Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 06

by Every Brilliant Eye

  This time I finished what I’d started to say and he said, “Color won’t be reaching its peak up north before next weekend. Try me in a week.”

  “Barry Stackpole told me to look you up.”

  He caught the telephone in mid-ring, picking up another pencil at the same time. “I can’t give you that now,” he told the mouthpiece. “Five minutes.” Hanging up: “I don’t know any Stackpoles. You got the wrong agency.”

  Before I could answer he was on the horn again. I skinned two twenties out of my wallet and tucked one end under the blotter.

  When he finished talking he scooped up the pencils he’d used and fed them one by one into a sharpener mounted on the desk, cranking the handle noisily between a meaty thumb and forefinger. He blew the shavings off the point of the last one, sighted down its length, then reversed ends and used the eraser to push the currency back in my direction.

  “Don’t let the location throw you, Jim,” he said. “I keep a roll of bills bigger than these in the toilet.”

  “Bet they get used when a twenty-to-one longshot comes in at Hazel Park.”

  His face turned a darker shade of yellow and his chins started to work. The bell jangled again. I picked up my money and let myself out while he was writing. If Barry was going to book a trip, he wouldn’t do it through the road show version of Guys and Dolls.

  Zephyr Travel was a dish of another order. The building was a colonial mansion built by one of the more obscure auto magnates during the First World War, all white with a shake roof and a balcony running clear around, supported by enough square columns to hold up three more of the same size. Its many windows looked out on a tide of cool green lawn that would make a golf course look shabby, bordered on either side by a line of cedars trimmed into perfect cones. The place had no sign. My driver checked the number on the gatepost and we glided up a broad composition driveway and braked in front of a porch that made the one on the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island look like a tenement stoop. Ours was the only vehicle in sight. I paid the driver and said he could go.

  “Maybe I wait.” He snicked up the flag on the meter. “You don’t look like someone that’s going to be in there long.”

  I went right in without knocking. That’s one ceremony cathedrals don’t stand on. The room I found myself in was a cozy acre, surrounded by windows with thick maroon drapes drawn shut and illuminated by sunlight streaming down through a skylight toward the rear onto a glossy brown floor, where it glimmered like moonlight on calm water. In the center of all this emptiness stood a French desk, all top and curving legs bleached white and then tinted mauve. The extra pair of curving legs under it belonged to a sleek operation in a blue dress with white lace trim around a heart-shaped neckline. Pearls above that, and higher up a gaunt model’s face with black hair all around, lots of it. As I approached, my footsteps chuckling in the rafters, she slid a red leather bookmark into a volume that would be Dante in the original or something like that and set it aside.

  “Zephyr Travel?” I asked.

  “Yes?” Her dark eyes gave up the barest flicker over my J.C. Penney suit.

  “I had to make sure. There’s no sign.”

  “We don’t advertise,” she said. “Our clients come to us on recommendation.”

  “You have a display in the Yellow Pages.”

  “Colonel Wheelock, that’s the owner, owns stock in Michigan Bell. He calls it priming the pump.”

  “He in?”

  “Have you an appointment?”

  “I need an appointment to arrange a vacation?”

  “You need a reference to make an appointment,” she said. “Maybe we aren’t the agency for you. We charter jets and around-the-world cruises and arrange safaris in Africa.”

  “I might consider renting an elephant.”

  “Twelve is the minimum.” She rested her chin on a red-nailed hand.

  “They come in sets?”

  “Maybe if you told me what you have in mind I could recommend someone.”

  I handed her a card. “I’m looking for a man named Barry Stackpole. He’s a columnist with the Detroit News. He recorded a check for three hundred and sixty dollars to a Z Travel shortly before he came up missing. We thought that might be you.”

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  “Sleuth’s plural. To make you think I’ve got a whole organization behind me. I don’t get as many doors put in my face when I use it.”

  “It wasn’t us. Three hundred and sixty dollars wouldn’t get you out that door.”

  While she was talking, a gaunt old man came out of the sun-washed section behind her leaning on an ebony cane and laid some papers on the desk. He had a straight back under a tan suit pinched at the waist, crisp white hair against a complexion the shade of walnut, and the general appearance of someone who was used to coming in out of the sun.

  “These are fine, Diane. Get them off today, will you?” His clipped British accent held a hint of command.

  “You didn’t have to bring them out, Colonel,” she said. “Why didn’t you buzz?”

  “I once hiked three miles through enemy lines with a dead sergeant on my back, although I didn’t know he was dead at the time. I think I can handle this.” A pair of faded blue eyes jerked my way and he stood a little straighter, if that was possible. “Sir?”

  I introduced myself and held out my hand. “You have a very famous name, Colonel Wheelock.”

  He hesitated, then took it. His grip was corded and very strong, but the hand shook a little.

  “An ancient war now,” he said, letting go. “Not many of you lads born since know anything about it nor care to. Which is only right. The study of war can have no end but destruction.”

  “Clausewitz?”

  “Wheelock. What can we do for you, young man?”

  Diane gave him my card. “Mr. Walker is looking for someone he thinks may have used us, a Mr. Stackpole of the News. I told him he’s mistaken.”

  “A private enquiry agent. Well, well. You were in Intelligence, no doubt?”

  “Military police. Before that I was stationed in Vietnam and Cambodia.”

  He made a face. It was cracked all over and when he did that he looked like the Mummy. “Filthy little bastard of a war. I was over there as an advisor when the UN first came in. I said then it could never be won. The cancer was too deep.”

  “That when you got into the safari business?”

  “I used to do a little shooting in Africa, but I’m not supposed to admit that now. When it went out of fashion I couldn’t see myself crawling through the bush with a camera around my neck. Now, hunting controls the animal population and prevents mass starvation, but what earthly good does photography do the ecology? So now I send others to do what I refuse to do and it’s made me a very rich man. I’m so proud of myself I could spit.”

  “Blood pressure, Colonel,” warned Diane.

  He creaked his cane. “It’s hell to be old. I’m not even allowed to get up a good head of steam. I didn’t do business with your quarry, Mr. Walker. My clientele is small and select, read that stinking. If he couldn’t afford to fly in friends from the Continent for a day on Boblo Island he isn’t on my preferred list. Did you know it’s terribly gauche to own a jet? One must charter. Those are the sort of interesting things one learns at this level of the travel game.”

  “All wars end, Colonel,” I said.

  “The hell of it is the professional soldiers go on.”

  “To fade away?”

  A smile tugged at the pleated lips. “MacArthur. The old rooster knew his strategy, but he certainly let the Japs pull the silk over his eyes during the Occupation. If only it were so neat as the process of fading. But someone has to stay on to pull out the tubes and fill your veins with evil-smelling fluid and paint your face and say words over you before lowering you into a stone vault so you can’t return to the earth. Humanity is a messy business. I can’t think of one messier, short of fantasy fulfillment, which is the one I’m in.” He thought about it
a little longer, then shook himself like an old dog. “Good luck, young man. I hope you find your friend.”

  “I didn’t say he was a friend.”

  The old eyes sparked briefly. “Didn’t you? Oh, well. Silly old man. Goodbye.”

  He turned and walked back into the wall of sunlight, leaning a little more heavily on the cane now, a deactivated warrior with a back that had to stay straight to support the kingsize chip on his shoulder. A hell of an old man. I had never heard of him.

  27

  “WHAT’D I SAY?” announced the cab driver as I got in the back. “But you was in there a little longer than I figured.”

  I gave him an address in downtown Detroit and said there was another buck in it for him if he didn’t talk on the way.

  “Okay, buddy.” He tucked a magazine with a Centennial Colt on the cover up over the visor, started up, and we turned away from the place where they put up air and sunshine in special bottles and back to the real world.

  Hole No. 1 was a challenge the first day out, full of interesting possibilities and the chance to meet new people. It was still that way on the third day if you were young and owned stock in Detroit Edison and Dr. Scholl’s. When you were broke and not young and it was the fourth day it was like shaving without a blade, driving a car up on blocks, shooting blanks at ducks. I had a record of a payment to a travel agency that didn’t exist and a wacky theory about three seemingly unrelated deaths that may or may not have had anything to do with why I was blowing my old age on cabs. I didn’t even have transportation. I was as low as you can get without having to climb a ladder to pull up your socks.

  The scenery changed by degrees from gables and wrought-iron fences to six-pack housing tracts and then worn granite making obscene gestures at the sky. I tipped the driver two bucks for keeping our bargain and stepped from warm sunshine into the chill cave of Schinder’s garage.

  The German was standing in front of the yawning hood of a two-year-old Thunderbird with a green finish worn down to rust-colored primer in leprous patches. As I came near he took a step backward, wiping his hands on a greasy rag, and said, “Start her.” The engine kicked in with a roar. He listened for two seconds and shouted to the man behind the wheel to shut it off.

  “Lifter,” he said. “Number two.”

  “Just like Paderewski.”

  He turned and saw me for the first time. “How do you feel about manual transmissions?” he asked.

  “We’re just good friends.”

  “Out back.” He started walking toward the rear. I followed.

  From the neck up, Schinder could have been a successful product of Hitler’s early experiments in genetic engineering: blue eyes, square features, and blond hair that was almost white, swept up from shaved temples into a mass of curls. Aside from that he was constructed along simian lines, a long waist and arms balanced on a pair of bent legs with a foot that turned inward sharply. He looked at least thirty years younger than he was.

  The foot gave him a rolling gait that was impossible to keep step with. From behind him I asked, “How’s Jock?”

  “Not too good. They expelled him from Ferris State for setting fire to his dormitory.”

  Jock was Joachim, Schinder’s son. I had helped get him off a Grand Theft Auto charge in return for a lifetime discount on all my auto work.

  We went through a tiny office at the back and exited into an asphalt lot with an eight-foot board fence all around and a narrow alley running alongside the building to the street. A row of cars and trucks in differing states of repair stood there and Schinder led the way to an old Buick Skylark with a dull blue finish.

  “This the best you could do?” I looked at a parking ding the size of a half-dollar on the door on the driver’s side.

  He said nothing, but kept walking to the front of the car and threw up the hood. The engine took up all the available space beneath.

  “Woman who had it thought oil was something you put on your salad,” he explained. “We yanked the block and dropped in an engine from an Olds Ninety-Eight. I was saving it for something special. You’re not it. But I’ll lease it to you for a month.”

  “A lot of hoses,” I said.

  “Camouflage, in case Lansing gets in mandatory pollution checks. Most of them aren’t hooked up to anything. She burns leaded gas. Lots of it. Three-fifty for the month.”

  “I’ll go two hundred.”

  “It just went up to four. We don’t bargain, or did you forget?”

  “Same service deal as always?”

  “I make a deal it’s a deal.”

  “Okay, four hundred. End of the month okay?”

  “Week,” he said. “Cash.”

  I put a cigarette in my mouth without lighting it. Wherever Schinder went, the air swam with gasoline fumes. He sweated the stuff. Finally I said okay again.

  “You want a test drive before we draw up papers?”

  “I trust you.”

  We went into the office and Schinder started opening and closing drawers. “Your boy did a pretty good job on that Olds, bled the brakes and broke the emergency shoe clean off. Your tie rod ends were just gone. Must have loosened the nuts. No wonder she didn’t steer.” He found a blank dealer’s license sticker and put it on the desk.

  “What kind of mechanic do you have to be to do that?” I asked.

  “No kind at all. Give me five minutes and I’ll show you how.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Had somebody for it, huh.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t like it. Too neat.”

  When he had the sticker made out he handed it over. “Life is that way,” he said. “When things get too tidy you want to go out and mess them up.”

  “You sound like an old warhorse I was talking to this morning.”

  “Which war?”

  “Yours.”

  “Other side, I bet.” He showed me his brief Wehrmacht recruiting-poster grin. “Keys are in the ignition.”

  The motor was as smooth as oil.

  I let it out on East Jefferson along the route Louise and I had taken by cab the night before. The lights were with me and between East Grand and Conner no one passed me. When I stepped on the gas the bottom fell out of the carburetor with a noise like lions in a pit and the needle jumped ahead twenty miles. Ralph Nader was going to put me on his Ten Most Wanted list.

  I played around with it on the expressways for a while. Wind fluttered through the open window on the driver’s side and sharpened my thoughts, or tried to. I do some of my best thinking while driving, but today my head was full of cottage cheese. At noon I stopped for lunch and dialed my service from the restaurant. I was to call a number at Detroit Police Headquarters and ask for Lieutenant Ysabel.

  “Ysabel.”

  There was noise on both ends of the line. I stood back out of the flow of employee traffic to and from the kitchen and screwed a finger into my free ear. “Walker,” I said. “How’s Major Crimes?”

  “They just keep getting majorer and majorer. When can you get away?”

  “Get away where?”

  “The Wayne County Morgue for starters. Then we’ll talk about whether we come back here to Thirteen Hundred.”

  “Who’s dead?”

  “The idea is you tell me.”

  I told him twenty minutes and we hung up on each other.

  The morgue is hidden underground behind Traffic Court at Lafayette and Brush. Most Detroiters don’t even know it’s there. I told the attendant inside the door I had an appointment with Ysabel and he said the lieutenant was waiting for me downstairs. I found him standing in the little room where they receive the parents of little girls found in dumpsters with their clothes gone and their faces beaten to bloody pulp. It had a table and chairs for sitting in while watching the closed-circuit TV screen over the table.

  Ysabel was wearing the same colorless suit and tie I’d seen him in at headquarters. Standing, he looked smaller, his large head and broad athletic build somehow out of proportion to his f
ive-foot-six height, but it was an illusion; he was all to scale. A black attendant in a white coat too big for him stood on the other side of the blank screen.

  “I’m getting the rube treatment today,” I said, nodding at the set-up.

  “New regs,” said the lieutenant. “No one but personnel goes inside. We had a woman freak out last month when she saw her son laid open on the table. Tactful cop, that Cranmer. She may sue.”

  “Fitzroy’s Cranmer?”

  “You know him?”

  “I rattled his cage once. When’s the show?”

  He looked at the attendant, who reached up and turned on the screen. It came on instantly, blue-gray with a face in the center, foreshortened a little by the angle of the camera. Waxen skin with a shadow of beard showing under the surface. Damp hair plastered flat to the skull, eyes glittering white semicircles under half-closed lids. Raw like that without music or make-up, it was a sight to make you appreciate the mortician’s art.

  Ysabel was watching me. “You know him, right?”

  It’s hard to lie while you’re looking at a stiff.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He tried to kill me yesterday.”

  After a second the lieutenant stirred and the man in the white coat turned off the switch. The screen went very black.

  Ysabel said, “Let’s go inside.”

  28

  THE PLACE HAD A little lounge for the employees, beverage machines and four orange molded plastic chairs around a folding card table with a blue vinyl skin peeling away from bare sheet metal. On the way there we passed through the room where the corpse I had been looking at on tv was laid out under the mounted camera. It belonged to a pudgy naked body with a trail of coarse black stitches from collarbone to groin and a clear line around its middle where a tight waistband had bisected a roll of doughy fat. The genitals were darker than the rest of the body. Through an open door into the lounge. Ysabel bought us each a cup of coffee from the machine and we sat down at the table. I sipped mine and pulled a face. The smell of formaldehyde and dead naked flesh got into everything.

  “The attendants eat their lunch in here,” he said. “Just open their paper sacks and haul out the hardboiled egg sandwiches and start scarfing. I guess you can get used to anything you hang around it long enough. But I had an uncle that worked in a slaughterhouse and hot days he’d start sweating and the house smelled like the back room of a butcher shop. I wouldn’t invite any of these guys to a pool party. I got a pool, you know. Wives.”