Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 07

by Lady Yesterday

  The Kitchen was a corner establishment on one of the broken streets that wind through the warehouse district, one block up from the Renaissance Center, from where you could look down a double row of scorched brick buildings with discolored panes in their windows and heaps of blasted paving and see the Center’s towers glistening at the end; the old Detroit with its hackles up snarling and lunging at the dainty heels of the new. Some of the warehouses had been converted into office buildings, not very convincingly, and the local press was starting to call the whole area Rivertown. The rats there are as big as condos.

  I left the car with some others in a little gravel lot and let myself through a heavy oak door into a narrow entryway scabbed over with black-and-white pictures in glass frames. In them, bored-looking policemen in baggy uniforms stood on docks with their thumbs hooked in their belts watching men in fedoras and tight overcoats strapping crates onto the running boards of medieval-looking cars. The restaurant had been a speakeasy when the Purple Gang shot it out with the Coast Guard and their rivals the Licavolis on the river, and unlike the current administration it was proud of that part of Detroit’s past. The original sliding peek-a-boo panel was still in the door and the oak-plank tables, carved all over with initials, had shelves underneath where drinks could be placed out of sight of passing policemen, as if they hadn’t had enough incentive to look the other way in the first place. Newspaper headlines from Prohibition plastered the ceiling posts and there was a small platform in one corner for live entertainment in the evenings. The lights were dim and salmon-colored.

  “One for lunch?” A pint-size hostess of eighteen or nineteen looked at me through orange bangs. She had a silver star pasted on her right cheek and a set of bracelets on both arms that clanked when she slid a laminated menu out of a wall rack. Black sacklike sweatshirt over ratty jeans and gold sandals. She went with the décor like tear gas.

  “It’s a little early,” I said, although the place was already filling up. “Manager handy?”

  “I’ll say.”

  I grinned and she went to fetch him, carrying the menu. I watched her little round jean-covered rump going away. It made me feel like a child molester.

  Presently she returned trailing a large heavy young man in a black processed suit and white shirt with a black knitted necktie. He had a head on me, which was going some, and outweighed me by sixty pounds, all of it babyfat. His light brown hair was plastered down like a seal’s coat and he had pale blue eyes in a scrubbed pink face without a trace of whiskers. The other kids would have called him fatty, and not so long ago. His face wore a pink concerned look.

  “Sir, is something the matter?”

  I gave him a card. “I’m looking for a man named George Favor, a musician. He used to play here.”

  He looked annoyed. Expressions showed on big soft faces like his like thumbprints in lard. “Come back tonight and talk to Zelinka. Zelinka manages here nights and books all the talent.”

  “He might not have been booked. He told someone he sat in sometimes.”

  “Talk to Zelinka.” He gave me back my card and went back the way he’d come. I looked down at the card. No one had ever done that before.

  “Blubber-butt.” The orange-haired hostess curled a lip at his back.

  I put the card away. “Who’s Zelinka, a belly dancer?”

  “Drago Zelinka. We just call him Z. He like throws out the scumbags and puts back everything that fat jerk screws up during the day. Hog-bucket’s only temporary while the real manager’s in California. The rest of the time he stands here being fat and I wait tables.”

  “Isn’t that a step up?”

  A small nose got wrinkled. “Shit. Nobody tips the hostess.”

  I gave her a dollar. “Tell Z what I want to talk to him about, okay? A trombonist named George Favor. I’ll be back tonight.”

  She put the bill in the pocket of her jeans and smiled at me. She had a gold tooth right in front.

  Back at the office I picked up the mail and filed the bills in the wastebasket. There wasn’t a final notice in the batch. That left me with a one-time-only chance to cruise the Caribbean and an advertisement for a correspondence course in forensic chemistry. I filed the advertisement with the bills and stapled the cruise brochure with its picture of a white ship on a cobalt sea to the corkboard on the wall next to the desk.

  I called my service for messages. I burned some tobacco. I dusted the telephone and sharpened some pencils. A shaft of wood insisted on beating the lead to the point and I kept resharpening it until I had a razor tip and an inch and a half of pencil. I put it in the drawer and stood the others on their erasers in the chipped cup, arranging them into a bouquet. I dumped the shavings into the wastebasket. I was having a busy morning.

  It didn’t much matter if any customers came in or if I sat there all day weaving a bulletproof vest out of paperclips. The walls were soaked stud-deep in clients’ problems and they were all beginning to sound depressingly alike. Mr. Detective, my husband is missing. Mr. Detective, my employees are stealing me blind. Mr. Detective, my wife is missing. Mr. Detective, my daughter is marrying a man next month and so far no one knows who he is or how many wives he’s murdered. Mr. Detective, my son is missing. It was getting so I couldn’t see them for the furniture. The same pinched women sitting with their knees together and their fingernails lined up on their purses in their laps, the same middle-aged men in pinstripes and reps and something screaming behind their tired faces, the same couples grown to resemble each other at a rate identical to the rate at which they had fallen out of love, not quite hating each other yet but getting there. They all stumbled down my hole with hope in their faces and despair in their eyes, animated ore cars forced off their worn wobbly rails by the reason I was in business. Even when I was able to give them what they asked for I was never sure if I had given them what they wanted. People aren’t pencils.

  They call it burnout. They have a name for everything and it never sounds like what it is. Burning and rotting aren’t at all similar.

  I got out the typewriter and updated my report for Axel Rainey. That started me thinking about Clara, and thinking about Clara reminded me of Astaire’s steakhouse that used to be Harold’s Hotcake Hacienda and I called there. A bright feminine voice thanked me for calling and asked me to call back after noon. It told me it was a recording. Even that made it happy.

  Hanging up, I checked my watch. Ten minutes to twelve. I locked the door to the inner office and left the waiting room open and had lunch in the diner down the street, where the soup du jour tasted like yesterjour and the grilled cheese sandwich tasted like never again. When I got back Iris was in the waiting room.

  She had on a leaf-yellow blouse tied at the waist over a burlap-colored tube top and a long green skirt that when she rose from the upholstered bench turned out not to be a skirt at all, but loose flared slacks. Culottes, they’re called. Toeless shoes with cork soles. She wasn’t wearing the turban. Her hair was longer now, waving at the collar and pushed over on one side. She used to wear it cropped very close. The new style softened the Egyptian effect.

  I said, “You must be freezing.”

  “I came downtown to buy something warmer,” she said. “I’ve never been to your office before. It’s kind of like you.”

  “Old and cheap?”

  “You’re not old.”

  I dredged up a grin. “Wait till you see the rest.”

  I unlocked the inner door and held it for her without getting my arm in the way. I never could identify the scent she wore. Maybe it was just her. She looked around while I was climbing out of the outdoor gear. She’d left hers, a tan woolen coat and a yellow beret, on the bench outside. “Looks honest.”

  “I didn’t think it was that bad.” I pulled out the customer chair for her. I had unbolted it from the floor finally. Salesmen’s breath didn’t bother me nearly as much as it used to. Neither did salesmen. They didn’t have any problems to unload, just merchandise. We sat down.

&n
bsp; “I feel like I’m being interviewed for a job,” she said.

  “I’d use the sofa but you might suspect my intentions.”

  “Have you found out anything?”

  “Nothing to report. I’m pretty much where you were last night.”

  “Do you have to?”

  I had opened a fresh pack of cigarettes. I put it down without taking one. “I didn’t know you quit.”

  “I gave them up on the island. Couldn’t get my brand, and anything’s easy after you kick dope.”

  “I never thought you would. Not for good.”

  “Well, we won’t know I have until I don’t.”

  “Small talk.” I pointed at her purse, green satin with a bronze clasp, trapped between her hip and the arm of her chair. “Is that as well armed as the last one?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s got something to do with why you’re here and I’m not smoking?”

  “I’m here to buy a pair of boots. And to find out how you were coming along.”

  I sat back. If they won’t bite you can’t make them. “You were right about Wooding,” I said. “He’s sick and scared. But he gave me some line and I’ll run it out as soon as you leave.”

  “Oh.” She made no move to get up.

  “Who’s after you?”

  “One of my old customers.”

  “Which one and for what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I said uh-huh. I wanted a smoke.

  “I checked into a motel my first two days in town. I didn’t want to show up at Mary M’s unannounced with two suitcases. Third morning, the day I moved out, I found this in my jewelry box.”

  She handed me a three-by-five index card. Someone had drawn a crude skull-and-crossbones on the blank side in red ink, a keyhole shape with two circles for eyes and an X underneath. The ruled side was blank. It was dog-eared and a little dirty. I laid it on the blotter next to my cigarettes. “What makes it a customer?”

  “The box has a false bottom. It’s where I used to put the johns’ money. Some of them probably saw me do it, in fact I’m sure some of them did. You don’t think like a normal human being with that juice in your veins. That’s where the card was, right in the middle under the false bottom.”

  “Jewelry boxes without false bottoms are rare. Anyone could figure it out. Or it could have worked its way out of a crack or something after a long time and you just never spotted it before. It doesn’t look new.”

  “I looked in the box the night before. It wasn’t in there then.”

  “Leave the room?”

  She nodded. “That was my first night at Astaire’s.”

  “Talk to the motel dick?”

  “The night manager, whatever they call them now. He thought it was a joke and I couldn’t prove anyone had been in the room after I left. I had a cheesy lock on the ground floor at the back. Place had entrances on every corner.”

  “Could just be someone playing pirate.”

  “What I thought, until somebody put a bullet through my windshield.”

  “I’m going to light up now,” I said.

  She nodded again and I did it and blew smoke away from her.

  “I wasn’t in the car,” she said. “I parked on the street in front of Mary M’s and when I came out for the suitcases I saw the hole, about head-high on the driver’s side. Bullet’s somewhere in the seat, I guess. I couldn’t have been inside five minutes.”

  “No one saw or heard anything?”

  “Nobody inside. I didn’t canvass the neighborhood.”

  “Care to guess who put it there?”

  She shook her head. “I tended to satisfy my customers.”

  “Who knows you’re in town?”

  “Just Mary M, and she didn’t know until I called her after I found the card. I always use phony names in motels; old habit. Alice Irving, if it means anything.”

  “Whoever loaned you the car knows.”

  “Not really. It belongs to my fiancé’s old partner in the fishing business. He’s in overseas tours now and he keeps the car in a garage downtown for emergencies and for his friends to use. Charles gave me the claim slip. That’s my fiancé. I never saw anyone, just the attendant at the garage.”

  “What’s the friend’s name?”

  She thought. “I forget. Is it important?”

  “I won’t know that until he tells me. Can you call Charles and ask him?”

  “I’d rather not. I haven’t told him anything about this. He didn’t want me to come here to begin with.”

  I got the location of the garage from her. While I was at it I got the name of the motel she’d stayed in and wrote it all down. “Make a list,” I said. “Even Gandhi had enemies. And get out of Mary M’s.”

  “You don’t know her. I’m as safe there as anywhere.”

  “Just like your car.”

  “I mean inside.”

  “Why didn’t I hear about this last night?”

  She put her purse in her lap. “Looking for my father for free is enough. Anything more would have to be interpreted as taking advantage. Somewhere there has to be a trade.”

  “Engaged goods are outside my reach.”

  She started to get up.

  “Sit,” I said. “It shouldn’t come as any surprise to you how big a jackass I can be.”

  “Remembering it and seeing it are different.” She remained standing. “I only came to ask if you’d dug up anything. The other thing just came out. Stick with Georgie Favor, please. It took a long time but I’m all grown up now.”

  “The bigger you get the more you need. No charge for the cracker-barrel philosophy.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Did you drive the car here?”

  “It’s in the lot down the street.”

  I stood. “Let’s go down and look at the bullet.”

  5

  IT WAS A BUTTERSCOTCH-COLORED Malibu, two years old, with a few parking dings in the doors but otherwise unmarked except for a clean hole in the windshield about where the eyes focused driving. The tip of my little finger just fitted it. A rip in the back of the driver’s seat where foam rubber was poking out through the tan vinyl said the gun had been fired at about a thirty-degree angle downward. The glass around the hole looked scorched. I leaned over and sniffed at it, jerking my head back involuntarily the way you do when sulfur puckers your nostrils.

  I looked around. Iris and I were alone at that end of the lot. The black attendant at the entrance was busy adjusting dials on the radio in his booth. Unclipping the Smith & Wesson from my belt inside my coat, I placed the muzzle against the hole. I had to do it with my left hand in order to duplicate the angle. That tied it to someone who was either right-or left-handed, or maybe he was ambidextrous; anyone can fire a shot with his off hand if accuracy doesn’t count. I holstered the gun and opened the door and got out my pocket knife. After ten minutes and as many curses my fingers closed around a hard lump inside the seat and I pulled out a conical piece of lead the size of a fat eraser. The tip was flattened slightly.

  “What will that tell anyone?” Iris asked.

  “Nothing, if our boy didn’t shoot someone with the same gun fairly recently.” I straightened, brushing pills of yellow foam rubber off my coat, wrapped the bullet in my handkerchief, and put it in my coat pocket. “If he did, ballistics will have it on file at thirteen hundred.”

  “Police.” She said it the way you might expect her to, given her background.

  “As a rule I don’t get any better treatment from them than you did when you were working,” I said. “Worse, probably. But I’ve got a pipeline of a sort. He doesn’t have to know where the bullet came from.”

  “I like that part.”

  I slammed the door. The attendant in the booth swung his head in our direction, then turned up the volume on his radio. The Temptations rattled the glass in the windows. I said, “Your admirer is still on a warning binge. He doesn’t want to hurt you yet or he wouldn’t be leaving notes a
nd shooting into empty cars. He’s got to come out of the wings sometime to tell you what he wants, or doesn’t want. If we do this right we’ll know who he is before he gets around to it.”

  “We?”

  “Me looking, you staying put. Don’t go out unless you can’t avoid it, and then take somebody you trust with you. And make that list.”

  “You mean like nuts with guns? I had some of those.”

  “I’m not surprised. This town’s full of them. Some of them are judges. I mean like anybody dark or hostile or who acted like his brains boiled too long, or not long enough. You know the formula.”

  “That doesn’t leave many,” she said. “It wouldn’t help. Nobody ever gives his right name.”

  “See what you can come up with anyway.”

  “Do I rate a bodyguard?”

  “Do you want one?”

  She shook her head. The yellow beret was bright against the gray granite around us. “I’m sleeping solo these days.”

  “Bodyguards are just nightlights, like fingerprinting your kids at school. It means their corpses can be identified.”

  “Also gives Big Brother a line on them early.”

  “That’s ACLU’s headache. I’ll drive you home. We can pick up your car later.”

  She patted my cheek and opened the door and slid in under the wheel. “Find my old man.” The engine ground over twice and caught.

  I leaned an arm on the open door. “Any chance somebody doesn’t want him found?”

  “They had to have followed me all the way from Kingston. I was just starting to ask questions here when that card turned up in my jewelry box. Why would somebody not want him found?”

  “I don’t know. Probably the two things have nothing to do with each other. Life doesn’t hang together that neat. I’m just spitballing.”

  She put the car in gear but left her foot on the brake. I stepped back. Grasping the door handle she looked up at me with thought on her face. “Are you getting enough sleep? You look beat.”