Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 06

by Every Brilliant Eye

  I wrote him out a check for a hundred dollars by way of down payment on another vehicle, rescued my Luger from the special pocket under the dash, and took a cab home to change.

  I showered, washing my knee carefully and the scraped hand, from which I plucked the remaining pebbles with tweezers. I applied iodine. The knee felt as if it were wearing a sheet of gauze, but a light brush started it tingling. I decided not to bind it, and put on dress pants and a sport coat over a knit shirt. Then I locked up, walked four blocks, and waited forty-five minutes for a city bus for the fifteen-minute ride to the office.

  No line of eager clients was loitering outside the locked door to the reception room. I glanced at the party-colored envelopes on the floor under the mail slot and left them. There were no messages at my service. I missed Willy. I wondered if I could find out where they were going to bury him and if I should put flowers on the grave. Somehow I thought he’d prefer a bottle of carbonated Beaujolais poured over the fresh sod.

  I suppose I should have been looking over my shoulder a lot more than I was. But they’d made their move, whoever they were. If it was a warning they’d wait to see if it took before they tried something else. If it was a legitimate try they’d be busy rigging another one. I could have been wrong; I already had been once, thinking they’d spell out last night’s threat before they did anything. But my knee hurt and I had a headache and the hell with them, whoever they were. Whoever they were, they were good. I hadn’t even spotted the tail.

  I reached for the telephone to call Louise. The damn thing rang while I had my fingers on it.

  “Walker, this is Arthur Rooney. Today makes three days you’ve been working on the Stackpole case. I was wondering if you’d learned anything.”

  “I have and I haven’t, Mr. Rooney,” I said. “I’ve got a pretty good idea what Barry was looking into when he vanished. The rest is a tangle. Can I get back to you?”

  “Tomorrow’s Friday. Monday the News starts kicking in a thousand dollars a day to the grand jury in his place.”

  “If you were counting on me finding him by then you’re not as smart as I know you are. Tracing a missing person is tough enough without doing it by someone else’s watch.”

  “I’m leaving tomorrow for a weekend in Jamaica. I’d like some sort of report by five o’clock.”

  The buzzer went off, telling me that someone had just entered my reception room. I switched it off and said, “You forgot ‘or else.’”

  “Look, I’m not making any ultimata.” His tone was suddenly conciliatory. I was the grieving widow again. “It’s just that the News has placed the matter in my hands and they’ll expect me to have some information for them before they start paying fines. No one’s hurrying you. I just want a rundown on the progress you’ve made so far.”

  “I’ll be in tomorrow. I need more working capital anyway. The expenses on this one are running high.”

  “How high?”

  “I need a suit and a new car.”

  Pause. “You’re wising off again, right?”

  “Not this time. Any explanations would run as long as my whole report. I’ll be in before five.”

  “Make it four. I’ve a plane to catch at seven and I have an idea we’ll be talking a while.” He clicked off.

  I got the Luger out of the top drawer where I’d stashed it, slipped it into the side pocket of my coat, and kept my hand on it while I opened the door to the outer office. A woman of fifty, trim and tall in a tweed suit and glasses with big round lenses, her graying hair cut short and streaked blond, was sitting on the bench with her ankles crossed, reading a two-month-old copy of the Saturday Review. She closed it and returned it to the coffee table with a tight lipsticked smile and I held the door for her.

  Her name was Mayanne Latimore, Dr. Mayanne Latimore, and she was a licensed psychologist with a practice in Grosse Pointe Woods. She had two grown daughters, both married, and she had been divorced six years. Eighteen months ago, she said, she had begun treating an inmate named Oscar Klave at the Wayne County Jail, who was serving ten months for fleecing some doctors in Dearborn on a phony moon shuttle project. The therapy was one of the conditions for parole. After his release they had gone on seeing each other, but not as doctor and patient, and he had promised to marry her as soon as his divorce came through. Meanwhile she had advanced him several sums of money to tide him over while he looked for a job. A week ago he and his estranged wife had pulled up stakes and left the state, violating his parole and neglecting to inform Dr. Latimore that they were leaving. She was concerned about what would happen to him if the law caught up with him and wanted me to find him first.

  I played with the pencil I had been using to write all this down. “How much money did you lend him?”

  “Roughly five thousand dollars.” The eyes behind the big lenses didn’t flicker.

  I wrote that down too. “Do you have a picture?”

  She gave me a Polaroid snap taken at the beach. Dr. Latimore, looking awkward and matronly in a one-piece white sharkskin suit, was standing next to a lean dark muscular number in his thirties with a hairy arm wrapped around her waist and that broad white smile you see on doorsteps and in insurance offices. He was wearing one of those black jockstraps that are always the rage in Europe. I put the picture in the drawer next to the gun.

  “I’ll put out a line on him, Dr. Latimore. But I wouldn’t count on him coming back any way but in bracelets.”

  “I just want to talk to him,” she said.

  I got some more information out of her and she wrote out a check for my three-day retainer. We stood.

  “I guess I look pretty foolish,” she said.

  “He’s a professional, Dr. Latimore. He gets his living making people look foolish.”

  “And me an expert on the human mind.”

  “It’s the personal equation. They don’t teach it in college.” I saw her to the door.

  The case was nothing. I traced him to a Milwaukee address through the firm that had sold his house and gave it to Dr. Latimore the next day. I don’t know where it went from there, but I had an idea. You can go to school six years longer than anyone else and not know as much as a kid in a video parlor on Gratiot who can barely write his own name.

  After the psychologist had left the first time I called Louise and asked her how was the world of letters.

  She laughed mellowly. “You got me just in time. I’m reading a scene in a first novel that has Pulitzer Prize written all over it. The hero is a bum and he’s negotiating with a flophouse manager for a bed for the night over the manager’s wife, who’s sitting on a chamber pot.”

  “Realistic.”

  “Oh, yes. Everyone receives visitors on the toilet. Where are you taking me for dinner?”

  “We’re confident today,” I said.

  “This morning was very nice.”

  “I knew you’d like Greektown.”

  “Who mentioned Greektown?”

  I grinned at the wall. “You won’t mind getting picked up in a cab.”

  “Car trouble?”

  “Not anymore. Ten o’clock okay?”

  “Why so late?”

  “I have something else to do first,” I said. “After dark.”

  23

  IF THE U.S. ARMY elected its own officers and the election were held tomorrow, Sergeant Mark Harney, no middle initial, would be commander-in-chief of all Southeast Asian operations by sundown.

  Harney is the type they used to cast as the leading man’s best friend in college pictures—the ones about finals and the big game, not the one you saw last week about shower rooms. He is a chipmunk’s smile in the center of a broad pink face topped by creamy yellow hair, with rings of wobbly flesh around his chest and middle and a piping voice that cracks when he gets excited, and no one has ever seen him calm. His bell shape is instantly recognizable against a landscape of emaciated orientals and reedy youths in uniform. Harney has done three tours in Nam and has service stripes to his shoulders, but
no two of us can agree on whether he has ever seen combat, though the consensus is that if he has, it has been a long time. He lives in a two-story hut on the edge of the base outside Hue, where he has strung sound equipment worth several thousand dollars stateside, but which he acquired for the price of a month’s supply of C rations from a Tokyo dealer with ties to the black market. When he is not there he can usually be found in the officers’ club, which is off limits to enlisted personnel and noncoms except for Sergeant Harney.

  Until recently it was a simple business transaction to deal heroin and cocaine from the sergeant. But of late he has moved his store upstairs to officer country. Soon, it has been said, he will do business with no one of lesser rank than first lieutenant.

  That is speculation, however. Because last night someone rolled an incendiary grenade through the door of Sergeant Harney’s hut while he was sleeping overhead, and this morning he is in the infirmary with third-degree burns over three-fourths of his body and the ends of the blood vessels on his head tied off like Farina’s pigtails. He is not expected to live.

  That was the last page of Barry’s manuscript. I went back and read the passage again. It seemed a strange place to end a book. But then it wasn’t the end or he wouldn’t have complained to me about never being able to finish anything. I laid the pages on top of the stack and lay fully clothed on the bed looking at the ceiling. My bed, my ceiling.

  It was after 6:00 P.M. and the star pattern scattered across the ceiling paper was growing dim. When I could no longer see it, it would be time to go out. The window was open and one of my neighbors was edging the weeds in his lawn with a power trimmer that hummed like an electric razor. I hoped it cut better. Farther off someone else who had his window open had a television set tuned to a Pistons exhibition basketball game. Last year’s season had ended the week before. A prop plane droned somewhere, an excruciatingly lonely sound. A woman called to someone named Brian and a screen door whacked a wooden frame. Under all this the hollow whooshing of heavy traffic drifted in from downtown; a muted roar like distant surf.

  The sunlight slipped a little, or it seemed to. Images turned over in my mind like old rotted timbers rolling in deep water. I thought about old labor men like Alfred Kindnagel, who get out because they don’t recognize any of the faces around them, then die. About cops, not old, like Ray Blankenship, who get out because they can’t look someone in the eye when asked what it is they do, and who maybe because of that close their lips around the cold blue oily barrels of revolvers in the ultimate act of self-degradation and squeeze the triggers. What do they look at? The wall? Pictures of their wives? Or do they watch their fingers contracting slowly, the cylinder starting to turn?

  I thought about bloodless bodies jammed into the trunks of automobiles with their wrists and ankles bound and holes in the backs of their heads, left to decompose and attract eventual attention in the long-term lot at the airport. Until that happens there is no grave more anonymous. You lie there getting waxen, your eulogy a litany of arrivals and departures gurgling unintelligibly out of the PA. system in the concourse, your mourners bored redcaps leaning on their luggage carts on the sidewalk arguing about the Lions’ bench. I thought about walking blonde dreams that the men who have them are not meant to keep. About friends that were more trouble than they’re worth. About wars, and how each one always seems worse than the one before because more things come out that were part of all the others but just waited their turn to be talked about. I thought about dead partners on dirty pavement and wives’ notes that don’t get thrown away and wait to be found again, like corpses walled up in the basement. About loan sharks named Amigo and pushbutton killers named Wally. I thought about a lot of things, and then the patch of sunlight was gone and I couldn’t see the printed stars.

  I got up, the rotted timbers of my thoughts spinning away in clouds of splinters, and padded into the kitchen in my stockinged feet. I was out of Scotch, but there was a swallow of vodka left in the company bottle. I poured it over ice and left it to steep while I took a shower. Afterward I got ready to shave, had a hand full of lather before I decided I was better off with a shadow and rinsed off the lather and dressed in dark clothes. I chose blue jeans and a dark gray sweater, colors that are harder to see at night than straight black. Last I put on thick brown socks and blue sneakers and went back into the kitchen and drank the vodka, watching my reflection in the window over the sink. It was gray out now. By the time I got to Barry Stackpole’s house in Harper Woods it would be dark enough.

  I called for a cab. The dispatcher, a gravelly voice with a Middle Eastern accent, said one was cruising the vicinity and would be at my door in a few minutes. I drained my glass, chewing the ice, washed it, dried it, and put it away in the cupboard. I looked at my reflection again and smoothed back my hair with both hands. Two more years of cases like this one and they’d be calling me the gray fox.

  A horn blew out front. I cut a Z in the wall and went out and mounted up.

  Harper Woods is strictly for local residents who don’t want a Detroit address. The bigger city presses against it on two sides, with Grosse Pointe Woods to the east and St. Clair Shores and East Detroit squatting on its head like Siamese gargoyles. It has no history and no business section to speak of, just rows and rows of houses and a school or two and some trees to justify the second half of its name and more churches than you can shake a prayer book at. I had the driver let me off three blocks short of my destination and tipped him a buck. He took it with a noncommittal smile. A diplomat.

  I walked the rest of the way. My knee was feeling pretty good, the way sore muscles feel good after an honest workout. The evening was cool. Someone was burning wood-hickory, by the smell. The sky wasn’t as cloudy as I’d have liked and a moon several days off the full stared down at me like an occluded eye. You can’t have everything. If you could you wouldn’t want it. Philosophy has it all over detective work; no one ever knows if you’re any good at it. Light shifted from star to star, like moths seeking a hole in a screen door. Two miles to the southwest, the rotating beacon at City Airport swung a smoky bat through the blackness.

  The house took some finding. I had been there only once, more than a year before, and then by daylight. At night the houses looked even more alike than their designers had intended. But the hour was early, and it was the only building on its block that wasn’t lighted. It was a brick one-story with garage attached and nonfunctional shutters on the windows. On the stoop I got my pencil flashlight out of a pocket and cupped my hands around the beam to read the number on the mailbox. It was Barry’s, all right.

  Just for the hell of it I pushed the bell. It chimed a lonely double stroke far back in the house. After a couple of minutes I tried again. Nothing. I opened the screen, tried the door, and trained the light on the lock. It was a dead bolt. I had hardly expected less. He would have another one on the back door and bar locks on the windows. Just because he was no longer living out of a suitcase didn’t mean he had gotten careless.

  I retraced my steps down the front walk. The street was empty. Across from Barry’s house stood its twin, but with everything reversed and a border of painted rocks to protect its prize lawn from motorcycles and pedestrians. Each rock was the size of a small coconut. I pried one loose, struck a Denny McClain stance, and hurled it like Grandma Moses.

  I was running when it hit, in a long silvery jingle of collapsing glass followed a half-second later by the clanging of a commercial alarm. This time I paced myself, running with head high and my arms pumping and my feet drumming the sidewalk in a steady rhythm. I was heading toward what passes for downtown in Harper Woods.

  I had made three blocks before the siren started up. It made a long thin tearing noise in the night air, yelping at corners and cross streets. Rubber scraped the curbs. The car passed me a block over, flashing its popcorn popper and shining its spot at doorknob level down both sides of the street. By then I was walking. My breath rasped and my heart hammered in my skull and my sweat d
ried to an icy shroud against my skin.

  Nearing the little business district, I stopped to comb my hair and adjust my clothes, using a darkened window belonging to an empty real estate office for a mirror. On the comer I entered a Cunningham’s and went to the magazine rack. I shared the premises with the pharmacist, a counter girl reading a paperback book with a groping couple on the cover, and a woman in her seventies in a red blazer and a black beret studying the label on a jar of cold cream. I slid a copy of Newsweek out of the rack and started reading. In a little while it was just me and the pharmacist and the counter girl. I flipped through an account of the President’s trip overseas, glanced at the Book and Cinema sections, read an article that said the sexual revolution was over. I was surprised no one had consulted me. I put it back and tried Time. The pictures were different.

  The girl at the counter had put down her book and was watching me, sighting down the aisle between the rows of greeting cards and pantyhose. A hand-lettered sign taped to the rack read NO LOITERING IN THE MAGAZINE SECTION. I chose a copy of Gentleman’s Quarterly and brought it over to her. She looked from it to my rumpled sweater and lowslung jeans.

  “It’s for my brother,” I said.

  She rang it up. I paid for it and left. There was a coffee shop on the next comer, where a group of Thursday night bowlers in green silk shirts were having their own little party at a back booth. They reminded me of the guy whose parking space I’d taken at Curly’s Bar and I grabbed a booth at the opposite end of the room. A waitress brought me coffee and a doughnut. I spent the next half hour dunking and sipping and grinning at the men’s fashion ads in GQ. A piece on grooming had some shaving tips I could use and I read that and a profile of Jack Nicholson and then the clock over the counter said nine o’clock. I folded a dollar bill under my saucer and settled the bill at the register. Walk twenty feet in any direction in this country and there is another place to eat. At any hour there are enough griddles going to heat Greenland.

  I rolled the magazine into a tube and jammed it into a city trash can, where the swarthy Italian number on the cover smiled amid crushed Styrofoam cups and wads of tissue. He reminded me of Wally Petite. Then I began walking back to Barry’s neighborhood. My knee had stiffened up some and I walked slowly to avoid limping, but not slowly enough to attract attention. I passed an elderly couple out for a stroll, the woman taking little nibbling steps with her hand on the man’s arm and his other hand on her back for support. It’s possible to do that on well-lighted streets that far north of the Renaissance City.