Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 07

by Lady Yesterday

  “Where’s Iris?”

  Mary looked up at me. She had trouble focusing. “She’s gone. They took her.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Nobody saw them. I was upstairs, the girls were all in their rooms. They must have broken in and hit him and grabbed her and left. Some bodyguard.”

  “You told me you didn’t need one. Anybody hear anything?” I spotted platinum-haired Sara in the group.

  “A car taking off,” she said. “Big engine.”

  The room was a bedroom, in good order with the bed made and a magazine lying open on the arm of a chair covered in green chintz. Working Woman, if it matters. The closet door was open and I recognized a couple of the outfits hanging inside. “This room is Iris’?”

  Mary said it was. She was pressing the washcloth to Jonesy’s wound, trying to stop the bleeding. “I think they cracked his skull.”

  I squatted and groped inside his jacket. My fingers touched the alligator butt of an automatic in an underarm holster. He hadn’t drawn it. I gestured at Mary, who took her hand away. I peeled aside the wet cloth. The gash was a long inverted comma with the point on top; an upward blow. I had seen others like it, in martial arts training in the army when someone miscalculated. “He say anything?”

  “He was out cold when I found him,” Mary said. “That’s been half an hour anyway. Where the hell is that ambulance?”

  A telephone rang. I thought at first it was the siren. She glanced toward the hallway and I stepped out over Jonesy and unhooked the receiver from the wall.

  “Hey, chamaco.”

  “Your boy Ang’s getting sloppy,” I told the accent. “He left him alive.”

  Mozo hesitated. “Off a man, anybody can do that. You got to be good to just put heem down. Hey, you didn’ tell me you was working with them Acardos.”

  “Get to it.”

  “Hokay, hombre, you like to talk turkey. I can get next to it. You give me the tape, I don’ cut off your girlfriend’s head and send it to you parcel post, how’s that?”

  “What tape?”

  “Man, you disappoint me. Just when I was starting to make you some respect. Time I met you, I didn’ know you been in that Anglo’s office, got the tape out of his safe. Hokay, this is America, land of opportunity, man got ambition, I don’ hold it against him. Talking’s over, chamaco. We trade.”

  “What, a tape for a corpse?”

  A hand covered the mouthpiece on his end. Through my other ear I heard the siren now, switching from wail to yelp as it came off the Chrysler.

  “Amos?” It was Iris.

  “You all right?”

  “My ass is freezing, what do you think? All I’ve got on is pajamas and a coat.”

  She started to say something else. The receiver was taken away.

  “The tape, chamaco. Or the rest of her gets as cold as her ass. Call you later, your office.”

  “Just a second.”

  “Thirty minutes. You don’ answer, I mail a package.” The connection broke.

  The ambulance was on the street now. I turned my back to the racket and called Information and got the number of the Adelaide Hotel. After a moment the clerk in the lobby put me through to Frank Acardo.

  When I finished talking the attendants were in the hallway, sporting the snappy dark blue police-type uniforms they wear now and carrying a stretcher. I tried to get Mary M’s attention but she was too busy herding her houseguests out of the way. Heading out I checked the lock on the front door. Detective work, it never ends. Flynn, the big redheaded Irishman who walked Tomaso Acardo’s dog, was waiting for me in front of the Adelaide when I stood on the brakes. He opened the door on the passenger’s side and got in. His hat perched warily on his big head with the narrow brim resting on the end of his pug. If there was still humor in his eyes it was lost in shadow.

  I took off while he was pulling the door shut. He gripped the dash as we cornered. “How’s Jonesy?”

  “Still breathing when I left. You carrying?”

  He bared his teeth at the windshield and said nothing. His big-jawed profile looked like flecked stone under the street lamps.

  “Could be we’re in a hell of a hurry just to wait,” I said. “But if Mozo knows anything about kidnapping, when he calls he’ll give me just enough time to get to the next contact spot and I can use the muscle.”

  “Just don’t pick up any cruisers.”

  “I thought you mob guys owned the law.”

  “You read too many books.”

  It was quiet in the car for the next two blocks. I said, “Your boss gave you up without a fight. He always that generous with the talent?”

  “Only when it involves Sam Mozo.”

  “You don’t sound excited.”

  “They ought to make all the little hard-ass punks wear numbers so we can tell them apart.”

  “Your boss’s old man was one. Back in the dry time.” I spun onto Grand River, spraying slush. He leaned on the door handle.

  “Prohibition. The good old days. I had it to here with that crap. The Purple Gang, me and Jonesy could take the whole bunch apart with our hands. Tight-ass little Jews, sharp suits and tommy guns. Christ.”

  “You two friends?”

  He shut down. “I just work with him.”

  “I didn’t hit him.”

  “All I know is you don’t just walk up to Jonesy and take him while he’s looking at you. Not if he don’t know you.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  There wasn’t any more time to talk. I parked in a tow-away zone in front of my building and the telephone was ringing when we reached the outer office. The lock was stubborn at first. I took a deep breath and tried the key again. The tumblers let go and I speared the receiver on the dive.

  “Chamaco, I was about to hang up.”

  I made an effort not to sound out of breath. “Your watch is fast.”

  “No way. Fi’teen t’ousan’ dollars, accurate to within two seconds a month for a year. You got the tape?”

  “No.”

  Pause. I heard echoes where he was. It sounded like a bus station.

  “Lady’s going to be disappointed, hombre. She could lose her head over a thing like that.”

  “You know I don’t have it here or you’d have broken in and searched the place. I can get it, but it has to wait for morning.”

  “Why morning?”

  “That’s when the place opens where I’ve got it stashed. Eight o’clock.”

  “No jokes. My English ain’ so good, I don’ get them. Frustrates me. I lose my sense of humor.”

  “Straight dope.”

  “ ’S’the only kind I deal.” More echoes. “Hokay, chamaco, call you tomorrow. Eight-thirty.”

  We hung up. I looked at Flynn standing in front of the door. “I bought us some time.”

  “What’s he want?”

  “I figure it’s a videotape made by a dead man named Charm at a motel Mozo owns on Tireman. Charm’s retirement plan was wrapped up in hidden cameras all over the place.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “Of Mozo, by Charm. If I read the dead man’s notebook right, Mozo was the S.M. who was paying Charm $5,000, probably on a regular basis, for something Charm taped in room 212.”

  “Sex?”

  “Mozo doesn’t strike me as the inhibited type.”

  “A dope deal then,” Flynn said. “Or a hit.”

  “Who’s he hit lately?”

  His Irish face ignited slowly. “Jesus. Not Jackie Acardo.”

  “It’s a thin hunch. But you can spit from where Jackie was last seen to the motel.”

  “Jesus. You got the tape?”

  “No. If I had I wouldn’t need Mozo to answer my questions.”

  He touched his big jaw. Moonlight coming in through the Venetian blinds behind the desk striped him. “You play it right on the edge, don’t you?”

  “It’s starting to feel like home.” I switched on the desk lamp and opened the top drawer. I t
ook out my Smith & Wesson, checked the cylinder, and holstered the gun. He watched me clip the holster to my belt under my overcoat. “Where you going?”

  “I think I know where he is.”

  “Mozo?”

  “No, Jimmy Hoffa. Sure Mozo. I’ve got good ears. It’s just what’s between them that hasn’t been working so hot.” I picked up my keys. “You coming?”

  “What if he’s there and the girl ain’t?”

  “What if I meet him tomorrow morning and I don’t have the tape?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, I’m coming. Jesus. You dicks got to have everything spelled out.”

  We went downstairs. The city hadn’t towed my Chevy, which was the first break I’d had in days.

  20

  THERE WAS A three-quarter moon that night. The sky had cleared so that the snow held the light and made the street lamps look like bureaucratic meddling. The air was raw cold, as it always is at night in February when there is nothing between the city and the frozen core of outer space. When I got out on Griswold and closed the car door the handle stuck to my hand and needles of ice pricked my nostrils. Flynn turned up his collar and cursed a cloud of thick vapor. His topcoat was too light, but he wouldn’t have chosen a heavier one. He was a man who liked to move. He looked heavy and slow; he wasn’t. Coming around the front of the car he was like a snow tiger rolling the stiffness out of its muscles, becoming fluid as he came. There was evil beauty in that gait. It was too bad he was a gangster.

  The Park-a-Lot Garage had a spectral quality in that light, gray seamless columns rising like Grecian pillars and dark metal gleaming softly where the cars were parked in tiers. The attendant’s booth, visible from the street, was black and empty. The building looked deserted and we had been standing there almost five minutes before I picked out the faint yellow glow on the second level from the lights of the city itself behind the concrete latticework. I pointed at it and we entered at ground level.

  The air inside seemed colder. It was rank with gasoline and sweet with auto exhaust. We found the painted fire door in the southeast corner and I pulled it open. A hinge squeaked, the sound sharp and echoing as in an amphitheater. We froze, but no one came to investigate. I picked up a square chunk of rough concrete that was used to prop open the door during the day and put it to work. I gestured to Flynn and he nodded and drew a black automatic from under his coat and took a stance at the base of the stairs while I climbed up. I unholstered the Smith & Wesson.

  Stagnation lay like dead fish in that stairwell, remembering old urine and carnal nights, moonlight sliding down the color of pale flesh and folding soddenly over the steps. My breath curled around me. I held it.

  The door at the top was open. I could see the office now, a glassed-in cubicle at the far end of the aisle I was standing in. Yellow light fanned out and painted streaks along the chrome bumpers of the cars parked in silent rows on either side. A shadow moved in the light.

  I fished a penny out of my pocket and flipped it down the stairwell, arcing it out to miss the steps. It tinkled at the bottom like glass breaking. After a long time the air stirred in the shaft. Flynn was coming up, as quietly as smoke rising. When he was beside me, big and Irish and smelling faintly of Old Spice, I made a movement with the revolver to hold him there and worked my way down the aisle, scalloping around the ends of the diagonally parked cars. Traffic thundered along the John Lodge outside. It was a remote sound, a meteor shower in a different galaxy.

  At the end of fifty feet I looked through the window from the shadow of a concrete post. Sam Mozo was sitting with his back to me, at a black pebbled-steel desk with three spindled stacks of white and yellow and pink papers on top, a different color to each spindle. He was smoking a brown cigarette and he had an old greasy radio on the desk tuned in to a Spanish-language station, so low I could barely hear it through the glass. I knew him by the roll of fat at the back of his neck and by his big white hat hanging on a corner of the radio. I smelled marijuana.

  There was an old sprung sofa in the corner opposite the desk and Iris was lying on it, on her back with an arm flung across her eyes to block out the light. She was wearing the bright floral-print pajamas from that afternoon and she had her shoes off. While I was watching she turned over onto her right shoulder, showing her back to the office and Mozo. A jet of smoke left him in a silent sigh. I didn’t blame him. It was a nice back.

  From my angle I couldn’t see if anyone else was in the office. In a building that depended on automobile space there wouldn’t be much more to it. I wondered where Felipe was. More than that I wondered where Ang was.

  He told me. Something scraped the floor, three times very fast like a dance step, and he came at me across the aisle from between two cars on that side, flying, a bent javelin in a tan suit, with his right leg knifed out in front and his trunk in line with it and his left leg steering his flight. Flynn fired, the automatic’s report a ringing bark, but the bullet twanged off a post and punched a hole in a windshield. The Korean was still flying, coming down now, a lethal foot aimed at my throat and behind it the ugly ivory face scrunched into a toothy grin. My own snap shot missed and I threw myself back between a red Fiero and a four-wheel-drive truck and grasped the truck’s door handle. It wasn’t locked and I swung it open, bracing it with my body just as he piled into it. Glass sprayed. I fell back hard against the concrete wall and sat down. My wind was gone and so was my gun.

  Coming up on my knees I groped for it. Ang was flopping like a trout, snarling something in what I assumed was Korean and trying to free his leg from the broken window in the truck’s door. He had found his leverage and was starting to pull it out when my hand closed on the gun underneath the Fiero. I pitched forward, getting my feet under me, and brought the butt down hard on his cropped head. It made a sickening sound and he went limp. His foot hung up in the ragged hole in the glass. He dangled there.

  I was sluggish. My lungs were filling slowly and my eyes stung. I wiped them with the back of the hand holding the gun. It came away bloody. I stumbled out into the aisle.

  “Heads up!”

  It was Flynn’s voice. Instinctively I pivoted in the direction of the office, but there was nobody inside now. At that instant the world went up in white flame and two square headlamps came down the aisle at me with a roar. I dived back between the vehicles just as the big gray Lincoln swept past with Felipe at the wheel. The slipstream almost took me off my feet. I caught my balance and turned and saw Flynn standing spread-eagled in the glare of the headlamps at the end of the aisle, both hands stretched out in front of him clasping the automatic. He fired. The copper-jacketed bullet glanced off the windshield with a thin scream. Then the car struck him and he went up in the air, heels over head, his gun spinning away. He missed the ceiling, hanging just under it for an impossible length of time, then came back down in front of the Lincoln as it swung around the line of parked cars. It bumped over him twice and kept going into the turn. I sent two shots after it, but I was afraid of hitting Iris. I shattered a taillight. Then the car was gone. Tires yelped as it spiraled down to ground level and then out onto Griswold.

  I heard sirens. I lurched down the aisle to where Flynn lay. His hat had come to rest upright nearby, untouched, display perfect. It wouldn’t fit him now. I stood there with my lungs aching, trying to breathe. I thought of George Favor struggling with emphysema. A trickle of blood from my forehead reached my lips then.

  It was that salt-and-iron taste that did it. I heard my gun clatter on the concrete, and that was the last thing I heard for a while.An angel brought me to.

  She had light brown hair that could have been honey blonde with no trouble, worn in bangs under a red plastic hairband, and baby blue eyes that were nowhere near the size of hen’s eggs. The tortoiseshell glasses disappointed me a little. I had angels figured for twenty-twenty vision.

  The walls of the place I was in were sea-green and so was the ceiling. I was in a bed with a she
et and a thin blanket drawn up under my chin and my head propped up on a foam-rubber pillow as thick as a book jacket. There was a steel rail on either side of the bed. That disappointed me a lot. Heaven looked a lot like a hospital room.

  The angel had a message for me. “Boy, is your head going to hurt.”

  I dredged a hand out from under the covers and touched three or four yards of gauze folded and taped on my forehead. “Feels numb.” I whispered it. There wasn’t any moisture left in my mouth.

  “That’s the local. They dug out enough glass to rebuild the Crystal Palace and took sixteen stitches. Here.” She put a blue plastic glass to my lips. I drank from it noisily and pulled a face.

  “I didn’t think they’d have to chlorinate the water in heaven.”

  “You’re in Receiving. They’re kicking you out of here as soon as you can stand up. Someone told them you don’t have insurance.”

  It was starting to come back, in little bright sharp pieces, like flying glass. I put Lieutenant Thaler back in mortal perspective. “Flynn?”

  “If you mean your buddy, they tagged him DOA. Dead on arrival at the floor is more like it; every bone in his body was broken. Hornet wants to nail you with felony homicide. It’s why I came in his place. In his state they wouldn’t let him in the door.”

  “He wouldn’t fit through the door. What about the Korean?

  “Concussion and torn tendons. He’ll be here a little longer. You want to tell me how he came to be in that condition? Otherwise I bust you for trespassing and assault.”

  “He won’t press charges.”

  “He won’t have to. We’ve got a dead man like I said.” She waited. She was sitting in a lavender chair with her legs crossed in flesh-colored knit slacks, low-heeled brown boots on her feet with buckles on them.

  “What time is it?” The vertical blinds were drawn over the windows and I couldn’t tell if it was still dark out.