But a man who had shut up his house to keep the memories inside when his wife left him wouldn’t remain untouched by a visit from the daughter he didn’t know existed, however he might deflect her from the ravaged and dying thing no one recognized as the spruce young blade in a thirty-year-old photograph. A thing like that would move him. I passed through a square arch and down a short dark hall lined with autographed pictures in glass frames and stood in an open doorway near the end.
The curtains weren’t quite shut, allowing a crack of light into a bedroom that had been shared by two people before it became stale and dark and without character. The air inside had a familiar bitter smell, strong not because it was fresh, but because it had been shut in for days, maybe since the day I had visited. On a bureau stood a photograph in a dusty frame of an older Wooding with his arm around a woman twenty years his junior. They were smiling, and his expression, while not as dazzling, was a link between the flashy young jazzman who had posed similarly with Iris’ mother and the thing on the double bed.
He lay atop the covers, looking smaller than before in a suit that had been far too large for him for months, but that had been brushed and arranged with the care of a mortician preparing for his own services. Inside the suit was a shell shriveled by age and cancer, everything but the big bead with its block features and nose that had been flattened in some long-ago backstage scuffle. He had combed his thin hair and trimmed the slim dark moustache and touched them up with something that was now definitely black dye, for it had an unnatural sheen against dead flesh. His eyes were glittering half-moons in the dim light. One of the sockets had filled with something dark that had spidered down from a puckered hole in his right temple and dried there. The big Ruger lay on the covers, its butt resting in his open right palm where it had come to rest.
I didn’t see a note. He wouldn’t have left one. The condition of his body would tell the medical examiner as much as he would want anyone to know. I didn’t go inside the room to see if I was wrong about the note or to feel the clamminess of his skin or the stiffness of his flesh. Instead I drew the door shut gently and went back the way I had come. The snowman next door was still weeping when I pulled away from the curb.
26
IN LATE JANUARY a female ticket agent at Detroit Metropolitan Airport had reported finding a conical object inside a stall in the women’s room. The terminal had been evacuated while a bomb crew checked it out. It turned out to be a Thermos bottle left behind by a plumber, but reaction was still setting in almost a month later and Security was trashing the Bill of Rights all over the place. As a non-passenger I wasn’t allowed beyond the checkpoint.
“It’s all right,” Iris said. “I’d rather wait alone. It’ll be my first chance to sit down with my thoughts.”
She had on a red beret in place of the yellow one she’d left at Mary M’s and the tan coat and new boots. A couple of male passengers and a gray-haired pilot looked her over on their way to the metal detector. I said, “I’ll cut through what red tape I can on this end. The air cargo outfits don’t like shipping bodies. You never see caskets in their TV ads.”
“Charles’ old partner will see to that. Charles said he caught him just before he checked out of his hotel in France.”
“Not every fiancé would go his future father-in-law’s transportation and burial. That may be a new one.”
“So I know two special men.” She watched the female guard going through an old lady’s purse. “I’m still not sure Joe wouldn’t rather stay here. Am I being selfish?”
“It’s not supposed to matter where your remains wind up. Anyway, a cemetery in Jamaica beats a trench on Wayne County property. He rented his house and the trailer wasn’t worth anything.” I handed her the flight bag full of new clothes.
“I want to bring him flowers without having to go through this. Maybe it’s guilt. I can’t even remember what I said to him when I left his trailer that one time. How could I not know my own father?”
“Easy. You’d never met him. I didn’t place him and I’m supposed to be trained to know what to look for. You were after George Favor. You had no reason to take a second look at Joe Wooding.”
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
“It was too late to matter. By then he’d probably already made up his mind to kill himself before the cancer did,” I lied.
She was watching me now, not buying any of it. “Charles makes a good living—”
“I get by. I was spinning my wheels when I bumped into you and got a break from missing wives and runaways and insurance work. I thought I was burned out until I saw John Alderdyce. He’s on his way back now too. He’ll have relapses, but the important thing is he’s bottomed out. Maybe helping him turn around did something for me too, points in purgatory or something. Getting paid besides would be overkill.”
“I’ll write.”
“I’ll read what you write.”
She kissed me hard. Then she turned away and put her bag on the conveyor and stepped through the detector. The last time I saw her she was turning heads on her way down the terminal, carrying the bag.
It was days before I found the unicorn pin she’d stuck in my pocket.
The bucket seat on the passenger’s side of the Chevy was tilted as she had left it when she took her bag out of the back. I looked at it, feeling empty, and tipped it back and started the engine. The announcer on the radio said we were headed for an early thaw. Icicles were dripping from the lamps along the Edsel Ford and residents in St. Clair Shores and the Crosse Pointes were being warned that the lake was rising. We were entering the first of the series of false springs that would continue through April.
I’d called Detroit Receiving Hospital that morning and a nurse had told me that Felipe Salazar, Sam Mozo’s cousin, was expected to recover following surgery to remove a bullet from his chest. In the same tone she informed me that Lester Hamilton had died in Emergency without having regained consciousness. After that I’d tried John Alderdyce at police headquarters, but he was out and I asked for Mary Ann Thaler, who said they were still looking for the videotape Lester had killed Eldon Charm to get. She couldn’t talk long. The Colombian drug dealers had started killing one another over Sam Mozo’s territory and the entire department was involved in throwing water on the fire.
Approaching the lot down the street from my building I passed a black Camaro parked at the curb with two men seated in front. I got a better look at them on foot, at their brown Latin faces and the way they held their cigarettes high between their index and middle fingers like Gilbert Roland. They elaborately paid me no attention at all as I walked past the car and went inside. On the stairs I transferred my gun from my overcoat pocket to its holster.
The key met no resistance when I inserted it in the lock on my inner office door. I got the gun out again and backed up a step.
“Cut the drama,” somebody said inside. “Nobody’s laying for you today.”
I recognized the voice. I pushed the door open. Frank Acardo was sitting behind my desk. He had on a vicuña coat with peaked lapels over a gray suit and a silver tie with black diamonds on it. A pearl felt hat with a braided band lay in state on the blotter. His face looked like the corner of a building with eyes.
“No wonder you can’t afford a better lock, the hours you keep.”
Both his hands were in sight on top of the desk. I holstered the Smith & Wesson. “Where’s Tomaso?”
“Taking the dog for a leak. Nobody else to do it until Jonesy finds his feet, and anyway he likes the little mange. They’re two of a kind; no balls.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe means what?”
“Just that I’m making conversation.”
“You look like you could stand some time in the hay yourself,” he said.
“Nice of you to care.”
“That’s civilization for you, saying you give a shit when you don’t. You really work here?”
“When I’m not wasting time talking to cheap gangsters
.”
“Cheap, yeah. That’s the word I was looking for. You broke our deal, Walker. You were going to hand me something on Mozo I could take to the board and get the green light to pencil him out. Nobody said nothing about dragging in the cops.”
I stretched my legs from the customer’s chair. It was a tight fit in my overcoat. I shook out a Winston and tapped it against the pack. “You never know which way these things are going to jump,” I said. “Anyway, Mozo’s dead. That’s what you wanted.”
“The shit killed my old man. I wanted to blow him off myself. No buttons, just me and a piece and that little spick looking at me over the barrel.”
“The board wouldn’t approve.”
“Bunch of slits, my old man called them. And he sat on it. But I didn’t come here to talk about the board.”
“You could’ve fooled me.”
“No, I don’t think I could. I underestimated you, pal. I won’t make that mistake again.”
He waited for me to ask. I lit the cigarette and pulled over the souvenir ashtray from Traverse City and blew smoke and said nothing. He gave up waiting.
“Flynn was a good soldier, one of the best. That deal we made cost plenty when I lost him. But I’m not bitching. Don’t you want to know why I’m not bitching?”
“You tapped the state lottery for a million.”
“A million, I spit on a million.” He leaned over and spat on my rug, which was a contradiction I didn’t bother to point out. “No, I’m not bitching on account of right now I’m farting rose petals. I’m farting rose petals on account of since Mozo got it every little Juan Valdez in town is tripping over his tacos to grab what Mozo left behind and hitting every other little Juan Valdez in town to do it. Meanwhile Jackie Acardo’s boy isn’t letting any grass grow, if you get my drift. This keeps up we’ll have our old lock back on the town by Easter. The spicks had their day. Now it’s the guineas’ turn back at the trough.”
His Richard Widmark was getting to me. “You came here to tell me that?”
“I thought you might like to know you’re off the stick. I’m still out one button, maybe two if Jonesy don’t come out of Receiving with all his jacks, and maybe you owe me and I’ll be in a position to collect someday. But because it all turned out so good I won’t be putting any hurt on you. Maybe that’s worth knowing.”
“Tomaso could have told me that himself. It sounds like his idea in the first place.”
“Uncle Goat never did have all his jacks. But he’s got a heart in him as big as his ass and he asked me to stop by and tell you to your face you’re off the stick. I’m feeling so good I say, sure, what the hell? Make an old man happy. Maybe he’ll put in a word when he sees God.”
“You’re smart to cover your bet.”
He watched me. “Well, I guess I didn’t come here to get thanked.”
“Maybe I do owe you,” I said.
“Yeah?” He had started to get up.
“Tomaso told me he had twenty quarries. Your grandfather gave him his first but you don’t run that into a string unless you’ve got brains and not a little ruthlessness. He said you were a hothead and had to be watched to see you didn’t draw too much fire. I think he’d do anything to prevent that, even if it meant dealing with the enemy. He’s got his own business to protect.”
“You saying he’d turn?”
“I don’t think he’d see it as turning. I know if he went down it wouldn’t be for something he had no control over.”
“You got him mixed up with someone with guts.”
“Maybe. He likes that dog. He said it would win the fights it cared to.”
“I got no time for this.” He stood and put on his hat.
I shrugged. If they won’t be warned you can’t make them. “You’re always welcome here, Frank. Next time call. If I’d known you were coming I’d have installed bars in the windows.”
“That’s Mr. Acardo, fuck.”
“Interesting name. Is that hyphenated?”
His little eyes grew sunken. On his way around the desk he stopped and looked down at me. The skin on his ugly face was pulled back tight. “I see you again I’ll feed you to the dog.”
I tapped some ash into the tray and took another drag. He waited again, but I didn’t say anything again and he went out. I didn’t tell him about the Colombians. He would have said he had no time for it.
The noises came a couple of minutes later, three of them very fast. It might have been someone clapping his hands. After that the sound of the Camaro taking off was shrill but remote, like Spanish laughter.
A Biography of Loren D. Estleman
Loren D. Estleman (b. 1952) is the award-winning author of over sixty-five novels, including mysteries and westerns.
Raised in a Michigan farmhouse constructed in 1867, Estleman submitted his first story for publication at the age of fifteen and accumulated 160 rejection letters over the next eight years. Once The Oklahoma Punk was published in 1976, success came quickly, allowing him to quit his day job in 1980 and become a fulltime writer.
Estleman’s most enduring character, Amos Walker, made his first appearance in 1980’s Motor City Blue, and the hardboiled Detroit private eye has been featured in twenty novels since. The fifth Amos Walker novel, Sugartown, won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best hardcover novel of 1985. Estleman’s most recent Walker novel is Infernal Angels.
Estleman has also won praise for his adventure novels set in the Old West. In 1980, The High Rocks was nominated for a National Book Award, and since then Estleman has featured its hero, Deputy U.S. Marshal Page Murdock, in seven more novels, most recently 2010’s The Book of Murdock. Estleman has received awards for many of his standalone westerns, receiving recognition for both his attention to historical detail and the elements of suspense that follow from his background as a mystery author. Journey of the Dead, a story of the man who murdered Billy the Kid, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, and a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.
In 1993 Estleman married Deborah Morgan, a fellow mystery author. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Loren D. Estleman in a Davy Crockett ensemble at age three aboard the Straits of Mackinac ferry with his brother, Charles, and father, Leauvett.
Estleman at age five in his kindergarten photograph. He grew up in Dexter, Michigan.
Estleman in his study in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, in the 1980s. The author wrote more than forty books on the manual typewriter he is working on in this image.
Estleman and his family. From left to right: older brother, Charles; mother, Louise; father, Leauvett; and Loren.
Estleman and Deborah Morgan at their wedding in Springdale, Arkansas, on June 19, 1993.
Estleman with actor Barry Corbin at the Western Heritage Awards in Oklahoma City in 1998. The author won Outstanding Western Novel for his book Journey of the Dead.
Loren signing books at Eyecon in St. Louis in 1999. He was the guest of honor.
Estleman and his fellow panelists at Bouchercon in 2000. From left to right: Harper Barnes, John Lutz, Loren D. Estleman, Max Allan Collins, and Stuart M. Kaminsky.
Estleman and his wife, Deborah, signing together while on a tour through Colorado in 2003.
Estleman with his grandson, Dylan Ray Brown, shown here writing an original story on “Papa’s” typewriter at Christmastime in 2005 in Springfield, Missouri.
Estleman with his granddaughter, Lydia Morgan Hopper, as he reads her a bedtime story on New Year’s Eve 2008. Books are among Lydia’s favorite things—and “Papa” is quick to encourage this.
Estleman and his wife, Deborah, with the late Elmer Kelton and his wife, Anne Kelton, in 2008. Estleman is holding his Elmer Kelton Award from the German Association for the Study of the Western.
Estleman in front of the Gas City water tower, which he passed by on many a road trip. After titling one of his novels after the town, Estleman was invited for a visit by the mayor, and in Febru
ary 2008 he was presented the key to the city.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1987 by Loren D. Estleman
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
978-1-4532-2262-1
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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