Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Broke?” I sat down.

  “Resilient. We’ve an easier time of it here, I think. The law is quite specific about what we can and can’t do. So long as we color inside the lines, it lets us alone.”

  “It’s the same where I come from.”

  He smiled. “Only you don’t always color inside the lines.”

  “It’s a four-hour drive, Mr. Hale. Not a spaceship. The work’s the same.”

  “You didn’t fly?”

  “You have to be at the airport two hours early. By then I was in St. Thomas.”

  “Next time you ought to take the train.” He caught me looking at what he was doing, and grinned broadly. “An industrialist in London found our surveillance equipment in his ceiling. This is how he delivered it. Whenever I have time on my hands I untangle another ten or twenty feet. Do you do divorce work?”

  “Every time I get the urge I slam a car door on my hand and it goes away. My tag’s missing persons. Like Delwayne Garnet?”

  He accepted the prod with a forgiving smile. “Mr. Garnet is no longer missing. He never was, actually. He’s been observing the statutes and paying the taxes of Canada right here in town for more than thirty years. That’s how we found him, by accessing the tax rolls in Ottawa.” He twitched an elbow toward a computer console on a stand. “He uses the name Lance West, as you suggested.”

  “Where’s he using it?”

  He slid open the deep drawer of the desk with a toe, dumped the ball of wire inside, and kicked the drawer shut. Then he spun his chair and lifted a marbled gray cardboard folder off a neat stack on a credenza under the window. “His address is on the first page,” he said, turning back and holding it out. “He works at home.”

  It was printed in boldface. “Where’s Yonge Street?”

  “Just round the corner. I wouldn’t be surprised if I passed Mr. West every day on the street. Shall we bill you, or would you rather leave a check with the receptionist?”

  I read the report in my car. Lance West, 52, was employed by Lost Galleon Entertainment, publisher and distributor of a line of graphic novels, which Llewellyn Hale had described as “Comic books with a glandular condition”; complex stories of conflicted superheroes, disgraced police officers, and other societal misfits pitted against even worse antagonists in stories told through panels, speech balloons, and spelled-out sound effects. Personal details were sketchy. There was no mention of marriages, children, or club memberships. But then all I’d authorized Loyal Dominion to do was find Garnet/West. A run through court records hadn’t turned up so much as a ticket for jaywalking, much less making or detonating bombs. International flight to avoid prosecution seemed to be the universal cure for political principles.

  The Yonge Street address belonged to the second story of a building containing a seafood-and-pasta restaurant. I found a spot across the street and got out with the urn under my arm to read the menu posted in the window. It was placed conveniently next to a door with a gridded glass, behind which a flight of narrow steps led to the next level. The specialty of the house was ravioli cooked in squid ink. I should have packed a lunch.

  A narrow alley separated the building from a stationery shop next door. I took it around to the back, where three cars shared a hundred square feet of brick paving with a pair of locked Dumpsters, and looked up at the second-floor windows. There were four, including two half-size crankouts that would probably belong to bathrooms. The square butts of air conditioners stuck out of the others. No easy exits there. An accommodating town, Toronto. I liked it more the longer I stayed.

  The door to the front stairs was unlocked. The well had been painted recently, a pleasing shade of teal, and I breathed through my mouth to avoid taking in fumes. The steps creaked. There was nothing I could do about that. I missed my .38. Most serious injuries take place on staircases, particularly when there are felons at the top.

  I made it to the landing without taking on any fresh holes. The place appeared to be in the middle of a spruce-up; a wainscoted hallway stretching to my right glistened with fresh varnish, but the floral runner looked as if it had been pressed between the pages of a book for sixty years. The jury was still out on the vintage bowl fixtures hanging from the ceiling. They were either part of the retro remodeling craze or left over from when they were new.

  There were two doors, paneled and painted, with numbers in scrolled brass fixed with brads to the center. The number on the second door was the one I was interested in. I used the section of wall between for a shield and knocked.

  “Who is it?” The voice was muffled by the door. I never try to read anything into one in that situation.

  “Delivery for Lance West.”

  He was silent just long enough for me to wonder if he took deliveries of any kind.

  “Okay, just a second.”

  Bolts slid. Chains jingled. Latches turned. I got ready to put my foot in the door.

  It opened wide, a surprise. A slightly older version of the Delwayne Garnet I’d seen in FBI telephoto shots stood in the doorway, wearing a gray hooded University of Toronto sweatshirt over brown cords with the ribs rubbed shiny at the knees, carpet slippers on his feet. He’d put on weight and lost hair, but the chin whiskers looked the same. At close range I was sure he was part black. Turpentine fumes rolled out of the apartment behind him.

  Time and lack of interest from the other side of the border had blunted his reflexes. He blinked at me from behind half-glasses, then at the urn I was holding. “What the hell’s that?”

  “Delwayne Garnet?”

  He took in air and tried to put the door in my face. I got my weight against it and swiveled inside.

  “I’m not a federal agent,” I said. “I’m not even a cop. I really am here just to make a delivery.”

  He’d stepped back, expecting an assault. “My name is West.”

  “Your mother’s name was West.”

  He turned and ran.

  I said hell, set the urn on a coffee table covered with artistic clutter—paintbrushes sticking up out of glasses, stained rags, stubs of charcoal scattered like droppings—and followed him down a short hall. The door he’d slammed behind him was locked, but it was one of those bathroom locks with a straight slot, designed to slip with a butterknife in case someone fell in the tub and needed rescuing. I used my pocket knife on it and found Garnet with one foot on the toilet, wriggling to get his hips through the narrow crankout window.

  I grabbed the waistband of his pants and pulled him back inside. His foot slipped off the toilet and he sat on the floor hard. Ten Most Wanted, my ass.

  EIGHT

  How do I know these are Beryl’s ashes?”

  Perched on a tall stool upholstered in black vinyl and silver duct tape, Delwayne Garnet had the top off the canister and was glowering inside. The stool was the only place to sit in the living room/office, apart from an unmade bed and a plaid armchair with a brick inserted in place of an amputated leg. I was sitting on one of its arms. The seat, sprung and sunken, looked like a miniature Bermuda Triangle.

  “I can’t swear to it myself,” I said. “You hear stories about crematoriums. Does it matter?”

  “I guess not.” He put the top back on and slid the canister into the bronze urn, balanced on the rail of a tilted drawing board. “Who was it said if we really believed in an afterlife, there’d be no need to visit a cemetery?”

  “Billy Graham. I’ve got a receipt from the lawyer for you to sign. You get a copy, if it helps.” I found it in my pocket and held it out.

  “Lawyers are fascists’ tools.” He took the receipt and read it. “What about the rest? The house on John R, all the money she squeezed out of her girls? A starving family in the Dominican Republic could live for a year off what she paid the Detroit Police Department every Tuesday.”

  “City turned the house into an empty lot years ago. The rest never came up in conversation. I suppose she made other arrangements.”

  “She would. I was just a tax deduction to her.�
� He took a fine-line pen off the drawing board rail, started to write “Lance West,” then drew a line through it when I cleared my throat, and scrawled “Delwayne Garnet” instead. I took it, tore off the original, and gave him the carbon.

  “She didn’t pay taxes. Her business was cash and carry. She raised you as a favor to your mother, because having a baby in Hollywood and no wedding band didn’t fly with the morals clause in a player’s contract. She didn’t have to. She went on supporting you after you ran away with the circus. She didn’t have to do that either. Then you stiffed her for better than thirty years without even a postcard. In her place I wouldn’t have given you my ashes. But that’s just me.”

  He pouted. I was beginning to see why no marriages had appeared on his record. There was a patch of dried blood on his cheek where he’d scratched himself trying to poke a thirty-six-inch waist through a thirty-inch window. The effort had taken the starch out of him, and he’d moped in from the bathroom and climbed up on the stool and listened to my spiel without interruption. It helped that I didn’t look like FBI. The Bureau wasn’t disguising its undercover men in cheap suits and tired faces that season.

  An oversize sheet of drawing paper was clipped to the tilted board, with two rows of panels roughed out on it in pencil. The action appeared to have something to do with two men wrestling on top of a tall building. The speech balloons were blank. Finished sheets of panels were thumbtacked to the walls. He was a good representative artist, with an eye for subtle expressions. The anatomy looked accurate, but then I can barely draw a conclusion.

  “You’ve come a ways from the Moroccan Army of Liberation,” I said.

  “That was Stu’s idea. He thought it sounded exotic, and that it would convince the pigs we had branches in both hemispheres. He was the idea man. Karl made the bombs. He had a chemistry scholarship at the U of M before he dropped out. He showed me how to make an explosive device out of used kitty litter.”

  Stuart Pearman and Karl Anthony Mason were the anarchists the Detroit forensics team had shoveled out of the wrecked van in 1968. I said, “I would’ve thought it was explosive enough without help. Ever blow anything up?”

  “Only on paper.” He swept an arm toward one of the tacked-up sheets, filled with flying debris and body parts and a Karumpph! in fat letters. “I’m hot stuff with a pencil or a brush. Any other tool—”

  “Karumpph. How’s the money?”

  “Pays the rent. The General Service Tax is killing me. These streets don’t clean themselves. Lost Galleon Entertainment is four guys and a PageMaker program. If I could hook up with one of the big imprints in the States I’d be set. They’re making movies out of graphic novels now.”

  “Spiderman.”

  He screwed up his face. “No, that’s a comic book: steroid freaks in long underwear. I mean dark, really complex pictures, where the camera crawls inside the heads of serial killers and psychotic gangsters. The originals are practically storyboards for the production team. All they have to do is cast the parts.”

  “I remember when they used to make movies out of real books.”

  “If you mean those gasbags on the New York Times list, they still are. I’m talking about the difference between a seven-course meal and a Twinkie. This is a respected art form.”

  “So what’s stopping you from making it big in the States?”

  “I’m a fugitive. I have to lie low.”

  “No one’s looking for you, Delwayne. The feds have known where you are for years. Who do you think I asked?”

  “If that’s true, how come I’m not in custody?”

  “They lost interest a week after you rabbited. They have bigger shrimp to poach these days, suicide bombers and video pirates. They use old hippies for target practice.”

  He frowned. He picked up a soft-lead pencil and added an ear to one of the men duking it out on the skyscraper. He threw the pencil down on the rail.

  “This could all be a ruse to coax me across the border and arrest me. I bet you’re a veteran.”

  “You might re-think ruse before you make the trip,” I said. “Yeah, I served. I don’t owe the feds a thing.”

  “Neither do I. A pig’s a pig. I watched them belly their way up to the trough for eighteen years. This one fat lieutenant asked me for a blow job once. Next time I saw him was on TV, accepting a commendation for valor from the mayor.”

  “Maybe he earned it.” I got up. “I didn’t come here for your backstory. I had that already. I don’t care if you come back home or go on drawing pictures for mooses and Mounties. I got what I came for.” I folded the receipt and put it in my pocket.

  His eyes followed me up. He unhooked his reading glasses. Without them, his face resembled one I’d been looking at in pictures lately; fuzzy ones made up of tiny dots in fifty-year-old newspapers. “I guess if you thought about it you’d hate my guts.”

  “You’d be surprised how little time I spend thinking about your guts.”

  “I do. I think about it a lot. Not what you think. I didn’t know you existed until a little while ago. I mean that whole idiotic episode, picket signs and combat footage and throwing buckets of blood in people’s faces. I tried to do a story about it. The images wouldn’t come. It’s not the block; I don’t believe in that except as an excuse not to work. After thirty years it all seems childish, even for a comic book.”

  “Graphic novel.”

  “You know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t. A lot of people who lived through it can’t get past it, no matter what side of it they were on.”

  “So don’t write about it. Do what they did then: Tell it as a western, or a comedy in Korea. You draw good explosions. Your sound effects need work. They go boom, just like you always heard.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t there when Stu and Karl were killed. I used to have nightmares about it, though, where I was. I saw myself lying in pieces and wondering how I was going to stick them all back together.” He looked at the drawing sheet, picked up the pencil, put it back. “Sometimes I had them when I wasn’t asleep.”

  “Flashbacks are cheap entertainment.”

  “I haven’t had one in years. I guess if I was going to use the material it should have been then.”

  “What are you going to do with the ashes?”

  He put his glasses back on, as if he couldn’t see the urn without them. “I haven’t thought about it. I’m not the kind of person who can live with something like that on the mantel, even if I had a mantel. Toss them in Humber Bay, I suppose. Think she’d mind?”

  “I didn’t know her well enough to know what she’d mind. All she told me was she didn’t want the State of Michigan to have them.”

  He showed his teeth. It might have passed for a raffish smile in one of his panels. “Same old Aunt Beryl. That was one area where we agreed.”

  “Put on old clothes. You never know when the wind will change.” I fisted the doorknob.

  “The story I really want to tell is my father’s.”

  Just pull on the knob and walk out. Like climbing in from a ledge. Nothing easier if you prefer solid earth under your feet to having it come at you from forty floors up. The job’s done. Forget about a hotel room or supper. Just pull on the knob and walk out and gas up and drive back across the border and don’t look back.

  Being smart is more than just knowing what to do. It’s knowing what to do and then doing it. So what I did was turn around and step off the ledge.

  NINE

  He was looking at me, with his head tilted back so that I couldn’t have been more than a smear seen through lenses designed for close work. It was probably as much as he wanted to see. A smear is a lot easier to talk to than a human being.

  “You know so much about me, you must know who my father was.”

  “I don’t. Unless Beryl told you, you don’t either. I’d bet plenty she didn’t.”

  “You said you didn’t know her that well.”

  “She ran a whorehouse in downtown Detroit for forty years a
nd bought two generations of cops. You wouldn’t be just now taking delivery on her ashes if she were the type to spill secrets to adolescents.”

  “It wasn’t that big a secret. People hear things and guess the rest. They gossip. You’d be surprised what a boy can learn through an open transom in an old house.”

  “Or hiding in closets. Under beds, too. I guess you picked up a real education there.”

  “Oh, sex. I found out all about that by the time I was eleven. I graduated with the help of a forty-eight-year-old whore named Rose. It was my first time and also my last. I’m still disgusted.”

  “I was the same way with mushrooms. Now I like them fine. Maybe you just got hold of a bad mushroom.”

  “Maybe I’m just not the mushroom type.” He took off his glasses and rubbed them on the front of his sweatshirt. “I admit it, I was a snoop. I lived in a house full of babysitters, and each one thought one of the others was keeping an eye on me. Five days a week after school and all day Saturday and Sunday I had the run of the place. I found out every method of birth control and all the remedies for crabs and worse, all by observation. And I found out my family history by eavesdropping. It was a glamorous life for the son of a movie star and a contender for the lightweight championship of the world.”

  “Movie stars don’t take bits in musicals, and Smallwood had a lot of contenders standing between him and the title. Romanticizing them doesn’t make your childhood less glamorous.” I shot my watch out of my cuff. “I need to get back on the road. The trucks start piling up on the bridge at four.”

  “What do you charge for an investigation?”

  “Depends on the investigation.”

  “You must know I’m talking about solving a murder.”

  “That’s police work.”

  “Are you saying you never interfere in a police case?”

  “I never take a job to interfere in a police case. There’s a difference.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “The police do.”

  “Are you afraid of the police?”

  “Terrified. They’re armed and they drink a lot of coffee.”