Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 06

by Every Brilliant Eye

  She said, “I think you should get away from it. Maybe drop it. Let some other investigator have it to whom it’s just another job.”

  “If I do,” I said, “I’m done. I’ll be like a bullfighter gone horn-shy.”

  “Would that be so bad?”

  “That’s something I don’t care to think about, like where the department store Santas go on December twenty-sixth.”

  “Then how about a drink?”

  “I just had one. Anyway, I’m due at my client’s office in half an hour. Call you after?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

  I knew the feeling.

  I had just put down the receiver when the bell rang again. I let it ring and got up and walked to the window and leaned on the sill breathing warm air from the street. Afternoon sunlight caught the roofs of cars going past, shearing along the edges like a bright dagger tearing cloth. A yellow Camaro with a jacked-up rear paused at the light, leaking loud rock music out its open windows, then took off with a bellow and a shirring of tires on asphalt. I wondered what it was like to have somewhere to go in that kind of hurry.

  The telephone was still jangling when I pulled my head back inside. I sat down and answered. It was Barry Stackpole.

  30

  “AMOS THE SHAMUS,” he said.

  My cigarette was still smoking in the ashtray. I picked it up, scraped off a column of ash, and drew hot gas into my lungs. I said, “That’s old, Barry. I didn’t much like it when it was new.”

  “Sorry. You never said.”

  He sounded far away. Then he didn’t. “I guess this is where I ask where you are.”

  “Just for now I’m on the other end of this phone. Word’s around you’re looking for me.”

  “Zodiac, right?”

  “How’d you figure Zodiac?” His voice sounded pleased.

  “You don’t gamble, which rules out Zeitgeist, and you wouldn’t rent a safari from Colonel Wheelock at Zephyr unless a cab came with it. I’m the guy who had to show you how to pitch a tent in Cambodia, remember? My thinking is Dave, the kid with the exotic moustache, was your plant at Zodiac.”

  “Your thinking is wrong. But he had a hold on my name just like everyone else in the downtown office. You should’ve checked the other location on McNichols. That’s where my man was. The kid gave your card to him and he called me.”

  “The kid said that office was empty.”

  “Since when do you believe anything a kid tells you?”

  “I had other leads to run down first. Would I have gained anything by going there?”

  “Some new scenery. The Cong put this guy in a wheelchair in ’71 and he didn’t tell them anything.”

  What I didn’t say filled the line at that point.

  He said, “Everyone knows you and I are friends. I couldn’t risk them turning the heat on you.”

  “Them being who?”

  “That’s for the Press Club some afternoon when my column’s done and you don’t have any keyholes to look through. I just called to let you know I’m still breathing and to ask a favor.”

  “You’re behind on favors now,” I said. “I know about Blankenship.”

  He hesitated a beat. “What do you know about Blankenship?”

  “Not over the telephone. I’m behind on favors to someone else. I know you talked to Amigo Fuentes and I know what your interest was in the Niles and Rosenberg murders. A cop I think is good is on it now. He isn’t with the Fourteenth.”

  “It’s gone past the Fourteenth,” he said. “The rot is in the roots.”

  “Anyway, it’s known. You can come back if that’s why you left. It isn’t, is it?”

  “The favor I called to ask is that you stop looking for me. You’re not helping.”

  “You left that check stub in your strongbox at home and that file folder in your office at the News for anyone to find who cared to look. Then you sat back and waited for your man at Zodiac to let you know who was looking. I’d say you’re doing more than just staying out of circulation.”

  He said nothing. I changed the subject.

  “You’re due in court Monday. Art Rooney is too refined a character to tear his hair. But his manicurist is having trouble living with him about now.”

  “Art Rooney can take a flying leap at the Milky Way. I’m surprised you didn’t tell him to do just that when he came to you. You know what he is.”

  “That’s dead, Barry. As dead as Dale Leopold.”

  “A lawyer’s just a pimp that went to college. If I came back Monday it wouldn’t be for him.”

  “I know about Harney too. Sergeant Mark Harney.”

  “Who?”

  He had paused an instant too long.

  “Someone burned him to death with an incendiary in Nam,” I said. “Unless he survived.”

  “Where’d you hear about that?”

  “You know where.”

  “Yeah, I guess I do. I forgot or I would’ve burned that script before I left. Too much Hemingway. It wasn’t his kind of war. No heroes, and the women weren’t delicate enough to admire his muscles.”

  “You didn’t forget. You wanted it found. The Harney thing didn’t mean anything to me when I first read it, just another fragging. Or it was until I read your wastebasket.”

  “Wastebasket.” There was no question mark on the end.

  “You’re a poetic drunk. ‘A Detroit makeover for the man who burned the candy man.’”

  “I don’t remember it. What’s it mean?”

  “Come on back and we’ll talk about it.”

  “Talking won’t help. I tried it once, went to a shrink for two visits. He kept asking me to join his group. I’m shelling out ninety bucks an hour for a wall full of diplomas and a Greek oath and he wants me to spill my guts in front of a roomful of strangers. I wanted that I’d have stuck with AA. The coffee was better.”

  “I’m free,” I said.

  “You’re worth less than that, chum. You go to work for a guy who went to work for the guy who murdered your partner.”

  “Humanity is a messy business. Someone told me.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out. Hell, I did too. You see why I need the time away? I’m dumping all over the only people who mean shit to me.”

  “Are you drinking?”

  “Yeah, but not all the time. I guess I’m really not a drunk after all. No lightning struck when I took the first one in a month.”

  “It isn’t like lightning usually. More like worms.”

  “Yeah. Well, I just wanted to tell you I’m okay and to stop looking for me.”

  “You told me.”

  “The question is did it take.”

  “I guess we’ll have to count our whiskers and wait.”

  I hung up then. It was a silly thing, the path to satisfaction for fools who have run out of arguments. I waited for the telephone to ring again but it didn’t. I left for my appointment.

  “You’re late.”

  Arthur Rooney, towering in a blue suit with orange pinstripes, stood with his back to the window overlooking the old county building. The light coming from behind merged his wolf’s eyes with the rest of his crisp features. He would manage to have that bright window behind him during interviews with laconic clients.

  “Sorry. I had to stop at my bank.”

  He waved away the apology. “I had to go ahead and call the cab company. The car will be here in a few minutes. Just enough time to tell me what you’ve found out.”

  “I won’t need that much time. I’m quitting.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “I never joke about giving up paying work.”

  “If it’s your conscience, Leopold—”

  “It’s not my conscience. Not about that, anyhow. Dale taught me never to get emotionally involved in a case. It was a good rule, though I haven’t always followed it. If I still asked myself what Dale would do in a given situation, which I haven’t for years, the answer wo
uld have been that he’d take the job. But it went wrong somewhere and I’m getting out.”

  “What’s happened? Is it what you said on the phone about needing a new car? I can arrange—”

  “Barry called me a little while ago.”

  “Stackpole? From where?” He started around the desk.

  “He wouldn’t say. I could get it from the telephone company if it was long distance, but he’s tricky. He probably used some kind of patch-through.”

  “Well, what did he say? Will he be back by Monday?”

  “He said if he was it wouldn’t be for you. He doesn’t share my high opinion of lawyers.”

  “Did he offer you money to drop the search? Is that why you stopped at your bank?” He had on his cross-examiner’s tone.

  “No, I stopped for this.”

  From inside my jacket I drew a thick legal envelope and sailed it onto his desk. It landed with a resounding thump. He stared at it for a second before picking it up and lifting the flap.

  “There are several hundred dollars here,” he said, glancing up.

  “Seven hundred and fifty. You can count it. I won’t be insulted.”

  “You don’t have to return the retainer. If you want to quit we’ll talk about it. But either way you’ve earned it. If you worked on the case at all.”

  “No, I’m walking away clean. Poor but clean.”

  “May I at least ask why?”

  “I’ve been looking for a man who doesn’t want to be found and who’s committed no crime.”

  “Yet.”

  I charged on. “There’s a question of rights here. Not your kind—legal rights—but the other. I’m a character with a certain amount of morals and I like to see some of them looking back at me when I shave. Also I think there’s some danger to Barry if he’s found.”

  “What kind of danger?”

  “The dangerous kind. Explaining it at this point would be like leading the danger to where he is.”

  “Damn it, Walker, I hired you to enlighten me, not keep secrets from me.”

  “That’s why the seven hundred and fifty. Full refund if not completely satisfied, like the Ginsu knife.”

  He worked his fists at his sides. They made a creaking sound.

  “You’re very naive,” he said then. “You see the world in black and white, good and bad, nothing in between.”

  “There isn’t anything in between, Mr. Rooney. Anyone who says there is has had some of the black rubbed off on him. The gray area is a myth. It’s when we started to believe in it that things went wrong.”

  “Do you honestly believe that?”

  “Good word, honestly,” I said.

  He ran an angry palm over the crisp shelf of hair above his forehead. The layered stacks riffled back down into place like new playing cards. “You’ve cost this firm and the News valuable time and thousands of dollars if Stackpole isn’t found soon. Suing you would be worth my appearing in court for the first time in years.”

  “Be my guest, Mr. Rooney. I’ve got a hat, two guns, and a bottle in the office with the Scotch two-thirds gone.”

  “Once a month I lunch with the head of the state police. You know your license comes out of that office.”

  I laughed in his face.

  “It must be the movies. Every tin Hitler with a hanky in his pocket thinks an investigator’s license is something to grab hold of and twist and the guy that has it will do whatever is wanted. Maybe it was once but it isn’t now. You get a chance to tell your side, and if the hearing doesn’t go your way you can go to A.C.L.U., and if A.C.L.U. is too busy smashing Nativity scenes you can go to court all the way up to Lansing, and from there all the way up to Washington. Along the way there are a hundred government and private agencies waiting to feed the kitty. You’re a lawyer, Mr. Rooney. You ought to know nothing dies clean in a democracy.”

  “And while all this is going on you don’t make Cent One.”

  “I’m good at that. I’ve had plenty of practice.”

  He drew himself up. The window wasn’t behind him now and I saw the pouches and slack indoor creases in his face and the fluorescent pallor under his superficial tan. He was an ugly man in a glossy package.

  “I’m glad I defended Earl North,” he said. “If I had it to do again I’d see he collected a bounty for killing your partner.”

  “That’s all I needed to hear, Mr. Rooney. Now excuse me while I go out and burn my clothes.”

  He watched me go and I walked outside past Helen the receptionist, who glanced up but didn’t catch my eye, and I rode the elevator down to the lobby without stopping. The sun was behind a cloud when I climbed into the Buick. The seat felt cool.

  I started the engine and drove but I didn’t go home or to the office. I was too restless for that. Instead I cruised up Woodward for most of its length, past the sleazy bars and topless bars and workingmen’s bars and family bars and cocktail bars downtown, past the Detroit Public Library and the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Wayne State University campus, over the Edsel Ford Freeway and past Shaw College and Northern High School and Cathedral Central High School and through Highland Park and along the edge of Palmer Park, where doctors and executives on long lunch hours dotted the greens in loud golf clothes, hitting balls and talking mergers and capital gains. Past the Michigan State Fairgrounds with the tents down now and the animal pens collapsed and in storage, the long Quonset building and rutted brown earth closed off like a concentration camp inside a wire mesh fence. Through Ferndale and Pleasant Ridge and between Huntington Woods and Royal Oak. Beyond them to Birmingham and then Bloomfield Hills, the silver-spoon twins, department stores and good restaurants and well-lighted bookshops and brick houses on side streets with lawns and gaslights out front and an afternoon literary society to every block, pools in back where the guests sat around in bathing suits sipping vodka gimlets and talking about the crime in Detroit and not swimming. After that I began to smell Iroquois Heights, so I detoured left and took Telegraph Road back down.

  Twice I passed bright flashers—red for state, blue for city—where cops had intercepted motorists cutting in and out of traffic or turning at no-turn intersections. It was rush hour and the hunting was good. The town that put the world on wheels was the same town that had hung the first traffic light to make a profit off it. Freud was wrong, all right. It was the angle that drove mankind, the angle and what it would bring.

  I didn’t have one. That made me a pervert, but perverts don’t care what they are. I stopped for gas and called Louise Starr from the station.

  31

  WE WENT SOMEWHERE for dinner and ended up back at her room at the Book Cadillac. It had a lowered ceiling and new furniture and carpet, but underneath that lurked the slight mustiness that all old hotels have no matter how elegant, a faint olfactory collage of cigarette smoke and leather suitcases and overnight sex. We sat in comfortable chairs, drinking the drinks room service had brought—a highball for her, a whiskey sour for me—and listening to something soft and unidentifiable drifting out of the radio attachment to the television set. Twelve stories down, traffic swished and horns honked.

  “So you quit,” Louise said, cradling her glass in her lap.

  She had on a pale gown that buttoned at the shoulder and fell open just above the knees, with red shoes and a matching purse she had laid on the bureau. Ruby barrettes kept her hair behind her ears.

  “I quit working for Walgren and Rooney.”

  She looked at me. “Is that some kind of qualifier?”

  “I don’t know what a qualifier is.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  While I was sitting there thinking, the radio station changed its format and a singing group came on, one of those that hire piano-movers to kick them between the legs when their voices drop. I went over and found the Windsor station that plays old dance tunes and stood near the window watching headlamps winking between buildings blocks away.

  “I’m going to go on looking for Barry,” I said, turning back.
“In my own way, at my own pace, with nobody watching over my shoulder.”

  “He won’t appreciate it.”

  “Jumpers don’t thank you for pulling them off ledges. That doesn’t mean you should keep on walking.”

  “Is he suicidal?”

  “He got drunk one night and talked about it, but I don’t think he’s the kind to do it, not directly, anyway. Did you ever see a picture with Frank Sinatra and Doris Day called Young at Heart?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Was it a musical?”

  “There was music in it, not the kind where everyone on the street joins in and knows all the words and dance steps. It was kind of a classy soap, with Sinatra marrying Doris and convincing himself he’s not good enough for her. Anyway, he’s driving through this heavy snow and brooding on it. Finally he just reaches down and turns off his wipers. The snow keeps piling up and blocking the windshield and he lowers his foot on the gas pedal and waits to slam into something.”

  “Is he killed?”

  “No, the movie had a sappy happy ending with Doris and Frank reconciling in his hospital room. The point is he didn’t set out to commit suicide, just removed all the stumbling blocks and let whatever was going to happen happen.”

  “And you think Barry’s doing that.”

  “Probably not with even that much intent. He has a strong sense of survival from having had to exercise it so much. Maybe he’s just testing it and leaving the results to fate. It explains why he got himself involved in a hot case, then vanished, but not without leaving a trail for the wolves to follow.”

  “Why would he set himself up to be killed, even subconsciously?”

  “The Old Testament ethic, maybe. I think he thinks he killed someone.”

  She set her drink on the lamp table between the chairs. “Who?”

  “Someone you wouldn’t know, a long time ago. It’s in his book.”

  “The one about Vietnam? What’s one killing among a hundred thousand?”

  “Nothing, then. A dozen years later, something. It takes that long for that kind of hangover to wear off. I’m guessing. I guess a lot. Six times out of ten I guess right. It’s a thing you pick up in the business, like flat feet.”