Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 04

by The Glass Highway

  “But you wouldn’t want to dump on him the minute his back’s turned,” I said.

  The quick bright grin again, like a light bulb blazing out.

  I smoked up the room a little. “What kind of press is this drawing?”

  “Turn to any channel any time of day and see if you can avoid Cecil Fish. So far you’re an unidentified lead. About tomorrow, though, he’ll have to release your name if he wants to stay on the front page. Unless, of course, we got it all wrapped up by then.”

  “Lots of luck, with that anchor they hung on you for a partner.”

  “Can that!” he said sharply. “You haven’t spent two years with him, which is what buys me the right to talk about him like I do.”

  I canned it. I’d forgotten for a second he was a cop. Dangerous mistake.

  The door opened and Zorn came in. He looked subdued, like a grass fire under control but still subject to sudden changes of wind. He glanced at Bloodworth, who shook his head almost imperceptibly.

  “That’s it for us for now, shamus,” grumped the sergeant. “Fish wants his turn.”

  They handcuffed me again for the elevator trip up two floors to the prosecutor’s office, where a three-man camera crew was busy rolling cable and packing equipment. Fish got up from behind a desk the size of a bed as we came in through the open door, but he hadn’t seen us yet. He was talking to a slick number in a shiny gray suit, with one of those heads of curly brown hair that is almost always a wig.

  “When did they say they need this tape?” The prosecutor peeled off his jacket.

  “Next Tuesday. It’s going into a sort of collage with that footage we shot of you speaking downtown and that pork-barrel session you had with those striking DPW workers last month. Servant of the people. It’s corny as hell, but the voters expect some of that.” The gray suit was flipping through papers attached to a clipboard in his hand.

  “What’s the rush? I won’t be stumping till spring.”

  “Trust your old campaign manager. You want to go to bed with your public at night and wake up with them every morning right through to the first Tuesday in November.”

  Fish gave him that plastic grin you see a lot of around election time. “And all the while I’ll be telling them it’s the opposition that’s screwing them.”

  Gray Suit spotted me, pulling a double take when he saw the cuffs. “Hold up,” he said, laying a hand on the arm of the guy carrying the camera. “Cecil, a couple of minutes of you interrogating a prisoner would put some zip in that day-in-the-life gag. We can go dumb with it, use a voice-over.”

  “Keep that monkey organ out of my face or you’ll be wearing it,” I told the suit brightly.

  Whether it was the cuffs or the wrinkled clothes or my Most Wanted look or a combination of all three, the blood slid out of his face.

  “Forget it, Ed,” said Fish, looking at me levelly. “That law-and-order stuff went out with George Wallace.”

  He steered his campaign manager to the door and gave him a friendly but firm push with his hand on the other’s back. The crew followed Ed out, glancing at me curiously as they passed. Fish’s politician’s smile lasted until the door was shut. Then he turned on Zorn.

  “What’s with the bracelets? Why not hang a neon sign on his ear, for chrissake? Don’t the words ‘secret witness’ mean anything down on your floor?” His voice got high when he spoke rapidly.

  Zorn unlocked the cuffs. “Department regs.”

  “More of Proust’s bullshit, you mean. Wait outside.”

  The sergeant and Bloodworth went out. I rubbed my wrists. There’s nothing quite like the bone-pinchers to remind you you’re in confinement. Fish regarded me for a moment with his pale blue eyes, then strode past me, unbuttoning his shirtcuffs and turning them back as he went. He stepped through a side door and left it open. A moment later I heard water running.

  The office was four times the size of my cell. The carpet was as green and spongy as the felt on a pool table, and bore the clear outlines of shoes and the marks made by the camera’s casters. Squares of something that looked like real oak paneled the walls, set corner-to-corner checkerboard fashion with the grain going two ways. Sober brown law volumes stood in a tall bookcase against one wall, suitable for standing in front of when the cameras were turning. Opposite that a big square window with net curtains and Venetian blinds framed downtown Iroquois Heights, and under the window were an ivory-colored sofa and a cocktail table for those in-depth interviews with women journalists with serious eyes and hurricane-proof coiffures. There wasn’t a thing on the desk but a tape recorder and a telephone in a box like an infant’s coffin.

  So far I was just some more furniture where my host was concerned.

  Fish came out of the bathroom buttoning his cuffs. His tie was done up and his face looked scrubbed and pink and a shade lighter than it had going in. The people we most hate and admire these days are all wearing make-up.

  I said, “You’ll never make state senator.”

  He started a little. His eyes narrowed behind the glasses. “Why do you say that?”

  “Voters today like candidates who talk. That icy silence is strictly Calvin Coolidge.”

  He grunted and hooked his tailored jacket off the back of his desk chair. Putting it on: “I did some checking up on you.”

  “I get checked up on a lot. What did they say this time?”

  “The exact wording doesn’t matter. You’re a smart operator. Not smart enough to stay on the sunny side of the authorities, but smart enough to make it good when you don’t. Too smart anyhow to help a murderer escape justice.”

  “Then what am I doing counting cockroaches in the felony tank?”

  “Because you’re guilty as hell of being a smartass and smuggling out a suspect you think is innocent of the crime as charged. Your penchant for the white horse is public record; you’ve ridden it into more jams than you can count. But never as tight a one as this.”

  “On what evidence?” I said. “A business card found at the scene of the shoot and a stolen Jeep parked around the corner from my office. You’d boot a rookie cop out of here if he came to you with a case like that.”

  He smiled tightly, without showing teeth. “Not if he had an eyewitness.”

  My scalp started tingling.

  “Even longtime private cops who know better can be taken in by appearances,” he said, stroking the tape recorder on his desk. “They think because the Customs officials on our side of the international border are ruder and ask sharper questions than the Canadians, they’re the ones to look out for. But some of those geezers over there have good memories.”

  I didn’t say anything. Suddenly it was very cold in the office.

  “We blew up Paula Royce’s driver’s license picture and yours from your investigator’s photostat and circulated them among all the shifts on both ends of the tunnel and the bridge yesterday. A Simon LaFarge remembers checking you through the Ambassador in a late-model gray two-door around five Christmas morning. He’s prepared to swear that a girl who looked like Paula Royce was riding with you.”

  I smiled. I’ve done harder things, but not recently. “Nice try, Fish. I bet you get a lot of confessions that way. From the guilty ones.”

  “You did a dumb thing, Walker. Don’t make it dumber. Twenty years dumber. That’s the max for accomplice after the fact in this state.”

  “That’s if you arrest your chief suspect, if you can prove she pulled the trigger, and if this LaFarge character, if he exists, identifies her as the girl in the car. No statements for you today, counselor. I’ll take my chances with the system.”

  “Last chance,” he said calmly. “Talk into this machine and you walk out of here. No cuffs, no cops, nothing. Free as air. Otherwise we nail your ass to the flagpole.”

  “Nuts to that. You’re just looking for a big trial to grandstand your way into Lansing. I’ve done some things I won’t admit to in this life, but helping hoist a showboater like you into a position where he can
do some real harm over the body of a girl who was just standing in the wrong place at the wrong time in a wrong city won’t be one of them. I’d like to go back to my nice quiet cell now. All this hobnobbing with cops and politicians is spoiling what’s left of my good name.”

  Fish’s face was scarlet. He walked on stiff legs to the door and tore it open. Zorn and Bloodworth were loitering in the reception room. “Tank this son of a bitch,” snarled the prosecutor. To me: “Get a lawyer. You’re going to want someone to work on your appeal after we hang you.”

  “Thanks. I’ve had my fill of them this trip.”

  Zorn whistled on the way down in the elevator. He’d been eavesdropping.

  I’d missed lunch, which was no accident on Fish’s part. Supper and night and breakfast again and the motionless lump of dead time in between. I had grown used to the mattress, and even the silence got so it didn’t make my skin crawl anymore. Only forty-two hours inside and I was becoming institutionalized. One of the inmates in the cell next to mine, a lean young black with sideburns as wide as my hand, helped kill some of the hours asking and answering trivia questions about old movies. Fred Astaire musicals were his specialty. He was awaiting trial for raping and beating a seventy-year-old woman in her apartment and making off with a portable television set.

  Sometime during the night, a kid busted for shoplifting tried to hang himself in his cell on the third floor and was cut down by a guard. We knew he was DOA at the emergency room of the local hospital before the jail administration did.

  Footsteps in the hall at lunchtime, but not the scrape and shuffle of the trustee who brought the meals. They stopped outside my cell. I looked up from the bunk at the blue-chinned deputy who pulled the a.m. shift. He unlocked the door.

  “Where’s the priest?” I asked.

  He said, “When you criminals going to get some new writers? Let’s go.”

  He took me down to Receiving. The grayhead who had checked me in Christmas Day was standing behind his desk, upon which my overcoat was folded, the hat perched on top. He handed me a paper sack containing my wallet, keys, wristwatch, pad, and pencil, pushed a property slip across the desk, and held out a ballpoint pen. “Give me your copy of the original receipt and sign this. Make sure it’s all there first.”

  I didn’t move. “Who sprang me?”

  “Authorization just came down from the city prosecutor’s office.” He wasn’t going to say anything more. Then he did. “The Mounties fished a three-year-old Mustang out of Lake Ontario this morning. Your girlfriend was still in it.”

  16

  “HEY, BEAUTIFUL HUNK.”

  I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the jail like an immigrant on Ellis Island, sucking free air and fingering a stale Winston out of my battered pack. Last night’s snowfall had already melted off the street and been swept into yellow piles against the curb. Fern Esterhazy was sitting there behind the wheel of a green Jaguar with the top down. Her long red hair was windblown and she was wearing dark glasses and a leather coat with a standing collar.

  I went over and said, “Crank the top up. The Ann-Margret look doesn’t include blue skin.”

  “You ex-cons have no adventure in your souls. Hop in.”

  I hopped in. The soft leather seat wrapped itself around me like an amorous stingray. “Let’s just make circles till I can smell something besides Lysol.”

  We took off with a chirp of expensive rubber. I caught my hat and stuck it on the floor under the dash. The engine whined up the scale, gathering breath during the gear changes. She shifted like a Daytona veteran. I turned up my own collar against frostbite.

  She said, “I tried to bail you out when I heard. They wouldn’t let me.”

  “There’s no bailing out a material witness. Who told you I was sprung?”

  “Dad got a call from Cecil Fish this morning.”

  “What about Paula Royce?”

  “Every time we meet you ask me the same thing. A Mountie spotted her last night driving a stolen car near Kingston and gave chase. They don’t ride horses anymore, except in parades. She ran him around for a while, then went off a curve straight into the lake. She drowned.”

  “She wasn’t that stupid.”

  “To steal a car, or to run it into the lake?”

  “Both. Pull over a minute.”

  We were doing sixty through the business district. She down-shifted, braking at the same time, and we skidded into the curb. Gasoline romped around inside the tank. I pried my fingers loose from the padded dash, got out, and walked back a block to drop a quarter into a newspaper stand on the corner. A picture of Cecil Fish fielding questions at a press conference took up a fourth of the front page under a headline reading witness held in broderick slaying. Below the fold was a smaller picture of me. I recognized it from my investigator’s license photostat of two renewals ago. I paged through the paper, but there was nothing in it about the chase that had ended in Lake Ontario.

  Fern appeared on foot beside me. “They just released the story,” she said. “It won’t be in print until tomorrow.”

  I stuck the paper under my arm. “How about a lift down to the police station?”

  “Let go of it, Amos.”

  In broad daylight, her face showed faint lines like her stepmother’s.

  I said, “Just for a minute. I want to thank Assistant Chief Proust for his hospitality.”

  We went back to the car. She touched off a cigarette with the dash lighter and wheeled us into the traffic lane. “Bud was a sweet kid. I never thought I’d miss him but I do.”

  “You think the girl killed him?”

  “I don’t hate her for it. I wouldn’t if she were still alive. It’s not as if she planned it, or as if she knew what she was doing. You’d think she did it too, if you weren’t still gone on her.”

  “I don’t know that I’ve ever been gone on anyone,” I said, “and neither do you. It’s more complicated than that. I’d buy the police version of what happened—maybe—if I wasn’t sure she was looking back over her shoulder all the time she was here. I want to know who it was she expected to see.”

  “Maybe it was herself. God, I’m Freudian today.” She raised her cigarette above the windshield and tapped ash off into the slipstream. “I was in analysis, you know. Two years.”

  “Who wasn’t, in your tax bracket? There’s the cop house. Dump me here. I’ll walk across.”

  I had a hand on the door handle when she spun the Jag into a tight U and we shrieked to a halt in front of the steps leading up to the front door. When the shocks were through squeaking I picked my hat up off the floor and stepped up onto the curb. I resisted the urge to get down and kiss the concrete.

  “How long will you be?” she asked.

  “As long as it takes my knees to stop wobbling.”

  She smiled beatifically. “I’ll be here when they do.”

  On my way up the steps I met a uniformed officer coming down. His cop’s eyes flicked from the car to me and he said, “That’s police parking only. Who’s she, the Pope in drag?”

  “Close. She’s Charles Esterhazy’s daughter.”

  His face got tired. He knew the name, “That figures. In this town everybody’s somebody’s.”

  Inside, the bald desk sergeant spotted me heading up the stairs and called out. I pretended not to hear. But he must have made a call to the squad room, because by the time I reached the second floor a detective was waiting for me. It was the same plainclothes man who had poked his head into Proust’s office to announce the city prosecutor’s arrival—was that only two days earlier? My life had fallen into two parts, before the slam and after.

  I said, “Chief in?”

  “Not to you, Jim.” He was a thin twist of hide with a pockmarked face and an obvious Adam’s apple that cleared his collar with three inches to spare. The strap of his under-arm holster defied gravity clinging to his almost nonexistent shoulders. “No civilians above the street without an accompanying officer.”

  �
��I didn’t see the X-rating downstairs.”

  “Look for it on your way out.”

  “Let the son of a bitch pass, Epstein.”

  At the guttural command, the detective glanced back at Proust leaning out through his office door, then moved just enough so that I had to walk around him to enter the squad room. The assistant chief held the door for me as I went into the office. I hear they do that for you in the gas chamber too.

  He closed the door. “Seat.”

  “No thanks. My keister’s still flat from that two-by-four in the icehouse.”

  “Suit yourself. How’s county food these days?”

  “They got food?”

  He snickered and circled behind his desk, walking with a jaunty step. Same well-cut blue suit, but today he was wearing a maroon silk tie with a musical clef embroidered in gold just below the knot. I didn’t know he’d been a musician.

  “You got angels on your shoulder, Walker. If we’d latched on to Paula Royce anything but dead, the grand jury would’ve indicted you along with her for complicity. We could still hook you for withholding information in a felony case, but why bother? There’s no percentage in holding a grudge.”

  I waited for the kicker. He lowered himself into his swivel chair with a pleasant little sigh and cracked a weary humidor on his desk to look over the cigars inside like a prom queen choosing from an assortment of chocolates. Then he sighed again, a little less contentedly, and flipped shut the lid without taking one. He was in too good a mood for someone who had just surrendered a plum to the Canadian authorities and was cutting down his tobacco consumption in the bargain. And he could hold a grudge till it sprouted leaves.

  “You’ll find a letter from state police headquarters in Lansing waiting for you at your office.” His muddy eyes looked dreamy. “I called them yesterday early. They’ve yanked your license on charges lodged by this office.”

  “I can petition for a hearing,” I said after a moment.