Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 17 - Retro

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I figure the trip was Smallwood’s way of saying toodle-oo. That picture of him with Fausta West outside the Oriole Ballroom was taken a week after the Castillo fight. She was in town to promote some flash Esther Williams musical that had maybe ninety seconds of Fausta, in a one-piece bathing suit. I guess she was a fight fan.”

  “He could’ve been two-timing them both.”

  She speared me with her sharp little eyes. “Who’s writing this piece?”

  “Sorry.”

  “I know a little bit about men. That’s why I never married. When they trade up, they don’t look back. Bagging a mannequin might get you some respect down on Twelfth Street. A movie queen makes you Nat King Cole.”

  “I wouldn’t call Fausta a movie queen.”

  “After Opal she would seem like Rita Hayworth.” She burped into a massive fist. “Pardon. The idea was to scrape up as much skinny as I could before I talked to her. It helps to catch someone in a lie right off the bat so you don’t have to worry about it later.”

  “It’s the same in my work. Only you have to worry about it later, too.”

  “Sometimes, but by then you know the tells. She had an apartment on Fielding, crumb palace without a working elevator; what the Chamber of Commerce calls a historic building. I decided to brace her at home. I brought along a photographer, a natty little guy named Shansky. He died on Pork Chop Hill. I parked him on the landing. I needed to soften her up before I brought in the heavy armor. When she didn’t answer her door I grabbed Shansky and we went back downstairs to find the super. He asked us if we were with the police.”

  I ran a finger up the side of my bottle, drawing a channel through the beads of moisture. The cold surface of the glass chilled me to the shoulder. Something nasty was coming.

  “We were six weeks too late,” she said. “I’ve missed my share of scoops, but that was a record. Morning after Christmas, Opal’s downstairs neighbors got the super out of bed to complain about flooding. She didn’t answer his knock, so he let himself in with his passkey. He found her stretched out in her bathtub with the faucet running. The water had washed away nearly all of the blood.”

  I stopped playing with the bottle. Two corpses had seemed more than sufficient.

  “Suicide?”

  “Botched abortion. The coroner said she was two months along.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Finally, Edie Van Eyck had had her fill of beer. We took turns using the bathroom and I helped her collect the bottles and take them into the kitchen, where the pantry contained separate receptacles for paper, glass, cans, and deposit bottles. Stroh’s empties rounded up a pair of industrial-size trash cans. We found niches for the fresh casualties. It was like building a house of cards.

  “Who was the father?” I asked.

  “The fetus’ blood type didn’t rule out Smallwood. But they weren’t looking for Smallwood. I read the police report, talked to the investigating officers. Opal didn’t have any friends she confided in, and no one they interviewed could tell them anything about her social life. Her only surviving family was a kid brother, but he’d been away at school since the car crash that killed their parents; he knew less about her than the girls she worked with. Remember, this was way, way before DNA testing. Had they found the father, he might have told them the name of the butcher who performed the operation. Apparently he kicked her loose still bleeding and she went home and soaked in a tub to ease the pain. The hot water would have just sped up the hemorrhaging. There was some evidence she’d struggled to get out, probably to call for help. But by then she was too weak. She passed out and just floated away.”

  A heavy rig downshifted on Ford Road, the rumble of its wheels jittering the panes in the windows.

  “Too bad she didn’t work for Fausta West’s studio,” I said. “They could have sent her on location for seven months.”

  Edie backed up to a white enamel sink, leaned her rear bumper against it, and folded her arms. She looked like Mr. Clean in a Prince Valiant wig. “She got a line or two in the late editions when the body was found. I never saw it, and neither did anyone else.”

  “Who claimed the body?”

  “The brother, I guess. I never saw him. Why bother? She was dead almost a week before the murder. And my story with her.”

  “Bummer, ain’t it?”

  “You too, huh?”

  “Someone was with Smallwood the night he was killed, a woman. She saw something. I had a theory it was the woman you say was Opal Benton. But theories are like kids. Sooner or later they grow up and disappoint you.”

  “I wouldn’t know. About kids, I mean. I’m an expert on busted theories. Mine was she killed him. Being dead is a tough alibi to crack.”

  I said nothing. Reporters aren’t detectives, no matter how much they like to think they’re related. The tactics are similar but the strategy’s different. I was already drawing up a new plan of battle.

  “It wasn’t long after that I went to work for Mr. Hearst,” she said. “I’d ducked too many assignments at the Freep and had nothing to show for it, not even a picture to prove a connection between Opal and Smallwood. When the puzzle editor quit and they asked me to fill his slot, I gave them my two weeks.”

  I took a square of glossy paper from my inside pocket and showed it to her.

  She unfolded her arms and leaned forward to squint at it. There was nothing wrong with her eyesight; no glasses had ever pinched the thick bridge of her nose. “That’s her. She had on that same fur aboard the train.” She leaned back again, a scowl pulling down her heavy jowls. “If you had that all along, why’d you act like you never heard of her?”

  “It wasn’t an act. All I had was the face. I needed a name to go with it. I had someone at the DIA shoot this off the screen while a tape was playing of Smallwood’s fight at the Garden. It was the only time the network crew didn’t focus on what was going on in the ring. My guy used a digital camera and processed it on his printer. Quite a century we’re living in.”

  “I’ll tell the world. Everyone in Detroit watched that fight on TV, but there isn’t one who could’ve seen what you did. Back then they only broadcast it once. There was no chance to go back for a second look, let alone freeze a shot that took one second to air. To think I spent hours with a loop in my hand, going over all the shots Shansky took of Smallwood getting off the train, trying to catch a glimpse of Opal. She must’ve stepped off the other side.”

  I put away the picture. “You wouldn’t still have those shots.”

  She winked. “You saw that thing on my living room wall. You ought to have guessed I never throw anything away.”

  She went upstairs to rummage while I prowled the ground floor, strictly in the interests of architecture and to clear my beery head. The place ran a thousand square feet, tops. It would have sheltered a family of four comfortably, taking turns in the little bathroom, crowding into the dining room for meals, listening to Lum ’n’Abner and Lowell Thomas in the living room, and doing most of their congregating in the kitchen, which was the biggest room on that level, and probably in the house. They’d been born too early to know you need a family room and a home theater and four bathrooms and a hot tub to function, also two incomes and eight credit-card accounts to keep the bank circling the firelight.

  I heard bumping and opened the door to the stairwell. Edie had both arms wrapped around a load of dusty shoeboxes and a photo album the size of a Gutenberg Bible. She had cobwebs in her hair.

  “I thought I’d have to kick it down,” she said. “What were you doing, sniffing my undies?”

  I needed that on top of a bellyful of hops. Without answering I relieved her of part of her burden and we carried it into the kitchen and dumped it on the stainless-steel table. We sat down and spent the next hour sorting through pictures. Most were black-and-white snapshots: strangers posing in front of bulbous automobiles, grinning on the beach in baggy swimsuits, playing euchre around folding card tables with bottles of beer at their elbows and cigarettes lis
ping smoke from piled ashtrays. A younger, not-as-hefty Edie, always in print dresses and white cotton gloves, seemed never to be without a brown bottle close at hand. Older Edie didn’t remember half the names of the people who shared the pictures and I didn’t know any of them, although I thought I recognized a callow Walter Reuther with his arm crooked awkwardly around her waist, smiling in front of a fraternal banner in some hotel ballroom or other, set up for a dinner.

  These things got a cursory glance at best. We reserved more time for the professional contact sheets and grainy press blowups, all of them stamped PROPERTY OF THE DETROIT FREE PRESS on the backs, some with faded crop marks and penciled codes for the boys in the composing room. Here and nowhere else, the Ford Rotunda still stood, throngs of men and women in hats streamed through the doors of the Union and Michigan Central stations, and politicos with Irish noses and skimmers on the backs of their heads shook hands with men in coveralls carrying lunchpails. Rudy Vallee, gullwing hair disheveled and bow tie askew, feigned a punch to the shoulder of a pop-eyed Eddie Cantor at some wartime benefit crowded with young men and female nurses in military uniform. It would have made nostalgic grazing through a Detroit I’d never known if we weren’t looking for something specific. We browsed a hole right through a fine summer afternoon and when dusk sifted in I got up and switched on the overhead light.

  We found what we were after between the black construction-paper pages of the big photo album-turned scrapbook, mounted with more snapshots in cardboard corners and saffron clippings pasted in of articles bearing Edie’s byline. It was in a shabby manila envelope bound with string, which came apart as she was untwisting it: a sheaf of four-by-five shots taken with a Speed Graphic camera, printed on cheap grainy stock for the approval of a photo editor, who would select those he wanted for processing on zinc plates and discard the rest. The rejects would go into a morgue file for possible later use, and probably disposal in the trash when no such use materialized; the glass negatives would be stored in separate files. Edie had taken the test prints home without permission and with a clear conscience, knowing how small the chances were that someone would ask about them later.

  They’d been snapped at the busy Michigan Central. Curtis Smallwood survived here in still life, his hatbrim shunted to its trademark jaunty angle, houndstooth overcoat draped over his tailored shoulders like the mantle of a victorious Roman emperor. The teeth beneath the Errol Flynn moustache shone, his hands in each shot were poised in gesticulation; in or out of the ring, the fighter had never lived who could be trained to keep them at his sides. Even the Band-Aid slanting over his right eye, where Castillo had managed to open a small cut, looked like a combat ribbon.

  Behind him stretched the rounded windows and gleaming combed steel of the streamliner that had borne him from Grand Central Terminal. Beside him stood a rat-faced character in checked lapels, floppy bow tie, and a moustache that slashed straight across his upper lip like a strip of electrical tape. Edie identified him as Archie McGraw, Smallwood’s manager, but I’d guessed that. Around them were gathered the guardians of the press in their stove-in fedoras and cloches, hunched gnomelike over their steno pads and folds of newsprint; contemporize their wardrobe, substitute radio microphones for their stubby pencils, and they could have stood in for a modern television crew, right down to the room-to-let expression on their faces.

  I wasn’t interested in any of this. I knew what Smallwood looked like, and the rest was just scenery. I spread the prints in front of me like solitaire and accepted a heavy magnifying glass with a bone handle from Edie, who said if I was looking for Opal Benton I was wasting my time. “Anyway, you’ve got the evidence in your pocket, for whatever it’s worth now.”

  “I’m not looking for Opal.”

  She didn’t ask any questions after that. I decided she was a better journalist than either the Times or the Free Press had given her credit for.

  I took out the digital photo from the DIA, laid it beside the press shots, and slid the lens over the faces in the crowd at the train station. Newspaper photography had lost an artist when Shansky died in Korea. Even disregarding those he hadn’t bothered to print, any of the ones he’d submitted would have been striking enough for the front page of any daily in the United States. Despite the obstructions and distractions of passengers and their parties flowing to and from the tracks, reporters trying to elbow their way closer to the catch of the day, and photographers from rival newspapers jockeying for position, he’d managed an even dozen prospects. Most of his colleagues in those competitive days would have been happy to settle for one.

  The peripheral images alone were suitable for framing. In the backgrounds, a handsome black porter in his trim tunic and cap assisted a middle-aged woman in seamed stockings down from the car with a white-gloved hand on her elbow; a small boy in a Cub Scout uniform sprinted toward a grandfatherly type in white handlebars lugging a two-suiter; a hulk in a mackinaw bent to inspect a wheel, one cheek pregnant with tobacco. There was a honey of a shot of a fat slob dressed in the rumpled standard issue of the Fourth Estate taking a picture of the inside of his own hat, knocked off his head by the corner of a trunk passing by on a baggage cart; printed, most likely, for the amusement of Shansky’s editor. All were in sharp focus, and any one could have been blown up and hung in a museum of Americana. I wasn’t interested in any of them either.

  I missed what I wanted the first time. My eyes were watering from the close work, crying pure beer, and I slid the lens right past it. I’d seen it; it just hadn’t registered, because I was already thinking ahead to the next photograph. When I finished with the last print, I rubbed my eyes and started again.

  “Good luck with that,” Edie said. “That’s one weekend I’ll never get back. It’s a wonder I never needed bifocals. Sometimes I think—”

  I shushed her.

  It was barely in the frame and almost out of focus. One hand was in motion and blurred. I blinked away the ghosts, bent closer, and centered the image in the lens. The face leapt forward.

  He looked older in traveling clothes, carrying a coat over one arm and a scuffed satchel and wearing a grown-up hat with a braided band. The good-looking porter was reaching up to help him down, but the blurred hand was waving him back; he already had one foot on the platform, a lad in a hurry. Husky build, with some babyfat still showing on his face. Time would render it down. He already had the square jaw.

  I looked from it to the digital photo and back. My eyes swept past Opal to the boy whose arm she was grasping in the seat next to hers. Then I turned both prints around and slid them toward Edie, tucking Opal’s face out of sight beneath the newspaper shot. That put her male companion into center frame. I handed Edie the lens and pointed at the boy stepping down from the train. She looked at both images.

  She sat back. “Same young fella. Who is he?”

  “Opal’s kid brother,” I said. “The one who was away at school when she died.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  How do you know that?” Edie asked. “You didn’t even know who she was when you came here.”

  “I could be wrong. Maybe she picked up a newsboy in New York and he followed her home. Anyway, I know who he is. Fifty years can change a lot of things about a person, but not his bone structure. Benton was Opal’s married name, wasn’t it?”

  “I think so. I lost most of my notes in the move to Malibu. I’m not sure I ever knew her family name. It wasn’t important to the story. Do you think he killed Smallwood?”

  “He had a hell of a motive, if he thought Smallwood was responsible for her pregnancy. It cost her her life. I’m still short a witness.”

  “You’re pushing your luck. The last five years went through my friends like grapeshot. I’ve outlived most of my pallbearers.”

  “Isn’t that the idea?”

  “Up to a point. A grave looks pretty bleak without flowers.”

  “What kind do you like?”

  “What kind do you?”

  “Good point.” I sto
od and shook circulation back into my legs. “Thanks for the day. I’ll let you know where it goes.”

  “You’d better.”

  I asked if she needed a hand putting the stuff away. She shook her head. She’d gathered the prints and curled snapshots into a pile, and now she plucked one off the top. “You can get me a beer while you’re up.”

  I did that, and left her sorting through dead friends.

  I was still a little woozy. I stopped at a Middle Eastern place, ate shredded lamb and rice, dry as pencil shavings, settled it with milk, and drove home. There was a bare chance Shelly and Nicky were staking out the place, but I was too tired to care. I’d been Walter Raleigh and Bulldog Drummond and the Roadrunner and Uriah Heep, all since breakfast; Salman Rushdie would have to wait until tomorrow. In any case there were no strange cars in the neighborhood.

  I felt musty; when I caught a whiff of myself I smelled like old magazines. I took a shower, put on a robe, and drank part of a glass of Scotch watching amateur singers fracturing old Whitney Houston tunes on TV for a panel of judges. Both the drink and the singers were flat. I switched off the set and dumped out the ice and went to bed.

  There was a band singer and a department-store model and I think a couple of cigarette girls.

  Jeremiah Morgenstern’s klaghorn voice was the last thing I wanted to jerk me out of the first shallow swells of sleep after an hour spent rolling the lumps out of my mattress. Enough alcohol in your system can make you drowsy; one drink too many can hold off sleep like a chorus of jackhammers. I was finally sinking under when I remembered what he’d said in his suite at the Airport Marriott.

  Smallwood liked his quail pale, by the way. The Hollywood chippie was just a piece of ass in the crowd.

  A band singer and a department-store model and a couple of cigarette girls.