Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 04

by The Glass Highway

  Our faces were close enough to kiss, but I didn’t indulge. The thing’s blond hair was dark and plastered to some swollen meat that may or may not have been the face of one Rhett Grissom. Splintered bone poked through the torn flesh in places. I’d seen one like that in Vietnam, when my squad entered a hut that had been used by Charlie to interrogate captured prisoners before bugging out. Over there it had been part of the natural order of things. In my own backyard it was different.

  And one thing was sure. He hadn’t drowned, not floating on his back like that. But if he had he would have welcomed it.

  I stood up and brushed the dirt off my knees and cast my eyes around the lake that was actually only a lull in the Detroit River. The buildings of Windsor still looked clean, but now they were leering. The pretty view had something wrong with it, like an oceanscape rolling giddy and uncaring over stove ships and the grinning faces of men long dead. I turned up my collar against a sudden chill gust off the surface and swung back toward the house.

  The maid was letting herself out the back door as I came up the flagstone path. She had on a cloth coat and a bright knit cap with a ball on top that made her look like someone just off the boat, and she was carrying a purse the size of a steamer trunk by a strap like a tow hawser. “I’m going home now,” she said. “You found Rhett?”

  “Yeah.”

  She didn’t hear me, but it must have been in my face. She looked at me closely, seemed on the edge of asking, then pulled the door shut firmly behind her and stepped off the stoop. “I’m going home now.”

  I watched her stumping down the driveway. At the end she turned right toward the bus stop on the corner. She didn’t look back. She’d been working for the family long enough not to ask questions where Rhett was concerned. The dumb Polack bit was strictly protective coloring. What a maid knows would bring a blush to the sallow cheeks of a thirty-year man on the vice squad.

  She’d locked the door, but the lock was nothing. I didn’t even bother to go around to the front to see if that one was still open. I’d noticed that it was dead-bolted. Curious how people, even people who are smart enough to have a lot of money, forget about things like back doors. Maybe the burglars who preyed on homes in Grosse Pointe were too classy to come in through the servants’ entrance. This one wasn’t. I slipped the latch almost as quickly as they do in fiction and headed up the back stairs to the smaller of the two bedrooms, which I figured was Rhett’s.

  The kid had his own refrigerator full of imported beer and several thousand dollars’ worth of stereo equipment besides the usual bedroom stuff. No wonder he had still been living at home at an age when most people had married and moved out. I frisked the room inside out, starting with the less likely places, the way you do with the clever-clever ones. I found a stack of pornography in exquisite bindings under the bed and a crumpled pair of black bikini panties not Rhett’s size behind the dresser. Too many electronic keyboards and screaming Negroes inside the album covers in the record cabinet. One of each would have been more than enough. Nothing taped behind or under drawers. Then I switched to the obvious places. He had eleven thousand dollars in cash rolled up and stashed in the toe of a bedroom slipper in the closet. Tax-free mad money from a spoiled rich kid’s part-time job pushing junk. I still wasn’t sure what ball I was looking for, but at least I was in the right park. The rest of the room was clean. He would be too tricky to hide his merchandise on the premises. I left the money where I’d found it and moved on to the adjoining bathroom.

  It was in the medicine cabinet over the sink. After lifting things down from the glass shelves and tapping the back for hidden panels, I was replacing the items with my hand wrapped in a handkerchief to keep my prints on my fingers where they belonged when I noticed how light the can of shaving cream was. I shook it. Something bumped around inside. I pried off the top. It was a funny place to keep an address book.

  The entries were in code, naturally. The last was written in a different color ink and had a hasty sort of look. I stuck the whole thing in my pocket, finished restocking the cabinet, and worked my way backward out through Rhett’s room, obliterating possible prints as I went. I snapped the latch on my way out the back door and drove downtown and put my hat in my hand and walked into the quiet efficiency of the Grosse Pointe Police Station. The sergeant at the desk was polite. They are always polite in that town. He listened to what I had to say, then radioed the Grissoms’ address to a car in the vicinity and asked me to take a seat.

  23

  A CAPTAIN QUINCANNON took it. He was a tall, thin redhead leaning hard on fifty, with merry eyes and a mouth that was not merry. I didn’t know him. Someday I’d meet all of them, but by that time there’d be a whole new batch coming up. His office was a pleasant carpeted oblong with a dark oak desk and baseball pictures hung on the walls. A young Quincannon grinned out at me from several of them, wearing a baggy uniform with the name of a semi-pro team I’d heard of once or twice on the shirt. A gold-framed triptych on the desk contained an attractive blonde in her forties and a boy and girl of about college age, both smiling the Quincannon smile. He sat me down in a comfortable chair with arms and walked around behind the desk and sat down and offered me a cigarette from a pack with some miles on it and took one for himself and used a small pair of scissors to cut it in half and put the other half back in the pack and lit up with a red plastic throwaway lighter. We blew smoke at each other’s shoulder.

  “You’re a P.I. named Walker?” His eyes belonged to a saloon comic setting up the punch line.

  “Was,” I corrected. “Right now there’s probably a very angry state trooper waiting for me at my office to collect my bona fides, if he hasn’t already got out a BOL bulletin on me.”

  “Oh. You’re that Walker.”

  “You’ve been reading the papers.”

  “I don’t have to. You’re this week’s icebreaker at all the police officers’ parties. Last week it was that new directive in New York calling for a cop to be read his rights and investigated every time he shoots a suspect in the line of duty.”

  “That bad?”

  He nodded economically and went on looking at me through the smoke of his half a cigarette. “Let’s have it.”

  “I’m working on the assumption this Paula Royce the papers have all been squawking about is still alive,” I said. “She does pills, and since Rhett Grissom seems to have been the Grosse Pointe distributor for Parke-Davis, I thought he might have had recent contact with her. I went out there today to talk to him. He isn’t saying much.”

  “We know all about Rhett Grissom. We’ve got an F.I. file on him as long as Woodward Avenue, but his father’s money buys a lot of backdoor justice. Just how were you planning to get this information out of him?”

  “Not by slapping him around until the bone came through his face. I know you have to ask that question, but remember that you wouldn’t be asking it at all if I didn’t come here to report finding the body.”

  “You see a lot of the double-reverse in this work,” he said dryly.

  “You mean when the killer calls the cops, thinking the cops won’t suspect him because he called them. That’s the thinking of someone who doesn’t know how cops work. But of course I might do it that way, thinking you’d think that because I know how cops work I wouldn’t try a stunt like that. We can play this shell game all day and wind up where we are right now.”

  “It might be worth the hassle to you if you were seen coming or going.”

  “I talked to the maid, kind of.”

  He waved that away. “She’s been questioned before. She hears and sees twice what she lets on, but a team of clam-crackers couldn’t open her up if they worked at it a week. Tossed the house, did you?”

  “I never said that. Breaking and entering isn’t the way I work.” There’s no law against lying to a cop.

  “Uh-huh.” He hung on to it a moment, playing with it, then put it down. Not away. “Okay, let’s just for now say that I think you’re virgin. What’s
your interest in the Royce girl to begin with?”

  “Strictly personal.”

  His grim mouth got grimmer. “Not good enough, Walker.”

  “Okay. Yesterday I had a visit from a lifetaker named Horn, Fletcher Horn, who as much as told me he’s looking to shove her over. With me it’s a business thing. Rumor has it I helped the girl out of the jam she was in with the law. Whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter. If I ever get back my license it would be nice if a potential client didn’t have to wonder about the services of a private investigator that got another client killed. Twice.”

  “Better. Paula Royce was your client, then?”

  “You’re putting words in my mouth again, Captain. A client is someone I agree to represent. Money doesn’t have to change hands for the definition to hold, although it’s nicer when it does. The word’s abroad that I helped her. I’m stuck with it either way.”

  “You split the hair plenty fine, I’ll say that for you.” He smudged out his butt in one of those beaten tin ashtrays kids make in shop for their fathers. It looked as if he’d been using it awhile. “What makes her still alive?”

  “For one thing, the number of people who want me to think she isn’t. For another, the fact that no one connected with the Iroquois Heights Police bothered to go over and identify her body.”

  “Oh them.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but they’re still cops. They don’t usually leave any t’s uncrossed unless someone makes it worth their while not to cross them.”

  “Pretty thin.”

  “Fat leads are a rare animal in my part of the forest.”

  “Mine too. Would this Horn be someone who would be likely to knock around a scroat like Rhett Grissom for the girl’s whereabouts?”

  “He would be someone who would be very likely to do just that. He’s proud of his ability to kill without weapons.”

  “Tell me more about this charming fellow.”

  I looked at my cigarette. “What I know is third-hand and sketchy. He just did three out of five at state for Grand Theft Auto, but that may have been his idea because he was hot. The reason he was hot is he’d just cooled a grand jury witness right under the cops’ noses. Word is he’s working for the Colombians at present, who are moving or have moved in on the area drug trade. Under another name, Paula Royce testified against their associates down in Florida a while back and did some damage. They’re looking for reparations.” I described Horn as well as I could, dwelling on his small hands and feet.

  “Sketchy, huh? What do you call a detailed report?” He was suspicious. They always are when the job looks too easy.

  “He likes to talk. And I’ve been in my line a long time. I have sources.”

  “I’ll bet. Must be nice knowing you can knock heads without the press and the politicians and the A.C.L.U. breathing down your neck.”

  “I’m just a private agent, Captain, or I was. I have to cut corners somewhere. They don’t turn to water when they get a hinge at my ID like they do with yours.”

  “Greener grass, Walker.” He planted his hands on the arms of his swivel. “You don’t have to deal every day with the hard-gloss punks they grow up here like I do. Mention prison and they laugh in your face. Juvenile hall is paved slick as spit with their fathers’ money. They slide out faster than they slide in. Scratch Rhett Grissom and make room for two more half his age with twice his smarts. We’re spinning our wheels on a glass highway up here.”

  “Beats rolling backward.”

  “We do our share of that too.” He got up and stuck out his hand. “Appreciate your coming down. We’ll tap the warden’s office in Jackson for the file on Horn and have his picture out on a circular this afternoon. I’m turning you over to Sergeant Minch to get all this down on paper. He’s our fastest typist. We’ll have you out of here in half an hour. Don’t forget where we are next time something comes up.”

  I rose and grasped the hand, which felt as if it belonged around the neck of a baseball bat. He was six-two and hard as a pine board. “Thanks, Captain. I’m not used to courtesy in a police station. A skipper like you could give the business a bad name.”

  “I’m not tough. I hung all that up with the uniform.”

  “Like hell you’re not tough.”

  His smile was economical, but a ghost of the young athlete’s grin waltzed around the edges. “Stay in touch.”

  By the time I got away from Sergeant Minch and his magic typewriter I had a ticket on my windshield for parking in a police zone. I considered going back in and paying it, but there were no other spaces in sight and I’d just find another ticket waiting for me when I returned. So I climbed behind the wheel and reached across and opened the glove compartment to put it away. A hand grenade plopped out and rolled across the floor toward me, wobbling drunkenly.

  24

  “THANKS, TIM.”

  The red-haired captain cradled the receiver and looked at me. “That was Officer Drinkwater calling from Belle Isle. The Detroit bomb squad has officially declared your pineapple a dud.”

  “I figured as much or there’d be a black smudge on the street out front where my car is parked.” I was burning my fourth Winston since returning to his office and waiting for the mud and loose asphalt to dry on my suit before brushing it off. I’d done some rolling on the pavement after the grenade showed up. “All I needed to round out this case was a killer with a sense of humor.”

  “You’re sure it was Horn planted it?”

  “I have to be. If I thought there were two like him kicking around I’d deliver my license to the state cops in person and take up making lamps out of old Buick engine blocks. Besides, demolitions are among his specialties. I figure this was a friendly warning for me to take a hike. I get them now and then, though they’re seldom this articulate.”

  “He wouldn’t have the brass to plant it while you were parked in front of a police station.”

  “He would if I were using J. Edgar Hoover as a hood ornament. You’ve never met him.” I killed the stub in the homemade ashtray. “But he’d have to have been hanging around the Grissom place until I showed and then followed me here, which is less than likely. He could have done it anytime after our little meeting in my office.”

  “I guess warnings like this roll right off hard guys like you,” he said dryly.

  “He scares the hell out of me, Captain. That could just as well have been the real thing, and I’ve seen what they can do in close quarters. He knew that, which is why he made that choice. His hobby is psychology.”

  Quincannon poked at the sorry pack of cigarettes on his desk without taking one. “He ought to turn it on himself. No sane man does what he did to Rhett Grissom.”

  “Prison’s lifted the lid off steadier guys than him.”

  He said, “I’ll have Minch type up the report on your little post-Christmas surprise package.”

  “You know the details.” I stood and reached for the doorknob. “Thanks again, Captain. I bet you were something to see out on the diamond.”

  He reminded me to pay my ticket and get my car the hell out of the blue zone.

  The other side of the coin was waiting in my little reception room when I got back. As I entered, a square-jawed number in a regulation haircut and a blue suit under a black coat got up from the bench. He was as tall as the captain in Grosse Pointe and his gaze was blue and direct.

  “Amos Walker?”

  I said, “Isn’t he in yet? I want to hire him to follow my wife. She’s got Motel Back like Yvonne Goolagong’s got tennis elbow.”

  “Nice try, Walker. I’ve seen your picture.” He flashed his badge and ID folder. “Officer Tynan, State Police. I was here earlier. You weren’t. I was going to give you another ten minutes and then swear out a warrant. I think you know what I’m here for.”

  “A Captain Quincannon of the Grosse Pointe Police wanted me even more than you did. Let’s do it.”

  Maintenance had been busy. The office door had been removed and the broken glas
s swept up. Tynan didn’t comment on the missing door. He was the kind of cop that wears a shoulder holster to the beach. In a couple of years he’d be a lieutenant. I flipped my license photostat and gun permit onto the desk in front of him and took the original license down from the wall and out of its frame and added it to the pile. He gathered up the talismans that kept me eating and cut out without so much as a click of his heels. No broken saber, no Rogue’s March, nothing. There’s no romance left in the world.

  I locked the outer door behind him and went back in and shucked my outerwear and sat behind the desk to scowl at Rhett Grissom’s address book. It didn’t look like much of a code. Numbers instead of letters and vice versa. I hesitated with my hand on the drawer handle, then opened it and got out a pencil and paper. I couldn’t live my life looking under the bed for hand grenades.

  The telephone interrupted me twenty minutes in. It was Theodore Grundy of the Justice Department.

  “I’ve spoken with my superiors,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “There’s been a new development in the case.” I told him about Grissom. I didn’t mention the book.

  A moment of silence for the dear departed. Then: “You think Horn killed him?”

  “Somebody had to. Why not Horn?”

  He paused. “You really don’t know where Paula Royce is, do you?”

  “I don’t. Don’t as in ‘do not.’ Do not as in the opposite of do. Grundy, I don’t.”

  He believed me then. For some reason I thought he never would. “I’ll get back to you in five minutes.” He broke off.

  It was closer to ten. “Yeah, Grundy,” I said into the mouthpiece.

  “The offer stands, Walker. We can’t have too many investigators cluttering up the landscape. There’s talk of the FBI getting involved, and even the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. I’ve got the go-ahead to swing your license for you if you’ll agree to forget all about Paula Royce.”