Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 04

by The Glass Highway

  I made the twelve-mile round trip in just under an hour. It can be done much faster, of course, but not with the prime suspect in a homicide in the car and every cop on wheels in the city on the prowl for early celebrants. I’d left my Luger in the office safe. Not long before, a group of visiting Baptist ministers had been arrested in the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel for carrying unlicensed firearms, and their pull was a lot greater than mine. My act added destroying evidence to the growing list of charges against me, but the weapon doesn’t tell anyone much of anything when it belonged to the victim and has been handled by someone other than the perpetrator. Someone upon whom I was gambling an awful lot wasn’t the perpetrator. Paula perked up as we left the Jeffries Freeway and wound onto Twenty-First Street, but she still wasn’t talking.

  “What about luggage?” I asked, when we were stopped for a light near the Ambassador Bridge. “Food?”

  “I have money. I’ll buy what I need. They have supermarkets and department stores there too. No one will look at me twice.”

  “Yeah, I bet they get a lot of Bolivians got up like Bette Davis.” The light changed and we pulled away.

  My quarters meant more to the toll guard than my face or my companion’s. We hummed over the icy blackness of the Detroit River and stopped for Customs on the other side. A gray-uniformed Canuck with salt-and-pepper sideburns and kind eyes peered inside the car under the lights of the station and asked me my name and birthplace and why we were visiting Canada. I said we were seeing relatives. None of it meant anything, and he thanked me and said merry Christmas and promptly forgot about us. He would have said those same words to a hundred other drivers that night.

  Windsor is just Detroit after the maid’s been in. When we’d gone a couple of dozen blocks Paula had me pull over and she opened her door. The wind coming off the river sucked at the opening and spat grainy snow inside. They’d had some there, not enough to worry about. Farther north they put the parking meters on the sidewalk against the buildings so you can find them after they’ve had what they call a respectable snowfall, and they still don’t worry about it. A sign in a lighted store window wished us happy holidays in French and English. She got a foot on the pavement and looked at me.

  “I’ll take the bus from here. I have a rough idea of the directions from hearing Bud talk about the cabin. Here.” She held out a wad of cash taken from a coat pocket. She didn’t carry a purse. “This is five hundred. I wish I could spare more.”

  I took it and gave her back half. “My day rate for escort duty,” I said. “What are you going to tell the cops when they ask where you were and how you got there?”

  “I hitched a ride.”

  “Guess again. When this breaks I’m going to the cops with hat in hand to tell them how I was duped into seeing you safely across the bridge.”

  “I was too far gone on pills to remember.”

  “That’s no good either. If you were that mucked up you could have smoked Bud and not remember that the same way.”

  Her eyes were normal now, the pupils natural. “Maybe that’s just what happened.”

  She got out and slammed the door and walked down the street and around the corner without looking back, holding down her hat with one hand. The wind snagged the hem of her raincoat. When she was out of sight I backed into an alley and went back the way I’d come.

  I believed there was a fishing cabin the same way I believed she’d be back in a week to turn herself in.

  I hit the sheets at six and just lay there listening to the antique clock in the living room bonging out the half hour and then the hour. But I must have dropped off finally, because it seemed to strike eight only a minute later. Then someone leaned on the door buzzer the way only one class of person in the whole world knows how to lean on a door buzzer. I got up and threw on a robe and shuffled to the front door in slippers while an ache started behind my left eye and began the slow crawl to the back of my skull.

  “Amos Walker?”

  I supported myself on the edge of the open door and looked into a face that was mostly nose and a fistful of teeth in a mouth that turned down at the corners when it smiled, like a shark’s. Its owner wore a long black overcoat and a brown fur hat with a brim that dipped down in front and a tuft of red feather stuck in the band. He was my height, heavy in the shoulders. He looked as if he could have taken me on the bright side of forty. Probably he still could; as Paula had said, they’ve got too many tricks. The other one, standing behind him and a little to his left on my porch, was built slighter than his companion and looked younger than I figured he was. His features were regular and very black. Hatless, he had on a hip-length brown leather coat that hung open over a jacket that didn’t quite match his pants. They were both wearing neckties. Most of them do, east of the ABC wardrobe department.

  I said, “Merry Christmas, officers.”

  The one with the nose and the downturned grin was just getting out his ID and badge folder. He hesitated, then put it away. “So you spotted us for heat, huh? Maybe we should change deodorants.”

  “It wouldn’t help.”

  He stopped smiling, but his teeth still showed. They fascinated me. They were large and egg-shaped, and his lips couldn’t cover them without looking as if he were trying to swallow an orange whole. “I’m Reuben Zorn, detective sergeant with the Iroquois Heights Police Department. That’s my partner, Dick Bloodworth. We been trying to call you for an hour. What you been doing?”

  “Stringing popcorn. I sleep hard. What’s the beef?”

  “The assistant chief wants to talk to you about the son of a client of yours that got himself a terminal headache last night or early this morning.” He put an index finger to his temple and worked the thumb up and down twice.

  “Which client is that?”

  He told me. I didn’t bother to act surprised. They look for that.

  “I flunked current events in high school,” I said. “What’s the assistant chief up there calling himself these days?”

  “Maybe you know him. He was an inspector down here till a year or so back. Name’s Proust.”

  I sighed.

  “He said some nice things about you, too.” Zorn was grinning upside-down. “I’m off duty ten minutes now and the wife says if I miss another Christmas morning at home she’s running off with a parole cop, so let’s kind of shake a leg, huh?”

  13

  THE IROQUOIS HEIGHTS Police Department worked out of three floors in a fairly new building on the main drag, those floors linoleum-paved and washed in pale fluorescent light. The place was designed for breathing and elbow room, but cops had been using it for a while and that had had the usual effect. There were too many desks crammed into the detective bureau on the second floor, the stairwell reeked of stale tobacco and the bulletin boards were elbow-deep in obsolete wanted circulars, two-month-old duty rosters, and newspaper cartoons as brown and brittle as last year’s leaves. Disinfectant smell prowled the halls.

  The place was as quiet as a hospital waiting room. A skeleton crew of uniforms and plainclothes men sat around slurping coffee out of Styrofoam cups and collecting double time for working the holiday. Over their feet on the desks and from the water cooler they watched Zorn, Bloodworth, and me as we paraded single-file along the wall to a door with assistant chief mark proust lettered in gold on the frosted glass. Next to the door, a two-foot aluminum Christmas tree shared a small library table with a Mr. Coffee machine, but in place of the usual ornaments, front-and-profile mug shots dangled from the branches. Police humor.

  Zorn rapped once and we went into a small office with a gray carpet, the usual desk, file cabinet, and two chairs, no other furniture. The desk was just a desk holding up the usual desk stuff and a nameplate reading assistant chief mark proust. The plasterboard walls were hung with framed citations, one of those academy class pictures with rows of visored adolescents in sepia ovals, and a framed front page from the Iroquois Heights Spectator bearing a photograph of Proust shaking hands with the mayor under
the headline mark proust named assistant chief.

  I figured I’d remember the name.

  “Walker, Chief,” said Zorn.

  Proust took his time finishing the police report he was reading at his desk and looked up at me the way you look at a picture that needs straightening. His hair was more white than gray now, very thin at the temples from years spent rubbing against his old fedora, but his long face was the same, pale as paper pulp and sagging into jowls and deep pouches under his eyes. He was dressing better these days, in blue serge with a high shine and a gray-and-red-striped tie. When I knew him it was baggy gray wool and hand-painted nooses from the state fair.

  He honored me for a long moment with his dishwater gaze. Then he smiled slowly with just his lowers. “Welcome to the suburbs, shamus. When was it we caught each other’s act last? Wasn’t it that time your old company commander got himself burned?”

  “That’s it,” I said. “I bet the rubber hoses are lonely since you left the department.”

  “Always the card.” He looked at Zorn. “You frisk him?”

  The sergeant looked surprised. “You didn’t say bring him in hard, Chief. He ain’t under arrest.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  He made it sound like a temporary oversight. I wasn’t packing anyway. My unregistered German meat-chopper was still in the safe in my office, and I’d left the Smith & Wesson locked in the desk. There was a gun or two lying around the house, but when cops issue an invitation it doesn’t include your hardware.

  Proust glanced down at my name on the report on his desk. In my work you learn to read upside-down. “You did a job a week ago for a party named Broderick?”

  “You know that already,” I said.

  “You found his son here in town?”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “We didn’t say you did. Yet. Sit down.”

  I was about to decline politely when the only other chair in the room was shoved against the back of my legs and Zorn’s ham hand dropped to my shoulder and pushed me down onto the hard seat. Proust got up and strolled around the desk with his hands in his pants pockets. This was going to be interesting. He’d perfected his interrogation technique working for the old Detroit STRESS (Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets) crackdown unit, the one dissolved by the present administration after the body count made national headlines.

  “Christmas is a season for surprises,” he began. “It started with Mrs. Charles Esterhazy of Grosse Pointe, who decided to drop by one Paula Royce’s place here in town about seven to wish her son the compliments of the holiday. She’s booked a flight with her husband to Jamaica at eight-fifteen. The front door’s locked and no one answers her knock, so she goes around back and tries the door there but it’s locked too. So she peeks in through the kitchen window, and guess what she sees.”

  “Stockings hung by the mantel with care.”

  He went on as if I hadn’t said anything. “She sees her son, one Bud Broderick, sprawled in his own brains on the kitchen floor. Her husband’s waiting in the car and she runs screaming back to him. He gets on the horn to the mayor, who’s a fellow member of his country club, gets him out of bed. The mayor turns around and gets the chief out of bed. Now, the chief don’t like anyone else sleeping when he can’t any more than the mayor, so he calls me, only he don’t get me out of bed, he catches me opening a package with a necktie in it from my daughter-in-law. This one here.” He waved the end of his red-and-gray tie. I’d thought it was a little quiet for him. He left it hanging outside his jacket. “I send Zorn and Bloodworth down to the Royce place and someone else over to talk to the boy’s father, who just happens to be Sandy Broderick, the guy on the news. He don’t shed a tear. He talks about the job you did for him and what happened at the Royce place a week ago. Then Zorn and Bloodworth get back and tell me they found this at the scene of the murder.” He got one of my cards out of a pocket and showed it to me.

  I shook a Winston out of my pack. “I might have given it to her. I give a lot of them out. I can’t be responsible for where they end up. What makes it murder? Gunshot wounds to the head are usually suicide.”

  He leaned forward suddenly. His tie hung straight down like a tongue. “Who told you it was a gunshot wound? He could have had his head bashed in with a skillet. I didn’t say anything about a gun.”

  I pointed the cigarette at Zorn. “Your boy does a nice pantomime. Graphic.”

  The sergeant shuffled under his superior’s murderous scrutiny.

  “You ought to tie a bell on your hounds if you don’t know what they’re doing,” I told Proust.

  “It’s the entry,” Bloodworth said.

  Everyone stared at the black detective. Since I knew him they were the first words out of his mouth. He was playing with a loose thread on the seam of his leather coat sleeve and didn’t catch his partner’s warning signal.

  He said, “Bullet entered under his chin and came out the top of his head. If they’re going to do it that way they usually stick the gun in their mouth. Also there were no powder burns, so it wasn’t even a contact wound. It reads like he was struggling with someone when it went off. Twice. Another bullet grazed his face, same angle. That could be just reflex, but like I said it doesn’t read suicide on account of the entry and no powder burns. Oh, and did I mention the gun was missing? The gun was missing.”

  Proust blew out his cheeks and pursed his lips, resembling a freshly landed carp. Zorn looked embarrassed, as if his partner had just spat on the rug. Cops have a thing about volunteering information, especially to a suspect. Bloodworth looked a little worried about the loose thread on his coat. Telling tales out of school wouldn’t bother him, standing as he was on the solid gold of Affirmative Action. I was busy wondering if it was safe to start liking him.

  The assistant chief jingled his keys in one pocket. For a space that was the only sound in the room. By the time he spoke he had scraped together enough poise to get by.

  “Here’s how we make it.” He stopped jingling. “We know you had words with young Broderick last week from what his old man told us. He was a scrappy drunk. From what his mother told us before her doctor stuck her under sedation we also know the Royce broad’s a doper. We found enough empty pill bottles on the premises to confirm that. Any pills she had on hand went with her when she smoked last night or early this morning. Lansing says she had a registered thirty-two revolver, and Bud was killed with a thirty-two. We’re still looking for that. Bud got in an argument with her at the wrong time, when she was half gone on reds and Black Beauties and the rest of the rainbow. He was drunk; his body smells like the alley behind a ginmill and it’s a sure bet his blood will test ninety proof at the lab. She got out the gun. They scuffled over it and it made noise, like Bloodworth said.”

  “Sounds plausible.” I let smoke curl out from under my upper lip. “For something built on a piece of legal tissue in Lansing and a couple of empty bottles.”

  “There’s a kid pushing life up in Marquette because of a partial thumbprint found in his uncle’s basement. What we can and can’t build a case on depends on how many people want it out of sight and how bad. Mind telling us where you were last night between seven and midnight? The M.E. tells us Buddy boy ran out of breath somewhere in there.”

  “I thought you had it tailored for the girl.”

  He gave me his Lon Chaney Jr. smile, all bottom teeth. “I’m a civil servant. Humor me.”

  “Rosecranz, the super in my building, can tell you I was in my office from about seven till nine. After that I was with Fern Esterhazy—that’s Bud’s stepsister—in The Chord Progression. The bartender there may remember me, though he won’t want to. We went from there to her place in Grosse Pointe. I left there at two-thirty.”

  Zorn leered. Proust pulled at his lower lip. “We’ll talk to all of them. Then where’d you go?”

  “Where does anyone go at two-thirty on a Christmas morning in Detroit?” I asked. “Skinny-dipping in Lake St. Clair.”

 
“With or without the Esterhazy cunt?” put in the sergeant.

  “Shut up, shithead,” Proust snapped. “We can do this smooth or we can do this rough, Walker. The book says we got to let you call a lawyer, but it don’t say we can’t show you the system first.”

  “On what charge? I came up here voluntarily.”

  “We forgot. Cops are human too.”

  “Says you.”

  His expression didn’t change. He’d heard lots worse plenty of times. “Where were you from two-thirty until my men came to get you at eight?”

  “In bed, like I told your boy Zorn.”

  We watched each other. Finally he said: “That’s it?”

  “I’m smart enough to come up with something better if it weren’t true.”

  “I know you, Walker. You’re dumb-smart. You’re hoping that’s just what we’ll think.”

  I burned tobacco. Here was where I was going to bail out with my story about getting euchred into giving a suspected murderess a lift. If it had been anyone else but Proust asking the question I might have. I burned tobacco and said nothing. The assistant chief made brief eye contact with Zorn, who came away from the wall with his head down. His coat was open and he had his fur hat shoved back past a black widow’s peak as sharp as a fish knife.

  “We know what you was doing,” he said. “You picked up the Royce cunt, or she picked you up, and you delivered her out of town, probably across the line in Ohio. Maybe Canada, but that’s a sucker play and we don’t figure you for that much of a sucker. That’s why we found your card in front of the door where someone who’s in a hurry might drop it on their way out. But like the chief said, us cops are human. We all got sour memories. Chances are we’ll forget your name and what you look like once we got a line on the girl.”

  “You’re missing Christmas morning, Sergeant,” I said.

  “Quit fucking around and read him his rights!” spat Proust,