Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 06

by Every Brilliant Eye

  I restacked the typewritten sheets and pushed them to one side and thought about what I should do next. I was suddenly thirsty and thought about the bottle in the bottom drawer of the desk. It seemed a corny place to keep a bottle; why didn’t I have a bar? But Mr. John T. Molloy said professionals who want to look professional didn’t have bars in their offices. A careful man, Mr. Molloy. He would wear pinstriped pajamas to bed and line up his slippers with the toes pointed out and when he had breakfast he would take his coffee and his toast first and then his eggs and bacon, one strip, fried not too crisp, because that was how professionals slept and ate breakfast. I thought of all that and then I wasn’t thirsty anymore. I said to hell with Mr. Molloy and his pajamas and bacon and got out my little sheaf of Xeroxed clippings. On top was the long piece about Alfred Kindnagel, the Jewish labor chief.

  The main photograph was one of these flattering studio jobs shot through a Kleenex, of a man with a large dome, jug ears, a comfortable set of chins, smiling eyes, and twelve black hairs strung across his scalp. He wore a brown suit with a stripe that was almost invisible and a softly shining sepia necktie. It was the kind of thing they frame in heavy gilt and hang in the boardroom with a brass plaque reading OUR FOUNDER. The others were more casual: Kindnagel, much younger and slimmer but already losing his hair, conversing earnestly in his shirtsleeves with a group of mortar-smeared bricklayers during the labor crises of the Depression; Kindnagel, aging, sitting on a bench outside a congressional committee hearing room, slumped in his overcoat with the brim of his hat turned up and a bodyguard seated on either side; Kindnagel in retirement, broad, bald, and beaming, pale belly hanging outside his swim trunks, tossing a ball for his six-year-old granddaughter at the beach; Kindnagel at his brother’s funeral, tired and emaciated-looking, leaning on the arms of his wife and middle-aged daughter. The caption said that was his most recent photograph. It was probably his last, as he died shortly before the article appeared.

  The story concentrated on his early years and the quiet methods by which he had obtained power among Jewish workers while the nation was watching the brawls and sit-down strikes at River Rouge and the machine guns atop the Ford plant, and on the efforts of the FBI, once it had belatedly taken notice of him, to harass him into retirement because of “leftist leanings.” But 117 hours of telephone taps at his home and office had yielded nothing more instructive than a crash course in the Yiddish vernacular and his mother’s matzoh recipe. Twelve years later he bowed out of public life for reasons of health and thereafter divided his seasons between the family home in Bloomfield Hills and a small estate in Miami.

  His widow’s name was Grete. Just for fun I looked her up in the directory. A G. Kindnagel was listed in Bloomfield Hills. I looked at my watch. I had four and a half hours to kill before Lieutenant Ysabel reported for duty.

  “Hello?”

  An elderly woman’s voice. “Grete Kindnagel?” I asked.

  “This is Grete Kindnagel. Please, who is speaking?”

  “I’m a Detroit private investigator looking into the disappearance of a man who I think may have been researching your late husband’s life when he vanished. I wondered if I could come over sometime and talk to you about it.”

  There was a little silence before she asked the question.

  “Is this Mr. Stackpole?”

  16

  A TISSUE OF CLOUD slid past the window, graying out the square of yellow on the desk and floor. I waited until it passed.

  “My name is Amos Walker,” I told Grete Kindnagel then. “Has Barry Stackpole been in contact with you?”

  “He called. Last week sometime, I don’t know what day just. They have to tell me when it’s Saturday so I remember not to cook or clean house. He asked could he come over, talk about Alf, just like you. I told him to come ahead. But he didn’t.” She paused, and I heard her breath trembling. “Is it about Alf’s pension?”

  I assured her it wasn’t. “What did Stackpole say?”

  “What I said. He said he didn’t want to talk about it over the phone. I made tea and put some cookies on a plate. I always have refreshments when visitors come. Only he didn’t.”

  “Is it all right if I come over now? I have some questions to ask. It won’t take long.”

  “I guess. But I’m not putting the water on until you get here.”

  I got directions and cruised on out.

  The feudal lines are softening around Detroit. In the old days, the blue collars and lunch pails kept to the city, with its weatherworn apartment buildings and miles of housing developments as alike as hiccups, while the gold collar pins and silver fox furs breathed the bottled air in Grosse Pointe. But then wages rose, drawing itinerant field hands up from Kentucky and Tennessee and Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi in their rattletrap trucks and touring cars to the automobile factories and creating a new class among the workers already on the scene, who fled north and west and staked out their own communities with names like Birmingham and Beverly Hills and Madison Heights and Pleasant Ridge, places with country clubs and basements with walnut paneling and blue shag rugs for the neighbors to sit around in sipping gin rickeys and talking about lawn edgers and orgasms. Bloomfield Hills was one of these, grown up around a sprawl of half-timbered buildings established by newspaper magnate George G. Booth in the 1920s, inspired by Hearst’s castle at San Simeon and including a church, private schools, an art school, and a science museum, under the name of the Cranbrook Institute. The homes were laid out in kind: bricks of hedges and redwood fences around backyard swimming pools, gaslights and Neighborhood Watch decals in the windows.

  The address Grete Kindnagel had given me belonged to a large brick house with wings on either side and red-painted shutters on at least a dozen windows facing the street. It had a half-acre of front lawn with one of those marble birdbaths on it that are made to look like Roman ruins and a circular composition driveway containing a gold Continental Mark IV glittering in a puddle of water that reflected the clouds skidding overhead. I parked behind it and mounted a fresh concrete slab in front of the door and used the knocker. It was shaped like a ram’s head with a ring in its mouth. Somewhere a motor with a long piston stroke was making a noise like pea soup coming to a boil.

  “Yes?”

  I looked at a tall man in his thirties with dark hair combed forward over an advancing brow and dark eyes I thought looked familiar without knowing why, and then I remembered the portrait of Alfred Kindnagel that had accompanied Jed Dutt’s article. He had on a white tennis shirt with a chesspiece embroidered on the left breast, rumpled gray cotton slacks, and black oxfords. He kept his hand on the knob of the open door.

  I explained who I was and why I was there. As I spoke, a little of the suspicion on his face skinned off. “Yes, Grandmother said she was expecting you,” he said. “I’m Jack Kindnagel, Alf’s grandson.”

  “Jack?”

  “Jeremiah, originally. Come in. Grandmother’s out back.”

  I wiped my feet and entered. He closed the door and I followed him through a sunlit room with paintings on the walls into other rooms with leather-bound books on shelves and antique tables holding up china clocks and porcelain figurines. The place was immaculate. Jack Kindnagel caught me looking around. “Grandmother does all the cleaning herself. She won’t have a housekeeper.”

  The motor noise got louder as we walked, and then we stepped out onto a screened-in porch with wicker furniture and bright cushions. Beyond the screen stretched an expanse of grass twice as big as the one in front. At the far end a tiny figure in a flowered dress under a broad straw hat wheeled a baby tractor around the comer of the lawn, towing a cutter spraying green clippings out the back. The air smelled sharply of cut grass.

  Kindnagel said something to me that was lost in the noise, but which I took as a request to wait, and went out through a screen door. At his approach the woman on the tractor reached down and hauled back on a handle, then flipped a switch or a key on the dash or whatever it was called. Th
e motor sputtered and died. She climbed down. Facing the young man at ground level she came barely to his shoulder. The straw hat bobbed up and down and the two started walking back to the porch.

  “Mr. Walker?” While her grandson held the screen door, Grete Kindnagel stepped through it and held out her hand. It was tiny and full of blue veins and gripped mine like a pair of pliers wrapped in a damp cloth. “My, you got here fast. I hoped to get done the mowing before you came. You met Jeremiah.”

  I said I had.

  “He’s a great disappointment to me,” she said, shaking her head. “All he does is wash the car and play golf.”

  “I’m a professional golfer.” He said it without rancor.

  “You smack a little white ball into a hole and call it work. Any schlemiel can do that.”

  “Grandmother keeps all my trophies in a glass case upstairs,” Jack told me.

  “Out of sight.”

  Jack said, “I’ll put the tea on.”

  “You keep Mr. Walker company. The male half of this family can’t boil water without burning it.” She went inside.

  Her grandson waved me into one of the wicker chairs and took the bench for himself. “She’s quite a lady,” he said. “Everyone thought she’d dry up and blow away when Alf died. She just got stronger. It took not having him around to make a real Jewish mother out of her. She’s eighty-seven now. She was a child bride.”

  “You call your grandfather Alf?”

  “Everyone did. He insisted.”

  We ran out of polite conversation then. I shifted my weight on the wicker. I felt like Sidney Greenstreet.

  “Why are you here?” asked Jack. “Alf’s been dead almost three years.”

  “You’re asking the wrong person, Mr. Kindnagel. Two other people are dead, one for almost as long as your grandfather, and I don’t know why I was asking about them either.”

  “It’s a strange way to go about conducting a missing person investigation.”

  “In my line I have to go looking in the tall grass. I can’t go where the light’s better because what I’m looking for won’t be there. Being a golfer you should understand that.”

  “I’m going to stay if you don’t mind,” he said. “And even if you do. To make sure Grandmother doesn’t get hurt.”

  I moved my head noncommittally and looked out through the screen. A line of half-grown maples separated the end of the yard from the beginnings of the one next door, the leaves turning copper.

  The old lady returned carrying a tray with a silver teapot and white china cups and a dish of oatmeal cookies. She set k down on a latticework table and began pouring. I stared at her. She was thick-waisted but not fat, and her face was round and tan without a wrinkle. Without the hat, her white hair curled back in thick waves behind small flat ears with amber buttons in them. The backs of her hands were burned red. She handed me a cup and saucer.

  “I hope you’re not one of these people that take sugar,” she said. “Alf did, until we went to England and they almost deported him for it.”

  “Thank you. I don’t take sugar in anything.”

  “You didn’t look to me like someone that would. Have a cookie.” She sat down on the bench next to her grandson, balancing a cup and saucer in her lap.

  “Where’s mine?” asked Jack.

  “You’re not staying.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Whose name is the house in?”

  “Grandmother—”

  She patted his knee. “Run along, Jeremiahla. Practice your bogies.”

  “You don’t practice bogies, you try to avoid them.” But he stood up. Bending to kiss her upturned cheek, he let his eyes rest on me for a second. I ate a cookie.

  When he had gone inside, she said: “He eagled the fifteenth at Metropolitan Beach last Saturday, finished four under for the tournament. Alf would have been proud.”

  I fed my grin some tea. “Can I ask you about Mr. Kindnagel?”

  “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Do you like those cookies?”

  They tasted like pressed newspaper. “Very much. Did Mr. Kindnagel have any dealings with a man named Philip Niles? He owned half of a body shop in Royal Oak.”

  “I don’t think so. He leased his cars from a company that took care of the maintenance.”

  “Union business?”

  “It’s eight years since a Kindnagel had anything to do with the union. Alf didn’t want anyone else in the family involved. He said labor racketeering was getting to be on the wrong foot. It’s why he left.”

  “I thought it was for his health.”

  “That’s what he told everyone. The truth is he came home one night and said he looked around and realized he was the last member of the board of directors that had ever held a trowel. All the younger men around him went to business school. They thought a callus was something you got on a clay court. I said, ‘Quit.’ He announced his retirement next day.”

  “He sounds like a man of principle.”

  “Yes.” It was a sigh.

  I played my hole card. “Did he know a Lieutenant Ray Blankenship of the Detroit Police Department?”

  “I can’t say. We met a number of police officers once the FBI started persecuting him. They searched his offices in Detroit several times. We knew they were cooperating with the federals. I don’t know that he knew their names ever. He didn’t bring them home for dinner.”

  “What about all that? Was your husband a leftist?”

  “You mean was he a Communist. Is this the home of a Communist? Well, he voted for Eugene Debs once. Who didn’t, who wasn’t born in this country? What can I tell you of a time when a quarter was so big you could trip over it? No, Alf was no leftist.”

  “Searches aren’t lieutenant level,” I mused. “Any other circumstances that might have brought him head to head with the authorities?”

  She freshened my tea. “Mr. Walker, my husband made his living in those what-do-you-call circumstances.”

  “The police specifically.”

  “Well, in the old days, when he was getting started, he had to cooperate with the Purple Gang, let them know what he was doing and was it all right with them. They had everything nailed down to do with the Jews around Detroit. He spent time at their homes and the police knew that and they came to talk to him now and then. And later he talked to some Jewish police officers about organizing them separate from the D.P.O.A., but that fell through. That’s too far back probably. I can’t think of anything else. Well, the murder.”

  “Which murder?”

  “Which murder. The murder. How many do you think we have? This isn’t the Teamsters. A shop steward in a bearing plant on Eight Mile Road. I think it was Eight Mile. It doesn’t matter because it’s closed now. He was shot. I don’t remember his name. It wasn’t long before Alf retired. The police talked to him about it, but he didn’t even know the man. I don’t know if they ever found out who did it or why.” She watched me writing in my notebook. “Do you think it’s important?”

  “Maybe. Probably not. The odds of being in the same union with a murdered man aren’t encouraging. These Purples you say your husband was in tight with; some of them kept their hands in after Prohibition was repealed. Did he maintain contact?”

  “I don’t know that he’d have reason to. Those boys lost their hold when the country went wet.”

  “That’s it?”

  She shook her head, smiling with a little shrug. “What has this to do with Mr. Stackpole?”

  “If I knew that I wouldn’t be out here breathing your air.” I flipped the pad shut and picked up my tea. The cookie was lying like a hockey puck on the floor of my stomach. First Amigo Fuentes’ jack handle, then Grete Kindnagel’s cookies. When the cup was empty I set it down and made leaving movements and she said:

  “Please stay a minute. I don’t get many new visitors, just the family. You get tired of looking around and seeing your own eyes looking back at you. Alf and I outlived all the friends we made.”

>   “You did well doing it.” I sat back.

  She looked out across the broad sweep of lawn and at the young maples. She had a profile like a little girl’s, all round with no sharp angles. “I spend most of my time out here when the weather’s nice. It’s the only place where I can feel it’s my home. When we built the place Alf brought in an interior decorator, a tall young woman in leopard pants and a scarf hanging down around her ankles. She decided antiques and old books fit someone of Alf’s gravity. That’s the word she used, gravity. So our furniture and my mother’s knickknacks went into storage and we made the place over into a museum like one of those Great American Homes they’re always painting in commercials on the TV. Sitting in the living room I always feel like I’m waiting to go somewhere else. I guess nothing’s stopping me from changing back now. But Alf liked it. Don’t ever let them take your home away from you, Mr. Walker.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I came over in nineteen-eleven,” she said. “My father smelled a pogrom coming and put together everything he had to send me. I made the trip all alone, a girl of fourteen, and stayed with my Uncle Max, who owned a fruit stand on Brush. I stayed a week, then he tried to do a terrible thing to me and I moved out. He said I’d become a whore or starve. I got a job waiting tables in a restaurant on Beaubien. I was a good waitress. I made my salary all over again in tips. Then the owner fired me and hired his daughter in my place, only she didn’t make one third as much in tips. I got another job waiting tables uptown. Three years I waited tables, and then Alf came in all covered with mortar dust. He looked like a young prince.”

  She was staring at the spot where the trees met the sky. Then she shook her head. “I’m sorry. When most of your life is the past you spend too much time in it. I’ve watched my people move past Twelfth and Fourteenth Streets into Oak Park and Southfield, and now they’re leaving Bloomfield Hills for Farmington. It’s a lot of past measured in city blocks like that.”