Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 04

by The Glass Highway

  “Is Bud his real first name?”

  He nodded. “And he hung on to Broderick, in spite of Esterhazy’s attempts to adopt him. He’s named after my late father.”

  “That explains why he named you Sandy.” I tapped my pencil on my knee. “If I find him, what do you want me to do? He’s an adult. If I bring him to you kicking I’m a kidnaper, and to be square there’s a substantial list of things I’d rather do than try wrestling a healthy twenty-year-old back to Daddy. That job’s for the fellows in uniform and they have nothing to fear from me.”

  “I’m not asking for that. I don’t want that. I wouldn’t know what to do with him if you did. I just want to know where he is so I can get in touch with him.” He uncapped a fat green fountain pen, scribbled a telephone number on the top sheet of a pad on the desk, tore it off, and gave it to me. “That’s my home number. It’s unlisted. When you find him, call. Maybe his father can talk some sense into him. It’s clear his mother can’t.”

  “It’s your money,” I said, tucking the scrap inside my pad. “Speaking of which.”

  He produced a flat wallet and counted out ten hundreds. “Is a thousand dollars an adequate retainer?”

  I allowed as it was and scooped the crisp new bills into my own tired wallet like a shoplifter cleaning out a jewelry display. “I need more on Bud. Skills, hobbies, personality, friends. And a recent picture if you’ve got one.”

  “You’ll have to get all that from Sharon. He’s a stranger to me, as I said.” He gave me her telephone number and address in Grosse Pointe. I took it down. He rose. “Report when you have something. Not here, if you can avoid it. I wouldn’t have met you here if this weren’t urgent and I could have been home last night. The studio brass threw a party to welcome me to the station.”

  “I thought your eyes looked bloodshot.” I stood and grasped his proffered hand.

  He smiled for the first time since I met him. “As the Indian said to the cowboy, ‘You should see them from this side.’ Bring me good news.”

  Blonde Marlene was brushing correction fluid onto a sheet in her IBM machine when I hit the reception room outside. I got out a cigarette and tapped it against the back of my hand. “He’s all yours.”

  “Not yet, but he will be,” she said, and flashed white teeth between glossed lips. We wished each other merry Christmas. She had a nice smile. It was a shame about the haircut and the gunk on her eyelids.

  In the parking lot the rain had turned to sleet. Tiny icicles shattered against my face and crackled like frying bacon when they struck asphalt. A fat bald guy in a trenchcoat with vice president stamped all over his rosy features was giving my car the evil eye in the space with someone’s name on it. He had the lot guard with him. I walked past them trailing smoke and unlocked the door on the driver’s side. Fatso waddled forward.

  “I just wanted to meet the reason I had to park half a mile down the pike.” His voice squeaked when he raised it. “I was about to have you towed away. Can’t you read? This is my space.”

  “Not anymore it isn’t,” I said, starting the motor. “Watch those long lunches next job.”

  His face looked a little gray in the rearview mirror as I was leaving. Not the guard’s, though. I hadn’t seen a grin that broad since the last time I paid my bar tab.

  I ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of water in a diner on Evergreen and had them half consumed before I remembered that I could afford better. So I gave the guy behind the counter a five-spot and told him to keep the change. He made me stay while he counted the whiskers in Lincoln’s beard. When he was finished I asked for change and decided not to eat there again soon.

  Sleet rattled against the diner’s front window like skeletal fingers. I dropped two dimes into a pay telephone near the door and pecked out Sharon Esterhazy’s number. She answered after one ring. Her speech had a thin, wound-up quality, like an excited Chihuahua or a Ronstadt album played at 75 RPM. At first she thought I was Bud calling to tell her where he was. I disappointed her as gently as possible and arranged a 3:00 p.m. meeting at her house. When I asked if her stepdaughter would be there too, she said, “Who knows?” laughed a little too gaily, and clicked off.

  Pronging the receiver, I had a flash of that black feeling you get when you’ve just started reading a book and you realize you’re going to hate it. But the feeling passed quickly and I blamed it on the rotten weather. Premonitions are like horoscopes. If you take them too seriously you wind up doing nothing. I headed for my bank.

  3

  THE HOUSE WAS a brick colonial around the corner from Grosse Pointe’s brisk downtown section, two stories high with white-shuttered windows, scrolls on the columns, and a widow’s walk from where you might see water if you stood on tiptoe and used your imagination. The lawn was big enough for softball, but right now there was a puddle in the middle wide enough to turn a cabin cruiser around in, proving that even the rich suffer during the winter; it was just a question of degrees. I parked in front of a garage that had been a carriage house in gentler times, checked my rubbers for cow flop, and went up and rang the doorbell. It made a noise like coins spilling. It would.

  “Something I can do for you, brown eyes?”

  If she was less than six feet tall, I had shrunk. Our eyes were almost level—hers were gray, like raw silver—and when I managed to glance down I saw that she was wearing loafers, not high heels. She was also wearing slacks and a matching top of some clinging, glittery green material that the tailor had run out of at mid-calf and forearm. They call them lounging pajamas. I call them trouble, especially with her inside of them at this time of day. Her hair was full, waist-length, and very red. It looked natural, but I’m no Sassoon. Her lips were painted crimson to match the long nails she had curled around the edge of the door. She had pale skin. She wouldn’t see much sun dressed like that. She was halfway through her twenties.

  “Christmas shopping?” Her tone knew me.

  “Why did I know you’d say that?” I asked. “You’d be Fern. You look like an exotic plant.”

  “We both feed on decay. You’re the sleuth who called Sharon about Bud.”

  I grinned. “It’s the gum soles, right?”

  “It’s the gum soles, wrong. I’ve hired enough P.I.’s to be able to identify the animal. You don’t enter a room till you’ve appraised all the furniture and found the laundry mark on the drapes. Sharon’s busy making herself presentable. You may as well come in; you’re in for a long wait.”

  “Meow.”

  We went into a living room with beige silk on the walls, some chairs and a sofa upholstered in brown leather, and a baby grand piano that was there just to hold up an African violet in a steel pot. Other potted plants stood along the base of the rear wall, which was all window looking out on a young maple with a wire fence around it, and beyond it the other houses in the neighborhood. The furniture was good for ten grand, by the way, and the drapes were cleaned at a place called Frawley’s on Kercheval.

  “You’d get catty too, after you lived with the queen as long as I have,” said Fern, hanging my coat and hat in a closet the size of my kitchen.

  I left my rubbers in a puddle on the hall floor. “Why not move out?”

  “What’ll I pay the rent with, my good looks?”

  “It’s been done. I was thinking more along the lines of a job. You look healthy.”

  “And blow my amateur standing? No thanks. I’ll take my chances with Nefertiti, there, at least until I find my next husband. Are you interested?”

  “What’s in it for me?” I sank into one of the leather armchairs.

  She looked at me, sizing up the goods, then folded herself across one padded arm and planted a lingering one on my mouth. She smelled of the usual cosmetics and that scent the female of the species exudes when she’s in season. When it was over she straightened, hoisted a bucketful of hair back over one shoulder, and waited.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I bet you can’t bake.”

  She made a
hoarse noise that might have been laughter and offered me a cigarette from a carved box on the glass-topped coffee table. I held up one of my own. She selected one for herself, removed an Aqua-filter from a package on the table, and coupled them. Everybody’s trying to quit but me. She used a silver table lighter to start both of ours and went over and sat down on the sofa. She moved her legs around a good deal getting comfortable. They gleamed like stretched satin below the pajama cuffs.

  “There’s no profit in hooking a private eye.” Smoke trailed out her nostrils. “The honest ones boil their shoes for lunch and the crooked ones are all greasy to the touch. When I marry again it’s going to be to someone with his name in the Social Register and one foot in the intensive care ward at Detroit Receiving.”

  “For shame,” I chided. “ERA and all.”

  “I never asked to be liberated. Besides, any constitutional amendment that can’t pass without bribery and coercion—or with it, for that matter—can’t be that good.”

  “Now that we’re such good friends, what can you tell me about Paula Royce?”

  Her eyes glittered. “I must be losing it. There was a time when I could make a man forget what business he was in for hours at a stretch.”

  “I bet you still could—if you tried. What about Paula Royce?”

  “I put on the PJ’s and everything. When Sharon told me a pair of pants was on its way—“

  “You’re not half the slut you like to think you are. There’s a time and place for the sex stuff, and these ain’t them. Paula Royce.”

  “You’re an icy son of a bitch,” she said. “I bet if I cut you you’d bleed Freon gas. I’d like to try and thaw you out one of these nights.” Her eyes smoked over.

  “Paula—” I started to say. She held up a hand.

  “Okay, okay. You don’t have to smack me in the kisser with a salami. I can tell you all I know about Paula while waiting for a traffic light to change. We only knew each other to say hello at parties. A sweet-tempered girl, I think. Quiet. Petite, if you like those cute French words. A brunette. All things I’m not.”

  “Where’d you meet her?”

  “At a party, where else? Don’t ask me whose. One’s pretty much like another. I guess it was about a year ago.”

  “Who brought her?”

  “I think she brought herself. I never saw her come in with anyone, there or the other places. If she ever left with someone I didn’t see that either, probably because I’d left by that time with someone myself.”

  “Was Bud there?”

  “Mmm-mm.” She was sucking on the filter. “They didn’t get together until three or four months ago. It was a do at Rhett Grissom’s. My date couldn’t make it at the last minute, so Bud offered to take me. He knew I try never to miss one of Rhett’s parties. The poor dear was so gallant.”

  “How long have you been talking about your stepbrother in the past tense?”

  She raised a pair of rather thick eyebrows. “Did I do that? Maybe it’s because he was so easy to forget. Damn it, there I go again. It’s hard to imagine him existing at all when you’re not in the room with him. Maybe that’s what attracted Paula. She was the same way.”

  “I hear your stepmother thinks she’s a doper.”

  “She should talk.” It came out in a bitter rush of smoke.

  I imitated her raised-eyebrow expression.

  She said, “Sharon pops so many pills it’s a wonder she has a chance to eat. Pills to wake up, pills to fall asleep, pills to lose weight, pills to gain it back. When she farts the room smells like a hospital ward. Paula’s nowhere near the doper she is. Probably not as much.”

  “You’re saying Paula does pills.”

  “Who doesn’t these days, outside Christian Science?” She stabbed out her butt in an onyx ashtray on the coffee table. The butt wasn’t half smoked. “Sharon thinks because she gets hers on a prescription and we get ours from a bowl at a party she’s holy and we’re bound for hell. Her doctor’s just a high-priced pusher with a diploma.”

  “Were there pills at Rhett Grissom’s party?”

  She started to answer. Then she smiled and placed the tip of a crimson-nailed forefinger against her upper lip. “For a minute there I forgot you’re a detective,” she said. “It’s the brown eyes. You ought to have them registered.”

  I dredged up my pad and pencil. “That’s Rhett as in Butler, G-R-I-S-S-O-M?”

  “Self-incrimination, darling.” She patted my knee and stood. “I have a date coining by at four. Excuse me while I slip into something a little less comfortable.”

  “Who for, you or your date?”

  She smiled again with her red-red lips and brushed her fingers along my jawline as she sashayed past. I twisted around in my chair to watch her leave. She passed another woman coming through the doorway from another room. They said nothing to each other.

  “Mr. Walker? I’m Sharon Esterhazy.”

  I got up and shook hands with a woman six inches shorter than her stepdaughter. She wore a cream-colored blouse with puffed sleeves, tucked into a brown flaring skirt cut to mask a slight middle-age weight shift, and her hair, arranged in a kind of pageboy, was that shade of blond that dark-haired women adopt to hide the gray as they grow older. She had on too much eye make-up, and from her nose to her mouth there were deep lines that powder couldn’t conceal. Her smile was as tight as a fist. Her hand felt cold.

  I moved my inner dial to Tranquil Charm and said, “Thanks for agreeing to see me, Mrs. Esterhazy. I didn’t give you much notice.”

  “Nonsense. Do I look like a busy woman? I’m just another one of those useless society butterflies you read about.”

  She made me a drink offer, which I declined, then waved me back into my seat and perched on the edge of the sofa with her rather thick ankles crossed and her hands folded in her lap, consciously avoiding the still-warm spot where Fern had been sitting. She looked about as much like a society butterfly as I look like Boris Karloff. I kept hearing nervous Chihuahuas in her speech.

  “I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Walker,” she said. “I wasn’t in favor of hiring you. It was Sandy’s idea. I think it’s a police matter and I may still call them. My husband pays taxes for just that privilege.”

  I put out my cigarette next to Fern’s. “How does Mr. Esterhazy feel about that?”

  “He’s left the decision to Sandy and me. He says that Bud’s our son and that he shouldn’t interfere.”

  “What does your husband do for a living?”

  “He’s an investment counselor. He built his own firm from the ground up, and now he employs twenty-three people. He’s a self-made man, unlike most of our neighbors.”

  Her tone was defensive. When a wife talks that way about her husband you get to wondering how many squashed toes he’s left behind. “Did he and Bud get along?”

  “Why do you ask?” The little dogs were yapping now. Her back was as straight as a pistol shot.

  “I’m just establishing a background,” I explained. “Bud was over fourteen when you remarried, old enough to have a sense of father that wouldn’t transfer easily to a relative stranger. I understand he wouldn’t let Mr. Esterhazy adopt him. Whenever a young person drops out of sight I have to wonder if family friction was a contributing factor.”

  “Well, you can stop wondering. As you say, Bud was too old to accept Charles as his father, but they got along very well. Bud called him by his first name.”

  And Fern called her stepmother by hers. But I took a passed ball. “It was just a test shot. Bud wasn’t living at home when he disappeared, so it seemed unlikely. But the police would have asked the same question. What sort of man is your son? Your stepdaughter says he’s quiet.”

  “A mortar burst would be quiet compared to her,” she said dryly. “Bud’s a normal twenty-year-old boy. He was on his high school debating team, played baseball, and dated, not always girls I approved of. I don’t imagine that’s unusual. He has good manners, which I suppose Fern might mistake for shyness,
never having had any of her own. I wanted him to attend college, but he wanted to take some time out to think about it. He lived here for a year while he went to job interviews and filled out applications. Then he was hired for the line at the Ford Rawsonville plant. As soon as he had some money in the bank, he moved out to be near his work. I didn’t want him to. What mother would? I was hoping he’d save the money for tuition. He’s got too much upstairs to spend the rest of his life tightening nuts.”

  “What about his interests outside of his job? Does he have hobbies?”

  “Sports and reading. He belonged to a local softball club, but he gave that up when he went to work. I think he liked books better anyway. Action stories, mostly. Spy fiction. I tried to get him interested in Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but he always came back to that Ludlum person.”

  I pretended to make a note of that. “Paula Royce.”

  Her jaw clenched. “If anything’s happened to Bud and she’s responsible I’ll kill her.”

  The air in the room had changed. I moved my shoulders around under my jacket. Now I knew where Sandy Broderick had picked up the mannerism. “Tell me about the time you saw her at your son’s apartment.”

  “She wasn’t living there. Understand that.” Her hands twisted in her lap. “The day he makes that kind of arrangement, if he ever does, it won’t be with someone like her. I had nothing to do and it was a nice day to get out—it was October, the color was peaking—so I drove over there for a visit. They were having an early dinner, something Bud had cooked. That surprised me, because he’d never cooked anything before, not while he was living here, in any case. She was very rude. She said I should have called first. Maybe that’s true, but it seems to me that was for Bud to say. And I’m sure she was on drugs. Her speech was slurred, kind of drunken, except she wasn’t drunk. I could tell the difference.”