Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro

by Loren D. Estleman

  But when the first flush faded, when you got past Smallwood’s speed and the oiled machinery of the lean, hard, dark body in the black-and-white trunks, particularly if you’d spent three minutes in the ring, any ring, you saw that he put too much effort into protecting his face. He’d bought into that “colored entertainment’s answer to Tyrone Power” offal the flacks were shoveling, at the expense of covering his midsection. He bent low enough moving in, but when he threw his right, he opened a window to his solar plexus. An opponent with patience and a sense of timing would wait for that next right, then duck in under his arm with a left hook and fold him like a Christmas card. Smallwood would probably recover—he hadn’t gone 23 and 0 without someone laying a glove on him somewhere painful—but his faith would be shaken. From then on he would divide his defense. That was where experience gained points over animal instinct. When he went down, he would go down on his face and stay there like poured cement.

  Not this time, however. Smallwood battled Castillo to a lopsided decision at the end of ten rounds, annihilating the competition on the basis of a knockdown in the sixth, an episode on the ropes in the ninth, with the older fighter covering up before a fusillade broken up by the referee, and cosmetics. At key points the victor managed to appear calm and in control while the more experienced man looked panicky, even when delivering combinations that under normal circumstances would raise his stock. This was politics. Archie McGraw, or someone if not Smallwood’s manager, had understood that spectator sport is a beauty contest at bottom and that judges are influenced as much by a show of grace under pressure as by an exhibition of skill.

  The fight was Smallwood’s all the way. Nothing less than a KO would have pulled things out for Castillo, and three or four rounds in it was clear he wouldn’t get it without support from infantry. I wondered what had become of the loser. In 1948, there wouldn’t have been much in front of him beyond selling used cars in local commercial spots and an endless stretch of would-be comeback bouts with one-time fellow contenders and farmhands who trained by lifting harrows and stunning Angus bulls with short-handled sledges behind the barn. If he caught a break he might have wound up as a stunt double for George Reeves on Superman. If his English was good, some producer might give him a speaking part as a bandido on Hopalong Cassidy. Likely he went back to Mexico or Guatemala and found work pumping gas and reliving his best fights for starry-eyed youths in a back room smelling of Valvoline and scorched fan belts.

  Sitting in the viewing room at the Detroit Institute of Arts, alone on a metal folding chair in front of a sixteen-inch monitor on a cart, I watched the tape through twice. I muted the sound the second time, to eliminate the distraction of the irritating blow-by-blow by the announcer; then as now, they never seemed to be watching the same fight I was, and were always puzzled by anything less pat than a knockout.

  It was pure self-indulgence on my part. Nothing about the fighting form of a man who’d been in his grave fifty-two years would tell me who put him there and why. Reading about Smallwood had aroused my nostalgia for a game that had become silly and irrelevant in later years, debased by loudmouth promoters, circus matches with professional wrestlers, and psychotic apes. It was crooked and brutal, always had been, but somewhere between the tank bouts and the greased palms of the officials you got to see a couple of youngsters with good reflexes literally battling themselves up out of the gutter. For all I knew, the racket may have taken a different direction if Smallwood had given the roadhouse a pass that chill winter night.

  Probably not, though. Boxing would always belong to the sharpers, the hoods in sharkskin suits and the media musicians in their shock hairdoes. Any kid dumb enough to stick his face into a buzz saw for money would never learn how to split a buck into ten parts and keep eleven.

  The camera work was bare-bones primitive. The Hollywood embargo against television had restricted the industry to equipment ancient even by the standards of Poverty Row, and the men who operated it were unemployable anywhere else. From the bawling introductions (“Ladeeeeeez and gentulmennnn”) to the manic clangor of the bell at the end of Round Ten, the lenses remained on the ring, with the exception of a broad sweep around the audience when the program came back from commercial (“Mabel, Black Label”). That may have been an accident, a miscue from the floor manager that caught the technician looking, followed by a hasty swipe and frantic grope for focus on the men standing on the canvas. I’d seen it the first time, of course, but hadn’t paid much attention for wanting to get back to the fight. Now I’d seen the fight.

  The arena was Madison Square Garden, that drafty echoing airplane hangar where champions and presidents had been made and broken since Buffalo Bill. The place was packed tight and everyone except the fighters was dressed up, including pearls, homburgs, and cummerbunds. This was the same crowd that turned out for a first night on Broadway. Even the fighters looked groomed and glossy.

  I got up and stopped the tape.

  I rewound to the commercial, then played the sequence again. It was too brief to confirm what I thought I’d seen. I looked for a frame-by-frame feature, but the TV/VCR didn’t have one. I went back again, crouched in front of the screen, and hit Pause. I missed it again, rewound again, and this time I punched the button just ahead of the shot that had caught my eye. The picture froze on a handful of faces in the audience at ringside.

  I went back to my chair and perched on the edge, leaning forward with my hands braced on my knees. The show wasn’t in the ring. It had been in the seats all along.

  A pretty blonde in what looked like an expensive fur stole sat in the lower lefthand corner of the screen, eyes wide, nostrils flared, a predator’s smile on her painted lips; the action that followed showed Smallwood charging out of his corner at the bell that began the round, which was enough to bring out the aggression in a confirmed Quaker. I was disappointed at first. I’d thought it was Fausta West. There was a strong resemblance, and she was seated in the front row, traditionally reserved for VIPs, splenetic boxing commissioners, and leeches in the combatants’ entourage. But she was younger than the actress had been at the time. This one was nineteen or twenty, her hair more frizzy than flowing, probably the result of a home bleach job, and her features were narrower. That still put her in Smallwood’s wheelhouse, if he liked women of a certain type. She had on a cloth hat of the pillbox variety, pinned almost to the side of her head, with a butterfly clip crusted with stones that even in monochrome looked like cheap costume jewelry. Probably nothing else she wore would come close to costing as much as the fur. That made it either a splurge from savings or a gift from an admirer. It looked like the fighter’s taste.

  That was as much as I could get from a split-second shot, two generations removed from the present. At that it was probably more than was there. You can get too clever, in prizefighting and sleuthing. I found myself losing interest in the blonde. Not so the young man sitting next to her.

  He was a boy really, a husky sixteen or seventeen. His suit fit him like a piano shawl and might have been made from a bolt of burlap. It might have come with his first pair of long pants. He had a square face and a stubborn cowlick that looked as if his mother wasn’t through training it. The woman in the next seat had a stranglehold on his upper arm and he was looking at her with the expression of someone whose prized poodle had just wet the neighbor’s new carpet.

  That was definitely too much to get out of an expression. When I hit Play it was gone, and it hadn’t been there for as long as a heartbeat. I was more interested in the face that had worn it. I recognized it, sort of. Half a century is as hard on hunches as it is on faces.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I made some arrangements with my DIA contact, who had some things to say about them in plain modern English, but said he’d see what he could do. His attitude was a clear indication I’d overdrawn my account there at last. That was okay. It had been burning a hole in my pocket for years.

  From the lobby I called Barry, who said he had a name for me. />
  “So do the cops,” I said, “but I’m not sensitive. Does this name belong to Jeremiah Morgenstern’s grease man in Detroit?”

  His computer squawked in the background, one of those sound bites you program in to tell you a message is incoming. It was Edward G. Robinson explaining to someone how he can dish it out but he can’t take it.

  “A couple of hours ago you declared Morgenstern a dead ball,” Barry said then. “You practically cleared him of killing Garnet.”

  “I haven’t changed my mind. He sent someone to hire me to find out who set him up for it.”

  “Business must suck. You never turned finger before.”

  “I didn’t this time. The job didn’t come with the name of his contact, so I turned it down. The contact set up the time and place of the meet with Morgenstern. If he didn’t rig the frame, he knows who did.”

  “Jerry ought to be able to figure that out.”

  “Jerry has people to answer to in New York. He can’t drop a piano on anyone without proof, and he can’t strongarm the evidence he needs this far off his turf without drawing the kind of fire he needs to avoid. I’m the only semi-legit character he knows in town who can find his nose with his thumb.”

  “Which you proceeded to do. And they call me gonzo.”

  “Brother,” I said, “you don’t know the half of it.”

  I could hear his slow smile spreading. “What did you do?”

  “Played Sir Walter Raleigh. Not an Oscar-quality performance; you need a cloak to do it up right. Anyway it isn’t for publication. Listen. Whoever tried to pin Jerry to Garnet killed Garnet, or knows who did. An out-of-work journalist I know could peddle a story like that into a full-time job.”

  “He could also finish up with a matched set of prosthetic legs.”

  My fingers pinched a cigarette out of the pack in my shirt pocket, thinking for themselves. A security guard padding the lobby aimed a scowl at me. I parked the cigarette behind an ear. He nodded and prowled on. “I didn’t know you took inventory on that sort of thing,” I told Barry.

  “I keep count. I just like to be the one who decides how far I stick my neck out. You asked for the name of someone who knew Curtis Smallwood and lives to tell the tale. That’s all I’m peddling today.”

  I wrote down the number, but not the name. I’d been reading it in bylines since the start of the case and didn’t think I’d forget it. It was Edie Van Eyck, the Free Press reporter who’d interviewed Smallwood for Gloves & Laces and followed the investigation of his murder all the way to Hollywood and back to its grave in the open files of the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department.

  “Yes?”

  She’d answered on the first ring, one of those granite-edged homesteader accents you hardly ever hear anymore.

  “Ms. Van Eyck?” I asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Edie Van Eyck?” The voice sounded strong for someone who had to be hovering around eighty. It might have belonged to a daughter or niece.

  “Yes.”

  I told her who I was and said I’d gotten her name from Barry Stackpole, a colleague of hers. I said I was investigating the Curtis Smallwood murder.

  “Yes?” She sounded interested for the first time.

  “It just got hot again,” I said. “Is there a convenient time when I can see you?”

  “Yes.”

  The address she gave me—the only time she answered more than “yes” to any of my questions—was in Dearborn. I took Warren, and got five blocks before I passed a gray Jaguar headed in the opposite direction.

  I figured they’d grown tired of staking out my building and gone trolling.

  I was tucked between a semi carrying the U.S. mail and an SUV two stories high, but any hope I’d had that they hadn’t seen me went out the exhaust pipe when I saw them pulling a U-turn in the middle of my rearview mirror.

  I turned right on Rosa Parks, crossed the line to pass a city bus, and got back just in time to avoid running over a new-style VW beetle coming my way. The beetle bleated and the bus whomped its air horn, a surround-sound effect. I goosed the accelerator, knocked a piece off the corner of Hudson, and made a left on Commonwealth. I blew out some carbon there, making for Holden.

  Grand was coming up. If they didn’t see me turn, I might decoy them into thinking I was running to ground. Meanwhile I’d be burning asphalt in the other direction.

  Shelly was too good a driver for that. The Jag swung in behind me, bumping over the curb and skinning shoe polish off a pedestrian starting to cross. I doglegged back to Parks and went the wrong way for a block, turning onto Antoinette nine feet short of a head-on with a minivan going the legal way. That should have lost them, but I picked them up again in the mirror when I heeled onto Sixteenth Street. For a disgraced mob boss, Shelly—if it was Shelly behind the wheel—drove like a getaway artist.

  The Grand Trunk crossed dead ahead. The trains don’t run as often as they used to, not nearly often enough to count on one to cut off a tail. But approaching the slumbering guardrails I got an idea.

  I slowed down.

  The Jag came up quickly. Shelly had to touch the brakes to keep from ramming me; he was still chary about the boss’s car. I slumped down a little, in case one of them—Nicky, of course—decided to risk a shot in broad daylight, and bumped up onto the tracks, shaving very close to the edge of the pavement where it had been built up for automobile traffic, doing about fifteen. From my tires the berm dropped off sharply to the cinderbed.

  I was tempting prey. Nicky would have gone for it in a New York minute, but Nicky wasn’t driving; a glance at the white head on the left side confirmed that. The older man had more experience and better judgment. But I’d humiliated him twice in close order. I was counting heavily on the blindness of fury.

  At first I thought I’d lost the gamble. He entered the crossing cautiously. Then he accelerated and wheeled right, drawing abreast. Nicky aimed his Beretta at me through the open window on his side.

  I spun the wheel his way. Metal screeched. The jolt jarred his trigger finger. The bullet struck my left front fender and tunneled under the paint, making a mound like a gopher. I tore the wheel the other way.

  Shelly was still reacting from the collision. He swung left and plunged the Jaguar off the edge of the asphalt on his side. Two tires blew. I flinched, even though I knew the reports hadn’t come from Nicky’s gun. I opened the carburetor wide and powered away from there.

  I felt a little sorry for Shelly. He wouldn’t have let his partner shoot. That wouldn’t have been in the orders, at least until they found out what I’d done with Pet. He’d failed at the executive level, and thanks to me he’d flopped as a stooge. No Mafia in the world would hire him now.

  To hell with him. He’d put a hole in his own son and dumped him in the Hudson to buy himself back into Morgenstern’s good graces. The march of years was making me mellow. In a little while I’d be offering CPR to tarantulas.

  Dearborn is Ford country, built from the axles up by the same people who gave us the Model T and the modern American labor movement. The local Ozymandias is everywhere represented: in its schools, its medical facilities, its public institutions, and its street names. Henry Ford Museum, Henry Ford Community College, Henry Ford Hospital, and the Ford Motor Company’s global headquarters are all there, a piston-rod’s throw from Ford Road and the Edsel Ford Freeway. The old crab’s angular figure stands in bronze, marble, granite, and cream cheese throughout the city, and with excellent reason. If not for him the place would still be a farm village, the mighty River Rouge plant a mosquito-infested swamp, and the whole not worth the effort of collecting taxes.

  Dearborn is also thirty percent Arab, the unofficial capital of the largest concentration of Muslims and Chaldeans outside the Middle East. Loudspeakers wail Islamic prayers, beards and turbans abound, and women glide down the corridors of the Fairlane Shopping Center, examining the merchandise through the slits in their burqas. They’re just one more contribution to the local
ethnic cocktail.

  Edie Van Eyck lived in a historic structure of a specific type. It was one of those narrow-fronted, steep-roofed frame houses built by Ford’s engineers for the use of Ford workers employed at the Ford plant, in a neighborhood that had once been filled with similar buildings but now had gone over almost entirely to split-levels. It looked a little like its famous architect, tall and gaunt and poised squarely between two centuries. It wore a fresh coat of paint, and green-and-white-striped awnings made puptents above the windows on the south side.

  I parked on a bed of fresh limestone, climbed the little front porch, and pushed a gutta-percha button next to the doorframe. A buzzer coughed toward the back of the house.

  The front door stood open on a warm summer day. Through the screen door I saw a dim living room with the rounded square of an old TV glimmering silver in a corner; company for the aged. Then a shadow blocked it out.

  “Yes?”

  There was that hardscrabble twang, and behind it the Liberty Bell shape of a woman in a billowy summer dress with penguins printed on it. Her face was a blur behind the heavy nylon mesh.

  For answer I took out one of my cards and flattened it against the screen. She leaned forward to peer at it, then reached up and tinkled a hook out of an eye. I took a step back, and she pushed the door open against the grinding complaint of its spring.

  “Ms. Van Eyck?”