever it was I don’t remember enjoying it.”

  11

  THE JUNKYARD—they call them Detroit cemeteries most other places—swallowed the whole block behind a twelve-foot board fence with hagman salvage painted on it in red letters as tall as a man, and an entrance on Myrtle. As I nursed my crate along the broken-asphalt driveway, picking my way between glittering carpets of shattered glass and twisted bits of molding, a yellow crane attached to an electromagnet shaped like an enormous suction cup lifted a late-model Buick with smashed fenders twenty feet above the aisles of stacked auto shells and set it almost noiselessly on the conveyor of a crusher busy knuckling an Oldsmobile two years younger than mine. The grinding, squealing inevitability of that machine made you cringe, like a hellfire minister holding forth in a church with no exits. The place smelled of dried mud and scorched metal.

  The office was a tiny shack made entirely of corrugated roofing wired together at the seams, with a hole cut for a window. A pair of men standing in the open watched me park next to a dusty pickup bearing the salvage company’s name and get out. One of the two was a squat black in his early sixties, with iron-gray hair curling up around the edge of his green billed cap and an impressive belly spilling through his open workshirt over his belt, rivulets of sweat making tracks in the fine coating of dust on his skin. His companion was a Hispanic, short and thin, sporting a lion’s mane of wild black hair and a Fu Manchu moustache. He had on a frayed denim jacket over bare brown chest, jeans with threads showing at the knees, and expensive steel-toed workshoes that had seen plenty of combat. He could have been thirty. He was probably closer to fifty. You treat the two ages two ways, so I played it safe and split the difference.

  “I’m looking for Amigo Fuentes,” I told him.

  His eyes were black under lowered lids. “Are you a policeman?” He tried hard not to pronounce the y like a j.

  I said I wasn’t and showed him my ID. His glance raked it swiftly.

  “Her parents send you?”

  I went on looking at him and put away my wallet. “You’re Fuentes?”

  “Let’s go inside. Cleon, bust them bolts if you got to, but yank that transmission. Man wants it by fi’ o’clock.”

  “Yas,” said the old black man, and left us, slapping a ballpeen hammer against the side of his leg as he walked.

  “Domb shits, these niggers,” Fuentes said over his shoulder. “Wanted Liquid Wrench to pop the bolts on a car was here ten years when I take over.”

  “Good help’s hard to find.”

  “Ain’ it the truth.” He snapped on a dropcord suspended over a steel desk, blinding me with 200 watts of sudden naked white light.

  Something struck me hard across the stomach. When I doubled over, a hand snaked behind me and jerked the revolver from my holster.

  The light went out. Green and yellow dots burst before my vision and glimmered away, like stones sinking in a deep pond. Fuentes was standing beside his desk with my Smith & Wesson in one hand and a jack handle in the other. I sucked for air and probed the sore spot on my abdomen.

  “Man wearing a piece walks different,” he said. “You’re estupid, Mr. Michigan State Police Licensed Private Investigator. What you think, you come see me wearing a piece, I’m estupid too? Domb cubatio, he going to shit when he sees you carry? Tell her parents is not my brat.”

  His voice was a whining singsong. I breathed and said, “I’ve heard better Alfonso Bedoyas. You do any Jane Withers?”

  He laid the gun on a stack of yellow invoices and slung the jack handle clanking onto the desk. “You take a tap good, I think. Maybe you ain’ so estupid after all. Maybe her parents don’ send you neither.”

  “The gun wasn’t for you. It’s that kind of neighborhood. No, her parents didn’t send me. I don’t even know who she is. I’m looking into the murder of Philip Niles, who turned up at Metro Airport a couple of years back with a twenty-two slug in the back of his head.”

  “Shit, Niles. Ask me about Cortez. They keep going to bring that up like a millage election till they nail me. I don’ kill Niles. I kill Niles, I don’ get my money. Is not good business. Even the cops see that finally.”

  “Bodies in trunks are a signature,” I said. “Feed it to the press and they’ll cough up ‘gangland-style slaying’ a hundred times out of a hundred. It happens you’re in a game that sometimes finds it necessary to cut losses by making examples of those players who forget the rules. I’m not talking about the salvage game.”

  “Sure, I shoot him from Miami, where I’m staying that week.”

  I laughed in his face.

  A brow got dark. His fingers touched the desk with the jack handle on it. Then he shrugged that exaggerated shrug they shrug in hot climates. “Hey, we’re just two guys talking. Man don’ pay on time, he gets more time. He don’ pay on time, he don’ walk so good. One out of fifty, sixty, maybe he gets dead, somebody slips or gets caught up in the moment, you been around, you know how that goes. But Niles, he got a good business—going concern, one partner only. You can’ make cash? Sign here, I got me a hook in Royal Oak. I don’ kill no one, understand, but more I don’ kill a man’s got prospects.”

  “He ran a body shop,” I said. “How much can there be in taking wrinkles out of fenders?”

  He uncovered a bandit’s grin with a glint of gold in it. “You ain’ been to Royal Oak, see the operation?”

  “What about it?”

  “You don’ do your homework, don’ ast me will I do it for you. What’s a private pig want with Niles, anyway? His wife think he making it with the angels?”

  I passed it. “You said they keep bringing up Niles. Who else has been around asking about him?”

  “Some blond Anglo about your age. Was in last week. I tor him what I tell you. He don’ get no jack handle, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “Hey, I got pride. I don’ hit no old ladies or cripples. Man limped.”

  The crusher ground away on the other side of the lot. A windshield gave with a noise like a wave breaking on rocks. He said, “Okay?”

  I stirred. “Okay, thanks. What do I owe you? Oh, yeah.” I slung a fist low into his midsection.

  He jackknifed, spraying spit. His lungs creaked and his hands closed and opened, closed and opened spasmodically. For a long time he held that position, saliva running off the point of his chin. Then he looked up at me slowly. Gold glinted.

  “You get one,” he gasped. “Don’t lean on your luck. After that I come for you with dogs.”

  “Amigo,” I said, “your accent’s slipping.” I picked up my gun and walked out of there and got into my car. As I backed around, the crane was feeding a fresh half-ton of steel and glass into the crusher, which went on masticating without a burp.

  12

  DETECTIVES IN BOOKS are always squawking about not having any leads to go on. In real life they beef about having too many. Birdseed on the windowsill of a room where a man was murdered could be a dying clue. It could just as easily be food for the birds. I had a room full of left shoes and broken pencil points and cryptic messages and a thousand ways to go, any one of which could wind up costing Walgren & Rooney and the Detroit News a bushel of cash and not buy them anything better than a bloodhound tracing a missing man’s boot back to the place where it was made. What makes you good in the work is a nose that tells you early when the trail’s going sour.

  I wished I had it. I took lunch in a coffee shop on Michigan Avenue, one of those places with a circular counter and a bouncing front door and stools that don’t get a chance to stop spinning between customers coming and going, a
nd laid out what I had so far. I had a Detroit police inspector, dead apparently by his own hand; a proprietor of a Royal Oak body shop, dead by someone else’s; a Jewish labor leader, dead by death; a live Cuban manager of a Detroit junkyard who lent money with no questions asked and who had obviously seen Al Pacino in Scarface thirty times and taken notes; and a sprinkling of newspaper clippings that had as much to do with one another as Alley Oop and the stock market forecast. All of which could have been just junk from a reporter’s drawer. Except for one thing.

  A guy answering Barry’s description, blond hair and bum leg, had been to see Amigo Fuentes within the past week, asking about Philip Niles. Or a guy that didn’t look anything like Barry, but that happened to share a couple of his characteristics, had been asking about him. Either way we were two people who had suddenly found a man who had been dead two years worth knowing about.

  I paid the counter girl, a blonde in her late thirties with tendrils of hair corkscrewing down both sides of her face, and asked if there was a telephone.

  “We had one, but the boss had it ripped out. Customers making calls blocked traffic at the door. Thanks, mister.” She tucked my dollar tip into the front of her uniform.

  “Your hair’s coming undone,” I said.

  She glanced quickly at her reflection in the stainless steel behind the counter. “Don’t scare me like that, mister,” she said, straightening. “I spent a half-week’s pay getting it to look like this.”

  “It looks nice.”

  She smiled. “Yeah?” Then she whisked my plate from in front of the hack who had taken my stool and asked what he was having.

  I drove around until I found a bank of open-air telephones on a corner and parked in front of a mailbox. A black woman in a light blue uniform as wide as a bus braked a three-wheeled scooter flush with my left rear fender as I climbed out. I had to look a second time to see the scooter.

  “You can’t stop there,” she said. “Unless you got something to mail.”

  I gave her a hinge at the honorary sheriff’s star in my wallet and lifted the receiver off one of the telephones. She sat there a minute, her little two-cycle engine making flatulent noises, then phut-phutted down the street to stop next to a diesel truck cab that was taking up two meters. I put the receiver back on the hook and swung up the metropolitan directory.

  Jed Dutt had told me Niles’s sister, Pearl Cochran, lived in Lathrup Village. There was only one Cochran listed in the Birmingham exchange with a Village address, a Kevin Cochran on Catalpa. I tapped out the number.

  “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Cochran?”

  “Yes?”

  “Pearl Cochran?”

  “Yes?” It was one of those high-pitched voices the unluckiest of us end up married to.

  “Philip Niles’s sister?”

  She might have drawn a quick breath. You can’t ever tell over the telephone. A hand got cupped over the mouthpiece and I heard muffled voices. Then she came back on the line. “Who am I speaking to, please?”

  I told her. “It has to do with a missing person case I’m working on,” I added. “I’d like to talk to you about it if you have time.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “I have reason to believe the man I’m looking for was investigating your brother’s murder when he disappeared.”

  “Mr.—Walker?” she said. “My brother is dead, Mr. Walker. Nothing we would have to say to each other will change that. I’ve reconciled myself to the fact that he was killed and that that gangster who killed him is still at large. It’s taken me nearly two years. You’ll understand if I say I don’t want to rip open that old wound.”

  “Is someone in the room with you, Mrs. Cochran?”

  “My husband was. He’s left. He and Philip never got along. I think his murder was a source of some satisfaction to Kevin, but we don’t discuss it. This is painful,” she added.

  I breathed some air. Mrs. Leopold, I have bad news, the worst. “I understand. One more question. Can you tell me if your brother’s body shop is still in business?”

  “The last I heard. It’s on Campbell Road between Eleven and Twelve Mile. Acme Collision. Philip’s old partner operates it.”

  “What’s the partner’s name?”

  “You said just one more question. Wally Petite. That’s his legal name, Wally. Not Walter.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Cochran. Sorry I bothered you.”

  “I’m sorry too.” She broke the connection.

  The telephone stand didn’t have a Yellow Pages. I got Acme’s number from Information. A Kentucky twang answered. When I asked for Petite it said, “Sec,” and I was listening to a hammer banging metal a long way off. A lot of seconds later the telephone rustled and someone said, “Petite.”

  I told him what I’d told Pearl Cochran and asked for an interview. There was a space during which I could tell the banging had stopped, then: “I don’t see what good it could do, but I suppose I can spare you a few minutes. Tomorrow morning at ten?”

  I said tomorrow morning at ten would be fine and we said goodbye. His voice had no inflection at all. I blamed it on the instrument.

  I tried a third number, but my luck wasn’t holding. A tape recording as old as my wallet growled and ground down and asked me to leave a message before the beep. I didn’t bother. I drove away from there. As I left the light at the corner, the meter maid was still idling next to the big truck with her ticket pad out, waiting for the first of the two meters to go into violation.

  Lou Gallardo worked out of a green Quonset hut on Pinecrest in Ferndale, with a partition between his four-by-four office and the storm door retailer he rented from, SPEEDO REPOSSESSIONS AND TRACES, read the steel tape on the red fire door that had stood open for as long as I had been coming there. I went in without knocking and found Lou on the telephone with one brown wingtip propped atop a stack of blank Michigan Secretary of State driver’s license application forms on a gray steel desk that showed the marks of a thousand struck matches. A red sock showed above the wingtip and two inches of hairy ankle showed above that. He had on green pants on top of the mess. A snappy dresser is Lou.

  He showed tobacco-stained teeth in a broad grimace of a grin when he saw me and waved at the wooden kitchen chair on the customer’s side of the desk. I transferred a month’s back run of the Free Press classifieds from the chair to the floor, moved a ceramic ashtray containing a smoldering stump of cigar to the far corner of the desk, and accepted the invitation.

  “Sure, the jimmy’s a legitimate expense,” he was telling the person on the other end of the line. “I busted the point off mine gaining entrance to the guy’s garage. Sure, he can sue. But no one wants to get called a deadbeat in open court. Yeah, I got the Caddy out back. Piece of shit. You can eat your lunch in the time between you stomp on the accelerator and the pistons get the hint. GM ought to be ashamed to call it a Cadillac. Time was—yeah.”

  I smoked a cigarette and watched him until I got exhausted and directed my attention elsewhere. Lou put more physical energy into a telephone conversation than any six bullfighters on a Sunday afternoon in Pamplona. I was admiring an assortment of burglar tools in a wooden ammunition case on a shelf behind his head when he banged down the receiver. I hadn’t heard a goodbye.

  “Last time I take on a goddamn accounting major for a client,” he said cheerfully. “How the hell are you, Amos?”

  “I’m eating.” I pointed at the box of tools. “You can get ninety days for just having those.”

  “I bought ’em off a detective in the Detroit B-and-E Bureau. He didn’t bust me. What brings Bulldog Drummond sniffing down Perspiration Lane today? You looking to go legit, get into repo work?”

  “I’m too old to learn the long way around those new locking transmissions, Lou. I need some dope on a smash-and-smooth shop in Royal Oak. Acme Collision, on Campbell Road. I figured you’d have it if anybody did.”

  He leaned back in his swivel and pulled a drawer out of a black pebbled-iron file cabine
t in worse shape than my green one. After thumbing through some tabbed cardboard folders he drew one out and put his foot down on the floor to make room on the desk. I watched him reading. He was a compact five feet with a sprinter’s frame going to fat and a perfectly round head with a matting of blue-black hair and a series of longitudinal creases in his cheeks that broke into an accordion when he smiled. His brow glistened, and although it was early afternoon on a cool day he had already sweated through his green-and-red-striped shirt. He could slide a car out of the police lockup under the guard’s nose and tell you where the refrigerator light went when it went out. If he had any ambition he’d have been the best P.I. in the state.

  “Thought so.” He held up a sheet. “Acme is the elephant’s graveyard for boosted wheels. It’s where hot Buicks go to die.”

  “Chop shop?”

  “Calling Acme Collision a chop shop is like calling the Vatican a country church.” He passed me the sheet.

  It was a computer printout off the Royal Oak Police Department’s central system, listing the serial numbers of dozens of stolen vehicles traced to Acme’s address. It was an original, not a Xerox copy. I handed it back. “So how come they’re still in business?”

  “Evidence. Car comes in, it’s stripped and pieced out over a six-state area in a few hours. By the time any part of it is traced to Acme the owner’s been paid by his insurance company, why should he come down, identify a greasy fuel pump? The Acme people are back on the street. Cops watch them for a little, they bump out fenders and go home at the end of the day with clean noses. Cops go back to what they were doing before and it starts in again. It’s a honey of an operation. If I weren’t so law-abiding these days I’d get in my résumé.”