Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 06

by Every Brilliant Eye

  I said, “I wouldn’t know.”

  “You did, though. You were married. I looked you up.”

  I lit a cigarette. It deadened the smell a little.

  He drank his coffee. “Kids found the body floating in the Old Channel off Zug Island this morning early. We figure it slipped its moorings in Lake St. Clair and came down river. M.E. found indications of rope burn on the left ankle. No ID, but whoever emptied the pockets was in a rush. Your name and office address was written on a piece of paper in the watch pocket of his pants.”

  “Any idea who he was?”

  “We know who he was.”

  He was looking at me across the table. I glanced around and finally knocked my ash off onto the linoleum floor. It was already paved with burns and old butts. “This the favor I owe?”

  “Nope. This is official police business being conducted in an unofficial place. You have to pretend there’s a tape machine and a steno in the room. I don’t get any satisfaction here, you won’t have to pretend. We’ll be at headquarters.”

  “We’re all muscle today,” I said. “Must be the formaldehyde.”

  “Caffeine.” He tapped his cup. “I’m supposed to stand away from it. But what the hell, I don’t use seat belts either. The stiff.”

  I took another drag and squashed out the butt. It was starting to taste like the air smelled. “On my way out of a bar called Curly’s in Highland Park yesterday I passed a guy going in,” I said. “He had grease on his hands. Maybe you found some under his nails.” He shrugged. I went on. “Anyway, when I got rolling down Fenkell my steering and brakes got up and left. If it was just a warning he came as close to making it stick as anyone has.”

  “Sure it was him?”

  “I wasn’t until five minutes ago.”

  “What were you doing at this place Curly’s?”

  “Drinking. What killed our friend?”

  “Small-caliber bullet in the brain. From behind.”

  “Twenty-two?”

  He sipped coffee. “We’re holding that back from the press. But yeah. I don’t know when that got to be badass. When I was a kid every boy got a twenty-two squirrel gun for his twelfth birthday. Now we get more of those at Major than anything else. A good axe murder comes in, there’s a rush of volunteers to work it just for the change of scenery.”

  “That why Major got this one?”

  “No. What else were you doing at Curly’s besides getting shitface?”

  I shook another cigarette out of the pack and played with it.

  “Keeping an eye on Wally Petite. You and I talked about him before. I was following him from the bar when everything laid down on me.”

  “What makes you so unpopular?”

  “I’m looking for Barry Stackpole, who’s not much more popular among a certain element. It’s like poison ivy.”

  “Or maybe it’s got something to do with somethin’ else you haven’t thought about. Or aren’t talking about.”

  “That being?”

  “You’re the private star. This the first try?”

  “Yeah. I got a call at home the night before. ‘Tough break, Walker.’ Nothing else, just that. Could’ve been our friend.”

  “Report it?”

  “You boys have enough to do without shaking the goblins out of my closet.”

  “Where does Petite figure?”

  “When I have that I’ll tie this one up with a bow.” I studied the brand name on the cigarette. I hadn’t lit it yet. “What caliber bullet was Philip Niles killed with? Petite’s partner?”

  “Twenty-two. You know that. What was Stackpole’s interest in the Niles kill to begin with?”

  “I don’t know that.”

  “Guess.”

  “I don’t make guesses in rooms that contain cops,” I said. “And if I did it would be privileged information.”

  “That withers under a strong light, pal.” His tone would etch steel.

  “Look it up,” I said. “I’m a licensed investigator on retainer to a firm of attorneys. That makes me an officer of the court and entitled to the same confidences as a lawyer and his client. You want more you go to a judge and ask him for a piece of Latin with his signature on it. He’ll fondle his gavel and show you the hall.”

  “Some would, maybe. There are judges and judges.”

  I moved a hand meaninglessly.

  He stretched and clasped his hands behind his head. “Forget about the imaginary steno and tape machine. Pretend we’re just two guys. What’s your guts say?”

  “Just two guys?”

  “I bought the coffee.”

  “Yeah.” I pushed mine away with one sip gone. “My guts say Barry found a link between several scattered killings, including Niles’s and Morris Rosenberg’s. My guts say the link was Inspector Ray Blankenship of the Detroit Police Department, who once arrested Wally Petite for petty theft and who ran the detective squad in the precinct where Rosenberg was killed outside the factory where he worked, and who blew off the top of his head the other morning because something made him sick. His wife said. My guts say Alfred Kindnagel was involved because he was Rosenberg’s higher-up in the union and because an article about him shared a file folder in Barry’s office with clippings on the others, not counting some random stuff I haven’t run down. My guts are like police detectives. They do a lot of talking and never say anything. Who’s the guy on the slab?”

  He played with his cup. “This confidence thing—it exclusive to clients?”

  “It doesn’t have to be.”

  “Shit, it’ll get out anyway. You can sit on a stink like this just so long. A Vice sergeant named Winters was down here waiting on an analysis when he was wheeled in. He recognized him. It speeded things up twenty-four hours anyway. His name was Gerald Page and he spent the last six and a half years in a blue uniform. Guess where.”

  “The Fourteenth Precinct. Blankenship’s.”

  “You’re quick,” he said.

  “A cop tried to kill me?”

  “Warn you, maybe. You said that. You going to light that weed or feed it and put it away?”

  I’d forgotten I was still holding it. I set it afire. “Someone, probably Blankenship, was contracting murders out of the Fourteenth,” I tried. “Petite and the inspector—he was a lieutenant then—knew each other from that old arrest. Maybe Blankenship had some kind of underground rep by that time. It can happen without his own brother knowing. When Petite went partners with Niles and then wanted to go solo he set up the hit through him. Maybe he had some kind of leverage; there’s plenty of it lying around in lockup. Anyway, he rigged it. Deals like that can eat away at a cop. If he has enough left of his self-respect he’ll take early retirement and if he still has enough left he might kill himself.”

  “We’re reopening the suicide investigation,” Ysabel said. “Whoever inherited Blankenship’s black hood might have made him Page’s first assignment.”

  “Where does Kindnagel figure?”

  “I sent a recruit down to the basement at Thirteen Hundred. They love browsing through those boxes of dusty files we haven’t got around to feeding the computer. The reports he came up with had Rosenberg organizing a separate union to nudge out Kindnagel’s. He had some support among the rank and file. If anyone pushed the button on him it would be the old man.”

  “Or one of his hirelings. Why didn’t this come out eight years ago?”

  “It’s your Supreme Court too,” he said. “We had videotape of Kindnagel strangling his wife, if his lawyer said she was choking on a prune pit and he was holding her up until help came, we couldn’t prove otherwise. Besides, it was Blankenship’s sandbox and Downtown has a policy about deferring to the original precinct.”

  “It got plowed under.”

  “Let’s say it got stepped over.”

  “Christ, I love this town.”

  He started tearing little pieces of Styrofoam off his cup. “You want honest government, hire a dictator. When you own everything you don’t have
to steal or cover things up. Cops are trained to kill. Claiming you only shot to wound during a fracas is grounds for dismissal from any police department in this country. It’s a skill that’s in demand and where there’s a demand there will always be someone to fill it.

  “We’re supposed to be better than average. More honest, more patient, quicker to react but slower to shoot. For that we get less money than these guys you see shoveling monkey shit into potholes on Telegraph and a flag on our coffins when we shoot too slow. You say that’s the decision we make when we put in our applications, but the longer you go the less you remember of that little speech you make when they swear you in. Maybe we ought to be made to say it again every couple of years. Somehow I don’t think that’d help. There are always going to be scroats.”

  “You should speak at the academy,” I said.

  “Even if they let me, no one’d listen. They’d all be too busy admiring themselves in the shiny toes of their regulation black oxfords.”

  “How wide you figure this goes?”

  “I.A.D. is hoping to contain it to the Fourteenth. My own thought is for every roach you see there are ten more you don’t. But for now I figure you and me are straight.”

  “It’s a place to start,” I said. “So when I stirred the coals I got a warning and then a shot at my life, or maybe two warnings. But it makes too much noise and Officer Page has to go. What about Barry?”

  “Forget Barry. Barry’s holding down the bottom of Lake St. Clair.”

  “He’s too smart for that.”

  “It’s the dumb ones that get to see their grandchildren. Unless us two straights haven’t been completely honest and open with each other.”

  I slid my stub into my cup. It sizzled and bobbed on the cold black surface, going dark. “Can I go?”

  He played with the pieces he’d torn off his cup, arranging them in abstract patterns on the table. Then he pushed them away.

  “You always could. I just had this nutty idea we could make each other’s job easier. I guess not.”

  I stood, but he wasn’t finished. His dark eyes had lost their liquid sheen. They were studs in his face. “Word I get is you play your own game. Okay, me too. Just don’t forget who you owe favors to.”

  “I won’t.”

  He said nothing more and I left. Gerald Page took no notice of me on my way past his table.

  Sergeant Grice was smoking a cigarette in the room with the closed-circuit television. The attendant had gone. I asked the sergeant what he was doing there.

  “Waiting on a lab report on that bag lady we scraped off Montcalm,” he said, knocking his ash off onto the floor. “M.E.’s going to tell me what was in her stomach when she got her throat slit. Like I don’t know it was cat food or that glue they serve at the Perpetual Mission.”

  “They’re just getting to it now?”

  “In Detroit Homicide you pick a place in line and stand in it. For derelicts you don’t even get to stand in the same building. What about you?”

  “Visiting a friend.”

  He didn’t hear the answer. He was staring at my face. “You ever turn in a complaint to Vice?”

  “For or against?” I said brightly. He didn’t react. “No, I never did.”

  “I didn’t think so. I’m still working on it.”

  I left him.

  The Skylark started with a touch and I took off slowly in deference to the dead inside the building.

  Cops come in all packages. Federal cops are the most full of themselves: They flip their IDs out of their neat suits with little practiced gestures like headwaiters snapping open linen napkins and ask questions out of the manual while ignoring any you might have. State cops are the most narcissistic; six-foot-two frustrated mounties in tailored uniforms and mirrored glasses, gloves in their belts. They blaze their spots on your rearview mirror when you’re going twenty miles over the limit on the expressway and call you sir or ma’am and ask you to sign the citation next to the X. County cops are the most professional, with time in peeling teenagers off trees and chasing stolen cars along twisting scenic highways at speeds over 100 m.p.h. and exchanging fire with prison walkaways and getting dead at a rate three times that of city cops.

  City cops vary from city to city, but they are all kinds, from polite precinct commanders in rich towns like Grosse Pointe who know whose names to keep off the blotter if they want to go on being precinct commanders, to private police forces in monied suburbs whose cars follow cars with battered fenders and cracked taillights until they’re clear of the limits just in case they might stop, to ex-Marine drill instructors and jaded former beat cops now vegetating behind desks in the big cities waiting to get in their twenty. Small-town cops are the bottom. They include overgrown hall monitors with their first whistle and gun and county turnkeys discharged for raping female inmates and parole officers forced to resign for cutting themselves in on their parolees’ take and squad room supermen who wore out their nightsticks every six months even though they hadn’t pulled street duty in two years, and they answer only to bored retired former big-city sergeants hired as part-time chiefs. A few hours with any number of them and you’ll yawn your way through Steven Spielberg’s next big shocker.

  I didn’t know where Lieutenant Ysabel fit in there. All I knew for sure was that he’d held out an opening, a hole to step through and dump my load and walk away with that clean sense of freedom an artist must feel after he’s burned a bad painting. As usual I’d reversed my feet and skeedaddled as fast as my load would let me. The only holes I ever choose to take always lead straight down.

  29

  THE MAIL WAS IN when I returned to the office. Read some, throw some away, file the bills under the blotter. When it got high enough to wobble, it would be time to pay some of them. No personal letters of any kind, no hand-addressed envelopes or perfumed deckle-edged stationery or postcard pictures of Spanish-style governors’ palaces with cheery notes written on the back. If it weren’t for Gutenberg I wouldn’t have any correspondence at all. Quit bellyaching, Walker. You called it when you hung out your shingle.

  I did a little business. I made a follow-up call to the real estate firm to ask if they had a forwarding address yet for the lady psychologist’s wandering boyfriend. They had it, but they didn’t have a telephone number. Next I called Milwaukee Information, who did. I typed it all into a brief report, sealed it in an envelope, addressed it, and called for a messenger service to take it to Dr. Latimore. I didn’t feel like seeing her or talking to her on the telephone. When I thought about it I didn’t want to see or talk to anyone. I needed a dead star in an unknown solar system and someone to hold my mail and messages.

  It was one of life’s little glitches. I didn’t want to deal with anyone but I didn’t want to be alone either. Being alone meant thinking, and I didn’t want to do that more than I didn’t want to do any of the other things. I didn’t want to think about Clancy the Cop really being Pittsburgh Phil, or of how I would react the next time I saw a blue uniform. The thin blue line had gone sour. We were all late Roman emperors at the mercy of the Praetorian Guard. I didn’t want to think about Gerald Page giving the camera that all-knowing look of the very dead. We had passed each other in the parking lot of a bar. How many of those we pass on the street today will be dead tomorrow?

  Most of all I didn’t want to think about Barry anchored to the floor of Lake St. Clair like so many of the people he had written about, his sandy hair twisting in the current, fish sliding past his dead eyes. I didn’t want to think about thinking about it. I didn’t need a dead star. What I needed was a vacation. What I had was a drink.

  The telephone rang while I was putting the bottle back in its drawer.

  “You want to talk about it?” Louise asked.

  I lit a Winston and blew a fan of smoke at the framed movie poster hung next to the door. “Talk is no good,” I said. “It’s communication that gets people into trouble. If pediatricians started sewing shut babies’ mouths tomorrow we’d lick
war in a generation. Anyway we talked about it last night. Too much. Mostly me. I’m the guy that casts the first stone, then runs.”

  “Can I take that as an apology?”

  “More like a clarification.”

  “Well, I’ll take what I can get,” she said. “But you were probably right, though I never thought of myself as the kind of woman you were talking about. Maybe that kind of woman never does.”

  “And maybe that’s the difference, not knowing or knowing and then doing it anyway.”

  “Sex is the currency of our time.”

  “What’s that, the epigraph to a book you’re editing?”

  “It could be. Subtlety seems to have gone out of literary fashion. Have you been out all day, or have you been just not answering your phone?”

  I watched the smoke curling in the room. “He may be dead,” I said. “Barry may be.”

  There was a little silence. “How do you know?”

  “I don’t. I don’t even know why I said it. I wasn’t planning to.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Mild shock. It goes away. It always does.” I propped the cigarette in the ashtray on the desk and let it smolder. “It’s funny, but I never thought about it until just a little while ago. It’s one of the things you take into account when someone’s missing, but I didn’t this time. Maybe that was my mistake from the start, letting myself think I could handle this as just another missing person case. I haven’t been or I’d have considered the possibility of his being dead. But the second to the last time I saw him he was talking suicide, and now someone’s dead who tried to kill me because I was doing the same thing Barry was when he disappeared.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  The question broke my shock. “Who?”

  “You said the man who tried to kill you is dead. Did—”

  “No. Whoever sent him did it. Trouble is I can’t think where to go from here. I’ve lost my objectivity and it’s like the first day of class and I don’t know what room I’m supposed to be in or what materials I’m supposed to have. This isn’t the worst day I’ve had in my life. But my tolerance isn’t what it was.”