Loren D. Estleman_Amos Walker 07

by Lady Yesterday

  “Four A.M. My shift ended two hours ago. But I’ve been pulling doubles so long I wouldn’t know what to do with time of my own.”

  I winched myself up on one elbow. I had on one of those Kleenexes they throw at your modesty in hospitals. I found the handle on the drawer of the nightstand and pulled it open. My cigarettes weren’t inside. “I don’t suppose you smoke,” I said.

  “No one does here. It’s like Utopia.” She was still waiting.

  I doubled the pillow in the small of my back. “Sam Mozo snatched my client. We were trying to get her out.”

  “We?”

  “Flynn, that’s the only name I knew him by. He worked for Frank Acardo.”

  “Generous of Frankie.”

  “He likes Mozo less than the cops. You’re the one told me that. I got just close enough to see they were holding my client in the garage when Ang jumped me. That’s Mozo’s pet Korean, the one with the bump on his head. By the time I was finished with him the Colombian got the woman into his car and his driver tried to make a road kill out of me. Flynn saved my hide by yelling. It didn’t do him any good. Your team missed Mozo by five minutes.”

  “It wouldn’t have if you’d called us.”

  “I had this crazy idea that riot guns and bull horns wouldn’t be too healthy for my client.”

  “You think she’s any healthier this way?”

  “Maybe it was the wrong call,” I said. “Maybe there wasn’t a right one.”

  She touched her glasses. “This have anything to do with an Acardo soldier Emergency Medical Services scraped out of a house on St. Antoine tonight named Albert Jones?”

  “That’d be Jonesy. He was guarding her when they took her. How is he?”

  “They’ve got him upstairs too, with a fractured skull. He should make it. You go through Acardo men like I go through cotton balls.” She paused. “You going to tell me who your client is and what Mozo wants with her?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Don’t get your glasses in an uproar, Lieutenant. After last night she has a one-in-fifty chance of still being alive. Bringing the cops in would take it down to zero.”

  She didn’t say anything for a minute. The morphine or whatever they had given me was keeping me drowsy. I was starting to float off on a warm cloud when she spoke. “You know who owns the motel where Charm was killed?”

  “Someone named Gordenier.”

  “Where’d you get that?” Her voice was sharp.

  I came awake. “I looked it up,” I lied. I thought of Lester Hamilton telling me about the A. G. that Charm had a noon appointment with on the day he was stabbed. “I got curious. I told you murder is interesting.”

  “Andrew Gordenier is a retired realtor. He fronts for Sam Mozo. Mozo owns the motel. Have you got anything to say about that?”

  “No.” I had to think for a long time before I said it. It was like swimming upstream in Jell-O. “I’m going to go night-night now, Lieutenant. Kick me if I snore.” I closed my eyes.

  I heard her get up after a minute. Behind my lids I was fighting to stay awake. I must have lost, because I never heard her leave. When I opened my eyes again, light was edging in between the window blinds.

  The catch on the bedrail was a week coming undone. Finally I swung it down and rested a while before moving again. Getting up was like leaving the womb. The thin blue carpet was cool under my feet.

  I found my clothes in a tin cabinet painted lavender to match the chair and put them on. I wondered if hospital decorators ever touched ground. The clothes were dirty from lying on the gritty oily floor of the garage, but my cigarettes were in my shirt pocket. I smoked one to gas the dope out of my veins and tied my shoelaces as tightly as I could on the theory that they would force blood to my head and I put on my hat and coat and walked out of there. The shoelace gimmick worked too well; my head was starting to throb.

  There was no uniform at the door to the room. Mary Ann Thaler’s brain didn’t work in that straight a line. I was counting on that. The sun was coming up red in a cold sky through a window at the end of the deserted corridor. I found the elevator and pushed the button for the lobby.

  The gray-haired floor nurse was on the telephone when I walked past the station. She didn’t call out after me. I used the telephone in the waiting room near the entrance to order a taxi. I was told one was in the neighborhood and would be there in a couple of minutes. I shared the room with a man reading a magazine on the sofa. Visiting hours didn’t start for another hour.

  The cab pulled up in front of the glass doors and I went out. As I pushed open the door, in the glass I saw the man on the sofa put down his magazine and raise a hand to his mouth. His partner was on the taxi’s rear bumper in a blue Plymouth before we left the parking lot.

  21

  I HAD A TICKET for leaving my car parked on Griswold during snow-removal hours. It could have been worse. If there’d been a storm it would have been towed. I put the ticket in my pocket and got in behind the wheel. Rigor mortis had taken claim of the upholstery.

  The blue Plymouth had pulled in behind a station wagon at the curb while I was paying off the cab driver. Its pipe was smoking in the morning chill. The Chevy’s engine cut in with a touch of the key. I let it warm up for a minute, then put it in drive and swung into a U-turn. Halfway through I kicked it and shot through the entrance across the ground floor of the Park-a-Lot Garage.

  The beefy attendant was just scrambling out of the booth when I exited on the Shelby side. The unmarked police unit, following, stood on its nose to avoid hitting him. I took off hard. I had two blocks on the Plymouth before it got shut of the building. After that we lost touch. I hoped for his sake the driver would answer to Mary Ann Thaler and not Acting Lieutenant Hornet.

  Alderdyce hadn’t closed his garage door. The snow had drifted in and formed quays around the foreign compact’s rear tires and the jumble on both sides. When he didn’t answer the bell I tried the knob. The front door wasn’t locked. I passed through stale, shut-up air into the living room, where he was sitting slumped in the padded scoop chair in the same cardigan and jeans I had seen him in two days earlier. He hadn’t had them off. His socks were dirty. His mouth was open and loud noises were coming out. It looked like the same bottle of Miller in his hand. It wasn’t. Several generations of empties were lined up on the coffee table and on the floor around the base of the chair. One of the orphans had rolled and come to rest against the butt of the deer rifle in the corner.

  “John.” I shook him by the shoulder. He stopped snoring, smacked his lips, shifted his position, and didn’t wake up. I caught the bottle before it toppled to the floor. It was half-full. I took a sip—the beer was flat—and stood it next to the others on the coffee table.

  The television was on. A hard-looking brunette in her late forties, dressed in a leotard and shaggy knee-high socks without feet, was trying to tie herself into a bow on a padded studio floor with her ankles gripped in both hands. I figured she was accepting kickbacks from the American Chiropractic Association. I turned it off and lit a cigarette. I blew a lungful of smoke into John’s open mouth.

  He came awake rolling his eyes and coughing and turned in the chair and retched. There was nothing to bring up. He turned back and saw me and his confusion slid away. Pure hate took its place.

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “I left my smelling salts at home. You all right?”

  “I will be.”

  His tone was urgent. He clawed his way to his feet, almost fell back down, and wobbled out of the room, caroming off a wall. Water trickled in the bathroom. After a long time he came back and dropped into the chair. Relief and contentment softened his dark savage face. He looked around.

  I picked up the half-full bottle and held it out. “Carbonation’s gone.”

  He took it anyway and drained it at a gulp. Then he put his head back and closed his eyes. “I thought you left.”

  “Five six-packs a
go.”

  “Time flies.”

  “I need your help.”

  He said nothing. He was either listening or asleep.

  “A little hood named Sam Mozo is holding a woman,” I said. “In a little while, if he hasn’t killed her already, he’s going to call me at my office to arrange a trade, the woman for some murder evidence I don’t have. I can’t go to the cops. If they find out she’s a witness against him they’ll slap her in protective custody, only there isn’t any where the Colombians are concerned. She’ll fall out of a hotel window or slip in the shower at County and break her neck. The Acardos want Mozo bad but I can’t go to them because I’ve already cost them two men and Frank’s the kind to teach me a lesson by letting Mozo burn the woman before he steps in. I have to have back-up at this meet. Mozo let his guard down last night but he won’t today, and the trade won’t be clean. Not after last night.”

  John’s eyes were still closed. I was starting to think I’d lost him.

  “I’m a cop,” he said.

  “A suspended one, who isn’t feeling a lot of loyalty to the department just now. Also a good one.”

  “Hold the bullshit. What do you need?”

  “If Mozo does call he won’t let me pick the spot. I need you in your car in front of my building. It’s a tail job.”

  “Can’t do it. I’m ripped.”

  “I need you, John.”

  “Don’t need me!”

  He was wide awake now, his face savage again. “Everywhere I look there’s someone else needing me. My wife, my kids, the fucking department. Why the hell do you think I dropped out? I’m drowning, man.”

  I waited until he subsided. It didn’t take long. His chest was working as if he’d just tried lifting something heavy and given up. My cigarette was singeing my fingers. I put it out.

  “I don’t have time to play psychiatrist,” I said. “He could be trying to call right now. If I had my service transfer him here he’d get hinky. You’re going to have to do your own pulling together. I hope you make it.”

  “Don’t count on me, I told you.”

  “I hope you’re there.”

  His eyes were closed again when I looked back at him from the door. The sight put ice in my belly. It was as if I’d never been there.

  It was a bright cold day, the snow unbearably white under the sun. I wore dark glasses on the way to my building. My eyes felt swollen and heavy behind them and I could feel each of the sixteen stitches in my forehead, like embedded sparks. My neck was scratchy. I felt greasy under my clothes.

  No one was using the waiting room. The mail hadn’t come yet. I took off my coat and jacket and shirt in the little water closet and bathed myself from the sink and used the emergency electric razor I kept there to intimidate my whiskers. They didn’t scare. I put on the same shirt and brushed the worst of the grit off the suit and combed my hair. I looked like a patched tire.

  My answering service said no one had called. I got off the line quickly to have it open and relayed some room-temperature Scotch from the bottle I kept in the desk to a pony glass to my stomach. What it might do when it met up with the painkiller still in my system was of strangely little concern to me. I was having an out-of-body experience.

  The sound of the mail slot clanking shut woke me. My watch read quarter to nine. The front of my head was pulsing independently of the rest of the skull when I got up and went over and bent down to pick up the mail.

  It wasn’t the mail. It was a thick brown envelope, hand delivered, slightly longer and wider than legal size, with the name of the consultancy firm I had called the day before printed on it. I took it over to the desk and sat down and slid a thumb under the Hap. The telephone rang. I jumped on it. “Mozo?”

  “Tomaso Acardo.” The gentle accent was more pronounced over the wire. “Francisco asked me to call. He says he doesn’t trust himself to talk to you this morning.”

  “I’m expecting an important call.”

  “So I gathered. You had a disappointing night. And a costly one for my nephew.”

  “I don’t remember a lot of talk about guarantees.”

  “Cut the fucking tea party, Uncle Goat.” I recognized Frank Acardo’s voice in the background. “Ask him what he’s got that was worth losing two of my best men.”

  “Francisco says—”

  “I heard. Tell him the wheels are still turning. I’ll call him when they stop.”

  Tomaso started to pass it on. His nephew cut him off. “You tell that fucking peeper he don’t show up here by nightfall carrying Sam Mozo’s head by the hair I’ll feed him his balls.”

  “Francisco says—”

  “I heard that too,” I said. “Tell him me and my balls will be in touch.” He was laughing gently in his deep rumble when I cradled the receiver.

  The computer printout from the consultancy firm echoed what Mary Ann Thaler had told me about the motel on Tireman. It, the Park-a-Lot Garage, and half a dozen other parking facilities in the metropolitan area belonged to something called SouthAmCo, principal stockholder Manuel Anuncio Malviento. It went on to list the company’s other holdings, including three auto dealerships and a substantial amount of property in Detroit, zoned residential. The most recent purchase had been made just that week. The telephone caught me digesting the information.

  “Hombre, you owe me a Korean.”

  “You said yourself that hand-to-hand stuff was out of date,” I said. “If it means anything, your boy Felipe took out an Acardo button.”

  “One dead lady friend, that’s what you bought yourself, chamaco.”

  The receiver creaked in my hand. I leveled my voice. “I don’t think so. Because if you killed her I’d go to the cops with the tape.”

  “Maybe you did already. I got people at Receiving. That’s a pretty lady cop visited you this morning.”

  “There’d be a warrant out for you if I did.”

  He gave me a Spanish lesson. I listened, but this time I couldn’t hear echoes. Well, he wouldn’t use the garage a second time.

  “It cost you,” he said, remembering his English. “You be ready to move. Now. Felipe, he’s parked across the street from your building. You ain’ out front alone in fi’ minutes, go back inside and wait for the mail. Her head be in it.”

  “How do I know she’s still wearing it?”

  “You don’t, man.” Click.

  The gray Lincoln was standing at the opposite curb with its motor running when I came out carrying something in a small paper sack. The hood was dented in front and some teeth were missing from the grille, but aside from that Flynn appeared to have sustained all the damage from that collision. I looked for John Alderdyce’s Japanese bug on my way across the street. I didn’t see it.

  I opened the front door on the passenger’s side and got in. The upholstery hadn’t been replaced yet and I was sitting on the knife-slash. Sam Mozo was hard on cars.

  Felipe was wearing the same powder-blue suit under a black coat with a fur collar and a black tie and Oxfords. Up close his face was pockmarked but hardly less aristocratic for that. The concave hairline lengthened his already funereal features behind black wraparound sunglasses. His shoulder harness was fastened and as he spun the wheel to leave the curb, some extra material pouched under his right arm. If you know what to look for you can always tell when the tailor has left room for a holster. I pointed my chin at it. “That the thirty-eight you used on her windshield?”

  He said nothing. It was warm in the car and I unbuttoned my overcoat. I smelled Brut. I didn’t figure it belonged to Felipe.

  “Must be interesting working for Little Caesar,” I tried again.

  “He is my cousin.”

  “You’re all cousins. Everybody must be related to everybody else down there.”

  “It is why I left.” He twirled the wheel again. We were entering the southbound John Lodge now.

  “You came up first?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tough spot.”

  “No
t so bad.” He had decided to talk. “I get the job driving the car. Back home I drive the taxi: ‘You want to see how the coffee is made, mister? I take you to the plantation, you get the free cup of the coffee.’ Chocho. The money is much better here. In a year I send for Manolo, Sam Mozo you call him. Now for him I drive the car. America is funny.”

  “I laugh all the time. Did you drive Jackie Acardo from the beergarden to the motel?”

  His face, which had become animated, fell back into its grave mode. He made no reply. That told me a lot. I dipped my line deeper.

  “Good clean hit,” I said. “To look at the room now you wouldn’t know anything happened in it. There’s something to be said for owning the roof you do your killing under. Too bad Mozo didn’t pay as much attention to his help. He should have known about Charm’s camera setup.”

  “There is no loyalty here.”

  I jumped on it. “You picked up Jackie at Joy and Evergreen and drove him to the motel for the hit?”

  “Manolo said he wanted to talk to him. I just drive.”

  I sat back and let some scenery pass. “I guess it’s a short step from driving a man to his death to running one over.”

  “I want to drive around you and the other,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Manolo he don’t let me. His hand is on the wheel, his foot it is on the pedal on top of mine. The man is dead, I guess.”

  “You’re a good guesser. Also a murderer.”

  He stopped at the light on East Jefferson. The shadow of the Renaissance Center darkened his features, or maybe it wasn’t that.

  “Who killed Charm, Ang or your cousin?”

  The light changed. We stayed on Jefferson, following the river. The downtown skyscrapers rolled away behind us. I checked the mirror on my side for John’s car. Nothing. Felipe turned down the heater. “None of us killed Charm,” he said then.

  I said, “I know.”

  22

  HE DIDN’T ASK HOW I knew, or even show interest. I wasn’t in a mood to volunteer anything—not yet, anyway. I settled myself in for a long quiet drive, but on the edge of Gabriel Richard Park he turned again and we headed directly toward the river.