Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You say he came in to give you information that might help you find out who killed his father—if it was his father—back in nineteen forty-nine. That’s a stretch, but say he really wanted a murder tied up that’s run loose all this time. Why now? Maybe it was you who said you had information. That might be enough to make him cross the border. Old jungle fighter kills war protester. That’d play at the Fisher Theater.”

  “Pretty thin.”

  “Maybe. Motives aren’t as important as they used to be. All you have to do is have issues with your mother. And who doesn’t?”

  “Someone should read me my rights before I respond to that.”

  “Someone will, when we arrest you for Murder One.”

  I took out the pack and showed it to him. He shook his head. I played with the cellophane. “I told Garnet that murder’s a crime without a sell-by date. What if someone killed him to keep from getting tied up?”

  “You mean one hand on the walker, the other on the gun? All the other suspects are dead or on oxygen.”

  “Even a senior citizen can tug a trigger. Ask Marvin Gaye.”

  “Say he taped Matlock and took the bus. Why didn’t he kill you instead? You’re the one with the shovel.”

  “Garnet would just hire another digger. Stop the client, stop the investigation.”

  “Who else knew there was one?”

  “That’s your job. I’ve already got one murder on my plate.”

  “So do I.” He returned the bills to the wallet and shoved the wallet across the desk. “Only my murder cancels out yours. Your bankroll’s on its way to the evidence room.” His eyes got even bleaker. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Taking inventory.” I riffled through the bills and put the wallet away. He hadn’t palmed any. I never thought he had, but I was getting tired of the cold war. I wanted to see what it took to touch him off.

  “You’re a goddamn masochist,” he said calmly. “I’m about to clank you in County as a material witness.”

  “I’ve been. Tonight’s corned beef hash. All I’ve got in the refrigerator is a box of Arm and Hammer.”

  “I’ve got a tuna casserole and a wife who couldn’t cook her way out of a telephone booth. I can wait all night for a story I can file downtown.” He rested a hand on the desktop. There was nothing else on it. I was betting there was nothing in the drawers either. The room was just a space between walls. In another six months it would be a Cinnabun. “Touch anything in Garnet’s room?”

  “Just the door on the way in.”

  “Yeah. If you wiped anything off we’ll know it.”

  “You just insulted the housekeeping staff.”

  “That Jap woman’s a pip,” he said. “She wouldn’t open up until I agreed to put in a good word with Immigration.”

  “Not even then, if you called her a Jap to her face.”

  He pointed at the wallet. “You’ve got a permit to carry. What caliber?”

  “Thirty-eight. I left it in the car.”

  “Ballistics will want it.”

  “I’ll bring it around. Am I clanked or can I go?”

  “I’ll decide after you sign a statement. Are you seriously planning to go on chasing?”

  I shook my head. “That was just a figure of speech. You just counted my operating budget. I’ve got a little more in the bank, but that’s already spoken for. I need to find a client with a pulse.”

  Hichens looked at the wall opposite the desk as if there were a clock on it. “I’m going to make a few calls, starting with this lawyer Meldrum. If your story checks I’ll kick you. Just so you know, I had to put two of my best men on unpaid leave for moonlighting as private stars. It didn’t make me like you guys any better than always.”

  I didn’t have anything for that. I let him take it on out.

  Guests in evening dress had begun to seep into the Marriott lobby when I asked the clerk behind the desk if he had a Morgenstern registered. He was a small-boned Mexican with a purple crucifix discreetly tattooed on the underside of one wrist.

  “Yes, sir.” He looked up from a drawerful of registration cards.

  “J. Morgenstern?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I asked him to ring the room. He dialed and handed me the receiver.

  “Yes?”

  The voice was a mezzo-soprano with one of those sandy edges you can feel in the sole of your foot. It was just the sort of voice I would have invented for the cool redhead if she didn’t already have it.

  “Mr. Morgenstern, please.”

  “He’s out. May I take a message?”

  “When do you expect him back?”

  “I can’t say. He’s attending a business meeting.”

  I looked at the clock on the wall behind the desk. “At six-thirty?”

  “Mr. Morgenstern doesn’t keep conventional hours. Who’s calling, please?”

  “Amos Walker. I’m a detective. I’d like to talk to him about an incident that took place this afternoon in the hotel.”

  “What sort of incident?”

  “The murder sort. It’s just routine.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement for the hotel.” She sounded amused. I might have just told her something had changed in the room service menu.

  “A guest on the third floor. I’m just calling around to find out if anyone saw anything.”

  “I’m sure if Mr. Morgenstern saw anything he’d have mentioned it to me.”

  “Are you his secretary?”

  “I’m his companion.”

  I’d never heard it called that, but I didn’t press it. “I have to ask the question anyway. I’d apprecite it if Mr. Morgenstern would call me.” I gave her my number.

  “What department are you with?”

  “None. I’m private.”

  Something rattled against the receiver on her end; pink nails, to match her lipstick? “You left that out when you said you were a detective.”

  “Would you have stayed on the line if I didn’t?”

  “I’ll tell Mr. Morgenstern you called.”

  I listened to the dial tone, then returned the receiver. I asked the clerk how long Mr. Morgenstern had been in residence.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t give out that information.”

  I used the pay telephone by the restrooms to call Lawrence Meldrum, with Meldrum and Zinzser. I got a recording telling me to call during business hours.

  A chain restaurant had opened up in what used to be a potato patch off an airport driveway christened for a county executive currently under investigation by the FBI for election fraud. My first meal of the day was beef tips and noodles, washed down by a cup of coffee filtered through a windsock. It was enough to make me miss the layup in the Wayne County Jail.

  FOURTEEN

  Meldrum and Zinzser occupied two floors of a downtown skyscraper with all the character of a washcloth. It stood on the site of a demolished umbrella factory and seemed to serve no architectural purpose other than to keep the Ford and Buhl buildings from colliding. The directory in the sterile lobby listed two other legal corporations above and below—a barrister sandwich—and a slew of single shingles throughout. I was at high risk for pinstripe poisoning.

  Halfway through an article in Hour magazine about robotics, I got the nod from the receptionist, a tall black vision with gold rivets holding her ears to her head, and followed her down a hall lined with shriveled maps in frames and into a conference room. A slight man in gray double-breasted linen looked up from the stack of shiny red folders he was distributing around the table, a fifteen-foot slab of polished pearwood surrounded by U-shaped swivels upholstered in rhinoceros or something equally durable.

  “Mr. Walker. I must say, you fulfill all my physical expectations.” He went on dealing out folders.

  “I wish everyone would stop saying that.”

  “Thank you, Judy.” When the vision had faded, drawing the door shut behind her, Lawrence Meldrum worked his way down the table and shook
my hand. He was older than he appeared from a distance, hair more white than fair, and his skin looked as fragile as the vellum maps outside the room. His bluebottle eyes stuck out a little. “I haven’t much time. I’m presiding at the marriage of two telephone companies in ninety minutes.”

  “I didn’t bring a gift.”

  “I’m afraid I have a weakness for metaphors. Especially the matrimonial kind. In the dusty mists of memory, it was a toincoss whether I attended business school or the seminary. Sometimes I’m not so sure I shouldn’t have done both.”

  I watched him square a red folder with the corners of the table. “Isn’t that a job for a legal secretary?”

  “Normally. But I’ve steered this project through eighteen months of national emergency, the rotten economy, and suspicious government inspectors, and I don’t want to jinx it in the last moment by letting the smallest detail out of my hands. By this time next year, you’ll be able to place all your local and long-distance calls through one company.”

  “Isn’t that how we started out?”

  “It is, and what did change bring us? Two incomprehensible bills instead of one simple one, a different area code to memorize for each neighborhood, and a thousand tons of discarded competing telephone directories piling up annually in the nation’s landfills. Who among us hasn’t wished we’d left well enough alone?”

  “So all this steering you’ve been doing is in reverse.”

  “Exactly. Throughout the twentieth century, ‘progress’ was the mantra of modern man. It built roads and factories, fed the hungry, cured plagues, and eradicated superstition—incidentally while placing ninety percent of the world’s wealth in the hands of a group of men who could sit comfortably around this table. It also destroyed tradition and custom, polluted oceans, and drove Irving Berlin into bitter early retirement. One sage observer remarked that western civilization reached its highest point with the invention of the can opener; after that, there was nothing to do but add electricity. Now we’re more interested in finding out where we took the wrong turn, which means retracing our steps. Have you noticed how often the word ‘retro’ occurs in today’s advertising? It’s used to sell everything from ballpoint pens to wings of hospitals. These days, backward is the new forward.”

  “Yeah, I say crap like that too when I want attention. I called to see you about the Garnet case.”

  “So you said. Your report arrived this morning. Everything seems to have concluded satisfactorily to all parties, deceased and quick.” He resumed distributing folders.

  “When I wrote it. Today the score is Deceased, two, Quick, Zero. Someone shot Delwayne Garnet to death in his room at the Airport Marriott yesterday afternoon.”

  A folder paused in mid-descent. “I’d heard there was a shooting. But the name wasn’t Garnet.”

  “He’d been using a phony name for years. When the papers find out who he was, they’ll play it up. A fugitive in a box is worth five in a cell.”

  “What was he doing at the Marriott?”

  “He called and said he wanted to give me information he couldn’t over the telephone. He wanted to hire me to find out who killed his father in nineteen forty-nine.”

  “Good God. Whatever for?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “The father? I hadn’t started looking.”

  “Not the father. I wasn’t aware he had one until just now, and I certainly don’t care what or who happened to him. Who killed Delwayne Garnet?”

  “Who didn’t? Vietnam made a lot of enemies on both sides, not counting any he might have made on his own in the meantime. I’ll try to find out, if you pick up my day rate and expenses.”

  “And why should I do that? This firm’s business with Garnet is finished.” He fussed with the last folder. It had a monogram on the cover I couldn’t read, with a lightning bolt through it.

  “When the cops come around, you’ll be able to say the incident is under internal investigation. It’ll make you look better in the press.”

  “The press has always been cordial, insofar as we’ve had relations at all. It may surprise you to learn the police are capable of conducting a thorough investigation without help.”

  “More than capable. I never knock what the other guy is selling. One of the questions they’ll ask is if you knew where Garnet has been keeping himself these past thirty-four years. A sheriff’s investigator who wants to be sheriff can turn that into a case of harboring. If he doesn’t, the FBI will. They need to shift the blame before someone on Capitol Hill thinks to ask them why they couldn’t find him and you could. The media will want to know the same thing. Meldrum and Zinzser could be this year’s Enron.”

  He straightened to his full height and faced me. His height wasn’t all that full, but he was narrow and made the most of the illusion. It would impress juries. “Are you threatening extortion?”

  “I’d be bluffing. I’m fresh out of merchandise. I told a county captain everything yesterday. I’m surprised you haven’t heard from him before this, but I got the impression he thinks the manual is just a suggestion. All I’m after is a client.”

  “We’ll take our chances. Would that be all right with you?”

  “Hunky-dory. Someone comes up missing every day. Someone else will drop around eventually with a checkbook to ask me to look for him, and if he doesn’t, I’ll go to that second someone myself, just like I came to you today.”

  “In that case, if you’ll excuse me.” He looked at his watch, a thin gold oval with an ostrich band.

  I didn’t move. “There’s another thing to consider, and you can have it for free. I assume you’re handling the rest of Beryl Garnet’s estate, apart from her ashes.”

  “A number of institutions were named in the will, not that it’s any of your affair. You’ll get no details under this roof.”

  “She could leave it to Underwear for Animals as far as I’m concerned. I didn’t ask. When homicide’s involved, a lot of penny action draws more fire than it would ordinarily. IRS will be curious about whether she declared all her illegal income. Since she ran a cathouse for forty years, it would all be illegal. The tax boys won’t care as long as they get their cut. An inquiry like that could tie up the estate until the Tigers win a pennant.”

  “We have an excellent tax attorney on staff.”

  “You’d better have a good PR guy, too. Otherwise you’ll go on Sixty Minutes as the best-dressed collection of pimps in history.”

  He didn’t throw himself down on the carpet and gnaw on a table leg. I hadn’t expected him to. He did the next best thing, which was fold his hands behind his back. In that position he resembled the Duke of Wellington, when it still looked like Waterloo could go either way.

  “And how do you, one man in one little office, propose to prevent that from happening?”

  “It’s a suite,” I said. “One and a half rooms and a water closet. I can’t prevent it. No one can. But with a professional investigator on retainer to get to the bottom of the Garnet mess, you might manage to look like a respectable corporation of counselors that got a little egg on its face and would like to know who threw it.”

  “Have you ever worked in public relations?”

  “No. I do all my lying for free.”

  He unlocked one of his hands and stroked the slick surface of the folder in front of him. “My partners and I retain an agency to conduct our investigations. We only approached you in the matter just ended because the late Mrs. Garnet requested it. Why should we use you now?”

  “There’s every reason not to. Your partners will scream at you. I don’t have any extra manpower unless I go outside, which is playing with fire when it comes to keeping things confidential, and what connections I have don’t go far up. My references are no good, because if having top billing in a firm this size means anything, you already checked those out when Beryl mentioned me. I can’t offer a thing your regular agency can’t a couple of hundred times over with everything on it,
except one.”

  “Good old-fashioned Yankee know-how?” His face broke into crossgrains when he lifted his lip.

  “A running start.”

  I couldn’t read his expression. He’d stood in front of too many juries. “You’ll save us money on legwork? That’s your offer?”

  “Two or three thousand, minimum. Assuming your agency’s minimum is my maximum.”

  “Two or three thousand. We spend that much every week on erasers.”

  “Your people make too many mistakes. You brought up money, not me. I’m saving you headlines. One local television station can air a hundred sound bites in one day. Multiply that by however many stations there are in this country. Don’t even count the twenty-four-hour news networks, where the crawl never stops. Ask your partners where they stand on that.”

  “Are you actually saying you intend to solve this—murder?”

  “I may solve two. No charge for the extra.”

  “The father? What the devil do I care who murdered him?”

  “Garnet cared. Maybe someone else cared he cared. It’s the long shot of long shots: fifty-three years and counting. But it has to be played.”

  “With my money.”

  “Yours and Zinzser’s. Is there a Zinzser, by the way, or is he like Betty Crocker?”

  “He’s semi-retired. His always was the wiser head.”

  I heard the knock before he did. I didn’t say anything. After a moment he shook himself like a lean old dog. “Yes?”

  “A man to see you, Mr. Meldrum. He says he’s with the sheriff’s department.” Even from the other side of a door, Judy sounded as exotic as she looked.

  “I’ll see him in my office.” To me: “Wait in reception. If I send word to show you out, that will be my answer.”

  “I’ll wait in my own stall. I know the way out of it.”

  “Please.”

  He got the word out with effort, as if it had been stuck between two teeth. Pleaders hate to do it for free.

  “Okay. Your magazines are newer than mine, anyway.”

  “Thank you. I’ll pay you for your time.”

  He held the door for me and locked it behind us. Captain Hichens towered over the receptionist in the hallway. I’d just about convinced myself he couldn’t be as tall as I remembered. His bleak eyes showed no expression when he recognized me. Expressing plenty. He shook Meldrum’s hand because it was in his way and pulled me aside by my sleeve. My arm was in the sleeve and I felt a bruise starting.