Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 07

by Lady Yesterday

  “That’s more than he ever said to me.”

  “He sounded drunk.”

  “That would explain it.”

  “What’ve you got for me?”

  I unwrapped the bullet and laid it atop one of the piles of paper. She looked at it without picking it up.

  “Thirty-eight. Where’d you get it?”

  “Lady I’m working for found it in her driver’s seat. Someone put it through the windshield. She wasn’t in the car at the time and she’d like to know who’s responsible.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  She looked amused. “You want me to spell it?”

  “I was expecting a lecture. Taxpayers’ money and like that.”

  “I was one of four sergeants up for this promotion,” she said. “The other three were black and one of them was a woman, and what do you think my chances were in the town that invented Affirmative Action? John took my jacket and my score on the looey’s exam upstairs and didn’t come back down until I had this spot. So when he says you’re okay I figure you’re up for Pope at least.”

  I scratched my ear.

  “Something?”

  “Just reconsidering my stand on women’s rights.”

  “I was against them from the start. All those women running around fulfilling themselves while some poor schnook couldn’t get a job to feed his family. Or hers.” She unscrewed the pen. “Leave your card, Mr. Walker. I’ll call if we raise anything.”

  8

  THE PLOW HAD JUST been down my street, followed by a salt truck to break up the ice the plow had uncovered and start dissolving my fenders and rocker panels. The cold air had frozen the ridges of snow hard as mortar and it was easier to pass a needle through the eye of a camel than to get into my driveway. I backed up and floored it and made it on the third try, tearing hell out of my new mudguards and throwing brine as high as the windows. Fortunately, much of the car is plastic.

  The house was chilly. There is something about trapping winter air that brings out the worst in it. I dialed up the thermostat and the oil furnace kicked in with the sound of a distant cash register. I plugged in the coffee maker and bought myself a drink from the cupboard bottle to start my blood moving. After a few minutes I took off my hat and coat to let the heat inside. The chill crept out of the place on slow club feet.

  In my not-so-easy chair, sipping coffee laced with whiskey and listening to the click-clunk of the antique clock in the living room, I went over what I had. It wasn’t much. It was less than that. So far I hadn’t been able to establish an existence for Little Georgie Favor this side of three years ago. Where he went after the Kitchen was a question as wide as Detroit, or as narrow as an old man’s options. I took out the picture Iris had given me of the two smiling people standing in front of the Piano Stool in Kingston. A happy young couple enjoying themselves for eternity, not knowing or caring what was coming, the moment lifted cleanly from time and set aside, like an item of token value rescued from an apartment before flames took it. Chief Crazy Horse was right. Cameras trapped the soul.

  There were people I couldn’t find. I had a drawerful of unfinished cases, most of them unpaid for too. Some of them just walked out on their lives and never went back. It’s easier than you might think, and the more paper we have to carry around to prove we exist the easier it gets. In the last century you could run out to the territories, but communities were small and strangers stuck out a mile. Now it’s just a question of getting hold of a birth certificate, which unlocks all the other paperwork, and getting swallowed up in a population center somewhere. Strangers are more common than acquaintances; no one thinks about them. They aren’t even invisible. They’re part of the scenery.

  For all that, people who disappear according to plan are the most easily traceable. They trade in opposites. If they live in Los Angeles they move to New York City. If they’re blond they dye their hair black. If they work in the accounting department they get a job hoisting crates of machine parts onto a loading dock. They take common names in place of unusual ones and nine out of ten of them wear their new lives like thorn underwear. You can pick them out of a crowd upside-down in a dirty mirror. The tough ones to find are the ones who left suddenly without thought, the thirty-year clerks who just missed being run over by stricken cab drivers on their way to work and the wives who walked into their husbands’ offices and found them on the sofas with their secretaries—people who just turned away from their various crossroads and started walking with no idea of where they were heading. They took up lives similar to those they had left, sometimes in the next block and sometimes without even changing their names, and unless someone who knew them in their other lives ran into them in a supermarket you’re out of luck. People don’t pay private investigators to sit around waiting for coincidences. The success ratio isn’t sparkling and even the most dedicated fishermen lose interest when their lines are slack as often as they’re taut.

  I didn’t know which pigeonhole fitted George Favor. A man without friends glides around on the edge of others’ vision. People never looked at him directly or noticed when he wasn’t around until something happened to remind them. The job needed less work. Sometimes when you just let them lie, a root found its way into the soil and they blossomed on their own. The other job, the death’s-head drawing in Iris’ jewelry box and the bullet in her car, needed more work. The garage where she’d picked up the car was one handle. So far the attendant she’d claimed it from was the only person who knew she was in town. That was my all day tomorrow. When it comes to giving up information, garage attendants are as easy as doormen and confidential secretaries at the Pentagon. Clams were named for them.

  I was still holding the picture. Having failed to draw any vibrations from it, I returned it to my breast pocket, brushing the paging device with my hand. I remembered Lester Hamilton then at the motel on Tireman, and as if that completed some sort of telepathic connection the beeper sounded. I turned it off and called my service. The girl said someone had left the name Lester and a number. I dialed it. He answered on the first ring.

  “Mr. Walker?”

  He sounded out of breath. I felt a tingling. He hadn’t called to tell me he’d turned up a license plate that didn’t belong in the motel parking lot. I asked him anyway.

  “Forget that,” he said. “It’s Mr. Charm. I’m in his office.”

  “Is he listening?”

  “No.”

  The tingling was stronger now. “Can he be?”

  He might have swallowed. You can’t tell over the telephone. “No.”

  I told him to sit tight and got my hat and coat and started reeling in line.

  9

  THE MOTEL LOOKED much the same at night. The parking lot was well lit and the sign splashed green neon on the snow at its feet. Lester was standing under the canopy when I swung into a slot near the entrance. He had on the same red blazer and green-and-white-striped scarf. He opened my door.

  “ ’S’go in the side,” he said. His flattop was a little mussed but other than that he looked as calm as moonlight.

  We went through a steel fire door around the corner from the main entrance, at the end of a corridor carpeted in orange sherbet that started at the unfriendly lobby. I didn’t get close enough to tell if the blazer behind the desk contained the towheaded clerk with the spiky moustache who had sneered at me that afternoon. Long before we got to it we turned down a shorter corridor ending in a ridged glass door with PRIVATE stenciled in black on one of the horizontal ridges. Lester pushed it open and stood aside holding it against the pressure of the closer. I accepted the invitation.

  It was a narrow room where work got done, unlike Drago Zelinka’s office at the Kitchen. A paneled desk two steps inside the door held up a scribbled-over appointment calendar and a metal rack jammed with letters in envelopes and a telephone with one of those caddies that let you rest the receiver on your shoulder while you’re going through the mail. There were a locked file cabinet and a gray
steel safe and a clipboard attached to the wall by the desk with papers curling away from it. There was a window looking across the space between the two buildings at the windows of the rooms on that side. I turned up the Venetian blinds to determine that and closed them again. The walls were painted beige.

  The carpet was shallow for easy cleaning and made of tough short black-and-brown fibers that wouldn’t wear out quickly. Mr. Charm was lying on it in a fetal curl with his congested face to the door and one hand curved loosely around an imitation stag handle protruding two inches above the watch pocket of his gray vest on the left side. The vest was stained dark around it but aside from that he was as well turned out as ever, with the gray knot of his silk necktie snugged up under his Adam’s apple and a soft shine on his black tasseled loafers and not too much cuff showing at his wrists. The round gray moustache was perfect. He’d approve.

  “He didn’t go off at three like usual.” Lester had stepped inside, letting the door close. “His light was still on and the door was locked when I checked again at ten. No one had saw him. I slipped the lock.”

  His skin was as cold as it gets, which is colder than just about anything. Still squatting, I examined the knife handle without touching it. It looked like a standard Boy Scout jackknife, only larger. They sell them in army surplus stores from Fairbanks to Miami. I got up, looked at him, looked at the door. If the body hadn’t been moved he could have got it while he was standing there holding the door open for his visitor. One thrust in and up by somebody who knew what he was doing. There were no heel marks on the carpet. The door had a button lock. It was just a matter of setting it on your way out.

  Mr. Charm. He had twitched his moustache at me twice and called me a cut-rate gumshoe.

  I went behind the desk. Light filtered down through frosted panels in the ceiling, but there was a gooseneck lamp on the desk as well, switched off. The bulb was cold. I switched it on, using my handkerchief now. His calendar was full to the end of the month, appointments inked in in a neat block hand like architects use. His last appointment for that day had been with the initials A. G. at noon, shortly before I’d met him. There were no cross-outs, no pages missing. No one had ever left this world more neatly. I asked Lester about A. G.

  “That’d be Mr. Gordenier, the owner.” He still sounded out of breath.

  There were scratches around the lock of the safe. They could have been brand-new or years old. You just can’t tell unless they’ve been exposed to the elements. I tugged at the handle. Locked.

  “He’s the only one had the combination,” said Lester.

  “Maybe he forgot it sometime. When did you see him last?”

  “Just after you left. I give him today’s license numbers. That’s them there on the board.”

  The top sheet on the clipboard attached to the wall contained a double row of letters and numbers written in a slashing hand, with the day’s date and 1 P.M. scrawled at the top. There were other lists for 11 A.M. and noon. I paged back further. There were two sets of three for each day. Both sets were seldom in the same hand; two sets, two shifts. At length I wrapped my hand and lifted the board off its hook. Setting it on the desk I pried up the clip and took them all out and shuffled through the cheap drugstore typing stock. A torn corner drifted out. I asked Lester if he had worked the night of February tenth.

  He stroked his crescent of dark beard. “Night before last, yeah. Pulled two shifts.”

  “You turned in three lists that night?”

  “Every night I’m on.”

  I handed him the triangle of paper. “Eight o’clock’s missing.”

  “No shit?”

  “It doesn’t take that long to unclip it. Somebody was in a hurry.”

  I was looking at him. He stood there holding the torn corner, which was blank on both sides. “Ain’t that the night you axed about before?”

  “Yeah. I don’t guess you make copies.”

  “Job don’t pay that much.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Hey, I didn’t take it.”

  “The ante just got upped.”

  His face went wooden. “Fuck you, Jack.”

  I didn’t say anything. He took my two five-dollar bills out of his pocket and threw them on the floor at my feet and reached for the door.

  “Take it easy,” I said. “It isn’t like you called me ahead of the cops to discuss ethics.”

  He hung there with his hand on the knob. I picked up the bills and held them out. After a moment he took them.

  I put the lists back in order and clipped them and rehung the board. Then I switched off the lamp. “Call the police. Don’t tell them about the missing list. They’ll find out about it in their own time. Leave me clear of it. You never saw me.”

  He was contemplating the bills, stroking his beard. It didn’t mean anything; they were just something to look at. I held out a fifty. He contemplated that.

  “I didn’t take nothing.”

  “I believe you. You’re too smart to monkey with a murder scene just for a couple of dollars. I had to throw it at you and see if you ducked.”

  “They lean, I talk,” he said. “I got a record.”

  “For what?”

  “They said I stole a car.”

  “They won’t lean that hard. No car thief did this. The fifty’s for making them work.”

  He took it and reached for the telephone. I caught his wrist. “Call from the lobby. All they did was arrest you for a felony. You don’t want to be around when they get mad.”

  “I used that phone to call you.”

  I let go of him and used the handkerchief on the receiver and buttons. He said, “They’ll wonder how come it’s clean.”

  “Not long. Nobody’s gone down for prints since the Lindbergh kidnapping.”

  He went out. I gave him a minute to get down the hall, then went back to Mr. Charm and rummaged inside his coat until I found his slim gray notebook, which I pocketed without opening. Before I left him I picked up a tiny glittering something from the carpet next to his body. It was in shadow from every angle unless you squatted to examine the knife, and I didn’t think Lester had done that. In that position it was hard to miss. You don’t see that many gold unicorn pins with diamonds for horns. I had seen only one.

  10

  FOR THE SECOND TIME I made a call from the telephone at the service station on Tireman. The snow had stopped at five inches and I was standing up to my ankles in someone else’s footprints. Just as someone answered, a big party in an arctic cap climbed into a pickup parked by the pumps and turned over the engine with the grinding squeal of a broken starter. I turned my back on the noise and asked for Iris. The pin felt heavy in my pocket.

  “Can you receive visitors?” I asked when she came on.

  “It’s not the House of Corrections,” she said. “Did you find my father?”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.” The pickup still hadn’t started when I pegged the receiver. It sounded like a pig passing a pineapple.

  Prostitution rehabilitation centers were out of my experience. I don’t know what I expected this one to be like. An old hotel, maybe, or a converted warehouse with a living room setup and a lot of former working girls sitting around in clean cotton shifts with their hair up, reading Bibles. What I found was a middle-size frame house on St. Antoine with cheery yellow siding and flower boxes heaped with snow under the front windows. The bell brought a small short-haired woman in her late thirties, with bright eyes and quick movements that reminded me of a hamster.

  “Iris’ friend, yes. I’m Mary M.” She stuck out a hand and I took it. It was like shaking hands with a small steam wrench.

  I stamped snow off my shoes and stepped inside. “What’s the M for, Magdalen?”

  “Micheljansky. Iris said you were direct. I’ll get her.”

  She pointed me toward an open door off a hallway papered in flowers and hung with photographs of sunsets and took off down it with backless slippers slapping her bare heels. She had on
a dragon-red quilted housecoat with white piping and a long blue lacy nightgown under it. The time was almost midnight.

  It was clearly a waiting room, only more personal than most. It had an expensive bordered rug and upholstered armchairs and a television set and a glass-topped end table holding up a lamp and some magazines. A blonde in a pink cashmere sweater and white jeans sat curled up in one of the chairs, holding an open book in her lap. Her hair was very light, almost white, and waved back gently from a sweet round face without make-up. She might have been twenty.

  I took the chair on the other side of the end table. “I’ll guess. Anna Karenina.”

  “Close. Valley of the Dolls.” She smiled without looking up from the book.

  “That’s a lot of reading this late.”

  “I’m not used to sleeping at night.”

  That was it for conversation. It was forced on my part anyway. After that I sat there waiting and listening to her turn pages. I wanted a cigarette, but there were no ashtrays, which nowadays is supposed to mean something.

  “You wouldn’t say on the phone if you’d found him.”

  I looked up. She was wearing a black-and-white-checked blouse tucked into black parachute pants and white half-heel boots that zipped up the sides. Her hair was the way she’d worn it to my office that afternoon. I stood. She saw the blonde and said, “Sara, can we have the room?”

  Sara got up and tucked the book under her arm. She was barefoot; her toenails were painted coral. “Another five minutes and I might’ve been back in business.” She smiled at me.

  Iris said, “No, you’d be out of business.”

  “It’s like that?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  It was too much for Sara. She left.

  “That your type now?” Iris asked.

  “To bounce on my knee and tell clean stories to.” I found the door and closed it. “I didn’t find him. It’s about the man who left your mash note.”

  “You could have left the door open. Mary knows.”