Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro

by Loren D. Estleman

  The mother held promise. Thirty-eight years old when interviewed, Regina Babbage blamed young Karl’s dark turn on his late father’s infidelities. Stepfather Winthrop was too gentle (read weak) to have exercised any influence, positive or otherwise, and so the boy had turned to others his own age in search of a male role model. She was especially vocal on the subject of Delwayne Garnet, but then she’d have to have been, Stuart Pearman being dead and beyond reach of her lash. She told the interviewing officer she wished Michigan had the death penalty so that she could attend the event after Garnet was captured, tried, and sentenced, and root for the electric current. She was singing with a band when she’d met the departed Mr. Mason, a drummer, and her statement was peppered with words she’d learned on the road and behind the bandstand. She was a big pile of steaming hate. She’d be seventy-two if her temper hadn’t blown a plug in the meantime, aged well outside the demographic for revenge killers. But handguns aren’t all that heavy. I added her name and vintage contact information to my notes.

  I returned the material to the young woman at the desk, an arrested adolescent with candy-striped hair and a copper brad through both nostrils, and went back outside, where if anything the sky was lower and the air dirtier than they had been that morning. I ate lunch at a counter and asked the attendant for a metropolitan directory. He found it holding up a package of poppyseed buns, which as health code violations went didn’t even dent the surface locally. Looking up the number was just something to do while I was waiting for the carcinogens to kick in. I didn’t expect to find anything.

  There was a W. S. Babbage listed in Royal Oak. I wrote the number on my napkin, made change for a ten, left a tip on top of the directory, and deposited the rest in the telephone by the door. Dialing the number was just something to do during digestion. I didn’t expect anyone named Winthrop or Regina to pick up.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice, cigarette-roughened at the edges.

  “Mrs. Babbage?”

  “This is Mrs. Babbage.”

  “Mrs. Winthrop Babbage?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Regina Babbage.”

  “Who’s asking, please?” Irritation had crept in.

  I made a mental note to try the number on the lottery. “My name is Walker, Mrs. Babbage, calling from Detroit. I’m investigating an incident connected with the death of Karl Anthony Mason.”

  The pause was shorter than expected. “Did they finally arrest that son of a bitch Garnet?”

  “I can’t discuss details over the telephone. Is there a place we can meet?”

  “How long will it take you to get up here?”

  I said twenty minutes, if the lights were with me. She gave directions, which I shorthanded on the napkin under her telephone number. She broke contact without saying good-bye. This was going to be as much fun as poking grizzlies.

  Woodward Avenue slices northwest from the Detroit River at a thirty-degree angle, passing the jeweled Fox and State theaters, the crater that was J.L. Hudson’s Department Store, the library and art museum, and dozens of weedy empty lots before leaving the city. Several dimensions later it enters Royal Oak, a white-flight community of factory commuters and retired schoolteachers with a pocket-size downtown and housing developments that resemble architectural theme parks: false Tudor, faux Bavarian, Cold War ranch, and the ever-popular split-level, complete with step-down garage and a flight of redwood stairs to the ground floor. A lot of decent people live there, and they pay the city police a living wage to see it stays that way. If you pull into a school parking lot to change a tire, a cop will be along in two minutes with friendly advice and maybe a dope-sniffing dog. Every well-groomed town is a police state of some kind.

  The neighborhood dozed in a cul-de-sac with a civilian patrol emblem mounted beneath the NO OUTLET sign, the one with Boris Badenov silhouetted in black to scare away prowlers. There were no Big Wheels or swing sets or basketball hoops, no cute two-seater convertibles, nothing to indicate that anyone under forty lived there or ever had. The vehicles in the driveways were large and sturdy, designed to ford the Amazon and scale K-2, and had probably never been driven above fifty even on the expressway. A very quiet place. I idled along at ten to hold down the rumble from my straight pipes. Even then I felt like a hospital visitor with squeaky soles.

  Regina Babbage’s address scrolled in wrought-iron script above the recessed door of a low stucco, connected by a dog-walk to a garage that was trying hard to look like a carriage house, with green shutters and zigzag crossplanks on the doors. It may have been, once; but only if Royal Oak had existed before the invention of the carburetor. I parked on a concrete pad and followed a flagstone border to the entryway. The lawn was fragrant from recent cutting, the terra-cotta tiles in front of the door swept and wearing a clean coconut mat. The place was scrubbed and plucked like an old lady who hadn’t forgotten youth’s first blush. It reminded me a little of Beryl Garnet.

  The man who answered the doorbell was tall, with a ham face and ears that stuck out as if to keep his head from sinking any lower between his shoulders. He wore a gray sweater with a shawl collar over a white shirt buttoned to the neck. He had large hands and feet, the latter shod in scuffed leather loafers, and the knees of his trousers bagged like a miner’s. If ever a man was born to bear the name Winthrop Babbage, this was it. We introduced ourselves without shaking hands and he let me into a living room with sleek leather sofas and loveseats in chrome frames and a fireplace with a black enamel mantel crowned with photographs in steel frames. The hearth didn’t look as if it had ever contained a fire. You could have cleaned the whole room with a leaf-blower.

  Regina Babbage stood in the center of the carpet as if she’d been waiting there for thirty-four years. She was a compact five-two and a hundred thirty pounds in a form-fitted blue shirt over black slacks with a crease that could cut glass. Her feet were small in cordovan slip-ons with brass buckles. She wore little makeup and her short hair was a plausible pale blonde.

  “Thank you for coming, Mr. Walker. Is it mister, by the way? I don’t recall your mentioning a rank.”

  “Mister’s as good as it gets,” I said. “I’m a private investigator, Mrs. Babbage. Thank you for seeing me.”

  Her face crumpled a little. She’d been holding it together through sheer will. “Does that mean Garnet isn’t in custody?”

  “He is and he isn’t. That’s what I came to talk to you about.”

  Her face collapsed the rest of the way. Winthrop glided to her side and cupped a hand under her elbow.

  “Do you know how long I’ve waited to hear that bastard is behind bars?” she asked. “Thirty-four years, two months, and eleven days. He killed my son, and no one cares. Mr. Hoover cared, but he’s as dead as Karl. They’ve become a joke, an anachronism, like Laugh-In and the Smothers Brothers. And I’m the one who’s left with a hole through me.”

  I said, “Karl’s prints were all over the bomb.”

  “What if they were? He wanted to draw attention to his beliefs. A handful of Bostoners wanted to dump English tea into the harbor to draw attention to their beliefs. They won, Karl lost. If it had gone a different direction, schoolchildren would be fighting to play him in the Fourth of July pageant.”

  “It was an anti-personnel bomb, Mrs. Babbage. That means it was meant to blow up people, not just a building. He stuffed it with nails and bits of bicycle chain.”

  “That was Garnet’s influence. My boy had principles. Garnet twisted them around to his own ends. Then when things went wrong he ran away. You know what I wish? I wish he’d killed someone in Texas. That’s one state where they know how to deal with a murderer. They let him sweat it out for years on Death Row, spending all his family assets on appeals. Then they wheel him into a room with glass walls and stick a needle in his arm.”

  Winthrop Babbage squeezed his wife’s elbow. “Please have a seat, Mr. Walker. Can I get you something to drink?” His voice was a velvety rumble, with humorous undertones. A sense
of the absurd would be the most well-worn tool in his survival kit. I put him around eighty.

  I said a glass of water would be welcome. The pressure inside the house was nearly as high as outdoors, even disregarding the personality of the hostess. Air conditioners don’t get much of a workout in the homes of old people.

  Mrs. Babbage and I were sitting when he returned from the kitchen carrying a tall glass with ice cubes colliding inside. I could feel the sweat building up where my back rested against the leather cushions of my sofa. She seemed cool enough sitting in the center of the one opposite, her hands resting in her lap. Her nose had a predator’s curve, with the skin stretched shiny across it and across her cheekbones; what feature writers call handsome and striking. Fifty years ago, her picture outside a ballroom would be enough to fill the place. Under a baby spot in a form-fitting gown, she wouldn’t have had to carry a tune across the stage; the audience would meet her halfway.

  She waited while I took a long sip and stood the glass on a mission table at my knee. “Who do you represent?”

  “The legal firm administrating the estate of Beryl Garnet, Delwayne Garnet’s guardian.”

  “I thought that whore was his mother.”

  “Not biologically or legally. I see you’ve made a study.”

  “The press dug up everything it could on everyone involved. Not from me, where Karl was concerned. I turned the hose on the vultures once. What they got was leaked by the police. They managed to twist even that. Garnet’s background didn’t surprise me. When you set out to raise a coward and a murderer, a brothel’s just the place to do it. So she died finally. I didn’t know prostitutes lived so long.”

  “Strictly speaking, she wasn’t a prostitute,” I said. “It might have occurred to you the press got that wrong too.”

  “Are you saying there’s no difference between her and me?”

  “He didn’t say that, Reggie.” Winthrop was poking tobacco into the bowl of a blackened brier. His leather club chair was the only piece of furniture in the room that didn’t look as if it had been trucked in from a doctor’s waiting room. In its corner you didn’t notice it at first, like the man who sat in it. “A parent can do everything right and still fail. Look at Karl.”

  “Stay out of it, old man. If you’d been half the example a good stepfather is supposed to be, I wouldn’t have to walk through an iron gate to visit my son.”

  “You’ve always blamed Ernest for that. Try to be consistent.” He got the pipe going and dropped the clump of burned matches into a chrome tray on the coffee table. Clouds of smoke added another twenty pounds to the atmosphere.

  “That whoremongering son of a bitch did his part every day of our marriage, and you didn’t do anything to make up for it when it came your turn. I was outnumbered from the start.”

  “Delwayne Garnet’s dead.”

  I was watching her closely when I said it. She didn’t blink.

  SEVENTEEN

  Winthrop took the stem out of his mouth. His ham face was gray. “How?”

  “He was shot yesterday in a hotel room at the airport.”

  “Which airport?”

  “Detroit Metropolitan. It was his first time back in the country in thirty-four years. He didn’t last thirty-four minutes.”

  Regina Babbage closed her eyes then and looked all of seventy-two years old. She might have been praying, but I wouldn’t have bet the collection plate on it. After ten seconds her eyes snapped open. “Who did it?”

  “I don’t know. Neither do the police. That’s what I came here to talk to you about.”

  “Am I a suspect?”

  “I didn’t think so when I figured your age. Now that I’ve met you, I’d tag you for it on the first good evidence.”

  We locked glances for a bit. It was like a snake trying to hypnotize another snake.

  “An honest one,” she said then. “You were right, Winthrop.”

  I didn’t ask what he’d been right about. “Where were you yesterday between eleven-thirty A.M. and twelve-fifteen P.M.?”

  “Here at home with me,” Winthrop said. “We’re here every day. We have no social life, no friends. We buried the last one two years ago.”

  “Is there anyone who can back that up? A husband’s testimony doesn’t draw much water with the cops.”

  “No. As I said, we have no—”

  “For God’s sake, Winthrop. We don’t have to answer his questions, let alone volunteer information.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We have nothing to conceal.”

  “She’s giving you good advice,” I said. “Even if you decided to confide in me, you’d have to do it all over again when the police come. They’ll work their way around to you, probably before the day is out. Mrs. Babbage gave them every reason when her son died.”

  “When he was murdered,” she said. “Euphemisms are opiates to silence survivors. Would you blame me if I killed Garnet?”

  “Did you?”

  She breathed in and out shallowly. “I almost wish I could confess, just to see the look on your face. On all their faces. No, I didn’t kill him. I’d give my soul to have been the one who did. Shocked?”

  “Paralyzed. Do you own a gun?”

  “Certainly not,” Winthrop said. “We’re Democrats.”

  I kept looking at Regina.

  “Do you want to see it?” she asked.

  “Reggie!”

  I said I would. She got up and went out, leaving me alone with Winthrop, drawing on his pipe with wrinkles stacked up to his bald crown.

  She came back pointing a long-barreled revolver at my chest. I was drinking water. I froze with the glass against my teeth.

  The old man had good reflexes. He scrambled to his feet.

  “Reggie, what are you doing with that?”

  “I bought it a week after I lost Karl. I thought I might need it to keep the reporters away. I never did; the hose worked fine.”

  “For God’s sake, stop waving it around!”

  “Don’t be so dramatic. Guns don’t just go off, like in the movies. Mr. Walker knows that. Don’t you, Mr. Walker?”

  “Depends on the gun. Hair-trigger isn’t just a colorful expression.” I drank some water and made my throat work.

  “I have a permit.” She shifted it to her other hand then and held it out to me, gripping it awkwardly across the middle of the frame.

  I set my glass down carefully, pried my fingers loose from it, and took hold of the butt. Her hand fell away and I felt the weight of the weapon. It was a Jet .22 with factory grips and an eight-and-a-half-inch barrel, a target piece. Remington hadn’t made one in forty years. I thumbed the cylinder around, looking inside the chambers, checked the muzzle, and handed it back. Winthrop goggled.

  “Garnet was shot with a larger caliber,” I said. “Also that gun hasn’t been fired in years. There’s rust in the barrel and mold on the cartridges. You’re supposed to clean and oil them every once in a while.”

  “I wouldn’t know how. I’ve never fired one in my life.” She let it dangle by her side.

  “I’ve never lived in a house that contained a firearm,” Winthrop said.

  “You’ve been living in one most of your married life. You survived.” She was looking at me. “Am I exonerated?”

  “Not quite. It could be a prop you keep around for anyone who asks. I admit you hold it like an umbrella, which is hard to do once you know your way around a gun; like faking virginity. But you’ve proved you’re smart.”

  “Such a cynical man.”

  “As long as you’re around I’m just a talented amateur. Killing Garnet took planning. Whoever did it slipped the gun past airport security in the middle of a national emergency. Being a little old lady might help. Anyway you’ve had thirty-four years, two months, and eleven days to work it out.”

  “Thirty-four years ago there was no airport security,” she said.

  It was a point. I wished she hadn’t had it ready.

  Winthrop said, “Are you working
with the police?”

  “I’m working in spite of them. Garnet was a client. Now Beryl Garnet’s lawyer is. That’s three jobs in one week, all involving the same family. I guess that makes me the faithful old retainer.” I stood. “Thank you for seeing me. I’m sorry I raked up bad memories. It’s that kind of case.”

  Regina’s eyes followed me up. “What was he doing back in the United States?”

  “We had an appointment. It didn’t have anything to do with what happened in sixty-eight.”

  Winthrop took the pipe out of his mouth. He looked at it as if he didn’t know what it was for. “How could my wife kill him if she didn’t even know he was in the country?”

  I paused. I tried to see a connection between the high-tech bug in my office and the rusty piece of machinery in the old woman’s hand. I shook my head.

  The old man reached down and closed his fingers around the revolver. She let him take it. All the gas seemed to have gone out of her.

  “I’ll see Mr. Walker out. Lie down, dear. Don’t forget what the doctor said.”

  She nodded, and went on nodding as if she’d forgotten how to stop. She turned and went out through the same door she’d come through minutes before, holding a gun. Her feet dragged. It might have been part of the same act.

  Winthrop put down his pipe, seemed to realize he was still holding the .22, and let it drop to the table with a thud. “Filthy things. The Chinese should have stuck with printing.”

  “People would just use rocks. You’d have to wait three days to buy one to border your garden.”

  “She could use a rock. I believe she could. Or her bare hands. I can’t see her using a gun.”